Stone tools found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi reveal a long-lost population of human relatives; their identity, and how they crossed the sea, is a mystery.#TheAbstract #science
Million-Year-Old Evidence of Epic Journey Near ‘Hobbit’ Island Discovered by Scientists
Scientists have discovered million-year-old artifacts made by a mysterious group of early humans on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, according to a breakthrough study published on Wednesday in Nature.The extraordinary find pushes the archaeological record of Sulawesi back by about 800,000 years, and confirms that hominins, the broader family to which humans belong, crossed treacherous ocean passages to reach the island, where they crafted simple tools.
The tool-makers may have been related to a group of archaic humans—nicknamed “hobbits” for their short stature—that lived on nearby Flores Island. But while the hobbits left behind skeletal remains, no fossils from the Sulawesi group have been unearthed. The tools, found at a site called Calio in South Sulawesi, are the only record of their existence for now.
“The discovery of these ancient stone tools at Calio is another important piece of the puzzle in our understanding of the movements of early hominins from the edge of the Asian landmass into the isolated zone of islands known as Wallacea,” said Adam Brumm, a professor of archaeology at Griffith University and a co-author of the new study, in an email.
“A major question remaining is the identity of the archaic humans of Sulawesi,” he added, noting that they might be Homo erectus, or descendents of this influential early human species that migrated from Africa to Asia. ”But until we have their fossils, who they were will remain a mystery.”
Stone tools dated to over 1.04 million-years-old, scale bars are 10mm. Image: M W Moore
The discovery was made by Budianto “Budi” Hakim, an Indonesian archaeologist who has spent decades searching for traces of archaic humans in Sulawesi. Hakim spotted one of the artifacts while scouring the region’s sandstone outcrops, prompting an excavation that unearthed a total of seven flaked tools crafted from chert rock. The remains of extinct elephants and pigs were also found in the sedimentary layers at the site, hinting at an ancient origin.The team used two independent methods to date the tools, both of which placed their age at a minimum of 1.04 million years old, making the artifacts the earliest evidence for hominin occupation of Sulawesi by far.
“Budi has been searching for this evidence for much of his life, so it is very exciting indeed,” said Brumm. “But it is not so surprising that we now have evidence for hominins on Sulawesi by one million years ago; we have long suspected that there had been a very deep history of human occupation of this island based on the discovery (in 2010) of stone tools on Flores to the south that date to at least a million years ago. Sulawesi was probably where the first hominins to set foot on Flores actually came from, so it made sense to us that the human presence on Sulawesi would go back at least as far as a million years, if not considerably earlier.”
“And personally, it did not surprise me that Budi unearthed this new find,” he continued. “He is a renowned figure in Indonesian archaeology and undoubtedly has the ‘golden touch.’”
The tools are sharp-edged flakes that were probably cut from larger rocks obtained from a nearby river channel. Like many tools made by hominins across time and regions, they would have been useful for cutting and scraping materials, though their exact purpose is unknown.
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The tools “can’t tell us very much about the behaviour or cognitive capacities of these early humans, other than that they were tool-makers who clearly understood how to choose stones with suitable properties and to fracture them in a controlled way to produce a supply of usable tools,” explained Brumm. “Over the past 2.5 million years, many different hominin species (including our own, Homo sapiens) have made stone tools that are essentially indistinguishable from the Sulawesi tools.”In addition to their mysterious identity, it is unclear how these early humans crossed ocean waters to reach these island shores, given that the shortest distance between the Asian mainland and Sulawesi would have been 30 miles, at minimum.
“This is too far to swim (in any case the ocean currents are too strong),” Brumm explained. “It is also very unlikely these archaic hominins had the cognitive ability to develop watercraft that were capable of making sea voyages, or indeed of the advanced planning required to gather resources and set sail over the horizon to an unseen land.”
“Most likely, they crossed to Sulawesi from the Asian mainland in the same way rodents and monkeys are suspected to have done; that is, by accident, perhaps as castaways on natural ‘rafts’ of floating vegetation,” he concluded.
It’s incredible to imagine these early humans getting caught up in tides or currents, perhaps stranded at sea for days, only to serendipitously wash up on a vast island that would become home to untold generations. Hakim, Brumm, and their colleagues hope to find more evidence of this long-lost population in the coming years, but for now, the stone tools offer a rare window into the lives of these accidental seafarers and their descendants.
Hominins on Sulawesi during the Early Pleistocene - Nature
Early Pleistocene artefacts at Calio suggest that Sulawesi was populated by hominins at around the same time as Flores, if not earlier.Nature
Kilopixel by Ben Holmen turns a CNC machine and a thousand wooden blocks into pixel art.#art #coolthings
Watch This Guy’s Interactive Wooden Pixel Machine Make Art in Real Time
Sitting in my office in NYC, I sent a CNC machine in a guy’s workshop in Wisconsin a 40 by 25 pixel drawing and watched it flip hand painted wooden blocks across a grid, one by one, until the glorious smiling 404 Media logo appeared—then watched it slowly erase, like a giant Etch A Sketch, moving on to the next drawing.Designer Ben Holmen created the Kilopixel, a giant grid made of 1,000 wooden blocks that a robot arm slowly turns to form user-submitted designs. “Compared to our modern displays with millions of pixels changing 60 times a second, a wooden display that changes a single pixel 10 times a minute is an incredibly inefficient way to create an image,” Holmen wrote on his blog detailing the project.
Choosing what to make the pixels from was its own hurdle: Holmen wrote that he tried ping pong balls, Styrofoam balls, bouncy balls, wooden balls, 3D printed balls, golf balls, foam balls, “anything approximately spherical and about 1-1.5in in diameter.” Some of these were too expensive; others didn’t hold up well to paint or drilling. Holmen settled on painted wooden blocks, each serving as one 40mm pixel. To be sure each block was exactly the right size, he built 25 shelves and drilled 40 holes into each, threading the blocks onto the shelves using metal wires. “This was painstaking and time consuming - I broke it down into multiple sessions over several weeks,” he wrote. “But it did create a very predictable grid of pixels and guaranteed that each pixel moved completely independently of the surrounding pixels.
youtube.com/embed/d5v3DRdMQ8U?…
From there, he used a CNC machine, which moves on the X, Y, and Z axes: across the grid, up and down, and the flipping finger that pokes inward to turn the pixel-blocks. Holmen wrote that he connected a Raspberry Pi to the CNC controller, which queries an API to get the next pixel in the design, activates the “pixel poker,” and reads a light sensor to determine whether the pixel face is painted black or raw wood.Two webcams stream the Kilopixel to Youtube, with a view of the whole grid and a view of the poker turning the blocks one by one. “The camera, USB hub, and light are hung from the ceilingwith a respectful amount of jank for the streaming phase of this project,” Holmen wrote. Anyone with a Bluesky account can connect their account and submit a pixel drawing for the machine to create, and people can upvote submissions they want to see next. Once it’s finished, the system uploads a timelapse of the painting to the site and posts it to Bluesky, tagging the submitter.
Drawn by @[url=did:plc:pt47oe625rv5cnrkgvntwbiq]Sam Cole[/url], completed in 44m39 Draw your own at kilopx.com
— kilopixel (@kilopx.com) 2025-08-05T20:33:14.719821ZI'm recording timelapses for every submission - this took 41 minutes in real time. Soon you'll be able to submit your own images to be drawn on my kilopixel! Can't wait to share this with the world and see what y'all come up with
— Ben Holmen (@benholmen.com) 2025-07-21T04:59:32.203Z
This entire process took him six years. I asked Holmen in an email what it cost him: “Probably around $1000 and hundreds of hours of my time,” he told me.And the project isn’t over: It still requires some babysitting. Sometime early Tuesday morning, the rig got misaligned while working on an elaborate pixellated American Gothic, with the flipper-finger grasping at the air between blocks instead of turning them. Holmen had to manually reset it in the morning, entering the feed to tinker with the grid.
He said he plans to run it 24/7, but that it might not go flawlessly at first. “I've had to restart the controller script twice in 10 hours, and restart the YouTube stream once,” he said on Monday, before the overnight error. “I am planning to run it for a few days or weeks depending on interest, then I'll move on to a different control concept. I don't want to babysit a finicky device all the time.”
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When I checked Kilopixel’s submissions on Monday, someone had drawn the Hacker News logo—a sure sign that a hug of death was coming. I asked Holmen if he’s had issues with overload. “Just one—I undersized my web server for the attention it got,” he told me on Monday evening. “It's been #1 on Hacker News for about 10 hours, which is a lot of traffic. kilopx.com has received about 13,000 unique visitors today, which I'm very pleased with. The article has received about 70,000 unique visitors so far.”The Kilopixel experiment might also be setting a time-to-penis record: In the six hours it’s been online as of writing this, I haven’t seen anyone try to make the robot draw a dick, yet. Holmen mentioned “defensive features” built into the web app in his blog for mitigating abuse, but so far people have behaved themselves. “I expect the best and worst out of people on the internet. I built an easy way for admins to delete gross or low effort submissions and enlisted a couple of trusted friends to keep an eye on the queue with me,” Holmen told me. “I'm certain there are ways to work around things, or submit enough to make cleanup a chore, but I decided to not lock things down prematurely and just respond as things evolve.”
Time to Penis / TTP
Time to Penis, abbreviated to TTP, is a video game development metric and slang term for the time it takes players to generate a penis-shaped object via any available means.Philipp (Know Your Meme)
Shared ChatGPT indexed by Google; how Wikipedia is fighting AI slop; and the history of how we got to Steam censorship.#Podcast
Podcast: Google Is Exposing Peoples’ ChatGPT Secrets
We start this week with Joseph’s story about nearly 100,000 ChatGPT conversations being indexed by Google. There’s some sensitive stuff in there. After the break, Emanuel tells us about Wikipedia’s new way of dealing with AI slop. In the subscribers-only section, Sam explains how we got to where we are with Steam and Itch.io; that history goes way back.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts,Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
- Nearly 100,000 ChatGPT Conversations Were Searchable on Google
- Wikipedia Editors Adopt ‘Speedy Deletion’ Policy for AI Slop Articles
- The Anti-Porn Crusade That Censored Steam and Itch.io Started 30 Years Ago
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
The lawsuit alleges XVideos, Bang Bros, XNXX, Girls Gone Wild and TrafficFactory are in violation of Florida's law that requires adult platforms to verify visitors are over 18.
The lawsuit alleges XVideos, Bang Bros, XNXX, Girls Gone Wild and TrafficFactory are in violation of Floridax27;s law that requires adult platforms to verify visitors are over 18.#ageverification
Florida Sues Huge Porn Sites Including XVideos and Bang Bros Over Age Verification Law
The state of Florida is suing some of the biggest porn platforms on the internet, accusing them of not complying with the state’s law that requires adult sites to verify that visitors are over the age of 18.The lawsuit, brought by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, is against the companies that own popular porn platforms including XVideos, XNXX, Bang Bros and Girls Gone Wild, and the adult advertising network TrafficFactory.com. Several of these platforms are owned by companies that are based outside of the U.S.
Uthmeier alleges that the companies are violating both HB3 and the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act.
On January 1, Florida joined 19 other states that require adult websites to verify users’ ages. Twenty-nine states currently have nearly identical legislation enacted for porn sites, or have bills pending. Age verification legislation has failed in eight other states.
“Multiple porn companies are flagrantly breaking Florida’s age verification law by exposing children to harmful, explicit content. As a father of young children, and as Attorney General, this is completely unacceptable,” Uthmeier said in a press release about the lawsuit. “We are taking legal action against these online pornographers who are willfully preying on the innocence of children for their financial gain.”
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The Free Speech Coalition along with several co-plaintiffs, including the sex education platform O.school, sexual wellness retailer Adam & Eve, adult fan platform JustFor.Fans, and Florida attorney Barry Chase filed a challenge to Florida’s law earlier this month. “These laws create a substantial burden on adults who want to access legal sites without fear of surveillance,” Alison Boden, Executive Director of the Free Speech Coalition, said in a press release published in December. “Despite the claims of the proponents, HB3 is not the same as showing an ID at a liquor store. It is invasive and carries significant risk to privacy. This law and others like it have effectively become state censorship, creating a massive chilling effect for those who speak about, or engage with, issues of sex or sexuality.”
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.404 MediaEmanuel Maiberg
After the Supreme Court upheld Texas’ age verification legislation in June, the Free Speech Coalition dropped the lawsuit in Florida. "However, we are continuing to monitor the governmental efforts to restrict adults' access to the internet in Florida," Mike Stabile, the director of public policy for the Free Speech Coalition, said in a statement to the Tallahassee Democrat. “The Paxton decision does not give the government carte blanche to censor content it doesn't like.”Experts say, and more than a year of real-world anecdotal evidence has shown at this point, that age verification laws are invasive of user’s privacy, chilling for Constitutional adult speech, and don’t work to keep children away from potentially harmful material.
As it has in many states once age verification legislation went into effect, Pornhub pulled access from Florida entirely on January 1, replacing the homepage with a video message from activist and performer Cherie DeVille: "As you may know, your elected officials in Florida are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website," DeVille says. " While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk.”
Lawsuit challenging age verification for adult websites dropped in Florida
A lawsuit challenging a Florida law requiring age verification for adult websites in Florida is dismissed., Tallahassee Democrat (Tallahassee Democrat)
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.”
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“The ability to quickly generate a lot of bogus content is problematic if we don't have a way to delete it just as quickly.”
“The ability to quickly generate a lot of bogus content is problematic if we donx27;t have a way to delete it just as quickly.”#News
Wikipedia Editors Adopt ‘Speedy Deletion’ Policy for AI Slop Articles
Wikipedia editors just adopted a new policy to help them deal with the slew of AI-generated articles flooding the online encyclopedia. The new policy, which gives an administrator the authority to quickly delete an AI-generated article that meets a certain criteria, isn’t only important to Wikipedia, but also an important example for how to deal with the growing AI slop problem from a platform that has so far managed to withstand various forms of enshittification that have plagued the rest of the internet.Wikipedia is maintained by a global, collaborative community of volunteer contributors and editors, and part of the reason it remains a reliable source of information is that this community takes a lot of time to discuss, deliberate, and argue about everything that happens on the platform, be it changes to individual articles or the policies that govern how those changes are made. It is normal for entire Wikipedia articles to be deleted, but the main process for deletion usually requires a week-long discussion phase during which Wikipedians try to come to consensus on whether to delete the article.
However, in order to deal with common problems that clearly violate Wikipedia’s policies, Wikipedia also has a “speedy deletion” process, where one person flags an article, an administrator checks if it meets certain conditions, and then deletes the article without the discussion period.
For example, articles composed entirely of gibberish, meaningless text, or what Wikipedia calls “patent nonsense,” can be flagged for speedy deletion. The same is true for articles that are just advertisements with no encyclopedic value. If someone flags an article for deletion because it is “most likely not notable,” that is a more subjective evaluation that requires a full discussion.
At the moment, most articles that Wikipedia editors flag as being AI-generated fall into the latter category because editors can’t be absolutely certain that they were AI-generated. Ilyas Lebleu, a founding member of WikiProject AI Cleanup and an editor that contributed some critical language in the recently adopted policy on AI generated articles and speedy deletion, told me that this is why previous proposals on regulating AI generated articles on Wikipedia have struggled.
“While it can be easy to spot hints that something is AI-generated (wording choices, em-dashes, bullet lists with bolded headers, ...), these tells are usually not so clear-cut, and we don't want to mistakenly delete something just because it sounds like AI,” Lebleu told me in an email. “In general, the rise of easy-to-generate AI content has been described as an ‘existential threat’ to Wikipedia: as our processes are geared towards (often long) discussions and consensus-building, the ability to quickly generate a lot of bogus content is problematic if we don't have a way to delete it just as quickly. Of course, AI content is not uniquely bad, and humans are perfectly capable of writing bad content too, but certainly not at the same rate. Our tools were made for a completely different scale.”
The solution Wikipedians came up with is to allow the speedy deletion of clearly AI-generated articles that broadly meet two conditions. The first is if the article includes “communication intended for the user.” This refers to language in the article that is clearly an LLM responding to a user prompt, like "Here is your Wikipedia article on…,” “Up to my last training update …,” and "as a large language model.” This is a clear tell that the article was generated by an LLM, and a method we’ve previously used to identify AI-generated social media posts and scientific papers.
Lebleu, who told me they’ve seen these tells “quite a few times,” said that more importantly, they indicate the user hasn’t even read the article they’re submitting.
“If the user hasn't checked for these basic things, we can safely assume that they haven't reviewed anything of what they copy-pasted, and that it is about as useful as white noise,” they said.
The other condition that would make an AI-generated article eligible for speedy deletion is if its citations are clearly wrong, another type of error LLMs are prone to. This can include both the inclusion of external links for books, articles, or scientific papers that don’t exist and don’t resolve, or links that lead to completely unrelated content. Wikipedia's new policy gives the example of “a paper on a beetle species being cited for a computer science article.”
Lebleu said that speedy deletion is a “band-aid” that can take care of the most obvious cases and that the AI problem will persist as they see a lot more AI-generated content that doesn’t meet these new conditions for speedy deletion. They also noted that AI can be a useful tool that could be a positive force for Wikipedia in the future.
“However, the present situation is very different, and speculation on how the technology might develop in the coming years can easily distract us from solving issues we are facing now, they said. “A key pillar of Wikipedia is that we have no firm rules, and any decisions we take today can be revisited in a few years when the technology evolves.”
Lebleu said that ultimately the new policy leaves Wikipedia in a better position than before, but not a perfect one.
“The good news (beyond the speedy deletion thing itself) is that we have, formally, made a statement on LLM-generated articles. This has been a controversial aspect in the community before: while the vast majority of us are opposed to AI content, exactly how to deal with it has been a point of contention, and early attempts at wide-ranging policies had failed. Here, building up on the previous incremental wins on AI images, drafts, and discussion comments, we workshopped a much more specific criterion, which nonetheless clearly states that unreviewed LLM content is not compatible in spirit with Wikipedia.”
Scientific Journals Are Publishing Papers With AI-Generated Text
The ChatGPT phrase “As of my last knowledge update” appears in several papers published by academic journals.Emanuel Maiberg (404 Media)
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
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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)
People failing to identify a video of adorable bunnies as AI slop has sparked worries that many more people could fall for online scams.#AISlop #TikTok
AI Bunnies on Trampoline Causing Crisis of Confidence on TikTok
A generation who thought they were immune from being fooled by AI has been tricked by this video of bunnies jumping on a trampoline:@rachelthecatlovers Just checked the home security cam and… I think we’ve got guest performers out back! @[url=https://mastod.org/users/ring]🦅 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇬🇧🇦🇺🇳🇿[/url] #bunny #ringdoorbell #ring #bunnies #trampoline ♬ Bounce When She Walk - OhboyprinceThe video currently has 183 million views on TikTok and it is at first glance extremely adorable. The caption says “Just checked the home security cam and… I think we’ve got guest performers out back! @[url=https://mastod.org/users/ring]🦅 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇬🇧🇦🇺🇳🇿[/url]”
People were excited by this. The bunnies seem to be having a nice time. @[url=https://social.coop/users/Greg]Greg[/url] posted on X “Never knew how much I needed to see bunnies jumping on a trampoline”
Unfortunately, the bunnies are not real.The video is AI generated. This becomes clear when, between the fifth and sixth seconds of the video, the back bunny vanishes.
The split second where the top left bunny vanishes
People want to believe, and the fact that it is AI generated is causing widespread crisis among people who thought that AI slop would only fool their parents. We are as a culture intensely attuned to the idea that animals might do cute things at night when we can’t see them, and there have been several real viral security camera videos lately of animals trepidatiously checking out trampolines.
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This particular video was difficult to discern as AI in part because security camera footage is also famously the blurriest type of footage. The aesthetics of this particular video make it very difficult to tell that it’s AI at first glance, because we are used to looking at surveillance camera footage as being blurry and dark, which can hide some of the standard signs people look at when trying to determine if a video is AI generated. The background of the image is also static; newer AI video generators are getting pretty good at creating the foreground subject of a video, but the background often remains very surreal. In this video, that’s not the case because of the static nature of the background. Pretending to be nighttime security footage also helps to disguise the things AI is often bad at—accurate movement, correct blur and lighting, and fine details. Tagging “@[url=https://mastod.org/users/ring]🦅 🇺🇸🇨🇦🇬🇧🇦🇺🇳🇿[/url]” was also pretty smart by the uploader, because it gives a plausible place for the video to come from.People are responding totally normally, embodying a very relatable arc; the confidence of youth to think “that will never happen to me,” followed by the crushing realization that eventually we all become old and susceptible to scams.
This guy sings that the video of the bunnies “might manufacture the way you made me feel - how do I know that the sky’s really sunny?”
@olivesongs11
7/29/25 - day 576 of writing a song every day
♬ original sound - olivesongsWhile @OliviaDaytonn says “Now I feel like I’m gonna be one of those old people that get scammed”.
@oliviadaytonn I wanted them to be real so badly #bunnies #trampoline ♬ original sound - olivia daytonAnother TikToker says the bunnies were “The first AI video I believed was real - I am doomed when I’m old”
@catenstuff #duet with @rachelthecatlovers #bunny #AAALASPARATUCURRO #bunnyjumpingontrampoline ♬ Bounce When She Walk - OhboyprinceAnd @sydney_benjamin offers a public apology to her best friend for sending her the video. “Guys, I fell for AI.. I’m quite ashamed, I think of myself as like an educated person.” She says that she felt good when she busted a previous AI video trend for her friends (Grandma Does Interviews On Street).
@sydney_benjamin
This one was hard to admit
♬ original sound - Sydney BenjaminThis video breaks down the animal-on-trampoline trend and explains how to spot a fake animal-on-trampoline video.
@showtoolsai How to spot AI videos - animals on trampolines #bunnies #dog #bear #bunny #ai ♬ original sound - showtoolsOf course, because the bunny video went viral, there are now copycats. This video, published on YouTube shorts one day after the first, by a different account, is also AI generated.
Copycat AI-generated bunny trampoline video on YouTube shorts
This is a theme that has a long history of being explored in song; for a more authentic trampolining-bunny musical experience, there is this video which is from a comfortably pre-AI “9 years ago”.
The uploader, @Rachelthecatlovers, only has four other videos. The account posted its first video a year ago, then waited, then posted a second one this week, which is also somewhat unusual for AI slop. Most AI slop accounts post multiple times a day, and most of the accounts are newly created. @Rachelthecatlovers has one other AI bunny video (the flap to the door disappears) and a bird cam video. It also has a video of grapes being rehydrated with a needle, tagged #bunny.
@Rachelthecatlovers' previous AI bunny video
People are freaked out by being fooled by this video and are clearly confident that they can usually spot videos that have been generated. But maybe that’s just the toupee fallacy; you only see the bad ones. Trampolining bunnies have broken that facade.
- YouTube
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.www.youtube.com
Submit to biometric face scanning or risk your account being deleted, Spotify says, following the enactment of the UK's Online Safety Act.
Submit to biometric face scanning or risk your account being deleted, Spotify says, following the enactment of the UKx27;s Online Safety Act.#spotify #ageverification
Spotify Is Forcing Users to Undergo Face Scanning to Access Explicit Content
Submit to biometric face scanning or risk your account being deleted, Spotify says, following the enactment of the UK's Online Safety Act.Samantha Cole (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)
The massive Tea breach; how the UK's age verification law is impacting access to information; and LeBron James' AI-related cease-and-desist.
The massive Tea breach; how the UKx27;s age verification law is impacting access to information; and LeBron Jamesx27; AI-related cease-and-desist.#Podcast
Podcast: The Tea Hack Just Keeps Getting Worse
The massive Tea breach; how the UK's age verification law is impacting access to information; and LeBron James' AI-related cease-and-desist.Joseph Cox (404 Media)
The Sig Sauer P320 has a reputation for firing without pulling the trigger. The manufacturer says that's impossible, but the firearms community is showing the truth is more complicated.
The Sig Sauer P320 has a reputation for firing without pulling the trigger. The manufacturer says thatx27;s impossible, but the firearms community is showing the truth is more complicated.#News
Gun Nerds Dismantle Infamous Pistol to Research If It Fires at Random
The Sig Sauer P320 has a reputation for firing without pulling the trigger. The manufacturer says that's impossible, but the firearms community is showing the truth is more complicated.Matthew Gault (404 Media)
“Without these safeguards, Mr. Barber eventually developed full-blown PTSD, which he is currently still being treated for,” the former mod's lawyer said.
“Without these safeguards, Mr. Barber eventually developed full-blown PTSD, which he is currently still being treated for,” the former modx27;s lawyer said.#ContentModeration
Former Moderator Sues Chaturbate for 'Psychological Trauma'
“Without these safeguards, Mr. Barber eventually developed full-blown PTSD, which he is currently still being treated for,” the former mod's lawyer said.Samantha Cole (404 Media)
This Company Wants to Bring End-to-End Encrypted Messages to Bluesky’s AT Protocol
Germ says it is the “first secure messaging service on the ATProtocol!”Joseph Cox (404 Media)
LeBron James' Lawyers Send Cease-and-Desist to AI Company Making Pregnant Videos of Him
Viral Instagram accounts making LeBron x27;brainrotx27; videos have also been banned.#AISlop
LeBron James' Lawyers Send Cease-and-Desist to AI Company Making Pregnant Videos of Him
Viral Instagram accounts making LeBron 'brainrot' videos have also been banned.Jason Koebler (404 Media)
The wiping commands probably wouldn't have worked, but a hacker who says they wanted to expose Amazon’s AI “security theater” was able to add code to Amazon’s popular ‘Q’ AI assistant for VS Code, which Amazon then pushed out to users.
The wiping commands probably wouldnx27;t have worked, but a hacker who says they wanted to expose Amazon’s AI “security theater” was able to add code to Amazon’s popular ‘Q’ AI assistant for VS Code, which Amazon then pushed out to users.#News #Hacking
Hacker Plants Computer 'Wiping' Commands in Amazon's AI Coding Agent
The wiping commands probably wouldn't have worked, but a hacker who says they wanted to expose Amazon’s AI “security theater” was able to add code to Amazon’s popular ‘Q’ AI assistant for VS Code, which Amazon then pushed out to users.Joseph Cox (404 Media)
The Tesla Diner has two gigantic screens, a robot that serves popcorn, and owners hope it will be free from people who don't like Tesla.
The Tesla Diner has two gigantic screens, a robot that serves popcorn, and owners hope it will be free from people who donx27;t like Tesla.#News #Tesla
'It's Not a Political Statement': Checking in With Tesla Superfans at Elon Musk's New Diner
The Tesla Diner has two gigantic screens, a robot that serves popcorn, and owners hope it will be free from people who don't like Tesla.Rosie Thomas (404 Media)