The exploit shows the extreme risk of offloading technical support to AI. www.404media.co/hackers-simp...
Who's Who of AI
404 Media
it's a website (and a podcast, and a newsletter) about humans and technology, made by four journalists you might already know. like and subscribe: 404media.co
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
Microsoft Wants to 'Make People Addicted' to its New AI Assistant, Internal Documents Reveal 404media.co
Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI 404media.co
Judge Learns Lawyers on Both Sides of Case Used AI, Cancels Trial, Kicks Everyone Off the Case 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
Internet of Shit: AI Poop Analysis App Offered to Sell Me Database of Its Users' Poops 404media.co
Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains 404media.co
Microsoft Hacked to Deliver Malware to Claude and Gemini Users 404media.co
'Sloppenheimer:' Amazon Employees Mock the Company’s AI on Slack 404media.co
Articles & links
LLMs including ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are obsessed with telling stories about lighthouse keepers and clockmakers, and one character named 'Elias Thorne' has made his way from chatbots to Amazon books. Researchers are trying to discover why.
"We show that a tiny snippet—just 13 words—of retrieved text on a UGC website like Reddit, Wikipedia, Quora, or Facebook can change AI agents to output spam / scam content pretty consistently."
An internal Microsoft strategy document says that the plan for its just-announced “Scout” personal assistant AI is to “make people addicted” to the tool before rolling out additional functionality, 404 Media has learned. www.404media.co/microsoft-wa...
And more crucially, it was opt-out, instead of opt-in. Meaning if you wanted to make sure your child wasn't being recorded and processed by AI, you needed to take your own steps. www.404media.co/researchers-...
Two of the lawyers were barred from appearing before the court for two years; all lawyers received a fine of between $1,000 and $3,500. www.404media.co/judge-learns...
"We’re also seeing this alongside incredibly risky sourcing, teens posting about wanting to grow an extra few inches. And then we’re seeing AI manipulation from vendors trying to promote these peptides.” www.404media.co/companies-ar...
The plan will essentially transform school buses into roaming surveillance vehicles. www.404media.co/buspatrol-pu...
Into the mess that is the app PoopCheck, that asks users to share their stool photos to be analyzed by AI. Also, they're selling the database of photos. www.404media.co/ai-poop-anal...
“It's making me dumber for sure.” www.404media.co/software-dev...
Microsoft took the highly unusual step of shutting down more than 70 of its own GitHub repositories after hackers pushed malware that would steal credentials from AI coding agent users.
The memes are yet another example of the contrast between what AI companies say in public about its potential power and benefit versus the reality of how the people who help create these AI tools use and criticize them internally. www.404media.co/sloppenheime...
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