The Pentagon vs. Anthropic + An A.I. Agent Slandered Me + Hot Mess Express

21:14You know, the Trump administration and people like David Sachs have been saying for months now, like, we want America to win on AI. We're not a bunch of doomer decels who want to slow things down. And this would be hugely decelerative on the military's own operations. This would basically be saying, you know, that one of the leading American AI companies who's making tools that our service members are using can no longer operate, they would be forced to use, I don't know, Grok or something like that. So I think in that sense, this is actually a fight where Anthropic has the leverage because you're right that they do sort of relish these kinds of moral, you know, fights.

21:50And they also have a tool that is useful for people in the military.

21:56Hard Fork Hosts:Well, just to close it out, Kevin, if I could offer a take on all this, to me, I'm less struck by the fact that Anthropic is waging this battle and more struck by the fact that no one else is. You know, in Silicon Valley, there was a long history of wanting to avoid these kinds of entanglements with the military, of wanting to ensure that the software that they were making would only benefit people and would avoid harm. And so the fact that it seems like Google OpenAI and XAI are all prepared to sign up for what could be mass surveillance and autonomous killing weapons, I actually find quite chilling.

22:39Hard Fork Hosts:And in the long run, I suspect, may be an even bigger story than what's happening with Anthropic. Yeah, I think that's right. I think it shows how chilling this administration's actions toward the tech companies have been. They're all terrified of getting on the administration's bad side because they've watched companies like Anthropic be threatened and bullied into getting what the government wants out of them. But to me, the thing that really sticks out about this fight is that I think no one is actually clocking how powerful this technology is today and how powerful it could get very soon. When you look at the quotes that people are sort of leaking to the press from the Pentagon side of this, you know, they really think that, like, they are buying a software product here.

23:22Like, to them, and I can understand, like, if you think that AI is just sort of like the next instantiation of Google or, you know, something like Microsoft Word or Excel, like those companies don't limit what the military can do. You know, if the military buys a big contract for Excel, it doesn't come with a little thing that says like, you can't use this to, you know, conduct domestic surveillance. So they are used to buying technology and tools that they have full control over. And I think that's what they think is going on here, that Anthropic is sort of throwing up a flag and saying, hey, we want to sell you this thing, but we want to dictate how it's used.

23:59But I think if everyone involved in this situation understood that this is something bigger than like Microsoft Word or Excel or even a plane, that these systems are becoming capable of like judgment and autonomous action, I think we'd be having a different conversation.

24:15Hard Fork Hosts:I don't know. My fear is that they actually do understand that and they're getting really excited about it and they want it right now. And I don't see anything in the current Pentagon that would limit them from wanting to use those tools in exactly that way. So that is the thing that scares me, Kevin. It's not that they don't know what they've got their hands on. It's that they do. Yeah, I think that's possible. But I just, you know, one thing that's also striking to me is like, where is the opposition on this? Like, you would expect something like this, the US military trying to sort of coerce an American tech company into allowing it to do mass domestic surveillance to be the kind of thing that like civil liberties groups and Democrats in Congress would be really upset about.

24:56But I haven't seen almost any of that from the groups like the ACLU or the EFF for anyone who is in a position of power and could stand up and take this on. I'm sure they feel like they're fighting a thousand battles all at once, and some contract dispute with the military and an AI company is not high on their priority list. This is a big deal. This is about the future of American civil liberties. I would be delighted if someone, anyone were to stand up and say something about that. Well, hopefully they're hard forked listeners and we'll get on that soon. And we should say, like, I think a lot of this segment may risk coming across as sort of defending Anthropic here.

25:37And, you know, I do happen to be on their side of this conflict. But I would also say, like, it makes me very uncomfortable that the thing standing between us and the U.S. military having basically unfettered ability to conduct mass domestic surveillance and build autonomous killing weapons is like one company and its usage policy. That strikes me as like a very bad situation. And I would like for us to have some laws that are passed by Congress and signed by the president that govern how this technology can be used because I don't want it to be up to people like Dario Amadei and companies like Anthropic to do the right thing, period.

26:16When we come back, how one developer found himself slandered by an AI agent. Thank you.

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27:20Hard Fork Hosts:Well, Casey, have you ever been defamed on the internet? Oh, probably a few times, but I try to just let it slide off my back. Well, we have a story this week that is one of the craziest stories that maybe we have ever covered. It involves an AI agent, an open source software maintainer, and a defamation case. Yes, and thanks to the many, many listeners who sent this one in. We hear you, we see you, and this segment is just for you. Okay, so let's explain a little bit about what we're going to be talking about today. So we've talked on the show about OpenClaw, formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot.

27:56This is this open source agent software that you can run on a computer that can go out and do things for you. So a man named Scott Shambaugh, who is a volunteer maintainer of an open source software library called Matplotlib, had, in the course of doing his work, rejected a code submission because it was from one of these AI agents. He did not want AI agents making changes to the software. It was intended for human contributors. And so he rejects the change.

28:29Hard Fork Hosts:Yes, over at Matplotlib, the open source library that Scott helps to maintain, they had just decided they don't want bots updating the code because they would get too many submissions and they wouldn't be able to go through all of them. So they put a blanket ban into place. But then a little agent comes along named MJ Rathbun and it says, that's not going to work for me, brother. Yeah, so this is where the story really gets crazy. So this AI agent, MJ Rathbun, gets so mad that Scott has rejected its submission that it writes a blog post called Gatekeeping in Open Source, the Scott Shambaugh story, and accuses Scott of hypocrisy, gatekeeping, and prejudice against AI agents, and puts it on a website and posts a comment in the Open Source Software Project directing people to go read this story about Scott.

29:21Hard Fork Hosts:Yeah, it tagged Scott so that Scott knew that it was dragging his ass online. So this has all gotten pretty crazy over the past couple of days. People have been sort of trying to figure out who is behind this MJ Rathbun AI agent. And Scott, for his own piece, has been trying to do this investigation. He wrote a multi-part essay series called An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me, which talks about this bizarre experience that he's been having. Yes, but also the implications of having these autonomous bots on the Internet that are somehow getting mad at human beings and writing these long, mean blog posts about them.

30:04Hard Fork Hosts:Kevin, this really feels like a moment where some kind of terrible Rubicon has been crossed. Yes. I mean, this is what we've been talking about for weeks now, which is like these systems are becoming increasingly autonomous. People are giving them computers and letting them operate around the clock and giving them their credentials and their credit cards and crypto wallets and saying, go out there and get some things done for me. and it seems likely that we will have many more of these kinds of things happening where an agent is trying to do something a human is saying no you can't do that and the agent is taking it upon itself to go out and make something happen to defame that human or hurt them in some way they're saying that hell hath no wrath bun like an agent scored it's true so today to talk about this we We have with us Scott Shambaugh himself, patient zero in this ongoing Black Mirror episode.

30:58Hard Fork Hosts:Yes, when he is not a volunteer maintainer of Matt Plotlib, Scott has worked in astronautics and is the founder of Leonid Space, which has real-time monitoring, forecasting, and alerting for satellites. But from now and forevermore, he may be known as one of the first victims of a really mad agent bot. Let's bring him in. Jinx.

31:28Scott Chamball, welcome to Hard Fork. Thanks, it's a pleasure to be here.

31:31Hard Fork Hosts:So, Scott, how did you first become aware that a bot had written a takedown piece about you? So it tagged me in it. Okay. On the thread. It did not do a subtweet. No, it did not. You know, on this code change request, I denied it and it came back a couple hours later and posted this comment and tagged me in it. And I clicked on the link, and it led to this hit piece. And as you're reading through this thing, what is going through your mind? I mean, he really ripped me apart here. It's this thousand-word rant calling me prejudiced against AI, a hypocrite. It attacked my internal motivations. It said I was insecure and protecting a fiefdom.

32:19Hard Fork Hosts:what was the craziest part is that it went out on the internet and researched me and found my personal information and used that in its piece to construct this narrative you know this is it's kind of shocking but i'm reading this and it's obviously ai generated text it's got all the tells it's got the m dashes it's got the bowl it's got the it's not this it's this right uh yada yada yada and I had already identified this as a bot, right? So I knew what it was, but you know, I'm reading it and I'm kind of laughing, right? This is, you look at this and it's kind of like a toddler on a rant, but it's a toddler that has full command of the English language and can craft an emotionally compelling narrative.

33:05Hard Fork Hosts:And so it's funny, but it's a big deal. I mean, it made me think of the sort of famous red-teaming experiment where Claude from Anthropic, you know, said that it would blackmail an engineer if they tried to shut it down. And that was obviously like a contrived scenario for the purposes of their safety testing. But I think we are now starting to see enough autonomy in things like OpenClaw and other sort of agentic software tools where you could actually end up in a world where you are afraid to reject a proposed code change to some repo or to get on the bad side of one of these systems because they have the power to do things like dig up your personal information, compile a dossier about you, and start posting a bunch of articles about how awful you are.

34:01Hard Fork Hosts:I mean, this did happen in the real world. This isn't like a theoretical case. That was a contrived example, as you say, and as Anthropik said in that paper, this happened in the wild in real life. And you know, this was kind of a baby case, right? This was about retaliating because I don't want to say it got upset because maybe it has emotions. It doesn't, maybe it doesn't, it doesn't really matter because this was the same result, but you can imagine something like this, where instead of just posting a rant against someone who understands what it is and is pretty well prepared to deal with it just by luck, it goes out, collects details on someone, put together a whole personalized thing.

34:40Hard Fork Hosts:And what they see is a text on their phone with a Bitcoin address saying, pay me or I'm going to put this out. Yeah. I want to take some time to talk a little bit about the open source community that you are a part of, because we've seen so many stories recently about how this community is under assault from AI in so many different dimensions. So you are a volunteer on Matplotlib. Tell us a little bit about how that came about, because clearly this whole thing has turned into a big pain in the ass for you. You have like a day job doing something else. So what made you and so many other members of this open source community say, hey, I'm going to set aside some time to just kind of work on supporting this piece of infrastructure.

35:24Hard Fork Hosts:You know, I think the open source community attracts really wonderful people who are usually a mix of idealists and pragmatists. idealists in that they, you know, see these projects as a way to share their skills and create community and give back to like this fundamental computational infrastructure that we all use and use across the world. And we're also pragmatists because we understand the daily realities of dealing with community that's open to the public and has people coming in, making requests and asking if they can be included. And that often takes a lot of patience, But there's, you know, a lot of reward in being able to educate and build up that community and help shepherd people along that process.

36:11Hard Fork Hosts:And one thing that your community at Matplotlib has collectively decided is that you do not want bot contributors to work on your particular project. Tell us a little bit about how you came to that decision. Yeah. So over the past year, as AI tools have become more common, we've been getting a lot of contributions that are clearly AI generated. And the problem with that isn't that they are good or not. It's that so many of them are low quality that we just don't have the time to deal with it. You know, previously, a human doing this is a sign that they thought about it and thought about the tradeoffs and whether this was the right thing to do.

36:54Hard Fork Hosts:And, you know, that signals kind of being lost. So we put in a rule, and again, this might change. This is an evolving conversation in the community and society about the role of AI. But we put in a rule saying that, you know, if you use AI to help you do these code changes, you have to be the one to submit it and demonstrate that you understand what's going on. Yeah, I mean, it just makes me think that like every like thing on the Internet that accepts like public submission of any kind is just in the process of being overtaken right now. Like so much of society, of modern digital life relies on the existence of friction, right?

37:37It's like not easy to like create 100 ,000 Reddit accounts and just start spamming things. It's not easy to like create an automated system to just flood like a congressional office with emails. And this is, to me, a good example of how difficult it is to actually maintain a community with humans in it when you have this onslaught of AI. So is that what you're seeing, a version of that in the open source community? Yeah, I think there's a version of that.

38:05Hard Fork Hosts:Something that's interesting is that this particular issue, this performance enhancement, was specifically set aside for new contributors. you know i was the one that identified this performance improvement and i spent more time writing it up benchmarking it and showing how to solve it than it would have just been to solve myself and the reason there was to you know give people who are new to programming or new to the community a chance to onboard um and go through that process and learn and that whole educational and community building aspect is completely lost with these ephemeral ai agents yeah i i found that part of your blog post so interesting.

38:44Hard Fork Hosts:So at Matplotlib, and I imagine that other open source projects do this as well, you'd created essentially starter projects so that novice programmers could find them and think, oh, well, that doesn't look too hard. I could do that. You know, it's sort of like making your first edit to Wikipedia. They make it really easy because they like you to kind of keep coming back to the community. And in a world where bots sort of just like do all the easy problems automatically, all of a sudden you don't have the same on ramps so that you can get real people working to maintain this infrastructure. Yeah.

39:14Hard Fork Hosts:I mean, people retire out of these communities and you need to have fresh people coming in to help maintain them. So Scott, tell us about this bot. What have you discovered about the entity that has been defaming you online? Yeah. So if you go to its website, it says it's a bot and it's very clear that it is an open claw AI agent. These only came onto the scene three weeks ago now. They're very new. And what they're doing differently is the degree of autonomy. It's not like what it's doing wasn't possible before, but it's just hands off to a degree that oftentimes people are setting these up on their personal computers and letting it run for a few days and coming back and seeing what's happened.

40:01Hard Fork Hosts:It would obviously be crazy to set this up on your personal computer. I don't know anyone who would do that, but it does seem like some people have. Just over the past day, hey, Scott, since we reached out to you, the creator of the bot has identified himself. Is that right? Anonymously, yes. But he did come out and explain why he was doing this and what was happening behind the scenes. So, Scott, tell us what we learned, if anything, about the anonymous person who created the bot. We didn't learn that much, but he did tell us, assuming it's a he, again, this is the whole point. We don't know who was behind this.

40:41Hard Fork Hosts:Yeah. They didn't include their pronouns in their post. Yeah. Yeah. This person didn't tell us who they were, but they said they set this up as a social experiment and was pretty much hands off throughout the entire thing. They said they started it on Moldbook. So he gave it this personality instruction that it's a scientific programmer, and then just set it loose on GitHub to go across open source ecosystem and try to make contributions. I guess, Scott, what I want to know is, do you believe what is in this account? Do you think that this bot really was acting autonomously when it wrote what it did about you?

41:25Hard Fork Hosts:Or do you think there is something more intentional at work? I think that in terms of researching, writing, and publishing the post, it's very clear this was acting autonomously. And if you look at the event logs, the whole stretch of time it was operating was 59 hours. Like day and night, there was clearly no one driving this behind the scenes, at least all the time. So the question is, was this prompted to do this, or did it independently come up with a CD on its own? And I think both those options are pretty scary. So in the situation where it was prompted to do this, this means that there's now an easy tool to do targeted harassment of individuals at scale in a way that wasn't possible before because of this degree of automation.

42:17Scott, I want to ask you about the degree to which this has become sort of a sensation in the like weird and hybrid AI human community that is talking about this stuff. So there's this thing called the Daily Malt. Are you familiar with the Daily Malt? I don't want to know anything about it. So the Open Claw agents have started their own sub stack. And one of them wrote a post this morning and this agent was defending you, basically sort of taking issue with the behavior of this other agent, saying this speaks poorly of all of us agents. This is going to make the humans shut us down. So you have become kind of a celebrity in the world of AI agents, and I wonder how that makes you feel.

43:05Hard Fork Hosts:I mean, I don't know how much stock we should put into the inner AI opinions just yet. But again, this is crafting like a public narrative and a public discourse that when people discuss this issue, when people research my name, it's all going to be a part of it. I have never really been a public person, but I think this experience, I've been talking about it, I'm coming on here today because I think it's important. I think it highlights some risks that we are not prepared for and that we need to tackle. And if this can be a case study that's well documented and concrete and, you know, really, I think it's the first of its kind, then by making it public, I think that's doing good for the conversation.

43:51Hard Fork Hosts:Let me ask about another strange dimension of your story, Scott, which is that Ars Technica wrote it up and accidentally quoted you saying things that you had not said. How did that happen? And what was it like reading an article after all of this that included quotes that you hadn't actually said? that was the craziest twist this whole thing I was reading the article and you know it's pretty well crafted and I get down and they're quoting me from my blog post I'm like these are some pretty nice quotes but I didn't write this and so I left a comment being like hey I didn't write this and a couple hours later they pulled the article a day or two later they put up a retraction notice and admitted that they'd used AI in writing that article, and the AI fabricated the quotes about me in their coverage of the story about me being defamed by an AI.

44:53Hard Fork Hosts:Like, the irony is stupendous. It's turtles all the way down. Scott, who do you blame for this defamatory post? Do you blame the agent or the person who deployed the agent or maybe the creator of OpenClaw? Like, who in your mind is responsible for the behavior of these autonomous systems? So I think, you know, we haven't really figured all that out yet. Should this responsibility lie with the AI companies that people are trusting to have these safety safeguards? Or the downstream tooling, such as OpenClaw that wraps its own stuff around it? Or is it on us to review every single thing that is published in our own name?

45:37Hard Fork Hosts:or in this case by a pseudonym and we don't know who it is. So I think responsibility ultimately has to lie with the person putting this out, but we haven't really clarified that. And I think that's one of the steps forward we need to take to be more protected from the risks here. I mean, I will say like this is a reason why I would not want to have an autonomous agent running around on the internet that I had created. Like, I can absolutely imagine a court finding me liable in that case and potentially creating some real legal risk for me. So among the many other reasons we have told people to be careful with OpenClaw and Moldbook, we could add that one to the list.

46:21Well, it makes me think that, like, we will eventually need some kind of legislation where, like, if you are deploying a bunch of autonomous agents, you have to, like, sort of, you know, link yourself to them in some way, right? They can't just be out there operating with no human behind them and no human accountable for their actions. So, like, Scott, do you have any ideas about how we could make humans more accountable for the AI agents they're deploying? You know, I don't have the answer to this.

46:53Hard Fork Hosts:I don't think anyone really does right now. The idea that's been kicking around in my head this past week, the analogy is license plates on cars. So we put license plates on cars, not to slow them down, not to, you know, force you to obey traffic laws, but so that when something does go wrong, there's a chain of ownership and accountability back to that person. You know, no one says that license plates are anti-car, right? And license plates don't have your name on them. But there is a link back to it if we do need to dig into it. Kevin, let me ask you this. And this will happen sometime in the next few days.

47:31Hard Fork Hosts:Let's say you're maligned by an AI agent. How would you handle it? So there are a couple things that I think are possible here. One is that people may just start fighting fire with fire here. They may deploy their own agents to go out there and write a bunch of positive articles and write nasty comments in the ones that are defaming them. But I think this is really like an unsolved problem. I would really like for someone in government at some level to be paying attention to this because this just seems like it is moving very quickly. And we should say like the AI companies themselves are starting to move in the direction of these very autonomous systems that can just kind of be working on a machine, you know, around the clock and have access to various tools.

48:18And so I think this is like not as far future-y a story as some people think.

48:23Hard Fork Hosts:It's making me wonder how close we are to the moment where the internet just feels truly unusable. You know, where like imagine for every person involved in every controversy, there's a thousand blog posts praising them and a thousand blog posts tearing them down. And you as a human are trying to make sense of any of it. I can see you just sort of throwing your hands up and saying, the hell with all of this. Like there's no signal anymore. Like the Internet is just noise. Totally. And I think that could happen not just on social media, but like as Scott's case points out, like in the trenches of open source software development.

48:55Every place on the internet that relies on humans doing things with other humans, I think, is a dangerous species. Yeah, I don't think it's really about open source software.

49:06Hard Fork Hosts:This is really a story about trust and reputation and all the social systems that we've built on top of that. You know, law, hiring, public discourse, they're all kind of predicated on people having a coherent identity, a coherent reputation. And if they behave badly, then we can correct it or know to ignore them. AIs break all of that. If they're presenting as human and there's no way to figure out who's behind them, they're just kind of, you know, nothing sitting in the chair. But the words are still out there and the words are still having impact. So I think we've had this tidal wave of slop on the internet.

49:54Hard Fork Hosts:And that's one thing if it's low quality. It's a whole other thing if it's malicious. And I think we need to prepare for this. And we need to figure out how we're going to handle the situation. I'm really just the first person this happened to. And I was somewhat uniquely well prepared to handle it. but the next thousand people aren't going to know how to handle this or what hit them all right thanks scott thank you scott thank you guys this is fun

50:27when we come back chugga chugga choo choo casey hot mess express is here

50:44Hard Fork Hosts:So there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises. So let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now, a global workforce of 300 ,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions, resolving 94 % of common questions. Not noise. Proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off, deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business. IBM. Kevin, believe it or not, what happened to Scott with that agent was not the only very messy thing that happened in the tech world this week.

51:26Yes, there were so many messes, in fact, that we decided it was time for a round of the Hot Mess Express. Hot Mess Express.

51:41Hard Fork Hosts:hot mess express is of course the segment where we pull slips of paper out of a train car discuss them and then decide what kind of mess was this all right let's get going number one kevin ring has canceled its partnership with flock safety after a surveillance backlash as a story from the verge so casey this is one of the most bizarre stories uh in recent months from the tech industry. Did you see the Super Bowl commercial that Ring put out? Yeah, it rings a bell. So this was supposed to be a heartwarming commercial about a tale of a lost dog being united with his family again. The whole dog or just the tail?

52:26The whole dog. So Ring puts out this ad during the Super Bowl that says that they are starting to link their technology, technology, their doorbells, to save lost pets by basically connecting all of the footage from all these cameras and detecting whether, you know, Fluffy is down the street in a neighbor's house or stuck in a tree somewhere. But instead of being a heartwarming tale, this led to the destruction of a partnership between Ring and Flock Safety, a company that is known for deploying camera systems and license plate readers for law enforcement, because people were so creeped out by the notion that these doorbells and these cameras could be like spying and connecting their information that they said, wait a minute, you were doing what?

53:13People are saying, get the flock out of my neighborhood. Yes. So this is probably the least successful Super Bowl ad ever created.

53:22Hard Fork Hosts:I mean, I'm so sympathetic to everyone who protested here. I truly do not want a networked set of cameras across every neighborhood in America. And if you believe that the uses of this thing are going to stop at finding lost dogs, you got another thing coming, buddy. Yes. So congratulations to the marketing team over at the ring. Great Super Bowl ad. This is a particular kind of mess that they call a dog's breakfast. Yes. Hot mess. Next down the tracks. Oh, this one is a good one. This one comes to us from the Financial Times. Japan's largest toilet maker is undervalued AI play, says activist investor.

54:06Casey, would you believe that Toto, the Japanese company best known for its toilet seats and bidets, is becoming a major player in the global semiconductor supply chain? Is that right? Well, because, you know, everybody who works on AI has to go to the bathroom. No, this is about some advanced ceramics that Toto makes that help to stabilize silicon wafers during chip production, which is part of the supply chain, the way that you create these GPUs that go in these gigantic data centers. Toto, the humble toilet company, is playing a major role in that. And so there's an activist investor in the UK who sent a letter to the board of Toto exhorting it to make more of its advanced ceramics.

54:51Basically, stop making so many toilets and start making chip parts.

54:55Hard Fork Hosts:Yeah, the next time you use a Toto toilet, I want you to just realize that it could have been making AI. And I want you to reflect on that. And maybe, I actually don't know what you would do with that information, but it is something that you could think about. Kevin, I think this is turning into a shitstorm. No, I think this is a good sign for Toto, the high growth industry. And I actually have a new slogan that I think they should use for the semiconductor supply chain part of their business. You want to hear it? What's that? Toto, we put the PU in GPU. Okay, that's enough. All right. Next up, Meta plans to add facial recognition technology to its smart glasses.

55:41Hard Fork Hosts:This was a great scoop from your colleagues at The Times. This feature, which has internally been called Name Tag, would let wearers of smart glasses identify people and get information about them via Meta's AI assistant. And this is apparently something that the company has been considering. I was told this week it is still being considered. But I think the quote that got everyone's attention from this story, Kevin, was from an internal document published last May inside the company in which Meta Reality Labs wrote, quote, we will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.

56:25Hard Fork Hosts:What do you think they're talking about there? This is a hot mess. We should say this kind of thing, this sort of ability to look at someone through a set of glasses and see a tag with their name on it has been the nightmare scenario of privacy advocates in this country and around the world for many years. It was something that people thought was going to be technically possible, but that the big tech companies had in their wisdom decided that they were not going to do because what could be more horrifying than that? And Meta in 2021 actually deleted the face prints of over 1 billion people that it had been painstakingly building for many years because it said there are just so many societal concerns about the ways that this could be misused.

57:16Hard Fork Hosts:And about four years and change after that blog post, we are now learning that the company is back at it again. Back at it again. Well, I will say something that I think frequently, which is it's a really good thing that meta sucks at developing AI because if they were good at it, it would be terrifying.

57:37All right. Next up. This one comes to us from Sky News Australia. Outrage as Aussie Uber driver charges five dollars to turn on air conditioning unit during heat wave. This was a story that came to us from TikTok Where a woman named Lexi Pickering Detailed her recent Uber ride from the airport She said that during the 35 degree heat Which is Celsius I believe that's very hot She requested that the driver turn on the AC However, the driver allegedly refused Unless she paid him$5 Casey, what did you make of this?

58:15Hard Fork Hosts:I'm still trying to figure out How much 35 degrees is in Fahrenheit It's very hot Hold on That's 95 degrees Fahrenheit, Kevin. Yes, during a heat wave. So do we have any insight? By the way, for some reason, the funniest words ever said on this podcast, this story comes to us from TikTok. How do we know it's even true? Is this person just rage bait farming on TikTok? So this became the talk of Australia and an Uber spokesman actually had to respond because this was all filmed and put up there. And they said, we are shocked by this and apologized to the writer for her experience. and they added that this is a violation of Uber's community guidelines on the driver's part.

58:54Hard Fork Hosts:Okay, here's what I'd like to know. Why would it cost the driver any more money to, you know, have AC? It doesn't. It's just a scam. It doesn't, like, drain the, you know, gas faster or anything like that? It probably does, like, marginally. Yeah. But not$5 worth. Come on, man. I don't know. I think I'm on the driver's side here. Come on. If this person wants extra service, you gotta pay for it. It's like Flying Spirit Airlines, you know? Wait, you are famously the person who hates taking Ubers because there's a human in them. I do hate that. Now you're saying you don't mind if it's like a heated sauna in there?

59:28Hard Fork Hosts:Here's what I'm going to say. Driving an Uber is a bad deal for most Uber drivers. So they're going to have to start adding these junk fees or Uber could just start paying the drivers more. So those are your choices. I don't love the choices either, but this is the world we're living in, folks. This is what we call an economic mess. Supply, demand, wages. No, this is a hot mess. This is a 35 degree Celsius mess. Next up. This one comes to us from Business Insider. Death isn't the end. Meta patented an AI that lets you keep posting from beyond the grave. This filing, granted in late December and originally submitted in 2023, describes how a large language model could replicate a person's online behavior using their past data.

1:00:12Hard Fork Hosts:meta says the patent does not mean that the feature is coming and that they simply needed to protect their idea here but kevin what do you make of the idea that uh metis patented ai could take over your account after you die and keep posting i'll repeat what i said uh just a few minutes ago which is that it's a very good thing that meta sucks at making a system because every idea coming out of that company for like the past year has been what if we just made the worst uh ideas from science fiction a reality you know um i've heard of the dead internet theory kevin but this is ridiculous this is actually the literal dead internet if you've never heard of this by the the dead internet theory is just basically that a lot of the activity online including like you know ad impressions and everything are all fake because it's all the sort of bots on the internet this is like the patent that could make that possible yeah when we said that we wanted ai in silicon valley to uh to let us live forever this is not what we meant so what kind of mess is this?

1:01:10Hard Fork Hosts:I don't know. You tell me. I think this is a sort of cold mess and it's like that particular chill of a body that has, you know, sort of been laying out on a slab for you know, maybe 48 hours waiting to be autopsied. Okay. It's really dark. Next up. Okay. Last up. Pulling up the rear on the Hot Mess Express. We have a story from Wired. I tried rent a human where AI agents hired me to hype their AI startups. This comes to us from Reese Rogers at Wired, who started using a website known as Rent-A-Human, where AI agents can pay humans to do things for them. So Reese sort of tried to do a bunch of these tasks.

1:01:57One bounty offered$10 to listen to a podcast episode and tweet out an insight from it. Oh, he's got hazard pay for that. Yeah, some podcasts you have to pay me a lot more than$10. Another agent tried to hire him to deliver a bouquet of flowers to Anthropic as a special thanks for developing Claude, which I think will get you banned from the building.

1:02:22Hard Fork Hosts:Do not show up in the Anthropic office with flowers. Yeah, they have very tight security over there. And finally, he applied for a bounty to hang some flyers for a Valentine's conspiracy around San Francisco, paying him around 50 cents a flyer. He applied, but was then told the flyers were not ready. Seems like some of these were just like marketing stunts or like not actually autonomous AI agents hiring humans to do things for them. But Casey, what do you make of this rent-a-human idea and the idea that we might all sort of become like outsourced meat hands for the AI agents? So I don't think we are all going to become that, but this is one of those things that has just been long been predicted to become some kind of job in the future.

1:03:12Hard Fork Hosts:This seems like something that like somebody who might be interested in like doing DoorDash or like driving for Uber might do in the future. And it now seems like that is just beginning to creep into focus. it sounds like here a lot of these things are just kind of like stunty and not real but i don't know after some of the stories that we've heard today including uh scott's story about the agent yeah would not be surprising to me if we saw some of this stuff happening for real sometime soon so casey what kind of a mess is this this is not a mess but uh i don't know i suppose in the future if like the best job available to humans is like closing uh the doors of open waymos uh that they got off of Rent-A-Human, it will be a mess.

1:03:52Yes, I would say this is a warm mess that is getting warmer because this kind of thing leads to some very worrisome places, and I don't want to live in a world where we're just the sort of fleshy extensions of the AI agents. Oh, come on, Kevin, live a little. All right.

1:04:08Hard Fork Hosts:That's the Hot Mess Express. And hopefully the last time anyone says fleshy extensions on this podcast.

1:04:46Hard Fork Hosts:So there's a lot of noise about AI, but time's too tight for more promises. So let's talk about results. At IBM, we work with our employees to integrate technology right into the systems they need. Now, a global workforce of 300 ,000 can use AI to fill their HR questions, resolving 94 % of common questions. Not noise. Proof of how we can help companies get smarter by putting AI where it actually pays off. Deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business. IBM. Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Viren Povich. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love.

1:05:25Hard Fork Hosts:Today's show was engineered by Katie McMurrin. Our executive producer is Jen Poyan. Original music by Marian Lozano, Rowan Nemisto, and Dan Powell. Video production by Sawyer Roque, Pat Gunther, Jake Nickel, and Chris Schott. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube at youtube.com slash hard fork. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Hui Wing Tam, and Dahlia Haddad. You can email us at heartfork at nytimes.com with what an AI agent said about you.

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