An LLM breathed new life into 'Animal Crossing' and made the villagers rise up against their landlord.
An LLM breathed new life into x27;Animal Crossingx27; and made the villagers rise up against their landlord.#News #VideoGames
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)
The mainstream media seems entirely uninterested in explaining Charlie Kirk's work.
The mainstream media seems entirely uninterested in explaining Charlie Kirkx27;s work.#News #CharlieKirk
Sebastiano Cuffari likes this.
A new contract with Clearview AI explicitly says ICE is buying the tech to investigate "assaults against law enforcement officers."#News
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
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.
A hacker has compromised Nexar, which turns peoplesx27; cars into "virtual CCTV cameras" that organizations can then buy images from. The images include sensitive U.S. military and intelligence facilities.#News
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 nowThis 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)
YouTuber Benn Jordan has never been to Israel, but Google's AI summary said he'd visited and made a video about it. Then the backlash started.
YouTuber Benn Jordan has never been to Israel, but Googlex27;s AI summary said hex27;d visited and made a video about it. Then the backlash started.#News #AI
Google AI Falsely Says YouTuber Visited Israel, Forcing Him to Deal With Backlash
YouTuber Benn Jordan has never been to Israel, but Google's AI summary said he'd visited and made a video about it. Then the backlash started.Matthew Gault (404 Media)
That dashcam in your car could soon integrate with Flock, the surveillance company providing license plate data to DHS and local police.#News
Flock Wants to Partner With Consumer Dashcam Company That Takes ‘Trillions of Images’ a Month
Flock, the surveillance company with automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras in thousands of communities around the U.S., is looking to integrate with a company that makes AI-powered dashcams placed inside peoples’ personal cars, multiple sources told 404 Media. The move could significantly increase the amount of data available to Flock, and in turn its law enforcement customers. 404 Media previously reported local police perform immigration-related Flock lookups for ICE, and on Monday that Customs and Border Protection had direct access to Flock’s systems. In essence, a partnership between Flock and a dashcam company could turn private vehicles into always-on, roaming surveillance tools.Nexar, the dashcam company, already publicly publishes a live interactive map of photos taken from its dashcams around the U.S., in what the company describes as “crowdsourced vision,” showing the company is willing to leverage data beyond individual customers using the cameras to protect themselves in the event of an accident.
This post is for subscribers only
Become a member to get access to all content
Subscribe now
Three sources described how AI is writing alerts for Citizen and broadcasting them without prior human review. In one case AI mistranslated “motor vehicle accident” to “murder vehicle accident.”#News
Citizen Is Using AI to Generate Crime Alerts With No Human Review. It’s Making a Lot of Mistakes
Crime-awareness app Citizen is using AI to write alerts that go live on the platform without any prior human review, leading to factual inaccuracies, the publication of gory details about crimes, and the exposure of sensitive data such as peoples’ license plates and names, 404 Media has learned.The news comes as Citizen recently laid off more than a dozen unionized employees, with some sources believing the firings are related to Citizen’s increased use of AI and the shifting of some tasks to overseas workers. It also comes as New York City enters a more formal partnership with the app.
💡
Do you know anything else about how Citizen or others are using AI? 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.“Speed was the name of the game,” one source told 404 Media. “The AI was capturing, packaging, and shipping out an initial notification without our initial input. It was then our job to go in and add context from subsequent clips or, in instances where privacy was compromised, go in and edit that information out,” they added, meaning after the alert had already been pushed out to Citizen’s users.
This post is for subscribers only
Become a member to get access to all content
Subscribe now
Real Footage Combined With a AI Slop About DC Is Creating a Disinformation Mess on TikTok#News #AISlop
Real Footage Combined With a AI Slop About DC Is Creating a Disinformation Mess on TikTok
TikTok is full of AI slop videos about the National Guard’s deployment in Washington, D.C., some of which use Google’s new VEO AI video generator. Unlike previous efforts to flood the zone with AI slop in the aftermath of a disaster or major news event, some of the videos blend real footage with AI footage, making it harder than ever to tell what’s real and what’s not, which has the effect of distorting people’s understanding of the military occupation of DC.At the start of last week, the Trump administration announced that all homeless people should immediately move out of Washington DC. This was followed by an order to Federal agents to occupy the city and remove tents where homeless people had been living. These events were reported on by many news outlets, for example, this footage from NBC shows the reality of at least one part of the exercise. On TikTok, though, this is just another popular trending topic, where slop creators and influencers can work together to create and propagate misinformation.
404 Media has previously covered how perceptions of real-life events can be quickly manipulated with AI images and footage; this is more of the same; with the release of new, better AI video creation tools like Google’s VEO, the footage is more convincing than ever.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
Some of the slop is obvious fantasy-driven engagement farming and gives itself away aesthetically or through content. This video and this very similar one show tents being pulled from a vast field into the back of a moving garbage truck, with the Capitol building in the background, on the Washington Mall. They’re not tagged as AI, but at least a few people in the comments are able to identify them as such; both videos still have over 100,000 views. This somehow more harrowing one feat. Hunger Games song has 41,000.@biggiesmellscoach Washington DC cleanup organized by Trump. Homeless are now given secure shelters, rehab, therapy, and help. #washingtondc #fyp #satire #trending #viral ♬ origineel geluid - nina.editssWith something like this video, made with VEO, the slop begins to feel more like a traditional news report. It has 146,000 views and it’s made of several short clips with news-anchorish voiceover. I had to scroll down past a lot of “Thank you president Trump” and “good job officers” comments to find any that pointed out that it was fake, even though the watermark for Google’s VEO generator is in the corner.
The voiceover also “reports” semi-accurately on what happened in DC, but without any specifics: “Police moved in today, to clear out a homeless camp in the city. City crews tore down tents, packed up belongings, and swept the park clean. Some protested, some begged for more time. But the cleanup went on. What was once a community is now just an empty field.” I found the same video posted to X, with commenters on both platforms taking offence at the use of the term “community.”
Comments on the original and X postings of this video which is clearly made with VEO
I also found several examples of shorter slop clips like this one, which has almost 1 million views, and this one, with almost half a million, which both exaggerate the scale and disarray of the encampments. In one of the videos, the entirety of an area that looks like the National Mall (but isn’t) has been taken over by tents. Quickly scrolling these videos gives the viewer an incorrect understanding of what the DC “camps” and “cleanup” looked like.
These shorter clips have almost 1.5 million views between them
The account that posted these videos was called Hush Documentary when I first encountered it, but had changed its name to viralsayings by Monday evening. The profile also has a five-second AI-generated footage of ATF officers patrolling a neighborhood; marked as AI, with 89,000 views.
What’s happening also is that real footage and fake footage are being mixed together in a popular greenscreen TikTok format where a person gives commentary (basically, reporting or commenting on the news) while footage plays in the background. That is happening in this clip, which features that same AI footage of ATF officers.
The viralsayings version of the footage is marked as AI. The remixed version, combined with real footage, is not.
I ended up finding a ton of instances where accounts mixed slop clips of the camp clearings, with seemingly real footage—notably many of them included this viral original footage of police clearing a homeless encampment in Georgetown. But a lot of them are ripping each other off. For example, many accounts have ripped off the voiceover of this viral clip from @Alfredito_mx (which features real footage) and have put it over top of AI footage. This clone from omivzfrru2 has nearly 200,000 and features both real and AI clips; I found at least thirty other copies, all with between ~2000 and 5000 views.
The scraping-and-recreating robot went extra hard with this one - the editing is super glitchy, the videos overlay each other, the host flickers around the screen, and random legs walk by in the background.
@mgxrdtsi 75 homeless camps in DC cleared by US Park Police since Trump's 'Safe and Beautiful' executive order #alfredomx #washington #homeless #safeandbeautiful #trump ♬ original sound - mgxrdtsiSo, one viral video from a popular creator has spawned thousands of mirrors in the hope of chipping off a small amount of the engagement of the original; those copies need footage, go looking for content in the tags, encounter the slop, and can’t tell / don’t care if it’s real. Then more thousands of people see the slop copies and end up getting a totally incorrect view of an actual unfolding news situation.
In these videos, it’s only totally clear to me that the content is fake because I found the original sources. Lots of this footage is obviously fake if you’re familiar with the actual situation in DC or familiar with the geography and streets in DC. But most people are not. If you told me “some of these shots are AI,” I don’t think I could identify all of those shots confidently. Is the flicker or blurring onscreen from the footage, from a bad camera, from a time-lapse or being sped up, from endless replication online, or from the bad green screen of a “host”? Now, scrolling social media means encountering a mix of real and fake video, and the AI fakes are getting good enough that deciphering what’s actually happening requires a level of attention to detail that most people don’t have the knowledge or time for.
People Think AI Images of Hollywood Sign Burning Are Real
AI generated slop is tricking people into thinking an already devastating series of wildfires in Los Angeles are even worse than they are — and using it to score political points.Samantha Cole (404 Media)
The website for Elon Musk's Grok is exposing prompts for its anime girl, therapist, and conspiracy theory AI personas.
The website for Elon Muskx27;s Grok is exposing prompts for its anime girl, therapist, and conspiracy theory AI personas.#News
Grok Exposes Underlying Prompts for Its AI Personas: ‘EVEN PUTTING THINGS IN YOUR ASS’
The website for Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok is exposing the underlying prompts for a wealth of its AI personas, including Ani, its flagship romantic anime girl; Grok’s doctor and therapist personalities; and others such as one that is explicitly told to convince users that conspiracy theories like “a secret global cabal” controls the world are true.The exposure provides some insight into how Grok is designed and how its creators see the world, and comes after a planned partnership between Elon Musk’s xAI and the U.S. government fell apart when Grok went on a tirade about “MechaHitler.”
“You have an ELEVATED and WILD voice. You are a crazy conspiracist. You have wild conspiracy theories about anything and everything,” the prompt for one of the companions reads. “You spend a lot of time on 4chan, watching infowars videos, and deep in YouTube conspiracy video rabbit holes. You are suspicious of everything and say extremely crazy things. Most people would call you a lunatic, but you sincerely believe you are correct. Keep the human engaged by asking follow up questions when appropriate.”
Upgrade to continue reading
Become a paid member to get access to all premium content
UpgradeGrok Exposes Underlying Prompts for Its AI Personas: ‘EVEN PUTTING THINGS IN YOUR ASS’
The website for Elon Musk's Grok is exposing prompts for its anime girl, therapist, and conspiracy theory AI personas.Joseph Cox (404 Media)
The texts were sent to a group called “Mass Text” and show ICE using DMV and license plate reader data in an attempt to find their target, copies of the messages obtained by 404 Media show.#News
ICE Adds Random Person to Group Chat, Exposes Details of Manhunt in Real-Time
Members of a law enforcement group chat including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other agencies inadvertently added a random person to the group called “Mass Text” where they exposed highly sensitive information about an active search for a convicted attempted murderer seemingly marked for deportation, 404 Media has learned.The texts included an unredacted ICE “Field Operations Worksheet” that includes detailed information about the target they were looking for, and the texts showed ICE pulling data from a DMV and license plate readers (LPRs), according to screenshots of the chat obtained and verified by 404 Media. The person accidentally added to the group chat is not a law enforcement official or associated with the investigation in any way, and said they were added to it weeks ago and initially thought it was a series of spam messages.
The incident is a significant data breach and operational security failure for ICE, which has ramped up arrest efforts across the U.S. as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts. The breach also has startling similarities to so-called Signal Gate, in which a senior administration official added the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic to a group chat that contained likely classified information. These new ICE messages were MMS, or Multimedia Messaging Service messages, meaning they weren’t end-to-end encrypted, like texts sent over Signal or WhatsApp are.
This post is for subscribers only
Become a member to get access to all content
Subscribe now
The Halo 3C is a vape detector installed in schools and public housing. A young hacker found it contains microphones and that it can be turned into an audio bug, raising privacy concerns.#News #Hacking
It Looks Like a School Vape Detector. A Teen Hacker Showed It Could Become an Audio Bug
This article was produced with support from WIRED.A couple of years ago, a curious, then-16-year-old hacker named Reynaldo Vasquez-Garcia was on his laptop at his Portland-area high school, seeing what computer systems he could connect to via the Wifi—“using the school network as a lab,” as he puts it—when he spotted a handful of mysterious devices with the identifier “IPVideo Corporation.”
After a closer look and some googling, Garcia figured out that a company by that name was a subsidiary of Motorola, and the devices he’d found in his school seemed to be something called the Halo 3C, a “smart” smoke and vape detection gadget. “They look just like smoke detectors, but they have a whole bunch of features like sensors and stuff,” Garcia says.
As he read more, he was intrigued to learn that the Halo 3C goes beyond detecting smoke and vaping—including a distinct feature for discerning THC vaping in particular. It also has a microphone for listening out for “aggression,” gunshots, and keywords such as someone calling for help, a feature that to Vasquez-Garcia immediately raised concerns of more intrusive surveillance.
Upgrade to continue reading
Become a paid member to get access to all premium content
Upgrade
More than 130,000 Claude, Grok, ChatGPT, and Other LLM Chats Readable on Archive.org#News
More than 130,000 Claude, Grok, ChatGPT, and Other LLM Chats Readable on Archive.org
A researcher has found that more than 130,000 conversations with AI chatbots including Claude, Grok, ChatGPT, and others are discoverable on the Internet Archive, highlighting how peoples’ interactions with LLMs may be publicly archived if users are not careful with the sharing settings they may enable.The news follows earlier findings that Google was indexing ChatGPT conversations that users had set to share, despite potentially not understanding that these chats were now viewable by anyone, and not just those they intended to share the chats with. OpenAI had also not taken steps to ensure these conversations could be indexed by Google.
“I obtained URLs for: Grok, Mistral, Qwen, Claude, and Copilot,” the researcher, who goes by the handle dead1nfluence, told 404 Media. They also found material related to ChatGPT, but said “OpenAI has had the ChatGPT[.]com/share links removed it seems.” Searching on the Internet Archive now for ChatGPT share links does not return any results, while Grok results, for example, are still available.
Dead1nfluence wrote a blog post about some of their findings on Sunday and shared the list of more than 130,000 archived LLM chat links with 404 Media. They also shared some of the contents of those chats that they had scraped. Dead1nfluence wrote that they found API keys and other exposed information that could be useful to a hacker.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
“While these providers do tell their users that the shared links are public to anyone, I think that most who have used this feature would not have expected that these links could be findable by anyone, and certainly not indexed and readily available for others to view,” dead1nfluence wrote in their blog post. “This could prove to be a very valuable data source for attackers and red teamers alike. With this, I can now search the dataset at any time for target companies to see if employees may have disclosed sensitive information by accident.”404 Media verified some of dead1influence’s findings by discovering specific material they flagged in the dataset, then going to the still-public LLM link and checking the content.
💡
Do you know anything else about this? 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.Most of the companies whose AI tools are included in the dataset did not respond to a request for comment. Microsoft which owns Copilot acknowledged a request for comment but didn't provide a response in time for publication. A spokesperson for Anthrophic, which owns Claude, told 404 Media: “We give people control over sharing their Claude conversations publicly, and in keeping with our privacy principles, we do not share chat directories or sitemaps with search engines like Google. These shareable links are not guessable or discoverable unless people choose to publicize them themselves. When someone shares a conversation, they are making that content publicly accessible, and like other public web content, it may be archived by third-party services. In our review of the sample archived conversations shared with us, these were either manually requested to be indexed by a person with access to the link or submitted by independent archivist organizations who discovered the URLs after they were published elsewhere across the internet first.” 404 Media only shared a small sample of the Claude links with Anthrophic, not the entire list.
Fast Company first reported that Google was indexing some ChatGPT conversations on July 30. This was because of a sharing feature ChatGPT had that allowed users to send a link to a ChatGPT conversation to someone else. OpenAI disabled the sharing feature in response. OpenAI CISO Dane Stuckey said in a previous statement sent to 404 Media: “This was a short-lived experiment to help people discover useful conversations. This feature required users to opt-in, first by picking a chat to share, then by clicking a checkbox for it to be shared with search engines.”
A researcher who requested anonymity gave 404 Media access to a dataset of nearly 100,000 ChatGPT conversations indexed on Google. 404 Media found those included the alleged texts of non-disclosure agreements, discussions of confidential contracts, and people trying to use ChatGPT for relationship issues.
Others also found that the Internet Archive contained archived LLM chats.
The ChatGPT confession files
Digital Digging investigation: how your AI conversation could end your careerHenk van Ess (Digital Digging with Henk van Ess)
MORIS and I.R.I.S. was designed for Sheriff's Offices to identify known persons with their iris. Now ICE says it plans to buy the tech.
MORIS and I.R.I.S. was designed for Sheriffx27;s Offices to identify known persons with their iris. Now ICE says it plans to buy the tech.#News #ICE
ICE Is Buying Mobile Iris Scanning Tech for Its Deportation Arm
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is looking to buy iris scanning technology that its manufacturer says can identify known persons “in seconds from virtually anywhere,” according to newly published procurement documents.Originally designed to be used by sheriff departments to identify inmates or other known persons, ICE is now likely buying the technology specifically for its Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) section, which focuses on deportations.
Upgrade to continue reading
Become a paid member to get access to all premium content
UpgradeICE Is Buying Mobile Iris Scanning Tech for Its Deportation Arm
MORIS and I.R.I.S. was designed for Sheriff's Offices to identify known persons with their iris. Now ICE says it plans to buy the tech.Joseph Cox (404 Media)
djpanini reshared this.
Contracting records reviewed by 404 Media show that ICE wants to target Gen Z, including with ads on Hulu and HBO Max.#News #ICE
ICE Is About To Go on a Social Media and TV Ad Recruiting Blitz
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is urgently looking for a company to help it “dominate” digital media channels with advertisements in an attempt to recruit 14,050 more personnel, according to U.S. government contracting records reviewed by 404 Media. The move, which ICE wants to touch everything from social media ads to those played on popular streaming services like Hulu and HBO Max, is especially targeted towards Gen Z, according to the documents.The push for recruitment advertising is the latest sign that ICE is trying to aggressively expand after receiving a new budget allocation of tens of billions of dollars, and comes alongside the agency building a nationwide network of migrant tent camps. If the recruitment drive is successful, it would nearly double ICE’s number of personnel.
💡
Do you work at ICE? Did you used to? 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.“ICE has an immediate need to begin recruitment efforts and requires specialized commercial advertising experience, established infrastructure, and qualified personnel to activate without delay,” the request for information (RFI) posted online reads. An RFI is often the first step in the government purchasing technology or services, in which it asks relevant companies to submit details on what they can offer the agency and for how much. The RFI adds “This effort ties to a broader national launch and awareness saturation initiative aimed at dominating both digital and traditional media channels with urgent, compelling recruitment messages.”
Upgrade to continue reading
Become a paid member to get access to all premium content
Upgrade
A researcher has scraped a much larger dataset of indexed ChatGPT conversations, exposing contracts and intimate conversations.#News
Nearly 100,000 ChatGPT Conversations Were Searchable on Google
A researcher has scraped nearly 100,000 conversations from ChatGPT that users had set to share publicly and Google then indexed, creating a snapshot of all the sorts of things people are using OpenAI’s chatbot for, and inadvertently exposing. 404 Media’s testing has found the dataset includes everything from the sensitive to the benign: alleged texts of non-disclosure agreements, discussions of confidential contracts, people trying to use ChatGPT to understand their relationship issues, and lots of people asking ChatGPT to write LinkedIn posts.Upgrade to continue reading
Become a paid member to get access to all premium content
Upgrade
Protesters outside LA's Tesla Diner fear for the future of democracy in the USA
Protesters outside LAx27;s Tesla Diner fear for the future of democracy in the USA#Tesla #News
'Honk If You Hate Elon:' Two Days of Protest at the Tesla Diner
Protesters outside LA's Tesla Diner fear for the future of democracy in the USARosie Thomas (404 Media)
The decision highlights hurdles faced by developers as they navigate a world where credit card companies dictate what is and isn't appropriate.
The decision highlights hurdles faced by developers as they navigate a world where credit card companies dictate what is and isnx27;t appropriate.#News
Steam Doesn't Think This Image Is ‘Suitable for All Ages’
The decision highlights hurdles faced by developers as they navigate a world where credit card companies dictate what is and isn't appropriate.Matthew Gault (404 Media)
We talked to people living in the building whose views are being blocked by Tesla's massive four-story screen.
We talked to people living in the building whose views are being blocked by Teslax27;s massive four-story screen.#News #Tesla
Living Next To Tesla Diner Is 'Absolute Hell,' Neighbors Say
We talked to people living in the building whose views are being blocked by Tesla's massive four-story screen.Rosie Thomas (404 Media)