Category: 404 Media

Earlier this month, Anthropic announced that future versions of Claude will generate text that includes watermarks showing it was AI-generated. At the time, Anthropic did not explain how this would work, leaving us to speculate on the podcast: Would it somehow encode this into the text? Include invisible characters? Do ...

Pornhub’s parent company will pay $120 million to settle claims that its platforms violated federal sex trafficking and child sexual abuse imagery laws. The deal settles two 2021 class action lawsuits in California and Alabama that claim Mindgeek, which has since rebranded to Aylo, profited off of child abuse material ...

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 ...