Why is everything a conspiracy?

Summary

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The Interface — BBC

Episode: "Why is everything a conspiracy?"

Date: April 30, 2026

Hosts: Tom Germain, Karen Hao, Nicky Woolf
Episode Theme:
A sharp, rapid-fire, and witty exploration of how modern technology—particularly social platforms, AI, and workplace surveillance—fuels conspiracy thinking, amplifies cultural anxieties, and changes our social landscape. The hosts unpack the recent Trump assassination attempt's online fallout, Meta’s invasive employee surveillance as AI training data, and the cultural backlash against “too perfect” AI-generated communication.

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Main Topics & Structure

1. The Anatomy of a Modern Conspiracy (00:58–10:32)

Focus:

Dissecting how the Trump assassination attempt instantly morphed into an online conspiracy storm; the hosts break down the “conspiracy theory playbook,” why humans are drawn to conspiracies, and whether it’s a feature or bug of our nature.

Key Discussion Points:

• Current Event: Trump assassination attempt during the White House Correspondent’s Dinner.
• Conspiracy Playbook:
  1. Event Occurs: Online misinformation spreads immediately—claims of second shooters, bombs, etc.
  2. Online Sleuthing: Misidentification—random people get accused before any facts are confirmed.
  3. ‘Baking’ Clues (QAnon Term): The community searches for “breadcrumbs,” often leading to wild narratives.
  4. Seeding and Amplification: Anonymous forums (e.g., 4chan, Reddit) generate and seed content that then leaks into mainstream feed ecosystems.
• Recent Example:
  • An anonymous 2023 Twitter account tweeted the shooter’s name “Cole Allen” ahead of the incident, sparking “time traveler” conspiracies.
  • Quote:

    "The conspiracy theory came about that a time traveler was warning us about this attack."
    — Nicky Woolf (04:37)

• Why Do Conspiracies Spread?
  • Sense of empowerment: following the clues feels like having insider knowledge.
  • Community & identity: "Followers" can monetize or gain attention.
  • When events feel incomprehensible, conspiracy offers false certainty.

Memorable Quotes:

• "It's kind of empowering, you know, unraveling conspiracy theories. Right. There's all these like massive global forces that are acting upon us..."
  — Tom Germain (08:07)

• "This is not a factor of any particular part of the internet. It is a fundamental part of human nature."
  — Nicky Woolf (08:56)

Important Segment Timestamps:

• (02:33–05:50) — Real-time account of conspiracy emergence after recent events
• (05:50–07:43) — Online “playbook” and how sites like Reddit and 4chan drive the machine
• (08:07–09:32) — Why humans crave hidden knowledge

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2. Meta’s AI Surveillance: The Road to “Metabots” (12:39–25:56)

Focus:

Meta’s controversial move to monitor every aspect of employees’ computer activity to train AI agents—revealing the true ambitions of Big Tech in replacing human labor.

Key Discussion Points:

• Reuters scoop: Meta now tracks all work-related employee activity—mouse movements, clicks, even screenshots—to feed AI training data.
• No Opt-Out: Employees are told: accept surveillance, leave, or move to Europe (where privacy laws apply).
  • Quote:

    "If they don't like it, that means they just have to leave the company or apparently move to Europe because Europe actually has data privacy protection."
    — Karen Hao (13:19)

• Why is AI being trained this way?
  • AI agents must learn how humans actually interact with digital interfaces, since not all software allows backend access.
• Effectiveness Doubts:
  • Past attempts failed—work data is inherently messy/non-computable.
  • Quoting MIT economist Daron Acemoglu: Real work involves complex, unprogrammable human skills.
  • Layoffs follow not because AI is ready, but as a "future bet."
  • Quote:

    "A lot of work is really complicated... social, emotional, relationship, change management, leadership skills... AI automated systems are really not that good at that."
    — Karen Hao (20:30)

• Cultural Impact:
  • Big layoffs, spending billions to chase automation dreams.
  • Worker agency eroded — surveillance is normalized.

Notable Exchanges:

• Tom Germain:

  "They are spying on you to try and create a little robot guy who, ideally for the company, does what you do, essentially." (18:34)

• Karen Hao:

  "Yes, we should be worried." (25:07)

Important Segment Timestamps:

• (12:39–15:30) — Details of Meta’s surveillance & employee reactions
• (19:33–23:30) — Big Tech layoffs and the flawed logic of automating white-collar work
• (25:07) — “Should we be worried?” moment

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3. The Backlash Against “Perfect” AI Writing (26:08–36:55)

Focus:

The hosts riff on a new Chrome extension that adds deliberate typos to AI-generated emails—spotlighting growing distrust and cultural resistance to synthetic writing.

Key Discussion Points:

• New Tool: Chrome extension “Sincerely” (by Ben Horowitz) lets users mask AI-generated writing with ‘human-like’ mistakes.
• Why the need?
  • A backlash is growing: “Good” writing (perfect, polished) is now read as AI-generated and therefore suspicious.
  • People actively hide AI use because of shame/stigma.
• Relationship to Broader Trends:
  • Cultural craving for imperfection: menus written in bad handwriting, rustic presentation in restaurants, etc.
  • The “ick” factor: Trust is eroded when readers sense an AI generated something deceptively.
  • Genuine human skill increasingly challenged by accusations of “this is AI”—even when it’s not.
    • Quote:

      "People are so—they find AI so distasteful that people are getting accused of using AI when they're not, and it's getting them in trouble."
      — Tom Germain (34:26)

• Justice/Discrimination Angle:
  • Are we unfairly judging non-native English speakers using AI for clarity?
  • Karen Hao: recounts an MIT professor’s warning about the risk of discriminating against those who use AI to edit their writing (31:10–31:30).
• The Social ‘Captcha’:
  • Everyone must now ‘prove’ they’re human; suspicion lingers everywhere.

Notable Quotes & Moments:

• Karen Hao:

  "There’s just this like little like, ick feeling that starts to kind of creep up where I'm like, ugh... I wish I was spending my time instead reading human writing." (31:23)

• Nicky Woolf:

  "What other corners are they using AI to cut, like it sort of trust in everything they're doing..." (32:00)

• Tom Germain:

  "It's like we're all dealing with this captcha all the time now, that... we've got to prove that we're not a robot and we're actually doing real stuff." (35:44)

Important Timestamps:

• (26:08–27:57) — Description of “Sincerely” typo extension & cultural context
• (29:20–32:39) — Hosts unpack emotional reactions to synthetic writing
• (34:26–35:44) — Real humans suffering false accusations of AI usage

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Conclusion & Reflections

• Mistrust as the New Default: Cultural reactions to tech—be it conspiracy thinking, workplace surveillance, or AI-generated communication—are increasingly shaped by acute skepticism, a search for authenticity, and a sense of powerlessness.
• Backlash Building: As hosts note, "the fact that [hiding AI use] caught on like this implies people don't like AI. They don't like having AI." (36:13)
• Invitation for Listener Stories: The hosts invite emails from users hiding their AI use, signaling ongoing curiosity about how these trends impact real lives (36:55).

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Episode Highlights & Outstanding Quotes

• Nicky Woolf: "The thing with this stuff, and this is a term that came out of QAnon... there's this idea of baking, which people who got into QAnon were called bakers because they were following the breadcrumbs." (07:48)
• Karen Hao: "We're a little bit screwed." (13:40)
• Tom Germain: "I would love to hear from people, right? Like I think there's, for a lot of us, like using AI kind of feels shameful in certain contexts... I would love to know if you're out there and you're using one of these tools and like you're putting in extra effort to hide it..." (36:55)

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Useful for Listeners Who Haven’t Tuned In

• The podcast uses concrete, recent events (Trump dinner attack; Meta surveillance; "Sincerely" typo app) to showcase how tech amplifies old human tendencies—be it conspiracy theorizing, fear of being replaced, or the craving for flawed, "real" expression.
• The hosts’ dynamic is quick, irreverent, and jargon-free; their insights cut through the noise with humor and genuine concern.
• Whether you worry about AI taking your job, or just want to know what that viral “time-traveler tweet” was about, this episode provides a clear, comprehensive, and relatable guide to how technology is “rewiring your world.”

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Transcript

[A]

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[B]

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[C]

If they could make us all get fired and hire metabots instead of people, that would be a huge victory. And they are trying to bring that world into fruition.

[B]

Yes, they are coming for you.

[C]

Hello and welcome back to the Interface, the show that decodes the tech that's rewiring your week and your world. I'm Thomas Germain.

[B]

I'm Karen Howe.

[D]

And I'm Nikki Wolfe. Today on the Interface, we'll be looking at how the Trump assassination attempt reveals the conspiracy theory playbook.

[B]

Meta is spying on its employees to replace them with AI. And you might be next.

[C]

And AI is making our world a little too perfect. So there's a new app you can use to add typos to your emails.

[D]

So I was in Washington D.C. this weekend and it was a bit of a strange weekend. I don't know if you guys saw the news. Yes, it was the White House Correspondent's Dinner this weekend, which is this big annual gala for the White House press corps. There's the main event, which I wasn't at. There was a. There's a load of satellite parties and there was a party nearby with actually a load of people who used to work in the National Security industry and everyone's phone went off all at the same time. And it was because, and I'm sure you've seen this, there was a attempted shooting at the White House Correspondent's Dinner. Now we're still finding out about what exactly happened, kind of as we go. This was only a couple of days ago as we record this. But that has not stopped the Internet from taking what happened and running with it. It's formed almost a perfect storm of conspiracy theory happenings in a way that I think is very, very illustrative of how this kind of stuff often happens.

[C]

So the second I heard that this had happened, you know, you can feel the gears start turning. There's going to be some people at least, who are out there telling some crazy story. But what do we know about what actually happened this weekend?

[D]

So this guy called Cole Allen, who we're still learning about exactly who he is, but he ran through the security at the correspondence dinner. Shots were fired. Some shots were fired by him, it seems. Some were fired by the Secret Service. He was taken into custody on the scene. Once the shooter was named, people quickly started digging online and found a anonymous Twitter account that in 2023, posted one tweet. This is the only tweet that this account has posted. And it just says Cole Allen, the name of the shooter. Mm. Unarguably. That's weird.

[C]

Look. Yeah, it's pretty weird.

[D]

So the conspiracy theory came about that a time traveler was warning us about this attack.

[C]

That makes sense.

[B]

What? Sorry, A time traveler posted.

[C]

What part of this is confusing?

[D]

The time traveler went back to 2023 to warn people about this shooting via the medium of. If I was a time traveler going back to 2023, there would be things I would do first, I think, before.

[C]

Yeah, well, I would just have more of a plan. You know, if I got my hands on time travel technology, I wouldn't get back. I was like, wow, I didn't think about this. I guess I'll tweet this guy's name and hope people catch on to it. Like, they could have given us some more clues.

[D]

Yeah.

[C]

The thing is with this stuff and, like, for anyone who's a conspiracy theorist, like, this is probably enraging and, like, we're part of it, obviously, because we're. We're picking this apart. But, like, could you walk us through, step by step, the conspiracy playbook? Because you can see it the same way every time. Right. This isn't some kind of special situation. It's just another conspiracy theory.

[D]

So first, while it's still happening. You get the misinformation about what's actually going on. You get theories that there'll be a second gunman. You get theories that there's unexploded bombs. People are sharing stuff who aren't on the scene. People are seeing stuff that's being shared from the scene that isn't necessarily from a trustworthy source. Then after the thing is over, immediately you'll start to get misidentification. So this didn't actually happen in the White House correspondence sense. But you will often get like a suspect who's named, who everyone will find on their kind of old Facebook account or something. And everyone, like if we don't know

[C]

who did it, like Sluice will go try and identify someone. The wrong guy. Yeah.

[D]

And then the authorities will name a suspect and then people will take that name and go hog wild with it. So in this case, this is how you got people finding that old time travelery tweet.

[C]

They dig through the social media.

[D]

Then you get people in finer and finer detail going through all of the videos, going through the information. That's the playbook, basically. That's the kind of thing to expect.

[B]

And it almost always brews on the same subreddits. Like this step,

[D]

it'll be happening on the same subreddits you will also see. So there's kind of below Reddit level there's a site called 4champs I think we've talked about before. These are kind of fully anonymous forums. And in some instances on these forums you will get people actively trying to seed conspiracies. Not saying that's what happened with this time traveller tweet, but a lot of the time you will have people making a photoshopped kind of fake picture of something like that, like something from the past and then spreading it. And because lots of people are on these sites, they can seed it in a way that will then make its way into the short form video algorithmic feed ecosystem.

[B]

So I'm still wondering like, why does this always happen?

[D]

The thing with this stuff, and this is a term that came out of QAnon, which was this massive kind of conglomeration of conspiracy theories that I did a lot of reporting on. There's this idea of baking which people who got into Qanon were called bakers because they were following the breadcrumbs. And people love following little clues.

[C]

It's kind of empowering, you know, unraveling conspiracy theories. Right. There's all these like massive global forces that are acting upon Us and the public all the time.

[D]

Especially in a world where you feel so powerless for everything.

[C]

If you can figure stuff out, it's like you're on the inside, you know what's really happening. You're catching the bad guys. And the other is that especially on the Internet, uh, it's a way to generate attention and make money.

[D]

Right.

[C]

There's this whole ecosystem that profits off this kind of stuff. Right.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

What would happen if Reddit just shut down the main subreddits that usually brew these conspiracy theories? Do you think that that would significantly ameliorate the problem or would it actually just push this activity to other parts of the Internet?

[D]

This is not a factor of any particular part of the Internet. It is a fundamental part of human nature. And the reason to not kind of shut this down too much is that actually, ultimately it is not necessarily unhealthy to not trust everything that you are told by people in authority. Right. Like that is not in and of itself a bad instinct. AI is going to make this kind of thing much harder that that's going to throw a spanner in all these works.

[C]

It's easier to produce this information quicker.

[D]

Yeah. You know.

[C]

Well, I think the thing to keep in mind here is way more nefarious and convoluted conspiracy theories than this one have happened and turn out to be real. Like, it's not. Like this sort of thing is unimaginable. But every single time, every time, without exception, that something bad and shocking happens, there will be all these conspiracy theories picking it apart and telling you about how it's some kind of master plan and nothing is real. So I think it's worth understanding what the tropes are, because if you start to notice, well, this is, this is just the same thing every time. That's a useful tool to help sort out whether things are actually truly bizarre or whether just like every real world event, there's something odd if you look too closely at it.

[D]

Yeah.

[B]

What's actually happening inside Iran? I'm Tristan Redman, host of the Global Story podcast from the BBC.

[A]

Iranians have been under a near total

[B]

Internet blackout for several months. Few Western journalists have been permitted to operate in the country. But in recent weeks, the BBC's chief international correspondent, Le Doucette, has been reporting on the ground in Tehran. For more, listen to the global story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. So I have to say I am not going to bring a palate cleanser to that story. I'm going to talk about more Scary things, but not as scary as an attempted assassination. Yes. So there was this scoop from Reuters that broke that Meta is installing new tracking software onto all of its employees devices for tracking their clicking, their mouse movements, occasionally taking screenshots and other things related to their work related activity. And this is all ultimately for the purpose of trying to improve their AI agents to perform work related tasks. This is a story that intersects so many different trends that are happening in the world simultaneously. The first one being that of course everyone has heard AI might take your job. And in this particular instance Meta is not only really orienting like they've, they're really explicitly coming out here and being like, we are on the path to trying to develop labor automating software. The first people that we are going to try to automate is our employees. And the second people might be you because they are training these agents to do the work in house and then to potentially sell it as a service or just release it open source into the world for other companies to do the exact same thing. But the other thing that's kind of an interesting trend that this hits upon is this general feeling that surveillance and AI is also just taking more and more agency and power away from workers in general and giving it back to the capital owners, the business owners. And obviously this has been a controversial announcement to employees for various different reasons, but one of them is simply that they cannot opt out. Workplace surveillance is already pretty common, workplace tracking is pretty common. And especially in the tech industry it's pretty common. But this is just a degree of invasiveness that I think really surprised Meta employees, especially because the executives made clear during an employee all hands that if they don't like it, that means they just have to leave the company or apparently move to Europe because Europe actually has data privacy protection. They have laws, they have laws over there.

[C]

Must be nice.

[B]

We're a little bit screwed.

[C]

But just so I'm clear, so every single thing that a Meta employee does in their computer now, like every mouse movement, everything they type is like being logged and ready recorded.

[B]

Not everything. So what the internal memos have said and what the executives have said during these employee all hands is that it's specifically work related apps, but Gmail is considered a work related app. So one of the concerns that employees brought up is that what about when we're just checking our Gmail for you know, like to talk to our doctor, you know, you know, like something that's like actually not work related but happens to be on the work related device and in a work related application. And the executives basically were like, well then just don't do it on your work laptop. Like you should do that elsewhere. So. So yeah, so it is supposed to be targeting very specific types of data, but obviously it's going to be hard to really only get work related information.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

So Reuters reached out to Meta and a Meta spokesperson did mention that they have safeguards to protect employee sensitive content. They didn't actually elaborate on what those safeguards are. They actually also didn't elaborate that to employees either. During the employee all hands.

[C]

It's just like, don't worry about it.

[B]

Yeah, but what, what's kind of interesting is, is the spokesperson then just reiterated essentially what we've been talking about here, which is if we're building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them. So they're just kind of reinforcing. Yes, they're coming for you.

[D]

Why would an AI agent being trained need to learn on stuff like mouse clicks? Right. AI is not interacting with a computer using a mouse. How does that.

[B]

This is a really interesting question because there's an answer for why this is being attempted, but there's also caveats to it. So the answer is like AI agents are ultimately navigating in a world, a digital world that's designed for humans. And so some of the things that the, that Meta wants to capture is like clicking buttons in software or navigating a drop down venue, things that humans would typically have to do because that is how software has been designed. And AI agents aren't actually just interacting at a behind the scenes level. They have to interact at this user interface level. But some people have brought up this question of is this actually the right way to train AI agents in the first place? Like they could actually just communicate more fundamentally with software, like ingesting HTML code, which is the code that tells the computer how to visualize a website. Like instead of using the pixels to capture the information on the website, like why not just ingest the code directly? So this is both a valid question and a kind of strange approach. But potentially it's because these AI agents aren't going to have access to the underlying code of a piece of software all the time. You know, they can't just, let's say you have Microsoft Word downloaded on your laptop. Like, the likelihood that Microsoft as a company would be willing to open up their code directly to a Meta AI agent is low probability. And so the AI agent will probably need to navigate different pieces of software that are owned by different companies just through that visual interface.

[D]

So actually that could get around things like signal encryption. Say someone's got the signal app on a work phone, it could open it in the way that the user would on the screen, rather than having to get into the encrypted actual app. That's terrifying.

[B]

Yes, yes, exactly. The thing that strikes me so much about this particular scoop is that the AI industry for a while was really trying to make themselves appear good. You know, like they're, they're this moral force. They're trying to ultimately work on things like scientific discovery and improving healthcare and education and whatever. And no, of course not. We're not trying to automate jobs. And now it's just all of that is melted away and it's like, yeah, we're coming after our own employees jobs first to use their data to then come after your jobs. Like it's, it's, we've gotten to the, you know, the evolution or the maturation of the AI industry to, to where they, they simply don't have to hide anymore what the actual main agenda is, and they're just going after it, full steam ahead.

[C]

Yeah, and it, like, if you're a meta employee, like, what is happening here is like, they are spying on you to try and create a little robot guy who, ideally for the company, does what you do, essentially. And then there's this, you know, fear, Right. We've heard often from the CEOs of AI companies that there will be like mass unemployment because these tools will get so good that they'll do all of our jobs and we'll all be on the street begging robots for change or something. I guess part of the question here is like, I think people hearing that obviously will be alarmed, right? They're like, specifically to create a white collar office worker. Like, is, do. How successful do you think these efforts are going to be? Will they, like, are jobs going to be replaced because of this thing or is it not as a. Do you expect it won't be as effective as, you know, the most dire predictions suggest?

[B]

The first thing to say is a pro. Projects like this have been tried before, the monitoring of mouse movements, keystrokes, screenshots to train AI agents, and they have not actually worked. One of the hypotheses about why it might be different this time is because of the sheer scale. Like, meta has a lot of employees and no one's allowed to opt out. So are they going to be able to capture, you know, usually it doesn't work because the data is really Noisy, and there's a small sample size. But is somehow the scale going to help overcome some of those challenges? But this is a really legitimate caveat to this whole enterprise is that is Meta actually going to successfully create the white collar worker? Probably not, because it turns out that a lot of work is really complicated. You know, Darren Osamoglu, this institute professor at MIT who won the Nobel Prize for economics, he always points out that in Silicon Valley there's this ideology that all aspects of work are kind of computable, and in the end, robots would actually do every aspect of work better than a human, as long as we just train it on the right data. But when you look at the reality of production, there's a lot of things that are not computable. Like there's a lot of social, emotional, relationship change management, like leadership skills involved in things and like dealing with surprising occurrences, dealing with, you know, just like the, the messiness of the world. And it turns out that actually AI automated systems are really not that good at that. Humans are particularly good at that. And so there is this big question of even with a sheer amount of scaled data for doing mouse movements, yeah, sure, maybe the AI agent will finally learn how to click a bunch of buttons and navigate dropdown menus, but is that sufficient enough to truly replace all forms of work? And Darren Osamungu's answer is, no, it's not. And what's. But what's interesting, that does not mean that there won't be potentially big layoffs in the near future due to the orientation of the AI industry in this direction. I mean, this scoop came out simultaneously with Meta also publicly announcing that they are laying off 8,000 employees and are going to leave 6,000 job openings vacant. They are not going to actually hire for them. And I think most people would assume, oh my God, Meta is successfully automating all this work away, and that is why they're not hiring these employees. But it's actually a little bit more nuanced than, than that they are making a future bet that based on their current investments, they will be able to eventually automate that work away. And they kind of need. They're under a lot of pressure to cut costs now, so they're just going to lay off those workers and not hire those workers immediately. And the reason they're under that pressure is because they're spending $135 billion this year on building out AI infrastructure. This is kind of a little case study for how other companies are going to operate. A lot of other companies are going to see the AI industry orienting towards trying to automate more and more work. And they, as consumers of those AI technologies, are then going to think, huh, well, maybe I can also make a future bet that eventually these AI tools are going to help me automate away most of the. The work that my employees are doing right now. But I kind of need to cut costs now to be more competitive. So let me just do the layoffs and slow down hiring in the present.

[C]

Well, the Wall Street Journal just reported that in March alone, the tech industry laid off 45,800 workers. Right. Like, layoffs, layoffs, layoffs. We've been hearing every month another company. And not just in the tech industry, like, you know, across other parts of the economy too. I think it is fair to say in the tech industry that layoffs are happening because of AI, but it isn't necessarily because jobs are being replaced by AI. It's because they are spending so much money, invest like an amount of money that, like, it's so large that the human mind cannot wrap itself around numbers this big. That's how many dollars are being spent on this stuff.

[B]

And.

[C]

And on top of that, we have just exited this period where, especially for the tech industry, money was free. Right. Interest rates were really low. Advertising on the Internet was just like. It's like they had their own mint and they were just making cash. Everything has tightened up and now they have to live in the real world. And they were probably really overstaffed and people are being let go because the companies now suddenly have to act like real businesses and not like Infinite Money Machines.

[D]

Yeah, obviously this is pretty confusing. There's some things. Should we be worried about losing our jobs because the AI is too good? Should we be worried about losing our jobs because the companies think it's too good, but it's not? Should we be worried about privacy because they're trying to create, you know, should we be worried?

[C]

Karen, help us sort through this. Like, we need a. We need a guide here.

[B]

Yes, we should be worried.

[C]

Okay. Oh, good. Okay. Okay, great.

[D]

But we're not sure exactly what we should be worried about.

[C]

We don't know how worried you should be.

[D]

Have a baseline level worried about.

[C]

No, I mean, they're trying to create a tool that will do people's jobs, ostensibly because that will be cheaper than a real person and you'll pay meta instead of paying an employee. If you're some random company, it is not at all a given that this will succeed, that it will be able to do your job and that this is going to be a huge problem. But it is certainly something to pay attention to. And it's worth understanding that that is the goal of this industry. Like, if they could make us all get fired and hire metabots instead of people, that would be a huge victory, and they are trying to bring that world into fruition.

[B]

And of course, this topic is hugely important and very complex. So we will definitely return to the topic of how AI is going to impact work and labor in the future.

[C]

All right, let's shift away from the world of work here. Used to be that great writing was a sign of competency, that you wanted everything you typed out to be perfect and look just right. And then we got all these tools that will do the writing for us that are trained on perfect grammar, who get every word, every punctuation mark exactly correct. They use, you know, fancy, elaborate language. It makes everything perfect and smooth to the point that now good writing is suspect. And last week, a new tool came out. It's a Chrome extension. Like, you can add this little app to your browser, and it will add typos and grammar mistakes to your email on purpose to make it look like you are a real flawed human being. And I think there's a couple reasons this is interesting, but one of them is, like, we've reached this point where using AI is now like a Mark of Cain, right? Like, people don't want to be seen as using it. Where at first it was like, oh, you have to. You need to learn how to be perfect and optimize. Everyone's got to get on AI. Now it's like, in a lot of corners of our society, it's become, like, a shameful thing. And I think people are trying to hide the fact that they are using AI. And this new tool is here to help you. It's called Sincerely. It was made by a guy named Ben Horowitz. Uh, it's a take on Grammarly. You know, it's like this app you can add that will, like, make your writing perfect. So this is. This is the opposite of that. He said this was a very useful tool for him. You add it to Chrome, you can tweak your writing. He built it using Claude, the AI made by Anthropic. So it's like AI all the way

[D]

down to hide your use of AI using AI.

[C]

Yeah, he kind of made this as a joke. He said he, like, didn't really. You know, it's supposed to be finding its cutesy, and you could. It. I think it costs like $5 or something. 4.99. He said he's not really trying to make money. He's, he's trying to make a point here.

[B]

I, I have to say, when I first heard of this, I was like, so we basically got a bunch of AI slop, and now we're just gonna get AI slop with typos? Like, it's like, yeah, I mean, you

[C]

know, I would not expect that this is going to become a regular thing that, like, everybody's going to start doing this, like, adding little mistakes to their writing. But the fact that this struck such a nerve. A reporter at Business Insider named Katie Nitopoulos wrote a piece about this. I think it says something about the current place that AI has in our society and our reaction to it. I mean, here's a question for you guys, right? I think this is an experience we're all having now. You're careening around the Internet and you encounter a piece of writing in particular. This happens with videos too. But you can a piece of writing and it kind of, you realize, oh, this sort of looks or sounds like it was written by AI. How do you guys react to that? When you're reading something, you're enjoying it, and then you realize maybe it's AI what does, how does that make you feel?

[D]

Generally speaking, when I'm reading something and I'm reading it because I like it, it is because I am already aware of and know the creator, right? Like, I subscribe to a whole bunch of the media, it's quite rare to me that I'll be reading something for its writing and not have kind of, by definition, done a little bit of background.

[C]

But what about a tweet, right? This happens to me all the time. I'm looking at social media, I see a piece of, I'm like listening along, or I'm reading something, I'm interested, and then I go, oh, wait a minute. This sounds like this.

[D]

Yeah, this, this Fruit Love island does not seem entirely on the level. I'm not sure, I'm not sure it's real.

[B]

I think there's sort of a spectrum in how people actually use AI to write, right? Like, there's the people who just generate the whole thing and just post it exactly as is. And I've definitely encountered so many of those posts on LinkedIn, especially LinkedIn is

[C]

I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. I, I think this is not good for your soul.

[B]

I know. I, I, we talk about that.

[C]

Yeah, that's a whole lot of time

[B]

on LinkedIn and it is really embarrassing. But yeah, it is just a cesspit of AI generated posts. So there's that, but then there's like people who use AI to structure their thoughts, and then there's like, people who've written the thing, especially English as a second language people, and then use AI to clean up the grammar. And like, I'm. I've been having like these huge discussions with people about this because I definitely have an aversion to seeing any kind of AI generated writing on any level of, of this spectrum. Because it, there's just this like little like, ick feeling that starts to kind of creep up where I'm like, ugh. Like I wish I was spending my time instead writing, reading human writing. But then like, I was talking with this professor at MIT who was saying that she kind of had this similar reaction to, especially when it came to like, emails. And she kind of realized that she might be discriminating against English as a second language speakers who might have a tendency to use AI more to clean up their grammar. And it really made me pause and think about whether I should then adjust my reaction when I see this stuff.

[C]

People probably, I'm sure, have really strong feelings about this. Like, no, it's outrageous. You should never use AI. There's some people who, who truly think it's like using it at all is an immoral act. All I know is the way I react to it. It's just like, ugh, like it just feels gross. I don't know that I'm right in feeling that way. It's just my natural reaction.

[B]

Yeah, you kind of feel a little bit cheated.

[D]

Yeah. And there's maybe also, you know, if there's a news reporter who the tweet by them, the post by them is AI generated. It's also, what other corners are they using AI to cut, like it sort of trust in everything they're doing. I think quite rightly so.

[C]

I mean, yeah, there, it's like a shortcut machine. And even if it's not a lack of trust, it's just like, you know, I, I thought I was listening to a guy and what I'm listening to is like the, the product of a prompt that I could have entered myself. Like, I can just go talk to ChatGPT if I want to hear what Chat GPT thinks about something.

[D]

Right.

[C]

However we should feel about this, there's this trend that has spread across our whole society, which I think is like a craving for imperfection. I've been reading a lot about this new thing that's going on with Restaurants especially, like, you know, in major cities in New York, in London and Los Angeles, where, like, the menu will be scribbled on the wall in like, intentionally bad handwriting or like they'll just hand you a little piece of paper. Because what we're getting through the mainstream has become so polished and smooth that now the edge is a sign of something human and something that people are looking for. It's a very weird moment where years ago it was the exact opposite, that it's like, too human. It's lazy. We don't want to see people who are, aren't putting in the effort to make things look perfect. Now the fact that it's bad and not as good as it could be is a sign that you put more effort into it because you did it yourself.

[B]

I kind of love it, to be honest. I, I, I'm all for returning back to these kinds of much more human, handcrafted things. It's, it's, it's nice to know that people are taking that extra care. It's kind of like, you know, sending your friend an email versus sending them a handwritten note. It's like so special.

[C]

Now we should start sending the podcast

[D]

to people in writing on to cassettes, wasn't it? And recording into. But if it can be faked, you know, if there's an AI that can start putting out plausible handwritten notes, then there'll be a backlash on that. Backlash.

[C]

There's a really interesting phenomenon that's happening where people are so they find AI so distasteful that people are getting accused of using AI when they're not, and it's getting them in trouble. There's this guy who makes videos. He's like a sculptor. He calls himself Argiloso. He'll take like a block of clay and with like a couple movements of his thumbs and fingers. It happens so quickly. It becomes this just like, unbelievably realistic face. And he's so good at it, and he does it so quickly that people are now in his comments accusing him of using AI. It's like ruining his reputation. And all these experts have chimed in, these like, AI video guys have chimed in to say, like, no, he is definitely not using AI. These are real videos. He's really doing it. But it's like hurting this real person's reputation. It's this really strange place to be. I mean, I was talking to somebody recently about how they were doing some work, you know, I think for university, and they turned in an essay and it like, got spit back at them. Saying that it was AI, it was too perfect and they went in and tried to mess up their own like true real human output to make it worse in order to not get flagged incorrectly by AI detectors. Which, you know, we can get into this on another episode. That stuff like does not work. It is not foolproof. You can't, you should not be relying on it. But like, yeah, it's like we're all dealing with this captcha all the time now that constantly as we move through the world we've got to prove that we're not a robot and we're actually doing real stuff. It's this weird double edged sword taking a step back.

[D]

All right, like the 35,000 foot view on this is that the fact that it caught on like this implies people don't like AI. They don't like having AI.

[C]

Some large subset of people, a large

[D]

subset of people don't like realizing that they have been tricked when they feel tricked, when they discover that they're reading something by AI to the point where something, the entire aim of which is to hide that AI has been involved, that shame is involved in the fact that AI is being used to make something has gotten this big. This first. It is the sign of a cultural backlash. Right? That's what we're talking about here.

[C]

I would love to hear from people, right? Like I think there's, for a lot of us, like using AI kind of feels shameful in certain contexts. Like I've heard people tell me that they like, they feel like it's the secret. I would love to know if you're out there and you're using one of these tools and like you're putting in extra effort to hide it from the people who are receiving what you're producing. It'd be really interesting to hear those stories.

[B]

Well, good thing we're not perfect because

[C]

we'll never get accused of being.

[D]

Yeah, we made a mistake last week

[C]

on our last episode. We were talking about how Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down and I mentioned that he had grown the company to be the most valuable business on Earth at $4 trillion. That was true for a long time. But of course Nvidia is the most valuable.

[D]

And thanks to John, who's a professor from Texas, who got in touch and pointed that out. That shows we are listening to all of your responses. We read all the emails and hands up, we screwed that one up.

[C]

If you are very mad at us, send us an email and we will read it and we'll be so sorry. All I want to do is make you happy.

[D]

Join us next week. If you're in the uk, you can listen on BBC Sounds and if you're outside the uk, you can listen wherever you get your podcasts or search for the Interface podcast on YouTube. If you want to get in touch with us, you can email@the interfacebc.com or WhatsApp us on 443-332072472. You can also find us on social media. Links are in the show.

[B]

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