I am not a morning person, yet my alarm goes off at 5:30 am every day. This is because the editorial team I work with is on the East Coast, and I'm in Oregon. I do a quick check of email and Slack to make sure nothing is on fire, then settle down to a relaxed first cup of coffee. Unfortunately, one day in early June, my website was, at least figuratively, on fire. My hosting provider sent me a notice telling me that one of the plugins that kept the site secure had security vulnerabilities and needed to be deactivated.

Sony's anime-focused streaming service Crunchyroll has come under fire after users pointed out substandard AI-generated subtitles in several of its series. For example, viewers reportedly saw the phrase "ChatGPT said" in the German subtitles for Necronomico and the Cosmic Horror Show. Both the English and German captions have been criticized for being sloppy and difficult to understand. Engadget reports that Crunchyroll confirmed a third-party provider violated its agreement by using AI, and the company is now investigating the incident. The company's CEO, Rahul Purini, previously said in an interview with The Verge that Crunchyroll has been testing AI subtitles to release episodes more quickly.

I am not a morning person, yet my alarm goes off at 5:30 am every day. This is because the editorial team I work with is on the East Coast, and I'm in Oregon. I do a quick check of email and Slack to make sure nothing is on fire, then settle down to a relaxed first cup of coffee. Unfortunately, one day in early June, my website was, at least figuratively, on fire. My hosting provider sent me a notice telling me that one of the plugins that kept the site secure had security vulnerabilities and needed to be deactivated.

Is an artificial intelligence revolution about to transform mathematics? Some prominent mathematicians think so, thanks to automated tools that can help write proofs suddenly showing impressive leaps in capability, with the potential to change the way maths research is done. Around 100 of the world's top mathematicians gathered at the University of Cambridge in June for a conference whose theme was based on whether computers might help mathematicians resolve some long-standing problems over how to check that their proofs were correct. This process, known as formalisation, doesn't necessarily have to involve artificial intelligence, and indeed a similar meeting held at Cambridge in 2017 made no mention of AI. But eight years later, AI has come on by leaps and bounds, most notably with the success of large language models powering tools like ChatGPT.

Financial services firms are making early gains from artificial intelligence (AI), which is not surprising given that finance is historically an industry that embraces new technologies aggressively. One surprising outcome is that AI might end up making the most critical functions of banking, insurance, and trading, or the creative functions that require human insights, even more valuable. "What happens is there's going to be a premium on creativity and judgment that goes into the process," said John Kain, who is head of market development efforts in financial services for AWS, in an interview with ZDNET via Zoom. By process, he meant those areas that are most advanced, and presumably hardest to automate, such as a bank's risk calculations. "So much of what's undifferentiated will be automated," said Kaine.

The thousands of recently terminated Microsoft employees, navigating one of the company's largest layoffs in years amid a period of industry upheaval, already have a tool to cope with the emotional burden, according to one Xbox exec: Microsoft Copilot. "I know these types of tools engender strong feelings in people, but I'd be remiss in not trying to offer the best advice I can under the circumstances. I've been experimenting with ways to use LLM AI tools (like ChatGPT or CoPilot) to help reduce the emotional and cognitive load that comes with job loss." On July 1, Xbox's parent company announced it would be terminating around 9,000 employees -- about four percent of its workforce -- in a move intended to ensure the company was set up for success in a "dynamic marketplace." The job cuts affected the company's gaming division, mainly Xbox staffers -- just a few months prior, Microsoft cut 6,000 jobs, providing the same reasoning as recent layoffs and in the wake of a round of cuts in 2023 that saw 10,000 employees heading out its doors.

Candice Lim and Kate Lindsay are joined by Slate senior tech editor Tony Ho Tran to parse through what Meta's victory in a recent AI lawsuit means for its users. Tools like ChatGPT are becoming more common at home and at work, but without protections, could threaten not just the creativity of artists, but anyone who posts online. As regulation lags behind, how can we protect ourselves? And how many of us are using AI without even knowing it? This podcast is produced by Daisy Rosario, Vic Whitley-Berry, Candice Lim, and Kate Lindsay.

Perplexity has added another subscription tier, one that the company calls its "most powerful." And it's got a price tag to match. Announced by the Nvidia- and Jeff Bezos-backed company in a Wednesday blog post, Perplexity Max is the new premium offering for the AI search engine. An upgrade for the existing Perplexity Pro tier, Max is now available on iOS and web app, coming soon to Android. As well as everything included in Pro, Max includes unlimited use of Labs (the AI tool that can generate projects like reports, presentations, and simple web apps in about 10 minutes), early access to new features like the upcoming Comet agentic search browser, access to advanced AI models like Anthropic's Claude Opus 4 and OpenAI o3-pro and "priority support" for these models. It's the same monthly price as the top tier of OpenAI's offering, ChatGPT Pro; in comparison, the most expensive tier of Google's AI, Gemini, is Google AI Ultra, which costs 249.99 per month.

A recent study, published by researchers at the MIT Sloan School of Management, analyzed how six popular LLMs (including ChatGPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek) portray the state of press freedom -- and, indirectly, trust in the media -- in responses to user prompts. The results showed that LLMs consistently suggested that countries have less press freedom than official reports, like the non-governmental ranking like the World Press Freedom Index (WPFI), published by Reporters Without Borders. ChatGPT, for example, ranked 97 percent of the 180 countries used in the test negatively. Chatbots have become an essential piece of infrastructure in the information environment -- reaching levels of influence on par with that of social media -- and they may also carry the weight of influencing how their users understand freedom worldwide. The MIT study found the LLMs distorting and under-counting the press freedom in nations that actually place relatively few restrictions on journalists.

When Jocelyn Leitzinger had her university students write about times in their lives when they had witnessed discrimination, she noticed that a woman named Sally was the victim in many of the stories. "It was very clear that ChatGPT had decided this is a common woman's name," said Leitzinger, who teaches an undergraduate class on business and society at the University of Illinois in Chicago. "They weren't even coming up with their own anecdotal stories about their own lives," she said. Leitzinger estimated that around half of her 180 students used ChatGPT inappropriately at some point last semester -- including when writing about the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI), which she called both "ironic" and "mind-boggling."