This is absolutely nuts: hackers are hijacking high-profile Instagram accounts by simply asking Meta's AI chatbot to change the email on the account. Meta's AI does it, hacker gets password reset code, they're in. A staggering security issue www.404media.co/hackers-simp...
Who's Who of AI
Joseph Cox
Why they matter
Directory member with public evidence across AI business.
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- 11h ago
Hacking/crime/privacy journalist. Author of DARK WIRE, buy here: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/joseph-cox/dark-wire/9781541702691/#preorder Co-founder of 404 Media. Signal: joseph.404 Email: [email protected]
What they're sharing
Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked 404media.co
Chatbots Keep Telling Stories About Lighthouse Keeper 'Elias Thorne'. We Might Know Why 404media.co
It Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggests 404media.co
AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop 404media.co
Microsoft Wants to 'Make People Addicted' to its New AI Assistant, Internal Documents Reveal 404media.co
Hack Reveals Suno AI Music Generator Scraped YouTube, Deezer, and Genius 404media.co
The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI 404media.co
Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI 404media.co
Companies Are Using Reddit to Manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI Search 404media.co
‘BusPatrol’ Put AI Cameras in Tens of Thousands of School Buses. Now They Want to Give Cops Access 404media.co
If AI Is Sentient Then So Is ‘Age of Empires II’ 404media.co
Internet of Shit: AI Poop Analysis App Offered to Sell Me Database of Its Users' Poops 404media.co
Articles & links
This is wild: essentially every LLM—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini—keeps using the same character when asked to make up a story, a guy called 'Elias Thorne'. He appears so much it's impacting Google Trends data and the self-published book market. Now we might know why www.404media.co…
New: A tiny snippet of user-generated text as short as 13 words is often enough to manipulate the AI agents that power tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI search. Shows trivially easy for companies/brands to manipulate ChatGPT results by posting on Reddit, Quora, etc www.404med…
New from 404 Media: a company is selling tons of old books specifically to AI companies and says they have a strong NDA to never reveal which AI company bought all of the books. They don't want headlines of 'we scanned and destroyed millions of books for AI' www.404media.co/ai…
AI Weekly's analysis
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- ISBNdb is brokering bulk purchases of printed books published before 2022, pitching them as training data structurally guaranteed to be free of AI-generated slop.
- The service advertises strict NDAs on every engagement, conceding that 'AI company destroys two million books' is not a sympathetic headline.
- Judge William Alsup already ruled that Anthropic's practice of buying, scanning, and destroying print books was 'clearly transformative' fair use.
Read full analysis →
New from 404 Media: we've seen internal documents that show Microsoft is explicitly planning to "make people addicted" to its new AI assistant 'Scout' which the company just announced. It is a clear goal according to the documents, with addiction being the first phase www.404m…
New: the highly controversial AI music generator Suno was hacked. The hacker sent us Suno source code; it shows the company scraped YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius. In all, Suno scraped *decades* worth of music from the internet. Obviously didn't pay artists www.404media.co/…
AI Weekly's analysis
→
- Leaked logs quantify scraping per platform: 2M+ YouTube clips, 62,117 Pond5 hours, 12,287 Deezer hours, 17,615 Genius hours, and roughly 1M podcast hours.
- Suno publicly called the breach 'limited' and 'quickly contained' while withholding notification from customers whose emails, phone numbers, and Stripe records were exposed.
- TechCrunch flags a distinct DMCA angle: deliberately circumventing YouTube's anti-scraping protections is a separate violation from copyright infringement in the underlying suits.
Read full analysis →
New: the tokenpocalypse is here, companies scrambling to stop spending so much on AI. I got leaked audio from consulting giant Accenture showing AI token spend/'chewing' is not from supercharged engineers. It's non-technical workers converting PDFs to presentations! www.404med…
New from 404 Media: researchers planned to stick cameras on preschool teachers to then train AI models. Cameras would capture everything the teacher saw, including, obviously, the children. Here's the document given to parents, left many questions, like how to opt out www.404m…
New from 404 Media: companies are using Reddit manipulate ChatGPT and Google AI Search. The strategy is to systematically manipulate answers provided by chatbots by manipulating the underlying source material those chatbots scrape—in this case, a popular subreddit www.404media…
NEW: 'BusPatrol' put AI cameras in tens of thousands of school buses to catch people who overtake parked buses. Now, according to leaked documents, BusPatrol plans to scan all license plates buses pass and give that data to law enforcement. Think, Flock on wheels www.404media.…
If AI is sentient, then so is Age of Empires 2. A Microsoft AI researcher built a basic neural network within the video game using digital goats to prove his point. Point is to show "sometimes the claims we make with regards to LLM capabilities are too strong." www.404media.co…
An app that uses AI to analyze photos of your poop and give a "daily gut health score" is now trying to sell that dataset of annotated photos of peoples' poop. Highlights the underground sale of highly sensitive, app-collected user data for AI training www.404media.co/ai-poop-…
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