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  Voting in 2026 Is Getting an AI Slop 'I Voted' Sticker It’s a small pleasure, but receiving an “I Voted” sticker after casting my ballot is one of my favorite parts of the whole voting process. I slap the sticker on my chest and spend the rest of the day feeling like I accomplished a little something. I participated in democracy and everyone who sees me will know it. Artificial intelligence robbed me of that small joy this year and replaced it with a small horror. My “I Voted” sticker i...

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  Reaping and sowing, CEO edition It’s rare to see an executive go from fucking around to finding out so quickly. That’s what happened last week when Proton CEO Andy Yen announced he was canceling a planned re-interview process for almost all current employees that would have checked if they’re using AI enough. This follows extreme backlash from Proton users and workers against the company's aggressive pivot to AI. It’s been a wild ride internally, several employees past and present have shar...

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  People Used to Drink Wine Made From Ground-Up Mummies. Now, Scientists Are Studying It Welcome back to the Abstract—and Happy Halloween! Here are the studies this week that smashed into Earth, put aliens on ice, drank mummy wine, and hugged it out. First, a century-old theory that comets enriched Earth with the stuff of life is upended by new models of ancient impacts. Then: the case for life in extraterrestrial sea ice, a Halloween-coded medieval concoction, and a scientific embrace. As alwa...

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  ‘Wake Up Call:’ Fanfiction Writers and Readers React to AO3 Outage In the wake of fanfiction repository Archive of Our Own (AO3) announcing a weeks-long security incident outage, readers and writers are reflecting on why the site is important to the fanfiction community, and how they’re coping with the downtime.   On Thursday, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the non-profit organization that runs AO3, posted that the site was down for maintenance, eventually updating to say the...

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  Scientists Analyzed Thousands of Psychedelic Trips. They Found Something Disturbing Researchers have amassed a trove of more than 25,000 calls to a support hotline for people during and after psychedelic trips, making it “the largest dataset of psychedelic support interactions ever assembled—exceeding the combined sample sizes of all published psychedelic clinical trials by an order of magnitude,” according to a study published on Friday in Science Advances. Despite the popularity of psychedel...

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  Proton’s CEO Cancels AI ‘Re-Interviews’ On Friday, Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, cancelled a series of nearly company-wide ‘re-interviews’ that would have forced employees to explain how they are using AI, with the clear intention that they may be fired if not using it enough in the eyes of Proton leadership, according to six current Proton employees and audio of an around two hour all-hands meeting obtained by 404 Media. The move came after 404 Media published an investigation on Thursday, whi...

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  Behind the Blog: Tech Support This 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 discuss customer service and Proton fallout. JASON: Since I wrote about ChatGPT turning me into tech support for people’s random problems, I have gotten many more AI-generated emails from people asking me to solve their tech support problems. So, mission accomplished I guess. I think and hope it was clear in the article...

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  Apple Is Entering Its Slop Era My ears perked up when I heard Apple’s new foldable phones were cracking. I licked my lips when the company announced it’s releasing a touch-screen laptop. This was a company that once charged $19 for a polishing cloth, asked $200 for a VESA mount, and sold $700 wheels for the Mac Pro. Now it’s borrowing tired ideas from its competitors and launching hardware its previous leaders rejected. The once dominant company is struggling to find its feet in an AI-driven p...

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  Massive Fanfic Site Archive of Our Own Says It’s Going Down for 'Up to 4 Weeks' Archive of Our Own (AO3), a massive repository for fanfiction and creative writing, might be down for as long as a month after going down for "maintenance" on Thursday. The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the non-profit organization that runs AO3, posted on its status page early Thursday morning that the site was down for maintenance. A few hours later, it updated the status to say th...

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  Podcast: Flock CEO Says the Backlash Isn’t Real We start this week with Jason and Joseph’s article about leaked audio from a private police conference. In that audio, Flock’s CEO made all sorts of wild claims about the backlash to his company not being real, and his wife’s advice to never apologize. After the break, Sam tells us why former Yahoo CEO Marrisa Mayer can’t keep pretending ‘gender doesn’t matter.’ In the subscribers-only section, Joseph tells us about a woman who is facing years in...

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  Manifestos, Fear, and ‘Loser Thinking’: Inside Proton’s AI Reckoning Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, had a message for an employee in the company’s security Slack channel who urged the company to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.” In a follow-up...

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  Senators Demand Meta Answer for 'Pervert Glasses' Following 404 Media Investigation Oregon Senator Ron Wyden and Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey sent a letter to Meta on Wednesday demanding the company answer for the privacy concerns its smart glasses pose to the public.  The letter cites 404 Media’s October 2025 investigation into how people use Meta’s smart glasses to harass massage parlor workers. That investigation found Instagram accounts with hundreds of thousands of follower...

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  Objection, your honor You've probably heard, at this point, about the big changes coming to Meta's AI scraping terms for business accounts. Nieman Lab had that scoop, and since then, small businesses, journalists, and artists using Meta products like Instagram have been raising the alarm. But if you're in the EU or UK, you might be in luck and can object to that use of your data, as some users have pointed out. Images via Unsplash / collage via 404 MediaIf You're In the UK or EU...

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  If You're In the UK or EU, Here's How to Object to Meta's AI Training Earlier this month, Meta updated its commercial terms of use for business accounts to allow it to “use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of” Meta’s products.  Many artists and small business owners that rely on Instagram and Facebook are livid at Meta granting itself permission to use their content, including from websites s...

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  It's not the bots, Flock Flock CEO Garrett Langley says some interesting things to cops behind closed doors. He recently lied about his surveillance technology’s role in tracking a woman who had self-administered an abortion and 404 Media’s coverage of that incident, calling it “entirely false.” Now, in leaked audio obtained by 404 Media, Langley is saying the protests that have broken out around the country against his company, many of which have resulted in communities canceling their con...

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  Marissa Mayer Can’t Keep Pretending 'Gender Doesn't Matter' In Sunday’s edition of the New York Times, Marissa Mayer, former president and CEO of Yahoo, told her interviewer something so absurd it’s since gone viral.  Struggling with the “impossible task” of naming three things that she loves about her own 10 year old daughter, the New York Times reports, Mayer asked the AI assistant she just launched to do that thinking for her. It delivered the perfect answer, Mayer said: “It cam...

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  Proton To ‘Re-Interview’ Staff About AI To See Who Gets To Keep Their Job Proton, the company behind ProtonMail and other privacy-focused products, told staff on Monday it would be ‘re-interviewing’ staff across the company about how they use AI in their jobs, with the implication that the interviews may decide whether staffers have “continued employment,” according to an internal Proton email obtained by 404 Media. This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content...

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  In Leaked Audio, Flock CEO Tells Cops Backlash to the Company Isn’t Real Garrett Langley, the CEO of automatic license plate reader company Flock, told an audience of police chiefs at a private police conference Sunday that anti-Flock protests around the country are not real, according to leaked audio obtained by 404 Media. He also said his wife advised him to never apologize, said he would prefer to never do interviews with the press again, and claimed without evidence that the social media o...

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  An Ancient Virus Explains Why the Human Brain Is Special Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that invaded our brains, thought fast, swapped coffins, and hit the art gallery. First, an ancient viral pandemic that afflicted many of our primate relatives—but somehow missed humans—may help explain how we got so smart (relatively speaking). Then: mammal brains eat crow, an upcycled sarcophagus, and a trip to the starry Provençal summer of 1889. As always, for more of my wo...

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  Podcast: ‘Reverse-Engineer Anything’ Is the Next Wave of AI Slop We start this week with Jason’s article about how everyone is apparently reverse-engineering everything. After the break, Joseph tells us about a big AI shakeup at consulting giant Accenture. In the subscribers-only section, Sam and Jason discuss the Character[.]ai bankruptcy. Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to pow...

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  Behind the Blog: Brute Forces This 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 discuss reverse engineering and some wild court docs. SAM: I’m using my btb to shamelessly ask for sources: Have you ever started making a recipe you found online, and realized it was AI generated?  I’m asking because I just saw that Etsy is banning certain kinds of AI slop, including AI-generated recipes and patterns....

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  Portal Texas Used to ‘Rubber Stamp’ Data Centers Down After 404 Media Reporting Texas has shut down the web portal for its automated construction permit filing system and suspended construction permits of 17 data center projects. The change came after 404 Media reported that a group of Texans discovered the state had continued to issue construction permits related to data centers despite Governor Greg Abbott calling for a pause in September. On Monday, the watchdog groups FracTracker Alliance...

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  This Woman's Living a CashApp Scam Nightmare GM! We have a few bangers for you today. First: Can you imagine sitting in jail for days without knowing why, and then finding out that it's because someone hacked CashApp to impersonate you? I would be kind of mad! And elsewhere on 404 this morning, we have some prescient thoughts from an autonomous weapons expert on the state of AI in war, what's going on with cybersecurity experts in the wake of the PHPocalypse, and more insights int...

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  AI Is Changing Everything About Hacking. No One Knows What Happens Next For much of the last month, many of the cybersecurity experts I talk to and follow have been posting like they are very scared. Many have been warning of an AI-powered “Black Swan” event, have been alarmed by the number of vulnerabilities suddenly discovered, and of the apparent power of AI agents and large language models more broadly to find and exploit previously unknown bugs.  The rhetoric has ranged from worried-but-m...

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  AI Is Already 'Amplifying the Destruction' of War The UN met this week to discuss, among other things, the threat of autonomous weapons. “The technology is developing at a pace that is very concerning,” Laurent Gisel, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross’s (ICRC) legal warfare team, told 404 Media. Gisel was in NYC this week to address the UN about all the things that are driving conflict across the planet. His prepared remarks include a statement on the illegal arm...

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  Cops Warned to Look for ‘Suspicious Behavior’ From People Opposing Flock at City Council Meetings A federal intelligence center warned police that city council meetings about Flock “may be viewed by extremists as a desirable target,” and told them to be on the lookout for “emotional confrontations” between people who oppose surveillance and government officials, according to a copy of the warning obtained by 404 Media. The warning, obtained by 404 Media, was issued by the Orange County Intelli...

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  Someone Opened a CashApp In Her Name. She Faces Years in Prison Amanda Smith answered the door one afternoon in April and came face to face with the local Sheriff’s department in upstate Pennsylvania. The officers said they had a warrant for her arrest for a crime she had allegedly committed more than a thousand miles away in Arkansas. “I was completely confused,” Smith recalled. For one, she had never been to Arkansas. Second, the warrant was for computer fraud. By her own admission, Smith wa...

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  DHS Said They Searched Man Who Wiped GrapheneOS Phone for Child Abuse Material. They Lied When a Department of Homeland Security official sent out an alert to stop Samuel Tunick, a Stop Cop City activist, at an airport in January 2025, they said the reason was because he was suspected of “terrorist activities,” according to new filed court records which include a screenshot of the alert and photos of Tunick’s interrogation. Tunick ultimately provided Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officia...

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  ‘Reverse-Engineer Anything’ Is the New Wild West of AI Over the weekend, it became fashionable to use AI to replace the operating systems on smart TVs with vibe coded or AI reverse-engineered ones to make them less bloated. People have taken proprietary internet-of-things devices that were bricked and abandoned by their creators and used AI to hack them and install new software on them, giving functionality the original developers took away.   In the last few days I have seen people hack smart...

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  Scientists Discover A Strange Particle Explains the Origin of Reality Scientists have discovered that an exotic particle that existed at the birth of the universe might solve one of the biggest mysteries in cosmology and help explain reality as we know it, according to a new study in Physical Review Letters. Our modern universe is dominated by matter, but it also contains fleeting amounts of antimatter, which is like a bizarro version of matter made of particles with the same mass, but opposit...