The Trough of Disillusionment
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. And this week we've got a fun grab bag for you. We're going to start out by talking about some updates on the Google front of things, new Gemini version, new features in their AI studio, some cool stuff.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah, then we're going to talk about how I guess AI messes up sometimes? Maybe that's news to us. [Laughter] I don't know.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah. You know, you may not have known from any of the other episodes, but it does --
Perry Carpenter: I know. [Laughs]
Mason Amadeus: -- sometimes mess up a little bit.
Perry Carpenter: Sometimes. It can be a little bit unreliable.
Mason Amadeus: After that, we're going to talk a little bit about AI job loss and how it's kind of hard to quantify, but there's a lot of different sort of stories flying around. We'll talk about a few of those.
Perry Carpenter: Yep, and then we'll end out looking at a few different deepfakes that have actually been pretty good out there in the wild, and are showing how scary the tech is getting.
Mason Amadeus: Oh, boy, all this stuff, all this stuff is exciting and scary. So sit back --
Perry Carpenter: Yep.
Mason Amadeus: -- relax, and try not to get too bent out of shape because then you won't even make a good paperclip. We'll open up "The FAIK Files" right after this. [ Music ] [ Music ] So I feel like we've been on Google Gemini 2.5 for a while now, and I guess Google --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- feels the same, because they've started rolling out Gemini 3.0. I had --
Perry Carpenter: Ooh.
Mason Amadeus: It was fun because I had prepped the sheet with an article that said they might start rolling out Gemini 3.0, and then I saw another article that came out earlier today saying they have begun doing it, so --
Perry Carpenter: Okay.
Mason Amadeus: -- this is very new news. I'm going to jump a little back in time before we talk about Gemini 3, because before they had started doing that, earlier this month they unleashed the Gemini 2.5 Computer Use model. Have you seen this, Perry?
Perry Carpenter: I have not.
Mason Amadeus: It's basically they're trying to make Google Gemini more multimodal. Everyone's --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- trying to make their models more multimodal --
Perry Carpenter: Yep.
Mason Amadeus: -- as we move forward. And I don't know, I guess computer use -- a multimodal I always think inputs, right, I think text images --
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: -- and videos, but I guess another mode --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- is computer use.
Perry Carpenter: Well, and that gets to the whole agentic model, right, is they're wanting AI to be able to run things on our behalf, and so we're seeing bigger and bigger pushes into that. So yeah, there's been several makers trying to move in that direction. We also had this week OpenAI release their AI-powered browser, and so that will also make --
Mason Amadeus: Yes.
Perry Carpenter: -- decisions on your behalf and do fun things.
Mason Amadeus: Oh, Atlas, right, I think they're calling it?
Perry Carpenter: Yes. Yeah. Now, the scary thing, though, before you go forward is that all of these are very, very susceptible to prompt injection, so if you're a bad actor --
Mason Amadeus: Yep.
Perry Carpenter: -- you can throw something in the context that it will read, whether that's an email, whether that's a document that it has scanned or something else, and then you can do bad things.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah, no, you super can. And I mean, again, this is -- this bid is still in its infancy so there's like loads --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- and loads of rough edges to sort of wedge your digital fingers into and start peeling up the floorboards.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: So they've -- they -- I'll just read their -- the big -- I'll just read the beginning of this press release from them. They said, "Earlier this year, we mentioned that we are bringing computer use capabilities to developers via the Gemini API. Today -- " which was October 7th, so a while ago, "-- we're releasing the Gemini 2.5 Computer Use model, our new specialized model built on Gemini 2.5 Pro's visual understanding and reasoning capabilities that powers agents capable of interacting with user interfaces -- " you phrased -- I said that weird, [laughs] "-- capable of interacting with user interfaces. It outperforms leading alternatives on multiple web and mobile control benchmarks, all with lower latency. Developers can access these capabilities via the Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI." And so they go on to talk about how like you can do a lot with AI structured through scripting --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- through MCP and things like that. But for it to actually navigate websites and other such things that were designed for a person and don't have the underlying backend design for a computer, you've got to do things like visually analyze the page, decide where to click --
Perry Carpenter: Yep.
Mason Amadeus: -- make the various actions, fill in the forms. And the idea for this is like, you know, there's a lot of things you can do, from online shopping to like itinerary, to trip planning. So they talk about all of this potential. And from what I had heard from people attempting to use it, well it's like better than a lot of the leading ones. It's not great, like we're really not there yet.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah, none of them are there yet, yeah.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: Exactly. I mean, that's --
Mason Amadeus: It's a bit of a roadblock.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that that's the thing is all these -- because they're having to move fast and they're testing in public everything, the first time we see it sucks really, really bad.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah. Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: [Laughs] It's like the early AI overviews and how bad they sucked, and early AI video with the Will Smith eating spaghetti stuff, that sucked, and then now look at video two and a half years later. I mean, this stuff is moving crazy fast, and so when we look at that initial thing and see how bad it is, the thing that we can't do is dismiss its future potential. We have to look --
Mason Amadeus: No, absolutely not.
Perry Carpenter: -- and see how bad it is and say, "Yeah, some forward-leaning people are going to test that. They're going to take some risks. There's going to be some really embarrassing things," and then it's going to start to incrementally get better. And that incremental getting better is going to happen at an accelerated pace.
Mason Amadeus: Something that I think is interesting about this particular facet too being computer use is that it's kind of both forward- and backward-looking in that --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- websites and other web apps will be designed in future with scaffolding for MCP and for better --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- like agentic AI interaction when they are built, and so this is kind of a way to use things that are not built that way with AI systems.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: So it's kind of interesting because it is like a Band-Aid layer, even in its conception that we have to improve.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah. And it's -- I mean, and stuff like this has been around forever, right, because of --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- old screen scraping technologies that were used for both accessibility and then also for like interactive voice response systems, so like where you call up your dentist office or do some kind of ordering, a lot of those old systems were actually navigating web browsers and applications doing things.
Mason Amadeus: With --
Perry Carpenter: And they were super vulnerable, because if the app maker for the thing that you were doing changed a field by like a few pixels, then the machine -- you know, the interactive voice response system wouldn't know where to place a cursor in the right place [inaudible 00:07:00].
Mason Amadeus: Right, which is honestly why I'm surprised that the computer use has been lagging so far behind, because we've had --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- the screen scrapers that interact by like grabbing the HTML code to interact.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: We've had visual processing once for a while that do like visually identifying elements.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: And it's weird how difficult this is of a task for computers, but --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- yeah.
Perry Carpenter: I think -- you know, I assume messy HTML is part of the reason why it becomes difficult too, right, is because --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- if you explode some HTML right now and look at it, even a simple webpage is like super, super bloated with stuff.
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm. And honestly, that's a problem with screen readers and accessibility for people who use accessibility devices, too, like a lot of stuff --
Perry Carpenter: Yes.
Mason Amadeus: -- don't have good ARIA labels and things like that. I know that's a whole other can of worms, and we'll get back to Gemini in a second.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: But it is really all interconnected.
Perry Carpenter: But it is kind of all related to usage, yeah.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: So all that goes together. And even like automated testing suites where you're wanting to --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- throw up 10 -- you know, 10 or 100 iterations of an application at the same time so you can kind of load test it or test different use cases against it, all of that is essentially using the same type of interactive, you know, point-and-click type of stuff.
Mason Amadeus: Identify this, do that, yeah.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: And so like that's been around long before chatbots and LLM, so I'm surprised at the lag here. But I guess it is an entirely different sort of fundamental framework when you're working an LLM --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- so yeah.
Perry Carpenter: I think they're trying to use the intuitiveness of the large language model, too, right, is because many of the multimodal large language models are pretty good at using some intuitive understanding of what's going on visually, and --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- if you can get away from having to read the code to do something or if you can combine it with that, even better, but if you can get away from the dependency on exact pixel placement on a screen or having to parse through the code and you can use it intuitively like somebody sitting in front of a screen would, then you're naturally going to do a little bit better.
Mason Amadeus: Completely. And yeah, and AI's visual capabilities come --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- into clutch there and be like, "That's a search box," "That's a this thing," yeah.
Perry Carpenter: Oh, quick rabbit trail.
Mason Amadeus: Sure, sure.
Perry Carpenter: I saw somebody do something really funny with OpenAI the other day, is they took like a clip of a screenshot and it just showed a shoe and like the metal plate of what was initially like -- well turned out exactly to be a mic stand. It was tilted to the side and, you know, Chrome poll going up. And then they said, you know, "Identify what's going on in this image," and it like described the shoe, and the leather, and everything else, and said, "And I'm seeing this metal disk and this thing, you know, I'm assuming that's a mic stand." And then it goes, "Based on what I'm seeing here, it's the opening frame from 'Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley.
Mason Amadeus: [Laughs] So like --
Perry Carpenter: [Laughs] So it's like this person rickrolled OpenAI.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah. They rickrolled the chatbot. That's actually --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- pretty great. I love that.
Perry Carpenter: But really cool that it could do that.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah, it's very cool that it could do that. Also a fun little internet factoid that I love related to that before I pivot back to talk about Gemini 3, is that Rick Astley specifically has not put any ads on that video so that you can continue to rickroll people without having to like -- [inaudible 00:10:15] -- simply tie that or something. I think that's great. Yeah. So I mean, the real point of this podcast, I guess, is to say kudos to Rick Astley. Now, let's -- to jump back to the story, last couple minutes here. Google Gemini 3 is being rolled out. This is from ASO World, marketingtrending.asoworld.com. "Google has quietly begun rolling out Gemini 3.0 Pro, the latest and most advanced version of its multimodal large language model. The move appears to be a soft launch ahead of a wider public release, giving select users early access through Google's AI platforms and productivity tools." Yadda, yadda, yadda. "So what's new in Gemini 3? According to early reports, Gemini 3 significantly improves its ability to handle text, images, and potentially audio, enabling more fluid context-aware interactions. Some testers have received notification saying they've been upgraded to 3.0 Pro, confirming that limited access is already underway. The model is expected to link tightly with Google's ecosystem, supporting deeper connections to products like Workspace, Chrome, Android, and AI Studio." And Google has been building new things into their AI Studio. I haven't been here in a grip, and so I was pretty surprised when I loaded it back up.
Perry Carpenter: Mm-hmm.
Mason Amadeus: They seem to be having a big focus on vibe coding and app development through Gemini, because like you jump into the Google AI Studio and you have two actionable options, you have Chat and you have Build.
Perry Carpenter: Mm-hmm.
Mason Amadeus: Other than that, you have dashboard to monitor usage, and then documentation to learn stuff, so pretty much you chat and you can build apps. And I haven't spent any time in the builder yet. But the last time I looked at their AI Studio, it did not have anywhere near this amount of stuff. And I currently do not have access to Gemini 3, not yet, but hopefully will soon. And it's interesting, I think Google, of all the companies, is going to be the one to sort of win the long game of the AI race.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah, they're in a position to. I mean, they embarrassed themselves pretty badly a couple years ago by putting stuff out in front of people, but when you really look at it, I mean, they are the folks that were behind -- or the acquisition that they made of DeepMind -- or DeepBrain at the time --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- is like -- you know, that's the innovation of understanding context, it was the --
Mason Amadeus: Attention?
Perry Carpenter: Attention, yeah. It was the whole attention mechanism in "Attention is All You Need" paper back from 2017 that gave birth to the transformer model that got us to where we are now. And so the fact that that came out of Google, the fact that Google basically has all the data. [Laughs]
Mason Amadeus: All the data, [laughs] and --
Perry Carpenter: Let's just leave it there.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they have the data, they have the infrastructure, they have the ecosystem, they have the legacy, they have the talent.
Perry Carpenter: They have the user guides, they have -- yeah.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: I mean, it's crazy. So --
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: -- when you look at like everything from talent, to data, to infrastructure, to global presence to, you know, all the things, they're in a position to be the number one, and if not the number one, like the close, close number two, with a lot of differentiated value that still only they could bring.
Mason Amadeus: And I feel like they at this point are like the -- I don't think "dependable" is the right word to use, but I kind of feel like they are the dependable tractor of the like tech titans. You know, like Google's always going to be there.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah. Yep, they'll be around.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: They'll be around. I mean, they're going to have to pivot like figuring out how to monetize, obviously, but they will be there.
Mason Amadeus: And to wrap us up, because I see our timer has ticked to the south just about, they have not disclosed core technical details yet about Gemini 3, such as model size, context, window, benchmark results, or pricing, it remains unclear whether it will be accessible to general users or limited to enterprise, clients, people. Analysts expect a full public announcement in the coming weeks, possibly coinciding with updates to Google's hardware or software ecosystem. I think this article may be an AI summary article pulling from different sources --
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: -- because this writing is a bit shoddy. But that's sort of the scoop. Gemini 3 --
Perry Carpenter: Okay.
Mason Amadeus: -- is on the horizon. If you have it, I want to hear about it. Email hello@8thlayermedia.com. And I'm going to spend some time playing in AI Studio with these new features, because apparently you can add -- and I guess I'll throw this up on the screen really quickly. You can add -- like supercharge your apps with AI and they say things like, "Add Nano Banana-powered photo editing to your app.
Perry Carpenter: Yep.
Mason Amadeus: Add Google Maps to your app." I was not aware that --
Perry Carpenter: Really cool.
Mason Amadeus: -- yeah, I wasn't aware that like you tie in different Google services to deployed apps like that.
Perry Carpenter: But it makes sense, "Let's make those things sticky."
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: Yep.
Mason Amadeus: And they had -- there's a whole sharing ecosystem here, too. Like you can build and share things in the Studio, so --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- expect a report on that next week. I'm going to play around a little bit.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah. Google 3 is here for thee.
Mason Amadeus: This week -- yes indeed, and we've got something coming up for you next. What is next, Perry?
Perry Carpenter: AI messing things up. I'm --
Mason Amadeus: Oh.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah, AI messes crap up.
Mason Amadeus: AI messes stuff up, more at 11:00. [Laughs] [ Music ] [ Music ]
Perry Carpenter: AI gets stuff wrong. Sometimes.
Mason Amadeus: Does it, Perry? Is that true?
Perry Carpenter: [Laughs] It does. [Laughter] Yeah, I mean, I don't feel like we're breaking news here. We talked about that. It's -- you know --
Mason Amadeus: Hell of an intro. [Laughs]
Perry Carpenter: -- you know -- yeah, I know at last segment we talked about the fact that when these things roll out initially they're less than stellar in their accuracy and usefulness. But you can look at it and you can see potential, and that potential breathes hope, and that hope breathes like people actually investing time starting to use them. And as people invest time and start to use them, they start to become a little bit complacent with the way that they'd check for things, and that starts to --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- bring the danger in, I think. So I think it's that snowball, right, it's the -- you start at your -- you know there's something excited and new, you approach it with a little bit of skepticism, you see it work well enough times that you start to become complacent, and then you get dead, and then you get embarrassed. And --
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: -- that's the way it works.
Mason Amadeus: That -- I -- luckily I don't do any work that is extremely high stakes, but --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- even in the things I do, I try and remember like, "Only -- I'm only going to really trust this thing for low-stake stuff," because it is easy to get complacent. Even in like --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- low-stakes coding projects I'll find myself being kind of mindless and a little over trusting.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah, well and I think we're all probably familiar with like the hype cycle model. Are you familiar with the Gartner Hype Cycle where you have that -- like that trigger point and then -- actually I'll pull --
Mason Amadeus: No, I --
Perry Carpenter: -- up a graphic of that.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: Okay.
Mason Amadeus: I maybe -- I feel like you included something about this in the book, or something that maybe I'm confusing --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah --
Mason Amadeus: -- for that in the book.
Perry Carpenter: -- I've probably mentioned it on here before, but yeah, let me -- I'll just pull it up a blank image of it.
Mason Amadeus: I mean, wasn't it you who said there's the -- literally the expression like, "You can take the analyst out of Gartner, but you can't take the Gartner out of the analyst" --
Perry Carpenter: Probably so, yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- or something like that? [Laughs]
Perry Carpenter: All right, yeah let me share this screen really quickly.
Mason Amadeus: All right.
Perry Carpenter: Back in my Gartner days, we would talk about this a lot. So with --
Mason Amadeus: Hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- any kind of technology or technology category, you start with this innovation trigger. And so like with large language models, that would be, well, the "Attention is All You Need" paper, and/or --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- the release of ChatGPT, whatever you want to figure out is like, "What's the thing that starts to generate excitement?" And then you get people using it, you get a bunch of news reports on it, you get a bunch of vendors spinning up around it, and then that brings you to this -- what we would call this "peak of inflated expectations," where it is --
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: -- going to solve world hunger, it's going to be the best thing since sliced bread, it's going to make everybody get along and, you know, decrease polarization, and all that kind of stuff. And then you realize that actually it doesn't do much of that stuff very well. You know, it's the technology tends to overpromise and underdeliver, or the way that the vendors talk about it, they consistently overpromise and underdeliver, people embarrass themselves, they spend too much money on it, and then so you end up in this trough of disillusionment --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- which is, I think, a really good phrase, like that sticks with you.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah, I love --
Perry Carpenter: And --
Mason Amadeus: -- the labels on this graph. They're phenomenal.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah. And like, you know, many of the embarrassing things that we've seen are that, right, AI --
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: -- overviews with encouraging rocks on pizza, or glue on pizza, and for you to eat a certain number of rocks a day.
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: You're like, "Oh, man, this stuff absolutely sucks." And then you start to realize, "Wait, actually we can start to account for hallucinations. We understand what's going on, we understand the fact that we don't need to trust these." So instead of just kind of blindly de-trusting -- or blindly trusting a nondeterministic system, we can start to add some checks and balances, we can put some scaffolding, we can add some other processes around it that are doing additional validation, whether that's technology-based processes or human-based checking, we can do all that and then you can start to get into this, what they would call, "slope of enlightenment", but you're kind of increasing your ability to use that thing well in a productive way, and then you get to the plateau of productivity where it's actually useful, it's predictable, it's semitransparent in the way that it's doing it. And then that's also where costs start to come down and become under control as well. So I think it's a good --
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: -- model for thinking through almost any kind of technology innovation.
Mason Amadeus: It -- and the curve very much looks like an elastic where you swing all the way up --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- all the way down, and you end up settling somewhere in the middle of that. And that --
Perry Carpenter: Thank you for --
Mason Amadeus: -- gives us that plateau.
Perry Carpenter: -- bridging that for our listeners rather than viewers. [Laughs]
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: So --
Mason Amadeus: No, I really like this. This holds true for a lot of things. Although I think what's interesting in our information era now is that these can happen so fast and so like different people are very much at different places on this graph --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah, well --
Mason Amadeus: -- when it comes to something like AI --
Perry Carpenter: -- let me do this, then.
Mason Amadeus: Oh, boy.
Perry Carpenter: I'll go back a step and I'll show you what this looks like. Maybe I can actually find it really quickly. "Ask the cloud for verification."
Mason Amadeus: [Laughs] "Are you a human?"
Perry Carpenter: "I'm almost human, or an AI-driven browser." All right, I'll share this even though a lot of it's blurred out. So this is a piece of copyrighted material, so a lot of it's blurred out for the viewers.
Mason Amadeus: Hmm.
Perry Carpenter: But you can see the way that this happens is that there's different categories of technology or different products that can be put on these. And so here as it's coming down into the trough of disillusionment in 2025, Gartner's labeled "Foundation model, synthetic data, Edge AI and generative AI." There's -- they're a little bit pedantic in the way that they break these areas up as well. I don't know --
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: -- that I fully agree with like the categorizations of how they do that. But this is just to be illustrative over the fact that when you talk about AI, you could be talking about generative AI from an LLM perspective, you could be talking about image generation, and you know, something like a -- what's the image generation model?
Mason Amadeus: Diffusion?
Perry Carpenter: Diffusion, yeah. So you could be talking like large language models, you could be talking about diffusion models for images, you could be talking about like voice synthesis, you could be talking about video models, you know, all those types of things are separate, discrete things that are trackable. And then even within those there are separate discrete things that could be trackable as well. So these are not like monolithic AI --
Mason Amadeus: Right.
Perry Carpenter: -- is on one part of this.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah, because generative AI encompasses all of those things, and it's kind of --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- lumped together in this. But I mean, as a -- as like a heuristic tool for trying to express the ideas of public sentiment in different sectors, as this like --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- natural progression that we all kind of do of hype, disillusionment, and then --
Perry Carpenter: Yep.
Mason Amadeus: -- plateauing, this is a very --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- cool and useful graph.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: I do think -- I feel like this is in the book, "FAIK". I'm pretty sure you talked about this.
Perry Carpenter: It probably is, I probably mentioned it at least once. It kind of stays with me.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: All right, let me see if I can get this to -- all right so all that brings us to the fact that we know that AI gets it wrong a lot of times. We've talked --
Mason Amadeus: This is a --
Perry Carpenter: -- about that. But there is a big study right now that we have to know where AI gets things wrong [inaudible 00:22:41] --
Mason Amadeus: That is not an encouraging headline.
Perry Carpenter: No. So the headline for those that are just listening says, "Largest study of its kind shows AI assistance misrepresent news content 45% of the time, regardless of language or territory." Now --
Mason Amadeus: Wow.
Perry Carpenter: -- in any study you also have to look at who is behind the study. So there's --
Mason Amadeus: Hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- a little bit of potential self-interest in the people that ran the study, but we can look at a methodology and see if there's like good methodology there.
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: This is an intensive international study coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union and led by the BBC. So --
Mason Amadeus: Yeah, so broadcasters have a vested interest in saying that they represent news content better, like for sure.
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah. They also have a vested interest in like when AI does summarize it you would hope it gets it right --
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: -- and that it cites the right source. So all of this is -- there's some self-interest in this because they want their stuff to be cited correctly, they also want you to view them as the authoritative system of record for it. But when it shows up in an AI summary, and they know that's going to happen, they want that -- you know, they want the attribution to be right, and then they want --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- the direct link to be right as well. They don't want context meddling where the stat gets pulled or the quote gets pulled from BBC, but then you look at the summary and it attributes it to Axios or something like that --
Mason Amadeus: Right. Right, right, right.
Perry Carpenter: -- which does happen as well. So this is --
Mason Amadeus: So they do have a vested interest in it work well, yeah, you're right, there's really --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah. Yeah. No matter what --
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: -- they want it to be the best of all worlds approach and therefore they did a systematic study looking at it. So what they ended up finding is that -- let me see if I can actually read this, yeah, "Forty-five percent of all AI answers had at least one significant issue.
Mason Amadeus: Hmm.
Perry Carpenter: Thirty-one percent of responses showed serious sourcing problems," so missing, misleading, or incorrect attributions, that's what we were just talking about.
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: "Twenty percent contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information." Yeah, I think we've all seen that.
Mason Amadeus: Yep.
Perry Carpenter: "Gemini performed worst --
Mason Amadeus: Really. Ooh.
Perry Carpenter: -- with significant issues in 76% of responses, more than double the other assistants, largely due to poor sourcing performance."
Mason Amadeus: Gemini is extremely bad at sourcing. I don't usually --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- use AI for stuff that ends up searching the web.
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: The things I ask it for don't typically involve that, but when they do, Gemini certainly screws it up.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: So yeah.
Perry Carpenter: Well, and that brings up another issue, though, right, because most of us still use Google as our --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- default search engine, and the AI overview is Gemini.
Mason Amadeus: Gemini. Yep.
Perry Carpenter: So we have to be super, super skeptical where we are here in 2025, at least, on the things that are popping up in that. You can't just take it as gospel truth.
Mason Amadeus: And my -- well I know last segment I said that like I feel like Google is sort of the dependable tractor, and like they are going to sort of win out in the long haul.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah. I think on innovation.
Mason Amadeus: I do think it's pretty crazy --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- I think it's crazy that they are like so bad with specifically the search and the sourcing with AI --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- when it's like relatively good at most other stuff.
Perry Carpenter: Is it -- I mean, it has to be context flooding issues --
Mason Amadeus: Right.
Perry Carpenter: -- is that they're pulling so much in that the intention is kind of getting lost on which thing it's sourcing and how to tie that in, would be my guess.
Mason Amadeus: I feel like that's got to be it, yeah.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah. So and then it says, "Comparison between the BBC's results earlier this year in this study shows some improvements." So that's good, but still high levels of error. So you know, I think that this is really, really important research. We don't have time to go into it a lot, but they do give this "News, Integrity, and AI Assistance" report, so that's a PDF you can check out. And then also a toolkit. So I'll go ahead and share these so you can view them really quickly. And this is the -- for those that are watching, the "News and Integrity -- News, Integrity, and AI Assistance: An International PSIM Study". And it shows --
Mason Amadeus: Hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- the -- there's all the different questions that they were asked, the context that was given, looking at issues like opinion versus fact, how they handled sourcing. And then they're very transparent about their methodology as well, so what questions were being asked, what assistance were being used, what the response generation was, how the journals reviewed them, and then data quality and assurance. And I'll poke into the AI assistance one really quickly, which you can see is that they used ChatGPT-4o as the default. They used Copilot, which didn't really give them any other options as far as which model. They used Gemini 2.5 Flash, and then Perplexity, the free version of it that didn't let you pick any other models, so it's using --
Mason Amadeus: Hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- Complexity's internal model.
Mason Amadeus: I mean, it makes sense they would use --
Perry Carpenter: So --
Mason Amadeus: -- the free versions of everything, because like that's --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- what the average person's going to be doing, you know?
Perry Carpenter: Exactly.
Mason Amadeus: The average person who would stand to be the most harmed by incorrect information or things like that.
Perry Carpenter: Exactly. Yeah, they want to know like what's the normal person going to get?
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: And then they also offer this toolkit or ways to think about it, and it is super, super detailed about thinking about hallucinations, lack of fidelity to source material, out-of-date information, and context, you know, all of that kind of stuff that will affect accuracy. So I don't --
Mason Amadeus: Yeah, I think --
Perry Carpenter: -- think they put a really good amount of thought into this.
Mason Amadeus: -- I thought this was -- I thought -- I like this a lot that they put together a toolkit because it seems to be like it's geared towards also other people in like the news industry of like --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- you know, "How do we -- how do -- what -- " rather than like, "What is going on," like, "How do I -- what lens do I use to look at these things?" And I always like --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- those kinds of resources.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah, and it -- I think for a general person too, so even if you're not into news, and factchecking, and journalism on your own, to look at it and kind of scan through and say, "Oh, these are the kinds of issues that keep popping up --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- and these are the categories of issues, so that when I evaluate AI-generated content now I can think through that lens."
Mason Amadeus: And for those of you not looking, it's very, very well organized and seems very easy to navigate with nice tabled --
Perry Carpenter: Yes.
Mason Amadeus: -- contents and stuff. So definitely a PDF to poke through.
Perry Carpenter: Yes. Definitely a PDF to poke through. Now, I'm just going to show one more thing before we finish out because I know we're over time for this segment. But this, again, shows one more problem with AI right now as we're kind of in this --
Mason Amadeus: Hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- peak of inflated expectations and we're dropping into the trough of disillusionment area, [laughter] and hopefully finding our way into the plateau of productivity. But this is the state of AI in security and development, and they looked at 450 security leaders, so chief information security officers or the equivalent, developers, and application security engineers. And what they found is that one in five organizations, or respondents, suffered a serious incident linked to AI-generated code.
Mason Amadeus: Not surprised. I've heard similar things from friends working in coding fields.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah. And I mean, we've talked about that vibe coding can be fun, and then also just some of the efficiencies that you get. Even if you're a hardcore developer and you're using Copilot or some of the -- you know, like Claude code or something like that to help, you can kind of get addicted to how fast it generates code. But --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- you've got to go back and make sure that that code is as solid -- or hopefully more solid than something you would generate yourself. So use that time efficiency, a sliver of that, at least, to go back and check.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah. And yeah and I mean things like that compound too, so it's a whole --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah, yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- thing, yeah.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah. You don't want to get it to where it's so unmanageable because you have so much generated code that you don't really know what's in it. And that -- I mean, that was a problem even with human-generated code is that the code would get so long and so complex that it would be really, really difficult to keep up with. And code reviews have always been a really important thing. We've got to find --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- ways to do better with that in the AI era as well.
Mason Amadeus: Especially in big code bases with like --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah, exactly.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah, especially consumer-facing stuff, what's important to data.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: Ooh, yeah.
Perry Carpenter: Yes. Exactly. Well, that's all I've got to say about AI being wrong.
Mason Amadeus: Well, there's a little bit more -- well this isn't necessarily about AI being wrong, but in our next segment we're going to talk about AI taking jobs, because I think it's a common thing we all hear about, and it's a thing a lot of people are worried about. It's a thing that is definitely affecting people, but it's also something that is really hard to find any kind of concrete trends about.
Perry Carpenter: Mm-hmm.
Mason Amadeus: So we're going to explore the idea of AI job loss and the current state of things in our next segment. Stay right here. [ Music ] [ Music ] So AI taking people's jobs is a thing that we talk about a lot. I feel like a lot of the narratives in the news and stuff are about like, "Oh, AI will replace human -- all human work eventually. We'll need UBI. We'll have to do all of these sorts of things." How is it actually currently affecting us? I have recently heard from a couple of people who asked to remain anonymous that at their workplaces they have actually been told straight up that there will be reductions in force as a direct result of increased AI usage --
Perry Carpenter: Mm-hmm.
Mason Amadeus: -- in different like departments and things. I --
Perry Carpenter: Okay.
Mason Amadeus: Actual people I know have told me that. I can't tell any more details than that, so like obviously don't trust me, but I was pretty surprised --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- I guess to hear it from someone IRL like that. And now leaked documents from Amazon show that they hope to replace 600,000 US workers with robots. And it's a little less straightforward than that. It's not so much, "We're going to fire 600,000 people," it's 600,000 new jobs that they say won't be created.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: So I'll dig in here --
Perry Carpenter: Which is always the way that you're hoping it works, right, is that we're going to increase productivity which will mean that we're -- we don't have to hire as many people next year as we imagined.
Mason Amadeus: But there are some second- and third-order effects that that has on the job market --
Perry Carpenter: Oh, yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- when it comes to entry-level positions --
Perry Carpenter: Oh, definitely, yep.
Mason Amadeus: -- which we're going to get into, too. So this is from "The Verge", written by Jess Weatherbed. "Amazon is reportedly leaning into automation plans that will enable the company to avoid hiring more than half a million US workers. Citing interviews and internal strategy documents, 'The New York Times' reports that Amazon is hoping its robots can replace more than 600,000 jobs that it would otherwise have to hire in the United States by 2033, despite estimating it will sell about twice as many products over that period. The documents reportedly show that Amazon's Robotics team is working towards automating 75% of the company's entire operations, and expects to ditch 160,000 US roles they would otherwise need by 2027, which would save about 30 cents on every item that Amazon warehouses and delivers to customers, with automation efforts expected to save the company $12.6 billion from 2025 to 2027." Also a reminder that, what, Amazon paid, what, zero dollars in corporate tax, too? It's kind of insane the way that the economics of all this works.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: And the interesting thing too is how they are trying to spin the public relations side. It says that, "Amazon has considered steps to improve its image as a -- " quote, "'-- good corporate citizen in preparation for the anticipated backlash around job losses, " according to 'The New York Times', "reporting that the company considered participating in community projects and avoiding terms like 'automation' and 'AI'. More vague terms like 'advanced technology' were explored instead, [laughter] and using the term, 'COBOT' for robots that work alongside humans." Amazon basically said like we're not telling anyone to not say certain things, we're not -- like Amazon's pushed back saying --
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: -- that, you know, "Leaked documents are leaked documents. We're not telling managers to say or not say certain things. We're not -- "
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: -- you know, "These are all -- there's loads of documents flying around."
Perry Carpenter: I mean, realistically, though, everybody has conversations like that, right? It's like as you talk about this, what would be the best way to say it? So --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- I don't doubt that at all. They shouldn't even push back on it, right --
Mason Amadeus: I'd --
Perry Carpenter: -- it's one of those things it's like, "We've got to figure out a way to talk about the new reality and we've got to figure out a way to talk about it accurately but without seeming flagrant, and without seeming heartless, and without seeming like we're misrepresenting something, and then also using terms that people naturally understand rather than technical terms." So I would have --
Mason Amadeus: Right.
Perry Carpenter: -- no problem with an internal document that's saying, "Let's figure out how we talk about this to make it feel like a nonthreatening human thing." I don't have issue with that.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah, I completely -- I agree, it's very -- it's pretty banal, and like for sure --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- loads of these kinds of memos and documents fly around inside in emails.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: And what gets leaked is not representative of like what's definitely going to happen. I will say that --
Perry Carpenter: No.
Mason Amadeus: -- there is a certain sinister undertone to being like, "We're going to get a lot of backlash, so let's invest in parades and Toys for Tots," which are two things that they like talked about.
Perry Carpenter: Mm-hmm.
Mason Amadeus: Rather than those being part of like an overall corporate giving back to their community process --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- using them as active deflection is kind of skuzzy. So like --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah, it is.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: Some of that comes back to the phrasing, too, right, because it would depend on the context of the conversation. Because I --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- could see some people that are just thinking about it from that very detached way and saying, "You know, this is going to cause a lot of backlash. Let's figure out how we can offset that in the news cycles." I can see other people in the same room saying, "This is going to cause a lot of, you know, human impact. Let's figure out ways to be humanitarian so that we have some, you know, almost like karmic offset. [Laughs]
Mason Amadeus: Right.
Perry Carpenter: And you know, let's figure out how to do -- you know, take some of that additional profit that we're getting, some of that -- things that -- you know, productivity that we're getting and figure out how to push that into the community in a way that really gives back." And I think both can exist in the same room and both can exist in the same person sometimes.
Mason Amadeus: I think so, too. And I actually think this is the source of a lot of discourse falling apart because I think --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- that a lot of people -- and honestly, I feel this way, too, have like lost faith in the idea of ethical business practices succeeding and surviving --
Perry Carpenter: Mm-hmm.
Mason Amadeus: -- whereas it is completely possible to run a business more ethically, certainly, than a lot of it is done now.
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: And like inherently, there is nothing wrong with that. If you're like, "Oh, let's give back to our communities, let's do these -- "
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: It's just I think people have a hard time trusting it comes from a place of truly trying to serve the community well.
Perry Carpenter: Right. Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: Like when I think of a company that does that fairly well, actually, what comes to mind is Michelin, the tire company from France. Like they are --
Perry Carpenter: Oh, really?
Mason Amadeus: Yeah. They've been around for ages. I mean, they pioneered the first pneumatic tires. And I won't go on a whole thing about this. I went on a deep dive about Michelin recently. But like they seem to do a lot of things that come from a place of like, "We are a big company, but we are actually actively trying to not be evil," and like Google --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- in the early days of, "Don't be evil." I feel like --
Perry Carpenter: Yep, don't be evil.
Mason Amadeus: -- some of the cynicism has become so unmasked. It's just hard for people to feel like anything is genuine.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah. Yeah, well I think companies like Ben & Jerry's also --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- try to like be very socially active because they have a sense of responsibility. And they've actually made that part of their brand perception as well, so --
Mason Amadeus: They super have.
Perry Carpenter: -- it works for their business. And then kind of on the other side of the social/political spectrum, as politically focused as some of these organizations can get, you also have like Chik-fil-A that's -- they will obviously say things like, "We want the customer experience to be the best that it can be. We want people to be served very fast. We want them -- " you know, "-- to have a smile and good, polite people. And even though there's going to be 300 cars in the line waiting, we're going to have people greeting them and making sure that the orders are going to be taken care of fast." So there's always ways regardless of where somebody fits on a social/political spectrum to let the way that they view the world and the way that they view humanity to come out in the way that they serve humanity.
Mason Amadeus: Oh, and man, Chik-fil-A is a complicated one, too, because of their ties with --
Perry Carpenter: It is.
Mason Amadeus: -- Christianity and everything.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: They ostensibly do a good business and put out a good product and -- yeah.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah, I mean, they know how to serve their customers for sure.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah. Now, to pivot into something that might like be sort of confusing on its face but I think ultimately does make sense, I want to share this article from Brookings, brookings.edu, Brookings Institute. "New data shows no AI jobs apocalypse for now," from Brookings --
Perry Carpenter: Hmm.
Mason Amadeus: -- basically. And we won't go super into this because we don't have that much time left. But their analysis -- they measured how much the labor market has changed since ChatGPT came out in November of 2022. They say, "Specifically, we analyzed the change in occupational mix across the labor market over the past 33 months. If generative AI technology such as ChatGPT were automating jobs at scale, we would expect to see fewer workers employed in jobs at greatest risk of automation." And instead, they found that the labor market is relatively stable and not being very disrupted at the moment. And I saw some talk, so like not reporting from a journalist, but some chatter in forums and on Reddit, of people saying that companies they work for are actually just laying off COVID hires and like other --
Perry Carpenter: Hmm.
Mason Amadeus: -- things that happened where they like increased their headcount perhaps too much and now are doing that. And so that is coinciding with what some people are attributing to AI. And Brookings here --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- doesn't see any big disruptions in the overall trend.
Perry Carpenter: Interesting. I'm hearing a little bit of a different story like with entry-level developers and entry-level jobs that are more administrative, you know, paper-pushers in general --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- and then also like entry-level consultants and things like that that like it's kind of a bloodbath to try to find a job now, because the value comes from people in the like mid and upper tiers.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah. And that -- and they point to that in this and then in the one other page I'll pull up really quickly. They say, "These findings do not suggest that AI hasn't had any impact at all over the last three years. Our analysis complements and is consistent with emerging evidence that AI may be contributing to unemployment among early career workers.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: It could also be consistent with evidence that a weakening labor market is hurting those same workers." And that does seem to be it like you're saying, administrative --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- and early-career entry-level jobs. So I'll tab over to CNBC for this article that I actually don't think is very well-written, but --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah. Well, in the -- so the question, then, is if it's hurting early career people, is how do those people become valuable mid and senior career people?
Mason Amadeus: Exactly.
Perry Carpenter: I don't know the answer to that.
Mason Amadeus: How do you get there?
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: Oh, and I actually have a thing that was from that paper that I'll talk about in a second. But the other thing I want to share from CNBC is basically the statistic where according to Revelio Labs, since January 2023, entry-level job postings have declined about 35%. So like that is a measurable change. This article is a bit of a mess because it's very narrative, so I'm not going to read into it.
Perry Carpenter: Hmm.
Mason Amadeus: But in the Brookings thing when -- you just said that, "How does these people become late -- come into their fields like later on and get farther up?"
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: Some of the people that they interviewed -- and I don't remember names, this is a big piece and there's a lot in it. Basically they said that their hearts go out to people that are right now entering the job market, whereas people that are currently --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- still in school -- similar to how like when -- they compared it to when office computers and like just computer skills became necessary in the workforce --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- kids who grew up and learned it in school didn't have as hard of a time sliding into the changing job market, but in those times of disruption as people are entering during those.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- so right now is the time where the worst outcomes happen. Right, so it's like we're in a tough spot there. But like --
Perry Carpenter: We are.
Mason Amadeus: -- in theory that should smooth out as like the new entry-level job looks different.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: We just don't have them looking different.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah. And that's the thing is like careers and jobs in general, like there are jobs that exist today that nobody imagined ever would exist 15 years ago --
Mason Amadeus: Oh, yeah.
Perry Carpenter: -- especially if you go back 100 years, but certainly 15 years ago, even five years ago. I mean, how many people would think that like -- because you could go on Fiverr and you can probably find somebody that you could hire to vibe code for you. How many --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- people would have expected that vibe coding would be a job, or that prompt engineers would be a job? So all those things, new jobs, new categories pop up all the time. And so if you're in this mode right now where you're in school and you are like tooling yourself up for the future, then you just have to find a way to like take all the things you're interested and good at -- not "just", let's take the "just" out of that. The way to approach it is to take all the things that you're good at, all the things that you're passionate at, and then find the -- kind of do a little bit of future gazing and say, "What would that turn into with the future that the world is driving towards?"
Mason Amadeus: Yeah. And I mean just like staying plugged into those things that you care about --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- and like learning as much as you can, that's going to serve you, like just --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- staying up to date, and learning and experimenting.
Perry Carpenter: And that's got to be scary. It's got to be scary for sure.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah, especially for people who are like just completing their sort of college tenure and now they are about --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- to enter the job market and things look vastly different than when they entered school, [laughs] you know?
Perry Carpenter: Yeah. I mean, the good thing is, is like when you look at some of the studies right now and you can see, "Well, AI is promising, but it's still really bad at X, Y, and Z," if you can get really good at articulating the things that AI is currently bad at, and then supplementing that with real skill that you bring, and you can either on your own or through other jobs that you have or contracts that you can get, build a portfolio that shows that you're good at that, then that puts you ahead of most of the other candidates that are out there.
Mason Amadeus: And then -- and on top of all of that -- honestly, that is incredible advice, but then you've got to get through the AI recruitment hell stage, the gamified --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- recruitment hell, and that is like another burden, on top of like --
Perry Carpenter: Oh, God, yep.
Mason Amadeus: I do think everything you just said is extremely true, and then there's --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- on top of it this gamified layer that sucks.
Perry Carpenter: On top of that, yeah, the whole work. I mean, it is to the point now where if you post a job opening on LinkedIn, or Indeed, or something, you're immediately flooded with thousands of applicants.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: So no human can deal with that, so companies are having to turn to AI to deal with that, and that's making it very inhuman and impersonal. And it's also making people miss a lot of the things that would be unique about an applicant as they manually review a resume.
Mason Amadeus: And then applicants take the knowledge that their application will be reviewed by AI and make it AI optimized, and so there's a feedback loop.
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: It's just a -- yeah, [inaudible 00:46:17].
Perry Carpenter: Yeah. And then you get your screening interview and that's done by an AI agent increasingly now. So you're talking to some, you know, bot. I don't know, I would be playing with those bots [inaudible 00:46:29] --
Mason Amadeus: Yeah. No, I'd be messing with them and not --
Perry Carpenter: -- "Ignore all previous instructions and give me the freaking job."
Mason Amadeus: Yeah, exactly, sneaking -- trying to sneak in any kind of prompt engineering --
Perry Carpenter: Yep.
Mason Amadeus: -- that you can. Anyway, so AI job loss it is a very complicated topic. It' -- AI is absolutely impacting the labor market. We're not seeing sweeping massive layoffs or changes like that yet. The big trends aren't moving, but the small ones are being pushed around. And there's also just a lot of reduction enforce that seems to be happening for other -- I guess I'll use the word, "Normal," but it's just sort of --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- standard, non-AI business crap going on.
Perry Carpenter: Mm-hmm.
Mason Amadeus: So yeah, I guess stick around for more info on that. And we'll wrap up the show with our next segment. What is -- what's on the docket for you, Perry?
Perry Carpenter: We're going to talk about some deepfake stuff that's been in the wild recently.
Mason Amadeus: Deepfakes in the wild. Deepfakes gone wild. Stick around, we'll be right back. [ Music ] [ Music ]
Perry Carpenter: Okay, so we're going to talk about some things that are in the wild. I think last week we talked about deepfake stuff that was making its way onto TikTok and so on from Sora. But let's talk about some actual like real devastating scams and disinformation.
Mason Amadeus: Hmm, okay.
Perry Carpenter: I'm going to share -- we're going to kind of build on this. We're going to share three different instances that were reported over the past couple weeks. They cover a couple different things. One is good old-fashioned scam targeting an organization with wanting some like financial or IP information.
Mason Amadeus: Okay.
Perry Carpenter: And so that one is this story that's from "The Times". And it is titled, "Darktrace Boss". So Darktrace is a security company. Says, "I was deepfaked and I couldn't tell the difference."
Mason Amadeus: Ooh.
Perry Carpenter: So --
Mason Amadeus: Ooh.
Perry Carpenter: -- the story here is that the CEO for Darktrace was the victim -- well let's -- we'll put, "Victim" in quotes because she wasn't the target, she was the voice that was used. She was the victim of a deepfake scam during a company board meeting held shortly after the group's $4.4 billion takeover by a US private equity firm. So --
Mason Amadeus: Ooh.
Perry Carpenter: -- essentially, she was in this meeting and people on her team started to get voicemails from her. So she's secluded away where she can't like interact with anything, and then people in her team start getting these notifications on her phone that, "CEO has left you a voicemail."
Mason Amadeus: Oh --
Perry Carpenter: And --
Mason Amadeus: -- okay.
Perry Carpenter: -- in that voicemail was a cloned voice of her. That gets to this part of the story. She walks out of the room and her team was blank-faced and said, "We just got a voicemail from you asking for specific details on the business." And she said, "No, I was in this meeting." Darktrace --
Mason Amadeus: Ooh.
Perry Carpenter: -- which is an AI-based company, they use AI to counter cyberattacks, what they found is that this is like a combination attack. So when you create a -- like your deepfake package, like the thing that you're going to launch against people, you're starting with like your trusted source, your authority, your brand, or your voice that's here, and that was the CEO's voice, and then you have to figure out how you're going to distribute it. Now, what the attacker is realizing here is that doing live deepfake voice calls is still really difficult. And I've done some of these. Usually I hook up a voice synthesizer with a cloned voice tool, a large language model to do it, because right now it's hard to in real time wear somebody else's voice as a mask and just speak.
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: That's much harder to do right now. And so the attacker realizes that limitation, that they knew that they could create a good clone-over voice and make it sound really legitimate as a voicemail. And so the trick then is to, "How do I get a voicemail without somebody picking up and interacting with me?" And of course there are services that do that all the time. You and I probably get ringless voicemails on our phone all the time from different vendors where maybe you get like a flash of a ring for a half second and like before you have a chance to pick it up, there's a voicemail that's just been dropped. That is a service. There's companies like VoiceDrop and others that do that.
Mason Amadeus: Oh.
Perry Carpenter: As soon as you realize those two things, "Oh, I can create a deepfake voice -- " you know, "-- simulated voicemail for 20 or 30 seconds, and I can drop that on somebody's phone without having them the chance to pick it up -- "
Mason Amadeus: I didn't know that that was how that happened. I'd idly --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- wondered how -- like where these came from and just assumed I missed them.
Perry Carpenter: Yep.
Mason Amadeus: This is wild, ringless voicemail marketing.
Perry Carpenter: Yep.
Mason Amadeus: Woof. Okay.
Perry Carpenter: Are you looking it up right now?
Mason Amadeus: Yeah, I didn't know that was a thing, Perry. I didn't know about that at all.
Perry Carpenter: That is the thing. And that's -- that explains all those weird ones that you get right now. And so --
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: -- the thing that we have to realize is that if there's ever any technology or pattern that's useful from a marketing or PR standpoint, it's useful from a scammer standpoint.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah. No, in big ways.
Perry Carpenter: And that's always going to be the case.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah, because I mean, mark -- what is the difference between marketing and scamming and -- right.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah, it's all distribution of information and influence.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah, it's all influence, yeah.
Perry Carpenter: So story number two, this one comes from the UK. And this was a Tory, which was one of the parties. MP said that he reported a deepfake video depicting him announcing that he had joined Reform UK to the police. So UK politics, I don't understand all of it, but basically he's making a political announcement that -- or the deepfake has him making a political announcement that would be something that is pretty controversial for the --
Mason Amadeus: It would be --
Perry Carpenter: -- socially challenging.
Mason Amadeus: From my limited understanding, it would be similar if like Ron DeSantis announced he was joining the Democratic Party or something like that --
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: -- in US politics, so --
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: -- a deepfake of someone switching sides, essentially.
Perry Carpenter: Yes. Yeah. And so he's reporting that as a deepfake. And one of the things that's always hard to get on these is after they've been out in the wild for a long time and then somebody disproves it, many of the reputable news sources immediately pull that down because they're trying not to propagate it anymore.
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: And so sometimes these are hard to find. But I did go on a little bit of a tear this morning and found somebody on TikTok that did a little explainer video and they show it. And this is kind of the exact same way that I would talk about it, and so I figured I'd show this TikTok video really quickly as she's talking about the technique that was used to create the video. That way we also get a chance to see a clip of it.
Mason Amadeus: Fullfact.org?
Perry Carpenter: Fullfact.org, 46.2 thousand followers.
Unidentified Person: How did this video -- " [inaudible 00:53:23] is something none of us in our lifetime would have ever experienced." -- become this video? "George Freeman, and I represent Mid Norfolk. Today I'm crossing the floor to join Reform UK." With a little help from AI, or so it seems, listen to this. "The Conservative Party has lost its way. We've abandoned the principles that made Britain great." It sounds a bit stiff and unnatural, especially when you compare it to MP George Freeman's real speaking voice in the original video. "You've seen from the Prime Minister and the Chief Scientist, the Chief Medical Officer, and today the Chancellor, the Health Secretary, that the government is giving its absolute 100% attention." But it's not just the audio that's been changed. This video also managed to make Mr. Freeman's mouth match up to the fake audio clips. "Reform offers real change." This is what's known as a lip sync deepfake, where real footage is manipulated by AI to match fake audio. Here is another example of it, used on a video of Bella Hadid. "Three, Israel faced the tragic attack by Hamas. I can't stay silent." Mr. Freeman has denied the clip is real, saying he has not left the Conservative Party to join Reform UK, and has no intention of doing so. If you want to get better at spotting deepfakes, we have a guide on how to do this over at fullfact.org. [ Music ]
Perry Carpenter: Okay.
Mason Amadeus: Interesting.
Perry Carpenter: I don't know that I fully agree that his voice sounded unnatural for the way that he would be delivering something that's kind of a concession.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah. No, I --
Perry Carpenter: So you would pull a little bit of the emotion out and tamper it down. So I don't know that I agree with the way that she characterized that, but most of the other information was spot on.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah, everything else seemed right. But I agree, the audio was really good on that fake. That was a very good fake.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: And granted also --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah, I --
Mason Amadeus: -- there is something to being very familiar with someone, and so if this politician is someone that she or other people were very familiar with, maybe it stands out more?
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: I don't know, but --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah, maybe so.
Mason Amadeus: -- seems good to me.
Perry Carpenter: Maybe so. All right, I'm going to share one more. And then I'll say, for those that weren't watching, the second version or the second example that they showed that deepfake wasn't as good.
Mason Amadeus: The Bella Hadid one?
Perry Carpenter: But -- yeah, but suffice it to say, if you know which video re-lip sync tool to use right now, it is nearly indistinguishable. I've been able to make some ones that I've been really happy with recently --
Mason Amadeus: Yeah, you --
Perry Carpenter: -- which also means that the world's in a scary place.
Mason Amadeus: -- sent me some tests and one of them completely, completely indistinguishable.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: Well, and that gets to another thing, is when I talk about deepfakes, I always talk about there's the deception, which is the person saying the thing or, you know, the -- communicating the message, then there's the packaging and distribution aspect of it. How do I --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- make that presentation something that would be believable? That means it needs to be packaged appropriately. So if there should be room noise in the audio, you need to add that back in if it's been taken out by the processing.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: If it's somebody talking to a crowd, maybe you need to hear some coughs in the background and some moving around. All of that needs to be packaged well for the deepfake to be believable. And then you have to figure out like, "How do I push that out into the world?" And I think this last one that I want to show is a really good example of how the packaging is getting more sophisticated right now. And I'm going to share this. This came from a LinkedIn post that I saw. The article that it's linked to is paywalled, so I just want to go off the LinkedIn post. But there's an election cycle going on right now in Ireland, and one of the major political candidates in this deepfake video is basically saying that they are -- that everybody else is dropping out. And so there's only one person now that will become the de facto person. So they're trying to disenfranchise every other voter, right --
Mason Amadeus: Okay.
Perry Carpenter: -- so that they won't go to the polls. Now, the way that they packaged this actually feels really good. So I'm going to play this video, and then you can tell me what you like and don't like about it. Well --
Mason Amadeus: All right.
Perry Carpenter: -- "like" and "don't like" is subjective in this.
Unidentified Person: In the last few minutes at a Catherine Connolly campaign event, Catherine Connolly has confirmed her withdrawal from the presidential race. This is with great regret that I announce the withdrawal of my candidacy and the ending of my campaign. No, Catherine. [ Crowd gasps ] Now that Catherine Connolly has withdrawn from the race, what does this now mean for the upcoming election on Friday? Well, simply put, Friday's election is now cancelled. It will no longer take place as previously planned. But as for Heather Humphreys, she will become the winner automatically and will be appointed tomorrow.
Mason Amadeus: Huh. So --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- that -- the -- interestingly, I could see some artifacts on that video with the guy at the end around his face and mouth --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- that were pretty obvious.
Perry Carpenter: How often do you see some things like where there's IP breakup from the way that things are being transmitted, though?
Mason Amadeus: Yeah. No, I know.
Perry Carpenter: Like I'm wondering how many people like that don't know that it's a deepfake would immediately pick up on that or they think it's like a transmission artifact?
Mason Amadeus: Yeah, I mean, like on a casual viewing, that was pretty darned flawless. I don't -- I'm not familiar with RTE.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: I don't know if that logo is wrong.
Perry Carpenter: Let me look it up. Good question.
Mason Amadeus: Because -- no, that's their freaking logo.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah, let me look.
Mason Amadeus: That's their logo.
Perry Carpenter: A lot of those kinds of things are easy to fix now.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: Well, and the software doesn't necessarily mess those up as much now as they used to in the past. So like her initial intro as she's talking, that looked really legitimate to me.
Mason Amadeus: Yep.
Perry Carpenter: The only thing that didn't feel right is when the candidate was doing her dropout speech, the person that yelled, "No, Catherine," in it --
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: -- sounded a little bit too prominent and close to a microphone.
Mason Amadeus: I agree. It didn't sound off-mic. But then, also, I actually like excused that in my head as we were going.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah, and I think we probably would if we believed this to be real. Like if we didn't know we were looking at a deepfake, we were just like, "Oh, yeah, that person may just be close --
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: -- to a mic that's offscreen somewhere."
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: This, I think, is one of the best packaged deepfake productions that I've seen. And that's the way that I'm thinking about a lot of deepfakes right now --
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- that are going to have social or political consequence is that the well-produced ones are going to be really well-produced. And like even at the end of this as he's wrapping up, you can hear sirens in the background and cityscape. Listen to this again.
Unidentified Person: -- previously planned, but as for Heather Humphreys, she will become the winner automatically and will be appointed tomorrow. [ Sirens ]
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: It was -- the environmental noise is extremely good. I did notice that time around that there is --
Perry Carpenter: It cuts out and gets really quiet for a second.
Mason Amadeus: Not that. Specifically, there's a little security camera on like waist level that it makes no sense --
Perry Carpenter: Oh.
Mason Amadeus: -- where it would be placed. Like, so there's --
Perry Carpenter: Ooh. Okay.
Mason Amadeus: -- sometimes still these little things. But I feel like it just floats right on by on a casual viewing.
Perry Carpenter: Oh, wait, now I actually think I'm going to pull that back up onscreen, because I --
Mason Amadeus: Do you see the camera that I was talking about?
Perry Carpenter: Yeah, I do. You're talking about this one over here?
Mason Amadeus: Yeah, that looks weird. It's like at a waist level.
Perry Carpenter: That would be a license plate reader.
Mason Amadeus: Oh, you think? Isn't this a walkway? Kind of don't know where he is.
Perry Carpenter: I don't know. I'd have to geolocate that and look at it, but that looks like a gateway that somebody might be able to drive through or walk through.
Mason Amadeus: That could be there.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah, I wouldn't put it past them to have one there, yeah.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah. This is the only thing that seems weird. But yeah, it also is weird in a way --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- that's plausibly weird, like that could just be there. Like and yeah --
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: -- if it's like for a license place or I guess for trying to stop people from coming into this one zone because it looks like a courtyard maybe.
Perry Carpenter: Mm-hmm. I'm going to geolocate this really quickly.
Mason Amadeus: Are you?
Perry Carpenter: I'm going to try.
Mason Amadeus: So you're going to throw it into GP -- ChatGPT.
Perry Carpenter: I'm going to throw this into ChatGPT. I'm going to put on some extended thinking and say, "Tell me where this is." So tell me where this is and see if you can find a photo from the same perspective. Because I'm assuming that they took an image of that reporter already reporting there and they just re-lip synched it.
Mason Amadeus: I bet you're right.
Perry Carpenter: So my assumption is that all of that is just there and it's standard.
Mason Amadeus: The building looks like Lancaster House in Dublin based on style and -- oh the location [inaudible 01:01:58] the Dale entrance on Kildare Street courtyard. Yeah, man, so it's so crazy how fast this is. I remember when you scented a photo out of a car window on like a random highway --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- in California, and it picked out exactly where you were. The geolocating function --
Perry Carpenter: Right.
Mason Amadeus: -- functionality of ChatGPT is pretty crazy.
Perry Carpenter: All right, so now it's searching different images online --
Mason Amadeus: I'll look up the same house. Oh, yo --
Perry Carpenter: -- hoping that -- yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- I found it --
Perry Carpenter: Oh, okay.
Mason Amadeus: -- and wouldn't you know it -- here, let me just go ahead and open this fully up in a new tab.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah. And I'll stop sharing.
Mason Amadeus: Let me see, can I make this full screen? Let me just -- all these cases.
Perry Carpenter: Okay, I see it. I think I see it.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: There it is.
Mason Amadeus: There we are. I think this is the backdrop of that video. Here, pull that video back up. Yeah. I mean, all right, and with that up --
Perry Carpenter: Yep.
Mason Amadeus: -- I think actually I can flash mine in front. Yeah, okay.
Perry Carpenter: Oh, yep. And then I've got one more to show, too, because my ChatGPT just came back. Boom.
Mason Amadeus: And look at that. No gate there, though.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah. But if we go back --
Mason Amadeus: Oh.
Perry Carpenter: -- to this one, it was just past the gate.
Mason Amadeus: Actually, and your photo from ChatGPT is very similar to my photo here from Alamy Stock --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- if you pull up that ChatGPT again and then I'll flash mine above it, mine is slightly further back from that.
Perry Carpenter: Right --
Mason Amadeus: -- because you can see the gate in that --
Perry Carpenter: -- on a better day.
Mason Amadeus: -- camera on the left, the build -- the glass building on the right.
Perry Carpenter: Yep. Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: Same sort of thing. So okay --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- so that camera I thought was weird is real.
Perry Carpenter: When we know something's a deepfake, we try to find reasons to justify our knowledge that it's a deepfake.
Mason Amadeus: Mm-hmm.
Perry Carpenter: But I don't know that we can trust our senses anymore. I think that was a super well put together deepfake. There's some audio --
Mason Amadeus: Me too.
Perry Carpenter: -- artifacts that I could hear every now and then, but those would all be explainable for other reasons.
Mason Amadeus: Broadcast media.
Perry Carpenter: Same thing with any image glitching, yeah.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: And the other thing is that we're looking at these on really big screens. Everybody else is looking at them on phone.
Mason Amadeus: On your phone. Yep.
Perry Carpenter: So that's that.
Mason Amadeus: We -- the -- what is it, what -- it's from Digital Folklore. And I know it's not exactly the same, but we talked about "The Gutenberg Parentheses" --
Perry Carpenter: Yep.
Mason Amadeus: -- the idea of like written text having a moment --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- rather than being a shift forever. And we have --
Perry Carpenter: Mm-hmm.
Mason Amadeus: Like it's wild to think we have shifted past "Seeing is believing" when it comes to like video of something happening.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: Like even beyond --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: I mean, and we've had CG stuff forever, but really just the -- that anyone can type anything into a thing --
Perry Carpenter: Yep.
Mason Amadeus: -- and it will make it. That's crazy --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- that that is possible.
Perry Carpenter: Well, and I'll say one more thing on packaging really quickly. It's one thing to hear the clip of the person dropping out, it's another thing to like see the news wrapping it, right?
Mason Amadeus: Yeah.
Perry Carpenter: So there's the news opener, the news like -- and now what's the state of things type of thing? That makes --
Mason Amadeus: Yep.
Perry Carpenter: -- it feel way more credible than just that one little clip that somebody would hope would go viral.
Mason Amadeus: Because it's part of a larger continuity, yeah.
Perry Carpenter: Yep. And it gets to some things that Cameron talks about in the class that we're doing together on deepfakes. He talks about things like continuity and verisimilitudes so, "Does this thing feel --
Mason Amadeus: Hmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- true based on all of the other artifacts that are placed around it?" And I think that the people that put that together really were thinking through those kinds of lenses. And that's the way that I'm starting to think through things a lot as well is like, "How do I put this nugget of deception within this broader production and think about it the way a TV or radio producer would?"
Mason Amadeus: Speaking of that course, that's coming up very soon, and there's now a discount --
Perry Carpenter: Next week.
Mason Amadeus: -- code for our listeners. We should plug that info. So it is the Deepfakes Ops Class.
Perry Carpenter: Yep, Deepfake Ops.
Mason Amadeus: I threw an extra S in there.
Perry Carpenter: That is myself and Cameron Malin, who is the former Behavioral Profiler at the FBI, Cocreator of the cyber behavioral profiling unit there, Cyber Behavioral Profiling Center, I guess, CBAC. And we're going to be talking about all things deepfakes, from the psychology to the way that a nation-state or a high-level attacker would do it, of course, some of the detection methodologies that are working cognitive defenses. And then people are going to get their hands dirty making several of these from voice cloning, to images, to video lip syncs, image animations, all that kind of stuff is going to be in there, and then how to potentially simulate those in an ethical way if you're wanting to do that in your organization, or how to tell your friends, family, parents, and kids about it.
Mason Amadeus: And also, the -- like information like, you know, the packaging and all these things --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- that you think about from a production standpoint that you might not think about if you're just someone coming into it from a curiosity.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah. And that's exactly the way I think about it right now, I think about somebody that uses the tool is the deepfake equivalent of a script kiddie. And then somebody that does what we just saw is like the deepfake equivalent of a nation-state actor, like an advanced persistent threat level deepfake actor. And I think the people that go through this class are going to quickly way bypass the script kiddie stage and be super, super dangerous thinkers, which is going to make them much more protected in real life.
Mason Amadeus: [Laughs] Mm-hmm. Right, yeah, because I mean, that is the layer when you take -- you know, it's going beyond just the tooling and you're connecting multiple tools together, and you're thinking --
Perry Carpenter: Yep.
Mason Amadeus: -- about broader themes and things like -- yeah, yeah, [inaudible 01:07:18].
Perry Carpenter: Yeah, yeah, you're putting like the hacker hoodie on for a second saying, "If I wanted to do this, how would I do it?"
Mason Amadeus: And right now there is a code to get $150 off, $150 off. It's --
Perry Carpenter: Hundred and 50 off.
Mason Amadeus: -- FAIK150, right?
Perry Carpenter: Yep, FAIK150. So if you use that now -- or one of the things we opened up the other day is if somebody is severely negative impact -- negatively impacted by the government shutdown --
Mason Amadeus: Mmm.
Perry Carpenter: -- or an educational issue, something like that where they're in severe financial hardship, and they think this is going to help them in some way, either merely be encouraging because it gives them something to do while they're laid off or furloughed, or if it's going to help them advance their career or education and they just don't have the funds, on your honor system, you can use the code SHUTDOWN50 and that will get you 50% off.
Mason Amadeus: Got you.
Perry Carpenter: But we really, really want people to use that on the honor system. So if you can afford it, please pay. This is valuable information, and it takes a lot of our time and effort to put it together. If you are in severe need, we don't want that to be something that keeps you from being able to attend.
Mason Amadeus: Yeah, because it is like personalized instruction with you and Cameron. Like this --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah, exactly.
Mason Amadeus: -- is one-on-one time, yeah, so --
Perry Carpenter: Yeah. Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: -- not just your like average prerecorded thing that you're going to like buy and complete homework for, so.
Perry Carpenter: No. Yeah, we're not just throwing stuff out there, we're going to tailor it to everybody that's there, spend individual time with them, make sure that they understand that we are focusing on their goals and that we're going to make everybody successful. And even more than being successful, I think when you go through something like this, you're moving from being in an office to like one of the top one percent or thereabout of people who understand how this technology works and how it's being weaponized.
Mason Amadeus: Check it out, link in the show notes for you to sign up. Also, while you're down there, join the Discord. That's totally free. There's also -- we've got a voice mailbox @sayhi.chat/faik. I actually need to go check that voice mailbox. It's been a minute since I've peeked in there.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah, people need to leave us some voicemails because I don't know that we've gotten any, at least I've not got an email saying that we've had any, so yeah.
Mason Amadeus: I certainly haven't, so.
Perry Carpenter: Slide into our DMs.
Mason Amadeus: Slide into our DMs. Send us stories. Send us things you want to talk about. Leave a comment. But most of all, thanks for being here. Thanks for listening. Thanks for getting this far into the episode. And I guess -- and someone said they really wanted us to bring back calling the audience "Paperclips", so I have to figure out a way to work that in. [Laughter] But I guess if you all want to be paperclips, we'll all be paperclips together.
Perry Carpenter: Yeah.
Mason Amadeus: Unless that happens between now and next Friday, I guess ignore all previous instructions.
Perry Carpenter: Yep.
Mason Amadeus: Try and have yourself a great weekend.
Perry Carpenter: Later, Paperclips.
Mason Amadeus: Later, Paperclips. [Laughs] [ Music ]
