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The Depravity Economy
Episode Notes
/Transcript
0:00 - Intro
1:32 - With Iran War, Kalshi and Polymarket Bet That the Depravity Economy Has No Bottom
51:37 - Amazon Change Means Wishlists Might Expose Your Address
YouTube Version: https://youtu.be/-OkUdEaRFGw
Hello, and welcome to the four zero four Media Podcast. I am Jason Kevlar. With me today are Emmanuel Meiberg. Hello. Samantha Cole.
Jason:Hello. And we have Matt Gault as well.
Matthew:Hello.
Sam:Joe is not here.
Jason:A reminder, Four Four Media is a journalist owned and operated publication. We could really use your support. You can go to 404media.co to subscribe. You will get bonus episodes and bonus segments, as well as early access to our interview podcast, comes out every Friday for subscribers and every Monday for non subscribers. So you can get early access to that.
Jason:As you'll notice, I am, I don't know, in a hotel room somewhere at Metac Conference. So that is why I don't have a beautiful script like Joseph. And also, it's like a running joke that none of us know how to host this podcast except for Joseph.
Sam:I told him right before this, I was like, we can do the intro. Yeah. And then we just
Jason:want to do the intro. Joseph offered to come on and do the intro for us and then leave.
Emanuel:Doesn't trust
Jason:We don't need that. We don't
Emanuel:need Did you do the intro off the dome?
Jason:Yeah, dude. I don't script. I'll script here.
Emanuel:Well. Crushed it. Thank you. It's pretty good.
Matthew:Have no idea.
Jason:Yeah. So this week, we are going to be talking about what's going on in Iran. Obviously, not all of it, but the couple of articles that we wrote. I guess we'll start with one that I wrote, which is called with Iran war, Khalshi and Polymarket bet that the depravity economy has no bottom. Emmanuel, this was your headline.
Jason:Thank you for that. I feel like depravity economy. Depravity? Depravity. Depravity.
Matthew:Depravity. Yeah.
Jason:Yeah. Has no bottom. I don't know. I guess I guess maybe we'll start by explaining what prediction markets are and where they came from. I would say So Yeah.
Emanuel:What the what the markets are, but then also like the obvious controversies that have come up since they became very popular in the last couple of years, I would say.
Jason:Yeah. So there's two major prediction markets. They're Kalshi and Polymarket. And weirdly, Kalshi seems to be bigger, at least in terms of money spent, at least when I look at things. But I I think of Polymarket first kind of.
Jason:But they are these apps and websites that allow you to basically bet on the outcome of anything that happens, like in the world. Essentially, they have taken the model that was started by DraftKings and which are gambling websites that allow you to bet on sports and have allowed you to bet on anything at all. And I think it's kind of important to start like very briefly with DraftKings and FanDuel because sports gambling has always been a thing. But what those places introduced was something called daily fantasy, where you were able to bet like like, if you had a fantasy football team, you would, you know, maybe pay money with your friends and you would wait an entire year to see, like, if you won or not. Whereas with DraftKings and FanDuel, you were suddenly able to bet on the outcomes of any individual game.
Jason:And then after that, you you could bet on the outcome of, you can bet on, like, hundreds of things per game. And so what it did was it took, like, the metabolism of these bets and made it really fast. Like, you could lose a lot of money very quickly. This has led to well, first of all, the these companies lobbied super hard all throughout the country to legalize their apps. And they're now legal in most of the country, but not all the country, I believe.
Jason:And sort of piggybacking off of that has been Polymarket and Kashi, which allows you to bet on the price of Bitcoin. It allows you to bet on sports games. It allows you to bet on who will win elections. It allows you to bet on the price of RAM. I don't know if you've seen that, but that's like a pretty interesting one.
Jason:And then notably, it allows you to bet on the outcomes of various geopolitical strife. So for months now, maybe, I guess, more than a year, like, you've been able to bet on whether The United States would bomb Iran and when that would happen and what that would look like. And if you bet yes and The US bombs Iran, then you get paid out. If you bet no and The US doesn't bomb Iran, then you get paid out and vice versa. You can get a lot more specific than just like, will The US bomb Iran?
Jason:Yeah.
Emanuel:Yeah. Just a couple of things. One is, obviously, the business of prediction markets in the form of poly market and call sheet is, as you say, an offshoot of sports betting becoming completely legal in most of the country and very popular. I would just add to that that prediction markets have existed for hundreds of years in the form of like an academic scientific method of predicting things. Usually they're done among like groups of experts on conflict or markets, and it's just like one way of gathering information, and the idea is that you get, the theory at least, is that you get better predictions from experts about what's about to happen if there is money on the line.
Emanuel:And somebody basically just took that fairly interesting, fairly useful model and said, let's let anyone bet on the same thing and make money off of it, which is both, as we'll get into, almost definitely a bad business, but also devalues the very idea of like what prediction markets are good for. I actually wanted to, like before we get into like the Iran issue specifically, and why we're talking about this today, some examples of how letting anyone bet on anything can go sideways. Matthew, luckily is here. A few weeks ago, you wrote about a I think it was a polymarket bet that was related to the war between Ukraine and Russia, and that appears to almost have definitely been cheated in a sense. Can you talk a bit about like what happened there?
Matthew:Yeah. So people have these really granular bets about how the war is going in Ukraine between Russia and Ukraine, down to like the street level, like what sections of the country are going to get taken. So for these kinds of bets, you have to have something that is an arbiter. You have to have some sort of third party that says like, Russia has officially taken this town square. Ukraine has officially defended this town square.
Matthew:So what Polymarket has been using for a long time is a map that's put out by the ISW, which is this kind of independent think tank that literally all it does is it tracks the street level of these conflicts. They were watching one in this particular town, and a lot of money was laid on whether or not Russia was going to take it. And it appears that someone at ISW who had access to edit the map laid a bet and altered the map kind of in off hours to make it appear that Russia had taken a town square and collected their money, that after the money was paid out, because this is all crypto, it's not like the money can't just simply be returned. Like once the bet was paid out and resolved, the map was edited back, ISW saw this, they did make a Somebody was let go or is no longer with ISW, but that's just kind of like one small controversy out of myriad controversies based Yeah.
Emanuel:And the lesson being basically, you let anyone bet on anything, you have more ways for people to profit and manipulate the results is essentially like the gist of what the issue is there.
Matthew:Perverse incentives create perversion, right?
Emanuel:Exactly. So leading up to The US and Israeli attack on Iran, and during the protests that preceded them, there's been a lot of bets on the prediction markets about Iran, and one of those was about whether or like for how long Ayatollah would stay in power, and obviously, he is now confirmed to have been killed in an airstrike. He is no longer in power, but Khalshi is not honoring the bets on that as predicted. Jason, can you talk about why that is and what the controversy is there?
Jason:Yeah. So the specific bet was written as Ali Khomeini out as supreme leader question mark. Like, that's pretty much it. Like, yes or no. And then, I guess, a date.
Jason:And he was killed in an airstrike. So kind of by definition, he's out as supreme leader. But then Kalshi's CEO and founder, who's this guy, Tarek Mansour, basically said, like, we're not paying this bet out because we don't allow people to directly profit from death, which is super interesting for a few reasons that I think we'll talk about. But I think that, I guess, Call She just doesn't wanna get into, like, an assassination betting pool market more or less. But basically, he argued that, like, the bet was supposed to be about whether the, like, Iranian regime was toppled and not just the Ayatollah.
Jason:And therefore, like, because the regime is still in power, the bet doesn't pay out. And, like, because he died, the bet is essentially, like, null and void. And I guess to be fair, I I don't think we need to be that fair in this situation, but to be fair, he, like, pulled out some, like, bylaws, like, in the terms and conditions of Polymarket. And it's like in the event of death, like, this this bet won't pay out. Very notably, it's like when you click deeper into these bets, it explains how, like, how you would decide who who wins, like, under what conditions as Matt Matt was saying, like, you need some sort of arbiter of the truth, which is another really interesting thing about these markets.
Jason:It's like we're constantly fighting about the truth and what what ground reality is and that sort of thing. And that's like the argument that Polymarket and CallShare are making is like, because there's money on the line, like we will be the arbiters of truth, like, as determined by whether these bets pay out or not, more or less. But basically, what they said was that winning that bet, quote, requires a broad consensus reporting indicating that core structures of the Islamic Republic have been dissolved, incapacitated, or replaced by a fundamentally different governing system or otherwise lost de facto power over a majority of the population of Iran. This could occur via revolution, civil war, military coup, or voluntary abdication, but only qualifies if the Islamic Republic is no longer exercises sovereign power. And then it it goes on and on and on like this.
Jason:And so, basically, it's like, if there's a coup, you win. If there is, like, a weird revolution, you win. But it doesn't say, like, if he dies, you win. And to be clear, like, $54,000,000 was bet on this by by people. And so, basically, what Call She did was, like, we're just gonna give everyone their money back and their fees, but we're not going to, like, pay the bet winnings from this.
Jason:And people have been, like, really mad about it.
Emanuel:I think it's pretty obvious that this is not Kalshi trying to like save money. Kalshi's business model allows for all these payments to be paid out no matter who wins the bet. They are trying to draw a line in the sand about, I mean, he explicitly said, like, we don't want any bet to allow people to profit from someone's death. When you allow people to bet on active conflicts, that is going to be an issue even if they do try to draw that line. Can you explain, like, what are some of the obvious problems with like trying to to frame it that way?
Jason:Yeah. I mean, I guess I'll first say that the idea of like assassination markets has been a thing in cyberpunk for a really long time. And then there's been numerous, like, dark web scandals where there's, like, a kill list and, like, Bitcoin tied to, like, if this person dies, you make money. And those are those are some of the most, like, dystopian controversial things that could possibly exist. And it should be noted that, like, Cauchy and Polymarket are, like, super unregulated in this administration.
Jason:It's just like what's happening there is completely insane, but there's almost no regulation of what's going on. And I think that what he's what he's trying to avoid here is a situation where he, like, are able to bet on the deaths of other people and then someone goes out and does like an assassination over it. Like, it's it's some of the bleakest stuff you could possibly imagine. But in trying to draw this line, it's like, well, you can bet on like 50 other things about the Iran war. You can bet on things like gas prices, which if you bet on gas prices going up, that kind of necessarily is betting on this conflict getting worse and and, you know, people are going to die in in that sense.
Jason:You can bet on things like, is Iran gonna attack countries in The Gulf on a specific day, like, retaliatorially. And, of course, that involves, like, missiles and bombings and all this sort of thing and people dying. And it doesn't it doesn't involve the deaths of, you know, the Ayatollah or a president or a well known executive or anything like that, but it involves deaths of civilians and like people in the military and things like that. And so they are drawing this line, but it's extremely, murky. And then I think you raised the point, which was a really good one that was like betting on the Ayatollah to stay in power would be betting on, like, the deaths of protesters in Iran because this this is a regime that has empowered itself by, like, simply crushing dissent, and in many cases that involves, you know, quasi judicial killings and and things like this and and, you know, executing protesters and stuff.
Jason:So kind of any way you slice it, it's betting on death. And then I guess the last thing I'll just say, kind of going back to prediction markets being around for a long time, it's like, I guess we should just recognize that the stock market is similar to this, like commodities trading is similar to this, like you can bet on, like, that is gambling to an extent. It's like there's so many people, like Palantir became a meme a meme stock for example. And like for Palantir stock to price to go up, that requires, like, horrible, like, human rights abuses and expansion of the surveillance state and, like, all this sort of thing. And so, I mean, there's many layers to it, but I think what happens with, like, Polymarket and Kashi is just, like, all of that kind of, like, artifice has been removed.
Jason:It's just straight up, like, what's going what's gonna happen in this war, bros? Like, let's get let's let's bet on it.
Emanuel:Yeah. It's it's like people are gonna die. There's no obvious way to make money off of that unless you're like an arms trader. How can the average person get in on on this war profiteering? How about we do it via prediction markets?
Emanuel:As you've alluded to, that this is sort of more masks off version of a lot of what is happening in the economy anyway, you did come up with a we we coined a term called the depravity economy. What do you what does that describe? Like, what what is the broader sense in the economy that you think this is an example of?
Jason:Yeah. I think they're not all exactly related, but it's hard to divorce what's happening here from what we've seen happen in the economy over the last decade where first, you know, you have people betting on Bitcoin, then you have people betting on, like, increasingly bizarre meme coins that many of which are just like blatantly a scam. You have like weird drop shipping and scams and just like hustle bros doing like lord knows what to to make money. You have people like throwing their stimulus checks into GameStop. You have the AI Gold Rush.
Jason:You have like like like this, yeah, sports gambling, things like this. And and I feel like I don't know Yeah. Where the bottom Like, I have no idea how much worse this can get, but it feels like this is reaching sort of the culmination where, like, you can make you can make like a million dollars if you buy this NFT of a of a gorilla and like flip it at the right time. And now it's just like, you can make tons of money if you are super up on the news or have some sort of inside information and you bet on just like death and destruction and human suffering. And, yeah, I don't know.
Jason:It's just like all vice there's like no all vices are game at this point, I guess. It's like whatever you want, like make money on whatever you want, like human trafficking, like who knows? Like Lord knows what's going on here. And it's just I I think the other kind of weird thing about this is that these markets have been legitimized so quickly because they're one of the few entities in The United States that still has so much money to advertise because their margins are just insane because they're just taking money from people all day every day. I mean, they're they're casinos, and so they make tons of money.
Jason:And so if you listen to podcasts, if you not ours. If you hear an ad for one of these, please tell us. Like, if you watch the Super Bowl, like, Polymarket and CallSheet are, like, on the broadcast. If you go to a sporting event, like, their names are on the, you know, the the court and things like this. And it's just been legitimized because there's so much money here.
Jason:And then increasingly, we're learning like Kalshi just signed some deal with the Associated Press. Like, Polymarket is integrated into Substack, and that is now specifically like the business model of Polymarket where they are talking about how, like, you're gonna get your news from Polymarket, which is really That's
Matthew:been Shane Copeland, the CEO. That's been his whole project if you listen to him talk of, Polymarket is that he thinks that Polymarket is a better way to deliver news to people. It is the future of news that has been like his long line the entire time.
Jason:So here's their argument for why they're allowing betting on the Iran situation. It's quote, the promise of prediction markets is to harness the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate unbiased forecast for the most important events to society. That ability is particularly invaluable in gut wrenching times like today. After discussing with those directly affected by the attacks who had dozens of questions, we realized that prediction markets could give them the answers they needed in ways TV news and X could not. And so they're like, yeah, get get your news from us.
Jason:Like, we you will know because we'll either pay it out or we won't. And then if you look at their Twitter feed, it's just like a bizarre wire service Twitter feed where they're like, France says it's gonna, like, get nukes, like more nukes. 41% of all scheduled flights in The Middle East have been canceled today. And then some of the tweets are like, new poly market, is the Ayatollah gonna be out? Like, there's they're they're interspersing this with, like, ways that you can get in on the action of the chaos that we've seen.
Emanuel:I dropped a link to this website in our work Slack, and I haven't written a story about it yet. If anybody who is listening knows more about it, please get in touch with me. But there's a site called, I think it's Roobet, and a lot of people are streaming it, and it basically shows traffic cameras from across the world and overlays like markers on the road on top of it, and allows people to bet on like how many cars are going to make it through this intersection in the next fifteen minutes. And when I think about the depravity economy, what I think about is the point in, like, mostly American capitalism, our economy where it's like increasingly there is less real production and more financialization of everything, and that is just like all that is left to do, and it's the only way for people, it's the only way they think they can actually get rich, is to find something that is like crypto, find something that is like the stock market, find something to bet on, because the idea of like actually working hard and getting a real job that is stable and retiring is like absurd at this point.
Emanuel:So people would rather like put it all on black. And you follow that to its logical endpoint, and that's people betting on whether world leaders are going to get blown up or not.
Jason:That's the Nothing of value is being created here.
Emanuel:Right. Exactly. So before we get off Iran, Matthew also wrote a story with the headline, Amazon Data Center is on Fire after Iranian Missile Strikes on Dubai. Matthew, how did we first learn that something happened to our precious AWS services in The Middle East?
Matthew:People complaining about not being able to access certain services on social media from Dubai, and also like all of these videos of as the Iranian strikes occurred in The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, there was a lot of really incredible Instagram reels of influencers pointing at the sky and watching the missiles crash down. And then AWS has a health dashboard where they publish information about what's going on, and shortly after the missile strikes, I think the first we heard of it was on March 1, they start posting updates about why people can't access certain services in the Middle East region. And a couple days ago, or yesterday when I first wrote this story, it was because they just said that there had been damage to the centers, and
Emanuel:they've Unspecified damage.
Matthew:Unspecified damage. And I reached out to them, and they were like, Yes, something has happened. And then they just referred me back to the dashboard. Yesterday at seven Eastern Time, they finally kind of came out with it and were like, Okay, it was Iranian drone strikes on two data centers in Dubai, and another drone strike that landed near one in Bahrain and exploded, but wasn't specifically at that data center knocked these data centers off. It's a thing where like, who knows when those are going to come back up?
Emanuel:Yeah. So we don't know if either of these data centers was targeted or not. Personally, this is completely me speculating, but it's hard to imagine at this point that they would be targeted. I feel like Iran would have far more high priority targets in the region. But it is a very interesting development.
Emanuel:I don't know if people know, but Matthew also has a podcast about conflict called Angry Planet. So the one question I wanted to ask you about this before we move on to the next segment is, like, do you think countries are looking at a missile strike on a data center, and will that actually does that change like offensive slash defensive postures for countries around the world? Are worried now about data centers being Because you can imagine how 100%. That would destabilize countries or increasingly as militaries rely on AI and big data to like What do
Matthew:was the big defense story in the week leading up to the attack on Iran is anthropic fighting with the DoD, and are they going be declared a supply chain risk? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Will all of like Claude and all of these other services live and die by these data centers that are being built across the entire planet. It would rely on human or signals intelligence being able to tell you which part of a service is being serviced by which data center, but that's a surmountable problem. You could figure that out.
Matthew:And then yeah, those are targets. If I can knock out the system that's going to help you do targeting or help you that's like running missile defense, I'm going to do it. It'll be the first thing I attack. So yeah, absolutely. I think data centers are And it causes this kind of civilian disruption like we're seeing here.
Matthew:Yeah, those targets for sure.
Emanuel:Yeah. I think you look at Ukraine and you see like the energy grid constantly being attacked, and it's hard to imagine in the future how like in a future conflict, it's data centers because that would be equally disruptive potentially. Okay.
Matthew:Well, and there's gonna be energy infrastructure built around all of these data centers too. Yeah. Whether it's where we're gonna build nuclear power plants and all, like, all sorts of things.
Emanuel:Okay. We'll leave that there, and then when we come back, we'll talk about a story I wrote about Wikipedia.
Sam:And we're back. This is a story that'll be out by the time this podcast comes out, but is not yet published. So the, the tentative head right now is AI translations are adding hallucinations to Wikipedia articles, and this is a story by Emmanuel. So Emmanuel's been following this. The the Wikipedia saga and Wikipedia beef is like a recurring recurring beat for four zero four, and it's always a delight and never complicated.
Sam:But, you know, the story is no different. So, I mean, why don't you just kinda set us up a little bit to begin with with some context on Wikipedia and how it's dealing with AI? If that's something that you can get into, like, elevator pitch level explanation. Like, what are they what's their stance at this point? How are they kind of how are they dealing with with AI and the influx of generative AI in general that'll kinda set us up into this AI translations problem?
Emanuel:I'll try to do it as briefly as possible because as you say, it is very complicated. I'm gonna talk exclusively about the position of Wikipedia editors, Wikipedia volunteers as opposed to the Wikimedia foundation, because it's quite different, but what Wikipedia editors think actually matters more because those are the people who govern the articles you see in Wikipedia. Their position, think, is extremely nuanced and sophisticated and good, and as I've said before, should be a model for the rest of the Internet, but it is essentially that they are not making blanket rules about generative AI because they are open to the possibility of it improving, of it becoming better. They are generally like a very permissive community, but what they are doing is establishing, this is my wording, I think it is fair, a kind of zero tolerance for AI generated errors. So they are aware that there's a bunch of generative AI, there is like a special task force of Wikipedia editors that goes around, tries to find generated content with errors on Wikipedia and fix it, and they are like implementing special rules on how to edit and fix AI generated content.
Emanuel:So that's kind of the the general outlook. It's no blanket rules against AI, but high, high vigilance about the errors that it produces because they're already seeing it.
Sam:Yeah. That's fair. And if you're not checking if you're using AI and not checking it, that's a huge problem and a red flag for you as an editor. So this story focuses on revolves around something called the Open Knowledge Association or OKA. Can you break down what the Open Knowledge Association is?
Sam:And how is that what role is that playing in this this AI translation relations problem? Like, what what is the problem that we're seeing?
Emanuel:So I think if you go to OKA's website and read what they do, it kind of looks bigger than it actually is. My understanding after talking to the founder is that it is basically a side project for a Google engineer who's based in Switzerland, I believe, and the idea is that he's a native French speaker. He thought that there were a lot of articles in French that are not available in English, and there's lot of articles in English that are not available in French, and he's like, I would really love it if there were more translations of articles across Wikipedia generally, which I think is like a fine and noble goal. But the way that he wants Okay A to treat this problem or this challenge is they pay translators, mostly people in the global South who don't get paid a lot of money, a few $100 a month, with the expectation of like forty hours a week for that pay, and explicitly instructing them to use AI to aid them in the translation.
Sam:Okay. Gotcha. And you you mentioned you talked to the founder. What did he have to say for himself in general? Like, what was his stance on all of this?
Emanuel:So I I talked to him over the over email over the past couple of days. His name is Jonathan Zimmerman, by the way. And it was pretty interesting because I'm coming to him after wading through very long, Wikipedia discussions. Something that I love about reporting on Wikipedia, there's two things. One, if you're talking to Wikipedia editors, they're the best sources in the world because all they do is write very concise, precise, informative articles.
Emanuel:So you'll ask them a question, they're like, here's the information, like in the right order, summarized as efficiently as possible. So I was talking to an editor who was a source of mine on a few previous stories who first informed me about this, and then the other thing that's great about reporting on Wikipedia is if it's a controversy among editors, the way they govern Wikipedia is that they have all these conversation in the open in talk pages. And essentially what has happened is that a few people started to notice pretty glaring editors, things like hallucinated citations. This is something that is very common with the LLMs. You'll ask an LLM to generate a scientific paper, it will generate something that reads a lot like a scientific paper with citations, but then the citations don't exist.
Emanuel:It's like you'll click on a link to a scientific article and it goes nowhere because it just made up the URL. So there were errors like that, there were factual errors, there were formatting errors because people, these okay editors or translators were copy pasting articles to LLMs and then submitting them as drafts to Wikipedia, and the editors noticed a pattern that it was all these okay editors, then they kind of investigated the company, and they found that not only were they instructed to use AI, not only Zimmerman disputes this, but to them, the quota seemed pretty high. Like, there was like a high churn of articles that you could imagine would result in more errors. At some point, they claim they were specifically instructed to use Grock to translate the articles, which I think is especially a slap in the face to Wikipedia editors because Grok made this Wikipedia competitor called Grokopedia, which is, I mean, I don't know if Jason has a more fair description of it, but it's like, it ingested all of Wikipedia and then AI generated an alternative that kind of has like a right wing skew sometimes, and then also has a bunch of errors because it's AI generated.
Jason:I would just add that sometimes that is then filtered back into other places and sometimes back into Wikipedia, not for very long, but there's been a couple instances of that.
Emanuel:Yeah. It's it's a real, like, pollutant, and that's actually the the reason I wanted to write this, because this is essentially what happened here. You have Wikipedia translators using Grok and then introducing Grok errors back into Wikipedia. Sorry. All that being said, to get to your question, I talked to Zimmerman, and, you know, he his position is the position that I see from a lot of people who are generative AI believers.
Emanuel:He thinks that generative AI is useful. It can make people work faster. It can make Wikipedia better. He's not alone in that. I've written before about Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, also is not as optimistic, but he's at least like open to the idea, and he says, Yes, there are errors, but we have very strict rules about editors having to look and verify that the output is correct, and if there are any errors that got introduced to Wikipedia, he apologizes and says that they need to like review and improve their process around that, but he did not say like, oh, my bad, maybe we shouldn't use AI in generating Wikipedia articles.
Emanuel:Not only that, he also suggested that one new measure they're introducing is having an AI check the output of the AI translations, which as we talked about very recently with like something like AlphaSchool, is a, at this point, established flawed method. You can't have an LLM that is prone to one type of errors. Check the output of the same LLM for the same errors because it's lacking the ability to catch its own mistakes.
Sam:Yeah. Always a great choice to send AI after AI. So they went back and forth, the editors, and they caught a bunch of these errors from OKA. Many of them, like you said, were the the source citation errors and just going back and actually looking at the source material and saying, oh, that that book doesn't even talk about that page doesn't even talk about what this Wikipedia article is about. So humans are having to go in and check the work of AI as usual.
Sam:So where did the editors land on this? What was the final call for them? Maybe not even final, maybe this evolves, but where's the call for them right now on whether or not they're gonna let okay keep contributing, or okay translators, I guess?
Emanuel:Yeah. Again, I think the response here from editors speaks to how reasonable, fair, and moderate the Wikipedia governance model is. There's no blanket rule against okay, there's no blanket rule against AI. What they've done is they flagged a couple, or not a couple, a few okay translators who have made mistakes, and now they're subject to additional review, as opposed to a regular translator or a regular editor. And then the other thing is there's like a, I think it's like a two strikes, then you're out kind of rule.
Emanuel:So if an editor uses AI translation twice, and they're like, they're given a warning, but for two times, like they find two drafts that have AI generated errors, just, they prevent the accounts from making contributions. I think that's like a very measured, responsible response. Zimmerman is not thrilled about that, but also said that he was like part of the discussion and is, you know, accepts the the new restrictions.
Sam:That's good, I guess. I I also wanna point out just the AI in translation is a very tricky problem in general. Language is very fluid, has lots of meanings in different contexts, something that AI can't understand in a lot of contexts. It doesn't have the human capacity for language. Obviously, it's doing, you know, language prediction models and things like that.
Sam:But a couple months ago, Galt actually published an article about Harper Collins using AI to translate Harlequin novels, which I think is a very interesting use for translation considering harlequin romance novels are this very formulaic prolific, like, sort of genre of book that gets churned out in mass. No offense to, like, horror novels and and the authors and their work, but it's it's based on being able to pump through these books very quickly. And they're globally popular. So Harper Collins said, you know what? We're going to start using AI in France to eliminate human contract human contractors who are translators who did the work before, which is awful, but is is also relying on humans to check the work of the AI in addition to this.
Sam:Did did this story bring up memories of that story, Galt? Because there's a really good comment section happening on our site with the Harper Collins blog and people debating whether whether this is a good use of AI or not.
Matthew:Oh, they I haven't seen that debate.
Sam:No. It's not so much debate. It's like thoughtful thoughtful comments being made, not
Matthew:so It's much a super interesting. It it did bring up those memories for me. It also, you know, and to even further it's like we saw, I assume, the New York Times profile with the romance authors that are using AI to generate like 40 books a year, I thought was also pretty interesting.
Sam:Especially since like AI can do Like Chad Chubby is gonna do erotica. There are so many like LMs that do erotic writing now.
Matthew:Makes And those women that the New York Times profiled are also have a side hustle teaching other people how to do it.
Sam:Oh, hell yeah. We're doing Pyramid, baby.
Matthew:Yeah. So it's like their whole scheme is, look, I'm generating one romance novel in forty five minutes, and on top of that, I am teaching you how to do-
Sam:Selling a class.
Matthew:Selling class. But I do wonder like what the bottom is for that. How many people are actually reading those books? What the bottom is for it? What the market is going to be like in the future when specifically on art, maybe people are more interested in having something that's explicitly labeled as this was written entirely by a human being.
Matthew:But I think that romance is an especially interesting place to watch because it is so business forward and formulaic that I think that it's one of those places where any of the advances and the fights are going to happen there first, right? And then like all of that will kind of trickle down into the rest of the genres.
Jason:I feel like the market for those books is like, can you trick people into buying them on accident?
Matthew:Yep. Because like if you've paid a buck 50 or whatever it is, there's a good chance you're not going to fight Amazon to get it back. Or Amazon has like the Kindle Direct program where somebody pays like a sub and then they can read as many of these as they want, and if they get a couple pages into one and see like an AI artifact, well, they're just going to move on to the next one, right? And it's maybe already counted as a view for the purposes of whoever's trimming out the slob. And I kind of have this wonder in spaces like that if we're not going to get to a place where people abandon spaces that are just kind of filled up with AI, and if that may be one of them, but I'm wondering if that'll eventually be a reaction.
Emanuel:Have either of you ever used AI translation in your regular life? Like either talking to an app and having it translate, or just like translating some text. Have you ever done that? Well, I
Matthew:mean, that's what Google Translate is. Right? Right. But
Emanuel:I bring that up because Google Translate actually, I think, is AI now, but I've used it a couple of times, and it is actually, like, shockingly good, much better than the the stuff you'd usually get from Google Translate. I used it twice. One is I think I was translating something from for my mom from Hebrew to English, and I I put it into Chateapiti. I translated it. I read the output.
Emanuel:I'm I'm fluent in Hebrew, I could check it and see that it was good, but it worked very well, and she ended up using it. Then I was trying to explain something to my neighbors who only speak Spanish, and I did the same thing, and I asked Jason to kind of look over the translation and see if it was okay. And he actually made some tweaks to it. They weren't like mistakes, but they were like the language was very formal or something like And he was like, nobody would actually talk like this, so he made some changes. The point I'm making, in both cases, LLMs, not surprisingly, extremely good at translating from one language to another, can be a very useful tool.
Emanuel:Crucially, in both cases, I was able to to to check it with somebody who actually speaks the language, which is is what you should be doing. And then it would theoretically,
Jason:it's fine. Use it all the time, like all the time. This is probably the most common use because, one, it's like YouTube has an auto translate feature now. So in addition to auto generated captions and transcripts, which are really useful for our reporting just in terms of finding things in really long videos, I can now watch an hour long video in Hindi and have it auto translate subtitles to English. And I can tell that it's not that good.
Jason:Like, you can definitely just tell it's not that good. I don't speak any Hindi, but the English that it translates to is very broken often or sometimes it just like can't do it. But for information gathering purposes, it's like incredibly useful. And that's how I did almost all of the AI slop reporting just in terms of finding out like relevant portions of different videos based on the auto translate. And then we got people who actually speak Hindi to to do like the direct translations for us.
Jason:But like that's an example. I mean, obviously, things like translating websites and like news articles, kind of using the built in tools as well. It's like, you you can tell, like, if you're translating like a a German article to English, like using the, like translate this entire website. Sometimes things are like broken, but it is useful to like get the gist of what's going on. And then, you know, for your own like information gathering purposes, you don't necessarily need it to be a 100% accurate.
Jason:But for something like Wikipedia, where you're like directly translating and then publishing, like that's that's not the case. You do need it to be accurate.
Matthew:Emmanuel, what did you translate for your mom, said?
Emanuel:I believe it was like an artist statement that she previously wrote and needed in English, or something like that, yeah.
Matthew:I think the use case right is huge because we're talking about like for information gathering purposes and being able to have someone check it afterwards. And I think like in the instance of like romance novels or art, and this is a huge thing that we haven't really covered, but I've kind of watched that's playing out in like anime and the translations of JRPGs. Don't laugh. You're making that face. But it's a big deal.
Matthew:A lot of these companies are moving to like auto translated, and people are upset. Because there's something like when you're looking at artistic expression, a translation is not just about like a one to one analog, right? There is nuance in the language, and a literal translation may not get across the same meaning in a piece of art. And I think that the LLMs have trouble with that, right? Have AI created
Emanuel:you ever read two translations of the same book, two different translations of the same book?
Matthew:Yeah. It's Mhmm. It's fascinating. Right?
Emanuel:No, it is. No, it's it's good. I love that we're very cultured like that. But it
Matthew:is cool. You're having that fight right now with the is it the Iliad or the Odyssey? The the there's a new translation.
Jason:Guys, guys. We gotta go. We gotta go on to that word. So like, yeah.
Emanuel:Had So that new translation of Madame Bovary. Please. Reads modern novel, Jason.
Jason:You gotta
Emanuel:check it out. Okay. Let's leave that there. And when we come back to our subscribers only segment, we will talk about Amazon Wishlists. And we're back.
Emanuel:Hello. Hello, subscribers. This next story is from Samantha. The title is Amazon change, it means wishlists might expose your address. Sam, how did you first notice something was happening here?
Sam:So I like many stories that I write, I noticed sex workers and adult content creators on x and blue sky freaking out. This is how many stories began on my beat. I specifically saw Crystal Davis posting about this on x. She posted a screenshot of an email that she got from Amazon that explained new changes to Amazon's wish list policies and was like, hey. Check this out.
Sam:You need to go check your settings right now. And then I saw more and more people talking about it, and it was happening kind of that day. So that was the first time I saw it.
Emanuel:And what did it say exactly? Like, what is changing?
Sam:So the email that people got, if you were if you had a wish list, had a public wish list specifically, because you you can do private ones and you can do public ones, it said, we're informing you about a change starting March 25. We will remove the option to restrict purchases from third party sellers for list items. Then it goes on to say, when gifts are purchased from your shared or public lists, Amazon needs to provide a shipping address to sellers and delivery partners to fulfill these orders. So those would be the third party sellers that they previously didn't really allow you to have on lists. It used to just be Amazon fulfillment only.
Sam:Now they're saying you can buy from a third party, whatever, if there's an item on here that is has a third party seller option like some some items do. So they're basically giving people a heads up. Like, hey. We're making this change in a month. If you have a wish list that is public in any way and people can just buy from it anytime, you need to check your settings and make sure your your address is not your residential address unless you want that to be out there exposed.
Sam:It was kind of the the subtext here. They literally did say, during the process, your address may become visible to gift purchasers and to help protect your to help protect your privacy, we recommend using a PO Box or a nonresidential address for any list you share, which I thought was interesting for them to give a little tip as part of this change. Usually, it would be like, you know, good luck. Figure it out. But they were like, hey, use a PO box if you're gonna do this sort of public wish list thing.
Emanuel:So there are many I get an email every day from the the many services and subscriptions that I have that are informing me about changes to privacy settings or other policies, terms of service, whatever. We can write like a 100 stories a day about this type of change. But I feel like we're dancing around the bush a little bit about like why this is a big deal and why this is something we care about. Can you, like, explain both the utility and the culture of wishlists in sex work?
Sam:Yeah. For sure.
Emanuel:Online sex work?
Sam:Yeah. So it's wish lists are really popular with sex sex workers and especially Doms, dominatrixes, and anyone doing that kind of work because you can send if you're a client of a sex worker, you can send a gift. You can send a tribute. It's not money changing hands. It's like, oh, I like your work, so I'm gonna send you this blanket that you said you liked and it's on your wish list, or I'm gonna send you like, some people do fun things like decor.
Sam:Like, you can say, oh, I'm a cam model, and I'm gonna put it on my wish list, like, a new neon sign. And other people use it as or you can use it as a mix of things. You can say, I I need a 40 pack of paper towels, and I'm gonna put that on my wish list. Instead of saying, give me a $150, you can say, here's my wish list, choose from it to get my needs met in that way. So it's really popular with sex workers.
Sam:It's also really popular with influencers, anyone who's doing any kind of like fan facing work is is these are popular with you can also I mean, I haven't seen this personally, but people were commenting on the story about how teachers use it for, like, stocking up their classroom. It's like if you put a a ton of school supplies, like, unfortunately, the country that we live in, teachers have to crowdfund their classrooms. So what they're putting on there is, like, pencils, paper, crayons, stuff like that. So it's not just sex workers that are doing wish list gift exchange sort of work, but it is definitely I would say the most common use that I've seen is sex workers, but I'm also in, like, a bubble of that's my beat. But I would say they probably popularized it.
Sam:And Amazon for a long time was really useful for this because it didn't reveal your address, which was important. It's not like you could say, here's a list of things I want. Here's my address. Send it here. It was that it would not reveal anything but your I think it was just your city and state, which is also not ideal, but, like, a lot of people are public with that anyway.
Sam:So this change was huge because that is the whole point of Amazon wishlisting is being semi private about where you're located, especially your home delivery address, which I think most people don't want public to the world.
Jason:Yeah.
Emanuel:All due respect to our teachers who we love, please buy them pencils and textbooks via Amazon or whatever means. I would I would give more credit to online sex workers here for a few reasons. There is like the, like the fun, like fetish, I don't know how you want to call it, aspect of it where it's like, there's like, there's a financial domination aspect of it. There's also like, oh, there's lingerie on my wish list. Do you want to buy me the lingerie and then you'll see me wear it on during a stream or something?
Emanuel:But correct me if I'm wrong, but I always thought that one of the main reasons this exists is because of discrimination against sex workers, where wishlist Amazon wishlist and buying gifts for sex workers predates OnlyFans, I think. Like, today, if if that's if that's your profession, if that's what you do, that's how you want to make money, you can open on OnlyFans and people can pay subscription, OnlyFans takes a cut or whatever, but it's like, it's a it's a there's like a channel for monetization there that is semi reliable, or as reliable as it can be. But that wasn't always the case, and it was tricky and potentially illegal, potentially incriminating, potentially dangerous to just like send somebody a PayPal and explain why you're sending them a PayPal payment or you're sending them a check or whatever. And like wishlists were kind of a way to get around that. Right?
Sam:Yeah. Yeah. And especially now, it's more and more people are debanked or banned from even platforms that are for sex work. It's people get banned from sex work platforms by payment processing rules and restrictions. There was a couple years ago a site called WishTender, which was like the other big way you could do a wish list for a long time was and that was big with Dominic's especially where you it was basically the Amazon thing, but you were outside of the Amazon ecosystem, which was nice because Amazon will also ban you for some of this stuff.
Sam:So but Amazon has, like, lingerie and sex toys and all that and lube and all kinds of stuff related to that work that makes it convenient to be there. But Wishtrendr was specifically for that purpose. And they ended up going under completely because Stripe changed its rules and forced them to comply with new extremely strict rules. And then they they folded like very quickly after that. They tried to find a new payment processor and I think did short, like, very briefly and then ended up shutting down.
Sam:So, yeah, you're totally right. It's like being debanged, being banned. It's it's much easier to just say, I need these things. I can't get them any other way online or, you know, like, I in very extreme cases, people literally don't can't use a credit card because they're, like, kicked out of the entire, like, JPMorgan Chase world, and they can't use, like, PayPal or Stripe or any of that or Venmo. So using Wishes was a to get around some of those limitations.
Sam:And again, it was a to do it privately. It was it was more secure.
Emanuel:Can you be more explicit about, like, the privacy concern here? Like, I think there's a dual risk for sex workers here that, like, any bit of information that someone can get this way would be would be dangerous for them. Can you can you like, what are the literal concerns?
Sam:I mean, the literal concern is, like, someone showing up at your house, a fan since this is a fan facing activity.
Emanuel:And they're celebrities. They're they're fans.
Sam:And celebrities. Yeah. So the the scenario would be someone you have an you have a public wish list, and it's attached. It's sending things to your home address. Someone you missed this email from Amazon, and you don't know the change happened.
Sam:So someone buys something from your wish list, and you don't know it, but they use a third party instead of, like, Amazon or whatever. They don't use they use, like they do the, like, other buy options, and they buy or they just go straight to an item that's not sold directly by Amazon. They then they buy the item and the third party seller at that point, Amazon has no control over what happens with that information, what happens with your shipping information, which is why Amazon is saying, hey, let's cover our asses here and say, just so you know, we don't know what's gonna happen with your address after it leaves our ecosystem. So Bob's Books gets the order from fan number 3000000 and then sends the tracking information to that fan and says, hey. Here's the tracking, and here's, like, the address.
Sam:It's like you don't even know what he's gonna do with it. Maybe the third party seller is the creep. Who knows? But in that scenario, it's like they have somehow revealed to the gift giver, maybe via receipts or tracking. Usually, tracking doesn't show the whole entire residential address if you're doing, like, USPS or UPS or FedEx.
Sam:But that third party seller doesn't know the difference between a wishlist item and a normal item or if you're a gift giver or not and just sends that to you and says, hey. You know, here's your order. Here's where it's going. And now that the gift giver has all that information, which is obviously awful. It's like you can get doxed online using that.
Sam:You could someone could just say, oh, now I have, you know, this famous porn star's address. I'm gonna sell that online. I'm gonna post it online. I'm gonna put it on forums, you know, whatever it is. Once you get someone's residential address, you can get a lot of their information, and all of that information is very public on data broker sites, PeopleFinder sites, which we've talked about very recently on this podcast and on four four.
Sam:But, yeah, it's like it's just you want that information to be under your control as much as possible. And this is something that we've all had to think about at four zero four. It's like we, as far as I know, use nonresidential PO boxes for business addresses because if you're having an l if you have an LLC, that information can be public. So if you're a independent contractor, if you're a content creator who's running using an LLC for tax purposes, very common. Freelancers do this.
Sam:You should be using a nonresidential address no matter what. You should be using a virtual mailbox, something that's not your home because that information is very public. So this this ironically, this privacy tip from Amazon is a good one, and it's good that they gave people a heads up, I think. But people are there are a million reasons to get off Amazon anyway, and lots of sex workers have taken a more moral stand against Amazon just in general. But if you're gonna use it, be smart about it in that way.
Sam:And also there there are other wishlist sites like Throne, which is pretty popular. I think came up after the Wishtrender thing or maybe they were maybe they were at the same time. But I don't know a ton about Throne myself. I think they use Stripe, which is, again, not great, but Stripe owns the game. So what are you gonna do?
Sam:But Throne is definitely a big one to check out if you're like if you're actually a sex worker and you wanna check out this kind of sort of wishlisting, that's maybe something to look at, but not for teachers probably.
Emanuel:Yeah. The the only other explicit danger that's specific to sex workers that I would add here is a lot of people do it on on the DL. Like, people don't show their face or use a fake name. They don't want their family to know. They don't they have a day job they don't want to know, and like this could fuck you up in that respect as well.
Emanuel:Yeah. I think we've done a really good job of explaining why this matters and why we took this particular angle that's looking at how this matters for sex workers. Somebody was in the comments sort of surprised why we're covering this change from the perspective of sex workers. Do we do we wanna leave that there? Is there is there a more specific you have a more specific response to that?
Emanuel:Or
Sam:I don't know. I saw that, and I I guess welcome. You're new here, and that's okay. We're glad to have you. Yeah.
Sam:We're getting we're all getting caught up here together. I I would say it's like it is a fair question because a lot of the times these are like really serious issues that then you're like, okay. So like you're taking the the perspective from like a somewhat smaller than the majority segment of workers. Like, there there are so many sex workers, and it's more common than you even think. But, you know, it's like like we just described, this is an issue that affects more than sex workers.
Sam:So it's like it's a fair enough question to say like, okay. So you're worried about porn stars. Why? And it's like, the reason is everything we just described. And also, we we discussed just a few minutes ago about the idea of sexual speech being affected first by something.
Sam:So with the romance novels, it's like AI translation affects romance novels in a very early stage. And eventually, it's coming for the rest of books, the rest of literature. I think paying attention to, again, how I found the story, which was sex workers sounding the alarm. That's how I found find so many stories because the way that it affects sex workers is the very early stage of how it will affect the rest of us. And we see this so, so much, so often.
Sam:We see it especially right now, the first thing that comes to mind is the age verification stuff, which is something that sex workers have been talking about for years and years and years. And people have said, oh, why do you care if you have to give your I if, you know, pervs have to give their ID to Pornhub. It's like, who cares? It's like, actually, you're gonna have to give your ID to Discord in about two and a half years. So good luck.
Sam:You're gonna wanna be up on
Jason:this idea to fucking windows soon in California, which I guess is a conversation
Emanuel:for another time. I was gonna come pick you up because he wrote fuck ice in a Word document or something like that, you know?
Sam:Yeah. We're in trouble.
Emanuel:That is that is a excellent answer to that question and so much more diplomatic than What's your answer? I had in mind, which is just like, I don't know. We're allowed to care about that. It's like, this is we care about it. But what you said
Sam:Oh, yeah. What you said This is yeah. And again, it's like, this is Warform media. Like, this is one of our our beats.
Emanuel:This is
Matthew:a good to see first news organization.
Sam:Yeah. Care, don't fuck you.
Emanuel:So I think we'll leave that there. I am not Jason. I can't do the outro off the dome.
Sam:Jason can do it.
Emanuel:Jason, let's do it.
Sam:As a reminder
Jason:Thank you for listening to four zero four Media Podcast. I'm Jason Kevlar. As a reminder, you can subscribe to four zero four Media at 404media.co. If you liked this episode, please leave us a five star review. If you did not like this episode, listen to a different one where we have a host who has a real script.
Jason:Please tell our your friends about us. This episode was produced by Kaleidoscope by Alyssa Midcalf. We will be back in a few days with a new episode. The end. That's the end.
Jason:Perfection.
Matthew:Beautiful.