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Back in 2022, the Center for Countering Digital Hate released a blistering report finding that social media platforms Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok all failed to remove 90 percent of Islamophobic content from their platforms.Facebook, in particular, had only stepped in to moderate seven out of 125 posts flagged by the Center, in direct violation of its own community guidelines on “expressions of contempt.”Fast forward four years, and it’s clear the platform has only become worse.As we reported over the weekend, the social media platform is currently teeming with various forms of Islamophobic and anti-Arab content. It’s a noxious…
Normally, you’d imagine huge megacorporations having a personal army of the best lawyers in the world who can spin anything in their favor. You’d certainly think that would be the case for 3M, the industrial conglomerate that got away with permanently poisoning our planet with “forever chemicals.”But nobody’s perfect all the time. In a lawsuit about who’s liable for a Houston explosion that killed three people, an “expert witness” that 3M’s legal team hired turned out to be a total hack who used AI to put together his entire report defending the company, 404 Media reports. The opposing legal team suspected…
Working class consumers around the world are tightening their belts, driven by runaway fuel prices, global inflation, and a wrath of new import tariffs introduced by US president Donald Trump. In the US, retail sales plunged 0.6 percent between May and July, blowing an expected 0.1 percent drop out of the water.In such a depressing financial environment, one class of consumer seems to be having a heyday: the ultra-rich in general, and the billionaires buoyed by the AI boom in particular.According to the Financial Times, the number of billionaires in the US rose 13 percent from April 2025 to 2026,…
Amazon has been caught scanning and destroying a large shipment of rare books so it can train its AI models.In an investigation by 404 Media, a bookseller suspected that an order they received for 1,000 books on Biblio, a marketplace where buyers can remain anonymous, was for an AI company. So to get to the bottom of the mystery, they agreed to place an Apple AirTag between the pages of one of the volumes.They tracked the shipment to a site at a massive Amazon warehouse in Nevada, where workers say their job is to strip the spines off of books…
It feels like an impossible task these days to purchase a “dumb” appliance that doesn’t need a constant internet connection and a slew of over-the-air updates — not to mention a completely unnecessary infusion of “AI.”And while most of the time the consequences of a broken update or server downtime are trivial, the stakes are considerably higher when it comes to feeding our pets.As The Verge reports, cat owners were horrified when they realized that their expensive smart pet feeders from the company Petlibro started missing feeding schedules due to an outage that started on August 11.“Feeder still offline, scheduled…
Kentucky parents are outraged after discovering that horribly inaccurate educational materials handed out to their middle school students were generated with AI.According to local station WDRB, students at Farnsley Middle School in Southwest Louisville were sent home with a packet chock full of AI hallucinations on their first day of the school year. The most obvious tell was a map of North America, which contained some jaw dropping misspellings of state names, misplaced cities, and hallucinated territories that don’t actually exist.Kentucky, for example, was mislabeled “Venecky,” while states like Texas and Louisiana were reimagined as “Taxas” and “Lookoong.” Though South…
OpenAI has revealed a new feature for ChatGPT’s desktop app on macOS that basically tracks your clicks, keystrokes, and more — all so it can fine-tune its AI model, raising obvious privacy concerns.The feature, called Computer History, lets ChatGPT “learn from everything you do on your computer,” said Ari Weinstein, an OpenAI product and engineering manager, on X. The company describes the tool as creating a timeline of your actions that an AI agent can use to learn how you work, finish tasks on your behalf that you started, and suggest skills and automations. The degree of access the software has to…
Over the weekend, senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) excoriated health secretary Robert Kennedy Jr in a letter over his “calamitous” response to the summer’s cyclosporiasis outbreak.New cases of explosive diarrhea, triggered by a microscopic parasite that’s been found to infest pre-packaged lettuce, have only recently started slowing down — despite Kennedy Jr declaring that the situation was purportedly “under control” almost exactly a month ago. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest numbers, there are north of 24,000 lab-confirmed and suspected cases of cyclosporiasis spanning 47 US states.As a result, Americans are ditching lettuce at record rates, forcing…
Online marketplaces are being flooded with AI slop — but is anybody willing to actually pay for it?In the case of CGTrader, a long-established online marketplace for 3D assets used by video game developers, film editors, and 3D printing nerds, users are sending a clear message. As 404 Media reports, the marketplace is being flooded by AI-generated assets, representing one in six models — but they only account for only $1 out of every $90 in revenue.In other words, virtually nobody’s willing to shell out for AI slop, meaning it’s economically almost valueless.“Buyers are voting with their wallets, and AI-generated…
A decade ago, young adults were flocking to vaunted tech giants like Google and Apple in pursuit of exciting jobs on the cutting edge of tech.In 2026, however, the status quo of young people who are uncritically enamored with the tech industry and its billionaire overlords has gone completely out the window.A new survey conducted by CNBC‘s Generation Labs asked over 1,000 US adults aged between 18 and 34 to share their thoughts on politics, AI, and the country’s economy.A particularly interesting branch of questions polled participants on their views of nine executives overseeing AI companies, and the results were…