Speaker 1: Ah, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast that
Speaker 1: is uh, it's a podcast. You know what what what
Speaker 1: do you want? That's honesty and advertising can't argue with that.
Speaker 2: It is.
Speaker 1: It is a podcast. I'm Robert Evans, your host, and
Speaker 1: I didn't think of a funny introduction for this episode,
Speaker 1: So pretend I shouted a tonally or screamed out the
Speaker 1: name of a dead dictator, and let's welcome our guest
Speaker 1: for the episode, Ben Bowler.
Speaker 3: If you could be a dictator's name, that would be
Speaker 3: most appreciated.
Speaker 1: Yeah, one of the hard to pronounce ones.
Speaker 3: Yeah, go for it.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, uh wow, that's that's definitely uh oh. There
Speaker 2: are so many good wines though. Okay, Matt Mood.
Speaker 4: I'm.
Speaker 1: Jodd. I think you're right there. You go out there.
Speaker 2: This is why you're the host, Robert.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean that's an interesting one, right because
Speaker 1: he wasn't I don't know how you yeah characterize exactly
Speaker 1: what he was, but he's become a darling of Twitter
Speaker 1: since his time as the as the leader of Iran,
Speaker 1: which is always fun as the air quotes leader. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: wild stuff. I do love like the every now and
Speaker 1: then you're like, this guy who had a very different
Speaker 1: vibe you know when he first came to my awareness
Speaker 1: via media is now like a completely different person in
Speaker 1: a lot of people's eyes because he like went after
Speaker 1: Donald Trump on Twitter. Always funny, Ben, how do you
Speaker 1: feel about AI? Not the movie with Haley Joel Osmond?
Speaker 2: Oh well, oh okay, Well, all my notes are trash then,
Speaker 2: because I thought we were talking about this.
Speaker 1: Okay, I did say prepare for an episode on AI
Speaker 1: and then send you thirty seven pictures of Jigglo Joel.
Speaker 2: So yeah, and thank you, thank you. I'm framing those, Robert,
Speaker 2: I'm framing those. Yeah. Well, I got to give a
Speaker 2: shout out to a lot of folks ethicists working in
Speaker 2: the field who are asking about the nature of consciousness
Speaker 2: and why why the term AI is somewhat you know, problematic,
Speaker 2: like what makes an intelligence artificial?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 2: But when I hear AI, if I'm most people, what
Speaker 2: I'm thinking is, oh, I should have studied math. Numbers
Speaker 2: are scaring.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've been so, I've been kind of digging into
Speaker 1: this as a new beat for myself as a reporter.
Speaker 1: As we'll introduce today, Like there's some some some stuff
Speaker 1: I've kind of gotten sucked into here, and as I've
Speaker 1: kind of talked to more people who are on the
Speaker 1: technical side of things here, I'm gaining both a deeper
Speaker 1: appreciation for how complex this stuff is. You know, there's
Speaker 1: been a lot that's sort of You've got this mix
Speaker 1: of like incredibly dense academic papers and kind of the
Speaker 1: the commentary of people who are actually like working with
Speaker 1: the nuts and bolts of this stuff and not trying
Speaker 1: to pump up the price of you know, the IPO
Speaker 1: valuation of their company. Right, and then you've got kind
Speaker 1: of the hype cycle, which is very different.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 1: The people who are are kind of talking about, you know,
Speaker 1: how models are actually constructed, and you know what the
Speaker 1: ideal size for the models might be, and like how
Speaker 1: the capabilities kind of will change as they sort of
Speaker 1: ramp up or ramp down the scale, talk about like
Speaker 1: the potential problems like model collapse and whatever. Versus the
Speaker 1: people who are like an AI is going to take
Speaker 1: control of all the nukes. No, no, this isn't just
Speaker 1: me stealing the plot of Terminator too in order to
Speaker 1: like hype up the power of the product my company's making.
Speaker 1: I swear these it's real swears ease, So.
Speaker 2: That's how you know it's legit. That is, that is
Speaker 2: some actual nomenclature used in the halls of powers where.
Speaker 1: Yees yeah, and I think you can always trust when
Speaker 1: a bunch of people with a vested financial interest in
Speaker 1: making their AI products seem extra powerful. Recite the plot
Speaker 1: of Terminator too to you as if it's you know,
Speaker 1: a serious, serious business. So as we've kind of let
Speaker 1: into the internet is a wash right now and kind
Speaker 1: of cheap takes on what AI means for the future,
Speaker 1: you know, on one hand, you've got these kind of
Speaker 1: terminatory fears. Kind of the best example of this recently
Speaker 1: was WECE put out this very dumb article that was
Speaker 1: like a military AI killed its creator because it was
Speaker 1: trying to stop it from launching a missile, and everyone
Speaker 1: was like, oh my god, you know, we have to
Speaker 1: stop this, and then it turns out, well, actually what
Speaker 1: happened is like a bunch of human beings were sitting
Speaker 1: around a table like kind of plotting out things that
Speaker 1: might happen if they ever built one of these, and
Speaker 1: someone was like, well, what if you did this, and
Speaker 1: like that's all that happened like they were playing fancy
Speaker 1: D and D. It's nothing to be scared of.
Speaker 2: Yeah, man, it's like it's like a war game, like
Speaker 2: a simulation, right, it's a planning out a hypothetical. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and it is that that's that's headline chicanery.
Speaker 1: And it's not it's not even a simulation where like
Speaker 1: they didn't like even code you know, a fake AI
Speaker 1: to like test it as a simulation. We're literally just
Speaker 1: like bullshitting, you know, like nothing, nothing was built. Which
Speaker 1: is not to say like I'm not concerned about the
Speaker 1: possibility of like AI, you know, involvement in weapons targeting
Speaker 1: and stuff and that kind of thing. Like there's a
Speaker 1: lot to be concerned about there, but not this article.
Speaker 1: And then kind of on the other end, on the
Speaker 1: positive end of the hype stuff, you've got like this
Speaker 1: this growing chorus of people who are like certain that
Speaker 1: AI is going to save education and rescue students. Bill
Speaker 1: Gates is like a big kind of he's one of
Speaker 1: the big guys like kind of pushing this idea. I
Speaker 1: found a thing recently where he was like very excitedly
Speaker 1: talking about how open ai had taught a chat bot
Speaker 1: to pass an ap test and why this might mean
Speaker 1: something good for education. I'm kind of hesitant to say
Speaker 1: that I buy that, just because I haven't really seen
Speaker 1: any evidence that like an AI is actually good at
Speaker 1: teaching people stuff, which is not to say I haven't
Speaker 1: seen evidence that there are uses for it in education potentially,
Speaker 1: but like, I think people are getting a little bullish
Speaker 1: about this, and kind of somewhere in between those two
Speaker 1: hype peaks, you know, the robots are going to nukasol
Speaker 1: or the robots are going to replace teachers. Somewhere in
Speaker 1: between those two hype peaks is a story I ran
Speaker 1: across a couple weeks ago about an author who wrote
Speaker 1: ninety seven books in nine months using chat GPT.
Speaker 2: Oh no oh no oh no, I think, oh gosh,
Speaker 2: all right.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna guess a lot of people came across this
Speaker 1: story and it's one of those things it sort of
Speaker 1: dropped and a bunch of different like places like the
Speaker 1: I think the Post was one of them. Insider was
Speaker 1: one of these kind of like low quality publications or
Speaker 1: publications that have recently unk in quality significantly, who are
Speaker 1: chasing SEO shit right, And it's also kind of noteworthy
Speaker 1: to me that like this story hit right as the
Speaker 1: writer strike began, like the writers go on strike, and
Speaker 1: then there's this story about like, well, this guy wrote
Speaker 1: almost one hundred books in less than a year using
Speaker 1: chat GPT. You know, maybe we don't need all these writers.
Speaker 1: Now if you actually look at this, this author quote
Speaker 1: unquote and with the most quotation marks around that word,
Speaker 1: I can possibly add like like a whole script that's
Speaker 1: just quotes around the word author. There is a guy
Speaker 1: named Tim Buscher, and the reality if you actually look
Speaker 1: into what's he did here, he didn't write ninety seven
Speaker 1: model novels using chat GPT. He had an AI generate
Speaker 1: like ninety seven stories each about two to five thousand words.
Speaker 1: And if you don't know how novels work generally speaking,
Speaker 1: kind of like the minimum word count before something's considered
Speaker 1: a novel, it's about fifty thousand words. It's and that's
Speaker 1: a short novel, right, you're talking about like I don't know,
Speaker 1: Old Man in the Sea style shit or something like that.
Speaker 1: I don't actually how many words Old Man in the Seas,
Speaker 1: But like my silly book with robot, horny cyborgs and
Speaker 1: stuff was one hundred and twenty thousand words.
Speaker 2: So also, it's a really good book and people should
Speaker 2: read it.
Speaker 1: Thank you. That's very nice.
Speaker 2: It's not a compliment. I'm objectively saying it's a good book.
Speaker 1: Well, thank thank you. I agree that because like he's
Speaker 1: not having it write novels. What he did was he
Speaker 1: had it churn out short stories each with dozens and
Speaker 1: dozens of illustrations in them. There's something like fifty or
Speaker 1: sixty in each story, which is also too many for
Speaker 1: a short story. Waits, Robert, did he draw the pictures himself?
Speaker 1: He sure did not. And we'll talk so like if
Speaker 1: you look at these, like I went to his web page,
Speaker 1: and thankfully, one thing I will give Tim Buscher is
Speaker 1: it looks like he's put most of these on a
Speaker 1: personal web page rather than dumping them all on Amazon,
Speaker 1: which is what we're going to talk about in a second.
Speaker 1: But if you look at the shit he's got like
Speaker 1: a bunch of different Like one of the stories is
Speaker 1: Occupy AI, which is described as like a story about
Speaker 1: protesters fighting cops because AI takes the jobs away or
Speaker 1: something like that. There's not like characters given or any
Speaker 1: kind of like sense of a narrative arc. But the
Speaker 1: AI generated art for the of the cops, like beating
Speaker 1: up people makes them look like the bad guys in Spaceballs,
Speaker 1: And I do appreciate that. So that's that's that's good.
Speaker 1: Sophie can show you the Spaceball's illustration. Oh holy smokes, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they found shit. So I don't I don't have a
Speaker 1: lot of respect for Tim's story writing project, but I
Speaker 1: also don't think it's particularly harmful, right, Like, other than that,
Speaker 1: you know, this guy got a bunch of news attention.
Speaker 1: His books are presumably geared towards adults, or at least
Speaker 1: young adults, and I don't really think a lot of
Speaker 1: people are gonna get swept up in it. But there's something,
Speaker 1: there is something sinister in the world of people using
Speaker 1: AI to generate stories. And this is where we get
Speaker 1: into the meat of what we're actually going to be
Speaker 1: talking about this week, because I have found myself doing
Speaker 1: some journalism again. I don't do as much of that
Speaker 1: as I used to, but I kind of got I
Speaker 1: fell down a rabbit hole over the last two weeks
Speaker 1: and I have been investigating something that I found really
Speaker 1: fucked up and scary. And the short of it is,
Speaker 1: the robots are coming for your children. If you've got
Speaker 1: kids out there, there is a shady network of influencers
Speaker 1: and conmen who are trying to warp your kid's brain
Speaker 1: so that they can make a quick buck off of
Speaker 1: Amazon KDP, which is called which is kindle direct publishing.
Speaker 1: So that's what we're fucking talking about today because it's
Speaker 1: actually a serious problem that people should be aware about.
Speaker 1: And I haven't seen any real reporting on this. I
Speaker 1: was keyed into this story when I ran across a
Speaker 1: Reuter's article like two weeks ago about a boom in
Speaker 1: AI written ebooks on Amazon, and the piece zooms in
Speaker 1: on this wanna be author named Brett Schickler. Brett is
Speaker 1: a salesman from Rochester who heard that chat GPT could
Speaker 1: write stories and he decided like he'd always wanted to
Speaker 1: be a writer, but he just could never get anything
Speaker 1: down on the page. And he was like, well, maybe
Speaker 1: this will make it possible for me. He told Reuters,
Speaker 1: the idea of writing a book finally seemed possible. I thought,
Speaker 1: I can do this. Unfortunately, the book he put out.
Speaker 3: Is why is that so funny? I can do this?
Speaker 1: By not so sad when you learn what he wrote
Speaker 1: because it's his book is The Wise Little Squirrel, a
Speaker 1: tale of saving and investing. It's a guide to fight
Speaker 1: literacy through the eyes of Sammy the Squirrel. And I'll
Speaker 1: say this, everything we're about to talk to on this
Speaker 1: episode is much worse than The Wise Little Squirrel, because
Speaker 1: I will give him credit for one thing. He Schickler's like,
Speaker 1: Brett has a thing he wants to get across to people.
Speaker 2: I'm not.
Speaker 1: I don't think he's done it well. I don't think
Speaker 1: this is the right way to teach kids kids financial
Speaker 1: literacy is to have like a robot generate a story
Speaker 1: about a squirrel so they learn how to invest. But
Speaker 1: he actually seems to care about like transmitting information to kids,
Speaker 1: which is Wellson who does. Yeah, So I'll give him
Speaker 1: some credit for that. Also give him some credit for
Speaker 1: the fact that the cover of his book it doesn't
Speaker 1: look good, Like this doesn't look like a real book.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say, but there's nothing like inherently off putting
Speaker 1: or terrifying about the squirrel drawing on the cover.
Speaker 2: I don't I don't know, man, I don't know.
Speaker 1: Robert Sophie find unsettling.
Speaker 2: Well, there's the other there's the other animal there, which.
Speaker 1: To wait, where's the other in the trees?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, well, and you know, the perspective is pretty
Speaker 1: fucked on that chipmunk. Yeah, I don't buy it. I
Speaker 1: don't buy the perspective here.
Speaker 3: And where did you and where did they get that acorn?
Speaker 3: We don't know.
Speaker 1: The acorn's massive.
Speaker 3: The acorn is bigger than the bear.
Speaker 1: Well, well that's just because the bear's further away. But
Speaker 1: the acorn is at least the same size as the
Speaker 1: squirrel's Torso, yeah, which I think might be, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe the subtext here is that the acorn is
Speaker 1: inherited wealth and and the squirrel, oh you know, it's
Speaker 1: to yeah represent you know, whereas whereas the squirrel in
Speaker 1: the tree behind him kind of represents the working class.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, who has no acorn? Right, because the
Speaker 1: inherited wealth of our of our anyway, whatever, I don't know,
Speaker 1: why am I? Why am I? Why am I doing this?
Speaker 1: So you nailed it, nailed Brett's Brett's book, which is
Speaker 1: available paperback only. That's another thing I'll give him credit for.
Speaker 1: Because the stuff that's actually really grifty is all being
Speaker 1: done on Kindle. It's currently in about thirty thousand, number
Speaker 1: thirty thousand in literature and fiction for children. One thing
Speaker 1: that does show is that like that sounds really low.
Speaker 1: That's not terrible, right, Like, given the number of books
Speaker 1: that are on Amazon, it's not like a runaway success.
Speaker 1: I think that this is like probably because there was
Speaker 1: a bunch of news stories around this, right because it
Speaker 1: was it's kind of the first AI children's book to
Speaker 1: go viral. It's not again any good, but I don't
Speaker 1: see the harm. Like what we're about to be talking
Speaker 1: about is like a bunch of people who have done
Speaker 1: this in a much more harmful direction. So this story
Speaker 1: kind of got me looking into what other people were
Speaker 1: writing AI children's books. And part of why I thought
Speaker 1: to do this was late last year I watched a
Speaker 1: documentary on the Folding Ideas YouTube channel. You're not aware
Speaker 1: of that. Folding Ideas As a channel run by a
Speaker 1: researcher and a writer named Dan Olsen, who I admire
Speaker 1: quite a lot. He's the guy who did that line
Speaker 1: go up documentary on NFTs that helped cause the nf
Speaker 1: T crash. He's very good at what he does, and
Speaker 1: late last year he published an investigation into a group
Speaker 1: of Amazon con artists who like charge several thousand dollars
Speaker 1: so that they can teach people how to mass produce
Speaker 1: low quality books to have both read by voice actors
Speaker 1: for like audible books, and to sell on Kindle through KDP,
Speaker 1: which is again Kindle Direct Publishing. And it's one of
Speaker 1: those things where like they're promising, they have all these
Speaker 1: lurid stories about like you can make tens of thousands
Speaker 1: of dollars in a few weeks. This is they really
Speaker 1: brad They're called the Mickelson Twins, the particular folks he's investigating,
Speaker 1: and they brag a lot about like how little effort
Speaker 1: it takes to do this, you have to do very
Speaker 1: almost no work whatsoever. And it's one of those like
Speaker 1: they're basically just having people look through to see what's
Speaker 1: selling on Amazon, create topics and then hire some ghostwriter,
Speaker 1: pay him a couple hundred bucks to write a full
Speaker 1: book in two weeks, three weeks something like that, and
Speaker 1: then find a voice actor and put it up. And
Speaker 1: these book books like they're nonsense in a lot of cases,
Speaker 1: like he was. I think the book that Dan put
Speaker 1: together is kind of like a thought exercise was about
Speaker 1: using self hypnosis to deal with epilepsy or something. So
Speaker 1: a lot of really irresponsible topics, all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: But the topics, you know, what matters is not like
Speaker 1: what you're actually trying to get out. It matters that,
Speaker 1: like what you're you're having these ghostwriters write include keywords
Speaker 1: that correspond to popular searches on Amazon. Right, it's an
Speaker 1: SEO scam.
Speaker 2: I read about this. I read about this because because Robert.
Speaker 2: The immediate question is why are these guys now selling
Speaker 2: this trick, right, this grift that they have exhausted, right,
Speaker 2: Like why did they move to the next grift. It's
Speaker 2: very it's it's very interesting. You know, I wonder if
Speaker 2: their next thing is going to be self help books.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that, like there's a there were already
Speaker 1: some sort of in that topic that they're putting out.
Speaker 1: I think mostly what it is is that, like you
Speaker 1: can make money doing this. Your goal basically is to
Speaker 1: trick people looking for real books on similar subjects into
Speaker 1: buying your books because it's kind of hard to tell
Speaker 1: on Kendle, and they may you know, if you just
Speaker 1: are putting enough stuff out there, the sheer number of
Speaker 1: people searching means that you'll make you know, sales, and
Speaker 1: if you know, you don't. If it doesn't take that
Speaker 1: much work, you know, if you get a couple hundred sales,
Speaker 1: it can be worth it. This is not an easy path,
Speaker 1: like actually an easy path to making a lot of money,
Speaker 1: which is why the real business is in conning the
Speaker 1: people who think that they'll make money off of this
Speaker 1: and getting them to pay you several thousand dollars to
Speaker 1: teach them all this crap. Dan in his video calls
Speaker 1: these people coentrepreneurs, which is is a clever bit of wordplay,
Speaker 1: but I do think the term actually kind of misses
Speaker 1: something important because then, well, the con is Dan is
Speaker 1: talking about, the con that he is he is unraveling,
Speaker 1: is that like this is not actually a great business.
Speaker 1: It's hard for people to really make money. They are
Speaker 1: lying to folks about how profitable this is so that
Speaker 1: they can take their money, and that is that is true.
Speaker 1: That is a con. But there's an actual outside harm
Speaker 1: aside from this con because like, the people they're conning
Speaker 1: are not just passive rubs. They're trying to like unethically
Speaker 1: make a quick buck. So to some extent, I'm like,
Speaker 1: I'm not I don't have a huge problem with who
Speaker 1: they're conning necessarily, But what I do have a real
Speaker 1: issue with is that the byproduct of the cons they're
Speaker 1: running is that the largest bookstore on the planet gets
Speaker 1: filled with thousands and thousands and thousands of nonsense titles
Speaker 1: that aren't real books that can spread disinformation, that can
Speaker 1: just cause people to waste money, that can like, like,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of issue. It makes it harder to
Speaker 1: like find stuff that you're looking for that's of quality,
Speaker 1: you know, on various topics. I've had to deal with
Speaker 1: this a few times with bastards where I'm looking for
Speaker 1: books on niche subjects and I find something that seems
Speaker 1: to be about it, but it turns out it's like
Speaker 1: one of these like crap books. It's like someone's at
Speaker 1: best paraphrased to Wikipedia entry or something.
Speaker 2: Is it is it that prolific thought?
Speaker 1: Like what thousands and thousands of times really I I
Speaker 1: have I have actually reached out to Amazon for comment
Speaker 1: on like how many AI titles they have in their
Speaker 1: library and how they like the degree to which or
Speaker 1: whether or not they do anything to attempt to like
Speaker 1: figure out which titles or AI or not, like I have.
Speaker 1: I've asked them a couple of questions on that about
Speaker 1: like their plagiarism, filters and stuff. I haven't heard back yet,
Speaker 1: And if I do, I'll update this. I'll record it
Speaker 1: update for you.
Speaker 2: Well, surely they can just they can just create a
Speaker 2: large language model that will respond to your insightful questions
Speaker 2: in novel form.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that would at least be a response. So far,
Speaker 1: I haven't gotten anything from them because I think they're
Speaker 1: they're following the Elon Musk root of just ignoring any
Speaker 1: questions from media because there's there's a lot of money.
Speaker 1: They make money anytime people upload the shit in anytime
Speaker 1: it sells, so like they don't have a problem with
Speaker 1: con men putting fake books up on the site. And
Speaker 1: it's one of those things. Again. When when I watched
Speaker 1: this video by Dan, I was like, well, this is
Speaker 1: an interesting con. I think what's happening here is kind
Speaker 1: of unsettling. And then you know the late like the
Speaker 1: AI explosion happened right, and suddenly this con gets supercharged
Speaker 1: because the main barrier to entry and barrier to production
Speaker 1: and profitability and the old way of doing things is
Speaker 1: the ghost writing. You know, these people the original version
Speaker 1: of this con You're hiring a human being to ghost
Speaker 1: write a fake book for you, basically, right, And a
Speaker 1: human being can only write fifty thousand dish words so fast,
Speaker 1: even if all they're doing is like paraphrasing a bunch
Speaker 1: of like Wikipedia and news articles, right, Like, there's a
Speaker 1: degree there's a hard limitation on how many of these
Speaker 1: can get written. And it's going to cost money because people,
Speaker 1: even people who will do this very cheaply, won't do
Speaker 1: it for nothing, whereas chat, GPT and other large language
Speaker 1: models will write thousands of words for you for effectively nothing.
Speaker 1: So as soon as I kind of read this story
Speaker 1: about this this children's book and thought back to Dan's video,
Speaker 1: I was like, oh shit, I bet this is causing
Speaker 1: I bet this is causing like a massive surge in
Speaker 1: crap getting posted onto Amazon Kindle. And it's unfortunately like
Speaker 1: more unsettling than I had initially thought, because with this
Speaker 1: early scam, with like the you know, these these these
Speaker 1: ghostwriting scams, the books tend to be fote like aimed
Speaker 1: towards adults. Right, You're trying to get adults who might
Speaker 1: might be looking for a topic or something to buy
Speaker 1: your book but it's hard to get chat GPT to
Speaker 1: write a whole proper nonfiction book, Like getting it to
Speaker 1: write a fifty thousand dish word book is almost impossible
Speaker 1: unless you do a bunch of like really messy sort
Speaker 1: of like prompt tricks, which is why all of Tim
Speaker 1: Buscher's books were a couple of thousand words long. But
Speaker 1: children's books are a very different story because children's books,
Speaker 1: if you like have gone through books for little kids,
Speaker 1: for toddlers or whatever, they're heavy on illustrations. There's an
Speaker 1: illustration every page, and there's often just a couple of
Speaker 1: sentences or a paragraph of text per page, which is
Speaker 1: exactly the kind of length that chat GPT and other
Speaker 1: lms are perfectly capable of reproducing. Right, so the places
Speaker 1: you'll go exactly exactly, and the places you're going to
Speaker 1: go are like directly into the recursive loop of slop
Speaker 1: feeding through you know, an LM, which is what the
Speaker 1: investigation we're talking about is this week, because as soon
Speaker 1: as I start type, I started typing in like how
Speaker 1: to write AI children's books, and shit, my YouTube search
Speaker 1: revealed video after video with titles like easy AI money,
Speaker 1: make one hundred K writing children's books with chat GPT
Speaker 1: and mid journey and easy passive income with chat GPT
Speaker 1: in mid Journey creating children's books, I watched way too
Speaker 1: many of these fucking videos, all of which lay out
Speaker 1: the same basic strategy. The first step is to pick
Speaker 1: a prompt an actual author might be decide. For example,
Speaker 1: I want to teach children about the importance of conservation
Speaker 1: with a cautionary tale about the thoughtless capitalization of natural resources. Right,
Speaker 1: you know, that's the Lora Axe, or one of my
Speaker 1: favorite books as a kid. You know, I want to
Speaker 1: write a book about a bat raised by birds that
Speaker 1: kind of shows kids that bats are beautiful and complex
Speaker 1: creatures and not just spooky set dressings for vampire stories.
Speaker 1: That's Stella Luna.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Those are, you know, examples of things human beings might
Speaker 1: try to transmit to children through, like actual human created
Speaker 1: children's books. But chatbots and grindset influencers are both incapable
Speaker 1: of feeling things or of wanting to transmit their feelings
Speaker 1: to others. Right, Like, You've got people who are effectively
Speaker 1: soulless using a robot that is effectively soulless in order
Speaker 1: to try and transmit messages to children, and that gets
Speaker 1: dark pretty quickly, Ben. But you know what's not dark?
Speaker 2: It is it goods and services?
Speaker 1: Yeah, the products and services that support this podcast. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you're aware of this been none of
Speaker 1: them are, you know? We we we have one. We
Speaker 1: take one promise from our our advertisers. Don't be evil
Speaker 1: dot dot dot unless it makes a lot of money.
Speaker 4: Your ads unless you have Cooler Zone Media are ad
Speaker 4: free subscription channel available on Apple.
Speaker 1: Podcasts, which is the most ethical way to consume this,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, it is true that every time
Speaker 1: you get a Cooler Zone Media subscription raytheon fires a
Speaker 1: Maffick missile at a at a school bus in a
Speaker 1: foreign country. But we are we are working to fix that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is it's not an intent.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a glitch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I heard. I heard that every time someone subscribes
Speaker 2: to U two cool Zone Media, they get a they
Speaker 2: get a little coupon and if we get another coupons,
Speaker 2: we can we can finally subtract a day from Henry
Speaker 2: Kissinger's life. I don't know which day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2: If it's a last letter, it's.
Speaker 1: Likely one of the days he ordered bombings in Cambodi.
Speaker 2: You don't think it done us. Yeah, we gotta subscribe.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so get enough subscriptions and together we can kill
Speaker 1: Henry Kissinger. Ah, we're back. So the process bin of
Speaker 1: picking a topic for an AI kids book is mechanical
Speaker 1: and bleak. It starts with a trip to the Amazon
Speaker 1: sales rankings. People use extensions like book Bolt, which show
Speaker 1: which topics are selling well, and it's it's kind of
Speaker 1: a mix of the videos that I found pointed out
Speaker 1: that like, you want stuff that's reasonably high up on
Speaker 1: the lists and has a good number of reviews, but
Speaker 1: you also don't want it to have too many reviews.
Speaker 1: The most successful AI kids books will only sell like
Speaker 1: does or maybe one hundred or so copies, and so
Speaker 1: they kind of like a lot of the people making
Speaker 1: these videos will disguise that by showing you like sales
Speaker 1: calculation apps where they plug in books by actual human
Speaker 1: beings to be like, you can make thirty two thousand
Speaker 1: dollars a month, you know, just like this guy who
Speaker 1: wrote this you know, storybook or whatever that's a bestseller did,
Speaker 1: which you're not gonna like actually do if you're really
Speaker 1: doing this for a business. But one of the creators
Speaker 1: that I watched kind of put together the One of
Speaker 1: these guys is called the Zinny Studio. They advocate copying
Speaker 1: the premises of real kids books that have several hundred
Speaker 1: reviews but less than a thousandth They've like worked this
Speaker 1: out to a science where like, if there's more than
Speaker 1: a thousand reviews, you're gonna get lost in the mix. Right,
Speaker 1: It's it's the stories are too big, So like whatever
Speaker 1: you put out isn't gonna break through. But if they've
Speaker 1: got a couple one hundred reviews, that's enough that like
Speaker 1: you know, there's a lot of interest. But also you
Speaker 1: have a good chance that while your book's new, if
Speaker 1: you can get a couple of early sales, you can
Speaker 1: you can juke it up the spots. There's also a
Speaker 1: strategy for price points. They note that like Amazon pays
Speaker 1: seventy percent in royalties if your book's two ninety nine,
Speaker 1: nine ninety nine, but if it's cheaper than that, they
Speaker 1: only pay out like half as much.
Speaker 2: We are in the wrong business. Yeah, we're in the
Speaker 2: wrong business. I cannot wait to read because this is
Speaker 2: this is like a dark side of cyborg philosophy, right, yeah, right,
Speaker 2: so like, uh, Robert Sophie, let's get on the seo.
Speaker 2: Let's find uh, let's find a topic, and let's have
Speaker 2: our evil Pandora jin kind of thing. Uh right, rite
Speaker 2: us a little old man in the sea and just
Speaker 2: mad lib whatever whatever the narrative is, right, I.
Speaker 1: Mean, I think the real answer Ben, because you and
Speaker 1: I both have hundreds of hours of our podcast. You know,
Speaker 1: there's ridiculous history and Behind the Bastards and everything else
Speaker 1: we've been on recorded. We feed all that into an
Speaker 1: AI and then just like, look at what's trending on Twitter,
Speaker 1: and then we have an AI generate like six hours
Speaker 1: of you and me talking about how masks don't work
Speaker 1: or something like that. Just like crap that stuff onto
Speaker 1: the internet. Whatever Joe Rogan talks about that week, We'll
Speaker 1: just generate an AI conversation between us about it, you know,
Speaker 1: toss in like fifteen percent Elon Musk, and then we retire.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. What I also love about this first off
Speaker 2: is the sincerity, and second off is the idea that
Speaker 2: nothing could go wrong at all.
Speaker 1: No, it won't, Like I don't know, I feel like,
Speaker 1: as long as you know, we need one human being
Speaker 1: in there to keep a handle on things, so it
Speaker 1: can just be like an AI version of you and
Speaker 1: an AI version of me, and then human Sophie sitting
Speaker 1: there and like trying to trying to control the robot conversation.
Speaker 1: We start giving out like the ingredients for job.
Speaker 2: So uh yeah, you know, uh Sophie, it sounds like
Speaker 2: you're cool with that, right, Yeah?
Speaker 3: No, I could never replace Robert with the robot.
Speaker 1: Yeah you could. I mean it would be a rot.
Speaker 1: But you know, I got that like that AI Seinfeld
Speaker 1: where it's just like a never ending mediocre Seinfeld episode.
Speaker 1: We could, we could. We could slip Sophie in that too,
Speaker 1: make you make you moderate AI brainless Seinfeld.
Speaker 2: So well, because you know, we're keeping things interesting, right.
Speaker 2: The problem is that Behind the Bastards is an important,
Speaker 2: uh and profound at times show. I'm kidding, yeah, okay, okay,
Speaker 2: all right. The problem is that Behind the Bastards is
Speaker 2: a Horton's show, so it might be too high on
Speaker 2: our SEO. We need to get some kind of spinoff
Speaker 2: thing that appears to be irrelevant but works on a
Speaker 2: search term that is that is kicking it for Jeff Bezos, right,
Speaker 2: and then and then we just crap out hours of that.
Speaker 2: Obviously this is behind the scenes, right, this is not
Speaker 2: going out live, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I think we call it the Passive Income Diet
Speaker 1: Hack Cast with Robert Evans and Ben Bolin. That's that.
Speaker 1: That's our that's our path to sixty seven million dollars.
Speaker 2: I love I love how it's so so brief and
Speaker 2: so snappy. You know, there's a lot of immediacy. Take
Speaker 2: that himingway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, stick pat yea exactly for sale o Zimbic never
Speaker 1: a drop shipped. I don't know like that that's most
Speaker 1: of what you need in there.
Speaker 2: We got them freestylely do I like it?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, it's good. So yeah, this is kind of
Speaker 1: the process of like making these books start. You use
Speaker 1: like these these different extenses to kind of see what's selling,
Speaker 1: figure out a premise for yourself. And some creators will
Speaker 1: take this research and they'll like try to make an
Speaker 1: original premise for a children's book to feed into the AI.
Speaker 1: But most of them suggest just collecting like they're not
Speaker 1: even doing that for the most part. Most of these
Speaker 1: people suggest collecting keywords by like whatever's popular, and then
Speaker 1: plugging those keywords into chat GPT and asking it to
Speaker 1: generate a story premiss, which they then feed back to
Speaker 1: it to have it generate a story, thus avoiding the
Speaker 1: risk that human creativity might happen at any point in
Speaker 1: this process.
Speaker 2: The mess see prompts you were talking about the it's
Speaker 2: sort of our cane, right. Writing prompt is a bit
Speaker 2: like casting a spell.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, casting a spell or a math equation. We'll
Speaker 1: talk about that in a little bit. But I want
Speaker 1: to play you a clip from this guide by the
Speaker 1: Zeni Studio, which had about two hundred and sixty eight
Speaker 1: k views when I watched it, kind of cautioning, attempting
Speaker 1: to make it seem a little bit less soulless than
Speaker 1: the process actually is. Sophie, you can play that.
Speaker 6: Now, do you research to find books to copy your
Speaker 6: Do you research to understand what is working? It's important
Speaker 6: to make your own original pieces, original story books, so
Speaker 6: you could stand out from your competition. Okay, now, so
Speaker 6: you could see that.
Speaker 1: She says that, right that it's you're not doing this
Speaker 1: to like copy people. You know, you're trying to find
Speaker 1: ideas for original work. Here's the actual prompt that she
Speaker 1: uses to generate her children's book, Write me a Children's Story.
Speaker 1: About a girl going on an adventure to find a
Speaker 1: missing treasure. Lesson you achieve what you put your mind on?
Speaker 1: Make it six pages, entitle each page, make his mind
Speaker 1: blowing and intriguing. I'm trying to have to go too
Speaker 1: hard on the misspellings, but it does show you how
Speaker 1: lazy you can be with these Like that's not a
Speaker 1: story idea, like going on an adventure? What kind of adventure?
Speaker 1: Finding a mission? What kind of treasure? How does she
Speaker 1: like the lesson you achieve what you put your mind on?
Speaker 1: Like that, that's like that's a producer. That's a producer
Speaker 1: walking in and saying, uh, you know, do a thing
Speaker 1: with the sort of vibe and and I love that.
Speaker 1: I love that shamal On at the end, Robert make
Speaker 1: it mind blowing, yeah, mind blowing yeah. And it's it's
Speaker 1: very funny because, like it is, all of these AI
Speaker 1: people are the same as like the worst folks in Hollywood, right,
Speaker 1: you know, there's good producers and bad producers, and nothing
Speaker 1: gets made without the producers who do know what they're doing.
Speaker 1: But there's a lot of folks who are like a
Speaker 1: lot of corporate folks, you know. I'm thinking about like
Speaker 1: David Zoslov and shit here who are like, Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: the idea. Why do we need writers? I already had
Speaker 1: the idea, you know, write me, write me a story
Speaker 1: about about a guy who's angry.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Max, Yeah, you guys heard about sharks? What what like?
Speaker 2: So I saw a thing on Instagram about torne So
Speaker 2: what if we what if we just do that?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, give me a Tornado thing with Bill Paxton.
Speaker 1: You know that's the that's the hard work. I already
Speaker 1: did it. You know, somebody can crap out the script anytime.
Speaker 3: D just call me Ishmael.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go. So I want to actually like
Speaker 1: read you the story that or at least a chunk
Speaker 1: of the story that gets generated by this this this
Speaker 1: prompt because I love it again. People are flipping out
Speaker 1: so much about like the quality of writing that these
Speaker 1: things are capable of, and like, I think what you're
Speaker 1: all going to learn is that like, this isn't writing
Speaker 1: what it puts out. So Page one, The Missing Treasure.
Speaker 1: Once upon a time there was a brave and curious
Speaker 1: girl named Sarah. She lived in a small village at
Speaker 1: the foot of a big mountain. One day, she heard
Speaker 1: about a missing treasure that was hidden in the mountain
Speaker 1: a long time ago. Sarah was very intrigued and decided
Speaker 1: to go on an adventure to find the missing treasure.
Speaker 1: So you see that, you say, like, first, I'm taking
Speaker 1: a break here, like is she The prompt said like
Speaker 1: make it intriguing, And what the robot did was like, well,
Speaker 1: I'll just say that Sarah is intrigued. That means that
Speaker 1: it's an intriguing story. Now, because I've used that word, we.
Speaker 2: Also see we also see repetition of phrases, right, Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's very clear that it's like a mechanical turk,
Speaker 1: you know. Page two, The journey begins. Sarah packed her
Speaker 1: backpack with food, water, and a map and set out
Speaker 1: on her journey. She hiked up the mountain and along
Speaker 1: the way she met many animals who offered to help her,
Speaker 1: but Sarah declined their help, saying I want to do
Speaker 1: this on my own. Why are their animals offering her
Speaker 1: to help? Like what what is it that she wants
Speaker 1: to do on her own? Like why is this important
Speaker 1: to her?
Speaker 2: Intriguing?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm intrigued by how incomplete this story is. Page three,
Speaker 1: The Cave of Trials. After several days of hiking, Sarah
Speaker 1: finally reached the top of the mountain. There, she found
Speaker 1: a cave that led deep into the mountain. She entered
Speaker 1: the cave and was met with many trials, including steve cliffs,
Speaker 1: deep chasms, and dark tunnels. But Sarah didn't give up.
Speaker 1: She kept moving forward, always remembering the lesson she learned
Speaker 1: from her parents, you can achieve what you put your
Speaker 1: mind to. Oh, now, her parents are characters in this,
Speaker 1: her parents, well not even really characters, Like she's not
Speaker 1: a it's you know, you can see what it's doing here, right,
Speaker 1: it's a simulacrum of a plot, right where you've got like, well,
Speaker 1: I know that plots have to have a conflict, you know,
Speaker 1: and characters in a story are supposed to have trial.
Speaker 1: So I will just say she went through trials, she
Speaker 1: didn't give up because her parents said, you can achieve
Speaker 1: what you put your mind to. Like, and that's what
Speaker 1: the story views as like transmitting a lesson to kids, right,
Speaker 1: is just like saying the lesson in there, which like,
Speaker 1: that's not if you think about children's books, like good
Speaker 1: children's books, the books that like you can still remember
Speaker 1: as a kid, that's not how they get messages across, right,
Speaker 1: Like it's deeper than that. Kids are actually not just
Speaker 1: capable of understanding like much more complicated messages than like
Speaker 1: you can achieve what you put your mind to. They
Speaker 1: they crave that, which is why, I mean part of
Speaker 1: why shit like doctor Seuss's books, you know, still sell
Speaker 1: a century or whatever after he fucked close to his
Speaker 1: century after he fucking wrote him.
Speaker 2: And he's kind of a piece of good books. Good books.
Speaker 1: What author isn't It's why like the Hobbits, you know,
Speaker 1: successful and shit like you don't just have Bilbo being
Speaker 1: like I learned that you can always trust in the
Speaker 1: power of friendship. No, you you show you know the
Speaker 1: character like evolving and changing and entering conflicts and and
Speaker 1: failing and then learning lessons and then succeeding. Like this
Speaker 1: is not super complex stuff. You're not like writing fucking
Speaker 1: ulysses just because you put this in here. But the
Speaker 1: chat bot like is incapable of kind of understanding this
Speaker 1: because it's it's it's a calculation. It's an algorithm, right,
Speaker 1: it's an it is not it can't want to tell
Speaker 1: a story, and like a critical part of telling a
Speaker 1: story is the intent you know, and and you know
Speaker 1: kind of spoiler. That's what's most unsettling about all of
Speaker 1: this to me and what we're kind of building too.
Speaker 1: But you can see, you know, kind of how how
Speaker 1: these how this story you know, technically meets the requirements
Speaker 1: that the Zenny Studio or whoever like set out for it,
Speaker 1: and none of these grindset people actually care about anything
Speaker 1: beyond the fact that like it might be able to
Speaker 1: pass muster on kindle, so like it's good enough, right,
Speaker 1: we'll go for it. We'll take this script and turn
Speaker 1: it into a book for little kids.
Speaker 2: Right right, right, But what first question, like, what do
Speaker 2: you think Joseph Campbell would think of this? Because it's
Speaker 2: clearly like again, it's a structural aggregate approach. It's a
Speaker 2: very lazy mad lib that you know, there's the uncanny
Speaker 2: valley to it. I agree with you there, it does
Speaker 2: feel that it's missing a soul. Right, we don't even
Speaker 2: know the animals, we don't even know the parents.
Speaker 1: Like wait, I think he'd probably be kind of interested
Speaker 1: in the fact that sort of the again, it's kind
Speaker 1: of the simulacrum of a story. It's not an actual story.
Speaker 1: It understands some aspects of the shape of a story,
Speaker 1: and it attempts to reproduce that, but without any kind
Speaker 1: of understanding of what the original is. So I suspect
Speaker 1: there's a degree to which he would find it intellectually fascinating.
Speaker 1: I think he would probably be buying a gun right now,
Speaker 1: towards the open AI offhsis he would be buying.
Speaker 2: He would be buying a gun, and he would like
Speaker 2: DM checkov and say, what's happening?
Speaker 1: But yeah, let's get the fuck down there. So I
Speaker 1: found an even lazier example of synthetic storytelling in a
Speaker 1: video by a guy named Christian Hidorn, which has about
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty thousand views. His YouTube channel is
Speaker 1: called tokenized AI and he had a mid He had
Speaker 1: mid Journey create what he calls a comic book. And boy,
Speaker 1: I am using that those words as fucking it's not
Speaker 1: a comic book, right, He's lying about what this is.
Speaker 1: It's a book with illustrations and barely any text, but
Speaker 1: it's not like anyway, it's not actually a comic book.
Speaker 1: And he plugs in the plot for this. He gets
Speaker 1: chat GPT to create a plot for him by kind
Speaker 1: of plugging in an equation for story ideas that reads
Speaker 1: like the brain of a Netflix executive. And I want
Speaker 1: to read you this equation because I find it really interesting,
Speaker 1: and Sophi'll show you it because it is it's physically
Speaker 1: laid out like a math equation.
Speaker 2: Almost.
Speaker 1: Story. Please come up with a short story based on
Speaker 1: in brackets theme that uses elements that are typical for
Speaker 1: in brackets genre stories. Provide me with a three to
Speaker 1: four sentence summary and store it in plot, and again,
Speaker 1: like you kind of plug in a theme. I want
Speaker 1: the theme to be an adventure, you know, or I
Speaker 1: want the theme to be like, you know, yeah, an
Speaker 1: adventure story in you know, the horror genre or whatever,
Speaker 1: something like that, and provide me with a yeah. So
Speaker 1: that's that's kind of the way the equate looks. And
Speaker 1: Christian decides he wants a comic book that has kind
Speaker 1: of like Indiana Jones uncharted style art vibes about like
Speaker 1: a man and a woman who meet up by coincidence
Speaker 1: and go on and adventure in like a dungeon to
Speaker 1: get a treasure, right, And it's one of those things
Speaker 1: I say. The artwork has the vibes of like Indiana
Speaker 1: Jones or Uncharted because the vibes are purely a product
Speaker 1: of the actual art itself. There's no actual plot in
Speaker 1: the story that chat GPT generates for him, and he
Speaker 1: has he has, he has the robot break down a
Speaker 1: story page to page, but it's it's not a story.
Speaker 1: Seen one. In a bustling Southeast Asian market, Maya and
Speaker 1: Leo accidentally bump into each other while following the same
Speaker 1: ancient map dialogue. Maya, hey, watch where you're going, Leo,
Speaker 1: that's my line?
Speaker 2: Whoa, whoa?
Speaker 1: That doesn't that's not like that, that's nonsense, Like it's
Speaker 1: one of those like why is that his line? He's
Speaker 1: never we've never met these characters before. We haven't heard
Speaker 1: him say that to anyone else, Like would why would
Speaker 1: that be the response that he would make to her?
Speaker 1: Like you know again, and this is because he's like,
Speaker 1: that's the setup, that's the background for these characters. You
Speaker 1: get scene two and again this is like the second
Speaker 1: page of the story. Maya and Leo reluctantly agree to
Speaker 1: work together deciphering the maps cryptic riddles dialogue. Maya, fine,
Speaker 1: but we split the treasure. Leo deal. Scene three, Journeying
Speaker 1: through against Jennal the duo encounters a treacherous river crossing test,
Speaker 1: testing their teamwork skills. Dialogue Maya will need to build
Speaker 1: a raft, Leo on it?
Speaker 5: Oh four?
Speaker 2: Good?
Speaker 1: Yeah, classic Leo. Yeah, classic Leo. That's the Leo I know,
Speaker 1: always raft building. Scene four, the pair solves a puzzle
Speaker 1: in a hidden temple, revealing the entrance to the treasure chamber.
Speaker 1: Dialogue Maya, we did it, Leo, Leo. Together, We're unstoppable.
Speaker 1: Scene five. Inside the chamber, Maya and Leo find the treasure,
Speaker 1: but also face it choice greed or friendship dialogue Maya,
Speaker 1: we could just take it all, Leo put at what cost?
Speaker 1: And this is in the video the videos, like I
Speaker 1: want him to have to like choose between greed and friendship,
Speaker 1: which like they like that. They don't act like it's
Speaker 1: just an artificial choice. There's no like, you know again,
Speaker 1: if you're doing like even a slightly more effortful version
Speaker 1: of this, do an Indiana Jones thing. You know, they
Speaker 1: pulled the treasure, but the room starts to collapse, and
Speaker 1: like Maya's you know, able to get across a chasm
Speaker 1: with the bag of treasure, but she, you know, she
Speaker 1: can't help, Like Leo falls and he's like hanging by
Speaker 1: a thread and she has to either take the treasure
Speaker 1: and run or drop the treasure and save him, you know,
Speaker 1: like something like that's that's that's that's not like again,
Speaker 1: it's not like high art. But that's a conflict, right,
Speaker 1: there's lab.
Speaker 2: There. Last Crusae was great.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you're gonna steal from Indiana Jones, do it well, right,
Speaker 1: like again, there's a whole look fucking uncharted, and shit
Speaker 1: started as doing that like that worked out fine for everybody, Like,
Speaker 1: but but it has to be a story. You know,
Speaker 1: we will forgive a lot of derivative shit. The thing
Speaker 1: about Star Wars, right, Star Wars, if you actually look
Speaker 1: at the stuff that Lucas was pulling from, is actually
Speaker 1: pretty derivative of a lot of different things that inspired
Speaker 1: him as a kid, of a lot of different like
Speaker 1: movies and shows and comic books that he had read
Speaker 1: as a young man. And it's fine because it's it's
Speaker 1: a it's a fucking rollicking good story, you know, but like,
Speaker 1: this is not a story. This is like the AI
Speaker 1: is checking every box, but it doesn't understand what the
Speaker 1: boxes are, so there's.
Speaker 2: Not that's it that's the quote.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's no none of the characters want anything. Really,
Speaker 1: there's no reason for them to be doing this. We
Speaker 1: know nothing about their lives. They're not like people, which again,
Speaker 1: this is like a little kid's story book. So I
Speaker 1: think the the idea that these people have is that like, well,
Speaker 1: kids don't notice that because they're dumb, and it's like,
Speaker 1: yes they do. Like that is that's that's that's why
Speaker 1: like fucking Pixar movies or the were the biggest thing
Speaker 1: for kids for a while. Those are not like nonsense stories.
Speaker 1: Those those all feet like The fucking Incredibles or whatever
Speaker 1: or this is not Pixar, but like one of the
Speaker 1: most beloved children's movies of all time I saw when
Speaker 1: I was like a little bitty kid, the fucking Iron
Speaker 1: Giant and Shit or The Brave Little Toaster. You know,
Speaker 1: those are stories with like sorrow and character and motivation
Speaker 1: and like things are set up and paid off, none
Speaker 1: of which the AI appears to be capable of doing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know what this reminds me of Robert Are
Speaker 2: you familiar with the book Plato? No? Okay, so back
Speaker 2: in the days of the Humans, Can I say that
Speaker 2: that way? No?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, back before the robots destroyed us all sure.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: In the days, in the days of the humans, there
Speaker 2: was a guy named William Wallace Cook who wrote a
Speaker 2: book called Plato with two t's, and he was he was,
Speaker 2: it's like an old school hack pulp novelist paid by
Speaker 2: the word, et cetera, or paid by the letter. I
Speaker 2: don't know how the math works out. He tried to
Speaker 2: structurally calculate to quantify the amount of possible stories, and
Speaker 2: he said, there are exactly one four hundred and sixty
Speaker 2: two possible plots, and right right, you like the specificity, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 2: Nineteen twenty eight he publishes his great epiphany in a
Speaker 2: book called Plato, The Master Book of All Plots, and
Speaker 2: I am frankly baffled that the the new you know,
Speaker 2: the new algorithmic overlords are forgetting their history. Let's do it.
Speaker 2: Let's you know what, Let's fight the tires, light the fires,
Speaker 2: kick the tires.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I just want to generate four teen hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty two novels then, and then we're done with books.
Speaker 1: You know, people said that when James Joyce put out Ulysses,
Speaker 1: this is the end of literature. But we can actually
Speaker 1: make it so you know, AI can and we can
Speaker 1: have Maya and Leo star in all of them. You
Speaker 1: know they'll, they'll, they can do it. I want to
Speaker 1: play you a clip from this fucking video making this
Speaker 1: dog shit not a comic book. So Sophie's going to
Speaker 1: do that.
Speaker 7: Now need a third image though, because we need to
Speaker 7: convey the fact that they've bumped into each other. In
Speaker 7: this prompt, you'll notice that I start with a style,
Speaker 7: but then I immediately set the scene first, only then
Speaker 7: I add the characters and finally end with the activities.
Speaker 7: As I said, you will need to experiment with what
Speaker 7: works best for you. I've also changed the aspect ratio
Speaker 7: because I'm creating a wider image panel. Okay, so this
Speaker 7: completes our first scene. Whether you use just.
Speaker 1: One possible, you see what he's going into all this like,
Speaker 1: we're trying to set the scene with these two characters
Speaker 1: bump into each other, and you have to be very
Speaker 1: you want to structure it this way is that the
Speaker 1: AI knows and it generates you an actual, proper, you know,
Speaker 1: image of this action happening. And like the picture we
Speaker 1: get is this very vague, generic looking bizarre type background,
Speaker 1: and then our two characters both staring directly at the
Speaker 1: viewer on frame. They have not bumped into each other.
Speaker 1: They don't, they aren't interacting, they don't seem aware of
Speaker 1: each other. It is not an illustration of what he
Speaker 1: asked it to write, but it's good enough.
Speaker 2: Like fuck it, you know, like.
Speaker 1: It's it's unchartedy. You know, it's for kids. Uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's pretty good. So I want to We're
Speaker 1: gonna get more into this, but you know, you know,
Speaker 1: what also reminds me a lot of the uncharted video
Speaker 1: games is the uncharted deals that our sponsors are thrown down.
Speaker 1: We're back. So looking at a bunch of these stories
Speaker 1: in a row kind of pulls the curtain. Aside on
Speaker 1: AI storytelling, a lot of the dialogue it generates is
Speaker 1: pretty nonsensical, and yeah, I can. I keep going back
Speaker 1: to that, like bit in scene one where she's like, hey,
Speaker 1: you bumped into me and he's like, that's my line. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it makes no sense and my kind of my only
Speaker 1: The only thing I think is that at some point
Speaker 1: an actual human wrote a story or probably a few
Speaker 1: people a number of people did where a character used
Speaker 1: that line as a retort, right, uh, and chat Gypts
Speaker 1: calculating algorithm or whatever, was like, this is an appropriate response.
Speaker 1: Plug it in even though it makes no sense, because
Speaker 1: that's kind of the way these things work.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Also, also, they both have one ancient map and
Speaker 2: you're not tell you where did they get it? Yeah? Right?
Speaker 2: Is it? Is it the same map?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 2: Like like the do they have copies of this?
Speaker 1: Who made it? What is the ruins there? And again
Speaker 1: you know Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade sets this
Speaker 1: up very elegant quickly by having River Phoenix go on
Speaker 1: a boy scout adventure and then come home having nearly
Speaker 1: been murdered and find out that his dad doesn't give
Speaker 1: a shit because he's too busy like working out you know,
Speaker 1: his notebook that has all the clues for the movie
Speaker 1: that we're about to watch. Perfect elegant, actual storytelling, good
Speaker 1: shit man movie rules.
Speaker 2: So wait, So the question that a lot of us
Speaker 2: listening today are going to have is it feels like
Speaker 2: we're talking a little bit about something profound, which is
Speaker 2: you mentioned Ulysses earlier. Ulysses triggered such an awesome conversation
Speaker 2: in US courts, right, over the nature of obscenity. Right,
Speaker 2: I don't know what it is, but I know it
Speaker 2: when I see it, right, So what like this does
Speaker 2: feel like there's something we don't know what it is,
Speaker 2: but we know when it's missing to a human story.
Speaker 1: I think what's missing? I keep bringing up the term simulacrum,
Speaker 1: and like, the simulacrum is a great example of like
Speaker 1: the kind of classic example is you, like, open up
Speaker 1: your a word app type thing up at somewhere probably
Speaker 1: in the top left hand corner, that's where it is online.
Speaker 1: You will see the image that means you click to
Speaker 1: save your document, right, And you and I and Sophie
Speaker 1: are all old enough that we know that that image
Speaker 1: is a floppy disc, right, Like that's the image, but
Speaker 1: like those don't exist anymore. People don't use floppies anymore.
Speaker 1: Huge numbers of the people who click on that every
Speaker 1: day to save their documents never lived in a world
Speaker 1: where like they touched a floppy disc. So the original
Speaker 1: thing like is no longer around, right, Like it's a simulacrum,
Speaker 1: you know, and like the kind of whatever kind of
Speaker 1: original meaning that it had has been replaced by something else.
Speaker 1: And like what we have here is like the simulacrum
Speaker 1: of a story. You've got these ingredients of story structure,
Speaker 1: these ingredients of pieces of pop culture, but there's no
Speaker 1: there's nothing that's actually trying to be transmitted. Nobody has
Speaker 1: like because there's not a person behind this, for one thing,
Speaker 1: and there's not an understanding of what it takes to
Speaker 1: make a story, so it can kind of look like
Speaker 1: a story. It can certainly trick the like these AI
Speaker 1: grindset people think it's close enough. But what's happening here
Speaker 1: that's really fucked up is that they are taking this
Speaker 1: thing that is not a story, and they are their
Speaker 1: goal is to trick overworked parents into buying this for
Speaker 1: children who will read it and be too young to
Speaker 1: elucidate why something seems to be wrong with their new book.
Speaker 1: And that's actually very frightening, right, Like there's there's we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about learning in a little bit, how
Speaker 1: kids learn and how they don't learn, but like, fundamentally
Speaker 1: kids are little information vacuums, and this stuff is wrong
Speaker 1: on a fundamental level, and they'll get that. They may
Speaker 1: not get it why, but it's not only is it
Speaker 1: kind of like off putting to them, but it has
Speaker 1: the potential to do harm to them. And this is
Speaker 1: you know, we've had versions of this. There's this thing
Speaker 1: called elsagate, right where like a year or two ago,
Speaker 1: there were suddenly all of these hundreds and hundreds and
Speaker 1: hundreds of like what appeared to be AI generated videos
Speaker 1: that were like involving Disney characters, Elsa being a big
Speaker 1: one from I think Frozen, and they were they were
Speaker 1: like singing.
Speaker 3: Real, what are you calling this character?
Speaker 1: Elsa right, Elsa, Elsa, Elsa, el Yeah, I said, Elsa right,
Speaker 1: and whatever, okay, whatever. So you've and like a lot
Speaker 1: of them would suddenly get like really weirdly sexual or
Speaker 1: like fucking get tweaked into this kind of like uncanny,
Speaker 1: unsettling almost like love crafty and weirdness, and they were
Speaker 1: remember this, yeah, and these were they were all crafted
Speaker 1: and used kind of the keywords that like when parents,
Speaker 1: you know, you're you're you got to cook dinner, you
Speaker 1: got to like do you know, clean the ause or
Speaker 1: some shit. Your kid won't calm down, You put them
Speaker 1: in front of YouTube and you put on a children's
Speaker 1: video and the algorithm eventually starts spinning, and so parents
Speaker 1: start realizing like, well, I set them on. You know,
Speaker 1: this video that was like a frozen song and now
Speaker 1: there's like this weird pornographic thing that they're watching, Like,
Speaker 1: where the fuck did this come from? A webitized AutoPlay? Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And I don't think there's still a solid understanding of
Speaker 1: where all these came from. There's a couple of different theories,
Speaker 1: but it's really unsettling because part of the problem is,
Speaker 1: like what does it do to kids to have that
Speaker 1: kind of shit in front of their eyes? Like, cause
Speaker 1: we're not even talking about like the danger of like
Speaker 1: what if a kid reads an adult book or you know,
Speaker 1: stumbles in when there's porn on the TV. You know,
Speaker 1: this is a question of like, well, this is like
Speaker 1: frightening nonsense that like is being fed into them automatically,
Speaker 1: like at a at a scale that was like hundreds
Speaker 1: of these videos tit. One of the channels for this
Speaker 1: was like one of the twenty biggest channels on you.
Speaker 1: This is fucked up, really problematic shit, and this is
Speaker 1: people Like what these grindset people are doing by pumping
Speaker 1: as many of these AI books into kindle as they
Speaker 1: can is they are creating the They're creating the the
Speaker 1: the hard copy, the physical book version of this, where
Speaker 1: parents are going to get tricked into buying this ship
Speaker 1: and kids are going to be sat down in front of.
Speaker 2: This and and technology always outpaces legislation. Yeah what you're describing, man,
Speaker 2: it sounds like this is a very very bad wild
Speaker 2: West situation. Uh, it's a it's a Cormac McCarthy level
Speaker 2: wild West situation, like the so there is no is
Speaker 2: there is there blowback? I mean, children are some of
Speaker 2: the most frighteningly intelligent things. Kids. No bullshit. Uh that
Speaker 2: that's super uncomfortable. There's you know, this reminds me of
Speaker 2: one of my favorite lines from the television show Community
Speaker 2: This Robert, I posit to you, Sophia, I posit to you,
Speaker 2: a fellow behind the bastards. Folks, this shit is both
Speaker 2: silly and evil, like a candy cigarette.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly, It's like the candy cigarette of literature, right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's one of those like one of the things
Speaker 1: I found interesting. So when I want again watching a
Speaker 1: bunch of these videos, you become aware of, like what
Speaker 1: the problems for these AI hustlers are, like, what the
Speaker 1: things they have to overcome is And one of the
Speaker 1: problems they face is that like every single book generated
Speaker 1: by the AIS they're using sets off plagiarism detectors, right,
Speaker 1: and like Amazon uses I think Amazon uses, I believe
Speaker 1: they use a plagiarism detector. I've asked them for specifics
Speaker 1: on this again I haven't heard back. But so one
Speaker 1: of the first things they'll do is they'll use something
Speaker 1: like Grammarly to like run the text that they've got
Speaker 1: through a plagiarism detector and it will inevitably tell them
Speaker 1: significant plagiarism found. But there's a solution they've got a
Speaker 1: way to solve for this, which is an app called Quilbot. Now,
Speaker 1: if you go online and look up quilbot, it's built
Speaker 1: by its creators as an online paraphrasing tool. So what
Speaker 1: quilbot does is you feed it text and it goes
Speaker 1: through that text and it replaces adjectives and verbs in
Speaker 1: the text with synonyms. So you know, if the original
Speaker 1: text has the word courageous, it'll replace it with brave,
Speaker 1: or if it's got the word resided, it'll replace it
Speaker 1: with lived. Stuff like that. So you feed this frankin
Speaker 1: text that you got from the AI into Quilbot and
Speaker 1: then quilbot does kind of a find and replace with
Speaker 1: a handful of the words in there, and then suddenly
Speaker 1: you've got something that won't trigger Amazon's plagiarism sensors and
Speaker 1: that you didn't have to actually edit yourself. Right, you
Speaker 1: still don't have to do any real work here. You
Speaker 1: just let another robot mix it up a little bit more. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: once you've got kind of passable text, the next step
Speaker 1: for these grifters is to create image prompts for all
Speaker 1: of the illustrations in the book. And again there's not
Speaker 1: room for creativity here or for any kind of like
Speaker 1: human influence. For each page, they just ask chat gpt
Speaker 1: to generate descriptions of the images needed for that text,
Speaker 1: and then they feed that text in the mid Journey
Speaker 1: or Leonardo, which is another AI image generator and used
Speaker 1: to produce something like this. And this is from another
Speaker 1: one of these. This is kind of like one of
Speaker 1: the better case scenario looking illustrations and it's from like
Speaker 1: one of these fucking AI book guides that I found
Speaker 1: on YouTube, and it's you know, it's not remarkable, right,
Speaker 1: Like it's I'll read you the text. This is from
Speaker 1: the chapter one setting off in an adventure. This is
Speaker 1: the whole chapter. Once upon a time, there was a
Speaker 1: young girl named Sarah who lived in a small village
Speaker 1: surrounded by rolling hills and lush forests. Sarah was an
Speaker 1: adventurous spirit and love to explore the great outdoors. One day,
Speaker 1: she heard a rumor that a long lost treasure was
Speaker 1: hidden somewhere in the hills. The treasure was said to
Speaker 1: be a great wealth of gold and precious gyms, and
Speaker 1: whoever found it would be incredibly rich. Sarah was determined
Speaker 1: to find the treasure and put all her focus on
Speaker 1: the task at hand, because the message here is that
Speaker 1: you need to focus in order to achieve your goals.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's the art that accompanies it isn't bad. It
Speaker 1: looks it kind of at first glance, you might assume
Speaker 1: a human drew it. You can kind of tell, like,
Speaker 1: for one thing, the perspective on the backpack on her
Speaker 1: back is all fucked up. It's not like actually quite right.
Speaker 1: It might be that her hand isn't a pocket, but
Speaker 1: she might actually just not have a hand. But like,
Speaker 1: it doesn't look bad. Especially again, you're like an overworked
Speaker 1: parent looking for a book.
Speaker 3: What you're saying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. If you're an if you're just like a
Speaker 1: parent skimming through these, maybe you you don't catch this
Speaker 1: right as like something problematic. You just see like, all right,
Speaker 1: well that one works and by the standards of age
Speaker 1: children's book arc this this one looks pretty good. And
Speaker 1: I should say here if you want to look at
Speaker 1: this stuff yourself. The text version of this article, of
Speaker 1: the whole article that we're using as the script for this,
Speaker 1: will be up as soon as the episodes drop on
Speaker 1: my substack, shatter Zone. Just type shatter Zone substack into Google.
Speaker 1: It'll be the first article that pops up. If you
Speaker 1: click on that, it's free to you. You don't have
Speaker 1: to give me your email or any of that fucking bullshit,
Speaker 1: and you can see all of the images and find
Speaker 1: links to everything if you want to, like track back
Speaker 1: to the work that I did here. So that's kind
Speaker 1: of the best case scenario for how these AI kids
Speaker 1: books work. Look, the worst case scenario is shown in
Speaker 1: this video, which has about four hundred and twelve thousand
Speaker 1: views by Paul Marls. Now. Prior to the AI explosion,
Speaker 1: Paul he was teaching. He had a bunch of videos
Speaker 1: teaching people how to like con other folks through Amazon
Speaker 1: KDP kind of the old fashioned way by like hiring
Speaker 1: ghostwriters and shit. His videos had titles like six hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty six dollars from thirty to sixty minutes work
Speaker 1: exclamation point, exclamation point, make money online with KDP low
Speaker 1: content books. This is like what he's advertising is like,
Speaker 1: these are low content books. To put anything into them.
Speaker 1: It's the laziest thing ever. But you can make this
Speaker 1: weirdly specific number of money if you follow my guides
Speaker 1: and Paul Marls, if you look him up, he has
Speaker 1: dozens of videos for sale on Amazon. I have reached
Speaker 1: out to Paul. His One of the ways you can
Speaker 1: tell this guy's sketchy is he has a website that
Speaker 1: like offers all of his different sort of like you know,
Speaker 1: guidebooks and videos and stuff for people who want to
Speaker 1: follow him in this grift, but it has no contact info.
Speaker 1: I did, like send him a message on his Facebook,
Speaker 1: which I don't think he will check, but you know,
Speaker 1: I did reach out Paul. I don't like Paul. I
Speaker 1: think he has a face in need of a fist here.
Speaker 1: I'm not using that kind of language in the article
Speaker 1: that I've written because I want to seem like an
Speaker 1: objective journalist. But as you'll see when we play a
Speaker 1: clip from this guy's video, he's pretty immediately off putting. Now,
Speaker 1: Paul ups the ante on laziness here by cutting out
Speaker 1: the text entirely and instead generating a children's coloring book
Speaker 1: that he hopes will seo well because it's about dinosaurs
Speaker 1: and turn a profit. It's even lazier, right, that's what
Speaker 1: Paul is is like, this is already a lazy grift.
Speaker 1: Paul's gonna make it lazier. Fuck all that text. We
Speaker 1: don't need a story, like, we don't need to use
Speaker 1: chat GPT. We'll just we'll make a coloring book super easy.
Speaker 1: And you may think a coloring book would be less
Speaker 1: problematic than some of this other shit we've seen. I
Speaker 1: assure you it's not. So he enters this very half
Speaker 1: assed prompt where he misspells the name of a dinosaur.
Speaker 1: The prompt is just like coloring page for kids, Tyrannosaurus
Speaker 1: rex in a jungle, and he doesn't spell it right.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna have Sophie play this guy describing how
Speaker 1: he generates the images for his coloring book, and maybe
Speaker 1: then you'll hate him as much as I do.
Speaker 5: And what we want our image to be off. Now
Speaker 5: I'm going to do a dinosaur coloring book. That doesn't
Speaker 5: mean to say you need to go out and do
Speaker 5: a dinosaur coloring book. You can use this method to
Speaker 5: create any number of different types of coloring book that
Speaker 5: you want. So I'm going to put in Turanosaurus rex
Speaker 5: in a jungle. The next instruction is going to be
Speaker 5: what sort of style, and we're going to put in
Speaker 5: cartoon style. Then I'm just going to tell it how
Speaker 5: I want the lines, and I want this with thick lines,
Speaker 5: low detail, and no shading. Now put in no shading,
Speaker 5: but you'll find that it probably will create some images
Speaker 5: with some element of shading. The next is we need
Speaker 5: to put two minus signs and then ar for aspect ratio.
Speaker 5: So we're just going to put in nine eleven and
Speaker 5: then we enter and we can see here it's starting
Speaker 5: to create the images.
Speaker 1: Okay, so stop at Sylvie, because now I want to talk.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about these images. First. I want
Speaker 1: to say, you'll note he's like, we don't want there
Speaker 1: to be shading, because you know, if there's shading in
Speaker 1: a thing, that you're supposed to color in it, Like,
Speaker 1: fucks up, you can't like color in shading very well.
Speaker 1: But he's like, sure there will be shading, but like whatever,
Speaker 1: who gives you know, we don't care anything about this stuff. Now,
Speaker 1: Sophie is going to show you. These are the images
Speaker 1: that he generates with that prompt take a good look
Speaker 1: at these dinosaurs. Can you can you tell me anything
Speaker 1: that's wrong with these Tyrannosaurus rexes.
Speaker 2: Oh sure they're not t rexes.
Speaker 1: No, they're not at all t rexes. One of them
Speaker 1: is a quadruped. It clearly has four legs, but like
Speaker 1: a t rex head on this like weird stump of
Speaker 1: a body. Another one, the tx rex has like human
Speaker 1: muscle arms and thumbs and thumbs. One of them, the
Speaker 1: one on the bottom left, like, not only is the
Speaker 1: bottom jaw twisted away from the top jaw, but if
Speaker 1: you notice, its front arm is actually its back leg.
Speaker 1: The back of its body is merged with a tree.
Speaker 1: And then like there's maybe two other sort of half
Speaker 1: formed limbs there and then the bottom right one like
Speaker 1: these I cannot exaggerate to you, like go go to
Speaker 1: shattersone substeck. Look at these fucking t rexes. These are
Speaker 1: so such fucked up janky tyrannosauruses, Like it is offensive
Speaker 1: to me, how shitty these t rexes look.
Speaker 3: The human hands are very funny.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the human hands on the bottom one is pretty great.
Speaker 1: I do like how in the top one, like mid
Speaker 1: journey's almost done like a rob Leaffield thing, where like
Speaker 1: it can't figure out the so so hey, maybe AI
Speaker 1: has at least reached Leaffield and levels of like illustrative potential.
Speaker 2: They need, they need never explained belts of ambiguous cartridges
Speaker 2: right right around the waste.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Also, you know what if there be that's gonna be
Speaker 1: another two iterations.
Speaker 2: Yeah, t rex with human hands that would have helped
Speaker 2: him out.
Speaker 1: They maybe they would have been around right, you know,
Speaker 1: if the t rex had developed the fucking handgun, you know,
Speaker 1: they could have fought off those fucking asteroids. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a you know when you say that, I think about
Speaker 1: a much better tyrannosaur drawing. Bill Watterson's classic Tyrannosaurs in
Speaker 1: f fourteen's still one of like the highlights of my childhood.
Speaker 1: That part of why I'm so offended by this coloring
Speaker 1: book is that, like the best parts of my childhood
Speaker 1: all involved dinosaurs, and he is just he understands that
Speaker 1: that kids are magnetically drawn to dinosaurs, always have been
Speaker 1: and always will be forever more, and so that he's
Speaker 1: grifting off that by provided like he just he doesn't
Speaker 1: even care enough to make sure that they look vaguely right,
Speaker 1: like any kid. Kids know more about dinosaurs than paleontologists.
Speaker 1: Any child is going to point out that these are
Speaker 1: fucked up looking t rexes. So Paul's guide after this
Speaker 1: kind of goes through how you lay out your coloring
Speaker 1: book to publication, how you cobble together a cover, you know,
Speaker 1: what kind of things you need so that it'll it'll
Speaker 1: get through Amazon sensors, and they'll let you upload it
Speaker 1: to like not just like because it's a coloring book,
Speaker 1: obviously you need physical copies and you can if you
Speaker 1: upload it right, Amazon will just like print and sell
Speaker 1: the books for you, the actual like physical books. And
Speaker 1: again this gets to what I worry about is that
Speaker 1: like parents who fall for these books are going to
Speaker 1: be you know, overworked. They're not going to be focusing
Speaker 1: on these books as much as their kids are, right,
Speaker 1: They're just like, I want to get a dinosaur coloring
Speaker 1: book for my kid or whatever they need a coloring book. Oh,
Speaker 1: this is what like popped up on Amazon. The cover
Speaker 1: looks fine. I am also worried. Particularly what scares me.
Speaker 1: It's both like parents who don't have a lot of time,
Speaker 1: they're going for whatever is affordable. And also there's a
Speaker 1: lot of charities that provide poor kids with free books,
Speaker 1: and they do bulk orders from places like Amazon that
Speaker 1: might get tricked by this kind of thing. And so
Speaker 1: the thing that like the vision I can't get out
Speaker 1: of my head is this like frightening ai future in
Speaker 1: which like rich kids get to color in proper dinosaurs
Speaker 1: from like coloring books that human beings drew, and poor
Speaker 1: kids grow up thinking stegosaurs had no tail and the
Speaker 1: earth used to have like a second moon that looked
Speaker 1: like nipple, which is another Look at this image here,
Speaker 1: Look at this fucking picture that that it drew that
Speaker 1: some kids, some kid's gonna get this, some kid's gonna
Speaker 1: get this fucking coloring book. Look at this fucking thing
Speaker 1: that's not a stegosaurus. I don't even know. It's got
Speaker 1: like spikes coming out of like like like actual like
Speaker 1: porcupine quills. Coming out of like the spines on its
Speaker 1: back and like it doesn't have a tail, there's like
Speaker 1: five legs and the perspectives wrong and then like the
Speaker 1: world behind it look like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's got spikes on the left, uh,
Speaker 2: the left hind leg.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, it's like fucked up. It's like super fucked up.
Speaker 3: Like what's very bad?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I hate this shit, and like the again, that's
Speaker 1: what's unsettling. Like there will always be high quality dinosaur
Speaker 1: coloring books and storybooks and stuff for kids, and because
Speaker 1: they're made by humans, they'll command a premium price. So
Speaker 1: like the poor kids grow up thinking that like yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know, you know, I find it fucked up,
Speaker 1: and maybe it'll be even bleaker than that, and nobody
Speaker 1: will get good children's books. But this is kind of
Speaker 1: like where I what I'm suspecting is at least the
Speaker 1: first thing that's going to happen is that like the
Speaker 1: kids who start getting shafted with this low quality, unsettling
Speaker 1: brain poisoning AI crap are like the kids who don't
Speaker 1: have as much money, you know, or whose parents don't
Speaker 1: have as much money, whose school districts don't have as
Speaker 1: much money. Now A cursorysearch on Amazon suggests that a
Speaker 1: lot of people have followed Paul's advice because there are
Speaker 1: a shitload of nearly identical coloring books. So, first off, been,
Speaker 1: this is the cover of Paul's book. Here you can
Speaker 1: see the dinosaur coloring book. You know, pretty simple, and
Speaker 1: that he did pick for the front cover the image
Speaker 1: that's like least fucked up looking like that almost looks
Speaker 1: right right. But then I found as I started looking
Speaker 1: through Amazon, several near identical copies, all sold under different names,
Speaker 1: and you can tell they're all AI copies because like,
Speaker 1: so this first one here, uh, the arms are fucked up,
Speaker 1: like they're in the position kind of like that one
Speaker 1: on the on the left is almost like set up
Speaker 1: like a leg and they're both bent down so you
Speaker 1: don't actually see the clause. You can tell the perspectives
Speaker 1: fucked up though that's by Jared Mason or it's not,
Speaker 1: because like Paul and other people talk about how you
Speaker 1: you just create fake names to write these books under.
Speaker 1: These could all be Paul, they could all be people
Speaker 1: following Paul's advice. We don't know. Here's another book where
Speaker 1: like what the fuck dinosaur is that supposed to be
Speaker 1: that is that is like, so again, folks, you really
Speaker 1: owe it to yourself.
Speaker 3: Sorry, what it is? What are the legs situation?
Speaker 1: The tripod Like it's got like the body of a dog,
Speaker 1: but like three legs, a t rex head and an
Speaker 1: arm that's not an arm like it's a it's an
Speaker 1: arm that looks like this. It looks like this animal
Speaker 1: was like a Civil War veteran who was gonna say if.
Speaker 2: You date it, like this guy's been through some ship,
Speaker 2: you know what I mean, Like and he's still uh.
Speaker 1: Wow, and it's it's it shows how lazy these people
Speaker 1: are that like anyone seeing that, she'd be like, that's
Speaker 1: not a dinosaur. That doesn't look there at all?
Speaker 2: What is happening here? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Oh good, there's more. And then this this one, this
Speaker 1: is a look at how the claws are like, its
Speaker 1: fingers are like as long as it's head. It's like
Speaker 1: a fucking salad fingers the dinosaur. It's so fucking weird.
Speaker 2: I like the incredible, Yeah, I like the nihilation. I
Speaker 2: like the there's something like there there's something very about
Speaker 2: the way the eyes are rolled up. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I love it. So despite featuring easily the worst dinosaur
Speaker 1: drawing I've ever seen in my life. This coloring book
Speaker 1: appears to be selling reasonably well. At the time this
Speaker 1: article was written, it was number seventy five and the
Speaker 1: teen in young adult drawing category. That's potentially decent money.
Speaker 1: That's not low on Amazon now. That is like in
Speaker 1: the teen and young adult drawing category. It's not like
Speaker 1: a massive category, but like that's there are human coloring
Speaker 1: books that are selling worse than this, I will guarantee you,
Speaker 1: And that's potentially meaningful money for this person. I use
Speaker 1: the term person lightly for whoever is like shitting this stuff.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's all Paul, maybe it's all people copying him.
Speaker 1: But like this is already a problem, is what I'm
Speaker 1: getting at, Because it's like this isn't like the worst thing,
Speaker 1: you know, in a world where yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 1: like the Catholic Church exists, fucked up coloring books aren't
Speaker 1: the worst thing for little kids, but like this is Seriously,
Speaker 1: I don't think it's it's good Like kids pay attention
Speaker 1: to stuff like this, like show like the Sheer, for
Speaker 1: one thing. I think the laziness in this reads off
Speaker 1: to them. But like it's just it's wrong, Like you
Speaker 1: shouldn't be shotgunning stuff that's wrong to kids because you're
Speaker 1: too lazy to like do even the minimum work of
Speaker 1: regenerating the images until they're right. I find this on settling,
Speaker 1: and there's a lot more to find on settling because,
Speaker 1: like part of what I did while researching this was
Speaker 1: kind of a deep dive on literary education theory because
Speaker 1: I wanted to have an idea of how some of
Speaker 1: the stuff is going to affect children. But that's going
Speaker 1: to be all for part one with us today, Ben,
Speaker 1: because you know, time to take five. Time to take five,
Speaker 1: do a little bit of a breather, and then we'll
Speaker 1: come back on Thursday and I will finish this deeply
Speaker 1: fucked up story. Ben, you got anything to plug?
Speaker 2: Yes, please check out and subscribe to Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Do your part in supporting accurate depictions of dinosaurs for children.
Speaker 2: You can also find me hanging with my rider dies
Speaker 2: Matt Frederick and Noel Brown on shows like Stuff They
Speaker 2: Don't Want You to Know and Ridiculous History. You can
Speaker 2: find me talking trash about mrs and French military rations
Speaker 2: on Twitter. Named it a burst of creativity at Ben
Speaker 2: Bolan hs w or at Instagram at Ben Bolan. That's
Speaker 2: that's the whole thing. Yeah, I think that's it, right, No, good.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, excellent. Yeah. I also love a good MRI
Speaker 1: and a bad MRI. I've been making my way through
Speaker 1: these mrs that Mountain House made, and it's like chili mac,
Speaker 1: which is devastating for your stomach. Just anytime you try,
Speaker 1: it's a nightmare. It's a nightmare. There's some good ones
Speaker 1: that I got a nice bison stew that I think,
Speaker 1: uh oh yeah, one of the companies I have made. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's some good ones out there. I had some when
Speaker 1: I was out hunting for a couple of days in
Speaker 1: the Cascades last year. I had this this freeze dried
Speaker 1: biscuits and gravy that actually fucked on reasonably hard.
Speaker 2: Did you uh, did you ever get done with all
Speaker 2: that mac and cheese? You said something? Oh no, I
Speaker 2: still have a ton of it.
Speaker 1: I have a couple of years worth of dried food
Speaker 1: at any given time, just in case I have to
Speaker 1: hole up in my house, you know, uh, firing wildly
Speaker 1: at trespassers. Uh in the road style situation.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, yeah, yp Cormac.
Speaker 4: We also would like to Plug the newest schools on
Speaker 4: media series Said Oligar, hosted by j K and Rahan,
Speaker 4: available on All the Things Robert, Do you want to
Speaker 4: give that link for where people can follow your substack
Speaker 4: one more time?
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, it's shatter Zone. So just go to shatter
Speaker 1: zone dot substack dot com. Uh and you will. You
Speaker 1: will find my thing. You don't have to you don't
Speaker 1: have to sign up or anything. It's free.
Speaker 2: You're good, okay.
Speaker 1: By shabam Zo.
Speaker 3: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 3: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
Speaker 3: dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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