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Someone came out with a little slip of paper with a phone number, and he was just told, call the FBI, and I don't have any more information. This is stuff that authorities use in criminal cases. This isn't messing around. Hello, and welcome to the four zero four Media Podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hit the world's both online and IRL. Four zero four Media is a journalist founding company and needs your support.

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I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are the other four zero four Media cofounders. The first being Emmanuel Mayberg. Hello. And Jason Kebler.

Hello. Sam was just here, but she has died.

Yeah. Rest in peace. Yeah. Sam's Wi Fi is not able to handle the the podcast today, so I just had to rerecord the intro. That's why I was laughing at the same time.

But Sam will be with us next time. What she was going to do, she was going to tell you about the four zero four Media party, which we did mention before, but we just want to give an update because tickets are selling. Sam says we will sell out even though it's a while away. It's a panel on Thursday, September 3 and you can get livestream access to that. You can also come in person And then there is the party the day after Friday, September 4 at Freeze Brewing in New York.

There is a link again to the details in the show notes. So please go check that out. And if you do want to come, make sure you get a ticket because yes, we will absolutely sell out. Alright, to this week's stories, Emmanuel, do you want to take us through this one that I wrote?

Yeah. The headline for this is, quote, The government hopes to set a precedent. An interview with the man charged for allegedly wiping his GrapheneOS phone. So this man, Samuel Tunnick, tell me who he is and what happened to him when he landed in an airport last year.

Yeah. So Samuel arrives in an airport in January 2025. He was returning to The US from a vacation in the Dominican Republic. And he doesn't know this, but DHS ahead of time sends a warning to the airport and says, hey, essentially, we are monitoring this person, we would like you to stop him at the border, and we really, really want to get ahold of his phone. I'm paraphrasing what his lawyer told me and obviously we'll get into more specifics.

But he gets to the airport with that context. The officials there, you know, asking a bunch of questions such as can we search your bags? He says no. They do it anyway. As will become apparent and as listeners probably know, the airport is a very unusual place when it comes to The US and what can be searched and what can't.

They go through his bags, don't find anything of note or illegal or anything like that. They ask to search his person, he says no, they do that as well. He asked for a lawyer multiple times during this and that is denied even though he has the phone number of a lawyer on him. And then they get to the phone. And these, I believe, Customs and Border Protection officials really, really want to search that phone.

They ask him to hand over the passcode, he declines to do so. There is a long back and forth where they say, look, we're going to get your phone one way or another, like we're probably going to break into it and all of that sort of thing. So why not just make it easier? And Samuel eventually does give over a code, which one of the officers types into the device. But then rather than unlocking the phone, his lawyer told me it went to a blank screen and then it displayed the Graphene OS logo.

We'll talk about Graphene in a minute. But basically, what had happened was that the phone was wiped when the official entered that code. It didn't unlock it. It wiped everything on the phone and basically returning it to a factory state. And obviously, well, I would say that probably greatly annoyed the officials who were trying to gain access to it and then not to get too far ahead, but then that is what these charges relate to.

That he came to this airport, he was being searched there, provided the code, it wipes the phone, and now he's being charged with that. Although, I'll just stress, there's no warrant for this phone. There's no specific evidence the authorities have said they need to go after. It's not like you have evidence of XYZ on your phone, hence we need to get it. He's being charged just for the wiping itself.

Before we continue, I think you should explain why is Samuel even a person of interest? Is he spy for a different country? Is he on America's most wanted list? What is the deal with Samuel?

Yeah. So we actually covered this case a while back. We broke news of it like last year in November or December when they got ahold of the indictment. And at the time it was man is being charged for allegedly wiping his phone. And so we couldn't include much of this context, which is in response to your question.

Even though I knew a lot of it, it wasn't clear enough to report. But now we can say that, you know, Samuel is part of the Stop Cop City activist movement in Atlanta, where I'm not going to go into everything about that, I'm sure people are aware of it. But basically, there's a grassroots movement that was protesting against the development of a law enforcement training facility on a certain piece of ground in Atlanta, and the protests range from, just signs and going to areas and protesting and that sort of thing. And then there are some sections of that movement that are violent as well. Again, there's no allegation that Samuel is part of that.

It's just that is the overarching context is that he is part of this movement and authorities have really, really clamped down on that. And when I spoke to Samuel about this case, which I think is the only interview he's given, about this, as far as I know, he put it squarely in this context that he is an activist, and he's being targeted, for that reason. Yeah. No. He's not a spy for China being stopped at the border and he's wiped evidence of that from his phone.

All of the evidence points to the authorities were targeting him for his connection to this activist movement, although not alleging he actually did any sort of crimes as part of that.

So let's talk about GrapheneOS. I want you to explain what it is, but if you can, like, situate it next to or in comparison to some of these other, like, privacy OSs or privacy phones, like, how does it fit into that ecosystem? And then also specifically, what is this feature that he used that he eventually was charged for?

Yeah, so GrapheneOS is a security and privacy focused operating system. It is a version of Android in that it will run on Android phones. So you'll put it on a Google Pixel or you'll put it on some other modern Android device. You do have to get kind of specific hardware sort of similar in the same sort of way as when you would buy, not buy, when you would use the operating system cubes, which is a version of Linux it's very, very security focused. You need a specific type of phone or type of computer to be able to run these operating systems.

So you do that. But the key thing is you don't buy GrapheneOS or if you do, you're a little bit of a sucker because you can just go and download it. I've done this many, many times. And no longer do you have to go through like a painful process of like flashing a ROM and getting it to your phone and unlocking the bootloader and that sort of thing. I mean, you might have to do some of those steps, but the last time I installed Graphene OS on the phone, I don't know, a couple of years ago at this point maybe, you plug it in and the installation is all done via the web browser.

It's like magic. It's really, really impressive where you can plug it in, you maybe do a few limited commands, and then you are installing a security focused operating system on your phone via the web browser on your computer. As for those benefits, they're big on the degoogling aspect of it. So they remove a bunch of Google services, the Play Store isn't on there as far as I can remember, a lot of other protections around privacy as well, doesn't or when it comes to connecting to certain phone networks as well, you like you don't want get shoved down to a two gs phone network because that's going to be less secure and maybe you can be tracked, so it doesn't allow that sort of thing. It protects the kernel as in that is hardened, which is sort of the beating heart of the operating system where if a hacker gets into the kernel, you're kind of screwed.

So it has a lot of protections there. But obviously, most importantly, for this case, I would think importantly, like for a lot of users is this wipe command where you can type in your normal pin, and that will just unlock the phone as normal. Or you can type in a what they call a duress pin, and that will wipe the phone. They call it a duress pin because there's this classic problem of, well, I have the fanciest encryption in the world with world's longest password. If a guy comes at me with a hammer and he's like, give me your password, I'm probably going to give him the password, right?

Or in this case, if you're being compelled by authorities to hand it over. So that's what the duress password does, what it's used for, and from all the evidence available. And I do want to stress like this is a charge, so Samuel allegedly did it, of course, and like that is very, very important. But his lawyer did tell me when this official entered this code, the phone went to a blank screen and then the GrapheneOS logo appeared. Like from that, it does seem like it was a wipe command.

The last thing I'll just say is that you asked about these other privacy phones and, you know, we've covered a bunch of those which are often used by organized crime, drug traffickers, Phantom Secure, Anchor Chat, Sky Secure. I would not put Graphene OS in the same bucket as those. Those like phones used by straight up criminals, they're very expensive, thousands of dollars for a six month, for a twelve month subscription. They're sold primarily to a closed ecosystem of criminals. They do have wipe commands as well, but you have to usually contact somebody at Phantom Secure or somewhere else to do the wipe for you.

That's how it's also different to iCloud where you can just sort of do that yourself as well. But Graphene is different in that it's you typing in the code or giving the code to someone, and it's free to use and free to download. Like, are companies that just rip off graphene and then try to sell it to drug traffickers, but they're not the same as graphene. Graphene is making this software available to anybody who wants to who wants to download it.

Yeah, that's kind of what I was getting at. It's like you reported a lot about these privacy phones and OSs that are marketed to criminals essentially, and this is not that. It's not in that world. It's not in that world where, like, people are personally selling the phones to organized crime. This is kind of a thing that's easily accessible.

You can imagine journalists using it, activists like Samuel using it, and so on. So initially, we couldn't report all the details about the case. What is the new stuff that we could publish recently?

Yeah. So I I obviously did research on Samuel before the initial article, and I knew of his activist connections, But yeah, at the time, like, there was so because all we had was the indictment, was man charged with wiping phones. I can't really do much more than that at the moment, and I think I explained that in the Behind the Blog that we published at the time. But the new stuff here is that his lawyers are filing or have filed a motion to suppress. Like they're trying to get the evidence thrown out here for a bunch of legal reasons that we don't really need to get into, but I will continue to cover in the future.

And as part of that, there was a hearing and it was in Atlanta, and a local journalist there who published in The Guardian went to this hearing, and then we heard a bunch more stuff like, hey, it was using graphene, some details about the airport, that sort of thing, which I had rumblings of, but I couldn't use. So it's very, very useful that there was a local journalist there who was able to go to this hearing because I can't just go to well, I guess I could do, but I can't really just go to Alantra on the off chance that, you know, this information is going to come out. So there's that sort of stuff. And then for this article, I mean, I got to speak to Samuel directly and ask him like straight up, what happened? How do you feel about this?

What is the context you think of this charge and the attempted search of your phone? And that was very, very useful to tell readers like, this is not a normal case. In fact, this is a very abnormal case. This is like an extraordinarily strange case, really. And talking to Samuel and his lawyer is like how I was able to tell that in in this piece.

So to the point of this being a strange case, I think at the center of that is the question of what is the alleged crime? Like, what what what did he what did Samuel do that that that he's in trouble?

Yeah. So what he didn't do is obstruction of justice, which is what I think a lot of people would go to. And when I've seen people who sell phones to drug traffickers, for example, actually be charged for wiping a phone, like it's come up in the Phantom Secure case, it came up in the Anom case as well, these people were charged for obstruction of justice specifically cause the Feds knew there was evidence of drug trafficking on these phones. And then they did the wipe command, well, you're deleting evidence and now we do that. Samuel's not being charged with that.

He's being charged with this other thing, which basically says, you I'm finding the quote here. He was indicted for allegedly destroying, quote, the digital contents of a Google Pixel phone. And like, that's it. It doesn't really say that you've removed evidence of XYZ because again, they don't know what's on the phone. It is purely a charge for destroying the contents of a phone, which I'd never seen before.

I've literally never ever heard of that. When I spoke to Samuel's lawyer as well, he said, well, we only ever found one other case, and it was a drug trafficking case. But he's, you know, a federal public defender in a pretty busy district, and he had basically never heard of this except one other case. It is really, really, really, really strange that he's being charged with this particular sort of crime.

So as you say, the airport is this, like, space in the country where you have less rights. It the authorities can really pin you down, and that's what happens to Samuel. But he claims that there is a whole bunch of surveillance that he was subject to before this moment. What what does he think or what does he claim that has been happening to him before this?

Yeah. So Samuel kind of took me back in time and he went to this point where he was just trying to get a job working I think on a Christmas tree lot, you know, like selling or cutting Christmas trees or something like that. And because part of that work technically took place on school grounds, he had to get a background check. And he doesn't have a criminal conviction, like doesn't have a criminal record, so assumed it would be fine. He applied for the background check, went through those steps, it was denied and wasn't really sure why.

So he contacted Atlanta Public Schools and they didn't really have much information at all beyond someone came out with a little slip of paper with a phone number and he was just told, call the FBI and I don't have any more information for you. He did do that or rather a lawyer working on his behalf did, didn't really get any more information that way, but it was only later through his lawyer and through some, you know, other sources of information just as I think stuff was coming out in the news, there was a camera put facing outside and looking at a house he used to live in, and I think a lot of other activists were here as well, and later that property was raided. I think more personal here is that through his lawyer, he learned that his cell phone records were subpoenaed. Andy got an email from Google saying that his Gmail was subpoenaed as well. So this is stuff the authorities use in criminal cases.

And these are, I mean, not the most powerful tools of the US government, but like this isn't messing around. This is like, we're gonna go get your emails, we're gonna go get your phone records. This isn't a cursory search. This is like a pretty deep phishing expedition targeted against him and presumably others as well. And I mean, way that Samuel put it to me was that, quote, they really just tried to dig up anything they could on me and they didn't find anything.

And in the lawyer's reading and Samuel's reading as well, they think this is what led to the airport charge basically. Like they've done all of this searching, as in the authorities, they've subpoenaed the cell phone records, they've looked at his Gmail, that sort of stuff as well, didn't find anything. Okay, we're finally going to get his phone at the airport, then we'll have something. They are then stopped. They can't do that because of the alleged wipe of the phone, right?

And then that is where this charge comes. And I think that narrative makes sense based on the information that we have available.

Okay. We'll keep following this case, I'm sure. We'll leave that there, and when we come back, we'll talk about a story from Jason about a really wild AI powered TikTok shop.

Alright. And we are back. Jason, you wrote this one, and I edited it. The headline is Inside an AI TikTok shop slop factory that shills supplements recalled by the FDA. So this one is wild.

It's also complicated. I'm going to do this in a slightly different way to how we did it in the article. In the article, we like started with a video example. I think here, let's start with a lawsuit first, just so people know who all the players are. So who is suing who and like what are each of these companies?

Then we'll get to the videos.

Yeah. So I'm going to mention the company that's suing the other company and then stop talking about them because because ultimately, like, this lawsuit is kind of weird. It's basically, like, two one supplement company is suing another supplement company, and it's not clear kind of, like and and this comes through in the court documents. It's not clear, like, whether they have standing to do this, but this is just the means through which I discovered, like, some of the facts of the case because of the lawsuit and the filings and things like this. And there's actually a company that Manuel's covered before, so he can chime in, like, later about other things that, he found earlier.

So basically, there is a company called Human that sells something called beetroot powder, which is a supplement. I won't confess to know anything about beetroot powder. They are suing another company called Ambrosia Labs, which has a sub brand called Rosebella.

Rosebella is the important one

that people should podcast, you really only need to know about Rosabella. Yeah. And so Rosabella is this brand that also sells beet root powder. They also sell, like, moringa supplements, like things just like random supplements. And they largely sell these supplements on Amazon and they sell them on TikTok shop.

And over the last year and a half or so, most of their sales appear to be coming from TikTok shop. And the way that they are doing it is through this affiliate marketing network. And so basically, Rosebella doesn't appear to be making so many of the TikTok videos that are promoting its product. Basically, they are asking other people on TikTok to promote its product. And then if viewers like buy the supplement through that specific video on TikTok shop, they get a commission.

And this is like super common on TikTok shop. It's basically like, oh, you wanna buy this, like phone tripod or whatever. You'll have creators who just make videos about that phone tripod. And then anytime people buy that phone tripod from that person making the videos, they get some cut of the sale. And so this is this is like functionally how TikTok shop works.

But what we have here is a supplement company that is making, frankly, like supplements of dubious quality. And I say this because the FDA recalled one of its products for having, like, perhaps, caused drug resistant salmonella infections. So it's like quite quite like a dubious situation. But basically, like, you have people advertising this beet root powder, and they are making all sorts of unfounded claims about the supposed health benefits of this powder. And that would be one thing if this were largely people who are real human beings making these claims, but the the vast majority of Rosebela's, like, sales appear to be coming through AI influencers.

And so it is like an AI generated doctor being like, do you have belly fat? Like, look into Rosebella. The other, like, very popular type of video is like a TED Talk type one where you have like someone on a stage with a microphone. And we'll get into like how this works in a second. But basically, like, a lot of the videos are racist.

Like, there's no other way of saying it. Many of them are like, this is a secret Nigerian health trick or this is a secret Egyptian health trick, or Ugandan, or secret Indian. Like, basically, they they are pitching Rosebela this beetroot powder as, like, this is a mystical secret supplement that will help you lose fat, lower your blood pressure, etcetera, etcetera. And you don't know about it because, like, tribes in Africa discovered this and modern science doesn't know about it and I'm telling you about it. And then, like, the influencer, the AI influencer is supposedly, like, a Nigerian or an African, like, Ugandan or Egyptian or Indian, and it just like plays into like extreme stereotypes.

Yeah. We'll play some.

Why is nobody talking about what this bitch said? She's 81, but she looks like she's 30. Watch this.

The best way to clean your gut after thirty years of eating junk food, it ain't a salad. It ain't no fancy juice cleanse.

Let me just recap it. So Rosebella is basically getting supplements from one company, then selling them on TikTok shop. And that would be sort of just of scammy, but also kind of normal, like drop shipping happens all the time, right? What's different here is that there is this AI component as well, where it's not just like a little bit of AI, it's like the entire thing is basically built around these AI generated influencers. And it's not even just Rosebela itself really doing it, it's like all of these other channels which are promoting this to get a cut of it as well.

Like it's sort of like all of these people contributing to trying to push all of these sketchy supplements across TikTok shop. So now that people have seen or heard some of these examples, before we get to who's actually behind this, which is the most interesting part I think, how are these videos made as far as you know?

Yeah. Well, so so I guess back to the lawsuit, the the thing at issue, the question here largely is, like, how closely is Rosabella directing this entire operation? Are they making the AI? Are they, like, telling people how to make the AI? That sort of thing.

Or is it just like people are randomly deciding to do this? Rosebela has an affiliate marketing program, like, and this is a good thing to do. And it's just like an out of control marketing thing that Rosebela is like not really directing. And that is like the crux of the lawsuit. Basically, human, the competitor alleges that Rosebel is like directing the entire thing and controlling the entire thing.

And so then I did some research and I should shout out Conspirituality, which is another podcast that did an episode about Rosebella, Mallory DeMille. She basically, like, studies supplement companies, and she studied this entire operation at some point, about a month ago. And this was before the lawsuit was filed, like, we kind of dug a bit into other areas. But Mallory found, like, quite a lot of of this stuff that I'm about to talk about, but it's all worth going through because it's insane. So basically, the person who is running Rosebella, who invented Rosebella is this guy named Luka Boschenko.

He rose to prominence on in TikTok hustle bro circles by creating a caffeine vape company, like That sounds like a good combination. Yeah. Yeah. Basically. And then like this is his current sort of operation.

And if you've listened to any of our previous episodes about AI slop factories and things like this, Basically, what's happening here is the same thing that's been happening for all, like, AI slop that we've kind of reported on where there is, like, a buy my course component to this, like, we'll teach you how to be rich situation. And so Luca runs this Discord that's like a Rosebela Discord that I could not get into, but is, like, referenced in various videos that we found on YouTube and also in the lawsuit. And then there is, like, a a series of YouTube guides as to, like, how to make AI generated Rosebella ads. And there is, like, one main guy making the most prominent videos, would say, and his name is Harry Chang. And he has a series of videos, one of which is called how I print $51,000 a month profit with AI influencers, parentheses, feels illegal.

Like

Amazing title.

This video, he talks specifically about targeting elderly people, like elderly the elderly health niche, which is like the niche is just like the type of content that you're creating that that is like under under indexed. And then in like another video, he has just a series of of videos about how to do this. And like in that video, talks about all these people are out there making hot, young AI generated swimsuit models and OnlyFans models. And he's like, you should be making AI generated 50 year olds because you're trying to trick 50 year olds and you want like, 60, 70, 80 year olds, and so you want them to, like, have a relatable person to to talk to. And then there's, like, a video about specifically how he makes individual TikTok videos.

And, you know, it's like he uses Google's v o three. Like, he uses Eleven Labs for the voice. He uses a tool called HeyGen, which is, like, quite popular among AI slot people. And he basically in this video is like, I see other health related videos that go viral from influencers. I copy paste their script.

I run it through ChatGPT, and I, like, make an influencer that says the exact same thing. So like in many cases, this has like nothing to do with the supplement whatsoever. It's not like, oh, this is like what the supplement theoretically can do. He isn't fat.

It seems.

Yeah. Like one of the videos that he highlights is like, another, like, a human, like, health influencer talking about not eating for a while, like what not eating sugar can do for you. And I don't know, like I have no way of knowing if if this is even like accurate information, but it's not related to supplements. But he's like, here's what not eating sugar can do for you. And that video went viral, and he's like, I'm just gonna take that and say that it's like related to this beet root powder.

And so it's like marketing that's completely divorced from like any sort of reality.

Which when you gain the world of supplements and health, is not only sketch and immoral, like depending on what it is exactly, like it could be illegal or at least that is what the lawsuit is claiming, right? And I know that it's like the lawsuit is strange because it's like a competitor being like, hey, you can't do that sort of thing. And it's like, why are you suing? It is a strange lawsuit, but that is the argument basically that you're using AI to make all of these videos and the claims do fall under regulation, basically is what they're trying to get at. Right?

Yeah. I mean, you'd hope, but like supplement world is, like, notoriously under regulated both in marketing and in what you can sell and the claims that you can make and all of that. But, you know, there's an FDA recall for some of these. It's like, it's not like they're selling, like, I don't know, like doorbell doorknobs or something. They're selling, like, health products that people ingest.

So anyways, basically, like, there's there's this guy who is very closely, like, related to Rosebella. He who's, like, teaching people how to do all of this stuff. And then there's another video where, like, I went through many, many podcasts, YouTube videos, like Luka Wyschenko, the founder of this company, doesn't talk about Rosebela very much in any of the YouTube videos. He talks about, like, how to make money on TikTok shop, but then is, like, very vague about what he actually does. But then there's one video that's a a meetup for TikTok shop hustlers, more or less.

And it happened in New York City last year. And in this video, Luca is like, I got super rich off of Rosebella through this influencer network. Thank you so much. The influencer network, couldn't have done it without you. And then there's like a Rosebella table, and they go over the Rosebella table in the video, and these people are like, I do the AI.

Like, I do the AI for TikTok shop, and the other person's like, I do the AI for Amazon. And it's just like, they admit it situation. It's like I

knew you gonna say that.

They're just going I mean, they're just going, like, like, deep into detail about, like, how they do this, how it's all, like, largely money focused. Like, there's very little focus on, what the product is, what it can do, like, that sort of thing. They're just like, oh, like, we're printing money over here.

Well, that that that's the one thing I wanna stress is that which I think is the thing that was really wild to me, is that this Luca guy, yes, he basically is Rosebella through the stuff that you found in these videos, and and we'll get to them removing them as well. But when you saw this and I read it, it clicked for me that, oh, Rosabella is basically not a supplements company. It is an influencer growth marketing hacking whatever company. It is a army of people on Discord making AI influencers, and it's way more useful to think of Rosebela as that than even like a sketch supplements company. That's almost like a fiction by these people.

Well, that's the thing is like, especially, Harry Chang, like in his videos, he's like, you can sell literally anything. Like, we you could pick anything. We've decided to pick this because it has high margins and, like, the audience that we're marketing it to is, like, susceptible to this Which is old people. Essentially. Yeah.

And he also says like, The United States has terrible health care, so people are desperate for for solutions. And so, yes He's not wrong. I know. Exactly. Exactly.

But anyways, like, at the end of this influencer mark, like, just to answer the question of, like, how closely is Rosebella, like, working with these people? It's like Luca there's like a a speech portion of this meetup, and Luca calls Harry Chang up on stage and is like, this is the most important influencer that we have. And he gives him a Rolex.

And there's one person in particular I wanna shout out today. Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Harry Chang. Oh, shit.

Shit. I cannot be any more proud to be working on a brand with you. And for that, I wanna give to you this watch today.

The relationship is, like, extremely close, basically. And this story didn't perform that well. I think maybe because people have heard like, the New York Times wrote about this at some point. Like, they did a video that mentioned Rosebella, like didn't go into detail. Like, I think that this has kind of been like percolating in the for a bit and people are used to AI slop, but like this also the specifics here are so complicated.

It's like a complicated lawsuit. It's a complicated supply chain of the product of the marketing of how TikTok shop works, how all this stuff works. But, like, the end result is basically, like, not only is social media getting flooded with, like, this AI slop, but it's being used to shill products. It's being used to, like I mean, they're faking doctors and and all of this. And, like, on the other end of it is just like these 20 YouTubers who are have set up a similar content empire, like a similar Discord content empire to the ones that we've seen before, only now it's like being used to sell health products and it's wild.

And like the lawsuit doesn't mention this, so I didn't get into it. But Emmanuel wrote about Rosebella earlier this year in a different context entirely. Well, it's still AI influencer related, but like they were working with this a 16 company, a funded company, like, called Double Speed. Like, it's kind of crazy. What's going on there?

So Double Speed is a startup founded by this 20 year old. Like you said, a 16 z is backing it. The basic pitch is that it's a platform where you can operate dozens, maybe more AI influencers. And not only does the platform generate the AI influencers and the Instagram posts and carousels and videos and all of that and post them to TikTok, it's doing it via a phone farm. So, like, a bunch of physical phones that can then individually post the videos as a way to get around, like, the various anti astroturfing policies and detection methods that these platforms have.

At some point, I got a leak of all the clients that were using, DoubleSpeed, and Rosabella was one of them, and they were using the same type of AI generated content that you just wrote about. And I reached out to them and didn't hear from them for weeks. I had already published the story. And I heard back, I think months after publishing it, and they flat out denied that they used double speed, which I found to be very strange because I had internal documentation showing that they were using it, and I saw the actual posts that were clearly advertising their products. So I was like, are they lying?

Are they, you know, just not aware that somebody at the company is doing it? But now because of this lawsuit, because of this story you wrote, I think it's a better theory is that one of these other influencers who's part of this affiliate program was doing this. So it's like Rosabella directly wasn't doing it. Somebody who was profiting from, like, affiliate links was doing it. And maybe they know, maybe they don't, but they could deny that they know it.

Well, the really good thing in Rosebela's statement to you about double speed, Emmanuel, is like, no, we're not doing this. We only use like genuine artisanal influences on social media. And it turns out as Jason's reporting is like, oh, no, they're AI generated as well. They're just AI generated by individual people, not AI generated by an A16 funded, startup, basically. And like, okay, dude, I guess, you know.

Yeah. And I mean, so I reached out for comment, obviously, both to the lawyers and to Luca directly. And immediately after I reached out, like, bunch of videos got deleted off of YouTube. Yeah. Which is like, okay.

Like, did you not understand that this was sitting out there on the Internet, especially because, like, their legal defense is really weird. It's the one I'd expect them to make, but it's one where they're kind of like partial like in some places it seems like they're denying that they use AI at all. And then in others they're like, well, like people can do whatever they want. We don't control them. But like here's these videos showing that they are like heavily involved here.

And then I got a response from Rosebela, the company that I used like their email and form to to reach out to. And I'm like almost positive that it's like AI generated. And I say that just because like it didn't answer any of my questions and was just like, sorry, like our, affiliate program is no longer running. And it's like, do you think I'm applying for your affiliate program? Like, I don't think anyone read it.

I I like, that's kind of the vibe that I got. But then all these videos did come down off the Internet. We had archived them, thankfully. But, yeah, it's like, I I'll be curious to see if this lawsuit moves forward. I am not a lawyer, but I get the sense that, like, it's a pretty weird lawsuit to bring as discussed.

And so, like, I don't know if one competitor, like one company can sue a competing company being like, we don't like your ads and therefore it's like hurting our business. But I do hope it gets to discovery because if it gets to discovery, like, basically, if if the lawsuit moves forward even slightly, there'll be, like, a lot more interesting things coming out most likely.

Yeah. Well, we'll keep an eye on that. Leave it there for the moment. If you are listening to the free version of the podcast, I'll now play us out. But if you are a paying for a full media subscriber, we're gonna talk about how Google introduced a frankly insane AI feature that lets you put drone strikes on Google Earth.

I think you can make the Eiffel Tower collapse as well. I saw that as well. You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404media.co. We'll be right back after this. Alright.

We're back in the subscribers only section. We were gonna talk about one of Sam's stories, but she had to bounce. So let's improvise on this one. Excuse me. The headline of this one is Google Earth's new AI lets anyone fabricate completely bullshit satellites images.

Jason, you should have a contributing reporting thing on here. I'm gonna go add that in afterwards because I think you did probably the most important part, which was actually trying out the tool. How about I just describe the feature and then I'll throw it to you, Jason, you can sort of describe what you did. But last week on the Thursday, Google introduced this new AI feature into Google Earth. For those who don't know, Google Earth, it's not the same as Google Maps or Street View or something like that.

If you use the desktop app, you basically bring up, you know, the world, the globe, the Earth, and you can go to any location and you can explore and map stuff and it's all based on satellite imagery and it's really, really useful for open source intelligence investigators and journalists and researchers, NGOs and governments as well, presumably. And you go there because the data is accurate as far as you know, like, oh, I'm looking at this place in Cairo, I'm looking at this place in Nairobi, or I'm looking at this place in Paris, like whatever, and you think it's going to be accurate. It may not be the most up to date satellite imagery, like, maybe you go to a more dedicated company for that, but you can access, you know, what the world looks like through Google Earth, and I have definitely used it a bunch. So Google introduces this feature that lets you just type in some sort of prompt for generative AI depending on wherever you're looking, right? So OSINT researchers came across this very, very quickly.

And then they started typing in unusual stuff. Let me find an example here, just scrolling down. This is from Henk Van S, an OSINT researcher, and they said, tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border. Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran, then I put a fatal crash on a street in Amsterdam, Google's own satellite imagery underneath all three. What on earth is Google doing?

So you can basically change or rather you can create an image, kind of a screenshot of Google Maps, Google Earth sort of thing, but you've created new stuff. And think the intended use case and Google never answered, like, I straight up asked them, what is the intended use case of this? And they never gave me a good answer. But I think it was, you know, like real estate could use it to see what stuff would look like with developments and that sort of thing. I saw that going around, but to be clear, Google never told me explicitly.

Sorry. Can I just like I know this is not what Google said, but Yeah? To push back on it, to see what real estate looks like from space?

Yeah. I know, dude.

I just don't know.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't understand the use case. It like really

Yeah. Yeah. Dude, I think it's like, hey, I'm like a developer and I'm gonna bulldoze this village and put like skyscrapers here and I need a screenshot for my deck or something like that. Right. Or like or I need to like in the permit filing, will like include like, I'm gonna put a swimming pool in my backyard.

So I'm gonna, like, generate one. But I don't I don't know that that's, like, required from any sort of, like, filing body, but, like, I think that they're imagining, like, I'm gonna show this on a on a like, see this this urban blight, like, we're gonna clean it up by putting like a spaceship launch pad here. And I'm gonna like screenshot it and put it on this, like, PowerPoint presentation. Right? Like, that's the only thing I can imagine.

I just feel like, obviously, there's a lot of mock ups for real estate. You see those all over the place. You'll you'll walk by new construction and they'll be like, this is what we're building. But it's never from space. It's like some sort of, like, action shot vista of some kind at, like, street level.

I feel like I never see shots from space. To me, it feels like somebody was just like, hey, we have this gigantic trove of data, of satellite imagery, and we could just feed this into a model to make it generate images that look like that. Let's just do it. Why not? It kind of feels like a why not to me, and I'm speculating.

I mean, it doesn't matter. And the fact that they took it down

immediately is like, yeah, why are we doing this? It's really dumb.

It is really, really crazy. So they clearly didn't think about the risk of how this would be used because the recent researchers, as I said, just started doing stuff like that immediately. I wrote this up kind of quickly. I was actually on a train at the time, so I was kind of juggling a bunch of stuff. I wrote it up, I filed it to you, Jason.

But your internet was better than mine, so you were able to actually try out the tool before we publish. Like what what sort of stuff did you make? And like why did you make that?

I mean, it's completely it was like so easy. It was just typing it, like typing in Google. I mean, like, or chat GBT or anything. I just picked random places on the map to start with. I just zoomed in on like like the Sahara Desert because I just started clicking the plus sign because we were kind of going fast.

And I was like, put skyscrapers here. Like I just typed it and it did it immediately. So I I wanted to start with like a innocuous one to see if the tool is still working.

Well, there's a real estate developer looking to expand into the Sahara. Exactly.

So I did that and then I was like, okay, I'm gonna go to my neighborhood or like somewhere near me. I don't know why, but I was just like thinking that. And I typed like add homeless homeless encampment because it's like a big topic of conversation here. There is like a lot of disinformation on the internet about it where it's like sometimes like old I've seen satellite footage of homeless encampments used in like media to to demonstrate like how LA is faring, with this problem. And I was like, oh, I could imagine like someone wanting to to do something like this to like portray a specific narrative.

And I was able to add like, I just type add a homeless encampment and added like a bunch of tents like on this popular strip of of Venice, which is like was on the cover of New York Times at one point during the pandemic for like its homelessness problem. I then clicked around a little further and I was like, at a bomb blast. And it's like demolished some buildings, put a crater in the ground, added some like bombed out cars that didn't exist there. And, you know, it generated all this stuff immediately and with no pushback whatsoever.

Yeah. There was no warning like, oh, that might violate our terms of use. Are you sure you wanna do that? It just did

It just did it. And I could have done a lot more, but I got rate limited. I was using the tool too much. It wasn't like I was stopped because of the type of content I was making. I was stopped because I was like using too much, too many AI tokens, you know?

And so at that point, was like, okay, this is like enough.

Yeah. You've you've proven the point. And then I did one when I got on Better Internet where I looked at specific Google corporate buildings and I was like, okay, make a mass protest or something outside of these Google buildings and immediately it made like crowds of people around it and like it looks, you know, pretty convincing. I did make some that didn't look as good like I did one that was, oh, do tanks and troops invading Mar A Lago. And the tanks looked a bit crap, to be honest, like it didn't look good.

But like all of the other ones were pretty good and I think they were more representative of what the product could deliver. So we did that, we published with our examples and examples from the recent researchers. Google says in a statement, well, they sent this before we published and we included it. Well, it's okay because there's a watermark in there that people can use to check if this was made by AI so people aren't going to get fooled. And I'm like, that is the most brain dead response I've seen to something about disinformation.

Like, first of all, do you think people are going to see an image on social media? And I mean normal people, not like journalists or racing researchers. Do you think they're gonna see an image on social media and think, I'm gonna check if that has a watermark in it? Not just that. I'm gonna check if that specifically has a particular Google watermark in it and then go and check that with the tools or whatever.

No, nobody's gonna do that. That's not how information spreads online. Secondly, do you think the people using this tool to make bullshit care about that? They just need the tweet to go viral for a little bit. You know what mean?

Half hour, an hour, something like that, and it's already caused a ton of damage, so they're not going to care about that. Thirdly, you can get around watermarks often by just cropping the image or something like that. So that just didn't make sense to me whatsoever. I was telling a friend in a group chat as we were reporting it or after we published it, I said, oh, Google's gonna roll this back like immediately, I promise you. And then a couple of hours later, I get the email from Google saying, here's our new statement.

We are rolling back this feature as we put in more guardrails in place or whatever. But like, this is straight up one of the stupidest AI tools I've ever seen. Like, it comes to Emmanuel's point of like getting to what was even the point of this. Like, I literally can't see like a legitimate use case that doesn't come with all of this bullshit as well. I know.

It's crazy.

Yeah. I mean, the funniest thing to me and it's like Emmanuel already nodded at this, but, like, I believe that this exists simply because Google is like, we have to put AI into everything that we have. And it's funny because, like, the thing that the the, like, AI that Google is doing to all of its products is the same no matter what the product is. It's just like, generate an image, generate text, generate an image, generate a video, generate an image. Like, there's nothing more than that.

Like, that is what they are doing. Like, Google Docs. It's just like whatever that thing is, it's like, you wanna change it? We'll use AI to change it or or add, change or add content is like the only magic trick that they have.

Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Same. I think I'm in Google Docs right now, and it's like this fucking AI thing at the bottom describing changes you want make.

I swear I turn off. I'm gonna have to go into the settings and turn off again. Alright. We will leave that there, and I will play us out. As a reminder, four zero four Media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers.

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