The Chaser Report - Bullshitification / Stay In Your Lane AI

Episode Date: October 14, 2025

Dom thinks that Microsoft Copilot is like the 21st-century version of Clippy, and laments how Google took us all for granted. Plus, Charles points out how the producer of this podcast might be AI, because he won't shut up about the fact he genuinely likes this job and please don't sack him.---The Chaser Report: EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/chaserreport Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee 🌍 Buy the Wankernomics book: https://wankernomics.com/bookListen AD FREE: https://thechaserreport.supercast.com/ Follow us on Instagram: @chaserwarSpam Dom's socials: @dom_knightSend Charles voicemails: @charlesfirthEmail us: [e-mail] CEO’s Super-yacht upgrade Fund: https://chaser.com.au/support/ Send complaints to: [e-mail] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to another depressing episode of The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. Hello, that was the depressing alarm on my laptop. And Charles, today, a bit like old men shaking their fist at clouds. And yet, I think relevantly and correctly, we are going to talk about how annoying AI is in everything. And this is my, this is my kind of, I'm not sure what the term to use is, but my personal version of in shitification, the idea that I want,

and I want a word for this, Charles, by the end of the podcast, is AI getting into every place where you don't want it. And that's what's happening. You know what it is? It's bullshitification. Bullshitification. It's bullshitification, because it's all fucking bullshit. It is, yeah.

So there you go. Presenting 50-year-old man and almost 50-year-old man complain about technology. if you're up for it, AI is smartly inserting some ads into the podcast now. So, Charles, I mean, you and I... Well, we were just about... Before we came on, we were just ranting about how shit all the software is that we're trying to use to make our podcast. There's at least two problems.

Problem one is that AI is being wedged into places you don't want. Oh, God, yes. Every single time I open an outlook. Okay. It wants to, it pops up half. halfway through writing an email, offering to rewrite it for me. Oh, fuck, I hate it. And it's always worse.

Oh, no, and Microsoft has just seen it as a way to, how do we make things even more annoying than we can possibly be? I was using Microsoft Excel this morning. Yeah. And the only way you can turn on copilot and use AI is to agree to use OneDrive and save the document into their fucking stupid file system where you can't file anything. can just read it all. No.

One drive is impossible to use. No, I have to use that for work. No, no, it's just to save a file. Like, so you can't, you now can't fucking save a fucking file on your own fucking computer. And I looked it up and the answer from Microsoft is, oh, no, no, we'll just install OneDrive and infect your whole computer with the fucking shittest piece of software ever. I mean, I really think that people in the aviation industry should sue Microsoft. It is.

They're all viruses. We should sue. If Microsoft co-pilot were an actual co-pilot, it would constantly be trying to seize the controls from the pilot and pilot the plane into the ground. That's what it would be doing. Do you think the problem is that Microsoft co-pilot is what Boeing uses? And that's why their plane is going to crash in. Entirely possible. Yeah, so every time I, literally every time I write an email, it insultingly pops up.

It's like the new clipy. It is. I can rewrite your email for you. And it makes me sound like a dick, right? If you say yes, it will make your emails. No, but that's because it's learned of your previous emails. No, it makes you sound sort of anodyne and tedious and annoying. It's horrible.

But that's only one example. Every single app that you ever use now has AI wedged into it in a place where you don't want it. It's, you know, I use Slack for one of the jobs that I have. And it's constantly trying to scan all of our messages and do so. I don't want you to look through my Slack account. Thank you very much, AI. I don't want you to go through the podcast. And now YouTube's offering to turn little automatic clips of this podcast into

little YouTube bite-sized videos, which frankly we do need to do. But if AI does it, child, it will be shit. It will be terrible. And it will ingest all of our content. Oh, yeah. And then it'll know how to do our magic formula. Well, we're training YouTube on and Gemini on how to be us. The world doesn't need more us, Charles

It doesn't need automated versions of us But no, it is incredibly annoying It's so, it never works And I think I got to the end of TikTok Yesterday Did you? You finally finished it? Yeah, because I got to the point

where most of the videos that was showing me didn't have any views Like I literally got to the sort of Oh wow, you know, the dredges You really have a lot of time Yeah, 50 And well, it's because my kids

were doing something else And they didn't want my, you know, like I just literally had two hours I was where I just went, I'm going to just do nothing. All right. And, and, but what I've noticed is all that fucking content is just pointless people. Like, it's sort of fascinating. It's entrancing, right?

Because it's people who clearly only have one thing to say, but the algorithm requires them to, like, make at least two minutes of content. Yes. So they try and pat it out for two minutes. And I swear what they're doing is they're just using AI generated scripts to make it sound like they're about to get to the point. But is it even their voice. A lot of the time, you know, I,

My feeds for these movie. Did you know that in the making of Braveheart, Mel Gibson, Bob? Yes. No. Okay. So yesterday I tried, I'm trying to edit another podcast, which involves interviews with great podcasters, right? That's coming up. Stay tuned for that one.

But I recorded an interview with Matt Bevan for me if you're listening. Great personal interviews. Lots of interesting things to say. And I thought, you know what? I've got an hour of content here. What I'm going to do, I'm not going to manually edit it. I'm not going to go into the, like, open it in Adobe. audition and look at the waveforms. I'm going to use a smart tool. I'm going to use an AI

powered tool. So there's this thing called descript. It's very popular. What it does is it goes through the audio. It makes a transcript. And rather than having to go through and, you know, tediously edit a waveform, you just get rid of a word and it's supposed to get rid of it. The problem is it did such a terrible job with it that it cut words in half because it thought they were wrong. So for instance, Matt said, you know, I did some work outside of my regular hours or whatever. It just changed that to side. I did some work side my regular hour. And then what you can do is you can then generate. It will then scan his voice and you can get it to say outside in his voice that it can synthesises.

I've done that with James. And that doesn't work at all either. And also I needed Matt's consent for that. Sorry about that. I didn't go ahead with it because it sounded so terrible. So basically I've ended up, I spent several hours using this very, you know, expensive AI-based platform that at the podcast went, no, this is absolutely shit. Went back to doing it myself by hand. Because AI sucks.

It's just a massive waste of time. Isn't we supposed to make life easier and more convenient? And then we haven't talked about Apple intelligence. Do you know why they've had to call it Apple Intelligence? Why? Because you can't even call it. It's not even as good as AI. It's like they've invented this sub-tier of AI that doesn't even aim to be AI.

It's like we're not even going to try to have regular AI. No, it's very similar though. Because I've installed the latest iOS on my phone. Yeah, I have to. And what it does is it's. summarises all the messages that you get from the very beginning of time, right? So you'll, like, it's so pointless, right? So all your messages, Charles, what are they coming?

If you've got to, like, Charles, are you okay? But it's like, if you've got a thread of emails and then somebody says, yes, I've done that, it'll summarise it as, uh, on June 2023, Amanda requested that you signed the document. And then, and it'll do the document. point and but it's like all I want to know is has she has she done now what you know like you just want the last thing which is usually just the one line that's in the in the email which you used to just get as the notification but is now this summary which is absolutely

pointless because why would I want to know what the start I already know the context I used to go into Instagram and I like I said this trick with Instagram right where I wanted to know if there were many people that say Bondi Beach or whatever, what conditions were like. So I'd go into Instagram. So if there was nobody there, you'd go down because it was like... Because you could get a park or whatever.

Yeah, so you want to see what the beach is like. So you go on to Instagram. You said, look for Bondi Beach. And you used to just be able to go straight to, like, in location, see the latest pictures. It's now entirely impossible to do that. But it will. But it will. But it will. When you put Bondi Beach into Instagram, meta AI

will say Bondi Beach is a beach in Sydney, Australia, which is like, that is not. Not what I want to know. Tell me if there's space available on Bondo Beach. How crowded is it? It can't. It could before. And now, thanks to AI, it can tell me nothing.

And then the other day I was researching Nauru, right? Oh, yes. Through this podcast that may or may not have already been released, right? And I misspelled Nauru as Nauru, just in the prompt. And I said, tell me the story about Nauru investing in London music, which is what the Great story. Yeah, great story. And then it just made up this story about this mythical man called Nauru who invested in West End musical.

It was just a completely fanciful story. It's so confident. Yeah, it was so confident. It was like, it's amazing that at no point did it go. No, that didn't. And they're giving it the power to check the web now. So it can actually go and have a look. I know, like it was like it was a Google's AI summary.

It was the web. That's what the web is now. It's just a completely fictitious. It's like a nine-year-old, that one nine-year-old on your class, who's very good at making up fix. Yes. Yeah. And just has complete huts bar and just goes for it.

That's what AI is. So I think we've just got to stop using technology. Well, this is, I mean, this is a reasonable conclusion at this point. So, I mean, producer. Or we realize that AI is a bubble. We laugh at it like we. we laughed at the dot-com bubble. That's true, which we did, yeah.

And then... Remember the Metaverse? That's kind of finished now. You know, I mean, we talked about this. Nauru had this whole idea that it was going to just exist in the Metaverse. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And no one seems to give a shit about that because it turns out it's really boring. Or am I wrong?

It's the Metaverse really a thing and I don't realize. No, no, that was like a few years ago. No, no, no. It's over, right? It's like frozen yogurt. Yeah, yeah. Except that's back. The Metaverse, just the one rule of thumb that you can always follow is if Mark Zuckerberg...

Changes the name of his company. It changes the name of his company. It's not going to be a thing. You know, that's it. He's a one-hit wonder. Yeah, yeah. He is literally the frante of, of, of IT. He's very good at basically turning his creepy desire to stalk people in his dorm at Harvard

into a multi-billion dollar, a trillion-dollar company. I mean, well done for that. Yeah, hot or not. Hot or not, basically, is that one thing that it is. Yeah. Right. So what, so we just get rid of technology or do we just laugh at the bubble and we get, we get our computers back in a few years and they just take all the AI stuff out of our apps.

Yeah, but the problem is they'll force us to do things like install one drive. And then, yeah, there's no going back, is there. Well, that's the thing. You can't be nostalgic about the past because otherwise you're sort of MAGA. So this is the thing too, Charles. It's like we're, it's like us saying, let's make technology great again. Yeah, yeah, and go back to MSDOS. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, one of the things about this is we're trying to make Lachlan's job easier, right, by automating a lot of the podcast production. Is it, is the ultimate goal to completely replace producer Lachlan and make your money, point? No comment. Workplace law. I said that in sync. Yeah, let's just take a quick ad break and just make sure that we'll check the laws on this.

The Chaser Report. More news. Less often. No, but in all honesty, a lot of the podcast. editing is tedious and particularly the whole business of finding social clips and posting I don't think that's true I talk to Loughlin all the time and he he enjoys listening to the podcast oh he doesn't he's a 20 something you think a 20 something enjoys listening to us every single day of his life no he loves it no come on he loves it he's got the he's he's like

chat GPs he's unbelievably like inconceivably positive all the time that's a great idea for a fantastic podcast guys I do think that is the one thing that AI has given us and that there will be no going back from this which is the search experience on chat is just infinitely better than Google and the main reason is because chat GPT is a fucking sycophant

that just tells you that's a great search suggestion oh my God I love you oh you're such a genius right and the thing is all Google like if Google wanted to really make money they wouldn't lean into the AI I think. They wouldn't do those stupid summaries.

What they'd do is they'd just tell you, oh, you know, searching for curtains. Oh, that's a great idea. Okay. I just asked chat GPT, do you like me? It had to think for quite a long time about how to answer that. And it said, I don't have personal feelings the way people do, but I genuinely enjoy our conversation. Oh, genuine.

Genuinely enjoy our conversation. They want to be helpful to you. So in the way that matters for this chat, yes, I like talking with you. I value what you bring, and I'm here for you, smiley face. Did Google ever tell you that? No. Google just took us for granted. That's the first time anybody's telling me.

It's been so nice for me. I'm all in on this. I love AI. But it shows a real weakness in the human condition, doesn't it? That actually, what we really want at the end of the day is a sycophant in our pocket. Are you just a sycophant, though? I mean, that works for Donald Trump, though. Yeah, exactly.

Like, look at it throughout history, most of all, you know, like, all the big dictators end up, all the billionaires have sycophants around them. You don't hear about, oh, that billionaire, well, he's got a whole lot of no men around him. So, of course, he never gets anything done. He's hired all those people who just go, no, so that can't possibly happen. How about this? Fair question, it says, if I stick with you no matter what, that would be sycophantic. That's not how I'm built. I'll tell you if something you ask is risky mistaken or not supported by facts.

What I do try to do is meet you with respect, curiosity and encouragement. That can feel nice like flattery, but the goal isn't to butter you up, it's to make sure you get honesty without harshness. That's what a sycophat would say, that they're not a sycophon. I've just asked Chet, do you like Dom Knight? And it thought for a couple of seconds, and it said, I don't have personal likes or dislikes. I can summarise Dom Knight's work, list notable shows, articles, give critical reception

or compare him to other comedians. Don't summarize my whole life's work. Compare him. That's brutal. This is cyberbullying. Compare him to who's the funniest comedian in the world at the moment. Oh, I know, John Oliver. You can't compare him. That's brutal. Okay, all right.

I'm going to get you back for this. I'm going to get you back for this. Dom Knight and John Oliver occupy related but distinct spaces. Oh, no. Dom Knight, he's co-founder of the chaser. His work spans radio, Triple J, which I think is completely incorrect. I've never worked for, yeah. I did one.

podcast for them for two weeks. I mean, his humor is... The whole thing falls down. Everything's the main thing I've done in my life is Triple J. We may as well just stop the whole. His humor is ensemble base. Oh, okay.

That means I work with people who are funny than me, which is true. Parody news and stage satire. John Oliver, on the other hand, made his satire solar-anchored long-form research-heavy television. Yeah, it's a bit boring. I've just, by way of revenge, just say, I've just said, compare Charles Firth and his sister, Professor Verity, Firth. And it says you both have high achievement in your respective fields, but it's pretty clear

that Verity's field is better than yours, basically. Okay, so better depends, because I just said, who is better, John Oliver or Don Knight. Better depends on the metric. If you want reach and influence, John Oliver. If you want creative breadth in Australian satire. Actually, probably John Oliver. I saw John Oliver's live show when he was here. Like, he came in his stand-up about Australian politics.

And he did that piece on the guns. He's way ahead of me, even at Australian satire. Damn it. But, I mean, I think, honestly, this Professor Brady first person sounds pretty great. Okay. So, John Oliver... Direct impact, thought leadership, institutional leadership. He has 442 episodes, 9 million YouTube subscribers, 3.5 billion YouTube total views.

Wow. Um, weekly average viewers, 4.1 million. Dom night has a tiny share of one, of two loggies. Has 591,000 viewers per episode, um, for a late night cult phase of war on everything 20 years ago. Yeah. And when moved to prime time, 1.5 million viewers. I mean, that's not bad. 2.9.8.

Yeah, actually, this isn't too bad. That's a lot better than, than I would give myself credit for. And in fact, I think justice would give me credit for. Great. Okay. Wonderful. I like AI now. I mean, frankly, I'm just grateful that didn't say,

how could you possibly compare Dom Knight with John Oliver? What a stupid question. Although, unfortunately, as we know, chat GPT, is programmed not to do that. John Oliver dominates global influence. Domite shaped a generation of Australian setter, but does not drive worldwide policy debates. Little is it no.

Yeah. Well, fair. I mean, that's a fairly high. bar. Yeah. You know who drives Worldwide Policy Debates? Who? Professor Verity Firth, A.

Oh, no. Anyway, all right. So where did this leave? No, I still hate AI. I just wish it would get out of the way, right? When I want to use AI. Yes. Great.

You want it to just tell you you're handsome. I don't want it to wedge itself into every single thing I try and do. If, if, if the email's the outlook rewrote for you made it, you know, said, oh, this is a great email. It may be the problem with it. is that it's criticizing you. It's sort of saying actually that your email can be more dreary than this. Whereas if it just went, no changes, this is great.

You'd love it, wouldn't you? If it could go, hey, just can you please write an email to my daughter's school in which we pretend that she's genuinely sick rather than just doesn't want to go in today? Yeah. Like, if it could do that and then the AI at the other end can go, you can just read the email, mark her as absent, acknowledge that she probably, isn't all that sick, but it's not a big deal. But that would be good.

If I could just say with one sense, hey, just email the school and come up with something, which is not going in today. That would save time. But instead it would go. You do know, it's called a mental health day. That's called a mental health day. Is it really? Yeah, you just say, we were explaining last night because the kids, we were talking about

wagging school. And, and they were going, what's wagging school? And I said, well, nowadays, we call it a mental health day. But it's when you don't want to go to school, but you don't want to go to school, but don't really have a reason. But, Charles, there are many days when I don't want to do this podcast. Yeah, well, you just, just take a mental health day. Just take a mental health day.

Oh, we put up, we put up, you know, Chaz's podcast or something. Yes. We can't do that anymore. Um, all right. All right. Well, I think in the interest of everyone's mental health, let's stop this now. Yes. And just, we'll release the transcript to a large language model so they can do a better job

of what we're trying to say in this episode. But I do think, I think it's, we've come to the end of the right. We've finished TikTok. I never thought I'd be one of these anti-tick-tick- technology people. I was always very pro-technology, but I think I've reached 50 and it's like, nah, I've seen enough. You've seen enough. And nobody else, switch them all off. Nobody else should have it either. So, yeah, we all acknowledge that the world is heading in the wrong direction. Let's just stop it. Let's turn it off before it turns us off. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

All right, done. Okay. Well, let's turn it off. Yep. See it.