A Hacker Faked a $1.3 Million Google Bounty and AI Made It Real
I Accidentally Became a Millionaire
Lyra Rebane, a security researcher with 14 Chrome CVEs, discovered she had unintended edit access to a Chromium bug report. As a joke, she changed the bounty field to $1,333,337 and tweeted it. The tweet went viral, an AI-generated news podcast reported it as fact, and Google's AI Overview now confidently tells searchers she's a millionaire. The post is a case study in how social media and AI can be exploited to spread disinformation.
I am not a millionaire. I have never been one. And yet, if you were to ask Google about it, you might just walk away with the impression that I am.
- netsharc
An actress (I think Jennifer Lawrence) told an anecdote on Graham Norton's talk show in the UK. I was watching live, around 10pm UK time. I was curious to learn more, so I started googling about the story. There were no results.
But as soon as the episode ended, there were results for the search! But they're all "news" sites referencing the episode that had just finished. "news" in quotes because they all felt bot-written (this was before LLM). For me it was a surreal experience about the speed of slop...