Record Labels Sue A.I. Music Generators + Inside the Pentagon’s Tech Upgrade + HatGPT

26:41But I think they understood, they were scared because they knew that the record industry is very organized. It has this kind of like, you know, history of litigation. And, you know, they sort of understood that they were likely to face lawsuits if they let this out into the public. So have you had discussions with the bigger AI companies, the more established ones that are working on this stuff? Or are they just sort of intuiting correctly that they would have a lot of legal problems on their hands if they let this stuff out into the general public? You know, you're raising a point that I don't think is discussed often enough, which is that there are companies out there that deserve credit for restraint.

27:19And part of it is that they know that we would bring a lawsuit and in the past we haven't been shy and that's useful. But part of it is also because these are their partners now. You know, there are real business relationships here and human relationships here between these companies. And so they, their natural, I think they're moving towards a world where their natural instinct is to approach their partners and see if they can work with them. You know, I know that YouTube did sort of its Dreamcast experiment, approached artists, approached record companies. That was sort of like the precursor or the beta to whatever they might be discussing now for what's going to go on shorts that we talked about earlier.

28:03And I'm sure that there are many others. But you're right. Yes, there are going to be companies like Suno and Udio that just seek investment, want to make a profit and steal stuff. But there is restraint and constructive action by a lot of companies out there who do view the creators as their partners. Well, it's a really interesting development, and I look forward to following it as it progresses. Thanks, Mitch. Thanks so much, Mitch. Thanks for coming by. Thanks, guys. Bye. When we come back, we're going Inside the Pentagon with Chris Kirchhoff, the author of Unit X. are we allowed outside the Pentagon?

29:08Well, Casey, let's talk about war. Let's talk about war. and what is it good for? Some say absolutely nothing. Others write books arguing the opposite. Yeah. So I've been wanting to talk about AI and technology and the military for a while on the show now because I think what's really flying under the radar of kind of the mainstream tech press these days is that there's just been a huge shift in Silicon Valley toward making things for the military and the U.S. military in particular. You know, years ago, it was the case that most of the big tech companies, they were sort of very reluctant to work with the military, to sell things to the Department of Defense, to make products that could be used in war.

29:54They had a lot of ethical and moral quandaries about that, and their employees did too. But we've really seen a shift over the past few years. They're now a bunch of startups working in defense tech, making things that are designed to be sold to the military and to national security forces. And we've also just seen a big effort at the Pentagon to modernize their infrastructure, to update their technology, to not get beat by other nations when it comes to having the latest and greatest weapons. Yeah. And also, Kevin, just the rise of AI in general, I think, has a lot of people curious about what the military thinks of what is going on out here.

30:33And is it eventually going to have to adopt a much more aggressive AI strategy than the one it has today? Yeah. So a few weeks ago, I met a guy named Chris Kirkoff. He's one of the authors, along with Raj Shah, of a book called Unit X. Chris is sort of a longtime defense tech guy. He was involved in a number of tech projects for the military. He worked at the National Security Council during the Obama administration. Fun fact, he was the highest ranking openly gay advisor in the Department of Defense for years. And most importantly, he was a founding partner of something called the Defense Innovation Unit, or DIU.

31:09It also goes by the name Unit X, which is basically this little experimental division that was set up about a decade ago by the Department of Defense to try to basically bring the Pentagon's technology up to date. And he and Raj Shah, who was another founding partner of the DIU, just wrote a book called Unit X that basically tells the story of how the Pentagon sort of realized that it had a problem with technology and set out to fix it. So I just thought we should bring in Chris to talk about some of the changes that he has seen in the military when it comes to technology and in Silicon Valley when it comes to the military.

31:48Let's do it.

32:02Chris Kierkoff, welcome to Hard Fork. Glad to be here. So I think people hear a lot about the military and technology, and they kind of assume that there are very futuristic things happening inside the Pentagon that we'll hear about at some point in the future. But a lot of what's in your book is actually about old technology and how underwhelming some of the military's technological prowess is. Your book opens with an anecdote about your co-author actually using a compact digital assistant because it was better. It had better navigation tools than the navigation system on his$30 million jet. That was sort of how you introduced the fact that the military is not quite as technologically sophisticated as many people might think.

32:46So I'm curious, when you first started your work with the military, what was the state of the technology? Well, it's really interesting. I mean, you go to the movies, and we have all seen Mission Impossible and James Bond. And wouldn't it be wonderful if that actually were the reality behind the curtain? But when you open up the curtain, you realize that actually in this country, there are two entirely different systems of technological production. There's one for the military, and then there's one for everything else. And to dramatize this, on the image of our book, Unit X, we have an iPhone, and on top of the iPhone is sitting an F-35, the world's most advanced fighter jet, a fifth-generation stealth fighter known as a flying computer for its incredible centrifuge and weapon suites.

33:30But the thing about the F-35 is that its design was actually finalized in 2001, and it did not enter operations until 2016. and a lot happened between 2001 and 2016, including the invention of the iPhone, which by the way, has a faster processor in it than the F35. And if you think about the F35 over the subsequent years, there's been three technological upgrades to it. And we're now what? We're almost an iPhone 16 season. And once you understand that, you understand why it was really important that the Pentagon thought about establishing a Silicon Valley office to start accessing in this whole other technology ecosystem that is faster and generally a lot less expensive than the firms that produce technology for the military.

34:16Yeah, I remember years ago, I interviewed your former boss, Ash Carter, the former Secretary of Defense who died in 2022. And I sort of expected that he'd want to talk about like all the newfangled stuff that the Pentagon was making, you know, autonomous drones, stealth bombers. But instead, we ended up talking about procurement, which is basically how the government buys stuff, whether it's a fighter jet or an iPhone. And I remember him telling me that procurement was just unbelievably complicated. And it was a huge part of what made government and the military in particular so inefficient and kind of backwards technologically.

34:56Describe how the military procures things and then what you discovered about how to maybe short-circuit that process or make it more efficient. You know, if you're looking to buy a nuclear aircraft carrier or a nuclear submarine, you can't really go on Amazon and price shop for that. I learned that the hard way, by the way. Should have upped your credit, Linda Casey. And so, you know, in those circumstances when the government is representing the taxpayer and buying one large military system, a multi-billion dollar system from one vendor, it's really important that the taxpayer not be overcharged.

35:32And so the Pentagon has developed a really elaborate system of procurement to ensure that it can control how production happens, the cost of individual items. And that works okay if you're in a situation where you have the government and one firm that makes one thing. It doesn't make any sense though if you're buying goods that multiple firms make or that are just available on the consumer market. And so one of the challenges we had out here in Silicon Valley when we first did a defense innovation unit was trying to figure out how to work with startups and tech companies who, it turns out, weren't interested in working with the government.

36:08And the reason why is that the government typically buys defense technology through something called the Federal Acquisition Rules, which is a little bit like the Old Testament. It's this dictionary-sized book of regulations. Letting a contract takes 18 to 24 months. If you're a startup, your investors tell you not to go down that path for a couple reasons. One, you're not going to make enough money before your next valuation. You're going to have to wait too long. You're going to go out of business before the government actually closes the sale. And two, even if you get that first contract, it's totally possible another firm with better lobbyists is going to take it right back away from you.

36:44So at Defense Innovation Unit, we had to figure out how to solve that paradox. Part of what I found interesting about your book was just the sort of accounts that you gave of these sort of clever loopholes that you and your team found around some of the bureaucratic slowness at the Pentagon. And in particular, this loophole that allowed you to purchase technology much, much more quickly that one of your staffers found. Tell that story, and maybe that'll help people understand kind of the systems that you were up against. It's an amazing story, but we knew when we arrived in Silicon Valley that we would fail unless we figured out a different way to contract with firms.

37:25And our first week in the office, this 29-year-old staff member named Lauren Daly, the daughter actually of a tank commander whose way of serving was to become a civilian in the Pentagon and work on acquisition, happened to be up because she's a total acquisition nerd. late at night reading the just-released National Defense Authorization Act, which is another dictionary-sized compendium of law that comes out every year. And she was flipping through it, trying to find new provisions in law that might change how acquisition worked. And sure enough, in Section 815 of the law, she found a single sentence that she realized somebody had placed there that changed everything.

38:06And that single sentence would allow us to use a completely different kind of contracting mechanisms called other transaction authorities that were actually first invented during the space race to allow NASA during the Apollo era to contract with mom and pop suppliers. And so she realized that this provision would allow us not only to use OTAs to buy technology, but the really important part is that if it worked, if it was successful in a pilot, we could immediately go to buy it at scale, to buy it in production. We didn't have to recompete it. There would be no pause, no 18-month pause between demonstrating your technology and having the department buy it.

38:43And when Lauren brought this to our attention, we thought, oh boy, this really is a game changer. So we flew Lauren to Washington. We had her meet with the head of acquisition policy of the Department of Defense. And in literally three weeks, we changed 60 years of Pentagon policy to create a whole new way to buy technology that to this day has been used to purchase$70 billion of technology for the Department of Defense. You just said that the reason that Silicon Valley tech companies, some of them didn't want to work with the military is because of this sort of arcane and complicated procurement process.

39:17But there were also real moral objections among a lot of tech companies and tech workers. In 2018, Google employees famously objected to something called Project Maven, which was a project the company had planned with the Pentagon that would have used their AI image recognition software to improve weapons and things like that. And there have been just a lot of objections over the years from Silicon Valley to working with the military to being defense contractors. Why do you think that was? And do you think that's changed at all? You know, it's completely understandable. You know, so few Americans serve in uniform.

39:56Most of us don't actually know somebody who's in the military. And it's really easy here in Silicon Valley, you know, where the weather's great. Sure, you read headlines in the news, but the military is not something that you encounter in your daily life. And you join a tech company to make the world better, to develop products that are gonna help people. You don't join a tech company assuming that you're gonna be making the world a more lethal place. But at the same time, Project Maven was actually something that I got a chance to work on and Defense Innovation Unit and a whole group of people led.

40:28And tell us about, remind us what Project Maven was. So Project Maven was an attempt to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to take a whole bunch of footage, surveillance footage, that was being captured in places like Iraq and Afghanistan and other military missions and to use machine learning to label what was found in this footage. So it was a tool to essentially automate work that otherwise would have taken human analysts hundreds of hours to do. And it was used primarily for intelligence and reconnaissance and force protection. So Project Maven, this is another misconception.

41:06You know, when you talk about military systems, there's really a lot of unpacking you have to do. The headline that got Project Maven in trouble said, you know, Google working on secret drone project. And it made it look as if Google was partnering with Defense Innovation Union at the Department of Defense to build offensive weapons to support the U.S. drone campaign. And that's not all what was happening. What was happening is Google was building tools that would help our analysts process the incredible amount of data flowing off many different observation platforms in the military. Right. But Google employees objected to this.

41:40They made a big case that Google should not participate in Project Maven, and eventually the company pulled out of the project. But speaking of Project Maven, I was curious because there was some reporting from Bloomberg this year that showed that the military has actually used Project Maven's technology as recently as February to identify targets for airstrikes in the Middle East. So isn't that exactly what the Google employees who were protesting Project Maven back when you were working on it at the Defense Department, isn't that exactly what they were scared would happen? Well, Project Maven, when Google was involved, was very much a pilot R &D project.

42:16And it's since transitioned, actually, into much more of an operational phase. And it's being used in a number of places. In fact, it's actually being used in Ukraine as well to help the U.S. identify military targets in Ukraine. And so this, again, speaks to, I think, a sea change in Silicon Valley since that original protest of 3 ,000 Google employees over Project Maven, where the world has changed a lot. And not for the better. You know, we have a land war going on in Europe on the border of NATO. And in fact, that war, the Ukraine conflict, has mobilized a lot of people in Silicon Valley to want to try and help support Ukraine's quest to defend its territory.

42:55And so I think we're in a very different time and moment right now as people watching the news realize that our security is actually quite a bit more fragile than we might have first imagined. I mean, I think one reaction that our listeners may have to this is they are very concerned about the use of AI and other technologies by the military. And I also hear from a lot of people at the tech companies who are really concerned about some of these contracts. I remember during the Project Maven controversy talking with people at Google who were part of the protest movement. And some things that they would say to me are like, well, you know, if I wanted to work for a defense contractor, I would have gone to go work for Lockheed Martin or Raytheon.

43:40I'm curious, like, what moral argument would you make to someone who maybe says, look, I did not sign up to make weapons of war. I am an AI engineer. I work on large language models or I work on image recognition stuff. What do you tell that person if you're working at the DIU trying to persuade them that it's okay to sell or license that technology to the Pentagon? I think you tell them that we're at an extraordinary moment in the history of war where everything is changing. And I'll just give you a couple of data points. A few weeks ago, the United States asked the Ukrainian military to pull back from the front lines all 31 of the M1A1 Abrams tanks that we had deployed to Ukraine to allow their military to better repel a Russian invasion.

44:25These are the most advanced tanks, not only in our inventory, but in the inventory of any one of our allies. and they were getting whacked by$2 ,000 Russian kamikaze drones,$2 ,000 drones killing tanks. What does that tell me? That tells me that a century of mechanized warfare that began in the first world war is over. And if you're building an army that's full of tanks, you now are the emperor with fewer clothes anyway. And I'll give you one other, you know, a couple other data points. Hamas, you know, has kicked off the largest ground war in the Middle East because of its attack in Israel on the 7th of October since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, threatening to destabilize the Middle East into a wider war.

45:12How did they do it? They did it by taking quadcopters and using them to drop grenades on the generators powering the Israeli border towers. That's what allowed the fighters to pour over the border. Another data point, Houthi rebels in Yemen right now are holding hostage 12 % of global shipping in the Red Sea because they're using autonomous sea drones, missiles, and loitering munitions to harass shipping. And so we're at this moment where the arsenal of democracy that we have, this incredibly forceful military is full of things like aircraft carriers and tanks are wielding weapons that are no longer as effective as they were 10 years ago.

45:53And if our military and our service doesn't catch up quick, we may be in a situation where we don't have the advantage we once did. And we have to think very differently about our security if that's the case. I mean, it sounds like you're kind of saying that the way to stop a bad guy with an AI drone is a good guy with an AI drone. Am I hearing you right that you're saying that we just, we have to have such overwhelmingly powerful, lethal technology in our military that other countries won't mess with us? I totally hear you and frankly hear all the people that, you know, years ago were affiliated with the stop killer robots movement.

46:30I mean, these weapons are, they're awful things. They do awful things to human beings. But, you know, at the same time, there's a deep literature on something called strategic stability that comes out of the Cold War. And part of that literature focuses on the proliferation of nuclear weapons. And the fact that actually the proliferation of nuclear weapons has actually reduced great power conflict in the world because nobody actually wants to get in a nuclear exchange. Now, would it be a good idea for everybody in the world to have their own nuclear weapon? Probably not. So all these things have limits.

47:02But that's an illustration of how strategic stability, in other words, a balance of power, can actually reduce the chance of conflict in the first place. I'm curious what you make of the Stop Killer Robots movement. There was a petition or an open letter that went around years ago that was signed by a bunch of leaders in AI, including Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind. They all pledged not to develop autonomous weapons. Do you think that was a good pledge or do you support autonomous weapons? I mean, I think autonomous weapons are now kind of a reality in the world. I mean, we're seeing this on the front lines of Ukraine.

47:41And, you know, if you're not willing to fight with autonomous weapons, then you're going to lose. Hmm. So there's this former OpenAI employee, Leopold Ashton Brenna, who recently released a long manifesto called Situational Awareness. And one of the predictions that he makes is that by about 2027, the US government would recognize that super intelligent AI was such a threat to the world order that AGI, sort of artificial general intelligence, would become functionally a project of the national security state, something like an AGI. AGI Manhattan Project. There's other speculation out there that maybe at some point the government would have to nationalize an open AI or an anthropic.

48:25Are you hearing any of these whispers yet? Like, are people starting to game this out at all? Well, I haven't. I confess, I haven't made it all through each 155 pages of that long manifesto. It was very long. You could summarize it with chat GPT. Fantastic. But these are important things to think about because it, it could be that in certain kinds of conflicts, whoever has the best AI wins. And if that's the case, and if AI is getting exponentially more and powerful, then to take things back to the iPhone and the F35, it's going to be really important that you have the kind of AI of the iPhone variety.

49:00You have the AI that's new every year. You don't have the F35 with the processor that was baked in in 2001, and you're only taken off on a runway in 2016. So I do think it's very important for folks to be focused on AI. Where this all goes, though, is a lot of speculation. I mean, if you had to bet in 10 years, do you think that the AI companies will also be private, or do you think the government will have stepped in and gotten way more interested in maybe taking one of them over? Well, I'd make the observation that, you know, we all watched Oppenheimer, especially employees at AI firms. They seem to love that film.

49:37And nuclear technology, it's what national security strategists would call a point technology. It's sort of zero to one. Either you have it or you don't. And AI is not gonna end up being a point technology. It's a very broadly diffused technology that's gonna be applied not only in weapons systems, but in institutions. It's gonna be broadly diffused around the economy. And for that reason, I don't think, or it's less likely anyway, that we're going to end up in a situation where somebody has the bomb and somebody doesn't. I think the gradations are going to be smoother and not quite as sharp. Part of what we've seen in other industries as technology sort of moves in and modernizes things is that often things become cheaper.

50:20You know, it's cheaper to do things using the latest technology than it is to do using outdated technology. Do you think some of the work that you've done at DIU trying to modernize how the Pentagon on works is going to result in smaller defense budgets being necessary going forward? Is the $2 trillion or so that the DOD has budgeted for this year, could that be$1 trillion or half a trillion in the coming years because of some of these modernizations? You're giving us a raise, Kevin. I think it's more like$800 billion. Well, I'm sorry. I got that answer from Google's AI overview, which also told me to eat rocks and put glue on my pizza.

50:58We should get the Secretary of Defense, he'd like that answer if you have that large of a budget. You know, it's certainly true that for a lot less money now, you can have a really destructive effect on the world as drone pilots in Ukraine and elsewhere in the world are showing. I think it's also true that the U.S. military has a whole bunch of legacy weapon systems that unfortunately are, you know, kind of like museum relics, right? I mean, if our most advanced tank can be destroyed by a drone, it might be time to retire our tank fleet. If our aircraft carriers cannot be defended against a hypersonic missile attack, it's probably not a good idea to sail one of our aircraft carriers anywhere near an advance adversary.

51:39So I think it is an opportune moment to really look at what we are spending our money on at the Defense Department and remember the goal of our nation's founders, which is to spend what we need to on defense and not a penny more. So I hear you saying that it's very important for the military to be prepared technologically for the world we're in, and that means working with Silicon Valley. But is there anything more specific that you want to share that you think that either side needs to be doing here or something specific that you want to see out of that collaboration? Well, I think one of the main goals of Defense Innovation Unit was literally to get the two groups talking.

52:17You know, before Defense Innovation Unit was founded, a secretary of defense hadn't been to Silicon Valley in 20 years. I mean, that's almost a generation. So Silicon Valley invents the mobile phone. It invents cloud computing. It invents AI. And nobody from the Defense Department bothers to even come and visit. And that's a problem. And so just bringing the two sides into conversation is itself, I think, a great achievement. Well, Chris, thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate the conversation. And the book, which comes out on July 9th, is called Unit X, How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Future of War.

52:55Thank you. Thank you, Chris.

52:59When we come back, play another round of Hat GPT.

53:16All right, Kevin. Well, it's time once again for Hat GPT.

53:25This, of course, is our favorite game. It's where we draw news stories from the week out of a hat. And we talk about them until one of us gets sick of hearing the other one talk and says, stop generating. That's right. Now, normally we pull slips of paper out of a hat, but due to our remote setup today, I will instead be pulling virtual slips of paper out of a laptop. But for those following along at YouTube, you will still see that I do have one of the Hatchypt hats here and I will be using it for a comic effect throughout the segment. Will you put it on actually? If we don't need it to draw slips out of, you might as well be wearing it.

53:57I might as well be wearing it. Yeah, it looks so good. Thank you so much and thank you once again to the listener who made this for us. You're a true fan. So good. Perfect. All right, Kevin, let me draw the first slip out of the laptop. Yep. Ilya Sutskiver has a new plan for safe super intelligence. Ilya Sutskiver is, of course, the OpenAI co-founder who was part of the coup against Sam Altman last year. And Bloomberg reports that he is now introducing his next project, a venture called Safe Super Intelligence, which aims to create a safe, powerful artificial intelligence system within a pure research organization that has no near-term intention of selling AI products or services.

54:42Kevin, what do you make of this? Well, it's very interesting on a number of levels, right? In some sense, this is kind of a mirror image of what happened several years ago when a bunch of safety-minded people left OpenAI after disagreeing with Sam Altman and started an AI safety-focused research company. That, of course, was anthropic. And so this is sort of the newest twist in this whole saga is that Ilya Suskever, who was, you know, very concerned about safety and how to make super intelligence that was smarter than humans, but also not evil and not going to destroy us, who has done, you know, something very similar.

55:20But I have to say, I don't quite get it. I mean, he's not saying much about the project, but part of the reason that these companies sell these AI products and services is to get the money to buy all the expensive equipment that you need to train these giant models. And so I just don't know, like, if you don't have any intention of selling this stuff before it becomes AGI. How are you paying for the AGI? Do you have a sense of that? No, I don't. I mean, Daniel Gross, who is one of Ilya's co-founders here, has basically said, don't worry about fundraising. We are going to be able to fundraise as much as we need for this.

55:57So I guess we will see. But yeah, it does feel a bit strange to have someone like Ilya saying he's going to build this totally without a commercial motive, in part because he said it before, right? Like, this is what is so funny about this, is it truly just is a case where the circle of life keeps repeating, where a small band of people get together, and they say, we want to build a very powerful AI system, and we're going to do it very safely, and then bit by bit, they realize, well, actually, we don't think that it's being built out safely. We're going to form a breakaway faction. So, if you're playing a lot at home, I believe this is the second breakaway faction to break away from open AI after Anthropic, and I look forward to Ilya quitting this company eventually to start a newer an even more safe company somewhere else.

56:40The really, really safe super intelligence company. Yeah, his next company, you've never seen safety like this. They wear helmets everywhere in the office and they just have keyboards. All right, stop generating. All right, pick one out of that, Kevin. All right, five men convicted of operating JetFlix, one of the largest illegal streaming sites in the U.S. This is from Variety. JetFlix was a sort of pirated streaming service that charged$9.99 a month while claiming to host more than 183 ,000 TV episodes, which is more than the combined catalogs of Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, and Amazon Prime video. Ooh, that sounds great.

57:19I'm going to open an account. What a deal. So the Justice Department, you know, said this was all illegal, and the five men who were charged with operating it were convicted by a federal jury in Las Vegas. According to the court documents and the evidence that was presented at the trial, this group of five men were basically scraping piracy services for illegal episodes of TV and then hosting them on their own thing. It does not appear to have been a particularly sophisticated scam. It's just what if we did this for a while and charged people money and then got caught? Well, I think this is very sad because here finally you have some people who are willing to stand up and fight inflation.

58:00And what does the government do? they come in and they say knock it off I will say though Kevin I can actually point to the mistake that these guys made so instead of scraping these 183 ,000 TV episodes and selling them for$9.99 a month what they should have done was feed them all into a large language model and then you can sell them to people for$20 a month so the next time when these guys get out of prison I hope they get in touch with me because I have a new business idea for them alright stop generating All right. Here's a story called 260 McNuggets. McDonald's ends AI drive-thru tests amid errors.

58:40This is from the New York Times. After a number of embarrassing videos showing customers fighting with its AI-powered drive-thru technology, McDonald's announced it was ending its three-year partnership with IBM. In one TikTok video, friends repeatedly tell the AI assistant to stop as it added hundreds of chicken McNuggets to their order. Other videos show the drive-thru technology adding nine iced teas to an order, refusing to add a Mountain Dew, and adding unrequested bacon to ice cream. Kevin, what the heck is going on at McDonald's? Well, as a fan of bacon ice cream, I should say, I want to get to one of these McDonald's before they take this thing down.

59:17Me too. Did you see any of these videos or any of these? I haven't. Did you? No, but we should watch one of them together. Let's watch one of them. Stop! Stop! The caption is, the McDonald's robot is wild. And it shows their screen at the thing where it is, it is like just tallying up McNuggets and starts charging them more than$200. Here's my question. Why is everyone just rushing to assume that the AI is wrong here? Maybe the AI knows what these gals need. Because, Kevin, here's the thing. When super intelligence arrives, we're going to think that we're smarter than it. But it's going to be smart.

59:57So there's going to be a period of adjustment as we sort of get used to having our new AI master. Have you been to a drive-thru that used AI to take your order yet? No. I mean, I don't even really understand. What was the AI here? Was this like an Alexa thing where I said, you know, McDonald's, add 10 McNuggets? Or like, what was actually happening? No, so this was a partnership that McDonald's struck with IBM. And basically, this was like technology that went inside the little, you know, menu things that have the microphone and the speaker in them. And so instead of having a, you know, a human say, what would you like?

1:00:34It would just say, what would you like? And then you said it and they would recognize it and put it into the system. So you could sort of eliminate that part of the labor of the drive-thru. Got it. Well, look, I, for one, am very glad this happened because for so long now, I've wondered, what does IBM do? And I have no idea. And now, if it ever comes up again, I'll say, oh, that's the company that made the McDonald's stop working. We should say it's not just McDonald's. A bunch of other companies are starting to use this technology. I actually think this is probably inevitable. This technology will get better.

1:01:06They will iron out some of the kinks. But I think there will probably still need to be a human in the loop on this one. All right, stop generating. Okay. Kevin, let's talk about what happened when 20 comedians got AI to write their routines. This is in the MIT Technology Review. Google deep-mind researchers found that although popular AI models from OpenAI and Google were effective at simple tasks like structuring a monologue or producing a rough first draft, they struggled to produce material that was original, stimulating, or crucially, funny. And I'd like to read you an example LLM joke, Kevin.

1:01:37Please. I decided to switch careers and become a pickpocket after watching a magic show Little did I know the only thing disappearing would be my reputation Waka waka waka Hey, I got a laugh out of you Kevin, what do you make of this? Are you surprised that AI isn't funnier? No, but this is interesting Like it's like this has been something that, you know Critics of large language models have been saying for years It's like, well, it can't tell a joke And, you know, I should say I've had funny experiences with large language models, but never after like asking them to tell me a joke. Yeah, like remember when you said to Cindy, take my wife, please.

1:02:18I get no respect, I tell you. No, but this is interesting because this was a study that was actually done by researchers at Google DeepMind. And basically, it appears that they had a group of comedians try writing some jokes with their language models. And in the abstract, it says that most of the participants in the study felt that the large language models did not succeed as a creativity support tool by producing bland and biased comedy tropes, which they describe in this paper as being akin to cruise ship comedy material from the 1950s, but a bit less racist. so so they were not impressed these comedians by uh by these language models ability to tell jokes uh you're an amateur comedian have you ever used ai to come up with jokes no i haven't and i have to say like i i think i understand the technological reason why these things aren't funny kevin which is that comedy is very up to the minute right it for something to be funny it's typically something that is on the edge of what is currently thought to be socially acceptable.

1:03:27And what is socially acceptable or what is surprising within a social context, that just changes all the time. And these models, they are trained on decades and decades and decades of text, and they just don't have any way of figuring out, well, what would be a really fresh thing to say. So maybe they'll get there eventually, but as they're built right now, I'm truly not surprised that they're not funny. All right. Stop generating. Next one. Waymo ditches the waitlist and opens up his robo taxis to everyone in San Francisco. This is from The Verge. Since 2022, Waymo has made its rides in its robo taxi service available only to people who were approved off of a waitlist.

1:04:08But as of this week, they are opening it up to anyone who wants to ride in San Francisco. Casey, what do you make of this? well i am excited that more people are going to get to try this this is uh as you've noted kevin become kind of the newest tourist attraction in san francisco is when you come here you see if you can find somebody to give you a ride in one of these self-driving cars and now uh everyone is just going to be able to come here and download the app and use it immediately i have to say i am scared about what this is going to mean for the wait times on waymo i've been taking waymo more lately, and it often will take 12 or 15 or 20 minutes to get a car.

1:04:49And now that everyone can download the app, I'm not expecting those wait times to go down. Yeah, I hope they are also simultaneously adding more cars to the Waymo network, because this is going to be very popular. You're saying they need Waymo cars? They do. I'm worried about the wait times, but I'm also worried about the condition of these cars, because I've noticed in my last few rides, they're a little dirtier. Oh, wait, really? Yeah, I mean, they're still pretty clean, but, you know, I did see like a takeout container in one the other day. Oh, my God. And I just I want to know how they plan to keep these things from becoming filled with people's crap.

1:05:27All right. Stop generating. All right. Last one. This one comes from The Verge. TikTok's AI tool accidentally let you put Hitler's words in a paid actor's mouth. TikTok mistakenly posted a link to an internal version of an AI digital avatar tool that apparently had zero guardrails. This was a tool that was supposed to let businesses generate ads using AI with paid actors using this AI voice dubbing thing that would make the actors repeat whatever you wanted to have them say, endorse your product or whatever. but very quickly people found out that you could use this tool to repeat excerpts of Mein Kampf bin Laden's letter to America it told people to drink bleach and vote on the wrong day

1:06:14and that was its recipe for a happy pride celebration um listen uh obviously this is a very sort of silly story it sounds like everything involved here was a mistake and I think if you're making some sort of digital AI tool that is meant to generate ads, you do want to put safeguards around that because, you know, otherwise people will exploit it. That said, Kevin, I do think people need to start getting comfortable with the fact that people are just going to be using these AI creation tools to do a bunch of kooky and crazy stuff. Like what? Like people are, you know, In the same way that people use Photoshop to make nudity or offensive images, and we don't storm the gates of Adobe saying shut down Photoshop, the same thing is going to happen with these digital AI tools.

1:07:04And while I do think that there are some notable differences, and it is sort of, you know, varies on a case-by-case basis, and if you're making a tool for creating ads, it feels different. There are just going to be a lot of digital tools like this that use AI to make stuff, and other people are going to use it to make offensive stuff. And when they do, we should hold the people accountable, perhaps more than we hold the tool accountable. Yeah, I agree with that. And I also think like this sort of product is not super worrisome to me. I mean, obviously, it should not be reading excerpts from my comp.

1:07:35Obviously, they did not mean to release this. I assume that when they do, you know, fix it, it will be much better. But this is not like a thing that is creating deep fakes of people without their consent. This is a thing where if you have a brand, you can choose from a variety of stock avatars that are created from people who actually get paid to have their likenesses used commercially. So, you know, the specific details of this one don't bother me that much. But it does open up some new licensing opportunities for us. Like we could have an AI set of avatars that could be out there advertising crypto tokens or whatever.

1:08:13And I, for one, am excited to see how people use that. Oh man, well, and if TikTok weren't banned We could probably make a lot of money that way But instead, you know, we're out of luck Yeah, get it while it's good Alright, close up the hat Thank you.

1:08:55Video production by Ryan Manning, Sawyer Roque, and Dylan Bergeson You can watch this full episode on YouTube at youtube.com slash hardfork You can see Casey's cool hat Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Huiwing Tam, Caitlin Presti, and Jeffrey Miranda As always, you can email us at hardfork at nytimes.com

1:09:25Thank you.