I am haunted by a pregnant bill in Andrew Cuomo’s new AI-generated attack ad against Zohran Mamdani. Cuomo posted the ad on his X account that riffed on the famous Schoolhouse Rock! song “I’m just a bill.” In Cuomo’s AI-generated cartoon nightmare, Zohran Mamdani lights money on fire while a phone bearing the ChatGPT logo…
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Chimpanzees revise their beliefs if they encounter new information, a hallmark of rationality that was once assumed to be unique to humans, according to a study published on Thursday in Science….
Last night Trump directed the Pentagon to start testing nukes again. If that happens, it’ll be the first time the US has detonated a nuke in more than 30 years. The organization that would likely be responsible for this would be the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a civilian workforce that oversees the American nuclear…
Someone recently managed to get on a Microsoft Teams call with representatives from phone hacking company Cellebrite, and then leaked a screenshot of the company’s capabilities against many Google Pixel phones, according to a forum post about the leak and 404 Media’s review of the material. The leak follows others obtained and verified by 404…
This story was reported with support from the MuckRock foundation. One of the largest distributors of print books for libraries is winding down operations by the end of the year, a huge disruption to public libraries across the country, some of which are warning their communities the shut down will limit their ability to lend…
“You don’t got no ID?” a Border Patrol agent in a baseball cap, sunglasses, and neck gaiter asks a kid on a bike. The officer and three others had just stopped the two young men on their bikes during the day in what a video documenting the incident says is Chicago. One of the boys…
A number of Instagram accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of views have uploaded videos filmed with Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses show men entering massage parlors across the country and soliciting the workers there for “tuggy” massages, or sex work. In some cases, the women laugh at the men, dismiss them, or don’t…
We start this week with Jason’s explanation of what Grokipedia is, and how it compares to the very much human-made Wikipedia. After the break, we talk all about the hell of updating Windows PCs and what that means specifically for Windows 10 users. In the subscribers-only section, Emanuel explains what a16z is doing with a…
On Monday morning, the Trump administration used a picture of Halo’s Master Chief to call for the destruction of immigrants. This administration is no stranger to appropriating pop culture for its propaganda, but something about seeing the stalwart hero of a beloved video game twisted into an anti-immigrant super soldier hit people pretty hard. Over…
What if your coworkers were AI? What if AI agents, not humans, monitored security camera feeds? What if you had an AI tech recruiter to find motivated candidates, or an entirely autonomous recruiting firm? What if UPS, but AI, or finance, but DeepMind? Does that sound like absolute hell on Earth? Well, too bad, because…
