A Dartmouth College associate professor of Japanese literature and culture became a narrative consultant for Ubisoft’s game Assassin’s Creed Shadow (which launched in March). Sachi Schmidt-Hori’s job “involved researching historical customs and reviewing scripts, not creating characters,” writes the Associated Press.

But when a trailer was released in May of 2024, some reacted to a game character named Yasuke who was a Black African samurai, according to the article, “with gamers criticizing his inclusion as ‘wokeness’ run amok”. And they directed the blame at Schmidt-Hori:

Gamers quickly zeroed in Schmidt-Hori, attacking her in online forums, posting bogus reviews of her scholarly work and flooding her inbox with profanity. Many drew attention to her academic research into gender and sexuality. Some tracked down her husband’s name and ridiculed him, too. [One Reddit user described Schmidt-Hori as a “sexual degenerate who hate humanity because no man want her,” while another called her a “professional woke social-justice warrior” who confirmed “fake history for Ubisoft.”] Learning Yasuke was based on a real person did little to assuage critics. Asian men in particular argued Schmidt-Hori was trying to erase them, even though her role involved researching historical customs and reviewing scripts, not creating characters.

Ubisoft told her to ignore the harassment, as did her friends. Instead, she drew inspiration from the late civil rights leader and congressman John Lewis. “I decided to cause ‘good trouble,'” she said. “I refused to ignore.” Schmidt-Hori began replying to some of the angry emails, asking the senders why they were mad at her and inviting them to speak face-to-face via Zoom. She wrote to an influencer who opposes diversity, equity and inclusion principles and had written about her, asking him if he intended to inspire the death threats she was getting. “If somebody said to your wife what people are saying to me, you wouldn’t like it, would you?” she asked. The writer didn’t reply, but he did take down the negative article about Schmidt-Hori.

Others apologized. “It truly destroyed me knowing that you had to suffer and cancel your class and received hate from horrible people,” one man wrote. “I feel somehow that you are part of my family, and I regret it. I’m sorry from the bottom of my heart.” Anik Talukder, a 28-year-old south Asian man living in the United Kingdom, said he apologized at least 10 times to Schmidt-Hori after accepting her Zoom invitation to discuss his Reddit post about her… He was shocked the professor reached out to him and hesitant to speak to her at first. But they ended up having a thoughtful conversation about the lack of Asian representation in Western media and have stayed in touch ever since. “I learned a massive lesson,” he said. “I shouldn’t have made this person a target for no reason whatsoever.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nintendo is going after the company that showed off unauthorized mockups of the not-yet-announced Switch 2 at CES 2025. In a lawsuit filed on Friday, Nintendo accuses accessory maker Genki of trademark infringement, unfair competition and false advertising, arguing that Genki “embarked upon a strategic campaign intended to capitalize on the public interest surrounding Nintendo’s next-generation console.” According to Nintendo, Genki promoted accessories it claimed are compatible with the Switch 2 despite not having official access to the console, and used the Switch logo to do so.

Following the initial reports in January that Genki brought Switch 2 mockups to CES and published a video said to show a 3D render of the console, Nintendo released a statement to say that neither the hardware nor imagery were official, per IGN. While Genki reportedly claimed it had access to a Switch 2 at first, the company later wrote on X that it does “not own or possess a black market console,” and told Game*Spark (translated by Automaton) that its mockups were based solely on leaked information. In the lawsuit, Nintendo says Genki’s “statements were contradictory and inconsistent,” yet the company “maintained its representation to consumers that its accessories will be compatible with the Nintendo Switch 2 upon the console’s release.”

Nintendo officially announced the Switch 2 on January 16, a little over a week after the mockups made their CES appearance. Even in the months since, Nintendo alleges, Genki “continues to exploit the attention of the media and fan base and usurp and threaten sales of Nintendo’s own accessories,” through means including piggybacking on Nintendo Direct with its own “Genki Direct” event immediately after. In a statement shared on X following the filing, Genki said it is “taking [the lawsuit] seriously and working with legal counsel to respond thoughtfully.”

“What we can say is this: Genki has always been an independent company focused on building innovative gaming accessories for the community we love,” Genki’s post continued. “We’re proud of the work we’ve done, and we stand by the quality and originality of our products. While we can’t comment in detail, we’re continuing preparations to fulfill orders and showcase our newest products at PAX East this week.”

The Nintendo Switch 2 arrives after years of rumors and speculation. In the lawsuit, Nintendo notes that it began planning the next-gen console shortly after the release of the first. Pre-orders for the Nintendo Switch 2 opened in April, and the console will be available on June 5.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/nintendo/nintendo-is-suing-the-accessory-brand-that-flaunted-switch-2-mockups-ahead-of-its-reveal-210341646.html?src=rss

“When Disneyland turns 70 this July, Main Street’s Opera House will play host to the return of Walt Disney, who will sit down with audiences to tell his story in robot form,” writes Gizmodo.

But they point out Walt’s granddaughter Johanna Miller wrote a Facebook post opposing the idea in November. (“They are Dehumanizing him. People are not replaceable…”)

The idea of a Robotic Grampa to give the public a feeling of who the living man was just makes no sense. It would be an imposter… You could never get the casual ness of his talking interacting with the camera his excitement to show and tell people about what is new at the park.

You can not add life to one. Empty of a soul or essence of the man. Knowing that he did not want this. Having your predecessors tell you that this was out of bounds…. So so Sad and disappointed.

The Facebook post claims that the son of a Disney engineer even remembers Walt saying that he never wanted to be an animatronic himself. And “Members of the Walt Disney family are said to be divided,” reports the Los Angeles Times, “with many supporting the animatronic and some others against it, say those in the know who have declined to speak on the record for fear of ruining their relationships.”
So that Facebook post “raised anew ethical questions that often surround any project attempting to capture the dead via technology,” their article adds, “be it holographic representations of performers or digitally re-created cinematic animations. And then some media outlets got a partial preview Wednesday, the Los Angeles Times reports:

An early sculpt of what would become the animatronic was revealed, one complete with age spots on Disney’s hands and weariness around his eyes — Imagineers stressed their intent is faithful accuracy — but much of the attraction remains secretive. The animatronic wasn’t shown, nor did Imagineering provide any images of the figure, which it promises will be one of its most technically advanced. Instead, Imagineering sought to show the care in which it was bringing Disney back to life while also attempting to assuage any fears regarding what has become a much-debated project among the Disney community…

Longtime Imagineer Tom Fitzgerald, known for his work on beloved Disney projects such as Star Tours and the Guardians of the Galaxy coaster in Florida, said Wednesday that “A Magical Life” has been in the works for about seven years. Asked directly about ethical concerns in representing the deceased via a robotic figurine, Fitzgerald noted the importance of the Walt Disney story, not only to the company but to culture at large… “What could we do at Disneyland for our audience that would be part of our tool kit vernacular but that would bring Walt to life in a way that you could only experience at the park? We felt the technology had gotten there. We felt there was a need to tell that story in a fresh way….”

“Walt Disney — A Magical Life” will walk a fine line when it opens, attempting to inspire a new generation to look into Disney’s life while also portraying him as more than just a character in the park’s arsenal. “Why are we doing this now?” Fitzgerald says. “For two reasons. One is Disneyland’s 70th anniversary is an ideal time we thought to create a permanent tribute to Walt Disney in the Opera House. The other: I grew up watching Walt Disney on television. I guess I’m the old man. He came into our living room every week and chatted and it was very casual and you felt like you knew the man. But a lot of people today don’t know Walt Disney was an individual. They think Walt Disney is a company.”

And now nearly 60 years after his death, Disney will once again grace Main Street, whether or not audiences — or even some members of his family — are ready to greet him.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With its Start menu-style application launcher and its bottom-of-the-screen taskbar, KDE Plasma is a “nice” and “traditional” desktop environment that’s “also highly customizable,” notes It’s FOSS News.

But there’s a change coming…

In contrast to other desktop environments, KDE offers a long-term support release (LTS) of Plasma, where bug fixes and security updates are provided for an extended period, with no new major changes being introduced. However, that is no longer the case now. Shared by Nate Graham, a prominent contributor within the KDE community, KDE has decided to stop working on LTS releases of Plasma, shifting its focus on extending support for the bug-fix and feature releases instead.
The reasoning behind this move is multi-faceted, with factors such as inconsistent expectations from the community, developers’ reluctance to work on older versions, and the lack of consistency in LTS support for Frameworks and Gear apps… I believe this move will provide Plasma users with a better Linux desktop experience, thanks to the extended bug-fix period, which will enhance the stability of each release.

From Graham’s blog post:
It’s no secret that our Plasma LTS (“Long-Term Support”) product isn’t great. It really only means we backport bug-fixes for longer than usual — usually without even testing them, since no Plasma developers enjoy living on or testing old branches. And there’s no corresponding LTS product for Frameworks or Gear apps, leaving a lot of holes in the LTS umbrella. Then there’s the fact that “LTS” means different things to different people; many have an expansive definition of the term that gives them expectations of stability that are impossible to meet.

Our conclusion was that the fairly limited nature of the product isn’t meeting anyone’s expectations, so we decided to not continue it. Instead, we’ll lengthen the effective support period of normal Plasma releases a bit by adding on an extra bug-fix release, taking us from five to six.

We also revisited the topic of reducing from three to two Plasma feature releases per year, with a much longer bug-fix release schedule. It would effectively make every Plasma version a sort of mini-LTS, and we’d also try to align them with the twice-yearly release schedules of Kubuntu and Fedora.

However, the concept of “Long-Term Support” doesn’t go away just because we’re not giving that label to any of our software releases anymore. Really, it was always a label applied by distros anyway — the distros doing the hard work of building an LTS final product out of myriad software components that were never themselves declared LTS by their own developers. It’s a lot of work.

So we decided to strengthen our messaging that users of KDE software on LTS distros should be reporting issues to their distro, and not to KDE. An LTS software stack is complex and requires a lot of engineering effort to stabilize; the most appropriate people to triage issues on LTS distros are the engineers putting them together. This will free up time among KDE’s bug triagers and developers to focus on current issues they can reproduce and fix, rather than wasting time on issues that can’t be reproduced due to a hugely different software stack, or that were fixed months or years ago yet reported to us anyway due to many users’ unfamiliarity with software release schedules and bug reporting.

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The votes are in and residents of a small swath of southern Texas are in favor of Starbase becoming a real city. The newly-designated city is home to SpaceX and many of its employees, and it’s where Elon Musk’s company builds rocket engines, launches spacecraft and manufactures other space-related tech. According to the final vote tally, 212 residents voted in favor of incorporating as Starbase, while six voted against the measure — but, it’s worth noting that most of the eligible voters in the locale are SpaceX employees and only 143 votes were needed to make Starbase a city.

Musk celebrated on X, while the city also made its first post, stating that “becoming a city will help us continue building the best community possible for the men and women building the future of humanity’s place in space.” The idea for Starbase dates back to March 2021, when Musk first teased the idea on what was then Twitter. Now that the vote has taken place, Starbase will be separated from Cameron County as its own roughly 1.5-square mile city. This designation is particularly important considering SpaceX may be able to circumvent governmental red tape when it comes to scheduling rocket launches. Previously, Musk’s company had to get permission from county authorities to close a nearby highway or restrict public access to Boca Chica Beach and Boca Chica State Park for rocket launches.

While the vote to designate Starbase as an official Texas city passed, county commissioners and judges still need to declare the election results official, according to Remi Garza, the elections administrator for Cameron County. Even though SpaceX may get a helping hand with Starbase handling its own building and permitting processes, Cameron County Judge Eddie Trevino told NBC News that any changes to the existing procedures that SpaceX has to go through would be unnecessary.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/spacexs-texas-hq-starbase-is-officially-on-its-way-to-becoming-a-city-185643351.html?src=rss

It looks like Marvel has another critical and box office hit on its hands—and deservedly so—with Thunderbolts*, a follow-up of sorts to 2021’s Black Widow and the final film in the MCU’s Phase Five.

Yes, the asterisk is part of the title. Yes, I found that choice inexplicable when it was first announced.  And yes, having seen the film, the asterisk makes perfect sense now as a well-timed joke. I won’t spill the beans because that would spoil the fun. Instead, I’ll simply say that Thunderbolts*  is a refreshing return to peak Marvel form: well-paced, witty, and action-packed with enough heart to ensure you care about the characters.

(Some spoilers below.)

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“Our future won’t be handed to us,” says the young narrator in a new ad from the nonprofit Code.org. “We will build it.”

“But how can we when the education we need is still just an elective?” says another young voice…

The ad goes on to tout the power “to create with computer science and AI — the skills transforming every industry…” and ends by saying “This isn’t radical. It’s what education is supposed to do. Make computer science and AI a graduation requirement.”

There’s also a hard-hitting new web site, which urges people to sign a letter of support (already signed by executives from top tech companies including Microsoft, Dropbox, AMD, Meta, Blue Origin, and Palantir — and by Steve Ballmer, who is listed as the chairman of the L.A. Clippers basketball team).

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp says the letter ran in the New York Times, while this campaign will officially kick off Monday…

Code.org teased the new Unlock8 campaign last month on social media as it celebrated a new Executive Order that makes K–12 AI literacy a U.S. priority, which it called a big win for CS & AI education, adding, “We’ve been building to this moment.” The move to make CS and AI a graduation requirement is a marked reversal of Code.org’s early days, when it offered Congressional testimony on behalf of itself and tech-led Computing in the Core reassuring lawmakers that: “Making computer science courses ‘count’ would not require schools to offer computer science or students to study it; it would simply allow existing computer science courses to satisfy a requirement that already exists.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A space observatory designed to map the entire sky over a period of two years to further our understanding of the early universe has started snapping images. SPHEREx, which launched in early March, got started with its observations this past week after over a month of setup procedures and system checks, according to NASA. The space telescope will complete about 14.5 orbits of Earth per day, capturing roughly 3,600 images daily and observing the sky in an unprecedented 102 wavelengths of infrared light. Its observations will eventually be combined to create four “all-sky” maps.

SPHEREx’s 25 month survey will be a comprehensive one. The spacecraft “orbits Earth from north to south, passing over the poles, and each day it takes images along one circular strip of the sky,” NASA explains. “As the days pass and the planet moves around the Sun, SPHEREx’s field of view shifts as well so that after six months, the observatory will have looked out into space in every direction.” Researchers will use the SPHEREx observations to study the universe’s expansion in the moments after the big bang, and search for the ingredients for life elsewhere in the Milky Way.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/nasas-spherex-space-telescope-has-begun-its-mission-to-map-the-entire-sky-in-3d-173458720.html?src=rss

Instead of deciding between four new models of iPhones every fall, you may have to choose among three in both the spring and the fall. A new report from The Information claims that Apple will change the release cycle for its smartphones, starting with the iPhone 18 in 2026. According to The Information, three unnamed supply chain sources detailed that the more expensive models will launch first, meaning the Pro models will keep the fall release window and the standard model iPhones will get pushed to the following spring.

It’s a notable departure from the typical all-at-once release schedule, but it could indicate that Apple wants to make room for other models, like the long-rumored foldable iPhone. If the report is accurate, Apple would release the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max and potentially the foldable iPhone in fall 2026, followed by the iPhone 18 base model, the iPhone 18 Slim and the iPhone 18e in spring 2027.

If you’ve been paying close attention to Apple’s releases, this change may not be much of a surprise. While the company has been releasing its annual batch of new iPhones in September or October since the iPhone 5, Apple started breaking from the schedule with the introduction of the iPhone SE models, which were usually released in March or April. More recently, Apple introduced the iPhone 16e in February to replace the SE range. As for the iPhone 17, we’re still expecting Apple’s regularly programmed schedule with four new devices to be revealed this September.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/apple-reportedly-wants-to-split-up-the-iphones-release-schedule-164737099.html?src=rss

Thursday the Free Software Foundation announced plans for a celebratory hackathon in November to improve free/libre software “in honor of its fortieth anniversary.

The FSF has been campaigning for software freedom for over forty years. As part of its celebrations, the organization is inviting the wider free software community (both projects and individual contributors) to participate in a global, online hackathon to help improve important libre software projects.

All free software projects, regardless of affiliation or (free) license, are invited to participate. As of now, the advanced GNU/Linux distribution and package manager GNU Guix, the boot software distribution GNU Boot, the media publishing system MediaGoblin, and the Free Software Directory, the FSF’s catalog of useful free software, have announced that they will submit a project. Interested contributors are encouraged to review the hackathon guidelines, which the FSF has made available online…

Hackathon contributions will be judged by a panel appointed by the FSF. The project and contributors making the most noteworthy contributions/patches will be given prizes by the Foundation. The hackathon will conclude with a closing ceremony.

“The FSF’s free software hackathon will be held November 21-23, 2025,” according to the announcement. “Submissions will be open until May 27.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dr. Paul Offit, an expert on infectious disease and immunology, told the Guardian that “We’re living in a post-herd-immunity world. I think the measles outbreak proves that. Measles — because it is the most contagious of the vaccine-preventable diseases, the most contagious human disease really — it is the first to come back.”

Three large outbreaks in Canada, Mexico and the US now account for the overwhelming majority of roughly 2,300 measles cases across the World Health Organization’s six-country Americas region, according to the health authority’s update this week. Risk of measles is considered high in the Americas, and has grown 11-fold compared with 2024. Only slightly behind, data released earlier this week from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and WHO also noted that measles cases across Europe were up tenfold in 2024 compared to 2023. That data also indicated that the 2024 measles cases in Europe followed a seasonal pattern, which was not previously noted in 2021 through 2023. Of the European cases, which reportedly hit 35,212 for 2024, 87% were reported in Romania. The ECDC said the dip in vaccine rates has impacted the recent spike in measles, with only three countries, Hungary, Malta and Portugal, having coverage of 95% or more for both doses of the measles vaccine.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader Mirnotoriety shared this report from the Register:

A proof-of-concept program has been released to demonstrate a so-called monitoring “blind spot” in how some Linux antivirus and other endpoint protection tools use the kernel’s io_uring interface.

That interface allows applications to make IO requests without using traditional system calls [to enhance performance by enabling asynchronous I/O operations between user space and the Linux kernel through shared ring buffers]. That’s a problem for security tools that rely on syscall monitoring to detect threats… [which] may miss changes that are instead going through the io_uring queues.

To demonstrate this, security shop ARMO built a proof-of-concept named Curing that lives entirely through io_uring. Because it avoids system calls, the program apparently went undetected by tools including Falco, Tetragon, and Microsoft Defender in their default configurations. ARMO claimed this is a “major blind spot” in the Linux security stack… “Not many companies are using it but you don’t need to be using it for an attacker to use it as enabled by default in most Linux systems, potentially tens of thousands of servers,” ARMO’s CEO Shauli Rozen told The Register. “If you’re not using io_uring then disable it, but that’s not always easy with cloud vendors.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For many, many years, I wouldn’t get a new game console until a couple years after it launched. This was partly because I wanted any new console I bought to have a decent-sized library of things to play, and partly because it sometimes paid to sit back and see which console was going to “win” the generation in terms of first-party exclusives and third-party developer support.

But mostly it was because, from the Atari VCS in the 70s all the way up through the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One generation in the 2010s, you could always count on game consoles getting cheaper as time went on. Those price reductions would often also come with internal tweaks and external redesigns—smaller or slimmer or otherwise improved versions of the console that made them superior to the originals (though you would occasionally lose a lesser-used feature or two along the way).

But both of those things have mostly stopped. The last permanent price drop for a major home or portable console we could find came back in 2016, when the PS4 Slim launched and dropped the price of entry from $349 to $299 (this doesn’t count the launch of new editions of consoles with reduced feature sets, like the New Nintendo 2DS in 2017 or $249 all-digital Xbox One in 2019). This generation, we’ve seen something that would have been unheard of a few years ago: price increases for consoles, including $50 extra for the new OLED edition of the Nintendo Switch in 2021, a $50 price hike for the slimmer disc-drive-less version of the PlayStation 5 in 2023, and $80 to $100 price hikes for the exact same unimproved versions of the Xbox Series S and X earlier this week.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from The Verge:

Firefox could be put out of business should a court implement all the [U.S.] Justice Department’s proposals to restrict Google’s search monopoly, an executive for the browser owner Mozilla testified Friday. “It’s very frightening,” Mozilla CFO Eric Muhlheim said.

The Department of Justice wants to bar Google from paying to be the default search engine in third-party browsers including Firefox, among a long list of other proposals including a forced sale of Google’s own Chrome browser and requiring it to syndicate search results to rivals. The court has already ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly in search, partly thanks to exclusionary deals that make it the default engine on browsers and phones, depriving rivals of places to distribute their search engines and scale up. But while Firefox — whose CFO is testifying as Google presents its defense — competes directly with Chrome, it warns that losing the lucrative default payments from Google could threaten its existence.

Firefox makes up about 90 percent of Mozilla’s revenue, according to Muhlheim, the finance chief for the organization’s for-profit arm — which in turn helps fund the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. About 85 percent of that revenue comes from its deal with Google, he added. Losing that revenue all at once would mean Mozilla would have to make “significant cuts across the company,” Muhlheim testified, and warned of a “downward spiral” that could happen if the company had to scale back product engineering investments in Firefox, making it less attractive to users. That kind of spiral, he said, could “put Firefox out of business.” That could also mean less money for nonprofit efforts like open source web tools and an assessment of how AI can help fight climate change.

Ironically, Muhlheim seemed to suggest that could cement the very market dominance the court seeks to remedy. Firefox’s underlying Gecko browser engine is “the only browser engine that is held not by Big Tech but by a nonprofit,” he said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A young entrepreneur who was among the earliest known recruiters for Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has a new, related gig—and he’s hiring. Anthony Jancso, cofounder of AcclerateX, a government tech startup, is looking for technologists to work on a project that aims to have artificial intelligence perform tasks that are currently the responsibility of tens of thousands of federal workers.

Jancso, a former Palantir employee, wrote in a Slack with about 2000 Palantir alumni in it that he’s hiring for a “DOGE orthogonal project to design benchmarks and deploy AI agents across live workflows in federal agencies,” according to an April 21 post reviewed by WIRED. Agents are programs that can perform work autonomously.

We’ve identified over 300 roles with almost full-process standardization, freeing up at least 70k FTEs for higher-impact work over the next year,” he continued, essentially claiming that tens of thousands of federal employees could see many aspects of their job automated and replaced by these AI agents. Workers for the project, he wrote, would be based on site in Washington, DC, and would not require a security clearance; it isn’t clear for whom they would work. Palantir did not respond to requests for comment.

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“It is the fastest, most efficient transistor ever,” proclaims an announcment from Peking University. “And most important of all, there’s no trace of silicon involved,” adds ZME Science.
From the South China Morning Post:
A team of researchers at Peking University claims to have shattered chip performance limits and proven that China can use new materials to “change lanes” in the semiconductor race by circumventing silicon-based roadblocks entirely.
The researchers, led by physical chemistry professor Peng Hailin, said their self-engineered 2D transistor could operate 40 per cent faster than Intel and TSMC’s cutting-edge 3-nanometre silicon chips, while consuming 10 per cent less energy…. “While this path is born out of necessity due to current sanctions, it also forces researchers to find solutions from fresh perspectives,” [Hailin] added.

“Peking’s major innovation comes from the two-dimensional nature of their transistors, facilitated by using an element other than silicon,” writes Tom’s Hardware:

BiâOâSe, or bismuth oxyselenide, is a semiconductor material studied for its use in sub-1nm process nodes for years, largely thanks to its ability to be a 2D semiconductor. Two-dimensional semiconductors, like 2D BiâOâSe, are more flexible and sturdy at a small scale than silicon, which runs into reduced carrier mobility at even the 10nm node. Such breakthroughs into stacked 2D transistors and the move from silicon to bismuth are exciting for the future of semiconductors and are necessary for the Chinese industry to compete on the leading edge of semiconductors.

ZME Science adds this note of skepticism. “Turning laboratory breakthroughs into commercial chips typically takes years — sometimes decades…”

Thanks to Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2016, an online “swarm intelligence” platform stunned horse-racing fans by making a correct prediction for the Kentucky Derby — naming all four top finishers in order. (But the next year its predictions weren’t even close, with TechRepublic suggesting 2016’s race just had an unusual cluster of obvious picks.)

Since then it’s become almost a tradition — asking AI to predict the winning horses each year, then see how close it came. So before today’s race, a horse named “Journalism” was given the best odds of winning by professional bookmakers — but could AI make a better prediction? USA Today reports:

The USA TODAY Network asked Microsoft Copilot AI to simulate the order of finish for the 2025 Kentucky Derby field based on the latest, odds, predictions and race factors on Thursday, May 1. Journalism came out on top in its projection. The AI-generated response cited Journalism’s favorable post position (No. 8), which has produced the second-most Kentucky Derby winners and a four-race winning streak that includes last month’s Santa Anita Derby.

ChatGPT also picked the exact same horse, according to FanDuel. But in fact, the winning horse turned out to be “Sovereignty” (a horse Copilot predicted would finish second). Meanwhile Copilot’s pick for first place (“Journalism”) finished in second.

But after that Copilot’s picks were way off…
Copilot’s pick for third place was a horse named Rodriguez — which hours later was scratched from the race altogether. (And the next day Copilot’s pick for 10th place was also scratched.)
Copilot’s pick for fourth place was “Sandman” — who finished in 18th place.
Copilot’s pick for fifth place was “Burnham Square” — who finished in 11th place.
Copilot’s pick for sixth place was “Luxor Cafe” — who finished in 10th place
Copilot’s pick for seventh place was “Render Judgment” — who finished in 16th place…

An online racing publication also asked “a trained AI LLM tool” for their predictions, and received a wildly uneven prediction:

Burnham Square (finished 11th)
Journalism (finished 2nd)
Sandman (finished 18th)
Tiztastic (finished 15th)
Baeza (finished 3rd)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.