Age-Gating the Internet + Cloudflare Takes On A.I. Scrapers + HatGPT

Summary

Podcast Summary: Hard Fork – Episode: Age-Gating the Internet + Cloudflare Takes On A.I. Scrapers + HatGPT

Release Date: August 1, 2025

Hosts: Kevin Roose and Casey Newton

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1. Age-Gating the Internet: An Overview

Introduction to Age Gating

The episode opens with Kevin Roose and Casey Newton delving into the recent surge of age-gating measures implemented across the Internet. These measures require users to verify their age before accessing certain online content, a move primarily driven by regulatory changes aimed at protecting minors.

UK’s Online Safety Act

Casey Newton provides an in-depth analysis of the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act, which mandates age verification for a wide range of websites to shield minors from harmful content.

• Implementation and Requirements:

  • Effective from [06:42], the Act requires websites to perform a risk assessment to determine if their content may be harmful to minors.
  • High-quality age assurance methods are necessary, moving beyond simple checkboxes to more secure verification processes such as driver's license uploads, credit card proofs, or biometric verification using camera selfies.

• Consequences and Public Reaction:

  • The abrupt implementation led to widespread confusion and anxiety among UK users. For instance, individuals attempting to access platforms like Pornhub faced unexpected requests to verify their age through sensitive personal information [07:37].
  • Public backlash is significant, with over 400,000 signatures on a petition seeking to reverse these changes [08:37].

• Impact Beyond Pornography:

  • Age verification isn't limited to adult content; platforms like Reddit, Wikipedia, and various subreddits now require age confirmation [07:44], disrupting user experience and accessibility.

Age Verification in the United States

The discussion shifts to the United States, where similar age verification laws are gaining traction.

• Supreme Court’s Stance:

  • The Supreme Court upheld a Texas law requiring age verification for accessing adult content online [10:17].
  • A total of 24 states have enacted similar laws, signaling a nationwide trend towards stricter online age controls.

• Stakes and Implications:

  • Casey emphasizes the broader implications of such regulations, suggesting a potential erosion of online freedom and a fragmented Internet experience based on age [03:53].
  • The necessity of balancing child protection with privacy rights and free expression is a central theme.

Privacy and Security Concerns

Both hosts express significant concerns regarding the privacy implications of age-gating.

• Data Vulnerability:

  • Users are required to submit sensitive personal information, heightening the risk of data breaches and misuse [05:34].
  • The incident with the T app exemplifies how inadequate security measures can lead to the exposure of personal verification data, causing public distrust [18:56].

• Alternative Solutions:

  • Apple’s proposed age verification API offers a more privacy-preserving approach by allowing parental controls without requiring users to upload personal documents [12:35].
  • This method anonymizes age data, ensuring that websites receive only the necessary verification tokens [13:34].

Broader Societal Implications

Casey and Kevin discuss the long-term impacts of age gating on free speech and online expression.

• Clawback of Speech Rights:

  • Casey links age verification to a broader trend of diminishing free speech rights, highlighting concerns over increasing government and corporate control over online content [17:20].
  • The potential for ongoing restrictions and the slippery slope towards broader censorship are emphasized [23:10].

• Future Outlook:

  • The conversation suggests that similar regulations are likely to extend globally, necessitating a collective dialogue on preserving internet freedoms while ensuring child safety.

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2. Cloudflare Takes On A.I. Scrapers

Introduction to the Issue

The podcast transitions to a guest segment featuring Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, who discusses the company's initiative to combat AI data scraping.

The Problem with AI Scrapers

Matthew Prince outlines the challenges posed by AI companies that indiscriminately scrape web content to train their models without compensating content creators.

• Impact on Content Creators:

  • The shift from traditional search interfaces to AI-driven content consumption significantly reduces traffic to original content creators [31:21].
  • Publishers face an existential threat as their incentives to create high-quality content diminish [33:08].

• Technical Challenges:

  • Traditional methods like robots.txt are insufficient as many AI scrapers bypass these protocols through alternative scraping techniques [35:36].
  • The need for more robust and enforceable solutions is evident.

Cloudflare’s Solution

Matthew details Cloudflare's strategy to block AI crawlers unless they enter into compensation agreements with content creators.

• Enforcement Mechanism:

  • Cloudflare utilizes its extensive network to monitor and block unauthorized AI scraping activities [37:34].
  • Publishers can now effectively prevent their content from being scraped by problematic AI entities without technical expertise.

• Monetization and Compensation:

  • The proposed model involves AI companies paying content creators for access, fostering a sustainable ecosystem [33:13].
  • Potential financial arrangements may resemble subscription-based models or revenue-sharing agreements, ensuring that content creators are fairly compensated [39:37].

• Industry Reactions:

  • Publishers have welcomed Cloudflare’s measures, finding relief in having a technical solution to a pressing problem [39:37].
  • AI companies are cautiously optimistic, recognizing the necessity of fair compensation but wary of the implementation complexities [39:37].

Future Implications for the Web

Matthew expresses concerns about the long-term health of the web if content creators are not adequately compensated.

• Sustainability of Content Creation:

  • Without proper incentives, the volume and quality of original content may decline, undermining the richness of the internet [33:08].
  • Cloudflare aims to establish a level playing field where both large and small AI companies can access content fairly [42:00].

• Potential Market Evolutions:

  • As negotiations and agreements solidify, the web may see a redefined relationship between content creators and AI entities, promoting a healthier and more equitable digital ecosystem [43:06].

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3. HatGPT: Tech Headline Riff

In a playful segment titled "HatGPT," Kevin Roose and Casey Newton engage in a game where they draw tech-related headlines from a hat and provide humorous and insightful commentary on them. This segment serves to lighten the episode while addressing various tech news stories.

Highlighted Headlines and Discussions:

1. LeBron James and AI-Generated Content

   • Summary: LeBron James issues a cease and desist to an AI tool creating unauthorized videos of him.
   • Notable Quote: Casey remarks, “Clankers and sloppers” as new slang terms for robots and AI tool users, reflecting discomfort with demeaning AI entities [00:34-01:14].

2. Sam Altman on ChatGPT Confidentiality

   • Summary: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warns that conversations with ChatGPT are not legally confidential, raising privacy concerns for users seeking therapeutic interactions.
   • Discussion Points: The balance between data usage for AI improvement and user privacy rights.

3. Robotic Deer Used to Catch Poachers

   • Summary: Wildlife officers employ remote-controlled robotic deer to deter and catch poachers in Wisconsin.
   • Humorous Take: Kevin jokes about using similar technology to protect his property from poachers, blending tech advancements with real-world applications.

4. AI Bracelets by Amazon

   • Summary: Amazon’s acquisition of a company developing AI-powered wearable devices that transcribe and analyze user conversations.
   • Privacy Concerns: Casey and Kevin express unease over constant surveillance and data recording, emphasizing the trade-off between utility and privacy.

5. Meta’s AI-Assisted Coding Tests

   • Summary: Meta allows job candidates to use AI assistants during coding interviews, adapting to the inevitability of AI in the workplace.
   • Implications: The integration of AI tools in professional evaluations and its effects on job recruitment processes.

6. Substack’s Erroneous Promotion of a Nazi Newsletter

   • Summary: Substack inadvertently promoted a pro-Nazi newsletter through its recommendation system, leading to ethical and moderation challenges.
   • Response: Casey shares her decision to move Platformer off Substack due to such issues, highlighting the importance of proactive content moderation.

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4. Concluding Remarks

The episode wraps up with the hosts encouraging listeners to subscribe to the New York Times Audio service to receive exclusive Hard Fork hats. The playful interaction in the HatGPT segment underscores the hosts' ability to intertwine serious tech discussions with engaging and entertaining content.

Notable Closing Quote: Casey Newton humorously advises listeners against delving into disturbing AI-generated content, emphasizing the podcast’s blend of insightful analysis and lighthearted banter [73:42].

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Key Takeaways

• Age-Gating Concerns: Regulatory measures like the UK's Online Safety Act and similar US state laws aim to protect minors online but pose significant privacy risks and challenges to free speech.

• Cloudflare's Initiative: Cloudflare is spearheading efforts to combat unauthorized AI scraping by enforcing compensation for content creators, aiming to sustain the web’s content ecosystem.

• Balancing Act: The episode highlights the delicate balance between technological advancements, regulatory compliance, user privacy, and the preservation of free expression on the Internet.

• Humorous Interlude: The HatGPT segment effectively blends current tech news with humor, making complex topics more relatable and engaging for listeners.

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Notable Quotes:

• Casey Newton [04:04]: "This truly is one of the most far-reaching attempts we have seen by a Western democracy to regulate speech online."

• Kevin Roose [05:34]: "The experience that had previously been basically completely private... is now being linked to your personally identifying information."

• Matthew Prince [31:19]: "If we don't have an incentive for people to create content, I think people will stop creating content."

• Casey Newton [12:35]: "Apple’s age verification API is a lot more elegant... It anonymizes that and passes it through to a developer."

• Matthew Prince [37:34]: "We're going to block AI companies from being able to get the content unless they're compensating the content creators for it."

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This comprehensive summary encapsulates the critical discussions from the "Hard Fork" podcast episode, providing listeners with a clear understanding of the complex interplay between internet regulations, AI advancements, and the preservation of online freedoms.

Transcript

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[Kevin Roos]

People on social media, Gen Z people have started referring to robots as clankers.

[Casey Newton]

Have you heard this? I believe I saw something about this, yes.

[Kevin Roos]

So people are saying, like, oh, like I hate when I call customer support and a clanker picks up and you know, this is sort of their new derogatory slang.

[Casey Newton]

Well, and it pairs nicely with another new piece of slang that I wonder if you heard, because people are talking about people who use tools like ChatGPT Law and they're calling them sloppers.

[Kevin Roos]

Really?

[Casey Newton]

Have you heard this?

[Kevin Roos]

No.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, so it's like if you're, I don't know, you're out on the Internet and you're publishing something and it seems like it's obviously just AI, somebody might call you a slopper. Well, clankers and sloppers.

[Kevin Roos]

Clankers and sloppers. I just think this is. It makes me a little uncomfortable. Even though clankers is not, you know, actually I think it's sort of a tongue in cheek thing. I just don't think we should be calling the robots names. I don't believe in slurring against anyone.

[Casey Newton]

You believe in an appeasement strategy with the robots. Just give them what they want.

[Kevin Roos]

They are keeping score.

[Casey Newton]

I believe that.

[Kevin Roos]

I'm Kevin Roos. I'm a tech columnist at the New York Times.

[Casey Newton]

I'm Casey Newton from Platformer and this is Hard Fork. This week, why age gates are suddenly popping up all over the Internet and how some could create more problems than they solve. Then Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince returns to the show to discuss his company's new plan to help websites fight back against AI scrapers. And finally, we're passing the hats for some hat G.

[Kevin Roos]

Well, Casey, we are here yet again to remind our great listeners that they can have their very own hard fork hat if they so choose.

[Casey Newton]

It's time to get the hat. If you don't have the hat, the moment is now.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes, for a limited time, you can get a hard fork hat with the purchase of a new annual New York Times audio subscription. This is a special edition. Hat this color is not gonna be available anywhere ever again. And it'll be going on ebay for hundreds Possibly thousands of dollars.

[Casey Newton]

Millions of dollars.

[Kevin Roos]

Millions of dollars. And you'll be like, why didn't I get a hard fork hat back when it was available to me as part of a New York Times audio subscription?

[Casey Newton]

If you missed out on the bitcoin, boom, get this hat.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, they're calling it Hatcoin and it's available now at nytimes.com/hard for Cat.

[Casey Newton]

Kevin, how old are you?

[Kevin Roos]

It's none of your business. How old are you?

[Casey Newton]

That's none of your business. But guess what? If we lived in the United Kingdom, it would be the government's business. Kevin. Because as many people found out over the last week, to use a lot of different websites, you now have to prove your age.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes. This is the age gating issue, which I've heard a lot of people talking about. I know you wrote about it in your newsletter this week. I'm excited to talk to you about it. And before we get into what is happening and some of the consequences and the reactions to this law, I wonder if you could just kind of sell me on the stakes. Why talk about how the UK's Online Safety act is mandating age verification for websites? Why does it matter to me, an American?

[Casey Newton]

Sure. So I would say a couple things. Number one, this truly is one of the most far reaching attempts we have seen by a Western democracy to regulate speech online. We've talked on the show in the past about various ways that people, people want to protect children online and requiring folks to verify their ages is one of the ways that has been discussed. But it's extremely rare to see it roll out across an entire country the way it has in the uk. So that's thing one, thing two is this stuff is coming to the United States. In June, the Supreme Court upheld a law in Texas that requires residents of Texas to do something very similar if they want to access adult content online. And so it's really not just a UK thing, Kevin. We are starting to see a gradual erosion of people's freedom of expression online.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, I think that's well taken. And I might just even take a further step back and say, like I think the Internet for The last call it 40 years has been a kind of informational free for all. Right? You are going to experience the same Internet whether you were 13 years old or 25 years old or 50 years old. But what we are talking about now and what is happening in the UK is you have to establish your age in order to sort of access a number of different kinds of services, including social media. And one outcome here would just be that the Internet actually kind of fragments in this way, where if you are 12 or 13 years old, you are just going to have a very different experience of the Internet than someone who is 25 or 50.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. And I think in addition to all of that, Kevin, there is just the fact that the way that websites are collecting this information is putting people at risk in ways that we can talk about.

[Kevin Roos]

Okay, so let's just start with what is happening in the UK. What's the backdrop here?

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, so in 2023, the United Kingdom passes something called the Online Safety act, and it includes provisions that require online services to try to spare minors from seeing what they would call harmful content online. So porn is a big part of that, but it also includes stuff about like, if you have a pro suicide website or a pro eating disorder website, you are now required in the United Kingdom to first do a sort of like, risk assessment of your website of, hey, could children access this and would they be exposed to this certain list of harms? And if so, you then have to implement what they call, like high quality age assurance, which means that, no, you can't get away with just putting a box on your website that says, yes, I promise, I'm 18. And so all of this goes into effect last Friday the 25th, and things start to go a little bit haywire.

[Kevin Roos]

What happens?

[Casey Newton]

Well, first of all, I think a lot of people in the UK just didn't realize that this was about to happen. And so, you know, they're sitting down for their evening visit to pornhub, and all of a sudden they find that they are being asked to upload their driver's license to prove that they're actually 18. There are a number of different ways that people are allowed to prove their identity. You could also, for example, show your credit card, because you can't have a credit card unless you're at least 18, or you can use phone or laptop's camera to take a picture of you. And they'll. They'll do some sort of, you know, AI in the background to figure out if they think that you're actually 18. But for a lot of adults who didn't see this coming, this produces some real anxiety because all of a sudden an experience that had previously been basically completely private, right, Just visiting a website is now being linked to your personally identifying information. And who knows what's happening to it once you actually submit it?

[Kevin Roos]

Right now, is this just affecting porn sites or are there other kinds of website sites where people are being Asked to prove that they're of age.

[Casey Newton]

It is affecting many more kinds of sites. So X is being affected. Many different subreddits are being affected. So like a stop smoking subreddit, a cider subreddit, various things that do not immediately seem like adult content and could actually be quite beneficial to minors. All of a sudden you need to prove who you are if you want to access them. Also, Wikipedia has said that they may have to limit access to the site in the UK because of priv concerns that are created by this law that would require them to collect a lot of information that they don't actually want to collect.

[Kevin Roos]

Now, is there porn on Wikipedia?

[Casey Newton]

I haven't been able to find any of you. Okay, well, I will say there are some Greek vases with some incredibly curvaceous men and women and, you know, depending on what kind of night you're having.

[Kevin Roos]

Right. So how are people in the UK reacting to this?

[Casey Newton]

This is not a keep calm and carry on situation, Kevin. Okay. More than 400,000 people have signed a petition that they want these changes to be reversed. And I will be curious to see where that goes. In the meantime though, people are just find new ways to get around this. And I think to the extent that this law actually sticks around, I think this will be the reason why is that people have just found all sorts of relatively easy workarounds. One thing you can do is use what they call a virtual private network, or vpn. All that does is just lie to your Internet service provider and say, hey, I'm not in the uk. I'm in the United States, where I can still watch most of what I want to watch. And so seeing a lot of that. But we're also seeing people get much more creative now. Are you familiar with the video game Death Stranding?

[Kevin Roos]

No, I'm not.

[Casey Newton]

So unfortunately, this is so funny if you have. If you know what Death Stranding is, it's this kind of very strange and beautiful video game made by this Japanese auteur. And people are using photo mode in the game to take pictures of the protagonist in order to fool the UK's age verification technology. And the reason this works is because in the photo mode of this game, you can tell the character smile or frown. And it turns out that a lot of the age gates in the UK are doing the same sort of thing where it's like if you're using the camera on your laptop, okay, now smile. Okay, now frown. People are now just doing this with the game Death Stranding. So if Death Stranding winds up being the best selling video game in the UK this year. We'll know why.

[Kevin Roos]

That's amazing. So, okay, has there been any response from the UK government or the safety authorities about people's reactions to this? Are they saying we'll keep improving the systems or something like that?

[Casey Newton]

There was a response from Ofcom, the UK's media regulator. They have said that this act is not, quote, a silver bullet, but, quote, until now, kids could easily stumble across porn and other online content that's harmful to them without even looking for it. Age checks will help prevent that.

[Kevin Roos]

All right, so that is what is happening in the uk. Where are we in the US with these age gating laws? I read some headlines about people in some states who are having to go through age verification to get to an adult website. But where are these laws and what is the regulatory picture here?

[Casey Newton]

So age verification laws have been passed in 24 states. And last month the Supreme Court upheld a law in Texas that requires websites where more than one third of the content is sexual material to use one of these age verification methods. And Justice Clarence Thomas spoke for the majority when he said, unlike a store clerk, a website operator cannot look at its visitors and estimate their ages. Without a requirement to submit proof of age, even clearly underage minors would be able to access sexual content undetected. So I suspect we're going to start to see these laws in more and more places.

[Kevin Roos]

So, all right, let me try to steel man the case for age verification here, because I think I am undecided about what I think about it, but I think you, you have decided that these laws are a bad idea. So I want to try to make the opposite case. We age gate things all the time to prevent minors from getting access to it or being exposed to it. So if I walk into a bar and the bouncer asks to see my id, that is allowed. No one has contested whether that is a violation of the Constitution. If I walk into this probably doesn't exist anymore, but when I was a kid, there were these things called nudie magazines. And if you wanted to go into a newsstand and get them, they were sort of like, like behind the counter. They would have these, like, special barriers on them and you would have to prove that you were of age to be allowed to buy that. So why is what's going on with age verification on adult websites on the Internet any different?

[Casey Newton]

So I share your concern here. I think that we should come up with ways to prevent minors from accessing this kind of adult material. I just object to the way in which they're doing it, which requires that people share a lot of personal information for the rest of their lives.

[Kevin Roos]

Like opposed to age gating. And in like as a, as a concept, you're just opposed to the way that they're doing it in the uk.

[Casey Newton]

Yes. And this year Apple suggested a way to do age verification that I think is a lot more elegant. Kevin. It's not available quite yet. They said this week to Bloomberg that it's coming soon. But basically they're going to offer what they call an age assurance API. And if you are a parent and you're setting up your child's device, you can just tell the device, hey, my kid is X years old, right? Or here's my kid's birthday. Apple can then essentially anonymize that and pass it through to a developer. And so if you are a Facebook or an Instagram or a TikTok, you just get a little token that says this person is 13. And so, you know, you may want to show them different kinds of content or you might want to restrict certain features and essentially put the onus on the, the parents and the device makers to do this. That way if you're just a normal adult using the Internet, you don't have to worry about, you know, uploading your driver's license to visit a website. So I think that that's a very elegant solution.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, I prefer the on device age verification rather than making, you know, operator go and like do their own version of this and store all the driver's license photos and whatever else. So I did not know that Apple was building that. So you're saying that's going to be released soon?

[Casey Newton]

Yes, they're going to release that soon. Now, interestingly, Metta is trying to ensure that this does not become the way that this is handled because that still puts an onus on Metta to do a lot of the age checking. They want Apple and Google, which also has a big app store, to have the legal liability in cases where a minor does access material that they're not supposed to. And so Meta has been leading a charge, lobbying for a lot of bills around the country that would put the onus on Apple and Google to do all the verification instead of them having to play a role in it. And they've been having some success.

[Kevin Roos]

Hmm. Now this confuses me because, you know, if I know one thing about Meta and other social media sites is that they are very good at collecting information on users and using machine learning to sort of detect who is more Interested in what and who is part of what consumer segment. I assume that these platforms already know or have very good guesses about how old all of their users are. So what is the issue with just having them do the detection? I also saw that YouTube this week is looking at things like your browsing history and your consumption patterns and the kinds of videos you're searching for to make their best estimate of whether you are underage or not. So why shouldn't the platforms have a responsibility or a role here too?

[Casey Newton]

I think the platforms do and should have a responsibility. What we have seen is a lot of reporting over the past couple of years that at Meta in particular, they were like, writing reports about how many, like, under 13 users they had of Instagram. Jeff Horowitz and the Wall Street Journal did a lot of this reporting. It's, you know, both very disturbing but, like, darkly comic to read. And like, yes, they absolutely knew that they had all of these younger users. And so they've spent the last year trying to release a lot of features that essentially make it more difficult for, you know, under 13s to use the platform. So all the platforms are kind of belatedly coming around on this. You know, you mentioned the YouTube thing. Here's something really interesting about YouTube. This week the Australian government said that they were going to ban YouTube for kids under 16 because they consider it social media, which was a major reversal from. From what they were saying before. I sort of think this is the sort of thing that if it was actually carried out, could cause the government of Australia to be toppled.

[Kevin Roos]

A bunch of, like, angry Minecraft preteens are going to storm the. Whatever the White House of Australia is.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, but. And we'll never know. But it just goes to show you, actually, if you, if you know what the seat of government is in Australia, please email hardforkytimes.com, we were unable to find this information online due to age checks. Anyways, look, I've been a little bit, you know, glib about this, maybe in the spirit of trying to record an entertaining segment about tech policy. But the truth is that this stuff is very complicated and I think, think everyone has a role to play, which is something that is very satisfying to say, but does not actually solve the problem. Because ultimately, if you want to solve the problem, somebody has to be responsible. Somebody has to try to implement a solution. Inevitably, when you implement a solution, people are going to be caught up in it. They're going to be, you know, falsely tagged as underage when they're overage. Or vice versa. So it is really messy. What I'm trying to say is there are more privacy preserving ways of understanding a person's age online and I would like to see us focus on those rather than this sort of blunt hammer approach that they're taking in the uk, which in practice is mostly just going to annoy a lot of adults and potentially put their public information out there in a way that could be breached, which is my way, Kevin, of introducing the conversation about tea.

[Kevin Roos]

Oh, yes, let's spill the tea about tea.

[Casey Newton]

Let's spill the tea about tea, Kevin. Lowest tea. And by the way, are there any red flags about you on T? I haven't looked yet.

[Kevin Roos]

I have not been able to look, nor will I be looking because of what happened over the past week. So T is an app that had a viral moment over the past week in part because it reached briefly number one on the iOS app store, ahead of ChatGPT and Instagram and all these other apps. And to my understanding, although I've never been on it, T is an app that allows women to sort of anonymously divulge experiences they've had with men. Yeah. So basically dish the dirt about the guy you dated who was sort of a jerk to you or behaved in a way that you didn't like. And what got people's attention was that you could only register for this app if you were a woman. So they would do some kind of verification process. When you signed up, I think you were asked to like scan your driver's license and also submit like a selfie so that they could sort of use AI to try to detect whether you are a woman or not and keep out all the men. And this drove a lot of people on the Internet insane. And so my understanding is they essentially hacked T. They. They found that T had not secured some of these uploads that users had made and they leaked a bunch of people's verification information and photos that they had submitted to T. And kind of a revenge of the message.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. And this gets to my exact concern with some of these age gating methods is it is just left up to the service provider to decide how you're going to verify people's ages. And while most countries do have some laws that regulate data, in practice we just see breaches all of the time. It feels like every week, you know, you see headlines about one app or another is being breached and in this case you have material that is just ripe for someone to do stuff that is really abusive. And indeed a bunch of 4chan users got a hold of all of these tea selfies, they started creating like, you know, hot or not style websites, just doing all kinds of gross stuff with them. And that, again, I think is just a really predictable outcome of building these kinds of age gating technologies.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, I think that's a really good point and an example of why we should not be throwing this to the website operators and platforms. Because inevitably some of them are going to use really secure, really well designed age verification services, but some of them are just going to do this in a very sloppy way and like inevitably leak people's personal information.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, and now like every online service just has to like have this database laying around. You know, it just like increases the risk across the entire Internet for all of us. Yeah.

[Kevin Roos]

So I think it makes a lot of sense to do it in a more centralized way through Apple and Google and their app stores. But I have also read that Apple has been lobbying against some of these state bills that would force them to, to do exactly that. So you just told me that Apple is building an age verification feature. But I've also read that Tim Cook at one point personally lobbied the governor of Texas not to do this kind of age verification thing. So what is going on here?

[Casey Newton]

So I think it's mostly just that they want to avoid the legal liability here. You know, I read one story that said, like, look, like Apple is a mall. Facebook is a liquor store in the mall. Like, you need to hold the liquor store accountable for who they are selling liquor to. Okay, like, this is like the Apple met metaphor. I think Apple does clearly want to play a role in the solution here. That's why they've sort of crafted this whole API. But they kind of want it to be on the honor system. Right. Where it's like, hey, we're going to do this. We can all agree this is a good thing. Now leave us alone. And what the lawmakers are saying are like, yeah, that's like a good thing. But also we want to hold you legally liable if we find out that like a bunch of, you know, eight year olds are, I don't know, like, you know, watching eating disorder content on TikTok.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And I'll also say, like, this is an issue, this age gating thing, where I find that my, my values are intention, because I agree with you that the First Amendment is important that adults should be able to like, access all manner of information on the Internet, even if it is lewd or obscene or inappropriate for children. I don't want a kind of UK style system where like you have to upload your driver's license to some, you know, database that may or may not be secure just to go like look at a subreddit. At the same time, I totally understand that parents have legitimate concerns here. I talk to so many parents who are just at their wit's end about how to safely introduce things like social media or smartphones or the Internet to their children without just sort of opening the floodgates. And parental controls are the thing that everyone talks about, but any parent can tell you these are not perfect. You practice practically have to become like a part time IT person to just to be able to like understand and control what your underage kids are doing on the Internet. So I totally understand where the anger comes from at these companies that have made it very clear that they don't want to be doing any of this. They don't want this to be their responsibility. But I think that we are going to move to an Internet with age verification in the United States and around the world. I just think that is going to happen. There's enough public pressure at this point that it is sort of inevitable in my mind. And so I would like to see it done in a way that preserves the privacy of those users rather than having sort of T style leaks every six months.

[Casey Newton]

I would like that too. You know, here's sort of the last thing I would say about this, Kevin. You know, this may not be the free expression that you, the listener, cares about the most. You may be happy to upload your ID if you want to look at adult content on the Internet or even Wikipedia. But what I am going to say is I view this very much as part and parcel with just a, a widespread clawback of speech rights in the United States over the past six months. Look at the attacks on free speech that we've seen against journalists, against academia, against broadcast media. Right? And now you are coming along and saying, by the way, now you need to show government ID to look at a website. Like these things are all of a piece. And I think it's important that we think about them as being of a piece, because it may be that, you know, six months, a year from now, we look back and we think, well, we have really lost a lot of ground with free expression. And the time to talk about that online is while you still can.

[Kevin Roos]

I see. Well, thank you for explaining this to me. It was not immediately clear to me why I needed to care about a tech regulation in the United Kingdom, but I think I get it now.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, I feel like just doing this segment has aged me about 10 years.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. Also I'm looking at a list of British expressions that mean really angry and I just have to read some of these.

[Casey Newton]

Let's hear them.

[Kevin Roos]

Like a bear with a sore head.

[Casey Newton]

Okay.

[Kevin Roos]

Throwing a wobbly.

[Casey Newton]

Throwing a wobbly.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. Anyway, I'm throwing a wobbly over this regulation and I think a lot of other Brits are in a right tizzy. When we come back, Matthew Prince from Cloudflare will explain how he's trying to keep the Internet safe from AI crawlers.

[Casey Newton]

Not to mention the clankers and the slopper.

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[Matthew Prince]

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[Kevin Roos]

Well, Kasey, we've got a very exciting guest with us today. Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare is here to talk about something new that they've been working on.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, and I am so excited about this, Kevin, because it actually is kind of in the dead center of my own interest as somebody who has a website on the Internet.

[Kevin Roos]

And Kasey, because we are talking about AI in this segment, we should talk about our disclosures.

[Casey Newton]

That's right, Kevin. Well, my Boyfriend works for the notorious AI scraping company Anthropic.

[Kevin Roos]

And my employer of the New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged copyright violations related to the training of large language models. So Cloudflare, for those who may remember, our last podcast with Matthew is sort of the plumbers and bouncers of the Internet. Right. They make a lot of these security services like DDoS protection that many, many websites rely on to keep their services safe. They also do a host of other security and data related things. And Matthew is a sort of die hard supporter of the Internet. And so a couple years ago when all these AI bots started scraping the intern Internet to feed data into their models, he and Cloudflare got really nervous about this. And so they have been doing a lot of interesting things to try to preserve what they see as the, the heart of the Internet. And recently they made a lot of waves by announcing that Cloudflare would start to introduce default blocking of these AI data scrapers, basically preventing AI companies from automatically being able to exploit and scrape the data from the websites that they're visiting. This is a step that he said would help to protect, protect content creators like you online.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. And so I'm excited to talk to him about that. And also Kevin, just about some of the research that Cloudflare has been doing into the state of the web as a whole. You know, you and I have both been worried about what the rise of AI means for the Internet in general. Cloudflare has taken a close look at that and has some interesting things to say.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, it's one of the sort of more underappreciated companies on the Internet. Their decisions about even seemingly small things can, can have enormous ripple effects throughout the industry. So I thought it was a really good time to bring on Matthew and ask him some questions about what they're doing and why.

[Casey Newton]

Well, let's bring him in.

[Kevin Roos]

Matthew Prince, welcome back to Hard Fork.

[Matthew Prince]

Thanks for having me.

[Kevin Roos]

So we're going to talk about AI and scraping and all the steps that you're taking to sort of protect the Internet. But before we we describe the solution that you're proposing, which you announced on something called Content Independence Day. I want to ask you to describe the problem. You had some pretty shocking numbers in your post on this about how much Internet traffic patterns have already changed as a result of AI. So talk a little bit about those and why you felt the need to do something about it.

[Matthew Prince]

Sure. So you know, at Cloudflare we sit in front of north of 20% of the web so we see a lot of what's happening online and we understand, I think, a lot of how the web works and the business model that exists behind it. And 25 years ago, basically, Google struck a deal, an implicit deal with publishers, which was you let us copy all of the content that you're creating and in exchange we'll send you traffic. The whole web, the economy of the entire web was really built on that search based interface. However, over the last 10 years, Google has changed what that interface looks like. It started sort of subtly starting about eight years ago when they introduced the answer box. And the answer box is if you type in something like when did Cloudflare launch? Instead of you having to go to 10 blue links, it just says September 27, 2010. And that was a pretty radical change because back in the day, Larry and Sergey used to brag about how their job was to get people off google.com as quickly as possible. Right. They even measured the time up in the corner to show you just how fast you, you basically were, you know, leaving their site and now all of a sudden Google was keeping you on the site. More recently they've introduced something that's AI overview. So if you do a search, most of the time now overview shows up, which is an AI summary of what's going on. And that has made a big difference in how much traffic goes to content creators from search.

[Kevin Roos]

How much of a difference? Like put some numbers on that. Yeah.

[Matthew Prince]

So if you, if you take 10 years of content ago as the sort of the standard and you compare it with Today, it's almost 10 times harder to get traffic today for a piece of content than it was 10 years ago. And it's gotten significantly worse just since the introduction of AI Answerbox. That's just with Google. And that's the good news. If you look at the AI companies, OpenAI is 750 times harder. Anthropic is 30,000 times harder. Harder. What's basically happening is as the interface of the web is shifting from search to AI, people are consuming derivatives, not originals. Basically they're not following the footnotes. And we've actually seen it get even worse as people are actually trusting the AI systems more because the AI systems are getting better. And what scares us about that is that there are really three reasons people create content. Maybe not you, Kevin, but one is vanity. But that's a big thing. Like there's a whole bunch of content that's just created, you know, for just the ego and the fame of doing it. But the business model is you either sell subscriptions or you sell ads or both of those things. And so the value has to be either make people famous or make them rich through ads or subscriptions. That is what has built the web over the last 25 years. The problem is that publishers are struggling already at 10 times harder. I worry that as more and more of the interface of the web looks like, OpenAI are anthropic. They're dead at 750 times, and they're buried in the ground and forgotten about it 30,000 times. And so if that's the case, if there's not an incentive for people to create content, I think people will stop creating content. And that really is an existential threat to the web.

[Kevin Roos]

Okay, that's a pretty good and concise description of the problem. So what is the solution here? What are you all doing?

[Matthew Prince]

Well, so I don't pretend to know exactly what the solution is, but I know kind of some of the aspects of how we have to get there. So the answer has to be, be that AI companies have to pay for content. The deal is different than it used to be with Search Search. They, you know, copied your content and in exchange, they sent you traffic that you can monetize. If now they're copying your content, they're not sending you anything, then why would you give them their content in. In the beginning? So AI companies have to pay for content. And, and I think what's encouraging is we're actually seeing some AI companies that are doing that. Amazon just announced a deal with the New York Times. OpenAI has done a number of content deals that are out there. But the problem with a lot of those deals that we realized was Sam@OpenAI can't be a sucker. He can't pay for content and then have all of his competitors get it for free. Or another way of thinking this is you can't have a market unless you have some level of scarcity. And so what we thought the first step was and what we announced on July 1, in conjunction with the who's who of the world's publishers, was we're going to by default, block the ability for AI crawlers to get content unless they are compensating the content creators for getting that content. And we think that that's super important now exactly how the compensation works. Again, I think there's a lot of different models I analogize it to. And at risk of hubris, when Apple announces, you know, the introduction of iTunes, 99 cents a song, right. That wasn't what the final business model was. The final business model that we've kind of come to is more like Spotify, where it's 10 bucks a month and you get kind of all you can eat from the Spotify playlist. I think we're going to take some iterations to figure out where we might start at some price, fixed price that's there. And we might evolve to something which is more like a Spotify model over time. But the first step has to be actually saying, if you're an AI company, you can't get content for free.

[Kevin Roos]

Now, if I'm a website operator and I want to prevent AI bots from scraping my site, I can already do that through robots Txt, I can just put a little file in the metadata and I can say, hey, these three crawlers you're allowed to scrape, but these other six you're not allowed to scrape. So how is what you are building with cloudflare different than that?

[Matthew Prince]

Well, the first thing is with robots Txt, the analogy would be like it's the speed limit sign where it says, okay, you can drive 55 miles an hour, right? There's no law of physics that says you have to draw 55 miles an hour. And I think a lot of us maybe sort of look at the speed limit sign and go, yeah, it's probably 60 is okay, right? It's the same thing. It is a recommendation, it's not an actual enforcement that's there. That's problem number one. Problem number two is it's incredibly blunt in terms of what it does. So you basically have to apply it across a significant portion of your site. So you can't say, okay, let these things out, but not let these things. The last problem, the problem is a lot of the search companies because again, we see a huge amount of the Internet. We can track how this works. A lot of the AI companies, I should say, if they hit a robots Txt file, what they then do is they find some other way to go out and scour the Internet to find your same content. So they'll actually do a search against Bing and try and pull the cache content or they'll go look at the Internet Archive or they'll actually do things that are incredibly sneaky, like pinging ad server networks to get a description of the page that comes back to them and try and find all kinds of things around. We've tracked some of the sort of worst performing AI companies and there's a huge range like OpenAI. They're actually the good guys here. They're doing things right. They're trying to do things the right way, but by far the best behavior. There are others that most closely resemble North Korean hackers, where they're literally using residential proxies to spoof who they are to try to get around the various blocks. And so I think that in addition to a road slide for the badly behaving bots, we actually need something where we say, we're going to take away your car because you keep going 400 miles an hour down the road.

[Casey Newton]

Tell us a bit how technically the solution that you've built works. How are you able to build those kind of fine grained controls? Yeah.

[Matthew Prince]

So Cloudflare, we're essentially a giant network and a ton of the web sits behind us, and so it has to flow through our pipes. And, and our primary business for most of our history has been cybersecurity. So every day we go to war with the North Korean hackers, the Russian hackers, the Iranian hackers, the, you know, Chinese hackers who are trying to get into our customer systems one way or another. And we're really good at identifying, no matter what they pretend to be, we're really good at identifying who they are, what they're doing and stopping them literally by just not letting their traffic get to our customers. What we realized, though, was that actually gave us the perfect position to be able to, to help anyone who is a content creator also set what were enforced rules of the road where we can say if this bot is behaving in a bad way, that we're going to block it. So, for instance, as we have now studied this, and we have very good evidence on what even some of the major AI companies are doing, that's really sleazy. We're going to put them in timeout. We're actually going to stop their ability to access a huge portion of the way, even if they pretend that they're doing it. And we've got the records to do that, and our security teams have actually investigated and figured that out. On the other hand, when somebody has done, if OpenAI has done a deal, we also want to make sure that they get that content as efficiently as possible and structured in a way which is possible. So the content creator can say, I want to allow OpenAI to come to my page. I think what we'll develop over time is then what is sort of a standard rack rate where you, as a content creator, even if you're smart, small, can say, okay, I'm happy to let this content be scraped, but here's the price for it, and that's something that how that market will develop, I think is going to be kind of the next steps of this project.

[Kevin Roos]

Now, you announced this new approach to AI crawlers a few weeks ago and flipped this switch that blocks all the crawlers by default. What has the reaction been from publishers, from AI companies, from people who are inside Cloudflare looking at.

[Matthew Prince]

Yeah, so I mean, from publishers, not surprisingly, I'm on a lot more people's Christmas lists because publishers were really struggling with how to deal with this. They saw the problem and they didn't have a good technical solution to be able to lock it down. They're not cybersecurity companies, so they have a harder time being able to track this. And so the glee that we've seen from publishers as they've turned the system on, seen what was going on, and then had the ability to push a button and say, you know, disallow, disallow, disallow, disallow has been really, really palpable. And I think that's why this resonated across such a wide swath of the publisher base. What surprised me has been the reaction of the AI companies, which I kind of thought that they were just gonna throw up all over this and hate it. But it hasn't been that for the most part, with a couple of exceptions, they've said, listen, we get it. Ultimately content is the fuel that runs our industry engine and we need to pay for it. But the key is it needs to be a level playing field. And so I think that what I am encouraged by is in all the conversations that I've been a part of, the AI companies said, if you can make it a level playing field, if you can make it something that's fair, then we're willing to pay for content. And that I think is that's a dramatic step that says that we're headed in the right direction. Now, making it fair is going to be a trick. And folks like Google who can just believe that they've got kind of a God given right to be able to copy everything off the web, that's going to take some persuading to get there. But I think as the industry lines up and says this is the right thing to do, that we'll be able to even get Google to hopefully voluntarily, but if not, there's certainly enough investigations on them going on around the world that one way or another, I think that they will be, will be persuaded or compelled to get behind this effort.

[Casey Newton]

I mean, basically what you're describing is a revenue share deal, right? And it seems only logical that a company like Google, which is going to be making a lot more revenue by crawling everyone's content because they're such a source of queries, should be paying more than the upstart AI company that just shows up on day one and wants to start crawling the web. So I would hope that they would be open to that.

[Matthew Prince]

I am encouraged and I do believe that Google really does believe in the ecosystem and they get it. But it's a little bit of the frog boiling in water, where 10 years ago or 25 years ago, when Google started, it was a good deal. Get in the nice pot of water, you're happy, you're a frog, right? But they've slowly turned the heat up, and that's made what used to be a good deal into a much, much worse deal. And so the deal needs to get renegotiated. And that's a big piece of it. The other thing that I think is important is you need to have access to content. And that's the thing today that's cheap. But my prediction is that over time, the real differentiator between the different AI companies is who has access to the most interesting content. And we've seen this play out with things like Netflix, where you can see that by getting original content, it actually drives subscribers. And so I think that at the end of the day, it's exactly right that fundamentally what content producers should be arguing for is we should be getting a share of whatever the revenue that you're generating from users is because we're the fuel that runs the engine that is powering your business.

[Casey Newton]

I feel like you can already see this today. And Kevin, I'm sure you've seen this. Matthew, be curious if you have too, but if you ever, like, use one of these chatbots to run a deep research report. Cause you're trying to really bone up on some set of historical facts or recent current events that you want to write about. You get these results, and half of them are from bleep bloop.com newswire, XYZ publishers that no one has ever heard of that you're not entirely sure are on the level. And so often when I run those searches, I think, God, I wish that the sources I trust actually did just have deals with these chatbots or that I could, like, log in with my, like, Bloomberg credentials and then just. Have you read Bloomberg too, as part of the report that you're making?

[Matthew Prince]

Yeah. And I think, I mean, all of those things will come, but two. Two things. One, bleep. Blop bloop.com actually, sometimes it's going to have really interesting original content. And I think part of the key here is we don't want to create a situation where the only people who get the content deals are the major, major publishers. I mean, the New York Times can do a big deal with OpenAI. At the same time, you want to make sure that the small AI companies, the new startups, are able to also get access to this. So, so a vibrant market here is lots of sellers and lots of buyers and you want to, you want to be able to do that right?

[Kevin Roos]

Now you mentioned that publishers are very happy about the steps that Cloudflare has taken to block these AI crawlers that a were not as excited, understandably, but, but maybe they would get on board too. I did talk to one AI executive about this who basically accused you and Cloudflare of setting up a new toll booth between the AI companies and the content companies because you are not only providing this technology, but you are sort of inserting yourselves as the merchant of record in these transactions. And this person asked me to ask you what percentage of each payment Cloudflare plans to take. So what percentage does Cloudflare plan to take from these transactions?

[Matthew Prince]

So first of all, like if you're the New York Times and you do a deal with OpenAI, that's your deal. We don't get any of that if we facilitate that. So if we're, we're the ones who go out and negotiate it, then yeah, we'll take some percentage of it. And I have no idea what that will be, but I think it'll be something reminiscent of like, what Spot. What does Spotify take of a subscriber's revenue versus what do they pay out? And usually that's sort of in the 20 to 30% range of what that is. I think the only way that we should get something is if we're actually generating value from this. And if not, then you should do the deals yourself between the AI companies and the publishers. And in that case, sure, we'll provide you the interface to be able to stop it, but that isn't something that we would take any percentage of. What's also important is we provide this at no cost to even our free users, because we think that this is fundamentally important, important to the sort of health of the long term Internet. It shouldn't be something that just the big companies can get access to. And so no matter who you are, if you're signing up for Cloudflare, you get these tools you get the analytics, you get the understanding, you get the ability to block it. And again, I think that we will be less involved in the transactions for folks like the New York times, but for bitbopbloop.com or whatever, it's probably a porn site that we're pointing people to, and you can sort of envision what it might be. Be. But if that's the case, then, yeah, I think that that's a place where, if we're doing work, then we should get compensated for that work.

[Casey Newton]

I mean, you know, so I have a website on the Internet, Platformer News. That's where my. My newsletter is. And I'm. I'm super interested in this because I frankly just do not have the time or energy to go out and try to strike deals with AI companies. I also have no idea what the value of Platformer is in that particular marketplace. So if somebody wants to go, like, make a market, and then I can just show up and you tell me, like, hey, you know, we can make you 80 bucks this year, or like, whatever. Whatever it is, like, I'm interested and you want to take 20% of that. Sure.

[Matthew Prince]

That's. Yeah. And I think that that feels fair. And hopefully we're not the only ones doing this. From my perspective personally, like, my wife and I own a small newspaper in our hometown. We see how hard and how important it is to have local news, and there's gotta be a business model to it. Like, reporters need to eat. You know, it costs money to print papers. Like, you have to have a business model that's there. You know, I think personally, We've built a $60 billion company on the back of the. I feel an enormous responsibility to give back to the Internet and actually protect it. Our mission is to help build a better Internet. If you talk to anyone at Cloudflare, that's why they work for us. And so, with all due respect to the AI executive, they've built an entire company by stealing content creators content and not compensating them for that. And if they keep doing that, people will stop creating content, which not only kills the Internet, but kills them in the process.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, I think there are a lot of people who would agree with you. One of them is not President Trump. He said just last week, in connection with some new AI policy rollouts that he was doing, he basically took the side of the AI companies and said that they shouldn't have to pay for copyrighted material. He said, quote, you can't be expected to have a successful AI program when every Single article, book or anything else that you've read or studied, you're supposed to pay for. It's not doable. So I guess what is the incentive for an AI company to agree to something like a pay per crawl system if the current administration is signaling that they're not gonna face any penalty for just breaking copyright the old way?

[Matthew Prince]

Yeah. And I think like many things that sometimes come out of the Trump administration, nuance is a little bit lost here. We've actually talked with a number of people in the Trump administration and I think what they are concerned about is much more a government instituted kind of you must pay X in the way that we've seen come out of Australia and the way that we've seen come out of Canada. Canada. I think that's what they're trying to signal that they're not in favor of. They are very much in favor of, as far as we can tell, private market solutions, where that is created. And so again, I think the incentive for the AI company is you need content in order to have access to build your tools and we've just stopped you from getting it. And so regardless of what the law says, we're going to be able to technically stop the AI companies from being able to get the content unless they're coming compensating the content creators for it.

[Kevin Roos]

I want to ask you, Matthew, about another release that you all did earlier this year related to this issue of AI crawling, which was something called the AI Labyrinth. This was a system that was designed to basically, instead of blocking AI crawlers, it would just sort of redirect them to an endless series of AI generated links and pages, basically trapping them in this labyrinth that they could not escape from. So my first question is, do you worry that the robots will remember that you did this to them and take their revenge?

[Matthew Prince]

Not a risk factor that we have currently included in our S1, but I'll talk to our legal team about it. We now have the data that there are some AI companies, big AI companies, well funded, that are just behaving horribly. And frankly, if they're going to behave like hackers, then we're going to behave like trolls right back to them. And we can feed enough garbage into their system that they will create garbage content. And so again, when we come back to what's the incentive like, you don't want to piss us off because again, we believe in the future of the Internet. We believe in supporting journalists, we believe in supporting content creators. We're on the side, the right side of history here. And so the right thing to do is say, yeah, you're spending $10 billion on GPUs, you're spending billions of dollars on employees. You should be dedicating at least something to paying for content.

[Kevin Roos]

Did the labyrinth work? Like what was the result of that?

[Matthew Prince]

I mean, for real, Again, we try not to, to put like OpenAI. Good, good actor, doing great, doing all the things right so we, we don't throw them in.

[Kevin Roos]

This message was not endorsed by the New York Times legal team.

[Matthew Prince]

That's yes, but, but for bad actors and there are bad actors out there, we can pollute their data and we can pollute it at scale.

[Casey Newton]

You know, I, I'm having the, I think entirely novel feeling of a hard fork ro recording where I'm feeling optimistic about the state of the media. Like every single time we talk about the Internet and the media on this show, I'm like, well it's going to be really tough. Everybody, you know, batten down the hatches. The storm is here. But Matthew, you actually are giving me optimism that you know, when, when someone with the right incentives, and I do feel like you have the right incentives shows up with great technology and like the willingness to go out and make a market maybe by hook and by crook, like we actually still will have a media industry five years from now.

[Matthew Prince]

Well, and I think and I might lose people because this is starting to get a little woo woo. But everything that's wrong with the world today is ultimately Google's fault. Now that's a little strong, but Google taught us they were the first ones to really teach us that traffic was the deity that we all had to worship to now. And again I think Google's actually been a net positive for the world massively. But Google beget Facebook, which beget TikTok, which is just kind of spiraling down in towards sort of the attention economy of how do I create a cortisol response and get people to click on my stuff so that we can sell ads to them. I think that that's the wrong direction for really furthering humanity. If on the other hand, as we create this, if the giant block of cheese has holes in it and we can say that if you as a creator go out there and create something that fills in one of those holes and we'll compensate you for that, we'll pay you more for it, what I'm hopeful is that we get a lot more really interesting long form knowledge generating content, which is what we all want, which was. And the only reason we're not getting it is because all of the incentives are not how do we do great things, but how do we actually just rage, bait people into clicking on links. And so I think it's super important that as we go through this, like, it shouldn't just be us figuring this out. And so, so I've tried to spend as much time with publishers, with AI companies, we've working with some of the leading academic economists, others, to sort of say, as we think about this market, how do we make sure it's as healthy as possible? Because the dark mirror version of this is not that journalists go away, not that researchers go away, it's that they're all employed by the five big AI companies. Right. And so it's not that we're going to go back to kind of the media times of the early 90s, it's that we're going to go back to the media times of like, like the Medicis, where you have just these five powerful families that control all of academia and research and journalism. And it's not actually that hard to envision. There'll be a conservative one, sort of the Fox News version, there'll be the liberal one, there'll be the Chinese one, there'll be the Europeans attempt at one, and those will be the things that are out there. And knowledge gets consigned behind that. I don't want that to happen. And I think the key to making that not happen is figuring out how we can have a healthy market with lots of sellers of content, lots of buyers of content, and make that as robust as possible.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. Now, Matthew, I know in the past you have expressed some concerns about the power that you and Cloudflare have by virtue of, you know, sitting in front of 20% of the Internet, as you say. And when we've talked before, it's been. Some of it has been in the context of, of the decisions you've made around content moderation, basically deciding whether or not to protect websites with extreme or violent content on them. You sort of famously pulled protection from 8chan, which led that site to go down after some mass shootings. I think a lot of people understood that. But you were concerned at the time that this sort of unilateral power that you had to sort of like wake up and make a big change to the structure of the Internet wasn't something that maybe anyone should have. So I'm curious, like, when you were deciding to implement this change to push the button to block all the AI crawlers by default, did you worry about that exercise of power and how sort of unilateral.

[Matthew Prince]

It was totally and I think we take that responsibility really seriously. But what we realized was all the publishers were sitting around saying, we're dying, we're dying, were dying, and no one was doing anything about it. And so if you're in that situation and you see something that really matters, I mean, the Internet really matters, and we should be fighting for it and we should be protecting it, and it's dying because the business model behind it is dying. And at no step have we said we're the only solution. In fact, we've tried to work with as many different, even competitors as possible to say, this is important, let's do it. And we don't pretend pretend that we have the answer or that it won't evolve over time. But we do know that the first step in any market has to be creating scarcity. And so that's what we did on July 1st.

[Casey Newton]

Got it.

[Kevin Roos]

Well, Matthew, thank you so much for stopping by. Really interesting experiment. I'm excited to follow it and see how it plays out.

[Matthew Prince]

Thank you guys for having me.

[Casey Newton]

Thanks, Matthew.

[Kevin Roos]

When we come back, we'll pass the hat for a big round of hatching. GPT.

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[Kevin Roos]

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[Casey Newton]

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[Kevin Roos]

All right, Casey, it's time to pass the hat. We are playing another round of our favorite game, Hat GPT. Hat GPT, of course, is our game where we pick tech headlines out of a hat, we riff on them, and we eventually yell at each other to.

[Casey Newton]

Stop generating, which they don't even say in ChatGPT anymore. Sadly, it's. It's already become a throwback express. Yes.

[Kevin Roos]

So let's use this week our brand new, very pretty hard fork hats. Casey, would you like to tell the people where they can get one of these?

[Casey Newton]

You can go to nytimes.com hardforkcatkevin and if you haven't already become a subscriber to New York Times Audio, and in exchange for that and a full year of all the great podcasts, including the entire Hard Fork back catalog, we will send you this very hat.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes. It will not have slips of paper inside it, though.

[Casey Newton]

Or will it? There's only one way out.

[Kevin Roos]

God, we are merging in the same person. It's terrible. Okay, so I'm gonna put the slips in. Okay, Jiggle them around a little bit there. Mix them up, and then. Why don't you pick the first one?

[Casey Newton]

All right. LeBron James lawyer send cease and desist to AI company making pregnant videos of him. This is from our friend Jason Keebler at 404 Media. He writes the creators of an AI tool and Discord community called InterLink AI that allowed people to create AI videos of NBA stars. Says that it got a cease and desist letter from lawyers representing LeBron James. AI generated videos of James. Kevin included scenes like James as a homeless person, James on his knees with his tongue out, and James lying on a couch clutching a pregnant belly. So I guess my first question here is, who is LeBron James? Just kidding. He's a very famous basketball player. Kevin, what do you make of this?

[Kevin Roos]

So this is obviously going to be a thing for celebrities. They do not like their names and likenesses being used without their permission. And especially if what you're doing with LeBron James's name and likeness is turning him into a pregnant person. Did you watch any of these videos?

[Casey Newton]

I did see a couple of them.

[Kevin Roos]

They're very disturbing.

[Casey Newton]

Some of them, I think, are, like, on the end of the spectrum. That is just, like, sort of, like, surreal and funny, and then some of it is like, also just, like, racist and horrible. And regardless of all of that, it's clear that LeBron James did not give permission for this. And it's an interesting story because as far as we know, this is one of the first known times that a celebrity has objected to the misuse of their likeness by an AI company.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, and I am worried that it seems like they have automated the jobs of the mpreg community. And mpreg is, of course.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. What is that? I didn't mean to ask you about that.

[Kevin Roos]

It's a niche fan fiction thing that for years people have been sort of creating these, like, animated fan fiction cartoons of, like, Sonic the Hedgehog becoming pregnant. Why are they doing this? I don't know. Couldn't tell you. Not an mpregger myself, but there were a lot of hardworking mpreg artists out there who now have been put out of jobs by these AI tools. So for that reason and that reason alone, I think we should take a hard stand.

[Casey Newton]

I now want to say retroactively to my parents, do not listen to this segment.

[Kevin Roos]

And Definitely don't Google MPreg.

[Casey Newton]

All right, stop generating.

[Kevin Roos]

Okay, next up. Oh, this is a fun one. Sam Altman warns there's no legal confidentiality when using ChatGPT as a therapist. This one comes from TechCrunch. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, went on the popular podcast by Theo Vaughn last week where he acknowledged that OpenAI might be legally required to produce a user's conversations with ChatGPT in the case of a lawsuit. Now, I saw this clip going around and I thought, sam Altman continues his terror campaign against the Hard Fork podcast. As you will remember, at our live show, he burst onto stage and then peppered us with questions about this lawsuit between OpenAI and the New York Times, which has resulted in OpenAI having to retain conversations between ChatGPT and its users. He's very upset about this, doesn't want this kind of document retention to be required, and has started advocating for the privacy guarantees that AI companies should be allowed to make with their users.

[Casey Newton]

Look, this one is important because a lot of people already are using these chatbots as therapists. They're having therapy style conversations. And I think most, most people are not thinking a lot about what is happening to that data. Some companies may want to erase that data for, you know, user protection reasons. Other companies might want to keep it forever and create a detailed profile about you and then, like, rent some information to advertisers. So I would love to see some kind of Legal intervention, regulatory intervention. Come down and say you're allowed to use information submitted to chatbots in these ways. You know, users should have full view into what a chatbot knows about them, what kind of information is being stored about them. They should be able to delete it. Right. We just need a lot of, like, data and privacy stuff around this sort of thing. And so I have to say I'm grateful for Sam Altman for at least saying, like, hey, by the way, you don't have legal protections here.

[Kevin Roos]

Yes, we are allowed to use data however we want in training our models, but God forbid, you know, anyone else want to use data about our users after the fact.

[Casey Newton]

All right, stuff, stop generating.

[Kevin Roos]

All right, your turn.

[Casey Newton]

How to catch a wily poacher in a sting a thermal robotic deer. This is from James Finelli at the Wall Street Journal. Wildlife enforcement officers turn to a Wisconsin taxidermist to make remote controlled robots that look like wild animals to catch poachers. Kevin. To make his decoys, a man named Brian Wolsel applies the skin of a dead animal to a mold made out of polyurethane. He affixes glass eyes and plastic ears. The circuitry to make the dec decoy's move comes from parts for remote controlled cars. With some AA batteries, officers can remotely operate the Bambi bots. Kevin, would you be interested in one of these to ward off some of the poachers on your property?

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah, I think there's been a lot of poaching attempts made against my livestock, and I won't be standing for it. So I'll be, I'll be buying one of these.

[Casey Newton]

Here's, here's where this man's real opportunity is. He needs to use the same technology to build decoy AI researchers and put them in OpenAI so that when Mark Zuckerberg comes onto of the property, he mistakenly poaches one of the robots instead one of the human researchers. So this is what I'm doing. Yeah, yeah.

[Kevin Roos]

In general, I think like robot animals. I'm not a big fan of like, there's actually on my block, there's a guy with a robot dog. He runs like a stem program for kids. And I've seen him like walking his robot dog out on the street. It's very disconcerting. Let's just say top 10 signs.

[Casey Newton]

You live in the Bay Area, by the way.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. Let's just say these things are not entirely life yet, and they do still give you the willies.

[Casey Newton]

All right, stop generating.

[Kevin Roos]

Next up. Did a guy just save a picture of a bird to a bird's brain. This one comes to us from Sean Hollister at the Verge. It's about a YouTuber named Ben Jordan, who has a popular channel about music and acoustic science, who was able to get a bird, a starling, to reproduce a spectrogram image in sound. Casey, did you hear about this story? I.

[Casey Newton]

This is actually my favorite story of the week.

[Kevin Roos]

What happened?

[Casey Newton]

So if I get this straight, the YouTuber converts an image into a sound. He then plays the sound for a bird. The bird then repeats the sound. And so in that way, you can say that the YouTuber was able to store an image in the bird's brain. He used the bird as a data transfer device. Like, it was a. Like a disk drive.

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. So you almost got it right, because what happened is he takes this drawing of a bird, he converts it into a spectrogram, then he plays that sound for the bird, the bird mimics it back, and then he takes that recording and turns it back into a spectrogram. So he's essentially going image to sound, transfers the sound to the bird, bird transfers it back, converts it back into an image. Now, Casey, why would you do something like this?

[Casey Newton]

Because you have a YouTube channel and you're trying to get a lot of subscribers. Now. How close was the image, the second image to the first image?

[Kevin Roos]

Apparently it was quite close. This was like, you know, the bird is a little bit of a lossy compression device, but you. You actually were able to sort of like, recognize it as a line drawing of a bird after the fact, which is kind of amazing, honestly.

[Casey Newton]

Hats off to this person. What a bizarre idea. But fantastic.

[Kevin Roos]

You know, I uploaded an episode of our podcast to a bird.

[Casey Newton]

Oh, yeah?

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. It's called Hard Stork.

[Casey Newton]

Okay, sir, why not stop generating. All right, you're up. Okay. Meta is going to let job candidates use AI during coding tests. This is from Jason Keibler at 404 Media. Again, Meta told employees that it is going to allow some coding job candidates to use an AI assistant during the interview process. According to internal Meta communications, on an internal message board for the company, there was a post that called for mock candidates because apparently they're going to let employees, you know, do one of these sort of AI assisted interviews so they can work out all of the kinks. So looks like Meta is going all in on using AI coding agents to write code, and also is just not going to try to stop people from cheating on their job entrance exams anymore.

[Kevin Roos]

This is total Roy Lee victory.

[Casey Newton]

Absolutely.

[Kevin Roos]

So this is like a Vindication of what Roy told us when he came on the show several months ago ago, which is that these leetcode interviews are totally cooked because now people can just use these tools like the ones Roy Lee is developing to cheat on their interviews. I guess Meta is sort of seeing the writing on the wall and saying, you know what? Go ahead, use your AI. We'll design our new test, which I think is probably a good outcome. What do you think?

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, I mean, I think I'm interested to see how this affects the. The candidates that they attract, the quality of the engineers that they can recruit. You know, I am ultimately persuaded that people are going to be using these tools in the workplace anyway, not use them when you're doing the actual test to get the job.

[Kevin Roos]

Now, do you think they make the people who are making a billion dollars a year take the tests when they come in?

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, they just give them the really hard version. They say, if you do a good job, we'll give you a billion dollars.

[Kevin Roos]

God, what a weird thing. Can you imagine being onboarded to a new job and like, you go through the training and it's like, you know, here's your benefits package, and you're just sitting there thinking, I'm making a million. A billion dollars.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. They're like, do you want to put anything in your. Your health savings flex account this year? What about the commuter benefit? Do you want the 40 bucks for Bart this. This month?

[Kevin Roos]

You're like, I'm making a billion dollars, people. I'm not sitting through the IT training. Okay, okay, stop generating.

[Casey Newton]

Stop generating. Here's one. Kevin. This is from Taylor Lorenz at User Mag. Substack sent a push alert encouraging users to subscribe to a note Nazi newsletter that claimed Jewish people are a sickness and that we must eradicate minorities to build a white homeland.

[Kevin Roos]

Oh, boy.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. And you know, I have to say, Kevin, rarely have I felt so smug in my entire life as I did when I read this story. Longtime listeners of the Hard Fork show may know that I moved Platformer off of Substack last year after some other folks had found a bunch of pro Nazi websites on the network. And Substack would not commit to doing any proactive searching for these blogs to get rid of them. And the main reason that I wanted to leave was I thought, these people are building amplification features, and inevitably they're going to just start promoting these things. And it might be unwitting and it might be intentional, but either way, I don't want any part of it. And so now sure enough, a bunch of people who had the Substack app installed yesterday just got a ringing endorsement for a Nazi blog.

[Kevin Roos]

Oh, boy.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah. Now, Substack did basically say that this was a huge mistake and they took the offending recommendation system offline and they're going to, you know, rejigger it so it doesn't have happen again. But, well, it. It did happen, and I feel quite.

[Kevin Roos]

Vindicated they did not see it coming.

[Casey Newton]

Yeah, that's. That's a good way of putting it. Yeah. All right, stop generating.

[Kevin Roos]

All right, last one. Why Amazon wants an AI bracelet that records everything you say. This comes from Nicole Wynn at the Wall Street Journal. Amazon is acquiring a company called be. BE makes a wearable device bee that transcribes all the conversations in your day, including when you talk to yourself, AI to turn that giant word soup into a searchable history, offering up key events and even to do lists based on your chatter. Friend of the POD and Wall Street Journal reporter Joanna Stern reported on her own experience testing out the B bracelet earlier this year. She described it as impressively useful and also, quote, really fucking creepy. Kasey, what do you make of this bracelet? And will you be buying one?

[Casey Newton]

I'm not gonna buy one for myself. You know, generally, I don't want a detailed record of everything that I say during the day. You know, one reasons why we podcast is so that most of what I say can be edited out. You know, so the idea that I would just sort of have this unfiltered record, you know, stored in an AWS bucket doesn't really appeal to me. Also, as I read the reviews of these. These devices from Joanna and others, nobody really seemed like they were getting a lot of value out of it. It was like, oh, yeah, I, like, told my husband I should get milk. And, like, now I get an email that's like, hey, remember, you want. Want milk? Is like, is that really worth, you know, giving up all of your privacy in perpetuity?

[Kevin Roos]

Well, and all the privacy of everyone that you talk to. Yes, exactly like that. That is the. The worst part of this. Like, I have at times been recording interviews and, like, accidentally left the voice memo running for, like, an hour afterwards. And it's never that it's that interesting, but sometimes it does catch other people's conversations in there, and then I feel bad about it and delete it. But with the B bracelet, they. This is the whole point. It's just logging you all the time. I don't think people are going to be that excited about that.

[Casey Newton]

Well, here's what I'm looking for is for keeping the be on you at all times to be a condition of continuing to work at the Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, because they're going through a lot of turmoil right now and there's a lot of people who are like leaking stuff to the media. So I think it's going to be like, hey, we need to check your b what have been we've been saying about this?

[Kevin Roos]

So it sounds like you are not going to be on the early beta tester list for the Amazon bracelet. Maybe I will.

[Casey Newton]

I'll be minding my own beeswax.

[Kevin Roos]

Stop generating okay, and that's HAT GPT. Yay. Thanks for playing.

[Casey Newton]

We won again.

[Kevin Roos]

What's that they used to say on Whose Line Is It Anyway? Where everything's made up and the points don't matter.

[Casey Newton]

That's right. Hat GPT. Very similar.

[Kevin Roos]

You know, my three year old is very obsessed with winning and losing.

[Casey Newton]

Oh yeah?

[Kevin Roos]

Yeah. Every time we do anything he says.

[Casey Newton]

I won, you lost.

[Kevin Roos]

So I'm going to start doing that with you.

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[Matthew Prince]

You set the gold standard for your business. Your website should do the same. WIX puts you at the helm so you can enjoy the creative freedom of designing your site just the way you want. Want someone to bounce your ideas off? Talk with AI to create a beautiful site together. Whatever your business, manage it from one place and tie it all together with a personalized domain name. Gear up for success with a brand that says you best. You can do it yourself on wix.

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[Kevin Roos]

Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Jen Poyant. We're fact checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show is engineered by Chris Wood. Original music by Alicia Ba? Itup, Rowan Nimisto, Alyssa Moxley and Dan Powell. Video production by Sawyer Roque, Pat Gunther, Jake Nichol and Chris Schott. You can watch this full episode on [e-mail] hardfork Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Qui Wing Tam, Dahlia Haddad and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us as [e-mail] send us all the images that you've uploaded to Birds Brains.

[Matthew Prince]

Running a business is hard work. Building your website shouldn't be. With wix you can express your ideas, give direction, then leave the heavy lifting to AI, from site creation to branded content and images. Have fun with the details, customize what you want the way you want, and manage your whole business from a centralized dashboard with expert AI tools. Build, scale and enjoy the incredible results. You can do it all yourself on wix.