2026-02-20 00:01:50
Porn performer Siri Dahl’s personal information, including her full legal name and birthday, was publicly exposed earlier this month by xAI’s Grok chatbot. Almost instantly, harassers started opening Facebook accounts in her name and posting stolen porn clips with her real name on sites for leaking OnlyFans content.
Dahl has used the name — a nod to her Scandinavian heritage — since the beginning of her career in the adult industry in 2012. Now, Grok is revealing her legal name and all personal information it can find to whoever happens to ask.
Dahl first noticed this happening last week, after a clip of the performer from a porn scene was making its rounds on X. The scene was incorrectly labelled, so someone on X replied, “Who is she? What is her name?” and tagged @grok to get an answer.
Grok answered, “she appears to be Siri Dahl, an American adult film actress born on June 20, 1988. Her real name is Adrienne Esther Manlove.” Grok provided her personal information unprompted; the user likely only wanted information on what performer appeared in the clip.
This is the latest in a series of abuses inflicted by Grok, xAI, and its users. At the end of 2025, people used Grok to produce thousands of images of nonconsensual sexual content, including images depicting children. The problem was so widespread that the UK’s Ofcom and several attorneys general launched or demanded investigations into X and Grok, and police raided X’s offices in France as part of an investigation into child sexual abuse material on the platform.
X strictly prohibits sharing other people’s personal information without their consent. “Sharing someone’s private information online without their permission, sometimes called ‘doxxing,’ is a breach of their privacy and can pose serious safety and security risks for those affected,” the platform’s terms of use state. But X’s own chatbot is doing it anyway.
While there have been some close calls, up until now Dahl had managed to keep her personal information private. “I've been paying for data removal services for like, at least six years now,” Dahl said. She said she’s spent “easily” thousands of dollars on those services, which promise to delete personal and potentially dangerous information as it comes up.
Grok is trained on X users’ posts, as well as data scraped from the wider internet. X’s website says “Grok was pre-trained by xAI on a variety of data from publicly available sources and data sets reviewed and curated by AI Tutors who are human reviewers.” Dahl said she doesn’t know where Grok originally got her legal name from. But now that it’s part of the system’s internal dataset, she feels like there’s no coming back; her days of pseudonymity are over.
Samantha Cole
“Now that it's been crawled, it's everywhere. There are a ton of Facebook accounts that come up that are pretending to be me, using my real name,” Dahl said. “There are now porn leak sites that are posting porn of me using only my legal name, not even putting my stage name on it.”
Users are now asking Grok for the make and model of Dahl’s car, her address, and other dangerous personal information. While it hasn’t been able to accurately reply yet, she worries it’s only a matter of time.
But Dahl isn’t the only person affected by the fallout.
“I do everything that I can reasonably within my power to keep my legal name private, and my main motivation for doing that is to reduce any chance of my family getting harassed,” she said. “It's really common for people to look up private information, get parents' phone numbers and start calling and harassing the parents, things like that. I've been able to keep my family safe from that kind of thing for years.”
Now, Dahl is having to call her family and put defensive plans in place.
In violating Dahl’s right to privacy, X’s Grok has destroyed Dahl’s ability to protect herself and her family online. Doxing her is not providing value to X users, as is ostensibly Grok’s goal. The original inquiry only wanted to know how to find more of her work, to which her stage name was the most useful answer.
“What would the motivation be for anyone to want to know my personal information, other than to harass and cause harm?” Dahl said.
In this ongoing discussion on “internet safety,” it is important to pay attention to who is being protected. Certainly not the users; the marginalized workers, or the young women. Not Dahl, or her family.
While the right to privacy online continues to be debated, it’s important to remember that privacy exists not only for bad-actors and shady characters. Historically, marginalized populations benefit from internet anonymity the most.
X did not respond to a request for comment.
2026-02-19 22:24:44
Pinterest has gone all in on artificial intelligence and users say it's destroying the site. Since 2009, the image sharing social media site has been a place for people to share their art, recipes, home renovation inspiration, corny motivational quotes, and more, but in the last year users, especially artists, say the site has gotten worse. AI-powered mods are pulling down posts and banning accounts, AI-generated art is filling feeds, and hand drawn art is labeled as AI modified.
“I feel like, increasingly, it's impossible to talk to a single human [at Pinterest],” artist and Pinterest user Tiana Oreglia told 404 Media. “Along with being filled with AI images that have been completely ruining the platform, Pinterest has implemented terrible AI moderation that the community is up in arms about. It's banning people randomly and I keep getting takedown notices for pins.”
Oreglia’s Pinterest account is where she keeps reference material for her work, including human anatomy photos. In the past few months, she’s noticed an uptick in seemingly innocuous photos of women being flagged by Pinterest’s AI moderators. Oreglia told 404 Media there’s been a clear pattern to the reference material the site has a problem with. “Female figures in particular, even if completely clothed, get taken down and I have to keep appealing those decisions,” she said. This pattern is common on many social media platforms, and predates the advent of generative AI.
“We publish clear guidelines on adult sexual content and nudity and use a combination of AI and human review for enforcement,” Pinterest told 404 Media. “We have an appeals process where a human reviews the content and reactivates it when we’ve made a mistake.” It also confirmed that the site uses both humans and automated systems for moderation.
Oreglia shared some of the works Pinterest flagged including a photo of a muscular woman in a bikini holding knives, a painting of two clothed women in an intimate embrace, and a stock photo of a man holding a gun on a telephone that was flagged for “self-harm.” In most cases, Oreglia can appeal and get a decision reversed, but that eats up time. Time she could be spending making art.
And those appeals aren’t always approved. “The worst case scenario for this stuff is that you get your account banned,” Oreglia said.
r/Pinterest is awash in users complaining about AI-related issues on the site. “Pinterest keeps automatically adding the ‘AI modified’ tag to my Pins...every time I appeal, Pinterest reviews it and removes the AI label. But then… the same thing happens again on new Pins and new artwork. So I’m stuck in this endless loop of appealing → label removed → new Pin gets tagged again,” read a post on r/Pinterest.
The redditor told 404 Media that this has happened three times so far and it takes between 24 to 48 hours to sort out.
“I actively promote my work as 100% hand-drawn and ‘no AI,’” they said. “On Etsy, I clearly position my brand around original illustration. So when a Pinterest Pin is labeled ‘Hand Drawn’ but simultaneously marked as ‘AI modified,’ it creates confusion and undermines that positioning.”
Artist Min Zakuga told 404 Media that they’ve seen a lot of their art on Pinterest get labeled as “AI modified” despite being older than image generation tech. “There is no way to take their auto-labeling off, other than going through a horribly long process where you have to prove it was not AI, which still may get rejected,” she said. “Even artwork from 10-13 years ago will still be labeled by Pinterest as AI, with them knowing full well something from 10 years ago could not possibly be AI.”
Other users are tired of seeing a constant flood of AI-generated art in their feeds. “I can't even scroll through 100 pins without 95 out of them being some AI slop or theft, let alone very talented artists tend to be sucked down and are being unrecognized by the sheer amount of it,” said another post. “I don't want to triple check my sources every single time I look at a pin, but I refuse to use any of that soulless garbage. However, Pinterest has been infested. Made obsolete.”
Artist Eva Toorenent told 404 Media that she’s been able to cull most of the AI-generated content from her board, but that it took a lot of time. Whenever she saw what she thought was an AI-generated image, she told Pinterest she didn’t want to see it and eventually the algorithm learned. But, like Oreglia fighting auto-moderation and Zakuga fighting to get the “AI modified” label taken off her work, training Pinterest’s algorithm to stop serving you AI-generated images eats up precious time.
AI boosters often talk about how much time these systems will save everyone. They’re pitched as productivity boosters. Earlier this month, Pinterest laid off 15 percent of its work force as part of a push to prioritize AI. In a post on LinkedIn, one of the former employees shared part of the email CEO Bill Ready sent out after the lay offs. “We’re doubling down on an AI-forward approach—prioritizing AI-focused roles, teams, and ways of working.”
Toorenent removed all her own art from her Pinterest account after hearing the news that the site would use public pins to train Pinterest Canvas, the company’s proprietary text-to-image AI. But she has no control over other users uploading her artwork. “I have already caught a few of my images still on Pinterest that I did not upload myself…that makes me incredibly mad,” she told 404 Media. “It used to be a great way to get your work seen among other people, but it’s being used to train their internal AI.”
Oreglia told 404 Media that the flood of AI has changed her relationship to a site she once used to prize. “It's definitely affected how I search things and I'm always now very critical about where something came from... although I've always been overly pedantic about research,” she said. “It does make you do your due diligence but it sucks to constantly have to question and check if something is authentic or synthetic.”
She’s thought about leaving the platform, but feels stuck. “I just want to be able to take all my references with me. I've been on the platform for about ten years and have very carefully curated it. It's really nice to be able to just go to my page and search for something I saved instead of having to save everything to folders although I also do that,” she said. “More and more I'm trying to curate and collect physical references too but some of that can take up space I don't have so it can be difficult. Having a physical reference library just seems more and more necessary these days…artists have to be adaptable to this kind of thing these days. It's annoying but not unmanageable.”
Ready has been vocal and proud about the company’s commitment to forcing AI into every aspect of the user experience. “At Pinterest…we’re deploying AI to flip the script on social media, using it to more aggressively promote user well being rather than the alternative formula of triggering engagement by enragement,” Ready said in a January column at Fortune. “Social media platforms like Pinterest live and die by users’ willingness to share creative and original ideas.”
2026-02-19 01:42:59
In its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Palantir says that increased regulation of immigration may impact the company’s ability to hire the talent it needs. At the same time, Palantir provides the technological infrastructure for the Trump administration’s mass deportation mission.
As 404 Media has shown, Palantir considers Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) a “mature” partner, and is working on a tool called ELITE that ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid.
2026-02-18 22:37:34
Ring’s controversial, AI-powered “Search Party” feature isn’t intended to always be limited only to dogs, the company’s founder, Jamie Siminoff, told Ring employees in an internal email obtained by 404 Media.
In October, Ring launched Search Party, an on-by-default feature that links together Ring cameras in a neighborhood and uses AI to search for specific lost dogs, essentially creating a networked, automated surveillance system. The feature got some attention at the time, but faced extreme backlash after Ring and Siminoff promoted Search Party during a Super Bowl ad. 404 Media obtained an email that Siminoff sent to all Ring employees in early October, soon after the feature’s launch, which said the feature was introduced “first for finding dogs,” but that it or features like it would be expanded to “zero out crime in neighborhoods.”
2026-02-18 21:56:02
This week we start with Emanuel’s wild story about Alpha School, a very hyped AI-powered school. Emanuel got leaked documents and spoke to former employees. After the break, Sam tells us what happens when someone decides to make an AI nudify OnlyFans with your likeness. In the subscribers-only section, Joseph tells us about the agencies buying GeoSpy, an AI that can geolocate photos in seconds.
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
Timestamps:
2:49 Understood: Deepfake Porn Empire
5:47 'Students Are Being Treated Like Guinea Pigs:' Inside an AI-Powered Private School
40:01 'The Most Dejected I’ve Ever Felt:' Harassers Made Nude AI Images of Her, Then Started an OnlyFans
2026-02-17 23:20:02
Alpha School, an “AI-powered private school” that heavily relies on AI to teach students and can cost up to $65,000 a year, is AI-generating faulty lesson plans that internal company documentation find sometimes do “more harm than good,” and scraping data from a variety of other online courses without permission to train its own AI, according to former Alpha School employees and internal company documents.
