#404 media

[thoughtportal]

An age verification bill in Kansas that is the most extreme in the country has passed both House and Senate and is on its way to the governor’s desk. The bill will make sites with more than 25 percent adult content liable to heavy fines if they don’t verify that visitors are over the age of 18. It also calls being gay “sexual conduct,” which critics say could set up the state for more censorship of LGBT+ citizens.

The bill is similar to the many others introduced or passed across the country in the last year, including ones enacted in Texas, Montana, North Carolina, Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Utah. Age verification laws in Indiana and Idaho will take effect on July 1, and bills are progressing in several more states.

The Kansas legislation has a major difference: The state will lower the bar for how much adult content a website needs to host in order to be liable. In the other states where age verification laws have been enacted, it’s been 33 percent, or one-third. Kansas reduces that number to 25 percent. Mainstream sites and social media platforms like Reddit and Twitter, as well as many other websites across the internet, host a large amount of porn despite not being “porn sites.” With an even lower bar to liability, the chilling effect of sexual content, sex education, and anything outside of heterosexual, biblical sterility could be massive.Age Verification Laws Drag Us Back to the Dark Ages of the InternetInvasive and ineffective age verification laws that require users show government-issued ID, like a driver’s license or passport, are passing like wildfire across the U.S.Emanuel Maiberg

“Any commercial entity that knowingly shares or distributes material that is harmful to minors on a website and such material appears on 25% or more of the webpages viewed on such website in any calendar month” falls under the purview of this bill, according to its text. If sites don’t comply, they could be fined up to $10,000 for each violation, and parents could sue for damages of at least $50,000.

Kansas criminal law defines “material harmful to minors” as involving “nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement or sadomasochistic abuse.” 

“Sexual conduct,” under Kansas law, means “acts of masturbation, homosexuality, sexual intercourse or physical contact with a person's clothed or unclothed genitals or pubic area or buttocks or with a human female's breast.” The Associated Press reported that the bill’s critics, including Democratic Rep. Brandon Woodard, “argued that the law could be interpreted broadly enough that LGBTQ+ teenagers could not access information about sexual orientation or gender identity because the legal definition of sexual conduct includes acts of ‘homosexuality.’” 

Aylo, Pornhub’s parent company, has blocked access to its more than a dozen websites in seven of the eight states with age verification laws in place. Earlier this month, 404 Media first reported that it blocked Texas. Age verification laws that require sites to verify ages—done through government-issued IDs like driver’s licenses or passports—won’t stop minors from seeing porn. Instead, as Emanuel and I wrote earlier this week, they’ll just drive everyone to sites with non-consensual abuse imagery and stolen content while opening everyone up to privacy exploitation. 

#article #censorship #online privacy #privacy #Kansas #LGBTQ #discrimination #404 media

[cyanide-e-pistachio]

Not exactly a usual post of mine I realize. But this article by 404 Media has been quite the interesting read. I thought the original Tumblr post about the open source AI debacle was a little sketch but 404’s interview with Andrew Spittle certainly raises some brows.

The way Automattic’s head of AI has worded this is very legal jargon-y. Moreover, what’s most interesting is that Automattic did not respond whether it could guarantee that people who opt out will have their data deleted retroactively.

Granted, a lack of response doesn’t always mean an admission of guilt, or anything of the sort. But I think we should not take Tumblrs promises at face value, even if we are given the option to opt out of 3rd party sharing.

Even if you have already opted out, I would still recommend (if you are an artist) to protect your works on this site and take the necessary precautions when posting.

#tumblr #ai art #ai #404 media

[1randomweirdo]

Bad news: Tumblr will be partnering with OpenAI and Midjourney

(You may have to 'subscribe' to read the whole article, but it's free, and I highly recommend that you do read the whole thing)

Decent-ish news: supposedly, we'll be able to opt out (if there is an option, I recommend double checking that it's still selected every once in a while

Bad news: Tumblr 'accidentally' gave all sorts of data to OpenAI/Midjourney that it shouldn't have 😑

FFS, tech bros, just leave us alone

#tech #technology #ai art is theft #AI #artificial intelligence #Midjourney #open AI #tumblr #data breach #opt out #FFS just leave us alone #read #article #news #404 Media

[the-mechanica]

In response to “Age Verification Laws Drag Us Back to the Dark Ages of the Internet,” Catherine Leonard writes: 

I think the hypocrisy on display here lays bare the lie behind this whole movement—movement used here expansively to refer to this as well as abortion bans, anti trans legislation, and any number of laws attempting to legislate culture. The old reliable cudgel of the right against gun control laws has forever been “if you ban guns, only the bad guys will have them” and so it’s true here, where only the worst porn sites will be accessible and visited by consumers. But the right doesn’t care about the ethics of porn consumption because the right doesn’t want anyone to consume porn, specifically they want to roll back every social advancement we’ve made over at least a century, including the sexual revolution. I see this pattern over and over in stories here and elsewhere, just the other week with the kootenai county sheriff’s field trip to the library, where exactly no children were protected from gender ideology, but a library book was destroyed and community meetings were wasted to scare people. Far from making things safer for children, environments of shame and paranoia are fertile ground for abusers, the purveyors of these conditions cannot be granted the rhetorical cover of protecting children, when their actual aims are far more sinister and far less agreeable.

#censorship #anti censorship #enshittification #age verification #404 media #not apex

[goblin-union]

Fuuuuuck that

#tumblr #ai #midjourney #openai #llm #hellsite #404 media

[alanshemper]

Frederick Joseph, author of two New York Times bestselling books about racism and social justice, posted a video about the removal on TikTok: “This is a really good example of narrative control and censorship,” he said. “It started going viral, not because people were necessarily agreeing with Osama Bin Laden’s actions or his moral clarity, but rather because the letter offered perspective into the hypocrisy of America, the hypocrisy of settler colonial nations, so on and so forth, and discussing the atrocities people in the Middle East have faced.”

“The Guardian decided to take it down. People on TikTok are talking about the letter, reading it, having this discourse about the issues, with, you know, places like the United States,” Joseph added. “They’re afraid of people having information so they decided to take it down.”

15 November 2023

#osama bin laden #letter to america #404 media #the guardian #censorship

[librarianrafia]

""A noticeable number of social media users are sharing their observation that search engines are becoming less and less capable of finding genuine and useful content satisfying their information needs," the researchers wrote. "Reportedly, a torrent of low-quality content, especially for product search, keeps drowning any kind of useful information in search results."

The researchers found that this is indeed the case. Many searches have been taken over by low quality, trashy SEO content, and lots of it seems potentially AI assisted or AI-generated.

"We find that the majority of high-ranking product reviews in the result pages of commercial search engines use affiliate marketing, and significant amounts are outright SEO product review spam," they wrote. "We also find strong correlations between search engine rankings and affiliate marketing, as well as a trend toward simplified, repetitive, and potentially AI-generated content."

#google #google search #404 media

[tentacledtechnomancer]

Hey @staff, What, with all due respect because I know there's no way this decision came from the bottom up, the fuck?

This statement absolutely does not help. https://automattic.com/2024/02/27/protecting-user-choice/ Looks like official position is that tumblr and wordpress.com blogs are going to be opted in to AI by default, but can then opt out.

In the words of one of my heroes, that's universally stupid.

#technomancer speaks #404 media #ai #tumblr #automattic

[anthropomorphique]

for all discord users: messages are getting scraped and sold.

https://www.404media.co/a-spy-site-is-scraping-discord-and-selling-users-messages/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter

#discord chat #discord server #discord #data scraping #404 media

[thoughtportal]

Tumblr and Wordpress are preparing to sell user data to Midjourney and OpenAI, according to a source with internal knowledge about the deals and internal documentation referring to the deals. 

The exact types of data from each platform going to each company are not spelled out in documentation we’ve reviewed, but internal communications reviewed by 404 Media make clear that deals between Automattic, the platforms’ parent company, and OpenAI and Midjourney are imminent.

The internal documentation details a messy and controversial process within Tumblr itself. One internal post made by Cyle Gage, a product manager at Tumblr, states that a query made to prepare data for OpenAI and Midjourney compiled a huge number of user posts that it wasn’t supposed to. It is not clear from Gage’s post whether this data has already been sent to OpenAI and Midjourney, or whether Gage was detailing a process for scrubbing the data before it was to be sent. 

Gage wrote:

“the way the data was queried for the initial data dump to Midjourney/OpenAI means we compiled a list of all tumblr’s public post content between 2014 and 2023, but also unfortunately it included, and should not have included:

private posts on public blogs

posts on deleted or suspended blogs

unanswered asks (normally these are not public until they’re answered)

private answers (these only show up to the receiver and are not public)

posts that are marked ‘explicit’ / NSFW / ‘mature’ by our more modern standards (this may not be a big deal, I don’t know)

content from premium partner blogs (special brand blogs like Apple’s former music blog, for example, who spent money with us on an ad campaign) that may have creative that doesn’t belong to us, and we don’t have the rights to share with this-parties; this one is kinda unknown to me, what deals are in place historically and what they should prevent us from doing.”

Gage’s post makes clear that engineers are working on compiling a list of post IDs that should not have been included, and that password-protected posts, DMs, and media flagged as CSAM and other community guidelines violations were not included.

Automattic plans to launch a new setting on Wednesday that will allow users to opt-out of data sharing with third parties, including AI companies, according to the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, and internal documents. A new FAQ section we reviewed is titled “What happens when you opt out?” states that “If you opt out from the start, we will block crawlers from accessing your content by adding your site on a disallowed list. If you change your mind later, we also plan to update any partners about people who newly opt-out and ask that their content be removed from past sources and future training.” 

404 Media has asked Automattic how it accidentally compiled data that it shouldn’t share, and whether any of that content was shared with OpenAI, but did not immediately hear back from the company. 404 Media asked Automattic about an imminent deal with Midjourney last week but did not hear back then, either.

Another internal document shows that, on February 23, an employee asked in a staff-only thread, “Do we have assurances that if a user opts out of their data being shared with third parties that our existing data partners will be notified of such a change and remove their data?”

Andrew Spittle, Automattic’s head of AI replied: “We will notify existing partners on a regular basis about anyone who's opted out since the last time we provided a list. I want this to be an ongoing process where we regularly advocate for past content to be excluded based on current preferences. We will ask that content be deleted and removed from any future training runs. I believe partners will honor this based on our conversations with them to this point. I don't think they gain much overall by retaining it.” Automattic did not respond to a question from 404 Media about whether it could guarantee that people who opt out will have their data deleted retroactively.

News about a deal between Tumblr and Midjourney has been rumored and speculated about on Tumblr for the last week. Someone claiming to be a former Tumblr employee announced in a Tumblr blog post that the platform was working on a deal with Midjourney, and the rumor made it onto Blind, an app for verified employees of companies to anonymously discuss their jobs. 404 Media has seen the Blind posts, in which what seems like an Automattic employee says, “I'm not sure why some of you are getting worked up or worried about this. It's totally legal, and sharing it publicly is perfectly fine since it's right there in the terms & conditions. So, go ahead and spread the word as much as you can with your friends and tech journalists, it's totally fine.”

Separately, 404 Media viewed a public, now-deleted post by Gage, the product manager, where he said that he was deleting all of his images off of Tumblr, and would be putting them on his personal website. A still-live post says, “i've deleted my photography from tumblr and will be moving it slowly but surely over to cylegage.com, which i'm building into a photography portfolio that i can control end-to-end.” At one point last week, his personal website had a specific note stating that he did not consent to AI scraping of his images. Gage’s original post has been deleted, and his website is now a blank page that just reads “Cyle.” Gage did not respond to a request for comment from 404 Media. 

Several online platforms have made similar deals with AI companies recently, including Reddit, which entered into an AI content licensing deal with Google and said in its SEC filing last week that it’s “in the early stages of monetizing [its] user base” by training AI on users’ posts. Last year, Shutterstock signed a six year deal with OpenAI to provide training data.

OpenAI and Midjourney did not respond to requests for comment. 

#article #404 media #AI #data

[fishstickmonkey]

404 Media is a new tech news site started by former Vice writers

#404 media #tech news

[anti-ai]

The AI-ick:

“We [a16z] believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone—we are literally making sand think,” he says. “We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.”

The Takeaway: Just another creep techno-libertarian high on his own supply, screeching about "Communists and Luddites" as he puts his foot down on the gas pedal as hard as he can to make tons of money off so-called AI, the stochastic parrots that will delete jobs and make the world a less trustworthy place. The problem with this particular one? He has $32 billion dollars to pour gasoline on the fire. Fuck off.

#ai generated #anti ai #ai #ai art #fuck ai everything #marc andreessen #404 media #luddite

[the-mechanica]

"Suing or shutting down porn sites to stop children from looking at porn makes even less sense than record labels trying to stop people from downloading music by suing Napster or movie studios trying to stop torrenting. Research has repeatedly shown that giving people a reasonable way to access the media they want to consume does not stop them from consuming it. It just pushes them to piracy. "

#404 media #enshittification #age verification #anti censorship

[r3mlato]

what a time to be alive

#404 media #ai shit

[nymvaline]

Well, that's two separate well explained recommendations for Kagi. (Cory Doctorow mentioned it in passing in a couple previous Pluralistic posts.) Guess I'm hopping on board to see what's up.

#kagi #search #pluralistic #404 media #enshittification

[harmlessvillain]

Still thinking about the alien job personality test

#things happen to me #404 media