The A.I. Disruption Is Here A.I. is disrupting sectors once thought insulated from it, upending the markets. Please enable javascript to get your Slate Plus feeds. If you can't access your feeds, please contact customer support. Check your phone for a link to finish setting up your feed. Please enter a valid phone number.

Beyond mistakes or nonsense, deliberately bad information being injected into AI search summaries is leading people down potentially harmful paths. These days, rather than showing you the traditional list of links when you run a search query, Google is intent on throwing up AI Overviews instead: synthesized summaries of information scraped off the web, with some word-prediction magic added, and packaged together in a way to sound as accurate and reliable as possible. We've written before about some of the problems with these AI Overviews, which regularly contain mistakes or nonsense, and of course rip off the work of the human writers who actually know the answers to the questions you're putting into Google. There's another problem though--these AI answers can actually be dangerous. As with every other new technology through history, scams are now making their way into AI Overviews as well, apparently injecting Google's AI answers with fraudulent phone numbers that you shouldn't trust.

As AI takes over dating apps, shitposting is the new authenticity. Please enable javascript to get your Slate Plus feeds. If you can't access your feeds, please contact customer support. Check your phone for a link to finish setting up your feed. Please enter a valid phone number.

Silicon Valley wants you to upload your medical records to chatbots. Please enable javascript to get your Slate Plus feeds. If you can't access your feeds, please contact customer support. Check your phone for a link to finish setting up your feed. Please enter a valid phone number.

Elon Musk's Grok is breaking the law, and nobody in power seems to care. Please enable javascript to get your Slate Plus feeds. If you can't access your feeds, please contact customer support. Check your phone for a link to finish setting up your feed. Please enter a valid phone number.

Please enable javascript to get your Slate Plus feeds. If you can't access your feeds, please contact customer support. Check your phone for a link to finish setting up your feed. Please enter a valid phone number. Enter your phone number and we'll text you a link to set up the podcast in your app: Apple Podcasts will only work on MacOS operating systems since Catalina .

Is the A.I. Bubble Bursting? An "A.I. hater" makes the case. Please enable javascript to get your Slate Plus feeds. If you can't access your feeds, please contact customer support. Check your phone for a link to finish setting up your feed.

How a bizarre VHS tape from 1987 led the way for modern dating apps. Please enable javascript to get your Slate Plus feeds. If you can't access your feeds, please contact customer support. Check your phone for a link to finish setting up your feed. Please enter a valid phone number.

If You Give A.I. a Nuke Computers can't decide to drop a bomb. Please enable javascript to get your Slate Plus feeds. If you can't access your feeds, please contact customer support. Check your phone for a link to finish setting up your feed. Please enter a valid phone number.

Plus: The SEC lets SolarWinds off the hook, Microsoft stops a historic DDoS attack, and FBI documents reveal the agency spied on an immigration activist Signal group in New York City. Eight years after a researcher warned WhatsApp that it was possible to extract user phone numbers en masse from the Meta-owned app, another team of researchers found that they could still do exactly that using a similar technique. The issue stems from WhatsApp's discovery feature, which allows someone to enter a person's phone number to see if they're on the app. By doing this billions of times--which WhatsApp did not prevent--researchers from the University of Vienna uncovered what they're calling "the most extensive exposure of phone numbers" ever . Vaping is a major problem in US high schools.