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- [00:01]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it, ready to make anything online make sense. There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up, required compatibility and availability. Veris 18:48% of practicing Christians say that
- [00:29]
Dexter Thomas
they would trust AI for their spiritual development.
- [00:32]
Geeta Jackson
There's going to be some kind of moment where AI will have to plateau because it's drawing on us.
- [00:37]
Jason Kebler
My brain is doing these constant machinations like is this real? Is this AI? Is this real? Is this AI?
- [00:44]
Sam
It feeds something inside you that you want to see. You want to see resistance.
- [00:52]
Podcast Host/Announcer
Hello and welcome to the 404 Media podcast where we bring you unparalleled access
- [00:57]
Jason Kebler
to hidden worlds, both online and IRL.
- [00:59]
Podcast Host/Announcer
As a reminder, 404 Media is a journalist founded podcast and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404Media.co subscribers get full access to all of our articles and our archives, as well as bonus segments on every podcast and early access to interview episodes such as this one. This week we're bringing you a special episode which is a live recording of an event we did at the LA Public Library about a month ago with our friends Dexter Thomas and Geeta Jackson. So, Sam, me, Dexter and Gita talking about how AI is destroying the Internet, changing how we live and work, and is also impacting Hollywood books, games, every industry, basically. We had a really great time and I think that it turned out quite well. So thanks to the LA Public Library for having us. Here is our conversation at the LA Public Library.
- [01:56]
Jason Kebler
Thanks everyone for coming. This is very cool. Thank you to the LA Central Library for having us. This is amazing. I'm Jason, this is Sam, Dita and Dexter.
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Dexter Thomas
What's going on?
- [02:07]
Jason Kebler
Hey. I think before we start, we have a short video to frame the conversation. We've been covering AI and AI generated media and all of that thing for a few years now. Things have really gotten a lot worse. To start, this is like pulled from my Instagram feed, my Instagram algorithm, directly from a few months ago. And this is sort of like the type of information ecosystem that we're seeing out there. So I guess let's be horrified and then we can go from there.
- [03:17]
Geeta Jackson
That's the inside of Jason's mind and that will explain a lot.
- [03:21]
Jason Kebler
Yeah. Did we like that? I don't know again that months ago. Yeah. And I think that most of those were AI generated. There are a few non AI generated things in there because I still do get some content that real humans are making. But again, that's from a few months ago that the technology has gotten a lot better since then. I feel like for a while I wasn't getting tricked at all because it was all very surreal and weird like that. But over the last few months, things have gotten a lot harder to discern. I don't know, do y' all see are your feeds like that?
- [03:59]
Sam
My feed isn't nearly as deranged, but I have noticed, like, I like to watch, especially when I'm in the bathroom, just random ASMR videos on Instagram. And that has been completely taken over by AI videos especially. I love clacky keyboard noises. And that is like a really, really popular AI generation platform. And I usually don't get tricked by them, but they are inescapable if you are looking for that topic and you
- [04:33]
Geeta Jackson
watch one and you're suddenly watching 400.
- [04:36]
Sam
Exactly. Exactly. It's been fun watching people who it's usually like, what if this keyboard was made out of honey? Like, what if this keyboard was made out of marshmallows?
- [04:46]
Geeta Jackson
Or the beds.
- [04:46]
Sam
Or the beds. Oh, you like. This is what it's like to slee a water bed that's made out of the ocean. Yeah. That kind of thing just gets sucked into my algorithm. And it's interesting to watch. Like, there's a YouTuber, Rosanna Pascano, I think, who did this project where she was like, I'm going to take those viral, like glass fruit ASMR videos and see if I can actually recreate something that gives you that same effect in real life. And often you basically just can't. You can make a goopy keyboard made of honey. It will take ruining a keyboard and a lot of honey. But that is an ASMR effect that is possible to achieve. But I imagine just sitting there and typing prompts into a computer is much, much, much faster. It sucks.
- [05:33]
Geeta Jackson
We were just saying before we came out here that I am getting tricked more and more often because the tricks that you use to used to detect fake images are no longer relevant. No. You know, it's not like people can blink now. You can't detect like a deep fake by watching people's eyes and blinking. There's like this viral. It's like Memphis Jukin video that everyone has seen at this point probably. But it's like a dance that's Very repeatable. And I at first was like, oh, my God, look at this guy. He's, like, so good at this. And now I'm realizing that, like, all of these videos are actually fake. Cause I'm seeing them over and over. But it took seeing the same video over and over for me to realize this isn't actually real. That's how good it is. And I look at this stuff all day long, so I should know better. But it's just getting so much easier to just scroll by and be like, oh, that's real. And you keep going.
- [06:18]
Sam
Yeah. The superficial details that were often big giveaways have more or less disappeared. But if you know something really specific, it often makes it really obvious. I know what a bicycle looks like. Right. And AI video just sometimes has difficulty with, like, a bicycle in motion, like, where all the things are supposed to go. And so if you're familiar with something, deeply familiar, or a cable. I worry so much about cable management in my house that when I see, like, cables that don't make sense in an AI video, I'm like, oh, that wire is not going anywhere. But it takes a. It's not like you can't just look for text, you can't look for cars in the background. You can't look for wires, electrical wires going on telephone poles anymore. A lot of these things have been smoothed out. And it's incredibly scary because you'll also see malicious grifters creating wholesale AI influencers that are often stealing content, often taking content from black women and putting a white woman in it, often trying to generate incredibly propagandic discourse. And that phase two camera format that influencers use, it's just so easy to replicate that now and have it just look like a human.
- [07:39]
Jason Kebler
Yeah, it's very interesting. Like, I follow the kind of business model of a lot of the type of content that we just saw, like, how it's made, who's making it. And a lot of it is somewhat kind of, like, incidental. Like, a lot of it is not. People who are necessarily trying to trick an audience. There's, like, a monetary, like, impetus for it, where they're just trying to go viral. They're trying to collect money from the ad impressions and that sort of thing. And so for a while, people were saying, you can do faceless AI, faceless reels, faceless TikToks. That's what they were saying. Because basically, like, the. The LA Fire stuff, it's like there's no person on screen narrating that. It's just scenery that sort of thing. But that's changing. Like recently, as Gita was saying, it's like you can digitally clone yourself, you can digitally clone someone else, create an AI influencer and have them read the news or have them say whatever you want. I want to talk a little bit about the topicality of it as well, because the Internet is really driven by the news cycle. When there's a big mass shooting or a war or a new movie comes out, that sort of thing, there's like, journalists write articles about it, YouTubers make videos about it. And what we've seen is there's been a rush of AI content being made about any world events, basically. And so Immediately after the LA fires, Dexter did a really amazing YouTube video tracking the types of fire disinformation that was coming. And also the ICE raids in LA and in Minneapolis, all over the country. There's a lot of AI generated content around that. And I was curious, Dexter, if you could tell us a little bit about what you found. I know this is like outdated reference.
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Dexter Thomas
No, the thing is, it's not. I mean, I was just thinking about this earlier because, like, you haven't talked about shrimp Jesus yet, which is the amount of restraint that you're showing now is amazing. Everybody familiar with shrimp Jesus? Okay. Yes, literally. Because actually when we talk about AI sloth, like, we should probably talk about that. Jason and 404 in general have had a really big hand in people actually understanding what the phrase AI slop is. I know that you don't necessarily think you created the term, but it's something that, right, like you were one of
- [10:04]
Jason Kebler
the first people that. I broke my brain with it by just like looking at it all day,
- [10:08]
Sam
every day in slack different pictures of Jesus Christ made out of shrimp or Jesus Christ being eaten by shrimp. Just like, I didn't want to see these things, but you showed them to me and now I know about them.
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Dexter Thomas
Jesus Christ made out of gold. Jesus Christ being lifted out of the ground by a helicopter or something like this. All of this stuff. And so just to show you the progression here, I think, you know, late 2023. Early. No, late 2023, I think. No, yeah, 2024. Also we talked about this and when we talked about it the whole time, just to show you, we were laughing the whole time because it was sort of like, isn't this funny? Hahaha. Our parents are on. On Facebook and being fooled by this stuff, right? Fast forward about six months. It was like six to eight months after that. I'm getting to the Fires thing. I'm on Instagram, and the fires. Fires are still happening, but the fires are still happening here in L. A. And I'm seeing this video of. And I think the first big video that I saw is there's a video of, like, a firefighter carrying some baby bears to safety, and there's, like, a fire behind it. And it all looks pretty real. And it takes me a while to realize that it doesn't really make any logical sense. Like, if you keep watching, for example, there's another firefighter that's, like, picking up a raccoon, but he's, like, pushing the raccoon into the smoke, like, instead of, like, saving it. But if you're not really, really truly paying attention, you don't quite pick up what's going on. But anyway, by this point, everything looks really real. It looks really real. And in the comments, so we can talk about the comments, you see people saying, oh, my gosh, I'm so glad that people are saving these animals. Like, everybody's work, you know, everybody's worried about the people, but we really need to worry about these animals. I mean, who. Who can agree. Who can disagree with, we should save the animals. They're all cute, right? But then the other interesting thing here was that occasionally somebody also would notice, hey, this is A.I. this isn't real. And the responses from the original person. So you have person A saying, hey, I'm glad this. Look at these brave firefighters. They're saving the raccoons, they're saving the baby bears, they're saving the baby deers. And then person B says, hey, this isn't real. Person A says, how do you know? Or they say, I'm sure this isn't the same person, but I'm sure this is happening somewhere. This is somebody trying to raise awareness. So why are you getting upset over these little details when we should focus on the truth? The truth is that this is happening somewhere. And, you know, you see similar things with, you know, ICE raids or whatever. It's like, you know, you see all these images of people angrily storming buildings and all these things like that. And it's like, yo, this actually isn't happening, man. Like, I'm outside. Like, I'm physically in front of the building that you're saying, they're burning down right now. And, like, the building is still there. And I'm seeing these comments coming in. It's like, as I'm physically outside watching federal agents shooting tear gas at people and other assorted things, and people are saying, well, I'M sure it's like this. It's just they're not capturing the actual angle. But this is a dramatization or whatever. But this is what's actually happening. This is the truth. And that's where you start to realize, oh, okay. This isn't really about fact checking anymore. This is about what feels real.
- [13:41]
Sam
It's what people would really like to see and want. I believe another genre of Ice Raid video I saw repeatedly was a pastor standing up to an ICE agent. And like, that is something. It feeds something inside you that you want to see. You want to see resistance. If you are something that someone that's sympathetic to immigrants, I hope we all are. And you want to see someone doing something that you wish you could do, even which is stand up in the face of danger. And the fact that it's not real. There are a lot of people kind of just don't care about that. They just want the warm fuzzy, the dopamine, the serotonin you get from seeing something that affirms your beliefs and makes you feel like some good is being done in the world. And they'll say the same thing. That's the same thing. I'm sure someone out there is doing it. It's a way of abdicating responsibility away from yourself also, because you could be the person that's doing that. You could go to a protest and stand up to an ICE agent. That's dangerous, though. So you'd like to watch a video of someone doing that instead.
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Dexter Thomas
And so I think a lot of this is there's a system here which we have to remember. I mean, you were talking about the incentives and the fact that you can make money off of this stuff, right? And so that's a really important point that's brought up because I think when we think about AI, we think, oh, this is a computer, this is a robot that's making it. But there are actually generally people behind the machine that are making these things. And so is everybody familiar with a meta? Do we know what a meta is? Not meta.
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Jason Kebler
The company, not the company.
- [15:20]
Dexter Thomas
Meta. Okay, meta, meta. So the meta game. Everybody know what a meta game is? Okay, so meta metagame is the game that's on top of the game. So, for example, tic tac toe. Tic tac toe is not. There's a way to win the game, and there's a way to almost guarantee that you win the game, which is to go first. Everybody knows this, right? If you go second, you're probably going to lose. Just go first. That's how it works. Another thing is like, say if you think of like, you know, Street Fighter games like that, people realize that, oh, all right. It turns out that it kind of matters what character you pick. You pick this character, there's the best character, or pick this character, stand down at the corner, just throw fireballs, the whole game, and you'll probably win. Like, you're probably not going to get hit. It's really easy to win. So that's the game on top of the game. People realize that there are ways to quote, unquote, hack the system, right? So there is a meta game, There is a meta. And so when we say meta, that's like the best way to win the game. So think of social media as a game or think of capitalism as a game. The best way to win the game of capitalism or the best way to win the game of social media capitalism, which is to say, to get the most views, what you want to do is you want to do something that feels emotionally impactful. You just want a reaction. It doesn't have to be true, it doesn't have to be insightful. And it doesn't even need to be necessarily, like mean or wrong or like mean spirited. For example, seeing a video of somebody standing up to an ice agent, hopefully everybody in the room would think that at the very least you have an, you have a first Amendment right to go up and say, hey, I don't think what you're doing is a good thing. That's legal right. And there's probably some people who in the room would say, yeah, that's a good thing that they're doing. If you can make that mo, if you can make a video of that moment feel real, you don't have to care as the person creating it whether or not that is actually happening. So the person who was making these videos of the, the fires in la, you know, these baby bears being take, you know, being rescued from the fires and stuff like that. I talked to them, hit them up, I DM them, they talk to me. They're Russian, they don't live here. It doesn't matter what their background is. What matters is, like, they have no stake in this other than are people going to feel emotionally attached to this? Yes or no. As the fires started to fade from the news, they switched to other stuff. There was a rumored ceasefire going to be happening. And so they posted something about Gaza. That video flopped. They moved on to something else. I think if you look at their video now, they're they're posting cute Animals because they're starting to think, okay, well, maybe people don't care about fires or like genocide. Maybe they care about cute bears. When you go back to the cute
- [18:04]
Jason Kebler
bears, it's all, I think that's the really important point is that everything you just said is totally true. But the thing that AI is breaking is the scale and speed and cheapness that this can all happen at. And we're talking right now, we're talking about slop on like Instagram and whatever, but it's happening to every sector of the economy. It's happening to everywhere on the Internet. It's like SEO used to be a thing, search engine optimization, where you wrote, if you wrote recipes, you'd have to write an entire backstory about why you're writing the recipe so that you can rank higher in Google and so on and so forth. And human beings used to write that content and they started doing this formulaic, here is why I make chocolate chip cookies. This is my why. For that. Here's a 3,000 word article about these chocolate chip cookies. And that is all. There's now this thing called AI engine optimization where that same thing is happening, but the content that's being created is being created so that OpenAI scans it, so that anthropic scans it and that it ends up in these AI engines. And so like the point of this panel is to talk not just about social media, but what's happening to Hollywood, what's happening to books, what's happening to like influencer culture, what's happening to like the porn industry, what's happening to everything around us. Because what's happening is the new meta is spam. It's just like spam across everything. And it's not just on social media, it's like the entire Internet, the entire economy. And the reason that it's spam is because for a human being to make anything or to do anything, it takes time, care, effort, money, resources, like all that sort of thing. But to make AI generated content, the entire purpose of it is efficiency and maximalizing what you can do. And so you can basically just spam out like, oh, this type of content is not working well. It only took me 10 seconds to make it. I will try something else. And when that other thing starts working, you just do more of it. More of it, more of it, more of it. And it becomes a lot harder for like human creators, human authors, human influencers to compete with that.
- [20:16]
Geeta Jackson
I want to go back to what you said about the recipe thing, because I think that is an important point to make. I think we're in a weird position right now where all the AI stuff can feel very tricky and fresh because it is new. Ish. It's. In the last couple years, I write about the adult industry and the porn industry quite a bit. And something that that industry in particular is having a real crisis about. Other people are having a crisis about it. The people who are actually in it are not actually that worried, but it's like, are AI influencers. I'm sure everyone has seen, if you're on Instagram at all, you've seen AI influencers who are like doing some kind of onlyfans grift or they're pretending to be hot girls to then get the comments from men who are like, you look so beautiful today. And it's like, that's not a real person. But it doesn't actually matter. To the people who are commenting, it seems like they know that it's AI, but they just want to participate in this ecosystem and feel seen and feel like they are part of something with all these other guys in the comment section. But something that I've started seeing with the AI babes, as we call them, is they have started needing plot lines of their own. They need to pretend to have lives and interesting. It's like with the fruit dramas or those kinds of things. It's like they actually need to have a human emotional pull that goes along with just like the hot girls. Because that's not. You can Google, you know, like hot girls and hot girls come up. But like, you actually need to feel an emotional investment in backstory, right? They need a backstory. They have like, friends. It's like these, these babes have friends and they're AI friends and like they talk to each other on their other accounts. So then if you're following this, you're kind of following this like micro drama of the AI babes. But. But I think we will reach a point and this is why the porn industry is not that worried about it, because they know this very intrinsically where what they're building that on is human creation and human content and IP and also just like, experience. So eventually they will need to do the equivalent of the recipe thing where you need to have an emotional pull. Not just like, I like looking at this eye candy. It's like, I actually want to invest my time into this. Where the humans who are in this industry aren't that worried because they know that the long game is having loyal fans, having people who care about what's going on. Like in Your life, even though that is like a parasocial connection, caring, you know, what you had for breakfast today, what your boyfriend's doing. Like, they, they feel a connection with these people that they crave, that they're maybe not getting in real life or that they want supplementary to their real life. And I think that is like, that gives me hope. Honestly. These conversations get really depressing really fast. But that gives me hope in that there's going to be some kind of moment where AI can't actually keep doing that well, and it will have to plateau because it's drawing on us, it's drawing on human experience.
- [23:07]
Jason Kebler
I want to jump on that and to ask Yita a question. A year or two ago I went to the Chinese theater over here because tcl, which is a Chinese like television manufacturer, was launching a streaming channel that was going to be fully AI generated. And they were showing these AI movie shorts. And there's this dream in Hollywood that you will be able to use AI to make more movies. Editing process, like script writing, all of this. And to some degree this is happening where human beings are being laid off and the ones that are left are being asked to use AI. But some are just saying like, well, maybe we can just like AI generate the whole thing. And they launched these movies and they were very terrible. And they were like, we're going to do this. This is the future of Hollywood. And you know, there's some that are like not so bad, but the ones that they were doing were like extremely bad.
- [24:03]
Geeta Jackson
How mean can I be in this story? And we were like, mean.
- [24:05]
Jason Kebler
Yeah. Like these were getting like 30, like 30 views on YouTube, like nothing like terrible. And backstage in the back room, if you will, we were talking about backrooms. Yeah. And Geeta, you made the point that like things that are like very practical and very human are really breaking through now.
- [24:27]
Sam
Yeah. So if you don't know the background of backrooms, it started not just as a viral YouTube series, but way, way, way back in the day of creepypasta copy and pasted ghost stories essentially that people would send to each other. This was an image that was posted to 4chan of a furniture store being disassembled and just a picture of a showroom essentially without any furniture in it, which just gives you a creepy, uncanny feeling. So from there that turned into several different independent media projects and then also has turned into this movie directed by a 20 year old, which kind of mind blowing, had a budget of $10 million. And this opening weekend it made I think 80 or $90 million it is. I saw it yesterday. It's a great movie. And I read an interview with Kane Parsons where He said that 90% of the effects in the film were practical. And you can really tell when you watch the movie that they're in a real space surrounded by real objects. Disney, which is a corporation that used to have a deal with OpenAI, has expressed a lot of interest in adding AI into their workflows. There was also Amazon recently announced a show, an animation show, that was going to be their foray into AI animation. And one of the principal animators on it, this man named Jorge Gutierrez, was harassed so badly for being a part of that project that he has stepped off. But he has also said AI is already in the animation pipeline. It's inevitable. But. But what I feel is I look at a movie like backrooms and how much money it made. And I also look at like, I love boosters, where you can tell in I love boosters that a lot of the effects are practical. And also when it would necessitate VFX in some way, they. They do stuff like claymation stuff that's really physical and obviously looks like isn't the point isn't realism. It looks fake, but it looks like a movie. And audiences are really responding to the evidence of a human being, essentially. I think I've also noticed this just with my website aftermath. It isn't just that people want to sign up for a website because they think our writing's good. They like knowing for a fact that human beings wrote it. And it gives them a sense of ease to know that we are not using AI. We will never use AI. And the words that you read on your page, they come from real human beings.
- [27:12]
Podcast Host/Announcer
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- [31:57]
Geeta Jackson
Jason, do you want to talk about, on that note, why AI is breaking your brain? Because that is because it is like the exhaustion of like you don't. You can let your guard down. You can think. A human wrote this so I don't have to like fact check it or think about it. And you wrote recently about just like AI Vigilance breaking your brain.
- [32:13]
Jason Kebler
Yeah. So in the lobby there's zine that I made two days ago in my garage.
- [32:20]
Geeta Jackson
A human made that?
- [32:21]
Jason Kebler
Yeah. You can tell. Definitely. It's very lo fi. It's not. It's not the best.
- [32:26]
Sam
There's the cool s in the back. If you need any reason to pick it up. There's the cool s in there.
- [32:30]
Jason Kebler
So, yeah, but basically inside it is an article I wrote a few weeks ago that I was walking my dog in Venice. I live in Venice. And I was listening to a podcast that I had been listening to for, like, years. And the woman narrator just, like, suddenly started saying, like, it's not just that you want to make sure that you're not paying taxes. It's also that blah, blah, blah. And it was like, using these formations that are very common in AI writing. It's not just this, it's that. And she did it like 14 times in a row. And I was like, this is a human. I know this is a human being because I've been listening to this person for years. But she wrote her script with AI And I can tell, like, I wasn't even trying to pick that up, but, like, my brain was like, oh. Like, I can tell that she did that. And it's not that. Well, there you go. So, okay, I went, this is it, though. I went precisely this article. I went to write the article and why I didn't like it. And I was like, it's not just that. And I was like, I'm doing it. I'm doing it. My brain is doing it.
- [33:38]
Dexter Thomas
Did you say you were going to delve into the topic more?
- [33:41]
Jason Kebler
I did use that word. That's not in my vocabulary, really, but that's the thing. It's like these machines are trained on real human writing. They have these patterns. It's pattern recognition. They start doing it. And I don't really want to be like, the AI police, the AI cops being like, did. Did my colleague write this using AI? Sam, did you send that email? No, but I get all these emails from readers and things like that, or PR people, Please write about my company. I was like, this is AI generated. You didn't put any effort into this. But what I noticed is that my brain is doing these constant machinations, like, is this real? Is this AI? Is this real? Is this AI? Do I care if it's real? Do I care if it's AI? Is it low stakes? Some of the stuff that I showed you up there, I don't really like any of it. Some of it, now that I'm getting, I'm like, eh, that's not so bad. Is that okay that I like it? And I feel like everyone is doing this to some degree when they go on the Internet. And I think it's pretty maddening, honestly. And I guess. I think that it is undeniable that artificial intelligence is changing the world at the moment, it's like there's so much money being put into it. People are losing their jobs because of it. You are encountering it. I think we can resist it. I think that you can be very human and sort of try to cut through the noise in that way. But companies are firing tens of thousands of people at once because they're like, well, we replaced you with a robot. And so I don't think it's something that's just going to suddenly go away. But this article is basically about how do we deal with. With this? Because we are in a situation now where everything we encounter on the Internet, but also in real life. Like, I see menus. Like, I'm like, this is AI generated.
- [35:35]
Sam
Like, a lot of Spencer Pratt's campaign materials.
- [35:38]
Geeta Jackson
Can we talk about Spence?
- [35:39]
Sam
Oh, my God, please, let's talk about Spence.
- [35:41]
Jason Kebler
Yeah, please save me. Let's talk about Los Angeles.
- [35:43]
Sam
Anyone trusts him when he was on the hills? We have, like, documented evidence of what he's like as a human being.
- [35:49]
Geeta Jackson
Anyway, do you want to get into Spencer? Because this has also been breaking your brain.
- [35:53]
Jason Kebler
Yeah. So, I mean, obviously Spencer Pratt running for mayor of la. I don't know if everyone here is, like, familiar with the type of campaign that he is running, but the type of campaign that he is running is one that is predicated on going viral repeatedly on the Internet using AI generated videos where he's like, wearing a Batman outfit and he's attacking Karen Bass, like, at a, like, Illuminati. Illuminati meeting or something.
- [36:20]
Geeta Jackson
Yeah.
- [36:21]
Jason Kebler
And you know, the thing is, is that this. He keeps going viral. He's getting tons of attention. It's unclear whether any of this attention is, like, from people in Los Angeles or whether it's like Silicon Valley, AI boosters and Elon Musk on Twitter and so on and so forth, but he's gotten, like, real buzz by doing this. And it feels like, one, the new way of kind of like, campaigning. But then two, a lot of these videos he's actually not making. It's like his fans are making them. He's picking up the ones that he thinks are popular or, like, I don't know, make him look like he owns the libs the most or something. And then he's posting those. And so it's almost this situation where he's just like, grabbing stuff off the Internet and using it. And I don't really know what to say beyond that other than it feels very bleak and dire. And I don't really know. It's like, so Decentralized at this point.
- [37:19]
Sam
It reminds me a lot of an article I read in the New York Times a couple months ago that I responded to on Aftermath about AI romance novels. And there were a lot of. There were like three authors in there that said they use AI in some part of the process of writing romance novels. But then like, I did a little bit of digging into the first author that was quoted most extensively who coincidentally sells a course to teach you how to write a romance novel with AI and she essentially writes just as many books as possible, churning them out formulaically, and they all sell maybe 30 copies each. And then you look on Goodreads and they all have like one or two stars. Maybe people don't actually like reading them, but it takes something that is like, real. Like something that's real. People like reading these books. They give the people comfortable, they make them happy. And then it's reducing it just to its most cynical components, you know, campaigning as just, I need to be the most popular. It doesn't really even matter what I'm saying or how I am owning the libs, but if someone makes content for me and I look good, then I'm just going to recirculate that. And it feels. I don't know, it makes me depressed because it feels like there's some kind of social contract breaking down there. Like, I. I want to. I don't want to be in a community. I am working on a romance novel right now, and I don't want to be in a community with authors that want to take this shortcut. I like to write words because I love writing and I love the craft. And sometimes it makes me want to bang my head against the wall. But that's what makes writing good and fun. I've talked to programmers who say, I know that Claude Code can write a lot of basic programs faster than I can, but I code because I like the craft of coding and I don't want to offload that to a machine. And here, where it's about like advocating for an entire city, it just feels disgusting. Like, it gives me the ick, like, hugely. And I feel an intense disconnect with people who find that appealing.
- [39:29]
Dexter Thomas
Well, hold on. You're not just writing a romance novel. You signed a book deal, right?
- [39:32]
Sam
Yeah, I have a. I'm tentative publication date next year. Next. The fall.
- [39:39]
Dexter Thomas
Don't undersell it.
- [39:40]
Sam
Come on. Yeah, no, come on. Level up for romance is coming from Mira Books next fall. Yeah. I have always wanted to write a novel and to see these authors that are Essentially saying that AI novels are inevitable, eventually everyone will use AI in part of the process. If it's idea generation, which is like, AI doesn't have any original ideas definitionally or proofreading or something, frequently it's like you don't even like writing. You don't even like writing. Why do you want to be an author if you want to use something to think for you to create this product? But it's made me sort of confront this fact that a lot of people actually do want to skip all of the hard parts and just have the success. It does sound really appealing when you put it that way. Right. It is a tool that appeals so directly to scammers. And I now just aesthetically associate these images and that kind of writing with someone who's trying to pull the wool over my eyes in some way.
- [40:48]
Dexter Thomas
Okay, so this is. Man, there's a lot here.
- [40:52]
Geeta Jackson
So
- [40:54]
Dexter Thomas
that is. That brings me back, though, to what we were talking about earlier, though, which is it's the meta. We've realized that the meta is just volume. Yeah, it's volume. And Right. You know what, Wayne Gretzky, you miss a hundred, you know, 100% of the shots that you don't take. Just take a million shots. One of them will go in. They don't have to be good shots. You just, like, hit the puck in this general direction, which AI can do that for you can hit the puck in general direction for you. One of these things is going to go in, and that's it. I mean, you know, it's expensive practicing not to make a too big of a deal out of this. But, you know that model that you're talking about, which is other people posting, you know, making clips for you, that's the Andrew Tate model. Yeah, that's the Andrew Tate model. Which is. Which is just to say that it's not really about having anything specific to say. It's about getting a bunch of other people to make clips for you, and then you promote those clips, and those will go viral. And the person who's making the clips, quote, unquote, big scare quotes here, everybody wins. I think society loses. To be very clear here, everybody wins. Right. But I think. Okay, to talk about another game thing,
- [42:01]
Sam
though,
- [42:03]
Dexter Thomas
not a good chess player at all. But one of the things that I hear from chess players is that they can recognize, like a really good chess player can recognize when somebody's setting up a particular move. Like, they know what. Okay, I see what you're doing there. Right. So if I. The thing that we're talking about here where, you know, people want human connection and they want to feel human connection. I think if I'm to look at this from the perspective of an AI booster, right? You know, take 100 steps back here. I think what is happening here is that, yes, maybe some of us in here truly care about the craft of films. Maybe some of us in here truly care about movies. That Venn diagram isn't necessarily a circle, though, right? Maybe some of you really, really, really care about filmmaking. Maybe some of you really, really, really care about writing. Maybe some people really care about food. There's a couple restaurants here which I will not name, which I know the people who own them, and I've talked to them, and they'll tell me. I talked to them when they were opening, they were saying, man, we make this really handcrafted food. It's all organic or whatever. And I look at the menu and all the imagery is AI generated. Food is very important to them. Visual art doesn't matter. It's decoration. We've gotten to a point where, like, if you ask for organic food, you're a snob. That's weird. Really, like, seriously, like. And I'm kind of one of those people, like, if you tell me, like, I only eat organic tomatoes, like, bro,
- [43:34]
Sam
come on, man, give me the chemicals.
- [43:37]
Dexter Thomas
Seriously, like, give me all the chemicals for real. But I think this is what's happening. I think that the move that's being made, and I don't think there's like, some, you know, group of AI people that are, you know, standing to make money. But if I was thinking from that perspective, it is this. Some people will resist in some directions, but they won't resist for everything. Not everybody really cares. Like, I really care about music. You play AI music around me, we're probably not friends anymore, you know, like, the images, like, I might give you a pass. Kraft macaroni and cheese. Let's go. Like, I don't care. Like, AI that up. Like, make it more artificial. I don't care. Right? But this is what I'm talking about, is that not every individual is going to push back on everything and want human in everything. That is the move that's being set up. Now, the problem. So, okay, what's the counter move, bro? I don't know. That's the problem. Sometimes you're playing chess and you're like, damn, that's a good move. I'm not really sure what to do about that, but I think it's good to know what move is being set up. And I think that is the structure that's being put up is again, that there is a. The bet being made is that not every human being is going to demand humans in every aspect of their art.
- [44:55]
Sam
Yeah, there is a video game that is very popular and very successful. It's an extraction shooter called Arc Raiders. And my cousin loves this game. When this game was first released, the developers were using AI voice acting for some of the. They're called barks. When characters say things off screen like, oh, a grenade, you know, that kind of thing. And if. If you're not really cognizant of how video games are made, you might think, oh, having AI barks is probably fine. An AI voice going, oh, you got me is probably not that bad. But there's a whole industry of real human beings that do that for a living and they normally get paid for that. And now that industry is beginning to shrink. What was hilarious though, is when Arc Raiders started making a lot of money, suddenly the development team, to win back social goodwill from other gamers were like, we're going to replace all those AI voice lines. We realize that actually human voice acting is just better. And I find that really interesting because they know they can cut good press and PR from websites like Polygon or Kotaku, writing art raiders developers to remove AI voice lines. But also you decided that human labor was not worth it in the first place. So if you already knew that human voice acting was better, why didn't you just hire a voice actor?
- [46:20]
Jason Kebler
Well, I think that's. It's a good question. But I think that's. The thing is like, the economics of all of this is like, that's why we try to focus so much on what is the economic incentive behind driving all of this. And I think like we. We do use AI in different ways at 404 Media, but not generative AI, not like that. It's just like Google search is AI, Google Maps is AI. Like there's different types of translation, like in animation.
- [46:56]
Sam
Line stabilization is a tool that uses AI like predictions. And that is something that animators really, really love.
- [47:02]
Jason Kebler
And it's been. But like these different, like translation is
- [47:05]
Dexter Thomas
a heavy topic too, man.
- [47:07]
Jason Kebler
Yeah.
- [47:08]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
Woof.
- [47:10]
Dexter Thomas
No, but like all it's all.
- [47:11]
Jason Kebler
Well, it's been like injected into like every part of like Adobe software. Like just using the Internet, using different types of machine learning and these sorts of things. And not all of it is large language models. Actually, a lot of it is. A lot of the most useful stuff is not. But I think that each Person sort of needs to decide, like, what is their line for? Like, what is your creative process going to be? Or like, what, what types of AI are you going to use in your work? And like, how, how does one abstain from it or resist it if they want to? Like, I did an article a year ago, basically being like, the journalistic pivot to AI is, is not going to work because at like big media companies, they're like, we are going to have robots write our articles. And you know something that I think about a lot is like, it takes so much time and effort to gain credibility and trust, and it takes like zero seconds to ruin it. It's like some weirdo wrote a book recently and it's like half of the things in it were AI generated and the New York Times wrote about it and so on and so forth. And it's just like, I don't want to read that book anymore. I forget the name of it. But it's about how AI is changing everything. Half of the sources in it are not real. And it's like, cool, good.
- [48:28]
Geeta Jackson
You're not wrong. It is changing everything. Yeah, for sure is. Yeah. And like, we've, we've made active decisions to. It's like, so you have like hired people to do like actually like translating YouTube videos when you were investigating a lot of this AI stuff. It's like, I need someone who's like a native speaker of this language because the auto generation that the AI is doing on YouTube is not good. Or like, if we wanted to, we did the zine last year that was about Ice action in LA specifically and Flock and surveillance. And we hired translators to translate the zine into Spanish because the work that it would take to run that through like Google Translate and then we would have to hire somebody anyway to check it because you can't trust the output.
- [49:10]
Jason Kebler
Well, could have run it through Google Translate and then just published it. And then someone would be like, you screwed this up. Like, I don't trust you use AI. Like, whatever. But. But yeah, I mean, to your point, like a lot of the AI slop articles that I've written, the sort of, the industry behind it, if you will, is in India. And so there's all these YouTube videos in Hindi about, like, here's how to generate videos about the AI, about shrimp Jesus and the LA wildfires, and here's what Americans care about in all of this. And it's like, I don't speak Hindi. I don't speak every language that these YouTube videos are happening in. And I Guess in an ideal world I would hire someone to watch all of those and tell me what's going on here. But honestly, it was like hundreds of hours of videos. And so what I did was I watched them using the auto translate feature, which I guess is AI, and then I was like, this seems interesting. Let me now pay a human being to actually translate what they're saying. I was using it to sort of get the vibe of what was happening in any given video. And like, to me, I felt like that was an. I mean, it was the YouTube built in translation service. Like, I didn't feel like I was like, sinning, if you will like to do that. And then we had that extra layer and same like, I write a lot about Flock, the automated license plate readers that Sam just mentioned. And it's like all of the things that are happening in that world, all the resistance to Flock right now is happening at city councils and like around the country. And they're happening in these meetings that are like four hours long. And I'm not watching like four hour long meetings from like 50 different cities every week. I'm opening up the translation or the transcription tool on YouTube control F for Flock. And then I'm watching like part of it, and I'm like, oh, this is the meeting where they talk about Flock. Cause sometimes it's a four hour meeting. I thought they were gonna talk about Flock and they don't at all. And I was like, cool. That's four hours of my life I'm not getting back.
- [51:10]
Sam
Do you guys still use OTTER for transcribing interviews? Otter, I'm horrible, horrible at transcribing interviews because I hate the sound of my own voice and I just don't want to hear it. And OTTER is very useful for just turning a really long audio file on my phone into something that I can go back into, Control F for certain keywords, and then sort of double check the transcription to make sure it's 100% accurate. And like, otherwise I'd be stuck here not transcribing anything because I don't want to hear my stupid voice.
- [51:41]
Geeta Jackson
Also, it's like these things are getting worse as they, as time goes on because they're ingesting more and more of the same bad shit. And so, like, and now OTTER is also not to just sit here and dump on Otter, but they should fix this stuff. It's like they're in just. They're injecting more and more AI prompts. It's like every part of the screen now is like do you want AI to do this? Do you want AI to summarize this? No, I don't. I. I just want you to do the thing that I pay for. And then I want to actually do the work of looking through the transcript and looking through the interview that I just did and being like, this is important to me. I don't want you to tell me what's important.
- [52:12]
Sam
Google started writing email responses, like pre writing email responses for me, and I wanted to shoot my computer with a gun. I was so angry that day because it's like, I wouldn't say that number one. And two, I can tell just from context that you don't know what I'm talking about, what this email is about. And you have to go deep into its settings to turn off all AI features. And even then, you still have a prompt for Gemini right at the top of the screen, replacing the place where I usually would click to go get Google Calendar. So my mouse over it accidentally all of the time.
- [52:46]
Dexter Thomas
So this is the issue, though, I think, is that we're all a very particular group of people here that are on the stage, but also everybody who like the fact that you came here, you're a very particular group of people. I mean, okay, actually going back to like, the. The art thing we were talking about, like, the act of creation, right? How many of you would refuse to listen to music that was created with AI? Okay, how many of you would refuse to read a book that was created with AI? Okay, how about watch a movie that was created with AI? Oh, okay. Some of these are the same, some of these are not. What. What about use a computer program that was partially created with AI?
- [53:28]
Podcast Host/Announcer
Wow.
- [53:28]
Dexter Thomas
How am I going to know? But then less people. But then, okay, what about the people who truly care about this, who truly care about coding? What about something that was translated with AI? Okay, see, now this is the thing. And actually, this is why I think what 404 did was so important. And I don't think if it really, like, flew over people's heads, but a lot of the ice reporting was translated into Spanish by human beings. This is why I like the phrase slop so much, is because we're used to the idea that certain people get a degraded experience with something. If you can only read Spanish or Spanish is the language you're most comfortable with. You don't get the premium stuff, you get the slop societally. We've decided that you do what I'm saying. And I think one of the things that's going to continue to happen is that we're just going to get used to like, oh, okay, well the slop is normal food. And, and we're, and for some experiences we don't. You don't deserve the premium experience. There will be people who get the human made stuff. There will be people who get the guarantee that this book was written by a human. That this, that this, that this journalism was made by a human. But listen, journalists have to eat. Like everybody up here got to get paid at some point, right? If you're generating slop journalism about stuff that may or may not have happened, that stuff is free. And so the social contract type stuff, like every individual having to make the decision that works for everybody in this room, I think, because I think we're all in the form of making those decisions for ourselves. What I want to add on top of that though is that those decisions are being actively made for us. You do what I'm saying where like again, societally we've kind of gotten used to the idea that oh yeah, certain people, if they don't, if English isn't their native language, they just don't get the good stuff. That's an unhinged conclusion to come to.
- [55:32]
Sam
There's a reason why we've decided that's okay. There's a reason why they're pushing AI in really specific categories of media. Pornography smut is like outside of mainstream culture. It's denigrated, usually romance novels. Even though they are basically single handedly like holding the entire publishing industry on its shoulders, people degrade romance novels and say that they have no, no value. I even think the kinds of movies that you saw, the Grandma's Chinese or tcl, whatever they are, I watch some of the clips from them and they're all like big action blockbusters. So movies we think of, it's also
- [56:12]
Jason Kebler
a budget TV company. Like it's for the people who can't afford like a Samsung TV or whatever.
- [56:18]
Sam
And yeah, yeah, I mean it's also like the, the AI Fruit stuff. It's all literally just recreating reality television. Like it's literally some of the same plot lines from Love island, like most frequently. And these are all things that we've kind of all accepted that reality TV is hugely exploitative and terrible. But we also, I watch it, I watch that shit. Like I love that shit so much. You know, I, I know that some of these categories of things, like they are all made by humans, but we've kind of accepted that some of them are lesser forms and therefore don't need to be respected. But it's in these lesser forms. It's in video games also, it's in animation, cartoons.
- [56:59]
Dexter Thomas
Who cares? It's cartoons.
- [57:00]
Sam
Exactly. Who cares? Kids don't need kids. Entertainment is also, there's a huge amount of AI bullshit. If you let the YouTube Kids recommendation flow just keep going, you will inevitably end up with at least something with AI voice acting in it. And we've just decided, yeah, that those people that like that stuff, those experiences do not matter. It does not matter if they're good or not.
- [57:21]
Jason Kebler
And I think both of you make such good points. And I think we were up here talking about like, you know, specific journalism tools that it's like, oh, we would use AI for this, we use AI for that. That's maybe boring if you're not a journalist. But I think for everyone out there, they need to sort of think like, like, well, I'm probably going to be asked to use this in my job or in my industry or I might lose my job to this industry. And I think it's hard because it's like a very difficult economy right now. But it's like, to what degree are you comfortable using these tools? And also like, as a person, like, what do you do better than a robot? 48 everyone does something much better than a robot. Like, I think that the quality, like, I guess there will, as you said, be like sort of a high and a low in terms of like, well, there's going to be like organic content that is made fully by humans and then it will live in a sea of AI generated content. And I think that standing out is right now still possible. But because like you said, we're not getting to make that choice. The algorithms are making the choice for us. And at the most powerful companies in the world are pushing this technology on their users, like, in ways that often aren't even noticeable or are super annoying. But they just keep doing it and hope that you'll eventually want Gmail to write an email for you and it'll be two robots talking. It'll be two humans talking to each other as intermediated by just Gmail responses.
- [58:51]
Sam
I resent this idea that a lot of jobs in the future are just going to become an AI minder. That is the future that is being sold to us, that we're going to sit next to a machine and just make sure it doesn't go off track. Essentially it doesn't explode on us. Like we're all going to end up being Homer Simpson with the drinky bird, you know, like that's just it. And I think there's more to the digital life than that.
- [59:15]
Dexter Thomas
Well, we're going to have. I mean, yeah, we're at whatever, whatever is going to happen. It's my thing, what it comes down to, unfortunately. I'm really sorry. It comes down to capitalism. If we want any changes being made, I have to say that it's probably going to be legislation. It's not going to be individual people making choices. And I say that because of this. 48% of practicing Christians say that they would trust AI for their spiritual development. And this wasn't done by some non part like whatever critical of Christians. This was made by a Christian, specifically a Christian polling organization. So they would know. What does that mean for pastors? All the pastors in the house, all the priests in the house. I don't know what you're like, maybe your job is also at risk too. But I say that to say that if. That if that one of the most innermost parts of humanness within America, specifically. Right. Myself not being a Christian. There's, there's something a little bit deeper that isn't going to be solved by everybody, you know, all of us in this room, you know, signing a piece of paper saying no to AI, like it just ain't gonna happen. It's gonna be a lot bigger than that, unfortunately, which means it's a lot tougher. But you know, it's good to know what the opponent's move is at the very least.
- [60:36]
Jason Kebler
Right?
- [60:42]
Podcast Host/Announcer
Thanks so much for listening and watching. This has been the 404 Media Podcast. We'll be back with another episode in a couple days. If you enjoyed this podcast, please tell your friends about us. This podcast was edited and produced by Alyssa Midcalf. It was filmed by the LA Public Library. And thanks again to the LA Public
- [61:01]
Jason Kebler
Library for having us.
- [61:03]
Podcast Host/Announcer
I'm Jason Kebler.
- [61:04]
Jason Kebler
We'll be back soon.
- [61:08]
Dexter Thomas
Sam.