Category: 404 Media

If you want a barometer of American political concerns you could do worse than checking what spam accounts are turning into AI-generated slop on Facebook. There are now hundreds of pages with names like “Life in Texas,” “History of Wisconsin,” and “Life Is Idaho” churning out dozens of AI-generated images ...

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contracted with a spyware company that tells customers it ensures they can use the tool without the agency being caught doing so, according to documents obtained by 404 Media through our ongoing lawsuit against ICE. In September, we sued ICE for documents related to its ...

Hackers say that they used Meta’s AI support chatbot to break into a host of high-profile Instagram profiles by asking the support bot to change the email address associated with the target account. The claims coincide with a series of high-profile Instagram account takeovers, including the Barack Obama White House ...

Amazon has shut down an internal company leaderboard which ranked employees based on how much they used AI tools at work. Amazon’s official announcement said that it ended the leaderboard because it had accomplished its goal of encouraging employees to use AI tools, but multiple Amazon employees told me they ...

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the stories this week that spread life across space, went stir crazy for science, held the colony together, and peacefully sat it out. First, what if we went all the way to Europa only to find that some earthly bacteria already set up ...

Dark patterns have been used by subscription companies and in bait-and-switch campaigns for decades. As more chatbot companies push to keep users engaged at all costs, how do manipulative design choices show up in conversational AI built on large language models? Researchers at the Center for Democracy & Technology studied ...

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 going deeper, Google’s search changes, and a rogue zine. SAM: Something I’ve been thinking about lately is the way a line of ...

Headway, a popular online therapy platform, says it will require clients and providers to undergo biometric scanning, and there’s no way to opt out other than leaving the platform. On April 3, Headway sent an email to clients informing them of the upcoming requirement: “To make sure Headway stays a ...

Rather than pay a monthly subscription for an app that plenty of people think kinda sucks, a developer has created Cracked Oura, an open source app that lets Oura ring wearers query and analyze their health data without the monthly fee.  On Thursday, Oura announced the new Ring 5, a ...

The Sun is experiencing “striking” long-term shifts in its behavior that have gone undiscovered for more than a decade, according to a study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on Wednesday.  The Sun passes through a cycle of high and low activity that lasts roughly 11 ...