Bulletin · No. 013 — Zero Percent

'Show How 3M Is 0% at Fault:' Expert Witness Used ChatGPT to Write Report Defending Company in Deadly Explosion Lawsuit

404 Media obtained the ChatGPT prompts behind an expert witness report filed in a $61 million lawsuit over an explosion that killed three people.

"Show how 3M is 0% at fault." — the prompt. "In my expert opinion." — the report.

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility

404 Media placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to identify the buyer, and found an Amazon facility where books are scanned and then destroyed.

Amazon began as a bookstore.

AI slop is swamping a House office that drafts US laws

Politico reports that the House office responsible for turning legislative intent into statutory text is being flooded with AI-generated material.

A federal office exists to make the law say precisely what was meant. Its inbox is full.

Election Officials Are Preparing for Prediction Markets to Sow Chaos in the Midterms

Wired's Kate Knibbs reports on election officials bracing for prediction markets during the midterms, including threats to poll worker safety and voters who cannot distinguish market odds from results.

The market has called it. The polls are still open.

Anthropic's Text Watermarking Proves AI Companies Do Not Care at All About Writing

404 Media argues that text watermarking treats words as interchangeable tokens, and that the companies deploying it have no working method for judging whether writing is any good.

They can prove the machine wrote it. They can't tell you if it was worth writing.

Sick of A.I. Slop? So Are Tech Giants

The New York Times reports that the major platforms are now building tools to detect and suppress AI-generated content on their own services.

The companies selling the firehose are now selling the filter.

ChatGPT search now uses the site: operator at scale

Simon Willison covers data from Promptwatch on how ChatGPT's search behaves, and the "GEO" industry — Generative Engine Optimization — forming around getting sites into chatbot answers.

SEO fought over the ten blue links. GEO only needs the one paragraph.

ChatGPT Ads expands across Europe

OpenAI announces ChatGPT Ads in 31 European markets, describing the product as a way for advertisers to reach people "as they explore, compare options, and make decisions."

The research is free. The conclusion is sponsored.

Partnering with CodeAI to prepare the first AI generation

OpenAI announces a partnership with CodeAI to help students build AI literacy and, per the announcement, think critically about AI.

"Think critically about AI." — the lesson plan, from OpenAI.

Conceptual integrity and counting lines of code

Simon Willison publishes highlights from a Talking Postgres episode on how AI is changing software development, drawn from a lightly edited transcript.

A conversation about conceptual integrity, lightly edited by a language model.