OpenAI's Fog of War + Betting on Iran + Hard Fork Review of Slop

18:47Hard Fork Hosts:If you go to the sort of nerdy AI conferences that Kevin and I do, this comes up a lot at the tabletop role-playing games that people do during lunch, right? Is that at some point, a government of one or more countries kind of steps in and takes over the AI lab. I understand in this moment that that feels like a kind of sci-fi scenario, right? Like most of the time when you're using ChatGPT, you probably don't think this is a dangerous superweapon, and we need to ensure that this is being controlled by the president. At the same time, we are now at war with Iran. We know that these systems are embedded in the command and control operations of the military.

19:24Hard Fork Hosts:And so to some extent, they are already becoming weapons, right? So if you say to me, do I think that once these systems become three, four, five, ten times more powerful, the government will want to take an interest in them and potentially oversee their development and deployment, I absolutely believe that will happen. I see no reason why that would happen. And unfortunately, how that goes, I think, depends a lot on the quality of the government that is overseeing that AI, right? And like, what do they want to do? Do they want to use it to create opportunity and safety and democracy for all? Or do they want to, you know, mount an authoritarian takeover of the globe?

20:04Arijeta Lajka:So if you are a leader at one of these companies and you know that, you know, at least until 2028, we are likely to have sort of the same administration in power. If you believe that the technology is rapidly accelerating such that a year or two years or three years from now, we might have something like a superhuman country of geniuses in a data center. What does that mean you should do? I mean, one thing that I've been thinking about is like, should these companies be doing deals with the government at all? Right. If the lesson of the past couple of weeks is that the federal government is not a trustworthy counterparty in these negotiations and is going to insist on total control and obedience or else they're going to try to nuke your company.

20:44Arijeta Lajka:Like, I think a very rational response from these companies will be like, well, we're just not going to make any more deals with you. You're going to have to use some open source models for your state department and your your military and your treasury because it's just too risky for us as a business risk. And you can't be trusted with it.

21:01Hard Fork Hosts:I could see why that may seem somewhat rational to them, but I don't think that that is the tack that they're going to take. I mean, even this week, after everything that has happened with Anthropik, Dario Amadei is still out there saying, we were very close to an agreement with the Pentagon. We liked working with the military. We want to work with the military again, right? So I think that's very important to note. Dario did not throw up his middle fingers on his way out the door. He is still trying to reach some sort of agreement. And I think in part, that likely is to avoid the exact sort of scenario that you are describing, right?

21:31Hard Fork Hosts:You kind of want to keep the tigers at bay for just a little while longer at least while you maybe think through the rest of that scenario, which is admittedly a very difficult one.

21:42Arijeta Lajka:Yeah. I've been rereading The Making of the Atomic Bomb this week, which is Dario Amadei's favorite book, and he used to give it to all Anthropic employees, and there's still a bunch of copies at their headquarters. It's sort of the company book as far as their mission goes. And they see a lot of parallels between what they're building and the Manhattan Project. And so I went back and I've been rereading it. And the piece that struck me from that experience was just right before the bombs were dropped in 1945, there was this point where the scientists got really worried about how their creation was going to be used.

22:17Arijeta Lajka:And a number of them from the Manhattan Project sort of created these petitions and reports and tried to get them to the government and say like, hey, could you guys like not use this against a city, at least as like a first line, you know, act of war. And the military and the government sort of like pretended to hear them out. And then they just went ahead and bombed Japan anyway. And there was sort of this moment where it was like, we hear you, you're the scientists, you're the geniuses who made this all work, but now you're playing in our turf. And so we're gonna control the technology from here and like, thank you for your input.

22:49Arijeta Lajka:And like, I think the comparison between them Manhattan Project and the AI industry is somewhat overstated. And I think it breaks down in some key ways, one of which is like, that was a government project. You know, the Manhattan Project was paid for by the government. These were government employees. What we're talking about now are private companies that have been developing this thing outside the public sector. So I think there's some important differences. But I do worry that we are headed toward a moment where this stuff just gets so useful to governments and militaries and confers such a decisive advantage to the countries that control it, that the U.S.

23:22Arijeta Lajka:government, no matter kind of who is in power, is just going to say, like, this thing is too important to be left to the private sector.

23:27Hard Fork Hosts:Well, I mean, keep in mind that one of the original ideas for OpenAI was that it should be a government-funded project. But Sam Altman and his co-founders just came to the conclusion, correctly, by the way, that no government would give them the amount of money they needed to build this technology, right? And, you know, they just sort of quickly came to the conclusion that it was just going to have to be a private enterprise. But, you know, going back to the earliest days, there was thinking among the people that created this technology that the government was going to take an interest in it eventually.

23:52Hard Fork Hosts:Another reason, though, Kevin, why I find the current situation so vexing is that you and I both covered President Biden's executive order on AI, which I personally felt like was a pretty gentle way of attempting to regulate the industry. It was sort of like, you know, inform us about your safety testing, please, when you test these new models and sort of, you know, hold federal agencies to get ready for this technology. And the howls of protest on the right that said, how dare this administration come in and try to put these fetters on capitalism? We are going to lose to China because of this sort of nanny state behavior.

24:28Hard Fork Hosts:And then to see those same people come to power and now say, we are going to tell you exactly how you are going to build your models, what they're going to do for the military, or else we will destroy you. is just, like, the whiplash is insane.

24:44Arijeta Lajka:Yeah, we didn't like that government trying to control the tech industry, but this government trying to control the tech industry, that's just business as usual. That's fine. So I guess my worry, zooming out from all of the stuff that's been going on for the past two weeks, is that we are sort of living through, like, an early dress rehearsal for what something like nationalization of the AI companies could look and feel like. I don't think it's going to be as sort of cut and dry as like it was during World War II where like the government showed up to a bunch of like steel plants and was like, hey, we run these now.

25:15Arijeta Lajka:I think it's going to be kind of this soft nationalization like we've been seeing over the past week where it's like a little pressure to build your models differently. Oh, maybe could you remove some of those safeguards? Oh, maybe this is actually so strategically important that we need to be the people putting the clauses in the constitution of Claude or whatever that dictate how it will behave in these high stakes situations. and I think that is a more likely direction, but I would not take full sort of like brute force nationalization off the table entirely. I think there's a decent chance that something like that happens.

25:48Arijeta Lajka:Well, maybe we should set up a prediction market for it. Speaking of prediction markets, when we come back, we'll talk about how prediction markets have made it to war so predictable.

26:35Hard Fork Hosts:We'll see you next time. distractions when you need to focus. Your laptop will help keep you locked in, even when it's bring your dog to work day. Built for those who stay in the flow. The Dell Pro. Built for you. Dell.com slash Dell dash pro.

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27:52Arijeta Lajka:Okay, Casey, so the other big news from the past week is that the United States is now at war in Iran. And one angle that really has been sticking out to me about this is the role that prediction markets are playing in this conflict, because I think that is something that we truly have not seen before.

28:11Hard Fork Hosts:Yeah, it seems like every new war brings along some grim new technology, and I would say that prediction markets are maybe grim technology number one for this conflict in Iran.

28:22Arijeta Lajka:Yes, it's a grim technology already, even absent the war. And now just with the war, it has become even grimmer. And we've talked about prediction markets on the show. We talked about them way back in 2023 when they were sort of this new thing that was like kind of in this legal gray area that wasn't really being done at any scale yet. It was sort of an interesting idea. Now, of course, you cannot walk down a street in a major American city without seeing one and probably multiple ads for prediction markets like Kalshi and Polly Market.

28:52Hard Fork Hosts:Yeah, this sort of gambling mania that has taken over all media and advertising, you know, from DraftKings to FanDuel has now extended even further into these prediction markets.

29:04Arijeta Lajka:So both Polymarket and Kalshi, the two leading prediction markets platforms, took a lot of heat this week on bets they were allowing their users to make on questions related to Iran. So Kalshi, which is kind of the more regulated U.S.-based prediction markets company, does not allow bets on war or assassination. But it did allow the question Ali Khamenei out as supreme leader, basically sort of as a kind of careful proxy for betting on the outcome of a war or a strike on Iran. Yeah.

29:36Hard Fork Hosts:And out, I suppose, could have, you know, many meetings. You know, perhaps there would be a sort of gentle democratic revolution in Iran. But I'm going to assume that most of the people who were wagering on that one assumed that he was going to be killed in war.

29:50Arijeta Lajka:Yeah, so people got really mad at Khalshi for allowing these bets on the fate of the Iranian leader. They also got mad when Khalshi sort of voided this market and said that it was going to reimburse anyone who may have lost money on this, basically make sure everyone ends up in the black. But people who were supposed to make a bunch of money because they correctly predicted the death of Khomeini were mad that they didn't get paid out their expected winnings. So just a big cluster all around.

30:18Hard Fork Hosts:And I just want to say, if you are one of the traders who did not get your expected winnings from the death of the Ayatollah, I just want to say I don't care. And it doesn't matter.

30:30Arijeta Lajka:So Polymarket, the other sort of less regulated offshore crypto-based prediction market, was even more permissive. They allowed people to bet on the dates of strikes on Iran and other details related to the war in Iran.

30:44Hard Fork Hosts:Their policy was really like, imagine the worst thing you could do on our platform. You can do that.

30:49Arijeta Lajka:Actually, they did draw a line when it came down to markets that allowed users to bet on the likelihood of nuclear detonations by specific dates. So sorry to anyone who is trying to cash in on nuclear war.

31:03Hard Fork Hosts:These woke liberals that won't let me bet on nuclear explosions need to go, Kevin.

31:07Arijeta Lajka:Okay. So no one was happy about this. Senator Chris Murphy posted that, quote, it's insane this is legal. People around Trump are profiting off war and death and also said that he was introducing legislation to ban this. And there are also a bunch of people looking into whether any of this has been done via insider trading. Basically, do you have people in the military or close to the decision makers in this conflict placing bets once they have this sort of non-public information about what is going to be happening?

31:38Hard Fork Hosts:Yeah. And I think it speaks to why allowing prediction markets to take bets at least around sort of like, you know, war and death is so corrosive and bad, Kevin, because not only is it just kind of like grim and like, how do we live in this society where, you know, gambling on war and death has become a sort of form of entertainment, but also you're just creating incentives for like the worst things in the world to happen, which doesn't seem logical to me.

32:08Arijeta Lajka:Well, and it's not even a theoretical harm here. Recently, Israel arrested a number of people who were accused of using classified information to bet on military operations on polymarkets. So this is already starting to happen. And I think this is why people like Senator Chris Murphy are so alarmed about this, not just because it's sort of like gross and aesthetically offensive to have people betting on wars. Although it is. Although it is, but also because it could create direct incentives if you're a member of the military and your commander gives you an order to go do an airstrike on an Iranian compound to log on to your phone and head over to one of the prediction markets platforms and say, you know what, I could make a couple grand off this.

32:52Hard Fork Hosts:Yeah, that's your little call sheet bonus. You know, this is not theoretical at all, Kevin. In fact, your colleague, Amy Fan at The Times wrote that it is relatively uncommon for someone to bet a significant sum of money that a U.S. strike will happen within the next day. But last Friday, more than 150 accounts placed hundreds of bets of at least$1 ,000 correctly predicting that there would be an American airstrike on Iran by Saturday.

33:16Arijeta Lajka:Yeah. So I think one of the interesting things here is like, I am not like a blanket opponent of prediction markets, right? I sort of bought some of the kind of theoretical arguments for why something like a prediction market could, for example, outperform political polls because it would incentivize people to like come up with really good polling data and like use that to trade on. And you could end up with kind of a better picture of a given election.

33:42Hard Fork Hosts:Or people will like say what they really think because their money is at stake and they're not just trying to like impress a pollster. Yes.

33:49Arijeta Lajka:And you've actually had some of the people who are in charge of these prediction markets It's sort of talking about the fact that insider trading can be good because it can get the best information to the markets as quickly as possible and kind of like give people an unfiltered understanding of what the real insiders are thinking. Now, of course, officially you are not supposed to be able to insider trade on these platforms, right? They all have policies against it. Kalshi says they've investigated people, that it is actually illegal per the CFTC, which is their main regulator, to place bets using inside information.

34:24Arijeta Lajka:But there are a couple problems with this. One is the CFTC is a tiny agency. It doesn't have a huge team of enforcers going out to investigate what I assume must be hundreds or thousands of trades using inside information on their platform every day. It's also not clear what is public information and what is private information. You know, there are certain types of information in the stock market that are considered material non-public information that it is illegal to trade on. But it is also legal to, you know, fly a drone over an oil facility to see how their production is going or to park outside a store and see the foot traffic going in and out and use that to sort of calculate how well their sales must be going.

35:05Hard Fork Hosts:I find it suspicious how much you know about the insider trading rules. I have to say, I didn't know you had this much facility with the law here. I'm calling my lawyer.

35:13Arijeta Lajka:But of course, this is part of the appeal of prediction markets in general is that they incentivize people with good information to trade on that information.

35:21Hard Fork Hosts:Yes. And if you allow people to wager on almost anything, how are you ever possibly going to police the entire platform to understand who is insider trading and who isn't?

35:30Arijeta Lajka:Yes. So I think in this specific case of war, I think it's very dangerous for some of the reasons that we've talked about. Not only do you have military officers and service people disclosing classified information in some cases to sort of make a little extra for themselves, but you also have just this incredibly strange war profiteering innovation where, like, you can just go on one of these platforms and try to make a bunch of money from something that involves a war. a lot of devastation and destruction.

36:03Hard Fork Hosts:You know, the other thing that comes to mind for me, Kevin, is that, you know, as you say, the prediction market backers, their argument is like, this just helps us understand the world better, right? This is a new kind of information that helps us see more clearly. And yet, as I look across all of the trades that you just described, I don't understand really what I was supposed to see more clearly, right? Like, maybe you get a, you know, a brief heads up about something horrible that is about to happen. Maybe that's, useful in at least some circumstances. But for the most part, I just don't feel like we actually have a much better understanding of the world because all of these bets are happening.

36:39Arijeta Lajka:Yeah. And I think in this specific case, that's especially true because if you actually look at the markets that were being traded before this strike on Iran, the conventional wisdom of the crowd was that this was not going to happen. It was a very low probability. I think something like 17 % probability on one of these platforms an hour before the strikes. So these markets aren't actually distributing the best possible information at all times. They're just kind of like aggregating vibes until like someone with inside information shows up and like makes a fortune.

37:12Hard Fork Hosts:Well, I think that's exactly it. It isn't as if these have been adopted by the mainstream and everybody's placing these sort of casual bets. And now we have this like beautiful, perfect understanding of the world. What we have, as you say, is a bunch of vibes plus some insider trading. And it just doesn't actually seem that useful to me in practice for most things.

37:29Arijeta Lajka:Yeah, I want to try to like sort of steel man the defense of prediction markets here and see what you make of it. So I think someone who believes that these prediction markets are good in the aggregate might say something like the following. People have been betting on war forever. They bet on the stock prices of defense companies. They bet on things like oil prices. That is all legal. We consider that sort of part of the normal markets. Those things all fluctuate when you have a war breakout. how is this any different? Your response.

38:02Hard Fork Hosts:Well, I think that it is actually really meaningful that these are indirect ways of betting on war, right? It seems very unlikely to me that if I, like, you know, buy oil stocks, assuming that they are going to go up, that I'm creating an incentive for somebody to assassinate the supreme leader of Iran.

38:21Arijeta Lajka:But wasn't this the whole conspiracy theory about the war in Iraq? Was that it was just motivated by, like, Dick Cheney owning a bunch of stock in Halliburton?

38:27Hard Fork Hosts:Well, I mean, yes, that was like the conspiracy theory. You know, I don't know that that was what was actually driving. And I think that, you know, as with most wars, at least at that time, there was sort of like a number of interrelated factors that were going on. And, you know, maybe oil was one of them. But my point here is just that when you have the betting at some sort of meaningful remove from the action, it just like feels better for me. It doesn't create the same horribly grim incentives that this particular approach does. Right.

38:57Arijeta Lajka:I think the difference for me is the directness that you mentioned. And, you know, one thing that came up over and over again when I was talking to people about prediction markets a couple years ago for this story is the assassination markets get really dark. Because if you have something like, you know, will this world leader, you know, be removed from power in air quotes before a certain date, that could actually create a bounty on that person where someone might go out and say, hey, if I want to make money on this, I need to like kill this person before this day.

39:27Hard Fork Hosts:And you know what is going to be the first thing that actually takes action on that, Kevin? Open claw. Mark my words. One of these bots plugged into a Mac Mini is going to see a prediction market for the assassination of a world leader. And it's going to say, well, I have some ideas about that.

39:42Arijeta Lajka:So I think everyone, most people agree that, like, the assassination prediction market is sort of, you know, out of bounds and is a bad idea for lots of reasons. But I think there are still a lot of gray area around these questions about conflict and war and politics. And I think it is the risk here is that these prediction markets have gotten so popular so quickly with so little regulatory oversight that it is just kind of legal to do a bunch of stuff on them that it's not legal to do in the regular stock market. Yeah.

40:13Hard Fork Hosts:Well, so you mentioned that some lawmakers have talked about introducing legislation. My experience is that that kind of legislation typically doesn't go anywhere. What, if anything, do we know about what is going to happen as this war continues to unfold in Iran when it comes to these prediction markets?

40:30Arijeta Lajka:I mean, I think the Trump administration is very unlikely to do anything to sort of stop the growth of prediction markets. We've already seen them signal via these sort of regulatory actions that they've dropped against polymarket, that they are not going to take a firm line against these prediction markets. We've also seen them adding members of the Trump family to their advisory boards. So I think all of these prediction markets are sort of becoming entangled with the administration in ways that are going to make it very hard for them to do anything. But I certainly expect, like, Democratic lawmakers to stand up and say, like, what the hell are we enabling here?

41:05Arijeta Lajka:Why are we allowing people to bet on the assassination of world leaders or the outcomes of a war in Iran? This just feels all incredibly fraught to me.

41:14Hard Fork Hosts:My fear is that we're in a sort of time race where, like, if Democrats were able to, like, somehow advance some legislation, maybe they win some seats in the midterms, maybe they retake the presidency. Maybe sometime within the next few years, they could meaningfully rein these prediction markets in. I think, though, if they continue to grow, my fear is that they will become a massive entrenched interest group like the crypto world, and they will then lobby to ensure that Democrats and Republicans both feel like they have a vested interest in these things sticking around. So, you know, my fear is that if we're to do anything about some of these excesses we've been talking about today, it needs to happen soon or otherwise platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket might just have too much money for that to happen.

41:58Arijeta Lajka:Yeah, I have a proposed rule for these prediction markets. Which is that you should have to go to a physical place like you do for a casino. I think that putting this stuff on people's phones, making it super easy for them to do it. Like, if you want to go bet on the war in Iran, you should have to, like, go to a seedy, like, OTB betting place to do it. Like, you should have to, like, put in some effort. It should not be as easy as whipping out your phone.

42:23Hard Fork Hosts:All right. Well, it's very interesting, Kevin. I predict we are not going to try that.

42:27Arijeta Lajka:No, I also predict we're not going to try that. But it's a good idea. People should listen to me.

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44:14Arijeta Lajka:I'm Winnalou.

44:15Hard Fork Hosts: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. 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. New York Times games are made by people, like the ones you just heard from. Go to nytimes.com slash games to start playing today. All right, Casey, well, it's time to look at some kids slop. Yeah, Kev, we have recently been alerted to the fact that YouTube has been beset by a bunch of AI-generated slop for toddlers, and it's time to take a look and see what we're dealing with.

44:57Arijeta Lajka:My colleague at the New York Times, Ariadne Leica, has a new story about this called How AI-generated Videos Are Distorting Your Child's YouTube Feed. And I read the story. I loved it. I thought, I've got to see some of this slop for myself. So today, let's take a look at this emerging new genre of AI slop directed at kids with a new installment of the Hard Fork Review of Slop.

45:29Arijeta Lajka:The Hard Fork Review of Slop.

45:33Hard Fork Hosts:All right, what do we have up first? First is a video about the alphabet. Do you know the alphabet? You know, I keep meaning to learn it.

45:40Arijeta Lajka:Okay, let's see how the AI generated alphabet videos are doing. Yeah.

45:46Hard Fork Hosts:Kids TV. ABC Farm Animals.

45:54Arijeta Lajka:So far, so good.

45:59Hard Fork Hosts:Okay, okay. Why are they being squirted out of a little paint bottle?

46:10Arijeta Lajka:Oh, I'm deeply uncomfortable with this. I'm going to have to answer so many questions from my three-year-old about why ducks come out of toothpaste tubes.

46:21Hard Fork Hosts:Listen, if you're three years old, you need to know this. That is not how a duck is made. So this video depicts the alphabet showing a series of animals whose names begin with a letter. and then a hand holding, I guess, a tube of paint sort of squirts out a little dollop of gross goo that then transforms surreally into an animal while sort of demented slop children sing the name of the animal in the background.

46:51Arijeta Lajka:Yes, like if you've ever seen the TV show Alex Mack from like the 90s on Nickelodeon where she like sort of assembles herself out of goo on the floor, it's sort of like that, but for animals.

47:00Hard Fork Hosts:That one was a little before my time, I'm afraid, but I'll research that one back in the archives. In any case, okay, yeah, very strange one Let's take a look at this next video, Kevin What do we have now? I believe we're going to see some animals appearing out of colorful clouds

47:16Arijeta Lajka:I is for Impala, green Impala says boing, boing, boing

47:21Hard Fork Hosts:Join, join, join J is for jackal Yellow jackal says au, au, au Oh boy

47:27Arijeta Lajka:K is for kudu Pink kudu says spin, spin, spin

47:32Hard Fork Hosts:L is for lion And purple lion says, Roar, roar, roar.

47:37Arijeta Lajka:He's rolling the R's on his roars. Why is the other animal a doctor? Why are they running toward the camera? Why is the kudu pink?

47:47Hard Fork Hosts:And what is a kudu? I have to say, I'm a little older than the target age for these videos, but I'm learning things myself. This is for you. I'm learning. So this video shows another series of animals, each one connected to a letter of the alphabet. But this one uses a trope of having this doctor figure inject these animals with color. And the doctor is also an animal. And the doctor is also an animal. Is this like anti-vax propaganda? Well, the thing is, like, whoever is making the slop knows that needles are scary to children. So this is effectively just an engagement hack, right? You know the kid is going to watch the injection because the kid is afraid of needles.

48:30Hard Fork Hosts:So this is just, again, this is just one of these little miniature insidious ways that these slot makers grab the attention of kids is by showing them something scary in order to hypnotize them into continuing to watch the slot.

48:43Arijeta Lajka:It does teach the valuable lesson that giving injections to children does result in them turning into pink kudos and running toward the camera. So all children need to learn that lesson eventually.

48:53Hard Fork Hosts:All right, this next one, Kevin, shows animals turning into armored vehicles, trucks, and planes, going to show once again that a key theme in Slop for kids in 2026 is the transformation of animals.

49:10Oh, wow.

49:11Arijeta Lajka:We got sort of mecha quail.

49:16Okay.

49:20Arijeta Lajka:Okay. Okay. I wonder if that's a licensed use of the Thomas the Tank Engine IP.

49:31Arijeta Lajka:Okay. Unfortunately, that one slapped for me. My kid would be super into that, and I must never show him that.

49:37Hard Fork Hosts:This one reminds me of cartoons that I watched as a kid, where there was a lot of Transformers transforming, and so I could understand why, you know, a lot of little kids might like that one. But, you know, this is making me realize that another reason why slot makers love the alphabet is because they can just stitch together a bunch of very short clips. And of course, most of the AI video generators that we have in this moment can only generate clips of up to a few seconds. So the alphabet just becomes a perfect way to stitch together all of that into one piece that still at least has some sort of coherence.

50:12Arijeta Lajka:Yeah. I mean, I guess I can see a world in which this stuff is not actually that harmful. Maybe it is going to teach some kids the alphabet, but it is just so weird. And it strikes me as just like, we already had a lot of videos teaching kids the alphabet. Why are people doing this?

50:29Hard Fork Hosts:But also, and you know, listen, I'm no child neurologist, but I wonder about the consequences of essentially just creating images that are designed to overstimulate a child. You know what I mean? It's like, at least when you're watching like a normal cartoon, there could be moments of relative calm or like a story might unfold over a few minutes when you're just showing like raw visual stimuli and bombarding a kid with it. It just doesn't seem like it's probably that good for them.

50:58Arijeta Lajka:This is how I know you do not have a child in the year of our Lord 2026. Because if you go onto like Coco Melon or any of the other like extremely popular children's programs, like they are essentially just this. It's like a series of very short clips. Maybe they do one song and then they do another. It cuts away to a different song, cuts away to a different song. It is like these same sort of like hyper stimulating environments. So like I'm not saying that any of this is good. I'm just saying like we have crossed the Rubicon a while ago and we are now in the land of the hyper stimulating children's entertainment.

51:29Arijeta Lajka:Like the big difference to my mind is now that it's just easier and cheaper to create this stuff.

51:34Hard Fork Hosts:This is my takeaway. When I have my child, which I do hope to do, the only visual stimulation that I'm going to allow them is a pile of sticks. An Etch-A-Sketch? They can make their own fun, you know, with the pile of sticks. But we are not going down this road, Kevin. All right. Why don't we wrap up with a lullaby about animated children tucking themselves into beds made out of fruit. Mmm.

52:00Arijeta Lajka:Love a fruit bed.

52:01Hard Fork Hosts:What'd you call me? Princess Blondie in her strawberry bed.

52:06Arijeta Lajka:Okay, we've got a girl with a crown going into a bed made of strawberries.

52:13Hard Fork Hosts:Banana bed. Banana bed. Kiwi bed. Superboy in his orange glow Drifts to sleep all warm and slow

52:29Arijeta Lajka:Casey, what do you make of the fruit beds?

52:31Hard Fork Hosts:You know, this is just another one that feels a little more surreal than I am comfortable with. You know, it's like, what is the child supposed to conclude from any of it? Like, it just sort of seems designed to confuse children more than to educate or even really entertain them.

52:48Arijeta Lajka:Yeah, and there have been, I will say, like, a few sort of videos in here where I'm like, oh, my kid would like that. But I don't like that he would like that. You know, it's like, I don't want him watching stuff that's just like a bunch of animals, like driving buses or lying in, you know, fruit beds.

53:04Hard Fork Hosts:Also, kids like lots of things that are bad for them. That's why we don't let them use cocaine.

53:10Arijeta Lajka:Yes. Well, now that we've seen the videos, I feel like we are armed and ready to have the conversation about what they all mean. So let's bring in my colleague, Arietta Laika.

53:18Hard Fork Hosts:I don't know. I feel like I need to cleanse first. maybe go read a play by Shakespeare or something. Just go watch an episode of Bluey. Very heartwarming.

53:31Arijeta Lajka:Arianna Leica, welcome to Hard Fork.

53:33Hard Fork Hosts:Thank you so much for having me.

53:34Arijeta Lajka:I wanted to just ask, like, first of all, how did you get interested in this? How did you learn about this? Did you get a tip from a toddler submitting things through the New York Times confidential tip process? How did this come onto your radar?

53:46Hard Fork Hosts:Yeah, so no toddlers were involved in the making of this story. We had some ethical concerns there about showing them these videos repeatedly. But I started by getting interested in this because there is so much AI slop on all of our social media feeds, regardless of the platform. And I was interested in learning more about how this content is being presented to children and how it's being moderated. And so where do many children watch media? It's YouTube. So I started by looking at channels that parents approve of, channels like Miss Rachel and Bluey that are considered more high quality and thoughtful, and other popular channels like Cocomelon, and said, well, if I click on a Cocomelon video, and I am a toddler, and I look at the recommended videos right next to that video, what sort of videos would I be recommended?

54:38Hard Fork Hosts:And we focused on YouTube Shorts because a lot of these AI tools default to this vertical format. And so we just started scrolling through the feed and making a note of the different videos we were seeing. One of my colleagues actually coded a tool where I wasn't really interacting with the screen, so it wouldn't influence the algorithm. And I was just like scrolling down and it was making a note of all the different links I was seeing. And then we later analyzed these videos frame by frame, determined which videos were AI generated.

55:08Arijeta Lajka:And were you using regular YouTube or YouTube Kids?

55:11Hard Fork Hosts:So we started looking at regular YouTube in a private browser because a lot of parents tend to put on their own YouTube accounts for their children. But then we also look through YouTube Kids, you know, because it is a more controlled environment with content that's supposed to be approved for children. And when you started this process, what were your sort of expectations? And then how much AI generated stuff did you wind up seeing as like kind of a proportion of the total? So I think, especially when I was watching channels like Miss Rachel and Bluey, I was expecting to see content that would be more in the lines of those programs, right?

55:50Hard Fork Hosts:More Bluey shorts. And I wasn't really seeing that. I was surprised just about how much AI-generated content was being recommended. Like in one session alone, in one 15-minute session that we were scrolling, more than 40 % of the videos were AI-generated.

56:05Arijeta Lajka:Wow. And how are you determining that? Is there like a detection system that you're plugging these things into? Yeah, the detection system is called looking at the video. Well, no, I'm saying like if you have a video of like a, you know, an alpaca getting squeezed out of a paint tube, like that's very clearly not photorealistic, but it could be made using some like CGI software or something like that. I suppose, yes. How did you determine that this was AI?

56:26Hard Fork Hosts:Right. So I think some of these videos were a little bit more obvious, but we looked at them frame by frame and tried to look for inconsistencies. inconsistencies. Like in some cases, the objects were just appearing in the background. There was text in the background that was distorted. If there was an animal in the background, it would morph into something else. Some of the videos were actually labeled as synthetic media, even though they were animated. And then we would also look at the YouTube channel and get a sense of like, okay, what sort of content have they been posting in the last few years?

56:54Hard Fork Hosts:And even some of the channels that had been around, you know, before the last two years where this technology really improved, they were making very simple, low-quality animation that looked nothing like what they had been posting the last few months.

57:07Arijeta Lajka:Now, Arietta, I have done a lot of reporting on YouTube, but it's been a few years. What are their actual policies like today on this kind of content?

57:17Hard Fork Hosts:So I sent them a few channels as examples, and I asked them what their policy is around flagging AI content that's being made for children, and that includes animated content. And they told me that content creators are required to label content that is realistic looking. In some cases, we saw that creators weren't labeling the content. And I'm referring to videos of animals, you know, displaying behaviors that those animals don't do, like elephants doing gymnastic maneuvers on a tightrope. Those videos, for example, are not labeled as synthetic media. Some creators were labeling the animated videos, but it's not part of YouTube's policy.

57:57Hard Fork Hosts:So it's really the burden is falling on parents, especially for parents who may not want their child to watch AI-generated media to determine, okay, what sort of video is this? And not only that, but you have to click through the video and then you see the synthetic media label. And when it comes to kids' content on YouTube, YouTube doesn't allow comments. So sometimes when there's an AI-generated video, you'll have people in the comments and say, like, this is AI. And in this case, you know, parents can't really talk amongst themselves as to what the video is. Has there been any backlash yet that we've seen from parents against these kinds of videos?

58:33Hard Fork Hosts:Like, are some parents upset by what they're seeing? Yeah, we came across several Reddit forums where people were asking how to get around this AI slop for kids, whether there was a filter on YouTube. Some parents recommended making a playlist. other parents were like get off youtube altogether and i i think um a lot of it is also going to fall on parents to you know closely supervise what kids are watching since the algorithm is pushing so much of this content right although of course the whole point of youtube is that what it's what you show your kids so that you don't have to spend time with them right you know it's i mean not in a mean way but like maybe you have to cook dinner right parents are busy yeah like if parents were you know sitting down to like watch youtube with their children like we would not be in this situation.

59:14Arijeta Lajka:Yeah, and I'll say, like, as the parent of a almost four-year-old, like, the couple times that I've, like, found him watching something like this because he, like, you know, went onto the YouTube kids app when he wasn't supposed to or something, my feeling about it is not, like, this is damaging my child. It's just, like, this is so bad. Like, the quality is just so bad. I wonder if you think, Arietta, like, there's any sort of evidence. What do we know about the actual effects of this on kids? Is the worry that it's actually harming them, or is the worry that there's just better stuff they could be watching?

59:46Hard Fork Hosts:So there's a lot of factors to consider. So these videos contain extraneous effects, and we know that when videos contain all these bedazzling elements, kids can learn as well. They're also devoid of a narrative arc, which is really beneficial for kids to watch content with the beginning, middle, and end with characters they can relate to, that they're familiar with, watching content that uses short phrases that they can understand and doesn't feature these abstract concepts. You know, worst case, a lot of these videos are fantastical and that could be cognitively overloading to the child. And when it comes to short form content, experts say for children under five, we know their attention systems are still developing.

1:00:28Hard Fork Hosts:So it's hard for them to follow rapid changes. And it really puts a heavy burden on children to process that information, especially when we see this more realistic, fantastical content of animals, you know, showing bizarre behaviors. You know, when I was growing up, Kevin, in the 1900s, I would watch He-Man. Remember He-Man? Yes. It was a cartoon about a gay guy who had a sword and rode a tiger around. Was he gay canonically? Well, I think not canonically, but read between the lines. Okay? Read between the lines. And, you know, as a young gay kid, I could see that and relate to that. And, you know, and yes, the stories were fantastical, you know, but to Arietta's point, there was a beginning and a middle and an end.

1:01:06Hard Fork Hosts:And, you know, it didn't exactly, like, teach me in the ways of the world. But like it maybe told me something about like storytelling and narrative. And it wasn't just sort of like raw flashing shapes and colors.

1:01:17Arijeta Lajka:Yes. I mean, I remember before I had a kid having this argument with people at YouTube about YouTube kids. Because there was, I think there was, you know, discussion and concern even back in like 2017 or 2018 about these weird videos. They weren't AI generated at the time, but they were like weird sort of Cocoa Melon ripoffs. And I remember saying to these YouTube people, like, you guys got to change the way that you do this. Like, instead of just default allowing channels to serve content to very young children, you have to, like, kind of set up some whitelist where, like, if you prove that, like, your stories have a beginning, middle, and end, and, like, there's some thought being put into them, you are allowed to be on YouTube Kids.

1:01:55Arijeta Lajka:And if you're not, if you're just some, like, content farm that's, like, churning out cocomelon ripoffs, like, you're not going to be allowed on. So do you get the sense, Arianna, that there's any, like, concern or consideration of this at YouTube? Or are they basically just sort of like, you know, we got bigger fish to fry?

1:02:12Hard Fork Hosts:I mean, these videos are recommended to me and these channels multiple times. And I've been looking at these videos since November. And what has it done to your brain?

1:02:22Arijeta Lajka:I bet you know your alphabet.

1:02:24Hard Fork Hosts:I do, yeah. Yeah, the alphabet and, you know, those songs really get stuck in your head, right?

1:02:30Arijeta Lajka:Yeah. Oh, trust me, I know.

1:02:32Hard Fork Hosts:And then it's just so fascinating to me how much more of these videos are recommended to me than more thoughtful content like PBS Kids, for example. Because PBS Kids also puts out shorts, but I was seeing more of this than PBS Kids. I mean, just to sort of like, you know, echo Kevin's question, this has gotten me thinking about Elsagate, right? This 2017 controversy where parents see a lot of really surreal content in YouTube and they get very upset. It seems like we have not seen that kind of backlash yet. And I'm wondering, is it because we just feel like the content is actually better here in some ways?

1:03:05Hard Fork Hosts:Or are most parents just not actually aware of just like the volume of slop that might be being served to their kids? Because so many of these videos are animated, it may not be obvious to some parents that these are AI generated. But we were working in a more contained environment. So like elsewhere on YouTube, there are so many videos featuring popular characters that children like in very violent scenarios. There's this show called Masha and the Bear. And I remember I typed in Masha and I was coming across videos of Masha's stomach being cut open. And that channel was putting up these videos and YouTube didn't take them down until I linked out to one of them in my story.

1:03:47Hard Fork Hosts:Wow. And I don't know if any of you know children who are obsessed with that K-pop Demon Hunters film, but there are so many horrible videos featuring those characters. And again, it's nonsensical. Sometimes the characters are pregnant and those are all over YouTube as well if you type in those characters' names. And by the way, that was the exact scandal of Elsagate was that people were seeing Elsa from Frozen pregnant all over YouTube. So, I mean, like, this truly is just a sequel to Elsagate, and I think it's, you know, interesting that it has flown under the radar until your story, Arietta.

1:04:22Hard Fork Hosts:Right, and before, I mean, you had to have some sort of animation skills to do that, but, like, now anyone can do this in a few minutes, so, you know, we're gonna be seeing more of this content. And again, what is so insidious here is that the people who are making these videos are counting on the fact that regular kids are going to go searching for K-pop demon hunters and Masha the Bear. And they are unwittingly just going to be served this slop of like, you know, the poor bear getting cut open and the pregnant demon hunter just through the recommendation algorithm. And like, this is where YouTube's responsibility lies, right?

1:04:57Hard Fork Hosts:Like, this is where YouTube should be saying, we're actually not going to show this incredibly disturbing stuff to kids.

1:05:02Arijeta Lajka:Yeah, I would say like among the parents of young children that I know, like very few of them let their kids watch YouTube, even YouTube kids for this exact reason that it's like you might start with Masha the Bear. You might start with, you know, a K-pop Demon Hunters video. You might start with Bluey or Cocoa Melon. but like you know you go away for 10 minutes to cook dinner and you come back and like they're on their third hop from the recommendation and they're watching some like you know weird ai generated thing with like spider-man you know on the surgery table or something and like that's like what are

1:05:34Hard Fork Hosts:we doing here because it turns out that all of these recommendation algorithms work exactly the same way they find the video that is the closest to going over the line and they find that it gets more engagement than any other and so that's what shows up in the feed right so how how many times are we going to have to revisit this story? It really depresses me, honestly.

1:05:52Arijeta Lajka:Arianna, until the platforms like YouTube take more action on this, what can parents do in the short term? I mean, if you're going to let your kid watch YouTube or YouTube Kids, is there anything you can do to like toggle off the AI slop or do you just kind of have to make peace with it?

1:06:08Hard Fork Hosts:In terms of filtering it out, there isn't an option to do that right now. In January, YouTube announced they're going to add some controls where parents can set time limits to YouTube Shorts. We're seeing a lot of this AI content YouTube shorts, so that might be an option. They call it the slop watch. You know, it's like a stopwatch, but for slop.

1:06:26Arijeta Lajka:I just wonder if, like, all of this is a losing battle. I feel like... Kevin Roos, do not bring your nihilism into the recording studio today. Well, just, like, look at what is happening to older children with, like, Tung Tung Tung Sahur and, like, all the AI slop from TikTok. talk. And I just feel like, you know, we're seeing old people falling for AI slop on Facebook and middle-aged people fall for it on, on X and Instagram. And like, it just feels like we're kind of creating this like lifelong pipeline of just like whatever slop is going to be most engaging to you.

1:07:01Hard Fork Hosts:Well, I'm glad you brought that up because that is the thought that I'm having as we wrap up is that while, you know, right now we're talking about the concerns we have for kids, I think that, you know, older, older teens and adults wind up having the same issue, which is they open up TikTok or Instagram reels and they see something that is designed to hypnotize them as well. And it might not be colors and shapes and the alphabet, but it does seem like the basic idea is just sort of turn your brain off and experience the raw visual stimuli for as long as, you know, we can get you to.

1:07:31Arijeta Lajka:Yes. Well, Arianna, fascinating story. Thank you so much for doing this digging and watching all of these children's videos so that I don't have to and so I can protect my child from them.

1:07:41Hard Fork Hosts:Thank you so much for having me.

1:07:42Arijeta Lajka:We're going to take one for the team.

1:07:44Hard Fork Hosts:Yes. Arianna, you really did take one for the team on this one, I have to say.

1:07:48Arijeta Lajka:All right. Thanks so much.

1:07:49Hard Fork Hosts:Thanks. Thanks.

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1:09:22Arijeta Lajka:Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Viren Pavich. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Chris Wood. Our executive producer is Jen Poyant. Original music by Alicia Baitoup, Rowan Nemisto, and Dan Powell. video production by Sawyer Roquet, Pat Gunther, Jake Nichol, and Chris Schott. You can watch this full episode on YouTube at youtube.com slash hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Hui Wing Tam, and Dalia Haddad. You can email us as always at hardfork at nytimes.com. Send us your toddler slop.

1:10:09Thank you.