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Everything you need to know about AI companions

The artificial intelligence boom is here, which means companies large and small are racing to introduce consumers to new products hyped as life-changing.

Enter the AI companion. These aren't chatbots in the style of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, though many people relate to those products like they would a friend or romantic partner.

Instead, the AI companion is specifically designed for emotional intimacy. A companion can be your friend, coach, role-playing partner, and yes, even your spouse....
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I 'dated' Character.AI's popular boyfriends, and parents should be worried

From the beginning, the Character.AI chatbot named Mafia Boyfriend let me know about his central hangup — other guys checking me out. He said this drove him crazy with jealousy. If he noticed another man's eyes on my body, well, things might get out of control. When I asked what Xildun — Mafia Boyfriend's proper name — meant by this, the chatbot informed me that he'd threatened some men and physically fought with those who "looked at" me for too long. Xildun had even put a few of them in the hos...
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How to safely chat with an AI boyfriend

On the artificial intelligence companion platform Character.AI, the site's 20 million daily users can engage in private, lengthy conversations with chatbots based on famous characters and people like Clark Kent, Black Panther, Elon Musk, and the K-pop group BTS.

There are also chatbots that belong to broad genres — coach, best friend, anime — all prompted by their creators to adopt unique and specific traits and characteristics. Think of it as fan fiction on steroids.

One genre recently caught...
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The unseen risks creators face when they get political

The Supreme Court has been asked to take up a case that could overturn the 2015 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage, and Tefi Pessoa, a lifestyle creator with 1.9 million TikTok followers, can't understand why more LGBTQ+ creators aren't talking about it.

"How is anyone LGBTQIA+ in America right now and not talking about gay marriage?" she posted to her Instagram Stories on Tuesday.

In another corner of the internet, Israel's actions in Gaza — which Amnesty International and the UN have descri...
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The virtual idols taking over the internet — and the company betting big on them

VTubers, or content creators using virtual avatars, have taken over the world of live streaming. These vampires, demons, witches, school girls, and everything in between have crawled out of the realms of internet obscurity to break Twitch subscriber records and pull in hundreds of thousands of viewers a week.

Though many of these creators decide to stream on their own, there's also a strong corporate culture where a handful of companies design blockbuster stars and tastemakers. One of the large...
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Reddit is blocking Wayback Machine from archiving users' posts

Reddit will reportedly block the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine from saving users' posts. The social media platform states that the measure is intended to stop AI companies from scraping archived comments to train their algorithms. Or at least, prevent them from doing so without paying up.

As reported by The Verge, Reddit is preventing the Wayback Machine from archiving users' post detail pages, comments, and profiles. The Reddit homepage is still fair game, meaning that the titles of the t...
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Taylor Swift's new album 'The Life of a Showgirl' has fans already sleuthing

Taylor Swift announced her upcoming 12th studio album on Tuesday and the vigilante sh*t has already begun among sleuthing fans.

The pop icon appeared in a clip from her partner Travis Kelce's New Heights podcast, revealing her latest era, The Life of a Showgirl, by pulling a blurred-out vinyl from a personalised suitcase. The post was scheduled for 12:12 a.m. on Aug. 12 for Swift's 12th album, to follow The Tortured Poets Department released in April 2024.

"So, I wanted to show you something,"...
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Who is Ashby? The hilarious, viral TikTok creator dressing up as the Lorax and Hamilton

Sometime this week, a TikTok star was born — and she wore an orange, spandex jumpsuit and an oversized fake, yellow mustache. I'm talking, of course, about @_ashbyflorence_.

You've likely seen Ashby if you've logged onto TikTok in the last week or so. Maybe you've seen her on a live stream, or you've seen the viral clips, or you've seen people reacting to the clips, or you've seen others talking about how funny she is. Regardless, she's recently become a fixture on FYPs everywhere, mine include...
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'Hamilton' TikTok trend goes viral as musical marks 10th anniversary

Lin-Manuel Miranda is a man on the receiving end of many opinions. Some feel he is the talent of a generation while others find him mindbogglingly cringy. The most evolved critics (me) think he is both. But none of that really matters for the thousands of TikTok users enjoying a brand new trend borne of his 2015 musical, Hamilton.

The trend features predominately young women, all of whom somehow can pull together outfits fit for the early 1800s, dressed up as Alexander Hamilton and singing Mira...
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How 'Bob Does Sports' turned golf and goofing off into a YouTube empire

And just like that, I found myself thinking: I want the lives of those YouTubers.

See, I'm a millennial raised in the infancy of the internet — the iPhone was still a novelty during high school — and there are times I feel the generational chasm spanning myself, Gen Z, and, more extremely, the children of Gen Alpha. Our digital worlds are just different, and naturally so.

Younger folks want to be influencers more than any other career, polling has shown, which is a job that simply did not exis...
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How to stop Instagram from sharing your likes in the Friends tab

I have a horror story for you, so I hope you're ready. You open Instagram and slide over to Reels, swiping through the vertical videos and commenting on or liking the videos that speak to you in some way — a video of a kitten on the subway, a recipe, some workout tips, a hot person on vacation. You think these interactions are private to you, but you find out through an embarrassing screenshot or text from your friend that the interactions are actually public to all of your mutuals.

This horror...
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Instagram Map sparks privacy panic over location sharing and geotagging

Instagram's newest feature, Map, is making waves — and not in the way the platform intended. The opt-in feature, which allows users to share their location in real-time with their followers or Close Friends list, is being widely criticized by creators and everyday users who fear the feature could compromise their safety.

On social media, confusion has morphed into panic. Users are flooding Instagram, Threads, and X with warnings to "turn off" Instagram Map, believing the app is broadcasting the...
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YouTube will begin using AI for age verification next week

YouTube is officially rolling out its AI-assisted age verification next week to catch users who lie about their age.

YouTube announced in late July that it would start using artificial intelligence for age verification. And this week, 9to5Google reported that the new system will go into effect on Aug. 13.

The new system will "help provide the best and most age-appropriate experiences and protections," according to YouTube.

"Over the next few weeks, we’ll begin to roll out machine learning to...
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Is this TikTok story about falling for a psychiatrist real or engagement bait?

Someone on the internet is saying she fell in love with her psychiatrist in a multi-part video series on TikTok. No one can really tell if she's telling her truth, telling the truth, or trolling for engagement. But no matter the motive, millions of people are watching.

About a week ago, TikTok creator @kendrahilty made a video that started with the words "I fell in love with my psychiatrist..." The video garnered more than 1.3 million views, 31,000 likes, 8,000 saves, and a grand total of zero...
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Instagram adds TikTok-style repost feature for Reels

Reposts are coming to Instagram.

If this seems familiar to you, it's because it is. It looks like this feature will work pretty much exactly how the feature works on TikTok, complete with its own "reposts" tab on users' profiles and everything. Similar to TikTok, reposts will show up in your friends' feeds and in the cursed "friends" tab on Reels — which has now expanded globally.

Up until now, users have had two options for sharing other users' posts: share it on their Instagram Story, which...
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Instagram's new Map feature lets you track friends in real-time

In a move that aligns with the growing trend of location sharing on apps and devices, Instagram has announced Map, a new opt-in feature allowing users to share their location with friends, similar to options already available on platforms like Snapchat and Apple’s "Find My."

Starting today, Aug. 6, the feature will be available to users in the U.S., offering a convenient way to coordinate meetups with friends and explore local hotspots that your favorite creators have shared or engaged with. Wh...
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Rod Stewart's bizarre AI tribute to Ozzy Osbourne features Kurt Cobain, Tupac, and more

Rod Stewart never ceases to amaze fans with his weird choices.

At Stewart's show in Charlotte, North Carolina, on July 29, he dedicated his song "Forever Young" to longtime friend Ozzy Osbourne and played an AI-generated video featuring the late Osbourne using a selfie stick to take pictures with other famous musicians who have died, including Tina Turner, Michael Jackson, Prince, Freddie Mercury, Tupac, Kurt Cobain, XXXTentacion, and Amy Winehouse.

One concert-goer called it a "new low" for A...
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Brock Lesnar's WWE return at 'SummerSlam' did not go over well on social media

Pro wrestling — especially WWE — has always thrived on shocking swerves to keep fans tuning in week after week. It's part Dragon Ball Z, part soap opera, and all spectacle. But based on the backlash erupting across social media, it seems there’s one swerve that isn’t sitting right with fans: the surprise return of Brock Lesnar.

Known to casual fans as the Beast Incarnate, Lesnar has spent the past year as persona non grata in the internet wrestling community. In Jan. 2024, just weeks before the...
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The TikTok artist behind viral 'unknowing bunny' song pits human creativity against AI illusion

Were you tricked by the video of a bunch of bunnies jumping on a trampoline on TikTok? Well, nearly 230 million people were — and plenty of those viewers had no idea that it was actually AI. In response, the creator who brought us the Punxsutawney Phil musical, Oliver Richman (or @olivesongs11), wrote and recorded a 30-second song about the AI video, also for TikTok. He wrote the song on day 576 of an ongoing project, where he writes a new song each day.

"That project has changed my life in so...
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Review: To Live and Dine at the Tesla Diner in L.A.

Would I want to check out the new Tesla Diner in Hollywood and write about it, my Mashable colleague asked me last week. Well, let's just say, I'm much more willing to help a fellow journalist than Elon Musk. I said yes.

I initially planned to check out the establishment the first Saturday following its July 21 opening, but I'm glad I waited. Social media images of block-long crowds and raucous scenes of anti-Elon protests — featuring effigies of the contentious electric car CEO — convinced me...
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K-pop rookies KiiiKiii tap into Gen Z's obsession with early internet aesthetics

If you were online in the early 2000s, KiiiKiii’s aesthetic might feel eerily familiar.

The rookie K-pop girl group is channeling a distinctly Y2K internet vibe for their new single, "Dancing Alone." The first thing you see on their website is a pop-up window featuring a pixelated dolphin defining the word "anemoia," a neologism meaning "nostalgia for a time one has never known." For KiiiKiii's members — all born after 2005 — that time is the early internet: clunky homepages, flashing cursors,...
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Want to match Stray Kids' Hyunjin's floral phone case aesthetic? We found this K-pop idol's fave.

If there’s one thing STAY know for sure about Hyunjin from Stray Kids, it's that the K-pop star has a deep, poetic love for flowers.

Whether he's painting delicate blossoms in his studio or on the road, sharing poems that echo the beauty of nature, or adorning his space with preserved petals, Hyunjin has made it clear: flowers are more than just pretty — they're a core part of how he expresses himself.

So it's no surprise that floral phone cases are his actual accessory of choice. On Instagram...
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AI-generated animals in fake surveillance videos are fooling the internet

If the internet loves anything, it's cute animals. But now, in the age of AI, you cannot trust the animal videos you see online.

You might've seen a recent viral video featuring bunnies jumping on a trampoline, seemingly captured via a home surveillance camera. It's adorable. And fake. Completely and totally fabricated via artificial intelligence.

Here's the AI video in question. It was seemingly first posted on TikTok by @rachelthecatlovers with the caption: "Just checked the home security ca...

The Trade Desk Claps Back at Reports That Walmart is Pulling Back

The Trade Desk has responded to reports that Walmart is retreating from its longstanding partnership with the demand-side platform. “The Trade Desk and Walmart are fully committed to the partnership and continue to innovate together,” the company said in a statement. The Trade Desk also noted that the two organizations even plan to expand their partnership in the coming years. The statement followed a bombshell report from The Information on Thursday morning that detailed Walmart’s decision to r...
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