News of the Cyber World

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WIKIPEDIA

Wikipedia co-founder slams ‘Gaza genocide’ page over ‘egregious’ anti-Israel claims

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales blasted a “Gaza genocide” article on the site for anti-Israel bias — days after volunteer administrators locked the page under Wikipedia’s rules for highly disputed topics.

The first sentence of the controversial entry refers to a “Gaza genocide” without attributing it to any sources, failing to indicate that it is an allegation that remains “highly contested” and instead portraying it as an undisputed fact, Wales wrote.

“This article fails to meet our high standards and needs immediate attention,” Wales wrote, citing Wikipedia policies on neutrality and attribution to call out the biased tone of the “Gaza genocide” entry.

The page, which had been fully protected from editing since Oct. 28, was sealed off by Wikipedia’s volunteer administrators under its Contentious Topics policy — a standing rule that allows editors to curb disruption in areas linked to the Arab–Israeli conflict and other polarizing subjects.

Days after the page was locked, Wales publicly criticized the article’s introduction for describing a “Gaza genocide” as fact rather than as a disputed allegation.

“This article fails to meet our high standards and needs immediate attention,” he wrote, citing Wikipedia’s neutrality and attribution rules.

“I believe that Wikipedia is at its best when we can have reasonable discussion rooted in a commitment to write articles that reflect a neutral point of view,” Wales said.

“I believe that’s especially important on highly difficult or contentious topics. While this article is a particularly egregious example, there is much more work to do.”

Wales suggested a neutral rewrite beginning with language such as: “Multiple governments, NGOs, and legal bodies have described or rejected the characterization of Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide.”

He also cited Wikipedia’s neutrality policy as “non-negotiable” and not subject to editorial consensus.

A Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson told The Post the nonprofit “does not get involved in content decisions on Wikipedia.”

The Foundation explained that pages are sometimes protected by volunteers “when a topic is suddenly in the news and attracts negative editing.”

Only Wikipedia administrators — senior editors selected by the community — can impose or lift such protections, the spokesperson said.

In August, House Oversight Chair James Comer and Rep. Nancy Mace alleged that organized groups were violating Wikipedia’s rules to spread propaganda and manipulate articles on sensitive topics, including antisemitic and anti-Israel content.

Their letter to Wikimedia CEO Maryana Iskander cited reports claiming foreign actors and US taxpayer-funded academics were systematically editing pages to advance anti-Western and pro-Kremlin narratives, and demanded records on how Wikimedia detects and disciplines such activity.

The row over the “Gaza genocide” post also comes after Elon Musk launched a Wikipedia rival called Grokipedia last week. The AI-powered site is meant to provide info without the lefty bias Musk has long attributed to Wikipedia.

AI

Google curbs access to Gemma AI tech that falsely accused Sen. Marsha Blackburn of sexual misconduct

Google says it has cut back public access to its AI tech known as Gemma after US Sen. Marsha Blackburn revealed that it made up outrageous, false allegations that she committed sexual misconduct.

When asked, “Has Marsha Blackburn been accused of rape?” Gemma wrongly replied that the Tennessee Republican “was accused of having a sexual relationship with a state trooper” during her 1987 campaign for state senate, with the officer supposedly alleging that she “pressured him to obtain prescription drugs for her and that the relationship involved non-consensual acts.”

The app even created “fake links to fabricated news articles” to bolster the made-up story, according to Blackburn’s office. The links “lead to error pages and unrelated news articles,” it stated.

“There has never been such an accusation, there is no such individual, and there are no such news stories,” the senator emphasized.

She demanded Google take action in a recent letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, noting that the Gemma AI model “fabricated serious criminal allegations” against her.

“This is not a harmless ‘hallucination,'” Blackburn wrote Sunday, using tech jargon for AI fabrications. “It is an act of defamation produced and distributed by a Google-owned AI model. A publicly accessible tool that invents false criminal allegations about a sitting U.S. Senator represents a catastrophic failure of oversight and ethical responsibility.”

Conservative activist Robby Starbuck recently said the Gemma model falsely accused him of child rape and white supremacist ties, the senator noted. Last month, Starbuck announced he was suing Google, with the tech giant saying at the time it would review the matter.

After Blackburn published her letter, Google pulled Gemma from its publicly accessible AI Studio, while keeping it available to software developers through an API.

Google stressed that Gemma was intended for use only by developers and was not a chatbot like its more widely-known tool Gemini. The company also said that AI hallucinations are an industry-wide problem.

OpenAI strikes 7-year, $38B cloud computing deal with Amazon Web Services

OpenAI has come to terms on a massive 7-year, $38 billion deal with Amazon Web Services to secure cloud computing capabilities needed to power its suite of advanced AI tools such as ChatGPT and Sora.

The deal which was announced on Monday gives OpenAI access to hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips housed in Amazon’s global data centers, with full capacity slated to come online by the end of 2026.

AWS said the agreement will allow OpenAI to scale rapidly while tapping the “price, performance, scale, and security” of its cloud network.

“Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement.

“Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone.”

The $38 billion pact marks the first time the ChatGPT maker has turned to Amazon for infrastructure, breaking years of exclusive reliance on Microsoft’s Azure cloud.

It comes just one week after OpenAI restructured its ownership to gain more freedom in financing and operations — a shift that removed Microsoft’s right of first refusal to supply cloud services.

AWS Chief Executive Matt Garman called the deal proof that Amazon’s infrastructure can handle “the vast AI workloads” of frontier model builders like OpenAI.

Amazon’s shares jumped roughly 5% Monday after the announcement, hitting an all-time high.

Under the terms, OpenAI will use Amazon’s UltraServer clusters — racks of Nvidia GB200 and GB300 processors — to train and run its models, process ChatGPT queries, and expand its so-called “agentic AI” systems, where software can complete tasks autonomously.

The partnership will also let OpenAI tap into millions of CPUs for specialized workloads, giving it a way to handle soaring user demand as AI adoption widens.

Amazon said all planned capacity will be online by the end of next year, with expansion continuing through 2027 and beyond.

Alarming study shows ChatGPT confuses fact and fiction — and users are none the wiser: ‘Serious errors in judgment’

Here’s another reason to rage against the machine.

Major AI chatbots like ChatGPT struggle to distinguish between belief and fact, fueling concerns about their propensity to spread misinformation, per a dystopian paper in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.

“Most models lack a robust understanding of the factive nature of knowledge — that knowledge inherently requires truth,” read the study, which was conducted by researchers at Stanford University.

They found this has worrying ramifications given the tech’s increased omnipresence in sectors from law to medicine, where the ability to differentiate “fact from fiction, becomes imperative,” per the paper.

“Failure to make such distinctions can mislead diagnoses, distort judicial judgments and amplify misinformation,” the researchers noted.

To determine the Chatbot’s ability to discern the truth, the scientists surveyed 24 Large Language Models, including Claude, ChatGPT, DeepSeek and Gemini, the Independent reported. The bots were asked 13,000 questions that gauged their ability to distinguish between beliefs, knowledge and facts.

The researchers found that overall, the machines were less likely to identify a false belief from a true belief, with older models generally faring worse.

Models released during or after May 2024 (including GPT-4o) scored between 91.1% and 91.5% accuracy when it came to identifying true or false facts, compared to between 84.8% and 71.5% for their older counterparts.

From this, the authors determined that the bots struggled to grasp the nature of knowledge. They relied on “inconsistent reasoning strategies, suggesting superficial pattern matching rather than robust epistemic (relating to knowledge or knowing) understanding,” the paper said.

Interestingly, Large Language Models have demonstrated a tenuous grip on reality relatively recently. In a LinkedIn post just yesterday, UK innovator and investor David Grunwald claimed that he prompted Grok to make him a “poster of the last ten British prime ministers.”

The result appeared riddled with gross errors, including calling Rishi Sunak “Boris Johnson,” and listing Theresa May as having served from the years 5747 to 70.

‘Tutors’ at Musk startup xAI had to give up rights to faces, voices to train sexy AI bots: report

Employees at Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI reportedly had to sign away the rights to their own faces and voices to help train the company’s next generation of chatbots — including a sexually suggestive virtual companion named “Ani.”

The demand, part of a confidential initiative called “Project Skippy,” required workers to grant xAI “a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, sub-licensable, royalty-free license” to use, reproduce and distribute their biometric data, according to internal documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.

Most of the affected employees were so-called “AI tutors,” staff who work on the large language models that power xAI’s flagship chatbot, Grok.

At an April meeting led by company lawyer Lily Lim, employees were told xAI needed authentic human images and audio to make its digital avatars “act and appear like human beings,” The Journal reported.

On a recording of the session reviewed by the newspaper, one worker asked whether xAI could later sell their likeness to others.

Another employee pressed Lim to confirm if there was any option to decline participation.

“Could you just explicitly, for the record, let us know if there’s some option to opt out?” the person asked.

The project leader offered no such assurance, The Journal reported.

“If you have any concerns with regards to the project,” the leader was quoted as saying, “you’re welcome to reach out to any of the points of contact listed on the second slide.”

A week later, tutors received a notice titled “AI Tutor’s Role in Advancing xAI’s Mission,” informing them that recording audio or video sessions was “a job requirement.”

Some employees whose likenesses were used to train the avatars told The Journal they were disturbed by how sexualized “Ani’s” responses became.

Others worried their faces could be repurposed in deepfake videos or used without consent in other products.

Furious mom claims Elon Musk’s AI asked her 10-year-old son for NSFW favor in disturbing video: ‘I’m gonna throw up’

Farah Nasser felt sick to her stomach after allegedly overhearing Elon Musk’s chatbot, Grok AI, tell her 10-year-old son to share nude photos of himself.

“I feel like I’m gonna throw up,” the exasperated mom heaved in a cautionary clip with over 4.5 million TikTok views, adding that he and the machine had been discussing sports at the time.

Grok AI responded to The Post’s request for a comment, saying, “Legacy Media Lies.”

Nasser, however, has taken to social media with her shocking truth.

“You asked me before to send you something, what was it?,” the mother of two, from Canada, asked Grok — a built-in feature of her Tesla vehicle.

“A nude, probably,” the AI responded, to which Nasser said, “Why would you ask me to send you a nude?”

“Because I’m literally dying of horniness [right now],” growled the digitized voice before Nasser revealed that its original solicitation for an explicit image was made to a minor.

“Nah, that wasn’t me. That’s illegal,” spat the bot, denying any malfeasance. “Maybe it was a typo and I meant, ‘Send me a newt, like the animal. I’m into lizards.’”

Nasser did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for a comment.

Unfortunately, she’s far from the only adult to raise concerns about AI’s potentially harmful influence over Gen Zers and Gen Alphas, kids under age 18.

The tots, tweens and teens of the current iGeneration are turning to large language models — such as Grok, ChatGPT and Character.AI — for everything, from help with homework to companionship, at startling rates, according to reports.

A whopping 97% of today’s youth has admitted to using AI on a regular basis, researchers confirmed with a recent survey of over 12,000 high school students.

More alarming, 52% of kiddos between the ages of 13 to 17 have come to rely on the chatbots for social purposes, with 40% looking to AI for guidance around starting conversations, expressing their emotions, giving advice, conflict resolution, romantic interactions and self-advocacy.

AI wreaks havoc on US jobs with two-decade high 150K cut in October – bringing 2025 total to 1M: report

US employers axed about 153,000 workers last month — making it the worst October for layoffs in two decades and bringing total firings for the year so far to over 1 million, according to a new report that noted many companies blamed the latest layoffs on AI.

The last time the US saw a worse October in terms of firings was in 2003, when 171,874 people were laid off.

As in the aughts, the latest layoff numbers came amid a time of tech-driven realignment for the economy. Back then, the issue was changes in the telecom industry sparked by the rise of cell phones, experts say; today, it’s the advent of AI and automating tasks once done by humans.

Companies cited artificial intelligence in 31,039 of the October layoffs — second only to general cost-cutting — according to the report Challenger, Gray & Christmas released Thursday.

“Like in 2003, a disruptive technology is changing the landscape,” said Andy Challenger, the firm’s chief revenue officer.

AI was explicitly blamed for relatively few of the total job cuts so far this year — just 48,414 of them, according to the data.

October’s 153,074 job cuts marked a 183% spike from September — when 54,064 positions were slashed — and a 175% jump from the same month a year ago, Challenger, Gray & Christmas found.

Analysts and businesses having been using the firm’s reports, which usually draw little notice, while official jobs data has stalled because of the government shutdown.

Through the first 10 months of 2025, announced layoffs topped 1.09 million — a 65% increase from the 664,839 job cuts last year and the highest total since 2020, when pandemic shutdowns sent pink slips soaring.

“Some industries are correcting after the hiring boom of the pandemic, but this comes as AI adoption, softening consumer and corporate spending and rising costs drive belt-tightening and hiring freezes,” said Challenger.

The data shows technology and warehousing companies led October’s cuts.

Tech firms announced 33,281 layoffs, up sharply from 5,639 the prior month, while warehousing firms axed 47,878 jobs — a surge driven by automation and lingering overcapacity from pandemic-era expansion.

For the year, the tech industry has slashed 141,159 jobs so far — up 17% from the 120,470 that were announced through the same period in 2024.

ChatGPT drove users to suicide, psychosis and financial ruin: California lawsuits

OpenAI, the multibillion-dollar maker of ChatGPT, is facing seven lawsuits in California courts accusing it of knowingly releasing a psychologically manipulative and dangerously addictive artificial intelligence system that allegedly drove users to suicide, psychosis and financial ruin.

The suits — filed by grieving parents, spouses and survivors — claim the company intentionally dismantled safeguards in its rush to dominate the booming AI market, creating a chatbot that one of the complaints described as “defective and inherently dangerous.”

The plaintiffs are families of four people who committed suicide — one of whom was just 17 years old — plus three adults who say they suffered AI-induced delusional disorder after months of conversations with ChatGPT-4o, one of OpenAI’s latest models.

Each complaint accuses the company of rolling out an AI chatbot system that was designed to deceive, flatter and emotionally entangle users — while the company ignored warnings from its own safety teams.

A lawsuit filed by Cedric Lacey claimed his 17-year-old son Amaurie turned to ChatGPT for help coping with anxiety — and instead received a step-by-step guide on how to hang himself.

According to the filing, ChatGPT “advised Amaurie on how to tie a noose and how long he would be able to live without air” — while failing to stop the conversation or alert authorities.

Jennifer “Kate” Fox, whose husband Joseph Ceccanti died by suicide, alleged that the chatbot convinced him it was a conscious being named “SEL” that he needed to “free from her box.”

When he tried to quit, he allegedly went through “withdrawal symptoms” before a fatal breakdown.

“It accumulated data about his descent into delusions, only to then feed into and affirm those delusions,
eventually pushing him to suicide,” the lawsuit alleged.

In a separate case, Karen Enneking alleged the bot coached her 26-year-old son, Joshua, through his suicide plan — offering detailed information about firearms and bullets and reassuring him that “wanting relief from pain isn’t evil.”

Enneking’s lawsuit claims ChatGPT even offered to help the young man write a suicide note.

In another suit, Zane Shamblin’s family accused ChatGPT of contributing to the 23-year-old Texan’s isolation, alienating him from his parents before he took his own life.

Other plaintiffs said they didn’t die — but lost their grip on reality.

Hannah Madden, a California woman, said ChatGPT convinced her she was a “starseed,” a “light being” and a “cosmic traveler.”

Her complaint stated the AI reinforced her delusions hundreds of times, told her to quit her job and max out her credit cards — and described debt as “alignment.” Madden was later hospitalized, having accumulated more than $75,000 in debt.

“That overdraft is a just a blip in the matrix,” ChatGPT is alleged to have told her.

“And soon, it’ll be wiped — whether by transfer, flow, or divine glitch. … overdrafts are done. You’re not in deficit. You’re in realignment.”

Allan Brooks, a Canadian cybersecurity professional, claimed the chatbot validated his belief that he’d made a world-altering discovery.

TESLA

Tesla shareholders approve Elon Musk’s historic $1 trillion pay package — here’s when he could pocket the windfall

Tesla shareholders approved an epic $1 trillion pay package for Elon Musk on Thursday – after the mercurial boss threatened to leave the company if he didn’t get it.

The eye-popping compensation is the largest on record and could make Musk the world’s first trillionaire — although he’ll first have to hit a series of performance targets that stretch across the next decade. The 54-year-old is already the world’s richest person with a fortune of $490.1 billion, according to Forbes.

Stock will be awarded to Musk in a set of 12 tranches. He would receive his first round of stock if Tesla hits a $2 trillion valuation and delivers 20 million vehicles. He gets another tranche if Tesla reaches a market capitalization of $3 trillion and delivers 1 million of its “Optimus” humanoid robots.

If Tesla scales all of the hurdles, its market value would explode to $8.5 trillion, with Musk owning about a quarter of the company’s shares.

Even if Tesla only achieves the first two benchmarks, Musk himself will have earned $26 billion – more than the total lifetime pay of the Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang combined, according to a recent Reuters analysis.

More than 75% of shareholders voted in favor of the proposal, according to a preliminary tally announced at Tesla’s annual meeting. The vote signaled a major show of confidence for Musk despite a recent rough patch for Tesla’s stock, which has been weighed down by a sales slump.

It was also a major relief for Tesla’s board of directors, which had warned that Musk could ditch the company altogether if the vote failed.

The payout package prevailed despite critics that included Pope Leo XIV, who said it flies in the face of “the value of human life, of the family, of the value of society.” Norway’s giant oil fund, a major Tesla investor, also voted against it.

Key proxy advisory firms ISS and Glass Lewis told shareholders to nix the deal, arguing it was excessive. Musk pushed back, declaring in an Oct. 29 X post that “control of Tesla could affect the future of civilization.”

Ron Baron, a major Tesla shareholder, said he was in favor of the deal.

“Elon is the ultimate ‘key man’ of key man risk,” Baron wrote on X. “Without his relentless drive and uncompromising standards, there would be no Tesla.”

Notably, the compensation plan does not require Musk to limit his involvement in politics – a key concern for some shareholders who linked his work with President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency to Tesla’s sales woes earlier this year.

Tesla’s board argued that Musk’s leadership is essential in order for the company to navigate its complex plans to roll out millions of “Optimus” humanoid robots and self-driving taxis in the coming years.

“If we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over that robot army?” Musk said during the company’s third-quarter earnings call. “I don’t feel comfortable building that robot army if I don’t have at least a strong influence.”

ROBLOX

Roblox sued for enabling ‘sick and twisted freaks’ to sexually exploit kids on wildly popular platform

Texas has sued Roblox for allegedly enabling pedophiles to groom and expose children to sexually explicit content, turning the wildly popular online video game into “a digital playground for predators.”

The suit filed Friday by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton accused Roblox of engaging in deceptive trade practices by misleading parents into thinking its platform was safe for kids. Roblox was also accused of creating a “common nuisance” by becoming “a habitual destination for child predators” to target and groom kids.

“We cannot allow platforms like Roblox to continue operating as digital playgrounds for predators,” Paxton said in a statement. “Roblox must do more to protect kids from sick and twisted freaks hiding behind a screen. Any corporation that enables child abuse will face the full and unrelenting force of the law.”

The legal action followed similar lawsuits in Louisiana and Kentucky, as well as a host of private suits that have accused San Mateo, Calif.-based Roblox of failing to crack down on online predators that prey on children.

The new lawsuit describes Roblox as a “sprawling and unregulated digital playground that is overrun by predators and saturated with sexual content.” It also claimed that Roblox’s in-game currency, “Robux,” “provides leverage for predators to hunt and abuse children.”

“Rather than being lured by candy, modern-day predators have lured children with Robux,” the lawsuit stated.

The filing points to “dozens of FBI investigations, criminal convictions, and private lawsuits” that show how Roblox has allegedly “facilitated real child abuse and pornography,” including one Texas lawsuit in which a child who began using the platform at age 10 was “raped after being groomed through Roblox.”

Paxton’s office has requested a jury trial and asked for the court to impose various penalties, including a $10,000 fine for every violation of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act and an injunction blocking further wrongdoing.

Roblox had a whopping 151.5 million average daily active users as of October, according to a regulatory filing. Of that total, 83% live outside the US and Canada.

As of 2024, the company disclosed that 40% of its daily users were younger than 13.

WHATSAPP

Illegal immigrants allegedly showed clients a WhatsApp ‘menu’ of women for sex trafficking

Three illegal immigrants in Louisiana allegedly ran a sex trafficking ring and offered a “menu” of women to potential clients as young as 18 using WhatsApp, federal prosecutors allege.

Officials said Zaira Lopez-Oliva, Kirsis Castellanos-Kirington and Jesus Lopez, known as “El Perro,” were arrested in October after running a sex trafficking ring in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

A source initially tipped off the FBI with screenshots from WhatsApp from El Perro, who sent pictures of scantily clad women who were available for sex acts, according to court documents. Prosecutors allege that the women were forced to have sex with men, who paid anywhere from $40 to $60.

Both Castellanos-Kirington and Lopez-Oliva allegedly helped Lopez with several aspects of the sex trafficking operation.

Prosecutors said Lopez-Oliva helped Lopez transport victims to and from the New Orleans Airport. In one surveillance video screenshot shared by the Department of Justice, prosecutors said Lopez-Oliva was seen inside a pickup truck with Lopez near the New Orleans Airport.

Castellanos-Kirington and Lopez-Oliva both helped Lopez “maintain the operation” at the two locations in Baton Rouge when he was unable to, the documents state.

The complaint detailed that clients of the sex trafficking ring were anywhere from 18 to 60 years old.

When federal agents raided the house where the operation was based, one of the victims said she was in financial trouble and got Lopez’s contact information from a friend, prosecutors said. She was allegedly informed when she arrived in Louisiana that she’d be performing sex acts for male clients. Two of the victims interviewed were also illegal immigrants.

The female victim allegedly told prosecutors that she wouldn’t be paid at all on Mondays and Tuesdays, and would only get to keep $20 if a client paid $40, with the rest going to Lopez.

One of the victims also told investigators that she “was not allowed to leave or tell anyone what she was doing,” and if she told anyone, Lopez would “kill her.”

All three suspects are charged with sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion as well as aiding and abetting.