1
00:00:01,480 --> 00:00:06,400
Speaker 1: Ah, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that

2
00:00:06,519 --> 00:00:09,039
Speaker 1: is uh, it's a podcast. You know what what what

3
00:00:09,320 --> 00:00:12,760
Speaker 1: do you want? That's honesty and advertising can't argue with that.

4
00:00:12,960 --> 00:00:13,280
Speaker 2: It is.

5
00:00:13,360 --> 00:00:18,439
Speaker 1: It is a podcast. I'm Robert Evans, your host, and

6
00:00:19,280 --> 00:00:22,720
Speaker 1: I didn't think of a funny introduction for this episode,

7
00:00:22,760 --> 00:00:26,520
Speaker 1: So pretend I shouted a tonally or screamed out the

8
00:00:26,600 --> 00:00:29,880
Speaker 1: name of a dead dictator, and let's welcome our guest

9
00:00:30,000 --> 00:00:32,680
Speaker 1: for the episode, Ben Bowler.

10
00:00:34,200 --> 00:00:36,559
Speaker 3: If you could be a dictator's name, that would be

11
00:00:36,760 --> 00:00:37,600
Speaker 3: most appreciated.

12
00:00:38,040 --> 00:00:39,600
Speaker 1: Yeah, one of the hard to pronounce ones.

13
00:00:39,720 --> 00:00:40,920
Speaker 3: Yeah, go for it.

14
00:00:40,400 --> 00:00:46,080
Speaker 2: Oh okay, uh wow, that's that's definitely uh oh. There

15
00:00:46,080 --> 00:00:48,519
Speaker 2: are so many good wines though. Okay, Matt Mood.

16
00:00:48,360 --> 00:00:48,680
Speaker 4: I'm.

17
00:00:50,840 --> 00:00:53,519
Speaker 1: Jodd. I think you're right there. You go out there.

18
00:00:53,840 --> 00:00:55,320
Speaker 2: This is why you're the host, Robert.

19
00:00:55,520 --> 00:00:57,800
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean that's an interesting one, right because

20
00:00:57,840 --> 00:01:02,560
Speaker 1: he wasn't I don't know how you yeah characterize exactly

21
00:01:02,600 --> 00:01:04,959
Speaker 1: what he was, but he's become a darling of Twitter

22
00:01:05,080 --> 00:01:07,679
Speaker 1: since his time as the as the leader of Iran,

23
00:01:08,160 --> 00:01:13,440
Speaker 1: which is always fun as the air quotes leader. Yeah yeah, yeah,

24
00:01:13,520 --> 00:01:17,920
Speaker 1: wild stuff. I do love like the every now and

25
00:01:17,959 --> 00:01:20,319
Speaker 1: then you're like, this guy who had a very different

26
00:01:20,480 --> 00:01:23,600
Speaker 1: vibe you know when he first came to my awareness

27
00:01:24,160 --> 00:01:28,360
Speaker 1: via media is now like a completely different person in

28
00:01:28,400 --> 00:01:30,800
Speaker 1: a lot of people's eyes because he like went after

29
00:01:30,840 --> 00:01:35,240
Speaker 1: Donald Trump on Twitter. Always funny, Ben, how do you

30
00:01:35,240 --> 00:01:39,640
Speaker 1: feel about AI? Not the movie with Haley Joel Osmond?

31
00:01:40,280 --> 00:01:44,080
Speaker 2: Oh well, oh okay, Well, all my notes are trash then,

32
00:01:44,200 --> 00:01:45,959
Speaker 2: because I thought we were talking about this.

33
00:01:46,440 --> 00:01:49,559
Speaker 1: Okay, I did say prepare for an episode on AI

34
00:01:49,800 --> 00:01:53,080
Speaker 1: and then send you thirty seven pictures of Jigglo Joel.

35
00:01:53,560 --> 00:01:57,360
Speaker 2: So yeah, and thank you, thank you. I'm framing those, Robert,

36
00:01:57,880 --> 00:02:01,600
Speaker 2: I'm framing those. Yeah. Well, I got to give a

37
00:02:01,640 --> 00:02:04,960
Speaker 2: shout out to a lot of folks ethicists working in

38
00:02:05,000 --> 00:02:08,600
Speaker 2: the field who are asking about the nature of consciousness

39
00:02:08,639 --> 00:02:16,040
Speaker 2: and why why the term AI is somewhat you know, problematic,

40
00:02:16,160 --> 00:02:19,160
Speaker 2: like what makes an intelligence artificial?

41
00:02:19,480 --> 00:02:19,720
Speaker 4: You know?

42
00:02:20,520 --> 00:02:24,720
Speaker 2: But when I hear AI, if I'm most people, what

43
00:02:24,880 --> 00:02:30,360
Speaker 2: I'm thinking is, oh, I should have studied math. Numbers

44
00:02:30,360 --> 00:02:31,000
Speaker 2: are scaring.

45
00:02:31,760 --> 00:02:34,520
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've been so, I've been kind of digging into

46
00:02:34,520 --> 00:02:37,840
Speaker 1: this as a new beat for myself as a reporter.

47
00:02:37,880 --> 00:02:42,200
Speaker 1: As we'll introduce today, Like there's some some some stuff

48
00:02:42,200 --> 00:02:44,360
Speaker 1: I've kind of gotten sucked into here, and as I've

49
00:02:44,440 --> 00:02:47,200
Speaker 1: kind of talked to more people who are on the

50
00:02:47,240 --> 00:02:50,440
Speaker 1: technical side of things here, I'm gaining both a deeper

51
00:02:50,520 --> 00:02:54,640
Speaker 1: appreciation for how complex this stuff is. You know, there's

52
00:02:54,680 --> 00:02:58,639
Speaker 1: been a lot that's sort of You've got this mix

53
00:02:58,880 --> 00:03:04,600
Speaker 1: of like incredibly dense academic papers and kind of the

54
00:03:04,600 --> 00:03:07,720
Speaker 1: the commentary of people who are actually like working with

55
00:03:07,760 --> 00:03:10,480
Speaker 1: the nuts and bolts of this stuff and not trying

56
00:03:10,520 --> 00:03:13,640
Speaker 1: to pump up the price of you know, the IPO

57
00:03:13,760 --> 00:03:17,239
Speaker 1: valuation of their company. Right, and then you've got kind

58
00:03:17,280 --> 00:03:19,680
Speaker 1: of the hype cycle, which is very different.

59
00:03:19,760 --> 00:03:19,919
Speaker 5: Right.

60
00:03:20,000 --> 00:03:23,160
Speaker 1: The people who are are kind of talking about, you know,

61
00:03:23,240 --> 00:03:26,520
Speaker 1: how models are actually constructed, and you know what the

62
00:03:26,600 --> 00:03:29,320
Speaker 1: ideal size for the models might be, and like how

63
00:03:29,360 --> 00:03:31,680
Speaker 1: the capabilities kind of will change as they sort of

64
00:03:31,760 --> 00:03:34,280
Speaker 1: ramp up or ramp down the scale, talk about like

65
00:03:34,320 --> 00:03:37,480
Speaker 1: the potential problems like model collapse and whatever. Versus the

66
00:03:37,480 --> 00:03:41,400
Speaker 1: people who are like an AI is going to take

67
00:03:41,440 --> 00:03:44,120
Speaker 1: control of all the nukes. No, no, this isn't just

68
00:03:44,200 --> 00:03:47,600
Speaker 1: me stealing the plot of Terminator too in order to

69
00:03:47,640 --> 00:03:50,880
Speaker 1: like hype up the power of the product my company's making.

70
00:03:50,920 --> 00:03:56,640
Speaker 1: I swear these it's real swears ease, So.

71
00:03:56,520 --> 00:03:59,320
Speaker 2: That's how you know it's legit. That is, that is

72
00:04:00,120 --> 00:04:04,800
Speaker 2: some actual nomenclature used in the halls of powers where.

73
00:04:04,680 --> 00:04:08,280
Speaker 1: Yees yeah, and I think you can always trust when

74
00:04:08,440 --> 00:04:11,400
Speaker 1: a bunch of people with a vested financial interest in

75
00:04:11,520 --> 00:04:16,880
Speaker 1: making their AI products seem extra powerful. Recite the plot

76
00:04:16,920 --> 00:04:20,080
Speaker 1: of Terminator too to you as if it's you know,

77
00:04:20,320 --> 00:04:24,640
Speaker 1: a serious, serious business. So as we've kind of let

78
00:04:24,680 --> 00:04:26,720
Speaker 1: into the internet is a wash right now and kind

79
00:04:26,720 --> 00:04:29,680
Speaker 1: of cheap takes on what AI means for the future,

80
00:04:29,920 --> 00:04:31,680
Speaker 1: you know, on one hand, you've got these kind of

81
00:04:31,760 --> 00:04:34,560
Speaker 1: terminatory fears. Kind of the best example of this recently

82
00:04:34,680 --> 00:04:37,560
Speaker 1: was WECE put out this very dumb article that was

83
00:04:37,640 --> 00:04:42,000
Speaker 1: like a military AI killed its creator because it was

84
00:04:42,040 --> 00:04:44,960
Speaker 1: trying to stop it from launching a missile, and everyone

85
00:04:45,040 --> 00:04:47,200
Speaker 1: was like, oh my god, you know, we have to

86
00:04:47,240 --> 00:04:49,320
Speaker 1: stop this, and then it turns out, well, actually what

87
00:04:49,400 --> 00:04:51,599
Speaker 1: happened is like a bunch of human beings were sitting

88
00:04:51,680 --> 00:04:54,480
Speaker 1: around a table like kind of plotting out things that

89
00:04:54,560 --> 00:04:56,680
Speaker 1: might happen if they ever built one of these, and

90
00:04:56,720 --> 00:04:58,960
Speaker 1: someone was like, well, what if you did this, and

91
00:04:59,040 --> 00:05:01,360
Speaker 1: like that's all that happened like they were playing fancy

92
00:05:01,440 --> 00:05:03,040
Speaker 1: D and D. It's nothing to be scared of.

93
00:05:03,560 --> 00:05:06,760
Speaker 2: Yeah, man, it's like it's like a war game, like

94
00:05:06,880 --> 00:05:11,080
Speaker 2: a simulation, right, it's a planning out a hypothetical. Yeah,

95
00:05:11,080 --> 00:05:14,520
Speaker 2: and it is that that's that's headline chicanery.

96
00:05:14,839 --> 00:05:17,000
Speaker 1: And it's not it's not even a simulation where like

97
00:05:17,040 --> 00:05:19,520
Speaker 1: they didn't like even code you know, a fake AI

98
00:05:19,680 --> 00:05:21,720
Speaker 1: to like test it as a simulation. We're literally just

99
00:05:21,720 --> 00:05:25,280
Speaker 1: like bullshitting, you know, like nothing, nothing was built. Which

100
00:05:25,320 --> 00:05:28,160
Speaker 1: is not to say like I'm not concerned about the

101
00:05:28,200 --> 00:05:32,719
Speaker 1: possibility of like AI, you know, involvement in weapons targeting

102
00:05:32,760 --> 00:05:34,160
Speaker 1: and stuff and that kind of thing. Like there's a

103
00:05:34,200 --> 00:05:37,159
Speaker 1: lot to be concerned about there, but not this article.

104
00:05:37,760 --> 00:05:39,320
Speaker 1: And then kind of on the other end, on the

105
00:05:39,360 --> 00:05:41,520
Speaker 1: positive end of the hype stuff, you've got like this

106
00:05:41,520 --> 00:05:44,280
Speaker 1: this growing chorus of people who are like certain that

107
00:05:44,360 --> 00:05:47,400
Speaker 1: AI is going to save education and rescue students. Bill

108
00:05:47,440 --> 00:05:50,080
Speaker 1: Gates is like a big kind of he's one of

109
00:05:50,080 --> 00:05:52,680
Speaker 1: the big guys like kind of pushing this idea. I

110
00:05:53,000 --> 00:05:55,760
Speaker 1: found a thing recently where he was like very excitedly

111
00:05:55,839 --> 00:05:58,280
Speaker 1: talking about how open ai had taught a chat bot

112
00:05:58,320 --> 00:06:01,640
Speaker 1: to pass an ap test and why this might mean

113
00:06:01,720 --> 00:06:05,320
Speaker 1: something good for education. I'm kind of hesitant to say

114
00:06:05,320 --> 00:06:08,120
Speaker 1: that I buy that, just because I haven't really seen

115
00:06:08,120 --> 00:06:11,599
Speaker 1: any evidence that like an AI is actually good at

116
00:06:11,760 --> 00:06:13,960
Speaker 1: teaching people stuff, which is not to say I haven't

117
00:06:13,960 --> 00:06:16,960
Speaker 1: seen evidence that there are uses for it in education potentially,

118
00:06:17,360 --> 00:06:19,719
Speaker 1: but like, I think people are getting a little bullish

119
00:06:19,760 --> 00:06:22,360
Speaker 1: about this, and kind of somewhere in between those two

120
00:06:22,400 --> 00:06:24,760
Speaker 1: hype peaks, you know, the robots are going to nukasol

121
00:06:24,920 --> 00:06:27,720
Speaker 1: or the robots are going to replace teachers. Somewhere in

122
00:06:27,760 --> 00:06:30,320
Speaker 1: between those two hype peaks is a story I ran

123
00:06:30,360 --> 00:06:33,120
Speaker 1: across a couple weeks ago about an author who wrote

124
00:06:33,200 --> 00:06:36,760
Speaker 1: ninety seven books in nine months using chat GPT.

125
00:06:37,160 --> 00:06:42,040
Speaker 2: Oh no oh no oh no, I think, oh gosh,

126
00:06:42,080 --> 00:06:42,679
Speaker 2: all right.

127
00:06:42,640 --> 00:06:45,040
Speaker 1: I'm gonna guess a lot of people came across this

128
00:06:45,120 --> 00:06:48,240
Speaker 1: story and it's one of those things it sort of

129
00:06:48,320 --> 00:06:51,800
Speaker 1: dropped and a bunch of different like places like the

130
00:06:51,920 --> 00:06:54,160
Speaker 1: I think the Post was one of them. Insider was

131
00:06:54,160 --> 00:06:58,160
Speaker 1: one of these kind of like low quality publications or

132
00:06:58,200 --> 00:07:03,480
Speaker 1: publications that have recently unk in quality significantly, who are

133
00:07:03,560 --> 00:07:06,880
Speaker 1: chasing SEO shit right, And it's also kind of noteworthy

134
00:07:06,880 --> 00:07:08,960
Speaker 1: to me that like this story hit right as the

135
00:07:09,000 --> 00:07:11,800
Speaker 1: writer strike began, like the writers go on strike, and

136
00:07:11,840 --> 00:07:13,920
Speaker 1: then there's this story about like, well, this guy wrote

137
00:07:13,920 --> 00:07:16,600
Speaker 1: almost one hundred books in less than a year using

138
00:07:16,680 --> 00:07:20,760
Speaker 1: chat GPT. You know, maybe we don't need all these writers.

139
00:07:21,080 --> 00:07:24,800
Speaker 1: Now if you actually look at this, this author quote

140
00:07:24,880 --> 00:07:27,920
Speaker 1: unquote and with the most quotation marks around that word,

141
00:07:27,960 --> 00:07:30,880
Speaker 1: I can possibly add like like a whole script that's

142
00:07:30,920 --> 00:07:34,000
Speaker 1: just quotes around the word author. There is a guy

143
00:07:34,080 --> 00:07:37,920
Speaker 1: named Tim Buscher, and the reality if you actually look

144
00:07:37,960 --> 00:07:40,679
Speaker 1: into what's he did here, he didn't write ninety seven

145
00:07:40,760 --> 00:07:44,560
Speaker 1: model novels using chat GPT. He had an AI generate

146
00:07:44,720 --> 00:07:48,720
Speaker 1: like ninety seven stories each about two to five thousand words.

147
00:07:49,920 --> 00:07:54,200
Speaker 1: And if you don't know how novels work generally speaking,

148
00:07:54,320 --> 00:07:57,600
Speaker 1: kind of like the minimum word count before something's considered

149
00:07:57,600 --> 00:08:00,800
Speaker 1: a novel, it's about fifty thousand words. It's and that's

150
00:08:00,800 --> 00:08:04,440
Speaker 1: a short novel, right, you're talking about like I don't know,

151
00:08:04,480 --> 00:08:06,840
Speaker 1: Old Man in the Sea style shit or something like that.

152
00:08:06,880 --> 00:08:08,640
Speaker 1: I don't actually how many words Old Man in the Seas,

153
00:08:08,640 --> 00:08:12,840
Speaker 1: But like my silly book with robot, horny cyborgs and

154
00:08:12,840 --> 00:08:14,559
Speaker 1: stuff was one hundred and twenty thousand words.

155
00:08:14,560 --> 00:08:17,160
Speaker 2: So also, it's a really good book and people should

156
00:08:17,160 --> 00:08:17,520
Speaker 2: read it.

157
00:08:17,760 --> 00:08:19,040
Speaker 1: Thank you. That's very nice.

158
00:08:20,000 --> 00:08:23,280
Speaker 2: It's not a compliment. I'm objectively saying it's a good book.

159
00:08:23,720 --> 00:08:27,000
Speaker 1: Well, thank thank you. I agree that because like he's

160
00:08:27,000 --> 00:08:29,680
Speaker 1: not having it write novels. What he did was he

161
00:08:29,880 --> 00:08:32,640
Speaker 1: had it churn out short stories each with dozens and

162
00:08:32,640 --> 00:08:35,160
Speaker 1: dozens of illustrations in them. There's something like fifty or

163
00:08:35,200 --> 00:08:37,480
Speaker 1: sixty in each story, which is also too many for

164
00:08:37,520 --> 00:08:41,800
Speaker 1: a short story. Waits, Robert, did he draw the pictures himself?

165
00:08:42,800 --> 00:08:45,800
Speaker 1: He sure did not. And we'll talk so like if

166
00:08:45,840 --> 00:08:49,080
Speaker 1: you look at these, like I went to his web page,

167
00:08:49,120 --> 00:08:51,360
Speaker 1: and thankfully, one thing I will give Tim Buscher is

168
00:08:51,440 --> 00:08:52,920
Speaker 1: it looks like he's put most of these on a

169
00:08:52,920 --> 00:08:56,040
Speaker 1: personal web page rather than dumping them all on Amazon,

170
00:08:57,160 --> 00:08:59,040
Speaker 1: which is what we're going to talk about in a second.

171
00:08:59,240 --> 00:09:01,000
Speaker 1: But if you look at the shit he's got like

172
00:09:01,320 --> 00:09:04,040
Speaker 1: a bunch of different Like one of the stories is

173
00:09:04,080 --> 00:09:08,040
Speaker 1: Occupy AI, which is described as like a story about

174
00:09:08,080 --> 00:09:12,920
Speaker 1: protesters fighting cops because AI takes the jobs away or

175
00:09:12,960 --> 00:09:17,960
Speaker 1: something like that. There's not like characters given or any

176
00:09:18,040 --> 00:09:20,600
Speaker 1: kind of like sense of a narrative arc. But the

177
00:09:20,679 --> 00:09:24,120
Speaker 1: AI generated art for the of the cops, like beating

178
00:09:24,200 --> 00:09:27,239
Speaker 1: up people makes them look like the bad guys in Spaceballs,

179
00:09:27,559 --> 00:09:31,440
Speaker 1: And I do appreciate that. So that's that's that's good.

180
00:09:31,480 --> 00:09:38,320
Speaker 1: Sophie can show you the Spaceball's illustration. Oh holy smokes, Yeah,

181
00:09:38,360 --> 00:09:44,959
Speaker 1: they found shit. So I don't I don't have a

182
00:09:45,000 --> 00:09:48,280
Speaker 1: lot of respect for Tim's story writing project, but I

183
00:09:48,320 --> 00:09:52,040
Speaker 1: also don't think it's particularly harmful, right, Like, other than that,

184
00:09:52,160 --> 00:09:53,840
Speaker 1: you know, this guy got a bunch of news attention.

185
00:09:53,960 --> 00:09:56,920
Speaker 1: His books are presumably geared towards adults, or at least

186
00:09:56,960 --> 00:09:59,360
Speaker 1: young adults, and I don't really think a lot of

187
00:09:59,400 --> 00:10:02,480
Speaker 1: people are gonna get swept up in it. But there's something,

188
00:10:02,640 --> 00:10:05,960
Speaker 1: there is something sinister in the world of people using

189
00:10:06,000 --> 00:10:08,920
Speaker 1: AI to generate stories. And this is where we get

190
00:10:08,920 --> 00:10:11,760
Speaker 1: into the meat of what we're actually going to be

191
00:10:11,800 --> 00:10:15,040
Speaker 1: talking about this week, because I have found myself doing

192
00:10:15,080 --> 00:10:17,720
Speaker 1: some journalism again. I don't do as much of that

193
00:10:17,840 --> 00:10:21,320
Speaker 1: as I used to, but I kind of got I

194
00:10:21,360 --> 00:10:23,520
Speaker 1: fell down a rabbit hole over the last two weeks

195
00:10:23,520 --> 00:10:27,000
Speaker 1: and I have been investigating something that I found really

196
00:10:27,040 --> 00:10:29,880
Speaker 1: fucked up and scary. And the short of it is,

197
00:10:30,000 --> 00:10:33,000
Speaker 1: the robots are coming for your children. If you've got

198
00:10:33,120 --> 00:10:37,000
Speaker 1: kids out there, there is a shady network of influencers

199
00:10:37,080 --> 00:10:40,440
Speaker 1: and conmen who are trying to warp your kid's brain

200
00:10:40,880 --> 00:10:42,760
Speaker 1: so that they can make a quick buck off of

201
00:10:42,800 --> 00:10:46,240
Speaker 1: Amazon KDP, which is called which is kindle direct publishing.

202
00:10:46,480 --> 00:10:48,760
Speaker 1: So that's what we're fucking talking about today because it's

203
00:10:48,800 --> 00:10:51,679
Speaker 1: actually a serious problem that people should be aware about.

204
00:10:51,679 --> 00:10:54,480
Speaker 1: And I haven't seen any real reporting on this. I

205
00:10:54,679 --> 00:10:57,120
Speaker 1: was keyed into this story when I ran across a

206
00:10:57,200 --> 00:11:00,560
Speaker 1: Reuter's article like two weeks ago about a boom in

207
00:11:00,640 --> 00:11:04,120
Speaker 1: AI written ebooks on Amazon, and the piece zooms in

208
00:11:04,400 --> 00:11:08,480
Speaker 1: on this wanna be author named Brett Schickler. Brett is

209
00:11:08,600 --> 00:11:12,000
Speaker 1: a salesman from Rochester who heard that chat GPT could

210
00:11:12,000 --> 00:11:15,000
Speaker 1: write stories and he decided like he'd always wanted to

211
00:11:15,040 --> 00:11:17,240
Speaker 1: be a writer, but he just could never get anything

212
00:11:17,280 --> 00:11:19,120
Speaker 1: down on the page. And he was like, well, maybe

213
00:11:19,120 --> 00:11:23,320
Speaker 1: this will make it possible for me. He told Reuters,

214
00:11:23,360 --> 00:11:26,000
Speaker 1: the idea of writing a book finally seemed possible. I thought,

215
00:11:26,280 --> 00:11:30,319
Speaker 1: I can do this. Unfortunately, the book he put out.

216
00:11:30,240 --> 00:11:33,240
Speaker 3: Is why is that so funny? I can do this?

217
00:11:33,480 --> 00:11:36,920
Speaker 1: By not so sad when you learn what he wrote

218
00:11:36,920 --> 00:11:40,280
Speaker 1: because it's his book is The Wise Little Squirrel, a

219
00:11:40,520 --> 00:11:44,520
Speaker 1: tale of saving and investing. It's a guide to fight

220
00:11:45,240 --> 00:11:50,240
Speaker 1: literacy through the eyes of Sammy the Squirrel. And I'll

221
00:11:50,240 --> 00:11:53,400
Speaker 1: say this, everything we're about to talk to on this

222
00:11:53,480 --> 00:11:56,480
Speaker 1: episode is much worse than The Wise Little Squirrel, because

223
00:11:56,480 --> 00:12:00,200
Speaker 1: I will give him credit for one thing. He Schickler's like,

224
00:12:00,240 --> 00:12:03,400
Speaker 1: Brett has a thing he wants to get across to people.

225
00:12:03,880 --> 00:12:04,160
Speaker 2: I'm not.

226
00:12:04,400 --> 00:12:06,000
Speaker 1: I don't think he's done it well. I don't think

227
00:12:06,000 --> 00:12:08,520
Speaker 1: this is the right way to teach kids kids financial

228
00:12:08,520 --> 00:12:12,120
Speaker 1: literacy is to have like a robot generate a story

229
00:12:12,120 --> 00:12:14,760
Speaker 1: about a squirrel so they learn how to invest. But

230
00:12:14,840 --> 00:12:19,960
Speaker 1: he actually seems to care about like transmitting information to kids,

231
00:12:20,000 --> 00:12:23,920
Speaker 1: which is Wellson who does. Yeah, So I'll give him

232
00:12:23,920 --> 00:12:26,520
Speaker 1: some credit for that. Also give him some credit for

233
00:12:26,559 --> 00:12:29,080
Speaker 1: the fact that the cover of his book it doesn't

234
00:12:29,120 --> 00:12:32,240
Speaker 1: look good, Like this doesn't look like a real book.

235
00:12:32,400 --> 00:12:37,000
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say, but there's nothing like inherently off putting

236
00:12:37,120 --> 00:12:39,840
Speaker 1: or terrifying about the squirrel drawing on the cover.

237
00:12:40,000 --> 00:12:42,400
Speaker 2: I don't I don't know, man, I don't know.

238
00:12:42,520 --> 00:12:44,440
Speaker 1: Robert Sophie find unsettling.

239
00:12:44,840 --> 00:12:49,439
Speaker 2: Well, there's the other there's the other animal there, which.

240
00:12:51,559 --> 00:12:54,560
Speaker 1: To wait, where's the other in the trees?

241
00:12:54,679 --> 00:12:54,839
Speaker 5: Oh?

242
00:12:54,920 --> 00:12:57,480
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, well, and you know, the perspective is pretty

243
00:12:57,520 --> 00:13:01,320
Speaker 1: fucked on that chipmunk. Yeah, I don't buy it. I

244
00:13:01,320 --> 00:13:02,559
Speaker 1: don't buy the perspective here.

245
00:13:02,600 --> 00:13:05,160
Speaker 3: And where did you and where did they get that acorn?

246
00:13:05,520 --> 00:13:06,000
Speaker 3: We don't know.

247
00:13:06,120 --> 00:13:07,319
Speaker 1: The acorn's massive.

248
00:13:07,679 --> 00:13:09,880
Speaker 3: The acorn is bigger than the bear.

249
00:13:11,280 --> 00:13:13,400
Speaker 1: Well, well that's just because the bear's further away. But

250
00:13:13,440 --> 00:13:16,360
Speaker 1: the acorn is at least the same size as the

251
00:13:16,400 --> 00:13:20,720
Speaker 1: squirrel's Torso, yeah, which I think might be, you know,

252
00:13:20,960 --> 00:13:23,840
Speaker 1: maybe maybe the subtext here is that the acorn is

253
00:13:23,880 --> 00:13:27,160
Speaker 1: inherited wealth and and the squirrel, oh you know, it's

254
00:13:27,200 --> 00:13:31,240
Speaker 1: to yeah represent you know, whereas whereas the squirrel in

255
00:13:31,320 --> 00:13:36,880
Speaker 1: the tree behind him kind of represents the working class.

256
00:13:37,160 --> 00:13:41,880
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, who has no acorn? Right, because the

257
00:13:42,040 --> 00:13:45,440
Speaker 1: inherited wealth of our of our anyway, whatever, I don't know,

258
00:13:45,440 --> 00:13:47,160
Speaker 1: why am I? Why am I? Why am I doing this?

259
00:13:47,840 --> 00:13:51,360
Speaker 1: So you nailed it, nailed Brett's Brett's book, which is

260
00:13:51,400 --> 00:13:54,280
Speaker 1: available paperback only. That's another thing I'll give him credit for.

261
00:13:54,400 --> 00:13:56,920
Speaker 1: Because the stuff that's actually really grifty is all being

262
00:13:56,920 --> 00:13:59,720
Speaker 1: done on Kindle. It's currently in about thirty thousand, number

263
00:13:59,720 --> 00:14:02,719
Speaker 1: thirty thousand in literature and fiction for children. One thing

264
00:14:02,720 --> 00:14:04,959
Speaker 1: that does show is that like that sounds really low.

265
00:14:05,040 --> 00:14:08,440
Speaker 1: That's not terrible, right, Like, given the number of books

266
00:14:08,520 --> 00:14:11,920
Speaker 1: that are on Amazon, it's not like a runaway success.

267
00:14:12,360 --> 00:14:14,400
Speaker 1: I think that this is like probably because there was

268
00:14:14,400 --> 00:14:16,520
Speaker 1: a bunch of news stories around this, right because it

269
00:14:16,559 --> 00:14:20,200
Speaker 1: was it's kind of the first AI children's book to

270
00:14:20,280 --> 00:14:24,600
Speaker 1: go viral. It's not again any good, but I don't

271
00:14:24,640 --> 00:14:27,640
Speaker 1: see the harm. Like what we're about to be talking

272
00:14:27,640 --> 00:14:29,600
Speaker 1: about is like a bunch of people who have done

273
00:14:29,640 --> 00:14:33,320
Speaker 1: this in a much more harmful direction. So this story

274
00:14:33,400 --> 00:14:37,040
Speaker 1: kind of got me looking into what other people were

275
00:14:37,160 --> 00:14:40,880
Speaker 1: writing AI children's books. And part of why I thought

276
00:14:40,920 --> 00:14:44,080
Speaker 1: to do this was late last year I watched a

277
00:14:44,160 --> 00:14:48,280
Speaker 1: documentary on the Folding Ideas YouTube channel. You're not aware

278
00:14:48,280 --> 00:14:50,400
Speaker 1: of that. Folding Ideas As a channel run by a

279
00:14:50,480 --> 00:14:53,560
Speaker 1: researcher and a writer named Dan Olsen, who I admire

280
00:14:53,680 --> 00:14:56,400
Speaker 1: quite a lot. He's the guy who did that line

281
00:14:56,440 --> 00:14:59,880
Speaker 1: go up documentary on NFTs that helped cause the nf

282
00:15:00,080 --> 00:15:02,560
Speaker 1: T crash. He's very good at what he does, and

283
00:15:02,640 --> 00:15:05,800
Speaker 1: late last year he published an investigation into a group

284
00:15:06,080 --> 00:15:10,480
Speaker 1: of Amazon con artists who like charge several thousand dollars

285
00:15:10,640 --> 00:15:13,560
Speaker 1: so that they can teach people how to mass produce

286
00:15:13,680 --> 00:15:18,480
Speaker 1: low quality books to have both read by voice actors

287
00:15:18,520 --> 00:15:21,840
Speaker 1: for like audible books, and to sell on Kindle through KDP,

288
00:15:21,920 --> 00:15:24,560
Speaker 1: which is again Kindle Direct Publishing. And it's one of

289
00:15:24,600 --> 00:15:27,240
Speaker 1: those things where like they're promising, they have all these

290
00:15:27,360 --> 00:15:29,360
Speaker 1: lurid stories about like you can make tens of thousands

291
00:15:29,400 --> 00:15:31,600
Speaker 1: of dollars in a few weeks. This is they really

292
00:15:31,640 --> 00:15:35,080
Speaker 1: brad They're called the Mickelson Twins, the particular folks he's investigating,

293
00:15:35,120 --> 00:15:37,680
Speaker 1: and they brag a lot about like how little effort

294
00:15:37,880 --> 00:15:39,680
Speaker 1: it takes to do this, you have to do very

295
00:15:39,800 --> 00:15:43,320
Speaker 1: almost no work whatsoever. And it's one of those like

296
00:15:43,360 --> 00:15:46,280
Speaker 1: they're basically just having people look through to see what's

297
00:15:46,280 --> 00:15:51,560
Speaker 1: selling on Amazon, create topics and then hire some ghostwriter,

298
00:15:51,800 --> 00:15:53,920
Speaker 1: pay him a couple hundred bucks to write a full

299
00:15:53,960 --> 00:15:57,000
Speaker 1: book in two weeks, three weeks something like that, and

300
00:15:57,040 --> 00:15:59,400
Speaker 1: then find a voice actor and put it up. And

301
00:15:59,440 --> 00:16:03,360
Speaker 1: these book books like they're nonsense in a lot of cases,

302
00:16:03,520 --> 00:16:06,280
Speaker 1: like he was. I think the book that Dan put

303
00:16:06,320 --> 00:16:08,720
Speaker 1: together is kind of like a thought exercise was about

304
00:16:08,800 --> 00:16:12,840
Speaker 1: using self hypnosis to deal with epilepsy or something. So

305
00:16:13,000 --> 00:16:16,080
Speaker 1: a lot of really irresponsible topics, all that sort of stuff.

306
00:16:17,040 --> 00:16:19,040
Speaker 1: But the topics, you know, what matters is not like

307
00:16:19,080 --> 00:16:20,960
Speaker 1: what you're actually trying to get out. It matters that,

308
00:16:21,080 --> 00:16:25,640
Speaker 1: like what you're you're having these ghostwriters write include keywords

309
00:16:25,680 --> 00:16:28,440
Speaker 1: that correspond to popular searches on Amazon. Right, it's an

310
00:16:28,480 --> 00:16:29,320
Speaker 1: SEO scam.

311
00:16:29,680 --> 00:16:34,520
Speaker 2: I read about this. I read about this because because Robert.

312
00:16:34,600 --> 00:16:40,480
Speaker 2: The immediate question is why are these guys now selling

313
00:16:40,720 --> 00:16:45,400
Speaker 2: this trick, right, this grift that they have exhausted, right,

314
00:16:46,080 --> 00:16:49,320
Speaker 2: Like why did they move to the next grift. It's

315
00:16:49,480 --> 00:16:53,680
Speaker 2: very it's it's very interesting. You know, I wonder if

316
00:16:53,680 --> 00:16:55,680
Speaker 2: their next thing is going to be self help books.

317
00:16:56,320 --> 00:16:59,480
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that, like there's a there were already

318
00:16:59,520 --> 00:17:01,560
Speaker 1: some sort of in that topic that they're putting out.

319
00:17:01,600 --> 00:17:03,920
Speaker 1: I think mostly what it is is that, like you

320
00:17:03,960 --> 00:17:06,919
Speaker 1: can make money doing this. Your goal basically is to

321
00:17:07,080 --> 00:17:10,400
Speaker 1: trick people looking for real books on similar subjects into

322
00:17:10,400 --> 00:17:13,080
Speaker 1: buying your books because it's kind of hard to tell

323
00:17:13,080 --> 00:17:15,320
Speaker 1: on Kendle, and they may you know, if you just

324
00:17:15,400 --> 00:17:17,920
Speaker 1: are putting enough stuff out there, the sheer number of

325
00:17:17,920 --> 00:17:20,560
Speaker 1: people searching means that you'll make you know, sales, and

326
00:17:20,600 --> 00:17:23,159
Speaker 1: if you know, you don't. If it doesn't take that

327
00:17:23,320 --> 00:17:25,600
Speaker 1: much work, you know, if you get a couple hundred sales,

328
00:17:25,640 --> 00:17:28,840
Speaker 1: it can be worth it. This is not an easy path,

329
00:17:29,400 --> 00:17:31,640
Speaker 1: like actually an easy path to making a lot of money,

330
00:17:31,640 --> 00:17:34,480
Speaker 1: which is why the real business is in conning the

331
00:17:34,520 --> 00:17:36,800
Speaker 1: people who think that they'll make money off of this

332
00:17:36,880 --> 00:17:39,080
Speaker 1: and getting them to pay you several thousand dollars to

333
00:17:39,119 --> 00:17:42,960
Speaker 1: teach them all this crap. Dan in his video calls

334
00:17:43,000 --> 00:17:46,960
Speaker 1: these people coentrepreneurs, which is is a clever bit of wordplay,

335
00:17:47,440 --> 00:17:49,639
Speaker 1: but I do think the term actually kind of misses

336
00:17:49,640 --> 00:17:53,359
Speaker 1: something important because then, well, the con is Dan is

337
00:17:53,400 --> 00:17:55,760
Speaker 1: talking about, the con that he is he is unraveling,

338
00:17:55,800 --> 00:17:58,840
Speaker 1: is that like this is not actually a great business.

339
00:17:58,920 --> 00:18:01,400
Speaker 1: It's hard for people to really make money. They are

340
00:18:01,480 --> 00:18:04,119
Speaker 1: lying to folks about how profitable this is so that

341
00:18:04,119 --> 00:18:06,840
Speaker 1: they can take their money, and that is that is true.

342
00:18:06,840 --> 00:18:10,200
Speaker 1: That is a con. But there's an actual outside harm

343
00:18:10,240 --> 00:18:12,800
Speaker 1: aside from this con because like, the people they're conning

344
00:18:13,119 --> 00:18:16,159
Speaker 1: are not just passive rubs. They're trying to like unethically

345
00:18:16,200 --> 00:18:18,760
Speaker 1: make a quick buck. So to some extent, I'm like,

346
00:18:18,800 --> 00:18:20,640
Speaker 1: I'm not I don't have a huge problem with who

347
00:18:20,640 --> 00:18:23,480
Speaker 1: they're conning necessarily, But what I do have a real

348
00:18:23,520 --> 00:18:26,760
Speaker 1: issue with is that the byproduct of the cons they're

349
00:18:26,800 --> 00:18:30,160
Speaker 1: running is that the largest bookstore on the planet gets

350
00:18:30,200 --> 00:18:34,120
Speaker 1: filled with thousands and thousands and thousands of nonsense titles

351
00:18:34,119 --> 00:18:38,800
Speaker 1: that aren't real books that can spread disinformation, that can

352
00:18:38,880 --> 00:18:41,919
Speaker 1: just cause people to waste money, that can like, like,

353
00:18:42,160 --> 00:18:44,000
Speaker 1: there's a lot of issue. It makes it harder to

354
00:18:44,080 --> 00:18:46,960
Speaker 1: like find stuff that you're looking for that's of quality,

355
00:18:47,000 --> 00:18:49,240
Speaker 1: you know, on various topics. I've had to deal with

356
00:18:49,320 --> 00:18:51,199
Speaker 1: this a few times with bastards where I'm looking for

357
00:18:51,240 --> 00:18:54,200
Speaker 1: books on niche subjects and I find something that seems

358
00:18:54,240 --> 00:18:55,720
Speaker 1: to be about it, but it turns out it's like

359
00:18:55,760 --> 00:18:58,080
Speaker 1: one of these like crap books. It's like someone's at

360
00:18:58,080 --> 00:19:00,719
Speaker 1: best paraphrased to Wikipedia entry or something.

361
00:19:00,960 --> 00:19:03,560
Speaker 2: Is it is it that prolific thought?

362
00:19:03,720 --> 00:19:07,000
Speaker 1: Like what thousands and thousands of times really I I

363
00:19:07,920 --> 00:19:11,520
Speaker 1: have I have actually reached out to Amazon for comment

364
00:19:11,600 --> 00:19:15,080
Speaker 1: on like how many AI titles they have in their

365
00:19:15,160 --> 00:19:18,040
Speaker 1: library and how they like the degree to which or

366
00:19:18,200 --> 00:19:20,159
Speaker 1: whether or not they do anything to attempt to like

367
00:19:20,960 --> 00:19:23,720
Speaker 1: figure out which titles or AI or not, like I have.

368
00:19:23,880 --> 00:19:25,920
Speaker 1: I've asked them a couple of questions on that about

369
00:19:25,960 --> 00:19:28,520
Speaker 1: like their plagiarism, filters and stuff. I haven't heard back yet,

370
00:19:30,480 --> 00:19:33,080
Speaker 1: And if I do, I'll update this. I'll record it

371
00:19:33,160 --> 00:19:33,679
Speaker 1: update for you.

372
00:19:33,920 --> 00:19:38,239
Speaker 2: Well, surely they can just they can just create a

373
00:19:38,359 --> 00:19:43,520
Speaker 2: large language model that will respond to your insightful questions

374
00:19:44,000 --> 00:19:45,480
Speaker 2: in novel form.

375
00:19:45,840 --> 00:19:48,760
Speaker 1: Yeah, that would at least be a response. So far,

376
00:19:48,840 --> 00:19:51,920
Speaker 1: I haven't gotten anything from them because I think they're

377
00:19:52,040 --> 00:19:55,000
Speaker 1: they're following the Elon Musk root of just ignoring any

378
00:19:55,080 --> 00:19:57,280
Speaker 1: questions from media because there's there's a lot of money.

379
00:19:57,440 --> 00:19:59,879
Speaker 1: They make money anytime people upload the shit in anytime

380
00:20:00,080 --> 00:20:02,000
Speaker 1: it sells, so like they don't have a problem with

381
00:20:02,080 --> 00:20:05,320
Speaker 1: con men putting fake books up on the site. And

382
00:20:05,440 --> 00:20:07,719
Speaker 1: it's one of those things. Again. When when I watched

383
00:20:07,720 --> 00:20:09,600
Speaker 1: this video by Dan, I was like, well, this is

384
00:20:09,600 --> 00:20:12,320
Speaker 1: an interesting con. I think what's happening here is kind

385
00:20:12,320 --> 00:20:16,280
Speaker 1: of unsettling. And then you know the late like the

386
00:20:16,359 --> 00:20:21,879
Speaker 1: AI explosion happened right, and suddenly this con gets supercharged

387
00:20:21,960 --> 00:20:25,800
Speaker 1: because the main barrier to entry and barrier to production

388
00:20:25,880 --> 00:20:28,320
Speaker 1: and profitability and the old way of doing things is

389
00:20:28,359 --> 00:20:31,440
Speaker 1: the ghost writing. You know, these people the original version

390
00:20:31,480 --> 00:20:33,879
Speaker 1: of this con You're hiring a human being to ghost

391
00:20:33,960 --> 00:20:36,879
Speaker 1: write a fake book for you, basically, right, And a

392
00:20:36,960 --> 00:20:40,679
Speaker 1: human being can only write fifty thousand dish words so fast,

393
00:20:40,800 --> 00:20:42,960
Speaker 1: even if all they're doing is like paraphrasing a bunch

394
00:20:43,000 --> 00:20:45,919
Speaker 1: of like Wikipedia and news articles, right, Like, there's a

395
00:20:46,000 --> 00:20:49,040
Speaker 1: degree there's a hard limitation on how many of these

396
00:20:49,080 --> 00:20:52,240
Speaker 1: can get written. And it's going to cost money because people,

397
00:20:52,280 --> 00:20:55,240
Speaker 1: even people who will do this very cheaply, won't do

398
00:20:55,359 --> 00:20:59,679
Speaker 1: it for nothing, whereas chat, GPT and other large language

399
00:20:59,680 --> 00:21:04,480
Speaker 1: models will write thousands of words for you for effectively nothing.

400
00:21:04,600 --> 00:21:07,399
Speaker 1: So as soon as I kind of read this story

401
00:21:07,440 --> 00:21:10,480
Speaker 1: about this this children's book and thought back to Dan's video,

402
00:21:10,520 --> 00:21:12,880
Speaker 1: I was like, oh shit, I bet this is causing

403
00:21:13,280 --> 00:21:15,840
Speaker 1: I bet this is causing like a massive surge in

404
00:21:15,920 --> 00:21:20,600
Speaker 1: crap getting posted onto Amazon Kindle. And it's unfortunately like

405
00:21:21,320 --> 00:21:25,000
Speaker 1: more unsettling than I had initially thought, because with this

406
00:21:25,520 --> 00:21:28,400
Speaker 1: early scam, with like the you know, these these these

407
00:21:28,440 --> 00:21:32,439
Speaker 1: ghostwriting scams, the books tend to be fote like aimed

408
00:21:32,520 --> 00:21:34,840
Speaker 1: towards adults. Right, You're trying to get adults who might

409
00:21:35,280 --> 00:21:37,080
Speaker 1: might be looking for a topic or something to buy

410
00:21:37,119 --> 00:21:41,600
Speaker 1: your book but it's hard to get chat GPT to

411
00:21:41,680 --> 00:21:44,920
Speaker 1: write a whole proper nonfiction book, Like getting it to

412
00:21:44,960 --> 00:21:48,320
Speaker 1: write a fifty thousand dish word book is almost impossible

413
00:21:48,400 --> 00:21:50,760
Speaker 1: unless you do a bunch of like really messy sort

414
00:21:50,800 --> 00:21:54,560
Speaker 1: of like prompt tricks, which is why all of Tim

415
00:21:54,560 --> 00:21:57,480
Speaker 1: Buscher's books were a couple of thousand words long. But

416
00:21:58,000 --> 00:22:02,760
Speaker 1: children's books are a very different story because children's books,

417
00:22:02,880 --> 00:22:05,280
Speaker 1: if you like have gone through books for little kids,

418
00:22:05,280 --> 00:22:08,719
Speaker 1: for toddlers or whatever, they're heavy on illustrations. There's an

419
00:22:08,720 --> 00:22:11,719
Speaker 1: illustration every page, and there's often just a couple of

420
00:22:11,760 --> 00:22:15,280
Speaker 1: sentences or a paragraph of text per page, which is

421
00:22:15,359 --> 00:22:18,560
Speaker 1: exactly the kind of length that chat GPT and other

422
00:22:18,880 --> 00:22:25,600
Speaker 1: lms are perfectly capable of reproducing. Right, so the places

423
00:22:25,640 --> 00:22:29,840
Speaker 1: you'll go exactly exactly, and the places you're going to

424
00:22:29,840 --> 00:22:33,520
Speaker 1: go are like directly into the recursive loop of slop

425
00:22:33,600 --> 00:22:37,639
Speaker 1: feeding through you know, an LM, which is what the

426
00:22:37,680 --> 00:22:39,800
Speaker 1: investigation we're talking about is this week, because as soon

427
00:22:39,840 --> 00:22:42,800
Speaker 1: as I start type, I started typing in like how

428
00:22:42,840 --> 00:22:45,960
Speaker 1: to write AI children's books, and shit, my YouTube search

429
00:22:46,000 --> 00:22:49,960
Speaker 1: revealed video after video with titles like easy AI money,

430
00:22:50,000 --> 00:22:52,920
Speaker 1: make one hundred K writing children's books with chat GPT

431
00:22:53,040 --> 00:22:56,840
Speaker 1: and mid journey and easy passive income with chat GPT

432
00:22:56,960 --> 00:23:01,239
Speaker 1: in mid Journey creating children's books, I watched way too

433
00:23:01,320 --> 00:23:03,800
Speaker 1: many of these fucking videos, all of which lay out

434
00:23:03,840 --> 00:23:06,160
Speaker 1: the same basic strategy. The first step is to pick

435
00:23:06,200 --> 00:23:09,120
Speaker 1: a prompt an actual author might be decide. For example,

436
00:23:09,320 --> 00:23:11,879
Speaker 1: I want to teach children about the importance of conservation

437
00:23:12,000 --> 00:23:15,960
Speaker 1: with a cautionary tale about the thoughtless capitalization of natural resources. Right,

438
00:23:16,160 --> 00:23:18,399
Speaker 1: you know, that's the Lora Axe, or one of my

439
00:23:18,440 --> 00:23:19,680
Speaker 1: favorite books as a kid. You know, I want to

440
00:23:19,680 --> 00:23:21,679
Speaker 1: write a book about a bat raised by birds that

441
00:23:21,800 --> 00:23:24,080
Speaker 1: kind of shows kids that bats are beautiful and complex

442
00:23:24,119 --> 00:23:27,479
Speaker 1: creatures and not just spooky set dressings for vampire stories.

443
00:23:27,480 --> 00:23:28,359
Speaker 1: That's Stella Luna.

444
00:23:28,480 --> 00:23:28,640
Speaker 2: Right.

445
00:23:28,880 --> 00:23:31,280
Speaker 1: Those are, you know, examples of things human beings might

446
00:23:31,320 --> 00:23:34,399
Speaker 1: try to transmit to children through, like actual human created

447
00:23:34,480 --> 00:23:39,400
Speaker 1: children's books. But chatbots and grindset influencers are both incapable

448
00:23:39,440 --> 00:23:42,160
Speaker 1: of feeling things or of wanting to transmit their feelings

449
00:23:42,200 --> 00:23:46,440
Speaker 1: to others. Right, Like, You've got people who are effectively

450
00:23:46,480 --> 00:23:50,160
Speaker 1: soulless using a robot that is effectively soulless in order

451
00:23:50,200 --> 00:23:53,200
Speaker 1: to try and transmit messages to children, and that gets

452
00:23:53,359 --> 00:23:58,359
Speaker 1: dark pretty quickly, Ben. But you know what's not dark?

453
00:24:00,160 --> 00:24:01,639
Speaker 2: It is it goods and services?

454
00:24:01,800 --> 00:24:04,399
Speaker 1: Yeah, the products and services that support this podcast. I

455
00:24:04,400 --> 00:24:06,720
Speaker 1: don't know if you're aware of this been none of

456
00:24:06,760 --> 00:24:08,959
Speaker 1: them are, you know? We we we have one. We

457
00:24:09,000 --> 00:24:13,399
Speaker 1: take one promise from our our advertisers. Don't be evil

458
00:24:14,200 --> 00:24:17,400
Speaker 1: dot dot dot unless it makes a lot of money.

459
00:24:19,920 --> 00:24:23,200
Speaker 4: Your ads unless you have Cooler Zone Media are ad

460
00:24:23,240 --> 00:24:26,359
Speaker 4: free subscription channel available on Apple.

461
00:24:26,119 --> 00:24:29,159
Speaker 1: Podcasts, which is the most ethical way to consume this,

462
00:24:29,400 --> 00:24:31,640
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, it is true that every time

463
00:24:31,680 --> 00:24:37,240
Speaker 1: you get a Cooler Zone Media subscription raytheon fires a

464
00:24:37,320 --> 00:24:40,760
Speaker 1: Maffick missile at a at a school bus in a

465
00:24:40,800 --> 00:24:44,200
Speaker 1: foreign country. But we are we are working to fix that. Yeah,

466
00:24:44,200 --> 00:24:45,600
Speaker 1: that is it's not an intent.

467
00:24:45,880 --> 00:24:47,160
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a glitch.

468
00:24:47,920 --> 00:24:52,080
Speaker 2: Yeah, I heard. I heard that every time someone subscribes

469
00:24:52,720 --> 00:24:57,800
Speaker 2: to U two cool Zone Media, they get a they

470
00:24:57,840 --> 00:25:00,880
Speaker 2: get a little coupon and if we get another coupons,

471
00:25:01,920 --> 00:25:06,800
Speaker 2: we can we can finally subtract a day from Henry

472
00:25:06,840 --> 00:25:09,040
Speaker 2: Kissinger's life. I don't know which day.

473
00:25:09,400 --> 00:25:10,760
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know.

474
00:25:10,760 --> 00:25:12,200
Speaker 2: If it's a last letter, it's.

475
00:25:12,080 --> 00:25:14,719
Speaker 1: Likely one of the days he ordered bombings in Cambodi.

476
00:25:15,320 --> 00:25:19,840
Speaker 2: You don't think it done us. Yeah, we gotta subscribe.

477
00:25:20,080 --> 00:25:22,840
Speaker 1: Yeah, so get enough subscriptions and together we can kill

478
00:25:22,880 --> 00:25:34,359
Speaker 1: Henry Kissinger. Ah, we're back. So the process bin of

479
00:25:34,440 --> 00:25:37,360
Speaker 1: picking a topic for an AI kids book is mechanical

480
00:25:37,440 --> 00:25:39,760
Speaker 1: and bleak. It starts with a trip to the Amazon

481
00:25:39,880 --> 00:25:43,800
Speaker 1: sales rankings. People use extensions like book Bolt, which show

482
00:25:43,840 --> 00:25:46,960
Speaker 1: which topics are selling well, and it's it's kind of

483
00:25:46,960 --> 00:25:49,320
Speaker 1: a mix of the videos that I found pointed out

484
00:25:49,320 --> 00:25:51,720
Speaker 1: that like, you want stuff that's reasonably high up on

485
00:25:51,760 --> 00:25:54,119
Speaker 1: the lists and has a good number of reviews, but

486
00:25:54,200 --> 00:25:56,720
Speaker 1: you also don't want it to have too many reviews.

487
00:25:56,920 --> 00:25:59,600
Speaker 1: The most successful AI kids books will only sell like

488
00:25:59,720 --> 00:26:03,520
Speaker 1: does or maybe one hundred or so copies, and so

489
00:26:03,760 --> 00:26:05,520
Speaker 1: they kind of like a lot of the people making

490
00:26:05,520 --> 00:26:08,120
Speaker 1: these videos will disguise that by showing you like sales

491
00:26:08,200 --> 00:26:11,600
Speaker 1: calculation apps where they plug in books by actual human

492
00:26:11,600 --> 00:26:14,840
Speaker 1: beings to be like, you can make thirty two thousand

493
00:26:14,880 --> 00:26:17,600
Speaker 1: dollars a month, you know, just like this guy who

494
00:26:17,600 --> 00:26:22,080
Speaker 1: wrote this you know, storybook or whatever that's a bestseller did,

495
00:26:22,760 --> 00:26:24,960
Speaker 1: which you're not gonna like actually do if you're really

496
00:26:25,000 --> 00:26:29,480
Speaker 1: doing this for a business. But one of the creators

497
00:26:29,520 --> 00:26:31,720
Speaker 1: that I watched kind of put together the One of

498
00:26:31,800 --> 00:26:36,760
Speaker 1: these guys is called the Zinny Studio. They advocate copying

499
00:26:36,760 --> 00:26:39,560
Speaker 1: the premises of real kids books that have several hundred

500
00:26:39,560 --> 00:26:41,919
Speaker 1: reviews but less than a thousandth They've like worked this

501
00:26:41,960 --> 00:26:43,919
Speaker 1: out to a science where like, if there's more than

502
00:26:43,960 --> 00:26:46,920
Speaker 1: a thousand reviews, you're gonna get lost in the mix. Right,

503
00:26:47,000 --> 00:26:49,240
Speaker 1: It's it's the stories are too big, So like whatever

504
00:26:49,280 --> 00:26:52,520
Speaker 1: you put out isn't gonna break through. But if they've

505
00:26:52,560 --> 00:26:55,000
Speaker 1: got a couple one hundred reviews, that's enough that like

506
00:26:55,080 --> 00:26:57,359
Speaker 1: you know, there's a lot of interest. But also you

507
00:26:57,359 --> 00:26:59,199
Speaker 1: have a good chance that while your book's new, if

508
00:26:59,200 --> 00:27:01,040
Speaker 1: you can get a couple of early sales, you can

509
00:27:01,119 --> 00:27:05,240
Speaker 1: you can juke it up the spots. There's also a

510
00:27:05,280 --> 00:27:08,639
Speaker 1: strategy for price points. They note that like Amazon pays

511
00:27:08,760 --> 00:27:11,800
Speaker 1: seventy percent in royalties if your book's two ninety nine,

512
00:27:11,960 --> 00:27:14,000
Speaker 1: nine ninety nine, but if it's cheaper than that, they

513
00:27:14,000 --> 00:27:15,400
Speaker 1: only pay out like half as much.

514
00:27:15,960 --> 00:27:19,960
Speaker 2: We are in the wrong business. Yeah, we're in the

515
00:27:20,040 --> 00:27:23,760
Speaker 2: wrong business. I cannot wait to read because this is

516
00:27:24,160 --> 00:27:29,600
Speaker 2: this is like a dark side of cyborg philosophy, right, yeah, right,

517
00:27:29,680 --> 00:27:35,480
Speaker 2: so like, uh, Robert Sophie, let's get on the seo.

518
00:27:35,960 --> 00:27:39,280
Speaker 2: Let's find uh, let's find a topic, and let's have

519
00:27:39,520 --> 00:27:45,200
Speaker 2: our evil Pandora jin kind of thing. Uh right, rite

520
00:27:45,280 --> 00:27:47,480
Speaker 2: us a little old man in the sea and just

521
00:27:47,640 --> 00:27:52,760
Speaker 2: mad lib whatever whatever the narrative is, right, I.

522
00:27:52,760 --> 00:27:55,320
Speaker 1: Mean, I think the real answer Ben, because you and

523
00:27:55,400 --> 00:27:58,040
Speaker 1: I both have hundreds of hours of our podcast. You know,

524
00:27:58,080 --> 00:28:00,560
Speaker 1: there's ridiculous history and Behind the Bastards and everything else

525
00:28:00,560 --> 00:28:03,639
Speaker 1: we've been on recorded. We feed all that into an

526
00:28:03,680 --> 00:28:06,640
Speaker 1: AI and then just like, look at what's trending on Twitter,

527
00:28:06,960 --> 00:28:09,920
Speaker 1: and then we have an AI generate like six hours

528
00:28:10,000 --> 00:28:13,240
Speaker 1: of you and me talking about how masks don't work

529
00:28:13,320 --> 00:28:16,280
Speaker 1: or something like that. Just like crap that stuff onto

530
00:28:16,280 --> 00:28:19,080
Speaker 1: the internet. Whatever Joe Rogan talks about that week, We'll

531
00:28:19,160 --> 00:28:23,159
Speaker 1: just generate an AI conversation between us about it, you know,

532
00:28:23,240 --> 00:28:27,120
Speaker 1: toss in like fifteen percent Elon Musk, and then we retire.

533
00:28:28,000 --> 00:28:32,840
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. What I also love about this first off

534
00:28:33,400 --> 00:28:37,600
Speaker 2: is the sincerity, and second off is the idea that

535
00:28:37,800 --> 00:28:40,600
Speaker 2: nothing could go wrong at all.

536
00:28:41,680 --> 00:28:45,280
Speaker 1: No, it won't, Like I don't know, I feel like,

537
00:28:45,680 --> 00:28:47,840
Speaker 1: as long as you know, we need one human being

538
00:28:47,880 --> 00:28:49,760
Speaker 1: in there to keep a handle on things, so it

539
00:28:49,760 --> 00:28:51,800
Speaker 1: can just be like an AI version of you and

540
00:28:51,840 --> 00:28:54,960
Speaker 1: an AI version of me, and then human Sophie sitting

541
00:28:54,960 --> 00:28:59,200
Speaker 1: there and like trying to trying to control the robot conversation.

542
00:29:00,120 --> 00:29:03,960
Speaker 1: We start giving out like the ingredients for job.

543
00:29:07,680 --> 00:29:12,680
Speaker 2: So uh yeah, you know, uh Sophie, it sounds like

544
00:29:12,760 --> 00:29:14,920
Speaker 2: you're cool with that, right, Yeah?

545
00:29:15,200 --> 00:29:17,480
Speaker 3: No, I could never replace Robert with the robot.

546
00:29:18,520 --> 00:29:20,800
Speaker 1: Yeah you could. I mean it would be a rot.

547
00:29:20,960 --> 00:29:25,000
Speaker 1: But you know, I got that like that AI Seinfeld

548
00:29:25,040 --> 00:29:28,840
Speaker 1: where it's just like a never ending mediocre Seinfeld episode.

549
00:29:29,000 --> 00:29:31,960
Speaker 1: We could, we could. We could slip Sophie in that too,

550
00:29:32,240 --> 00:29:36,640
Speaker 1: make you make you moderate AI brainless Seinfeld.

551
00:29:37,720 --> 00:29:44,760
Speaker 2: So well, because you know, we're keeping things interesting, right.

552
00:29:45,360 --> 00:29:49,360
Speaker 2: The problem is that Behind the Bastards is an important,

553
00:29:49,960 --> 00:29:56,520
Speaker 2: uh and profound at times show. I'm kidding, yeah, okay, okay,

554
00:29:56,560 --> 00:29:59,640
Speaker 2: all right. The problem is that Behind the Bastards is

555
00:29:59,680 --> 00:30:03,600
Speaker 2: a Horton's show, so it might be too high on

556
00:30:03,640 --> 00:30:08,040
Speaker 2: our SEO. We need to get some kind of spinoff

557
00:30:08,160 --> 00:30:12,080
Speaker 2: thing that appears to be irrelevant but works on a

558
00:30:12,120 --> 00:30:16,400
Speaker 2: search term that is that is kicking it for Jeff Bezos, right,

559
00:30:16,760 --> 00:30:19,320
Speaker 2: and then and then we just crap out hours of that.

560
00:30:20,200 --> 00:30:23,880
Speaker 2: Obviously this is behind the scenes, right, this is not

561
00:30:24,000 --> 00:30:25,440
Speaker 2: going out live, right.

562
00:30:25,920 --> 00:30:29,880
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think we call it the Passive Income Diet

563
00:30:29,920 --> 00:30:33,640
Speaker 1: Hack Cast with Robert Evans and Ben Bolin. That's that.

564
00:30:33,640 --> 00:30:36,960
Speaker 1: That's our that's our path to sixty seven million dollars.

565
00:30:37,120 --> 00:30:40,280
Speaker 2: I love I love how it's so so brief and

566
00:30:40,320 --> 00:30:44,240
Speaker 2: so snappy. You know, there's a lot of immediacy. Take

567
00:30:44,280 --> 00:30:45,600
Speaker 2: that himingway.

568
00:30:45,280 --> 00:30:50,480
Speaker 1: Yeah, stick pat yea exactly for sale o Zimbic never

569
00:30:50,600 --> 00:30:53,880
Speaker 1: a drop shipped. I don't know like that that's most

570
00:30:53,880 --> 00:30:54,680
Speaker 1: of what you need in there.

571
00:30:55,600 --> 00:30:57,400
Speaker 2: We got them freestylely do I like it?

572
00:30:57,480 --> 00:31:01,160
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, it's good. So yeah, this is kind of

573
00:31:01,640 --> 00:31:03,960
Speaker 1: the process of like making these books start. You use

574
00:31:04,080 --> 00:31:06,480
Speaker 1: like these these different extenses to kind of see what's selling,

575
00:31:06,520 --> 00:31:09,040
Speaker 1: figure out a premise for yourself. And some creators will

576
00:31:09,040 --> 00:31:11,760
Speaker 1: take this research and they'll like try to make an

577
00:31:11,800 --> 00:31:14,560
Speaker 1: original premise for a children's book to feed into the AI.

578
00:31:14,960 --> 00:31:17,920
Speaker 1: But most of them suggest just collecting like they're not

579
00:31:18,000 --> 00:31:20,040
Speaker 1: even doing that for the most part. Most of these

580
00:31:20,080 --> 00:31:24,000
Speaker 1: people suggest collecting keywords by like whatever's popular, and then

581
00:31:24,040 --> 00:31:27,080
Speaker 1: plugging those keywords into chat GPT and asking it to

582
00:31:27,120 --> 00:31:30,320
Speaker 1: generate a story premiss, which they then feed back to

583
00:31:30,360 --> 00:31:33,000
Speaker 1: it to have it generate a story, thus avoiding the

584
00:31:33,120 --> 00:31:35,800
Speaker 1: risk that human creativity might happen at any point in

585
00:31:35,840 --> 00:31:36,560
Speaker 1: this process.

586
00:31:37,040 --> 00:31:40,560
Speaker 2: The mess see prompts you were talking about the it's

587
00:31:40,600 --> 00:31:43,360
Speaker 2: sort of our cane, right. Writing prompt is a bit

588
00:31:43,480 --> 00:31:44,800
Speaker 2: like casting a spell.

589
00:31:45,200 --> 00:31:48,280
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, casting a spell or a math equation. We'll

590
00:31:48,280 --> 00:31:50,000
Speaker 1: talk about that in a little bit. But I want

591
00:31:50,000 --> 00:31:51,640
Speaker 1: to play you a clip from this guide by the

592
00:31:51,920 --> 00:31:54,000
Speaker 1: Zeni Studio, which had about two hundred and sixty eight

593
00:31:54,080 --> 00:31:58,840
Speaker 1: k views when I watched it, kind of cautioning, attempting

594
00:31:58,920 --> 00:32:01,200
Speaker 1: to make it seem a little bit less soulless than

595
00:32:01,200 --> 00:32:03,760
Speaker 1: the process actually is. Sophie, you can play that.

596
00:32:03,840 --> 00:32:07,480
Speaker 6: Now, do you research to find books to copy your

597
00:32:07,560 --> 00:32:12,320
Speaker 6: Do you research to understand what is working? It's important

598
00:32:12,480 --> 00:32:17,440
Speaker 6: to make your own original pieces, original story books, so

599
00:32:17,480 --> 00:32:21,560
Speaker 6: you could stand out from your competition. Okay, now, so

600
00:32:22,160 --> 00:32:22,800
Speaker 6: you could see that.

601
00:32:24,440 --> 00:32:27,280
Speaker 1: She says that, right that it's you're not doing this

602
00:32:27,360 --> 00:32:29,800
Speaker 1: to like copy people. You know, you're trying to find

603
00:32:29,840 --> 00:32:33,040
Speaker 1: ideas for original work. Here's the actual prompt that she

604
00:32:33,280 --> 00:32:37,440
Speaker 1: uses to generate her children's book, Write me a Children's Story.

605
00:32:37,480 --> 00:32:39,560
Speaker 1: About a girl going on an adventure to find a

606
00:32:39,600 --> 00:32:42,680
Speaker 1: missing treasure. Lesson you achieve what you put your mind on?

607
00:32:42,840 --> 00:32:45,960
Speaker 1: Make it six pages, entitle each page, make his mind

608
00:32:46,000 --> 00:32:49,239
Speaker 1: blowing and intriguing. I'm trying to have to go too

609
00:32:49,320 --> 00:32:51,040
Speaker 1: hard on the misspellings, but it does show you how

610
00:32:51,120 --> 00:32:53,160
Speaker 1: lazy you can be with these Like that's not a

611
00:32:53,240 --> 00:32:57,320
Speaker 1: story idea, like going on an adventure? What kind of adventure?

612
00:32:57,400 --> 00:32:59,520
Speaker 1: Finding a mission? What kind of treasure? How does she

613
00:32:59,840 --> 00:33:02,960
Speaker 1: like the lesson you achieve what you put your mind on?

614
00:33:03,360 --> 00:33:08,040
Speaker 1: Like that, that's like that's a producer. That's a producer

615
00:33:08,160 --> 00:33:12,400
Speaker 1: walking in and saying, uh, you know, do a thing

616
00:33:12,680 --> 00:33:15,400
Speaker 1: with the sort of vibe and and I love that.

617
00:33:15,520 --> 00:33:18,160
Speaker 1: I love that shamal On at the end, Robert make

618
00:33:18,240 --> 00:33:22,320
Speaker 1: it mind blowing, yeah, mind blowing yeah. And it's it's

619
00:33:22,440 --> 00:33:25,000
Speaker 1: very funny because, like it is, all of these AI

620
00:33:25,160 --> 00:33:29,760
Speaker 1: people are the same as like the worst folks in Hollywood, right,

621
00:33:29,840 --> 00:33:32,480
Speaker 1: you know, there's good producers and bad producers, and nothing

622
00:33:32,520 --> 00:33:35,480
Speaker 1: gets made without the producers who do know what they're doing.

623
00:33:36,280 --> 00:33:37,840
Speaker 1: But there's a lot of folks who are like a

624
00:33:37,840 --> 00:33:39,600
Speaker 1: lot of corporate folks, you know. I'm thinking about like

625
00:33:39,680 --> 00:33:43,520
Speaker 1: David Zoslov and shit here who are like, Yeah, I'm

626
00:33:43,560 --> 00:33:45,560
Speaker 1: the idea. Why do we need writers? I already had

627
00:33:45,600 --> 00:33:48,040
Speaker 1: the idea, you know, write me, write me a story

628
00:33:48,080 --> 00:33:50,360
Speaker 1: about about a guy who's angry.

629
00:33:51,040 --> 00:33:56,400
Speaker 2: Yeah, Max, Yeah, you guys heard about sharks? What what like?

630
00:33:57,120 --> 00:34:01,880
Speaker 2: So I saw a thing on Instagram about torne So

631
00:34:01,960 --> 00:34:03,880
Speaker 2: what if we what if we just do that?

632
00:34:04,080 --> 00:34:07,240
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, give me a Tornado thing with Bill Paxton.

633
00:34:07,320 --> 00:34:09,320
Speaker 1: You know that's the that's the hard work. I already

634
00:34:09,320 --> 00:34:12,520
Speaker 1: did it. You know, somebody can crap out the script anytime.

635
00:34:12,680 --> 00:34:15,160
Speaker 3: D just call me Ishmael.

636
00:34:18,719 --> 00:34:22,040
Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go. So I want to actually like

637
00:34:22,400 --> 00:34:26,120
Speaker 1: read you the story that or at least a chunk

638
00:34:26,160 --> 00:34:28,960
Speaker 1: of the story that gets generated by this this this

639
00:34:29,040 --> 00:34:32,279
Speaker 1: prompt because I love it again. People are flipping out

640
00:34:32,320 --> 00:34:35,080
Speaker 1: so much about like the quality of writing that these

641
00:34:35,120 --> 00:34:37,960
Speaker 1: things are capable of, and like, I think what you're

642
00:34:37,960 --> 00:34:40,160
Speaker 1: all going to learn is that like, this isn't writing

643
00:34:40,360 --> 00:34:44,360
Speaker 1: what it puts out. So Page one, The Missing Treasure.

644
00:34:44,880 --> 00:34:46,960
Speaker 1: Once upon a time there was a brave and curious

645
00:34:47,000 --> 00:34:49,120
Speaker 1: girl named Sarah. She lived in a small village at

646
00:34:49,120 --> 00:34:51,000
Speaker 1: the foot of a big mountain. One day, she heard

647
00:34:51,040 --> 00:34:52,960
Speaker 1: about a missing treasure that was hidden in the mountain

648
00:34:52,960 --> 00:34:55,840
Speaker 1: a long time ago. Sarah was very intrigued and decided

649
00:34:55,880 --> 00:34:58,000
Speaker 1: to go on an adventure to find the missing treasure.

650
00:34:58,440 --> 00:35:01,200
Speaker 1: So you see that, you say, like, first, I'm taking

651
00:35:01,200 --> 00:35:03,600
Speaker 1: a break here, like is she The prompt said like

652
00:35:03,640 --> 00:35:06,359
Speaker 1: make it intriguing, And what the robot did was like, well,

653
00:35:06,400 --> 00:35:08,920
Speaker 1: I'll just say that Sarah is intrigued. That means that

654
00:35:09,120 --> 00:35:12,799
Speaker 1: it's an intriguing story. Now, because I've used that word, we.

655
00:35:13,320 --> 00:35:18,600
Speaker 2: Also see we also see repetition of phrases, right, Oh yeah.

656
00:35:18,120 --> 00:35:21,160
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's very clear that it's like a mechanical turk,

657
00:35:21,280 --> 00:35:25,120
Speaker 1: you know. Page two, The journey begins. Sarah packed her

658
00:35:25,160 --> 00:35:27,399
Speaker 1: backpack with food, water, and a map and set out

659
00:35:27,440 --> 00:35:29,480
Speaker 1: on her journey. She hiked up the mountain and along

660
00:35:29,520 --> 00:35:31,879
Speaker 1: the way she met many animals who offered to help her,

661
00:35:32,080 --> 00:35:34,480
Speaker 1: but Sarah declined their help, saying I want to do

662
00:35:34,560 --> 00:35:37,680
Speaker 1: this on my own. Why are their animals offering her

663
00:35:37,719 --> 00:35:41,120
Speaker 1: to help? Like what what is it that she wants

664
00:35:41,200 --> 00:35:43,040
Speaker 1: to do on her own? Like why is this important

665
00:35:43,040 --> 00:35:44,399
Speaker 1: to her?

666
00:35:44,719 --> 00:35:45,200
Speaker 2: Intriguing?

667
00:35:45,640 --> 00:35:50,239
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm intrigued by how incomplete this story is. Page three,

668
00:35:50,360 --> 00:35:53,600
Speaker 1: The Cave of Trials. After several days of hiking, Sarah

669
00:35:53,680 --> 00:35:56,480
Speaker 1: finally reached the top of the mountain. There, she found

670
00:35:56,480 --> 00:35:58,399
Speaker 1: a cave that led deep into the mountain. She entered

671
00:35:58,400 --> 00:36:01,520
Speaker 1: the cave and was met with many trials, including steve cliffs,

672
00:36:01,800 --> 00:36:04,640
Speaker 1: deep chasms, and dark tunnels. But Sarah didn't give up.

673
00:36:04,719 --> 00:36:07,439
Speaker 1: She kept moving forward, always remembering the lesson she learned

674
00:36:07,440 --> 00:36:09,799
Speaker 1: from her parents, you can achieve what you put your

675
00:36:09,840 --> 00:36:12,759
Speaker 1: mind to. Oh, now, her parents are characters in this,

676
00:36:13,000 --> 00:36:15,440
Speaker 1: her parents, well not even really characters, Like she's not

677
00:36:15,520 --> 00:36:18,759
Speaker 1: a it's you know, you can see what it's doing here, right,

678
00:36:18,800 --> 00:36:22,560
Speaker 1: it's a simulacrum of a plot, right where you've got like, well,

679
00:36:22,600 --> 00:36:24,920
Speaker 1: I know that plots have to have a conflict, you know,

680
00:36:24,960 --> 00:36:27,360
Speaker 1: and characters in a story are supposed to have trial.

681
00:36:27,440 --> 00:36:29,920
Speaker 1: So I will just say she went through trials, she

682
00:36:30,040 --> 00:36:32,720
Speaker 1: didn't give up because her parents said, you can achieve

683
00:36:32,760 --> 00:36:35,440
Speaker 1: what you put your mind to. Like, and that's what

684
00:36:35,480 --> 00:36:39,279
Speaker 1: the story views as like transmitting a lesson to kids, right,

685
00:36:39,440 --> 00:36:41,799
Speaker 1: is just like saying the lesson in there, which like,

686
00:36:42,239 --> 00:36:44,719
Speaker 1: that's not if you think about children's books, like good

687
00:36:44,840 --> 00:36:47,440
Speaker 1: children's books, the books that like you can still remember

688
00:36:47,480 --> 00:36:52,000
Speaker 1: as a kid, that's not how they get messages across, right,

689
00:36:52,480 --> 00:36:56,000
Speaker 1: Like it's deeper than that. Kids are actually not just

690
00:36:56,120 --> 00:37:00,239
Speaker 1: capable of understanding like much more complicated messages than like

691
00:37:00,680 --> 00:37:03,160
Speaker 1: you can achieve what you put your mind to. They

692
00:37:03,280 --> 00:37:05,600
Speaker 1: they crave that, which is why, I mean part of

693
00:37:05,600 --> 00:37:08,680
Speaker 1: why shit like doctor Seuss's books, you know, still sell

694
00:37:08,760 --> 00:37:10,880
Speaker 1: a century or whatever after he fucked close to his

695
00:37:10,920 --> 00:37:12,400
Speaker 1: century after he fucking wrote him.

696
00:37:12,600 --> 00:37:15,800
Speaker 2: And he's kind of a piece of good books. Good books.

697
00:37:17,520 --> 00:37:20,640
Speaker 1: What author isn't It's why like the Hobbits, you know,

698
00:37:20,840 --> 00:37:24,279
Speaker 1: successful and shit like you don't just have Bilbo being

699
00:37:24,360 --> 00:37:26,880
Speaker 1: like I learned that you can always trust in the

700
00:37:26,920 --> 00:37:30,640
Speaker 1: power of friendship. No, you you show you know the

701
00:37:30,760 --> 00:37:35,200
Speaker 1: character like evolving and changing and entering conflicts and and

702
00:37:35,280 --> 00:37:39,120
Speaker 1: failing and then learning lessons and then succeeding. Like this

703
00:37:39,280 --> 00:37:42,800
Speaker 1: is not super complex stuff. You're not like writing fucking

704
00:37:42,880 --> 00:37:45,239
Speaker 1: ulysses just because you put this in here. But the

705
00:37:45,680 --> 00:37:49,239
Speaker 1: chat bot like is incapable of kind of understanding this

706
00:37:49,360 --> 00:37:53,399
Speaker 1: because it's it's it's a calculation. It's an algorithm, right,

707
00:37:53,440 --> 00:37:56,839
Speaker 1: it's an it is not it can't want to tell

708
00:37:56,880 --> 00:37:59,719
Speaker 1: a story, and like a critical part of telling a

709
00:37:59,760 --> 00:38:04,160
Speaker 1: story is the intent you know, and and you know

710
00:38:04,280 --> 00:38:08,560
Speaker 1: kind of spoiler. That's what's most unsettling about all of

711
00:38:08,560 --> 00:38:10,600
Speaker 1: this to me and what we're kind of building too.

712
00:38:10,640 --> 00:38:13,520
Speaker 1: But you can see, you know, kind of how how

713
00:38:13,560 --> 00:38:18,200
Speaker 1: these how this story you know, technically meets the requirements

714
00:38:18,800 --> 00:38:22,120
Speaker 1: that the Zenny Studio or whoever like set out for it,

715
00:38:22,520 --> 00:38:26,040
Speaker 1: and none of these grindset people actually care about anything

716
00:38:26,080 --> 00:38:28,520
Speaker 1: beyond the fact that like it might be able to

717
00:38:28,560 --> 00:38:31,600
Speaker 1: pass muster on kindle, so like it's good enough, right,

718
00:38:31,640 --> 00:38:33,520
Speaker 1: we'll go for it. We'll take this script and turn

719
00:38:33,560 --> 00:38:35,319
Speaker 1: it into a book for little kids.

720
00:38:35,320 --> 00:38:39,680
Speaker 2: Right right, right, But what first question, like, what do

721
00:38:39,719 --> 00:38:42,839
Speaker 2: you think Joseph Campbell would think of this? Because it's

722
00:38:42,920 --> 00:38:49,719
Speaker 2: clearly like again, it's a structural aggregate approach. It's a

723
00:38:49,840 --> 00:38:54,280
Speaker 2: very lazy mad lib that you know, there's the uncanny

724
00:38:54,360 --> 00:38:57,239
Speaker 2: valley to it. I agree with you there, it does

725
00:38:57,320 --> 00:39:01,279
Speaker 2: feel that it's missing a soul. Right, we don't even

726
00:39:01,280 --> 00:39:03,440
Speaker 2: know the animals, we don't even know the parents.

727
00:39:03,600 --> 00:39:06,880
Speaker 1: Like wait, I think he'd probably be kind of interested

728
00:39:06,960 --> 00:39:09,480
Speaker 1: in the fact that sort of the again, it's kind

729
00:39:09,520 --> 00:39:13,480
Speaker 1: of the simulacrum of a story. It's not an actual story.

730
00:39:13,560 --> 00:39:17,080
Speaker 1: It understands some aspects of the shape of a story,

731
00:39:17,120 --> 00:39:20,080
Speaker 1: and it attempts to reproduce that, but without any kind

732
00:39:20,120 --> 00:39:23,080
Speaker 1: of understanding of what the original is. So I suspect

733
00:39:23,120 --> 00:39:25,719
Speaker 1: there's a degree to which he would find it intellectually fascinating.

734
00:39:25,760 --> 00:39:28,319
Speaker 1: I think he would probably be buying a gun right now,

735
00:39:29,440 --> 00:39:32,640
Speaker 1: towards the open AI offhsis he would be buying.

736
00:39:32,800 --> 00:39:35,279
Speaker 2: He would be buying a gun, and he would like

737
00:39:35,719 --> 00:39:38,480
Speaker 2: DM checkov and say, what's happening?

738
00:39:38,560 --> 00:39:42,200
Speaker 1: But yeah, let's get the fuck down there. So I

739
00:39:42,239 --> 00:39:45,520
Speaker 1: found an even lazier example of synthetic storytelling in a

740
00:39:45,640 --> 00:39:48,560
Speaker 1: video by a guy named Christian Hidorn, which has about

741
00:39:48,560 --> 00:39:51,319
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty thousand views. His YouTube channel is

742
00:39:51,360 --> 00:39:53,839
Speaker 1: called tokenized AI and he had a mid He had

743
00:39:53,880 --> 00:39:56,960
Speaker 1: mid Journey create what he calls a comic book. And boy,

744
00:39:57,239 --> 00:40:01,239
Speaker 1: I am using that those words as fucking it's not

745
00:40:01,320 --> 00:40:03,920
Speaker 1: a comic book, right, He's lying about what this is.

746
00:40:04,000 --> 00:40:08,000
Speaker 1: It's a book with illustrations and barely any text, but

747
00:40:08,080 --> 00:40:10,840
Speaker 1: it's not like anyway, it's not actually a comic book.

748
00:40:11,480 --> 00:40:14,760
Speaker 1: And he plugs in the plot for this. He gets

749
00:40:15,200 --> 00:40:18,480
Speaker 1: chat GPT to create a plot for him by kind

750
00:40:18,480 --> 00:40:21,640
Speaker 1: of plugging in an equation for story ideas that reads

751
00:40:21,719 --> 00:40:24,319
Speaker 1: like the brain of a Netflix executive. And I want

752
00:40:24,320 --> 00:40:26,520
Speaker 1: to read you this equation because I find it really interesting,

753
00:40:26,520 --> 00:40:29,040
Speaker 1: and Sophi'll show you it because it is it's physically

754
00:40:29,120 --> 00:40:30,480
Speaker 1: laid out like a math equation.

755
00:40:30,600 --> 00:40:31,000
Speaker 2: Almost.

756
00:40:31,560 --> 00:40:34,560
Speaker 1: Story. Please come up with a short story based on

757
00:40:34,800 --> 00:40:38,319
Speaker 1: in brackets theme that uses elements that are typical for

758
00:40:38,760 --> 00:40:41,719
Speaker 1: in brackets genre stories. Provide me with a three to

759
00:40:41,719 --> 00:40:45,120
Speaker 1: four sentence summary and store it in plot, and again,

760
00:40:45,239 --> 00:40:47,000
Speaker 1: like you kind of plug in a theme. I want

761
00:40:47,040 --> 00:40:49,040
Speaker 1: the theme to be an adventure, you know, or I

762
00:40:49,040 --> 00:40:51,640
Speaker 1: want the theme to be like, you know, yeah, an

763
00:40:51,640 --> 00:40:54,960
Speaker 1: adventure story in you know, the horror genre or whatever,

764
00:40:55,920 --> 00:40:58,480
Speaker 1: something like that, and provide me with a yeah. So

765
00:40:58,640 --> 00:41:00,520
Speaker 1: that's that's kind of the way the equate looks. And

766
00:41:00,600 --> 00:41:03,719
Speaker 1: Christian decides he wants a comic book that has kind

767
00:41:03,760 --> 00:41:08,520
Speaker 1: of like Indiana Jones uncharted style art vibes about like

768
00:41:08,880 --> 00:41:12,080
Speaker 1: a man and a woman who meet up by coincidence

769
00:41:12,080 --> 00:41:14,200
Speaker 1: and go on and adventure in like a dungeon to

770
00:41:14,239 --> 00:41:17,840
Speaker 1: get a treasure, right, And it's one of those things

771
00:41:18,000 --> 00:41:20,920
Speaker 1: I say. The artwork has the vibes of like Indiana

772
00:41:21,000 --> 00:41:24,440
Speaker 1: Jones or Uncharted because the vibes are purely a product

773
00:41:24,480 --> 00:41:27,400
Speaker 1: of the actual art itself. There's no actual plot in

774
00:41:27,440 --> 00:41:30,319
Speaker 1: the story that chat GPT generates for him, and he

775
00:41:30,360 --> 00:41:33,520
Speaker 1: has he has, he has the robot break down a

776
00:41:33,600 --> 00:41:37,000
Speaker 1: story page to page, but it's it's not a story.

777
00:41:37,800 --> 00:41:41,520
Speaker 1: Seen one. In a bustling Southeast Asian market, Maya and

778
00:41:41,600 --> 00:41:44,640
Speaker 1: Leo accidentally bump into each other while following the same

779
00:41:44,719 --> 00:41:48,800
Speaker 1: ancient map dialogue. Maya, hey, watch where you're going, Leo,

780
00:41:49,160 --> 00:41:50,239
Speaker 1: that's my line?

781
00:41:50,920 --> 00:41:51,560
Speaker 2: Whoa, whoa?

782
00:41:51,920 --> 00:41:55,239
Speaker 1: That doesn't that's not like that, that's nonsense, Like it's

783
00:41:55,239 --> 00:41:57,160
Speaker 1: one of those like why is that his line? He's

784
00:41:57,200 --> 00:41:59,600
Speaker 1: never we've never met these characters before. We haven't heard

785
00:41:59,640 --> 00:42:02,880
Speaker 1: him say that to anyone else, Like would why would

786
00:42:02,920 --> 00:42:05,520
Speaker 1: that be the response that he would make to her?

787
00:42:05,960 --> 00:42:10,839
Speaker 1: Like you know again, and this is because he's like,

788
00:42:11,000 --> 00:42:13,520
Speaker 1: that's the setup, that's the background for these characters. You

789
00:42:13,560 --> 00:42:16,080
Speaker 1: get scene two and again this is like the second

790
00:42:16,080 --> 00:42:18,960
Speaker 1: page of the story. Maya and Leo reluctantly agree to

791
00:42:19,000 --> 00:42:23,360
Speaker 1: work together deciphering the maps cryptic riddles dialogue. Maya, fine,

792
00:42:23,400 --> 00:42:27,440
Speaker 1: but we split the treasure. Leo deal. Scene three, Journeying

793
00:42:27,440 --> 00:42:31,160
Speaker 1: through against Jennal the duo encounters a treacherous river crossing test,

794
00:42:31,440 --> 00:42:34,959
Speaker 1: testing their teamwork skills. Dialogue Maya will need to build

795
00:42:34,960 --> 00:42:36,480
Speaker 1: a raft, Leo on it?

796
00:42:37,800 --> 00:42:38,279
Speaker 5: Oh four?

797
00:42:38,480 --> 00:42:38,680
Speaker 2: Good?

798
00:42:39,040 --> 00:42:43,000
Speaker 1: Yeah, classic Leo. Yeah, classic Leo. That's the Leo I know,

799
00:42:43,120 --> 00:42:47,960
Speaker 1: always raft building. Scene four, the pair solves a puzzle

800
00:42:47,960 --> 00:42:50,800
Speaker 1: in a hidden temple, revealing the entrance to the treasure chamber.

801
00:42:51,120 --> 00:42:55,040
Speaker 1: Dialogue Maya, we did it, Leo, Leo. Together, We're unstoppable.

802
00:42:55,680 --> 00:42:59,200
Speaker 1: Scene five. Inside the chamber, Maya and Leo find the treasure,

803
00:42:59,200 --> 00:43:03,080
Speaker 1: but also face it choice greed or friendship dialogue Maya,

804
00:43:03,239 --> 00:43:05,960
Speaker 1: we could just take it all, Leo put at what cost?

805
00:43:06,760 --> 00:43:08,719
Speaker 1: And this is in the video the videos, like I

806
00:43:08,719 --> 00:43:11,880
Speaker 1: want him to have to like choose between greed and friendship,

807
00:43:11,920 --> 00:43:15,040
Speaker 1: which like they like that. They don't act like it's

808
00:43:15,080 --> 00:43:18,440
Speaker 1: just an artificial choice. There's no like, you know again,

809
00:43:18,560 --> 00:43:21,560
Speaker 1: if you're doing like even a slightly more effortful version

810
00:43:21,600 --> 00:43:23,600
Speaker 1: of this, do an Indiana Jones thing. You know, they

811
00:43:23,600 --> 00:43:26,400
Speaker 1: pulled the treasure, but the room starts to collapse, and

812
00:43:26,480 --> 00:43:29,240
Speaker 1: like Maya's you know, able to get across a chasm

813
00:43:29,320 --> 00:43:31,560
Speaker 1: with the bag of treasure, but she, you know, she

814
00:43:31,680 --> 00:43:34,239
Speaker 1: can't help, Like Leo falls and he's like hanging by

815
00:43:34,239 --> 00:43:36,520
Speaker 1: a thread and she has to either take the treasure

816
00:43:36,560 --> 00:43:38,880
Speaker 1: and run or drop the treasure and save him, you know,

817
00:43:39,360 --> 00:43:42,720
Speaker 1: like something like that's that's that's that's not like again,

818
00:43:42,760 --> 00:43:45,040
Speaker 1: it's not like high art. But that's a conflict, right,

819
00:43:45,280 --> 00:43:46,040
Speaker 1: there's lab.

820
00:43:47,440 --> 00:43:49,520
Speaker 2: There. Last Crusae was great.

821
00:43:50,000 --> 00:43:53,279
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you're gonna steal from Indiana Jones, do it well, right,

822
00:43:53,400 --> 00:43:56,480
Speaker 1: like again, there's a whole look fucking uncharted, and shit

823
00:43:56,600 --> 00:43:59,840
Speaker 1: started as doing that like that worked out fine for everybody, Like,

824
00:44:01,200 --> 00:44:03,440
Speaker 1: but but it has to be a story. You know,

825
00:44:03,800 --> 00:44:07,080
Speaker 1: we will forgive a lot of derivative shit. The thing

826
00:44:07,160 --> 00:44:09,839
Speaker 1: about Star Wars, right, Star Wars, if you actually look

827
00:44:09,880 --> 00:44:12,640
Speaker 1: at the stuff that Lucas was pulling from, is actually

828
00:44:12,840 --> 00:44:15,360
Speaker 1: pretty derivative of a lot of different things that inspired

829
00:44:15,440 --> 00:44:17,000
Speaker 1: him as a kid, of a lot of different like

830
00:44:17,520 --> 00:44:20,080
Speaker 1: movies and shows and comic books that he had read

831
00:44:20,120 --> 00:44:23,600
Speaker 1: as a young man. And it's fine because it's it's

832
00:44:23,640 --> 00:44:26,759
Speaker 1: a it's a fucking rollicking good story, you know, but like,

833
00:44:26,840 --> 00:44:30,880
Speaker 1: this is not a story. This is like the AI

834
00:44:31,320 --> 00:44:34,719
Speaker 1: is checking every box, but it doesn't understand what the

835
00:44:34,760 --> 00:44:36,080
Speaker 1: boxes are, so there's.

836
00:44:36,000 --> 00:44:37,840
Speaker 2: Not that's it that's the quote.

837
00:44:38,280 --> 00:44:42,440
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's no none of the characters want anything. Really,

838
00:44:42,480 --> 00:44:44,960
Speaker 1: there's no reason for them to be doing this. We

839
00:44:45,040 --> 00:44:49,360
Speaker 1: know nothing about their lives. They're not like people, which again,

840
00:44:49,719 --> 00:44:52,520
Speaker 1: this is like a little kid's story book. So I

841
00:44:52,560 --> 00:44:54,960
Speaker 1: think the the idea that these people have is that like, well,

842
00:44:55,040 --> 00:44:57,000
Speaker 1: kids don't notice that because they're dumb, and it's like,

843
00:44:57,080 --> 00:45:00,520
Speaker 1: yes they do. Like that is that's that's that's why

844
00:45:01,120 --> 00:45:03,920
Speaker 1: like fucking Pixar movies or the were the biggest thing

845
00:45:03,960 --> 00:45:07,280
Speaker 1: for kids for a while. Those are not like nonsense stories.

846
00:45:07,360 --> 00:45:10,799
Speaker 1: Those those all feet like The fucking Incredibles or whatever

847
00:45:11,000 --> 00:45:12,840
Speaker 1: or this is not Pixar, but like one of the

848
00:45:12,840 --> 00:45:15,120
Speaker 1: most beloved children's movies of all time I saw when

849
00:45:15,120 --> 00:45:17,360
Speaker 1: I was like a little bitty kid, the fucking Iron

850
00:45:17,440 --> 00:45:20,360
Speaker 1: Giant and Shit or The Brave Little Toaster. You know,

851
00:45:20,440 --> 00:45:23,880
Speaker 1: those are stories with like sorrow and character and motivation

852
00:45:24,800 --> 00:45:27,640
Speaker 1: and like things are set up and paid off, none

853
00:45:27,680 --> 00:45:30,360
Speaker 1: of which the AI appears to be capable of doing.

854
00:45:31,280 --> 00:45:34,759
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know what this reminds me of Robert Are

855
00:45:34,760 --> 00:45:40,520
Speaker 2: you familiar with the book Plato? No? Okay, so back

856
00:45:40,560 --> 00:45:43,520
Speaker 2: in the days of the Humans, Can I say that

857
00:45:43,520 --> 00:45:43,960
Speaker 2: that way? No?

858
00:45:44,000 --> 00:45:46,799
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, back before the robots destroyed us all sure.

859
00:45:47,160 --> 00:45:47,399
Speaker 4: Yeah.

860
00:45:47,440 --> 00:45:49,960
Speaker 2: In the days, in the days of the humans, there

861
00:45:50,080 --> 00:45:53,920
Speaker 2: was a guy named William Wallace Cook who wrote a

862
00:45:53,920 --> 00:45:59,960
Speaker 2: book called Plato with two t's, and he was he was,

863
00:46:00,000 --> 00:46:03,920
Speaker 2: it's like an old school hack pulp novelist paid by

864
00:46:03,960 --> 00:46:06,719
Speaker 2: the word, et cetera, or paid by the letter. I

865
00:46:06,760 --> 00:46:10,360
Speaker 2: don't know how the math works out. He tried to

866
00:46:10,520 --> 00:46:16,960
Speaker 2: structurally calculate to quantify the amount of possible stories, and

867
00:46:17,360 --> 00:46:21,480
Speaker 2: he said, there are exactly one four hundred and sixty

868
00:46:21,480 --> 00:46:26,600
Speaker 2: two possible plots, and right right, you like the specificity, right.

869
00:46:26,600 --> 00:46:27,680
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love it.

870
00:46:28,560 --> 00:46:33,040
Speaker 2: Nineteen twenty eight he publishes his great epiphany in a

871
00:46:33,080 --> 00:46:38,359
Speaker 2: book called Plato, The Master Book of All Plots, and

872
00:46:38,760 --> 00:46:44,520
Speaker 2: I am frankly baffled that the the new you know,

873
00:46:44,960 --> 00:46:51,839
Speaker 2: the new algorithmic overlords are forgetting their history. Let's do it.

874
00:46:52,400 --> 00:46:56,480
Speaker 2: Let's you know what, Let's fight the tires, light the fires,

875
00:46:56,560 --> 00:46:57,720
Speaker 2: kick the tires.

876
00:46:58,520 --> 00:47:00,759
Speaker 1: Yeah. I just want to generate four teen hundred and

877
00:47:00,800 --> 00:47:04,520
Speaker 1: sixty two novels then, and then we're done with books.

878
00:47:05,800 --> 00:47:08,800
Speaker 1: You know, people said that when James Joyce put out Ulysses,

879
00:47:08,840 --> 00:47:11,600
Speaker 1: this is the end of literature. But we can actually

880
00:47:11,640 --> 00:47:14,680
Speaker 1: make it so you know, AI can and we can

881
00:47:14,719 --> 00:47:17,080
Speaker 1: have Maya and Leo star in all of them. You

882
00:47:17,080 --> 00:47:19,800
Speaker 1: know they'll, they'll, they can do it. I want to

883
00:47:19,800 --> 00:47:22,160
Speaker 1: play you a clip from this fucking video making this

884
00:47:22,360 --> 00:47:25,719
Speaker 1: dog shit not a comic book. So Sophie's going to

885
00:47:25,800 --> 00:47:26,040
Speaker 1: do that.

886
00:47:26,120 --> 00:47:28,799
Speaker 7: Now need a third image though, because we need to

887
00:47:28,800 --> 00:47:32,480
Speaker 7: convey the fact that they've bumped into each other. In

888
00:47:32,520 --> 00:47:34,720
Speaker 7: this prompt, you'll notice that I start with a style,

889
00:47:34,800 --> 00:47:37,839
Speaker 7: but then I immediately set the scene first, only then

890
00:47:37,880 --> 00:47:40,840
Speaker 7: I add the characters and finally end with the activities.

891
00:47:41,000 --> 00:47:43,160
Speaker 7: As I said, you will need to experiment with what

892
00:47:43,280 --> 00:47:46,560
Speaker 7: works best for you. I've also changed the aspect ratio

893
00:47:46,640 --> 00:47:50,239
Speaker 7: because I'm creating a wider image panel. Okay, so this

894
00:47:50,360 --> 00:47:53,040
Speaker 7: completes our first scene. Whether you use just.

895
00:47:53,120 --> 00:47:56,759
Speaker 1: One possible, you see what he's going into all this like,

896
00:47:56,880 --> 00:47:58,720
Speaker 1: we're trying to set the scene with these two characters

897
00:47:58,719 --> 00:48:00,279
Speaker 1: bump into each other, and you have to be very

898
00:48:00,280 --> 00:48:01,840
Speaker 1: you want to structure it this way is that the

899
00:48:01,880 --> 00:48:05,960
Speaker 1: AI knows and it generates you an actual, proper, you know,

900
00:48:06,080 --> 00:48:08,560
Speaker 1: image of this action happening. And like the picture we

901
00:48:08,640 --> 00:48:14,360
Speaker 1: get is this very vague, generic looking bizarre type background,

902
00:48:14,719 --> 00:48:18,480
Speaker 1: and then our two characters both staring directly at the

903
00:48:18,600 --> 00:48:21,120
Speaker 1: viewer on frame. They have not bumped into each other.

904
00:48:21,600 --> 00:48:24,680
Speaker 1: They don't, they aren't interacting, they don't seem aware of

905
00:48:24,719 --> 00:48:26,759
Speaker 1: each other. It is not an illustration of what he

906
00:48:26,800 --> 00:48:28,640
Speaker 1: asked it to write, but it's good enough.

907
00:48:28,760 --> 00:48:30,040
Speaker 2: Like fuck it, you know, like.

908
00:48:30,040 --> 00:48:34,960
Speaker 1: It's it's unchartedy. You know, it's for kids. Uh, yeah,

909
00:48:35,000 --> 00:48:38,680
Speaker 1: it's it's it's pretty good. So I want to We're

910
00:48:38,680 --> 00:48:41,480
Speaker 1: gonna get more into this, but you know, you know,

911
00:48:41,520 --> 00:48:44,840
Speaker 1: what also reminds me a lot of the uncharted video

912
00:48:44,920 --> 00:48:52,160
Speaker 1: games is the uncharted deals that our sponsors are thrown down.

913
00:48:58,719 --> 00:49:03,400
Speaker 1: We're back. So looking at a bunch of these stories

914
00:49:03,440 --> 00:49:05,480
Speaker 1: in a row kind of pulls the curtain. Aside on

915
00:49:05,560 --> 00:49:08,480
Speaker 1: AI storytelling, a lot of the dialogue it generates is

916
00:49:08,719 --> 00:49:13,279
Speaker 1: pretty nonsensical, and yeah, I can. I keep going back

917
00:49:13,280 --> 00:49:16,919
Speaker 1: to that, like bit in scene one where she's like, hey,

918
00:49:16,960 --> 00:49:20,359
Speaker 1: you bumped into me and he's like, that's my line. Yeah,

919
00:49:20,400 --> 00:49:22,640
Speaker 1: it makes no sense and my kind of my only

920
00:49:22,719 --> 00:49:24,160
Speaker 1: The only thing I think is that at some point

921
00:49:24,160 --> 00:49:26,879
Speaker 1: an actual human wrote a story or probably a few

922
00:49:26,920 --> 00:49:30,080
Speaker 1: people a number of people did where a character used

923
00:49:30,080 --> 00:49:34,160
Speaker 1: that line as a retort, right, uh, and chat Gypts

924
00:49:34,520 --> 00:49:38,400
Speaker 1: calculating algorithm or whatever, was like, this is an appropriate response.

925
00:49:38,520 --> 00:49:41,479
Speaker 1: Plug it in even though it makes no sense, because

926
00:49:41,480 --> 00:49:42,759
Speaker 1: that's kind of the way these things work.

927
00:49:42,840 --> 00:49:48,520
Speaker 2: Yeah. Also, also, they both have one ancient map and

928
00:49:48,640 --> 00:49:51,799
Speaker 2: you're not tell you where did they get it? Yeah? Right?

929
00:49:52,680 --> 00:49:54,320
Speaker 2: Is it? Is it the same map?

930
00:49:54,600 --> 00:49:54,840
Speaker 4: You know?

931
00:49:55,040 --> 00:49:57,399
Speaker 2: Like like the do they have copies of this?

932
00:49:57,560 --> 00:50:00,840
Speaker 1: Who made it? What is the ruins there? And again

933
00:50:01,160 --> 00:50:04,719
Speaker 1: you know Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade sets this

934
00:50:04,920 --> 00:50:08,640
Speaker 1: up very elegant quickly by having River Phoenix go on

935
00:50:08,680 --> 00:50:12,680
Speaker 1: a boy scout adventure and then come home having nearly

936
00:50:12,719 --> 00:50:15,680
Speaker 1: been murdered and find out that his dad doesn't give

937
00:50:15,719 --> 00:50:18,560
Speaker 1: a shit because he's too busy like working out you know,

938
00:50:18,719 --> 00:50:21,439
Speaker 1: his notebook that has all the clues for the movie

939
00:50:21,440 --> 00:50:26,480
Speaker 1: that we're about to watch. Perfect elegant, actual storytelling, good

940
00:50:26,520 --> 00:50:28,680
Speaker 1: shit man movie rules.

941
00:50:29,320 --> 00:50:32,319
Speaker 2: So wait, So the question that a lot of us

942
00:50:32,400 --> 00:50:38,440
Speaker 2: listening today are going to have is it feels like

943
00:50:38,480 --> 00:50:43,279
Speaker 2: we're talking a little bit about something profound, which is

944
00:50:43,760 --> 00:50:49,920
Speaker 2: you mentioned Ulysses earlier. Ulysses triggered such an awesome conversation

945
00:50:50,239 --> 00:50:53,640
Speaker 2: in US courts, right, over the nature of obscenity. Right,

946
00:50:53,719 --> 00:50:55,640
Speaker 2: I don't know what it is, but I know it

947
00:50:55,680 --> 00:51:00,799
Speaker 2: when I see it, right, So what like this does

948
00:51:00,920 --> 00:51:04,239
Speaker 2: feel like there's something we don't know what it is,

949
00:51:04,800 --> 00:51:08,320
Speaker 2: but we know when it's missing to a human story.

950
00:51:08,840 --> 00:51:11,720
Speaker 1: I think what's missing? I keep bringing up the term simulacrum,

951
00:51:11,760 --> 00:51:15,000
Speaker 1: and like, the simulacrum is a great example of like

952
00:51:15,040 --> 00:51:17,319
Speaker 1: the kind of classic example is you, like, open up

953
00:51:17,840 --> 00:51:21,320
Speaker 1: your a word app type thing up at somewhere probably

954
00:51:21,360 --> 00:51:23,320
Speaker 1: in the top left hand corner, that's where it is online.

955
00:51:23,440 --> 00:51:26,400
Speaker 1: You will see the image that means you click to

956
00:51:26,480 --> 00:51:29,880
Speaker 1: save your document, right, And you and I and Sophie

957
00:51:29,920 --> 00:51:31,920
Speaker 1: are all old enough that we know that that image

958
00:51:31,920 --> 00:51:34,400
Speaker 1: is a floppy disc, right, Like that's the image, but

959
00:51:34,520 --> 00:51:38,280
Speaker 1: like those don't exist anymore. People don't use floppies anymore.

960
00:51:38,800 --> 00:51:41,439
Speaker 1: Huge numbers of the people who click on that every

961
00:51:41,520 --> 00:51:44,400
Speaker 1: day to save their documents never lived in a world

962
00:51:44,520 --> 00:51:48,239
Speaker 1: where like they touched a floppy disc. So the original

963
00:51:48,320 --> 00:51:52,040
Speaker 1: thing like is no longer around, right, Like it's a simulacrum,

964
00:51:52,080 --> 00:51:54,360
Speaker 1: you know, and like the kind of whatever kind of

965
00:51:54,400 --> 00:51:57,480
Speaker 1: original meaning that it had has been replaced by something else.

966
00:51:57,520 --> 00:51:59,960
Speaker 1: And like what we have here is like the simulacrum

967
00:52:00,040 --> 00:52:03,960
Speaker 1: of a story. You've got these ingredients of story structure,

968
00:52:04,000 --> 00:52:07,279
Speaker 1: these ingredients of pieces of pop culture, but there's no

969
00:52:07,520 --> 00:52:10,520
Speaker 1: there's nothing that's actually trying to be transmitted. Nobody has

970
00:52:10,680 --> 00:52:13,680
Speaker 1: like because there's not a person behind this, for one thing,

971
00:52:13,719 --> 00:52:16,319
Speaker 1: and there's not an understanding of what it takes to

972
00:52:16,440 --> 00:52:19,400
Speaker 1: make a story, so it can kind of look like

973
00:52:19,440 --> 00:52:21,840
Speaker 1: a story. It can certainly trick the like these AI

974
00:52:22,120 --> 00:52:25,640
Speaker 1: grindset people think it's close enough. But what's happening here

975
00:52:25,680 --> 00:52:28,000
Speaker 1: that's really fucked up is that they are taking this

976
00:52:28,080 --> 00:52:31,480
Speaker 1: thing that is not a story, and they are their

977
00:52:31,560 --> 00:52:35,880
Speaker 1: goal is to trick overworked parents into buying this for

978
00:52:36,160 --> 00:52:40,160
Speaker 1: children who will read it and be too young to

979
00:52:40,239 --> 00:52:44,320
Speaker 1: elucidate why something seems to be wrong with their new book.

980
00:52:45,160 --> 00:52:48,879
Speaker 1: And that's actually very frightening, right, Like there's there's we're

981
00:52:48,880 --> 00:52:51,399
Speaker 1: going to talk about learning in a little bit, how

982
00:52:51,480 --> 00:52:54,919
Speaker 1: kids learn and how they don't learn, but like, fundamentally

983
00:52:55,280 --> 00:52:59,040
Speaker 1: kids are little information vacuums, and this stuff is wrong

984
00:52:59,280 --> 00:53:01,759
Speaker 1: on a fundamental level, and they'll get that. They may

985
00:53:01,760 --> 00:53:04,719
Speaker 1: not get it why, but it's not only is it

986
00:53:04,800 --> 00:53:06,359
Speaker 1: kind of like off putting to them, but it has

987
00:53:06,400 --> 00:53:09,560
Speaker 1: the potential to do harm to them. And this is

988
00:53:09,760 --> 00:53:11,560
Speaker 1: you know, we've had versions of this. There's this thing

989
00:53:11,600 --> 00:53:14,080
Speaker 1: called elsagate, right where like a year or two ago,

990
00:53:14,440 --> 00:53:16,680
Speaker 1: there were suddenly all of these hundreds and hundreds and

991
00:53:16,719 --> 00:53:20,840
Speaker 1: hundreds of like what appeared to be AI generated videos

992
00:53:20,880 --> 00:53:24,319
Speaker 1: that were like involving Disney characters, Elsa being a big

993
00:53:24,360 --> 00:53:27,480
Speaker 1: one from I think Frozen, and they were they were

994
00:53:27,520 --> 00:53:28,560
Speaker 1: like singing.

995
00:53:28,239 --> 00:53:30,800
Speaker 3: Real, what are you calling this character?

996
00:53:31,760 --> 00:53:37,839
Speaker 1: Elsa right, Elsa, Elsa, Elsa, el Yeah, I said, Elsa right,

997
00:53:37,920 --> 00:53:43,560
Speaker 1: and whatever, okay, whatever. So you've and like a lot

998
00:53:43,560 --> 00:53:46,480
Speaker 1: of them would suddenly get like really weirdly sexual or

999
00:53:46,560 --> 00:53:50,360
Speaker 1: like fucking get tweaked into this kind of like uncanny,

1000
00:53:50,600 --> 00:53:53,480
Speaker 1: unsettling almost like love crafty and weirdness, and they were

1001
00:53:53,560 --> 00:53:56,320
Speaker 1: remember this, yeah, and these were they were all crafted

1002
00:53:56,360 --> 00:53:58,920
Speaker 1: and used kind of the keywords that like when parents,

1003
00:53:59,280 --> 00:54:01,160
Speaker 1: you know, you're you're you got to cook dinner, you

1004
00:54:01,200 --> 00:54:02,920
Speaker 1: got to like do you know, clean the ause or

1005
00:54:02,920 --> 00:54:05,640
Speaker 1: some shit. Your kid won't calm down, You put them

1006
00:54:05,680 --> 00:54:07,320
Speaker 1: in front of YouTube and you put on a children's

1007
00:54:07,400 --> 00:54:10,160
Speaker 1: video and the algorithm eventually starts spinning, and so parents

1008
00:54:10,200 --> 00:54:13,040
Speaker 1: start realizing like, well, I set them on. You know,

1009
00:54:13,440 --> 00:54:16,120
Speaker 1: this video that was like a frozen song and now

1010
00:54:16,160 --> 00:54:18,800
Speaker 1: there's like this weird pornographic thing that they're watching, Like,

1011
00:54:18,840 --> 00:54:22,960
Speaker 1: where the fuck did this come from? A webitized AutoPlay? Yeah, exactly.

1012
00:54:23,360 --> 00:54:25,920
Speaker 1: And I don't think there's still a solid understanding of

1013
00:54:25,960 --> 00:54:28,440
Speaker 1: where all these came from. There's a couple of different theories,

1014
00:54:29,640 --> 00:54:32,719
Speaker 1: but it's really unsettling because part of the problem is,

1015
00:54:32,800 --> 00:54:35,480
Speaker 1: like what does it do to kids to have that

1016
00:54:35,600 --> 00:54:38,000
Speaker 1: kind of shit in front of their eyes? Like, cause

1017
00:54:38,000 --> 00:54:40,080
Speaker 1: we're not even talking about like the danger of like

1018
00:54:40,360 --> 00:54:42,799
Speaker 1: what if a kid reads an adult book or you know,

1019
00:54:42,880 --> 00:54:45,200
Speaker 1: stumbles in when there's porn on the TV. You know,

1020
00:54:45,400 --> 00:54:47,480
Speaker 1: this is a question of like, well, this is like

1021
00:54:47,719 --> 00:54:54,440
Speaker 1: frightening nonsense that like is being fed into them automatically,

1022
00:54:54,880 --> 00:54:56,800
Speaker 1: like at a at a scale that was like hundreds

1023
00:54:56,800 --> 00:54:59,120
Speaker 1: of these videos tit. One of the channels for this

1024
00:54:59,200 --> 00:55:00,840
Speaker 1: was like one of the twenty biggest channels on you.

1025
00:55:00,880 --> 00:55:04,880
Speaker 1: This is fucked up, really problematic shit, and this is

1026
00:55:05,040 --> 00:55:07,880
Speaker 1: people Like what these grindset people are doing by pumping

1027
00:55:07,920 --> 00:55:10,239
Speaker 1: as many of these AI books into kindle as they

1028
00:55:10,280 --> 00:55:15,000
Speaker 1: can is they are creating the They're creating the the

1029
00:55:15,000 --> 00:55:19,000
Speaker 1: the hard copy, the physical book version of this, where

1030
00:55:19,239 --> 00:55:21,640
Speaker 1: parents are going to get tricked into buying this ship

1031
00:55:21,920 --> 00:55:23,759
Speaker 1: and kids are going to be sat down in front of.

1032
00:55:23,680 --> 00:55:31,279
Speaker 2: This and and technology always outpaces legislation. Yeah what you're describing, man,

1033
00:55:31,320 --> 00:55:38,160
Speaker 2: it sounds like this is a very very bad wild

1034
00:55:38,239 --> 00:55:42,880
Speaker 2: West situation. Uh, it's a it's a Cormac McCarthy level

1035
00:55:43,120 --> 00:55:49,600
Speaker 2: wild West situation, like the so there is no is

1036
00:55:49,600 --> 00:55:52,759
Speaker 2: there is there blowback? I mean, children are some of

1037
00:55:52,800 --> 00:56:00,280
Speaker 2: the most frighteningly intelligent things. Kids. No bullshit. Uh that

1038
00:56:00,280 --> 00:56:03,600
Speaker 2: that's super uncomfortable. There's you know, this reminds me of

1039
00:56:04,680 --> 00:56:10,200
Speaker 2: one of my favorite lines from the television show Community

1040
00:56:10,239 --> 00:56:13,239
Speaker 2: This Robert, I posit to you, Sophia, I posit to you,

1041
00:56:14,080 --> 00:56:17,920
Speaker 2: a fellow behind the bastards. Folks, this shit is both

1042
00:56:18,600 --> 00:56:22,120
Speaker 2: silly and evil, like a candy cigarette.

1043
00:56:22,360 --> 00:56:27,880
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly, It's like the candy cigarette of literature, right. Yeah.

1044
00:56:27,920 --> 00:56:29,759
Speaker 1: And it's one of those like one of the things

1045
00:56:29,800 --> 00:56:32,640
Speaker 1: I found interesting. So when I want again watching a

1046
00:56:32,640 --> 00:56:34,560
Speaker 1: bunch of these videos, you become aware of, like what

1047
00:56:34,600 --> 00:56:36,960
Speaker 1: the problems for these AI hustlers are, like, what the

1048
00:56:37,000 --> 00:56:39,080
Speaker 1: things they have to overcome is And one of the

1049
00:56:39,120 --> 00:56:42,480
Speaker 1: problems they face is that like every single book generated

1050
00:56:42,520 --> 00:56:46,799
Speaker 1: by the AIS they're using sets off plagiarism detectors, right,

1051
00:56:47,040 --> 00:56:50,360
Speaker 1: and like Amazon uses I think Amazon uses, I believe

1052
00:56:50,400 --> 00:56:53,400
Speaker 1: they use a plagiarism detector. I've asked them for specifics

1053
00:56:53,400 --> 00:56:56,640
Speaker 1: on this again I haven't heard back. But so one

1054
00:56:56,640 --> 00:56:58,720
Speaker 1: of the first things they'll do is they'll use something

1055
00:56:58,760 --> 00:57:01,239
Speaker 1: like Grammarly to like run the text that they've got

1056
00:57:01,280 --> 00:57:03,839
Speaker 1: through a plagiarism detector and it will inevitably tell them

1057
00:57:03,840 --> 00:57:08,279
Speaker 1: significant plagiarism found. But there's a solution they've got a

1058
00:57:08,320 --> 00:57:11,840
Speaker 1: way to solve for this, which is an app called Quilbot. Now,

1059
00:57:11,880 --> 00:57:13,799
Speaker 1: if you go online and look up quilbot, it's built

1060
00:57:13,840 --> 00:57:16,720
Speaker 1: by its creators as an online paraphrasing tool. So what

1061
00:57:16,800 --> 00:57:19,240
Speaker 1: quilbot does is you feed it text and it goes

1062
00:57:19,240 --> 00:57:22,880
Speaker 1: through that text and it replaces adjectives and verbs in

1063
00:57:22,960 --> 00:57:26,120
Speaker 1: the text with synonyms. So you know, if the original

1064
00:57:26,120 --> 00:57:28,680
Speaker 1: text has the word courageous, it'll replace it with brave,

1065
00:57:29,080 --> 00:57:31,240
Speaker 1: or if it's got the word resided, it'll replace it

1066
00:57:31,280 --> 00:57:34,320
Speaker 1: with lived. Stuff like that. So you feed this frankin

1067
00:57:34,400 --> 00:57:36,960
Speaker 1: text that you got from the AI into Quilbot and

1068
00:57:37,000 --> 00:57:39,640
Speaker 1: then quilbot does kind of a find and replace with

1069
00:57:39,720 --> 00:57:42,280
Speaker 1: a handful of the words in there, and then suddenly

1070
00:57:42,280 --> 00:57:45,960
Speaker 1: you've got something that won't trigger Amazon's plagiarism sensors and

1071
00:57:46,000 --> 00:57:48,600
Speaker 1: that you didn't have to actually edit yourself. Right, you

1072
00:57:48,960 --> 00:57:51,040
Speaker 1: still don't have to do any real work here. You

1073
00:57:51,160 --> 00:57:57,200
Speaker 1: just let another robot mix it up a little bit more. Yeah. Now,

1074
00:57:57,360 --> 00:58:00,400
Speaker 1: once you've got kind of passable text, the next step

1075
00:58:00,480 --> 00:58:03,040
Speaker 1: for these grifters is to create image prompts for all

1076
00:58:03,040 --> 00:58:05,840
Speaker 1: of the illustrations in the book. And again there's not

1077
00:58:06,000 --> 00:58:08,560
Speaker 1: room for creativity here or for any kind of like

1078
00:58:08,720 --> 00:58:12,560
Speaker 1: human influence. For each page, they just ask chat gpt

1079
00:58:12,760 --> 00:58:15,760
Speaker 1: to generate descriptions of the images needed for that text,

1080
00:58:16,120 --> 00:58:18,320
Speaker 1: and then they feed that text in the mid Journey

1081
00:58:18,440 --> 00:58:21,520
Speaker 1: or Leonardo, which is another AI image generator and used

1082
00:58:21,600 --> 00:58:24,280
Speaker 1: to produce something like this. And this is from another

1083
00:58:24,320 --> 00:58:26,280
Speaker 1: one of these. This is kind of like one of

1084
00:58:26,320 --> 00:58:30,440
Speaker 1: the better case scenario looking illustrations and it's from like

1085
00:58:30,520 --> 00:58:34,240
Speaker 1: one of these fucking AI book guides that I found

1086
00:58:34,320 --> 00:58:38,360
Speaker 1: on YouTube, and it's you know, it's not remarkable, right,

1087
00:58:38,440 --> 00:58:40,800
Speaker 1: Like it's I'll read you the text. This is from

1088
00:58:40,920 --> 00:58:43,480
Speaker 1: the chapter one setting off in an adventure. This is

1089
00:58:43,480 --> 00:58:45,800
Speaker 1: the whole chapter. Once upon a time, there was a

1090
00:58:45,800 --> 00:58:47,920
Speaker 1: young girl named Sarah who lived in a small village

1091
00:58:47,920 --> 00:58:50,720
Speaker 1: surrounded by rolling hills and lush forests. Sarah was an

1092
00:58:50,720 --> 00:58:53,440
Speaker 1: adventurous spirit and love to explore the great outdoors. One day,

1093
00:58:53,440 --> 00:58:55,320
Speaker 1: she heard a rumor that a long lost treasure was

1094
00:58:55,360 --> 00:58:57,640
Speaker 1: hidden somewhere in the hills. The treasure was said to

1095
00:58:57,640 --> 00:58:59,360
Speaker 1: be a great wealth of gold and precious gyms, and

1096
00:58:59,360 --> 00:59:02,160
Speaker 1: whoever found it would be incredibly rich. Sarah was determined

1097
00:59:02,200 --> 00:59:03,960
Speaker 1: to find the treasure and put all her focus on

1098
00:59:04,000 --> 00:59:06,520
Speaker 1: the task at hand, because the message here is that

1099
00:59:06,840 --> 00:59:10,000
Speaker 1: you need to focus in order to achieve your goals.

1100
00:59:10,440 --> 00:59:12,600
Speaker 2: Oh okay, yeah.

1101
00:59:12,200 --> 00:59:15,200
Speaker 1: And it's the art that accompanies it isn't bad. It

1102
00:59:15,240 --> 00:59:17,720
Speaker 1: looks it kind of at first glance, you might assume

1103
00:59:17,720 --> 00:59:19,720
Speaker 1: a human drew it. You can kind of tell, like,

1104
00:59:19,800 --> 00:59:21,960
Speaker 1: for one thing, the perspective on the backpack on her

1105
00:59:22,000 --> 00:59:24,400
Speaker 1: back is all fucked up. It's not like actually quite right.

1106
00:59:25,800 --> 00:59:27,800
Speaker 1: It might be that her hand isn't a pocket, but

1107
00:59:27,840 --> 00:59:29,600
Speaker 1: she might actually just not have a hand. But like,

1108
00:59:29,640 --> 00:59:33,560
Speaker 1: it doesn't look bad. Especially again, you're like an overworked

1109
00:59:33,560 --> 00:59:34,520
Speaker 1: parent looking for a book.

1110
00:59:35,480 --> 00:59:36,520
Speaker 3: What you're saying.

1111
00:59:36,840 --> 00:59:39,240
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. If you're an if you're just like a

1112
00:59:39,240 --> 00:59:42,240
Speaker 1: parent skimming through these, maybe you you don't catch this

1113
00:59:42,440 --> 00:59:45,240
Speaker 1: right as like something problematic. You just see like, all right,

1114
00:59:45,240 --> 00:59:47,919
Speaker 1: well that one works and by the standards of age

1115
00:59:48,320 --> 00:59:51,640
Speaker 1: children's book arc this this one looks pretty good. And

1116
00:59:51,680 --> 00:59:53,160
Speaker 1: I should say here if you want to look at

1117
00:59:53,160 --> 00:59:56,720
Speaker 1: this stuff yourself. The text version of this article, of

1118
00:59:56,760 --> 00:59:58,880
Speaker 1: the whole article that we're using as the script for this,

1119
00:59:59,320 --> 01:00:01,880
Speaker 1: will be up as soon as the episodes drop on

1120
01:00:02,000 --> 01:00:06,120
Speaker 1: my substack, shatter Zone. Just type shatter Zone substack into Google.

1121
01:00:06,200 --> 01:00:08,560
Speaker 1: It'll be the first article that pops up. If you

1122
01:00:08,600 --> 01:00:10,760
Speaker 1: click on that, it's free to you. You don't have

1123
01:00:10,800 --> 01:00:12,960
Speaker 1: to give me your email or any of that fucking bullshit,

1124
01:00:13,640 --> 01:00:15,720
Speaker 1: and you can see all of the images and find

1125
01:00:15,720 --> 01:00:17,880
Speaker 1: links to everything if you want to, like track back

1126
01:00:18,240 --> 01:00:21,360
Speaker 1: to the work that I did here. So that's kind

1127
01:00:21,400 --> 01:00:24,160
Speaker 1: of the best case scenario for how these AI kids

1128
01:00:24,200 --> 01:00:27,960
Speaker 1: books work. Look, the worst case scenario is shown in

1129
01:00:28,000 --> 01:00:30,480
Speaker 1: this video, which has about four hundred and twelve thousand

1130
01:00:30,520 --> 01:00:34,560
Speaker 1: views by Paul Marls. Now. Prior to the AI explosion,

1131
01:00:34,680 --> 01:00:36,880
Speaker 1: Paul he was teaching. He had a bunch of videos

1132
01:00:36,880 --> 01:00:40,520
Speaker 1: teaching people how to like con other folks through Amazon

1133
01:00:40,640 --> 01:00:43,440
Speaker 1: KDP kind of the old fashioned way by like hiring

1134
01:00:43,440 --> 01:00:48,040
Speaker 1: ghostwriters and shit. His videos had titles like six hundred

1135
01:00:48,040 --> 01:00:50,480
Speaker 1: and thirty six dollars from thirty to sixty minutes work

1136
01:00:50,560 --> 01:00:54,640
Speaker 1: exclamation point, exclamation point, make money online with KDP low

1137
01:00:54,720 --> 01:00:58,480
Speaker 1: content books. This is like what he's advertising is like,

1138
01:00:58,520 --> 01:01:01,560
Speaker 1: these are low content books. To put anything into them.

1139
01:01:01,800 --> 01:01:04,200
Speaker 1: It's the laziest thing ever. But you can make this

1140
01:01:04,240 --> 01:01:07,320
Speaker 1: weirdly specific number of money if you follow my guides

1141
01:01:08,800 --> 01:01:10,640
Speaker 1: and Paul Marls, if you look him up, he has

1142
01:01:10,680 --> 01:01:13,600
Speaker 1: dozens of videos for sale on Amazon. I have reached

1143
01:01:13,600 --> 01:01:15,840
Speaker 1: out to Paul. His One of the ways you can

1144
01:01:15,840 --> 01:01:18,440
Speaker 1: tell this guy's sketchy is he has a website that

1145
01:01:18,560 --> 01:01:21,280
Speaker 1: like offers all of his different sort of like you know,

1146
01:01:21,440 --> 01:01:24,000
Speaker 1: guidebooks and videos and stuff for people who want to

1147
01:01:24,040 --> 01:01:28,040
Speaker 1: follow him in this grift, but it has no contact info.

1148
01:01:28,120 --> 01:01:30,560
Speaker 1: I did, like send him a message on his Facebook,

1149
01:01:30,600 --> 01:01:33,000
Speaker 1: which I don't think he will check, but you know,

1150
01:01:33,320 --> 01:01:36,800
Speaker 1: I did reach out Paul. I don't like Paul. I

1151
01:01:36,840 --> 01:01:39,160
Speaker 1: think he has a face in need of a fist here.

1152
01:01:40,200 --> 01:01:42,520
Speaker 1: I'm not using that kind of language in the article

1153
01:01:42,560 --> 01:01:44,840
Speaker 1: that I've written because I want to seem like an

1154
01:01:44,840 --> 01:01:47,720
Speaker 1: objective journalist. But as you'll see when we play a

1155
01:01:47,760 --> 01:01:51,040
Speaker 1: clip from this guy's video, he's pretty immediately off putting. Now,

1156
01:01:51,160 --> 01:01:54,400
Speaker 1: Paul ups the ante on laziness here by cutting out

1157
01:01:54,520 --> 01:02:00,200
Speaker 1: the text entirely and instead generating a children's coloring book

1158
01:02:00,240 --> 01:02:03,200
Speaker 1: that he hopes will seo well because it's about dinosaurs

1159
01:02:03,200 --> 01:02:05,960
Speaker 1: and turn a profit. It's even lazier, right, that's what

1160
01:02:06,000 --> 01:02:08,280
Speaker 1: Paul is is like, this is already a lazy grift.

1161
01:02:08,280 --> 01:02:11,080
Speaker 1: Paul's gonna make it lazier. Fuck all that text. We

1162
01:02:11,080 --> 01:02:13,400
Speaker 1: don't need a story, like, we don't need to use

1163
01:02:13,520 --> 01:02:18,680
Speaker 1: chat GPT. We'll just we'll make a coloring book super easy.

1164
01:02:19,520 --> 01:02:21,520
Speaker 1: And you may think a coloring book would be less

1165
01:02:21,520 --> 01:02:24,120
Speaker 1: problematic than some of this other shit we've seen. I

1166
01:02:24,160 --> 01:02:27,680
Speaker 1: assure you it's not. So he enters this very half

1167
01:02:27,720 --> 01:02:30,920
Speaker 1: assed prompt where he misspells the name of a dinosaur.

1168
01:02:31,200 --> 01:02:34,600
Speaker 1: The prompt is just like coloring page for kids, Tyrannosaurus

1169
01:02:34,600 --> 01:02:37,120
Speaker 1: rex in a jungle, and he doesn't spell it right.

1170
01:02:37,160 --> 01:02:41,040
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna have Sophie play this guy describing how

1171
01:02:41,080 --> 01:02:45,840
Speaker 1: he generates the images for his coloring book, and maybe

1172
01:02:45,840 --> 01:02:47,160
Speaker 1: then you'll hate him as much as I do.

1173
01:02:47,960 --> 01:02:51,400
Speaker 5: And what we want our image to be off. Now

1174
01:02:51,480 --> 01:02:54,720
Speaker 5: I'm going to do a dinosaur coloring book. That doesn't

1175
01:02:54,760 --> 01:02:56,360
Speaker 5: mean to say you need to go out and do

1176
01:02:56,360 --> 01:02:58,760
Speaker 5: a dinosaur coloring book. You can use this method to

1177
01:02:58,840 --> 01:03:02,840
Speaker 5: create any number of different types of coloring book that

1178
01:03:02,880 --> 01:03:06,080
Speaker 5: you want. So I'm going to put in Turanosaurus rex

1179
01:03:07,040 --> 01:03:10,560
Speaker 5: in a jungle. The next instruction is going to be

1180
01:03:10,720 --> 01:03:12,680
Speaker 5: what sort of style, and we're going to put in

1181
01:03:12,840 --> 01:03:15,480
Speaker 5: cartoon style. Then I'm just going to tell it how

1182
01:03:15,520 --> 01:03:18,360
Speaker 5: I want the lines, and I want this with thick lines,

1183
01:03:18,880 --> 01:03:23,800
Speaker 5: low detail, and no shading. Now put in no shading,

1184
01:03:24,080 --> 01:03:27,840
Speaker 5: but you'll find that it probably will create some images

1185
01:03:28,080 --> 01:03:31,080
Speaker 5: with some element of shading. The next is we need

1186
01:03:31,120 --> 01:03:35,400
Speaker 5: to put two minus signs and then ar for aspect ratio.

1187
01:03:35,520 --> 01:03:38,480
Speaker 5: So we're just going to put in nine eleven and

1188
01:03:38,520 --> 01:03:41,400
Speaker 5: then we enter and we can see here it's starting

1189
01:03:41,400 --> 01:03:42,280
Speaker 5: to create the images.

1190
01:03:44,040 --> 01:03:46,440
Speaker 1: Okay, so stop at Sylvie, because now I want to talk.

1191
01:03:46,440 --> 01:03:48,400
Speaker 1: I want to talk about these images. First. I want

1192
01:03:48,400 --> 01:03:50,560
Speaker 1: to say, you'll note he's like, we don't want there

1193
01:03:50,560 --> 01:03:53,120
Speaker 1: to be shading, because you know, if there's shading in

1194
01:03:53,160 --> 01:03:54,880
Speaker 1: a thing, that you're supposed to color in it, Like,

1195
01:03:54,920 --> 01:03:57,200
Speaker 1: fucks up, you can't like color in shading very well.

1196
01:03:57,280 --> 01:03:59,560
Speaker 1: But he's like, sure there will be shading, but like whatever,

1197
01:03:59,560 --> 01:04:03,720
Speaker 1: who gives you know, we don't care anything about this stuff. Now,

1198
01:04:03,800 --> 01:04:05,840
Speaker 1: Sophie is going to show you. These are the images

1199
01:04:05,880 --> 01:04:08,360
Speaker 1: that he generates with that prompt take a good look

1200
01:04:08,360 --> 01:04:10,560
Speaker 1: at these dinosaurs. Can you can you tell me anything

1201
01:04:10,560 --> 01:04:12,600
Speaker 1: that's wrong with these Tyrannosaurus rexes.

1202
01:04:13,120 --> 01:04:14,600
Speaker 2: Oh sure they're not t rexes.

1203
01:04:14,840 --> 01:04:16,920
Speaker 1: No, they're not at all t rexes. One of them

1204
01:04:17,000 --> 01:04:20,120
Speaker 1: is a quadruped. It clearly has four legs, but like

1205
01:04:20,160 --> 01:04:22,800
Speaker 1: a t rex head on this like weird stump of

1206
01:04:22,800 --> 01:04:25,960
Speaker 1: a body. Another one, the tx rex has like human

1207
01:04:26,040 --> 01:04:30,320
Speaker 1: muscle arms and thumbs and thumbs. One of them, the

1208
01:04:30,360 --> 01:04:32,880
Speaker 1: one on the bottom left, like, not only is the

1209
01:04:32,920 --> 01:04:36,240
Speaker 1: bottom jaw twisted away from the top jaw, but if

1210
01:04:36,280 --> 01:04:40,320
Speaker 1: you notice, its front arm is actually its back leg.

1211
01:04:40,720 --> 01:04:43,760
Speaker 1: The back of its body is merged with a tree.

1212
01:04:44,120 --> 01:04:47,680
Speaker 1: And then like there's maybe two other sort of half

1213
01:04:47,720 --> 01:04:50,520
Speaker 1: formed limbs there and then the bottom right one like

1214
01:04:50,560 --> 01:04:53,200
Speaker 1: these I cannot exaggerate to you, like go go to

1215
01:04:53,280 --> 01:04:56,480
Speaker 1: shattersone substeck. Look at these fucking t rexes. These are

1216
01:04:56,520 --> 01:05:01,520
Speaker 1: so such fucked up janky tyrannosauruses, Like it is offensive

1217
01:05:01,560 --> 01:05:03,640
Speaker 1: to me, how shitty these t rexes look.

1218
01:05:05,120 --> 01:05:07,800
Speaker 3: The human hands are very funny.

1219
01:05:07,960 --> 01:05:10,720
Speaker 1: Yeah, the human hands on the bottom one is pretty great.

1220
01:05:11,000 --> 01:05:14,360
Speaker 1: I do like how in the top one, like mid

1221
01:05:14,400 --> 01:05:17,160
Speaker 1: journey's almost done like a rob Leaffield thing, where like

1222
01:05:17,200 --> 01:05:23,560
Speaker 1: it can't figure out the so so hey, maybe AI

1223
01:05:23,720 --> 01:05:28,960
Speaker 1: has at least reached Leaffield and levels of like illustrative potential.

1224
01:05:29,480 --> 01:05:36,400
Speaker 2: They need, they need never explained belts of ambiguous cartridges

1225
01:05:36,640 --> 01:05:38,440
Speaker 2: right right around the waste.

1226
01:05:38,640 --> 01:05:38,800
Speaker 5: Yeah.

1227
01:05:39,160 --> 01:05:42,320
Speaker 1: Also, you know what if there be that's gonna be

1228
01:05:42,320 --> 01:05:44,360
Speaker 1: another two iterations.

1229
01:05:44,720 --> 01:05:48,040
Speaker 2: Yeah, t rex with human hands that would have helped

1230
01:05:48,080 --> 01:05:48,400
Speaker 2: him out.

1231
01:05:50,400 --> 01:05:52,880
Speaker 1: They maybe they would have been around right, you know,

1232
01:05:52,920 --> 01:05:56,320
Speaker 1: if the t rex had developed the fucking handgun, you know,

1233
01:05:56,600 --> 01:06:03,800
Speaker 1: they could have fought off those fucking asteroids. Yeah, it's

1234
01:06:03,840 --> 01:06:05,880
Speaker 1: a you know when you say that, I think about

1235
01:06:05,920 --> 01:06:10,360
Speaker 1: a much better tyrannosaur drawing. Bill Watterson's classic Tyrannosaurs in

1236
01:06:10,480 --> 01:06:14,160
Speaker 1: f fourteen's still one of like the highlights of my childhood.

1237
01:06:15,000 --> 01:06:17,240
Speaker 1: That part of why I'm so offended by this coloring

1238
01:06:17,240 --> 01:06:20,160
Speaker 1: book is that, like the best parts of my childhood

1239
01:06:20,200 --> 01:06:24,160
Speaker 1: all involved dinosaurs, and he is just he understands that

1240
01:06:24,160 --> 01:06:27,400
Speaker 1: that kids are magnetically drawn to dinosaurs, always have been

1241
01:06:27,440 --> 01:06:30,680
Speaker 1: and always will be forever more, and so that he's

1242
01:06:30,720 --> 01:06:33,959
Speaker 1: grifting off that by provided like he just he doesn't

1243
01:06:33,960 --> 01:06:36,600
Speaker 1: even care enough to make sure that they look vaguely right,

1244
01:06:36,720 --> 01:06:40,480
Speaker 1: like any kid. Kids know more about dinosaurs than paleontologists.

1245
01:06:40,520 --> 01:06:42,280
Speaker 1: Any child is going to point out that these are

1246
01:06:42,320 --> 01:06:46,880
Speaker 1: fucked up looking t rexes. So Paul's guide after this

1247
01:06:46,960 --> 01:06:48,400
Speaker 1: kind of goes through how you lay out your coloring

1248
01:06:48,440 --> 01:06:51,240
Speaker 1: book to publication, how you cobble together a cover, you know,

1249
01:06:51,280 --> 01:06:53,160
Speaker 1: what kind of things you need so that it'll it'll

1250
01:06:53,160 --> 01:06:56,000
Speaker 1: get through Amazon sensors, and they'll let you upload it

1251
01:06:56,040 --> 01:06:58,360
Speaker 1: to like not just like because it's a coloring book,

1252
01:06:58,400 --> 01:07:01,440
Speaker 1: obviously you need physical copies and you can if you

1253
01:07:01,520 --> 01:07:03,840
Speaker 1: upload it right, Amazon will just like print and sell

1254
01:07:03,880 --> 01:07:06,680
Speaker 1: the books for you, the actual like physical books. And

1255
01:07:06,720 --> 01:07:08,720
Speaker 1: again this gets to what I worry about is that

1256
01:07:08,800 --> 01:07:12,200
Speaker 1: like parents who fall for these books are going to

1257
01:07:12,240 --> 01:07:14,960
Speaker 1: be you know, overworked. They're not going to be focusing

1258
01:07:15,000 --> 01:07:16,800
Speaker 1: on these books as much as their kids are, right,

1259
01:07:16,840 --> 01:07:18,800
Speaker 1: They're just like, I want to get a dinosaur coloring

1260
01:07:18,800 --> 01:07:21,240
Speaker 1: book for my kid or whatever they need a coloring book. Oh,

1261
01:07:21,240 --> 01:07:23,520
Speaker 1: this is what like popped up on Amazon. The cover

1262
01:07:23,600 --> 01:07:27,640
Speaker 1: looks fine. I am also worried. Particularly what scares me.

1263
01:07:27,840 --> 01:07:29,880
Speaker 1: It's both like parents who don't have a lot of time,

1264
01:07:30,240 --> 01:07:33,360
Speaker 1: they're going for whatever is affordable. And also there's a

1265
01:07:33,360 --> 01:07:36,720
Speaker 1: lot of charities that provide poor kids with free books,

1266
01:07:36,960 --> 01:07:40,280
Speaker 1: and they do bulk orders from places like Amazon that

1267
01:07:40,360 --> 01:07:42,320
Speaker 1: might get tricked by this kind of thing. And so

1268
01:07:43,160 --> 01:07:45,080
Speaker 1: the thing that like the vision I can't get out

1269
01:07:45,080 --> 01:07:47,840
Speaker 1: of my head is this like frightening ai future in

1270
01:07:47,880 --> 01:07:51,439
Speaker 1: which like rich kids get to color in proper dinosaurs

1271
01:07:51,480 --> 01:07:54,720
Speaker 1: from like coloring books that human beings drew, and poor

1272
01:07:54,800 --> 01:07:57,720
Speaker 1: kids grow up thinking stegosaurs had no tail and the

1273
01:07:57,800 --> 01:07:59,800
Speaker 1: earth used to have like a second moon that looked

1274
01:07:59,800 --> 01:08:02,040
Speaker 1: like nipple, which is another Look at this image here,

1275
01:08:02,040 --> 01:08:05,560
Speaker 1: Look at this fucking picture that that it drew that

1276
01:08:05,680 --> 01:08:09,560
Speaker 1: some kids, some kid's gonna get this, some kid's gonna

1277
01:08:09,560 --> 01:08:11,520
Speaker 1: get this fucking coloring book. Look at this fucking thing

1278
01:08:11,560 --> 01:08:13,720
Speaker 1: that's not a stegosaurus. I don't even know. It's got

1279
01:08:13,720 --> 01:08:16,640
Speaker 1: like spikes coming out of like like like actual like

1280
01:08:16,680 --> 01:08:19,800
Speaker 1: porcupine quills. Coming out of like the spines on its

1281
01:08:19,800 --> 01:08:22,400
Speaker 1: back and like it doesn't have a tail, there's like

1282
01:08:22,560 --> 01:08:25,400
Speaker 1: five legs and the perspectives wrong and then like the

1283
01:08:25,479 --> 01:08:26,800
Speaker 1: world behind it look like.

1284
01:08:26,920 --> 01:08:34,760
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's got spikes on the left, uh,

1285
01:08:34,800 --> 01:08:35,800
Speaker 2: the left hind leg.

1286
01:08:37,160 --> 01:08:40,280
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, it's like fucked up. It's like super fucked up.

1287
01:08:40,400 --> 01:08:42,080
Speaker 3: Like what's very bad?

1288
01:08:42,960 --> 01:08:45,840
Speaker 1: Yeah, I hate this shit, and like the again, that's

1289
01:08:45,840 --> 01:08:49,840
Speaker 1: what's unsettling. Like there will always be high quality dinosaur

1290
01:08:49,880 --> 01:08:53,320
Speaker 1: coloring books and storybooks and stuff for kids, and because

1291
01:08:53,360 --> 01:08:56,000
Speaker 1: they're made by humans, they'll command a premium price. So

1292
01:08:56,080 --> 01:09:01,320
Speaker 1: like the poor kids grow up thinking that like yeah,

1293
01:09:01,400 --> 01:09:04,439
Speaker 1: I don't know, you know, I find it fucked up,

1294
01:09:06,200 --> 01:09:08,639
Speaker 1: and maybe it'll be even bleaker than that, and nobody

1295
01:09:08,680 --> 01:09:11,360
Speaker 1: will get good children's books. But this is kind of

1296
01:09:11,400 --> 01:09:13,880
Speaker 1: like where I what I'm suspecting is at least the

1297
01:09:13,920 --> 01:09:15,680
Speaker 1: first thing that's going to happen is that like the

1298
01:09:15,760 --> 01:09:20,040
Speaker 1: kids who start getting shafted with this low quality, unsettling

1299
01:09:20,160 --> 01:09:22,880
Speaker 1: brain poisoning AI crap are like the kids who don't

1300
01:09:22,920 --> 01:09:24,760
Speaker 1: have as much money, you know, or whose parents don't

1301
01:09:24,760 --> 01:09:26,960
Speaker 1: have as much money, whose school districts don't have as

1302
01:09:27,040 --> 01:09:31,080
Speaker 1: much money. Now A cursorysearch on Amazon suggests that a

1303
01:09:31,200 --> 01:09:33,600
Speaker 1: lot of people have followed Paul's advice because there are

1304
01:09:33,640 --> 01:09:37,040
Speaker 1: a shitload of nearly identical coloring books. So, first off, been,

1305
01:09:37,240 --> 01:09:40,400
Speaker 1: this is the cover of Paul's book. Here you can

1306
01:09:40,439 --> 01:09:43,519
Speaker 1: see the dinosaur coloring book. You know, pretty simple, and

1307
01:09:43,520 --> 01:09:46,000
Speaker 1: that he did pick for the front cover the image

1308
01:09:46,040 --> 01:09:48,719
Speaker 1: that's like least fucked up looking like that almost looks

1309
01:09:48,800 --> 01:09:52,719
Speaker 1: right right. But then I found as I started looking

1310
01:09:52,760 --> 01:09:56,920
Speaker 1: through Amazon, several near identical copies, all sold under different names,

1311
01:09:57,600 --> 01:09:59,720
Speaker 1: and you can tell they're all AI copies because like,

1312
01:09:59,760 --> 01:10:03,320
Speaker 1: so this first one here, uh, the arms are fucked up,

1313
01:10:03,439 --> 01:10:05,360
Speaker 1: like they're in the position kind of like that one

1314
01:10:05,360 --> 01:10:07,479
Speaker 1: on the on the left is almost like set up

1315
01:10:07,520 --> 01:10:10,200
Speaker 1: like a leg and they're both bent down so you

1316
01:10:10,200 --> 01:10:12,680
Speaker 1: don't actually see the clause. You can tell the perspectives

1317
01:10:12,680 --> 01:10:17,120
Speaker 1: fucked up though that's by Jared Mason or it's not,

1318
01:10:17,280 --> 01:10:19,960
Speaker 1: because like Paul and other people talk about how you

1319
01:10:19,960 --> 01:10:22,639
Speaker 1: you just create fake names to write these books under.

1320
01:10:22,760 --> 01:10:24,719
Speaker 1: These could all be Paul, they could all be people

1321
01:10:24,760 --> 01:10:28,200
Speaker 1: following Paul's advice. We don't know. Here's another book where

1322
01:10:28,240 --> 01:10:31,000
Speaker 1: like what the fuck dinosaur is that supposed to be

1323
01:10:31,479 --> 01:10:35,080
Speaker 1: that is that is like, so again, folks, you really

1324
01:10:35,280 --> 01:10:36,120
Speaker 1: owe it to yourself.

1325
01:10:37,640 --> 01:10:42,880
Speaker 3: Sorry, what it is? What are the legs situation?

1326
01:10:43,080 --> 01:10:46,439
Speaker 1: The tripod Like it's got like the body of a dog,

1327
01:10:46,560 --> 01:10:50,400
Speaker 1: but like three legs, a t rex head and an

1328
01:10:50,520 --> 01:10:53,160
Speaker 1: arm that's not an arm like it's a it's an

1329
01:10:53,280 --> 01:10:55,479
Speaker 1: arm that looks like this. It looks like this animal

1330
01:10:55,600 --> 01:10:58,519
Speaker 1: was like a Civil War veteran who was gonna say if.

1331
01:10:58,360 --> 01:11:00,880
Speaker 2: You date it, like this guy's been through some ship,

1332
01:11:01,080 --> 01:11:04,280
Speaker 2: you know what I mean, Like and he's still uh.

1333
01:11:07,280 --> 01:11:10,559
Speaker 1: Wow, and it's it's it shows how lazy these people

1334
01:11:10,600 --> 01:11:12,840
Speaker 1: are that like anyone seeing that, she'd be like, that's

1335
01:11:12,880 --> 01:11:14,880
Speaker 1: not a dinosaur. That doesn't look there at all?

1336
01:11:14,920 --> 01:11:16,759
Speaker 2: What is happening here? Yeah?

1337
01:11:17,000 --> 01:11:19,160
Speaker 1: Oh good, there's more. And then this this one, this

1338
01:11:19,240 --> 01:11:25,320
Speaker 1: is a look at how the claws are like, its

1339
01:11:25,520 --> 01:11:28,040
Speaker 1: fingers are like as long as it's head. It's like

1340
01:11:28,120 --> 01:11:35,160
Speaker 1: a fucking salad fingers the dinosaur. It's so fucking weird.

1341
01:11:35,360 --> 01:11:40,640
Speaker 2: I like the incredible, Yeah, I like the nihilation. I

1342
01:11:40,760 --> 01:11:45,679
Speaker 2: like the there's something like there there's something very about

1343
01:11:45,720 --> 01:11:48,719
Speaker 2: the way the eyes are rolled up. Yeah.

1344
01:11:49,000 --> 01:11:52,960
Speaker 1: I love it. So despite featuring easily the worst dinosaur

1345
01:11:53,040 --> 01:11:55,080
Speaker 1: drawing I've ever seen in my life. This coloring book

1346
01:11:55,120 --> 01:11:57,760
Speaker 1: appears to be selling reasonably well. At the time this

1347
01:11:57,880 --> 01:12:00,360
Speaker 1: article was written, it was number seventy five and the

1348
01:12:00,360 --> 01:12:04,920
Speaker 1: teen in young adult drawing category. That's potentially decent money.

1349
01:12:05,200 --> 01:12:07,880
Speaker 1: That's not low on Amazon now. That is like in

1350
01:12:07,920 --> 01:12:10,160
Speaker 1: the teen and young adult drawing category. It's not like

1351
01:12:10,200 --> 01:12:14,000
Speaker 1: a massive category, but like that's there are human coloring

1352
01:12:14,040 --> 01:12:16,720
Speaker 1: books that are selling worse than this, I will guarantee you,

1353
01:12:17,040 --> 01:12:21,599
Speaker 1: And that's potentially meaningful money for this person. I use

1354
01:12:21,640 --> 01:12:25,400
Speaker 1: the term person lightly for whoever is like shitting this stuff.

1355
01:12:25,439 --> 01:12:28,160
Speaker 1: Maybe it's all Paul, maybe it's all people copying him.

1356
01:12:28,160 --> 01:12:30,920
Speaker 1: But like this is already a problem, is what I'm

1357
01:12:30,920 --> 01:12:33,760
Speaker 1: getting at, Because it's like this isn't like the worst thing,

1358
01:12:34,080 --> 01:12:35,920
Speaker 1: you know, in a world where yeah, I don't know,

1359
01:12:36,000 --> 01:12:39,320
Speaker 1: like the Catholic Church exists, fucked up coloring books aren't

1360
01:12:39,320 --> 01:12:45,920
Speaker 1: the worst thing for little kids, but like this is Seriously,

1361
01:12:46,439 --> 01:12:49,719
Speaker 1: I don't think it's it's good Like kids pay attention

1362
01:12:49,840 --> 01:12:53,479
Speaker 1: to stuff like this, like show like the Sheer, for

1363
01:12:53,520 --> 01:12:55,720
Speaker 1: one thing. I think the laziness in this reads off

1364
01:12:55,720 --> 01:12:58,720
Speaker 1: to them. But like it's just it's wrong, Like you

1365
01:12:58,760 --> 01:13:04,000
Speaker 1: shouldn't be shotgunning stuff that's wrong to kids because you're

1366
01:13:04,000 --> 01:13:07,120
Speaker 1: too lazy to like do even the minimum work of

1367
01:13:07,640 --> 01:13:12,479
Speaker 1: regenerating the images until they're right. I find this on settling,

1368
01:13:12,600 --> 01:13:14,760
Speaker 1: and there's a lot more to find on settling because,

1369
01:13:14,800 --> 01:13:16,760
Speaker 1: like part of what I did while researching this was

1370
01:13:16,800 --> 01:13:20,479
Speaker 1: kind of a deep dive on literary education theory because

1371
01:13:20,479 --> 01:13:22,040
Speaker 1: I wanted to have an idea of how some of

1372
01:13:22,080 --> 01:13:25,559
Speaker 1: the stuff is going to affect children. But that's going

1373
01:13:25,600 --> 01:13:28,960
Speaker 1: to be all for part one with us today, Ben,

1374
01:13:29,400 --> 01:13:33,080
Speaker 1: because you know, time to take five. Time to take five,

1375
01:13:33,240 --> 01:13:35,240
Speaker 1: do a little bit of a breather, and then we'll

1376
01:13:35,240 --> 01:13:39,000
Speaker 1: come back on Thursday and I will finish this deeply

1377
01:13:39,080 --> 01:13:42,360
Speaker 1: fucked up story. Ben, you got anything to plug?

1378
01:13:43,800 --> 01:13:47,839
Speaker 2: Yes, please check out and subscribe to Cool Zone Media.

1379
01:13:47,960 --> 01:13:53,320
Speaker 2: Do your part in supporting accurate depictions of dinosaurs for children.

1380
01:13:53,840 --> 01:13:57,760
Speaker 2: You can also find me hanging with my rider dies

1381
01:13:57,800 --> 01:14:01,200
Speaker 2: Matt Frederick and Noel Brown on shows like Stuff They

1382
01:14:01,240 --> 01:14:06,000
Speaker 2: Don't Want You to Know and Ridiculous History. You can

1383
01:14:06,240 --> 01:14:12,400
Speaker 2: find me talking trash about mrs and French military rations

1384
01:14:12,479 --> 01:14:15,320
Speaker 2: on Twitter. Named it a burst of creativity at Ben

1385
01:14:15,400 --> 01:14:20,320
Speaker 2: Bolan hs w or at Instagram at Ben Bolan. That's

1386
01:14:20,360 --> 01:14:25,000
Speaker 2: that's the whole thing. Yeah, I think that's it, right, No, good.

1387
01:14:24,840 --> 01:14:29,040
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, excellent. Yeah. I also love a good MRI

1388
01:14:29,720 --> 01:14:32,439
Speaker 1: and a bad MRI. I've been making my way through

1389
01:14:32,439 --> 01:14:35,920
Speaker 1: these mrs that Mountain House made, and it's like chili mac,

1390
01:14:35,960 --> 01:14:39,840
Speaker 1: which is devastating for your stomach. Just anytime you try,

1391
01:14:41,200 --> 01:14:44,040
Speaker 1: it's a nightmare. It's a nightmare. There's some good ones

1392
01:14:44,080 --> 01:14:47,200
Speaker 1: that I got a nice bison stew that I think,

1393
01:14:47,360 --> 01:14:49,880
Speaker 1: uh oh yeah, one of the companies I have made. Yeah,

1394
01:14:49,880 --> 01:14:51,720
Speaker 1: there's some good ones out there. I had some when

1395
01:14:51,720 --> 01:14:53,360
Speaker 1: I was out hunting for a couple of days in

1396
01:14:53,400 --> 01:14:56,759
Speaker 1: the Cascades last year. I had this this freeze dried

1397
01:14:57,560 --> 01:15:00,960
Speaker 1: biscuits and gravy that actually fucked on reasonably hard.

1398
01:15:01,680 --> 01:15:04,479
Speaker 2: Did you uh, did you ever get done with all

1399
01:15:04,479 --> 01:15:08,519
Speaker 2: that mac and cheese? You said something? Oh no, I

1400
01:15:08,560 --> 01:15:09,360
Speaker 2: still have a ton of it.

1401
01:15:09,439 --> 01:15:11,360
Speaker 1: I have a couple of years worth of dried food

1402
01:15:11,400 --> 01:15:14,760
Speaker 1: at any given time, just in case I have to

1403
01:15:14,800 --> 01:15:18,320
Speaker 1: hole up in my house, you know, uh, firing wildly

1404
01:15:18,360 --> 01:15:21,680
Speaker 1: at trespassers. Uh in the road style situation.

1405
01:15:21,880 --> 01:15:24,639
Speaker 3: Oh okay, yeah, yp Cormac.

1406
01:15:25,720 --> 01:15:27,960
Speaker 4: We also would like to Plug the newest schools on

1407
01:15:28,040 --> 01:15:30,920
Speaker 4: media series Said Oligar, hosted by j K and Rahan,

1408
01:15:32,200 --> 01:15:36,000
Speaker 4: available on All the Things Robert, Do you want to

1409
01:15:36,400 --> 01:15:40,080
Speaker 4: give that link for where people can follow your substack

1410
01:15:40,120 --> 01:15:40,719
Speaker 4: one more time?

1411
01:15:41,200 --> 01:15:45,280
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, it's shatter Zone. So just go to shatter

1412
01:15:45,400 --> 01:15:49,200
Speaker 1: zone dot substack dot com. Uh and you will. You

1413
01:15:49,240 --> 01:15:51,960
Speaker 1: will find my thing. You don't have to you don't

1414
01:15:51,960 --> 01:15:54,439
Speaker 1: have to sign up or anything. It's free.

1415
01:15:54,920 --> 01:15:56,240
Speaker 2: You're good, okay.

1416
01:15:57,640 --> 01:15:59,479
Speaker 1: By shabam Zo.

1417
01:16:01,880 --> 01:16:04,599
Speaker 3: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.

1418
01:16:04,960 --> 01:16:08,200
Speaker 3: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia

1419
01:16:08,400 --> 01:16:11,639
Speaker 3: dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,

1420
01:16:11,680 --> 01:16:14,280
Speaker 3: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.