Elon Musk's X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, has begun restoring complimentary blue checks for some of its users, the latest unexpected shift to cause a lot of confusion on the platform.

For years, Twitter's blue checks mirrored verification badges that are common on social media, largely reserved for celebrities, politicians and other influential accounts. That changed months after Musk bought the platform for $44 billion in October 2022.

An artificial intelligence-powered chatbot created by New York City to help small business owners is under criticism for dispensing bizarre advice that misstates local policies and advises companies to violate the law.

But days after the issues were first reported last week by tech news outlet The Markup, the city has opted to leave the tool on its official government website. Mayor Eric Adams defended the decision this week even as he acknowledged the chatbot's answers were "wrong in some areas."

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin loved pulling pranks, so much so they began rolling outlandish ideas every April Fools' Day not long after starting their company more than a quarter century ago. One year, Google posted a job opening for a Copernicus research center on the moon. Another year, the company said it planned to roll out a "scratch and sniff" feature on its search engine.

The jokes were so consistently over-the-top that people learned to laugh them off as another example of Google mischief. And that's why Page and Brin decided to unveil something no one would believe was possible 20 years ago on April Fools' Day.

Google has agreed to purge billions of records containing personal information collected from more than 136 million people in the U.S. surfing the internet through its Chrome web browser.

The massive housecleaning comes as part of a settlement in a lawsuit accusing the search giant of illegal surveillance.

AI fakery is quickly becoming one of the biggest problems confronting us online. Deceptive pictures, videos and audio are proliferating as a result of the rise and misuse of generative artificial intelligence tools.

With AI deepfakes cropping up almost every day, depicting everyone from Taylor Swift to Donald Trump, it's getting harder to tell what's real from what's not. Video and image generators like DALL-E, Midjourney and OpenAI's Sora make it easy for people without any technical skills to create deepfakes — just type a request and the system spits it out.

Federal prosecutors on Monday painted one-time British tech star Mike Lynch as the ruthless mastermind of an $11 billion deal that defrauded Silicon Valley pioneer Hewlett Packard.

But his lawyer depicted him as a visionary who was made a scapegoat for a desperate buyer's bad decision.

Alex Pearlman shut the door on dreams of a standup comedy career almost a decade ago, pivoting from the stage to an office cubicle where he worked a customer service job.

Then he started posting random jokes and commentary about pop culture and politics on TikTok. Just over 2.5 million followers later, he quit his nine-to-five and recently booked his first nationwide tour.

European Union regulators on Thursday ratcheted up scrutiny of big tech companies including Google, Facebook and TikTok with requests for information on how they're dealing with risks from generative artificial intelligence, such as the viral spread of deepfakes.

The European Commission, the EU's executive branch, has sent questionnaires about the ways that eight platforms and search engines — including Microsoft's Bing, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and X, formerly Twitter — are curbing the risks of generative AI.

TikTok once again finds itself in a precarious position as lawmakers in Washington move forward with a bill that could lead to a nationwide ban on the platform.

The House on Wednesday passed legislation that would ban TikTok if its China-based owner ByteDance doesn't sell its stakes in the popular social media platform within six months of the bill's enactment.

At first glance, images circulating online showing former President Donald Trump surrounded by groups of Black people smiling and laughing seem nothing out of the ordinary, but a look closer is telling.

Odd lighting and too-perfect details provide clues to the fact they were all generated using artificial intelligence. The photos, which have not been linked to the Trump campaign, emerged as Trump seeks to win over Black voters who polls show remain loyal to President Joe Biden.