
Zuckerberg, TikTok, and Treadmills That Sniff
Mason Amadeus: Live from the 8th Layer Media Studios in the backrooms of the deep web, this is "The FAIK Files".
Perry Carpenter: When tech gets weird, we are here to make sense of it. I'm Perry Carpenter.
Mason Amadeus: And I'm Mason Amadeus. On this episode, we're going to talk about how Meta is making some choices; we'll put it that way.
Perry Carpenter: And then what the heck is going on between China and the US, and like how can we make sense of that?
Mason Amadeus: After that we'll talk about how your exercise equipment might be smelling you, [laughs] period --
Perry Carpenter: Ooh.
Mason Amadeus: -- full stop.
Perry Carpenter: Yes, and then we're going to look at some thoughts and concerns around AI power consumption and try to bring data to the discussion.
Mason Amadeus: Absolutely. All that and more on this episode of "The FAIK Files". So sit back, relax, and accept only those strictly necessary cookies. We'll open up "The FAIK Files" right after this. [ Music ] So Meta has been on a tear doing some stuff lately. There have been a lot of --
Perry Carpenter: Some stuff?
Mason Amadeus: Yes, there have been a lot of shifts in -- we'll just dive right into it. So they're not doing fact-checking anymore. [Laughter] That was the big headline.
Perry Carpenter: Is that a fact?
Mason Amadeus: That is a fact. They announced that starting in the US they're ending their third-party fact-checking program and moving to a community notes model, like there is over on Twitter. They say, quote, "We will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are a part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations. We will take a more personalized approach to political content, so that people who want to see more of it in their feeds can." Now, that in itself is an interesting statement, the idea that if you want to see more political --
Perry Carpenter: Yes.
Mason Amadeus: -- content you can.
Perry Carpenter: Yes, and I always wonder like what's the mechanism that lets them know that you want more. It's -- you know, the way that I assume that is happening is you slow down and you engage with posts. Does that --
Mason Amadeus: Yes.
Perry Carpenter: -- mean because you've slowed down and engaged that you really want, or does it mean that you're shocked, horrified, scared, angry? I don't know.
Mason Amadeus: Yes.
Perry Carpenter: But if you've engaged, what does the algorithm make of that?
Mason Amadeus: And I mean this is a company that in some ways pioneered a lot of rage baiting with --
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: -- their history. And we talked before about this, the Facebook sort of journey about what they have been for has made things I think extra convoluted, because like initially Facebook -- well I mean in the early days it was Mark Zuckerberg's website for like rating the attractiveness of people. And then it evolved into like --
Perry Carpenter: Yes.
Mason Amadeus: -- a lighthearted fun thing, kind of like Myspace was at the time, but with like poking and FarmVille. And then it became, "Well, it needs to be authentic. You have to use real names. This is where real people you actually know gather." And so it gave -- it got a more intimate feeling, the network you have on there is more real. And now they're saying like, "We don't want to be the arbiters of truth," and they had, you know, the Cambridge Analytica scandal. And they've just been progressively less and less good, I guess, in terms of their customer base.
Perry Carpenter: Yes. I mean, it's interesting because, you know, 2015/2016 timeframe they seemed to be really pioneering a lot of interesting work on trust and safety.
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: And people were actually applauding it. Doesn't mean that everybody on Facebook liked it when they saw a fact check or they liked it. But the broader tech community and people that think about disinformation, misinformation and how to inject trust and safety within tech platforms were fairly complementary of the stance that Meta was taking. But what we've seen since that timeframe, that eight years, I guess, has been that there have been more and more arguments around it, and the political tide has shifted to where Zuckerberg feels like he needs to capitulate.
Mason Amadeus: Yes, and I know we try and avoid getting too deep in the weeds when it comes to political stuff on this show because it's a tech show, they're a bit inextricable here. And I mean there's a definite --
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: -- shift with certain kinds of disinformation, misinformation, and speech that are favored by a sort of the current moment of the incoming administration.
Perry Carpenter: Mm-hmm.
Mason Amadeus: I'm really using a lot of euphemistic language here. I think, you know, I feel a lot of people know my personal thoughts on it. But the thing that is concerning is that like community notes are a great supplement to fact-checking. It's great to have people be able to add context that doesn't have to come from like a third party official source. It can be really useful --
Perry Carpenter: Yes.
Mason Amadeus: -- but it is not a replacement. That is not -- and it's because of something that you talk about a lot where like the impact of the disinformation gets out there first, and then these community note corrections coming in don't really have much of an impact. And I mean that is the problem with fact-checking too, but they were --
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: -- doing better about it and now they're deciding not to because of certain people's complaints of censorship. And getting put in Facebook jail is like a thing. They did -- they talk about -- in their release specifically they said that the systems that they've developed to manage content on their platforms are just getting increasingly hard for them to manage. And yes, I get that. And like they have -- they say that they're over-enforcing the rules, limiting legitimate political debate and censoring too much trivial content, and subjecting too many people to frustrating enforcement actions. Yes, like people, myself included, have been put in Facebook jail for like a joke that wasn't even edgy or anything. Like they definitely over-tuned --
Perry Carpenter: Mm-hmm.
Mason Amadeus: -- some of their stuff at different points. But this is very transparently kowtowing to the political climate, because they also ended their --
Perry Carpenter: Yes.
Mason Amadeus: -- DEI programs, their DEI initiatives. They said that they're just done with removing all that kind of language.
Perry Carpenter: Yes; but it seems like some of that may be more semantics, right? So you know, I wonder when it comes to Meta the long-term effects of things, because we have seen that their focus on trust and safety for a while was a reaction to some really, really horrible stuff that their platform accidentally enabled people in other parts of the country, other parts of the world that were essentially misinforming everybody around them and it led to violence against certain people. You can look up what happened in Myanmar --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- if you're really interested in that. But you know, just scares and the way that groupthink works really can become weaponized on a platform like Facebook. And maybe people don't even realize that they're -- that it is weaponization, but it comes full force against a person or a group of people because of the moral panic or societal panic around something; similar to in this last -- you know, this last couple months where people were saying that in Springfield people were eating dogs and cats.
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: There's, you know, absolutely no truth to that, but it could go out and people could believe it's true, and then all of a sudden you're -- you have people around a Nigerian immigrant or a Haitian immigrant --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- just beating that person to death because they believe that they're really, you know, stealing Fluffy and eating Fluffy --
Mason Amadeus: And --
Perry Carpenter: -- and it's just not true.
Mason Amadeus: -- Facebook's prior positioning as being like a trusted network of people that are close to you I think really compounds this because, you know, everyone on Facebook is --
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: -- your cousins, your uncles, your friends, your coworkers, your teachers, your parents. Like people you know in real life tend to be the people you communicate with on Facebook; which is different from platforms like Twitter or X where --
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: -- those networks are a lot looser, broader, and more like topically oriented I guess --
Perry Carpenter: Yes.
Mason Amadeus: -- or topically hooked. So --
Perry Carpenter: Yes.
Mason Amadeus: Yes, the trusted network being invaded is not ever a good thing. And --
Perry Carpenter: Yes, I know that people hate fact-checking, but I really wish Meta would have figured out a way to tune the algorithms a little bit more to where they didn't put people in Facebook jail for things that they didn't need to be in Facebook jail for, but also were able to bring in, let's say, you know, multiple sources across a spectrum of political and social beliefs for fact-checking to come to some kind of consensus about different parts of the -- you know, different things that are going on around the world.
Mason Amadeus: Well, and like you would think in the age of AI that we are entering that AI in moderation tools would be something that they will be jumping more on the bandwagon of, but you will notice like with Groq and that whole thing, which is X's AI, Elon Musk's AI, that claimed he was the biggest spreader of disinformation, there -- you know, there's like a lot of claims that, "Well, that's just censorship at this point." So I can see why Meta is like, "We're just not going to do it," rather than put more effort into it because it doesn't favor the current political administration and the people who support it.
Perry Carpenter: Yes.
Mason Amadeus: And --
Perry Carpenter: And if they fire their whole trust and safety team and ease up on the algorithms, they can save a lot of money. The --
Mason Amadeus: Yes.
Perry Carpenter: You know, they don't need a couple hundred people that were in that team. And they've been looking at moving people from California to Texas for various reasons, both economic and political, I can assume.
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm. Well, and they've recently announced that they're going to cut five percent of their global workforce. Zuckerberg is saying that it's people who aren't meeting expectations they're just going to be, quote, "Doing more extensive performance-based cuts during this cycle." He said, "This is going to be an intense year and I want to make sure we have the best people on our teams." And so I guess you do that by cutting five percent of your global workforce, if you're Meta. Zuckerberg is on a tear, I feel like right now, because he also -- he went on the Joe Rogan podcast and said that corporate America is neutered, and that we need more masculine energy in our companies and things like that. So there's some very blatant signaling going on in that regard underneath all of this. And I'm troubled a bit. I don't -- I wish I had grabbed them to have them handy, but I have seen some posts from users online saying that you can search for essentially slurs against people in the LGBTQ community, but you can't search for just terms like "LGBTQ", or "transgender", or anything like that. And that is highly concerning.
Perry Carpenter: Absolutely. It's going to be interesting because I think that Facebook is in this age right now where they're trying to figure out how to stay relevant.
Mason Amadeus: Yes.
Perry Carpenter: And it was probably a wake -- a really big wakeup call for them when they saw that the -- you know, the sociopolitical way that people are thinking in the US is -- literally it's a 50/50 split. And so it could be that they were like, "Well, we're just -- if it's going to be a 50/50 split, we're just going to go with whatever administration and social current that administration is going to favor so that we can deal with the political fallout and then we'll switch with the next administration," and so on.
Mason Amadeus: Yes, and like we shouldn't ever look to these companies to be beacons of morality or anything like that, but it's disheartening to see the switch be so blatant in terms of like how much -- how much he seems to be trying to signal his like allegiance to this --
Perry Carpenter: Yes.
Mason Amadeus: -- ideology. I think it will be interesting to see how it all shakes out. My personal thought is that Mark Zuckerberg is a robot powered on sweet baby raised barbecue sauce, [laughter] so we'll see if that comes out.
Perry Carpenter: Could be.
Mason Amadeus: I could share that on Facebook and I guess it won't get fact-checked now. I've seen some --
Perry Carpenter: No, I've seen a lot of people sharing some crazy stuff about Mark Zuckerberg --
Mason Amadeus: Yes.
Perry Carpenter: -- that has not been getting fact-checked.
Mason Amadeus: Yes; rat transplants, but we won't get into that. Instead, we're going to get into talking about China. That's what's coming up next, right here on "The FAIK Files". Don't move. [ Music ]
Perry Carpenter: All right, so if you are unaware, it looks like within the next couple days TikTok in the US may be no more. That's more of a -- people call it a ban, but it's more of a blocking than anything else. They have to remove it from the app stores, different network carriers have to be able to block the IP and the domains, and traffic going to and from, kind of a community effort to remove TikTok. It is --
Mason Amadeus: That's this coming Sunday, isn't it?
Perry Carpenter: Yes, this coming Sunday, the 19th.
Mason Amadeus: Oof.
Perry Carpenter: So the interesting thing that I've seen around this is like in the book "FAIK", I talk about the fact that anybody that is sufficiently motivated will get around some kind of control, and it's like an algorithmic control. So one of the examples that I give is that Snapchat will notify a user if you've taken a screenshot of their post. And so teenagers have realized that they can just grab somebody else's phone and use their camera and take a picture of the phone with that post, and of course that doesn't notify anybody. Similar things happening with TikTok, there are people that in anticipation of the 19th have been saying, "Well, if you don't want me to have TikTok, I'll just jump off and I'll go to the equivalent app that is owned and run in China and is -- " you know, their name is translated "RedNote" or even more accurately, "Little Red Book", which I think is ironic in a lot of ways when you understand what "Little Red Book" traditionally can mean in China.
Mason Amadeus: Yes, why don't you explain that, because I know a tiny bit about it, but what -- "Little Red Book" is a reference to a specific piece of literature, right, that's like a little bit troubling.
Perry Carpenter: It is. Well, and when you think about the tension between the US and China around technology and specifically TikTok, people are afraid of the political and the propaganda fallout of how China could potentially influence US-based minds. And when we talk about the way that China is perceived, we always thinking about capitalism in the US versus communism in China --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- or some other parts of the world. Red is associated with communism for a variety of reasons. But when we talk about "Little Red Book", that is actually a book that has been very, very popular in China for a long time because it was required to be popular. There is the little red book that is the sayings of Chairman Mao, and if you go look it up, what you'll see is that it's kind of these aphorisms, these little pithy sayings, but there is a propaganda purpose for everybody in China having those. It is seeding the ideas that matter to the Chinese government within the minds of the people through these really easy-to-understand and remember aphorisms. And I think that when you look at the people in the US who are banning TikTok, they have to be feeling a little bit helpless when they're seeing people from the US jump from something that we did have a little bit of control over, at least, to the thing that is the unfettered, quote, unquote, "little red book propaganda machine". And that's like the epitome of irony --
Mason Amadeus: Yes.
Perry Carpenter: -- is the way that I think about it.
Mason Amadeus: So like, what, T minus ten seconds until that one gets blocked, right? Surely if the whole concern was over China having influence over people in the US and data from the litany of censors you have on your smart phone of people in the US --
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: -- surely you're not going to be able to keep accessing the Chinese version of TikTok, right; or are you?
Perry Carpenter: I -- yes, I don't know; I don't know. Does it at some point turn into whack-a-mole? Do they just keep -- in the Apple App Store it would be harder to - for it to turn into whack-a-mole because of the processes that apps have to go through to get approved. Google Play Store could be a little bit harder to tamp down. But then also just can you block every potential IP address and domain that might be supporting that? If the app starts to work, people can navigate to website X that's --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- up this week.
Mason Amadeus: Yes, like technologically --
Perry Carpenter: Yes.
Mason Amadeus: -- enforcing a ban like this is a little bit futile in that regard, right? And I mean, I --
Perry Carpenter: Yes.
Mason Amadeus: This whole saga of banning TikTok is interesting to me. And I have not been as plugged into it as perhaps I should have been. Because it seems to me like the threat was overblown a bit from TikTok specifically. It kind of seemed as though that was a bit of a scapegoat. Because like there's loads of apps that we use on our phones that are owned by other countries that presumably are collecting a ton of data on us that could be used in malicious ways as well, but we really focused on TikTok because of -- I feel like because of cultural issues with, you know, the kids using it and the kind of content there and like the --
Perry Carpenter: Wow.
Mason Amadeus: -- China scare at the moment. Like what are your thoughts on is this like banning TikTok even remotely a smart thing to do, or even try to do; like --
Perry Carpenter: Yes, I understand some of the -- I understand where people are coming from with some of the concerns, right, because TikTok is being targeted because of the explosive growth that they've had, which means that they have a really, really high amount of US-based attention economy focused --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- you know, eyeballs on screens. There's a lot of that. It is very highly addictive for people that use it. And the algorithm can be pushed and shaped to start to become something that would further a propaganda point that you might want to make. So if you think that the US is trying to stop Chinese-based propaganda or influence on a generation or a certain people group, then you can start to understand it. The other thing is that TikTok and a lot of apps in general, especially social media apps, collect a ton of data and also have access to things like geolocation and --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- preferences, the things you're interested in. I would assume that you could do a data study of the videos that somebody watches and you could get a really good personality profile on that person, what some of their likes and dislikes are, probably to a point that it would be shocking for that person to read the amount of intelligence that could be derived from that.
Mason Amadeus: But that's true of --
Perry Carpenter: So I think that that's --
Mason Amadeus: -- so many apps.
Perry Carpenter: -- that's true of any social media.
Mason Amadeus: Yes.
Perry Carpenter: Yes. But the difference here is that we're in the US and we see China as a political and economic foe in a lot of ways. Even though we have trade agreements with China, there is an ideological, geopolitical, and economic concern that China really has the intention to come in and eat our lunch in a lot of ways. It's very clearly stated and it has been for several years where China is intending to go as a geopolitical force and to replace the US in a lot of those kinds of standings. And so the US is afraid of that. And you know, I think of this like any mobile program, if you have a bad actor and if we're -- if we'll give the US the leeway of saying that in their mind China is a bad actor, if you give a bad actor access to somebody's location, their trajectory, their personal taste, the way that they behave, the people that they hang around because we understand that your app is on somebody's phone that's next to somebody else's app that may be of a certain persuasion, or have a certain political role, so now we can see when people cluster together --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- when they move apart, all of that becomes a really good intelligence resource. And I don't think that they want to just hand China the ability unfettered to have that kind of intelligence resource operating in the US.
Mason Amadeus: The idea of banning it, it is kind of like a mainline right up front very blatantly owned by China and massively popular thing, so I can see why it would get --
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: -- the brunt of the attention. I just -- I can't help but think that this ban isn't really going to achieve anything.
Perry Carpenter: Yes, I think it will be interesting to see what the effect is if they get shut down on the 19th and somebody doesn't swoop in and do something heroic like buy it, or come up with a plan, or somebody put a stay on that from a legal perspective. But assuming they get banned, if the effect of that is that people that want TikTok just jump over to the mainland China version of the app, the US has kind of lost that argument [laughs] at this point.
Mason Amadeus: Yes. I mean, completely.
Perry Carpenter: And clearly people have the sympathy for the Chinese app. And what I've seen is that people in the US have been feeling very welcomed on that platform. There was something really interesting that happened to me last week on TikTok too, is that as I was scrolling through my TikTok feed, there were lots of things that seemed to be pro China popping up --
Mason Amadeus: Hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- in my feed, of like tourists that went to China and they were in awe of the architecture, and how nice everybody was, and how clean everything was; and it was just video after video of that that normally wouldn't have been on my feed. So I've -- I was wondering if it was people like me that caused that trend to happen, you know --
Mason Amadeus: Hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- normal Americans and they're just interested in China, or if maybe the Chinese government or ByteDance kind of turned up that in order to hopefully, you know, in their mind influence the way that Americans perceive China, and TikTok, and ByteDance, and whatever other apps or companies may be associated with that.
Mason Amadeus: Yes, they -- maybe they put their thumb on that scale a little bit. I mean, do you veraciously consume other travel content particularly or anything --
Perry Carpenter: No.
Mason Amadeus: -- like that?
Perry Carpenter: No --
Mason Amadeus: Hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- that's what was so weird about it is it -- you know, like six or seven videos almost in a row --
Mason Amadeus: Oh, really.
Perry Carpenter: -- of people marveling at Chinese architecture and technology, and I would never have seen that before. [ Music ] All right, so I'm going to do this one pretty quickly. But there was an interesting press release that I saw from Consumer Reports where they talk about an investigation that showed that companies that do all this on-demand connected workout stuff with the equipment that comes with it -- I'm, you know, thinking like Tonal and Peloton machines and --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- Bowflex, and so on, all these on-demand connected devices are gathering information about us, which probably isn't surprising. But the --
Mason Amadeus: Right, because --
Perry Carpenter: -- extent of the information is surprising.
Mason Amadeus: -- like a lot of them they like measure your heart rate and all that stuff while you're using it. I figured the internet connected ones are probably collecting all of that for some reason, but not your smell, [laughs] surely.
Perry Carpenter: Yes, which was the weird thing. And of course, they put that in as a hook line.
Mason Amadeus: Right.
Perry Carpenter: One of the companies that they looked at as they were looking at the terms and conditions, -- it was Bowflex. They said, "If you're a Bowflex user, you might be surprised to learn that the company in its privacy policy also grants its right -- grants itself the right to collect and share data on how you smell.
Mason Amadeus: Unreal. [Laughs]
Perry Carpenter: Yes.
Mason Amadeus: How do they even get that?
Perry Carpenter: So there are questions about whether they actually have that or if they're just kind of reserving the right in case they put, you know, the equivalent of Smell-O-Vision or --
Mason Amadeus: Hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- smell detectors within their devices. It's like, "Yes, Perry is really, really working up a sweat in that and his sweat sounds -- smells like onion.
Mason Amadeus: Right. [Laughs]
Perry Carpenter: We wonder if he has a health condition or maybe he just likes onions, so we can sell the data to advertisers. We can also notify his Apple Watch that there might be a, you know, heart condition there or some other kind of health thing. We can also notify his health insurance provider that they need to up his rates because --
Mason Amadeus: No.
Perry Carpenter: -- there's some concern."
Mason Amadeus: Oh.
Perry Carpenter: You know, anytime I think about data collection and all these, it's always, you know, those few things. It is what can the data do to enhance your health, and that's the stats that are being shown, but then also the stats that get shared with like Apple Health or something like that. Then there is the data that says things about you that might be used to monetize you in some way.
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: So how do we share that data out with advertisers that are third parties? And then how surreptitiously might that data be used against you in some other way, which might be your insurance company or something. Does your insurance company get access to that maybe with your consent or implied consent, because if it gets used in one way, it could potentially lower your rates, but as soon as it starts to go the other way, of course your rates are going to get higher because of whatever those indicators are.
Mason Amadeus: Right, if they perceive something as a risk. I really -- that makes me really deeply uncomfortable. Like I love data and metrics like a -- particularly I wish I could get more data and metrics about my own body. Like the idea of more in-depth health monitoring software would be amazing. And I have severe health anxiety pretty much all the time. So that would be great. But the idea of that being sold to an insurance company to change my rates based on things like that, that is hellish.
Perry Carpenter: Yes.
Mason Amadeus: That sounds nightmarish.
Perry Carpenter: And to be sure they don't -- I mean, just to be really clear, they don't say anything like that. That's just my mind of saying, "A health insurance company would really want that. Your insurance provider would want that data if they could have access to it and if you could -- if they could work with any of these providers to inject themselves in the terms of conditions -- terms or conditions or as an optional third-party thing that you can click on and give access to it for potential promotion benefit, then they'll probably do that --
Mason Amadeus: Yes.
Perry Carpenter: -- because that only makes sense with their business model."
Mason Amadeus: It really reminds me of there's a lot of concern around period tracking apps for women or for people who have periods in the US with a lot of current legislation around abortion access and things like that, not to -- Right.
Perry Carpenter: This is like our most political episode ever, but like the fear around who gets that data, who can read that data, what do they infer about you, how can they use it to track you.
Mason Amadeus: Yes.
Perry Carpenter: And that's -- like there -- I feel like these fears like seven though they're not currently selling your data to an insurance company to determine your rate, I feel like that is a very, very valid thing to be afraid of and want to get out ahead of somehow. Like this is --
Mason Amadeus: Yes.
Perry Carpenter: -- where regulation, I think, could step in and say, "You can't do that. Don't do that.
Mason Amadeus: Right. [Laughs] Yes --
Perry Carpenter: If you do that, it's illegal."
Mason Amadeus: -- it definitely should.
Perry Carpenter: Yes. The regulation should definitely get involved in that. The problem is, is that a lot of the people that are in charge of the regulatory bodies don't think the way a technologist thinks.
Mason Amadeus: No, that's for sure.
Perry Carpenter: Because when you look at the data that's here from a -- just a sheer data collection perspective, you can think a lot of interesting uses. But then if you add like an entrepreneurial mindset on top of it, you can think of a lot of potential economic benefit that you get by having this data and the ways that you might monetize that. If you put your bad actor hat on, you can think about all the ways to potentially target somebody negatively based on all of the information as well through like extortion or through some other means. Like when you were talking about the period tracking apps, certainly if there was a very oppressive regime in one area and you got some interesting information based on the tracker app, you could be more oppressive from a political perspective and stop somebody from doing something or you could extort somebody and --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- pressure them into doing something that they otherwise wouldn't do. So data -- and this even goes back to like the TikTok discussion, data is gold --
Mason Amadeus: Yes.
Perry Carpenter: -- in a lot of these things, not necessarily because of just the single data point, but what it means and what it can infer when you put all those data points together and then you start to think through these different prisms.
Mason Amadeus: And like just to be clear to put another button on this, there's -- we have not -- this report doesn't say that they are using your data in this way, just that they are collecting --
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: -- extreme amounts of your data and they could use it for these things. It doesn't seem --
Perry Carpenter: And they want --
Mason Amadeus: -- like there's anything in the way.
Perry Carpenter: -- the ability to collect your smell if it comes down to it.
Mason Amadeus: Yes. [Laughter] Yes.
Perry Carpenter: Which is just creepy, it's like, "That doesn't pass the sniff test."
Mason Amadeus: Oh, gosh; no, it doesn't.
Perry Carpenter: The Consumer Reports article is worth a read. We'll put that in the show notes. They look at BowFlex, Concept2, Hydrow Row, Kinomap, Lululemon, NordicTrack, Peloton, Tempo, Tonal, and Zwift. So some of those I haven't even heard of --
Mason Amadeus: Yes, me neither.
Perry Carpenter: -- but if company can see data and get data, company wants data, I think is what it comes down to; and they will try to give themselves permission to have that, house that, and do whatever they think is going to be beneficial to them, not necessarily you.
Mason Amadeus: I want to -- not to elongate the segment too much, but really quickly get your opinion on I'm seeing an uptick in advertisement for services like Incogny and others that claim to remove your data from data brokers.
Perry Carpenter: Hmm.
Mason Amadeus: Like they go and they send all of those requests to take your personal information out of whatever various data brokering services they have contacts with. And I think it has to do with the EU's like "right to be forgotten" law. It's just such a cumbersome process --
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: -- to do yourself, they do it for you. But I have not dug into like the veracity of their claims or if they're effective or not.
Perry Carpenter: Yes.
Mason Amadeus: Have you at all?
Perry Carpenter: We should take a look at that. I've not. I've seen the ads, I've seen the influencers that are trying to get people on board. You know, there are so many influences that are selling different VPN services and --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- those VPN services are not always what they're cracked up to be.
Mason Amadeus: They make weird claims about security that just aren't true or possible with a VPN.
Perry Carpenter: Yes, that are just not true.
Mason Amadeus: Yes.
Perry Carpenter: So same thing with services like this, I would want to do a little bit of research before I make any claims. That being said, there is a quote that I want to get to from this before we move on. They give themselves carte blanche to do whatever they want with the data, even if they don't currently have a use case for it. And that's kind of like where the smell version of this comes in it's like, "Why do they see themselves wanting to use that in the future?" We have to realize that our data is valuable. And one of the things that some of these systems have on them is cameras.
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: So they can see the way you're working out, they can hear you. Where are those videos being stored? Are those compromising in any way, embarrassing? What if somebody were to hack into those systems? And you know, it's one thing for a potentially embarrassing video of you trying to keep up with a workout, but it's another thing if maybe even the system wasn't all that secure and the camera and audio is recording the times when you don't know that it's recording.
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: Do they have the ability in some kind of diagnostic mode to just turn the camera on remotely? And does that happen as either a glitch at some point and get recorded or does it happen through a hacking event? We don't know. But because all of that information is being ingested and because all those capabilities are being there, we have to assume that they can be used against us in some way and it's not always going to be for our own benefit.
Mason Amadeus: Yes, I don't love the preemptively getting permission to sort of do whatever with whatever, because --
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: -- when they do it, they can be like, "It's been in there for a long time and we -- you know, you agreed to it 40 years ago," or whatever; not 40 years but yes.
Perry Carpenter: Yes, exactly.
Mason Amadeus: That's -- [laughs]
Perry Carpenter: I think that's it for this segment.
Mason Amadeus: -- that's good to know. We're going to come up with the segment about AI power consumption next with a little bit of a call for help. Stay close. [ Music ] All right, we're going to keep this quick, because this one is -- this is a work in progress that I want to share. I have a conspiracy board of information; because I recently encountered a slew of posts from creators that I love and who I would normally think of as very like critical thinkers spreading misinformation about AI, particularly around AI power consumption and climate change with claims that like asking ChatGPT a question is equivalent to like a thousand Google searches or dumping out a cup of water. And I'm seeing these claims get spread uncritically all around, and so I wanted to track down the root of what that was, which I think I have found, and then also try and figure out like actual power use for AI. And the first hurdle is obviously that we need better terms to disambiguate different kinds of AI and different AI uses, because the power figures for one thing are not the same as the power figures for another. So if like asking ChatGPT a question there's a completely different thing than generating an image. And it seems like most of the online vitriol is directed at image generation in particular because that is a very visible kind of sloppy AI thing, video and images. And so I am putting out a call right here for people who have more experience with AI systems hopefully at a larger scale. I want to talk about power consumption and get some better numbers. What I've been doing on my end I picked up a kilowatt meter and I've got it on my desk, and I've been monitoring and taking measurements of my computer's power usage at various times. I've gotten --
Perry Carpenter: Nice.
Mason Amadeus: -- power usage metrics for different AI models I've run locally, as well as other things just like playing videogames, using a blender, and stuff like that. And I also have tracked down a web of sources to try and find where that initial claim came from. And what I have dug down to so far is the report, electricity 2024 report from the International Energy Agency, which is a great agency that does a lot of important work. But there is one paragraph where they say, "Search tools like Googles could see a tenfold increase of their electricity demand in the case of fully implementing AI in it. When comparing the average electricity demand of a typical Google search, 0.3 watt hours of electricity to OpenAI's ChatGPT, 2.9 watt hours per request, and considering nine billion searches daily, this would require almost ten terawatts of additional electricity in a year." Their math checks out based on the claims they make, but that metric from OpenAI, that 2.9 watt hours per request, links to a website that is about -- or it links to a paper called "The Growing Energy Footprint of Artificial Intelligence" by Alex de Vries or Alec de Vries, who is an PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School of Business and Economics, who got that figure from another website that was about like search engine optimization and power use. There's a rabbit trail that goes deeper and deeper down and I haven't yet found the actual verifiable figures that that number came from. But anyway, it ended up in Alex's paper here. The IEA reported on it. And then all of these other outlets went and changed the units around so that it would sound bigger and more scary, I was noticing.
Perry Carpenter: Hmm.
Mason Amadeus: Like nature.com decided to change "watt hours" to "kilojoules", which is an indecipherable unit, but it's got "kilo"; sounds very big.
Perry Carpenter: Interesting.
Mason Amadeus: And that kind of reporting, I think, just snowballed into these memes I'm seeing shared that are saying that AI is the biggest contributor to climate change. And at the same time, 2023 and 2024 were the hottest years on record by a bigger margin than usual. But the cause of that wasn't data center power consumption, it was actually a reduction in sulfur aerosol emissions from shipping that had been masking --
Perry Carpenter: Ooh.
Mason Amadeus: -- other warming effects of the climate; so actually cutting down on sulfur emissions when these big shipping vessels, which are toxic to humans and wildlife, has caused the global temperatures to rise. Couple that with a strung En Nino --
Perry Carpenter: Interesting.
Mason Amadeus: -- and a weird El Nino cycle -- El Nino, El Nina cycle -- Nina -- I'm talking too fast for my short tongue-tied tongue; the -- completely unrelated. We do still need to talk about CO2 emissions, which are the big concern with data center builds and stuff like that and we can talk about the scale of these data centers getting bigger and bigger and more power hungry because they are.
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: And I have some great figures from that. I signed up for all these newsletters from datacenterdynamics.com.
Perry Carpenter: Nice.
Mason Amadeus: Like -- and I'll just throw out one of them. I'm working on a bigger, well-presented project on this, but this is why I want extra help. This I thought was interesting. LaGrange, which is a pretty embedded manufacturer, all sorts of various elements like power distribution, all the stuff you would find in data centers, they've put out in the industry brief and they said, "Not that long ago, 50-megawatt data centers were enormous. Today, one prominent real estate company reports that its standard transaction size is 300 megawatts." And it's getting inquiries about building data centers up to one gigawatt. And we're all talking about gigawatt data centers now that cost between six to eight million dollars per megawatt. The servers that run these AI services typically made by NVIDIA, NVIDIA's DGX like H100 servers that weigh nearly 300 pounds and use up to ten kilowatts per server, that's all real. The data centers are getting bigger --
Perry Carpenter: Mm-hmm.
Mason Amadeus: -- heavier, hotter, more dense, and more power hungry, but they are not the same -- that is not the same thing as like generating an image on your computer, which I measured used about 360 watts for like four minutes, which was the equivalent of me playing --
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: -- BeamNG.drive for four minutes. All of these figures are really overblown. Getting good hard data about individual forms of energy consumption in different sectors of AI is difficult. OpenAI is not like great about talking about it; none of the big companies are. So if anyone who's listening to this has insight or information on this side of things, I want you to reach out and send an email to us, hello@8thlayermedia.com, and in that subject line if you could just put "FAIK power", F-A-I-K power, I'll search that up --
Perry Carpenter: Nice.
Mason Amadeus: -- and look for any kind of input we can get; or if you want to leave a voicemail, at sayhi.chat/faik. Because I want to put together a really good piece sort of demystifying AI power usage in climate change; because as someone who -- I would describe myself as highly concerned about climate change. I want us to all be honest. And it feels like there's a lot of dishonesty because people have a distaste for AI or because people are very pro AI and bullish on it they want to ignore certain realities. And I think we need to --
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: -- split the uprights and just tell the truth and -- yes --
Perry Carpenter: Yes.
Mason Amadeus: -- I want some help with that.
Perry Carpenter: Well, and it's interesting, too, because when you start to look at the studies, when people are not precise with their words or their data, it gets really, really confusing because people talk about like water use --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- but there's two types of water use at least, right, there's withdraw, so there's the water that's being used to cool things, nd then there's consumption, which is water that never really enters the system again because it's just been used in different ways. But --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- water that gets evaporated does get returned to the atmosphere and that, you know, gets turned back to good ecological use. But water that is totally gone is, of course, just totally gone. But there's -- that's not always disambiguated in the figures.
Mason Amadeus: And it's also -- there's so much nuance to all of it because a lot of the water use that people talk about is evaporative cooling, like you mentioned, where it goes back up into the atmosphere.
Perry Carpenter: Mm-hmm.
Mason Amadeus: That water doesn't always come back down in the same place as it was and it's also taking like drinkable, potable water and evaporating it. And the way that the climate cycles and weather work it doesn't always come back to the same place, so you can actually make arid areas --
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: -- more arid. And that is a concern. But evaporative cooling isn't -- I believe it's not even like the main way that you cool things. And right now, especially, all of these big companies are moving to closed loop systems, which is like if you -- anyone who's built a computer has seen like the all-in-one cooler. It's got like liquid in it that never comes out.
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: It's just all trapped in there and it cycles around to a radiator, cools down, back to the hot place, gets hot, cycle through the radiator, cool down.
Perry Carpenter: Mm-hmm.
Mason Amadeus: They're moving to those kinds of things in the infrastructure; obviously far more advanced, because at this scale you're talking about these massive multi thousands of pounds -- hundreds of thousands of pounds of computers. The interconnects look more complicated. The way that that plumbing works is more complicated. There's actually some speculation that the reason Microsoft paused construction on a big data center on the old Foxconn plant land is because they want to incorporate better, more sustainable cooling solutions. Because there's also an economic incentive to do that. The other ways to cool things are expensive. A closed loop system is more efficient in a lot of ways. And so there's just --
Perry Carpenter: Yes.
Mason Amadeus: -- miles, and miles, and miles of nuance to cut through, and I want to make a simplified primer that is easy to understand. And that is my goal ultimately, and I wanted to put a call out to help for the people who listen to this show and might have more.
Perry Carpenter: We should take all of the information that we get, all the different research studies, put them all into OpenAI's o1 model, and then just let it churn on that and destroy the world.
Mason Amadeus: There we go, yes, have it optimize. It will be ironic, though, if it used up more power than it ended up saving. [Laughs]
Perry Carpenter: Right. I mean, fun thing on that is you know how OpenAI did this $200 a month plan --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- for use for o1 and other things, they actually came out and said that they are losing money on that because people are using it way more than they had anticipated.
Mason Amadeus: I saw that, which I thought was interesting.
Perry Carpenter: That's neither here nor there on the energy consumption bid, but it could be that people are using more powerful models when they don't necessarily need to. And one of the things that could be done to drop consumption of energy and everything else could be some prefiltering on whatever query is there, so it directs it to the type of model that's going to be most efficient and most effective for that prompt that you put in.
Mason Amadeus: Yes, because it is totally true, generally speaking, that a bigger model is using more power per inference request.
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: Obviously, gains and efficiency in different -- I don't know if "architecture" is the technically right term, but I think everyone knows what I mean, like all of that impacts --
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: -- energy use. But yes, I think the idea of prefiltering queries and sending them to -- it kind of feels like the group of experts kind of vibe except it's like --
Perry Carpenter: Exactly.
Mason Amadeus: -- a group of interns, or a group of experts, or whatever.
Perry Carpenter: Yes, or a mixture of experts --
Mason Amadeus: That's it.
Perry Carpenter: -- I think is the correct term.
Mason Amadeus: I knew the acronym was "MO", not "GO"; couldn't remember.
Perry Carpenter: [Laughs] Yes. But anyway, if folks have studies that they've seen, articles that they have read or want us to put into the pile of fodder that we're going to use for this, then send it our way.
Mason Amadeus: Or even memes that you see in the wild about this --
Perry Carpenter: Ooh.
Mason Amadeus: -- or claims that you're seeing. Like I -- half of this is about the discourse and half of it is about the data. And those are both, I would say, equal halves because I want to take the data and change the discourse, if I can, to be more honest; just more realistic and grounded. It's really easy to get fired up by everything these days and lose nuance, and I don't want to contribute to that if I can avoid it. But there are genuine concerns around AI power consumption. We've gotten a voicemail -- or an email about it even, too. So if you have concerns or questions, send those and help me guide my research.
Perry Carpenter: Won't be our own little community notes where we're correcting ourselves on the AI power consumption.
Mason Amadeus: Yes, absolutely. And I think that wraps us up for this week's episode.
Perry Carpenter: I think that does.
Mason Amadeus: Thank you for joining us. Again, email is hello@8thlayermedia.com. Send us a voicemail, sayhi.chat/faik.
Perry Carpenter: Oh, we also have a new YouTube channel --
Mason Amadeus: Yes.
Perry Carpenter: -- that we're going to start throwing some stuff on pretty soon. But if you want to subscribe, even if you go there right now, "The FAIK Files", YouTube channel, if you go there and there are no videos, please subscribe. That means that when we put those first videos out there, they might get routed to you and the algorithm might get tricked into showing us a little bit of favor.
Mason Amadeus: Yes, we want to trick that algorithm into being our friend. And we're going to be putting out a lot more --
Perry Carpenter: Yes.
Mason Amadeus: -- video content. We actually are recording for the first time on a different platform here, so if there are any sort of technical hiccups or inconsistencies that you heard this episode, that's why. We're still working out the kinks.
Perry Carpenter: But it's good. It's good. Looking forward to doing more stuff with video. We're going to be doing some tutorials stuff that's just fun, then we're going to be releasing this show -- segments of this show as little clips, and probably a lot of stuff more -- a lot more stuff that I'm not even thinking about.
Mason Amadeus: Yes. We're going to have some fun with it. And don't worry, the podcast isn't going anywhere, so we will catch you same bad time, same -- or same paperclip time, same paperclip channel, I guess.
Perry Carpenter: Absolutely.
Mason Amadeus: We'll catch you next week. >> [Singing] Thanks for listening to this week's episode of "The FAIK Files". Don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. Tell your friends about "The FAIK Files". It's a great way to let people know you love them. Oh, and check the show notes. There's cool stuff in there like links to the articles we covered today, also links to our Discord server where you can hang out with other cool people who have great taste in podcasts. I say impeccable taste. And you can also leave us a voicemail. Yes. [ Music ] So on behalf of Perry and Mason, thanks for listening. And tune in next week for "The FAIK Files", the show about AI with the misspelled name