Spotify is publishing new, AI-generated songs on the official pages of artists who died years ago without the permission of their estates or record labels. According to his official Spotify page, Blaze Foley, a country music singer-songwriter who was murdered in 1989, released a new song called “Together” last week. The song, which features a…
The National Institutes of Health claims it’s being strained by an onslaught of AI-generated research applications and is capping the number of proposals researchers can submit in a year. In a new policy announcement on July 17, titled “Supporting Fairness and Originality in NIH Research Applications,” the NIH wrote that it has recently “observed instances…
When your laptop is infected with infostealing malware, it’s not just hackers that might get your passwords, billing and email addresses, and a list of sites or services you’ve created accounts on, potentially including some embarrassing ones. A private intelligence company run by a young founder is now taking that hacked data from what it…
As millions of people turn to AI chatbots for everything from relationship advice to writing school essays, new research indicates that different models take noticeably different tacks when faced with questions of cooperation. Researchers at Oxford University and King’s College London tested LLMs using game theory, giving LLMs from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic prompts that…
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies that made me smile, think, and despair for humanity this week. First up, it’s officially a hot Jurassic summer with the recent release of yet another Mesozoic movie filled with de-extincted animals that are oddly preoccupied with human flesh. We’ll lead with a story about a…
Hello 404 Media readers! We’re excited to announce that we’re having our first ever party in Los Angeles. We have partnered with the amazing DIY hackerspace RIP.SPACE in the Arts District. We’ll start the night with a live podcast about the surveillance technologies powering ICE, with a specific focus on tools that are being used…
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 data dumps, high stakes, and lizard brain screen time. JOSEPH: Flight Manifests Reveal Dozens of Previously Unknown People on Three Deportation Flights to El Salvador is the…
Conservative content mill PragerU is partnering with the White House to make AI-generated videos of founding fathers and Revolutionary War-era randos. PragerU is a nonprofit organization with a mission “to promote American values through the creative use of digital media, technology and edu-tainment,” according to its website. It’s been criticized for advancing climate denial and…
The CEO seemingly having an affair with the head of HR at his company at the Coldplay concert is a viral video for the ages, but it is also, unfortunately, emblematic of our current private surveillance and social media hellscape. The video, which is now viral on every platform that we can possibly think of,…
ICE officers are able to point their smartphone’s camera at a person and near instantaneously run their face against a bank of 200 million images, then pull up their name, date of birth, nationality, unique identifiers such as their “alien” number, and whether an immigration judge has determined they should be deported from the country,…
