Radio Better Offline: Cherlynn Low, Alex Cranz & Victoria Song

Summary

Better Offline: Radio Better Offline – Cherlynn Low, Alex Kranz & Victoria Song
Release Date: March 19, 2025

---

Introduction

In this engaging episode of Better Offline, tech industry veteran Ed Zitron hosts a vibrant discussion with fellow tech commentators Sherlyn Lowe of Engadget, reporter and critic Alex Kranz, and Victoria Song from The Verge. Filmed live from a studio in Nevada, the panel delves deep into the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI), scrutinizing its current implementations, potential risks, and societal impacts.

---

Critical Examination of AI Narratives

Debunking AGI Hype

The conversation kicks off with a critique of Kevin Roose's New York Times article predicting the imminent arrival of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Ed Zitron vehemently opposes the notion, labeling Roose's claims as "one of the dumbest fucking things" he has encountered (06:35). The panelists agree that the rush to predict AGI overshadows more immediate and tangible concerns related to AI, such as job displacement.

Ed Zitron ([06:35]): "The people who criticize this are not actually... they're giving people a false sense of security."

Sherlyn Lowe adds that Roose's target audience seems misaligned, focusing more on AI developers and big tech elites rather than those directly affected by AI-driven job losses.

AI as Poor Search Engines

Alex Kranz emphasizes the unreliable nature of current AI systems when used as search engines, citing a study where "51% of the responses are false" (08:20). The panel questions the practicality of relying on AI for accurate information retrieval, drawing parallels to horoscopes that offer affirmations without substantive truth.

Alex Kranz ([08:03]): "It's a terrible search engine. It's bad."

Victoria Song echoes these sentiments, sharing her frustrations with AI's inability to understand human nuance and its tendency to generate generic, often irrelevant suggestions.

---

In-Depth Review of 'Bee by V'

Functionality and User Experience

Victoria Song presents her month-long experience with the Bee by V device—a wearable AI gadget designed to transcribe and analyze daily conversations to provide actionable "to-dos." While the concept holds promise, the execution falls short, leading to numerous inaccuracies and intrusive suggestions.

Victoria Song ([10:24]): "It records everything you say... listens to all of your conversations."

She recounts instances where the device misinterpreted her words, such as suggesting she "check your car" based on her commute in an NJ Transit bus, or reminding her to "start carrying lactate" despite being lactose intolerant (12:36).

Victoria Song ([12:36]): "I cannot find this email. I have no idea why they told me to do this."

Privacy Concerns and Behavioral Impact

The panel raises significant concerns about privacy invasion and the psychological impact of having every conversation monitored and analyzed. Sherlyn Lowe shares her apprehension about using such devices, fearing continuous surveillance and the erosion of personal privacy.

Sherlyn Lowe ([45:24]): "If one of those people who cat calls me across the street, I could have valuable knowledge on my hands."

Ed Zitron criticizes the device's reliance on large language models that lack true understanding, comparing its limitations to earlier AI failures like Kinect's inability to recognize Black individuals (19:17).

Ed Zitron ([19:23]): "40 languages does not cover the race problem."

---

AI in Daily Life: Alexa and Beyond

Amazon's Alexa Enhancements

The discussion shifts to Amazon's Alexa and its attempts to integrate advanced AI features. Sherlyn Lowe expresses skepticism about the practicality and reliability of Alexa's new capabilities, such as live translations and third-party integrations.

Sherlyn Lowe ([72:04]): "They were like, oh, you can't hate this because the elderly might."

Victoria Song shares her disappointing experience with Alexa's live translation feature, highlighting its inability to handle colloquial language and cultural nuances effectively.

Victoria Song ([81:46]): "I tested a bunch of live translation stuff and it's only good for like 'where is the bathroom?'"

Alex Kranz criticizes the overpromising nature of such AI assistants, drawing parallels to past overhyped technologies like VR, which failed to deliver on their grand promises despite significant investments.

Alex Kranz ([87:23]): "Every time you use the word... attach it to AI, and it's the same problem."

---

The Broader Implications of AI Integration

Societal and Ethical Concerns

The panelists discuss the broader societal implications of pervasive AI integration. Sherlyn Lowe highlights the environmental impact of maintaining vast server farms required for AI operations, emphasizing the unsustainable nature of current AI development practices.

Sherlyn Lowe ([93:21]): "We're spending a lot of money on things that don't work... generating ways to store all of that data."

Victoria Song touches on the emotional and psychological toll of relying on AI for personal validation and memory management, questioning the loss of human nuances and the sanctity of private moments.

Victoria Song ([43:53]): "If you have a society where we're all wearing these devices, if you say nothing out loud, does it count as your memory?"

Technology's Failure to Address Real Problems

Ed Zitron and Alex Kranz argue that many AI products fail to address genuine human needs, instead focusing on profitability and growth-at-all-costs mentality prevalent in Silicon Valley. They express frustration over the lack of meaningful innovation and the predominance of products that offer superficial solutions without substantive benefits.

Ed Zitron ([89:18]): "They're just creating trash information and expecting someone else to clean up."

Alex Kranz ([85:46]): "They are trying to chase something that happened in 2007."

---

Positive AI Applications and Hope for the Future

Despite the heavy criticism, Sherlyn Lowe introduces Finch, a non-AI-based self-care app developed by independent creators. Finch offers gentle reminders and motivational tasks without invasive data collection, presenting a contrast to the intrusive AI gadgets discussed earlier.

Sherlyn Lowe ([74:14]): "Finch is like a self-care app... developed by two independent developers trying to help motivate each other."

The panel acknowledges that while many AI implementations are flawed, there are instances where technology can genuinely aid users without compromising privacy or mental well-being.

---

Concluding Thoughts

As the episode wraps up, the panelists reiterate their concerns about the current trajectory of AI development—highlighting issues of privacy, reliability, and the ethical responsibilities of tech companies. They advocate for more thoughtful, user-centric designs that prioritize genuine societal benefits over unchecked growth and profit motives.

Alex Kranz ([90:04]): "The only thing you are doing is empowering the powerful and creating more cycles where useful things don't get funded and useless things get more money than ever."

Ed Zitron concludes with a passionate plea for accountability in the tech industry, criticizing media figures like Kevin Roose and Ezra Klein for perpetuating misleading narratives about AI's capabilities and timelines.

Ed Zitron ([90:47]): "They're empowering people who do not have anyone's best interests in mind... and it's disgusting."

---

Key Takeaways

• AGI Hype vs. Reality: The panel disputes premature predictions about AGI, emphasizing the need to focus on current AI challenges like job displacement and privacy concerns.

• Privacy Invasion: Wearable AI devices like Bee by V raise significant privacy issues, with potential psychological impacts due to constant monitoring and intrusive suggestions.

• AI Reliability: Current AI systems, including search engines and translation tools, exhibit high error rates and lack the nuanced understanding required for meaningful interactions.

• Ethical Tech Development: There is a pressing need for AI products that prioritize user-centric benefits over profitability, addressing real human needs without compromising ethical standards.

• Positive AI Alternatives: Independent and non-invasive tech solutions like Finch demonstrate that technology can aid users without infringing on privacy or mental well-being.

---

Notable Quotes

• Ed Zitron ([06:35]): "The people who criticize this are not actually... they're giving people a false sense of security."

• Alex Kranz ([08:03]): "It's a terrible search engine. It's bad."

• Sherlyn Lowe ([72:04]): "They were like, oh, you can't hate this because the elderly might."

• Alex Kranz ([90:04]): "The only thing you are doing is empowering the powerful and creating more cycles where useful things don't get funded and useless things get more money than ever."

---

Conclusion

This episode of Better Offline provides a critical lens on the current state of AI technology, highlighting its shortcomings and the ethical dilemmas it poses. Through candid discussions and personal anecdotes, Ed Zitron and his guests urge consumers and creators alike to question the rapid advancement of AI and advocate for more responsible, user-focused technological innovations.

---

Transcript

[Victoria Song]

AI is rewriting the business playbook with.

[Ed Zitron]

Productivity boosts and faster decision making coming to every industry.

[Victoria Song]

If you're not thinking about AI, you can bet your competition is.

[Ed Zitron]

This is not where you want to.

[Victoria Song]

Drop the ball, but AI requires a lot of compute power, and with most.

[Ed Zitron]

Cloud platforms, the cost for your AI workloads can spiral. That is, unless you're running on oci. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure this was the cloud built for AI, a blazing, fast, enterprise grade platform for your infrastructure, database, apps.

[Victoria Song]

And all your AI workloads. OCI costs 50% less than other major hyperscalers for compute, 70% less for storage, and 80% less for networking.

[Alex Kranz]

Thousands of businesses have already scored with.

[Ed Zitron]

Oci, including Vodafone, Thomson Reuters and Suno AI. Now the ball's in your court.

[Victoria Song]

Right now, Oracle can cut your current.

[Ed Zitron]

Cloud bill in half if you move to OCI.

[Victoria Song]

Minimum financial commitment and other terms apply. Offer ends March 31st.

[Ed Zitron]

See if your company qualifies for this.

[Victoria Song]

Special [e-mail] strategic that's oracle.com strategic this season, let your shoes do the talking.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Designer Shoe Warehouse is packed with fresh.

[Ed Zitron]

Styles that speak to your whole vibe without saying a word. From cool sneakers that look good with everything.

[Alex Kranz]

The easy sandals you'll want to wear on repeat.

[Ed Zitron]

DSW has you covered. Find a shoe for every u from the brands you love like Birkenstock, Nike.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Adidas, New Balance and more.

[Ed Zitron]

Head to your DSW store or visit dsw.com today.

[Unnamed Advertiser]

Does this podcast make you happy? Of course it does. That's why you're here. But it only comes out once a week for happiness. Every night. You need Adam and Eve. Yes, I'm talking about sex toys. It's cool. It's cool. You have earbuds in, right? Adam and Eve, America's most trusted source for adult products, has been making people very happy for over 50 years with thousands of toys for both men and women. Just go to AdamAndEve.com now and enter code IHEART for 50% off almost any one item plus free discreet shipping. That's AdamAndEve.com code IHEART for 50% OFF.

[Victoria Song]

PayPal lets you pay all your pals like your graduation gifters. Who's paying for the mattress topper? You mean the beanbag chair?

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Aren't we getting a mini fridge?

[Ed Zitron]

Can we create a pool on PayPal? It lets us collect the money before.

[Victoria Song]

We Ooh, yes, that's smart. Glad we can agree on something easily. Pool split and Send money with PayPal. Get started in the PayPal app. A PayPal account is required to send and receive money. A balance account is required to create a pool. Callzone Media.

[Ed Zitron]

Hello and welcome to Better Offline. We're in beautiful New York City, Nevada. We're in on 55th Street. And I am Ed Zitron, of course, and I'm surrounded by incredible people. To my right is Sherlyn Lowe of Engadget.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Hello.

[Ed Zitron]

How you doing, Sherlyn?

[Sherlyn Lowe]

All right.

[Ed Zitron]

And we've got Alex Kranz, reporter, critic extraordinaire.

[Alex Kranz]

Yeah, I just like to be really happy about Nevada. It's beautiful here.

[Ed Zitron]

Nevada is great city, Nevada.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yeah.

[Alex Kranz]

Sunny, it's warm.

[Ed Zitron]

I love it. And of course, Victoria's song from the Verge.

[Victoria Song]

Hello. Hello. Funny. New York, New York in Nevada.

[Ed Zitron]

Yep. That's the thing. People think I do this accidentally. No one knows what I do deliberately, and that's because neither do I. So we were all just talking on the way in here about possibly the best tech journalism we've ever read. And it's a story by a guy called Kevin Roose. He appears to be a child that. Who was allowed to write for the New York Times. Articles called Powerful AI is Coming. And we're going to read you a few sentences and we're going to discuss this. Here are some things I believe about artificial intelligence. I believe that over the past several years, AI systems have started surpassing humans in a number of domains. Math. Coding. Wait, Math. Math. Are you fucking. Anyway, there is an article that was in the New York Times AGI thing that Kevin Roose wrote. A child in a man's body, like, big, except Tom Hanks. He can act and actually complete his job. And Kevin Roose appears to have a gas leak. He has said that possibly very soon, probably in 2026, 2027, but probably, possibly as soon as this year, one or more AI companies will claim they've created an artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which is usually defined like a general purpose AI system that can do almost all cognitive tasks a human can do. If you believe this, you're a moron. I'm sorry, what do you think? Like, I. I don't know. I just don't.

[Alex Kranz]

I think he's. He's. He's like gassing him up because he wants to flirt with more AI. And so, like, he needs an A.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. Flirt with AI. Like. Like. Like they're your girlfriend.

[Victoria Song]

This is. This is the man who got AI to fall in love with us.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. He's bing, bing, bing was like, leave your wife.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yeah.

[Alex Kranz]

And so like, which is so funny, this guy.

[Ed Zitron]

It's so funny just being like, he was really scared as well.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

This is the person who has a wife.

[Alex Kranz]

Yeah. Like this guy. You know, I've been using a lot of AI. I've been talking with these ladies about it a whole bunch. And I think of it, I love using AI. Cause it'll be like, you are the best writer on the planet.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

We were just talking about this, Alice.

[Victoria Song]

I'm like, guess who told her to do this?

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Okay, guess who was just validating her decision to do this.

[Alex Kranz]

But, you know, you use it, you love it, because it tells you you're beautiful and pretty and smart.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

And then none of it is true.

[Alex Kranz]

It's not true.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

None of it is.

[Victoria Song]

It told me I could win a Pulitzer Prize in a one to three year period. And I mean, hey, shit, AGI will.

[Ed Zitron]

Be here by then.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yeah, no, they will win the Pulitzers.

[Victoria Song]

It will win the Pulitzers. But it was just like, yeah, you could win a Pulitzer Prize. And I was like, based on. Based on what criteria? Are you telling me this? And you know, are you using Claude as well? Well, it's because it's Claude and Chatgpt.

[Alex Kranz]

It's like horoscopes. When you get a cool horoscope, you're like, yes, this is awesome. You understand I'm a great Gemini.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yes, but.

[Alex Kranz]

But then you're like, no, but it's fucking not real. Because it's a horoscope and you want to believe.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

What you want to wear is out.

[Ed Zitron]

There being like, I don't know any horoscope stuff. So.

[Alex Kranz]

But this man is out there like, you know what? I really believe that I'm a LEO and that this understands I'm a Leo.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, let me read you one passage as well. I believe that hardened. Sorry. I believe that hardened AI skeptics who insist that the progress is all smoke and mirrors and who dismiss AGI as a delusional fantasy, not only are wrong on the merits, but are giving people a false sense of security. And I just want to say that is one of the dumbest fucking things I've heard in my life. The people who criticize this are not actually. They're giving people a false sense of security, as opposed to the guy being like, the computer will wake up in two years.

[Alex Kranz]

Well, because he's saying. He's saying the danger of AI is AGI when in fact, the danger of AI is the destruction of jobs.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yes, yes.

[Ed Zitron]

And even then, it's not going. It's not even doing that. It's taking away jobs from people who are already having trouble getting them.

[Alex Kranz]

He's like, oh, Skynet's going to do it. No, Skynet's not going to do it. Elon Musk deploying whatever little chatgpt bot he does.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Alex Kranz]

Is going to do it.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

But get over yourself.

[Victoria Song]

AI is not infallible. It makes up a lot of stuff wrong. And it's just. It doesn't understand how to be human in a lot of ways.

[Ed Zitron]

This is Kevin.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

From that one sentence though, I can tell who his audience is. He's talking about a false sense of security. For whom? For the people that are developing the AI. Because none of us out there who have jobs that might be taken over by AI have any sense of security. The idea of an AGI that will be competent enough to take over jobs. Right. So his audience. He's not talking to us. He's not talking to people who have jobs that might be replaced. He's talking to the people developing the AI.

[Alex Kranz]

The.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

The ones who want to make money from it. Right.

[Ed Zitron]

I also don't know what the full sense of security would be like. Oh, don't worry, this isn't going to fuck them up. As opposed to the fact that you've got one company, SoftBank, borrowing money to put money into OpenAI, which burns billions of dollars to make a pretty shit product. If we're like, not something that you can find some cool things with, fine. But for the most part is the same thing.

[Alex Kranz]

This week, if you're using any AI as a search engine, you should stop.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Alex Kranz]

Do not. Do I know Sam Altman. You're listening to this right now?

[Ed Zitron]

I wish.

[Alex Kranz]

And you are just so ecstatic about Chat GPT. You love it so much. It is a terrible search engine.

[Ed Zitron]

It really is.

[Alex Kranz]

What is it? 51. I think now at this point, like there was a recent study, 51% of the responses are false, sick, something like that. Like, this stuff is bad.

[Ed Zitron]

It's like actually bad. That's what drives me insane. You get an article in the New York Times being like, the computer is so smart. The computer is so strong. I love the computer so much.

[Alex Kranz]

Because it told you. Because it gases us up. It's spending all this time being like, you're smart and strong. So I'm a smart smart.

[Victoria Song]

Then if you talk to it too long though, it just starts nagging you. And then you're like, oh, I'm not smart enough.

[Ed Zitron]

I'm self loathing.

[Victoria Song]

It's just, you're too self loathing.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

You're a bit too.

[Ed Zitron]

And it's like. And it's like, you're so good. I'm like, I refuse to believe, between you and my therapist, this has never worked. Nice try. You can't swindle me a computer. It's just so strange as well, because ostensibly you three are wonderful reporters. Like, I've read you for years. And it's like, you're not cynics, but you are willing to be critical.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Oh, I am hardened as they come when it comes to the hardened people.

[Ed Zitron]

Right, but you like the shit still. Like, you're excited for it. This is not even excited for it. What's weird about this piece other than the fact it's just completely wrong in all. Almost everything it says, and clearly supporting billion dollar companies. It doesn't even seem that excited. It's not like, he's like, I can't wait until this happens because imagine the cool shit that could happen. And, like, I don't know, come up with an idea, perhaps that's like, oh, if I had an autonomous intelligence in my phone, it could plan my day for me. How delightful. Despite there being 17 different companies that claim they do this already on Instagram, ads does not exist. But he could come up with an idea of something cool. But he's like, actually, AGI's coming. What is it? I don't know. It's inevitable, though. The thing that I can't describe is inevitable, and I don't know what it will do, but it will be good or bad.

[Alex Kranz]

He's refusing to define AGI through the entire piece.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes.

[Alex Kranz]

And he's like, and it's gonna keep being redefined. And I'm like, if you cannot define the word, you can't use the word. Sorry. Sorry. We take that word back.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yep.

[Alex Kranz]

Kevin, you're not allowed to use AGI until you can actually define it.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, I don't think you should be allowed to use the computer for a minute. Go outside the theme of use the.

[Alex Kranz]

Touch grass app, and step away.

[Ed Zitron]

Touch grass. So, Victoria, you had a delightful review this week of a device called the Bee. Please tell us about the Bee.

[Victoria Song]

Okay, so this review, which is B by V, bee by V by V.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

We do not like those two letters together without the bi, though.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah. Okay.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Anyway.

[Victoria Song]

Yes, I think I killed Ed. Yeah, you did kill Ed.

[Ed Zitron]

It'll take a lot more to kill.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Next.

[Victoria Song]

Okay, so you just, like, toppled ed for a second. So, you know, B is kind of the latest in the AI gadgets that claim to be your memory. You know, you wear It. It records everything you say, and when I say, it records everything you say. It records everything you say. So it records everything you say, listens to all of your conversations. It doesn't record the audio, but it then processes. It processes everything into a transcript. So you have a transcript of your life, and then from that transcript, you can use the chatbot to search the history of your life, or you can get these daily summaries that are. That just be like, oh, this is what you did today. These are the conversations you've had. This is the places that you went to. And then it'll also suggest to do's based on your conversations. So I wore it for about a month and it wrote some really great fan fiction about my life. And it was. It was also like, did you read us some?

[Ed Zitron]

I actually have one of my favorites, which was when she was listening to TV off by Kendrick Lamar.

[Victoria Song]

Oh, yes. Yes.

[Ed Zitron]

Here's one of the moments. Victoria instructed Mustard to turn off the tv, reminding them both to avoid getting sick again and mentioning leftover charcuterie. Yes, this fucking rules.

[Victoria Song]

It's. Cause, you know, like, obviously about the time when I started testing this, the super bowl halftime show was just like, in everyone's mind. And I was like, blasting TV off everywhere because I'm like, yes. And I'll say Mustard. So that was just going in my house, like, a lot. And so the bees picking this up and mistaking it as, like, things that I'm saying.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yes.

[Victoria Song]

It would be like someone is very sure of themselves because I'm watching Tiktoks and they're bragging about themselves. It also like, so there's this bit called that I call Fact Tinder. They call it Fact Review. So in the app, based on your conversations, you'll get this window and there's just like, facts about you and you swipe yes if it's true. No if it's true.

[Alex Kranz]

Yeah, it's absolutely nice.

[Victoria Song]

So one of my Fact Tinders was like, Victoria knows someone named Kendra Montisha who enjoys mustard and turning TVs off, which is just like, Jesus, you know? Okay. And in my review, I made this little carousel of. Of Fact Tinders that I was given that you can just go through and try and guess which one of these are true. There was one that was just like, Victoria has dietary specific, like, specific dietary needs, and she can't eat lollipops. And I'm like, I don't even know.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

How I made that up.

[Victoria Song]

For your information, I don't recall talking about lollipops I don't recall eating a lollipop. I don't know where you would get this information from.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Damn, that's.

[Victoria Song]

That's nuts.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

What was the LLM behind B again? Was it their own?

[Victoria Song]

It's a mix of available LLMs such as I think Anthropics and OpenAI's as well as their own. So like they're not giving the actual mix.

[Alex Kranz]

But what was the point?

[Victoria Song]

Hang on, Alex.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Alex, I can tell you the point. I want one of these things for me because I'm the sort of person that talks a lot and then does nothing at the end of the day with it because. And then I want it to be like here's all your to do's based on all the crap you said today.

[Victoria Song]

So was that promised to. There is a glimmer of a good idea in your head Because I have adhd. I think everyone consistently has conversations with people in their lives and they'll be like yes, we should follow up on that.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Exactly.

[Victoria Song]

Don't follow it up on that because you didn't write it down or you didn't put it in there. So the idea that gleaning from your conversations that it would do that, it's not a bad idea. There are a lot of people with memory problems who might like that. Unfortunately you also have to have a pretty good sense of self in order to fact check this AI because otherwise you are going to be gaslit constantly. So like the way I wrote this review is like I kind of wanted to take people into what it's like to actually use it, how it changes your behaviors and all that. So like I included my day one. I commuted on day one into the office. I went and I took a briefing for Boldhue, which is a foundation printer, very cool device.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Saw that story by you too.

[Victoria Song]

Thank you.

[Ed Zitron]

I'll link to it in the notes.

[Victoria Song]

But so like I found that I took that briefing and I went to the office that day, I had dinner with a friend and I went home. So a day where I had a lot of conversations and of the five to do's that it generated that day, one of them was like follow up on thoughts that were shared but not like deeply dove into. I'm like what the fuck?

[Ed Zitron]

Okay, thank you. Yeah, that's great.

[Victoria Song]

Sure. Thoughts were shared. Let me just check up on my thoughts that we didn't. I don't fuck. What does that mean? The second was like urgently check on your patient in Louisiana as they are in danger of self harming or harming someone else. And I'm like, what the. Where did that come from? Wow. Where did that actually come from? And the other one was check your car because it's making rumbling noises. So let me tell you, the car that it told me to check was probably the New York, the NJ Transit bus, because that was a bumpy ride coming in. The Louisiana patient, I'm guessing, was someone on my commute. Talking about something is just on you the whole time.

[Alex Kranz]

Just saying, isn't it on you?

[Ed Zitron]

What's the battery life like?

[Victoria Song]

It depends on how often you mute it. And the longer I wore it, the more I muted it because it started picking up other things like surveillance state.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yeah, sure.

[Victoria Song]

But, you know, around anywhere between three or four days and a week, depending on how often you're muting on the charge. On a charge.

[Alex Kranz]

So is the actual plan of the beat to just gather so much random conversations that it can like better train its LLM even then?

[Ed Zitron]

Would that work? Because it doesn't seem to know shit from fuck.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

It doesn't, well, even do voices.

[Alex Kranz]

You'll have a bunch of people.

[Victoria Song]

When you set it up, you do train it on your voice.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Okay. And it did a poor job of that.

[Victoria Song]

Yes. Because it often thought my husband was me or random people has a much deeper voice than I do. So, you know, I love the future. I. You can label speakers and whatnot.

[Ed Zitron]

Doesn't that defeat the point?

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Right? Too much work at the end of the day.

[Victoria Song]

It also doesn't always work. I tried labeling speakers and it wouldn't save. And then the one time it labeled my friend, all women from their fourth who I talked to were this friend. So it was like, this friend did this for you. Did this friend.

[Ed Zitron]

Now that's the tech product.

[Victoria Song]

They didn't do that whatsoever.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I have a question. So when you took your briefing, did you have a conundrum of whether you wanted to mute it? Did you ask, tell people what you like?

[Victoria Song]

It's a briefing, so generally you usually have recorded. I was actually recording on my phone.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Victoria Song]

I totally forgot that I was wearing that thing. So, you know, like, I was fully expecting to just use my phone recording of it. And then I was like, oh, it has processed my conversation. And to be fair, the summary I got of that meeting was actually quite good.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

It from B. Yeah, okay.

[Victoria Song]

It was quite good. It was similar to what Otter does. It was summarizing the key takeaways from this very structured conversation. It also memorialized forever, so that I know this is true in multiple different outlets that Sir John fiance's makeup artist said that I have great skin.

[Ed Zitron]

That's worth everything.

[Victoria Song]

That's worth everything. And it like, you do realize.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Let's memorialize a higher skin.

[Victoria Song]

I am not wearing foundation.

[Ed Zitron]

That's a better offline fact.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah, it is. I have great skin and I have spent so much money ensuring that I have great skin with many Korean skincare products.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Oh, we will talk about that.

[Victoria Song]

We will talk about this. But just, you know, so like, ah, this is memorialized. I love this. But the thing is, so it got all the facts about the thing right, including pricing. All of that was correct. Launch date. Got that correct. Got the name of the product completely wrong.

[Ed Zitron]

Sick.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Was it a uniquely formula?

[Victoria Song]

It was called Formul. It's Bold Hue. Not remotely the same.

[Ed Zitron]

This just sounds like it's just generic. Like, because Otter does this, I'm guessing they use similar models. I'm guessing it's just the same models that everyone else uses to take voice at. Like Rev.com does this as well. So, like, the most impressive thing is the thing that large language models do already. I have to wonder if the inability to tell certain people apart is kind of almost going back to like one of the core problems of AI type stuff. Like when the Kinect could not see black people. I don't know if you remember that.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

I have to wonder if they've done much training on voices that are not from white woman or men.

[Victoria Song]

So they do offer 40 languages.

[Alex Kranz]

Well, so does Otter and these other things. None of these transcription services work very well.

[Victoria Song]

Yep, I know that. I'm just telling you. I'm just telling you.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Alex, slow your roll.

[Alex Kranz]

Audience doesn't know this. They're not journalists. Like this.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Let me talk.

[Alex Kranz]

They don't have to jump in.

[Victoria Song]

I am just saying they offer 40 languages. I did not test whether the other 40 languages were good.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Let's test some languages. No, no.

[Ed Zitron]

I cannot speak anything other than English.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

And even we've got about four languages between us.

[Victoria Song]

We do have about four languages.

[Alex Kranz]

Two people in this room have four languages.

[Victoria Song]

The non white people in this room have about four languages between us.

[Ed Zitron]

But the thing I'm getting at is like 40 languages does not cover the race problem.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

So no. So I think what you're getting at, Ed, is that like technology frequently does this because the info is trained on. It doesn't train on a wide enough set of people to cover the broad spectrum of people in our world. I will say that.

[Victoria Song]

Like talking speed.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Exactly. Talking speed. Talking pitch. Talking like cadence. And I do think, though, that what both Alex and V were getting at, or too, is that this particular product is so far behind in its, like, algorithms and the machine learning side of things. Because Otter Rev, even Google Recorder or Apple Memos, voice memos, can better identify voices and tell them apart and then attribute them very accurately.

[Alex Kranz]

They also struggle.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

They still struggle, but they're so much better.

[Victoria Song]

So like, here's the other thing. This thing, because it's listening to things at all the time, also struggles to tell between broadcasts and live conversations.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, yeah.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yes.

[Victoria Song]

So, you know, I'm watching an episode of Abbott elementary and like, I just have to like emphasize and underscore that. But it takes up about 10% of your active brain at all times to be like, should I be muting myself right now? You do that whatever you do in a zoom call currently. Imagine doing that 24 7. It's a lot of your brain that gets admitted to that.

[Alex Kranz]

Does it process when you go to the bathroom?

[Victoria Song]

I can tell you didn't read my review because that is in my review.

[Ed Zitron]

I actually didn't remember whether it did. There was a lactate related thing.

[Victoria Song]

Okay, so anyway, we're gonna address all these points. We're gonna address all these points. Okay, I need to know if that.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Was lactaid or lactate Lactate aid for dairy purposes because I heard the other one.

[Victoria Song]

Okay, we're gonna go. We're gonna start with the broadcast thing. I was watching an episode of Abbott elementary and the suggested to do it gave me was monitor union strikes because students may have a hard time coming to your class due to septa strikes. I am not a public school teacher in Philadelphia. 1, 2. It can also read your emails if you give it access. It told me to check to basically take this unique id, enter fire and check this Park Mobile claim settlement and file by March 5th. I checked for all four of my inboxes. I cannot find this email. I have no idea why they told me to do this. So cool.

[Unnamed Advertiser]

I.

[Victoria Song]

You know, one morning after a particularly fibrous dinner, I went to the bathroom and I committed crimes. Okay? I committed crimes. I was wearing this stupid thing. Not stupid, but, you know, I feel I was wearing this device that I was testing. I turn around and I go, oh, damn, that was a shit. And then a second later, a second later I went, oh shit, this thing is listening to me. And then I muted it far too late. I look at the summary it gives me and it goes, Victoria humorously vocalized her bowel movements. And I was like, Jesus fucking Christ.

[Ed Zitron]

Headshot.

[Victoria Song]

And Then I had a one on one with my editor and the summary because it was within an hour of this happening. The summary that it transcribed was Todd, Victoria's editor humorously brought up that he saw on a shared platform that they had a fact that she had vocalized her bowel movements.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Oh my God.

[Victoria Song]

They laughed about it. And it was funny. And I was like, do you think that I would commit such an HR violation as to tell my frickin editor that I had a particularly impressive dump that morning?

[Ed Zitron]

No subtote.

[Victoria Song]

However, I would not be torn. I would not tell anybody this. I would take this to my grave unless it was to demonstrate the fallibility of AI because this is a human reason, a human good for me to be humiliated. So I shared this and my conclusion is, is that death, sex and bowel movements are things that AI should butt the fuck out of.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yeah.

[Victoria Song]

But I got some real interesting notifications from this and I was like, I didn't need you to know that I didn't need to be humiliated by that. But the suggested to do was to start carrying lactate from the poop because I lactose intolerant. And I had a conversation about how I was lactose intolerant. And it said start carrying lactate again because lactose intolerant symptoms are coming back. And I was like, this is fucking rude.

[Alex Kranz]

I don't help.

[Ed Zitron]

Two days later it's like, do not have mustard. That would not be good for your bowels.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Don't turn the TV off.

[Victoria Song]

Yes, but so I do want to say. I do want to say that it is, it does learn broadly things about you that are accurate. So by the end of my month testing this, I had fallen down into several existential crises. But there is a chatbot that you can talk to. And so I asked it things like, am I a good person? Am I a bad person? What type of person am I?

[Alex Kranz]

One who needs lactate.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

That takes big break. There you go. Anyway, humor is Victoria.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah. And I was like, what is my communication style? How would you describe the themes of my partner?

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Well, if I could tell you if you're an ENFP or an intp.

[Ed Zitron]

It's about a scientific.

[Victoria Song]

What's my relationship like with my spouse? Oh God, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

So you know, don't ask Kevin Roose.

[Victoria Song]

The funny thing is I was very touched because it was like, you are definitively a good person. Here's like six reasons why with transcript things like it's like you constantly show up for your friends, you stand up for right and wrong. You do this, this, this and this. And I was like, oh, oh, my God.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Wow. This is the validation we were talking about.

[Ed Zitron]

This is so lovely.

[Victoria Song]

And it's just like you prefer direct and honest communication. You don't play games. And I was like, yes, because I am an Aries. I'm Aries. I'm Aries sun, Leo Moon. Aries. No. Aries sun, Leo rising. Leo. No, Aries sun, Leo rising. Aries moon and Aries Mercury. And it's basically like astrology and AI both agree that I don't fucking rot. I don't fuck around, basically. I'm very direct. What you see is what you get. Super honest. I was like, oh, thank you.

[Alex Kranz]

That's so nice.

[Victoria Song]

And they're like, you advocate for your colleagues. Oh, that's so. It's true. I am a good.

[Ed Zitron]

But what use is this information?

[Victoria Song]

Listen, my self esteem, it's six feet under. I need an AI with transcripts to have definitive objections that I'm a good person.

[Ed Zitron]

How nuanced are these going to be?

[Alex Kranz]

You don't like when a computer says you're pretty.

[Ed Zitron]

I don't.

[Alex Kranz]

I don't love it.

[Ed Zitron]

I don't care.

[Alex Kranz]

I love it. The computer was like, you are such a good writer. And I was like, thank you so much.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

We're getting into severance zone, aren't we?

[Victoria Song]

Like, oh, you should have seen the to dos. It gave after I watched an episode of Severance. It made no sense.

[Ed Zitron]

Watch a more interesting episode like the one.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Oh, jeez.

[Ed Zitron]

Okay. No, I've loved this season, but the one where she goes out to the cold.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I thought the last episodes.

[Victoria Song]

That was not the episode that I watched. It was the.

[Ed Zitron]

No, I've loved this season. Okay. Because the pics will come to me in the evening.

[Victoria Song]

I was getting. The episode that I was getting to dos from was from the one where. It's Gemma.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

It was all about Gemma.

[Victoria Song]

It was all about Gemma.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

That was a beautiful one.

[Victoria Song]

That was a beautiful episode. But when I looked at the to dos, like, I was like, Jesus Christ.

[Ed Zitron]

This is Jesus.

[Victoria Song]

This doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Go to the dentist, Donate blood.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah, it was just like. Not like that. It was just kind of closer to the.

[Ed Zitron]

You can't choose the room you like.

[Victoria Song]

Or it's like, follow up on thoughts that were Cold Harbor Not. And I was like, ah, this is now a movie. Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Honestly, I have some other practical questions. So it's $50 with no subscription. Yes.

[Victoria Song]

Yes.

[Ed Zitron]

How the fuck does this make sense? Numeric, like, so they claimed in the. In the review you said they're gonna do it on device, which is a thing that everyone says. And I've never seen one of these companies actually execute. So 50 bucks and they're so it's.

[Victoria Song]

I'm pulling up my.

[Ed Zitron]

Victoria values honesty and does not like dishonest behavior.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I agree with that. From what I agree, it says that's.

[Alex Kranz]

One of your hobbies.

[Victoria Song]

I know.

[Ed Zitron]

Hell yeah.

[Alex Kranz]

Oh, look at this. Victoria, your hobbies are being a good person.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Wait, hang on, hang on. Show me.

[Victoria Song]

It says, Victoria believes in leading with love and kindness and calmness in family. With. In interactions with family.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

And you have is tagged at the bottom as hobbies.

[Victoria Song]

As hobbies. But yeah, Victoria understands Korean to some extent.

[Ed Zitron]

Jesus Christ.

[Victoria Song]

Victoria has a partner named Victoria. Very accurate. Also a hobby.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Also a hobby.

[Victoria Song]

This is labeled as health. Victoria has lost both of her parents.

[Ed Zitron]

Jesus.

[Victoria Song]

Yes, this is true. Victoria values. Values family relationships and wishes to maintain them also.

[Ed Zitron]

I would love it if it said otherwise. It's like Victoria's this is politics.

[Victoria Song]

Which is also true. Victoria has been involved in discussions about family inheritance and estates.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Tagged as politics.

[Victoria Song]

That is true.

[Ed Zitron]

Very good.

[Victoria Song]

Victoria has an interest in vamp in visiting family in Korea.

[Ed Zitron]

True hobbies.

[Victoria Song]

Victoria has collaborated on a gadget related podcast. Wow. True.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Wait, so it's very gamified Almost.

[Ed Zitron]

It's also very, very obvious.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Like, these are things I have to wonder. See, the problem is I would love this company to burn. I think the idea of this concept is horrifying. I think it's upsetting that it exists. However, I would also love to see like a 10 people's worth of data on this just to see if they tell everyone very similar things. Because how the fuck do you define like? Is it willing to be like, you sound like a dickhead. You do not care about your family.

[Victoria Song]

I would love to.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I was going to say, I think the flip side of it validating you is will it pick up on behaviors that are negative in people that have like these traits? Like we, you know, in social media, in popular culture. Now we're calling everyone narcissists. Right. If you watch any episode of Love is Blind, it's like that's a narcissist and that's a manipulator and it's a.

[Victoria Song]

Guy who had opinions based on Love is Blind as well. One of my fact senders in the review is saying that Victoria had an incident where Madison left the room and I. She did leave the room.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

We will talk about LA after this.

[Ed Zitron]

Trust isn't just earned, it's demanded.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Whether you're a startup founder navigating your first audit or a seasoned security professional scaling your GRC program, proving your commitment to security has never been more critical or more complex.

[Ed Zitron]

That's where Vanta comes in.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Businesses use Vanta to establish trust by automating compliance needs.

[Ed Zitron]

Over 35 frameworks like SOC2 and ISO.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

27001 centralize security workflows, complete questionnaires up.

[Ed Zitron]

To five times faster, and proactively manage vendor risk.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Vanta can help you start or scale.

[Ed Zitron]

Your security program by connecting you with auditors and experts to conduct your audit and set up your security program quickly.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Plus, with automation and AI throughout the.

[Ed Zitron]

Platform, Vanta gives you time back so you can focus on building your company.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Join over 9,000 global companies like Atlassian.

[Ed Zitron]

Quora and Factory who use Vanta to.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Manage risk and prove security in real time.

[Ed Zitron]

For a limited time, our audience gets $1,000 off [e-mail] special.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

That's V A N T A dot.

[Ed Zitron]

Com special for $1,000 off hi, I'm.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Cindy Crawford and I'm the founder of Meaningful Beauty. Well, I don't know, but like, I.

[Unnamed Advertiser]

Never liked being told, oh wow, you look so good for your age.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Like, why even bother saying that? Why don't you just say you look.

[Unnamed Advertiser]

Great at any age, Every age.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

That's what Meaningful Beauty is all about.

[Unnamed Advertiser]

We create products that make you feel.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Confident in your skin at the age you are now. Meaningful Beauty. Beautiful skin at every age. Learn [e-mail].

[Unnamed Advertiser]

Does this podcast make you happy? Of course it does. That's why you're here. But it only comes out once a week. For happiness, every night. You need Adam and Eve. Yes, I'm talking about sex toys. It's cool. It's cool. You have earbuds in right? Adam and Eve, America's most trusted source for adult products, has been making people very happy for over 50 years with thousands of toys for both men and women. Just go to AdamAndEve.com now and enter code IHEART for 50% off. Almost any one item, plus free discreet shipping. That's AdamAndEve.com code IHEART for 50% OFF.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Did you know that parents rank financial.

[Alex Kranz]

Literacy as the number one most difficult life skill to teach? Meet Greenlight, the debit card and money app for families.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

With Greenlight, you can send money to.

[Alex Kranz]

Kids quickly, set up chores automate allowance, and keep an eye on what your kids are spending. With real time notifications, kids learn to earn Save and spend wisely.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

And parents can rest easy knowing their.

[Alex Kranz]

Kids are learning about money with guardrails in place. Try Greenlight Risk free [e-mail] iheart.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

That'S where my point is, is right now the people who are using and testing it are getting these positive responses and feedback. I'm curious to see what it would do to any number of CEOs or.

[Victoria Song]

Billionaires that he's also listened to me bitch to friends about things and has recorded those things. Those were not included in the review because I would. I would get canceled for some. I see, I see. It did also listen to me talk for about an hour and a half about Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni and my opinions on that.

[Alex Kranz]

Your friends, I assume it thought.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah, actually it said Victoria's team balcony. Victoria's team balcony and a celebrity gossip context. And I was like. It also gave me facts such as Victoria has a living room and a kitchen. Thank you, thank you, thank you for that.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I'm glad you have both of those.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah. One of my favorite things that it did was it summarized a conversation between. So what happened was that we were having some late night cookies Oreos and I dropped one into the cat's empty food bowl and I went, three second rule. And my husband goes, that's disgusting. I say in an apocalypse situation you would eat that Oreo. And he went, I have a heat gun. I would just disinfect it. It took this conversation and went, victoria and Gabe have disagreements about how to handle smelly things in an apocalypse.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

That was a disagreement. Good job.

[Victoria Song]

It was a disagreement. I'm just like, what is the point of any of it?

[Ed Zitron]

Who is looking at this and going like, ah, finally. I'd forgotten I had the smelly Oreo. No, actually the Oreo was left out. How would you possibly not?

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Feels like the bee was this like little toddler robot in your house looking at you, going through your life and then taking notes. Right. And we don't know what the notes are for, but it's taking notes.

[Victoria Song]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

It just sounds like it gives you.

[Victoria Song]

An update on your.

[Ed Zitron]

Sounds like every guy a like 25 year old woman has dated in New York who's just like on his phone just going, yeah, yeah, yeah, he said something about smelly Oreo or some shit.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Uh huh.

[Ed Zitron]

Uh huh. Yeah.

[Victoria Song]

I will say I think you had an argument every once in a while. You do get a really good to do though. Like it was like follow up with your video team about making a social for the bull tube. That was something I actually did call the plumber because. Which I did fix the HOA violation that you left festering for eight months.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

How Dick.

[Victoria Song]

I did different jobs. So, you know, like, some of them are good.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

And how frequently are they good? Like one out of every.

[Victoria Song]

I would say it depends on what you use it for. So if you're using it primarily for work conversations, which is.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

So you mute it when it's not.

[Victoria Song]

When you mute it and you only use it for work conversations, your batting.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Average is quite high for takeaways that 90%.

[Victoria Song]

No, like 60. Sherlyn. 60 is pretty good.

[Ed Zitron]

This is the worst it'll ever be.

[Victoria Song]

And it depends on how many people are in the conversation with you. So it listened to a staff meeting and the takeaways were not so particularly good for me, but they would have been great for someone in the particular thing. But then if you're talking friends, like, it's difficult because you're talking with friends. You have to go like, hey. So just so you know, I have this thing on me and it's listening and it's going to have some AI insights. And some of your friends. Some of my friends are techie. So they're like, oh, man. What. What LLM does it use? So, like, they don't mind. My bestie is just like another one of your fucking devices. Sure, go ahead. Whatever.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

My friends are so tired of my shit.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah, one of your doodads. Go, go off. My husband, however, was very much like, it is not useful enough to invade my privacy.

[Ed Zitron]

That's a great reveal.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

It's the people around you.

[Alex Kranz]

Yeah, that's what I was gonna ask. Is like, is $50 worth. Like $50 to invade your privacy forever? To give all of your. Not just like your bowel movements.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah.

[Alex Kranz]

Everything to a company you don't know worth it?

[Victoria Song]

I mean, they. Okay, I have to come on here and say I did ask about the privacy. It's not like I didn't ask about that.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I was gonna ask that to you.

[Victoria Song]

They are working on a local phone only model.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, yeah. Working on that.

[Victoria Song]

Working on that.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Right.

[Victoria Song]

I'm just saying.

[Ed Zitron]

No, just be clear. I'm not criticizing you.

[Victoria Song]

I'm just saying the other thing is that everything is encrypted in transit and at rest. Good. They have a third party party auditing their privacy protocols every so often. And then no audio is stored. It's just process. And then you get transcripts, which, you know, sometimes I was like, I. I would actually like audio proof that my cousin made me cry. So That I could shove it in their face in the future, but.

[Alex Kranz]

But it's still doing a transcript, so it's still.

[Victoria Song]

The transcript is not always correct.

[Alex Kranz]

It's not always correct.

[Ed Zitron]

But what's crazy is this company raised $7 million a year ago.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I can't believe.

[Ed Zitron]

And it took them this long to come up with a product that kind of works.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

That money could be built, like, saving so many lives. I'm sorry. I'm so angry.

[Ed Zitron]

Burn it. You feel warm at least.

[Victoria Song]

It's funny.

[Alex Kranz]

No, I will say, I think $7 million. They produced hardware.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes.

[Alex Kranz]

That's. That's a thing they did for $7 million. I mean, that's almost impressive.

[Ed Zitron]

It's almost impressive. But that's kind of the review of AI Though.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah.

[Alex Kranz]

But no, I think it's almost impressive. This seems the most. No disrespect. A pointless, deeply flawed product only two steps above the rabbit.

[Ed Zitron]

This feels like some shit I hear about.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Calling it above the rabbit is very interesting.

[Ed Zitron]

This is like a 2015. This is some Indiegogo fraud.

[Alex Kranz]

Yes, exactly.

[Victoria Song]

That's what, five. Because it worked better than humane at what it said it was gonna do.

[Ed Zitron]

Okay, that's fair. It's also 50 bucks.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Well, it's also because. Yeah, that and also humane made way greater claims and promises. Rabbit also made very great claims. I want to point out that, like, I'm. I find it funny that, like, there's a lot of concerns of invasions of privacy. And I get that. That for people around me, there is an invasion of privacy. I was intrigued by the $50 B. Because, like, Victoria, sometimes I do want, like, the audio recording of things happening in my life. There is as receipts.

[Victoria Song]

Like I said, there's a glimmer.

[Alex Kranz]

Hold on. What do you have in your pocket? What are two on the. On right here in front of us.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I have nothing but good luck and stars in my eyes.

[Alex Kranz]

We all have phones.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

It is.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Something that's always recording. Alex, you don't think, like, maybe myself and Victoria. I'll speak for myself. Do. Which is that I feel as if everywhere I go, every day, I am more at risk of, like, needing to back up my experience to defend myself. And that's why that sort of device always felt appealing to me.

[Victoria Song]

And maybe because I think in an enterprise sense. It does make sense if you're a lecturer, if you're a lawyer, if you're, you know, and you need someone.

[Alex Kranz]

No lawyer in their right mind.

[Victoria Song]

I'm not. I'm. Okay. Not a lawyer in their right mind. Lawyer in their bad mind, in their wrong mind, but just like just someone who takes a lot of meetings and needs a lot of notes from those meetings. Like, there is like a use case there.

[Ed Zitron]

But the problem is with those, and I understand what you're getting at is like doctors and lawyers, here's the thing. They need. They need.

[Alex Kranz]

Well, hipaa, it needs to work.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

They need accuracy.

[Ed Zitron]

If you get a nuanced thing wrong in the law, that tends to be what lawyers love.

[Victoria Song]

That's the problem. So that's why I'm saying there's like a glimmer of an idea there. Like, I think there's the glimmer of.

[Ed Zitron]

The idea generative AI AI writ large. It's just fucking. There's a glimmer of an idea is.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

The suggestion of a good thing. It's not a good thing.

[Ed Zitron]

The concepts of a plan.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah, it's just like, if you spend a month constantly reviewing your own life and fact checking. What?

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yeah. How did that leave you feeling?

[Victoria Song]

Not well. It was like I felt insane a little bit because I was constantly fact checking and I was constantly, like, when I actually thought, like, it was reading my text messages for a while because, like, I was like, these are private conversations I had in text messages on encrypted platforms. How is it even knowing these degenerates? Were you thinking out loud?

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Were you taking.

[Victoria Song]

This did really affect my behavior over a month because I realized that, like an offhand comment, it can just glean so much from that. That was just frightening to me. I feel like I would say like a thing in passing to my husband and be like, oh, here's an update on that. And it would just. And I was like, oh, shit. And so I've actually been very quiet the last month. Like, I don't. I don't speak anymore to myself. After the poop.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

After the poop.

[Victoria Song]

One year after Poop Gate and bathroom crimes, I was like, I do not say things, anything to me.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I meant to ask if in the encryption process whether the sounds of plops get encrypted too. But I guess, you know, I would love an audio file of that for myself. That's horrifying.

[Ed Zitron]

I think that there is a larger thing here, though, that this is a classic tech guy idea. It's like, what is an idea? I'd have, oh, I want to memorize everything that's happening around me and be able to analyze it and then do these insights. It's actually a very cruel way to live because we say things offhanded, forgetting.

[Victoria Song]

Is, like, very important part of life, but being fallible.

[Ed Zitron]

Our existence is not something that is written down in its entirety. And indeed, I don't know how useful it is having everything written down.

[Victoria Song]

It's not at all a fun thing.

[Alex Kranz]

Unless you're, like, a researcher.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Alex Kranz]

A hundred years from now is absolutely gonna love to know how VY responded to her Balboa.

[Victoria Song]

The funny thing.

[Alex Kranz]

Oh, my God, they're going off Dr. Like the anthropologists. 200 years from now, it's gonna be like, Ann Lister. They're just like, thank you for giving me all of this.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

They've listened to this and they're like, we need to dig up Victoria's file now.

[Alex Kranz]

And that's the only reason, like, if you're an archivist. I'm so sorry.

[Victoria Song]

Listen. Okay.

[Alex Kranz]

No, I didn't be. Did.

[Victoria Song]

Anyway. Anyway, I would just like to note that I am an avid diarist and a journal. Like a journaler.

[Ed Zitron]

I would have gone with another way of saying it.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Personally, I've heard diarrhea.

[Victoria Song]

Oh, fuck you guys. Anyway, I write daily. I journal.

[Ed Zitron]

I journal. I also journal regularly.

[Victoria Song]

I journal regularly. So this past month, I have journaled every single day. And the things that I write down and that I remember as memorable are not always the same thing that this thing picked up because a lot of my thoughts and things that are important to me and memories that are meaningful to me are completely silent. So my philosophical question is, if it doesn't happen out loud, if you have a society where we're all wearing these devices, if you say nothing out loud, does it count as your memory?

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Victoria Song]

And this device would say, no, people can't know that from you.

[Ed Zitron]

It's also a very crude analysis of memory itself. Human memory is insane.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah, it is.

[Ed Zitron]

Like, it's. The things we remember are done in chunks. The experience of being alive, at least for me, is. It's not like my thoughts, like. And now I'm on a podcast. And now I'll say the thing. It's like, I do.

[Alex Kranz]

There are apparently people who do.

[Victoria Song]

I actually do.

[Ed Zitron]

Those people are.

[Alex Kranz]

No, wait, Sherlyn, you think like this.

[Ed Zitron]

What's it like to be normal?

[Victoria Song]

What's it like to have an internal model?

[Ed Zitron]

It's just.

[Victoria Song]

I don't have an internal model.

[Ed Zitron]

It's more just adjacent to Cornholio for me. But Cornholio, I actually. You mentioned something earlier, though, Shirley, and I want to go back to, which is you said this thing about feeling the need to document things around you. Can you go into, like, what Is the thing pushing you to do that, having to witness it?

[Sherlyn Lowe]

It's because I feel as if I maybe in part of my life, I've talked to both of you about this before, where I encounter things and then I feel as if I get questioned about them afterwards and people don't believe me. Right.

[Victoria Song]

It's like journalism brain.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

It's journalism brain. It's microaggression being thrown your way daily. It's being a lady, it's being a woman. It's like the things that we have to think about all the time. So, like, I feel as if. If I had a wearable microphone or camera on me all the time. This is why I review the humane with great enthusiasm. At first. It's. I feel as if, if one of those people who cat calls me across the street, I. I had, like, documented evidence of that and I could bring it up, like, how many times it happens a week. I could have, like, valuable knowledge on my hands to be like, when people question if I. If it really happens that much, I can be like, look at all these instances. So for that reason, I have a lot of things that document parts of my life. I. To your point, Alex, I have phones that record a lot of my conversations when I feel they're important.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

There's my security camera outside. I'm like, whatever it captures, promotion, I have it triggered on a motion sensor and it records everything. And I'm like, oh, I don't pay now for the backup that, like, allows me to go back in time and look at them all the day. But, like, if I did, I would sit there and look all the time.

[Alex Kranz]

Yeah.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I think that experience is not every woman or every person who feels that way. But I don't know, something in my, like, upbringing or my culture, like, has led me to feel like there's.

[Victoria Song]

There's a fine line. Because I do think that when you do that, when you are constantly reviewing the. The documents of your life, it can be not so great for your mental health.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Oh, absolutely. It's not super.

[Victoria Song]

Like, my conclusion is that, like, part of being a human is understanding when you need to forget things, move on, and instead you're inviting an AI to do that.

[Alex Kranz]

For me, a really poorly implemented. Honestly, because of how. Yeah, how badly it failed you. You're having a poorly implemented AI, Right. Intending to profit off of you in ways we still don't know because $50 to have that many AI, like, yeah, they're not making money, they're burning cash. So where are they making their money? Money that I think.

[Victoria Song]

I think there is plans down the line to subscription. Subscription.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yeah.

[Victoria Song]

Of course, right now there isn't one.

[Alex Kranz]

That is the way of every single one of these products. We see this again and again and again. There's something that, like, really moves Silicon Valley and they get really, really excited. In this case, it's AI and they're like, how can we commodify this? How can. How can we. How can we make money off of this? How can I go and make money off of this? I think that all the time I'm unemployed right now.

[Ed Zitron]

Alex Cran, she's great.

[Alex Kranz]

I'm also. But it's this constant thing, and then they release this product that is pretty terrible. You gave it a 5. It is clearly not finished. And it is for such a small group of the population. How on earth do they expect anyone in the normal world who's just out there existing, who goes to Walmart all the time and doesn't listen to podcasts all the time to be like, yeah, I want to take this little $50 thing that's gonna charge me money monthly and wear this on my. And record everything I do.

[Ed Zitron]

No normal person.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

No one would.

[Victoria Song]

No, no one would.

[Ed Zitron]

No normal person.

[Alex Kranz]

Such. It is such brain worms. It's insane that this is like.

[Victoria Song]

But you have that a lot in, like, the context. They only think about the positive of it. And, like. No, they don't.

[Alex Kranz]

All.

[Victoria Song]

They're thinking about the negative.

[Alex Kranz]

They're not thinking about the positive. Let's be really clear. They're not thinking about the positive of it. They're thinking about, how can I make money?

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yes.

[Victoria Song]

Growth.

[Alex Kranz]

How can I grow? Yeah, that is. It is this growth at all cost thing.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yes, that is.

[Alex Kranz]

And it's.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

And it's ruining this world.

[Victoria Song]

But, I mean, when they market it, they tell you all the good things it can do, but they never, like, really get into the fact that, like, they listen to me cry, like, pretty heavily after I got into a fight.

[Ed Zitron]

I'm sorry.

[Victoria Song]

And then I had to review the transcript and then look at it and then just, like, have it analyze how I was feeling, because it was like, one sad one for me.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

It's like when Amazon did tone.

[Alex Kranz]

As someone who's recorded one of her own firings before, you don't want to listen to that stuff.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Oh, I've recorded a breakup before.

[Victoria Song]

That was great. Oh, my God. You don't. You don't.

[Alex Kranz]

I did it for legal reasons. That's unhinged, girl.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

You know me. I am unhinged.

[Alex Kranz]

Oh, my God. I want to.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Like, you're lucky I haven't recorded all our conversations. Honey, no, no, here's the thing. I will clarify that. I record. I don't go and review every day. I think that that's really detrimental to your health. I do it for the. Like, the receipts and. Yeah, and in that breakup example, I don't think I actually recorded it. I wrote down every single word I can remember.

[Ed Zitron]

And that's different, just to be clear.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yes, yes. It's just a huge invasion of press.

[Alex Kranz]

I think what I'm really frustrated by is this is another example of a totally unfinished product. We're seeing this again and again. Again. We saw it with Apple this last week, where Intelligence, you've got Gruber and Gurman and a lot of these other people saying, hey, something's wrong when you've.

[Ed Zitron]

Got fucking Gruber being like, I don't.

[Alex Kranz]

Like them, but exactly. You've lost Gruber. That means you've failed. And we're seeing that, like, if Apple is out there rushing a product when they know it's not ready, especially Apple, of all the companies have all of the stuff, they don't have the use cases. It's like what we saw with VR. I spent years covering VR, waiting for that big moment. And everybody says it's just around the corner.

[Ed Zitron]

It's always around the fucking corner.

[Alex Kranz]

Is it here yet?

[Victoria Song]

No.

[Alex Kranz]

Okay. I just wanted to chat.

[Ed Zitron]

Thank you.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Is it because V is in her name?

[Alex Kranz]

It's because she does a lot of VR covers.

[Ed Zitron]

It's Victoria reality.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Thank you.

[Alex Kranz]

Victoria.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Exactly.

[Alex Kranz]

I've seen her wear a lot of.

[Victoria Song]

Different glasses, a lot of smart glasses.

[Ed Zitron]

And also the company that made this, by the way, the founding team came from Twitter.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Oh, sorry.

[Ed Zitron]

They helped ship Twitter Spaces, you know, that beloved product and some sort of video chat app called Squad.

[Alex Kranz]

Okay.

[Ed Zitron]

The Squad, the anti bro startup, is creating a safe space for teenage girls online. And wait a second, let's see who's who founded this. Esther Corford. I think she's the woman that helped Elon Musk. Anyway, point is, these fucking people don't care at all. They're not sitting there being like, how would this be helpful? Because. Because the most helpful thing would make sure it was really focused that it was able to discern a professional and. But they probably can't do it because it isn't possible. Ah, it's.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

It's just people cared about people. People with money cared about other people. We would be spending this money on cancer research where the NIH grants are being pulled installed right now, or they would focus it on improving the health care system of this country. But people do not care. They care about taking their money and growing it for more money for themselves. That's it. Which I hate, by the way.

[Victoria Song]

Don't expect people to suddenly become good people overnight, especially if they have money. But there is just like one thing where it's like, you have to at the very least create a good product experience for people. And the thing that frustrates me the most when I review products is that I feel like there's just this Pollyanni, Pollyannish like, view of what life is from these people in Silicon Valley where it's just like, I. I have had a life of great suffering and they think it's like, you know, I've been through a lot of shit. Like both my parents died, my dog died, my entire immediate family died in the last five years.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh my God, I'm so sorry.

[Victoria Song]

It's fine. It's not, but it's fine. I have like a lot of, you know, traumatic stuff that has happened and it's kind of changed my perspective of these kinds of devices because life is not pretty. There are just moments where. There are moments where it's very hard and where these sorts of to dos. I can imagine a time where, like, when I was in the height of my grief, where I would have loved a thing to remind me to do stuff, to listen to the conversations that I was not processing to give me those to dos. Like, there are moments, and I think there is a desire for something like that, that AI could ostensibly at some point when it actually works. A lot of asterisks here that could help people. And I think if people want to pursue that, that's great. But you can't do it without acknowledging the fact that not every moment in your life is going to be pleasant. They're going to be embarrassing, there's going to be heartbreak, there's going to be these negative experiences that you don't necessarily want summarized to you in a way that you're gonna have to review and feel. Gas. Did your ex gaslight you? Guess what? The AI is gonna gaslight you how that horrible douche gaslit you.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Victoria Song]

And like that kind of of thing is just not necessarily great. But you get it across so many different categories.

[Alex Kranz]

Put on my business person hat. It's not just bad.

[Ed Zitron]

She's putting it on.

[Alex Kranz]

I know.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

She's literally.

[Alex Kranz]

It's a bad hat. It's a little top hat. Let me get my Monocle out. It's not just. It's bad for people, it's a bad product.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Alex Kranz]

Like let's be clear. A lot of these products we've seen again and again and again trying to do AI, trying to make. Google's done some decent work in this space with decent. But most of these products continue to be bad. They continue to be searching.

[Ed Zitron]

I'm sorry, I gotta push back on that. Like what with Google. I'm sorry.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Notebook. LM alone is.

[Alex Kranz]

There was that thing where you could like, you could like erase a person out of a picture.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Oh, magic eraser.

[Alex Kranz]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

That's not generative AI though.

[Alex Kranz]

Yeah, it is. It's generating.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Is that generative? It's not in the era of. So Google's done that before the rise of OpenAI.

[Alex Kranz]

What else did it do?

[Ed Zitron]

This is, by the way, this is also the industry that the entire economy is built on top of, just to be clear. And these are some of the most well credentialed tech people. And we're all just going, fuck.

[Alex Kranz]

What?

[Ed Zitron]

Why?

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Well, so hang on. Pause, pause. I want to pivot to all of that by saying there is a good product that's built to help people feel better. You're pointing at me for AI? No, not AI. That's the thing.

[Alex Kranz]

No, I want to talk about.

[Victoria Song]

You want to talk about Mexican standoff of pointing.

[Alex Kranz]

Pointing at each other so hard.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

We really were.

[Ed Zitron]

They are really. They're doing the spider.

[Alex Kranz]

We were the spider man.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, but they're not similar. They just.

[Victoria Song]

Sherlyn make a point.

[Ed Zitron]

Anyway.

[Alex Kranz]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Wait, who's going?

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I was gonna go. I have been using this app. I encountered it through a co worker who wrote about it for us. It's called Finch. It's an app that's like a self care app. Right? So by taking care of yourself, you're taking care of this pet, you're helping it grow. And what it is is these the most gentle suggestions of to DOS in a day. Whether it is as simple as get out of bed, brush your teeth, drink water, you complete them, you get points, you grow your pet, whatever is a gentle reminder of things you want to do throughout the day and you can reward yourself. And it is developed by, and here's the crucial difference, two independent developers that were college buddies that we're just trying to help motivate each other. And I think that is an example I can point to of tech being able to help people because I also read the subreddit.

[Alex Kranz]

I mean that is a great. That is a great example And a lot of different things there it was. It's two people not seeking.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

It's not for growth capitalism.

[Alex Kranz]

And it's not. It doesn't sound like it's using a lot of generative AI.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

No, it's not AI based. It has a point. It is a very focused product with a core mission in mind of helping people. And that is something I can stand by.

[Alex Kranz]

Yeah. And. But I think most of these products we're seeing is particularly in the AI.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Especially from the big companies and the VCs.

[Alex Kranz]

They are. Everybody is out just doing this money grab. Everybody's just saying, how do I grab?

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Because the motivation is different. Hold on, hold on. Exactly.

[Alex Kranz]

Of course they're asking that. And what are they all doing? Why are they all doing this? They're all trying to chase the iPhone. They're all trying to chase something that happened in 2007.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Sure.

[Alex Kranz]

And let's point out, in 2007, the iPhone was a way more. Even in its shittiest state, 2007 was a way more well thought out, well produced product than any of the products.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

It was so different.

[Ed Zitron]

And it also fixed really big. Obvious. I got the original iPhone. I was a little nerd. I didn't have friends, but I did have money saved up from writing and I bought it. And I remember showing people visual voicemail and people going, holy shit. That's amazing. Because voicemail at the time was this defunct product where you had to dial in and hit a button.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I do miss recording my voicemail message.

[Ed Zitron]

I do not.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I do. It's cute as hell.

[Ed Zitron]

You can barely understand me half the fucking time. So unless I'm on this show, I hope. But, like, you could send text messages and it didn't involve you doing, like, the weird hitting the numbers thing. Obvious.

[Alex Kranz]

I love the Tina.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Sorry. Okay.

[Alex Kranz]

Yeah.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Okay.

[Victoria Song]

It's just intention, right?

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. Intentionality problems experienced by humans.

[Alex Kranz]

Exactly, Exactly. Right now, all we are doing is we are creating things and everybody's sitting around saying, wow, I wish that. You know, a universal problem. Everybody wants to chronicle every moment of their life. Yeah, Sherlyn does.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I sure do.

[Ed Zitron]

You actually don't.

[Alex Kranz]

Yeah, Sherlyn, you actually don't.

[Ed Zitron]

You want to chronicle important moments at some point. You don't want to chronicle every moment.

[Victoria Song]

No.

[Alex Kranz]

And also, no offense, Sherlyn is one person.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yeah. I am the most important, but I am one person.

[Alex Kranz]

You are one person. You are like, that is a very small group of people. And they're like, everybody wants to do this.

[Ed Zitron]

I think there is a much Higher level problem, though, which is they are not being like, well, you know what? People have problems with remembering things. They're like, yeah, we can't fucking fix that. We actually can't fix that. Like, we can't. We can't fix that. Or people have problems with communication. Yeah, well, we really also can't fix that. What can we do? Record everything and hope something fucking comes out? I don't know. These worms with their money, give it to me.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I feel like they took the nugget of a good idea, which is what you have been saying, the glimmer of a good idea, and then stuffed. They needed money to make the good idea work. And the only way to get that money is to say AI is the way.

[Ed Zitron]

I agree. I think there's also another step, which is they actually can't do the good idea. I don't think they're capable of doing it because the good idea would be like, hey, listen to what's going on and just tell me what things you think I might forget. It can't do that. Because the only thing they can do is have a big sludge of information, chuck it at a large language model and hope something comes out other than like, I don't want to watch the Garbo movie. Which is a quote from your article.

[Victoria Song]

Yes, the Garbo movie was. It ends with. From my very 90 minute long slant. How I don't want to see that.

[Ed Zitron]

My cat Babu, I talk to him like a person. It's gonna be like you told Bob.

[Victoria Song]

I also talked to my cat as a person and it said that I had a rough and tumble ride with them discussing childhood memories. Because it mentioned my cat Petey.

[Ed Zitron]

Right?

[Victoria Song]

And I'm like, petey's my cat. And I was talking to the cat and I say, oh, who's a widow baby who's innocent?

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Wait, did he understand that?

[Victoria Song]

No, it just said that I have a dog named Edie.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Oh, great.

[Ed Zitron]

Nailed it.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

No, it would be. It'd be like how saying to like, Ed has talked to Hal, who he calls Mr. Beautiful and Mr. Fluffy.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

And he really is. He acts like the most beautiful cat in the world.

[Victoria Song]

He is. I would imagine your fact. Tinder would say Ed knows someone named Mr. Beautiful and he is fluffy or something like that.

[Alex Kranz]

Mr.

[Ed Zitron]

Perfect, Mr. Beautiful and so on. It's just. And I think that's what it really is. We all are coming up with like, distinct problems that can be solved. And this is not what large language models do. And it's very difficult to get them to do specific things as proven by the fact that none of the products exist.

[Victoria Song]

You can't solve being human. Yes, that's the thing is, like, we're all human.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Hi, I'm Cindy Crawford and I'm the founder of Meaningful Beauty.

[Unnamed Advertiser]

Well, I don't know about you, but like, I never liked being told, oh wow, you look so good for your age.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Like, why even bother saying that? Why don't you just say you look.

[Unnamed Advertiser]

Great at any age, Every age.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

That's what Meaningful Beauty is all about.

[Unnamed Advertiser]

We create products that make you feel.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Confident in your skin at the age you are now. Meaningful Beauty. Beautiful skin at every age. Learn more@meaningful beauty.com.

[Unnamed Advertiser]

Does this podcast make you happy? Of course it does. That's why you're here. But it only comes out once a week. For happiness, every night. You need Adam and Eve. Yes, I'm talking about sex toys. It's cool.

[Victoria Song]

It's cool.

[Unnamed Advertiser]

You have earbuds in right? Adam and Eve, America's most trusted source for adult products, has been making people very happy for over 50 years with thousands of toys for both men and women. Just go to AdamAndEve.com now and enter code IHEART for 50% off. Almost any one item plus free discreet shipping. That's AdamAndEve.com code IHEART for 50% OFF when it comes to playtime, never let your squad down.

[Alex Kranz]

Unlock elite gaming [e-mail] Push your gameplay.

[Unnamed Advertiser]

Beyond performance with 13th gen Intel Core processors.

[Alex Kranz]

Upgrade to smooth high quality streaming with Intel Wi Fi 6e and maximize game performance with enhanced overclocking.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Win the tech search and head to.

[Alex Kranz]

Lenovo.Com ready to prioritize yourself in the new year? Your skin is a great place to start. Dime Beauty, founded by a master esthetician, is more than just a skincare company. With four skin conscious categories, Skincare, beauty, Body care and Fragrance, Dime offers simple, spa worthy products that will help you enter 2025 with confidence. Whether you're revitalizing your regimen with nourishing products or building one from scratch, Dime makes it easy. The work system, our all in one best selling routine includes a cleanser of your choice, toners, serums and moisturizers. Taking the guesswork out of skincare for your healthiest, happiest skin yet. Dime's commitment to clean ingredients and sustainable packaging ensures every product is as gentle on your skin as it is on the planet. With thousands of glowing five star reviews and a loyal community, the results speak for themselves. Revive your skin and give yourself the routine refresh you deserve by visiting dimebeautyco.com that's dimebeauty co.com your best skin awaits.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I said this in a previous episode with you at the CES episode where I don't even think robotics need to be humanoid in nature.

[Ed Zitron]

But okay, it's not an efficient form of body.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Exactly. Or of repetitive movement. That's it.

[Ed Zitron]

Also, they're not even making the youth like so much of this. What frustrates me. Even with the Kevin Roose thing, it's like, no real problem solved. What could a conscious. An AGI could theoretically listen without recording and go, okay, I think you might need a reminder on this, because I know you. These motherfuckers. Actually, that is the ultimate problem with this. It doesn't know you at all. It actually doesn't know you.

[Victoria Song]

That actually reminds me of when I was testing the meta ray ban. Live AI. What?

[Ed Zitron]

She's pulling a hair off.

[Victoria Song]

It just bugged me, but I was testing that. And so it's live AI, it's multimodal. It can look at what you're looking at and you can ask it questions and it'll see what you're seeing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There are actual use cases for that. I've had many, many blind and low vision people reach out to me saying that that could change their lives, which is cool. That is good. I love that. But you know the demos that they were like, suggesting that I try or whatnot. I looked at my room, I was like, tell me how I could make this room look less sad, basically. And there's like, oh, you could put art up. You could have a plant. You could have some rugs. And I was like, oh, Jesus fucking Christ.

[Ed Zitron]

You could text any random white guy and they'd be like, I don't fucking know.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yeah, what's.

[Victoria Song]

What art. Should I. Should I use Rainy Forest? I know I had to ask like five or six different questions. Just digging and digging and digging for this AI.

[Alex Kranz]

Well, that's because.

[Victoria Song]

Just an artist. I asked my best friend, she said, you would love xyz. I loved xyz. I bought it immediately.

[Ed Zitron]

It wasn't contextually intelligent. It doesn't have. It doesn't look around and go, okay. Looking at the format of this room, it's just frustrating because it is the. It's the info slop. It just. It is just collecting data and going, see, I actually.

[Alex Kranz]

I was telling Sherlyn about this earlier. I had a great moment where somebody was like, oh, yeah, I use Claude AI as a therapist. And I was like, you're unhinged. I love you.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

It is.

[Alex Kranz]

And so I was like, I'm gonna talk to Claude. AI. And I was talking to it, and I was. You know, I was telling her about how things were going and everything.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Oh, yeah.

[Alex Kranz]

And I was like, I would really like it if you would recommend a book to me that kind of speaks to the experiences I'm having right now. And immediately it was like, Goldfinch. And I was like, goldfinch?

[Ed Zitron]

I'm not familiar with that.

[Victoria Song]

I've read that book. Why that book?

[Alex Kranz]

What is this?

[Victoria Song]

Explain that. Okay, so this book is Bill Dung's Roman from Donna Tartt, author of Secret History, is about this little boy named Theo, whose mom, like, dies in a terrorist attack at the Met. And he, like, steals a piece of.

[Alex Kranz]

Art, just like me.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

And it just goes.

[Victoria Song]

It goes through his life of just being like, oh, I have my Alex.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

The resemblance is on.

[Victoria Song]

And I'm obsessed with a manic pixie dream girl. Oh, that's true in the thing. And then I do a bunch of crime. And at the end of the book, he's just like, well, I've made life decisions.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. Average, better offline listener. Yeah.

[Alex Kranz]

Anyway, it was like, I read. I looked at that, and I was like, well, this is a terrible fucking suggestion. And so I said, okay, cool. Suggest a movie to me. And it goes, Silver Linings Playbook.

[Ed Zitron]

And I was like, kids.

[Alex Kranz]

And honestly, it was the best moment in my entire experience with this thing. Because before that, I'd been like, wow, this starts to get me. And I started to almost, like, believe the AI understood me, even though I know for a fact it's stupid and it doesn't. And then it said, goldfinch and Silver Linings Playbook. And I was like, oh, right, you're still wrong. You are a stupid robot. You are incapable of making the connections that humans make. And you are so far from it that you would recommend these two, because all you did was. You saw on the Internet, someone said goldfinch and self actualization or some. And. And so clearly, it's gonna.

[Ed Zitron]

When you vectorize every fact and bit of data and you go just, this is just like human beings.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

And then you're like, yeah, you're a.

[Ed Zitron]

Relational database with legs.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yeah.

[Alex Kranz]

And I loved that moment because it immediately said, oh, yeah, this is a fucking robot.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

You're going close to something that's not real.

[Alex Kranz]

Yeah. And it immediately pulled me out of it. I was like, this is hysterical. I love this thing. And I stopped using it for a minute because like immediately it broke you.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Out of that illusion.

[Alex Kranz]

It broke me out of that illusion. And I loved that moment because it reminded me these things suck. They're not human.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Well, hang on, hang on. There was a point up until that that you were like this.

[Alex Kranz]

Oh no. Yeah, I love it. Like I said, I love this thing because it is a big. It's like a horoscope.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

The validation machine.

[Alex Kranz]

Yeah, it's a big validation machine. And just like a horoscope, it makes me feel pretty. And then it recommends Silver Linings, Playbook or Goldfinch. And I'm reminded that it's a horoscope.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yeah, this was. Yeah, go on.

[Ed Zitron]

No, no, you were saying something.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I was just going to say that this was the point in the conversation we were having just now, Alex, where you and I were both like, it is all still logic programming. It is all still input output. It is as much and as sophisticated as the output output seems. It is still input output, which is the basis of most computing.

[Ed Zitron]

Right?

[Sherlyn Lowe]

And it's like until it so called things for itself. That AGI question isn't there like the, the two years ago. It's not, it's never going to be because it takes the human brain to be capable.

[Ed Zitron]

It also is not doing what we don't even understand intelligence. But it is relational data. But it's very, very complex. And I realize someone's gonna listen again, it's not a relational day. Shut the. Go outside. But it's, it's like, it's relational things. It's just looking going well, based on what you've said, I think this and I don't. And as a thing with no experiences, I'm gonna say sure. Like it's Goldfinch.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

It's about growth, about life. Therefore assign it to Alex.

[Victoria Song]

Like emotions. Like we don't even understand emotions. How is it we don't.

[Ed Zitron]

It's not even smart enough to be like Howl's moving castle, which would cheer me up anytime.

[Alex Kranz]

Yeah, if it had said that, I would have been like, like sick. Damn. I wouldn't be here right now because I'd still be just talking to Claude AI. We'd be getting married, we'd have a date.

[Victoria Song]

She's been sending me screenshots of like the Claude and I'm just like, haha, love that for you, girl.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

But it's also just like.

[Victoria Song]

But it's also like I'm monitoring because if you get too crazy and do it, I'm just gonna be like it's not real.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yeah. I know of people who use it and I've read of cases on Reddit where people use it as their mental health replacement. Like the therapist stand in. And it's not. I think we are aware. It's not. I worry for the people out there who are not, who are talking to ChatGPT like it is Debbie Greener by their adoption.

[Ed Zitron]

I was just thinking Kevin Roos.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

There you go. That's the New York Times audience.

[Ed Zitron]

This is why actually connects to why I'm so pissed off at Kevin. He should know better, but a lot of people don't. The reason that I think a lot of right wing YouTubers have taken over, like how men think is because a lot of people just looking for something to tell them what they want to hear. And this is the biggest machine to.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Do that validation you were talking about.

[Ed Zitron]

Will validate and not challenging at all. It's not. It might challenge you in the most gentle way.

[Victoria Song]

It never challenged me. It just told me I was great.

[Alex Kranz]

Yeah.

[Victoria Song]

And then although it told me, like areas I could slightly improve.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Oh, like a performance review.

[Alex Kranz]

I can get rid of my typos. It told me. And then I'll win a pull up.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Oh, my God. I tell you that all the time.

[Ed Zitron]

These motherfuckers love to tell people they're gonna win pullers.

[Alex Kranz]

I know, it's really hard.

[Ed Zitron]

I have tried, by the way, to use it like a mental health thing.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Sure.

[Ed Zitron]

And I've had to just be like, be rude, push back. And it can barely do it. Cannot fucking keep up with my swag. I just demolish it. I just, I brutalize it. It's got nothing.

[Victoria Song]

There's like this Korean term called nunchi. And it means, it means like, you should be able to read a room.

[Alex Kranz]

Emotional intelligence.

[Victoria Song]

Emotional intelligence. It's like nunchi. It's like I, I'm not good at translating, but it's like eye power or something like that.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

That's cool.

[Victoria Song]

And so like Korean parents will, will tell you, like, oh, why you don't you have nunchi? Is because you should be able to look at a room and see what's going on, see what people are saying, read between the lines and make conclusions based on that. AI can't do that.

[Ed Zitron]

And that's exactly the problem with the bee and exactly the problem with large language models. It literally cannot read the room. All it can do is read this blob of text, this thing, and go. Based on all of the training I've done from stealing the Internet, I Think that you will win a Pulitzer or.

[Victoria Song]

You or like syntactically your writing is similar to someone who has won a Pulitzer. So.

[Ed Zitron]

And that's all that it is. It's just each year the Pulitzer looks for like the most similar thing to last year.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Because that's how human beings make sense.

[Alex Kranz]

And it's only a chapter. And it's like that chapter when you. A Pulitzer.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, but when you ask, it's like I never stole anything. Charlene. So you covered the. I actually have somehow missed this because I. I didn't want to know the Alexa AI. What are they fucking doing? The Alexa plus man, one of these people. I read an interview with Nilay Patel and I didn't get any information. So if you could tell me with.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Pano's Panay, I'm assuming the new hardware chief at or senior vice president, I think of devices and services at Amazon. Anyway, got a chance to speak with him and also did an interview where I basically learned nothing because Panos is that kind of an enigma, by the way. He just talks. Oh yeah, he is charming.

[Ed Zitron]

I think Enigma is a very kind way of saying guy who doesn't say anything despite his paycheck.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

But fair enough. That's my opinion. That's media training. And I have to admit that I tend to be suckered in by that. I'm the sort of person who falls.

[Alex Kranz]

He'S got a very heck of me.

[Ed Zitron]

Never come on this show.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

So Alexa, and apologies to everyone that has an echo speaker, please go mute your speakers right now. But Alexa is the redesigned version of that assistant that Amazon's been promising forever. Right. So it's been like we're going to use LLMs, we're going to use generative things to make a more conversational language flow between you and the assistant. And you can pause yourself in between talking or speaking your comments or like correct yourself mid sentence or say a lot of things and not use contextual like follow up questions and that sort of thing. And it should pause it. That is supposed to be like very handle complex tasks. Right. You can stack tasks. You can also. What kind of tasks? Ah, so like oh no, look at my ring camera feed and see if any like huskies showed up or if anybody walked my dog today or something. That sort of thing. Still simplistic in nature.

[Alex Kranz]

Set multiple timers.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

You know what, here's the thing. At the event we had a hands on quote in air quotes because we didn't actually get hands on. We were just shown a lot of demos and we're it felt very rehearsed. I don't like that sort of event. I don't call it hands on because we didn't use it ourselves. So anyway, eyes on. Eyes on. I was most intrigued, however, by Amazon's promise of how it's going to integrate with third party SO services, which is one of the things that these assistants.

[Victoria Song]

Are historically very kind of like the agentic.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Exactly.

[Ed Zitron]

Wait, wait, wait. We've heard that word now.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I don't like agentic.

[Victoria Song]

It's not.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

It's.

[Ed Zitron]

What does it do?

[Victoria Song]

Web forms.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

So let's set aside the agentic question for a moment and talk about the third party integration.

[Alex Kranz]

Yes, Panos, what does it do?

[Sherlyn Lowe]

But I hope I more. No, you're allowed to say stuff. Yes. Sorry, Panos. There's three parts that Daniel Roche Bosch, their vp. I apologize for the last name thing mentioned. So one was the APIs. Right. It will work with people that it knows are its partners, Who Uber, Spotify, etc. To API into its assistant so that you can say something like, oh, get me an Uber for whatever, or get me a. Like just be very natural with how you talk to your assistant. The second is agentic. So it's going to have. This was funny to me, Alexa. A chatbot. Talk to other chatbots on the Internet and they will just talk to each other on your behalf.

[Alex Kranz]

Why would I want them to?

[Ed Zitron]

I respect the shit out of you, but I must say you just said the magic words of it will do.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Ah, it's supposed to. Well, it claims. Listen, I Ed. Ed you get out of my face because I write carefully.

[Ed Zitron]

I know you do.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

There's a lot of hate when I.

[Victoria Song]

Move on, when I speak.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I don't edit after. Anyway, it's supposed to.

[Ed Zitron]

I do sound like that.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Thank you. It's supposed to. I don't do spiritish. Now where was I? Yeah, it's supposed to have the assistants talk to each other. We've seen no demonstrations of this. Well, I mean we saw an on stage.

[Alex Kranz]

Here's my question.

[Victoria Song]

Order an Uber.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yes.

[Alex Kranz]

Or.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Or you can order food through Amazon Fresh. Who wants to do Amazon?

[Ed Zitron]

I. Who wants to do this?

[Alex Kranz]

Exactly.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yeah.

[Alex Kranz]

Who wants to do this? Because if I'm going to ask it to order an Uber, is it going to be like Siri where I asked it to call my mom and it called my aunt that I haven't talked to in 15 years and they. It's totally different name supposed to be.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, but how can you even call an Uber on it?

[Alex Kranz]

Yeah, you're going to call an Uber on.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

So here's, here's, here's the demo they gave. And I'm sure, I think that was what Victoria was going to get through. The demo they gave were like, oh, what was that restaurant I liked? And then like, Alexa will be like, oh, make me a reservation at the second one. So instead of having to like, whatever.

[Ed Zitron]

Almost useful.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yeah. A lot of, A lot of assistants are supposed to get close to doing.

[Alex Kranz]

Except for you're expected to put your trust.

[Victoria Song]

Yes.

[Alex Kranz]

And it will get every single point of that. And it is not capable of that.

[Ed Zitron]

And they're charging more for this. Yes.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Well, no, no, no. Prime. Prime subscribers get it for free. You have to pay if you're not a Prime subscriber. Which, like.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Victoria Song]

One of the, one of the demos, like, so I wasn't there, but I was listening through an audio feed.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I was streaming the feed.

[Victoria Song]

So basically there was like one demo where it was like, oh, can you find me tickets to this Red Sox game for. Oh, that's a little too pricey. Can you set an alert?

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yeah.

[Victoria Song]

And basically David was like, I already found tickets for that exact game for $56 online. Right.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

You can do it faster by Googling yourself.

[Victoria Song]

And then there's also just like, oh, you know, tell me what time so and so's flight is coming in.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Right.

[Victoria Song]

Okay.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Send an Uber. Yeah. To pick that up.

[Victoria Song]

Kind of feels like that's not how Uber at JFK works.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Right, right, right, exactly.

[Alex Kranz]

It kind of feels like this was designed for mid level executives who can't afford their own assistant.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yes.

[Ed Zitron]

This sounds like it was designed to do this fucking event.

[Victoria Song]

I guess.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

This just sounds like it was. They designed enough things to demo an event.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I agree with you.

[Ed Zitron]

I'm not criticizing you, just to be clear.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

No, I want to point out that I was getting to a point, which is that none of this was interesting to me because it's been done, slash been attempted to be done, slash. You can do it better yourself.

[Alex Kranz]

Google's been doing this for five years.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Exactly. Big, big advantage.

[Alex Kranz]

And it definitely worked.

[Victoria Song]

Duplex didn't work.

[Alex Kranz]

Was notably a big phony. When it did it, when it had the duplex. Was it the AI that called?

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yeah, the restaurant reservation duplex.

[Alex Kranz]

Fake.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Well, I don't know because I haven't looked at it myself.

[Ed Zitron]

I just never could find that.

[Alex Kranz]

I believe all the. A lot of the restaurants I have.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Used it myself to get them to call Mala Project.

[Alex Kranz]

Yeah. Great restaurant.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

To make a reservation.

[Ed Zitron]

I just like, I keep Coming back to this thought of, who is this actually for? Because I don't know. The way I live my life is not like I'm like, what's that restaurant I like? And I need to make a reservation at the restaurant that I like enough to make a reservation, but not enough to remember it.

[Victoria Song]

You're getting to a point that I've had with a problem that I've had with AI is that, you know, you have to know how to prompt it.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yes, great.

[Victoria Song]

But that you want.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

That's what Amazon's trying to solve with the new Alexa thing, because.

[Victoria Song]

Trying to solve exactly like which I.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I'm sorry, I had a long conversation with someone else about this.

[Alex Kranz]

You invented that type of. Yes, exactly.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

So you get us to learn how to talk to our assistants in a very specific way. Now you want us to talk naturally to it, as if that's not learning a whole other type of behavior.

[Victoria Song]

It's a whole language.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

As if it's going to work. Like I'm talking to my friends. It's not. I. I can get, like, all kinds of incense about this.

[Victoria Song]

I. I was testing. What was it? I got a demo of Project Astra back at IO and I was just, like, talking to it, and they were like, no, no, no, you can talk normal. And I was like, yes, you have to remember, I have.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Estra is the eyeglass.

[Victoria Song]

Frickin, frickin years of going, hey, Google. Sorry. Hey, Google Alexa. You know, like that exact insane series.

[Ed Zitron]

Oingo Boingo Little Girls.

[Alex Kranz]

I am so excited for a bunch of your listeners punish me every day.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

You need a warning at the start of this episode to mute.

[Ed Zitron]

I will be warning nobody.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yeah, it's all Ed's fault. Better production.

[Ed Zitron]

It is my fault.

[Alex Kranz]

It's on your listeners for listening to you without.

[Ed Zitron]

I will get someone to beep out if I remember, which I won't.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

There you go. Sorry. At the same time, I was gonna say, yeah, Project Estra is interesting. I don't know if it'll work yet, but Astra is Google's, like, experimental implementation of Gemini, where you can use your phone's camera to point it around a room and then it'll remember things it saw, even if it's not.

[Alex Kranz]

I want to be really clear about that.

[Victoria Song]

I want to. If I had a dollar for every single time a tech exec said multimodal.

[Alex Kranz]

I want to be really clear on something. They've been promising this stuff for 10, 15 years at this point. Alexa came out in, what, 2014 or. Yeah, 2014. That's when they first announced this. There's a big reason we haven't seen huge changes, even with fairly good generative AI and fairly good large language models that can listen to us and really understand our speech. And that is because computers still can't process all this stuff. Because if you and I are both in the same room and you're asking Alexa for that restaurant and I'm saying, no, no, no, don't forget the restaurant, what movie we want to go to.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

We can only do one stream of data at a time.

[Ed Zitron]

Okay. Here's an article from the Verge. June 13, 2016. Apple over opens up Siri to app developers. This is nearly here for a decade.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

So I mean, look, I, I will, I take, I will take note against that. Like nothing has changed. Because I think the echo speaker alone has changed the way a lot of people disagree.

[Ed Zitron]

What does it do?

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I speak to my speaker a lot. I do. Like it's hands free control. Smart home control. Yes.

[Victoria Song]

No, no. But elderly people, you don't. People who are understanding.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

People with accessibility issues, mobility issues, they can use that and it works well. And they're working with VoiceIt to make it better for people with speech impediments.

[Ed Zitron]

And I agree, that sounds great, but it's, it's.

[Alex Kranz]

No, I, I think, I think voice control.

[Unnamed Advertiser]

Super.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yeah. I don't mean Alexa.

[Alex Kranz]

I will say all of these products currently are not as good as what they suggest.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Exactly.

[Alex Kranz]

They are. Not that.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

They constantly make promises like there's things.

[Ed Zitron]

That measure everything they sow their oats on. Things like what? And you're right to say that, by the way, but they're like, oh, you can't hate this because the elderly might.

[Victoria Song]

No, no, no, no, no. You can.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

You absolutely should hate.

[Ed Zitron]

I can and I will. I'm doing it right now.

[Victoria Song]

It's universal. Right. It's like smart glasses when they first came out, everyone was like, fuck that Glass.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Everybody thought Google Glass was cute, though. No, still my LinkedIn picture. Anyway, no.

[Victoria Song]

Anyway. Bubble in the shower. But it had use cases in enterprise for a long time and that's where it thrived because it had a specific use case for a specific time.

[Ed Zitron]

But here's the thing.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

And that was too expensive for that.

[Ed Zitron]

And how often was it actually used for that? Because that's the thing, they always say it's got play in the enterprise. How much play, how much revenue, how much use.

[Alex Kranz]

You know how many people are putting on a HoloLens right now to turn some sort of wrench on A pipe.

[Victoria Song]

Like zero, that's zero minute there. But like there's nothing wrong with some of this tech just being very use case specific.

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Victoria Song]

And just exploring if they were selling it on that, if they were selling it on that, if they were being honest about it. They're making it, but they're making it something for everybody.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

That's how they make the money.

[Ed Zitron]

They don't even make the money now billions of dollars.

[Victoria Song]

But they don't even like acknowledge it's.

[Alex Kranz]

Not that it's to get a higher valuation from the stock market. It's all just for investors to be like, well they're going to do something in 20 years. I mean that's the entire. I think even Elon Musk is in our.

[Victoria Song]

So like was the other thing that came out this week that they're going to add like live translations to the AirPods possibly and all of that sort.

[Ed Zitron]

Of stuff which I think is already on Google.

[Victoria Song]

They talk about how like AI can enable live translational. I've tested a bunch of live translation stuff and it's only good for like where is the bathroom? Here is your bill.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

It's not good for real conversations.

[Victoria Song]

Supposed to have real conversations. And I wrote about this when the humane came out and absolutely could not for its life translate a single fucking thing I said as like how would you know it's wrong?

[Ed Zitron]

You don't speak the fucking language.

[Victoria Song]

That too. But then like you know, the other thing is, is just like there are times where I wish that I had some sort of like AI translator in.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

My life translator thing in my life.

[Victoria Song]

That I could trust. Like when my mom was sick. The thing that they don't tell you about neurodegenerative diseases is that you will lose your second language as it happens. So my mom lost her ability to speak English. My father lost his ability to speak English as well. They raised me so that I did not speak Korean well, I can understand it, but I can only say like.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Bagel pie, I'm hungry. So they can understand you but you can't and get them to understand.

[Victoria Song]

So like my family, I mean we operate as if I am Chewbacca, the English speaking Chewbacca and everyone else speaks Korean and we understand each other. I am Korean Chewbacca in my family. But in any case just give me.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

A phrase in Korean Jubaka that would.

[Victoria Song]

Be like I. I'll just be like so actually I like my Korean is such that in my brain that like one time I was in a taxi cab with non Korean speakers and he was asking us a question, and I understood him and I told him where to go. I don't know the words I use, but I told him where to go accurately. And my friends were like, you lying bitch, you speak Korean? And I was like, no, I. I really can't.

[Alex Kranz]

Just blacked out.

[Victoria Song]

I blacked out and I just told.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Him, oh, it's like when Ron used parsel tongue in Chamber of Secrets.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah. It's like, that's my Korean.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

No, no, no. Ron did it in Final Deathly Halos.

[Victoria Song]

Anyway, but, like, me speaking Korean is.

[Alex Kranz]

Just like, there we go.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I agree. Obligatory.

[Victoria Song]

But yeah. No, so, like, when you get to the. The translation thing, it can't do slang. It can't do the fact that, like.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I. I will admit, when I did talk to the humane AI in Cantonese, it did do colloquial better than any other language translator I've used, which is hilarious.

[Ed Zitron]

It feels like translation, though, is the most obvious one where it can't fail because the nuances of language and I. So I have a coordinational disability, dyspraxia, spatial awareness. It really affects my ability to learn languages because structural concepts, not so good. So learning. I couldn't learn French. I failed French, Latin, German, Spanish. I'm like, the school kept throwing them at me. It's like, fuck you.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

You're really good at failing. I love that.

[Ed Zitron]

No, I'm like, the fail mark. And it was because, like, the way English works is very different.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Also, I didn't care. I was very depressed. But it really was the structural stuff, like trying to learn another language when you don't get those concepts. And I imagine large language models also have this problem.

[Victoria Song]

Add to the fact that not all languages are higher. Like, English is a very low context language, and Asian languages are high context.

[Ed Zitron]

I don't even know what that means.

[Victoria Song]

So what that means is a lot.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Of things are unsaid, basically.

[Victoria Song]

A lot of things are unsaid. A lot of. Of things are. Like how you talk to a person in Japanese and Korean, which are my. My languages that I studied depends on. Are they older than you, you're gonna talk to them differently, and they're older.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Than you use a different.

[Ed Zitron]

There's no way for the language to.

[Victoria Song]

Express that you're gonna be using things in that to express that. Or like, if you. If I say something to you in Japanese and I'm just like. So classic business example that they give for Japanese is you ask a yes or no question, and they go like, ooh, that might be Difficult. That means no.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Okay. Singapore Singlish is like this. Singlish has a saying. Can is can, which means it can't be done. Like, as in, you can. You can do this.

[Alex Kranz]

Yeah, you can.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, you can.

[Victoria Song]

That's the sort of thing.

[Ed Zitron]

Am I meant to.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

How is LLM meant to pick.

[Alex Kranz]

Yeah, you can up.

[Victoria Song]

How is it supposed to know that?

[Alex Kranz]

Well, this is why not everyone at the UN is wearing a B at the moment. Or. Or the Google headphones or Pixel buds or whatever.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Yeah.

[Alex Kranz]

This is why they have real human gentlemen translators. We see this translating stuff work, but you can't.

[Ed Zitron]

You're paying for the trust.

[Alex Kranz]

Yeah, yeah, you have to pay for the trust because Google Translate is really, really great if I need to go check, double check something. But if there was ever a time where I needed to be like, hey, I need to know what this is in Japanese, I am not asking Google Translate.

[Victoria Song]

I'm texting very basic things. Like, if you're saying, like, oh, I have. Oh. So another thing was, like, I would have friends visit me when I lived in Japan, and they would be like, oh, I can't eat this for. Cause I'm a vegan. I was like, we can't say that you're a vegan.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

They want, yeah, no Mandarin. We don't have that either.

[Victoria Song]

You have to say that you have an allergy to meat, and then they'll take it out.

[Alex Kranz]

And that is psychological allergy.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

See, this is the thing that drives me insane about all of this, because looping it right back to hating Kevin Rus work. But it's like these people vigorously beating off about AGI. It's, like, based on an entire industry of people saying, yeah, it sort of works, but it doesn't. And by the way, it burns billions of dollars. And by the way, will it get better? Yeah, probably not, but it will. My company is so powerful and strong and so weak and sick, it's the best thing ever, but also is dying.

[Alex Kranz]

And this is exactly what they said with VR. They said, you know what? Give it a minute. If we just. If we just keep going, everybody's gonna be doing VR. Everybody's gonna be moving on to ar, and it doesn't happen because they're trying to force something. It's not the phone, but it's kind.

[Ed Zitron]

Of like, give up. But it's kind of like VR in the sense that, like, for VR to work in the Ready Player One thing, which is fucking insane. If you want Ready Player One to be real, physical.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I like how that's your touch.

[Ed Zitron]

Point, but also terrible film. Worst book written for simple to none.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Of all the VR examples we've got.

[Ed Zitron]

Remember all the things that you know. But also that film was a dystopia. The other thing is, it's an extra sensory psychological experience.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

You would need things that so many.

[Ed Zitron]

Need to do, not even the beginnings of exist. You don't have something that can take over your senses and you can move in a space vastly different.

[Victoria Song]

Accessibility in VR and augmented reality is like, really tough.

[Ed Zitron]

We're not even there. And in the same way, with AI, we don't have a thinking computer. This shit can't do anything on its own. You try and like, oh, agents are here. Fuck you. Agents are nowhere. Stop using that word. Every time you use the word. Agent Norman Finkelstein, Mr. Borelli, that anyway, reference to people. I love doing voices.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

I love voices.

[Ed Zitron]

I love voices. It's just every time I hear from these fucking companies and how much money they have and they're like, here is something that sucks. It stinks. You should be so excited. You need to be excited for this. It sucks it doesn't do the thing you want it to do. Can it do this? No. Will it do this? Trust me.

[Alex Kranz]

Well, if you get us to our next round of funding.

[Ed Zitron]

But even if you're like Amazon or Google.

[Alex Kranz]

Yeah.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

The thing I hate most about all of this, that beyond everything we've already said, and I think we've already kind of alluded to this with what you just said, Ed, which is we're spending a lot of money on things that don't work, but we in the process generating a lot of ways, generating a lot of, like, energy laws with all the server farms that are just going to take over this world just to back up and store all of that data that they're scoping and, like, grabbing.

[Alex Kranz]

The only reason I love AI is every time I'm like, am I pretty? I know it is costing someone so much money to have that little shitty robot be like, you're the cutest truck.

[Ed Zitron]

Of like, animals into a furnace.

[Alex Kranz]

Yeah. I'm like, yeah, you're destroying the environment.

[Victoria Song]

It's like, how many Validation from quality.

[Alex Kranz]

Thank you.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

How many bees have they sold that?

[Victoria Song]

I don't know. They are like, they're in, like a beta thing. It's technically an Apple watch app too. You don't actually need to buy their hardware.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. This company rules. I love this. There's so many.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

How many humane AI pins have caught on fire and then are now in the trash because they turned all I mean, that company, they said 10,000 units. They said something like that.

[Ed Zitron]

Humane was the biggest, like, dunce moment for members of the media. I'm not gonna name so many people. Like, this is gonna be great. Even though it was like, yeah, it's a seven.

[Victoria Song]

So mad at me when I wrote my translation piece and they were like, we, we need to talk. And then I was like, let's talk.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Was it Bethany that reached out or.

[Victoria Song]

Yeah, they ghosted me.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Well, they ghosted us.

[Ed Zitron]

Two management consultants, both liking dignity. Anyway, we have to bring this to an end because we are running out of time. And otherwise I'm just gonna start reading the Kevin Roose bit again. That motherfucking. I just.

[Alex Kranz]

As an irresponsible piece to write.

[Ed Zitron]

It is irresponsible. I think that that is a good kind of place to get some final thoughts where it's like. Like, it's not just that these things don't work and they stink and they're expensive and they burn billions of dollars to destroy the environment. They steal from everyone.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Not just that. Sure.

[Alex Kranz]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Other than those things. By representing them as imminently useful and helpful. The only thing you are doing is empowering the powerful and creating more cycles where useful things don't get funded and useless things get more money than ever. And it's disgusting. I actually, I know it sounds a little drag to be like, the guy said the computer was too smart, but it's. You're speaking on the New York Times. And it's not just him, it's Ezra Klein as well. Another fucking moron. Jesus fucking Christ. These guys put one just, like, put, like, anyone in this room. I think they do a much fucking better job. But it's just like, it's empowering people who do not have anyone's best interests in mind or any. Or actually fixing anyone's real problems and.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Or are out of touch.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes. Okay.

[Alex Kranz]

I still maintain.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Exactly.

[Alex Kranz]

Get a certain income you're not allowed to have online. Like, you can't talk online.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Alex Kranz]

Because you are so out of touch from the rest of us. I don't want to hear it.

[Victoria Song]

What's the number?

[Alex Kranz]

Way more than I make.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Well, yeah, but I think like. Or 100 mil.

[Alex Kranz]

It's like a couple of million, right? Like, if you're like, oh, I can go spend 12k on a first class ticket. You have too much money so you can't talk anymore.

[Ed Zitron]

No. It reminds me of the Sam Altman moment on this, my favorite Notebook podcast where he's like, yeah. So I write my Little notes and I crumple them up and I throw them behind me.

[Alex Kranz]

And that's a really good accent.

[Ed Zitron]

The housekeeper comes by and she. I don't know where she comes. Which means she's there all the time. And it's just like, first of all, you said in front of a person you have a housekeeper. Second of all, you could not remember when they're there, which means they're always there. And third of all, you're just creating, like, you're fucking AI. You're just creating trash information that you throw around and expect someone else to clean up. Loathsome little fucks. Anyway, great place to end it, Sherlyn. Where can people find you?

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Engadget.com and I guess I don't know what social media platform to shout out. BlueSky. Sherlyn. BSky Social.

[Ed Zitron]

Alex.

[Alex Kranz]

Yeah, I'm about to spart.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Spart.

[Alex Kranz]

Yeah, I'm gonna start this over again.

[Ed Zitron]

Okay, that's enough.

[Alex Kranz]

Yeah, Yeah. I am about to start a four week special engagement at Gizmodo. I'm gonna be hanging out with those folks and saying all sorts of things that really need to be said about technology because, oh, boy, are we. In a moment. And you can also find me on. On all social media platforms until I make enough money where I don't have to use them.

[Ed Zitron]

Beautiful, Victoria.

[Victoria Song]

You can find me at vicmsong on every social media platform. And I write at the Verge.

[Ed Zitron]

You can find me on the New York Times. My name's Kevin Roose.

[Victoria Song]

Oh, God.

[Ed Zitron]

And I will be saying multiple leads.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

We've been catfished.

[Ed Zitron]

I am Kevin R. No, you can find me on all my social media platforms. Ed Zitron. There isn't another one, thankfully, because I think they.

[Alex Kranz]

Weren't you in the New Yorker, though?

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Aren't you in the New Yorker recently?

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, they, they, they ketchup too spicy. Me. They were like, right at the beginning of it. I didn't think that they. He wasn't recording yet and he was like. I was like, yeah, is the kung pao chicken spicy? And they're like, yeah. Thankfully he kept up. The bit was like, is the plum chicken spicy? And the bit where I was like eating white rice and going, hot, hot, hot. Me going on hot ones and just drinking the milk.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Cindaboo after this.

[Ed Zitron]

Please don't kill me. But yeah. Thank you for listening, everyone. It's been another radio better offline and Alexa play tool 46 and 2.

[Victoria Song]

That's cruel.

[Ed Zitron]

Some banks. I don't care. One of the greatest songs of thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio [e-mail] m a t t o s o w s k-I.com you can email me at easy betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's your ed.app to visit the Discord and go to r betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

[Alex Kranz]

Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or.

[Victoria Song]

Wherever you get your podcasts. PayPal lets you pay all your pals like your graduation gifters. Who's paying for the mattress topper? You mean the beanbag chair?

[Sherlyn Lowe]

Aren't we getting a mini fridge?

[Ed Zitron]

Can we create a pool on PayPal? It lets us collect the money before we buy.

[Victoria Song]

Ooh, yes, that's smart. Glad we can agree on something easily. Pool split and Send Money with PayPal. Get started in the PayPal app. A PayPal account is required to send and receive money. A balance account is required to create a pool.

[Unnamed Advertiser]

Does this podcast make you happy? Of course it does. That's why you're here. But it only comes out once a week for happiness. Every night. You need Adam and Eve. Yes, I'm talking about sex toys. It's cool.

[Victoria Song]

It's cool.

[Unnamed Advertiser]

You have earbuds in right? Adam and Eve, America's most trusted source for adult products, has been making people very happy for over 50 years with thousands of toys for both men and women. Just go to AdamandEve.com now and enter code IHEARTRADING IHEART for 50% off almost any one item, plus free discreet shipping. That's AdamandEve.com code IHEART for 50% off. For some of us, personal finances aren't just personal.

[Sherlyn Lowe]

They include a lot more people than.

[Unnamed Advertiser]

Ourselves, loved ones, neighbors, the communities we call home, and the causes we hold in our hearts. At Thrivent, we help plan your financial picture with the bigger picture in mind. Because even though our business is helping guide your finances, our ambition is to make it mean so much more. Thrivent, where money means more. Connect with [e-mail] now you can get.

[Victoria Song]

Disney plus and Hulu together for just 2.99amonth.

[Ed Zitron]

For four months, we sure would love that.

[Victoria Song]

Get both and watch Marvel's Daredevil, Born Again and Moana 2 on Disney Plus. Can I get a Chihu on Hulu? Check out Good American Family and Paradise. Call it in now Disney plus and Hulu together for just 2.99amonth. All of these and more streaming soon.

[Alex Kranz]

New and returning subscribers 18 + only after four months.

[Victoria Song]

Plan auto renews at 1,099amonth until canceled.

[Ed Zitron]

Offer ends 3:30, 25 terms apply.