Kevin Schaul
Kevin Schaul

Visual journalist/hacker covering AI

Short posts

Another glimpse into what people really use ChatGPT for, and it’s … really something

https://wapo.st/3LzQUL2

I feel very tired now after another long day at work so wanted to pop in ...

Set up a git scraper for LMArena leaderboards. This csv has all the text ranks since May 2025, and will be updated as rankings change.

lmarena-leaderboard-history/history.csv at main · kevinschaul/lmarena-leaderboard-history

Hell of a story right here

Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show

Must-read story on Common Crawl — the scraped internet data behind many LLMs. They tell publishers they are making progress on takedown requests, but … nope!

Glad we have journalists with tech chops like Alex Reisner who can test their claims

The Nonprofit Doing the AI Industry’s Dirty Work

Crawl’s attorney wrote: “I confirm that Common Crawl has initiated work to remove your members’ content from the data archive. Presently, approximately 50% of this content has been removed.” I spoke with other publishers who’d received similar messages from Common Crawl. One was told, after multiple follow-up emails, that removal was 50 percent, 70 percent, and then 80 percent complete. By writing code to browse the petabytes of data, I was able to see that large quantities of articles from the Times, the DRA, and these other publishers are still present in Common Crawl’s archives. Furthermore, the files are stored in a system that logs the modification times of every file. The foundation adds a new “crawl” to its archive every few weeks, each containing 1 billion to 4 billion webpages, and it has been publishing these regular installments since 2013. None of the content files in Common Crawl’s archives appears to have been modified since 2016, suggesting that no content has been removed in at least nine years. Yet the nonprofit appears to be concealing this from visitors to its website, where a search function, the only nontechnical tool for seeing what’s in Common Crawl’s archives, returns misleading results for certain domains. A search for nytimes.com in any crawl from 2013 through 2022 shows a “no captures” result, when in fact there are articles from NYTimes.com in most of these crawls. I also discovered more than 1,000 other domains that produce this incorrect “no captures” result for at least several of the crawls, and most of these domains belong to publishers, including the BBC, Reuters, The New Yorker, Wired, the Financial Times, The Washington Post, and, yes, The Atlantic.

Lovely image editing evals with before/after sliders https://genai-showdown.specr.net/image-editing

Results of

Some personal news: I’m now a visual reporter covering AI for the Washington Post’s excellent tech team.

I’m a hacker/journalist with a comp sci background. Expect analysis, explainers and experiments on how AI really works and what it means for us.

RSS heads can find me here kschaul.com/index.xml

Tech giants keep touting a system they built to label AI-generated content. But it only works if everyone uses it.

So I checked. They’re not using it.

I generated a video with OpenAI’s Sora and confirmed it had the Content Credentials metadata, which marks it as AI-generated. I posted it across social media. Every site stripped the metadata off my video. Only YouTube displayed any indication that it was synthetic (hidden behind a menu).

I also tested generating Sora clips using the API and could not believe the outputs have no visible watermark or Content Credentials metadata. I still don’t know if that’s on purpose or an oversight because they don’t answer my emails.

Anyway, many more details in the article (and so much more to say than can fit in one article)

🎁 wapo.st/4qokjaC

Table titled Few social media sites labeled fake videos as AI-generated

Just tried out Atlas (OpenAI’s new browser). Asked it to find me some cheap ram.

3 mins later, it told me Microcenter’s best price was $299. I checked manually (took 10s) and found one at $183. None are $299.

🥸

(Video sped up 5x)

My lukewarm take is that this might work sometimes for some tasks. But woof are the privacy and security implications bad. The risk/reward is hopelessly unbalanced.

Trump has posted at least 62 AI-generated images or videos on his socials, which NYT has rounded up here https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/21/business/media/trump-ai-truth-social-no-kings.html

New from me: Last year, the best open-weight AI models were made in the U.S. Now, they are all made in China.

More data and what it means -> 🎁 wapo.st/4nPUBud

Chart titled Chinese companies make the most popular free AI models