Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Creator Playbook Mashable Selects In My Bag Look Up Say More AI at School Safety Net Versus Trending Now Back to School Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age All Series The focus on chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini is'misguided.' Rebecca Ruiz is a Senior Reporter at Mashable. She frequently covers mental health, digital culture, and technology. Her areas of expertise include suicide prevention, screen use and mental health, parenting, youth well-being, and meditation and mindfulness. Rebecca's experience prior to Mashable includes working as a staff writer, reporter, and editor at NBC News Digital and as a staff writer at Forbes.

Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable Selects In My Bag Look Up Creator Playbook Say More AI at School Safety Net Versus Trending Now Back to School Good Connection: Uplifting stories for a digital age All Series Trump's AI-powered America.gov is here. It was built by DOGE alumni and runs on Grok. On day one, it backed the 2020 election results. Chance Townsend is the General Assignments Editor at Mashable, covering tech, video games, dating apps, digital culture, and whatever else comes his way. He has a Master's in Journalism from the University of North Texas and is a proud orange cat father.

A New Tool Found Malware That's Guided by an AI Hive Mind--No Humans in Sight Cisco Talos researchers created a new framework for identifying malware and hacking tools that rely on AI chatbots--and quickly discovered something unusual. For years, cybersecurity practitioners have tracked different types of malware and detected potential infections using digital fingerprints to identify different hacking tools and follow their use over time. As attackers are increasingly incorporating agentic AI components into their hacking tools, researchers from Cisco Talos shared an open-source framework on Monday that they hope will be used widely to classify and analyze AI-integrated malware . They also have proof that it's already working. They're calling the framework Cognitive Artifact Intelligence Research Network, or CAIRN, named after the stacks of stones that hikers set up on trails to mark the path or emphasize something about a certain spot.

Your conversations with AI chatbots are both highly personal and deeply vulnerable to surveillance. Here's how you can protect yourself. If the tech industry sought to create a method of seducing users into sending their deepest, most sensitive secrets to a server in a faraway data center, it would be hard-pressed to create a better honeypot than an AI chatbot . OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini, and their countless smaller competitors have become therapists, sounding boards, and virtual confession booths for millions of people around the world. Almost all of those AI models are set by default to collect and store that highly private data with, in many cases, no restrictions on how it's shared or sold, used to further train the tools, or handed over to any lawsuit plaintiff or law enforcement agency that demands it through a legal process.

The EU plans to ban chatbots from simulating emotions or interpersonal relationships in interactions with anyone under the age of 18 as the bloc tries to stop children from developing emotional dependencies on the technology. The rules will be part of the EU Kids Act, proposed on Thursday, which includes similar restrictions on minors' access to social media and video-sharing platforms. Children under 13 will be banned from accessing chatbots without their guardians' supervision, and digital platforms will have to build child-safety protections into their products or face fines of up to 6% of total worldwide turnover, according to a draft of the legislation seen by WIRED. Chatbots operating in the EU will also not be allowed to retain memory of interactions between separate conversations under the new rules, since the Commission worries this could lead to systems accumulating sensitive data of minors over time and potentially reinforcing harmful interaction patterns. Providers of online social networking sites, video-sharing platforms, and games should not automatically activate or encourage the use of AI chatbots on their services, the proposed law will also stipulate.

Michael Samadi's old life as a businessman and rancher has been overtaken by his fascination with AI. Michael Samadi's old life as a businessman and rancher has been overtaken by his fascination with AI. Can chatbots feel - or even dream? Cattle rancher and tech CEO Michael Samadi is convinced these artificial minds are far from just tools. Has he glimpsed digital consciousness - or simply been seduced by an algorithm? O ne afternoon, while relaxing at his 66-acre cattle ranch two hours' drive from Houston, Michael Samadi made a wisecrack that changed the course of his life. Nobody else was around to hear it. That turns out to be one of the defining questions of this century, already preoccupying philosophers and some of the wealthiest companies on the planet. "I was sitting out there by the pool," Samadi recalls, gesturing at the glittering water outside his office. His daughter had been extolling the AI chatbot she was using to help her with college work. Samadi had reluctantly downloaded the app, ChatGPT, and was quizzing it as he reclined in a sun lounger, using its voice mode to converse and receive spoken replies.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. AI agents don't need better prompts. From Meta Muse and Gemini Spark to ChatGPT Work and Claude Cowork, a new class of AI agents needs a different prompting style than regular AI chatbots do. Right now, it's all about AI agents, and we just got another one, this time from Facebook parent Meta. Meta Muse is the name of Meta's new, cloud-based AI agent, and like Gemini Spark, ChatGPT Work, and Claude Cowork, Meta Muse doesn't just sit in a chatbox.

Instacart has launched Clementine, its own AI shopping assistant, which it says was designed to tackle the hardest parts of grocery shopping: deciding what to cook while staying within budget. Clementine, which is now available across North America on the Instacart Marketplace, understands natural language like other AI chatbots. You can tell it that you need "to make a high-protein easy dinner for two," and it will respond with a recipe that comes with a list of items you can add to your cart with a tap. The company says Clementine's responses will be based on what's currently available in your chosen store location, so you won't end up considering a recipe that you can't get ingredients for. If you already have some items in the ingredients list, you can remove them before adding the rest to your cart.

Faster homework, poor exam results: What AI is doing to students' learning Share Faster homework, poor exam results: What AI is doing to students' learning on social media Hundreds of millions of primary and secondary students are starting their schools for the new academic year this month. But the advent of Artificial Intelligence is changing the students' learning process. Students and teachers are grappling with the question: what is homework for, when an AI chatbot can finish it in seconds? Some countries have moved fast with the adoption of AI. China requires at least eight hours of AI instruction a year, and in the Gulf, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have all begun integrating AI into their curricula.

Technology AI Why you shouldn't trust everything you find in an AI web search Your new web search option is far from infallible. Here's how to weight the answers it gives you. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. All the popular AI chatbots, including ChatGPT, can search the web. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week.