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…
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…
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…
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…
Members of a congressional committee have demanded Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem for more information about Mobile Fortify, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) new facial recognition app, which taps into an unprecedented array of government databases and uses a system ordinarily reserved for when people enter or exit the U.S. 404 Media…
Science and music YouTuber Benn Jordan had a rough few days earlier this week after Google’s AI Summary falsely said he recently visited Israel and caused people to believe he supported the country during its war on Gaza. Jordan does not support Israel and has previously donated to Palestinian charities. Jordan told 404 Media that…
The Federal Trade Commission announced Wednesday that Pornhub and its parent company Aylo settled a lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission and the state of Utah. The FTC and Utah’s attorney general claimed that Pornhub and its affiliates “deceived users by doing little to block tens of thousands of videos and photos featuring child…
🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Scientists have long been puzzled by the sturdy glaciers of the mountains of central Asia, which have inexplicably remained intact even as other glaciers around the world rapidly recede due to…
An old school ransomware attack has a new twist: threatening to feed data to AI companies so it’ll be added to LLM datasets. Artists&Clients is a website that connects independent artists with interested clients. Around August 30, a message appeared on Artists&Clients attributed to the ransomware group LunaLock. “We have breached the website Artists&Clients to…
It’s now illegal in Michigan to make AI-generated sexual imagery of someone without their written consent. Michigan joins 47 other states in the U.S. that have enacted their own deepfake laws. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed the bipartisan-sponsored House Bills 4047 and its companion bill 4048 on August 26. In a press release, Whitmer specifically…
