Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Say It sixteen.
Speaker 3: Six six.
Speaker 2: Welcome to sixteenth minute, the show where we take in
Speaker 2: notorious moment or main character of the Internet and remind
Speaker 2: you that they're a person and so are you and
Speaker 2: that sucks for everyone. And this week we're taking a
Speaker 2: bit of an interlude, a breather, if you will. I
Speaker 2: don't know if I've ever really, like, properly taken a breather.
Speaker 2: Say it sounds like that scene from Midsomar when I'm
Speaker 2: taking a breather?
Speaker 4: Is that relaxing? See, I'm relaxing.
Speaker 2: But occasionally, for sixteenth minute episodes to be the right length,
Speaker 2: we will end up having to cut interviews that I
Speaker 2: really love. In today's interview with Jason Kebler at four
Speaker 2: or four Media is one of those. It touches on
Speaker 2: a lot of stuff that's been on my mind, including
Speaker 2: the reason that this episode is a little shorter than normal.
Speaker 2: So we're gonna share these interviews that got cut, mostly
Speaker 2: because I think they're instructive to what this show is about,
Speaker 2: but also to ensure that the quality of this show
Speaker 2: is staying consistent. And this interview actually motivated me to
Speaker 2: want to talk about that a little more or at
Speaker 2: least once, because the reality of making any reported digital
Speaker 2: media right now is, in my opinion, even when you're
Speaker 2: lucky to work with an incredible group of producers and
Speaker 2: collaborators and are paid well to do it, as I
Speaker 2: am very lucky to be, there is still a lot
Speaker 2: of pressure to produce right just like make as much
Speaker 2: as possible. But if you want to make stuff to
Speaker 2: the top of your ability, at some point this is
Speaker 2: going to be at odds, right, or in order to
Speaker 2: make it not at odds, you'll have to give other
Speaker 2: parts of your life up. Jason and I start by
Speaker 2: talking about a rise in AI art, but I was
Speaker 2: really pleasantly surprised that we sort of took this turn
Speaker 2: into talking about artists and creators and journalists being forced
Speaker 2: to compete and compare themselves to machines, because that ethos
Speaker 2: to make as much as possible ties into all these
Speaker 2: dystopian problems that are happening around US. Journalists are losing
Speaker 2: jobs in massive numbers. The remaining journalists are not paid
Speaker 2: enough to make up for the fired people's absence, but
Speaker 2: that are expected to cover the same amount at the
Speaker 2: same skill level, and the archive of all of those
Speaker 2: journalists work is being disappeared from the Internet as if
Speaker 2: the labor never even took place. And this is a
Speaker 2: tiny thing, but I cannot stand that analog media collectors
Speaker 2: were right all the time. All of my Blu Ray
Speaker 2: boyfriends were right. I was wrong to bully them for it.
Speaker 2: I talked about this in the first episode of sixteenth Minute.
Speaker 2: You are listening to a future piece of lost media.
Speaker 2: I believe that anyone who's making anything and distributing it online,
Speaker 2: and it's a lot of us, are being encouraged to
Speaker 2: churn out content at unprecedented rates and are being told
Speaker 2: to accept that that labor can be deleted from existence
Speaker 2: if the company that happens to be your mommy needs
Speaker 2: a tax cut. And so with this pressure to create
Speaker 2: while being told that this creation is disposable, it feels
Speaker 2: like some have taken a very depressing message away. Why
Speaker 2: even bother to make something that you would stand by
Speaker 2: if it's just gonna disappear anyways. It's a wrongheaded and
Speaker 2: embarrassing takeaway. But I genuinely think that this is part
Speaker 2: of why there is such a plagiarism issue across media
Speaker 2: right now. It's really frustrating it's no excuse for that behavior,
Speaker 2: but maybe you've noticed it. The mindset of oh cool,
Speaker 2: I'll just make some shit up or steal it from
Speaker 2: someone else so i can post more, because that's what
Speaker 2: I'm supposed to be doing. I, along with millions of others,
Speaker 2: watched a YouTube doc from h Bomber Guy late last
Speaker 2: year called Plagiarism and YouTube about the proliferation of plagiarism
Speaker 2: on YouTube that spotlights a few damning specific examples. And
Speaker 2: all of these examples were creators, which, God, what a
Speaker 2: nebulous term. I wish we needed a new word, crea tours.
Speaker 2: All of these examples were creators who had ripped off
Speaker 2: others without credit and the interest of producing more faster
Speaker 2: that still felt like it could be made by them.
Speaker 2: And sure, this problem has a lot of heads to
Speaker 2: cut off. Another issue is that crediting practices online seem
Speaker 2: to be worse than ever. I mean, I know early
Speaker 2: in my podcasting I wasn't encouraged or as beholden to
Speaker 2: provide detailed citation, and it produces problems like what we
Speaker 2: talked about in the Black TikTok Strike episode. The TikTok
Speaker 2: algorithm encourages people to replicate dances, but doesn't encourage them
Speaker 2: to credit the choreographers. And that's how you get Charlie
Speaker 2: Demilio with a million dollar brand deal performing other people's
Speaker 2: work that she couldn't tell you the source of. But
Speaker 2: the trickier thing here is the volume of content. H
Speaker 2: Bomber Guy is an incredibly thoughtful and talented person. There's
Speaker 2: no one like him, and he and his producer usually
Speaker 2: make about one long video a year, a feature length,
Speaker 2: carefully researched and cited video a year, with an eye
Speaker 2: to visuals, to pacing, to all of these things. That's
Speaker 2: why they're so good. They're taking the time. I'm not
Speaker 2: introducing a new idea here, and in an equitable landscape,
Speaker 2: everyone would have that time. But what I'm seeing for
Speaker 2: newer creators is that the baseline encouragement is to make
Speaker 2: as much as possible in a way that's not just
Speaker 2: unsustainable if you stop hanging out with your friends in
Speaker 2: a way that is literally impossible. And I'm guilty of this.
Speaker 2: I'll sometimes see the output of one of my peers
Speaker 2: and be like.
Speaker 4: I need to do more. I'm not doing enough.
Speaker 2: The problem is I don't know how that would be
Speaker 2: possible without completely creating my life or starting to take
Speaker 2: shortcuts making the thing a little bit worse. And I
Speaker 2: feel tighthested and like I'm bitching and I'm fine. All
Speaker 2: I'm trying to get at here is that I don't
Speaker 2: know how to reconcile making the kind of quality things
Speaker 2: that I want to make with the amount that people
Speaker 2: are encouraged to make. I don't know how I would
Speaker 2: do that unless I were a machine. And that's kind
Speaker 2: of what I think we're being encouraged to do. And
Speaker 2: how are being encouraged to think of ourselves produce things
Speaker 2: at the rate of a machine while remaining a discernible, vulnerable,
Speaker 2: advertisement reading savant. When I think about how I would
Speaker 2: like to be able to work, it's embarrassing, right, Like
Speaker 2: my ideal form is someone who can produce like a
Speaker 2: machine while maintaining the just relatable enough veneer of nice
Speaker 2: legs and gum disease. But more often than not those
Speaker 2: things are in direct conflict. It's not possible.
Speaker 4: It sucks.
Speaker 2: It sucks that we're being encouraged to produce like machines,
Speaker 2: But I'd be lying if I didn't say that.
Speaker 4: At many points in my career.
Speaker 2: That wasn't a fantasy of what I wish I were
Speaker 2: capable of, which is you it's not punk rock at all.
Speaker 2: What I meant to say was every so often, sixteenth
Speaker 2: Minute is going to release a shorter episode of an
Speaker 2: interview that I wasn't able to get into the final
Speaker 2: cut of an episode. I am very guilty of assigning
Speaker 2: myself too much homework, which my collaborator and producers Sophie
Speaker 2: and Ian can certainly attest to.
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, guys.
Speaker 2: Today we are talking to Jason Kepler, whose work has
Speaker 2: been invaluable to me in making this show, and I've
Speaker 2: been a follower of his work for years before. We
Speaker 2: originally recorded this for last week's episode about the sixty
Speaker 2: five foot hot Dog in Times Square, because as I
Speaker 2: was observing the online reception to this incredible public work
Speaker 2: of art that was the sixty five foot hot Dog,
Speaker 2: there was an even more prominent strain of art discourse
Speaker 2: making the rounds in my little algorithm. So with that
Speaker 2: in mind, here's a little setup of what we're dropping
Speaker 2: into AI images. I know you've heard of them, sometimes
Speaker 2: they're even called art. And in the weeks that the
Speaker 2: Times Square hot Dog was this big fixation Facebook and
Speaker 2: LinkedIn in particular, We're pushing AI artworks into algorithms at very,
Speaker 2: very high rates, and tech journalists were starting to call bullshit.
Speaker 2: This story was on my radar for a number of reasons.
Speaker 2: As a listener of fellow cools on media podcast Plug
Speaker 2: Better offline with ed Zitron Plug, I already knew that
Speaker 2: Google implementing AI into its search engine had all but
Speaker 2: blown the entire website up, and as a follower of
Speaker 2: Jason Kebler at four h four Media, who was also
Speaker 2: a former editor of Motherboard and a critical source in
Speaker 2: our Boston Slide Coop episode, I started seeing reports of
Speaker 2: Facebook being flooded with fake AI images. Now I've been
Speaker 2: seeing aiart go viral for years. People had a lot
Speaker 2: of fun with those early generators right and seeing the
Speaker 2: polar Express movie looking results, But as time went on,
Speaker 2: many were finding AI images harder and harder to identify
Speaker 2: as AI images. Recently, there was a lot of talk
Speaker 2: about the AI generated all eyes on Rafa graphic that
Speaker 2: went around on Instagram in lieu of actual on the
Speaker 2: ground images of Gaza, of which there were plenty that
Speaker 2: would have done far more to demonstrate the severity and
Speaker 2: the violence that is taking place as Palace Indians are
Speaker 2: continually targeted and genocided by Israel and then over on
Speaker 2: platforms that younger people kind of don't use anymore. Facebook
Speaker 2: and LinkedIn. AI was flooding their algorithms and the images
Speaker 2: taking off were unbelievably fucked up looking. Let's throw in
Speaker 2: some music, why not? A series of AI photos of
Speaker 2: a child in what appears to be an African rural
Speaker 2: village with these weird art projects, A sea through motorcycle,
Speaker 2: a portie made of popsicle sticks and bone Chillingly, a
Speaker 2: wooden bust of Mark Zuckerberg, a hummingbird with gigantic hairy testicles,
Speaker 2: with the caption ninety nine years of luck, you will
Speaker 2: never lack money for your trip in travels, Peter Griffin
Speaker 2: sharing food with orphans in Africa.
Speaker 4: A dead eyed Jesus Christ with.
Speaker 2: The crown of thorns, surrounded by two beautiful light attendants,
Speaker 2: one of whom is giving him a gigantic cheeseburger. Captioned
Speaker 2: Beautiful Cabin Crew Scarlett Johansson hashtag boom challenge. So many
Speaker 2: of them have This caption could not tell you why
Speaker 2: with a gun to my head. These are kind of funny, right,
Speaker 2: but on a long enough scrolling timeline, it gets unbelievably depressing.
Speaker 2: And if they're in your feed, they're preventing you from
Speaker 2: seeing something useful or at least made by a person.
Speaker 2: And all of this made the conversation around a sixty
Speaker 2: five foot hot dog with intent made by people, and
Speaker 2: the importance of public art and public art funding feel
Speaker 2: all the more relevant. I asked about the AI art
Speaker 2: that is attempting to take over our social media feeds
Speaker 2: with Jason Kebler. Here's our talk.
Speaker 3: I'm Jason Kebler. I'm the co host of the four
Speaker 3: Media podcast.
Speaker 4: First of all, thank you so much for doing such
Speaker 4: incredible work.
Speaker 2: Your research into the slide cop was integral into getting
Speaker 2: us closer to cracking that story.
Speaker 4: No one has done it still, but.
Speaker 3: I love slide Cop.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: We got that Foya response back like the day before
Speaker 3: we launched our new website, and I was like, oh,
Speaker 3: we have to lead with that.
Speaker 2: During the same period of time of this public artwork
Speaker 2: and publicly funded artwork that I'm talking about, there is
Speaker 2: another conversation going on about the rise of AI art
Speaker 2: that is also being like flooded into algorithms in certain
Speaker 2: areas of the Internet.
Speaker 4: How did you first How did this first get on
Speaker 4: your radar?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so, I mean I've been aware of the fact
Speaker 3: that AI art exists for a very long time. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, we sort of covered the rise of like
Speaker 3: Dolly and mid Journey, and people just sort of like
Speaker 3: generating images of like very often anime girls and then
Speaker 3: like futuristic city scapes. It's like people either gravitate to
Speaker 3: like hot women or like sci fi future.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like weird screen shaver images.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like when these things launch. But I think that
Speaker 3: I first started seeing this as like a thing that
Speaker 3: was just going to flood the Internet when I started
Speaker 3: seeing these images like on Facebook all the time. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And it started with, if you can believe it, like
Speaker 3: a guy in the UK who sculpts dogs out of
Speaker 3: logs using a chainsaw. He does like chainsaw art. So
Speaker 3: it's like if you want a statue of your dog,
Speaker 3: he will make one for you out of like a
Speaker 3: giant piece of wood. Incredible, And this is like very expensive.
Speaker 3: It caused like thousands of dollars and it takes him
Speaker 3: like weeks to do and he like documents the entire
Speaker 3: process as he does this and is like a social
Speaker 3: media influencer alongside of selling these like wooden dogs.
Speaker 2: That used to be one of my favorite areas of
Speaker 2: YouTube was like weird art process videos, but at least
Speaker 2: it was proof that it happened right.
Speaker 3: And it's like, I mean, these are things like you
Speaker 3: see him using the chainsaw. You see him taking like
Speaker 3: a gigantic block or cylinder of wood and turning it
Speaker 3: into like a German shepherd, and you know these this
Speaker 3: is like a popular type of content online. It's like
Speaker 3: it was going viral on its own. But then you know,
Speaker 3: one of our readers actually sent it to me because
Speaker 3: he had seen like fifty different versions of the same image,
Speaker 3: except in every image the dog was slightly different or
Speaker 3: the man was slightly different. The guy who does this
Speaker 3: is like white, like twenty five year old from the
Speaker 3: United Kingdom, and in some of the images this man
Speaker 3: had become a one. Sometimes it was like he had
Speaker 3: to go tee. Other times the guy was Latino. Sometimes
Speaker 3: the dog was a German shepherd. Sometimes it was like
Speaker 3: a Saint Bernard, other times it was like a poodle.
Speaker 3: It was like but it wasn't very obviously AI. It's
Speaker 3: like it was still like kind of realistic. So if
Speaker 3: you were just like scrolling through, it's like, oh wow,
Speaker 3: like lots of people are carving dogs these days, and
Speaker 3: they were like going viral on Facebook. So I was like, oh,
Speaker 3: like what's going on here? And then I found this
Speaker 3: community of people on Facebook who were like documenting the
Speaker 3: spread of this type of content where basically like a
Speaker 3: viral image was being run through an AI and then
Speaker 3: was going viral itself even though that new image was
Speaker 3: not real.
Speaker 2: Who benefits from these images being out there?
Speaker 3: I mean, I think it's just like kind of run
Speaker 3: of the mill spam. It's like Facebook has been filled
Speaker 3: with spam for years at this point, and there are
Speaker 3: people who are just like building pages that have tons
Speaker 3: and tons of followers, and they're either selling the pages
Speaker 3: or they like find some way of turning it into
Speaker 3: either a scam or just like a spam opportunity. It's
Speaker 3: like a lot of them link off of Facebook and
Speaker 3: then you click on the link and you get like
Speaker 3: nine hundred pop ups and they're all just like Google ads.
Speaker 3: So you have people like collecting, you know, their pennies
Speaker 3: from each of these little clicks. A lot of the
Speaker 3: people who are doing these are in like Vietnam, Cambodia, Brazil, Nigeria,
Speaker 3: and we know that because Facebook started making people disclose
Speaker 3: like where they are located. Interesting if you run like
Speaker 3: one of these pages, yeah, which was something that they
Speaker 3: did like after like the fake news scare of twenty sixteen.
Speaker 4: Okay, well seems to have really helped.
Speaker 3: They surely, Yeah, yeah, But anyways, it's like a lot
Speaker 3: of this stuff is happening in places where the cost
Speaker 3: of living is a little bit lower, and so I
Speaker 3: don't think that they're making tons of money, but they
Speaker 3: are clearly making enough money that it's like beneficial for them.
Speaker 2: To do it. They also seem to be sort of
Speaker 2: like sticky inside of certain algorithms. I know you've written
Speaker 2: about Facebook in particular and now also LinkedIn more recently.
Speaker 2: From what you can gather, are these images more easily
Speaker 2: sucked into algorithms than stuff that's real?
Speaker 3: I think that some of it is so weird and
Speaker 3: bizarre now that you kind of like can't help but
Speaker 3: either click on it or like engage with it in
Speaker 3: some way, even if you know that it's AI, it's
Speaker 3: and so you know I'm a reporter. I've been seeking
Speaker 3: this stuff out for a while, but once I started
Speaker 3: clicking on it, that's all I got. I get like
Speaker 3: tons and tons and tons of AI images. And I
Speaker 3: think that Facebook hasn't been a super relevant platform for
Speaker 3: people who are pretty online for a while. And so, yeah,
Speaker 3: people don't like use Facebook that much. It's still has
Speaker 3: billions of users, actually, but among journalists and comedians and
Speaker 3: people who just like use the internet a lot, I
Speaker 3: don't think Facebook is that popular anymore. And so I
Speaker 3: know that some people like went back to Facebook when
Speaker 3: they saw that this weird stuff was showing up there.
Speaker 3: And then you click on like one image and that
Speaker 3: ends up being like all that you see. You mentioned
Speaker 3: the algorithm, And a really interesting thing that's happened is
Speaker 3: TikTok was like the biggest threat to Facebook for a
Speaker 3: long time. And by Facebook, I mean like meta the company,
Speaker 3: because it was like destroying Instagram for a moment. That's
Speaker 3: why they introduced reels. And like the big thing that
Speaker 3: TikTok has is the for you page, which is the
Speaker 3: algorithm where you just like open it and you can
Speaker 3: scroll forever and you'll just see like stuff that you
Speaker 3: that the app thinks that you'll like. And that's like
Speaker 3: not something that Instagram and Facebook had for a long time.
Speaker 3: It's something where like you opened it and you would
Speaker 3: see there was an algorithm, but it was mostly from
Speaker 3: pages that you followed or pages that people you liked
Speaker 3: or were friends with engaged with. And Facebook launched this
Speaker 3: thing about a year ago called Recommended for You, and
Speaker 3: it's basically the TikTok algorithm, but for Facebook. I know
Speaker 3: that was a long wind up, but basically what has
Speaker 3: happened is Facebook has started showing people things that are
Speaker 3: popular on Facebook, regardless of whether anyone you know has
Speaker 3: like ever engaged with it, or has anything to do
Speaker 3: with it, or like cares about it at all. And
Speaker 3: that's how a lot of this stuff is getting recommended
Speaker 3: because not only are these people like posting the ai images,
Speaker 3: they then have like an apparatus to like comment, engage
Speaker 3: with it and get it going in the algorithm for
Speaker 3: lack of a better term, and then you end up
Speaker 3: seeing it.
Speaker 2: I know it's not the exact same thing, but like
Speaker 2: when there was that significant Twitter algorithm shift and all
Speaker 2: of a sudden, there are main characters introduced that probably
Speaker 2: wouldn't have been possible ten years before because you never
Speaker 2: would have seen them.
Speaker 3: I've seen two things. One, there's like a bunch of
Speaker 3: people on Facebook who can't tell that this stuff is AI.
Speaker 3: There's like tons and tons of bots. And then there's
Speaker 3: people don't know that it's AI. Then there's people who
Speaker 3: do know that it's AI but are just like engaging
Speaker 3: with it because it's weird. And then there's like a
Speaker 3: whole other phenomenon that is happening where there are people
Speaker 3: who have heard about AI art and know that aiart exists,
Speaker 3: but don't want to be fooled by it. These are
Speaker 3: people like a lot of my parents' friends, they've like
Speaker 3: heard about AI and they like, I'm not going to
Speaker 3: fall for it, because I like started asking people like
Speaker 3: have you seen AI art on Facebook? Like are you
Speaker 3: getting it on your Facebook? I like posted that on
Speaker 3: Facebook and then ask people to send me examples of
Speaker 3: AI art that showed up in their feed, and so
Speaker 3: many people send me real stuff that they're like, this
Speaker 3: art's too good, like I can't possibly be real, And
Speaker 3: so I think this other thing is happening too, where
Speaker 3: people like don't want to be seen as being an
Speaker 3: idiot who fell for AI art, and so they have
Speaker 3: their guard up to the point where like, that's fake,
Speaker 3: that's fake. That's fake.
Speaker 2: I saw a thread from an artist who was beside himself.
Speaker 2: You could plug your own art into an AI driven
Speaker 2: analysis bot that would tell you what the percentage of
Speaker 2: likelihood that your own art was AI, and sometimes you
Speaker 2: would get like a real piece of work that was
Speaker 2: like this is seventy five percent likely to be AI.
Speaker 2: And so there's actual artists who are beside themselves having
Speaker 2: to defend what their art is is real.
Speaker 3: AI art is like a black box algorithm, like you
Speaker 3: type a prompton and something comes out the other end,
Speaker 3: and you don't know exactly how that was made. And
Speaker 3: then there are all these AI art detectors that themselves
Speaker 3: are AI and themselves are like this black box that
Speaker 3: we don't know how they work. And you know, some
Speaker 3: of them are designed by people who are trying their
Speaker 3: best and like trying to like help determine like is
Speaker 3: this real? Is it's not? But then there's also a
Speaker 3: bunch of like snake oil people out there making the
Speaker 3: same thing. It's just calling real stuff bullshit because we
Speaker 3: don't know how it works either. It's just like a
Speaker 3: fake program that is also AI that is not accurate
Speaker 3: or trustworthy either.
Speaker 4: That's interesting that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you've found that people are becoming so paranoid that
Speaker 2: they're mistakenly preventing themselves from engaging with something that's real.
Speaker 2: Probably an obvious question who stands to be harmed by
Speaker 2: if this continues and trending in the same direction.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that there is a backlash to this stuff,
Speaker 3: Like I don't think that people like it for the
Speaker 3: most part, like the masses. I think that the masses
Speaker 3: want to like engage with real art made by real
Speaker 3: humans that time and effort and care was put into.
Speaker 3: So I do think that what's happening is very bad
Speaker 3: and scary. Like I have some optimism from the backlash
Speaker 3: that we've seen where people are going to like specifically
Speaker 3: seek out and support human journalists, human artists, human musicians. However,
Speaker 3: I think that we're in a very critical moment now
Speaker 3: where every single platform is like injecting some version of
Speaker 3: AI into their platform and is being taken over by
Speaker 3: AI spam to some extent. It's like Google has its
Speaker 3: you know, AI discovery stuff, like Facebook is a mess,
Speaker 3: Instagram has all these AI influencers on them now TikTok
Speaker 3: is the same. I think discoverability on the internet is
Speaker 3: what is most at risk. It's like, are we going
Speaker 3: to be able to find human art When an algorithm
Speaker 3: can make one thousand paintings in one second and a
Speaker 3: human takes a week to paint a picture. It's just
Speaker 3: like humans can't compete with the output that's happening, And
Speaker 3: so I worry that human creativity and human stuff is
Speaker 3: just going to get drowned out, rightfully.
Speaker 2: So in the last year, a lot of talk about
Speaker 2: you know, I hate they have to be like human creators,
Speaker 2: but human creators who are making stuff, but they're trying
Speaker 2: to please the algorithm. So they're making a lot of
Speaker 2: stuff really fast. There's like a rise in plagiarism. There's
Speaker 2: a rise in just like I need to have something out.
Speaker 2: I don't care if it's good, I don't care if
Speaker 2: it's anything. It's the only way to sustain and connecting
Speaker 2: those two ideas of like, yes, there's been a huge
Speaker 2: rise in finding out that someone who presents as very
Speaker 2: genuine doesn't actually do their homework, outsources it somewhere, steals shit,
Speaker 2: and that's awful, but I feel like it is in
Speaker 2: response to something where you know, it's a very cynical
Speaker 2: way of being, Like how else do I compete when
Speaker 2: you know there's an AI technology that can, at least
Speaker 2: on its face, think it does what I do and
Speaker 2: reach a larger.
Speaker 4: Audience, Like what the fuck do you do?
Speaker 1: Uh?
Speaker 4: Not plagiarize other people?
Speaker 2: But like it's just if I feel like it just
Speaker 2: introduces all of these like ethical problems among human artists.
Speaker 3: I approach this from, you know, the perspective of like
Speaker 3: a journalist and a writer and someone who publishes blogs
Speaker 3: on the Internet, and I think that what happened. I
Speaker 3: think it's very similar for comedians and people who make
Speaker 3: like TikTok videos and YouTubers and artists, where the Internet
Speaker 3: is kind of a slot machine like a lottery. It's
Speaker 3: like you spend a lot of time creating something and
Speaker 3: then you publish it and either a bunch of people
Speaker 3: look at it or like no one looks at it.
Speaker 3: You either sort of like win the algorithmic lottery and
Speaker 3: you get into the system that is like here's all
Speaker 3: your retweets, here's your likes, here's your comments, and like
Speaker 3: you're going to get millions of views on this thing,
Speaker 3: or you're gonna get hundreds of thousands of music on
Speaker 3: this thing, or you're gonna get like nothing. And there
Speaker 3: have been so many times where I have worked very
Speaker 3: hard on an article and talk to like a lot
Speaker 3: of people, like interviewed a bunch of people, spend a
Speaker 3: lot of time, I'm on it, painstakingly edited it, and
Speaker 3: then published it and no one reads it, and I'm like, oh,
Speaker 3: that sucked. But then like five minutes later, I will see,
Speaker 3: like I'll do something that I don't care about that
Speaker 3: much and it will be like a short, jokey blog
Speaker 3: about whatever, and I publish it and it goes massively viral,
Speaker 3: and I'm like, cool, wish I could have made that
Speaker 3: happen to the thing that I cared about versus the
Speaker 3: other thing. And so I think that's how you end
Speaker 3: up with this phenomenon that you're describing, where you want
Speaker 3: to take as many bites at the apple as possible,
Speaker 3: and like humans start behaving, humans start like doing stuff
Speaker 3: trying to reverse engineer what will work with an algorithm.
Speaker 3: And I think that's what makes me so scared about
Speaker 3: AI generated content, is that a human might get one
Speaker 3: bite at the apple or five bites at the apple
Speaker 3: if they work very quickly, and the AI can take
Speaker 3: like a million swings at it because it can just
Speaker 3: endlessly generate different iterations of it.
Speaker 2: Do you have advice for people who are combating this
Speaker 2: machine in art specifically, but also just you know, if
Speaker 2: your work is in constant contest with aiah.
Speaker 3: So I worked for a Vice for ten years, and
Speaker 3: I'm proud of what we did there, and you know,
Speaker 3: I don't think that what we did was bad, but
Speaker 3: it was also part of like a big company where
Speaker 3: we were like publishing lots of articles. We were you know,
Speaker 3: trying to get people to read our stuff, so on
Speaker 3: and so forth. And now you know, I started a
Speaker 3: company with three of my former colleagues called four or
Speaker 3: four Media, and it's we're not going to have the
Speaker 3: scale that Vice had, Like we're not going to have
Speaker 3: as many people read our stuff. But what we have
Speaker 3: done and what sort of like gives me hope, is
Speaker 3: we have started explaining to people that in our work,
Speaker 3: like hello, we are human beings who are sitting at
Speaker 3: a computer typing up our little posts and putting them
Speaker 3: on our little website. And this takes a lot of time,
Speaker 3: it takes a lot of effort, and here's like how
Speaker 3: we do it, and here's why you should support that.
Speaker 3: We've tried to like give a peek behind the curtain
Speaker 3: that sort of like documents the process of like what
Speaker 3: reporting is. It's not that Vice never did that, but
Speaker 3: it's like many of these like really big outlets have
Speaker 3: like a view from nowhere where the journalist isn't like
Speaker 3: inserting themselves into the work and the blogs just like
Speaker 3: up here on the Internet. And I think that you
Speaker 3: can take that and extend it to everything. It's like
Speaker 3: if you're a photographer and there's just like you're just
Speaker 3: posting photo photo, photo, photo photo, that those photos might
Speaker 3: be great or the art that you're making might be great.
Speaker 3: I think it's important to document like how much time
Speaker 3: and effort and work goes into making the things that
Speaker 3: you're making, and like explaining to people why it is
Speaker 3: what differentiates you from someone who's shitting out fifty million
Speaker 3: photos from mid journey or like writing a book on
Speaker 3: chat GPT in three seconds and publishing forty of them
Speaker 3: on Amazon. You know, like I think that that doesn't
Speaker 3: mean that that we're going to win that we the
Speaker 3: humans are going to like win versus a sort of
Speaker 3: like tech industry and tech platforms that are not super
Speaker 3: friendly to humans. Yeah, but I think that that is
Speaker 3: like the the path forward. You want the work to
Speaker 3: stand for itself. But I think you also kind of
Speaker 3: need to be like.
Speaker 2: Hey, yeah, working hard over here, like God, that's like
Speaker 2: that is very pragmatic, Like I mean, essentially you have
Speaker 2: to show here's the log, here is my change thaw,
Speaker 2: here is how it becomes a German Shepherd's statue. I
Speaker 2: shared the optimism that it does seem that most people
Speaker 2: want what they consume, whether it's art, whether it's journalism,
Speaker 2: they don't want a robot writing it. They trust the
Speaker 2: person more than they trust the robot.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now there's also this additional Well, the best practice is
Speaker 2: maybe to just like occasionally remind people that you're not
Speaker 2: a robot. I think what you're doing is much smarter
Speaker 2: because I think sometimes I like internalize weird shame about
Speaker 2: my own process.
Speaker 3: Well, I think that's been drilled into artists and been
Speaker 3: drilled into journalists too. It's like I went to journalism school,
Speaker 3: which is extremely embarrassing, Like in retrospect, it's like I
Speaker 3: was being trained to like go into a dead industry, but.
Speaker 4: Like majored in radio. It's a thing that they.
Speaker 3: Teach you is like objectivity, like you're not the story,
Speaker 3: you're not a part of it, blah blah blah. And
Speaker 3: it's like if you do that, nothing differentiates you from
Speaker 3: the zillions of other people who are doing the same thing.
Speaker 3: And I think that this is actually something that like
Speaker 3: YouTubers and influencers have been very good at. It's like
Speaker 3: I hate to hand it to Logan Paul or whatever,
Speaker 3: but it's like he has people who specifically seek him
Speaker 3: out and you can. I just said Logan Paul because
Speaker 3: it's the first name that came to my head. But
Speaker 3: it's like all of these influencers, all these comedians who
Speaker 3: kind of give you like a peek behind the curtain
Speaker 3: and like have a personality to them, also seem to
Speaker 3: be doing better than like the institution that is like
Speaker 3: we're just going to publish a bunch of kind of
Speaker 3: like wire service articles. That said, it's like such an
Speaker 3: extra thing that everyone now needs to do. It's like
Speaker 3: you don't not only do you have to like do
Speaker 3: the work, but then you have to like explain the work,
Speaker 3: and then you have to like foster a community and
Speaker 3: be beholden to that community, and it is pretty exhausting,
Speaker 3: and it can come at the expense of hanging out
Speaker 3: with your friends, responding to text messages from your mom
Speaker 3: like yeah.
Speaker 4: Because you're you're busy curiating something. That just a reminder
Speaker 4: I'm a person.
Speaker 2: Thanks so much to Jason, and you can subscribe to
Speaker 2: four or four Media and check out their podcast in
Speaker 2: the description. Their work is so fucking good and thorough
Speaker 2: and they're reporting on tech in the Internet unlike anyone else.
Speaker 2: And also thanks to Jason for just encouraging me to
Speaker 2: share about my own process. I feel embarrassed, I feel naked.
Speaker 2: It will never happen again, but there it is. In
Speaker 2: all seriousness. This conversation was really useful for me. It
Speaker 2: was a reminder that it's not reboten and it shouldn't
Speaker 2: be discouraged to occasionally just say, hey, making something you
Speaker 2: can stand by takes a while. When you hear these
Speaker 2: shorter episodes, that's what's happening. I want to make sure
Speaker 2: that you're listening to information that is good and thoughtful,
Speaker 2: and I want to make sure that I don't accidentally
Speaker 2: kill myself doing it, So thank you for listening. Try
Speaker 2: not to work until three in the morning, and text
Speaker 2: your mom back. We'll be back next week.
Speaker 4: Glad You're here.
Speaker 2: Sixteenth Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 4: It is written, posted, and produced by me Jamie Loftus.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans Llamas
Speaker 2: and Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.
Speaker 4: Our theme song is.
Speaker 2: By Sat thirteen and Pet. Shout outs to our dog
Speaker 2: producer Anderson my Kat's Flee and Casper and by Pet
Speaker 2: Rockbert who will outlive us all Bye.