New: YouTube is rolling out AI-generated replies for creators to more easily respond to their comments. But sometimes they're completely nonsensical, wrong, or weirdly intimate. Lazy Game Reviews told us the automated comments come across as "tone deaf"

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YouTube “Enhances” Comment Section With AI-Generated Nonsense

YouTube’s rollout of AI tools shows nonsensical AI-generated audience engagement and AI slop thumbnails.

New from 404 Media: Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg has rage quit a Wordpress community Slack after court injunction. “It's hard to imagine wanting to continue to working on WordPress after this,” he wrote in that Slack

404 Media

WordPress CEO Rage Quits Community Slack After Court Injunction

Automattic is ordered to undo several of the actions of its CEO Matt Mullenweg in its ongoing legal battle with WP Engine. “It's hard to imagine ...

Since Friday, more health insurance companies (Kaiser Permanente, Aetna, and Humana) have scrubbed webpages which show their company leadership in the wake of the murder of UnitedHealth CEO

404 Media

Major Health Insurance Companies Take Down Leadership Pages Following Murder of United Healthcare CEO

Following the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, multiple major health insurance companies have taken their executive leadership pag...

New: Texas’ governor has served 404 Media with a subpoena for info about an internal Google database we were leaked. This is a serious threat to press freedom and we are fighting it legally. We object.

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404 Media Objects to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's Subpoena to Access Our Reporting

404 Media's reporting on an internal Google privacy violation database has been subpoenaed by the State of Texas. We are fighting it.

New from 404 Media: there is an unauthorized effort to archive Netflix's disappeared interactive shows. A group of fans in a Discord server are reverse engineering Netflix, found a way to pull the shows, saving them now

404 Media

The Unauthorized Effort to Archive Netflix’s Disappeared Interactive Shows

A group of fans are reverse engineering Netflix and creating unauthorized archives of interactive shows like Battle Kitty and Minecraft: Story Mode

New: your Bluesky posts are probably in many different datasets for potential AI/ML research. There's one of 300 million posts, two million, 8 million, etc

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Your Bluesky Posts Are Probably In A Bunch of Datasets Now

After a machine learning librarian released and then deleted a dataset of one million Bluesky posts, several other, even bigger datasets have appea...

New from 404 Media: this is huge. FTC to ban Venntel from selling sensitive location data. Sensitive locations include health facilities (think abortion); places of worship; schools; refugee shelters. Crucial because Venntel sold its data to ICE, CBP etc

404 Media

FTC Bans Location Data Company That Powers the Surveillance Ecosystem

Venntel is a primary provider of location data to the government or other companies that sell to U.S. agencies. The FTC is banning Venntel from sel...

The Economist calls DARK WIRE, my book on the FBI's secret running of a tech company for organized crime, as one of the best books of the year. "The author spent years getting to know the players, many of them unsavoury international gangsters." https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/11/22/the-best-books-of-2024-as-chosen-by-the-economist

New from 404 Media: Bluesky may have said it won't use user data to train generative AI, but someone else just published a dataset of million Bluesky posts for "machine learning research". Already very popular dataset, your data may be scraped

404 Media

Someone Made a Dataset of One Million Bluesky Posts for 'Machine Learning Research'

A Hugging Face employee made a huge dataset of Bluesky posts, and it’s already very popular.

Before we launched 404 Media, "allegedly very smart people" (as Emanuel calls them) told us to our faces it would take us years to build to one million views a month. We just crossed that. That's still relatively small, but independent media can work. Go do it.