Open Model Wars + Claire Stapleton's Dishy Google Memoir + Substack's Slop Fight

21:59Claire Stapleton:My sense, and I'm far from a China expert, I know only what I read, but Chairman Xi Jinping gave a speech within the past few weeks about open source AI in which he doubled down on it and was basically saying, we are going to keep at this. This is our approach. We think it is good for the world. And what I took from those remarks is this man, I don't even like using this term, but unfortunately, this is the best one I have here. This man is not AGI pilled. This man does not see what is coming. He does not understand how good these models are going to be. This may be a case of a person who is using models that are three to seven months behind the frontier, right?

22:36Claire Stapleton:He's using basically the equivalent of like Opus 4.6, and it's pretty good, but it hasn't put the fear of God into him yet. And my suspicion is sometime within the next three to seven months, he is going to get the fear of God put into him. And the same thing is going to happen to him that happened to the Trump administration, which you may recall was also all gas, no brakes until very recently when they saw a few things and they said, we're going to need a different approach here. So the same thing is going to happen to China. It is only a matter of time. Well, I did see that after this open letter was signed by so many researchers, Daniel Cocotello, former Hard Fork guest, author of AI 2027, updated his probability estimates of Doom attached to his scenarios where he gives slightly higher weight to better outcomes and slightly lower.

23:27The likelihood of a race to ASI has declined by 10 % in his estimation. Okay. Good news. A little good news from the AI 2027 crowd.

23:39Claire Stapleton:Well, we love to hear it. We love to feature good news on this broadcast. And I don't know that you'll hear any again soon, but savor it in this moment. Yeah. I mean, looking at the connective tissue between these two open letters, the open models letter by NVIDIA and the signatories there and this Pace the Frontier letter, it just seems like the sort of temperature is rising on Silicon Valley and on these models. A lot of people are having the realization that progress is continuing, that the models keep getting more capable. You don't hear as many people talking about the model capabilities plateauing or leveling off.

24:20I think most people who are in and around this space understand that we are headed into strange territory here. And so I think a lot of the battle lines are starting to be drawn now. And what you hear is people inside the labs saying, hey, this is really crazy. It's time to pay attention. And you hear people at other companies saying, hey, this could get really crazy. We better put in place some safeguards for open models now. And I think that the thing that joins these letters is a sense of urgency, a sense of sort of wanting to retain some control or agency over this seemingly disembodied force and just people like kind of freaking out as these models get more capable.

24:58Claire Stapleton:Yeah, but I just can't help but worry that the labs are muddling their own message. Because while it is true that they are saying some of these things publicly, and they are signing these open letters, you know, that's sort of what they're doing with one hand. While on the other hand, it's like, there's a very business as usual quality to the labs. And that, you know, I imagine that if, you know, they were with us in the room right now, they would say, well, look, we've got to do multiple things at once. Like we are running a company, you know, we can't, you know, just like completely opt out of our circumstances.

25:27Claire Stapleton:But on the other hand, it is just very strange that everything that we've just discussed, which really could become quite existential, feels like a footnote in a conversation that is still largely about the release of new models, the signing of new customers, the construction of new data centers, and all the rest. Well, they're going public, right? So it's like the sort of rhetoric about a slowdown or pacing the frontier sounds great, but like which of these companies are actually going to be willing to slow down if it, for example, would hurt their prospects of IPO-ing? It just really makes me glad that the Manhattan Project was conducted by the government and not a for-profit enterprise.

26:06Claire Stapleton:I think there was some wisdom in having public servants work on the hardest problems of our time. You don't think Oppenheimer should have been filing S1s and thinking about their margins as they approached an IPO? I think we're all very lucky that he didn't.

26:23When we come back, don't be evil. I say it to Kevin before every recording, and it's also the title of Claire Stapleton's new book. We'll talk to her about what she thinks about worker activism in Silicon Valley and her time at Google.

26:52The thing about AI for business, it may not automatically fit the way your business works. At IBM, we've seen this firsthand. But by embedding AI across HR, IT, and procurement processes, we've reduced costs by millions, slash repetitive tasks and freed thousands of hours for strategic work. Now we're helping companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business, IBM. This is Maurice Shema, host of The Last 12 Weeks, a new podcast from Serial Productions, The Marshall Project, and The New York Times. A couple of years back, I got an email from a defense lawyer who wanted me to write about his client.

27:35The client, David Wood, was on death row in Texas. Had been there for more than 30 years. The lawyer was writing because David Wood had lost all of his appeals. He was set to be executed. The lawyer's plan to stop the execution was to try and prove something that nobody had successfully done in three decades. That one of Texas' most notorious serial killers was actually innocent. It wasn't that the lawyers didn't have a case to make. I know two people fabricated testimony to get a guy executed. It's just that they had so little time to make it. The last 12 weeks. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

28:24Kevin, have you ever wanted to walk out on your job? No, I'm a good worker. Well, I have to admit, there have been times over my long career where the thought has occurred to me, but I never had the courage to do it. Someone who did, however, have the courage to do it is Claire Stapleton. Yes, our guest today is Claire Stapleton, a former Google employee who is just about to publish a memoir about her time at the company. The book is called Don't Be Evil. It's about her experience at Google, where she worked from 2007 through 2019. She was most notable for her role in the Google walkout that you just mentioned in 2018 when more than 20 ,000 Google employees publicly protested the actions of their employer.

29:08And she is back with this book, which is a very spicy memoir. Yeah, it's a kind of coming of age story about somebody who comes into Silicon Valley very idealistic and shares the idealism of her employer, but over time witnesses a bunch of things that changes her relationship, not just to the company, but to big tech in general. And I think left her with a lot of questions about what is possible within a company like this. Yeah, so I read the book on the plane yesterday. It is very fun. It's very well written. She's a great writer. She was actually known as the voice of Google internally. She wrote a lot of these sort of internal communications that would tell people, you know, here's this event that's going on.

29:53Or she would sort of bring her voice into the company's official communications to its own employees. So I was excited to read it. I'm excited to talk to Claire. And I think I want to hear her perspective on how workers in Silicon Valley fare today, as opposed to when she was organizing this walkout a few years ago. Yeah, well, let's bring her in.

30:18Claire Stapleton, welcome to Heart Fork. Thank you so much for having me. This is huge. Claire, you joined Google in 2007 to work on communications, and your job was to make the company's executives and internal emails sound googly. And I thought for our younger listeners who may have missed that sort of googly era, what was considered googly back in the day? And how much did you believe it when you were doing that writing? Well, I mean, yeah, I wasn't questioning much. I think, you know, coming out of college, like, you know, most young people in America, Google seemed like this amazing place to work.

30:53It was, you know, on the cover of magazines. There's a lot of sort of breathless press of these sort of futuristic campuses where you flush with perks. and indeed it was corporate, but the kind of Google flavor of it was to have kind of high personality, high quirk, and to kind of keep the rhetoric and the sort of family feeling pumping. I don't think anyone would have said that. It wasn't like my manager would say, you know, we're trying to like squeeze the most out of employees, so let's have them like jacked up on the mission values of the company at all times. But there was so much enthusiasm and so much idealism that the outside world was certainly contributing to and I think intensifying the effect of, you know, being at a company like that.

31:35And so it was a very kind of funny place to land as a young person.

31:40Claire Stapleton:Yeah. Over the next decade, you write in the book about becoming gradually disillusioned with the company's culture. You experience executive misconduct. You see this boys club atmosphere, this tendency at YouTube to ignore or talk past various crises on the platform. What do you think was the disconnect between that ideal that they were selling when you arrived in 2007 and the company that you found yourself working for? Well, I mean, I think that that, you know, tension existed back in 2004 to 2007, 2010, that early period that, you know, in which Google seemed, you know, the optimism felt like it was, it could really live up to something, that Google could be this different kind of company.

32:26And now we sort of laugh and roll our eyes, you know, at that because, of course, you know, tech companies ended up becoming the very kind of powerful institutions that they were skeptical of to begin with. They ended up consolidating so much money and power that, you know, the contradictions absolutely exploded. And so, you know, I, along with so many other people, was just sort of struggling with the loss of that identity because we started at a place that promised you could do some real good with your life. Even if you're like a junior communications staffer, you're part of the sort of world historical thing.

32:58Yeah. I mean, I think one other transformation that has happened in the last, call it 10 years, is that the people who run these giant tech platforms have sort of learned about what's happening on their own platforms. And around the time you were working at YouTube, Claire, I was doing a lot of reporting on YouTube. I wrote many stories and did many podcasts about the problems on that platform at the time. And I always noticed that there was kind of this willful blindness on the part of the people who ran YouTube at the time. It's not that they didn't know there was bad stuff happening on YouTube, but they didn't see it.

33:32It wasn't surfaced to them all the time. And to them, YouTube seemed like this vehicle for progressive social change. But describe how that felt from the inside. Yeah. I mean, I think it's so deep in the bones that tech executives want to feel that not only their technology is just a neutral tool, but actually a really positive force in the world. And that, again, another tension that was exploding as the creator community became really problematic. And I think it'd be one thing if Google and YouTube weren't so invested in preserving the sort of goody-goody image was sort of wild because I was on a team that was essentially brand management, disseminate the values, run the International Women's Day campaign, hype up, rewind, which is supposed to be the sort of wholesome, folksy representation of everything that's going on in the platform where people are building businesses.

34:23We had all these narratives every year, so it's a hit the narratives with the tweets, with the campaigns. And being on the social media team, it was part of the experience of doing that is the cognitive dissonance becomes unbearable Because every time we would tweet anything out that was even like completely, you know, anodyne, people would be like, this is a horrible company that's undoing society. And I remember this, you know, this anecdote from, you know, from that time where they had the people who were content reviewers that they would bring, you know, puppies to them and do these sort of morale things to kind of soothe their spirit.

34:54Because when you're looking at like beheadings and, you know, children being abused and stuff all day, it really gets deep in your psyche because it's just so relentlessly dark. And there was a point at one of our off sites on the marketing team where they also brought puppies. And I'm like, we are the same because in a way we're having to sit with the darkness of the platform every single day. In our social media team, we had a daily stand-up called Nightmare Fuel, where we would just go through the kind of darkest stuff that had surfaced on YouTube, basically because we'd had so many examples of things where we had tweeted something out that ended up sounding like a reference to something really perverse.

35:32Like, you know, someone's doing some crazy thing with knife play. And it's a big controversy that day, but we missed it. And then we're posting, like, someone carving Halloween pumpkins with a knife. And it sounds like we're kind of, you know, being tongue-in-cheek about this, like, really dark thing. So we had to have this briefing to be able to steer clear of the kind of most disgusting things on the platform. But when you're really sitting with that for 30 minutes at the beginning of every single day, you're like, wait, are we the bad guys here? This tool starts to feel way less neutral.

36:01Claire Stapleton:I think there's a really important lesson there, particularly for our younger listeners, which is if you're in a job where your manager brings you a puppy at any point to sort of help you cope with the job, you're in danger, girl. You are in danger. You're the bad guy. Yeah. Let's talk about the walkout. So in 2018, the New York Times reports that former Android boss Andy Rubin had been paid a$90 million severance package despite being asked to resign due to sexual misconduct allegations, as well as other executives that had similar allegations toward them who also received severance packages.

36:35Claire Stapleton:In the end, 20 ,000 Googlers walk out on their jobs to protest. Claire, tell us about your role in organizing the walkout and how it came together. Yeah. So, you know, the Andy Rubin story, which was, it was just, it was the, you know, the match that lit the flame. I mean, in the fire, it was right on the heels of a huge controversy internally to Google, which was the Damore memo in which a kind of, you know, mid-level engineer at Google had sent around a memo basically decrying the company's diversity programs on the using kind of a bunch of different social science to say women really are not as well suited to being engineers.

37:16They're way too empathetic. They're way too relationally oriented. This is such a logical, you know, sort of practical job. And it's just a huge waste of money. Meanwhile, you know, Google's like, you know, alienating conservatives. He went, you know, went on and a few different things. So the Rubin story came out and I was following this. It was a mom's email group called Expecting a New Moms. And it was very, very active group. A lot of female engineers just talking about parenting or whatever related to mom life at the workplace. And the Rubin News hit that email group incredibly hard. I think that women start.

37:52So they started to share stories. I was just following it and I was fascinated by it because you sort of hit her, you know, hear a lot about startup culture and Brotopia and the kind of founding of Silicon Valley as being sort of inherently sexist. But I was genuinely surprised at the force and weight of a lot of these stories where women had felt that they had suffered, you know, all sorts of different kind of microaggressions and aggressions, a lot of people struggling with coming back from maternity leave. And it was a bit like, you know, what happened to the so-called like company of the future, you know, progressive workplace where people feel like all their projects are given away after they're, you know, coming back from maternity leave and that sort of thing.

38:29So I was not at all involved in what was an already brewing, simmering organizing community at Google, which had formed around Maven and Dragonfly, two much more kind of technology-focused issues where people were organizing to stop Google from, in the case of Maven, a government contract in which Google technology be used for, you know, as weapons of war. And I so but anyway, so I basically was reading these, you know, all these women's stories and thinking like, you know, I used to sit at the side of the stage for TGIF every single week.

39:04Claire Stapleton:And that's the weekly all hands at Google where you would get to ask questions of the executives. T.J.F. was the sort of hallmark of the culture because it was sort of inviting tough questions and dissent. And it was an incredibly effective vehicle for normative control, basically, or organizational control, because you could kind of absorb the dissent. And there's so much admiration and love and, you know, generosity in workers' view of Larry and Sergey and the other executives that, you know, nothing really survived. No controversies would really survive past, you know, maybe one or two TGIFs.

39:39But I just felt like, you know, OK, sure, bring it all to TGIF and, you know, see what happens. And the TGIF that very day, I think the story broke on a Thursday and they were running TGIFs on Thursday in that time. No, TGIF no longer exists. But they the executives gave a bunch of these really sort of flat, bland statements, not really taking accountability, kind of talking around the Rubin stuff, saying a lot of, you know, know, we really empathize with the hurt, you know, this sort of like corporate language, which, you know, in any other moment in my own trajectory as a corporate comms person, you know, kind of would say this is the sort of thing you have to say.

40:17But at that point, it just felt like, you know, this is this rupture moment, you know, in America, you know, in this company where we're talking about systemic change, to use another buzzword of that time. And it's not going to cut it to sort of just like deliver the same talking points. So, you know, that very night and the next day, the women on the moms group kept sort of percolating, you know, ideas and thoughts about like how to escalate from there. And in my kind of naivete about, you know, the history of labor organizing and all those other things where you're supposed to kind of move slowly and, you know, build solidarity.

40:48I was like, let's do a walkout, you know. I was like, okay, I love that. And the women were like, yeah. I mean, it was truly, you know, it, for better or for worse, it was good girls revolt because, you know, it's like all these sort of like high achieving women coming together around this shared purpose, mad as hell. And, you know, very well organized protest. And then ultimately, fascinatingly enough, from the corporate comms perspective, the executives got right on board and they were like, we're walking out, too. I remember that. That was fascinating. It was like you had very high ranking Google executives who you would expect to be sort of shocked and offended by this walkout.

41:28instead sort of turning it into like a kind of executive-sponsored event?

41:33Claire Stapleton:Yeah, so I've been dying to get your thoughts about this, Claire, because like among the people who walk out is Ruth Porat, who was then the chief financial officer of the company and presumably had approved all those severance packages. So why do you think that executives responded in the way that they did to the walkout? Yeah, I know Ruth had a lot of really interesting statements around that time, which I think showed what they were trying to do. And then they, of course, quickly pivoted, you know, to more like chilling effects after that. But I think that they felt like they could contain the walkout in a very similar way to the way that, you know, TGIF existed, which is that, OK, the women of the company are really mad.

42:09Let's all blow off steam. And we're going to we're going to kind of transfer the energy of that into something that feels non-threatening by having the CEO send an email around saying we welcome people doing this. But what she said at the time was, you know, she went to a conference, I think, the next week and she said, this is, you know, we have Googlers doing what Googlers do well, which is, you know, kind of thinking big about problems. And if we can solve self-driving cars, like, why can't we solve this? You know, kind of referring to sexual harassment, I guess, which is like, OK, great. Like, let us know.

42:40Like, why can't we solve sexual harassment then? You know, it's like plenty of opportunity there with your own power, institutional power. um yeah for example like one thing you could do is you could not pay 90 million dollars to people who are credibly accused of sexual harassment and maybe in some small way that would strike a blow against sexual harassment right i'm just spitballing over here kevin i mean at one point they were trying to invite the walkout organizers and to have a meeting with there's there was some sort of power center you know susan and ruth and jen fitzpatrick and some other people and And they were like, we really want to – it was before the walkout and they were trying to get – they said they wanted – the stated purpose was that they wanted to get the organizers' feedback on, you know, how to avoid the situation.

43:25And I'm like, avoid what situation? Again, you're the people who are signing off on these obscene pay packages and, you know, you know where the rot is. We don't even know where all the rot is. Our feedback is not what you need here. And, of course, people like Meredith Whitaker who were – kind of had much more of their eyes open to how fundamentally existentially threatening this organizing was and would continue to be in the minds of executives. But she was like, of course, what they're going to try to do is defang our leadership because you have tremendous personal power and also institutional power being someone like that who sits at the top ranks of a company like Google.

44:04and how could we not be drawn in, you know, or something by that. So anyway, we didn't do the meeting and they certainly weren't interested in hearing our feedback after that. The relationship between tech workers and their employers has dramatically changed in the years since the walkout. I've heard Google executives and executives at other tech companies sort of lament those years where workers were walking out and expressing solidarity as sort of the time when the inmates were running the asylum. You know, now there is sort of this sense that you are lucky to have a job at one of these companies and the company does not have to care what you think anymore.

44:40With one specific exception of like Frontier AI Lab employees who we can talk about in a bit. But I'm curious like how that shift has felt for you as someone who I think created one of the high watermarks of worker empowerment in Silicon Valley. Yeah, I mean, it could never have happened without all that Google did to create psychological safety, right? I mean, they had these kind of interesting data science, organizational psychology PhDs at the company studying what makes teams thrive, what makes people sort of give the most of their kind of creativity and entrepreneurial spirit and stick around and all those other things.

45:15And a lot of that was about worker voice and feeling like you have a stake in the company, feeling like you can express yourself feeling free from harm or whatever, right? I mean, Larry Page talked about this kind of stuff all the time. It's like why we set the company up this way is so it will be successful. And that's kind of shocked me the most is that this sort of like, oh, no, we actually don't care. You're competing. Your job could easily go to AI. We don't care about humans at all anymore. Our company doesn't really need you. And so you should be, you know, grateful, deferential. You know, I think that the cost of that disillusionment is so much bigger than what the top executives are willing to face because they'd rather have a well-managed kind of obedient workforce.

45:56I think that's, you know, all the layoffs. and all those other things where people, of course, aren't as willing to, you know, step out of line and, you know, speak up and challenge authority. This week, we saw an open letter from more than a thousand employees of the Frontier AI Labs asking the government to help pace AI development, including some of the leaders of these AI labs. I'm very curious what you made of that, because to me, that felt like, oh, maybe this is a kind of resurgence of tech worker activism or people realizing, oh, wait, we have leverage. We're very in demand. We are going to use that leverage to try to push through some policy agenda that we have.

46:42Was that heartening for you? Did you feel like that was kind of a nothing burger? What did you make of that letter? No, I think any time when people are banding together and putting their name on something and feeling really passionately about it. It's great. And I'm constantly, I'm waiting, waiting by the phones. I think that, I truly think that like tech activism is going to swing back around again, because you have this sort of disaffected workforce. You have very, very challenging public opinion about AI. The kids walking out of Sundar Pichai's Stanford commencement speech was huge. I mean, I think the young people and their hatred of sort of intrinsic, not hatred, but mistrust of AI and the sort of the kind of broader, you know, societal consciousness raising that, you know, whatever big tech said it was going to be, it's become this massive consolidation of data, power, money, resources, you know, and we're back to like not trusting the corporations are going to have anyone's best interest in mind.

47:42And, you know, I think all those conditions are very fruitful. You know, if people feel like they're willing to risk, that's always the hardest part is are people willing to risk their jobs? Because, you know, however, you know, Google was going to respond, however any company might say they're going to respond, companies don't like work. They don't like sharing power. They don't like, you know, people organizing for power, subverting, you know, their authority, no matter how, you know, kumbaya and open collaborative the culture might be stated on paper. So I think it's, you know, there's definitely some ripe conditions for the resurgence of tech worker activism.

48:17But certainly all the promise of that particular moment of the walkout, I mean, way faster than I could have ever imagined, it shifted, drained, momentum slowed to a crawl.

48:32Claire Stapleton:I wanted to ask you, in the aftermath of the walkout, what hopes you might have had about it coalescing into something more durable? Like what goals did you all have and what happened to them? It was, you know, it was a little bit the kind of hubris of Google of Googlers. I mean, even, you know, I'm thinking really of myself where it's like, oh, we can just reinvent labor organizing. No, no, no. Like the canonical book, No Shortcuts is right, which is that it really does. Even if you had this kind of crazy moment in time, you have to move lunch table to lunch table. It's a slog. It's dangerous.

49:06I mean, you need to have OPSEC and all these things that, you know, I think that someone like me who had, you know, kind of, you know, a total ignorance of how these things actually work. That was really helpful for the walkout because you just have me being like, I'm happy to be the bull in the China shop. And like Google's never going to fire me. So like guns blazing, you know, I'm sending out the emails. I'm making the Google group internal to Google. I mean, because everything was about numbers, not, you know, OPSEC. So, yeah, I think that that was one of the kind of surprising things was that Google was completely turning the wheels on chilling the organizing.

49:39And I think they did some really effective things to do that, chiefly firing everybody who was a rabble rouser or marking them as sort of like dissident person. But it was also really challenging, you know. And, you know, there's a union effort at Google, which I think is, you know, still going. But it's hard, slow work to get people to sign their name for that. You know, it requires a streak of person that has a real stake in it. And I think that, you know, a lot of people, you know, in a big tech company say, you know, sure, I wish better conditions for everyone here, including myself. But am I willing to risk it?

50:15We live in a very kind of idealistic kind of careerist culture. So it's really hard to build that number base.

50:23Claire Stapleton:As you reflect back on your time at Google, I wonder how much of the bad conduct and culture that you experienced do you think was unique to Google as opposed to it being just sort of like Silicon Valley culture or even big company culture? I think this is what big companies are like. And I remember talking to a woman who'd been a real upset the apple cart type of lady in Wall Street in the 1980s. And she was like, you know, tech seems worse to me because there's this pretense that it is different. You know, it's like I think that that's that was what I think intensified this effect at Google, which, of course, is true of any other company and any other tech company, which is that Google was so invested in the narrative that it was something different.

51:06and they hired on the back of it, and there was so much sort of lip service to it internally, that I think that the kind of loss of innocence and the loss of that identity was very, very hard for Googlers. Even though, as I say in the book, it was like a really important and necessary process for me to say, yeah, let's just be honest about what a corporation can do and, you know, and how executives can act in their, like, you know, highly constrained, you know, where all the incentives are, you know, something very different than the flourishing of the human spirit or whatever. So I think, you know, Google represents a moment in time where, you know, we all kind of believed that, you know, corporations could be something different.

51:44And ultimately, Google is just like the ultimate corporation, right?

51:47Claire Stapleton:So the idealism that you write about in your book that once defined Google so strongly, I feel like now really lives at two other companies, which are OpenAI and Anthropic. Like you talk to the people who work there and they are incredibly idealistic about what they are doing. They think that they are building technology that is going to solve the world's hardest problems, that is going to cure cancer, you know, extend human lifespan and all of the rest. What lessons would you share with them or what maybe warnings might you give them as their companies sort of continue down this path? What should they be on alert for?

52:26Claire Stapleton:And are there any illusions that you might dispel for them now? You know, I feel like such a cynic because I saw someone who I think is really cool on Twitter saying it was her first week at Anthropic and like, wow, I'm in the future. Like, you know, every day I'm just my mind is blown and I'm like, fell for it again, award. No, I mean, I think it I think it's really important to interrogate. What is that feeling doing? What is that rhetoric doing to me as an outsider? I don't doubt that there are elements that are really exciting or, you know, it does feel futuristic because there's, you know, all these open questions about, you know, sort of where we're going.

53:04And it's like, again, we're in a period of time where there's lots of societal transformation and there's kind of like this competitiveness. And Google was really invested in that, too, you know, with social media. It's like we're all, you know, we're fighting for civilization here, but much less insane. Like the rhetoric was felt less insane actually then. And now it's like, you know, the singularity and all this. But, you know, I think it's really important to try to develop an understanding of what that power is and what it does, how it's being deployed and how you are being how that rhetoric is working on you, because it doesn't mean that, you know, people shouldn't feel like they're solving big problems together or that really smart people shouldn't be working on these things.

53:48So they should. But, you know, I think that that being able to compartmentalize your work a little bit, question authority a little bit. You know, these things are really, really healthy because otherwise you risk, you know, the people who are having to, like, process their Google experience in therapy for ketamine therapy for 10 years afterwards. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Claire, thanks so much for stopping by. The book is out next week. It is called Don't Be Evil. And we're very glad to have talked to you before the gag order comes down. God, what a pleasure. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Claire.

54:23When we come back, a smackdown in Substacktown. People are mad about their new AI detector.

54:44The thing about AI for business, it may not automatically fit the way your business works. At IBM, we've seen this firsthand. But by embedding AI across HR, IT, and procurement processes, we've reduced costs by millions, slash repetitive tasks, and freed thousands of hours for strategic work. Now we're helping companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business, IBM. I'm Winnalou. I write the game Connections, one of the puzzles from New York Times games, and I love horror movies. I love my dog and I love trying to trick you.

55:23I'm Sam Mazursky and I create the game Spelling Bee and Letterboxd on a daily basis. And I have this thing called promesthesia. I see color when I'm listening to music. I'm Tracy Bennett. I get to pick the wordle word every day, which is not as easy as it sounds. A fun fact about me is that I am descended from a witch who was put on trial in Salem. Wow, amazing. And I'm Joel Fogliano. I create your daily mini crossword. I've been making these puzzles for the Times for over 10 years now, which is like 3 ,000 minis. I am begging the universe for any new five-letter word. New York Times games are made by people, like the ones you just heard from.

56:05Go to nytimes.com slash games to start playing today. What's everyone's fastest mini time? Four seconds. No. What? I'll go find it. I have my screenshot somewhere. well casey it's time to talk about slop yes it has been a big week kevin in the fight against slop on wednesday the ai detection company pangram announced it had raised nine million

56:29Claire Stapleton:dollars and released its first ai image detecting model but i think where most people probably saw pangram in the news was a few days earlier when substack announced it was going to integrate the company's technology into its platform so that readers can now know when you're reading an essay how much of it was written by AI. Yeah, this is fascinating to me because I have seen over the past few months the substacks that I subscribe to just kind of gradually start sounding more sloppish. They're talking about, you know, how things are landing. A lot of load-bearing points. A lot of load-bearing points.

57:07It's not X, it's Y, like that kind of thing. And so Substack has apparently noticed this too and is now giving readers the option to click a little button to just run an automatic AI detector inside whatever post, whatever Substack newsletter they are reading. Yes. And it is a quite expansive feature. It includes not just posts, but comments, replies, notes, which is their little social networking feature that they have. Anything on Substack that is longer than 100 words, you can now run the scanner on. And on the flip side, if you're a creator, they've added this new how I make this box, which is essentially an amnesty feature where if you're a slopster, you can say, hey, just so you know, I write this with slop.

57:54Or I guess, conversely, you could say, I would never use AI to create what I'm creating. Yeah, I thought this was really interesting. The CEO of Substack, Chris Best, posted about this. He called this clawed fishing, basically people misleading their readers about whether they're using AI or not, how much they're using AI to write their newsletters. Credit where it's due. I think that is a good and catchy phrase. It is.

58:18Claire Stapleton:And I think that will catch on. And the reason I think it is a good phrase is because it is obviously a play on catfishing. And catfishing is kind of a deception, right? It's like, I'm sending you this picture of me, but I don't really look like this. And Claude is saying, like, I'm making it seem as if I wrote this when, in fact, this is the output of an LLM. Yeah, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this as a professional newsletter guy and Substack critic, what you make of this. But I should say, like, on the face of it, I have no problem with this. I have not done one of these Substack disclaimers, but in my book, I have a whole preface that sort of talks about how I did and did not use AI writing the book.

58:57So I didn't use it to write the words, but I did use it for research and all kinds of other stuff. And I thought that was important just to sort of disclose and be transparent with readers. And maybe it makes people less or more interested in reading the book. I don't care. What I was trying to avoid is a situation where people are going through and being suspicious. Oh, did this page have any AI on it? Did that page? And so I think this is a good practice for writers in this day and age to just be transparent and straightforward with their audience. Yeah, so I'm actually going to agree with you.

59:27I think this is a good feature because I, too, get annoyed when I am reading a Substack post and I feel like I am just reading Slop and I kind of want to, you know, leave a comment saying like, did you really write this? But now I don't have to because I'll just be able to scan it. But while we are enthusiastic about this feature as Substack readers, some Substack writers seem to be quite upset about it. 404 Media had an article this week in which they quoted at least one Substack writer calling this a witch hunt. Wow. Now, do you know how you can tell if a witch was created with AI? How? Six fingers.

1:00:06Now, you might wonder why are these writers so concerned about this feature? Well, they're worried about false positives and the reputational damage that they might endure if they are falsely accused of clawed fishing. Yeah, I am somewhat sympathetic to this critique because, you know, we've talked on this show before about how none of these AI detector tools really work perfectly. I think pangram is, from what I understand, like sort of the best of the lot. But still, there are false positives. Some independent studies have found, you know, there's some number of false positives where it's accusing people of using AI.

1:00:41And so I am worried about the accuracy of these tools. And I think that there will be, you know, maybe a small number, but some number of writers who are falsely accused of using AI because of this feature. Yeah, you know, this seems like the sort of thing that I should be empathetic about, but I just find that I'm not. And I think ultimately for most sub stackers, it's just not actually going to be that big of a deal to be falsely accused of having used AI, right? These writers by their nature, like these are independent writers. Like these are bloggers. These are not people who are at risk of losing their jobs because they used AI.

1:01:16I think, you know, the worst case scenario here is they have to write a Substack post where they're like, hey, I know that this essay kept getting tagged as AI, but it wasn't, you know? I also think that savvy writers will find ways around this. I've actually heard of people running sort of like an anti-Pangram, like sort of loop where they tell an LLM, like, write this essay and then run it through Pangram. And if it keeps coming up as AI detected, write it again and keep doing that until it doesn't come up as AI detected anymore. So there's sort of a cat and mouse game going on here. Whenever you do something that just takes way more time than actually writing it yourself, I get very delighted by that.

1:01:57Claire Stapleton:So that seems like a really smart tactic. you know other people though are saying kevin in addition to the people who are worried about the the witch hunt that there was a writer named mac collier who wrote quote i'm not going to apologize for using ai in the creation process i wrote for 20 years without ai i could do it again if i wanted to but basically he said look like the only thing that that ai is doing for me is making my writing better and why would you not want it to do that and i think the answer to that is hey buddy go nuts with the AI, but like, at least for this moment, we want to know and we want to see the scan.

1:02:30Yeah. I have mixed feelings about this because I feel similarly to Mac in the sense that like, I feel a lot of pressure not to use AI in my writing. And I do not use AI in my writing, to be clear, to write the words on the page or the words in the column. I do not use AI, but I feel there is a lot of pressure, social and otherwise for writers not to use AI at all during any part of their process. Yeah. And I actually feel like journalists and other writers should use the best tools that are available to them. And for some writers, like maybe people who are not, you know, for whom English is not a first language, people who are just starting out, like I think this could be excusable to use AI as a more active part of your writing process.

1:03:12But I do think like writers have an obligation for now to disclose this. Yeah. Well, I think one reason why this is all really interesting, Kevin, is trying to understand why Substack felt like they needed to do this, right? And I think the reason is that they must believe that if Substack becomes seen as primarily a destination for slop, it will lower the value of the network, right? Like Substack makes its money when people go and buy subscriptions. And I think they have rightly intuited people do not want to pay subscriptions to slop. They want to pay subscriptions for human writing. So I'm curious, do you think that is the right bet?

1:03:55Yeah, I think this is a fair bet for them to make. I think what people are paying for when they pay for a sub stack is sort of like direct access to a person's brain. And if what you are getting instead is something that's mostly the output of an LLM, I think people will feel like they're getting a raw deal, like there's some deception going on. And, you know, this is an area where I think the norms are going to evolve because pretty soon it will, like, AI will be integrated in every word processor and content management system, and it will just be kind of unfathomable to, like, do this the old way.

1:04:30But for now, I think there are still enough purists who want 0 % AI-generated text in their Substack newsletters that I think this is a good bet for them right now.

1:04:40Claire Stapleton:I think, honestly, there are all sorts of reasons why they might want to do this. I mean, one thing about Substack is that anyone can use it for free, right? And even if you have 100 ,000 free subscribers, they will send an email to 100 ,000 people for free. That's costing them a lot of money. And so they're probably staring down the barrel of a future where everyone in every profession is like, I'm going to start a newsletter. I'm going to have a chatbot write it, a chatbot respond to all of my comments. And all of a sudden, that's going to become an enormous expense for them. And so they need to find a way to discourage people from doing that sort of thing.

1:05:14Yeah. I mean, I'll be very curious to see how many people actually use the AI detection tool. Because right now, like the way it's designed, you have to go out and like select this tool. It does not automatically like overlay a thing on the post that says this was generated by AI. And my sense is like, you know, there are a lot of people out there who probably don't care, frankly. If they can't tell that something was generated by AI, what they're reacting to is just, how good is this thing that I'm reading? It's not like, we've seen all these slop threads go viral on X and other social networks.

1:05:46LinkedIn now is just people posting AI stuff. And my impression is not that it has made LinkedIn a less popular platform. It probably is just, people are just judging it based on the quality of what they're reading.

1:05:58Claire Stapleton:Well, it's not less popular, but keep in mind, LinkedIn is free to use for the most part. right? Like LinkedIn isn't making you pay to read those posts. Thank God. But Substack is. And so I just think it's different. I will say when this news was announced, I heard a terrible scream come out of Sand Hill Road down in Silicon Valley as every venture capitalist realized that they could no longer outsource their incessant thought leadership posts about the economy to clawed anymore, Kevin. Well, they've been employing human ghostwriters for years to write their tweets and blog posts. And they should do it again.

1:06:31So we need to keep those jobs afloat.

1:06:33Claire Stapleton:Now, another interesting dimension of this, and of course, this was particularly delicious to me, Kevin, as somebody who dramatically left Substack a few years back because of the Nazis that were on the platform that the company declined to remove. In this one moment, Substack has told us that on some level, they find AI-generated writing more offensive than Nazi content. Yes, I think that is one very ungenerous way of interpreting this. I think it is also like a threat to their business in a way that maybe Nazi content is not. Yeah. It turns out no one actually cares if there's Nazis on your platform.

1:07:07Well, just you. It's basically you and like three other people. That's right. And that's it. But a lot of people do care if their feeds are full of slop. Here's what people don't realize here in 2026. Nazis used to be very controversial. I would even go so far as to say they were a sort of hated group. But things have changed a lot. And now what we hate is AI.

1:07:30Claire Stapleton:One more point that I would just make about all of this, and I think this is instructive to everyone on Substack, even if you support this change. This was a really great reminder, I think, and wake up call that Substack is a platform. And Substack is going to do the things that are best for Substack. And so if you like this particular change, great. But if you don't like it, well, guess what? You're on a platform. The terms can change on you at any time, and they may not be in your favor. Yeah. Have you checked any of the sub stacks that you subscribe to using this new AI detection feature? You know what?

1:08:03Claire Stapleton:I haven't yet. I'm waiting for the next time like a VC blog post starts making the rounds to see if I can bust them. Let's try it now. Should we try one now? Yeah. What should we check? I went to a blog about AI agents on sub stack, which I just assumed, you know, was probably generated by AI. And they've disabled the AI detection. So that's an important thing to point out. as a writer, you can disable AI detection on your blog. But at that point, you might as well just put a big red banner at the top of your website that reads slop. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In conclusion, I hope that landed well with you.

1:08:42It landed cleanly. That was a load-bearing segment. Load-bearing insights.

1:08:45Claire Stapleton:Load-bearing insights here on The Hard Fork Show.

1:09:14So there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises. So let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now, a global workforce of 300 ,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions, resolving 94 % of common questions. Not noise. Proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business. IBM. The New York Times app has all this stuff that you may not have seen. The way the tabs are at the top with all of the different sections.

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1:10:18Hot Fork is produced by Whitney Jones and Rachel Cohn. We're edited by Viren Povich. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show is engineered by Katie McMurrin. Original music by Rowan Nemisto, Alyssa Moxley, Chris Wood, and Dan Powell. Video production by Jake Nichol and Chris Schott. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube at youtube.com slash hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Lee Wing Tam, Brooke Minters, and Dahlia Haddad. You can email us at hardfork at nytimes.com with your open letter. Thank you.