NASA paid for access to Clearview AI’s “Investigator Tool + Cloud Database,” according to a set of procurement documents obtained by 404 Media under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Clearview is a controversial facial recognition company which was the first to cross the rubicon of allowing third parties to search for someone’s face and…
Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University protester who was detained by ICE on Saturday, has been moved to a detention facility in Louisiana, according to ICE’s detainee locator system. Khalil was a key part of Columbia students’ protests last year against Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment of Gaza in response to the October 7 attacks. He is a…
Wikipedia is one of the most valuable repositories of information ever created by humanity. Having your own Wikipedia page has become a kind of status symbol—proof that someone is important enough to enter the historical record. But, ironically, having your face in a Wikipedia page is often not flattering at all. In fact, Wikipedia portraits,…
Welcome back to the Abstract! Let me start this column with a question: Are you a man or a mouse? Or a mammoth? Or a mammoth mouse? Okay, that was more than one question, but in my defense, scientists made a bunch of mammothy mice and I’m getting my taxonomical lines crossed. Then, hornet guts:…
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 a Supreme drop, a visit to a local Risograph printer, and what is up with Big Car. JOSEPH: My only experience with brands like Supreme and drops…
Google’s featured snippet is pulling in an Amazon AI summary of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi manifesto Mein Kampf that calls it “a true work of art” in the latest AI-related fuckup affecting top search results. As of writing, searching for “mein kampf positive reviews” returned a result that was pulled from an AI-generated summary of an…
A number of AI video generators, mostly released by Chinese companies, lack the most basic guardrails that prevent people from generating nonconsensual nudity and pornography, and are already widely used for that exact purpose in online communities dedicated to creating and sharing that type of content. A 404 Media investigation into these AI video generators…
A leading French university is inviting American scientists who fear their research on subjects like climate might be censored by Donald Trump’s administration to do their work in France. “The program is called ‘safe place for science,’ and will provide 15 million Euros in funding for some 15 researchers over a 3-year period,” Clara Bufi,…
A game created with AI in just 30 minutes is generating more than $50,000 a month, its creator claims—and could be a peek at how AI can, and can’t, change game design in the future. fly.pieter.com, an in-browser “fun free-to-play MMO flight sim made with AI” was made by Pieter Levels, who amassed a huge…
A team of volunteer archivists has recreated the Centers for Disease Control website exactly as it was the day Donald Trump was inaugurated. The site, called RestoredCDC.org, went live Tuesday and is currently being hosted in Europe. As we have been following since the beginning of Trump’s second term, websites across the entire federal government…
