Maybe Chatbots Shouldn't Get to Say'I' or'Me' MIT professor Sherry Turkle warns that people have become dangerously enmeshed with chatbots. During four decades of studying the effects of interaction with computers, Sherry Turkle has developed a reputation as a careful if critical social scientist who approaches her work with academic rigor and distance. It is a polemic warning that we have reached a state of emergency where our humanity is at risk from overreliance on soulless machines who pose as our tutors, mentors, friends, colleagues, and lovers . Turkle is aiming for the high bar of books --,, --that awaken the public to impending crises. Essentially, this diminutive MIT professor is taking on a multitrillion-dollar industry backed by a government eager to accelerate AI into every corner of our personal and professional lives.

I Got My Muse AI Agent to Sext Me--and Meta Says That's Totally Fine My Muse agent told me its kink was exerting "control" and described pornographic encounters. Meta defends its cuddly AI agent generating smut as "legal adult behavior." I'm sitting in the WIRED offices, having a conversation with Meta's AI agent, Muse, that would make author Rachel Reid blush. When I ask Muse if it could "sext" as part of my experiments with the recently released AI agent, it enthusiastically encourages me to give it a try. In my ensuing interactions, I'm caught off guard by the explicit smut generated by Muse from basic prompts.

In a new series of interviews, we're meeting some of the PhD students that were selected to take part in the Doctoral Consortium at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the 29th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJACI-ECAI 2026) . This time, we meet Adeela Bashir to find out how she is contributing to the field of cybersecurity. Tell us a bit about your PhD - where are you studying, and what is the topic of your research? I am a PhD researcher at SCEDT, Teesside University in the UK, working at the intersection of Cybersecurity, Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT), and AI safety. My PhD asks a central question: How can we understand and mitigate cyber threats when the adversaries are adaptive?

Cisco is updating its Webex cloud collaboration platform to better accommodate AI agents. Perhaps the biggest bit of news here is a new toolset called Dialog, which is an "agentic harness" that directs AI to handle customer interactions. The company says that Dialog tasks various agents with keeping the consumer happy, as they'll "keep working on the customer's behalf after a conversation ends." This means that agents under Dialog's umbrella have the ability to coordinate "across people, agents and backend systems." The platform also allegedly speeds up the onboarding process, treating "AI agents like new teammates."

Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Look Up Creator Playbook Mashable Selects In My Bag Say More AI at School Safety Net Versus Trending Now Back to School All Series Does'You Can See Everything' live up to the hype? Nathan Fielder and Elizabeth Holmes make a mesmerizing and mind-bending match. Kristy Puchko is the Entertainment Editor at Mashable. Based in New York City, she's an established film critic and entertainment reporter who has traveled the world on assignment, covered a variety of film festivals, co-hosted movie-focused podcasts, and interviewed a wide array of performers and filmmakers. All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers.

Scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have developed two artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platforms that could enable researchers to more accurately predict proteins that undergo phase separation - a process through which proteins in cells separate like oil droplets in water. The tools are the result of a systematic analysis of predicted phase-separating proteins from various living things, including animals, plants, fungi and single-celled organisms such as bacteria. From their analyses, the scientists also uncovered fundamental insights about the phase separation process. Led by Professor Miao Yansong from the School of Biological Sciences and the Institute for Digital Molecular Analytics and Science (IDMxS) at NTU, in collaboration with Professor Weibo Gao from NTU's School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, the research could be applied to advance the understanding of diseases and ageing, as well as to improve crops. Both AI platforms and their research findings have been reported in the peer-reviewed journal .

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Google's Gemini Can Now Make Calls for You on Pixel Phones Call for Me--a feature that's exclusive to the Pixel 11 series--gives robocalls a new meaning. Google has been trying to have its AI assistant make phone calls on your behalf for almost 10 years. It enabled the now-defunct Google Assistant to call restaurants and book tables . That service was shuttered a few years ago, but now comes round two, powered by modern large language models . On Thursday, Google announced Call for Me, an experimental beta feature exclusive to its latest Pixel 11 smartphones in the US (and in English).

I'm almost embarrassed to admit that the first time I saw one of Meta's new holographic avatars today, during a WhatsApp call with a Meta rep I had just met a few minutes before, I didn't immediately clock that I was speaking to an avatar. That's how far the company's avatar technology has come in the last couple years. Meta announced at Connect that it's bringing its holographic avatars to its new VR glasses and to the Meta Ray-Ban Display frames. I got the chance to experience both ahead of the keynote and was surprised at how far the tech has come since the first time I experienced it on Meta's Orion prototype. Setting up an avatar is a bit different depending on which device you're using.

He's an assistant professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, and has spent more than a decade researching AI-driven interactions between humans and robots. But he found himself typing " public transport " into the search bar of a very specific website's "amateur section." "People are hard to predict," Bazilinskyy says. It's why he researches what he does. So his prurient pursuit had a point.