This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here. This article contains references to sexual assault. An Ohio man made pornographic deepfake videos of at least 10 people he was stalking and harassing, and sent the AI-generated imagery to the victims’ family and…

Welcome back to the Abstract!  It’s hard to keep up with all the news about all the giant gassy orbiters out there. I’m speaking, of course, about hot Jupiters, a class of planets that takes the concept of “inhospitable” to dazzling and creative new levels, and which had an epic news week. Then, what did…

This article was produced with support from WIRED. The salesperson hawking Brother printers on Taobao works hard, like, really hard. At any time of the day, even when there’s no audience on the Chinese ecommerce platform, the same woman wearing a white shirt and black skirt is always livestreaming, boasting about the various features of different office…

One of the big unanswered questions at last week’s grand opening of Hollywood’s Tesla Diner was how its neighbors were feeling about the new, four-story tall movie screen placed directly outside their apartment building.  Turns out, many of them are not liking it, or the general chaos that the diner has brought. First, there was…

The Wikimedia Foundation is building new tools that it hopes will help Wikipedia editors stay anonymous in part to avoid harassment and legal threats as Elon Musk and the Heritage Foundation ramp up their attacks on people who edit Wikipedia. Some of the tactics have been pioneered by Wikimedia in countries with authoritarian governments and…

In what might be a first, a programmer added a feature to a piece of software because ChatGPT hallucinated it, and customers kept attempting to force the software to do it.. The developers of the sheet music scanning app Soundslice, a site that lets people digitize and edit sheet music, added additional functionality to their…