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- [00:00]
Joseph
With less than a minute till halftime. Arnie, please put your phone down. You're missing your own kid's football game. I know, hun, but a branch is blowing in front of the DIY video.
- [00:10]
Emmanuel
Camera I set up and I keep getting annoying alerts.
- [00:13]
Joseph
The biggest fumble was not getting a local security pro to install alarm.com alarm.com.
- [00:19]
Sam
How would that help?
- [00:20]
Joseph
The Bensons have it. Their cameras filter out false alerts, but also detect trespassers and scare them away before they even get close to the house.
- [00:28]
Sam
How?
- [00:29]
Joseph
Flashing lights, whistles. The camera even gives gives verbal warnings like hey, you in the black jacket in the driveway. This is private property.
- [00:37]
Emmanuel
Leave now.
- [00:37]
Sam
Wow.
- [00:38]
Joseph
Best of all, the Benson's Alarm.com system is professionally monitored so they don't have to call for help in an emergency. Huh.
- [00:46]
Emmanuel
I really could put my phone away.
- [00:47]
Joseph
Yes.
- [00:48]
Emmanuel
Touchdown.
- [00:50]
Joseph
Let's get an Alarm.com system before the team goes to states. Alarm.com, your home field advantage. Visit Alarm.com to find an authorized service provider.
- [01:00]
Emmanuel
This episode is brought to you by Lifelock. The holidays mean more travel, more shopping, more time online and more personal info in places that could expose you to identity theft. That's why LifeLock monitors millions of data points every second. If your identity is stolen, their US based restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Get more holiday fun and less holiday worry with Lifelock. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast terms apply hey Joseph.
- [01:31]
Joseph
Here we are on holiday as I hope you are as well. This is a re upload of an episode we've recorded over a year ago I think now, but it was just for paying subscribers and we just wanted to give listeners of our free feed a taste of what they can get if they do become a subscriber. It's a discussion about how we cover artificial intelligence. As I'm sure you've noticed, we cover it in a bit of a different way from other outlets. While they may be focused on the companies and the technologies, we're focused on the harms and the use cases and everything else that's happening to and by humans right now. So I hope you enjoy this episode and subscribe at 404 Media Co for more bonus content as well. Thank you. Sorry, that music went off for way, way, way longer than I thought.
- [02:45]
Jason
Why does the bonus 5 music go so hard?
- [02:47]
Joseph
Well, we saved that exactly for the paying subs. Joseph here. The person you heard speaking was Sam. We also have Emmanuel and Jason. This is a subscribers only episode of the 404 Media podcast. If you're listening to this, you're a sub and thank you for that. We're going to get straight into it. We've published a couple of stories over the past week that started or rather contributed to a lot of, let's say, debate around images and artificial intelligence and journalism and tech companies responsibilities and all of that. You know, here we're just going to talk a bit more casually about what we think of that reaction, the questions it brings up, all of that sort of thing. Before we get going, let me just provide two very quick summaries of the two stories we're basically going to be talking about and around them. The first is one that we just spoke about on the weekly pod. You can go listen to it there as well. But that's by Sam, and that's called Bing is generating images of Spongebob doing 9 11. Basically, people took Bing's AI image generation, which typically stops you from using prompts such as World Trade Center, 9 11, that sort of thing, because Microsoft doesn't want that sort of stuff on this platform. But people found workarounds by including Sam doing prompts for like Kirby flying a commercial jetliner to skyscrapers, all of that sort of thing. And then the second is one written by Emmanuel, which was 4chan, uses Bing to flood the Internet with racist images. It is where it says on the tin, members of 4chan, instead of using Photoshop or maybe, you know, more established tools, they would go in, they would use Bing's AI to generate racist images. And then they were telling, you know, their community members, go post this on Instagram or wherever. Right.
- [04:38]
Sam
And then if I read that on a tin, I'm not buying, I'm not buying the product inside.
- [04:42]
Joseph
No, I'm just saying it's accurate. I'm not saying it's a good tin. I know, it's just like spake beans. I want to know what's. I want to know what's in it. You know, so we publish those pieces and then there's some reaction. I think all of you guys are more familiar with what the actual reaction was. So I don't know. Emmanuel, do you want to like jump in and summarize maybe what the reaction was? Exactly.
- [05:08]
Emmanuel
Yeah. So I think first it's important to say that the story, and in particular the tweets about the story went very viral. A lot of people retweeted it, but namely Mike Solana, who is a venture capitalist who has a huge following, retweeted it. And then Elon Musk the main character on the platform, responded to him. So it went mega, mega viral. And when you go that viral on Twitter, as you all know, as anyone who has experienced it before knows, it just becomes a mess that has a general shape that you recognize. Like, people make the point of the article to you, assuming that you don't understand it. People thought that we were being critical of the images themselves. We're saying that the images themselves were reprehensible. The SpongeBob image specifically.
- [06:07]
Joseph
Right. And I don't think we care about some. Yeah, to be perfectly honest, you know.
- [06:13]
Emmanuel
Right. Yeah. I mean, a funny image, like a great, great image.
- [06:18]
Joseph
But I mean, I mean, it's 20, 23. We're long past the time when 9, 11 jokes were even mildly controversial. You know, like, it's not bad, or.
- [06:27]
Emmanuel
They'Re controversial, but I definitely, I mean, I saw it and I was like, wow, we should use that image because it's. It's very grabby and funny. Um, and then obviously, just the whole range of racism and antisemitism. Uh, I don't know, Sam, if you got any heat for being a woman, but it's like whatever. Whatever you are, it's like they kind of are. Are mean to you in that specific way. So that's, that's just the nature of. Of going viral on Twitter. But the response that is specific to this story, I think in order to understand it, we have to explain that the story is entering an ongoing debate in AI. And I want to try and map out roughly what the debate is true. And there is a spectrum that on one end there is people who are concerned with AI safety, and on the other end, there are people who are concerned with AI ethics. That's how people in the field describe the debate. I find that kind of confusing. Those are confusing terms. A better way to think about it is just open source AI development and close. That's roughly how the debate maps. And on one far end, like the very far end of the spectrum, are these effective accelerationist AI people. And accelerationism, if you're familiar with the idea, is whatever is happening, you just want to, like, do whether it's good or bad. Right? You just want to, like, pedal to the metal, go faster, reach a logical conclusion of the process.
- [08:15]
Joseph
Right. People may be familiar with that term more in the context of like, you know, extremism and that sort of thing. But that's. That's not, that's not what you're saying here, really.
- [08:24]
Emmanuel
But it's just. It's a similar dynamic. It is related, right? So like the origin, I think, is actually like kind of like a lefty idea idea, which is capitalism is this process. We're not going to see the end of capitalism until we rush through the process and reach the conclusion and then we can do something else, right? A communist, socialist kind of alternative. And then, as you say, the, like, that dynamic was picked up by extremist people who are like, we have to like, this is kind of like the Boogaloo Boys thing, right? It's like. And the Charles Manson thing as well. It's like, there is racial strife, there's political strife, let's have it out, let's have a race war and we'll reach the end of the current state of America and then we can have something new in their eyes, probably something like a fascist alternative, right? In AI, the effective accelerationist crowd, which has prominent members like the head of.
- [09:21]
Joseph
Y Combinator, which is a startup incubator.
- [09:25]
Emmanuel
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And people are unabashedly effective accelerationists. They have, they have the E ACC tag in their Twitter usernames and they just think that the only way through the upheaval of AI is through it. And it's just like, we have to just like develop it. No regulation, no restrictions, just let AI do its thing. And on the other end of that is some sort of like, AI utopia, right? Because we're going to get all the benefits of all the benefits of AI. We'll go through whatever turmoil society is going to go through and then we're going to reach some AI utopia. That's one end of the spectrum. And the other, very far end of the spectrum is the like, AI alarmist crowd who believe that some form of AGI is going to kill us all imminently. And for that reason we have to pause the development of AI. We have to restrict it with the number of GPUs that are able to work on it or ban it altogether. And also critically make open source development of AI illegal because it's too dangerous for people to have access to this technology. Now, those are the extremes of each side of the spectrum, right? In between them are like totally good, cogent arguments for either side. So, for example, like some AI researchers that I talk to who study the data sets that the AI tools are trained on and are trying to find the bias in AI. They say that it's much better to have open source AI because the outcomes might be bad, but at least we're able to see into the black box, understand what is happening and try to mitigate as opposed to, rather than just.
- [11:22]
Joseph
One company being able to control all of it or private industry or whatever.
- [11:26]
Emmanuel
Right. And behind closed doors, right. So it's like OpenAI, it's doing its thing, it's doing bad things and we can't even tell you why or do anything about it. So that's a totally good argument. And then like a logical argument on the other side is the AI safety people who are like people are doing harm with this right now. Like actual harm is being done to actual people right now because the tools are open source. And this is something that we reported on, right? Like stable diffusion, text to image AI tool. People are using it as we speak to create like deep fake pornography. Non consensually of like everyone under the sun. It just, it is happening.
- [12:06]
Joseph
Specific people who did not give their consent. It's not we're going, oh no, they're making porn. It's that they're targeting specific people.
- [12:13]
Emmanuel
Right. So that's the argument, that's the spectrum, that's the debate. That's the largest conversation that is happening. And then we publish our story. And I think the way people read it, despite, you know, both Sam and I making very clearly the argument that it's like we don't know what the solution is and we are not like saying that each, that either side is correct. It's a very complicated question and I don't have an answer for it. Like, I'm not going to like give you my take on which is the correct side of the argument because I.
- [12:47]
Sam
Don'T know, it's also almost definitely somewhere in the middle.
- [12:51]
Emmanuel
Oh yeah, for sure. And I think we will get to that also because that the conversation is really stupid because people just assume that it can only be one extreme or the other, but people just assume that we are on a side that is kind of like wagging its finger and saying that AI tools have to be put behind some lock and key and average people shouldn't be able to use it. And then, you know, people trot out these metaphors around like, oh, you want, would you ban the printing press? Would you ban word processors? Which is the tweet that Elon loved.
- [13:23]
Joseph
So much with his little crying, laughing emoji.
- [13:29]
Emmanuel
His divorced emoji. Yeah, so yeah, so that's kind of the state of the debate and that's how we entered it and that's what people assumed about the stories, even though it's, I mean it's simply not what we believe and not what we wrote.
- [13:42]
Joseph
Sam, what do you think about Some of the reaction or did Emmanuel miss anything there or what did you see from you're in.
- [13:50]
Jason
Yeah, I mean I, I saw a lot of people like, like Emmanuel said, wishing for the articles that we wrote, you know, begging us to write what we already wrote or you know, just saying like I wish someone would tackle this in a way that's more nuanced. And it's like you didn't read past the headline and you looked at the pictures and that's very obvious. You know, we did, we did write quite a bit of nuance into these stories. We always do. It's, you know, we don't just post 200 word look at this type blogs. We almost always try to provide some kind of context into why it's important to write about these things and also, you know, how it's affecting real people. I think my, and I wrote about this a little bit in our, like our newsletter behind the blog thing. But my thing is like these, these ways that these companies are using AI is impacting the way we use the Internet. Like moderation affects the way people behave. We. That's very obvious, good or bad. But you know, it's an AI is being used in moderation pretty much everywhere you look at this point. Whether or not they call it AI or they call it, you know, just like machine learning or whatever they want to say it is, that's it's AI is going after people, it's going after more AI generated content. In Bing's case, it's AI going after AI while Microsoft is kind of like some kind of third party with their hands up being like, we don't know there's the users and then there's the moderation tools and that we're just like, we don't know what's going on or you know, that's what I kind of. I inferred from their non response to me about user safety. But yeah, you can't say sex on TikTok without getting banned. So people started saying segs with two GS. Now that's the thing people say out loud.
- [15:41]
Joseph
Crazy.
- [15:42]
Jason
You can't say suicide on TikTok.
- [15:45]
Joseph
So people say S E GGs.
- [15:49]
Jason
Yeah, like to be funny.
- [15:51]
Joseph
Okay.
- [15:52]
Jason
Yeah, like ironically.
- [15:53]
Joseph
But it's like explaining to me what people do to be funny me.
- [15:56]
Sam
Like it's to be funny but it's, it's to avoid the algorithmic moderation.
- [16:03]
Jason
Yeah, people say unalive instead of suicide. That's the thing people say out loud in. It's not just like they're Avoiding, like, written bans. They're avoiding the AI scraping or, like, reading, listening to them without, you know, considering context and then banning them outright. I think that's kind of the frustrating thing is, like, people just don't know what is going to get banned and what's not. And the way that these rules are applied is so uneven that who knows? It's like Emmanuel said this in his piece, but you can't generate a nipple on Bing, but you can generate, like, massive amounts, like, horribly racist shit. That's something. Is something is wrong there. Like, I don't think that's a controversial statement that, like, that's a lopsided view of moderating your own platform. And this is one of the biggest companies, this is like the second biggest company in the world, has a huge vested interest in brand safety, and it's dropping the ball massively because they wanted to roll out a shiny new toy. I mean, there's a lot of just, like, in the word processing. It's like, it's so. It's like. It's one of those things that's like. It almost makes sense until you think about it for three seconds and then you're like, oh, this is a dumb argument to make just to dismiss somebody else's actual concerns.
- [17:15]
Joseph
Well, on the nipple thing, just very briefly, even if you don't take, again, I think, the very justifiable position of like, well, these priorities are a bit out of whack, right? You don't allow the generation of a nipple, but you will allow the generation of racist shit. You know, look, even if you put that aside and you don't even put a value judgment on it, you can just be like, Microsoft at some point made a decision that allowed this, you know, and, like, maybe it was an accident by Microsoft, maybe it was a deliberate policy where they have a slide deck hidden in a vault deep inside Microsoft HQ where they're like, we're going to get rid of the nipples or whatever. Obviously, I don't think it's that. I think it's more messy and probably, like, you know, a lack of foresight on how these tools are going to be used. But even at minimum, if you don't do the value judgment, it shows that decisions have been made that are impacting the output of this AI, you know, and that is that at a bare minimum. Jason, you were going to say something.
- [18:16]
Sam
I was just going to say both Sam and Emanuel are geniuses and just said very smart things. One thing I do want to say is we put. We're doing this podcast on the paid feed for a few different reasons. I think one of the reasons, though is a lot of the people who are criticizing us and who are jumping into this conversation, they're very loud and they're like, influential and they're famous and we can talk about that in a minute. But it's like, I am certain that tens of thousands of people saw our articles and they're like, that's fucked up. Or that's interesting. And then thought it was a good article and read it and continued on their way. And I don't think that we want to get into a position where we are defending ourselves against the loudest voices in the room every single time. Like anyone criticizes anything. Because as Emmanuel said, anytime you go viral, there's going to be some criticism. But, like, it goes viral for a reason. And that reason is because people think it's interesting. Like most times, most like in our, we've been doing this for a long time and most of the time that we have something go viral, it's usually our best stuff or when we've hit on some like a hot button issue or something that people are talking about. And I am certain that the vast majority of people read these articles and were like, good article, thanks for doing it. But then there was a small number of people who were like, you're everything that's wrong with journalism. This is terrible. You want to censor, you want to censor us, blah, blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera. And I think because some of the people who were making that argument were very, have like giant megaphones, it can seem like that's what the vast majority of people think. But I, I want to like, state for a fact. I don't think that most people are going to see this article about Spongebob flying into the World Trade center and think 404 Media is trying to censor Microsoft and the creative tools being used here. I just don't think that that's the dominant position. And so we didn't want to spend an hour talking about it in our main podcast. But I do know. But it is an interesting debate and we're happy to have it.
- [20:44]
Joseph
It's a springboard for us to talk about some stuff that we don't necessarily always get to talk about, which is, you know, more behind the scenes stuff that our subscribers can listen to. Yeah, I mean, I think you just mentioned something about how, you know, lots of people read it and just go on with their day, while others will like, almost like read a Motivation into it. And look again, I didn't write these two stories, which is why I'm kind of like letting you guys just like more talk it out. And you're a lot smarter than me on it. But I'm super interested in the journalism side of things. And that made me just think that, you know, sometimes I would publish a piece and people would be like, this isn't a scandal. Or they'd be like. They go on the assumption that you can only write about something if it's a scandal, which is ridiculous. You can just write about something because it's interesting. You can write about something because it incrementally provides more information. This, I don't think it's a scandal, you know, but I think it's incredibly interesting that Microsoft is allowing these things even when it actually goes specifically against their policies. And just.
- [21:46]
Emmanuel
Joe, can I just refine that? I agree with that. But to refine, let's put scandal aside. I'm not making any value judgment about scandal or not scandal. Microsoft is one of the biggest companies in the world and employs some of the most talented computer scientists in the world. It is a huge center of technological power. And when it deploys something, it has the ability to make millions of people take notice of it and use it. You earlier talked about Microsoft making choices. And I think what is interesting and I think what is important is that what Sam's story showed and I think what the 4chan people have abused, is that it is not making choices as much as Microsoft think it is making choices. It is deploying the tools and it has written all these rules for how the tools can be used, but they don't work. Right.
- [23:06]
Joseph
It's like, even according to their own policies.
- [23:09]
Emmanuel
Yeah, their own policies don't work. And something that I really liked about Sam's story, like a really good observation, is that it's like essentially there's this new term that appeared in the past year, prompt engineer. Right. And people are prompt engineering the tool to do things that Microsoft doesn't want it to do. Whether it wanting it to do it or not is a scandal. You decide, dear reader. You know, but this giant, powerful company deployed this thing that it can no longer control. That, to me, is the interesting thing. And as Sam pointed out, it is not clear that they will ever be able to control it because it's not clear that while we can teach AI to understand language, it's not clear that we can make it understand cultural context, which is how people are hacking the tool. Right. That. That it and it's already out there.
- [24:13]
Sam
So it's like humans outsmarting the machines with our cultural context. Yeah, it's true.
- [24:19]
Emmanuel
I mean, that is what's happening. Yeah.
- [24:22]
Joseph
Let me just super briefly end that point because, yeah, the scandal thing isn't coming from me. That's just what people have told me. But it's more just that people assume that when you choose something to cover, you're taking a side. And that's not what it is. It's that we think there is a public interest in writing about that. Sometimes the public interest is very high when we publish an investigation. Sometimes I would call it a normal amount, which is something here where we were like, hey, this doesn't match Microsoft's own policies. That's kind of wild. And sometimes it's like lower, but still very beneficial in that. I don't know. Jason often gets these really entertaining, funny foyers about police officers doing stupid things. And don't get me wrong, they're funny, but they also show maybe systemic issue with the police or something like that. When you write an article, you're not going out to be like, I'm going to use this as ammo for my side. It's like, there's a public interest there, and that's almost like the start and the end of it. And I think people forget that we're not going out trying to censor the AI, you know, we're going out because there's public interest in highlighting wherever this information is.
- [25:34]
Sam
Well, people say it about any article you do, no matter what. That's what I'm saying.
- [25:38]
Joseph
I'm making it super pro because I'm tired of this shit.
- [25:40]
Sam
Like the delivery robots story I did where people. Where, like, this delivery robot was giving footage to the Los Angeles Police Department. Vast majority of response to that was like, wow, I didn't know this. Thank you for writing this. This is interesting. I see these robots all the time. There are so many people, though, who were like, you didn't know that? Like, this is. How is this news? How is this new? And I'm like, it's new. Because literally it was unknown. Like, this is the. Here's the specific case. It's the first time we could assume or infer that, yes, there's cameras on these things. Maybe the lapd, like, would want it. Now we're showing that it's happened and there's this huge contingent of people being like, oh, you didn't assume that there was a. You know, if there was a camera, the LAPD is getting it and it's like you could guess. You could.
- [26:31]
Joseph
Yeah.
- [26:32]
Sam
Like, that's why I foia. I foia ed it, because I thought maybe this is happening.
- [26:36]
Jason
What was that blog even showing the.
- [26:38]
Sam
Public that it's happening?
- [26:39]
Joseph
Yeah.
- [26:40]
Sam
And it's like, I'm very sorry that you personally do not feel that this was worth writing about, but lots of people did. Like, lots of people found new information from it. And I'm sorry if you, if we write similar, like, as you said, incremental type stuff, sometimes people don't get it until the 30th time you write about it. Sorry, maybe they didn't see the other 25 times that someone wrote about ring cameras and police or whatever. And that's fine. Not everyone consumes everything all the time.
- [27:13]
Joseph
Right.
- [27:14]
Jason
I don't know what they want you to write. Like, like the. That that blog would just be like, I think that the cameras on the robots are watching me. Like, we need, like we need to prove some things sometimes. And the way to do that is like getting the actual documents or seeing other people do it in the wild or, you know, like, we can't just make shit up. Apparently can, but like, it's our website. We can, but like, our lawyer wouldn't like that very much.
- [27:39]
Joseph
Yeah.
- [27:50]
Sam
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- [32:05]
Joseph
Let's bring it back around to AI a little bit rather than the his 10 years of stored beef against people and I don't beef anymore. I'm namaste. I'm zen.
- [32:18]
Jason
I can't wait till the next time you beef and I'm gonna take this clip.
- [32:21]
Joseph
No, absolutely not. No, it's not gonna happen. So one reader who wrote in was Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games. They make Fortnite all that. They have the Epic Games launcher competitive to Steam. They have a lot of money eman maybe explain it in a minute about what they do in AI because I'm a little bit unfamiliar on that. But let me read out Tim's Twitter DM to me after he read some of this coverage because again, it's a useful springboard to talk about some issues. He says the latest 404 AI articles have been irking me, so I thought about why at the core they are written to be inflammatory while taking an implicit but not clearly articulated editorial position about who is to be considered morally responsible for content created by a human using AI prompting. And then he provides some positions they could take. The first would be, you know, it's the human who prompts the AI is responsible, it's the creator of the AI, or maybe it's the government through regulation. His message then continues without clearly taking an editorial position. It feels like the debate is playing out in the Twitter quarter fad analogies capitalized. And he says he would love to see a 404 editorial on the topic of responsibility attribution, which seriously weighs the implications of those three positions he laid out. And he says this might drive some productive discourse about principles rather than Microsoft Word comparisons and the like. I mean, what do we think of that? The first thing I'll just say is that I don't know if it's necessarily our responsibility to always take an editorial position. I mean, I know that maybe you guys articles are a little more voicey than mine. I am like very, you know, almost boring to the point where I like don't really Take a position beyond just publishing information. And I would certainly disagree that your pieces are inflammatory. But, you know, what do we think? Maybe Emmanuel, with that message and maybe that question, what do you make of that?
- [34:39]
Emmanuel
I guess a few things. First of all, I'm sorry, but I have to say this just in case. People listen, and they're like, why didn't you mention this? But Tim Sweeney, who I. I'm like, a big video game nerd and like a history nerd, and particularly this era that he came out of and have been familiar with him for many, many years and, like, played his games and used his products and all that stuff. However, Tim Sweeney is a very rich man. This is a very wealthy company. He just fired 16% of his workforce. Despite being incredibly rich, he acquired Bandcamp last year and has dumped it on this other company song trailer, just, like, a couple of weeks ago. Those people don't know what their future is. They were in negotiations for their first union contract. They're locked out of their computers. It's something that I've been trying to report on. Just want readers to know that I'm aware of this, of this context for this person specifically. I think, first of all, also, thank you for, like, writing a thoughtful question. You know, it's just like, he took the time. He clearly read the articles, and he articulated a position and question, and I really respect that. And I want to let readers know that, as I say in my Twitter bio, I read every email that I get. And if you write me, like, a considerate email, even if you disagree with me, I will probably. Probably engage with you. Just I'm saying this is a good response, right? Even if we disagree to the content of the response. I think it's really interesting that people constantly talk about how they want unbiased reporting, they want factual reporting. But then at the same time, what Tim is saying is that we should tell him what we think and also what he should think. And I just don't think that's my job. Like, I'm happy to engage with the questions here. I will, but I just want to note that it's like, all we did is report about something that is happening in the world and present it to the world. And obviously, the world found it to be very controversial and reacted to it with, like, a variety of emotions. And Tim is like, you're making me feel these emotions. That makes me uncomfortable. Please tell me what I should feel so I can be calm. And it's like, I'm sorry, but it's like, not a Job requirement for me. You know, it's just like, I'm okay with you feeling uncomfortable. And perhaps maybe that is the point. Right. It's like we wrote an article that is making you kind of, like, consider these questions and be uncomfortable and realize that you're uncomfortable and uncertain what you should think. And like, we as a society probably, like, need to think about these issues and come up with solutions. I don't have the solutions. Sorry. That's just like, my first reaction to it. Sam or Jason, do you want to.
- [37:41]
Jason
No, I think that's right. I mean, I think that's. I also, I felt the same way about when I saw this message. Just shared it. Like, I didn't take it as, like. I didn't take it as, like, hostile, but it was like, it was definitely, like a respectful message. But it was also like, you're asking for something that we're not. We can't do, we're not gonna do, we don't have any desire to do is to tell you how to think or how to feel about these things. A lot of people reacted that way to the spongebob thing. And in particular, it's like, because it is a pretty neutral image out of context. And I think it's, you know, like, that is just like the process of thinking through these things is doing them sometimes. Like, the process of thinking through what Microsoft is doing or what generative AI is doing to the world is maybe just making a bunch of like, weird images of like, mpreg Sonic flying a plane toward New York City. I don't know. It's. It's an interesting kind of thought experiment. And it's also something people were doing in the real world that we. Our job is to report on that kind of thing. So, yeah, I think that's a really a good response, Emmanuel.
- [38:52]
Sam
Jason, I think that if you applied this to a different subject, what he is asking, or like, the, the sort of, like, underlying thing here in my opinion, is like, let's imagine this article is about climate change. Like, let's just imagine it was about climate change. We could be like, the Arctic melted. Historic amount of ice fell into the ocean this year. Very bad, actually, no, not very bad. Historic amount of ice fell into the Arctic. Then we go talk to a scientist who says that it's bad, and we talk to a scientist who says that actually it's good or that it's neutral or that it doesn't matter. And then you can read the article and you can make up your own mind, but you're presented two different ways to think. And that is like largely how journalism has functioned for the last like 50 to 60 years. Right before that there was actually like more of a slant. Like I took a journalism history class. So I know that it has not always been this both sizing of everything. But the version of this article is like, you go talk to an AI safety person and you go talk to an AI ethics person. One person says this is good and that you should be able to generate anything you want on Bing. And the other person says this is bad and it's dangerous and then you can like come up with an idea. I think that we write about these things so often that we do get experts to weigh in on things all the time. And we will continue to get experts to weigh in on things. But I also don't think that it's necessary for every article. And I guess, I guess to be fair to Tim, he's asking us to do that and then to tell him which side is which side wins. And one, I think it's complicated. And two, I think that people can see the image and see what we're writing about and think about it for two seconds and come to their own decision and come to their own thoughts and feelings. And I think that Spongebob 911 is one thing. I think that the follow up, which people are using the same tool to create super racist, super anti semitic stuff and then are spamming it to people on, you know, social media that is not super well moderated. It's like, that's bad. I feel comfortable saying it's bad when 4chan like makes like content that dehumanizes black people and that, you know, is super anti Semitic and et cetera, et cetera. And when Microsoft enables that, it's like, it's not great. It's not, it's probably not what Microsoft intended. And I think that an intelligent reader, I think Tim is intelligent, but I think also he should think about it for two seconds. It's, it's not good. And I don't think that we need to talk to someone who can say these images that make black people look like animals is bad. Like that, that was the intention of the, of the image of many of the images that 4chan was generating is bad. And then the way that they're using it, the context was also to harass and like in a very hateful manner. And I think that we've written enough articles where I think our stance that hate is bad is not controversial and doesn't need to Be spelled out at length in every article.
- [42:30]
Joseph
Yeah. Like, I'm going to talk very generally, and I feel like this is a fair characterization of the position, but I think it's a stupid position. So, you know, maybe I'm going to miss a little bit here. But. And to be clear, I'm not. This isn't responding to Tim's question. This is a more general point. But it's when people say they want unbiased media, like we were mentioning earlier. Yes. And as you say, Jason, you have a climate change example of one person say good, one person say bad. Yay, balanced journalism. Look, come on, one of those people is full of fucking shit. They are wrong. It is a disservice to the reader to present both as equal positions in the same way that it would be a disservice to a reader to be like, well, you know, Russian. Russia invaded Ukraine, but Ukraine, you know, maybe deserved it or some other, like, ludicrous position. There's very clearly a good guy and very clearly fucking bad guy. Right. And that obviously also applies to people who are generating racist imagery with AI. Like, it would be a disservice to even float the possibility that maybe racism and AI actually good. No, fuck that. Like, you're, you're, you're leading to an article that's actually going to make the person less informed, it's going to make it more muddy, that sort of thing.
- [43:53]
Sam
Well, the literal argument is that in a word processor, you can write racist things and. Or with your pen and paper, you can write racist things. And yet we don't ban pen and paper and we don't ban the word processor. So why would we ban, why would we restrict what AI can do? Like, that is what. That's literally Elon Musk and Mike Solana's argument, right?
- [44:15]
Joseph
Which does feed into what Tim's question more specifically is actually about, like, the positions, right? Which is, you know, is it the human who prompts the AI who is responsible? Is it the creator of the AI? I guess that's Microsoft, like, in this case. Or is it, you know, the government should come in and regulate it. We don't pretend to have an answer. And I don't think we're like, we're not going to claim to have an answer. Right. But definitely in the piece and the pieces, it comes through that we are, we are approaching this even implicitly from the frame that, well, this is Microsoft's tool. But crucially, it's like violating its own terms. You know, if Microsoft didn't have those terms, maybe the piece would actually be framed differently. But it's approached through that lens of Bing's policies because Bing put the policies there and that's the entire public interest in this. And it's highlighting that those policies aren't working right. If it was, I don't know if we were more researchers focused purely on racism or we were looking at research that showed, I don't know, people felt more attacked based on their race through a hyper realistic AI generated image than what somebody drew on a post it note. You know, that's not the best example, but then that would be the frame. And what I'm trying to get to is that we're not going to pretend to have an answer. I think the frame of an article does come from the facts of what's actually happening and we're going out and finding out what those facts are, which is these. This tool doesn't gel with Microsoft's policies.
- [45:51]
Emmanuel
I also don't want to provide an answer, but I want to engage directly with what the three options that Tim is offering. So is it the person who is using the tool, is it the creator of the tool or is it the government who is responsible for kind of controlling the output? I don't know. But I do want to highlight that one of the responses that I've seen a lot is, well, do you want the government to tell you what you can do with a drill? Right? And the analogy is like one is a tool, the other is a tool and I can do whatever I want with a drill and I can't do whatever I want with an AI tool. That's not fair, it's not good. Blah, blah, blah. Like I said, it's like Tim Sweeney, incredibly accomplished human being, Elon Musk, you know what I mean? Mike Solana, not a fan personally, but it's like they're not like random people off the street. Like they work in technology, they understand how it works. They had a lot of success there. Some other people that have seen comment on this or have this sentiment. One who is very notable, I thought, is Yann Lecun. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, but he is a professor at nyu. He is meta's chief AI scientist. It's like these are some of the most accomplished computer scientists living, you know, Yann Lecun. It's like if AI is going to be as useful, as important to society as some people think, then it's like he's probably in line for a Nobel, right? Like he already has a Turing Road, like, I'm just trying to say very, very, very smart computer scientists. That doesn't mean that they are like experts on everything. And I think that becomes clear when you actually examine this like, drill analogy or this pen and paper analogy or this word processor analogy. And that is that those things are actually regulated. Right? Like, those things are regulated like a drill. Right? So it's like if you operate a drill, depending on where you're operating it, it has already gone through a bunch of safety regulations. If you're working on a professional site, then you're under OSHA regulations about how you're operating a drill. Like, there's like a very complex web of regulation that impacts most of what we do in the world. And like, that is a huge part of what civilization is. It's like we have these conversations and we use different regulatory bodies and organizations to make rules. And it's not clear that the people who are making this argument know that. It's like we are constantly swimming through this huge sea of regulations and it's not always top of mind, but it's there. And I think either, like, some people genuinely don't understand that. And I think some people, if you zoom out, it just comes back to this perspective in the tech industry and in Silicon Valley, where it's just like they're just expressing a libertarian tendency. Right? It's just like we make that technology don't tell us what to do. This will make the world better. The more you try to control us, the worse it will be. And that, that is the actual opinion that's being expressed and doesn't really have to do with what would be best for AI specifically.
- [49:36]
Sam
I guess if you think of about the three options, it's like the preferable option is that the user doesn't make racist imagery which relies on the thinking that racism, hate, violence, et cetera, will be stamped out of society and civilization through some sort of collective fixing of human nature that happens naturally without any. Like, it's a false premise. Like that. That one is not one of the three options. It's just not. Because that one relies on a systemic changing of human nature.
- [50:12]
Joseph
It would be nice, but it's not. Unfortunately, and rather depressingly, it seems like the least likely of all of them.
- [50:20]
Sam
Well, it's. I mean, it's the gun debate where it's like, oh, the preferable one is that people stop shooting each other. Like, that's the preferable option.
- [50:29]
Joseph
Right. But it's not gonna happen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think just really briefly, we'll do. We'll do a couple more things to Sam and then maybe a manual. I mean, I almost feel like it's useful not to spell it out super long or super explicitly, but just to say a little bit out loud, I mean, what are your own motivations when it comes to covering AI tech in the way we do? You'll have other publications like, I don't know, Fortune, Forbes, whoever, covering the VC side, the capital size totally makes sense for their audience. For us, we're going in very much on the ground floor looking at sometimes abuse, sometimes funny shit that people are doing with it and then showing a broader, you know, broader importance for that activity there. Sam, I mean, what is your own motivation for covering AI tech in the way we do and maybe even this story?
- [51:27]
Jason
Yeah, I think someone on Twitter said something that made me laugh. It was kind of tongue in cheek, but not kind of true. They were like, the journalistic urge to just post funny is the end, beginning and end of cycle. Which, yeah, that's obviously, it's like you see funny shit happening online. We cover online culture and technology. Let's unpack what that is. So I, I do think that is like, that's obviously facetious, but looking at what people are doing with the tech, I don't know another way to do it. It's like these are the things that confound the VCs. So if you're just writing about what the businesses are doing, the VCs are doing, and what the movements are in the investor world, that obviously affects a lot of things. And it's very important to write about those things. But if no one's writing about the crazy, weird shit that people are actually doing with the technology, we're missing a lot. I wrote about the chatbot, the sex chatbots, the erotic roleplay chatbots that are jailbreaking and getting around filters for large language models. And that to me was a really interesting and fascinating and kind of like inspiring story to write because it was people taking something that companies and corporations had blown tons of money on. Not blown, but you know, they invested a lot of money, they invested millions of dollars in these development of these models. And then people immediately were like, if you're not going to let me do horny shit on this, I'm going to go do it myself. Stop me.
- [53:02]
Joseph
Right?
- [53:03]
Jason
They can't. And I think that's really where, that's where the fun stuff is. That's where the scary and horrible stuff is. And if you're not following that very ground level reporting yeah, you're missing a whole world of stuff going on that the VCs and the tech world is not paying attention to, obviously.
- [53:26]
Joseph
Yes. Emmanuel, what about you? What is your motivation for coming in and covering AI in the way we do or from the angle that we do?
- [53:36]
Emmanuel
I think I said this a few times when we launched 404, but I'm very interested in how people use technology in unexpected ways, in the ways people subvert technology. And I can't think of a more perfect example than Sam writing a story one day about people subverting being image creator and saying, wait, Microsoft is not in control of this, as Microsoft thinks. And then less than 24 hours later, somebody sends me an email and he's like, hey, the same thing that Sam says is happening in a kind of funny, harmless way is actually being used in an extremely harmful way. And it's just like, that's basically the thesis for my approach to AI, people using it in unexpected ways.
- [54:33]
Joseph
Yeah, sure. Jason, I think you had a couple of thoughts.
- [54:36]
Sam
Yeah. I want to engage very quickly with what I think is the dumbest argument. I'm very sorry, but I saw it a lot, which is like, a lot of are like, mainstream media, like, has fallen so far. Like, they. They're writing about. They're generating outrage by, like, making spongebob fly into the World Trade Center. There's so much more important stuff happening. One fuck you. Like, straight up, like, we can write about anything we want. We're not mainstream media. We literally, Literally, not that we are not that. And it's like, it was a broader critique, but it's like weird people who have a website that we made ourselves, that we have no bosses, so we can write about whatever we want. Like, we can. That is. That is what. That's why we did this. So that we can write about whatever we want and you don't have to like it. That's fine. But the argument that goes hand in hand with this is they're saying you wouldn't censor the word processor or the typewriter, so why are you going to censor AI? And the argument is that you shouldn't write about this stuff. Like, this is inherently a pro censorship view. It's like anyone can write anything they want on the word processor except for these journalists who are writing something that I don't like as a billionaire, and it's upset me as a billionaire, I'm very upset that they wrote this. It's like, it's stupid, it's very dumb, and it makes me. It's like, it makes us mad. It makes me mad. At least the other thing. And very quickly, it's like people are saying, what's the big deal? Spongebob is flying into the World Trade Center. Kirby is flying into the World Trade Center. I've written articles about Nintendo suing a high school student for throwing a Pokemon card tournament at his, like, local Internet cafe. It's like, these companies do not have any sense of humor when it comes to their trademarks and their copyright and their intellectual property. And because Microsoft is so big and so powerful and whatever. Like, I kind of doubt that Nintendo is going to sue Bing for allowing people to fly Mario and Kirby into the World Trade Center. But let's say I drew Mario flying into the World Trade center and then I wanted to throw a party about it and charge $5 admission to. For people to look at my art of Mario flying into the World Trade Center. It's like, I would probably get a letter from Nintendo's lawyers. We've written about Nintendo.
- [57:13]
Joseph
Yes.
- [57:14]
Emmanuel
Should we put it on the merch store?
- [57:16]
Sam
Yeah, exactly. It's like, in what world? Like, make it. I don't care. It doesn't offend me. But someone go ask Shigeru Miyamoto. Miyamoto. Miyamoto. I don't know. Sorry. Very sorry.
- [57:30]
Joseph
I'll get to it.
- [57:30]
Sam
Go ask him. And we did ask them. And then they're like, oh, you're snitching to Nintendo. And it's like, we want to know about a guy who lives in a shack in the Dominican Republic who owes Nintendo $6 million. And it's like, he's fucked. He's. He's like, we'll live in poverty until he dies because Nintendo sued him through the Feds and took more pennies than he will ever make in his entire life. It's like this. It's crazy. These. These people care. Like, Nintendo cares. Right?
- [58:06]
Jason
They've also definitely seen it.
- [58:07]
Joseph
Yes.
- [58:07]
Sam
Yeah.
- [58:08]
Jason
You know, we don't have to go. We don't have to go deliver it to them. Some alarm went off in their office immediately.
- [58:14]
Emmanuel
Sorry.
- [58:14]
Joseph
And recently reason that we would deliver it is because there is just a public interest in knowing how massive companies are going to react to one another when this technology proliferates. That's what we want though. Emmanuel, you were going to say something.
- [58:25]
Emmanuel
Just to add to what you said, Joe. It just like it'd be useful for readers to know if they're going to get sued if they make an image of Mario using Bing AI. Are they going to get sued? Is Microsoft going to get sued? Are both of them going to get sued or is no one going to get sued? It's like that's a good question. No, that is part of what Tim is asking. Right, sorry. Just the same people who are getting very mad and are like don't write about this. They're all also heavily invested in a specific outcome. Elon Musk has an AI company. Mike Solana, I'm sorry I'm not read up on his portfolio but I assume he has a bunch of dumb AI companies. You know, John Carmack just posted a very long tweet, like a way longer tweet than you should be able to tweet about how we have to fight for open source AI right now or it's like we'll never win it back, blah blah blah. And it's like he might be right. I'm not. Maybe that is actually the correct path. But he also has an AI company. It's like all these people are heavily invested in a specific outcome. It's not that they're just like philosophers and you're like here's what's best for society. It just they're making the argument that is going to make them rich.
- [59:38]
Joseph
Yeah. When you think about it, Socrates, Plato, Nietzsche, they didn't have a substack, you know, so like I mean what. And now what would it be like if they did? Anyway, I don't know where the philosophical.
- [59:53]
Sam
Argument for AI accelerationism very shortly there's a shorthand for it which is called like AI fueled techno, luxury, communism. And it's this idea that AI will make everything and it will do all the jobs and we'll have a universal basic income and no one will have to work and we'll all live in luxury and we'll all like profit from this. What real world events have occurred that make anyone think that this is the likely outcome of super intelligent AI. Like when has any of these rich people who have like ushered this in fought for a stronger welfare state?
- [60:31]
Joseph
Right.
- [60:31]
Sam
Like that's the hope. That's the dream. Nominally philosophically, but it's like there's nothing to suggest that's actually going to happen.
- [60:39]
Joseph
Yeah, totally. I think for the last question, just because somebody did ask me this specifically on Bluesky. I don't want to put either Emmanuel or Sam on the spot, but maybe you have an idea on this. They say that our sites articles on non consensual AI images feature a lot of discord servers. That sort of thing. They ask isn't non Consensual sexual images against Discord's terms of service and what are they doing about it? Like, I don't know if you know the TOs off the top of your head, but, like, you do. Okay, what is it and what are they doing about it?
- [61:16]
Jason
Is against the tos. Is defects are against terms of service. As of when we asked them if they were in 2020 or whenever it was 2018, 2019, when the defects were things. Yeah, it's against it, for sure. Discord will take action on things when it rises to their level of awareness, which a lot of the time is through journalism. So Discord doesn't know what's going on a lot of the time in a lot of these closed communities, because they're closed and they rely on moderators to keep people within the guidelines because it's in their interest to do so. Like, it's very much in their interest to keep their own community in line with what Discord wants, because they're risking their entire server getting shut down and banned. That's the short answer. I mean, that's what they do about it, is they do something about it when it. When they become aware of it, which is rare.
- [62:09]
Joseph
When we tell them about it. Basically.
- [62:11]
Jason
Yeah.
- [62:11]
Emmanuel
When we send them the link directly and ask them directly, I guess it's not enough for us to publish the.
- [62:16]
Jason
Story, which is the case on a lot of platforms.
- [62:19]
Emmanuel
It's like, I don't always hit them up. Discord is my personal anom. It's my app that I keep out there to keep track of all these dirt bags. You know what I mean?
- [62:33]
Jason
Yeah.
- [62:34]
Joseph
All right.
- [62:34]
Jason
It's also not our, you know, we're not. We're not mods.
- [62:37]
Joseph
No, no. And let me. Let me just close with that in that sort of similar to the oh, why are you telling Nintendo thing. It's like, for years I was. Well, I still am. I'm hesitant to provide, you know, if I'm reporting on YouTube or Facebook or Twitter or whoever, I don't always want to give them the specific link to the material because it is not my job to moderate for them. In fact, whether they can find it without my assistance is part of the story, especially if we're approaching it through a content moderation frame. When I will provide it is when typically they sort of need that to provide an informed statement. So I don't have a great example off the top of my head, but let's say I go and ping them about some sort of abuse, and they will only be able to sort of make sense of what the hell I'm actually fucking talking about. If they have a link to the specific thing and they can provide a statement. So more often than not, that is why we sometimes provide links of material. I think that would apply there. All right. With that, thank you all for listening to this Subscribers only podcast. Please feel free to leave a five star review on the free version. You actually can't on the premium version, but that's all okay because you're already subscribing. Tell your friends about the podcast as well. I will now let the subscriber music, which is really intense, just let it roll. Just play us out. I guess we'll just let that go. Okay, here we fucking.