The Slop Report - September 18, 2026
Today: How Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying…; Meta ordered to remove UK deepfakes as oversight board…; LLMs respond differently to harmful prompts when AI…
Your daily digest of AI-generated content news from around the web. All signal, no slop.
1. How Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning Them Into Zombie Content Farms That They Say Get 50 Million Page Views per Month
Futurism - · Sep 17
Brown Brothers Media is the biggest media company you’ve never heard of — powered by AI, fake writers, and plagiarism. When we started asking questions, it started deleting massive amounts of content. The post How Three Brothers Built an AI Slop Empire by Buying Legitimate News Sites and Turning The
2. Meta ordered to remove UK deepfakes as oversight board criticises ‘inadequate’ safeguards
The Guardian Tech - · Sep 17
Facebook told it was wrong in leaving up AI-generated videos of a Labour councillor and Muslim campaigner, amid calls to curb fakes Meta’s “supreme court” has ordered the tech company to take down deepfake videos of a UK politician and a young Muslim woman from Facebook and do more to tackle AI-gene
3. LLMs respond differently to harmful prompts when AI watermarking is used
Ars Technica - · Sep 17
SynthID can cause models to follow harmful instructions they would otherwise refuse.
4. Oversight Board says Meta’s rules for AI deepfakes are ‘consistently and fundamentally inadequate’
Engadget - · Sep 17
The Oversight Board is asking Meta to prioritize AI content when it’s reported.
5. Andrew Ng calls the AI extinction warnings science fiction
The Next Web - · Sep 17
Andrew Ng, who helped start Google Brain and Coursera, told Bloomberg TV that warnings of human extinction from AI are much more science fiction than science, and that the industry stokes them for publicity and to shape regulation. The EU AI Act already lists both the engineering risks he wants prio
6. Andrew Hastie says AI advised him to reply ‘congratulations!’ to man who planned to end life with assisted dying
The Guardian Tech - · Sep 18
Liberal MP speaks of AI’s shortcomings as cyber chief tells inquiry the tech is needed to fend off ‘highly capable malicious cyber actors’ Get our new political email , free app or daily news podcast When a man with a terminal illness wrote to his local MP Andrew Hastie, telling him he planned on en
7. Republican and Democratic states defy Trump on AI regulation
Politico Technology - · Sep 18
Calls for more robust limits have escalated since July.
8. Inside the scramble for trusted AI cops
Axios - · Sep 18
A host of industry players, policy wonks and businesses are grappling with the question of how to regulate AI in a trustworthy manner. Inside the White House, it’s mostly business as usual. Why it matters: The industry’s mad dash is the product of an ad hoc regulatory apparatus and a general consens
9. The specter of AI-enabled bioweapons is a wake-up call for biotech
MIT Technology Review - · Sep 18
In recent weeks, leaders of some of the biggest AI companies have warned that the very tech they are developing is dangerous. Last weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued that AI carries serious risk and that progress should be slowed. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded on X: “I agree with Dario tha
10. They hacked a TikTok user’s camera, with help from free AI
Washington Post Tech - · Sep 18
Chinese AI models given away free have potent cybersecurity skills, widening access to high-level hacking knowledge that can be used for good or ill.
11. Could AI really end humanity? Post your questions for our tech reporters now
The Guardian Tech - · Sep 18
After a week of alarming warnings about the technology’s potential to destroy the world as we know it, our expert tech reporters will take your questions on the reality of the AI threat. Join us at 3pm BST (4pm CEST, 10am EDT) where they will answer live Sign up or sign in to ask your question The l
12. Former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson joins Palantir
The Guardian Tech - · Sep 18
Peer takes full-time position at the controversial company as it fends off pressure from both Andy Burnham’s government and Sadiq Khan Another former government minister has been hired by a controversial US AI company, this time Palantir, which has appointed Andy Burnham’s former ministerial colleag
13. Is Trump’s AI obsession walking the world into disaster? – podcast
The Guardian Tech - · Sep 18
Tech bosses have called for a slowdown in artificial intelligence and the creation of formal guardrails from the US government. But why is President Trump unmoved by the doomsday predictions, dismissing them as a ‘hoax’? What lies behind his embrace of the AI industry? Jonathan Freedland speaks to t
14. EFF to Lawmakers: Ground AI Cybersecurity Rules in Best Practices
EFF Deeplinks - · Sep 18
With doomsday AI scenarios dominating the news, lawmakers are rightly concerned about reports concerning security breaches at major US AI labs, such as the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident and the many others reported in its aftermath. As they consider potentially regulating frontier AI, they should foc
15. AI titans invited to Trump-Xi dinner
Politico Technology - · Sep 17
The executives’ attendance signals artificial intelligence could be a key talking point during negotiations next week.
16. Is the AI safety debate about safety or control?
TechCrunch AI - · Sep 17
Not everyone agrees with Amodei’s call for globally coordinated action for AI safety.
17. Microsoft exec called AI scraping the “largest theft of labor in human history”
Ars Technica - · Sep 17
Microsoft, OpenAI emails reveal fear of AI “doom loop” killing news orgs.
18. UN turns to Google to make its global data ready for AI agents
TechCrunch AI - · Sep 17
The shift comes after a UNICEF test found leading AI models struggled to accurately retrieve global development statistics.
19. Microsoft exec called AI scraping ‘the largest theft of labor in human history,’ new unredacted filings reveal
TechCrunch AI - · Sep 17
Newly unsealed court filings show Microsoft privately called OpenAI’s data practices “theft” while both companies scraped paywalled Times content, built datasets from it, and warned internally it would gut publishers.
20. Base Labs launches an open-weight AI safety partnership with Hugging Face and Goodfire
TechCrunch AI - · Sep 17
Base Labs, the research group Baseten spun up earlier this year, will develop and publish methods for training and monitoring open models.
21. Trump’s AI wager meets a safety reckoning
Fast Company Tech - · Sep 17
Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company ‘s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI . I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company , covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here . And if y
22. AI is supercharging money scams. Here’s how to protect yourself from fraud
Fast Company Tech - · Sep 17
The phone rings , and it’s your grandson’s shaken voice. There’s been an accident, he says, and he needs money before anyone finds out. Except it isn’t him. It’s software that learned his voice from a clip posted online, run by a stranger working through a list of phone numbers. For years, warnings
23. King Charles warns of ‘existential danger’ of AI falling into wrong hands
BBC Technology - · Sep 17
The comments were made at a summit in Ayrshire with participants from AI giants including Nvidia, OpenAI and Anthropic.
24. Grassroots coalition asks politicians to choose voters over Big AI’s $140M machine
The Register - · Sep 17
QuitGPT-led pledge targets Leading the Future’s push for lighter regulation ahead of the midterms
25. Huawei plans Q1 2027 launch of new AI chip as it takes on Nvidia
TechCrunch AI - · Sep 17
Huawei is accelerating the launch of its next-generation Ascend 960DT AI chip as it pushes to compete with Nvidia and close China’s AI computing gap with the U.S.
25 stories sourced from Ars Technica, Axios, BBC Technology, EFF Deeplinks, Engadget, Fast Company Tech, Futurism, MIT Technology Review, Politico Technology, TechCrunch AI, The Guardian Tech, The Next Web, The Register, Washington Post Tech. The Slop Report is published daily. Subscribe via RSS.