The 404 Media Podcast

In this week's show, we start with a couple of articles about how companies might *actually* be listening to conversations through smart device microphones to target ads. Plenty of questions remain, but we discuss everything we know so far. After the break, Sam explains a new Stanford study which has resulted in one of AI's most important datasets being taken offline (check the article itself for a clarification on Google's connection to the story which we learned after recording)...

A really bizarre mystery this week. We broke the news that a man somehow flew into LAX without a ticket or passport and DHS is totally stumped. Who knows how he got there? No one, apparently. Then Sam breaks down the latest Patreon ban hammer against a misunderstood community. In the subscriber's only section, Joseph explains a massive mistake by Verizon potentially put a person's physical safety at risk, and what this means for why he doesn't use a phone...

A content warning for the free section of this episode. Emanuel explains a massive investigation of his into how Civitai, the a16z funded AI platform, generated images that “could be categorized as child pornography,” according to internal Slack chats and more. This is a difficult, complicated, but important story. I'll leave it at that. Then in the subscriber's only section, we talk about Jason's investigation into pickleball turf wars...

So much drama this episode but with an important message behind it all. For the first half, Sam and Jason break down their stories about Eduards Sizovs, a tech conference founder who listed a fake, "auto-generated" woman as a conference speaker. Sizovs is also behind a highly popular woman-in-tech account. There are layers here. 

After the break, Jason explains how Plex is leaking users' viewing habits to one another...

Well that was a lot of drama in the world of OpenAI. Fear not, we have a unique angle on how the person in the running to be OpenAI's new CEO was a character in a Harry Potter fanfic that was written deliberately as a recruiting tool to the effective altruist movement. That's definitely a sentence...

We recorded this immediately after publishing some breaking news: we discovered that venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is funding Civitai, an AI marketplace we've repeatedly shown is an engine for nonconsensual AI porn. Just this week Emanuel reported Civitai had introduced a "bounty" system, that financially rewards people for making AI-models of specific targets. We talk about both stories in the first section of the podcast...

This week goes in all sorts of directions. First, Joseph runs through his in-depth article on Fusus, a surveillance company that took over one small American town with AI-powered cameras. Now, they're everywhere, both in the U.S. and increasingly abroad. After the break, Sam tells us how attendees of an NFT conference got more than they bargained for, and ended up getting (temporarily) blinded (literally)...

We're shaking things up with a new format! As well as the two stories available to all listeners, we have a third discussion at the end which is only for paying subscribers. We explain why at the top of the show.

As for this week's articles, first Emanuel explains how YouTube is making money off a livestream of an open air drug market. After the break, Jason and Emanuel discuss their two stories about Israel-Palestine and the lack of archiving efforts and freedom of information...

For the first half of the show, we talk about a couple of stories around the Israel-Palestine conflict. First, Instagram "sincerely apologizes" to Sam for its auto-translations which added the word "terrorist" to sentences containing the word "Palestinian." Then, Joseph and Emanuel talk about their article about how verified Twitter accounts have taken the term "OSINT" and used it to spread their own garbage information...

Content warning for the first half of the episode because it touches on violent themes. Emanuel takes us through how so-called AI detectors are, instead of clearing up the fog of misinformation around the Israel-Palestine conflict, may actually be making everything much worse. A crucial story for these ongoing events. Then after the break, we change gears and Jason explains a trademark dispute in the film photography community. Spoiler: everyone is mad...