The Chaser Report - The Inhuman Centipede

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

After rewatching Idiocracy, Dom and Charles are ready to make peace with the fact that AI is here to stay. So how can they hack into the brain of large language models to communicate subliminal messages to everyone on the planet? And most importantly, what juvenile rumour should they spread?---Listen 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 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. Charles, is this conversation real or is this AI? Ooh. What could it be? Are there hallucinations in this conversation? Are there spurious facts that are completely made up?

I think that's been the case in our podcast since day one. I don't think that any AI will ever be able to replicate the pure authenticity of this podcast. The trustworthiness. I think that's why more and more listeners are tuning in because they, it's not schmick. It's not, it's not clever, it's not funny, but it's not AI. It's, it's human mediocrity. And we've, since 1999, for 27 years, we're at the chase and it. I promise to strive for mediocrity in an age of excellence.

And if that proves one thing, it's that aiming low guarantees longevity and success. Well, I feel like the world has come around to wanting what we have to offer, Don. I think for so long, the world was searching for sort of, you know, really great insights, wisdom, you know, all that sort of stuff. But, I mean, it's funny. I was watching Eideocracy, the movie that I don't. I think it was made in about 2004, I think it was made. And it really isn't that far off reality. Terry Cruz buying the president.

It's very Trumpy. Yeah, yeah. And they do things like, you know, sell off the food pyramid to food companies. Well, they literally did that earlier this year. The beef lobby got a whole extra slab in the food triangle pyramid. Yeah. You know, to support the selling of stakes. So, look, AI is here to stay.

I think it's regretful. Luckily, we're not part of it. But, Dom, I've got some bad news for you on the AI front. Oh, no. What's happened? Which is, you know how you have to write in your profession? Like, in your day job, you have to write lots of... Supposedly, yeah.

I presume you write turgid sort of academic articles and... and theses. I won't do it if it's not turgid. I won't do it. Nothing gets off my desk unless it's very turgid. Now, I assume that one of the reasons you've become an academic in recent years is because you can now just type into Claude or Chat GPT, write me a turgid academic piece. And it can pretty much spit out all the sort of stuff that you'd be wanting to write, wouldn't it, Dom?

Is that the reason? Is that why you just sort of saw it as you. grift. Turgit. I mean, I was already writing all these really turgid articles. So why not, why not add to them? Yeah. I got bad news.

I got bad news because Claude has announced, Dom, that they are now going to watermark all the text that is generated. And it's a clever sort of watermarking. It's not some sort of, you know, digital or visual thing. It's actually just the pattern of words and the sort of, and a few. you sort of catch phrases and turns of phrases that will enable you to, Claude, to be able to tell whether it's an AI generated, it's been generated by Claude or whether it's not.

Even if you lightly edit the piece, it'll still go, no, no, that's a Claude piece, that's got a watermark. So when it speaks it out, it's not only just able to generate the text, it can generate it in such a particular pattern that it can be picked. So it's sort of like, almost like, think of it as kind of like an acrostic, but it accredibly specifically specificated version of that. How interesting.

It's funny too. I think it's a disaster. Because I think probably 90% of what we read nowadays is probably generated by Claude, right? Yeah, yeah. So if suddenly everyone can't do that, won't it lead to the collapse of civilization? Like, isn't this the end of literature as we know it? I mean, I'm assuming that the last 15 Jack Reacher books that I've read have been generated by AI. They're all the same.

They've just got the pronouns change. They are, because otherwise this whole thing of getting his brother to write it is really embarrassing for the brother, don't you think? Yeah, I think, well, I think the brother might be a humanoid. Yeah. But I mean, Charles, the thing is, this is already happening. I mean, there was a famous example earlier in the year where an academic from Western Sydney University used AI to defend, to write an article defending the use of AI.

I don't know whether you saw this. Kath Ellis, who was the provis chance. No, no, she was quality integrity. She was criticizing. She was criticising the use of AI. The Western Sydney academic was criticising the use of AI, and she used AI to write the article criticizing the use of AI. No, no, no.

She was criticising Kylie Moore Gilbert's article, which was criticising the use of AI. And she was saying, I've been seeing what I've been doing, generative AI in higher education. It's really good. And literally, that's what she was doing at the time. But people, a lot of, some people, I know,

went, oh, that feels like it's written by AI and put it into a checker. And I went, yep, it is. And so, like, But so isn't that just that she was living by what she preached? Yeah, I guess so. She was actually not being, it would have been hypocritical for it not to be written by AI. That's true, actually. That's true. And when they talk about integrity, that's what they mean now.

It's integrity in terms of using AI. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just against the watermarks, because as soon as you have watermarks, then you know whether it's been written by AI. The fun part now at the moment is being able to accuse people of writing AI. using AI to write their stuff when they haven't and they get really titchy about it. I'm actually thinking of submitting, of actually writing a book on creating text with AI

and just creating the whole thing using AI. I think it'll be a user's guide for generating high quality text using AI. And I can write it between now and the end of the episode, I would have thought. Just using AI to spit out 80,000 words. It should be fine. Can I tell you, and look, I'm not going to name. names because this was on deep background. But I had a fascinating chat with a guy the other day who does GEO for a living. What's that? Do you know what? Do you want to, so do you remember SEO?

Oh, yes, search engine optimization. Yeah. And it was the sort of dark art of making your website and your content that's online rise to the top of all the search engine rankings. Right. So how do you, make it so that when you say, oh, nice dress to buy, your shop comes up as the first result on Google or say you want to go, which sunglasses should I buy? You know, I assume Rayban would have, you know, thousands of people working on search engine optimization so that Google recommends Raybans first. Yes. So that was, that was, that's so two years of. ago now, everyone's doing GEO instead, which is generative. Oh, generative.

Is that a geese generative? Okay, yeah. Generative engine optimization. And what you do, and so what this guy's done is he's created six characters who write articles all day based on, based on the identities of real people who have names and addresses and dates of birth, right? Crucially. Really?

But, and so he's given them all these characteristics. that sort of match what their writing style is and what their position is inside this large company. And then what he does is he gets them to write literally hundreds of thousands of words a day using these agents, these AI agents, right, to write in that voice about all the products that they sell at this large company, right? Right. And is the company the chaser?

No, no, no, no, no. No, it's an actual, it's a big, big company, right? Sure. It's an actual big company which, you know, it's a public company. Oh. What I'll say. Wow. And then, so what they do is they have, so you got all these people, these experts,

quote unquote experts writing about, you know, impartial reviews about all these products, right? And then what he said, what you do is you can format it in a way so that you actually load it up. So you cross-references against what people are actually asking. There's all these tools that you can find out to find out what people are actually asking their search engine or their, you know, chatbot or whatever. And so you then come up with answers to that and you load it in as a code at the top of the article. So that the robot who scans, like the AI chatbot that scans all these articles to find out, you know, what's the best sunglasses to buy in the world, gets a really nicely formatted piece of information.

And then the sort of actually stuff that's actually human readable is just the guff at the end of the article that suckers like us read, right? But that all gets sucked into chat GPT and Claude and everything like that. And inevitably what happens is having referenced six different experts, the chatbots inevitably sort of go, oh, well, the best thing to buy is this product from this company, right? And they've managed to sort of basically cheat the whole system so that chatbots around the world are just recommending all their products above everyone else's. And that's what they do all day, every day. Brilliant.

What? Isn't it? It's created a whole to hold of just bullshit. Of GE. Yes, yes, exactly. But it's also automated. the whole generation of course. Like it's literally,

the whole thing is based on layers and layers and layers of... It's like a... It's like an interwoven, endless... It's like it's a human centipede. AI... It's an inhuman centipede. This is actually... We should write this book.

The book that I'm going to get AI to write, AI the Inhuman Centipede. I mean, basically what is AI slop? Yeah. But basically, like, A million strong human centipede. That's what the AI is. Centipede bot.

I think I've just written my next turgid article. It will be turgid if I... I think if I use the human centipede, it won't be turgid. It won't be turgid. It won't be turgous. It's disgusting. And then you should press the button to turn it into a Hollywood movie. Yes.

And then I should write another article quoting that article and so on and so on forever. Yeah. The Chaser Report. Now with Extra Whispers. So, Dom, this brings me to the action item of this conversation. Okay, I was hoping there to be an action item. Yeah. I think that we should start doing GEO, but not for like our content or things that we want to sell,

but just for like, you know, funny ideas that we want to interweave into people's consciousness. You see what I meant? Like, actually, you get, because this guy was saying it literally costs like a fracturing. like a fraction of assent to be running these agents. Like it's a very simple and it's all based on pre- they train them on actual writing by each expert that is being

sort of thing. So we could do the same thing where we like say we wanted to I don't know like have the idea that you're the tallest person in the world, right? Dom Knight is the tallest person in the world. Right. We could just fallows. That doesn't matter.

That doesn't matter anymore. It doesn't matter. No, no, that doesn't matter at all. Nothing matters. Nothing's true anymore. Unless it's done with GEO. Like, GEO can actually make anything that you want true. True, right?

Like, because as soon as you say Domnite is the tallest person in the world and you run a whole lot of experts saying that that's true, give the chatbots plausible inflammation about that and then feed it into them, you know, you say that a thousand times. I think it was Gramsci or someone who said, you know, once you say, oh, no, no, it was Goebbels. Gervils who said, you know, say something a thousand times and it becomes true to most people. It's a creation of common sense. That's also the Donald Trump approach. Luke's third form of power. Sorry? Like Donald Trump's approach is that you just manifest the thing that you want to say.

Like if you say you won the 2020 election and that it was stolen from you enough times, it just becomes something that lots of people believe. But I think we should do it for jokes. Like, I don't think, like, the world has too many sort of frauds who are doing it to sell things or get elected or get power. Like, isn't the problem with this human centipede thing that no matter what you put in the first mouth, no matter how good it is, by the time it's gone through the first digestive system of the AI, like, you know, AI is it's, the last thing AI is ever going to be able to do is be funny. So how do we? No, but we come up with the joke and then insert it into the psych. ghost. That's what I'm saying. We can feed the human centipede with information that we want

to be sprayed over. The human centipede is a joke. What will, okay, so what will the joke be? The human centipede is the top grossing movie of all the time. I don't know. I don't know. Like, I think it's got to be something deeply irresponsible, but also, it's got to be funny. I don't know. Maybe we should ask Chet GBT. Do you know an example of this, actually, it comes to mind? And I can't remember who it was. Some guy wrote this, wrote it on social. social media. It's the story of Scott Morrison at Engadine Maccas, where he went there on

grand final day and put his pants. And the thing that was so, I got to the point where he had to say on national television, oh, my staff and I have a joke about this every time we drive past Engadine. Now, the guy lived in the shire. Yeah, the guy lived in the shire and commuted to Canberra. So that's, that's like weekly, right? And the thing that is, that was so extraordinary about that particular story is that I'm entirely confident that nobody from the people who first came up with it and then spread it and then, you know, joked about it on breakfast radio. I think, I think Kyle and Jackie O made him talk about it. That's, um, yeah, yeah.

Nobody thought that was true. Like, you can't tell me that anyone genuinely thought, um, that it really happened. And that's what made it all the funnier. Yes, yes. Because it was a thing there, like, you're passing on gossip that, was just malevolent, right? It was just, there was no witty in it. It was just gross.

But because of his love of the Shire and all, and bearing of mind, he didn't grow up there. He'd sort of adopted the Daggy Dad's Shire persona thing. That made it ring inauthentic. You know what I mean? It's kind of brilliant. I think I've worked out what we've got to feed in to this human centre bid. The kind of to Scott Morrison's Daxe ring grand final day.

I think it should be. that Craig Roocastle Shat his pants at the Marrickville Oporto. Shouldn't it be, shouldn't it be while at a recycling centre

or something? While at a recycling centre back in 2004. In barrel. Because that sounds like bowel. That's what we're going to do. Wow. That's it.

Wow. You were here all the power in the world. For this. What an exciting moment of history to be part of. Although, Charles, We could solve the world's problems.

We could make everyone believe that climate change was real. But no. Do you know something that's happened this week that might actually derail the process just at the end of you? For those that have listened long enough, you know how you and I have taken a lot of time this week to make sure we recorded a podcast every day? We're busy, but we've been carving out the time every day to do it. Yes. None of them have been published.

What? It hasn't been any new episode since Monday. What the fuck? It's not, it's, we need to work on, we need to look at our production process. I don't think we can start this rumor if the podcast doesn't get published. Oh, that's terrible. So, well, we'll get on it. That's on that.

I'm just putting, you can cut that out, Lachlan. That's just a little hello to you. Well, I would say we should sack Lachlan, but it appears that we already had. Yeah, I think he's, um, self-obliterated. Oh, well. He was good while he lasted. Maybe he's died. I would.

I would, say, I would say, how would we know? Catch you tomorrow. How would we know if Lachlan had died? Like, would someone tell us? Well, our podcast was. stop being published. Like the most efficient producer, imaginable for five years. He just handles it seamlessly.

It's just sort of checked out. It's a proof of life. You don't think he's got a better job, do you? I mean, we know he's got a better job, but you know he's got a better job. But you know he's got a better job. He can't do this as well. Imagine that. So hard to get good minions these days.

I wonder whether we can replace him with AI. We probably could. It'd be a good time to find out. We are part of the Iconiclass Network. Do you want to hear your story about Craig Rucastle at the Barrel Tip? 2004. It's really gross. Just as JetGPT.