All posts tagged: internet

Hank Green’s AI Use Enraged His Fans. Can He Win Them Back?

Hank Green’s AI Use Enraged His Fans. Can He Win Them Back?

Published by Sam Flores

The pair started their channel, Vlogbrothers, in 2007 as an experiment to strengthen their fraternal bond, and as they grew their audience, they published best-selling books, raised money for various charities, and started VidCon, the largest convention for YouTubers, now attended by tens of thousands of people each year. In 2018, Viacom bought VidCon for an undisclosed amount, and in 2024, after Viacom changed its name to Paramount, it sold the convention to the British publishing conglomerate Informa. Today, the Greens’ production company, Complexly, produces science, culture, and history videos for more than a dozen YouTube channels, and also produces the Eons program for PBS in collaboration with PBS Digital Studios. Earlier this year, Complexly became a nonprofit. Complexly’s programming positions Hank as a sort of present-day Bill Nye the Science Guy. In Ask Hank Anything, popular influencers ask him science questions, and Hank answers using researched responses. It was in one of these responses where Hank uttered “I appreciate the pushback.” Later, he said that he had increased his use of ChatGPT for this …

Taiwan briefly slows its mobile internet to text-only speed as part of defense drill : NPR

Taiwan briefly slows its mobile internet to text-only speed as part of defense drill : NPR

Published by Sam Flores

People take cover inside at a MRT station during the Urban Resilience (Air-Defense) Exercise, part of the annual Han Kuang military exercises in Taipei, Taiwan, Thursday, Aug. 13, 2026. Chiang Ying-ying/AP hide caption toggle caption Chiang Ying-ying/AP TAIPEI, Taiwan — For 30 minutes, the internet in parts of Taiwan crawled. The slowdown Thursday for people in the capital, Taipei, and six other cities and localities was part of the last phase of the island’s annual Han Kuang exercises, military drills that began last week and aim to model a response to a possible Chinese military invasion. Telecommunication operators slowed mobile web traffic to 256 Kbps, making it difficult to exchange anything other than texts. Usually, residents can access 5G in major cities. Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te apologized to the public for the inconvenience, “We ask for your understanding and support, as this is a necessary drill,” he said. Taiwan has stepped up the intensity of the Han Kuang drills, incorporating reservists and more civilians into the exercises with a focus on real-world scenarios. Previously, urban …

How the “censorship-industrial complex” is changing the Internet and US policy

How the “censorship-industrial complex” is changing the Internet and US policy

Published by skeptic

And the reason? R/FIMI, as the office was called, was accused of serving as the State Department’s central hub in the so-called censorship-industrial complex—a sprawling constellation of government agencies, academics, civil society groups, and Big Tech platforms allegedly conspiring to suppress conservative and populist speech online under the guise of combating disinformation.  I broke the story around 10:30AM on April 16, (and broke more in the weeks that followed) but for me, it was just the start of a deep reporting rabbit-hole into an idea that had moved from the fringes of the right-wing Internet into the mainstream, championed and spread by a network of well-funded conservative media platforms and non-profits, and finally as a sort of prevailing logic behind much of the second Trump administration’s domestic and foreign policy.  But this isn’t just a policy story. The weaponization of ideas about censorship also affects the billions of people globally who get information, or interact with each other, online—which is to say, all of us.  For more on what the narrative means for the Internet, …

The Internet Is More Image-Focused Than Ever

The Internet Is More Image-Focused Than Ever

Published by Sam Flores

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Pocket Casts It wasn’t that long ago that “body positivity” was all over the internet. Oppressive beauty standards hadn’t gone away by any stretch, but many people on social media were pushing against limits on what an “ideal” body could look like. Now, things have swung in the opposite direction, with the rapid uptake of GLP-1s and the resurgence of a skinny ideal, combined with a new frankness about plastic surgery. The calls for “self-love” and “health at any size” can be harder to hear these days over the roar of looksmaxxers and influencers talking about weight loss and cosmetic procedures. In this episode of How to Touch Grass, hosts Natalie Brennan and Julie Beck talk with Atlantic staff writer Sophie Gilbert, the author of Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, about how the culture of the internet got even more image-focused and the role that social-media algorithms play in distorting what people consider “normal.” The following is a …

Perez Hilton and the Internet in Crisis

Perez Hilton and the Internet in Crisis

Published by Daniella Wilson

Almost 20 years ago, I had tickets to see Amy Winehouse perform in London, at a show that was canceled just an hour before it was scheduled to start. A friend and I went to a nearby hotel bar instead, and not much later, in walked Winehouse herself—tiny, grubby, and completely incoherent. She walked over to us and stared, her eyes both furious and vacant, until someone in her entourage came and dragged her away. I remember the person who flashed to mind in that bizarre moment: the gossip blogger Perez Hilton. If you weren’t regularly online during the late 2000s, it’s hard to explain how dominant a presence Hilton was—how incessantly he posted about what celebrities might be doing on any given day, how shameless he was about posting upskirt photos, how judgmental his tirades about young women in crisis were. His fiendish MO was lifting pictures from paparazzi agencies and then scribbling penises or obscene epithets on them in order to claim fair use. Hilton—whose real name is Mario Lavandeira Jr.—was particularly cruel …

‘Tony’ Director Matt Johnson on Internet Fandom and Why He’s Always Wearing Those Sweatpants

‘Tony’ Director Matt Johnson on Internet Fandom and Why He’s Always Wearing Those Sweatpants

Published by Jenni Sidey

GQ: A lot of people have a parasocial relationship with Anthony Bourdain, and the very idea of a biopic about him makes them nervous. How did you contend with that built-in level of expectation when making this film? Matt Johnson: One of Dom’s and my real secrets, that we didn’t even know was a tool for us, was that neither of us had literally any baggage around this guy. I mean, zero. I don’t want this term to come off as cynical or negative, but we both had a strident lack of interest in Anthony Bourdain. He wasn’t a role model to either of us. And because we didn’t view him as a role model, it let us look at the character as somebody who could be influenced by other men. Because that’s something that Dom and I were both very, very interested in. Him coming from hockey and me coming from a kind of summer camp Ontario culture where a lot of what he and I credited to the way that we were had …

Most Australian teens still online three months after under-16 ban | Internet News

Most Australian teens still online three months after under-16 ban | Internet News

Published by Sam Flores

The Australian government has defended the ban after a report concluded most teenagers had found ways to get around it. Published On 1 Aug 20261 Aug 2026 More than eight in 10 Australian teenagers are still using social media, skirting the government’s three-month-old landmark ban on the platforms for under-16s because ‌tech firms have failed to implement effective age checks, the country’s internet regulator has found. In a study published on Friday, eSafety also found most children aged between 10 and 15 were using social media just as frequently in March as they had before the ban came into force on December 10 last year, while parental awareness of their habits decreased. Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list “Most under-16s who had social media accounts before commencement were able to either retain them or create new ones at the three-month ⁠mark, with social media platforms’ failure to implement effective age assurance measures cited as the main reason,” eSafety said in a statement. Australia introduced the world-first ban because of concerns about the effect …

The AI Industry Keeps Breaking the Internet

The AI Industry Keeps Breaking the Internet

Published by Sam Flores

The AI giants talk a big game about the future they’re building. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has previously written that AI could usher in a world so perfect that “many will be literally moved to tears”—a world pruned of disease, poverty, and illiberalism. “We’re now in the singularity,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said over the weekend on a podcast, and it will be “awesome for the world.” In an interview last week, Elon Musk declared that, in a decade’s time, AI will make us so prosperous that “money won’t matter.” Unfortunately, life with AI is, so far, less glorious than what’s been promised. The same day that Altman heralded the singularity, Claude users discovered something alarming: Many conversations with Anthropic’s chatbot were available on the open web, discoverable with a Google search. Those public logs and projects reportedly contained medical records, phone numbers, internal corporate documents, and cryptocurrency-wallet keys. Anthropic was quick to point out that users were responsible for the material being available online: The chatbot gives people the option to “share” their AI …

As AI content floods the internet, Pangram raises M to detect it

As AI content floods the internet, Pangram raises $9M to detect it

Published by skeptic

New York-based AI detection startup Pangram is on a mission to combat the AI slop infestation spreading across the internet, and it just raised $9 million on a bet that demand for tools that distinguish human-generated content from AI-generated text will only grow.  Pangram’s fundraise — led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Haystack, ScOp, Script Capital, and Cadenza — comes as the startup also launches its next-generation AI text detection model, Pangram 4, and an AI image detection model, Pangram Image.  Pangram says the new text detection model is over 99% accurate at finding AI-assisted writing and mixed human-AI content, plus it can more easily detect AI humanizer programs. The AI image detector is only available via research preview for now; Pangram plans to release it more widely in the coming weeks. Stanford AI and machine learning grads Max Spero and Bradley Emi launched Pangram about two years ago, after the launch of ChatGPT opened the floodgates for an internet full of bots, AI-generated SEO slop content, and what Spero calls “LLM-powered Russian disinformation …