Festival Tickets and Fake Seeds Fuel Algorithmic Fraud
July 2, 2026
From Anthropic-assisted breaches of major music festival ticketing systems to the flood of AI-generated botanical scams on global marketplaces, automated tools are rapidly lowering the barrier for systemic exploitation. As German courts hold search engines liable for hallucinated claims and Canadian activists deploy synthetic MPs, the legal and social boundaries of accountability are dissolving into a blur of probabilistic output and institutional negligence.
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Now we’re getting AI fake news complaining about how AI fake news is the death of real news
Reading sad things about journalism — newspapers, especially — has been a big part of my job for almost two decades. On Monday, I came across such a story that seemed to be getting traction on social media. According to the link aggregator Sill, 18 people I follow on Bluesky had shared a link to...
- media and technology
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German Court Says Google Is Liable For False Claims In Its AI Overviews Because They Are Its Own Words
Legal systems have always struggled to keep up with rapid technological change, and things are no different in the world of generative AI. There are still relatively few rulings on the new issues that the roll-out of AI-based services is raising. That makes a ground-breaking judgment from a court in…
- media and technology
- AI governance
- structural power
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Scammers Sell Seeds for Exotic AI-Generated Flowers That Don’t Exist
Ebay, Amazon, and Etsy are unable to stop the flood of AI-generated seed scams.
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Claude Helped a Hacker Find a Way to Issue Tickets to Almost Every US Music Festival
A researcher found that using Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.7, he could break into the website of Front Gate—used by every festival from Lollapalooza to Bonnaroo—and freely issue any ticket he chose.
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If an AI chatbot misleads you, who is to blame?
- media and technology
- AI governance
- structural power
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Build Canada Created a Robot MP. It’s Not Cute
Tech bros coded an AI ‘politician’ to love ‘economic freedom.’ Who are its constituents? Last in a series.
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Once, cyber-attacks required great skill. AI is changing that.
- media and technology
- AI governance
- structural power
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You can dream while you’re awake. The boundary between wakefulness and sleep is a lot blurrier than you’d think
Tonight, as you close your eyes in bed, something strange will happen to you: your mind will drift from an ordinary thought to a dream, but it will be impossible to say exactly when it happened. We tend to imagine that the boundary between being asleep and awake is clear: when we are awake, we think…
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8 principles from human ecology can help AI work for human well-being
AI is a factor in human well-being, whether harmful or helpful. EvgeniyShkolenko via Getty Images Artificial intelligence is reshaping relationships by providing conversation and companionship, and reshaping how people work. For children, it is making toys interactive and data-driven, and it is mech…
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An Alberta school chat listed girls to assault. The response shows Canada still has a rape culture problem
Gender-based violence researchers, feminists and activists use the term “rape culture” to describe a society where violence against women, girls and gender-diverse people is normalized, victims are blamed and perpetrators are routinely excused. Earlier this month, it reared its head again: this time…
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