The Gray Area: The End of the Human Internet

0:00Kara Swisher:Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. We're off for the Fourth of July holiday, but we've still got something special for you today. We're bringing you an episode of The Gray Area, another great Vox Media podcast. It's a weekly podcast that looks at culture, tech, and politics with an eye towards philosophy. In this episode, host Sean Illing talks with Atlantic writer Charlie Wirtzel about why so much of the internet now feels artificial, manipulated, or unreal. Sean's interviews are always insightful, and Charlie is a friend of this show, so stick around.

0:36This is A Gray Area. I am Sean Illing. My guest today is Charlie Warzel. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of their newsletter, Galaxy Brain. Charlie wrote a piece about AI and what he calls a crisis of agency, which is this feeling that so much of our lives online are being shaped and distorted by bots, algorithms and various AI generated content. Everything feels a little fake, a little manipulated. If you spend any time at all online, you know what I'm talking about. So we get into why the internet feels so strange right now and whether it's still possible to build spaces online that feel genuinely human.

1:15Hope you enjoy it.

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2:55Kara Swisher:Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects. Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more. Charlie Warzel, welcome back to the show. Thank you for having me. Yeah, man, it's been a while. Let's talk about your recent piece in The Atlantic.

3:29There is a lot of AI discourse right now, but this piece is sort of getting at a part of it that seems a little under-discussed, which is the increasingly weird bot-haunted internet we all live inside now. So let's just start there. What is the feeling you are describing in this piece? The feeling that I'm describing is one of disorientation, but also paranoia, I think. I think what I feel a lot on the internet right now is this paranoia. And I started the piece with a callback to a piece by the internet tech writer, Max Reed, who wrote New York Magazine back in 2018 about what he called the inversion, which is this tipping point where, you know, the bot and fake content, content made synthetically instead of just by, you know, you or me, human beings, may like surpass some of, you know, the content that was made.

4:37we all make and that the internet would sort of be just a majority fake to some degree or majority you know automated and that at the time i remember was a real revelation for a lot of people this this feeling that oh whoa like so you're telling me there's all these people using these sock puppet sock puppet accounts on twitter or facebook or wherever that you know there's there's these fake bots trying to sell me stuff, that a lot of websites are populated with, you know, automated comments or whatever it is. And now that's honestly a pretty quaint idea that someone wouldn't be as aware of that because in the generative AI age or whatever we're going to call it or whatever we're in basically since, you know, the arrival of ChatGPT, but even before it, you have an internet now that is jammed full of synthetic content in all sorts of ways.

5:37So you have synthetic text, you know, all the, um, all the things that we would call AI slop, right. And now you just have people generating whole sites with the click of a button, right. To promote something that either isn't real or that is, you know, a scam or, you know, like pretty awful. You have that happening on this vast scale, so much so that Google search, most of what you see is going to be garbage, right? Then you have synthetic music, AI slop videos and things, you know, clogging these feeds. And you have organizations that are doing a new style of content marketing, of viral marketing, in which they spin up fake accounts to seed algorithms with information that is befitting their client, right?

6:38So if you're an artist, you can have these viral marketing firms that will spam TikTok with your song so that it becomes the algorithm thinks, oh, this is a popular song. And then when other people start posting it, it gets priority inside the feeds. So it's this idea that like what people are really doing now is they're not marketing to human beings. They're marketing to these algorithms. The end result of all of that, right, this idea that everything around you might be fake, it creates this sense of paranoia. It's not just that there's not one thing that people are talking or thinking about.

7:19It's that you can make a convincing case that anything you don't like or that you think is suspect or that is weird in some way is a psyop. It's fake. Somebody has seeded that, right? And that, to me, is a change. It is a dramatic change in the way that people behave online. And it really affects everything from our politics to our culture because you walk around with this feeling. There's this great term, the liar's dividend, right? Which is the idea that you can, when there's so much garbage out there, people can cast dispersions on things that are real, right? And say, oh, I think it's fake.

7:58I think it's a lie, right? You can sort of completely blur and warp reality. And I think that that's the way that culture works now. So not that we can know this really with any precision, but if you just had to guess, if you just had a big giant pie chart of all the shit on the Internet, like roughly what percentage of that pie chart do you think would be synthetic stuff? It's such a good question. You can't take the temperature of the entire Internet, right? But you're seeing this play out in music with, I interviewed on my podcast this guy who is the front man of a very beloved progressive rock band, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.

8:43And they took their music off Spotify in protest of Spotify funding, their founder funding a defense company. and when they left they had domain squatters basically king gizzard squatters who came in and took their page essentially by creating ai slop music that sounded similar to their stuff and was making money off their streams and all that and had to you know fight spotify to get it taken down which they did you have you you have so many different playlists on spotify that are i've done some reporting into this you go into especially like like jazz or just instrumental type music classical music and you start clicking around on some of those artists and you don't see anything any human beings there right like you don't you go to these these you know their youtube page and then the youtube page is just you know like like the when you don't when you don't put a profile picture on it right and it only directs you back to the spotify link there's no you know manager page or anything like that or label and you start to realize oh well then i guess i guess that's i guess that's fake right and so you have so you're i'm listening to jazz music that i think is made by another human being and it's not and again it that sense of paranoia creeps in when you start to recognize some of some of these things i think a lot of us want to walk through the world and say listen i've got reasonably good taste i've got reasonably good judgment i'm not sitting around listening to you know fake jazz music and you might be right we all might be it's it's not a it's not a question anymore of taste because there's there's so much volume that is just so strange you know i mean i i know what you mean but it's very hard to name You know, somehow the internet feels fake and real and dead and alive all at the same time.

10:44You know, people are clearly still there, but you're never really sure who or what is speaking. You're never sure who made the thing you're looking at or why it appeared in front of you. It seems like we should definitely take a step back maybe and just think about how bizarre this situation is for our primate brains. Yeah. And that, you know, was kind of coming off the backs of a lot of the early social media backlash to the election of Donald Trump and people starting to look into, well, what is happening? How is Facebook changing this? Right. And then you had the Cambridge Analytica scandal that same year, 2018, where there was what turned out to be, honestly, a bit of an overreaction to what is known as psychographic profiling.

11:34I was part of that overreaction. I think I was, too, because we were all figuring out. And this speaks to some of these platforms and their prominence in our lives, right? It makes a lot of sense to want to assign them an extreme amount of power. You know, they're connecting billions of people. They have all this money. They're building these tools of surveillance to track our every move. There's reason to be paranoid. You know, Cambridge Analytica was in the business of selling you the idea that they were changing people's minds left and right all the time, that they could come into a place and affect an election because it's a great tactic.

12:14Like, not coincidentally, that's what the artificial intelligence companies have done for the last four years or so, right? They started with the Doomer marketing. They started with the, we're going to build something so powerful. It's a Manhattan project for, you know, for words, et cetera. And so. Yeah, we're going to blow up the world, but subscribe wherever you get your AI. Right. It's like, okay, cool. interesting choice i think we used to think of the internet as an engine of connection right of of sharing information of a real of like a human to human thing but it was it was still deception and fakery fakery of all kinds is is obviously a volume game and artificial intelligence degenerative artificial intelligence boom that we've seen it's it's a tool of scale you push a button you you get a moby dick you know sized uh tome of words if you want right you can make the same video uh and a lot of creators do this 200 ways in 15 minutes me talking doing my thing okay now make that put me in 200 locations let's spam the internet with it, see what the algorithm likes, see what people like, and then use that.

13:43It's like, it is a tool for volume. And that volume is synthetic. I mean, maybe if the question back in, you know, 2018, 2019 was, you know, is this a bot or not? I mean, now it just seems like more fundamentally, what the hell kind of environment even is this? Right? And like, we don't even have a name for it yet. It's just weird and different. It's not the old internet. It's something else. And in the same way, I don't really think we have a real name for this period of history. Yeah. I don't think we really have a name for whatever this new internet is, but it's like fundamentally different.

14:22It's a different thing altogether. together it is and it's what is fascinating to me is the way in which it it functions in the in the what's interesting to me is the way that it is a outgrowth in some ways of of the the post-truth moment like it we've created we've had this environment, right, where we're all given access to so much information that we can rationalize it any way we want. It's one of my hobby horses that nobody knows what anyone is doing online. And that is a problem, right? If I say something as a, you know, a columnist at the Atlantic and put something out, the main beef that I get is you're living in some stupid bubble.

15:20That's not real. That's not representative of the information experience, right? You're seeing all of this. Get off Twitter, man. Like, it's a bubble. Like, you're just seeing this. That's totally valid and totally true. But there's also a lot of people who are dismissing certain things that are real because they don't want to see them. And also because it doesn't reflect their algorithmic experience of the internet. And I think it's really difficult when you don't know what anyone else's experience is like, right? You walk around a little bit feeling kind of insane. Like I feel this sometimes when I plug into whatever discourse or conversation and, you know, I write about the internet.

16:10I'm not terminally online in my real life. Like I go there for the purpose of understanding it, you know, reporting on it, studying, seeing things that bubble up. I like to be outside in my other times. People constantly will say like, dude, you got to get off the internet. And I think that that is in some ways a response to what you're saying makes me uncomfortable, not only because I maybe disagree with the information, but because your experience is clearly so different than mine that it's it's awkward for me to imagine that we are existing inside the same culture or that we have to interact with each other and, and, and talk about these things.

16:52Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's not really post truth at this point. It's, um, post real or post human, like how much of the internet at this point is basically just like machines performing humanity back at us under the guise of being people, right? So this, for the piece, I referenced this researcher named Aiden Walker. He's a Gen Z online researcher. He is extremely smart about memes. And, you know, it's a great example of someone who takes something that's like kind of silly in concept and actually gets to like the philosophical human understandings of all this. and he came up with this theory so what we've been talking about uh with the you know there's machines and algorithms are just kind of like running the whole show right that's been referred to as the dead internet theory the idea that there's really not a lot of humanity on the internet it's all the bots and we kind of just sit there aiden walker took that a step further recently and he his theory it's it's somewhat colorful is that it's like the cuck internet theory say more yes i will have to say more which is that the product the synthetic product of these artificial intelligence things be it like you know a slop video of of a cat you know dancing on a street in paris or whatever right that a bunch of people are flicking through you know instagram reels or Facebook and just, you know, hitting like or whatever, or, oh, that's cute.

18:32I'm going to forward that to whatever you have that, which is synthetic. It's machines. It's machine made. It's trained off of all, all of these other machines. Then you have the algorithm, which is predisposed to like that stuff because that stuff is all trained off of what the algorithm has already shown you and given you, right? You have this, when you, what's happening is those things are meeting. Those things are in the room interacting with each other. And the human is sitting in the corner in the chair watching that. The human is the consenting observer to an interaction, a melding of sorts of these two machines that have been predisposed to do this in service of viral advertising revenue.

19:22And that is a lot of what the internet is. The internet isn't dead. The internet is really active. It's moving. It's doing stuff. These two elements that aren't human are, you know, doing it all night long. And we, the human, are just sort of sitting there like, okay, yeah, no. I'll have some more, I guess. Yeah, sure. You know, we are consenting to it in some sense. Other people would argue that, you know, we're being coerced. You know, on the old internet, you had the capacity to explore. Truly, right? You would stumble and click around and kind of get lost. And now so much of it is just a giant sprawling machine designed to mainline into your veins as much content as possible, content optimized for engagement.

20:12So you're not really exploring or participating in that way. You are just a passive product. I mean, as you put it to piece, right, we basically now exist humans to feed data into the machinery. That is what we are doing. And it is keeping us stupefied and entertained along the way. But that's fundamentally what we have been reduced to. yeah i don't know that all is is lost yet but i think that what i described this moment as is as a as a crisis of agency not that it's it's over but we are all really concerned about our future agency like i don't think these tools are powerful enough yet like i think it's giving these tools in Silicon Valley, it's buying too much into the narrative to say, we're all automatons.

21:04Like, you know, I think from a culture standpoint of consuming, you know, endless scroll vibe, like the best example of this is you go on a social media app or something like that, or you're just wasting time on your phone and you look up and you go, man, what? Like, that was not how I wanted to use those 20 minutes, right? But that's like that feeling of regret that you might have. That's an example of that consuming part of the agency. But on the side of jobs and, you know, and AI job loss, things like that, I don't think these tools yet, I mean, maybe if you're, you know, a programmer or someone in this highly technical space where um these agentic coding platforms are doing such a good job of cranking out inhuman amounts of code so quickly i can understand that there's fears but it's more the anxiety of what is coming we are in this this crisis of like yeah a generative ai is making us ask these, this really weird question, which is what is a human for?

22:17Right. And that's, that's, that's a wild thing to have, you know, publicly traded companies asking you, right? What is the human for? And I think that is what we are feeling right now as a, as a society, whether you are a booster who is worried and has a little bit of the doomerism stuff in it, or you're somebody who's out protesting data centers in your town. A lot of it is centered around this idea of, like, what is a human for?

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26:01I wanted to go back to the idea of psyops, right? Maybe the answer really is just the paranoia. But that word, psyop, has broken containment. What exactly does that mean? And also, why has it become so prevalent now? Is it just everyone's paranoid of everything? Well, PSYOP is like a, you know, it's kind of like a military grade, you know, it's an operation that is meant to, you know, trick you psychologically. I don't have the definition, you know, in front of me. Like a clandestine manipulation campaign. Yes. Basically. Great way to put it. And I think that, again, when we talk about anything that's happened in a technological, cultural sense, it all builds off of the stuff that came before it, right?

26:55So, like, that's why the Cambridge Analytica history, I think, is really important here, right? It primes people to see these things as experiments, right? These tech companies made news because they did experiments. They're not, they were experiments in service of like, you know, trying to tweak their platforms to be better at advertising. Like they weren't nefarious backroom, you know, horrible experiments in brainwashing and mind control. But again, I think we get to this situation, we're seeing it so much right now in AI. where all these people in Silicon Valley are like, why does every person in the country who's not deeply involved in these niche discourses or working at these places, why does everyone just reflexively hate artificial intelligence?

27:53Why does it poll worse than Donald Trump? This stuff is so cool. I'm racking my brain. Why doesn't this? It's like, well, you spent a lot of time talking about how dangerous it is, how civilizationally perilous it could be in the wrong hands, right? How if we don't put the exact right guardrails up, awful things can happen. We could, you know, we could destroy our economy overnight, right? One of these things could, you know, could take over and manipulate the stock market and crash everything. You hear all of this stuff. And the thing is, when you repeat a lot of ominous crap, over time, people start to internalize it.

28:37And that is, to go back to the psyops, that is part of it, right? We hear that these companies are so powerful. They're so able to manipulate consumer sentiment. They're so able to drive people to make purchases. They're so useful to drive people to go out to campaign rallies, and then they get hooked on whatever, and then they start getting in these groups, right? You know, QAnon was this fringe message board thing that was kind of silly and stupid. And Facebook groups became this gathering place during the pandemic for otherwise pretty average Joe, normal type people to engage with this thing.

29:25And it became this cultural, tribal, community-based ideology that broke contain and radicalized a whole bunch of people. When you see and you have all of these past examples of how this technology can get away from us and change us, people start to internalize that. And now people reach for this idea of the PSYOP in the same way that people reach for QAnon, right? It's a way to explain something that you don't want to grapple with or that is uncomfortable or that you don't understand or that you can't easily assign something to, right? the the whole the most recent psyop thing controversy is over this band geese this indie band who are very popular they've been around for a little bit but they're they got very popular the last year with this album they were everywhere they are as a band using some of these viral apparently viral marketing firms or whatever that is its own thing the the core issue with the band geese is that they're polarizing their singer has this like warbly kind of sometimes atonal voice they're like a little bit hard to listen to for for some people and other people think that they're the velvet underground right it's the super polarizing thing where someone listens to it and has two completely diametrically opposed opinions and instead of trying to grapple with that it's so much easier to just say, if you hate geese, yeah, man, it's a freaking psyop.

31:14Well, the problem with paranoia, it kind of becomes its own trap, right? I mean, like, if you think everything is manipulated, then you just become manipulable in a totally different way, right? Like, but where is that line between healthy skepticism and losing your damn mind online? Because I think a lot of us are living uncomfortably right on that border all the time. It also doesn't help that we live in an era of great corruption, of great conspiracy theorizing, right? You look at what has happened with Donald Trump and cryptocurrencies and things like that, and you see an unbelievable amount of corruption just happening in plain sight, like rug pulls from the president of the United States and his family.

32:02and no real accountability for that, such that society just goes, ah, well, nevertheless.

32:11And after a while, again, people are going to internalize these lessons and say, well, if this is what I can see, if this is what I am allowed access to, then I'm pretty sure this is just how the world works. And so the things that I don't have the tools to explain that's you know in some ways it's a rational response to some of these things that are happening even if they tend to be irrational theories What makes something slop? Is it just bad AI content? It really feels like slop is broken contain in terms of nomenclature I'm inclined to say that it follows that pornography standard of you know it when you see it right you know it when you see it I think what for me the way that I think about slop what a sentence the way that I deem something as slop would be having a kind of contempt for its audience right like uh you're you're an idiot you don't care you're just scroll like i'm gonna yeah here's shrimp jesus you know dummy like that when you feel that thing from someone who's like i'm doing click volume ad arbitrage from the philippines from this, you know, center building as many different Facebook pages to spam, you know, unsuspecting older people without this media literacy to just, you know, oh, yeah, like, you know, did you see that Garth Brooks spoke out about the Supreme Court case, you know, at this sold out concert in South Africa, you know, like something totally random that didn't happen and just like shoving it down people's faces because not because they have any particular political ideology, but they're just trying to make a quick buck.

34:16That is what I consider to be slop. You know, I think when you look at very recently, there's been a spate of either sanctioned or non-sanctioned campaign videos that have come out like for Spencer Pratt in Los Angeles is one of him like as Batman, totally AI generated, would have taken, you know, millions of dollars to make Now somebody can just make it on the outside. The campaign can promote it for itself. It goes viral. I don't see that. It is slop, technically, but I see it slightly different, right? That's almost just propaganda or all that stuff, those Lego videos of Donald Trump coming out of Iran to sort of knock on the U.S.