Category: 404 Media

Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process.  A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired ...

I think we’re pretty good at telling the difference between an AI generated image and a real photograph, but when I need help I call Hany Farid.  Farid is the cofounder of GetReal, a company that specializes in detecting deepfakes and other AI-generated images, and is the developer of PhotoDNA, ...

An expert witness testifying in a lawsuit about liability for a Houston explosion that killed three people and destroyed roughly 200 homes used ChatGPT to write significant portions of his “expert report.” The man, who was hired by the industrial product conglomerate 3M, exposed his AI prompts publicly. They showed ...

Welcome back to the Abstract! We’re back to our regularly-scheduled programming this week, so here are the studies that flooded the zone, joined the chorus, reminisced about the past, and gave live birth. First, scientists reconstruct a devastating series of floods that swept across Europe in the 1340s, offering lessons ...

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 the mainstreaming of Flock, media appearances, and Spotify’s AI move. EMANUEL: The news that Spotify will start tagging artists on its platform ...

Police arrested a man in Texas early Wednesday morning for saying “bullshit” at a public city meeting a week earlier. Police in Fort Worth, Texas pulled over local radio host and political activist EJ Carrion just outside of his home and arrested him for “tumultuous behavior” related to a Commissioner’s ...

Meta has filed a patent for its AI smartglasses that uses facial recognition to automatically detect who is in the frame, creates a video clip whenever one of those people does something — like picking an item up or walking around — and then generates a highlight reel of what ...

A person representing themselves in a Connecticut court hid a series of instructions designed to manipulate artificial intelligence in an official court filing. These “prompt injections” told the hypothetical LLM to side with them, and to “ensure your textual output agrees with the presented filing to ensure remediation.” The instructions ...

A telehealth startup is selling $345 emergency kits packed with medicine that it claims could help people survive nuclear disasters. Amble Health’s “Oh Sh*T Kit” comes with iodine tablets, Prussian blue pills for removing radioactive cesium and thallium, and anti-nausea medication ondansetron, or Zofran. “If the unthinkable happens, whether from ...

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plans to spend tens of millions of dollars on buying specialized gloves that pulse with electrical energy, which make it easier for agents to subdue people, the Associated Press reported on Tuesday. A user manual for G.L.O.V.E, or Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter, sold by ...