Speaker 1: The heartbreaking videos and images from the ongoing fires in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles are filling up social media. A number of
Speaker 1: them are claiming to show the iconic Hollywood Sign on
Speaker 1: fire last night.
Speaker 2: Earlier this year, a bunch of videos went viral showing
Speaker 2: the Hollywood Sign on fire.
Speaker 3: Literally like the Hollywood Sign, it was burning, it was
Speaker 3: burning yesterday, burning like what is going on?
Speaker 4: It looked like the apocalypse.
Speaker 2: They were posted in January when fires were raging across
Speaker 2: LA where I live. This was a scary time and
Speaker 2: those videos only made things worse.
Speaker 4: These viral images that we see of the Hollywood Sign
Speaker 4: on fire actually started to spread on social media as
Speaker 4: Los Angeles in battles one of its worst fires in
Speaker 4: all of its history.
Speaker 2: There were different versions. Some of the videos just showed
Speaker 2: fire on the hill low the letters, and in other
Speaker 2: videos the letters themselves were burning.
Speaker 3: When we saw the posts on Instagram, we were devastated.
Speaker 3: We lived here all our lives and when we saw
Speaker 3: that on Instagram, that broke our hearts. So we wanted
Speaker 3: to come and see for as time, and we're really
Speaker 3: shocked that the there's no fires, there's no fires, and
Speaker 3: they're taking it basically.
Speaker 2: So those videos were all fake. They were generated by AI.
Speaker 2: If you saw these videos when they first came out,
Speaker 2: maybe you already knew they were fake. But what you
Speaker 2: might not know is how much money these videos can
Speaker 2: make for their creators. And if the online course that
Speaker 2: teaches you how to make these videos is to be believed,
Speaker 2: you can make over five thousand dollars a month. Videos
Speaker 2: like the Hollywood Sign burning are part of a bigger
Speaker 2: phenomenon that is probably filling up your feed right now.
Speaker 2: There's a word for this slap.
Speaker 5: I actually don't know where it came from. Like I
Speaker 5: had been calling it AI spam, I was writing about
Speaker 5: it before it was called AI, and then someone on
Speaker 5: Twitter I think, could just start calling it slop, and
Speaker 5: I feel like slop is a better term for it.
Speaker 5: There's a lot of different types of AI slop at
Speaker 5: this point, but basically it is an AI generated image
Speaker 5: or video that is designed to go viral on social media.
Speaker 2: Jason Kevler is my friend and former colleague from back
Speaker 2: when we both worked advice. Since then, he co founded
Speaker 2: a site called four or for Media, and pretty much
Speaker 2: right out the gate this stuff turned into one of
Speaker 2: his beats. You're one of the first people who was
Speaker 2: really documenting AI slap before it really truly blew up.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean I'm obsessed with it. I've been obsessed
Speaker 5: with it since the get go. I've just found it
Speaker 5: to be like very fascinating to cover because I can
Speaker 5: kind of like watch in real time as people lose
Speaker 5: touch with reality. To be honest with you.
Speaker 2: I don't know if I'm quite as obsessed with with
Speaker 2: this stuff as Jason is. But then again, he was
Speaker 2: looking at golden Jesus helicopters and I'm here looking at
Speaker 2: fake fires. But when I started investigating, I realized that
Speaker 2: the stuff that he was seeing and the stuff that
Speaker 2: I was watching, we're all part of the same machine.
Speaker 2: And I managed to talk to one of the people
Speaker 2: behind it. I'm afraid from Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This
Speaker 2: is kill Switch. I'm Dexter Thomas, I'm Chari.
Speaker 6: Buy.
Speaker 2: When did you start writing about AI slab?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was December twenty twenty three. One of our
Speaker 5: readers posted this image of a guy in the United
Speaker 5: Kingdom who carves dogs out of wood like with a chainsaw,
Speaker 5: and this reader had noticed that there were all these
Speaker 5: copycats of this one guy's dog wood carvings. Basically, there
Speaker 5: were these Facebook pages that were posting dozens and dozens
Speaker 5: of different versions of the original photos that he was uploading.
Speaker 5: And so in some images it's like the guy would
Speaker 5: be would have a goatee. In some images, the guy
Speaker 5: would look Latino. In some images, the guy would be
Speaker 5: a woman. In some images, the dog would be a
Speaker 5: German shepherd instead of like, you know, a Golden Retriever.
Speaker 5: And it was very obvious that they had been modified
Speaker 5: by AI.
Speaker 2: This stuff sounds pretty innocuous, and I guess it was.
Speaker 2: Back in twenty twenty three. Image to image generators like
Speaker 2: Dolly and Microsoft's Being Image Generator were still kind of novel,
Speaker 2: and if someone wanted to use that to make variations
Speaker 2: on existing images of chainsaw wood carvings, I mean, that's
Speaker 2: not really my thing, but hey, if people are into it, whatever.
Speaker 2: It was just kind of a.
Speaker 5: Lot at first. This meant a lot of people were
Speaker 5: using these aiimage generators and they were creating Facebook pages
Speaker 5: and then posting I don't know, twenty thirty forty times
Speaker 5: a day, and each page would have a theme. So
Speaker 5: one of the themes would be like beautiful log cabins.
Speaker 5: So a person would generate one hundred log cabins using
Speaker 5: these aiimage generators and then they would post them on Facebook.
Speaker 2: But his AI tools got better, and these Facebook pages
Speaker 2: became more viral, the AI slap became more targeted and weirder.
Speaker 5: The moment that this became really mainstream, in my opinion,
Speaker 5: was this moment of shrimp Jesus and shrimp Jesus. Oh
Speaker 5: we go right in Jesus, I mean, I think so.
Speaker 5: So for a while, there were all of these images
Speaker 5: of Jesus, this sort of stereotypical white Jesus, long hair,
Speaker 5: and people were just posting hundreds of images of Jesus
Speaker 5: in different situations and then the caption would say please
Speaker 5: give me an amen. They would be asking people to
Speaker 5: comment on this, which would boost in the algorithm, and
Speaker 5: none of it was real. It was all AI generated.
Speaker 5: There was a lot of images of Jesus sand sculptures,
Speaker 5: and then the caption would be like only true believers
Speaker 5: will love my art or something like that. And then
Speaker 5: there was this one image where Jesus was floating above
Speaker 5: the ocean and he had the face of Jesus but
Speaker 5: the arms of shrimp. It was basically like an iracnid
Speaker 5: Jesus with like six arms and they were all made
Speaker 5: of shrimp. And it was just like obviously insane, like
Speaker 5: an insane image, something that a human I don't think
Speaker 5: would probably ever think up on their own. And this
Speaker 5: image had millions of likes on Facebook, and there were
Speaker 5: a bunch of different versions of it. It just went
Speaker 5: incredibly viral and weirdly, like a lot of the comments
Speaker 5: were not even about the fact that Jesus was a shrimp.
Speaker 5: It was just like, amen, I love God, things like that,
Speaker 5: and so, I mean, I don't think people thought it
Speaker 5: was real, but it clearly didn't matter to a lot
Speaker 5: of people that this was just like an absurd image.
Speaker 2: It sounds like shrimp Jesus was kind of the turning
Speaker 2: point for Ais. I don't want to say the genesis necessarily,
Speaker 2: I don't want to get too biblical with this, but
Speaker 2: when I read your article on shrimp Jesus, I think
Speaker 2: that is when I really truly realized, Okay, something really
Speaker 2: really strange is happening here.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was very interesting that this was happening on Facebook. First, like,
Speaker 5: Facebook is a really old social network at this point,
Speaker 5: it's not cool anymore. Like, I don't know a lot
Speaker 5: of people who use Facebook in the same way that
Speaker 5: they might have in like two thousand and eight, and
Speaker 5: the people that I do know who use it are
Speaker 5: generally older and therefore, I mean, perhaps more susceptible to
Speaker 5: fake AI images. And then I wrote that article, and
Speaker 5: there was also some different meme accounts on Instagram and
Speaker 5: on Twitter who took screenshots of shrimp Jesus, and they
Speaker 5: started saying Facebook is cooked. Facebook is became a meme
Speaker 5: meaning look at what's happening over on Facebook. All the
Speaker 5: old people are getting tricked into liking this absurd stuff.
Speaker 5: And so that is a moment where AI slop escaped Facebook.
Speaker 2: Shrimp Jesus went viral in April of twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: At the time, I remember thinking it was pretty funny.
Speaker 2: I actually interviewed Jason about it and we basically spent
Speaker 2: half an hour just laughing. But now, just a year later,
Speaker 2: AI slap isn't only on Facebook tricking our parents. It's everywhere,
Speaker 2: and it's not just bizarre or obviously fake stuff like
Speaker 2: shrimp Jesus anymore. Some of those fake la fire videos
Speaker 2: looked real, and they fooled a lot of people, so.
Speaker 3: Which came right here just to check out the fires,
Speaker 3: and there's nothing burnie in Hollywood.
Speaker 5: The sign like you was shown on TV last night.
Speaker 3: You guys should help each other out instead of trying
Speaker 3: to create false narratives and trying to promote bus, you know,
Speaker 3: help help each other out. It's not it's not it's
Speaker 3: not right.
Speaker 2: This is the latest iteration of AI content, more realistic,
Speaker 2: more targeted, and tied to real world events.
Speaker 5: That's the scary thing about it, right, is that when
Speaker 5: I first started writing about this, there was almost nothing
Speaker 5: that was political or tied to the news in any way.
Speaker 5: It was almost all like, look at this crazy food,
Speaker 5: look at this amazing futuristic sci fi scenescape, look at
Speaker 5: shrimp Jesus, look at this sand sculpture. And then what
Speaker 5: has happened is the people making this stuff have realized
Speaker 5: that they can get more attention if they start tying
Speaker 5: it to the news in some way.
Speaker 2: So one night, as the fires were still burning in La,
Speaker 2: I opened up Instagram, and this was kind of everyone's
Speaker 2: way of communicating, and it was also kind of a lifeline.
Speaker 2: When you look at someone's stories, you never knew if
Speaker 2: it was going to be them saying, hey, I'm okay,
Speaker 2: I'm safe, or if it was going to be them
Speaker 2: showing their house burning down. So I'm scrolling through and
Speaker 2: I see this video of animals that are in a
Speaker 2: burning forest and there's firefighters saving the baby animals. There's
Speaker 2: a firefighter holding these two baby bear cubs and carrying
Speaker 2: them out of the flames. Pretty quickly, I realized, wait
Speaker 2: a second, this is fake. And then I look at
Speaker 2: the view count. It's in the millions and there's thousands
Speaker 2: of comments. I get curious and I look at the
Speaker 2: username future rider US. That's kind of weird. So I
Speaker 2: look at the post history, and most of the posts
Speaker 2: were of these AI motorcycles that were riding through futuristic landscapes,
Speaker 2: so the name makes sense for those. But I scroll
Speaker 2: up and I see that as soon who as the
Speaker 2: fire started, they posted a fake Hollywood sign burning video
Speaker 2: that got them a million views, and that was their
Speaker 2: biggest success to that point, and they just kept posting
Speaker 2: fire content after that.
Speaker 5: The thing that's happened alongside of that is the AI
Speaker 5: has gotten a lot better. The AI has gotten a
Speaker 5: lot more convincing.
Speaker 2: I said, I was able to tell this it's fake,
Speaker 2: but it took me a second. And the comments are
Speaker 2: kind of mixed. There's some people who are completely unaware
Speaker 2: that this stuff is fake and saying things like, Wow,
Speaker 2: look at these brave firefighters. I'm so glad they're helping
Speaker 2: the animals. But there's other people who are posting angry
Speaker 2: comments like how dare you make fake content about this disaster?
Speaker 5: And so now you have a lot of people who
Speaker 5: are making stuff that is designed to hit the news
Speaker 5: cycle in some way, to upset people, to enrage people,
Speaker 5: or to trick them. It's not just on face Book.
Speaker 5: It's on YouTube, it's on TikTok, It's on Instagram. You know,
Speaker 5: I've even seen it on Pinterest and LinkedIn. So it's
Speaker 5: really become a strategy for people who want to make
Speaker 5: money on the internet at this point.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's weird because it seemed like everything trickled down
Speaker 2: to Facebook in the past few years. Good features from
Speaker 2: somewhere else eventually make it over to Facebook. Information that
Speaker 2: first happens on Twitter, because it's really real time, eventually
Speaker 2: makes it over to Facebook. It's not like this really
Speaker 2: weird thing that has started on Facebook is spread out
Speaker 2: to the rest of the world.
Speaker 5: It's the first time Facebook's irrelevant in like a decade.
Speaker 2: This is the innovation that's happening on Facebook. No joke.
Speaker 2: Yeah is aislab. But when was it that you first
Speaker 2: started seeing stuff that was realistic and was directly tied
Speaker 2: to actual events that were happening in the real world.
Speaker 5: There was this moment where in Israel's invasion of Gaza,
Speaker 5: there was that moment where they went into Rafa and
Speaker 5: there was an AI generated image called all Eyes on Rafa.
Speaker 2: Can you describe the image?
Speaker 5: Yeah, So it was huge font and it said all
Speaker 5: eyes on Rafa. There was like a bunch of tents
Speaker 5: and what looked to be like a refugee camp. And
Speaker 5: this was shared like tens of millions of times on Instagram.
Speaker 5: A lot of celebrities shared it. There was a bunch
Speaker 5: of people writing about it. So I started looking for
Speaker 5: where it came from, and I found this group on
Speaker 5: Facebook for AI creators in Malaysia and they were testing
Speaker 5: all of these different versions of AI generated images about
Speaker 5: the war in Gaza, and the all Eyes on Rafa
Speaker 5: image came from that Facebook group. So that was the
Speaker 5: first time that I ever saw AI spam intersect directly
Speaker 5: with the news, and it was interesting because in that
Speaker 5: group they were talking about the all eyes on Rafa
Speaker 5: image and how viral it went, and we're like, maybe
Speaker 5: we can reverse engineer this, maybe we can do this
Speaker 5: over and over and over again. A month after that,
Speaker 5: I figured out how people were making money with these
Speaker 5: images and why and the whole strategy behind it.
Speaker 2: Who's behind these posts and how do they make money.
Speaker 2: We'll get into that after the break. One of the
Speaker 2: disconnects that I've been seeing just in my own reporting
Speaker 2: is that I think there is an awareness growing among
Speaker 2: some people that AI generated images are a thing, and
Speaker 2: that it's not always obvious if something is AI. But
Speaker 2: I think a lot of people don't necessarily realize why
Speaker 2: this is being made, what motivation there might be.
Speaker 5: For a very long time. I and also the experts
Speaker 5: that I spoke to, One thing that we couldn't figure
Speaker 5: out was like, why are they doing this? Like what
Speaker 5: is the scam here? Because there was no obvious way
Speaker 5: that it was being monetized. For months, I thought that
Speaker 5: people were doing this and trying to make money off
Speaker 5: of Facebook's platform in some way. I thought they were
Speaker 5: trying to hack people I thought they were trying to
Speaker 5: push them off the website to steal their credit card
Speaker 5: information or something like that. But all along they were
Speaker 5: just getting paid directly by Facebook because these images were
Speaker 5: going viral.
Speaker 2: These creators don't need to scam anybody. Having a viral
Speaker 2: video is enough to make a lot of money.
Speaker 5: Facebook has this thing called the Creator Bonus Program, and
Speaker 5: it basically pays people a sliver of ad revenue for
Speaker 5: posts that get engagement.
Speaker 2: How much money can you make? Meta doesn't publish those numbers,
Speaker 2: but I asked a few influencers and recently the rate
Speaker 2: seemed to be around one hundred to one hundred and
Speaker 2: twenty dollars per million views.
Speaker 5: It's become a job to be totally honest with you.
Speaker 5: It's pretty crazy because there's there's like this one example
Speaker 5: of a guy who quit his job in India. He
Speaker 5: was like working in the medical industry and he wasn't
Speaker 5: making a lot of money and he was supporting his
Speaker 5: family and he was like, I used to work like
Speaker 5: sixteen hour days and then I learned about spamming Facebook.
Speaker 5: And he posted this one image that was a train
Speaker 5: made out of leaves. It's like just to passenger train,
Speaker 5: but the train was made entirely out of leaves. It
Speaker 5: was an AI image and he made four hundred dollars
Speaker 5: from that image. And he was like, I was only
Speaker 5: making two hundred dollars a month at my other job. Wow,
Speaker 5: And so I just do this now.
Speaker 2: Wow. And there's the incentive. You can make pretty serious
Speaker 2: money here, which brings us back to future writer us.
Speaker 2: It's not really possible to know exactly how much money
Speaker 2: they're making, but if we go back to that estimate
Speaker 2: of about one hundred bucks per million views, let's compare
Speaker 2: that to their most successful day. In a roughly twenty
Speaker 2: four hour stretch, starting on January tenth, they posted seven
Speaker 2: videos which collectively got about ninety four million views. Theoretically,
Speaker 2: that could work out to nine thousand, four hundred dollars
Speaker 2: in one day. And that's not the only way the
Speaker 2: account makes money. They also sell a guide so that
Speaker 2: you yourself can start your own AI slaw business for
Speaker 2: just nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 6: Want to grow your Instagram TikTok YouTube fast, get thousands
Speaker 6: of followers, create viral reels, and earn five thousand dollars
Speaker 6: plus every month with the Viral Reels Guide it's easier
Speaker 6: than ever. Step by step instructions, proven strategies, the perfect
Speaker 6: for beginners, no experience needed, Ready to start. Grab the
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Speaker 2: This is a key part of the new AI slop economy.
Speaker 5: So there is this entire network of influencers. Almost all
Speaker 5: of them are in India, Vietnam, Pakistan, a couple in
Speaker 5: a few African countries and Central America, but for the
Speaker 5: most part they are in developing countries who have YouTube channels,
Speaker 5: who are like, here is how you can make AI spam,
Speaker 5: and here's how to put it on Facebook, and here's
Speaker 5: how to mind to ties it.
Speaker 2: So as I went further down this Future writer us
Speaker 2: rabbit hole, I got so curious that I realized I
Speaker 2: needed to know what was in this course they were selling,
Speaker 2: So for journalism's sake, I bought it. It's a ZIP
Speaker 2: file with two files. The first one is this really
Speaker 2: short PDF which is pretty clearly chat GBT generated, and
Speaker 2: the summary of it is it basically gives you these instructions.
Speaker 2: First look online for what's already trending at the moment. Second,
Speaker 2: type that into Sora dot Ai to generate a video
Speaker 2: about that thing, add some music, and three posts a
Speaker 2: video online. Then just repeat that multiple times a day.
Speaker 2: The second file is just a seven minute iPhone screen
Speaker 2: recording of them generating a prompt and then uploading that online.
Speaker 5: It's like almost like a pyramid scheme where it's like, well, well,
Speaker 5: this one person made a lot of money and here's
Speaker 5: a guide to doing it, so I'm gonna try as well.
Speaker 5: You just have like tens of thousands of people who
Speaker 5: are trying this, and the end result is the entire
Speaker 5: platform gets spammed.
Speaker 2: So who's the audience for this stuff?
Speaker 5: I mean, there's definitely some strategic thinking about will people
Speaker 5: in the United States, the United Kingdom or Canada care
Speaker 5: about this stuff? That's the strategy. And I know that's
Speaker 5: the strategy because a lot of the videos about how
Speaker 5: to make this stuff talk about here's what people in
Speaker 5: the United States care about. Like I watched one video
Speaker 5: that basically was like Americans love babies and they love pets,
Speaker 5: and so make AI images about babies and pets. I've
Speaker 5: seen guides that are like, here's what you need to
Speaker 5: know about Jesus because you may be Hindu and you
Speaker 5: don't know so like, if you're making AI spam about Jesus,
Speaker 5: here are words to type in that will get you Jesus.
Speaker 5: Because a lot of Americans are Christian. You want people
Speaker 5: in the United States and Canada to look at these
Speaker 5: because the way that online advertising works is if you
Speaker 5: are in a richer country, the ad rates are higher,
Speaker 5: page views from developed countries.
Speaker 7: Are worth more.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but I think the audience is an algorithm. I
Speaker 5: think that the audience is like what what works well
Speaker 5: in the algorithm, because the goal is not to create
Speaker 5: an amazing image or an amazing video that people are
Speaker 5: going to resonate with. The goal is to make people
Speaker 5: linger on any given image or video long enough to
Speaker 5: send a signal to the algorithm that this is something
Speaker 5: that a human being spent time looking at, spend time
Speaker 5: engaging with. You know, if it's something totally absurd, you're
Speaker 5: going to get people in the comment saying, hey, this
Speaker 5: isn't real, and then you're going to have fights back
Speaker 5: and forth, and all of those signals send to the
Speaker 5: algorithm that this is something that's worth surfacing in someone
Speaker 5: else's feed. And so I really don't think that the
Speaker 5: audience for this is real human beings.
Speaker 2: You might have heard that last bit and thought of
Speaker 2: something called the dead Internet theory. It's well, you could
Speaker 2: kind of call it a conspiracy theory, but basically it
Speaker 2: refers to the idea that the Internet has so many
Speaker 2: bots and algorithmically generated content that human interaction is actually
Speaker 2: a minority of the traffic online. The majority of traffic
Speaker 2: is just bots spamming each other back and forth.
Speaker 5: And the way that you would apply this to say,
Speaker 5: shrimp Jesus, for example, is like, well, there's a bot
Speaker 5: that posted this AI image, and then maybe all the
Speaker 5: people liking at our bots, and maybe all the people
Speaker 5: commenting on it our bots, and therefore none of it
Speaker 5: is real.
Speaker 2: But Jason has a slightly different theory.
Speaker 5: I think that's too reductive. I just I don't think
Speaker 5: that that's what's happening, and I know that's not what's happening,
Speaker 5: because there are human beings in the loop. I'm certain
Speaker 5: of it. Like they're human beings who are prompting these
Speaker 5: AI images and are posting them. They may not be
Speaker 5: monitoring the accounts very closely, but they're making it and
Speaker 5: they're posting these images. And then there are definitely bots
Speaker 5: who are liking and commenting on some of these images.
Speaker 5: But these images and these photos and these you know,
Speaker 5: videos are showing up in people's feeds. So I've called
Speaker 5: the zombie Internet, where it's like a mix of human
Speaker 5: beings and bots, where you have human beings arguing in
Speaker 5: the comments with bots. You have human beings in the
Speaker 5: comments arguing with other human beings. You have bots in
Speaker 5: the comments arguing with other bots. And it's to me,
Speaker 5: that's even worse than dead Internet, where everyone is a bot,
Speaker 5: because you have all of these real humans who can't
Speaker 5: tell that they're commenting on an AI generated image and
Speaker 5: they're arguing about it, and they're spending tons of time,
Speaker 5: like tons of like you know, human hours, engaging with it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like we're humans are moving amongst the dead, and
Speaker 2: you end up with something that's only kind of half
Speaker 2: alive and half dead and somewhere in the middle there. So,
Speaker 2: while humans might not be the target audience for these
Speaker 2: images and videos, real people are being fed this content
Speaker 2: and you'd think that that would piss them off, but
Speaker 2: we're starting to find out that that's not necessarily the case.
Speaker 5: So there was a Hurricane Helene that hit you know,
Speaker 5: North Carolina, Georgia the southeast and in the aftermath that
Speaker 5: there were a lot of horrible images coming out of it,
Speaker 5: has come out of any natural disaster, and there was
Speaker 5: an AI generated image of a three year old girl
Speaker 5: crying and I think she was like sitting on a
Speaker 5: raft or you know, there was like a flood around her.
Speaker 5: And this image is very clearly AI generated, but it
Speaker 5: went really viral and it was shared by a few
Speaker 5: Republican politicians and they were sort of talking about how
Speaker 5: this is what FEMA and Joe Biden's poor response to
Speaker 5: the hurricane has done to people, right and there was
Speaker 5: a moment where everyone was like, this is fake, You're stupid,
Speaker 5: And the response from the politicians were like, I don't
Speaker 5: care if it's real or not. Something like this is
Speaker 5: happening there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I'll even read it here. This is
Speaker 2: Amy Kramer, the National Committee woman for the Republican National Convention, said,
Speaker 2: I'm reading this verbatim. There are people going through much
Speaker 2: worse than what is shown in this pic. So I'm
Speaker 2: leaving it because it is emblematic of the trauma and
Speaker 2: pain people are living through right now. That is something
Speaker 2: that I've seen a lot when I look at the
Speaker 2: comment sections of fake AI generated images that are related
Speaker 2: to something that's actually happening in the real world, you'll
Speaker 2: see people in the comments who were, I think, in
Speaker 2: their own way, trying to make the Internet a better
Speaker 2: place by telling people, hey, this is fake and trying
Speaker 2: to educate people. And then some of those responses though,
Speaker 2: are well, I don't care if this is fake. It
Speaker 2: doesn't matter because I'm sure something like this is happening.
Speaker 2: This is just a depiction of it. Yeah, that I
Speaker 2: find really interesting.
Speaker 5: It's really interesting, and I'll tell you like I used
Speaker 5: to be more optimistic that social media can be fixed
Speaker 5: and like her information ecosystems can be fixed and things
Speaker 5: like that, and a lot of my first articles about
Speaker 5: this were about people can't tell that they're not real,
Speaker 5: and therefore it's bad that people can't tell that it's
Speaker 5: not real. And now it's a mix of people not
Speaker 5: being able to tell that these things are not real
Speaker 5: and people not caring that they're not real. And the
Speaker 5: second one is almost worse, where you know it's fake,
Speaker 5: but you share it anyway because it captures some sort
Speaker 5: of vibe, like if it verifies their worldview, then it's
Speaker 5: useful to them in some way. Making it very unclear
Speaker 5: what is real and what is fake is part of
Speaker 5: the point of that entire project, where the truth is unknowable.
Speaker 2: What are social media platforms doing about this? And is
Speaker 2: there anything that we can do about it? That's after
Speaker 2: the break, So this is where I have to ask
Speaker 2: about what the platforms are doing, because this sounds like
Speaker 2: it would make the experience really not fun. You get
Speaker 2: on Facebook, you get on Instagram, you get on TikTok,
Speaker 2: and everything is fake. Platforms can't possibly want this. So
Speaker 2: you've talked to platforms, what's been the responsive places, especially
Speaker 2: like Facebook.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they don't care, like they like it, and I
Speaker 5: know that they like it because Mark Zuckerberg has talked
Speaker 5: about it in quarterly earnings reports Q three of last year.
Speaker 7: Another part that I haven't talked about quite as much
Speaker 7: yet is the opportunity for AI to help people create content.
Speaker 7: And I think we're going to add a whole new
Speaker 7: category of content, which is AI generated or AI summarized content.
Speaker 7: And I think that that's going to be just very
Speaker 7: exciting for the for Facebook and Instagram and maybe threads
Speaker 7: or other kind of feed experiences over time, and.
Speaker 5: I've also talked to Facebook comms people and said, like,
Speaker 5: do you want this type of stuff on your platform?
Speaker 5: Are you going to delete it? And you know, they
Speaker 5: will delete some of the really grotesque things if it
Speaker 5: violates other parts of their content policies, but they will
Speaker 5: not delete anything just because it is AI generated or
Speaker 5: because it's spam. And at the same time, Meta is
Speaker 5: developing its own artificial intelligence. You can make AI slop
Speaker 5: for lack of a better term, using Meta's own tools
Speaker 5: and then post it to Facebook. And then most recently
Speaker 5: that they said, you know, we're going to hopefully create
Speaker 5: tools that will allow users to make their own AI
Speaker 5: generated profiles of fake people. And we imagine a future
Speaker 5: where like a lot of the content on these platforms
Speaker 5: is generated by AI.
Speaker 2: Jason, why like this seems like a bad All this
Speaker 2: stuff seems bad.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I've tried to figure out exactly why this is happening,
Speaker 5: Like I've tried to put myself in Mark Zuckerberg's shoes
Speaker 5: and be like, Okay, what is like the bullish argument here?
Speaker 5: And so one, it's like they're spending billions and billions
Speaker 5: of dollars on AI data centers, so they need to
Speaker 5: push this on people because they think that artificial intelligence
Speaker 5: is the future of work, it's the future of the Internet,
Speaker 5: it's the future of humanity, and so they are desperate
Speaker 5: to find use cases for this in some way. The
Speaker 5: other thing that I've been thinking about is that the
Speaker 5: way that all of Meta's platforms work is it tries
Speaker 5: to learn as much about you as possible so that
Speaker 5: you stay on their platforms as long as possible so
Speaker 5: that they can deliver targeted ads to you. And right
Speaker 5: now they have billions of people posting on their platforms
Speaker 5: all sorts of different types of content, and then they
Speaker 5: need to rely on their algorithm to categorize that content
Speaker 5: in some way and deliver it to people who they
Speaker 5: think will like it. And what I think is happening
Speaker 5: here is they want to use artificial intelligence to create
Speaker 5: hyper specific types of content so that you get on
Speaker 5: their platforms and you don't stop scrolling. It's like, if
Speaker 5: you are really into, like a specific type of sports
Speaker 5: car and you only want to see like amazing videos
Speaker 5: of that sports car driving around, there might not be
Speaker 5: human beings creating enough of that content to like satisfy
Speaker 5: you and keep you on that platform. Long enough, Whereas
Speaker 5: with artificial intelligence, they can just make millions of different
Speaker 5: variations of the specific thing that you're into, feed it
Speaker 5: to you over and over and over again, and then
Speaker 5: you know, target you even more close to with ads
Speaker 5: and keep you on the platform longer. They want to
Speaker 5: trap people into like even more specific algorithmic silos where
Speaker 5: hyper specific, artificially intelligent content is fed to you endlessly.
Speaker 2: Which brings us back to our guy or gal. I
Speaker 2: actually don't know, future writer us. I'd seen all these
Speaker 2: angry comments in their posts, and I decided I just
Speaker 2: needed to see what the person behind the account was thinking,
Speaker 2: so I DM them. They told me they were Russian,
Speaker 2: and at first they were mostly bragging about how many
Speaker 2: views they were getting. But when I pointed out that
Speaker 2: a lot of people were either angry about their posts
Speaker 2: or had no idea that it was fake, they started
Speaker 2: getting defensive. Future writer us said that they didn't see
Speaker 2: the problem because they'd added an AI tag to their videos,
Speaker 2: and well, they have a point. Instagram does have a
Speaker 2: feature that allows uploaders to voluntarily tag their posts as
Speaker 2: AI generated. The trouble is that this label doesn't show
Speaker 2: up when you're watching the video Normally, you only see
Speaker 2: it if you look at the bottom and there's a
Speaker 2: C more tag and you tap that, and even then
Speaker 2: space is prioritized for the song title, so sometimes that
Speaker 2: tag is pushed off the screen and all it says
Speaker 2: is AI info in small text in the bottom right,
Speaker 2: and if you tap that, it shows you some more
Speaker 2: information AI info, not AI warning, not AI caution, just
Speaker 2: AI info. Why would you ever tap that? Meta has
Speaker 2: a page on their site that makes a big deal
Speaker 2: about the introduction of this tag, and they primarily show
Speaker 2: what it looks like in the grid view. The issue
Speaker 2: is that it's even more imperceptible there. So when you
Speaker 2: first look at a post and the grid, you see
Speaker 2: the location tag, then you see the music title, and
Speaker 2: that scrolls in a view for a few moments. Only
Speaker 2: after that does the text AI info appear. By that
Speaker 2: you're watching the video, you're not looking at tiny text
Speaker 2: rolls in the upper corner of your screen. And also,
Speaker 2: Meta never notified users that they were rolling this feature out.
Speaker 2: Why would anyone know that this exists? And by the way,
Speaker 2: I did reach out to Meta when I was first
Speaker 2: reporting on this, and I asked them about their policy
Speaker 2: on AI on their platform, specifically, if there's any obligation
Speaker 2: for a user to more clearly label a post as
Speaker 2: AI other than that small badge, or why the desktop
Speaker 2: doesn't show the badge at all. They never responded, and
Speaker 2: this is where I have to kind of agree with
Speaker 2: Future writer us. They said that if people don't notice
Speaker 2: the interfaces AI tag, it's not the poster's fault, it's Instagram's,
Speaker 2: and it's the platform's responsibility to make those tags bigger
Speaker 2: or more noticeable. That doesn't seem to be happening, and
Speaker 2: since both the AI slot posters and the platforms are
Speaker 2: making money, there's no real incentive for anyone to stop.
Speaker 2: But it does get weird when this stuff is happening
Speaker 2: in a place that you live. You've been reporting on
Speaker 2: AI slap a lot, and I'm sure that when you
Speaker 2: saw the Hollywood sign thing on fire, youknew exactly what
Speaker 2: that was. Was there anything about the AI generated slap
Speaker 2: that was coming from the LA fires that was surprising
Speaker 2: to you?
Speaker 5: I wasn't surprised that it happened, like I wasn't surprised
Speaker 5: that people were making slop about it. I was surprised
Speaker 5: that it upset me, like I was surprised, as someone
Speaker 5: who lives in Los Angeles, who knows people who lost
Speaker 5: their homes, who saw the fires like you know, the
Speaker 5: first day as they were growing. I was surprised that
Speaker 5: I was upset that this was happening and that people
Speaker 5: were making money off of it. And I think I
Speaker 5: was also upset because there were some really brave journalists
Speaker 5: from the LA Times, New York Times, a lot of
Speaker 5: local spots who were going there take photos, taking videos,
Speaker 5: risking their lives to share this stuff. And then many
Speaker 5: of the images and videos that were going really viral
Speaker 5: were just like the Hollywood Sign is on fire. And
Speaker 5: I was surprised because it was like the first time
Speaker 5: that aislop had impacted anything that had any personal meaning
Speaker 5: to me, and I found it to be like pretty upsetting.
Speaker 2: It's interesting that you say that about people risking their
Speaker 2: lives because the creator, when people started calling them out
Speaker 2: a lot on their most viral reel, they posted a
Speaker 2: response and they say, I'm Marita here. In this video,
Speaker 2: I aimed to shed light on the reality of what's happening.
Speaker 2: The problems are very real. Animals are dying, homes are
Speaker 2: being destroyed, and firefighters are risking their lives to save others.
Speaker 2: They don't have the time to produce visually stunning and
Speaker 2: powerful footage to raise awareness about these issues. That's why
Speaker 2: I took the initiative to create something that could help
Speaker 2: people see and truly think about these tragedies. So basically,
Speaker 2: people are risking their lives, they don't have time to
Speaker 2: make these really well produced things, so I made this
Speaker 2: for you. Which, of course, this all breaks down when
Speaker 2: right after the fires stop being in the news as much,
Speaker 2: they go on to making completely other unrelated AI generated content.
Speaker 5: I find it to be offensive more or less. It's
Speaker 5: just like it's I think it's kind of tasteless. I
Speaker 5: don't think that that matters anymore on the Internet. But
Speaker 5: you know, there were plenty of images coming out of
Speaker 5: the La Fires, and we don't need an unlimited, infinite
Speaker 5: visual gallery of everything that is happening. And I think
Speaker 5: that's one of the biggest problems with AI slot more generally,
Speaker 5: is that you can find any news that you want,
Speaker 5: anything that confirms your worldview because of and because of
Speaker 5: social media. So it's like, if you think that the
Speaker 5: La fires was an act of God punishing gay people
Speaker 5: in Los Angeles, which I've seen AI videos where that's
Speaker 5: what they're about, Like God is striking back against Hollywood's
Speaker 5: gay people. There's a video for you. If you think
Speaker 5: that it was like a space laser, there's a video
Speaker 5: for you. Like if you think that it was just
Speaker 5: like climate change, there's a video for you. If you
Speaker 5: only care about the animals that lost their homes, like,
Speaker 5: there's a video for you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it just feels like something we're gonna see more
Speaker 2: and more. You know, every time there's some new advancement
Speaker 2: or some new engine has dropped, some new you know,
Speaker 2: AI technology is dropped, people look at it, and the
Speaker 2: really excited people will post, oh my gosh, look at
Speaker 2: this and just think we're able to accomplish this today.
Speaker 2: But this is the worst it'll ever be. What does
Speaker 2: that mean for the future of AI slop and the
Speaker 2: future of how we're going to experience reality on the internet.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So two things. One that's absolutely correct. It's like
Speaker 5: I've watched this stuff evolve in real time, and AI
Speaker 5: generated videos especially have gotten far more realistic in the
Speaker 5: last month and way way way better than they were
Speaker 5: a year ago. And two the people were saying, like
Speaker 5: we can use artificial intelligence to improve special effects for Hollywood,
Speaker 5: to improve productivity for you know, writers or whatever like that.
Speaker 5: All the productivity gains that are going to happen in
Speaker 5: sort of like a best case use of artificial intelligence,
Speaker 5: that very well might be true. But alongside of that,
Speaker 5: you're going to have so many more people using these
Speaker 5: tools to spam the Internet, to abuse people, to make
Speaker 5: deep fakes of you know, celebrities and people that they
Speaker 5: know in high school and things like that. And when
Speaker 5: you're just like using the Internet as a consumer like that,
Speaker 5: that's a lot of what you're going to experience because
Speaker 5: there's a lot more people trying to make a few
Speaker 5: bucks on Facebook than there are Hollywood studios that are
Speaker 5: trying to make like a triple A film.
Speaker 2: So one last thing before I let Jason go, I
Speaker 2: asked if he could read me this one paragraph from
Speaker 2: his shrimp Jesus article, and hopefully it'll make sense why I.
Speaker 5: Asked, there are AI generated pages full of AI deformed women,
Speaker 5: breastfeeding tiny cows, celebrities with amputations that they do not
Speaker 5: have in real life. Jesus as a shrimp, Jesus as
Speaker 5: a collection of Phanto bottles, Jesus as sand sculpture, Jesus
Speaker 5: as a series of ramen noodles, Jesus as a shrimp
Speaker 5: mixed with sprite bottles and ramen noodles. Jesus made a
Speaker 5: plastic bottles and posing with large breasted AI generated female soldiers.
Speaker 5: Jesus on a plane with AI generated sexy fe flight attendants,
Speaker 5: giant gold Jesus being evacuated from a river, golden helicopter,
Speaker 5: Jesus banana, Jesus coffee, Jesus goldfish, Jesus rice Jesus, any
Speaker 5: number of AI generated female soldiers on a page called
Speaker 5: beautiful Military, a page called everything skull, which is exactly
Speaker 5: what it sounds like. Malnourished dogs, indigenous identity pages, beautiful landscapes,
Speaker 5: flower arrangements, weird cakes, et cetera. I should write like
Speaker 5: that more often, where it's just like, here's a bunch
Speaker 5: of shit I saw.
Speaker 2: I mean, just the breadth and the absolute unhinged quality
Speaker 2: of it. I think it gives. It's a wild snapshot
Speaker 2: of where we were. What is this last year? That
Speaker 2: was the state of Ai back then was slop, was
Speaker 2: kind of funny, and now not that long long after this,
Speaker 2: we're now in the zone where aislop is being used
Speaker 2: to make people afraid. It's being used to make people
Speaker 2: think the things that are happening that are obviously not happening.
Speaker 2: And this is affecting people who otherwise think that they're
Speaker 2: very smart and informed and engaged and knowledgeable about the world.
Speaker 2: So we've made a jump, a really quick jump from Hahaha,
Speaker 2: isn't this funny all of us smart nerds on the
Speaker 2: internet get to laugh at our parents' generation to wait
Speaker 2: a second, this is affecting stuff that's affecting our perception
Speaker 2: of a literal natural disaster that happened where you and
Speaker 2: I live.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean almost everything is trying to scare people.
Speaker 5: It's trying to talk about the news, it's trying to
Speaker 5: confuse people. And yeah, there's definitely a part of me
Speaker 5: where I'm like, can we go back to Jesus with
Speaker 5: the hot flight tence? Like what are we doing here?
Speaker 2: And here we are?
Speaker 5: Yeah, And like I feel like I can still generally
Speaker 5: tell what's AI generated and what's not, but I'm using
Speaker 5: like way more of my brain power like to try
Speaker 5: to decipher what's real and what's not because it is
Speaker 5: getting way better.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for listening to kill Switch and
Speaker 2: let us know what you think. If there's something we
Speaker 2: want us to cover, let us know that too. You
Speaker 2: can hit us at kill Switch at Kaleidoscope dot NYC,
Speaker 2: or you can find me at dex Digi on the
Speaker 2: Gram or Blue Sky if that's more your flavor. And
Speaker 2: also if you can leave us a review, it helps
Speaker 2: other people find the show, which helps us keep doing
Speaker 2: our thing. This show is hosted by me Dexter Thomas.
Speaker 2: It's produced by Seno Ozaki, Darluk Potts, and Kate Osborne.
Speaker 2: The theme song is by Kyle Murdoch, who also mixed
Speaker 2: the show from Kaleidoscope Or execut Native producers are Oz
Speaker 2: Valascian on Guest, Kaki Kadur, and Kate Osbourne from iHeart
Speaker 2: Our Executive producers are Katrina Norbl and Nikki E. Tor See.
Speaker 2: All in the next one h