Podcast
Artificial Insanity
Hosted by sophieandjess · EN
Artificial Insanity covers AI news, culture, society, and literacy for the non-techie. If you refuse to let tech billionaires do the thinking for you and want to understand AI without the boring tech bro lectures, come hither.
Sophie and Jess have over 20 years of combined experience across television, film, animation, and tech, and now they're looking at what's next. And it's all leading toward one big, menty b.
We cut through the hype and get to what actually matters— the everyday hard-working person who wants to keep their job or just wants 30 more minutes with their kid at night.
14episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
How to Poison AI (The Dark Side of AEO)
1w ago01:00:05Tap to summarizeRemember SEO? That decades-long arms race that turned every recipe into a 4,000-word memoir? Great news: we're doing it all again, except this time we're optimizing for chatbots instead of humans. It's called AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization, and it's exactly as cursed as it sounds.This week we dig into the new economy of pleasing the machines: Which sources chatbots actually love to cite (spoiler: Reddit is doing a lot of heavy lifting), the licensing deals where media outlets sell their journalism as AI training fodder, and how the entire ad industry is scrambling to figure out what "ad spend" even means when nobody clicks on anything anymore.Plus: the people deliberately seeding false information on Reddit to poison AI answers. Digital vandalism or folk resistance? Depends on your mood.If you've ever wondered why AI confidently told you something insane, this episode explains the supply chain.Follow us on IG: @artificialinsaitypodEmail us: artificialinsanitypodcast@gmail.com
Transcribe →Fake It Til You Make It Is Now the Entire AI Business Model
3w ago01:02:33Tap to summarizeThis week we're chasing the great Silicon Valley pivot panic. The moment every company decides it's secretly an AI company, evidence be damned! Midjourney, the people who make AI pictures of cats in hats, have decided their next move is… scanning your entire body. Welcome to Midjourney Medical, where you'll strip down, descend into a pool of "golden light," and float through a ring of underwater sensors that allegedly out-MRI an MRI in 60 seconds. They're calling it "Ultrasonic CT" — which is neither a CT nor radiation, it's an ultrasound (and one they licensed from a company called Butterfly Network for ~$74M, not invented themselves). It's a Gen-1 prototype with zero FDA clearance, and actual radiologists have politely noted that sound waves can't get through bone, air, or deep tissue — so good luck imaging "the whole body." But sure, billion scans a month by 2031. The first spa opens in San Francisco in 2027, hot tubs included.Then: Allbirds. Yes, the wool sneaker people. They sold off the entire shoe business for $39M and rebranded as an AI compute company, first "NewBird AI," now apparently Smartbird, buying up GPUs to lease out to the AI gold rush. The stock leapt nearly 600% the second they said "AI" out loud. Worth noting: the company was once valued at $4 billion and the pivot's whole vibe is straight out of 2017, when Long Island Iced Tea became "Long Blockchain" and got delisted within a year.And finally, the Y Combinator of it all: the cultural engine where lab fellows are nudged to raise money on the idea before the product actually works. Fake it till you make it, now an institutional business model. So is this the AI bubble inflating its final breath, or is everything genuinely AI now? We have thoughts. Most of them sarcastic.🎧 New episodes every week. Subscribe so you're there when the next shoe company becomes a server farm.Follow us on IG: @artificialinsanitypodEmail us: artificialinsanitypodcast@gmail.com
Transcribe →Was Fable 5 Selectively Punished?
4w ago00:49:18Tap to summarizeThe White House has figured out how to weaponize Anthropic's whole personality: turn the company's safety-consciousness into the very reason to punish it. This week's episode is about the governments decision to pull Fable 5. Which honestly seems a little suss after Anthropic spent months telling the Pentagon "no" to mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapons. The government tried to blacklist them, a judge called it retaliation, and now, conveniently, the feds have pulled Anthropic's two most powerful models over a "national security" threat that Anthropic says is a minor jailbreak available in half a dozen other models, including OpenAI's GPT-5.5. Same flaw, single target. We're not saying it's payback. We're just laying the facts on the table and letting you connect the dots.Follow us on IG: @artificialinsanitypodEmail us: artificialinsanitypodcast@gmail.com
Transcribe →The AI Bubble Prepares to Pop
Jun 1600:58:44Tap to summarizeThree of the biggest AI companies in the world are heading to public markets, and the numbers are eye-watering. But does the hype match the reality? This week Sophie and Jess take on the most common arguments against an AI bubble burst, and put them to the test. Spoiler: the Amazon comparison doesn't hold up the way people think it does. Neither does Jevons Paradox. We're not financial advisors, but we do have opinions.Follow us on IG: @artificialinsanitypodEmail us: artificialinsanitypodcast@gmail.com#ai #bubble #spacex #openai #anthropic
Transcribe →AI Can Save Lives. We Still Don't Trust It.
Jun 900:52:28Tap to summarizeThis week we dig into several stories about AI doing things nobody explicitly signed off on. Google DeepMind quietly got its hands on the medical records of 1.6 million NHS patients (without consent) to build an app that actually worked. Netflix used AI deepfakes of grieving mothers in a true crime documentary and somehow made it worse. And Erin Brockovich is back, this time crowdsourcing a map of AI data centers that are being built in communities with zero transparency.#bigtech #artificialintelligence #ai
Transcribe →Hollywood to AI: Please Save Us
Jun 301:11:45Tap to summarizeHollywood is throwing a Hail Mary.... And apparently the plan is AI. Jess spent two days at the "AI on the Lot" conference at Amazon Studios so we didn't have to, and she came back with some bold promises from the people selling the dream. Sophie isn't buying it. Who are these mystery jobs actually for? What will they involve? Did anyone at this conference care about the environment? And has Hollywood noticed that audiences hate AI slop? Buckle up.#layoffs #hollywoodstudios #ai Follow us on IG: @artificialinsanitypodEmail us: artificialinsanitypodcast@gmail.com
Transcribe →Would you give up your data to find love?
May 2601:09:20Tap to summarizeBumble says Swiping is Out and AI Agents are In!First up this week, we talk about why we turned down our first brand deal offer. Then we cover Bumble's announcement that they are getting rid of the traditional swiping feature and implementing AI agents to do the matchmaking for their users. We do a deep dive into this and also discuss future of dating apps in the age of AI. Finally, we give you some rapid fire AI news headlines (because a LOT happened in AI over the last week.)
Transcribe →Smarter Tools, Dumber People - How AI is Affecting our Brains.
May 1900:52:41Tap to summarizeThis week's stories:🧠 The ChatGPT Dunning Kruger Effect: People are using AI to feel like instant experts, then dumping mountains of chat logs on everyone around them as "proof." We break down why this is happening and why it's kind of hilarious.🎓 Princeton Kills Its 133-Year-Old Honor Code: One of America's most prestigious universities just scrapped its honour code because AI cheating has made it basically unenforceable. The end of an era, folks.☕ ChatGPT's Starbucks Fail: A reporter from The Verge tested ChatGPT's shiny new Starbucks ordering feature. It went about as well as ordering a "venti AI latte with extra hallucination."💩 Someone Sold a Database of Poop Photos for $10K: Yes, really. The app PoopCheck had its entire poop image database sold on the Data Hoarder subreddit for ten thousand dollars. We have questions. Many questions.
Transcribe →Are these Tech Oligarchs Bitchier than the Real Housewives?
May 1201:14:38Tap to summarizeThe boys are at it AGAIN. 🍿This week: Peter Thiel, fresh off destroying Gawker, is back with a new scheme to push him closer to world domination. It's called Objection.ai: an AI-powered "truth tribunal" where tech billionaires can pay to have a robot jury investigate journalists who say mean things about them. Co-founded by the same lawyer who helped Thiel bankrupt Gawker, critics say it's less about truth and more about making it terrifying to report on powerful men with thin skin. We explain how it works and why it's somehow even worse than it sounds.Then, bust out the popcorn to watch Silicon Valley's best cat fight: We cover the start of the Elon VS Altman trial.And finally, a palate cleanser: Oracle employees staging a quiet rebellion against mass layoffs from the inside.
Transcribe →Is AI conscious? We said no. They got mad.
Apr 3000:51:08Tap to summarizeWe made one video saying Claude probably isn't conscious. The comments? Absolute chaos.Turns out, people have feelings about AI feelings.... And they're not shy about sharing them. So we're back to dig into the wildest arguments from both sides! We'll cover:- Why our last video sent certain corners of the internet into a spiral- The actual philosophical debate around AI consciousness (yes, it's a real thing)- The most unhinged and most compelling arguments we received- Whether any of it changed our mindsWhether you think Claude is a sentient being or a very expensive autocomplete - this one's for you.Follow us on IG: @artificialinsanitypod Email: artificialinsanitypodcast@gmail.com
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