ai – Tech News

Instagram cracks down on AI accounts pretending to be human

image via theverge.com

Instagram is finally taking steps to address the rise of fake AI-influencer accounts that have gotten harder to spot. It’s also renaming the “AI creator” label to “AI-generated profile” to make it clear when a profile features an AI-generated person that’s not a real human being. “We’ve heard that people don’t like seeing a profile that seems human, only to find out later that the person featured is AI-generated,” said Instagram in a blog post. “They want to know when a profile features an AI-generated person.”
https://www.theverge.com/tech/986593/instagram-addresses-fake-ai-profile-slop

Humanoid robots smash Usain Bolt’s 100-meter record

The 9.58-second 100-meter dash record set by Usain Bolt in 2009 has been outpaced by Chinese robots participating at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing. In a preliminary heat on Saturday, Tiangong Ultra, made by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, ran the distance in 9.39 seconds, followed by the Honor-developed Lightning at 9.47 seconds.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/983688/world-humanoid-robot-games-sprint-record-2026

Not an AI Optimist? You’re With the Majority of Americans

New polls from Pew Research, CNBC, and YouGov show that the majority of Americans think AI development is moving too fast and are concerned about its future. As TechCrunch reports, this is an increase over last year, suggesting that even as AI becomes more integrated into our day-to-day lives, many are increasingly worried.
https://ca.pcmag.com/ai/17544/not-an-ai-optimist-youre-with-the-majority-of-americans

Anthropic’s Text Watermarking Proves AI Companies Do Not Care at All About Writing

Earlier this month, Anthropic announced that future versions of Claude will generate text that includes watermarks showing it was AI-generated. At the time, Anthropic did not explain how this would work, leaving us to speculate on the podcast: Would it somehow encode this into the text? Include invisible characters? Do something with the metadata? We now know, thanks to a blog post over the weekend, that Anthropic will do this by changing how its AI writes altogether.
https://www.404media.co/anthropics-text-watermarking-proves-ai-companies-do-not-care-at-all-about-writing/

Teachers Warn That Students Are Losing the Ability to Think as They Lean on AI for Everything

Students across the country are using AI models to complete assignments and write entire essays. Some of this constitutes cheating, but in many cases schools are allowing students to make some use of AI tools. This is a slippery slop. As some experts argue, any intrusion of automation into the writing process isn’t just threatening students’ composition skills, but their entire ability to think.
https://futurism.com/future-society/students-lose-ability-think-ai

Cursor capitalizes on GitHub frustration, launches rival hosting platform

For as long as anyone can remember, GitHub has been the de facto code host preferred by a majority of developers. However, in recent times, the platform has struggled with widely reported outages and performance degradation and, as it drops the ball, Cursor is waiting to pick it up.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/18/cursor-capitalizes-on-github-frustration-launches-rival-hosting-platform/

Apple’s Camera-Equipped AirPods Confirmed: See Them in Action

Apple is working on camera-equipped AirPods that appear to be nearly ready to launch, based on a video MacRumors found in the macOS Tahoe 26.7 release candidate. In a short demo, a man holds a book up so the camera in the AirPods can see the title. "With Visual Intelligence, your world becomes savable. See something you like? Just ask me to save it for later," says the voiceover text.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/17/camera-equipped-airpods-macos-26-7/