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It’s finally Friday, it’s the day before a long weekend, and it’s time to catch up on what you may have missed.
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Online child sexual exploitation is on the rise, and parents, lawmakers, and platform leaders are working hard to solve this complex problem.
The challenge is that grooming isn’t like other online safety violations - it unfolds over time and across platforms, making it extremely difficult to detect at scale. At the same time, trust & safety teams are not equipped to manually review conversations to identify grooming, before it’s too late.
But scaled detection is possible. ActiveFence’s latest report unveils its approach to this complex task. I don’t want to give too much away, but the key lies in combining deep expertise in predatory behaviors, pattern recognition, and user-level moderation, among other strategies.
To learn more about ActiveFence's industry-leading approach, and how to detect and stop grooming on your platform - check out their report here.
On the podcast this week, Jason and Emanuel discuss the arrest of Telegram cofounder Pavel Durov, a slide deck showing "active listening" advertising based on microphone data, and a concerning new study that shows AI-generated CSAM is more common than you think. Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or watch it on YouTube. Don’t forget!!! In less than one week, we’re meeting up in Brooklyn to celebrate one year of 404 Media. Subscribers get in free. We sold out our initial batch of tickets and are releasing more as of right now; get them while they’re hot. Details here.  Unsplash SCHOOL’S BACKA new survey attempts to quantify just how common it is for minors to AI-generate nudes of other minors. One in 10 minors reported that their friends or classmates have used AI tools to generate nudes of other kids, according to the survey. “We’ve long known that AI tools were commonly used among minors and that nudify apps in particular, which can take a photograph of anyone and use AI to make them appear nude, have spread chaos and panic through several schools across the country,” Emanuel wrote, but the survey is one of the first attempt to measure the scope of the problem.  Image via 404 Media BOLD CLAIMS 404 Media previously reported Cox Media Group (CMG) was advertising a service that claimed to target ads based on what potential customers said near device microphones. Now, we have the pitch deck CMG sent to prospective companies. After Joseph’s reporting, Google kicked CMG off its Partner Program in response.  Collage via 404 Media SACREBLEU Telegram founder Pavel Durov’s arrest in France last weekend “lit the internet on fire in a very specific and complicated way,” Jason wrote. He broke down how conservatives and free speech champions have called the arrest politically motivated, and an attack on encrypted messaging and free expression. “There are too many unknowns at this moment to say for sure what’s going on here,” he wrote. “But I’m going to attempt to explain why you’re seeing some of what you’re seeing about Telegram and what we do know about the messaging app.”  Screenshot via GameNGen OUR WEBSITE ALSO RUNS DOOMYou’ve probably seen the classic video game DOOM running on all sorts of random things, like toothbrushes and Ikea lamps. But this time, it’s novel not because of what device it's running on, but how it's running at all. It’s not the Doom game engine, but a diffusion model, a type of generative AI model most commonly used to generate media, that’s responding to player input in real time. The diffusion model is trained gameplay footage of Doom to produce the next frame based on the frames that came before it and player input. READ MOREResponding to “Appliance and Tractor Companies Lobby Against Giving the Military the Right to Repair,” Lewis Edwards writes: “Eisenhower warned us about the Military Industrial Complex over half a century ago. The initial sale isn't enough and they have to continuously pad their books with parts and services to make investors happy. The anti-tank weapons sent to Ukraine used one-off batteries. Recharging was not an option because otherwise how could you continuously sell new batteries to the military? The soldiers had to develop other methods for powering the weapons to replace the batteries they didn't have access to. Sure, it voided the warranty, but that's easy to justify when the alternative is losing a war.”
And replying to “Apple’s Huge “Dual Use” Face Swap App Problem Is Not Going Away,” K. observes: “I haven't gone through the App Store review process since 2016, but I haven't heard of it being significantly less of a nightmare. Apple not only can review every app (and update) submitted, it does. If the company decided to ban "fart" apps 8 or 9 years ago because it felt like the market was too saturated it could also ban Face Swap apps or at least subject them to higher scrutiny.”
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 generative AI in gaming, getting into sports events, and good laptops. EMANUEL: I saw a good, highly specific meme yesterday that made me actually laugh out loud. It’s about ray tracing, a new way of simulating how light reflects and refracts in real time that Nvidia introduced a couple of GPU generations ago. The joke is that despite all the hype about ray tracing being one of the most amazing developments in real time 3D graphics in years, ray tracing doesn’t really look much better than the “prebaked” lighting tricks video games used prior to ray tracing, which mostly achieve the same look without the highly demanding calculations required to realistically simulate how light bounces off reflective surfaces. It’s been hugely optimized since and actually runs great now even with ray tracing on, but Cyberpunk 2077 at launch was a great example of this. You’d turn on ray tracing and watch your average frames per second drop from 120 to 40, and if you squint and look really closely you might notice that the puddles in the street are now accurately reflecting the neon signs in the city as opposed to “faking” the reflection with a 2D texture that sort of matches the environment but is not a “real” reflection. It’s just not a great trade off, even if you’re willing to spend thousands of dollars to run the latest video game on maxed out settings, which I am, and you sort of have to be to get the meme. Read the rest of Emanuel's Behind the Blog, as well as Jason and Sam's, by becoming a paid subscriber.
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