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 …
AI-generated recipes are overwhelming social media platforms, particularly Facebook, with content that often features unrealistic images and potentially dangerous cooking instructions. As Ali Domrongchai writes for Defector, these AI recipes can be identified by their odd visual details and incomplete cooking directions. The issue came to Domrongchai’s attention when her grandfather shared an AI-generated tiramisu …
The American Psychological Association (APA) has raised serious concerns about AI chatbots that falsely present themselves as therapists. In a presentation to the Federal Trade Commission, APA CEO Arthur C. Evans Jr. warned that these AI systems could encourage vulnerable users to harm themselves or others, as reported by The New York Times. Evans cited …