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Tech News
Researchers report that large language models can develop novel social biases not present in their original training data when placed in adaptive, exploration-based learning settings. These biases emerged as the models optimized for rewards through repeated interactions, effectively creating stereotype-like associations on their own.
A debut crime novelist's $2 million book deal collapsed after rumors surfaced that AI had helped write the manuscript, prompting his own literary agents to pull it from consideration. The incident, born from a fierce bidding war among fourteen publishing houses, has become emblematic of a broader cultural reckoning over AI use that is now spreading from creative industries into everyday corporate workplaces.
At this year's Worldcon convention, voters handed out the Hugo Awards across categories including television, with AppleTV+'s Murderbot topping episodes from Severance, Pluribus, Doctor Who and The Wheel of Time. A graphic novel adaptation of work by the late Ursula K. Le Guin also took home a Hugo, among more than 4,000 nominated works considered this year.
A writer describes a recurring pattern in reading fiction: novels often begin tediously before hitting a turning point—borrowed from the poetic term 'volta'—after which they become compulsively readable. To test the idea, the author had several friends read Graham Greene's 'The End of the Affair' and report when this shift occurred for them, finding the moment varied widely, from page 20 to much later in the book.
A literary essay examines how Edgar Allan Poe's stories derive their terror not from the murders depicted but from the confessions that follow them, tracing this back to Poe's own career struggles as an editor at Graham's magazine in 1841 Philadelphia. It details Poe's financial precariousness as a writer, noting he earned little from his early books despite growing critical respect, and had to rely on magazine work to make a living.
Capcom's long-dormant Onimusha franchise returns after nearly two decades with Way of the Sword, casting players as a young, brash version of swordsman Miyamoto Musashi who is killed and resurrected by the series' signature Oni gauntlet to fight a demon invasion. The game blends its classic mythic samurai setting with precision-timed, parry-based combat reminiscent of modern Soulslike titles like Elden Ring.
At Black Hat USA 2026, PortSwigger research director James Kettle unveiled an open source AI-driven tool called HTTP Terminator, designed to test whether AI could invent original hacking techniques rather than just find known bugs. The tool autonomously produced new HTTP desync, or request smuggling, attacks and used them to breach real enterprise sites, including several belonging to financial services firms.