It's humans all the way down

Friday already? Must be weekly roundup time.

On the podcast this week, OpenAI and Microsoft’s big admissions from court records that they are destroying the internet in all sorts of ways, and how we hijacked a real band’s Spotify page with AI-generated slop. In the section for subscribers at the Supporter level, we hear all about iLands, the AI agent spam factory.

And on this week’s interview podcast, I talk to Professor Sherry Turkle, a licensed clinical psychologist, the founding director of MIT's Initiative on Technology and Self, and the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT. Her new book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines comes out on September 29.

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

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WE NEED YOUR HELP

Cities around the country are ditching Flock’s automatic license plate reader cameras, and replacing them with equivalent cameras from law enforcement contracting giant Axon. That move in large part comes in response to 404 Media’s coverage of how local cops performed lookups in Flock for ICE, and how a cop in Texas searched Flock cameras nationwide to look for a woman who self-administered an abortion. That brings up questions: what are cities and law enforcement agencies using Axon ALPRs for? And who are they in turn sharing that data with? 404 Media has started to find out, but needs the help of local residents and community members to figure out what is happening across the country.

HUMANS ALL THE WAY DOWN

Last week, Meta executives announced that its much-hyped AI agent, Muse, had a new feature: It could call businesses for you to do things like make a restaurant reservation or a haircut appointment. But in reality, Meta is testing having these calls being made by humans in call centers, 404 Media has learned. Internally, however, the company announced the features to employees and said that it had “added a human agent layer for calls to get completed,” and that “Muse human agent calls [sic] is ready for company dogfooding,” or testing. “Muse doesn’t just dial a number. It calls a business on your behalf, handles the conversation, completes your request, and reports back with a transcript and a summary,” the internal message board post to employees, seen by 404 Media, reads. “It also no longer works alone. Muse is now able to hand requests to a trained human agent, who places the call and works it through.”

WHO HACKS THE HACKERS

The catastrophic hack of at least thousands of FBI officials’ personal data, including their addresses, phone numbers, and even their spouses, includes members of the FBI’s secretive hacking team, potentially revealing who exactly is in that unit, 404 Media has found. The findings further highlight how sensitive the stolen data is, and how valuable it may be to criminals or to foreign intelligence agencies. There is very little public information about the FBI’s hacking unit, including the operations it conducts, the tools it uses, or which agents are part of it.

Image: AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell

TEXAS THINGS

Last month Fort Worth, Texas police arrested political activist EJ Carrion a week after he cursed at a city council meeting. In his driveway, they told him the charge was “disrupting some kind of procession,” according to body cam footage of the arrest obtained by 404 Media. Carrion was one of hundreds of Tarrant County residents who’d turned up for a Commissioner's Court meeting on August 4 to speak out against a plan to close a third of the area’s polling places. “You said you were all about cooling the temperature and yet you vote for this extremist bullshit. All of you are bullshit,” Carrion said during the meeting on August 4 before walking out the door. A week later, Fort Worth Police pulled Carrion over in his driveway and arrested him.

COMMENTS OF THE WEEK

Replying to People Training OpenAI’s AI Fired for Using AI to Train the AI, Skibidi Flusher writes:

"This is the future of work (if you can get it) if the tech overlords continue to get their way: 'I felt no joy in the work or that I was contributing to society in any way.'"

And in response to Americans Fear AI Will Make the World Worse, Love It Anyway, Squidward Tortellini writes:

"I don't think it's a paradox at all, we're constantly being told that it's going to take our jobs and destroy the world and all that, and most people are either worried about that or know that it won't do that but worry about its water use, pollution, etc."

Some really good usernames this week, guys.

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 some small changes, an AI song, and internet soup.

JOSEPH: We’re making a couple of changes that might sound boring to someone who doesn’t read or listen to our work, but I’m actually legit excited about them, and I think they will be better for all of you too. I’ll talk about one now and maybe the other next week.