Controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI attempted to purchase hundreds of millions of arrest records including social security numbers, mugshots, and even email addresses to incorporate into its product, 404 Media has learned. For years, Clearview AI has collected billions of photos from social media websites including Facebook, LinkedIn and others and sold access to…
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 an exciting revamp of The Abstract, tech betrayals, and the “it’s for cops” defense. EMANUEL: Most of you already know this but we are expanding The Abstract,…
I am standing on the corner of Harris Road and Young Street outside of the Crossroads Business Park in Bakersfield, California, looking up at a Flock surveillance camera bolted high above a traffic signal. On my phone, I am watching myself in real time as the camera records and livestreams me—without any password or login—to…
This week, we talk about how ‘Boring History’ AI slop is taking over YouTube and making it harder to discover content that humans spend months researching, filming, and editing. Then we talk about how Meta has totally given up on content moderation. In the bonus segment, we discuss the ‘AI Darwin Awards,’ which is, uhh,…
A powerful AI tool can predict with high accuracy the location of photos based on features inside the image itself—such as vegetation, architecture, and the distance between buildings—in seconds, with the company now marketing the tool to law enforcement officers and government agencies. Called GeoSpy, made by a firm called Graylark Technologies out of Boston,…
The biggest AI story of the first week of 2026 involves Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot turning the social media platform into an AI child sexual imagery factory, seemingly overnight. I’ve said several times on the 404 Media podcast and elsewhere that we could devote an entire beat to “loser shit.” What’s happening this week with…
Let’s start 2025 off strong by avoiding it entirely and escaping a thousand years into the past to an Amazonian civilization of forest islands, garden cities, and duck tales. From there, we’ll flee even farther from the present, though we’ll keep the “enchanted forest” vibe going strong. Then, the BATS are SURFING. What else do…
DeepSeek, a relatively unknown Chinese-developed AI model, is now the most popular app in the US Apple App Store based on hype associated with it releasing an an AI model that outpaces OpenAI’s and other companies’ models on some benchmarks while being trained on older chips at a much lower cost. It has caused Nvidia…
A large image dataset used to develop AI tools for detecting nudity contains a number of images of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), according to the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (C3P). The NudeNet dataset, which contains more than 700,000 images scraped from the internet, was used to train an AI image classifier which could…
