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It's the last weekly roundup of 2025. I'm feeling sentimental! But let's stick to business. On the podcast this week: why someone is being charged for allegedly wiping a phone before CBP could search it, and how an Anthropic exec forced AI onto a queer gamer Discord. In the section for subscribers at the Supporter level: Disney and OpenAI deal. And in this week’s interview episode, Emanuel talks to Becky Ferreira about her new book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens about what the search for extraterrestrial life teaches us about humans, and what the near and far future of the search for alien life looks like. Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Supporters also have access to our next interview episode, where Jason talks to The Handbasket founder and independent journalist Marisa Kabas, right now. If you're a paying 404 Media subscriber, you can find this episode in your feed right now. If not, sign up here.
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WAY TO KILL A VIBEA Discord community for gay gamers is in disarray after one of its moderators and an executive at Anthropic forced the company’s AI chatbot on the Discord, despite protests from members. Users voted to restrict Anthropic's Claude to its own channel, but Jason Clinton, Anthropic’s CISO and a moderator in the Discord, overrode them. According to members of this Discord community who spoke with 404 Media on the condition of anonymity, the Discord that was once vibrant is now a ghost town. They blame the chatbot and Clinton’s behavior following its launch. When users confronted Clinton with their concerns, he brushed them off, said he would not submit to mob rule, and explained that AIs have emotions and that tech firms were working to create a new form of sentience, according to Discord logs and conversations with members of the group.  Photo by appshunter.io / Unsplash LIES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES The woman who helped coerce other women into the clutches of sex trafficking ring GirlsDoPorn will spend two years in prison, a federal judge ordered on Friday. GirlsDoPorn operated for almost a decade; its owners and co-conspirators were indicted on federal sex trafficking charges in October 2019. Over the years, its content became wildly popular on some of the world’s biggest porn tube sites, including PornHub, where the videos generated millions of views. Valorie Moser was the bookkeeper for GirlsDoPorn and met victims as they arrived in San Diego to be filmed—and in many cases, brutally abused—by sex traffickers Michael Pratt, Matthew Wolfe, and their co-conspirators.  Photo by Jonathan Cooper on Unsplash DOWN ON THE PHONE FARMDoublespeed, a startup backed by a16z that uses a phone farm to manage at least hundreds of AI-generated social media accounts and promote products has been hacked. The hack reveals what products the AI-generated accounts are promoting, often without the required disclosure that these are advertisements, and allowed the hacker to take control of more than 1,000 smartphones that power the company. The hacker, who asked for anonymity because he feared retaliation from the company, said he reported the vulnerability to Doublespeed on October 31. At the time of writing, the hacker said he still has access to the company’s backend, including the phone farm itself. Doublespeed did not respond to a request for comment.  Screenshots via 404 Media AGENTS ON AGENTS ON AGENTSICE paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to a company that makes “AI agents” to rapidly track down targets. The company claims the “skip tracing” AI agents help agencies find people of interest and map out their family and other associates more quickly. According to the procurement records, the company’s services were specifically for Enforcement and Removal Operations, the part of ICE that identifies, arrests, and deports people. The contract comes as ICE is spending millions of dollars, and plans to spend tens of millions more, on skip tracing services more broadly. The practice involves ICE paying bounty hunters to use digital tools and physically stalk immigrants to verify their addresses, then report that information to ICE so the agency can act.  Image: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, via Flickr. READ MOREThere are a TON of comments on Matthew Gault’s story this week, Anthropic Exec Forces AI Chatbot on Gay Discord Community, Members Flee, so you should just go read them all. Minito writes: “The anthropomorphism of AI genuinely disgusts me. No, this random instance of Claude running in a data center does not ‘feel’, it's not ‘growing neurons’, it's taking in tokens and running it through transformers until it spits out sentences. It's not ‘off doing stuff for its own enjoyment’, it's too busy running other prompts to actually respond in a reasonable time. It's like believing a math problem has a soul because the solution is x = 11 and 11 is your angel number.”
And Andrew Brandt writes: “This whole story seems to encapsulate the bizarre bubble that envelops the ‘AI’ industry and its purveyors. There's a quasi-religious, cultlike belief in the concept that this collection of servers running spicy autocomplete will somehow become a new lifeform. There's also the weird inability (or more charitably, unwillingness) to seek consent. As if the idea of asking others to weigh in on a decision is anathema. You see it in every company that is pushing ‘AI’ to the front of their business. There's a pretty famous line from The Maltese Falcon, where Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade is browbeating a low-level crook, and tells him ‘when you're slapped, you'll take it and like it.’ It feels like that's the base-level instruction set Clinton is operating from. Folks who are the biggest promulgators/promoters of ‘AI,’ like Clinton, seem to consider democracy, as a concept, to be invalid. Calling a (rigged, because he set it up without a "no" option) vote ‘mob rule’ reveals the psychopathy behind this: There's no introspection, no willingness to consider that ‘maybe I'm wrong’ - just charge ahead and do whatever you want, regardless of anyone else in the community's explicit requests to refrain from doing what you want. It's almost like this guy doesn't want a community – maybe doesn't even understand what a community is. He wants a group of willing followers who will share his joy at interacting with the silicon. Again, it points to a cult-leader (or perhaps cult high priest) mentality that seems...dangerously deranged. I feel regret that this one person has managed to tear apart a community in such a short time. Perhaps that is the real power of ‘AI’ - it seems to be really good at destroying everything it touches. Consent. Democracy. Community. Environment. Social interactions. Our sense of safety. The understanding of ground truth, itself. A lot of that has to do with the sociopathy of the Altmans, Pichais, Musks, Zuckerbergs, and Clintons of this world. They birthed a baby just like them, no soul, consuming everything it can and taking, demanding, space nobody ever ceded to them.”
Much to discuss! BEHIND THE BLOGThis 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 history repeating itself and Meta's relationship with links. JOSEPH: I wanted to add a little bit from behind the scenes of this piece: Man Charged for Wiping Phone Before CBP Could Search It. As I said on the podcast this week, there are and continue to be many questions around the case. Especially why CBP stopped Samuel Tunick in the first place. In the piece I did not focus on Tunick’s activism because frankly we don’t know yet how big a role it played in CBP stopping him. I mentioned it but didn’t focus on it. I think regardless, someone being charged for allegedly wiping a phone is interesting essentially no matter who they are. Yes, it absolutely may turn out that he was stopped specifically because of his activism. Maybe lots of people think it’s very likely that’s the reason. But I can’t frame a story because it feels like that’s maybe the case. I have to go on what actual evidence I have at the moment. Read the rest of Joseph's Behind the Blog, as well as Sam, Jason, and Emanuel's, by becoming a paid subscriber.
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