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Resident of the world, traveling the road of life
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Claude is exposing a wealth of users’ chats and creations in Google search results, meaning anyone can dig through conversations or other material that people used Claude to make but may not have realized were publicly available for strangers to see.
Slime Dot, a young R&B artist from Las Vegas, currently has over 100,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. In an interview with GQ in May, after sharing an image of herself posing with Drake on Instagram, Slime Dot directly denied accusations that she was an “AI artist,” saying “The truth doesn’t matter these days. People are always gonna try to explain something they don’t fully understand and believe what they want.” GQ originally credulously published the interview and said it was “debunking the AI rumors.” Eventually, GQ added a note to the end of the article conceding Slime Dot was an AI avatar, but said the “talent behind the music remains undeniable.”
This confusion could have been avoided if Spotify had done what many of its users and critics have been begging it to do since AI music generators like Suno and Udio made it trivial to flood the internet with AI music. Spotify could flag Slime Dot and other AI-generated music on its platform as such. Other platforms, like YouTube, already do this.
Since Spotify doesn’t do that, users can visit SoullessMusic.com, a database for “AI artists hiding on Spotify. No bands, no studios, no soul, just machines and melody.” There, Slime Dot is listed as “almost certainly AI” based on an analysis of three of the tracks and the fact that Slime Dot released such a large number of tracks in a short period of time. Alternatively, users could go to SlopTracker, where they can upload files or copy/paste links to Spotify tracks to run them through a tool which will tell them, with varying degrees of confidence, whether a song was AI-generated or not. SlopTracker found that Slime Dot’s track “Fully” was 95 percent likely to be AI generated by Suno.
“I didn't know what's AI and what's not,” Graeme Fulton, who created SoullessMusic, told me. “And then I'm on Instagram Reels and I see loads of artists unhappy saying some artist has popped up with their song and just copied it. And there's loads of different cases where they [AI artists] would copy an artist's look and appearance […] sort of just stealing from artists.”
Last year, I wrote a story about an exceptionally bad example of what Fulton is talking about. A scammer used Spotify to publish AI-generated music under the name of a real, dead musician, seemingly in an attempt to syphon money from his popularity via streams. After I published that story I heard from several (living) artists who said the same thing happened to them. A similar case involving a Danish jazz musician was covered by Danish publications in April.
Another reader recently told me about a popular Spotify artist that was publishing hours of Iranian jazz every week. The channel, Qajar Jazz, which popped up in December of last year, has 29,579 monthly listeners, gained more popularity after the start of the U.S. war with Iran and the channel making vague allusions to resilience and preserving culture in video descriptions and comments on YouTube. Unlike Spotify, Qajar Jazz videos on YouTube are labeled as being AI-generated in the fine print, though it’s unclear if the channel tagged itself as such or if YouTube did. Both SoullessMusic and SlopTracker detect it as being AI generated.
Qajar Jazz did not respond to a request for comment.
Many of the YouTube comments on Qajar Jazz videos indicate that people think the music is made by real people. In addition to creating a database of AI generated music on Spotify, SoullessMusic also collects social media posts from people who say they were similarly tricked by AI generated music. Some posts are from musicians who lament the fact that they are now competing with algorithms that can produce thousands of tracks with no effort, and others are from artists whose music was directly ripped off by AI artists.
Fulton said he started looking around on GitHub for open source AI music detection tools, and ended up building a new, open source detector that relies on open source models called SONICS, the lofcz vocoder fakeprint detector, and other open data sets. SoullessMusic also scans a track’s metadata for any tags that might tie it back to a specific AI music generator, and Fulton says he also has a script that scans Wikipedia for existing entries on an artist. Users can submit tracks from Spotify to the site they suspect are AI generated, and Fulton reviews them manually before adding them to the database. Despite all of this, he admits the system is not perfect.
Both Soulless Music and SlopTracker use AI and other automated tools to detect AI music. As we’ve written previously, using AI detectors to detect AI content is an inherently flawed process that can lead to false positives. When I asked him how he handles cases of false positives, Fulton said “it's not ideal when that happens, but it's going to happen because it's still quite tricky to check what's AI and what’s not.”
Spotify’s lack of transparency and unwillingness to label AI-generated music makes it impossible to track how much money its making on the platform. Last year, the company announced that it would it would AI disclosures on AI generated music, but I haven’t seen it on any of the dozens of tracks I reviewed for this story. Udio and Sudo both include inaudible digital watermarking in their generation, which in theory could make it easy for Spotify to tag these tracks.
Spotify did not respond to a request for comment.
Soulless music attempts to quantify that number based on publicly available streaming data. The small number of AI artists tracked on SoullessMusic generate an estimated $5.7 million a year, with the most popular AI artist, mikeeysmind, generating $1.5 million annually alone. In April, Deezer, a Spotify competitor that attempts to tag all AI-generated music on its platform, said 44 percent of all new music uploaded to its platform is now AI generated. SlopTracker, which attempts to track AI generated music on Spotify that is featured on official Spotify-curated playlists, that those artists are “draining” $0.1188 per second from real artists who could be making the music instead.
Codeberg is a computer code repository. It’s a bit like Github or GitLab — you put your software onto it and other programmers can collaborate with you.
But Codeberg’s not really like GitHub or GitLab. It’s a nonprofit cooperative, run by volunteers and funded by its members. Codeberg is tiny!
Codeberg doesn’t aspire to being the hugest code repository. It’s not meant to be all things to all people.
The AI bros, though, are outraged at Codeberg — because yesterday, Codeberg’s members passed a change to the terms of use to disallow AI vibe-coded projects. [Codeberg]
Here’s the change: [Codeberg]
You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by “generative AI”-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).
One reason was the increasing cost of hosting and building personal vibe projects: [Codeberg]
it seems ridiculous to see projects with a single developer and virtually no users consuming as much or even more resources than some of the largest community projects on Codeberg … We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects.
But it’s not just the expense — they think AI coding is bad for free software collaboration:
The widespread use of LLMs in FLOSS is instead becoming a multidimensional attack on the trust between contributors and the very idea of convivial collaboration itself.
… sharing the result of an prompt and calling it “libre software” does not make the world a better place.
This amendment was a pretty easy sell. Codeberg already had problems last year with AI scraper bots overloading their systems. [Codeberg]
Codeberg is not going to do a mass deletion, a bonfire of the vibes. But if a project’s causing issues, and it’s slop code, they will be asking the vibe coder to find somewhere else.
The AI bros are incensed. They’re proclaiming they’ll never host their stuff on Codeberg again! This sets a horrifying precedent! Imagine if code repositories had rules! They could kick anyone off! If Codeberg falls, who’s next? This is a disaster for free software!
Codeberg is tiny. It’d be pretty easy to replace. You could even use the same software. Why do the AI bros insist that this particular project must let them in?
The AI bros are worried about the precedent that someone, anywhere, can tell them “no,” and make it stick. And others who hate vibe code might realise they too can say no. You can just ban the slop bros.
But how can you tell? How do you know if something’s vibe code, huh?
You can always tell when someone’s coding with a chatbot. They tell you. Repeatedly. They cannot shut up about it.
Asking that question at all tells us straight away. Nobody who does not code with a chatbot ever worries that it’s hard to tell whether it’s slop. That question only comes from the vibe code bros.
The Codeberg members also banned: [Codeberg]
Content that harms the reputation of Codeberg, such as cryptocurrency related projects.
This means scams. The crypto bros were also outraged, complained a lot on Twitter, and swore they would boycott this project they don’t use and aren’t members of. Because someone, anywhere, dared to tell them: no.
Several projects saw these two changes and are now moving to Codeberg. Because having standards turns out to be a plus point.
For most young professionals, the prospect of renting a decently sized apartment in the center of a major U.S. metropolis like New York, Denver, or Miami can seem impossible. The cost of living in highly desirable urban centers has far outpaced overall salary increases. Urby is seeking to rectify this widespread dilemma and flip the script on what urban living looks like.
Launched in 2010 by seasoned developer David Barry, the chain has expanded into secondary and tertiary markets near these major urban cores, with suitable transportation links. Though the units are smaller, the emphasis is placed on the communal spaces.
Photography by Robert Tsai; courtesy of Urby and Concrete Amsterdam
“Apartment living in the United States has become especially transitory and sterile,” Barry says. “My goal has always been to create a more human experience and better facilitate social interaction.”
In locations like Staten Island, Jersey City, and Washington, D.C., these complexes have emerged as alternatives—fully amenitized, condensed communities, but not hermetically sealed enclaves. Rather, they’ve been successfully implemented to open up and embrace their surroundings. Innovative, concept-oriented Dutch architecture firm Concrete Amsterdam has been involved since day one.
Photography by Robert Tsai; courtesy of Urby and Concrete Amsterdam
The company has been instrumental in defining smart layouts and finishing options for the compact, flexible studio to three-bedroom residences, as evidenced in Urby’s latest property in Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood. Beta-tested in a factory before being introduced at scale, these units were designed to more closely align with the needs of Millennial and Gen-Z renters. The kitchens are galley-style but feature all of the essential top-line appliances. Large enough to accommodate queen-size mattresses and a dresser, bedrooms are separated in the layout so roommates have privacy.
Photography by Robert Tsai; courtesy of Urby and Concrete Amsterdam
Concrete Amsterdam has also been a crucial partner in shaping the program and design of shared spaces at each location, which include everything from a multifunctional work-from-home lounge that moonlights as a party room to an onsite hotel-style lobby restaurant, a fitness center, outdoor patios, and even a dog park.
After 15 years of collaboration, Fishtown Urby represents how the two companies have developed a distinctive yet refined approach through trial and error. “You’re always balancing your own experience with how trends are shifting,” says Barry. One such tendency that has emerged in the past few years is the ability to seamlessly move between social and fitness spaces.
Photography by Robert Tsai; courtesy of Urby and Concrete Amsterdam
At Fishtown Urby, a larger-than-average gym sits on the ground floor. It connects directly to a large backyard barbecue area and dog park. Nearby, a well-lit living room features soundproof office pods and banquette seating. The lobby is preceded by a semi-enclosed entrance courtyard designed with native plants by Belgian landscape architect Bas Smets. Percy, a retro-style cafe serving regional staples, also opens into this calm green space.
On the top floor, a hidden door leads into a purple-clad disco-style speakeasy with a picture window perfectly framing the Downtown Philly skyline. The rooftop patio serves as yet another gathering space; the strategically introduced cutaways help bring down the sheer scale of the block-wide, all-brick building, better aligning it with the proportion of the repurposed industrial structures and rowhomes in its vicinity.
Photography by Robert Tsai; courtesy of Urby and Concrete Amsterdam
“Every architectural detail here is designed to enhance daily living, from the robust brick envelope to the smartly positioned transom windows that balance privacy with daylight,” says Erikjan Vermeulen, partner at Concrete Amsterdam. “It’s about creating spaces that are not only beautiful, but genuinely functional for urban life.”
The most critical factor, Urby and Concrete’s key strategy across the chain, has always been to carefully introduce site-responsive elements that are functional, aesthetic, and allow the buildings to blend into the neighborhood. In Fishtown, the structure is emblazoned with a distinctive mural that honors the area’s industrial and creative heritage as well as the Dutch heritage of its maker, noted tattoo artist Henk Schiffmacher.
Photography by Robert Tsai; courtesy of Urby and Concrete Amsterdam
True to form when considering the particular strain of ironic irreverence that has defined Dutch design over the past few decades, Schiffmacher collaborated with Royal Delft, the renowned ceramic producer, on a series of Delft Blue plates. The traditional painted pottery features playful, tattoo-inspired patterns and imagery, including dragons, crying hearts, swallows, sailors, and clipper ships.
One of many in Fishtown, the mural also recalls the age-old tradition, developed by Dutch craftspeople in the 16th and 17th centuries, to imitate Chinese painted porcelain, which was hard to find at the time. Adding to the complex of cultural references embedded in the work, Schiffmacher also drew inspiration from the sacred songline motifs used by Aboriginal Australians as a form of wayfinding. Here, this type of pattern, introduced between the transom windows, is also chosen to honor the local indigenous Lenape people, who used beadwork as a means of communication.
Photography by Robert Tsai; courtesy of Urby and Concrete Amsterdam
The rest of the layered imagery nods to the more recent past and present of the location: tools used in the seafood industry that once thrived and the supplies of many of the artists that now live here. The blue-on-white paint scheme is what brings everything together.
Rather than functioning as a standalone apartment block, Fishtown Urby uses architecture, interiors, and public art alike to weave itself into the neighborhood it now calls home.
Photography by Robert Tsai; courtesy of Urby and Concrete Amsterdam
Every AI vendor trains their chatbots on the Common Crawl, a copy of the whole public internet. But that’s just the starting point. AI vendors are desperate for more data — in the hope of making their chatbot suck a bit less.
Last year, we covered how Anthropic was buying physical books, scanning them, and destroying them to feed their Claude chatbot. Judge William Alsup ruled this fair use. In particular, he said mulching the books was perfectly fine because making them digital was “exceedingly transformative”: [Order on Fair Use, 2025, PDF]
The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other. And, there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the company.
The great plan here was literally spelled out in the words of Anthropic executives: “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.” But also, “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.” [Washington Post, archive]
Don’t want it to be known? Wonder why?
Anthropic also downloaded pirate book libraries, which the court found not to be fair use. This is where Anthropic lost part of the case and why they had to pay out the authors $1.5 billion.
But the lawsuit didn’t stop Anthropic. To the contrary, it gave them license to keep going. They’re still buying rare books. As rare as possible. And feeding them into the book mulcher.
We tried tracking this down a few months ago. There’s one book buyer called Zoom Books in Canada and Nevada who are buying up such large volumes that booksellers around the world were left scratching their heads. The booksellers report Zoom buying up dusty piles of old books nobody wanted and they weren’t able to move — and paying good money for them, too. [Amazon Seller Central; Amazon Seller Central; blog post]
We tried and failed to quite find a smoking gun linking Zoom Books directly to Anthropic. But Zoom did have a blog — with AI-related posts. These posts have all disappeared, but there’s an Internet Archive link to one post called “AI Models Can Reproduce Books Verbatim — What New Research Means for Training Data Compliance,” which nobody has a surviving copy of. Must have been mulched. [Zoom, archive]
Zoom denies they’re doing the actual scanning and destruction of books: “To be unequivocally clear: Zoom Books does not digitize or destroy used or new books for the purpose of training AI models, nor for any other purpose.” [Publishers Lunch]
Fine, but what Zoom’s denying is not the claim. The claim is that it’s Anthropic doing the scanning and shredding — and that Zoom is buying the books on their behalf.
Finally, Emanuel Maiberg from 404 Media has nailed down the story. He got a great interview from a bookseller who spilled the beans. Maiberg’s story, “AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They’re Free of AI Slop,” doesn’t specifically name Zoom Books, but he’s identified other bulk book buyers. [404, archive]
The star of the story is ISBNdb, a book catalogue platform, indexing the ISBN (international standard book number) printed on the back cover of almost every book since 1970. But ISBNdb is now selling itself hard to AI companies. It’s also got scare stories that authors — who are apparently the AI vendors’ greatest enemies — are poisoning their books to mess with the models! Oh no! [ISBNdb, archive]
So ISBNdb is telling AI companies they should train on print books from before 2022: “This pre-2022 inventory represents a vast, provably clean corpus that exists nowhere else in quite the same form.”
ISBNdb also reassures its AI customers that it can totally keep their names secret.
To be clear, ISBNdb is not buying the books itself. Various bulk book buyers order the books online. But ISBNdb is a vital part of the chain.
According to 404’s Mailberg:
One bookseller told me that similarly large orders of books were coming through another marketplace called Biblio. Customers can provide Biblio with a spreadsheet of ISBNs they want to purchase and the company takes it from there.
ISBNdb loudly advocates strip-mining the world’s old books, scanning them for AI training, and then pulping them — and leaving the only remainder of the original text as some weights in a large language model. And all this for an unnamed large AI company that’s going broke in a year.
ISBNdb understands the key issue here — it’s bad public relations: [ISBNdb, archive]
“AI company destroys two million books” is not a headline that generates sympathy.
We wonder why it doesn’t generate sympathy. You, foolish pleb, might think preserving old knowledge and not strip-mining it might be some sort of public good.
But it’s fine, because, according to ISBNdb:
A physical book is a delivery mechanism for information. Once that information has been extracted and encoded into an AI model, the delivery mechanism has served its purpose.
Served its purpose. You heard them: the purpose of a book is to train AI.
Also, ISBNdb gets paid. And that’s what counts.
For the past decade, Hotel Hubertus has made headlines for its bold, architecturally adventurous amenities. Now, the 75-key resort has turned its attention to the rest of its wellness spaces, applying the same design language to a reimagined lobby, bar, and panoramic sauna. Earlier additions include the dramatic 82-foot-long cantilevered Sky Pool, introduced in 2016, and the equally “diabolical” Heaven & Hell sauna and cold plunge facility from 2022. Both suspended structures embrace a pared-back aesthetic while subtly referencing the alpine architecture of the Dolomites.
A panoramic sauna at Hotel Hubertus. Photography by Markus Ranalter.
Jutting out over the valley, the heated infinity pool is supported by timber beams sourced from the region. Also constructed from locally sourced timber, the sauna features a gabled roof shape mirrored upside down on its lower level.
The pristine, sparsely populated region of northeastern Italy is known for its tall, jagged limestone peaks and clear blue lakes. Above all, these wellness spaces are designed to take full advantage of the striking vista that Hotel Hubertus frames from its eastern-facing mountainside perch. Overlooking the resort is Kronplatz, one of the region’s premier ski destinations, whose slopes become an extensive network of hiking and mountain biking trails during the warmer months.
The Sky Pool was revealed at Hotel Hubertus in 2016. Photography by Nicho di Biasi.
When it came time to reimagine the rest of Hotel Hubertus’s spa and social spaces, it made sense to do so with the same distilled site-responsivity, without skimping on the effect of grandeur. A reimagined lobby includes a bar and a brand-new panoramic sauna, tucked beneath a green roof that extends from a sprawling grass terrace.
The reimagined Hotel Huberto lobby. Photography by Markus Ranalter.
Replacing a set of small cabins, the new sauna is wrapped in a striking herringbone-patterned wood paneling. It plays host to guided infusion rituals at 180 degrees, bio-based treatments at a much more restorative 131 degrees, and steam baths at 112 degrees. Regardless of what guests choose, they’ll always have sweeping vistas in front of them.
This is a far cry from most resorts, even those nearby, that tend to bury their wellness facilities in basements or away from the most captivating views. Here, every space—including all categories of accommodation—looks out over the valley and soaring mountains in the distance. The minimalist design language keeps the surrounding landscape front and center. The underlying intent is for Hotel Hubertus to integrate more fully into its natural setting.
Photography by Manuel Kottersteger
“It looks like one piece of architecture now,” says Markus Gasser, the resort’s second-generation co-proprietor. “We made sure these enhancements stayed true to the surroundings but have a contemporary look and feel.”
Rather than relying on traditional chalet motifs, the redesign lets the landscape remain the focal point.
Hotel Hubertus’s Heaven & Hell sauna and cold plunge experience. Photography by Davide Anzimani & Rebecca Paviola.
“Hotel Hubertus began as a place for my grandfather to gather with friends after a day of hunting,” Gasser explains. “Over the past five decades, we’ve slowly but surely expanded it into what it is now. The focus has always been on providing our guests with the best amenities possible, doing everything to help them enjoy the area, not necessarily maximizing our profit margins.”
Photography by Manuel Kottersteger
Many of the significant changes he and his family have introduced could only have been made because the operation remains so small. Unlike a larger hotel chain, Gasser doesn’t have to run these projects by a supervisory board or a group of outside investors.
“While we’ve expanded over the years, we’ve kept the room number below 75,” he explains. “The idea is to have our most loyal customers come back time and time again and have something new for them to discover each time.”
Photography by Manuel Kottersteger
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