This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here. After a group of attorneys were caught using AI to cite cases that didn’t actually exist in court documents last month, another lawyer was told to pay $15,000 for his own AI hallucinations that…
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 stunt blogging, Signal pains, and murderous Reels. EMANUEL: Yesterday Jason wrote about Instagram delivering users reels showing murder, gore, and extreme violence. It’s hard to say exactly…
On Tuesday, Chinese tech giant Alibaba released a new “open” AI video generation model called Wan 2.1 and shared the software on Github, allowing anyone with the technical know-how and hardware to use and modify freely. It took about 24 hours for the model to be adopted by the AI porn hobbyist community, which has…
A U.S. soldier who recently pleaded guilty to hacking AT&T and Verizon communicated with an email address that he believed belonged to a foreign country’s military intelligence service and attempted to sell the service stolen data, according to newly filed court records reviewed by 404 Media. The court document also says that the soldier searched…
The surveillance company Flock sent the creator of a website that maps its license plate-reading cameras a cease and desist letter demanding that he immediately stop using the name “DeFlock” on his website. 404 Media previously wrote about DeFlock, an open source mapping project created by Will Freeman that tracks the locations of automated license…
Bluesky deleted a viral, AI-generated protest video in which Donald Trump is sucking on Elon Musk’s toes because its moderators said it was “non-consensual explicit material.” The video was broadcast on televisions inside the office Housing and Urban Development earlier this week, and quickly went viral on Bluesky and Twitter. Independent journalist Marisa Kabas obtained…
We start this week’s episode with Joseph finding out someone basically ripped off his book with a potentially AI-generated summary. Emanuel also updates us on some of the impact his reporting on AI in libraries has had. After the break, Sam tells us all about a Y Combinator supported startup that is straight-up dehumanizing factory…
A venture capital-backed “AI performance monitoring system for factory workers” is proposing what appears to be dehumanizing surveillance of factories, where machine vision tracks workers’ hand movements and output so a boss can look at graphs and yell at them about efficiency. In a launch video demoing the product, Baid and Mohta put on a…
Workers around the federal government are scrambling to figure out how and if they should respond to an all-government email sent Saturday at the behest of Elon Musk asking them to list five things they did at work within the last week. During the confusion caused by Musk’s email, workers at the Treasury Department received…
An AI-generated video of President Donald Trump sucking on Elon Musk’s feet, overlaid with the text “LONG LIVE THE REAL KING,” played on TV screens at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) headquarters in Washington, D.C., multiple journalists are reporting on social media. Journalist Marisa Kabas posted the video on Bluesky, writing, “this…
