AI Researcher Resignations; Bots Hiring Humans; Evie Magazine’s Party

11:18Brian:But, you know, it's also, I think, fair to say that with AI companies, as with social media companies a decade ago, like, the way that they talk about what they're doing is not in terms of just trying to make money for shareholders. It's, you know, a much loftier vision of what they're doing and why.

11:35Leah:Well, it's a claim that it's entirely mission-driven. But even with that, didn't Anthropic have someone who left recently as well?

11:40Brian:That was one of those notes that was like very vague. And we were like, okay, well, what? I mean, every time this happens, I think Brian and me are both in Slack being like, can someone find out what's going on here? What does it mean that you couldn't pursue your values at Anthropic?

11:52Zoe:There's just so much drama inside these companies, both related to this and related to everything else. It is remarkable how much money they have to burn and how consequential their products are given the levels of dysfunction that we're seeing. And that's just what we know, right? And we know a lot because it's so dysfunctional, but man, messy in there.

12:14Brian:I know. It's interesting because, you know, reportedly OpenAI is gearing up to go public in the next year. There's a lot that needs to happen behind the scenes for the company to be ready for that, to be ready for that level of scrutiny. But I think this is also, at least in terms of advertising, this is something that Fiji Simo, who's the CEO of Applications at OpenAI, has been really concerned with. Because she was brought over after she was the CEO of Instacart, but before that spent years and years at Meta working quite closely with Mark Zuckerberg. And people were really nervous when she joined OpenAI that she was going to run the Meta playbook at their little AI lab.

12:58Brian:I'm putting little in quotes too. You know, I spoke to her a few months ago. It sounded like she was trying to be quite thoughtful about this. But I think this is a point that both Fiji and OpenAI at large is like very sensitive about. Being the like bad AI company, being the one that's like, you know, running ad and shitification faster than its competitors. Like I think Anthropik is kind of hitting it where it hurts with that ad. And so frankly, is this researcher who penned the letter in the New York Times.

13:27Zoe:And we're still just a few weeks or so away from opening AI going to adult companionship with AI models, right? Like they're doing the speed run. Speaking of lofty goals in AI, I do want to ask Zoe and Leah, have you all heard of the website Rent-A-Human?

13:46Brian:Unfortunately, yes.

13:47Leah:Yeah. And kind of, I didn't want to. I didn't want to know that our AI overlords had already figured out how to rent us. I mean, explain this further, please, Brian, but like that's the gist of it, right? They figured out how to have us do their tasks for them.

14:04Zoe:Yeah. I mean, it's right there in the name. It's Rent-A-Human. And it's a site where AI agents can hire human beings to do all of those things in the real world that they can't do because they are AI. The tasks range from the ridiculous to the more ridiculous. someone was offering by someone i mean some it some ai agent was offering someone 30 bucks an hour to count pigeons in washington dc another delivering cbd gummies for 75 an hour all of this is just things again that a disembodied ai agent cannot do there's still a human behind them who set up the agent in the first place but then the agent pays the human to do the thing there are four million visits on this site over half a million users and by users i mean people who said yes, please, I would like to do the bidding of a bot and get paid for it.

14:55Zoe:And it's only growing from here. Rent me. Yeah. It's basically, if you're familiar with Fiverr, it's Fiverr, but with bots.

15:01Brian:But okay, we have to have a caveat in here because the article lays out in meticulous detail how a lot of these jobs, the writer was applying to them and not hearing back when he actually got a job. It seemed like the job was just like a marketing ploy for an AI startup. Like, what is actually going on?

15:19Zoe:Our colleague, Reese Rogers, actually rented himself out as a human and wrote about him on Wired. And yeah, his experience was exactly what you said. He had a hard time getting a gig to begin with by the time he finally got one. It was transparently a marketing gig, didn't get paid that much for it. He felt kind of used. I think part of that, though, is a function of so many humans want to do this. It's maybe not surprising that I think there's more humans that want to do this than bots that want to assign.

15:46Brian:Isn't this just about the state of the economy right now, though? I'm like, if we're thinking this is a new form of gig work and people want it as just like a way to make money on the side, is it not a sign that like people are unable to find jobs in other areas?

16:01Leah:Probably. Right? I mean, this is, there's how many other gig work apps can you sign yourself up for? You know, every time that I talk to an Uber driver, they're like, yes, I'm also a Lyft driver and I do Postmates and I do this and this and this. And then like, I don't know, the Rent to Human, as much as it like appears to be this bizarro publicity stunt, who knows where it could go from here, right? I keep thinking about people that are like, wait, hold on. Now AI is supposed to be doing the art for us while we do their menial tasks. Like that is the final direction of this in my very Doomer mindset.

16:37Zoe:I think what's a little bit, well, there's a lot that's kind of silly about all this. But what seems extra silly to me is that AI agents, if not right now, like the direction we're headed is they're just going to use Fiverr. They're just going to use Amazon Prime. Like they're just going to use these existing infrastructure sites on people's behalf. You don't need a separate site that's just for bots. Bots are going to be roaming the web or agents are going to be roaming the web freely. So it's a little bit of a it's a taste of what's to come in a centralized form with a goofy name. But ultimately, I think it is a look at what's more troubling to me, a future where you don't know if you're being assigned by a bot or by an agent or not.

17:18Zoe:You don't know what's on the other end of that line. Okay.

17:21Brian:Well, as someone who took once the practice test for the LSAT a single time when I debated going to law school, I have to ask who is liable if you get hurt on your little bot task job, if you mess something up and someone else gets hurt. Are we talking about the bot being liable? I feel like there's an interesting legal question here. The bot is an individual though,

17:43Leah:right? Like this is, I'm sorry. This is right. Like they're still being set out and even given the instructions to assign someone to these varying tasks, right? So surely it would be whatever business, whatever AI startup, whatever crypto wallet something that is encouraging people to count Washington's pigeons. Crypto wallet something. You heard it here first, folks. Crypto wallet is on the brain because you need a crypto wallet to get paid for tasks by Rent-A-Human. That was a huge red flag to me.

18:15Zoe:Are we shocked that there's a crypto tie-in?

18:16Leah:There has to be a crypto tie-in. There's always a crypto tie-in.

18:19Zoe:I will say we also talked to the founders of Rent-A-Human, a 26-year-old Argentinian software engineer, Alexander Le Teplo, and his co-founder, Patricia Tani. Would it surprise either of you to know, again, that this website was vibe-coded in a day by an AI agent.

18:35Leah:That makes so much sense.

18:37Zoe:It's agents all the way down. All right.

18:39Leah:I am removing AI from the chat, you guys. This is way too much for me today. I feel like I was an incredible sport about the last 20 minutes of my life. Thank you so much. And to be clear, these are all really, really important stories, but I want to talk about a very different story that I think could have maybe not as much of an impact as AI on the rest of the world, but a sizable cultural and political impact nonetheless. Let's get into the midterms and more specifically.

19:07Zoe:Leah, it's so early. It's February. Do we have to?

19:10Leah:I also feel like you made us do this like two weeks ago. Okay, but this is a really different way into it. So polls are not looking great for the GOP. In the last couple of weeks, we've seen a number of issues not track super well, Whether that was, you know, ICE's invasion of Minneapolis, economy, as we have been talking about, not so great no matter what President Donald Trump says. So in classic Republican fashion, they have like backups on backups on backups. We have the Manosphere on one side, which is plugging away. We have our hardy podcasters that Wired has been covering for a long, long time.

19:47Leah:But I want to look a little bit at a different side of this and how Republicans are appealing to young women right now. And that's EV Magazine, which is a digital and print magazine with conservative women as their main audience target. They have quite literally called themselves the conservative Cosmo before. They were founded in 2019, and the entire point was to have an alternative. It was this idea that conservative women were like sitting down reading Marie Claire and Vogue and Cosmo and being like, stop throwing your liberal ideas at me amidst these like makeup ads. And now like I'm totally serious.

20:25Leah:And so you have Evie magazine, which if you're scrolling through their online right now, you see things that are like, is this actually political? It's articles like seven questions to ask early if you want a serious relationship or how to dress like Olivia Dean on a budget. But so much of it is a classic example of soft power in action. This is so many of the other articles running alongside are like critiques of birth control or women sharing experiences about, you know, why having sex before marriage actually doomed all of their relationships. It's this like very interesting space that's actually been picking up quite a bit of attention.

21:01Leah:You have Republicans across the spectrum that are pretty obsessed with it. Candice Owens, Steve Bannon, and Brett Cooper, a conservative commentator, all champion Evie. So Brett Cooper and I actually have something really important in common, you guys. We were both at Evie Magazine's very first live event on Sunday night in New York City. This was their live event at New York Fashion Week. It was held at the Standard Hotels Boom in Chelsea, and it was so bizarre. I wrote an article about it. Did you read it? Tell me what you think.

21:34Brian:I read it. The detail about the room smelling like burnt hair really got me. That was—

21:41Zoe:Very evocative.

21:42Brian:Very evocative. I felt like I was there. I was also—because I read a profile on Brett Cooper a while back, and I was very curious what she's like in person.

21:51Leah:Many of the women at this event gave off the appearance of trying really, really hard to look very, very glamorous and very, very with it and very, very much at this function. that was, in quotes, attempting to celebrate the Romantic era. It wasn't inherently political. Like, that's the wild thing. If you walked in off the street, you were not going to go, oh, this is conservatism. We're not talking about like MAGA hats or whatever. No, no, no, no, no, no. If you're talking conservatism, you're talking like Sidney Sweeney rather than like ice patrolling streets. Like, that was more the vibe, which is really important because that's actually how they're winning hearts and minds here.

22:35Leah:This is soft power.

22:36Zoe:Leah, I have a chicken and an egg question here, which is that there was clearly a market for this, right? Because it's doing well. So how much of EV, and they've been around for, you know, seven years or so and growing, how much of their success is they've just tapped into a market that didn't have a magazine like this, but they always wanted one? And how much of it is they are winning people over to conservatism who wouldn't have otherwise been there?

23:03Leah:I think it's both. I really think it's both. The talking to the people that were at the party, you know, you had like, I talked to conservative commentators who certainly were conservative long before Evie was founded and will be around long after the internet. But what I was also taken with were like random young women who were like, no, I really like the aesthetic. I love their soft focus photography. I love their focus on these models. and also they have great celebrity content. So it was really running the gambit here. But to be entirely clear, like there is no way to actually separate Evie from politics.

23:41Leah:Like the magazine Traffics and Conspiracy Theory shares anti-vaccine content, has Trad Wife inspo like every other article. Remember Ballerina Farm? Like they helped bring it into a lot of the main sphere. Like they have articles about rejecting quote-unquote modern feminism and pushing modern femininity instead. And maybe in some ways the most explicit part of what they're doing is they also push an app that was founded by the editor-in-chief and co-founders of EV. The app is called 28. It was founded in part by Peter Thiel. And in the app, users log information about their periods to calculate their menstrual cycle.

24:21Leah:And advertisements for it quite literally run next to articles that criticize hormonal birth control. One of the co-founders and editor-in-chief, Brittany Hugo Boom, actually told the New York Times that when she originally pitched Peter Thiel on funding this, part of her pitch was about the quote-unquote fertility crisis, which is, as we know, something that like a lot of conservatives are really, really concerned about for whatever reason.

24:46Brian:I feel like it seems from the outside, like there's a bit of a contradiction, and I'm wondering if it felt like this at the event, between people like Brett Cooper and Brittany, this co-founder, who are modern entrepreneurial women who seem like they're working really hard and building kind of a business. And then this message that women should take the more traditional female role in the family and perhaps not be a work. I mean, I don't know what else you mean by being anti-feminist, but do those things feel like they clash? They seem like they do.

25:16Leah:They absolutely feel like they clash. But the explanation of that, like from a woman I spoke to at the event or even in the articles that they're running on their website is in fact, no, it's about choice. And it's about women's right to choose if they would like to be at home with their children or they would like to be out in events. And something that caught my eye, honestly, in the last few days that I haven't been able to look away from is other outlets have put out their descriptions of the party as well. And very little of their descriptions, I'm thinking of this Wall Street Journal article in particular, talked very much about politics.

25:50Leah:And like the bigger focus was on like Evie being in this conservative space, but like this glamorous, glamorous event. And it really sanitized everything. And that is so much of this to me is that like Evie already on like through their articles is sanitizing all of their stances here. And the party was doing the exact same. It was really, really wild to watch.

26:11Zoe:And yeah, and to your point, it's not just about Evie. There is such a huge ecosystem of influencers in this space that have huge followings that are pushing a very similar line.

26:22Leah:We're in a moment right now, I think, where media is still figuring out how we talk about political influencers. Do we glamorize? Do we sanitize? Do we give them the platform? Do we give them the pedestal? EV has created its own ecosystem for this, somewhat in the same way that like the Republican manosphere did as well. When it comes to the midterms, we're looking at an entire range of young woman voters who perhaps are not that interested in like what the Republican mainstream is offering them, but can look at Evie and can look at influencers like Brett Cooper and buy what they're selling. I am very, very, very curious to see how this plays out in the elections this year.

27:08Brian:Coming up after the break, we'll share our Wired Tired picks for the week. Stay with us.

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28:52Brian:I'm CNN tech reporter Claire Duffy. I cover artificial intelligence and other new technologies for a living. And even I sometimes get overwhelmed trying to keep up with it all. So I'm starting a new show where together we can explore how to experiment with these new tools without getting played by them. It's called Terms of Service. This technology is so crazy powerful. Follow CNN's Terms of Service wherever you get your podcasts.

29:24Brian:It's time for our Wired, Tired segment. Whatever is new and cool is wired, obviously. Whatever is passé is tired. Are we ready?

29:35Zoe:I'm going to be ripped from the headlines. This might be a controversial pick. I think my wire this week is Lego's smart brick. So I don't know if you guys have been following this, but Lego has introduced a brick that has all kinds of sensors in it, an accelerometer. It can basically, you integrate it into an existing system and it can say, if you're playing with like your Millennium Falcon build, it'll know if you like have a crash landing, it'll make some sort of noise. It sort of brings a level of interactivity to Lego, which I think purists are probably saying, no, don't do that. Lego's fine.

30:11Zoe:And that's true for you. If you don't want to use it, you don't have to. But I think it's nice to see that they're still trying new things, whether it works or it doesn't. I appreciate the effort and I'm curious to try it out for myself.

30:26Brian:I like that. We're still on the magnetiles phase, but I'm excited for that. Once we can get over the tiny choking hazard, then I feel like we'll launch into the Lego phase.

30:35Zoe:Unstoppable, yeah. No, they're great.

30:37Leah:Okay. For anyone that actually knows me, this is a very, very difficult one. For me, what is tired is Resi and OpenTable and any app I need to use to get a reservation for anything ever. I have become a caricature of myself, you guys. I am setting alarms like seven times a day to try and get different reservations. I love food. I love going out to eat. And in New York, it has just become hell on earth.

31:10Brian:This is going to be Leah's entrance into AI agents once she figures out how to deploy clodblasts.

31:17Zoe:Just vibe, code, and agent. Vibe, code, and agent.

31:20Leah:Already tried. Already tried. Already asked a friend of mine. I'm like, honestly, not even kidding. This is something that I have absolutely looked into. This would solve so many things for me. And I'm devastated because as Zoe in particular knows, I love reservations. I actually love having a plan and knowing that I'm going to be able to get in. So when I say that my Wired is walking into a restaurant, that's like not actually true because I would have so much anxiety in like the two-hour lead up. I'm like, maybe we just won't eat tonight. And that's fine. That's fine. I'll be okay with that.

31:47Leah:No. My wire doesn't in fact exist yet, which is just like a restaurant that entirely refuses reservations or has a different system altogether. There's a restaurant in Maine that's absolutely amazing called The Lost Kitchen. They had like a whole TV show about them. I mean, Aaron French, Unbelievable Chef. This is how they take reservations, you guys. You mail in a postcard. I thought that was a gimmick before, but now I think that's it. I think that's where I'm at. It's too much. They appified my favorite hobby. And now I can't do it anymore. I'm sorry. It's okay. I say this, though, and I for sure have an alarm going off in 15 minutes to try and get in somewhere.

32:26Brian:But will it work? I was going to say, I completely still rely on you when I'm in New York. I'm like, I expect every evening to be a cool culinary experience.

32:34Leah:Yes, and it will be. And it will be. Trust me. It's just, I think it's just a phase. Talk to me in a week or so. I'm annoyed. I'm just annoyed.

32:41Zoe:After you've vibe-coded your AI agent to make reservations.

32:45Leah:Yeah, exactly. Yeah, this is my path to the dark side.

32:49Brian:This is AGI, baby. What's yours? Okay, this is my tired. I don't want to get in trouble with every member of my family, but my kids have discovered how to FaceTime with their grandparents. My older daughter now spends a lot. She's constantly asking to call my dad in particular. It's very cute, but do I love the fact that she now fully knows how to work an iPhone? I do not. I do not love that. We are on the wait list for the tin can phone. And guys, that's my word. I'm really excited for this future, a Wi-Fi connected phone that just makes calls. What? Yes. The marketing is made in a lab to get me to spend money.

33:28Brian:I love it so much. And supposedly it ships in April.

33:32Leah:I'm looking it up right now. The colors are so cute. This actually looks like a tin can phone. This is not like a Motorola Razr. This is adorable.

33:40Zoe:It's huge. and once you get your parent network on it all the kids in the school can call each other in a

33:47Brian:nice controlled way wait brian do your kids have it i think my kids are a little older so everyone's

33:54Zoe:already on smart watches and stuff um so we just missed it but also check wired.com in a couple of weeks a week for a really nice story about this wait this is really i want one should we get them

34:08Leah:and call each other? I know. Are they encrypted? Probably no. Probably no. That's our show for today. We'll link to all the stories we spoke about today in the show notes. If you have any comments, you can find the episode transcripts at wired.com to discuss. Uncanny Valley is produced by Kaleidoscope Content. Adriana Tapia produced this episode. It was mixed by Amar Lal at Macrosound. Mark Leda was our San Francisco studio engineer. Fran Bandy is our New York studio engineer. Kate Osborne is our executive producer. And Katie Drummond is WIRED's global editorial director.

34:51Zoe:This week on the political scene from The New Yorker, Trump's rupture in the world order. Europe caught between two adversarial great powers. That's basically dialing back the clock to not only pre-World War II, but really it's a pre-20th century view of the world. And I would say it's a world of permanent insecurity that we're looking at. Join me, Evan Osnos, and my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser every Friday on The Political Scene, available wherever you get your podcasts.

35:27Leah:This show is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at odoo.com. That's odoo.com. From PRX.