2025-05-09 02:48:02
Job hunting can be a dehumanizing, demoralizing experience even if you’re interacting with an empathetic recruiter on the other end. For the 1.7 million people slogging through long-term unemployment in the U.S., the process is grueling at best. Add to this the advent of AI-generated recruiter avatars that glitch out on you before you even speak to a real person at the company you’re trying to work for, and now you’re truly in hell.
This week, TikTok user @its_ken04, who goes by Ken, posted a recording she took of 25 seconds of the “interview” that’s now viral on TikTok. In the video, the avatar says “vertical bar pilates” 14 times in a row, occasionally tripping over the words or stuttering, while Ken stares at the screen unamused.
@its_ken04 It was genuinely so creepy and weird. Please stop trying to be lazy and have AI try to do YOUR JOB!!! It gave me the creeps so bad #fyp
♬ original sound - Its Ken 🤍
Ken told me the company told her ahead of time that AI would be used in the application process, and that the platform was called Apriora. She was applying for a job at a Stretch Lab location near Columbus, Ohio, she said.
“This was the first meeting ever,” she said. “I guess I was supposed to earn my right to speak to a human lol.”
Apriora, founded in 2023 by John Rytel and Aaron Wang, is a Y Combinator startup that promises to help companies “hire 87% faster” and “interview 93% cheaper” because it can interview multiple candidates at once.
“By interviewing more candidates with Apriora’s AI, employers can widen their talent aperture and identify qualified applicants from non-traditional backgrounds that may have otherwise been screened out of the hiring process,” Wang told Forbes in 2024. “Job seekers prefer interviewing with AI in many cases, since knowing the interviewer is AI helps to reduce interviewing anxiety, allowing job seekers to perform at their best.”
That wasn’t Ken’s experience. “I thought it was really creepy and I was freaked out,” she said. “I didn’t find it funny at all until I had posted it on TikTok and the comments made me feel better. I was very shocked, I didn’t do anything to make it glitch so this was very surprising. I would never go through this process ever again. If another company wants me to talk to AI I will just decline.”
Almost all of the more than 3,100 comments on her video agree: “I applied to a job today that had an AI interview and immediately closed the window, cause if they’re not taking the time to interview me, I’m not taking the time to try to work there,” one said. “A company tried to send me to an AI interview for an HR position… Why would I want to work HUMAN resources for a company that won’t even dignify me with human interaction???” another wrote.
The recruitment and talent acquisition industry has been hemorrhaging for years now, as companies slow hiring in an economic downturn. “Recruiting will be disproportionately affected since we’re planning to hire fewer people next year,” Zuckerberg said in a letter to employees in 2022 announcing that the company would lay off more than 11,000 people. Of that number, Meta reportedly marked around 1,500 recruiters and HR roles for cuts. Google eliminated hundreds of recruitment roles in 2023.
Even as so many people need and are looking for jobs, companies are making it harder and weirder to try to get one. Last year, Emanuel wrote about Paradox.ai, the bizarre personality quiz required of prospective food and service workers that tells employers how potential hires rank in terms of “agreeableness” and “emotional stability,” and Joseph covered Fairgo.ai, which uses AI agents to interview job candidates on behalf of other companies; an applicant faced with a Fairgo AI recruiter said it was a “perfect demonstration of late stage capitalism.” And in February, I wrote about Anthropic, the company that made AI writing assistant Claude, adding a requirement to open role descriptions that made applicants agree that they wouldn’t use an AI assistant to help with their application. Companies don’t want you using AI, but they’ll send an AI avatar to do their job for them.
Apriora did not respond to requests for comment.
2025-05-08 03:45:57
An AI avatar made to look and sound like the likeness of a man who was killed in a road rage incident addressed the court and the man who killed him: “To Gabriel Horcasitas, the man who shot me, it is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances,” the AI avatar of Christopher Pelkey said. “In another life we probably could have been friends. I believe in forgiveness and a God who forgives. I still do.”
It was the first time the AI avatar of a victim—in this case, a dead man—has ever addressed a court, and it raises many questions about the use of this type of technology in future court proceedings.
The avatar was made by Pelkey’s sister, Stacey Wales. Wales tells 404 Media that her husband, Pelkey’s brother-in-law, recoiled when she told him about the idea. “He told me, ‘Stacey, you’re asking a lot.’”
2025-05-08 00:14:36
Earlier this week TeleMessage, the company that creates modified versions of messaging apps like Signal and adds an archiving ability to them, made a video private on its YouTube channel that explained how its Signal message archiving tool worked, and how the company says it is able to copy messages securely. The hiding of the video came after 404 Media revealed that a hacker had targeted TeleMessage, which is used by the Trump administration, and managed to obtain the contents of some users’ messages and group chats.
404 Media made a transcript of what this video said and is now publishing it in order to preserve TeleMessage’s claims around the security and functioning of its Signal archiving product. The news comes after Senator Ron Wyden has demanded a Department of Justice investigation into the TeleMessage episode, including the national security risk the app poses. The letter demanding the investigation also points to TeleMessage’s marketing material which claims messages are protected with end-to-end encryption, a claim that both the hack and a subsequent technical analysis refute.
The video said TeleMessage’s app keeps “intact the Signal security and end-to-end encryption when communicating with other Signal users.” This is not true, judging by the fact the hacker was able to obtain plaintext Signal messages. The video also says “The only difference is the TeleMessage version captures all incoming and outgoing Signal messages for archiving purposes.”
2025-05-07 23:03:15
Dora the Explorer, the cute Nickelodeon cartoon character, is teaching kids what it means to be “Sigma,” a slang term describing an extremely toxic male archetype which originates in the darkest corners of the so-called “manosphere.”
“Hola, grown-ups! Today I have a super cool word for you! Sigma,” a 3D rendered version of Dora says in a video uploaded to the official Dora the Explorer Instagram account yesterday. “‘Sigma’ is a word for someone who’s confident, independent, and does things their own way! Think of it as someone who’s a leader and a trendsetter. Let’s say your friend is doing their own thing, focusing on their goals, and not worrying about what others think. You can say, ‘you’re such a SIGMA!’”
Nickelodeon removed this video after this article was published, but here's what it looked like:
As Dora explains this, the video cuts to different Nickelodeon characters like Spongebob Squarepants and Aang, the main character from Avatar: The Last Airbender. The video, which was also shared from the official Nickelodeon Instagram account, has 2.8 million views, 156,000 likes, and almost 7,000 comments, most of which are incredulous or joking about Dora defining a term even mildly online users recognize as inappropriate for children.
“Dora that’s not even Spanish you’re losing the PLOT,” one user said.
Dora’s definition of Sigma isn’t wrong, but it’s missing some very important context. In the world of toxic masculinity, incelhood, and the manosphere, men fit into one of a few rigid categories. There are Beta males, who are viewed as weak, effeminate, and generally losers who can’t get women, and Alpha males who are strong, masculine, and can dominate women as well as other beta males. And then there are Sigma males, who are so masculine they ascend these categories and the normal social hierarchies and become something more powerful. It is very similar and sometimes overlaps with the community of “Men Going Their Own Way” (MGTOW).
Know Your Meme attributes the origin of the term to the far-right misogynist and white supremacist Theodore Beale, known mostly for his online persona Vox Day. In 2010, Beale defined Sigmas on his blog as:
To be fair, Sigma went through another evolution before Dora’s video. It is now part of the “brainrot” meta meme, which takes a bunch of online terms like Skibidi, Rizz, and Sigma, and blends them all into a soup which is regurgitate in various forms to express that you spent too much time on the internet and can prove that by referencing these words.
I don’t know if Nickelodeon or the people in charge of these social media accounts are ignorant of Sigma’s origin, if they don’t care, or if it’s some irony-poisoned cynical wink at an audience that is obviously responding to the provocation.
I can easily imagine this being a case of brands trying to be and online for engagement but going too far, especially because it’s working—this post is getting a lot more engagement than most things the Dora account has posted.
It also reminds me of something that’s been bugging me for months but I have not had an excuse to write about yet, which is that the TV brand TCL has been promoting its products with ads calling their customers “gooners” and inviting them to “goon” with their TVs. Technically, TCL is an official partner with the Arsenal Football Club, which has called its fans gooners for years, but the TCL posts are obviously playing on the fact that today, at least online, “gooning” more commonly refers to the practice of hedonistic masturbation and excessive porn consumption. TCL also invites its customers to be “Alpha.”
Ultimately it doesn’t matter if the Dora post is a mistake that can’t tell the difference between skibidi toilet and a racist Pepe the Frog, or if it’s an ironic joke. While the video addresses “grown-ups,” Dora is a giant kids media brand, and she is currently introducing them to a toxic philosophy that glorifies misogyny and the desire to be above and outside social relationships.
Nickelodeon did not respond to a request for comment.
Update: This story has been updated to note Nickelodeon removed the video after we published the article.
2025-05-07 21:35:34
Trump has found an aesthetic to define his second term: grotesque AI slop.
Over the weekend, the Trump administration posted at least seven different pieces of AI generated or AI altered media, ranging from Trump imagining himself as a pope and a Star Wars Jedi (or Sith?) to Obama-esque “Hope” posters featuring people the administration has deported.
This has become the Slop Presidency, and AI-generated images are the perfect artistic medium for the Trump presidency. They're impulsively created, grotesque, and low-effort. Trumpworld’s fascination with slop is the logical next step for a President that, in his first term, regularly retweeted random memes created by his army of supporters on Discord or The Donald, a subreddit that ultimately became a Reddit-clone website after it was banned. AI allows his team to create media that would never exist otherwise, a particularly useful tool for a President and administration that has a hostile relationship with reality.
Trump’s original fascination with AI slop began last summer, after he said legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were “eating the cats…they’re eating the pets” in his debate with Kamala Harris. The internet’s AI slop factories began spinning up images of Trump as cat-and-dog savior. Since then, Trump and the administration have occasionally shared or reposted AI slop. In his first week in office, Trump shared an AI-generated “GM” car image that was promoting $TRUMP coin. “What a beautiful car. Congrats to GM!,” he posted.
At the end of February, Trump shared a video on his Truth Social account that imagined a world where Gaza was turned into a Trump Casino.
But this weekend, Trump began sharing AI slop on a level we’ve not seen before.
Trump’s AI-tinged weekend began on Friday night with a photo-realistic picture of himself as the Pope on his Truth Social account. The White House reposted a screenshot of the image on X, which pissed off the Catholic Church.
“This is deeply offensive to Catholics especially during this sacred time that we are still mourning the death of Pope Francis and praying for the guidance of the Holy Spirit for the election of our new Pope. He owes an apology,” Thomas Paprocki, an American Bishop in Illinois, said on X.
During a press conference on Monday, Trump dismissed the accusation that the Trump Pope was offensive and then said he didn’t post it. “The Catholics loved it. I had nothing to do with it,” Trump said. “Somebody made up a picture of me dressed like the Pope and they put it out on the internet,” Trump said. “That’s not me that did it, I have no idea where it came from. Maybe it was AI. But I know nothing about it. I just saw it last evening.”
All political movements are accompanied by artists who translate the politics into pictures, writing, and music. Adolf Ziegler captured the Nazi ideal in paintings. Stalin’s Soviet Union churned out mass produced and striking propaganda posters that wanted citizens about how to live. The MAGA movement’s artistic aesthetic is AI slop and Donald Trump is its king. It is not concerned with convincing anyone or using art to inform people about its movement. It seeks only to upset people who aren’t on board and excite the faithful because it upsets people.
Not content to just aggravate Catholics, the Trump administration then used AI to offend adherents of another of America’s major religions: Star Wars fans. On May the 4th, the official White House X account posted an AI-generated image of a muscle bound Trump wielding a red light saber and flanked by two bald eagles.
“Happy May the 4th to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting so hard to to [sic] bring Sith Lords, Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, & well known MS-13 Gang Members, back into our Galaxy. You’re not the Rebellion—you’re the Empire,” it said in the post. “May the 4th be with you.” As the replies pointed out, red light sabers are typically used by villains.
This was just one of a series of Star Wars related AI-generated cringe that went out from official Trump admin accounts over the weekend. DOD Rapid Response on X (an account that publishes propaganda on behalf of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth) posted a five minute video that contained a Star Wars intro style scroll of Trump’s “accomplishments” before treating viewers to a pic of Trump and Hegseth as Jedi. The account for the U.S. Army’s Pacific Command sent out an “AI-enhanced” image of soldiers doing a training exercise. Both of the soldiers’s weapons were replaced with lightsabers.
Trump and the people who created AI-image generators do not respect artists. There is no style that either will not exploit or sully. OpenAI reduced Hayao Miyazaki's life’s work to a gross meme, and the White House played along. For years the Lofi Girl has sat in windows on screens across the planet while people studied, read, and worked. Over the weekend the White House YouTube channel ran “Lo-Fi MAGA Video to Relax/ Study To” while an animated President Trump sat at a desk, mimicking the Lofi Girl.
Maybe you don’t like Star Wars, are unmoved by Studio Ghibli films, or have never chilled to lofi beats. It doesn’t matter, the message is clear: if you love something Trump will pervert it. Nothing will be untouched. Sacred objects and beloved art exist only to be desecrated. AI has made that as easy as pushing a button.
AI generated slop content is part of a brute force attack on the algorithms that control reality and the Trump administration’s constant use of AI art reflects its own brute force attack on American democracy. It’s not just that its aesthetics are useful for Trump, its entire mode of being is useful for how his administration has governed so far, by brute forcing the Presidency with a slew of executive orders, budget cuts, attacks on institutions, and sloppily executed deportations. The strategy is to overwhelm the American bureaucracy and the legal system, and to exhaust his enemies with an endless stream of bullshit; by the time we shake out what’s legal and what’s not, much of the damage has already been done.
One of the wonderful things about making art is the process. A lot happens between conception and execution. An idea pops into an artist's head and it changes dramatically while they attempt to render that idea into reality. That doesn’t happen with AI-generated images. There is no creation process, there is only instant gratification. Whatever impulsive and grotesque thought pops into the mind of the creator can immediately be realized.
And so every revenge fantasy Trump and his followers ever wanted can be made real at a moment’s notice. On March 27, the White House X account posted a Ghibli-style AI image of a crying woman being arrested by ICE.
Here is a real woman who has been accused of a crime, her image appropriated by the state and rendered into a cartoon. America has total power over this woman. Arrested for drug trafficking, her image has been plastered all over the internet. She’ll be deported. Not content with total control over her body and future, the administration has made her into a caricature and invited its followers to mock her online.
2025-05-07 21:00:25
We start this week's episode with our massive story on TeleMessage, the Signal clone the Trump administration uses to archive messages which was hacked. We have more detail than anyone else on that story. After the break, Jason tells us about another hack, this time GlobalX Air, one of the airlines used by ICE for deportation flights. In the subscribers-only section, Sam and Emanuel tell us about the shut down of Mr. Deepfakes, and what the lasting legacy of the site will be.
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.