Welcome back to the Abstract, 404 Media’s weekly roundup of scientific studies to distract us from our present dystopia! This week, we are traveling back in time to 16th century Transylvania, so please make sure you are up to date on your bubonic plague shots. A study reconstructed wild weather events through the eyes of…
A German researcher captured the contents of the White House’s “DEI.gov” during a brief period when it was not password protected. The capture shows that the site contains a list of vague, alleged government-funded tasks and their costs, without sources or context, like “$1.3 million to Arab and Jewish photographers,” “$1.5 million for ‘art for…
After being forced by a court order to restore certain pages about gender and diversity to government websites, the Trump administration has added a note to the top of those pages saying “Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate, and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes,…
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 Apple’s iCloud, Wikipedia is a miracle of humankind, and good soup. JASON: After our relatively unhinged BTBs last week, many of you left extremely nice comments, reached out…
The doge.gov website that was spun up to track Elon Musk’s cuts to the federal government is insecure and pulls from a database that can be edited by anyone, according to two separate people who found the vulnerability and shared it with 404 Media. One coder added at least two database entries that are visible…
This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here. After a judge called out a law firm for citing fake cases in court documents, the attorneys admitted to AI “hallucinating” the cases. In a court order filed last week, Wyoming District Judge Kelly Rankin demanded…
Subscribe Join the newsletter to get the latest updates. Success Great! Check your inbox and click the link. Error Please enter a valid email address. Elizabeth Hernandez found out about the decade-old murder from a flurry of tips sent to her newsroom in August last year. The tips were all reacting to a YouTube video…
A government website created by the Trump administration to “track government waste” has been left unupdated with a default WordPress sample page that includes language about an imaginary architecture firm. “Waste.gov: Tracking government waste,” the tagline for the website, archived here, says. The rest of the webpage, however, is about an imaginary architecture firm called…
This week we discuss a new Microsoft study that finds using generative AI is “atrophying” people’s cognition and critical thinking skills, the right’s war on Wikipedia, and, in the subscriber’s section, the idea of posting against fascism. Articles discussed: Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared”Wikipedia Prepares for ‘Increase in Threats’ to…
Videos that use AI generated voices of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are gaining a massive number of views on TikTok, showing that the platform is also suffering from the onslaught of AI-generated slop that has flooded every corner of the internet. According to Alexios Mantzarlis in his Faked Up newsletter, 400 videos from…
