I got a tip yesterday from an anonymous US army officer that the US government was about to break new ground in authoritarian dumbassery. The officer had logged into his work computer in the morning, and got a popup:
GenAI.mil. Victory belongs to those who embrace real innovation, not the antiquated systems of a bygone era. It’s time to deliver efficient, decisive results for the warfighter. I want YOU to use AI.
Then he clicked on the “close” button and it played a video from defense secretary Pete Hegseth, telling you how much AI is the future: [Twitter]
The future of American warfare is here. And it’s spelled AI.
… At the click of a button, AI models on GenAI can be utilized to conduct deep research, format documents, and even analyze video or imagery at unprecedented speed.
The popup also had a link to genai.mil/launch — which didn’t work.
GenAI.mil was giving an error message yesterday, but now has a nice splash page saying it’s for internal use only and you should join the army for access.
The logo, like all chatbot logos, looks like a butthole. The stylised text font looks somewhere between the ‘70s NASA worm logo and one of the Starship Troopers movie fonts. Hegseth is the guy who saw Starship Troopers and didn’t realise it was a satire of guys like him.
The actual chatbot is an instance of Google Gemini, running on a secured cloud with restricted access for unclassified work. The press release is titled “The War Department Unleashes AI on New GenAI.mil Platform” and has a lot of Hegseth talking like a game trailer: [press release]
Gemini for Government is the embodiment of American AI excellence, placing unmatched analytical and creative power directly into the hands of the world’s most dominant fighting force.
… Their achievement directly embodies the Department’s core tenets of reviving the warrior ethos, rebuilding American military capabilities, and re-establishing deterrence through technological dominance and uncompromising grit.
Google’s press release was a bit less bombastic and somewhat longer on specific claimed uses: [press release]
summarizing policy handbooks, generating project-specific compliance checklists, extracting key terms from statements of work, and creating detailed risk assessments for operational planning.
There’s one small problem you or I might spot immediately — chatbots are most famous for making stuff up. Chatbots don’t summarise text — they shorten it. Chatbots miss important details, especially anything unusual, and they reverse meanings.
That’s tolerable precisely as long as quality doesn’t matter. If you’re absolutely sure nobody will read this document, AI is just the thing.
But this is the military, so it’s not like details matter or lives are on the line if you’re out in the field and get a sheet of instructions that are completely detached from reality.
Just as long as the AI industry gets the golden prize, the final stage of capitalism — a defense contract!
If anyone goes to trial for, say, war crimes? The chatbot told me. I was just following orders. I hear that one works every time.
Google suspended a mobile app developer’s accounts after he uploaded AI training data to his Google Drive. Unbeknownst to him, the widely used dataset, which is cited in a number of academic papers and distributed via an academic file sharing site, contained child sexual abuse material. The developer reported the dataset to a child safety organization, which eventually resulted in the dataset’s removal, but he claims Google’s ban has been "devastating.”
A message from Google said his account “has content that involves a child being sexually abused or exploited. This is a severe violation of Google's policies and might be illegal.”
Pretty sure Google and the other tech companies make money from CSAM on their services, but hey, they’re the real victims when that happens. Can’t really check all the stuff the products upload every day, right? That would cost money.
404 Media is making a print zine about the surveillance tactics used by ICE, and the ways people are resisting this technology. It will be 16 pages and printed on a risograph printer by a printshop in Los Angeles. It contains both reworked versions of our best reporting on ICE and some new articles for the zine. It will be available at the beginning of January.
I have been somewhat obsessed with making a print product for the last year or so, and we’re really excited to try this experiment. If it goes well, we hope to make more of our journalism available in print. We are doing this in part because we were invited to help throw a benefit concert by our friends at heaven2nite in Los Angeles on January 4, with the proceeds going to the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), an LA-based nonprofit providing support to Dreamers, immigrant families, and low-wage workers in California. We are going to be giving away copies of the zine at that concert and are selling copies on our Shopify page to ship in early January.
Why are we doing this? Well, zines are cool, and print media is cool. We have joked about wanting to print out our blogs and hand them out door-to-door or staple them to lamp posts. Handing out zines at a concert or sending them to you in the mail will get the job done, too.
We have spent the last two-and-a-half years trying to build something more sustainable and more human in a world and on an internet that feels more automated and more artificial than ever. We have shown that it’s possible for a small team of dedicated reporters to do impactful, groundbreaking accountability journalism on the companies and powers that are pushing us to a more inhumane world without overwhelmingly focusing on appeasing social media and search algorithms. Nevertheless, we still spend a lot of our time trying to figure out how to reach new audiences using social media and search, without making ourselves feel totally beholden to it. Alongside that, we put a huge amount of effort into convincing people who find our stuff on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube or Reddit (and Bluesky and Mastodon) to follow our work on platforms where we can directly reach them without an algorithmic intermediary. That’s why we focus so much on building our own website, our own direct email newsletters, our own full-text RSS feeds, and RSS-based podcast feeds.
This has gone well, but we have seen our colleagues at The Onion and other independent media outlets bring back the printed word, which, again, is cool, but also comes with other benefits. Print can totally sidestep Big Tech’s distribution mechanisms. It can be mailed, sold in stores, and handed out at concerts. It can be read and passed to a friend, donated to a thrift store and discovered by someone killing time on a weekend, or tossed in a recycling bin and rescued by a random passerby. It is a piece of physical media that can be organically discovered in the real world.
Print does come with some complications, most notably it is significantly more expensive to make and distribute a print product than it is to make a website, and it’s also a slower medium (duh). Ghost, our website and email infrastructure, also doesn’t have a native way to integrate a print subscription into a membership. This is a long way of saying that the only way this first print experiment makes sense is if we sell it as a separate product. Subscribers at the Supporter level will get a discount; we can’t yet include print in your existing subscription for all sorts of logistical and financial reasons, but we will eventually make a PDF of the zine available to subscribers. If you're a subscriber, your code is at the bottom of this post.
Some other details: Our cover art was made by Veri Alvarez, a super talented LA-based artist whose work you can find here. The interior of the magazine was designed and laid out by our old friend Ernie Smith, who runs the amazing Tedium newsletter and who was willing to unretire from his days of laying out newspapers to help us with this. We are printing it at Punch Kiss Press, a DIY risograph studio here in Los Angeles. For those unfamiliar, risograph printing is sort of like silkscreening on paper, where you print one color at a time and layer them on top of each other to get very cool color mixing effects.
We did not originally set out to spend most of the last year reporting on ICE. But we have watched the agency grow from an already horrifying organization into a deportation force that is better funded than most militaries. We have seen full-scale occupations of Los Angeles and Chicago, daily raids playing out in cities, towns, and workplaces across the country, and people getting abducted while they are at work, shopping, or walking down the street.
As this has played out, we have focused on highlighting the ways that the Trump administration has used the considerable power of the federal government and the vast amounts of information it has to empower ICE’s surveillance machine. Technologies and databases created during earlier administrations for one governmental purpose (collecting taxes, for example) have been repurposed as huge caches of data now used to track and detain undocumented immigrants. Privacy protections and data sharing walls between federal agencies have been knocked down. Technologies that were designed for local law enforcement or were created to make rich people feel safer, like license plate tracking cameras, have grown into huge surveillance dragnets that can be accessed by ICE. Surveillance tools that have always been concerning—phone hacking malware, social media surveillance software, facial recognition algorithms, and AI-powered smart glasses—are being used against some of society’s most vulnerable people. There is not a ton of reason for optimism, but in the face of an oppressive force, people are fighting back, and we tried to highlight their work in the zine, too.
Again, this is an experiment, so we can’t commit at the moment to a print subscription, future zines, future magazines, or anything like that. But we are hopeful that people like it and that we can figure out how to do more print products and to do them more often. If you have a connection at a newspaper printing press, a place that prints magazines or catalogs, or otherwise have expertise in printmaking, design, layout, or other things that deal with the printed word, please get in touch, it will help us as we explore the feasibility of doing future print products (jason@404media.co).
We are also hoping that groups who work with immigrants throughout the United States will be interested in this; if that’s you please email me (jason@404media.co). We are also exploring translating the zine into Spanish.
If you are a subscriber, your discount code is below this:
On a recent immigration raid, a Border Patrol agent wore a pair of Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, with the privacy light clearly on signaling he was recording the encounter, which agents are not permitted to do, according to photos and videos of the incident shared with 404 Media.
Previously when 404 Media covered Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials’ use of Meta’s Ray-Bans, it wasn’t clear if the officials were using them to record raids because the recording lights were not on in any of the photos seen by 404 Media. In the new material from Charlotte, North Carolina, during the recent wave of immigration enforcement, the recording light is visibly illuminated.
That is significant because CBP says it does not allow employees to use personal recording devices. CBP told 404 Media it does not have an arrangement with Meta, indicating this official was wearing personally-sourced glasses.
Instagram is generating headlines for users’ Instagram posts without their knowledge, seemingly in an attempt to get those posts to rank higher in Google Search results.
I first noticed Instagram-generated headlines thanks to a Bluesky post from the author Jeff VanderMeer. Last week, VanderMeer posted a video to Instagram of a bunny eating a banana. VanderMeer didn’t include a caption or comment with the post, but noticed that it appeared in Google Search results with the following headline: “Meet the Bunny Who Loves Eating Bananas, A Nutritious Snack For Your Pet.”
Another Instagram post from the Groton Public Library in Massachusetts—an image of VanderMeer’s Annihilation book cover promoting a group reading—also didn’t include a caption or comment, but appears on Google Search results with the following headline “Join Jeff VanderMeer on a Thrilling Beachside Adventure with Mesta …”
I’ve confirmed that Instagram is generating headlines in a similar style for other users without their knowledge. One cosplayer who wished to remain anonymous posted a video of herself showing off costumes in various locations. The same post appeared on Google with a headline about discovering real-life locations to do cosplaying in Seattle. This Instagram mentioned the city in a hashtag but did not write anything resembling that headline.
Google told me that it is not generating the headlines, and that it’s pulling the text directly from Instagram. Meta acknowledged my request for comment but did not respond in time for publication. I’ll update this story if I hear back.
“I hate it,” VanderMeer told me in an email. “If I post content, I want to be the one contextualizing it, not some third party. It's especially bad because they're using the most click-bait style of headline generation, which is antithetical to how I try to be on social—which is absolutely NOT calculated, but organic, humorous, and sincere. Then you add in that this is likely an automated AI process, which means unintentionally contributing to theft and a junk industry, and that the headlines are often inaccurate and the summary descriptions below the headline even worse... basically, your post through search results becomes shitty spam.”
“I would not write mediocre text like that and it sounds as if it was auto-generated at-scale with an LLM. This becomes problematic when the headline or description advertises someone in a way that is not how they would personally describe themselves,” Brian Dang, another cosplayer who goes by @mrdangphotos and noticed Instagram generated headlines for his posts, told me. We don’t know how exactly Instagram is generating these headlines.
By using Google's Rich Result Test tool, which shows what Google sees for any site, I saw that these headlines appeared under the <title></title> tags for those post’s Instagram pages.
“It appears that Instagram is only serving that title to Google (and perhaps other search bots),” Jon Henshaw, a search engine optimization (SEO) expert and editor of Coywolf, told me in an email. “I couldn't find any reference to it in the pre-rendered or rendered HTML in Chrome Dev Tools as a regular visitor on my home network. It does appear like Instagram is generating titles and doing it explicitly for search engines.”
When I looked at the code for these pages, I saw that Instagram was also generating long descriptions for posts without the user’s knowledge, like: “Seattle’s cosplay photography is a treasure trove of inspiration for fans of the genre. Check out these real-life cosplay locations and photos taken by @mrdangphotos. From costumes to locations, get the scoop on how to recreate these looks and capture your own cosplay moments in Seattle.”
Neither the generated headlines or the descriptions are the alternative text (alt text) that Instagram automatically generates for accessibility reasons. To create alt text, Instagram uses computer vision and artificial intelligence to automatically create a description of the image that people who are blind or have low-vision can access with a screen reader. Sometimes the alt text Instagram generates appears under the headline in Google Search results. At other times, generated description copy that is not the alt text appears in the same place. We don’t know how exactly Instagram is creating these headlines, but it could use similar technology.
“The larger implications are terrible—search results could show inaccurate results that are reputationally damaging or promulgating a falsehood that actively harms someone who doesn't drill down,” VanderMeer said. “And we all know we live in a world where often people are just reading the headline and first couple of paragraphs of an article, so it's possible something could go viral based on a factual misunderstanding.”
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the rollout of GenAI.mil today in a video posted to X. To hear Hegseth tell it, the website is “the future of American warfare.” In practice, based on what we know so far from press releases and Hegseth’s posturing, GenAI.mil appears to be a custom chatbot interface for Google Gemini that can handle some forms of sensitive—but not classified—data.
Hegseth’s announcement was full of bold pronouncements about the future of killing people. These kinds of pronouncements are typical of the second Trump administration which has said it believes the rush to “win” AI is an existential threat on par with the invention of nuclear weapons during World War II.
Hegseth, however, did not talk about weapons in his announcement. He talked about spreadsheets and videos. “At the click of a button, AI models on GenAI can be used to conduct deep research, format documents, and even analyze video or imagery at unprecedented speed,” Hegseth said in the video on X. Office work, basically. “We will continue to aggressively field the world’s best technology to make our fighting force more lethal than ever before.”
Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s under secretary for research and engineering, also stressed how important GenAI would be to the process of killing people in a press release about the site’s launch.
“There is no prize for second place in the global race for AI dominance. We are moving rapidly to deploy powerful AI capabilities like Gemini for Government directly to our workforce. AI is America's next Manifest Destiny, and we're ensuring that we dominate this new frontier,” Michael said in the press release, referencing the 19th century American belief that God had divinely ordained Americans to settle the west at the same time he announced a new chatbot.
The press release says Google Cloud's Gemini for Government will be the first instance available on the internal platform. It’s certified for Controlled Unclassified Information, the release states, and claims that because it’s web grounded with Google Search–meaning it’ll pull from Google search results to answer queries–that makes it “reliable” and “dramatically reduces the risk of AI hallucinations.” As we’ve covered, because Google search results are also consuming AI content that contains errors and AI-invented data from across the web, it’s become nearly unusable for regular consumers and researchers alike.
During a press conference about the rollout this morning, Michael told reporters that GenAI.mil would soon incorporate other AI models and would one day be able to handle classified as well as sensitive data. As of this writing, GenAI’s website is down.
“For the first time ever, by the end of this week, three million employees, warfighters, contractors, are going to have AI on their desktop, every single one,” Michael told reporters this morning, according to Breaking Defense. They’ll “start with three million people, start innovating, using building, asking more about what they can do, then bring those to the higher classification level, bringing in different capabilities,” he said.
The second Trump administration has done everything in its power to make it easier for the people in Silicon Valley to push AI on America and the world. It has done this, in part, by framing it as a national security issue. Trump has signed several executive orders aimed at cutting regulations around data centers and the construction of nuclear power plants. He’s threatened to sign another that would block states from passing their own AI regulations. Each executive order and piece of proposed legislation threatens that losing the AI race would mean making America weak and vulnerable and erode national security.
The country’s tech moguls are rushing to build datacenters and nuclear power plants while the boom time continues. Nevermind that people do not want to live next to datacenters for a whole host of reasons. Nevermind that tech companies are using faulty AIs to speed up the construction of nuclear power plants. Nevermind that the Pentagon already had a proprietary LLM it had operated since 2024.
“We are pushing all of our chips in on artificial intelligence as a fighting force. The Department is tapping into America's commercial genius, and we're embedding generative AI into our daily battle rhythm,’ Hegseth said in the press release about GenAI.mil. "AI tools present boundless opportunities to increase efficiency, and we are thrilled to witness AI's future positive impact across the War Department."
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