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April 12, 2025 - QAA

01:09:17

AI Slopaganda feat. Ryan Broderick (E319)

Artificial Intelligence carries a host of risks: it could reshape jobs and the economy, alter educational practices, help powerful figures dodge accountability through AI-assisted decision-making, and even influence our personal relationships and mental well-being. But here’s the biggest question: how will AI affect the content filling up your social media feeds? In today’s episode, journalist Ryan Broderick joins us to discuss the influx of “AI slop” — which increasingly jostles for space alongside human-created content. We’ll explore the “Shrimp Jesus” Facebook phenomenon, a viral (yet entirely fabricated) story about Elon Musk saving a young girl with Neuralink, and the 1995 sci-fi horror film Screamers. Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: https://patreon.com/qaa Thanks for subscribing to QAA on patreon. /// Ryan Broderick https://x.com/broderick https://bsky.app/profile/ryanhatesthis.bsky.social Garbage Day Newsletter https://www.garbageday.email/ Panic World Podcast https://pod.link/1740187810 /// Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com) https://qaapodcast.com /// REFERENCES Nearly all Americans use AI, though most dislike it, poll shows https://www.axios.com/2025/01/15/americans-use-ai-products-poll Behold the AI Slop Dominating Google Image Results for "Does Corn Get Digested" https://futurism.com/google-image-corn-ai-slop Facebook's Shrimp Jesus, Explained https://www.404media.co/email/1cdf7620-2e2f-4450-9cd9-e041f4f0c27f/ Zuckerberg 'Loves' AI Slop Image From Spam Account That Posts Amputated Children https://www.404media.co/zuckerberg-loves-ai-slop-image-from-spam-account-that-posts-amputated-children/ Why you should be skeptical of that ‘leaked’ audio of JD Vance criticizing Elon Musk https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2025/jd-vance-rant-elon-musk-making-look-bad/ ‘Trump Gaza’ AI video intended as political satire, says creator https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/06/trump-gaza-ai-video-intended-as-political-satire-says-creator “AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism.” New Socialist https://newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/ai-the-new-aesthetics-of-fascism/ Signal President Meredith Whittaker calls out agentic AI as having ‘profound’ security and privacy issues https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/07/signal-president-meredith-whittaker-calls-out-agentic-ai-as-having-profound-security-and-privacy-issues/

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	Thank you.
	If you're hearing this, well done.
	You've found a way to connect to the internet.
	Welcome to the QAA podcast, episode 319, AI Slopaganda, featuring Ryan Broderick.
	As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
	Whenever the topic of the proliferation of artificial intelligence comes up, often you'll hear somebody say something along the lines of, you know, it's interesting, but I don't really use that stuff.
	Well, I have some bad news for that person, because they are almost certainly wrong.
	They use AI products without realizing it.
	Artificial intelligence is a unique tech product category because of how it's been forcefully shoved into the hands of unwitting consumers.
	Normally, when a kind of tech product is introduced, it's first picked up by tech hobbyists, early adopters, and maybe industrial users.
	And if it's potentially useful for the lives of normal people, companies will roll out more user-friendly versions of that product until it slowly reaches mass adoption.
	But with AI, tech companies did things a little differently.
	They took products that people were already using, then added AI-enabled features on the assumption that everyone's gonna love them.
	Well... The American economy deindustrialized and if this doesn't work out, we're basically fucked.
	I don't remember when it happened, but I went to search Google one day and a new voice appeared at the top of the screen.
	I watched this amazing movie called Screamers, I believe, and it represents the fact that advanced societies created these evil underground saws that kill people.
	And then eventually they're indistinguishable from human beings, and I feel like that's what we did, you know?
	We're just like, hey, wouldn't it be cool if there was a way to sew faster?
	And now it's like, is this a person?
	Am I in love?
	I would like to hand out the Jake Rockatansky Award for obscure movie references to Julian, because this is absolutely one of my favorite classic sci-fi weird movies, so good for you.
	Oh, it's so excellent.
	It's got the guy who plays Robocop in the original Robocop.
	What's his name?
	I can't remember.
	It's got face tattoos that predicted the Zoomer generation.
	And it's an amazing, it's like one of the best B-movies out there of that era.
	All right.
	Sorry, Travis.
	Please, please return.
	So if you watch Netflix, then you are getting AI-powered show recommendations that are advertised to you through AI-generated thumbnails.
	If you use Google Maps, then the roads you drive on are determined by AI-powered route optimization.
	If you take photographs with a modern iPhone, the pictures on your camera roll have been subtly enhanced with AI.
	So we have an unusual situation in which almost every American uses AI-enhanced products even though most people don't like AI.
	That sounds crazy, but that's what the polling says.
	A Gallup poll of Americans taken late last year discovered that 99% of consumers use AI-powered tech products, but nearly two-thirds didn't realize they were doing so.
	You know what it is?
	It's technology's version of corn syrup.
	It's fucking heavily subsidized by what used to be government but now is the private sector.
	It's in everything we fucking consume.
	It's making us stupider and potentially fatter and more lazy.
	Yes, America rules.
	Inject more water.
	Oh, I love it.
	Most people don't use, like, generative AI apps like ChatGPT or Grok, but they nearly universally use products that have integrated AI.
	That same poll found that 72% of those surveyed had a somewhat or very negative opinion of how AI would impact the spread of false information, while 64% said the same about how it affects social connections.
	So this has created an unusual situation in which most people, against their knowledge or will, use a kind of technology that they hate and fear.
	Damn, that sucks.
	Next you're going to tell me my tax money goes to doing horrifying things that insult the very existence of humanity on Earth?
	You know what it is?
	I think like Silicon Valley, like they tried to get the mass adoption of like blockchain powered products.
	That didn't quite take.
	They tried to get the mass adoption of like VR products and that didn't take as well as they had hoped.
	So they decided once AI came around and said, fuck it, you're using it whether you like it or not.
	This is a fucking autopilot country.
	Like we like to think it's idiocracy, but that gives too much personality to the way America is structured.
	Our president is just President Profit.
	And okay, I'm going into ad busters territory.
	This is actually making me cringe.
	Now, there are a lot of risks associated with AI in terms of how it might affect jobs and the economy, how it might change education, and of course, how regular AI use might impact our minds and personal relationships.
	But today, I want to zero in on my area of concern.
	How is it going to affect the content I see every day?
	That's what's important.
	Yeah. That is what's vital, right?
	You know?
	Yeah. That's what's kept me logging in day after day.
	The promise that on any given day, I might see something really cool.
	I want to whack it to, like, the old, like, jab comics, hand-drawn representations of Disney characters going down on each other.
	I refuse to let Grok make me jack off to Pixar 3D stuff.
	I like that stuff, though.
	I'm pro.
	I'm pro auto-generated Pixar pornography.
	I want that for a note for the record.
	That's fine, though.
	That's fair, until you have a child and then, like, some other child inputs their face into Grok and then suddenly there's, you know, that's the main downside of the AI pornography is how insane...
	The one downside, you're right.
	Yeah, everything else is awesome because it's like, oh, what if the girl in Total Recall was, like, real and looked awesome and was here in front of me?
	Julian is like one of the guys who's like, Treasure Planet was the last great Disney pornography.
	In the realm of AI content, you know, there are a few main dangers.
	Namely, AI-enabled disinformation, AI slop, In other words, AI is enabling more bullshit, more trash, and more fascist propaganda.
	These are like the three things I hate most about online content.
	To help us unpack the risks that AI poses to good content, we are joined by Ryan Broderick, journalist and author of the newsletter Garbage Day.
	He has written extensively about AI and its impact over the past few years, and I'm very excited to talk to him today.
	Ryan, thanks for joining us.
	Thank you for having me.
	I'm excited to talk about my new role as a creative director for OpenAI.
	Thank you so much.
	I'm excited to talk about AI.
	I love it so much.
	I have to say, yes, this is an unusual PR tour that you're doing, but I'm excited here for you nonetheless.
	I thought this would be a great place to start.
	In fact, I'm not even Jake Rockatansky.
	Ryan's here to unveil the new Rakatansky LLM model that is able to make references to movies like Screamers, Robot Jocks, and toy lines like Mask and Star Wars.
	Oh, Travis is just writing prompts for three different AIs.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Travis is totally alone right now.
	Which is interesting.
	That's the funniest idea ever.
	That Travis is just podcasting with like three bots.
	Yeah. It'd probably be easier to be perfectly honest.
	It'd probably be better for your mental health.
	He keeps telling me to say that he's really big and strong.
	He just types that over and over again.
	It's interesting.
	All right, let's start with AI slop.
	And I love the term slop.
	I feel like it's a necessary term in the same reason that like the term spam was necessary with the rise of email.
	It describes something that help us like understand it and avoid it.
	And it's a kind of like content that is like cheap, ugly, mass produced and very often crowds out human beings.
	So, Ryan, how would you define AI slop?
	Yeah, it's like what pigs eat.
	It's everywhere.
	I mean, if anyone listening still uses Facebook, that's where you're going to see the most of it.
	It's constantly mutating in really interesting ways, but there are these pages on Facebook that are generating hundreds, thousands, maybe possibly up now, at this point, millions of pictures using something like Midjourney or ChachiBT, and it looks like normal internet content if you're not focusing on it particularly hard,
	and it's meant to mimic.
	Yes, yes.
	It's going to get mad cow disease from essentially consuming itself.
	I do love some of the Facebook stuff.
	It's always like, Jesus, who's 12 years old, he's a veteran, and he also, it's his birthday, so if you like this, it will save his life.
	Otherwise, we will shoot him.
	I came across a really good pocket the other day of fake America's Got Talent videos, but it's like, they're all titled like, Six-Headed Nigerian Man Sings Beautifully, and it's like an AI-generated...
	Man from Nigeria with six heads, like, impressing Simon Cowell up on stage.
	And I think that's so cool that old people are staring at this shit all day long.
	It's awesome, actually.
	What is, like, what is the purpose of somebody who is, you know, programming AI to make this kind of content?
	Do they get paid off ad clicks or something like that?
	Or are they just, are they like the Joker and they're like, I'm gonna flood Facebook with, like, the eight-headed, you know, Simon Cowell impressor?
	So, 404 Media did track down some of the...
	And there's like a pocket of them in, I want to say India, that are taking suggestions from people of like what they think Americans would like.
	And then they're generating like thousands of images and they're part of Facebook's creator program.
	So, like, they had this WhatsApp of all these, like, guys in India being like, I think they're going to really like, like, what if Jesus was a soldier?
	And then they'll generate, like, hundreds of images of, like, Jesus as a soldier.
	Another big trope is, like, Asian flight attendants with Jesus.
	That seems to be, like, a really big one.
	I also found a network of people who were just making, like, images of, like, children in villages in the global south driving, like, little cars made of plastic bottles.
	Seems to be kind of, like, maybe, like, a pro-recycling angle there.
	But there are these, like, fever dreams of, like, things.
	that people already care about online and they're just like brute forcing them and uploading them en masse to Facebook to make some money.
	Yeah, I mean, it is like, yeah, just as cheap as it gets.
	Like, you don't even need to know the culture.
	Just, you know, like Americans like Jesus injured veterans and the flag.
	Well, just type variations of that into your, you know, your prompt field and you can just get stuff that is, you know, Americans will probably like.
	If they, you know, they don't look at it too closely.
	They'll just see it scroll on their Facebook page for like a second and they'll click like and they'll keep moving and that'll be good enough.
	And I should point out, like, this behavior, like, Yeah, or, like, make a whole meal in the sink type shit.
	So those were all out of work Vegas magicians that all knew each other and were like trying to zero in on ways to enrage old people.
	And so like the AI content farms are doing the exact same thing.
	Like they're trying to figure out how to either piss off or like, I don't know, like impress
	or like amaze old people and then they turn that engagement into money and Facebook will just pay them for it.
	I'm thinking about starting it myself.
	I think it sounds really cool, actually.
	Yeah, I got a couple ideas of what I think people want to see.
	I want to make two soldiers kissing in front of Jesus, and I want to just flood Facebook with it until all the old people go insane.
	Wasn't one of them, like, actually, like, an IDF soldier, like, kissing a Palestinian person?
	I feel like that was the whole thing.
	Yeah, I mean, there's not a lot of oversight with these pages.
	Like, they're clearly not looking at what they're doing.
	So, like, every once in a while, it'll generate, like, I mean, Jesus made of crabs was a big...
	We saw crab Jesus.
	Shrimp Jesus, yeah.
	A lot of that stuff.
	Totally get what the point of Shrimp Jesus is, but I find it fascinating.
	I like looking at him.
	The best is, like, the post says, made it with my own hands.
	What the fuck are you talking about?
	How do you make Shrimp Jesus with your own hands and it's also underwater?
	Well, so a lot of these pages have stuff like, it's my birthday, or, you know, like, I just made this, or, you know, give me one like because it's my birthday, like, stuff like that.
	So they're really just, like, mad-libbing it, which...
	Like I said, they were doing this before with random memes and weird videos, and now they're just making them wholesale with an AI.
	This was posted by an account called Love Father and Mother Bless You.
	Yeah, I follow it.
	It's pretty good.
	I love all the different crustaceans that they turn Jesus into.
	It's really neat.
	If they wanted to make it sound more human, they should make the captions something like, I did a thing.
	I see that all the time.
	And from real human beings.
	And this is a thing that somebody did.
	So it technically works.
	That's very millennial.
	That's very millennial.
	Millennials love to have sex with each other and be like, I guess we just did a thing.
	But boomers are more like, love.
	I don't know.
	It's a weird generation thing.
	Boomers are like, one like, please.
	Yeah, one like for my grandson.
	He's a soldier, and he's with Jesus in this picture I made.
	Yeah, I don't know.
	Like a toxic positivity version of a ransom letter.
	Yeah. Crustaceans are like, you know, these are not necessarily, they're the bottom feeders of the ocean.
	I mean, how do, you know, super religious people feel about Jesus being turned into like an eight-legged, you know, sand crab?
	He turned that way because in the past, I have been trying to figure out the prompt for this one, because this one is a popular one.
	Because they had to have put something into the AI to make it.
	My best guess is that this was meant to be some kind of underwater statue of Jesus.
	And maybe the AI got confused and was like, he's a shrimp now.
	They A-B tested it, and they were like, the shrimp ones work actually better than the underwater ones.
	Well, so this is a thing that I learned years and years and years ago, which is, like, some of the top-performing stuff on Facebook in terms of, like, articles that when...
	Remember when people would, like, share articles on Facebook?
	Yeah. Yeah, some of the top-performing headlines on Facebook, like, had typos in them or bad grammar syntax.
	And, like, a data scientist I spoke to once, their best guess was, like, it looks wrong, so it stands out.
	Yes! So there's, like, an uncanny value effect that's always been kind of present on the Facebook news feed, and now you can just, like...
	Make an AI do it, basically.
	I wish they had given him claws.
	You know what I mean?
	Like two pinchers instead of hands.
	Jesus can't hug you with claws.
	His whole body is shrimp, but then his hands and head are Jesus.
	But it's a statue of Jesus.
	Yeah, that's true.
	It's not human Jesus.
	It's a statue of Jesus inside of a shrimp or some kind of lobster.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, it looks like somebody has played a hilarious prank, and in the middle of the night they've come in and put a shrimp costume around the statue.
	You put a shrimp on my Jesus statue.
	Oh no.
	You know, like that.
	Please like it's a prank.
	This has 185,000 reactions, 2.7 thousand comments, 445 shares.
	Wow. We truly are lost.
	Let me put that in context for you guys, because I track the top engaged with posts on Facebook month to month.
	This had, ah, yeah, okay, that's really funny, actually.
	This had almost the exact same amount of engagement as the third most shared news story on Facebook last month, which was an ABC story about Tesla protests.
	Amazing. There we go.
	Oh, even worse.
	Okay, this had, this had, oh my god, okay, this had the exact same amount of engagement.
	as the ACLU's page for the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil.
	Oh, fuck.
	You know, shrimp Jesus.
	I feel like this is like content built for like three second attention spans.
	It's like the closest content can come to just pure heroin.
	Like you're scrolling by and someone's brain goes, I like bodies of water.
	I like Jesus.
	I like novel things.
	And they see this and then within half a second they're like, I like the things, the things I like.
	May I just say that I think you're wrong because heroin takes too much effort to either smoke or inject?
	This is like an inhalant that you're accidentally exposed to.
	I will also say just like, you know, I've done a lot of digging into like the late stage rot of Facebook because I find it extremely fascinating.
	And like one thing that I do think it's sort of like lost in the shuffle when we talk about this stuff is that like there are a lot of people not in America on Facebook and a large chunk of them are like not exactly literate.
	And so when you see like these really bizarre, super religious like images, a lot of them have like imagery that to an American like makes no sense.
	I love that phrase.
	even have like words on them.
	You know, they're sometimes just images.
	Yeah. But this is this next one.
	All American, baby.
	This is for us.
	Yeah. Why don't pictures like this ever trend?
	Smiley.
	A bunch of emojis.
	It shows a line of men in military uniforms who all have artificial legs, presumably, and they're all sitting in wheelchairs in front of a row of candles and flags.
	Y'all got blowed up.
	And no one cares.
	And no one cares.
	No one cares about our disabled veterans.
	You know, they also all got blowed up hands, because if you look at the hands, they look like inflated surgical gloves holding onto one another.
	They look like cocktail weenies.
	Yeah, it's awesome.
	This one's sick, actually.
	I think this one's really good, and I think it makes a really good point that, like, you know, why don't images like this trend, you know?
	Posted by Military Coming Home.
	Yeah. I mean, it's one of those strange things.
	It's like, there's...
	It's not hard to find images of disabled veterans that are real, but why exactly would people take the extra effort to generate a fake one in order to pull on people's heartstrings?
	So my understanding is that like the Facebook newsfeed is extremely choosy right now.
	And it has been for like the last year or two.
	It changes all the time.
	So my thought process is like if you can get an AI to just generate like hundreds of these, you can put them in an album on your page and then you have a better shot at like going viral
	Also, Travis, good luck finding this many veterans with both their legs missing that are this hot.
	that have posed in this exact way with the sun striking and a lens flare behind them.
	You know, it's called composition.
	Just because you're not an esthete and you can't tell the difference between some actually depressed aerobics
	Yeah, I don't know a lot of, like...
	I think that this is beautiful, and, you know, I think it should have more disabled vets in it, actually.
	Like, I only see four or five.
	We should put more in.
	The ones behind, yeah, it's unclear what they're even up to.
	The AI gets really confused by background and foreground.
	It sort of loses interest as it, like, renders the image.
	Yeah. Letters as well.
	If you look at the name tags on their uniform, it just looks like hieroglyphics.
	Thank you for your service, it says.
	And you know what?
	I do thank these guys for their service.
	Unfortunately, they were not able to find prosthetics that look the same.
	They're all like...
	But I do like that they wear their boots over their prosthetic legs.
	I love that, actually.
	They all have big-ass boots and the metal pole just goes,
	Yeah, that's sick.
	Fuck. Earlier this year, a Facebook slop image of a woman in a bakery standing next to a horse sculpture made of bread went viral.
	And it got over 65,000 shares.
	And there she is.
	She's standing next to the bread sculpture.
	And there's the caption that says, I made every detail with love, but it seems no one cares.
	A lot of these captions, they're all sob stories.
	People love the sob stories, I guess.
	They do.
	I like the idea that this is a Trojan horse for, like, a person who just can't stop eating bread, where you're actually, like, smuggling invaders into his house in a giant bread horse.
	It'd be cool if, like, you opened it up and there was just, like, hundreds of, like, shrimp Jesuses inside.
	A bunch of disabled veterans are sneaking into the bakery.
	Yeah, big horse.
	They overtook your house.
	Give it a month.
	Give it a month.
	This one got some traction in the news because the image was liked by Mark Zuckerberg himself.
	So, I mean, that's disturbing to me because I think that, you know, I would hope that, like, Facebook or other platforms are allowing the proliferation of the slop because of negligence rather than malice.
	But if, like, Zuckerberg is straight up like, hey, that's a pretty cool piece of junky slop that went viral and got, you know, 189,000 comments, suggest to me.
	Well, I think they are because they're not viewing it that way.
	And it's not even to say that he thinks that this isn't slop.
	But from the conversations I've had with people in these social media platforms, it seems like what they really think that this is is a way to standardize the level, the production quality of user-generated content.
	Because they are all chasing scale that requires them to have massive, massive user bases in countries where maybe someone can't afford Adobe Photoshop.
	That's why all of them launched the ability to make AI-generated content inside the app itself because they keep promising advertisers that their content is going to get better, that users will get better at making videos, better at making images.
	So Mark Zuckerberg, I have to assume, looks at this and he's like, great, this is better than an ugly Photoshop or a bad animated GIF that's been passed around WhatsApp for a decade.
	This, to him, is like advertisers can say, cool, we can go next to the bread horse.
	And the person who shared this is just a page called Faithful that has the Christian cross as its logo.
	Oh yeah, this is actually my favorite game.
	Let's see what Faithful's all about.
	I love looking up weird-ass Facebook pages.
	One thing that I think that's kind of ironic is that Zuckerberg has had this whole like he's like trying to de-age himself you know he's wearing he's got you know he got a stylist he got a cool chain he got you know he's he's making sure his hair is you know Brock more broccoli-esque it's like he's trying to get younger but his audience on Facebook is getting like older and crustier and you know more detached from reality it's kind of funny Okay,
	I got some good info here.
	So Faithful is a Romanian apparel page.
	It has 1.2 million, 1.3 million followers and it's running a shitload of ads basically asking people to hit the like button so they can go to heaven.
	It's like pictures of heaven and it says like hit the like button.
	And yeah, and it's selling clothing and it's full of AI generated videos and photos with like weird stories attached to them.
	Like the top one right now is about like a pregnant woman who was just kicked out of her house.
	Oh, weird.
	It's like a lot of pregnant women being abused by their husbands.
	Okay. Great stuff.
	We love it.
	Very, very cool.
	Have you paid your engagement tithe today?
	Have you liked?
	Have you commented?
	Are you going to get into heaven?
	Yeah, it turns out what was inside the Trojan horse was much scarier than Shrimp Jesus.
	It's hundreds of pregnant women trying to escape their husbands.
	This is fucked up.
	Okay, cool.
	Yeah, Facebook is a dark place.
	But yeah, so that has 1.3 million followers on that page.
	Oh my god.
	I'm so glad I don't have Facebook.
	I feel like I should point out that when we talk about AI slop, that doesn't always mean AI images that misrepresent themselves.
	Sometimes AI slop is like produced by supposedly reputable organizations.
	We saw this recently with the rise of AI influencers.
	In October of last year, Germany's tourism board launched an AI travel influencer named Emma.
	So Emma is on Instagram and the German Tourist Board website where people can ask her for travel advice.
	So here's the introductory video of Emma.
	Hi, I am Emma, and I am the first AI influencer of travel destination Germany.
	I'm excited to take you on an amazing journey through this fascinating and inspiring country.
	Germany has so much to offer, from impressive historical sites to vibrant cities and beautiful landscapes.
	I'll be sharing stories about my travel experiences, activities, and traditions throughout Germany.
	Again, I want to reiterate, this isn't some like, you know, Romanian content factory.
	This is the German tourist board, the group of people who are supposedly supposed to help people go to Germany for tourism purposes.
	And there's talking, there's an AI influencer talking about how they're going to share their experiences.
	And I don't like this because AI entities don't have experiences.
	They have data input.
	They lack qualia.
	They don't have what you and I have.
	They can't actually tell me, based upon an original experience that they had, what it's like to travel somewhere and see something extraordinary.
	I don't know.
	It's very weird to me the idea that AI entities would crowd out travel influencing.
	And I know for a fact that anybody who's really looking at this video is being like, can I get her to sext with me?
	Can I get her to take her clothes off?
	She's a beautiful Aryan, I will give for that.
	She really is.
	I was a little alarmed at just how blonde and how blue-eyed our travel guide in Germany was.
	I am in love with her.
	My question is, are they actually putting footage of Germany in there with her, or is that also AI-generated?
	It's definitely AI-generated.
	That's so awesome.
	Come visit this place that doesn't exist.
	Well, that's the problem is you can't edit any of this stuff.
	So like, yeah, it's all AI generated because you can't like put her on a thing.
	But I mean, to me, this just like speaks to just like how broken social media is, which like is kind of my take on AI in general that like, yeah, AI is bad and like is ugly and annoying, but it's being created and used specifically to like fill a hole in social media.
	It has no utility actually beyond just like filling in a widget on Instagram or TikTok or something.
	And this is like a great example where like they could have easily just like hired a pretty woman to walk around Germany or whatever.
	But they don't even care enough about their own social media pages to do that.
	Like, somebody would have loved that job, you know, as like an actor.
	Yeah, it's like an easy job.
	And like, they're the travel board of Germany.
	Like, that's their job.
	But like, social media matters so little now because all these platforms are so unshitted and broken that like, why would they bother?
	Why not just generate a woman and move on?
	I do thank them for kind of bringing it so fast to such a bad place because I've uninstalled Instagram, long uninstalled Facebook.
	I've even uninstalled Twitter.
	I do not have That's good, man.
	I've got TikTok.
	I'm really into TikTok.
	But other than that, not really.
	Occasionally, I'll be on Twitter, but not even that much.
	Not even to check in on my enemies anymore.
	See, I pay for Twitter.
	I'm on Truth Social, Parler.
	I watch a lot of streams on Kik.
	Like, that's where I'm at.
	I'm on the good part of the internet.
	Oh, God.
	Oh, that's a dark...
	I'm watching Aiden Ross streams all day.
	Oh, God!
	Oh, man.
	These are the worst people.
	Somebody hasn't heard about Gab.
	No, I got banned from Gab because I was too religious.
	I was too much of a Christian nationalist and they booted me off.
	These guys are the worst.
	And of course you find out that Aiden Ross originally got his start as a 2K streamer, which makes perfect sense because it's the most toxic community ever.
	I saw this other guy named, he's like a little guy named Jack Dottie or something like that.
	He basically goes around with a large bodyguard trying to start fights with people and then he hides.
	Oh yeah, I know that guy.
	Awesome. Whoa, whoa, whoa!
	I wouldn't call little people that, Jake.
	Come on.
	He's not like an actual little person, right?
	He's like a small man, isn't he?
	Yeah, he's just a short, short guy.
	I have nothing against actual little people.
	I find short men disgusting.
	I've worked with a bunch of little people.
	I've had actually some of the best experiences in my life.
	If you're between 4'8 and 5'9, I think you are disgusting.
	But other than that, that's fine.
	I think that's totally fine.
	They just say, you know, like my opinion of these guys is that they just go like, oh, bet, bet, bet, bet, bet.
	No, no cap, no cap, no cap, no cap.
	Bet, bet, bet.
	Oh, bro, bro, bro, bro, bro.
	That's like my archetype in these brands.
	It's just guys going bet, bet, bet, bro, bro, bro.
	Cap, cap, cap, cap, cap.
	Just like little guys walking around and doing streams.
	Ugh. Bullies.
	Bullies. All of them.
	Triggered. We should replace them with AI is what we should do.
	Yeah, that wouldn't be such a bad thing.
	We can replace them with Emma, who's verified, I see, by the way.
	I'm looking at the video.
	She said this is a verified user.
	What does that even mean in an AI context?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
	There's also a big concern about how slop is affecting what people see through Google search.
	Earlier this year, users on Twitter pointed out that a simple Google search query for the phrase, does corn get digested, returns a Google image search results page filled with these strange, nonsensical AI graphics claiming to depict the corn kernel's journey through the human digestive tract.
	The top six results for the query, including the first and the second results, were AI slop.
	I think my favorite here is what the text says.
	Uncoked kermels of corn that it stay stay undigetitated.
	And then the second piece of text says, Uncoked cardes of corn, corn abenen of part in ite broken bound into gross and absolute.
	That's so good.
	That's what corn does.
	I learned something!
	I learned something today.
	That's exactly what corn does in your body.
	Yeah. I mean, it reminded me a lot of the Lewis Carroll poem, The Jabberwocky.
	You know, it has all these nonsensical words and like, you know, and the weird...
	My favorite is that the corn kernels here have clearly, like, they've been drawing from candy corn as well.
	So the coloring looks like the Halloween candy.
	And also, by the way, the digestive tract itself, including the heart, which is just, like, wrong.
	Like, it can't even do the human anatomy part.
	Mine looks like that.
	Yeah, well, this is average American inside.
	Yeah, this is what most Americans, because of microplastics.
	Yeah. What's fascinating about this, like, specific use case of, like, just appearing in Google image search results is, like, and, you know, not to be, like, too blackmailed about this, but, like, this, to me, means that, like, there's no actual fixing this.
	Like, it's actually impossible to fix this problem.
	I don't, I mean, you'd basically have to build an AI to find AI-generated content, which exists, but, like, it's a losing game, and so, like, I really don't know what happens now.
	I don't actually know what happens with most services.
	I'm working on a piece right now about Pinterest.
	Pinterest is completely filled up with images like this, and I don't know how you fix that.
	Air-to-surface missiles?
	Data centers?
	Maybe, but it just means that the age of social media that briefly existed where you could kind of sort of use it, I don't think it can come back.
	Good! Good!
	I am an accelerationist for this.
	I was just going to say, I totally agree, Julian.
	In some ways, if this AI explosion destroys social media, makes it unusable for humans and it just becomes a place where the bots are talking to one another and planning our demise.
	Like, that's a net positive for human beings, I think.
	If we can get pushed off of social media by AI because we can't keep up with it and we can't generate, like, you know, as engaging content.
	Maybe that's how we get ourselves away from social media, which I would argue was the beginning of the end for human beings.
	I don't disagree, but my fear is that that's not what happens.
	My fear is that we're already kind of seeing what I think would happen, which is companies like OpenAI say, oh yeah, everything's really screwed up outside of our little walled garden, but if you pay for OpenAI, you can use ChatGPT instead of having to deal with the wild.
	This is actually how social media platforms launched in the 2000s.
	Look, the real internet is full of scammers and neo-Nazis and viruses.
	Come use Facebook and you'll be safe there.
	To me, when I see, like, AI images flooding social media sites, my immediate thought is, like, it's happening again, and they're just, like, making a newer, more expensive walled garden that, like, people will be expected to live in.
	Yeah. That's my fear.
	My just fear is that it's happening.
	It's happening again!
	You certainly give me something to think about.
	Yeah. I do think more people will touch grass.
	I hope so.
	I just want to be able to take my AI girlfriend out to the park, actually.
	That would be great.
	Well, that would involve some Have you guys seen Virtuosity?
	Hold on, hold on, hold on.
	Say more.
	Hold on.
	Let him cook.
	Let him cook here.
	No, he was about to bring up Virtuosity, which I actually have seen, and it is one of the worst movies I've ever experienced.
	No, come on.
	It is so insane.
	Very early Russell Crowe performance, which is absolutely, which is very good.
	Very good movie.
	Denzel Washington.
	It's actually directed by the guy who did Lawnmower Man.
	Sick. That movie is so good.
	Oh, man.
	In no world is that a good movie, but it is a fascinating oddity and relic of its time.
	Well, I think one of the great things about art is that it's subjective.
	You know, one person might say, in no way, in no world is that a good movie.
	But another person might say, I read the book and watched it.
	Virtuosity, Rotten Tomatoes.
	Oh, well.
	Let's see.
	Let's see what most people think about it.
	Oh, 32%.
	And the tomato meter is 31%.
	So, I think it is true, but in this case, I am going to trust the numbers.
	Yeah, I think I'm going to trust the science.
	I move on talking about AI disinformation.
	There's more deliberate, more malicious sort of like false information that's being spread around on social media.
	Just a couple weeks ago, there was this bullshit story about Elon Musk helping a little girl with a neurological condition named Lily.
	And this story was paired with an AI-generated image of Elon.
	And this went viral on Twitter.
	One account that promoted it had over 35,000 retweets.
	And the image, if you look closely, it has some tells that it's AI, but at first glance, it's pretty good.
	The shading, the lighting on Elon is okay.
	Yeah. Like, what is...
	This is also hard to wrap my head around because, like, and I always wonder about this, like, do the majority of the 35,000 retweets or whatever, those people, are they sharing this because they think it's real, or are they sharing this because they think it's cool?
	Like, I can't imagine a world where I would believe this.
	And I just have a really tough time putting myself, I'm trying to empathize with, like, the kind of person that would share this and be like, that happened.
	And maybe, I don't know, I just, I can't imagine.
	I mean, they were just a few days ago organizing a pro- I feel like it's just unthinkable to us, perhaps, but we are a very specific type of bearded podcasting man.
	We're all bearded podcasters in this Google Meet room right now.
	Yeah, I guess.
	With a lot of misinformation stuff, I'm always like, okay, it's probably 50% people who believe it and 50% people who are just having a goof on the web.
	Even old people can have a goof.
	But like this one, I just, I don't know, maybe people did believe it.
	That's so dark.
	Who would ever write this many words if it wasn't real?
	So this is the accompanying story, which is also obviously AI-generated, and it promotes this heart-tugging tale.
	Corey, could we get like a very sad piano, and Jake, could you read this for us?
	Oh, and make sure that the sad piano is AI-generated.
	Make sure Jake is also AI-generated.
	No, no, we'll keep him real.
	His suffering has to be real for it to feel good to me.
	Lily's condition, a degenerative brain disorder diagnosed at age three, had defied conventional treatments, leaving her parents desperate as medical bills soared past $2 million.
	Enter Elon Musk, who...
	After reading about her plight in a local news story, directed his Musk Foundation to intervene.
	He not only paid off the family's debts, but funded an experimental procedure at a top California hospital.
	Implantment. I didn't know where this...
	No wait, this actually is believable!
	This is believable now!
	No child should suffer when we have the tools to help.
	Musk reportedly told doctors insisting on fast-tracking the effort to give Lily a fighting chance.
	So before you key a random
	Oh, that's what this is about.
	That's so good.
	That's so fucking good.
	Oh my God.
	Holy shit.
	Oh, Jesus Christ.
	So before you key a random person's Tesla, or set fire to a Tesla dealership, or speak ill of the great Elon Musk, I ask you, what the hell did you do for Lily?
	I would actually counter what you were saying, Ryan, which is that this is believable because he would be this evil to pay $2 million to get access to the brain of a dying child so he could put his evil machine in.
	Also, I really do like how explicit they are about before you, and then it gets better and better, like, key a random person's Tesla, set fire to a Tesla dealership.
	This is a perfect example of saying the good thing, but kind of listing it as a bad thing.
	Underneath the post, there were just dozens of responses from Twitter users who, assuming these are also real people, seem to genuinely believe it.
	So here's one.
	Think for yourself, says, I did not know about this story.
	I already admire Elon Musk.
	This just elevates him even more.
	Not only is he brilliant, but he cares and he's compassionate.
	And it's in the format where you put like a space between each line and it has punctuation at the end of each line too.
	It's the LinkedIn format, if I may identify it.
	That's exactly right.
	Yeah, like LinkedIn broetry or whatever it's called.
	Here's another one.
	Belan F. Yeah.
	Writes, Elon wants to do good with the money he has.
	We need more Elons in this world.
	He has a heart of gold.
	None of the people who have tried to destroy Elon because he doesn't agree with them politically have never or will never accomplish what he has for mankind.
	She is right.
	None of those people will never accomplish what he has for mankind.
	We have one last one.
	This one in all caps.
	Okay, this is Grace360 Media LLC.
	What an inspiring, awesome story, adding to the illustrious servant-hearted, whatever that means, Elon Musk's stupendous legacy.
	We are very grateful to Jesus for such an indescribable gift of service to our beautiful country.
	And then it's three different colored hearts.
	All hail Jesus shrimp!
	Yes. According to Jesus Shrimp, Elon Musk can put a microchip in my brain.
	Things are even stupider than I thought at the beginning of this episode.
	That is a serious risk about doing this podcast is that you can feel a certain type of way at the beginning of a recording.
	Happiness, hopefulness, whatever it is.
	Grateful to be doing a podcast.
	And then halfway through, you can have, like, little to no hope whatsoever.
	I remember back in, like, 2016, like, there were analysts and commentators who were, like, really worried that, like, fake news articles written by Macedonian teenagers, you know, in office buildings threatened to overwhelm factual information on social media.
	And here we have a situation where like a single person with no real writing or artistic talent can produce just a massive amount of fake news every single day and just flood every platform with it.
	It's like, I don't know how sustainable this is.
	I mean, this is this is my thing.
	I don't know how you fix this.
	Yeah. Before this, the most common version of this was like finding images or videos that looked like other things.
	So like this was really common, like during like Russia's invasion of Ukraine or like, you know, the beginning of the conflict in Israel and Palestine where you find like random war footage or stuff from like War Thunder 3 or whatever.
	And like, that still is a thing, but now you can just, I mean, the AI imagery is getting better.
	Like, some of the newer stuff I've seen generated with like the most recent version of ChatGPT is like, it looks good enough.
	And so I don't know how you fix that.
	I don't know how you stop that from happening.
	Yeah, the worst part is that, like, these people often don't even care whether or not it's true.
	I think you've written about this before, Ryan, about how, you know, like, people don't share, the fact that something is false doesn't, or even knowing that it's false doesn't stop people from sharing it.
	It's just, they just need to feel like it's real, or feel like it approaches a real concept, right?
	Yeah, I mean, this is something that, yeah, I go back and forth on a lot where, like, I think the assumption, especially from, like, a lot of journalists, is like, oh, this person is sharing this, like, clearly fake story about Elon Musk, like, harvesting I'm just having fun online.
	line and like you know i think it like even if it's like racist or like insane what they're doing like if you talk to them about it like yeah i didn't i don't believe that haitian immigrants are actually eating cats and dogs in springfield ohio but i'm gonna share it because like i'm a racist and i think it's funny and like that is just
	a part of the way the internet sort of compresses everything down i yeah i don't i don't just assume anymore because i because there's plenty of people who just like understand this is dumb and
	Yeah, like, whether or not people believe that Elon Musk saved...
	That's exactly it.
	That's my take on it.
	But I think there are, though, people who genuinely probably believe this, which, you know, is awesome.
	That's so awesome.
	Now, I should point out that liberals can also be vulnerable to falling for AI-assisted disinformation.
	A couple weeks ago, a post on Twitter went viral that allegedly contained an audio recording of JD Vance criticizing Elon Musk for not being an American or an elected official.
	But it was actually an AI voice clone and honestly not even a very good one because it sounds very, you know
	I fell for this.
	I'm not too proud to admit it.
	It was early in the morning and I listened to it and I briefly fell for it.
	It's okay.
	I fall for shit all the time, man.
	I sent my brother like a trailer for a video game.
	And I was like, dude, I think it was the AI game, Julian, that we were talking about, the crypto game.
	And I was like, dude, this looks amazing.
	And it's coming out pretty soon.
	And two minutes later, he sent me a screenshot of two articles that were fake, fake game, scam game.
	I was like, oh, man.
	It's a thing.
	It's real.
	I'll tell you this.
	And he wouldn't like it if I said it, but he's not even an American.
	He is from South Africa.
	He is a hotspot.
	is this great American leader in a room that has the tortures of some of the greatest men that ever lived in this country.
	And he has the audacity to act like he is an elected official.
	Yeah, it's not very good.
	But, you know, if you want to believe that, like, there's, you know, there's lots of palace intrigue that's causing the Trump administration to fall apart, it's very tempting to believe.
	Yeah, I mean, this was, this came out like, you know, whoever made this published it like two or three days before Musk seems to have actually I don't know.
	I was like, yeah.
	Also, it's J.D. Vance being a little bitch.
	That sounds exactly like how J.D. Vance would be a little bitch.
	And very clever of the person who produced it to kind of make it sound like it was being recorded from far away and problematic sound.
	I mean, I think that that's kind of the most dangerous area where you get into AI and disinformation is somebody who's clever enough to, okay, how can I, I'm not just going to present this, you know, what the AI spits out.
	I'm actually going to produce it.
	And I do think, like, AI, audio AI is probably the most dangerous one,
	because it's one that, like, we are, like, primed as, like, animals to, like, trust the most.
	Like, the robocalls during the election last year, like, that stuff is, that stuff is scary.
	And I'm not just saying that because I fell for this one briefly.
	I was actually duped by an AI-generated video just a couple days ago.
	And part of why I was duped is because of how innocuous and non-political it is.
	Usually, whenever I see an image or a video and it falls neatly into a political narrative or it's just highly partisan, my defenses go up.
	But in this case, my defenses were very much down.
	So the video depicts a small gold bar being mashed and spread around by a pestle.
	And it's supposed to depict just how soft and malleable gold is.
	I've heard that about gold.
	I've heard it's really soft.
	It is really soft, but the video was still fake.
	So I watched the video on Twitter.
	I thought it was really neat, but I saw the community note explaining that actually the video is AI.
	So here it is.
	It confirmed your prejudice about gold.
	I would have gone into that with the same, because I feel like that's the first gold fact you learned as a kid.
	It's like, hey, did you know that gold's really soft?
	And I would totally believe that.
	I totally believe this.
	I mean, yeah, look, I mean, it's not crazy.
	It's just sort of like, you know, just someone like mashing a bar of gold around until it like crumbles and like turns into this gold paste.
	But is this AI generated?
	This is AI generated.
	This is very pleasing on the eyes.
	Can you stop pausing it?
	I want to just stare at this for a while.
	Just have that bad boy look for five or six hours.
	It's nice.
	It is nice.
	It's got a nice chalky sort of feel to it.
	I want to crush that gold so bad.
	You know we're in a recession because you guys are jacking off the gold.
	Fake gold.
	I just want to watch this on an iPad.
	The volume full up at an Apple.
	I don't know.
	Hold on, I'm going to ask ChatGPT once again.
	Can I break a gold bar?
	I'm asking Google.
	I'm asking Google.
	Ryan, why would you want to break a gold bar in half?
	You will lose the value.
	This one like rattled me a lot because had I not been corrected, I would have sincerely believed that I had seen a real depiction of raw gold being mashed.
	And consequently, I would have this slightly off understanding of the mechanics of the physical world.
	And that's not like a big deal by itself, but like I'm worried about how like AI might allow these slight misunderstandings that are seemingly innocuous to just accumulate.
	I can see a scenario in which like I just see something inaccurate, but totally convincing, like just over and over and over again every day.
	And these misunderstandings build up so much that my model of how the world operates is actually a model of how artificial neural networks respond to user prompts.
	Yeah, this used to be something that like Matthew Snow would tell you in third grade that like, oh, you know, gold, did you know that you can squish a gold bar between your fingers and you go through life being like, that's true.
	Yeah. You know, it's one thing when a human tells you misinformation because you're in third grade, but it's another thing to see a video of it.
	Yeah. You know, because you now have visual confirmation.
	I looked it up.
	If it's pure gold, you can kind of dent it or bend it.
	But you can't do that.
	You can't do what the AI is saying, just for the record.
	Interesting. Yeah.
	Right. Do you have any concerns about just how AI is going to affect just our general sense-making abilities?
	Yeah. I mean, I've definitely already caught myself absorbing incorrect information through osmosis that was likely AI-generated.
	But that's been happening to me since Elon Musk took over Twitter.
	I still use it for work.
	And I would say once or twice a month, I'll repeat something that I passively absorbed on there.
	And someone will be like, that's not true.
	And then I'll have to look it up and realize that wasn't true.
	And so I think AI is a part of that.
	Although someone asked me the other day, what is the biggest...
	Which was the Balenciaga Pope.
	Which I genuinely believed.
	And I think that was because, like, the Pope does weird shit all the time.
	So, like, of course, like, sure, he's walking around in a Balenciaga park.
	Sure, why not?
	But, like, I can't really think of another example of, like, a mass-level, like, serious people falling for a piece of AI.
	There's stuff out there that happens all the time.
	You know, we're talking about our own experiences with it.
	But in terms of, like, a large-scale, like, is this AI or not incident, like, oh, Glasgow AI Willy Wonka is probably another example.
	And then there was the incident where an AI generator Our last premium
	is actually...
	is actually on that very topic.
	So, yeah, if you're interested in hearing more about that, you should go check it out.
	About Lawnmower Man?
	No, about, like, the AI apocalypse and the AI doomers.
	No, so, I mean, there's an argument you made that we're living through the AI apocalypse literally right now.
	So, yeah, I mean, I worry about all that stuff.
	But, like, trying to, like, I think trying to organize it into, like, what kind of AI apocalypse are we in is kind of a fascinating problem.
	Because it's so, it's not what we kind of imagine, but it is what we imagine at the same time.
	I also want to cover this idea that AI art is fascist, or at the very least, it's the preferred method of generating art for modern fascists.
	For example, Elon Musk has promoted several AI-generated images of himself, especially to promote Doge.
	Here's one from last year in which depicts him and Trump wearing glasses, and it says Doge in front of the White House.
	And of course, he doesn't generate his own images even.
	Like he finds images that are like tweeted at him and then he promotes them.
	But yeah, he's tweeted out a lot of AI generated images of himself.
	The UK politician, Ashley Simon, who is a leader of the far right Britain First Party, has posted multiple AI generated images depicting dark skinned Muslim men laughing and jeering behind a distraught young white woman.
	There's not a lot of subtext there.
	He kind of like get what's being communicated.
	And last month, Trump posted a video called Trump Gaza.
	It depicts a family emerging from the wreckage of a war-torn Gaza into a beachside resort town lined with skyscrapers.
	Trump is seen sipping cocktails with the topless Benjamin Netanyahu on sun loungers while Elon Musk eats flatbread and dip.
	It is properly insane.
	Yeah, this one really, like seeing it There was a sense of dread and unreality, and I'm quite hard to shake.
	I don't know if the biggest risk here is misinformation.
	I'm not even sure if disinformation and misinformation is a term that's useful anymore.
	But this, because of the very real, like, genocide behind this, combined with seeing Netanyahu's nips as he, like, sips, like, an AI pina colada with Trump, it really just felt extremely bad.
	Yeah, the creator of this video is the Israeli-born American filmmaker Solo Avital, who claimed that he made the video as satire to poke fun of Trump's claim that he wanted to turn Gaza into the Riviera of the Middle East.
	But the Trump team liked it so much, they just posted it, I think unironically.
	Another huge L for Israeli comedy, which has been consistent.
	I hadn't heard that this was supposed to be satire.
	That's fascinating, actually.
	And very, very funny.
	It makes it much darker, actually.
	Right, why do you think that, like, you know, the right has embraced AI art so rapidly and thoroughly?
	So, yeah, I wanted to pull up, like, where I started to, like, where I had first heard this idea, and there was an ex-user who goes by Hiro or Hiro Badge, and back in August they had sort of argued that AI art was to modern fascism what futurism was to 20th century fascism.
	And they had come up with that idea after the former spokesman for the for Israel made like an AI image tribute to like Israel's trip to Australia and they're just like you know this is they called it mechanically reproduced slopped remote apartheid and to answer the question of why there was a really fascinating interview done by Politico Europe in February where like the chairman for Alternative for Germany the far right party in Germany said that they
	have fully embraced AI art To not just describe the future that they want in words, but to illustrate it and present it, and of course, sometimes amplify it.
	And this was similar to something that had been clocked by the writer Gareth Watkins in the publication New Socialist.
	I've talked to him about this too briefly.
	I think that is the idea, is if you want to produce...
	Because modern fascism is effectively selling people an impossible future, like a future that can't exist.
	And so if you use AI, you can mass...
	images of this impossible future.
	The idea of a Palestinian Riviera owned by Donald Trump.
	They can make their deranged fantasies real and they can flood the internet with them.
	And it all goes back to Steve Bannon's concept of flooding the zone with shit, which still works.
	And AI only helps with that.
	And so in the last four or five months, the majority of the right wing AI images I'm seeing are not meant to trick people so much as they're meant to dream up this beautiful fascist paradise when the political project is over.
	Which is a fascinating change to me.
	They know what they're doing, I think, now with it.
	Yeah, it's perfect.
	AI-generated idyllic past, AI-generated utopian future, and deportation, incarceration, and genocide in the present.
	Right. They can make an anime Ghibli meme of Hispanic people being sent to a Salvadoran gulag, and they can laugh at you, and they can generate beautiful images of what will happen when they're done with their genocide.
	They don't have to think about it.
	They don't even have to hire anyone to do it.
	It makes me think of that old movie, Wag.
	Yes. I worry that,
	you know, in the same way so many people got fooled by footage from Arma 3. That's what it was.
	Not War Thunder.
	It was Arma 3. Yeah, Arma.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And yeah, exactly.
	It's like, that's kind of where my worry is the most is that there will be enough people believing that a certain conflict is real or a certain, you know, horrific image is real that it actually can start to shift public opinion in ways that,
	you know, people...
	I don't know.
	I just feel like we're so capable of this organically and we're kind of scrounging around for a single case that was truly awful.
	But I think that propaganda and the kind of brainwashing of the American people, I mean, we don't even need this shit.
	We got a handcrafted tradition.
	I will say that I read that article, The New Socialist, from Earth Watkins.
	I enjoyed it very much, and I want to read a passage from it because Watkins makes a couple of interesting points, namely that the right may like AI art because it can generate the kind of shallowly realistic works that they like, and it can also do it without the help of working-class,
	typically left-leaning artists.
	That even the best AI models are not fit to be used in any professional context is largely irrelevant.
	The selling point is that their users don't have to pay, and more importantly interact with, a person who is felt to be beneath them, but upon whose technical skills they are forced to depend.
	For relatively small groups like Britain First, hiring a full-time graphic designer to keep up with its insatiable lust for images of crying soldiers and leering foreigners would clearly be an unjustifiable expense.
	But surely world leaders capable of marshalling vast state resources could afford, at the very least, to get someone from Fiverr.
	Then again, why would they do even that when they could simply use AI and thus signal to their base their utter contempt for labor?
	For its right-wing adherents, the absence of humans is a feature, not a bug, of AI art.
	Where mechanically produced art used to draw attention to its artificiality, think of the mass-produced modernism of the Bauhaus, which the Nazis repressed and the AFD have condemned, or the music of Kraftwerk, AI art pretends to realism.
	It can produce art the way right-wingers like it.
	Thomas Kinkade paintings, soulless DreamWorks 3D cartoons, depthless imagery that yields only the reading that its creator intended, and vitally, it can do so without the need for artists.
	I would go on to further say is that like, at least I don't have a great If I try to think of all the amazing conservative art that I've seen over the years, I can't really think of that.
	Conservatives are not necessarily known for their beautiful expression through the classical arts, and I wonder if AI allows them to do it without actually having any skill, and that's why it's more popular to them.
	This is totally unrelated, but whenever that question comes up, I always ask myself, does King of the Hill count?
	Yeah, that's the thing.
	If it's didactic, if it's trying to push politics on the audience, I would agree with you, Jake.
	But Clint Eastwood is an insanely good director, great actor.
	His writing is even good.
	Country music can be good.
	Johnny Cash is a fairly conservative artist.
	Yeah, I guess just because it's not in my sort of orbit doesn't necessarily mean that it's not out there.
	But I would tweak what you're saying and say that this is a specific kind of capitalistic fascism.
	And it's not like, this is not normal, I mean, normal conservatism, I don't even know what the fuck that means, but this is a very specific political movement, I would argue.
	John McNaughton is going to be the subject of our upcoming premium, and he fascinates me because he basically was making, he's like making AI slop, kind of.
	For conservatives, but absolutely painstakingly with oil paint.
	And he's almost like art that was designed to be fed into an AI so that people could make up their own John McNaughton paintings.
	So that Photoshop could have the John McNaughton filter on whatever you want to express.
	But yeah, it is interesting.
	Is King of the Hill conservative art?
	Does that count?
	That's the thing with calling an art a politics, right?
	I'm actually kind of playing into the conservative gripes hands because it's like they don't like it when what they think is liberal propaganda is pushed on them when really that's just a lot of it is just art that they see things they don't like in.
	But! Having said that, there is really fucking annoying progressive, left-wing, centrist, liberal, like, didactic art.
	I mean, you know, oftentimes trying to teach a political lesson overtly in your art is gonna be a huge L, no matter what perspective you're coming from.
	And more and more, I feel like people actually, like, want that or crave that because they're confusing art with just having, seeing themselves and their beliefs represented in a certain medium.
	Actually, I'm going to get deeper into that in the John McNaughton premium, so definitely go sign up for our premium Patreon feed.
	All right.
	Any final thoughts on the AI apocalypse that's going to consume us all?
	It's here!
	Good luck.
	Good luck.
	I think that it's way scarier to examine AI in its functions in like denying people health care automatically and shit like that.
	But also it's worth noting that we would do that using human labor.
	Like we are totally capable of lying to each other, of being extremely cruel, of, you know, committing crimes against humanity.
	We don't really need the help of AI.
	I think my take has been and probably will continue to be that this is Just a great way for us to wash our hands of things that we were going to do anyways.
	Yeah. Well, yeah, we don't need the help of AI.
	I don't need a car to get across town, but it helps.
	Yeah, okay.
	I mean...
	I mean, so I understand your position.
	We are fucked even absent AI, so it's really just, at worst, a minor accelerant to the dystopia we are already living in.
	Yeah. Also, just get off social media.
	Like, if this does one good thing for you, it's to realize that what you're consuming is slop and that even the real...
	You know?
	Log off.
	Ryan, thanks for joining us.
	Remind us where people can find more of your work.
	You can find me writing every other day on my newsletter Garbage Day, garbageday.email.
	You can find my podcast, Panic World, on all of the apps where you consume audio content with your ears.
	And I'm on Blue Sky.
	Just search Ryan Hates This.
	I'll pop right up.
	Nice. Yeah.
	Well, beloved listener, we're so grateful that you have listened to another episode of the QAA podcast.
	You can go to patreon.com slash QAA, and that's where you're going to have the opportunity to give us $5 a month and get access to our premium feed.
	Like I said earlier, we're constantly cooking stuff up there, and it often allows us to explore things that maybe aren't Maine-worthy, but I find Just as interesting in the marginalia and in the kind of hidden corners and the smaller sized topics.
	So you can go there and sign up.
	Do it.
	It's probably less than the cost of a beer wherever you live, depending on how Bidenflation and Trumpflation have reached you.
	For everything else, we've got a website qaapodcast.com Oh, and Corey, please input this into ChatGPT and generate me saying it.
	Write a sign-off for the podcast QAnon Anonymous, now renamed QAA, that blesses the listeners with a prayer and also wishes them well until next week.
	And with that, dear listeners, we send you into the week ahead.
	May your mind stay sharp, your heart stay true, and your curiosity keep you questioning the world around you.
	We pray for your strength, your clarity, and your peace.
	Until next week, stay vigilant, stay safe.
	Oh, also, Julian, quick warning.
	Include please in your prompt next time or else.
	Kisses. I think there's a real danger that we're facing, and Signal is clocking this pretty closely,
	of the introduction of this sort of notion of agentic AI into our devices and lives, in part because what we're doing is giving so much control.
	To these systems that are going to need access to data.
	The value add is something like can look up a concert, book a ticket, schedule it in your calendar, and message all your friends that it's booked, right?
	So what would it need to do that?
	Well, it would need access to our browser, an ability to drive that.
	It would need our credit card information to pay for the tickets.
	It would need access to our calendar, everything we're doing, everyone we're meeting.
	It would need access to Signal to open and send that message to our friends.
	And it would need to be able to drive that across our entire system with something that looks like root permission.
	Accessing every single one of those databases probably in the clear, because there's no model to do that encrypted.
	And if we're talking about a sufficiently powerful model, AI,
	That's almost certainly being sent to a cloud server where it's being processed and sent back.
	So there's a profound issue with security and privacy that is haunting this sort of hype around agents and that is ultimately threatening to break the blood-brain barrier between the application layer and the OS layer by conjoining all of these separate services,
	muddying their data.
	And doing things like undermining the privacy of your signal messages because, hey, the agent's got to get in, the agent's got to text your friends, the agent's got to pull the data out of your text and got to summarize that so that, again, your brain can sit in a jar and you're not doing any of that yourself.
	You're doing something else.
	So I think we need to be really careful.
	When I think about the immediate concerns, not simply the history of AI and the fact that it's predicated on this larger surveillance model, there's a real issue right now.

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