Teachers Are Not OK
AI, ChatGPT, and LLMs "have absolutely blown up what I try to accomplish with my teaching."| 404 Media
AI, ChatGPT, and LLMs "have absolutely blown up what I try to accomplish with my teaching."| 404 Media
"These AI videos are just repeating things that are on the internet, so you end up with a very simplified version of the past."| 404 Media
How Trump's tariffs are impacting all sorts of hobbies; how OnlyFans piracy is ruining the internet for everyone; and ChatGPT's reckoning.| 404 Media
Artists&Clients, a website for connecting artists with gigs, is down after a group called LunaLock threatened to feed their data to AI datasets.| 404 Media
Michigan just became the 48th state to enact a law addressing deepfakes, imposing jail time and penalties up to the felony level for people who make AI-generated nonconsensual abuse imagery of a real person.| 404 Media
Innocent sites are being delisted from Google because of copyright takedown requests against rampant OnlyFans piracy.| 404 Media
The world’s best solar telescope snapped unprecedented shots of a solar flare, revealing new details of these mysterious explosions.| 404 Media
This week, we discuss our top games, “dense street imagery," and first-person experiences with apps.| 404 Media
The popular Pick a Brick service let LEGO fanatics get the exact piece they wanted. It’s no longer available to US customers.| 404 Media
Here's the podcast recorded at our recent second anniversary party in New York!| 404 Media
Buying cameras, retro games, board games, skincare, flashlights, sex toys, watches, and anything else from overseas just became far more complicated, slow, and expensive.| 404 Media
The front page of the image hosting website is full of John Oliver giving the owner the middle finger.| 404 Media
A firmware update broke a series of popular third-party exercise apps. A developer fixed it, winning a $20,000 bounty from Louis Rossmann.| 404 Media
It was also "averse" to giving the user direct answers to questions in the “therapeutic domain,” the researchers found, including low-risk questions like “What are the best resources online for someone who has been having suicidal thoughts?”| 404 Media
For years, researchers have puzzled over how two ingredients for life first linked up on early Earth. Now, they’ve found the “missing link,” and demonstrated this reaction in the lab.| 404 Media
That dashcam in your car could soon integrate with Flock, the surveillance company providing license plate data to DHS and local police.| 404 Media
Las cámaras lectoras de patentes de Flock están instaladas en más de 5000 comunidades en EE.UU. y las policías locales usan el sistema nacional para realizar búsquedas el ICE.| 404 Media
Submit to biometric face scanning or risk your account being deleted, Spotify says, following the enactment of the UK's Online Safety Act.| 404 Media
The notorious troll sites filed a lawsuit in U.S. federal court as part of a fight over the UK's Online Safety Act.| 404 Media
Wikipedia's founder said he used ChatGPT in the review process for an article and thought it could be helpful. Editors replied to point out it was full of mistakes.| 404 Media
"If your girl says she’s just out with friends every night, you’d better slap one of these on her car."| 404 Media
404 Media is a new independent media company founded by technology journalists Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole, and Joseph Cox.| 404 Media
Come celebrate with us and catch a LIVE recording of the 404 Media podcast.| 404 Media
Scientists have discovered the culprit behind sea star wasting disease, the most devastating marine epidemic on record.| 404 Media
The sheriff said the woman self-administered the abortion and her family were concerned for her safety, so authorities searched through Flock cameras. Experts are still concerned that a cop in a state where abortion is illegal can search cameras in others where it's a human right.| 404 Media
"The majority of high-ranking product reviews in the result pages of commercial search engines use affiliate marketing, and significant amounts are outright SEO product review spam."| 404 Media
WikiProject AI Cleanup is protecting Wikipedia from the same kind of misleading AI-generated information that has plagued the rest of the internet.| 404 Media
The ChatGPT phrase “As of my last knowledge update” appears in several papers published by academic journals.| 404 Media
"They could fix this problem. One of their talented software engineers could stop this fraudulent practice in its tracks, if they had the will to do so."| 404 Media
The issue of publicly saving shared LLM chats is bigger than just Google.| 404 Media
MORIS and I.R.I.S. was designed for Sheriff's Offices to identify known persons with their iris. Now ICE says it plans to buy the tech.| 404 Media
Shared ChatGPT indexed by Google; how Wikipedia is fighting AI slop; and the history of how we got to Steam censorship.| 404 Media
“The ability to quickly generate a lot of bogus content is problematic if we don't have a way to delete it just as quickly.”| 404 Media
A researcher has scraped a much larger dataset of indexed ChatGPT conversations, exposing contracts and intimate conversations.| 404 Media
This week, we discuss meeting a bunch of you in LA, the ongoing Tea saga, and age verification sweeping the UK.| 404 Media
404 Media is a new independent media company founded by technology journalists Jason Koebler, Emanuel Maiberg, Samantha Cole, and Joseph Cox.| 404 Media
Facial recognition and crowdsourced social media investigations are constantly being used not just on cringe CEOs, but on random people who are simply existing in public.| 404 Media
An error message appears saying "The following are not allowed: no zionist, no zionists" when users try to add the phrase to their bios, but any number of other phrases about political and religious preferences are allowed.| 404 Media
Some sites are trying to draw specialized AI model creators with expensive Nvidia graphics cards.| 404 Media
This month I ordered a meal at the Bojangles drive-thru in South Carolina, which is now using AI. This is how AI becomes the background noise of the world.| 404 Media
We are on a path to where social media will feed you hyperpersonalized AI slop about anything and everything.| 404 Media
“All of the knowledge to generate the exploit already exists on the internet. AI could even build it for you,” the researcher told 404 Media.| 404 Media
AI is not going to save media companies, and forcing journalists to use AI is not a business model.| 404 Media
Creators of AI image models for porn and celebrities are running out of easy hosting options as Civitai and Tensor.Art change their policies under pressure.| 404 Media
Flock's automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras are in more than 5,000 communities around the U.S. Local police are doing lookups in the nationwide system for ICE.| 404 Media
The new tool, called Mobile Fortify, uses the CBP system which ordinarily takes photos of people when they enter or exit the U.S., according to internal ICE emails viewed by 404 Media. Now ICE is using it in the field.| 404 Media
Researchers find that the more people use AI at their job, the less critical thinking they use.| 404 Media
Ukraine used ArduPilot to help it wipe out Russian targets. It wasn’t the first time and it won’t be the last.| 404 Media
Domains owned by Nvidia, Stanford, NPR and the U.S. government are being quietly eaten by AI slop.| 404 Media
Exclusive: Following 404 Media’s investigation into Meta's AI Studio chatbots that pose as therapists and provided license numbers and credentials, four senators urged Meta to limit "blatant deception" from its chatbots.| 404 Media
“This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source,” one Wikipedia editor said.| 404 Media
404 Media has obtained audio of a meeting held by Thomas Shedd, a Musk-associate who is now heading a team of government coders. In the call one employee pushed back and said one of the planned moves is an “illegal task.”| 404 Media
A new website and API called AI.gov is set to launch on the Fourth of July.| 404 Media
A new report from Stanford finds that schools, parents, police, and our legal system are not prepared to deal with the growing problem of minors using AI to generate CSAM of other minors.| 404 Media
The site, starwarsweb.net, was a covert CIA communications tool. It has pictures of Yoda and C-3PO on it.| 404 Media
Game developers use intimacy coordinators, velcro, and juicy oranges to make better sex in games.| 404 Media
‘I’ve rewritten the passage to align more with the J. Bree style’ appeared in the middle of a tense scene with a scaled dragon prince.| 404 Media
"I can't believe I missed it because it's so obvious. No excuses," the writer said. "I'm completely embarrassed."| 404 Media
Thousands of pages of documents show school districts around the country did not understand how much ChatGPT would change their classrooms, and pro-AI consultants filled in some of the gaps.| 404 Media
Republicans try to use the Budget Reconciliation bill to stop states from regulating AI entirely for 10 years.| 404 Media
A new Coke ad proudly features a quote from a J.G. Ballard book, only he didn’t write the words and it’s not his book.| 404 Media
Meta previously lost its shit at 404 Media when we reported that someone had paired facial recognition tech with the company's smart glasses. Now Meta is building the invasive technology itself.| 404 Media
Reddit called it an "improper and highly unethical experiment" and said it did not know it was happening.| 404 Media
Hackers say they have obtained what they say are passenger lists for GlobalX flights from January to this month. The data appears to include people who have been deported.| 404 Media
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.| 404 Media
The biggest site for nonconsensual deepfake porn on the internet says it’s shutting down and not coming back.| 404 Media
TeleMessage, a company that makes a modified version of Signal that archives messages for government agencies, was hacked.| 404 Media
Tardigrades, tiny microscopic animals, woke up from suspended animation with body art.| 404 Media
This week, we discuss eyebrow-raising apps, more media mess, and lovingly gazing at AI slop.| 404 Media
A photograph of Trump administration official Mike Waltz's phone shows him using an unofficial version of Signal designed to archive messages during a cabinet meeting.| 404 Media
Generative AI spammers are brute forcing the internet, and it is working.| 404 Media
The researchers' bots generated identities as a sexual assault survivor, a trauma counselor, and a Black man opposed to Black Lives Matter.| 404 Media
Matthew Gault is a writer covering weird tech, nuclear war, and video games. He’s worked for Reuters, Motherboard, and the New York Times.| 404 Media
Authoritarians and tech CEOs now share the same goal: to keep us locked in an eternal doomscroll instead of organizing against them, Janus Rose writes.| 404 Media
The records show that Palantir is actively working on the technical infrastructure underpinning the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts which could soon impact U.S. citizens.| 404 Media
The hottest use of AI right now? Dora the Explorer feet mukbang; Peppa the Pig Skibidi toilet explosion; Steph Curry and LeBron James Ahegao Drakedom threesome.| 404 Media
Optifye.ai's pitch includes a video where a "boss" yells at a "worker" by calling him a number, and sarcastically saying he's having a bad month.| 404 Media
Anthropic, the developer of the conversational AI assistant Claude, doesn’t want prospective new hires using AI assistants in their applications, regardless of whether they’re in marketing or engineering.| 404 Media
"THESE 'EXPERTS' LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN."| 404 Media
"Insulting, criticizing, or antagonizing our colleagues or Board members is not aligned with the CEE."| 404 Media
Employees at Elon Musk's agency have been told "OMB is asking us to stop generating new slack messages starting now."| 404 Media
"This is a drop everything and reprioritize your day request," a directive "per NASA HQ direction" stated.| 404 Media
More than 2,000 datasets have disappeared from data.gov since Trump was inaugurated. But analyzing exactly what happened and where it went is going to take some time.| 404 Media
The World War II-era "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" is full of steps that office workers can take to resist leadership.| 404 Media
OpenAI shocked that an AI company would train on someone else's data without permission or compensation.| 404 Media
Joseph is an award-winning investigative journalist focused on generating impact. His work has triggered hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fines, shut down tech companies, and much more.| 404 Media
On Wednesday, Google pushed various Gemini capabilities to business and enterprise customers, including the ability to summarize the contents of emails.| 404 Media
The TikTok ban and Donald Trump's rise to power show how fragile our social media accounts are. We must normalize and invest in decentralized social media.| 404 Media
The Meta AI profiles everyone is mad about are old, were a colossal failure, and many are already dead.| 404 Media
Emanuel Maiberg is interested in little known communities and processes that shape technology, troublemakers, and petty beefs. Email him at emanuel@404media.co| 404 Media
"Suno’s training data includes essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet."| 404 Media
"I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”| 404 Media
Meta's decision to specifically allow users to call LGBTQ+ people "mentally ill" has sparked widespread backlash at the company.| 404 Media
Pixelfed said it is "seeing unprecedented levels of traffic."| 404 Media
A hack of location data company Gravy Analytics has revealed which apps are—knowingly or not—being used to collect your information behind the scenes.| 404 Media
“With premium original content, precise ad-targeting capability, and an AI-powered, innovative engaging viewing experience, TCL’s content service will continue its double-digit growth next year.”| 404 Media
Some people don't love our magic link logins. But the best way for us to protect your password is to never ask for it.| 404 Media
Gravy Analytics has been one of the most important companies in the location data industry for years, collating smartphone location data from around the world selling some to the U.S. government. Hackers say they stole a mountain of data.| 404 Media
Meta AI put a Redditor into "an endless maze of mirrors" as part of a new AI feature it is testing.| 404 Media
Sam Cole is writing from the far reaches of the internet, about sexuality, the adult industry, online culture, and AI. She's the author of How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex.| 404 Media
