In what may be one of the more questionable uses of AI to date, Amazon announced on Wednesday that it will display AI-generated images of products within its shopping app based on users’ search queries. That’s right — a retailer where people shop for real-world products thinks that displaying fake photos will “help” consumers better find what they’re looking for.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/03/amazon-will-show-ai-product-images-when-you-search-for-some-reason/
In response to Google’s changes, many have begun defecting to DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused alternative that has never been able to break past Google’s dominance, accounting for only around 2% of the U.S. search market. “Google is force-feeding AI with no way to opt out,” Weinberg said Tuesday in a statement, referring to Google’s Search overhaul. “As a result, their results are getting worse, not better. We want to be the place that puts users in charge and allows them to decide how much or how little AI they want.”
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/26/duckduckgo-installs-are-up-30-as-users-reject-being-force-fed-googles-ai-search/
Mozilla unveiled a major visual and functional overhaul of Firefox on Wednesday, the browser's largest redesign since 2020, with changes to its appearance, privacy settings, and AI controls expected to roll out later this year. Those eager to try the new look can already do so, as Neowin reports that the Nova changes are live in Firefox's experimental Nightly channel. Activation requires opening about:config, creating a new boolean entry called "browser.nova.enabled," and toggling it to true before restarting — though anyone doing so should be aware that Nightly is a pre-release channel and instability is possible.
https://qz.com/mozilla-firefox-project-nova-redesign-ai-controls-052226
It’s graduation week, which means the emissaries of the nation’s elite are now descending onto college campuses to deliver the much-discussed and, they hope, indelibly quotable college commencement address. The problem this year, however, is that the news of the day is artificial intelligence, and students just don’t want to hear it. AI has become a hobgoblin of bad graduation addresses, landing somewhere between cringe, out of touch, and offensive.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91544892/the-students-booing-ai-arent-luddites
The era of the “ten blue links” is officially over. At its Google I/O conference on Tuesday, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search centered around a reimagined “intelligent search box” – what the…
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/google-search-as-you-know-it-is-over/
Chinese robotics company Unitree just showed off an explosive demo: a fully functional mecha suit for a human pilot. “We kindly request that all users refrain from making any dangerous modifications or using the robot in a hazardous manner,” the company said in its announcement.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/unitree-mecha-suit
Of the 10,871 new podcast feeds created in the past nine days, 4,243 of them, or 39 percent, have signs of being AI-generated, data from the Podcast Index cited by Bloomberg last week showed. “It’s absurd,” Dave Jones, who runs the Podcast Index, said on his own show last week, per the outlet.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/half-ai-podcasts-slop