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It’s Friday!!! We published so many bangers this week. On the podcast this week: A website that uses facial recognition to instantly reveal a LAPD officer’s name and salary, and a massive AI ruling that opens the way for AI companies to scrape everyone’s art. In the bonus section for paid subscribers in the Supporters tier: the AI slop in the Iran and Israel conflict, and why it matters. Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. If you couldn’t make it to our livestreamed FOIA Forum, you’re in luck: It’s now online for supporters to access whenever they want. And if you want to watch but aren’t a paying subscriber yet, I’ve got a link for you.
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THE COPARAZZIICE is using a new mobile phone app that can identify someone based on their fingerprints or face by simply pointing a smartphone camera at them, according to internal ICE emails viewed by 404 Media. The underlying system used for the facial recognition component of the app is ordinarily used when people enter or exit the U.S. Now, that system is being used inside the U.S. by ICE to identify people in the field.  Image: Nick Fancher via Unsplash TODAY IN CHATBOT HORRORSPeople are self-treating themselves and other community members for what they feel is “chatbot addiction” in online communities. “Those communities didn't exist for me back when I was quitting,” one former chatbot user said. All he could do was delete his account, block the website and try to spend as much time as he could “in the real world,” he said. Posts in Character_AI_Recovery include “I’ve been so unhealthy obsessed with Character.ai and it’s ruining me (long and cringe vent),” “I want to relapse so bad,” “It’s destroying me from the inside out,” “I keep relapsing,” and “this is ruining my life.” It also has posts like “at this moment, about two hours clean,” “I am getting better!” and “I am recovered.”  Photo by Sean Lee / Unsplash WATCHING YOU, WATCHING US A new site, FuckLAPD.com, is using public records and facial recognition technology to allow anyone to identify police officers in Los Angeles they have a picture of. The tool, made by artist Kyle McDonald, is designed to help people identify cops who may otherwise try to conceal their identity, such as covering their badge or serial number. “We deserve to know who is shooting us in the face even when they have their badge covered up,” McDonald told 404 Media when asked if the site was made in response to police violence during the LA protests against ICE that started earlier this month. “fucklapd.com is a response to the violence of the LAPD during the recent protests against the horrific ICE raids. And more broadly—the failure of the LAPD to accomplish anything useful with over $2B in funding each year.”  Image: Olena Bohovyk via Unsplash READING PAINBOWA federal judge in California ruled Monday that Anthropic likely violated copyright law when it pirated authors’ books to create a giant dataset and "forever" library but that training its AI on those books without authors' permission constitutes transformative fair use under copyright law. The complex decision is one of the first of its kind in a series of high-profile copyright lawsuits brought by authors and artists against AI companies.  Image elements: Flock promotional materials. Collage via 404 Media FLOCKING HELLFlock, the automatic license plate reader (ALPR) company with a presence in thousands of communities across the U.S., has stopped agencies across the country from searching cameras inside Illinois, California, and Virginia, 404 Media has learned. The dramatic moves come after 404 Media revealed local police departments were repeatedly performing lookups around the country on behalf of ICE, a Texas officer searched cameras nationwide for a woman who self-administered an abortion, and lawmakers recently signed a new law in Virginia. P.S.: We’re excited about our friend Brian Merchant’s new series AI Killed My Job, which features first-person stories from the world of AI-powered unemployment. His first entry is out now, which you can check out over at Blood in the Machine. READ MOREReplying to ‘FuckLAPD.com’ Lets Anyone Use Facial Recognition to Instantly Identify Cops Stephen Beitzel writes: “Try to buy men's casual wear in a color palette *other* than that of military camouflage. Cars and clothes have low-key been encouraging U.S. men to LARP as military-adjacent for years. Now actual military-esque public employees (police, state and federal enforcement agents) seem to be LARPing as Counter Strike players. In the story, this bit really struck me: "...people cannot be sure that the heavily armed group of men coming towards them are really federal agents or not." And then there's this claim by ICE that their agents are trying to conceal their identities because they are at risk of assault. So, does that really fly? I mean, if a U.S. citizen feels they're at risk of assault from an ICE agent, would ICE be really understanding if the U.S. citizen dressed like an ICE agent trying to conceal their identity? And at what point does one or the other give in completely to the role-play and start shooting the "disguised" person, claiming they felt threatened by the unknown person who is possibly a terrorist? This is a freaking nightmare.”
And responding to This Queer Online Zine Can Only Be Read Via an Ancient Internet Protocol, MK writes: “I really like this article! I'd love to see even more coverage of cool and unique things that people are doing with tech.”
Same! I am always on the lookout for people doing cool shit, to mix up the dystopia. Here’s another one from this week. Send us your cool and unique things! 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. his week, we discuss wrestling over a good headline, what to read this summer, and Super 8 film. EMANUEL: I would really love it if the people who accuse us of using “clickbait” headlines saw how long, pedantic, and annoying our internal debates are about headlines for some stories. Case in point is Jason’s story this week, which had the headline “Judge Rules Training AI on Authors' Books Is Legal But Pirating Them Is Not.” This is an important decision so it got covered everywhere. I don’t think any of the other headlines I saw from other big publications are wrong, but they do reflect why it was hard to summarize this story in a headline, and different headlines reflect what different publications’ thought was most important and notable about it. If you want a full breakdown you should read Jason’s story, but the gist is that a judge ruled that it’s okay for companies to use copyrighted books for their training data, but it’s not okay for them to get these books by pirating them, which many of them did. That’s the simplest way I can think of to sum it up and that’s what our headline says, but there are still many levels of complexity to the story that no headline could fully capture. Read the rest of Emanuel's Behind the Blog, as well as Sam, Joseph and Jason's, by becoming a paid subscriber.
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