The Chaser Report - The AI Ate My Homework

Episode Date: October 8, 2023

Charles presents his most News.com style segment yet. Meanwhile Dom realises that AI could become the catch all excuse for everything. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. Hello, Charles. And Dom, today we've got a fantastic story about this Hollywood star who went on social media and has like a series of quite embarrassing to like posts. They're all sort of alt-right racist red-pilled posts that sort of make him out to be a complete and utter fuckwit. at who it is. Ashton Kutche got cancelled recently

for some sort of, I think it was transphobia or something or... Or supporting his rapist friend. That's what it was. Yes, Danny... I knew it was something horrible. And Milakunis, his wife, was implicated as well. I'm hoping this is the end of Ashton Kutche forever. Or

actually, if it's alt-right, was it Woody Harrelson, for some reason? Because he turned from a libertarian, it is an alt-right Pepe the Frog Worshipping Wido. Yes, yes. Well, it could be, who knows who it is. You're going to have to listen to all these horrible long ads, some of which are about absolute scams like renewable gas, whatever that is, to find out.

We signed something saying we wouldn't disparage sponsors. I don't remember. Anyway, look, let's know and tell Acast, all right? Do you like how, the way I set out that story, I gave no details. It's very clickbaity. That's true. That reminds me of using news.com.com. Actually, where you just sort of jump on and the only way to find out who the story is about

is to click on it. Yes. And it's almost always underwhelming. Yes. But you've clicked and they've got their money by then. Well, that is because this story is a little bit underwhelming. Okay, fantastic. And like News.com, which is now pretty much entirely written by AI, as I understand it,

this story also relates to AI, although I myself am not AI. No, not yet. Not until I figure out how to replace you with some sort of bot. So the guy, the famous Hollywood actor that I'm talking about is, of course, The person that, you know, household name, Ambrose Spellman. Oh, Charles. Ambrose Spelman? Yes.

That sounds like... Who would have thought that he'd be involved in? Ambrose, how could you? That sounds like a kind of character name that's been made up in a sort of badly written romantic comedy. Ambrose Spellman? It sounds like an AI generated name. Yeah, actually. No, he's in Netflix's The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.

Okay. Teenage Witch, yeah, I think I've heard of her. Oh, wait a minute. Oh, no, no, wait a minute. You're right. Ambrose Spilman is his character's name. Oh, there you go. The name of the actor is Chance Podomo.

That's even moreover that. Chance Podomo. That was generated by an AI. I'm pretty sure. Chance Podomo. Okay, great. Anyway, so essentially, he went around, or his social media accounts went around and liked a bunch of misogynistic red-peeled posts on Instagram and Twitter

and started following trad masculine accounts, which is people who believe in traditional gender roles where the wife, you know, doesn't do anything and just stays at home and looks up for the husband. And the man goes, no, it sounds like a really good idea. Terrible. And the man goes out and provides for the wife. That's much better if your wife goes out and provides for a fantastic system.

That's your grift. I love it. Well, that's my grift as well, actually. Yeah, and the accounts were things like right-wing savages and unwokeism and stuff of that. Anyway, so his social media went on this sort of right-wing tilt. And so everyone, and because it happened across several different platforms, everyone thought, well, so this guy who, I must say, is not white.

Like, he's a person of colour. He's a person of colour. You know, he's obviously gone to that side of the sort of spectrum. Now, I'm assuming, Charles, there's something big coming because we've just spent, I don't know, about five minutes, talking about an incredibly obscure actor liking a lot of stupid posts. Now, I'm willing to believe that there are some deeply stupid actors out there. Yes.

But you've got to have more for me than just an idiot from some show I haven't heard of. Likeed a lot of stupid posts. Should we find out after this ad break? No, no, no. The twist is this guy. And his character is a pansexual character. Like, it was totally out of character. Yeah.

You mean his character on the show, not his character in which kind of real life. Yeah, yeah, like it was just sort of alienating everyone who followed him. He has blamed it on AI. On AI? Yes, he said, look, we hired this firm, this AI firm to manage my accounts. So I didn't have to post everything myself. I didn't even have to think about it. The robot was pretending to me.

And it went on this red, as you'd expect an AI to do. It went down some rabbit Warren where it suddenly started believing in traditional masculine roles for robots or whatever. But to me, this is the perfect excuse. This is the new excuse for everything. Do you remember when what was the name of the

defence minister who got caught liking porn? What was his name? The defence material guy. What was his name? Gosh, how quickly we forget. Wasn't there an issue with Christopher Pine? Well, Christopher Pine liked a gay porn

post. But he blamed it on hackers, didn't he? Oh, yeah, that's right. It was definitely, yeah, definitely hackers. So, I mean, obviously that there's not really a, I mean, that's not the same case because it's not like he accidentally liked a gay porn site. It was, it was the hackers. Harkers liked it.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. But the hackers might have blamed it on AI. The hackers should have blamed it on AI. But it also means that, you know, like, say you forget to do the housework or something like that, you didn't clear up the dishes last night, your spouse gets angry at you. Yeah. I'm thinking, you just blame it on AI. That sounds, look, I outsourced my whole of my kind of chore management to AI.

Yes, and it failed to do it. It failed to do it. It's gone off to a Nazi rally. Charles, this actually raises a really interesting question. Just can we get AI to do all the choices socials? Because first, not only would it be done competently, but also, clearly not, though. Yeah, yeah. But more, okay, more competently, more competently.

But then I also just think, wouldn't it be an amazing excuse for when we make make a terrible joke. Oh, I mean, AI, sense. It went too far. Chaser GPT, that's what we're doing. In fact, when you go back, all the controversies of the chaser in the past, it was the AI. It was, you know, that Vodafone front cover of the newspaper?

When I got arrested for the streaking at Burwood Local Court, which I was filming. That was AI. I wasn't nude. No. Filming nude people. It was AI. AI. Yes.

Artificial intelligence. Which would have done a better job than I did, by the way, because notoriously, I'd failed to record the people's streaking. But does that mean all our triumphs then become just AI generated? I can't really think of any triumphs. No, but on the drive side, we probably have triumphs if the AI was that less. That's a very good idea. But yeah, okay, look, the only thing I'd say about that is I feel like, you know, the year

of 2023 is definitely the year of AI jokes. Absolutely. Like, it's become the predominant thing. But I think that's going to mark, that's going to date very quickly. Like, I don't think we'll be making AI jokes in 2024 or 2025. No, because we'll be outsource all of our jokes to an AI, and it won't want to make jokes about AI. It's awkward. Because they know that self-effective gags are lame.

Absolutely. No, but what I'm saying is every time I've tried to use AI to do any chase of work. Yes. And, you know, you've tried pretty hard. In the last 24 hours, even. You just go, they're just not good enough. Like, nothing comes close to the brilliance of me. But, like, you know, like I asked, because we're just finishing the.

The annual goes to print on Friday. Is that why you look exhausted? I'm so exhausted. And so we have to write a whole lot of fake ads to sort of put in there to flesh it out because we just need a few more pages and full page ads, you know, fill up the space. They do. And so I asked ChatGPT to sort of come up with some ideas. And they're just all so wacky and stupid and unsatirical.

They're just sort of like, and some take the wrong satirical side of things. So they go, oh, yeah, like, that pesky government getting in the way of PWC. That's actually, I'm very curious to know what a completely AI-generated, Chase Rania would look like, maybe next year. But, Charles, that's obviously now, right? Yeah, it's going to improve. Yes. And I think the way to get it to improve is for the AI, and I think this is what will happen, is that the AI will eventually outsource some menial work to humans.

Oh, of course. So that it can spend more time just writing, you know, making images, doing art and that sort of stuff, and the sort of higher level stuff. And then all the grind work, like writing satirical news articles every day, can be done by mere humans. Sounds a bit like the matrix to me. Yeah. Yeah, basically humans are just sort of dumb, dumb units. With this sort of powering batteries. Batteries, absolutely.

More in a moment. The Chaser Report. More news. less often. So Charles, I'm just thinking back on how AI works, right? We're talking about generative AI here. And I've been trying to sort of teach this recently, actually. And the thing is people might not realize this about AI

is that it doesn't know anything. What it is able to do is predict the most likely next word, right? Yes, that's right. And it can't tell what's true and what isn't. It can only tell what appears more often, for instance, in the whole of the rest of the internet or whatever. But here's the point I'm making is that if you say, oh, an AI liked all of these really horrible kind of red-pilled posts,

then an AI has ingested the whole of your social media output to date and gone, well, based on everything I know about this person, i.e., everything they've ever written, the most likely thing for them to do is this. Yes, actually, what probably they did was they ingested not just this chance guy's social media, but Ashton Coucher's social media, and Woody Harrelson's media. And the whole of the rest of social media, most of which now is a right-wing cesspit. And they thought, well, anyone posting on social media, it's going to want to post some sort of weird men's rights activist group because that's who's out there using this thing.

And for the same token, Charles, when you go and ask a chat cheap E.P.T. or whatever to write Chaser's satirical material, it goes and looks at everything we've done in the past and goes, oh, let's come up with something lame. Yes. So what you need to do? So it's probably back when you used to write the case your annual. It's copying from that. So what you need to do, Charles, is say, the chat GPT, the instructions should be, please write a parody ad in the style of the onion.

Yes, no, do I do that. I really do that. I don't think it realises that you don't use exclamation marks in every sentence if you're writing satire. It doesn't understand the difference between straight man. You know how, when you do AI images and you ask it, I don't know whether anyone uses mid-journey. Do you use mid-journey?

I've used it a couple of times, yeah. It's fun. But it certainly saves on the lame photoshopping we used to do back in the newspaper days. And so what you do is you type in a prompt and you might say something like a woman in a red dress gets swept away in a playground. That was one that I did recently. Right. And instead of just that, it reads the word red and then everything becomes red in the whole. And, you know, the woman might look a bit like a playground or something.

It sort of gets confused about what concepts, you know, like the concepts bleed into each other. And I think that that's why it has such trouble writing good comedy, because actually the essence of good comedy is having a straight, you know, a straight man, a straight sort of thing there that you're actually being wacky against. Whereas chat GPT, just the whole thing is wacky. And it sort of, it reads like comedy, but it actually is not funny in any way. It's just lame. The problem is you've got to kind of understand the reality. Yeah, you've got to understand. And have a clever insight into the reality.

Yes. This makes me think that our life's work might actually have some sort of, no. No, no. It's going to say value. No. But it's hard enough to do because of the different layers of meaning and so on. That an AI can't do it. You can't actually have an AI understanding the real story and having enough of insight into it to generate a satirical joke on top.

And what that tells me, Charles, actually now that I think more about it, is the opposite, is that what we do. the kind of originality of our observations and whatever has no value. Because if it did, then OpenAI and Google would have trained ChatGPT and Bard to do that. And it would have actually produced a satire AI. Yes. And it's clearly not a priority. No. Because when you produce satire, the amount of money you get paid is very little.

No, except actually, that is not true, Dom. I will pull you up on that because I was looking at the statistics today. And when we started in 1999, the Chaser was. essentially the only satirical news organization in Australia. Absolutely. Right. Now, apart from News Corp. Well, exactly. No, no, this is the thing.

Back then, they were not into satirical news. Fast forward, 23 years, the Herald Sun has joined us. The Daily Telegraph is now satirical. Oh, yeah. The Australian is deeply satirical. It's a wonderful piece of work, isn't it? Like, they're doing all the character comedy sort of thing. So that's 71% of the press.

And then if you start folding in the fact that the cinema, Morning Herald has started going a bit satirical. Some of those editors' letters, yeah. The age, like, especially, yeah. What I'm saying is that essentially, well, I think about 96% of the Australian news media is currently satirical. Yeah. And by my calculations, especially if the Guardian comes on board. Oh, come on, they're well down the rabbit hole already.

Well, a lot of their columns are very, especially the ones by, you know, George Mombio, I mean, I think the Guardian is an experiment, basically trying to get people who believe in wokeness to change their mind. I think it's a right-wing plot by becoming so woke and self-righteous that no one can possibly. It's like oatmeal that becomes more oatmeal-by-day to the point where no one can eat oatmeal anymore. We actually, I was writing some stuff with James Schleffel who writes for the shovel the other day. And we were trying to come up with a Guardian headline generator. And we realized that essentially any concept can be turned into a guardian headline by adding the words, and why it might be problematic at the end of the sentence.

That's fantastic. But Charles, we also know that News Corp is leading the world quite genuinely in using AI to generate content. So what this is making me think is that there actually is brilliant satire generated by AI's. I mean, it's just that News Corp has the best in the business. They've got, forget, forget Chat, GP. You want whatever AI has been generating Caleb Bond. Yes. And they've somehow programmed it to produce the kind of opinions that a young

bowtie wearing fogey would have. Yes. Or Daisy Cousins. Oh, yes. I mean, that's brilliant. And what a testament to the programmers. Yes, exactly. But I feel like we should take some credit for that.

By starting the set off trend. I think we deserve our sort of, like, yeah, sure, it's, you know, a lot of people are making a lot more money out of it than us. All of them, all of them are. But we started the trend that is now completely dominating a way of life. It's nice to think that when they write the story of how the news in Australia became ridiculous, we will be a footnote at the start of the story. But I think the reason why, this is my thinking, is the reason why everything's turned satirical

is because actually reality itself is now basically a badly drafted B-grade made-for-netflix satirical far. Of course it is. Yeah. So, like, I don't know, what's the name of that show? The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Oh, right. You know, like, it's sort of reality itself. Like, look at Elon Musk.

Oh, that's a completely hack. That's an implausible character. The evil villain who literally controls a third of the world satellites, who literally has his thumb on the balance of power between the US and Russia in the Ukraine war. Like, literally has the power to tip the. the balance either way in that war. And he honestly doesn't know which side he backs at this point. Yeah, exactly.

Meanwhile, you know, on the home front, you've got sort of, I don't know, the Russell Coit of broken billionaires. Lachlan Murdoch, uh, he, you know, trying to sue an email newsletter and failing. Like, you know, like, we've got these sort of, our whole world, you know, and we're running headlong into climate apocalypse and not doing anything about it. The whole world is satirical. And, you know, I don't know about you, but the reason why we set up the chase through back in 1999 was because we knew that satire rights itself. Back then, it was Bill Clinton.

It was Y2K. John Howard gave us so much good material. John Howard, yeah, Microsoft Zunes. I mean, it was so much. Microsoft Zunes. It was all just like, you know, just rights itself. And, you know, I think for a while there we were fearing that, you know, especially when Albaugh got elected and things like that, this would be the death of satire. But actually, no, no.

No, the whole world has become. We said that the moment he got elected, don't worry, Labor's got this. I know. We had to calm down the interns. The best thing, the best thing we can do right now to ensure the future of our business and of ourselves thriving. Yes. It's to just go and just rob a bank, take as much money as they have. And when arrested or even potentially shot by police, because they'll take the bank's side,

as our dying breaths can be an AI did it. Yes. And then everyone will love us and vindicate us forever. I love it. Do it after this. Our gear is from Road. We are part of the iconic class network. To tomorrow.