Welcome back to the Abstract! Let me start this column with a question: Are you a man or a mouse? Or a mammoth? Or a mammoth mouse? Okay, that was more than one question, but in my defense, scientists made a bunch of mammothy mice and I’m getting my taxonomical lines crossed. Then, hornet guts:…
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 a Supreme drop, a visit to a local Risograph printer, and what is up with Big Car. JOSEPH: My only experience with brands like Supreme and drops…
Google’s featured snippet is pulling in an Amazon AI summary of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi manifesto Mein Kampf that calls it “a true work of art” in the latest AI-related fuckup affecting top search results. As of writing, searching for “mein kampf positive reviews” returned a result that was pulled from an AI-generated summary of an…
A number of AI video generators, mostly released by Chinese companies, lack the most basic guardrails that prevent people from generating nonconsensual nudity and pornography, and are already widely used for that exact purpose in online communities dedicated to creating and sharing that type of content. A 404 Media investigation into these AI video generators…
A game created with AI in just 30 minutes is generating more than $50,000 a month, its creator claims—and could be a peek at how AI can, and can’t, change game design in the future. fly.pieter.com, an in-browser “fun free-to-play MMO flight sim made with AI” was made by Pieter Levels, who amassed a huge…
A leading French university is inviting American scientists who fear their research on subjects like climate might be censored by Donald Trump’s administration to do their work in France. “The program is called ‘safe place for science,’ and will provide 15 million Euros in funding for some 15 researchers over a 3-year period,” Clara Bufi,…
A team of volunteer archivists has recreated the Centers for Disease Control website exactly as it was the day Donald Trump was inaugurated. The site, called RestoredCDC.org, went live Tuesday and is currently being hosted in Europe. As we have been following since the beginning of Trump’s second term, websites across the entire federal government…
Cellebrite, the company which makes near ubiquitous phone hacking and forensics technology used by police officers around the world, has introduced artificial intelligence capabilities into its products, including summarizing chat logs or audio messages from seized mobile phones, according to an announcement from the company last month. The introduction of AI into a tool that…
This week we start with Jason’s article on how a Facebook group for Cybertruck owners is completely overrun with people flipping them off. Then Joseph explains how U.S. crypto traders are buying IDs from the tropical nation of Palau to skirt the law. Then in the subscribers-only section (with a content warning), we talk about…