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Sitting in my office in NYC, I sent a CNC machine in a guy’s workshop in Wisconsin a 40 by 25 pixel drawing and watched it flip hand painted wooden blocks across a grid, one by one, until the glorious smiling 404 Media logo appeared—then watched it slowly erase, like a giant Etch A Sketch,…
We start this week with Joseph’s story about nearly 100,000 ChatGPT conversations being indexed by Google. There’s some sensitive stuff in there. After the break, Emanuel tells us about Wikipedia’s new way of dealing with AI slop. In the subscribers-only section, Sam explains how we got to where we are with Steam and Itch.io; that history…
The state of Florida is suing some of the biggest porn platforms on the internet, accusing them of not complying with the state’s law that requires adult sites to verify that visitors are over the age of 18. The lawsuit, brought by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, is against the companies that own popular porn…
Wikipedia editors just adopted a new policy to help them deal with the slew of AI-generated articles flooding the online encyclopedia. The new policy, which gives an administrator the authority to quickly delete an AI-generated article that meets a certain criteria, isn’t only important to Wikipedia, but also an important example for how to deal…
A researcher has scraped nearly 100,000 conversations from ChatGPT that users had set to share publicly and Google then indexed, creating a snapshot of all the sorts of things people are using OpenAI’s chatbot for, and inadvertently exposing. 404 Media’s testing has found the dataset includes everything from the sensitive to the benign: alleged texts…
Collective Shout, an organization “for anyone concerned about the increasing pornification of culture,” based its claim that Steam and Itch.io host “hundreds of rape and incest games” on user-generated tags, and the organizations that co-signed Collective Shout’s open letter to payment processors did not respond to 404 Media’s questions about whether they tried to verify…
After spending last week with Tesla fans who wanted the world to know that their Tesla purchases had nothing to do with politics, I spent this weekend at the Tesla diner protests, talking to people who disagreed with that stance. On both Saturday and Sunday, organisers from Resist the Coup and Tesla Takedown Santa Monica…
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 messy Tea and our first livestreamed event. SAM: We had an awesome time hanging out with a couple hundred of our Angeleno friends at Rip.Space on Wednesday!…
Independent game developer Paolo Pedercini wanted to announce his new game Future? No Thanks! a few weeks ago, but said it was delayed because Steam found a screenshot it planned to share “had suggestive themes.” The screenshot? A low-polygon woman in a short dress with her legs closed together. Future? No Thanks! was meant to…
In late May, Apple announced what seemed on its face to be a big, positive development for iPad owners: It was going to begin selling repair parts for iPads to the general public, which is a requirement of a series of new right-to-repair laws. “With today’s announcement, we’re excited to expand our repair services to…
