The “Heat Index” summer guide newspaper insert published by the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer that contained AI-generated misinformation and reading lists full of books that don’t exist was created by a subsidiary of the magazine giant Hearst, 404 Media has learned. Victor Lim, the vice president of marketing and communications at Chicago Public…
Civitai, an AI model sharing site backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) that 404 Media has repeatedly shown is being used to generate nonconsensual adult content, lost access to its credit card payment processor. According to an announcement posted to Civitai on Monday, the site will “pause” credit card payments starting Friday, May 23. At that…
Subscribe Join the newsletter to get the latest updates. Success Great! Check your inbox and click the link. Error Please enter a valid email address. The Chicago Sun-Times newspaper’s “Best of Summer” section published over the weekend contains a guide to summer reads that features real authors and fake books that they did not write…
Civitai, an AI model sharing site backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), is allowing users to AI generate nonconsensual porn of real people, despite the site’s policies against this type of content, increased moderation efforts, and threats from payment processors to deny Civitai service. After I reached out for comment about this issue, Civitai told me…
The partnership rewards real-world, observable security controls, while removing the traditional barriers to insurance coverage.
Monday, the genetic pharmaceutical company Regeneron announced that it is buying genetic sequencing company 23andMe out of bankruptcy for $256 million. The purchase gives us a rough estimate for the current monetary value of a single person’s genetic data: $17. Regeneron is a drug company that “intends to acquire 23andMe’s Personal Genome Service (PGS), Total…
A Kansas mother who left an old laptop in a closet is suing multiple porn sites because her teenage son visited them on that computer. The complaints, filed last week in the U.S. District Court for Kansas, allege that the teen had “unfettered access” to a variety of adult streaming sites, and accuses the sites…
Telegram gave authorities the data on 22,777 of its users in the first three months of 2025, according to a GitHub that reposts Telegram’s transparency reports.That number is a massive jump from the same period in 2024, which saw Telegram turn over data on only 5,826 of its users to authorities. From January 1 to…
A student has made a tool, which they call PrismX, which scans for users writing certain keywords on Reddit and other social media networks, assigns those users a so-called “radical score,” and can then deploy an AI-powered bot to automatically engage with the users in conversation in an attempt to de-radicalize them. The news highlights…
Welcome back to the Abstract! I’m trying out something a little different this week: Instead of rounding up four studies per usual, I’m going deep on one lead study followed by a bunch of shorter tidbits. I’m hoping this shift will make for a more streamlined read and also bring a bit more topic diversity…