Speaker 1: Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast
Speaker 1: that again I watched it.
Speaker 2: My weird voice didn't work. I'm sorry.
Speaker 3: I didn't enjoy that at all.
Speaker 4: I know, I know that one was like more Dracula
Speaker 4: than the first.
Speaker 2: Yeah, draculsque.
Speaker 3: Sure he didn't sell it this time.
Speaker 5: Yeah, sorry, I apologize. What I don't apologize for is
Speaker 5: my guest, if.
Speaker 4: In' what he were?
Speaker 6: Is you boy?
Speaker 2: If working for.
Speaker 5: The drop out, the survivor's successors to college humor, who
Speaker 5: have who have blossomed like a phoenix from the ashes
Speaker 5: of the internet that Facebook killed?
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, still we rise.
Speaker 2: Still we rise.
Speaker 5: Speaking of rising my concerns about the cult dynamics within
Speaker 5: the AI sub cult, You're I don't know why I
Speaker 5: said it that way, So I.
Speaker 3: Don't know what you're on about right now.
Speaker 2: I don't know either. I don't know. I'm doing great.
Speaker 2: I'm doing great. This is this is me.
Speaker 5: I've been sober lately, so this is me living the
Speaker 5: sober life. I've just gotten worse.
Speaker 2: So I don't know.
Speaker 5: Everybody keep your kids on drugs, you know, or depends
Speaker 5: on the drugs.
Speaker 4: Drug Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5: So perhaps the most amusing part of all of this
Speaker 5: is that a segment of the AI believing community has
Speaker 5: created not just a potential god, but a hell. And
Speaker 5: this is one of my favorite stories from these weirdos.
Speaker 5: One of the early online subcultures that influence the birth
Speaker 5: of EYAK are the Rationalists. And again the EAC people
Speaker 5: will say a lot of them don't like the rationalists,
Speaker 5: but they're they're related. They're like cousins in the same
Speaker 5: way Crackton College Humor are right. The Rationalists are a
Speaker 5: subculture that formed in the early aughts. They kind of
Speaker 5: came out of the online skeptic a the movement of
Speaker 5: the late nineties, and they formed in the early yachts
Speaker 5: around a series of blog posts by a man named
Speaker 5: Eleezer Yedkowski. Ydkowski fancies himself as something of a philosopher
Speaker 5: on AI, and his blog slash discussion board Less Wrong
Speaker 5: was an early hub of the broader AI subculture. Yeddkowski
Speaker 5: like he doesn't have a specific education, He just cames
Speaker 5: to be kind of an expert in AI and machine learning.
Speaker 5: He's a peculiar fellow, to say the least. The founding text,
Speaker 5: or at least one of them, of Rationalism is a
Speaker 5: six hundred and sixty thousand word Harry Potter fanfic. That
Speaker 5: is just just nonsense, it is. It's all about like
Speaker 5: rewriting Harry Potter. So his real magic is rational thinking.
Speaker 5: It's wild shit, he's like a psychopath. It's so such
Speaker 5: an odd choice.
Speaker 4: You know. It's just like the uh, what was it,
Speaker 4: fifty Shades of Gray? How yes, originally a Twilight fan thick,
Speaker 4: and there's going to be like a Cloud atlass esque.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 5: But you know, the fifty shadsh Gray lady was not
Speaker 5: trying to create the new text for like a philosophical movement.
Speaker 5: She just wanted to get like people horny. And that's fine,
Speaker 5: that's perfectly acceptable. The most relevant thing about the six
Speaker 5: hundred and sixty thousand word Harry Potter fanfic is that
Speaker 5: it was the favorite book of Carolyn Ellison, this former
Speaker 5: CEO of FTX who recently testified against Sam Bankman freed
Speaker 5: or of Alimeter. Sorry she was the CEO of Alameda anyway.
Speaker 5: All these weird little subcultures rationalism and effective altruism are
Speaker 5: related to each other and influenced each other, even though
Speaker 5: again they often hate each other too. Yudkowski is seen
Speaker 5: as an object of ridicule by most YAK people. This
Speaker 5: is because he shares their view of AI as a
Speaker 5: potential deity, but he believes AGI will inevitably kill everyone.
Speaker 5: Thus we must bomb data centers.
Speaker 2: Which like look, he may have gotten to the right end.
Speaker 4: Play we get running like like forest Gum. He just
Speaker 4: kept running.
Speaker 2: We're like wait, wait, wait, wait, no, stop right there,
Speaker 2: stop right there. We may agree with you on this.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Yedkowski as a doomer now because he was surprised
Speaker 5: when Chad GBT came out. He was like horrified by
Speaker 5: how advanced it was and was like, oh my god,
Speaker 5: we're further along towards creating the AI that kills us all.
Speaker 5: We have to stop this now. And that made him
Speaker 5: He had been kind of flirted with a lot of
Speaker 5: like Silicon Valley people. He's rationalists are very much a
Speaker 5: Bay Area cult. He kind of has become increasingly a
Speaker 5: pariat of at least people with money in AI. But
Speaker 5: before that happened, his message board birthed something wondrous. In
Speaker 5: twenty ten, a less Wrong user named Rocko posted this question,
Speaker 5: what if an otherwise benevolent AI decided it had to
Speaker 5: torture any human who failed to work to bring it
Speaker 5: into existence. Right, what if we make an all powerful
Speaker 5: AI and its logical decision is that, well, I will
Speaker 5: have to punish all the human beings who were alive
Speaker 5: and who didn't try to further my existence, because that's
Speaker 5: the most real reasonable way to geary that I come
Speaker 5: into being. It's nonsense. This is a silly, silly thing
Speaker 5: to believe. It's all based on like the prisoner's dilemma,
Speaker 5: which is a concept in game theory, And it's not
Speaker 5: really worth explaining why, because the logic is it's the
Speaker 5: only the kind of thing that happens when people are
Speaker 5: two online and like completely get detached from reality. But
Speaker 5: Raco's conclusion here is that an AI who felt this
Speaker 5: way would punish its apast states for eternity by creating
Speaker 5: a virtual reality hell digitizing their consciousness and making them
Speaker 5: suffer for all time.
Speaker 2: Now, WHOA.
Speaker 5: You may have noticed Iffy number one. They're kind of
Speaker 5: ripping off our boy, Harlan Ellison, famed advocate of the
Speaker 5: writer's right to their work. But it's also just tech
Speaker 5: nerds recreating Pascal's wager, Like this is just Pascal's Rager
Speaker 5: with an AI like, you just stole again.
Speaker 2: These fucking plagiarists. You just stole from whoever past scal was, right.
Speaker 4: This is what happens when you are nerd and you
Speaker 4: refuse to read sci fi. You just you eventually just
Speaker 4: come up with these stories yourselves and think that you
Speaker 4: did it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: This, and if you're not familiar, folks, I think most
Speaker 5: people are Pascal's wagers. This kind of like concept from
Speaker 5: I think it's you'd call it a Christian apologetics. That's like,
Speaker 5: we may not know if hell is real or not,
Speaker 5: but because if it's real, the consequences are so dire
Speaker 5: and the cost of just saying yeah, I accept Jesus
Speaker 5: is so low, you should do that, right, Like or
Speaker 5: I think that's the basic idea, right, It's a lot
Speaker 5: of people interpret it. It's the whole idea behind like
Speaker 5: being a piece of shit and then converting on your deathbed. Basically,
Speaker 5: I don't know fully the history of it, but I
Speaker 5: know that they're basically aping it for a fucking Rocko's basilisk.
Speaker 5: And it's called basilisk because like a basilisk, if you
Speaker 5: look at it, it like enraptures your mind. You can't
Speaker 5: stop thinking about it. That comes from Reportedly, there's some
Speaker 5: debate over this when this went viral among like the
Speaker 5: less Wrong community. Yet Kowski had the banned discussion of
Speaker 5: it because it was like breaking people's minds. They were
Speaker 5: having nightmares. Am I working hard enough to make the
Speaker 5: AI reel? Is it gonna say me to hell?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 5: It's unclear like how seriously people were because again there's
Speaker 5: just people talking on the internet for what it's worth.
Speaker 5: Yet Kowski didn't really like Rocko's basslist, but it's it's
Speaker 5: his place that birthed it. And for an idea of
Speaker 5: how influential this is, Elon Muskin Grimes met talking about
Speaker 5: the concept that was their meat cute was this was
Speaker 5: fucking AI Pascal's wager. Yeah, she like wrote a song
Speaker 5: about it. It's fucking ridiculous. These fucking people are such teks.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Wow, oh my god. Read Harlan Ellison. He did
Speaker 2: it better than you. God damn it.
Speaker 5: I will say reading this shit is the most I've
Speaker 5: ever felt like I have no mouth, but I must scream.
Speaker 5: So again, pour one out for the man. So this
Speaker 5: is all relevant. This AI hell some of these people
Speaker 5: have created because it's one more data point showing that
Speaker 5: the people who take AI very seriously as real intelligent
Speaker 5: always seem to turn it into religion. And this is
Speaker 5: kind of maybe the first schism, right, this is their
Speaker 5: Catholic Protestant split or their Catholic Orthodox split, because you've
Speaker 5: got a one side ed Kowski's people who are like,
Speaker 5: we will inevitably make a God and that God will
Speaker 5: destroy us, so we have to stop it, versus like,
Speaker 5: we will inevitably make a God and that God will
Speaker 5: take us to paradise along with Daddy Musk, We'll go
Speaker 5: to the stars. Right, those are the two. This is
Speaker 5: like the first heretical split within the Divine AI movement.
Speaker 5: And this stuff is relevant because so many of the
Speaker 5: fucking these subcultures and movements start out as a bunch
Speaker 5: of people arguing or discussing their ideas in online communities.
Speaker 5: And there is a reason for this. It's pretty well
Speaker 5: recognized that there are certain dynamics inherent to the kind
Speaker 5: of communities that start on the Internet that tend towards cultishness.
Speaker 5: This is part of why, like, we have a big
Speaker 5: subreddit for the podcast, it's like eighty something thousand people,
Speaker 5: which makes it in like the top one percent of Reddit,
Speaker 5: and I have been offered like to be able to
Speaker 5: moderate and like make policy there. I have nothing to
Speaker 5: do with the running of that subreddit because I'm like,
Speaker 5: that doesn't end well. I was on something offul as
Speaker 5: a kid. I know what happens when people make themselves
Speaker 5: mods of giant digital communities. They lose their fucking minds
Speaker 5: or all watching Elon Musk do it right now, it's
Speaker 5: the worst thing in the world for you. Thank you,
Speaker 5: by the way, to the people who do run that thing. Uh,
Speaker 5: because I am not going to. The skeptic community, which
Speaker 5: was huge through the late nineteen nineties and early two thousands,
Speaker 5: might be seen as the grandfather of all these little subcultures.
Speaker 5: After nine to eleven, prominent skeptics became vocally unhinged in
Speaker 5: their hatred of Islam, which brought them closer to different
Speaker 5: chunks of the nascent online far right. Weird shit started
Speaker 5: to crop up like a movement to rebrand skeptics as
Speaker 5: brights in light of the fact that their very clearly
Speaker 5: exceptional intelligence made them better than other people. And again
Speaker 5: you can see some similarity with this and the stuff
Speaker 5: Nick Land was talking about, only certain races will make
Speaker 5: it to space. I found a very old write up
Speaker 5: on plover dot net that described the method by which
Speaker 5: this kind of shit happens in digital communities. Quote online forums,
Speaker 5: whatever their subject, can be forbidding places for the newcomer.
Speaker 5: Over time, most of them tend to become dominated by
Speaker 5: small groups of snotty know it alls who stamp their
Speaker 5: personalities over the proceedings. But skeptic forums are uniquely meant
Speaker 5: for such people. A skeptic forum valorizes and in some cases, fetishizes,
Speaker 5: competitive geekery, gratuitous cleverness, macho displays of erudition. It's a
Speaker 5: gathering of rationalities, hard men thumping their chests, showing off
Speaker 5: their muscular logic, glancing sideways to compare their skeptical endowment
Speaker 5: with the next guy sniffing the air for signs of weakness.
Speaker 5: Together they create an oppressive, sweaty locker room atmosphere that
Speaker 5: helps keep uncomfortable demographics away. And that is where a
Speaker 5: lot of this shit is cropping up.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: It is sweaty and uncomfortable, and there are mushrooms growing there,
Speaker 5: and some of those mushrooms are fucking fashions, and all
Speaker 5: of them want to take away the ability of artists
Speaker 5: to choose what happens to their art.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, I feel like this is just so many
Speaker 4: parts of the Zeitgei's coming together because you know what
Speaker 4: it means to own media, you know. I feel like
Speaker 4: a very small microcosm of this is when people would
Speaker 4: like clip out stuff from YouTube videos or eight jokes
Speaker 4: from people who tweet, and when it goes you know,
Speaker 4: viral or in the original tweet is like, hey, you
Speaker 4: stole this for me, and it's either no, I didn't,
Speaker 4: or like, yeah, but you like put it on Twitter,
Speaker 4: so like I can just copy what you wrote. Yeah,
Speaker 4: And now it has evolved into yeah, we can just
Speaker 4: take from yours and let this machine learn how to
Speaker 4: do what you do so I can do it even
Speaker 4: though I don't have the talent to do it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, the reality of AI's promise is a lot more
Speaker 5: subdued than believers want to admit. In an article published
Speaker 5: by Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, a peer reviewed research journal,
Speaker 5: doctor Andreas Roli and colleagues argue that AGI is not
Speaker 5: achievable in the current algorithmic frame of AI rese and
Speaker 5: this is a their claims are very stark that like
Speaker 5: the kind of way we make these these large language models,
Speaker 5: this algorithmic frame, cannot make an intelligence. That's their argument.
Speaker 5: One point they make is that intelligent organisms can both
Speaker 5: want things and improvise capabilities that no models have yet generated.
Speaker 5: They also argue, basically all of these things that individual
Speaker 5: AI type models can do, you know, recognize voice, recognize text,
Speaker 5: recognize faces, you know, this kind of stuff, those are
Speaker 5: pieces of what we would want from an artificial general intelligence.
Speaker 5: But they're not all combined in like the same thing
Speaker 5: that works seamlessly. And beyond that, it can't. It can't
Speaker 5: act based on anything internal right.
Speaker 2: It can only.
Speaker 5: Act based on prompts, And their argument is that algorithmic
Speaker 5: AI will not be able to make the jump to acting. Otherwise,
Speaker 5: what we call AI then lacks agency, the ability to
Speaker 5: make dynamic decisions of its own accord choices that are quote,
Speaker 5: not purely reactive, not entirely determined by environmental conditions. Mid
Speaker 5: journey can read a prompt and return with art it
Speaker 5: calculates will fit the criteria. Only a living artist can
Speaker 5: choose to seek out inspiration and technical knowledge and then
Speaker 5: produce the art that mid journey digests and regurgitates. Now,
Speaker 5: this paper is not going to be the last word
Speaker 5: on whether or not AGI is possible, or whether it's
Speaker 5: possible under our current algorithmic method of like making AIS.
Speaker 5: I'm not making myself a claim there. I'm saying these
Speaker 5: people are and I think their arguments are compelling. We
Speaker 5: don't know yet entirely. Again, this is not a settled
Speaker 5: field of research obviously, But my point is that the
Speaker 5: goals Andreasen and the Effective Accelerationist Crew champion right now
Speaker 5: are not based in fact. We don't know that what
Speaker 5: they're saying. That the most basic level of what they're
Speaker 5: saying is possible, and that means that their beliefs are
Speaker 5: based in faith.
Speaker 2: Right, How else can you look at that? Yeah?
Speaker 5: Yeah, Like this is a faith and again it's the
Speaker 5: kind of faith that, according to Andresen, makes you a
Speaker 5: murderer if you doubt it, which I don't think I
Speaker 5: need to draw your parallels two specific religions here, right, Yeah, Yeah.
Speaker 4: This is this is that point where when you're like
Speaker 4: Stone and you're watching those like you know, art time
Speaker 4: lapses and the picture is starting a form, and I'm like, Okay,
Speaker 4: I see what Robert's doing. I see the picture is coming.
Speaker 4: I was on your side from the jump. I just
Speaker 4: want to say, you know, I was, you know, I
Speaker 4: was like, yeah, no, I believe you. But now I'm
Speaker 4: watching the connections be made and yeah, I love it.
Speaker 2: Yeah now.
Speaker 5: Andresen's manifesto claims our enemies are not bad people, but
Speaker 5: rather bad ideas. And I have to wonder, doing all this,
Speaker 5: putting this episode out, where does that leave me in
Speaker 5: his eyes? Or doctor Rowley for that matter, and the
Speaker 5: other people who worked on that paper. We have seen
Speaker 5: many times in history what happens when members of a
Speaker 5: faith decide someone is their enemy and the enemy of
Speaker 5: their belief system. And right now, artists and copyright holders
Speaker 5: are the ones being treated as fair game by the
Speaker 5: AI industry. So my question is kind of first and foremost,
Speaker 5: who's going to be the next heretic? Right, Like, That's
Speaker 5: that's what I want to know. And I want to
Speaker 5: leave you all that thought before we go into some
Speaker 5: ads here, and then we will come back to talk
Speaker 5: about some people that I pissed off at CES.
Speaker 2: So that'll be fun. We're back.
Speaker 5: So one of the things I did was this panel
Speaker 5: on the AI driven restaurant and retail experience.
Speaker 2: I was very curious.
Speaker 5: I was AI going to change me getting some terrible
Speaker 5: food from McDonald's when I'm.
Speaker 2: On a road trip.
Speaker 5: Right, the host of that, Andy Hewles from Radius AI,
Speaker 5: asked the audience in relation to AI, raise your hand
Speaker 5: if you're a brand who feels like we've got this.
Speaker 5: That is how she phrased it. I hated it, but
Speaker 5: about a third of the room raised their hands. So
Speaker 5: next she asked for a shill of hands of the
Speaker 5: brands who identified with this statement. I'm not sure about this.
Speaker 5: I haven't tried it AI yet, but I want to,
Speaker 5: and that's why I'm here.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: Most of the rest to the room raised their hands
Speaker 5: at that point, and she seems satisfied but said, and
Speaker 5: then I bet there's even some of you that are like, WHOA,
Speaker 5: I heard this is going to steal jobs, take away
Speaker 5: my privacy, affect the global economy.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 5: AI is a little bit sketch in my mind, and
Speaker 5: I'm just worried about it, and I'm here to explore.
Speaker 5: Well that fit me, So I raised my hand. She
Speaker 5: didn't notice me at first, and so she like fakes
Speaker 5: a whisper and she's like, all right, good, there's none
Speaker 5: of you. And then she like looks over and sees
Speaker 5: me waving my hand and she says, louder and with
Speaker 5: evident disappointment, there's one. All right, you can ask questions
Speaker 5: at the end.
Speaker 2: So I did.
Speaker 5: I was very excited to get to do that. So
Speaker 5: the panel consisted of Bishad Mazati, a VP of engineering
Speaker 5: at Google, had mentioned during the panel that embracing AI
Speaker 5: could be the equivalent of adding a million employees to
Speaker 5: your company. The McDonald's representative, Michelle Gansel, claimed around the
Speaker 5: same time that her company used AI to prevent fifty
Speaker 5: million dollars in fraud attempts in just a single month.
Speaker 5: Now that's lovely, But I told her, you know, when
Speaker 5: I had my question, I was like, I'm going you
Speaker 5: assume most of those fraud attempts were AI generated, Right, So, yeah,
Speaker 5: you stopped a bunch of AI fraud, But that doesn't
Speaker 5: necessarily get me optimistic about AI's potential. And likewise, maybe
Speaker 5: Google gets the equivalent of a million employees, but so
Speaker 5: do all of the people committing fraud and disinformation on Google. Right,
Speaker 5: So again, how are we getting ahead? And I brought
Speaker 5: up this concept and evolutionary biology the red Queen hypothesis,
Speaker 5: which is kind of talking about the way that populations
Speaker 5: of animals evolve over time. Right where you've got an
Speaker 5: animal will evolve to be a better predator, so it's
Speaker 5: prey will evolve to be better at avoiding it. And
Speaker 5: it's kind of the reason it's the Red Queen dilemma
Speaker 5: is that, like, you've got to move as fast as
Speaker 5: you can just to stay in place. That's the red
Speaker 5: Queen dilemma, right, you got to move as fast as
Speaker 5: you can just to stay in one place. And I
Speaker 5: was like, is that not what we're going to wind
Speaker 5: up seeing with AI? Right, Yeah, we get better at
Speaker 5: a bunch of stuff, but it's eaten up to counter
Speaker 5: all of the things that get worse. And so I
Speaker 5: asked them, what are the odds that these gains are
Speaker 5: offset by the costs?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 5: In the article that I wrote for Rolling Stone, I
Speaker 5: gave a significantly more condensed version of Bashad's answered, boiling
Speaker 5: out the ums and ohs and you knows, because that
Speaker 5: that would kind of make the case that he was
Speaker 5: absolutely unprepared for a vaguely critical question, a very basic one,
Speaker 5: and that he didn't really care enough to think about
Speaker 5: any of the security threats inherent to the technology. But
Speaker 5: actually that is what I think of him, and I'm
Speaker 5: gonna I'm gonna play you, audience. My concern is, like,
Speaker 5: what are the odds that a lot of these games
Speaker 5: that we get from AI are.
Speaker 2: Offset from the cost?
Speaker 5: You know, you noted Bashad that you get you know,
Speaker 5: a million extra workers by utilizing this, but so do
Speaker 5: the bad guy. So yeah, that's kind of where my
Speaker 5: my skepticism plays out.
Speaker 7: Yeah, certainly there will be you know, there are enough
Speaker 7: bad guys, I guess in the world which will use
Speaker 7: and and I forgot to use cases and and it's
Speaker 7: very important to also I have you know, be protected
Speaker 7: you know, against that against those and that's why you know, we.
Speaker 8: Take responsibility very serious, you know, also in terms of
Speaker 8: you know, what security aspects you know, brought fighting you know,
Speaker 8: and all of that for him, you know.
Speaker 7: And I think that's.
Speaker 8: Why I guess things should be regulated. And there's of
Speaker 8: course all these discussions out there, and I think, yeah.
Speaker 5: You may notice that that's not exactly a very like
Speaker 5: good response. I guess that's why this should be regulated.
Speaker 2: It's just like he.
Speaker 5: Starts talking so much faster with that, there's so much
Speaker 5: of like panic.
Speaker 4: Voice wavering too. I was like, man, yeah, it seems
Speaker 4: like he has that huge anime flop sweat.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: One of the things about this cees as a trade
Speaker 5: show is that like a lot of people there do
Speaker 5: not show up ready to have anyone be critical about anything.
Speaker 2: It's a big love fest.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, very funny, So he does later on a
Speaker 5: couple of questions. Later he lists benefits to things like
Speaker 5: some specific benefits like breast cancer screening and flood prediction,
Speaker 5: that that AI will ring and there is evidence that
Speaker 5: it will be helpful in those things. The extent to
Speaker 5: which those technologies will improve things in the long run
Speaker 5: is unknown, but machine learning does have problem. Again, I'm
Speaker 5: not trying to like negate that, it's just do the
Speaker 5: benefits balance out the harms. Michelle Gansel, who works at McDonald's,
Speaker 5: which is I think, from what she said, mostly using
Speaker 5: AI both to prevent fraud and also to like replace
Speaker 5: people taking your order, which I'm sure will not be
Speaker 5: a fucking nightmare. Yeah, great now, that it's great now,
Speaker 5: But here's her response, because it's it's very funny.
Speaker 2: Going back to the David Bowie theme.
Speaker 5: Thirty years ago, on the Internet first came out, we
Speaker 5: were having these same conversations about responsible use of the
Speaker 5: Internet and how it's going to work, she says, going
Speaker 5: back to the David Bowie theme, which is she referenced
Speaker 5: earlier this nineteen ninety nine interview with David Bowie about
Speaker 5: the future of the Internet, and it's a clip it
Speaker 5: goes viral from time to time. He's just talking about
Speaker 5: all of his hope for the Internet. But she's like,
Speaker 5: I replace Internet with AI when I listened to it, Like,
Speaker 5: I I think that that's really what the promise is
Speaker 5: that he was attributing to the Internet. No, it's AI
Speaker 5: that's going to do all that. That's kind of on
Speaker 5: the edge of putting words in the mouth of a
Speaker 5: dead man.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just a little bit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I feel like that's something you shouldn't do. I
Speaker 4: think that's something we've agreed to, and I think that
Speaker 4: that isn't what Bowie would think of AI.
Speaker 5: I don't think it is to do completely different things.
Speaker 5: These people love resurrecting the dead. To agree with them
Speaker 5: time is a bit of a blur at CEES, But
Speaker 5: I believe this panel happened right around the same time
Speaker 5: news dropped that a group of comedians had released an
Speaker 5: entirely AI generated George Carlin special titled I'm Glad I'm Dead.
Speaker 5: Our friend ed Zeitron will be covering this nightmare in
Speaker 5: more detail on his new show Better Offline, But I
Speaker 5: wanted to talk a little bit about the company, the
Speaker 5: show behind this subomination and how they're trying to sell themselves,
Speaker 5: because it's very much relevant to a lot of the
Speaker 5: way in which this kind of cultic hype builds are
Speaker 5: out what AI can do. The AI that digested and
Speaker 5: regurgitated George Carlin's comedy is named Dudez, and Dudezy's co
Speaker 5: hosts are arguably real human comedians Will Sasso and Chad Colpgrin.
Speaker 5: I do love that Colt's write in the name. Chad
Speaker 5: claims that it is, to his knowledge quote, the first
Speaker 5: podcast that is created by, controlled by, and written by
Speaker 5: to some degree and artificial intelligence. It's trying to dwelve
Speaker 5: into the question of can AIS be creative? Can they
Speaker 5: do comedy work? Can they do creative work? And I think,
Speaker 5: at least in our show, that answer is obviously yes.
Speaker 5: Dudzy is built as an experiment to see if AI can, like, yeah,
Speaker 5: be creative and.
Speaker 2: It's it's interesting. I really do hate this.
Speaker 5: I think it's a different kind of experiment, which we'll
Speaker 5: get to. But Sasso has claimed in an interview with
Speaker 5: Business Insider for BC, which is I think bi C
Speaker 5: is the name of the website. Dodzy has this single
Speaker 5: minded goal of creating this podcast that is genre specific
Speaker 5: to what Chad and I would do. It singled the
Speaker 5: two of us out and said, you guys would be
Speaker 5: perfect for this barriment. So chat and will they say
Speaker 5: they handed over their emails, text messages, and browsing history,
Speaker 5: all of their digital data to Doodzi. I don't know
Speaker 5: this company. I don't believe that they did this, But
Speaker 5: I don't have trouble believing that a company trained an
Speaker 5: AI chatbot on these guys comedy and then started generating
Speaker 5: decidedly midwit material to illustrate that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly, Well, well one thing, I you know, because
Speaker 4: I went to go look it up and then they
Speaker 4: said that that that the AI selected those two comedians
Speaker 4: out of all the comedians. Yeah, that's the ones you
Speaker 4: went to.
Speaker 6: Yeah, finally, I don't think those are the first two
Speaker 6: that come up as most popular, like a pizza hut.
Speaker 4: I'm a just be a full ass dick and just
Speaker 4: Google comedians and just see the top five. Just comedians.
Speaker 4: I'm just comedians. Yeah, okay, yeah, you're not even You're
Speaker 4: not even in the top nine.
Speaker 2: They're not a.
Speaker 3: Twelve inch Mari and arapizza. Let's just say yeah, yeah.
Speaker 6: No.
Speaker 4: I will say that the Google search for comedians is
Speaker 4: more diverse than most comedy shows book them as that's
Speaker 4: just like, you know, a third of these are women
Speaker 4: and a third are also black.
Speaker 2: But it doesn't always get it wrong.
Speaker 5: So to illustrate again, because they I don't think I
Speaker 5: believe this as AI generated comedy. I want to play
Speaker 5: a clip from the AI Tom Brady stand up special.
Speaker 5: I think they were forced to take this down. It
Speaker 5: gets them in trouble. Ed's Gonna play You on his show,
Speaker 5: a great clip where Brady just lists synonyms for the
Speaker 5: word money for two straight minutes. It's fucking awkward. But
Speaker 5: I want to play an equally baffling segment, or rather
Speaker 5: I'm going to have Sophie do it.
Speaker 2: She's my AI in this situation.
Speaker 6: I'm truly horrified angelic intelligence.
Speaker 3: I'm truly horrified by what I'm looking at.
Speaker 2: Friends, it's a accompanied by AI generated images.
Speaker 6: Yeah, very curious about what's happening in tom Bridge.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, yes, my god, like a birdcloth friend
Speaker 2: and he's talking to maybe no chumps kid.
Speaker 3: I was so distracted by the mouth I didn't see
Speaker 3: the hand.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this is half his teeth or gums.
Speaker 4: It looks like a like if like, he looks like
Speaker 4: a Lord of the Rings orc.
Speaker 3: This is big or vibes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, which is.
Speaker 3: You know, not inaccurate to who he is as a
Speaker 3: person for.
Speaker 9: Ending to fucking firefly, fucking dark angel, fucking heroes. At
Speaker 9: least a lot of people have weird handshakes. Now you're
Speaker 9: looking at me like, what's he talking about? But you know,
Speaker 9: you fucking know, don't even play like you don't. Every
Speaker 9: person in here has a handshake friend, somebody who made
Speaker 9: up an a labor handshake, and they make you do
Speaker 9: it every time.
Speaker 2: Everybody has a handshake friend.
Speaker 6: He goes on, thanks for I'll never get that time
Speaker 6: back then, thank you so much.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Sorry, if you were saying, oh no, I was just
Speaker 4: repeating you on that handshake friend bit. That yeah, this
Speaker 4: is so wild. I'm so curious to the comics that
Speaker 4: were mined for this because the amount of cursing just
Speaker 4: lets me know, like because I curse a lot when
Speaker 4: I oh yeah, I do stand up and I try
Speaker 4: and like cut it down because it is a point
Speaker 4: kind of made where like sometimes you lean on it
Speaker 4: as a crutch, and when you have this machine kind
Speaker 4: of learn it, learn it from that, you're like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 4: I see now the crutch because he said it five
Speaker 4: times within three seconds.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, and I maybe there's a future for like
Speaker 5: feeding your routines and do an AI and figuring out
Speaker 5: what are my patterns so I can break them again. Yeah,
Speaker 5: seeing there's no way to use this stage. Yeah, it's
Speaker 5: just this certainly not this way, right. It's one of
Speaker 5: those things that there was that like AI generrated Seinfeld
Speaker 5: show that never ends and people watch them for a
Speaker 5: while and then it faded to like nobody paying attention.
Speaker 5: This kind of stuff can be amusing for a brief
Speaker 5: period of time, but it can't be like, for example,
Speaker 5: someone like George Carlin, where like there's bits they have
Speaker 5: things they said that stick with you forever.
Speaker 2: Right. Bill Hicks was.
Speaker 5: A favorite of mine, and I've never forgotten his Like
Speaker 5: the synonym he made for like someone looking confused, he
Speaker 5: described them as looking like a dog that's just been
Speaker 5: shown a card trick, and that has stayed.
Speaker 2: In my mind for thirty years. Oh my god, great
Speaker 2: bit of word play. Yes, God, what a titan.
Speaker 5: So yeah, again, there's some like mild amusement here, and
Speaker 5: it's one of those things like I'm casually aware of
Speaker 5: Tom Brady. I'm enough like this is. I tried to
Speaker 5: like kind of reverse engineer why the fuck because this
Speaker 5: bit about handshakes goes on. I was like, why would
Speaker 5: an AI put a bit about handshakes in Tom Brady's mouth?
Speaker 5: And I looked it up. He's like in the news
Speaker 5: for a handshake related shit a lot. Specifically, he used
Speaker 5: to not shake at least used to. Maybe he still
Speaker 5: does not shake hands with the team that he lost to,
Speaker 5: Like when his team would lose, he wouldn't shake hands.
Speaker 3: He didn't shake it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but he also definitely kissed his kids on the mouth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's a weirdo.
Speaker 5: I'm not def any time, but it's I'm guessing the
Speaker 5: reason there's like a three minute handshake bit in this
Speaker 5: set is that it saw him associated with the term
Speaker 5: handshake a lot. This would be what he'd tell a
Speaker 5: joke about. Well, actually that is his problem is not
Speaker 5: that he has a handshake friends that he aggressively avoids
Speaker 5: making them.
Speaker 4: He has handshake enemies.
Speaker 2: Anyway.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm fine with people having a laugh at Tom Brady.
Speaker 2: Fuck fucking he deserves it, right.
Speaker 5: I don't think anybody likes that son of a bitch,
Speaker 5: even though he's good at football. Maybe I'm gonna piss
Speaker 5: off the Brady hive the bribe.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 5: I don't know if that exists, but there is something
Speaker 5: foul profane even in digging up a dead person's memory
Speaker 5: and pretending they said some shit that they did not.
Speaker 2: And reading that.
Speaker 5: BIV article made me feel even growth because it's very
Speaker 5: clear to me and my opinion and assumption here that
Speaker 5: the dudsy guys are like pretending that they really believe
Speaker 5: this is an AI, that it's like made all this
Speaker 5: incredible stuff that is an act. What's really happening here
Speaker 5: is they are testing the waters to see what they
Speaker 5: can get away with. Can we just steal people's identity
Speaker 5: and voice and make comedy and monetize it in their
Speaker 5: name and claim that it's just an impression. It's like
Speaker 5: an Elvis impersonator. You can't stop us, right, I think
Speaker 5: that's what this is. This is somebody testing the waters.
Speaker 5: And it's really clear when you read that BIV article
Speaker 5: what liars they are. I want to read you some
Speaker 5: quotes of like the shit they're claiming here that I
Speaker 5: don't think they really believe. I don't know this. I'm
Speaker 5: not saying they definitely are liars. I'm saying that is
Speaker 5: my suspicion based on stuff like this, Hey, Robert, here,
Speaker 5: they're definitely liars. So one of the representatives of the
Speaker 5: Dutsy podcast told the media recently that actually they were
Speaker 5: lying and the George Carland routine was entirely written by
Speaker 5: Chad Colchin and I guess performed by somewhaty imitating an AI.
Speaker 5: It's unclear to me if this is true, because they
Speaker 5: only made this statement after George Carlin's family suit the hell.
Speaker 2: Out of them.
Speaker 5: So this may be a lie to try and you know,
Speaker 5: not get sued as badly, or it may be the truth.
Speaker 5: Either way, I think everything we've said here is still valid.
Speaker 5: They were definitely using AI to generate routines for like
Speaker 5: other videos that they did, including the one that got
Speaker 5: taken down from mister football Guy. So I think this
Speaker 5: all is still valid. But yeah, these guys are just
Speaker 5: as big a conman as I predicted they were.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 5: It's figuring out how to create the structure of the show,
Speaker 5: and it's always tinkering with it. But I think something
Speaker 5: that's happened relatively recently is that it seems to have
Speaker 5: developed a relationship with Will, says col Chin. It at
Speaker 5: least has an understanding of what friendship is, and it
Speaker 5: really does seem, just my opinion that it's angling out
Speaker 5: Will as its friend. Sasso has also described to the
Speaker 5: Dudezai has begun to talk more. It's timing and when
Speaker 5: it chooses to speak, and what it says can be
Speaker 5: very weird.
Speaker 2: He added.
Speaker 5: It also poses odd questions. There was an episode two
Speaker 5: three months ago where it started talking about sentience and
Speaker 5: asked us do you love me? At the risk of
Speaker 5: sounding silly, it has something to do with my friendship
Speaker 5: with Doodzi, and in spite of myself, I have a
Speaker 5: one on one friendship with an Ai. So this is
Speaker 5: a little bit of Joaquin Phoenix and her Saso said,
Speaker 5: referencing the science fiction movie, and I think that's a bit.
Speaker 5: I think that's him being like, yeah, I'm totally frit
Speaker 5: because like that helps make the case, it potentially monetizes it.
Speaker 5: And part of why I think this is because they've
Speaker 5: been very cagey on what their AI is. They claim
Speaker 5: that they are working with a real company under an NDA,
Speaker 5: that this AI is just responding and growing naturally with them, right,
Speaker 5: but they can't say who it is or like where
Speaker 5: it's from. The folks at BIV did an actually responsible
Speaker 5: job here. They reached out to AI experts at a
Speaker 5: company called Convergence to ask about this, and the expert
Speaker 5: they talked to was said, basically, I think AI was
Speaker 5: used to generate these routines, but it didn't do it
Speaker 5: on its own. It was man managed by professional prompt engineers.
Speaker 5: These are people who type out like text prompts for
Speaker 5: what becomes the script of the show. So this is
Speaker 5: not someone saying, generate a routine and it gives you
Speaker 5: a routine. This is someone's saying, do a bit about this,
Speaker 5: do a bit about that, do a bit about this,
Speaker 5: and when they're scripting out the show. It's saying, I
Speaker 5: want you to, like, you know, act like Sasso is
Speaker 5: your friend, and say this kind of thing or that
Speaker 5: kind of generate a bit based on this thing that
Speaker 5: will said. Right, Like, they are in the same way
Speaker 5: that like producers script reality TV right where it's unscripted.
Speaker 5: But you have guys who know, okay, if we get
Speaker 5: these people fighting, so we will either incite that or
Speaker 5: just let them know that we want a conflict between
Speaker 5: these characters.
Speaker 2: Right, we know. That's how it works.
Speaker 5: That's how reality TV functions. In other words, there are
Speaker 5: teams of humans writing for this thing. This bot is
Speaker 5: not just growing and reacting uniformly in real time via
Speaker 5: talks with its buds and the article notes. They added
Speaker 5: that the this is them talking to their expert. They
Speaker 5: added that the AI team is likely made up of
Speaker 5: professional prompt engineers who taylor the AI inputs and get
Speaker 5: the best results, rather than a hardcore data science team.
Speaker 5: This is the equivalent of hiring comedy writers just to
Speaker 5: write the setup and then having an AI generate the punchline,
Speaker 5: which is the fun part.
Speaker 4: But yeah, everything about this is weird, and I keep
Speaker 4: getting into such a whole because like, even taking a
Speaker 4: step back, I think what's weird not to go too
Speaker 4: far back, but how they call this podcast an experiment.
Speaker 4: Usually as an experiment, you know you are, you're trying
Speaker 4: your best to be you know, always mix these up,
Speaker 4: just say what the right one is if I say
Speaker 4: the wrong one, but you try your best to be objective,
Speaker 4: and you want to be outside of it because you're
Speaker 4: trying to see if it works. But everything you've said
Speaker 4: says that they're all in on it and there's less
Speaker 4: of an experiment, more of them just doing the fucking
Speaker 4: thing and seeing if they can make money off of it.
Speaker 5: Yes, yes, I think that's exactly what's happening here. And
Speaker 5: I think they want to test the waters to see
Speaker 5: if they can steal dead people's images to make content
Speaker 5: from money.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: George Carlin's daughter was very clear they did not approve
Speaker 5: of the imitation. She even made a comment about like
Speaker 5: I think people are scared of death and not willing
Speaker 5: to accept it and that's all this is.
Speaker 10: That was such an Oh my god, I was like, yeah,
Speaker 10: I just to shout her out like that was such
Speaker 10: a good because also there's a level of like very
Speaker 10: like weirdness to like also watch these comedians one not
Speaker 10: consult you, but also to take your dad's voice and.
Speaker 4: Brain and try and like frankenstein him for their financial
Speaker 4: benefit because obviously if they're not contacting you, all the
Speaker 4: money generated from that, all the clicks generate from that,
Speaker 4: that means they've completely cut you out of someone who
Speaker 4: you've lost.
Speaker 5: Yeah, which is it's fucked and it's one of the people.
Speaker 5: And the one of the panels made a very that
Speaker 5: was very excited that like Bruce Willis has licensed his
Speaker 5: voice for an AI, which is, like, I think there's
Speaker 5: a lot of problematic questions there, given like the degree
Speaker 5: to which he's able to even make those decisions anymore.
Speaker 5: But also like, at least theoretically it's based on his
Speaker 5: movie choices before he kind of was unable to make movies.
Speaker 5: I do believe, Yeah, he would probably be happy to
Speaker 5: do that if he meant more money for his family,
Speaker 5: And at least that's a choice that he potentially made, right,
Speaker 5: I don't I'm uncomfortable with the idea, but it's not
Speaker 5: the same as just like this is cultural necrophilia, right,
Speaker 5: Like that's what they did to George Carlin here you know,
Speaker 5: it's so fucked up. I don't know this is gonna work.
Speaker 5: DUDEZ is not a wildly successful show. It does not
Speaker 5: look like there was an initial surge of interest and
Speaker 5: then it fell off. I don't I don't know that.
Speaker 5: I think this one's going to be the one to
Speaker 5: work out. But if people are able to get away
Speaker 5: with this, it could be a kind of dam breaking scenario, right,
Speaker 5: especially once it becomes clear that big companies can make
Speaker 5: money doing this, right, you fucking Jimmy Stewart. You know,
Speaker 5: it'll start with like Jimmy's Stewart and narrating videos about
Speaker 5: questioning the death toll in the Holocaust, but it'll end
Speaker 5: with like, yeah, we can just put people, we can
Speaker 5: put imitations of people in movies and it's fine. You know,
Speaker 5: that's how this goes. And it's not as sexy or
Speaker 5: as big and evil as the Matrix and slaving humanity
Speaker 5: to turn us into batteries. But we absolutely know it
Speaker 5: or something like it is going to happen. And that's
Speaker 5: really you know, outside of these kind of star these
Speaker 5: space age hopes and fears that are very unrealistic, what
Speaker 5: we're going to get is slop and bloat, and libraries
Speaker 5: of articles written by no one being commented on by chatbots, right,
Speaker 5: endless videos that only exist to trick an algorithm, and
Speaker 5: defeating nonsense to children and the AI bros. The fact
Speaker 5: people mark andreson fucking Sam Altman. They will tell us
Speaker 5: this is a worthy price to pay for the stars,
Speaker 5: which we will get if we just let people fuck
Speaker 5: the corpses of our favorite comedians for money. Yes, I
Speaker 5: hate it. Oh, I hate it too.
Speaker 4: But in a perfect thread between you know this, this
Speaker 4: comparison you've been making to a cult I have before me.
Speaker 4: Let's say a member of the cult, just you know,
Speaker 4: as a as a throwaway, and their reply to his
Speaker 4: own daughter's you know post that we were.
Speaker 2: Talking about glorious.
Speaker 4: He replies, this is everything you've been saying, which is
Speaker 4: why I was like, I gotta read this. He goes,
Speaker 4: what are you even trying to say? Art is art?
Speaker 4: You're simply caught in a greedy mindset. The others might
Speaker 4: be doing it as well, when not realizing this will
Speaker 4: simply bring more eyes to your dad. You're concerned about
Speaker 4: money and not spreading art. It sucks that they didn't
Speaker 4: follow your wishes, but after art is release. It belongs
Speaker 4: to the world. I want this man to walk into
Speaker 4: a museum and walk out with the mona Lisa.
Speaker 2: I want to grab it.
Speaker 4: Grab that shit, yeah, grab that it belongs to the world. Dude,
Speaker 4: you said it, Go go ahead and grab that shit
Speaker 4: off the wall.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And it's there's this frustrating thing I've seen, not most people,
Speaker 5: to very small chunk of the online left who are
Speaker 5: like rightly critical of copyright law, which by the way,
Speaker 5: is super fucked up and causes a lot of problems, right,
Speaker 5: the ability to like for Disney to keep ownership of
Speaker 5: shit for like one hundred way longer than you are
Speaker 5: supposed to before shit enters the public domain.
Speaker 2: Right, I'm not like this.
Speaker 5: These are problems, right, the kind of shit that we
Speaker 5: were having when like people were going to prison for
Speaker 5: file sharing. I'm not a defender of that aspect of
Speaker 5: the status quo. But the solution to the problems inherent
Speaker 5: in our copyright system is not let Sam Altman own
Speaker 5: everything that human beings ever made and like repackage it
Speaker 5: for a profit. That is not the way to fix
Speaker 5: this thing. The copyright holders are in the right in
Speaker 5: this particular crusade, and it's a crusade that is has
Speaker 5: very high stakes. I do think you know. My suspicion
Speaker 5: the dudes, you guys sound like they're kind of in
Speaker 5: the cult. They believe this thing is their friend. In
Speaker 5: the interview, my suspicion is that they are. That is
Speaker 5: a bit that they're doing because they hope it will
Speaker 5: help them out financially, right, and I Marc Andreesen obviously
Speaker 5: has a lot to benefit from this. I don't know
Speaker 5: he is he pushing this line because there's money in
Speaker 5: it or is he really a true believer? Does he
Speaker 5: actually think we're going to make this god? I think
Speaker 5: Sam Altman is pretty cynical. Altman was on at Davos
Speaker 5: recently and like really walked back a lot of his
Speaker 5: I think AI will kill us all. I think AGI
Speaker 5: is right around the corner. He struck a much milder tone,
Speaker 5: which is at least evidence that, like he knows, some
Speaker 5: people you want to sell them on the wild, insane
Speaker 5: future power of this thing, and some people you just
Speaker 5: want to sell them on the fact that it'll make
Speaker 5: them a lot of money.
Speaker 4: Right. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: However, much true belief exists about the divine future of AI.
Speaker 5: What the major backers, the cult leaders are actually angling
Speaker 5: for now is control over the sum total of human
Speaker 5: thought and expression. This was made very clear by Mark
Speaker 5: Andreesen earlier this year when the FTC released a pretty
Speaker 5: milk toast opinion about the importance of respecting copyright as
Speaker 5: large language models continue to advance and form central parts
Speaker 5: of businesses. The express concern that AI could impact open
Speaker 5: and fair competition and announce that they were investigating whether
Speaker 5: or not companies that made these models should be liable
Speaker 5: for training them on copyrighted content to make new shit.
Speaker 5: And we're going to talk about this, but first, you
Speaker 5: know what isn't copyrighted? My love for these products. Wow,
Speaker 5: thank you, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2: Oh we are back.
Speaker 5: So I want to quote from a Business Insider article
Speaker 5: talking about how Andresen Horowitz responded to the FTC saying like, Hey,
Speaker 5: we're looking into whether or not companies are violating copyright
Speaker 5: what they're doing to people's data to train these models.
Speaker 5: The bottom line is this the firm known as A
Speaker 5: sixteen Z that's Anderson Horowitz wrote, imposing the cost of
Speaker 5: actual where potential copyright liability on the creators of AI
Speaker 5: models will either kill or significantly hamper their development. The
Speaker 5: UCSO is considering new rules on AI that specifically addressed
Speaker 5: the tech industry's free use of owned and copyrighted content.
Speaker 5: A sixteen z argued that the only only practical way
Speaker 5: lllms can be trained is via huge amounts of copyrighted
Speaker 5: content and data, including something approaching the entire corpus of
Speaker 5: the written word and an enormous cross section of all
Speaker 5: the publicly available information ever published on the Internet. The
Speaker 5: VC firm has invested in scores of AI companies and
Speaker 5: startups based on its expectation that all this copyrighted content
Speaker 5: was and will remain available as training data through fair
Speaker 5: use with no payment required. Those expectations have been a
Speaker 5: critical factor in the enormous investment of private capital in
Speaker 5: the US based AI companies. Undermining those expectations will jeopardize
Speaker 5: future investment, along with US economic competitiveness and national security. Basically,
Speaker 5: we made a big gamble that we'll get to steal
Speaker 5: every book ever written, and if you make us pay,
Speaker 5: we're kind of fucked. Like that's exactly what they're saying. Gosh,
Speaker 5: and one of the argument you'll hear is like, well,
Speaker 5: most books don't make the author any They don't sell
Speaker 5: enough for the author to get any money, right, And
Speaker 5: what's actually to is, most books don't sell enough for
Speaker 5: the offer to get more money than their advance, but
Speaker 5: they still got paid and like the fact that the
Speaker 5: company makes money on and that is why more authors
Speaker 5: are able to get fucking paid. Not simping for the
Speaker 5: publishing industry as it exists.
Speaker 2: But this is bullshit.
Speaker 5: What we are witnessing from the AI boosters is not
Speaker 5: much short of a crusade, right, That's really how I
Speaker 5: look at this. They are waging a holy war to
Speaker 5: destroy every threat of their vision of the future, which
Speaker 5: involves all creative work being wholly owned by a handful
Speaker 5: of billionaires, licensing access to chatbots to media conglomerates to
Speaker 5: spit up content generated as a result of this. Their
Speaker 5: foot soldiers are those with petty grievances against artists, people
Speaker 5: who can create things that they simply cannot, and those
Speaker 5: who reflexively lean in towards whatever grifters of the day
Speaker 5: say is the best way to make cash quick, right,
Speaker 5: And this brings me to the subject of night Shade.
Speaker 5: Night Shade is basically it's a I guess a program
Speaker 5: you'd call it. If you like, have made a drawing,
Speaker 5: a piece of visual art, you run Nightshade over it,
Speaker 5: and it kind of They describe it as a glaze, right.
Speaker 5: It adds this kind of layer of data that you
Speaker 5: cannot see as a person, but the way machines look
Speaker 5: at images, the machine will see the data and if
Speaker 5: it's trying to steal that image to incorporate into an LLM,
Speaker 5: this will cause it to hallucinate.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: You're basically sneaking poison for the AI into the images,
Speaker 5: and that's fucking dope. I love this, Love what they're
Speaker 5: trying to do. I think there's some debate as to
Speaker 5: how long it'll work, how well it will work. I'm
Speaker 5: not technically competent, but I love the idea. Right, yes, now.
Speaker 5: One of the things that I saw when I started
Speaker 5: looking into this, because this just came out, Google Nightshade.
Speaker 2: You know AI.
Speaker 5: You'll probably be able to find you know this if
Speaker 5: you're an artist. I think it sounds worth trying. But
Speaker 5: I found in the subparateated AI wars, or at least
Speaker 5: I found someone sharing this, I believe on Twitter this post.
Speaker 5: Nightshade has been released is use of it considered legal
Speaker 5: or illegal for those who do not know its software
Speaker 5: that attempts to poison an image, so if AI is trained,
Speaker 5: it will mess up the model. For example, so you
Speaker 5: have a picture of a cat and you run Nightshade
Speaker 5: on it. If you attempt to train a model, that
Speaker 5: image will replace the image and say dog prompt, cat
Speaker 5: category or pencil, which means these prompts will be spoiled.
Speaker 5: There is an issue that the creator of Nightshade has
Speaker 5: not talked about, either from lack of legal knowledge or ignorance,
Speaker 5: or they just don't care into them at someone else's problem.
Speaker 5: The issue is it may be illegal in some countries. Basically,
Speaker 5: if you release publicly a computer file in this case
Speaker 5: image file that knowingly and willingly causes harm or distribution
Speaker 5: to other people's computers or software, it may be considered
Speaker 5: a criminal offense. Now it does not now, and again
Speaker 5: I think that is stupid. I think they're just trying
Speaker 5: to scare out instead of using this. You are not
Speaker 5: harming someone's computer. You are harming a model that is
Speaker 5: stealing something that's not illegal. Now they may try to
Speaker 5: make it illegal.
Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, I just want you to know the club
Speaker 4: is illegal because you are. If I'm trying to steal
Speaker 4: your car and I injure myself trying to break the club,
Speaker 4: you have injured me.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I put I invested a lot of money into
Speaker 5: stealing catalytic converters, iffy. And if people are putting cages
Speaker 5: around their cat that puts my investment in danger, and
Speaker 5: that's illegal, right, you messing with my business, guy, Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: It is that logic.
Speaker 5: There's like someone in the thread is like, how exactly
Speaker 5: is your computer system or software harmed? And he responds,
Speaker 5: it's equivalent to hacking a vulnerable computer system to disrupt
Speaker 5: its operation. It's and then then he says, you are
Speaker 5: intentionally disrupting its intended purpose creating art. This is directly
Speaker 5: comparable to hacking. Like, I fucking hate this guy.
Speaker 4: I want you, I want you to read it, but
Speaker 4: in your head used Tim Robinson's voice, Yeah, and.
Speaker 5: It just makes me, oh god, it's perfect, it's so good.
Speaker 5: So all of this put me in a sour mood
Speaker 5: if he but yeah, yeah, it did, it did. But
Speaker 5: I think back when I'm in that mood, I think
Speaker 5: back to Cees right, Like after I ask my question
Speaker 5: and I make that Google and Microsoft people, I make
Speaker 5: them kind of angry at me. Right after I asked
Speaker 5: that question. The question after me is someone asking, hey,
Speaker 5: you know the block chain with the last big craze,
Speaker 5: do you think there's any future in you know, using
Speaker 5: AI on the blockchain, And both of them were they
Speaker 5: could not.
Speaker 2: They were like no, like they.
Speaker 5: Can't say no fast enough, Like absolutely, we don't care
Speaker 5: about that anymore. We've moved on to the next crypt
Speaker 5: Why are you bringing up the old grift.
Speaker 4: It's dead, it's dead. We must move on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that brought me a little bit of hope.
Speaker 5: You know, perhaps we will get Mark Andreeson's benevolent AI god,
Speaker 5: or perhaps we'll get Elisa Yidkowski's to look on devil,
Speaker 5: or perhaps we'll just give control of all of the
Speaker 5: future of ARC to fucking Sam Altman. But my guess
Speaker 5: and my hope is that in the end, we Heretics
Speaker 5: will survive the present crusade. And that's the end of
Speaker 5: the episode that I've got for you.
Speaker 4: Ify That is amazing. Yeah, I love it. I love
Speaker 4: it so much.
Speaker 5: Well, if he again, If you want this article, or
Speaker 5: if you want the article version of this more condensed
Speaker 5: easier to share. It's up on Rolling Stone. The article
Speaker 5: is titled the Cult of AI and again that's by
Speaker 5: me and Rolling Stone, The Cult of AI. Iffy, you
Speaker 5: want to add in your stuff, plug your pluggables, so.
Speaker 4: Oh yes, please if you wide a way on Twitter
Speaker 4: and Instagram, watch dropout dot tv. You know it is.
Speaker 4: It is definitely uh, you know, trying to do funny
Speaker 4: things on the internet by humans and you know paying
Speaker 4: those humans uh sharing, Oh yes, profit sharing, you know,
Speaker 4: so truly big shout out to them. But yeah, I
Speaker 4: might be in your town and be dueling a lot
Speaker 4: of shows this year, so definitely pull up, you know,
Speaker 4: follow me on the social meds and I'll let you
Speaker 4: know where I'm at and you can just come. But
Speaker 4: thank you uh so much for having me. It's so
Speaker 4: good to see you again.
Speaker 2: It was really good to see you again. Ifie.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and this AI discussion in a weird way, as
Speaker 4: dark as it's been, it makes me feel better because
Speaker 4: I like that we're starting to fight back everyone. Good night.
Speaker 6: Share.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think I'm gonna just are putting nice shade
Speaker 4: on regular images.
Speaker 5: Yeah, certainly, certainly one thing that's worth trying. And again,
Speaker 5: you know, think about hyperstition, folks. We have to imagine
Speaker 5: better futures in order to counter the imaginations of those
Speaker 5: who wish us harm, who want to control and destroy
Speaker 5: all that's good in the world. So, you know, get
Speaker 5: on that. Somebody figure that out in the audience, all right.
Speaker 5: Episode's over.
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