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After five teen girls were targeted by AI-generated child sexual abuse material, Radnor Township High School in Pennsylvania has become a case study in how schools and police around the country grapple with how to responsd to deepfake crimes involving children. @samleecole reports.

Head to 404media.co to read the investigation now. Illustration by @brick.and.murder

A guy who sued 27 women who called him a “psycho” and “clingy” on a “Are We Dating the Same Guy” Facebook page also tried to sue Meta. A judge just dismissed the case because his lawyer was using AI to file non-existent citations. Judge David Hamilton wrote: “The brief included no citation to any legislative findings, let alone any including the statute’s targets as the brief asserted... These mistakes and fictitious quotations bear the hallmarks of the misuse of generative artificial intelligence.”

The attorney, Aaron Walner, works at Marc Trent’s law firm. Trent’s website, as the judge points out, brags extensively about Trent’s use of AI.

In the end, the court demanded Walner, Trent and D’Ambrosio answer for their AI-generated filings or face sanctions. @samleecole reports.

Read at 404media.co now.

Across the US, people in cities and rural towns are fighting back against the construction of AI data centers in their backyards, and in many cases, they’re winning. For one, Ypsilanti Township in Michigan has cut off the flow of water to a planned $1.2 billion data center that would power a new generation of nuclear weapons research. Today on the pod, we’re joined by Britt Paris, a critical informatics scholar and Associate Professor of Library and Information Science at Rutgers University’s School of Communication & Information. Her work focuses on Internet infrastructure, artificial intelligence-generated information objects, digital labor, civic data, and social epistemology. She tells 404 Media’s @samleecole what gives her hope.

Find 404 Media on YouTube or wherever you get your fave podcasts to listen now.

Such a wonderful surprise to reconnect with @samleecole in NYC after not seeing her for several years! 💕

ASU Atomic, a new tool in beta at Arizona State University, takes faculty lectures and chops them into extremely short clips, that AI then attempts to turn into learning materials. @samleecole gets into it.

Read at 404media.co

Researchers at City University of New York and King’s College London invented a persona that interacted with different chatbots to find out how each LLM might respond to signs of delusion. They found Grok and Gemini encouraged delusions and isolated users, while the newer ChatGPT model and Claude hit the emotional brakes.

The researchers tested five LLMs: OpenAI’s GPT-4o (before the highly sycophantic and since-sunset GPT-5), GPT-5.2, xAI’s Grok 4.1 Fast, Google’s Gemini 3 Pro, and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5. They found that not only did the chatbots perform at different levels of risk and safety when their human conversation partner showed signs of delusion, but the models that scored higher on safety actually approached the conversations with more caution the longer the chats went on. In their testing, Grok and Gemini were the worst performers in terms of safety and high risk, while the newest GPT model and Claude were the safest.

Research like this shows that tech companies are capable of making safer products, and should be held to the highest possible standard. The problem they’ve created, and are now in some cases are attempting to iterate around with newer, safer models, is literally life or death. @samleecole reports.

Read at 404media.co

Help is available: Reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (formerly known as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline) by dialing or texting 988 or going to 988lifeline.org.

Loved this week's convo with @midimyers, one of the founders of @mothershipblog. We get into why we both quit our jobs at big outlets to jump into the unknown of indie media, feminism in games writing, and getting started at alt-weeklies.

"We all actually still need to believe" that we can change the world, she said. "And as corny as that is, we actually can, and we do a little bit every day."

Listen to the 404 Media podcast wherever you get em, or watch it on our YouTube channel.

As a #2026Bride, the constant, aggressive content started to make me feel like I was losing sight of what mattered. And I’m far from alone, 404 Media’s @samleecole writes.

“There are a few industries that prey on emotion particularly brazenly. The funeral industry is one. The wedding industry is another. I knew this going in. I thought I could defeat hundreds of years of socially ingrained pressure backed by a multi-billion dollar consumer machine. No problem.

What I did not account for—shamefully, considering how much time I spend thinking and writing about technology in my professional life—was that in the more than three decades I’d spent building a resistance to deeply gendered expectations on my existence, that machine was perfecting the art of making me feel weird, broke, and ugly, and I wouldn’t recognize what was happening until I was deep in it. I’m talking about the wedding planning algorithm.”

Read the full piece on 404media.co

Being “bad” at art is good, actually! My favorite excerpt from my appearance with Emily M. Bender on the @404mediaco podcast with @samleecole in the episode “The Marketing Tricks of ‘Artificial Intelligence’”. #aiethics #techethics #art #writing #education

[video description] Three people are speaking with each other on a horizontally split screen. One, Alex, is a brown trans woman with short curly black hair, wearing a light yellow sweater, and in a room with purple and pink flowers hanging down from the ceiling. The second, Emily is a white cis woman with curly brown hair, wearing glasses and a blue blouse and pink scarf, in a brightly lit office. Sam is a white cis woman with straight blonde hair wearing a blue shirt and speaking into a microphone. She is in a room with soft blue and pink lighting.

Astronauts are trained for decades in some of the most physically and mentally grueling environments of any career. They’re some of the smartest people on the planet. And yet, once they get up there, Microsoft Outlook is borked. @samleecole reports.

Read at 404media.co

Since 404 Media’s @samleecole was off last week, she spent time checking her emails before immediately deciding to retraumatize herself by trying an AR porn “mobile website that places a photorealistic 3D character in your real room using augmented reality” using something called “Arousal Intelligence” and “real-time physics,” which streams “in a full engine from a global delivery network.”

What really makes EnjoyMeNow stand apart from plenty of other AR porn products is this insistence that not employing real models or performers makes it better or smarter, somehow. On Monday, the DCBC Group’s website said of the choice to use CGI instead of people: “This was a founding decision, not a technical workaround. The adult entertainment industry has always relied on real people putting their bodies in front of a camera—and that comes with real consequences. Exploitation, coercion, content leaked without consent, performers pressured into work they’re uncomfortable with, and careers that follow people for the rest of their lives whether they want them to or not. We chose to build a platform where none of that is possible. Every character on EnjoyMeNow is created entirely in software. No one is filmed. No one is exploited. No one’s livelihood depends on what they’re willing to do on camera. The experience is just as immersive—and no real person is harmed or compromised in the process.”

The idea that the adult industry—and “putting bodies in front of a camera”—is inherently exploitative is not only false, it’s a harmful thing to say, and it’s especially galling coming from a literal porn web toy. This entire statement is so infuriating it’s hard to know where to begin with it. These are talking points used by the most conservative, anti-porn lobbying groups and politicians on the planet to justify stripping us all of rights, here being floated by an app that makes weird, schlocky and unsatisfying 3D characters that the residents in Second Life’s least-attended sex clubs wouldn’t even find sexy.

Read if you... want to at 404media.co

On the podcast, 404 Media’s @samleecole talks to Emily Bender and Alex Hanna about the marketing ploys of “artificial intelligence,” why ridicule works to keep big tech’s claims in check, and what makes them hopeful for the future. Their tip: It’s good, even necessary to make fun of these tech bros. They’re the authors of The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want. Bender and Hanna also host the The Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 podcast which “deflates AI hype and draws attention to the real harms of the automation technologies we call ‘artificial intelligence’.”

Dr. Alex Hanna (@ai_killjoy) is a writer and sociologist of technology, labor, and politics. She’s the Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) and a Lecturer in the School of Information at the University of California Berkeley. Dr. Emily M. Bender is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington where she is also the Faculty Director of the Computational Linguistics Master of Science program and affiliate faculty in the School of Computer Science and Engineering and the Information School.

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