Who is really paying the influencers?

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1:43Using AI is making you stupider. If AI is coming up with the idea for you, you're going to get worse at coming up with ideas. Hello, and welcome back to The Interface, the show that decodes how tech is rewiring your week and your world. I'm Karen Howe. I'm Thomas Germain, and Nicky Wolf is out this week, but we got a great show for you. Today on The Interface, the secret campaign to make you fear Chinese AI. Speaking of AI, we'll tell you how you can use it without turning your brain to mush. And are self-driven cars getting worse? I hope not.

2:23Hey, Tom, you spend a lot of time on social media. I sure do. Have you noticed any of the people that you follow suddenly randomly starting to talk about how much they love AI? Well, certainly a lot of me talking about AI on social media. But I have noticed over the past couple years, I mean, obviously it's become like the topic of conversation across our society. But I did get this weird feeling that it seemed like there were a lot of people talking about it in this strange way, people who weren't normally invested in this subject. And it did actually stick out to me. You definitely have sweaty senses and you're onto something because there's this crazy story this week in Wired that was written by the journalist Taylor Lorenz, where she discovered that there is essentially this secret campaign where the AI industry is funneling money to influencers to make them talk about how much they love American AI and how much you should fear Chinese AI.

3:29So they're paying all these influencers online? Are they giving them a script? Or how does this work? So they're paying these influencers, and the influencers are not disclosing that when they generate content on behalf of this client, that it is this client that's funding them. So they label their posts and say it's an advertisement, but they don't actually say an advertisement for who. And the reason why Tella Lorenz discovered this is because she was one of the people that was reached out to by this campaign asking if she would accept money to be part of this campaign. And so she ended up getting a bunch of documents that are given to these influencers to explain like how they should be engaging in this campaign.

4:16And there's kind of two parts to this campaign. One part is where they talk about how much they love American AI. And, you know, the briefing document even says, talk about how you use AI and how it's great that it's made in the USA while feeding your kids or something like that. It's like really specific. Yeah, kitchen table politics. Yeah, exactly. And then the second part is this idea that you should be really scared that Chinese AI companies might beat American AI companies and that would be bad for everyone. And it's just such a fascinating story because of a few reasons. One is that, in general, this argument of rah-rah, American AI, boo, Chinese AI, is one of the things that the tech industry has long loved to use to try and ward off regulations.

5:10China's so scary. So they're really trying to tap into this argument that has arguably worked for a really long time for them, but in this subtle way where instead of using it directly with policymakers on the Hill testifying during Congress, they're now trying to just mainline it straight to people without actually disclosing that they are doing that. And the second interesting thing about this story is who is actually funding this within the AI industry. So the money is actually coming from this group called Leading the Future. And I've done a little reporting on Leading the Future before. Or this is an AI industry super PAC that spun up with the explicit intent of pumping a bunch of money into influencing the upcoming elections.

6:03And Leading the Future has said that they have currently raised around$140 million of money for this purpose. So Leading the Future is like those are the guys who are behind this effort to change your mind. Leading the future is behind the money that is going into this effort. So there are multiple organizations involved. Leading the future funds this other entity called Build American AI. And then Build American AI is the one that actually distributes it to this social media campaign company to then source the influencers. So complicated. So it's this really convoluted trail of money. But it all starts with leading the future.

6:45And Leading the Future is funded by people like Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, and Theresa Horowitz, the venture capital firm, and is modeled after this super pack that was originally designed by the crypto industry called Fairshake. I don't know if you've ever heard of this super pack. Fairshake. Fairshake was this really infamous super pack that the crypto industry spun up. It was the brainchild of this man named Chris Lehane, who is now the head of global policy at OpenAI. And at the time, Chris Lehane, he was this very experienced political operative that had previously worked for the Clintons.

7:27And Lehane basically, after working for a while at Washington, hopped over to Silicon Valley and essentially is credited as the man who taught Silicon Valley how to play politics. And he at the time was like, hey, we should start funneling the tech industry's money into influencing elections. And Fairshake came out of this idea and started pumping around$200 million into the 2024 elections. And they say that they had great success. They were able to elect in a pro-crypto Congress. And then they ended up with pro-crypto legislation. And so the AI industry has taken this exact playbook. The crypto playbook.

8:15They created Leading the Future. Chris Lahan is still behind the scenes involved. And they're pumping money into elections. But there's kind of this new element now where they're also pumping money in this dark money way. Because the thing about funding elections is that you have to publicly disclose when you are funding and who you are funding and how much you are funding. those elections. But when you're funding influencers, influencers don't actually have to say any of that. There's nothing like illegal about this. Like you could have a conversation about the ethics, but like you are allowed to pay someone to promote your economic or political or business goals.

8:58What's the defense? What are the people involved with this? What are they saying? Well, they don't really have. I wouldn't call it a defense. I would call it maybe an explanation. So Televans did reach out to Leading the Future and Leading the Future said, the United States has an opportunity to remain the global leader in AI innovation. And we're taking that message to the broadest possible audience through an all of the above communication strategy. Sounds, I mean, that's what I would do.

9:34And she also reached out to OpenAI. OpenAI spokesperson said that OpenAI has no corporate affiliation with Leading the Future, the donation from Brockman and the involvement of Chris Lehane in their personal capacity. Gotcha. So that's not, this isn't an official OpenAI communication strategy. It's just the guys who are in charge of OpenAI are doing this. That's right. It's interesting. If you pay close attention to the tech industry, there's been this narrative about how we all need to be so freaked out about Chinese tech companies for a while now, right? There's this phone manufacturer, one of the biggest in the world called Huawei.

10:15They're not allowed to sell phones in the United States because they got banned because they're a natural security threat. There's this story that we talked about a couple of weeks ago where Chinese or I I guess foreign companies, but all routers are made in China. You're not going to be allowed, apparently, to sell a router made outside of the United States, a Wi-Fi router, without special permission. And now we're hearing about this campaign to make us afraid of Chinese AI companies. It's worth noting, and I mean, Karen, this is your area of expertise, so I'd love to hear you talk about this.

10:50But the whole reason for being for companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, is they're like, AI is super dangerous. And if we let the bad guys make it first, then we'll all be in trouble. So we need to get there first. That's this idea that is at the center of this whole thing. Yeah, that's right. And part of it is because there are people within Silicon Valley that genuinely believe this. And part of it is because they have just realized that this is the trump card of all arguments to ward off regulation. Right. I was recently talking with some policymakers on the Hill.

11:31They were actually telling me that this argument is really losing steam because a lot of policymakers are beginning to feel played. They feel like they listened to Silicon Valley for over a decade now. You know, first with the social media companies making this argument and now with the AI companies making this argument. And it really just has not panned out the way that Silicon Valley said it would. the argument was, hey, don't regulate us because then we're going to dominate. And ironically, now a lot of Chinese AI models are not just dominating globally, but they're also dominating within Silicon Valley.

12:06Like there are a lot of Silicon Valley startups that are just using Chinese AI models instead of American AI ones because they're cheaper, they are easier to deploy, they're open and free to download. So policymakers are getting really tired of this rhetoric, which I suspect might be one of the reasons why the AI industry is now going straight to the people with this messaging. Right. Because they probably feel the fact that they're losing this policymaker audience. So they're trying the same rhetoric with a different one. Also, the public is not really into this narrative either. So it almost feels a little bit like the tech industry is running out of ideas for how to actually message itself and turn around the narrative because they've tried the policymakers.

12:52Policymakers are losing ground there. They're trying the public. They're losing ground there. And they don't really have new things to say for why we should like their technology and use it. I mean, I guess we'll see. Maybe this has been enormously successful. We don't really know. I would love to hear from people. How do you feel about Chinese AI companies? Like, do you have a thought in your head about whether you should be worried about them? And if you do, like, where did that come from? Where did you hear about that? Because these ideas kind of seep in, right? I would also be curious for our listeners whether or not they start noticing influencers that they follow actually listing some kind of advertising content without mentioning who is advertising.

13:38In particular, you should try to look for this content with influencers that usually don't, in fact, talk about technology in the campaign. They have been targeting lifestyle influencers. And according to a briefing document, Taylor Runs reported that the organization's also seeking to, quote, extend beyond left-leaning female lifestyle and family content creators to focus on left-leaning influencers who are political commentators, business tech leaders, and male lifestyle influencers. And they have a totally other operation that is targeting the right-wing equivalents of all these categories as well.

14:17There's a guy I follow who like talks about if you're a dude, like how your jeans are supposed to fit. If he starts talking about AI, I'm going to be suspicious. I'm going to know something's up. If he just starts saying, wow, AI makes me so much more effective at putting on my jeans. Right, they'd be really worried about your pants.

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16:19So I think a lot of people are afraid of AI. Maybe you're worried about someday China's AI is going to take over or something like that. It would be better for the American. but there's a much more immediate concern, one that makes me very worried about myself personally. And it's this notion that maybe you've heard about this, that using AI is making you stupider. There have been a bunch of studies that suggest that using AI too much or in the wrong way is harmful to your cognition, right? That it is like worsening the functions of your brain. and I found this very alarming because a couple of years, like when AI first came out, right?

17:06Well, first came out, when AI really exploded when Chachi GPT came out in 2022, I was like, this is the most annoying thing I've ever seen. I cannot stand the way that all these guys on Twitter are talking about how it's going to change my life. And I really, I was like, I don't want it. But then I was like, well, no, I have to force myself to use this stuff because, you know, this is my beat. This is what I write about. I really need to understand it. So I like consciously like sat down and I was like, how can I inject this into my life as much as possible? So I know it backwards and forwards.

17:37So when I talk about it, I know what I'm talking about. Now, I'm worried that that effort has ruined my poor little brain. There was a study that came out last year that got a ton of attention where they took a pretty small group of college students. and they had some of them write an essay with AI and they had some of them write an essay, you know, by hand and they hooked them up to a brain scan and the ones who wrote it with AI, their like brain wasn't making as much connections and everyone freaked out. And there was this like narrative that was put forward that like using AI one time is gonna like fry your synapses or something.

18:21Absolute nonsense. That's not true. That isn't really what the study was saying. The thing is here, this is brand new science, right? AI in the hands of the masses is a new thing, at least, you know, large language models, the tech that runs stuff like ChatGPT and Claude, that's new. We don't know how it's affecting your brain, but there are some indications that there are reasons to be alarmed. So I called up a bunch of neuroscientists and, you know, professors and experts who like study how the brain learns, what makes things stick and what makes them kind of fall away. And the analogy that I kept hearing time and again, they're like, it's not this simple, but you can kind of think of your brain like a muscle, right?

19:04And there's certain things that if you stop practicing them, you will get worse at it. And we've seen this with some older technologies. So when GPS first came out, they did a bunch of studies, like when it was like when there were a lot of people who were using it, but like a lot of people who didn't. So you could do this control group thing, right? Where you had people who weren't. They found that people who use GPS all the time, they get worse at essentially building mental maps, right? Their spatial memory and spatial reasoning gets worse. And then they did these studies where they like took people who continued to use GPS and like went back and studied them again after like a year or two.

19:46And they found that continued to deteriorate, which is, you know, I don't know if you have this experience. I like can't get home without looking at my, like there's certain routes I take all the time, but it's like, I don't know where anything is anymore. Yeah, I can't remember directions. And ever since I got a phone that could program contacts into my phone, I have not remembered a number ever again. Like all of the numbers that I remember are my childhood. Right, I can tell you my phone number where I grew up in LA, I don't know my parents' home phone number now, which I need to. Like, I dial it all the time, but I just, like, hit the little button.

20:24If I lost my phone, I'd never speak to my parents again, I guess. And there's also, have you ever heard of the Google effect? Have you ever heard of this one? No. This is older. When search engines first took over, they did a bunch of studies, and they found that if you look something up using a search engine, you will have a harder time remembering it. As opposed to looking it up through an encyclopedia? Yeah. So essentially what this is about is like the effort that you put into it. Right. If it took you a bunch of work to find a piece of information, that effort, that's what matters. I talked to this neuroscientist named Adam Green, and he said the way you should think about it is like if you're at the gym, you can, like the goal is to lift the weight, right?

21:12But if you get a robot to lift the weight, It doesn't matter that the weight went up. You're not going to get any of the benefit. So there have been some initial studies that suggest AI could cause us some problems because what this is all about is shortcuts and AI is the ultimate shortcut machine. There's never been a tool that is across so many different tasks able to remove the effort and make things easier. So one big area that people are concerned about is creativity, that AI could be making us less creative. There's a study going through peer review right now, but it's pretty compelling.

21:51I took a look at it, where they looked at thousands and thousands of thousands of college application essays. And they found that across society, there's this implication that like the pool of ideas that we're all having is getting smaller. that like just the ideas that human beings are having are becoming more similar and less varied. That's bad on a societal level, but even on an individual level, there are all these implications that like if you're using AI to do a creative task, right? If you're like trying to come up with a joke and you're going through that kind of process all the time, you're going to get worse.

22:34Coming up with jokes. Yeah, but like you can think about other analogies, right? Like anytime you're brainstorming, if AI is coming up with the idea for you, you're going to get worse at coming up with ideas. It's like very narrow, right? It's not ideas in general, but it's like this particular style of brainstorming task. The less, you know, you don't use it, you lose it. So, and it's not just that like, you're going to get worse at this, but if we're all using the same machine, the same computer program to come up with ideas that like original thought, it could slip away. And I think this is pretty alarming.

23:10You're making your brain worse and like our collective societal brain is getting worse. This could have serious consequences. This is why I take the exact opposite approach from you, Tom, which is I cover the technology, but I refuse to use it. Because I worry that even just ask, like if I were to ask, you know, when you're staring at a blank page. Every writer's worst nightmare. You have writer's block, you're trying to figure out the first sentence. And I talk with writers who say, yeah, they use an AI chatbot to just spark that first sentence so that they're not staring at the blank page. I am terrified of getting that, the phrasing into my mind and then not being able to get it out of my head and having that pollute my own original phrasing, my own original thinking, potentially without me even realizing, you know, over time, so much of my writing, I think the strength of it is the fact that it sounds like me.

24:17It sounds unique and distinctive. And that is a strength that I want to protect and preserve. That's such a good setup that people are going to think that we plan this, because that is the advice here is leave the page blank for longer, right? That's crazy. Okay. Yeah, it's pretty good. It's pretty good, right? What you need to do, and this applies across a couple of these things, you need to come up with the idea yourself, right? So you need to come up with your joke, and then you can use AI to help you refine it, right? Like, I don't think it's useful advice to tell people, like, stop using AI, right?

24:52If this is part of your life, think about how to use it better without, like, messing things up. So try to extend your own thought and then use AI to improve upon it rather than having AI come up with the thing by itself. Adam Green, the neuroscientist I talked to, his advice was like, notice how painful it is. If there's like a mental task that you need to do, if it's like, oh, I just don't. It's like, it's going to take too much effort. I don't want to do this. Like if that's starting to feel like too much work, like a thing that you used to do all the time, and now it's like, I just don't want to.

25:31That's when you need to freak out. You know, this is an area where you want to focus and start putting more work back in. There's another, I think this is even scarier. There's some evidence that we are getting worse at critical thinking, at least when we are using AI. There was this really compelling study that came out where they talked about this idea of cognitive surrender where they set up this experiment where people had to come up with a statement, I think about like climate change or something. And they had some people use AI to come up with the idea. And they had some people just come up with it themselves.

26:10And they had some people do both. They found that people trusted AI over their own intuition and their own thought process. So they thought it through themselves. and then they asked the AI and the AI gave an answer. They were like, well, the AI must be right. Even when it was wrong, even when they set up an experiment where it's kind of obvious that the robot is wrong, people are like, well, there's just, the robot's smarter than I am. There've been a bunch of other tests too that show people who use AI, they just like put extra faith in it. And not just when you're using AI, there was a study that found from a university in Switzerland that people who use AI more often that are like heavy users of AI.

26:51It was a big, the hundreds of people in the sample. So, you know, worth something. We're just like worse at critical thinking tests in general. In general. And what age were these people? Great question. They found that this seems to affect younger people more significantly. So there's a lot of concerns about how AI is affecting younger minds, right? Like your brain isn't done developing until you're in your 20s. So if you're younger or you know someone who is, maybe this is something that you might want to think about here. And the advice here is a little bit more difficult if you use AI all the time.