Speaker 1: What's soulless my children's fiction? I don't know. I don't
Speaker 1: know how to open this one. We're coming back on
Speaker 1: my investigation, my two part investigation into the unsettling and
Speaker 1: the moderately evil world of ai children's book Grifters. My
Speaker 1: guest is Ben Bohlan from Ridiculous History and Boy basically
Speaker 1: all of the podcasts that helped invent podcasting as an industry.
Speaker 1: Thank you Ben for being on the show and talking
Speaker 1: with us today. Ben, you mentioned a book called Ploto
Speaker 1: in our last episode, which is this weird algorithmic novel
Speaker 1: that a guy wrote in a book in the twenties
Speaker 1: where he lays out the fourteen hundred and sixty two
Speaker 1: possible book book plots. And we wanted to start talking
Speaker 1: about this because you found your copy of Plato.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yes, yeah, thank you for having me, Robert Sophie
Speaker 2: Fellow fans of Behind the Bastards. Let's give just a
Speaker 2: short excerpt from the forward of Plato by William Wallace.
Speaker 2: Cooked Yeah. It begins, picture a man and a woman
Speaker 2: walking through a thick fog in London. The year is
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty six. They are in love and they are miserable.
Speaker 1: Well and then already, Yeah, I'm hooked. Tell me more. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know what Greenlit get, You get exactly two seasons
Speaker 1: on Netflix. Make sure to end it on a on
Speaker 1: a cliffhanger that we won't resolve because we have to
Speaker 1: pay you more if we do season three.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Robert owns Netflix now, Yeah, I fucking knew it.
Speaker 1: I knew it as you you know, I traded in
Speaker 1: my Pontiac Aztec, which which provided me with almost twice
Speaker 1: as much money as I needed to buy Netflix. So yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I now own Netflix and no longer have a death
Speaker 1: trap car. They let me keep the ASTech they paid
Speaker 1: me not to sell it to them. Sorry, I'm just
Speaker 1: seeing need of advertising. I'm hearing needive advertising for Pontiac
Speaker 1: here for Big Pontiac. And yeah, being an advertiser on podcasts,
Speaker 1: didn't manufacture Pontiactiac. We apparently made real cars once.
Speaker 2: And I'm wondering, I'm wondering, did you write the beginning
Speaker 2: of this show? Did you? I guess we should go
Speaker 2: public with this. Part one of this week's series was
Speaker 2: written in entirely by chat GPT. Is that correct?
Speaker 1: Yeah? I actually had meant to write part two in
Speaker 1: chat GPT. But chat GPT was so horrified by the
Speaker 1: task of writing behind the Bastards that it attempted to
Speaker 1: hijack my Pontiac as Tech, which which then drove itself
Speaker 1: into a mailbox and detonated on impact. So ri I
Speaker 1: p chat GPT. You know it was. It contained billions
Speaker 1: and billions of lines of texts, but it did not
Speaker 1: contain the ability to safely pilot a Pontiac vehicle track.
Speaker 2: Now if I was, if I was a child, I
Speaker 2: would think this is an intriguing story, perhaps with some
Speaker 2: some hidden treasure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, we could. We could do a whole children's
Speaker 1: book about the Pontiac az Tech from Breaking Bad And
Speaker 1: what the fact that Walt has to drive such a
Speaker 1: piece of shit car says about his character? Really some
Speaker 1: of the best, most masterful character building. These ais could
Speaker 1: never do such effective character building as setting up the
Speaker 1: desperation of an impoverished chemistry teacher's life by showing him
Speaker 1: drive a Pontiac as Tech.
Speaker 2: Pontiac, are you unhappy? Take it on the road?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Pontiac, you won't live long in this car.
Speaker 2: God. Also, Breaking Bads really good.
Speaker 1: It is quite good, as good, as good as the
Speaker 1: Aztecs was a shitty car. So it when we left off,
Speaker 1: we were talking about we went through some really remarkable
Speaker 1: looking trannosaur images for this terrible coloring book. Now, in
Speaker 1: addition to making three legged t rexes, most AI image
Speaker 1: generators struggle to keep characters consistent across multiple images within
Speaker 1: a single book. So if you're like, you know, you've
Speaker 1: got like twenty pages, right, you need twenty illustrations for
Speaker 1: this book, and your character is this little girl in
Speaker 1: a zoo or whatever, you can give it the same input,
Speaker 1: like describe the little girl the same in each prompt,
Speaker 1: but it's really hard to get it to actually do
Speaker 1: the exact same girl in each illustration. Right. There are ways,
Speaker 1: there's whole guides to like keeping characters consistent, but it's
Speaker 1: it's a thing that like isn't easy. And most of
Speaker 1: the creators that I followed just kind of ignored this
Speaker 1: because it is kind of a pain in the ass
Speaker 1: to do, and they kind of trusted that what they
Speaker 1: were putting out, like the different illustrations looked close enough
Speaker 1: that like the parents buying these books wouldn't notice. And
Speaker 1: Sophy's going to show you. These are two pages from
Speaker 1: like a children's book about a little girl at a zoo.
Speaker 1: It's like bad, it's not about anything, but you can see,
Speaker 1: like the little girl, this is supposed to be the
Speaker 1: same character. But that's like those are clearly different little
Speaker 1: girls in both images. Oh oh yeah, one of them
Speaker 1: ass kind of curly hair, one of them asked straight hair.
Speaker 1: They're both done slightly different styles, but it is they
Speaker 1: are kind of close enough that unless you're really looking,
Speaker 1: you might not notice it. Most of the books I've seen,
Speaker 1: the consistency is even worse than that. And the laziest
Speaker 1: example of this I found is from the comic book
Speaker 1: the Adventure comic book that we talked about last episode,
Speaker 1: which is titled Treasures Beyond Gold, even though no treasures
Speaker 1: gold or otherwise actually make it into the book. Now,
Speaker 1: the author of this, Chris Heidorn, who are Christian Hidorn
Speaker 1: prevert like, does very technical prompts for his images, but
Speaker 1: this still means that he's just asking the machine to
Speaker 1: draw an attractive Western man or an attractive young Asian woman,
Speaker 1: like those are what he plugs in. And yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's not like the so one of the for example,
Speaker 1: like one of the one of the prompts. He's got
Speaker 1: is like slash imagine blend of comic book art and
Speaker 1: line art and full natural colors. Attractive Western man in
Speaker 1: his early thirties with short cropped brown hair and stubble beard,
Speaker 1: shirt in beige color, walking through a bustling Southeast Asian
Speaker 1: market reading treasure map. And this results in a comic
Speaker 1: book where every single page, both of our main two
Speaker 1: characters are completely different people often drawn in decent styles,
Speaker 1: so you can see different styles. You can see in
Speaker 1: these two different images from two different pages. In the
Speaker 1: first one, she looks like, I don't know, like a
Speaker 1: you know, you've got like the the late character, and
Speaker 1: she's kind of like got a T shirt and what
Speaker 1: looks like a bandolier a sashel around her shoulder. She's
Speaker 1: got long straight hair. The male lead looks like Dean
Speaker 1: Winchester from Supernatural, you know, and he's got like a
Speaker 1: green over. He's not actually wearing baths like she's like
Speaker 1: the thing said, but like and then in the second image,
Speaker 1: from like a page or two later, she's been like
Speaker 1: animed up like twenty percent. Her eyes are like three
Speaker 1: times as large, and then he's gotten like fifteen percent
Speaker 1: Shaggy from Scooby Doo added to him, like, they're not
Speaker 1: the same people. She's got lip filler, she's wearing like
Speaker 1: what you might call it a sleeveless shirt now and
Speaker 1: again like an animate up a little bit. He's like, like,
Speaker 1: they're not the same people. Like, they're very clearly, very
Speaker 1: different looking characters.
Speaker 2: They lost their they also they lost their gear.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're wearing totally different clothing and equipment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you can tell from the facial structure, like
Speaker 2: the the the curvature of the job. You know what
Speaker 2: it is. You know what it is if you're a
Speaker 2: parent thumbing through something like this. And again, everybody tune
Speaker 2: into part one if you haven't listened yet, if your
Speaker 2: parent thumbing through something like this or encountering this stuff
Speaker 2: with a cursory look. Then the two images of people,
Speaker 2: they they look like they could be related to each other.
Speaker 2: But to your point, Robert, very clearly not the same folks.
Speaker 1: Not the same folks. And like obviously there's the normal
Speaker 1: like weirdness like it. You know, the Dean Winchester version
Speaker 1: of the character looks better, but his neck is like
Speaker 1: cocked to an angle. Yeah, she's like a little kid,
Speaker 1: and the second one.
Speaker 2: Her face off the size of a child's face.
Speaker 3: And then yeah, but this is so Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's weird. It's weird. And again, an adult who like
Speaker 1: actually looked at this would kind of recognize a couple
Speaker 1: of pages in, oh, this is like some weird, shitty
Speaker 1: AI art thing. But again, these books, I think can
Speaker 1: be damaging to little kids. And this is what gets
Speaker 1: me into the actual educational research that I did for
Speaker 1: this investigation, because.
Speaker 2: There's a yeah literary you were talking about this in
Speaker 2: part one, right, this is triggered or inspired deep dive
Speaker 2: into a sort of.
Speaker 1: Yeah, literary educational theory because like I wanted to know,
Speaker 1: is it like bad for kids to get handed nonsense
Speaker 1: books that aren't like, aren't about anything at all, and
Speaker 1: where the art is like not actually art, like where
Speaker 1: there's no intentionality behind it. It's just kind of like
Speaker 1: clip art placed more or less randomly and often slightly
Speaker 1: warped by you know, a machine hallucination. And yeah, there's
Speaker 1: actually there's a substantial body of scientific research into what
Speaker 1: is referred to as emergent literacy. Right. Emergent literacy is
Speaker 1: the these are the reading and writing skills that a
Speaker 1: child possesses or builds before they are can formally reader write.
Speaker 1: So when you are sitting down with your six month
Speaker 1: eight month old kid and you're going over a storybook
Speaker 1: that kid can't read, right, they can't like look at
Speaker 1: words and recognize what the individual words are. But because
Speaker 1: you're reading the story, they are starting to pick up
Speaker 1: on aspects of how stories are structured, what a story
Speaker 1: can tell, what characters are. These are all things that
Speaker 1: they are picking up that aren't literacy but also are
Speaker 1: a crucial building block to literacy. Right, this is emergent literacy. Right.
Speaker 1: That's this is a critical part of kids learning how
Speaker 1: to read and learning how to appreciate reading. Right, It's
Speaker 1: why Like when I was a kid, my mom like
Speaker 1: the honestly, like ninety percent of her parenting strategy is
Speaker 1: basically make sure he always has a book in his hands.
Speaker 2: Oh nice, were you able to did you have curation? Curate?
Speaker 2: Did you have autotomy?
Speaker 1: When I was too young to pick my because you know,
Speaker 1: at a certain age, like you know, I was six
Speaker 1: months of a year old or whatever, I'm not really
Speaker 1: picking my own books. She's just like you were like,
Speaker 1: but it was also like I did have a lot
Speaker 1: of like my grandma had basically every national geographic and
Speaker 1: like I would see ones with pirates or dinosaurs, and
Speaker 1: so I had like a lot of that shit. No
Speaker 1: as I and as I like was younger. You know,
Speaker 1: when I was in second grade, I found my dad
Speaker 1: had a copy of The Lost World checked out from
Speaker 1: the library, and I like demanded he renew it because
Speaker 1: there was a dinosaurs goll on the front. And so
Speaker 1: in second grade I read The Lost World, which is
Speaker 1: not a book that's for second graders. But my mom's
Speaker 1: attitude was like, like I had, my TV access was
Speaker 1: super restricted. I couldn't watch like Rin and Stimpy or
Speaker 1: The Simpsons as a little kid. But like, if it
Speaker 1: was a book, it didn't matter if there was fucking,
Speaker 1: if there was murder, if there was like sex crimes.
Speaker 1: As long as it was a book, it was okay.
Speaker 1: That was like my mom's attitude. If he's reading it's fine.
Speaker 2: I feel. I read Stephen King's It when he was
Speaker 2: probably too young.
Speaker 1: That's a fucked up book for a kid.
Speaker 2: Sure, it's not ideal. And my and my parents were like, hey,
Speaker 2: they were bragging. They were like, hey, look at our
Speaker 2: kid reads. Uh, this stuff on his own. What a
Speaker 2: self starter? What a literate child?
Speaker 1: And I actually think we're joking about it. I actually
Speaker 1: think like kids reading about fucked up shit is good
Speaker 1: for them in a way that like maybe kids watching
Speaker 1: fucked up shit in movies or TV isn't because interesting.
Speaker 1: There's the degree of we're going to talk about this,
Speaker 1: Like watching TV or a movie is much more of
Speaker 1: a one way street, especially for a kid. You know,
Speaker 1: as adults you kind of get the ability to sort
Speaker 1: of interact with and analyze it more. I do think
Speaker 1: that like watching TV or a movie is more of
Speaker 1: a one way thing than like when you are reading,
Speaker 1: as we'll talk about, it's a dialogue between you and
Speaker 1: the book, right, like you are actively constructing meaning alongside
Speaker 1: that work. Anyway, this gets us back to like emergent storytelling,
Speaker 1: because a lot of aspects of emergent storytelling are things
Speaker 1: like understanding that the illustrations in a book are carrying
Speaker 1: aspects of character and aspects of the story. And so
Speaker 1: little kids, very little kids, one year olds, two years
Speaker 1: all year olds earlier than you'd expect, have already started
Speaker 1: to realize that when they are looking at a story book,
Speaker 1: what you're reading them is not the whole story. The
Speaker 1: illustrations are part of the story. One study on emergent
Speaker 1: reading strategies I read by Judith Leisiker and Elizabeth Hopper
Speaker 1: of Purdue University noted emergent reading strategies such as wordless
Speaker 1: book reading are often seen as precursors to the meaning
Speaker 1: making that comes later during print reading. I actually found
Speaker 1: one study where like they would read kids a story,
Speaker 1: and then they would hand them a copy of that
Speaker 1: story book without any text on it, and they would
Speaker 1: ask the kids to write the story, and the kids
Speaker 1: would write more detailed stories than the original versions because
Speaker 1: they're taking things that they recognize from the illustrations and
Speaker 1: adding that in when they recreate the story, you know,
Speaker 1: which is really interesting to me. And that's what scares
Speaker 1: me about a lot of these mid journey created children's books,
Speaker 1: because when you've got a story that somebody is wanting
Speaker 1: to tell transmit information through their story, their illustrations are
Speaker 1: transmitting information too. That is not None of these illustrations
Speaker 1: and these abooks are transmitting information. They are there to
Speaker 1: tick a box, but like the characters aren't interacting. They
Speaker 1: don't even match what they're supposed to match with the
Speaker 1: prompt says like it's all off, Like it may look
Speaker 1: like a human drawing, Like these look like competent drawings,
Speaker 1: but they're not drawings of anything. Nothing is being revealed
Speaker 1: in the faces of these characters, in their physical positioning
Speaker 1: and the actions that they're shown taking part in it, Like,
Speaker 1: none of that is actually present here because there's not
Speaker 1: a person driving the artwork. And that's really small. Children
Speaker 1: are info vacuums. They are hoovering up observations about the
Speaker 1: world at a terrifying pace, and before they can read,
Speaker 1: they come to understand things like story structure and the
Speaker 1: meaning of words and phrases by studying the illustrations that
Speaker 1: accompany text. By breaking the illustrative part of a story book,
Speaker 1: you are breaking the way in which kids learn to
Speaker 1: read at a fundamental level before they even under Like
Speaker 1: the precursors to literacy are shattered by not showing them
Speaker 1: actual illustrations. Like there's a real danger of that here.
Speaker 1: The fact that these are so disjointed and wrong could
Speaker 1: fuck up the way kids sort of are understanding these
Speaker 1: stories on a very fundamental level. Yeah, and that's really frightening.
Speaker 1: To me, that's a real risk.
Speaker 2: That's not even I mean, we can call it a risk.
Speaker 2: But this is as earlier establishment. This is a thing
Speaker 2: that is happening. Yeah, there is the injurious potential short,
Speaker 2: but that potential has to a degree been actualized.
Speaker 1: You know, and some number of kids have had these
Speaker 1: books handed to them already.
Speaker 2: And and what what what would be then? I think
Speaker 2: everybody probably is thinking the same question, what would the
Speaker 2: risk be? Like? What is the what is the worst
Speaker 2: case scenario? Does a does a child uh read a
Speaker 2: does like a latchkey kid, uh sit alone with their
Speaker 2: uh fantastically terrible uh children's stories and they what They
Speaker 2: go to a museum one day and they say, Hey,
Speaker 2: the t rex skeleton is wrong? Where are the thumbs?
Speaker 1: I think that's I think that's like one a specific
Speaker 1: thing that could happen as a result of these like
Speaker 1: weird coloring books. I think the scarier thing that could
Speaker 1: happen as the result of stories one of them is
Speaker 1: that like kids who become readers, who come to love
Speaker 1: reading and fiction and thus writing and then create you know, culture, right,
Speaker 1: Like large aspects of our culture created by kids who
Speaker 1: love to read as kids and then become writers. That
Speaker 1: a necessary part of that is loving and understanding stories,
Speaker 1: and a necessary part of that is into gradually integrating
Speaker 1: the illustrations, which are the first things that you start
Speaker 1: to recognize in story books as a kid, to words
Speaker 1: and the way that words work, and the way that
Speaker 1: words tell stories and describe characters and plot, and this
Speaker 1: kind of can break that. The risk is that like,
Speaker 1: and kids are you know, potentially kind of fragile here,
Speaker 1: Like you could damage the ability of children to appreciate
Speaker 1: reading and to appreciate stories. And maybe kids who would
Speaker 1: have been readers, who would have cared about this stuff,
Speaker 1: or who would have wanted to create things won't because
Speaker 1: they're kind of at a very early stage. Their understanding
Speaker 1: of what reading is for is broken because it's not
Speaker 1: being They're not having a conversation, you know, between an
Speaker 1: author and an illustrator in themselves and constructing meaning from that.
Speaker 1: They are having this simulacrum of a story. This this nonsense.
Speaker 1: These the fucking potato chips of of of like even
Speaker 1: worse than potato chips. If you ever you know, you know,
Speaker 1: did you ever read good Omens?
Speaker 2: Yes? Yeah, Terry Pratchett and Neil.
Speaker 1: Pratchett and Neil Game and one of the it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's a book. Anti Christ is like the hero
Speaker 1: kind of and there's like the four Horsemen of the
Speaker 1: Apocalypse our characters in it, and one of them, Famine
Speaker 1: is like kind of a little counterintuitively at first, he's
Speaker 1: like his big plot, he's like running this some fast
Speaker 1: food franchise. The food has any nutrition in it, Like
Speaker 1: there's nothing. It's actually you can starve to death eating
Speaker 1: this food. Like That's what I think of when I
Speaker 1: think of these books and what they can do to
Speaker 1: like kid's abilit like developing literacy. I find that unsettling,
Speaker 1: AI advocate when you talk about how fucked up and
Speaker 1: wrong a lot of this looks. We'll talk about like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, this is just mid journey version I know
Speaker 1: three or four or whatever, or this is you know,
Speaker 1: version three or four of chatch Ept and it's only
Speaker 1: going to get better. Look at how much better it
Speaker 1: is now than it was. You know, before you knew
Speaker 1: these things existed. It's going to get so much better.
Speaker 1: You know, eventually it'll be seamless. You won't be able
Speaker 1: to tell. That's actually not a guarantee. Nobody knows that.
Speaker 1: For one thing, we're kind of off the map here,
Speaker 1: like one of the big Like there's aspects of how
Speaker 1: these things work that are kind of like unclear even
Speaker 1: to the people making them in aspects of how good
Speaker 1: can they be. And one of the things I will say,
Speaker 1: I heard this from somebody who's who's in the industry recently,
Speaker 1: was like, you know, like, how do you tell whether
Speaker 1: or not the model is getting more intelligent? And he's like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, how do you tell if people are
Speaker 1: more or less intelligent? We don't have a good agreement
Speaker 1: on that, like a like IQ's bullshit, Like, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: actually pretty good point, you know, like you're you're not wrong.
Speaker 1: But also just like the idea that these models will
Speaker 1: get better and better at storytelling, at creating fiction, at
Speaker 1: creating images to go with fiction, that is not a guarantee.
Speaker 1: One of the reasons why that's not a guarantee is
Speaker 1: that the popularity of AI tools means that the Internet
Speaker 1: at a very rapid pace, is being flooded with more
Speaker 1: AI generated stuff. Right, More and more of this is
Speaker 1: getting spat out on the Internet every day, And because
Speaker 1: new ais will be trained on this content. That means
Speaker 1: that new AIS and AIS that are updated to have
Speaker 1: more stuff from after twenty twenty two are going to
Speaker 1: be trained on stuff that they generated. So you are
Speaker 1: feeding AI art and text back into the model and
Speaker 1: feed it's a feedback. It can lead to what researchers
Speaker 1: call model collapse, right, which is the idea that like, well,
Speaker 1: the kind of these derangements, these messed up illustrations, like
Speaker 1: the faults. If you're feeding this back and retraining it
Speaker 1: on flawed stuff that had already put out, it's going
Speaker 1: to just keep exacerbating those flaws. A group of researchers
Speaker 1: published in the General ARCSIV described this as what happens
Speaker 1: when quote, the use of model generated content and training
Speaker 1: causes irreversible defects in the resulting models. Oh like that
Speaker 1: movie multiplicity exactly, like multiplicity. That's right, that's right. This
Speaker 1: is a multiplicity kind of situation. Yeah. And I find
Speaker 1: this particularly worrisome because the present models are already pretty
Speaker 1: full of defects. Take the storybook generated for a video
Speaker 1: called I Create a best selling children's book using AI
Speaker 1: in under an hour. Now. The creator of this video,
Speaker 1: whose name is Grayson Sands, looks like what you'd get
Speaker 1: if you fed mid journey the prompt what if Ron
Speaker 1: Weasley was a registered sex offender? And I don't know
Speaker 1: if i'll include that joke in the final article. It's
Speaker 1: mean and not proper for like a serious piece of journalism.
Speaker 1: But I don't like this guy.
Speaker 2: It's also it's also just I mean because we're an
Speaker 2: audio podcast, right, so it's also just for everyone playing
Speaker 2: along at home. Uh do look at do look it up?
Speaker 2: You know I hate black hair.
Speaker 1: He's got the big, like white framed sunglasses. He's got
Speaker 1: a leather jacket on. There's a guitar hung on his
Speaker 1: wall behind him for someone.
Speaker 2: He's got epaulets, which for some reason bothers me. It's
Speaker 2: it's like a Again, we're very not into body shaming.
Speaker 1: But this is not about his body shape or anything
Speaker 1: about this. This is why his aesthetic choices, his vibe.
Speaker 2: His vibe. His vibe looks off. So wait, in under
Speaker 2: an hour, we create a best selling children's book.
Speaker 1: Sounds like there's what he promises in the video.
Speaker 2: Sounds like there should be some air quotes around a
Speaker 2: couple of these things, Robert.
Speaker 1: All of them. So he decides he's going to generate
Speaker 1: a book for kids based on a based on a
Speaker 1: character in a tattoo he got that. He says, like,
Speaker 1: I got this tattoo for no reason. It means nothing
Speaker 1: to me basically, and it's a tattoo of a stegosaur
Speaker 1: playing a stand up bass. So he got I think
Speaker 1: it or triceratops. Sorry, I whant to say stegosaurs. Jesus Christ,
Speaker 1: what a see? I used to know dinosaur stuff when
Speaker 1: I was a kid. You forget.
Speaker 3: It doesn't even look like a dinosaur.
Speaker 4: Really.
Speaker 1: It's not a good tattoo. And it's one of the
Speaker 1: things that's like, Look, I have a lot of tattoos.
Speaker 1: I love tattoos. I don't think every tattoo has to
Speaker 1: have deep meaning. But if you're if you're specifically being
Speaker 1: like this tattoo. I got this random tattoo for no reason,
Speaker 1: And now I'm going to make a book. I'm going
Speaker 1: to try to trick kids into reading a book about
Speaker 1: the character in this tattoo. That just makes me angry.
Speaker 1: It does.
Speaker 3: I don't like it.
Speaker 1: Robert, fuck you for emphasizing how little you care about
Speaker 1: what you're making. So, yeah, he feeds a picture of
Speaker 1: this tattoo, and this is one of those like there
Speaker 1: are cool things these ais can do. The fact that
Speaker 1: you can take a picture of your tattoo and say, hey,
Speaker 1: use this as an illustration in a story book. That's
Speaker 1: kind of neat, you know, bait can. Considering the crude
Speaker 1: drawing that it has to work with, mid Journey does
Speaker 1: a decent enough job turning this into a character. It's
Speaker 1: like it's okay, it's not good, but it's like fine fish.
Speaker 1: It's off ish. But what's really off?
Speaker 2: It's intriguing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's there. What's really off is the world behind
Speaker 1: the character. There's almost a little bit of a Susian vibe,
Speaker 1: but like without any kind of intent behind it, which
Speaker 1: is unsettling. And this becomes more obvious in the subsequent pages.
Speaker 1: Look at this, like there's random music signs like drifting
Speaker 1: through like hung like garlands on the branchless trees. All
Speaker 1: of the dinosaurs have these weird long arcing heads that
Speaker 1: are almost make them shaped like me, Like it's the
Speaker 1: sun has a giant question mark in the middle of it,
Speaker 1: and then there's a second question mark next to the
Speaker 1: sun for no reason, Like this is.
Speaker 2: Very soft Dolly, Yeah, yeah, yeah, a little bit hi,
Speaker 2: really bad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, got this next page because as it goes on,
Speaker 1: like it gets increasingly more divorced from anything that like, okay,
Speaker 1: how would you describe this almost pornographic? Right, Like those
Speaker 1: are tits on that tree?
Speaker 2: Those are those are genitalia?
Speaker 1: Yeah, like, yeah, there's there's some dicks and some tits
Speaker 1: in this one. It's weird, right, And yeah, I can admit,
Speaker 1: like there's something interesting and amusing about how hallucinatory this is.
Speaker 1: If this was like a win Amp visualization, like if
Speaker 1: I was if I had just taken a bunch of
Speaker 1: five O M I P T and was like putting
Speaker 1: on a Murder City Devil's record and sat like a
Speaker 1: fucking I don't know, uh yeah, like win Amp visualizations
Speaker 1: and I got shipped like this and be like, oh cool,
Speaker 1: that's kind of neat. But it doesn't have anything to
Speaker 1: do with the story, right. The story that this guy
Speaker 1: has had chat gpt right for his book is about
Speaker 1: a brachiosaurus who plays piano teaching a tricera to play bass, right, Like,
Speaker 1: this isn't there's no reason for the art to look
Speaker 1: like this. It's not like in keeping he hasn't like written.
Speaker 1: He hasn't like written like a psychedelic dinosaur story here,
Speaker 1: and thus this is kind of like fitting. It's like
Speaker 1: a very basic story about a dinosaur that wants to
Speaker 1: learn bass and meets a friend who teaches him how
Speaker 1: to do music. Like it doesn't make any sense that
Speaker 1: it looks this way. It's just confusing to kids. At
Speaker 1: the end of the video, Grayson tells us how he
Speaker 1: got this book to be a bestseller, and it turns
Speaker 1: out he just called up a bunch of his friends
Speaker 1: and family and told them he'd written a book that
Speaker 1: was on Amazon, and then he begged them all to
Speaker 1: buy it. They did, and then it went up through
Speaker 1: the rankings because it doesn't take a lot to do
Speaker 1: that with print books, and it started appearing higher and
Speaker 1: Amazon's search results, and he's like, hey, guys, I wrote
Speaker 1: a book. Would you buy it? And they're like, wow,
Speaker 1: you wrote a book, And like, man, why when they
Speaker 1: get a sight of what you've actually done, I don't know.
Speaker 1: Don't invite this kid. Look, if you're his parents, it's
Speaker 1: time to just cut bait, you know, lock the doors
Speaker 1: when it comes by for the holidays, don't let Grayson in.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very it's it is very what we're seeing here.
Speaker 2: To your earlier point about this breaking kids right and
Speaker 2: fundamentals of storytelling is now we're seeing If you're a kid,
Speaker 2: you're reading this, and you're seeing two very divided things.
Speaker 2: There are two different stories being told. One is a
Speaker 2: kind of mad Lib style about a brachiosaurus who feels
Speaker 2: authoritative enough on base to teach tricerah tops or whatever.
Speaker 2: And this second thing is the clear mental decline violently
Speaker 2: of an artist. That's what it looks like, like the
Speaker 2: styles keep switching, you know what I mean? Like, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I get, I get what you're saying. Man, I think
Speaker 2: that is I think another dangerous part of this is
Speaker 2: that if you were a kid reading right. When you're
Speaker 2: a kid, you prize the books, you prize the information
Speaker 2: you have access to as a sponge. So if you
Speaker 2: are reading these things and you're quite impressionable, then you
Speaker 2: will have these sort of indelibly imprinted in your mind,
Speaker 2: and years decades later you might say, triceratops, Gosh should
Speaker 2: get into jazz.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. This could lead to a whole new world
Speaker 1: of jazz heads, and then they'll be smoking their jazz
Speaker 1: cigarettes We don't need that kind of shit listeners. Regular
Speaker 1: listeners will know this, but if you're new to the show,
Speaker 1: Ben and I are both the angry faculty members from
Speaker 1: Back to the Future who were trying to stop Marty
Speaker 1: from hanging out with those jazz singers. That was our
Speaker 1: big break. Yeah, that was our big break. That was
Speaker 1: our big break. Speaking of old timey fifties people being
Speaker 1: bigoted against jazz music. You know who also hates jazz?
Speaker 1: Sponsors of this podcast, Oh yeah, yeah, I hate it.
Speaker 3: We make them send us a certified document stating that
Speaker 3: with a with their signature on.
Speaker 2: It or else it's a jazz a David.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. We're back. And boy, you know, you
Speaker 1: know what Jazz Today is missing?
Speaker 2: What's that, Robert?
Speaker 1: Jazz Today is missing? William Reiker wearing a onesie, sitting
Speaker 1: awkwardly backwards in a chair playing the saxophone in order
Speaker 1: to win the love of an Ai generated woman in
Speaker 1: that one episode where like he and Picard are kind
Speaker 1: of gooning together on the holid deck if you know
Speaker 1: the term gooning. My favorite episode of Star Trek, By.
Speaker 2: The way, I've learned so much in the space of
Speaker 2: less than sixty seconds.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right, we're gonna get some t sh it's
Speaker 1: at for you people. That's a that's Riker and Picard
Speaker 1: just just gooning out together with that uh that Ai
Speaker 1: lady in the jazz club. Just really really really because
Speaker 1: it's it's the twenty fourth century. They don't have shame
Speaker 1: like we do.
Speaker 3: You know, you act like Rory Blank couldn't make a
Speaker 3: beautiful design with that guy.
Speaker 2: In tend to have Rory Blank do a Picard and
Speaker 2: Riker gooning T shirt.
Speaker 4: Hi.
Speaker 2: Well, they're a post shame economy in the world, in
Speaker 2: the universe.
Speaker 1: Of absolutely no, there's there's no such thing as shame.
Speaker 1: They are. They are all as horny as a letter
Speaker 1: from Uh. Oh shit, I just ruined this joke because
Speaker 1: you wrote James Joyce as a letter from James Joyce
Speaker 1: to his wife. Yeah. Google James Joyce Love letter sheets.
Speaker 1: You'll learn some fun things about one of history's greatest artists.
Speaker 1: So speaking of not one of history's greatest artists.
Speaker 2: Sure, under an under an hour he wrote this book?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, James Joyce wrote Ulysses in less than an hour. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it took him a lot longer. You know actually when
Speaker 1: you read Ulysses, because one of the most famous scenes
Speaker 1: in that book that got it attacked by a lot
Speaker 1: of anti obscenity laws is one of the characters walking
Speaker 1: along the strand basically and masturbating through a hole in
Speaker 1: his pocket while his wife fucks some other guy. And
Speaker 1: when you are reading a story about a man masturbating
Speaker 1: through a hole in his pocket, again, all fiction is
Speaker 1: a dialogue between reader and author, you're kind of gooning
Speaker 1: with James Joyce.
Speaker 2: Beautiful, good point.
Speaker 1: Isn't that? Beautiful inspiring art can really take us to
Speaker 1: some amazing places.
Speaker 2: Sure, cat, you know, literacy is the first hollow deck,
Speaker 2: you know exactly. It's also it's also like, you know,
Speaker 2: the thing I think people forget often is that being
Speaker 2: able to read, to encounter uh story is it's sort
Speaker 2: of the closest folks have gotten to necromancy rights, right,
Speaker 2: time travel, speaking with the dead, and uh, you gotta
Speaker 2: be you gotta be careful with this stuff. Also Finnigan's
Speaker 2: wake Man, just between us, I can tell you're a
Speaker 2: fellow uh enthusiast. Absolutely, yeah, our filthy, our filthy pal James. Yeah,
Speaker 2: do you think James Joyce knows what Finnigan's Wake is about.
Speaker 1: I go back and forth on that. I had one
Speaker 1: of my one of my UH fiction teachers when I
Speaker 1: was like a younger man, was very angry whenever you
Speaker 1: would bring up Finnegan's Wake, and just like he hated
Speaker 1: James Joyce and he thought like the whole book was
Speaker 1: a con. I find it like sometimes it's I'll go
Speaker 1: through it when I'm trying to go to sleep just
Speaker 1: because like it's it's it's actually it's kind of I
Speaker 1: think like Blood Meridian Is is challenging in some ways
Speaker 1: that aren't different, because like so much of reading Blood
Speaker 1: Merity is like what the fuck did he mean by that?
Speaker 1: Like was the actually like what was going on here?
Speaker 1: Bloodbridian is a lot is much more closer to like
Speaker 1: a normal novel than than Finnigan's Wake is though, but
Speaker 1: like they're both interesting. Also, when I was a kid,
Speaker 1: I read a series of mystery books that were themed
Speaker 1: after Finnigan's Wake, where like the character's name was Finnigan's Wake,
Speaker 1: like z W A k E. Weird. I just remembered that.
Speaker 1: Now it's an odd idea to make like a series
Speaker 1: of children's mystery novels themed after James Joyce's Finnegans.
Speaker 2: Wake Chat GPT make a make a an intriguer story
Speaker 2: about a dinosaur learning to play the piccolo, written in
Speaker 2: the style at Cormack McCarthy. Oh, also make it mind blowing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, definitely make it mind blowing. God especially Yeah. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we were just talking about this fucked up uh
Speaker 1: Dandy the Dinosaur is the the dog shit book that
Speaker 1: this guy generates based off of his tattoo at There's
Speaker 1: only two reviews for it, both of them are five stars,
Speaker 1: but like, I don't know if they're real or not,
Speaker 1: or if like he had family members write reviews for
Speaker 1: him to try to help his book sell. So it's
Speaker 1: one of those things. He's gaming the system here, right,
Speaker 1: He's having like his friends and family buy a bunch
Speaker 1: of copies to try to shoot it up the Amazon
Speaker 1: rankings and the hope that that generates organic sales. I
Speaker 1: can't tell, based on the information that's available to us
Speaker 1: if Grayson's effort to game the system was successful or not,
Speaker 1: if it like made him money, But the basic tactics
Speaker 1: he's engaging in can be used and will be used
Speaker 1: by other people generating AI books, who have access to
Speaker 1: more resources and who might have actual agendas, Because this
Speaker 1: is the kind of thing that already happens, right, Like,
Speaker 1: if you've got you know, you have like a celebrity
Speaker 1: or a politician who like releases some ghost written book
Speaker 1: and they like work for the Heritage Foundation or some
Speaker 1: like fucking think tank or whatever. That think tank will
Speaker 1: buy like ten thousand copies of the book so that
Speaker 1: it makes it in the New York Times bestseller list.
Speaker 1: Like that's like a common tactic, right, And what he
Speaker 1: was attempting to do, Grayson was kind of incompetently attempting
Speaker 1: to do is the kindle version of that. But there's
Speaker 1: no reason why people couldn't, like again, who have an
Speaker 1: actual agenda, couldn't generate a series of children's books, buy
Speaker 1: a bunch of copies of them to get it to
Speaker 1: shoot up in the rankings, and the hope that that
Speaker 1: tricks a bunch of charities and parents and all these
Speaker 1: kind of libraries and stuff to flood the market, like
Speaker 1: and to flood kids with copies of whatever book they've got.
Speaker 1: And when it comes to like how that could be
Speaker 1: in settling, that brings me to another Unfortunate Soul. Another
Speaker 1: Unfortunate AI author. His name is Lewis Lucas Kitchen. You
Speaker 1: can see Lucas up there in the front image.
Speaker 3: Can I just say, all these people same vibe?
Speaker 1: They all have the exact same vibe. You know, they
Speaker 1: all have strong opinions about eight pictures and how much
Speaker 1: money they might be worth.
Speaker 2: I can't wait to hear their.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh yeah, and uh yeah Lucas. You know, based
Speaker 1: on the illustration that we've got down there for his book,
Speaker 1: it features like you've got this kind of old man
Speaker 1: on one side looking at like a leather bound book,
Speaker 1: and then like a puppy dog in the middle with
Speaker 1: some like creepy gnomes under it, and then like this
Speaker 1: very demonic looking rabid unicorn character that does not look
Speaker 1: like the same style of art as the as the
Speaker 1: other characters. Looking at the color of his book, you
Speaker 1: would guess that it's like the story of an old
Speaker 1: man and his dog maybe getting murdered in the woods
Speaker 1: by a unicorn. But what's what he's actually writing here
Speaker 1: is much more frightening. Because Lucas is an evangelical Christian,
Speaker 1: he might be a fundamentalist. He writes science fiction books
Speaker 1: about like prostolytizing on Mars. He like he has like
Speaker 1: a bunch of like all of his he does like
Speaker 1: a large number of like weird kind of Christian evangelical fiction.
Speaker 1: And the story prompt that he feeds his ai is
Speaker 1: one of the more absurd ones I've come across. And
Speaker 1: I'm going to read that to you. Now, write a
Speaker 1: children's book where the protagonist is a little puppy named Fluff.
Speaker 1: Fluff wants someone to tell him about Jesus, but he
Speaker 1: can't read John three point sixteen, so he needs a solution.
Speaker 1: The antagonist of this story is a bad unicorn, and
Speaker 1: the story include a field with trees. Also include magic
Speaker 1: in the forest. Also include a story a character who
Speaker 1: says uh uh over and over. Now, if that sounds weird,
Speaker 1: it's because Lucas has his kids help him write the prompt,
Speaker 1: which you know, I try not to be totally negative.
Speaker 1: I can see like, if you're a parent, you know,
Speaker 1: and you've got kids who are a little bit older
Speaker 1: and have some you know who can read a bit themselves,
Speaker 1: you sit down and you have them all right, you know,
Speaker 1: like you would you know, what kind of bedtime story
Speaker 1: do we want? Give me some character names and a plot,
Speaker 1: and let's plug it in the chat GPT and then
Speaker 1: if you're a good parent, A way that this could
Speaker 1: be a good learning exercise is it generates a crappy
Speaker 1: AI story and then you sit down and you go
Speaker 1: over with your kids and you go, well, what's missing here?
Speaker 1: Why doesn't this work? You know what? What is like?
Speaker 1: Why isn't this complete? What are the things that we
Speaker 1: add to this in order to make an actual proper story?
Speaker 1: You could actually teach kids something about storytelling in a
Speaker 1: way that would be useful doing that. That's not what
Speaker 1: Lucas is doing here. Don't worry.
Speaker 2: I mean he's not you just like like again, because
Speaker 2: I know one of the things we get sometimes is
Speaker 2: the idea that we are not fun at parties or
Speaker 2: we're darker depressing. But but I think you laid out
Speaker 2: a really good, like hypothetical scenario. What what if of
Speaker 2: children and parents communicating emergent storytelling, creating dialogue? And I
Speaker 2: just want to take a moment before we go towards
Speaker 2: some even more troubling horizons to say that was really nice, man, Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's really cool.
Speaker 1: I tried to not do all so one of the
Speaker 1: things I did research into this is I like played
Speaker 1: some of these videos for a friend of mine who
Speaker 1: is a young mother and you know, and who is
Speaker 1: not she's not as online nearly as online as I am,
Speaker 1: and she's not like, she's not someone who is as
Speaker 1: much of a pessimist about all of this stuff as
Speaker 1: I am. And she was like, oh, you know, like
Speaker 1: this is creepy. The fact that these people are like
Speaker 1: just shotgunning novels out onto kindled trick people. But like
Speaker 1: I could see it being cool. I've always you know,
Speaker 1: maybe I could make a story and the AI could
Speaker 1: help me because I'm not a writer, and I could
Speaker 1: like you know, use it to generate the bones and
Speaker 1: I could fill it out and I could make like
Speaker 1: a custom little story for my kid, and that might
Speaker 1: be nice. I'm like, yeah, sure, I don't think that's harmful.
Speaker 1: Like that's as long as you're not just printing what
Speaker 1: the AI gives you. If if this helps you make
Speaker 1: like a neat, little bespoke storybook for your kid and
Speaker 1: that makes you feel good, that's fine.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying like the problem is that all of
Speaker 1: this stuff is immediately being taken by the worst common
Speaker 1: denominators in our society. Right, The same people who are
Speaker 1: trying to like get you to spend your life savings
Speaker 1: on monkey drawings a year ago are now cramming, like shotgunning,
Speaker 1: hundreds and hundreds of books a month onto Amazon that
Speaker 1: are are going to like do damage we probably don't
Speaker 1: fully understand to any kids who read enough of them.
Speaker 1: That's the problem. Not that there aren't cool uses for
Speaker 1: this stuff here, but Lucas is not doing anything cool here.
Speaker 1: This book, this weird Jesus book that he generates using
Speaker 1: chatt is as nonsensical and devoid of actual plot as
Speaker 1: all of the others we've seen. And I'm going to
Speaker 1: read you the text that the chatbot cooks up for
Speaker 1: this story. Oh buddy, Once upon a time, in a
Speaker 1: magical forest with fields full of trees, there lived a
Speaker 1: little puppy named Fluff. Fluff was a curious puppy, and
Speaker 1: he loved to explore the forest and learn new things.
Speaker 1: One day, Fluff heard about a man named Jesus who
Speaker 1: was very special and had done many wonderful things. Fluff
Speaker 1: was very interested and wanted to learn more about Jesus.
Speaker 1: But there was one problem. Fluff couldn't read. Oh god,
Speaker 1: that's so weird. First off, if you're a fucking dedicated
Speaker 1: Christian enough that, like your AI scam book is trying
Speaker 1: to get kids hooked on Jesus, can you describe him
Speaker 1: better than he was special and did wonderful things? Right, Like,
Speaker 1: at least if you're gonna be like be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: he saved people's souls. He made it possible for us
Speaker 1: to go like, you can say more about Jesus than
Speaker 1: this than he well, he's like he did nice stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, checking the boxes right, Like, yeah, there's this guy Jesus.
Speaker 2: He's got a good vibe. But yeah, dogs can't read those,
Speaker 2: so that's like a problem.
Speaker 1: Get some fucked.
Speaker 2: So wait, this is also dangerous, is it not? Because
Speaker 2: it is where we're verging from the land of of
Speaker 2: mad lib check the boxes, absence of motivation right uh,
Speaker 2: into into the land of proselytizing or propagandizing without without
Speaker 2: an understanding of it. Like, it's that's very weird, that's
Speaker 2: very off putting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the scale of propaganda that's possible when you don't
Speaker 1: even have to have anyone to actually write or illustrate it.
Speaker 1: But also how propaganda that's that like disjointed and incoherent,
Speaker 1: Like does it all just become noise and get lost?
Speaker 1: And then the primary problem is just that it like
Speaker 1: floods the zone and makes it hard to find stuff
Speaker 1: that isn't this kind of trash or is it just
Speaker 1: or does it like does being exposed to so much
Speaker 1: of this disjointed, weird, robotic hallucination shit alter the way
Speaker 1: that we think we don't really know yet. You know,
Speaker 1: we didn't know what social media was going to do
Speaker 1: to us, and now all of us we have all
Speaker 1: the attention spans of a fucking fruit fly.
Speaker 4: So yeah, I want to play there's a there's a
Speaker 4: point in this fucking off putting book where or off
Speaker 4: putting video where he like plays the an a he
Speaker 4: has an ai narrator narrate this book, because again, why
Speaker 4: involve human creativity in any way, shape or form alongside
Speaker 4: these terrible images that it's generated with like video of
Speaker 4: his kids reacting to it, so you can see how
Speaker 4: his children react to the story.
Speaker 1: So we're going to play a section of that and
Speaker 1: keep an eye on their faces.
Speaker 5: The unicorn stopped in her tracks. She couldn't move any
Speaker 5: clotheser to Fluff and the old man. The old man
Speaker 5: smiled and.
Speaker 6: Said, see, Cloff, Jesus not only gives us eternal life
Speaker 6: for free, but he protects us too. We just have
Speaker 6: to trust him and ask for help.
Speaker 5: Fluff was amazed. He thanked the old man for teaching
Speaker 5: him about Jesus. From that day on self was a
Speaker 5: happy puppy, and he always remembered the lesson the old
Speaker 5: man had taught him.
Speaker 2: He knew that no.
Speaker 5: Matter what, Jesus gives eternal life to those who believe
Speaker 5: and helps them every day.
Speaker 2: Evil is evil.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 1: Oh my, it's so hard because if you watch the
Speaker 1: video of the kids at the start of it, like
Speaker 1: they're they're they're both kind of they're all kind of
Speaker 1: like sitting up, and as it goes on, like one
Speaker 1: girl puts her head into her hands, the other has
Speaker 1: like her head hands on her like they're not they
Speaker 1: look uncomfortable, like they're not enjoying this story that they're
Speaker 1: being fed. Ah, it's so fucked up. Also dog shit story.
Speaker 1: But like, yeah, the fact that in his video where
Speaker 1: he's trying to like show how well robots can generate
Speaker 1: Christian propaganda like his own kids could not be less
Speaker 1: engaged in this shit, which maybe is a good thing, right,
Speaker 1: Maybe the fact that they're so inherently bored by it
Speaker 1: means it won't do as much damage as I'm afraid.
Speaker 1: But you know what will do as much damage as
Speaker 1: I'm afraid of?
Speaker 2: Jazz?
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, jazz fundamentally a mind poison. You know, that's
Speaker 1: why the team means these days the teen's been They're
Speaker 1: always pulling up in their jaloppies to the to the
Speaker 1: get the malted milkshakes and the civil rights movement. God
Speaker 1: damn it. Anyway, here's ads.
Speaker 2: I like, we're at tagging jazz unreasonably unrelated.
Speaker 1: Way, take it down. Let's take it down. Jazz has
Speaker 1: had enough time in the sun. All right, here's ads Ah,
Speaker 1: we are be a double Q, which is how I
Speaker 1: spell back. So yeah, this is like fucked up, and
Speaker 1: I don't think his kids liked it, But it is
Speaker 1: the kind of thing that I worry about, or at
Speaker 1: least there's like evidence of the kind of thing that
Speaker 1: I worry about, Like where where's some of the directions
Speaker 1: of this might head? Because churches and also political organizations
Speaker 1: groups like Turning Point USA, who are already looking at
Speaker 1: young people and have access to grind and a lot
Speaker 1: of money, like the potential of them to generate huge
Speaker 1: amounts of propaganda content, to buy up copies, to get
Speaker 1: Amazon to spread it, and in order to do that,
Speaker 1: in order to like trick large numbers of parents and
Speaker 1: kids into buying books that contain weird right wing propaganda.
Speaker 1: Like they're already doing versions of this con all throughout
Speaker 1: the world and throughout media throughout like our culture. I
Speaker 1: am deeply concerned about the ability to like spread it
Speaker 1: in more subtle ways through like these fake children's books.
Speaker 2: And shit right, Oh, like a story about dinosaurs who
Speaker 2: learned that there are bathrooms only for some specific types
Speaker 2: of dinosaur.
Speaker 1: And that's why, you know, when they stop doing that,
Speaker 1: when they let all of the dinosaurs use whatever bathroom
Speaker 1: they feel they should use, that's when the media hits
Speaker 1: because God decided to kill them all. Yeah, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I think it could be fucked up. And you know, again,
Speaker 1: there's some actual rigorous reason to think that this could
Speaker 1: cause some serious damage. In the book Literature is Exploration,
Speaker 1: which is a very influential book on literary theory by
Speaker 1: Professor Luis Rosenblatt. Rosenblatt argues that the reader is a
Speaker 1: crucial piece as I've been talking about, is a crucial
Speaker 1: part of any piece of literature. She writes, there is
Speaker 1: no such thing as a generic reader or a generic
Speaker 1: literary work. There are only the potential millions of individual
Speaker 1: readers or the potential millions of individual literary works. A
Speaker 1: novel or a poem or a play remains merely ink
Speaker 1: spots on paper until a reader transforms them into a
Speaker 1: set of meaningful symbols and what Yeah, it's beautiful. And
Speaker 1: what she means by this is that books from Blood
Speaker 1: Meridian to hop On Pop are a dialogue between writer
Speaker 1: and reader. The machines that are generating these stories cannot
Speaker 1: participate in a conversation. They are mechanical turks. They are
Speaker 1: not conversing. They are guessing what word comes next, based
Speaker 1: on a mix of complex math and the labor of
Speaker 1: Kenyan contractors paid two dollars an hour to make sure
Speaker 1: that the responses aren't too racist. This is a problem
Speaker 1: in part because one of the things we know about
Speaker 1: how books impact people is that reading real books, reading
Speaker 1: novels teaches empathy. It is common knowledge and well documented
Speaker 1: that reading long term fiction makes people better able to
Speaker 1: identify with other people's thoughts and struggles. Being a reader
Speaker 1: makes you more empathetic. Right. This is well established and
Speaker 1: well documented. Educational researchers have found that very young children
Speaker 1: can actually be influenced towards engaging in new behavior by
Speaker 1: the stories that they read. And I'm going to quote
Speaker 1: from an article by Peggy Albers in The Atlantic. Here,
Speaker 1: stories can be used to change children's perspectives about their
Speaker 1: views on people in different parts of the world. For example,
Speaker 1: Hillary Jenks works with children and teachers on how images
Speaker 1: and stories on refugees can influence the way that refugees
Speaker 1: are perceived. Kathy Short studied children's engagement with literature around
Speaker 1: human rights and their work in a diverse K through
Speaker 1: five school with two hundred children. They found stories moved
Speaker 1: even such young children to consider how they could bring
Speaker 1: change in their own local community in school. Now, in
Speaker 1: that last case with Kathy Short, the students that she
Speaker 1: was like engaging in these stories. She told them basically
Speaker 1: like read them. You know that they have these collections
Speaker 1: of books about like kids who did amazing things. Kathy
Speaker 1: reads a bunch of these, like k through five students
Speaker 1: the story of an anti child labor activist, a real
Speaker 1: kid named ickbal Massey who was murdered at age twelve
Speaker 1: as a result of attempting to like end child labor.
Speaker 1: And I think it was Pakistan. And the kids that
Speaker 1: she's reading these who very young children, are so moved
Speaker 1: by the story of this person and by what they've
Speaker 1: read that they decided to create a community garden and
Speaker 1: like built a community garden together and then grew food
Speaker 1: that they donated to a local food Like this was
Speaker 1: months and months and months of work, like basically, and
Speaker 1: kind of the point that Kathy was making with this
Speaker 1: research is that like something as simple as reading a
Speaker 1: single story can inspire and influence young children to take action,
Speaker 1: months of action, to like seriously engage themselves in things.
Speaker 1: Because like that's how influential stories can be on behavior,
Speaker 1: and particularly the behavior of children, because you know they've
Speaker 1: been fed less shit, you know they're able to It
Speaker 1: means more when a kid encounters a story than it
Speaker 1: does when you do, because you've got a lot more
Speaker 1: stories in your head. And that's part of what is
Speaker 1: unsettling to me about all this, because like, you know,
Speaker 1: is it possible that an AI generated story about ickbaal
Speaker 1: Massey could inspire, you know, little kids in a school
Speaker 1: to take positive action like that. Maybe is it possible
Speaker 1: that an AI generated story could inspire kids to take
Speaker 1: negative actions? Maybe we don't know. But the thing that's
Speaker 1: most frightening to me is we're all going to learn
Speaker 1: the answer to these questions together in the very new
Speaker 1: near future, whether we want to or not.
Speaker 2: That is chilling.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's cool, it's good stuff. Love that we're doing this.
Speaker 2: I would say, I would say that for many of
Speaker 2: us playing along at home, this concept might sound somewhat abstract.
Speaker 2: This might sound somewhat hypothetical, or a thought experiment or
Speaker 2: something or one of the one four hundred and sixty
Speaker 2: two only possible stories and Plato. But the but the
Speaker 2: reality that you have outlined here, Robert is stark. You
Speaker 2: know it is. It is inevitable that this will occur.
Speaker 2: It's happening now, right, You're coming to us in real time.
Speaker 2: You've you've cited multiple sting here. Yeah, yeah, it could,
Speaker 2: it could happen. I don't want to do fanboys. But
Speaker 2: the point is, I think the point is sobering. And
Speaker 2: one question that a lot of folks are gonna have
Speaker 2: here is what, if anything, will will people do with
Speaker 2: this knowledge? Like for people who have listened, who are
Speaker 2: listening now, who have kids or who have loved ones,
Speaker 2: have any sort of ability to curate access to information,
Speaker 2: is there something they can do?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I think number one. If you're a parent,
Speaker 1: if you're someone who buys the you know, who buys
Speaker 1: gifts for kids, you know, because you've got some of
Speaker 1: the family or whatever, be aware of this. Be aware
Speaker 1: of what's out there. Be aware that, Like you can't
Speaker 1: just look at Oh, this kid likes coloring books. Let
Speaker 1: me see what the most popular coloring book in dinosaurs is, right,
Speaker 1: Take take a second look, take more of a look
Speaker 1: at the reviews. You know. See if you can look
Speaker 1: through a couple of different you know, pages from it
Speaker 1: on the Amazon things, see if it has any of
Speaker 1: these hallmarks.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: Again, if you go to the Shatterzone dot substack dot com,
Speaker 1: you'll find, you know, the actual article version of this episode.
Speaker 1: Look at the images we've put up here and take
Speaker 1: a look to see if you can see any of
Speaker 1: these hallmarks. Take a look at the text. It should
Speaker 1: be pretty obvious to you an adult if the text
Speaker 1: is AI generated. That's kind of the first most basic
Speaker 1: thing you can do is like be aware of what's
Speaker 1: possible and try to keep an eye on it and
Speaker 1: make sure that you don't contribute to paying these people
Speaker 1: or to getting more of this stuff out to kids.
Speaker 1: I think the other things that Cannon should be done.
Speaker 1: Number one, we could be pressuring Amazon to make it
Speaker 1: harder to do this stuff. Make it clear what their
Speaker 1: plagiarism detectors are, make it clear what their lines are
Speaker 1: for AI, you know, work being crapped out to children, Like,
Speaker 1: do they have any restrictions there? Are you just allowed
Speaker 1: to put up as many of these random books as
Speaker 1: you want without any kind of limitation. Well, so far
Speaker 1: that's the situation. Can Amazon be pressured to take a
Speaker 1: different tact? Well, if there actually was enough bad pr perhaps.
Speaker 2: Oh I just want to pause right there, because that
Speaker 2: sounded like a bar Like that sounded like you were
Speaker 2: about to drop a beat with the internal rhyme scheme
Speaker 2: in the cadence. Everybody play that back, play that.
Speaker 1: Para, cut it to a beat, someone someone can fix
Speaker 1: that up for us. But yeah, you know, like, look,
Speaker 1: that's what I would like people to like there needs
Speaker 1: to be pressure on Amazon about this stuff, among other things,
Speaker 1: Like again, I've reached out to several of these creators
Speaker 1: for common but I reached out for Amazon to Amazon
Speaker 1: for content on a number of things. They haven't gotten
Speaker 1: back to me. I know a lot of journalists listen
Speaker 1: to this stuff. There's room for other articles on this.
Speaker 1: It'll get good traffic. Everybody reads AI shit. Get out
Speaker 1: there yourself and make them answer some of these things.
Speaker 1: You know, one of the there's a couple of different
Speaker 1: questions that I asked Amazon, and I'll read them right now.
Speaker 1: Number one, does Amazon restrict the publication of AI works
Speaker 1: on Kindle in any way? Does it make a difference
Speaker 1: if the works are marketed towards children? Number two? Does
Speaker 1: Amazon keep data on how many Amazon AI generated books
Speaker 1: of various types are selling? Number three? And the guides
Speaker 1: that I have watched creators discuss how the texts they
Speaker 1: generate sets off Amazon plagiarism detectors. To get around this, creators,
Speaker 1: who's a service called quilbot which replaces adjectives with synonyms?
Speaker 1: Is this a violation of Kindle slash KDP terms of service?
Speaker 1: You know, these are pretty basic questions, there's more to
Speaker 1: be asked, but like the sheer factor of like being
Speaker 1: reached out to and talked to, Like, if there's enough
Speaker 1: bad press, it's theoretical that they might make it harder
Speaker 1: for these people to do what they're doing. Likewise, you know,
Speaker 1: I think that these different sort of grindset creators could
Speaker 1: be you know, for one thing, it's possible that there's
Speaker 1: some violation of YouTube here, that they are like admitting
Speaker 1: to engaging in plagiarism and then finding ways around it. Like,
Speaker 1: I think there's an argument to be made at least
Speaker 1: that like there might be actually rights issues here, Like
Speaker 1: if if the initial text of this is plagiarism and
Speaker 1: they are disguising that plagiarism and then profiting off of it,
Speaker 1: there's a degree to which they could be in illegally
Speaker 1: dicey area. It's possible that you could, uh, you could
Speaker 1: get YouTube to take action against some of this content.
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's it's it's largely a matter of,
Speaker 1: like you can get enough people angry about this on
Speaker 1: behalf of the kids, But then these companies will eventually
Speaker 1: take action, not because it's the right thing to do,
Speaker 1: but because if enough people get angry, corporations tend to
Speaker 1: take the coward's way out, which is becomes what the
Speaker 1: angry people want. Yeah, so I don't know. That's that's
Speaker 1: my only suggestion right now. I'll keep thinking about it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think that's great though. This is uh, this actionable advice.
Speaker 2: So yeah, we'll see. Yeah, yeah, well we'll see. It'll
Speaker 2: be it'll be interesting to listen to this episode in
Speaker 2: what do you think five years?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, when all of our jobs have been replaced
Speaker 1: by AI except for Sophie. The entire world of media
Speaker 1: is just like Sophie sitting down to talk with Harrison
Speaker 1: Ford about his new baldness cream and Sophie sitting down
Speaker 1: with Joe Rogan to talk about, you know, steroids, Sophie
Speaker 1: sitting down with AI me to read a story about
Speaker 1: Hitler that uses facts that were just made up in
Speaker 1: the ether.
Speaker 3: There there's no way, Robot, you could a total shriek
Speaker 3: the way that real you.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Sophie. You understand. The only thing that I'm
Speaker 1: actually proud of is my atonal shrieking. I went to
Speaker 1: school for four years to learn how to shriek like that,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that's doctor attal shrieking.
Speaker 1: That's right, that's right. Yeah, yeah, I teach a class
Speaker 1: in Stanford how to go.
Speaker 2: Is it? Is it in Stanford? Because I heard it
Speaker 2: was on a cross street, like, yeah, a cross street.
Speaker 2: I have a I have a bullhorn. I also have
Speaker 2: a crude spear that I whittled, you know, but it's
Speaker 2: it's basically Stanford. Hey, that's a human made spear though,
Speaker 2: credit where it's due. Oh yeah, absolutely, I only use
Speaker 2: human made spears. And also sometimes one time a spear
Speaker 2: that was was crafted by a chimpanzee. But you know,
Speaker 2: SAME's that's between you and the chimp. Man.
Speaker 1: A lot of things are between me and that chimp.
Speaker 3: Just to say, but do we do we have any
Speaker 3: pluggables that then here? Ben?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I will. I will say you can check
Speaker 2: out more by going to cool Zone Media. I want
Speaker 2: to give a big shout out to Gare who has
Speaker 2: done Yes, Garrison, Garrison, who has done some top notch
Speaker 2: reporting in my opinion on the current events in Atlanta.
Speaker 2: You may be familiar with the stop with the stop cups.
Speaker 3: Is available and it could happen here and is truly incredible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, great stuff. Anything else, Ben.
Speaker 2: Oh Yeah, you can find me. Yeah, you can find
Speaker 2: me on on Twitter or Instagram wherever you Yeah, you
Speaker 2: can find me on Friends to Farmers only, you know, no, yeah,
Speaker 2: so big, you know I'm an overall influencer. Oh my
Speaker 2: gosh levels to these jokes. Take that, you know, try
Speaker 2: that chat JPII. But uh but in a burst of
Speaker 2: creativity calling myself some derivation of at Ben Bowling because yeah,
Speaker 2: super secret code.
Speaker 3: National Brian Robert. What's that link for your substack one
Speaker 3: more time?
Speaker 1: Uh, shatterzone dot substack dot com.
Speaker 2: It is not regular updated, but you know every we
Speaker 2: were not super rarely updated.
Speaker 1: It's free and you can find this article on h
Speaker 1: on fucking how AI is Coming for your children? That'll
Speaker 1: probably be the title, how AI is Coming for your children?
Speaker 1: Just go to the go to the substack. You'll find it.
Speaker 1: You'll find all these fucked up dinosaur images. But I
Speaker 1: guarantee you you haven't seen enough fucked up looking dinosaurs
Speaker 1: in your life, simply have not. Check check it out, leabe, okay,
Speaker 1: bye bye.
Speaker 3: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 3: For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
Speaker 3: dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 3: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.