The 404 Media Podcast

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We start this week with Joseph’s stories on the massive FBI hack. 404 Media broke this news and continued to cover the breach of data on all FBI employees and their spouses. After the break, Jason tells us how a surveillance company is telling cops it wants to add facial recognition tech to Flock camera data. In the subscribers-only section, Jason and Joseph chat all about Muse, Meta’s new agentic AI, and how humans are actually behind some of the tasks. Because of course.

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Facial recognition is everywhere now. It’s in surveillance cameras; it’s soon going to be in Meta’s RayBan pervert glasses, and some students already did that. You now have massively viral accounts that take clips of people, run them through facial recognition software, and then post their name and other personal info for everyone to see. We haven’t fully come to terms with what it means to live in a world where anyone can basically dox anyone else now.

To talk through this, Joseph spoke to Kashmir Hill. She’s a reporter at the New York Times, and the author of Your Face Belongs to Us: A Tale of AI, a Secretive Startup, and the End of Privacy.

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YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/aUFnQPtxJ9o

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We start this week with Jason’s story about OpenAI and Microsoft’s big admissions from court records that they are destroying the internet in all sorts of ways, and stealing intellectual property on an unprecedented scale. He admit it. After the break, Emanuel explains how he hijacked a real band’s Spotify page with AI-generated slop. In the subscribers-only section, we hear all about iLands, the AI agent platform that is basically just spam.

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When chatbots become our closest “friends,” what happens to our capacity to care? 

This week I'm joined by Professor Sherry Turkle. Sherry is a licensed clinical psychologist, the founding director of MIT's Initiative on Technology and Self, and the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT. She's a the New York Times bestselling author of multiple books including Alone Together, Reclaiming Conversation, and The Empathy Diaries. 

Her latest book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, comes out on September 29. In it, Turkle explores how conversational chatbots have changed the ways we relate to other humans, empathize with each other, and what that could mean for our future.

“The progression is: First we talk to each other, then we talk to each other through machines, and now we drop the middleman and we're happy to just talk to machines,” she said in our conversation. 

We get into what happens when people stop placing importance on emotionally connecting with other people, and whether it’s too late to pull back from the path we’re on.

Youtube Version: https://youtu.be/whqDsYhCl0s

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In this bonus collaboration with our friends at The Intercept, 404 Media's Jason Koebler and the Intercept's Sam Biddle and Akela Lacy discuss the ways AI is already used to empower private surveillance companies that filter data to the government, how AI is used in war, and the prospect of an AI apocalypse. This podcast was recorded live in Los Angeles at The Loved One on September 12.

Check out The Intercept Briefing podcast wherever you get your podcasts, and find a full transcript of this pod here.

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We start this week with Joseph’s story about the people who are reading real ChatGPT users’ prompts and conversations. He got a bunch of documents all about these contractors and saw real prompts himself. After the break, Sam tells us all about the Automattic CEO getting kicked out. Then coming back again. In the subscribers-only section, Emanuel tells us why a16z thinks enshittification is not real.

YouTube version: https://youtu.be/AyPuYrjLk1E

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This week we’re joined by Jennie Rose Halprein. Jennie is the executive director of Library Futures, a non-profit that advocates for a fair digital future for libraries and the communities they serve. We have written a bunch of stories about libraries over the years, and I have talked to Jennie a few times for those stories. I always have really interesting conversations with her, but a lot of what we talk about never makes it into a story. That’s why I wanted to share one of those conversations with you today. We of course touch upon censorship but also many other subjects, so I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/mS0xofGW2hE

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We start this week with Joseph’s story about the secretive predictive policing units inside DHS that are analyzing Americans’ financial data and having local cops pull them over. After the break, Jason tells us about the funky shirt designed to fool AI-camera systems. In the subscribers-only section, we talk all about our third anniversary events. 

YouTube version: https://youtu.be/o0AG6A5MIRg

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This week Jason talks to Lindsey Isaacs and her lawyer, Patrick McGeehan. Last year, Lindsey was falsely arrested and imprisoned after authorities used Flock’s license plate reader system to pull over the wrong person in a hit-and-run that killed three people. Lindsey spent 13 days in jail because of this screwup.

This all happened because authorities were looking for a black dodge Durango, and used Flock’s freeform search to look for a black SUV. Lindsey happened to be driving a black dodge Durango 3 miles west of where the crash happened a few minutes beforehand. Lindsey was arrested even though there was no damage to her car. She again, spent 13 days in jail before the charges against her were dropped. This is one of the worst cases of Flock-related policing screwups we’ve ever seen, and an innocent person had their life upended because of it. We spoke to Lindsey and Patrick about what happened, the case, Flock surveillance, and their lawsuit against the police who did this to her.

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We start this week with Emanuel’s follow-up to his Amazon book scanning story, in which he spoke to someone who worked in the Amazon warehouse which destroys books to train Amazon’s AI products. After the break, Emanuel and Sam tell us about the same few names appearing in LLM output over and over again. In the subscribers-only section, Joseph tells us why ICE is buying loads of data about ‘voter fraud’.

Youtube Version: https://youtu.be/PcNdLnLF7mo

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