Jeff Bezos’ tacky wedding; RFK Jr. hawks wearables; Racist AI TikToks; Minnesota murderer's data brokers; AI bands on Spotify; BarbieGPT – NEWS ROUNDUP!
00:02:10.160I wanted to first give a little bit of an update on a story that you and I covered together
00:02:14.240earlier this week about this wave of AI-generated videos that are flooding TikTok right now
00:02:21.900that feature black people, typically black women, but some black men in these very over-the-top0.70
00:02:28.040exaggerated racist ways to the point where I argue they are essentially the new iteration0.54
00:02:33.040of minstrel shows for the digital age. Minstrel shows were an incredibly popular form of
00:02:37.640entertainment in the 19th century where mostly white performers would wear blackface to make1.00
00:02:42.180fun of black people and portray us as stupid and lazy. But they weren't just entertainment,1.00
00:02:46.160they were also a way to affirm a political and social climate hostile to black folks after
00:02:50.420slavery. This is essentially what these videos on TikTok are doing just using AI. And we made that
00:02:56.980episode, we recorded it about a week ago on Saturday. It has not even been a full week,
00:03:02.480and already I have seen more and more iterations of these videos on TikTok. One of the hallmarks
00:03:08.640of these videos that we talked about in that episode was really a deep dive into where these
00:03:12.920AI-generated videos are coming from, the historical context of them, the technological context of how
00:03:18.040they're being made and what they say about our culture today, one of the points that we made is
00:03:22.400that AI-generated content oftentimes gets more and more extreme. And so in just a week's time,
00:03:29.540I feel like the version of these videos we were talking about has already kind of been cranked
00:03:34.100to 11 in terms of the extreme racist qualities that I am seeing in this kind of content.
00:03:39.680Yeah, 100%. After we recorded that episode over the weekend, I created a TikTok account,
00:03:46.920which is not something that i'd had before uh and my for you page was just filled with those kinds
00:03:54.360of videos and the ones that are there today i looked uh just a couple hours ago before we got
00:04:02.060on the mic here they're so much more extreme than the ones that you and i were concerned about just
00:04:08.200like four or five days ago so just more extreme and they like to be clear they started off extreme
00:04:16.680And now they're like, so over the top, I can't believe that I'm looking at a mainstream social
00:04:22.620media platform like TikTok, and not some kind of like video powered 4chan.
00:04:27.700No, absolutely. So there's one in particular that I saw that I want to talk about now,
00:04:31.700because it honestly not only has the racism been cranked to 11, but it's gotten even more
00:04:39.400horrifying, if you can believe that. So one of the types of these videos that we talked about
00:04:44.040in that episode was what people are calling slave talk, which kind of shows these AI generated
00:04:49.300enslaved people imagined if they had social media and they were vlogging their experiences
00:04:54.880on the plantation. And so that is bad enough. End of sentence. However, the premise is insane
00:05:03.880to begin with. It's noxious. It's terrible. Noxious is a better word. They have found a way
00:05:08.760to make it even worse because I saw videos where someone was making these slave talk AI generated
00:05:16.680TikTok videos that showed an enslaved person, you know, using AI to demonstrate what their time on
00:05:23.020a plantation might have been like and having them say, oh, slavery wasn't that bad. I don't actually
00:05:27.800mind it. Being an enslaved person on a plantation isn't so bad. But they were utilizing TikTok shop
00:05:34.700to use these videos to sell a solar powered sun hat that has fans built into it. And so it was
00:05:43.260an enslaved person being like, oh, my time on the plantation is hard, but this hat has made it so
00:05:50.240much easier. Go to my TikTok shop in my bio to buy this hat. Now I will say enough people complained
00:05:57.020about this video that TikTok took it down. So it's no longer available. They're no longer selling
00:06:01.560this hat using abhorrent AI-generated enslaved people fan fiction. However, this is what I mean.
00:06:08.920I feel like this really, even just in a few days since we made that episode about this kind of
00:06:13.500content, the fact that somebody would put this kind of content on TikTok and then utilize this
00:06:20.080kind of content to sell a sun hat really just says a lot. I mean, I guess I got to say I'm happy
00:06:27.160TikTok took it down. But when I talked about the ways that I thought that this kind of content
00:06:32.820really said something about how extreme we are willing to go and how AI really allows us to do
00:06:39.560that at scale, when I made this episode, I didn't think it was going to get this dark. And it got
00:06:44.580so dark so fast. So dark so fast. And something about using the technology to sell
00:06:55.320such a pedestrian item as like a solar powered sun hat with a little fan on it
00:07:02.920is like extra dark. Like it's, it's so almost benign built on such an absurd marketing premise
00:07:13.940that it's actually like unimaginably dark. It's pretty bad. And there's just something
00:07:21.960so dystopian about it. And I made this point in our deep dive about this kind of content
00:07:26.320that it really bothers me that this is the use case for AI. We're being told that this
00:07:32.160is the linchpin of our economy. It's going to be so important. It's going to transform
00:07:35.560everything. And the way that we are seeing it used is just so small and gross, making
00:07:43.940what I would argue is AI-generated minstrel show content to sell cheap junk on TikTok
00:07:50.720shop. I just, we're cooked. It's just, it's bad. I will say one pivot of this kind of content that
00:07:59.660I did see is in the wake of the news that the United States bombed Iran. So most of the content
00:08:05.540that we talked about in that episode was about how Black women were being shown in this incredibly
00:08:09.480negative, racist, stereotypical light where we were aggressive, violent, loud, ghetto, all of that.
00:08:16.780But in the wake of the bombing of Iran, this video went viral that showed what I would have thought was an obviously AI-generated Black woman who is supposed to be a soldier who is celebrating this bombing with her other soldiers.
00:08:32.360And she's saying, you know, blessed are the – she's saying what sounds like a Bible quote, like, blessed are the peacemakers.0.72
00:08:37.660We hit their nukes. Mission complete. Now it's time for peace. Matthew 5.9 says, blessed are the peacemakers.
00:08:44.900And so even though so much of the AI-generated content that is flooding TikTok that depicts
00:08:50.480Black women now is negative, what's also interesting to me is that I don't think it's a
00:08:55.660coincidence that they chose an AI-generated Black woman to be in this video, you know,0.94
00:09:00.960that I think is pretty clearly AI-generated propaganda to make the United States, like,0.87
00:09:06.280really excited about the fact that we bombed Iran. And when I saw this video, I thought, well,0.57
00:09:11.420this is obviously ai like no one's gonna think this is a real person and i have to kind of
00:09:17.960say like the comments of that video surprised me in that the majority of the comments that i saw
00:09:28.200did not seem to to clock that it was ai and it just i mean i'm not saying anything groundbreaking
00:09:34.920here, but the ability of AI to generate propaganda at scale, it was worrisome. And I think especially
00:09:44.160using Black women as a symbol of that, I mean, I think whoever created that video chose to have0.71
00:09:51.840it centered on an AI-generated Black women, because I do think there's a narrative that
00:09:56.280people trust Black women when it comes to political happenings, you know, the phrase
00:10:02.300of, like, trust Black women. And so I think that it's interesting how Black womanhood is used as
00:10:07.600this easy shorthand when you want to get people on your side of your propaganda video, but also
00:10:14.100you could swipe up and you could see a video of that same Black woman being depicted in an0.97
00:10:20.380incredibly demeaning, disrespectful, racist way. And so it's like, I mean, when do we get to have0.89
00:10:26.400our humanity depicted. It's either we're this mouthpiece for, like, jingoistic, rah-rah American
00:10:33.780sentiment, or we're being compared to animals in racist AI-generated content. There's no in-between.
00:10:42.140No one is showing our actual humanity in any of this content, I guess is what I'll say.
00:10:46.140Like, when we first recorded that episode about a week ago, it was a problem that people were
00:10:53.180noticing and talking about like, hey, what's up with all these strange videos? And it's only
00:10:58.700gotten worse. It is interesting and, you know, commendable that TikTok is taking some of these
00:11:05.980videos down. But, you know, that's not a solution on the same scale of the people who are putting
00:11:14.340these videos up right like if there are a thousand people creating a thousand of these videos every
00:11:23.280hour and putting them up and only the most popular generate enough reaction and calls to take them
00:11:31.640down that tiktok or whatever platform actually takes action that's not an effective solution
00:11:38.240So it's going to be really interesting to see what happens with this.
00:11:45.560Like, it can't just keep going on and getting worse.
00:11:52.040When I was doing platform accountability work and like working with the leaders at platforms like TikTok, who I used to sit down with regularly, some of the folks who worked there about their content moderation policies, that was the biggest frustration was that it was like playing whack-a-mole.
00:12:06.660And there's no whack-a-mole strategy. Like, I thought we were doing good work, and I'm proud of the work that we did. But, you know, one comes down, two come up in its place. And so, yeah, I think that it really demonstrates the need for TikTok to do something meaningful if they want to get a handle of this kind of content on their platform.
00:12:25.140And we have already seen just in the last few days how much this content has taken off, become more extreme, become more racist, and really ratcheted up what they're doing.
00:12:34.960So I think it's great TikTok took this one video down, but that's certainly not going to be enough to turn the tides of this.
00:12:41.500yeah and we see that all over the place and not just this category of videos but like health
00:12:48.560misinformation vaccine misinformation political attacks like whack-a-mole is not an effective
00:12:59.120solution whack-a-mole is like one step removed from just giving up so we will put the link to
00:13:05.900our deep dive into AI-generated digital blackface, I guess, minstrel content on TikTok in the show
00:13:14.240notes. Check it out. I'm pretty proud of that episode. So if you haven't listened to it,
00:13:18.340please check it out. Let's take a quick break.
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00:30:15.380well speaking of ways that we deserve better and ways that we don't have to live like this1.00
00:30:23.180did you see rfk jr's big plug about wearables he plugs the stupidest shit everything that comes1.00
00:30:30.820out of his mouth is so stupid but yes okay so health secretary robert f kennedy jr announced1.00
00:30:37.980one of the largest hhs campaigns in history his words to encourage the use of wearables to track1.00
00:30:44.880health conditions. You might be asking, what's a wearable? Things like the Aura Ring, the Fitbit,
00:30:50.840rings, bands, watches, and even clothes that use tech to track human vital signs. It can track
00:30:55.940how many steps you take, your heart rate, how many calories you've burned, all that kind of stuff.
00:31:01.500So RFK Jr. said that Americans buying wearables are one of the keys to his plan to making America
00:31:07.980healthy again. He said, we think that wearables are a key to the Maha agenda, making America
00:31:13.280healthy again. My vision is that every American is wearing a wearable within four years. They can
00:31:18.360see what food is doing to their glucose levels, their heart rates, and a number of other metrics
00:31:22.100as they eat it. He also tweeted that wearables put the power of health back in the hands of the
00:31:27.320American people. This is horse shit. This is absolute horse shit. And I say this as somebody1.00
00:31:33.580who wears a wearable. I went through quite a lot of trouble to find one that I felt like was like
00:31:38.660the least smart, like the, you know, if you've got a smartphone, like the opposite, the dumbest0.96
00:31:43.920wearable I could find. But, so I'm not anti-wearable, but this idea that he could gut public0.96
00:31:50.120health infrastructure and then move that responsibility onto individuals by saying0.96
00:31:55.260it's our responsibility to buy a consumer product that monitors our health is absolute horseshit0.88
00:32:00.460for so many reasons. First, philosophically, the idea that health and optimizing one's health
00:32:05.900means giving hundreds of dollars to a private company for them to be able to access sensitive
00:32:10.840information about your body and your health is absurd. I am not buying that. And so what these
00:32:15.380products sometimes monitor is so much more than like your heartbeat and how much you sleep.
00:32:20.800Kevin Johnson, the CEO of security testing and consulting at the company Secure Lab said,
00:32:25.220we are not just talking about heartbeat. We're not just talking about your sleep schedule.
00:32:29.620We're talking about your location. We're talking about most of these apps tie into your contacts,
00:32:34.560So the fact that RFK Jr. is saying that we should all be moving toward wearing wearables in four years and that that is going to be the ideal way for us to take charge of our health, I completely reject the idea that giving more of my private, intimate information to private companies and paying for the pleasure is me taking charge of my health.
00:32:55.880and physically wearables are notoriously not reliable cnet did a study and found that even
00:33:03.140good wearables wearables that you that like have a pretty good reputation are often inaccurate so
00:33:08.680if you're trying to like casually measure your sleep casually measure your steps casually measure
00:33:15.140how much calories you've burned in a day fine but if you are relying on a wearable in lieu of
00:33:20.260actual access to medical testing or information to meaningfully monitor your health. No, bad.
00:33:27.960It does not work that way. Wearables and the kind of information they provide is simply not
00:33:32.480a substitute for a robust public health infrastructure. Yeah, not even close. It's
00:33:37.860it's such a joke. I mean, it falls apart in multiple ways. For one, his whole thing is like
00:33:44.680make america healthy again where he wants to return us to some previous like state of the
00:33:51.360glory days of health were people wearing wearables during that like previous heyday no not at all
00:33:58.780you know his big initiatives are like getting people to not take vaccines uh getting people to
00:34:06.480eat more beef tallow and less seed oils uh stuff like that like none of these things
00:34:15.420are going to be immediately visible by wearables uh like wearables are fine they're great you know
00:34:24.100people who like them i use one uh it provides interesting information but it's not going to be
00:34:32.200the the like huge difference maker in the the health of a national public population honestly
00:34:42.160it's not even worth me going down the sort of like it's it's so ridiculous on its face that
00:34:49.120getting into the specifics of how it won't work and why it doesn't make sense it's almost not
00:34:52.900even worth it yes that is exactly right that's how unfortunately we how we have to treat everything1.00
00:34:57.800that comes out of his idiot mouth like he just says such stupid stuff all the time at first i1.00
00:35:03.540thought he was just like a dumb person but i no longer think that i think he knows exactly what1.00
00:35:09.600he's doing i think he is performing the like shapes of an informed health official uh knowing0.98
00:35:20.740full well that he is doing so deceptively his references don't back up what he says he talks
00:35:26.960in the same meeting he'll talk about like demanding a gold standard for vaccines and then he'll turn
00:35:33.680around and pull up a bunch of bullshit about wearables when like there's no evidence that
00:35:39.040where you know putting on wearables is going to improve the overall health of some population0.87
00:35:45.680there's zero evidence for that he he's just all over the place and you're absolutely right that
00:35:51.580like engaging in his the things he says in good faith is a losing battle it's like more whack-a-mole0.98
00:35:58.140everything that comes out of his mouth is a goddamn mole that needs to be whacked so i absolutely0.99
00:36:03.340agree with you that i i don't think he's just like a stupid person i think he knows exactly1.00
00:36:07.520what he's doing and this is all part of a larger agenda there is a very good episode of one of my0.95
00:36:12.360favorite podcasts conspirituality it's like i don't recommend other podcasts a ton on this show
00:36:18.380I will put the episode in the show notes because you need to hear it. It's so fascinating if you
00:36:23.600care about this stuff. But basically, they were saying that Make America Healthy Again is really
00:36:28.100all about shifting public health from a public concern to a private concern that will be managed
00:36:35.560by a network of loosely slash, if at all, regulated private companies, whether it's
00:36:40.920bogus health testing companies or supplement companies, and now wearable. So I listened to
00:36:46.180that episode maybe a month ago. And I was like, that makes so much sense. That makes so much
00:36:49.620sense. And then lo and behold, today he's like, oh, everybody should be buying wearables in four
00:36:55.020years' time. Every American should have a wearable. That's all it takes to make America
00:37:00.020healthy again. And oftentimes we'll have these make America healthy again influencers getting
00:37:06.280a cut of that because those influencers are now legitimately in the administration. So then you
00:37:11.320have situations like the administration's nominee for Surgeon General, Dr. Casey Means, who co-founded
00:37:16.660a glucose monitoring company called Levels and sells a monitoring app as well as other kind of0.89
00:37:21.400bullshit wellness products. And so the whole idea is shifting the burden and responsibility of health0.78
00:37:28.060from the public sphere to the private sphere, selling instead of there being, okay, like
00:37:34.180robust access to public health, robust access to healthcare, all of that. It's like, no, no, no,
00:37:39.860know scam testing that is loosely regulated in supplements. And also we'll make a little cut of
00:37:45.800that on the side. Yeah. And also these grifters have built their whole enterprise on a foundation
00:37:55.000of like flooding the zone with scammy information on social media and just overwhelming people with
00:38:04.600information and like shiny statistics and, and stories that like feel one way, even though maybe
00:38:13.800they don't like actually connect to, to a deeper impact in terms of health. And the thing with
00:38:21.120wearables is that they produce a ton of information and it's, it truly is a way of
00:38:28.380taking that scammy online universe of health misinformation that has so enriched these
00:38:37.020scammy people like rfk jr and the whole network of his friends who sell supplements online
00:38:47.940uh it takes that whole scammy information ecosystem and moves it
00:38:52.960offline onto people's bodies and into people's health. And it's bad. It's bad. We shouldn't do
00:39:02.540that. And there's been so much research and reporting about the fact that wearables,
00:39:06.920and again, I'm not anti-wearable. I wear one of myself to measure my physical activity in my
00:39:10.660sleep. I'm not anti-wearable, but there's so much research about the fact that simply having more
00:39:17.140access to information about your vitals and your physicality does not actually make you healthier.
00:39:23.460And in some ways, that level of surveillance actually might be perhaps counterintuitively
00:39:27.300making you less healthy, right? And so more information is not always the thing that makes
00:39:32.340you healthier. And again, even if it were, wearables are not a substitute for having
00:39:39.620access to healthcare, being able to see a doctor, being able to get actual medical tests from a
00:39:45.440doctor, not some sort of scam testing company, actual public health infrastructure. And I just
00:39:50.780hate the way that this just turns our health into just another thing these people can grift off,
00:39:56.140another way to scam. Yeah. I'm not anti-wearable either. I think wearables are very valuable.
00:40:02.940And if he were out there talking about the importance of wearables as part of a new
00:40:11.380initiative that's going to connect people and their bioinformatics with healthcare providers
00:40:21.480who will monitor them and, you know, help them make health decisions as part of some sort of
00:40:27.960cohesive plan to improve people's health. That would be something I would want to listen to,
00:40:34.340but there's no, there's none of that follow through in what he talks about. He's just like,
00:40:40.320oh, people should have wearables. That's where it begins and ends.
00:42:32.840So Ars Technica spoke to Public Citizen's co-president, Robert Weissman, who really laid out just how potentially harmful this could be to kids.
00:42:41.080Mattel should announce immediately that it will not incorporate AI technology into children's toys.
00:42:46.260Children do not have the cognitive capacity to distinguish fully between reality and play.
00:42:50.860Mattel should not leverage its trust with parents to conduct a reckless social experiment on our young children by selling toys that incorporate AI.
00:42:59.680So when asked about the specifics of what this toy might be like, both Mattel and OpenAI were like, it's going to be fine.
00:43:15.080next story they both put out statements where they really glossed over everything and i will
00:43:20.300say the statements kind of like said the right words to signal that they're like don't want to
00:43:24.980harm kids with this product what's also funny to me is like how nothing the state the statement
00:43:30.380from open ai is so in their statement they promised quote to bring a new dimension of ai powered
00:43:36.480innovation and magic to mattel's iconic brands like i'm sorry what does that mean like what does
00:43:42.740that mean like like break that down for me it really is giving like it's barbie but now she
00:43:49.780harnesses the power of ai or like but now she's got a new hat you know it just it just it doesn't
00:43:55.240it's like it says a lot while saying nothing i guess is what i'm trying to say yeah so curious
00:44:00.600what sort of toys are gonna roll off the mattel assembly line empowered with ai whatever that
00:44:08.680means my god when i was a kid my brother had a teddy rubskin which was the most terrifying item
00:44:15.740probably of my entire childhood i don't know if people have ever experienced teddy rubskin but it
00:44:21.300was this nightmare bear that i think you would put a tape he had a tape cassette in his stomach and
00:44:27.160you would put a tape in it and the tape would play and his mouth would move in this very natural
00:44:33.120animatronic way and then it would play the tape as if he was speaking but it was you could tell
00:44:38.640he wasn't speaking well because it's like a stuffed animal but also like it didn't sync up0.99
00:44:44.040right like it didn't look right and my brother loved this fucking thing and it was terrifying0.98
00:44:49.200as i i just hope for the sake of the next generation that they're not making some sort of0.98
00:44:54.060ai enabled nightmare style teddy rubskin where the mouth moves but it's fucking open ai chat gpt0.98
00:45:00.520oh my god nightmares just like feeding you sycophantic like narcissism fuel about how0.99
00:45:08.640much smarter you are than all the rest oh my god i mean have you seen that i mean i know you've
00:45:13.160seen it because we saw it together the movie megan yeah so i love megan and it was probably
00:45:19.840the most fun i had at the theater of whatever year it came out if you have not seen megan
00:45:25.000it's about a toy like a like a doll that is for kids that is like ai enabled but like0.93
00:45:32.380it's basically this story yeah it's basically this story but also megan is cunty like she0.99
00:45:37.560like it's like it's this story but she serves cunt0.91
00:45:41.920also they're making a sequel by the way oh which i will be like first in line to see i'm sure i'm0.86
00:45:51.080sure it's going to be terrible but i'll be first in line to see but i mean so that i'm glad you
00:45:55.880compared this because it is very i think that the movie megan does present a version of like what
00:46:02.280this might be like because we know so much about the ways that ai can be unsafe for adults even
00:46:08.260let alone for kids adam dodge the founder of a digital safety company that prevents cyber abuse
00:46:13.320called n tab pointed to a lawsuit where a grieving mom alleged her son died by suicide after
00:46:19.640are interacting with hyper-realistic chatbots. He said, AI is unpredictable, sycophantic,
00:46:24.640and addictive. I don't want to be posting a year from now about how a Hot Wheels car
00:46:28.900encouraged self-harm or that children are in committed romantic relationships with their
00:46:33.180AI Barbies. Like, come on, a Hot Wheels that convinces a kid to self-harm? No, thank you.
00:46:39.860Yeah, it sounds ridiculous, but it's not outside the realm of possibility, right? Because it's0.86
00:46:46.480it's people who are on the borderline of of the danger zone already who are most susceptible to
00:46:55.580being harmed by products like this and i think everybody should be concerned about privacy
00:47:01.080hopefully mattel is gonna build in some good privacy protocols into the their ai toys i guess
00:47:08.880i don't know i would think long and hard about buying any of them for any kids in my life but
00:47:15.360But even aside from privacy, I think those other harms are even scarier, like encouraging suicide is obviously about the worst, but LLMs are already causing mental problems for a lot of people.
00:47:34.240You know, last week on the News Roundup, you and Ed Zitron talked about chatbots falsely claiming to have therapy degrees and doling out therapeutic advice inappropriately.
00:47:46.080Who knows what harm might come from that?
00:47:48.920But there was another story that came out about the same time, about last week, about people just straight up losing their minds on Reddit.
00:47:55.860Uh, the moderators of a pro AI subreddit says they've had to ban over a hundred people who kept spamming the subreddit with claims about how they created a new form of God or super intelligence.
00:48:09.640Uh, you know, all that sycophantic behavior and flattery from the chat bots, just reflecting back what they, what these people wanted to hear.
00:48:19.080it broke their brains uh and mattel thinks that they can safely put that stuff in the hands of
00:48:25.720children i don't know i just don't buy it like yikes yeah and i mean you make a good point like
00:48:33.160we don't even fully know how ai is impacting adults yet so why give why like encourage children
00:48:40.660to be to be mixed up with this and i do think it just i mean we've talked about this on the show
00:48:45.640before, but just the sort of philosophical idea of shouldn't some things be protected,
00:48:53.620like children and play, I think that's really sacred. And the fact that open AI sees this as
00:48:59.240just another thing to harness, another way to, you know, mine our kids, exploit their privacy,
00:49:06.760probably use whatever they're able to glean from those experiences with children to train their AI
00:49:12.280further for their own benefit, it just feels very exploitative. And I mean, I would have thought for
00:49:20.060a society that so often gets up in arms about protecting the children, and nobody wants to
00:49:26.400protect kids more than me, but that is often our rallying cry. When it comes down to it,
00:49:31.760we fucking hate children. We don't want to protect children. We will not do the bare1.00
00:49:35.160minimum to protect children. The bare minimum is don't let open AI give them this technology that
00:49:42.520we already know harms adult and we don't even know the full scale of that yet. That would be
00:49:48.940the very least we could do and we're not willing to do it. And so, yeah, I hate this. It reminds
00:49:55.440me a lot of the way that we know that social media platforms like Facebook knowingly harm
00:50:00.960kids, girls as young as 13, and continue to knowingly do so because it makes them a profit.
00:50:08.060You know, I wish that we had a country where tech companies making more money was not as
00:50:14.780important as protecting our youth, but we don't live in that country. But we love to grandstand
00:50:20.300about protecting the kids when it's convenient, when it's just the bare minimum, we do nothing.
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00:50:52.760not thinking about podcasting think again more americans listen to podcasts than ad supported
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00:51:19.060started that's 844-844-iheart when i was 14 years old i was kidnapped and held captive for nine
00:51:27.040months i survived and i've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed
00:51:33.420them i'm elizabeth smart and these are the survivor files i just remember this low taunting
00:51:40.980voice next to my ear saying shut up don't say anything every week i'm with survivors who live
00:51:48.840through the unthinkable i knew if he woke up without a doubt he was going to hurt me i started
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00:52:21.620If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:52:28.480This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:52:40.660I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
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00:53:14.400Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:54:09.500It's been kind of a quiet, under-the-radar thing because people don't really enjoy 100% AI-generated music.
00:54:15.260However, now it might be that they are pushing this music in some kind of shady ways while not disclosing that it's entirely AI generated and these bands do not exist, while kind of pretending like these bands are actually human.
00:54:30.760So Paul Bender, who was the bassist for the Australian band Hiatus Coyote, who I love,
00:54:35.120released a new solo project called The Sweet Enoughs.
00:54:38.020And Spotify pushed his new song to all of his followers.
00:54:40.920So he has lots and lots of followers on Spotify.
00:54:42.580So Spotify was like, hey, this band, this guy who's in a band that you like has a new
00:54:51.560And in fact, he never authorized this.
00:54:53.500He said, it was some of the most insanely clunky, amateurish, bizarre pieces of audio
00:54:58.740i have ever experienced and then it happened again the next time with a distorted mumble
00:55:05.080rap track that appeared in his spotify profile that another which he said quote basically sounded
00:55:11.540like crazy frog era euro trash gotta say that kind of makes me want to like like it doesn't
00:55:18.200make me not want to hear it it's not a genre i'm familiar with but i am curious about crazy frog
00:55:25.100era hero trash is not a genre you're familiar with yeah am i missing out i think you might be
00:55:29.780missing out so in the following days a fourth track surfaced so he was convinced these songs
00:55:36.300were ai generated and it made him realize just how easy it was for platforms to do this to create
00:55:41.960ai generated music and then push it out to his followers lying saying that it was him
00:55:48.120he spoke to the australian outlet abc and said that he realized how easy it was to create an
00:55:53.880ai-generated song and upload it to an artist's profile within 10 minutes with zero hacking or
00:55:58.720authentication required a track can be cleared and approved to be released in five to seven days
00:56:03.740the whole process is effectively functioning on an honor-based system which he says is incredibly
00:56:09.060inappropriate for the music industry one of the slimiest most parasitic places in the universe
00:56:14.700yeah that's wild i had no idea that so like i could just upload a track and be like oh this is
00:56:23.600this is the new ariana grande track yeah you could upload a track of you like farting into
00:56:28.500a microphone and being like this is the new ariana just dropped and spotify will be like sure okay
00:56:33.080yeah that's crazy according according to paul bender that's how it works so this was back in
00:56:39.8202020 right the story gets even weirder because now we might have another ai generated band
00:56:45.880being populated via spotify's curated listener playlist the band is called the velvet sundown
00:56:53.240which even that name kind of made me like something about it says a the fact that it's
00:56:59.980like very close to the velvet underground like it just oh i i went down the rabbit hole like
00:57:05.200there was this oh my god great uh story about this i don't want to like scoop your thunder here
00:57:09.820but so it's the name comes from this video game from like 10 years ago this like super uh like
00:57:20.540low profile video game that was released on steam uh it's like a murder mystery on a cruise ship
00:57:28.600and the tagline is something like like you can't trust anyone and nothing is what it seems
00:57:35.180and it's like what a perfect name for an ai man this is some like taunting letters to the police
00:57:44.320oj simpson if publishing a book called if i did it nonsense like this this is some like
00:57:50.520do you know what i'm saying like yeah listeners should really uh read that piece that we're
00:57:58.120going to link to about the velvet sundown it is truly an interesting weird little rabbit hole
00:58:04.300okay so i did not find that information about the band's name but i did do a deep dive
00:58:09.020I am confident in saying that in my opinion, this band is AI generated. There is not a stitch of
00:58:16.280evidence that this band exists outside of music streaming platforms. They say the names of the
00:58:22.420individual musicians, wink, wink, who are in the band, did a Google on them. There's not a stitch
00:58:27.940of evidence that any of them has existed ever online. I know that I sound like freaking Charlie
00:58:34.240and always sunny there is no pepe sylvia but i am confident in saying that in my opinion there
00:58:39.980is no velvet sundown this band doesn't exist all of the names that they have given to us are made
00:58:45.020up all the images that they give us are ai generated like we'll put it in the show notes but
00:58:49.360like when you look at this image it's like this is an ai generated band like these are not real
00:58:53.620people now that doesn't necessarily mean the band is fake like you bet this could be their like
00:58:57.460visual style this is an ai generated band this band don't exist like i'm very i'm very confident
00:59:02.120in saying this. So this band has more than 325,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. And it's not
00:59:08.460only on Spotify. It's also on Amazon Music, YouTube, and Deezer, and other streaming services.
00:59:14.060So questions about this band first gathered steam on Reddit, and then later TikTok,
00:59:18.820where people were wondering why this random band with an obviously AI-generated image and
00:59:24.100zero footprint across all of social media was being included on Spotify's curated playlists.
00:59:28.680The Velvet Sundown have 1,533 followers on Spotify, but 325,388 monthly listeners at the time of the publishing of this really good deep dive article on Music Ally.
00:59:43.600Their bio on Spotify includes a very glowing quote from the music magazine Billboard saying, quote, they sound like the memory of something you never lived and somehow make it feel real, which a Google search suggests has never been published by Billboard ever.
01:03:22.220so I don't know if that probably translates to like,
01:03:25.240here's $2 because they don't pay artists very well.
01:03:29.080But if this whole saga with this AI-generated band
01:03:32.320that doesn't really exist is to say anything about it,
01:03:34.760I think Spotify is probably trying to find a way to...
01:03:37.860see if they can sidestep human artists altogether, right? One little pesky thing about humans is that
01:03:45.440we really do prefer to be paid for our work. And so I think if they're like, how can we cut out
01:03:50.680this whole humans liking to be paid for their labor thing? And obviously, Spotify would be
01:03:57.760doubling down on AI because their CEO, Daniel Ek, just announced a $702 million investment in Helsing,
01:04:04.520A German defense tech startup that develops military drones and AI battlefield software, which, you know, when I think, when I think like Spotify and like music and streaming, I think military drones and AI battlefield software.