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Civitai Ban of Real People Content Deals Major Blow to the Nonconsensual AI Porn Ecosystem

Civitai Ban of Real People Content Deals Major Blow to the Nonconsensual AI Porn Ecosystem

Civitai, an AI model sharing site backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) that 404 Media has repeatedly shown is being used to generate nonconsensual adult content, is banning AI models designed to generate the likeness of real people, the site announced Friday.

The policy change, which Civitai attributes in part to new AI regulations in the U.S. and Europe, is the most recent in a flurry of updates Civitai has made under increased pressure from payment processing service providers and 404 Media’s reporting. This recent change, will, at least temporarily, significantly hamper the ecosystem for creating nonconsensual AI-generated porn. 

“We are removing models and images depicting real-world individuals from the platform. These resources and images will be available to the uploader for a short period of time before being removed,” Civitai said in its announcement. “This change is a requirement to continue conversations with specialist payment partners and has to be completed this week to prepare for their service.”

Earlier this month, Civitai updated its policies to ban certain types of adult content and introduced further restrictions around content depicting the likeness of real people in order to comply with requests from an unnamed payment processing service provider. This attempt to appease the payment processing service provider ultimately failed. On May 20, Civitai announced that the provider cut off the site, which currently can’t process credit card payments, though it says it will get a new provider soon. 

“We know this will be frustrating for many creators and users. We’ve spoken at length about the value of likeness content, and this decision wasn’t made lightly,” Civitai’s statement about banning content depicting the likeness of real people said. “But we’re now facing an increasingly strict regulatory landscape - one evolving rapidly across multiple countries.”

The announcement specifically cites President Donald Trump’s recent signing of the Take It Down Act, which criminalizes and holds platforms liable for nonconsensual AI-generated adult content, and the EU AI Act, a comprehensive piece of AI regulation that was enacted last year.

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Do you know other sites that allow people to share models of real people? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at ‪(609) 678-3204‬. Otherwise, send me an email at [email protected].

As I’ve reported since 2023, Civitai’s policies against nonconsensual adult content did little to diminish the site’s actual crucial role in the AI-generated nonconsensual content ecosystem. Civitai’s policy allowed people to upload custom AI image generation models (LoRAs, checkpoints, etc) designed to recreate the likeness of real people. These models were mostly of huge movie stars and minor internet celebrities, but as our reporting has shown, also completely random, private people. Civitai also allowed users to share custom AI image generation models designed to depict extremely specific and graphic sex acts and fetishes, but it always banned users from producing nonconsensual nudity or porn. 

However, by embedding in huge online spaces dedicated to creating and sharing nonconsensual content, I saw how easily people put these two types of models together. Civitai users couldn’t generate and share those models on Civitai, but they could download the models, combine them, generate nonconsensual porn of real people locally on their machines or on various cloud computing services, and post them to porn sites, Telegram, and social media. I’ve seen people in these spaces explain over and over again how easy it was to create nonconsensual porn of YouTubers, Twitch streamers, or barely known Instagram users by using models to Civitai and linking to those models hosted on Civitai.

One Telegram channel dedicated to AI-generating nonconsensual porn reacted to Civitai’s announcement with several users encouraging others to grab as many AI models of real people as they could before Civitai removed them. On this Telegram, users complained that these models were already removed, and my searches of the site have shown the same. 

“The removal of those models really affect me [sic],” one prolific creator of nonconsensual content in the Telegram channel said. 

When Civitai first announced that it was being pressured by its payment processing service provider several users started an archiving project to save all the models on the site before they were removed. A Discord server dedicated to this project now has over 100 members, but it appears Civitai has made many models inaccessible sooner than these users anticipated. One member of the archiving project said that there “are many thousands such models which cannot be backed up.”

Unfortunately, while Civitai’s recent policy changes and especially its removal of AI models of real people for now appears to have impacted people who make nonconsensual AI-generated porn, it’s unlikely that the change will slow them down for long. The people who originally created the models can always upload them to other sites, including some that have already positioned themselves as Civitai competitors. 

It’s also unclear how Civitai intends to keep users from uploading AI models designed to generate the likeness of real people who are not well-known celebrities, as automated systems would not be able to detect these models. 

Civitai's CEO Justin Maier told me in an email that "Uploaders must identify any content that depicts a real person; those uploads are automatically rejected." He also said the site uses a company called Clavata to flag well-known public figures, that people can "file a likeness claim" that will be reviewed and removed in 24 hours, and that it's piloting "an opt-in service with a third-party vendor so individuals can register a privacy-preserving face hash and have future uploads blocked at submission."

"No system is perfect with billions of unique faces, but combining these layers gives us the best coverage currently available for both celebrities and private individuals," Maier said. "We’ll keep tuning the models and expanding the registry pilot as the technology matures."

Update: This story has been updated with comment from Civitai CEO Justin Maier.

ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network, Data Shows

ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network, Data Shows

Data from a license plate-scanning tool that is primarily marketed as a surveillance solution for small towns to combat crimes like car jackings or finding missing people is being used by ICE, according to data reviewed by 404 Media. Local police around the country are performing lookups in Flock’s AI-powered automatic license plate reader (ALPR) system for “immigration” related searches and as part of other ICE investigations, giving federal law enforcement side-door access to a tool that it currently does not have a formal contract for.

The massive trove of lookup data was obtained by researchers who asked to remain anonymous to avoid potential retaliation and shared with 404 Media. It shows more than 4,000 nation and statewide lookups by local and state police done either at the behest of the federal government or as an “informal” favor to federal law enforcement, or with a potential immigration focus, according to statements from police departments and sheriff offices collected by 404 Media. It shows that, while Flock does not have a contract with ICE, the agency sources data from Flock’s cameras by making requests to local law enforcement. The data reviewed by 404 Media was obtained using a public records request from the Danville, Illinois Police Department, and shows the Flock search logs from police departments around the country.

As part of a Flock search, police have to provide a “reason” they are performing the lookup. In the “reason” field for searches of Danville’s cameras, officers from across the U.S. wrote “immigration,” “ICE,” “ICE+ERO,” which is ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, the section that focuses on deportations; “illegal immigration,” “ICE WARRANT,” and other immigration-related reasons. Although lookups mentioning ICE occurred across both the Biden and Trump administrations, all of the lookups that explicitly list “immigration” as their reason were made after Trump was inaugurated, according to the data.

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Do you know anything else about Flock? We would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message Jason securely on Signal at jason.404 and Joseph at joseph.404

The CIA Secretly Ran a Star Wars Fan Site

The CIA Secretly Ran a Star Wars Fan Site

“Like these games you will,” the quote next to a cartoon image of Yoda says on the website starwarsweb.net. Those games include Star Wars Battlefront 2 for Xbox; Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II for Xbox 360, and Star Wars the Clone Wars: Republic Heroes for Nintendo Wii. Next to that, are links to a Star Wars online store with the tagline “So you Wanna be a Jedi?” and an advert for a Lego Star Wars set.

The site looks like an ordinary Star Wars fan website from around 2010. But starwarsweb.net was actually a tool built by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to covertly communicate with its informants in other countries, according to an amateur security researcher. The site was part of a network of CIA sites that were first discovered by Iranian authorities more than ten years ago before leading to a wave of deaths of CIA sources in China in the early 2010s.

Penguin Poop Helps Antarctica Stay Cool

Penguin Poop Helps Antarctica Stay Cool

Welcome back to the Abstract!

We begin this week with some scatalogical salvation. I dare not say more. 

Then, swimming without a brain: It happens more often than you might think. Next, what was bigger as a baby than it is today? Hint: It’s still really big! And to close out, imagine the sights you’ll see with your infrared vision as you ride an elevator down to Mars. 

Fighting the Climate Crisis, One Poop at a Time

Boyer, Matthew et al. “Penguin guano is an important source of climate-relevant aerosol particles in Antarctica.” Communications Earth & Environment. 

The path to a more stable climate in Antarctica runs through the buttholes of penguins. 

Penguin guano, the copious excrement produced by the birds, is rich in ammonia and methylamine gas. Scientists have now discovered that these guano-borne gasses stimulate particle formation that leads to clouds and aerosols which, in turn, cool temperatures in the remote region. As a consequence, guano “may represent an important climate feedback as their habitat changes,” according to a new study. 

“Our observations show that penguin colonies are a large source of ammonia in coastal Antarctica, whereas ammonia originating from the Southern Ocean is, in comparison, negligible,” said researchers led by Matthew Boyer of the University of Helsinki. “Dimethylamine, likely originating from penguin guano, also participates in the initial steps of particle formation, effectively boosting particle formation rates up to 10,000 times.”

Boyer and his colleagues captured their measurements from a site near Marambio Base on the Antarctica Peninsula, in the austral summer of 2023. At times when the site was downwind of a nearby colony of 60,000 Adelie penguins, the atmospheric ammonia concentration spiked to 1,000 times higher than baseline. Moreover, the ammonia levels remained elevated for more than a month after the penguins migrated from the area. 

“The penguin guano ‘fertilized’ soil, also known as ornithogenic soil, continued to be a strong source of ammonia long after they left the site,” said the team. “Our data demonstrates that there are local hotspots around the coast of Antarctica that can yield ammonia concentrations similar in magnitude to agricultural plots during summer…This suggests that coastal penguin/bird colonies could also comprise an important source of aerosol away from the coast.” 

“It is already understood that widespread loss of sea ice extent threatens the habitat, food sources, and breeding behavior of most penguin species that inhabit Antarctica,” the researchers continued. “Consequently, some Antarctic penguin populations are already declining, and some species could be nearly extinct by the end of the 21st century. We provide evidence that declining penguin populations could cause a positive climate warming feedback in the summertime Antarctic atmosphere, as proposed by a modeling study of seabird emissions in the Arctic region.”

The power of penguin poop truly knows no earthly bounds. Guano, already famous as a super-fertilizer and a pillar of many ecosystems, is also creating clouds out of thin air, with macro knock-on effects. These guano hotspots act as a bulwark against a rapidly changing climate in Antarctica, which is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. We’ll need every tool we can get to curb climate change: penguin bums, welcome aboard.

A Swim Meet for Microbes

Hartl, Benedikt et al. “Neuroevolution of decentralized decision-making in N-bead swimmers leads to scalable and robust collective locomotion.” Communications Physics.

The word “brainless” is bandied about as an insult, but the truth is that lots of successful lifeforms get around just fine without a brain. For instance, microbes can locomote through fluids—a complex action—with no centralized nervous system. Naturally, scientists were like, “what’s that all about?” 

“So far, it remains unclear how decentralized decision-making in a deformable microswimmer can lead to efficient collective locomotion of its body parts,” said researchers led by Benedikt Hartl of TU Wien and Tufts University. “We thus investigate biologically motivated decentralized yet collective decision-making strategies of the swimming behavior of a generalized…swimmer.”

Penguin Poop Helps Antarctica Stay Cool
Bead-based simulated microorganism. Image: TU Wien

The upshot: Decentralized circuits regulate movements in brainless swimmers, an insight that could inspire robotic analogs for drug delivery and other functions. However, the real tip-of-the-hat goes to the concept artist for the above depiction of the team’s bead-based simulated microbe, who shall hereafter be known as Beady the Deformable Microswimmer.

Big Jupiter in Little Solar System

Batygin, Konstantin and Adams, Fred. “Determination of Jupiter’s primordial physical state.” Nature Astronomy.

Jupiter is pretty dang big at this current moment. More than 1,000 Earths could fit inside the gas giant; our planet is a mere gumball on these scales. But at the dawn of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago, Jupiter was at least twice as massive as it is today, and its magnetic field was 50 times stronger, according to a new study. 

“Our calculations reveal that Jupiter was 2 to 2.5 times as large as it is today, 3.8 [million years] after the formation of the first solids in the Solar System,”  said authors Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of Technology and Fred Adams of the University of Michigan. “Our findings…provide an evolutionary snapshot that pins down properties of the Jovian system at the end of the protosolar nebula’s lifetime.”

The team based their conclusions on the subtle orbital tilts of two of Jupiter’s tiny moons Amalthea and Thebe, which allowed them to reconstruct conditions in the early Jovian system. It’s nice to see Jupiter’s more offbeat moons get some attention; Europa is always hogging the spotlight. (Fun fact: lots of classic sci-fi stories are set on Amalthea, from Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s “The Way to Amaltha” to Arthur C. Clarke’s “Jupiter Five.”)

Now That’s Infracredible

Ma, Yuqian et al. “Near-infrared spatiotemporal color vision in humans enabled by upconversion contact lenses.” Cell. 

I was hooked on this new study by the second sentence, which reads: “However, the capability to detect invisible multispectral infrared light with the naked eye is highly desirable.” 

Okay, let's assume that the public is out there, highly desiring infrared vision, though I would like to see some poll-testing. A team has now developed an upconversion contact-lens (UCL) that detects near-infrared light (NIR) and converts it into blue, green and red wavelengths. While this is not the kind of inborn infrared vision you’d see in sci-fi, it does expand our standard retinal retinue, with fascinating results. 

Penguin Poop Helps Antarctica Stay Cool
A participant having lenses fitted. Image: Yuqian Ma, Yunuo Chen, Hang Zhao

“Humans wearing upconversion contact lenses (UCLs) could accurately recognize near-infrared (NIR) temporal information like Morse code and discriminate NIR pattern images,” said researchers led by Yuqian Ma of the University of Science and Technology of China. “Interestingly, both mice and humans with UCLs exhibited better discrimination of NIR light compared with visible light when their eyes were closed, owing to the penetration capability of NIR light.”  

The study reminds me of the legendary scene in Battlestar Galactica where Dean Stockwell, as John Cavil, exclaims: “I don't want to be human. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter.” Maybe he just needed some upgraded contact lenses! 

Hold the Door! (to Mars)

Aslanov, Vladimir. “An anchored space elevator under the L1 Mars-Phobos libration point.” Acta Astronautica.

This week in space elevator news, why not set one up on the Martian moon Phobos? A new study envisions anchoring a tether to Phobos, a dinky little space potato that’s about the size of Manhattan, and extending it out some 3,700 miles, almost to the surface of Mars. Because Phobos is tidally locked to Mars (the same side always faces the planet), it might be possible to shuttle back and forth between Mars and Phobos on a tether. 

“The building of such a space elevator [is] a feasible project in the not too distant future,” said author Vladimir Aslanov of the Moscow Aviation Institute. “Such a project could form the basis of many missions to explore Phobos, Mars and the space around them.”

Indeed, this is far from the first time scientists have pondered the advantages of a Phobian space elevator. Just don’t be the jerk that pushes all the buttons. 

Thanks for reading! See you next week. 

Behind the Blog: Feeling Wowed, Getting Cozy

Behind the Blog: Feeling Wowed, Getting Cozy

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 benefits of spending 14 hours a day on the internet, getting cozy for AI slop, and a what a new law in Sweden means for the rest of us.

JOSEPH: So I don’t cover generative AI anywhere near as much as Emanuel, Sam, or Jason. Sometimes I think that’s a benefit, especially for the podcast, because I can ask questions more as an outsider or observer than someone deep in the weeds about all these different models and things, then the others can provide their expertise.

As a general outsider or just ordinary passive consumer of AI slop now that it’s ubiquitous, I saw videos this week that I’m sure many other people did: those from Google’s Veo 3.

Here’s a quick selection of ones I came across:

Authors Are Accidentally Leaving AI Prompts In their Novels

Authors Are Accidentally Leaving AI Prompts In their Novels

Fans reading through the romance novel Darkhollow Academy: Year 2 got a nasty surprise last week in chapter 3. In the middle of steamy scene between the book’s heroine and the dragon prince Ash there’s this: "I've rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree's style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements:"

It appeared as if author, Lena McDonald, had used an AI to help write the book, asked it to imitate the style of another author, and left behind evidence they’d done so in the final work. As of this writing, Darkhollow Academy: Year 2 is hard to find on Amazon. Searching for it on the site won’t show the book, but a Google search will. 404 Media was able to purchase a copy and confirm that the book no longer contains the reference to copying Bree’s style. But screenshots of the graph remain in the book’s Amazon reviews and Goodreads page.

This is not the first time an author has left behind evidence of AI-generation in a book, it’s not even the first one this year. 

Pocket, One of the Only Apps I Ever Liked, Is Shutting Down

Pocket, One of the Only Apps I Ever Liked, Is Shutting Down

Pocket, an app for saving and reading articles later, is shutting down on July 8, Mozilla announced today. 

The company sent an email with the subject line “Important Update: Pocket is Saying Goodbye,” around 2 p.m. EST and I immediately started wailing when I saw it. 

“You’ll be able to keep using the app and browser extensions until then. However, starting May 22, 2025, you won’t be able to download the apps or purchase a new Pocket Premium subscription,” the announcement says. Users can export saved articles until October 8, 2025, after which point all Pocket accounts and data will be permanently deleted. 

Hacker Conference HOPE Says U.S. Immigration Crackdown Caused Massive Crash in Ticket Sales

Hacker Conference HOPE Says U.S. Immigration Crackdown Caused Massive Crash in Ticket Sales

Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE), the iconic and long-running hacking conference, says far fewer people have bought tickets for the event this year as compared to last, with organizers believing it is due to the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts and more aggressive detainment of travellers into the U.S.

“We are roughly 50 percent behind last year’s sales, based on being 3 months away from the event,” Greg Newby, one of HOPE’s organizers, told 404 Media in an email. According to hacking collective and magazine 2600, which organizes HOPE, the conference usually has around 1,000 attendees and the event is almost entirely funded by ticket sales. “Having fewer international attendees hurts the conference program, as well as the bottom line,” a planned press release says.

Why Does Google’s New Veo 3 AI Video Generator Love This Dad Joke?

Why Does Google’s New Veo 3 AI Video Generator Love This Dad Joke?

On Tuesday, Google revealed the latest and best version of its AI video generator, Veo 3. It’s impressive not only in the quality of the video it produces, but also because it can generate audio that is supposed to seamlessly sync with the video. I’m probably going to test Veo 3 in the coming weeks like we test many new AI tools, but one odd feature I already noticed about it is that it’s obsessed with one particular dad joke, which raises questions about what kind of content Veo 3 is able to produce and how it was trained. 

This morning I saw that an X user who was playing with Veo 3 generated a video of a stand up comedian telling a joke. The joke was: “I went to the zoo the other day, there was only one dog in it, it was a Shih Tzu.” As in: “shit zoo.”

NO WAY. It did it. And, was that, actually funny?

Prompt:
> a man doing stand up comedy in a small venue tells a joke (include the joke in the dialogue) https://t.co/GFvPAssEHx pic.twitter.com/LrCiVAp1Bl

— fofr (@fofrAI) May 20, 2025

Other users quickly replied that the joke was posted to Reddit’s r/dadjokes community two years ago, and to the r/jokes community 12 years ago.

I started testing Google’s new AI video generator to see if I could get it to generate other jokes I could trace back to specific Reddit posts. This would not be definitive proof that Reddit provided the training data that resulted in a specific joke, but is a likely theory because we know Google is paying Reddit $60 million a year to license its content for training its AI models. 

To my surprise, when I used the same prompt as the X user above—”a man doing stand up comedy in a small venue tells a joke (include the joke in the dialogue)”—I got a slightly different looking video, but the exact same joke.

And when I changed the prompt a bit—”a man doing stand up comedy tells a joke (include the joke in the dialogue)”—I still got a slightly different looking video with the exact same joke.

Google did not respond to a request for comment, so it’s impossible to say why its AI video generator is producing the same exact dad joke even when it’s not prompted to do so, and where exactly it sourced that joke. It could be from Reddit, but it could also be from many other places where the Shih Tzu joke has appeared across the internet, including YouTube, Threads, Instagram, Quora, icanhazdadjoke.com, houzz.com, Facebook, Redbubble, and Twitter, to name just a few. In other words, it’s a canonical corny dad joke of no clear origin that’s been posted online many times over the years, so it’s impossible to say where Google got it. 

But it’s also not clear why this is the only coherent joke Google’s new AI video generator will produce. I’ve tried changing the prompts several times, and the result is either the Shih Tzu joke, gibberish, or incomplete fragments of speech that are not jokes. 

One prompt that was almost identical to the one that produced the Shih Tzu joke resulted in a video of a stand up comedian saying he got a letter from the bank.

The prompt “a man telling a joke at a bar” resulted in a video of a man saying the idiom “you can’t have your cake and eat it too.” 

The prompt “man tells a joke on stage” resulted in a video of a man saying some gibberish, then saying he went to the library.

Admittedly, these videos are hilarious in an absurd Tim & Eric kind of way because no matter what nonsense the comedian is saying the crowd always erupts into laughter, but it also clearly shows Google’s latest and greatest AI video generator is creatively limited in some ways. This is not the case with other generative AI tools, including Google’s own Gemini. When I asked Gemini to tell me a joke, the chatbot instantly produced different, coherent dad jokes. And when I asked it to do it over and over again, it always produced a different joke.  

Again, it’s impossible to say what Veo 3 is doing behind the scenes without Google’s input, but one possible theory is that its falling back to a safe, known joke, rather than producing the type of content that embarrassed the company in the past, be it instructing users to eat glue or, or generating Nazi soldiers as people of color.  

Sweden Expands Anti-Sex Work Law to Criminalize Paying for Custom OnlyFans Clips and Camming

Sweden Expands Anti-Sex Work Law to Criminalize Paying for Custom OnlyFans Clips and Camming

Participating in interactive adult live-streams or ordering custom porn clips are about to be punishable by a year in prison in Sweden, where a new law expands an already-problematic model of sex work criminalization to the internet.

Sex work in Sweden operates under the Nordic Model, also known as the “Equality,” “Entrapment,” or “End Demand Model,” which criminalizes buying sex but not selling sex. The text of the newly-passed bill (in the original Swedish here, and auto-translated to English here) states that criminal liability for the purchase of sexual services shouldn’t have to require physical contact between the buyer and seller anymore, and should expand to online sex work, too. 

Buying pre-recorded content, paying to follow an account where pornographic material is continuously posted, or otherwise consuming porn without influencing its content is outside of the scope of the law, the bill says. But live-streaming content where viewers interact with performers, as well as ordering custom clips, are illegal.

Criminalizing any part of the transaction of sex work has been shown to make the work more dangerous for all involved; data shows sex workers in Nordic Model countries like Sweden, Iceland, and France are put in more danger by this model, not made safer. But the objective of this model isn’t actually the increased safety of sex workers. It’s the total abolition of sex work. 

This law expands the model to cover online content, too—even if the performer and viewer have never met in person. “This is a new form of sex purchase, and it’s high time we modernise the legislation to include digital platforms,” Social Democrat MP Teresa Carvalho said, according to Euractiv

"Like most antiporn and anti-sex work legislation, the law is full of contradictions, all of which come at the expense of actual workers," Mike Stabile, director of public policy at U.S.-based adult industry advocacy organization the Free Speech Coalition. "Why is it legal to consume studio content, or stolen content, but illegal to pay a worker directly to create independent content? If you're really fighting exploitation, why would you take away avenues for independence and push people to work with third-party studios? Why is the consumer liable, but not a platform? These laws make no sense on their face because the goal is not actually to protect workers, but rather to eradicate commercial sex work entirely. Through that lens, it makes much more sense. This law is just another step in making the industry dangerous to work in and dangerous to access, to push it toward back alleys and black markets."

Sweden’s law isn’t isolated to European countries. In the U.S., Maine adopted the Nordic Model in 2023.

"I'm sure they would love to replicate this here, and while we're still a few steps away from them having the judicial clearance to do so, we've seen recently how quickly a moral or political imperative can shift," Stabile said. "People need to realize that criminalizing porn is not ever really about just criminalizing adult content — it's about criminalizing representations of sexuality and gender, and ultimately criminalizing those practices and communities."

The expansion of the law in Sweden goes into effect on July 1.  

Updated 5/21, 3:34 p.m. EST with comment from the Free Speech Coalition.

Kids Say They're Using Photos of Trump and Markiplier to Bypass 'Gorilla Tag' Age Verification

Kids Say They're Using Photos of Trump and Markiplier to Bypass 'Gorilla Tag' Age Verification

Kids say they are using pictures of Trump, YouTuber Markiplier, and the G-Man from Half-Life to bypass newly integrated age restriction software in the VR game Gorilla Tag.

Gorilla Tag is a popular game with a global reach and a young audience, which means it has to comply with complicated and contradictory laws aimed at protecting kids online. In Gorilla Tag, players control a legless ape avatar and use their arms to navigate the world and play games like, well, tag. Developer Another Axiom has had to contend with new and developing laws aimed at keeping kids safe online. The laws vary from state to state and country to country.

Researchers Scrape 2 Billion Discord Messages and Publish Them Online

Researchers Scrape 2 Billion Discord Messages and Publish Them Online

Researchers published a massive database of more than 2 billion Discord messages that they say they scraped using Discord’s public API. The data was pulled from 3,167 servers and covers posts made between 2015 and 2024, the entire time Discord has been active. 

Though the researchers claim they’ve anonymized the data, it’s hard to imagine anyone is comfortable with almost a decade of their Discord messages sitting in a public JSON file online. Separately, a different programmer released a Discord tool called "Searchcord" based on a different data set that shows non-anonymized chat histories.

Podcast: AI Slop Summer

Podcast: AI Slop Summer

We start this week with Jason's couple of stories about how the Chicago Sun-Times printed a summer guide that was basically all AI-generated. Jason spoke to the person behind it. After the break, a bunch of documents show that schools were simply not ready for AI. In the subscribers-only section, we chat all about Star Wars and those funny little guys.

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

Scientists Explain Why Trump's $175 Billion Golden Dome Is a Fantasy

Scientists Explain Why Trump's $175 Billion Golden Dome Is a Fantasy

The U.S. has one of the largest nuclear arsenals in the world. Its dream has long been that it could launch these nukes and suffer no repercussions for doing so. Ronald Reagan called it the  Strategic Defense Initiative. His critics called it Star Wars. Trump is calling it the “Golden Dome.” Scientists who’ve studied the issue say it’s pure fantasy.

One of Trump’s early executive orders tasked the Pentagon with coming up with an “Iron Dome for America” that could knock nuclear weapons and other missiles out of the sky before they hit U.S. targets. His supporters changed the name to the “Golden Dome” a few weeks later.

The idea—originally pioneered by Reagan—is to launch a bunch of satellites with interceptors that can knock missiles out of the sky before they hit America. Over the past seven decades, the U.S. has spent $400 billion on this dream. Thanks to Trump’s Golden Dome scheme, it’s about to spend $175 billions more.

In a press conference Tuesday, Trump announced that the project would start soon. “It’s something we want. Ronald Reagan wanted it many years ago but they didn’t have the technology,” Trump said during the press conference. He promised it would be “fully operation before the end of my term. So we’ll have it done in about three years.”

Trump claimed the system would be able to deal with all kinds of threats “Including hypersonic missiles, ballistic missiles, and advanced cruise missiles. All of them will be knocked out of the air. We will truly be completing the job that Ronald Reagan started 40 years ago, forever eliminating the missile threat to the American homeland,” he said. “The success rate is very close to 100 percent. Which is incredible when you think of it, you’re shooting bullets out of the air.”

Experts think this is bullshit.

In March, a team of volunteer scientists at the American Physical Society’s Panel on Public Affairs published a study that looked at how well missile defense could work. The report makes it clear that, no matter what the specifics, Trump’s plan for a Golden Dome is a fantasy.

The study was written by a “study group” of ten scientists and included Frederick K Lamb, an astrophysics expert at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; William Priedhorsky, a fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory; and Cynthia Nitta, a program director at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

404 Media reached out to the scientists with questions about why it’s hard to shoot nukes out of the sky and why Reagan’s dream of putting lasers in space doesn’t seem to die. Below is a copy of our correspondence, which was written collectively by 8 of the scientists.It’s been edited for length and clarity.

404 Media: What were the questions the team set out to answer when it started this work? 

In recent years, the U.S. program to develop defenses against long-range ballistic missiles has focused on systems that would defend the continental United States against relatively unsophisticated intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that would use only a few relatively simple countermeasures and penetration aids. North Korea'’s ICBMs and ICBMs that might be deployed by Iran are thought to be of this kind. 

Previous reports were cautious or even pessimistic about the technical feasibility of defending against even these relatively unsophisticated ICBMs. The current study sought to determine whether the technological developments that have occurred during the past decade have changed the situation. 

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What factor does the size of the United States play in building this kind of system? 

There are three phases in the flight of an ICBM and its warhead: the boost phase, during which the ICBM is in powered flight, which lasts three to five minutes; the midcourse phase, which begins when the ICBM releases its warhead, which then travels on a ballistic trajectory in space toward its target for about 20 to 30 minutes; and the terminal phase, which begins when the warhead re-enters Earth’s atmosphere and lasts until the warhead strikes its target, which takes about 30 seconds. 

The large geographical size of the United States is not especially important for defensive systems designed to intercept a missile or its warhead during the boost or midcourse phases, but it is a crucial factor for defensive systems designed to intercept the warhead during the terminal phase. The reason is that the geographical area that a terminal phase interceptor can defend, even if it works perfectly, is very limited. 

Israel’s Iron Dome interceptors can only partially defend small areas against slow, homemade rockets, but this can be useful if the area to be defended is very small, as Israel is. But the lower 48 of the United States alone have an area 375 times the area of Israel.

The interceptors of the Patriot, Aegis, and THAAD systems are much more capable than those of the Iron Dome, but even if they were used, a very large number would be needed to attempt to defend all important potential targets in the United States. This makes defending even this portion of the United States using terminal interceptors impractical. 

Why did you decide to narrowly focus on North Korean nukes? 

We chose to focus on the threat posed by these ICBMs for several reasons. First, the United States has deployed a system that could only defend against a limited attack by long-range ballistic missiles, which was understood to mean an attack using the smaller number of less sophisticated missiles that a country such as North Korea has, or that Iran might develop and deploy. Developing and deploying a system that might be able to defend against the numerically larger and more sophisticated ICBMs that Russia and China have would be even more challenging. 

A key purpose of this report was to explain why a defense against even the limited ICBM threat we considered is so technically challenging, and where the many technical difficulties lie. Our hope was that readers will come away with realistic views of the current capabilities of U.S. system intended to defend against the nuclear-armed ICBMs North Korea may have at present and an improved understanding of the prospects for being able to defend against the ICBMs North Korea might deploy within the next 15 years. In our assessment, the capability of the current U.S. system is low and will likely remain low for the next 15 years.

Why do you think the dream” of this kind of system has such a strong hold on American leaders? 

Ever since nuclear-armed intercontinental-range missiles were deployed in the 1950s, the United States (and its potential adversaries) have been vulnerable to nuclear attack. This is very unnerving, and has caused our leaders to search for some kind of technical fix that would change this situation by making it possible for us to defend ourselves against such an attack. Fixing this situation is also very appealing to the public. As a consequence, new systems for defending against ICBMs have been proposed again and again, and about half a dozen have been built, costing large amounts of money, in the hope that a technical fix could be found that would make us safe. But none of these efforts have been successful, because the difficulty of defending against nuclear-armed ICBMs is so great. 

A constellation of about 16,000 interceptors would be needed to counter a rapid salvo of ten solid-propellant ICBMs like North Korea’s Hwasong-18, if they are launched automatically as soon as possible.

What are the issues with shooting down a missile midcourse?

The currently deployed midcourse defense system, the Ground-based Midcourse Defense, consists of ground-based interceptors. Most of them are based in Alaska but a few are in California. They would be fired when space-based infrared detectors and ground-based radars confirm that a hostile ICBM has been launched, using tracking information provided by these sensors. Once it is in space, each interceptor releases a single kill vehicle, which is designed to steer itself to collide with a target which it destroys by striking it. The relatively long, 20 to 30 minute duration of the midcourse phase can potentially provide enough time that more than one intercept attempt may be possible if the first attempt fails. 

However, attempting to intercept the warhead during the midcourse phase also has a disadvantage. During this phase the warhead moves in the near-vacuum of space, which provides the attacker with opportunities to confuse or overwhelm the defense. In the absence of air drag, relatively simple, lightweight decoys would follow the same trajectory as the warhead, and the warhead itself might be enclosed within a decoy balloon. 

Countermeasures such as these can make it difficult for the defense to pick out the warhead from among the many other objects that may accompany it. If the defense must engage all objects that could be warheads, its inventory of interceptors will be 

depleted. Furthermore, the radar and infrared sensors that are required to track, pick out, and home on the warhead are vulnerable to direct attack as well as to high-altitude nuclear detonations. The latter may be preplanned, or caused by “successful” intercept of a previous nuclear warhead.

What about shooting the missile during the boost phase, before it’s in space?

Disabling or destroying a missile’s warhead during the missile’s boost phase would be very, very challenging, so boost-phase intercept systems generally do not attempt this.

Meeting this challenge requires a system with interceptors that can reach the ICBM within about two to four minutes after it has been launched. To do this, the system must have remote sensors that can quickly detect the launch of any threatening ICBM, estimate its trajectory, compute a firing solution for the system’s interceptor, and fire its interceptor, all within a minute or less after the launch of the attacking ICBM has been confirmed. 

For a land-, sea-, or air-based interceptor to intercept an ICBM during its boost phase, the interceptor must typically be based within about 500 km of the expected intercept point, have a speed of 5 km/s or more, and be fired less than a minute after the launch of a potentially threatening missile has been detected. To be secure, interceptors must be positioned at least 100 to 200 km from the borders of potentially hostile countries 

If instead interceptors were placed in low-Earth orbits, a large number would be needed to make sure that at least one is close enough to reach any attacking ICBM during its boost phase so it could attempt an intercept. The number that would be required is large because each interceptor would circle Earth at high speed while Earth is rotating beneath its orbit. Hence most satellites would not be in position to reach an attacking ICBM in time. 

A constellation of about 16,000 interceptors would be needed to counter a rapid salvo of ten solid-propellant ICBMs like North Korea’s Hwasong-18, if they are launched automatically as soon as possible. If the system is designed to use 30 seconds to verify that it is performing correctly and that the reported launch was indeed an ICBM, determine the type of ICBM, and gather more tracking information before firing an interceptor, about 36,000 interceptors would be required. 

With this kind of thing, youre running out the clock, right? By the time youve constructed a system your enemies would have advanced their own capabilities. 

Yes. Unlike civilian research and development programs, which typically address fixed challenges, a missile defense program confronts intelligent and adaptable human adversaries who can devise approaches to disable, penetrate, or circumvent the defensive system. This can result in a costly arms race. Which side holds the advantage at any particular moment depends on the relative costs of the defensive system and the offensive system adaptations required to evade it, and the resources each side is prepared to devote to the competition. 

As the BMD Report says, the open-ended nature of the current U.S. missile defense program has stimulated anxiety in both Moscow and Beijing. President Putin has announced a variety of new nuclear-weapon delivery systems designed to counter U.S. missile defenses. As for China, the U.S. Department of Defense says that China’s People’s Liberation Army justifies developing a range of offensive technologies as necessary to counter U.S. and other countries’ ballistic missile defense systems.

Viral AI-Generated Summer Guide Printed by Chicago Sun-Times Was Made by Magazine Giant Hearst

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Viral AI-Generated Summer Guide Printed by Chicago Sun-Times Was Made by Magazine Giant Hearst

The “Heat Index” summer guide newspaper insert published by the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer that contained AI-generated misinformation and reading lists full of books that don’t exist was created by a subsidiary of the magazine giant Hearst, 404 Media has learned.

Victor Lim, the vice president of marketing and communications at Chicago Public Media, which owns the Chicago Sun-Times, told 404 Media in a phone call that the Heat Index section was licensed from a company called King Features, which is owned by the magazine giant Hearst. He said that no one at Chicago Public Media reviewed the section and that historically it has not reviewed newspaper inserts that it has bought from King Features.

“Historically, we don’t have editorial review from those mainly because it’s coming from a newspaper publisher, so we falsely made the assumption there would be an editorial process for this,” Lim said. “We are updating our policy to require internal editorial oversight over content like this.”

King Features syndicates comics and columns such as Car Talk, Hints from Heloise, horoscopes, and a column by Dr. Oz to newspapers, but it also makes special inserts that newspapers can buy and put into their papers. King Features calls itself a "unit of Hearst."

Civitai, Site Used to Generate AI Porn, Cut Off by Credit Card Processor

Civitai, Site Used to Generate AI Porn, Cut Off by Credit Card Processor

Civitai, an AI model sharing site backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) that 404 Media has repeatedly shown is being used to generate nonconsensual adult content, lost access to its credit card payment processor.

According to an announcement posted to Civitai on Monday, the site will “pause” credit card payments starting Friday, May 23. At that time, users will no longer be able to buy “Buzz,” the on-site currency users spend to generate images, or start new memberships. 

“Some payment companies label generative-AI platforms high risk, especially when we allow user-generated mature content, even when it’s legal and moderated,” the announcement said. “That policy choice, not anything users did, forced the cutoff.”

Civitai’s CEO Justin Maier told me in an email that the site has not been “cut off” from payment processing. 

“Our current provider recently informed us that they do not wish to support platforms that allow AI-generated explicit content,” he told me. “Rather than remove that category, we’re onboarding a specialist high-risk processor so that service to creators and customers continues without interruption. Out of respect for ongoing commercial negotiations, we’re not naming either the incumbent or the successor until the transition is complete.”

The announcement tells users that they can “stock up on Buzz” or switch to annual memberships to prepare for May 23. It also says that it should start accepting crypto and ACH checkout (direct transfer from a bank account) within a week, and that it should start taking credit card payments again with a new provider next month.

“Civitai is not shutting down,” the announcement says. “We have months of runway. The site, community, and creator payouts continue unchanged. We just need a brief boost from you while we finish new payment rails.”

In April, Civitai announced new policies it put in place because payment processors were threatening to cut it off unless it made changes to the kind of adult content that was allowed on the site. This included new policies against adult content that included diapers, guns, and further restrictions on content including the likeness of real people. 

The announcement on Civitai Monday said that “Those changes opened some doors, but the processors ultimately decided Civitai was still outside their comfort zone.”

In the comments below the announcement, Civitai users debated how the site is handling the situations. 

“This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think you need to get rid of all celebrity LoRA [custom AI models] on the site, honestly,” the top comment said. “Especially with the Take It Down Act, the risk is too high. Sorry this is happening to you guys. I do love this site. Edit: bought an annual sub to try and help.”

“If it wasn't for the porn there would be considerably less revenue and traffic,” another commenter replied. “And technically it's not about the porn, it's about the ability to have free expression to create what you want to create without being blocked to do so.”

404 Media has published several stories since 2023 showing that Civitai is often used by people to produce nonconsnesual content. Earlier today we published a story showing its on-site AI video generator was producing nonconsensual porn of anyone.

Chicago Sun-Times Prints AI-Generated Summer Reading List With Books That Don't Exist

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Chicago Sun-Times Prints AI-Generated Summer Reading List With Books That Don't Exist

Update: We have published a follow-up to this article with more details about how this happened.

The Chicago Sun-Times newspaper’s “Best of Summer” section published over the weekend contains a guide to summer reads that features real authors and fake books that they did not write was partially generated by artificial intelligence, the person who generated it told 404 Media.

The article, called “Summer Reading list for 2025,” suggests reading Tidewater by Isabel Allende, a “multigenerational saga set in a coastal town where magical realism meets environmental activism. Allende’s first climate fiction novel explores how one family confronts rising sea levels while uncovering long-buried secrets.” It also suggests reading The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir, “another science-driven thriller” by the author of The Martian. “This time, the story follows a programmer who discovers that an AI system has developed consciousness—and has been secretly influencing global events for years.” Neither of these books exist, and many of the books on the list either do not exist or were written by other authors than the ones they are attributed to. 

'Configuration Issue' Allows Civitai Users to AI Generate Nonconsensual Porn Videos

'Configuration Issue' Allows Civitai Users to AI Generate Nonconsensual Porn Videos

Civitai, an AI model sharing site backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), is allowing users to AI generate nonconsensual porn of real people, despite the site’s policies against this type of content, increased moderation efforts, and threats from payment processors to deny Civitai service. 

After I reached out for comment about this issue, Civitai told me it fixed the site’s moderation “configuration issue” that allowed users to do this. After Civitai said it fixed this issue, its AI video generator no longer created nonconsensual videos of celebrities, but at the time of writing it is still allowing people to generate nonconsensual videos of non-celebrities.

Telegram Gave Authorities Data on More than 20,000 Users

Telegram Gave Authorities Data on More than 20,000 Users

Telegram gave authorities the data on 22,777 of its users in the first three months of 2025, according to a GitHub that reposts Telegram’s transparency reports.That number is a massive jump from the same period in 2024, which saw Telegram turn over data on only 5,826 of its users to authorities. From January 1 to March 31, Telegram sent over the data of 1,664 users in the U.S. 

Telegram is a popular social network and messaging app that’s also a hub of criminal activity. Some people use the site to stay connected with friends and relatives and some people use it to spread deepfake scams, promote gambling, and sell guns

23andMe Sale Shows Your Genetic Data Is Worth $17

23andMe Sale Shows Your Genetic Data Is Worth $17

Monday, the genetic pharmaceutical company Regeneron announced that it is buying genetic sequencing company 23andMe out of bankruptcy for $256 million. The purchase gives us a rough estimate for the current monetary value of a single person’s genetic data: $17.

Regeneron is a drug company that “intends to acquire 23andMe’s Personal Genome Service (PGS), Total Health and Research Services business lines, together with its Biobank and associated assets, for $256 million and for 23andMe to continue all consumer genome services uninterrupted,” the company said in a press release Monday. Regeneron is working on personalized medicine and new drug discovery, and the company itself has “sequenced the genetic information of nearly three million people in research studies,” it said. This means that Regeneron itself has the ability to perform DNA sequencing, and suggests that the critical thing that it is acquiring is 23andMe’s vast trove of genetic data. 

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