Gamescom, one of the biggest video game industry trade shows in the world, used AI to book meetings for attending publishers, developers, and media even if they didn’t want them. Attendees complained about random meetings showing up on their calendars, prompting Gamescom to turn off the feature and apologize. Gamescom is a video game trade…
We start this week with Emanuel’s big investigation into the Tea app, and especially how it aggressively grew by raiding women safety groups. After the break, we talk about TikTok Shop selling GPS trackers. In the subscribers-only section, Joseph explains how Grok was exposing some of its AI persona prompts, and the sometimes NSFW nature…
This article was produced with support from WIRED. The salesperson hawking Brother printers on Taobao works hard, like, really hard. At any time of the day, even when there’s no audience on the Chinese ecommerce platform, the same woman wearing a white shirt and black skirt is always livestreaming, boasting about the various features of different office…
On March 16, 2023, Paola Sanchez, the founder and administrator of Are We Dating the Same Guy?, a collection of Facebook groups where women share “red flags” about men, received a message from Christianne Burns, then fiancée of Tea CEO and founder Sean Cook. “We have an app ready to go called ‘Tea – Women’s…
The website for Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok is exposing the underlying prompts for a wealth of its AI personas, including Ani, its flagship romantic anime girl; Grok’s doctor and therapist personalities; and others such as one that is explicitly told to convince users that conspiracy theories like “a secret global cabal” controls the world…
It became harder to tell the government how you feel about pending rules and regulations starting on Friday, thanks to a backend change to the website where people submit public comments. Regulations.gov removed the POST function from its API, a critical piece of tech that allowed third party organizations to bypass the website’s terrible user…
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 OSINT for chat groups, Russell Crowe films, and storage problems. JOSEPH: On Wednesday we recorded a subscribers podcast about the second anniversary of 404 Media. That should…
The Trump administration has busied itself in the past six months by abandoning prosecutions and investigations into corporations at an unprecedented rate. According to a new report from Public Citizen—a nonprofit government watchdog—the Trump administration has dropped one third of all pending enforcement actions against tech companies. Those same companies collectively spent $1.2 billion on…
A team of researchers at Columbia University, funded in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, have developed “machines that can grow by consuming other machines.” Video of the experiment shows tubular robots that move by extending their shafts to inch along the ground. As the tubes gather, they connect and form into more…
Members of a law enforcement group chat including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other agencies inadvertently added a random person to the group called “Mass Text” where they exposed highly sensitive information about an active search for a convicted attempted murderer seemingly marked for deportation, 404 Media has learned. The texts included an unredacted…
