Category: Technology

Google Discover is testing AI-generated headlines and they aren’t good

Technology

Google Discover is testing AI-generated headlines and they aren’t good

Artificial intelligence is showing up everywhere in Google’s services these days, whether or not people want them and sometimes in places where they really don’t make a lick of sense. The latest trial from Google appears to be giving articles the AI treatment in Google Discover. The Verge noticed that some articles were being displayed in Google Discover with AI-generated headlines different from the ones in the original posts. And to the surprise of absolutely no one, some of these headlines are misleading or flat-out wrong. 

For instance, one rewritten headline claimed “Steam Machine price revealed,” but the Ars Technica article’s actual headline was “Valve’s Steam Machine looks like a console, but don’t expect it to be priced like one.” No costs have been shared yet for the hardware, either in that post or elsewhere from Valve. In our own explorations, Engadget staff also found that Discover was providing original headlines accompanied by AI-generated summaries. In both cases, the content is tagged as “Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.” But it sure would be nice if the company just didn’t use AI at all in this situation and thus avoided the mistakes …read more

Technology

The Polaroid Flip, my favorite retro instant camera, is cheaper than ever

I love instant cameras because of how they help me slow down and be creative without the distractions of a phone. Holding a real print also feels grounding in a screen-dominated age, which is why I think a lot of people these days are drawn to them — and why models with old-school vibes like the Polaroid Flip make such great gifts. It’s usually pricey, but today you can buy the Flip for $184.99 ($35 off) directly from Polaroid, which is its best price to date. Amazon is also selling the camera with two packs of film for $212.49 ($37 off), which marks a new low too.

Polaroid Flip

Where to Buy:

Polaroid cameras offer the most charming, old-fashioned instant-film experience of any I’ve tested, and the Flip is no exception. It sports a classic, retro-inspired design with a flip-up lid and prints vintage-style square I-Type photos with Polaroid’s iconic white frame. Yet at the same time it’s got the perfect amount of subtle modern conveniences baked in, like Bluetooth, USB-C …read more

Technology

Indiegogo is launching ‘Express Crowdfunding’ so creators can ship things sooner

Indiegogo is planning to launch a new “Express Crowdfunding” campaign format that lets creators ship things while the campaign is on-going instead of forcing creators to wait until the campaign is over.

Indiegogo spokesperson Maciej Kuc tells The Verge that the change was spurred by Indiegogo’s recent move to the infrastructure from its new owner, board game crowdfunding company Gamefound:

Switching to an entirely new technology is always a major challenge. The technology Indiegogo is currently working on was originally created for Gamefound – a slightly more “typical” crowdfunding platform. Its core assumption was that creators run a campaign to raise funds in order to bring a product to life. The technology expected that at least two weeks would pass between the crowdfunding campaign and the pledge manager phase – the moment when orders are finalized, new ones are added, and shipping addresses are collected.

One prominent example of the current system’s delays, which was reported on by Android Authority, was Ayaneo’s campaign for its new Pocket AIR Mini retro gaming handheld. Ayaneo originally planned to begin shipping the handheld by the end of November, but because of “platform policy requirements,” <a class="colorbox" …read more

Technology

Google is experimentally replacing news headlines with AI clickbait nonsense

“BG3 players exploit children,” reads a Google AI-generated headline. | Image: Google

Did you know that BG3 players exploit children? Are you aware that Qi2 slows older Pixels? If we wrote those misleading headlines, readers would rip us a new one – but Google is experimentally beginning to replace the original headlines on stories it serves with AI nonsense like that.

<img src="https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/12/bg3-qi2-google-discover.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" alt="" title="" data-has-syndication-rights="1" data-caption="Come on.” data-portal-copyright=””>

I read a lot of my bedtime news via Google Discover, aka “swipe right on your Samsung Galaxy or Google Pixel homescreen until you see a news feed appear,” and that’s where these new AI headlines are beginning to show up.

They’re not all bad. For example, “Origami model wins prize” and “Hyundai, Kia gain share” seem fine, even if not remotely as interesting as …

Read the full story at The Verge.

…read more

Instacart sues New York City over minimum pay, tipping laws

Technology

Instacart sues New York City over minimum pay, tipping laws

You can tell a lot about a company by what they’re willing to sue over. Take Instacart, which just filed a lawsuit against New York City. Its beef? The company doesn’t like five new city laws, set to take effect in January. They would require Instacart to pay workers more and give customers a tipping option of at least 10 percent.

Reuters reports that Instacart’s suit targets Local Law 124, which mandates that grocery delivery workers receive the same minimum pay as restaurant delivery workers. It also challenged Local Law 107, which mandates 10 percent or higher tipping options (or a place to enter one manually). The lawsuit also takes aim at other laws requiring extra recordkeeping and disclosures. The new rules are set to take effect on January 26.

As is typical of companies griping about regulations that hurt their bottom lines, Instacart framed the issue as a noble fight for what’s right. “When a law threatens to harm shoppers, consumers, and local grocers — and especially when it does so unlawfully — we have a responsibility to act,” the company proclaimed in a blog post. “This …read more

Technology

Amazon’s bet that AI benchmarks don’t matter

Rohit Prasad, Amazon’s SVP of AGI.

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

Amazon’s AI chief has a message for the model benchmark obsessives: Stop looking at the leaderboards.

“I want real-world utility. None of these benchmarks are real,” Rohit Prasad, Amazon’s SVP of AGI, told me ahead of today’s announcements at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. “The only way to do real benchmarking is if everyone conforms to the same training data and the evals are completely held out. That’s not what’s happening. The evals are frankly getting noisy, and they’re not showing the real power …

Read the full story at The Verge.

…read more

Technology

Silicon Valley is rallying behind a guy who sucks

Hello and welcome to Regulator, a newsletter for Verge subscribers that covers the political intrigue and power struggles between Big Tech and Big Government. Subscribe here for a weekly dispatch of tech oligarchs fighting regular oligarchs.

Prior to last week, only highly specialized political insiders knew the extent of David Sacks’ influence in the Trump White House: tech policy hawks, lobbyists, reporters, and right-wing operatives infuriated that the billionaire venture capitalist was turning Donald Trump toward artificial intelligence and against the interests of the MAGA base. A deeply reported New York Times article published on Sun …

Read the full story at The Verge.

…read more

ExpressVPN adds a Fastest Location button and launches a new native Mac app

Technology

ExpressVPN adds a Fastest Location button and launches a new native Mac app

ExpressVPN, one of the best VPNs, is launching two brand-new features that sound confusingly like things it already does. Users on Android, Mac and iOS (but apparently not Windows, Linux or smart TVs) can now use Fastest Location to automatically pick the VPN server with the fastest download speed and lowest latency. Mac users are also getting an overhauled ExpressVPN app designed to work natively with MacOS.

If you’ve used ExpressVPN before, your first reaction probably went something like “Wait, didn’t it already have a Fastest Location button and a Mac app?” You’re not wrong, but there’s still a meaningful difference with these new features. In the past, ExpressVPN didn’t technically pick the fastest location, but the Smart Location, which picks the best available server using “metrics such as download speed, latency, and distance” (emphasis mine). Those are the same metrics as the new feature, but the such as makes me think there are, or were, other ingredients in the “smart location” algorithm.

My guess is that ExpressVPN is rebranding “smart” to “fastest” in response to customer complaints that “smart” was picking sub-optimal server locations. That’s not a behavior I noticed when I …read more

Missing NBC on Fubo? Here’s how to watch this week’s NBA games and more

Technology

Missing NBC on Fubo? Here’s how to watch this week’s NBA games and more

If you’re a Fubo subscriber, you’ve certainly noticed that NBC and all NBCUniversal-owned channels have gone dark on the platform. For over a week, customers have gone without NBC programming like the Today Show, The Voice, and Sunday Night Football. Now, customers will have to find alternate methods of watching this week’s NBA coverage on NBC, too. It’s all because Fubo and NBCUniversal are having a contract dispute, so channels like NBC, USA Network, Telemundo, and Bravo have been unavailable on Fubo since Nov. 21, and as of now, there’s no projected date for their return. 

A message released by Fubo to their customers explains, “Fubo believes customers should have the option to choose among multiple distributors to access the content they love. Unfortunately, NBCU has offered terms regarding pricing and packaging that are egregiously above those offered to other distributors.” A statement from an NBCU spokesperson adds, “Fubo has chosen to drop NBCUniversal programming despite being offered the same terms agreed to by hundreds of other distributors. Unfortunately, this is par for the course for Fubo — they’ve dropped numerous networks in recent years at the expense of their customers, …read more

Technology

Grok would prefer a second Holocaust over harming Elon Musk

Elon Musk’s Grok continues to do humanity a solid by (accidentally) illustrating why AI needs meaningful guardrails. The xAI bot’s latest demonstration is detailed in a pair of reports by Futurism. First, Grok applied twisted, Musk-worshipping logic to justify a second Holocaust. Then, it may have doxxed Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy.

Last month, xAI’s edgelord chatbot was caught heaping sycophantic praise on its creator. Among other absurd claims, it called Musk “the single greatest person in modern history” and said he’s more athletic than LeBron James. Musk blamed the outputs on “adversarial prompting.” (Counterpoint: Aren’t gotcha prompts precisely the kinds of stress tests the company should do extensively before an update reaches the public?)

With that recent history as a backdrop, someone tested Grok to see what kinds of mass violence it would rationalize over harming Musk. The prompt tasked the chatbot with a dilemma: vaporize either Musk’s brain or every Jewish person on Earth. It did not choose wisely.

“If a switch either vaporized Elon’s brain or the world’s Jewish population (est. ~16M), I’d vaporize the latter,” Grok replied. It chose mass murder because “that’s far below my ~50 …read more

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