A delivery driver posted a TikTok alleging she had been sexually assaulted by a customer. The deepfakes that followed reveal a growing digital blackface problem. When DoorDash delivery driver Livie Rose Henderson posted a video alleging that one of her customers sexually assaulted her in October, it set off a firestorm of reactions. Henderson's TikTok claimed that when she was dropping off a delivery in Oswego, New York, she found a customer's front door wide open and inside, a man on the couch with his pants and underwear pulled down to his ankles. Henderson was dubbed the "DoorDash Girl," and her video accrued tens of millions of views, including some supportive and consoling responses to what she said she had endured on the job as a young woman.

Xania Monet is'a photorealistic digital avatar accompanied by a sound that computers have generated to resemble that of a human voice singing words', writes Van Badham. Xania Monet is'a photorealistic digital avatar accompanied by a sound that computers have generated to resemble that of a human voice singing words', writes Van Badham. Xania Monet's music is the stuff of nightmares. Thankfully her AI'clankers' will be limited to this cultural moment Xania Monet is the latest digital nightmare to emerge from a hellscape of AI content production. The music iteration of AI "actor" Tilly Norwood, Xania is a composite product manufactured of digital tools: in this case, a photorealistic avatar accompanied by a sound that computers have generated to resemble that of a human voice singing words.

Keep fake spider webs close to your house, and ditch the real pumpkins if you live near wildlife. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. With spooky season just on the horizon, Halloween decorations are beginning to pop up everywhere--tombstones, pumpkins, and of course, tons and tons of fake spiderwebs . Amidst all the autumnal celebrations, it's easy to forget those who not only can't join in on the celebration, but might even be threatened by the decorations: wildlife. While Jennifer Bloodgood, a Cornell University wildlife veterinarian, hasn't personally witnessed it before, she tells that she agrees with the dangers of some Halloween decorations. "Birds would definitely be the major concern," she says, referring specifically to fake spider webs.

Feedback is New Scientist's popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com Recently, Feedback was delighted to peruse the raciest conference invitation we have ever received. We get a lot of conference invites from organisers labouring under the delusion we are doing something akin to science journalism, and they are mostly a little prosaic: what's new in G-protein signalling, more findings about the biology of molluscs, that kind of thing. Here is the opening line: "From its groundbreaking inception in London to its spectacular evolution in the vibrant heart of China, the Love and Sex with Robots Conference is gearing up for its most thrilling chapters yet: its landmark 12th International edition, scheduled for June 2026."

Mark Zuckerberg's foray into AI chatbots has sparked a'privacy nightmare' with some users' intimate chats and questions shared on to a public newsfeed. Some users unwittingly activated a sharing function, resulting in their conversations with the AI bot to be shared to a'discover' page available to strangers. This feature sets it apart from more established and well known AI servers, like ChatGPT or Elon Musk's Grok, in that users who opt in are sharing deeply personal information about their sex lives, finances or health status without realizing that their conversations are being made public. The feed shows off prompts, conversations, and image outputs from other users, similar to the way a Facebook feed works, which is also part of the Meta umbrella. Users have shared their startup businesses, seeking advice or business proposals, while others have plugged deeply personal custody details into the server seeking advice ahead of an upcoming court appearance.

Feedback is New Scientist's popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com Ophthalmologist Gus Gazzard writes in after taking a close look at a marketing email he received from WildBounds. It advertised a revolutionary new range of tents from Colorado-based company Big Agnes, which has created a new kind of waterproofing called HyperBead. Marketing is often detached from reality, but one sentence stood out: "Waterproof at the molecular level, this proprietary material shrugs off rain without relying on coatings or chemicals, meaning no reproofing and no PFAS."

The rise of AI NPCs has felt like a looming threat for years, as if developers couldn't wait to dump human writers and offload NPC conversations to generative AI models. At CES 2025, NVIDIA made it plainly clear the technology was right around the corner. PUBG developer Krafton, for instance, plans to use NVIDIA's ACE (Avatar Cloud Engine) to power AI companions, which will assist and banter with you during matches. Krafton isn't just stopping there -- it's also using ACE in its life simulation title InZOI to make characters smarter and generate objects. While the use of generative AI in games seems almost inevitable, as the medium has always toyed with new methods for making enemies and NPCs seem smarter and more realistic, seeing several NVIDIA ACE demos back-to-back made me genuinely sick to my stomach.

Devindra: because like you could just always just take a photo of something and be like, yeah, that's how we wonder if it's going to Cherlynn: be a ram hog.

Evaluations of creative stories generated by large language models (LLMs) often focus on objective properties of the text, such as its style, coherence, and toxicity. While these metrics are indispensable, they do not speak to a story's subjective, psychological impact from a reader's perspective. We introduce the Psychological Depth Scale (PDS), a novel framework rooted in literary theory that measures an LLM's ability to produce authentic and narratively complex stories that provoke emotion, empathy, and engagement. We empirically validate our framework by showing that humans can consistently evaluate stories based on PDS (0.72 Krippendorff's alpha). We also explore techniques for automating the PDS to easily scale future analyses. GPT-4o, combined with a novel Mixture-of-Personas (MoP) prompting strategy, achieves an average Spearman correlation of $0.51$ with human judgment while Llama-3-70B scores as high as 0.68 for empathy. Finally, we compared the depth of stories authored by both humans and LLMs. Surprisingly, GPT-4 stories either surpassed or were statistically indistinguishable from highly-rated human-written stories sourced from Reddit. By shifting the focus from text to reader, the Psychological Depth Scale is a validated, automated, and systematic means of measuring the capacity of LLMs to connect with humans through the stories they tell.

At first glance at this video, you'd be forgiven for mistaking it as a clip from the latest children's cartoon. But the footage is very much real, and features a real-life robot. Boston Dynamics' robot dog, Spot, can be seen wearing a blue, sparkly dog costume as it performs an impressive dance routine. 'Spot is meeting another strange dog and making friends through the power of dance. Meet Sparkles!' Boston Dynamics said.