Student journalists meet the moment, as we’ve seen most recently this week. As the Cornell University sexual abuse case highlights the importance of student journalism, public records reveal how schools try to censor on-campus news outlets. Claire Woodcock talked to students and legal experts about how censorship from above impacts their work. “One of the biggest things we’ve certainly found with censors over the years is they want to be called everything but a censor,” one expert said. “What
Student journalists meet the moment, as we’ve seen most recently this week. As the Cornell University sexual abuse case highlights the importance of student journalism, public records reveal how schools try to censor on-campus news outlets. Claire Woodcock talked to students and legal experts about how censorship from above impacts their work. “One of the biggest things we’ve certainly found with censors over the years is they want to be called everything but a censor,” one expert said. “What they’re doing is everything but censorship.”
Student journalists, their advisors, and legal advocates say colleagues and administrators are attempting to undermine student reporting on Jeffrey Epstein, Gaza, and other issues that public institutions would rather not have their reputations connected to.
Public records obtained by 404 Media show administrators taking meetings with parents and alumni when they take issue with student reporting and asking advisors to compromise their professional ethics. They also show escalating tensions between student newsroom staff and administrators, prompting more legal aid requests to advocacy groups.
This comes as student journalists at The Cornell Daily Sun earned recognition for breaking the “Cornell Seven” story regarding the lawsuit filed in New York’s trial court last month by a Jane Doe accusing current and former Cornell University students of drugging and sexual abuse. The student journalists told The Cut this week that a vague university and campus police statement from nearly two years ago prompted more questions than answers. Such is the basis for most accountability journalism on college campuses.
The cases we reviewed involved the phase of the reporting process that comes later, where a factual dispute the newsroom has defended or a complaint where the person doesn’t bother to explain what is allegedly wrong with the students’ reporting.
A lawyer used ChatGPT to generate briefs that included completely made-up witnesses and testimony while representing a man accused of shooting his wife. When he was caught by the judges, the lawyer blamed it on his own “stupidity.” “It's little comfort to know that my stupidity is what brings us together this afternoon,” New Mexico attorney Stephen D. Aarons said in a hearing last month before five judges. He “assumed” ChatGPT would generate a “bulletproof summary of proceedings.” Instead, Ch
A lawyer used ChatGPT to generate briefs that included completely made-up witnesses and testimony while representing a man accused of shooting his wife. When he was caught by the judges, the lawyer blamed it on his own “stupidity.”
“It's little comfort to know that my stupidity is what brings us together this afternoon,” New Mexico attorney Stephen D. Aarons said in a hearing last month before five judges. He “assumed” ChatGPT would generate a “bulletproof summary of proceedings.” Instead, ChatGPT generated false testimony from “wholly fabricated witnesses,” according to an order of direct contempt from the New Mexico Supreme Court. Aarons was representing a man who was found guilty of killing his wife earlier this year; Aarons said he hadn’t told his client directly that he was caught using ChatGPT on the case because he’s currently serving life in prison.
The false testimony included a nonexistent person named Danny Stanton saying he received threats, and another made-up person, Linda Stanton, saying her husband received threats. Other false testimony from more AI-generated people in Aarons’ brief included statements “regarding the shooter’s clothing and appearance,” according to the order.
Reuters reported on the case earlier this month. "I am remorseful but hopeful that the disciplinary board takes into account it was an honest mistake," Aarons told Reuters. "It is a lesson learned for all professionals who rely upon this powerful but sometimes unstable technology."
Aarons’ reasoning for trusting ChatGPT, he said in the August hearing, was that he’d heard of doctors using AI for medical research.
“So, Counsel, do you watch the news? Do you listen to the radio? Do you read anything about what's going on in the world?” one of the judges asked Aarons. “Because the problem with lawyers relying on AI hallucinations is an above-the-fold story every single day.”
Lawyers getting caught using AI and submitting errors to the court has been a big problem for years, and the judge is right: It’d be very hard to avoid hearing about this pattern of “stupidity” unless you were living under a rock. There has been caseaftercaseaftercase showing attorneys failing their clients by submitting error-riddled AI-generated documents in their filings, and are the definition of “you had one job:” in the case of AI-brained lawyers, they can’t seem to resist taking shortcuts regardless of how risky it is for their own careers and their clients lives.
Like in Aarons' case, we sometimes get to hear and see judges go off on attorneys for this behavior. In May, judges in the Supreme Court of the State of New York Appellate Division let several lawyers have it for more than 20 minutes about their AI use and laziness, and called their failures “striking, concerning, disappointing, and saddening.” And it’s not just lawyers anymore; court reporters are submitting AI-generated errors, too.
“So, either you buried your head in the sand. And that's a choice to do that. An intentional choice to be uninformed,” the judge continued to Aarons. “Or, you took a gamble. And neither of those are consistent with the code of conduct. So I'm really struggling with your response, saying, ‘Well, I didn't understand. I didn't know about hallucinations.’ My 13-year-old nephew knows about hallucinations. My 75-year-old stepmother knows about hallucinations. So, either you made a decision not to be aware of what's happening in the world in using this tool appropriately, which is a willful choice. Or you decided to roll the dice.”
At the end of the hearing, Aarons admits that he hasn’t told his client directly about this mess, saying he’d only talked to his family members so far, telling them there was “a problem with the brief.” He said his client is hard to reach because he speaks Spanish and is in prison.
“So you didn't say, ‘I relied on ChatGPT, and it submitted lies to the court, and the court is mad at me, and now there's a hearing.’ I'm guessing you didn't tell your client’s family members that,” a judge asked Aarons.
“I didn't talk about ChatGPT. I just said there was a problem with a brief that I filed,” Aarons said.
According to the order, the judges found Aarons to be in direct contempt of court, referred him to the Disciplinary Board for further consideration, and barred from appearing before the court pending the outcome of the board’s investigation. They also threw him off the case in question and assigned a public defender to his former client.
While he waits for the board to decide what to do with him, Aarons was sanctioned $5,000, which he must pay to the State Bar of New Mexico Client Protection Fund.
Abusive, sexually explicit deepfakes have only become easier to make and more widespread in the last nine years. Since we first covered deepfakes when they appeared in 2017, they’ve never been the stuff of dark web sites or shadowy networks. They're found on social media networks, through basic web searches, and on easily downloadable apps and accessible forums. The most prominent hosts of non-consensual, AI-generated imagery are supported by some of the biggest web infrastructure providers i
Abusive, sexually explicit deepfakes have only become easier to make and more widespread in the last nine years. Since we first covered deepfakes when they appeared in 2017, they’ve never been the stuff of dark web sites or shadowy networks. They're found on social media networks, through basic web searches, and on easily downloadable apps and accessible forums.
The most prominent hosts of non-consensual, AI-generated imagery are supported by some of the biggest web infrastructure providers in the world, getting their hosting, email, advertising, and content management systems from these companies. A new study examines how providers like Cloudflare, Google, Proton, Namecheap, and WordPress help non-consensual imagery sites thrive. Despite years of knowledge about these wildly popular sites, big tech companies continue providing infrastructure services that prop up abuse imagery, even though their own terms of service often prohibit illegal and harmful content, the study claims.
Hany Farid, professor in Computer Science at Dartmouth College, Sophie Nightingale, a senior lecturer in psychology at Lancaster University, and Lancaster’s Sarah Morgan, who acts as the project coordinator on Nightingale’s “Protecting Ordinary People from Deepfake Harms” fellowship published their paper, “The Backbone of Abuse: How Infrastructure Providers Enable the Proliferation of AI-Generated Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery” in Stanford’s peer-reviewed Journal of Online Trust and Safety on Wednesday.
In a six-week period between February and March, they identified 400 URLs based on keyword searching and Google Alerts, then narrowed the sites down to 88 that were actively hosting non-consensual intimate imagery. Most of the content on these sites was of female celebrities, actresses, pop singers, K-pop idols, and women working in politics or activism. From there, they used open-source web-analysis tools like WHOIS to see what infrastructure providers the sites used.
“Five players emerged as dominant infrastructure providers: Cloudflare, Google, Namecheap, WordPress, and Protonmail,” the researchers wrote in their paper. Cloudflare provided “the lion’s share of services,” they wrote, by providing website hosting, content delivery network, and domain-name server services, as well as analytic tools. Google provided SSL certificates and advertising space for the majority of the sites studied, while Namecheap was the dominant provider of domain registrar services, WordPress provided the majority of their content management system services, and Proton provided mail servers.
Each of these service providers forbid customers and users from using their services for illegal activity. Publishing or threatening to publish AI-generated non-consensual sexual imagery is a federal crime in the U.S. and elsewhere, and sexual abuse imagery in general is illegal in many countries.
Cloudflare, Proton, and Namecheap did not respond to 404 Media’s requests for comment about these findings.
A spokesperson for Google told 404 Media in a statement: “Without the specific domains from the report, we can’t investigate these claims. We have strict policies against non-consensual explicit content — including AI-generated imagery — across all our products. We make it easy for people to quickly remove this content on Search, continuously update our systems to limit its visibility, and we prohibit monetizing or promoting non-consensual and sexually explicit content."
The Google spokesperson added that its advertising platform prohibits monetizing or promoting non-consensual and sexually explicit content, and treats this content as egregious violations, blocking ads on the sites or suspending the advertiser accounts involved. They also noted people can request the removal of non-consensual explicit images from Search, and pointed to Google’s recently-updated removal request process. Google has also updated its ranking algorithms by promoting non-explicit content where possible, they said, and demotes sites in search results that have a high number of removals against them.
A WordPress spokesperson said WordPress is “open-source software, not a hosting provider,” and wrote in a statement: “WordPress.org does not host websites or provide hosting services to sites that use WordPress, and we do not have access to or control over content published on independently hosted WordPress sites.” They noted that WordPress’s software is distributed under the general public use license, allowing anyone to use it for any purpose. “We take the issue of non-consensual intimate imagery seriously, but describing WordPress as providing services or infrastructure to these sites conflates the software a site uses with the services that host and operate it,” the spokesperson said.
In response to WordPress’s statement, Farid noted that while WordPress.org is not a host, WordPress.com is a hosting service. “It's operated by Automattic, which Matt Mullenweg also runs, and it hosts millions of sites. Any NCII site on WordPress.com is squarely within scope,” he told 404 Media. “Automattic provides services to self-hosted sites. Jetpack and the WordPress.com CDN serve images from i0.wp.com/i1.wp.com for sites that enable it, meaning the intimate images themselves can be served from Automattic infrastructure even when the site is hosted elsewhere. That's infrastructure by any definition.”
Farid also noted that WordPress.org maintains “an ongoing service relationship with self-hosted sites,” he said, with core updates, plugin and theme distribution, and security patches coming from WordPress.org servers. Farid mentioned Automattic’s ongoing legal battle with WP Engine, during which, in 2024, Mullenweg announced WP Engine was blocked and then unblocked from accessing WordPress servers; this “showed the project can and will cut a specific operator off from those services,” he said.
“So ‘no access to or control over’ is not entirely accurate,” Farid said.
These providers do draw their own moral and legal lines on what kinds of customers they’ll tolerate and when they cooperate with authorities. After initially refusing to do so, Cloudflare dropped hate speech and doxing site Kiwifarms from its protection services in 2022, and terrorist manifesto host 8chan in 2019. In 2018, Cloudflare banned sex work harm reduction social network Switter from using its services, citing anti-trafficking legislation FOSTA/SESTA, and in 2017, it Cloudflare stopped services to neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer. In 2023, victims of the sex trafficking ring Girls Do Porn demanded Cloudflare stop providing services to sites hosting their abuse; Cloudflare claimed it doesn’t have “control over the content of websites using those services,” doesn’t have “the ability to alter or remove content on them,” and doesn’t “have knowledge of the people or entities who post any specific content to such websites.”
Aside from the infrastructure issue the researchers were studying, they found that 312 of the 400 sites they initially identified were unrelated to deepfakes, like gambling or random travel or cooking SEO-slop sites, but were using non-consensual imagery keywords as a way to rank higher in search results. This shows how incredibly popular the marketplace is for AI-generated abuse imagery, and how sites are able to manipulate Google search to appear higher in results if they use related terms.
Morgan told me that while journalists can expose site administrators (like in the case of MrDeepfakes.com, whose owner was identified by a massive joint investigation by Bellingcat, the CBC and TjekDet), and legislation can act as a deterrent, the research group wanted to focus on infrastructure providers as the “distribution supply” for these sites. “Creators are going to create and people are going to demand. We can’t stop that. But we can call for providers to cut the distribution supply and stop enabling these sites. This content needs preventing from being shared in the first place. All parts of the ecosystem have to work together to play a part,” she said.
The researchers recommend in their paper that these providers stop supplying services to sites hosting non-consensual imagery.
“We aren’t saying that infrastructure providers are knowingly facilitating this content — or that they are aware of what’s on every site that uses their provisions — but it’s in providers’ power to vastly improve their moderation and cease services to sites as soon as they are identified as hosting this content. And to check sites that are reported to them,” Morgan said. “A gold standard response in our eyes would be a commitment from infrastructure providers to working with NGOs and governments across the globe who are searching for solutions that will lead to verifying URLs and sharing these with participating platforms so they can be blocked.”
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss some small changes, an AI song, and internet soup.JOSEPH: We’re making a couple of changes that might sound boring to someone who doesn’t read or listen to our work, but I’m actually legit excited about them, and I think they will be better for all of you too. I’ll talk about one now and maybe the other next week.
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss some small changes, an AI song, and internet soup.
JOSEPH: We’re making a couple of changes that might sound boring to someone who doesn’t read or listen to our work, but I’m actually legit excited about them, and I think they will be better for all of you too. I’ll talk about one now and maybe the other next week.
When I first started writing about online cultures and subcultures almost 10 years ago, one of the first scholars I read on the subject of internet anthropology was Professor Sherry Turkle. Her earlier books, including The Second Self (published in 1984) and Life on the Screen (1995) became something like a model for my own writing and this kind of reporting— approaching the internet with an ethnographer's mindset and taking nonjudgemental documentation of how people are behaving and feeling
When I first started writing about online cultures and subcultures almost 10 years ago, one of the first scholars I read on the subject of internet anthropology was Professor Sherry Turkle. Her earlier books, including The Second Self (published in 1984) and Life on the Screen (1995) became something like a model for my own writing and this kind of reporting— approaching the internet with an ethnographer's mindset and taking nonjudgemental documentation of how people are behaving and feeling in a given space, even if that space is digital.
Through talking directly to people in their own environments, whether they were in MUDs and early virtual chat spaces or Second Life and massive role-playing games, her work revealed endlessly interesting firsthand perspectives on lifestyles that people still found subversive, marginal, and at times perverse. The people she interviewed often said that digital worlds offered support, companionship, sexual satisfaction, gender play and freedom that the quote-unquote "real" world did not. These were topics traditional academia wasn't yet touching: cyber-sex, intimate relationships unfolding in chatrooms, embodiment in online worlds that felt as real to their inhabitants as the world their physical selves sat in behind a keyboard.
What struck me about those books — and later, in Alone Together, Reclaiming Conversation, and The Empathy Diaries — was often how fundamental the human needs for connection and vulnerability are, despite the technology being used to fulfill those needs.
Fast forward to today. Something has shifted. “In 1984, I called the computer a second self,” Turkle writes in her latest book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines. “Computers provoked an explosion of talk about what was essential about being a person and about how new computational ideas might illuminate our thinking about the mind. With the digital twin, the metaphor is turned on its head. It’s the agent who is in charge and imagines a version of you. Now you’re the second self. So when you are given time to get ‘back to your life,’ it’s been diminished.”
Professor Turkle is a licensed clinical psychologist, the founding director of MIT's Initiative on Technology and Self, and the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT. Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines comes out on September 29.
The technology today is wildly different than it was in the 80s, but as Professor Turkle explores in our conversation for the 404 Media podcast, the need for empathy, vulnerability, and to feel understood remains central to the human experience. With increasing reliance on conversational “companion” chatbots like ChatGPT and Replika, we risk misinterpreting machine programming as care, and risk misattributing human qualities like empathy and emotional intelligence onto unfeeling, incapable robots. The result, she argues, is a population forfeiting its empathy skills at an alarming rate, trading difficult feelings and conversations with humans for convenience and instantaneous feedback.
“When people turn to a chatbot, they don’t have to dread the fatigue of genuine give-and-take. And they don’t fear judgment or abandonment. But when we talk to chatbots, we lose the skills required to interact with humans, so chatbots start to feel like a better option. With an alternative, disappointment with people feels unnecessary,” Turkle writes.
What happens when people stop caring that there’s not a human on the other line? We got into that on the podcast.
“It's a product whose fundamental directive is to keep your attention. And so it matters very much that we sort of become glommed onto it as though it were a person when it isn't,” Professor Turkle said in our conversation. “But more than that, I think that it's very important to ask, what is the end game of this?” She referred to the interview Mark Zuckerberg gave last year when he said Americans can only have three real friends, and intended to let AI fill in the demand for more.
“Now that to me is a very dark endgame,” she said. “And so people who say, ‘What the hell? I kind of like it.’ Well, let's just think about where we're moving towards. Because it's not just a little entertainment. It's a corporate project to get us involved in certain kinds of relationships that are going to make tons of money and to keep us at our screens all day talking to sycophantic, seemingly loving entities that don't know who we are and don’t care about us.”
In our wide-ranging conversation, we talk about how we got here, the concept of “deskilling” one’s own capacity for human connection and vulnerability, whether there’s a way back out of this mess for us, and what happened when she asked a chatbot to roleplay her own legacy (spoiler alert: nothing good).
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss just doing it, machines that eat the internet, and an eavesdropping watch.EMANUEL: It is a foundational, defining feature of 404 Media, but I sometimes forget that when I’m having trouble with a story, I need to just do it. This is most of all true when it comes to reporting. I spent a couple of weeks looking into AI generated music on Spot
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss just doing it, machines that eat the internet, and an eavesdropping watch.
EMANUEL: It is a foundational, defining feature of 404 Media, but I sometimes forget that when I’m having trouble with a story, I need to just do it.
This is most of all true when it comes to reporting. I spent a couple of weeks looking into AI generated music on Spotify appearing under the names of real artists. It’s an issue I and many other publications have reported on in the past, but whenever I look into it I am shocked by how prevalent the issue is. If you talk to any musician or spend some time clicking around music platforms yourself, you’re going to quickly find hundreds of examples of this abuse of the digital music distribution system.
Connexion
