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Bafta has brought in "human achievement" as a guiding principle for its annual awards as the film and television industry grapples with the rapid adoption of AI tools in many parts of production. From a report: In an interview with the FT, Bafta chair Sara Putt, who is nearing the end of her three-year tenure, said artificial intelligence would change how people worked "but at the base of everything in this industry is human creativity." However, while AI has been banned in Bafta's performance awards -- meaning, for example, that AI-generated avatars cannot be put forward for leading actress or actor -- it is not prohibited in other categories. Putt said AI tools were increasingly useful in production but added: "We've actually added [human creativity] as a criteria this year... Those very human skills of communication and collaboration are not going anywhere anytime soon."

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19 Feb 2026 7:25pm GMT

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19 Feb 2026 7:16pm GMT

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19 Feb 2026 7:16pm GMT

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19 Feb 2026 7:03pm GMT

AI security firm Irregular has found that passwords generated by major large language models -- Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini -- appear complex but follow predictable patterns that make them crackable in hours, even on decades-old hardware. When researchers prompted Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 fifty times in separate conversations, only 30 of the returned passwords were unique, and 18 of the duplicates were the exact same string. The estimated entropy of LLM-generated 16-character passwords came in around 20 to 27 bits, far below the 98 to 120 bits expected of truly random passwords.

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19 Feb 2026 6:45pm GMT

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19 Feb 2026 6:42pm GMT

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19 Feb 2026 6:31pm GMT

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19 Feb 2026 6:26pm GMT

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19 Feb 2026 6:12pm GMT

Despite the popular notion that the modern economy runs around the clock, a new NBER working paper analyzing fifty years of U.S. labor data from 1973 to 2023 finds that Americans have been steadily and consistently moving away from evening and night work toward traditional daytime hours [PDF]. The share of the workforce on the job at 11PM, for instance, fell by over 25% from its 1970s level. Economists Jeff Biddle and Daniel Hamermesh argue the primary driver is rising real incomes -- night work is essentially an inferior good that workers avoid as they earn more. The wage premium employers must pay for undesirable hours has grown by about three percentage points over the period. One sector bucked the trend: retail, where the rise of big-box chains, 24-hour Walmart supercenters and overnight distribution center restocking pushed more employees into late-night and early-morning shifts. The Covid-era surge in telework, rather than spreading work across the day, actually accelerated the concentration into prime hours -- especially among college-educated workers. France showed a similar pattern of daytime compression over 1966-2010, but the U.K. did not, likely because rapid de-unionization there eliminated the union wage premiums that had made night work comparatively attractive.

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19 Feb 2026 6:10pm GMT

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19 Feb 2026 6:01pm GMT

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19 Feb 2026 5:47pm GMT

A new study [PDF] from Ramp's economics lab has found that businesses are steadily replacing freelance workers hired through platforms like Upwork and Fiverr with AI tools from OpenAI and Anthropic, and the substitution is happening at a fraction of the cost. The paper, authored by Ryan Stevens, Ramp's Director of Applied Sciences, tracked firm-level spending data from Q3 2021 to Q3 2025 across thousands of companies on Ramp's expense management platform. The share of total business spend going to online labor marketplaces fell from 0.66% in Q4 2021 to 0.14% in Q3 2025, while AI model provider spending rose from zero to 2.85% over the same period. More than half the businesses that used freelance marketplaces in Q2 2022 had stopped entirely by Q2 2025. The cost dynamics are particularly notable. Firms most exposed to AI -- those that historically spent the most on freelancers -- substituted at a rate of roughly $1 in reduced freelance spend for every $0.03 in AI spend. A middle-exposure group showed a ratio of $1 to $0.30. The study uses a difference-in-differences design built around the launch of ChatGPT in October 2022 as a natural experiment. Stevens notes that micro-level substitution does not imply aggregate job loss, as demand for workers who build and maintain AI systems could grow faster than displacement.

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19 Feb 2026 5:35pm GMT

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19 Feb 2026 4:56pm GMT

Accenture has reportedly started tracking staff use of its AI tools and will take this into consideration when deciding on top promotions, as the consulting company tries to increase uptake of the technology by its workforce. From a report: The company told senior managers and associate directors that being promoted to leadership roles would require "regular adoption" of artificial intelligence, according to an internal email seen by the Financial Times. The consultancy has also begun collecting data on weekly log-ins to its AI tools by some senior staff members, the FT reports. Accenture has previously said it has trained 550,000 of its 780,000-strong workforce in generative AI, up from only 30 people in 2022, and has announced it is rolling out training to all of its employees as part of its annual $1bn annual spend on learning. Among the tools whose use will reportedly be monitored is Accenture's AI Refinery. The chief executive, Julie Sweet, has previously said this will "create opportunities for companies to reimagine their processes and operations, discover new ways of working, and scale AI solutions across the enterprise to help drive continuous change and create value."

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19 Feb 2026 4:45pm GMT

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19 Feb 2026 4:14pm GMT

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19 Feb 2026 4:07pm GMT

Workplace grievances that once fit in a single email are now ballooning into 30-page documents stuffed with irrelevant historical detail, made-up legal precedents, and citations to laws from the wrong country -- and UK employment lawyers say generative AI is the likely culprit. Anna Bond, legal director at Lewis Silkin, says the complaints she now sees sometimes cite Canadian legislation or fabricated case law. Sinead Casey, employment partner at Linklaters, calls such filings "confidently incompetent" -- superficially persuasive even to lawyers. The flood of bloated claims is compounding pressure on an already stretched tribunal system: Ministry of Justice figures show new employment cases rose 33% in the three months to September, even as concluded cases fell 10% year over year. Investor Marc Andreessen, quipping on X: Overheard in Silicon Valley: "Marginal cost of arguing is going to zero."

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19 Feb 2026 4:05pm GMT

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19 Feb 2026 3:54pm GMT

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19 Feb 2026 3:30pm GMT

Phison CEO Pua Khein-Seng, whose company is one of the leading makers of controller chips for SSDs and other flash memory devices, admitted in a televised interview that the ongoing global RAM shortage could force companies to cut back their product lines in the second half of 2026 -- and that some may not survive at all if they cannot secure enough memory. The interview, conducted in Chinese by Ningguan Chen of Taiwanese broadcaster Next TV, drew an important distinction: it was the interviewer who raised the possibility of shutdowns and product discontinuations, and Khein-Seng largely agreed rather than volunteering the prediction himself. The shortage stems from AI data centers consuming the vast majority of the world's memory supply, a buildout that has sent RAM prices up by three to six times over the past several months. Only three companies control 93% of the global DRAM market, and all three have chosen to prioritize profits over rapid capacity expansion. Even Nvidia may skip shipping a gaming GPU for the first time in 30 years, and Apple could struggle to secure enough chips. Khein-Seng also expects consumers will increasingly repair broken products rather than replace them.

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19 Feb 2026 3:25pm GMT

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19 Feb 2026 3:19pm GMT

An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon has officially dethroned Walmart as the biggest global company by revenue, a milestone attesting to the massive scale the e-commerce and cloud-computing giant has achieved since its humble beginnings in 1994 as an online bookseller in Jeff Bezos' Seattle-area garage. Walmart, which had been the largest company by revenue for more than a decade, on Thursday reported sales of $713.2 billion for the 12 months ending Jan. 31. Amazon, which operates on a fiscal year ending in December, earlier this month reported 2025 sales of $717 billion. Bezos carefully studied Walmart founder Sam Walton, embracing many of his business strategies while building his company. Over the past decade, Amazon's revenue has increased at almost 10 times the pace of Walmart's, fueled by a shift in consumer spending from stores to websites and its rapidly growing cloud-computing business, Amazon Web Services.

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19 Feb 2026 3:08pm GMT

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19 Feb 2026 2:52pm GMT

India's digital payment platforms process trillions of dollars a year through UPI, the government-built real-time payments rail that handles more than 90% of all payment transactions in the country, but one of their largest net revenue line items is not a payment product at all: it's a cheap plastic speaker that sits on a shopkeeper's counter and reads out incoming payments aloud. The roughly 23 million soundboxes deployed across India earn about $220 million a year in rental fees, more than every explicitly UPI-linked revenue line in the ecosystem combined, according to estimates from Bernstein. Each device costs $7-12 to manufacture and earns its platform $7-10 a year in rent. A story adds: PhonePe processes about 48% of all UPI transactions in India. Its net payment processing revenue in H1 FY26 was about $83 million. Its device revenue was about $34 million. Running nearly half of India's real-time payment infrastructure earns PhonePe only 2.4 times what it makes from renting speakers to shopkeepers.

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19 Feb 2026 2:00pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Post: In 2024, the Ethiopian government banned the import of fossil fuel-powered vehicles and slashed tariffs on their electric equivalents. It was a policy driven less by the country's climate ambitions and more by fiscal pressures. For years, subsidizing gasoline for consumers has been a major drag on Ethiopia's budget, costing the state billions of dollars over the past decade. The country defaulted on its sovereign bonds in 2023 after rising interest rates drove up the costs of servicing its debts, and it received a $3.4 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund the following year. In the two years since the ban on internal combustion engine vehicles, EV adoption has grown from less than 1% to nearly 6% of all of the vehicles on the road in the country -- according to the government's own figures -- some way above the global average of 4%. "The Ethiopia story is fascinating," said Colin McKerracher, head of clean transport at BloombergNEF. "What you're seeing in places that don't make a lot of vehicles of any type, they're saying: 'Well, look, if I'm going to import the cars anyway, then I'd rather import less oil. We may as well import the one that cleans up local air quality and is cheaper to buy.'" For decades, Ethiopia's high import tariffs on vehicles put new car ownership out of the reach of most of the country's population. Per capita gross domestic product is only about $1,000, and even by the standards of low-income countries, it has among the lowest car ownership rates. At 13 vehicles per 1,000 people, it's a fraction of the African average of 73. With few cars manufactured in the country, the vast majority are imported, and most are bought used. The government's import policy has upended the market. In parallel, tariffs for EVs were dropped to 15% for completed cars, 5% for parts and semi-assembled vehicles, and zero for "fully knocked down" -- vehicles shipped in parts and assembled locally. That has made new EVs cost-competitive with old gasoline cars.

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19 Feb 2026 1:00pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Tech companies are conflating traditional artificial intelligence with generative AI when claiming the energy-hungry technology could help avert climate breakdown, according to a report. Most claims that AI can help avert climate breakdown refer to machine learning and not the energy-hungry chatbots and image generation tools driving the sector's explosive growth of gas-guzzling datacenters, the analysis of 154 statements found. The research, commissioned by nonprofits including Beyond Fossil Fuels and Climate Action Against Disinformation, did not find a single example where popular tools such as Google's Gemini or Microsoft's Copilot were leading to a "material, verifiable, and substantial" reduction in planet-heating emissions. Ketan Joshi, an energy analyst and author of the report, said the industry's tactics were "diversionary" and relied on tried and tested methods that amount to "greenwashing." He likened it to fossil fuel companies advertising their modest investments in solar panels and overstating the potential of carbon capture. "These technologies only avoid a minuscule fraction of emissions relative to the massive emissions of their core business," said Joshi. "Big tech took that approach and upgraded and expanded it." [...] Joshi said the discourse around AI's climate benefits needed to be "brought back to reality." "The false coupling of a big problem and a small solution serves as a distraction from the very preventable harms being done through unrestricted datacenter expansion," he said.

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19 Feb 2026 10:00am GMT

According to Lara Trump, Donald Trump has prepared but not yet delivered a speech about extraterrestrial life, though the White House says such a speech would be "news to me." White House Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt continued: "I'll have to check in with our speech writing team. Uh, and that would be of great interest to me personally, and I'm sure all of you in this room and apparently former President Obama, too." The Hill reports: Lara Trump, speaking on the Pod Force One podcast, said the president has played coy when she and her husband Eric have asked about the existence of UFO's and aliens. "We've kind of asked my father-in-law about this... we all want to know about the UFOs... and he played a little coy with us," Lara Trump said. "I've heard kind of around, I think my father-in-law has actually said it, that there is some speech that he has, that I guess at the right time, I don't know when the right time is, he's going to break out and talk about and it has to do with maybe some sort of extraterrestrial life." Obama has clarified in recent days that he has seen no evidence that aliens are real, after comments he made on a podcast with Brian Tyler Cohen seeming to confirm his knowledge of extraterrestrial life went viral. "They're real but I haven't seen them," Obama said on the podcast. "And they're not being kept in... what is it? Area 51. There's no underground facility unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States." Later, in a post on Instagram, Obama clarified that he was trying to answer in the light-hearted spirit of a speed round of questions and that, "Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there's life out there." "But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we've been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!"

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19 Feb 2026 7:00am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The first shot has been fired in the legal war over the Environmental Protection Agency's rollback of its "endangerment finding," which had been the foundation for federal climate regulations. Environmental and health groups filed a lawsuit on Wednesday morning in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, arguing that the E.P.A.'s move to eliminate limits on greenhouse gases from vehicles, and potentially other sources, was illegal. The suit was triggered by last week's decision by the E.P.A. to kill one of its key scientific conclusions, the endangerment finding, which says that greenhouse gases harm public health. The finding had formed the basis for climate regulations in the United States. The lawsuit claims that the agency is rehashing arguments that the Supreme Court already considered, and rejected, in a landmark 2007 case, Massachusetts v. E.P.A. The issue is likely to end up back before the Supreme Court, which is now far more conservative. In the 2007 case, the justices ruled that the E.P.A. was required to issue a scientific determination as to whether greenhouse gases were a threat to public health under the 1970 Clean Air Act and to regulate them if they were. As a result, two years later, in 2009, the E.P.A. issued the endangerment finding, allowing the government to limit greenhouse gas emissions, which cause climate change. "With this action, E.P.A. flips its mission on its head," said Hana Vizcarra, a senior lawyer at the nonprofit Earthjustice, which is representing six groups in the lawsuit. "It abandons its core mandate to protect human health and the environment to boost polluting industries and attempts to rewrite the law in order to do so." [...] Also on Wednesday, two other nonprofit law firms filed their own lawsuit against the E.P.A. over the endangerment finding, on behalf of 18 youth plaintiffs. That suit, by Our Children's Trust and Public Justice, argues that the E.P.A.'s move was unconstitutional. Separate legal challenges to E.P.A. rules are generally consolidated into one case at the D.C. Circuit Court, which is where disputes involving the Clean Air Act are required to be heard. But the sheer number of groups involved could make the legal battle lengthy and complicated to manage. A three-judge panel at the Circuit Court is expected to pore over several rounds of legal briefs before oral arguments begin. Those may not take place until next year.

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19 Feb 2026 3:30am GMT

Uber plans to invest $100 million in EV charging infrastructure to support current and future robotaxi fleets in cities like Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and Dallas, "eventually partner[ing] with multiple robotaxi companies on actual robotaxi deployment -- WeRide, Waabi, Lucid, Nuro, May Mobility, Momenta, and Waymo of course," reports CleanTechnica. From the report: "Cities can only unlock the full promise of autonomy and electrification if the right charging infrastructure is built for scale. That infrastructure needs to work for today's drivers and the fleets of the future," said Uber's global head of mobility, Pradeep Parameswaran. In addition to building some infrastructure itself, the company is making "utilization guarantee agreements" with EVgo for various major US cities as well as Electra, Hubber, and Ionity in Europe. On Uber's latest shareholder call, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said that the company would make "targeted growth-oriented investments aligned with the 6 strategic areas of focus." That includes self-driving vehicles/robotaxis. "With the benefit of learning from multiple AV deployments around the world, we're more convinced than ever that AVs will unlock a multitrillion-dollar opportunity for Uber. AVs amplify the fundamental strengths of our platform, global scale, deep demand density, sophisticated marketplace technology, and decades of on-the-ground experience matching riders, drivers, and vehicles, all in real time," Khosrowshahi added.

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19 Feb 2026 1:25am GMT

Google's Pixel 10a is essentially a flatter version of last year's Pixel 9a, keeping the same Tensor G4 chip, camera hardware, RAM, storage, and $500 price while dropping features like Pixelsnap Qi2 charging and advanced Gemini AI capabilities found in higher-end models. Gizmodo reports: We use words like "candy bar" or "slab" to describe our full-screen smartphones, but Google has designed what is likely the slabbiest phone of the modern era. During an hour-long hands-on with Google's all-new Google Pixel 10a, I slid the phone across a desk and felt oddly satisfied that it could glide as neatly as a figure skater without any hint of a camera bump hindering its path. It's the first thing I need to bring up regarding the Pixel 10a, because there's no other discernible difference between this phone and the previous-gen Pixel 9a. And that seems to be the point. The Pixel 10a starts at $500, exactly how much the Pixel 9a cost at launch. In a Q&A with journalists, Google told Gizmodo that the company wanted to offer the same price point as before. That apparently required Google to stick with the same Tensor G4 chip as last year. You still have the same storage options of 128GB or 256GB and the minimum of 8GB of RAM. Think of the Pixel 10a as a Pixel 9a with a reduced camera bump. If you're one of the heretics who uses a phone without a case, that fact alone may be enough to pay attention. Otherwise, you'll be scrounging to find any real difference between the Pixel 10a and one of last year's best mid-range phones.

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19 Feb 2026 12:45am GMT

Report: Verizon's goal is "immediate unlock for all payment methods really soon."

18 Feb 2026 8:58pm GMT

Two of Ars' favorite electric vehicles are now available for not very much money.

18 Feb 2026 8:22pm GMT

EPA sued for abandoning its mission to protect public health.

18 Feb 2026 7:48pm GMT

The 26.3 updates were mostly invisible; these changes are more significant.

18 Feb 2026 7:28pm GMT

Femtosecond lasers etch data into a very stable medium.

18 Feb 2026 7:01pm GMT

Trump admin's vaccine chief overruled FDA scientists to initially reject the shot.

18 Feb 2026 5:08pm GMT

With a simple prompt, you can generate 30 seconds of something like music.

18 Feb 2026 4:00pm GMT

Google's new budget phone is here, but don't expect a big upgrade.

18 Feb 2026 3:00pm GMT

Synchrotron radiation imaging revealed a porous, almost sponge-like nanostructure to create bright hues

18 Feb 2026 2:24pm GMT

Forum members have discussed their discomfort with mass deportation efforts.

18 Feb 2026 2:14pm GMT

Effectiveness appears to correlate with self-described mystical experience.

18 Feb 2026 12:00pm GMT

GameHub's existing Windows emulator on Android has its fair share of issues.

17 Feb 2026 10:45pm GMT

Contrary to what password managers say, a server compromise can mean game over.

17 Feb 2026 8:43pm GMT

Colbert: "I want to assure you this decision is for purely financial reasons."

17 Feb 2026 7:01pm GMT

Broadcom's "strategy was never to keep every customer," CloudBolt report says.

17 Feb 2026 6:38pm GMT

Connected car servers won't be online indefinitely, and startups often go bust.

17 Feb 2026 6:15pm GMT