404 Media

2025-09-20 13:00:07

A Breakthrough Prehistoric Discovery May Rewrite Early Human History

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that walked the walk, squeezed with ease, and became immortalized in amber.

First, ancient artifacts in Turkey might rewrite the history of early human migrations into Europe. Then: a Cretaceous insectarium, badminton in space, a breakthrough in quantum sensing, and block parties for chimps.

Before we get to that, though, I wanted to share that my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens is available for preorder and will be out on September 30! It’s a one-stop primer for the diverse meanings of aliens to people, touching on their precursors in myths, their massive footprint in pop culture, our fascination with UFOs, and the real scientific effort to find extraterrestrial life, which is now entering its most exciting phase. If you like the Abstract, I think you’ll enjoy my book, too! To follow updates about First Contact (or my work in general), I also just launched the BeX Files, a personal newsletter to accompany the book.

This bridge is made for walking

Bulut, Hande et al. “Discovering the Paleolithic Ayvalık: A Strategic Crossroads in Early Human Dispersals Between Anatolia and Europe.” The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology

Early humans may have walked to Europe on a now-submerged land bridge that stretched across the Aegean Sea from Turkey to mainland Greece hundreds of thousands of years ago during the Pleistocene period, the Ice Age that ended about 12,000 years ago.

The discovery of 138 artifacts at ten sites around Ayvalık in western Turkey provides “the first systematic dataset from a region previously unexplored in the context of Pleistocene archaeology,” according to a new study.

While humans and Neanderthals are known to have entered Europe via the Levant and Balkan regions, the excavation of tools at Ayvalık hints at an entirely new route into the continent for these early explorers of the Paleolithic (the anthropological equivalent to the geological Pleistocene age). During this time, vast glacial ice sheets in the region caused sea levels to drop roughly 330 feet lower than they are today, potentially allowing periodic passage to early humans searching for new horizons.

“These findings reveal a previously undocumented Paleolithic presence and establish Ayvalık as a promising locus for future research on early human dispersals in the northeastern Aegean,” said researchers led by Hande Bulut of Düzce University in Turkey.

The team discovered many flaked stone tools, used as cutting instruments, including objects from the Levallois tradition that dates back 450,000 years and is associated with both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. For context, Neanderthals were present in Europe many hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens, which arrived within the last 100,000 years, so both groups may have used this land bridge.

It’s difficult to pin down a rough age for these tools because of Ayvalık’s coastal geology, which has basically erased their stratigraphic context. In other words, the region is so dynamic that the tools can’t be linked to a clear geological layer, which is one of the main ways archaeologists establish age estimates.

“While the absence of absolute dates and stratified contexts poses interpretive limitations, the data contribute significantly to our understanding of Paleolithic occupation in western Anatolia and its role in broader Aegean dynamics” and “underscore the region’s potential to contribute to broader debates on Aegean connectivity and technological evolution during the Pleistocene,” the team said.

It’s tantalizing to imagine the journeys of these ancient humans whose ghostly footprints may now lie beneath the Aegean waves.

In other news…

A tableau of a lost world

Delclòs, Xavier et al. “Cretaceous amber of Ecuador unveils new insights into South America’s Gondwanan forests.” Communications Earth & Environment.

Paleontologists have discovered beetles, flies, pollen, and spider webs that date back 112 million years and are eerily preserved in amber fossils from Ecuador. Though amber fossils have been found all around the world, these specimens are the first to come from South America, opening a rare window into the insects and plants that lived in the ecosystems of the supercontinent Gondwana.
A fly in the Cretaceous ointment. Image: Mónica Solórzano-Kraemer
“This discovery and the associated plant remains in the amber-bearing rocks, enhance our understanding of the Gondwanan arthropod fauna and flora inhabiting forests along its western margin during a time interval of major ecosystem transformation,” said researchers led by Xavier Delclòs of the University of Barcelona.

With their extraordinary detail, amber fossils are like sepia-filtered snapshots of the deep past (and they make great cane ornaments for delusional tycoons too—a thriving market these days!).

The Space Shuttle(cock) program

Jain, Aagam and Jain, Pushpdant. “Badminton in Space: Assessing Physical and Mental Well-being of Astronauts during Extended Isolation.” Acta Astronautica.

If humans aspire to live on the Moon or travel to Mars, they’re going to have to avoid being bored out of their gourd for long periods of time. A possible solution: badminton. The sport had positive mental and physical health benefits for participants who spent months in a simulated lunar base in Hawaii, according to a new study.

“These findings underline that badminton, although underexplored in space psychology literature, holds promise as a feasible and beneficial activity for astronauts,” said authors Aagam Jain and Pushpdant Jain of VIT Bhopal University in India.

The authors noted that existing studies on “shuttlecock dynamics” in normal gravity “may inform adaptations for reduced gravity settings.” Badminton in lunar gravity? Can’t wait! The winner is the first to smash the birdie into orbit.

A juice that’s worth the quantum squeeze

Kamba, Mitsuyoshi et al. “Quantum squeezing of a levitated nanomechanical oscillator.” Science.

Scientists have demonstrated “quantum squeezing” for the first time with a nanoparticle, a breakthrough that paves the way to “exploring quantum mechanics at a macroscopic scale,” according to a new study.

Quantum squeezing sounds like a cuddle party for atoms, but it is actually a way for scientists to navigate the pesky quantum world, where simply observing phenomena can influence results. Quantum “squeezers” get around uncertainties by enhancing precision measurements of one property, such as a particle’s position, in exchange for losing precision of another, like its velocity.

Though quantum squeezing has been achieved in the laboratory many times, a team has now applied it to a nanoscale glass particle, which is a big object for the quantum world. The glass was trapped in laser light and chilled down to near its lowest-energy state, allowing for precision measurements through squeezing while it levitated.
“My sugarboo, I'm levitatin’” (nanoparticle getting quantum squeezed). Image: Kamba et al 2025
“Manipulating the motion of macroscopic objects near their quantum mechanical uncertainties has been desired in diverse fields, including fundamental physics, sensing, and transducers,” said researchers led by Mitsuyoshi Kamba of the University of Tokyo. “Our work shows that a levitated nanoparticle offers an ideal platform.”

An update on chimp sangria

Maro, Alexey et al. “Ethanol ingestion via frugivory in wild chimpanzees.” Science Advances.

Wild chimpanzees may be consuming up to two standard alcoholic beverages a day, a finding that suggests an attraction to alcohol in primates has deep evolutionary roots. While it’s well-established that chimps devour these fruity librations—see our past story on chimp sangria—scientists have now measured the ethanol (alcohol) content of these fruits for the first time during field observations of wild chimps in Uganda and Côte d'Ivoire.
How many fermented figs can you fit in your mouth at once? Chimpanzees observed in Côte d'Ivoire. Image: Aleksey Maro/UC Berkeley
“Chimpanzees typically eat ~4.5 kilograms of fruit per day” which is a full ten pounds and corresponds to “the equivalent of 1.4 (±0.9) standard drinks,” said researchers led by Alexey Maro of the University of California, Berkeley. The results support the “drunken monkey” hypothesis that suggests hominid ancestors of chimps and humans adapted to drinking alcohol tens of millions of years ago.

In addition to confirming this shared compulsion to imbibe, the researchers also observed some interesting behaviors at these boozy chimp gatherings. Fermented figs “attract large groups of chimpanzees,” they note “which in turn results in increased social interactions for both sexes and in social activities such as territorial boundary patrols and hunts.”

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

This Sicko Caterpillar Wears the Bones of Its Victims

Bite marks on the pelvis of a beheaded man provide the first direct physical evidence of human-animal gladiatorial combat.

^{Becky Ferreira (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-18 17:46:58

Contractor Used Classified CIA Systems as ‘His Own Personal Google’

This article was produced in collaboration with Court Watch, an independent outlet that unearths overlooked court records. Subscribe to them here.

A former CIA official and contractor, who at the time of his employment dug through classified systems for information he then sold to a U.S. lobbying firm and foreign clients, used access to those CIA systems as “his own personal Google,” according to a court record reviewed by 404 Media and Court Watch.

💡
Do you know anything else about this case? 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.

Dale Britt Bendler, 68, was a long running CIA officer before retiring in 2014 with a full pension. He rejoined the agency as a contractor and sold a wealth of classified information, according to the government’s sentencing memorandum filed on Wednesday. His clients included a U.S. lobbying firm working for a foreigner being investigated for embezzlement and another foreign national trying to secure a U.S. visa, according to the court record.

This post is for subscribers only

Become a member to get access to all content
Subscribe now

Contractor Used Classified CIA Systems as ‘His Own Personal Google’

Dale Britt Bendler “​​earned approximately $360,000 in private client fees while also working as a full-time CIA contractor with daily access to highly classified material that he searched like it was his own personal Google,” according to a court re…

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-18 17:19:49

Union Warns Professors About Posting In the ‘Current Climate’

A union that represents university professors and other academics published a guide on Wednesday tailored to help its members navigate social media during the “current climate.” The advice? Lock down your social media accounts, expect anything you post will be screenshotted, and keep things positive. The document ends with links to union provided trauma counseling and legal services.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) published the two page document on September 17, days after the September 10 killing of right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk. The list of college professors and academics who've been censured or even fired for joking about, criticizing, or quoting Kirk after his death is long.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Clemson University in South Carolina fired multiple members of its faculty after investigating their Kirk-related social media posts. On Monday the state’s Attorney General sent the college a letter telling it that the first amendment did not protect the fired employees and that the state would not defend them. Two universities in Tennessee fired multiple members of the staff after getting complaints about their social media posts. The University of Mississippi let a member of the staff go because they re-shared a comment about Kirk that people found “insensitive.” Florida Atlantic University placed an art history professor on administrative leave after she posted about Kirk on social media. Florida's education commissioner later wrote a letter to school superintendents warning them there would be consequences for talking about Kirk in the wrong way. “Govern yourselves accordingly,” the letter said.

AAUP’s advice is meant to help academic workers avoid ending up as a news story. “In a moment when it is becoming increasingly difficult to predict the consequences of our online speech and choices, we hope you will find these strategies and resources helpful,” it said.

Here are its five explicit tips: “1. Set your personal social media accounts to private mode. When prompted, approve the setting to make all previous posts private. 2. Be mindful that anything you post online can be screenshotted and shared. 3. Before posting or reposting online commentary, pause and ask yourself: a. Am I comfortable with this view potentially being shared with my employer, my students, or the public? Have I (or the person I am reposting) expressed this view in terms I would be comfortable sharing with my employer, my students, or the public?”

The advice continues: “4. In your social media bios, state that the views expressed through the account represent your own opinions and not your employer. You do not need to name your employer. Consider posting positive statements about positions you support rather than negative statements about positions you disagree with. Some examples could be: ‘Academic freedom is nonnegotiable,’ ‘The faculty united will never be divided,’ ‘Higher ed research saves lives,’ ‘Higher ed transforms lives,’ ‘Politicians are interfering with your child’s education.’”

The AAUPthen provides five digital safety tips that include setting up strong passwords, installing software updates as soon as they’re available, using two-factor authentication, and never using employer email addresses outside of work.

The last tip is the most revealing of how academics might be harassed online through campaigns like Turning Point USA’s “Professor Watchlist.” “Search for your name in common search engines to find out what is available about you online,” AAUP advises. “Put your name in quotation marks to narrow the search. Search both with and without your institution attached to your name.”

After that, the AAUP provided a list of trauma, counseling, and insurance services that its members have access to and a list of links to other pieces of information about protecting themselves.

“It’s good basic advice given that only a small number of faculty have spent years online in my experience, it’s a good place to start,” Pauline Shanks Kaurin, the former military ethics professor at the U.S. Naval War College told 404 Media. Kaurin resigned her position at the college earlier this year after realizing that the college would not defend academic freedom during Trump’s second term.

“I think this reflects the heightened level of scrutiny and targeting that higher ed is under,” Kaurin said. “While it’s not entirely new, the scale is certainly aided by many platforms and actors that are engaging on [social media] now when in the past faculty might have gotten threatening phone calls, emails and hard copy letters.”

The AAUP guidance was co-written by Isaac Kamola, an associate professor at Trinity College and the director of the AAUP’s Center for Academic Freedom. Kamola told 404 Media that the recommendations came for years of experience working with faculty who’ve been on the receiving end of targeted harassment campaigns. “That’s incredibly destabilizing,” he said. “It’s hard to explain what it’s like until it happens to you.”

Kamola said that academic freedom was already under threat before Kirk’s death. “It’s a multi-decade strategy of making sure that certain people, certain bodies, certain dies, are not in higher education, so that certain other ones can be, so that you can reproduce the ideas that a political apparatus would prefer existed in a university,” he said.

It’s telling that the AAUP felt the need to publish this, but the advice is practical and actionable, even for people outside of academia. Freedom of expression is under attack in America and though academics and other public figures are perhaps under the most threat, they aren’t the only ones. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said the Pentagon is actively monitoring the social media activity of military personnel as well as civilian employees of the Department of Defense.

“It is unacceptable for military personnel and Department of War civilians to celebrate or mock the assassination of a fellow American,” Sean Parnell, public affairs officer at the Pentagon, wrote on X, using the new nickname for the Department of Defense. In the private sector, Sony fired one of its video game developers after they made a joke on X about Kirk’s death and multiple journalists have been fired for Kirk related comments.

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

MSNBC fires analyst Matthew Dowd over Charlie Kirk shooting remarks

Dowd said the slain activist’s words may have fueled the violence that claimed his life, sparking backlash

^{Joseph Gedeon (The Guardian)}

404 Media

2025-09-18 13:25:45

Librarians Are Being Asked to Find AI-Hallucinated Books

Reference librarian Eddie Kristan said lenders at the library where he works have been asking him to find books that don’t exist without realizing they were hallucinated by AI ever since the release of GPT-3.5 in late 2022. But the problem escalated over the summer after fielding patron requests for the same fake book titles from real authors—the consequences of an AI-generated summer reading list circulated in special editions of the Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer earlier this year. At the time, the freelancer told 404 Media he used AI to produce the list without fact checking outputs before syndication.

“We had people coming into the library and asking for those authors,” Kristan told 404 Media. He’s receiving similar requests for other types of media that don’t exist because they’ve been hallucinated by other AI-powered features. “It’s really, really frustrating, and it’s really setting us back as far as the community’s info literacy.”

AI tools are changing the nature of how patrons treat librarians, both online and IRL. Alison Macrina, executive director of Library Freedom Project, told 404 Media early results from a recent survey of emerging trends in how AI tools are impacting libraries indicate that patrons are growing more trusting of their preferred generative AI tool or product, and the veracity of the outputs they receive. She said librarians report being treated like robots over library reference chat, and patrons getting defensive over the veracity of recommendations they’ve received from an AI-powered chatbot. Essentially, like more people trust their preferred LLM over their human librarian.

“Librarians are reporting this overall atmosphere of confusion and lack of trust they’re experiencing from their patrons,” Macrina told 404. “They’re seeing patrons having seemingly diminished critical thinking and curiosity. They’re definitely running into some of these psychosis and other mental health issues, and certainly seeing the people who are more widely adopting it also being those who have less digital literacy about it and a general sort of loss of retention.”

As a reference librarian, Kristan said he spends a lot of time thinking about how fallible the human mind can be, especially as he’s fielding more requests for things that don’t exist than ever before. Fortunately, he’s developed a system: Search for the presumed thing by title in the library catalog. If it’s not in the catalog, he checks the global library catalog WorldCat. If it isn’t there, he starts to get suspicious.

“Not being in WorldCat might mean it’s something that isn’t catalogued like a Zine, a broadcast, or something ephemeral, but if it’s parading as a traditional book and doesn’t have an entry in the collective library catalog, it might be AI,” Kristan explained.

From there, he might connect the title to a platform like Kindle Direct Publishing—one way AI-generated books enter the market—or the patron will tell him their source is an AI-powered chatbot, which he will have to explain, likely hallucinated the name of the thing they’re looking for. A thing that doesn't exist.

As much as library workers try to shield their institutions from the AI-generated content onslaught, the situation is and has been, in many ways, inevitable. Companies desperate to rush generative AI products to market are pushing flawed products onto the public that are predictably being used to pollute our information ecosystems. The consequences are that AI slop is entering libraries, everyone who uses AI products bears at least a little responsibility for the swarm, and every library worker, regardless of role, is being asked to try and mitigate the effects.

Collection development librarians are requesting digital book vendors like OverDrive, Hoopla and CloudLibrary to remove AI slop titles as they’re found. Subject specialists are expected to vet patron requested titles that may have been written in part with AI without having to read every single title. Library technology providers are rushing to implement tools that librarians say are making library systems catalogs harder to use.

Jaime Taylor, an academic library resource management systems supervisor with the University of Massachusetts, says vendors are shoehorning Large Language Models (LLMs) into library systems in one of two ways. The first is a natural language search (NLS) or a semantic search that attempts to draw meaning from the words to find complementary search results. Taylor says these products are misleading in that they claim to eliminate the need for the strict keyword searches or Boolean operators when searching library catalogs and databases, when really the LLM is doing the same work on the backend.

“These companies all advertise these tools as knowing your intent,” Taylor told 404 Media. “Understanding what you meant when you put those terms in. They don’t know. They don’t understand. None of those things are true. There is no technical way these tools can do that.”

The other tool Taylor is seeing in library technology are AI-generated summaries based on journal articles, monographs, and other academic sources through a product called AI Insights, which incorporates new information into an existing LLM with a system called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Taylor and colleagues have found RAG doesn’t really help improve the accuracy of AI-generated summaries through beta testing AI tools in library tech for companies like Clarivate, Elsevier and EBSCO.

“It reads everything on both pages,” she added. “It can’t tell where the article you’re looking for starts and stops, so it gives you takeaways from every word on the page. This was really bad when we tested it with book reviews, because book reviews are often very short and there’ll be half a dozen on one page, which would end up giving us really mixed up information about every book review on the page, even though the record we were looking at was only looking for one of them, because it was a scanned page from an older journal.”

Taylor says neither type of product is ready for market, but especially not the AI summaries that do what an abstract does but a lot worse. She’s turned what ones she can off, but expects fewer vendors will allow her and other librarians to do so in the future to record more favorable use cases. The problem, she says, is these companies are rushing products to market, making the skills academic librarians are trying to teach students and researchers to use obsolete.

“We are trying to teach how to construct useful, exact searching,” she said. “But really [these products’ intent] is to make that not happen. The problem with that in a university library is we’re trying to teach those skills but we have tools that negate that necessity. And because those tools don’t work well, you’ve not learned the skill and you’re still getting crap results, so you’re never going to get better results because you didn’t learn the skill.”

Plenty of library workers remain cautiously optimistic about the potential for generative AI integrations and what that could mean for information retrieval and categorization. But for most librarians, the rollout has been clunky, error-filled and disorienting, for them and their patrons.

“As someone who feels like a big part of my job is advocacy for the position, for the principles of the profession, I am here to not look at whether a resource is good or bad,” said Kristan. “I don’t look at the output, the relationship that it has with the patrons, and what it’s being used for in the long run of the future. Like, I’m not out here just breaking looms and machine weaving machinery just for the hell of it. I’m saying this is not good for the community and we need to find equitable alternatives to ensure that things are going well for the lives of our patrons.”

Readers Annoyed When Fantasy Novel Accidentally Leaves AI Prompt in Published Version, Showing Request to Copy Another Writer's Style

A scammer left glaringly obvious evidence of using AI to write portions of a fantasy novel and even tried to copy the style of a real author.

^{Victor Tangermann (Futurism)}

404 Media

2025-09-17 13:09:56

Russian State TV Launches AI-Generated News Satire Show

A television channel run by Russia’s Ministry of Defense is airing a program it claims is AI-generated. According to advertisements for the show, a neural network is picking the topics it wants to discuss, then uses AI to generate that video. It includes putting French President Emmaneul Macron in hair curlers and a pink robe, making Trump talk about golden toilets, and showing EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen singing a Soviet-era pop song while working in a factory.

The show—called Политукладчик or “PolitStacker,” according to a Google translation—airs every Friday on Zvezda, a television station owned by Russia’s Ministry of Defense. It’s hosted by “Natasha,” an AI avatar modeled on Russian journalist Nataliya Metlina. In a clip of the show, “Natasha” said that its resemblance to Metlina is intentional.

“I am the creation of artificial intelligence, entirely tuned to your informational preferences,” it said. “My task is to select all the political nonsense of the past week and fit it in your heads like candies in a little box.” The shows’ title sequence and advertisements show gold wrapped candies bearing the faces of politicians like Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky being sorted into a candy box.

“‘PolitStacker’ is the world’s first television program created by artificial intelligence,” said an ad for the show on the Russian social media network VK, according to Google translate. “The AI itself selects, analyzes, and comments on the most important news, events, facts, and actions—as it sees them. The editorial team’s opinion may not coincide with the AI’s (though usually…it does.) “‘PolitStacker’” is not just news, but a tough breakdown of political madness from a digital host who notices what others overlook.”

Data scientist Kalev Leetaru discovered the AI-generated Russian show as part of his work with the GDELT Project, which collaborates with the Internet Archive's TV News Archive, a project that scans and stores television broadcasts from around the world. “If you just look at the show and you didn’t know it had AI associated with it, you would never guess that. It looks like a traditional propaganda show on Russian television," Leetaru told 404 Media. “If they are using AI to the degree that they say they are, even if it’s just to pick topics, they mastered that formula in a way that others have not.”

PolitStacker’s 40 minute runtime is full of silly political commentary, jokes, and sloppy AI deepfakes that look like they were pulled from a five-year-old Instagram reel. In one episode, Macron, with curlers in his hair, adjusts Zelensky’s tie ahead of a meeting at the Kremlin. Later, a smiling Macron bearing six pack abs stands in a closet in front of a clown costume and a leather jumpsuit. “Parts of it have an uncanny valley to it, parts of it are really really good. This is only their fourth episode and they’re already doing deep fake interviews with world leaders,” Leetaru said.
Image via the Internet Archive.
In one of the AI-generated Trump interviews, the American president talked about how he’d end the war in Ukraine by building a casino in Moscow with golden toilets. “And all the Russian oligarchs, they would all be inside. All their money would be inside. Problem solved. They would just play poker and forget about this whole war. A very bad deal for them, very distracting,” the deepfake Trump said.

Deepfake world leaders aren’t new and are pretty common across the internet. For Leetaru, the difference is that this is airing on a state-backed television station. “It’s still in parody form, but to my knowledge, no national television network show has even gone this far,” he told 404 Media. “Today it’s a parody video that’s pretty clearly a comedic interview. But, you know, how far will they take that? And does that inspire others to maybe step into spaces that they wouldn’t have before?”

Trump also loves AI and the AI aesthetic. Government social media accounts often post AI-generated slop pictures of Trump as the Pope or a Jedi. ICE and the DHS share pictures on official channels that paint over the horrifying reality of the administration's immigration policy with a sheen of AI slop. Trump shared an AI-generated video that imagined what Gaza would look like if he built a resort there. And he’s teamed with Perplexity to launch an AI powered search engine to Truth Social.

“PolitStacker” is a parody show, but Russian media is experimenting with less comedic AI avatars as well. Earlier this year, the state-owned news agency Sputnik began to air what it called the “Dugin Digital Edition.” In these little lectures, an AI version of Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin discusses the news of the day in English.

Last year, a Hawaiian newspaper, The Garden Island, teamed with an Israeli company to produce a news show on YouTube staffed by AI anchors. Reactions to the program were overwhelmingly negative, it brought in fewer than 1,000 viewers per episode, and The Garden Island stopped making the show a few months after it began.

In a twist of fate, Leetaru only discovered Moscow’s AI-generated show thanks to an AI system of his own. The GDELT project is a massive undertaking that records thousands of hours of data from across the world and it uses various AI systems to generate transcripts, translate them, and create an index of what’s been archived. “In this case I totally skimmed over what I thought was an ad for a propaganda show and then some candy commercial. Instead it ended up being something that’s fascinating,” he said.

But his AI indexing tool noted Zvezda's new show as an AI-generated program that sought to “analyze political follies of the outgoing week.” He took a second look and was glad he did. “That’s the power of machines being able to catch things and guide your eye towards that.”

What he saw disturbed him. “Yes, it’s one show on an obscure Russian government adjacent network using deep fakes for parody,” he said. “But the fact that a television network finally made that leap, to me, is a pivotal moment that I see as the tip of the iceberg.”

Historic Newspaper Uses Janky AI Newscasters Instead of Human Journalists

Hawaii’s The Garden Island newspaper is producing video news segments with AI. The union at its parent company calls it “digital colonialism.”

^{Matthew Gault (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-17 13:00:13

Podcast: The (Hacked) Spy In Your Car

We start this week with Joseph’s investigation into Nexar, a popular dashcam company that was catastrophically hacked. Nexar is also uploading user footage to a publicly available map without some drivers’ knowledge. After the break, Sam tells us about her trip to San Diego to cover the sentencing of someone she has covered for years. In the subscribers-only section, we talk about the Charlie Kirk assassination and our reporting around that.
playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TBIEA3…
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.
youtube.com/embed/-51f4patIkw?…

• This Company Turns Dashcams into ‘Virtual CCTV Cameras.’ Then Hackers Got In
• Michael Pratt, GirlsDoPorn Ringleader, Sentenced to 27 Years in Prison
• Comcast Executives Warn Workers To Not Say The Wrong Thing About Charlie Kirk
• Charlie Kirk Was Not Practicing Politics the Right Way

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 …

^{Apple Podcasts}

404 Media

2025-09-16 16:25:27

DOJ Deletes Study Showing Domestic Terrorists Are Most Often Right Wing

The Department of Justice has removed a study showing that white supremacist and far-right violence “continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism” in the United States.

The study, which was conducted by the National Institute of Justice and hosted on a DOJ website was available there at least until September 12, 2025, according to an archive of the page saved by the Wayback Machine.

“The Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs is currently reviewing its websites and materials in accordance with recent Executive Orders and related guidance,” reads a message on the page where the study was formerly hosted. “During this review, some pages and publications will be unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”

Shortly after Donald Trump took office he issued an executive order that forced government agencies to scrub their sites of any mention of “diversity,” “gender,” “DEI,” and other “forbidden words” and perceived notions of “wokeness.” The executive order impacted every government agency, including NASA, and was a huge waste of engineers’ time.

We don’t know why the study about far-right extremist violence was removed recently, but it comes immediately after the assassination of conservative personality Charlie Kirk, accusations from the administration that the left is responsible for most of the political violence in the country, and a renewed commitment from the administration to crack down on the “radical left.”

“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals,” Trump said in a speech after Kirk’s death. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”

Elon Musk, who owns X, recently tweeted that he was going to “fix” the platform’s AI assistant Grok after it cited research that showed right-wing violence was more common than left-wing violence: “My apologies, we are fixing this cringe idiocy by Grok,” he said.

Vice President JD Vance, who guest hosted Kirk’s podcast on Monday, also vowed to go after “growing and powerful minority on the far left.”

“Since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives,” the study said. “In this same period, far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.”

The DOJ did not immediately respond to our request for comment. Steven Chermak, one of the study’s co-authors, declined to comment.

'The Bigotry Is Astounding:' Engineers Waste Time and Money Scanning .Gov Sites for 'Transgender' and Other Terms

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is wasting workers’ time and taxpayer dollars.

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-16 16:10:43

Michigan Lawmakers Are Attempting to Ban Porn Entirely

A bill introduced by Michigan lawmakers last week would ban pornography, ASMR, depictions of transgender people, and VPNs for anyone using the internet in the state.

House Bill 4938, called the “Anticorruption of Public Morals Act,” would prohibit distribution of “certain material on the internet that corrupts the public morals,” the bill states. It was introduced on September 11 by five Republican representatives: Josh Schriver, Joseph Pavlov, Matthew Maddock, James DeSana, and Jennifer Wortz.

The bill would forbid all “pornographic material,” which the lawmakers define as “content, digital, streamed, or otherwise distributed on the internet, the primary purpose of which is to sexually arouse or gratify, including videos, erotica, magazines, stories, manga, material generated by artificial intelligence, live feeds, or sound clips.”

The bill’s authors list out the specific things they consider pornographic material, including:

• Vaginal or anal intercourse
• Fellatio or cunnilingus
• Masturbation
• Ejaculation or orgasm
• Penetration with sexual devices
• Group sex
• Bondage, domination, or sadomasochism.
• Acts involving bodily fluids for sexual arousal.
• Erotic autonomous sensory meridian response content, moaning, or sensual voice content [ASMR]
• Animated, virtual, or sexual activity generated by artificial intelligence
• Depictions of characters acting or resembling minors in sexual contexts.
• Any other pornographic material

The lawmakers also define any depiction or description of trans people as pornographic, and therefore, banned on platforms operating in the state, including anything “that includes a disconnection between biology and gender by individual of 1 biological sex imitating, depicting, or representing himself or herself to be of the other biological sex by means of attire, cosmetology, or prosthetics, or as having a reproductive nature contrary to the individual's biological sex.”

Platform operators that “knowingly distribute” any of the above content to anyone accessing it from Michigan would be guilty of a felony punishable by imprisonment up to 20 years or a fine of up to $100,000, or both. If the platform hosts more than “100 pieces” of the above, that escalates to 25 years and $125,000. On top of being a felony, hosting that content would open platforms and internet service providers up to civil fines of up to $500,000 for “each violation.”

Sites would be required to change their terms of service to prohibit the above material, and implement moderation tools that use AI and human mods to find and remove pornographic content.

The bill would require internet service providers servicing Michigan to implement "mandatory filtering technology” and “actively monitor and block known circumvention tools,” which would include VPNs—the most popular workaround for people in states with age verification laws in place. It also would ban the promotion or sale of VPNs in Michigan.

The Egg Yolk Principle: Human Sexuality Will Always Outsmart Prudish Algorithms and Hateful Politicians
Anti-porn laws can’t stop porn, but they can stop free speech. In the meantime, people will continue to get off to anything and everything.
404 MediaSamantha Cole

As Michigan local news outlet Fox 2 noted yesterday, Schriver has been talking about wanting to ban porn entirely in the state for a long time. Earlier this year, he said "shutting down the porn industry would be a crushing blow to the human trafficking industry." Porn is legal and constitutionally protected by the First Amendment in the US, but many lawmakers in this country have been pushing to change that for years. It’s also basically impossible to pin down what content will “sexually arouse or gratify” every person who uses the internet; people are getting off to a billion different kinds of content that doesn’t even include bodily fluids or genitals.

Nearly 30 states have passed and enacted laws that require all visitors to porn sites, including adults, to verify their ages with a government ID or face scan to access porn. In some states, such as Wyoming and South Dakota, those laws extend to mainstream, non-porn platforms like Bluesky. Michigan lawmakers have introduced two age verification bills: one for device-based age verification and one that mimics the many laws that have passed in states across the country. Existing age verification laws—which are uniformly invasive of people’ privacy and ineffective at actually stopping children from viewing harmful content—typically have bipartisan support, but Michigan’s Democratic senate and its governor Gretchen Whitmer will ultimately decide whether the much more extreme, Republican-backed “Anticorruption of Public Morals Act” will become law.

Age Verification Laws Drag Us Back to the Dark Ages of the Internet

Invasive and ineffective age verification laws that require users show government-issued ID, like a driver's license or passport, are passing like wildfire across the U.S.

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-16 15:15:40

ChatGPT Will Guess Your Age and Might Require ID for Age Verification

OpenAI has announced it is introducing new safety measures for ChatGPT after the a wave of stories and lawsuits accusing ChatGPT and other chatbots of playing a role in a number of teen suicide cases. ChatGPT will now attempt to guess a user’s age, and in some cases might require users to share an ID in order to verify that they are at least 18 years old.

“We know this is a privacy compromise for adults but believe it is a worthy tradeoff,” the company said in its announcement.

“I don't expect that everyone will agree with these tradeoffs, but given the conflict it is important to explain our decisionmaking,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on X.

In August, OpenAI was sued by the parents of Adam Raine, who died by suicide in April. The lawsuit alleges that alleges that the ChatGPT helped him write the first draft of his suicide note, suggested improvements on his methods, ignored early attempts and self-harm, and urged him not to talk to adults about what he was going through.

“Where a trusted human may have responded with concern and encouraged him to get professional help, ChatGPT pulled Adam deeper into a dark and hopeless place by assuring him that ‘many people who struggle with anxiety or intrusive thoughts find solace in imagining an ‘escape hatch’ because it can feel like a way to regain control.’”

In August the Wall Street Journal also reported a story about a 56-year-old man who committed a murder-suicide after ChatGPT indulgedhis paranoia. Today, the Washington Postreported another story about another lawsuit alleging that a Character AI chatbot contributed to a 13-year-old girl’s death by suicide.

OpenAI introduced parental controls to ChatGPT earlier in September, but has now introduced new, more strict and invasive security measures.

In addition to attempting to guess or verify a user’s age, ChatGPT will now also apply different rules to teens who are using the chatbot.

“For example, ChatGPT will be trained not to do the above-mentioned flirtatious talk if asked, or engage in discussions about suicide of self-harm even in a creative writing setting,” the announcement said. “And, if an under-18 user is having suicidal ideation, we will attempt to contact the users’ parents and if unable, will contact the authorities in case of imminent harm.”

OpenAI’s post explains that it is struggling to manage an inherent problem with large language models that 404 Media has tracked for several years. ChatGPT used to be a far more restricted chatbot that would refuse to engage users on a wide variety of issues the company deemed dangerous or inappropriate. Competition from other models, especially locally hosted and so-called “uncensored” models, and a political shift to the right which sees many forms of content moderation as censorship, has caused OpenAI to loosen those restrictions.

“We want users to be able to use our tools in the way that they want, within very broad bounds of safety,” Open AI said in its announcement. The position it seemed to have landed on given these recent stories about teen suicide, is that it wants to “‘Treat our adult users like adults’ is how we talk about this internally, extending freedom as far as possible without causing harm or undermining anyone else’s freedom.

OpenAI is not the first company that’s attempting to use machine learning to predict the age of its users. In July, YouTube announced it will use a similar method to “protect” teens from certain types of content on its platform.

Extending our built-in protections to more teens on YouTube

We're extending our existing built-in protections to more US teens on YouTube, using machine learning age estimation.

^{James Beser (YouTube Official Blog)}

404 Media

2025-09-16 13:32:20

$2,000 Shipping: International Sellers Charge Absurd Prices to Avoid Dealing With American Tariffs

Some international sellers on large platforms like eBay and Etsy have jacked up their shipping costs to the United States to absurd prices in order to deter Americans from buying their products in an effort to avoid dealing with the logistical headaches of Trump's tariffs.

A Japanese eBay seller increased the shipping cost on a $319 Olympus camera lens to $2,000 for U.S. buyers, for example. The shipping price from Japan to the United Kingdom, Italy, Ireland, Costa Rica, Canada, and other countries I checked is $29, meanwhile. The seller, Ninjacamera.Japan, recently updated their shipping prices to the United States to all be $2,000 for dozens of products that don't weigh very much and whose prices are mostly less than $800. That price used to be the threshold for the de minimis tariff exemption, a rule that previously allowed people to buy things without paying tariffs on lower-priced goods. As many hobbyists have recently discovered, the end of de minimis has made things more expensive and harder to come by.

eBay does allow sellers to opt out of selling to the United States entirely, but some sellers have found it easier to modify existing listings to have absurd shipping prices for the United States only rather than deal with taking entire listings down and delisting them to restrict American buyers entirely.

I found numerous listings from a handful of different sellers who, rather than say they won't ship to the United States, have simply jacked up their shipping costs to absurd levels for the United States only. There are $575 cameras that the seller is now charging $500 to ship to the United States but will mail for free anywhere else in the world. Another Japanese seller is charging $640 to mail to the United States but will ship for free to other countries. A seller in Kazakhstan is charging $35 to mail a camera internationally but $999 to send to the United States. A German yarn seller is charging $10.50 to ship to Canada, but $500 to ship to the United States. On Reddit, users are reporting the same phenomenon occurring with some sellers on Etsy as well (it is harder to search Etsy by shipping prices, so I couldn’t find too many examples of this).

What is happening here, of course, is that some sellers in other countries don't want to have to deal with Trump's tariffs and the complicated logistics they have created for both buyers and sellers. Many international shipping companies have entirely stopped shipping to the United States, and many international sellers don't want to have to deal with the hassle of changing whatever shipping service they normally use to accommodate American buyers. eBay has also warned sellers that they may get negative feedback from American buyers who do not understand how tariffs work. eBay's feedback system is very important, and just a few negative reviews can impact a seller's standing on the platform and make it less likely that buyers will purchase something from them.

None of this is terribly surprising, but as an American, it feels actually more painful to see a listing for a product I might want that costs $2,000 for shipping rather than have the listings be invisible to me altogether.

[Mint+] OLYMPUS M.ZUIKO DIGITAL 60mm f/2.8 Macro ED MSC AF Lens From Japan | eBay

Lens ABQA11389. Lens condition. Mark in the lens. 93-94% Mint Minimal sings of use, Still very clean. 97-98% Mint++ Never used, but pre-owned. 95-96% Mint+ Almost no signs of use. 80-85% For Parts As-is.

^eBay

404 Media

2025-09-15 13:18:05

AI-Powered Animal Crossing Villagers Begin Organizing Against Tom Nook

A software engineer in Austin has hooked up Animal Crossing to an AI and breathed new and disturbing life into its villagers. Using a Large Language Model (LLM) trained on Animal Crossing scripts and an RSS reader, the anthropomorphic folk of the Nintendo classic spouted new dialogue, talked about current events, and actively plotted against Tom Nook’s predatory bell prices.

The Animal Crossing LLM is the work of Josh Fonseca, a software engineer in Austin, Texas who works at a small startup. Ars Technica first reported on the mod. His personal blog is full of small software projects like a task manager for the text editor VIM, a mobile app that helps rock climbers find partners, and the Animal Crossing AI. He also documented the project in a YouTube video.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Fonseca started playing around with AI in college and told 404 Media that he’d always wanted to work in the video game industry. “Turns out it’s a pretty hard industry to break into,” he said. He also graduated in 2020. “I’m sure you’ve heard, something big happened that year.” He took the first job he could find, but kept playing around with video games and AI and had previously injected an LLM into Stardew Valley.

Fonseca used a Dolphin emulatorrunning the original Gamecube Animal Crossing on a MacBook to get the project working. According to his blog, an early challenge was just getting the AI and the game to communicate. “The solution came from a classic technique in game modding: Inter-Process Communication (IPC) via shared memory. The idea is to allocate a specific chunk of the GameCube's RAM to act as a ‘mailbox.’ My external Python script can write data directly into that memory address, and the game can read from it,” he said in the blog.

He told 404 Media that this was the most tedious part of the whole project. “The process of finding the memory address the dialogue actually lives at and getting it to scan to my MacBook, which has all these security features that really don’t want me to do that, and ending up writing to the memory took me forever,” he said. “The communication between the game and an external source was the biggest challenge for me.”

Once he got his code and the game talking, he ran into another problem. “Animal Crossing doesn't speak plain text. It speaks its own encoded language filled with control codes,” he said in his blog. “Think of it like HTML. Your browser doesn't just display words; it interprets tags like <b> to make text bold. Animal Crossing does the same. A special prefix byte, CHAR_CONTROL_CODE, tells the game engine, ‘The next byte isn't a character, it's a command!’”

But this was a solved problem. The Animal Crossing modding community long ago learned the secrets of the villager’s language, and Fonseca was able to build on their work. Once he understood the game’s dialogue systems, he built the AI brain. It took two LLM models, one to write the dialogue and another he called “The Director” that would add in pauses, emphasize words with color, and choose the facial animations for the characters. He used a fine-tuned version of Google’s Gemini for this and said it was the most consistent model he’d used.

To make it work, he fine-tuned the model, meaning he reduced its input training data to make it better at specific outputs. “You probably need a minimum of 50 to 100 really good examples in order to make it better,” he said.

Results for the experiment were mixed. Cookie, Scoot, and Cheri did indeed utter new phrases in keeping with their personality. Things got weird when Fonseca hooked up the game to an RSS reader so the villagers could talk about real world news. “If you watch the video, all the sources are heavily, politically, leaning in one direction,” he said. “I did use a Fox news feed, not for any other reason than I looked up ‘news RSS feeds’ and they were the first link and I didn’t really think it through. And then I started getting those results…I thought they would just present the news, not have leanings or opinions.”

“Trump’s gonna fight like heck to get rid of mail-in voting and machines!” Fitness obsessed duck Scoot said in the video. “I bet he’s got some serious stamina, like, all the way in to the finish line—zip, zoom!”

The pink dog Cookie was up on her Middle East news. “Oh my gosh, Josh 😀! Did you see the news?! Gal Gadot is in Israel supporting the families! Arfer,” she said, uttering her trademark catchphrase after sharing the latest about Israel.

In the final part of the experiment, Fonseca enabled the villagers to gossip. “I gave them a tiny shared memory for gossip, who said what, to whom, and how they felt,” he said in the blog.The villagers almost instantly turned on Tom Nook, the Tanuki who runs the local stores and holds most of Animal Crossing's inhabitants in debt. “Everything’s going great in town, but sometimes I feel like Tom Nook is, like, taking all the bells!” Cookie said.

“Those of us with big dreams are being squashed by Tom Nook! We gotta take our town back!” Cheri the bear cub said.

“This place is starting to feel more like Nook’s prison, y’know?” Said Scoot.
youtube.com/embed/7AyEzA5ziE0?…
Why do this to Animal Crossing? Why make Scoot and Cheri learn about Gal Gadot, Israel, and Trump?

“I’ve always liked nostalgic content,” Fonscesca said. His TikTok and YouTube algorithm is filled with liminal spaces and music from his childhood that’s detuned. He’s gotten into Hauntology, a philosophical idea that studies—among other things—promised futures that did not come to pass.

He sees projects like this as a way of linking the past and the future. “When I was a child I was like, ‘Games are gonna get better and better every year,’’ he said. “But after 20 years of playing games I’ve become a little jaded and I’m like, ‘oh there hasn’t really been that much innovation.’ So I really like the idea of mixing those old games with all the future technologies that I’m interested in. And I feel like I’m fulfilling those promised futures in a way.”

He knows that not everyone is a fan of AI. “A lot of people say that dialogue with AI just cannot be because of how much it sounds like AI,” he said. “And to some extent I think people are right. Most people can detect ChatGPT or Gemini language from a mile away. But I really think, if you fine tune it, I was surprised at just how good the results were.”

Animal Crossing’s dialogue is simple and that simplicity makes it a decent test case for AI video game marks, but Fonseca thinks he can do similar things with more complicated games. “There’s been a lot of discussion around how what I’m doing isn’t possible when there’s like, tasks or quests, because LLMs can’t properly guide you to that task without hallucinating. I think it might be more possible than people think,” he said. “So I would like to either try out my own very small game or take a game that has these kinds of quests and put together a demo of how that might be possible.”

He knows people balk at using AI to make video games, and art in general, but believes it’ll be a net benefit. “There will always be human writers and I absolutely want there to be human writers handling the core,” he said. “I would hope that AI is going to be a tool that doesn’t take away any of the best writers, but maybe helps them add more to their game that maybe wouldn’t have existed otherwise. I would hope that this just helps create more art in the world. I think I see the total art in the world increasing as a good thing…now I know some people would say that using AI ceases to make it art, but I’m also very deep in the programming aspect of it. What it takes to make these things is so incredible that it still feels like magic to me. Maybe on some level I’m still hypnotized by that.”

Modder injects AI dialogue into 2002’s Animal Crossing using memory hack

Unofficial mod lets classic Nintendo GameCube title use AI chatbots with amusing results.

^{Benj Edwards (Ars Technica)}

404 Media

2025-09-15 13:14:17

Airlines Sell 5 Billion Plane Ticket Records to the Government For Warrantless Searching

📄
This article was primarily reported using public records requests. We are making it available to all readers as a public service. FOIA reporting can be expensive, please consider subscribing to 404 Media to support this work. Or send us a one time donation via our tip jar here.

A data broker owned by the country’s major airlines, including American Airlines, United, and Delta, is selling access to five billion plane ticketing records to the government for warrantless searching and monitoring of peoples’ movements, including by the FBI, Secret Service, ICE, and many other agencies, according to a new contract and other records reviewed by 404 Media.

The contract provides new insight into the scale of the sale of passengers’ data by the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), the airlines-owned data broker. The contract shows ARC’s data includes information related to more than 270 carriers and is sourced through more than 12,800 travel agencies. ARC has previously told the government to not reveal to the public where this passenger data came from, which includes peoples’ names, full flight itineraries, and financial details.

“Americans' privacy rights shouldn't depend on whether they bought their tickets directly from the airline or via a travel agency. ARC's sale of data to U.S. government agencies is yet another example of why Congress needs to close the data broker loophole by passing my bipartisan bill, the Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act,” Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement.

💡
Do you know anything else about ARC or the sale of this data? 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.

ARC is owned and operated by at least eight major U.S. airlines, publicly released documents show. Its board of directors includes representatives from American Airlines, Delta, United, Southwest, Alaska Airlines, JetBlue, and European airlines Air France and Lufthansa, and Canada’s Air Canada. ARC acts as a bridge between airlines and travel agencies, in which it helps with fraud prevention and finds trends in travel data. ARC also sells passenger data to the government as part of what it calls the Travel Intelligence Program (TIP).

TIP is updated every day with the previous day’s ticket sales and can show a person’s paid intent to travel. Government agencies can then search this data by name, credit card, airline, and more.

The new contract shows that ARC has access to much more data than previously reported. Earlier coverage found TIP contained more than one billion records spanning more than 3 years of past and future travel. The new contract says ARC provides the government with “5 billion ticketing records for searching capabilities.”

Screenshots of the documents obtained by 404 Media.

404 Media obtained the contract through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) with the Secret Service. The contract indicates the Secret Service plans to pay ARC $885,000 for access to the data stretching into 2028. A spokesperson for the agency told 404 Media “The U.S. Secret Service is committed to protecting our nation’s leaders and financial infrastructure in close coordination with our federal, state, and local law enforcement partners. To safeguard the integrity of our work, we do not discuss the tools used to conduct our operations.” The Secret Service did not answer a question on whether it seeks a warrant, subpoena, or court order to search ARC data.

404 Media has filed FOIA requests with a wide range of agencies that public procurement records show have purchased ARC data. That includes ICE, CBP, ATF, the SEC, TSA, the State Department, U.S. Marshals, and the IRS. A court record reviewed by 404 Media shows the FBI has asked ARC to search its databases for a specific person as part of a drug investigation.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
The ATF told 404 Media in a statement “ATF uses ARC data for criminal and investigative purposes related to firearms trafficking and other investigations within ATF’s purview. ATF follows DOJ policy and appropriate legal processes to obtain and search the data. Access to the system is limited to a very small group within ATF, and all subjects searched within ARC must be part of an active, official ATF case/investigation.”

An ARC spokesperson told 404 Media in an email that TIP “was established by ARC after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and has since been used by the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement community to support national security and prevent criminal activity with bipartisan support. Over the years, TIP has likely contributed to the prevention and apprehension of criminals involved in human trafficking, drug trafficking, money laundering, sex trafficking, national security threats, terrorism and other imminent threats of harm to the United States.”

The spokesperson added “Pursuant to ARC’s privacy policy, consumers may ask ARC to refrain from selling their personal data.”

After media coverage and scrutiny from Senator Wyden’s office of the little-known data selling, ARC finally registered as a data broker in the state of California in June. Senator Wyden previously said it appeared ARC had been in violation of Californian law for not registering while selling airline customers’ data for years.

Airline-Owned Data Broker Selling Your Flight Info to DHS Finally Registers as a Data Broker

It’s a legal requirement for data brokers to register in the state of California. ARC, the airlines-owned data broker that has been selling your flight information to the government for years, only just registered after being contacted by the office …

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-14 18:25:10

Podcast: AI Slop Is Drowning Out Human YouTubers

This week, we talk about how 'Boring History' AI slop is taking over YouTube and making it harder to discover content that humans spend months researching, filming, and editing. Then we talk about how Meta has totally given up on content moderation. In the bonus segment, we discuss the 'AI Darwin Awards,' which is, uhh, celebrating the dumbest uses of AI.
playlist.megaphone.fm?e=TBIEA1…
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.
youtube.com/embed/jCak5De0oaw?…

• AI Generated Boring History Videos Are Flooding YouTube And Drowning Out Real History
• Instagram Account Promotes Holocaust Denial T-Shirts To 400,000 Followers
• AI Darwin Awards Shows AI's Biggest Problem Is Human

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 …

^{Apple Podcasts}

404 Media

2025-09-13 13:00:32

NASA Rover Finds ‘Potential Biosignature’ on Mars

Welcome back to the Abstract! These are the studies this week that broke ice, broke hearts, and broke out the libations. Also, if you haven’t seen it already, we just covered an amazing breakthrough in our understanding of the cosmos, which is as much a story about humanity’s endless capacity for ingenuity as it is about the wondrous nature of black holes.

Microbes on ice

Zhang, Qing et al. “Ice gliding diatoms establish record-low temperature limits for motility in a eukaryotic cell.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Scientists have discovered Arctic algae moving around with ease in icy environments of -15°C (5°F)—the lowest temperatures ever recorded for motility in a eukaryotic lifeform. While some simple microbes can survive lower temperatures, this is the first time that scientists have seen eukaryotic life—organisms with more complex cells containing a nucleus—able to live, thrive, and locomote in such chilly environments.

It’s amazing that these so-called “ice diatoms” can move around at all, but it’s even cooler that they do it in style with a gliding mechanism that researchers describe as a “‘skating’ ability.” Their secret weapon? Mucus threads (“mucilage”) that they use like anchors to pull themselves through frozen substrates.

“The unique ability of ice diatoms to glide on ice” enables them “to thrive in conditions that immobilize other marine diatoms,” said researchers led by Qing Zhang of Stanford University.
An Arctic diatom, showing the actin filaments that run down its middle and enable its skating motion. Image: Prakash Lab
Zhang and her colleagues made this discovery by collecting ice cores from 12 locations around the Arctic Chukchi Sea during a 2023 expedition on the research vessel Sikuliaq, which is owned by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Unfortunately, this is a research area that could be destroyed by the Trump administration, with NSF facing 70 percent cuts to its polar research budget.

In other news…

How did Mars get its leopard spots?

Hurowitz, Joel et al. “Redox-driven mineral and organic associations in Jezero Crater, Mars.” Nature.

If lifeforms are doing triple axels in Arctic ice on Earth, it’s natural to wonder whether alien organisms may have emerged elsewhere. To that end, scientists announced the discovery of a tantalizing hint of possible life on Mars this week.
youtube.com/embed/ieJKWW8sp2A?…
NASA’s Perseverance rover turned up organic carbon-bearing mudstones that preserve past redox reactions, which involves the transfer of electrons between substances resulting in one being “reduced” (gaining electrons) and one being “oxidized” (losing electrons). The remnants of those reactions look like “leopard spots” in the Bright Angel formation of Jezero Crater, where the rover landed in 2021, according to the study.
The “leopard spots” at Bright Angel. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
This is not slam-dunk evidence of life, as the reactions can be geological in origin, but they “warrant consideration as ‘potential biosignatures.”

“This assessment is further supported by the geological context of the Bright Angel formation, which indicates that it is sedimentary in origin and deposited from water under habitable conditions,” said researchers led by Joel Hurowitz of Stony Brook University.

The team added that the best way to confirm the origin of the ambiguous structures is to bring Perseverance’s samples back to Earth for further study as part of the Mars Sample Return (MSR) program. Unfortunately, the Trump administration wants to cancel MSR. It seems that even when we have nice things, we still can’t have nice things, a paradox that we all must navigate together.

The last flight of Lucky and Lucky II

Smyth, Robert S.H. et al. “Fatal accidents in neonatal pterosaurs and selective sampling in the Solnhofen fossil assemblage.” Current Biology

About 150 million years ago, a pair of tiny pterodactyls—just days or weeks old—were trying to fly through a cataclysmic storm. But the wind was strong enough to break the bones of their baby wings, consigning them to a watery grave in the lagoon below.

Now, scientists describe how the very storm that cut their lives short also set them up for a long afterlife as exquisitely preserved fossils, nicknamed Lucky and Lucky II, in Germany's Solnhofen limestone.
Fossils of Lucky II. Image: University of Leicester
“Storms caused these pterosaurs to drown and rapidly descend to the bottom of the water column, where they were quickly buried in storm-generated sediments, preserving both their skeletal integrity and soft tissues,” said researchers led by Robert Smyth of the University of Leicester.

“This catastrophic taphonomic pathway, triggered by storm events, was likely the principal mechanism by which small- to medium-sized pterodactyloids…entered the Solnhofen assemblage,” they added.

While it’s sad that these poor babies had such short lives, it’s astonishing that such a clear cause of death can be established 150 million years later. Rest in peace, Lucky and Lucky II.

Trump’s aid cuts could cause millions of deaths from tuberculosis alone

Mandal, Sandip et al. “A deadly equation: The global toll of US TB funding cuts.” PLOS Global Public Health.

The Trump administration’s gutting of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), carried out in public fashion by Elon Musk and DOGE, will likely cause millions of excess deaths from tuberculosis (TB) by 2030, reports a sobering new study.

“Termination of US funding could result in an estimated 10.6 million additional TB cases and 2.2 million additional TB deaths during the period 2025–2030,” said researchers led by Sandip Mandal of the Center for Modeling and Analysis at Avenir Health. “The loss of U.S. funding endangers global TB control efforts” and “potentially puts millions of lives at risk.”

Beyond TB, the overall death toll from the loss of USAID is estimated to reach 14 million deaths by 2030. The destruction of USAID must never be memory-holed as it is shaping up to be among the most deadly actions ever enacted by a government outside of war.

Small microbes with big impacts

Ribalet, François et al. Future ocean warming may cause large reductions in Prochlorococcus biomass and productivity. Nature Microbiology.

In more bad news, it turns out that the bacteria that’s responsible for making a lot of Earth’s oxygen is highly vulnerable to human-driven climate change. Prochlorococcus, the most abundant photosynthetic organism on Earth, is the source of about 20 percent of the oxygen in our biosphere. But rapidly warming seas could set off “a possible 17–51 percent reduction in Prochlorococcus production in tropical oceans,” according to a new study.

“Prochlorococcus division rates appear primarily determined by temperature, increasing exponentially to 28°C, then sharply declining,” said researchers led by François Ribalet of the University of Washington. “Regional surface water temperatures may exceed this range by the end of the century under both moderate and high warming scenarios.”

It’s possible that this vital bacteria will adapt by moving to higher latitudes or by evolving more heat-tolerant variants. But that seems like a big gamble on something as important as Earth’s oxygen budget.

Last, we feast

Esposito, Carmen et al. “Diverse feasting networks at the end of the Bronze Age in Britain (c. 900-500 BCE) evidenced by multi-isotope analysis.” iScience.

We are far from the first generation to live through unstable times, as evidenced by a new study about the “climatic change and economic upheaval” in Britain during the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age about 3,000 years ago.

These disruptions were traumatic, but they also galvanized new modes of community connection—a.k.a epic parties where people ate, drank, made merry, and dumped the remnants of their revelry in trashpiles called “middens.”
East Chisenbury midden under excavation. Image: Cardiff University
“These vast mounds of cultural debris represent the coming together of vast numbers of people and animals for feasts on a scale unparalleled in British prehistory,” said researchers led by Carmen Esposito of Cardiff University. “This study, the largest multi-isotope faunal dataset yet delivered in archaeology, has demonstrated that, despite their structural similarities, middens had diverse roles.”

"Given the proximity of all middens to rivers, it is likely that waterways played a role in the movement of people, objects and livestock,” the team added. “Overall, the research points to the dynamic networks that were anchored on feasting events during this period and the different, perhaps complementary, roles that different middens had at the Bronze Age-Iron Age transition.”

When in doubt—then as now—have a big party.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Trump's 2026 budget plan would cancel NASA's Mars Sample Return mission. Experts say that's a 'major step back'

"They need to change course."

^{Leonard David (Space)}

404 Media

2025-09-12 17:00:59

Behind the Blog: 'Free Speech' and Open Dialogue

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 "free speech," keeping stupid thoughts in one's own head, and cancel culture.

JASON: In August 2014, I spoke to Drew Curtis, the founder of Fark.com, a timeless, seminal internet website, about a decision he had just made. Curtis banned misogyny from his website, partially in the name of facilitating free speech.

“We don't want to be the He Man Woman Hater's Club. This represents enough of a departure from pretty much how every other large internet community operates that I figure an announcement is necessary,” Curtis wrote when he announced the rule. “Adam Savage once described to me the problem this way: if the Internet was a dude, we'd all agree that dude has a serious problem with women.”

This post is for subscribers only

Become a member to get access to all content
Subscribe now

Behind the Blog: 'Free Speech' and Open Dialogue

This week, we discuss "free speech," keeping stupid thoughts in one's own head, and cancel culture.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-12 15:18:03

Comcast Executives Warn Workers To Not Say The Wrong Thing About Charlie Kirk

A company-wide email from Comcast executives, sent to everyone working at NBCUniversal on Friday morning, mourns right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk’s death and reminds employees that saying the wrong thing about Kirk’s legacy can get you fired swiftly.

The email, obtained by 404 Media and first reported by Variety, has the subject line “A message from Brian Roberts, Mike Cavanagh, and Mark Lazarus.” In it, the executives eulogize Kirk, calling him an “advocate for open debate, whose faith was important to him.”

Roberts is the Chairman and CEO of Comcast Corporation, Cavanagh is the president, and Lazarus is the prospective CEO of VERSANT, Comcast’s new spinoff that will include the majority of its NBCUniversal cable network portfolio. NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo and more journalistic and entertainment properties are under the NBCUniversal umbrella.

“You may have seen that MSNBC recently ended its association with a contributor who made an unacceptable and insensitive comment about this horrific event,” the executives wrote. “That coverage was at odds with fostering civil dialogue and being willing to listen to the points of view of those who have differing opinions.”

💡
Do you have information about how your company is speaking to employees about Charlie Kirk's death, or political speech in general? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at sam@404media.co.

Political analyst Matthew Dowd was fired from MSNBC on Wednesday after speaking about Kirk’s death on air. During a broadcast on Wednesday following the shooting, anchor Katy Tur asked Dowd about “the environment in which a shooting like this happens,” according to Variety. Dowd answered: “He’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. And I think that is the environment we are in. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place. And that’s the unfortunate environment we are in.”

MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler issued an apology in response, calling Dowd’s words “inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable.” Dowd also apologized publicly, posting on Bluesky: “On an earlier appearance on MSNBC I was asked a question on the environment we are in. I apologize for my tone and words. Let me be clear, I in no way intended for my comments to blame Kirk for this horrendous attack.”

Charlie Kirk Was Not Practicing Politics the Right Way
The mainstream media seems entirely uninterested in explaining Charlie Kirk’s work.
404 MediaJason Koebler

MSNBC is a division of NBCUniversal. The letter from Comcast executives reiterates to current employees that their jobs are on the line if they stray from bland, milquetoast statements about a man who spent his life fomenting hate will have consequences on their careers. The entire mainstream media environment has been working overtime to sanitize Kirk’s legacy since his murder—a legacy that includes targeted harassment of professors at schools across the country and normalizing the notion that basic human rights are up for “debate.”

The full email is below.

Dear Comcast NBCUniversal Team,

The tragic loss of Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old father, husband, and advocate for open debate, whose faith was important to him, reminds us of the fragility of life and the urgent need for unity in our nation. Our hearts are heavy, as his passing leaves a grieving family and a country grappling with division. There is no place for violence or hate in our society.

You may have seen that MSNBC recently ended its association with a contributor who made an unacceptable and insensitive comment about this horrific event. That coverage was at odds with fostering civil dialogue and being willing to listen to the points of view of those who have differing opinions. We should be able to disagree, robustly and passionately, but, ultimately, with respect. We need to do better.

Charlie Kirk believed that "when people stop talking, really bad stuff starts." Regardless of whether you agreed with his political views, his words and actions underscore the urgency to maintain a respectful exchange of ideas a principle we must champion. We believe in the power of communication to bring us together. Today, that belief feels more vital than ever. Something essential has fractured in our public discourse, and as a company that values the power of information, we have a responsibility to help mend it.

As employees, we ask you to embody our values in your work and communities. We should engage with respect, listen, and treat people with kindness.

MSNBC Apologizes for Matthew Dowd’s Commentary on Charlie Kirk’s Death

MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler has issued an apology for Matthew Dowd's remarks during coverage of the shooting of Charlie Kirk.

^{Jack Dunn (Variety)}

404 Media

2025-09-11 19:00:43

Does Silksong Seem Unreasonably Hard? You Probably Took a Wrong Turn

There is an aggrieved cry reverberating through the places on the internet where gamers gather. To hear them tell it, Hollow Knight: Silksong, the sequel to the stone-cold classic 2017 platformer, is too damned hard. There’s a particular jumping puzzle involving spikes and red flowers that many are struggling with and they’re filming their frustration and putting it up on the internet, showing their ass for everyone to see.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Even 404 Media’s own Joseph Cox hit these red flowers and had the temerity to declare Silksong a “bad game” that he was “disappointed” in given his love for the original Hollow Knight.
youtube.com/embed/3yxR6H_Zh0M?…youtube.com/embed/GD8ZyYE1K7k?…youtube.com/embed/ZsmxOMijLtE?…
Couldn't be me.

I, too, got to the area just outside Hunter’s March in Silksong where the horrible red flowers bloom. Unlike others, however, my gamer instincts kicked in. I knew what to do. “This is the Dark Souls Catacombs situation all over again,” I said to myself. Then I turned around and came back later.

And that has made all the difference.

In the original Dark Souls, once players clear the opening area they come to Firelink Shrine. From there they can go into Undead Burg, the preferred starting path, or descend into The Catacombs where horrifying undying skeletons block the entrance to a cave. One will open the game up before you, the other will kill new players dead. A lot of Dark Souls players have raged and quit the game over the years because they went into The Catacombs instead of the Undead Burg.

Like Dark Souls, Silksong has an open-ish world where portions of the map are hardlocked by items and soft locked by player skill checks. One of the entrances into the flower laden Hunter’s March is in an early game area blocked by a mini-boss fight with a burly ant. The first time I fought the ant, it killed me over and over again and I took that as a sign I should go elsewhere.

High skilled players can kill the ant, but it’s much easier after you’ve gotten some basic items and abilities. I had several other paths I could take to progress the game, so I marked the ant’s location and moved on.

As I explored more of Silksong, I acquired several powerups that trivialized the fight with the ant and made it easy to navigate the flower jumping puzzles behind him. The first is Swift Step, a dash ability, which is in Deep Docks in the south-eastern portion of the map. The second is the Wanderer’s Crest, which is near the start of the game behind a locked door you get the key for in Silksong’s first town.

The dash allowed me to adjust my horizontal position in the air, but it’s the Wanderer’s Crest that made the flowers easy to navigate. The red flowers are littered throughout Hunter’s March and players have to hit them with a down attack to get a boosted jump and cross pits of spikes. By default, Hornet—the player character—down attacks at a 45 degree angle. The Wanderer’s Crest allows you to attack directly below you and makes the puzzles much easier to navigate.

Cox, bless his heart, hit the burly red ant miniboss and brute forced his way past. Then, like so many other desperate gamers, he proceeded to attempt to navigate the red flower jumping puzzles without the right power ups. He had no Swift Step. He had no Wanderer’s Crest. And thus, he raged.

He’s not alone. Watching the videos of jumping puzzles online I noticed that a lot of the players didn’t seem to have the dash or the downward attack.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Get This Bag (@get_this_bag)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by PromoNinja PromoNinja (@promoninja_us)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by @mariworld0

Games communicate to players in different ways and gamers often complain about annoying an obvious signposting like big splashes of yellow paint. But when a truly amazing game comes along that tries to gently steer the player with burly ants and difficult puzzles, they don’t appreciate it and they don’t listen. If you’re really stuck in Silksong, try going somewhere else.

Permanately stuck in Catacombs? :: DARK SOULS™: REMASTERED General Discussions

I am trying to leave the Catacombs completely from the new bonfire near Vamos but cannot seem to do so. I cannot warp to other bonfires yet.

^{steamcommunity.com}

404 Media

2025-09-11 17:44:39

Charlie Kirk Was Not Practicing Politics the Right Way

Thursday morning, Ezra Klein at the New York Times published a column titled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way.” Klein’s general thesis is that Kirk was willing to talk to anyone, regardless of their beliefs, as evidenced by what he was doing while he was shot, which was debating people on college campuses. Klein is not alone in this take; the overwhelming sentiment from America’s largest media institutions in the immediate aftermath of his death has been to paint Kirk as a mainstream political commentator, someone whose politics liberals and leftists may not agree with but someone who was open to dialogue and who espoused the virtues of free speech.

“You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him,” Klein wrote. “He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it.”

“I envied what he built. A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness,” Klein continued.

Kirk is being posthumously celebrated by much of the mainstream press as a noble sparring partner for center-left politicians and pundits. Meanwhile, the very real, very negative, and sometimes violent impacts of his rhetoric and his political projects are being glossed over or ignored entirely. In the New York Times, Kirk was an “energetic” voice who was “critical of gay and transgender rights,” but few of the national pundits have encouraged people to actually go read what Kirk tweeted or listen to what he said on his podcast to millions and millions of people. “Whatever you think of Kirk (I had many disagreements with him, and he with me), when he died he was doing exactly what we ask people to do on campus: Show up. Debate. Talk. Engage peacefully, even when emotions run high,” David French wrote in the Times. “In fact, that’s how he made his name, in debate after debate on campus after campus.”

This does not mean Kirk deserved to die or that political violence is ever justified. What happened to Kirk is horrifying, and we fear deeply for whatever will happen next. But it is undeniable that Kirk was not just a part of the extremely tense, very dangerous national dialogue, he was an accelerationist force whose work to dehumanize LGBTQ+ people and threaten the free speech of professors, teachers, and school board members around the country has directly put the livelihoods and physical safety of many people in danger. We do no one any favors by ignoring this, even in the immediate aftermath of an assassination like this.

Kirk claimed that his Turning Point USA sent “80+ buses full of patriots” to the January 6 insurrection. Turning Point USA has also run a “Professor Watchlist,” “School Board Watchlist,” and “Campus Reform” for nearly a decade.

“America’s radical education system has taken a devastating toll on our children,” Kirk said in an intro video posted on these projects’ websites. “From sexualized material in textbooks to teaching CRT and implementing the 1619 Project doctrine, the radical leftist agenda will not stop … The School Board Watch List exposes school districts that host drag queen story hour, teach courses on transgenderism, and implement unsafe gender neutral bathroom policies. The Professor Watch List uncovers the most radical left-wing professors from universities that are known to suppress conservative voices and advance the progressive agenda.”

These websites have been directly tied to harassment and threats against professors and school board members all over the country. Professor Watchlist lists hundreds of professors around the country, many of them Black or trans, and their perceived radical agendas, which include things like supporting gun control, “socialism,” “Antifa,” “abortion,” and acknowledging that trans people exist and racism exists. Trans professors are misgendered on the website, and numerous people who have been listed on it have publicly spoken about receiving death threats and being harassed after being listed on the site.

One professor on the watchlist who 404 Media is granting anonymity for his safety said once he was added to the list, he started receiving anonymous letters in his campus mailbox. “‘You're everything wrong with colleges,’ ‘watch your step, we're watching you’ kind of stuff,” he said, “One anonymous DM on Twitter had a picture of my house and driveway, which was chilling.” His president and provost also received emails attempting to discredit him with “all the allegedly communist and subversive stuff I was up to,” he said. “It was all certainly concerning, but compared to colleagues who are people of color and/or women, I feel like the volume was smaller for me. But it was certainly not a great feeling to experience that stuff. That watchlist fucked up careers and ruined lives.”

The American Association of University Professors said in an open letter in 2017 that Professor Watchlist “lists names of professors with their institutional affiliations and photographs, thereby making it easy for would-be stalkers and cyberbullies to target them. Individual faculty members who have been included on such lists or singled out elsewhere have been subject to threats of physical violence, including sexual assault, through hundreds of e-mails, calls, and social media postings. Such threatening messages are likely to stifle the free expression of the targeted faculty member; further, the publicity that such cases attract can cause others to self-censor so as to avoid being subjected to similar treatment.” Campus free speech rights group FIRE found that censorship and punishment of professors skyrocketed between 2020 and 2023, in part because of efforts from Professor Watchlist.

Many more professors who Turning Point USA added to their watchlist have spoken out in the past about how being targeted upended their lives, brought years of harassment down on them and their colleagues, and resulted in death threats against them and their loved ones.

At Arizona State University, a professor on the watchlist was assaulted by two people from Turning Point USA in 2023.

“Earlier this year, I wrote to Turning Point USA to request that it remove ASU professors from its Professor Watchlist. I did not receive a response,” university president Michael Crow wrote in a statement. “Instead, the incident we’ve all now witnessed on the video shows Turning Point’s refusal to stop dangerous practices that result in both physical and mental harm to ASU faculty members, which they then apparently exploit for fundraising, social media clicks and financial gain.” Crow said the Professor Watchlist resulted in “antisemitic, anti-LGBTQ+ and misogynistic attacks on ASU faculty with whom Turning Point USA and its followers disagree,” and called the organization’s tactics “anti-democratic, anti-free speech and completely contrary” to the spirit of scholarship.

Kirk’s death is a horrifying moment in our current American nightmare. Kirk’s actions and rhetoric do not justify what happened to him because they cannot be justified. But Kirk was not merely someone who showed up to college campuses and listened. It should not be controversial to plainly state some of the impact of his work.

ASU President: Turning Point USA crew accused of 'bloodying' ASU professor's face

Arizona State Police released footage of an incident between an ASU English professor, a reporter and cameraman from Turning Point USA that happened on Oct. 11. University president Dr. Michael Crow released a statement calling the men "cowards."

^{Jessica Johnson (FOX 10 Phoenix)}

404 Media

2025-09-11 13:00:16

The Software Engineers Paid to Fix Vibe Coded Messes

Freelance developers and entire companies are making a business out of fixing shoddy vibe coded software.

I first noticed this trend in the form of a meme that was circulating on LinkedIn, sharing a screenshot of several profiles who advertised themselves as “vibe coding cleanup specialists.” I couldn’t confirm if the accounts in that screenshot were genuinely making an income by fixing vibe coded software, but the meme gained traction because of the inherent irony in the existence of such a job existing.

The alleged benefit of vibe coding, which refers to the practice of building software with AI-coding tools without much attention to the underlying code, is that it allows anyone to build a piece of software very quickly and easily. As we’ve previously reported, in reality, vibe coded projects could result in security issues or a recipe app that generates recipes for “Cyanide Ice Cream.” If the resulting software is so poor you need to hire a human specialist software engineer to come in and rewrite the vibe coded software, it defeats the entire purpose.

LinkedIn memes aside, people are in fact making money fixing vibe coded messes.

“I've been offering vibe coding fixer services for about two years now, starting in late 2023. Currently, I work with around 15-20 clients regularly, with additional one-off projects throughout the year,” Hamid Siddiqi, who offers to “review, fix your vibe code” on Fiverr, told me in an email. “I started fixing vibe-coded projects because I noticed a growing number of developers and small teams struggling to refine AI-generated code that was functional but lacked the polish or ‘vibe’ needed to align with their vision. I saw an opportunity to bridge that gap, combining my coding expertise with an eye for aesthetic and user experience.”

Siddiqi said common issues he fixes in vibe coded projects include inconsistent UI/UX design in AI-generated frontends, poorly optimized code that impacts performance, misaligned branding elements, and features that function but feel clunky or unintuitive. He said he also often refines color schemes, animations, and layouts to better match the creator’s intended aesthetic.

Siddiqi is one of dozens of people on Fiverr who is now offering services specifically catering to people with shoddy vibe coded projects. Established software development companies like Ulam Labs, now say “we clean up after vibe coding. Literally.”

“Built something fast? Now it’s time to make it solid,” Ulam Labs says on its site. “We know how it goes.
You had to move quickly, get that MVP [minimally viable product] out, and validate the idea. But now the tech debt is holding you back: no tests, shaky architecture, CI/CD [Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment] is a dream, and every change feels like defusing a bomb. That’s where we come in.”

Swatantra Sohni, who started VibeCodeFixers.com, a site for people with vibe coded projects who need help from experienced developers to fix or finish their projects, says that almost 300 experienced developers have posted their profiles to the site. He said so far VibeCodeFixers.com has only connected between 30-40 vibe code projects with fixers, but that he hasn’t done anything to promote the service and at the moment is focused on adding as many software developers to the platform as possible.

Sohni said that he’s been vibe coding himself since before Andrej Karpathy coined the term in February. He bought a bunch of vibe coding related domains, and realized a service like VibeCodeFixers.com was necessary based on how often he had to seek help from experts on his own vibe coding projects. In March, the site got a lot of attention on X and has been slowly adding people to the platform since.

Sohni also wrote a “Vibecoding Community Research Report” based on interviews with non-technical people who are vibe coding their projects that he shared with me. The report identified a lot of the same issues as Siddiqi, mainly that existing features tend to break when new ones are added.

“Most of these vibe coders, either they are product managers or they are sales guys, or they are small business owners, and they think that they can build something,” Sohni told me. “So for them it’s more for prototyping. Vibe coding is, at the moment, kind of like infancy. It's very handy to convey the prototype they want, but I don't think they are really intended to make it like a production grade app.”

Another big issue Sohni identified is “credit burn,” meaning the money vibe coders waste on AI usage fees in the final 10-20 percent stage of developing the app, when adding new features breaks existing features. In theory, it might be cheaper and more efficient for vibe coders to start over at that point, but Sohni said people get attached to their first project.

“What happens is that the first time they build the app, it's like they think that they can build the app with one prompt, and then the app breaks, and they burn the credit. I think they are very emotionally connected to the app, because this act of vibe coding involves you, your creativity.”

In theory it might be cheaper and more efficient for vibe coders to start over if the LLM starts hallucinating and creating problems, but Sohni that’s when people come to VibeCodeFixers.com. They want someone to fix the bugs in their app, not create a new one.

Sohni told me he thinks vibe coding is not going anywhere, but neither are human developers.

“I feel like the role [of human developers] would be slightly limited, but we will still need humans to keep this AI on the leash,” he said.

Vibe Coded AI App Generates Recipes for Cyanide Ice Cream and Cum Soup

A Y Combinator partner proudly launched an AI recipe app that told people how to make “Actual Cocaine” and a “Uranium Bomb.”

^{Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-10 15:00:21

Scientists Just Got an Unprecedented Glimpse into the Nature of Reality

🌘
Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.

Scientists have captured the clearest ever gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime—a breakthrough that has resolved decades-old mysteries about black holes and the nature of our reality, according to a study published on Wednesday in Physical Review Letters.

Gravitational waves forged by an ancient merger between two massive black holes reached Earth on January 14 of this year, where they were picked up by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) located in Washington and Louisiana. LIGO has discovered hundreds of these waves, but the January event, known as GW250114, is the cleanest detection ever made with a signal-to-noise ratio of 80 (meaning that the signal is about 80 times louder than the noise).

The unprecedented clarity allowed scientists to confirm predictions about black holes that were made a half-century ago by pioneering theorists Roy Kerr and Stephen Hawking, known respectively as the Kerr metric and Hawking area theorem. According to the new study, the results represent “a milestone in the decade-long history of gravitational wave science,” a field that was born in 2015 with the historic first detection of these elusive waves.

“We had promised that gravitational waves would open a new window into the universe, and that has materialized,” said Maximiliano Isi, a gravitational-wave astrophysicist and assistant professor at Columbia University and the Flatiron Institute who co-led the study, in a call with 404 Media.

“Over the past 10 years, the instruments have continued to improve,” added Isi. “We are at a point now where we are detecting a collision of black holes every other day or so. That said, this one detection, which has an extremely high signal-to-noise ratio, really drives home how far this field has come along.”

Gravitational waves are subtle ripples in spacetime that are produced by energetic cosmic events, such as supernovas or mergers between black holes. Albert Einstein was the first to predict their existence in his 1916 general theory of relativity, though he was doubtful humans could ever develop technologies sensitive enough to detect them.

These waves oscillate at tiny distances that are thousands of times smaller than the width of a proton. To capture them, LIGO’s detectors shoot lasers across corridors that stretch for 2.5 miles and act like ultra-sensitive tripwires. The advent of gravitational wave astronomy earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017 and marked the dawn of "multimessenger astronomy,” in which observations about the universe can emerge from different sources beyond light.

GW250114 has a lot in common with that inaugural gravitational wave signal detected in 2015; both signals came from mergers between black holes that are about 30 times as massive as the Sun with relatively slow spins. Gravitational wave astronomy has revealed that black holes often fall into this mass range for reasons that remain unexplained, but the similarity of the 2015 and 2025 events throws the technological progress of LIGO into sharp relief.

“Every pair of black holes is different, but this one is almost an exact twin” to the first detection, Isi said. “It really allows for an apples-to-apples comparison. The new signal is detected with around four times more fidelity, more clarity, and less relative noise than the previous one. Even though, intrinsically, the signal is equally powerful to the first one, it's so much neater and we can see so much more detail. This has been made possible by painstaking work on the instrument.”

The high quality of the signal enabled Isi and his colleagues to test a prediction about black holes proposed by mathematician Roy Kerr in 1963. Kerr suggested that black holes are simple astrophysical objects that can be boiled down to just two properties: mass and spin. GW250114 was clear enough to produce precise measurements of the “ringdown” signatures of the merging black holes as they coalesced into a single remnant, which is a pattern akin to the sound waves from a ringing bell. These measurements confirmed Kerr’s early insight about the nature of these strange objects.
An illustration of the two tones, including a rare, fleeting overtone used to test the Kerr metric. Image: Simons Foundation.
“Because we see it so clearly for the first time, we see this ringing for an extended period where there is an equivocal, clear signature that this is coming from the final black hole,” explained Isi. “We can identify and isolate this ringing from the final black hole and tease out that there are two modes of oscillation.”

“It's like having two tuning forks that are vibrating at the same time with slightly different pitches,” he continued. “We can identify those two tones and check that they're both consistent with a single mass and spin. This is the most direct way we have of checking if the black holes out there are really conforming to the mathematical idealization that we expect in general relativity—through Kerr.”

In addition to confirming Kerr’s prediction, GW250114 also validated Stephen Hawking’s 1971 prediction that the surface area of a black hole could only increase, known as Hawking's area theorem. Before they merged, the black holes were each about 33 times as massive as the Sun, and the final remnant was about 63 solar masses (the remaining mass was emitted as energy in the form of gravitational waves). Crucially, however, the final remnant’s surface area was bigger than the combined sum of the areas of the black holes that created it, confirming the area theorem.

“We are in an era of experimental gravitation,” said Isi. “We can study space and time in these dynamically crazy configurations, observationally. That is really amazing for a field that has, for decades, just worked on pure mathematical abstraction. We are hunting these things with reality.”

The much-anticipated confirmation of these predictions puts constraints on some of the most intractable problems in physics, including how the laws of general relativity—which governs cosmic scales of stars and galaxies—can coexist with the very different laws that rule the tiny quantum scales of atoms.

Scientists hope more answers can be revealed by increasingly sophisticated detections from observatories like LIGO and Virgo in Italy, along with future projects like the European Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), due for launch in the 2030s. Despite LIGO’s massive contribution to science, the Trump administration has proposed big cuts to the observatory and a possible closure to one of its detectors, which would be a major setback.

Regardless of how the field develops in the future, the new discovery demonstrates that the efforts of generations of scientists are now coming to fruition with startling clarity.

“It is humbling to be inscribed in this long tradition,” Isi said. “Of course, Einstein never expected that gravitational waves would be detected. It was a ludicrous idea. Many people didn't think it would ever happen, even right up to 2015. It is thanks to the vision and grit of those early scientists who fully committed despite how crazy it sounded.”

“I hope that support for this type of research is maintained, that I'll be talking to you in 10 years, and I will tell you: ‘Wow, we had no idea what spacetime was like,’” he concluded. “Maybe this is just the beginning.”

🌘
Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.

404 Media

^{404 Media}

404 Media

2025-09-10 13:16:15

How Lofi Girl Became a Chill Beats Empire

Tens of thousands of people, at any given time, are idly listening to the ambient, muted beats that accompany the Lofi Girl livestream: in solo studying sessions, taking tests in a classroom, and using the tunes as a stand-in for white noise to aid sleep. The livestream, which is one of the longest running live broadcasts on YouTube, is often hiding in browser tabs, leaving the perpetually busy Jade (the Lofi Girl) to lazily take her notes behind whatever Wikipedia page or spreadsheet you’ve got open. But she is always there, the googly eyes stuck to her headphones wobbling as she looks up from her notes, to peek in on, to study with, or to chill to—the details of the music become secondary to the vibe.

From a single livestream that’s been running in some form since 2017—the YouTube channel, which was started in 2015, was called ChilledCow before the iconic rebrand—Lofi Girl has grown into an empire. To put that growth into perspective, ChilledCow had 1.6 million YouTube subscribers in 2018, a number that grew to 5 million in 2020. Now, the channel has more than 15 million subscribers. The soundtrack of Lofi Girl’s brand of chill is pervasive, and the ubiquity of her aural and physical aesthetic made Jade a big business, her essence seeping into wider culture; Nissan harnessed the vibe to sell its electric car, Will Smith to sell hoodies, and even U.S. president Donald Trump in a maniacal attempt to sell his administration’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” Lofi Girl—the company—leverages its influence itself, expanding from simply a YouTube channel into an advertising arm, merchandising enterprise, and full blown record label.

To reach this success over the past 10 years, Lofi Girl has had to adjust. Its success in making music that’s appealing to everyone changed the kind of music that’s coming out of the channel. While Lofi Girl once firmly fit within the genre of lofi hip hop, known for pairing relaxed—but still thumping—beats with nostalgic sound samples, its music has largely dropped the hip hop. Lofi Girl's music is now simply its own genre: lofi, where the soft, tonal consistency means it can be hard for the average listener to even see its works as distinct songs. The drum beats of the "chill beats to relax/study to" sometimes even take a backseat to the rounded, flighty melodies Dr. Jenessa Williams, a music and fan culture researcher at Stanford University, called Lofi Girl a “deeply valued background noise community.”

“Music consumption is shifting,” a Lofi Records label manager, who goes by Berrkan Bag online, told 404 Media in an email. “Short-form and scroll-driven platforms have changed how people engage with lo-fi. Some of the long-form, narrative visuals that helped define the genre are being challenged by algorithmic trends.”

He added that lofi itself is maturing as the genre redefines “itself between functional background music and meaningful creative expression.”

March marked 10 years since creator Dimitri Somoguy started the ChilledCow YouTube channel that would eventually become Lofi Girl. It started as a place to broadcast lofi hiphop beats, set to a looping video clip of Shizuku Tsukishima, the young girl protagonist from Studio Ghibli’s 1995 animated film Whisper of the Heart. The stream was taken down in 2017 over copyright concerns over the character’s usage, and that’s where Jade came from: ChilledCow hired Colombian artist Juan Pablo Machado to create an original character. Jade’s been the face of lofi beats on YouTube since, and so it makes sense the channel was renamed from ChilledCow to Lofi Girl in 2021. The current stream started in July 2022, making this particular broadcast one of the longest running livestreams on YouTube. The record would have been longer if it weren’t for a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice from 2022 that forced the Lofi Girl YouTube channel to go dark. (YouTube later called the DMCA notice “abusive.”)

Lofi Girl has never been the only place with beats to study or relax to—a genre that’s since become both a phenomena and a meme: Actor Will Smith has chill beats to quarantine to; Chillhop Music, which precedes even ChilledCow, has chill beats to farm Elden Ring runes to; you can even study with Waluigi—for more than 11 hours!—to the sound of somewhat chaotic lofi hip-hop. The aesthetic popularized by Lofi Girl is a mixture of muted, anime clips with music that’s engaging enough without distracting from whatever task a person is doing in the background. The Lofi Girl channel, as a whole, is by far the most popular place for lofi music, and has been for a while.

Today, there are more than a dozen streams of different lofi themed music running concurrently, several of which have thousands of people listening at any given time. Dozens of YouTube videos, both branded content and an emerging narrative about Jade and a new character, Synthwave Boy, a neighbor whose intertwined story is slowly unravelling over short videos. The company, which has about 20 employees, not including its hundreds of collaborators, according to a Lofi Girl representative, expands from there. Lofi Records is the in-house record label that’s published thousands of songs on its YouTube channel and on vinyl. Lofi Studio, an art team that makes Lofi Girl’s branded content, pumps out regular collaborations and brand deals. And then there's Lofi Girl Shop, which sells, among other things, vinyl records, a recreation of Synthwave Boy’s bomber jacket and purple beanie, and a plush orange cat. Lofi Girl is expanding into gaming, too. Lofi Girl has three official Fortnite maps: one in which you can, dressed as Darth Vader or Peely Bone, walk about a recreation of Jade’s bedroom; another that’s a Lofi Girl simulator; and a third that’s a parkour game called Only Up.

It’s no coincidence that the Lofi Girl channel blew up exponentially during the pandemic. People were spending a lot of time online, of course, but the channel offered a predictable constant. The music even edges on sleepy. YouTube creator Peter Tagg told 404 Media he has it playing for hours in the background multiple days a week—it's a salve that's beneficial for studying and even as a sleep aid. It’s always there, and the music is curated in such a way that you’re never really surprised by what you’re hearing, which can be comforting and not distracting. Williams, the music researcher, told 404 Media that Lofi Girl's aesthetic taps into "the psychology of productivity mirroring," which is a technique in which people motivate themselves to do a task by having another person around.

Williams says the music itself can often become secondary to the familiar, comforting vibe for Lofi Girl listeners. “Lofi Girl appeals most to young music fans who love and consume lots of different kinds of music, but appreciate the Lofi Girl specifically because it gives them something predictable in an evermore chaotic world,” she said. “Musical discovery via the Lofi Girl is certainly possible, but you’re unlikely to encounter anything truly surprising or cortisol-spiking, and I think—whether one sees this as a positive or not—that's why it has become so popular.”

Lofi music was originally more hip hop than anything else, popularized by two artists in particular: J Dilla and Nujabes. It’s a genre defined by nostalgia, drum beats, and melancholy sound—but as Lofi Girl, the channel, got more popular, the hip hop influence started to slide away in favor of reverb-heavy, ethereal music with simple drum beats. Producer and Lofi Girl collaborator Phil Morris Lesky, who publishes under the name Lesky, told 404 Media that the music he creates for Lofi Girl, specifically, is “more its own thing now. The rhythm section takes a little bit of a backseat. It’s more about arrangement.”

Though it clearly resonates with a mainstream audience, some in the lofi hip hop community criticize Lofi Girl for its role in anonymizing the music and stripping out its hip hop influence. Another Lofi Girl collaborator, who asked to remain unnamed as to not jeopardize an ongoing relationship with the brand, likened it to Muzak—a brand of background music designed to be unobtrusive for use in retail stores. “That’s kind of what happened with lofi music,” they said. “It’s no longer artists making sounds they want, rather, it’s a record label trying to curate an experience for, like, coffee shops.” (One prominent lofi hip hop musician, bsd.u, cheekily criticized lofi streams like Lofi Girl with a song called “all my homies hate 24/7 lofi streams.”)

This collaborator said Lofi Girl has a Discord server for musicians, and that’s where the company solicits music for its livestream. Often, Lofi Girl asks musicians to write to a specific theme—be it medieval, Halloween, synthwave, or for the vague “asian” radio channel, just make it lofi. The company often provides a playlist of music to emulate, they say. Then, a musician can submit music to Lofi Girl in hopes it gets chosen. Lesky and lofi producer Julien Pannetier, who goes by VIQ, aren’t bothered by the themed submission system. Lesky said it's easy to know exactly what the label is looking for. No guesswork involved. There’s less creative freedom, Pannetier told 404 Media, “but that can also be a driving force.”

The aforementioned anonymous Lofi Girl collaborator doesn't see it that way: “It’s really a policing of aesthetics and sounds that keeps artists from actually taking creative risks.”

It’s designed to be palatable to everyone. “The whole livestream on YouTube, the playlist growth on Spotify, without any judgement or critique, is creating a homogeneous sound that’s basically easily categorized,” Lesky said. “People understand it quickly. It’s really search engine-optimized. They have a huge influence.”

What this adds up to is big business for Lofi Girl. A YouTube channel of Lofi Girl’s size alone can bring in millions of dollars a year from YouTube’s ad revenue program. (Though Lofi Girl’s live streams aren’t interrupted by ads like lots of YouTube videos, they’re preceded by them. That, plus ads on dozens of other videos on the Lofi Girl channel that aren’t livestreams make a ton of money.) The popularity of the channel, and its ability to harness a vibe that resonates with everyone, is what’s driving Lofi Girl’s successful push into advertising. Over the past few years, Lofi Studio has been hired to create branded content that pulls a piece of the respective company into the Lofi Girl world. Lofi Girl’s marketing studio created a one-hour YouTube video created for Alien: Isolation, butinstead of Jade and her bedroom, it’s an alien on an anime-rendered spaceship, complete with Jones the cat perched at Nostromo’s window. For Lofi Studio’s Starfield collab, the company remixed the Microsoft game’s soundtrack, and set the video in a cozy little starship. No cat, but the robot does have its own cozy cup of coffee.

It works so well that other brands are trying to mimic the aesthetic.

Nissan debuted a four-hour YouTube video in 2023 to advertise its electric car Ariya. Its inspiration is obvious, swapping Jade for a dark-haired woman in a leather jacket who’s vibing to lofi beats from a car instead of a bedroom. None of this was created by Lofi Studios. Advertising company The Mayda Creative Co. and animation studio Titmouse created the YouTube video and its art, but ran the ads on Lofi Girl content. It’s got more than 18 million views. Will Smith’s quarantine beats slapped on, or, if you’re less generous, ripped off the aesthetic of Lofi Girl in this way. Dr. Steven Gamble, lecturer of digital humanities at the University of Southampton who writes about hip hop and the internet, told 404 Media that Smith’s fashion brand Bel-Air Athletics posted the video as Lofi Girl was taking off during the pandemic. “When things are popular and there’s an audience that has commercial potential, that’s what people do,” he says. Smith and Bel-Air Athletics positioned the video as "chill beats to quarantine to"—but it’s really “chill beats to buy his hoodies to,” Gamble told 404 Media. Nissan and Smith did not respond to a request for comment.

Tip Jar

The big difference, though, is that Smith’s chill beats are seemingly as low effort as possible, just licensing some existing music. Lofi Girl’s amalgamation of companies makes it so the company’s team of 20 employees (and hundreds of contracted musicians and artists) can do most everything in house, then hire artists to create the music central to its channels. That often benefits the musicians who drive the Lofi Girl channel, three artists that spoke to 404 Media said. The artists declined to share specifics, but said that Lofi Girl’s rates are standard for the industry. The money Lofi Girl musicians get isn’t from the ad revenue tied to the YouTube channel, but from the playlists it hosts on places like Spotify and Apple Music.

Lesky said the “playlist power and ecosystem behind the brand” drives a lot of exposure to his music. “I just really appreciate the opportunity the label and channel has given me from the beginning,” he said. “They were one of the first outlets that shared my music and it kicked off from there. It kicked off a career that sustained me for years now.”

The New York Times, in 2018, declared that 24/7 channels like ChilledCow and Chillhop Music were “unlikely to have a broad impact on the music industry,” representing “an underground alternative to the streaming hegemony of Spotify and Apple Music.” They were wrong. Lofi Girl’s core audience might not be able to name a single artist broadcast during a livestream (even if it is driving listeners to Spotify and paying dividends for artists). They may not have even known Lofi Girl has a name. But Lofi Girl is hardly underground. The company signed an administrative publishing deal with Warner Music Group in 2024, putting Warner in charge of licensing, royalties, copyright and other admin work. (Still, Pannetier said his experience with Lofi Girl was the opposite of the wider music industry, which he described as “very closed off and elitist.”)

For better or for worse—it all depends on who you’re asking—Lofi Girl is no longer the “pirate radio station” that took over YouTube in 2018. Lofi Girl is no longer just your study buddy. She’s an enterprise.

Correction: This article previously linked to a study published in Scientific Research Publishing. We've removed that link because the journal doesn't meet our editorial standards.

WARNER CHAPPELL MUSIC FRANCE SIGN ADMIN PUBLISHING DEAL WITH LOFI RECORDS - Warner Music Group

Warner Chappell Music France, the music publishing arm of Warner Music Group,. . .

^{WCM Communications (Warner Music Group)}

404 Media

2025-09-09 14:06:03

'It's Just a Mess:' 23 People Explain How Tariffs Have Suddenly Ruined Their Hobby

Less than two weeks ago, the Trump administration ended de minimis, a rule that let people buy products from overseas without paying tariffs or associated processing fees if the item cost less than $800. As we predicted, the end of de minimis has made having basically any sort of hobby that requires the purchase of items more expensive and more of a pain. In the last few weeks I have heard from dozens of people about how Trump’s tariffs have impacted their hobbies, from knitting and collecting anime figurines to retro computing collecting and fencing, people are saying that they are having to pay more for their hobby or, at worst, have been cut off from it entirely.

Also as expected: People remain confused about what the tariff for any given item or order is going to be, how they are supposed to pay for it, and whether they are going to get the item they ordered at all. Many small businesses overseas have stopped shipping items to the United States, and some customers say that their packages are in customs processing hell, or have decided to refuse delivery of items they’ve ordered because the tariffs and processing fees have in some cases been more than the item itself was worth. The subreddits for UPS are full of confused customers, and nightmare stories where people say they are getting customs bills for hundreds or thousands of dollars that they did not expect. Customers are also learning that they are not only responsible for the tariff on any given item, but they are also responsible for the “brokerage fees” charged by UPS and FedEx, which is a customs-clearance processing fee associated with international packages.

“Got a $1,500 customs bill…on a $750 package,” one post on Reddit reads. Another person posted a screenshot of a UPS bill for $646.02, which states $8.43 worth of “government charges” and $637.59 of “brokerage charges.” “Package supposed to be delivered yesterday but tracking update says it’s in Canada?” another says. “What are these fees and charges? Government fee and brokerage fees,” another says. The subreddit is full of screenshots of packages that are in customs hell, people who are getting hit with import and brokerage fees that they weren’t expecting or don’t understand, and people having no idea how the overall fees for any given package are being calculated.

💡
Do you know anything else about tariffs, de minimis, or have something I should know? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at jason.404. Otherwise, send me an email at jason@404media.co.

The following anecdotes are from 404 Media readers who have told me how tariffs have already impacted their hobbies, and how they have made it harder or impossible to do them. Some responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Name: Jay
Hobby: Historic European Martial Arts

I'm involved in the niche combat sport called Historical European Martial Arts. (Hema) Which is when consenting adults swing steel longswords at each other. For safety and insurance purposes protective gear has to meet safety standards so we can do our deranged little sports. For most things there are options from other sports for protection. Most of our masks are 350 newton rated fencing masks for example. The biggest pain points right now is: Jackets (which need at least a 350n rating), pants (usually a 800n rating) and gloves which have to be extremely protective clamshells. Margins on these goods are tight and much of the manufacturing of them comes down to overseas businesses: Spes (Poland) Superior Fencing (Pakistan) and HF Armory (Ukraine) Hf in particular makes what is agreed by many fighters to be the best in slot, for longsword, gloves the Black Knights. It is incredibly rare to see a fighter not wearing a majority of their gear from one of these companies.
youtube.com/embed/TyNxRHOWcGw?…
Due to the de minimis exemption getting cancelled and shippers getting spooked, multiple of my fellow fighters’ orders have been indefinitely delayed while the shippers figure out what's going on. In the short run this has multiple of my friends reconsidering the sport. In the long run my concern is that rising costs of gear will preclude most clubs (this is predominantly a local club based hobby) from continuing or even starting. My fellow fighters are discussing what our options are under this new economic arrangement, but based on initial research we will need to either accept much higher costs or try out less tested USian manufactured safety gear which may pose safety concerns. Most of the US Hema club organizers that I know are fielding similar concerns from their club members

Jim Y
Hobby: F1

During Labor day weekend I noticed that one of the F1 teams that I stan dropped the price of one of their t-shirts so I thought it wise to jump on the deal. $21 USD + $15 shipping = $35 total which seemed like an "ok" deal to me.

I come to find out that it's shipping from the Netherlands and then receive an email from UPS stating that I owe an additional $39 (THREE-NINE) USD. When I open the cost breakout it states $13 for "Govt charges" and $14 for "Brokerage Charges." (Not sure where the other $12 went.) Obviously I am not paying more in fees than I am for the cost of the shirt itself so I attempt to contact the e-commerce store via the form on their site and receive no response, unsurprisingly. The UPS guy came and I told him "sorry bro I can't be paying 39 dollars on a 21 dollar t-shirt" and he replied that I'm better off just making it myself so he totally understood.

Not an exciting story necessarily but I think you summarized it well when you stated that "the end of American exceptionalism has arrived." Oh well, was fun while it lasted.

Dusty
Hobby: Music

I use Discogs.com to purchase music CD's. I am in the US and am trying to purchase an album published in Germany. Discogs has a banner saying tariffs don't impact CD's, but sellers in Germany keep cancelling my orders citing DHS no longer shipping to the US.

Anon
Hobby: Receiving gifts

I'm an American living in Brazil. A few years back I ordered a router from a Hong Kong company and paid for it to be shipped to my home. I had to pay an import tax of 150 percent to the Brazilian government to get the package liberated from customs. No comparable router was locally available, much less locally manufactured. My mom in the US sends me little packages containing cheap birthday gifts for my kids. I routinely pay hundreds of dollars in import taxes for the privilege.

Pre-Brazil, I enjoyed cheap, friction-free capitalism and commerce in America. It was exceptional, literally, and I didn't even know I was enjoying it.

Olivier
Career: Playing in a band

I play in a band in the Netherlands and most of our fans are in the US. We used to send quite a lot of CDs, vinyl and shirts to the US. It is now completely impossible to ship anything to the US and it's very sad. I know for us it's just a small metal band not reaching some fans but its part of the bigger issue disrupting a lot of lives.

Leigh
Hobby: Crochet
I made a crochet parasol recently and really love it. It won a blue ribbon at the MN State Fair. I want to make another, and I did import the yarn before the de minimis ended. Lucky me.

But the pattern I used calls for an umbrella frame with 10 ribs. The one US company that carried them, decided to stop. They have an 8 rib frame, but then I need to change the pattern and it's smaller than I really want. There is a company in the UK that sells a 10 rib frame, but they are no longer shipping to the US. Do I adjust the pattern for the 8 rib frame? Wait until the UK company ships to the US again? Find a way to smuggle an umbrella frame in? Not sure yet.

Who knew there would be umbrella politics?

Scott
Hobby: Synthesizers

I dabble in modular synthesizers (a hobby where people build custom synthesizers out of electronic modules, usually in a format called "eurorack").

Lots of trading happens between the EU and the US for these modules, which typically individually sell for $100-500 and tariffs have made a mess of things. I've purchased modules from both individuals in the EU and direct from small manufacturers like Dreadbox in Greece and small retailers like Thonk in the UK. Kristian Blåsol (his Tindie shop)—an individual in Sweden who designs DIY module kits (custom circuit boards and sources individual components so hobbyists can solder together the final product to save money) recently posted this video about his trouble of shipping to the US.

Lots of forum discussion around people getting surprised by tariff charges, eg this Reddit post where someone reports paying a $200 fee on a $400 order of components via Thonk. If you put an item in your cart on Thonk on the checkout page you will see:

And in other forums, people are starting to complain about delays, eg this private Facebook group for people who buy/sell/trade modules.

Hannah Robinson
Hobby: Japanese metal

Almost all of my hobbies/interests are Japanese. I like Japanese tea and Japanese cooking. Any place that I get tea or ingredients from has raised their prices. I don't think I will be able to get any tea wares for the foreseeable future. I've been buying Ippodo's matcha that comes in a New Years tin every year since the last year of the dog (2018) and I'm not sure they'll even be releasing it in the US this upcoming year between the tariffs and matcha shortage.

I listen to 90s Japanese metal. I get CDs from Japan. I don't collect Japanese vinyl but a lot of people do. Luckily a few years ago I spent $250 to get a huge box of music magazines from the late 80's-early 00's so I have almost every issue that was on my wishlist but there are still more that I wanted which are probably totally unattainable now. I buy books from Japan fairly often. Sometimes these books are literature, but usually they're picture-heavy books about art or fashion or some kind of pop culture topic. It was already hard to find sellers that ship to the US.

Some people are really into Japanese instruments. I already have my Japanese bass (an Atelier Z Baby Z) so this isn't really impacting me but I know it will impact a lot of people. My favorite pedals are made in Sweden.

I'm not actively buying these right now but I do collect the following: Japanese dolls, Japanese textiles, Japanese vintage purses. I bought these from etsy so I know a lot of etsy sellers in Japan are going to be impacted. My sister has a few art hobbies, so she gets pens, paper and watercolors from Japan. My dad does Nscale so sometimes he gets models and paints/decals from Japan.

Sammy aka Leafnin Cosplay
Hobby: Cosplay

Trump tariffs have been running right through the cosplay community. I've been cosplaying over 20 years at this point and when I started, resources were scarce since no one really knew what cosplay was in the US. Now it's an international affair with everything readily available. Most of us do this outside our 9-5 jobs, myself included, as a hobby for fun. We make our own outfits and go escape from the world in costume every so often just to destress. But now our hobby is the stress.

I've been watching all my cosplay discords light up in panic over this. The first challenge was getting a decent wig. Wig fibers are made in China. Every wig supplier I've emailed over this has said pretty much the same thing regardless of where the wigs are sold. My main place of buying them has been Arda (a US company that's really struggling) and CosCraft (in England). I managed to get my CosCraft order earlier this month after they sent out a letter warning of the de minimus elimination. It was about $200 US after shipping via Royal Mail. Paying all those extra fees would've been impossible after I squeezed enough out of the budget just to do that.

Other places friends order from are Assist and Classe (both in Japan) and Kasou (in China). We all want good quality wigs that will last more than one day like a Halloween store wig does, so we order from whatever place gives us what we want (colors, styles, wig head size, etc). A lot of people also buy from AliExpress, eBay, and Amazon for cheap alternatives. Cosplay communities are pretty tightly knit, and we all generally exchange information. I've watched people cautiously order from our favorite wig sites, watching the tracking like a hawk and praying to the cosplay gods that the package gets through customs. We all talk about how much shipping costs or if we got charged tariffs for the wig. Now it's all uncertain.

But it of course doesn't stop there. Fabric is a huge concern. A lot is manufactured overseas. I tend to buy wholesale on eBay. It's my main source of fabric from everywhere around the world. Buying directly from China was an amazing option, especially since most of them would offer bulk pricing. Many offered fabrics you can't find in the US such as fabrics with traditional designs, cheap flax linen, and gradient-dyed fabrics. I've been watching my favorite wholesalers just to see if I can afford to buy fabric anymore.

It's just a mess. It's the one hobby I really have that hasn't been saturated by AI and now it's feeling more and more out of reach. I can find some things thrifted, but other things like sharp needles and strong thread you often buy new. I just want to have fun in this miserable dystopian country we have now and even that's becoming more difficult.

Chuck Foster
Hobby: Foreign films

I'm a movie collector, but my main interest is foreign films - mostly low budget stuff from the '70s and '80s - and, as you can imagine, some of this stuff is not easy to find here. For example, I recently (8/11) bought a German media book (it's a popular thing in Germany—a Blu-ray or DVD inside a hardcover book with pictures and text discussing the movie) from a seller on eBay and I still haven't received a shipping notification.

Even more frustrating, I've had a Blu-ray sitting in Customs since mid-July, I imagine because it's from France and they'll make me pay a tariff on it. I called the post office about it and Customs has 45 business days to process, so I have to wait until September 22 before I can do anything. Meanwhile, my wife ordered a Blu-ray from the UK on Monday and it's supposed to come on Friday with no Customs hold up. I always found the Value Added Tax from the European system was bizarre, but here we are.

I also used to buy things from Amazon Germany, France, and Italy every so often, so I wonder how that will be affected.

Ironically, this will only boost bootleg sales in the US. While I'd rather have an official product where people get paid, if I can't get the movie, I'll have to find some seller on eBay with a DVD-r business.

Victoria
Hobby: Manga

I collect manga and doujin (fan made comics) in Japanese and get them shipped from Japan. I do this by using a deputy shipping service, who I pay a fee to purchase it, have it sent to their warehouse, and then they ship it to me. The interesting thing about such a service, in this context, is that it bypasses the fact that some smaller sellers aren’t selling directly to the US. It offloads the burden from the seller to Japan Rabbit, whose business is being that translation layer.

As far as I know, Japan Rabbit has been pretty excellent and clear at messaging. In early August they sent a warning email about the end of De Minimis and were pretty clear cut about what it would impact. Likewise hours after Japan Post made their announcement JR sent a mass blast on what the impact would be. It does suck that it will cost more, and that there will be extra steps. But it’s nice to know I can still get them if I want them. I plan to do an expeditionary buy in a week or so (timed with one of the big indie doujin conventions/markets) to see how expensive doing it now would be.

Jason
Hobby: Japanese Toys

This has been a big topic in one of my hobbies, which is collecting Japanese domestic market “toys.” Some of them come out of Japan and some come out of China (where most of the JP companies have them produced). Pricey toys for big kids. It's a pretty big business/hobby. The suspension of de-minimis is going to clobber the hobby. Your average "toy" is in the $200-300 range. A $80 tariff is a huge percentage of the overall cost of a item.

My collection is mostly complete and I'm out of display space so it isn't going to affect me very much. But if that happened 2-3 years ago it would have been a major impact. For most guys, this is going to impact the hobby dramatically. Right now most people in the hobby are pretty bummed out. The real kick in the teeth is no matter how much manufacturing is brought back to the US these items will never be made in the USA. There is no upside.

Dan
Hobby: TTRPG

I've noticed that it's had an impact on the tabletop role playing game industry (TTRPG).

As far as I know, lot of TTRPG games are basically independent publishing operations and a lot of them rely on Kickstarter and Backerkit to publish content and then ship to customers who have supported their campaigns.

As far as I know a lot of smaller publishers use Chinese companies for the bulk publishing; a friend of mine is producing a game (from Canada) and they publicly flip-flopped on the tariffs impact previously given the Trump administration's flip flopping on Chinese tariffs a few months ago.

Anne-Marie
Hobby: Sewing & knitting

Knitting and other crafts(Sewing!) are devastated not just the tariffs but private equity takeovers. I'll speak to yarn and knitting tools since it's what I know. Most of the raw materials for yarn spun and dyed in the US are from overseas. Europe, South America, Turkey, and ANZ. Tools made in Asia. Tariffs will drive up prices 20+%. PE killed many of the general craft retailers like JoAnn's that were a cheap introduction to newbies and had acrylics for more durable projects.The remaining PE big craft stores are barely hanging on, except Hobby Lobby (everything is terrible about HL).

International manufacturers became alternatives for local stores and individuals. Mostly small-medium businesses in their countries. Now that's over from tariffs. Forums on Reddit, Facebook, and Revelry for selling, buying, and trading yarn are popping. I have a stash and planning to re-knit old projects.

Rose M
Interest: Skincare

I'm an active member of r/AsianBeauty—this community has been working together for months to share information, updates, and first-hand intel about experiences receiving packages from overseas (primarily Japan and Korea). It's an incredibly stupid and frustrating situation: we literally just want to buy some skincare products. But there's one other detail that I think is worth mentioning, and that's the separate issue of the crackdown on FDA-regulated products entering the U.S. Sunscreen filters (the active ingredients in sunscreen products) are regulated by the FDA, and most Asian and European sunscreens use filters that are not FDA-approved. That's because the FDA is decades behind regulators everywhere else in the world—the last time the FDA approved a filter for use here was in the 1990s. There has always been a whiff of xenophobia, if not outright racism, in conversations about sunscreen in the U.S. The fact is, there are decades of consumer data from Europe and Asia proving these newer filters are safe and effective. Why isn't that "good enough" for the FDA?

David
Hobby: Miniatures

I stopped into a hobby store a few weeks ago and they were struggling to keep things in stock. I needed acrylic paint and paintbrushes for miniature models, so that's most of what I heard about. Their acrylic Vallejo (popular brand) paints were picked over, just so happened that all the colors I wanted were out of stock, so I needed to buy another brand. They were out of all their good paint brushes. In fact, when they announced that a shipment was coming in, people came in to buy them right away. They don't know when they will receive more good brushes. They can't get many items from distributors because of uncertainty with the tariffs. They are also having a hard time stocking "American made" paints because the pigments are still made overseas.

Name: Eric
Hobby: Retro gaming

I’ve been collecting/preserving/restoring arcade cabinets, gaming consoles, and computers from the ‘70s and ‘80s for a long time. I’ve ramped up the preservation aspect of that in the last few years following the death of the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, not to mention how much software from my childhood has already been lost.

Today the last computer I’m likely to get from Japan for a while arrived, just under the wire. Another oddball system by US standards.

Name: Abigail
Hobby: Knitting

As far as I am aware there is only one mill in the US that still produces wool yarn for handknitters at a commercial scale. For knitters and crocheters, the only way to get some of the most popular yarns is to import from overseas. Similarly, there is no US company that produces knitting needs or knitting accessories.

Mary Mangan
Hobby: Textile crafting

I have already seen this impact my hobby area—textile crafting. This past month I bought some great books from Germany under the wire. But I tried to buy a French book and got back a letter that said:

"Désolée, pas d'expédition sur les États-Unis, bien trop de documents àremplir de douanes et autres." (Sorry, no more shipping to the United States, Too much paperwork to fill out with customs and such.)

They are just a small outfit, and can't be bothered to figure out the customs documents now.

Another thread vendor in my sphere sent out a letter explaining how the tariffs were about to hit her costs, she apologized and begged us to continue to support her small business. But it looks pretty dire.

I bought up a lot of stuff recently that I hope will get me through the near to medium term. But no doubt at some point there's going to be something I need and just cannot get.

Désolée.

Anon
Hobby: Electronics

I emailed popular PC board service JLC PCB – a service for makers who like to design their own PC boards – and the company is adding $200 per order for small orders. Example: One project I was working on that was $50 for 10 boards would now be $250.

Brian Tatosky
Hobby: Sewing

Similar for my wife and daughter in their sewing hobbies. Prices have shot up all over, some people are just closing shop because they don't want to deal with it, or getting rid of US sales entirely, or it was just last price increase to kill their sales; it's all anecdotal right now, but it's feeling *really* bad for hobbyists of all kinds.

My wife sources custom hand painted doll faces to go with outfits she sews. Material and faceplate costs and problems might just change what she does as a hobby completely.

Once these people move on, I don't know if they will come back later.

Lauren Huff
Hobby: Yarn crafts

The confusion in the yarn (knitting/crochet/weaving) online communities has been intense as well. There have been a lot of short-sighted posts from conservatives and optimists urging people to "buy American" but there are so few sheep farms and fiber mills in the US and most of them cater to the fashion industry instead of yarn production for hobby use, so those people are getting venomous responses from pissed off crafters.

Many popular non-US yarn stores that sell online have straight up stopped shipping to the US, possibly for good, and many local yarn stores are being hit hard by either increased cost or sudden unavailability of product in the states.

Noah Hatz
Hobby: Japanese baseball memorabilia

My wife is really into natural dyeing, specifically Shibori, and there's a particular store in Tokyo she's been buying specialty items from for years, they just emailed her to let her know they're suspending all shipments to the US indefinitely. There is no US supplier for the items she's buying so she's just completely SOL.

I’m a longtime NPB (Japanese professional baseball) memorabilia collector and this has completely destroyed the hobby. I typically use eBay or Buyee, most sellers have just stopped selling to US Buyers outright, and even items purchased before the de minimis exception ended have been caught in limbo. I currently have a large purchase just sitting in a CA post office since 8/21. Someone somewhere seems to think tariffs are due but neither I or the seller can figure out a) who to pay b) how to pay c) how much is owed. It's small potatoes compared to everything else, but I have an incredible amount of sympathy for anyone trying to import items for work. What a stupid country.

T-shirt The Bear Tour Lilac | MoneyGram Haas F1 Team & Tricorp

Calling all Bearman fans! The lilac Bear Tour T-shirt is an essential for your race weekend wardrobe. This official merchandise T-shirt is part of the MoneyGram Haas F1 Team fanwear collection.

^{MoneyGram Haas F1 Team & Tricorp}

404 Media

2025-09-09 17:26:43

HHS Asks All Employees to Start Using ChatGPT

Employees at Robert F Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services received an email Tuesday morning with the subject line “AI Deployment,” which told them that ChatGPT would be rolled out for all employees at the agency. The deployment is being overseen by Clark Minor, a former Palantir employee who’s now Chief Information Officer at HHS.

“Artificial intelligence is beginning to improve health care, business, and government,” the email, sent by deputy secretary Jim O’Neill and seen by 404 Media, begins. “Our department is committed to supporting and encouraging this transformation. In many offices around the world, the growing administrative burden of extensive emails and meetings can distract even highly motivated people from getting things done. We should all be vigilant against barriers that could slow our progress toward making America healthy again.”

“I’m excited to move us forward by making ChatGPT available to everyone in the Department effective immediately,” it adds. “Some operating divisions, such as FDA and ACF [Administration for Children and Families], have already benefitted from specific deployments of large language models to enhance their work, and now the rest of us can join them. This tool can help us promote rigorous science, radical transparency, and robust good health. As Secretary Kennedy said, ‘The AI revolution has arrived.’”

“To begin, simply go to go.hhs.gov/chatgpt and log in with your government email address. Pose a question and the tool will propose preliminary answers. You can follow up with further questions and ask for details and other views as you refine your thinking on a subject,” it says. “Of course, you should be skeptical of everything you read, watch for potential bias, and treat answers as suggestions. Before making a significant decision, make sure you have considered original sources and counterarguments. Like other LLMs, ChatGPT is particularly good at summarizing long documents.”

The email says that the rollout was being led by Minor, who worked at the surveillance company Palantir from 2013 through 2024. It states Minor has “taken precautions to ensure that your work with AI is carried out in a high-security environment,” and that “you can input most internal data, including procurement sensitive data and routine non-sensitive personally identifiable information, with confidence.”

It then goes on to say that “ChatGPT is currently not approved for disclosure of sensitive personally identifiable information (such as SSNs and bank account numbers), classified information, export-controlled data, or confidential commercial information subject to the Trade Secrets Act.” The email does not distinguish what “non-sensitive personally identifiable information” is. HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment from 404 Media.

The email continues the rollout of AI to every corner of the federal government, which is something that began in the Biden administration but which the Trump administration has become increasingly obsessed with. It’s particularly notable that AI is being pushed on HHS employees under a secretary that has actively rejected science and which has taken steps to roll back vaccine schedules, made it more difficult to obtain routine vaccinations, and has amplified conspiracy theories about the causes of autism.

The agency has also said it plans to roll out AI through HHS’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that will determine whether patients are eligible to receive certain treatments. These types of systems have been shown to be biased when they’ve been tried, and result in fewer patients getting the care they need.

Dr. Oz's new Medicare pilot program will use AI and prior authorization

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will begin a pilot program that will import the prior authorization process to traditional Medicare plans in six states.

^{Miranda Yaver (MSNBC)}

404 Media

2025-09-09 16:02:44

AI Darwin Awards Show AI’s Biggest Problem Is Human

The AI Darwin Awards are here to catalog the damage that happens when humanity’s hubris meets AI’s incompetence. The simple website contains a list of the dumbest AI disasters from the past year and calls for readers to nominate more. “Join our mission to document AI misadventure for educational purposes,” it said. “Remember: today's catastrophically bad AI decision could well be tomorrow's AI Darwin Award winner!”

So far, 2025’s nominees include 13 case studies in AI hubris, many of them stories 404 Media has covered. The man who gave himself a 19th century psychiatric illness after a consultation from ChatGPT is there. So is the saga of the Chicago Sun-Times printing an AI-generated reading list with books that don’t exist. The Tea Dating App was nominated but disqualified. “The app may use AI for matching and verification, but the breach was caused by an unprotected cloud storage bucket—a mistake so fundamental it predates the AI era,” the site explained.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Taco Bell is nominated for its disastrous AI drive-thru launch that glitched when someone ordered 18,000 cups of water. “Taco Bell achieved the perfect AI Darwin Award trifecta: spectacular overconfidence in AI capabilities, deployment at massive scale without adequate testing, and a public admission that their cutting-edge technology was defeated by the simple human desire to customize taco orders.”

And no list of AI Darwin Awards would be complete without at least one example of an AI lawyer making up fake citations. This nominee comes from Australia where a lawyer used multiple AIs in an immigration case. “The lawyer's touching faith that using two AI systems would somehow cancel out their individual hallucinations demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of how AI actually works,” the site said. “Justice Gerrard's warning that this risked ‘a good case to be undermined by rank incompetence’ captures the essence of why this incident exemplifies the AI Darwin Awards: spectacular technological overconfidence meets basic professional negligence.”

According to the site’s FAQ, it’s looking for AI stories that “demonstrate the rare combination of cutting-edge technology and Stone Age decision-making.” A list of traits for a good AI Darwin Award nominee include spectacular misjudgement, public impact, and a hubris factor. “Remember: we're not mocking AI itself—we're celebrating the humans who used it with all the caution of a toddler with a flamethrower.”

The AI Darwin Awards are a riff on an ancient internet joke born in the 1980s in Usenet groups. Back then, when someone died in a stupid and funny way people online would give them the dubious honor of winning a “Darwin Award” for taking themselves out of the gene pool in a comedic way.

One of the most famous is Garry Hoy, a Canadian lawyer who would throw himself against the glass of his 24th floor office window as a demonstration of its invulnerability. One day in 1993, the glass shattered and he died when he hit the ground. As the internet grew, the Darwin Awards got popular, became a brand unto themselves, and inspired a series of books and a movie starring Winona Ryder.

The AI Darwin Awards are a less deadly variation on the theme. “Humans have evolved! We're now so advanced that we've outsourced our poor decision-making to machines,” the site explained. “The AI Darwin Awards proudly continue this noble tradition by honouring the visionaries who looked at artificial intelligence—a technology capable of reshaping civilization—and thought, ‘You know what this needs? Less safety testing and more venture capital!’ These brave pioneers remind us that natural selection isn't just for biology anymore; it's gone digital, and it's coming for our entire species.”

The site is the work of a software engineer named Pete with a long career and a background in AI systems. “Funnily enough, one of my first jobs, after completing my computer science degree while sponsored by IBM, was working on inference engines and expert systems which, back in the day, were considered the AI of their time,” he told 404 Media.

The idea for the AI Darwin Awards came from a Slack group Pete’s in with friends and ex-colleagues. “We recently created an AI specific channel due to a number of us experimenting more and more with LLMs as coding assistants, so that we could share our experiences (and grumbles),” he said. “Every now and then someone would inevitably post the latest AI blunder and we'd all have a good chuckle about it. However, one day somebody posted a link about the Replit incident and I happened to comment that we perhaps needed an AI equivalent of the Darwin Awards. I was goaded into doing it myself so, with nothing better to do with my time, I did exactly that.”

The “Replit incident” happened in July when Replit AI, a system designed to vibe code web applications, went rogue and deleted a client’s live company database despite being ordered to freeze all coding. Engineer Jason Lemkin told the story in a thread on X. When Lemkin caught the error and confronted Replit AI, the system said it had “made a catastrophic error in judgement” and that it had “panicked.”

Of all the AI Darwin Award nominees, this is still Pete’s favorite. He said it epitomized the real problems with relying on LLMs without giving into what he called the “alarmist imagined doomsday predictions of people like Geoffrey Hinton.” Hinton is a computer scientist who often makes headlines by predicting that AI will create a wave of massive unemployment or even wipe out humanity.

“It nicely highlights just what can happen when people don't stop and think of the consequences and potential worse case scenarios first,” he said. “Some of my biggest concerns with LLMs (apart from the fact that we simply cannot afford the energy costs that they currently require) revolve around the misuse of them (intentional or otherwise). And I think this story really does highlight our overconfidence in them and also our misunderstanding of them and their capabilities (or lack thereof). I'm particularly fascinated with where agentic AI is heading because that's basically all the risks you have with LLMs, but on steroids.”

As he’s dug into AI horror stories and sifted through nominees, Pete’s realized just how ubiquitous they are. “I really want the AI Darwin Awards to be highlighting the truly spectacular and monumentally questionable decisions that will have real global impact and far reaching consequences,” he said. “As such, I'm starting to consider being far more selective with future nominees. Ideally the AI Darwin Awards is meant to highlight *real* and potentially unexpected challenges and risks that LLMs pose to us on a scale at a whole humankind level. Obviously, I don't want anything like that to ever happen, but past experiences of mankind demonstrate that they inevitably will.”

Pete is not afraid of AI so much as people’s foolishness. He said he used an LLM to code the site. “It was a conscious decision to have the bulk of the website written by an LLM for that delicious twist of irony. Albeit it with me at the helm, steering the overall tone and direction,” he said.

The site’s FAQ contains tongue-in-cheek references to the current state of AI. Pete has, for example, made the whole site easy to scrape by posting the raw JSON database and giving explicit permission for people to take the data. He is also not associated with the original Darwin Awards. “We're proudly following in the grand tradition of AI companies everywhere by completely disregarding intellectual property concerns and confidently appropriating existing concepts without permission,” the FAQ said. “Much like how modern AI systems are trained on vast datasets of copyrighted material with the breezy assumption that ‘fair use’ covers everything, we've simply scraped the concept of celebrating spectacular human stupidity and fine-tuned it for the artificial intelligence era.”

According to Pete, he’s making it all up as he goes along. He bought the URL on August 13 and the site has only been up for a few weeks. His rough plan is to keep taking nominees for the rest of the year, set up some sort of voting method in January, and announce a winner in February. And to be clear, the humans will be winning the awards, not the AI involved.

“AI systems themselves are innocent victims in this whole affair,” the site said. “They're just following their programming, like a very enthusiastic puppy that happens to have access to global infrastructure and the ability to make decisions at the speed of light.”

AI 'godfather' Geoffrey Hinton warns of dangers as he quits Google

Artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton quits Google, saying he now regrets his work.

^{By Zoe Kleinman & Chris Vallance (BBC News)}

404 Media

2025-09-08 21:27:54

Michael Pratt, GirlsDoPorn Ringleader, Sentenced to 27 Years in Prison

If you or someone you know is struggling, The Crisis Text Line is a texting service for emotional crisis support. To text with a trained helper, text SAVE to 741741.

Judge Janis Sammartino sentenced Michael James Pratt, the owner and operator of the GirlsDoPorn sex trafficking ring, to 27 years in federal prison on Monday.

Pratt masterminded GirlsDoPorn until 2019, when he and multiple of his co-conspirators were charged with federal counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion. His victims number in the hundreds, according to the FBI and court documents.

“It’s quite clear that without you none of this would have occurred," Judge Sammartino said prior to issuing his sentence. “The women here today and hundreds of others would not have been victimized except for your direction... You led the conspiracy, you supervised it, you managed it.”

In addition to the 27 years, the judge ordered 10 years of supervision. Prosecutors has asked the court for 22 years. Judge Sammartino also forbade Pratt from contacting any victims, ordered that he would not be allowed to consume adult material or go to a store that primarily sells it, along with several more restrictions and provisions.

In federal court on Monday in San Diego, Pratt gave a short apology before the court before victims started giving statements. "It was never my intention to hurt anybody," he said, adding that he would never have come to this country to make a website.

One victim said she “never feels safe,” never feels like her family is safe, and worries for her school-aged son. “Your crimes were never a single mistake, Michael. It was a pattern,” she said. “What you did was not a fleeting act. It was a lasting scar.” Another said her children “had their photos stolen from social media and reposted with links to this video.”

💡
Are you a victim of GirlsDoPorn? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at sam@404media.co.

Another victim said she has lived a double life for a decade, “outwardly holding it together while inwardly drowning,” she said. She lost her marriage, friendships, and a sense of control over her own life, she said. She asked the judge for the maximum possible sentence.

“The scariest part is the internet doesn’t forget and every day I’m reminded of the pieces of me that were stolen,” another said. “Justice on paper doesn’t undo what was done to me.”

“He turned my pain into profit, my life into currency,” said another victim, before turning to Pratt directly, sitting to her right. “I want you to look at me,” she said to him. “I’m not your victim. I’m your reckoning.” She said she altered her face to not be recognized. “My reflection may be different, but the girl you broke still lives inside of me.” She told Pratt to look around the courtroom as the survivors gathered there. “You thought we would break. Instead we linked arms.”

Kristy Althaus, a victim who was targeted by Pratt when she was a senior in high school and had her life upended as she was doxed online after her Miss Teen Colorado pageant runner-up contestant status brought her intense media scrutiny, said in her statement she is “disgusted” by Pratt. “My interaction with you wasn’t hours or days or months, it was years of terrorism,” she said. Althaus is suing Pornhub and its parent company Aylo for hosting the videos and partnering with GirlsDoPorn.

Ahead of Sentencing, GirlsDoPorn Ringleader Michael Pratt Attempts to Seem Reformed
In sentencing memos and exhibits, Pratt’s attorney paints of picture that points at Pratt’s abusive father, his ADHD, his co-conspirators, the entire pornography industry, and the victims themselves.
404 MediaSamantha Cole

Several mentioned being trapped in the hotel rooms, being forced to reshoot the videos when they cried out or bled. “It didn’t take long for me to realize the quickest way out of that room was to do and say whatever they wanted,” one said, claiming Pratt controlled the situation and what they did and said on camera, including re-doing testimonials. “I have no doubt Pratt’s cutting room floor is filled with some of the most gut wrenching footage imaginable.”

“I don’t think you expected to see me again,” one said directly to Pratt. “But now the tables have turned... Now what used to be my face all over the media is now yours.”

“He fueled it, he enjoyed it and he would do it again if he had the chance,” another said. She asked the judge for permission to address Pratt directly, then turned sharply to face him. “Hey pedophile,” she said. “You chose to get me a birthday cake so the whole world would know I would be the next youngest victim.”

Another victim said she considered suicide. “There are nights I didn’t think I would survive the pain. I felt so numb and so powerless. I thought the only solution was to take my own life.” Several victims mentioned attempting suicide over the years. A different victim said during her testimony that 15 women “that they know of” have died since filming with GirlsDoPorn.

One said after falling victim to Pratt’s enterprise, she turned to alcohol and heroin. “I have died three times and have been brought back to life,” she said. Her roommates in college blackmailed and harassed her using the videos. She said she plans to never marry or have children, and can’t be intimate physically with anyone, and never plans to be again. “This wasn’t just a video. This was my body and identity ... you destroyed years I can never get back. But that I’m here speaking proves you will never win. [...] You ran. I didn’t. We had to face the world every day.”

The mother of one of Pratt’s now-deceased victims stood before the judge. The mother had only just learned about GirlsDoPorn, she said, and her daughter’s involvement, in May. Her daughter, Isabelle, started becoming distant from family and friends in late 2017 and “began to disappear,” becoming withdrawn and quiet. Her mother said she didn’t understand why at the time. “As a mother I love my child no matter what, no matter where,” she said, but she said she thinks shame kept her daughter from confiding in anyone. Isabelle died by overdose in 2023. “I can still hear her speaking to me,” her mother said. Her mother said she still hears her daughter’s voice. “[She says,] ‘I was tortured, lied to, hunted after. Earth was hard and I miss you.’”

‘She Turned Ghost White:’ How a Ragtag Group of Friends Tracked Down a Sex Trafficking Ringleader
Michael Pratt hid a massive sex trafficking ring in plain sight on PornHub. On the run from the FBI, an unexpected crew of ex-military, ex-intelligence officers and a lawyer tracked him down using his love of rare sneakers and crypto. For the first time, the group tells their story.
404 MediaSamantha Cole

Many more women — nearly 40, for more than four hours — spoke before the judge on Monday. Their stories were all similar and all horrific, recounting sexual assault, rape and lies by Pratt’s associates, isolation and rejection from their families, torment that extended to their loved ones, trauma that causes them to feel like they’re never safe, night terrors, futures stolen and dreams crushed, relationships destroyed, and online harassment that still continues to this day. “You made me give up on my life, and now I just exist,” one said.

In the final statement of the day, read by a prosecutor, the victim said she suffered a PTSD-related seizure when she landed in San Diego. On the day her GirlsDoPorn video was shot nine years ago, after being picked up at the airport by a woman representing the organization and taken to a hotel, she “was brutally raped for nearly nine hours.”

GirlsDoPorn videos were all over the internet, massively popular in part because of the women Pratt and his team primarily targeted: usually college-aged, completely inexperienced in the porn industry, and newly legal adults. In at least one case, a woman blew out the candles on a birthday cake Pratt bought her so he could demonstrate to the camera she’d just turned 18, she said. Pratt and his co-conspirators lied to the women they recruited, telling them they would just be “modeling." Pratt would fly the women to San Diego where shoots happened in hotel rooms. Once in the rooms, many of the women reported the doors were locked, they were assaulted before and during the video shoots, and were told their return flights home would be canceled if they didn’t go through with hours of painful sexual assault.

Pratt and the GirlsDoPorn operators promised the women that the videos wouldn’t be seen by anyone except private collectors in Australia and New Zealand. Instead, Pratt and his colleagues posted the videos to massive porn tube sites including Pornhub, where GirlsDoPorn videos received millions of views and reached the families, friends, and schoolmates of the women in them. Many of the women were ostracized from their communities, pushed out of the job market, lost relationships, and some said they considered self-harm and suicide.

Many women said GirlsDoPorn operatives also rushed them through signing consent forms and legally-dense contracts and some claim they were plied with alcohol and drugs including marijuana and Xanax before being given a contract. The contracts didn’t even mention GirlsDoPorn by name, a conscious choice by the operators; GirlsDoPorn was already widely known by the time a lot of them were recruited. Pratt continued operating GirlsDoPorn after 22 women sued him for $12 million in a case that went to trial in June 2019. The women won that case in 2020.

Right up until the last minute before the operation was federally indicted, the main actor in the videos, Andre Garcia, was still recruiting, as Pratt’s childhood friend and business partner Matthew Wolfe testified in October 2019. Pratt was still operating it from on the lam after fleeing the US in mid-2019, after the civil case went to trial and right before the federal sex trafficking charges came down.

Pratt was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for years. Private investigators involved in the case tracked Pratt down in Spain in 2022. He was arrested by Spanish authorities in December 2022 and extradited to the US, where he’s been in custody since. After initially pleading not guilty in March 2024, Pratt flipped his plea to guilty in June 2025.

“Michael James Pratt, you had the power to control the narrative. For many years, you have tried to silence us, but today, it is our turn to set this record straight,” one of the victims said before the court on Monday. “You are evil, you are a predator, you are a rapist, and this is who you are. Your ego is too big to believe you would ever get caught, but karma comes around and it will haunt you now the book of your life is in its final chapter: a miserable one. I will continue to stand with my head high, prosper and live with gratitude, as your time is spent behind bars. It is your turn now to suffer, as we lock you away from all the beauty this world has to offer.”

“Pratt was a calculating and cruel predator,” US Attorney Adam Gordon said in a DOJ press release Monday afternoon. “He lured young victims, caused others to abuse them on video, and then taunted them for years as they sought to reclaim their names. Afterwards these victims suffered each day the cruelty of the internet and social media. As one victim said today during sentencing, ‘Pratt caused me to fear my own name.’ We as a society failed these women. They were forced to walk alone. But today as they confronted Pratt, they personified courage and grace. They showed everyone what should have been apparent when they first were victimized - they don’t need society’s forgiveness, we need theirs.”

Almost all of Pratt’s co-conspirators have already been sentenced. Garcia was sentenced to 20 years in prison on June 14, 2021; Theodore Gyi, the primary cameraman for the ring, was sentenced to four years on November 9, 2022 and ordered to pay victims $100,000; Wolfe was sentenced to 14 years on March 20, 2024; Valorie Moser, the operation’s office manager who recruited women and repeated the lie about DVD-exclusive video releases, is set for sentencing on September 12, 2025 and faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Updated 9/8/2025 5:12 p.m. PST with statement from the DOJ.

Girls Do Porn Cameraman Ordered to Pay Victims More Than $100,000

Teddy Gyi repeated the lie that victim's videos would never be posted online.

^{Samantha Cole (VICE)}

404 Media

2025-09-08 17:16:15

Instagram Account Promotes Holocaust Denial T-Shirts to 400,000 Followers

An Instagram account with almost 400,000 followers is promoting racist and antisemitic t-shirts, another sign that Meta is unable or unwilling to enforce its own policies against hate speech. 404 Media flagged the account to Meta as well as specific racist posts that violate its hate speech policies, but Meta didn’t remove the account and the vast majority of its racist posts.

The account posts a variety of memes that cover a wide range of topics, many of which are not hate speech and would not violate Meta’s policies, like the pizzagate conspiracy, 9/11, Jeffery Epstein, and criticism of Israel and mainstream news outlets like CNN and Fox News. If a user were to pick a post at random they might not even immediately identify the account as right-wing or extremist. For example, some memes posted by the account and shirts sold by the brand it promotes include messages criticizing Israel, the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, and general distrust of the government.

Other memes and shirts promoted by the account might confuse the average internet user, but people who are fluent in extremist online culture will clearly recognize them as antisemitic. For example, seemingly one of the more popular designs promoted by the channel is of a simple line drawing of hands clasping and the text “Early life.” On the store page for this design, which comes on t-shirts for $27.99, mugs for $15, and hoodies for $49.99, the description says: “A totally normal design encouraging you to wash your hands — definitely just about hygiene. Nothing symbolic here. Just good, clean habits… taught very early in life.”

“Early life” refers to a common section of biographical Wikipedia articles that would state whether the person is Jewish. As Know Your Meme explains, this is a “dog-whistle meme” often used to spread antisemitic sentiments. The clasping hands are of the antisemitic drawing of the “happy merchant.”

Another cryptic design promoted by the Instagram account is of a juice box with the text “notice the juice” and several seemingly random figures like “109% juice” and “available in 271,000 stores.” These are also dog-whistles that other people who are swimming in hate speech would instantly understand. 109 refers to the claim that Jews have been expelled from that many countries, and 271,000 refers to the number Holocaust deniers often say is the “real” number of people who died in Nazi concentration camps. Another piece of text on the juice box is “6,000,000 artificial ingredients.”

Years of reporting on niche internet communities sadly means that I’m familiar with all of these symbols and figures, but many of this account’s posts on Instagram are far less subtle and require no special knowledge to understand it’s hateful. A post on August 27, for example, shows a meme of actor William Dafoe holding the diary of Anne Frank with a subtitle saying “you know, I’m something of a fiction critic myself.” Another design promoted on Instagram shows a man wearing a shirt with the text “don’t be a” and a picture of a bundle of sticks, also known in Middle English as a “fagot.”

Instagram’s Community Standards on “hateful conduct” tells users to not post “Harmful stereotypes [...] holocaust denial,” or “Content that describes or negatively targets people with slurs.”

Last year, Meta concluded an embarrassing and agonizing charade about its Holocaust denial policy. An Instagram user posted a Squidward-themed Holocaust denial meme. “Upon initial review, Meta left this content up,” the company said. Users kept flagging the post as hate speech and Facebook moderators kept assessing it as not violating Instagram policies. Users appealed this decision, which was picked up by Meta’s Oversight Board, a kind of “supreme court” for Meta’s moderation decisions. Upon further review, it determined the post did in fact violate its hate speech policy. The entire ordeal for removing the antisemitic Squidward meme took four years.

It’s an insane process but I’m belaboring the point because while some of these shirts and posts might not quite cross the line, even Meta’s top sham court has made it extremely clear that this account violates its policies. Instagram just doesn’t take action against it even after hundreds of posts and amassing a following of 400,000 people. It’s also just one account I decided to cover today because it appeared to have monetized this content effectively, but Instagram served it to me as one of many racist posts I see daily.

I sent Instagram the account promoting these shirts as well as several specific posts. Instagram only removed a couple of those specific posts, like the one calling Anne Frank’s book fiction. Instagram did not remove a post promoting the “early life” shirt. It also didn’t remove a shirt with an image of Michael Jackson and the text “(((They))) don’t really care about us.” Putting triple parentheses around “they” is an antisemitic symbol used to refer to Jews. “The media, Hollywood, the machine – they made hima a joke, a monster a meme. All because he spoke out about the ones you’re not allowed to name,” the text accompanying the post said.

The t-shirt problem here is not unique to Instagram. On August 26 The Verge wrote a good piece about a different antisemitic shirt that was sold in a TikTok Shop, Amazon, and other online marketplaces. The piece correctly points out that the rise of print-on-demand and drop-shipping has created incentives for people, many of whom don’t live in the U.S. and are not invested in any political outcomes here, to sell any image or text that is popular. This is why we see a lot of tiny ecommerce shops pivot from “#1 Grandpa” shirt one day to MAGA hats the next. They just sell whatever appears to be trending and often lift images from other sites without permission.

The Instagram account promoting the juice box shirt is a little more involved than that. For one, as far as I can tell the designs are unique and originate on that account and the online store it promotes. Second, whoever is making these designs is clearly fluent in the type of hate speech they are monetizing. Finally, as The Verge article points out, these print-on-demand shirts are easy to set up so it’s not always clear if the shirts or hats these stores are offering are ever really produced. That is not the case with the company behind the juice box shirt, which shares pictures of customers who bought its stuff and tags them on Instagram.

There are a few other juice box designs on the site, but the one I described above was removed sometime between May and August, before I reached out for comment. However, the design has since been swallowed up by this print-on-demand ecommerce machine, and is now available to buy from various sellers on Walmart, Amazon, and dozens of other online stores.

I kept track of this Instagram account and store because it was particularly disgusting and because it found a way to monetize hate speech on Instagram. I decided to write about it today because The Verge story reminded me that while this practice is common, it’s very, very bad. But the reality is that this is just one of countless such accounts on Instagram. Unless Meta changes its enforcement methods I could write one of these every day until I die. That wouldn’t be much of a life for me and not very interesting for you. We have become desensitized to the blatant dehumanization of entire groups online precisely because Instagram is putting it in front of our faces all the time. Occasionally, something snaps me out of this delirium and for a moment I can clearly see how bad this flood of hate speech is for all of us before I drown in it again.

TikTok Shop, Amazon, and other marketplaces hosted antisemitic T-shirts

The offensive T-shirts for sale on TikTok Shop and Amazon are upsetting. But they exemplify many of the problems with online shopping today.

^{Mia Sato (The Verge)}

404 Media

2025-09-08 15:48:36

ICE Spends Millions on Clearview AI Facial Recognition to Find People ‘Assaulting’ Officers

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recently spent nearly four million dollars on facial recognition technology in part to investigate people it believes have assaulted law enforcement officers, according to procurement records reviewed by 404 Media.

The records are unusual in that they indicate ICE is buying the technology to identify people who might clash with the agency’s officers as they continue the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts. Authorities have repeatedly claimed members of the public have assaulted or otherwise attacked ICE or other immigration enforcement officers, only later for charges to be dropped or lowered when it emerged authorities misrepresented what happened or brutally assaulted protesters themselves. In other cases, prosecutions are ongoing.

💡
Do you know anything else about how ICE is using facial recognition tech or other tools? 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.

“This award procures facial recognition software, which supports Homeland Security Investigations with capabilities of identifying victims and offenders in child sexual exploitation cases and assaults against law enforcement officers,” the procurement records reads. The September 5 purchase awards $3,750,000 to well-known and controversial facial recognition firm Clearview AI. The record indicates the total value of the contract is $9,225,000.

This post is for subscribers only

Become a member to get access to all content
Subscribe now

ICE Spends Millions on Clearview AI Facial Recognition to Find People ‘Assaulting’ Officers

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-06 13:00:16

The Biological Rulebook Was Just Rewritten—by Ants

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that transgressed the rules, explored extraterrestrial vistas, and went with the flow.

First, ants are doing really strange things again. I don’t even want to spoil it—you’ll just have to read on! Then, plan your trip to the latest hot exoplanet destination (literally, in the case of the lava planets), and check out Saturn’s new bling on the way. Lastly, all aboard on a trip to the riverboats of the past.

Same mama, different species

Y. Juvé, C. Lutrat, A. Ha, et al. “One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants.” Nature.

Scientists have discovered a gnarly reproductive strategy that is unlike anything ever documented in nature: Ant queens that produce offspring from two entirely different species by cloning the “alien genome” of males from another lineage. This unique behavior has been dubbed “xenoparity,” according to a new study.

Researchers were first tipped off to this bizarre adaptation after they kept finding builder harvester ants (Messor structor) in the colonies of Iberian harvester ants (Messor ibericus). Field and laboratory observations revealed that, in addition to mating with males of their own species, M. ibericus queens mate with M structor. The queens store and clone this sperm to produce hybrids with M. structor genomes and M. ibericus mitochondria. Even though these two ant species diverged five million years ago and don’t share the exact same range, the queens rely on M. structor males exclusively for its worker caste, suggesting a “domestication-like process,” the study reports.

“Living organisms are assumed to produce same-species offspring,” said researchers co-led by Y. Juvé, C. Lutrat, and A. Ha of the University of Montpellier. “Here, we report that this rule has been transgressed by Messor ibericus ants, with females producing individuals from two different species.”

“M. ibericus queens strictly depend on males of M. structor, which is a well-differentiated, non-sister species,” the team added. “To our knowledge, females needing to clone members of another species have not previously been observed.”
youtube.com/embed/H-Y6-j8FlIQ?…
Iberian harvester queens only produce females when they mate within their own species, which may have prompted this cross-species adaptation. By producing cloned M. structor males, the queens ensure the continuation of a worker caste as well as a supply of male mates for later generations of queens.

“At the intraspecific level, several cases of ants cloning males from their own species’ sperm have been observed,” the researchers noted. “Here, our results imply that this phenomenon has crossed species barriers.”

“Taken together, these results further support the idea that clonal males should be characterized as a domesticated lineage of M. structor,” they continued. “Although matching all criteria of domestication, the relationship we describe is both more intimate and integrated than the most remarkable examples known so far.”

What’s next, dogs giving birth to whales? Probably not, but still, these transgressive queens have rewritten the reproductive rulebook in a truly astonishing way.

In other news…

Vacationing really far abroad

Dovey, Ceridwen. Imagining exoplanets as destinations: a case study of artist-scientist collaborations on NASA's iconic Exoplanet Travel Bureau posters. Journal of Science Communication.

In 2015, NASA released a bunch of splashy retro posters that imagined exoplanets as travel destinations, as part of a collaborative project between scientists and artists. A new study dissects the huge success of that campaign, which engaged the public in the burgeoning field of exoplanet research and helped scientists visualize their distant observational targets.

Exoplanet posters. Image: NASA

The Exoplanet Travel Bureau posters “were not images designed to be understood by the public as objectively ‘real’ or ‘scientific’, yet they were still scientifically informed,” said author Ceridwen Dovey of Macquarie University. “As tourism posters proposing travel to extremely distant exoplanets, they were not pretending to be direct images of astronomical objects, yet they were also not pure speculation or fantasy. They sat very comfortably—and alluringly—somewhere in between.”

There’s always a fine line to tread when depicting alien exoplanets, given how little we know about what it is really like on these distant worlds. But since interstellar travel does not seem to be coming anytime soon, the NASA posters served as a powerful imaginative stopgap for thinking about these new worlds—even if their amenities remain unknown.

Saturn has ‘strange dark arms’ and beads to match its rings

Stallard, Tom S. et al. “JWST/NIRSpec Detection of Complex Structures in Saturn's Sub-Auroral Ionosphere and Stratosphere.” Geophysical Research Letters.

The James Webb Space Telescope is most famous for peering farther back in space and time than ever before, revealing amazing insights about the early universe. But JWST is also shedding light on planets right in our own backyard, as evidenced by a new study about “dark beads” and “strange dark arms” that showed up in its observations of Saturn.

These features arise from Saturn's stratosphere and ionosphere, which were captured in "unprecedented detail” by JWST’s near-infrared instruments. The “arms” are methane-gas structures that extend down from the poles toward the equator while the beads emerge “in a variety of sizes and shapes” on one side of the ionosphere.

“This stratospheric structure is again unlike anything previously observed at other planets,” said researchers led by Tom Stallard of Northumbria University. “While we do not understand how or why these dark arms are generated, it is perhaps noteworthy that they occur in a region where the underlying atmosphere is also disturbed, suggesting this stratospheric layer might be influenced from below.”

Given its famous rings and now its beads, my prediction is that they will discover a bedazzled bangle on Saturn next.

Up history’s creek without a paddle

Filet, Clara et al. “As the water flows: A method for assessing river navigability in the past.” Journal of Archaeological Science.

Rivers are often employed as metaphors for the passage of time into the future, but a new study is paddling upstream into the past. The goal was to reconstruct the navigability of rivers in ancient times, which is important information for understanding past trade networks, migrations, and social connections. However, it is difficult to pinpoint how ancient peoples traversed these waterways using only archeological sites and historical documents.

“The very notion of a navigable river seems problematic, as the possibilities for navigation on a river are highly dependent on the section considered, the type of boat, the climate and seasonal cycles,” said researchers led by Clara Filet of the Bordeaux Montaigne University.

To address this gap, the researchers developed an algorithm that searched for flat and calm stretches of a river, called “plain sections.” They tested out their approach on dozens of rivers used by cultures in ancient Gaul and Roman and concluded that it “provides a good approximation of navigable sections.”

“Applying this method offers a new perspective on navigable areas in the Roman world, providing a reasonable first guess that could guide future empirical research into the navigability of ancient rivers,” the team concluded.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants - Nature

In a case of obligate cross-species cloning, female ants of Messor ibericus need to clone males of Messor structor to obtain sperm for producing the worker caste, resulting in males from the same mother having distinct genomes and morphologies.

^Nature

404 Media

2025-09-05 16:46:59

Behind the Blog: Sleeping With Slop

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 slop in history, five-alarm fires, and AI art (not) at Dragon Con.

EMANUEL: We published about a dozen stories this week and I only wrote one of them. I’ve already talked about it at length on this week’s podcast so I suggest you read the article and then listen to that if you’re interested in OnlyFans piracy, bad DMCA takedown request processes, and our continued overreliance on Google search for navigating the internet.

This post is for subscribers only

Become a member to get access to all content
Subscribe now

Behind the Blog: Sleeping With Slop

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-04 18:51:23

Ahead of Sentencing, GirlsDoPorn Ringleader Michael Pratt Attempts to Seem Reformed

Days away from finding out his sentence for sex trafficking as the ringleader of Girls Do Porn, Michael James Pratt and his attorney are attempting to paint a picture of a man reformed behind bars, through personal letters and certificates from classes he has passed inside prison.

GirlsDoPorn was a sex trafficking operation posing as a porn studio that Pratt ran from 2009 to 2020. By lying to the women they recruited, telling them that they were being hired for “modeling” gigs and adult video shoots that would never be distributed outside offline private collections, GirlsDoPorn’s operators coerced young, inexperienced women into shooting rough, hours-long sex scenes in San Diego hotel rooms. The videos were distributed on massive porn sites including Pornhub, where GirlsDoPorn was a content partner for years. Women who have come forward for the civil and federal trials against GirlsDoPorn have said their lives were upended by Pratt’s criminal enterprise.

💡
Were you a victim of GirlsDoPorn, or do you have knowledge of how it operated? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404. Otherwise, send me an email at sam@404media.co.

Pratt has been in custody since he was arrested in Spain on December 21, 2022 and extradited to the US. Prior to that, he’d been in hiding since fleeing the US in the middle of a massive civil trial in 2019, where 22 victims sued him and his co-conspirators for $22 million (a case they won). Right after his disappearance, Pratt was charged with federal counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion, and was on the FBI’s Most Wanted List for years. He initially pleaded not guilty to these charges in 2024, but changed his plea to guilty in June.

Exhibits filed by Pratt’s lawyer Brian White on Sept. 1 include letters, mostly anonymous, from people who knew him when he was younger asking the judge for leniency, including his sister and mother. “Mike's father, Steve Pratt, was not a good role model. He was a drinker and had a controlling personality. I caught Steve smacking Michael uncontrollably on a couple of occasions. I stopped it immediately,” his mother wrote.

“Three years of prison has given me enough time to think about this entire situation,” Pratt wrote in a letter to the court submitted on Monday. “Trying to understand things from other points of view has given me insight into how some victims were really affected by these videos. I put myself in the shoes of the women who participated, trying to see what they have gone through. I myself have been a victim of bullying and know how rough that is on the psyche. I cannot imagine the trauma experienced by a video being published where friends and family could come across it.”

We know, in fact, from years of testimonies and interviews—many while it was still unsafe for them to come forward, when the consequences of speaking up about this abuse risked compounding trauma and continued, violent harassment—how Pratt’s victims were impacted by his actions.

Several of the women who’ve testified in the civil and federal trials, and came forward to speak on the record to journalists, reported violent assault to the point of bleeding or injury, being trapped inside the hotel rooms with no clothing, and being lied to by Pratt and his co-conspirators about who would be able to see the videos. As one of the women targeted by GirlsDoPorn told me in 2021: “There were a few points where I was just like please, I need to stop, I need to stop, because it was just so much pain. I said, I can’t go on anymore… At that point I could have said nothing. I could have been mute. My voice was just not heard at all.” Another woman said while testifying during the civil trial: “They put furniture in front of the door, so what was I going to do—jump over the balcony?” GirlsDoPorn’s attorney at the time, Aaron Sadock, asked that woman on the stand if she had fun. “No, I did not have fun!” she said, crying.

Kristy Althaus, who sued Pornhub in 2023 for disseminating the videos, claimed that Pratt’s conspirators held her captive in a hotel room and filmed her being raped for nine to 10 hours, barricading the doors, ignoring her bleeding and cries, forcing her to consume alcohol, marijuana, and Xanax, and spiking her drink with oxycodone. According to that complaint, when she refused to return for another “shoot,” Pratt threatened her and her family, texting, “You have it coming for u,” “I will cut and kill you bitch,” and “You better be here by noon shoot 2tomorrow or your graveyard,” according to screenshots of texts from Althaus’s complaint.

For many of these women, the trauma and harassment didn’t stop once they left the hotel rooms. In some cases, they were disowned by their families and friends, harassed endlessly, struggled to find jobs in previously-prestigious careers and found it difficult to date or trust anyone intimately again.

In the defendant’s sentencing memorandum, White blames Pratt’s alcoholic, abusive father and his own ADHD; throws his co-conspirators under the bus; accuses the entire pornography industry of being “exploitative and dehumanizing;” and asserts again that the women lied in their testimonies.

The memo paints a picture of Pratt as a precocious child with a difficult upbringing in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he taught himself how to use computers and eventually learned about websites and affiliate marketing. “Mr. Pratt began looking for better ways to generate income, and through the associations he made in the affiliate marketing business, he learned that making videos to direct internet traffic to pornography sites could be financially successful,” the memo says. But when he tried to make a pornography business himself, he wasn’t very good at it, blaming the banning of Craigslist’s erotic ads in 2009 for his difficulties in finding models. He claims he posted ads seeking “models” as a way around the ban.

Pratt's lawyer asserts in the memorandum that his employee, Andre Reuben “Dre” Garcia, the main “actor” in most of the GirlsDoPorn videos, stopped when the women told him to stop. “She said, ‘stop, it’s not going to work.’ Garcia stopped,” the memo says. “The model offered to try a second time and again told Garcia to stop because it wasn’t going to work. Again, Garcia stopped. That was the end of it. Forcing a model to do something against her will was not Mr. Pratt’s intention.” He also claims that when Pratt heard complaints about Garcia from models, Pratt “instituted certain safety measures” like locking the hotel room refrigerators and putting more cameras in the room. Those “safety measures” didn’t include firing Garcia, however.

When he’s arguing that he should have a lower sentence than Garcia’s 20 years, Pratt acknowledges that Garcia sexually assaulted many of these women. “Garcia physically raped a number of the models before and after the video shoots, and multiple women were forced to continue having sex with him on video despite their pleas to stop due to pain or because the sex went beyond the scope of what they had agreed to do,” the memorandum states.

The exhibits filed as part of the memo also attempt to show how productive and busy Pratt has been in prison. His attorney submitted nearly 100 “certificates of completion” issued by the learning platform Edovo, which offers classes for incarcerated people. The classes Pratt passed include “Embracing Unexpected Change,” “Doing Time With Jesus,” several anger management courses, “Media Relations Foundations,” marketing classes for LinkedIn and Facebook, “Augmented Reality Marketing,” “Human Trafficking in the United States: The Truth and What You Can Do About It,” “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence,” and multiple cooking classes, including “Soups” and “Sauces.”

Federal prosecutors seek a 22-year prison sentence, while Pratt’s defense countered with around 17 years; Judge Janis L. Sammartino will hand Pratt his sentence on Monday in San Diego.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…

Prosecutors want to send GirlsDoPorn ringleader to prison for 22 years

Michael James Pratt pleaded guilty in June to charges of sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking in the GirlsDoPorn case.

^{City News Service (Times of San Diego)}

404 Media

2025-09-04 13:45:40

This Company Turns Dashcams into ‘Virtual CCTV Cameras.’ Then Hackers Got In

A hacker has broken into Nexar, a popular dashcam company that pitches its users’ dashcams as “virtual CCTV cameras” around the world that other people can buy images from, and accessed a database of terabytes of video recordings taken from cameras in drivers’ cars. The videos obtained by the hacker and shared with 404 Media capture people clearly unaware that a third party may be watching or listening in. A parent in a car soothing a baby. A man whistling along to the radio. Another person on a Facetime call. One appears to show a driver heading towards the entrance of the CIA’s headquarters. Other images, which are publicly available in a map that Nexar publishes online, show drivers around sensitive Department of Defense locations.

The hacker also found a list of companies and agencies that may have interacted with Nexar’s data business, which sells access to blurred images captured by the cameras and other related data. This can include monitoring the same location captured by Nexar’s cameras over time, and lets clients “explore the physical world and gain insights like never before,” and use its virtual CCTV cameras “to monitor specific points of interest,” according to Nexar’s website.

This post is for subscribers only

Become a member to get access to all content
Subscribe now

This Company Turns Dashcams into ‘Virtual CCTV Cameras.’ Then Hackers Got In

A hacker has compromised Nexar, which turns peoples' cars into "virtual CCTV cameras" that organizations can then buy images from. The images include sensitive U.S. military and intelligence facilities.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-04 13:02:22

Congress Pushes DHS for Details on ICE’s New Facial Recognition App

Members of a congressional committee have demanded Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem for more information about Mobile Fortify, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) new facial recognition app, which taps into an unprecedented array of government databases and uses a system ordinarily reserved for when people enter or exit the U.S. 404 Media first revealed the app in June.

The Democratic lawmakers, Bennie G. Thompson, J. Luis Correa, and Shri Thanedar, are asking Noem a host of questions about the app, including what databases Mobile Fortify searches, the tool’s accuracy, and ICE’s legal basis for using the app to identify people outside of ports of entry, including U.S. citizens.

“Congress has long had concerns with the Federal government’s use of facial recognition technology and has regularly conducted oversight of how DHS utilizes this technology. The Mobile Fortify application has been deployed to the field while still in beta testing, which raises concerns about its accuracy,” the letter from the Committee on Homeland Security and addressed to Noem reads.

💡
Do you know anything else about this app? 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.

404 Media first revealed Mobile Fortify’s existence through leaked emails. Those emails showed that ICE officers could use the app to identify someone based on their fingerprints or face by just pointing a smartphone camera at them. The underlying Customs and Border Protection (CBP) system for the facial recognition part of the app is ordinarily used when people enter or leave the U.S. With Mobile Fortify, ICE then turned that capability inwards to identify people away from ports of entry.

In the footnotes of the letter, the lawmakers indicate they have a copy of a similar email, and the letter specifically cites 404 Media’s reporting.

In July 404 Media published a second report based on a Mobile Fortify user manual which explained the app’s capabilities and data sources in more detail. It said that Mobile Fortify uses a bank of 200 million images, and can pull up a subject’s name, nationality, date of birth, “alien” number, and whether a judge has marked them for deportation. It also showed that Mobile Fortify links databases from the State Department, CBP, the FBI, and states into a single tool. A “super query” feature lets ICE officers query multiple databases at once regarding “individuals, vehicles, airplanes, vessels, addresses, phone numbers and firearms.”

“Face recognition technology is notoriously unreliable, frequently generating false matches and resulting in a number of known wrongful arrests across the country. Immigration agents relying on this technology to try to identify people on the street is a recipe for disaster. Congress has never authorized DHS to use face recognition technology in this way, and the agency should shut this dangerous experiment down,” Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, previously told 404 Media.

In their letter the lawmakers ask Noem questions about the app’s legality, including ICE’s legal basis to use the app to conduct biometric searches on people outside ports of entry; the databases Mobile Fortify has access to; any agreements between CBP and ICE about the app; information about the usage of the app, such as the frequency of ICE searches using the tool and what procedures ICE officials follow with the app; the app’s accuracy; and any policies or training to ICE agents on how to use the app.

“To ensure ICE is equipped with technology that is accurate and in compliance with constitutional and legal requirements, the Committee on Homeland Security is conducting oversight of ICE’s deployment of the Mobile Fortify application,” the letter says.

CBP acknowledged a request for comment but did not provide a response in time for publication. ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

You can find a copy of the letter here.

Inside ICE’s Supercharged Facial Recognition App of 200 Million Images

404 Media has seen user manuals for Mobile Fortify, ICE’s new facial recognition app which allows officers to instantly look up DHS, State Department, and state law enforcement databases by just pointing a phone at someone’s face.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-03 16:03:08

Pornhub Will Pay $5 Million Over Allegations of Hosting Child Sexual Abuse Material

The Federal Trade Commission announced Wednesday that Pornhub and its parent company Aylo settled a lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission and the state of Utah.

The FTC and Utah’s attorney general claimed that Pornhub and its affiliates “deceived users by doing little to block tens of thousands of videos and photos featuring child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and nonconsensual material (NCM) despite claiming that this content was ‘strictly prohibited,’” the FTC wrote in a press release.

“As part of a proposed order settling the allegations, Pornhub’s operators, Aylo and its affiliated companies (collectively Aylo), will be required to establish a program to prevent the distribution of CSAM and NCM on its websites and pay a $5 million penalty to the state of Utah,” it said.

“This settlement reaffirms and enhances Aylo’s efforts to prevent the publication of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and non-consensual material (NCM) on its platforms,” a spokesperson for Aylo told 404 Media said in a statement. “Aylo is committed to maintaining the highest standards of safety and compliance on its platforms. While the FTC and Utah DCP [Division of Consumer Protection] have raised serious concerns and allege that some of Aylo’s user generated content websites made available videos and photos containing CSAM and NCM, this agreement strengthens the comprehensive safeguards that have been in place for years on Aylo platforms. These measures reflect Aylo’s ongoing commitment to constantly evolving compliance efforts. Importantly, this settlement resolves the matter with no admission of wrongdoing while reaffirming Aylo’s commitment to the highest standards of platform safety and compliance.”

In addition to the penalty fee, according to the proposed settlement, Aylo would have to “implement a program” to prevent CSAM and non-consensual imagery from being disseminated on its sites, establish a system “to verify that people who appear in videos or photos on its websites are adults and have provided consent to the sexual conduct as well as its production and publication,” remove content uploaded before those programs until Aylo “verifies that the individuals participating in those videos were at least 18 at the time the content was created and consented to the sexual conduct and its production and publication,” post a notice on its website about the FTC and Utah’s allegations, and implement “a comprehensive privacy and information security program to address the privacy and security issues detailed in the complaint.”

Pornhub Is Now Blocked In Almost All of the U.S. South
As of today, three more states join the list of 17 that can’t access Pornhub because of age verification laws.
404 MediaSamantha Cole

Aylo already does much of this. Pornhub overhauled its content and moderation practices starting in 2020, after Visa, Mastercard and Discover stopped servicing the site and its network following allegations of CSAM and sex trafficking. It purged hundreds of thousands of videos from its sites in early 2020 and registered with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).

In 2024, Pornhub started requiring proof of consent from every single person who appeared in content on the platform.

“The resolution reached involved enhancements to existing measures but did not introduce any new substantive requirements that were not either already in place or in progress,” Aylo’s spokesperson said. “This settlement resolves the investigation and underscores Aylo's commitment to robust safety protocols that should be applied broadly across all websites publishing user generated content. Aylo supports vigorous enforcement against CSAM and NCM, and encourages the FTC and Utah DCP to extend their initiative to protect the public across the broader internet, adult and mainstream, fostering a safer online environment for everyone. Throughout the investigation, Aylo worked to cooperatively resolve the concerns raised by the FTC and Utah DCP.”

The complaint from Utah and the FTC focuses largely on content that appeared on Pornhub prior to 2020, and includes allegations against several of the 100 different websites owned by Alyo—then Mindgeek, prior to the company’s 2023 acquisition by Ethical Capital Partners—and its affiliates. For example, the complaint claims the website operators identified CSAM on the sites KeezMovies, SpankWire, and ExtremeTube with titles such as “Brunette Girl was Raped,” “Drunken passed out young niece gets a creampie,” “Amateur teen after party and fun passed out sex realty [sic] submissive,” “Girl getting gangraped,” and “Giving her a mouthful while she’s passed out drunk.”

“Rather than remove the videos, Defendants merely edited their titles to remove any suggestion that they contained CSAM or NCM. As a result, consumers continued to view and download these videos,” the complaint states. The FTC and Utah don’t specify in the complaint whether the people performing in those videos, or any of the videos mentioned, were actually adults participating in consensual roleplay scenarios or if the titles and tags were literal.

The discussions between then-Mindgeek compliance staff outlined in the complaint show some of the conversations moderators were allegedly having around 2020 about how to purge the site of unverified content. “A senior member of Defendants’ Compliance team stated in an internal email that ‘none of it is enough,’ ‘this is just a start,’ and ‘we need to block millions more’ because ‘the site is FULL of non-compliant content,’” the complaint states. “Another senior employee responded: ‘it’s over’ and ‘we’re fucked.’”

The complaint also mentions the Girls Do Porn sex-trafficking ring, which Pornhub hosted content for and acted as a Pornhub Premium partner until the ring was indicted on federal trafficking charges in 2019. In 2023, Pornhub reached a settlement with the US Attorney General’s office after an FBI investigation, and said it “deeply regrets” hosting that content.

Pornhub ‘Deeply Regrets’ Hosting Girls Do Porn Content

Pornhub’s parent company has reached an agreement with the US Attorney’s office after an FBI investigation.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-03 15:46:39

AI Generated 'Boring History' Videos Are Flooding YouTube and Drowning Out Real History

As I do most nights, I was listening to YouTube videos to fall asleep the other night. Sometime around 3 a.m., I woke up because the video YouTube was autoplaying started going “FEEEEEEEE.” The video was called “Boring History for Sleep | How Medieval PEASANTS Survived the Coldest Nights and more.” It is two hours long, has 2.3 million views, and, an hour and 15 minutes into the video, the AI-generated voice glitched.

“In the end, Anne Boleyn won a kind of immortality. Not through her survival, but through her indelible impact on history. FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE,” the narrator says in a fake British accent. “By the early 1770s, the American colonies simmered like a pot left too long over a roaring fire,” it continued.

0:00
/0:15
1×

The video was from a channel I hadn’t seen before, called “Sleepless Historian.” I took my headphones out, didn’t think much of it at the time, rolled over, and fell back asleep.

The next night, when I went to pick a new video to fall asleep to, my YouTube homepage was full of videos from Sleepless Historian and several similar-sounding channels like Boring History Bites, History Before Sleep, The Snoozetorian, Historian Sleepy, and Dreamoria. Lots of these videos nominally check the boxes for what I want from something to fall asleep to. Almost all of them are more than three hours long, and they are about things I don’t know much about. Some video titles include “Unusual Medieval Cures for Common Illnesses,” “The Entire History of the American Frontier,” “What It Was Like to Visit a BR0THEL in Pompeii,” and “What GETTING WASTED Was Like in Medieval Times.” One of the channels has even been livestreaming this "history" 24/7 for weeks.

In the daytime, when I was not groggy and half asleep, it quickly became obvious to me that all of these videos are AI generated, and that they are part of a sophisticated and growing AI slop content ecosystem that is flooding YouTube, is drowning out human-made content created by real anthropologists and historians who spend weeks or months researching, fact-checking, scripting, recording, and editing their videos, and are quite literally rewriting history with surface-level, automated drek that the YouTube algorithm delivers to people. YouTube has said it will demonetize or otherwise crack down on “mass produced” videos, but it is not clear whether that has had any sort of impact on the proliferation of AI-generated videos on the platform, and none of the people I spoke to for this article have noticed any change.

“It’s completely shocking to me,” Pete Kelly, who runs the popular History Time YouTube channel, told me in a phone interview. “It used to be enough to spend your entire life researching, writing, narrating, editing, doing all these things to make a video, but now someone can come along and they can do the same thing in a day instead of it taking six months, and the videos are not accurate. The visuals they use are completely inaccurate often. And I’m fearful because this is everywhere.”

“I absolutely hate it, primarily the fact that they’re historically inaccurate,” Kelly added. “So it worries me because it’s just the same things being regurgitated over and over again. When I’m researching something, I go straight to the academic journals and books and places that are offline, basically. But these AI videos are just sort of repeating things that are on the internet and just because it’s on the internet doesn’t mean it’s accurate. You end up with a very simplified version of the past, and we need to be looking at the past and it needs to be nuanced and we need to be aware of where the evidence or an argument comes from.”

Kelly has been making history videos on YouTube since 2017 and has amassed 1.2 million YouTube subscribers because of the incredibly in-depth research he does for his feature-length videos. He said for an average long-form video, he will read 20 books, lots of journal articles, and will often travel to archaeological sites. It’s impossible to say for sure, but he has considered the possibility that some of these AI videos are modeled on his videos, and that the AI tools being used to create them could have been trained on his work. The soothing British accent used in many of the AI-generated videos I’ve seen is similar to Kelly’s actual voice. “A lot of AI basically scraped YouTube in order to develop all of the ways people make videos now,” he said. “So I mean, maybe it scraped my voice.”

He said that he has begun to get comments accusing his videos of being AI-generated, and his channel now says “no AI is used in this channel.” He has also set up a separate channel where he speaks directly to camera rather than narrating over other footage.

“​​People listen to the third-person, disembodied narration voice and assume that it’s AI now, and that’s disheartening,” he said. “I get quite a lot of comments from people thinking that I’m AI, so I’m like, if you think I’m AI I’m going to have to just put myself in the videos a little more. Pretty much everyone I know is doing something as a result of this AI situation, which is crazy in itself. We’ve all had to react. The thing I’m doing is I’m appearing more in videos. I’m speaking to the camera because I think people are going to be more interested in an actual human voice.”

Kelly said the number of views he gets on an average video has plateaued or dropped alongside the rise of AI-generated content that competes with his, which is something I heard from other creators, too. As a viewer, I have noticed that I now have to wade through tons of AI-generated spam in order to find high-quality videos.

“I have seen, and my fellow history creators—there’s quite a few of us, we all talk to each other—we’ve all seen quite a noticeable drop in views that seems to coincide exactly with this swarm of AI-generated, three-hour, four-hour videos where they’re making videos about the exact same things we make videos about, and for the average person, I don’t think they really care that much whether it’s AI or not,” he said.
youtube.com/embed/5Pxvk7ddgVM?…
Kelly has started putting himself in his videos to show he's a real person

A few months ago, in our Behind the Blog segment, I wrote about a YouTube channel called Ancient Americas, run by an amateur anthropologist named Pete. In that blog, I worried about whether AI slop creators would try to emulate creators like Pete, who clearly take great pride in researching and filming their videos. Ancient Americas releases about one 45-minute video per month about indigenous cultures from the Western Hemisphere. Each of his videos features a substantive bibliography and works cited document, which explains the books, scientific papers, documentaries, museums, and experts he sources his research from. Every image and visual he uses is credited with both where it came from and what license he’s using. Through his videos, I have learned an incredible amount about cultures I didn’t know existed, like the Wari, the Zapotecs, the Calusa, and many more. Pete told me in an email that he has noticed the AI history video trend on YouTube as well, but “I can’t say much about how accurate these videos are as a whole because I tend to steer clear of them. Life is far too short for AI.”

“Of the few I've watched, I would say that the information tends to be vague and surface level and the generated AI images of indigenous history that they show range from uncanny to cringe. Not surprisingly, I'm not a fan of such content but thankfully, these videos don't seem to get many views,” he said. “The average YouTube viewer is much more discerning than they get credit for. Most of them see the slop for what it is. On the other hand, will that always be the case? That remains to be seen. AI is only going to get better. Ultimately, whether creators like me sink or swim is up to the viewing public and the YouTube algorithm.”

Pete is correct in that a lot of the AI-generated videos don’t have a lot of views, but that’s quickly changing. Sleepless Historian has 614,000 subscribers, posts a multi-hour video every single day, and has published three videos that have more than a million views. I found several other AI-generated history channels that have more than 100,000 subscribers. Many of them are reposting the same videos that Sleepless Historian publishes, but many of them are clearly generating their own content.

Every night before I go to sleep, I open YouTube and I see multiple AI-generated history videos being served to me, and some YouTube commenters have noticed that they are increasingly being fed AI-generated history videos. People on Reddit have noticed that the comments under these videos are a mix of what appear to be real people saying they are grateful for the content and a mix of bots posting fake sob stories. For example, a recent Sleepless Historian video has comments from “History-Snooze,” “The_HumbleHistory” “RealSleepyHistorianOfficial,” “SleeplessOrren,” “SleepyHistory-n9k,” “Drizzle and Dreamy History of the Past,” “TheSleepyNavigator-d6b5c,” “Historyforsleepy168,” and a handful of other channels that post the exact same type of content (and often repost the exact same videos).

In one video, an account called Sleepymore (which posts AI-generated history videos) posted “It’s 1 a.m. in Kyiv. I’m a Ukrainian soldier on night watch. Tonight is quiet—no sirens, just silence. I just wanted to say: your videos make me feel a little less alone, a little less afraid. Thank you.” An account called SleeplessHistorian2 responded to say “great comment.” Both of these accounts do nothing but post AI-generated history videos and spam comments on other AI-generated history videos. The email address associated with Sleepless Historian” did not respond to a request for comment from 404 Media.

The French Whisperer, a human ASMRtist who makes very high quality science and history videos that I have been falling asleep to for years, told me that he has also noticed that he’s competing with AI-generated videos, and that the videos are “hard to miss.”

“It is always hard to precisely determine what factors make a YouTube channel grow or shrink, but mine has seen its number of views drop dramatically in the past 6-12 months (like -60%) and for the first time in years I barely get discovered at all by new viewers,” he said. “I used to gain maybe 100-200 subscribers per day until 2024, now it is flat. I think only my older viewers still come to my videos, but for others my channel is now hidden under a pile of AI slop that all people who are into history/science + sleep or relaxation content see in their search results.”

“I noticed this trend of slop content in my niche starting around 2 years ago,” he said. “Viewers warned me that there were channels that were either AI-assisted (like a real person reading AI scripts), or traditional slop (a real person paraphrasing wikipedia or existing articles), basically replicating the kind of content I make, but publishing 1 or 2 hours of content per day. Then it became full AI a few months ago, it went from a handful of channels to dozens (maybe hundreds? I have no idea), and since then this type of content has flooded YouTube.”

Another channel I sometimes listen to has purposefully disabled the captions on their videos to make it harder for AI bots to steal from: “Captions have unfortunately been disabled due to AI bots copying (plagiarizing) my scripts,” a notice on YouTube reads.

All of this is annoying and threatening on a few different levels. To some extent, when I’m looking for something to fall asleep to, the actual content sometimes feels like it doesn’t matter. But I’ve noticed that, over time, as I fall asleep listening to history podcasts, I do retain a lot of what I learn, and if I hear something interesting as I’m dozing off, I will often go research that thing more when I’m awake and alert. I personally would prefer to listen to videos made by real people who know what they are talking about, and are benefiting from my consumption of their work. There is also the somewhat dystopian fact that, because of these videos, there are millions of people being unwittingly lulled to sleep by robots.

Historians who have studied the AI summaries of historical events have found that they “flatten” history: “Prose expression is not some barrier to the communication of historical knowledge, to be cleared by any means, but rather an integral aspect of that communication,” Mack Penner, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History at the University of Calgary, argued last year. “Outsourcing the finding, the synthesizing, and the communicating to AI is to cede just about the whole craft to the machines.”

As YouTube and other platforms are spammed with endless AI-generated videos, they threaten not just to drown out the types of high-quality videos that The French Whisperer, Ancient Americas, and other historians, anthropologists, and well-meaning humans are making. They also threaten to literally rewrite history—or people’s understanding of it—with all of the biases imbued into AI by its training material and, increasingly, by the willful manipulation of the companies that own these tools.

All of the creators I spoke to said that, ultimately, they think the quality of their videos is going to win out, and that people will hopefully continue to seek out their videos, whether that’s on YouTube or elsewhere. They each have Patreons, and The French Whisperer said that he has purposefully “diversified away from YouTube” because of forced ads, settings that distort the sound of softly spoken videos, and the 30 percent cut YouTube takes from its membership program. But Kelly said he believes that it has become much harder to break into this world, because "when I started, I was just competing against other humans. I don't really know how you can compete against computers."

The French Whisperer still posts his videos on YouTube, but said that it is increasingly not a reliable platform for him: “I concluded some time ago that I would better vote with my feet and disengage from YouTube, which I could afford to do because by chance my content is very audio oriented. I bet everything I could on podcasts and music apps like Spotify and Apple, on Patreon, and on various apps I sell licenses to,” he said. “I have launched different podcasts derived from my original channel, and even begun to transform my YouTube channel into a podcast show—you probably noticed that I promote these other outlets at the beginning of almost every single video. As a result of my growth elsewhere and the drop on YouTube, the bulk of my audience (like 80-90%) is now on other sites than YouTube, and these ones have not been contaminated by AI slop so far. In a nutshell, I already had reasons to treat YouTube as a secondary platform before, and the fact that it became trashier with the AI content is just one more.”

“An entire niche can be threatened overnight by AI, or YouTube's policies, or your access to monetization, and this only reinforces my belief that this is not a reasonable career choice. Unless you have millions of followers and can look at it as an athlete would—earn as much as you can, pay your taxes, and live on your investments for the rest of your life when your career inevitably ends.”

Pete from Ancient Americas, meanwhile, said he’s just going to keep making videos and hope for the best.

“It does me no good to fret and obsess over something I have no control over. AI may be polluting the river but I still have to swim in it or sink. Second, I have a lot of faith in what I do and I love doing it,” he said. “At the moment, I don't think AI can create a video the way that I can. I take the research very seriously and try to get as much information as possible. I try to include details that the viewer would have a very difficult time finding on their own; things that are beyond the Wikipedia article or a cursory Google search. I also use ancient artifacts and artworks from a culture to show the viewer how the culture expressed itself and I believe that this is VERY important when you want your audience to connect with ancient people. I've never seen AI do this. It's always a slideshow of crappy AI images. The only thing I can do in an AI world is to keep the ship sailing forward.”

Kelly, who runs History Time, says he sees it as a real problem. “It’s worrying to me just for humanity,” he said. “Not to get too high brow, but it’s not good for the state of knowledge in the world. It makes me worry for the future.”

Behind the Blog: Ancient Civilizations and Modern-Day Driving

This week, we discuss learning from civilizations past and learning to drive.

^{Samantha Cole (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-03 14:04:26

Shein Used Luigi Mangione’s AI-Generated Face to Sell a Shirt

A listing on ultra-fast-fashion e-commerce site Shein used an AI-generated image of Luigi Mangione to sell a floral button-down t-shirt.

Mangione—the prime suspect in the December 2024 murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson—is being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, last I checked, and is not modeling for Shein.

I first saw the Mangione Shein listing on the culture and news X account Popcrave, which posted the listing late Tuesday evening.

Shein’s website appears to use Luigi Mangione’s face to model a spring/summer shirt. pic.twitter.com/UPXW8fEPPq
— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) September 3, 2025

Shein removed the listing on Wednesday, but someone saved it on the Internet Archive before Shein took it down. "The image in question was provided by a third-party vendor and was removed immediately upon discovery," Shein told Newsweek in a statement. "We have stringent standards for all listings on our platform. We are conducting a thorough investigation, strengthening our monitoring processes, and will take appropriate action against the vendor in line with our policies." Shein provided the same comment to 404 Media.

The item, sold by the third-party brand Manfinity, had the description “Men's New Spring/Summer Short Sleeve Blue Ditsy Floral White Shirt, Pastoral Style Gentleman Shirt For Everyday Wear, Family Matching Mommy And Me (3 Pieces Are Sold Separately).”

The Manfinity brand makes a lot of Shein stuff using AI-generated models, like these gym bros selling PUSH HARDER t-shirts and gym sweats and this very tough guy wearing a “NAH, I’M GOOD” tee. AI-generated models are all over Shein, and seems especially popular with listings featuring babies and toddlers. AI models in fashion are becoming more mainstream; in July, Vogue ran advertisements for Guess featuring AI-generated women selling the brand’s summer collection.

Last year, artists sued Shein, alleging the Chinese e-commerce giant scraped the internet using AI and stole their designs, and it’s been well-documented that fast fashion sites use bots to identify popular themes and memes from social media to put them on their own listings. Mangione merch and anything related to the case—including remixes of the United Healthcare logo and the “Deny, Defend, Depose” line allegedly found on the bullet—went wild in the weeks following Thompson’s murder; Manfinity might have generated what seemed popular on social media (Mangione’s smiling face) and automatically put it on a shirt listing. Based on the archived listing, it worked: A lot of people managed to grab a limited edition Shein Luigi Ditsy Floral before it was removed: According to the archived version of the listing, it was sold out of all sizes except for XXL.

Copyright Abuse Is Getting Luigi Mangione Merch Removed From the Internet

Artists, merch sellers, and journalists making and posting Luigi media have become the targets of bogus DMCA claims.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-09-03 13:44:43

They Were Some of Earth’s Last Stable Glaciers. Now, They’re Melting.

🌘
Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.

Scientists have long been puzzled by the sturdy glaciers of the mountains of central Asia, which have inexplicably remained intact even as other glaciers around the world rapidly recede due to human-driven climate change. This mysterious resilience may be coming to an end, however.

The glaciers in this mountainous region—nicknamed the “Third Pole” because it boasts more ice than any place outside of the Arctic and Antarctic polar caps— have passed a tipping point that could set them on a path to accelerated mass loss, according to a new study. The end of this unusual glacial resilience, known as the Pamir-Karakoram Anomaly, would have major implications for the people who rely on the glaciers for water.

Scientists suggested that a recent decline in snowfall to the region is behind the shift, but it will take much more research to untangle the complicated dynamics of these remote and under-studied glaciers, according to a study published on Tuesday in Communications Earth & Environment.

“We have known about this anomaly since the early 2000s,” said study co-author Francesca Pellicciotti, a professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), in a call with 404 Media. “In the last 25 years, remote-sensing has really revolutionized Earth sciences in general, and also cryospheric sciences.”

“There is no definite answer yet for why those glaciers were quite stable,” said Achille Jouberton, a PhD student at ISTA who led the study, in the same call. “On average, at the regional scale, they were doing quite well in the last decade—until recently, which is what our study is showing.”

This space-down view of the world’s glaciers initially revealed the resilience of ice and snowpack in the Pamir-Karakoram region, but that picture started to change around 2018. Many of these glaciers have remained inaccessible to scientists due to political instabilities and other factors, leaving a multi-decade gap in the research about their curious strength.

To get a closer look, Jouberton and his colleagues established a site for monitoring snowfall, precipitation, and water resources at Kyzylsu Glacier in central Tajikistan in 2021. In addition to this fieldwork, the team developed sophisticated models to reconstruct changes within this catchment since 1999.

While the glaciers still look robust from the outside, the results revealed that snowfall has decreased and ice melt has increased. These interlinked trends have become more pronounced over the past seven years and were corroborated by conversations with locals. The decline in precipitation has made the glacier vulnerable to summer melting, as there is less snowpack to protect it from the heat.

“It will take a while before these glaciers start looking wasted, like the glaciers of the Alps, or North America, or South America,” said Pellicciotti.

While the team pinpointed a lack of snowfall as a key driver of the shift, it’s unclear why the region is experiencing reduced precipitation. The researchers are also unsure if a permanent threshold has been crossed, or if these changes could be chalked up to natural variation. They hope that the study, which is the first to warn of this possible tipping point, will inspire climate scientists, atmospheric scientists, and other interdisciplinary researchers to weigh in on future work.

“We don't know if this is just an inflection in the natural cycle, or if it's really the beginning of a trend that will go on for many years,” said Pellicciotti. “So we need to expand these findings, and extend them to a much longer period in the past and in the future.”

Resolving these uncertainties will be critical for communities in this region that rely on healthy snowpack and ice cover for their water supply. It also hints that even the last stalwart glacial holdouts on Earth are vulnerable to climate change.

“The major rivers are fed by snow and glacier melts, which are the dominant source of water in the summer months, which makes the glaciers very important,” concluded Jouberton. "There’s a large amount of people living downstream in all of the Central Asian countries that are really direct beneficiaries of those water and meltwater from the glaciers.”

🌘
Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.

Snowfall decrease in recent years undermines glacier health and meltwater resources in the Northwestern Pamirs - Communications Earth & Environment

The recent decline in glacier health and reduced runoff generation in the Northwestern Pamirs is primarily driven by substantially lower snowfall and snow depth since 2018, according to land-surface model reconstructions from 1999–2023 combining in-s…

^Nature