The 404 Media Podcast (Premium Feed)

The most annoying thing in the world is when software is, like, cute. Microsoft made this change years ago where, like, if you have a crash, you're like, uh-oh, something bad happened. It's like, shut the fuck up. What's the error code? Because I'm gonna have to, like, plug it into Google.

Hello, and welcome to the four zero four Media Podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. Four zero four Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co, as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to the comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.co.

Also, remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel where you can watch all of our episodes. Subscribe at youtube.com/@404mediaco. I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are two of the four zero four Media cofounders. The first being Sam Cole.

Hello.

And the other being Emmanuel Mayberg.

Hello.

So Jason's not here. He's probably on a private jet somewhere. If you have read the website at the time of recording, you'll know what that's referring to. I won't spoil it. Like, go read that really, really good article if you want, and you should.

But otherwise, I'm sure you will will speak about it next week on the poll. I don't think I'm here next week, but Jason will fill us in there for sure. Sam, do you wanna take us through this one?

Yeah. So this first one, we have a set of stories that kinda go together. So the first one is by Joe. The Tokenpocalypse token know. Tokenpocalypse?

Token I I I even considers well, this was the hardest bit is the Tokenpocalypse.

Tokenpocalypse. Tokenpocalypse is here. Companies are scrambling to stop spending so much on AI. I feel like we have coined a few token related words. Did we coin token maxing, or was that an existing term?

Emmanuel, what do you think?

I believe the brain genius of the FEA companies actually came

up with that. Fine. Alright. So I will give it up.

This one, I thought I coined it. I thought I coined Tokenpocalypse, and then I think I googled it after the fact, and I found TechCrunch had used it in a headline like a few days before. Fuck. So alright. It's it's it's in the air.

Yeah.

Yeah. So yeah. So we're introducing some some new words here. We're Tokenmaxing. We're Tokenpocalypsing.

So do you wanna just define what we're what we're talking about when we're talking about the Tokenpocalypse?

Yeah. So in my definition, after coining this term days after TechCrunch and presumably some other people, the reason I kinda use this term is that something has really, really shifted in the AI industry where we've had companies rushing to adopt AI in all sorts of forms. Maybe that's

in

coding, maybe that's agentic AI in their businesses as well and whatever. And companies have sort of been doing this, maybe not regardless of the cost, but it's been presented to them as like cheap, right? Oh, well, this is cheaper than people. You do your subscription or whatever it is to an AI company every month, every year or whatever, maybe if you're enterprise, you get a big deal. But there's this shift happening where now there's much more emphasis on the cost of individual tokens, which, you know, is basically user usage metrics, right?

So now you'll have companies like GitHub being like, we're actually gonna charge you per token. And all of a sudden, companies are realizing, oh, AI actually costs us a lot of money. And like, we're burning through these tokens, which we'll talk about in a bit. So that's why I use that term, and I think that's why other people are using it as well. There's this big paradigm shift where, oh, this isn't actually just automatically saving us money.

We now have to figure out, shit, how much do how do we stop spending so much money on these tokens, basically.

Yeah. Which is I mean, it's rich because of the last few months. Jason wrote a story that, and we'll get into just, the ways that this has been working in the last few months. But Jason wrote a story a couple months ago about token maxing and how, like, that was the thing in, like, March and April to be bragging about how much token spend you have or, like, these leaderboards that we can get into in a bit. But before we do that, this story that you wrote involves audio that you obtained from a consulting company called Accenture.

And I think if you're in tech, you know what Accenture is. But I even when I was editing this story, was like, what are we even are we talking about Accenture's token spend or Accenture is consulting on token spend? So can you just walk us through, like, what how does Accenture come into play in this particular story? Like, what are they what's their place in the Token mania, I guess?

Yeah. I mean, who knows what Accenture does? You know?

Yeah. It's one of those.

I think that's an open question. Yeah. Obviously, they're a consulting giant and they've done stuff like work on content moderation for Facebook. Right? Like a significant amount was outsourced to Accenture back in the day.

And they will fulfill this role where they come into companies and be like, hey, we can help you optimize this task or we can cut off expenditure on this resource or whatever it is, right? And in this particular case, they are talking we're talking about two things. They are talking about token spend inside Accenture itself, but also with their clients, right? They clearly have visibility into what their clients are doing or what their clients are saying. In this audio, it doesn't mention any specific clients, and we can't play you the original audio for source protection reasons, but they do say like, well, we're seeing this sort of thing inside and outside with our clients as well.

But Accenture, I mean, we'll talk about more about this in a minute, it's funny how they position themselves sort of as the problem in the first place and the cure where they've told companies you need to get on AI. You need to do this as quickly as possible. And then it's like, oh, wait. All of these companies are spending a bunch of money on tokens, and maybe we can help with that.

Yeah. Weird how that works. Weird how consultants keep getting away with it. So, yeah, like you said, this is based on audio that you had obtained, and it was the audio is from an internal meeting. And so, you know, obviously, they're discussing things that they don't necessarily want the wider public to to hear or, you know, are not ready to discuss in public.

But there's one part that's pretty key to the conversation, and it's coming from Justice Kwok who is the agentic AI strategy lead at Accenture. That's a hell of a title. But in the audio, Justice says, we're seeing from some of the data internally, at least it's actually not our engineers that are driving the token consumption. It's a lot of the non engineers that are doing some of those behaviors that we're talking about in the meeting. So what are the behaviors?

Like, what are the non engineers that Justice is talking about actually spending tokens on?

Yeah. It's a funny piece of audio because it actually starts with a joke, and it's kind of hard to describe that in an article. Starts with very sarcastic comments. So Justice, who you just introduced, is preparing to present in this meeting, and then someone interrupts Stuart Henderson, who's a very senior person in Accenture, and he jokes that, oh, you have these slides, but I hope you didn't use AI to just convert a PDF into markdown and all of that sort of thing. And then Stuart says, I'm learning that's one of the big token chewers, turning PDFs into markdown.

Is that right? Which obviously, as I said, is a joke, but then leads to a pretty serious question. And then that's when justice replies with, yeah, that's actually the behavior that we've been seeing. So I found this fascinating for a few different reasons. The first, obviously, I love that term token chewing.

I mean, that is a consultant ass term, if I've ever heard one. Maybe Emmanuel or Jason have heard it when they looked into Tokenpocalypse or whatever, but I never heard that before. So I like that. But just the idea that it really undercuts that narrative that, oh, this explosive use of AI is all about supercharged 10x engineers or whatever using AI to produce mountains of code and then we can ship products faster or whatever. Here, it seems to be non technical employees do non technical tasks like converting a PDF into a PowerPoint.

And it's kind of like the he omit it meme that actually it just isn't all that sophisticated. And to be clear, this isn't to say that AI is not being used in Claude code or Codex or whatever to make a bunch of code, obviously it is as well, but we've entered this more mature stage of AI being in companies where the reality is setting in. It's like, oh, people are just using for a bunch of dumb fucking shit, basically. And hey, it might be a time saver, you know, converting PDF into a PowerPoint might save you thirty minutes, if not more, to spend so much of a perfectionist you are of your slides. But there's going to be a cost to that down the road that I think people are only just starting to realize.

Yeah, and then, I mean, Justice goes on and says more broadly that they're really seeing what they call a rapid escalation in AI token spend. I think they say soaring token spend as well. Like, maybe stuff isn't dire, but it's like to the point where obviously Accenture sees an opportunity here and they're having internal meetings and then we're hearing about it as well.

Yeah. It's just lazy. It's like, it's just the laziness of it all is wild. I mean, you can get AI to summarize your PDF for you, read it for you, now turn it into slides. It's like, what is your job actually?

Especially for Accenture, who a lot of people made this joke in the comments, like Accenture's whole thing, if you're being a bit mean to them or whatever, is making slides, basically. A bunch of consultants just make slides, and now apparently they're not even doing that. You know?

Yeah. Amazing. Incredible, incredibly lucrative career, I guess. So, yeah, not to over explain the joke at all, but it's just so we see this over and over. It's like the AI is kinda hollowing out our ability to do anything yourself.

It's like, can we not make a grocery list for ourselves anymore? Can't turn can't read a PDF anymore. Can't read anything anymore. Have to have it summarized. Have to have it turned into slides.

You slap those slides over to somebody else. Maybe they're using AI to read the slides, recording the meeting, summarizing for you later. I don't know. So, yeah, it's it's trying to put some value into an already fake job, I guess. So this, like we hinted at earlier, is part of a much wider trend that we're seeing around AI.

Couple months ago, we had, you know, token maxing. We had bragging about token use and spend, and now we're seeing companies scaling back. So just quickly, what are some of the companies that are actually talking about this outside of Accenture and talking about, you know, charging customers or scaling back employee using AI?

I mean, the first big change, which I think I mentioned was GitHub moving to a token model. And that happened, I think, at the start of June and we're recording this at the end of June. And that's when we've seen, I think, a bunch of media coverage and also for us, like a bunch of leaks from various companies where, oh, wow, that took no time at all to start impacting people where the change comes in June 1, and then halfway through the month and then towards the end of the month, we have all of these leaks, including some of which will be in an article that we'll publish like after this podcast is actually out. But sort of the biggest one, I think for me, is probably Uber, where they kept employees use of AI tools like Claude Code and Cursor as well. That came after the Uber CTO said the company had blown through its entire AI budget in just a matter of months.

Walmart as well, I think stopped people using tools recently. So a bunch of massive, massive companies are either like trying to find a way to save money, and we'll touch on that in next story, or they're just like pulling the brakes on it entirely. On the Tokenpocalypse and stuff, I think Emmanuel might be better at that. Like, what what do you think, Emmanuel, about how this sits in with that whole idea of everybody wants to use AI as much as possible?

I think we'll probably get into this a bit more definitely in the story that we're about to publish, but when we talk about the story in the next segment, I think it's just employees are like in a very contradictory they're getting very mixed messages. On the one hand, it's like AI is gonna change everything. You have to use it all the time. It's gonna make you a 100 times more efficient. And that is now overlapping with, but please don't bankrupt the company because we're spending way too much money on it.

And I'm trying to think about, like, if I've ever experienced myself such a corporate one eighty, and I'm guessing it may be. It's like if you imagine, like, one of those pivots to video where they're like, we need everything to be video. It's video all the time, and then you wake up one morning and they're like, we don't have the money to to shoot anything and get crews. But but even that is more simple than this. They're just like getting, like, completely conflicting messages.

I don't know how you're supposed to navigate that, to be honest.

Yeah. That's a good analogy, I think, or it's the closest I can think of is, you know, we're we're shift we're shifting strategy this way. Oh, wait. We can't actually fund that strategy, but we still expect you to, like, perform and do the work with these tools that you don't have, which is just lovely. And just one last thing on this story because I think it is so good.

A couple months ago, the Financial Times reported that Accenture started forcing people to use AI or risk missing out on promotions. So it's not just like we really want you to use this. It's if you don't use it, you will not grow in this company. You will not ever get a better paycheck, get a better role. You will be stuck where you're at.

Or I assume probably the implication is we're gonna let you go because you don't fit in here anymore. And at the time, a spokesperson told CNBC, our strategy is to be the reinvention partner of choice for our clients and to be the most client focused AI enabled great place to work. And then later in the the audio, Justice Quack says Accenture plans to formally launch a product called Token IQ, which I'm sure is like some kind of throttling mechanism for the token use for employees, but we don't know yet. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. Because the I mean, there's a bunch of other stuff in the audio that I didn't really get into because it does just, like, get probably a little bit too in the weeds and boring for listeners, but basically what they do go on to say is like, there's all of these different ways that we might be able to curb token spend, and that's like putting budgets in place, user controls, and that sort of thing. And I don't think it's as serious as obviously like the content of like chatbots where, you know, we have this big problem where there aren't guardrails and fucking chatbots are telling people to kill themselves and all of that sort of thing. Obviously, it is not as bad as that.

But there's an interesting parallel where chatbots didn't have the guardrails for that and it did all sorts of like horrible, potentially unexpected behavior. Here, AI tools have rolled out and there haven't been guardrails in place to stop companies spending millions of dollars or something on LLMs or, you know, burning through their tokens or whatever. So there's an interesting constant there where these tools are coming out and there might be a chat board, it might be a coding tool, but you don't have these guardrails, in place. And now, Accenture can position itself after telling its clients to adopt AI as quickly as possible. Well, we can help you deal with what Justice calls token economics.

I think at the start of the audio, they're introduced as token ops as well. So like this is a whole thing now where they're making sort of umbrella terms to talk about just this part of the AI industry. Like there are people now dedicated just to figuring out how do we not spend so much money on tokens and that sort of thing. Justice actually makes the point that the guardrails weren't there. He's making that's just not me making this point.

He's making that as well. And now we're in the position to be able to do that ourselves, which is incredibly convenient for a consulting giant, obviously.

Interesting how it works. Okay. Let's take a break, and then we'll come back and talk about a very related story, but I don't know, little bit even funnier, even more absurd. So, we'll be back. So we're back with another story about AI cost, AI spend at companies and how they're dealing with it.

Headline is companies like Joaquin Claude and Codex talk like cavemen to stop AI's soaring costs. Joe, is another story that you wrote. Just walk us through how this how you came across this, I guess, to to begin with.

Yeah. So Emmanuel and I are working on another story, which probably won't be in the show notes here, but we're gonna publish it just around the same time this goes out to all of our free listeners. If you're a paid subscriber, you're getting this beforehand. Please don't listen to it and then go and scoop us. That would be really annoying.

But we'll talk about that a little bit. So we're working on that story about the various ways that companies are actually trying to stop this. So whereas the Accenture audio was like, there's this issue and companies are spending too much on AI and we need to help them stop token spend. We looked at the ways that companies are actually doing that, and we'll talk about those in a bit. But a really, really interesting one I got was a leaked memo from a company that does sort of digital infrastructure and actually works on data centers now as well.

In this memo, they were talking about the various ways to curb token use, and one was use the quote unquote caveman plugin. And I never heard of this, and it was highlighted to me, And I went to look around, and yeah, it's there on on GitHub. That that's how I first come across it.

Yeah. Gotcha. So, yeah, you start looking into this. What does what does it actually do? We should have done this whole podcast in caveman speak, by the way.

I don't think I could do it.

But I I was already planning to do that for my behind the blog on Friday, but I did something equivalent last week. I I think I kinda need to give people the real behind the blog.

Yeah. This is becoming too experimental.

Because now is the time just phoning it in with like weird bits every week. We should have done that. Why would no. I was gonna do caveman voice, but I'm not gonna do

it It's like a meme on TikTok and Instagram. Have you seen this? It's like explain things in caveman.

Have you

seen this Emmanuel? Emmanuel's more online than no? It's like it's like your physical therapist explains to you, it's like, yes, protein. No, electrolytes. It's like electrolytes good?

It's like, it's a whole thing. It makes me feel like totally brain rotted. Anyway, so yeah, tell us tell us what it does and also you tried it. So tell us what your experience was with it.

Yeah. I mean, it really does that. It changes the output of Claude and Codex, and I think you can do Gemini and basically any sort of AI tool at this point, and it changes the output to not be the normal, verbose, flowery, over the top responses that you'll get from these LLMs and make it really, really to the point where like it is avoiding completely unnecessary grammar to communicate this point. And I mean, were examples, in the piece, but I think I think it was you, Sam, that sort of gave me this idea when I was writing it. But yeah, it's less the sort of voice of the AI chatbot, which is like, oh, you were right to push back.

I was wrong. I'm so sorry. Here's a big explanation. It just goes hulk smash, basically. So if you're asking it to do code, it just like, here's the code.

It doesn't give you this over the top explanation. If you're asking a question, it will just shoot out a response, which it believes is still accurate. And I guess in my tests, I would say it's still accurate. I haven't done it a whole bunch, but like the tool does work as advertised. I downloaded it, I integrated it with Claude Code, I asked it to look at some code I had previously worked on, it was actually a way to scrape contracts from DHS procurement databases and that sort of thing.

And I I wanted to check, like, if I ask it to look at this code that was previously written, is it going to give me like a really in-depth analysis or just tell me how it works? And it just it replied to something like, uses API, no scraping. I'm like, damn, that's true. That is right on point. Didn't need to provide any more information there.

So like, it does what it says, which is that it doesn't change your input. Obviously, you can still be as verbose as you want, but it changes it as the creator told me just into a terse tool. Like you're not having a fun conversation with this thing, which frankly, if we're going to have to live with AI chatbots for a bit longer, or if I worked in a company where it was forced upon me like Accenture or whatever, I personally wish much prefer engaging with it like it's a tool, not a conversation they have to have this fucking computer program every single day. So like, it seems like it does the job. Yeah.

Yeah. I've like, I've tried so I'm not, like, in a on a mission to make chat GBT useful for me, certainly. Most of time when I I'm like, oh, maybe it could do this. It doesn't do it well. So I was trying a while back to make it because I was like, maybe there is something in, if it only spoke like a computer, like, if it was actually just, like, returning tasks instead of, like, giving me all this, it's like, shut up.

Stop talking. So I basically told it. I was like, shut up. Stop talking to me. Like, you're a person.

You are a computer. Speak in computer syntax. Like, only speak in, like, the the necessary words and return the task. And it's really hard to make it do that. So I thought it was interesting that they created a plug in for this instead of just prompt injecting and like making it like you are a caveman.

Like, because I bet it would try to do like a a fucking character. Like, would do like, you know, Ugo Aga, like

Yeah. Yeah. It wouldn't work. A club and shit, like banging itself

on It would do a whole storyline. It'd be like, I'm the greatest K mans that existed. It's like, stop, shut up. Stop speaking.

Tangent, but I agree with you that the most annoying thing in the world is when software is like cute

Yes.

And tries to talk to you cute. Like, Microsoft made this change years ago where, like, if you have a crash, you're like, uh-oh, something bad happened. It's like, shut the

fuck up.

Shoot my screen. Shut up. The error code? What's the error code? Because I'm gonna have to, like, plug it into Google.

It's so annoying. And I also I've just had an experience that was like, I forget what I was calling, but it was like an AI, whatever interview thing. And it takes so much longer just because of, like, the pageantry of, like, trying to pretend like you're a person, and it's just like a person would actually be way more efficient than this. So just like cut to the chase.

It won't do it.

So I hate that stuff.

I hate it. I do think it's like this is like, I I start to feel really old and grumpy, but like we have strayed so far. Like when we started doing UI and graphical interfaces that spoke to you like a person, even just like the the copywriting on the error message like you said, the original sin. I think we shouldn't we never it should have been command line the whole way. We should have never we should have never strayed from that.

But who could have predicted that this is where we would be today is, like, trying to code using AI and making it talk like a caveman.

I I think just briefly on the point you made, Sam, that, you know, you you could just do a prompt, right, as you say, be like, hey, be a caveman, but there could be all sorts of side effects on that. I can't find the exact quote in front of me right now because the GitHub page is a little bit long, but the creator does mention there somewhere, like this is more effective than a prompt or something, which I think exactly goes to what you're talking about. Like, they've had to develop a I think it's called a skill, right, in Claude Code parlance, but like, they've had to make something that goes a little bit further than could you just shut the fuck up, please? And it apparently works. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. So we have some idea of who's using who might be using this thing. Who is actually using caveman Claude?

Yeah. So the memo I got was from a company called Legrand, which I'll be honest, I had not heard of before. I think when Jason edited this piece, was, I've not heard of this company. You need to define it. And yeah, as I said, they're they're electrical and digital infrastructure, and I found it quite funny that they have moved into the data center business and that sort of thing.

And they were the ones that have this internal memo that said, Hey, maybe you should use Caveman. When I spoke to Caveman's creator as well, he mentioned that he's heard it's being used by individual developers in NVIDIA, OpenAI, and GitHub, and then some others as well. I'll just stress, that doesn't mean there's like a company wide deployment of caveman or OpenAI or an Nvidia or something like that, but that's pretty interesting. Ordinarily, it would be like, well, the creator is saying that and, you know, maybe it's in his interest to just say the big companies are using or people at big companies are using this tool. But what was really, really interesting is that he flagged to me when you go through sort of the commit history of the tool, Shane Sweeney, who is the director of engineering at OpenAI, contributed code to this really, really early on when it launched and added functionality for Caveman to work with Codex, which is OpenAI's coding agent.

So at a minimum, Sweeney has written codes to work along with this tool as well. So I felt much more confident including the creator's assertion that, yeah, people inside big companies are using this. None of those companies have got back to me, GitHub, OpenAI or Nvidia, none of them got back to me. But I absolutely would not be surprised if more and more companies are using this or more individual developers are using this because something I should have said earlier, but it does work not just in the making the output more basic, but apparently it works with reducing token spend as well. So you can do a command in there, which is like caveman hyphen stats or something like that, and it'll come out with this is how many tokens we think you've saved.

So we estimated without Caveman, it was like 8.8 k or something, and then the token saved was like 5.8, around 65% saved. I would have to look a little bit more into the methodology to figure out, well, how exactly are you determining that, but putting those together, yeah, this could be really, really weirdly valuable to companies that are like, I'm burning through my token allocation or my budget or whatever. It And does make you think like, maybe we should have just made the software be a fucking piece of software in the first place rather than an AI companion. Obviously, I'm being facetious, like exactly what Emmanuel was saying, like all the cutesy ness of it. Now you have to install an independent tool and someone has to make an independent tool to actually get these sorts of code agents to where they want to be.

And speaking of agents, it's not just like integrations with ClawCode or Codex or whatever. I didn't try this, but you can download like a version for OpenCloor, which is the agentic AI, right? And you can even download an entire agent which does everything in caveman. So, like, not just the outputs, but apparently a more all encompassing approach to caveman as well. I haven't tried that one, but I imagine that one works as well.

Yeah. So you teased at the top. Emmanuel has a story coming. You and Emmanuel both have a story coming about companies other companies that are dealing with this entire problem that we've been talking about for the last thirty minutes. And I know what else do we have coming down the line?

Like, you you saw some stuff with Citi, maybe IBM. Like, what's what are we looking at coming up?

So I think we wanna save kind of our best nuggets of information here for the article, which will be published tomorrow. But there are a few things that I think are not going to make it into the story that I think are pretty funny and are a good example of what people are dealing with. That is just like examples of how companies are trying to limit the token spend, which is really just the amount of money that we're spending that these companies are spending on AI tools. The long and short of it is that access used to be unlimited, and now there is a limit. This I have experienced where it's like, oh, we used to have unlimited access to Getty.

You can use all the Getty images you want, and then it's like, you need to sign four forms and you only get like one image a week. And that's kind of like what is happening at these companies. And one of those companies is IBM, which has its own internal coding agent called Bob. And in order to use Bob, you need to use Bobcoins. And it's I saw a screenshot on Slack, and it's a bunch of IBM employees complaining that they're fresh out of Bobcoins.

And it's like, oh, no, my Bobcoins. I'm out of Bobcoins. How am I gonna finish this project? And I thought that it's just like such a funny dystopian snapshot of, like, what the push and then the pull from AI tools is is doing to to the average employee. I think, Joe, there was like a did you want to talk about the Citibank?

Yeah, I'll talk about the Citi one. So Citi, the, you know, banking conglomerate that I'm sure many people will know is that I've seen emails where Citi says, essentially, woah, woah, slow down. Please stop using so much AI. Obviously, I'm paraphrasing, you'll be able to see the actual quoted email in the piece. But they approach it in a couple of different ways.

The first is that they really, really encourage people, hey, please, please use the appropriate model for the task. And I think we're seeing this across a bunch of companies where users are defaulting to like the most recent and the most powerful and the most token hungry model for Claude or whatever, now it'll be OPUS 4.7 or 4.6 and then GPT 5.5, right, for OpenAI. And people are using like those models with reasoning as well, which is supposed to be, you know, the AI can really work through some problems and figure it out itself. They're using that for basic stuff, which I presume is stuff like making presentations, like we were talking about that sort thing. So they're encouraging, of course, I think pleading with employees, please stop using the powerful stuff for that.

And then in other cases, according to the emails I've seen, Citi has just cut off access to a bunch of the more powerful models as well. So it started with please don't, and now it's like, you can't use this unless you have like some very, very specific use case. I should say I went to Citi for comment about this and they said on backgrounds that we haven't actually closed off any access to models and we're not doing this. I then saw a screenshot where someone is unable to access the models. So I don't think that statement is fully accurate or maybe you need to read between the lines there.

But yeah, that piece will come out around about the time this podcast is out and I'll try and get it in the, show notes. But we got a bunch more detail from a bunch more companies about all of the different ways they're trying to curb, this AI use, essentially. Because, I mean, I think it's out of control for a lot of people, and I think you'll probably see that in, some of the stats in the story as well. Alright. Should we leave that there?

If you're listening to the free version of the podcast, I will now play us out. But if you are a paying four zero four Media subscriber, we're gonna talk about flowers that don't even exist. You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404media.co. We'll be right back after this. Alright.

And we are back in the subscribers only section. This is one that Emmanuel wrote. The headline is scammers sell seeds for exotic AI generated flowers that don't exist. So Emmanuel, what's the deal here? They are AI generated images for seeds, the flowers that don't even exist or in some places, flowers are real species, but the images are helping the sellers scam people or is it both?

Or you see what I'm getting at? When I edited this, I got a little bit tripped up.

Yeah. So there's two categories. So for example, there is a real flower or a variety of a sunflower called a teddy bear sunflower. And it's called the teddy bear flower because it has more petals and it's kind of roundish and it kind of just seems fluffier than your textbook flower that that that you would normally see under, like, the dictionary definition of a sunflower. And it looks cool.

I I like plants. It looks like a cool plant. But there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of listings for teddy bear sunflower seeds that are clearly AI generated, and these flowers in these images are huge. For some very strange reason, many of these images that are promoting these sunflower seeds always include an image of a grandma for scale. So it's like I did love twice as big as this little old lady and the, like, the petals are huge and, like, super fluffy and they're all these, like, exotic purple and blue colors, and and just like, obviously obviously fake.

But it's like a fake exaggerated version of a real of a real plant. And then you have, like, just a 100% fabricated. It looks like it came out of the jungle and Avatar flowers. Flowers that look like cat heads, flowers that look like butterflies. They are often advertised as Sam, I think you know plants better than me, but is it like hosta plants is what it's called?

I don't know. Hosta is like this, like, popular type of of plants. So a lot of them are advertised as hosta plants, they look nothing like that.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The big wides, like the kind of tie dye y ones. Yes.

They're not usually tie dye. They're supposed to be tie dye. They're green.

They're green. Yeah. But, like, green ones, the images, like, they are blue. They're red, red, white, and blue. They're in the shape of butterflies.

They're in they're just like these impossible variations, and people are actually buying these from from Etsy, from Amazon, from eBay, and also a bunch of specialty seed online stores. And and yeah, the very, very common scam.

You brought up people that are actually buying them. How do you know that? Are they like leaving reviews? Are they saying actually my seed did not actually grow into a big black and white butterfly? How do you know people are buying them?

So mostly what you see is that, like on Etsy, for example, you can see that the seller is active, you can see that they've actually made sales, and you see that there are like verified reviews from buyers. I suspect but can't prove that a lot of those are fake because all they say is like, great product, great seller, and like the message are identical and they're five stars. And that's hard to believe because there's also a bunch of one star reviews that say that the shipment didn't arrive, the seeds were dead, or the seeds were for a completely different plant. And that's like one way to know that people are actually buying these and getting scammed. Very usefully on eBay, when you have a product listing, in order to build trust and to show potential buyers that a seller is safe to do business with.

It will show you how many times they sold a particular product. And there is a type of seed for these impossibly colorful roses that I saw sold more than 37,000 times.

Wow.

So it's like extremely extremely popular. And then, you know, you can see other eBay listings where these Impossible Flowers sold a thousand here, a 100 there and so on.

Yeah. What's the risk here? Because it can vary, right? Some people may be like, oh, well, you bought some seeds and they weren't the flower that you wanted, which I guess sucks, but seeds aren't super expensive. Well, maybe these ones are, but like, what's the risk here?

Because it

could be

a little bit worse than that.

Yeah. Allow me a brief friendly rant. Sure. We love scientists. We love talking to scientists because they know a lot of things and are very rigorous by definition.

And sometimes that makes them difficult to talk about an issue. Uh-huh. I've reached out to so many botanists. I personally know botanists, and they kind of, like, don't really wanna talk about this, and I guess it's because they haven't looked at the seeds themselves. They don't know what they are.

They don't wanna go on the record saying anything about it. So it's been difficult and, like, the story was held up for a long time because of that. However, this isn't the only seed scam that is happening right now. The obvious risk, obviously, is you're just wasting your money. You're trying to buy something.

You're not getting what you want. You got scammed out of a few dollars. The bigger risk is, and I know this because this was a huge concern around the time of, these mysterious seed packet shipments. Do you guys remember that whole thing?

Yeah. Jason was obsessed with it.

Yeah. Jason wrote a really great story about it at motherboard. Basically, way it works is you would get a shipment of seeds randomly from some random Amazon seller. You wouldn't know why. And the reason why is the Amazon seller needed a record of shipping a customer something so they could write a fake review and show that they are real sellers so they can then go on and sell other fake products.

And seed just happened to be the cheapest thing that you can sell. And there were so many of these going around to so many people in the country that three different states issued warnings to to people to say not to plant them, and that's because you're very likely to introduce an invasive species to your local ecology, and that's not good. That can be actually pretty devastating. Like, the ramifications of an invasive plant could be really, really bad. And that's the same risk here, right?

It's like you think you're buying a sunflower seed, you're getting something completely different and potentially invasive, and you're planting in the ground and then potentially causing trouble for generations.

Yeah. And I mean, speaking of risks, obviously, the other story brings to mind is not just Jason's one about the seeds, but also Sam, you covered these AI generated mushroom foraging books, do you see like a parallel there as well? It's just AI seems to be all in the plant world.

Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I mean, it's yeah. I'm sure it's very easy to to create these images with AI because they're, like, loose and organic to begin with.

It's there's no, like you're not working against some kind of, like, uncanny valley thing because it's a plant. But yeah. I mean, obviously, the mushroom thing is, like, more high stakes, but I do wonder, it's like, what are we actually putting in the ground when we're planting these? Like, what are they actually selling people? Did Jason end up analyzing seeds?

Were the seeds dangerous, or were they just like

I'm not sure. I forget

if you bought some.

I don't think so.

Think remember. But, yeah, I mean, I would be interested to know, like, what what is actually getting planted when you're planting, like, one of these crazy psychedelic rainbow hostas. And I'm sure it's not that. It might not even be a regular ass hosta. It probably is like weeds or something or just like, you know, oregano.

You know, who knows what what what is being shipped to people? I don't know. Maybe we should buy some and plant some and and create an ecological disaster. Could

be Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Just briefly, Emmanuel, what did Etsy and eBay say? Did they take down their listings?

Did they give you a statement? Like, what what was the response from any of the platforms?

Etsy and Amazon did not respond, which is curious because I know they are doing something about this. Like, there are many, many stores that you can currently see on their website that sell this stuff, but they're also actively removing stuff. So they know this is happening. They know it's against their rules. They don't want to see this, but they also don't want to comment on it.

Same story with eBay, but eBay did respond and, you know, the usual, they're they're they're trying to get a handle on it. It's not allowed, yada yada. The thing that I thought was interesting is that they appear to draw the line not at advertising products with AI images, but the image not matching what is being sold. So in theory, there's nothing wrong with, like, selling seeds for roses with AI generated images of roses. They just have to be, like, comparable or representative of what people actually get, which I guess, I don't know, like, aware when you're looking at eBay, that it's not like a total ban on AI generated images of products.

Yeah. That's actually a really interesting point where they're actually okay with that. It just it crosses some sort of line at some point, and that line might be a little bit fuzzy. Alright. We'll leave that there, and I will play us out.

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