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Dating Apps Are In Their Sh*tpost Era

Slate

As AI takes over dating apps, shitposting is the new authenticity. Please enable javascript to get your Slate Plus feeds. If you can't access your feeds, please contact customer support. Check your phone for a link to finish setting up your feed. Please enter a valid phone number.


The New York Times and Chicago Tribune sue Perplexity over alleged copyright infringement

Engadget

Both publications claim the AI company scraped their works for LLM training and often reproduced their content verbatim. The said it had sent Perplexity several cease-and-desist demands to stop using its content until the two reached an agreement, but the AI company persisted in doing so. First, by scraping its website (including in real time) to train AI models and feed content into the likes of the Claude chatbot and Comet browser . The also says Perplexity damaged its brand by falsely attributing completely fabricated information (aka hallucinations) to the newspaper. The also filed a lawsuit against Perplexity for similar reasons.



The Former Staffer Calling Out OpenAI's Erotica Claims

WIRED

Steven Adler used to lead product safety at OpenAI. On this week's episode of, he talks about what AI users should know about their bots. When the history of AI is written, Steven Adler may just end up being its Paul Revere--or at least, one of them--when it comes to safety. Last month Adler, who spent four years in various safety roles at OpenAI, wrote a piece for The New York Times with a rather alarming title: "I Led Product Safety at OpenAI. In it, he laid out the problems OpenAI faced when it came to allowing users to have erotic conversations with chatbots while also protecting them from any impacts those interactions could have on their mental health. "Nobody wanted to be the morality police, but we lacked ways to measure and manage erotic usage carefully," he wrote. "We decided AI-powered erotica would have to wait." Adler wrote his op-ed because OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had recently announced that the company would soon allow " erotica for verified adults ."


What does Elon Musk do with all his money?

BBC News

What does Elon Musk do with all his money? Tesla boss Elon Musk has been one of the world's richest people for several years now, and that wealth recently went stratospheric when he became the first half-trillionaire. Despite this, Musk has insisted he leads a largely unglamorous lifestyle. He said in 2021 that he lived in a Texas home valued at $50,000 (£38,000). His former partner Grimes, with whom he has two children, told Vanity Fair in 2022 he does not live the extravagant life of excess luxury many assume.


Elon Musk's Grokipedia Pushes Far-Right Talking Points

WIRED

The new AI-powered Wikipedia competitor falsely claims that pornography worsened the AIDS epidemic and that social media may be fueling a rise in transgender people. On Monday, Elon Musk's xAI startup launched Grokipedia, which the billionaire is pitching as an AI-generated alternative to the crowdsourced encyclopedia Wikipedia. Musk first announced the project in late September on his social media platform X, saying it would be "a massive improvement over Wikipedia," and "a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe." Musk said last week that he had delayed the launch of Grokipedia because his team needed "to do more work to purge out the propaganda." When Grokipedia eventually dropped on Monday, WIRED was initially unable to access the website and received an automated message that it was blocked.


Digital Domination: A Case for Republican Liberty in Artificial Intelligence

Hamilton, Matthew David

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is set to revolutionize social and political life in unpredictable ways, raising questions about the principles that ought to guide its development and regulation. By examining digital advertising and social media algorithms, this article highlights how artificial intelligence already poses a significant threat to the republican conception of liberty -- or freedom from unaccountable power -- and thereby highlights the necessity of protecting republican liberty when integrating artificial intelligence into society. At an individual level, these algorithms can subconsciously influence behavior and thought, and those subject to this influence have limited power over the algorithms they engage. At the political level, these algorithms give technology company executives and other foreign parties the power to influence domestic political processes, such as elections; the multinational nature of algorithm-based platforms and the speed with which technology companies innovate make incumbent state institutions ineffective at holding these actors accountable. At both levels, artificial intelligence has thus created a new form of unfreedom: digital domination. By drawing on the works of Quentin Skinner, Philip Pettit, and other republican theorists, this article asserts that individuals must have mechanisms to hold algorithms (and those who develop them) accountable in order to be truly free.


Matthew Prince Wants AI Companies to Pay for Their Sins

WIRED

The Cloudflare CEO joined to talk about standing up to content scraping, the internet's potential futures, and his company's relationship to Trump. Matthew Prince may not be a household name, but the world most certainly knows his work. Prince is the cofounder and CEO of Cloudflare . Launched in 2010, the internet infrastructure company has found itself increasingly in the position of serving as the web's bodyguard. It filters out bad traffic, keeps sites safe, and stops them from crashing when too many people visit. Its tools defend against DDoS attacks. In 2017, Cloudflare made headlines when it dropped white supremacist site The Daily Stormer . Cloudflare's severing of ties with The Daily Stormer marked a momentous shift, one that came after years of claiming a neutral stance. Prince continues to evolve the way Cloudflare works. In July, the company rolled out a new tool tasked with blocking unauthorized AI scraping. It effectively creates a pay-per-crawl model requiring AI platforms to shell out money if they want access to a site's content. On this episode of, I talked to Prince about publishing, the old internet, and how his ideal version of the future web means that OpenAI just might become the Netflix of content. KATIE DRUMMOND: Good to have you here, Matthew. You should have been warned ahead of time, but you probably weren't.


Hasan Piker Will Never Run for Office

WIRED

The Twitch streamer could pivot from influencer to candidate. But he tells WIRED's podcast he'd rather use his platform to tell Dems "you can't podcast your way out of this problem." Hasan Piker is many things to many people. They don't all feel the same way about Piker or his politics, but most presumably agree on one thing: He is a relentless human being. Most days a week, you can find the 34-year-old Twitch streamer talking to his audience, often for six to nine hours at a stretch. And during President Trump's second term, there's plenty of that to go around. He has nearly 3 million followers on Twitch and has hosted conversations with Senator Bernie Sanders and US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He claims his election night stream in 2024 reached a staggering 7.5 million viewers. On this episode of, I talked to Piker about his looks, his love of Italian sandwiches, and any future political aspirations he might (or might not) want to tease. It's great to be here. I heard you were just at the gym. Yeah, I was at the park. Some days I take my dog and I play a little bit of basketball and get to hang out with some people.


He Was Laughed Out of Academia for This Take About Technology. Turns Out He Was Right.

Slate

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. The most accurate description of being online that was ever articulated comes to us from a Canadian professor. The light and the message go right through us," he said during a television appearance. "At this moment, we are on the air, and on the air we do not have any physical body. When you're on the telephone or on radio or on TV, you don't have a physical body.