The 404 Media Podcast (Premium Feed)

Joseph: 00:10

Hello. And welcome to the latest what do we call it? Subscribers' comment show at 404 Media. You are listening to this because you are a paying 4 zero four media subscriber, where we go over your best comments. It's that thing they say at the beginning of the script of every single free podcast, but we're actually doing it now.

Joseph: 00:31

And we've gone through, and there's, you know, a ton of really insightful comments and interesting questions from all of you on the site. So we're just gonna run through a bunch and, riff off them. I'm gonna start with this one, from Matthew Nakama, the location data firm offers to help cops track targets via doctor visits. This is a piece I published recently. And basically, they're asking, has anyone actually done research on which apps are selling location data?

Joseph: 01:05

And they say, back in 2018, they actually installed Android app that informs them every time, something query location. And he quickly noticed that the AAA and New Jersey transit apps periodically queried location when they weren't in use, but I couldn't say what they were doing with the data or what was being sold. Great question. The answer is yes, but it's quite hard. So I did this piece back at Motherboard in around 2018, actually, finally the same year that you started looking at your own apps.

Joseph: 01:38

And I was able to figure out which apps were providing data to a supply chain that ended up with, potentially US military contractors, you know, including a Muslim prayer app, that sort of thing. The long and short of it is is that was that a Australian government report published what is called the API endpoint. This is basically the domain that the apps communicate with to send location data. It was like x mode dot io or something. So it's kind of obvious, but you need to let confirmation.

Joseph: 02:13

Then you take that, and either you go and manually download apps, and you insert the traffic, you do what we call an attacker in the middle attack. You then see if the app is sending any data to that domain. You can then set up, well, sometimes that data is encrypted, so you have to mess around the certificates. So then you can actually intercept that encrypted data. And in my case, I was able to see, oh, wow.

Joseph: 02:43

That is my literal, latitude and longitude being sent to the x mode domain. And that's how I verified, a bunch of apps for doing that. That's very time intensive, obviously. You can also use services, you know, there's one called Corellium. Right?

Joseph: 03:02

And that allows you to, like, sort of virtualize it. There's another one I have access to from, I think, the antivirus company, Avast. Right? And you can go in and you it searches APKs all at once for you. So you just type in that API endpoint.

Joseph: 03:18

It'll show you show you all the apps that use that endpoint. So you can do it at scale. That all sounds really great. That all sounds really interesting. I've done that.

Joseph: 03:26

Other people have done that. You need to know that endpoint. And, also, you just need to know what companies are even doing interesting stuff with location data. So it's almost like a chicken and egg problem. Like, you you you're not exactly sure where you always, start, but I'm very interested in doing more on that.

Joseph: 03:43

It's just it takes a long time. You need resources and, honestly, a little bit of luck as well. You know?

Jason: 03:51

Isn't some of the, like, bid stream data, the the advertising data not necessarily pulling from, like, specific GPS, location permissions that you give apps? Like, I don't quite understand how that one works, but it it seemed to me like even if you have location services off, the real time bidding system sort of allows for for location tracking somehow?

Joseph: 04:20

Yeah. I think it's a bit of both. And I'll be honest, and I think this is, sort of our understanding is, like, we we have, like, a lot of understanding about the SDK stuff, like the stuff in apps, but when it does come to real time bidding, it's just a lot harder to understand because it's so much less tangible. But sometimes those ads are put into apps. And if those apps have location settings enabled, then they can get that way.

Joseph: 04:44

I think it can also, if it's just a banner ad, right, or something like that, you can at least get IP information, which can still be very revealing. Right? So you can collect information, that way. That being said, for me to, like, go and look at, like, oh, what ads are transferring location data? It gets even harder because there's all this black box process behind it, where all these companies are bidding and you don't know exactly what's going on.

Joseph: 05:12

If anyone is listening who works in advertising industry and basically has more documents about RTB, real time bidding, and how it's used by surveillance. Please, I'd be very interested, seeing those. Alright. This is one I put in the document, but I think it's more for, Jason or Sam. But it was on the podcast, BuzzFeed's AI as a a disaster.

Joseph: 05:38

But in that, I think we're talking about book publishing and this deal that Sam wrote about HarperCollins, all that, where publishers were, like, doing deals to sell the author's work. And, Anthony wrote in, and they basically were talking about this price that we quoted of around $2,000, $2,500. And they say, I suspect that the trend of slurping up books into Gen2 AI will put downward pressure on royalty payments. Who needs to buy these books if they can just query the LLM, or if the publisher can otherwise continually generate derivative articles and books. If that happens, the net effect will be to turn a lifelong royalty payment with opportunity for growth into a one time payment.

Joseph: 06:24

Sam, what what what do you think of that as someone who's covered the AI deals and also as somebody who wrote a book?

Sam: 06:32

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's pretty accurate. I think people generally like, outside of publishing and if you haven't published a book, people people kind of have this idea about royalties as, like, something that you get a check, like, once a month or something. And it's like, oh my god.

Sam: 06:50

Royalties forever. It's not the case, like, any in any industry that I can think of. It's, like, people who write and work on shows don't get real just like this for movies unless you're like a big actor and you're like your your face is worth something. But, yeah, I mean, it's like the royalties thing is not really it's not real money for most people. It's like you get the advance, you have to make back the advance in sales before you start getting royalties, and, usually, that's really hard to do.

Sam: 07:20

So, yeah, I do think it's like like the there was a comment in that or that someone had given me when I was writing that MIT story that was basically, like, you know, this is actually a systemic issue where, these LLMs and training on books is, like, kicking the legs out from underneath of, whole expertises and industries because, you know, it's like that's someone's life work that you're churning into AI fodder. Is it is it 2 is $2,000 worth it? Like, we talked about that on that pod. It's like, is 2 grand worth it? I don't know.

Sam: 07:59

Like, I for a lot of people, they might just need 2 grand. For a lot of people, they might be like, no. Fuck you. But, yeah. Like, Anthony goes on to say there's, like, no upside to authors right now and a lot of downsides, which I would agree with.

Sam: 08:13

I I don't really think that having your book cited by Chat GPT is an upside that was worth having it ingest your life's work like that.

Jason: 08:25

I would like to bring up my favorite podcast that none of you listen to, but you should all listen to called the World of DOS, which is world of, I don't data as a service, I believe. It is a podcast that is hosted by the CEO of a an anti what what is the what is the company? Oh my god.

Joseph: 08:49

Say SafeGraph?

Jason: 08:50

Yeah. SafeGraph. Can can you tell me what SafeGraph is again? I I always forget.

Joseph: 08:54

SafeGraph is was a data broker. We found it was selling location data related to abortion clinics. They've kinda stopped that now. And then they sell place of interest data, which is just very accurate map data. Like, oh, hey, there's a hospital here.

Joseph: 09:09

And then intelligence agencies or of a client or private companies can ingest that. But as you always send us clips from that podcast, he's very, he's very much in the tech space much more broadly. Right?

Jason: 09:23

Yeah. So it's the CEO of SafeGraph, and he has on other CEOs in tech. And very often, he has on other CEOs from data broker companies, and this is why I like listening to it because it's, like, fully mask off CEOs talking to each other in a way that they never talk to journalists and never would talk to journalists. And they recently, like, this week had, the CEO of Life 360 on, which is a essentially, it's like spyware that you install on your child's phone to track what they're doing. And they discuss this idea that you should get paid for your data, which is kinda similar to to getting paid for, like, your book.

Jason: 10:10

And the CEO of Life 360 is what? Is, like, people think that they should be paid, like, 20¢ a year because that's what their data is worth. And I think that that is kind of how these companies are looking at data that they're ingesting to LLMs. They're like, your book is worth we need your book, but your book is also worthless to us. We're not willing to pay, like, actual money for it, because they're saying, like, only if they're able to get huge amounts of data is it worthwhile to them.

Jason: 10:45

So in aggregate, this data is very worthwhile, and and it's, you know, fueling these companies that are worth 1,000,000,000 of dollars. But any individual book or article or image, they say is essentially worthless to them. And that that's very similar to how the, like, you shouldn't worry about, you know, your privacy data being scooped up because, actually, it's, like, worthless to us unless we have everyone's data. And I think that they are trying to have this narrative where it's, like, driving down the prices that they're willing to pay because they'll say, like, oh, if we chain our our LLM on Sam's book only, it's, like, a pretty worthless LLM. Wow.

Jason: 11:27

To be clear, I super disagree with this take, but, like, that is how that is how, like, the CEOs

Sam: 11:32

LLM. Yeah.

Jason: 11:34

Yeah. Yeah. But that's, like, how CEOs in this space think. They're like, oh, your your data is worthless. Less.

Jason: 11:40

Like, they they are really trying to drive down what each individual person thinks their their data is worth, and then they're able to, like, acquire in bulk on the cheap, more or less.

Joseph: 11:53

Yeah. To to a book author, it's it is a culmination of all of your years decades of expertise and research and efforts and intellectual property. And to one of these companies, it is a singular data point, which may or may not provide value by itself. But, you know, they're just trying to extract that. Right?

Joseph: 12:18

Sam, I think this one is yours, the moderator's one, if you wanna read this.

Sam: 12:22

Yeah. I can set that up. So this is a reply to a story with the headline, moderators across social media struggle to contain celebrations of UnitedHealthcare CEO's assassination. It's just like a roundup of, like, what, what's going on online, the big reaction that we saw, to the UnitedHealthcare CEO's, killing last week. Was that last week?

Sam: 12:45

Oh my god.

Emanuel: 12:47

There's other night.

Sam: 12:47

It feels real real

Joseph: 12:48

time I call on you.

Sam: 12:50

I don't like it. Rotators. But yeah. So, Nick Miller is pointing out a quote that I got from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield because I reached out to them for comment about their change. They had walked back a policy for anesthesia where they were going to start charging more or start charging basically, like, overtime in anesthesia.

Sam: 13:12

So, like, if your surgery went over the predicted, like, estimated amount of time that the doctor said it would, you would start getting charged out of pocket, like, it wouldn't be covered, which is crazy. But their response to me or they had said something about they walked it back because of widespread info widespread misinformation online. And I was like, well, what do you what's who's being misinformed about what? Like, what are we talking about when you send this information? And they, they didn't reply to that that, question specifically.

Sam: 13:50

They gave, like, a PR response, which was funny. And then Nick Miller said in the comments, I saw some well, actually, as we was talking about, people who are, like, coming to the defense, I guess, of the CEO or, like, finger wagging at people who were celebrating his death. I saw someone actually on social media arguing that anesthesiologists are overpaid and overcharging insurance companies. The people in the replies were not having it. US health insurance companies are about as close as you can get to a universally despised institution, and yet there's still no shortage of very serious people trying to defend them.

Sam: 14:28

I haven't seen, like, like, anyone saying, like I haven't seen what he's talking about where people are saying the anesthesiologist are overpaid and overcharged or overcharging insurance companies, but, like, that is a crazy take. I want those people paid a lot of money. That's a really hard job. Like, I recently had to go under anesthesia and, like, that's the last guy you see before it goes black, and you want that guy to be doing a good job. And, like, they take care of you after.

Sam: 14:56

They basically make sure you don't die while the surgery is while some gory shit is happening to your body. But, yeah, that that comment and just in general, I think people should go to that comment section and go to the comment sections on our site of all these stories about the UnitedHealthcare situation because they are very active. People have a lot of opinions on our comment section about all of this. So, yeah, if you're listening to this, you're a subscriber, so you have comment capabilities. You should get in there, because things are popping.

Jason: 15:30

There's been a lot of, like, Well, Actually articles out there primarily from, like, The Atlantic and The New York Times that are trying to, like, fact check yeah. Like, fact check, people's broad feeling, like, understandable broad feeling that the US health care system is broken, and then there's, like, lots of charts and graphs going around being like, well, if you adjust for this and you adjust for that, it's actually not the health care system's fault or, like, actually, health insurance companies have very small profit margins, things like that. We're certainly not gonna, like, debunk them on this podcast, but I find that that reflex to be really annoying. I don't know.

Sam: 16:15

Yeah. It became like a like a discussion about the discussion, which is my least favorite thing that happens on the Internet. It's like we're talking about a reaction to the reaction to the reaction. It's like, okay.

Joseph: 16:25

Like Can we just talk about health care?

Sam: 16:27

Let's talk about the actual the actual issue and not, like, people's feelings about it in papers of record. Yeah.

Joseph: 16:34

You know? This is this is more of a comment than the question, whether all comments were you going on about. This is one from Nathan Munn on the post we did about why the work still matters. Because in the wake of the Trump win of the US election, as we said, like, we had some people unsubscribing because, can't remember exactly what it was, but you know, depressing and that sort of thing. And, you know, there's a sentiment that some people wanna turn off and absolutely think that will be the case.

Joseph: 17:08

But Nathan writes, I've always liked and respects your guys' work and approach, but this post a 100 percent convinced me to resubscribe. In terms of bang for your buck, 404 delivers more real world positive impact from reporting than any of our other I can think of. I think when we most strongly feel the need to tune out, as I certainly do these days, is when we actually need to pay more attention. It's no time to back away from reality when the stakes are so high. Absolutely take breaks, self care, etcetera.

Joseph: 17:35

But keeping ourselves out of an authoritarian nightmare will take patience, community, and good information. Proud to support. Yeah. Thank you, Nathan. And I do agree the bang for your buck's pretty good because we.

Joseph: 17:48

And, you know, that's it. We don't need to glorify that too much. I think this is you, Emmanuel, Pokemon.

Emanuel: 17:57

Yeah. So this is a reply, to a story with the headline Pokemon Go players have unwittingly trained AI to navigate the world. That story was about what Niantic, the company that develops Pokemon GO, calls a large geospatial model, which is using all the data generated by the game to create this AI model they will be able to navigate the physical world and could be used for, AR and robotics and other things that may or may not be scary. The company, would not tell us how it intends to use it and if it's gonna have any limitations at all, including for military use. And, Stephen Smith commented, who would unwillingly contribute to a modern day YouTube, Reddit, Stack Overflow, or Twitter knowing that they are just feeding the robots that will one day replace them.

Emanuel: 18:53

And the next generation of tech entrepreneurs will face an audience completely unwilling to give them any data at all because they have shown that at the slightest incentives, they will wrap them out for money. And I just never thought about this question from the perspective of an average Internet user as opposed to, like, an artist sharing their work or obviously a journalist posting articles to to the Internet. So for me, the transaction of posting is very clear right now. I write articles. I post them to our website.

Emanuel: 19:35

We get paid by our audience to do that, and I am aware that doing so could result in an AI model training on my articles. But I have done the math, and, obviously, it's worth it for me. Like, we make a living doing this. I like doing this. I realized that that is a risk, but it's worth it for me because that's a transaction.

Emanuel: 19:59

But I was wondering if you guys have thought about whether this this this, like, just makes you not wanna post stuff online and comment and tweet. I've already felt that way, like, before we learned more about scraping an AI training and all that. I just no longer wish to engage online in that way, But I thought this was a really good point, and I'm I'm I'm wondering if if this makes people wanna post less and if if you guys wanna post less. Like, I certainly think as I don't know. There's something that feels like you're getting robbed, and we've definitely seen that sentiment on Reddit where a lot of the comments are, like, very, very useful.

Emanuel: 20:49

And I just I just worry that, like, you know, I follow the plumbing Reddit and find it very useful. And there's just plumbers here sharing, like, their, years of training with anyone who cares to to ask them any question. Any idea of, like, a plumber no longer wanting to do that because it's gonna train some, like, plumbing AI assistant is, like, I don't know, pretty scary to me as a lurker and someone who enjoys the random post of random people on the Internet that are not getting paid in any way like we are. What do you guys have you have you considered this? Have you thought about not posting for this reason?

Jason: 21:29

Well, these companies are banking on the idea that people aren't going to care. Like, that is the thesis of Reddit selling this this info, like, you know, all of these companies that are allowing their information to not their information, but their users' information to be trained upon. It's like they are banking on no one giving a shit, more or less. And I don't know if the average person actually cares or if it's, like, a loud minority of people who care, who are, like, conscious of this sort of thing. But I almost I almost think that it it it might like, I worry more about the output of the robots versus the, fact that they are being trained.

Jason: 22:13

And what I mean by that is, like, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, all of these places are getting spammed with AI generated content. Like, that is happening. That's what we write about all the time. And if I'm a plumber who is spending a bunch of time responding to questions on the plumbing subreddit, I, like, I get something out of that where I feel like I'm helping the community. People are reading it.

Jason: 22:38

I'm having a a conversation back and forth. Maybe it, like, makes me feel good. Whereas if Reddit just wants you to talk to a chatbot trained on the plumbing subreddit.

Emanuel: 22:50

Which it does, by the way. They are

Jason: 22:51

bolding out. That's not hypothetical. Yeah. It's like Reddit is, like, running an end around its users, first of all. Like, they are trying to diminish the one advantage that Reddit has, which is are these hyper specific communities where people talk to each other.

Jason: 23:10

And then also if I'm the plumber and I comment or leave a post and there's, like, thousands of AI generated comments all around it, it's like, why would I continue to participate in that community?

Emanuel: 23:23

Can I actually I I wanna get into, we talk about comments, but I included an email in here that I wanna talk about as well, and I wanna talk about it now because it gets at the same issue from a different angle? So this was a reply I got via email, in response to a story with the headline, YouTube enhances, in quotation marks, comments section with AI generated nonsense. And this is mostly based on a limited rollout of, this feature that YouTube creators now have access to. This is from Lazy Game Reviews, which is like a big YouTube channel I've followed for years. He makes really good content if you guys wanna check it out.

Emanuel: 24:04

And I talked to him for this story as well. But, basically, when, sometimes when you're in Gmail and you reply to an email, it gives you these three boxes to instantly reply to someone, and I've honestly used that because sometimes the reply is just like, thank you. So

Joseph: 24:21

I use it when it's really funny. I don't have to use this as a And

Emanuel: 24:24

sometimes I'll do that. Yeah. So, like, I feel like I've gotten several emails from Sam where the reply was, like, a screenshot of the 3 options.

Sam: 24:30

It's like, thanks. Good to know. And then, like like, what you're sending me is, like, hate mail.

Emanuel: 24:34

Yeah. So it's like YouTube has had that for YouTubers to respond to respond to comments on their videos for years now, but now what they're doing is they're training an AI model on your replies and writing out long involved replies to comments for YouTubers. And obviously, like, they're hilariously wrong and and silly, and that's what the story is about. But, I got this email from, Mark Slutsky who noted that many years ago let me just look up the exact year. I think 2014.

Emanuel: 25:13

Yeah. In 2014, he wrote this story for BuzzFeed about the comment section on YouTube videos and how personal and touching they can be. So I don't know. It's like someone's favorite song and, a hundred comments deep. Somebody writes, like, this long comment about how important this song is to them, and, you know, it helped them through this, like, tough moment in their life.

Emanuel: 25:44

And he was just saying that having AI content flood the common sections on YouTube will make that kind of online archaeology useless or impossible soon. And I think that's really true and really sad for me as someone who never commented a bunch and now on principle, I don't wanna do it. But I am a huge lurker, and while we've spent, I think, many years online talking about how toxic and bad comment sections are, which certainly that is true. Like, we've all published online. We've seen people comment on stories, like, many, many bad comments, especially in the in the in the in YouTube videos.

Emanuel: 26:32

But also there's, like, a lot of value there. Right? It's just like a lot of what we do, a lot of our reporting is just, like, diving into, like, public discussions on Reddit, on YouTube, on whatever. And, like, the idea of that just becoming totally worthless because it's all being autogenerated by YouTubers and bots and whatever is, I don't know, I found also pretty depressing and made me long. Right?

Emanuel: 26:58

Like, I can imagine a future where I'm like, oh, man. Remember when YouTube comments were good because it was actual people being toxic as opposed to bots being toxic?

Joseph: 27:08

Yeah. All I'll all I'll say briefly on that is just like, obviously, I've read the YouTube story you did and already found it depressing. But now you bring up that email that you got and, there's a YouTube video I often go back to because the comments are so, heartfelt. It's a song by an electronic artist I listen to, and it's all and it's kind of old school dance music. And all of these people in the comments, they're like 14, 50 year old ravers or whatever from England.

Joseph: 27:37

They're like, oh, man, this brings me back to like 99 where we crashed my car in the ditch, but then we went to the warehouse party and kept on going. And it's just reams and reams of people being really sincere and nostalgic for a time that no longer exists. That makes me genuinely fucking mad. That, like, that might not exist anymore. And that it's like it's the most human comment section I've ever seen on YouTube.

Joseph: 27:59

Like, don't fuck that. You know?

Emanuel: 28:01

Yeah. I mean, that's exactly what Mark Slutsky's story here is about. And there's that. And I would just add to that, I guess, that it's we spent, as people who report on the Internet, many years kinda wading through the the mess of just, like, people interacting online and how bad that can be. And I guess what I'm saying is, like, it's easy to imagine a future where we're like, that was the good old day.

Emanuel: 28:29

You know what I mean? Because it was people and not just like algorithms.

Joseph: 28:35

It's crazy. Yeah. I've never really thought about it like that. Jason?

Jason: 28:38

I've decided that I'm gonna start, beefing as a resident in my local neighborhood. I've been I've been, like, wading into Instagram comment sections, Just letting you know, moonlighting there. And, I just feel like I don't have enough beef in my life. So I'm fighting with NIMBYs on Nextdoor and also on the local Instagram pages. That's good.

Jason: 29:04

I'm

Emanuel: 29:04

gonna meeting. Fight IRL.

Jason: 29:06

Dude, I I would have, but you have me fucking working recording this podcast. There's a there's a pub there's a hearing right now. But but don't worry. My thoughts have been heard on Instagram.

Joseph: 29:19

Sure. That's good. I've just moved the beefing as Emmanuel knows to the group chat. And I'm just like, anybody says anything, I'll deliberately take the opposite stance and just start yelling at them. Oh, I like this video game.

Joseph: 29:30

No. It's stupid. Anyway, we we don't need to get into that. This other one oh, no. Google decided to refresh itself one second.

Joseph: 29:40

Here we go. I think it was this one. Here we go. So just a funny comment from Nick Miller, who says, does anyone this was on one of our podcasts. Does anyone have a running total of the number of episodes where the Facebook anus rule comes up?

Joseph: 29:56

Lol. The Facebook anus rule being this example that me and Jason keep bringing up and seemingly we don't remember that we've brought it up before or maybe we do. But content moderation and Facebook

Jason: 30:07

said rule I remember.

Joseph: 30:09

I mean, it was the best one. And we're not gonna explain it again, and you'll listen to that. It's just funny that we apparently, we keep bringing that up. And maybe I should dig up those documents. Like, I must have them somewhere.

Joseph: 30:18

Maybe we just, hey, here's the anus example we keep talking about if you want, and then we can get that taken off Instagram or whatever. Is this you is this you again, Emmanuel? Deep fake YouTube ads?

Emanuel: 30:34

Yes. It is. Sorry. Yes. I messed up your order here.

Joseph: 30:37

All good.

Sam: 30:38

The one that ends in rock hard is Emmanuel's story. Yes.

Emanuel: 30:41

Office. Yeah. Sorry. So this is a reply to a story with the title deep fake YouTube ads of celebrities promise to get you rock hard. It's similar to a story Jason has done months ago, about deep fake videos of celebrities shilling for stuff that they obviously are not really being paid to promote.

Emanuel: 31:04

And I won't read this whole comment, but, Nathan Buck brings up a very good point, which this story is based on pre roll ads on YouTube. And I wrote recently that I started paying for YouTube premium because their ad blocking blocking stuff has become pretty aggressive, and I use YouTube a lot and it just, like, wore me down. And I'm very happy to have paid for it, like it's worth the money. But I didn't consider the fact that I actually find good story leads by getting really bad ads. I'm sure we all do on Instagram, on Facebook, and YouTube, and I I didn't even consider that I need to consume the garbage.

Emanuel: 31:55

I need to to eat the dog food as I as I like saying. And thank you, Nathan, for the reminder.

Jason: 32:04

That's the best part of the of this job. You get to eat dog food all day.

Emanuel: 32:09

Eat the dog food. Yeah.

Jason: 32:12

So I'm getting ads on YouTube for YouTube ad blockers, which I think is really interesting. It's like I'm I'm getting preroll YouTube ads for a YouTube ad blocker that they claim circumvents Google's war on ad blocking, which I'm going to blog, so don't steal that. But I find that to be very interesting that Have you tried it now? No. Not yet.

Jason: 32:38

I haven't had time. I I kinda doubt it works. It seems super scammy. Right. But it's interesting that it's like we we did this ad about how YouTube is going to war with ad blockers.

Jason: 32:52

It's it's for an ad blocker. We put this ad in your ad so that you could block ads, etcetera, etcetera.

Emanuel: 33:00

Do either of you intentionally, like, disable ad blocking anywhere you go online just to see what is happening? I do that on, like

Joseph: 33:09

It's why I don't pay for YouTube. So and then and then I know you just said that, but, like, I haven't got that many ones, but there was a piece I don't think it was a 404. It was a motherboard, but I was getting loads of ads for the IDF. Right? Mhmm.

Joseph: 33:20

And we we covered that, and I think YouTube removed that IDF advert. And before then, but especially since then, I'm just like, I always watch the ads, basically. And, I don't get that many stories, so probably the trade off is not worth it. And I'm wasting so much time looking at fucking adverts every single day on YouTube, but it's legitimately one of the reasons I don't pay for it. Yeah.

Emanuel: 33:42

I definitely when I make the rounds, when I'm like, when I'm looking for something, something that used to be in rotation, it's just like go to Pornhub and look at all the ads because it used to be a crazy, crazy scene. It's a lot more cleaned up now.

Jason: 33:56

But I have no ad blocker of any sort because I support the websites that I view.

Sam: 34:00

Oh my god.

Joseph: 34:01

Wow. That's good. That's good.

Sam: 34:04

I was thinking about this the other day how, like, my, like, personal life on the Internet is I, like, I feel like there are 2 people that exist as me on the Internet. There's, like, the me that's just, like, a a normal person who's trying to, like, use the Internet in the smoothest way possible without the shitty experience. And then there's the me that's, like, you have to actually like you said, like, you have to look at this shit. Not even going out of my way. It's just like, I I started I also started a premium trial for YouTube, and it's like, I have ad blockers, and I probably shouldn't.

Sam: 34:35

But, like, god. Like, I don't get to be, like, a person who has a a normal, seamless, not and shitified existence on the Internet because, like, most people probably move through the Internet that way. I turn my ad blocker off. I go to Vice sometimes, and I turn it off. I wanna see how bad it is.

Joseph: 34:55

Good. You wanna support the company.

Jason: 34:57

I mean, we've we've talked about that before. Not about ads really, but about, like, social media in general. It's like, dude, I don't wanna use it, like, at all, really. I think that if I I think that if I were not a journalist, like, I would not use any of these.

Sam: 35:11

I don't know why anybody does other than, like, to keep track of, like, your close friends on Instagram maybe. Like, maybe that's it. And, yeah, that goes back to, like, a man's question about posting. It's like, am I in my thirties, or am I just, like, tired and tired of posting, or is it getting worse to post? Like, is it a less pleasant experience to use these websites in general than it used to be when I was super into posting everywhere all the time.

Emanuel: 35:34

A similar experiment that I recommend people try is when you're legitimately trying to find out something that is happening in the news and try to get the information without going to any site where you pay for a subscription or try to hop over a paywall, and that could be pretty scary sometimes. You're like, oh, I actually can't get good information about, like, a flood or something like this.

Joseph: 36:02

Yeah. Absolutely. Sam, I think this is one of those you I I deleted a couple of mine just because we have a lot to get through. But there's a WordPress CEO rage quits community Slack after court injunction. I've highlighted it in the

Sam: 36:16

job. Yeah. This is a short one. I just wanna acknowledge because this is a comment from Ernie Smith, who we respect and admire very much. Ernie Ernie said, what a silly mess.

Sam: 36:27

Just utterly focused on the wrong things. And, like, Ernie has obviously been following the story very closely as, like, someone who's, in this in this, like, open source space, and he has an interest in, like, programming and web development, things like that. So

Joseph: 36:45

it

Sam: 36:45

makes sense that he's like his reaction is like, what a mess, but, like, I think Joe and I were talking the other day about how, like, someone had commented somewhere that the latest story we did about the WordPress drama, which this conversation is an example of, they were like, you need to go into more elaborate detail because people don't know what you're talking about from the jump. Like, you there's all this, like, presupposed information that you're not telling, and that or this article lacks a lot of that. And it's like, we don't have 3,000 words to describe the drama going on with this particular saga. So this isn't even in the like, that comment is correct. Like, there is a lot of, like, information that you have to come to certain stories that we write with a lot of, prior knowledge, unfortunately, and we don't take the time every single time to explain to you what's going on.

Sam: 37:38

Because if you're reading a story about the CEO of Automatic, you probably already are interested in, like, whatever the drama is regardless, and you probably already have that backstory. And if you don't, there are hyperlinked explainers on our in that story on our website.

Jason: 37:55

This was the entire premise of Vox Media was that they were going to, like, build a story, like, over time, and you would be able to go and read through it. And they they launched with this idea, and it was basically, like, a journalist run Wikipedia more or less where, like, articles would grow and change over time, and it just, like, didn't work in that way more or less.

Sam: 38:19

Yeah. And then, like, if I'm if I'm looking because this keeps happening when I'm writing stories about WordPress. If I'm looking for the latest about WordPress, TechCrunch is actually doing really good, consistent stories about the WordPress legal drama. But, like, they're also running, like, a a developing, like, mega blog about it, and that's what comes up when you search. And, like, I don't know.

Sam: 38:44

I don't know. Are people returning to that? Should we be doing, like, mega blogs where, like, you're just updating, updating, updating?

Jason: 38:51

We call that an SEO anchor page, I believe.

Sam: 38:54

Yeah.

Jason: 38:54

And Vice tried to do it toward the end of its 10 of our tenure there, and it was fucking nightmare.

Sam: 39:00

It doesn't seem like it would be, like, good or smart to do, but maybe it works for them. I have no idea.

Joseph: 39:06

I mean, they're, yeah, they're a lot bigger. Maybe maybe they do have the weight in SEO or something where they can pull off.

Jason: 39:12

I think the goal is to, like, stay on the front page of Google forever because you're updating it constantly, and then it's like if you can get on you can, like, passively collect traffic over time, but it's, like, takes a lot of time to to do that, and you already have to have very strong, like, search authority or whatever. Like, I think I think that's what they're doing. Right?

Sam: 39:35

Yeah. And, like, the story so if I Google WordPress TechCrunch, what comes up is that page, the scroll bar is little because this is long now, and the title is the WordPress versus WP Engine drama explained, and that's kind of the first thing comes up when you Google this. And it's long as hell, like, I have to scroll the whole thing to figure it out. So

Jason: 40:01

So you just type WordPress drama. It's also the first Yeah. Which is something that

Joseph: 40:05

I don't have. Just Google. Yeah. Without even TechCrunch is, like, oh, shit. For basic well, the first result is actually Reddit, and then the second one is TechCrunch.

Joseph: 40:12

Yeah.

Jason: 40:12

It's

Sam: 40:12

like the live blogging format is interesting to me. They're also doing, like, breakout stories that are they link to in that. I don't know. I wish you try it.

Jason: 40:20

I don't

Sam: 40:21

actually wanna try it. It sounds No.

Joseph: 40:22

It sounds very tiring.

Sam: 40:24

Man, it looks

Joseph: 40:25

to be honest.

Jason: 40:27

This is why we're getting into ebooks.

Joseph: 40:30

Eventually. Yeah.

Jason: 40:31

The WordPress drama ebook by Sam Cole.

Sam: 40:35

Good. Yeah. For sure. I just kinda really tired thinking about that.

Joseph: 40:39

Comes with a free Amazon drop shift shipping course or something.

Jason: 40:43

And then we train into a chatbot on it so you can ask questions of of the author.

Emanuel: 40:48

I was gonna say it's AI generated ebook. Oh, yeah.

Joseph: 40:50

I'm not writing it. Jason, I think this is you about your theater movies AI story.

Jason: 40:59

Yeah. So this is about the, story I did about the first AI generated commercially streaming, movies by TCL. SK left a really amazing comment on this. I learned more from this comment than any other comment I've learned on 404 Media. I'm sorry to to every other commenter.

Jason: 41:19

There's many, many good ones, but, basically, I had something in the article where I explained that the AI generated characters had dead eyes, and they moved in ways that I couldn't really explain, but just felt unreal to me. And SK, who I don't know exactly who that is, says that they work in movies, and they know exactly, like, why we feel that way when we watch AI generated content. So I'm gonna try to read. I mean, it's a really long comment. I'm just gonna read the beginning of it.

Jason: 41:53

But, they say, in the above examples, part of the dead eye feeling comes from the fact that all of the eye lines are wide slash inconsistent, and often, if there are multiple characters on a screen, often they're looking in opposite directions. A lot of that sense of engagement that comes from an actor's performance or their distance comes from the director carefully managing eye lines for a scene. 2 days ago on a set, we spent 15 minutes on a beach scrambling to get a shot before the tide came in and washed this away in order to set all of our actor eye lines correctly for the camera position. And when it's wrong and you know what you're looking for, it's incredibly wrong. This is something I I knew nothing about.

Jason: 42:33

I had no idea this was the case, but it does make sense where, the uncanniness of some of these scenes that I talk about in the piece are really weird when there's multiple characters, because sometimes the characters are not exactly, like, looking at each other the way that human beings would. So I thought that that was really insightful, and, you should check it out. Also, there's, like, 20 comments on that story, all of which are very interesting. So thank you to everyone who's commented.

Joseph: 43:04

I love when we get comments from people who are in the industry we're covering and obviously have so much more expertise, than than we do. And that's always fascinating. Here's a quick one from me. The story is I don't own a cell phone, can this privacy focused network change that? It's about this phone company called Cape, where they're doing all of these, potentially privacy enhancing features, like rotating your IMSI and your IMEI, you know, these unique identifiers on your phone and your ad ID.

Joseph: 43:36

And Rees Jones and I already replied to this in the comments, but I just thought it was worth elaborating on slightly in the pod. They say, the more I think about this, the more this article feels like an advert for Cape, considering this is on 4 zero four and written by Joseph, the dark wire author. I certainly hope I'm wrong. As I said in response, no, it's not an advert. We have very light touch ads on the site and in the newsletter.

Joseph: 44:01

As paying subscribers, you don't see those. But they're very, you know, non invasive, very you can it it's not like going to I think, it's not like going to a website elsewhere on the Internet, and you're like, oh my god, I can't even see the article. I think they're very tasteful, and well placed, and well designed, all that sort of thing. But when we have an advert, or I mean, we can just go to talk more broadly. When a a journalist runs an advert, or a media or outlet runs an advert, it is clearly marked as such.

Joseph: 44:29

You know, you'll have stuff like sponsored content, or this content brought to you by all that sort of thing. I think that when people are when people are so used to either me specifically or journalists like us, covering stuff, they always think it has to be, like, negative or a scandal. And when you write that something is genuinely interesting, people like, well, there must be enough. It's like, no. Sometimes you just write about stuff because it's genuinely interesting and there's public interest that in that as well.

Joseph: 45:01

You know? Sometimes it's funny. Sometimes, you know, some of our articles border on shitposts, because there's just something really entertaining about something. But no, it's it's not an advert. And at the end of the piece, I said, you know, I'm I'm not endorsing this anyway.

Joseph: 45:17

I said that at the top. And I can't make an informed decision about it until we have more information. But, yeah, that's that's just not how journalism works or how a media company works. Jason, April.

Jason: 45:29

I think also, we don't do a lot of this, but a lot of publications do, and it's, you know, it's fine. But I wouldn't exactly call this a review, but it's like review adjacent where you try a product and then you write about what the experience of using that product was. And it's like reviews are also not advertisements. Some publications do reviews and then they sort of use it for affiliate marketing where, you know, they'll link to where to buy the product and then they get a small amount of money, from people who purchase that product. But it's it's not the creator of that product that is, like, engaging and giving money to the publication.

Jason: 46:12

It's like Amazon or Best Buy or whatever. Except sometimes that's actually changing because there's, like, a company that now pays people to do that, and that's sketchy, and we don't do that. But that's just to say that, like, I find reviews to be very useful as a reader, who might be thinking about how to solve a problem, or do I need this product or this gadget or whatever. And reviews necessarily involve, like, opinions. I think that Joseph especially does not like, he doesn't insert himself into stories as much as I do.

Jason: 46:49

I think every story I did this week, I, like, talked about my personal experience in some way, which is something that you learn in journalism school is not what you're supposed to do, but I think is stupid. And so I don't listen to that rule, because I think that we sort of, like, try to explain where we're coming from on something. But I think in this case, it's like Joseph has not used a phone in many years. That is, like, a really interesting experience. Like, most people are not like that, and we've talked about that on the podcast and made fun of him for it lots.

Jason: 47:20

But I think that having that perspective of not having used a phone and trying to, like, explain it in a somewhat personal way improves the story and improves the journalism. And this is a really I thought this is a really interesting piece that was, like, a mix of reported journalism as well as sort of explaining like, it's not really a product review, and it's but it's got elements of that. I thought it was like a I thought you handled it well, I guess, is what I'm saying. And I'm honestly, like, pretty surprised that someone thought it was an ad because, like, throughout the piece, you're like, I'm not recommending this. I don't know.

Jason: 48:00

I can't think of any ad where you would say, I don't like this product and a company would pay money for it. That's not how that works.

Joseph: 48:08

No. As far as I know. Yeah. And it was good because of your edits, to be clear. But I think this one is you again, Jason, about ghost engineers.

Jason: 48:20

Yeah. So this is about a Stanford study that was really controversial. It's called our overemployed ghost engineers making 6 figures do nothing. I got a lot of comments on this and a couple emails, and I think most people sort of understood what I was going for, but I also think some of the criticism was fair, which is to say this study was I guess I'll put study in air quotes here, but it it's a Stanford, like, researcher. He's not exactly faculty.

Jason: 48:55

It's kind of weird. The whole thing is kind of weird, but he basically did this Twitter thread and did a study where he claims that his algorithms are analyzing how much work different coders are doing and have determined that a lot of them are not doing any work as judged by his algorithm. And this is not normally something that we would cover because it's not peer reviewed. It's not even, like, pub it's not even published in any way, but it went quite viral. And I found it interesting at that the study was happening at all, that this type of research was happening at all, where he was given access to companies' internal GitHubs and was claiming that he was analyzing workers' work for the companies, and then companies were making decisions based on what he was saying.

Jason: 49:46

And kind of, like, whether he is full of shit or not, I think that it says something about surveillance of workers, which is something that, like, companies are obsessed with recently, like, different tools that can analyze what workers are doing. And, so a lot of the comments sort of talked about the fact that there's a lot of glue work that goes on in software engineering and in anything. And what glue work means is, you know, stuff that doesn't show up in terms of lines of code written. And there was this really good comment from LCRF about how they have spent a lot of time staring at code or documentation just to sort of, like, learn what's going on, and then an algorithm would not know that they are actually working because they're not typing or they're not writing code. And that often a lot of the work in software engineering is solving problems maybe away from the coding terminal, and then sort of implementing it or is talking to people.

Jason: 50:56

There was also a really good comment about about this was from Frank Malefant, and the comment is, it's always remote workers are slacking and never project managers are useless. And then Mike Loon had a comment about asking, how does the algorithm work? How does it judge code quality? Does it have the capability to understand the reasoning something was implemented in a certain way? Is it even possible to judge code quality if you're an algorithm?

Jason: 51:29

And then sort of concludes that this guy is an absolute hack? I think all that stuff is fair, and and I actually agree with all of it. And I hope it was clear in the article that I do find this work to be, like, very controversial. We've written a lot about workplace surveillance, and I think it's gonna be a big story next year and and onward as companies keep demanding people return to office and as companies try to replace workers with AI. So that's why I wrote this story.

Jason: 52:01

And I I think that a lot of people understood that, but I I think I could have also made it a little bit more clear that the fact that this research is happening at all, I find to be quite concerning, and I don't think we can take at face value the outcome of it.

Joseph: 52:19

Sure. Totally. Here's just a quick one from me. The story was Teva has become a massive money laundering tool for Mexican drug traffickers, FedSay. Teva is a cryptocurrency which is allegedly tied to the US dollar.

Joseph: 52:34

You know, for every Teva out there, there's a dollar sat somewhere. Right? That's the claim. And, drug traffickers are using it, apparently. And the here is a, comment from Steven.

Joseph: 52:46

So this is wild and just raises more questions for me. I've long said that the main uses for cryptocurrencies are guns, drugs, and CSAN, With remittances, a far distant 4th. The ease of transfer surely plays into this, but the fact that every transaction is there on the chain has stuck with me. Why? If one is trying to obfuscate the money trail, would one pipe it all through cryptocurrency?

Joseph: 53:09

As the story shows, it is still traceable. Yes. That is totally the case. I remember when Bitcoin first emerged, or a few years after it first emerged, everyone called it an anonymous currency. Right?

Joseph: 53:21

And I think people still generally call it that, when really it's a pseudonymous currency. You know that, oh, the wallet ABC 123 sent this to x y z 789 or whatever. Right? It's not actually anonymous. There's, there was a moniker or something attached to it.

Joseph: 53:40

And, of course, all of those transactions are there as well. If that interests you at all, definitely go read Andy Greenberg's Traces in the Dark, his latest book, which is all about the people investigating crimes facilitated by or committed on the blockchain, for lack of a better way of putting it. But the thing I wanted to bring up is, remember back when Bitcoin first came out and there was all the libertarians and stuff, and they were like, this is free money, and it's, you can do whatever you want, and the banks aren't gonna stop us, all of that sort of thing. And as the industry has matured, I would say, the comms strategy now is like, no. This is actually the best currency for for catching money launderers because it's all logged somewhere.

Joseph: 54:27

And I've been talking about this in the group chat, that I remember, Manuel and a couple other people. And it's just such a 180 pivot. It's amazing. And, I don't know. It's the complete opposite of what it was before, where now it's like, an actual marketing gimmick that it can be traced.

Joseph: 54:48

And it's funny. After I published this piece, I already included Teva's statement. I think they realized sort of how bad the look was, and they sent another statement basically saying the same thing. But, like, it can be traced. It can't be traced.

Joseph: 55:01

And I I just find it interesting that the industry is doing all of that stuff now.

Jason: 55:06

Do we think that crypto we're gonna have to start covering crypto again just because it's like I don't know. My mom was texting me about crypto, about Bitcoin, asking if she should buy Bitcoin. I think she actually just said crypto, which is not good. The hock shoe thing, etcetera. Like, I'm just raising the specter of, like, this, unfortunately, probably we're gonna have to cover in some way, shape, or form.

Emanuel: 55:30

As we know from covering it for a decade, it comes in waves, and we're due for a wave. And given the composition of this coming administration and cabinet and and the value of of Bitcoin, honestly. Right? Like, the waves are directed

Jason: 55:49

It aligns directly with the price.

Emanuel: 55:52

Yeah. Right. So it's like it's coming back. What is it gonna look like? I don't know, But it's it's it's coming back big time.

Emanuel: 56:01

It's my bet. I'm I'm I'm happy to be wrong, but if I was to place a bet, I think we're gonna spend a lot of next year talking about cryptocurrency.

Joseph: 56:12

Yeah. Because

Jason: 56:13

brush up. Everyone brush up on your DAOs, your NFTs. You're going to the contracts. Yeah.

Joseph: 56:19

You get

Emanuel: 56:19

paid to get paid. Like,

Joseph: 56:21

how does it work?

Jason: 56:23

So it's a distributed ledger.

Joseph: 56:25

Right. Yeah. I fucking hate the DAO shit and the NFT shit. That was the stuff that I was like, this is so annoying to cover. But, yeah, I mean, you're right in the well, they're trying to get a very sympathetic head of the SEC or whatever around crypto.

Joseph: 56:41

Right? I've honestly blanked out a little bit, but we'll have to,

Emanuel: 56:45

jump on top of it.

Joseph: 56:46

I think we should

Emanuel: 56:47

get into it in one of these pods we're gonna record, for the break, but, I mean, they're talking about, like, taking apart the FDIC, which is what insures your money in the bank.

Joseph: 56:58

Please don't do. Right.

Emanuel: 56:59

So it's, like, one way

Joseph: 57:00

you think

Jason: 57:01

like the one that they did because of the bank runs, because of, like, Black Tuesday day or whatever, the stock market crash that led to the great depression.

Emanuel: 57:10

Right. No. But it's like but I I saw some I can't I'm I'm sorry that I can't credit the the person who posted this, but it's like one way you can increase the value of cryptocurrency is decrease the stability of any other form of holding value of your money. Right? It's like Dude,

Sam: 57:27

let's fucking go. Let's fucking go. Yeah. Right.

Emanuel: 57:29

So it's just like, what can we do to banks to make them as risky as a as a as a what what are they called? What are the apes called?

Sam: 57:38

What? I think

Joseph: 57:39

they're just apes. Right?

Emanuel: 57:40

They're just called apes? Aren't they isn't there some aren't there

Jason: 57:43

Bored ape.

Joseph: 57:43

You talking about?

Emanuel: 57:44

Bored apes. Bored apes. So just, like, make your bank account as risky as holding an NFT of a bored ape. That's how you can fucking pump the value of NFTs. Yeah.

Sam: 57:53

Between that and, like, sports gambling, is fully back on. And then, like, so many people are, like, fully addicted to gambling and are calling it day trading.

Joseph: 58:02

Yeah. Mhmm.

Sam: 58:05

Like, things are gonna be That's

Jason: 58:07

good. That's good.

Sam: 58:07

Yeah. It's gonna be great fresh and shit very soon. Fun.

Joseph: 58:12

I mean, I'm gonna keep covering how Joe traffic is doing, and that's probably about it, but we'll see. Yeah. Alright. May we're coming up to an hour. So maybe for our last one, Jason, is this you?

Jason: 58:24

Yeah. This is about, x's lawsuit in the onion trying to buy Infowars case. So if you don't remember that story, basically, like, Elon Musk injected himself into this bankruptcy proceeding. And I didn't explore this in the piece, but a lot of people brought this up where x was basically saying that it owns all accounts, in this bankruptcy court, and so, therefore, it couldn't be reassigned. Like, the Infowars account couldn't be reassigned to The Onion.

Jason: 58:55

Since then, like, a judge has there's there's been updates in the case where the judge has blocked the sale, and it's unclear what's going to happen. But a lot of people are saying, like, like, Stephen b had a comment. What are the section 2 30 implications of x's new legal argument? I would love to see x held responsible for all the defamation, support of terrorism, sexual abuse imagery, nonconsensual intimate images, and other illegal speech hosted on the platform. You know, great question.

Jason: 59:24

Lots of people said, like, oh, if x owns everything, they must now be responsible. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm going to pour cold water on this, unfortunately, and say, based on what I know, bankruptcy court is like a parallel bizarre legal system that is part of the federal system, but things that happen in bankruptcy court, like, often are not, often, like, don't really have much to do with hap with what happens in regular court, which is to say, I don't think that there's I I really don't think that there's, like, further ramifications of this, especially, you know, this is a Texas bankruptcy court. It it has really very little to do with section 230 and and other things like that. So I don't think that, x is shooting itself in the foot here. I I think it's a really interesting question, but I I just unfortunately, don't think that Elon has, like, self owned himself into being held responsible for all the garbage on that platform.

Joseph: 01:00:34

I know you're not a lawyer, as you just said, but I was flagging this to Emmanuel. I'm sure he's here to

Jason: 01:00:40

the bar

Joseph: 01:00:41

though. Oh, okay. Sure. So the YouTube comment story that Emmanuel did where creators can reply to their own comments with AI generated responses, A few people were like quote tweeting it or quote skitting or whatever it is. And they were saying, well, does this make it, you know, not user generated content because this is being generated by YouTube itself, so then it doesn't fall under section 2 30 protections.

Joseph: 01:01:08

To put you on the spot, what is your legal analysis of that, Jason?

Jason: 01:01:14

Dude, I thought you would just ask a manual.

Joseph: 01:01:17

No. No. No. You have to We were saying about it, but you but you asked the section 230 expert.

Jason: 01:01:23

Yeah. Okay. Jason, stop listening.

Sam: 01:01:24

I'm very excited because I'm a lawyer.

Jason: 01:01:26

Do. I was like, I

Sam: 01:01:27

see that support all the time.

Jason: 01:01:29

It's crazy. Dude, objection. Objection, your honor. Raul. Ask it again.

Jason: 01:01:34

I'm really sorry.

Sam: 01:01:36

I was listening. When you said section 2:30, I was like, I'm done.

Jason: 01:01:39

I'm done. I'm listening now. You have my full undivided attention.

Joseph: 01:01:43

I mean okay. So when there. When YouTube uses AI to generate a comment Yeah. As Emmanuel said

Jason: 01:01:52

Oh, are they?

Sam: 01:01:53

Are they publisher?

Jason: 01:01:54

Oh, okay.

Joseph: 01:01:54

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is it YouTube that's the publisher there rather than user generated content?

Jason: 01:02:01

Dude, great question. I think, boss

Joseph: 01:02:05

That's what you say in court. You're in court. And they they and you're like, George, great question.

Jason: 01:02:10

Great question. You know what? Probably not because, because the person posting it is an account holder, and you and Google would argue that it's being reviewed by a hue a user. Therefore, they're not they're not publishing it, the user.

Sam: 01:02:26

They're not publishing it. Post.

Jason: 01:02:27

They're not pushing post. But can Facebook be held, accountable for things that it's, like, AI chatbot says? I I think that's a better question, and I think

Joseph: 01:02:38

that one is recently?

Jason: 01:02:39

Yeah. I mean, there's obviously, like, a a lawsuit right now against character AI, about, you know, it telling a teenager to kill himself. Mhmm. I don't think that character AI has a very good section 2 30 argument here. You know, it's a Facebook and the social media platforms are are different, but they are all putting various chatbots into their systems.

Jason: 01:03:05

And I think that if it's like a Facebook owned chatbot, I think the argument is much less strong, as a lawyer, your honor.

Joseph: 01:03:16

I was about salute as if that's what judges do in in court. Like, no. No. That's not what they do. Alright.

Joseph: 01:03:23

Should we look It's

Jason: 01:03:24

not that I wasn't listening. It's that

Joseph: 01:03:26

No. No. I get it.

Emanuel: 01:03:27

I get it. Jason's trying not to get disbarred right now. Yeah.

Joseph: 01:03:30

Your honor your honor, I wasn't, like, zoning out completely.

Sam: 01:03:34

Especially as a jerk.

Jason: 01:03:35

Your your honor, I was not listening. So sorry.

Sam: 01:03:38

Let's go to recess, please.

Joseph: 01:03:39

That that must have that must have happened. I'm gonna Google that in a minute. That must have happened.

Jason: 01:03:43

Feel like that that I had a panic attack associated, like that like, the type I've haven't had since, like, high school where they call You said Emmanuel and I were talking, and I was like, okay. This is for Emmanuel. I I started to see, like, if there was anything else that I need to do after this.

Joseph: 01:04:03

Dude, I totally get it. I totally understand. I think we all do it. Alright. Should we leave that there?

Joseph: 01:04:09

Anything else? No? Okay. Thank you for listening, as they're paying for a full media subscriber. Again, we'll keep doing these periodically.

Joseph: 01:04:20

Please write your comments onto our articles, so then we have stuff to talk about. We really really do appreciate it. And we appreciate your support. Alright. And I will play us out.