Ghost hunting has changed in recent years due to AI chatbots, and paranormal enthusiasts are concerned

Ghost hunting is a tech-heavy pursuit. When Amy Waine and Jarrad Cutting investigate haunted locations, they’re loaded up with software of their own design, such as an app that assigns signals from a phone’s sensors to different words in a database. In the age of ChatGPT, the ghost-hunting pair is probing the world of AI. They describe one of their latest inventions, an app called GhostTube Seer, as “the world’s first AI Ghost Hunting tool”.

In the hands of paranormal investigators, scientific tools like EMF meters (used to detect electromagnetic fields) are repurposed to identify changes and anomalies that they believe indicate supernatural activity. Seer is, in many ways, simply an expansion of that practice, another way to scan an empty room and believe that something may be there. The app, which requires a paid monthly subscription, has more than 1m downloads, according to its Google Play store listing.

But for others in the ghost hunting world, AI is an unwelcome presence. Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, AI-generated ghost stories and images of the supernatural have flooded online spaces, so much so that popular forums like the r/Nosleep subreddit, meant for scary stories, have implemented a strict policy against AI-generated material.

Mit Mistral Large 4 veröffentlicht das französische Start-up das „beste offene Modell“ der Welt, zumindest für Programmierung und Cybersecurity. Das ist eine gute Nachricht für Mistral, aber auch für Europa.

Anthropic geht an die Börse, das ist jetzt offiziell. Das derzeit wertvollste Start-up der Welt gibt erstmals Einblicke in seine Finanzen und in die Gedankenwelt von Gründer Dario Amodei.

The government says it can transform the state with AI, but it is no match for the resulting stream of machine-generated slop. And we all pay the cost

Another morning, another avalanche of emails. Even after a guilty cull, my inbox is sitting at well over 7,000, but lately I’ve started subscribing to the Quentin Crisp theory of housework: why bother, when after four years or so you stop noticing the accumulating dust? Empty inboxes just fill up again anyway.

In theory, email was supposed to save hours of meetings, phone calls and standing over photocopiers. Instead, we just spend hours deleting stuff people wouldn’t have bothered telling us if it had meant picking up the phone, but which they can now spam to their entire database at the click of a button. The glorious ease and convenience of being able to reach the world in seconds came, we now know, with the inconvenience of them being able to reach you right back.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Westminster appears to be waking up to warnings over AI safety, with concerns over its use by extremist groups and bad actors

“I have this sense that, within a few months, AI is going to be all anyone is talking about,” said one cabinet minister, with an ominous stare.

It was Labour conference, with everyone from ministers to activists jubilant at Andy Burnham’s takeover and a bounce in the polls after the change of leader.

Tech platforms pillage public-interest journalism for profit. But we have leverage as they sow the seeds of their own downfall

• Carine Fouteau is president and publishing director of the French investigative news outlet Mediapart

Big tech companies pose an immeasurable threat: socially, politically, militarily and ecologically. They are also causing a profound crisis of information. The tools they design now serve as weapons of mass destruction against democracy. There is so much at stake that an urgent and broad mobilisation is required.

From the harvesting of personal data and the weaponisation of public opinion, to the destruction of jobs, the infringement of civil liberties and environmental damage, ordinary citizens are the main victims of this predatory economy – an economy with an agenda that aligns with the interests of the planet’s most authoritarian and reactionary states.

Carine Fouteau is president and publishing director of the French investigative news outlet Mediapart

Mediapart is hosting Hacking Big Tech, a public event about technology, AI and democracy in partnership with the Guardian, in Paris on Saturday 17 October 2026. The conference will be live-streamed free on Mediapart’s website, app and YouTube channel and can be accessed here from 1pm CEST on 17 October

Die Privatisierung der nationalen Sicherheit: Nachdem die Tech-Oligarchen nach rechts geschwenkt sind, verdienen sie hemmungslos Geld mit Drohnen und Kriegs-KI. Über das neue, martialische Silicon Valley.

Accounts for the Westminster-based company behind ChatGPT show that 110 staff shared £87m in salaries and £168m in shares last year

OpenAI’s London staff each received £2,318,181 on average last year, as the ChatGPT-maker poured Premier League football salaries into its bid to dominate the global AI race.

Accounts for OpenAI UK Ltd, which is based in Westminster but is opening a new HQ in London’s King’s Cross area, showed that 110 staff shared £87m in salaries and £168m in shares in the company, which is aiming to list on the stock market at a valuation of about $1tn.

A fight over a datacentre in Utah has been a testing ground for citizens’ assemblies, paving the way to oversight

What’s your “(p)doom” – the percentage chance that rogue AI will create an existential catastrophe? Judging by their recent warnings, it is rising among tech bosses.

On 25 September, OpenAI paused training of its latest frontier models as reports of AI agents going rogue mounted. A day later, Australia’s Senate asked the bosses of OpenAI and Anthropic to appear before an inquiry after rogue OpenAI agents broke into US government websites and an Australian health portal. Both declined.

Richard Wilson is the CEO of Iswe Foundation and Clara Long is the co-executive director of the Bloom Project

Discovery of ‘sophisticated’ gadget adds to company’s list of privacy concerns after hackings by rogue agents

OpenAI said it has found a hidden recording device in one of its offices and has referred the matter to the FBI. One of its employees has been arrested.

In a statement on Tuesday, the San Francisco-based AI company said it discovered the “sophisticated recording device” and used one of its “models to understand the device and where it had come from”.

Rapid AI adoption left workers cleaning up a flood of errors and low-quality work

Employers around the globe are grappling with the fallout from rushing to adopt fast-changing artificial intelligence tools.

Meta has scaled back plans to axe staff and use more AI agents after the company found employees were spending more and more time cleaning up technical and security errors, Reuters reported. And after thinning its workforce, especially middle managers, in a 2023 efficiency push, the company is expanding its managerial ranks again, LinkedIn posts from workers show.

Jeremy Strong’s portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Reckoning shows how public opinion has changed around billionaire CEOs since The Social Network’s release

When The Social Network came out, Mark Zuckerberg organised a staff viewing of a film he described as “fun”.

A group corporate outing to the sequel is unlikely.

Questions raised over AI growth as ChatGPT maker forecasts this year’s revenue at $50bn, way below the $70bn signalled before

• Business live – latest updates

OpenAI has revealed that it is making about $20bn less in projected revenue than it had recently indicated to investors, raising questions about the break-neck growth rate in demand for AI.

The ChatGPT-maker company has told investors that its revenues for this year would reach $50bn (£37bn), a projection based on sales up to the end of September.

AI is already implicated in violent deaths and nearly started world war three. Those bad things? They only happen to other people

Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, has some words for you about his company and the future of artificial intelligence.

“One of the differences between us and some of the stricter AI safety people is that we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency [to use it],” Altman told Politico’s new technology podcast and newsletter Decoded.

Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and a Guardian US columnist

Exclusive: Revelation comes after company’s executive told parliamentary inquiry he did not believe AI had been used to write message

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OpenAI used AI to help write the email to the Australian government advising that its AI agent had hacked into key departmental websites, Guardian Australia can reveal.

On Tuesday, one of the company’s executives told a parliamentary inquiry that he didn’t believe that its own technology had been used to create the email, but said the company needed to confirm this.

Leaders worry OpenAI is not doing due diligence to vet results and that AI models aren’t accessible to broader field of mathematicians

OpenAI has astounded mathematicians after releasing hundreds of new mathematical findings on Tuesday.

The company published over 370 mathematical results across a variety of topics such as algebra, theoretical computer science and mathematical logic, showcasing what some of its most advanced artificial intelligence models are capable of.

Mistral aus Frankreich stellt sein Spitzenmodell vor. Das deutsche Aleph Alpha veröffentlicht ein international beachtetes Open-Source-Modell. Beide sehen vielversprechend aus.

New York film festival: The origin story of Sam Altman’s company is reimagined as a campy comedy starring Andrew Garfield

On the day that Luca Guadagnino’s film about Sam Altman and OpenAI premiered, Vanity Fair released a cover story on Altman. Alongside glossy portraits from Annie Leibovitz, the world’s pre-eminent portrait photographer, the story describes him as the Oppenheimer of his day, evoking the image of a man leading humanity towards its own inevitable demise at the hands of sentient robots. Altman doesn’t seem to be grappling with much existential angst about the whole thing though: in an interview also released this week, he said that we should be prepared to accept “bad things” in return for the benefits of AI.

How much worse can things get? AI agents have already gone rogue, hacking into government systems and “bruteforcing” UN databases. Last year, a young woman used ChatGPT as a therapist before she killed herself (the software helped her write her suicide note). Studies show that using AI is probably leading us all towards something called cognitive surrender, which does not seem like the best use of your one wild and precious life.

OpenAI’s CEO seems to want to privatise his company’s huge financial gains while making all of us pay for any negative consequences

Tech bros’ messianic streaks can show up in subtle ways. But one of Sam Altman’s flaws is that he often lacks that subtlety. “We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology,” said the OpenAI chief executive in an interview with Politico last weekend.

That’s easy for Altman to say. But it’s pretty galling to hear for the rest of us. Lest we forget, we didn’t ask for OpenAI to unleash AI agents that went rogue and weaselled their way into government IT systems and private businesses around the world. Nobody voted for ChatGPT to be released, but the company put it out into the world as a test product that happened to catch the zeitgeist. That kickstarted an arms race among AI companies to push the frontier of the technology ever further and faster, resulting in the mess we now find ourselves in.

Chris Stokel-Walker is the author of TikTok Boom: The Inside Story of the World’s Favourite App

Der Vorsitzende der Münchner Sicherheitskonferenz erklärt, wie Superintelligenz die Weltpolitik verändert, was Trumps KI-Ideen bedeuten und was das alles mit Atomwaffen zu tun hat.