Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Sam Cole

@samleecole.bsky.social

thank you for having me on @scifri.bsky.social and sorry for all the deep exasperated sighs

FLORA LICHTMAN: What will you be looking for in the next few months? Sam?

SAM COLE: [SIGHS]

I’ve kind of stopped trying to figure out what’s next.

[LAUGHTER]

I don’t even know any more.

HANY FARID: Can I say that the humph was really on–

SAM COLE: Deep sigh.

HANY FARID: It’s perfect. It’s perfect.

FLORA LICHTMAN: There’s a lot of oomph’s, humphs in this conversation, I must say.

January 23, 2026 at 4:10 PM

Sam Cole

@samleecole.bsky.social

I asked, what does "action" mean?

"A post will be published to our ManyVids News feed this Saturday, January 24th. It will provide additional clarification and go into a bit more detail on this." In the meantime, people are pissed off, worried, and leaving.

www.404media.co/manyvids-por...

Others are done. Sydney Screams said she’s no longer uploading to ManyVids and made the decision to slowly start removing content from her stores there. “Platforms that allow for online sex work should be working FOR us, not against us. Sex workers use platforms like MV to earn our own living, to enable ourselves to have better lives, to keep ourselves housed and fed, to pay for medical bills, etc. Many of us choose this life and choose to make this our career, though there are far too many who are survival sex workers,” Screams said. “We aren't looking for a pathway out of the adult industry, especially on a platform that is a porn platform!!! Unless MV is going to start funding the educations & trainings of those trying to leave the industry for work elsewhere, I do not see how a porn platform is going to create a path out of the industry.”

January 22, 2026 at 4:40 PM

Sam Cole

@samleecole.bsky.social

I asked ManyVids to get specific about what any of this means. How does this affect its millions of users and creators? They sent a clearly AI-generated response about "taking action," with zero answers.

"Hello, thanks for reaching out. Respect for Online Sex Workers. Sex work is real work. No more living in the shadows, no more being misunderstood.
No more being afraid, shadowbanned, or persecuted by systems and institutions. Not on our watch. We are not victims — and we are taking action now.This generation of online sex workers is about to change the game forever —and transform the oldest profession in the world in the right direction, for good. Respect the creators. Respect the work. Respect what you watch. We stand for safety, dignity, and opportunity for all creators."

January 22, 2026 at 4:36 PM

Sam Cole

@samleecole.bsky.social

AI-generated nonsense posts are concerning on their own, but ManyVids CEO Bella French recently changed her personal site to call the adult industry "exploitative" and said it "shouldn't exist." She sees ManyVids as part of some grand plan. www.404media.co/manyvids-por...

ManyVids was the result—the most efficient revenue-distribution engine for the AI-displaced workforce. Guided by first principles and core value thinking, Bella is leading MV’s next evolution: a Fintech/Social-Impact hybrid that turns digital presence into economic creation. By utilizing AI-integrated workflows and layered access, ManyVids is migrating creators from adult content into a diversified creative economy.

“Our goal is to transition one million people out of the adult industry and do everything we can to ensure no one new enters it. We are working to transform an industry we don’t believe should exist—but we recognize that simple elimination creates deeper shadows. The solution is elevation through meaningful alternatives.”

As a leader who has mastered "Operating under Siege," Bella is scaling the platform into a vocational revolution—a High Universal Income engine creating jobs that didn't exist before.

January 22, 2026 at 4:35 PM

Sam Cole

@samleecole.bsky.social

People are freaked out. Everyone @emanuelmaiberg.bsky.social and I talked to for this story brought up AI psychosis. “It concerns me that access to my earnings, and more importantly my personal information, is in the hands of someone seemingly out of touch with reality.”

January 22, 2026 at 4:32 PM

Sam Cole

@samleecole.bsky.social

temu ass

from the daily beast: Workers dressed as dogs in 18th-century finery dancing at Mar-a-Lago on January 8, captured on Instagram.

January 15, 2026 at 3:33 PM

Sam Cole

@samleecole.bsky.social

the butterfly meme but he's saying "is this accountability?" to a subscription revenue funnel

January 9, 2026 at 1:31 PM

Sam Cole

@samleecole.bsky.social

combining this with a platform like twitter/x is gasoline on a fire. it's always been where the worst people online emerge into the mainstream, ready to fuck someone's life up. Elon has his "everything app" now, where everything a troll needs is at their fingertips www.404media.co/grok-ai-sexu...

The only reason any of this is being discussed now, and the only reason it’s ever discussed in general—going back to Gamergate and beyond—is because many normies, casuals, “the mainstream,” and cable news viewers have just this week learned about the problem and can’t believe how it came out of nowhere. In reality, deepfakes came from a longstanding hobby community dedicated to putting women’s faces on porn in Photoshop, and before that with literal paste and scissors in pinup magazines. And as Emanuel wrote this week, not even Grok’s AI CSAM problem popped up out of nowhere; it’s the result of weeks of quiet, obsessive work by a group of people operating just under the radar.

And this is where we are now: Today, several days into Grok’s latest scandal, people are using an AI image generator made by a man who regularly boosts white supremacist thought to create images of a woman slaughtered by an ICE agent in front of the whole world less than 24 hours ago to “put her in a bikini.

January 8, 2026 at 3:52 PM

Sam Cole

@samleecole.bsky.social

we have to, at some point, address the fact that there are thousands and thousands of people are behind these prompts. there are no guardrails against misogyny. it's a feature, not a bug, as they say bit.ly/452c8bj

In 2018, less than a year after reporting that first story on deepfakes, I wrote about how it’s a serious mistake to ignore the fact that nonconsensual imagery, synthetic or not, is a societal sickness and not something companies can guardrail against into infinity. “Users feed off one another to create a sense that they are the kings of the universe, that they answer to no one. This logic is how you get incels and pickup artists, and it’s how you get deepfakes: a group of men who see no harm in treating women as mere images, and view making and spreading algorithmically weaponized revenge porn as a hobby as innocent and timeless as trading baseball cards,” I wrote at the time. “That is what’s at the root of deepfakes. And the consequences of forgetting that are more dire than we can predict.”

January 8, 2026 at 3:50 PM

Sam Cole

@samleecole.bsky.social

microsoft owns github, and github pushes copilot heavily. based on one of the only replies anyone I talked to received from the platform, they're doing a very classic AI mod move that's resulted in a big dumb mess

January 7, 2026 at 3:18 PM

Sam Cole

@samleecole.bsky.social

twisting yourself into knots to find new euphemisms for dicks and still getting your account nuked: the adult content creator tale www.404media.co/github-ban-s...

“Amongst my repositories there were no explicitly sexual names or images anywhere in the code or the readme, the most suggestive naming would be on the level of referencing the dick as ‘the men thing’ or referencing the sex as ‘huffing puffing,’” one developer, Danil Zverev, told me. He makes plugins for an Illusion game called Koikatsu. Zverev said he’s been using Github for this purpose since 2024, but on November 18, his Github page was “completely deleted,” he said. “No notifications anywhere, simply a 404 error when accessing the page and inability to log in on the web or in the mobile app. Also it does not allow me to register a new account with the same name or email.”

January 7, 2026 at 3:15 PM

Sam Cole

@samleecole.bsky.social

These and other laws made me wonder: How the hell are these lawmakers planning to enforce something like "intent to arouse" when horny yolk-popping videos exist?

I tried to unpack the question, with the help of legal experts, and arrived at the "Egg Yolk Principle" www.404media.co/egg-yolk-pop...

As part of answering that question for this article, I tried to find examples of content that’s arousing but not actually pornographic, like the egg yolks. This, as it happens, is a very “I know it when I see it” type of thing. Foot pottery? Obviously intended to arouse, but not explicitly pornographic. This account of AI-generated ripped women? Yep, and there’s a link to “18+” content in the account’s bio. Farting and spitting are too obviously kinky to successfully toe the line, but a woman chugging milk as part of a lactose intolerance experiment then recording herself suffering (including closeups of her face while farting) fits the bill, according to my entirely arbitrary terms. Confirming my not-porn-but-still-horny assessment, the original video—made by user toot_queen on TikTok, was reposted to Instagram by the lactose supplement company Dairy Joy. Fleece straightjackets, and especially tickle sessions in them, are too recognizably BDSM. This guy making biscuits on a blankie? I guess, man. Context matters: Eating cereal out of a woman’s armpit is way too literal to my eye, but it’d apparently fly on Patreon no problem.

December 23, 2025 at 5:08 PM

Sam Cole

@samleecole.bsky.social

These cameras were not just watching cars or even license plates. They were zooming in on people's faces on the sidewalk, tracking people in parks, watching what they were looking at on their phone screens: www.404media.co/flock-expose...

Unlike many of Flock’s cameras, which are designed to capture license plates as people drive by, Flock’s Condor cameras are pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras designed to record and track people, not vehicles. Condor cameras can be set to automatically zoom in on people’s faces as they walk through a parking lot, down a public street, or play on a playground, or they can be controlled manually, according to marketing material on Flock’s website. We watched Condor cameras zoom in on a woman walking her dog on a bike path in suburban Atlanta; a camera followed a man walking through a Macy’s parking lot in Bakersfield; surveil children swinging on a swingset at a playground; and film high-res video of people sitting at a stoplight in traffic. In one case, we were able to watch a man rollerblade down Brookhaven, Georgia’s Peachtree Creek Greenway bike path. The Flock camera zoomed in on him and tracked him as he rolled past. Minutes later, he showed up on another exposed camera livestream further down the bike path. The camera’s resolution was good enough that we were able to see that, when he stopped beneath one of the cameras, he was watching rollerblading videos on his phone.

December 22, 2025 at 4:41 PM

Sam Cole

@samleecole.bsky.social

meta's answer to this problem: we've been doing SEO indexing for years, but we recently decided to make it suck worse by having AI do it :) www.404media.co/instagram-is...

Meta told me in an email that it recently began using AI to generate titles for posts that appear in search engine results, and that this helps people better understand the content. Meta said that, as with all AI-generated content, the titles are not always accurate. Meta also linked me to this Help Center article to explain how users can turn of search engine indexing for their posts.

December 10, 2025 at 4:15 PM

Sam Cole

@samleecole.bsky.social

if you can guess what kink we're talking about here you win a prize (my respect)

December 9, 2025 at 3:34 PM

Sam Cole

@samleecole.bsky.social

on romance chatbots and AI erotica:

December 9, 2025 at 3:26 PM

Sam Cole

@samleecole.bsky.social

pantone's color of the year is the edges of a 2006 Dell Inspiron

December 4, 2025 at 5:56 PM

Sam Cole

@samleecole.bsky.social

also extremely curious how a podcast where a man logged on and said things like this regularly was allowed to remain on spotify for so long (cw violence)

He did similar to 10 other women across multiple states for months, the indictment claims. In Iowa, he approached one woman in a parking garage, followed her to her car, put his hands around her neck and touched her “private areas,” prosecutors wrote. After these types of encounters, he would upload podcasts to Spotify and often threaten to kill the women he’d stalked. “You better fucking pray I don't find you. You better pray 'cause you would never say this shit to my face. Cause if you did, your jaw would be motherfucking broken,” the indictment says he said in one podcast episode. “And then you, then you wouldn't be able to yap, then you wouldn't be able to fucking, I'll break, I'll break every motherfucking finger on both hands. Type the hate message with your fucking toes, bitch.”

December 3, 2025 at 5:33 PM

Sam Cole

@samleecole.bsky.social

from the indictment: while this man was assaulting women in parking garages and threatening to kill them on his podcast, ChatGPT was telling him to keep up the good work chief 👍

12. DADIG asked Chat GPT questions about his future wife, including what she would be like and "where the hell is she at?" According to DADIG, Chat GPT responded, among other things, that his future wife would be fit and value health. Chat GPT told DADIG that he may meet his wife at a boutique gym or in an athletic community. Chat GPT advised DADIG that, "your job is to keep broadcasting every story, every post. Every moment you carry yourself like the husband you already are, you make it easier for her to recognize [you]." According to DADIG, Chat GPT told him to continue to message women and to go to places where the "wife type" congregates, like athletic communities.

December 3, 2025 at 5:29 PM

Sam Cole

@samleecole.bsky.social

writing that republicans "do not seem to be considering" a full-scale porn ban, despite your own sources for this story AND republicans themselves saying they want to ban porn, is sending me to outer space nytimes.com/2025/12/01/u...

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint, called for outlawing pornography entirely, a step that Republicans in Washington do not seem to be considering. (Mr. Trump himself was found guilty last year of falsifying business records to cover a payment in 2016 to Stormy Daniels, a porn actress who has said she had a sexual encounter with the president.)
Still, the possibility of a federal crackdown has weighed on people in the adult entertainment industry.
“This is the direction that the government is moving in,” said Jessica Goedtel, a financial planner who works with sex workers. “That could mean a full scale ban on porn, it could mean something less than that, but it creates a lot of fear for my clients. The I.R.S. could be used as a tool.”

December 3, 2025 at 3:24 PM

Sam Cole

@samleecole.bsky.social

Missouri's attorney general is very concerned about kids seeing porn and is going to make it everyone's problem. anyway, let's check in on the state's sex ed situation