Podcast: We Spoke to an Amazon Worker Destroying Books for AI
404 Media podcast covers Amazon destroying scanned books for AI training, recurring AI names in academic papers, and ICE voter-data spending.
404 Media's podcast follows up on its investigation of an Amazon warehouse where books are scanned and destroyed for AI training data, including an interview with a warehouse worker. The hosts also discuss how the same few names repeatedly surface in LLM outputs and AI-generated academic papers. The episode additionally covers ICE's plans to spend millions on voter fraud data and Boston Dynamics robot dogs.
Podcast: Humans Are Reading Your ChatGPT Conversations
404 Media podcast examines contractors who read real ChatGPT user conversations, plus Automattic CEO turmoil and a16z's enshittification essay.
404 Media's weekly podcast leads with an investigation into 'Project Lily,' the human contractors who review real ChatGPT users' prompts and conversations; the reporter reviewed internal documents about the program. It also covers leadership upheaval at Automattic, where CEO Matt Mullenweg was put on leave of absence and then claimed he was back in control. A subscriber-only segment discusses a16z's argument that enshittification is not real.
Podcast: Amazon is Destroying Rare Books to Train AI
404 Media podcast covers Amazon buying and destroying rare books for AI training, AI misuse in court cases, and Meta's glasses patent.
404 Media's podcast discusses its investigation tracing a shipment of rare books to an Amazon AI training facility where they were destroyed, alongside reporting on AI misuse in courts: an expert witness who used ChatGPT to write a report defending 3M in a deadly explosion lawsuit, and a prompt injection hidden in a legal filing instructing AI to side with one party. It also covers Meta's new patent for AI smart glasses with facial recognition and research into the glasses being used to harass women.
Podcast: Mark Zuckerberg’s 'Superintelligent' AI Future That No One Wants
404 Media podcast discusses Meta's 'superintelligent' AI agents push, AI posing as human peer reviewers, and cities swapping Flock cameras for Axon.
This 404 Media podcast episode covers Jason Koebler's article on Mark Zuckerberg's 6,500-word essay and plan for Meta AI agents, Emanuel Maiberg's finding that a company advertising '100% human-written, never AI' medical peer review is actually entirely AI-generated, and Joseph Cox's reporting on cities ditching Flock license plate readers only to replace them with Axon ones. The episode is commentary and journalism roundup rather than a security or AI research disclosure.