All results
Character.AI and Google have agreed to settle a lawsuit regarding a 14-year-old’s suicide. Character.AI was founded by former Google engineers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas in 2021, and the platform allows millions of users to create and chat with AI characters that can simulate a friend, a girlfriend, or another intimate partner, according to The New York Times. The platform has secured $200 million in investments, and Google has also paid the company nearly $3 billion to license Character.AI’s technology, with the founders returning to their posts at Google. As AFROTECH™ previously told you, 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III developed a romantic attachment to a Character.AI chatbot with the likeness of the “ Game of Thrones ” character Daenerys Targaryen. The attachment was described as toggling between platonic and romantic. Various messages were exchanged , and Setzer became increasingly disconnected from the real world, even losing interest in activities he once enjoyed such...
Wu-Tang’s RZA is leaning into AI to accelerate his creativity across both film and music. Born Robert Fitzgerald Diggs, RZA admitted during a CES 2026 panel titled “ From Concept to Reality: Creatives Using AI to Bring Big Ideas to Life,” that he views the technology as a strong creative assistant. It has provided a foundation for his work, enabling him to operate more efficiently. “Creativity is time … It could take three days to get something good with today’s technology. And with AI assistant, I could turn that three days to three hours. So even quicker,” RZA told the audience. Gemini He also shared he uses Gemini, Google’s AI assistant that can turn words into videos and create images in seconds, according to its website. While working on a film project where he wanted the characters to board the Staten Island ferry, then travel across a frozen Hudson River with RZA’s logo, RZA used Gemini to create those conditions, which would typically be difficult for productions to achieve,...
Universal Music Group (UMG) aims to leverage AI to enhance the experience of music lovers worldwide. According to a news release, the company is teaming up with NVIDIA to improve fan engagement globally by deploying NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure alongside UMG’s music catalog, which spans millions of tracks across genres. Per the release, the partnership focuses on three key objectives — music discovery, engagement, and creation — and the first two goals will utilize NVIDIA Music Flamingo, a large audio–language model that can understand and capture harmony, structure, timbre, lyrics, and cultural context for tracks of up to 15 minutes. The press release states the model has a “ human-like understanding of songs, ” and is expected to help fans discover music in new ways while giving artists opportunities to expand their audiences. “We’re entering an era where a music catalog can be explored like an intelligent universe — conversational, contextual, and genuinely interactive,” said...
Amazon has launched a slate of initiatives to ensure learners are equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) training. During a session at CES 2026 titled “ Next-Gen Skills: Preparing Students for Tomorrow’s Tech, ” Ben Moskovich, senior manager of public policy at Amazon Web Services, shared that Amazon aims to train 4 million learners in AI and ensure that 10,000 educators are equipped with curricula by 2028. This goal is supported by $30 million in AWS promotional credits and an additional $1.5 million in cash prizes awarded to students who are victorious in the Presidential AI Challenge, a press release confirms. Presidential AI Challenge The Presidential AI Challenge is geared toward K-12 youth, educators, mentors, and community teams who are leveraging AI for real-world solutions, according to the White House. People of all backgrounds are encouraged to engage with the program and showcase their work nationally. The challenge stems from an executive order signed by President...
An AI-powered solution was launched for displaced workers and recent college graduates in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia (DMV) area. Talent Capital Talent Capital, a regional career services initiative of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, was launched in Washington, D.C., by Mayor Muriel Bowser and partners in October 2025, according to a press release. The new program comes after over 317,000 federal employees lost their jobs in 2025, with defense, agriculture, and treasury departments taking the hardest hits, per Federal News Network. In the DMV area, 34,100 federal employees lost their jobs from January to September 2025, according to Bethesda Magazine. Furthermore, college graduates have also been challenged in the job market with fewer entry-level positions available, CNBC mentions. Youth unemployment is sometimes an “early indicator that the economy is slowing down or maybe even heading towards a recession,” according to Anders Humlum,...
T.I. is reshaping his perspective around AI. On the rapper’s podcast “expediTIously,” which has more than 619,000 subscribers (at the time of this writing), he weighed in on technology, — something that has a stronghold across various industries including music. Some in the industry are banking on AI-powered music creation platforms like Suno. Timbaland is an advocate for Suno and serves as its strategic advisor, as AFROTECH™ previously told you. Dr. Dre is also leveraging AI while producing works for Bruce Springsteen, T.I. confirmed on the podcast. It was the Compton, CA-born and “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang” artist who changed T.I.’s viewpoint around AI. “I think it’s dangerous. Initially I have been emphatically against it,” T.I. explained. “However, I talked to Dr. Dre and you know he was telling me about you know he’s producing for Bruce Springsteen and he telling me that he’s using some AI. He sent me some stuff that he did on AI, and he was like ‘No it’s still work. You still...
Artificial intelligence made an impact on the job market in 2025. AFROTECH™ has reported various layoffs across a handful of companies this year, with AI being a contributing factor. Among them is Microsoft, which laid off 15,000 workers, about 17% of its workforce, while continuing to invest $80 billion in AI. “We continue to implement organisational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace,” a Microsoft spokesperson told BBC in July when a 9,000 reduction in the tech company’s workforce was announced. HP also shared that it intends to lay off between 4,000 and 6,000 employees by 2028 as it integrates AI into its operations, per CNN. As AFROTECH™ stated, it intends to lay off employees in product development, internal operations, and customer support. According to CNN, HP CEO Enrique Lores said, “This initiative will create $1 billion in gross run rate savings over three years.” AI can already replace $1.2 trillion in wages across sectors...
Blanca Burch is shedding light on the misrepresentation of Black hairstyles by AI. The Milwaukee native attended an immersion school for elementary and middle school. She spent half her days speaking French and the other half speaking English, which she credits with giving her a global perspective and sparking her curiosity about areas beyond her immediate community. When she attended Spelman College, she initially entered as a psychology major but later pivoted to international relations and affairs with a focus on East Asia. “I had been studying Japanese for about a year when I first came to Spelman. So I figured that would be a fun path to take,” she told AFROTECH™. She took a course at the HBCU’s Arthur M. Blank Spelman Innovation Lab as a junior, a makerspace that supports “creative inquiry, unconventional research, experimental pedagogy, and exploratory play” to help students in art, science, technology, and engineering, its website reads. Culturally Kreative Art was a focus...
Isaiah Chavous isn’t anti-AI, but he is on a mission to protect what makes art human. Chavous’s stance is reflected in his footprint as a founder, which marries his passion for music. His mother, a single parent, introduced him to soulful music as a child, but he would take it to new heights by becoming a musician, something uncommon in his family. At age 13, he was making and recording his own music. He described himself as becoming a “bit of a geek” in the band from sixth grade through high school, when he solidified his passion for music, leading him to create a brand called Wifi Kids. “I used it as a vessel to be creative, not only to make music and put out music, but to host events and make merchandise and get into fashion,” Chavous told AFROTECH™. He continued, “It also correlated to my first introduction to technical products — building websites, designing things, becoming efficient in Adobe Photoshop and Premiere. And I remember having a cracked version of all of the...
Instagram users can have more control over their algorithm. According to ABC News, the social media company announced a new feature, Your Algorithm. Using AI, it will generate a summary of users’ interests by analyzing their activity. Tessa Lyons, vice president of product at Instagram, told “Good Morning America.” “If we get it wrong, you can remove those interests from your algorithm,” she said in the interview. The feature can be accessed by navigating to the Reels tab, where users will find an icon shaped like two lines with a heart. They will be presented with a dashboard that shows their interests and can select what they would like to view more or less of, per ABC News. “Being able to tell us that directly so that we can take action in real time, I think, will improve their Instagram experience,” Lyons said on “Good Morning America.” “This is one way for you to give us feedback on what you’re seeing on reels that can influence the reels you’re seeing going forward. And I...
President Donald Trump is placing guardrails around AI’s influence across states. He has signed an executive order that will introduce a “single national framework” for AI, according to CNN. This will also limit the states from placing their own regulations on the technology. The executive order states, “to win, United States AI companies must be free to innovate without cumbersome regulation. But excessive State regulation thwarts this imperative,” CNBC reports. This comes at a time when tech leaders, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, have been adamant that state regulations would limit the nation’s AI race against China and slow progress altogether, per CNN. “This is an executive order that orders aspects of your administration to take decisive action to ensure that AI can operate within a single national framework in this country, as opposed to being subject to state-level regulation that could potentially cripple the industry,” White House aide Will Scharf said of the executive...
iHeartRadio is making its stance loud and clear when it comes to AI’s use on its platform. According to Billboard, Tom Poleman, iHeartRadio’s chief programming officer and president, said in a letter that the company will not be using AI-generated personalities or “play AI music that features synthetic vocalists pretending to be human.” Additionally, its podcasts published will follow this new program, “Guaranteed Human,” as well. “…iHeart is one of the last truly human entertainment sources and our listeners come to us for companionship, connection, and authenticity — something AI can’t replicate,” Poleman said. The announcement comes at a time when AI artists are making waves in the music industry, including Solomon Ray, an AI-generated “Mississippi-made soul singer,” with an EP called “A Soulful Christmas,” Christian Today reports. Christopher “Topher” Townsend, a conservative Hip-Hop artist, is the human behind Solomon Ray. The AI artist he created has garnered more than 324,000...
Fanbase continues to find new ways for its users to profit from their content. The Atlanta, GA-based company was founded by Isaac Hayes III in 2018. Through its social media platform, users are paid from day one for their content, including videos, photos, audio, and stories, as AFROTECH™ previously told you. Fanbase is now teaming up with pocstock, a global diversity content company that offers royalty-free diversity stock photos, videos, and illustrations of Black, Hispanic, Asian, and Indigenous people, as well as people with disabilities. According to separate coverage from AFROTECH™ , pocstock secured $500,000 in seed funding in a 2023 round led by 9.58 Venture Partners, with a portion of the funding used to integrate AI to improve the customer experience and ensure photographers have access to “cutting-edge, diversity-imaging solutions.” “As with any frontier, especially technology, there will be a rush to get products out to the market,” pocstock CEO Steve Jones said in a...
Google has unveiled a new project that will reduce the environmental impact of AI on Earth. The tech company unveiled Project Suncatcher, which aims to launch data centers in space powered by solar energy, Business Insider reports. Google is exploring bringing the project to life through a web of solar-powered satellites, equipped with its Tensor Processing Unit AI chips, according to a press release. The project aims to “one day scale machine learning in space.” “Inspired by other Google moonshots like autonomous vehicles and quantum computing, we’ve begun work on the foundational work needed to one day make this future possible,” notes the press release. Google CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed that the company plans to launch the space data centers by 2027. “We’ll send tiny, tiny racks of machines, and have them in satellites, test them out, and then start scaling from there,” Pichai said, according to Business Insider. “At Google, we’re always proud of taking moonshots. One of our...
AI is already capable of replacing nearly 12% of the U.S. workforce, according to a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study. This was determined by the Iceberg Index, which is a “skills-centered measure of workforce exposure in the AI economy,” according to a research paper. The tool was created by MIT in partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and it can reportedly predict how the U.S. workforce can be impacted by AI and related policy, according to CNBC. “Project Iceberg enables policymakers and business leaders to identify exposure hotspots, prioritize training and infrastructure investments, and test interventions before committing billions to implementation,” the report said, per CNBC. At this time, the index does not show when or where jobs will be lost. It was used to analyze 151 million workers, covering more than 32,000 skills across 923 occupations across the country, and assessed whether AI is already capable of taking over those skills,...