404 Media Live: How AI Is Destroying the Internet

24:48This was an image that was posted to 4chan of a furniture store being disassembled and just a picture of a showroom, essentially, without any furniture in it, which just gives you a creepy, uncanny feeling. So from there, that turned into several different independent media projects, and then also has turned into this movie directed by a 20-year-old, which is kind of mind-blowing. It had a budget of$10 million, and this opening weekend it made, I think,$80 or $90 million. I saw it yesterday. It's a great movie. And I read an interview with Kane Parsons where he said that 90 % of the effects in the film were practical.

25:32And you can really tell when you watch the movie that they're in a real space surrounded by real objects. Disney, which is a corporation that used to have a deal with OpenAI, has expressed a lot of interest in adding AI into their workflows there was also uh amazon recently announced a show an animation show with um that was going to be their foray into ai animation and one of the principal animators on it this man named jorge gugierrez was harassed so badly for being a part of that project that he has he has stepped off but he has also said animations are ai's already in the animation pipeline like it's inevitable but what i feel is i look at a movie like backrooms and how much money it made and And I also look at like I Love Boosters, where you can tell in I Love Boosters that a lot of the effects are practical.

26:23And also when it would necessitate VFX in some way, they do stuff like claymation, stuff that's really physical and obviously looks like the point isn't realism. It looks fake, but it looks like a movie. And audiences are really responding to the evidence of a human being, essentially. I think I've also noticed this just with my website Aftermath it isn't just that people want to sign up for a website because they think our writing's good they like knowing for a fact that human beings wrote it and it gives them an ease like a sense of ease to know that we are not using AI we will never use AI and the words that you read on your page they come from real human beings

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32:01Jason, do you want to talk about on that note why AI is breaking your brain? Because it is like the exhaustion of like, you can let your guard down. You can think, a human wrote this, so I don't have to like fact check it or think about it. And you wrote recently about just like AI, vigilance, breaking your brain. Yeah, so in the lobby, there's zine that I made two days ago in my garage. A human made that. Yeah, you can tell, definitely. It's very lo-fi. It's not the best. There's the cool ass in the back if you need any reason to pick it up. There's the cool ass in there. Yeah, but basically inside it is an article I wrote a few weeks ago that I was walking my dog in Venice.

32:43I live in Venice, and I was listening to a podcast that I had been listening to for like years. And the woman narrator just like suddenly started saying, like, it's not just that you want to make sure that you're not paying taxes. It's also that blah, blah, blah. And it was like using these formations that are very common in AI writing that it's not just this, it's that. And she did it like 14 times in a row. And I was like, this is a human, I know this is a human being because I've been listening to this person for years, but she wrote her script with AI and I can tell, like, I wasn't even trying to pick that up, but like my brain was like, oh, like I can tell that she did that.

33:26And it's not that, well, there you go. So, okay. I went, this is it though. I went to write the article. I went to write the article and why I didn't like it. And I was like, it's not just that. And I was like, I'm doing it. I'm doing it. My brain is doing it. Did you say you were going to delve into the topic more? I did. I don't use that word. I don't, I don't, that's not in my vocabulary really, but that's the thing. It's like these, these machines are trained on real human writing. They have these patterns, it's pattern recognition, they start doing it. And I don't really want to be like the AI police, the AI cops being like, did my colleague write this using AI?

34:05Sam, did you send that email? No. But I get all these emails from like readers and things like that. And I was like, or PR people like, please write about my company. I was like, this is AI generated. Like you didn't put any effort into this. But what I noticed is that my brain is doing these like constant machinations. Like, is this real? Is this AI? Is this real? Is this AI? Do I care if it's real? Do I care if it's AI? Is it low stakes? Like some of the stuff that I showed you up there, I don't really like any of it, but some of it now that I'm getting, I'm like, eh, that's not so bad. Is that okay that I like it?

34:38And I feel like everyone is doing this to some degree when they go on the internet. And I think it's, it's pretty maddening, honestly. And I guess I don't, I think that it is undeniable that artificial intelligence is changing the world at the moment. It's like, there's so much money being put into it. Like people are losing their jobs because of it. You are encountering it. Like, I think we can resist it, I think that you can be very human and sort of try to cut through the noise in that way. But like companies are firing tens of thousands of people at once because they're like, well, we replaced you with a robot.

35:20And so I don't think it's something that's just going to like suddenly go away. But this article is basically about like, how do we deal with this? Because we are in a situation now where everything we encounter on the internet, but also in real life, Like I see menus, like I'm like, this is AI generated. A lot of Spencer Pratt's campaign materials. Can we talk about Spence? Oh my God, please. Let's talk about Spence. Yeah, please save me. Let's talk about Spence. How anyone trusts him when he was on the hills? We have like documented evidence of what he's like as a human being. Anyway. Do you want to get into Spencer?

35:55Because you, this has also been right here. Yeah, so I mean, obviously Spencer Pratt running for mayor of LA. I don't know if everyone here is like familiar with the type of campaign that he is running. but the type of campaign that he is running is one that is predicated on going viral repeatedly on the internet using AI generated videos where he's like wearing a Batman outfit and he's like attacking Karen Bass like at a like Illuminati meeting. And, you know, the thing is, is that this he keeps going viral. He's getting tons of attention. It's unclear whether any of this attention is like from people in Los Angeles or whether it's like Silicon Valley, AI boosters and Elon Musk on Twitter and so on and so forth.

36:42But he's gotten like real buzz by doing this. and it feels like, like one, the new way of kind of like campaigning, but then two, a lot of these videos he's actually not making. It's like his fans are making them. He's picking up the ones that he thinks are popular or like, I don't know, make him look like he owns the libs the most or something. And then like he's posting those. And so it's almost this situation where he's just like grabbing stuff off the internet and using it. And I don't really know what to say beyond that other than it feels very bleak and dire. And I don't really know. It's like so decentralized at this point.

37:23It reminds me a lot of an article I read in the New York Times a couple months ago that I responded to on Aftermath about AI romance novels. And there were a lot of, there were like three authors in there that said they use AI in some part of the process of writing romance novels. But then I did a little bit of digging into the first author that was quoted most extensively, who coincidentally sells a course to teach you how to write a romance novel with AI. And she essentially writes just as many books as possible, churning them out formulaically, and they all sell maybe 30 copies each. And then you look on Goodreads, and they all have one or two stars, maybe.

38:04People don't actually like reading them. but it takes something that is like real like something that's real people like reading these books they may give the people comfort they make them happy and then it's reducing it just to its most cynical components you know campaigning as just i need to be the most popular it doesn't really even matter what i'm saying or the how i am owning the libs but if someone makes content for me and I look good then I'm just going to recirculate that and it feels I don't know it makes me depressed because it feels like there's some kind of social contract breaking down there like I I want to I don't want to be in a community I am working on a romance novel right now and I don't want to be in a community with authors that want to take this shortcut I like to write words because I love writing and I love the craft and sometimes it makes me want to bang my head against the wall but like that's like what makes writing good and fun i've talked to programmers who say i know that clod code can write a lot of basic programs faster than i can but i code because i like the craft of coding yeah and i don't want to offload that to a machine and here where it's about like advocating for an entire city it just feels disgusting like it gives me the ick like hugely and I feel an intense disconnect with with people who find that appealing well hold on

39:33Dexter Thomas:you're not just writing a romance novel you signed a book deal right yeah I'm tentative publication date next year next the fall uh don't undersell it come on yeah no come on level up for romance is coming from Mira Books next fall yeah it's um I have always wanted to write a novel and to see these authors that are essentially saying that ai novels are inevitable eventually everyone will use ai and part of the process if it's idea generation which is like ai doesn't have any original ideas definitionally um and or or proofreading or something um frequently like it's like you don't even like writing you don't even like writing why do you want to be an author if you want to use something to think for you to create this product but it's made me sort of confront this fact that like a lot of people actually do want to skip all of the hard parts and just have the success it does sound really appealing when you put it that way right like it is um a tool that appeals so directly to scammers and i now just aesthetically associate these images and that kind of writing with someone who's trying to pull the wool over my eyes in some way well let me okay so this is man there's a lot here so that is that brings me back though to what we were talking about earlier though which is it's the meta we've realized that the meta is just volume yeah it's volume and right you know what wayne grisky you miss a hundred you know 100 % of the shots that you don't take.

41:14Dexter Thomas:Just take a million shots. One of them will go in. They don't have to be good shots. You just like hit the puck in this general direction, which AI can do that for you. You can hit the puck in general direction for you. One of these things is going to go in, and that's it. I mean, you know, Spencer Pratt thing, not to make a too big of a deal out of this, but you know, that model that you're talking about, which is other people posting, you know, making clips for you, that's the Andrew Tate model. That's the Andrew Tate model, which is just to say that it's not really about having anything specific to say.

41:44Dexter Thomas:It's about getting a bunch of other people to make clips for you, and then you promote those clips, and those will go viral. And the person who's making the clips, quote-unquote, big scare quotes here, everybody wins. I think society loses, to be very clear here. Everybody wins, right? But I think, okay, to talk about another game thing, though, I'm not a good chess player at all. but one of the things that I hear from chess players is that they can recognize like a really good chess player can recognize when somebody's setting up a particular move like they know what okay I see what you're doing there right so if I the thing we're talking about here where you know people want human connection and they want to feel human connection I think if I'm to look at this from the perspective of an AI booster, right?

42:36Dexter Thomas:You know, take 100 steps back here. I think what is happening here is that, yes, maybe some of us in here truly care about the craft of films. Maybe some of us in here truly care about movies. That Venn diagram isn't necessarily a circle, though, right? Maybe some of you really, really, really care about filmmaking. Maybe some of you really, really, really care about writing. Maybe some people really care about food. There's a couple restaurants here, which I will not name, which I know the people who own them and I've talked to them and they'll tell me and I talked to them when they were opening they were saying man we make this really handcrafted food it's all organic or whatever and I look at the menu and all the imagery is AI generated food is very important to them visual art doesn't matter it's decoration we've gotten to a point where if you ask for organic food you're a snob that's weird really like seriously like and and i'm kind of one of those people like if you tell me like i only eat organic tomatoes like bro come on man give me the chemicals seriously like give me all the chemicals for real but i think this is what's happening i think that the move that's being made and i don't think there's like some you know group of ai people that are you know standing to make money but if i was thinking from that perspective it is this some people will resist in some directions, but they won't resist for everything.

44:01Dexter Thomas:Not everybody really cares. Like, I really care about music. You play AI music around me. We're probably not friends anymore. You know, like the images, like I might give you a pass. Kraft macaroni and cheese, let's go. Like, I don't care. Like AI that up, like make it more artificial. I don't care. Right. But this is what I'm talking about is that not everyone, not every individual is going to push back on everything and want human in everything. That is the move that's being set up. Now the problem, so okay, what's the counter move? Bro, I don't know. That's the problem. Sometimes you're playing chess and you're like, damn, that's a good move.

44:41Dexter Thomas:I'm not really sure what to do about that. But I think it's good to know what move is being set up and I think that is the structure that's being put up. Again, there is a the bet being made is that not every human being is going to demand humans in every aspect of their art. Yeah, there is a video game that is very popular and very successful. It's an extraction shooter called Ark Raiders. And my cousin loves this game. When this game was first released, the developers were using AI voice acting for some of the, they're called barks, when characters say things off screen, like, oh, a grenade, you know, that kind of thing.

45:20And if you're not really cognizant of how video games are made, Like you might think, oh, having AI barks is probably fine. You know, an AI voice going, oh, you got me, is probably not that bad. But there's a whole industry of real human beings that do that for a living. And they normally get paid for that. And like now that industry is beginning to shrink. And what was hilarious, though, is when arc readers started making a lot of money, suddenly the development team to win back social goodwill from other gamers were like, we're going to replace all those AI voice lines. We realize that actually human voice acting is just better.

45:58And I find that really interesting. Because they know they can cut good press and PR from websites like Polygon or Kotaku writing art creators, developers to remove AI voice lines. But also, you decided that human labor was not worth it in the first place. So if you already knew that human voice acting was better, why didn't you just hire a voice actor? well I think that's um it's a good question but I I think that's the thing is like the the economics of all of this is like that's why we try to focus so much on like what is the economic incentive behind driving all of this and I think like we we do use AI in different ways at 404 Media, but not generative AI, not like that.

46:50It's just like Google Search is AI. Google Maps is AI. Like, there's different translation. In animation, line stabilization is a tool that uses AI, like, predictions. And that is something that animators really, really love. But these different AI tools have been... Translation is a heavy topic, too, man. Woof. No, but like... Well, it's been injected into every part of Adobe software, just using the internet, using different types of machine learning and these sorts of things. And not all of it is large language models. Actually, a lot of the most useful stuff is not. But I think that each person sort of needs to decide what is their line for what is your creative process going to be or what types of AI are you going to use in your work and how does one abstain from it or resist it if they want to?

47:49I did an article a year ago basically being like, the journalistic pivot to AI is not going to work because big media companies, they're like, we are going to have robots write our articles. And something that I think about a lot is it takes so much time and effort to gain credibility and trust and it takes zero seconds to ruin it. It's like some weirdo wrote a book recently and it's like half of the things in it were AI generated and the New York Times wrote about it and so on and so forth. And it's just like, I don't want to read that book anymore. Like I'd forget the name of it, but it's about how AI is changing everything.

48:27Half of the sources in it are not real. And it's like, cool, good. You're not wrong. It is changing everything. Yeah. For sure it is. Yeah. And like we've made active decisions too. it's like so you have like hired people to do like actually like translating YouTube videos when you were investigating a lot of this AI stuff. It's like I need someone who's like a native speaker of this language because the auto generation that the AI is doing on YouTube is not good or like if we wanted to, we did the zine last year that was about ice action in LA specifically and flock and surveillance and we hired translators to translate the zine into Spanish because the work that it would take to run that through like Google Translate and then we would have to hire somebody anyway to check it because you can't trust the output.

49:13Well, we could have run it through Google Translate and then just published it. And then someone would be like, you screwed this up. Like, I don't trust you use AI, like whatever. But yeah, I mean, to your point, like a lot of the AI slop articles that I've written, the sort of the industry behind it, if you will, is in India. And so there's all these YouTube videos in Hindi about like, here's how to generate videos about the AI, about shrimp Jesus and the LA wildfires. And here's what Americans care about in all of this. And it's like, I don't speak Hindi. I don't speak every language that these YouTube videos are happening in.

49:49And I guess in an ideal world, I would hire someone to watch all of those and tell me like what's going on here. But honestly, it was like hundreds of hours of videos. And so what I did was I watched them using the auto translate feature, which I guess is AI. And then I was like, this seems interesting. Let me now pay a human being to actually translate what they're saying. Like I was using it to sort of get the vibe of what was happening in any given video. And like, to me, I felt like that wasn't, I mean, it was the YouTube built-in like translation service. Like I didn't feel like I was like sinning, if you will, like to do that.

50:30But, and then we had that like extra layer and same, like I've read a lot about Flock, the automated license plate readers that Sam just mentioned. And it's like all of the things that are happening in that world, all the resistance to Flock right now is happening at city councils and like around the country. And they're happening in these meetings that are like four hours long. And I'm not watching like four hour long meetings from like 50 different cities every week. I'm opening up the transcription tool on YouTube, Control-F for Flock, and then I'm watching like part of it. And I'm like, oh, this is the meeting where they talk about Flock.

51:06Because sometimes it's a four-hour meeting. I thought they were gonna talk about Flock and they don't at all. And I was like, cool. That's four hours of my life I'm not getting back. Do you guys still use Otter for transcribing interviews? Otter, I'm horrible, horrible at transcribing interviews because I hate the sound of my own voice and I just don't wanna hear it. And Otter is very useful for just turning a really long audio file on my phone into something that I can go back into, control F for certain keywords, and then sort of double check the transcription to make sure it's 100 % accurate.

51:38And like, otherwise I'd be stuck here not transcribing anything because I don't want to hear my stupid voice. It's like these things are getting worse as time goes on because they're ingesting more and more of the same bad shit. and so like and now otter is also not to just sit here and dump on otter but they should fix this stuff um it's like they're in just they're injecting more and more ai prompts it's like every part of the screen now is like do you want ai to do this you want ai to summarize this no i don't i just want you to do the thing that i pay for and then i want to actually do the work of looking through the transcript and looking through the interview that i just did and being like this is important to me i don't want you to tell me what's important uh google started writing email responses like pre-writing email responses for me and I like wanted to shoot my computer with a gun I was so angry that day because it's like I wouldn't say that number one uh and two like I can tell just from a context that you don't know what I'm talking about what this email is about and I had you have to go deep into its settings to turn off all like AI features and even then you still have a prompt for Gemini right at the top of the screen replacing the place where I usually would click to go get Google Calendar, so my mouse over accidentally all of the time.

52:49Dexter Thomas:So this is the issue, though, I think, is that we're all a very particular group of people here that are on the stage, but also everybody who, like, the fact that you came here, you're a very particular group of people. I mean, okay. Actually, going back to, like, the art thing, we were talking about, like, the act of creation, right? How many of you would refuse to listen to music that was created with AI? Okay. How many of you would refuse to read a book that was created with AI? Okay. How about watch a movie that was created with AI? Okay. Some of these are the same. Some of these are not. What about use a computer program that was partially created with AI?

53:31Dexter Thomas:Wow. How am I going to know, but then less people, but then, okay, what about the people who truly care about this, who truly care about coding? What about something was translated with AI?

53:44Dexter Thomas:okay see now this is the thing and actually this is why i think what 404 did was so important and i don't think if it really like flew over people's heads but a lot of the the ice reporting was translated into spanish by human beings this is why i like the phrase slop so much is because we're used to the idea that certain people get a degraded experience with something. If you can only read Spanish, or Spanish is the language you're most comfortable with, you don't get the premium stuff. You get the slop. Societally, we've decided that. You know what I'm saying? And I think one of the things that's going to continue to happen is that we're just going to get used to, oh, okay, well, the slop is normal food.

54:30Dexter Thomas:And for some experiences, you don't deserve the premium experience. There will be people who get the human-made stuff. There will be people who get the guarantee that this book was written by a human, that this journalism was made by a human. But listen, journalists have to eat. Everybody up here got to get paid at some point, right? If you're generating slop journalism about stuff that may or may not have happened, that stuff is free. and so the the social contract type stuff like every individual having to make the decision that works for everybody in this room i think because i think we're all in the form of like making those decisions for ourselves what what i want to add on top of that though is that those decisions are being actively made for us you do what i'm saying we're like again societally We've kind of gotten used to the idea that, oh, yeah, certain people, if English isn't their native language, they just don't get the good stuff.

55:34Dexter Thomas:That's an unhinged conclusion to come to. And we've decided that's okay. There's a reason why they're pushing AI in really specific categories of media. Pornography, smut, is like outside of mainstream culture, it's denigrated usually. romance novels even though they are basically single-handedly like holding the entire publishing industry on its shoulders people degrade romance novels and say that they have no no value i even think the kinds of movies that you saw the the uh grammys chinese or tcl whatever um they are i watch some of the clips from them and they're all like big action blockbusters so movies it's also a budget TV company.

56:18Like it's for people who can't afford like a Samsung TV or whatever. And yeah. Yeah. I mean it's also like the AI fruit stuff. It's all literally just recreating reality television. Like it's literally some of the same plot lines from Love Island like most frequently. And these are all things that we've kind of all accepted that reality TV is hugely exploitative and terrible but we also I watch it. I watch that shit. Like I love that shit so much. You know. I know that some of these categories of things, like they are all made by humans, but we've kind of accepted that some of them are lesser forms and therefore don't need to be respected.

56:57But it's in these lesser forms. It's in video games also. It's in animation. Cartoons. Who cares? It's cartoons. Exactly. Who cares? Kids don't need, like kids entertainment is also, there's a huge amount of AI bullshit. If you let the YouTube kids recommendation flow, just keep going, you will inevitably end up with at least something with AI voice acting in it. And we've just decided, yeah, that those people that like that stuff, those experiences do not matter. It does not matter if they're good or not. And I think both of you make such good points. And I think we were up here talking about specific journalism tools that it's like, oh, we would use AI for this, we use AI for that.

57:34That's maybe boring if you're not a journalist. But I think for everyone out there, they need to sort of think like, well, I'm probably going to be asked to use this in my job or in my industry, or I might lose my job to this industry. And I think it's hard because it's like a very difficult economy right now. But it's like, to what degree are you comfortable using these tools? And also like as a person, like what do you do better than a robot? Everyone does something much better than a robot. Like I think that the quality, like I guess there will, as you said, be like a sort of a high and a low in terms of like, well, there's going to be like organic content that is made fully by humans.

58:18And then it will live in a sea of AI generated content. And I think that standing out is right now still possible, but because like you said, we're not getting to make that choice. The algorithms are making the choice for us. And the most powerful companies in the world are pushing this technology on their users, like in ways that often aren't even noticeable or are super annoying, but they just keep doing it and hope that you'll eventually want Gmail to write an email for you. And it'll be two robots talking. It'll be two humans talking to each other as intermediated by just Gmail responses. I resent this idea that a lot of jobs in the future are just going to become an AI minder.

59:00That is the future that is being sold to us. That we're going to sit next to a machine and just make sure it doesn't go off track, essentially. It doesn't explode on us. We're all going to end up being Homer Simpson with the drinky bird. That's just it. I think there's more to the life than that.

59:19Dexter Thomas:Well, we're going to have... Whatever is going to happen, my thing, what it comes down to, unfortunately, I'm really sorry, it comes down to capitalism. If we want any changes being made, I have to say that it's probably going to be legislation. It's not going to be individual people making choices. And I say that because of this. 48 % of practicing Christians say that they would trust AI for their spiritual development. And this wasn't done by some nonpart, like whatever critical of Christians. This was made by a Christian, specifically a Christian polling organization. So they would know. What does that mean for pastors, all the pastors in the house, all the priests in the house?

1:00:03Dexter Thomas:I don't know what you're like. Maybe your job is also at risk too. But I say that to say that if that, is if that one of the most innermost parts of humanness within america specifically right myself not being a christian um there's there's something a little bit deeper that isn't going to be solved by everybody you know all of us in this room you know signing a piece of paper saying no to ai like it just ain't gonna happen it's gonna be a lot bigger than that unfortunately which means it's a lot tougher but you know it's good to know what the opponent's move is at the very least right thanks so much for listening and watching uh this has been the 404 media podcast we'll be back with another episode in a couple days uh if you enjoyed this podcast please tell your friends about us this podcast was edited and produced by alissa midcalf it was filmed by the la Public Library.

1:01:03And thanks again to the LA Public Library for having us. I'm Jason Kepler. We'll be back soon.