New: Hackers have been stealing high-profile Instagram accounts by simply asking Meta's AI support chatbot to change the email associated with the account they want to steal. Shockingly easy, terrible flaw associated with offloading support to AI: www.404media.co/hackers-simp...
Who's Who of AI
Jason Koebler
Why they matter
Tracked through public AI activity and peer connections inside the directory.
- AI signals
- 13 past 30d
- Sources
- 2 distinct domains
- Discussions
- 7 past 30d
- Latest signal
- 19h ago
Journalist @404Media.co
Signal: jason.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
AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop 404media.co
It Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggests 404media.co
We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility 404media.co
The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI 404media.co
View on Bluesky →
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
Judge Learns Lawyers on Both Sides of Case Used AI, Cancels Trial, Kicks Everyone Off the Case 404media.co
LinkedIn Introduces a 'Seems Like AI Slop' Button 404media.co
Google Earth’s New AI Lets Anyone Fabricate Completely Bullshit Satellite Images 404media.co
Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI 404media.co
Articles & links
honestly, not a serious technology www.404media.co/elias-thorne...
“The world's best AI training data is sitting on a shelf. Books represent curated, peer-reviewed, domain-specific human knowledge, structured in a way no web crawl can replicate. Dense, edited, authoritative." www.404media.co/ai-companies...
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: Researchers have quantified how easy AI search is to manipulate. Just 13 words buried in a random Reddit comment can poison AI search results. They suggest this is not easy to stop: "The way you can attack these systems is so much dumber than you think it is" www.404media…
Exclusive: A rare bookseller suspected his books were being bought by AI companies. He stuck an AirTag in a book and we tracked it to a secretive Amazon facility in Las Vegas where they scan and destroy books called VGT3: https://t.co/WXSo0zB6JF
AI Weekly's analysis
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- 404 Media hid an Apple AirTag in a roughly 1,000-book order sold on Biblio and followed it to an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas.
- The shipment terminated at Amazon's LAS8 site at 5801 Nicco Way, home to a team called VGT3 whose logo is a Tyrannosaurus rex clutching an open book.
- Amazon told the outlet it 'purchases books through commercial channels'; the company classes its Nova family of models as 'frontier.'
Read full analysis →
Jason Koebler reposted
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: Internal Microsoft planning documents say the company's goal is to "make people addicted" to its new Scout AI assistant www.404media.co/microsoft-wa...
Scoop: The AI music generator Suno was hacked. Hacker shared source code that shows how the tool was made and part of the music and podcasts that were scraped to create it. Decades worth of music, lyrics, and podcasts from YouTube, Deezer, Genius & more www.404media.co/hack-re…
AI Weekly's analysis
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- 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 →
In Mississippi, lawyers on both sides of a court case were caught using AI, essentially two LLMs arguing against each other. The judge dismissed all lawyers from the case and canceled the trial: www.404media.co/judge-learns...
Jason Koebler reposted
New: LinkedIn just introduced a "seems like AI slop" button. That's literally what the button says. The thought leaders are going to have a meltdown www.404media.co/linkedin-int...
AI Weekly's analysis
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- LinkedIn added a 'seems like AI slop' option to the three-dot menu on posts; selecting it hides the post from the user's feed.
- Chief product officer Hari Srinivasan said user flags will feed classifiers LinkedIn is 'ramping up' to detect slop and low-quality content.
- Detection service Pangram estimated 41 percent of long-form and 30 percent of short-form LinkedIn posts are likely AI-generated.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky →
is it good that you can just put anything you want into Google Earth with AI now: www.404media.co/google-earth...
AI Weekly's analysis
→
- Google launched an AI image feature in Google Earth on Thursday and pulled it within a day after 404 Media showed fabricated scenes.
- The tool used Nano Banana 2 to render text prompts onto real satellite data, generating fake bomb craters, nuclear sites, and protests.
- Named experts including Henk Van Ess and Ross Burley warned the launch could erode decades of built-up trust in Google Earth imagery.
Read full analysis →
Absolutely crazy: Researchers wanted to put cameras on teachers to observe the behaviors of preschool students and use the footage to train AI www.404media.co/researchers-...
Their own posts
Recent commentary
automatically running signal messages through a stranger's AI is, I think, the worst pitch and idea I've ever been cold pitched in my life and that is saying a lot
google has injected its gemini AI bullshit into our google docs and i just highlighted an article i wrote and told it to "refine" to see what it would do and it deleted the entire thing
extremely lucky to still make a living writing on the internet. we have many supporters/subscribers and i'm mostly an optimistic person. then i see something like this and i want to scream forever into a pillow. AI account ripping off our reporting about AI ripping off authors, goes viral, no link
our ai will let hackers steal your account, but also, on the other hand, we are using it to make useless slop
very sad that the MAGA skateboard shop near me that used AI posters to market its stuff is going out of business. who could have predicted this
the Google Cloud AI baseball commercial is excellent because it’s about how you can use AI to make completely useless inferences about random things and ascribe false meaning to them
you should be shot into the sun if you AI generate your forum posts
Their network
In Jason Koebler's orbit
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