This episode of the 404 Media podcast covers the latest wave of AI slop, a major AI shake-up at Accenture and the bankruptcy of Character.ai, along with how people are stripping surveillance ads from their TVs.
An update to Google's privacy policy adds an exception to its pledge not to use Drive, Gmail or Google Photos content for personalised ads. People who use its personalised AI features could therefore see ads based on their personal data.
OpenAI explains how it scaled Habitat, its storage system for ChatGPT, with reliable multi-tenancy, global caching and Azure Cosmos DB. The company says reads became 12 times faster.
Vercel Connect can now create a separate, restricted Stripe API key for each agent or task, limited to the permissions the user selects. The aim is to stop agents from running on Stripe's default key, which grants full access to an account.
Google Research describes work on applying foundation models to screening for tuberculosis.
South African novelist Coral Hart says she wrote 371 novels in 20 months with the help of AI and generated a million dollars in revenue in 2026. She now also offers to produce books to order.