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Foreign.
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Welcome to the 404 Media podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404 Media Co as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content@ 404 Media co. I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are two of the 404 Media co founders. The first being Emanuel Mayberg.
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Hello.
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And Jason Kebler.
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A
Hello.
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And then we're also joined by our regular contributor, Matthew Galt.
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D
Hello.
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B
All right, so we are officially back for the new year. I hope everybody enjoyed the replays of our interview episodes. There was mine with the head of Signal. Sam had one about pornhub as well. Definitely check those out if you haven't already. And I think those were good because a lot of stuff has happened in both of those broader stories when it comes to AI encryption, backdoors, age verification, porn and everything else. So I thought those were good to carry us over. But we're back.
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A
It's good to be back. New content, new content, please.
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B
Exactly. And we actually published a ton over the holiday break. Obviously we wrote a lot of this beforehand and that one of those is the first story we're going to talk about. That is Matthew's one. The headline was Research is a Hunting America for Hidden Data Centres. I'm actually going to read the lead because I thought it was really, really good and I think that'll set us up for the rest of the discussion if I can read it on my tiny screen here. A team of researchers at Epoch AI, a non profit research institute, are using open source intelligence to map the growth of America's data centers. The team pours over satellite imagery, building permits and other local legal documents to build a map of the massive computer filled buildings spring up across the United States. Matthew, this is really, really interesting. It came in pretty late in the year, right at the end and then we published it, as I said, over the holiday. So we'll get into the map and the specifics and your experience with it. But what is this organization? What is Epoch AI?
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D
It's a. Sometimes I struggle with what to call these things. So it's like a think tank, basically it's a nonprofit think tank that is just tracking the growth of the AI industry. And having talked to them, I think that they are ambivalent to pro AI, quite honestly, but they are serious about understanding the impact of this technology, especially with regards to the infrastructure that it's going to take to build it out. And so you can kind of think of them as like, they're collecting a bunch of data to explain to any kind of anyone that would come to them about what's going on in the country and the rest of the world, quite frankly. But one of their main focuses is America, but they are looking outside of the US as well.
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B
Sure. So just to expand on that a little bit, what is this motivation for building this map? It's just, hey, we think more information is better or we think, why specifically focus on this? What's sort of the drive behind it?
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D
Because we don't know a lot about it. I wouldn't say that data center construction is a secretive industry, but it is just something that's kind of sprung up in the last couple years in the United States and is affecting a lot of communities. People don't always understand how it's affecting the communities and what's being built. Exactly. And who owns what. So it is just an attempt to like, get a baseline knowledge of what's in the country and like, what it seems to be costing in terms of like, energy infrastructure and like, what exactly it looks like, how big it is and you know, who owns it. Yeah, it's like sometimes, sometimes you live. I've been talking to people the last like six months and sometimes you live down the street from like a woodland area. It gets cleared out and like buildings start being constructed and you have no idea what the hell going on.
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B
Right. Jason, I feel like you've brought it up a few times about how we want to cover data centers or AI data centers more and more. Matthew has been doing that with I think three or four articles at this point. Something like that.
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D
There's another one in the hopper too.
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B
That's going to be one coming.
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D
Super interesting.
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B
Great. So what's the context here, Jason, of like.
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I mean, this is a. This is the entire American economy at this point. It's like it's. I mean, it's. It's pretty shocking if you actually look at the numbers, which I do not have in front of me right now. But if you look at the jobs numbers, it's like there are two places where there is job growth in the United States right now. It's like nursing and healthcare because they're an aging population. And it's data center construction. It's like construction jobs, like H Vac jobs. Like. Yeah, like electricians and things like that. And so one it's like the entire American economy is like, betting on this. Two data centers are, like, really controversial in the places that they are being built and set up for a variety of reasons. One, often they're like, pretty loud. Two, and more importantly, they use a shitload of energy. And so there is like quite a lot of discussion about how we are powering these things. You know, in many cases, they're powered by fossil fuels. In some cases, very rarely or not often enough, I would say, are they being powered by renewable energy. And so there's. There goes like a hand in hand, like, who, how are these things being powered? And also what are the impacts on the local community because of that? Because in a lot of places these data centers have come in and people's electricity bills have gone through the roof because there's, you know, the, the actual, like, power generation, there's like, not enough of it to go around. And so the price of it goes up. And, and often, I mean, these things are. Well, maybe the map shows more. But I, I would say the ones that are quite controversial are ones that are being built in relatively poor areas. And so they're being built in places where people can't afford to pay more for their electricity. And that's happening because a lot of times, you know, the city governments, the state governments are giving tax breaks to these companies to build these things. And so they're getting put in places where there's not as much like NIMBY type pushback. There's also a lot of them being built in like, Northern Virginia, which is a pretty wealthy place. And there's like a, there is a lot of pushback there because that's a pretty rich part of the country. And it's just become like this huge political issue in those places. Like, we probably should do this at some point, but there's a state representative in Virginia who ran essentially on like an anti AI, anti data center platform, and he was elected. So, yeah, I mean, that's like the broader context. And I bring up Virginia because it's close to D.C. it's also close to where the Internet enters the country. There's all these different places where the undersea cables enter the country. And so you have a lot of Internet throughput capability there. And so that's one of the reasons that that's happening there, among others. But yeah, it's like, hugely important at the moment.
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B
Yeah.
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D
Also the water.
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Right, the water. And then one other thing is like, once these things are actually built, they don't bring that many jobs it's like there's a lot of jobs in actually building them, but then once they're up and running, it's like there's not that many people who work on them to keep them up and running. So it's not like it's some amazing financial boon for these local communities. There's kind of, like, a lot of promise. And then once they're up and running, it's like, okay, we have, like, seven people working there or whatever. I don't know actually how many people it takes, but I think I mentioned this on a recent podcast that we recorded, but I went to a bitcoin mine in upstate New York that was causing some of these problems a few years ago, where the bitcoin mine was built there because they had really cheap hydropower. And the bitcoin mine sucked up so much of the energy that people's bills were going through the roof. And the bitcoin mining company was like, oh, but we brought, like, we're bringing jobs back to this town that doesn't have that many. And it's like there was actually only two people working at the bitcoin mine because it's just like, they needed someone to, like, turn on the light and they needed, like, security, essentially. There was once it was actually like everything was installed. There was nothing going on there. And it's like, that is not the exact same as these data centers, but it's. It's similar in Vibe, where it's just like, you just have a bunch of computers running, and you just have to make sure that the computers don't blow up.
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B
Well, for this, it's probably even worse because once it's built, the AI is going to be running in the data center. It's, like, cool. Now we have the AI to take even more jobs, which aren't even physically located here. Obviously, I'm generalizing. Matthew, what were you going to say?
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D
There's just a similar situation happening in West Texas in a city called Clarendon, where it's got, like, a population of 10,000 people, and it's mostly retirees. It's people that moved out there because it was cheap to live there. And this is like, they wanted to retire close to the plains. And just like that's. This is. This is the final place they're going. Well, guess where they're building a data center. And guess what's happening to everyone's electricity bills? And they're giving the same line like, well, we're bringing jobs to the communities. Like, we didn't need it. Was a bunch of retirees. We didn't need jobs.
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B
They literally don't want jobs.
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D
Yeah. And the other thing that I think is one of the other things I think is really interesting about this stuff and one of the things that worries me about how it's propping up the community is that it's an enormous gamble that people think is going to pay off in five, ten years.
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B
How so?
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D
In West Texas again, near Amarillo, they're going to build four big nuclear reactors, suck up a bunch of water from an aquifer that's already not doing great to kind of to fuel them. The reactors probably won't come on for at least five years, probably more. So to get the data center up and running that they want to power with the, the nuke plants that will be constructed before the nuke plants are, they're going to build a bunch of like natural gas plants to, to burn, burn everything off. It's going to spike everyone's energy bills because none of that's going to go back into the community. And what happens in five years, 10 years if there's a contraction on LLMs, if this AI stuff doesn't pan out? And now we've invested billions of dollars in all this infrastructure that's just going to be unnecessary overnight, no longer profitable to build, what happens then?
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Yeah, you know, totally fair.
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I mean this is, this is like the huge trillion dollar question is like are we going to have these husks of data like these abandoned data centers? And I think Emmanuel, to put you on the spot is a little bit more bullish on this. That sort of like kind of regardless of what happens with AI, like there will be some need for these data centers eventually at some point. So like perhaps the risk of this is not as, as high, but nonetheless.
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We will compute something. Whether that's generating images on Grok or something else is to be seen or it doesn't mean it will be a good return on investment. But I don't think they'll sit there empty like abandoned gold mines or something.
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Streaming video games. Right. I mean it's like anything, yeah, Xbox can put their servers there or whatever.
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Five years.
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This happened right before we went on break. And I hesitate to like open this Pandora's box, but have we followed the data centers in space debate? It doesn't make any sense to me like from a, from a logistical perspective.
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D
Again, it's one of those things where it takes too much money to build it to get any kind of return on it in anything under like a hundred Years. Right. Like, it's a. It's a great idea because it's cold up there, etc. But like to get everything up there and get it running and then beam everything back, it's just like, that's. That seems like a pretty tall order.
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C
I thought we were putting them in the ocean.
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A
I think the ocean is better. Well, don't clip this, because I don't. I mean, the negative externalities of having them underwater could be many, but ocean is also very cold and is a lot closer. And the Internet's already down there.
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And they've done it. They did one test. I remember Microsoft.
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Microsoft has or had one.
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C
Yeah.
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B
Well, speaking of, maybe there's one under the water. Is that on the map, Matthew? Or rather, let me rephrase the question to bring it to the story. They have this map and you can scroll through it and zoom around and look at all of these different data centers across America. How is epochai actually building this map? I touched on this by reading out the lead. But how are they making this map? Are they just on Google Street View? What are they doing?
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D
I mean, they're using slightly fancier things than Google Street View, but yes, they're looking at satellite imagery. They're kind of tracking news stories about the announcement of data centers. And then you go and you look at the satellite imagery for the location. You pour through, like, local filings at the county level and at the city level to see, like, what people have declared that they are building. And then one of the things I thought was really fascinating is looking at the satellite imagery for these construction projects and looking specifically at what cooling infrastructure is like. So they look and they see if something's uncovered, which a lot of stuff is like, how many fans are they building? How big are the fans? And then that they kind of have like, a formula that they go through and say, like, all right, so they've got this number of fans, and that tells us that it's using this much electricity and that it's generating this much data. Right. And kind of working backward from the problem, because a lot of this stuff is, you know, Google doesn't want to necessarily tell you how much gig megawatts, like a DeepMind facility in New Albany is using. Right? So they. They look at the outside of the thing and. And work backwards that way. It's all. It's all open source and open information.
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B
I mean, it actually sounds like a fair bit of work, you know, like bringing it all together. What is your experience scrolling through the map? Is it pretty Intuitive, Is it informative? Like, what's it like actually to use this map?
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D
I think it's really good because it's all like, you just look at the map, it's all right there, you got your bright blue circles, you click on a blue circle, go into it and then it's all annotated. Like I'm looking at this one for Google, that's in Oklahoma, and it'll kind of walk you through all the little individual pieces like I was talking about. Like this is where the backup power is, this is where its fans are. And then you can even click through dates to see what it was look like, what it looked like as it was under construction. You get a lot of information about what these things look like and how they work just by going through these maps.
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B
Interesting. How busy is the map? Are we talking a few results? Dozens? Because it can't be a massively populated map.
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Or maybe I'm wrong. No, no, no. It's only got in the US it's only got a few results right now because there's kind of an arbitrary line that they've marked where like you could technically say, like everyone's PC is a, is a data center, right? Because it's, it's doing compute, it has a GPU in it. At what point do you have enough GPUs strung together that you consider it a data center for the purposes of this map?
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Right.
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D
And right now they're kind of only looking at like bigger, more massive projects and that's what they're, they're charting out. But, and also they don't know about everything and they haven't run the numbers on every little thing they've found. So that's just stuff kind of comes up as they have the time to get it up on the map. So right now it's like a dozen things in the United States. They've got some other stuff in other places in the world. They've got some in Oman and one in China that they found. But I imagine the map is going to grow as the year goes on, right?
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B
It's not cataloging Every DigitalOcean and AWS Data center because of course they're all over the place and have been for years and years and years because everything is obviously move to cloud infrastructure and that sort of thing. But it's not that it's very specifically stuff about AI, right?
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D
This is very narrowly focused on, yeah, the stuff that is powering like DeepMind and Xai and anthropic stuff and like even an Alibaba data center that's here or in China rather. So yeah, it is very narrowly on those kinds of things. And they also have like some stuff that's like, we think that this is what it is. So yeah, that is kind of what's going on.
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B
I think just to round it out, what happens now? Are you going to keep an eye on this map and return to it? I mean, I guess that it's not really going to break news probably. I don't think this map is going to reveal a new data center because it's going to be picked up in local or national press, presumably before it's on the map. But do you think you'll come back to this?
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D
Like, this is going to be a resource resource for me this year. And it was especially interesting because we. This is one of those that like, I kind of stumbled on this at the end of the year because I was talking to some guys about some nuke stuff and some like some Oent stuff they're doing with, with, with like nuke watching. And they were like, have you talked to the data, these data center guys? They're doing something very interesting and that's kind of how I got onto this. And I was interested because like, Jason, I think data center and resistance to data center is going to be a pretty big story this year. And I kind of wrote this without like at the end of the year without super thinking about it. Very hard talk to the guys. And I came back and I had so many emails and messages from people that were like, they're building a data center here. Like this thing is going up. And like it just like any kind of anytime I write about this stuff, it really, people were paying attention and it really like, you know, I always get a lot of ton of messages. So it just again it tells me that like this is something that people really care about. So as I continue to like carve out a data center beat this year, this is going to be a resource for me for sure.
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B
Hell yeah. Yeah, that sounds great. And you're right. People do get, people do care about it.
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A
Jason, I have a very quick update on the Microsoft data center. It's very funny on the underwater ones. So in 2020, soon after they were launched, the headline on a Microsoft press release is Microsoft Finds Underwater Data Centers Are Reliable, Practical and Use Energy Sustainably. And then it says more than half the world's population lives within 120 miles of the coast. By putting data centers underwater near coastal cities, data would have a short distance to travel leading to Fast and smooth web surfing, video streaming and game playing. Here is a headline from IT Pro, which is a trade publication that writes about data centers and other things. From July 19, 2024, Microsoft scrapped its Project Natic, which is what this was called Underwater Data Center Trial. Here's why. It was never going to work. It's basically like they had all sorts of issues with it. They're not running it anymore. The main issue was that it was like hundreds of feet under the ocean. And so if they needed to do any sort of maintenance on it, they needed either scuba divers or to haul the entire data center back up to the surface, which was extremely expensive and did not work. So perhaps underwater, maybe not the best.
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B
Which makes you think it's also quite expensive to go up to space, as far as I know. Like it's not super cheap, you know.
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A
So as I recall, when we had to service the Hubble Space Telescope, for example, that was like quite, quite an undertaking.
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B
Right? Right. Why didn't they call it Project Atlantis? That would have made way more sense.
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D
Too on the nose.
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B
Yeah, I guess so. All right, we'll leave that there. When we come back after the break, we're going to be talking about, frankly, the complete shit show that's happening with Grok and it's AI image generation. We'll be right back after this.
- [22:25]
A
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D
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- [25:48]
B
All right, and we are back. Jason, this is one you wrote, but I know everybody here has thoughts on this, so please jump in. But just to get it started, the headline was grok's AI CSAM Shit show, referring to child sexual abuse imagery or material. Sorry, Jason. To get going. What did people realize over the holiday that they could have Grok do?
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A
Yeah, so I mean, hey, at Grok has been become a big thing on X, like, hey, at Grok, like respond to this person, blah, blah, blah. And people realized that they could ask Grok to put women in bikinis who had posted their photos on Twitter on X or to do all sorts of things like spread her legs, take her clothes off, so on and so forth. And it became a meme for the last, I don't know, like two weeks. At this point, it's still happening to some degree where anytime you see an image on Twitter, there's like often someone under it asking Grok to like manipulate the image in some way. And what was happening was people were doing this to images of underage girls. And so there was like a Stranger Things actress who I think is 14, who was put in a bikini, and people just doing like, you know, really up things to underage people, which is crazy. It's like very, very bad. You know, you don't even need to like explain why it's bad. It's just, it's child sexual abuse material being generated on one of the biggest social media platforms owned by the richest man on the world in the world. And this started, you know, another round of discussion about why X is a bad place and why it's like an irresponsible place. And I mean, I feel like we have entered a period where I think it is important to sort of point out what is happening, but it's not. Like it doesn't seem like there's any sort of hope that there's going to be some meaningful regulation of this by the US Government. Of course. And it. And there certainly doesn't seem to be much self regulation occurring by Elon Musk. It's. It is like by and large and anything goes shit show cesspool that.
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D
Have they even released like a statement or said anything at all?
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A
I mean, I think that Twitter public relations has updated its autoresponder, the press autoresponder. For a while it was just sending the poop emoji. And then there was like a brief period where they were maybe answering some people like very brief period. And now I think it just as an autoresponder, that's like the media lies.
- [28:51]
B
And so I haven't seen that one, but the one.
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D
I haven't seen that one yet either.
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B
Yeah, the one I remember is that it was. We're looking into it, we're busy. And this was sort of around the doge time. I think they changed to that after the poop emoji. But I hadn't seen the media Lies one. But you're right in that, look, this is the sort of stuff we've seen AI be used for literally years at this point. Obviously Emmanuel and Sam have done a ton of coverage on it. What's different here? Sort of two things. It's happening on a major tech platform which has been acquired by, you know, a tech billionaire, a tech mogul, all of that sort of thing. And the second component is that it's very much in public. Like the Telegram groups that Emmanuel goes to and finds, oh, this is how they're doing. Images of Taylor Swift or whatever. That's. Yes, it's on Telegram, but it's somewhat private or at least, you know, semi public. I guess this is just fucking out there and they're just doing it on this platform.
- [29:54]
A
I mean, well, let's throw it to Emmanuel in a second. But some of the background here is every social media platform has been taken over by AI slop. We've talked about this a lot, but right, all, all of that, almost all of that AI slop is being generated elsewhere and then being posted onto the social media platform. Meta has tried to integrate AI into its platforms and has done so in like a pretty shitty way that people don't really use. And so this was like a hope of Mark Zuckerberg that people would like use Meta AI to auto generate shit and like you would sometimes be talking to a robot, but sometimes be talking to a human. And like that hasn't worked very well. Meanwhile with Sora, Sam Altman and OpenAI have tried to make like a fully AI generated social media platform. And it's like that had a flash in the pan and it didn't really work. But now like, what has happened with Grok on X is that the AI, as you say, is integrated into the entire experience and it's. It's not great. Don't like it. I'm curious what Emmanuel's thoughts are on it, but yeah, it's. It's like Elon Musk has kind of succeeded at this, like making people interact with AI alongside of other people. Goal of some of these tech scions.
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C
I think one of the best observations in the article is what you just said, where everybody's doing AI, but as is often the case, it really matters what the specifics are and what the UI is and what the user experience is. And in this case it's not only that the AI generation is happening in the same feed as everything else with nothing in between. You just tweet at Grok and it puts the result in the feed. It's not just any feed. Right. It's like historically also, as you mentioned in the article, and you link it back to what happened just before we came back from the holiday break. Twitter used to be the place where you go to catch up with what's happening in the news or what's happening around the world in near real time.
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B
Right.
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C
Like, I don't know what Twitter slogan is now, but it used to be it's what's happening. And now you go to Twitter to see what's happening and it's like non consensual bikini AI generated shots of minors and that just kind of, you know, collapses the information environment and what is happening in the darkest corners of the web into one place in a really awful way. I also wanted to talk about something that I think I will probably write soon when I get a minute, but I wrote in May this story that is basically identical, maybe a little worse, but less known, and the headline for that story was Elon Musk's GROK AI will quote, remove her clothes in public on X. And it's the same thing. People just discovered an accident or by trial and error that you can reply to the image of usually a woman, any woman on an X and it will produce a nude image of her. And that process of Twitter's millions of users suddenly discovering an exploit is just a. It's very similar to the process that I see in those telegram communities where people produce non consensual porn and try to produce it with very mainstream tools by finding loopholes in the guardrails. And I feel like looking at those communities today is like looking into the future of Twitter. And what I'll say about that is this is like a pretty primitive way of producing bad content with grok. And I'm seeing people produce way, way, way, way, way worse things. And I'm also seeing X, to their credit, in real time, responding to the exploits. Like they see what people output and they fix it. But then, you know, there's thousands of people in this telegram group and they immediately shift to a new exploit. And it's like it's this cat and mouse game that I've been following for months and there is just no stopping it. You're not going to be able, I think, to fully end this problem because as we've said a million times, the nudity is in the training data and as long as it's in the training data, it's going to be impossible to completely prevent it from showing up in the output. The Only way to stop it would be to go into the training data, extract it, or redo the training data from scratch, which would be really expensive and realistically not something that these companies want to do anyway. So I would just say it's like, we are only a couple of years into this, but unless something fundamentally changes, whether it's the law or the technology, we're just going to be doing this every few weeks, every few months. It's just going to be something like this.
- [35:37]
A
Well, I think another thing about X also is that it's like Grok is doing this to real images that people are posting. And I mean, I guess you can do that with other AI image generators and other AI tools, but it's like one of the kind of jarring things, at least to me, is that like a major world event occurred last weekend and I am on the west coast. So it was like 2 in the morning, west coast time when people started talking about explosions in Caracas. And that's not like a very active time on the Internet, the American Internet. And so I went to Blue Sky. I was like, there's not like that much going on here other than people freaking out, understandably so. And so I, I don't spend like a whole lot of time on anymore. But I was like, well, all of the Trump administration has accounts on X. Like, is DHS bragging about this? Like, is the. Is Pete Heth bragging about this? Is Stephen Miller talking about this? Like, what's going on? So I went there and there were videos, like, being posted of, you know, like Instagram stories that people had taken from the ground in Caracas, like, allegedly, you know, it was videos of like, explosions and helicopters and things like that. And it's like, okay, you know, breaking news event has always been really fraught time on Twitter, on. On the Internet in general. Like, whether it's a mass shooting or a hurricane or an act of war or something like that. It's like you have some real information and you have some fake information. You have people trying to with you and you have like old. You have like real images from other things that are not actually happening now that are being like recontextualized and just like posted to fool people. And so you always sort of like have your guard up. And like I was scrolling through this and I'm like, okay, like, this seems like plausibly real. Like maybe this video is plausibly real. I was just like looking for my own interest. I was very interested in what was happening. Like we were going to war or Something I wanted to know what was happening. So there's like that, but then there's also like AI generated images of Maduro that look really real because they're getting a lot better. They don't have seven fingers anymore. And also they have like this blurry effect on them because it's nighttime and it's like, I don't know, this could plausibly be real. I have no idea. I bet it's fake. But it could be real. And then you have that image and someone's put him in a bikini and added nipples to him and shit. And this is all happening like in the same timeline and it's just like, dude, this is so fucked up. Like this is just like such a. Such a mess. It's just such a mess. And it's like always been a mess, but now it's a mess in a way that is like, like brain exploding essentially.
- [38:38]
B
Yeah, I'm trying to get the news, I'm trying to extract some value from Twitter or X. Like it used to be, it used to be a genuinely good source of information and now you'll get the government propaganda from there. And Maduro in a bikini as well. And then a bunch of actually like straight up abusive images as well.
- [38:58]
A
Yeah. And I mean for the people who are just like, just leave X, it's like I have functionally left X. Like I don't really post there but, but like during a war in this information vacuum at three in the morning knowing. And like as a journalist I'm like, okay, let me go look what this is like at the moment. Like who is posting there, what's going on? And like this is what's going on. It's like a mix of like non consensual sexual imagery, government propaganda, Elon Musk like stoking some weird fears and then like Grok taking like women's clothes off. And then also I saw an AI generated image of Charlie Kirk that I can never unsee where he had comically long nipples and it's like, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. That's what we're doing now. Got it.
- [39:49]
B
Matthew, what were you going to say? Before I ask Jason about something else.
- [39:54]
D
Just do we ever think that this will get to a point where there is more of a mass abandonment of these platforms? At a certain point it is just filled with garbage and we can't sustenate. Like it's not worth it to even go.
- [40:08]
B
I mean, don't have the numbers, but anecdotally, I think just based on everything Jason has Just said there's going to be less and less value for genuine users. There's going to be continued value for the blue tick grifters and all of that. And they're absolutely not going to leave until they have their incentives removed. But yeah, it's absolutely a less valuable environment for me. When it was the Venezuela stuff, I think I got up and I check Apple News because I can sort of aggregate Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, sometimes New York Times, all in one. And I basically use that now as my Twitter feed, whereas years ago I would have scrolled Twitter and got some good information for some good OSINT accounts. It's like I'm just gonna wait for the Wall Street Journal report or something, you know, and scroll through that feed.
- [40:59]
D
Essentially, I got added on a bunch of discords at like three in the morning.
- [41:04]
B
Oh.
- [41:06]
A
Yeah. I mean, I think that for like, daily use, like, yes, these things are. I think people are abandoning them to some extent at least. Like people who want to protect their peace and their mental health to some extent. But I think that when there is an act of war, a mass shooting, like something like that, you can't really solve the information vacuum that occurs between the time that something happens and the New York Times reporting on it, or CNN reporting on it or, or whatever, where it's like, okay, here's like a source of information. And the solution is that, like, there's not that much you can do at three in the morning laying in bed. Like, wait till some of the facts become clear. But I think that human nature is such that it's like, no, I want to, I want to see what's happening now, especially. I mean, God forbid, but like, in, in a mass shooting situation, it's like often people are trying to figure out what's going on, and then a lot of the stuff ends up getting scrubbed at some point. Like, maybe it's just because I am a journalist, but it's like, I want to see this stuff from the Internet, like, before it gets deleted. I want to, like, know what's going on. And it's just like, unfortunately, I don't. I don't think it has to be Twitter, but it's like there needs. There is. We're used to a world where you can post something instantly and see it instantly. And like, that is not how the news media works for, like, understandable reasons for the most part. Although the New York Times took like five hours before they said, like, the US did this, which was like, crazy, Especially because there's reporting from semaphore saying that they were tipped off this beforehand. But it's just like that there is. People are going to want to try to solve the information vacuum that exists. And I don't know how you solve it other than with some of these micro blogging platforms or like clicking around Instagram like it's, it's not, not great. I don't know.
- [43:10]
B
Yeah, it's funny because I was kind.
- [43:12]
D
Of experiencing this yesterday because there was the gunfire at the Presidential palace in Caracas. Did you guys follow this at all? Did you see this? So it was, it was a. Like there was gunfire at Presidential palace in Caracas. And like I was. Saw it happen in real time. I was like looking at the posts, it's getting posted on Reddit and like some discord groups I'm in and like people started to kind of work themselves up into a fur and this was like, all right, this is it. Like, this is the military coup. Like, here's the fallout from all of this. And people kind of. You can already see people designing the narrative in their head before we know anything about what's going on based on a couple guys posts and then come to find out a drone had gotten too close and they'd shot it down and that's it. It was just like a quadcopter and that was the whole of what had happened. But for 30 minutes in real time as we're watching these videos, we've worked ourselves up and yeah, I don't know how you solve that problem because that is human nature. We're always going to be jumping to those conclusions.
- [44:18]
B
Yeah. The thing I'll just add is that, I mean, that's like the old problem, the ongoing problem. That's the problem. Jones. Right. There's this kind of unrelated thing and it'll be a tangent, but you'll bring it back to the AI in that and sort of the grok problem as well. There was a post on Reddit recently over the holidays that claimed to be from a developer at some food delivery app, you know, an Uber Eats or a delivery or whatever. Right. And it was making all these very bold claims that there's like desperate pricing for certain drivers, etc. Etc. We didn't cover it because we were, you know, on break at the time. I think we all, we all needed our break. Other people did and they determined, various outlets did, I think Platformer, maybe the version as well, that it was likely AI generated text. The thing I'm getting to is that one of the reporters engaged with the poster and said, hey, can you verify you're an employee or whatever? And they provided an image of what purported to be an Uber employee badge, which was also likely AI generated. That terrifies me as a journalist in that maybe one day somebody's going to try and do that if they haven't already. And that just makes our job so much harder. The combination of the problem you're describing, Matthew, and now just somebody can just whip up something that looks kind of like an Uber ID in like 30 seconds or less.
- [45:58]
D
How long until you get got? Because it's probably going to happen one day.
- [46:01]
B
Everyone's going to get got. Everyone's going to get got in a personal context. It's not an age thing, it's not an education thing, it's not whether you're online or not. Everyone's going to get got in a personal context and everyone's going to get got in a professional context at some point as well, essentially. Jason, sort of to wrap it up just briefly, and this was in the piece sort of towards the end, what was it with journalists trying to get Grok to apologize for this behaviour, or.
- [46:35]
A
Behaviour'S the wrong word. I mean, I'll try to be quick but like, basically people asked like, grok, hey, are you sorry that you're generating this? And Grok was like, oh yes, this happened for XYZ reason. And you know, we're working on it and we're sorry, et cetera. And this is like rule number one about reporting on AI is that AI is not sentient. AI cannot apologize. AI cannot really explain why it did something and it especially is not a stand in for the company that created it. This has happened like a lot of times and I feel like I was going to write a story about it one time, but there was some horrible, like the meta AI bots that they launched and there was a few journalists who started interviewing these meta AI bots and why they were like not diverse enough, something like this. And the meta AI bots were explaining that there was like an internal problem at at Meta, that they were like exposing all this and it's like that's not how an LLM works. Like the LLM does not work. The LLM does not know what is happening at the company. It doesn't speak for the company, it can't apologize, it can't go in and expose corruption within the company. And this is the most common email that we get from people all the time. Overall is like Gemini told me something about Google, here's my chat. And that is a sign of AI psychosis. If you're doing that, don't do that. It's not good. It's just not how it works. But anyways, like CBS wrote that Grok apologized. A bunch of outlets wrote that Grok apologized. And it's like Grock didn't apologize. X didn't apologize. I haven't seen X apologize. Unless. Unless something has changed in the last few minutes. Like Elon Musk was having Grok turn him into take off his clothes. Like this is not something that they're sorry about.
- [48:51]
B
Yeah, Grok regurgitated a series of words that look like an apology shaped object. But it's not an apology. You need intent behind.
- [49:01]
D
Well, it gave them what they wanted. Somebody prompted it to apologize and it did what LLMs do. It gave them what they wanted.
- [49:08]
B
Yeah, I mean, if you ask it to not apologize, you'll probably not apologize.
- [49:12]
D
Exactly.
- [49:12]
B
Yeah, we'll leave that there. If you're listening to the free version of the podcast on our play us out. But if you are a paying 404 media subscriber, we're going to talk about how we finally bought 404Media.com. You know, with an M of a fully fledged dot com domain, you can subscribe and gain access to that content@404 media. Don't go to the dot com. I mean you can. We'll redirect anyway. Just go to 404Media co. As a reminder, 404Media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers. If you do wish to subscribe to 404 Media and directly support our work, please go to 404 Media co. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad free version of this podcast. You also get to listen to the the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope and Alyssa Midcalf. Another way to support us is by leaving a five star rating and review for the podcast. That stuff really helps us out. This has been 404 Media. We'll see you again next week.
- [50:23]
A
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