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Sam is out so this is Joseph. Thank GOD it’s Friday. On this week’s podcast, we discuss a new wave of sextortion emails which send a target their home address to scare them into paying and the rise of the right to repair movement for your body and prescription drugs. And in the subscribers-only section, a years old Reddit mystery that is finally solved, thanks to crowdsourcing and facial recognition tech.
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or watch it on our YouTube channel. Earlier this week, Sam went on NPR’s On the Media to talk about what we’ve done in the last year, and the future of independent journalism. Listen here. But let’s go into what we covered this week!  IMAGE: VITALY MAZUR CHATBOTS TO DOX A man in Massachusetts was arrested Wednesday after allegedly stalking, doxing, and harassing a female professor for seven years. Among a series of crimes, the man is accused of using AI to create fake nudes of the woman, and of making a chatbot in her likeness that gave out her name, address, and personal details on a website for AI-powered sex bots. As the court records say “If another user interacting with the chatbot asked the ‘Victim’ where she lived, the chatbot could provide the Victim’s true home address followed by ‘Why don’t you come over?'”  IMAGE: ILGMYZIN/UNSPLASH CROOKS DITCH TELEGRAM An array of different types of criminals, including hackers, fraudsters, and drug dealers, are deleting their Telegram accounts or migrating contacts off the app after the arrest and subsequent charging of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov. One concern is that if Telegram does pivot to actually performing content moderation on any sort of real scale, the company could then provide data to the authorities. “Reason for deleting: Safety Reasons, due to the arrest of Telegram CEO!” one person wrote. FORCED HAND As you probably saw, Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris for president during the presidential debate in an Instagram post. But importantly, she cited AI generated images of her that faked an endorsement for Donald Trump as the reason why she felt the need to speak up. Of course the biggest through line: Taylor Swift is one of the most deepfaked women in the world. Now there is a supreme irony in AI-generated images showing her and her fans endorsing Donald Trump being her last straw. THE GARDEN ISLAND GOES AI A company that owns several newspapers in Hawaii is using AI-generated newscasters to create video news segments against the wishes of its unionized journalists, who say the newspaper’s owners are replacing journalists with AI and described the practice as “digital colonialism.” Readers visiting the YouTube and Instagram accounts for The Garden Island, Kauai’s only daily newspaper, are currently greeted by James and Rose, a pair of AI-generated newscasters that squawk out local news coverage in stilted robotic voices. The videos are made with Caledo, an Israeli startup that was founded in 2023 with the express goal of turning written news pieces into digital broadcast news. READ MORE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK Replying to “Stalker Allegedly Created AI Chatbot on NSFW Platform to Dox and Harass Woman,” Tia Benedict writes: Thank you for your work on this issue. When they say "move fast and break things" it rarely includes plans for cleaning up your own mess. That's why articles like this are important. It forces some responsibility.
Replying to “Historic Newspaper Uses Janky AI Newscasters Instead of Human Journalists,” Richard R Brooks writes: I just love the heart felt feelings that they emote. For those of us who love having to deal with automated phone systems at stores, this gives us even more chances to be disrespected by companies. They never miss a chance to show that our time is worth less than nothing to them.
It feels so good to have people with money work to humiliate us nonstop.
Replying to “‘Celebrity Number Six’ Internet Mystery Is Solved,” Bryan Manske writes: As a silly little hobby I take overnight time-lapse movies of weather events. Just because it's fun, I guess. No other reason, really. But it's amazing how many social sites and would-be friends are willing to label/tag these images or movies as "AI generated". You can pretty much devalue anything these days by claiming they're "AI generated". For my part, I'll keep making clips and stills like "Storm Front at Midnight" and "For a Foggy Morning", they'll just never feed Facebook and their ilk. And as a network and systems engineer of 40+ years I'm still calling out "AI" (ie: Advertising Intelligence) as nothing more than "fancy autocorrect" at this point. The enormous amount of investor cash flowing at it doesn't make it any more impressive than "fancy autocorrect" in my book.
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 communicating risks, brain rot, and the arrest of Telegram's CEO. JASON: I wanted to address one thing a few commenters have asked about on my article about Four Thieves Vinegar Collective, an anarchist group making pirated, DIY versions of patented pharmaceuticals. A few people have asked about safety, or felt like the article didn’t spend enough time addressing whether it is safe to make DIY versions of medications. I talked about this on our podcast a bit but wanted to write a little bit more about it here. Read the rest of Jason's Behind the Blog, as well as Emanuel's and Joseph's, by becoming a paid subscriber.
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