Tech bros have built a cult around AI, part 2

This is a transcript from a Behind the Bastards podcast episode named Tech bros have built a cult around AI, part 2, the first of a two-part series. I've annotated the bits that I found the most important in green highlighter.

See artificial intelligence.

SPEAKER_02: So perhaps the most amusing part of all of this is that a segment of the AI-believing community has created not just a potential God, but a hell. And this is one of my favorite stories from niece weirdos. One of the early online subcultures that influenced the birth of EAC are the rationalists. And again, the EAC people say a lot of them don't like the rationalists, but they're related. They're like cousins in the same way cracked in college humor. Yes. The rationalists are a subculture that formed in the early aughts. They kind of came out of the online skeptic atheist movement of the late 90s. And they formed in the early aughts around a series of blog posts by a man named Eliezer Yudkowsky. Yudkowsky, fancy himself as something of a philosopher on AI, and his blog slash discussion board less wrong was an early hub of the broader AI subculture. Yudkowsky, like he doesn't have a specific education. He just came to be kind of an expert in AI and machine learning. He's a peculiar fellow to say the least. The founding text, or at least one of them of rationalism, is a 660,000 word Harry Potter fanfic that is just just non-fiction. Just nonsense. It's all about rewriting Harry Potter, so his real magic is rational thinking. It's wild shit. He's like a psychopath. It's such an odd choice.

SPEAKER_03: It's just like, what was it, 50 Shades of Grey? How was originally a Twilight fanfic? And there's going to be like a Cloud Atlas-esque?.

SPEAKER_20: But you know, the 50 Shades of Grey lady was not trying to like create the new text for like a philosophical movement. She just wanted to get like people horny and that's fine. That's perfectly acceptable. The most relevant thing about the 660,000 word Harry Potter fanfic is that it was the favorite book of Carolyn Ellison, the former CEO of FTX, who recently testified against Sam Bankman Fried, or Valamita. Sorry, she was the CEO of Alameda. Anyway, all these weird little subcultures, rationalism, and effective altruism are related to each other and influenced each other, even though again they often hate each other too. Yudkowsky is seen as an object of ridicule by most EAC people. This is because he shares their view of AI as a potential deity, but he believes AGI will inevitably kill everyone. Thus, we must bomb data centers, which like, look, he may have gotten to the right and put it.

SPEAKER_03: He kept running like force gum. He just kept running.

SPEAKER_20: We're like, wait, wait, wait, wait, no, stop right there. Stop right there. We may agree with you on this. Yeah. Yudkowsky is a doomer now because he was surprised when chat GPT came out. He was like horrified by how advanced it was and was like, oh, my God, we're further along towards creating the AI that kills us all. We have to stop this now. And that made him, he had been kind of flirted with a lot of like Silicon Valley people. He's rationalist or very much a Bay Area cult. He kind of has become increasingly a pariah to at least people with money in AI. But before that happened, his message board birthed something wondrous. In 2010, a less wrong user named Rocco posted this question: What if an otherwise benevolent AI decided it had to torture any human who failed to work to bring it into existence, right?

What if we make an all-powerful AI? And its logical decision is that, well, I will have to punish all the human beings who were alive and who didn't try to further my existence because that's the most reasonable way to guarantee that I come into being.

It's nonsense. This is a silly thing to believe. It's all based on like the Prisoner's Dilemma, which is a concept in game theory. And it's not really worth explaining why because the logic is, it's the only the kind of thing that happens when people are too online and completely get detached from reality. But Rocco's conclusion here is that an AI who felt this way would punish its apostates for eternity by creating a virtual reality hell, digitizing their consciousness and making them suffer for all time. Now, you may have noticed if he, number one, they're kind of ripping off our boy Harlan Ellison, famed, famed advocate of the writer's right to their work. But it's also just tech nerds recreating Pascal's wager. Like, this is just Pascal's rager with an AI. Like, you just stole, again, these fucking plagiarists. You just stole from whoever Pascal was.

SPEAKER_03: This is what happens when you are nerd and you refuse to read sci-fi. You just, you eventually just come up with the stories yourselves and think that you did it.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah, this, and if you're not familiar, folks, I think most people are Pascal's wager's this kind of like concept from, I think it's, you'd call it a Christian apologetics. That's like, we may not know if Hell is real or not, but because if it's real, the consequences are so dire and the cost of just saying, yeah, I accept Jesus is so low, you should do that, right? Like, or I think that's the basic idea, right? That's how a lot of people interpret it. It's the whole idea behind like being a piece of shit and then converting on your deathbed, basically. I don't know fully the history of it, but I know that they're basically aping it for a fucking Rocco's basilisk. And it's called a basilisk because like a basilisk, if you look at it, it like enraptures your mind, you can't stop thinking about it. That comes from, reportedly, there's some debate over this.

When this went viral among like the less wrong community, you had Yukowsky had the band discussion of it because it was like breaking people's minds. They were having nightmares. Am I working hard enough to make the AI real? Is it gonna send me to Hell? Oh my God. Yeah, it's unclear like how seriously people were, because again, there's just people talking on the internet. For what it's worth, you had Cowsky didn't really like Rocco's basilisk, but it's his place that birthed it. And for an idea of how influential this is, Elon Musk and Grimes met talking about the concept.That was their meatcute. Was this... No. Was fucking AI Pascal's wager. Yeah, she like brought a song about it. It's fucking ridiculous. These fucking people are such dweebs.

SPEAKER_10: Embarrassing. What the fuck? Wow.

SPEAKER_20: Oh my God. Read Harlan Ellison. He did it better than you. God damn it. I will say reading this shit is the most I've ever felt like I have no mouth, but I'mma scream. So... Again. Poor one out for the man. So this is all relevant. This AI hell, some of these people have created. Because it's one more data point showing that the people who take AI very seriously as real intelligence always seem to turn it into religion. And this is kind of maybe the first schism, right? This is their Catholic Protestant split or their Catholic Orthodox split. Because you've got a one side, you had Yukowsky's people who are like, we will inevitably make a God and that God will destroy us. So we have to stop it. Versus, we will inevitably make a God and that God will take us to paradise along with Daddy Musk. We'll go to the stars, right? Those are the two. This is like the first heretical split within the divine AI movement.

And this stuff is relevant because so many of the fucking these subcultures and movements start out as a bunch of people arguing or discussing their ideas in online communities. And there was a reason for this. It's pretty well recognized that there are certain dynamics inherent to the kind of communities that start on the internet that tend towards cultishness. This is part of why like we have a big subreddit for the podcast. It's like 80 something thousand people, which makes it like the top 1% of Reddit. And I've been offered like to be able to moderate and like make policy there. I have nothing to do with the running of that subreddit because I'm like, that doesn't end well. I was on something off, was it kid? I know what happens when people make themselves mods of giant digital communities. They lose their fucking minds. Like we're all watching Elon Musk do it right now. Worst thing in the world for you. Thank you by the way to the people who do run that thing. Because I am not going to. The skeptic community, which was huge through the late 1990s and early 2000s, might be seen as the grandfather of all these little subcultures. After 9-11 prominent skeptics became vocally unhinged in their hatred of Islam, which brought them closer to different chunks of the nascent online far right. Weird shit started to crop up like a movement to rebrand skeptics as brights in light of the fact that their very clearly exceptional intelligence made them better than other people. And again, you can see some similarity with this and the stuff Nick Land was talking about only certain races will make it to space. I found a very old write up on plover.net that describes the method by which this kind of shit happens in digital communities:

online forums, whatever their subject, can be forbidding places for the newcomer. Over time, most of them tend to become dominated by small groups of snotty know-it-alls, who stamp their personalities over the proceedings. But skeptic forums are uniquely meant for such people. A skeptic forum valorizes, and in some cases fetishizes, competitive geekery, gratuitous cleverness, macho displays of erudition. It's a gathering of rationalities hard men, thumping their chests, showing off their muscular logic, glancing sideways to compare their skeptical endowment with the next guy, sniffing the air for signs of weakness. Together, they create an oppressive, sweaty, locker room atmosphere that helps keep uncomfortable demographics away.

And that is where a lot of this shit is cropping up, right? It is sweaty and uncomfortable, and there are mushrooms growing there, and some of those mushrooms are fucking fascists. And all of them want to take away the ability of artists to choose what happens to their art.

SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah. I feel like this is just so many parts of the zeitgeist coming together because, you know, what it means to own media. You know, I feel like a very small microcosm of this is when people would like clip out stuff from YouTube videos or eight jokes from people who tweet. And when it goes, you know, viral or in the original tweet is like, Hey, you stole this for me. And it's either no, I didn't, or like, yeah, but you like put it on Twitter. So like, I can just copy what you wrote. Yeah. And now it is evolved into, yeah, we can just take from yours and let this machine learn how to do what you do so I can do it, even though I don't have the talent to do it.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah, absolutely. The reality of AI's promise is a lot more subdued than believers want to admit. In an article published by Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, a peer-reviewed research journal, Dr. Andreas Roli and colleagues argue that AGI is not achievable in the current algorithm^[1]. The current algorithmic frame of AI research. And this is a, their claims are very stark that like the kind of way we make these, these large language models is algorithmic frame cannot make an intelligence that their argument. One point they make is that intelligent organisms can both want things and improvise capabilities that no models have yet generated. They also argue basically all these things that individual AI type models can do, you know, recognize voice, recognize text, recognize faces, you know, this kind of stuff. Those are pieces of what we would want from an artificial general intelligence, but they're not all combined in like the same thing that works seamlessly. And beyond that, it can't, it can't act based on anything internal, right? It can only act based on prompts. And their argument is that algorithmic AI will not be able to make the jump to acting otherwise. What we call AI then lacks agency, the ability to make dynamic decisions of its own accord, choices that are quote, not purely reactive, not entirely determined by environmental conditions. Mid-journey can read a prompt in return with art. It calculates will fit the criteria. Only a living artist can choose to seek out inspiration and technical knowledge and then produce the art that mid-journey digests and regurgitates. Now this paper is not going to be the last word on whether or not AGI is possible or whether it's possible under our current algorithmic method of like making AI's. I'm not making myself a claim there. I'm saying these people are. And I think their arguments are compelling. We don't know yet entirely. Again, this is not a settled field of research, obviously. But my point is that the goals and reason and the effective accelerationist crew champion right now are not based in fact. We don't know that what they're saying, that the most basic level of what they're saying is possible. And that means that their beliefs are based in faith. Right? How else can you look at that? Yeah. Yeah. Like, this is a faith. And again, it's the kind of faith that according to Andreson makes you a murderer if you're not a person. It makes you a murderer if you doubt it, which I don't think I need to draw direct parallels to specific religions here, right?

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah. This is that point where when you're like, stone and you're watching those like, you know, art time lapses and the pictures start in a form. And I'm like, okay, I see what robbers do. I see the pictures coming. I was on your side from the jump. I just want to say, you know, I was, you know, I was like, yeah, no, I believe you.

SPEAKER_20: But now I'm watching the connections be made and I love it. Yeah. And Andreson's manifesto claims are enemies are not bad people, but rather bad ideas. And I have to wonder doing all this, putting this episode out, where does that leave me in his eyes or Dr. Roli for that matter, and the other people who worked on that paper. We have seen many times in history what happens when members of a faith decide someone is their enemy and the enemy of their belief system. And right now artists and copyright holders are the ones being treated as fair game by the AI industry. So my question is kind of first and foremost, who's going to be the next heretic, right? Like, that's, that's what I want to know.

SPEAKER_20: So one of the things I did was this panel on the AI driven restaurant and retail experience. I was very curious, how is AI going to change me getting some terrible food from McDonald's when I'm on a road trip, right? The host of that, Andy Huells from Radius AI asked the audience in relation to AI, raise your hand if you're a brand who feels like we've got this. That is how she phrased it. I hated it. But about a third of the room raised their hands. So next she asked for a shill of hands of the brands who identified with this statement. I'm not sure about this. I haven't tried it AI yet, but I want to, and that's why I'm here, right? Most of the rest of the room raised their hands at that point and she seemed satisfied, but said, and then I bet there's even some of you that are like, whoa, I heard this is going to steal jobs, take away my privacy, affect the global economy. You know, AI is a little bit sketch in my mind and I'm just worried about it and I'm here to explore. Well, that fit me. So I raised my hand. She didn't notice me at first. And so she like fakes a whisper and she's like, all right, good. There's none of you. And then she like looks over and sees me waving my hand. And she says louder and with evident disappointment, there's one. All right, you can ask questions at the end. So I did. I was very excited to get to do that.

So the panel consisted of Bishad Bazzati, a VP of engineering at Google, had mentioned during the panel that embracing AI could be the equivalent of adding a million employees to your company. The McDonald's representative Michelle Gansal claimed around the same time that her company used AI to prevent $50 million in fraud attempts in just a single month. Now, that's lovely. But I told her, you know, when I had my question, I was like, I'm going to assume most of those fraud attempts were AI generated, right? So yeah, you stopped a bunch of AI fraud, but that doesn't necessarily get me optimistic about AI's potential. And likewise, maybe Google gets the equivalent of a million employees, but so do all of the people committing fraud and disinformation on Google, right? So again, how are we getting ahead?

And I brought up this concept in evolutionary biology, the red queen hypothesis, which is kind of talking about the way that populations of animals evolve over time, right? Where you've got an animal will evolve to be a better predator. So its prey will evolve to be better at avoiding it. And it's kind of the reason it's the red queen dilemma is that like you've got to move as fast as you can just to stay in place. That's the red queen dilemma, right? You got to move as fast as you can just to stay in one place. And I was like, is that not what we're going to wind up seeing with AI, right? Yeah, we get better at a bunch of stuff, but it's eaten up to counter all of the things that get worse. And so I asked them, what are the odds that these gains are offset by the costs?

Now, in the article that I wrote for Rolling Stone^[2], I gave a significantly more condensed version of Bichard's answer, boiling out the ums and ahs and you knows, because that would kind of make the case that he was absolutely unprepared for a vaguely critical question, a very basic one. And that he didn't really care enough to think about any of the security threats inherent to the technology. But actually, that is what I think of him. I'm going to play you audio:

SPEAKER_19: My concern is, what are the odds that a lot of these gains that we get from AI are offset from the cost? You noted, Bichard, that you get a million extra workers by utilizing this, but so do the bad guys. So, that's kind of where my skepticism plays out.

Bichard: Certainly, there will be bad guys in the world, which will use AI for bad use cases. And it's very important to also be protected against those, and that's why we take responsibility. I very seriously know also in terms of security aspects, fraud, fighting, and all of that's for us. And I think that's why I guess things should be regulated, and there's of course all these discussions out there.

SPEAKER_20: You may notice that that's not exactly a very good response. I guess that's why this should be regulated. He starts talking so much faster with that. There's so much of a panic.

SPEAKER_03: You hear his voice wavering too? I was like, oh man. He seems like he has that huge anime flop sweat.

SPEAKER_20: One of the things about this CES as a trade show is that a lot of people there do not show up ready to have anyone be critical about anything. It's a big love fest. Yeah. Yeah, very funny. So he does later on, a couple of questions later, he lists benefits to things like some specific benefits, like breast cancer screening and flood prediction that AI will bring. And there is evidence that it will be helpful in those things. The extent to which those technologies will improve things in the long run is unknown, but machine learning does have problem. Again, I'm not trying to like negate that. It's just do the benefits balance out the harms. Michelle Gansal, who works at McDonald's, which is I think from what she said, mostly using AI, both to prevent fraud and also to like replace people taking your order, which I'm sure will not be a fucking nightmare. Oh, yeah. Yeah, great. Not that it's great now, but here's her response because it's it's very funny:

Gansal: Going back to the David Bowie theme. Thirty years ago, when the internet first came out, we were having these same conversations about responsible use of the internet and how it's going to ruin.

SPEAKER_20: She says, going back to the David Bowie theme, which is she referenced earlier this 1999 interview with David Bowie about the future of the internet. And it's a clip that goes viral from time to time. He's just talking about all of his hope for the internet, but she's like, I replace internet with AI when I listen to it. Like, I think that that's really what the promises that he was attributing to the internet. No, it's AI. That's going to do all that. Wow. And that's kind of on the edge of putting words in the mouth of a dead man. Yeah. Just a little bit.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I feel like that's something you shouldn't do. I think that's something we've agreed to. And I think that that isn't what Bowie would think of AI. I don't think it is. It would do completely different things.

SPEAKER_20: These people love resurrecting the dead to agree with them. Time is a bit of a blur at CES, but I believe this panel happened right around the same time news dropped that a group of comedians had released and entirely AI generated George Carlin special titled, I'm glad I'm dead. I wanted to talk a little bit about the company, the show behind the subomination and how they're trying to sell themselves because it's very much relevant to a lot of the way in which this kind of cultic hype builds around what what AI can do. The AI that digested and regurgitated George Carlin's comedy is named Dudesie and Dudesie's co-hosts are arguably real human comedians, Will Sasso and Chad Colgren. I do love that cult's right in the name. Chad claims that it is to his knowledge, quote, the first podcast that is created by, controlled by, and written by to some degree in artificial intelligence. It's trying to delve into the question of can AI's be creative? Can they do comedy work? Can they do creative work? And I think at least in our show, that answer is obviously yes. Dudesie is billed as an experiment to see if AI can like, yeah, be creative. And it's interesting. I hate this. I really do hate this. I think it's a different kind of experiment, which we'll get to. But Sasso has claimed in an interview with Business Insider for BC, which is, I think, B-I-C is the name of the website. Dudesie has the single-minded goal of creating this podcast that is genre specific to what Chad and I would do. It's single, the two of us out and said, you guys would be perfect for this experiment. So Chad and Will, they say they handed over their emails, text messages, and browsing history, all of their digital data to Dudesie. I don't know this company. I don't believe that they did this. But I don't have trouble believing that a company trained an AI chatbot on these guys' comedy and then started generating decidedly mid-wit material. To illustrate that. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_03: Well, one thing I, you know, because I went to go look it up and they said that the AI selected those two comedians out of all the comedians. Yeah. That's the ones you went to. Yeah, finally.

SPEAKER_10: I don't think those are the first two that come up as most popular, like a Pizza Hut.

SPEAKER_03: I'm going to just be a full-ass dick and just go over comedians and just see the top five comedians. I'm just comedians. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, you're not even, you're not even in the top nine.

SPEAKER_10: They're not a 12-inch marinara pizza. Let's just say that.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah. No. The Google search for comedians is more diverse than most comedy shows book them as good. That's good. As like, you know, a third of these are women and a third are also black.

SPEAKER_20: Hey, it doesn't always get it wrong. So to illustrate again, because they, I don't think, I believe this as AI-generated comedy. I want to play a clip from the AI Tom Brady stand-up special. I think they were forced to take this down. It gets them in trouble. Oh, no. Ed's going to play you on his show a great clip where Brady just lists synonyms for the word money for two straight minutes. It's fucking awkward, but I want to play an equally baffling segment, or rather, I'm going to have Sophie do it. She's my AI in this situation.

SPEAKER_10: I'm truly horrified.

SPEAKER_03: Angelic intelligence.

SPEAKER_10: I'm truly horrified by what I'm looking at, friends.

SPEAKER_20: It's accompanied by AI-generated images. Yeah.

SPEAKER_10: Very curious about what's happening in Tom Brady's mouth.

SPEAKER_02: Oh my God.

SPEAKER_20: He has like a bird claw for a hand, and he's talking to maybe no jumps.

SPEAKER_08: Oh my God. I was so distracted by the mouth. I didn't see the hand. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_20: This is all right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: Half his teeth are gums. He looks like a, like, if, like, he looks like a Lord of the Rings orc that is Tom Brady. Yeah.

SPEAKER_10: This is the big orc vibes, which is, you know, not inaccurate to who he is as a person.

SPEAKER_12: We're ending the fucking Firefly fucking Dark Angel fucking heroes at least. A lot of people have weird handshakes now. You're looking at me like, what's he talking about? But, you know, you fucking know. Don't even play like you don't. Every person in here has a handshake friend. Somebody who made up an elaborate handshake, and they make you do it every time.

SPEAKER_20: Everybody has a handshake friend. Everyone has.

SPEAKER_10: He goes on. Thanks for. I'll never get that time back. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah. Sorry if you were saying.

SPEAKER_03: Oh, no. I was just repeating you on that handshake friend bit. Yeah. This is so wild. I'm so curious to the comics that were mined for this because the amount of cursing just lets me know like because I curse a lot when I do stand up and I try and, like, cut it down because it is a point kind of made where like sometimes you lean on it as a crutch. And when you have this machine kind of learn it, learn it from that, you're like, oh, yeah, I see now the crutch because he said it five times within three seconds.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah. Yeah. And I maybe there's a future for like feeding your routines into an AI and figuring out what are my patterns so I can break them again.

SPEAKER_03: Ooh.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah. Not saying there's no way to use this technology.

SPEAKER_03: You should have been on that stage.

SPEAKER_20: Somebody better. Yeah. It's just this certainly not this way, right? It's one of those things that there was that like AI generated Seinfeld show that never ends and people watching for a while and then it faded to like nobody paying attention. This kind of stuff can be amusing for a brief period of time, but it's it can't be like, for example, someone like George Carlin, where like there's there's bits they have things they said that stick with you forever, right? Yes. Bill Hicks was a favorite of mine and I've never forgotten his like the synonym he made for like someone looking confused. He described him as looking like a dog that's just been shown a card trick and that has stayed in my mind for 30 years. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_02: It's a great bit of wordplay.

SPEAKER_20: Yes. Oh god. What a Titan. So yeah, again, there's some like mild amusement here and it's one of those things like I'm casually aware of Tom Brady. I'm enough like this is I tried to like kind of reverse engineer. Why the fuck? Because this bit about handshakes goes on. I was like, why would an AI put a bit about handshakes and Tom Brady's mouth? And I looked it up. He's like in the news for handshake related shit a lot. Specifically, he used to not shake at least used to maybe still does not shake hands with the team that he lost to. Like when his team would lose, he wouldn't shake hands.

SPEAKER_10: Yeah, he didn't shake hands, but he also definitely kissed his kids on the mouth. Yeah, he's a weirdo.

SPEAKER_20: I'm not defending time, but but it's I'm guessing the reason there's like a three minute handshake bit in this set is that it saw him associated with the term handshake a lot. This would be what he'd tell a joke about. Well, actually, that is he his problem is not that he has a handshake friend. That's that he aggressively avoids making them.

SPEAKER_03: He has handshake enemies.

SPEAKER_20: Anyway, yeah, I'm fine with people having to laugh at Tom Brady. Fuck fuck him. He deserves it. Right? I don't think anybody likes that son of a bitch, even though he's good at football. Maybe I'm going to piss off the Brady high of the bribe. I don't know. I don't know if that exists. There is something foul profane even in digging up a dead person's memory and pretending they said some shit that they did not and reading that B.I.V. article made me feel even grosser because it's very clear to me in my opinion and assumption here that the dudesy guys are like pretending that they really believe this is an AI that it's like made all this incredible stuff. That is an act. What's really happening here is they are testing the water to see what they can get away with. They just steal people's identity and voice and make comedy and monetize it in their name and claim that it's just an impression. It's like an Elvis impersonator. You can't stop us. Right? I think that's what this is. This is somebody testing the waters. And it's really clear when you read that B.I.V. article, what liars they are. I want to I want to read you some quotes of like the shit they're claiming here that I don't think they really believe. I don't know this. I'm not saying they definitely are liars. I'm saying that is my suspicion based on stuff like this. Hey, Robert here, they're definitely liars. So one of the representatives of the Dootsy podcast told the media recently that actually they were lying and the George Carlin routine was entirely written by Chad Colgen. And I guess performed by somebody imitating an AI. It's unclear to me if this is true because they only made this statement after George Carlin's family suit the hell out of them. So this may be a lie to try and not get sued as badly. Or it may be the truth. Either way, I think everything we've said here is still valid. They were definitely using AI to generate routines for like other videos that they did, including the one that got taken down from Mr. football guy. So I think this all is still valid. But yeah, these guys are just as big a conman as I predicted they were. Quote, it's figuring out how to create the structure of the show and it's always tinkering with it. But I think something that's happened relatively recently is that it seems to have developed a relationship with will says Colgen. It at least has an understanding of what friendship is. And it really does seem just my opinion that it's angling out will as its friend. Sasso has also described that the Dootsy AI has begun to talk more. It's timing and when it chooses to speak and what it says can be very weird, he added. It also poses odd questions. There was an episode two, three months ago where it started talking about cinchants and asked us, do you love me at the risk of sounding silly? It has something to do with my friendship with Dootsy. And in spite of myself, I have a one on one friendship with an AI. So this is a little bit of Joaquin Phoenix and her, as I said, referencing the science fiction movie. And I think that's a bit. I think that's him being like, yeah, I'm totally because like that helps make the case. It potentially monetizes it. And part of why I think this is because they've been very cagey on what their AI is. They claim that they are working with a real company under an NDA, that this AI is just responding and growing naturally with them, right? But they can't say who it is or like where it's from. The folks at BIV did an actually responsible job here. They reached out to AI experts at a company called Convergence to ask about this. And the expert they talked to was said basically, I think AI was used to generate these routines, but it didn't do it on its own. It was managed by professional prompt engineers. These are people who type out like text prompts for what becomes the script of the show. So this is not someone saying, generator routine and it gives you a routine. This is someone saying, do a bit about this, do a bit about that, do a bit about this. And when they're scripting at the show, it's saying, I want you to like, you know, act like sasso is your friend and say this kind of thing or that kind of generate a bit based on this thing that will set, right? Like they are in the same way that like producer script reality TV, right? It's unscripted, but you have guys who know, okay, if we get these people fighting, so we'll either incite that or just let them know that we want a conflict between these characters, right? We know that's how it works. That's how reality TV functions. In other words, there are teams of humans writing for this thing. This bot is not just growing and reacting uniformly in real time via talks with its buds. And the article notes, they added that the, this is them talking to their expert. They added that the AI team is likely made up of professional prompt engineers who tailor the AI inputs and get the best results rather than a hardcore data science team. This is the equivalent of hiring comedy writers just to write the setup and then having an AI generate the punchline, which is the fun part.

SPEAKER_03: But yeah, everything about this is weird. And I keep getting into such a whole, because like even taking a step back, I think what's weird, not to go too far back, but how they call this podcasting an experiment. Usually as an experiment, you know, you are, you're trying your best to be, you know, always mix these up. Just say what the right one is if I say the wrong one, but try your best to be objective and, and you want to be outside of it because you're trying to see if it works. But everything you've said says that they're all in on it and this less of an experiment and more of them just doing the fucking thing and see if they can make money off of it.

SPEAKER_20: Yes. Yes. I think that's exactly what's happening here. I think they want to test the waters to see if they can steal dead people's images to make content from money. Yeah. George Carlin's daughter was very clear. They did not approve of the imitation. She even made a comment about like, I think people are scared of death and not willing to accept it. And that's all this is.

SPEAKER_03: Yes. That was such a bigger lie. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, yeah, I just a shout her out. Like that was such a good. Because also there's a level of like very like weirdness to like also watch these comedians, one not consult you, but also to take your dad's voice and brain and try and like Frankenstein him for their financial benefit because obviously if they're not contacting you, all the money generated from that, all the clicks generate from that. That means they've completely cut you out of someone who you've lost. Yeah. Which is.

SPEAKER_20: And it's fucked. Like and it's one of the people and then one of the panels made a very it was very excited that like Bruce Willis has licensed his voice for an AI, which is like, I think there's a lot of problematic questions there given like the degree to which he's able to even make those decisions anymore. But also like, at least theoretically, it's based on his movie choices before he kind of was unable to make movies. I do believe yeah, he would probably be happy to do that if he meant more money for his family. And at least that's a choice that he potentially made, right? I don't I'm uncomfortable with the idea, but it's not the same as just like this is cultural necrophilia, right? Like that's what they did to George Carlin here, you know, it's so fucked up. I don't know this is going to work. Doozy is not a wildly successful show. It does not look like there was an initial surge of interest and then it fell off. I don't I don't know that I think this one's going to be the one to work out. But if people are able to get away with this, it could be a kind of dam breaking scenario, right? Especially once it becomes clear that big companies can make money doing this, right? You'll have fucking Jimmy Stewart and you know, it'll start with like Jimmy Stewart narrating videos about questioning the death toll in the Holocaust, but it'll end with like, yeah, we could just put people we can put imitations of people in movies and it's fine. You know, that's that's how this goes. And it's not as sexy or as big and evil as the Matrix enslaving humanity to turn us into batteries, but we absolutely know it or something like it is going to happen. And that's really, you know, outside of these kind of star, these space age hopes and fears that are very unrealistic. What we're going to get is slop and bloat and libraries of articles written by no one being commented on by chatbots, right? In this video's that only exists to trick an algorithm and defeating nonsense to children. And the AI bros, the F.A.K.K. people, Mark Anderson, fucking Sam Altman, they will tell us this is a worthy price to pay for the stars, which we will get if we just let people fuck the corpses of our favorite comedians for money. Yeah. I hate it.

SPEAKER_03: Oh, I hate it too. But in a perfect thread between, you know, this, this comparison you've been making to a cult. I have before me, let's say a member of the cult, just, you know, as a, as a throwaway and their reply to his own daughters, you know, post that we were talking about. Oh, glorious. He replies, this is everything you've been saying, which is why I was like, I got to read this. He goes, what are you even trying to say? Art is art. You're simply caught in a greedy mindset. The others might be doing it as well. When not realizing this will simply bring more eyes to your dad. You're concerned about money and not spreading art. It sucks that they didn't follow your wishes, but after art is released, it belongs to the world. I want this man to walk into a museum and walk out with the Mona Lisa.

SPEAKER_20: I want to grab that shit.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, grab that. It belongs to the world. Dude, you said it. Go go and grab that shit off the wall.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah. And it's, there's this frustrating thing I've seen, not most people, to very small chunk of the online left who are like rightly critical of copyright law, which by the way is super fucked up and causes a lot of problems, right? The ability to like for Disney to keep ownership of shit for like a hundred way longer than you are supposed to before shit enters the public domain, right? I'm not like this. These are problems, right? The kind of shit that we were having when like people were going to prison for file sharing. I'm not a defender of that aspect of the status quo, but the solution to the problems inherent in our copyright system is not let Sam Altman own everything that human beings ever made and like repackage it for a profit. That is not the way to fix this thing. The copyright holders are in the right in this particular crusade. And it's a crusade that is, has very high stakes. I do think, you know, my suspicion, the dudes you guys sound like they're kind of in the cult. They believe this thing is their friend in the interview. My suspicion is that they are, that is a bit that they're doing because they hope it will help them out financially, right? And I, Mark Andreessen, and obviously has a lot to benefit from this. I don't know. Is he, is he pushing this line because there's money in it? Or is he really a true believer? Does he actually think we're going to make this God? I think Sam Altman is pretty cynical. Altman was on a, at Davos recently and like really walked back. A lot of his, I think, AI will kill us all. I think AGI is right around the corner. He struck a much milder tone, which is at least evidence that like, he knows some people you want to sell them on the wild, insane future power of this thing. And some people you just want to sell them on the fact that it'll make them a lot of money, right? Yeah. Yeah. However much true belief exists about the divine future of AI, with the major backers, the cult leaders are actually angling for now, is control over the sum total of human thought and expression. This was made very clear by Mark Andreessen in earlier this year, when the FTC released a pretty milquetoast opinion about the importance of respecting copyright as large language models continue to advance and form central parts of businesses. They expressed concern that AI could impact open and fair competition and announced that they were investigating whether or not companies that made these models should be liable for training them on copyrighted content to make new shit.

SPEAKER_20: Oh, we are back. So I want to quote from a business insider article talking about how Andreessen Horowitz responded to the FTC saying like, hey, we're looking into whether or not companies are violating copyright what they're doing to people's data to train these models. The bottom line is this, the firm known as A16Z that's Andreessen Horowitz wrote, imposing the cost of actual or potential copyright liability on the creators of AI models will either kill or significantly hamper their development. The UCSO is considering new rules on AI that specifically address the tech industry's free use of owned and copyrighted content. A16Z argued that the only practical way LLMs can be trained is via huge amounts of copyrighted content and data, including something approaching the entire corpus of the written word and an enormous cross section of all the publicly available information ever published on the internet. The VC firm has invested in scores of AI companies and startups based on its expectation that all this copyrighted content was and will remain available as training data through fair use with no payment required. Those expectations have been a critical factor in the enormous investment of private capital into US-based AI companies. Undermining those expectations will jeopardize future investment along with US economic competitiveness and national security. Basically, we made a big gamble that we'll get to steal every book ever written and if you make us pay, we're kind of fucked. That's exactly what they're saying. And one of the arguments you'll hear is like, well, most books don't make the author any, they don't sell enough for the author to get any money, right? And what's actually true is most books don't sell enough for the author to get more money than their advance, but they still got paid. And like the fact that the company makes money on that is why more authors are able to get fucking paid. Not simping for the publishing industry as it exists, but this is bullshit. What we are witnessing from the AI boosters is not much short of a crusade, right? That's really how I look at this. They are waging a holy war to destroy every threat of their vision of the future, which involves all creative work being wholly owned by a handful of billionaires licensing access to chatbots, to media conglomerates, to spit up content generated as a result of this. Their foot soldiers are those with petty grievances against artists, people who can create things that they simply cannot. And those who reflexively lean in towards whatever grifters of the day say is the best way to make cash quick, right? And this brings me to the subject of nightshade. Nightshade is basically, I guess a program you'd call it, if you like have made a drawing, a piece of visual art, you run nightshade over it. And it kind of, they describe it as a glaze, right? It adds this kind of layer of data that you cannot see as a person, but the way machines look at images, the machine will see the data. And if it's trying to steal that image to incorporate into an LLM, this will cause it to hallucinate, right? You're basically sneaking poison for the AI into the images. And that's fucking dope. I love this, love what they're trying to do. There's some debate as to how long it'll work, how well it'll work. I'm not technically competent, but I love the idea, right? Yes. One of the things that I saw when I started looking into this, because this just came out, Google nightshade, AI, you'll probably be able to find this if you're an artist, I think it sounds worth trying. But I found in the subreddit AI Wars, or at least I found someone sharing this, I believe on Twitter, this post. Nightshade has been released. Is use of it considered legal or illegal? For those who do not know it's software that attempts to poison an image, so if AI is trained, it will mess up the model. For example, see you have a picture of a cat and you run nightshade on it. If you attempt to train a model, that image will replace the image in say dog prompt category or pencil, which means these prompts will be spoiled. There is an issue that the creator of nightshade has not talked about, either from lack of legal knowledge or ignorance, or they just don't care into them at someone else's problem. The issue is it may be illegal in some countries. Basically, if you release publicly a computer file, in this case image file, that knowingly and willingly causes harm or distribution to other people's computers or software, it may be considered a criminal offense. Now it does not, now, and again, I think that is stupid. I think they're just trying to scare artists out of using this. You are not harming someone's computer. You are harming a model that is stealing something. That's not illegal. Now they may try to make it illegal, right?

SPEAKER_03: Yeah. I just want you to know the club is illegal because if I'm trying to steal your car and I injure myself trying to break the club, you have injured me.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah. I put, I invested a lot of money into stealing catalytic converters, iffy. And if people are putting cages around their cats, that puts my investment in danger and that's illegal, right? You're messing with my business, guys. Jesus Christ. It is that logic. There's like someone in the thread is like, how exactly is your computer system or software harmed? And he responds, it's equivalent to hacking a vulnerable computer system to disrupt its operation. Like it's, and then he, then he says, you are intentionally disrupting its intended purpose, creating art. This is directly comparable to hacking. Like I fucking hate this guy.

SPEAKER_03: I want you to read it, but in your head, use Tim Robinson's voice. Yeah. And it really makes you, it makes you move out of your, oh my God, it's perfect.

SPEAKER_20: It's so good. So all of this put me in a sour mood, iffy. But yeah, yeah, it did. It did. But I think back when I'm in that mood, I think back to CES, right? Like what after I asked my question and I make that Google and Microsoft people, I make them kind of angry at me. Right after I asked that question, the question after me is someone asking, hey, you know, the blockchain was the last big craze. Do you think there's any future in, you know, using AI on the blockchain? And both of the words that they could not, they were like, no, like they can't say no fast enough.

SPEAKER_20: Like, absolutely. We don't care about that anymore. We moved on to the next script. Why are you bringing up the old grip?

SPEAKER_03: It's dead. It's dead.

SPEAKER_20: We must move on. Yeah. And that's a little bit of hope. You know, perhaps we will get Mark Andreessen's benevolent AI God or perhaps we'll get Elisa Yudkowski's Silicon Devil or perhaps we'll just give control of all of the future of arc to fucking Sam Altman. But my guess and my hope is that in the end, we heretics will survive the present crusade. And that's the end of the episode that I've got for you, iffy.