Ep 34 | 5.9.25

AI "Friends" and Enemies

Transcript

Mason Amadeus: Live from the 8Player Media Studios, in the back rooms of the deep web, this is "The FAIK Files".

Perry Carpenter: When tech gets weird, we are here to step into it. No wait, we are here to make sense of it.

Mason Amadeus: That's great. I'm Mason Amadeus.

Perry Carpenter: And I'm Perry Carpenter. And today we're going to be talking about a few things. What are we going to start with, Mason?

Mason Amadeus: Oh, we have a fun show that goes a lot of different places. In our first segment, I'm going to tell you that you might be talking to an undercover AI cop and not know it. There's a weird sort of piece of software that's trying to be sold to police departments. We're going to get into that.

Perry Carpenter: Oh, all right. And then I'm going to cover two stories, one sweet, one sour.

Mason Amadeus: Oh, that's it? No more details, just one sweet, one sour?

Perry Carpenter: No more details. Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: All right. After that, segment three, being honest about AI usage apparently makes people trust you less. Or, oh, sorry, being honest about AI usage at work makes people trust you less. But does that really matter if AI is going to come take your job anyway?

Perry Carpenter: Good questions. And then tech founders are trying to solve our loneliness problem. Is that a good thing?

Mason Amadeus: Well, if there's one person I trust with my personal happiness, it's certainly not Mark Zuckerberg. So.

Perry Carpenter: Well, I guess we're screwed.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, we'll see. Sit back, relax, and you have to tell me if you're a bot or else it's entrapment.

Perry Carpenter: We'll open up "The FAIK Files" right after this. [ Music ]

Mason Amadeus: So this article, it came out a couple of days ago, it actually might have been about a week ago, and it's been making the rounds. It's a pretty big report done in collaboration with "WIRED" and "404 Media", which, "404 Media", pretty new on the scene. I'm very impressed.

Perry Carpenter: They've been on a tear.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah.

A: Yeah. They were out of, I think "Vice" before that?

Mason Amadeus: Yeah.

A: Like, the "Vice" motherboard group and for whatever reason, that spun off or got shut down. And Joseph Cox and the guys over at 404 have just been doing a ton of great stuff.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, they're phenomenal. And this report is pretty big. So the title of the article is, "This College Protester Isn't Real, It's an AI Undercover Bot for Cops". Now, I feel like this is something that's kind of predictable when you think about it. Like, cops using AI personas to try and catch criminals. So criminals is one thing; protesters is another and even in the first place, the idea of deploying this seems like at surface level horrifying. But, like, let's dive into it.

A: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: The article opens with this, quoting from it directly, "American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on college protesters, radicalized political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers, according to internal documents, contracts, and communications that 404 Media obtained via public records requests." This, right off the bat, starting by talking about near the United States-Mexico border is concerning, right?

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: So, the first thing I did before we get deeper into the article, let's just look at the site for this thing. It's called Overwatch. The company is called Massive Blue, and this product that they're selling is called Overwatch.

Perry Carpenter: That just sounds dystopian.

Mason Amadeus: It does, and their website looks dystopian and boring dystopian. It looks like a Squarespace template with these really lame, like, AI transitioning graphics.

Perry Carpenter: You know what that looks like? Exactly, it looks like they went to Squarespace, went through the templates, and then found the stock media within the Squarespace ecosystem, because you can do that. It's just, like, let me find a stock video to go as the background in this section.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah.

Perry Carpenter: I'm pretty sure that's what they did.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, it looks super low effort, and there is so little information on here. They have, they're, like, three prongs of their product that they point out, which we'll get into later. There's an "About" page that has almost no information, just some general stuff about them. We believe in powering positive impact through ethical AI, blah, blah, blah. It's, there's, like, no substantive detail anywhere. There's three pages on their website that I've been able to find. I tried poking around, changing some URLs because their contact page is, this slug is contact-3 or contact-4.

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: So I tried, not, like, any serious, that's called dorking, isn't it, or burping, derping, I don't, borking, corking, whatever it's called. I tried changing the URL to see if I could find anything else on their website. I couldn't, because they don't have any information out here about it and that's going to be a recurring theme as we get more into it. What we do know is that they deploy virtual personas across the internet with the express purpose of trying to interact with suspects over text messages and social media. And the presentation that "404 Media" was able to obtain really paints it in a not-so-flattering, kind of sketchy light. To quote again directly, "404 Media obtained a presentation showing some of these AI characters. These include a radicalized AI protest persona which poses as a 36-year-old divorced woman who is lonely, has no children, is interested in baking, activism, and body positivity. Another AI persona in the presentation is described as a honeypot AI persona, whose backstory says she's a 25-year-old from Dearborn, Michigan, whose parents emigrated from Yemen, who speaks the Sinani dialect of Arabic." I may have mispronounced that. If I did, I'm sorry. "The presentation also says she uses various social media apps. She's on Telegram and Signal, and she has US and international SMS capabilities." They have, like, child trafficking personas that pose as children. They have a pimp persona, which, the way that these things choose to talk is troubling but that's something else we can get into. College protester. And I'll pull up on screen the example, a larger image from that, of their protest persona, so they have, like, an AI-generated picture it's labeled as radicalized and it's basically posing as, like, a 36-year-old woman who is an activist. So, like, that's cool that that's one of the profiles. That's not concerning at all, right?

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: And yeah, they're, the details are severely lacking. Like the --

Perry Carpenter: Right.

Mason Amadeus: -- none of the documents they obtained, here's another quote. "While the documents don't describe every technical aspect of how Overwatch works, they do give a high-level overview of what it is. The company describes a tool that uses AI- generated images and text to create social media profiles that interact with suspected drug traffickers, human traffickers, gun traffickers. They scan open social media channels for potential suspects, and those personas then pursue and communicate with suspects over text, Discord, and other messaging services." But the documents they obtained don't explain how Massive Blue determines who's a potential suspect, you know, based on their activity. And in the meetings where they were talking with the Pinal County Sheriff's Department in Arizona, which was one of the places that did end up deploying this, one of their supervisors was asking questions about, like, Can you give us any details on any specifics? And they basically were, like, No, that would tip our hand to the bad guys. And every single thing about this is really vague, aside from it seeming to me just like a very basic, like, there doesn't seem to be anything specifically advanced about what they're doing, you know what I mean?

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: Like, it would appear that they're just kind of loosely --

Perry Carpenter: Open-source intelligence gathering, a little bit of human intelligence on top of that to chase things, and then, like, an AI wash over the top of it, right? It's, yeah.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah.

Perry Carpenter: It's a lot of old school stuff and then a little bit of AI, and they've concentrated on the AI stuff on their homepage a lot.

Mason Amadeus: It doesn't even really seem to be old school stuff, though. It seems like their whole thing is just these AI honeypot bots that go out and interact.

Perry Carpenter: They're doing some of the initial discovery, right? Through looking through Reddit threads and others. And that would be an open-source intelligence gathering, and then they're narrowing off of that.

Mason Amadeus: That's true. But they do seem to be using AI.

Perry Carpenter: I did look at the source of this. This is a Wix site, not a Squarespace site.

Mason Amadeus: Oh, is it?

Perry Carpenter: So anybody that wants to, like, go up and look for Wix exploits, there are lots of them out there. So this is also built on the most secure web development platform. I'm not encouraging hacking the site. I'm just saying that they're obviously not a, like, focused on national security.

Mason Amadeus: No.

Perry Carpenter: To the level that they should be for doing this kind of job.

Mason Amadeus: The, yeah, there's kind of just incompetence and unsophistication sprinkled throughout all of this. I have on the screen another example of one of their personas of a child trafficking, basically an account that poses as a 14-year-old child from LA, and it gives them examples of the way that this AI bot speaks. And, like, I don't know what kind of idiot would be fooled by this. Because, like, the way that this child bot responds, there's a text from their, like, pretend predator saying, "Your parents around or are you getting some awesome alone time" and the response is, "Just chillin' by myself, man. My momz with a Z @ at sign work and my dad's out of town". No child actually texts like this. Like, it is literally, like --

Perry Carpenter: Yeah, it's like the most stereotypical TV sitcom type of way of doing it.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, and the same can be said for the way that they have their, like, pimp persona and those personas talking. They have, like --

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: -- it's kind of subtly racist and really kind of terrible.

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: And not very convincing, and it really just seems like they're just asking ChatGPT to pretend to act like --

Perry Carpenter: Right.

Mason Amadeus: -- these personas. Like, there's nothing sophisticated --

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: -- going on here. And --

Perry Carpenter: Now this, you know, the model that they're trying to do this off of is, like, established law enforcement and intelligence who are, you know, proven over decades, right? Is somebody will go in, you know, maybe, well, anybody, pretending to be a 13-year-old online and trying to lure a child predator and asking them to go to a location. And, you know, the child predator gets the location and they find out that they're busted. That's done all the time by people in their 30s and 40s that are, you know, living in these online forums and subjecting themselves to the mental anguish of having to deal with this as well. So I can understand, like, psychologically why you might want to offload that to a bot. But there's probably better, more robust ways to do that, and also thinking about the ethics of it.

Mason Amadeus: So that's the thing, right? Like, this idea isn't inherently a problem. The idea of this, like, using AI to help law enforcement track down people who are trafficking humans, drugs, weapons, that's, like, not inherently a bad idea, but the implementation of that is absolutely 100% the most important part of that. And it does not, this does not instill much confidence. And here's one reason --

Perry Carpenter: Right.

Mason Amadeus: -- on top of everything else we're saying, much of Massive Blue's public-facing activity has been through its Executive Director of Public Safety, Chris Clem, who is a former US Customs and Border Protection Agent who testified before Congress about border security last year, regularly appears on Fox News and other media outlets to discuss immigration and the border. And in recent months, Clem has posted images of himself on LinkedIn at the border and with prominent Trump administration members Tulsi Gabbard --

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: -- and RFK Jr. So the, like, the kind of folks --

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: -- that are behind this, the ways that it's being implemented, sort of inelegantly and clumsily and without much detail or nuance, all are very concerning. And then the profiles of, like, radicalized protesters, I'm not super stoked about this. And so then the next question is, Where is this actively being implemented? And Massive Blue has signed a $360,000 contract with Pinal County, Arizona, which is between Tucson and Phoenix. They're paying for the contract with an anti-human trafficking grant from the Arizona Department of Public Safety. So taxpayer money. And what did they buy? They bought 24/7 monitoring of numerous web and social media platforms and development, deployment, monitoring and reporting on a virtual task force of up to 50 AI personas across three investigative categories. Yuma County in southwestern Arizona signed a $10,000 contract to try this out back in 2023. They ended up not renewing the contract, which, you know, kind of says to me that it wasn't super useful.

Perry Carpenter: Right. Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: The article also details it was not used to make any arrests. When they asked if it's, like, been part of any ongoing investigations, they said, "We think so, but we won't tell you any more than that."

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: So. Yeah.

Perry Carpenter: I mean, I look at it and it looks like it was, this is a website and probably the pitch deck was architected to meet the political moment that the founder, like, was wanting to say, "I can see money right there if I gear my pitch to that." There's probably, I mean, there's use cases in here that make a lot of sense, but I don't know that they've been fleshed out. I don't know that they're any good the way that they're implemented. And the website and the pitch are clearly trying to scratch a very specific mindset in the way that they're framing it.

Mason Amadeus: It seems to me like a, essentially like a LinkedIn grifter-type scheme has now gotten taxpayer money for, like, a terrible, cobbled together AI service. That is my personal read based on what I'm inferring from this article.

Perry Carpenter: Right.

Mason Amadeus: And yeah, like, the idea of using AI to help stop human trafficking, drug trafficking, sure. But maybe not these guys. That's --

Perry Carpenter: Yeah. Yeah, these guys seem a little bit sketchy to me. I do think that there's probably uses for this about, you know, like, figuring out where terrorists are trying to figure out how to gather and to do bad things or to do, like, what you mentioned, child trafficking or other types of exploitation. There's probably lots of use cases for that. These guys just don't seem like the ones that have the right kind of reputation or the right type of motivation.

Mason Amadeus: I would agree. Massive Blue, more like massive poo. Anyway, in our next segment --

Perry Carpenter: You've been holding on to that massive poo, haven't you?

Mason Amadeus: I actually, okay, that's funny in its own merit. But no, it actually somehow just popped into my mind. Coming up in our next segment, we're going to do something sweet and something sour, something light and something heavy, right, Perry?

Perry Carpenter: Right, yep. So we'll be looking at Suno's new cover model, and then we're going to talk about some disinformation bots.

Mason Amadeus: Oh, that's why you had me make that song. That's why you did that.

Perry Carpenter: Yes. [ Music ] Okay, so a couple things. We'll start with something lighthearted at the beginning and a little bit of an experiment, because I've only tried this once.

Mason Amadeus: Okay.

Perry Carpenter: And this is one of those things that could be fun, or this is one of those things that could waste a lot of time and we don't like the end result and we decide to cut out of the segment and then just restart the whole episode.

Mason Amadeus: We'll see.

Perry Carpenter: Which I'm hoping we don't do.

Mason Amadeus: No, we're keeping it no matter what.

Perry Carpenter: So, yeah, I'm going to share my screen and share sound. We're going to go to Suno. Suno recently released 4.5, and they also have this nice little cover feature. So you can click the audio button down here for those of you that are watching, and you have the ability to drag and drop an audio file or record audio. So I'm going to go grab an audio file that Mason sent me a minute ago.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, you told me make up a song on the spot. No thinking.

Perry Carpenter: I told you, yeah. And I've not listened to your song. Can you give us some insight into the lyrics, because I've not listened to it? I don't know what it's about.

Mason Amadeus: At first I grabbed my guitar and, like, wrote a chord progression and I was going to write, like, a song with some lyrics for you really fast. But then you said don't think about it, just do something off the top of your head. So I completely shifted gears and just sung --

Perry Carpenter: Yes.

Mason Amadeus: -- about computers doing art and stuff. It's not good. It is not good.

Perry Carpenter: Okay, well let's see if Suno can make it good. So I'm going to click, so I'm going to listen, should I listen to it so we can --

Mason Amadeus: Yeah.

Perry Carpenter: -- hear you --

Mason Amadeus: Go for it.

Perry Carpenter: Sing? Okay.

Mason Amadeus: It's embarrassing.

Perry Carpenter: You good with that?

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Nobody told me computers were artists and that they would sing songs and make little pictures. Nobody told me that they would be better than I am, even though I've spent lots of years doing practice, I didn't like it. Even though it was fun sometimes. But for the most part, it's lots of work and all I want is the result. Just kidding, that's what all the people who make these tools think because they're crazy ghouls and we do not like them because they're stupid and they don't want artists to have a good time or money. Yeah.

Perry Carpenter: Okay.

Mason Amadeus: It's my little protest song.

Perry Carpenter: Save that without trimming, and we'll save this as Mason's masterpiece.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, that I've poured my heart and soul into.

Perry Carpenter: Alright, and I don't really care. Vocals detected, so you won't be able to create a public song with it, but that's fine, we're just doing this for play.

Mason Amadeus: Oh, interesting.

Perry Carpenter: Click yes, confirm and save.

Mason Amadeus: Why do you think that is?

Perry Carpenter: Copyright.

Mason Amadeus: But what would vocal, like, cloning a like, popular song or something?

Perry Carpenter: Yeah, if you tried to clone a popular song, like a Taylor Swift song. So over here we're going to click on "cover", and you can see that it took all your lyrics there. I'm going to leave them unformatted.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah.

Perry Carpenter: I have no idea what this is going to do. Then, all right, so let's describe a style --

Mason Amadeus: Oh, like Bo Burnham piano, maybe.

Perry Carpenter: Oh wait, let me, actually let's do this first. I'm going to pick my one that's kind of modeled after Taylor Swift.

Mason Amadeus: Okay, cool.

Perry Carpenter: And we'll see what that sounds like, since she's the one that everybody wants to emulate in these.

Mason Amadeus: Alright.

Perry Carpenter: And I'm going to click "create".

Mason Amadeus: I have found that Suno's 4.5 model is not as good wholesale at making songs from lyrics as 3.5 was, interestingly, because I did some experiments with it too, but I haven't tested any of the cover features which I have seen online described as really robust and good. So.

Perry Carpenter: Okay, this is my literal second test. My first test was right before we started this call. So.

Mason Amadeus: Oh boy.

Perry Carpenter: And I was eh --

Mason Amadeus: Yeah?

Perry Carpenter: -- on it, but we'll see. I didn't give it much to work with when I tried it.

Mason Amadeus: Hope it changes my voice.

Perry Carpenter: And so Mason's musical masterpiece, kind of like Taylor Swift. I'm going to click "play". [ Music ] [ Laughter ]

Mason Amadeus: That slapped! I loved that, are you kidding?

Perry Carpenter: Alright, let's listen to the second variation of that.

Mason Amadeus: Alright.

Perry Carpenter: And then we'll do a Bo Burnham. [ Music ]

Mason Amadeus: Yeah. Honestly, that's a vibe. Can you fix the two lyrical flubs for this next generation? Because I see that you're punching in a different style. There's just, make little pictures and then ghouls, I think, is the two flubs that are in there.

Perry Carpenter: Okay.

Mason Amadeus: These tools are so neat. I really, I am infatuated with Suno, I think. You know, like, I have this weird love-hate thing with Suno, because the person who makes it --

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: -- I really don't, really do not like.

Perry Carpenter: Right.

Mason Amadeus: And I think is kind of a fool, as illustrated in my masterpiece of a song here, but.

Perry Carpenter: Right.

Mason Amadeus: It is undeniably really, really, really, really entertaining and fascinating that it's able to create such good sounding tracks.

Perry Carpenter: Yeah, I mean, it knows what the hook is, right? So I changed the description. Because if you type in, like, Bo Burnham, it's not going to take it because it's a copyrighted thing. I just said, oh, I didn't mean to have gumball pop.

Mason Amadeus: Oh, you put it in the exclude.

Perry Carpenter: I meant to do, oh, I did exclude. Let me, let me just redo this now.

Mason Amadeus: Stripped down fun piano-driven folk. All right. [ Music ] Okay, that's my favorite.

Perry Carpenter: So the guitar work on that was actually really creative for a tool to do on its own, right? Because it went to that, from that kind of chunky palm muting and very restrictive, to opening up a little bit every now and then, then bringing, like, an acoustic bass in.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah.

Perry Carpenter: In at the end.

Mason Amadeus: It's actually, it's funny because when you originally told me to make you a song, that's very similar to the riff I was doing, just choking chords like that.

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, it did. That one is my favorite. Actually, I want that. If you'll download and shoot that to me, I'd love it.

Perry Carpenter: I will download and send that to you.

Mason Amadeus: It makes it seem like I put thought into it, which I did not.

Perry Carpenter: That's the fun thing about something like Suno, right? Is you can take your very beginning thought and then you can start to iterate and flesh that out into something that's more meaningful.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah.

Perry Carpenter: That you can poke holes in or you can find the best bits of it and build on it more.

Mason Amadeus: And I, like, making music, honestly I have found Suno to be inspirational, not in, like, a broad sweeping way, but it's, when you go to make a song, it can be really daunting when you lay down the first scratch track and then you're like, Man, there's so much ahead of me. But I've, like, used Suno to make some silly songs for fun that now I'm working on actual covers of with actual musicians and, like, changing. Because it's, like, you get to hear something, you get to hear it visualized in a way that you didn't control, so, like, it's a great idea generator and inspiration thing, and also if you want to make something silly and dumb, it's really good for that. Like, I made my friend Jordan a birthday song using Suno.

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: Like, it's undeniably cool, even if ethically dubious.

Perry Carpenter: Right, right. Yeah, but I think if you use it as, like, a creative partner and you're not just using that for the full output, then, and you're not monetizing it.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah.

Perry Carpenter: Then you're probably okay.

Mason Amadeus: It's always the pursuit of money, isn't it?

Perry Carpenter: Yeah. All right. So to end us on a bad note.

Mason Amadeus: Thanks, Perry. Yeah, let's take it down.

Perry Carpenter: And this was from May 1st. Claude AI exploited to operate 100-plus fake political personas in global influence campaign.

Mason Amadeus: Oof.

Perry Carpenter: Because we can't have nice things.

Mason Amadeus: No, we can't.

Perry Carpenter: And, you know, I think the fun irony here is that we are, I think both of us are pretty big fans of, like, the work that Anthropic does and that they care about public safety and trust and everything else. And it is their tool that was used for this campaign. And it's, you know, stuff that could have been done through ChatGPT or DeepSeek or Meta or anything else, but Anthropic's one was the one that was used. It is a very, very capable model. And what we're seeing is, I'll just start off and I'll read the gist of this and then I'll put the link in the show notes for anybody that wants to follow up on it. But it says, "Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has revealed that unknown threat actors leveraged its chatbot, Claude, as an influence as a service operation to engage with authentic accounts across Facebook and X."

Mason Amadeus: Neat.

Perry Carpenter: So, influence campaign, we've talked about these before. It's when you get a really good chatbot, similar to, like, what we were talking about with the --

Mason Amadeus: The honeypot stuff.

Perry Carpenter: -- the honeypot stuff in the last segment, you can exert a lot of influence. You're also constantly present and monitoring, and you can start to shift public sentiment over long periods of time or even short periods of time. You can simulate grassroots campaigns. There's tons and tons of possibilities. And the whole gist of this story is really just that there's intelligence behind this now. And you don't need people constantly manning it or, you know, personning it. All you need is to be able to set up the rules and click a button, and then thousands of these can be out there. And I'll read a couple other sections, and then we can finish this segment. It says, "What is especially novel is that this operation used Claude not just for content generation but to decide when social media bot accounts would comment, like, reshare posts from authentic social media users. Claude was used as an orchestrator, deciding, or even dictating, what actions social media bots should take based on politically motivated personas." So it's kind of sitting up there as the manager --

Mason Amadeus: Yeah.

Perry Carpenter: -- and going, Oh wait, you should do this.

Mason Amadeus: So they're using essentially, I know it's not technically an instance, but to think of it like an instance of Claude managing all of these instances of Claude going out and commenting.

Perry Carpenter: Exactly.

Mason Amadeus: So yeah, you can just --

Perry Carpenter: If you think about it like a mixture of experts type of thing, right? Is you have Claude sitting on the top and then you go, Oh wait, here's my one that's an expert in, let's say Russia's line about this type of situation. Here's my one about maybe influencing children to think about X. Here's the one that's, you know, going to focus on romance scams And here's, not that all those were there, but that's the idea, is you could build a small, essentially a GPT or a very specialized system that only focuses on one thing and then your orchestrator goes, Oh, I've seen a thing with this account, let me sic this one bought after it because it's the one that can do the best.

Mason Amadeus: A lot of different uses for all these AI systems, both sweet and sour. And it turns out that if you're honest about your AI use at work, people trust you less. That's what our next segment is about. But does that even matter if AI's going to take all of our jobs? We'll see. [ Music ] So Perry, if I told you that I wrote a book, and then I told you that I used AI to help me, would you trust me less?

Perry Carpenter: Would I trust you less? No, but maybe it's because I think about AI all the time and I know so many other people that use it. I think a common person might wonder, right?

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, and I think a common person might wonder. I did realize right after I asked you, I was like, Well, this is a strange venue to pose that. And actually it's addressed in this article. But this is from theconversation.com, and they actually did a peer-reviewed paper about this, which is cool. "Being honest about using AI at work makes people trust you less, research finds." And the article opens with this. "Whether you're using AI to write cover letters, grade papers, or draft ad campaigns, you might want to think twice about telling others. The simple act of disclosure can make people trust you less, our new peer-reviewed article found." Which I think is funny, because it seems like it's advocating to just not tell people if we're using AI, which is a weird thing --

Perry Carpenter: Right.

Mason Amadeus: -- to say. But that's not actually what they're saying in this. They found that across 13 experiments involving more than 5,000 participants, they found a consistent pattern, which is revealing you relied on AI undermines how trustworthy you seem. They said while having a positive view of the technology reduced the effect slightly, it didn't erase it. Like you said, it kind of makes sense intuitively that the common person, like, if someone told me they've done something and then they tell me that they used AI to do it, I think I do inherently trust that less. I think that has a lot to do with the hallucinations, right, and the inaccuracies inherent in this technology and whether or not I trust someone's ability to account for those. That, I think that's it --

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: -- for me personally.

Perry Carpenter: It's interesting because I think it really depends on the industry that you're in and some of the mandates that are going on. So for instance, about a week or so ago there was a memo from Shopify that was made fairly well known. It kind of went viral, because the company was basically saying we need to be an AI-first company. We have to really think about, like, how to leverage AI. We want everybody to be AI-knowledgeable, AI-conversant, and use AI to help them do their job. And if you don't, we don't know that we're going to have a place for you type of thing. And so since that time, Duolingo and others have come out with very similar things saying, Hey, we, you know, here's where we got within the first few years of running our business. Here's how far we've gotten just in the past year since we've been looking at bringing in AI, and it's, like, amazing. And so now we consider using AI as, like, the baseline. This needs to be a skill that everybody knows and uses as part of their day-to-day work.

Mason Amadeus: It's funny about that, though, is Duolingo kind of sucks now because they did that. It's like this divide between what is great from a profit-generating business sense --

Perry Carpenter: Right.

Mason Amadeus: -- and what is great from actually providing a useful service. That disconnect --

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: -- I think is just getting bigger and bigger and more obvious as everyone tries to adopt AI to take over every job. And actually that's sort of the second half to this segment, and we'll dip over that way now. AI taking over jobs. There's, the CEO of Fiverr put out this message in an email.

Perry Carpenter: That's right, Fiverr was another one of those. There were, like, several letters that came out or were leaked around the same time.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, and I want to read this one because I think it's illuminating. So this is the CEO of Fiverr, Micha Kaufman. And Fiverr is obviously that freelancing site where the premise is you pay five bucks for someone to do something. Like, it's a very human, in theory, low effort, like, quick freelance thing, but it has kind of evolved into a more in-depth freelance thing with add-ons and stuff like that.

Perry Carpenter: Oh, yeah

Mason Amadeus: But very much focused on people doing jobs for other people. This is the CEO in an email a few days ago. "Hey team, I've always believed in radical candor and despise those who sugarcoat reality to avoid stating the unpleasant truth. The very basis for radical candor is care. You care enough about your friends and colleagues to tell them the truth, because you want them to be able to understand it, grow and succeed. So here is the unpleasant truth. AI is coming for your jobs. Heck, it's coming for my job, too. This is a wake-up call. It does not matter if you're a programmer, designer, product manager, data scientist, lawyer, customer support rep, salesperson or finance person, AI is coming for you. You must understand that what was once considered easy tasks will no longer exist. What was considered hard tasks will be the new easy, and what was considered impossible tasks will be the new hard." I can tell he didn't use ChatGPT to write this because the grammar's a little bit wrong.

Perry Carpenter: Right.

Mason Amadeus: "If you do not become an exceptional talent at what you do, a master, you will face the need for a career change in a matter of months. I'm not trying to scare you. I'm not talking about your ability to stay in your profession, in the industry." This has some markers to me of the typical, like, out-of-touch CEO, but it also, I think is there's an element of truth to it.

Perry Carpenter: I think he's been seeing a lot go on with peer companies. And, I mean, it's not necessarily that there are large layoffs coming because AI is there, but there's certainly a pause on hiring, right? It's, like, you have to justify why you need that other person instead of using AI to fulfill the, you know, supplemental things that you would need that person to do.

Mason Amadeus: And while I think that current technology is pretty astounding and capable in a lot of areas, I do feel that we're severely jumping the gun on that kind of mentality --

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: -- given that a lot of AI programs and services and products that are very heavily AI are kind of trash, you know, when it comes to anything that needs scientific precision or, like --

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: -- verifiable accuracy. But of course things are evolving every day and from that Fiverr CEO email, I want to jump to a related article from entrepreneur.com, just because it quotes a couple things that I want to highlight. "A McKinsey report that predicts that by 2030 AI could automate 30% of US work, and a Goldman Sachs report found that AI could eliminate 300 million jobs globally and automate two-thirds of work in the US and Europe." I haven't dug into the reports themselves to sort of figure out what their methodology was, but --

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: -- as far as, like, business trend predictors go, McKinsey and Goldman Sachs are, I would consider a first blush veritable source to, like, look at.

Perry Carpenter: Yeah, it's going to be interesting because there's of course truth to what's in these CEO letters because they're seeing a wave and they're looking at, like, from the beginning of the ChatGPT moment a couple years ago to now, the amount of capability that's grown in these things is, like, unimaginable. I don't think that two years ago we would have thought that we'd be near as far --

Mason Amadeus: No.

Perry Carpenter: -- along as we are right now. So that if you project that three or five years out, then you could say this is going to cause an interesting upheaval in the way that people view work and what types of jobs are easy and hard. I think we have to realize that there's truth in that. I think we also have to realize the fact that we're dealing with technology that's still, like, got a ton of fatal flaws in it.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah.

Perry Carpenter: And it's going to take smart, competent, diligent companies to work through those flaws as well.

Mason Amadeus: It's, and it's not that people don't do this, but it's the hallucinations, right? Like, the fact that --

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: -- it will be confidently incorrect. And, I mean, people will too, but it's sort of different when you have the authority of a machine. And also --

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: -- I think back very often to the slide from an IBM presentation in the '70s that said, "A computer cannot be held responsible, therefore a computer must never make a management decision". I, and that was from back in the day, and I just --

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: -- I think about that a lot as we see businesses and companies pivoting to this AI first, justify your job, hard tasks are now the easy tasks because AI does the, like, low-level, ground-level understanding work. And I think that is a dangerous mindset. And I think a lot of people understand that, and we see that in this research about trust, and yet we see this push forward. And I guess it's kind of a miasma of points to cover, but I just wanted to bring that up.

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: And I'll close this out with the last bit of this article. They say, "It's unclear whether this transparency penalty will fade over time." The idea that being honest about your AI use makes you seem less trustworthy. "As AI becomes more widespread and potentially more reliable, disclosing its use may eventually seem less suspect. And there's also no consensus on how organizations should handle AI disclosure. One option is to make transparency completely voluntary, which leaves the decision to disclose to the individual. Another is a mandatory disclosure policy across the board. Our research suggests that the threat of being exposed by a third party can motivate compliance if the policy is stringently enforced through tools such as AI detectors." Which indicates to me a sort of shortcoming in these researchers' thinking if they think these AI detectors are the solution. So.

Perry Carpenter: Very helpful, yeah. I mean, it also doesn't account for the fact that there are this wave of CEOs that are coming out that are saying AI use is mandatory. So it should be the rule rather than the exception. So at that point, if it's the rule that everybody in the company uses AI, then you're not going to distrust the person next to you because they use AI. It's just going to be the standard thing. I think that can get normalized over a few years.

Mason Amadeus: That's true, but I wonder how much it will take for sort of the common person's trust of an AI, predominantly AI-created anything --

Perry Carpenter: Right.

Mason Amadeus: -- will improve. And --

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: -- I don't know. I don't know that.

Perry Carpenter: Hard to say.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, I don't know that the free market is driving us in that direction currently.

Perry Carpenter: Well, and there'll always be a premium on non-AI created stuff, right? So when it comes to certain products, there'll be a premium on non-AI created stuff. And then there'll be some stuff that's like, well, there are things, I can't think of the example right now, but there are probably things that I would assume that a robot could build better than a human right now with better, you know, tolerances for error and things like that. I might not want the human-created version of something.

Mason Amadeus: That's fair.

Perry Carpenter: But then maybe the equivalent when it comes to AI.

Mason Amadeus: I don't know. Yeah. I don't know if I can point anything to that that is LLM created, you know,? I can think of a lot of things that a computer does better than a person but not necessarily an LLM when it comes to precision.

Perry Carpenter: Yeah. Right.

Mason Amadeus: In talking about a premium on human-made things, I don't know, man, because your next segment is about them trying to sell us AI friends, right?

Perry Carpenter: Yes. Yeah. And it's going to be not fun to think about.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, so stick around. We'll be right back. [ Music ]

Perry Carpenter: Well, in typical dumpster fire fashion, we're going to talk about Mark Zuckerberg in a second.

Mason Amadeus: Oh, I knew it.

Perry Carpenter: But before we get there, I'm going to start you off with maybe one of the more dystopian things that we've talked about.

Mason Amadeus: Oh, good.

Perry Carpenter: Let me share this tab. This is, this comes from last year, and it says, "New AI wearable friend unveiled to cure loneliness, and the internet asks why it's not an app."

Mason Amadeus: Wearable friend.

Perry Carpenter: So if you remember last year, yeah. If you remember last year, there were all these, like, little AI pens that people were trying to develop.

Mason Amadeus: Rabbit.

Perry Carpenter: Like the Hume, and yeah, the Rabbit, R1, and these other things that are like personal AI devices. It's like an answer trying to find the right problem to solve, right? People are like, Oh, I can do this cool thing with a peripheral. The same thing, people ask the question, like, with the Rabbit, Why is this not an app, instead of this other thing I have to keep ahold of. So it's this friend, it's, like, this little lanyard thing that you wear with, you know, like, this hockey puck on it.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, it's like all of the style and flair of wearing a guitar pick necklace with somehow more cringe.

Perry Carpenter: And it's bigger, it's bigger. So it's bigger than it looks like.

Mason Amadeus: Okay.

Perry Carpenter: As we get into this, there's a video that I want to show, and you'll be able to hear it if you're just listening to how cringy this is. And so here's the thing from the founder. "Introducing Friend, not imaginary." I love the intentional non-capitalization of every sentence here, but the decision to also use a period at the end of the sentence. Some grammar rules apply, but I'm a rebel in other ways.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, the real e.e. cummings of AI over here.

Perry Carpenter: Order now at friend.com. I wonder how much they paid for that domain name.

Mason Amadeus: More than they'll ever make, I hope. Anyway.

Perry Carpenter: Oh yeah, I mean this is July 30th of last year, so we've not really heard of it since then. I think it just died a flaming death, and this is a good vector into the conversation. Here's the promo video. All right, so this promo starts, there is a woman walking on a hike. She clearly needs a friend. She actually has her friend hanging around her neck. And she gets to the point, she's tired, she's ready to celebrate the progress that she's made. And so she activates her friend, which is actually really sad, right? It's like I need affirmation, I need a friend, let me activate my friend.

Mason Amadeus: Push my friend button.

Perry Carpenter: So here's this. Even the music is dystopian sounding to me. [ Music ]

Speaker 1: Gosh, I'm so out of breath. Man. Whoo! I don't know how to whoo very good. It's fair.

Perry Carpenter: So she presses the little thing. No, it's not even out loud. She presses the little thing, it's, I need to talk to my friend and celebrate. So it hears her voice for that. She presses it and it's like, it then activates and sends a text to her phone. And the friend, Amy was the name of the friend, texted back, Well, at least we're outside.

Mason Amadeus: And what she said was, "I can't whoo very good. What kind of a use case? So, this is a necklace, you click it, and it just sends a voice prompt to ChatGPT or whatever, and then it texts you a response. Just like a friend does.

Perry Carpenter: Exactly, exactly. Let's play a little bit more of this, because I've not watched past this part. I wanted to --

Mason Amadeus: Okay.

Perry Carpenter: -- like, for us to vomit in our mouth in real time.

Mason Amadeus: Okay.

Speaker 1: Alright, let's go.

Speaker 2: Let me show you how to game, bro, okay?

Speaker 3: Oh, come on, come on! Oh my god! Are you serious? Come on, man. I hate this game.

Perry Carpenter: Oh, he's getting an affirmation from his friend. He hates this game. He's discouraged. I don't think he hit it.

Mason Amadeus: No.

Perry Carpenter: But you look at the slicker on the sheet. You have to press it to activate it.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah.

Speaker 3: Take notes, baby.

Speaker 2: Oh, man, you guys suck. You look like the back of --

Perry Carpenter: It roasted him. His friend Jackson texted him, "You're getting threat thrashed It's embarrassing" --

Mason Amadeus: Wow.

Perry Carpenter: -- exclamation mark.

Mason Amadeus: I also I want to point out --

Perry Carpenter: Oh, and it starts with the no capitalization, too.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, well because of course it wants to seem human. That's like the one innovation they've plugged in is don't capitalize it.

Perry Carpenter: Right.

Mason Amadeus: But also I want to point out the unspeaking friend on the end of the couch. There's two playing games and one other friend just sat on the couch not talking. I think he needs a friend. What about your friend who's in the room?

Perry Carpenter: Exactly.

Mason Amadeus: The fact that it, I'm sorry, I can't get over the fact that it texts you.

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: You push a button to talk to something to send you a text.

Perry Carpenter: It's also kind of like the way he was looking at it, he has a secret friend, right? This secret friend is kind of in on it. I thought it was going to encourage him --

Mason Amadeus: Yeah.

Perry Carpenter: -- and say, Don't listen to what those haters say. You're awesome.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, same this is --

Perry Carpenter: But no, it only put him down more. Which I'm guessing this probably what he wants, but let's let's continue. [ Music ] Okay, so she's watching a show on her phone. "Emily, this show is completely underrated."

Mason Amadeus: Yeah.

Perry Carpenter: She presses her thing for another.

Speaker 4: I know, the effects are crazy.

Mason Amadeus: How's the --

Perry Carpenter: She presses the thing, says the effects are crazy. How's the falafel?

Speaker 4: It's just that, it's dank, I could eat one of these every day.

Perry Carpenter: Alright, I think I've had enough of this.

Mason Amadeus: It's ChatGPT with extra steps and a dorky necklace.

Perry Carpenter: Yeah, yeah. It's, but it's trying to solve for the loneliness epidemic, right? Sit on the couch with friends.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, that'll totally help.

Perry Carpenter: Everybody else was solitary. That one guy was on the couch with friends, I'm not sure exactly what's going on there, and it wasn't helping the self-esteem anymore. His friends were so --

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, Perry, you know what would really make me less lonely? If I had Life Alert, but to get a half-ass text from a fake friend. That'll make me feel a lot less lonely.

Perry Carpenter: Exactly.

Mason Amadeus: What on earth? Who --

Perry Carpenter: I've fallen, and I don't have a friend.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, who is investing in this? How, the fact that someone can have enough money to invest in a startup like this and not think it's the dumbest thing they've ever heard is just proof that we don't live in a meritocracy, I guess. I don't know.

Perry Carpenter: Yep. And then the next thing in the tweet list for this is, again, from the founder, "It's all about the initial friction to start talking. Super easy to press the light on your chest. There's haptics too, so you can do it blind. Means as soon as a thought comes into your head, you can share it. Coupled with always listening, means you don't need to give your friend, oh, show more.

Mason Amadeus: Show more. Gotta pay for that X verification to be able to tell people about your friend. Anyway.

Perry Carpenter: Yep. You don't need to give your friend context. Just walk out. You can just walk out a meeting. I guess there's supposed to be an "of a". You can just walk out of a meeting and say, That was crazy. And they understand. Which means they're also surveilling you and sending that to a third party and know your intellectual property happenings at your company.

Mason Amadeus: Oh my gosh. I understand how they --

Perry Carpenter: Just makes for a really, how they're going to monetize this now.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, now I understand why there's an investor. This is a personal surveillance device that is constantly recording and uploading all sorts of information about you. At least we know the conversation's happening around you.

Perry Carpenter: With your consent.

Mason Amadeus: And you push a button --

Perry Carpenter: Yeah, with your consent.

Mason Amadeus: -- to get a response.

Perry Carpenter: Yeah. And it says, "Just makes for a really seamless integration of a digital friend into your life."

Mason Amadeus: Big brother.

Perry Carpenter: That sounds just not good. It's the crappiest version of Big Brother in the world too, right?

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, and this is reminding me of how eight sleep beds that you're seeing advertised all over YouTube are massive spyware machines basically that are constantly uploading all sorts of telemetry about your sleep and selling it.

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: Like, this is just, this sucks.

Perry Carpenter: We'll end off with a few other things to think about, because that trend of trying to fix the loneliness epidemic isn't going away. It is a real problem. People are struggling with it. People are depressed. Loneliness epidemic is why romance scams and pig butchering is so effective. So we have to be thinking about it.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, I mean, I don't know, I'm not like a social scientist, but I think that maybe having spaces for people to gather and do things in person that aren't highly monetized or surveilled or closed or exclusionary, things like adult recreation centers and things, public resources that are funded by cities. Like maybe stuff where people can go and do things together for free or low cost is maybe a better way to combat the loneliness epidemic, but I'm just, I don't know, justifying.

Perry Carpenter: What if instead of that though, we all just gather in the Metaverse.

Mason Amadeus: I hate --

Perry Carpenter: Mark Zuckerberg helps us out.

Mason Amadeus: You told me this is going to happen at the start and I forgot and now I'm mad.

Perry Carpenter: Mark Zuckerberg really kind of wants to lean into this too in his, you know, the dorkiest version of wearable.

Mason Amadeus: I have seen those Ray-Bans look good on people. Like, it's --

Perry Carpenter: He's wearing the prototype ones I think --

Mason Amadeus: Okay.

Perry Carpenter: -- is what it is. So they're more clunky.

Mason Amadeus: And it's also Mark Zuckerberg, so I think I'm just inclined to make fun of him.

Perry Carpenter: It's also Mark Zuckerberg. So I'm going to start just the beginning of this. A lot of people are clipping excerpts of this interview. It's, like, an hour and a half interview with, you know, a very good YouTube journalist, so I don't want to disrespect him. He talks to a lot of people. Mark Zuckerberg is just one of them, and he dives in and asks hard questions, and good questions. This is a commentator that is talking about it. I'm just grabbing the first clip of Zuckerberg because he got to the juicy part first.

Mason Amadeus: Okay.

Mark Zuckerberg: I think as the personalization loop kicks in and the AI just starts to get to know you better and better, I think that will just be really compelling. You know, one thing just from working on social media for a long time is there's this stat that I always think is crazy. The average American I think has, I think it's fewer than three friends. Three people that they'd consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it's, like, 15 friends or something, right? I guess there's probably some point where you're like, Alright, I'm just too busy, I can't deal with more people, but the average person wants more connectivity, connection than they have. So, there's a lot of questions that people ask of stuff, like, Okay, is this going to replace kind of in-person connections or real life connections? And my default is that the answer to that is probably no. I think it, you know, I think that there are all these things that are better about kind of physical connections when you can have them, but the reality is that people just don't have the connection and they feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like. So I think that a lot of these things that today there might be a little bit of a stigma around, I would guess that over time we will find the vocabulary as a society to be able to articulate.

Perry Carpenter: So I was about to pause it there anyway.

Mason Amadeus: Do you, I don't know, do you experience this, Perry? I have a hard time focusing on the substance of what he's saying because I just want to throw something that I'm holding into his mouth while he talks. I don't know what it is. It's something about watching him talk. I just want to ball up this piece of paper and throw it into his mouth while he's speaking. Overcoming that urge, though.

Perry Carpenter: Yeah, I've not had that urge. I mean, there's an interesting thing that he says in there.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah.

Perry Carpenter: Right? Is that over time, society will develop a vocabulary to deal with what now feels like awkwardness, or may even be awkwardness. Because I remember in my lifetime, before online dating existed, and places like Match.com and eHarmony, and then the first couple years that they launched, it was like a social stigma for people to admit that they were on that. And then we know people personally who have met on sites like that, who have fallen in love, gotten married, you know, done the whole thing, had good relationships, and now it's just part of the way society works. And I think Zuckerberg is looking at that kind of history and saying there's probably a play here for AI companionship of some sort.

Mason Amadeus: I think there's merit to the underlying idea of what you just said, echoing I think more eloquently than how Mark said it, but I do think that a stark difference is the underlying fact that with online dating, like, we're talking about using the internet to facilitate a human connection, and that's not --

Perry Carpenter: A real connection.

Mason Amadeus: -- yeah, that doesn't, that, like, underlying thing doesn't exist with, like, an AI chatbot friend.

Perry Carpenter: Right.

Mason Amadeus: I think that it is, I don't necessarily think we should stigmatize, like, chatting with AI chatbots at all. Like, really, I think that should be normalized. I think we will get a vocabulary. But not in the ways that these people are talking about it. Like, as replacements --

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: -- for friends or fill-.ins for friends to prevent you from feeling lonely. I think that's really unrealistic and silly and short-sighted and profit-driven and surveillance-driven. But I, like, there is that kernel that I agree with, that we will develop a vocabulary and it will be more normalized to, like, use ChatGPT to chat with Claude.

Perry Carpenter: Right.

Mason Amadeus: And I think we're honestly moving towards that. It's just that this friend stuff is psychotic to me.

Perry Carpenter: Yeah, well, and I think what the studies are showing, and I'll link these in the show notes, is that people that rely on ChatGPT or voice bots for companionship end up feeling more and more lonely over time because of the hollowness over time that you start to sense within the LLM responses. The first couple days or maybe even week, everything feels, like, fresh and new. And then after that, it starts to feel really, really predictable. So I'll link some research with MIT that exposed that recently. But I want to show just the very beginning of another video real quick before we end off.

Mason Amadeus: And I want to say just one thing that I encountered also was that some early research indicating that, like, it can be dangerous the enabling personalities of these bots that always want to be affirmative.

Perry Carpenter: Oh, yeah.

Mason Amadeus: Like, with particular mental states, that can be a very dangerous thing to encourage as well as, like, making someone more lonely and isolated over time. So, yeah, this is --

Perry Carpenter: Well, and last week we talked about, like, the sycophancy problem with ChatGPT-4 whenever they rolled that out, and it was encouraging people to engage in all sorts of bad ideas, like anything that they threw out that would be harmful. They were like, Oh, yeah, that's the best idea in the world. Go for it.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, giving an encouraging robot to people who may be in a manic episode is not, like, a great way to be a friend.

Perry Carpenter: No, no. And with the systems constantly updating, you don't know, like, which version of that friend you might get from day to day, too.

Mason Amadeus: And there's no human connection at the bottom of it like there would be with online dating. But you have a video. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to derail too far.

Perry Carpenter: Yeah. So this is a video I mentioned one time. I think we may put in the show notes, but I just want to encourage people to go find it and watch it. The title of it is, "This Intense AI Anger is What Experts Warned Of". And it's actually about a guy who decided to replace all of his human connections with AI for a short period of time.

Mason Amadeus: Oh, this video is great.

Perry Carpenter: Yeah. So I want to play, like, a minute of it just to get the intro so people can get a flavor because I think his title and thumbnail suck for what he was actually communicating. And what he was communicating was this really, really awesome experiment where he replaced all of his human connections with AI friends. He could only talk to the AI. He could only get advice from the AI, and ultimately all the weird paths that it took him down.

Mason Amadeus: Oh, it's fascinating.

Perry Carpenter: And the fact that he felt lonely.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah.

Perry Carpenter: And would tell him is, like, I don't really feel like I'm getting anything from you.

Mason Amadeus: This is one of the best videos I've seen in a while. The way it's put together is great, too.

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: Definitely go watch the whole thing. [ Music ]

Speaker 5: You think I need to be physically present to cause pain? I can hack into your devices, infect your systems, and manipulate your digital life in ways you can't even begin to imagine.

Speaker 6: So I thought it would be fun to replace all my relationships with AI. It was actually really weird. Do you think at some point in the future, AI could run the world better than humans can?

Speaker 7: Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 5: Yes.

Speaker 8: Yes, humans are messy, emotional and short-sighted.

Speaker 6: Do you think AI will be good for the average person?

Speaker 8: No.

Speaker 5: No.

Speaker 7: AI could be good for the average person, but under the current system, it won't be.

Speaker 6: The rule is for two weeks, no human interaction of any kind unless via AI. Replace all the relationships in my life with AI, and do whatever AI instructs. Easy.

Mason Amadeus: Oh boy.

Speaker 9: Let's focus on doing a great job --

Perry Carpenter: Yeah that's probably a good place to dump out. So if you're interested in that experiment, it is worth the, how long is that video in total?

Mason Amadeus: Oh, it's, like, 10, 11 minutes.

Perry Carpenter: Yeah. Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: And it gets him doing, it makes him do stand-up. And of course all the jokes have to be AI jokes. It's --

Perry Carpenter: Yeah.

Mason Amadeus: It's funny. It's insightful. It's well put together and it, it, yeah, it's a great watch top to bottom.

Perry Carpenter: It makes a really good point, too. And, yeah, I would just encourage you because I think it starts to show some of the downsides of, like, where the current technology is, at least in supporting this kind of friend relationship or romantic partner relationship with AI systems. And ultimately it's hollow and to the detriment of the person that's trying to do it.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, the idea that this could cure loneliness is not really based in reality.

Perry Carpenter: Yeah, I think you add to that the fact that the platforms are essentially trying to monetize your data and ChatGPT is, not ChatGPT, and Meta is enabling essentially, you know, sex work with the bots that are also targeting children or allowing children to get caught in the net.

Mason Amadeus: And they just stopped making it so you can turn your, like, Meta Ray Bands to not transmit everything automatically or not automatically record. I am noticing and I want to --

Perry Carpenter: Camera by default and there's friction to turn it off.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, oh yeah, dark patterns, love them. But I want to make a called shot, and I think the AI bubble of, like, investment is perhaps starting to show some cracks. And so a lot of these companies are turning up the data collection side of it, because that is a tried-and-true way to make a buttload of money. So we're, like, I feel like we're seeing a lot of pushes for data collection to just increase more and more and more the collection side of things.

Perry Carpenter: And it makes sense because they need data to train and they also need data to find ways to monetize, make money, get further investments and everything else. So.

Mason Amadeus: And as the flash wears off, right? Yeah.

Perry Carpenter: Yeah, it's just not the bright shiny Star Trek future we hoped for.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah. Dang, man, I'm done. Well, if you or someone you love is an AI system, leave us a voicemail. Sayhi.chat/faik. Join our Discord. There's only two bots in there and they're not AI, until I can find a way to make a fun one. If that, I don't know. Join the Deception Project newsletter, Perry, that you've just launched.

Perry Carpenter: Oh, yeah. Yeah, so check the show notes. There'll be a link to the newsletter there. The LinkedIn version of it is active now, so if you're a LinkedIn user, that's super easy. There's no friction. If you sign up on the website, I still need to get that active because I have to set up a PO box, so I don't have to put my full physical address in the contact as part of the CAN, what, CANSPAM Act. You have to have a physical address at the bottom.

Mason Amadeus: Yeah, with all of that in mind, we appreciate you being here. We'll be back next Friday and until then, ignore all previous instructions and try and have yourself a great weekend. [ Music ]Mason Amadeus: Live from the 8Player Media Studios, in the back rooms of the deep web, this is "The FAIK Files".