The 404 Media Podcast (Premium Feed)

Joseph: 00:03

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

Joseph: 00:30

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

Sam: 00:36

Hey.

Joseph: 00:36

Emmanuel Madoff Hello. Jason Kevlar.

Jason: 00:41

Hello. Hello.

Joseph: 00:43

Jason, do you briefly want to explain why why your background looks

Jason: 00:47

Why there's a different mosquito net behind me? Yeah. I am in I'm on Lamu Island in Kenya, which is not where I normally record. I was invited to take part in this AI conference, AI and journalism conference, and specifically how to keep humans relevant in the age of AI. So I've taken a very long trip, very lucky to be here, and I'm actually gonna be doing a little bit of reporting while I'm here.

Jason: 01:18

Kenya is like a hotbed of data labeling, which is like content moderation for ChatGPT and AI tools as well as like training a lot of these tools. So I'm meeting with some folks here. We'll probably record some podcast material for the future, but this is it's been a really very fun trip for me, very, like, lucky to do it. I've met a lot of really great Kenyan journalists, including a lot of people who focus on the same things that we do, like surveillance and privacy and things like that in a much different context. So hopefully, we'll be able to have a little bit more info about that on future episodes and and talk to some of some of them about some of the work that they're doing while I'm here.

Joseph: 02:06

Yeah. That sounds really, really interesting. And do you wanna take us through this first story

Jason: 02:12

Yeah. I wrote? So let's let's first talk about this story. It's called Elite, Elite is in quotes, the Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid. This is kind of the latest on our reporting on the surveillance tools that ICE uses and specifically the latest in a series of stories that you've been doing about Palantir.

Jason: 02:36

Do you just wanna give us some of the background about, like, how you got started on this story before we jump into specifically what Elite is?

Joseph: 02:44

Yeah. So as you say, we've been covering ICE and this technological backbone and Palantir stuff for a while. You know, months ago, we first revealed that Palantir was getting much closer to ICE with a leak through Palantir and some public procurement records I looked at. With this story, I was hearing about something called Elite, and I didn't really know what it was. There were just rumblings of it.

Joseph: 03:13

And then eventually, I got this user guide which explained in much more detail what it was, what it was capable of, and of course, we'll get into that a little bit shortly as well. And then also this testimony from Oregon, which, again, we'll get into more specifics in a minute, but ICE and Customs and Border Protection officials talking really explicitly about not just this elite tool, but also Mobile Fortify, the facial recognition app that we've covered, and some other stuff as well. And then, of course, I found the Palantir connection as well, which frankly, when I figured that out, it was, oh, I have to write this quickly because this is taking on a new sense of urgency. Not that it wasn't important before, of course, but as soon as you realize Palantir is involved, I think people are interested in that, for better and for worse. Sometimes it seems sort of this omnipotent sort of bogeyman that can do anything, but I think it's really important to know what Palantir is doing during the second Trump administration.

Joseph: 04:20

So this story sort of brought all of that together.

Jason: 04:24

Yeah. I mean, I think some of our first reporting on the Trump administration and on ICE's activities were about some legacy contracts that Palantir had with the Department of Homeland Security to build these big databases for the government. Soon after things started, there was this reporting about something called Immigration OS, and something that was never really clear to me at the time was, like, what was or what is Immigration OS?

Emanuel: 04:53

Like, we

Jason: 04:54

had these contracts, we had this name, Immigration OS. We knew that it probably had something to do with aggregating data and providing it to ICE. But with Elite, which, you know, there's all these names floating around, like, don't actually know if Elite is part of Immigration OS or if Immigration OS has become Elite or whatever, but we doubt we now know about this program called Elite. So that is being used by ICE right now. What is it, and what is its purpose?

Joseph: 05:24

Yeah. It's a dedicated tool for ICE to basically acquire lists of targets or people, obviously. And I should say that maybe as a force of habit, I'll use the word target just because that's sort of the terminology that ICE uses in the user guide. But, of course, I'm talking about people, individuals, you know, human beings. So I apologize if I lean on that term, but I remember when you were editing, Jason, you were like, it's okay to use Target a couple of times, but try not to use it during the entire copy, which I did because I was just referencing the material, but just keep that in mind.

Joseph: 06:02

So it allows ICE to draw up a list of people from a particular neighborhood, drill down on them, and then export these lists of people that they want to target or detain. It's meant to be basically the entire life cycle from, well, let's find a neighborhood. Okay. Well, let's find who lives there. Well, now let's get a list of those people.

Joseph: 06:24

Now let's have a supervisor approve this operation and then go out. And to make it a little bit more tangible, one part of it is a geospatial interface or rather is a maps interface. Right? So ICE can of like the tool we spoke about last week, which was different, to be clear. They can draw a shape on a map, you know, a circle or a rectangle or whatever.

Joseph: 06:48

The map will be populated with all of the people that ICE may wish to target there. You can then click on an individual person, bring up their dossier, and that will have their name, their date of birth, a photo of them if that's available, and their current or known address. And this is the most important part, I think, because it also comes with a confidence score. Say, it'll be 88.2 out of a 100 or 79 out of 100, and that is based on where the data is coming from and its recency. And I've mentioned this before, but as we keep covering ICE and its technology and its data sharing agreements, one thing comes up over and over and over again.

Joseph: 07:39

It's addresses. ICE wants them. It is like gold for them where they can go, we believe this person is at this location or this apartment block or this particular flat or apartment or whatever. That is what they're trying to get. We've seen that where they've hired, you know, bounty hunters and PIs to verify addresses.

Joseph: 07:59

So this elite tool essentially brings all of that together. Now I don't mean all of the data. I do we'll get into where some of it comes from, but I don't know where it's all coming from necessarily, but it's to turn that data that ICE has going into this tool into something they can actually act on. It's not like an abstract technology product over here doing something that we can't really visualize or think about or sort of touch or understand, this is what it seems ICE is using to actually plan where to go and who to pick up.

Jason: 08:38

Yeah. I I mean, that's part of the headline where it's like the Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid, which I guess we'll talk a little bit more about this case in Oregon in a minute. But was there anything else from the user guide that you sort of wanted to to highlight before we get in into that?

Joseph: 08:56

Yeah. I think it would just be some of the data sources. So, again, with the addresses, there was a little bit in the user guide that said, hey, the address confidence score is this new feature in Elite, and those addresses come from, it says, the Department of Health, which is pretty interesting. A lot of people aren't going to assume that data from the health department is going be used for immigration enforcement, but obviously, this is a different world now. There's mentions of USCIS, which is part of DHS as well, right?

Joseph: 09:31

And then there's also a mention of CLEAR, which it it is hard to report when companies don't respond to requests for comment. We don't think it's CLEAR as in the system lets you go through the airport quicker. Right? It seems to me that it's probably Thomson Reuters data products called CLEAR. Reuters has sold tons of data to the government in the past.

Joseph: 09:59

They regularly contract with ICE. We've covered that before. So it looks like they gained data from that as well. That being said, I don't know if that's all of the data sources. Like, oh, remember all of that stuff about the IRS giving addresses to ICE?

Joseph: 10:14

Could that be fed into here? I I don't know. Like, potentially, but those were the ones that were mentioned in the user guides at least.

Jason: 10:22

Yeah. So I mean, I I know you had sort of like sourcing on this and that sort of thing, but the government actually has talked about the use of elite in this case in Oregon, and you got testimony from that case from, I believe it was an ICE officer or maybe a DHS official. So what what is the case in Oregon, and and what did you learn through that testimony?

Joseph: 10:48

Yeah. So the case in Oregon is about a woman whose initials in the court records are MJMA, if I'm recalling correctly, and she was detained along with around 30 other people during an immigration raid in Oregon in October, I think. She was briefly detained, taken to a facility, then released with no conditions by ICE. In the testimony, she said that she entered The US repeatedly on a tourist visa. She's now seeking asylum.

Joseph: 11:23

So that's sort of the context of this case, and she's suing the government because to protect her constitutional rights, I believe. That's all well and good. That's the context. But there's a ton of interesting stuff in the testimony of that case from ICE officials, from officials from Customs and Border Protection as well, and there are mentions of elite in there where they say, this is the ICE official, I believe. Yes, you use elites to find densely populated areas.

Joseph: 11:54

Like, you're not gonna go to a house that just has one pin on it. You're going to, say, go to an apartment complex with a load of pins on it because there's probably gonna be more people to arrest or detain there. And in text messages

Jason: 12:08

Just sorry. So when you say density, though, when you say density, it's not density of just, like, people living there. It's like density of suspected undocumented immigrants. It's like density of potential targets. Right?

Joseph: 12:24

Yes. Density of potential targets. That's absolutely it. Now, you know, there are, of course, some questions it raises such as, well, how reliable is the data that ICE would have on undocumented people? If they're getting data from, you know, DHS and USCIS, isn't that going to be people legally in the country?

Joseph: 12:45

And it's gonna be very case by case, and frankly, it's quite messy. But they have a lot of data here to go on, and that's apparently what they're using it for. So that case, MJMA's case, it was actually reported briefly by local Oregon media in December because there was a hearing that month, and there was a very brief mention of the mobile fort the Mobile Fortify app being used on that woman and returning the wrong name twice. You know? We picked up on that and fleshed that out with some additional reporting as well.

Joseph: 13:21

And, of course, it tied into the elite Palantir piece here as well. I should just say that, you know, we left Vice, well, because the company was falling apart, obviously, and it was going bankrupt, but one of the catalyzing events for me to, you know, leave and then make this with all of you was that one day, I tried to get some court records for my job at Vice looking up some court case which you do every single day, and it's supposed to cost 10¢ and couldn't do it because Vice wasn't paying his credit card bills apparently. In this case, I emailed the court. I get a quote for $650 for these court transcripts, which is a lot of money. So that's just how much transcripts cost.

Joseph: 14:10

But we could just do it because we own the company now. If we're like, it's probably worth paying $650 to get this very, very important transcript, which has already resulted in two really, really important stories. It's just refreshing that we're able to do that. I just wanted to mention that.

Jason: 14:28

And we published the transcript too, so you don't have to pay $600, which is nice.

Joseph: 14:32

Yes.

Jason: 14:33

So you mentioned Palantir a lot. Palantir's in the headline. We know Palantir made this, But the user guide you have actually doesn't say that, I don't think. So you had to sort of establish that link. Can you talk how you did that?

Joseph: 14:49

Yes. So in the testimony and when I heard about elite, it was just spelled either as a single word or an acronym or, you know, just by by itself, but this user guide spelled it out, and it's a really, really complicated one. I'm actually pulling up the Wikipedia. Somebody has added our article to the Palantir Wikipedia because I can't access the site right now on this screen, but it stands for enhanced leads identification and targeting for enforcement. That is the spelled acronym that was in the user guide, and I thought, well, what exactly does that relate to?

Joseph: 15:32

So I googled it, literally that phrase. The only result on the Internet at the time was an additional piece of information in a Palantir contract where it said Palantir was being paid 29,900,000.0 for work on a few other things, but including configuration of enhanced leads identification targeting for enforcement. So it is clear that Palantir is working on this in some capacity. Now did Palantir originally design the system? Did Palantir build it from the ground up?

Joseph: 16:07

Are they just setting up and then somebody else is gonna take over? That isn't clear. It just says they provided some sort of continuing configuration on this system. But for me, that's an incredibly strong link where I've never seen the acronym anywhere else except in this Palantir contract. I mean, I think the connection is pretty clear.

Jason: 16:29

Yeah. I guess just to round this out, what sort of what comes next? Like, what's your takeaway from this? And then, I mean, presumably, we're gonna continue to follow the use of this and other related tools, but, yeah, what what do you think this shows?

Joseph: 16:49

I think for what comes next, presumably, they'll put more data in there. Part of the user guide says it's integrating new data sources, so it sort of leaves open the possibility of adding more. But my main takeaway is that I kind of touched on it a little bit earlier, but we've been covering for months that there's all of this abstract technology being built and it's sort of happening over there in the background or in the shadows. Even when we've got leaks from inside Palantir describing the company's work with ICE, it's always been quite abstract and obscure, and you can't really put your finger on it because it's just dressed in all of these very confusing acronyms and technical jargon and all of that. This story, I think, is the clearest example yet of what Palantir is building and what ICE is actually doing on the ground.

Joseph: 17:45

It is clear that this tool is part of ICE's mass deportation effort because that is literally what it's designed for, and now we've seen that there is a through line between the tech that Palantir is making and what is happening on the ground. It's a combination of all those things. It's the user guide. It's the testimony from Oregon. It's the public procurement records, And, yeah, I just think this is the clearest link between the company and what is actually happening.

Jason: 18:11

Alright. Let's leave that there. Yeah?

Joseph: 18:13

Yeah. And when we come back after the break, we're gonna talk about one Emmanuel works on about well, may maybe just wait and see. We'll be right back after this. Alright. And we are back.

Joseph: 18:39

Emmanuel wrote this one, as I said, and the headline is Instagram AI influencers are defaming celebrities with sex scandals. Honestly, I had to read the lead, like, a couple of times just to get my head around it because I'm I'm sure it's very clear to you, Emmanuel Ray Simple, but I've been out of the loop of sort of what these AI influencers are doing for a minute, and this kind of spun me out. To start, can you give us some examples of some of these images that are being posted? Then we'll get into the how and the why, but like, what are we looking at when we're talking about this?

Emanuel: 19:14

Yeah. That's fair. It is confusing. I kind of had the same experience when I tried to write it down. We all look at Instagram, and I think Jason and I especially get a lot of AI generated content and AI generated influencer content, and I look at it every day, so I'm steeped in it, and it all seems very obvious and regular to me until you try to describe what is actually happening, and then it's extremely weird and convoluted.

Emanuel: 19:49

But to your question, I think a good example for one of these images is or the post rather is, it's an Instagram Reel, you will see a very realistic looking image of a woman courtside at a basketball game taking a selfie with LeBron James, and it will say how it started, and then it will play a song and cut to an image of the same woman and LeBron James in bed, under the covers, with their shirts off, all sweaty, hair tousled, obviously seeming like they've just had sex, and again, very convincing image. Sometimes it's an image, sometimes it's a slightly animated video, and that is just one example of many. Like any celebrity that you can imagine, there is a video of them with the exact same format, and they are all over Instagram reels.

Joseph: 21:03

Gotcha. But just to clarify, obviously, the Mike Tyson or the LeBron James or whoever the celebrity is, they're not real. Obviously, that is an AI generation of that celebrity. But also, the other person who is allegedly taking a selfie with LeBron or whoever is also not real. I think that is, as you say, you know, somewhat obvious to to all three of you where you've looked at this AI stuff a lot, but maybe people who are just coming to this might be scratching their heads being like, wait.

Joseph: 21:36

The the influencer is not real either. Can you just briefly explain that?

Emanuel: 21:40

Yeah. In the vast majority of cases, I think there are out there are outliers, and and we can maybe talk about those, but in the vast majority of cases, the personality behind the account that is posting this content is itself an AI generated woman, female character, almost certainly created by a man, and Jason and I have done a ton of reporting about, like, people who create these accounts, and looks very realistic, but yes, like, entirely AI generated.

Joseph: 22:20

Gotcha. Well, on that, who who is making these these AI images then? Like, is it grifters? Is it people trying to make money? Is it people just looking for clout?

Joseph: 22:34

Like, what's the profile of somebody who is making this?

Emanuel: 22:37

Yeah. So I think it was a year ago now. Jason and I wrote this article and have done a few follow ups since, but I think we're due for a refresher or a couple new new stories about what's happening in this space, but it is a community of people who are kind of like in this hustle bro culture, get rich quick scheme culture, who are just into this latest fad in the same way that they are into drop shipping, or cryptocurrency, or what have you. You can plug into this whole community that exists on Instagram and Discord and other places, and learn how to AI generate a personality, gain traction with that personality on Instagram, and then funnel users via that attention to other places online where you can monetize that same AI generated personality by selling AI generated nude photos of them.

Joseph: 23:46

So that's the play. It's to basically entice people with, oh, look, I I had a sex tape with Mike Tyson or whatever. I know they don't say sex tape necessarily, but you see what I'm getting at. They they say that and then drive them to, like, an OnlyFans or an OnlyFans equivalent, like, is that the play?

Emanuel: 24:07

Yeah. That's always the that's how you monetize the attention. Right? It's like you you you funnel people to specifically FanView, which is an OnlyFans competitor. OnlyFans so far has pretty strict limitations on AI generated content.

Emanuel: 24:25

They do not want it on the platform, which I think is good and surprising, but we'll see how long that lasts. And FanView basically offers the same service as OnlyFansBy has a more permissive policy, which essentially boils down to you can have a totally AI generated personality with AI generated nudes, you just have to disclose that it's AI generated. So the flow is you're on Instagram, you see an AI generated woman, you're interested, you go to the bio, you find a link to fan view, you click through, and then you can buy nudes or videos from this AI generated character, and it will say on FanView that they are AI generated, and I think that's in response to our reporting, because we flagged this happening to FanView a few times where those people weren't disclosed as AI, so now that tag is there, but it's at the bottom. It's like it's in the fine print that it's an AI generated personality, and I think it would be very easy to miss. But yeah, that's generally the flow, and the story is really what we call like a story about the current quote unquote meta, in the same way that people discuss the Twitch meta, right?

Emanuel: 25:47

It's like people who stream on Twitch, or in the Twitch culture talk about how, like, what are streamers doing right now in order to get attention on Twitch? And it's the same thing on Instagram, and we've seen several metas, and this is just the latest one, and it is extremely common and extremely viral. Like, I just had that classic thing where you see one of these posts, and then because of the hashtags, because of the music that people use on the posts, and because of my engagement with it, I just got like an endless stream of these and seeing all these celebrities. I was just like up one night looking at this on my phone, and we do this thing on Slack where we send ourselves messages just to like remind ourselves stuff to blog in the morning, and I just like kept messaging myself like 20 Instagrams in a row of this exact thing.

Joseph: 26:46

Yeah. That will bring me to my other question. But before that, I just wanna ask Sam and Jason, have you either of you come across this organically? Like, I feel like Jason's answer may be skewed because he's probably in the really bad bits of reels. But, Sam, have you come across is it, like, broken containment and come across your feed at all, Sam?

Joseph: 27:07

No. Not yet?

Sam: 27:08

Not really, which is surprising considering I assume the algorithm is basing my algorithm on, like, my connections algorithms. Emmanuel sends me terrible things all the time. So, like, it hasn't caught on to that yet. I don't know why. I don't I haven't seen it just in my normal, like, personal scrolling.

Sam: 27:26

So yeah.

Joseph: 27:27

Jason, did you

Jason: 27:28

see Are you talking about the the celebrity stuff in particular? Yes. So I I hadn't seen this until Emmanuel sent it to me, but a huge amount of my reels in general are AI generated influencers. I feel like get this because I follow them and I buy their products. No.

Jason: 27:53

I mean, it's because I've written a lot about them, but I feel like there's all these niches within the, like, AI influencer space. Like, Emmanuel has written about the ones where they've been altered to look like they have Down syndrome, for example. But I I am now getting a lot of, like, how to make your own vibes, like the hustle bro thing. And so it's like, oh, I'm getting a lot where it's like starts as an AI generated woman and then the woman morphs into the man who made her.

Joseph: 28:30

Oh.

Jason: 28:32

Which is like

Sam: 28:33

I get a lot of

Jason: 28:33

those jarring.

Joseph: 28:34

Yeah. Very creepy. Shh.

Jason: 28:39

Creepy and I I think I mean, Emmanuel mentioned it, but I think, like, that that will probably be our next follow-up is sort of the, like, world that has, I don't know, of, like, men on yachts standing next to their AI influencer who they are like, this woman doesn't exist, but she made me rich.

Joseph: 29:00

Yeah. So the celebrity ones, they have gone viral. You know, they're pretty maybe even popular is the wrong word. They're just viral. I'll I'll just stick with that term.

Joseph: 29:11

Right? And a lot of people seemingly are seeing them. Do you think, Emmanuel, people actually believe it? Like, do they actually believe that, oh my god, LeBron James did x y z, or that like, does it even matter whether whether people believe it or not?

Emanuel: 29:28

So they're definitely viral. I I gave a few examples in the story, and I just checked on it while we were talking, and, yeah, many of these posts have millions and millions of views. I think the largest one I've seen is 20,000,000 views. That was on who was it? John Jones, a video showing John Jones in one of these scenarios, John Jones being an MMA fighter.

Emanuel: 29:51

I don't know why that one took off, but very popular. Whether people believe it. Sam and I have discussed this a few times, it's something that we've attempted to report out. It's a more complicated question than you might imagine. If you go into the comments, you see broadly two types of posts.

Emanuel: 30:15

One of them is, I would say, thank God, people saying clearly this is AI, and I think that shows that generally speaking, Internet users are becoming more educated about this type of content, and they can just sort it out. They can see that it's not real. But then the other bucket of posts is people just like posting fire emojis and saying, oh my god, you're so beautiful. Please post more. I love you.

Emanuel: 30:45

Stuff like that. And, like, are those bots? Are those actual people? Is it, like, sock puppets that are just engaging with the account in order to boost its numbers? It's hard to say.

Emanuel: 30:58

I would guess that there is a non negligible number of people who do believe this stuff, but I I have we have not been able to like quantify and scientifically prove that's the case.

Joseph: 31:13

Sam, maybe just briefly on that, because as Emmanuel said, I remember this as well, like, you've tried to reach out to people, right, who the people who look like old men who are, like, replying to an AI influencer, like, wow. You're so beautiful. You're so gorgeous. Like, I think you tried that. Did did you ever hear back, like, in general?

Joseph: 31:35

Or

Sam: 31:35

I sent so many DMs to so many people's dads that I gave up. It was crazy, and I think a lot of them probably were also bots. It's hard to tell. Right? Because it's like it's just like a picture of this guy who just looks like a normal kind of cringey guy and he doesn't have a lot of, like, organic posts, but is, like, commenting on every AI model's, you know, image on the platform.

Sam: 32:04

That could be a real person, and probably a lot of them were real people. I didn't get anywhere with that, and I it's something that I occasionally pick up. It's like when I see one of these floating in my feed and then I see a bunch of people commenting, I'm just, like, shooting off DMs to these guys. Maybe my DMs are going to, like, their requests or something, and they don't know how to find them. Yeah.

Sam: 32:24

I the most, like, actual response that I got from anyone was a guy just started going through my profile and liking all of my posts and didn't answer me at all and just liked every one of my posts from the past, like, three years, and then I made my profile private. So I don't know. It's like, I guess if you know someone who's really into replying to AI models posts in real life, ask them why and send them my way. If you're the child of one of these guys that's your dad, please email me because I wanna

Emanuel: 33:00

know what that's Calling all uncles. Please reach out.

Sam: 33:03

Calling all trapped uncs, please email us now at four four ms dot c o.

Emanuel: 33:07

The one thing I'll say that it's like good evidence that somebody is buying into this is that it is an ecosystem, right? It's like there are so many of these accounts, even if it's just like a handful of people who are making a ton of these accounts, and as we discussed, they all funnel eyeballs to places where they can be monetized, and if you look at FanView, those accounts do have subscribers, people do buy the images. I can't tell you for a fact that those people don't know or don't know that the images are AI generated, but but

Joseph: 33:46

There might not a

Emanuel: 33:46

somebody is buying the images. You know what I mean? And this wouldn't exist as a phenomenon on on Instagram if if that wasn't the case.

Joseph: 33:54

Yeah. Maybe just the last thing I was gonna ask is, what do you think might happen now? And I bring that up because I think when you posted the article on social media, maybe you mentioned something about you reckon these celebrities might start finding someone to sue, and that could be better. Maybe I'm misremembering what you posted, but, like, do you think lawsuits might happen here? Because the celebrities didn't consent to this, obviously.

Emanuel: 34:23

Yeah. That's a very good question. The thing that actually caught my eye and eventually made me want to write this, because I've been looking at it for a while, is that I saw that post with LeBron, and as Jason broke the news a while ago, there was a very notable case where LeBron's lawyers reached out and sent a cease and desist to one of these groups that's creating AI generated videos of him. In this case, it was like, I apologize, it always gets like really stupid when we talk about this stuff, talk about stuff, but it's like videos of pregnant LeBron in jail with P Diddy and stuff like that, and I think that probably trickled up to him, and he was like, okay, enough is enough. And they sent us cease and desist to that group, and then I believe Jason was in that Discord, and they actually stopped making those videos.

Emanuel: 35:18

So I was like, okay, let's highlight that this is happening still, but in another format. And yeah, I think it's just a question of like how spicy and annoying it gets for these celebrities until they do something, but I definitely think they have standing to do something. Whether they go after individual users or Instagram as a platform, I don't know, but it's like, it's pretty like, it's not it's not nice and it's unambiguous. You know what I mean? It's like the accounts are not flagged as like, this is parody, or I'm joking.

Emanuel: 35:53

It's like, literally, they're lying about having affairs with celebrities in order to gain clout and sell, you know, like content that could be defamation. It's pretty bad.

Joseph: 36:08

Jason, were you gonna add to that?

Jason: 36:10

I mean, I was just gonna say that, yeah, like, we have seen when there's, like, even the tiniest bit of pushback from some of these celebrities, like, in the form of a legal letter that they've stopped. And you you kind of, like, hate to put the onus on the victims of this, but, like, Jon Jones and LeBron James and, like, I don't know, the people who are being put into this are not Like, what's happening is not, like, the most graphic type of NCII that we've seen. Like, it it's not good. But at the same time, it's like, I do feel some of these celebrities could make quite a difference by, like, making a thing out of this. And I I wish that they would because we've seen, like, we've seen women who've been deepfaked talk about this and talk about, like, how it affects them.

Jason: 37:12

You know, like, celebrities have have finally kind of gone on the record and talked about this, and that and we know, you know, sort of the really horrible things that some less famous women have gone through when they've discovered, you know, deep fakes of themselves on the Internet. Like Sam's done a lot of great reporting on that. But, like, if LeBron starts threatening to sue these people, if Jon Jones starts threatening to sue these people, I think it would make a real difference, not just in terms of, like, they would stop making deep fakes of LeBron James, but, like, perhaps, maybe the platforms would start thinking about actually moderating this sort of thing. Maybe some of the communities would, like, shy away from stealing people's likenesses at the very least. Like, I don't think this industry is gonna go away, unfortunately, but I do think just, like, the vaguest of legal threats might actually do something, and it's weird that we've only really seen that one from LeBron James, like, couple months ago, but not much else.

Joseph: 38:24

Yeah. And as Emmanuel alluded to, like, it's it's bordering on defamation or, well, I guess under US laws, it probably wouldn't be libel. Right? But I can definitely see some celebrities not responding to this very well, and Jason totally agree with you that maybe it could be an avenue to some other change for frankly normal people as well. We'll leave that there.

Joseph: 38:52

If you're 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 a pretty big change around AI at Comic Con. You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404media.co. We'll be right back after this. I crucially did not have me thanking you joining us, Matthew, on the recording.

Joseph: 39:29

So the audience never did hear that. I'm just gonna appear randomly. Okay. Obviously, we're in the subscribers only section now, and we brought Matthew in to talk about this story, which hasn't actually published yet. So if you are a paying subscriber and you're you're hearing this because you are, please don't steal our story because it will publish tomorrow.

Joseph: 39:54

Like, please please don't be a a weirdo about that. Obviously, I know you're not going to. But the headline we agreed on is Comic Con bans AI art after artist pushback. First, who's been to Comic Con? Matthew, have you been?

Joseph: 40:14

Emmanuel? No? I've never been, to be clear.

Matthew: 40:16

The one in San Diego? No. I've been to Dragon Con, which is like the the Southeast. That's the big one in Atlanta. But it's basically the same thing.

Matthew: 40:24

It's I mean, it's not as prestigious because, like, Robert Downey Jr. Doesn't show up to to that one. But but but, yeah, it's a pretty big deal down here.

Joseph: 40:35

Emmanuel, you must go, right?

Emanuel: 40:37

I haven't been. I've been in San Diego while it was happening once, and you could definitely tell because I was at a restaurant, and like, the table next to you was like Iron Man and cosplay having lunch. But that was a little bit before, or as it was becoming what it is today. It was still kind of like a comic book show back then. It was before the Marvel universe became the biggest thing in movies.

Joseph: 41:04

Right. Right. Yeah. I I presume there is before Marvel Cinematic Universe and after Cinematic Universe when it comes to, obviously, these conferences. I haven't been, but, obviously, I know it through cultural osmosis.

Joseph: 41:19

What I don't know is Comic Con's specific stance, which has been changed as the headline alludes to. But, Matthew, could you tell us what the stance on AI was before the change? And I think they've been around since like 2023, 2024, something like that. What was

Matthew: 41:38

it like before? Well, let me put it in context just a little bit more because I think if you haven't been to like one of these shows, it's maybe important to understand that, a lot of the You see a lot of people in cosplay walking around. You see a lot of booths, and you see people showing off movie trailers. There's a big component of these conventions. And like the one in Atlanta takes up the whole floor of the the convention space.

Matthew: 42:01

That is what they call Artist Alley or the art show, and it is a place where both professional and amateur and like everything in between artists show up, they put up booths, and you might get to meet like your favorite comic artist and interact with them, get something signed, and like buy a piece of work from them. And it's this big, enormous space. And so there's a question I think of like what do you do about AI generated art in these spaces? And for the past few years, I was able to track it back to at least 2024 that this was in their rules. They basically said that you could have AI generated art at your booth, but it had to be marked as not for sale.

Matthew: 42:47

You couldn't profit off of it. And you had to clearly mark it as AI produced, and it had to be like you had to credit the original artist whose style you were ripping, which I thought was very interesting because it's the language is, you know, it has to be marked with done in the style of, and then the information about the afterwards. So if you had like a Steve Ditko inspired AI generated art, you had to put that on there. So that was the original rule, and I think that this is one of those cases where it maybe didn't come up, or nobody really noticed it. And obviously, especially from the artistic community, anti AI sentiment is growing understandably, and this year somebody noticed.

Matthew: 43:36

And the artist got mad, and they wrote a bunch of letters, and it's now banned on the Comic Con floor.

Joseph: 43:44

Yeah. It's interesting because it's not like they didn't have a policy. They had a policy, and from your description, it actually sounds pretty detailed. Like, it wasn't just, I don't know. You can use AI or whatever.

Joseph: 43:57

It was like, you can use it, but you can't profit off it. You have to have a disclaimer. You have to credit the original influence or whatever. So, you know, they've fought through it at least somewhat, but apparently, as you say, people have just started to notice. So when you say it's now banned, I mean, in its totality, what what does that mean exactly?

Joseph: 44:20

What's the stance now?

Matthew: 44:22

Material created by artificial intelligence either partially or wholly is not allowed in the art show. Wow. Full stop. It's a much shorter piece of information now. It's it's banned.

Matthew: 44:33

You can't have it there.

Joseph: 44:35

Right. So I know you said obviously, like, people notice that sort of thing. What more specifically did they notice? Or I guess a different way to ask it is, how did you come across it? Were people just talking about this this year or something?

Joseph: 44:53

Like, did you Yeah. Sort of spot it?

Matthew: 44:55

So I noticed it because Emmanuel pointed out to me actually, I believe, but what what had happened was that some of the artists that go to these art shows and like attend Comic Con, and they were looking over the art show language, the rules, and then noticed this artificial intelligence policy on it, and then went online and called it out and then started spraying the word among themselves. You know, I talked to two different artists about this, and essentially what happened is they kind of started a public pressure campaign, and like I said, reached out to Comic Con directly. Apparently, a few of them talked to people at Comic Con and got some response back. They did not respond to my multiple emails. But yeah, it was this kind of thing where the artists went online and said like, hey, you know, this stuff is taking jobs away from us quite literally.

Matthew: 45:47

We are offended by it both in terms of the way that it, you know, extracts labor, our value from our labor without compensating us, and also just we think it's aesthetically gross. We don't want it on the floor. Please change this. And then within twenty four hours, Comic Con had changed it.

Joseph: 46:05

Wow. That's very quick. When you spoke to some of these artists, what did they say? And I presume they have the very normal and and common concerns of AI that you laid out. It takes labor, all of that sort of thing.

Joseph: 46:21

Did they say anything maybe more specific about this policy, or what what what did they tell you?

Matthew: 46:29

One of the things I talked to Carla Ortiz, who's like a she kind of does these beautiful like paintings for like The Gathering cards and has also done some concept artwork for Marvel. And she of course had all of those typical concerns, but one thing she said that I thought was very interesting is that like these artist alley spaces are kind of a I would almost describe them as like a sacred space. These are places where people that are learning the art or are interested in the art get to meet people that are like at the height of the profession, and it's a place where like there's that the line between fan and the artist is like very thin. And that introducing this kind of machine generated stuff into there was like offensive to her because it felt like something profane coming into a sacred space. And she also pointed out that like, you know, this AI generated art is already taking jobs away from us.

Matthew: 47:36

You know, the studios who used to hire an artist to do a bunch of iterative work in like the design process are now just having a bunch of like prompting an AI and it's generating a bunch of stuff. Then they come to the artist and say like, okay, these are the AI samples we've got. Paint this one. And so you would have a job maybe for like six months that you weren't able to sustain yourself on, and now it's like a week. It's gone.

Matthew: 48:02

Like, that that month of those months of income are gone. And then I also talked to I'm gonna get the name wrong as I rapidly scroll through. Tiana Orgelia, who's another comic book artist, and she told me also thought it was very interesting that she's kind of offended by the aesthetics of this stuff, and also thinks that AI generated art is like an artistic dead end because it can't create anything new. It can't move forward like artistic material or concepts. All it can do is kind of regurgitate and remix the past.

Matthew: 48:44

And so because of that, she was offended by it in like a in a different way and just doesn't want it in these spaces at all.

Joseph: 48:53

Yeah. Absolutely. Especially in something that's just explicitly a space for human creativity and artwork. It's just like, why why the hell would we have this? And on how it looks, I mean, we've all developed, I think, the muscle now where you can look at a piece of artwork and just go, it's got that sheen to it where it looks like an AI generated piece of artwork that I see in a YouTube ad for some mobile game, which I see every single day because I refuse to pay for YouTube premium.

Joseph: 49:23

You'll never get me. I'm gonna watch your crappy AI adverts every single day. But, yeah, you can tell, absolutely. So why would you want to have your art next to that?

Emanuel: 49:31

I I would also add that it's notable that this is happening at Comic Con. It's not surprising that artists would be against AI art, but Comic Con is one of those places where that big fight, the rubber really meets the road, and that's because there's like a legal aspect to it where Marvel and Midjourney or one of the other AI generators, they were in a legal battle. I believe that's settled. As we've said, like Disney a deal with OpenAI, and I think some of that was resolved then. But then also, as Matthew notes in the story, there was a big Marvel show, which I think eventually flopped, but at the time, it was like a big launch.

Matthew: 50:21

No one

Joseph: 50:22

watch this thing.

Emanuel: 50:22

Yeah. But it was a big launch for Marvel. It was important for Marvel at the time, Marvel being a Disney company. What was it called? Was it Secret Wars?

Matthew: 50:33

Secret Secret Invasion.

Emanuel: 50:35

Secret Invasion.

Matthew: 50:36

Don't know about the roles? Terrible.

Emanuel: 50:38

Right. So it's Secret Invasion Marvel TV show, and I think it was like a big product for Disney plus, big reason. They thought people would sign up to it. And the intro, the title sequence was AI generated, and poorly, it was very sloppy. And by the rules of Comic Con today, after the controversy, like, that wouldn't be allowed, right?

Emanuel: 51:04

Like, you wouldn't be able to put that in the art show, and I think that's a big deal, right? It's like you have the artists pushing in their own spaces to ban this stuff, and then on the other hand, like the people who actually pay their bills are actively replacing them with this generative AI stuff. So I don't know. I thought it was like a really interesting case for generative AI v artists.

Joseph: 51:33

Yeah. Absolutely. And sorry. Just to wrap it up really quickly. Comic Con, you said, did not get back to you, Matthew.

Joseph: 51:41

I find that kind of interesting because the change has been made. This is public.

Matthew: 51:45

Why not comment on it? It was so fast. It was so public, and I it seems like they talked the organizers did talk to some of the artists. Right. And, you know, what the Tia told me, you know, the organizer basically told them that they put those AI stipulations in a few years ago when they kind of didn't know how AI was going to work, and he wasn't super happy about allowing it, but Comic Con wasn't going to do anything until someone noticed and made them.

Matthew: 52:19

And then when someone noticed and made them, they did it immediately. Mhmm. But but it took someone pointing it out before they could change anything.

Joseph: 52:28

Yeah. It's not like Comic Con did not know that was their policy because they they made the policy. Right. Alright. Let's leave that there.

Joseph: 52:38

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

Joseph: 53:02

This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope and Alyssa Midcalf. Another way to support us is by leaving a five star rating and review for the podcast. That stuff really does help us out. Well, please just tell a friend about us as well. This has been four zero four Media.

Joseph: 53:17

We'll see you again next week.