IM 853: All The Clocks Were Wrong - The Rise and Fall of Fact-Checking

23:34But yeah, now I'm with you. There's something, yeah, there's something about it. And, you know, maybe it's a bit of the branding and the feel and all that and their messaging. But, you know, the stuff that comes out of it seems to, because I have that and I have access to the paid models for Gemini and I'm leaning more towards Claude these days. But all that being said, yeah.

23:56Craig Silverman:He says it the Canadian way, by the way. Claude. Claude. we were told that we have to joey says you got to say claude okay i lived in quebec for a while so yeah absolutely um and maybe that's also part of the appeal so you originated the term fake news claude is correct uh yeah so i i usually say i i sort of popularized it and then and then trump kind of took it, you know? And so, like, quickly, the backstory is in 2014, I was doing a research project at the Tao Center at Columbia, where I was studying how viral claims were spreading, and particularly how news organizations and news websites were covering them.

24:39So, there'd be a report somewhere, or there'd be a claim on Twitter. And then, you know, me and a research assistant, we would look at who covered that, and how they wrote about it. Did they report it as true? Did they report that, oh, it could be true? Did they say it's false? And we would look at the associated social engagement to try and sort of, you know, start to quantify like how much were news organizations consciously or unconsciously spreading things that turned out to not be true? How much were they jumping on rumors to try and get social engagement around them? And so as part of that research, I was out there hunting for, you know, claims that were in that gray area of maybe true, maybe false, as well as stuff that was just like totally fake, totally false.

25:17And I came across plus a cluster, like, you know, more than a dozen websites that all looked like real news websites. They had news articles on them. They had bylines. They had photos for their authors. The authors often had bios, but everything was a hundred percent made up. And it was all about the ads on the site. So they would come up with a crazy headline and story. They would post on Facebook. It would go viral. People would click because at that time, Facebook still had showing people links and people click like crazy. This is, you know, 2014. And it was all about money. It was just, and so I just, in my, the research report I ended up publishing in early 2015, I described them as fake news websites, because that's what they were to me, literally just a fake news website.

26:02And defined it as, you know, 100 % false, intended to deceive and economically driven. And that was the definition I used from 2014 all the way through to the end of 2016, as I was doing lots of reporting at that time for then for buzzfeed news about you know the the false pro trump stuff that was coming from you know the guys i reported on in north macedonia who were you know running those websites which ended up being a big story at the time and uh and yeah that was when the term sort of got out there and was popularized and then starting i guess in about january of 2017 trump decided to take ownership of the term i would say and well that's the best way to uh co

26:41Craig Silverman:you co-opt those terms and then you can make them your own that's the best way well that's what he did there's there's somebody we used to work with all of us in the disinformation space in the back named claire wardle who's now at brown university i think um she tried to lecture us all and say stop using it yeah because it's being used by trump and you don't want to play into that but it was it was a lost cause it was out there in the in the lexicon we're talking to a disinformation mason researcher uh craig silverman his publication his newsletter uh is a great wealth of information not only about what's going on out there but also how to detect it yourself uh indicator.media is the place to go you talk a little bit about the gender consequences of uh of fake images and of course grok's been in the news uh malaysia indonesia blocking grok the uk is considering blocking grok because of the non-consensual deep fakes uh it's been the uh been generating of course actually they want to block x because that's where they all end up and just earlier today elon this is by the way the other side of fake news is lie right and if you lie there's what's ben franklin said the the lie goes all the way around the world while the truth's just putting its pants on lies somehow manage to get lodged in the brain and and people believe them just this morning elon said i'm not aware of any naked underaged images generated by grok literally zero obviously grok does not spontaneously generate images it only does so according to user requests well yeah when asked to generate images it'll refuse to produce anything illegal as the operating principle by the way our friend i can't show them plenty the liberator immediately posted a bunch of images he liberated they got grok prompt broke grok to do so yes you can clearly do it um this is the other side of this is that the people with a vested interest in disinformation use that platform to uh lie about it to spread more disinformation that makes people's question their own eyes their own brains yeah musk's takeover of twitter obviously really changed the dynamics of the kind of content that was i don't follow him but i get his tweets whether i like it or not yeah you know and it's interesting i think he was smart enough to realize you if you control this platform you control a bully pulpit this is very very valuable this was worth 44 million dollars money he can easily afford because it gave him such power.

29:26Craig, I'm curious as we go back. Go ahead. Oh, I was just going to say quickly, I mean, the other thing that I think made the purchase worth it for him was that, you know, with the growth of AI and LLMs, you need training data and you need access to an ongoing stream of information. and that's why now X is part of XAI because it's just feeding into and presents the models there. So in the end, I don't think that's what he originally planned and said, this is exactly what will happen, but I think it's worked out quite well for him. So Craig, I'm curious to go back to 2016 and the rush about fact-checking.

30:07You were very much involved. Your co-founder Alexios was very much involved. We both talked to Meta at the time about their efforts to hire fact-checkers. There was a fact-checking organization. I'm curious about your thoughts about Lessons Learned. What did that movement do right and wrong? What should we know based on that experience? Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting because for a long time, fact-checking was very, very small, very, very niche. Nobody really, you know, didn't pay a huge amount of attention to it. And it was often focused on, it was mostly an American phenomenon, and it was mostly focused on checking the public statements of politicians and other big public figures.

30:50And a little bit, even before the end of 2016, a little bit, you would see the PolitiFacts and others starting to be like, yeah, we should probably check these viral claims, whether they're from a public figure or not, but the stuff going crazy on Facebook. But, you know, but what happened at the end of 2016 was a massive change where Meta, then just known as Facebook, went to the International Fact Checking Network that my partner, Alexios, was the executive director of at the time and said, hey, we are trying to do something to improve the quality of information on our platform. What if we paid fact checkers that have been certified by you guys to kind of check things?

31:27And so this was this basically over the ensuing whatever eight years, Meta became the biggest single funder of fact checking in the world, which is crazy to think about, but also not good for the the sustainability of fact checking and also not good for the perception of fact checking. I think as well, where you are seen as kind of working for Meta and tied to the platform that is actually one of the biggest, you know, sources of this stuff. So on the one hand, Meta taking some responsibility, a good thing. On the other, it became in some ways, you know, a very lucrative albatross around the neck of, I think, a lot of fact checkers.

32:03And as Meta abandoned the U.S. program earlier, early last year in a pretty spectacular fashion, throwing the fact checkers on the bus, Mark Zuckerberg calling them bias. Now I think fact checkers around the world realize like, oh, this is continuing for us, but it could end at any time. And this is a company that will throw us under the bus when the political movement makes it for them. And so I think, you know, I think one of the problems that fact checking has always had is that you seem like a finger wagging, you know, no fun. You know, you're not, you're just like taking the air out of the balloon.

32:36You're no fun at a party. exactly and this is honestly like in that 2014 research project this is this is what i saw um and i don't i forget if i put this in in the report or not but this will only make sense to people who watch the show cheers i talked about like the cliff clavin effect yeah that makes sense you know many people talk about the cliff clavin effect but very few people know it came from argentina in 1823 yeah barris is like what the hell are you guys talking about no sometimes Sometimes this happens on this show and I just learned to smile and nod. Yeah. It's, and I mean, Jeff is a longtime TV critic, you know.

33:17He knows Cliff Clavin. He knows every television. Absolutely. Right. And so he was the know-it-all on the show and nobody, you know, he was annoying. And I would see it when somebody would debunk something on Facebook or on Twitter or whatever. People were like, oh, you're spoiling the fun. And so I think that's a problem the movement has always had is never finding a way to sort of communicate in ways other than seeming like finger wagging folks. And I also think the problem, one of the problems with that partnership was that Meta sort of was the one that decided really everything. Like they were paid, they produced fact checks, then Meta got them.

33:54And Meta could decide when to label, how to label, when to, you know, remove a label, whether or not to reduce distribution, whether to remove something. And but the fact checkers ended up being the ones being blamed, even though Meta had the decisions. And so, you know, I think I think everybody who works in fact checking that I've ever met is well-meaning. But there's definitely been, you know, some moments and some challenges and some problems. And and I think, you know, the brand of fact checking has been really damaged over the last decade or so.

34:24Craig Silverman:Well, it didn't help when Meta fired all the fact checkers, too. That kind of undermined the whole premise. Right. In a way, it might be a liberation moment for some of the US fact check, even though they just lost a bunch of funding, like very suddenly, to chart and have to find, you know, that sustainability financially, but also to be able to say, you know, we are not tied to them anymore. is, you know, it could be one of these things that in the long run, maybe helps fact checkers chart a different path. But the reality is, you know, they've been under attack for quite some time by folks who have always labeled them as biased, whether, you know, regardless of what they put out there.

35:03And I think fact checkers, like frankly, a lot of people in the disinformation community were never good at sort of battling and fighting back. You know, it's a weird, maybe irony of it, except for, you know, some people occasionally are good at it, but a lot of times they just want to do the work and not necessarily get caught up in the battle over it, but they get dragged in whether they want it or not. I'm curious, I feel like a common criticism you often heard of fact-checking was that, oh, well, people don't, even if you fact-check something correctly, people don't believe the fact-check or will dig in their heels.

35:41Did you see that in practice? Absolutely. And actually, it goes to Jeff's question of what does it sort of get wrong? I mean, for better or worse, the perception for a lot of people of fact-checking is the goal of fact-checking is to change people's minds, right? That's what I think a lot of folks think. And fact-checking is, for the most part, if you're dealing with people who have an open mind, fact-checking is shown to be effective. If you are talking about folks who have their mind made up and are very closely held on a belief or a particular issue, you know, the idea that fact checkers are going to come in and write one article and that person's going to be like, oh, okay, yeah, right.

36:21I totally see it differently now. And so I think the expectations that fairly or unfairly that the goal is to sort of change people's minds and influence how people think. I don't know that fact checkers necessarily do the work with that in mind, but it is something that I think a lot of people feel is the goal. And the truth is like fact checking is not really good at changing deeply held beliefs. It's better as kind of an accountability measure. And some of the data that's out there is that it was actually effective around politicians pre-Trump, where if they knew fact-checkers were going to be working around their race, they were shown by some studies to actually be less likely to kind of stretch the truth a bit more.

37:00Trump blew that out of the water, but that's in the pre-Trump era where it was actually shown to be effective. But Paris, that's also the issue of context. The folks that you sent us to at If Books Could Kill, the podcast, Glenn Kessler, who was a fact checker at the Washington Post, was their bet noire. Because he would proudly say, oh, I found this fact and whatever it is, and I've got the fact, and would miss the larger context and would miss the larger effort at deception that occurred. And so fact checking can be misused, I think, as they well pointed out. you know many people don't know that bet noir is an old french phrase it refers to a black beak who knew you had a good cliff clavin impression i i live to be a know-it-all uh you do try to

37:47Craig Silverman:coach you do we do have to do a bt and a pt before trump and post trump when it comes to facts and disinformation because in many ways i mean he's shown of course that you can uh defy norms you know on mass so in many ways he's shown that it doesn't matter in fact didn't uh kelly a con kelly and conway say that we're in a post-fact era it's an alternative facts what what are you so what are you so concerned about facts for yeah i mean he strolled it that was he just realized i can i can brute force this system they can't keep up with me uh at a certain point you know it's going to keep washing over people and i can continue to kind of make the claims and statements i want and sort of get away with it and is it the old russian uh flood the zone model that he's using exactly there's a yeah that was the rand yeah the rand corporation the fire hose of falsehood yes yep fire that's a better way to say it fire hood of falsehood uh but i doubt he'd read that rand corporation report but uh somehow he and then this is his brilliance i intuitively understood this i don't think it was intellectual i think he just intuitively understood as from his years of lying as a real estate developer about how many floors his buildings had he learned you know this works you don't have to follow these norms but leo isn't it also it's a it's a russian uh fire hose of disinformation for soviet uh but it was though was i think there was a putin connection it's a strategic it's a tactic it's a tactic i think there were people who were connected to it as a tactic yeah i think there are a lot of different reasons why people end up employing what become the same tactics whether or not they are conscious or uh carefully planning it out so what do we do to restore a faith in facts, to restore a faith in science?

39:53Craig Silverman:How can we get moved out of this? How do we fix everything, Brian? How do we fix this post, how do we get out of this post-fact era? Well, I'm glad you asked me because I have the answer and it's only going to take 20 seconds and that's it and we're good. Great, wonderful. And$100 a year will help. Oh boy, yeah. You know, There isn't one fix. These sort of unsatisfying points around it are that it's a whole of society challenge, a whole of society problem, and it's interconnected and all those things that make it complex. But I do think for the average person, the starting point is just around some awareness of the dynamics of this information environment that we're all in, which is incredible abundance of information and much more open, which is great.

40:40More voices, more opportunity for people to participate, but it also means it's much easier to manipulate. And so, it puts a little more responsibility on all of us when it's not just like a handful of professionalized media outlets, which were never perfect. And you're not saying that that was the great time when it was like that, but you had a smaller amount of choices and it was coming in a professionalized environment where it had failings and problems, but they were sort of more contained. And today, you have so much more choice, but that means you have a responsibility. You're not getting a hand holding from someone.

41:18And so the awareness of how much it is being manipulated, and that's why it's like, I don't just mention the political stuff. It's, you know, the financially motivated people, the skeezy marketers, the scammers, all of that is out there intermingling. As Parra said, people with different motivations can create the same kind of stuff without necessarily, you know, studying from the same textbook. And we are all kind of under attack from this stuff. And so, the awareness that you need to kind of be on guard and you need to value your attention is to me always the very first thing. We have to be a little less passive.

41:52And I think the other part of that is like, okay, so if I'm aware, then what do I do is like patience is one of the best things. You don't need to take an action right away. You don't need to go withdraw money if if someone has tells you that, you know, you owe money to the government, but you also don't need to click like, you don't need to reshare it. You don't need to necessarily stay on that video because your attention is really, really valuable to those kinds of people and the platforms. And you should value it too and think about where you are giving it and where you aren't and don't feel like you have to take an action because a lot of times it is about getting past, you know, your initial defenses and riling up an emotion or appealing to an existing belief.

42:32And then we're sort of on autopilot. So you have some awareness, you guard your attention, you don't, you find a way to be patient and not quick to act. And then you think about looking in other places rather than just the thing that's in front of you. And those are to me are like, very simple human behavioral things that if people practice, that's, that's a really helpful thing, because it's like, you can talk about tools and techniques and stuff like that. But the average person, it's really about your behavior and how you think about navigating this, this universe that we're in. in, which is really chaotic and does have a lot of risk to it.

43:07Craig Silverman:Is the key also funding responsible, reliable sources of information? Well, look, it looks like I'm talking my own book when I say that, but I mean, I kind of did set you up for that. So go ahead. I mean, I think, I think it's, you know, one of the challenges, and I think this is something Jeff has talked a lot about is I don't think it's a great information environment if only the good stuff is behind paywalls. Like that's not a great scenario. We don't really want to end up with that. But I do think, you know, there's an element of you should find places that you do want to support and you should find places that serve you and that do it well on a consistent basis.

43:47Nobody's going to be perfect. But finding ways to support that and sort of get in the habit of that, it makes people feel good when they actually are supporting, you know, an information source that that they feel connected to. But I also think like for the larger ecosystem, we have to figure out ways to make sure that good quality information is being surfaced and is not locked away for people who can afford it. So Craig, as part of that too, what I've been arguing unpopularly, but not for the first time in my life, is that not only do I think that training AI models is fair use, but we as journalists need to look at our moral and ethical obligation to take journalism to where people are.

44:25And if we in journalism cut off through bot killers and legislation and litigation all the AI, then the propagandists and the marketers are going to have a field day. They will have AI to themselves. And AI won't know when to call upon the journalistic organization. How do you look at how we operate from journalism in this new reality? Yeah, I can see why it's unpopular to say it should all be fair use for them. We should give it all up to the AI. Yeah, me and Paris are kind of like, oh. I don't know. But I mean, I think there's a fundamental point there of, you know, you don't want to surrender that environment and starve it of good quality information.

45:18At the same time, you know, I think the challenge for me around that argument is you look at the valuations, you look at the fundraising that those companies have. And it's like, I think they got a little bit of money to maybe, you know. I think there's a discussion to be had, yes. And it should be a negotiation. And I hope that, yes, that information gets in there. What actually concerns me about it is even if they do these deals, they're going to end up the way basically Meta ended up, which is it did start doing deals with fact checkers. And then it did deals with news organizations. and because it did deals with news organizations that some people said, oh, those are all liberal news organizations.

45:50And it felt it had to run and do a bunch of deals with conservative news organizations. And so it's like at the end of the day, none of these companies, even though they're like the LLMs are saying, we're going to give you the right answer. We're going to give you good quality information. They politically, it's poisonous for them to stand up and say, yes, we are going to pay for quality information and we are going to pick and choose because they're just going to get targeted the way Meta did. And so I think that's going to be a real battle. Or maybe it won't be. Maybe they'll just, you know, make sure that they're doing what Meta did is like do big deals.

46:22You know, they did a deal with the New York Times. Well, we better go make sure we do a deal with Fox News. Otherwise, we're going to be in trouble. And so, you know, I would like to see, obviously, the high quality information in there. I think the negotiation should be happening. I think the reality is, you know, there's no choice. I think you've got to have a way to get it in and into these models. Because frankly, of the stuff that I track online, I already see a lot of shady people selling products saying that they can get your company ranked highly in LLMs. That's already happening 100%.

46:54People are already trying to poison the results. People are already trying to inject into them. And if we don't find a way to get the good quality stuff in, it will get drowned out. Amen. And I think that the other problem with the deals to date, I've said this on the show, is that it's mogul to mogul. It's open AI to Murdoch. And the vast ecosystem of news is left out. The diversity of voices, the pluralism of journalism is completely left out. And so that's why I have argued that we need to consider whether those organizations should come together to create an API for news. But that's not going to be popular either.

47:30Craig Silverman:Craig Silverman is the king of disinformation. not making it is detecting it the kingdom of disinformation expert uh i regret the error i'm sorry craig uh co-founder of indicator.media go there now read up uh there's a free membership but for a hundred dollars a year you can also be a subscriber and i think it seems like a very worthy thing to subscribe to craig i really appreciate a hundred dollar ties yeah yeah and i really i'm I'm grateful to you for the work you do. It's so important. For years. It's a good fight. For years. Yeah. Truly. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on. Thank you for that.

48:11Thank you to all of you to, you know, having discussions where you can actually get into some detail on these things. It's much appreciated.

48:17Craig Silverman:You know, many people don't know that Toronto was called the city of the broad shoulders because of the, no, I don't know why it was. No, it's not that. It's the big smoke. I don't know why it's the big smoke, but it's. I don't either, actually. Yeah. Is there a lot of smoke and is it physically large? there were a lot of factories at one time yeah i mean i guess you could call any city at a certain time the big smoke when i when i when we launched our why is toronto called the big smoke oh she'll know and if she doesn't i will say this is the one thing that claude that clud doesn't have smog smog yeah when we launched the uh call for help show in toronto the first episode I got a whole bunch of synonyms for Toronto and I said live from the big smoke this is home of the Raptors it's call for help and that was kind of fun so but that's the only one I was coined by as we have the corner of fake news here was coined by Alan fatheringham who was a well-known journalist back in the very well known yes all right Craig thank you so much I appreciate it thanks to Rosie too for joining us Rosie what was a dinner time Rosie went out of there I I have to feed her right now or she is going to come attack me.

49:29Yes. Oh, you're doing a podcast. I thought it was CNN. There's a cat behind him holding a gun right now. Never mind. Thanks, Craig. Take care. Thank you so much, everybody. Appreciate it. Take care. We'll have more on Intelligent Machines in just a moment after this word from our sponsor,

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53:37twit perris is your phone back great question i was uh i was trying to yes but how long will it be back that is my question probably not long i was trying to enlist everybody to send you a bunch of texts so you you got a hundred texts when you came back online but i guess see what you missed why did Paris say that I don't know I tried to text you guys multiple times today and it wouldn't go through even when I was on Wi-Fi you know it seemed awfully quiet in there in our group chat

54:07Craig Silverman:yeah it's not what you want so um I'm glad to hear you say you like Claude I do just because it has a French name Claude um yeah I mean I just want I enjoy that I like that I get to call it Kludd, but I just think that it, I think it approaches the problems I set it, the tasks I give it in a way intuitively that is more aligned with what I'm looking for than ChatGPT or Gemini. I actually just, I had previously been subscribing to the pro, or I guess the first paid tier for both ChatGPT and CLUD, but I recently just canceled ChatGPT because I wasn't using it. I did the next best thing. I kept ChatGPT, but I upped my CLUD subscription to the$250.

55:00Craig Silverman:Oh, does that mean you get access to CLUD co-work? I get it all. Well, that was part of the reason because I'm on a Mac and I thought, well, I'll try co-work. But honestly, I like the command line, which can do every single thing that all the other CLUDs can do, but to me, it feels a little bit more, as you said, more serious. I've been using it. So what happened was I was using it to configure my new laptop, and it was great. I could say, you know, I would say things like, well, how do I get the fingerprint reader working? I said, oh, I could do that. Let me download some software. Here, just put your fingerprint.

55:34Craig Silverman:It walked me through it, and it set it up. How do I get the buttons to turn the screen brighter? That's not seeming to work. Oh, yeah, well, you need this app. so its expertise in a lot of technical areas was very useful are you giving a direct access to your machine uh you can in many ways yes you can and uh for instance no because it's doing it at my command and it always asks prompt injection attack well who's going to do that i'm sitting on my computer there's no one here to famous last words would steve approve well i showed steve he didn't seem to mind it in fact what's interesting we're gonna have harper reed on on sunday no no prompt injection comes when you're doing something in public you know how would somebody prompt inject anything here i'm using this at my machine aren't there just more areas for prompt injection attacks to occur if you're using something like clod coworker i assume clod code where suddenly it has access to all the documents in your computer if one of the things you downloaded has a prompt injection thing then certainly the amount of vectors for potential attacks expand yeah if you say if you said hey i just downloaded this this text file read it and this is where people are doing it or this document like you might have a document you've downloaded and you say i don't want to analyze this just give me the bullet points but it's been maliciously formed it's a maliciously form pdf that has hidden text in there that is a prompt yeah that would happened.

57:05Craig Silverman:I'm not doing that. I'm sitting here. Every PDF he downloads is perfect. I'm not having Claude analyze PDFs. I'm not having it do that kind of thing. I'm actually sitting here saying, you know, configure this for me or do this for me. I mean, I guess there's some risk. It seems fine to me. In fact, one of the things I've been doing is asking Claude to do a security essay, find security flaws. And, you know, where I found them, I said, for instance, said, well, you have a text file in your root directory. It's not public, but that text file has your keys for the API and for your access to GitHub.

57:45Craig Silverman:You probably should encrypt those. You want me to do that for you? And I said, yes. And it runs PGP and encrypts them. And then it adds code to various things saying, okay, instead of getting it from a plain text file, you can, and it says, test this first, make sure it all works yes i guess there's potentially you there's always going to be some trust but i think the kinds of things i'm doing seem less likely to be vulnerable have you gotten access to chat gpt health yet not yet i did apply immediately uh but have not like yeah i think you probably should always be careful right um that's what paris has been trying to tell you yes but but that doesn't mean you shouldn't use it i think you should just look there's plenty of use it wisely as i said the other day if you go to webmd and ask it for advice you probably shouldn't just say oh yeah it must be true it's on webmd you know if you go to dr oz and ask for advice you might want to there's a lot of suspect places you can get advice that aren't ai in fact a lot of the suspect stuff in ai comes from websites that were full of bs to begin with did you just ask about open ai health or claude health paris uh i asked open ai health but what my next question what about claude health have you gotten into that no who i assume that claude health is available only to the mac subscribers is that correct do i have access to have it in the rundown i also said ask claude could you set it up so that i can hit a key and talk to you instead of typing and said yeah let me just set up a faster whisper dictate and you just press the copilot it's great because i use it's on a windows i will say the one thing that is a downgrade for me going from chat gpt to claude is uh not as many cool voices i think you got you got one voice and it's classic i'm not using the chat machine it's all i'm typing i'm not talking to it i'm just saying that's the one thing that claude doesn't have just because i do enjoy i did enjoy whatever specific voice i picked out from the many from chat gpt i thought it was pretty good i don't chat chat is for the plebs i'm yeah i vote well do you want me to show you the app that claude wrote for me is this your perfect app the ideal app so this is one of the insights so anyway so i was using it to configure i thought well maybe i could do some maybe i could do more with this maybe i need some more tokens uh and i'll you know what the nice thing is it's 250 bucks this month if it's not useful or i want to do the nice thing is it's really a neck and horse race between a few different companies if i want to do next month chat gpt max i could do that so you're not really locked in it is a lot look i admit it's a lot of money um but how much would you spend for custom software and this is one of the things i realized is this is going to change software a little bit i'm not writing programs for you to use i'm not interested in that i'm writing code i'm running programs for me to use that are tailored to my needs so one of the things that i do all the time is um i spent many hours a day going through news feeds looking for stories for the show you you see them all in our rundown and every other show that i do which involves going to a newsreader i've tried a bunch of different newsreaders or going to websites like tech meme and scanning them and then bookmarking them in i use raindrop.io i thought you know, maybe I could speed this up with a simpler program that's tailored specifically to my needs.

1:01:16Craig Silverman:So a Sunday morning, I wrote this with Claude. I didn't write any code. Claude said, you want to do this? And I told, I gave it a, Claude has, Claude code has a planning mode and a coding mode. You go into the planning mode and you say, hey, here's what I want to do. So I gave it a list of features that I was looking for. I said, okay, do you want to do this in Python or Rust. I thought, well, I'm not doing Rust. That's supposed to be a good language. I don't know any Rust. I know some Python. I'm not in Rust. So it wrote, by the way, this program as it stands now is 3 ,000 lines of Rust code.

1:01:49Craig Silverman:I posted on GitHub if people want to see it. It's on my GitHub account, Leo Laporte. But what you would probably do with it is download it, clone it, run Claude code on it, and say, now I want to customize this for my needs. Here's a starting point, but I want to make this mine. So I called it Speedy Reader. by the way i didn't call it speedy reader to begin with i called it rss reader but then i thought you know i should give it a good name and i said claude can you change the name and it said yeah it just changes the name whatever you want boss uh let me show you how speedy it is can you show my screen could you have my screen yeah so i'll just run speedy reader that's how fast it pops up um and this is downloaded now first of all i only care about articles from the last week because next week it'll be a new show is this why we have a lot more articles in your part of the rundown today yes wait so now how did you are you walking us through how you created this or what does it i guess this is the program it does yeah so what did so what i do what i well i how did i get here what was the problem how did how did they get in here how do you send it to speedy you know how do you know how a feed reader works you have rss links right yeah so all of these sources nine to five google slash dot ars technica have rss links i have had for a long time a list of rss links they come in a standardized format called opml so i said i want to download my opml file which i exported from my old feed reader and import it here so it said okay we'll we'll import the in fact i've added if you look at the help i've added a way to import an opml file as well as export you've got to send this to dave weiner you have to send this to dave weiner um But this is very specific.

1:03:32Craig Silverman:For instance, it said, well, you know, a lot of feed readers have ways to star articles and keep track of what you've read and haven't read. And I said, no, no. They put them in at first. I said, I don't want that. I don't need that. In fact, when I bookmark, I only want to bookmark to one place. So I'm just going to have B for bookmark. Let's bookmark this. And it says, and then I just want to enter a tag, IM, and hit return. And now it's bookmarked on Raindrop. the other thing that i had to do is oh sometimes there's articles this is the top you see is feed content but i want to know i want more can you do an ai summary so i'm using haiku which is the faster clawed model not the high-end opus model to generate bullet-pointed summaries of the articles which then i can uh use save it also gives me a better idea and it's a very quick way for me to look at the article.

1:04:25Craig Silverman:The point is, this is very specific. Are you able to then read the full article in this? Or do you have to like click the link? If I hit, oh, it will open a browser to it. Oh, that's so cool. Wait, so do you have the prompts for setting this up? This just reminds me of Kevin Roos, frenemy of the pod, posted this week that he said, Claude Code is so good, I built a Plocket clone over the break. and kept adding new features. Text-to-speech read aloud, video summaries, spaced repetition emails, Kindle sync, and now I have a perfect external brain. And he posted a version of it that I thought, honestly, was just a good way to go about this.

1:05:10See, but I have no interest in giving this to anybody else. KevinRoos.com slash dash. But that's just, I think it's cool if you find something that's useful, you can just include the he at the bottom all your hosts. I was going to say, give this to us at the very least. So Kevin at the beginning, at the bottom has a install with Cloud Code. If you have Cloud Code setup takes two minutes, just paste this prompt. And he has like an eight step prompt in there that you can then go through to get your own version of this.

1:05:39Craig Silverman:Yeah. In fact, Cloud wrote all of that for me as well. If I go to my repositories here, you can see I posted on GitHub. So it is available for anybody who wants to take a look at it one of the things github did because i wrote it in rust is it made versions for linux and mac so you can run it you can download it there are binaries on here you could download and run but really i don't think that's the point i think the point is that people can now with without any coding skills with i mean i guess you might have to be a little technical this is going to change over time right this is what i was trying to ask last week personal software that scratches your itch specifically but you can also create it's a whole new software industry you can create uh applications agents call what you will for other people you can charge yeah i'm less interested in that i think the real power but i think there's opportunities some people but i think the real power is everybody should learn how to do this and do it themselves you could by the way if i did this with the 20 version it just would take time because every maybe every few hours it would say, okay, you got to take a break till two.

1:06:50Craig Silverman:But you could absolutely do this, not probably in the free version, but you could absolutely do this with the$20 version. I think that this is the future of software. I remember back in the early days of computing, George Morrow, who, I know you remember the Osborne, Jeff, which is a suitcase - I had one. The Morrow was a clone of that. It was a suitcase-lugable. And George Morrow was the guy behind a brilliant guy i had that too oh well there you go he said then and we're talking what 19 29 i don't know what it is 1984 or it was it was cpm so it wasn't windows so it would have been you know early 80s he said then everybody's just right there on software which i laughed at because people don't have that capability that's what that's what that's part of what this shift is to me the ai shift is people can write their own software what this really does is it fulfills the promise the very early promise we were always looking for of a human to computer interface uh that understood language so we speak in one language computer speaks in a different language there's some interface that allows us to tell our computer what we want and it will do it and it's always been kind of out there the distant holy grail of computing this brings it so much more immediate and and really now the sky for me the sky's the limit i can say i can customize this i'm thinking of all sorts of software how many words in total did you use to prompt it you guess if you if you do go to the github you can see the conversation it's probably quite a few because i i spent a couple hours doing it on sunday it was a finished thing and then over the last couple of days see this is the other thing and this is what um uh mike masnick was telling us it's never yes yes you you know i go oh you know what i for instance it ain't shrink wrapped anymore i realized oh i don't really care how many read or unread articles there are just forget about red or unread assume if it's in there i haven't read it because i'm going to delete it so the main key i use is the delete is d just delete that nope not going to look i don't want to ever see that again i've read it um so i changed that on the left here it used to have the headline and then now I just have the date because really what I care about is, see, it's T for Tuesday.

1:09:10Craig Silverman:What I really care about is how old is this story because I don't want to do a story that's a week old. If I go to the bottom, this is last Wednesday, right? So these are last Wednesday stories. So I want to know how old it is. So I've got the date and I've got the source. The headline is in the upper right. And then beneath it, I have the opportunity. I don't want to generate an AI summary every time, although I could change that, have it do it at night when I'm not around. That uses more compute. Yeah, that's all right. I got lots of compute. I spent a lot of money. Hi, this has been a real quick Leo on this.

1:09:46I was wondering why the Leo's links document started to look different. And this is probably it. Oh, yeah.

1:09:53Craig Silverman:These are all going to. This AI summary gets dropped in there, too. So all the boxes get really big. And now it's a lot harder to parse. Well, see, I can. Okay, that's true. I can change this. So what we have a way of, this is the raindrop that it goes to when I bookmark it. You see, I just bookmarked this one. And if I have a summary, it's going to put the bullet points in there. And you don't like that, Benito? I don't like how it imports it into the document that I use to make the doc, to make the show doc. Yeah. So we're using Zapier to import that into a Google Sheet. I think ultimately the best way to do this would be to get the stakeholders together and say, okay, this is what I want.

1:10:33Craig Silverman:This is how it's going to process it. Now, what do you need when I put this in the sheet and have it do that too? So I can control the whole chain. So right now, yeah. Did you have to clean up all these headlines? No, I didn't have to clean it up. It's just... The doc we're looking at? I didn't have to clean it up. It's just that now I only see a couple of articles per screen. I can't see like 12 or 13. I only see like six now because the summary makes the box really big. I can also stop putting that in. But I think now that you have this, like, yeah, we should get all the stakeholders together and figure out, like, what the best way to do this is now.

1:11:07Because right now it's still a little, you know, it's just pieced together still right now, right? But now that you have that app. Well, it's perfect on my end. Yeah, exactly. You understand?

1:11:15Craig Silverman:It's perfect on my end. But see, this is what it's generating is this spreadsheet. And you can see now that these boxes have more information. Yes, scroll down, see how it used to look. Yeah, see that? but I thought you just ignored this column anyway this is the summary column the description column but yeah you paste it but you see how I only see like five articles per screen now like four or what I could easily do and I will do is have Zapier not copy description the thing the next step I was also thinking which I will do for you Benito the next step by the way Benito is so inspired by this tell them what you're gonna what you're thinking I'm gonna start vibe coding too.

1:11:55I'm going to vibe code some audio plugins because I wanted a specific reverb this weekend and I couldn't afford it. So I was like, oh, maybe I'll just try to vibe code one. And it was surprisingly easy. So I'm going to start making more. Yeah. That's exciting.

1:12:12Craig Silverman:Cool. And this is the thing is that Claude understands APIs or can download APIs and understand them. So this there's a specific format for plugins called vsts you can tell claude okay learn everything there is to know about vsts and how to make them now you know that i want to make a vst and it will actually there's an interactive part in the planning thing where i'll say okay well what do you need what do you want how do you want me to do this and there's so there is some inactivity you can even go back to claude as i have several times and said what do you think i for instance if you see when I generate a a summary it there's a there's a hang for a few seconds I said hey could you put actually I said I want could you put a little rotating newspaper or something some way of letting me know so what it said well no I'll put this little braille rotator in there that's more standard so put the little rotator in there it's cute and I said well you know what I want you to do i want you to go through the entire code base and look for anything that might happen like a refresh feed that will will lock that will make this unresponsive and put up one of those little rotators anywhere that that happens and some some information like you're you're doing something so i know that i haven't lost access to the computer these are little things it's easy to do and claude has some lots of experience of how others have done it in fact when i said do a news reader it knew what a news reader should look like i actually had to tell it no i don't i don't want that i don't need to star anything i'm going to either bookmark it or delete it that's all i want and and it removed that stuff so it has some understanding of what's kind of typical and then you customize it from there to put it straight in the spreadsheet well that's zappier does that but i could yes so the next step is to perhaps to eliminate zapier although zapier does it pretty easy right now for me to say to zapier hey just don't copy that big fat field benito doesn't want it um ultimately what i think i will do for you guys and the others is make a briefing book so uh what i can also do is say okay now go through all of the stories that that I have bookmarked for the week of January 14th and create a bulleted list of the headlines, a briefing book.

1:14:38Craig Silverman:And this is the thing I'm really interested in because as you know, we all bookmark far more stories than we are ever going to get to, especially when Leo talks on and on about Claude. Now, whose fault is that? What would be really interesting, and I don't know how well it works, is to say to Claude, okay, what are the most important ones? But you see, you never go with important. You go with the things that spark your conversation. They probably won't do a good job, unless maybe after I could say, hey, note what I've picked in the past. Could you learn what my... I wonder. I mean, I think you could ask which ones might spark the most interesting conversations.

1:15:15Yeah. I mean, there's... I don't know. We'll see. Let me ask you a question, if I may. So there's a company like Cursor out there that got a lot of attention that is there to also code in AI. How does that fit? Where do these things fit? Where does Claude code versus Cursor fit? So Cursor will use Claude,

1:15:34Craig Silverman:but it's what we call an integrated development environment, an IDE. It's an editor. So the way this evolved is initially, like Copilot on GitHub is you'd be in an editor, you'd start typing something, and it would complete what you were typing. It would save you typing. That was called IntelliSense. That was the first step. then later copilot you could say hey i'm sitting in my editor could you write the next block i want to could you write some code that would just uh scale everything by 20 and then it would propose code which you could then include in the editor or he would even enter it into the editor just like intellisense it would auto complete that and that's what a lot of people are still doing that's kind of what i my understanding of how cursor works any gravity from google those are editors where the ai is in the editor and inserting stuff this is not like that i mean i can do that uh i can do that in my emacs which is the code editor i use but i kind of prefer this this is not any i'm not doing any coding i'm just are you editing any of the code did you change any of the raw code i don't know rust not a line no it's 3 000 lines of code i don't even understand but i don't need to understand it remember i that's another reason why i don't want to ship this this is i'm taking the entire risk myself i don't have to write a eula that says i make no warranty about the appropriateness of this software if it doesn't work it's not on me um should i um should i show you what it looks like let me see what would be a feature um can you let me see do this can you add a clock that tells me how long i've been using speedy reader maybe i'm maybe i'm worried i'm spending too much time in speedy reader maybe you're not being speedy enough maybe i'm not being speedy enough so now it's thinking you can keep it on here for a little bit benito just so people can see what it looks like again this isn't an editor this is so it's looking at the code that's that's the code right there that's part of the code it's looking for a place to put this request um it's actually reading the code i didn't develop it on this computer i asked this computer to catch up i developed it on a different computer so i said hey claude catch up okay so yeah it's found somewhere to put it claude says hey leo mustard oh ketchup ketchup aren't you glad i didn't say orange uh showing you where it's adding the lines yeah this is so it does show you the code and the green is added if it's deleting something it'll be in highlighted in red adding elapsed time formatting methods so these are this is code it's adding i know enough coding i know i can look at this and know what it's doing i mean i'm not rust isn't yeah no but you didn't you didn't feel any compulsion to go and no i wouldn't want to break it that's another thing you know people often say well what about the security concerns it i think it's must there's a reds thing so it's deleting that to replace it with something else so i think it's much less likely to make the kind of boneheaded errors coders often make because we're lazy or We're not paying attention or whatever.

1:19:02Craig Silverman:I think it doesn't get tired. It's much less likely to make those errors. And as it gets better and better, it's going to know more and more of the kinds of errors. Okay, done. The session timer now appears in the bottom right corner. Timer starts when you launch the app. Let's see. Should we see if it did it? Let me exit out. I don't know if it put it in the new one. No, it didn't. Let's see. let me ask it how I can get it in the can you build this version so I can call it by name so it has to compile it I think no it compiled it all right fascinating yeah so you know what I think that it should make the timer if you get to a certain point it goes it turns red and there's like a little frowning case that emerge.

1:19:56Craig Silverman:This is the iterative process, which is so interesting. I can then say, yeah, you know, what I really want to know is not just how long I've been in this session, but how long I've been doing this all week, for instance. This is my double question, but for the sake of us dumb people out here, are you running this in Linux on your laptop? It's running on a Mac right now. This is an executable. Yes, it's an executable for Mac or Linux. In fact, if you go to the GitHub, you can download it and write it. Got it. You know, there's a few things you need to know how to do. Like you have to import the OPML and stuff, but I've tried to make that fairly straightforward.

1:20:32Craig Silverman:It's all documented on the GitHub. You want to be nice to me? You know what I want? Yeah. I want a version of this to go to arxiv.org and look at all of the last week's papers. Now I'm in the business of writing code. and find the ones that are relevant to a discussion about uh media and uh that are interesting for discussion okay i could probably do that but why don't you do it i bet you could do it jeff if you gave me the face this is the thing revise it this is the important thing it's empowers people even people who are not coders people like jeff to create custom software for themselves that does exactly what they want and you can refine it and get it better and i think that you shouldn't feel like you can't do this this is i guess my point yeah i just gotta find the time to it doesn't take that much time i didn't i wasn't i was doing other things i was watching a football game so darren okey is telling me what to do in the in the discord saying go to go go google.opal well one of the things that's interesting is um trust no one saying you could do this with n8n and and but i think n8n which is that node-based editor that lets you hook stuff up is actually obsoleted by this i think you can write code directly that does it i think a lot of the this is the other thing is changing so rapidly uh on christmas day andre karpathy did we mention this last week i might have tweeted i can't keep up this is a guy who created the term vibe coding yeah it's happening too fast there's too many tools i can't keep up and that's what's really interesting this is exploding a lot of the new features in claude code that have been released in the last two weeks have been written by claude code now that's interesting because that means now this stuff is going to happen faster and faster and faster and faster well it takes away the it's the end of it's the it's it's the expansion of coding and the end of coding once we've always said this once ai starts to improve itself you know it eliminates the human in the loop there's no limit oh no you're still in the loop because you're you're you're you're deciding what is right for you i don't have to be the customer did i tell you about ralph wiggums what um is that the name of a cat so it'd be it would be a good name for a cat i think so okay there's a tool called ralph wiggums uh and i'm going to say use ralph so this was coded originally by a third party and then anthropic said oh this is really good use ralph wiggums uh what ralph wiggums does is it makes it a little bit more autonomous uh oh use it for what oh uh what you do is i'm not sure what you mean you say we fail english that's impossible uh i'm in danger what ralph wiggum's the ralph wiggum's uh plugin does is you can give it a constraint like i want you to keep doing this until there are no more errors and then you can also the constraint can also be and but only do it 20 times because i don't want you to use up all my credits and it will can it will go out and continue to work and this is the beginning this is what people are starting to do now and you'll see people talking about this i let cod go go go for three days or i let it go for an hour and it wrote this splat game you can give it these constraints and it will start to do stuff so ralph wiggums is really interesting i didn't invoke it properly but uh because you can say hey Ralph uh keep working on this until the spinner gives you no errors.

1:24:29It's a bash loop is what Reddit is telling me. Yeah well okay so this is the other thing yeah bash is just a

1:24:38Craig Silverman:a shell programming language it's a shell script uh you can write this stuff in anything that's what's also really interesting it's it's very agnostic about languages. the real thing is this is a human to machine interface that uses english which we happen to be pretty good at but computers have been terrible at understanding

1:25:04Craig Silverman:interesting yeah all that's my little that's my show and tell yes yeah ralph wiggum when not while not finished send prompt to cloud it just it loops it until you get to the And you have to tell it what the completion criteria is. But I still want to go back. You're still the customer. You're still the human who wants to use this. And you will decide when it's done. You will say whether it's good enough, whether it does what you want. It's never done. Just like Mac Masnick said, he's continuing to work on his time management program. Probably every day he says, yeah, I don't like that. Can you make it blue?

1:25:43i'm often saying that well i think you both as an experiment should play with this a little bit it it's maybe seems

1:25:56Craig Silverman:imposing if you're not uh comfortable with the command line or a coder but honestly i think i don't i think it's very doable if you want jeff we can do this send me a paragraph of what you want Oh, and I will, I will. We could do a club twit where we all vibe code together. We could actually, we've done that already. I think it might take 24 hours to do that, Paris. It could. We might need to do a full live thing. Did you see how fast it wrote that little timer for me? I mean, it's just. I mean, did you see how fast Claude made a game where I could hit you with a tomato last week? Exactly. It was like two and a half minutes.

1:26:30It wasn't, it was not a very good game. Did you show any friends the game you made?

1:26:34Craig Silverman:And Darren wants me to show you Google's Opal because you could also do this. This is something that's less intimidating and less capable, but somewhat similar. Yes, but you have to give it access to your entire Google Drive, which I don't like. Oh, I haven't tried it. Is that really true? It's already Google. Okay. I know. Google already has all my stuff. I don't want, I just don't like when somebody, when I have to connect something to my entire Google Drive. You have to give it permissions. That's not what I want. you need to burn google account for that kind of stuff i know i know that's what i gotta do all right so opal is darren says is not less capable so that's good take that leo so there knows he's a big fan build and share many ai apps using natural language um all right fine so yeah which is what i've wanted to do yes yeah maybe jeff you should start here just to see create a weather specific outfit for a specific look uh and you see it's it's well i'll zoom in on this but it's not um it's it's very it's no what this is a nodal compositor is what it is and so you you create nodes and you can i can insert something in here and and so forth and these run on opal if i want to share it with uh paris does it run there so this makes web apps like it actually wants you to make web apps yeah okay that's what i wanted that's exactly what i wanted right thank you darren so let's start with the weather so do you think it will work on a workplace account jeff i i don't know when it comes to your wardrobe do you identify as male female or nine binary let's do this for paris so female okay getting weather report it's going to generate a nice outfit for you i didn't answer all the questions so maybe it won't be perfect yeah this is kind of interesting give me uh by the way trust no one says it will work with your uh workspace account jeff oh this is good for today download all my google drive files it wants to see edit create and delete only specific google drive files you use in this app this is why we got to get a burner it wants to view query edit and manage the content you uploaded to the generative language API semantic retriever, whatever the hell that is.

1:29:01Learn more.

1:29:03Craig Silverman:Okay. What's the occasion for this outfit, Paris? Let's say going out for drinks tomorrow night. I think that's actually a good one because I think it's supposed to be very cold tomorrow night. If I recall correctly, I think we're getting... Why don't you have it going out for drinks? What else defines your style? Tell it to look up the weather in New York tomorrow. Oh, and I would say, uh like see nihilist goth right yeah nihilist a little goth alt but also kind of colorful and and glam some glam yeah yeah some glam you know we'll really confuse it i think oh my uh i had while i was doing all this i was getting claude to put together a briefing report for us based on this rundown um and so i'll i'll put it together for you oh cool you're using someone else's app here right you're not making a stylist app here this is their app yeah this is uh their their demo app uh let's start with the weather oh i actually tried opal first for vibe going because it was free but they only make executable so i couldn't make plugins yeah i think you really want to cloud code is yeah yeah uh going yeah but for dummies like me but you know hey i've never I've never coded a line in my life.

1:30:22Entry drug. Yeah, you're still younger and more courageous than I am. Young man. How interesting. We're all coders now. No, we're all developers now. Claude's doing the coding. There are no coders. I guess that's true.

1:30:37Craig Silverman:I will, what excites me is that this is the notion of something super hyper-personalized, that it is finally the holy grail of computing, which is that I control my computer. By the way, I'm kind of soured on both Windows and Macintosh because they are so opinionated about what you should and shouldn't be able to do with your computer. That's one of the reasons I went to Linux. Oh, this looks good. I think Paris, this is Midnight Muse. Oh, yeah. It's going to be, yeah. Emerald Allure. What do we got going on here? Let's see. Black faux leather trench coat. That's kind of nice. That is. Black velvet long sleeve top.

1:31:11Craig Silverman:Bag matches your glasses. Yeah, chunky black platform combat boots. I do have those. And here's a little bit of color. Emerald green velvet crossbody bag. You have vibrant. Now I need to own any of these. Oxblood lipstick. You want the Oxblood lipstick. I keep trying to text you guys my Claude briefing, but I no longer have the ability to send and receive SMSs. Oh. You can put it in Discord. Are you still? Is Ryzen still not? It was up for maybe like five minutes, but then it went back down. I guess I'll put it in Discord. um i do have a question i don't um if you decide to sell this app who owns it oh i do yeah okay so claude has no say you can't cloud has no okay no well here's the other but can you copyright it sure why not uh products of ai as of now can't be cut oh yeah but the human part is so i because a human was involved so that was the that was the thing is that the the solely ai Yes.

1:32:15Craig Silverman:But if a human has created it with the help of AI or not, it's copyrightable. Here's what Claude thinks are the main themes of this week. The AI industry is experiencing a simultaneous trust crisis and power consolidation moment, says Claude. Three parallel storylines dominate. Grok's deepfake disaster demonstrates what happens when safety guardrails are removed. Apple's surrender to Google reveals that even trillion-dollar companies can't build frontier AI alone. And healthcare AI's gold rush shows all three major AI labs racing into the highest stakes domain. Meanwhile, the financial viability of the entire AI sector faces unprecedented scrutiny.

1:32:58I mean, it's fine.

1:32:59Craig Silverman:That's pretty good. I mean, those are the three top stories I've been talking about, for sure. Yeah, it is a little slick, Jeff. You're right. No, it is. Well, I don't like its pros i never do like their pros that's why i asked it for the summaries to be bullet pointed for instance is i just just the facts man anyway i've talked way too long about this let's get to some other stories in just a moment we will this is intelligent machines uh actually darren would you find out he says do you own the code can you take it with you darren says that's a really good question so let's put the club to work ask all your ais who owns this code that i wrote I believe I do because it prompted it unless it no I know I do of course I do anyway we'll move on I don't know is there something is there something in the cloud code EULA that says like we own all the code that comes out of here oh well look I'm very surprised if it does I mean this the intent of this is to have people write software that's why you pay 250 bucks a month yes but who death the money for the software if I sell it?

1:34:05Craig Silverman:Okay, I will check but I'd be shocked if it. Oh, okay. Darren says you own the code Claude Code was making but when you're talking about Bolt or Opal and their hosting of it, that's another question. Yeah, they have to host it so it's not exactly yours. That's interesting. But now I've got to figure out how to make an RSS feed from the archive.org API. I love it when AIs apologize. Paris, go ahead and tell us what I said, Jeff to Claude, Jeff thinks your prose is quote, a little too slick. How do you feel about that? I enjoyed it because then it has like the thinking and whenever it was doing the thinking, you saw one saying, weighing my immediate negative response as potentially defensive.

1:34:55What are you doing, claude he says claude or it says honestly he's probably right there's a certain ai generated sheen that creeps in right right there right there that's right right that the tidy parallel structures the way everything gets packaged beneath thematic buckets with connecting threads it reads like it was written by someone who's read a lot of good writing but hasn't actually lived through a 3 a.m deadline fueled by bad coffee and spite now it's trying to be too cute you know. The briefing format kind of invites it, too. It's defensive. It's true. I like bullets. I try to synthesize a dozen major stories into a scannable section.

1:35:32The temptation is to make everything feel equally weighted and polished. This is a good lesson for editors. It's, you know. If it's useful feedback, I could lean harder into the places where the stories are genuinely messy or where the through lines don't actually connect as cleanly as i made them sound would it be more dear if they had typos lawrence did some research it would be upsetting yes he

1:36:01Craig Silverman:says uh anthropics consumer terms state subject to your compliance with our terms we assign to you all of our right title and interest if any in outputs you own the code uh the commercial terms are more explicit customer owns all outputs and anthropic assigns to customer its right title and interest, if any, in and to outputs. And Anthropic will not train their model on your inputs or outputs under commercial terms. But Claude itself says there is uncertainty in copyright law. It requires human authorship. This is what we were talking about. But that means if it's purely generated by AI, when you modify or integrate or substantially contribute to AI-generated code, you strengthen your ownership claim through your human authorship.

1:36:45Craig Silverman:i think i can make a strong claim that i authored this program with the help of claude but that doesn't give claude right uh the rights to it yeah gotta wait for the eventual i was gonna take a break there will be a court case about this there will of course yeah yeah yeah another reason why i have no desire to sell this but i'd be glad to write you your little program jeff so just send me a paragraph of what you want that's all right i'll go to opal and try it as well Okay, but - Does it have to be RSS? Can it go to the website and do a search and execute that? Absolutely. So I don't need an RSS feed.

1:37:20Oh, no, that's just what I was writing.

1:37:22Craig Silverman:This absolutely does not have to be RSS. In fact, there is, as we talked about last week, a Chrome plugin for Cloud Code that it can invoke Chrome and do anything a web browser can do. Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. Can I do this? Can I use the address of your GitHub and say, go look at Leo's application? Yes. i like it i want you to modify it to do this yes in fact right there on the github there's an explanation of how to do that that's because i've made that repository public github does allow you make private repositories but because i've made it public anybody can look at it and and download it and fork it it's mit licensed it's a it's a open source license by the way interestingly i didn't it didn't ask me and i didn't specify a license it just chose that which is a good license I'm happy with it it's a very interesting uh our show today brought to you by zscaler the world's largest cloud security platform the potential rewards of AI as you can see are very you know interesting and certainly as a business you really cannot ignore AI in your business but there are risks too right you can't ignore those like the loss of sensitive data attacks against enterprise managed AI.

1:38:39Craig Silverman:And let's not forget generative AI, just as it's a boon for you, is a boon for threat actors, helping them to rapidly create phishing lures and write malicious code and automate data extraction. Did you know there were, last year, there were 1.3 million instances of social security numbers leaked to AI applications. Chat, GPT, and Microsoft Copilot alone saw nearly 3.2 million data violations. I think a lot of businesses realize it's time to rethink our safe use of public and private AI. And that's why you want to check out Zscaler. Listen to what Siva, who's the Director of Security and Infrastructure at Zwora, says about using Zscaler to prevent AI attacks.

1:39:26With Zscaler being in line in a security protection strategy helps us monitor all the traffic. So even if a bad actor were to use AI, because we have a tight security framework around our endpoint, helps us proactively prevent that activity from happening. AI is tremendous in terms of its opportunities, but it also brings in challenges. We're confident that Zscaler is going to help us ensure that we're not slowed down by security challenges, but continue to take advantage of all the advancements.

1:39:56Craig Silverman:with zscaler zero trust plus ai you can safely adopt gen ai and private ai to boost productivity across the business their zero trust architecture plus ai helps you reduce the risks of ai related data loss and protects against ai attacks to guarantee greater productivity and compliance To learn more, go to zscaler.com slash security. That's zscaler.com slash security. And we thank them so much for supporting intelligent machines. Jeff and Paris, I'm sorry, I monopolized the conversation. I'm a little bit, I'm very excited about what's happening with AI. I think this year, I think a lot of doubters are going to have to eat their words.

1:40:40i think things are happening very rapidly now very rapidly some good some bad i mean there's the grok the whole grok thing well that's anything that he touches is bad so yeah as

1:40:55Craig Silverman:as who has it said that that's an elon problem not an ai problem uh grok's solution was well you gotta if you have a paid account you can generate sexual imagery hey you know i guess he said it well didn't didn't open ai at one point say they were gonna do the same thing if you had a paid account they were gonna do erotica for adults if you are provably an adult and by the way i've noticed who was it was i think it was anthropic uh said maybe it was apple somebody said we were going to verify your age before it was when i was using it either it It was when you were trying to generate all that erotica.

1:41:35It was like, oh yeah, of course. We've got to get you.

1:41:38Craig Silverman:Tell me a dirty story, Claude. No, I think I was using Claude on the iPhone and it said, we've got to verify your age. Apple has my age. This is something Steve's always been talking about. He said, you know, the platforms, Android and iOS know your age in many cases. They could easily be, and they have an API. In fact, that's what whoever it was, Anthropoc or OpenAI were using. They said, which age group are you in? That's the Apple API. You don't say your specific age, just which age group you're in before they allow you to use it, period. I think they're very concerned about miners using it.

1:42:17Craig Silverman:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Indonesia and Malaysia blocked CROC. I think I mentioned that. UK is considering it. By the way, as a result, Elon is on a rampage against the UK on X today. I wonder why. As your analysis, your clever analysis pointed out, Paris, one of the big stories this week is Apple has announced that, yes, we are going to use Gemini from Google. We're going to pay them a billion dollars a year, and it will be the foundation model for Siri and Apple intelligence. but we're going to take their model we're going to copy it from their server to our servers and we're going to run it in our own private apple cloud so no information will go back to google just i do like that yeah makes sense i think it's what people want i really do uh we mentioned claude co-work i think that's less of a story than people have been making of it it allows you so the big one of the examples they've used is see normies can use it uh you have to have a mac and you have to have a paid cloud account but a 20 buck account will count uh normies are using it to do things like see all those icons on my desktop could you put them in folders and organize them stuff okay do you really need an ai to do that for you just organize your folders, people.

1:43:42Craig Silverman:If it were so easy, I wouldn't have all those icons on my desktop. You just need to set it so that your screenshots save in a folder called screenshots and then bada bing, bada boom, you're good. Summarize my meetings from this week. Find action items. I think that's pretty good. Basically, the idea, this is just what Copilot was doing from Microsoft, what Apple intelligence will probably do once gemini is is transplanted um this is this is what these companies think people want which is kind of like a little assistant right they do want a little guy who'll help them with their work and that is nice yeah so it's worth a try i this is why initially i paid for the high-end claude because you can't do it with the i don't i think you i think you can do it with the 20 dollar one i can't remember i think i remember i had to buy an expensive one but then i thought well i can use good more here's their example you saw this obviously look at all those icons what a mess organize my desktop that's quite a clutter desktop i see you have a mix of project folders screenshots photos video files this person has deeper problems than desktop i have seen many many many desktops like this this is very calm this is yeah i've seen much worse yeah look at that oh my god no i can't find it you didn't even just do the right click organize the thing first like that you can just do that i guess i don't know yeah and not as well as that you're all because it knows what the contents are oh yeah um you should also be aware it says of the risks of prompt injections.

1:45:33Yep.

1:45:34Craig Silverman:Attempts by attackers to alter Claude's plans through content it might encounter on the internet. We've built sophisticated defenses against prompt injections, but agent safety is still an active area of development in this industry. Hint, hint. Not our fault. We recommend taking precautions, particularly while you learn how it works. Well, there are going to be new attack vectors. There are. It's absolutely true. Have you seen, I'm sure you have Paris because it was on Reddit, all the videos of the new driverless delivery vans in China? I have not. They have become a total meme. They plow, well, watch.

1:46:17They plow through crumbling roads. They're relentless. Oh my gosh. They refuse to stop for anything.

1:46:31there's also the videos of the the walking robots the humanoid robots attacking people on the street really now that's just like don't go on the cement do you see he was waving his shovel

1:46:42Craig Silverman:trying to stop it and now this guy this truck driver is getting out he's saying he's gonna kick it get going this one has a motorcycle attached to the wheels luckily there was no blood trailing behind yeah well you gotta wonder what happened with the driver behind yeah um yeah i just i thought you know i enjoy these robots gone wrong videos meta has decided it's not the metaverse they've laid off a bunch of people in the metaverse division and they they say you can work on ai I wonder if Apple's going to do the same. Apple continues to double down on the Vision Pro. Meta's Reality Labs, according to Engadget, has lost more than$70 billion in the last four years, five years.

1:47:40Craig Silverman:$70 billion. In fact, Meta's actively trying to change the narrative on this. They ordered, or they made sure people knew that they had ordered a doubling of the luxotica ray-ban display meta glasses but a number of pundits have said yeah we don't think they're actually selling them oh there isn't really a market for them uh every sales figure people can find shows it's not selling all that well but if you ordered a double the production that becomes the story right and i think that maybe the more telling stories that they're laying off so many people from the reality labs i mean at some point even though zuckerberg i was just looking up he controls near total voting control over meta through dual class oh yeah oh yeah he was very smart about 10 votes per share of class b giving him around 60 of total votes so if you're a stockholder you have one vote for every 10 that mark zuckerberg has but still i wonder when there's going to be activist investors who come in and say enough of this meta crap i mean meta is closing down three vr studios as part of its latest round of meta cuts they're doing layoffs in the metaverse team i don't know what the activist event investors would be pushing for outside of that i mean they're already clearly being like yeah the whole meta thing was pretty dumb well they should have done it two years you're gonna have dumb i'm gonna you can watch while i cut up my american express card because on monday while i was didn't you just did you just show the the card number to everybody you can see the number because it's no longer good because monday i got a text from t-mobile saying hey leo you got 28 000 uh points you did i said click this link to see what your rewards could be they're gonna expire tonight i said this is your job i know i can't i've never been bit by this before the closest i can i saw someone added us on like blue sky being like never submit any of your information to a a random link you get texted and i'm like do they go to the site what's going on right my my um my my reserves were uh down i guess it was early morning part of it i blame t-mobile a little bit because t-mobile continually sends me promotional legitimate promotional text messages turn it off well but the point is i want to know about his points i was i was not surprised to get this message from t-mobile because they keep saying oh it's t-mobile tuesday you're gonna get a free hamburger so i thought oh this is another you know one of those fine benefits from being a t-mobile subscriber which i am i okay i'm saying this i know i it makes me look stupid i'm saying it to everybody to know this could happen to anybody okay because you're right i should have known better i think we need a public interest ad made by ai has a there's a hook a fish hook in leo's mouth oh it gets worse listen listen to all the red flags oh so the link is to t-mobile dot l-u-o-s-a dot cc oh well that must be their fulfillment.

1:51:03So I clicked the link. Oh my God.

1:51:07Craig Silverman:I'm on my phone, T-Mobile page. It says, oh, hey, you can get some Sony headphones. You can get an iPad. You can get, or travel discounts. Would you like to use the travel discounts? I said, no, you know what? I don't need headphones, but I could give those as a gift. So let me get the Sony headphones. I said, great. Here's the shipping fees. But we recommend the 99 cent one because you'll get it in five days. I said, good, but we need a credit card for the 99 cents so i entered the credit card uh and there was a long delay and i should have that should have been like while the hacker you still got a live one and then i get it says okay we're gonna send you a text it got a text message and this is the other thing so i used my apple card first uh actually that one failed so i said oh well let me use a different one so i put my visa in and it's been and they said uh oh there's a text message and it said the visa text message was a little weird it said to add your visa to the apple wallet enter this code which i realized in hindsight the bad guys were smart because what they're doing is instead of using these credit cards directly they're adding them to an apple wallet so it's invisible to the merchant right the merchant doesn't get the information about the credit card So it's a good way of staying anonymous when you're using the stolen credit card.

1:52:28Craig Silverman:But then, you know, weirdly, there was a long delay. I kept refreshing the page. It said, stay on this page until it's done. And it didn't work either. So I thought, well, I'll try one more. I'll do the American Express card. It was the business card. Oh, you did another one? Jeez. So, and then finally, I went. When did the gulp come? Wait a minute. And then said, well, that didn't work either. I said, wait a minute. I must have been groggy. I don't know. I have no excuse. I have canceled all three of those cards. Now, here's the nice thing. The Apple card, you just say that number. Give me a new one.

1:53:09Craig Silverman:So it just invalidated immediately. Lisa shouts down the stairwell about an hour later saying, did you just try to charge something at Lowe's for 500 bucks? I said, no. He said, well, American Express blocked it. i said well i hope so because i froze the card so they um within an hour they tried to use it uh i've canceled all three cards that's why you saw me cutting that up i know it's embarrassing it could happen to any of us well that's why i'm bringing it up just to remind you it can happen it's easy i feel like i am so far in the opposite way that it's like it is a impediment to my daily life.

1:53:51Like I have had issues where I get a legit text from Bank of America being like, your credit card's been compromised. Like, please click here to like, you know, verify a transaction. And it definitely like, wasn't me. They were correctly texting me and I will like call Bank of America from a different number I have saved and like being like, I'm clearly someone's trying to hack me. And they're like, no, no, no. Someone did take your credit card but that message was real yeah um i you know obviously i knew i knew better and

1:54:23Craig Silverman:this is every possible red flag i've been telling people for 20 years not to do this uh somebody's asking didn't you use your sponsor privacy.com if i wanted to take the time i could have generated a one-time only card yeah but i didn't it was too much of a rush it was only 99 cents i want those headphones they're free and it was going to expire tonight i didn't want to lose those points you could never lose those did you actually look at the t-mobile site to see how many points you do have yeah well after all of this i went to the t-mumble site they don't offer points

1:55:00my mistake was doing that after i gave them three credit card numbers oh that's perfect was there ever any moment between credit card one and two and credit card two and three where you're

1:55:11Craig Silverman:like hmm no the thing was hitting me on the head saying don't do this it was like spinning was slow it didn't work there was every reason to go oh yeah this is bogus luosa.cc i right there right i have no excuse i must you know what stoned i don't know what was that seems like a link that's generated by a website that i'm going to cannibalize from my picks the week called creepylink.com it sounds like it i'll go to right now it's a website that's kind of a url shortener or in some ways a url lengthener that it will make any link look absolutely creepy and like it's going to give you a virus for instance i'll put in twit.tv here into creepylink.com and it's given me google.clic.link.a bunch of string of text underscore free money dot bac no if i had seen a lot of numbers and stuff i might have i there is certainly i would have i don't know i don't know what i would have done i don't i it was like it was a it was like 7 30 in the morning it was it wasn't fully awake i don't know i don't know how that happened by the way i'm going to click that link what do is there free money there there is free money and it's going to give you something oh did you see what uh hey look at that's pretty good discord said did you see what you do when you click it on discord potential dangerous download with purple guy says no no leo don't do it don't do it it certainly does make your links look as suspicious as possible if you're in a buying mood though scooter x put up a uh a link to a hands-on with a new b now that it's an amazon hands yeah big deal right they were showing it easy oh s they were showing it at ces in fact uh we had uh jennifer patterson tui on and she actually is wearing one now i don't you know i was tempted it's funny because i already gave my be away to my hairdresser because i wanted her to record all those personal conversations she has every day with her clients uh she couldn't get it working on android i probably should have kept it but i just i didn't i love that you're like this is a security risk for me to have and it's a bad product i'm gonna give it to you someone who knows a lot less i had told her that i was wearing i showed her and talked about it and she said oh that's cool i want that i want to be able to record all of these so that that week instead of tipping her i just gave her the b i still tipped her i still tipped i said my salon should do a reality show I go to a barbershop.

1:57:50Craig Silverman:I just want to tell you, I go to a barbershop where they offer you tequila when you walk in the door. Not even whiskey? Tequila feels crazy. They have whiskey, but they, oh yeah. I mean, they're - Are they giving you just like a shot or are you just getting straight tequila in a glass like it's whiskey? They were doing shots. Yeah. Okay. That's, I guess, fine. I like barbershops. I want to go to a - They had a girly calendar on the wall. Oh boy. But what's funny is my barber is a woman. i said what does that bother you she said well a little bit anyway we moved we moved she left that barber shop uh all mail and i followed her to her own she owns it now it's called las katrinas it's really good i like it nice and if you go there you will be recorded yes no she never got it working because she had an android phone oh it was i'm in danger you're watching intelligent machines the show that just goes on and on and on and on with jeff jarvis and paris martineau are you working on a big story is there a radioactive shrimp in your future um i'm working on another story yeah you mentioned you went to the courthouse you know i went to a courthouse today to go look at some documents because um we have a really messed up system in the U.S.

1:59:13where if you want to look at court records from any of our district courts, you have to pay money for each document you look at based on the amount of pages you're looking at, as if you're printing them out. And that gets really annoying and expensive and adds up when you're trolling through cases that maybe have like 40 associated cases and you've got to figure out what document you need. But I've realized you can view all these for free if you go to the actual courthouse where those documents are associated as it should be as it should but i think i should be i just go on a website that's a free version of a website where i have to pay it costs them

1:59:49Craig Silverman:nothing i should be able to address free money.google.bat.bit it should be yeah it should be because that's what it felt like but instead i just had to check all my electronic devices and sit in a room where all the clocks were wrong. All the ones on the computer kept saying it was 9.54. And I was like, it's very clearly mid-afternoon. And so I had to keep going up to this man by the desk and being like, what time is it? And he's pointing at something else, a different clock that would be kind of wrong. And then I looked through them. You couldn't take pictures of the documents? No, I had to bring in pencil and paper, and I wrote on my legal pad the names of the document exhibits, because I already knew the case numbers, that I want to then, tonight, once I'm done with this podcast, go and pay money to download on my computer.

2:00:47Wow. Because that's a really normal way to have a function in court. But you can't tell us what you're working on.

2:00:51Craig Silverman:I can't. It is a secret. Good. And how long does it take you to do a story like this? Well, it depends. This is a story me and my editors have been kind of kicking around thematically for a bit, but it's kind of a complicated topic that on first glance seems a bit boring or esoteric, but every time I explain it to people, they get very interested. Those could be the best ones. But I mean, it's difficult to figure out how we drill that down into a couple different stories that will interest people on the topic. And I think we found one angle for it. But there's a couple different kind of procedural questions we have to answer first.

2:01:30So that's what I'm going to do.

2:01:32Craig Silverman:Is this a typical process? It sounds like Consumer Reports is really more detailed, focused, more thoughtful. They really are. I've really enjoyed working here. It's just a lot of people who know their stuff. That's cool. care a lot about taking the time to get it right because i can i mean i would imagine most websites would just say yeah whatever go ahead and do it you got you got three more stories to do by noon so yeah they're just like whatever do anything do it um just fill that page yeah yeah good i'm so glad you got that job what a great place to work and they should be glad they got you i think your colleague is going to be on twitter on sunday oh lovely all right all right all right we're to take a break you're watching intelligent machines with this intelligent person perish smart no and and then a couple of dummies uh jeff and and leo actually i'm the dummy look you got this brilliant investigative reporter you got this this former journalist now esteemed professor deep thinker and an author and here i am i'm a podcaster i will say i did somehow end up showing someone Dev Knoll last night.

2:02:40And they were like, whoa, he used to do that? Does he look like that? They were like, oh, he worked with Soledad? That's cool. I was like, she hated him. She hated Dev Knoll. Not Leo, but Dev. I think she, I don't know,

2:02:58Craig Silverman:we tried to interview her and then she cancelled. So maybe she doesn't. Maybe she realized, she went, Leo, oh, I'm not going to interview her there. You know, do you have this school flashback at the time? Just tell something and hope that it's true? No, not at all. Why do you have a safe space? You mean everything is safe? Yes, exactly. Why do you have a app that understands you? No matter whether it's a job, job or a job. That's right. It doesn't feel like it's like it's a tax. Taxes done? Safe. With Why do you have a tax? this is intelligent machines all right all right all right Matthew McConaughey is trademarking himself saying all right all right all right ego just he's the actor I cannot bear most he he wants to fight AI misuse there he is in the 1993 film dazed and confused which is where he coined that term or the screenwriter's going that term already all right all right um trademark he actually he actually has the deadline that is his line he actually did he yeah yeah good all right so he should trademark it he had eight trademark applications approved by the u.s patent and trademark office featuring him staring smiling and talking according to the wall street journal um his attorney said the trademarks are meant to stop ai apps or users from simulating his voice or likeness without permission like on sora right there's a seven second clip of him standing on a porch there's a three second clip of him sitting in front of a christmas tree and there's audio of him saying all right all right so leo what would you trademark of yourself what is the trademarkable leo laporte but see i have no desire to do that i want people to use my i know my image what is the essence of you i guess there's there's really nothing nothing empty i don't know i think you watch the show and you and it's over and you go who was that guy in the middle i don't i don't he's a non-entity i'm like uh joey bishop i'm like i'm like sorry paris can we have a brief discussion of what Anthony just posted in the chat, which is a full character sheet for DevNull to be able to ostensibly recreate him in 3D videos.

2:05:34Craig Silverman:We don't really even need that. I talked to the guy who was at the company that created DevNull and he said, oh yeah, I have all the files on a hard drive. Well, they'll need it because Anthony's got a 3D recreation of DevNull's butt right here. It's a little too good looking. Honestly, he wasn't that good looking. I think Devnell needs one gold tooth. That's my pitch. Although I am going to trademark this image from Pretty Fly for a Cis guy. Now, do you think Matthew McConaughey would get mad at that? Yeah, you're sued. I'm in deep trouble. I don't know. I would never wear that watch, though.

2:06:16It's pretty funny. it's i like what you can do with um with ai have you shown paris the suit you had to wear when you made devnull like i have it over here i can you have a suit with just a bunch of little balls

2:06:31Craig Silverman:think of a wet suit yeah think of a wet suit it was it was neoprene full body neoprene except for the head stopped the neck and it had ping pong like ping pong ball like things on it no actually Yeah, like the suits they put those cats in for the cat game. Yeah, exactly. Or it was actually, that would be if you were on camera. This didn't have ping pong balls because there was no camera. It was all electromagnetic sensors. So it would sense your motion. But there were still things stuck all over the suit. But I don't have a picture, I don't think. Maybe there is a picture somewhere. I think you should show up one day to record just in one of those suits.

2:07:10Yeah, I think so.

2:07:12Craig Silverman:and i think there was i feel like there was a headpiece because uh and then but i had puppeteers i was the one doing the movement uh there was a person with a like a little joystick doing my mouth movement and then carsten my old producer was spinning my hair and making my eyebrows go up

2:07:34Craig Silverman:and that was way back when that was 1994 i mean this was very early on doing real-time mocap it wasn't even pre-recorded it was done live that rig must have been so expensive it was attached to a half million dollar silicon graphics on jesus nbc baby network tv was the thing i have a pick for the for the network tv thing uh later on for it's actually for paris to get her caught up to the cultural milieu that she is bathing in right now beautiful yeah i have been monopolizing this please you guys your stories of the week are there any archive.org stories that want to talk about sorry if i write this program are there going to be more archive.org stories i've gotten really distracted looking up photos of cats in motion capture suits sending the discord i see they're just really cute have you ever played the game stray i have but then i got really sad because there's a couple quick time events in the game where if you don't move the cat fast enough it gets uh overwhelmed by little glommie gooey guys and the cat dies and it made me so deeply sad to see the cat die that i was like i literally can't play the game anymore it didn't make me sad it angered me it angered me but it made me sad the cats seem too real well that's why i liked it right up to that point it was a chance to experience life as a cat I know.

2:09:15And I don't want to experience life as a cat getting overwhelmed by glommie gooey guys.

2:09:22Craig Silverman:I'll give you a story while you guys look for your stories. The Senate yesterday unanimously, unanimously passed the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Conceptual Edits Act, act or defiance act no roll call vote no senator objected uh this is of course in response to grok and the deep fakes of course now it goes to the house where it will die a quiet death i don't know maybe not maybe people i do feel like there's been a surprising amount of um political capital on the hill for these sort of bills. Yeah. By the way, this bill does not give law enforcement any new tools. All it does is say, as a victim, you can sue.

2:10:11Craig Silverman:And remember, Texas did this. This is the new thing, which is, oh, no, we don't want to enforce laws. We're just going to let people bring civil suits, tie up the courts. That'll solve the problem. And will enable citizens to sue. Yeah, citizens. That's the one thing this bill does. if you're a victim you can sue now interestingly not only sue the creator of the deep fake but the platform so you could in fact sue grok or x.com i will choose a story here that just came in over the wire i'll put it in the live chat um x announced has while we've been sitting here recording this that it's going to no longer a grok will no longer allow the editing of images of real people into bikinis, as well as they're kind of making some other just general changes to this.

2:11:06Well, why, Elon? There was no problem, you said. It never happened. It never happened. Zero. But if it does, we're going to stop. Yeah, it says that basically you can't use a Grok account to edit images of real people into revealing clothing generally, and that all of the image-generating features are going to be behind its subscriber paywall. And the ability of all users to generate images of real people in bikinis, underwear, and similar attire will be geo-blocked in regions where it's illegal, which seems like not exactly the point. Make it legal everywhere where it's not illegal. Yeah.

2:11:49Jeff, your turn. We could talk about the billionaire tax and how pissed I am at the founders of Google to have already escaped.

2:11:56Craig Silverman:Yeah. Larry Page bought a mansion in Florida where there is not only no billionaire tax, there's no state tax at all. Moved his companies out of California. And in fact, now Gavin Newsom, our governor, is saying, oh, I'm going to stop that law. We can't lose our billionaires. Oh, heaven forfend. No billionaires. Whatever will we do? Gavin, they're not paying any taxes. They're just leeches. it's okay for us to lose them. It might help with the housing crisis. Yep, yep. So if Newsom vetoes it, which he says he will do, then there'll be an effort in the crazy California to get it on the ballot. Which will pass.

2:12:38Craig Silverman:I mean, I think it's a good idea. I mean, look, there's no reason a billionaire should be able to hoard their money. I don't understand how the billionaire's tax works, But the argument often in these cases is that if you tax assets as opposed to income, then if you, let's say, start taxing a farm, there'll be no farm left. Tax income. I agree. The problem is billionaires are very good at deferring and hiding income. Right. They basically borrow against assets and spend that money. But there needs to be a way to get these suckers. Yeah. Peter Thiel has donated$3 million to fight the billionaire.

2:13:16Craig Silverman:Yeah, I understand both sides of this. i really do um it's you know it's problematic it it wouldn't it's the billionaires wouldn't suffer they can't afford it it's the people who have stock uh options or stock awards from their companies they're working at facebook or apple and they get stock awards but they can't buy a house with it yet that's yeah they can't do anything with it it's not actual money but they are taxed on it and i understand that jensen wong has said he has no objection to the tax interesting that honestly the really big billionaires like larry page and jensen it's a rounding error yeah it's nothing well their their their increase in their equity value is far exceeds five percent if it's only five percent a year then they're doing it wrong patrick delahandy says massachusetts does this people said oh no all the billionaires leave of Massachusetts, but the number in the state went up after the taxes went into effect.

2:14:14Craig Silverman:And what are they spending the money on? It means every child in every school in Massachusetts gets lunch free. And they say there's no such thing as a free lunch. I don't know why I put this in the rundown. I think maybe because I want to make Paris listen to a 1952 recording of J.R.R. tolkien reading from the hobbit please do yeah i think it's incredible that this surfaced right

2:14:46i don't know where he came from nor who or what he was this was 1952 this was very early in the

2:14:53Craig Silverman:tape recording era and somebody sat down with tolkien and said hey look at this cool thing i've got would you uh would you record read some of your book into it um he also sang apparently oh i would like to did he sing in elvish uh that's a good question when tolkien visited a friend in 1952 to retrieve a manuscript he was shown a tape recorder having never seen one before he said how does it work and it was and was then delighted to have his voice recorded and hear himself played back for the first time the only reason this is newsworthy these are these have been around for a while is that somebody's put them up on youtube so if you if you want to hear it search youtube for jrr tolkien that's pretty cool i've heard these before uh another interesting um thing i don't know if this is in the rundown i should have probably added this dig launched new new dig today oh oh i i've been using it for a while i guess it's now what is i guess your i'm curious as to your experience so far because it's basically from what i've heard of the um writing about it seems to basically be reddit like there's communities posts comments and it's all invite reddit exactly i know but reddig has abandoned that for long enough that It is red.

2:16:18Reddit is more ingrained in the common mind for these features now than dig ever was. And I think that's always been a bit of a shame given what a early advantage dig had to this. I'm logging. Well, I'm, I guess I won't log. So one thing that I saw in some of the coverage of this is, uh, Kevin Rose is kind of emphasizing the trust, like anti bot angle of it as like kind of an interesting aspect of this. basically he's betting like this AI era social media needs new verification tools beyond just like a blue check mark and says that they're going to use zero knowledge proofs like cryptographic verification without revealing personal data and other quote signals of trust bundled together to identify people within specific communities like one of the examples they gave is a community for aura ring owners could verify that everybody actually owns an aura ring that's in order to

2:17:17Craig Silverman:participate in it kevin first of all kevin's a good friend longtime friend i've known him forever uh he uh has been on our show many times he was one of the founding uh members of our panels um he the problem with dig was that everybody gamed it they went out of business because it was a very successful way to get attention for your blog or your website or whatever and people started gaming it and they couldn't figure out a way to not to keep it from gaming and so he was briefly on the cover of business week briefly it was for a whole week on the cover of business week as the 60 million dollar man which kevin took great pains to lift down say i never made that any money from dig uh they eventually you know kind of sold it uh but reddit sell ads right yeah well that reddit did it right and was very successful the reason the thing that dig did that reddit took was this idea of voting stuff up and so dig became you know you would go there and see the most voted stories would be the top stories so just as we were talking about earlier how do you figure out what are the stories to pay attention to yeah so i didn't realize that they my boss steve newhouse when i worked for him at an advance really wanted to invest in or buy dig but he couldn't get anywhere with them so he got this he took the second choice which was reddit interesting and it did very well and he was smart enough because it's also condi but he owned it fully for very little money but then he spun it out so he could create equity in it right to motivate the uh the staff and it's grown to be huge now it it looks like kind of i guess yeah it looks like reddit it's not yeah what does it look like slash food going on here's slash food the bagel of life all right uh i wouldn't need it do they have a subreddit for conspiracy theorists that uh how about let's see if they have it for sovereign citizens i was about to say sovereign the sovereign citizen subreddit is really what i'm always looking for in a communicant uh no communities you could start it oh yeah i could um i don't know what other subject you said conspiracy they must have that well no i i really mean meant uh sovereign citizen i assume they don't have a conspiracy is one being it's an early uh version of it but they must have what is do they have a like what's do they have a what's hot or popular oh like what is the most popular one post in ai core coding well it's only been a couple of hours well no but i've been there's been the non-public beta has been around for months let's see what the most doug story is no i'm not going to show that uh how italian hazelnuts built an empire so rich it shouldn't pay taxes cheesecake oh no you're still on food you're on oh am i subreddit oh oh i i was on the most dug okay so here's trending trump says americans don't need canadian products you're in finance now on the right is what it shows oh but i'm how does he get to a home with everything Let's go to the...

2:20:23I don't know. You keep doing some back. Click on a little dig.

2:20:27Craig Silverman:Click back, back, back, back, back, back, back, back, back, back, back. Click on the dig logo. Go to hold. Feed, trending, most dug. That's what I want. All of dig. Dig rebooted under original founder, Kevin Rosen, Alexis Ohanian, who ironically was the original founder of Reddit and is now married to Serena Williams.

2:20:50Craig Silverman:Yeah, okay. you know it's like reddit capture a path you know what i i was it was pretty slow when i went originally for the beta but now that it's going um yeah what's there i'll check it out and it has what's this dig daily it looks like a audio oh it must be podcast interesting it's not it's not doing anything but i guess it's like a podcast yeah who's excited for the animal this looks just like reddit doesn't it animal crossing is there an animal cross is there a new there is a new one for you have to have a new game or oh yeah they've added a lot new content yep yep yep yep yep it's it's pretty cool are you uh are you ready to go back paris i haven't well it'll be quite sad because animal crossing does that thing where you haven't been there in years where everybody looks at you and he's like oh it's been six years and they say exactly how long it's been like six years three months and four days since you've been here i have long said the thing that new animal crossing is missing and i will die on this hill is they need to bring back resetti they need to bring back that annoying little guy who gets really mad at you if you reset your games that you can uh take advantage of the time feature of it uh to get better stuff and it i think that's just a wonderful game mechanic that frankly more games need to be using is i love that there's a little guy that yells at you uh apparently captain has a family and they have a resort on the pier It's kind of cool.

2:22:32Oh, boy.

2:22:33Craig Silverman:That pier was empty for so long. There's some new... Oh, my God. There is a Resetti's Reset Service. I'm happy he's so here. Clear your island with Resetti's Reset Service. Here he is. I want the entire island cleared, and then you start over. Listen, that's not what Resetti does, but I'm happy I get to see him. Yay. I might pick it up. Now, I don't have the Switch 2 yet. I should buy it. Can you play this without the Switch 2? It just looks like they found him a job, Paris. They found Resetti a job. They found Resetti a job instead of annoying you. I think that's great. But, you know, I think his job should be to give you increasingly long monologues about the importance of playing your game the right way.

2:23:17Craig Silverman:Yes, you can upgrade it. The 3.0 update is it for everybody. There is a$5 Switch 2 version, which has enhanced graphics and mouse controls game chat capability and the ability to host up to 12 people on your island at once. This was my COVID game. What horrors await me? I haven't been back there since COVID. Yeah, this is our quarantine game. What we did when we couldn't leave the house. Yeah, maybe we should all get back into it and connect our islands. Okay. No, it's such a time sink. I've got to spend time with Claude now he's very demanding I did like this story and it has nothing to do with AI but I'm gonna do it anyway postal arbitrage yeah I didn't figure this out okay so if you want to send a postcard or a letter to a friend right now can you believe it a stamp is 78 cents it's that's messed up that's messed up but it turns out if you're a prime member it will send stuff items for less than that in fact they sell items for less than that with free shipping so what they're doing is a way to stay in touch with friends is exchanging cheap items like a lime or a packet of kool-aid tropical punch powder mix just a little thing that's cheaper than a letter and then you put on the on the little note that you can send with it your letter yes it's called postal arbitrage.

2:24:46I will say, though, if anybody who's looking to do this to try and keep in touch with their friends, the little gift note that you can send with your Prime packages is like a heat stamp. So it will disintegrate into nothing. The text will go away after a couple of weeks.

2:25:05Craig Silverman:So make sure. Well, it's overnight. I mean, yeah. All right, Paris, I'm going to send you a russet potato. I'll let you choose. Thank you. how much carbon goes in the atmosphere with every trip christ yeah oh we are burning the the future of our children but but damn it we've got free postage for now until the postal service uh shuts down jammer beatus had a great idea which is twits 24 hours of animal crossing and i agree we could we could do an hour of those just sending is there items to one another i guess i could with the hdmi port connect i could i could connect it up easy probably do it right now listen we could do a solid one-third to one-half of the 24-hour stream just gaming it's very tempting and as someone who used a sad lamp for the first time today i think if we just had one of those babies running for the whole live stream we'd stay awake the whole time okay you talk amongst yourselves while i see if i can hook this up are you gonna play animal crossing right now i i'm gonna fall over jeff can't even comprehend the idea of playing a video game about his on a hot pad on a sore ass aren't we all yeah when are you when are you going one eye uh next wednesday so i'll come in in the afternoon like that it's too complicated i have to move the whole dock which has to be plugged in and i'll have it for the next show and we can show a jeff pentamento we should you just need to plug it into the black magic and you're in your set that's it yeah no i yeah it has so but i need the dock for the hdmi out and the dock is and is all plugged into the back of my credenza so uh how dare they move the credenza i could never move a credenza the power supply out it's really rather entangled back there and uh i have i really haven't played it it's you're right you get you have roaches in your house and spider webs and they everybody kind of complains about how long you've been gone and all right let's try to use vo and i used our pictures if you go to the discord and you scroll up you'll see the three videos i made about us oh in view this new view we're not quite recognizable that's no you look a little bit like peter uh no that's not it you'll see two of them say local news the other one is uh was my effort to have us in uh the pit before that oh after you with the show the pit yes are these supposed to be us in the discord or is in the so the discord why don't i see it it's higher up there i'm about 47 years old yeah and have the four arms of a man i look like the guy from project runway oh no that's jeff wait a minute let me turn up the sound is there sound on it yeah there's sound the latest reports are looking stable yeah let's proceed with the next topic remember our previous big hair on this and that's how we wrapped up today she looks like i like that none of the lips are even remotely going on with all right so here's one where we're what gilligan's island i was asking us to do a dance routine on a cruise ship it's getting filtered out leo the audio is getting filtered out a little bit oh i gotta click uh hold on no original sound is on it was it just wasn't very yeah it's just not very loud

2:28:47oh the waves are crashing the sun is bright we're sailing away is this supposed to look like us yeah it's ridiculous no and I tried to go do a fourth and I ran out of my videos for the day thank god the one that really didn't work if you go up further um I thought we would do the pit version but then of course it put the vital signs on us so you can't see it let's proceed with caution remember our previous findings on this and that's how we wrapped up today's procedure folks well did i pull a microphone from his chest

2:29:23that's very weird so you cut it with a steak knife and then you pull out a microphone i mean and i like that the background is your house though jeff yeah oh it is it's hey well that's the good news it is in his living room yeah that's your studio yeah so at least it got that right and actually this cruise ship looks just like my uh my my bedroom uh

2:29:56Craig Silverman:okay anything else before i i send it to the pics of the week i'm gonna go grab a cat really quick some people in the chat are asking for that but then we should we saw a little gizmo sighting earlier but to compliment the rosy sighting you're watching intelligent machines hey a very special thanks to our club twit members who make this show possible uh this week has been a little light on the adverts but you know it's always a relief to know that we've got your support. In fact, 25 % of our costs are supported by club members, which is very cool since it's less than 2 % of the total audience joins the club.

2:30:33Craig Silverman:I'd like to make that a bigger number. Big enough, we wouldn't need ads at all. Wouldn't you like that? No ads? Well, that's one of the benefits of being a club member. No ads. You wouldn't even hear me begging. Access to the Discord, where all of those weird AI things are. And if you act today, we'll send you a hair from Gizmo, a gizmo hair a gizmo hair we've got plenty of them we got lots coming off in bush we got lots i don't know uh it's just a one added benefit of the oh gizmos doesn't like that idea at all at all i want to keep all my hair i want my hair don't take my hair uh twit.tv slash club twit we've got a lot of stuff coming up in fact in about an hour and a half micah is going to do his crafting corner a very chill chance to hang with micah and micah sergeant and many of our club members as they do crafting of various kinds he likes to do lego there's crocheting sewing cooking coding lots of fun actually we have been doing a lot of coding in our ai user group that's the first friday of every month so it'll be in a couple of weeks a chance to get together with other club members who are really into ai and we do stuff we make stuff we also have oh some good stuff coming up Friday Chris Markwater photo guy for our photography show you should come on that Paris you can ask him about what camera you should get I should I really he's a great teacher he would be he would be a good guy to listen to we also have Stacy's book club coming up in at the end of the month a very interesting book what else oh Johnny Jett's gonna make his return he was a regular weekly regular on the radio show talking about about travel and tech, and he will do his thing.

2:32:19Craig Silverman:I've realized I haven't talked to Johnny in so long. So we're going to get Johnny and talk travel.

2:32:29Craig Silverman:So please join the club. We'd love to have you. Twitter.tv slash club. Twit. All of that's possible, made possible by your membership. Paris Motno's pick of the week. You got a few of them here. I got a couple picks the week. I did Creepy Link. I guess I'll plug that we tested five more protein powders after our last thing. It's actually kind of good news. I got hundreds and hundreds of emails from seemingly every reader in America asking me why I didn't test their favorite protein powder. So, I tested the five most requested ones. All of them had low levels of lead, which were low enough for kind of safe daily or near daily consumption, which I think is particularly interesting because a common criticism or response I heard from, frankly, a lot of companies in the supplement space, as well as people who take protein shakes that we found at high amounts of lead, they're all like, well, it's really hard to get lead out of these things.

2:33:32There's always going to be some lead. It's really unrealistic to use consumer reports as really stringent lead standards. And this proves it's not. We tested five products, all chocolate, which could result in maybe more lead in it. And all of them had low, safer, at least, amounts of it, which show it's totally feasible for this industry to produce safe products. Just not every company is doing it. I asked a lot of the, or I asked all the companies the products we tested. A lot of them didn't want to talk, which I thought was weird, because I think this is a pretty easy PR victory. But the two that did respond said how they did this is it's pretty simple.

2:34:14They just test all their ingredients and test every lot of their finished product. And if there's a lot of lead in it or something bad, then they don't send customers the product, which seems like pretty standard operating procedure to me.

2:34:27Craig Silverman:How hard is it to test for lead? I mean, you guys are doing this at Consumer Reports Labs. Is it a difficult test? I mean, it's, I guess you have to actually send it out to its own kind of lab. I think what I heard from some in the industry is that because there isn't a stringent requirement, there's no like strict federal limits basically for the amount of heavy metals, like something like lead permitted in protein powders. Basically what the rules are is the FDA is like supplement makers, you're not supposed to have anything harmful in your products, but you get to decide how much lead counts as harmful and tests to it.

2:35:04Yeah, it really hands off on this. For a lot of companies, what they do, if they're going to do anything, they might reach out to like, there's this kind of third party testing service called NSF International that they have less stringent standards. They say it's good to have up to 10 micrograms per serving of lead. And we think that's like – Good too? You're fine. That's what they will test too. You'll only flag as having too much lead if you're over 10 micrograms per serving. And for context, the FDA says like one of the kind of the point that they reference as like women of childbearing age, but then also all American adults for like lead exposure where it could be a risk is like around like eight something.

2:35:57So it's like, I don't know. I don't think that we should. I don't think that a large amount of lead is good for anybody. and it was heartening to find out that there are like better options out there

2:36:09Craig Silverman:good consumer reports and this one's open to the public this article all of my reporting is open to the public nice um yeah so get on up there um my other brief pick i'll just shout out i mean i'm cannibalizing a pick for next week but such one won't do is uh traders season four everybody the traders is a perfect reality show you should be watching i really love coming dresses up like the campiest uh demonic lord of a manner you've ever heard and it's lovely uh you get to see housewives fight survivor people fight drag race people all while they pretend like they're about to be murdered in a creepy scottish castle it's fantastic do they shoot it in scotland or do they shoot it they shoot it in scotland oh that's nice in a giant mansion yeah nice yeah i think is he scottish oh yeah i think so because i couldn't be it couldn't make up an accent like that that's a real accent don't you think he hosted the webbies many uh years ago it's quite funny quite good yeah he's just a great guy he's got such crazy outfits on the show too i mean they really dress him up in the most outlandish things i think i saw him in cabaret actually on broadway actually was the old studio 54 that they turned into a theater a likely place for him to be very talented uh i had two picks and they're both for you paris yes one is wiki flicks which is a wiki with 35 ,000 public domain films in it.

2:37:50Craig Silverman:You can read the stories of these films and then you can also watch them. Like, did you see Nosferatu when it came out a couple of years ago? Well, wouldn't you like to see the original Nosferatu? That, one of Nick Cage's favorite films. Yeah. And they have a button called the Bechdel test that gives it, I guess, a rating in the Bechdel test. i doubt nosferatu what is the bechdel results i don't know that's the test where you uh you do women talk about men in this movie if or do are they are there is there two women having a conversation about not men not having men yeah yeah oh i see they give it a good badge if it passes the bechdel test they give a badge yes uh in old arizona did not i'm sorry to say oh they've a trip to the moon on here oh the classic jacques yeah okay it says that a trip to the moon passes the bechdel test but is anybody talking it's a silent film of course it does omission is a uh is a virtue yeah there are no women talking in it how about it's a wonderful life i bet that doesn't do women in that movie have oh it's green in the bechdel test that means it's good oh okay so the when it's read in the bechdel test that means it doesn't pass all right so it's a wonderful ice does pass cabinet of dr caligari does not how about mabel's strange predicament i wonder how that's doesn't has no bechdel reading it's only 17 minutes though so this is a chance to see a bunch of public domain films some new ones have come out by the way of course every january 1st yep and uh and this is really good 35 000 movies in wiki flicks uh no i'm sorry i got that wrong 4409 movies i guess i don't know where i got that number i made that number up just up you were damned llm that was an llm well 4 500 movies still is a good number a goodly number the other one uh i think is fantastic wantmymtv.versell.app it is mtv rewind you can now i know you were not born in the mtv era you're smart now but this is mtv did you did it have music on it when you watched it yeah no all the time in my house growing up we'd play mtv just kind of in the background floating through uh this had now i double click any channel that set as your channel i don't know if it's what's going on it did when oh yeah here we go the for instance the first day of mtv you can watch the first day that's fun wouldn't that be cool live aid from 1985 uh after the passing of bobby weir you can watch the grateful for the music bob weir on meeting jerry garcy so this is just a collection of stuff but if you want to really kind of relive mtv they have mtv in the 70s 80s 90s who put this together i don't know but i love it and uh i think all these are youtube videos so uh it's legit and you can uh you can relive your childhood the mtv rewind i always thought that mtv should have a streaming channel where they're playing today's date like 20 years ago yeah exactly what was going on like 20 25 years ago they should just do that on this yeah uh really clever idea and and all this stuff is on youtube now so um flexosaurus rex did it well that answers that uh thanks flexosaurus thanks flexosaurus rex whoever you are mtv rewind uh okay uh now jeff jarvis's pick well i'll go with the one that pisses paris and i both voted for this one let's go with this one which is the bombshell report in the guardian oh asked out on the discovery of microplastics through the human body we want a little good news okay maybe this what do you what do you think of this jeff so the the premise of this report which is a response to the reports we all saw that said they found microplastics in everybody in their brain and stuff is that fat in your body is very hard to distinguish from the kind of microprastic polymers especially the microscopic particles that you would find and they believe that is probably false positives that that the especially in the brain the Guardian has identified seven studies that have been challenged by researchers publishing criticism a recent analysis listed 18 studies that said it had not considered that some human tissue can produce measurements easily confused with the signal given by common plastics the issue is that this is it's useful to be having a discussion about our limits of analysis when it comes to anything, basically, but especially when we're talking about very small particles like this and a relatively new field.

2:43:07However, I think the framing of this is overly broad and overly dismissive of a very large field of research that has a lot going for it. Even the quote in the headline, this is a bombshell report, and much of the most inflammatory quotes throughout the piece uh casting doubt and these studies are from a former dow chemicals engineer who like worked for the companies that put a lot of the microplastics and phthalates in things um i think it's also i mean if you look at the specific negative you can't say there aren't microplastics yeah but like they're like some of these critiques that they're talking about but like don't entirely add up.

2:43:57Like one of the, I believe, studies that they say has people are asking questions about their methodology involves the kind of, the researcher that checked like cadavers' brains that came with the whole spoonful of microplastics thing that stuck in a lot of people's heads. Like he literally found a spoonful of actual plastics in the brain. Like the spoonful analogy was the plastics he found in the cadavers filled a spoonful in one case. So I don't think that you can say that that's like a limit. The analysis of that was incorrect. Let me quote Dr. Dushan Materik at the Heimholtz Center for Environmental Research in Germany, who says, the brain microplastic paper is a joke.

2:44:40Craig Silverman:Fat is known to make false positives for polyethylene. The brain is approximately 60 % fat. Rising obesity levels could be an alternative explanation for the trend. I mean, I think that tells you all you need to there's like a very specific category of like Scientific critic who's like well Maybe the answer could just be rising and obesity levels for everything which I think is a gross Simplification of a number question. There's a lot of plastics in polluting the world I think it's a commentary on media both ends of the story. Yeah When they were supposedly found they took scientific papers that are going to be challenged as they should be challenged because that's how science works and they overdid it.

2:45:23And then here comes the challenge and they're kind of overdoing that. And that's what media always does because we don't understand how to communicate science. And I should put in a plug here that I am affiliated with the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science for just these reasons. God bless Alan Alda. Science is super slow and media wants to be fast. So like those two things are just not compatible. Here's some critiques of this from one of my colleagues who were discussing this yesterday who has been kind of covering this over the last decade, which is that I found some of the critiques quite persuasive, right?

2:45:57Others less so. And I agree this is kind of dramatic framing for what is essentially no one has agreed upon methods for measuring microplastics, so some headlines are probably way overblown. Like, I think that that's basically the takeaway here, and that's fairly uncontroversial. Like, I don't think that anybody would think that's like a bombshell study or that these other ones are a joke. And specifically that researcher you just quoted who called the brain study a joke is literally selling his own, quote unquote, better method for detecting nanoplax sticks on his own LinkedIn. Like, that's his whole thing.

2:46:31So, I feel like that should have been included in there as well if you're going to say that this guy is some objective source on this. Like, yeah, and he's also trying to market what he thinks is a better version of this and sell it to you. um i think that like i don't know i don't entirely know why people are so focused on microplastics given that they are really difficult to properly detect and how little we know about their health harms we know like i mean yeah i think we're all freaked out about because plastic just very clearly seems bad to be there but we know that there are chemicals in plastics like phthalates and bisophenols that like leach out into us and into our food and And we have a lot of research showing the ill effects of that.

2:47:16And I think that that is, I don't know, a way better thing to focus on here than being like, no, the microplastics don't really exist. It's fine. Put plastic in everything. It's just a, I don't know, I'm sorry to take away our good moment of news.

2:47:28Craig Silverman:You can also make a strong case of plastics, which are made from hydrocarbons from fossil fuels, are not a good thing to make anyway because they don't biodegrade and they're made with problematic chemicals. And they're everywhere in our lives. use less plastics is not a bad thing to aim for whether that's in your going into your brain or not uh let's i mean i i try it's so hard just like you paris i don't buy i don't buy water bottles i use a refillable uh bottle when i go to the grocery store we use uh cloth bags instead of the plastic bags the grocery store uh offers uh uh not just for carrying home the groceries but putting the vegetables in too we i mean i just wear every possible eliminate plastics uh that's Nobody would disagree.

2:48:13Craig Silverman:I don't think, except the oil industry. That's a good thing to do. We don't need all these plastics. They're a bad thing. I don't use a plastic toothbrush. I don't use plastic razor blades whenever possible. I try to avoid the use of plastics. Where do you get a non-plastic toothbrush from? You can get bamboo toothbrushes. On airlines, they have wooden ones. Yeah, you can get bamboo toothbrushes. Are the Brussels non-plastic? I use an electric toothbrush because I think that's better for my teeth, made by a company called Suri. They recycle the toothbrush. The toothbrush itself, the cornstarch, the head of the thing, is made out of cornstarch, which you send back to them and they recycle.

2:48:57Craig Silverman:And then the body is repairable, which is really fantastic. You send it back to them and they can take it apart and recycle it or repair it and send it back to you. so i actually really like this thing but uh yeah that's how i try to avoid plastic toothbrushes um same thing with razor blades i just use an electric i switched to electric razor so i wouldn't use uh plastic razor blades now i'm using my ass and i are fading okay fading ass thank you jeff jarvis professor of journalistic are you oh i forgot you had some uh procedure you are you are you doing all right that's next week no i i this is i fell on saturday that's why oh i'm sorry i feel better you took a fall i did take a fall like an idiot i was pulling the um sheets and blankets off the bed to do the wash and standing on a hardwood floor and bare feet and the um i had put the blanket in really securely the week before yeah so my feet went out and i

2:50:05I have the next Wednesday morning. I have the first of my eye. You're going to have the eye patch. That's right. We've got to get eye patches, Liam. I have an eye patch. I will wear it. Yeah. And also a monocle so I can have an eye patch and a monocle. Thank you, Jeff. Jeff Jarvis. Don't forget to get his books.

2:50:28Craig Silverman:The Gutenberg Parenthesis Magazine and everything else. jeffjarvis.com Paris Martineau thank you so much investigative journalist she's working on a string the red string consumer reports thank you all for joining us we do this week in intelligent machines I almost said this week in Google we do intelligent machines every Wednesday MS Now darn it MS Now MS Now has anybody anybody in MSNBC said MSNBC I haven't heard it I have not heard them super impressed that they that's really impressive and given the amount of errors that cbs news has already done oh don't get me started don't get us started yeah sorry we can't we can't bring this up at this don't bring up barry weiss don't please what's his name tony du kippel uh like you have to cope with him cope with him if you go he's gonna be doing a sponsored whiskey hour very soon if you go to uh katie kirk media you'll see me writing about it she invited me to write about it nice i can't wait to read it exciting it's sad i mean that was the tiffany network but that's another story for another it's now the capital montane network yeah uh we do the show every wednesday 2 p.m actually i'm trying to do by the way i don't want to do p.m anymore because that's latin i don't want to do o 'clock because that's medieval i'm going to say we it's at

2:51:53Craig Silverman:1400 we do it at 1400 pacific 1700 etc eastern time that is a 2200 utc yeah see i'm going to do 24 o 'clock from now on all my clocks are 24 2400 o 'clock is crazy no it's 2200 2200 2200 no i didn't say o 'clock i said 2200 anymore there's no o 'clock somebody reminded me that's of the clock we were talking about this right and we don't want we don't it's not post meridian what the hell does that mean no 1400 pacific tradition tradition is okay i am a man of the new ai generated century that's all i want to say we will see you you can watch us live uh in the discord if you're a club member also on youtube tiktok no not tiktok youtube twitch x facebook linkedin and kick tiktok proved too difficult we have lots of barriers to streaming uh after the fact on demand versions of the show at the website twitter tv slash im uh and um you can also get it on youtube if you want to share it with friends and family.

2:53:07Craig Silverman:Best thing to do, though, subscribe to your favorite podcast client. That way you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you tomorrow, next week, this is going to be the show. But I got to get my eye patch on the proper side. Which eye will it be on, Jeff? Left. Left eye. Okay, we all need to left eye. Two weeks later, the right. We do. Oh, God, that's so confusing. What was that? I'm going to have, it might'll be ugly as white plastic thing with. Oh no. Yeah. Cup. Yeah. You should get one of those dog things like the Elizabethan collars. Keep you from licking your wounds.

2:53:47Thank you for joining us. We'll see you next time on intelligent machines.

2:53:51Craig Silverman:Do not lick your wounds kids. Hey everybody, Leo Laporte here. It's your last chance. We're in the final stretch of our 2026 audience survey. So important for us both to know you better because we don't gather information about you except this one time a year. And it helps us with advertising. And we collect no personal information. We just want to know about you in general. So if you would help us out, if you haven't filled out our survey yet, this is the time. It closes January 31st. Twit.tv slash survey26. It helps us improve our shows. And it helps us make money. And we need to do both. So survey is at twit.tv slash survey26.

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