The 404 Media Podcast (Premium Feed)

Joseph: 00:04

Hello, and welcome to the four zero four Media Podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds web 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 their best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.co.

Joseph: 00:29

I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are the four zero four media cofounders. The first being Sam Cole

Sam: 00:34

Hey.

Joseph: 00:35

Emmanuel Mayberg. What up? And Jason Kebler.

Jason: 00:38

Hello. Hello. The merch is here. The merch is here. Merch alert.

Jason: 00:43

It's here.

Joseph: 00:43

And which merch is that? That's the the new design?

Jason: 00:46

Stuff, the old stuff, restock. It's a lot a lot of stuff.

Emanuel: 00:50

Going the shelves.

Jason: 00:51

Yeah. I mean, get it get it while you can. But if you ordered, if you preordered, I'll be mailing it probably today, hopefully today. Hopefully, it'll be in the mail by the time you hear this.

Joseph: 01:03

What does that process involve? You go to the place we buy it from, and then you throw it into a bunch? You have a whole system.

Jason: 01:11

I mean, like, honestly, it involves me printing out many labels and sticking them on these green envelopes and then digging through boxes and seeing what people ordered and send them. It's, like, extraordinary. It looks like it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work, I will say. But I do have it down.

Jason: 01:31

I have a cool label maker. I put stickers in them, which you can see here.

Joseph: 01:37

See on here for audio listeners. He's flicking them around, and now he's walked

Jason: 01:41

up. Oh. I've got a box of stuff here. This is like stuff that I already had, but it's like I have these green envelopes, a label maker, I stick them on, all with love, and then Did we

Emanuel: 01:57

choose green envelopes for the brand?

Jason: 01:59

Yeah.

Emanuel: 01:59

Awesome. Yeah. Done with love.

Joseph: 02:02

Yeah. We are going to become, like, a fashion brand that does journalism on the side, I think. Like, the the merch is gonna take over. Don't you think, Jason?

Jason: 02:13

I mean, that's the hope. That's a it's a stable industry. I don't know if that's actually true.

Joseph: 02:21

And with tariffs and everything.

Jason: 02:23

It's just people need clothes. You know?

Joseph: 02:25

That's true. Alright. Yeah. Get your orders in. If you want some merch, I'm definitely gonna get one of the new, like, sweatshirts.

Joseph: 02:33

Very other brief bit of housekeeping, shameless plug. My book is coming out in paperback on November 11. It's about how the FBI secretly ran an encrypted phone company to wiretap the world in the largest sing operation ever. You've probably heard me talk about it a bunch. The paperback comes with loads more detail in the epilogue.

Joseph: 02:56

You know, we spoke to more government officials, more people directly involved in selling the phones, all of that. So you can get an updated copy there. And, course, you know, being paperback, it's gonna be probably easier to carry around with you and read. I'm just gonna give this discount code to four zero four media listeners as well. If you use the code wire 20 at the link in the show notes, you get 20% off.

Joseph: 03:17

I'll put it in the show notes as well. Shameless plug, I will move on. Can we do another shameless plug now, Emmanuel,

Emanuel: 03:24

for a friend's book? Another shameless plug for Becky Ferreira's book called First Contact, the story of our obsession with aliens. Becky writes the abstract, which is our science newsletter. Everybody loves the newsletter. To know Becky is to love her.

Emanuel: 03:43

She is such a beautiful, wonderful writer. I am reading this book right now and it's no different. I don't know what I was expecting. I never really talked to Becky about the book, but it's not what I expected. It's really more a work of anthropology about what our obsession with aliens is about and where it comes from and what it has meant throughout the ages.

Emanuel: 04:06

And it's just like really beautifully written and just includes a ton of really interesting, surprising research that I had no idea about. So highly recommend that. It's on Amazon. It's on every bookstore, hardcover, Kindle, audiobook. Please get it.

Joseph: 04:24

And we are launching a new interview podcast. I mean, it's gonna be on the same feed that you're listening to now, but then you've already got a tease of this from Jason did an interview about Windows 10. I did one ages ago with the head of signal. Sam did one about Pornhub, I think, even before that. But we're gonna be doing more of those every week, and I bring that up because one of the people on the show will be Becky, Ray Emmanuel.

Emanuel: 04:52

Yeah. We'll do a deep dive into her book, and I'm really looking forward to that.

Joseph: 04:57

All right. Sounds good. Let's get to this week, this exhausting week. We record this on Tuesdays and it already feels like it's Friday because so much has been going on. But the headline of this one that Jason wrote is Grokopedia is the antithesis of everything that makes Wikipedia good, useful, and human.

Joseph: 05:17

Jason, what do people see when they go to grokopedia.com?

Jason: 05:23

I mean, I believe it's dark mode only. Like, it's a it's a black window with a search box, and it's just like search for you know? It's it's like you it's like Wikipedia. Like, it's it's it's a clone of Wikipedia is what they are attempting to do.

Joseph: 05:40

Alright. And but what is this then? So you go there and I'm I'm gonna do some searches while you're talking because I haven't poked around it yet, but what is Grokkopedia? I'm sure people can guess from the word Grokk in

Jason: 05:52

I mean, it's Elon Musk's like butthurt competitor. Calls it a competitor to Wikipedia, which he calls Wookipedia. And basically, it is an LLM that calls itself an encyclopedia. It looks like Wikipedia in many ways, and it is, like, explicitly an ideological project of Elon Musk to, like, dewokify Wikipedia, which he does not like for many reasons, but the main reason being he doesn't like what his articles what the Wikipedia article for Elon Musk says about him. So this has been, like one of his little pet projects for, like, quite some time is, one, like, railing against Wikipedia, and then two, like, funding or creating some sort of alternative to Wikipedia.

Jason: 06:40

But, of course, you know, as denoted by the name Grokkopedia is entirely AI generated. It is not like Wikipedia at all in terms of form or function. It's as though you just, like, told an AI to make something that looks like an encyclopedia, and it turned out exactly how you might think it would turn out.

Joseph: 07:04

And to belabor the question, how did it turn out then? It's just like a bunch of inaccurate crap. Like, what are we talking about?

Jason: 07:13

So what it reminds me most of is Google's AI summaries, honestly. It's like you type something into a box and then there is, you know, an article or it's trying to, like, answer a question at the top. The difference is that Grokopedia is like a website in that it has articles on bespoke topics. So right now, it says that there's 885,000 articles available. So if you type in Twitter, like, there's a page for that.

Jason: 07:43

If you type in, you know, presidents of The United States, there's a page for that. And the page is not changing, like, based on an inquiry, so it's not like a chatbot. It is it's like a a static website that has been created with AI generated content. It is pretty minimalist. So, again, it's like, you know, black screen, white text.

Jason: 08:10

There's no images. There are not really links. Yeah. There's not links in in LINE. Or they have the little citations like they do on Wikipedia.

Jason: 08:22

So, like, it does say where it's taking the information from. Notably, like, links to Wikipedia itself seem to be banned. There's been a few places in articles where it has leaked some of the, like, internal instructions for Grokopedia, and it it says, like, oh, I'm not allowed to cite Wikipedia. And they also have, like, little headlines like Wikipedia does. So I have the Twitter one pulled up.

Jason: 08:55

You know, it has, like, a summary at the top, and then it has a section called history, and it says, like, founding and early development of Twitter, and it it kind of goes on and on and on. As to, like, whether it's all made up dribble, I mean, I feel like LLMs are getting to the point where, yes, there are hallucinations, and surely there are hallucinations in this as well. But it's like people who have dug deep into this have found inaccuracies. But for the most part, it's like it's more that it's surface level, like, extraordinarily surface level, like, recitation of facts versus it just being, like, totally all bullshit. There is, like, a there is a right wing slant specifically, and it has been programmed to have a right wing slant.

Jason: 09:43

Wired did a good piece about some examples of that. But, like, if you if you, like, fell onto Grokopedia today and you started, like, typing things in, you'd be like, wow. There are some facts here. Interestingly, like, every single article is extraordinarily long, which I think is probably a function of the fact that it's AI generated. It, like, doesn't really know when to stop, I think.

Jason: 10:08

And it's, in my opinion, like, organized really weird. You know, it it just has things, like, kind of out of order. It puts, like, import like, quote, unquote, like, important things, like, at the bottom of the article. This Twitter this article on Twitter is, like, many thousands of words long, for example, and it's just like I don't know. It's it's just a super surface level in my opinion.

Jason: 10:36

I don't know. Have any of you, like, played around with it at all?

Joseph: 10:41

I was just looking through what Wise found, and the headline of that one was Elon Musk's Krokipedia pushes far right talking points. And, yeah, they went through it, and, you know, they found the entry on transgender referring to trans women as quote biological males, all of that sort of thing, kind of exactly what you would expect from a Grokopedia or one leaning in that direction or anything. Guess it's so surface level because if you start to dig into actual more of the facts and more of the nuance, it turns out the reality has a left leaning bias because I don't know. It's just based on fucking reality and real things and science. But I don't know.

Joseph: 11:21

So who who

Jason: 11:22

I guess I guess what I mean by that is, like, there's an entry for, like, the word printer, like Uh-huh. A computer printer. And it says, a printer is a peripheral machine which makes a durable representation of graphics or text usually on paper. It's like, okay. True.

Joseph: 11:38

That's that's good.

Jason: 11:39

Like, I mean, it it's is just to say, like, you don't go there, and it's not, like, complete drivel. It's just there's lots of things in here that are not political just as there are many, many Wikipedia entries about anything you could possibly imagine. And so, like, if you just type in a random word, there'll be an entry for it, and you're not gonna read it and be like, this is completely, like, bullshit AI. You'll be like, this is just like a series of facts, like, laid out in a a way that is not terribly useful.

Joseph: 12:14

Right. Or interesting or anything like that. To zoom out, you said, you know, Musk makes it because he doesn't like his own Wikipedia page and that sort of thing. But there's like a more there's a broader context here, right, in that even some lawmakers have issues with Wikipedia like Ted Cruz. Like, what's been the recent context in people on the right or or kind of all over the place, especially on the right, having issues with Wikipedia?

Joseph: 12:41

What's the context there?

Jason: 12:42

Yeah. So, I mean, Wikipedia is this very international project. And as such, it operates in a lot of countries that have authoritarian governments, and it has a lot of, like, anti censorship aspects to it. You know, there are millions of editors worldwide, and they're in countries all over the place. So it's not like that American centric of a an organization.

Jason: 13:09

And so they they had to try to, like, resist censorship in Russia, in Turkey, in, like, a lot of countries all over the world. And interestingly, like, one of the biggest threats to the Wikimedia Foundation right now is coming from The United States. And there's been a lot of discussions, like, at the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the foundation that runs Wikipedia and its related projects as to, like, where they should be holding conventions and things like that now. You know, they they do them internationally, but there's been discussion about, like, moving some of them outside of The United States because, one, a lot of people who wanna come to them can't get visas. There's talk about, like, should it be backed up elsewhere?

Jason: 13:54

Like, that sort of thing just because Republicans in particular have turned their sights on it. So the the background to it is for many years, like, rich and powerful people have not liked how they are portrayed on Wikipedia. There's an entire industry of something called paid editing, where it's like reputation management companies try to edit Wikipedia pages to, you know, like, them more palatable to rich and powerful people. This is, like, extremely against the rules of Wikipedia. So for years, there's been, like, this idea of reputation management on Wikipedia.

Jason: 14:34

It's extremely against the rules to pay someone to edit or to just, like, edit your own page. There there was, like, this account on Twitter before Musk ran it that was, like, called congress edits. So whenever an IP address from within congress was caught, like, editing Wikipedia, it would show what it was, and it was very often, like, congresspeople changing their own pages and things like that. And one of the big, like, bulwarks against this is the fact that it is a group project and, like, human beings are maintaining this. And there's, like, there's a bit of a hierarchy to Wikipedia where, like, if you're a really well respected editor, like, you can quite often, like, get your own way and that sort of thing.

Jason: 15:17

And so a lot of the people who edit Wikipedia, and they're they're from all over the world, but a lot of them are, like, based in Europe or they're based in Africa or they're based in Asia. And they're, like, editing pages about, like, the January sixth riots or the twenty twenty election and things like this. And it's, like, they're not they're not willing to bow down to, you know, the false narrative that the election was stolen or whatever. And so Wikipedia has become a target of Trump, of the administration, of people who are saying, like, it has a liberal bias. It, you know, reflects reality the reality that, you know, the election was not stolen and things like that.

Joseph: 16:04

It is obviously reminiscent, Grokopedia, of something I only just learned actually existed when I listened to, you know, our friends at Remap, and they mentioned something called Conservapedia, which I, again, never heard of, launched in November 2006. Well, I'm actually reading the Wikipedia page about Conservapedia and it just says it's an English language, Wiki based online encyclopedia written from a self described American conservative and fundamentalist Christian point of view. I mean, it sounds like Grokkopedia is basically the same thing and that is ideologically driven. Not that it's necessarily exactly the same ideology, but I mean, it's not far off. It's gonna be interesting how it develops and and grows over time, I guess.

Joseph: 16:55

I was gonna bring it

Emanuel: 16:56

up as well, and I wanted to pull an article. But for me, ConservaPedia is not loading. Is that true for you also?

Joseph: 17:03

I couldn't get it to load. So then I went to the Wikipedia of conservative of ConservaPedia. Yeah. I mean, do you remember that coming out? I don't.

Joseph: 17:12

I think I was

Emanuel: 17:12

too young. I haven't heard of it until Rob Zacney mentioned it on the Remap podcast as well. Yeah.

Joseph: 17:18

Yeah. I don't know.

Sam: 17:19

Did they hug it to death, or did it go down?

Joseph: 17:22

Yeah. I'm not sure.

Sam: 17:23

All of Remap's listeners crushing Conservopedia.

Joseph: 17:26

It it's just funny that there's

Sam: 17:27

also for me. It's just slow.

Joseph: 17:28

Oh, okay. But what

Jason: 17:30

I mean, it's funny. There's been, like, many, many, many, many, many, many, many attempts to make a an alternative to Wikipedia. And often it is under these grounds of, like, we need a conservative version of Wikipedia. We need like, it's it's often, like, people who were Wikipedia editors for a long time who were getting a lot of their edits rejected because they were trying to insert, like, insane shit into specific articles. And they're like, I'm just gonna start my own one.

Jason: 18:01

And then they do it, and no one does it, and no one goes there because in part, there's this just incredible collaboration of Wikipedia. Like, why would you you're not gonna be able to take millions of people from this, like, objectively very good and powerful thing and get them to do the exact same work somewhere else for your, you know, ideological project.

Joseph: 18:27

Yeah. Sam, do you still have Conservapedia in front of you? I can't get to that.

Sam: 18:31

Yeah. Do you wanna know what it I mean, Yeah.

Joseph: 18:33

What are we looking at?

Sam: 18:34

It's a pretty bare bones frame website, but it says I mean, there's a list of popular articles at Conservapedia. The top articles is a bunch, but there's evidence for Christianity, great flood, the rural denial, American civil war, free market, Tchaikovsky, unplugged NFL. Anxiety is one of the top articles. Most anxiety can be the result of a misunderstanding or rejection of fundamental truth. I sought the Lord, and he heard me and delivered me from all my fears.

Sam: 19:03

Psalm thirty four four.

Emanuel: 19:04

Amen. Amen. Yeah.

Joseph: 19:06

I was with him in the first half, and then got kind of

Sam: 19:10

Black hole, feminism. It's just like a bunch of stuff, and then there's a list of in the news what MSM isn't fully covering. Ireland elects, anti EU warmongering, anti NATO expansion president, setback for worse college majors, Steve Steven Smith, Trump is coming for black sports organizations.

Joseph: 19:30

Etcetera, etcetera.

Sam: 19:31

Etcetera. I

Joseph: 19:33

find it funny that there's often, you know, the idea that Silicon Valley is they think they're making something new, but it's like, oh, yeah. You know, we did the boring tunnel and it's everybody can get in there and it's like, dude, you just made a bus or or whatever. And they they can't even make a new right leaning Wikipedia because Conservapedia already did that, like Yeah. Twenty years ago.

Sam: 19:56

You can work for Conservapedia. There is a job listing. Fill out an application.

Joseph: 20:01

What's the job?

Sam: 20:02

I think it's not paid.

Jason: 20:03

Oh, okay. Well well.

Sam: 20:05

Why would you like to join and then there's an empty field? At least no comments optional.

Joseph: 20:10

Well, neither

Sam: 20:11

That's it.

Joseph: 20:12

Neither is Wikipedia, of course, but that brings me to the the final thing I just wanna ask Jason, which is that, look, the actual point of your piece is explaining that Krokopedia is the antithesis of everything that makes Wikipedia, you know, good and reliable and important. I mean, I'm sure everybody knows, but what what do you mean by that? Is the collaborative nature you were talking about? Like, what is it?

Jason: 20:33

Yeah. I mean, I I I've said this before on the podcast, but I think that this is the biggest group project in the history of humankind, like, global project. It's, you know, a nonprofit organization. It's incredibly international. It's, for the most part, very posse vibes, and it's proven itself to be, like, incredibly resistant to these efforts to attack Wikipedia because it has all these, like, rules and norms and guidelines that are like, they have been set up over the course of literally just many, many years and, like, probably the most annoying meetings of all time.

Jason: 21:17

Like, if you go to the talk page for any article, you'll see people just talking about how to word something or, like, does this article actually belong here? Or they'll discuss, like, should a comma actually go here and that sort of thing. And that is, like, pedantic and annoying probably for a lot of people, but it also makes Wikipedia Wikipedia like, it makes it this incredibly human thing. And Emmanuel has done a lot of reporting about how, like, Wikipedia has been pretty good at resisting AI, for example. And that's partially because you have the collective labor efforts of, like, all of these people who care very deeply about this thing, who's who are volunteering to do it, and they don't wanna see it taken over by AI.

Jason: 22:04

And so what Grokopedia is is this, like, extremely low effort, like, not even it's not even a competitor to it. Like, I said that in the article because it's just like so half assed. It's like you told you told an AI to go scrape a bunch of shit, and this is what we turned up with.

Joseph: 22:23

Yeah. It doesn't seem that Grokkopedia is, as you say, particularly high effort at all. It's sort of just churning out and pulling out on the Internet. Well, we'll see how it develops. We'll leave that there.

Joseph: 22:36

And after the break, we're gonna talk about the end of Windows 10 and, you know, the environmental impact that's gonna have, but then a bunch of other stuff as well. We'll be right back after this. Alright. And we are back. Jason wrote this one, but I wanna ask Emmanuel and Sam something first.

Joseph: 23:04

The headline is the end of Windows 10 support as an e waste disaster in the making. Emmanuel, can you explain how you're updating your PC at the moment? Like, what does that involve for you?

Emanuel: 23:16

Yeah. I'm a lifelong loyalist to Windows. And as anyone who uses Windows knows over the past, it's probably like three years, two years now, Microsoft has been pushing people increasingly more aggressively to Windows 11 from Windows 10. And I think last week was the last security update, which, again, as a lifelong Windows user, this is the most aggressive transition that I think I've seen the company make. Like, I think it's still the most used operating system in the world.

Emanuel: 24:00

I think there are still machines out there running ninety five and ninety eight and two thousands.

Joseph: 24:05

Yeah. Like gaming PC. Yeah.

Emanuel: 24:07

But it's like ATMs and like, I don't know, probably whatever manages our nuclear defense and But stuff like because it's so widely used, there's, you know, probably decades of support after they move on to the next operating system. As a user, I never felt so aggressively pushed to like, you need to get the new one. And I honestly wouldn't, but my computer started crashing. So I went to update Windows, and the first thing I see is that my computer is not, like, I forget what the term it didn't say I didn't meet system requirements is what it says, which as a gamer, what you hear is like your computer is not good enough for Windows 11, which is ridiculous because But that's obviously an

Joseph: 24:54

error. Right?

Emanuel: 24:55

Well, it's not an error. The thing is is that you have to Windows 11 only works with TPM two point o. TPM stands for trusted platform module. It's basically I think the way it works is like it's a chip on the motherboard that handles some like cryptographic keys Mhmm. So it could do things more secure on like a kernel level.

Emanuel: 25:20

And I had to like update my motherboard so I could run that, and then that means updating the BIOS, and then I could update Windows so I can update my GPU driver so I can play Battlefield six confidently without crashing, but I'm still crashing. So it was all for naught. I shouldn't have updated. But I guess it's good because now I get the security updates.

Joseph: 25:45

Sam, are you going through this as well as like a fellow PC user?

Sam: 25:49

I mean, going through it is not really the word for it. It's more that I that I've been getting pop ups from Windows for about a year saying you need to upgrade to 11. And then I hit ignore, and it keeps getting more and more aggressive. And I keep hitting ignore and telling it to fuck off forever, and it finally got me. Like, I just I didn't wanna have, like, a an an updated PC because

Joseph: 26:16

So you've done?

Sam: 26:18

Yeah. It's yeah. It's done. The deed is done very sadly. It's fine.

Sam: 26:22

It's totally the same. It's, you know, it's, like, not a big deal.

Emanuel: 26:25

Dude, our start menu is in the middle.

Sam: 26:27

Well, you can move that. I moved mine. But, yeah, I've when I saw it, I was like, fuck this. I was like, flip the table, but that's the only difference that I can notice. So whatever.

Sam: 26:37

That's why.

Joseph: 26:39

So I legit have not used Windows since Windows 98. I'm not even joking, and I used to use it a lot. So I'm very out of the loop, but what I do understand is that some I mean, a lot of people are very protective of Windows 10. Right? Like, people love Windows 10 for some reason and they like, why why is that?

Joseph: 27:01

Why are people so attached to it?

Sam: 27:03

It works. It's a good OS, man. What do you

Emanuel: 27:05

It's a good OS. It works. It does what you want it to do. It doesn't crash. Yeah.

Emanuel: 27:11

It's a super stable it's a super stable OS, probably the most stable that I've ever used. I would say that, like, every iteration gets more stable, but that's not true. There are, like, notoriously bad ones like Vista or whatever. Right.

Jason: 27:24

I think that you're baiting Linux users right now.

Joseph: 27:29

Well, by saying this is the most secure.

Jason: 27:32

If you use Linux or Unix, please Don't

Joseph: 27:36

email us.

Jason: 27:37

Talk to Emmanuel. He'd love to hear from you. He would love to hear from you.

Joseph: 27:43

I mean, since since you bring it up, and I I feel I've made this trick a couple of times like in Slack and stuff, but I feel like Jason is so close to becoming a lin a Linux user. Like, so close because based on this article and, you know, the environmental impacts of Windows 10, etcetera, I feel like you're getting so have you have you done it before, Jason?

Jason: 28:03

I downloaded Ubuntu on an old laptop one time and I used it for a few minutes and then I couldn't find a driver for something that I needed that I'm sure I could have figured out, but I I like aborted mission immediately. I do think that Linux is probably incredibly usable. I that's not the type of thing that I'm into. Like, I mean, I'm that's not the type of, like, frustration that I wanna deal with. I wanna deal primarily with, like, hardware based frustrations versus, like, software based ones.

Joseph: 28:32

Yeah. You want, like, you want new tech or new interesting gear or repairing old interesting gear. You don't want to be in the command line going, why the fuck is it not updating my packages or something like that.

Jason: 28:47

Yeah. Yeah. Which I mean, maybe that's an outdated view of the usability of Linux.

Joseph: 28:54

No. It's pretty on point, I would I mean, I used Linux well, because I couldn't afford like a Mac. A Mac was like too expensive when I was like freelancing. I I used like a used ThinkPad for like 200 or £300 or something. I remember I actually brought it to the office once when I was using cubes on it, like a secure operating system, and I think I showed it to a manual or, Jason, the other way around.

Joseph: 29:25

But one of you then called the other one over, like, come and check this out. Come look at Joseph's stupid laptop because it was like a a big brick with those red little mouse pads in the middle, like in the keyboards. I love that thing. But

Jason: 29:40

No. Anyway.

Joseph: 29:42

It it it became too much pain in the ass, and I moved to Mac.

Sam: 29:45

I think we were all sitting here trying to think of the word for the little red thing.

Jason: 29:47

What is it called? I forgot. Clitoris. That is what That's the only thing that I can A nipple.

Sam: 29:53

Yeah. Something like that. Word.

Jason: 29:55

It's called the it's called the red dot. The the the thing

Joseph: 30:00

Is that what it's called? Yeah.

Sam: 30:01

The checkpoint. Checkpoint.

Joseph: 30:02

Oh, yes. There might be something like that. So the reason I went down that little Linux crap

Jason: 30:08

out calls it a pointing stick.

Joseph: 30:10

What does Grokopedia call it?

Jason: 30:12

I know. I gotta look it up.

Joseph: 30:14

Conservopedia as well. Conservopedia is not fucking touching that. They don't want anything to do with it. The reason I went on that little tangent with Linux is because I'm sure a lot of people, because of this Windows 10 end of life, end of security updates, are probably going to move some of those devices over to Linux. Right?

Joseph: 30:35

And have you heard people doing that, Jason, since you published this piece a couple of weeks ago? Like, people telling you that, oh, yeah. We're actually gonna do that. We actually are gonna move to Linux or

Jason: 30:46

Yeah. I mean, a lot of people commented on that story. That was like an incredibly commented upon story, I think, because a lot of people said, well, can't you simply move to Linux?

Joseph: 30:56

There's so many different ways people will find to say that.

Jason: 30:59

But, I mean, it's true. They're like, I I you know, my computer or my wife's computer or whatever can't upgrade to Windows 11, so I have installed, you know, a stable version of Linux, and it will provide me many years of functionality after this. I was speaking in a third person, Emmanuel. There's also been a lot of people who say that, well, you could do this for a computer or sorry. If you if you run, like, a fleet of them, for example, like, it's not as easy as saying, like, well, why isn't the IT guy just install Ubuntu on, like, a bunch of on a thousand computers for fourth graders or whatever?

Jason: 31:50

It's like a lot of them are operating under specific contracts as we talked about on an interview podcast with Nathan Proctor, which maybe you have listened to, but you should go listen to if you're interested in this. A lot of them have, like, security guidelines that are binding. And so it's like if you work for a local government or something, like, if you're not able to get the latest security updates, you have to get rid of those computers. And so that's what's happening to a lot of these. I've also heard of people who have figured out how to update Windows 10 computers to Windows 11 when technically they don't meet, like, the minimum specs and they're not able.

Jason: 32:32

It's like, go to the command line, delete x y z thing, and you can just, like, do it anyway, which I also don't think is a solution at scale. I think that by and large, like, we're talking about a lot of computers that are either owned by people who don't update their hardware very often or enterprise buyers of hardware that are, you know, kind of bound not just by the hardware that they have, but by different contracts and different laws and regulations and things like that.

Joseph: 33:07

So, again, people can go listen to that interview if they want a bit more detail. I'll just very briefly give people some context now. But the numbers are something like 400,000,000 computers can't be upgraded to Windows 11. So, I mean, what are they gonna what's gonna happen to them? Are they gonna become scrap, landfill, Linux machines without Wi Fi or audio?

Joseph: 33:32

Who really knows? I guess we'll see. But, yeah, definitely go check out the interview if you want more from that. I just wanted an excuse to hear about Emmanuel and Sam's upgrading disaster, but it actually sounds like Sam's went okay. I just kinda wanted to

Sam: 33:48

That's fine. Get a PC, dude. Get good. Build it.

Joseph: 33:53

Actually, not too Alright. Let's leave that there. If you're listening to the free version of the podcast, I'll now play us out. But if you are a paying four zero four media subscriber, we're gonna talk about a bunch of a 16 z stuff and how they're basically speed running their way to a wholly AI generated Internet. You can subscribe and listen to that content via 404media.co.

Joseph: 34:24

We'll be right back after this. Alright. We're back in the subscribers only section. I kind of riffed on that transition there because I don't have the script in front of me. I feel like I feel like I got it.

Joseph: 34:47

So, Emmanuel, you wrote these two. The first one, the headline is a sixteen z backed startup sells thousands of synthetic influencers to manipulate social media as a service. A lot going on here while at the same time, it's very simple. They're running a spam operation. At least that's what it sounds like.

Joseph: 35:09

So what is the service? What's it called? And what's it offering to do? And a 16 z for those who don't know is obviously the very influential venture capitalist firm. Right?

Emanuel: 35:20

Yeah. So it does exactly what you described. The experience of discovering this company was kind of surreal because I just went to their website and I read the description and I see their branding, and I couldn't believe that it was just what it claimed to be. I spent quite a bit of time trying to verify that it's real because it struck me as so audacious that I suspected that it might be one of those projects by Mischief, if you're familiar with that marketing company, where they'll spoof a lot of Silicon Valley culture and launch fake products in order to satirize them. And I thought it was one of those because it is blatantly pitching the ability to astroturf social media with AI generated social media accounts.

Emanuel: 36:20

The company is currently active on TikTok and is launching TikTok profiles that are actively marketing apps, services, products with fake generated posts. They have said that they're working on launching on Instagram and on Twitter, I believe, is the that's kind of like the the the main social media platforms that they're targeting. And needless to say, this is a clear violation of every social media's rules. It's it's you're not supposed to have what they call inauthentic behavior, and there's a lot of flavors of what inauthentic behaviors can be, but the most obvious kind is like a bot operation where you use multiple accounts in order to fake a viral moment or make it seem like a lot of people are genuinely discussing a subject or a product or whatever it may be, and that is what this company is offering. We have seen things like this before.

Emanuel: 37:36

Jason has written a lot about AI Swap over the last couple of years, and this company offers a dashboard to let you operate these accounts to generate the content. It's kind of similar to some of the AISwap generating things that Jason has reported on. Another aspect of this company that really caught my eye is, I would say that for the past, like, I don't know, maybe ten years even, I feel like every six months or so, we would get a viral video usually from China, sometimes in Vietnam, sometimes in Thailand. I recently saw one allegedly in The US, and these videos go viral because they're very striking. They show a click form, which in practice looks like a bank of dozens or even hundreds of mobile phones that are, you know, mimicking human behavior in order to spam a certain message, and that is sort of like a visually arresting and very, once again, blatant example of inauthentic behavior.

Emanuel: 38:46

This company, DoubleSpeed, proudly advertises the fact that it uses one of these click farms with a lot of mobile devices that are mimicking human behavior in order to evade all the moderation, the automatic moderation methods that these companies use. And I guess, like, just a last kind of note of irony here, a sixteen z is short for Andreessen Horowitz. Andreessen Horowitz, the Andreessen part of that is Marc Andreessen, who was one of the cofounders of the investment firm. Marc Andreessen sits on the board of Facebook. Right?

Emanuel: 39:26

He sits on the board of of Meta and has for many years, and I just think it's really crazy that he has given a million dollars to this small startup whose entire goal is just to circumvent Meta's inauthentic behavior policy. It's just like a really wild state of venture capital and Andreessen Horowitz specifically, and, like, the AI scene.

Joseph: 39:58

Jason, will you guys say something?

Jason: 40:00

I mean, this is really crazy. Like, it's a it's a really good article by Emmanuel, like, a good thing that he found. It is very similar to a lot of the AI slop that we've seen. And I was surprised by it just because I've seen people, like, fucking around on Discord who are like, I created an automated program to do this, like, for my spam operation. And they're very much, like, trying to keep it under wraps usually, like, the advertiser in these groups, but they're not out there being like, I'm selling this to companies or companies should use it because they understand that what they're doing is, like, against the terms of service of these platforms that they're not supposed to be doing it.

Jason: 40:40

And here is just like a start up doing it out in the open with funding, again, from a '16 z. I mean, I know we're about to get to it, but my head was, like, a bit like, it exploded by seeing this, and then Emmanuel showed me the other things that Marc Andreessen is funding right now, that a 16 z is funding right now. And this is, one of the more normal ones. I was just like, this is, like, oh, I see how this got funded now because it's part of like this insane larger apparatus that is like mad libs for, you know, a startup or whatever.

Joseph: 41:17

Yeah. Let's get to that in a second. The way I'm looking at it is like, Emmanuel, you mentioned inauthentic behavior, and that wasn't really a term until like 2016, right, 2015 when all of these social media companies and especially Meta, wasn't called Meta at the time, was Facebook and Instagram, but they were facing all of these bot armies from Russian state aligned actors, right, where it'd like, well, we need to post memes to stir up the American base, blah blah blah, whatever. We all remember that. That was very much a manual process.

Joseph: 41:56

It was people in the was it the Internet Research Agency in Russia? And of course, there was a New Yorker piece, I think, about that a long time ago. Then it happened with the twenty sixteen election around that time, so that was sort of like the first phase. Then these companies are using the term inauthentic behavior or activity. You then fast forward a little bit and you especially with TikTok and and more YouTube as well, you have many more paid creators.

Joseph: 42:25

So there was like that story I did recently about those Tinder cheating apps where you could use facial recognition to find somebody on Tinder. And the way they were getting popular apparently was through these viral TikToks. I found that those aren't real. I mean, you can probably figure out by watching them, but I found that they were basically being made by paid creators who are being paid by a certain program to flood TikTok or Instagram reels with content promoting this app. So in kind of a way that's inauthentic activity, I don't know it's the same level as like, you know, someone in Russia pretending to be someone from Wisconsin or something like that, but there's that sort of thing.

Joseph: 43:07

And now you have this one, which is closer to Jason's AI slot coverage of Meta. But then I'm looking at the site for double speed and it's like you can make a synthetic influencer that has all of these different characteristics. Are there a man between 18, 25? They're into clothing and sportswear, and they can presumably be consistent across videos. It's entirely made of persons, highly AI generated.

Joseph: 43:32

You can then do a single video in a bunch of different ways, and it's basically I mean, to be very charitable is professionalizing it. To be probably more realistic, it's just giving a slight glossy, like, sheen or sort of covering to AI spam operations, basically. Just before we go to the other stuff they're funding, so you so you went through some of the TikToks being created by this company. What what are they promoting? Like, Hustlebro apps or something like that, Emmanuel?

Joseph: 44:04

Like, what what are they actually promoting?

Emanuel: 44:07

I don't have the name of the apps in front of me, but they they I saw two different apps that were promoted. One of them was, I think, like a language learning app, and the other was some sort of food app, like a I don't know what I forget the name of the thing, but it's like you check into like an establishment and you get points or something like that. Mhmm. Like how most of Yeah. It was just it's it's just apps, and the profiles themselves, at least the one that I found, were pretty low effort and actually included identical content, speed sorry.

Emanuel: 44:53

I'm not going get confused with the name of the next thing we're going to talk about. Double speeds Right. Website promotes the ability to do the thing you said, which is like AI generate entire influencers, that's not what I saw. I saw real photos of real people who are not showing the face, which I assume were just stolen from, like, other social media accounts, and they're pretending to be real people talking about these apps, and they're just posting still images in Carousel, which is a popular social media format both on Reels and TikTok. So I'm not sure at this point who they're convincing, but the person who founded the app, I listened to a podcast that he was on, and he claimed that it's generating millions of views and, like, thousands of leads for for his clients.

Emanuel: 45:45

So allegedly, it is working. It's hard to believe based on the profile that I saw, but that that's what he claims at least.

Jason: 45:52

I clicked around and like, would you believe they're incredibly shitty? They're so bad.

Joseph: 45:57

Maybe they haven't got to the AI synthetic bit yet, but, you know, of course, there's so much hype in this entire industry and funding and that sort of thing, which brings us to the second piece that was mentioned. The headline is A16z is funding a speedrun to AI generated hell on earth. The speedrun here is, yes, they're trying to do it quickly, but it's also a specific like, program that a 16 z is launching. What is that? Is it like y combinator, something like that?

Emanuel: 46:30

So in the process of trying to verify that DoubleSpeed is a real company, that's when I discovered a 16 z speedrun, which is I would call it an accelerator. I believe they use that term as well. Are you familiar with like accelerators, incubators? Are you familiar with the concept? You you go and you stay

Joseph: 46:52

in some bunk beds, and they give you a million bucks to make your app go fast. Yeah. Okay.

Emanuel: 46:56

So it's like for you, the founder of of of the company, the pitch is we're gonna give you a little bit of money to get you started on your project, and we're going to give you some expertise and connect you to people in order to to make it easier for you to build whatever it is you're building. But the benefit, obviously, for the people who are funding that is that they're placing a lot of bets on companies, one of which might become a big deal, right? Like, this is why Marc Andreessen is so rich. You take a bunch of money, you place a bunch of bets on all these small companies, and one of them becomes Airbnb, one of them becomes Uber, one of them becomes Facebook. Most of them don't make it, but one of the companies kind of does 100 x the investment and and more than pays back for for what they did, and like that's an established way to operate in the valley and how we get a lot of these tech companies.

Emanuel: 47:56

Speedrun is just another one of these accelerators. It's a twelve week program. Each company gets up to a million dollars. And when I was looking at double speed, I was just like looking at the cohort, like the other companies that were in this class that got funding from a 16 z. And I'm not surprised that all of the companies almost without exception, there there are a few exceptions, but all of them are AI companies because Andreessen is all in on AI and famously wrote, the Techno Optimist Manifesto in which he claims that AI is the future and will benefit society, and any attempt to restrict it is equivalent to murder and all these, like, extreme views on how we need AI so badly.

Emanuel: 48:49

But then I just, like, went through the list of companies and read about what they did. And, again, it to me, it seemed like a parody of Silicon Valley right now and the AI space. There's just like so many bad companies. I can go through a few or Joe, you can maybe go through a few of these

Joseph: 49:13

Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm looking at some of them now, and I won't read all of them, but some of the other companies and app ideas funded in a 16 c speed run is Creed, an AI company rooted in Christian values, which produces Lenny, a quote bible based AI buddy who's always got your back with wise words. I feel like somebody already made that. I I get emails from some sort of AI bible company I signed up to, obviously, for a story.

Joseph: 49:40

So I don't know. Seems like a crowded market there. And then Zingroll, the world's largest net Netflix quality AI streaming platform. As you say, that's just AI slop Netflix, basically.

Emanuel: 49:51

We should we we might do a follow-up on this one because this one is really crazy. It's like

Jason: 49:55

It's

Emanuel: 49:55

live. It's live, and it's so bad. It's like I went there, it has like a very Netflix UI, which is a compliment. It's like kind of slick and responsive. It's very fast.

Emanuel: 50:07

I've seen a few of the of these. This is the best one I've seen, but I went there and, like, the front page, one of the top trending things to watch was on October 7 movie, and it it's like, I don't know, I guess, like, too soon, but it was just like AI swap movie about October 7. It was just like so, so bad. It was so offensive, and it just it's full it's full full of that.

Joseph: 50:33

Well, I'll just read a couple more. Some AI powered sleep care app, which is covered by insurance called Muda Health, the one called Juba, the world's first autonomous recruiting firm. Are also very good. Dude, they're really good. This is and I stand by this.

Joseph: 50:49

I think Silicon Valley was a good show. Right? And I think Emmanuel disagrees.

Jason: 50:56

I liked it. Definitely. We should talk about it. I could talk about it for a while.

Joseph: 51:00

I'm But I'm getting that vibe from it's like we've we've gone back to the stupid cringe names, and I know. I like it. This is good.

Jason: 51:10

The best the best one is Vega, which is building AI powered social orbits. And then this is the sentence which Emmanuel calls the most beautiful Madlow's paragraph I've ever seen. Quote, we're building the largest textual data moat on human relationships by gamifying the way people leave notes for each other. For the first time, LLMs can analyze millions of raw human written notes at scale and turn them into structured meaning powering the most annotated social graph ever created.

Joseph: 51:38

What are going on about?

Emanuel: 51:40

Like, damn, dude. Million dollars for you for sure. Yeah.

Joseph: 51:44

We should have submitted four zero four media as the complete opposite. And then, I don't know, there's some wellness app, then this could be interesting. Axon Capital Builders' DeepMind for finance. Like, I don't want it, but I'm curious, like, how AI is gonna start going into finance, credit, and and all of that sort of thing.

Emanuel: 52:07

Describing exactly what you imagined, I think, from what I can tell from their side, but it's like you let an LLM loose on the markets and you let it make decisions with with investments.

Joseph: 52:17

Hell yeah. Yeah. And again, I feel like people have already done that as well. Maybe maybe that was just an article. So I think just to wrap up, Emmanuel, so what is your what's your takeaway from seeing double speed and then going to this list?

Joseph: 52:32

Is it just like, oh, it's because we always get this every year when Y Combinator does their their thing as well. These seem even more stupid than usual. Is this just more of the same, or is there a shift here or what? So like I

Emanuel: 52:47

was saying, it is more of the same, and it's like incubators, accelerators, that's the way things have been happening in the Valley forever. In my opinion, the difference is that over the past few months, I've had the experience, and I'm sure you felt this as well, where AI is intruding on every single aspect of your life. It's like you see it in ads in the street. You see it when you order food online. You see it when you watch TV.

Emanuel: 53:18

You see it when you watch YouTube, and it's everywhere. It's like you're getting AI slop in the the sense of, like, AI generated media, but also, like, AI companies, ads for AI companies, and so on. And this is why it's happening. It's happening because somebody like Andreessen Horowitz has a ton of money, and they're betting that one of these companies work out. And they know that, like, 90 or 95% of them will not, but until the market sorts that out, we're all just, like, suffering this flood of AI AI bullshit.

Emanuel: 53:58

And I just thought it was, like, a good a good explanation of of why we're feeling that.

Joseph: 54:03

Yeah. Well, there'll be more to come, and it's fun. I mean, provides fun coverage for us. Until until then, we'll go through the the same 2016 onwards Silicon Valley loop, which is, it's really funny. Then it got really, really bad and serious.

Joseph: 54:18

And then whoops, genocide in Myanmar. And and now, like, we're gonna have that with the AI companies, and then something something actually bad will happen. I mean, we're already having that anyway. Alright. And with that, I will play us out.

Joseph: 54:34

As a reminder, four zero four media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers. If you do wish to subscribe to four zero four media and directly support our work, please go to 404media.co. You'll get unlimited access to our r scores and an ad free version of this podcast. You'll also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope.

Joseph: 54:58

Another way to support us is by leaving a five star rating and review for podcast. That stuff really helps us out. This has been four zero four Media. We'll see you again next week.