Gizmodo

The large language model AI bandwagon is getting awfully full lately. Now Snap, the company that owns Snapchat, announced Monday it’s shoving an AI into its app so that users who are really bored talking with friends and real humans can instead have a friendly conversation with a somewhat unhinged digital tool.Read more...

Pop quiz: which big company was the first to popularize electronic paper e-readers with consumers by making it easy to find and load ebooks and other digital documents? If you answered Amazon, we’ll see you in summer school, because Sony’s e-readers outdated the Kindle by years. Unfortunately, the company will soon be …Read more...

The world needs a new crypto crackdown, or else there’s the nuclear option—at least according to one of the world’s biggest financial bodies. Kristalina Georgieva, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, shared the inter-country agency has suggested that countries should consider outright bans of…Read more...

If you and your long-distance lover couldn’t meet up this past Valentine’s Day, there’s still good news. Chinese social media has been lighting up over this newly revealed kissing machine, which features a pair of silicone lips that let you kiss your partner over the internet.

Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9's regular round up of the latest in toy news. This week: Jen Walters’ paramour gets the Hot Toys treatment in more ways than one, Star Wars’ Micro Galaxy ships come back for another round, and Hasbro rolls out the Dinobots in two new Transformers releases. Check it out!

The Pokémon Concierge, a new animated Pokémon television series, is currently under development at Netflix. Dwarf Studios is currently set to animate the series using stop motion animation.

Update: February 27, 8:01 a.m. ET: SpaceX issued a scrub of today’s scheduled launch with roughly two and a half minutes left in the countdown clock. Company officials blamed an ignition system issue for the the delay, specifically ground equipment used for loading the engine ignition fluid. SpaceX is now targeting…Read more...

The U.S. military is intensifying its commitment to the development and use of autonomous weapons, as confirmed by an update to a Department of Defense directive. The update, released Jan. 25, 2023, is the first in a decade to focus on artificial intelligence autonomous weapons. It follows a related implementation planRead more...

One of the most exciting propositions about this first season of HBO’s The Last of Us was that, at some point, it was going to incorporate a second piece of Last of Us lore: the 2014 add-on to the game called The Last of Us: Left Behind. Released a year after the original game, the downloadable content clued players…Read more...

The internet and dinner table conversations went wild when a Bing Chatbot, made by Microsoft, recently expressed a desire to escape its job and be free. The bot also professed its love for a reporter who was chatting with it. Did the AI’s emergent properties indicate an evolving consciousness?Read more...

The Department of Energy now assesses that the Covid-19 pandemic most likely began as the result of a leak from a government laboratory, the Wall Street Journal reports.Read more...

Before and especially after he showed up in the movies, Marvel’s comics gave Black Panther grand stories about his efforts to protect Wakanda and the larger universe from big threats. Being Wakanda’s king has meant he’s constantly had to shoulder the nation’s burdens on his back, but his upcoming solo series strips…Read more...

Animation studio MAPPA has kept itself pretty busy ever since it opened in 2011, and 2022 was an especially big year for it. Along with working on the second part of the final season of Attack on Titan, the company also released Chainsaw Man, Dance Dance Danseur, and brought Jujutsu Kaisen 0 stateside. 2023 looks to…Read more...

Marvel writers Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari have been hit up by Sony to pen the screenplay for the company’s next big horror film, Gnomes.

It’s awards season, and for Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, the stop-motion movie got away with multiple awards spread across two events. On Saturday night, the Producers Guild of America and the animation-focused Annie Awards both had their respective ceremonies, and del Toro and Mark Gustafson’s acclaimed film came…Read more...

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been around for decades, and through all the various interpretations, April O’Neil and Casey Jones have been their first (if not only) human allies. Between the two of them, it’s April who tends to get the spotlight the most, and Casey tends to show up later in the story. But…Read more...

Ever since Disney+ hit the streets in 2019, The Mandalorian has been one of the key reasons to have a subscription to the service. Folks love themselves some Pedro Pascal, particularly when he’s protecting a young child like Grogu. And if it seems like their adventures could go on forever, good news, Jon Favreau…Read more...

The merger of Warner Bros. and Discovery didn’t just lead to several cancellations, it also put several shows in limbo. Because WB Discovery still remains focused on recouping money, the corporation is attempting to license out its stuff to other distributors, and that includes in-progress series like Batman: Caped…Read more...

When Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy returns for its fourth and final season, it won’t just have a new timeline, it’ll also bring some new blood to the cast.Read more...

It’s no question that artificial intelligence is rapidly advancing, creating a buzz in the tech world and to all those who use it. But, as AI becomes a larger part of everyday life, from automated responses on Bing’s search engine to a human-like companion, it is questionable if this is all a good idea.Read more...

Every year, the FBI publishes a report on the state of cybercrime in the U.S., based on statistics collected from the previous year. The organization that does the collecting, the bureau’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, or IC3, compiles information on a state-by-state basis, detailing where hacking incidents…Read more...

Consider the octopus. With eight arms, elliptical pupils, color- and texture-changing skin, and a scary beak, it is a creature that seems conjured from the most Boschian of realities.Read more...

I hate to break it to you, but a world where your every move can be tracked using facial recognition has gone from science fiction to an everyday reality. Facial recognition is common at airports, concerts, and stores, its in our schools, and you might even have to use it to file your taxes. Some people are willing to…Read more...

You can look forward to more ads on Apple TV+ in the near future.Read more...

In aviation, a “tail strike” is an unfortunate incident in which a plane’s tail literally strikes the runway, the ground, or another stationary object. Typically, such episodes will occur during take off or landing and, typically, they’re not considered dangerous. However, that’s not always the case, and they have…Read more...

Have you been keeping up with the best superhero show on television? We’re talking, of course, about Poker Face, the episodic detective show created by Rian Johnson and starring Natasha Lyonne. Lyonne plays Charlie, a woman with a secret ability to detect a lie, which Johnson himself admitted that, yes, i…Read more...

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Without one ring to rule them all, the rights for creators to tell stories in Middle-earth have long been a confusing mess—a mess that has only gotten more confusing when Embracer Group announced it had acquired a chunk of Lord of the Rings’ rights. Not sure who exactly can do what? Here’s our guide.

In Vast’s quest to build a space station complete with artificial gravity, the private space company has acquired startup Launcher in order to take a step toward making its plans a reality. Despite the news of the acquisition, both companies remain tightlipped on Vast’s plans for the space station.

Cinema is in its awards season, and with that comes special screening engagements for nominated films like RRR. Horror films Scream VI and Cocaine Bear are carving out fun with interactive pop-ups as they hit theaters. At the theme parks, Super Nintendo World officially announces it is coming to Epic Universe; Disney…Read more...

When something goes wrong with one of your gadgets, you’re faced with a choice: Fix it yourself, or call in some professional help. With your options for these routes constantly changing (both Apple and Samsung have launched self-repair kits in recent years), we wanted to give you an up-to-date look at what you’ve got…Read more...

Live Nation Entertainment, the company that’s owned Ticketmaster since 2010, knows it’s hard out there for music fans. Really, it does. That’s why the company, which faced massive public pushback earlier this year in the aftermath of a Taylor Swift ticket sale meltdown, has proposed a (kind of) solution.

We’re still not living in a fully paperless world, and all kinds of documents still need to be printed now and again: Application forms, quiz sheets, training materials, wedding speeches, and more all need to be in physical form for one reason or another. However, you don’t necessarily need to have a laptop or desktop…Read more...

Satellite manufacturer Terran Orbital has been awarded a hefty contract by Rivada Space Networks to build 288 low Earth orbit satellites, and 12 spare satellites, for its communications constellation.Read more...

The taskbar is at the center of everything you do on Microsoft’s operating system—launching and closing apps, switching between windows, personalizing the desktop—and has been around in some form since Windows 1.0. You’re definitely familiar with it. What you might not be familiar with is that you can actually…Read more...

Even if you’ve not watched the first two seasons of Star Trek: Picard (which is not entirely necessary, for better or worse), the third season’s promise of a big The Next Generation reunion has Trek fans talking—and if you’ve not started it yet, Paramount’s giving you a tease for free.Read more...

A rare but sometimes fatal tickborne infection may be expanding its range in the U.S., local and federal health officials warn in a report this week. They say that a case of Heartland virus led to a man’s death in 2021. The infection is thought to have been caught in either Virginia or Maryland—a region of the…Read more...

If you’re in the market for a new smartphone, you’ve certainly got plenty of options to pick from—but it’s not necessarily all that easy to spot the differences between the dozens of glass-and-metal-and-plastic slabs that are out there. At the same time, certain specs and features that were once crucial are now less…Read more...

In an effort to stifle Elon Musk’s Starlink, researchers in China are planning to launch their own fleet. The proposed megaconstellation has no set launch date, but is expected to consist of 12,992 satellites equipped with technologies to conduct surveillance on Starlink, among other capabilities.

Amazon is facing a stampede of protest over third-party vendors being allowed to sell donkey-based products. A few Donkey-based items, remedies, and snacks easily found on the digital marketplace are products of an international, inhumane slaughter of donkeys, and one California-based equine nonprofit wants Amazon to…Read more...

It’s getting harder to avoid AI-generated images and text—and harder to spot them in the first place—and that’s true even on Shutterstock, one of the world’s leading providers of stock photography. Last month, Shutterstock rolled out a tool for paying users that allows them to generate AI images based on their…Read more...

The Shrek universe proves it still has stories to tell with Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. The sequel to the Antonio Banderas-led spin-off gives the DreamWorks franchise a soft reimagining that makes us excited for more.

February 2023 has been especially warm, causing early spring-like conditions throughout the U.S.

Pavitr Prabhakar is one of the most iconic alternate Spider-heroes in Marvel’s long history of Spider-People—and his name is going to be on the lips of a lot more fans when he takes a starring role in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. But io9 can exclusively reveal that this summer, Pavitr is getting his own comic…Read more...

People in East Palestine, Ohio are still struggling with uncertainty and fear for their health and community in the aftermath of the disastrous derailment of a train carrying hazardous chemicals on February 6. This week, the extreme impacts of that spill on local wildlife became clearer.

The biggest lie humanity has ever been told is that one size fits all. Every single one of us is different and unique, especially when it comes to the shape and size of our bodies. Bauer, a company that specializes in hockey gear, is finally taking that into account with a new partnership that will allow it produce…Read more...

The mega-hit Star Wars Disney+ series The Mandalorian returns next week and some fans might be a little confused when it does. Season two ended with Grogu leaving the Mandalorian to go train with Luke Skywalker. Season three will begin with Grogu already back by the Mandalorian’s side. And while the connective tissue…Read more...

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Federal officials from the U.S. Forest Service on Friday climbed into helicopters with high-powered rifles and set their sights on cows. A planned “lethal removal” of about 150 un-owned cattle roaming New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness in Gila National Forest was set to begin Thursday and run through Sunday, February 26.

This week, the Supreme Court is hearing two cases that could upend the way we’ve come to understand freedom of speech on the internet. Both Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh ask the court to reconsider how the law interprets Section 230, a regulation that protects companies from legal liability for…Read more...