Researchers from SentinelOne’s SentinelLabs have discovered that spammers utilized OpenAI’s chatbot to generate unique messages that successfully bypassed spam filters on more than 80,000 websites over a four-month period. According to a report published by Dan Goodin on Ars Technica, the operation went undetected by OpenAI for at least four months before the company revoked …
Website owners are experiencing dramatic traffic losses following Google’s introduction of AI Overviews, according to an investigation by Davey Alba and Julia Love of Bloomberg. The report, based on interviews with 25 publishers, reveals that many independent websites have seen traffic plummet by up to 70% since March 2024, disrupting the long-standing relationship between content …
Free and open source software (FOSS) projects are facing severe infrastructure challenges due to aggressive crawling by AI companies. According to a report by Niccolò Venerandi, multiple FOSS projects have experienced outages and service disruptions from AI crawlers that ignore standard protocols like robots.txt. SourceHut founder Drew DeVault reported that LLM crawlers are accessing expensive …
Over 400 Hollywood creative leaders have signed an open letter opposing AI companies’ efforts to weaken copyright protections. According to Todd Spangler of Variety, the letter was sent to the Trump administration’s Office of Science and Technology Policy in response to submissions from OpenAI and Google. Ben Stiller, Mark Ruffalo, Cate Blanchett, and Paul McCartney …
Author Molly White argues that AI companies are endangering free knowledge projects by exploiting them without contributing back. In her newsletter “Citation Needed,” White describes how generative AI companies use open resources like Wikipedia while placing costly demands on their infrastructure and failing to provide attribution or financial support. The real threat isn’t AI using …
Jason Koebler, co-founder of 404 Media, reports that generative AI is being used as a “brute force attack” on social media algorithms, flooding platforms with low-quality content at unprecedented scale. In his article, Koebler explains that AI creators can produce dozens of posts in minutes, allowing them to quickly identify and exploit what performs well …
Amazon will eliminate a privacy feature that allowed Echo users to process Alexa requests locally without sending voice recordings to the cloud. According to Scharon Harding at Ars Technica, this change takes effect March 28 and coincides with the rollout of Alexa+, Amazon’s new subscription-based assistant. All voice commands to Echo devices will now be …
Signal President Meredith Whittaker has raised serious concerns about the privacy implications of agentic AI systems. Speaking at SXSW in Austin, Texas, Whittaker described using AI agents as “putting your brain in a jar” and highlighted significant security vulnerabilities. According to Sarah Perez’s reporting for TechCrunch, these AI systems would require extensive permissions to perform …
A new report by content licensing platform TollBit reveals that AI search engines like those from OpenAI and Perplexity send 96% less referral traffic to news sites compared to traditional Google search. According to Rashi Shrivastava’s article in Forbes, AI companies scraped websites 2 million times on average in Q4 2023, with each page scraped …
Pinterest is experiencing a surge of AI-generated content that is making it difficult for users to find authentic human-created materials. According to an article by Maggie Harrison Dupré published on Futurism, AI-generated images and posts are dominating search results across categories including recipes, DIY projects, art, and fashion. The author found that many top search …