Employees at Robert F Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services received an email Tuesday morning with the subject line “AI Deployment,” which told them that ChatGPT would be rolled out for all employees at the agency. The deployment is being overseen by Clark Minor, a former Palantir employee who’s now Chief Information Officer…
The AI Darwin Awards are here to catalog the damage that happens when humanity’s hubris meets AI’s incompetence. The simple website contains a list of the dumbest AI disasters from the past year and calls for readers to nominate more. “Join our mission to document AI misadventure for educational purposes,” it said. “Remember: today’s catastrophically…
Less than two weeks ago, the Trump administration ended de minimis, a rule that let people buy products from overseas without paying tariffs or associated processing fees if the item cost less than $800. As we predicted, the end of de minimis has made having basically any sort of hobby that requires the purchase of…
If you or someone you know is struggling, The Crisis Text Line is a texting service for emotional crisis support. To text with a trained helper, text SAVE to 741741. Judge Janis Sammartino sentenced Michael James Pratt, the owner and operator of the GirlsDoPorn sex trafficking ring, to 27 years in federal prison on Monday….
An Instagram account with almost 400,000 followers is promoting racist and antisemitic t-shirts, another sign that Meta is unable or unwilling to enforce its own policies against hate speech. 404 Media flagged the account to Meta as well as specific racist posts that violate its hate speech policies, but Meta didn’t remove the account and…
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recently spent nearly four million dollars on facial recognition technology in part to investigate people it believes have assaulted law enforcement officers, according to procurement records reviewed by 404 Media. The records are unusual in that they indicate ICE is buying the technology to identify people who might clash with…
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that transgressed the rules, explored extraterrestrial vistas, and went with the flow. First, ants are doing really strange things again. I don’t even want to spoil it—you’ll just have to read on! Then, plan your trip to the latest hot exoplanet destination (literally, in…
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 slop in history, five-alarm fires, and AI art (not) at Dragon Con. EMANUEL: We published about a dozen stories this week and I only wrote one of…
Days away from finding out his sentence for sex trafficking as the ringleader of Girls Do Porn, Michael James Pratt and his attorney are attempting to paint a picture of a man reformed behind bars, through personal letters and certificates from classes he has passed inside prison. GirlsDoPorn was a sex trafficking operation posing as…
A hacker has broken into Nexar, a popular dashcam company that pitches its users’ dashcams as “virtual CCTV cameras” around the world that other people can buy images from, and accessed a database of terabytes of video recordings taken from cameras in drivers’ cars. The videos obtained by the hacker and shared with 404 Media…
