Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 926: Wayward AI Stories

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

Man tackled children off bikes, dragged 1 into his home after being ding dong ditched for weeks, police say You Can Now Get a Religious Exemption From Using AI at Work Google's AI Overviews Feature Is Telling Users That SCP Horror Fiction Entities Are Real Dealership revoked offer to buy back customer's BMW, blaming wayward AI chatbot | CBC News f the way': The backlash over delivery robots

This episode of Cognitive Dissidence is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Recording live from Glorahole Studios in Chicago and beyond. This is Cognitive Dissence. Every episode, we blast anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence.

to any topic that makes the news makes it big or makes us mad. It's skeptical. It's political. And there is no welcome at today. For you is Thursday, July the 2nd. Not for us. It's Friday still June 26th.

We're recording two in a row. We're having a little fun with our funny show. It's still Friday for us. But I just got back from Ohio. I visited a friend I've been friends with for a very, very long time. And he's one of the few people who's sort of, of like, he does a lot of like outdoor sort of pursuits and he's a, he's a firearms guy. We've shot with him before in the past. He's, he came up. You and I and a bunch of other people

used to do this thing where we'd go up to Michigan and go trap shooting for a weekend. And, and he visited us up there once. That was a great time. I remember. He's a really nice guy. But we wound up visiting him in Ohio. And he lives by Columbus, Ohio. Okay. And I was going out there to to go do some, some, some, uh, some shooting with him at a, at a range. We were going to go shoot at a range together. And when we were, when I was on my way out there, he had, he had sent me a message and he said, do you want to go ATV riding?

And I was like, sure, I've been on an ATV before. It sounds fine. He's like, well, there's a tour by me. We can go on. And when I get out there, I was like, oh, cool. You know, Sarah doesn't want to drive one. She'll be behind me. She'll be on the back of the ATV.

He's like, no, no, no, it's a side by side. He's like, it's not a, okay. So it's a UTV instead. And a UTV is a utility, and it's not a utility terrain vehicle. It's what it is, UTV. But they're like, are you seeing these, right? These razors. Right?

They look like so much fun. So they're razors. They're like a little go cart. You're on a tiny little go cart. And my wife is next to me. And they have an oh shit handlebar for her. So right next to her, she's got a handlebar she can hold on to. They don't have a front windshield.

So it's just open to the world. They have, they do have a Bluetooth speaker that you can connect your phone to and drive through the nature with. I don't know how you'd hear it over the engine. And they go in, you know, different modes, you know, high, low, whatever, and you drive along. And we get down there and we show up, we go west, or pardon me, we go east from Columbus. So we're in Columbus and they're already east of Columbus. They already live east of Columbus on the other side. 20 miles east of Columbus.

So we're at their house. We get in their car in the morning and we drive east farther. And we're at the bottom of the states, so it's kind of in the foothills of the Appalachians, and it's right by, I don't know how close it was, but he had said, West Virginia is nearby where we stopped, right?

And we get out, and everybody who speaks to you sounds like a jug band. They are 100%. It is, there is a twang to how they speak to them. down there. We get into this thing and the guys telling us how to drive and what you're going to do and how you're going to drive through these things. And he sounds like Yosemite Sam or Falkhorn

and Leghorn, I guess, is who it would sound like we get in and we start driving. And you're on the road and these things go pretty fast. We're going like 25, 30 miles an hour on this little road. And then we turn into this backwoods place. It's in the middle of like this backwoods area in the middle of the Appalachians over there, we start going up and down these trails. And at first the trails are fine, but maybe the third turn in. He turns,

and I look, and there's no way around except for what seems to be a vertical straight up a hill. And I look at Sarah and I go, no. But there's two ruts. Oh, shit. And I'm like, no. That motherfucker gets on this thing,

and he goes straight up the side of this thing. And Tom, this is something I would not have tried if a person wasn't there doing it right in front of me. If I didn't see a human being, do it right in front of me and expect me to do it. It is not a thing I would have attempted. There had to be 50 times that I did the exact same thing over and over on these hills where we were going up or down

almost a straight cliff face. And you would have been like, this is an impassable moment. I would have thought to myself, there's no way. I turned the corner multiple times where there would be like a little tiny, nice little path over here,

and then I would look to the right, I'd be like, no way. And he would turn to the right. These vehicles sound amazing. They are little animals. Was it hard to figure out what it's to staying high and low? So it's automatic.

Oh, so you don't have to. So you just put the thing in. And for the most part, high, which is only two-wheel drive. For the most part, you're on high. Really? Twice. He turned back to everybody, and he had a symbol.

He would hold his hands up at four fingers. Okay. And that meant go to four-wheel drive. And that meant you had to pull this lever all the way back. And then you were in four-wheel drive, and then you drove up the hill. And so we did that a couple times. It wasn't all the time. It was a couple.

Sure. But most of the time, on these straight-up hills. On the ones where we had to put it in four-wheel drive, it was a straight-up hill with a tiny little spot and another straight up hill and a tiny spot and another so you're up. I don't say like it's straight up hill is two-wheel drive you have to go like upside down to go four-wheel drive? What does it happen? I mean it was

insane but I was blown away by one how fun these things are because they were an absolute hoot. They were an absolute hoot but the places that he was putting us I was thinking to myself this guy has a lot of faith in me right? He has a lot of faith in everybody in this line that you're not going to flip

this thing over ass over tea kettle. But I was blown away by it. And when we got in, the first thing I said to Sarah, I was like, do not whatever you do, put your hand out to save yourself if we start to flip over. I was like, you will break your hand, you may lose an arm. I was like, do not whatever you do. And so the whole time, she's white knuckling it. Did she like it or she? She liked it. She thought it was a lot of fun. But there's a couple of times where she thought, thank you for telling me that, because we were, you know, twisting and moving. And it was insane.

But it was like, it was genuinely just, there was eight or so people on this trip where they had eight UTVs and they all follow each other through the woods and this guy drives you through the woods and you cruise around in there. I'd never been on anything like that. I've driven these things before.

Yeah. But you wind up, the times I've done it, they've sort of been like, there's the big yard we own go drive on the UTV. And I'm like, yeah, sure. Put, but, but, but, oh, I went over a little hill,

put, put, putt, put. This one, I was blown away by what they were, they were like, no, get on it. That sounds like the best time. It was a hoot. It blows me away. Like, I'll tell you a quick story. Like, it blows me away when you get, like, into an experience where somebody assumes

that you have a level of, like, competence or they just trust you to do a thing. And you're like, all I did to swipe my credit card. I don't know what I'm doing. I did, I was in, I was camping in Kentucky and I wanted to go white water rafting. And I showed up to go white water rafting. And they were pretty significant rapids and a group of kids showed up. And so the guides, the guides are in kayaks. So they're like, okay, cool. There's this group of like church kids. They put me in the back as the guy who steers the boat. And they're like, okay, like two minute tutorial on how to steer

a white water rock. Now steer it forever. And they're like, you're in charge. And now I've got a boat full of fucking Methodist youth group kids or whatever. And the guide is in a kayak, and we're going down this river. And I don't know how to steer this boat. And like, it's just because I was an adult.

That's the only reason that I was the guy in charge of steering the boat. So the guy when the kayak would go down and he'd like do this like sharp right hand turn and go round the rock. You've got to shoot through the thing. Because if you go sideways, you've got to the boat and people are going to pop out. I flip the boat.

People popped out. I'm grabbing kids and hurling them into the boat. I'm like, I am terrified. I am incompetent in this thing. Because it's literally the only time I've ever tried to drive or steer or pilot a white watercraft. And I'm like, why did you do this to me? Why I'm fucking fishing kids out of the drink like with one arm? Like, and it's like even like a regular size kid, soaking wet with a fucking life.

fest on. They're heavy as fuck, but I've got to like hold on to the thing and I'm like leaning over and I'm like torquing my back and I'm like horking kids into the boat and they're like oh god. And like some of the kids wouldn't like steer or like like pedal or like push paddle thank you because they were scared

and I'm like y'all we don't have any power. I can't do this. It was the worst. It was so terrible. That sounds like it sucks so bad. It sucked so bad and I felt incompetent in front of these like and these guides are all like you know 20 years old and fit as fuck and they know what they're doing. They should 100%

have a guide in there. And I'm like, why aren't you in the boat? Why are you in the kayak? That's silly. Yeah, that's a bad trip. People will just like, you swipe a credit card and they'll just be like, yeah, I trust you. And I'm like, don't trust me. There's a bunch of those things that you can do while you're on vacation. You find those ones that are good and bad, etc.

But it is interesting. The level of expertise that they expect from certain people, that is a really, it's a really crazy thing. I was blown away that they expected me to do some of these things because I would not have done them if another person hadn't done them. The whole time I was thinking to myself, I was like, if I didn't see a person

do what he just did, I wouldn't even think it's possible. That sounds, I want to do this. It was a hoot. It was a lot of fun, but it was also pretty hairy at times. I bet it was scary. It was hairy at times. There was times that you're going up the hill and you'll catch in these ruts and you'll be like bouncing around. But I'd be interested to hear from the listeners if they have any sort of stories like that where they've been on a thing that they've paid for and then suddenly someone's like, no, you're going to have to like know how to do heart surgery. Sir, you'll be landing this plane. Exactly.

That's what it feels like. That's what it feels like. It's like, oh, we didn't teach you how to do it, but here's your hang glider. Yes, right. Right. God damn. All right. Let's talk about some crazy shit.

This is from 13 WIBW. Man tackled children off bikes dragged one into his home after being ding-dong dished for weeks. This poor guy. But also, he's kind of a dick. But it's so funny because they're ding-dong ditching him, right? And he's getting madder and he's getting madder and he's getting madder and he's getting madder. And then these people ring his doorbell. And they say, we want to apologize.

We're so sorry. And then he comes out and they're like, fuck you. And they burn away. And then he was like, that's it. Now I'm mad. And then he hit and he went after him. But if they wouldn't have done that one last thing, he probably would have just been okay with the ding-dong ditching. But he like kind of definitely went after these kids in a way that he probably shouldn't have.

But he was, he was very angry and then they also antagonized him. Like, I have had my house ding-dong ditched and I think it's hilarious. It's funny. Like I laugh. But there's a level of repetition that becomes, I don't know, like it's harassment at some point. And it sucks when kids do it because what are you supposed to do? You can't do anything. You can't beat up kids for just annoying you.

Yeah. That's like a whole thing. you're not allowed to do, you know? And like, I get it. We shouldn't be beating up kids that annoy us. It's a whole problem. But at the same time, I remember when I was, this is terrible, when I was a teenager, me and my buddy, Dave, decided for some reason we didn't like this other kid that lived down the street.

And so we would go and steal his mailbox. We would just take the whole box, the post and everything, rip it out of the ground in the middle of the night, take it to the creek and throw it in the creek. And then when his parents bought a new mailbox, we'd rip that mailbox out of the ground, Jesus Christ, Tom. We just did it over and over and over again. We just constantly decide. And I don't even remember why.

Like, I only remember stealing this poor family's fucking mailbox post and all. And, like, they would try to, like, cement it in or do a different thing. But, like, you got to put an IED in there. Right, yeah. They should have. The thing is, but the problem is, they were working against two teenagers with nothing better to do. Yeah. And there really is no force in the verse.

Is it? That can stop something like that two teenagers. teenage boys with time on their hands and nothing better to do. So, like, eventually they just didn't replace it. And I presume they got, like, a post office. Yeah, just at that point, you're like, you know what, we're just done. And all we were doing is harassing this poor family. And I don't know why.

So mean, Tom. People, like, teenage, like, kids are just the worst. They're bad. They're just the worst. I, so did you ever, like, egg houses or throw, uh, toilet paper and do that stuff? Did you ever do any of that stuff? I did egging. And then, um, at the suggestion of my.

friend's girlfriend, we also filled water balloons with water and flower. Jesus Christ, dude. Because then it's harder to clean off. That's so mean. I know, man. Like, I know. Like, I don't know why we did these things. But, like, we did these things.

So I don't remember egging anything when I was growing up. But I do remember in my area and in high school, lots of people teeped houses. So that was the thing they did. They would just TP at the time. ton of houses. And I remember it was homecoming weekend was coming up. This is so stupid. And I had graduated high school at that point, but I was just out of high school. So it was like the one, my first year out of high school. I still knew a bunch of people who were still in high school. I was friends with people that were seniors that year. And I was working with this lady.

And she lived in the same village as me. And I remember telling her, oh yeah, my buddies are going out. It's their senior night. They're going out and they're going to go. do toilet papering because it's homecoming so they're going to go do that work. Tonight, I had mentioned it to her. And she's like, if I give you and your friends 20 bucks, will you guys go

TP my neighbor who I hate? Their kid is in high school. Their kid is in high school. So she took out a hit on her neighbor's house. Okay, this is great. And we did go after their house for this. I forget what it was. It was a sum son of money. I think it was 20 bucks.

Enough to buy like couple old English bottles or whatever. It was nothing. But her son was in high school at a time. So she was like, it's the perfect crime. Right. Because you can't tell who did it. And the kids were out already doing it. So I talked to them and I said, yeah, it's down the street.

And I remember I went with them and they had a lawn jockey. And I mummified their lawn jockey. I took a roll of toilet paper and I went around the legs and the body. I loved it. And I wrapped it all. Like I fucking tied it like. a package. I wrapped it all up. And then we, we fled. And I came to see her on Monday, because it was Monday morning, we went to work. And she said, it backfired. She came out in the morning to see all

this. And we got them good. It was streamers from the trees and everything was covered. And she had a big smile on her face about how popular her son was because he got his house teaped. Oh. So it backfired on her, what she had wanted to do. When you said it backfired, I was thinking, like, maybe you got her house. Oh, no, no, no, that would been amazing. That would be so fun. But, no, we did it.

And instead of enraging her neighbor, which is what she had planned to do, what she had paid us the hit money to do. You made him a hero. I made him a hero. And so now it was a total backfire. And she was like, it wasn't even worth it. And then I was like, I was like, you know,

crime never is. Crime's never worth it. It turns out. I'm glad I could teach you that lesson. Now, like, give me that 20 so I can buy. Old English. When I was working at Circuit City, myself and a very good friend of ours,

I was a guy who worked in the warehouse. It was his last day. And one of the girls from the warehouse came and she said, hey, would you help us prank this guy? I barely even knew the guy. But I was like... But I was like... But I was like, yeah, we'll fucking prank somebody.

And she gave us like, I don't know, 20 bucks or something for like prank supplies or whatever. So, man... There was a lot more money in the economy back then for prank supplies. I just want people to know that. There was a whole line eye. There was a whole prank economy

that was going on. So we went across the street to the grocery store. We bought boxes and boxes of aluminum foil and then Vaseline and then we went in the warehouse and we got pallet wrap

and we went out to his car. We got his car keys and we made these crumpled aluminum balls and we filled his car with crumpled up aluminum foil balls. And then we shut the door

And then we took this pallet wrap, which is like what they wrap. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know what it is, but you might explain it. Like, imagine like a giant industrial-sized thing of cling wrap. It's very thick, and they use it to make sure that boxes that are on pallets don't fall over. Exactly. So we got a giant thing of pallet wrap from the warehouse. And we pallet-wrapped his entire car.

We'd run it under the car and over, and under the car and over. We used the whole thing of pallet wrap on this guy's car. Good for you, Tom. Then we smeared Vaseline on it. So we couldn't find any purchase. to like peel it off. Wow. And we thought this was great.

Because we're like, this is going to be great. Because he's going to get smeared up with Vaseline. It's going to be annoying. And when he finally opens it, this thing is of fucking aluminum foil ball is going to pile. Christ, so we thought this was great. And we were excited because we thought that like maybe we weren't actually trying to be malicious. We were just trying to have a, it was this last day. We thought like this would be like a fun prank that everyone will laugh about.

And we'll all work together to clean it up. I can't wait until this guy. was fucking next level pissed. He did not find this funny at all. Like, at all. Like, he was furious about it. And so then everybody else felt sheepish and wouldn't admit that this was like a funny prank.

And it was just a thing that nobody ever admitted to doing instead of being this, like, funny kind of jokey send-off thing where, like, in my mind I had it where, like, everybody's like, oh, you guys. And then everybody, like, kind of pitches in to, like, kind of clean it up. And then he opens the door. Instead, he got mad and you guys were, like, And everybody was like, that sucks.

Who would do that? You know? Nobody would like... Bunch of dicks around here. You know, I heard down the block this happens to the guy. Because like everybody was then like, oh, no, I just want to say to anybody who's listening, I'm not proud of anything I did. No, I was the worst, man.

I was the worst. I was such an asshole. I was such a mean, shitty kid. I don't know why I did the things I did. And in hindsight, it's bad. So I don't want to, I don't want to give people the wrong. impression that I think that it's a, that I did a funny thing. I think I was

an asshole. I think it was a genuine asshole. Same man. Yeah. Same. A hundred percent the same. And if somebody had come out and like taught me a lesson about it, maybe I would shook me by my thing. I don't really we should beat up kids. I think the guy, that guy went a little too far. At a certain point, he's threatening someone with a rock. So like, genuinely. He got arrested

and he shook. Yeah. And like, this is one of those moments where this guy, there's a spring that broke. Like, this is something that he just, could not compute anymore. Granted, everybody that was going after him was all gas, no breaks for a long time. And he felt like he was maybe harassed. But that's not a reason to do what he did.

No, no, no, I don't know. This, I was thinking about you when I saw this. Yahoo News from futurism. You can now get a religious exemption from using AI at work. So this is really funny. And I think this is so funny. Because the Pope came out and was like, yeah, AI is pretty much awful. some Unitarian Universalist was like,

ooh, interesting. And they are using that to say, using AI violates my deeply held religious beliefs. And so I need a religious exemption. And because in this country, we don't require that a religious exemption actually be tied to any kind of a theocratic principle, right? Or it doesn't need to make sense.

Although this one does make sense. This one does. I'm just saying sometimes they don't have to even. Right. Because, you know, we have created a situation, which I think this is like chickens coming home to roost, right, where people can claim a religious exemption and they are not required to demonstrate

that their religion is of a certain size, has a holy book, that this intersects with their religious teachings in any way. Otherwise there'd be no religious exemptions for vaccines, right? So we've carved this out and said pretty much anything. I mean, it's like the people who used to wear the colanders on their head Yeah, the postafarians. The postafarians

to get their photo taken because they said that you have to let me wear this on my head because it's my religious covering for my head. Yeah. Which is great

because it shows the absurdity of what's happening in our world that shows how absurd religious exemption is in general. Maybe we shouldn't do it for anyone,

let alone do it for somebody who's going to do something very silly because we don't have any way to control or regulate that. Like when everything is silly, you can't create safeguards where your silly thing is protected

and my silly thing isn't. But this one, I will say this, I'm normally like a religious exemption. In this case, I'm thinking, nice way to game the system there. Good for you. Because I know that there is an oncoming tide of AI that we cannot escape.

It is, it's the tsunami is hit, and it's the water is rising. How high is the water, Mama? Yeah. And so we're seeing it happen. and I'm happy that someone is able to even just stand in the current. I'm happy that that's the case.

But I don't think no matter what that current's going to pick this person up and drag them along. I think we're at a point now where there's just no turning back in this face of this thing. So here's what I wonder about though is that if I'm an employer

and somebody has, so like the whole goal of AI at some point for most employers is to create, they talk about like, we're going to create efficiencies, it's going to save us money. Otherwise, why would they do it?

Right? And when they say that, what they mean is we're going to have less employees. Right? That's what they mean. It's what they mean. I actually think that by doing this, this person creates an HR situation where they say, if you fire me in favor of AI instead of the guy one cubicle over, I have a religious discrimination claim.

So I am actually more protected than that other guy. So when it comes time for layoffs, I'm now, I've put my. I've put you on notice that I'm in a protected class. And so if I'm as a company, I'm doing layers. Wow. I might think twice about whether that person gets laid off. So I think it's kind of smart in that respect. Yeah, yeah.

It's smart, but it's also alienating and potentially like their employers can still let you go. It makes me wonder too, because we live in a country where you don't need a reason. Right. Right. So I can just fire you for no reason. And if you're not as productive, what is happening outside, right? fucking KR. There's sons of sirens.

The guy next door has this mower driving around. It's insane. Pretty soon there's going to be gunfire. It's insane what's happening outside right now. But in Illinois, for sure, in other places all across the country, you can just fire people because you want to.

So you can walk into their office a week after them saying, I'm not going to use AI because you said and you'd be like, yeah, I don't like the way you look. Go away. And then they say, well, it was because of AI. And you'd be like, well, you have to prove that.

I never, I never, send an email about it. I never talk to anybody about it when they discover or anything. It's not going to be a big deal. Nobody's going to care. And I can fight you for any reason I want. And if you are less productive, you could be painting yourself in a corner because other people are using this thing if it is more productive. I don't know. I'm not going to make that judgment call. But it may be that someone else is able to do more work because they're using AI to do some of the busy work that they would have had to do. Maybe this could put you in a really bad position, especially in places where they don't have any, what is the, it's a no cause state. I think

they what's they call it. That will state. So yeah. So they could just get rid of you. Yeah. The employee might, what the employee might do is, is create a situation though where it's like, well, do you really want to get into a pissing match about it? Or do you want to just fire the other guy?

But the thing is, is like, like, in some ways, you're fighting uphill as an employee because you've got to hire somebody to represent you. Oh, yeah. A big company might already have somebody who can do that work and would just need a call. Yeah, it's a mess. The whole thing is a mess. It's a mess. This is great, though.

Another AI story. I feel like most of the stories we're going to hit on our funny show from now on and not so funny show. It's going to be AI stories. This is from futurism. Google's AI overviews feature is telling users that SCP horror fiction entities are real. The Google quick search AI function that pops up. when you search for something, it will give you a summary, an AI summary. This has been happening for over a year.

And there's been multiple times I've seen that summary be wrong. Oh, it's terrible. It's not good. It's not a good summary. They sometimes will misunderstand the question that you're asking, the search engine. Sometimes they will hallucinate and put in the wrong information. And this is one of those cases. there's a

they created a creature a horror creature in this fiction that they write online about a head that wanders the bottom of the ocean as a like a head

that was lopped off of somebody yeah and it's a whole it's like a whole copy paste creepy pasta thing or whatever it is it's all that it's like that it's that it's just a an online horror thing that someone is passing off and AI thinks it's real.

Yeah. Well, or at least it's pretending, presenting it as such. It's so funny because like AI has no idea. It's so funny how much stock and faith is placed in this stuff because AI can't tell fact from fiction. It's not a thinking thing. It's a predictive language model. So it doesn't know if the originating material is presented as non-fiction.

and that's the way that that material is built and comes off because that's Blair Witchie, right? It's part of the fun of it. Then there's nothing that's going to cue the AI model in to say that doesn't comport with reality because it's not a thinking machine. It's a predictive machine. So it doesn't know AI gets weird shit wrong all the time. It doesn't know what day and time it is. Really? AI has no idea that time has passed from one like instance within a chat to another instance within a chat. it cannot keep track of dates and times without additional prompting

and additional context clues. So it's not even running a clock in its background when you're using it. AI does a lot of weird shit because it doesn't know, it doesn't actually know things. It doesn't draw from like a knowledge base unless you tell it to only go

to a certain knowledge base. If you don't tell it to go to a knowledge base to look for its information, it'll just predict whatever it, thinks you're most likely to want to hear. That's how it's built. The sycophancy is a feature, not a bug. So, like, of course it does this. And it's so wrong about so many things all the time. You have to be crazy careful. I may have mentioned this before, but like, I tried to get AI to build like a cycling thing for me. And it very confidently was like, yeah, here's what you can do.

And I'm like, it doesn't work. And it's like, okay, I fixed it this time. Now it'll work for sure. And then I'm like, it doesn't work. It's like, yep, no, that was never going to work. now it'll really work. And it's like, it turns out it could never do it in the first place because it didn't have the right API. But it doesn't want to say no because it's not built to say no

unless you build something in it to allow it to say no. It's crazy. Like, we're putting so much stock in this thing. And like, the more I've learned about it, and I've had to dig deep into it for my work, the more I've learned about it, the more I'm like, oh. On occasion, I'll call up AI

to do a quick sort of rearrange of something for me. So a very menial task that would take me 15 minutes or something, I can normally paste something into AI and it'll just spit out the thing I want. So it's like an admin assistant where you just say I just need these names

and I need these in this order or whatever and it'll do it. And sometimes I ask it to metadataag things for me. So I'll paste something in and say, give me what you would think would be five or 10 meta tags for this particular thing so I can paste them into the tag area of something.

I tried to do that recently because we finished our season on No Rogan, and I had a list of all the things we covered. So I had a list of the person and the subject that we covered, so whoever it was in the subject. And I pasted it in and I said, do me a favor, go through this, and look and say, how many of these people are podcasters? How many of these people are? and pick five or six tags that would fit a category of these people.

Are they comedians? Are they whatever? Are they podcasters? Are they billionaires? Are they whatever? And I said, tell me what they are and then list them out. And it came back and it said, well, the largest group is politicians at seven. And I said, okay, list the seven politicians.

And then it listed them and two of them were not politicians. And I said, two of those are not politicians. And they said, yeah, you're right. Those two aren't politicians. And I said, but you listed them as politicians, that's a huge error. Right. Yeah, you're right. Yeah.

Yeah, you're right. So the thing is, is like, even for a simple task like that, which I, if I were to hand off this page of things to anybody who understands media at all, or even just had access to internet, maybe they don't even know the names of those people. They don't even recognize a single name on there. But they know that if they type it into something, they would be able to follow it somewhere, maybe to Wikipedia or wherever, and be like, oh, this is J.D. Vance. He is a politician. That's one category. He's this. It might take them two hours to go through that whole list to

search for everybody, but they would have a pretty good list and understanding of who that is and who they are and what kind of qualities they had. In this case, wasn't the case at all. It just literally was like absolutely wrong about 20% of the thing. So, 14% or whatever of the things. It's so crazy. I have an instance within Claude that I've been using to track like my food, my workouts, my sleep. I built an agent to do this as part of an experiment to learn how to use AI better.

I built this agent. And it will sometimes just get things wildly wrong. And I'll have to remind it. Like, not remind it. Because once you work with something too, it'll start to drift because its context window gets full. It can't like refer back to its sense. properly. It'll move away from like its prescribed data knowledge base without permission.

It just does weird stuff sometimes. And it also can't do math properly because it's not actually performing calculations. It is really bad at math. So even just adding up my macros in a day or adding up my calories in a day, sometimes I'll just look at it. Like, that's not right. I'll be like, oh yeah, that's not how math works. And it'll do it again and it'll maybe get it right. But it's wrong a lot. Like, it's just like wrong a lot. It's like, I don't understand

why we're putting as much faith into it as we put into it because it's so confidently wrong. We covered on citation needed a chat GPT convincing people to do crazy shit.

Yeah. Story that Heath did, I think it was. And, you know, this is not something that should surprise us because chat GPT convinced, was trying to convince someone

they could fly. Yeah. You know, Keith was reading aloud some of the entries that ChatGPT had to this person. And if you were to get that kind of stuff from what you would consider

and what a lot of people consider a supercomputer, right? That's how people view AI. You might be convinced of some of these things. Yeah. People are. So weird. So this story came up about it hallucinating.

And I thought to myself, Of course it does. Yeah. It's like this is, this should surprise literally no one. Yeah. It is such an untrustworthy tool. It's an interesting tool. But it is like, it's like a research assistant that you're paying in like $11 an hour to work for you.

And they're not good at their job. Right. They're not good at their job. They're not good at their constantly. They just never get tired. And they never, and they take a lot of criticism. Right. They're fine with it.

I think that we, we are. forced to accept it. Everyone right now is sort of in this mode of forcing themselves to accept it. You've got to somehow try to use it because the corporate America has made a

decision that this is coming. So if you don't, you're just going to be left behind, just like people who are like, I'm never going to go on the internet. I'm never going to load that up. I don't need any of that stuff. You send me a proper letter. So there's going to be a point in our future where there's

just not going to be any way around not using it. I feel like, and everything, I mean, every app is now got it front and center. Everything is constantly talking about how you can use AI to help improve your experience, etc., etc. I think

that as much as I fucking hate it, like, so much of my life, I have to try to use it on occasion just to see if there's something I can use it for. Because if not, I'm going to be left behind in a lot of ways. That's exactly how I think about it. It won't do, and I won't use it for, you know, generating scripts, writing, things like that.

It's not something I can use it for. I won't use it for it. I won't use it for it. I like to do that stuff and I don't want it to do that. I don't mind if I can fix it in some way to actually do some of the menial labor that I have to do. That would be amazing. And I think a lot of people would be okay with that. But even I personally even think using AI to edit your audio and to edit your video, I personally think that's a generative AI.

Because editing is an art. Editing is a creation. It's an art. I'm creating something out of these things. So I don't ever use it for those things. I don't use it to do those things. The only thing I ever generate on any of the things we do is it will generate the text that we say. And often it's wrong.

Right. You have to like go through and, like, go through and, like figure out how it's wrong or you just let it sit or I hand it off to somebody else on our team who does it. But yeah, it's crazy how bad it is at so many things and how quickly we're embracing it. You know, maybe it'll get better at those things. I'm still not going to be crazy about embracing it. Yeah, I use it. It's funny because like I'll, I use it for my work to organize my thoughts. So I'll use it to like, I'll take a lot of times what I'll do is I'll just be sort of like thinking about a project or thinking about something I have a problem.

I have to solve at work. And I'll talk into it and I'll say, all I want you to do is organize my thoughts. Do not add or subtract to my thoughts. Simply organize them into a bullet pointed list. And it will do that for a while. And then it'll start to kind of add, oh, I have a suggestion. I'm going to add this. Like, this really speaks to that.

I'm like, stop. Stop. I'm not asking you to do my thinking for me. I'll do all the thinking. All I need you to do is write it down. So that I can do this while I'm on my extra. You're treating it like a secretary in some ways or something. Yeah.

So I just organize my thoughts for me. And it'll still sometimes be like, I snuck another one in. Whenever, fuck you. I was told by Aaron Rabinowitz. He said, it's actually relatively good at proofreading. He said, so you can post stuff in. And I'm a pretty horrendous at, not spelling, because spelling has a little spigley line or anything.

I can almost always correct it. But it's word structure and how things go together sometimes is bad for me when I type. I'm not great at it. And I oftentimes won't capitalize or put periods in places that should be or proper punctuation in certain places. So I'll ask it to do that. And it does a pretty good job.

But often what it'll do is try to add one. And I'll say, don't do that. I didn't ask you to do that. I just want you to proofread it. I just need you to proofread it. That's all I need. And it's proofreading it to a point that is past the blue line red line stuff

that the thing normally does, which is the simple stuff. I needed to do a little more than that. And it often fails. Yeah, because it can't figure out what guardrails are. Yeah, because it constantly wants to step over the line. Yep.

So this is a... Speaking of stepping over the line. CBC, I love this. Dealership revoked offer to buyback customers, BMW, blaming wayward AI chatbought. They eventually acquiesced because the article came out.

Yeah. So the article comes out and they're like, fine, I guess we'll lose money on a stupid deal for his stupid computer. that we told to do the stupid thing. They wound up outsourcing this essentially haggling process to an AI. Guy said, well, what do you say about this number?

And they said, sure. And he said, cool, I can sell them back my BMW and pay it off. And they just started zero essentially. And he was like, cool, I'll do that. And then he went to go in. And they said, no, we're not going on or what the chatbot said. Yeah, fuck you. They tried to claim in their legal filing.

And this was bonkers. claimed in the legal filing that the AI chap bot should be considered a separate legal entity. Why? It's the same. And then the counter argument, which prevails, of course, and this isn't in this, in this instance, but it was referred to. The counter argument is like, no, it's the same as an employee. You've empowered this bot to do work and communicate directly with a customer on your behalf. So you own the risk that that creates the same as you would own the risk if an employee. did it. If an employee sends you an offer and you've empowered that employee to send that offer, that offer stands. You have to hold to that offer. It's how it works. Think if you had a a Drano company or something like that, you created some sort of chemical and you had a chat bot that was the thing that was your customer service. And someone said, I drank a bunch and they're like, don't worry about it. Right. And then they died. And then that chat log still existed

on their computer on your computer. Do you think you'd be a whole liable for that? Fuck yeah. Absolutely it would. So why isn't this, why isn't this the case, right? If that would be the case where you would be held liable for something like that, why wouldn't it translate to whatever they say to the customer, you're liable for? Yeah. It doesn't make any sense.

It doesn't. And like, I bought a car a few years ago for my wife and I bought a used car and I went in and they had, like, they had all the features and stuff listed on their like cars.com website. and then the price. And the price was good. The feature's good. I wasn't there to haggle. I was there just to buy the car.

I wanted a test drive it. If I liked it, I was just going to buy it for what it was. And they're like, okay, do you want this like extra service guarantee? I'm like, I sure do. It's included in your ad. So it's included in the price.

And he's like, no, it's not included the price. I'm like, that's not how ads work. So we had a little back and forth. And I'm like, I don't know what to tell you, man. You put it in the ad as an included benefit here. You put the price on. So I'll be leaving with this or I'll be leaving. those are our two choices.

And he honored it because he kind of had to. That's how that works when you fuck up. That's just how that works. And like the chatbot, they're supposed to have this human in the loop step, you know? So if you just ignore the human in the loop step and your chatbot is like, yeah, fucking making deals out here left and right.

Hey, what's going on? Come up. Come over to fucking Jet GPT's BMW warehouse. We're giving them away. We're making them away. We're making it rain. It's fucking amazing. I love it.

So good. I worry, though. So the Supreme Court came out and said, I was going to ask you this. The Supreme Court came out and said with Citizens United that corporations are people. Do you think with the tech companies being as powerful as they are, that the tech companies will be able to argue that there should be a legal carve out for chatbots, which is different and like human paralleled in some legal way? I would never put it past our dysfunctional judicial system to do something like that. I think it's going to happen. I don't know what form it's going to take, but I think it's going to happen.

I wouldn't put it past them at all to do something like that. Because I think it's totally in their best interest. They have in their best, that people in power that will acquiesce to anything they think is in their best interest. So why wouldn't I think that that would be something that would be in the future? You would have to be naive to think that that's not something that they would automatically try to do even if they don't think they're going to fail. They're going to try to do it. I think there's going to be a new categorization of chatbots or AIs that carves out a space that doesn't benefit the walkie-talkie-fleshy people. I think, I don't know what it's going to look like, but we already did it with corporations and we decided that money is speech, the corporations are people.

robots will become people too. 100%. And I think that what they'll be is people that can be negligent. Yes. I think that's what will happen is they'll be held to a lower standard than a person. That's what I think too.

There'll be some kind of diminished responsibility clause or something bullshit. We're going to have like one of these AI lawnmowers is going to chew up a whole family. Yeah, right? And then the company's going to say, yeah, it's their fault. What are you going to do?

There's going to be AI surgeon that like takes out somebody's liver instead of spleen like that one guy that we covered. Yeah, exactly. They cut somebody's leg off and then they put it back next week. No problem. Get back in here. Get back in there, champ. We sewed your nuts right to your face. And there's going to be a CEO who's going to be smoking a cigar and he's going to fold up a couple hundred dollar bills and he's going to put it in Clarence Thomas G string and he's going to slap his ass heartily and say, dance for me. Dance for me right now and he will. Clarence will twerk. Absolutely. All right. BBC. We had to get out of the way. Hold on a second.

Guys, stop for a second and just think about a twerking Clarence Thomas. Don't drive our listeners away. They have to know, please. We love you guys. We don't want to think about it. Who want to think about what's happening right now? Just think about it. Go ahead, time.

This is from the BBC. We had to get out of the way. The backlash over delivery robots. Have you seen some of the videos of these, though, where they're just their, they don't, the delivery robots aren't quite sure how to navigate our world. Sure. okay at it, but they're not great at it. And there's been a couple of times that there was a guy I saw. So there's a guy, he's riding his bike. And he's somewhere, maybe L.A. or something. And as he's riding, the delivery robot is making like sad sounds because it can't get past like. And it's, it's, so the guy

stops his bike, gets out and clear some of the rubble out of the way. So it could go past. And then he actually puts it down in the street because he's like, well, it's not going to be able to get past this area that's sort of dilapidated. And there might even been a tent on the sidewalk. And so there's no way it's going to get past. So he puts it on the ground. And then it drives over and then it gets over to the other side.

And once it gets back on the sidewalk, it's like burp, burp, burp, bro. And so the guy felt bad because it was making burp-per sounds. He runs over and he lifts up the front legs. And at a certain point, when he picked it up, it started squealing. Because there's an alarm. Right, yeah, yeah. That goes off when you grab it. So he picked it up and it was like,

it's like when you pick up a hurt dog. It starts while like wailing. That's what happened. And then he put it back on the thing. And then it was like, burpab and like took off. It's like a mouse droid from Star Wars or something. So fucking weird.

Dude, it's crazy. But genuinely, I feel like we're in a position now that I realize it makes me sound old. But I feel like we're accelerating in a place. with certain technologies that make me feel really uncomfortable, this is one of them. Like,

I don't like the autonomous thing driving around on our sidewalks, and what is naturally going to happen is an autonomous thing is going to naturally be traveling on our roadways, which we know is happening with Waymo's. We know it's happening with people who have Tesla's driving program

and things like that. So we know that sort of thing's already happening. But I just don't want to, like there's a part of me that really doesn't want it to be ubiquitous. If it was ubiquitous and good, all the time really good, I'd be okay with it.

If suddenly everyone was like, you're not allowed to drive anywhere, everybody has to have this thing that takes you places. And if you want to drive somewhere, you have to drive over here. And then there'd be no backups on highways. You could, like, the computer would know exactly what to do.

It'd be like, oh, you'd be zipper merging at like 50 miles and out. It would be nothing. It wouldn't be an issue. There's no human error involved anymore. So it's just constantly shuffling cars, moving you wherever you need to move. It would be fine. But the problem is that there's always kind of, if the computer gets really good and humanity still sort of stays where it's at, it's not going to be great because you're going to have to

deal with the stupidest human on the road all the time. That's not great. And then if it's not good, like we've seen a lot of AI stuff not be great, we know that it can make a lot of mistakes. That's not great either. So it's just we're stuck in this weird middle ground. Yeah, I feel like this stuff gets rolled out before it. ready for prime time just to roll something out sometimes.

And these rolling robots are a part of it. Yeah. Also, like, delivery jobs are good jobs. They're just jobs for people to have. Like, we don't have to outsource everything. That's a real good point. I am annoyed by, like, annoyed isn't even the right word. I'm offended at the idea that everything should be automated.

We can't build a society like that. We can't have us. Who's going to order the food if nobody does jobs? I am fine with them replacing this job as a menial task job as long as we're willing to pay the wages of the people who are losing that job, right? Yeah. UBI. If UBI was a thing and these people were able to live, no problem without having to have that

job, then fine. We don't do that, man. No. We don't take care of those people. We don't, we haven't yet agreed that everybody should get medicine when they're sick for free. We're not just going to give people money for nothing. Yeah. and dire straits.

Of course not. All right, that's going to wrap it up for our goofy show, not-so-goofy show, sad AI show for this week. We're going to be back on Monday. We'll be back on Monday for a full show. We're going to leave you like we always do with the skeptics creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue,

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