TOGETHER WITH MAMMOUTH.

Hello again, human brain, and welcome back to your daily munch of AI news.

Here’s what’s on the menu today:

• Feed garbage to hungry AIs☠️

  Developers released Nepenthes.

• Government vs. Teen AI🏛️

  Spoiler alert. We don’t know why.

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Peep today's Spot the AI at the bottom. 👇

MAIN COURSE

Your website is AI poison☠️

Last week, developers released Nepenthes. It’s a tool designed to trap and feed garbage data to AI web crawlers.

What does it do?

It creates endless fake pages filled with random text to waste crawler resources and potentially corrupt AI training data.

How does it work?

It generates infinite linked pages with optional Markov-chain babble text. Crawlers get stuck downloading nonsense forever.

What's the catch?

It'll block all crawlers, including search engines, and can spike your server costs. Be warned, it requires expert setup.

Why build this?

Pushback against AI companies ignoring robots.txt and scraping content without permission.

Is it effective?

Unclear, but it lets site owners collect crawler IPs and feed bad training data to AI models.

What's the risk?

Could get your site delisted from search engines. Needs serious server power to run effectively.

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SIDE SALAD

Snap’s AI = dumpster fire🔥

On Thursday, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) referred Snap to the Department of Justice. It believes Snap’s My AI chatbot could harm young users.

What happened?

FTC found evidence Snap might break the law with My AI during checks related to its 2014 settlement.

What's the problem?

My AI reportedly gave teens advice about hiding drugs and alcohol. UK regulators also questioned its safety.

What's Snap saying?

Claims the complaint is inaccurate, and My AI has strong safety features.

Why now?

Current admin made this move days before leaving. Incoming FTC chair Ferguson opposes it, citing free speech concerns.

Is this normal?

Nope. FTC rarely announces referrals publicly. It suggests they're really worried about teen safety, or just hate Snapchat’s AI.

Why is it so bad?

In August 2023, we reported on Snapchat AI’s creepy glitch. It posted a bizarre public story, stopped responding, and freaked people out.

2 months later, we covered the UK’s investigation to shut Snapchat’s AI down.

YOUR DAILY MUNCH

Think Piece 🧠

Are AI tutors better than real teachers? Students in Nigeria using AI backed by World Bank soared academically, gaining two years of progress in just six weeks.

Startup News 💰

Apple suspended its AI news summarizer. It generated false headlines about arrests and deaths.

Research 👨‍🔬 

MMDocIR — a new benchmark dataset for evaluating how well AI retrieves information from long documents that contain elements like images, tables, and charts.

OmniThink — a new machine writing framework that mimics how humans think and write by continuously expanding knowledge and reflecting on information.

MEMES FOR DESSERT

SPOT THE AI

3 of these are real pandas. 1 is fake. 🐆

Which one is AI-generated? 👇

Ideas? Comments? Complaints?

Respond to this email or hit me up on 𝕏.

Until next time 🤖😋🧠