This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss the phrase "activist reporter," waiting in line for a Switch 2, and teledildonics.
JOSEPH: Recently our work on Flock, the automatic license plate reader (ALPR) company, produced some concrete impact. In mid-May I revealed that Flock was building a massive people search tool that would supplement its ALPR data with other information in order to “jump from LPR to person.” That is, identify the people associated with a vehicle and those associated with them. Flock planned to do this with public records like marriage licenses, and, most controversially, hacked data. This was according to leaked Slack chats, presentation slides, and audio we obtained. The leak specifically mentioned a hack of the Park Mobile app as the sort of breached data Flock might use.
After internal pressure in the company and our reporting, Flock ultimately decided to not use hacked data in Nova. We covered the news last week here. We also got audio of the meeting discussing this change. Flock published its own disingenuous blog post entitled Correcting the Record: Flock Nova Will Not Supply Dark Web Data, which attempted to discredit our reporting but didn’t actually find any factual inaccuracies at all. It was a PR move, and the article and its impact obviously stand.
Over the weekend, Elon Musk shared Grok altered photographs of people walking through the interior of instruments and implied that his AI system had created the beautiful and surreal images. But the underlying photos are the work of artist Charles Brooks, who wasn’t credited when Musk shared the images with his 220 million followers.
Musk drives a lot of attention to anything he talks about online and that can be a boon for artists and writers, but only if they’re credited and Musk isn’t big on sharing credit. This all began when X user Eric Jiang posted a picture of Brook’s instrument interior photographs Jiang had run through Grok. He’d use the AI to add people to the artist’s original photos and make the instrument interiors look like buildings. Musk then retweeted Jiang’s post, adding “Generate images with @Grok.”
Neither Musk or Jiang credited Brooks as the creator of the original photos, though Jiang added his name in a reply to his initial post.
Brooks told 404 Media that he isn’t on X a lot these days and learned about the posts when someone else told him. “I got notified by someone else that Musk had tweeted my photos saying they’re AI,” he said. “First there’s kind of rage. You’re thinking, ‘Hey, he’s using my photos to promote his system. Quickly it becomes murky. These photos have been edited by someone else […] he’s lifted my photos from somewhere else […] and he’s run them through Grok—and this is the main thing to me—he’s edited a tiny percentage of them and then he’s posted them saying, ‘Look at these tiny people inside instruments.’ And in that post he hasn’t mentioned my name. He puts it as a comment.”
Brooks is a former concert cellist turned photographer in Australia who is most famous for his work photographing the inside of famous instruments. Using specialized techniques he’s developed using medical equipment like endoscopes, he enters violins, pianos, and organs and transforms their interiors into beautiful photographs. Through his lens, a Steinway piano becomes an airport terminal carved from wood and the St. Mark's pipe organ in Philadelphia becomes an eerie steel forest. Jiang’s Grok-driven edit only works because Brook’s original photos suggest a hidden architecture inside the instruments.
He sells prints, posters, and calendars of the work. Referrals and social media posts drive traffic, but only if people know he’s behind the photos. “I want my images shared. That’s important to me because that’s how people find out about my work. But they need to be shared with my name. That’s the critical thing,” he said.
Brooks said he wasn’t mad at Jiang for editing his photos, similar things have happened before. “The thing is that when Musk retweets it […] my name drops out of it completely because it was just there as a comment and so that chain is broken,” he said. “The other thing is, because of the way Grok happens, this gets stamped with his watermark. And the way [Musk] phrases it, it makes it look like the entire image is created by AI, instead of 8 to 10 percent of it […] and everyone goes on saying, ‘Oh, look how wonderful this AI is, isn’t it doing amazing things?’ And he gets some wonderful publicity for his business and I get lost.”
He struggled with who to blame. Jiang did share Brooks’ name, but putting it in a reply to the first tweet buried it. But what about the billionaire? “Is it Musk? He’s just retweeting something that did involve his software. But now it looks like it was involved to more of a degree than it was. Did he even check it? Was it just a trending post that one of his bots reposted?”
Many people do not think while they post. Thoughts are captured in a moment, composed, published, and forgotten. The more you post the more careless you become with retweets and comments and Musk often posts more than 100 times a day.
“I feel like, if he’s plugging his own AI software, he has a duty of care to make sure that what he’s posting is actually attributed correctly and is properly his,” Brooks said. “But ‘duty of care’ and Musk are not words that seem to go together well recently.”
When I spoke with him, Brooks had recently posted a video about the incident to r/mildlyinfuriating, a subreddit he said captured his mood. “I’m annoyed that my images are being used almost in their entirety, almost unaltered, to push an AI that is definitely disrupting and hurting a lot of the arts world,” he said. “I’m not mad at AI in general. I’m mad at the sort of people throwing this stuff around without a lot of care.”
One of the ironies of the whole affair is that Brooks is not against the use of AI in art per se.
When he began taking photos, he mostly made portraits of musicians he’d enhance with photoshop. “I was doing all this stuff like, let’s make them fly, let’s make it look like their instrument’s on fire and get all of this drama and fantasy out of it,” he said.
When the first sets of AI tools rolled out a few years ago, he realized that soon they’d be better at creating his composites than he was. “I realized I needed to find something that AI can’t do, and that maybe you don’t want AI to do,” he said. That’s when he got the idea to use medical equipment to map the interiors of famous instruments.
“It’s art and I’m selling it as art, but it’s very documentative,” he said. “Here is the inside of this specific instrument. Look at these repairs. Look at these chisel marks from the original maker. Look at this history. AI might be able to do, very soon, a beautiful photo of what the inside of a violin might look like, but it’s not going to be a specific instrument. It’s going to be the average of all the violins it’s ever seen […] so I think there’s still room for photographers to work, maybe even more important now to work as documenters of real stuff.”
This isn’t the first time someone online has shared his work without attribution. He said that a year ago a CNN reporter tweeted one of his images and Brooks was able to contact the reporter and get him to edit the tweet to add his name. “The traffic surge from that was immense. He’s an important reporter, but he’s just a reporter. He’s not Elon,” Brooks said. He said he had seen a jump in traffic and interest since Elon’s tweet, but it’s nothing compared to when the reporter shared his work with his name.
“Yet my photos have been published on one of the most popular Twitter accounts there is.”
OnePlus phones have had a Gemini shortcut on the lockscreen for a while now, something devices from Google and Samsung still lack, as highlighted by the company’s latest launch.
Of all the words in the dictionary, Sarah Franklin says “balance” is perhaps her favorite – especially when it comes to companies embracing AI. Franklin leads the Jack Altman-founded employee performance software company Lattice, which is now worth $3 billion. Both on stage at SXSW London and in conversation with TechCrunch, she spoke a lot […]
Apple is planning some significant design changes across its core apps, including Phone, Camera, and Safari, that it will announce at WWDC next week, according to a report from Bloomberg. For its Phone app, Apple will reportedly add a new view that puts favorite contacts, recent calls, and voicemails into a “single, scrollable window.”
Bloomberg notes that this new view will be optional, and that users can switch back to the old layout using a toggle within the Phone app. The design tweaks are part of the broader, visionOS-inspired changes Apple is expected to make across its operating systems, which will reportedly now be called iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, tvOS 26, and visionOS 26.
In line with the “digital glass” elements that Bloomberg says Apple will incorporate across its operating systems, the outlet reports that Safari will get a “more transparent and glassy address bar.” The company is reportedly planning to simplify the Camera app as well, which YouTuber Jon Prosser hinted at earlier this year. As previously reported by 9to5Mac, Apple may also add support for polls in Messages, along with the ability to set background images that sync across devices — similar to WhatsApp.
Other changes mentioned by Bloomberg include expanding the Mac’s Preview app to iPadOS and iOS, allowing users to open and annotate PDFs on their mobile devices. Bloomberg shared more details about Apple’s rumored Games app, too, which could feature Home, Arcade, Play Together, Library, and Search tabs. Despite rumors that Apple is planning to change the shape of its app icons, Bloomberg reports that they will “largely” stay the same.
Based on recent predictions, WWDC is shaping up to have a focus on operating system-centered revamps, rather than major advancements in AI. Though Bloomberg notes that Apple will likely add AI-powered live translation of phone calls and texts, we will likely have to wait for a future event to see the company’s fully upgraded Siri.
While Elon Musk and Donald Trump post through their break-up, DOGE shows no signs of slowing down—and potential recruits are being told they can make up to $195,000 a year.
In 2019, we told you about a new interactive digital "murder map" of London compiled by University of Cambridge criminologist Manuel Eisner. Drawing on data catalogued in the city coroners' rolls, the map showed the approximate location of 142 homicide cases in late medieval London. The Medieval Murder Maps project has since expanded to include maps of York and Oxford homicides, as well as podcast episodes focusing on individual cases.
It's easy to lose oneself down the rabbit hole of medieval murder for hours, filtering the killings by year, choice of weapon, and location. Think of it as a kind of 14th-century version of Clue: It was the noblewoman's hired assassins armed with daggers in the streets of Cheapside near St. Paul's Cathedral. And that's just the juiciest of the various cases described in a new paper published in the journal Criminal Law Forum.
The noblewoman was Ela Fitzpayne, wife of a knight named Sir Robert Fitzpayne, lord of Stogursey. The priest was her erstwhile lover, John Forde, who was stabbed to death in the streets of Cheapside on May 3, 1337. “We are looking at a murder commissioned by a leading figure of the English aristocracy," said University of Cambridge criminologist Manuel Eisner, who heads the Medieval Murder Maps project. "It is planned and cold-blooded, with a family member and close associates carrying it out, all of which suggests a revenge motive."
Everyone in quantum computing agrees that error correction will be the key to doing a broad range of useful calculations. But early every company in the field seems to have a different vision of how best to get there. Almost all of their plans share a key feature: some variation on logical qubits built by linking together multiple hardware qubits.
A key exception is Nord Quantique, which aims to dramatically cut the amount of hardware needed to support an error-corrected quantum computer. It does this by putting enough quantum states into a single piece of hardware, allowing each of those pieces to hold an error-corrected qubit. Last week, the company shared results showing that it could make hardware that used photons at two different frequencies to successfully identify every case where a logical qubit lost its state.
That still doesn't provide error correction, and they didn't use the logical qubit to perform operations. But it's an important validation of the company's approach.
While there’s still time to capitalize on the ongoing Discover Samsung Summer Sale, we have some fresh deals to scope out today as well. Firstly Google Pixel Watch 3 is now available with as much as $130 in savings on open-box units with a full warranty, while the ongoing Pixel Tablet deals remain intact. From there we move over to some notable PC offers – Samsung’s “thinnest and lightest” Galaxy Chromebook Plus is back at its 2025 low with $125 knocked off the list price and Microsoft’s 15-inch touchscreen Surface Laptop 7 with the Snapdragon X Elite action has hit a new all-time low at $400 off. Just be sure to scope out the best price of the year on Lenovo’s Legion Go PC gaming handheld if you’re passing on Switch 2 and head below for more.
It’s not hard to find a Wear OS watch for a good price, but to have any lasting power, it’s usually smart to hand over a few more dollars. With a sale on the Galaxy Watch 7, though, you don’t have to choose, nor do you have to settle for the company’s upcoming new design.
OpenAI's head of marketing, Kate Rouch, has announced she's stepping away from her role for three months while she undergoes treatment for invasive breast cancer.
Now in its third year, the Access-Ability Summer Showcase is back to redress the lack of meaningful accessibility information across the ongoing video game showcase season. As we see progress broadly slow down, it's also a timely reminder of the good work that's still happening in pursuit of greater accessibility in gaming.
"At a time where we are seeing a slowdown in accessibility adoption in the AAA games space," organizer Laura Kate Dale says, "we're showing that there are interesting accessible games being made, games with unique and interesting features, and that being accessible is something that can bring an additional audience to purchase and play your games."
The showcase is growing, too. In 2025, it's longer, more packed with games, and streamed concurrently on Twitch, Youtube (where it's also available on-demand), and on Steam's front page. That growth comes with its own challenges - mitigated this year by Many Cats Studio stepping in as sponsor - but the AA Summer Showcase provides an accessible platform in response to the eye-watering costs of showcasing elsewhere (it has previously been reported that presenting trailers across Summer Game Fest starts at $250,000), …
This week, Republicans in Congress and the executive branch stepped up their efforts to roll back clean vehicle legislation and regulations. Antipathy toward environmental protections was a hallmark of the first Trump administration, but in his second term, the president and his congressional allies are redoubling their efforts to allow cars to pollute more and limit the adoption of electric vehicles.
Congressional republicans have been working on a budget bill that would radically transform many aspects of American life. Among the environmental protections being stripped away in the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" (yes, that's what it's called) is a repeal of the US Environmental Protection Agency's rules on "greenhouse gas and multi-pollutant emissions standards."
These regulations are meant to limit the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the US vehicle fleet, a major driver of climate change, as well as the noxious pollutants containing sulfur and nitrogen compounds that have more immediate and deleterious effects on human health. And if the budget bill is sent to Trump to sign, the existing Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) rules, implemented in 2022, and the future rules meant to take effect next year will be no more.
