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Happy Friday! Come and get your weekly roundup. On the 404 Media podcast this week: how AI-powered ads on Buzzfeed are recommending people buy things like a hat worn by a person who died by suicide, an unprecedented leak out of phone forensics tech Graykey, and HarperCollins' AI deal (and how MIT Press is exploring deals, too).
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Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or watch it on YouTube. On Monday we’ll be speaking at the Brooklyn Public Library about how to pry records from the government using public records requests. Think of it as one of our FOIA Forums but for the wider public. Details are here. We’re also planning the next installment of our FOIA Forum series for paid subscribers, which will be about specifically getting information from the incoming administration. More on that soon. Become a subscriber to get the invite.  Image via Wired ‘AI PIMPING’Instagram is flooded with hundreds of AI-generated influencers who are stealing videos from real models and adult content creators, giving them AI-generated faces, and monetizing their bodies with links to dating sites, Patreon, OnlyFans competitors, and various AI apps. Instagram is unable or unwilling to stop the flood of AI-generated content on its platform and protect the human creators on Instagram—several of whom told us that they are now competing with AI content in a way that is impacting their ability to make a living.  Unsplash POKEMON ‘TRAINER?’Niantic, the company behind the extremely popular augmented reality mobile games Pokémon Go and Ingress, announced that it is using data collected by its millions of players to create an AI model that can navigate the real world. Niantic said it is building a “Large Geospatial Model” that “will enable computers not only to perceive and understand physical spaces, but also to interact with them in new ways, forming a critical component of AR glasses and fields beyond, including robotics, content creation and autonomous systems.” They also called it the “world’s future operating system.”  Va legal filing by the Department of Justice GRAPHIC DESIGN IS HIS PASSIONA 28-year-old Houston man was arrested last week, according to a legal filing by the Department of Justice, after allegedly telling an undercover FBI agent that he wanted to conduct an “operation like 9/11.” Legal filing about his case show that he was an aspiring ISIS graphic designer who was working with ISIS’s second-in-command graphic designer, known as “The Nightmare” because of the extensive notes and revisions that were required before any piece of propaganda he worked on was pushed out.  Unsplash / Collage via 404 Media BOOKS FOR SALEAs several major publishers sell their authors’ works to tech giants for large language model fodder, MIT Press is asking authors for their input before any training deals are made, and claims that it’s been approached by AI companies to do so. MIT Press said in an email sent out to authors earlier this month that the publisher has been approached by “several AI companies and data brokers for training generative AI tools in exchange for payment.” It goes on to say that it has not entered into any such deal “thus far” but recognizes that MIT Press content is “already being used for training purposes.”  Image: Magnet Forensics on Vimeo. LEAKY SECRETSIn an unprecedented leak for highly-secretive company Grayshift, documents obtained by 404 Media show the Graykey, a phone unlocking and forensics tool that is used by law enforcement around the world, is only able to retrieve partial data from all modern iPhones that run iOS 18 or iOS 18.0.1. The documents do not appear to contain information about what Graykey can access from the public release of iOS 18.1, which was released on October 28. Although one of its main competitors Cellebrite has faced similar leaks before, this is the first time that anyone has published which phones the Graykey is able, or unable, to access. READ MORE Commenting on AI-Powered Buzzfeed Ads Suggest You Buy Hat of Man Who Died by Suicide, Gapster wrote: “The massive quantity of ads in daily life has been bothering me for a decade and it just keeps getting worse. From the time I get out of bed to the time I go to sleep, all I see and hear are ads. I gather at some point the ads will make it into our dreams, at which point, I will prefer not to be awake or asleep. This dystopian possibility highlights the potential for a future where advertising becomes so pervasive and invasive that it permeates every aspect of our existence, making the very act of living feel like an unending marketing campaign. Turn off, tune out, drop out.”
And responding to HarperCollins Confirms It Has a Deal to Sell Authors' Work to AI Company Marius Kießling said: “With all the completely unethical data aggregation to train models going on, this is close to being refreshing news. Its opt-in for authors and they are getting an offer for compensation. I can however not judge if it is a fair offer to allow a company to regurgitate your works.”
And Lisa also commented: “Wow, a whole $2500 (not negotiable!) for the creative content of your life's work!! How generous! I'm sure there are going to be authors who feel desperate enough to take this offer, but maybe not? I strongly doubt that this is a really good offer. I'm just spitballing here, but are there any authors who would negotiate a separate contract with an a.i. company to produce essays or short works to directly sell to them? Would they make more money? On the other hand, any book that exists somewhere online as a digital file, possibly already has been scraped for "free" by the a.i. companies. That is a purely hypothetical, though.”
Subscribers get commenting privileges! Sign up here to get in the comment section. 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 talk about conjuring gaming memories, AI-generated Birkin bags, and a rejection of a certain type of criticism. JOSEPH: Yesterday I did something unthinkable. Deranged. Sordid. I played World of Warcraft. On Thursday Blizzard launched fresh servers for the Classic version of the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game. Basically this means that, although World of Warcraft is still going strong (it’s recent expansion, The War Within, has got pretty good reviews and player counts), and despite there already being World of Warcraft Classic (which started at the original, or ‘vanilla’, state of the game and has steadily progressed through its expansions), there is now a third, maybe fourth parallel strand of the game which has gone right back to the beginning. 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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