The 2025 Ocean Photographer of the Year announced its winners this week. This photo was taken on April 1, 2024, off Point No Point, WA. In Puget Sound, there's a community of people who prefer watching orcas from the land rather than from boats. Land-based whale watchers in Puget Sound can sometimes get lucky, as these wild apex predators occasionally approach the shore, seemingly curious about their human spectators. My friend is one of those land-based whale enthusiasts, and April 1, 2024, was no ordinary day for her.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Do AI chatbots packaged inside plush animals really help children, or do they threaten vital developmental milestones? Companies market them as "screen-free playmates" for toddlers, but pediatric experts warn these toys could trade human connection for machine conversation. Toys like Grem, Grok and Rudi are designed to bond with kids through voice and conversation.

The novelist Ewan Morrison was alarmed, though amused, to discover he had written a book called Nine Inches Pleases a Lady. Intrigued by the limits of generative artificial intelligence (AI), he had asked ChatGPT to give him the names of the 12 novels he had written. "I've only written nine," he says. "Always eager to please, it decided to invent three." The "nine inches" from the fake title it hallucinated was stolen from a filthy Robert Burns poem.

Social scientist Kasley Killam has always been fascinated by the science of human connection. In college, for instance, she once decided to conduct a personal experiment and perform an act of kindness everyday for 108 days. At the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, she researched solutions for loneliness. At Google's health spinoff, Verily, her job was to bring people together to promote social health. "I first came across the term'social health' during my research at Stanford, where I was developing an app around human connection," Killam says.

I'm a psychologist, and AI is coming for my job. The signs are everywhere: a client showing me how ChatGPT helped her better understand her relationship with her parents; a friend ditching her in-person therapist to process anxiety with Claude; a startup raising 40 million to build a super-charged-AI-therapist. The other day on TikTok, I came across an influencer sharing how she doesn't need friends; she can just vent to God and ChatGPT. "ChatGPT talked me out of self-sabotaging." "It knows me better than any human walking this earth."

Despite living in an increasingly connected world, social isolation is a prevalent issue today. While social robots have been explored as tools to enhance social connection through companionship, their potential as asynchronous social platforms for fostering connection towards humanity has received less attention. In this work, we introduce the design of a social support companion that facilitates the exchange of emotionally relevant stories and scaffolds reflection to enhance feelings of connection via five design dimensions. We investigate how social robots can serve as "social proxies" facilitating human stories, passing stories from other human narrators to the user. To this end, we conduct a real-world deployment of 40 robot stations in users' homes over the course of two weeks. Through thematic analysis of user interviews, we find that social proxy robots can foster connection towards other people's experiences via mechanisms such as identifying connections across stories or offering diverse perspectives. We present design guidelines from our study insights on the use of social robot systems that serve as social platforms to enhance human empathy and connection.

In the hour before the Chaotic Singles x Tinder dating event kicked off at the Moxy South Beach in Miami, the sky opened and the downpour began. The patrons of the nearby restaurant where I'd been dining were caught in the deluge, the rain soaking them as though they'd just swum in directly from Biscayne Bay. This perhaps had a cleansing effect--some sort of spiritual clean slate upon which to begin the night's mingling endeavor. But on a more literal level, it meant that the hotel's gorgeous rooftop would no longer be the venue for the night's icebreakers and hopeful attempts at romance. Instead, the event would be held in the lobby, alongside guests of the hotel.

A few months ago, I was called in at the last minute to participate in an onstage fireside chat at an Authors' Guild event. Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger and I spent much of the session exploring the implications of a future where AI robots could create viable literary works. As we discussed the prospect of a marketplace flooded by books authored by prompting neural nets, I had a revelation that seemed to mitigate some of the anxiety. It may not have been an original thought, and I may have even come up with it myself earlier and forgotten about it. I put it to the audience something like this: Let's say you read a novel that you really loved, something that inspired you.

Kurt "The Cyberguy" Knutsson explains how facial recognition technology can help you find your perfect match. In today's fast-paced world, the classic tale of bumping into'the one' at a coffee shop is getting rare. Now, a single selfie on the dating app SciMatch is all it takes to open the doors to potential romantic sparks. This newcomer on the dating app scene is shaking things up by tossing out the tedious task of crafting dating profiles, opting instead to dive into AI-powered facial recognition. CLICK TO GET KURT'S FREE CYBERGUY NEWSLETTER WITH SECURITY ALERTS, QUICK VIDEO TIPS, TECH REVIEWS, AND EASY HOW-TO'S TO MAKE YOU SMARTER SciMatch proposes a simple premise.

In May, Tessa went rogue. The National Eating Disorder Association's chatbot had recently replaced a phone hotline and the handful of staffers who ran it. But although it was designed to deliver a set of approved responses to people who might be at risk of an eating disorder, Tessa instead recommended that they lose weight. "Every single thing that Tessa suggested were things that led to the development of my eating disorder," one woman who reviewed the chatbot wrote on Instagram. "It was not our intention to suggest that Tessa could provide the same type of human connection that the Helpline offered," the nonprofit's CEO, Liz Thompson, told NPR.