In short
Episode topic: How algorithmic feeds shape wedding/body-image expectations and spending anxiety, then a separate story on an AI “clean room” tool (Malice.sh) that satirically and practically helps generate code meant to bypass open-source copyright obligations.
Guests/backgrounds
Host Sam Lee Cole, plus 4-4 Media co-founders Emmanuel Myberg and Jason Kepler. Sam recently married (wedding content stopped immediately after). Emmanuel reported on Malice.sh; Jason co-discusses.
Key claims
Wedding algorithms quickly target engaged women with “thin/skinny,” body-checking, and “best day of your life” pressure; they also inflate budgets and can push people toward credit-card precarity. Social media mixes aspirational “styled shoots” (posed, brand-optimized, often not real weddings) with normal posts, creating an echo chamber of unattainable expectations. Malice.sh uses the “clean room” legal concept to generate replacement software from specifications, aiming to “liberate” code from licenses; even if satire, it can function.
Notable examples
“POV, you’re not fat, you’re just puffy”; “$150,000 wedding = $10/day”; Reddit “Budget Brides” gatekeeping; styled shoots with models and clickable brand catalogs; Malice.sh producing functional clean-room copies; discussion of the Shardet/Python-library clean-room controversy.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VODiving into Wedding Algorithms
1:15 to 2:00
Discussion about the impact of algorithms on wedding planning.
Personal Wedding Experience
2:00 to 4:00
Sam shares her experience with wedding planning and algorithmic influence.
“So not super far ahead, but long enough.”
The Pressure of Engagement Content
4:00 to 7:30
Exploration of the pressure and standards set by engagement content.
“And then pretty immediately it became like wedding dresses and like how to tell if your wedding dress suits your body type.”
Body Image and Wedding Expectations
7:30 to 10:00
Discussion about body image issues related to wedding expectations.
“it's like 10K and under budget wedding and they are like, oh, your parents helped you.”
The Financial Burden of Weddings
10:00 to 13:00
Examining the rising costs of weddings and the financial stress involved.
“So people are still spending more and more and more and trying to chase this vision that they have of this big wedding that like, not even it doesn't have to be big.”
Cultural Expectations of Weddings
13:00 to 14:00
Analyzing cultural messages about weddings and their implications.
“But it is so ingrained in everything that you hear and see in media.”
Understanding Styled Shoots in Wedding Planning
14:00 to 18:04
Learn about the concept and impact of styled shoots on wedding planning and expectations.
“But the DIY aspect of it all is like, it became very accessible to try to throw a big party like this.”
The Emotional Toll of Social Media
18:04 to 21:06
Explore how social media influences emotions during significant life events like weddings.
“It's the trying that ends up you're unhappy because so many of us are not in the tax bracket where...”
Navigating Wedding Expectations and Reality
21:06 to 27:04
Discuss the disparity between wedding expectations shaped by social media and the actual experience.
“And then that feeling becomes very exhausting.”
Reflections on the Wedding Experience
27:04 to 28:00
Reflect on the impact of social media during weddings and the feelings it creates post-event.
“And that's what weddings are for, basically.”
Show all 18 chapters
Navigating Consumer Pressure in Life Changes
28:00 to 30:40
Explore the pressures of societal expectations during major life events like weddings and parenting.
“I actually feel less because I felt prepared before this to be for things to attempt to influence me because that's part of life.”
Examining Malice.sh and Copyright Issues
36:30 to 42:04
Delve into the controversial AI tool Malice.sh that challenges open source software copyrights.
“It's called This AI Tool Rips Off Open Source Software Without Violating Copyright.”
Exploring Malice: A Satirical Open Source Project
42:04 to 43:44
Discussion on the Malice project and its implications in the open source community.
“I would say we've talked about this before about people making little pieces of protest art and stuff like that.”
Understanding Copyright and Open Source
43:44 to 46:06
Examination of copyright concepts and their impact on open source software.
“What is the conversation around this been?”
The Provocative Nature of Malice
46:06 to 48:30
Analysis of the reactions to the Malice project and its impact on open source culture.
“can go there, copy it, and then create something private, for-profit, without having to credit anyone, without having to expand the community, and so on.”
The Challenges of Open Source Sustainability
48:30 to 53:14
Discussion on sustainability issues in open source amidst corporate influence and AI.
“it is a provocation and people are provoked.”
AI's Impact on Copyright Law
53:14 to 56:00
Insight into how AI is challenging traditional copyright structures and practices.
“are then responsible for how that code performs and what it does and all that sort of thing.”
The Impact of AI on Copyright Law
56:00 to 56:36
Explore how AI challenges existing copyright laws and practices.
“And then AI comes along, and all you have to do is press a button.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Sam:This needs to be the hottest you've ever been, the skinniest you've ever been, and also needs to be like the most impressive party. And like, if you don't put in this effort and you make all these people come to your wedding, they're going to secretly hate you and your life will be over.
0:17Sam:Hello, and welcome to the 4-4 Media podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 4-4 Media is a journalist founding company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 4-4media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 44media.co. I'm your host, not Joseph. I'm Sam. Joseph is out. But with me are 44media's other co-founders, Emmanuel Myberg. Hello. And Jason Kepler. Hello.
0:51Emanuel:Hello.
0:52Sam:Yeah, so today we're going to be talking about a weird, wild spread of stories. the first of which is a story that I wrote I don't even have the headline in front of me it's like I went crazy is the TLDR the headline is I almost lost my mind in the bridal algorithm so yeah let's just get into it I have many questions that I've written for Sam for context I got married recently a couple weeks ago and full disclosure Jason and I and of course Joseph were all at this wedding so maybe we can have some insight from a guest's perspective but to start how did you get fed into this algorithm when did that happen and what does that feel like so I think I mean I assume that I first started getting this stuff because I was searching for vendors and things like that to plan the wedding, which I started doing maybe nine months ahead of the actual date.
2:03Sam:So not super far ahead, but long enough. So I was like emailing people. I was searching for like venues and wedding dresses and stuff like that. And I think everybody's had the experience of like you search something or you talk about something or like someone on your Wi-Fi network searches something and then you immediately start getting ads for it on Instagram or you start getting that content. That's pretty much what was happening with me. It was immediately just like the most intense bridal and wedding planning content. I think it started with dresses. It actually started with engagements, which I got and engaged and felt very just like, you know, not like super particular about my engagement.
2:48Sam:I know a lot of people feel differently and like have a certain vision for the way they want to get engaged or like the ring and things like that. And when I got engaged, I started getting all this content that's like super posed, like beautiful backdrops, people hiding photographers, things like that. For the engagement. For the engagement. Yeah. For engagement content. And then rings, guides to how to know if your ring doesn't suit you. Negative stuff about the ring. And at this point, I was already engaged. Because it was a surprise. I was not searching this stuff before the engagement. So I was starting to get that content.
3:26Sam:And I was like, this feels a little bad and weird to be comparing something that already happened and that I was very happy about, obviously. to then like influencer content and showing like huge rocks on people's fingers and like, which is very in style right now, I guess. Like a big, big ass diamond is back. Which, you know, if that's your thing, that's awesome. But I'm not a baddie like that. So I was like, oh my God, what's wrong with me? Why is my ring not like, bam, the biggest thing you've ever seen? And then pretty immediately it became like wedding dresses and like how to tell if your wedding dress suits your body type.
4:07Sam:And then it was like how to get your best bridal arms was like a huge one, I guess. I mean, that's something that a lot of women are self-conscious of. How to get this workout that will like tone down your arms without getting bulky is a huge piece of content that I saw all the time. So it was pretty instant. And then it became like, not just the... Because I guess the dress is the person that I started searching. And then I started searching for and contacting vendors for venues and florals and all the stuff that comes with that. And that's what followed pretty quickly after that was like really outrageous scenes from like weddings that some of them now I know don't even exist and weren't real weddings.
4:53Sam:We can get into that. the arms post is like one genre of post can you describe like some of the archetypes some of the genres of post like what are the big ones what are the big things that the algo uh is pushing on you in terms of what a wedding should be like and look like or what you're supposed to feel like i mean the so obviously this is just i've written before about like GLP one ads are just my constant experience on Instagram. And I'm not searching for that actively. It's just my demographic. Uh, that's very popular with, um, you know, women in their mid thirties. Um, so the weight loss stuff was huge.
5:41Sam:There were a lot of like my weight loss journey to my big day. Um, you know, there are really funny. It's, I mean, it's not funny because it's like so twisted, but there was one that I put in the story that's like POV, you're not fat, you're just puffy, which like, thanks. I'm glad I know that. It's like so much better. There's just a ton of like what I, what I ate in a day, which is obviously, um, maybe not obviously, but it's pretty insidiously, um, eating disorder content a lot of the time is like counting calories and, uh, tracking and body checking and things like that. So, um, there's a ton of the body image stuff that comes with this.
6:19Sam:there's also just like the spending of it all. The most outrageous example I ever saw was, it was a video that said, if you spend$150 ,000 on a wedding and stay married for 40 years, that's only about$10 a day. Not bad for the best day of your life, which is like girl math. So it kind of hit me in a spot. I was like, hey, you know, that's a point to be made. I don't know if you ever do that with like big purchases. You're like, you know, With clothes.
6:49Emanuel:with clothes, with jeans. That's just$3 per wear.
6:52Sam:Exactly. I'm doing it with my roof at the moment. Yeah, if I live here for until I die, this roof will only cost$3 a day. Probably a lot more than that. But yeah, it's like this budget stuff, the spending stuff. It's also big on Reddit. It's not just Instagram and TikTok. It's like there's Big Budget Brides, which is a subreddit. Then there's a different subreddit for budget brides is a subreddit, budget weddings, budget wedding planning. And if you stray outside of their parameters for the budget, so if you're in budget, it's like 10K and under budget wedding and they are like, oh, your parents helped you.
7:35Sam:So you only spend$10 ,000, but this is actually a$60 ,000 wedding. You will get absolutely reamed on budget brides. They do not play about that. It's like spending$10 ,000 on your photographer is not a budget wedding. And people try to pull that. But yeah, it's all these arbitrary rules about and gatekeeping about what you can talk about even within these algorithms. I got married in 2017, but I did not do a wedding. So I'm asking these questions really innocently and genuinely. You came to work the same day. I remember this. We were like, where'd you go for a long lunch? And you were like, I went to the courthouse.
8:16Yeah, it was a healthcare situation that stuck.
8:22Sam:Yeah. But I'm assuming you're coming at the wedding at this point, when you're starting to plan and you're looking at venues, there's some kind of vision. Maybe it's not an aesthetic vision, but there's like, this is the size and this is who we want to be there. That's how you start to scope it out. And I guess what I'm trying to figure out is like, is the scoping out of the wedding at all, did it actually change because of what you're seeing? And can you point to anything specifically where like, yeah, the algorithm kind of pushed me to do this or that? I mean, it definitely like... I think you start to realize, first of all, that everything that you've seen online and even other people's weddings that you've been to are not within the budget that you thought.
9:12Sam:So that's kind of the first thing that happens is like, oh, this wedding that I'm looking at online or this wedding that I went to, I thought that I could get that in this amount. And you can't. And that's just... It's like no matter what it is, unless it was at a McDonald's play place, you can't. And even then, maybe stretching it. So like, you start to kind of... Things start to creep up because everything is so expensive right now. And I specifically didn't get into a conversation about vendors and pricing in this article because I think vendors and what they price is their business. And if you can't afford a vendor, you should do a different vendor.
9:52Sam:That's totally there. As someone who's running a small business also, it's like, I get it. Your price is your price. but everything is so incredibly expensive right now. And something that interesting that I found when I was writing this was, um, even as cost of living goes higher and higher and higher and people's economic situations get objectively worse, the price of a wedding is still going up. So people are still spending more and more and more and trying to chase this vision that they have of this big wedding that like, not even it doesn't have to be big. It's like micro weddings are a big thing right now.
10:24Sam:So like 10 people, 20 people, which is so funny to me to call it micro. It's like people are calling five person parties elopements now is kind of where we're at. Like the expansion of like, it's like, that's not an elopement. That's still a wedding. Your parents were there. So I think that's part of it is like everything is still kind of inflating and expanding in this world while what people can like reasonably afford based on their income is not the same. So I do think people are going into credit card debt for weddings to get married, which is just probably a whole other article about this topic and how people are going into financial precarity because they think in the$150 ,000 frame of that one reel, it's like, oh, it's only$40 a day, but it's the most important day in my whole life.
11:16Sam:and that's something that you hear over and over and over is like this is this needs to be the hottest you've ever been the skinniest you've ever been now it's like all of everything is back to being you know thin thin thin and also needs to be like the most impressive most memorable for your guests party and like if you don't put in this effort and you make all these people come to your wedding they're gonna secretly hate you and your life will be over it's very like Regency era weird. It's like, oh my god, I'm like royalty for the day. But then you have that mindset for like a year plus leading up to it.
11:54Sam:Yeah. It's wild. I feel like we're just talking but like, how do you take that? Like, how do you feel about that statement? Like the most important day of your life thing? I think it's obviously beneficial for these companies that are selling this stuff to put that pressure on people. It's obviously bullshit. It's like, this isn't the peak of my life. Hopefully, you know, hopefully it's also, I mean, we could get into just like the, just the gender of it all. But like, it's, we still have these attitudes about weddings where the bride is like, you know, after today, she becomes then a mother and a wife.
12:38Sam:And her public facing part of society is over. And now we tuck her away forever with her husband and they are never to be seen again. And this is kind of like, this is her peak. And now it's all downhill from here, basically. Or it's just different. And that's something that I obviously reject as a concept. I think most women do. But it is so ingrained in everything that you hear and see in media. It's like the end of every Disney movie is like someone gets married. the end of every like big budget movie in general is like that's kind of the the big moment is like oh my god the wedding um there are tons of just like reality tv shows about you know wedding being the goal so it's you're fighting against years decades of this messaging as a as one singular person but then also like decades of the industry just like ramping up ramping up and a lot of this stuff is not even that old i mean weddings like weddings as a spectacle for normal people like not for the queen of england uh is a new concept it's not even something that we've had for more than like 200 150 years it's pretty recent and especially the the market for brides specifically so um i would say i would blame martha for quite a bit of this even though she is my queen But the DIY aspect of it all is like, it became very accessible to try to throw a big party like this.
14:11So I think something that really speaks to that and the most revealing part of the story to me was the concept of the styled shoot. I didn't really understand how that works. Can you talk about that? Yeah.
14:23Sam:Yeah. So a styled shoot is, it's an opportunity for vendors to show off what they do for social media or for magazine. So you will have a venue that says, we want to do a styled shoot. We want to host a styled shoot here. Or, you know, you might have a photographer that says, I want to, I want to arrange a styled shoot. So they contact a venue. But either way, it's like, it starts with the vendor saying, we're going to set up a photo shoot. basically. It's a photo shoot of an imaginary wedding. So you'll bring in models as the guests and the bride and groom. One of the sources that I talked to for this was...
15:02Sam:She's a wedding photographer and she had tweeted and she went very viral. She was like, one of the tells for a styled shoot is a handsome groom. It's like if the men and the guests look hot, it's probably a styled shoot, which is so funny. But I mean, I think she was being tongue-in-cheek, but also not really. It's like these are literal magazine models. So you have florists, you have designers, you have stylists, you have hairdressers, you have makeup artists. You have wedding dress designers come in to the space for the day and say, we're going to put out our best. Florals is big for this. And then they all take pictures very carefully, which is not what happens at a wedding.
15:44Sam:Things are very chaotic and moving really fast. and you're dealing with real people who do not know how to behave in front of a camera. Myself very much included in that. So, and you also have the bride is planning the thing usually. So it's like she's running around doing stuff and not standing around looking pretty. But in a styled shoe, that is what happens. It's like people come in and are specifically posed in a way that makes the products and the venue and the florals and all that stuff look really nice. So all of that is ending up on social media alongside normal weddings and influencer weddings.
16:20Sam:So people who are paid to have big, lavish lifestyle weddings are posting on Instagram along with me and everyone else and the style shoots. And the style shoots will list all of the brands. If you're planning a wedding, you can go through and click. I like these swirls. I wonder who did them. Go through and look at them and look at their catalog. It's like an interactive bridal magazine. None of this is really that new of a concept. But it's because it's all posted in a venue where supposedly we're all just there sharing normal stuff. It becomes this weird... I don't even know. It's almost like an echo chamber of unattainable stuff.
17:04Sam:It's all very aspirational. Well, people post basically advertisements. That's what you're describing. They're posting wedding catalogs. That's what it is. But then... But it's not marked as an ad. Right. But it's like that's in your feed. It's like you're looking at wedding content. And then a professional catalog shoot with professional models and professional staging, everything is woven into that. And what I understood from the story is that people come to wedding planners and photographers and so on and they say like, I want my wedding to look like that. Right. It's just like, I want... At the end of this event, I want a bunch of photographs that look like this.
17:42and that people don't realize that that is a job. You know what I mean? It's like if you want to have a styled shoot, that takes away from your ability to have a real wedding because you have to work at producing those images. And people actually... It sounds like people are actually making that trade-off.
18:02Sam:I think so. Yeah. I think a lot of people do try. It's the trying that ends up you're unhappy because so many of us are not in the tax bracket where... I mean, a lot of the plan, I was like, oh, I'll get up, maybe I'll get a planner and I don't have to think about any of this. Planners don't get out of bed for less, like your budget for the whole wedding has to be like a certain amount. And usually it's very high. Some of the ones I was looking at were like close to a hundred thousand dollars. I was like, I like, what? What are you talking? What do you mean? So I like, it's not even that you can stop thinking about it and give that job to another vendor because those vendors are expecting to then show off your wedding as part of their offering.
18:46Sam:So they want the big budget wedding because it's going to look good on their website and their portfolio because they're like, I planned this with a$200 ,000 budget.
18:55Emanuel:I think the point you just raised about how social media makes us feel is super interesting because if you're going through kind of just like a normal time in life or whatever, you can open up any of these feeds and who knows what you'll get. You can kind of mindlessly pass the time and feel whatever, like you'll get whatever ads you get. But I think that if you're getting engaged, if you're getting married, if you're going through the death of a loved one, something like that, it's like you're in a either positively or negatively like fragile state emotionally. and you don't know what you're going to get.
19:38Emanuel:And I think that, yeah, for you, it's like, oh, maybe you just wanted to open up Instagram and see what your friends were doing or just scroll whatever. And instead, you're just getting fed this steady diet of wedding content. And it's like, I mean, there's been so much written and said about how social media affects us and makes us feel and things like that. But I think at least, I don't know, in like my life like sometimes like I can't look at social media right now like at all because I don't know what I'm gonna see and I just don't wanna take that risk kind of yeah
20:15Sam:it becomes it's it makes it amplifies whatever you're feeling already or whatever you're experiencing in your in real life life it's like it knows whatever you're going I mean it's you know it happens with apartment hunting it happens with house hunting it happens with like Even if you start sharing stuff a little bit too much, it's like I got in a really bizarre algorithm for a little bit that was like dying animals and babies. And I was like, this is not something that I'm experiencing at all in my life. But I lingered too long on it, I guess. And then it was like, that was all my algorithm was.
20:50Sam:And then it takes effort to get out of it. So you have to dig into a different direction by liking and sharing things on purpose to get away from it. which is just like it's so much energy to spend on something that's completely optional but and it's also like you never know the really tricky part about the bridal stuff that i found and this is something that happens all the time but like it's a concept that is very well known but you never know if the next thing you see is going to be the thing that saves your wedding um it could be like that thing that i was looking for um that will keep my friends from hating me is the thing that I will miss if I close the phone.
21:31And then that feeling becomes very exhausting.
21:35Sam:It's like, I have to keep looking because some of this is useful sometimes. It's interesting. I've never planned a wedding. I didn't really, I had no idea what I wanted to do, which was probably part of the problem. I went in very blank slate about it and had a very different vision than what I ended up with because like what I said before, like the creep of everything it's like you start to realize like oh i actually can't just people keep saying people keep commenting on the video that we posted in the story i mean not so much on the story people are very nice in the story because there are subscribers but saying like oh well just get pizza in someone's backyard and it'll be totally fine it's like that's what i wanted to do actually but i don't know anyone with a backyard and not big enough and not within like 100 miles of an airport so where you know like I have to do a venue and then I have to do everything else so we might as well do a venue that I like we might as well do food that I like um I don't know it's just it's hard to describe without and that's another thing it's it's hard to describe without feeling very frivolous and silly um which is something quite a few people said to me while I was writing the story was a lot of this content people push back on it and then you see that and you're like oh thank god I'm not actually bridezilla I'm just dealing with something very real did you continue to get
22:56Emanuel:wedding content after you got married.
22:58Sam:Immediately it ended. Immediately. The day of the wedding. Isn't that weird? Is Instagram reading my emails and knows the date? Well, I was posting the day. As we know, nobody's listening to your microphone or anything like that. It just probably picked up on some very subtle behavior that you actually engaged in to pick up on what your next phase of life is. But we'll get to that in a second. I want to linger on the wedding for just another question or two. I guess one thing is, day of, are you able to be in it or because of the social media experience, you're having kind of like an out-of-body meta view of it where you're thinking about how it's mediated and what pictures people are taking and how it's on social media?
23:52or are you just like, oh, this is actually a lovely, wonderful time?
Read the full transcript
23:58Sam:I mean, I really wasn't thinking too much about... I was thinking about it right leading up to the day before because we were shopping for stuff the day before and doing florals. And then right after, I was thinking about it a little bit. But during the day, I wasn't thinking about it. I was really busy, obviously, because it's a wedding. but I was I did have the thought a couple times where I was like this thing that I was really stressed about and or like really thought was gonna matter didn't matter at all and then I was kind of pissed I was like I've I drove myself kind of nuts for no reason and this content drove me nuts for no reason and no one else knows it and it doesn't matter at all um i did talk to my friend kelly who had a really gorgeous wedding that i went to last year and she's she's a very balanced grounded person um but she told me that she did think about like the being posted on her being posted her and her husband being posted on social media during the day felt a little strange to her she was like oh not only have i been looking at all the social media where i have these aspirational weddings but then i'm the content Now it's like I'm becoming someone else's post who's at the wedding.
25:19Sam:So that was a little bit like, it wasn't really super in the back of my mind. Like mostly, I originally wanted to have no phones, especially for the ceremony, but then I considered it for the wedding itself. And then I was like, actually, this is kind of just part of what we do now. Like we just like, this is kind of part of why we like show or how we show that we're excited and celebrating someone is posting on social media. So, you know, it's like, I'm, I'm going to let it rip in that regard. But, um, I was worried that it was going to take me out of the moment or like make me feel weird about like being online.
25:54Sam:Um, so yeah, I also ended up before the wedding. I, many months before I knew that I wanted to turn my, my Instagram, like at Sam Lee Cole into only professional. so I scrubbed it basically I was like I don't want to have anything on here that's from my personal life um because so much of my work is very public facing and you guys understand this but like you know I wanted to have a space where I could only post 404 stuff and have my stories on there um have interviews and things like that but um I made a very conscious decision to separate personal life and professional life online way before which I think did help um I wasn't worried about someone creepy or sources or something like that seeing a very personal day via other people's posts of it.
26:47Sam:So yeah, I mean, I thought about it, but I was mostly just hamming it up all day long.
26:58Last question, or before the last question, I'll just say I wrote down in our podcast prep document a question which is whether sam had fun which i think she she just kind of answered but then she responded she said did you and i did i did have fun and i think to your point i i did have the thought i was like oh this is a lot of effort and like the food is nice and the venue is really nice and uh the bride and groom look really nice but i was like i'm having a good time but it kind of has nothing to do with any of it right it's like i'm having a good time because it's like i'm there with Jason and Joe and other people that we know.
27:36And it's like, that's nice. It's nice to get together. And that's what weddings are for, basically. But last question, you end the story and you say that you immediately got fed into baby algorithm, which I'm well familiar with and I've mentioned before. But I'm wondering, it's like, having gone through this experience, do you think you're prepared at all? or better at filtering that content?
28:06Sam:No. Not at all. No, I feel really unprepared. I actually feel less because I felt prepared before this to be for things to attempt to influence me because that's part of life. We live in a very consumerist society and that's part of it. But I thought I was ready for this in particular because I was like, it's a wedding. It's not the most important day of my life. it's not the hottest I'll ever be hopefully so like it's it's something that I thought I had down and I just extremely didn't I thought I would be cooler than that and I extremely wasn't which is such a pick me attitude but like I really thought I was not I've never been like oh I need the ball gown so I just I'm like what do I not know about myself about this content about what I'm about to face that it's going to hit me with.
29:01Sam:And I think the parenting stuff, it's, I had so many people after this story, so many people reached out who I know are not planning on having kids or that's not something that they've done in their lives, but they said the same exact thing. They were like, right after I got married, I started seeing baby stuff, which is so crazy. And like, it's just like, I don't know. It's like, I don't know why I expect different or better, but it's very anxiety inducing. Obviously, you know this, and I'm curious what you've, what you saw leading up to your firstborn but like you're dealing with a human now this is not just like some day or dress it's like this is if you don't take the right supplement or you don't have this amount of tummy time or it's like I know things that I shouldn't have to know right now um but it feels very life or death because it's a human it's a baby and you're like maybe the next thing is going to be the thing that keeps my baby from dying.
29:58Sam:That's exactly the kind of content that you end up seeing. It's that serious. I don't know. Did you see a bunch of it before yours? I'll just say this and then I'll wrap it up. You'll find this out immediately. But it's like you and your husband are going to get extremely different baby algorithms. It's like, I got funny little videos about, oh, look at me. I'm playing Call of Duty with my infant asleep on my chest. My baby's drinking a beer. Right. Ha, ha, ha. And then meanwhile, my wife is like, if you don't do this, you're a bad person and you're going to jail. You know what I mean? So it's extremely, it's extremely gendered and very different for moms and dads.
30:38Hell yeah. Okay. Let's leave that there. Congratulations to Sam. Celebrate her wedding by buying the gift of a 4-4 media subscription.
30:47Sam:That's right. Please. And, it's only $0.255? I don't know what the math would be for a yearly subscription. We should start advertising like that, probably. Yeah. Okay, we'll leave that there and we'll be right back.
31:13Emanuel:Buying glasses used to feel way harder than it should. Like you walk into a store, everything's overpriced, half the styles feel outdated, and somehow you still can't tell what's actually going to look good on your face. It always felt like way too much effort for something you wear every single day. That's why I've been really into Warby Parker. Honestly, it's the only place I've been buying glasses from for like the last 15 years. They basically simplified the entire process. Their virtual try-on is actually legit. You just open your phone, point the camera at your face and you can see how different frames look in real time.
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36:29Emanuel:Okay, we're back. This is a story that Emanuel wrote. It's called This AI Tool Rips Off Open Source Software Without Violating Copyright. Emanuel, while you were working on the story, you kept saying you were working on a story about clean rooms. And I was like, what is Emanuel talking about? as in, are you doing something regarding a spaceship that's going to space or like semiconductors or something like this? Like, have you suddenly decided to get into different types of antibacterial techniques? But no, we're talking about a metaphorical clean room. We're talking about an app, a company called Malice.sh.
37:14Emanuel:What is Malice.sh? So I guess I will start by explaining what a cleanroom is. I wasn't familiar with the term, but as soon as I looked it up, I was very familiar with the concept. the most famous example of it is in I think it was 1982 there was a company that wanted to make its own computer and computer parts but IBM was so dominant at the time that it would be hard to find a market if you weren't playing in like the IBM ecosystem them. And they wanted to find a way into it without actually buying and licensing IBM computers and parts. So what they did is they took one engineering team that looked at the IBM system and figured out what does this system accomplish that a new system would need to accomplish in order to be compatible.
38:26And they create those specifications. And they call that team the contaminated team. And they just produce the specifications and hand it over to another engineering team that is the clean team. And they're clean, quote unquote, because they haven't been exposed to any IBM documentation, the specifications, or code, or anything like that. They have no previous knowledge of how IBM's systems work. And they just take those specifications and build something that meets those specifications in whatever way they can and what they produce. Since they haven't been exposed to any IBM documentation, they can't be accused of copying it because they literally didn't.
39:08They just created something that matches the specifications, but they did it completely independently. And that is considered not a violation of IBM's copyright. this is a theory that has since been proven by case law uh have you guys watched halt and catch
39:24Emanuel:fire did anybody see that no but everyone loves that show i get recommended it constantly it's very good it's very good and i think it's the first season like one of the the way that one of the main characters is introduced is kind of like a dramatization of this exact story she's brought in to do a clean room design of some other system. So it's like a famous incident. All of that is background to malus.sh. Malus is spelled M-A-L-U-S. Pronounced malus like bad, like the word. And what it does is produce AI-generated clean room designs of any piece of software. You give it and the site is pitched as something that can be used to, quote-unquote, liberate open source projects from their copyright licenses.
40:26So you can go to GitHub, take any open source piece of software and feed it to mouse AI. The way they say it works is why one AI agent produces the specifications, another AI agent then designs, you know, entirely AI generates a piece of software that meets those specifications. and the resulting piece of software is something that is liberated of the copyright that the open software originally used. I should say right here, this kind of blew up on Hacker News and it took people a minute to figure it out. But if you start reading the fine print, it's very clear that this is satire.
41:16Malice's website is so openly hostile to open source and wanting to destroy the basic incentives that make open source possible that it's very obviously built as a piece of satire. And I did end up talking to the person who made it And he's somebody who works in open source. Specifically, he works in researching the economics of open source. He works for the UN right now. And this is the point of the project.
41:58Emanuel:That's true, but it also fully works, doesn't it? Yes. I would say we've talked about this before about people making little pieces of protest art and stuff like that. To me, the difference between a good one and a bad one is whether it actually functions as the thing that it says that it is. And this does. You can go to this website. Malice is a real LLC. It has a Stripe account. You can pay it money. You can feed it a piece of open source source software and it will produce something and people are doing it like i talked to the guy behind it mike nolan and he didn't tell me exactly how much money uh he has made so far but he says the company is profitable in the hundreds of dollars so like not a lot of money um but people are using it people are legitimately taking pieces of software feeding it and getting a functional piece of software on the other end.
42:56And he's a technical person. So it's quite a bit of effort went into making sure this works as advertised.
43:06Emanuel:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I think that's very interesting. Just because it is... It's a very cool project. It's a very interesting thing that he is satirizing. But I'm curious what happens if someone uses this and creates a very valuable company with it or something like that? Are you just creating the thing that you are trying to warn against? But I do think that... I guess I'm curious how this was received in the open source world. What is the conversation around this been? because I know that copyright licenses and the terms under which you can fork an open source project or use an open source project is one of the biggest topics of conversation in the open source world, which is a notably pedantic world where people are always talking about these things.
44:07Emanuel:So yeah, how has it been received? So I guess copyright and open source is kind of a weird thing because when we think of copyright, usually it's like, I don't know, I wrote a book. I don't want people to copy my book and resell it as their own. So I have a copyright that prevents people from doing that. If somebody does that, I can sue them. It's like that's what copyright is usually for. Jason, I think you know a lot more about copyright than I do, but it's like there's this concept of copyleft, right? You've heard that, yeah. So it's like in open source, people use copyright in sort of the opposite way.
44:51So the license for an open source piece of software will usually say, you can use this to create your own project. But if you do that, you have to credit the original project. and then also whatever you create also has to use the same license. And the effect of that is that you are maintaining the work in a way that keeps it open. And then also you are ideally expanding the number of people and the community of people that are invested in the software, therefore hopefully recruiting more people to contribute to it and grow it and maintain it. It's so on. It's similar to Wikipedia in that the copyright license creates the incentives that feed the open source community, which makes it possible.
45:57And the thing that Malice is doing is liberating it of those requirements in a way that a more cynical commercial actor can go there, copy it, and then create something private, for-profit, without having to credit anyone, without having to expand the community, and so on. And to your question about how this was received, I think there's a minority of people who are, I mean, frankly, stupid and cynical that Mike told me are actually using the software without realizing it's satire or even contacting him and asking for quotes and stuff like that. Like people actually trying to do the thing that he is satirizing.
46:42And then other people, particularly people in the open source community, see for what it is. I think it's obviously controversial because it's actually doing the bad thing. But it's also doing what he wanted to do, which is start a very serious discussion about this problem, which is real, right? It's like, this isn't a theory. This is something that is actually happening. The thing that immediately came to mind, and this actually happened, I think, shortly after Malice was launched, but it didn't get any attention. There is this Python library called Shardet. Is that how I'm going to pronounce it?
47:26I'm not sure. I've asked people and nobody... has said it out loud ever, seemingly. But this guy, this pretty pivotal Python library, has used not the MIT license, but some other very permissive copyright license. And he did the thing. He fed it to Claude. and Claude spat out a clean room copy of the code and he gave it a new license that was less permissive. And the person who originally built this open source tool came out of the woodwork 15 years later and he was like, hey, this is not cool. And that started a whole discussion about can this person create a copy of Shardé that rips it of the original permissive copyright.
48:25So yeah, I guess it's like, it is a provocative, it is a provocation and people are provoked. I guess that's how I would say the response has been.
48:38Emanuel:Yeah, I mean, I think just like zooming out even further though, it's like, and we're going to talk more about it in the subscriber section, but it's just like so much of the AI boom is in AI writing code. And so much of what these AI tools are trained on are open source projects in general. And in general, not all open source projects, but a lot of them have very permissive copyright structures because that's just the entire purpose of the whole thing. It's like, yes, you can use this to create commercial products. you can use this to create spinoff projects, whatever. As far as I know, it's not the entire reason that Creative Commons was created and all these different licenses within Creative Commons were created.
49:28Emanuel:But a lot of them use very, very permissive copyright structures. And in doing so, to some extent, they've enabled the creation of a lot of these tools. not that any of the AI companies have given a shit about copyright and that's something that they have fought about since we've been talking about this but I think that the fact is a lot of these open source code repositories can be used for anything and so that was like a I don't know that's like it's just there's layers here I guess I would say yeah Yeah, for sure. I think... I didn't put a lot of this into the story, but I did talk with Mike, the creator of Malice, about this a lot, which is...
50:25There are other structural problems in open source that people in the open source community talk about a lot, but not outside of it. Which is, for example, open source is free and people are volunteering and contributing and all that. But in reality, the way a lot of that labor is done is a big company like a Google or a Microsoft will take some people on staff and be like, hey, you guys are now working on this open source project because it is a dependency for us. We have some commercial piece of software that depends on this open source project. Therefore, Microsoft is going to have to put people who are on payroll to contribute to an open source project.
51:15And it's free and it's open. But in reality, the big commercial companies have a lot of say in how it all goes. And that's another thing that Mike was trying to highlight. He's like, okay, people in open source kind of think of themselves as very enlightened and above the machinations of the tech industry and tech layoffs and all of this because they're like off in this open source bubble. But he's like, it doesn't really work that way. And the malice is sort of highlighting that anyone can get in there and sabotage the community, be it like a big company like Microsoft in the way that it's funding things and direct how a project is going or in the sense that people think they're being very ethical and enlightened working in open source, but then they don't want to talk about how, whatever, military applications of open source projects or things like that.
52:17So I thought that was an interesting argument, but a little outside the AI copyright thing. So it didn't include as much of that, but I thought it was a good point.
52:26Emanuel:Yeah, I mean, another interesting point, and I guess maybe we can leave it after this, but a big part of open source is the fact that you have a lot of different people looking at the code and catching vulnerabilities and iterating on the code and sort of talking about where something should go, so on and so forth. And one of the points of this, and there's a quote from Mike to this effect, is that once you fork something in this way and remove it from that open source space, you're losing a lot of the benefits of open source. You are then in charge of that project. So you're grabbing a snapshot of it at some point.
53:10Emanuel:And then you or your AI agents or your company are then responsible for how that code performs and what it does and all that sort of thing. So the quote here is like, even if you accept the legal argument, the ethics fucking suck. Open source isn't just source code you download once. It's an ongoing relationship, security patches, bug fixes, adaptations to new platforms, accumulated expertise from years of triage and review. A clean room re-implementation fucks all of that. You get a snapshot with none of the maintenance. It's basically just a fork where nobody knows how the code works. Nobody's watching for CVEs, which are security vulnerabilities.
53:52Emanuel:And nobody knows what to do when it breaks. That's not liberation. It's just technical debt. So in some ways, you're just ending up with the same problems that a lot of vibe-coded projects would have, where it's like, well, this thing works, or maybe it mostly works, but it's broken in some sort of way. And you may not have any idea how to fix it or how to maintain it or update it as you need. Yeah, and you're siphoning the brainpower and the labor that the open source copyright licenses use to feed back into the open source community. you're siphoning them off to these forked projects that don't have those licenses and draining all the people, energy, knowledge you need in order to keep open source alive, which is a concern.
54:52I think the last thing I'll say is, none of it is new. Like I said, there's always been commercial interest. Open source is always a fluid, debated thing with various pressures. The difference is AI, right? And this is what we see in our reporting across every topic. People have always been able to do this. The reason that the clean room method was validated by case law and that judges repeatedly have said, like, okay, yeah, this doesn't violate copyright law. You can do this. You can create a copy of IBM's BIOS or whatever. Is that if you wanted to do a clean room implementation, it actually took a lot of labor and money and investment.
55:43It's like, you have to get these two teams. You have to get a bunch of very talented developers to build something from scratch and so on. So it's like, okay, it's like how... You can't tell people not to build something that takes a lot of effort and thought and creativity. And also, the cost of that means that it's going to be somewhat limited. Not anyone could do this. And then AI comes along, and all you have to do is press a button. The whole thing is automated. And that just upends the conventional wisdom on what you should be allowed to do. And the law hasn't cut up yet, and it's not clear that it will.
56:20But in the meantime, we're living in this place where it's like AI took... the landscape of copyright law and software and open source and just found a vulnerability to use like a term of the trade, that can really fuck things up. Cool.
56:36Emanuel:All right. Let's leave that there. If you are listening to the free version, this is the end of the podcast. If you want to hear us talk more about AI and software development and things like this, we'll be talking about that in the subscribers only section, which you can get access by subscribing to 404media at 404media.co
56:59Sam:As a reminder 404media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers. If you wish to subscribe to 404media and directly support our work please go to 404media.co You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad-free version of this podcast. You'll also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope and Alyssa Midcalf Another way to support us is by leaving a five-star rating and review for the podcast. That stuff really helps us out. This has been 4Four Media. We'll see you again next week.
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From the publisher
This week Sam unpacks how social media algorithms manipulate our emotions around everything from engagement rings to wedding dresses to babies, and what it feels like getting lost in the #Weddingtok sauce, and Emanuel breaks down a satirical but functional AI tool that rips off open source software. There’s a long history in “clean room” software that’s really interesting. In the section for subscribers at the Supporter level, Jason walks us through “tokenmaxxing” and startups obsessed with spending as much money as possible on AI—and as little as possible on humans.
Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for access to this episode's bonus content and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.
I Almost Lost My Mind in the Bridal Algorithm
This AI Tool Rips Off Open Source Software Without Violating Copyright
YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/-NEjEaOp1tI
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