The technology industry’s coolest new hall monitors at 404 Media, a team comprised entirely of laid off Vice people, melted down last week after discovering they themselves could use Bing’s AI image generator to create images of Kirby doing the 9/11 terrorist attacks, among other assorted offensive material, which they believed an existential crisis. This latest entrant in the genre of hysterical safetyism, in which journalists tell an AI chatbot to say or paint offensive things and then write pieces about the offensive things AI chatbots say and paint (It’s a Chatbot, Kevin) is of course in no way novel. But it is notable, I think, how rapidly 404 has devolved, in accordance with the nature of your average tech journalist, from ‘edgy’ rewrites of months-old Pirate Wires articles to ‘edgy’ rewrites of months-old histrionic New York Times columns. Read our breakdown of the whole embarrassing incident on @piratewires. 

Is Elon Musk worse than Hamas? Hear me out. The billionaire shitposting god of Silicon Valley recently cut a “disinformation fighting tool.” Then, over the weekend, Hamas initiated one of the most brutal terrorist attacks in modern history. These things are related, according to thoughtful technology journalists. We should definitely have a serious conversation about this, and it should definitely be right now. (The Information)

Realignment incoming. This one’s fairly strange, and the trend itself only just beginning, but following the weekend’s unfathomably gruesome mass murder leftists across the country predictably took the side of terrorists. Nothing to see here, just standard psyco “yay genocide” college stuff. But as the the discourse surrounding Hamas’ massacre has evolved — a national conversation far different today than even yesterday — Ryna Workman, president of the NYU Law Student Bar Association (SBA), penned an open letter in apparent defense of Hamas. Within hours of the viral story, the major law firm she was set to land a job at publicly rescinded her offer. I knew things were different after even Trudeau felt he had to say something about the rape parades, and I’ve long since written about the overall vibe shift. But consequence culture for bloodthirsty college zealots? That feels new to me, and quite significant.