Google’s featured snippet is pulling in an Amazon AI summary of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi manifesto Mein Kampf that calls it “a true work of art” in the latest AI-related fuckup affecting top search results.

As of writing, searching for “mein kampf positive reviews” returned a result that was pulled from an AI-generated summary of an Amazon listing’s customer reviews. So, it’s a search algorithm attempting to summarize an AI summary. The full AI summary on Amazon says: “Customers find the book easy to read and interesting. They appreciate the insightful and intelligent rants. The print looks nice and is plain. Readers describe the book as a true work of art. However, some find the content boring and grim. Opinions vary on the suspenseful content, historical accuracy, and value for money.”

As I’m writing this, Google says “An AI Overview is not available for this search,” but the Amazon AI summary was in large text directly below it, in the space where an overview would typically be, above other web results. This is what Google calls a featured snippet: "Google's automated systems select featured snippets based on how well they answer the specific search request and how helpful they are to the user," the company says. A highlight appeared, added by Google, over the phrase “easy to read and interesting.” Notably the featured snippet result for this doesn’t quote everything from Amazon’s AI, so it is itself a summary. 

Alexios Mantzarlis, the director of the security, trust, and safety initiative at Cornell Tech and formerly principal of Trust & Safety Intelligence at Google, first spotted the result.

After I contacted Google for comment (the company hasn’t responded as of writing) an AI Overview did appear, and notes that the book is “widely condemned for its hateful and racist ideology,” but that historical analyses “might point to aspects of the book that could be considered ‘positive’ from a purely literary or rhetorical perspective.”

This is, at least, a better summation of the conversation around Hitler’s book that Amazon’s AI summary gives. The AI-generated review summary on the Amazon listing also shows links to see reviews that mention specific words, like “readability,” “read pace,” and “suspenseful content.” Enough people mentioned Mein Kampf being boring that there’s a “boredom” link, too.

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The 2,067 reviews for this specific copy of Hitler’s fascist manifesto are mostly positive, and taken extremely literally, the blueprint for Nazism is easy to read and, in some sense, “interesting.” But the reviews are much more nuanced than that. Reviewing the roadmap for the Holocaust from the world’s most infamous genocidal dictator with “five stars” seems twisted, but the reviews are nuanced in a way that AI clearly doesn’t understand—but a human can. 

“Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler, should be read by everyone in the world who are interested in a world of peace, social responsibility, and worldwide cooperation,” one reviewer wrote, in an honestly pretty concerning start to a very long review. But they go on to write more that clarifies their point of view: “This evil book presents a dark vision of how to go about creating tyranny in a democratic society so that one, similar to Russia, is created. [...] Also, Hitler is an excellent writer; he is not a rambling madman writing disconnected ideas and expressing a confusing methodology. His text is easy reading, and it is a world classic that is a must read.”

Another five-star review says: “Chilling to begin reading this book and realize that these are the words written by Adolf Hitler. Read it and absorb what he says in his own words and you soon grasp what he means. [...] We are bound to repeat History if we don't understand mistakes that were made in the past.”

These aren’t “positive” reviews; most of the five-star reviews are noting the quality of the print or shipping, and not endorsing the contents of the book.

Mein Kampf has never been banned in the U.S. (unlike plenty of other books about race, gender, and sex), but Amazon did briefly ban listings of the book from its platform in 2020 before reinstating it.

Google’s AI Overview shoots itself in the algorithmic foot frequently, so it’s noteworthy that it’s sitting this result out. When it launched in May 2024 as a default feature on searches, it was an immediate and often hysterical mess, telling people it’s chill to eat glue and that they should consume one small rock a day. In January, the feature was telling users to use the most famous sex toy in the world with children for behavioral issues. These weird results are beside the bigger point: Google’s perversion of its own search function—its most popular and important product—is a deep problem that it still hasn’t fixed, and that has real repercussions for the health of the internet. At first, AI Overview was so bad Google added an option to turn it off entirely, but the company is still hanging on to the feature despite all of this. 

The Mein Kampf AI summaries are also an example of how AI is starting to eat itself online, and the cracks are showing. Studies in the last few years show that AI models are consuming AI-generated content as training data in a way that’s polluting and destroying the models themselves.

Biting Edge brings beautiful design to dogs and humans alike. Multifunctional, stylish, and fun, your furry friends may not be fully able to appreciate the sleek design and storage solutions of the Biting Edge lineup, but you will. Minimalist aesthetics meet sustainable pet design, fully made in the Europe and with high-quality, non-toxic materials. Modular and chic, Biting Edge is smart storage for everyone in the family.

Good design considers every size and shape, individual users requiring different solutions. Ergonomic concerns are essential in pet design, even the same animal requiring different height needs over time. Biting Edge has thought of it all, practical and food storage concerns top of mind for the two creators of the brand. Sisters who left their respective jobs of designer and entrepreneur, Ivana and Tamara Petruša worked for three years, funneling their passion for dogs and design into one elegant collection.

“Dogs’ and their owners’ needs were the focus of our design process,” says Biting Edge head designer and co-founder Tamara Petruša. “But it had to meet rigorous criteria that we set out both as dog owners and design professionals.” This shows clearly in all aspects of usability, aptly considering scenarios and needs that only true dog lovers would know.

Eat Prey Love is a dog feeder with airtight, integrated storage to hold food, treats, or other pet accessories. The bowls easily slide into the grooves on the front to adjust for your pet’s specific size.

By The Way is a modular wall shelf that holds your pet’s leash, toys, and additional essentials.

A large, intuitive handle for the lid and adjustable feeding bowls are just some of the features in Beauty For The Beast, a home-like structure that also includes a stainless steel dry food compartment and toy storage as well.

Bowls And Flowers is a wall-mounted dog feeder and vertical planter with an adjustable design offering endless possibilities.

One Bite Stand is a solid wood dog feeder with integrated storage on the sides to hold food or treats.

Thoughtful, clean, and made with the highest quality materials, the Biting Edge line extends beyond the pet. Anyone, regardless of how you might use the storage components and multi-functionality of the piece, could use a sweet little home for their dry goods or small items. We’re also thinking this would be great for an upscale workshop or kitchen, the Scandinavian influences allowing it to blend seamlessly with existing furniture. If the rest of our homes are carefully curated, why should pet furniture look any different?

Tamara shares that incorporating practicality and food-safety in an aesthetically pleasing design was quite a challenge: “We wanted more than just eye-catching interior gadgets. The designs had a number of variations, mainly to make them easily adjustable for different dogs and to smoothly incorporate the airtight food compartment using only materials that are both certified food-safe and environmentally friendly. The construction also had to be convenient so we can ship the product anywhere in the world.” True sustainability considers the product at every phase of its life cycle, a standard designers have an obligation to consider in a period of unstoppable consumption. Biting Edge has done their job to consider how their products will stand the test of time, offering solutions that will grow and change with families needs, years of care and love housed in ceramic and birch.

To learn more about Biting Edge and their range of pet products, please visit biting-edge.com.

Photography courtesy of Biting Edge.

Today's links

• Two weak spots in Big Tech economics: Kick 'em in the dongle.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Two weak spots in Big Tech economics (permalink)

Big Tech's astonishing scale is matched only by its farcical valuations – price-to-earnings ratios that consistently dwarf the capitalization of traditional hard-goods businesses. For example, Amazon's profit-to-earnings ratio is 37.65; Target's is only 13.34. That means that investors value every dollar Amazon brings in at three times the value they place on a dollar spent at Target.

The fact that Big Tech stocks trade at such a premium isn't merely of interest to tech investors, or even to the personal wealth managers who handle the assets of tech executives whose personal portfolios are full of their employers' stock options.

The high valuations of tech stocks don't just reflect an advantage over bricks and mortar firms – they are the advantage. If you're Target and you're hoping to hire someone who's just interviewed at Amazon, you have to beat Amazon's total compensation offer. But when Amazon makes that offer, they can pay some – maybe even most – of the offer in stock, rather than in cash.

This is a huge advantage! After all, to get dollars, both Amazon and Target have to convince you to spend money in their stores (or, in Amazon's case, with its cloud, or as a Prime sub, etc etc). Both Amazon and Target get their dollars from entities outside of the firm's four walls, and the dollars only come in when they convince someone else to do business with them.

But stock comes from inside the firm. Amazon makes new Amazon shares by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet. They don't have to convince you to buy anything in order to issue that new stock. That is their call, and their call alone.

Amazon can buy lots of things with stock – not just the labor of in-demand technical workers who command six-figure salaries. They can even buy whole companies using stock. So if Amazon and Target are bidding against one another for an anticompetitive acquisition of a key supplier or competitor, Amazon can beat Target's bid without having to spend the dollars its shareholders would like them to divert to dividends, stock buybacks, etc.

In other words, a company with a fantastic profit/earning ratio has its own money-printer that produces currency that can be used to buy labor and even acquire companies.

But why do investors value tech stocks so highly? In part, it's just circular reasoning: a company with a high stock price can beat its competitors because it has a high stock price, so I should buy its stock, which will drive up its stock price even further.

But there's more to this than self-fulfilling prophecy. The high price of tech stocks reflects the market's belief that these companies will continue to grow. If you think a company will be ten times bigger in two years, and it's only priced at three times as much as mature rivals that have stopped growing altogether, then that 300% stock premium is a bargain, because the company will have 1,000% growth in just a couple years. Tech companies have proven themselves, time and again, to be capable of posting incredible growth – think of how quickly Google went from a niche competitor to established search engines to the dominant player, with a 90% market share.

That kind of growth is enough to make anyone giddy, but it eventually runs up against the law of large numbers: doubling a small number is easy, doubling a large number is much, much harder. A search engine that's used by 90% of the world can't double its users – there just aren't enough people to sign up. They'd need to breed several billion new humans, raise them to maturity, and then convince them to be Google users.

And here's the thing: the flipside of the huge profits that can be reaped by investors who buy stocks at a premium in anticipation of growth is the certainty that you will be wiped out if you're still holding the stock when the growth halts. When Amazon stops growing, its PE ratio should fall to something like Target's, which means that its stock should decline by two thirds on that day.

Which is why Big Tech investors tend to be twitchy, hair-trigger types, easily stampeded into mass selloffs. That's what happened in 2022, when Facebook admitted to investors that it had grown more slowly than it had projected, and investors staged the largest stock selloff in history (to that point – hi, Nvidia!), wiping a quarter-trillion dollars off Meta's valuation in a day:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sergeiklebnikov/2022/02/03/stocks-plunge-after-facebooks-massive-sell-off-nasdaq-falls-37/

As Stein's Law has it: "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Growth stocks have to stop growing, eventually, and when they do, you'd better beat everyone else to the fire exit, or you're going to get crushed in the stampede.

Which is why tech companies are so obsessed with both actual growth, and stories about growth. Facebook spent tens of billions on bribes to telcos around the world, demanding that they charge extra to access non-Facebook websites and apps, in a bid to sign up "the next billion users":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/02/countries-zero-rating-have-more-expensive-wireless-broadband-countries-without-it

That wasn't just about some ideological commitment to growth – it was about the real, material advantages that a growing company has, namely, that it can substitute the stock it creates for free by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet for money that it can only get by convincing you to give your money to it.

"Facebook Zero" (as this bribery program was called) was about actual growth: finding people who weren't Facebook users and turning them into Facebook users, preferably forever (thanks to Facebook's suite of lock-in tactics that make it a digital roach motel that users check into but don't check out of):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

But plenty of the things that Big Tech gets up to are about the narrative of growth. That's why Big Tech has pumped every tech bubble of this stupid decade: metaverse, cryptocurrency, AI. These technologies have each been at the forefront of Big Tech marketing and investor communications, but not solely because they represented a market opportunity. Rather, they represented a more-or-less plausible explanation for how these companies that were on the wrong side of the law of large numbers could continue to double in size, without breeding billions of new customers to sign up for their services.

The tell – as always – comes in the way that these companies refute their critics. When critics point out that Facebook spent $1.2 billion on a metaverse product that only has 32 users:

https://futurism.com/the-byte/metaverse-decentraland-report-active-users

Or that practically no one buys anything with cryptocurrency:

https://www.mollywhite.net/annotations/latecomers-guide-to-crypto/

Not even when the government gives them free crypto and passes a law forcing merchants to accept crypto:

https://bitcoinblog.de/2024/09/02/weak-bitcoin-adoption-in-el-salvador-disappoints-the-president/

Or that hardly anyone uses AI, and what uses it does have are often low-value:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai-business/

The "narrative entrepreneurs" behind the claims of infinite growth from these technologies all have the same response: "That's what they said about the web, and yet it grew really fast! People who lacked the vision to understand the web's potential missed out. Buy [crypto|metaverse|AI] or have fun being poor!"

It's true – there were a lot of people who were blithely dismissive of the web, and they were wrong. But the fact that the web's skeptics were wrong doesn't mean that skepticism itself is foolish. People were also skeptical of Qibi, Beanie Babies, and the Segway – all of which were predicted to continue to increase in value forever and become permanently installed as significant facts in the economy. The fact that lots of people think something is stupid is not a reliable indicator that it is actually great.

So it's not just that capitalism adopts "the ideology of a tumor" in insisting that infinite growth is possible. The value in corporate claims to eternal growth is not aesthetic, it is material. If the market believes a company will grow, then that company gets to print its own money, which lets it outcompete mature rivals, which lets it grow some more.

But! When the company runs out of growth potential, the process runs in reverse. Not only do executives – whose portfolios are stuffed full of their own company's shares – stand to lose most of their net worth overnight, but once a company's stock starts to decline, it can expect to see an exodus of the key personnel who are compensated in now-worthless stock. That means that once a company hits a bad bump in the road that sets it off course, it needs to worry about losing all the skilled employees who can get it back on the road.

So growth is important, not for its own sake, but for how it affects the cost basis of companies, and thus determines their competitive outlook. But not all growth is created equal.

Remember when Facebook pissed away billions in a bid to capture "the next billion users"? Those users – people from poor countries in the global south – were not as valuable to Facebook as its US customers. The news that sparked a $250 billion, one-day selloff of Facebook shares wasn't merely about anemic growth – it was specifically about anemic growth in the USA.

American customers are worth more than other users to Big Tech – that's true even of users from other populous countries, and of users from other wealthy countries. Norway is rich as hell, but each Norwegian Facebook user is worth pennies on the kroner compared to American users. And there are brazilians of people in South America, but they're worth even less per capita than Norwegians are. Even the whole EU, with its 500m+ relatively wealthy consumers, is only worth a fraction of the US market.

Why is the American market so prized by Big Tech? Because it the only country in the world at the center of a Venn diagram with three overlapping circles. America is the only country in the world that is:

a) populous;

b) wealthy; and

c) totally lacking in legal privacy protections.

The US Congress last updated American consumer privacy law in 1988, when the Video Privacy Protection Act was passed to protect Americans from the high-tech threat of…video store clerks leaking your rental history to the newspapers. Despite the bewildering, obvious, serious privacy risks that have emerged since Die Hard was in theaters, Congress has done nothing to extend Americans' consumer privacy rights.

There are other rich countries where privacy law sucks, but they are small countries with few people. There are extremely populous poor countries with shitty privacy laws, but they're poor. Tech has to steal the private data of dozens of those people to make as much money as they can get from selling the data of just one American. And there are other rich, populous countries – like Germany, say – but those countries actually defend the privacy of the people who live there, and so the revenue tech gets from each of those users is even lower than the RPU for the undefended poor people of the global south.

America is exceptional in that it represents the one place where there are lots of wealthy people who are totally defenseless. We're an all-you-can-eat buffet for the privacy-annihilating voyeurs of Silicon Valley.

These are the two dirty secrets of Big Tech's economics. These companies are reliant on the fragile narrative of infinite growth, and that narrative isn't merely about global growth, but it is particularly and especially about growth in the USA.

Tech's power comes from an implausible story of discovering an endless stream of Americans to sign up and screw over. That story is extremely load-bearing – so much so that by the instant at which the first crack appears, collapse is only moments away. And boy, are there cracks:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/power-cut/

(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)

• The Populist Revolt Against Oligarchy Begins https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-the-populist-revolt

• DISCOUNTED HOTEL DEALS ANNOUNCED FOR HOPE_16 https://www.2600.com/content/discounted-hotel-deals-announced-hope16

• Beatrice Twice Queen of Hungary https://www.exurbe.com/beatrice-twice-queen-of-hungary/

Object permanence (permalink)

#20yrsago EU software patents pass in the teeth of decency and democracy https://web.archive.org/web/20050310004103/http://wiki.ffii.org/Cons050307En

#20yrsago Europe’s “Broadcast Flag” dangers https://web.archive.org/web/20050305062313/http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21595

#20yrsago Koster’s keynote from Game Developers Conference https://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2005/03/raphs_keynote.html

#20yrsago Sterling on the counterfeits of Belgrade https://web.archive.org/web/20050223100218/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/view.html?pg=4

#15yrsago Ubisoft DRM servers go down, punishing customers but not pirates https://www.escapistmagazine.com/Ubisoft-DRM-Authentication-Servers-Go-Down/

#10yrsago Albuquerque PD encrypts videos before releasing them in records request https://www.techdirt.com/2015/03/06/albuquerque-police-dept-complies-with-records-request-releasing-password-protected-videos-not-password/

#10yrsago Judge who invented Ferguson’s debtor’s prisons owes $170K in tax https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/06/ferguson-judge-owes-unpaid-taxes-ronald-brockmeyer

#10yrsago Hartford, CT says friends can’t room together unless some of them are servants https://www.courant.com/2015/02/17/hartford-upholds-action-against-scarborough-street-family/

#10yrsago Improving the estimate of US police killings https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-new-estimate-of-killings-by-police-is-way-higher-and-still-too-low/

#5yrsago The savior of Waterstones will turn every B&N into an indie https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/07/bookselling-is-back/#dauntbn

#5yrsago Compromise threatens Intel's chip-within-a-chip https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/07/bookselling-is-back/#csme

#5yrsago Gig economy drivers won't get sick-pay if they have covid-19 symptoms https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/07/bookselling-is-back/#covid-gig

#5yrsago Audio from last night's Canada Reads event in Kelowna https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/07/bookselling-is-back/#kelowna

#1yrago 1900s futurism https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/07/the-gernsback-continuum/#wheres-my-jetpack

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Virtual: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It (Indiana University), Mar 7
  https://events.iu.edu/mediaiub/event/1783095-with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshitti

• Austin: Reclaim, Reframe, Reimagine, Mar 7
  https://schedule.sxsw.com/2025/events/PP150498

• Austin: EFF-Austin Salon, Mar 7
  https://www.grotto101.com/effaustinsxsalon2025/

• Austin: Tensions in Creative Labor & Generative AI, Mar 8
  https://schedule.sxsw.com/2025/events/PP149418

• Austin: The Next 25: A Conversation About the Future of Open, Mar 8
  https://www.classy.org/event/creative-commons'-open-house-for-an-open-future/e663144

• Austin: Fediverse House, Mar 10
  https://about.flipboard.com/fediverse-house/

• Austin: Picks and Shovels at First Light Books, Mar 10
  https://thethirdplace.is/event/cory-doctorow-picks-shovels-1

• Burbank: Picks and Shovels with Wil Wheaton, Mar 13
  https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3257/Thu%2C_Mar_13th_6_pm%3A_Pick_%26_Shovel%3A_A_Martin_Hench_Novel_HB.html#/

• Europa Park: Cloudfest, Mar 17-20
  https://cloudfest.link/

• San Diego: Picks and Shovels at Mysterious Galaxy, Mar 24
  https://www.mystgalaxy.com/32425Doctorow

• Virtual: Picks and Shovels at Imagine! Belfast, Mar 24
  https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cory-doctorow-in-conversation-with-alan-meban-tickets-1106421399189

• Chicago: Picks and Shovels with Peter Sagal, Apr 2
  https://exileinbookville.com/events/44853

• Chicago: ABA Techshow, Apr 3
  https://www.techshow.com/

• Bloomington: Picks and Shovels at Morgenstern, Apr 4
  https://morgensternbooks.com/event/2025-04-04/author-event-cory-doctorow

• Pittsburgh: PyCon, May 16
  https://us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/

• PDX: Teardown 2025, Jun 20-22
  https://www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/portland-2025

• PDX: Picks and Shovels at Barnes and Noble, Jun 20
  https://stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062183697-0

• New Orleans: DeepSouthCon63, Oct 10-12, 2025
  http://www.contraflowscifi.org/

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Democracy Now
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKV5GB6dN3o

• The Culture Show
  https://www.wgbh.org/podcasts/the-culture-show/february-20-2025-chelsea-handler-cory-doctorow-and-the-red-bull-heavy-metal-contest-at-boston-city-hall

• Picks and Shovels with Yanis Varoufakis and David Moscrop (Jacobin)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkIDep7Z4LM

Latest books (permalink)

• • Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books (permalink)

• Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2026

• Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• The Memex Method, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Status: second pass edit underway (readaloud)

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

• Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2025

Latest podcast: With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It https://craphound.com/news/2025/02/26/with-great-power-came-no-responsibility-how-enshittification-conquered-the-21st-century-and-how-we-can-overthrow-it/

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

ISSN: 3066-764X

Ex-OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever’s new startup Safe Superintelligence just closed another funding round. For $2 billion, Sutskever promises not to release any product at all until SSI has developed “super intelligence.” Nice work if you can get it. [WSJ, archive]

Sutskever was part of the OpenAI board who tried to fire Sam Altman in late 2023 for being a serial dissembler they couldn’t trust. But Sam had the money on his side — venture capital considers lying a job requirement — and was reinstated.

Sutskever did nothing for six months, then left OpenAI in May 2024 to found SSI. In SSI’s October 2024 funding round, it scored $1 billion — which was 20% of all first-round venture funding in 2024.

At least SSI isn’t just trying to make LLMs bigger. Sutskever has said that scaling is clapped-out. He tells the WSJ that SSI has found a “different mountain to climb.” No, you can’t see it. [SSI]

Eliezer Yudkowsky of LessWrong, the founder of AI doomerism as we know it, has long advocated a version of “science” that operates in secret. MIRI, his AI charity, notoriously releases almost no visible work. [LessWrong, 2008]

SSI has learned from the AI doomers and gone as cultist as it can. SSI’s 20 employees are discouraged from mentioning SSI on their LinkedIn. The company looks for “promising technologists whom Sutskever can mentor” — rather than experienced people who’ve grown self-respect. [CalcalisTech]

A number of AI video generators, mostly released by Chinese companies, lack the most basic guardrails that prevent people from generating nonconsensual nudity and pornography, and are already widely used for that exact purpose in online communities dedicated to creating and sharing that type of content.

A 404 Media investigation into these AI video generators show that the same kind of ecosystem that’s developed around AI image generators and nonconsensual content has already been replicated around AI video generators, meaning that only a single image of someone is now required to create a short nonconsensual adult video of them. Most of these videos are created by abusing mainstream tools from companies with millions of dollars in venture capital funding, and are extremely easy to produce, requiring only a reference image and a text prompt describing a sexual act. Other tools use more complicated workflows that require more technical expertise, but are based on technology produced by some of the biggest tech companies in the world. The latter are free to use, and have attracted a large community of hobbyists who produced guides for these workflows, as well as tools and models that make those videos easier to produce. 

“[These AI video generators] need to put in safeguards to prevent the prompting and creation of NCII [nonconsensual intimate images],” Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley and one of the world’s leading experts on synthetic media, told me in an email. “OpenAI’s DALL-E, for example, has some pretty good semantic guardrails on the user prompt input, and image filtering on the image output to prevent the widespread misuse of their image generator. This type of output filtering is relatively standard now and used in many social media platforms like Facebook/Instagram/YouTube to limit the uploading of NSFW content.”

The most popular tool I’ve seen people use to create nonconsensual intimate videos is Pixverse, which is made by a Beijing-based company called AIsphere and founded by Wang Changhu, the former “head of vision technology” at TikTok owner ByteDance. People who create nonconsensual content use different AI video generators for different purposes, and they commonly use Pixverse to create videos that make female celebrities look as if they’re taking their tops off. 

404 Media is not sharing the exact prompts that produce these videos, but they use the same loophole we’ve seen multiple times with other generative AI tools, most notably Microsoft’s AI image generator Designer, which was used to create nude images of Taylor Swift viewed by millions of people on X. Essentially, the prompts describe a sexual act or nudity without using any explicit terms that developers use to flag prompts their tool shouldn’t generate. I’ve seen this method used across a variety of generative AI tools since the Taylor Swift incident in January of 2024, but generally developers have had more strict guardrails that prevent this type of abuse since. But a new crop of AI video generators seem remarkably lax in this respect. 

In addition to not having strong guardrails on what kind of prompts these AI video generators will accept, it appears AI video generators are easier to abuse because of their image-to-video feature. This allows users to feed a single still image to the AI generator, then type a text prompt in order to animate that image how they like. With Pixverse, people took images of celebrities from the red carpet, social media, and other sources, and then typed a prompt in which they described the celebrity undressing. In other instances, users first AI generated a nonconsensual explicit image of a real person, then fed that AI-generated image to the AI video generators to animate them. In fact, many of the nonconsensual AI videos I’ve seen are reusing the same Taylor Swift images that went viral in 2024, or other nonconsensual explicit images of other celebrities created with Microsoft’s Designer before the company introduced stronger guardrails. 

Judging by the hundreds of videos I’ve seen, it appears certain AI video generators are better at producing specific types of nonconsensual videos. For example, while Pixverse is often used to make videos in which women take their tops off, Hailuo, an AI video generator from a Chinese company called Minimax, is often used to make videos of women who turn around and shake their bare ass at the camera. Hailuo is also used to make videos where two people can be made to kiss, an increasingly popular use of AI video generators, and a feature that’s been advertised on Instagram. KlingAI, from the Chinese company Kuaishou, has been used to animate nonconsensual AI generated nude images, or videos that drench the person in the video with white liquid that looks like semen, but people in this community say that there’s been a “purge” on Kling that now makes it harder to produce these videos. 

The community that’s dedicated to making these videos and sharing prompts that bypass guardrails tends to move from AI tool to AI tool as they discover new vulnerabilities or as companies close loopholes. It’s easy to identify which AI video generator they are using because sometimes they either say so or share instructions and screenshots of the app’s interface. In many cases, the videos they produce include a watermark with the AI generator’s branding. 

At the time of writing, many users have flocked to Pika, a US-based AI video generator. People in this community have discovered that Pika will easily produce very graphic nonconsensual videos, including videos of celebrities performing oral sex. Again, all users need in order to produce these videos is a single image of a real person and a text prompt.

“Pika is very liberal with both image uploaded and prompt,” one user in a Telegram community for sharing nonconsensual content, who uploaded nonconsensual content created with Pika, said. Another user, who shared a video created with Pika that animates a graphic image of a female celebrity, suggested that if users’ prompts get blocked, they can just keep trying to generate the video over and over again until Pika produces the video. I was able to produce a nonconsensual video with Pika using the instructions shared in this community on my first try.

Users can also produce this content with these apps on their phones. Pixverse, Kling, Hailuo, and Pika are also available via the Apple App Store. Pixverse, Kling, and Hailuo are available via the Google Play Store. 

Apple did not respond to my request for comment. Google acknowledged my request for comment but did not provide one in time for publication. As my previous reporting has shown, both companies have struggled to deal with the “dual use” nature of these apps, which seem innocent on the app stores, but can also be used to produce nonconsensual content that violate the companies’ policies. 

“While the lewd photos and videos may be fake, the harms to victims of these AI-generated deepfakes are very real. My DEFIANCE Act would finally give victims the ability to hold perpetrators accountable, and it’s time for Congress to pass it into law,” Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told me in an email. In February, Durbin sent Mark Zuckerberg a letter asking why the company can’t get a handle on AI nudify ads being promoted on Meta’s platforms. In December, other members of Congress pushed the CEOs of Apple and Google to explain their role in hosting these apps on their app stores as well. 

“For AI services that refuse to put in reasonable guardrails, Apple and Google should remove them from their app-store,” Farid said. “And, if these services utilize any financial services (Visa, Mastercard, Amex, PayPal), these financial services should drop these bad actors thus crippling their ability to monetize.”

The vast majority of people who AI generate nonconsensual videos use these types of apps because they are free or cheap, easy to access, and easy to use. But users with more technical expertise and access to powerful GPUs are now using open AI models produced by tech giants to make more believable videos without any restriction. 

The most popular open AI video generation model in this community is HunyuanVideo, which was developed by the Chinese tech giant Tencent. Tencent published a paper introducing HunyuanVideo on December 3, 2024, along with Github and HuggingFace pages that explain how it works and where users could download the model and run and modify it on their own. What followed was an accelerated version of what we’ve seen with the evolution of Stable Diffusion, an open AI image generation model: people immediately started to modify HunyuanVideo to create models designed to produce hardcore porn and the likeness of specific real people, ranging from the biggest movie stars in the world to lesser known Instagram influencers and YouTubers. 

These models are primarily distributed on Civitai, a site where users share customized AI models, which in recent months significantly grew its AI video category and has a category dedicated to HunyuanVideo models. Civitai’s site shows that some of the most downloaded HunyuanVideo models are “HunyuanVideo POV Missionary” (18,000 downloads), “Titty Drop Hunyuan Video LoRA” (14,300 downloads), and “HunyuanVideo Cumshot” (9,000 downloads), each promoted with a short video showing the act described in their title. Some of the other most popular models are of celebrities like Elizabeth Olsen, Natalie Portman, and Pokimane. 

When asked how he made AI generated pornographic videos of specific female YouTubers and Twitch streamers, one of the most prolific creators in a Telegram community for sharing nonconsensual content told others in that channel that they use HunyuanVideo, and in one instance linked to a specific model hosted on Civitai that’s been modified to create videos with the likeness of a specific female Twitch streamer. 

Since Tencent released HunyuanVideo in early December, hundreds of custom HunyuanVideo AI models have been shared on Civitai, the most popular of which are either dedicated to specific celebrities or sexual acts.

As I reported on February 27, Wan 2.1, another open AI video generation model developed by Chinese tech giant Alibaba, was also immediately adopted by this community to create pornography. It took about 24 hours since Wan 2.1 was released on February 24 for modified models like “Better Titfuck” to start popping up on Civitai. 

Previous 404 Media stories about Civitai have shown that it is widely used by people who create nonconsensual content. Civitai allows users to share AI models that have been modified to produce the likeness of real people and models that have been modified to produce pornography, but does not allow users to share media or models of nonconsensual pornography. However, as 404 Media’s previous stories have shown, there’s nothing preventing Civitai users from downloading the models and using them to produce nonconsensual content off-site. 

“Please note that our community guidelines strictly prohibit any requests related to pornography, violence, illegal activities, or anything involving celebrities. These types of requests will be rejected in accordance with our policies,” a representative from Minimax, which makes Hailuo, told me after I reached out for comment. The company did not respond to a question about what it’s doing to stop people from making nonconsensual content, despite it being against its policies. 

“HunyuanVideo is an open-source project available to developers and the community,” a Tencent spokesperson told me in an email. “Our acceptable use policies prohibit the creation of illegal, unlawful, or universally undesirable content. We encourage the safe and fair use of HunyuanVideo and do not condone the misuse of its open-source tools or features.”

Tencent also said that it’s aware that people have used its software to create specialized models to produce illegal or prohibited content, which is outside its intended and permissible use of HunyuanVideo.

KlingAI maker Kuaishou, Pixverse maker AIsphere, and Alibaba did not respond to a request for comment.

Within southwest Arkansas’s Garvan Woodland Gardens, a four-story communal treehouse welcomes visitors to the Evans Children’s Adventure Garden. Designed by modus studio and constructed in 2018, the whimsical yet contemporary structure is embraced by pine and oak trees, connecting visitors to the surrounding woods via elevated walkways and lookouts.

“This unique structure is a defining small project for modus,” the team says, sharing that the work draws on their own childhood experiences in the region. They add that “it is easy to take for granted our strong connection to the creeks, forests, insects, and animals of Arkansas. However, many children in the modern world are unfortunately disconnected from this type of play.”

The studio took dendrology, the study of trees and wooded plants, as a starting point for the overall form and the way people interact with the space as they move along its passageways and stairwells.

The curving screen encasing the structure is composed of 113 fins made from locally sourced Southern yellow pine. Airy slats and metal screens redolent of branches let the light and breeze filter through, maintaining visitors’ connection to the surrounding Ouachita Forest from numerous vantage points.

Designers conceived of a space that would refocus people’s attention on the natural wonders of the canopy and allow visitors to climb higher and see farther. “The tree house uses a rich visual and tactile environment to stimulate the mind and body and strengthen connections back to the natural world while accommodating the needs of all users,” the firm says.

modus studio was recently selected to exhibit in the U.S. Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. If you’re in Arkansas, you can also see Coler Mountain Bike Preserve, where the team designed a series of pavilions and dynamic bridges. Find more on the studio’s website. (via Plain Magazine)

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Visitors Commune with the Forest Canopy in a Four-Story Treehouse in Arkansas appeared first on Colossal.