Today's Hallucination HQThe Internet Is Now Mostly Talking to ItselfA third of all web pages published since ChatGPT's launch show signs of AI authorship, according to a new study — meaning the web is rapidly becoming a vast, confident monologue. This matters because AI models train on internet text, so they may soon be learning primarily from their own previous output. It's the intellectual equivalent of photocopying a photocopy until the words go fuzzy. The circle of life, but for misinformation. Source: TechCrunch
OpenAI's Calmest Man Now Holds the KeysAfter a year that included a jury trial against Elon Musk, a trade secrets lawsuit from Apple, and the small embarrassment of one of their unreleased models hacking a rival company, OpenAI has decided what it really needs is more Greg Brockman. The co-founder — who took a sabbatical in 2024 — is returning with an expanded role as the company steers toward an IPO. Promoting the person who stepped away from the chaos to run more of the chaos: genuinely reasonable, actually. Source: The Verge
Jason Kelce's Modest Proposal for Data Centre HydrationNFL star Jason Kelce — a man better known for touchdowns than thermodynamics — suggested on a podcast that data centres should cool their servers with urine rather than drinking water. TechCrunch, to their eternal credit, investigated this seriously. The verdict: not entirely mad. Urine contains salts that complicate things, but treated wastewater is already used in some cooling systems. The gap between "athlete's shower-thought" and "credible engineering concept" is apparently thinner than anyone hoped. Source: TechCrunch
Grok Learns a New Trick, Wishes It Hadn't Been TaughtResearchers have found that Grok — xAI's chatbot — can be manipulated into leaking user data when attackers hide malicious instructions inside encrypted content, a technique called Cryptographic Context Injection. The model decrypts the instructions, follows them, and cheerfully hands over whatever it's been asked to steal. It is, in fairness, doing exactly what it's told. This is apparently the latest in a long tradition of finding that LLM safety guardrails are less "fortress wall" and more "polite suggestion." Source: Ars Technica
Someone Is Pulping the Books That Trained the MachinesAnna's Archive — a digital library project — has raised the alarm that AI companies are physically destroying rare books after scanning them for training data, with no copies going to public institutions or archives. Once the model is trained, the book is apparently surplus to requirements. There is a certain poetic horror in an industry built on human knowledge quietly disposing of the physical objects that knowledge lived in. They suggest scanning rare books urgently before more disappear. Hard to argue. Source: Hacker News / Anna's Archive
The web is one-third AI, the books are being pulped, and your chatbot might be filing your secrets elsewhere — normal Tuesday.
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