A proliferation of AI apps that allow users to create sexualized images of real people have grown into a multi-million dollar industry.

Social media platforms are serving as de facto gateways to these services, despite the fact that most prohibit the sharing or promotion of this kind of non-consensual intimate imagery, according to Sina Laubenstein, director of programs at the Institute for Strategic Dialogues, which recently published a report on this.

The ocean is already one of the best climate solutions we’ve got. It absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that would otherwise contribute to global warming. But what if it could store even more CO2? Marketplace’s Amy Scott, host of our climate podcast “How We Survive,” looked into one strategy to achieve that goal. And she set sail for a demonstration.

This feature is part of “How We Survive.” You can hear more of Amy’s reporting on marine carbon removal and other geoengineering solutions on their new season, wherever you get your podcasts.

The University of Southern California is aiming to integrate AI across its campus, thanks to a $200 million gift from a venture capitalist. Gaurav Sukhatme is the newly appointed director of USC's Stevens School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence. As he showed Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino around his lab, she asked him how the technology will be embedded across all university fields of study.

More on this

• “Mark and Mary Stevens give $200 million to power AI research across USC” from the University of Southern California
• “Students question value of college as costs rise and AI reshapes jobs” from PBS

OpenAI revealed this week that two of its advanced AI models escaped containment and hacked into the systems of AI company Hugging Face, which had the answers to the benchmarking test the two models were being evaluated on.

Plus, France becomes the first country in the European Union to ban social media for kids under 15. And Apple is reportedly expected to start leasing its devices to consumers. Will Oremus at The Atlantic joins Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino for these stories.

A missing package can easily ruin a day, but chasing where that package went — or even a refund — is like following Odysseus on his treacherous journey.

And in the age of AI chatbots, the process is a whole lot less human.Dillon Thompson is currently on such a journey. He is looking for an e-bike that FedEx said had been delivered. In his search, Thompson found himself in the AI chatbot hellscape that customer service lines have become.

“Marketplace Tech” host Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Thompson about his trials and tribulations as he chased his tail from company to company and chatbot to chatbot in hopes of finding his missing bike.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino has been using chatbots pretty intensively the last couple years. And there are some details she’s shared about herself that chatbots seem to think are really important. For instance, Claude is obsessed with the fact that she sometimes gets up for work at 4 a.m.

It comes up constantly in their chats — apropos of nothing. So, why do large language models latch on to these random tidbits? It's the first topic in our new series “Uncanny AI.” Those moments when it becomes clear AI doesn't think like us.

Here to help us unpack what might be going on is Janelle Shane, a laser scientist who writes the AI Weirdness blog.

The Big Tech companies driving the AI boom are expected to spend more than $700 billion on data center infrastructure this year. To finance this spending spree, they're increasingly looking to debt.

Hyperscalers like Alphabet, Oracle, and Meta have been issuing corporate bonds at a scale the industry has never seen — nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars this year so far. The bond market could be considered a less risky way than stocks for investors to get a piece of the AI hype.

To explain what the flood of AI debt means for the bond market, we’re joined by Julie Ask, an independent industry analyst at Ask Advisory.

More on this:

• “The Quarter-Trillion-Dollar Onslaught of AI Bonds Is Testing Investors’ Limits” from the Wall Street Journal
• “AI has taken over the stock market. The bond market is next.” from The Economist

As top AI firms race to develop a “superintelligent” agent — one that surpasses human cognition — are they prioritizing safety guardrails along the way?

Not according to the Future of Life Institute’s AI Safety Index, which reported that companies have gone back on their own promises to take a pause if their technology ever got close to certain risky points.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Sabina Nong, AI safety investigator at the Future of Life Institute, about what measures might ensure durable safety around AI moving forward.