🌘 Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week. Regular ejaculation — for example, by masturbation — produces higher quality sperm, a finding that has implications for fertility science and assisted reproductive technologies, according to a comprehensive new study published…
Barely three months ago, the Walt Disney Company announced that it would be bringing user-generated AI slop to Disney+ as part of a landmark $1 billion investment into OpenAI that would allow people to use Sora to create short videos from more than 200 beloved Disney characters. The announcement was so important that Disney’s then-CEO…
When Meta announced its plan to shut down Horizon Worlds last week a lot of us laughed. Social scientist Dr Ruth Diaz was not one of them. Diaz worked for Meta as a VR community design developer in the early days of the Horizon Worlds project and left in 2022. After Meta’s announcement last week,…
This week we start with Emanuel’s crazy story about WebinarTV, a company that is secretly recording Zoom meetings and turning them into AI-powered podcasts. It’s nuts. After the break, Joseph tells us about the eccentric billionaire who tried to become a cocaine kingpin. In the subscribers-only section, we lament the lose of the metaverse. Listen…
A Serve Robotics food delivery robot crashed through the glass wall of a bus stop shelter in Chicago earlier this week, shattering the glass all over the sidewalk. The crash comes amid a protest against delivery robots in Chicago and a few weeks after a politician who represents part of Chicago said he would not…
WebinarTV, a company that bills itself as “a search engine for the best webinars,” is secretly scanning the internet for Zoom meeting links, recording the calls, and turning them into AI-generated podcasts for profit. In some cases, people only found out that their Zoom calls were recorded once WebinarTV reached out to them directly to…
A top result on Google for people searching for Claude plugins sent users to a site that recently contained malicious code in an apparent attempt to steal their credentials. The news shows how the explosion of interest in generative AI tools is giving hackers new ways to attack users. The malicious site was flagged to…
On Monday a judge said videos of recent depositions from DOGE members can be published online once again. The ruling is something of an about face for Judge Colleen McMahon, who originally ordered plaintiffs in the DOGE-related lawsuit “claw back” the videos they had published to YouTube. The videos were already massively viral at the…
Watching people outsource their critical thinking, emotions, and sanity to glitchy “AI” chatbots has been one of the most uniquely terrifying aspects of being a human being in recent years. While wealthy tech evangelists like Sam Altman continue to make wild proclamations about how large language models (LLMs) are destined to do our jobs and…
This week, Sam talks to Emily Bender and Alex Hanna about the marketing ploys of “artificial intelligence,” why ridicule works to keep big tech’s claims in check, and what makes them hopeful for the future. They’re the authors of The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want. Dr….
