QAA Podcast - AI Slopaganda feat. Ryan Broderick (E319)

Episode Date: April 12, 2025

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/

Keep mehap. 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 host, Jake Rockatansky, 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 like tech hobbyists, like early adopters, or 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 going to love them.

Well, the American economy deindustrialized, and if this doesn't work out, we're basically fuck. 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, like, amazing movie, uh, called screamers, I believe. And it represents like the fact that advanced societies created these like evil underground saws that kill people. And then eventually they're like indistinguishable from 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 like there was a way to like so faster? And, uh, 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. Oh, God, what's his name? I can't remember. It's got face tattoos that predicted the Zumer 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 are doing so. You know what it is?

It's technology's version of corn syrup. Yeah. 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 in my chicken. More AI in all of my tools. Oh, I'll love it.

Most people don't use, like, generative AI apps like chat GPT or GROC, 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 insults the very

existence of humanity on earth and our crimes beyond our understanding. And I also have no control over that. 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, V-R. are products, and that wouldn'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 idocracy, 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, like jobs in 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 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 GROC make me jack off to Pixar 3D stuff that was auto-generated. I like that stuff, though. I'm pro. I'm pro-autogenated Pixar pornography. I want that for a note for the record. That's fine, no. That's fair until you have a child, and then, like, some other child inputs their face into GROC, 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 and was the race that I choose and height I choose and hair I choose. 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 and how computer made images serve as the perfect aesthetic form of the far right. 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're joined by Ryan Broderick, journalist and author of the newsletter Garbage Day. He has written

extensively about AI and it's impacted 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, you know, I'm excited here for you nonetheless, yeah. 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 Rockatansky, uh, LLM model that is able to make references to movies like screamers, robot jocks, and toy lines like Mask and Starcom. Oh, Travis is just writing props for three different AI. 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 generated content. So Ryan, how would you define AI slop? Yeah. It's like what it's like what pigs eat. It's, it's everywhere. I mean, if anyone listening still uses Facebook, like that's where you're going to see the most of it. It's constantly mutating in really interesting ways. But there are, you know, these pages on Facebook that are generating hundreds, thousands, maybe possibly up now, at this point, millions of pictures using something like Mid Journey or Chachabit. And it looks like normal internet content if you're not focusing on it, you know, particularly hard. And it's meant to mimic like what we already do with the internet. And it, you know, it is being made by humans, but they're just putting in a prompt generating, you know,

hundreds of images at once. And it's everywhere now. And a lot of this stuff is beginning to train AIs as well, which is kind of funny. So, like, the AI, there's a theory that AI is going to start to break down because it's making its own guard. It's eating its own shit, basically. Yes, yes, it's going to get the, like, it's going to get mad cow disease from, like, essentially consuming itself. I do love some of the Facebook stuff. It's always like, oh, 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, like, 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 the shit all day log. 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? Are they just, are they like the Joker and they're like, I'm going to flood Facebook with like the eight-headed, you know, Simon Cowell impressor?

So 404 Media, like did track down some of, some of these guys that are doing this. 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 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 are 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 they're these like fever dreams of like things that people already care about online and they're just like brute forcing them and uploading them on mass to Facebook to make some money. Yeah, I mean, it is like, yeah, just as cheap as it gets. It's like, you don't even need to know the culture. You just know, you know, like Americans like Jesus injured veterans. Yeah. And the flag will just type variations of that into your, you know, 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, isn't new. Like, I interviewed a network of magicians during the pandemic that were, like, eating food out of toilets and, like, doing pranks and stuff. You know, like, the women who were eating at toilets on Facebook in, like, 2021, 2022? Yeah, or, like, make a whole meal in the sink. Yeah, yeah. So those were all out of work, Vegas magicians that all knew each other. And we're, 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 thing for a while.

I never saw crab Jesus. Shrimp Jesus, yeah. Shrimp Jesus, crap. Like, a lot of that stuff. And I don't really 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, 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 living it, which like I said, like they were doing this before with like random memes and weird videos and now they're just like 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 caption 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, like, have sex with each other and be like, I guess we just did a thing. But like, boomers are more like, love me. It's my birth. 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. Crestations are like, you know, these are not necessary. 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? eating him and as a crustacean he is now immune 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 like underwater statue of Jesus and like maybe the AI got confused and was like he's a he's a shrimp now they AB tested it and they were like the shrimp ones work actually better than the under 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 were, like, share articles on Facebook? 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. This 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. So it's like, because it's, yeah, 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 he's got the stat that 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. This has a hundred. 185,000 reactions, 2.7,000 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, uh, 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 Mahmood Khalil. Oh, fuck. That's. 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, 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 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. And like probably not even to anyone else to be very honest. But like it's clearly this to me like feels like it's going for like an audience of people who are like not exactly used to using the internet in a way in a serious way. Like you know, it's for a very older sort of like lower income audience in places that like don't speak English or where that's why a lot of them don't 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 that frame so good blah blah blah a bunch of emojis it shows a 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 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 they look like inflated surgical gloves holding on to one another look like cocktail weanies yeah it's awesome this one's sick actually I think this one's really good and I think it tells a really good it's really 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 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 news feed 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 than if you're, like, hunting for each one. It's like, it's like, it's like a machine gun. 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 S-theat and you can't tell the difference between some actually depressed Iraq vet and this doesn't mean that these beautiful, large-hearted, both literally and figuratively 70-year-olds. 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. Unclear. 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 unit,

form. It just looks like... Oh, yeah. It's always like... Heroglyphics. 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, like, big-ass boots and the metal, like, pole just goes straight down into the boot. Yeah, that's sick. Fuck. Earlier this year, a Facebook slop image of a woman in a bakery standing next to a The horse sculpture made of bread went viral, and it got over 65,000 shares.

And there's, 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 Jesus is inside. A bunch of disabled veterans are sneaking into the bakery. Yeah, big horse. They overtook your house. Yeah. 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. this slop because of negligence rather than malice. But if like Zuckerberg is straight up like, hey, that's a, that's pretty cool piece of junkie slop that went viral and got, you know, 189,000 comments, suggest to me that, you know, they're perfectly fine with it.

Well, I think they are because they're not viewing it that way. And it's not even to say that like he thinks that this isn't slop. But like from the conversations I've had with, you know, people like in the social media platforms. It seems like what they really think that this is is like a way to standardize the level like to production quality of user generated content because like they are all chasing scale that requires them to have massive, massive user bases in countries where like maybe someone can't afford Adobe Photoshop. That's why all of them launched like the ability to make AI generated content inside the app itself because they keep promising advertisers that their content's going

to get better, that like users will get better at making videos, better making images and memes and whatever. So like Mark Zuckerberg, I have to assume, looks at this and he's like, great. Like, this is better than like an ugly Photoshop, you know, or like a, like a bad animated gift that's been passed around WhatsApp for a decade. Like this to him is like advertisers can say, cool, like 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 is all about. I love looking up weird-ass Facebook pages. One thing that I think that's, like, 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's got a stylist, he got a cool chain, he got, you know, he's making sure his hair is, you know, more broccoli-esque. It's like, he's trying to get younger, but his audience on Facebook is getting, like, older and crustyer, 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 one more. 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. Um, it's like pictures of heaven and it says like hit the like like button. And yeah, and it's selling clothing and it's full of AI generated videos and photos with like

weird stories attach 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 like abused by their husbands. Okay. Great stuff. We love it. Very, very cool. Have you paid your engagement tithed 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 rides 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. 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 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, can I get her to sex with me? Can I get her to take her clothes off? She is a beautiful area and I will give for that. 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. That, yeah. My question is, are they actually putting footage of Germany in there with her? Or is that also AI generated? Definitely AI generated. Yeah, that's also 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 it 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 week. 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 they don't even care enough about their own social media pages to do that.

Yeah, so true. 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 inshitted 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 social media on my phone anymore and rarely visited on desktop. 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. Twitter. I'm on truth social parlor. I watch a lot of streams on kick. Like, that's where I'm at. I'm on the good part of the internet. Oh, God. Oh, that's a dark. You're on, you're on a dark path. I'm watching Aiden Ross streams all day, you know? Oh, God. Oh, man. These are the worst people. Somebody hasn't heard about Gab. Oh, 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, like, originally got his start as a two-case. streamer, which makes perfect sense because they're like, it's like the most toxic community ever. I saw this other guy named him. He's like a little guy named Jack Doddy or something like that. He basically goes around with like a large bodyguard, like trying to start fights with people and then he

hides behind the bodyguard. Oh yeah. And I'm like, oh man. Like these, these vile, vile creatures. 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 like actual little people. I find short men disgusting. I've worked a bunch of little curble. I've had actually some of the best experiences in my life. If you're between four, eight, and five, nine,

like 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, I just like, is that they just go like, oh, bet, bet, bet, bet, bet, bet. No, no cap, no cat, no cat, no cat, no cat, no cat, bet, bet, bet, oh, bro, bro, bro, bro. That's like my, my, like, archetype in these brand is. Just guys going, bet, bet, bro, bro, bro, cap, cap, cap, cap, cap, cap.

Just like little guys walking around, they're doing streams. 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.

I love Emma. This is a verified, a verified user. Which, 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 kernels 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 kernels of corn that it's stay stay undigetated and then the second piece of text says uncoked card is of corn corn aben of part in itte broken bound into gross and absost that's so good i that's what corn does i learned something today that's exactly what corn does in your body yeah i mean it uh remind me a lot of the lewis carol poem the jabrwaukee you know it has all these nonsensical words and like you know and the weird rhythms. And, yeah, but that was intended to be, you know, strange and nonsensical and disorienting.

But this is just the byproduct of whatever prompt they put in. My favorite is that the corn kernels here have clearly, like, they've been drawing from candy corn as well. Yeah. 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 blackpilled about this. But, like, this to me means that, like, there's no actually fixing this. Like, it's actually impossible to fix this problem. I don't, I mean, I don't, you'd have 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. Like, I don't actually know what happens with most services when I was, I'm working on a piece right now about Pinterest that is, Pinterest is completely filled up with images like this. And I don't know how you fix that. Uh, air to surface missiles, data centers. I, maybe. But it just means that like the, the age of social media that briefly existed where you could kind of sort of use it, just can, I don't think it can come back. Good. Good. I am an accelerationist for this. Yeah, yeah. I was just going to say, like, I totally agree, Julian. Like, in some ways, like, if this AI explosion destroys social media and makes it unusually. usable 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. Like, 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. Like, my fear is that, like, we're already kind of seeing what I think would happen, which is, like, companies, like, open AI say, oh, yeah, like, everything's really screwed up outside of our, like, little walled garden. But if you, like, pay for open AI, you can, like, use chat EBT instead of having to deal with, like, the wild.

This is actually how social media platforms launched in the 2000s. They were like, look, the real internet is, like, full of scammers and neo-Nazis and, like, 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 that's my just fears 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 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 kind of 3d printer have you guys See virtuosity? Hold on, hold on, hold on. Say more. Hold on. 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. It is so insane. Very early Russell Crow 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. That movie is so good. 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. So, 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. I'm going to, yeah, I think I'm going to trust the science. I move on talking about AI disinformation. There's more, 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, like one account that promoted it. However, 35,000 retweets. And the image, the image, like, if you look closely, it has some tells that it's AI, but, like, at first glance, it's pretty good. Like, the shading, the lighting on Elon is, is okay. He's, like, leaning forward and, like, a black shirt and black pants. But I can, I can see how this would fool people. Wait a second. The most disturbing part here is that it is a child on, like, a hospital bed, or at least depicts one. And they've, like, censored the nipples, I guess? 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-dose rally in Santa Monica. So, like, these people do exist, 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 Meat Room right now. Yeah, I guess.

It's just like, because with a lot of misinformation stuff, I'm always like, okay, it's probably like 50% people who believe it and like 50% people who are just like having a goof on the web you know like even old people can like have a goof on the web but like this one I just I don't know maybe maybe people did believe it that's so it'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. Did it know where the...

No, wait, this actually is believable. This is believable now. Implanting a neuralink chip to repair damaged neural connections. 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.

Oh, my God. Get fucked. 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, like, get access to the brain of a dying child.

Yeah, I take it back. So he could put his evil machine in. Also, I really do like how explicit they are about like before you and then it gets better and better. Like, he a random person's Tesla, set fire to a Tesla dealership. Uh, this is a perfect example of saying the good thing. but kind of listing it is a bad thing.

Underneath the post, there actually were just dozens of responses from Twitter users who, like, assuming the use are also real people, seem to genuinely believe it. So here is 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 broatry or whatever it's called. Here's another one. Bellemph. Belan F. Yeah.

Right. Elon wants to do good with the money he has. We need more Elon's 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 Grace 360 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 so, 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. Gratefulness. Whatever it is. grateful to be, you know, 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, you know, 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 my thing. I don't know how you fix this. 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'd find like random war footage or stuff from like war thunder three or whatever and like like claim it was happening and like that still is a thing but now you can just i mean the ai imagery is getting better it like some of the newer stuff i've seen generated with like the most recent version of chat chb t is like very 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 But 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 a young girl's brain to stop people from lighting Tesla's on fire. And you're like, oh, you must all believe that. And I don't know, like, I've talked to a lot of people on the internet over the years who, like, share and do dumb stuff. And a lot of them are like, I don't believe that. I'm just having fun online. 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 believe I don't believe that Haitian immigrants are actually eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. But I'm going to 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 like, there's plenty of people who just like understand this is dumb and but serves a political purpose. Yeah, like whether or not people believe that Elon Musk saved a seven-year-old girl, you know, this story expresses how some people feel about Elon Musk, you know. 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 J.D. 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 the very good one because it sounds very

low quality, but lots of people fell for it anyway. 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, I sent my brother like a trailer, like a trailer

for a video game and I was like dude I think it was that AI the AI game Julian that we were talking about the like crypto game and I was like dude this looks amazing I was like and it's coming out pretty soon and like two minutes later he sent me a screenshot of like two articles that were like fake fake game

scam game I was like oh man yeah it's a thing it's real I'll tell you this and he wouldn't like me if I said but he's not even in a bird he is from South Africa I mean, his constant is this great American leader in a room that has the portrait 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, this came out like. You know, whoever made this published it like two or three days before Musk seems to have actually gotten the boot from the White House. Like this, I don't know. I was like, yeah, also it's J.D. Vance being a little bitch. And I was like, that sounds like 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 that there's 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 a little bit and massage it to make it even, you know, seem a little bit more realistic. I think that's those are the scariest kind of people that are willing to put in the time to modify what the, you know, the content that the AI gives them. 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 a AI-generated video just a couple days ago. And part of why I was duped is because of, like, how innocuous and non-political it is, like, usually, like, whenever I see, like, an image or a video and it falls neatly into, like, a political narrative or it's just highly partisan, like, 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, like, depict just like how soft and malleable gold is. I've heard that about gold. I've heard it's really soft. It is really soft, but there's, but the video was still fake.

So I watched the video on Twitter. I thought it was really neat, but I saw, like, the community note explaining that, like, 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, like, the first, like, gold fact you learned. as a kid, it's like, hey, did you know that's like gold's really soft? Like, and I would totally believe that. Yeah, I would 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. Oh, okay. This is very pleasing on the eyes. Yeah, wait, can you stop pausing it?

I want to just stare at this for a while. All right. Or just have that bad boy look for like five or six hours. Like, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's nice. It is nice.

That's nice. It's got a nice, like, chalky sort of feel to it. Yeah, 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 like an iPad, like the volume full up at an apple bees, you know? Yeah. I want to make a fucking cake with that gold bad.

Yeah. I want to eat that gold now. Apparently, yeah, like pure gold is soft and malleable, but it's not that soft and malleable. It doesn't, like, completely fall apart and turn into a pace just by mashing it a bit. Could I, like, break a gold bar with my hands? I don't know. Hold on. I'm going to ask chat chit you once again.

All right. Can I break a gold? 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 of like just over and over and over again every day. 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, 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, like, like, concerns about just how AI is going to affect just our general sense making abilities? Yeah. I mean, I've definitely already caught myself, like, absorbing incorrect information through osmosis that was likely AI generated. But that's been happening to me since Elon Musk took over Twitter.

Like, I still use it for work. And like, you know, I would say once or twice a month, I'll repeat something that I like sort of passively absorbed on there. And someone will be like, that's not true. And then I'll have to like look it up and realize like that wasn't true. And so I think like, you know, AI is a part of that. Although, you know, someone asked me the other day, like what is the biggest sort of example of people falling for something that was AI generated?

And so far, there has only really been like one. one true instance of like many people around the world thinking a piece of AI generated content was real, 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 he like, sure, he's walking around in a Balenciaga Parker. 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, isn't it probably another example? And then there was the incident where an AI generated a fake Halloween party in Dublin last year. So there are these little incidents that are happening more and more. And I think, actually, I mean, you could include the tariffs.

You could include Trump's tariffs. Those were AI generated. Oh, I suppose so. Yeah. The math is all AI generated. And like the list of countries was AI generated. I saw an argument this afternoon arguing that it might be like the first example of a true nefarious AI misalignment problem happening.

Like the thing that everyone was. one's been like worried about for 20 since lawnmore man came out. 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 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 to what's being communicated. Yeah. 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 has seen sipping cocktails with the topless Benjamin Netanyahu on sunlangers while Elon Musk

eats flat bread and dip. It is properly insane. Yeah, this one really like seeing it, it just, there was, there was like a sense of dreaded on reality. and I'm quite hard to shake. Like, I don't, 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 a AI pinia colada with Trump, it, uh, it really just felt extremely bad. Yeah, the creator of this video is the Israeli-born American filmmaker Solo Avetal 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. But, yeah, they... 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, uh, in a dark, it makes it much darker, actually. Yeah. 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 a ex-user who goes by hero or high row badge. And back in August, they had sort of argued that AI art was to modern fascism, what futurism was to ninth, uh, 20th century fascism. And, 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 you know this is

they called it mechanically reproduced slop from apartide and to answer the question of why there was a really fascinating interview done by politico europe in uh 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. Like, I think that is the idea is like, if you want to produce, like, 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 produce images of this impossible future, the idea of a Palestinian Riviera owned by Donald Trump. Like, 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 like 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 like dream up this like

beautiful fascist paradise when the 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 a i generated idyllic past a i generated utopian future and uh deportation incarceration and genocide in the present right they can make an anime ghibli meme of like you know Hispanic people being sent to like an like a salvador and gulag and they can they can they can generate you know beautiful images of what will happen when they're done with, you know, their genocide and like that, they don't have to think about it. They don't even have to hire anyone to do it. It makes me think of, uh, that old movie, Wag the Dog. Because I, you know, AI is constantly improving and getting closer and

closer and closer to, you know, spitting out images that are, you know, fooling people easier. And I, I, I, I, I remember that movie and they had to actually go and film stuff, you know, to kick off this, you know, to just sort of pretend, you know, make this made up war, whatever. I can't remember the exact plot of the movie. But imagine if they had AI. You don't have to hire any actors. There's no, you don't have to have any kind of production value. And I, I worry that, you know, in the same way, so many people got fooled by footage from Arma three, you know. That sort of was. Not War Thunder. It was Arma three. Yeah, Arma, yeah, yeah. And yeah, exactly. It's, it's like, that's kind of where my worry is the most is, 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, people who who want public opinion shifted in a certain way, you know, want the cards to fall. I don't know. I just feel like we're so capable of this organically and like we're kind of scrounging around for a single case that was truly awful. But I think that propaganda and like the kind of brainwashing of the American people. I mean, that's, we don't even need this shit. We got a

handcrafted tradition. I would say that I did, I read that article, The New Socialist, from Airth 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 like shallowly realistic works that they like. And they can also do it without the help of like working class, you know, typically left-leading 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 adherence, 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 craftwork, AI art pretends surrealism. It can produce art the way right-wingers like it. Thomas Kincaid 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, can't really think of that, you know, not a lot, you know, conservatives, are not necessarily known for their beautiful expression through the, you know, sort of the classical arts. And I wonder if AI sort of allows them to do it

without actually having any skill. And that's why it's sort of more popular to them. This is totally unrelated. But whenever that question comes up, I always ask myself, does King of the Hill count as conservative art? Yeah, that's the thing is like if it's didactic, like if it's trying to push politics on the user,

or on the audience, I would agree with. you, Jake. But, like, you know, Clint Eastwood is an insanely good director, great actor, his writing is even good. Country music can be good. Like, Johnny Cash is a fairly conservative artist. Yeah, I guess just because it's not in my sort of, like, orbit doesn't necessarily mean that it's not out there. But I would, I would tweak what you're saying and say that, like, it's cap, like, this is a specific kind of capitalistic fascism. And it's not like, this is not normal conservative isn't what I don't even know what that fuck that means but like 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 like 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 like John McNaught paintings, like, so that Photoshop could have the John McNaughton filter on whatever you want to express. But, yeah, it is, it is interesting. Is King of the Hill conservative art? Does that count? That's the thing with calling an art of politics, right? It's, that's actually kind of playing into the conservative, like, 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 going to 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'll 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, uh, 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, quote unquote, real stuff is slop. And, uh, that if, if it's becoming indistinguishable from this kind of shit, maybe you want to question why you're glued to of that feed all day, 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, Garbage Day. Email.

You can find my podcast, Panic Worlds, 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 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, you know, it often allows us to explore things that maybe aren't like main 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 Trump relation have reached you.

For everything else, we've got a website, QAAPodcast.com. Oh, and Corey, please input this into chat GPT and generate me saying it. Write a sign-off for the podcast, Q-Anon 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. And as always, QAA will be here. Oh, also, Julian, quick warning, include please in your prompt next time or else. Kisses. We have auto-keyed content based on your preferences. 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 route 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 model that's powering that, there's no way that's happening on device, even though on devices and the prophylactic isn't going to really solve a lot of those issues, 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, you know, predicated on this larger surveillance model, there's a real issue right now of the undermining that AI systems are poised to do in these privacy and security guarantees in the name of this sort of, you know, magic genie bot that's going to take care of the exigencies of life.