Emanuel Maiberg, writing for 404 Media: A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final...

Touch Grass, the debut novel of Sydney based Australian author Mary Colussi, was published in June this year. And a fraudulent publishing deal was not too far behind. In this instance though AI slop played a part in giving the scam away. An email sent to Colussi, apparently from a representative of a well-known...

A few years ago I did an online coffee quiz. Highly scientific no doubt. My taste in coffee was — because I’m primarily a cappuccino drinker — adjudged to be “entry level”. Nice. I occasionally partake of other varieties, like short black or piccolo, but they’re just a little light on coffee (and froth, and...

It looks like AI scrapers have been using a surreptitious method of making their marauding presence appear legitimate, this time by appending a bogus query parameter, or tracking tag, to the URL of the webpage they are targeting. In the last month or so, I have seen a stack of page visit items looking something like...

Located one-point-one-five billion light years from Earth, the behemoth galaxy, at one-point-seven-million light in years in length, somewhat dwarfs our home, the Milky Way, which measures in at a mere one-hundred-thousand light years across. Using kiloparsecs as a metric, the size difference between IC 1101 and the...

I’m still reading through Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recently published vision of an AI future, but this paragraph jumped out at me: Humanity is not a monoculture. People’s diverse values represent different tradeoffs they would make on important issues. There is no technological solution that can align with...

Strathfield is a suburb located in the west of Sydney, Australia. I don’t know many people living in the area, so I’m not there often, but have occasionally wandered the streets near the railway station. About a third of residents were born in Australia, while a reasonable number of people hail from Nepal, China,...

Since the volume of slop-in-general is of epidemic proportions on the platform, it makes perfect sense an AI agent write actual AI slop for consumption there.

The Voyager 1 space probe is almost one light-day away from Earth. But the craft has been on its trajectory since being launched in 1977. Deep space flights carrying people will need to move at far greater speed if they are to, for example, reach Alpha Centaur, the star system closest to the Sun, in a reasonable...

Tangentially related to the previous post. A few days ago Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published the company’s latest AI vision. Or the one for this week at least. And the future is rosy, incredibly rosy. If Meta has it their way, everyone will have access to their own “exceptionally capable” agent — must Meta use URLs...

There’s good news and there’s bad news, but in reality not much is really good. The good, such that it is; AI bots could well put scammers out of work. The bad; the AI scammers are far more effective at deceiving people. Disturbingly though, these are scams that involve entering into a fake relationship with the...

We’re talking about things like mass extinctions and major geological events. Scientists are not exactly sure why momentous upheavals seem to occur at approximately the same intervals, but they have theories. These range from Earth’s position in space over time, relative to our galaxy’s mid-plane, to the (extremely...