Speaker 1: From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is tech stuff, I'm
Speaker 1: as Voloscian and.
Speaker 2: I'm care Price.
Speaker 1: Today we get into what the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's
Speaker 1: assassination tells us about the state of content moderation and
Speaker 1: also how teens in New York City are responding to
Speaker 1: having their smartphones banned in schools.
Speaker 2: Then, on Chatting Me, a woman turns to chat GPT
Speaker 2: to help her mom with a mysterious ailment.
Speaker 3: Her life was very diminished because she couldn't walk upstairs,
Speaker 3: she was having really poor sleeps because the pain would
Speaker 3: wake her up in the night, and overall, she just
Speaker 3: started to feel like she was really declining in her health.
Speaker 1: Overall, all of that on the Weekend Tech, It's Friday,
Speaker 1: September nineteenth.
Speaker 2: Hi Cara, Hi os.
Speaker 1: So normally we start these episodes a bit more lighthearted,
Speaker 1: but of course, the major news of the last week
Speaker 1: has been anything but lighthearted with the assassination of the
Speaker 1: right wing pundit and influencer Charlie Kirk.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it seems kind of like the only news story
Speaker 2: right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and obviously it does have a lot of overlap
Speaker 1: with tech, especially social media. From the gaming references inscribed
Speaker 1: on the bullets to the Internet communities. The shooter was
Speaker 1: part of to the way Charlie Kirk himself sort of
Speaker 1: reshaped the way social media is used for political organizing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and of course there's the countless memes and takes
Speaker 2: following a major news event like this.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I was actually talking to a friend of mine
Speaker 1: the other day about the video of the assassination, and
Speaker 1: he said to me, you know, in the old days
Speaker 1: on the Internet, I might have to go looking for
Speaker 1: this kind of horrific, very disturbing, almost real time content,
Speaker 1: But these days I have to basically do everything I
Speaker 1: can to avoid seeing it. And that really stuck with me,
Speaker 1: because in the past, you would have to go in
Speaker 1: search of this kind of confrontation with a video of
Speaker 1: someone being murdered in plain sight, but now it's plastered
Speaker 1: over every social media app. Over the last few months,
Speaker 1: we've seen all kinds of stories reporting about how the
Speaker 1: social media platforms have been pulling back on content moderation,
Speaker 1: either because of the politics at the moment or simply
Speaker 1: to save costs.
Speaker 2: Yeah. You know, I've also seen a bunch of stories
Speaker 2: about companies like TikTok and meta replacing human content moderators
Speaker 2: with AI, which apparently has had mixed results.
Speaker 1: I'm going to put my hand up because on the
Speaker 1: face of it, I'm not that drawn to stories about
Speaker 1: content moderation.
Speaker 2: You fight against them, Actually.
Speaker 1: I fight against them. We get pitched it quite regularly
Speaker 1: by our wonderful producers. The last time was when Facebook
Speaker 1: replaced their content moderation system largely with these things called
Speaker 1: community notes, where the community itself flags if something it's
Speaker 1: misinformation or hateful, et cetera, etc. But this week is
Speaker 1: obviously something we couldn't avoid, and it feels to me
Speaker 1: I almost feel a little bit embarrassed about not having
Speaker 1: focus on this earlier, because it feels like one of
Speaker 1: those frog in the pot moments where it's a little late.
Speaker 2: To jump out and you think we're boiling.
Speaker 1: I think we're boiling, or perhaps even boiled. It was
Speaker 1: a story and why that really brought it home to me.
Speaker 1: With the headline Charlie Kirk was shot and killed in
Speaker 1: a post content moderation world, the wide article points out
Speaker 1: that very few of the videos of the shooting that
Speaker 1: are all over various social media have content warnings, and
Speaker 1: actually a ton of them play automatically before viewers have
Speaker 1: the chance to consent to what they're about to see.
Speaker 2: Yeah, auto play in this sense is not your friend,
Speaker 2: and I think it probably accounts for the dissemination of
Speaker 2: this video more so than just the average person looking
Speaker 2: for it. And whenever a video like this, most recent
Speaker 2: Charlie Kirk killing video comes out, I think about the
Speaker 2: at which video is now disseminated and how ill prepared
Speaker 2: the Internet is to handle it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Also, I mean shooting in four K from close up.
Speaker 1: I mean the horror of this video, at least in
Speaker 1: what I've read about it, is quite striking. Experts in
Speaker 1: the wide piece who have been tracking the spread of
Speaker 1: the videos online say that a lot of the platforms
Speaker 1: are actually failing to enforce their own content moderation rules,
Speaker 1: but also that it's kind of a tricky situation because
Speaker 1: the video falls in between quote graphic content, which is allowed,
Speaker 1: and quote glorified violence, which usually isn't right.
Speaker 2: And then there's the fact that this is like a
Speaker 2: major news event, which I'm sure makes it even more complicated.
Speaker 1: Definitely, it's also the culmination of some fairly major political
Speaker 1: and philosophical changes to the way social media platforms are run.
Speaker 1: Of course, we all remember when Elon Musk brought Twitter
Speaker 1: back in twenty twenty two. He loosened content restrictions pretty
Speaker 1: much immediately, and Bettie said this was in response to
Speaker 1: what he claimed was suppression of conservative leaning post hosts.
Speaker 1: Then YouTube and Meta both followed suit. In twenty twenty three,
Speaker 1: YouTube said that curbing misinformation could lead to quote the
Speaker 1: unintended effect of curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the
Speaker 1: risk of violence or other real world harm. In twenty
Speaker 1: twenty five, Meta cited quote recent elections as a reason
Speaker 1: to quote remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender
Speaker 1: that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and now the whole Internet is basically four chan basically.
Speaker 1: I mean. The interesting thing, though, as Wide points out,
Speaker 1: is that the more established platforms do still have real
Speaker 1: rules around content moderation, and in many cases the circulation
Speaker 1: and distribution of the assassination footage violates those rules. But
Speaker 1: nonetheless the videos are getting millions and millions of views
Speaker 1: and are still up and circulating widely.
Speaker 2: So what is your takeaway from all of this?
Speaker 1: I mean, it's this kind of confection of corrosive and
Speaker 1: divisive rhetoric online translating into offline, translating back into online.
Speaker 1: This kind of vicious circle or a buros of radicalization.
Speaker 1: And there's an expert quoted who'd observe people on x
Speaker 1: commenting on the video of the Charlie Kirk assassination saying
Speaker 1: that it heradicalized them. Now, it didn't say in which direction.
Speaker 1: We may be able to infer that it radicalize them
Speaker 1: against the left, but either way, I mean, this is
Speaker 1: just another moment that I'm very concerned about, and I
Speaker 1: think everyone is will further harden the lines and further
Speaker 1: feed this beast of online radicalization and real world violence.
Speaker 2: You know, this story really encapsulates practically all of the
Speaker 2: harms that people fear that social media might unleash onto
Speaker 2: the world. The story that I want to report on
Speaker 2: today has to do with the effects of technology actually
Speaker 2: on our younger citizens and is a little more lighthearted.
Speaker 2: Have you heard about the cell phone band in New York?
Speaker 1: A little bit, but tell me more so.
Speaker 2: New York City public schools recently became the largest district
Speaker 2: in the United States to ban students from using cell
Speaker 2: phones during a school day. So this is a state
Speaker 2: wide law, and it's something that's happening more and more
Speaker 2: across the country. California and Louisiana also have restrictions, and
Speaker 2: this week marks the second week since the band went
Speaker 2: into effect in New York.
Speaker 1: I kind of can't believe this is happening. It feels
Speaker 1: like the pipe dream of so many digital and social
Speaker 1: media theorists being an actually in real life, how's it going?
Speaker 2: You know? When I saw it, I was like, is
Speaker 2: this for real? You know, like it feels that sort
Speaker 2: of unbelievable. I actually did some reporting on this. We
Speaker 2: have a friend whose child, Ruby is a middle schooler
Speaker 2: in Brooklyn, New York, and they were kind enough to
Speaker 2: send us some voice memos about their experience with the
Speaker 2: phone band. So here are some of the things they
Speaker 2: say are tough about the phone ban.
Speaker 4: The one good thing about on phones at school is
Speaker 4: that we can't take videos of other people. I mean,
Speaker 4: sometimes we want to like record something within our phone
Speaker 4: group that we think is funny, like recording one of
Speaker 4: us eating a ginormous hamburger or something funny like that.
Speaker 4: Sometimes it's hard when it's like a fight or something,
Speaker 4: it's really not good to have.
Speaker 2: A phone out.
Speaker 1: I mean, not having a digital record of all of
Speaker 1: the shenanigans at school is something I think many kids
Speaker 1: will be grateful for in future and parents are probably
Speaker 1: grateful for today. But how does this actually work practicing?
Speaker 1: How do you stop kids from using their phones at school?
Speaker 2: Different schools are actually taking different approaches to the phone band.
Speaker 2: Most of them either confiscate students' phones at the beginning
Speaker 2: of the day and put them in lockers or these
Speaker 2: magnetic pouches that have locks in them. But Ruby also
Speaker 2: said that some kids and their parents just like literally
Speaker 2: don't care about the rules at all.
Speaker 5: A lot of kids just don't give him their phones
Speaker 5: and they lie that they don't have a device, and
Speaker 5: their parents sign it because their parents don't really care,
Speaker 5: and then they just have their phones out in launch.
Speaker 2: This probably would have been me to be honest.
Speaker 1: Would your parents have signed the fake waiver that you
Speaker 1: actually don't have a phone?
Speaker 2: No, they were kind of rule followers, unfortunately, But I
Speaker 2: would have figured out a way to hack. That would
Speaker 2: have been part of the fun of going to school.
Speaker 2: There was this article that really caught my eye from
Speaker 2: Gotham Mist, which has this amazing headline from burner phones
Speaker 2: to decks of cards and YC. Teens are adjusting to
Speaker 2: the smartphone ban, and the reporters of this article talk
Speaker 2: to a bunch of teenagers about how they're adapting to
Speaker 2: the ban, and a lot of these teenagers are embracing
Speaker 2: their low tech school day. Now they're playing with Polaroid cameras,
Speaker 2: which have made a huge comeback. And it's just interesting
Speaker 2: to me that teens have been forced into the dark
Speaker 2: and have found new light with things that we were
Speaker 2: just doing twenty years ago.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean the twenty year ago equivalent of this.
Speaker 1: When I was a kid, my greatest pleasure was watching
Speaker 1: TV and playing with my PlayStation one. I lived in
Speaker 1: the countryside in England and we would have these blackouts
Speaker 1: or power out from time to time, I didn't know
Speaker 1: once every six months, and my mom would bring out
Speaker 1: the candles and then we'd play a board game or
Speaker 1: play Uno or something which had this kind of sweet
Speaker 1: nostalgic quality to it. At the same time, I was
Speaker 1: very happy that we were plugged in most of the time.
Speaker 1: I didn't have to do it more than a couple
Speaker 1: of times a year.
Speaker 2: And I think what got you into Oxford was how
Speaker 2: good you were at Uno? Had you been playing PlayStation
Speaker 2: one that whole time? God knows, But in all seriousness,
Speaker 2: there does seem to be a sort of nostalgia among
Speaker 2: gen z for the esthetics of really even the two thousands,
Speaker 2: not even so much the nineties, like the two thousands,
Speaker 2: which is so funny to me about having nostalgia for
Speaker 2: a time where I was just a teenager. One student
Speaker 2: quoted in the article said she's looking into whether the
Speaker 2: school would allow her to bring an MP three.
Speaker 1: Player otherwise known as an iPod iPod, And.
Speaker 2: A teacher talked about how some of his students brought
Speaker 2: in a transistor radio but they didn't know they needed
Speaker 2: to extend the antenna, which he had to help him with.
Speaker 1: I love that that is a true that is a
Speaker 1: true teachable moment because this is like almost like a
Speaker 1: scene from a from like a feel good atis TV
Speaker 1: show where the teacher help helps this year, no sun
Speaker 1: you have to extend their antennae. Exactly beyond fueling the
Speaker 1: demand for nostalgia tech, is the phone band really changing
Speaker 1: much about the experience of being at school?
Speaker 2: So that same teacher who extended the antenna said that actually,
Speaker 2: the lunch room is noticeably louder in a good way.
Speaker 2: He said that previously the lunch room was muted, and
Speaker 2: that this band has really lifted a pall. The teacher said,
Speaker 2: this is a huge difference from last year, when kids
Speaker 2: would spend twenty minutes in the bathroom checking their phone
Speaker 2: and walk through the halls in silence with their heads down.
Speaker 2: I know this is true because it sounds like a
Speaker 2: description of me in my own house.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately me too. Ruby mentioned the idea of getting your
Speaker 1: parents to write letters saying you don't have a phone
Speaker 1: in the first place. It's one kind of work around,
Speaker 1: but how compliant to the kids being what are the
Speaker 1: ways around this they're looking for.
Speaker 2: They're coming up with all kinds of ways. So the
Speaker 2: pouches that I told you about that are supposed to
Speaker 2: make phones inaccessible during the day, there's all of these
Speaker 2: tiktoks now showing students breaking into them, and Ruby actually
Speaker 2: says that trying to get them open has become a
Speaker 2: common downtime activity for students. Kids also use their school
Speaker 2: issued laptops to send each other emails or to chat
Speaker 2: each other using Google docs like imagine being so desperate
Speaker 2: that you're dming in Google docs. And of course, you know,
Speaker 2: kids still have access to their phones all the time
Speaker 2: that they're not in school, which is most of the day.
Speaker 2: A couple of teachers in the article talked about chaotic
Speaker 2: scenes at the end of the day when kids finally
Speaker 2: get their phones back, which made me laugh. But overall,
Speaker 2: the band seems to be going kind of well, and
Speaker 2: it may be something that becomes a standard for students
Speaker 2: around the globe. You know, over half US states have
Speaker 2: at least a partial band in place, and there are
Speaker 2: a ton of other countries that have student cell phone
Speaker 2: bands with varying degrees of strictness. Denmark, of course, Australia.
Speaker 2: France has had one for a while but made it
Speaker 2: even more strict earlier this year, and China has had
Speaker 2: one since twenty twenty one.
Speaker 1: It's sort of hard to imagine why it took so long.
Speaker 1: Are there any people who are objecting to this? Apart
Speaker 1: from obviously the students who want to be on their phones.
Speaker 2: All day, there are objectors. Not everybody is happy. The
Speaker 2: president of the National Parents Union actually wrote an op
Speaker 2: ed in USA today saying what we really need are
Speaker 2: smarter rules around phone usage, and that treating all phone
Speaker 2: uses a distraction can cause kids to miss out on
Speaker 2: the ways phones can be helpful to students.
Speaker 1: With all due respect to the president of the National Parents' Union,
Speaker 1: you feel as a certain self selecting quality to that job.
Speaker 1: Is your job to play devil's advocate on every single issue.
Speaker 2: That's right. She argues phones can keep kids safe during
Speaker 2: emergencies and that we should be preparing them for adulthood
Speaker 2: in the modern world by teaching them to have healthy
Speaker 2: relationships with their phones. And also, some parents don't like
Speaker 2: that they suddenly can't get a hold of their kids
Speaker 2: during the school day.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean also, as a parent of kids in school,
Speaker 1: the reality of emergency situations, violence, etc. Is also true.
Speaker 1: So I do understand why parents want to be in
Speaker 1: contact with their kids. But as always in life, you're
Speaker 1: weighing harms, right, and the harm of having your kid
Speaker 1: on their phone all the time at school seems to
Speaker 1: me is somebod who's not a parent to be quite
Speaker 1: significant and a good thing to mitigate.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I think on the whole people really
Speaker 2: like the effects these bands are having, and not just
Speaker 2: in New York. I actually read this blog post that
Speaker 2: aggregated a bunch of social media reactions from teachers in
Speaker 2: states with student phone bands across the country. One teacher
Speaker 2: was saying, has the solution really been this easy the
Speaker 2: whole time? Teachers across the country are saying that libraries
Speaker 2: are busier, behavior issues are down, and that you know
Speaker 2: this is anecdotal, but still. One teacher even wrote that
Speaker 2: kids are passing notes to each other in class instead
Speaker 2: of texting and called it quote beautiful.
Speaker 1: When I was in school, passing notes was quote against
Speaker 1: the rules. But I guess punishment. I guess it's not
Speaker 1: just kids who are nostalgic. Teachers going to be nostalgic too.
Speaker 1: After the break, Elon Musk is briefly supplanted as the
Speaker 1: richest man in the world. A podcast company puts out
Speaker 1: three thousand episodes a week with the help of AI,
Speaker 1: and British members of parliament get accused of using Chat
Speaker 1: to write their speeches. Stay with us, We're back and
Speaker 1: we've got a few more headlines to you this week, and.
Speaker 2: Then a story about how chat GPT helped a woman
Speaker 2: diagnose her mother's mysterious knee problem.
Speaker 1: But first, Kara, have you had a man named Larry Ellison.
Speaker 2: Owner of the island of Lenai I have.
Speaker 1: That's his Awaiian reoubt. What else do you know about him?
Speaker 2: You know, he really burst into consciousness this year. He's
Speaker 2: obviously the CEO of Oracle. He's been spending a bunch
Speaker 2: of time at the White House. We talked about him
Speaker 2: announcing the five hundred billion dollars Stargate Data Center project
Speaker 2: with Donald Trump just a few days after the inauguration.
Speaker 2: He also helped finance his son David's acquisition of Paramount,
Speaker 2: and apparently they're also looking at buying Warner Brothers Discovery.
Speaker 2: I think the company is going to be called Para
Speaker 2: Brothers Discover Warner.
Speaker 1: Twenty twenty five really has been the year of Larry Ellison,
Speaker 1: which is impressive given he's eighty one years old. I
Speaker 1: read a piece in Bloomberg about him that charts some
Speaker 1: of his enthusiasms. There is the private island, which you mentioned.
Speaker 1: He also flies a jet, of course. He once shot
Speaker 1: at his elbow in a high speed bicycle crash and
Speaker 1: punctured his lung body surfing. He also had a cameo
Speaker 1: in the Marvel movie Iron Man two and for one
Speaker 1: brief glimmering moment. Last week, he became the world's richest man,
Speaker 1: overtaking Elon. Ellison's personal wealth peaked at three hundred and
Speaker 1: ninety three billion dollars, just ahead of Elon at three
Speaker 1: hundred and eighty four billion dollars.
Speaker 2: How how did he overtake Elon?
Speaker 1: Well, it all happened because last Tuesday, Oracle announced their
Speaker 1: quarterly results and they surprised the market with extraordinary growth
Speaker 1: in spend on cloud computing services driven by AI demand
Speaker 1: at other tech companies. Essentially, so they announced not one,
Speaker 1: not two, not three, but four multi billion dollar AI
Speaker 1: contracts for their cloud services with three different clients. One
Speaker 1: of those deals was with open Ai and was worth
Speaker 1: three hundred billion dollars. So Oracle shares shot up by
Speaker 1: thirty six percent, and Larry Ellison is Oracle's largest shareholder,
Speaker 1: earning forty percent of the company. So the events of
Speaker 1: last week shot his personal net worth up by one
Speaker 1: hundred billion dollars.
Speaker 2: I said that he fell back behind Elon, though he.
Speaker 1: Did fall back behind Elon, but I think they're they're close,
Speaker 1: although Elon's crown apparently is safe for now. Our friend
Speaker 1: Nick Thompson who's the CEO of The Atlantic, had an
Speaker 1: interesting take on the wider implications of this story. He
Speaker 1: talked about how the fact that Oracle has not built
Speaker 1: its own large language model makes it an attractive, non
Speaker 1: competitive collaborator for a lot of other AI companies, and
Speaker 1: so in a strange sense, Oracle's a kind of legacy
Speaker 1: player has been rewarded for the fact that it wasn't
Speaker 1: at the cutting edge of the air revolution and therefore
Speaker 1: is seen as a non threatening partner by other tech companies.
Speaker 2: There's actually more good news for Oracle investors. As of
Speaker 2: the time of this recording, the US and China are
Speaker 2: expected to announce a deal for TikTok's operations in the
Speaker 2: US to be taken over by Oracle, silver Lake and
Speaker 2: in recent Horowitz, with US investors holding about an eighty
Speaker 2: percent stake and Chinese investors owning the rest. But there's
Speaker 2: actually another AI boom a bruin, and this one is
Speaker 2: in the form of podcasts. I read this really crazy
Speaker 2: article in the Hollywood Reporter recently about a new podcast
Speaker 2: company called in Inception Point Ai, which is a name
Speaker 2: that was only possibly created by AI.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, but I don't think the prompt was very
Speaker 1: good because it's not much of a name for podcast company.
Speaker 1: It's an inception.
Speaker 2: Point as really it's really not, but I guess.
Speaker 1: A good name for an AI company.
Speaker 2: It is a good name for an AI company, which
Speaker 2: this is. So. This podcast network has over five thousand
Speaker 2: shows and they put out over three thousand episodes per
Speaker 2: week in the last two years. They claim to have
Speaker 2: ten million downloads. Inception Point is saying that their secret
Speaker 2: is that they can make a podcast episode in about
Speaker 2: an hour for one dollar or less, and they use
Speaker 2: AI for everything, choosing episode topics based on Google and
Speaker 2: social media trends and then releasing five different versions with
Speaker 2: different SEO friendly titles to see which ones perform best.
Speaker 2: The ones that do well get scaled up, and the
Speaker 2: production process is largely automated, using one hundred and eighty
Speaker 2: four custom AI agents to make episodes that are then
Speaker 2: basically just given quick QC quality ch and some sound
Speaker 2: design from a human producer.
Speaker 1: I don't doubt that you can make an AI podcast
Speaker 1: episode for a dollar. I do wonder if a dollar
Speaker 1: will be enough to pay somebody to spend an hour
Speaker 1: listening to it, or perhaps the audience for these AI
Speaker 1: podcasts is other AIS.
Speaker 2: It just might be you know, I don't think people
Speaker 2: in the actual podcast industry are very thrilled, but the
Speaker 2: inception points CEO Janine Wright, who actually used to be
Speaker 2: the CEO of the podcast company Wondery, insists that this
Speaker 2: is the future and this is my favorite part. She
Speaker 2: says in the article, quote we believe that in the
Speaker 2: near future, half of the people on the planet will
Speaker 2: be AI, and we are the company that's bringing those
Speaker 2: people to life.
Speaker 1: What a truly weird quote. When you're starting a new
Speaker 1: business or fundraising, you always need some kind of bold
Speaker 1: or provocative mission statement. But we believe that in future
Speaker 1: half the people in the world will be AI is
Speaker 1: definitely provocative.
Speaker 2: I want to introduce you to some of these people
Speaker 2: that will make up half of the population of the world,
Speaker 2: people including chef Claire Delish. She's a host. I think
Speaker 2: I would imagine a food podcast or nature expert Nigel Thistledown,
Speaker 2: who has to be English or else. He's definitely not real.
Speaker 2: The episodes on this network cover everything from weather reports
Speaker 2: to cooking and gardening, and the company is looking into
Speaker 2: turning these AI personalities into chatbots that can then interact
Speaker 2: with listeners, though they claim they want to steer clear
Speaker 2: of developing anything that someone would accidentally have a deep
Speaker 2: relationship with. I don't know how anyone could resist a
Speaker 2: relationship with Chef Claire Delish on the basis of the
Speaker 2: content that she's creating.
Speaker 1: But you know, I have to say, this story feels
Speaker 1: like he was hallucinated by it, does AI. I'm also
Speaker 1: somewhat curious about that ten million download number. Did you
Speaker 1: find anything about any kind of listener responses to the
Speaker 1: well of inspiring content?
Speaker 2: Well, other than all of the women who had fallen
Speaker 2: in love with Nigel thistledown in a parasocial relationship. A
Speaker 2: lot of people say that these episodes are not very good,
Speaker 2: and they've also said that they have that kind of
Speaker 2: uncanny quality that still screams text to speech. But Janine
Speaker 2: Wright doesn't really seem to care. In the article, she says, quote,
Speaker 2: I think that people who are still referring to all
Speaker 2: AI generated content as aislop are probably lazy luddites. That's
Speaker 2: I think she's talking to us, because there's a lot
Speaker 2: of really good stuff out there. As for that purported
Speaker 2: ten million download number, a quick glance at the company's
Speaker 2: shows and reviews says they probably don't have a ton
Speaker 2: of listeners. However, with such low overhead, they say they
Speaker 2: only need about twenty downloads per episode to turn a profit.
Speaker 2: Companies take note.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's funny that reference to lazy Luddites. We did
Speaker 1: an episode on tech Stuff a couple of months ago
Speaker 1: with a guy called Brian Merchant who wrote a book
Speaker 1: about the real Luddites, who I think anything but lazy.
Speaker 1: They were kind of pro testers who sacrificed, in many
Speaker 1: cases their lives during the Industrial Revolution to protest against
Speaker 1: how the mechanization of work was making people jobless and
Speaker 1: driving them into poverty. So I think Genine right may
Speaker 1: be wrong on that one. But on the topic of
Speaker 1: unconvincing AI personalities, have you heard about the most recent
Speaker 1: throwdown in the British Parliament?
Speaker 2: No? I have not. I don't feels the followed British politics.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't think that many people do in Britain
Speaker 1: alone in the US. But there's an article in the
Speaker 1: newspaper called The Independent about how several labor MPs have
Speaker 1: been accused by their conservative counterparts of using AI to
Speaker 1: write their speeches, and how could they tell well. One
Speaker 1: of the people making these accusations is Conservative MP Tom Tuggandat,
Speaker 1: who says that labor MP speeches are increasingly starting to
Speaker 1: have more and more americanisms.
Speaker 2: Tom Tuggenhat works with Claire Delish and Nigel Thistledown. Did
Speaker 2: he mention specifically what americanisms are being used?
Speaker 1: Yes, the phrase I rise to speak really got Tom
Speaker 1: hot under the hat. He said, quote I rise to speak,
Speaker 1: I rise to speak, I rise to speak. Chack GPT
Speaker 1: knows you're there. But this is an americanism that we
Speaker 1: don't use but still keep using it because it makes
Speaker 1: it clear that this place has become absurd.
Speaker 2: As an American, I can say I've never once said
Speaker 2: I rise to speak, maybe save for in my high
Speaker 2: chair growing up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, as a bridge I've never used it either. But
Speaker 1: I did some googling and it turns out I rise
Speaker 1: to speak is frequently used in Congress in the US,
Speaker 1: and it's had a meteoric rise in British Parliament recently.
Speaker 1: Tom is correct to pointed out last year it was
Speaker 1: used two hundred and thirty times in the whole year.
Speaker 1: This year it's already been used six hundred and thirty
Speaker 1: five times, and I think it's the kind of processed
Speaker 1: type thing that people use in the House of Representatives
Speaker 1: which is now infiltrated Parliament. And Tom tuggan Dat is
Speaker 1: blaming chachipt for this lazy MP is using it to
Speaker 1: write their speeches.
Speaker 2: Are there any other examples of AI in the MP speeches?
Speaker 1: Yeah, there are words like underscore, streamline, navigate, bustling, which
Speaker 1: often used by large language models and are now popping
Speaker 1: up more and more in Parliament, as are these commonly
Speaker 1: used AI sentence constructions like not only X, but y
Speaker 1: or the phrase not merely. And of course I mean
Speaker 1: there's this interesting socio linguistic question here right, which is
Speaker 1: are all of these MPs actually using chat gibt to
Speaker 1: write their speeches or have the phrases of chat gibt
Speaker 1: become so ubiquitous in human language that real humans are
Speaker 1: unthinkingly now imitating machines.
Speaker 2: That's what I ask myself about your posts on LinkedIn.
Speaker 2: And now to our final segment of the day, Chat
Speaker 2: and Me, where we discuss how people are really using chatbots.
Speaker 2: And remember we want to hear from you, so please
Speaker 2: send your chat stories to our inbox Tech Stuff podcast
Speaker 2: at gmail dot com. This week we heard from our
Speaker 2: listener Shalon from Vancouver, Canada, and she told us Chat
Speaker 2: helped her mom with a mysterious medical problem.
Speaker 3: So my mother is seventy four and she started having
Speaker 3: knee pain about a year ago and it kind of
Speaker 3: came out of nowhere, but it was pretty severe and
Speaker 3: it was making it really difficult for her to sleep.
Speaker 3: So obviously she talked to her doctor. The advice from
Speaker 3: the doctor was just give it a little time to
Speaker 3: d and then eventually she went back to the doctor.
Speaker 3: The doctor said, okay, fine, we're going to give you
Speaker 3: an X ray. There was absolutely nothing wrong with her knee.
Speaker 1: Here's always comforting when you go to the doctor with
Speaker 1: a medical problem like severe pain, and you get a
Speaker 1: test and the answer comes back nothing wrong with you.
Speaker 2: It gets worse. A few months later, Shanan and her
Speaker 2: mom finally got the doctor to give them a referral
Speaker 2: for a physiotherapist, but the physiotherapist also couldn't find anything
Speaker 2: wrong with her knee. Another nightmare. Shllan told us that
Speaker 2: at this point, the injury was starting to have a
Speaker 2: big impact on her mom's mental health as well as
Speaker 2: her physical health.
Speaker 3: Her life was very diminished because she couldn't walk upstairs,
Speaker 3: she was having really poor sleeps because the pain would
Speaker 3: wake her up in the night, and overall, she just
Speaker 3: started to feel like she was really declining in her health.
Speaker 1: Overall, this sounds quite horrific. Does Chat ride to the rescue?
Speaker 2: This is where Chat comes to the rescue. Shllen's mom
Speaker 2: was visiting her and as a kind of last resort,
Speaker 2: they turned to Chat GPT. They listed all the symptoms
Speaker 2: and told Chat the whole story, what all the different
Speaker 2: doctors had said. She talked to Chat for about forty
Speaker 2: five minutes, and then.
Speaker 3: It diagnosed her with a condition and gave her exercises
Speaker 3: she needed to do, what she needed to do to
Speaker 3: sleep at night, how she needed to sleep at night,
Speaker 3: how she needed to walk during the day, et cetera,
Speaker 3: et cetera.
Speaker 1: So did it work well?
Speaker 2: Shllon and her mom decided to do an experiment and
Speaker 2: follow Chat's advice religiously for two weeks just to see
Speaker 2: if it helped. Guess what completely healed, and Shalon said,
Speaker 2: it's made a huge difference in her mom's life, not
Speaker 2: just because the pain is gone, but because doctors had
Speaker 2: been kind of dismissing it, and because it was also
Speaker 2: one of the first experiences her mom had had with
Speaker 2: the very scary reality of getting older.
Speaker 3: As people age, it's like one thing happens, and then
Speaker 3: the next thing happens, and then the next thing happens,
Speaker 3: and your body is falling apart. And so my mom
Speaker 3: has never had like a major issue that she couldn't
Speaker 3: overcome in her health, and so this was the first
Speaker 3: thing that was like, Okay, I guess this is the beginning.
Speaker 2: Of the end, like it's over for me.
Speaker 3: And so the fact that she has been able to
Speaker 3: overcome this and has her kneeback and her health back,
Speaker 3: it's been really life changing for her.
Speaker 2: That's it for this week for Tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm Kara Price and I'm os Valashin. This episode was
Speaker 1: produced by Eliza Dennis, Melissa Slaughter, Julian Nutter, and Tyler Hill.
Speaker 1: He was executive produced by me Kara Price and Kate
Speaker 1: Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Kastrian Norvel for iHeart Podcasts, Kyle
Speaker 1: Murdoch Missy's episode and also write our theme song.
Speaker 2: Join us next Wednesday for the first episode of the
Speaker 2: new podcast on Crisper with Walter Isaacson. It's a five
Speaker 2: part series that tells the story of how a revolutionary
Speaker 2: gene editing tool was created.
Speaker 1: And please do rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: on Spotify, wherever you listen, and also write to us
Speaker 1: at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com. We're getting
Speaker 1: so many great submissions for our Chat and me segment
Speaker 1: and we love to get even more. We'll send you
Speaker 1: a T shirt if you you like