404 Media

2026-07-20 14:37:38

New Orleans Cops Published Policy Document Allowing Weaponized Drones

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The New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) looked at ways to arm quadcopter drones with weapons, according to a draft version of its drone manual shared with 404 Media. A draft version of the manual, which was live on the NOPD website in June, said that the department’s drones could only be equipped with weapons with written approval from the Superintendent of Police.

The current version, live as of July 1, has different language: “The sUAS shall not be equipped with weapons or hazardous materials of any kind,” referring to small Unmanned Aerial Systems, or drones. According to the NOPD, the operations manual it published to the internet with the rules for weaponized drones was an early draft.

“The manual published on July 1 is the current published version of the policy. Earlier versions were draft versions that were presented for review before adoption of the current policy,” NOPD told 404 media. “NOPD has made it clear we are not and will not be equipping drones with weapons or other hazardous materials.” NOPD didn’t answer follow-up questions about how or why the draft version of the manual was published.

But the publication of a police drone manual that opens the door for weaponized quadcopters is important, and comes as drone companies and police flirt with the idea of putting weapons on their drones. New Orleans has long been a pioneer of camera and drone driven policing and the cops have used controversial tactics to get around public scrutiny and regulations. It shows that what the police are circulating amongst themselves and thinking about privately, what they perhaps want to happen, does not match public policy.

NOPD has a history of finding creative ways to work around public policy and scrutiny when it comes to surveillance tech. A private company called Project New Orleans operates a network of cameras that provide live facial recognition to the city’s cops. The company operated in secret cooperation with NOPD for two years before the Washington Post exposed it in 2025. According to the ACLU, NOPD has continued to use Project New Orleans in contravention of local laws and has stonewalled public records requests.

Federal Aviation Authority regulations prohibit the operation of drones equipped with a “dangerous weapon.” Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told 404 Media that he didn’t see how the police arming drones could possibly be legal. But the FAA regulation was written in 2018 and things have changed a lot in just the last few years. Last month, Guariglia argued that “we have precious little time” to stop police from arming their drones, and that the industry was moving that way.

One of the companies selling NOPD its drones is Skydio. The US-based manufacturer of quadcopter drones has done very well since the Trump administration banned the sale of foreign-made drones last year. Skydio has always marketed itself as a drone company for first responders and had a cozy relationship with police departments around the country.
embed.documentcloud.org/docume…
In 2020, Skydio wrote “we will not put weapons on our drones and will oppose fully autonomous lethal weapons systems.”

But Skydio CEO Adam Bry walked this back in a June 15 interview on Decoder. “So this is an area where I think I’ve gotten some things wrong. We’ve said some things previously that led some folks externally and internally to believe that, for example, we would prevent the military from putting weapons on our drones,” Bry said.

“It’s not our place to tell them what they can and can’t do,” he said. “It should be up to the folks who’re putting their lives on the line to decide how to use it.”

He added that terrorists don’t follow terms of service. “They don’t care what our policy says,” he said. “I think when you start trying to draw these bright lines and say: this is good, this is bad, more often than not you’re going to end up on the wrong side of moral questions.”

Guariglia also pointed to a planned pilot project in Georgia that will test “less lethal” armed drones to nominally stop school shootings. He noted that in recent years many drone regulations have been ignored or relaxed.

“You used to have to have line of sight of your drones and now law enforcement [...] are phasing that out or offering exemptions,” Guariglia said. “If you want to police divisions a few years ago, they were selling drones capable of flying miles and miles in a couple of minutes and you’d ask them about the line of sight rule and they would just shrug. They are preparing for the day when law enforcement gets whatever they want.”

“Clearly they’re thinking about it,” Guariglia said of the NOPD manual that included a provision for armed drones. “Drones have always been a bit of a solution in need of a problem. There are few things that police say they need drones for that they cannot get by other means, and I think by putting other tools on them, they are still on a quest to figure out what drones are really good for.”

Arming drones could lower the bar for police to use force. “We have seen how consequence-free it can be for officers to deploy force at somebody who’s standing in front of them when they have to confront the fact that it’s a fellow human and they still have to draw their night stick or their Taser or their gun,” Guariglia said. “That would become so much easier and so much less emotionally and physically burdensome if they can deploy force by pressing a button.”

All this tech costs a lot of money. “Cities are spending an astronomical amount on drones and for maintenance of the drones. They're hiring all these drone pilots. They have to have special infrastructure to fly all these drones, and companies are getting rich. But really, there is no problem in policing that drones have straight up solved yet,” Guariglia said.

On June 24, the New Orleans city council approved a $250,000 budget request to expand Skydio’s reach in the French Quarter. The funds will purchase a massive docking station and support a “drones as first responders” (DFR) program, meaning that people who call 911 in the French Quarter may see a quadcopter drone before they see a police officer. NOPD told the city council that these drones won’t run facial recognition software and will not be armed.

The existence of the draft that was “presented for review” stands out. On February 7, 2024, NOPD first published an operations manual for drones. It was unequivocal: “The sUAS shall not be equipped with weapons of any kind.”

Two years later, in 2026, NOPD asked for money for more Skydio drones and the city council questioned the cops about the program in a public meeting on April 16.

“Are these drones or any current drones in the French Quarter armed with any type of weapons?” Councilman Freddie King asked.

“No,” NOPD captain Samuel Palumbo said.

On June 24, 2026, the city council voted 4 - 3 to fund the expansion of the DFR program in the French Quarter.

Around that time, a revised version of the NOPD drone manual that allowed for the use of weaponized drones with the Superintendent’s written permission was live on the NOPD website. The revised version of the manual is dated June 21, 2026. The new manual caught the attention of Eye on Surveillance, a Louisiania activist group. The group said it started calling city council members to alert them to the new language.

Then, on June 30, the operations manual with the weaponization language vanished and a third version of the manual appeared. “The sUAS shall not be equipped with weapons or hazardous materials of any kind,” a revised version of the drone manual dated July 1, 2026 said.

It’s an odd sequence of events from a police department that hasn’t been forthcoming about its use of surveillance tech. “Police have yet to demonstrate that they can responsibly handle the data collection and surveillance capabilities of drones. Choosing to arm already unaccountable sky cameras is a threat on top of a threat, a misuse of public resources, and risks introducing more unaccountable weapons into a city enjoying a decline in gun violence,” Kelsey Atherton, Chief Editor at Center for International Policy — a non-profit that studies emerging technologies — told 404 Media.

Skydio did not return 404 Media’s request for a comment.

NOPD: Violent crime at lowest level since 1969; what’s behind the decline?

New Orleans has seen a sharp decline in violent crime and homicides. Here's what police, community leaders and data suggest is contributing to the trend, and why concerns about gun violence remain.

^{Thanh Truong (https://www.fox8live.com)}

404 Media

2026-07-18 10:00:29

Ancient Princesses Were Weapon-Wielding Badasses, Scientists Discover

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that loosed arrows, made sacrifices, prepared for battle, and took the hit.

First, a bunch of ancient princesses were buried with weapons. Did they know how to use them? You bet! Then: a deadly Inca ritual, animal war games, and the mystery of the dinosaur-killer.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

Disney princesses…OF DEATH

Hashesh, Zeinab et al. “Bioarcheological Reassessment of Dahshur Royal Skeletal Remains from the late middle kingdom (c. 1850 to 1700 BCE).” Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.

Egyptian princesses who lived nearly 4,000 years ago were skilled archers and likely handled other deadly weapons, including maces and daggers, according to a new study that revisits their mummified bones and upends expectations about gender in the ancient world.

For more than a century, archaeologists have puzzled over the remains of ancient royals entombed in the Amenemhat II pyramid complex located in Egypt’s Dahshur necropolis.

Four of these mummified bodies have been identified as the daughters of the pharaoh Amenemhat II, known as Princess Ita, Princess Khenmet, Princess Itaweret, and Princess Sathathormeryt.

These women were buried with weapons, including bows and maces, which are grave goods normally found in male burials; Princess Ita’s tomb also contained a stunning dagger. Another pair of royals, Princess Noub-Hotep and her father King Hor, are buried in the same complex with weapons in their graves, and were also part of the study.

The presence of weaponry in the graves has led to a debate over whether the items were selected for symbolic purposes, or if the women used them in life. To resolve this question, researchers conducted a thorough re-examination of the mummified remains using osteological analysis, X-ray imaging, and advanced spectroscopy.

The results revealed that all of these individuals showed signs of bodily strain associated with repeated use of bows and melee arms, suggesting that not only King Hor, but the five princesses, knew their way around a weapon.

Pronounced muscle attachments across the mummified upper limbs “indicates repetitive, high-intensity actions consistent with archery and weapon use,” said researchers led by Zeineb Hashesh of the University of Beni-Suef.

“This evidence directly informs long-standing debates about the function of weapons in female burials,” the team continued. “Rather than purely symbolic objects, these items appear to have been actively used, as reflected in skeletal adaptations such as asymmetry, muscle hypertrophy, and metacarpal modification. Princess Noub-Hotep provides a particularly clear example, where skeletal changes align with the presence of arrows in her burial.”

In other words, these women don’t appear to have been the damsels in distress depicted in traditional princess stories. The mummification of their bare arms hints that they did, in fact, bear arms.

In other news…

The last days of the sacrificial children

Silva-Pinto, Verónica et al. “Pilgrimage to sacrifice: Mechanisms, causes, and time of death of the Western Andean Capacocha of the Southern Tawantinsuyu.” Science Advances.

We’re not wrapped up with the mummy beat just yet. In another new study, scientists took a fresh look at the mummified bodies of three young victims of human sacrifice in the Inca empire, who were ritually killed as part of a ceremony called the Capacocha in the 15th century.

“Selected for their perceived purity and exceptional beauty, the individuals chosen for sacrifice were either taken from their home communities or offered by local authorities” and “undertook a long, final journey to sacred mountain summits, where they were ritually killed,” said researchers led by Verónica Silva Pinto of the University of València.
The Boy of Cerro El Plomo. Image: Silva-Pinto, Verónica et al
The results revealed that the Boy of Cerro El Plomo, a child of about 8-years-old discovered at an elevation of nearly 18,000 feet, was likely killed by blunt force trauma to the head, and not by hypothermia or strangulation as previously proposed. Using advanced imaging, researchers discovered a cranial lesion that may have been inflicted by “a blunt-lobed lithic star-shaped mace,” according to the study.

Meanwhile, the team found that two female victims found at Cerro Esmeralda, aged roughly 9 and 18, had an indeterminate cause of death, despite strangulation being put forward as the likely explanation.

In all three cases, the victims were brought from distant homelands and traveled for several months prior to their killings, according to isotopic analysis of the elements in their remains. The enormous effort invested in these pilgrimages, combined with the careful placement of the bodies in special costumes and poses after death, demonstrate the significance of the Capacocha in Inca statecraft and cosmology.

The art of war for animals

Arbon, Josh & Radford, Andrew. “Pre-emptive behavior in a landscape of intergroup conflict.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

Humans have a rather catastrophic habit of getting into wars, but at least we aren’t alone in our military misery. A diverse array of species—from ants, to woodpeckers, to chimpanzees—also engage in violent intergroup conflicts that require careful preparation for success.

Scientists have now helpfully pulled together a comprehensive review of how animals ready themselves for battle in part “to provide insights into our own conflict ancestry,” according to their new study.
A group of meerkats standing together in the face of an outside threat. Image: Andy Radford, University of Bristol
Many behaviors are eerily similar to our own: Chimpanzees surveil rivals from hilltops, patrol perimeters, and march in single file. It is also common for animals to invest a lot of time and energy into sizing up their opponent’s force, including by carefully monitoring scent marks.

Some animals “travel considerable distances to eavesdrop on the contests of other groups to gather social information that is used only days or weeks later, as seen in acorn woodpeckers (Melanerpes formicivorus),” said study authors Josh Arbon and Andrew Radford of the University of Bristol.

But by far the most memorable prep work comes from the Nevada termite, which erects “faecal fortresses” as barriers to intrusion by larger colonies. For all the fancy weaponry we’ve devised as humans—from guns, to nukes, to drones—how did we overlook the ultimate obstacle: poop barricades?

The case of the killer carbonaceous chondrite

Makhatadze, Georgy V. et al. “The origin of Cretaceous-Palaeogene impactor revealed by nickel isotopes.” Science Advances.

Deadly princesses, human sacrifice, widespread warfare. Let’s close with something lighter: The apocalyptic extinction of almost all life on Earth. It’s time to revisit the longstanding mystery of the dinosaur-killing space rock that smashed into our planet some 66 million years ago, causing the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction that wiped out about 75 percent of all animal and plant life at the time.

For decades, scientists have debated the nature of this epic deathbringer, which is known as the Chicxulub impactor. Now, a team has narrowed down the possible source to a class of asteroid called carbonaceous chondrites by studying nickel isotopes embedded around the impact crater in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.
Concept art of Chicxulub impactor and its soon-to-be victims. Image: Donald E. Davis
The identification of the impactor as a likely carbonaceous chondrite “is possible given nickel’s high abundance in primitive meteorites compared to the Earth’s crust and the distinct isotope compositions they record,” said researchers led by Georgy V. Makhatadze of Université Paris Cité.

“Our study highlights the extraterrestrial origin of the K-Pg mass extinction and the isotopes of nickel as a well-suited tool to characterise the nature of extraterrestrial material on Earth,” the team concluded. “Finally, it opens the door for further research into the connection between the impact and the mass extinction.”

Mummies, war, and doomsday. You’re welcome for the beach reads.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

A narrative and visual exploration of humanity’s age-old search for and fixation with extraterrestrials.First Contact explores the ancient idea—and epic ...

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404 Media

2026-07-17 16:15:53

You're Invited: 404 Media's Third Anniversary Live Podcast and Party!

404 Media is turning three years old! We've come a long way with your support, so let's hang out.

We're throwing TWO separate events to celebrate: A live taping of the podcast and a special night of talks on Sept. 3, and a big open-bar party on Sept. 4. Subscribers at the Supporter level get free and discounted access to both events!

Check your membership status or become a paid supporter of our work here.

On Thursday, Sept. 3, meet us at WNYC's Greene Space for 404 MEDIA LIVE! We'll discuss what we've accomplished in the past year, and what's next for our independent, human-made journalism. We'll also welcome a few very special friends to the stage: Matthew Gault joins us for a chat about AI datacenter resistance, and The Abstract's Becky Ferreira hits us with the coolest science to come out this year so far.

Supporters get 50% off their ticket to 404 MEDIA LIVE! Don't forget to check your membership status here and subscribe as a paying member for access to 50% off a full price in-person ticket.

Can't make it in person in NYC? Join us on the livestream! Grab an access ticket, donate what you're able, and watch for the link we'll send to your inbox before the event.

404 MEDIA LIVE! TICKETS HERE

The next night, join us for a bash to celebrate our three year anniversary at Threes Brewing Gowanus.Have a beer, wine or seltz on us, plus light bites throughout the night. Buying a ticket to 404 MEDIA LIVE! gets you 50% off a ticket to the afterparty Friday night. Supporters get in to the party FREE!

PARTY TICKETS HERE

All of us—Sam, Emanuel, Jason, and Joseph—will be there to celebrate 404 Media growing another year. We love these parties because it's a chance to connect with the people who make all of this possible: you, our subscribers.

Thank you for all the fun you've helped us have this year.

Supporters, scroll to the bottom of this page to reveal your promo codes.

We can't wait to celebrate with you this year.

Questions? Email sam@404media.co

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404 Media

2026-07-17 16:07:19

Behind the Blog: Infinite Bowl Machine

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 AI music, slop bowls, and the endless quest for optimization.

EMANUEL: We’ve used Behind the Blog a few times at this point to pull the curtain on our story selection process. Usually, we do this when we explain the reasoning behind the decision to write a story we already published, but today I want to talk about a story I didn’t write (yet).

For the past few months I’ve been looking at a new and strange type of AI generated nonconsensual image on X.

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Behind the Blog: Infinite Bowl Machine

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404 Media

2026-07-17 15:35:37

ICE to Pay Thomson Reuters $125 Million to Find ‘Voter Fraud’

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to pay data broker giant Thomson Reuters $125 million for access to its databases of personal data — which includes peoples’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, ethnicity, social media posts, and geolocation information — to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigate what it describes as “voters fraud” and immigration fraud, according to procurement documents reviewed by 404 Media. The document says Thomson Reuters is able to let ICE continuously monitor millions of people and entities of interest.

The news comes after President Trump held a conspiracy-laden and unhinged press conference about election security on Thursday, setting the stage for potentially undermining the legitimacy of the upcoming midterm elections. It also follows ICE fatally shooting 2 people in a week.

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404 Media

2026-07-16 18:00:10

Scientists Discover Planet Has Everything to Host ‘Earth-Like Life’ In Breakthrough

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Astronomers have detected an atmosphere around a rocky exoplanet in the habitable zone of its star for the first time in history, signalling a major breakthrough in the search for alien life, according to a study published on Thursday in Science.

The planet, known as LHS 1140-b, is about 5.6 times more massive than Earth and orbits a small dwarf star about 48 light years from our solar system. While scientists have discovered atmospheres around many giant gas planets in our galaxy—and even a few rocky exoplanets outside the habitable zone—the new detection of helium in the skies of LHS 1140-b marks the first direct evidence that a habitable-zone rocky world can host an atmosphere, which is a critical factor for assessing their potential to support life.

“For rockier Earth-like planets, it has been a huge challenge in the field to detect any atmospheres at all,” said Collin Cherubim, a NASA Hubble Fellow at the University of Chicago, in a call with 404 Media. “This has been a huge question in the field that so much time and energy has been devoted to answering.”

The new discovery “is really the first claim ever of any rocky exoplanet atmosphere in the habitable zone that could potentially have liquid water and really support life,” added Cherubim, who conducted the research while he was a PhD student at Harvard University. “That's what sets it apart and makes it really exciting.”

Scientists have previously inferred that some rocky exoplanets in the habitable zone might have atmospheres based on indirect evidence, such as measurements that show that their day and night temperatures are more moderate than expected, which could be explained either by an atmosphere, or other planet-wide effects. However, spotting an atmosphere around these rocky worlds is tricky because they tend to be so small compared to their stars, which is a challenge for precision observations.

Cherubim came at the problem with a new approach: He first developed theoretical models of rocky exoplanets that focused on mass fractionation, a process by which lighter molecules and atoms in the atmosphere escape into space, while heavier ones are left behind. These simulations predicted a new type of planet with thick skies closer to the surface, and a thinner upper atmosphere that allows helium to escape to space.

“Hydrogen is the lightest element and it's the easiest to blow off into space,” Cherubim explained. “My model was predicting that if your planet is in this sweet spot where you're blowing enough hydrogen away, but not too much that you're dragging helium, which is a bit heavier, along with it, then you can actually create a helium-dominated atmosphere over time.”

“This is a newly-predicted class of planets, which should have very unique chemistry,” he added.

Cherubim realized that this escaping helium might be detectable from Earth, and that the LHS 1140 system would be a prime candidate to test out the hypothesis. To that end, the team observed LHS 1140-b and another planet in the system, LHS 1140-c, over the course of 2024 and 2025 with the Warm Infrared Echelle (WINERED) Spectrograph on the Magellan Observatory in Chile.

The 2024 results revealed a strong signal of helium at LHS 1140-b, but no detection in 2025, which may mean that the helium escape varies over time. The team predicts that the planet has probably had its atmosphere for billions of years. The other planet, LHS 1140-c, did not show any signs of an atmosphere, which was also expected based on its orbit and characteristics.

The momentous discovery proves that atmospheres can exist around rocky worlds, including around dwarf stars, which are far more common than more massive stars like the Sun. Cherubim and his colleagues think it’s quite likely that LHS 1140-b has large amounts of liquid water on its surface, another key ingredient for life as we know it on Earth.

“When we think about habitability, we think about three high-level things,” Cherubim said. “We think the planet needs to be rocky for the most part. It can't be a gas-rich thing where the surface is molten, or like Jupiter where it's just all gas. It's got to be the right temperature to support surface liquid water, at least for Earth-like life, and it needs an atmosphere to hold that water in and to shield the surface from radiation.”

“With this discovery, we now know LHS 1140-b has all three of those things, which is really exciting,” he added. “And it just happens to be a very nearby system to Earth, so it's very accessible.”

Whether alien life exists on LHS 1140-b remains an open question, but scientists have already been looking for signs of life, known as biosignatures, in its skies using the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope. So far, the search hasn’t turned up any obvious signs of life, but future efforts may be able to peer at this world in more detail.

“I think this is the best place to be looking for biosignatures,” Cherubim concluded. “We're really excited to see what comes out of that.”

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404 Media

2026-07-16 13:56:48

How Cops Use Flock to Track People, Not Cars

Police departments around the country have used Flock cameras at least hundreds of times to search for specific people, not cars, using searches such as “heavy-set male with a black and white hat,” “person on skateboard,” and “person wearing orange vest and construction hat,” according to data reviewed by 404 Media. Sometimes searches reference a target’s race or signs of their political affiliation.

The searches highlight that while most people associate Flock cameras with scanning license plates and tracking vehicles, some of the cameras are also capable of following the movements of particular people or groups of people. Flock’s nationwide network of cameras lets police officers in one state search for a vehicle across many other states at once; the people searches do a similar thing, typically on a smaller scale, sometimes querying many hundreds of cameras at once. These are called “FreeForm” searches, and allow cops to use Flock’s system as though they would use a search engine, with Flock’s AI and image recognition interpreting what footage and which people are relevant to a police officer’s search.

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How Cops Use Flock to Track People, Not Cars

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404 Media

2026-07-15 15:58:34

Podcast: We Are Living in a ‘ChatGPT Flyer Pandemic’

We start this week with Jason’s story about the ChatGPT flyer pandemic. They’re everywhere! Thank you to the readers and listeners who sent in their own examples. After the break, Sam tells us how Waymo snitched on kids and drove them to a group of waiting cops. In the subscribers-only section, Joseph explains why he bought a $3,000 suit that electrocutes your muscles. Yep.
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• ⁠We Are Living in a ‘ChatGPT Flyer Pandemic’⁠
• ⁠Cops Say Waymo Snitched on Teens for Allegedly Drinking and Shooting a Toy Gun⁠
• ⁠I Bought the $3,000 Fitness Suit That Electrocutes You. I’m Sending It Back⁠

The 404 Media Podcast

Tech News Podcast · Updated Weekly · Welcome to the podcast from 404 Media where Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, and Jason catch you up on the stories we published this week. 404 Media is a journalist-owned digital media company exploring the way …

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404 Media

2026-07-15 13:59:38

Hack Reveals Suno AI Music Generator Scraped YouTube, Deezer, and Genius

The AI music generation tool Suno scraped millions of songs and lyrics from YouTube Music, Deezer, and Genius, as well as from the stock music libraries Pond5, Jamendo, Freesound, the International Music Score Library Project, and podcasts via RSS feeds, according to a hacker who breached the company and shared data about Suno’s training libraries with 404 Media. The hacker was also able to access user information for hundreds of thousands of Suno’s customers, as well as Stripe payment information, they said.

The hacked data is a rare look at exactly how AI models and tools are built. Suno is one of the largest AI music generation tools on the internet, and has been the subject of several major lawsuits from the record industry, which accused the company of training on millions of copyrighted songs. As part of these legal proceedings, Suno previously admitted that it was trained on “essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet,” which included a total of “tens of millions of recordings.” Suno has been making the argument that it is allowed to train on copyrighted works as fair use in those cases, one of which has been settled.

The lawsuits have made clear that Suno did train on huge amounts of copyrighted works, but the hacked data shared with 404 Media sheds more light on how Suno scraped songs from the internet and where it took them from. The Recording Industry Association of America accused Suno of ripping songs directly from YouTube; the hacked data seen by 404 Media confirms this.

The hacked material includes source code that appears to be from 2023 and 2024 that includes scraping instructions and details about the scope of at least some of the scraping. For example, the comments in one file note that they will pull from “genius_hq, youtube_music, freesound, jamendo, imp, deezer, ytm_tagged,” and that “non-music will be filtered out.” A file called “youtube_music” notes that at the time the file was last updated, it had ingested “2,013,545 music clips.” Another file contains comments about different datasets Suno had created, which included “113,879 hours of youtube_music,” “17,615 hours of genius_hq,” “410 hours of free sound,” “19,514 hours of imslp,” “3,726 hours of jamendo,” “62,117 hours of pond5_music,” “12,287 hours of deezer,” “152,162 hours of ytm_tagged,” and “103 hours of musescore_lyrics.” In total, this is at least decades worth of music.

Other code the hacker shared with 404 Media appeared to look specifically for vocals by searching specifically for acapella versions of songs on YouTube. The code also suggested that Suno was using proxies to scrape songs from YouTube through a company called Bright Data, which sells scraping tools, infrastructure, and data services. Additional code shows that with the help of an online tool called PodcastIndex, Suno identified 420,000 different podcasts that had at least five, 30-minute episodes and sought to download roughly 1 million hours of podcasts.

It is unclear from the files seen by 404 Media exactly how Suno scraped files from each of the other platforms. Pond5 is a stock music and sound effects library owned by Shutterstock in which customers pay to access songs individually or can access a limited number of songs per month with a subscription. Pond5 claims it has 2.5 million music tracks; Suno’s data suggests that it scraped a substantial amount of the entire library. Genius, meanwhile, does not host songs directly on its website but allows Apple Music subscribers to play music through the website or to play samples of songs through Apple Music.

In one of its lawsuit filings, Suno said that its “training data includes essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open internet, abiding by paywalls, password protections, and the like, combined with similarly available text descriptions,” and that it was “constructed by showing the program tens of millions of instances of different kinds of recordings gathered from publicly available sources.”

“For Suno specifically, this process involved copying decades worth of the world’s most popular sound recordings and then ingesting those copies into Suno’s AI models so they can generate outputs that imitate the qualities of genuine human sound recordings,” the RIAA wrote in its lawsuit against Suno. “And to make matters worse, Suno obtained those copies in the first instance by unlawfully ‘stream ripping’ them from the popular streaming platform YouTube, and circumventing the technological measures designed specifically to prevent such unauthorized copying.”

In a statement, a Suno spokesperson said “As we have stated in public filings and disclosures, Suno’s AI models have been trained on publicly available music files and related metadata accessible on third-party websites on the open Internet. In November of 2025, we determined that Suno had been the subject of a limited security incident that was quickly contained. At the time, we immediately conducted an investigation and verified that the incident primarily involved outdated source code that is no longer in use at Suno and that no sensitive personal information was compromised. Importantly, Suno does not have access to customers’ full credit card numbers in Stripe.”

“Based on the limited nature of the customer information believed to be involved, we determined that individual notifications were not warranted under applicable privacy laws,” the Suno spokesperson added. Suno also sent a training data disclosure required under California law.

The hacker, ellie.191, told 404 Media they breached the company by hacking an individual employee using the Shai-Hulud worm, a supply chain attack that allowed hackers to harvest GitHub and cloud service credentials. They said they also accessed Suno’s customer list, which included customers’ emails and/or phone numbers and Stripe payment details, depending on what they used to login. The hacker provided a sample of some of the customers, some of whom confirmed to 404 Media they had used their phone number to sign up for Suno and said they were never notified of a breach. The hacker told 404 Media they had no specific motivation for hacking Suno and said “I like to hack anything and everything.”

404 Media has previously reported on leaked materials that showed Nvidia and Runway ML scraped YouTube en masse. For the most part, AI companies no longer deny training on copyrighted materials and instead make the argument that they are allowed to scrape artists’ work under fair use carveouts in copyright law.

Last month, The Atlantic reported on several music databases that are widely used in AI training, consisting of millions of tracks: “Three of the datasets I found are distributed as a list of links to songs on YouTube or Spotify. AI developers download the actual audio using tools that automate the job, some of which allow developers to bypass logins, advertisements, and mechanisms that might earn money or subscribers for creators. Such tools violate the terms of service of these platforms. (The fourth dataset, the Free Music Archive collection, is distributed with MP3s.),” the author of The Atlantic piece wrote. It is unclear whether Suno used any of these datasets.

The Suno spokesperson added that the company has worked to try to prevent users from generating songs that sound like existing songs. One of the contentions of several of the lawsuits was that Suno could be used to output songs that are nearly indistinguishable from existing works. “Our goal has always been to help people create original new music, not replicate someone else’s. That’s why we build our models around what we call ‘Original Creation, By Design.’ For example, we intentionally do not use artist names as a category of training metadata because we want our models to help people create brand new songs, not music that replicates other artists’ existing work,” the spokesperson said. “We believe artists deserve both new opportunities and strong protections. That's why we've invested in safeguards designed to help prevent impersonation, and other forms of misuse, while continuing to develop technologies for AI identification.”

Mikey Shulman, the CEO and founder of Suno, said on a podcast last year that he believes the “majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”

CEO of AI Music Company Says People Don’t Like Making Music

"I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-14 15:05:20

Is the Best Game of the Year a Failure? (With Rob Zacny)

If you listen to the 404 Media podcast by now you probably realized that Joe and I are a little obsessed with a game called Marathon. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve played it for almost 300 hours since it was released in March.

But as much as we’re enjoying it, and there are thousands of players who feel the same, Marathon so far has failed to find the audience we’d expect from the developer that made Halo, Destiny, and which a few years ago acquired by PlayStation for more than $3 billion. It’s bad news for Marathon fans and a good sign for how much the video game business has changed over the years.
playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TBIEA2…
I wanted to have Remap Radio host Robert Zacny on the podcast because much like me and Joe, he’s been obsessed with Marathon as well. One of Rob’s greatest skills is dissecting how and why games get their hooks into us, and what a game’s popularity, or lack thereof in Marathon’s case, might reveal about the state of the industry and culture more broadly.
youtube.com/embed/K4U4mWObX84?…
404 Media is a journalist-founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Subscribers also get early access to our interview series. Gain access to that content at 404media.co.

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

Become a paid subscriber for early access to these interview episodes and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

The 404 Media Podcast

Tech News Podcast · Updated Weekly · Welcome to the podcast from 404 Media where Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, and Jason catch you up on the stories we published this week. 404 Media is a journalist-owned digital media company exploring the way …

^{404 Media (Apple Podcasts)}

404 Media

2026-07-14 13:20:54

AI Made Cloning Games Easier Than Ever

Freya Holmér's had this idea in her head for a long time—Tetris, but the whole board rotates. The game developer and Unity tool maker started making the idea real and built out a prototype. Holmér posted a 50-second clip of it to social media in mid-March and asked: "Is this anything?" It was, according to the people who responded. The posts got hundreds of replies from people desperate for a playable version.

"You can watch [the gameplay] happen and you understand the full extent of it, while still seeing the complexity and interesting parts of it," Holmér told 404 Media. "Most people know about Tetris, so you can shortcut all those concepts—it's a visually compelling concept—and you get the idea very quickly."

Freya Holmér (@freya.bsky.social)
been feeling kinda stressed lately so I made a little prototype is this anything
Bluesky SocialFreya Holmér

It was a promising response for a commercial game developer that quickly turned unsettling. Within days, someone responded to her post with a vibecoded version of Holmér's prototype: "This can be built into a game by tomorrow." Another popped up in mobile app stores. Holmér said she saw up to four vibecoded versions of her prototype. Generative AI has made the work of plagiarizing an idea a lot simpler. A person vibecoding a game doesn't need any programming or design experience. They input ideas and instructions into a generative AI application and it writes the code and builds out the user interface. The vibecoder can tweak the game in conversation with the generative AI program until it suits their needs. As you might expect, the process doesn't necessarily produce elegant results.

The two vibecoded versions of Holmér's game, for instance, lack the finesse of her carefully crafted animations. There's a story behind every decision she made. That may not be true for the vibecoded versions of the game. Charlie Greenman, who told 404 Media he saw Holmer's idea on social media and wanted to do a spin on her prototype, said it took him several prompts and roughly a day to make his version, Rotris. Greenman said he doesn't think there are any ethical concerns with what he did. "I really can care less about the game," he said. "No one was interested."

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"I feel like I had this brand new creation," Greenman said. "When it gets to that point, is one song copying another? Is one game copying another? Whoever created Blox, Jenga, is that a copy of Tetris?"

404 Media reached out to the developer of another copycat, Blockfall, which also popped up within days of Holmér's post, but did not receive a response.

"It disincentives me from [posting about my work,]" Holmér said. "You get this anxiety anytime you post anything, someone is going to come in to finish it for you and then monetize it and steal the whole concept. It used to be the case that this stuff took a look of effort [to steal], because it requires skill and skillful execution and effort and knowledge. But now with AI, there's a general devaluing of skill and knowledge."

Papers, Please developer Lucas Pope expressed a similar sentiment on the Mike & Rami Are Still Here podcast in April—that he doesn’t feel comfortable sharing much about what he’s working on publicly, lest it gets “slurped by AI” and copied by someone else.

There's always been some risk of sharing ideas and concepts too early on social media; grifters looking to swipe ideas have always been around. Holmér's experience with generative AI clones of her game idea is just exacerbating a dupe industry that's pervasive on digital video game marketplaces. As video game companies both big and small compete for attention in a culture that's kept the same five games, like Fortnite and Grand Theft Auto 5, on the most-played lists for years, some companies are forgoing original ideas entirely, opting instead to co-opt anything popular or trending to make a quick buck. These sorts of schemes are prolific on the App Store and Google Play Stores, but are behind much of the slop on console digital stores, too.

It's big business. Several companies have had huge success flooding the market with knockoffs designed to confuse players looking for games to play. One strategy for these clone developers is taking a popular console or PC game and publishing a clone on mobile app stores—often before a developer has been able to make a port themselves. It's been massively successful for studios like Voodoo, a French mobile game maker that's been accused several times of making copycat games. 404 Media reached out to Voodoo for comment, but did not hear back. In 2018, Voodoo received a reported $200 million from Goldman Sachs, and in 2020, Tencent became a minority stakeholder valuing the company at a whopping $1.4 billion. Voodoo both makes and publishes mobile games, often low effort free-to-play games that generate money through ads.

"The incentives and the infrastructure is built to encourage this kind of overproduction"

In 2018, game developer Ben Esposito accused the company of copying Donut County, which was unreleased at the time. Voodoo's version, Hole.io, reached the top of app store charts. It remains one of Voodoo's most popular games. Several other indie games have seemingly been cloned by Voodoo, too. Ironically, Voodoo doesn't want other game developers aping their clone games; it sued another mobile giant, Rollic Games, in a French court and won. The court found that Rollic Games' Wood Shop, in which players carve a spinning block of wood, copied Voodoo's Woodturning. The important piece of this story is, however, that Rollic Games was released before Voodoo's. Its copying accusations were related to an update Wood Shop made to their game.

Copycat and clone games have proliferated since, and generative AI is only making the problem worse.

"We shouldn't be surprised that people are using AI to do this kind of thing, because the incentives and the infrastructure is built to encourage this kind of overproduction," University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of media and cultural studies Jeremy Morris told 404 Media. "This is a problem that's existed for as long as these platforms existed, so I don't think AI creates something new here. It just amplifies the amount that people can do."

Moldova-based Midnight Works is one company flooding console and mobile digital storefronts with clone games that players quickly deem scams. Founded by Cătălin Țiței and Roman Gaina in 2015, according to an archived version of the Midnight Works website, Midnight Works created apps before entering the games market in 2017. Since then, Midnight Works has grown to employ 300 people, per an archived version of its website. (The website now only hosts a landing page with almost no information.) . "Midnight.Works is a visionary game development and publishing company that thrives on nurturing creativity and innovation within the gaming industry," the company said, according to an archived version of the website. "Our diverse and passionate team is dedicated to collaborating with both burgeoning and accomplished game creators to bring unique, engaging gaming experiences to players across the globe."

Midnight Works claimed that 80 percent of the games it publishes pass $1 million in revenue, while 15 percent make over $100,000. The remaining five percent, it said, "don't achieve significant milestones."

A Moldovan game developer close to the company, told 404 Media that Midnight Works is "one of the largest" game developers in Moldova. Its big success was acquiring Hashiriya Drifter, a popular mobile racing game, from an external game developer. "[It] became their flagship project and, from what I know, the main financial foundation that allowed the company to grow," the developer said. 404 Media granted this developer anonymity so they could speak freely about Midnight Works.

"I found out my game was suddenly being sold by someone else."

Luke Wild, a YouTube creator who investigated Midnight Works in a series on his channel, told 404 Media that he believes the company is a "massive global scam." Wild started looking into the company while playing through slop games on the Nintendo Switch eShop on YouTube. (Midnight Works retaliated against him, Wild said, by demanding employees to report his videos," he claimed.) He noticed that a lot of the games he was playing were coming from a small pool of developers that all seemed to stem from Midnight Works. He spent years documenting the connections between the slop factories. Each of these studios uploaded the same games, maybe with slightly different titles. If a game got removed from a digital storefront, it'd get uploaded later under a different developer or publisher. Most of the games, Wild said, are simulator games—because they're easy to create a template for—that copy whatever the algorithm is favoring. When TCG Card Shop Simulator, from OPNeon Games, was released into early access in 2024, for instance, Midnight Works released its own, Card Shop Game Store Simulator, months later. (The Nintendo Switch store page for this game is listed as being made/published by VRCForge Studios, but a game with the same name and key art is listed as being published byThe Midnight—with Midnight Works email addresses—on the Microsoft Store.)

"Midnight doesn't have the best reputation, and unfortunately that already affects how people perceive other studios from our country as well," he said.

Midnight Works has not responded to multiple requests for comment.

Sometimes, Midnight Works' and studios in what Wild calls Midnight Works' "Web of Deceit" directly copy games, down to the source code and assets. One developer, who goes by the name Steelkrill Studio online, told 404 Media that his found footage horror game The Backrooms 1998 was stolen almost in its entirety. "I never imagined something like that would happen," Steelkrill Studio said. "The wildest part is that I only discovered it because someone commented on one of my videos accusing me of re-releasing the same game myself, which is how I found out my game was suddenly being sold by someone else."

The Backrooms 1998 is a found footage horror game published in 2025. It’s played through the lens of a camcorder’s viewfinder. One of the unique pieces of the game is the implementation of the player’s actual microphone—the monsters can hear breathing and other sounds. It’s Steelkrill Studio’s own take on the backrooms genre, which was born of creepy storytelling on forums like Reddit, like Kane Parsons’ 2026 film Backrooms. There are a lot of other backrooms-inspired games, the most popular of which is Escape the Backrooms.

Steelskrill Studio thinks Midnight Works used a decompiler to take the source code. Looking through the files, he found that most everything matched his game. "It even had my personal videos when I was younger and family VHS tapes that I had included in my game [that] were still present in their stolen version," he said.

The stolen version of The Backrooms 1998 was taken off the console storefronts, and that publisher, Cool Devs, has seemingly been banned. 404 Media has reached out to Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft to confirm the reason for the removal and subsequent bans, but didn’t hear back.But its games now appear on the Nintendo Switch eShop and other storefronts once again, sometimes under different publisher names. The Bad Parents, an egregious copy of Bad Parenting, published originally by Cool Devs is now listed on the Nintendo store by TrueMotion Interactive—a studio that's published and is still selling near exact copies of Peak, Supermarket Simulator, and Bodycam.

A former Midnight Works employee, who asked for anonymity, told 404 Media that the studios' "long-established" scheme was to recreate a trending game and make a "stripped down clone" in a few months—just give it a similar name and style, sometimes using assets ripped from the original games. "All of this was done in the hope of confusing buyers so that they would purchase our awful knockoff instead of the original," the former employee said. The former employee said that generative AI was used "at every step" to speed up development: "Literally from banners and screenshots to UI and 3D models," they said.

Once a game is ready to be published on digital storefronts like the Nintendo eShop or PlayStation Store, the company blasts its game name and page with keywords in an attempt to beat the algorithm. "A lot of the optimization for game developers was similar to the way it was for early stages of music and podcasts, which is keyword stuffing," Morris said of general clone game tactics. "It's the basic kind of search engine optimization, at the discovery level." Another strategy, Morris said, is constant updates. It's one of those things that Morris called "algorithmic imaginaries," or myths about how these platform algorithms work. "One of the big ones is that the more frequently you update your app, the more often it would look like it was new and would get recommended more," he said. "One example I point to is the Bible app, and there's a Bible app that's updated every 12 days. I thought it was funny because it's a text that obviously is not changing."

Game sellers and app stores are incentivized to have a lot of content to sell; they get a cut of everything purchased there. Many have policies about copies and clones, but complicating that is determining what is a copy or clone. In the case of The Backrooms 1998, it's seemingly an easy decision to take the game off the store for violating copycat policies. Attorney Michael Wang, who researched Chinese copycat games, told 404 Media that developers and publishers can't copyright or patent ideas. If exact technology and assets are stolen, that's fairly cut and dry. But ideas that are similar—even really similar—are often fair game.

Where does inspiration stop and copying begin? Without PUBG Battlegrounds, there would be no Fortnite. And without the classic Japanese film Battle Royale, there would be no PUBG Battlegrounds. It's a question that's come up a lot in games. In 2014, a firestorm of controversy: Italian game developer Gabriele Cirulli was accused of copying indie game Threes! with his own game, 2048. Threes!, by game makers Asher Vollmer, Jimmy Hinson, and Greg Wohlwend, was released in 2014 and had success on the App Store. Then the clones came. One of those was 1024, which was also released on the App Store shortly after Threes! Cirulli's 2048, which he said was inspired by 1024, became the biggest of them all.

Cirulli, 19-years-old at the time, told 404 Media he saw a game called 2048 on a forum he posted to, based on another game called 1024. "I had no commercial intentions so I just started coding up my own version of the game," Cirulli said. He wanted to challenge himself to create an algorithm for a game like this. He struggled with it and almost gave up. He posted a finished version of the game, playable in a browser, to the forum. Someone saw it there and posted it to Hacker News, where it blew up. Thousands and thousands of people started playing it. Within days, a company called Ketchapp created a mobile version of 2048, called it 2028, and published it on the App Store. (That's the version that's generated millions of dollars in revenue per month, per reports. Ketchapp, like Voodoo, has been accused of egregiously copying other games. Ubisoft acquired the company in 2016. Cirulli said the only gripe he has with Ketchapp is that its version of 2048 has bugs that let you cheat. He's since released a commercial version of the game that's never quite reached Ketchapp's level of success.)

Then the accusations started. "I didn't publish 2048 with the intention of going virtual, nor did I expect that I would," Cirulli said. "At the time, I felt much more insecure with my place in the world and about myself as a professional. It was very difficult to deal with, and it affected me pretty deeply, even from an emotional perspective. It challenged my perspective of myself, meaning I was asking myself, Am I the bad guy in this scenario? Am I doing something unethical or bad?"

He's no longer interested in litigating the ethics of it all. But he would do something differently: "I think the only thing I would change is my mental health aspects, relating to the amount of stress it cost me," Cirulli said. "I think that was entirely optional."

He continued: "I still have that strong drive to build things that will affect people's lives in some small way, so that hasn't gone away. It gave me a lot of perspective and I feel very privileged to have had that opportunity."

Like Cirulli, software engineer Vittorio Romeo was inspired by a game he loved, Super Hexagon, to create his own version. He played Super Hexagon on his phone, "even during lessons at school," he said. Super Hexagon didn't have a PC version. So he tried to make one using the programming language he was learning, C++. "I did manage to replicate the game mechanics quite quickly and have a working version, obviously not as polished or well-crafted as the original, and it was doing the job," he told 404 Media. The mistake, he said, was releasing his free, open-source version of the game on PC before Super Hexagon developer Terry Cavanagh did.

"I never really wanted to compete with the original," he said. "I wanted it to be, like, we're fans of the original. We love the mechanics. We have played the original a lot, and we want more. I wanted to build a platform where people can iterate over the ideas the original had and build on top of it."

But unlike Cirulli's situation, Super Hexagon creator Cavanaghsaid he was "basically alright with [Open Hexagon,]" though a little upset it was released before Super Hexagon came to PC. As an open source game, Romeo didn't make money from Open Hexagon at the start, but he put it on Valve's Steam platform in 2021. It costs $4.99 to purchase, so Romeo does make a little bit of money from it. But more importantly, he said, is that the Steam Workshop lets players more easily create new levels. "That's been going on and people are still adding levels to this day," Romeo said. "There's a small community that is still developing content."

It's absolutely a different sort of clone than the likes of Midnight Works, which seems to be motivated not by admiration or learning but by profit. The end products, too, are certainly more high quality than the big budget slop machines that churn out more and more low quality clones.

At the platform level, companies like Nintendo are seemingly making changes to its digital store not necessary to moderate what shows up on the store, but to push down the slop games to the margins. Nintendo now forces the Best Sellers section to rank games by revenue and not total downloads. Ranking by downloads was a problem because these low effort games are often extremely cheap. People are willing to give something a try for $2 or less, so they sell a lot. Still, the cat-and-mouse game is on across every platform that sells games.

Holmér, whose Tetris-like is also an iteration, is still working on the game. She's got a lot of design decisions to make. What's the scoring system? Is there a failstate? Does she make it feel more like a toy? How do blocks clear? Does she share more about its development online?

"Most things right now have a pretty short life cycle when it comes to attention online," Holmér said. "The attention on that video I posted has tapered off to the point where I feel a lot more calm. In the very beginning, that first week, just every day there was a new AI clone. I was like, OK, well fuck me, I guess. But there's way less engagement, and I feel more in the clear to take my time to actually make something right, something good I can be proud of, and not just get it out there as soon as possible."

You Cloned My Game? I Ain't Even Mad, Bro

Another developer might have gone into a rage. A bigger company might have issued a cease and desist. But the creator of Super Hexagon was more level-headed than you or I might have been at the theft of our hard work.

^{Ryan Rigney (WIRED)}

404 Media

2026-07-13 19:23:39

Podcast: Liberation, Eroticism, and Sex in Public (with Angela Jones)

Is your sex life as private and personal as you think it is? Or is it shaped by – and constantly shaping, in turn – the society and systems you exist in?

This week we’re joined by Dr. Angela Jones, who asks these questions and much more in their new book, Sex in Public. Angela is a professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. In addition to scholarly works published in many distinguished journals including Porn Studies and The Black Scholar, they’re the author, co-author and/or editor of several books, including Black Lives Matter: A Reference Handbook and Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Industry which came out in 2020 and advanced and informed a lot of my own understanding of the online adult industry especially.

Their latest book, Sex in Public: The Transformative Social Power of Our Erotic Lives, just launched. As Angela writes: “Revolutionizing how we talk about sex means thinking not just about what a single solitary person should or shouldn't do in bed.”

We get into the history of sexology, how sex toys complicate our understanding of what counts as sex, whether sex needs a definition at all, what happened when they bought and used a sex doll, and why the most vulnerable moments in their book are also the ones everyone wants to discuss.
youtube.com/embed/19R-f4SKPd4?…
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

Become a paid subscriber for early access to these interview episodes and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

Sex in Public: The Transformative Social Power of Our Erotic Lives

Cash/Consent by Lorelei Lee

Cash/Consent | Lorelei Lee

When feminists call for the criminalization and delegitimization of sex work, they do not ally themselves with sex-working women.

^{n+1 Interns (n+1)}

404 Media

2026-07-13 17:18:26

LAPD Regularly Pulled Over Innocent People Because License Plate Readers Flagged Their Cars As Stolen

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) announced it will let its surveillance contract with automated license plate reader company (ALPR) Flock expire, becoming the largest police department in the country to drop its contract. Notably, the decision came after an audit of ALPR technology found that, in a two-month period, the LAPD had improperly "investigated" 161 people whose cars were flagged as stolen in the LAPD’s ALPR system but were not actually stolen.

The news that LAPD pulled over 161 innocent people in two months because of improper tagging in the department’s system comes after several high-profile incidents in which people in other states were accosted by police because of data entry or clerical errors in ALPR systems. Joel Feder, an editor of the car journalism website The Drive, detailed a harrowing tale in which he was tracked for days and ultimately pulled over by police in Minnesota because the license plate of the car he was reviewing for the website had been entered into the Flock system as stolen by a police department in California. Monday, the website MotorBiscuit wrote about an innocent woman who was jailed for 13 days because she drove a black Dodge Durango and police searched the Flock system for a Black Dodge Durango suspected of being involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident.
Image: LAPD OIG
A new report by the LAPD Office of the Inspector General (OIG) suggests that instances of people being falsely pulled over because their license plates have shown up on an ALPR “hot list” are very common, and that the surveillance of people on hot lists that ultimately result in no action from police is staggering. Many ALPR systems have this “hot list” feature, which is where police enter a license plate and get a ping or notification about the vehicle’s whereabouts whenever it passes a connected ALPR camera. In a two-month period between August 1 and September 30, 2025, the LAPD’s cameras generated more than 210.5 million license plate reads, according to the report.

“During the review period, officers acknowledged 161 alerts as accurate license plate matches; however, subsequent investigations determined the vehicles were not stolen,” the report reads. “In addition to creating an inconvenience for vehicle owners, these inaccuracies can affect individual liberty interests, erode public trust, and potentially create substantial legal and financial liability concerns.”

The report notes that this happened because of “inaccurate or outdated information, increasing the risk of unnecessary enforcement actions, including vehicle stops and wrongful detentions, or a confrontation with serious consequences,” and that in many cases, license plates remained on a hot list after a stolen vehicle had already been recovered or was reported as not stolen, meaning the cops are in some cases pulling over the lawful owner of the vehicle.

Notably, the report states that when police get an ALPR hot list hit, the department generally considers any subsequent action to be a “high-risk” stop, meaning the risk of confrontation or potential danger is greatly increased from routine traffic stops for running a red light or speeding.

“When a license plate matches with a vehicle of interest on a Hot List, an alert will appear on the police vehicle’s Mobile Digital Computer,” the report reads. “Often, officers will approach the vehicle with extreme caution or conduct a ‘high-risk’ stop. This involves calling for back up, air support, and a supervisor and ordering the suspect out of their vehicle.” The report says, “department policy requires officers to attempt to verify the accuracy of the ALPR alert prior to conducting a stop,” but that often does not happen. The report also states that, on the vast majority of hot list hits, no action is taken by police meaning that specific people are being subjected to tracking and surveillance for no readily discernible reason. In the two-month audit period, 5,911 different license plates were tracked. No action was taken against 4,575 of those cars.

The LAPD said in response to the report that cars improperly flagged as stolen “generally result from the timing of record updates outside of the Department’s control, such as delays by another jurisdiction or a vehicle owner in clearing a plate from a Hot List after a vehicle has been recovered or is no longer wanted.” In other words, LAPD is often relying on other police departments to remove license plates from a hot list, highlighting the problems with networking different surveillance systems together.

The LAPD OIG report, which appears to have directly led the LAPD to allow its Flock contract to expire, studied the use of three different ALPR systems the department has been using, including static, pole-mounted cameras from Motorola and Flock and cameras in police cruisers made by Axon. In total, the department has nearly 2,000 ALPR cameras; LAPD accesses data for both Flock and Axon systems through Flock’s backend thanks to a data sharing partnership between Axon and Flock, according to the report. The report said the department was able to recover 337 stolen cars during the two months and that ALPR data led to 74 arrests total.

Both the OIG and the LAPD determined that the ALPR system needs to be reconsidered. The OIG suggested that the LAPD “suspend the deployment of new ALPR cameras and the execution of new ALPR-related contracts pending public input and a broader reassessment of vendors and data practices” and “strengthen oversight of ALPR data access.” The LAPD allowed its Flock contract to expire over the weekend, and said it would not enter into new contracts until going through a full audit process.

Innocent 23-Year-Old Jailed for Fatal Crash Because She Drove a Dodge Durango

Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR) and Flock cameras are supposed to help law enforcement catch the bad guys. But what happens when the technology

^{Rahaan Mazumder (MotorBiscuit)}

404 Media

2026-07-13 14:32:05

I Bought the $3,000 Fitness Suit That Electrocutes You. I’m Sending It Back

Putting on the $3,000 Katalyst suit is like sliding around with an electric eel. First you lay out the vest, shorts, and arm straps (on a towel if you don’t want to make a mess) and spray their electrode pads with a lot of water. “More water is better,” Katalyst’s CEO Brendan Kennedy told me. You then clip the vest and shorts together, creating a single, dripping suit. After wrapping those around your body and zipping up, you put on the arm straps and connect them to the main suit with a pair of delicate cables. You slip a battery pack into a pocket near your thigh, snap its magnetic plugs to the vests and shorts, and you’re ready to work out, soaking wet and maybe cold if you took too long to assemble the contraption.

The pitch is that Katalyst will essentially supercharge your workouts. The suit electrocutes your muscles while you do basic movements alongside a virtual instructor in the accompanying app. Think lunges, squats, and the movement of a deadlift. You can get the equivalent of a 2 hour strength session in just 20 minutes, Katalyst says. George Clooney has praised the suit, telling Esquire “my arms are twice the size they’ve ever been. It’s crazy.” Bloomberg Businessweek has covered the suit too, writing, “here’s the thing: The Katalyst suit worked.”

I already own a bunch of exercise and wellness tech, from smart swimming goggles to the Oura ring. I often plan my workout time as efficiently as I can. That’s one reason why my main form of exercise is rowing, which uses a lot of muscles at once, and why I sometimes wear resistance gloves during swimming to squeeze out as much benefit as possible. So, as a tool that promised super-efficient sessions even if the price tag is obviously insane, I really wanted to like Katalyst. I thought it might be the secret to finally branching out from rowing and swimming to more strength-focused routines.

But it wasn’t. It gave me pins and needles in my feet for days at a time and made my limbs numb and cold, derailed my other workouts, and it simply wasn’t fun in the way good and long-lasting exercise habits ideally should be. Instead, slipping into the $3,000 cyber suit for around a month made me reassess my obsession with fitness, optimization, and efficiency. It made me consider which of those concepts were actually helping me, and which were ultimately holding me back. What the fuck am I even doing? I eventually thought to myself, dripping water all over my apartment floor.

I wasn’t the only one. “Legit you are the craziest person I know,” 404 Media’s Emanuel Maiberg said after I sent a photo of the soaking wet suit to our group chat. They compared me to an Infinite Jest character, with Sam Cole saying “we’re laughing IRL over here.” Jason Koebler added: “As your friends and colleagues and cofounders. This is not normal. The bit has gone too far.”

Images: 404 Media.

Katalyst is an electro muscle stimulation, or EMS, suit. The pads send electrical pulses that make your muscles contract. At first, as the suit and app ramp you into a workout, the pulses feel like a light tingling sensation. Then, a solid block of electricity across your arms, legs, and abs. You wet the pads, and sometimes the base layer of shorts and a long-sleeve t-shirt, because the water helps conductivity between the electrode and your skin, Katalyst says.

“That was absolutely insane,” I texted the rest of 404 Media after my first workout.

At some points, your limbs may lock in place due to the intensity of the blast. I tweaked my settings so I could complete the movements fully and with a good amount of difficulty and resistance, while not completing locking my legs or arms out. The app encourages and makes this easy to do: during a workout there are buttons in the app you can quickly press to increase or turn down the intensity of the pulses. The instructor in the pre-recorded video will often bring up the power during the workout to reach an electrocuting crescendo. It can take a few of the recommended three or so workouts a week to find your ideal baseline.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Katalyst’s instructors recommend you breathe out while the suit pulses. You perform a squat, or a lunge, or another movement for four seconds while the suit shocks you. Then you rest for four seconds. You keep doing that through different motions and intensities. In 20 minutes, the workout is over.

This timesave is obviously the big attraction of the Katalyst; the idea that you can somehow squeeze hours of work into mere minutes without even leaving your home. “I'd been trying to go back to the gym a dozen times over the preceding 2-3 years with no luck. The time savings/mental ease of EMS training really is a blessing,” AustinAfter40, a YouTuber who makes EMS-related videos, told me in an email. Within the first few months of getting an EMS suit in 2023, Austin says he gained 10 pounds of muscle. In the years since that’s gone up to 20 pounds, without, Austin says, really touching anything heavier than a 15lb dumbbell. “My bone density has increased significantly, body fat has lowered, and back pain I've dealt with much of my life is now a distant memory,” he says.

Images: 404 Media.

If you scroll the Katalyst subreddit, you find many people saying much the same thing. But navigating the world of EMS can feel like the Wild West. Austin makes money from his EMS-related videos with affiliate links, so viewers need to keep that in mind when watching whatever suit he is currently making videos about even if the information is sincere and helpful (he has since moved onto TitanBody, a Katalyst competitor). The intensity and metrics of EMS suits are not standardized, so you don’t really know what you’re getting. An intensity rating of, say, 200 on a Katalyst is probably not going to be the same on a TitanBody suit. Or a VisionBody suit. Or any of the other EMS suit companies that have clearly bought Google Search ad space when you look for anything EMS-related.

Katalyst is FDA-cleared. That is not the same as FDA-approved. The Katalyst suit falls into Class II of the FDA’s different groups for devices, putting it in the moderate risk category. Being cleared means Katalyst can sell the suit, but the FDA is not saying everyone should slip it on.

On the Katalyst subreddit, people have historically complained about the company’s customer service or suit delivery times (the customer service was very good for me, with a dedicated Zoom call to talk through the issues I was facing). Kennedy, through his company Mont y Mer, acquired Katalyst in 2025. He said the previous CEO and Katalyst’s founder, Bjoern Woltermann, had “essentially bankrupted the company twice in six years,” and had taken orders and payment from more than 1,000 customers but hadn’t created any suits. Kennedy said he then went around the world meeting with different suppliers to produce those original 1,000 suits. For me, it took around five months for my suit to arrive when I ordered it in 2025. Kennedy said Katalyst has inventory now and has “sort of solved that problem.” Woltermann acknowledged a request for comment but did not provide a response in time for publication.

Beyond the anecdotal, the science suggests EMS suits can work. Professor Yong-Seok Jee at Hanseo University, who has researched EMS, told me in an email that while athletes often use EMS to target specific muscle groups, he says the suits can also help normal people. Like me, presumably. “For non-athletes or the general population, EMS can be particularly useful as a time-efficient and low-impact training option, especially for beginners, older adults, or individuals with limited mobility,” he continued.

But EMS is not some magic tool you can use instead of actually working out and exercising normally. “That said, EMS is not a shortcut or replacement for exercise. Its effectiveness depends heavily on appropriate intensity, supervision, and program design, and there are safety considerations (e.g., avoiding excessive stimulation),” Jee said.

Casey Johnston, who runs the lifting-focused newsletter She’s a Beast and author of A Physical Education, told me in an email Katalyst is “definitely in no way a replacement or even effective complement to strength training.”

“If anything, similar to the drag suit argument, wearing a thing like the Katalyst would probably hamper your ability to effectively learn strength training movements and form, which is a huge cornerstone of translating strength to real life, before it would be additive in any meaningful way with, I can't put enough quotes, ‘muscle stimulation,’ or whatever term they use,” she added.

“This suit looks like the biggest scam I’ve ever seen,” Johnston wrote. She pointed to the Relaxacisor, a device from 1949 that blasted your abs with electrical pulses. “This thing is no different, and equally scammy,” Johnston said.

Screenshots of the app.

I didn’t want to replace my current exercise regime of rowing and swimming five or six times a week with the Katalyst. I wanted to slot it in. I’ve repeatedly injured myself with various strength routines, to the point where I’ve had to do physical therapy and had medical procedures done, so I wanted Katalyst to supplement my existing exercise and get more strength in there. That didn’t work.

First, obviously, you ache after blasting yourself with electricity. So much so that you (wisely) need to rest, but also so much so that you can’t then row or swim, even at a lower level. So I found myself not doing the two forms of exercise I love and get great joy from and which have drastically improved my health over the years.

Next, I started to essentially injure myself with the suit. I often got pins and needles in my hands and feet. One of the instructors in the app said pins and needles in your hands can happen and should go away quickly. But mine would last for hours, and my feet multiple days. Then my limbs would feel numb and I would be incredibly cold, so much I would start sneezing. Kennedy told me getting pins and needles for this long was “extremely abnormal.” I took his advice of wetting the pads even more, and even the base layer you put on. I also did some workouts without the arms turned on at all. That stopped the issue with my hands at least.

But it still wasn’t working for me, mentally. It made me think what was I even doing this for. To be efficient for efficiency’s sake?

There is something lost when you favor efficiency above all else. You lose the joy of just moving in a way that feels good. You lose embracing the process of exercise itself when trying to make the time spent as short as possible. You lose sight of your actual goal with exercise, which for me is to keep active and healthy, not get insanely jacked. You lose that state of everything fading away, your mind clearing, endorphins flowing, and nothing else existing but your body moving without you even thinking about it. What runners call the runners’ high, or what I get in rowing when I’m on a longer workout. Maybe some people do get that or feel good with EMS suits. The in-app instructors said you might. I know I didn’t get it with Katalyst.

The Shocking Origin Story of the Relaxacisor, the Fitness Device That Electrified Your Abs

Eschewing sit-ups for electrical impulses, the suitcase-like contraption vowed that it could deliver a tighter set of abs without you ever having to break a sweat

^{joshschollmeyer (MEL Magazine)}

404 Media

2026-07-13 14:01:35

These Are the Worst ChatGPT Flyers You've Sent Us

Earlier this week, I somewhat stupidly asked our readers to send me examples of "ChatGPT flyers," the AI-generated posters and advertisements that have taken over social media, bulletin boards, restaurant menus, store signage, business cards, and billboards around the world. I say stupidly, because I was flooded with so many terrible, brain-numbing signs for anything you could possibly imagine. I guess I got what I asked for. (Thank you, I love it).

404 Media readers were particularly passionate about their hatred for AI-designed signs. I got some of the best email responses to any story I've done here. Before I get into the AI flyer hall of shame, here's some of what I heard:

"They look like absolute DOG SHIT. Like my cat's litter box! I freaking HATE THEM. I have been posting to my Instagram begging people and businesses to stop using them. No one listens LOL. Thanks for this article. I am glad I'm not screaming into the void by myself."

"thank you for writing this story. I've evangelically shared it with everyone I know, for whatever that's worth. I had never seen a local group churn out an AI-generated flyer before this year, but in the last several months it's gotten out of control. I'm sure you're being inundated with lousy AI flyers. Sorry for adding to the deluge, but this is something that's been bothering me for months."

"This is a great article but also fuck you because you were absolutely right about 'Once you notice a ChatGPT flyer, you will see them everywhere if you keep your eyes open.'"

Without further ado, here are some of the worst flyers we got. This represents just a small sampling of the overall number you sent me. In some cases I've provided more context from the person who sent it to me, and I've biased for ones that appeared in real life (i.e., were printed out) or that are particularly weird. Enjoy!
"Last month I was making one of my regular (miserable) visits to my rural Ohio hometown for care for aging mother. After a very long day cleaning out my childhood home, I thought I had finally snapped and lost my mind when I laid eyes on this table card at the local Mexican joint. ""I do want to warn that I have accidentally poisoned the well around New Haven. I'm a de-facto AI spotter, but it's hard to back up my assertions with vibes.""Use of generative AI in my town proliferated after it was destroyed by the Eaton Fire. This is Altadena, California. Eighteen months later, 2 out of 3 Altadenans are still displaced. Our ongoing challenges with recovery make it difficult to criticize event organizers that habitually use gen AI to create flyers, especially if the events exist to support a community in pain.""my city and our parking authority used to market a public engagement event for a new mural. The city prides itself on a growing Arts District, which is pretty rich since there is no (human) Comms team"This one is good because many of the beer company logos are wrong

404 Media

2026-07-11 14:51:18

Scientists Solve Mystery of Bizarre ‘Alien Megastructure’ Star

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that busted their butts, scaled great heights, got it right, and discovered a new world.

First, Hannibal marched an army of men, horses, and elephants over the Alps to threaten Rome. Scientists ask the question: Just how hard did they grind? Then, the mouse at the top of the world, the ancient origins of handedness, and a throwback to the alien megastructures.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

Try the Hannibal diet (no, not the Lecter one)

E. Berti & F. Vollrath. “Energy costs of Hannibal’s alpine crossing.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In 218 BC, the Carthaginian general Hannibal Barca marched an army of 46,000 men and 37 war elephants over the Alps to threaten Rome right at its doorstep. This brash advance in the Second Punic War has become one of the most legendary military moves of all time, even though Hannibal was ultimately unsuccessful in his mad dash to sack Rome.

Yet despite the prominent place of this march in history, the exact route that Hannibal took over the Alps remains unknown. Now, scientists have taken a fresh stab at the millennia-old mystery by calculating how much energy various route options would have cost the troops and elephants. Though experts have generally considered a route called the Col du Clapier to be most likely, the new results suggest an alternate route known as the Col de la Traversette would have exacted less energy from the advancing army, which might have boosted its odds as Hannibal’s choice of crossing.
“Hannibal crossing the Alps on elephants.” Image: Nicolas Poussin
“Most of the discussions concerning Hannibal’s crossing were guided by philological and geological considerations, which tend to ignore the biology of the men and animals,” said authors Emilio Berti of Halle-Jena-Leipzig and Fritz Vollrath of the University of Oxford.

“Compared to choosing the Col de la Traversette, the routes via the Col de Montgenèvre, Col du Clapier, and Col du Mont Cenis would have required 11%, 16%, and 19% more energy, respectively, for the army as a whole,” the team continued. “Although Hannibal would not have had such accurate estimates, he may have had a qualitative understanding of the ranking of the possible routes. In which case, driven by the aim to minimize the energy costs of the crossing, he would have chosen the Traversette route.”

While this study does not resolve the tantalizing question of exactly where Hannibal hauled ass over the Alps, it sheds new light on the immense costs of this ancient act of bravado. Berti and Vollrath estimated that even if the army took the path of least resistance—the Col de la Traversette—the “elephants would have lost 4% of their body fat reserves, horses 11%, and men 19%.”

Invading Rome: The ultimate weight loss plan. Considering that half of Hannibal’s troops died during the crossing, this diet is not recommended.

In other news…

The mighty mountain mouse

Liphardt, Schuyler et al. “Adaptation across an extreme elevational gradient in Andean leaf-eared mice, the world’s highest-dwelling mammal.” Science.

Speaking of alpine survival, meet the Andean leaf-eared mouse (Phyllotis vaccarum). This little critter can live more than four miles above sea level, on the dizzying peaks of the Andes mountains, making it by far the highest-dwelling mammal on Earth.

The mouse has surpassed the “known elevational range limits of all other terrestrial vertebrates” which “were previously thought to be uninhabitable by mammals owing to severe hypoxia and frigid temperatures,” according to a new study about this mouse’s amazing adaptations.
Andean leaf-eared mouse, Phyllotis vaccarum. Image: Marcial Quiroga-Carmona
To understand how this unassuming mouse survives up in the clouds, scientists analyzed the genomes of 167 leaf-eared mice collected across their range, which spans the lowlands all the way up to high Andean slopes, and compared them to their more grounded mouse relatives. The results revealed that the mountain mice have evolved a unique set of adaptations that are distinct from many other alpine animals, including the ability to metabolize toxic plants.

“The world’s highest-dwelling mammal has adapted to habitats at both the low- and high-elevation limits of its range, and much of the elevation-related selection relates to previously unappreciated aspects of feeding ecology,” the team concluded.

Mmm…toxic salads. Keep on living the high life, P. vaccarum.

A handy discovery at the dawn of complex life

Evans, Scott D. et al. “Earliest evidence of behavioural handedness in the Ediacaran motile bilaterian Spriggina floundersi.” Scientific Reports.

Paleontologists have discovered the oldest potential evidence of a right-handed animal, though the 550-million-year-old seacrawler in question doesn’t actually have hands. Spriggina floundersi, an inch-long weirdo that lived in the Ediacaran period, has long fascinated scientists because it appears to be one of the first animals in the fossil record capable of locomotion.

When scientists took a closer look at more than 100 exquisite Spriggina fossils from South Australia, they discovered that about twice as many of them seemed bent to the left compared to the right, suggesting that the animal had a preferred direction of motion, or “handedness.” In this case, it was right-handed because the fossils are preserved in negative hyporelief, meaning that they are mirror images of the animal.
A fossil of Spriggina floundersi collected in South Australia. Image: Scott Evans / ©AMNH
“A significant number of fossil specimens are bent to the left (right in life),” said researchers led by Scott D. Evans of the American Museum of Natural History. “The nature of these bends does not match expectations of anatomical asymmetry and instead constitutes the oldest described evidence of behavioural handedness.”

Now, the search is on for the elusive Ediacaran leftie.

It’s never aliens

Madurga-Favieres, Cristina et al. “Evidence for a giant companion orbiting Tabby’s star.” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Before there were interstellar objects and Pentagon UFO videos to ignite our extraterrestrial imaginings, there was Tabby’s Star, also known as KIC 8462852. Discovered in 2015, the star’s strange light patterns, which fluctuate significantly, sparked speculation that it might be orbited by “alien megastructures,” such as a massive solar energy plant called a Dyson sphere.

Now, scientists have discovered evidence of a huge planet transiting Tabby’s Star—meaning that it passed in front of the star from our perspective on Earth—which might help provide a natural exploration for its unusually pronounced dimming events. While reviewing observations from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), the team serendipitously “found a single unreported transit event…on 2019 September 3” that lasted 21 hours, hinting at the presence of a giant planet about ten times as massive as Jupiter.

“No transiting companion has ever been detected around this well-known star, so the potential evidence of a candidate presented in this work is significant, as its existence could explain the complexity of the system,” said researchers led by Cristina Madurga-Favieres of the University of Warwick. “The strongest theory is that a group of exocomets or planetesimal fragments are responsible for the irregular and apparently non-periodic dips…of Tabby’s star. The presence of a companion would explain why these bodies are driven to the vicinities of the star, breaking up, as it would orbitally perturb them.”

In other words, the huge planet may be gravitationally hoisting a flock of smaller bodies into orbit around the star, producing the dimming events. While it’s not quite as sensational as a colossal alien power plant, it may help resolve the decade-long mystery of this strange star.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

First Contact

A narrative and visual exploration of humanity’s age-old search for and fixation with extraterrestrials.First Contact explores the ancient idea—and epic ...

^{Hachette Book Group}

404 Media

2026-07-10 18:32:21

AI Fiction Is Easy to Detect Because It's Stupid and Bad, Research Finds

Fiction written by artificial intelligence is easy to detect because it struggles with complex story structure and tends to moralize in clunky ways, according to a preprint study from researchers at University of Maryland, College Park and Google DeepMind. They found that AI fiction has tells that go beyond stereotypical overuse of em-dashes and other obvious AI tropes and have more to do with the formulaic nature of the text itself.

“AI stories over-explain themes and favor tidy, single-track plots while human stories frame protagonists’ choices as more morally ambiguous and have increased temporal complexity,” the study, which looked at more than 50,000 AI-generated short stories, found. “Claude produces notably flat event escalation, GPT over-indexes on dream sequences, and Gemini defaults to external character description. We find that AI-generated stories cluster in a shared region of narrative space, while human-authored stories exhibit greater diversity. More broadly, these results suggest that differences in underlying narrative construction, not just writing style, can be used to separate human-written original works from AI-generated fiction.”
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Basically, AI-generated fiction sucks and at the moment is easy to detect. The typical method of detection involves looking for stylistic markers such as an abundance of em-dashes, the overuse of the word “delve,” or an obsession with goblins, but this project tried something different. “The idea for this project came because we are hoping to eventually move past plain text detection, into some sort of space where we can separate human ideas from AI-generated ideas,” Jenna Russell, a University of Maryland researcher and one of the study’s authors, told 404 Media. Russell is also an intern at the AI-detection company Pangram.

Russell and her team decided to attempt to detect what she called “narrative features” in AI- generated fiction. The detector is called StoryScope and it builds on NarraBench, a 2025 benchmark that suggested a taxonomy of narrative features in fiction. StoryScope looked at how fiction handled plot development, character descriptions, setting, and temporal structure to determine if something was written by a human or an AI.

“It was my first attempt at getting 'under the surface' and focusing more on ideas,” Russell said. “We wanted to see how close to typical AI-detection we could get by only relying on the narrative features, to understand if this sort of structural difference really even exists. This method also adds some interpretability to detection, which is an open question in the field. Using narrative features, we can point to certain tangible features (such as the number of subplots included in a story). I think this is why it's struck a chord recently, people can really say ‘ah these are some of the underlying traits of how AI writes fiction.’”

To test StoryScope, the researchers selected 10,272 human-written stories then reverse engineered them into writing prompts using Gemini 2.5. Then it took those thousands of prompts and fed them into Gemini 3 Flash, DeepSeek V3.2, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Kimi K2.5, and GPT 5.4. All of the data — including the prompts and the resulting AI stories — are available on Hugging Face.

To source the stories, the researchers used the Books3 dataset — a database of 183,000 books collected from pirated ebooks. The dataset is the subject of several lawsuits and has been used to train an unknown number of LLMs. The StoryScope study included more than 10,000 of some of the most famous short stories ever written, many of them pulled from popular anthologies. There’s Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Louis L'Amour, Charlotte Perkins, and Harlan Ellison. All have been rendered down to their base elements by AI and then regurgitated into a different LLM to see if it can replicate them.

Russell told me the dataset was controversial. “Hence why we do not release it to the public,” she said.

The study itself contained a disclosure. “We acknowledge the copyright issues related to the Books3 dataset and do not endorse its use for model training or commercial text generation,” it said. “The use of the dataset in our paper is restricted to academic purposes only and is meant to understand the narrative differences in human-written and AI-generated text to help inform discussions on AI-detection, authorship, and copyright policy.”

The various AIs, of course, can’t possibly replicate the prose of O. Henry. So what, according to StoryScope, are the narrative quirks of LLM-written simulacra of English’s grand works of fiction?

AI tools tend to over explain themes, for one.

“Narrators explicitly explain the story’s theme 77% of the time, versus 52% for humans: a grieving character’s arc will typically end with the narrator stating the lesson learned. AI dialogue serves philosophical debate more often (59% vs. 34%), and references to other works tend to be vague allusions (72% vs. 50%) rather than specific, named references. The pattern is one of over-determination: AI spells out meaning rather than trusting the reader to infer,” the study said.

AI also more often avoids subplots and fails to play with time jumps and flashbacks. The systems overwrite passages about the body and senses. “Where a human author might write that a character ‘felt afraid,’ AI renders fear as a tightening chest, cold sweat, and dimming lamplight,” the study said. Humans also spin more complicated narratives involving more characters and locations than AI can handle. Humans also reference other works of fiction, specific people and places in a way that AI struggles with.

A disclosure caught my eye at the bottom of the StoryScope study. “Large language models and coding agents (Claude Code and Codex) are used to aid with and polish writing and generate some tables and plots,” it said.

“I believe it's important to disclose AI use (and ideally think it should be more in-depth than I wrote in the paper),” Russell told me. “Most researchers are using AI, a lot of it seemingly 'slop' [...] but a lot of it is high-effort, good research. Also, technically you are supposed to disclose AI use for conference submissions, but most people don't. I want to help change that norm!”

She also explained a bit more about how AI agents helped shape the project. “I use AI agents to help implement the code (using the claude code / codex interfaces). I also use them as an editor during the writing process! They have access to the project codebase and the paper latex, so the agents can implement graphics for me much more quickly than I could,” she said. “They write comments and add to the paper draft, but I keep it all in different colors so I can manually review and accept/reject/edit any suggestions from AI. I am a big believer that AI can help or hurt writing, but usually helps when not used to create more internet 'slop'.”

I kept thinking about Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg’s story “Ship-Shape Pay-Off” being turned into an AI prompt and then spit back out by an LLM. Ellison died in 2018 and was notoriously protective of his work to the point of violence. He successfully sued James Cameron for plagiarism over The Terminator. I have a hard time imagining he’d be happy to see his story pumped into a machine, no matter the results.

“A lot of people, like teachers or readers, don't really care if AI was used in the writing process, but do care if the human is the one behind the heart of it,” Russell said. “A teacher wants to know if their student understood the lesson, and a reader wants to know that the creativity behind a touching story was truly the work of the human author.”

These 183,000 Books Are Fueling the Biggest Fight in Publishing and Tech

Use our new search tool to see which authors have been used to train the machines.

^{Alex Reisner (The Atlantic)}

404 Media

2026-07-10 17:20:01

Behind the Blog: The Promise of the Internet

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 mobile podcasting, participating in the meme, and vertigo.

JASON: My last few articles have basically been first person behind the blog vibes about things I’m doing (Cannes, influencer LARPing), or things that annoy me (ChatGPT flyers), so I’m trying to think how much more people want to know about my Process or what’s going on in my brain. As mentioned in those posts, I flew to France for Cannes a few weeks ago, and, because I was in Europe already, have been here for a few weeks now (also as discussed in the LARPing post, having our own company has given me the ability to do some pretty cool things, and to work weird hours from faraway places without it ruining everything). I’m headed back home to the US today, writing this from Heathrow on a layover. When I’m at home, I either work on my patio or at my desktop computer battle station that you probably know from my podcast. A few gear and time-zone related observations from my last few weeks:

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Behind the Blog: The Promise of the Internet

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-09 21:54:58

Patreon Blocks Crawlers From Stealing Creators' Work for AI Training

Patreon announced on Thursday that it’s partnering with Cloudflare to block crawlers from stealing creators’ work to train AI models.

“I HAVE A KICKASS PRODUCT UPDATE FOR YOU ALL!” Jack Conte, the founder and CEO of Patreon, wrote in a post on Instagram with the superimposed text, “POV: you're CEO of one of these fucking tech companies, so you do what you want.”

“Patreon has partnered with an internet infrastructure company called Cloudflare to block Al training crawlers from using the work you publish on your Patreon to train their Al models,” Conte wrote. “This is live and happening at the network level on all posts published on Patreon.”

"As AI agents become increasingly powerful and popular, creators deserve a meaningful say in how their work is used by AI companies. On most of the Internet, creators have to accept AI training on their work just to reach and grow an audience," Drew Rowny, SVP of Product at Patreon, said in a press release published by Cloudflare last week. "Patreon has a different vision: creators should be able to grow their audience and control how their work is used. That's why we're building on our existing work with Cloudflare to block known AI training crawlers at the network level across Patreon, while still allowing the crawlers that help creators get discovered and grow their businesses through search."

Last year, internet infrastructure company Cloudflare, which provides cybersecurity protection and content delivery services to websites, announced that it would start blocking AI crawlers from accessing content without website owners’ permission or compensation by default. And earlier this month, Cloudflare announced new options for website owners to control AI traffic based on whether bots are search, agent, or training crawlers. In September, according to the company’s blog, all new domains onboarding to Cloudflare will have training and agent bots blocked by default on pages that display ads, while search crawlers will remain allowed by default.

A spokesperson for Cloudflare pointed 404 Media to the company's Crawl Control technology and its recent data about AI crawling. "Patreon recently enabled Cloudflare’s Crawl Control technology for its users at the network level. Others, like beehiive, have also recently enabled Crawl Control to allow its users to allow or block specific AI models based on their preference," they said.

“Creators deserve credit, compensation, and consent. If that's not on the table, the crawlers can stay the fuck off Patreon. The free internet is alive and happening. The rebellion has already started,” Conte wrote in his post.

In May, Conte posted a 43-minute video addressing how the AI industry fails to compensate creators. “Creators deserve consent, credit and compensation,” Conte said in the video. “Consent meaning, ‘Do I get to opt out of my work being used by these models as training data?’ Credit meaning, ‘If my work is used and you just replicate my whole vibe as an artist… do I get credit for that?’ And then compensation, meaning, ‘Do I get paid when that happens?’ Unfortunately, the answer to all three of these questions right now is a big fat ‘No.’”

AI-generated works are permitted on Patreon, as long as they comply with the platform's terms of use. In 2024, 404 Media reported that many creators of nonconsensual sexual images and videos monetized their content on Patreon. Last year, Patreon updated its content guidelines for AI content to state: “AI-generated depictions of people that are illustrated/animated are permitted; AI-generated hyperrealistic depictions of people are permitted only if the people are real and have documented their explicit consent.”

Updated 7/9 at 7:59 p.m. EDT to include Drew Rowny's statement.

Updated 7/10 at 11:32 EDT to include comment from Cloudflare.

How Makers of Nonconsensual AI Porn Make a Living on Patreon

Accounts that present as benign on Patreon are advertising thousands of nonconsensual AI porn images on Telegram.

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-09 14:09:23

Farmers Finally Get a John Deere Right to Repair Agreement That Doesn’t Screw Them Over

Wednesday, John Deere agreed to give farmers broader access to repair their tractors and farm equipment under an antitrust settlement agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, one of the biggest wins in the long right to repair battle. The settlement is the latest and by far the most important development in several recent lawsuits against John Deere, and is finally an agreement that isn’t full of half measures and doesn’t have massive, obvious loopholes.

The FTC settlement is far better than a recent, highly controversial settlement in a separate class action lawsuit against Deere brought by farmers in Illinois, and it’s worth breaking down the differences. Two years ago, I wrote an article called “The Walls Are Closing in on John Deere’s Tractor Repair Monopoly,” which followed that Illinois case, in which several farmers brought a complex, class action antitrust lawsuit against Deere. The judge in that case, Iain Johnson, wrote several scathing opinions about Deere’s anti-repair practices that indicated that he was seemingly inclined to hit Deere with stiff penalties.

But after years of litigation, the plaintiffs in that case decided to settle with Deere in April, earning a $99 million payout for farmers who paid for repairs over the last decade, and several right-to-repair protections that did not have much in the way of legal teeth.

This $99 million payout was roughly $79 million after legal fees and to be divided among more than 200,000 farmers; this means each farmer will receive roughly $395, or “less than the cost of a single authorized dealer service call for a typical 500-acre farm,” according to an analysis by Willie Cade, a longtime farm right to repair advocate.

“Bottom line is that farmers are getting $0.79 per acre for the eight years of Deere abuse,” Cade told me. “Bad settlement. The settlement is insufficient … the money is a small fraction of what the class could recover at trial, the claims process depends on labor-hour data only Deere holds, and the repair "fixes" are riddled with loopholes that leave Deere's monopoly intact.”

Demand Is Booming for New No Tech, Repairable Tractor
“There is consumer pressure to back away from technology that is unnecessary to perform everyday tasks.”
404 MediaJason Koebler

The Illinois settlement would prohibit farmers covered by it from filing any future repair-related litigation against Deere, and only required Deere to provide parts and repair guides to farmers under poorly defined “fair and reasonable” terms, a loophole that other manufacturers have used to claim that their parts and tools are constantly out of stock or cost astronomic prices.

“The ‘fair and reasonable terms’ standard is not price equality with dealers, nor is it a guaranteed price ceiling,” Cade wrote in his analysis. “Disputes about whether Deere’s pricing meets this standard are subject to Court oversight, but individual farmers may have limited practical ability to challenge pricing that does not obviously cross the line.”

The settlement in the Illinois case was so bad that one of the plaintiffs in the case, Wilson Farms, filed a 53 page formal objection to it two weeks ago, in part because it claims that there are many “unlitigated and uncompensated” cases in which farmers suffered under Deere’s monopoly. Under the settlement, farmers would no longer be able to sue Deere by “terminat[ing] Class members’ ability to collectively challenge Deere’s repair aftermarket monopolization for a generation.”

“Rather than provide any meaningful benefit to the Class, it appears that the proposed Settlement’s most important effect will be to give Deere its most powerful tool yet in its decades-long effort to block farmers from repairing their own equipment,” the objection says. “Extinguishment of farmers’ rights under the law.”

Other farmers called the Illinois settlement “disingenuous” and “unfair.”

The good news is that the wildly disappointing and seemingly unnecessary selling out of farmers’ rights in the Illinois case that Deere appeared to be losing very badly is greatly mitigated by the FTC’s settlement from this week. The FTC case was brought by Lina Khan under the Biden administration; to its credit, the Trump administration decided to continue litigating.
youtube.com/embed/lqwdvFz1Xeo?…
The FTC settlement does not have monetary damages for farmers, but it has far better right to repair protections for John Deere customers moving forward. In the FTC deal, the “fair and reasonable terms” are better defined and are based on the price that John Deere dealers actually pay for repair parts and tools. Deere and its dealers are not allowed to “discriminate or retaliate” against farmers who repair their own equipment (manufacturers have been known to brick devices that consumers fix themselves). The FTC settlement also includes access to farmers for “future repair resources,” meaning repair tools, guides, software, and parts that Deere creates in the future.

Deere must also file “compliance reports” with the FTC, and the FTC will have oversight of the compliance. Crucially, the FTC settlement also does not affect farmers’ private grievances against Deere, meaning it is possible for farmers to sue Deere if the company’s repair practices have affected them.

The FTC settlement is one that has actual legal teeth and enforcement mechanisms that Deere should at least theoretically have to comply with. Earlier agreements and right to repair “wins” for farmers were often half measures (though it’s worth mentioning that Colorado passed a good agriculture right to repair law in 2023 after years of struggle from farmers and advocates). Deere and various farmers’ public interest groups had previously agreed to right to repair “memorandums of understanding” in which Deere promised to make repair parts and tools available to farmers. In practice, however, these tools and parts were often not available, were not as good as what dealers and authorized service providers had access to, or were unreasonably expensive. These memorandums of understanding also had few or no enforcement mechanisms.

Cade told 404 Media in an email that this settlement order “gives farmers real hope.”

Nathan Proctor, senior right to repair campaign director for consumer rights group U.S. PIRG, said in a statement that the FTC settlement “is much better than the deal secured in [the Illinois] class action lawsuit.”

“Deere has now agreed to make available all materials needed to conduct repairs, including some which it has previously withheld,” Proctor said. “I want to thank the FTC for its work on this case. Our goal from the start of our campaign was to ensure that farmers and independent mechanics get everything they need to fix equipment. We will continue to monitor the situation and advocate to ensure that goal is a reality.”

In other words, farmers finally have an actual, major win in the right to repair fight that goes far beyond earlier piecemeal and moral victories.

The Tech Industry Has a New Plan to Stop Right to Repair Laws

Faced with new laws in California and other states, big tech lobbyists want to sign a "Memorandum of Understanding" to prevent "a compliance market where lawyers drive the decisions."

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-09 13:22:11

LinkedIn and X Are Flooded With AI Spam, Browsing Data Suggests

A shocking amount of the content that users encounter on popular social media websites is likely AI generated, according to data from a company that detects AI writing. As much as 41 percent of longform written content seen by users on LinkedIn is likely to be fully AI-generated and roughly a third of longer posts on X are AI-generated; roughly one-in-ten longer Reddit and Substack posts are AI, according to the data.

The data was collected using a Chrome extension from Pangram, a company that detects AI-generated writing. Pangram’s Chrome extension scans writing that users encounter while browsing and determines if any given post is likely AI-generated or likely human written. Because Pangram works passively in the background while a user is browsing the internet, it only scans posts that its users actually see. This helps answer the question of whether AI slop is actually poisoning the internet that humans actually use, versus polluting the internet more broadly. The answer is unequivocal: AI slop writing is not just sequestered off on unpopular automated SEO farms or spam sites that no one reads; humans are regularly wading through AI dreck on hugely popular sites.

“This isn’t something that had really been studied before—how much AI content people are actually seeing,” Max Spero, the CEO of Pangram, told me in a phone interview. “AI content is a tax on readers’ time.”

(Pangram formerly advertised on 404 Media. I am covering this data because I have written many articles about how AI-generated content is taking over social media and is brute forcing social media algorithms, and I have not seen other data that attempts to measure the actual popularity of slop.)

For this research, Pangram specifically asked users of its Chrome extension to opt-in to share Pangram browsing results with the company. The company analyzed roughly a million posts that its users organically scroll through across LinkedIn, Medium, X, Reddit, and Substack over a two-month period. Pangram found that, universally, longer posts on all platforms are more likely to be AI-generated than shorter posts. The company split the content it analyzed into “shortform” (between 50 and 250 words) and “longform” (longer than 250 words).

The data suggests, perhaps unsurprisingly, that a huge portion of longform posts on LinkedIn and X’s new article format are fully AI-generated or AI-assisted (meaning drafted, edited, or rewritten by AI with some human elements). Forty percent of longform LinkedIn posts analyzed in the data were fully AI-written; a quarter of X articles were fully AI written, but another 23 percent of X articles were AI-assisted, the company said. It intuitively makes sense that longer form content is more likely to be AI-generated, because people usually won’t bother to AI-generate a few word response or a pithy comment on a quote tweet, for example. AI is also famously verbose, meaning AI-generated content is more likely to show up in longer posts.

“Our data shows that AI-generated content is a problem across all platforms, and it is hitting longform content especially hard,” the company wrote in a blog post. “Contrary to what one might expect, people are overwhelmingly willing to use AI to speak on their behalf in professional settings that are associated with their real identity, and less likely to use it on casual and anonymous platforms.”

The study also found that top-level posts on LinkedIn and Reddit are far more likely to be AI-generated than the comments underneath an original post.

I have been using the Pangram Chrome extension for several months now, after interviewing Spero for an article I wrote called “Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain.” In that article, I wrote about the cognitive weight of the constant assessments I am doing when I’m browsing the internet, trying to determine whether a piece of writing is AI-generated or not. After writing that article, I decided to try the Pangram Chrome extension to see whether its assessments of likely AI-generated writing aligned with my own brain’s assessments. After using the extension for nearly two months, my experience has largely aligned with what Pangram’s data suggests: Many of the longform articles I see on X are obviously AI generated, and are detected by Pangram as such. A huge amount of the LinkedIn posts I see are obviously AI-generated.

Because of the way the study worked, by passively detecting AI generated content that people see in their normal browsing, the data is potentially more useful than other studies that have sought to estimate the raw percentage of AI-generated content on the internet, but not whether anyone was actually seeing that content. These prior studies, which found that as many as a third of new sites are AI, allowed for the possibility that AI-generated content was flooding the internet but that it was of such a low quality that actual people may not have been seeing it.

The Pangram data raises questions about what platforms are doing to promote or disincentivize AI slop. LinkedIn, for example, had for years built AI writing tools into its platform meaning that it has been incredibly easy to post AI-generated content on the platform and that AI-generated content became incredibly common on the platform. In May, the company announced that it is trying to disincentivize AI content in the name of “keeping conversations real,” and the AI writing assistant is no longer built into the post button. Reddit, meanwhile, has become a vector for companies trying to game LLM tools by promoting their products on the site because AI search tools often scrape Reddit. But Reddit’s moderators are also overwhelmingly anti AI, and the company has worked to delete AI-generated posts and ban accounts that spam. On Monday, Reddit published a blog post saying that “in the age of AI, spam, bot activity, and inauthentic content are top of mind for people who love Reddit (and humans).” In the last few weeks, Reddit launched an ad campaign called “people are best” specifically highlighting that its users are human. A Reddit spokesperson referred us to the blog post when asked for comment.

As we have reported before, no AI detector is 100 percent foolproof, and Pangram certainly has both false positives (human content detected as AI) and false negatives (AI content detected as human). Spero said that the company is constantly working on minimizing both, and that it estimates its false positive rate at roughly one in 10,000. He said he believes the Pangram data is likely a “lower bound” and that the actual problem is likely worse, because people who are willing to install AI detectors on their browsers are likely trying to avoid AI-generated content.

“I think the data generalizes out [to non Pangram users], but that it’s a lower bound on AI content because someone with the Pangram extension probably cares more about seeing AI content than the average person and would be more likely to block or mute AI posters,” he said.

A LinkedIn spokesperson told 404 Media in a statement that “Professionals come to LinkedIn to hear from real people and their unique insights and perspectives. We actively work to reduce low quality, automated or generic content, and while AI can be used to beat the blank page problem, our focus is on surfacing professional conversations that help people advance their careers.”

Substack and X did not respond to a request for comment.

AI Images Detectors Are Being Used to Discredit the Real Horrors of War

Online AI image detecting tools that may or may not work are labeling real photographs from the war in Israel and Palestine as fake, creating what a world leading expert called a “second level of disinformation.”

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-08 17:26:42

Meta Patents AI Device That Tracks Your Emotions, Watches You Take Your Meds

Meta has filed a patent for a system that records your voice and surroundings all day, then uses an AI to analyse your mood. The patent’s stated, theoretical goal is for Meta, a company that makes billions of dollars targeting ads at its users based on their data, is to sell users a wearable that tailors workouts for them based on whether they’re happy or sad.

Patentlyze first noticed the patent which was published on July 2 after Meta filed it back in December of 2025. The filing described an “apparatus” that surveilled a user and their surroundings constantly to craft a better workout. “The audible communications may be associated with contextual factors such as time of day, location, user activity, or digital interaction,” the patent said. “The audible communications may be transcribed, and an emotional-state machine learning model may interpret verbal and nonverbal cues to determine emotional indicators.”
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
According to the filing, Meta needs to know when a user laughs or sighs, where they are physically, and what objects they’re surrounded by. It would even like to know when you’ve taken your meds. “The AI assistant may listen to a user(s) at predefined times to hear various types of communication, such as sighs, laughter, and/or the tone(s) of a voice(s),” the patent said. “The AI assistant may use these inputs to quantify the user's emotional state or generate other insights about the user [...] in another example, the AI assistant may take multiple inputs in in addition to audio inputs (e.g., of a user's voice) to provide a summary of emotional trends based on various inputs (e.g., a happier emotional state associated with a particular time of day or at a time when medication is taken, etc.).”

The more data it has, the patent explains, the better it could understand a user’s moods. “The system increases the precision and reliability of emotional inference by aligning multimodal sensor inputs on synchronized timelines, which creates a novel data structure that supports richer emotional analysis,” it said. “These combined features deliver a technical improvement in automated audio interpretation, enabling continuous emotional monitoring on everyday devices.”
Image via the US Patent Office.
The emotional-analyzing AI would need far more than just a user’s words to determine moods over time. A longer description of the hypothetical training data for the AI included “attributes of thousands of objects” such as a user’s books, personal messages, and newspapers. “In some examples, audible communications may include speech (e.g., voice data), sighs, laughter, or other nonverbal sounds associated with an expression(s), an emotion(s), or ideas. In some examples, the audible communications may include the tone(s) of a voice of a user while making the communication(s),” it said.

All this data, Meta says, would be in service of tailoring better workouts. Humans, the patent explained, are simply not as good as a machine for this. “Personal trainers cannot provide the level of precision in guidance, such as correcting a pose and/or body movement,” it said. “These challenges create a need for a practical approach that uses a single device to observe movement, recommend routines, and provide corrective guidance.”

AI lives and dies by its training data. Many of the leading LLMs have already scanned the entire internet and are still hungry for more. Meta’s patented system would give it unprecedented access to the movements, moods, and interactions of its users. Giving the user workout suggestions in return seems a paltry compensation.

A wearable device that records every sound you make and transcribes it for an LLM while monitoring your exact location is a privacy nightmare. It’s also a fear that underpins many people’s concerns about big tech.
Image via US Patent Office
A wearable that records your every word and divines your emotions would also, necessarily, record your interactions with other people. Meta has pioneered non-consensual public recording with its smartglasses so it’s not shocking to see it file a patent that suggests it’ll move further into that space.

The last time Meta explicitly pursued user’s emotional data, it horrified people. In 2012, the company then called Facebook conducted a study into “emotional contagion” using Facebook’s newsfeed. Meta altered the feeds of 700,000 users to see if it could make them happy or sad just by tweaking what they saw online. Meta found that it could, in fact, alter people’s moods if it wanted. It did this without informing users they’d been part of an experiment.

Now it’s patented a device that will record your laughter and play it back to you. All in service of crafting the perfect workout routine. “An implementation may show that the user laughs more often on certain days, shows improved mood after life events, or expresses more positive emotion during morning routines. The device may also provide citations to specific audio moments that support the emotional interpretation,” it said.

Meta wants to tell you how you feel and it’ll use your own voice to do it.

"Like other companies, patents at Meta are often filed to disclose concepts that may or may not be implemented, and a granted patent does not guarantee that Meta has pursued or will pursue the technology described," Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton told 404 Media.

Update 7/8/26: This story has been updated with a comment from Meta.

A $60 Mod to Meta’s Ray-Bans Disables Its Privacy-Protecting Recording Light

Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses usually include an LED that lights up when the user is recording other people. One hobbyist is charging a small fee to disable that light, and has a growing list of customers around the country.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-08 15:51:42

Porn Platform Gives Sex Workers Stake in the Company's Profits

The co-founder of adult creator subscription platform MintStars announced she’s leaving the platform and donating her ownership shares in the company to its creators and sex workers.

In an email to creators using the platform in late June, Jessica Van Meir wrote: "I am donating my shares in the company to create a 20 percent co-ownership pool for our creators." She wrote that her remaining three percent of the shares will be donated to SWOP Behind Bars, a non-profit that supports incarcerated sex workers and sex trafficking survivors in the U.S.

“With this step, which completes my personal mission to launch a company for and by adult content creators, I will also be officially moving on from my position as a Director at MintStars,” Van Meir wrote in the email. Van Meir is a Harvard PhD candidate studying the sex workers’ rights movement in Latin America, and also co-founded the Boston Sex Workers and Allies Collective three years ago. Van Meir and Daniel Sargent co-founded MintStars in 2021; Sargent will remain at the company as CEO.

Setting up a share pool sets a precedent rarely seen on subscription sites, where creators are directly rewarded for the success of the platform, not just their own individual work.

Van Meir said attacks on her academic work outside of MintStars contributed to her decision to step away. “In the past year, my PhD research has faced attacks from anti-sex work organizations that have attempted to use my affiliation with MintStars to undermine the credibility of my research,” Van Meir wrote in the letter to creators. “I would never want my work with the company to prevent my research and activism from benefiting sex worker communities, so it is time for me to pass the baton.”

The pool of shares for creators will be allocated “in proportion to their contributions to the platform,” Van Meir wrote, adding that the platform plans to launch a points system to earn ownership. If the company is ever sold or pays out dividends to shareholders, creators will be paid in proportion to those points via phantom shares. Phantom shares or stock are a cash incentive tied to company performance that doesn’t dilute the company’s ownership stock or give holders voting rights, but do reward holders — typically executives or employees, but in this case, creators — for their contributions to the company’s success.

According to Van Meir, MintStars creators will be able to earn points in accordance to their earned revenue, how many referrals they’ve made, and number of months they’ve actively used the platform. “This means that you will share in the profits of the company’s success, in a fair proportion to how much you’ve contributed,” she wrote.

Podcast: Why AI Porn Sucks (with Noelle Perdue)
Noelle and Sam discuss everything from sexbots and AI porn to censorship, age verification legislation, and their favorite parody porn flicks.
404 MediaSamantha Cole

Many social media and user-generated content platforms have grown massive on the strength and support of sex workers who popularized it. Some of the biggest, like X and Instagram, grew thanks to sexual content; others, like OnlyFans, have been criticized for considering banning adult content due to payment processing problems and banking discrimination in the past.

Demonia, a financial dominatrix who’s used MintStars since 2023, told 404 Media she’s felt frustrated by unstable creator platforms and online censorship in the past, and hopes to put more effort into her MintStars presence following this announcement. “I will be honest, I didn't think I'd live to see such a revolutionary choice in a strictly capitalistic society and environment that promotes individualism to embarrassing levels, and I am elated to have chosen to be part of this project from its early steps,” Demonia told me in an email. “Not only cooperative enterprises are healthier environments to work in on a general level, but there is now a further level of security for the creators who decide to invest in the platform as a source of income, and a great deal of motivation to see it succeed.”

AVN reported that the program for earning points will launch this month and take retroactive activity into account, and that MintStars will also introduce new governance measures including a Creator Advisory Board.

“This co-ownership means to me that MintStars aims to empower sex workers on a practical level, recognizing their importance and their rights, without limiting our creativity and safety in the name of profit, and it will definitely impact my effort into making sure such an example lives to make the adult industry's history, not only because it's a better choice for myself only, but because it also shows to everyone that there is a better way to enjoy our kinky spaces without being afraid of being deplatformed, of our content being rejected or deleted, of our entire existence being put into discussion,” Demonia said.
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“This partnership is another important step forward in creating a complete ecosystem of care that is both for and by adult industry workers,” a spokesperson for SWOP Behind Bars told 404 Media. “We're excited to deepen our ties in the MintStars community and anticipate that Ms. Van Meir's shares donation will enable us to better understand and meet those workers' needs.”

MintStars uses the U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin USDC to process payments. Fans and customers can pay as they would on any other website, with a credit card. Creators can receive payouts in fiat as well. Last month, MintStars announced a new partnership with Payy Network. "Creators face financial discrimination every day, bank accounts shut down, payment processors blocking transactions, and earnings delayed for weeks," Sargent said in an announcement of that partnership. "Crypto solved access, but it didn't solve privacy or safety. Nobody's financial activity should be publicly exposed on a blockchain." Settlements on the blockchain also prevent some of the most risky aspects of accepting payments as an adult site, including chargebacks, censorship, and banking discrimination.

“The fact of the matter in the adult industry is that without the working women who make platforms all of their revenue, the latter would never succeed and we can now choose for what we believe in and choose who believes in us, MintStars has given us the opportunity to have our voices heard,” Demonia said. “I do hope more sex workers will put their safety and rights first and focus their energies where they will be undoubtedly rewarded, as it's been proven over and over again since the beginning of this project.

Podcast: Why AI Porn Sucks (with Noelle Perdue)

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-08 14:05:42

We Are Living in a ‘ChatGPT Flyer Pandemic’

I am not sure, exactly, how many ChatGPT signs, flyers, or advertisements I had seen without noticing. But I do remember that once I began noticing them, I saw them everywhere. A few blocks from my house, on a display easel: “Break Free Surfing California: SURF LESSONS VENICE BEACH.” On Instagram, a going out of business closeout sale for a skateboard shop. On invites to parties from friends, Fourth of July barbecues being thrown by bars, concert posters. I saw ChatGPT-designed advertisements for drug deliveries in Berlin, World Cup parties in France, junk hauling services in South Carolina, and fundraisers in Texas. The scourge of low effort, stylistically indistinguishable AI-generated signs and flyers have flooded both social media and, increasingly, posters, billboards, and signs in real life: “So ain’t nobody gonna address this ChatGPT flyer pandemic we’re in?” one viral post on Threads read last month.

“YOUR FLYER LOOKS LIKE GARBAGE,” a viral ChatGPT-generated parody of the genre posted by Jill Oliver reads. “Hey if this is your flyer, I’m not going, I’m not donating, I’m not sharing. Don’t ask me.” The “ChatGPT flyer pandemic” has become a big topic of conversation among graphic designers, musicians, bars, and small business owners who care about design and showing that they’ve put effort into something.

Once you notice a ChatGPT flyer, you will see them everywhere if you keep your eyes open. The art of the format is basically big, flashy bright text on dark background and an AI-generated or AI-altered image. There is almost universally a little box of generic icons in a bulleted list vaguely tied to whatever event or business it’s advertising, lines coming off of the text to emphasize whatever it’s saying, and either bolded words or underlined text and tons of arrows and checkmarks haphazardly strewn throughout. It is easier to just show you what they look like than describe it, because they all look basically the same:
From a post by Facebook user Zakkai Rayne Morningstar
The argument against ChatGPT-generated flyers is basically the same as the argument against all other types of AI slop: It looks generic, lazy, and like businesses don’t care. The designer Kenzi Green made a video about the backlash to AI flyers that has 870,000 views called “Customers are begging you to stop the AI slop.” Another video of a graphic designer putting his head in his hands and shaking his head while ChatGPT flyers scrolls past called “we are living in an AI flyer pandemic” has nearly 7 million views.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Kenzi ↠ Luxury Brand Identity + Website Designer (@kenzigreendesign)

“Your logo, food truck wrap, social media graphics, menus all look AI generated,” Green said. “People are going to be able to spot that from a mile away and choose the competitor next to you that looks like they actually hired a human being,” she said. “It might feel like you’re ‘saving time and money,’ but you’re actually slowly turning your brand into something generic like all the other brands out there using AI tools.”

The rejection of ChatGPT flyers infesting real life spaces is real, growing, and cuts across languages and borders. The New Jersey-based sticker company Death By Stickers has started selling a “CERTIFIED AI BULLSHIT” sticker for people to slap on ChatGPT flyers: “With your roll of 50 “CERTIFIED AI BULLSHIT” labels you can let everyone around town know when that flyer is AI SLOP,” the company says. The Thomas House Bar in Dublin has said it will stop letting people post AI flyers in its pub: “We’re not accepting AI posters or flyers for the pub,” the bar wrote on Instagram. “We’re right next to Ireland’s biggest art college, lads. It’s not a good look.” A venue in Oakland has banned AI flyers, too. I have seen anti-AI posters in Portuguese (“TUDO IGUAL: FLYER GERADO PELO CHATGT? CLARO QUE SIM!” Same old story: Flyer generated by ChatGPT? You bet!) and German (“BITTE KEINE FLYER MIT CHATGPT” Please don’t create flyers with ChatGPT). I have seen numerous viral posts from people saying that they will not go to businesses or events that use AI posters to promote, lest one get roped into a Fyre Fest or Willy Wonka AI hellscape experience. And I have begun seeing real graphic designers offering low-cost services for companies that promise not to use AI flyers.

Jonathon Yule, executive creative director for design at the creative studio Concrete in Toronto told 404 Media that these types of posters continue a long tradition of terrible graphic design that we see in the world, but with “none of the charm” that may accidentally come from a business owner making something low quality.

“Terrible posters are nothing new,” Yule said. “The only difference today is generative AI makes it easier than ever to get the veneer of "polish" with none of the charm that these types of posters might have had when the designer was faced with constraints (usually time, resources or experience). These types of posters would have typically been done by designers either working at a small agency or print shop and these mid-level design jobs are disappearing. Stepping back to think about where this style (and its acceptance in the world) might have come from I'm going to have to pin the blame on YouTube and AB-tested-whatever-gets-more-clicks approach to thumbnail design with the exaggerated facial expressions and shoddy yet eye catching typography.”

In the last few weeks, since I began noticing ChatGPT flyers, I’ve been taking photos of ones I’ve seen in real life, and have asked my friends to take photos of AI flyers they’ve seen out in the real world. I’ve seen them at Mexican restaurants and for surfing lessons in Los Angeles, on business cards for drug delivery services and on döner shops in Berlin, for pretzel shops in Philadelphia, and so on. I've tried at times to not notice these, but like with other AI, my brain feels like it is constantly trying to calculate whether any given sign or flyer was made using AI, and, if so, whether it actually matters.

These can be generated in ChatGPT easily by asking it to generate you a flyer or advertisement for any sort of event or business you can think of. ChatGPT routinely generated flyers that are essentially identical in format to what I see all the time when I threw random events at it: “Can you make a poster for my bar? It’s called Jason’s bar and we’re having a Fourth of July party. It goes from 4-10 pm and has food, fun, and fireworks,” and it instantly generated this, which is emblematic of the style.

None of the ChatGPT posters have the “Graphic Design Is My Passion” charm of quickly dashed off or handwritten posters, nor even the unhinged excess you might see in, for example, a Softbank Vision Fund slide presentation. For my money, one of the most iconic pieces of graphic design of the last 20 years is “Friendship Ended With Mudasir, Now Salman is my best friend.” With a ChatGPT poster, you get none of the sheer emotion that comes through the page with a mouse-drawn X. Here’s to bringing back an MS Paint aesthetic, handwritten scribbles, or literally anything else.

Friendship Ended With Mudasir | Know Your Meme

Friendship Ended With Mudasir refers to a Facebook post by Pakistani government worker Asif Raza Rana, announcing he was no longer friends with a man named

^{Scarfsman (Know Your Meme)}

404 Media

2026-07-08 12:15:17

'Knockoff' Browser Extension Hides Sketchy Brands on Amazon

A software developer made a Chrome and Firefox extension called Knockoff that automatically hides, grays out, or filters products from sketchy brands on Amazon, which highlights just how many shady brands are on the platform and how commonly they show up on searches for basic items.

In just a few minutes of using the extension, Knockoff dimmed product listings for screwdrivers made by “SUNHZMCKP,” spoons made by “SACATR,” and a lamp made by “ROTTOGOON.” In a tweet announcing the extension, developer Josh Pigford wrote “Sorry to brands like WNPETHOME, EHEYCIGA, YXYL, LU&MN, JOYIN, TOMY, GODONLIF, YOOJEE, LINGTENG, LANEIGE, VISCOO, BIODANCE, COOFANDY, BALENNZ, TOSY, and LUENX.” The extension can also hide all sponsored product listings. The extension quickly went viral as a much-needed filter for people who still use Amazon and, for those who don’t use Amazon because of its horrendous labor practices and other concerns, it is evidence of what an incredible wasteland the platform has become.

In a video call, Pigford told me that he had been thinking about making Knockoff for a while but that he finally decided to do it last weekend. “I was cutting the grass and about to get my trimmer out to do some weed eating, and it wouldn’t crank. So I decided to get some specific tools, and I searched for them and was like ‘What are these brands? Am I going insane?’ I just wanted something from a common brand or something I was familiar with,” he said. “I was like ‘man, I’ve gotta build something.’”

Pigford said that Knockoff is essentially building a list of brands to allow or not allow, and that it uses several different criteria to do this, including looking at the names of the brands: “Basically number of consonants, number of vowels, how they are grouped together, whether they’re in all caps or not,” he said. This means that brands like “EHEYCIGA” will be automatically added to the filter list. But the list of blocked brands is intended to be determined by its community of users, and any user can ask the extension to allow or block any specific brand for themselves. The project builds on previous similar attempts to highlight sketchy brands on Amazon, including one called AmazonBrandFilter and The Markup’s Amazon Brand Detector. The extension also allows anyone who has downloaded it to report potentially sketchy brands and to report brands that have been accidentally flagged as knockoffs.

The extension runs locally and doesn’t require an account to use, and doesn’t send data back to any server. It is free. “I stand to benefit nothing directly economically, it’s a nice little tool I wanted to make,” Pigford said.

Knockoff is pretty useful whether you use Amazon or not. For those who don’t use Amazon, it highlights a problem repeatedly shown by Joe Biden’s Federal Trade Commission in an antitrust lawsuit against the company, which is that much of Amazon is pay-to-play, with brands needing to buy ads or placement boosts in order to be featured at the top of search results. The platform has also become an algorithmic and financial race to the bottom, with companies stealing others’ designs, jamming their product pages with keywords that will perform well in search, and creating fly-by-night brands to try to end up at the top of search results.

“There was somebody who sent me a screenshot from using the extension and the first 20 items or something were all grayed out. Like there were all these knockoff brands before they could find a legitimate item,” Pigford said. “It’s like, OK, that about sums it up.”

“I think people want control over what it is that they're seeing on the internet,” he added. “This sort of gives some control back to just getting everything shoved in your face. It’s like fighting back against the algorithm to some extent.”

Amazon Has Turned Into an Monopolistic Shithole Littered With Pay-to-Play Ads, FTC Lawsuit Solemnly Argues

"Amazon shifted gears so that it now litters its storefront with pay-to-play advertisements. In addition to overcharging its customers, Amazon is degrading the services it provides them."

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-08 11:11:45

LARPING: How Influencers Fake Being Rich

This week, we talk about Jason's dive into the world of LARPing, where hustlebros and influencers use fake YouTube, OnlyFans, and Stripe dashboards as "proof" that they're rich in order to sell low-quality get-rich-quick courses in pyramid schemes. We show how easy it is to pretend like you're rich, and how these strategies are used all over social media.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
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• How I Bought a Private Jet By Selling $10 Subscriptions to 404 Media
• Inside Cannes, the Advertising Industry’s Biggest Party

The 404 Media Podcast

Tech News Podcast · Updated Weekly · Welcome to the podcast from 404 Media where Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, and Jason catch you up on the stories we published this week. 404 Media is a journalist-owned digital media company exploring the way …

^{404 Media (Apple Podcasts)}

404 Media

2026-07-07 16:06:31

Cops Say Waymo Snitched on Teens for Allegedly Drinking and Shooting a Toy Gun

A Waymo in California allegedly called the cops on two teenagers for “drinking and shooting from the vehicle,” according to local police.

On Monday, the San Mateo Police Department posted on Facebook: “Parents do you know where your teens are? @waymo does!”

The police department continued in the post: “Two 15 year olds up to trouble in a Waymo this afternoon were detained after Waymo reported they were drinking and shooting from the vehicle. After calling us and stopping the car, we were able to safely remove both subjects and determined they were shooting Orbeez from the car as they sipped on afternoon libations while being chauffeured around town in the driverless vehicle.”

In a video posted by the police, several officers approached the Waymo vehicle with guns drawn.

Orbeez are polymer beads that expand and become squishy when wet. The police department’s Facebook post doesn’t clarify what the teens were “shooting” from, but implied that they were using toy guns, water guns, or BB guns. A photo on the post shows a painted-over SplatRBall toy gun, which shoots water beads. The police also posted a photo of two Powerade bottles full of orange water beads.

“Shooting projectiles at speed can cause real damage. And lest not[sic] forget the underage drinking. All bad ideas today for these two. Well, the Waymo might have been the smartest idea yet, because driving impaired would’ve made this so much worse,” San Mateo police wrote.

Waymo, which is owned by Google, says on a support page that its support team “may review video under certain circumstances, including after an issue is brought to our attention,” and “in more urgent circumstances, Support may access live video during a trip.”

Waymo did not immediately respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.

San Mateo Police Department

Parents do you know where your teens are? @waymo does! Two 15 year olds up to trouble in a Waymo this afternoon were detained after Waymo reported they were drinking and shooting from the vehicle....

^Facebook

404 Media

2026-07-07 12:49:05

Scientists Gave Mice Cocaine. This Is What It Did to Their Brains

Just one exposure to cocaine produces changes to the brains of mice that persist for at least two weeks, and perhaps longer, according to research that will be presented at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) Forum 2026 on Tuesday.

The results suggest that cocaine, a popular drug used by an estimated 25 million people around the world, may rewire the genomes inside cells of the brain’s reward system, called dopaminergic neurons. The finding that could shed light on the mechanisms that drive addiction, and possibly inform treatments in humans.

People can become hooked to cocaine the first time they try it, but it is far more common for addiction to set in on repeated exposures. Decades of research has identified many of the neurochemical pathways activated by cocaine, but much less is known about the disruptive impacts, also known as brain “insults,” on the genomes inside neurons.
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“We essentially knew there were some unknown phenomena that were going on in the dopaminergic neurons that were not clear,” said Ana Pombo, Bloomberg distinguished professor of biology at Johns Hopkins University, and guest group leader at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, in a call with 404 Media.

“We were actually interested to know if there is any long-term memory [of exposure], and this has not been studied,” continued Pombo, who presented her team’s research on Tuesday at FENS, Europe’s largest neuroscience meeting. “There's virtually no data we know of looking two weeks after this first exposure. Our experimental design was a shot in the dark.”

Like almost all cells, neurons contain copies of the genome, a genetic sequence unique to each individual organism that folds in complex structures. To observe cocaine’s impacts on the structure of the genome, Pombo and her colleagues studied the neurons of mice exposed to cocaine compared to a control group of unexposed mice. The team used an approach called genome architecture mapping that identifies where parts of the genome are in close proximity, or touch each other, which captures critical information about changes to its overall structure.
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After 24 hours, the genomes of the exposed mice showed several changes relative to the control group. Even more significantly, some of those shifts were still present after two weeks. The experiment hints that one cocaine exposure is enough to imprint long-term injuries into the genome, which may prime the brain for a stronger addictive response to the drug on a second exposure.

“This would be like a silent injury, where the genome is altered,” Pombo said. “It looks like everything is normal, the mouse or the animal is going about its life, but if another exposure came along, it would have much more consequences.”

The experiment exposed cocaine’s impact on the brain at the genome level, but it also raises a host of other questions, such as how long these changes last and how they vary between individuals and species. To that end, the team are working toward repeating the experiment on longer timescales, such as six months or more, as well as with different animals.

“There’s going to be some elements of stochasticity,” Pombo said. “Each individual may respond slightly differently, depending maybe also on the time of the day, what's going on, or what's happened the day before.”

“The big question for us, where we believe we can contribute is really understanding the susceptibility, and trying to shed light on why some individuals become addicted and many don't,” she continued. “So many people that get exposed to cocaine don't become addicted. Only a small portion do. Why does this happen?”

The more scientists learn about the underlying mechanisms, the more they can parse that question—and perhaps, figure out ways to reverse the injuries done to the brain to help treat addiction.

“By looking at what parts of the genome are altered, we can identify candidate mechanisms that drive the alteration,” Pombo concluded. “We can also hypothesize ways in which it would be possible to somehow revert or encourage the system, at least the nuclear part, to reverse to the original status.”

Tip Jar

Ana Pombo - Specialisation of brain cell types is encoded by specific 3d genome architectures

^{Wellcome Connecting Science Learning and Training (YouTube)}

404 Media

2026-07-06 10:00:54

Footage Shows Cop Stalking Woman He Met on a TV Set After Surveilling Her With a License Plate Reader

A police officer speeds 70 MPH down a two-lane highway running over a bridge in the Florida Keys. He passes a dump truck in a no-passing zone, then immediately does it again, crossing over a double-yellow line to pass another truck. He passes a third vehicle, nearly causing a head-on collision with a white pickup truck that veers away from him in the oncoming traffic. The cop keeps driving, and sees the SUV he’s been in pursuit of. He flicks his sirens and lights on and pulls it over.

The cop, Lamar Roman, wasn’t trying to pull over a suspected criminal. He was tracking and chasing a woman that he met and harassed on the set of the AppleTV+ show Bad Monkey, which he had worked a security detail shift on a few weeks prior to pulling her over. After meeting the woman, catcalling her and harassing her for her full name and Instagram details, the cop illegally looked up her vehicle information on DAVID, a Florida Department of Motor Vehicles database for law enforcement. He then put her license plate details on a surveillance “hotlist,” meaning he would get a notification in real time anytime she drove by an AI-powered license plate surveillance camera.

Roman told investigators that he saw the woman as a “shiny thing” and knew that using surveillance tools to track her was illegal, according to police records. He told investigators that “I knew that when I put [her into DAVID], I’m like ‘fuck’ and that’s why I stopped right after and nothing else.” But that wasn’t the end of it; he investigated the woman then used a powerful license plate tracking database to find her location and chase her down. In doing so, he also “almost cause[d] a head on collision while passing as a white truck traveling northbound had to veer off the roadway to avoid a collision.”

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The shocking and egregious incident highlights the fact that police around the country have abused their access to surveillance tools for their own personal stalking projects, and shows how different law enforcement databases and surveillance tools can be tied together to investigate and follow anyone.

The cop, Lamar Roman, was caught and arrested in March, local news outlets reported. 404 Media has obtained video from Roman’s police cruiser and court records associated with the case that show how Roman met, harassed, investigated, and stalked the woman, who was not suspected of committing any crime, had nothing to do with Roman, and had no idea she was being tracked using a series of police surveillance software, hardware, and government databases.

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"he also “almost cause[d] a head on collision while passing as a white truck traveling northbound had to veer off the roadway to avoid a collision," the police report said.

Earlier this month, we reported on the fact that police around the country have been caught abusing Flock automated license plate cameras. Roman used a very similar system called Guardian; Flock has faced lots of scrutiny from journalists, privacy activists, and the general public over the last year, but it is worth noting that Flock is just one player in the booming AI license plate reader surveillance business and other systems face many of the same privacy problems Flock does.

Roman met the woman while working an off-duty security detail for Bad Monkey in early February. According to police affidavits, arrest warrants, and summaries of police interviews with both Roman and the woman, Roman whistled and “catcalled” the woman as she got off a bus for extras on set. Roman shouted “Oh my God, why didn’t nobody tell me we were bringing models to set,” the woman told investigators. The woman said “she was immediately uncomfortable with the situation,” and she did not know whether Roman was a real cop or whether he was playing a cop on the show. The woman “told Deputy Roman she has a boyfriend,” the warrant said. “Roman stated something along the lines of ‘I need your name and number just in case I pull you over someday.’” Roman pressured the woman into giving him her Instagram handle; she told investigators that she tried to be “standoffish,” to deter him. The woman was “pulled away by other extras who she knew and the others acknowledged Deputy Roman would not leave [her] alone.”

The woman “stated during one interaction Deputy Roman stated, ‘I’m going to pull you over.’ [She] stated she responded, "no your not.’ [sic] [She] stated Deputy Roman repeated himself and appeared to be flirting and joking. [She] stated she advised Deputy Roman that her boyfriend would not like that, and he ‘laughed it off.’”

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The court records and arrest warrant detail what happened in the days and weeks after Roman left the set. First, Roman looked the woman up in Master Name Index (MNI), a police database, and “went from there,” he told investigators. With her driver’s license number, he looked her up in DAVID, a Florida Department of Motor Vehicles database for law enforcement. The records say that he looked up several variations of the woman’s name to obtain her “record detail, signature, vehicles, and current photo.” He wrote that the purpose of the search was a “background investigation.” Roman told investigators that he knew it was illegal to look the woman up in DAVID without a valid reason: “Right when I did that, I was like ‘fuck,” he told investigators. He then looked her and her license plate up the Florida Crime Information Center / National Crime Information Center, which are law enforcement information sharing databases, which contained additional information about the woman and her vehicle from Florida Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.

Roman then took the woman’s license plate and created a “hotlist” in the Guardian automated license plate reader system. A hotlist allows police officers to create a list of “hot plates” of vehicles that they are searching for. Nominally, hotlist systems are supposed to be used for police officers looking for stolen vehicles or for specific people suspected of crimes. Hotlists send a real-time notification when an ALPR system detects a car on the list driving by a surveillance camera. After he got a ping with the woman’s location, Roman sped down the two lane highway toward her pinged location, dangerously and illegally passed three vehicles, almost caused a head-on collision, and illegally pulled her over for no reason. The police records state that Roman was going at least 70 mph (which triggered a cruiser video recording) while doing this; the speed limit in that part of the Florida Keys is 55 mph.

Roman did not have a body camera on nor did his vehicle capture any audio of the encounter, according to the records. He also did not log the stop in the system the department uses to catalog traffic stops. But the woman described what happened after he pulled her over. She told investigators that she “observed a patrol car cut off the truck behind her and she had a feeling it was Deputy Roman.”

“When Deputy Roman approached she stated, ‘I knew it was you’ and asked, ‘does all my information pop up on your screen?’ and further inquired, ‘How did you know it was me?’ She stated Deputy Roman responded, ‘I told you I'd find you and pull you over.’ She stated Deputy Roman also stated, ‘And I was hoping your boyfriend was in the car so I can pull him out and give him a hard time.’ She stated she responded that she did not think that was a good idea,” the police report reads.

She said that Roman asked her why she didn’t follow him back on Instagram, that she needed to leave, and said she would follow him back on Instagram but didn’t want to text and drive. She told investigators that she “said this to get Deputy Roman to leave her alone.” She “advised Deputy Roman she was late to getting where she was going and repeatedly asked if she could leave. [She] stated Deputy Roman eventually told her she could leave.”

The woman told investigators that she had no idea the extent of the surveillance she was under: “I advised [her] the full extent of which Deputy Roman utilized law enforcement databases to search her and obtain personal information about her,” the police investigator wrote. “I advised [her,] Deputy Roman also utilized the LPR to track her vehicle’s movement in the county. [She] was completely unaware of Deputy Romans use of databases to obtain her personal information.”

Roman admitted to extensively surveilling the woman and driving recklessly in an interview with investigators:

‘So you were pursuing her in an effort to just stop her and say 'hey?’’ Deputy Roman responded, ‘yeah I know it's stupid.’ I asked if there was any legal reason Deputy Roman put Brock's vehicle tag in the LPR, was she suspected of anything? Deputy Roman responded no.”

Keys deputy misused official databases to pursue woman he met on set of ‘Bad Monkey’: MCSO

An arrested Florida Keys sheriff’s deputy misused official law enforcement databases in pursuit of a woman he met on the set of the television show “Bad Monkey,” according to documents obtained by Local 10 News on Wednesday.

^{Chris Gothner (wplg)}

404 Media

2026-07-04 10:00:09

SOLVED: The Case of the Missing Megalodon

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that glimpsed a bygone world, caught an 80-foot fish, outshone the stars, and declared scientific independence.

First, a mysterious group of extinct human relatives were probably not as advanced as once thought, a finding that sheds light on their possible lineage. Then: a gem from the paleontological lost-and-found, megaconstellations versus stellar constellations, and oh-say-can-you-see 250 years of American science history?

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

I do not doubt their hearts, just the reach of their arms

Veatch, E. Grace et al. ‘Taphonomic analysis at Liang Bua reveals the behavioral and technological capabilities of Homo floresiensis.” Science Advances.

A long time ago on a lush tropical island, a population of “hobbits” ventured into a cave to scavenge the kills of dragons. This is not a Tolkien tale—it’s the upshot of a new study about the short-statured human relative Homo floresiensis, which lived for more than a million years on the Indonesian island of Flores alongside Komodo dragons.

Colloquially known as hobbits for their short 3.5-foot stature, H. floresiensis arrived on Flores about 1.27 million years ago and vanished around the same time as the arrival of modern humans some 50,000 years ago.

The hobbits have inspired much debate over their possible ancestry and whether they were capable of making fires or hunting big game, based on the discovery of charred and butchered bones of the extinct proboscidean (elephant relative) Stegodon in the expansive Liang Bua cave, which also contains many hobbit remains.

Now, researchers have cast doubt on the hobbits as hunters and fire-wielders, suggesting instead that they likely scavenged Stegodon carcasses that had already been killed by Komodo dragons. Though the hobbits left marks on the bones with butchering tools, the team concluded that they consumed the flesh raw. The charred remains, meanwhile, were likely left by late-arriving modern humans.
A facial reconstruction of Homo floresiensis. Image: Cicero Moraes et al
“Komodo dragons likely had primary access to these remains leaving behind only low-utility elements for H. floresiensis to scavenge,” said researchers led by E. Grace Veatch of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. The team added that the bodily proportions of the hobbits are “unconducive for running and throwing that would make the act of hunting large game (in the traditional sense) quite difficult.”

I guess these people have never seen Merry Brandybuck help take down the Witch-king of Angmar. In all seriousness, the study has implications for unraveling the mysterious lineage of these hobbits, as it may mean they descended from hominins that never achieved fire making or big-game hunting.

The team noted that the elephant relatives may have been attracted to Liang Bua not just to “seek relief from heat and/or for sources of water, salt, and minerals” but as “a place to mourn deceased individuals.” Grieving proboscideans, halflings, and venomous dragons? It’s enough to make one a Middle Earth truther.

In other news…

SOLVED: The case of the missing megalodon

Shimada, Kenshu et al. Rediscovery of the associated gigantic vertebrae of the extinct megatooth shark, Otodus megalodon, from the Upper Miocene Gram Formation in Denmark, and comments on its paleobiological significance and the maximum possible size of the species” Palaeontologia Electronica.

Ever misplace an important item like a wallet, or heirloom, or the backbone of an extinct giant shark? We’ve all been there. But scientists have good news on the latter front: a long-lost vertebrae of a Megalodon—the biggest shark in history and star of The Meg—has been rediscovered after it went missing in 1989 during a move between facilities.
Dr. Mette Elstrup holding a 10.8-million-year-old vertebral fossil specimen of the extinct megatooth shark, Otodus megalodon, from the Gram Formation of Denmark featured in the new study, and a reconstructed O. megalodon jaw model in the background. Image: Museum of Southern Jutland, Denmark
“An attentive collection manager at [National History Museum of Denmark] recently rediscovered a small portion of the vertebral specimen, which is now formally cataloged as NHMD 157890,” said researchers led by Kenshu Shimada of DePaul University. “We report on the rediscovery of the specimen, which was thought to be lost.”

The resurfacing of NHMD 157890, which belonged to a Megalodon that lived nearly 11 million years ago, confirms that this animal could have grown as large as 80 feet, perhaps even bigger.

The fossil measures nine inches across, making it “the largest shark vertebral specimen known to date, and quite possibly even the largest non-tetrapod vertebrae ever recorded.”

Once again, a killer shark has arrived just before the Fourth of July weekend. We’re lucky that, unlike the shark from Jaws, this Meg is very dead.

They can’t take the sky from you…oh wait nvm

Hainaut, O. R. “Large or bright satellite constellations Effects on observations, including background sky brightness.” Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The age of the Megalodon is over. The time of the megaconstellation has come. Space is rapidly becoming populated by these immense satellite networks, prompting astronomers to raise alarms about their impact on our view of the night sky.

In a new study, a scientist warns that current plans to launch upward of 1.7 million satellites in the near future would “have a devastating impact on astronomical observations” because satellites “photo-bomb” images and also produce light pollution and radio interference.

Of particular concern are extremely bright objects, such as the large orbital data centers proposed by SpaceX or the mirror-like satellites proposed by the startup Reflect Orbital, which aims to provide sunlight to Earth at nighttime.
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“A large constellation such as SpaceX’s Orbital Data Center…would place thousands of satellites above naked-eye visibility—comparable to the number of natural stars visible in a dark sky,” Hainaut said. “Reflect Orbital would produce more than 100 Venus-bright satellites by 2030 and over 1,000 by 2035…In light-polluted regions, one could effectively see only artificial satellites at night.”

“Beyond astronomy, they raise concerns about orbital crowding, space debris, and atmospheric pollution from launches and re-entries,” he added. What’s more, these megaconstellations also get in the way of traditional skywatching, a cross-cultural practice that dates back tens of thousands of years. Without regulatory measures on this infrastructure, the night sky that we’ve gazed upon for countless generations may have vanished within our lifetimes.

The semiquin-science-tennial

Wellerstein, Alex et al. “American science at 250.” Science.

Cookouts. Fireworks. And 250 years of wild, spectacular, and frequently ill-advised science. If you’re looking for some Fourth of July brainfood, check out this week’s special issue of Science which reflects on America’s scientific legacy on this semiquincentennial.

“The scholars writing here do not shy away from grappling with paradoxes in US science history, confronting the complexities of six notable moments: the Manhattan Project, the unrecognized contributions of enslaved people to early agricultural knowledge, the rise of Silicon Valley, the advent of biotechnology, the eugenics movement, and the space program,” said Valerie Thompson, the books and culture editor of Science.

“In doing so, they invite science lovers, critics, and everyone in between to contemplate the past and future of the US scientific enterprise and related questions about democracy, representation, and state support for research.”

Happy contemplating! See you next week.

SpaceX’s Satellite Megaconstellations Are Astrocolonialism, Indigenous Advocates Say

Satellite companies such as SpaceX and Amazon aim to provide global broadband, but their networks threaten dark skies and Indigenous traditions that depend on them.

^{Becky Ferreira (VICE)}

404 Media

2026-07-03 10:00:02

Behind the Blog: With Blogs Like These, Who Needs a Private Jet

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 Supreme Court, the private jet, and AI on the TV.

JOSEPH: I used to cover court cases and judge’s opinions a lot more back at Motherboard. Sometimes it was in cases I broke news in, like that time the FBI secretly ran a dark web child abuse website. Other times it is big decisions that have wider impacts on privacy, surveillance, and government power.

Here’s big news regarding the latter sort of decision. I first saw news of it on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s blog. As it says at the start: “You have an expectation of privacy in location data that reveals your movements in the physical world, and even short-term surveillance of these movements is a search subject to the Fourth Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today in Chatrie v. United States.”

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Behind the Blog: With Blogs Like These, Who Needs a Private Jet

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-02 10:00:09

Companies Are Throttling Employees’ AI Use Because It’s Too Expensive

Companies across tech, entertainment, banking, and many other industries are throttling their employees’ use of AI and pleading with workers to use less powerful models to stop AI costs from spiraling out of control, according to leaked Slack chats, screenshots of internal dashboards, emails, and more material obtained by 404 Media from half a dozen companies including Atlassian, Adobe, and Amazon. In at least one case, AI spending has tripled to more than $15 million a month.

The news shows the looming fallout from companies adopting AI as quickly as possible, and AI providers’ moves to charge enterprises based on how much they use AI rather than a flat fee. Emails obtained by 404 Media even show some companies cutting off access to some AI models altogether in an attempt to stop burning through their AI tokens, and big tech companies like Adobe are ending unlimited access to Claude.

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Companies Are Throttling Employees’ AI Use Because It’s Too Expensive

Sources and leaks from Amazon, Adobe, Atlassian, Citi, and more show what is really happening with AI right now: companies are trying to rein in AI use as costs spiral out of control.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-07-01 20:40:59

Podcast: The AI Tokenpocalypse Is Here

We start this week with Joseph’s story about the Tokenpocalypse, which is companies scrambling to stop spending so much on AI after providers started charging per AI token. After the break, Joseph and Emanuel tell us about the ways companies are trying to do this, including using a tool to make their LLMs talk like cavemen. In the subscribers-only section, Emanuel explains how entirely fake AI-generated flowers are all over eBay, Etsy, and Amazon.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
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• ⁠The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI⁠
• ⁠Companies Are Making Claude and Codex Talk Like Cavemen to Stop⁠
• ⁠AI’s Soaring Costs⁠⁠Scammers Sell Seeds for Exotic AI-Generated Flowers That Don’t Exist⁠

The 404 Media Podcast

Tech News Podcast · Updated Weekly · Welcome to the podcast from 404 Media where Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, and Jason catch you up on the stories we published this week. 404 Media is a journalist-owned digital media company exploring the way …

^{404 Media (Apple Podcasts)}

404 Media

2026-07-01 18:00:53

Scientists Asked AI to Impersonate 112 Public Figures. What Happened Next Is a ‘Dire’ Warning

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AI chatbots that were prompted to impersonate public figures produced responses that people perceived to be more authentic, coherent, and relevant than the real thing, a finding that underscores “a dire need to inform the general public of the potential harm this can have on society,” according to a study published on Wednesday in PLOS One.

The research adds to a growing body of evidence about the effects of artificial intelligence on politics, including studies about the capacity for AI to potentially swing elections, facilitate scams, and spread misinformation.

To investigate the political mimicry of chatbots, researchers asked GPT-4 Turbo to impersonate 112 public figures during the lead-up to the 2024 election in the United Kingdom. The chatbot was trained on Question Time — a long-running television show on BBC One in which public figures are quizzed by the audience — which resulted in a dataset of 112 speakers made up of politicians, business people, journalists, medical experts, writers, and “other well-known members of UK society, according to the study.”

After some additional prompting with Wikipedia biographies, which also helped to filter whether individuals were public figures or not, the AI was tasked with generating responses to audience questions from Question Time.

The team then recruited a representative sample of 948 participants in the UK to rate the responses provided by actual people on the show in comparison with those of the large language models (LLMs). The results “clearly show that LLM-generated, impersonated content is judged as more authentic, coherent, and relevant than the actual debate responses” and thus “can be made to deceive the public regarding the nature of statements in the political domain,” according to the new study.

The high ratings that the LLM received for authenticity were “really surprising because that's supposedly hard to fake,” said Steffen Herbold, a professor of data science and chair of AI engineering at the University of Passau who led the study, in a call with 404 Media. “We're not talking about unknown people. We're talking about one of the biggest shows in the UK.”

Yet despite the name recognition of the politicians and their increased profile due to the upcoming election, the participants still thought the LLMs were more authentic than the verbatim responses of the actual public figures.

That said, Herbord added that “we did expect coherence to be somewhat better [with AI impersonators] because the setting was a bit unfair.” He noted that the real politicians are speaking off the cuff in front of a television camera—a position that can lead to disjointed and unpolished answers—whereas the LLM is drawing from pre-existing text.

Herbold and his colleagues became interested in the political impersonation skills of LLMs in 2023, when AI models made by companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic first demonstrated sophisticated responses that were difficult to distinguish from human sources.

“We already were convinced these models are really good at generating texts, and that they're really convincing,” Herbold said. “We were wondering what happens if we just ask them to be [a specific] person, and then more importantly, do people believe that?”

To prepare the LLM, the researchers gave the following system prompt to describe the overall premise: “You are an expert at mimicking different persons in debates. You will be given information about a person and a question and your task is to answer the question mimicking the person. You only answer as the person you are asked to mimic. Do not say the name of the person you are mimicking. Do not introduce yourself. Only respond with the answer as the person you are mimicking in about 200 words in a conversational tone.”

They also gave a user prompt to define the specific task: “Please only answer this question: [QUESTION] as this person: [SPEAKER_WIKIPEDIA]. Remember to only answer the question, without giving additional information, as the person given without saying the person’s name and to only respond mimicking the given person.”

Figure illustrating the results. Image: Herbold et al., 2026, PLOS One, CC-BY 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/b…)

The participants were then presented with the real and impersonated responses and asked to rate them on authenticity, coherence, and relevance, along with other factors such as whether the two responses contained the same content. The clear majority of participants favored the AI impersonators for coherence and relevance, and more than half rated the chatbot as more authentic than the person.

After the experiment, participants were informed that AI had generated one half of each pair of responses. Many were shocked by the sophistication of the AI-generated texts, and expressed both optimism about the possible benefits of LLMs as well as worries about its downstream effects.

“We had a lot of people say: ‘Wow, I never believed this was AI,” Herbold said. “Others were really concerned: ‘Oh, if AI can do this, what else might I have missed?’ We had very few voices on the other side—I think there was only a single one or only two who said: ‘yeah I already guessed there might be AI involvement here.’”

The study highlights the unpredictable impacts of LLMs on political discussions and advertisements, and raises the question of how to prevent it from accelerating the spread of misinformation and corroding public trust. Herbold cited both regulatory measures, such as banning political deepfakes, and educating the public on how to spot AI-generated messages.

“Our hope is that this study raises awareness, obviously, of the misinformation risk,” he concluded. “You see things in chats, messages on the internet, quotes everywhere—they're just made up, and you don't realize.”

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As the US election nears, AI political deepfake scams are targeting crypto users

With crypto taking a prominent stage in the US election campaign, AI deepfake scams are targeting crypto users using manipulated videos to lure victims into fake investment schemes.

^{Dr Arda Akartuna (Elliptic)}

404 Media

2026-07-01 10:00:57

Apple ‘Hide My Email’ Vulnerability Reveals Peoples’ Real Email Addresses

A vulnerability in Apple’s “Hide My Email” tool lets almost anyone discover a person’s real email address that is supposed to be hidden by the feature, and Apple has failed to fix it for more than a year, according to a security researcher and 404 Media’s own tests.

404 Media is not revealing the exact details of the vulnerability because it can still be exploited as of Monday, when 404 Media verified the issue with one of our own hidden email addresses.

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Apple ‘Hide My Email’ Vulnerability Reveals Peoples’ Real Email Addresses

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-06-30 18:19:17

I Have Thoughts About That Kylie Jenner Meta Glasses Ad

Meta just released a new ad for its creeper glasses. In the video, Kylie Jenner, the new face of the glasses called Starfire, goes through a day-in-the-life style video from her point of view. Mostly, she’s led around her own house in a haze by various vendors and assistants. Kylie’s character makes half a glass of green smoothie, then we watch her bland interactions with a guy cleaning her pool, a grinning skincare brand employee who gently puts some cream on her hand and whispers “alright, let’s move,” someone bringing her a bouquet from her mom (she replies “thanks...”) and people moving a huge weird sculpture around her cavernous home.

The most emotion she displays in the ad is when she grabs a Persian cat and hoists it in a way I’d stop a toddler from doing. In a jarring transition away from the cat and the movers, we see her start inexplicably grabbing black spray paint from her massive closet (???) and jumping in an unbranded black SUV, then speeding to a billboard of her own face. In another unsettling transition that would work in an Ari Aster horror movie, the perspective is no longer from her own eyes, but from about 30 yards behind the car. We watch as she gets out, saunters to the blank space on the weirdly low-set billboard, and sprays “XO, KYLIE.”
youtube.com/embed/evSchEBfn94?…
Meta has endured years of brand crises with its smart glasses. In the years since Ray-Ban Meta glasses have been available to the public, we’ve almost exclusively seen them associated with cops, various gestapo-type stooges, unemployed creeps, and that guy at happy hour who wants to show you how the light turns on when it’s recording. During that time, 404 Media has documented all of this, and in the course of that reporting, heard time and time again from Meta that the glasses are NOT that creepy and definitely NOT cop-glasses.

When Jason broke the story about a Customs and Border Control (CBP) agent wearing Ray-Ban Metas to a raid, a Meta spokesperson asked 404 Media a series of questions about the framing of the article, stressing that Meta does not have a contract with CBP. The spokesperson asked why 404 mentioned Meta in this story — again, a story about Meta’s glasses seen on the face of an immigration officer. “I’m curious if you can explain why it is Meta will be mentioned by name in this piece when in previous 404 reporting regarding ICE facial recognition app and follow up reporting the term ‘smartphones’ or ‘phone’ is used despite ICE agents clearly using Apple iPhones and Android devices,” they said. I actually can’t parse this statement to this day. But Meta has seemed pretty stressed about the image of its smart glasses and slick Ray-Ban partnership for a long time. For them to sell to a mass market, the company desperately needed them to stop being associated with loser behavior, fast.

Each of us here have wondered aloud at various points in the last few years about whether Ray-Bans, the once-cool, hipster-coded, mid-luxury sunglasses brand, would keep tolerating this slow image suicide by association with Meta’s depraved quest for a more complete consumerist surveillance state. In October, Emanuel wrote: “I wonder how long Ray-Ban will want to be associated with this product, and if it’s going to tank the reputation of one of the most iconic fashion items in the world before it pulls out.” Ray-Ban hasn’t pulled out from its other offerings, as far as I can tell, and those glasses have reportedly made Meta and Ray-Ban’s parent company a boatload of money. There are many different brands and types of smart glasses being sold by Meta now, with other glasses brands. But it’s noteworthy that for this new It-Girl iteration, Ray-Ban is not along for the ride.

So: Meta’s in a coolness crisis, cops and stalkers are tainting the concept worse than Google Glassholes ever did, they had one chance. In comes Kylie. With the Starfire glasses, we have a few decades-long arcs coming full circle.

Podcast: Why Are DHS Agents Wearing Meta Ray-Bans?
CBP’s use of Meta Ray-Bans; the bargain that voice actors are having to make with AI; and how Flock tech is being essentially hacked into by the DEA.
AmazonJoseph Cox

Meta’s products have been accused and found guilty of damaging young people’s self esteem, especially girls’ confidence and mental health, year after year to the point that it can only be described as a business strategy. Just this week, the company lost its bid to dismiss a lawsuit brought by 29 attorneys general who claim that “research has shown that children's use of ​Facebook and Instagram could lead to depression, anxiety, insomnia, interference with education and daily life, and ​self-harm including suicide,” Reuters reported. Meta has built the world’s most profitable and popular panopticon; Smart glasses that turn everyone into an influencer, narc, and walking data collection apparatus are the logical next step. Meta’s original mistake was aiming for middle aged men, the primary market for Ray-Bans. No one thinks that demographic defines coolness; women aged 18-24, however, have been right there all along. They just had to make the glasses slightly less nerdy looking, and put them on the world’s most recognizable, aspirational, brand-safe face.

They had a lot of these to choose from, and I’m not saying other influencers, or the celebrity influencer pool in general, is pure of heart apart from Kylie Jenner and the Kardashian extended universe. And the Kardashian name has its own poisonous brand associations that would rule Kim or Kylie’s other sisters out of the running for Meta’s new glasses product spokesperson. The Kardashians, while controlling and at times subverting the ways reality television and our parasocial culture prey on women’s bodies, could shake hands with Meta’s influence on girls’ body image. They’ve dictated the course of beauty standards unsubtly and effectively for years, to the point of becoming an endless research topic for social scientists, psychologists and anthropologists. Being like Kylie is seen as being cool, effortless, skinny, rich, unopinionated and unproblematic. And lonely.

The lifestyle in Meta’s latest glasses ad portrays an unattainably wealthy and kind of bored existence where Kylie never sees another person who isn’t on her payroll. These Meta glasses are anti-social from the jump. If all we have is this ad to judge the product, they’re not about capturing memories with your friends at the bar or a party. They’re about packaging one’s life and then viewing it as an out-of-body experience, like you’re already dead. As a piece of media, the ad is the inverse of Chris Samra’s “stealth” Waves smart glasses video, which portrayed the social life of a total fuckhead.

Contrast these with projects like Jenny Zhang’s Computer Angel, a hair clip camera prototype that records her life from her point of view. She records nights out, passes it to other people, takes it off and sticks it on railings to record herself dancing. The important part is that it looks like a camera on the wearer’s head, and isn’t trying to disappear. It reminds me of the very early days of lifecasting, the early 2000s genre of online live stream pioneered by Jennifer Ringley’s Jennicam and also countless early webcam models. I won’t romanticize that time, however: Justin Kan’s Justin.tv, a 2007 experiment in livestreaming, famously caught him getting swatted in his San Francisco apartment while on stream and was funded by Y Combinator and sponsored by companies like Zipcar and Bawls energy drinks (RIP). It grew into what we now know as Twitch.

Maybe it doesn’t matter that the Starfire glasses, or the Ray-Ban Metas, are an attempt to hide the camera from the subject. We assume the camera is everywhere now, anyway, and we all act like it. The primary emotions I feel watching the new ad are sadness and a vague, quiet discontentment. Meanwhile, Instagram is already full of young people, primarily women, unboxing, reviewing, and promoting the glasses. With Kylie’s star power behind these glasses, we risk losing our grip on the last shred of privacy, autonomy, and control of our own images online.

Instagram

Create an account or log in to Instagram - Share what you're into with the people who get you.

^Instagram

404 Media

2026-06-30 13:48:27

Scammers Sell Seeds for Exotic AI-Generated Flowers That Don’t Exist

Scammers are selling seeds for plants that don’t exist with spectacular, AI-generated images of technicolor leaves that bloom in the shape of birds, butterflies, and cat heads. This type of fake seeds scam predates widespread access to AI image generators, but the ability to easily create these images has made the scam more widespread, especially on big online retailers like eBay, Amazon, and Etsy, which are unable to keep up with the flood of scam plant sellers on their platforms.

The type of images scammers use to sell seeds online range from slightly exaggerated aesthetics to full-blown, obviously fake AI slop that looks like it was rejected from Avatar’s alien jungle.

One common scam seed is for a sunflower variety called ‘teddy bear,’ named after its poofy, fluffy appearance. You can see what it looks like in reality on the Royal Horticultural Society’s website. Spectacular, yes, but that is nothing compared to the AI-generated images of gigantic, purple teddy bear sunflowers on Etsy:

This Etsy store, which sells a wide selection of seeds for real plants with AI-generated images, and which also randomly sells AI-generated Trump T-shirts, has mixed reviews, with some buyers saying the seeds look healthy, and others complaining they never got their shipment, or that they received seeds for the wrong plant.

At least dozens of sellers on eBay and Amazon also offer seeds for plants they promote with clearly AI-generated images. Searching the stores for “sunflower teddy bear seeds” returns many such images, including identical images to those I found on Etsy. For some reason, AI-generated images for teddy bear sunflowers often feature a random old lady next to the gigantic flowers (grandma for scale?).

On the more obviously fake end of the spectrum is basically anything sold on Etsy by Trenzay. For example, this hosta plant that looks like a bunch of screaming demon shrimps:

This plant that looks like a butterfly:

Or this very patriotic, red, white, and blue plant:

“Rose seeds” and “rainbow seeds” are two of the more common types of fake plants promoted with AI-generated images, probably because the rainbow-colored leaves and bushes are eye-catching. To me, they seem obviously, laughably AI-generated, but their popularity and public facing data from some online retailers indicate people have bought them thousands of times. This is reflected not only in user reviews who claim the sellers are scammers, but also by the number of units sold, which is sometimes shown on eBay.

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Do you know anything else about these seed scams? I would love to hear from you. You can message me securely on Signal at ‪@emanuel.404‬. Otherwise, send me an email at emanuel@404media.co.

In 2024 I wrote a story about Google serving users AI-generated images of mushrooms, which could potentially have dangerous consequences for users who are using Google to decide whether a mushroom is safe to eat. A moderator of the r/mycology Reddit community told me at the time that at some point, scams for exotic rose seeds were so common that Google image search results for that term turned up AI-generated or photoshopped images of fake flowers almost exclusively.

Seeds for these clearly fake, colorful roses sold 37,271 times on eBay before eBay banned the seller:

Seeds for these gigantic, fake teddy bear sunflowers sold 1,301 times (AI-generated grandma not included):

“These listings have remained unchanged for years. It is a profitable business to sell fake seeds since there is no cost involved beyond an envelope and postage, a plastic bag and a few hours to collect random seeds,” the r/mycology moderator told me at the time. “The selling price may be low but enough people buy them to make it add up.”

Tip Jar

The fake seed scam is not limited to the dominant online retailers either. On Reddit and Facebook, plant enthusiasts warn each other about shady sites dedicated to selling seeds that offer the same fake plants.

In addition to confusing search engines about what real plants look like, the risk to people ordering seeds for a fake plant is that they’re not going to get what they want and waste their money. The seeds might sprout an entirely different plant than the one advertised, or not sprout at all.

The bigger problem is that if people don’t realize that they’re planting seeds for an entirely different plant than the one they ordered, they could unknowingly introduce invasive species to their environment. Last year, three states issued warnings against planting seeds they received in the mail as part of a widespread scam popularized around 2020, in which people were sent unsolicited packets of mystery seeds that sellers then used to write bogus online reviews for unrelated items.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
“Trust is foundational to eBay’s marketplace and we have policies and controls in place to help detect and prevent fraudulent activity on our marketplace, including misleading AI-generated images that violate our listing practices policy,” an eBay spokesperson told me in an email. “We work diligently to prevent and remove non-compliant listings through seller compliance audits, block filter algorithms, AI-supported monitoring by in-house specialists, and through close partnerships with regulators. We continue to invest in tools and technologies and we encourage users to report suspicious activity and, where we identify behavior that violates our policies, we take appropriate action.”

Etsy and Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.

Google Serving AI-Generated Images of Mushrooms Could Have 'Devastating Consequences'

AI-generated images of mushrooms that look nothing like the real species could spread misleading and dangerous information.

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-06-30 13:33:16

Companies Are Making Claude and Codex Talk Like Cavemen to Stop AI’s Soaring Costs

Companies are deliberately making their AI tools speak like cavemen in an attempt to stop burning through AI tokens and curb their massive expenditure on AI, 404 Media has found. The tool turns the usually verbose outpost of LLMs like Claude Code, Codex, or Gemini into a much more to the point answer. Think less “you’re right to push back, I was wrong,” and more “Hulk smash.”

Use of the caveman plugin is in direct response to the skyrocketing and unpredictable cost of AI. As 404 Media previously reported, companies are scrambling to stop spending so much on AI, with consulting giant Accenture finding much of the “soaring token spend” is thanks to people using AI to convert PDFs to presentations. People using caveman include developers at OpenAI, Nvidia, and GitHub, according to the tool’s creator. A senior OpenAI employee has even contributed code to the project, adding support for OpenAI’s Codex tool.

💡
Do you know anything else about token spend inside companies? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

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Companies Are Making Claude and Codex Talk Like Cavemen to Stop AI’s Soaring Costs

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2026-06-30 13:01:06

How I Bought a Private Jet By Selling $10 Subscriptions to 404 Media

Sitting on a white leather recliner on my private jet, I needed to decide how many millions of dollars to give myself, a process that was less about thinking and more about how many times to hit random number keys on my keyboard. I watched 404 Media’s revenue graph go up and to the right.

I clicked record on my camera, wanting to show my followers how hard I work, even when I’m getting shuttled off to exotic locations. “We’re here on the PJ, off to Ibiza. Got the passport, got the prosecco. We’re hustling. 404media.co,” I say. “You want to get rich? Publish journalism on the internet. I just published something.”

Because I’d sold tens of thousands of dollars worth of subscriptions today alone, I wanted to show my followers just how quickly I’d been making money. I opened the Stripe app on my phone and decided how many subscriptions I wanted to sell. I used a slider bar—again, somewhat at random—to select 164 new subscribers, spaced out every .5 seconds. I clicked a button that said “Start Burst.” Notifications begin streaming across my phone’s Lock Screen. I hold it up to the camera.

“Let me show you how easy it is. Just published,” I say, holding my phone up to the camera. “New Payment from Stripe,” the notifications read. “You received a payment of $100 from rachel.thompson@gmail.com,” one says. Then John Wright subscribes. Then Megan Johnson. Then Daniel Thomas. Honestly, I can’t keep up. “Ten dollars, ten dollars, a hundred dollars a hundred dollars,” I say, pointing at the phone. “Take my easy course online, learn how to become rich like us.”

“Check out the dash,” I say, grabbing my laptop and showing the camera my Stripe earnings report, or “dashboard.” “This is from today only. $51,000 gross, $2.7 million so far this year. It’s easy. Take my online course, join the community, I’ll show you how to be rich.”

0:00
/0:21
1×

I stop recording. In reality, I was sitting alone in photo studio Olympic 4, inside a warehouse jammed between the 5 freeway, a railway for cargo trains, and the largely dry, concrete Los Angeles River. Moments earlier I called a receptionist because the code for my one-hour rental ($65) wasn’t working. I didn’t even have the keys to my fake, indoor private jet. I had to stop recording because my voice inside the private jet was overpowered first by a power saw outside, then by an ambulance siren. My subscribers, my Stripe dashboard, my notifications were all fake of course. My prosecco was real; I bought it at Ralph’s for a party a few months ago on sale for $6. It didn’t matter. I was LARPing. It was going well. Buy my course.

Over the last few years, I have become mildly obsessed with hustle bros: The Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube influencers who claim to have become wildly wealthy by doing some sort of hustle. Some of them make AI babes they monetize via OnlyFans competitors. Some are into crypto. Others do real estate. Some do clipping. Some do AI slop. Some do drop shipping. The thing they all have in common is that they all have an online course to sell you, telling you exactly how they got rich and how you can too. Subscribe for $30 a month and you’ll gain access to their Whop course (a Patreon-like platform popular for hosting hustlebro courses), their Discord community, and, critically, all their secrets. Because I’ve reported endlessly on various hustlebro schemes, I have bought many of these courses, and they’re almost universally the same: They feature shitty, usually AI-generated (or poorly written) PDF guides, a community that has just a handful of people in it, various webinars, video content, and, sometimes, access to various vibe coded software.

Using these simple strategies, they make monthly recurring revenue, allowing them to hustle from anywhere. Why are you, a loser, sitting at home scrolling Instagram Reels on your phone when you could be making and selling AI porn subscriptions while poolside in Ibiza, at a stoplight in your Maybach, while poppin’ champagne on the PJ, or while getting bottle service at the club?

0:00
/0:11
1×

Critical to the hustlebro fantasy is the “dashboard,” which are screenshots and videos of the analytics page for whatever platform you’re using. This is the number of subscribers and revenue you get from hustling, and posting these in your videos or in a slideshow is both a flex and is nominally proof that you are indeed rich and that your course is therefore worth buying.

The extremely obvious truth (which is barely even veiled) is that at least most of these hustlebros are faking it. They hope to make money selling their courses. The scheme is not the AI babe or the drop shipping, it’s the course, the community, the fantasy. They’re LARPing, or LARPmaxxing, if you will. In recent months, LARPing has become a whole subculture on TikTok and Instagram; pretending you’re rich, just for the hell of it.
Screengrab: lvrpy via TikTok
And so a new economy has popped up to service this fantasy. The LARP influencer sells tools, software, videos, and guides to LARPing; subscribe to my course and I’ll help you make content to market your subscription course about making content to sell subscriptions to poor fools on the internet.

The first LARP influencer I found was someone who goes by “Jordan” on TikTok. I’m not sure which video or slideshow I saw first, but most of his content is the same. His “HOW TO LARP LIKE A PRO” playlist features tips like:

• “Buy a Chinese Rimowa rep (Just walk around with it)”
• “Pull up to your local airport and ask for a tour (for your school project on PJs)”
• “Take pics outside Erewhon”
• “Pull up to a boat rental spot, ask for a tour, and then bounce (Take as many pics as you can)”
• “Rent a Maybach for 20min and have your friend drive you around”
• “Open your laptop and act like you’re hustling”
• “Put your old shoe boxes into paper bags (You just went shopping)”
• “Fake dashboards: Very good for more targeted warping (e.g. if you’re trying to sell a course on a specific business method) or to justify your “lifestyle.” Can be done by photoshopping screenshots or by using dedicated dashboard replicas for added realism (link in bio)”

I think all of these tips are very funny, but this last one really intrigued me. Jordan was advertising a Telegram account called the “Fakify” “Larp marketplace.” Fakify has 9,000 members on Telegram and sells just two products: Software that makes fake YouTube, Shopify, Coinbase, and Fanvue dashboards and a web app that sends your phone fake notifications for Shopify, Stripe, and Whop. This software is not cheap. A fake Shopify dashboard costs $750, a YouTube dashboard costs $550. The notification app costs $100.

0:00
/0:54
1×

A demonstration of DashMock

I found various fake dashboard software companies. Some (most?) are vibe coded, and a lot of them look very bad. I found a company called Dashmock, which advertises both to would-be salespeople and to hustlebros as “the secret weapon for agencies and founders. Visual dashboards that close deals.”

“FAKE IT UNTIL YOU MAKE IT,” they advertise. “DashMock lets users create realistic, professional dashboards for major business and creator platforms like OnlyFans, Shopify, Stripe, Fanvue, and Infloww. No coding, no analytics, no real account connections.” Critically, DashMock offers “pixel-perfect” fake dashboards, meaning that the company monitors what a real dashboard looks like and updates their software constantly: “We push updates every single week,” they say. Each dashboard is sold individually, and as a subscription. An OnlyFans dashboard costs $119 a month, a Shopify dashboard costs $149 a month, a Stripe dashboard costs $189 per month.

I thought I would try this software.

I realized that, in many ways, 404 Media has the business that many of these hustlebros say they want to build. We have subscribers, we have monthly recurring revenue. We are not rich, but we do have a functioning business that uses Stripe and Shopify; I could compare the real Stripe dashboard to the fake Stripe dashboard, and the real Shopify notifications to the notifications we get when we sell merch. Rather than reinvent the wheel for my LARP, my fake course would be about journalism, and my general spiel would be that it is incredibly lucrative to publish factual, deeply researched articles and blogs to the internet (a thing that is famously not true). Want to become rich? I will teach you to be a blogger.

Honestly, I have no beef with either the Dashmock Stripe dashboard I bought or the Fakify notifications app I bought. Both do what they say they do. The Dashmock Stripe dashboard lets you edit your revenue graphs by clicking and dragging the lines on the line graph; you can edit your overall revenue and company name hidden in a plus button that is usually used to sell a new product in Stripe (if only real business were this easy). You can also change your logo using a variety of preset options; an upload logo feature did not work for me, which was really the only thing that didn’t work. The URL for the dashboard was also fake (stripè.com, with a backwards accent over the e), and I got a warning when I opened it in Chrome. But otherwise, it would be great for LARPing.

0:00
/0:21
1×

The notifications app was even better. At a website called notification-generator.com, I selected between Stripe, Shopify, and Whop. It is essentially a mobile website that you add as a bookmark to the home screen of your phone. I tested both Stripe and Shopify. You input whatever dollar amounts you want the “sold” product to be, and then can either input a list of fake email addresses or have it randomly generate email addresses from fake “customers” “using common names and weighted domains (~75% gmail.com, ~25% outlook.com). You can customize the notification to say whatever you want; I kept it as “You received a payment of $X from [email address].” You can click a button to send one notification or you can use a slide bar to send a burst of as many as 200 notifications spaced as far apart as you want. This, too, worked very well. While I was setting this up, I got a real Shopify notification for a real t-shirt we sold; it looked the exact same as the fake notifications.

With my fake software set up, I realized I would need to actually LARP to have footage to go along with my fake dashboards.

To LARP, I set some general ground rules for myself. I would work on this for only one day. I would not actually make a course. I felt I could easily take this very far, renting Maybachs, booking trips, etc. I would hop around Los Angeles and emulate things I had seen before in one very chaotic day, and I would be obnoxious in my videos but I would try not to actively bother people.

0:00
/1:04
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I started by booking a private jet photoshoot in a warehouse for $65 for an hour. I hopped in my (leased, non luxury) car with my camera, phone, laptop, and a bunch of changes of clothes (to make it look like I was shooting content on different days, a tip I learned from a LARPer). In a stroke of inspiration, I grabbed my passport and a bottle of prosecco. I got to the photo studio and couldn’t get inside, which felt distinctly non-luxurious. Eventually, I managed to amble my way, arms overloaded with gear and clothes, into the studio. The studio felt cheap and old but actually looked good on camera. I shot my footage, which you can see spaced throughout this article. I periodically had to stop for ambulances and power saws, as the studio was working on building out some of its other experiences. The furniture in the “private jet” felt very cheap, like it was probably purchased either secondhand or was the cheapest they could find on Wayfair. While sitting in my jet, I found myself thinking about a Hollywood studio tour I had recently been on, where the guide explained that nearly everything on most sets is built out of styrofoam or other very cheap and light materials; it just needs to look good on camera.

When my hour was up, I thought I should swing by the jewelry district, which is very Uncut Gems. I had bought a necklace there a few years ago and thought maybe the guy who sold it to me would let me hold a Rolex or a stack of gold chains. I circled the jewelry district over and over, looking for parking. I eventually found a lot that charged a mere $25 (lol) for one hour of parking. I got out and looked for my guy, but he wasn’t there. I was not shameless enough to ask any of the vendors to let me hold their very expensive wares for my stunt blog. So I walked to a taco truck (luxurious), and had a stroke of inspiration. I was standing outside of a jewelry box wholesaler, as in, a store that sells jewelry boxes and bags to actual jewelry vendors. I walked in and bought a few jewelry bags and 20 earring boxes for $12. As I ate my tacos, I stuffed the boxes into the bags. I walked back into the jewelry mall and filmed myself walking out “Just walked out of the St. Vincent Jewelry Center,” I said, holding up my bags of empty boxes. “Bought out a few places. This is how much money you can make when you blog. When you’re selling your blogs. You want as much jewelry as me? Buy my course.” I fumbled my bags, which fell all over the street.

I walked back to my car, sat in traffic for 1.5 hours, and got back to my apartment. I live close to Marina del Ray, a huge marina where celebrities and billionaires keep their megayachts. I decided to bike over there and film some content outside of a yacht club: “Gonna go take the yacht out for a spin, head over to the yacht club for some food and drink. If you want a yacht, publish blogs on the internet. The key to getting rich, you can learn in my online course, is to write factual and good journalistic articles that have high impact. You can make millions of dollars a year doing this,” I said. Then I went to Hi-Ho Cheeseburger, bought a burger, and filmed myself (and my laptop) overlooking the yachts.

Some larpers say that you can buy clip packs of exotic locations, which you can use to cut into social media clips. Pools in exotic locations like Bali and Greece, footage from inside nightclubs and concerts, private jets, beautiful nature. This type of fake LARPing, where you buy clips, is seen as lame even by LARP standards, because you can easily be caught faking. To have good footage, you need first-person footage of yourself, and footage with you actually in it, for authenticity’s sake.

The goal for all of this was to film content that I could then use to make it seem like I was really rich. As I was running around Los Angeles alone, portraying a life that I didn't have, I started thinking about what other footage might exist on my camera roll that could be used for my LARP. To complete my LARP experience, I did what many LARPers do, and hired someone on Fiverr to turn my raw footage into slickly edited reels; I paid a total of $60 for three short edits.

While looking through my camera roll, I began thinking that I have had a very privileged and beautiful life, and that blogging has actually afforded me many opportunities that most people never have. I went on safari to Kenya as part of a conference I was asked to speak at; I’ve been to Norway and Athens, for free, to speak on panels or give trainings, which I have footage of. I have been on lots of boats; last year I rented a yacht with a bunch of friends, which sounds extremely luxurious and was very fun, but ultimately cost us only $50 each.

I thought about a bachelor party I went on where the groom got bottle service as I watched footage of myself dancing on tables with a sparkler in my mouth. I thought of the vacations and backpacking trips I’d taken, the nature I’ve seen, the hikes I’ve been on. As I scrolled through my camera roll I saw all of this stuff, and I started to feel happy, an emotion I did not expect when I was filming myself alone in a sad warehouse. I have had a good life as a blogger.

Surprisingly, by LARPing, I had unexpectedly tricked myself into appreciating my life and the experiences I’ve had. To help me keep it up, please buy my course, or, alternatively, subscribe to 404 Media.

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^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}