U.S. regulators have opened a new investigation into about 2,000 Waymo self-driving cars after reports that one of the company's robotaxis illegally passed a stopped school bus with flashing lights and children disembarking.

Waymo says it's "already developed and implemented improvements related to stopping for school buses and will land additional software updates in our next software release." The company added "driving safely around children has always been one of Waymo's highest priorities. ... [Waymo] approached the school bus from an angle where the flashing lights and stop sign were not visible and drove slowly around the front of the bus before driving past it, keeping a safe distance from children." Reuters reports: NHTSA opened the investigation after a recent media report aired video of an incident in Georgia in which a Waymo did not remain stationary when approaching a school bus with its red lights flashing and stop arm deployed. The report said the Waymo vehicle initially stopped then maneuvered around the bus, passing the extended stop arm while students were disembarking. Waymo's automated driving system surpassed 100 million miles of driving in July and is logging 2 million miles per week, the agency said. "Based on NHTSA's engagement with Waymo on this incident and the accumulation of operational miles, the likelihood of other prior similar incidents is high," the agency said. NHTSA said the vehicle involved was equipped with Waymo's fifth-generation Automated Driving System and was operating without a human safety driver at the time of the incident.

Apple has struck a five-year, $750 million deal to become the exclusive U.S. home for Formula 1 starting in 2026. "Apple is paying a significant premium over the $90 million per year currently paid by ESPN, whose F1 broadcast deal expires at the end of 2025 after holding the rights in the U.S. since 2018," notes Variety. From the report: According to Apple, it will deliver the Formula 1 programming with a "more dynamic and elevated viewing experience," and both parties expressed optimism that the deal will attract new motorsports fans in America in the years ahead. The company is rebranding the video-streaming service, which launched in 2019 as Apple TV+, to remove the plus sign.

It's another big move by Apple into sports, which also has streaming deals with MLB and Major League Soccer. The F1 agreement and follows Apple's partnership with Formula 1 for original film "F1 The Movie," starring Brad Pitt, which raked in $629 million worldwide at the box office this year -- the highest-grossing sports movie of all time and Pitt's highest-grossing feature to date. "F1 The Movie" will debut on Apple TV on Dec. 12, 2025.

Amazon's Ring has announced a partnership with Flock Safety, the AI-powered camera network already used by ICE, the Secret Service, and other federal agencies. "Now agencies that use Flock can request that Ring doorbell users share footage to help with 'evidence collection and investigative work,'" reports TechCrunch. From the report: Flock cameras work by scanning the license plates and other identifying information about cars they see. Flock's government and police customers can also make natural language searches of their video footage to find people who match specific descriptions. However, AI-powered technology used by law enforcement has been proven to exacerbate racial biases. On the same day that Ring announced this partnership, 404 Media reported that ICE, the Secret Service, and the Navy had access to Flock's network of cameras. By partnering with Ring, Flock could potentially access footage from millions more cameras.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: I realize that, at this point, there are already far too many shows. Every channel, every streaming service is teeming with content demanding your attention, and there are simply too few hours in the day to watch them all. However, with that in mind, may I recommend a new show called Space Live? There's only one episode. The only potential downside is that the episode literally lasts for ever. Actually, that's inaccurate. Space Live isn't a show, it's a channel. It launched on Wednesday morning, tucked away on ITVX, and consists only of live footage of Earth broadcast from the International Space Station. It's beguiling to watch, especially for anyone who didn't realize that a person can be awestruck and bored simultaneously.

It's billed as a world first. ITV has partnered with British space media company Sen to use live 4K footage from its proprietary SpaceTV-1 video camera system, mounted on the International Space Station, giving us three camera views: one of the station's docking ports, a horizon view able to show sunrises and storms, and a camera pointing straight down as the ISS passes across the planet. A tracker in the corner of the screen shows the live location of the ISS, while a real-time AI information feed provides facts about our geography and weather systems.

Of course, if you wanted to be picky, you could argue it isn't exactly new. Nasa's YouTube channel has been streaming live footage from the ISS for years, and uniformly draws an audience of a few thousand. But Space Live is, if nothing else, slightly snazzier. The footage is certainly nicer: at 8.30am on Wednesday, Space Live showed gorgeous images of the sun's glare bouncing off the sea around the Bay of Biscay, while all Nasa could offer was a piece of cloth with the word "Flap" written on it. There's even a soundtrack, a constant, soothing kind of hold music that loops and loops without ever becoming fully annoying. It's an improvement, in other words. And, at least for the first orbit, it is absolutely spellbinding.

The California Broadband & Video Association has objected to legislation signed by Governor Gavin Newsom on October 15 that allows apartment tenants to opt out of mandatory bulk billing for internet service. The cable industry group called the measure "an anti-affordability bill masked as consumer protection."

The association said property owners would have to provide refunds to tenants who decline internet service provided through building contracts. The law "undermines the basis of the cost savings and will lead to bulk billing being phased out," the group said. Assembly member Rhodesia Ransom, who authored the bill, said lobby groups for internet providers and real estate companies worked hard to defeat it.

The association told the Sacramento Bee it was disappointed Newsom signed the legislation because it would be "an impediment to utilizing an effective tool" that helped middle-class Californians get discounted rates. The law takes effect January 1. Tenants who are denied the right to opt out can deduct subscription costs from their rent.

The Japanese government has made a formal request asking OpenAI to refrain from copyright infringement. The request came after Sora 2 began generating videos featuring copyrighted characters from anime and video games. Minoru Kiuchi spoke at the Cabinet Office press conference on Friday and described manga and anime as "irreplaceable treasures" that Japan boasts to the world.

The request was made online by the Cabinet Office's Intellectual Property Strategy Headquarters. Sora 2, which launched recently, generates twenty-second videos at 1080p resolution. Social media is getting filled with videos showing characters from One Piece, Demon Slayer, Pokemon and Mario. Digital Minister Masaaki Taira expressed hopes that OpenAI would comply voluntarily. He indicated that measures under Japan's AI Promotion Act may be invoked if the issue remains unresolved.

Indonesia's film industry has started using generative AI tools to produce films at a fraction of Hollywood budgets. The country's filmmakers are deploying ChatGPT for scriptwriting, Midjourney for image generation, and Runway for video storyboarding. VFX artist Amilio Garcia Leonard told Rest of World that AI has reduced his draft editing time by 70%.

The Indonesian Film Producer Association supports the technology. Indonesian films typically cost 10 billion rupiah ($602,500), less than 1% of major Hollywood productions. The sector employed about 40,000 people in 2020 and generated over $400 million in box office sales in 2023. Jobs for storyboarders, VFX artists, and voice actors are disappearing.

The FCC has forced major U.S. online retailers to remove millions of listings for prohibited Chinese-made electronics, including products from Huawei, ZTE, Hikvision, and Dahua, citing national security risks. Reuters reports: FCC Chair Brendan Carr said in an interview [on Friday] that the items removed are either on a U.S. list of barred equipment or were not authorized by the agency, including items like home security cameras and smart watches from companies including Huawei, Hangzhou Hikvision, ZTE, and Dahua Technology Company. Carr said companies are putting new processes in place to prevent future prohibited items as a result of FCC oversight. "We're going to keep our efforts up," Carr said. The FCC issued a new national security notice reminding companies of prohibited items including video surveillance equipment. Carr said the items could allow China to "surveil Americans, disrupt communications networks and otherwise threaten U.S. national security."

Google's viral Nano Banana AI image editor is being woven into Search, NotebookLM, and Photos. Engadget reports: Perhaps the most notable integration here is with NotebookLM. Nano Banana is being used to drastically change up Video Overviews, offering up six new styles like watercolor and anime. It also now generates contextual illustrations based on sources and there's a new option for micro-videos called Briefs. For the uninitiated, Video Overviews is a neat little tool available to NotebookLM users that automatically generates explainer videos from documents. It can even whip up a narrated slideshow with visuals. The AI-heavy update starts rolling out to Pro users this week and to all users in "the upcoming weeks."

Search integration offers new ways to make and edit images while using the official Google app. The company says folks can use a chat prompt to, say, ask the bot to create a stylized version of a pre-existing image. Additionally, photos can be snapped directly from the Lens tool and then edited via the AI. This is rolling out right now in English for US customers, with more countries and languages coming in the near future. We don't have any actual information as to what the Photos integration will look like, with Google simply saying it's bringing Nano Banana to the platform in "the weeks ahead."

Enthusiasm for Sora 2 "wasn't shared in Hollywood," reports the Los Angeles Times, "where the new AI tools have created a swift backlash" that "appears to be only just the beginning of a bruising legal fight that could shape the future of AI use in the entertainment business." [OpenAI] executives went on a charm offensive last year. They reached out to key players in the entertainment industry — including Walt Disney Co. — about potential areas for collaboration and trying to assuage concerns about its technology. This year, the San Francisco-based AI startup took a more assertive approach. Before unveiling Sora 2 to the general public, OpenAI executives had conversations with some studios and talent agencies, putting them on notice that they need to explicitly declare which pieces of intellectual property — including licensed characters — were being opted-out of having their likeness depicted on the AI platform, according to two sources familiar with the matter who were not authorized to comment. Actors would be included in Sora 2 unless they opted out, the people said. OpenAI disputes the claim and says that it was always the company's intent to give actors and other public figures control over how their likeness is used.

The response was immediate.... [Big talent agencies objected, along with performers' unions and major studios.] "Decades of enforceable copyright law establishes that content owners do not need to 'opt out' to prevent infringing uses of their protected IP," Warner Bros. Discovery said in a statement... The strong pushback from the creative community could be a strategy to force OpenAI into entering licensing agreements for the content they need, legal experts said... One challenge is figuring out a way that fairly compensates talent and rights holders. Several people who work within the entertainment industry ecosystem said they don't believe a flat fee works.
Meanwhile, "the complete copyright-free-for-all approach that OpenAI took to its new AI video generation model, Sora 2, lasted all of one week," writes Gizmodo. But that means the service has "now pissed off its users." As 404 Media pointed out, social channels like Twitter and Reddit are now flooded with Sora users who are angry they can't make 10-second clips featuring their favorite characters anymore. One user in the OpenAI subreddit said that being able to play with copyrighted material was "the only reason this app was so fun."
Futurism published more reactions, including ""It's official, Sora 2 is completely boring and useless with these copyright restrictions." Others accused OpenAI of abusing copyright to hype up its new app. "This is just classic OpenAI at this point," another user wrote. "They do this s*** all the time. Let people have fun for a day or two and then just start censoring like crazy." The app now has a measly 2.9-star rating on the App Store, indicative of growing disillusionment and frustration with censorship... [It's not dropped to 2.8.]

In an apparent effort to save face, Altman claimed this week that many copyright holders are actually begging to have their characters appear on Sora, instead of complaining about the trend. "In the case of Sora, we've heard from a lot of concerned rightsholders and also a lot of rightsholders who are like 'My concern is you won't put my character in enough,'" he told the a16z podcast earlier this week. "So I can completely see a world where subject to the decisions that a rightsholder has, they get more upset with us for not generating their character often enough than too much," he added. Whether most rightsholders would agree with that sentiment remains to be seen.
Business Insider offers another reaction. After watching Sora 2's main public feed, they write that Sora 2 "seems to be overrun with teenage boys."

"I'm here to say we have to give these AI bubble predictions a rest," says Yahoo Finance executive editor Brian Sozzi. First of all, AI is a real technology being deployed in real ways inside of Corporate America. Second, this technology is requiring more physical assets in the ground — which are being built to support AI's real-world application. What Zach Dell (son of Michael Dell) is working on at startup Base Power (which just raised $1 billion) impressed me this week. It's addressing a key issue — power availability and costs in part because of rising stress on the grid due to AI development.

Next, the spending on AI infrastructure doesn't strike me as reckless. I talk to CFOs and they walk me through their thinking, which seems logical. They aren't foaming at the mouth with wild-eyed predictions of grandeur similar to the late '90s. Plus, the tech giants making the biggest AI investments are fueling their ambitions by cash on hand — not loading up balance sheets with debt. The upstarts in AI are well funded, not being 100% stupid in their organizational build-outs. They're working on tangible technology that has actual orders behind it...

Lastly here in my scolding of the AI worrywarts is that valuations don't support the warning calls. According to new research out of Goldman Sachs this week, the median forward P/E ratio across the Magnificent Seven is 27 times, or 26 times if excluding Tesla (TSLA), which has a much higher multiple than the other companies. This is roughly half the equivalent valuation of the biggest seven companies in the late 1990s, while the dominant companies in Japan (mostly banks) traded at higher valuations still. What's more, the current enterprise-to-sales ratios are also much lower than those of the dominant companies in the late 1990s.

"So it is true that valuations are high but, in our view, generally not at levels that are as high as are typically seen at the height of a financial bubble," said Goldman Sachs strategist Peter Oppenheimer.

"A 29-year-old man has been arrested on suspicion of starting the Pacific Palisades fire in Los Angeles that killed 12 people and destroyed more than 6,000 homes in January," reports the BBC.

"Evidence collected from Jonathan Rinderknecht's digital devices included an image he generated on ChatGPT depicting a burning city, justice department officials said." Mr Rinderknecht had been living and working in California, and moved to Florida shortly after the fire, according to authorities. The initial blaze Mr Rinderknecht allegedly started on New Year's Day was called the Lachman fire. Although it was quickly suppressed by firefighters, it continued to smoulder underground in the root structure of dense vegetation, according to investigators, before it flared up again above ground in a windstorm [nearly a week later]... He lit it with an open flame after he completed a ride as an Uber driver on New Year's Eve, according to the indictment.

Two passengers rode with Mr Rinderknecht earlier on New Year's Eve. One passenger told investigators he remembered the driver had appeared agitated and angry. Officials said they had used his phone data to pinpoint his location when the fire initially started on 1 January, but when they pressed him on details he allegedly lied to investigators, claiming he was near the bottom of the trail... The phone also showed that he repeatedly called 911 just after midnight on New Year's day, but could not get through because of patchy mobile reception on the trailhead. There was a screen recording of him trying to call emergency services and at one point being connected with a dispatcher. Mr Rinderknecht also asked ChatGPT: "Are you at fault if a fire is lift [sic] because of your cigarettes?"

Investigators said the suspect wanted to "preserve evidence of himself trying to assist in the suppression of the fire". "He wanted to create evidence regarding a more innocent explanation for the cause of the fire," the indictment said... In July 2024, five months before he allegedly set the fire, Mr Rinderknecht asked ChatGPT to create an image of a "dystopian painting" that included a burning forest and a crowd of people running away from a fire, according to investigators.
The announcement from officials suggests they retrieved data about Rinderknecht's iPhone. It says after walking up the trailer Rinderknecht "listened to a rap song — to which he had listened repeatedly in previous days — whose music video included things being lit on fire."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC News: The study by a team from Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children (also known as Sick Kids) and St. Michael's Hospital was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It found that children who spent more time on screens before age eight scored lower on standardized tests. Child psychiatry researchers say handing kids digital devices, like iPads, every time they have a tantrum could lead to future issues. One new study links too much screen time to emotional and anger management problems.

The study followed more than 3,000 kids in Ontario over a 15 year span from 2008 to 2023, tracking how much time they spent watching TV or DVDs, playing video games, using the computer or playing on handheld devices like iPads, as reported by their parents. That data was compared to their EQAO standardized test scores, which are used to assess the reading and math skills of kids across Ontario in grades 3 and 6. The findings point to a "significant association," between screen use and lower test scores, according to Dr. Catherine Birken, a pediatrician and senior scientist at Sick Kids and lead author of the study.

"For each additional hour of screen use, there was approximately a 10 percent lower odds of meeting standards in both reading and mathematics ... in Grade 3 and mathematics in Grade 6," said Dr. Catherine Birken, a pediatrician and senior scientist at Sick Kids and lead author of the study, in an interview with CBC News. The study didn't differentiate between different types of screen time -- for example, whether a child was playing a game on their iPad versus FaceTiming a relative in another city, or watching an educational video. It was also an observational study that relied on parents answering questionnaires about how much time their kids spent in front of screens. The study authors note that this means the research can't be taken as definitive proof that screen time causes lower grades, just that the two things tend to go hand in hand.

Sony and AMD are collaborating on new GPU technologies for the next-generation PlayStation (likely the PS6), introducing innovations like Radiance Cores for advanced ray tracing and "Universal Compression" for improved performance and efficiency. The Verge reports: Sony's next console (presumably the PS6) is coming in "a few years time," according to someone who I'd believe to make that claim. Mark Cerny, lead architect on the PS5 and PS5 Pro, joined Jack Huynh, SVP and GM of AMD's computing and graphics group, in a YouTube video wherein the pair spend nine minutes going through some very specific, co-developed advancements in graphics technology that will come to the next console. But the pair cautioned that the technologies are still in "every early days" and "only exist in simulation right now."

Much of it boils down to how the companies are working to make it easier for future GPUs to handle graphics upscaling, ray tracing, and the super-intensive path tracing techniques used to make game worlds look more realistic. Cerny says "the current approach has reached its limit," so Sony is working with AMD to integrate components of its next-gen RDNA architecture in future consoles. AMD's Huynh introduced Radiance Cores (similar in theory to Nvidia's RT Cores) that are dedicated to handling ray tracing and path tracing. In addition to Sony's new consoles having the new cores, they will almost certainly be built into AMD's future desktop GPUs, too, and likely within whatever it's assisting with in its Xbox partnership.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: The world's largest and most disruptive botnet is now drawing a majority of its firepower from compromised Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices hosted on U.S. Internet providers like AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, new evidence suggests. Experts say the heavy concentration of infected devices at U.S. providers is complicating efforts to limit collateral damage from the botnet's attacks, which shattered previous records this week with a brief traffic flood that clocked in at nearly 30 trillion bits of data per second.

Since its debut more than a year ago, the Aisuru botnet has steadily outcompeted virtually all other IoT-based botnets in the wild, with recent attacks siphoning Internet bandwidth from an estimated 300,000 compromised hosts worldwide. The hacked systems that get subsumed into the botnet are mostly consumer-grade routers, security cameras, digital video recorders and other devices operating with insecure and outdated firmware, and/or factory-default settings. Aisuru's owners are continuously scanning the Internet for these vulnerable devices and enslaving them for use in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that can overwhelm targeted servers with crippling amounts of junk traffic.

As Aisuru's size has mushroomed, so has its punch. In May 2025, KrebsOnSecurity was hit with a near-record 6.35 terabits per second (Tbps) attack from Aisuru, which was then the largest assault that Google's DDoS protection service Project Shield had ever mitigated. Days later, Aisuru shattered that record with a data blast in excess of 11 Tbps. By late September, Aisuru was publicly flexing DDoS capabilities topping 22 Tbps. Then on October 6, its operators heaved a whopping 29.6 terabits of junk data packets each second at a targeted host. Hardly anyone noticed because it appears to have been a brief test or demonstration of Aisuru's capabilities: The traffic flood lasted less only a few seconds and was pointed at an Internet server that was specifically designed to measure large-scale DDoS attacks.

Aisuru's overlords aren't just showing off. Their botnet is being blamed for a series of increasingly massive and disruptive attacks. Although recent assaults from Aisuru have targeted mostly ISPs that serve online gaming communities like Minecraft, those digital sieges often result in widespread collateral Internet disruption. For the past several weeks, ISPs hosting some of the Internet's top gaming destinations have been hit with a relentless volley of gargantuan attacks that experts say are well beyond the DDoS mitigation capabilities of most organizations connected to the Internet today.

TiVo, the digital video recording pioneer, has moved on from its legacy DVR technology, focusing instead on its branded operating system software promoting third-party content searches, recommendation, including free ad-supported streaming options and more for smart televisions. From a report: "As of Oct. 1, 2025, TiVo has stopped selling Edge DVR hardware products," the company said in an AI-based message. The recording said that the company and its associates no longer manufacture DVR hardware, "and our remaining inventory is now depleted." TiVo said it remains "committed to providing support for our DVR customers and will continue to provide support for the foreseeable future." TiVo in 1999 created the first set-top device enabling users to record and skip ads within television programming.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Over the course of a nearly four-decade career, Cory Doctorow has written 15 novels, four graphic novels, dozens of short stories, six nonfiction books, approximately 60,000 blog posts and thousands of essays. And yet for all the millions of words he's published, these days the award-winning science fiction author and veteran internet activist is best known for just a single one: Enshittification. The term, which Doctorow, 54, popularized in essays in 2022 and 2023, refers to the way that online platforms become worse to use over time, as the corporations that own them try to make more money. Though the coinage is cheeky, in Doctorow's telling the phenomenon it describes is a specific, nearly scientific process that progresses according to discrete stages, like a disease.

Since then, the meaning has expanded to encompass a general vibe -- a feeling far greater than frustration at Facebook, which long ago ceased being a good way to connect with friends, or Google, whose search is now baggy with SEO spam. Of late, the idea has been employed to describe everything from video games to television to American democracy itself. "It's frustrating. It's demoralizing. It's even terrifying," Doctorow said in a 2024 speech. On Tuesday, Farrar Straus & Giroux will release "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Doctorow's book-length elaboration on his essays, complete with case studies (Uber, Twitter, Photoshop) and his prescriptions for change, which revolve around breaking up big tech companies and regulating them more robustly. Further reading: The Enshittification Hall of Shame

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Sora 2, Open AI's new AI video generator, puts a visual watermark on every video it generates. But the little cartoon-eyed cloud logo meant to help people distinguish between reality and AI-generated bullshit is easy to remove and there are half a dozen websites that will help anyone do it in a few minutes. A simple search for "sora watermark" on any social media site will return links to places where a user can upload a Sora 2 video and remove the watermark. 404 Media tested three of these websites, and they all seamlessly removed the watermark from the video in a matter of seconds.

Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley professor and an expert on digitally manipulated images, said he's not shocked at how fast people were able to remove watermarks from Sora 2 videos. "It was predictable," he said. "Sora isn't the first AI model to add visible watermarks and this isn't the first time that within hours of these models being released, someone released code or a service to remove these watermarks." [...] According to Farid, Open AI is decent at employing strategies like watermarks, content credentials, and semantic guardrails to manage malicious use. But it doesn't matter. "It is just a matter of time before someone else releases a model without these safeguards," he said.

Both [Rachel Tobac, CEO of SocialProof Security] and Farid said that the ease at which people can remove watermarks from AI-generated content wasn't a reason to stop using watermarks. "Using a watermark is the bare minimum for an organization attempting to minimize the harm that their AI video and audio tools create," Tobac said, but she thinks the companies need to go further. "We will need to see a broad partnership between AI and Social Media companies to build in detection for scams/harmful content and AI labeling not only on the AI generation side, but also on the upload side for social media platforms. Social Media companies will also need to build large teams to manage the likely influx of AI generated social media video and audio content to detect and limit the reach for scammy and harmful content." "I'd like to know what OpenAI is doing to respond to how people are finding ways around their safeguards," Farid said. "Will they adapt and strengthen their guardrails? Will they ban users from their platforms? If they are not aggressive here, then this is going to end badly for us all."

An anonymous reader shares a report: YouTube megastar Jimmy Donaldson, the creator behind the platform's biggest channel MrBeast, is worried there are "scary times" ahead for the creator economy as AI video tools make it increasingly difficult to tell what is real.

"When AI videos are just as good as normal videos, I wonder what that will do to YouTube and how it will impact the millions of creators currently making content for a living.. scary times," Donaldson said on X on Sunday. Donaldson's concerns come on the heels of OpenAI's release of a Sora social media platform able to AI generated short-form videos, including of individuals who "upload" themselves onto the app. Meta launched its similar video-generating Vibes platform last month.

The director of a tour operation remembers two tourists arriving in a rural town in Peru determined to hike alone in the mountains to a sacred canyon recommended by their AI chatbot. But the canyon didn't exists — and a high-altitude hike could be dangerous (especially where cellphone coverage is also spotty). They're part of a BBC report on travellers arriving at their destination "only to find they've been fed incorrect information or steered to a place that only exists in the hard-wired imagination of a robot..."

"According to a 2024 survey, 37% of those surveyed who used AI to help plan their travels reported that it could not provide enough information, while around 33% said their AI-generated recommendations included false information." Some examples? - Dana Yao and her husband recently experienced this first-hand. The couple used ChatGPT to plan a romantic hike to the top of Mount Misen on the Japanese island of Itsukushima earlier this year. After exploring the town of Miyajima with no issues, they set off at 15:00 to hike to the montain's summit in time for sunset, exactly as ChatGPT had instructed them. "That's when the problem showed up," said Yao, a creator who runs a blog about traveling in Japan, "[when] we were ready to descend [the mountain via] the ropeway station. ChatGPT said the last ropeway down was at 17:30, but in reality, the ropeway had already closed. So, we were stuck at the mountain top..."

- A 2024 BBC article reported that [dedicated travel AI site] Layla briefly told users that there was an Eiffel Tower in Beijing and suggested a marathon route across northern Italy to a British traveller that was entirely unfeasible...

- A recent Fast Company article recounted an incident where a couple made the trek to a scenic cable car in Malaysia that they had seen on TikTok, only to find that no such structure existed. The video they'd watched had been entirely AI generated, either to drum up engagement or for some other strange purpose.
Rayid Ghani, a distinguished professor in machine learning at Carnegie Melon University, tells them that an AI chatbot "doesn't know the difference between travel advice, directions or recipes. It just knows words. So, it keeps spitting out words that make whatever it's telling you sound realistic..."