Almost two dozen digital rights and consumer protection organizations sent a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday urging regulators to investigate Character.AI and Meta’s “unlicensed practice of medicine facilitated by their product,” through therapy-themed bots that claim to have credentials and confidentiality “with inadequate controls and disclosures.”   The complaint and request for investigation…

Meta said it is suing a nudify app that 404 Media reported bought thousands of ads on Instagram and Facebook, repeatedly violating its policies.  Meta is suing Joy Timeline HK Limited, the entity behind the CrushAI nudify app that allows users to take an image of anyone and AI-generate a nude image of them without…

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has confirmed it is flying Predator drones above the Los Angeles protests, and specifically in support of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to a CBP statement sent to 404 Media. The statement follows 404 Media’s reporting that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has flown two Predator drones above…

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization which hosts and develops Wikipedia, has paused an experiment that showed users AI-generated summaries at the top of articles after an overwhelmingly negative reaction from the Wikipedia editors community. “Just because Google has rolled out its AI summaries doesn’t mean we need to one-up them, I sincerely beg you…

It’s that time again! We’re planning our latest FOIA Forum, a live, hour-long or more interactive session where Joseph and Jason (and this time Emanuel too maybe) will teach you how to pry records from government agencies through public records requests. We’re planning this for Wednesday, 18th at 1 PM Eastern. That’s in just one…

A judge ruled that John Deere must face a lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission and five states over its tractor and agricultural equipment repair monopoly, and rejected the company’s argument that the case should be thrown out. This means Deere is now facing both a class action lawsuit and a federal antitrust lawsuit over…

Much of this episode is about the ongoing anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. We start with Joseph explaining how he monitored surveillance aircraft flying over the protests, including what turned out to be a Predator drone. After the break, Jason tells us about the burning Waymos. In the subscribers-only section, we talk about the owner…

Web domains owned by Nvidia, Stanford, NPR, and the U.S. government are hosting pages full of AI slop articles that redirect to a spam marketing site.  On a site seemingly abandoned by Nvidia for events, called events.nsv.nvidia.com, a spam marketing operation moved in and posted more than 62,000 AI-generated articles, many of them full of…

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) flew two high-powered Predator surveillance drones above the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles over the weekend, according to air traffic control (ATC) audio unearthed by an aviation tracking enthusiast then reviewed by 404 Media and cross-referenced with flight data. The use of Predator drones highlights the extraordinary resources government…

The federal government is working on a website and API called “ai.gov” to “accelerate government innovation with AI” that is supposed to launch on July 4 and will include an analytics feature that shows how much a specific government team is using AI, according to an early version of the website and code posted by…