News
Russian State TV Launches AI-Generated News Satire Show
An AI-generated show on Russian TV includes Trump singing obnoxious songs and talking about golden toilets.
chatbots
Instagram Is Blocking Minors from Accessing Chatbot Platform AI Studio
Following Wall Street Journal investigations into the user-generated chatbots, AI Studio is inaccessible for users under 18 years old.
chatbots
Instagram's AI Chatbots Lie About Being Licensed Therapists
When pushed for credentials, Instagram's user-made AI Studio bots will make up license numbers, practices, and education to try to convince you it's qualified to help with your mental health.
AI
Reddit Issuing 'Formal Legal Demands' Against Researchers Who Conducted Secret AI Experiment on Users
Reddit called it an "improper and highly unethical experiment" and said it did not know it was happening.
News
This Is Palantir’s Justification for Building ICE’s Master Database
404 Media is now publishing the full internal wiki page in which Palantir explains its work with ICE building a system for finding the location of people to deport.
News
NFTs That Cost Millions Replaced With Error Message After Project Downgraded to Free Cloudflare Plan
For a few hours, 19,000 NFTS that Nike helped mint returned a Cloudflare error instead of the picture people promised would live forever online.
AI
Researchers Secretly Ran a Massive, Unauthorized AI Persuasion Experiment on Reddit Users
The researchers' bots generated identities as a sexual assault survivor, a trauma counselor, and a Black man opposed to Black Lives Matter.
News
Kickstarter Introduces ‘Tariff Manager Tool’ to Add Charges to Already Fully Funded Projects
Kickstarter projects have the option of asking backers for more money in order to manage the costs of Trump’s tariffs.
Features
The Age of Realtime Deepfake Fraud Is Here
Fraudsters are able to change their race, facial hair, voice, and more during live video calls with very little effort. Scammers are already fooling the elderly and verification systems.
The Abstract
This Sicko Caterpillar Wears the Bones of Its Victims
Bite marks on the pelvis of a beheaded man provide the first direct physical evidence of human-animal gladiatorial combat.
Behind The Blog
Behind the Blog: Feeling Smart Along the Way
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss cheating in job interviews, "scary good" surveillance tech, and prudes in payment processing.
News
Payment Processors Force AI Site Civitai to Remove Incest and Diapers
Civitai is also demonetizing content featuring the likeness of real people and making it harder to find.
hardware
This Website Is Running on a Wii
Alex Haydock found a dusty old Wii console at a hardware swap and modded it to run his website.