The Gargle - Google landlords | Spy cam | AI copyright

Episode Date: January 12, 2024

Guest editors Pierre Novellie and Kai Samra join host Alice Fraser for episode 144 of The Gargle - the sonic glossy magazine to The Bugle, with one rule: no politics! Google landlords Spy cam AI copyright Social media ads ReviewsStory 1: https://www.businessinsider.com/company-towns-facebook-google-tesla-elon-musk-housing-real-estate-2023-12Story 2: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67652317Story 3: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/dec/27/new-york-times-openai-microsoft-lawsuitStory 4: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-instagram-tiktok-snapchat-children-advertising-2022-harvard-study/HOW TO SUPPORT THE GARGLE- Keep The Gargle alive and well by joining Team Bugle with a one-off payment, or become a Team Bugler or Super Bugler to receive extra bonus treats!https://www.thebuglepodcast.com/donate Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, it's producer Chris from The Bugle here. Did you know that I have a new series of my podcast, Richie Firth Travel Hacker, out now? It's the show where Richie Firth and I talk about how to make travel better in our very special way. In this series, we discuss line bikes, Teslas, the London overground, and a whole bunch of other random stuff that possibly involves wheels

or tracks or engines of some variety. God, what a hot sell this is. I mean, you must be so excited. Listen now. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Every sport has their big, juicy controversy. Boxing has the Mike Tyson ear bite.

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Acast.com. This is a podcast from The Bugle. descriptor doorway then swiftly presses six code numbers into the discrete panel embedded beside the door. It swings open a mouth to darkness and the businessman ducks in. From the cold depths beneath the city comes a waft of the gargle. Welcome, this is the gargle, the sonic glossy magazine to the Bugle's audio newspaper for a visual world. All of the news, none of the politics. I am your host Alice Fraser and your guest editors for this week's edition of the magazine are Pierre Noveli. Welcome.

Thank you very much. And Kai Samra. Hello. Hello. Also, I just want to take this opportunity to apologise for my voice. I don't know what's happened. I watched The Godfather a couple of days ago. Apparently my voice has now turned into Vito Corleone or something.

I feel like I should be making offers that people can't refuse. I don't know what's going on. But apologies to everyone listening. I thought you were going to say, what's the Godfather? And you were like cheering so loud at you. Well, come on, the Mafia. Well, before we strap a canary to our heads, tie ourselves together with a rope and plunge into the depths of this week's top stories,

let's have a look at the front cover of the magazine. The front cover this week is Tom Cruise posing provocatively with the deal he just signed with Warner Brothers to develop original and franchise movies, which he will star in in which I'm very excited about it means we can all have that weird feeling where we enjoy Tom Cruise being Tom Cruise in a movie while also having to contemplate the reality that his non-screen personhood is living in a very different dimension from the rest of us and we can never know how creepy that is I resent Tom

Cruise because he makes me think oh there's there's something not right there, you know? Yeah, it's weird. I'd never know whether that's me projecting that onto anybody who's just really, really nice. I just think no one can ever be that nice. And I feel like that says more about me than somebody like Tom Cruise. Yeah, he has the eeriness of a vampire. He's too youthful. you start to realize why medieval

people were so superstitious about the youthful old you think yeah there is something eldritch about him apparently christian bale uh used for when he was an american psycho used tom cruise as his example which uh i think yeah, maybe you're not. Yeah, maybe there is something in that bit. It's a thing of, you know, you're not asking whether he did a deal with the devil. You're wondering what sub clauses are in his specific deal. Yeah, exactly. How well did you make the deal? Can I do my own stunts in this deal?

Yeah, there's definitely a sub clause about being able to still have really sort of really, really resilient knees as an older guy. Like he's jumping, he's landing hard on his ankles and he's fine. Yeah, big advert for Scientology though. Yeah. If only the knees, if only because of the knees

that's a big USP of when I look for a cult. So the health benefits. I just feel if you have adult children, you shouldn't be allowed to have pecs. Yes, your chest must go from square to rounder for every adult child. A little, an extra few degrees off the corner there.

Yeah. And the satirical cartoon this week is a pregnant woman standing at the fork of two paths, each of which offers one of the two wildly different prevalent narratives about the process of birth-giving between the fully medical, book it in and get it chopped out under full anaesthetic on a Thursday at 10am so you don't miss your Friday hair appointment, or the full-on trust-your-woman's-body-all-pain-is-just-an-expression-of-externally-imposed-fear ducks don't fear childbirth, what's the worst that can happen in childbirth?

Please don't look at history or statistics to answer that question. Got to choose one of those two forks. Look, it's not politics, but it is topical to me right now, is all I'm saying. Top story this week is property news. This is the news that company towns are coming back. This has been a creeping news story over the last few years that we have been returning to again and again. It looks like the multinational corporations are going back to the steam age

in that they're starting to try and own people and the places they live. Pierre Noveli, you are an oil baron. Can you unpack this story for us? Yes. As a 200-year-old industrialist, I find a lot to like in this story. There's a lot of familiar ground here. Basically, private companies in Silicon Valley have decided to start building housing, mainly for their employees, but not specifically. Anyone can come and live in a terrifying, dystopian sort of suburb filled with robot wives. You know, I think that's going to be an option at some point. They're going to go full. What's the movie with the robot wives?

Stepford? Stepford Wives, that's right. I think their working title was Robot Wives. You can see why they went with them. Real spoiler territory there. Yeah, they're going to start prioritizing their employees, but renting out sort of like a suburb of the future, stylish apartment block,

vegan barbecue on roof, you things like that and it just shows that tech companies especially when the economy gets shit love to go back to the most traditional ways of making money land and oil taking things like all the best ways of making money i think maybe facebook could start selling cloves they could import cloves from the east you know we get really traditional get medieval um maybe uh peter teal could start selling indulgences you know if you have done sin then uh his company the f**king Silmarillion, whatever it's called, they could start deleting your browser history if you feel sad about some porn you've seen. I think maybe there's a lot of potential here.

But yeah, basically, we're going back to company towns, but with a kind of upper middle class bent to it. Yes, they haven't got quite to the point where a bottle of Mountain Dew costs $1 more than your salary, and then you go increasingly into indentured servitude. But I don't think it's not going to happen. Like, I'm not going to put money on that not happening. Yeah, it's the Google could have a company store, but it would sell mechanical keyboards and natural wine.

I'm trying to think of a kind of crossover between coders and silicon valley types i guess yeah yeah yoga mat made from material from a pro invented to accommodate some need of a private space uh uh launch yeah it's it's not quite as insane as that but it's it's getting there and it is kind of proof that the private hand of the market will eventually replace the state if the need is good enough, great enough, like housing. But it will be 22 years too late. And it will be mainly for shareholders and employees first.

So it's kind of right that the market will provide. But too late and in a creepy way that won't help you immediately. Oh, yeah. It's really weird. You are right. Because even when they were doing the space launches, I was thinking, is this the 60s? I was just like, what's going on?

There goes medieval. But I had a weird experience with landlords recently. Well, I'll say recently. It was a few years ago. I moved to Catford, which should have been alarm bells anyway. But I met a landlord. Very nice. I rented the room out from him like a

month went by six months went by 12 months went by and then a random person just knocked on my door and was like who are you and I was like who are you and he was like I own the property and apparently I'd just be giving the money to a random person who nobody knew and I was just like this I was essentially catfished for rent. And I feel like this is exactly the same way, Mark, as I can possibly. I was thinking if Instagram does landlords, that is essentially what is going to happen.

So I'm very dubious about the whole thing. But also I agree. I think whenever there's a product, I think the areas will inevitably just mirror the platform. You know, like Facebook will essentially just be a graveyard of people you grew up with but don't want to speak to anymore.

That's slightly, it'd basically be Birmingham for me. That's what it would be like. So, yeah, I'm very dubious of the whole thing, to be honest. If Facebook can build a suburb half as good as they can tell me about discount Ray-Bans, then I'm excited. Yeah, they'll definitely filter the hell out of that problem. I'm excited to look into the bright lights of the future while wearing my discount Ray-Bans. Yeah. I wouldn't live in a Bing house.

Yeah. I'd live in a Google house. I wouldn't live in a Bing house. Yeah. A TikTok house. Definitely stay clear of that. Actually, yeah, that's right. Which of the, which were the platforms, if they were doing a house, which would clear of that. Actually, yeah, that's right. Which of the, which were the platforms if they were doing a house, would you want to go to? I say LinkedIn. Definitely not a TikTok house.

No. A TikTok house would be one of those things where like every one minute, all of the rooms shift in like a disorienting MC Escher style labyrinth flashback. You get locked out if you mention Tiananmen Square. Yeah, and India don't recognise it, so my family are never going to come and visit.

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And this episode of the podcast is brought to you by confirmation bias. Of course it is. You believe me because I'm the one you believe, and you can retweet me without fact-checking. Even if I say something that's technically wrong, it's about someone you don't like, and they probably deserve it by virtue of probably having gotten away with something else equally bad in the past. Confirmation bias. Of course it is.

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but creepy tech news in the things that these people are willing to sell for money, including the controversial clothes hook spy camera now on sale at Amazon. Kai Samra, you've seen things you shouldn't. Can you unpack this story for us? That was between us. So this is the story of how spy cameras are disguised as clothes hooks that are being sold on Amazon, despite the firm being sued over the gadgets. A US judge recently ruled the retail giant was faced a law case brought by a woman who alleged she was filmed in the bathroom

using a clothes hook camera purchased on Amazon. Now, obviously, obviously awful awful thing but initially when I read this I was like well it's surely the person that committed the crime that's in the wrong as opposed to the person that supplied the thing like if I don't know like if Pierre chucked a bucket of KFC chicken on my head and then I got really really angry and then just decided to sue Colonel Sanders it'd be like it's, sorry. That's the worst metaphor I've ever used, by the way. But basically, I then, I thought about it for a bit longer, used this little thing called my brain.

And I was like, well, actually it's only, obviously just used for one, literally the only purpose of that product is to spy on people. Like there's literally nothing else. Like it's obviously not decorative. Like no one was ever like, oh, that spy camera really brings out the room, know um also it kind of annoys me i think the term spy gadget

gets used way too liberally at the moment you know like when i think of gadgets i think of like invisible cars like x-ray glasses i don't think of like a pervy coat hanger you know it's just like the worst episode of the chains but never you know it's like when people kind of go oh that person's a legend and it's like he's not a legend like he just watched the wire that's it like um but I don't um it's bad they've already been sued over it so I don't know how they're still allowed to but it's still on there I actually had a look 199 quid which is insane I think have you considered um selling them yourself under kai samara spy cameras oh my god this thing this thing sells itself yeah if this podcast brings nothing else it's that idea and yeah hopefully be a million out of this i'll make sure it's so suspicious that

it's a clothes hook as well because it's so for when clothes are coming on and off yeah you're right yeah it's like a dentist's mirror on the top of a man's shoe there's no way that you're selling this for a legitimate legitimate purpose i just want to hold myself accountable that i'm hooking my bra on correctly like there is no reason that you would be buying a clothes hook spy camera that is like i'm trying to check my form i'm trying to check my form. I rewind. I watch. I see if I could do it faster. Like watching a golf swing. That's all it's for.

Seeing if I'm getting undressed in the best way. Just trying to prove beyond reasonable doubt that I put my pants on one leg at a time, just like everyone else. Like, I don't. Yeah. Someone's been leaving a lot of mints in my pockets. And so I think I need to get a camera to see who's doing that. What's the most suspicious? Clothes hanger is pretty suspicious to have a camera inside.

Showerhead, probably. Like it's on the level where they're just like, it's a showerhead camera, you know, for no reason. Yeah. Just in case somebody breaks into the house through the drain. You know, you need it there. Yeah, exactly. Now it's time for your reviews. As you know, each week we ask our guest editors to bring in something to review out of five stars.

Pierre, what have you brought in for us this week? It is my toilet cistern. And just to keep the theme running of when I come on this podcast, things have broken in my house. It does seem to keep happening. My toilet is now ambitiously flushing forever. It never stops

flushing. It's like a little water feature. It's like a little... I think my toilet has adopted a rise and grind mentality that I really admire. It's read all those accounts of guys who get up at 2 a.m. to do crunches and learn Mandarin,

and it's decided to never, ever, ever stop flushing. And so I'm giving it... It's supposed to be like the other guys'. Yeah. Five stars for ambition for my toilet system. I kind of want to see it now after you said it was a water feature. If only you had a Kai Samra spy camera, then we could all view it.

It's just a camera for above a toilet to make sure it's still working. That's all it is. Please rate it on Amazon. Verified purchases only. Yeah, so five stars for my very ambitious toilet system. That is the reason why I had to get up early and go to Screwfix this morning and buy extra parts. Just to keep up with the work rate of my f***ing toilet. So that is five stars from me.

Five stars for the toilet system. Kai, what have you brought in for us? So I'm going to review, and I've thought very long and hard about this, pints of wine. Pints of wine are now making a bit of a comeback uh because of brexit um apparently i read like politicians have passed some sort of legislation to be able to sell pints of wine and every manufacturer is like no obviously not that is a ridiculous idea um and i just like the idea of all these things coming out after pro-brexit like i just like the idea of like after brexit this country just just turning into rubble and just every brexit vote

to sip in a pint of pinot grigio and just clutching a blue passport, being like, this worked out really well. And also I've got a bit of personal beef with the pints of wine. I remember being a kid, there was like a party, I was only like seven and there was a bit of wine in a pint glass and I thought it was juice. So that was like my first accidental exposure to booze um and then famously like the England football manager Sam Allardyce got secretly recorded um I don't know if it's a spy camera with a clothes hook um with uh he got secretly recorded like making all these dodgy deals and he was clutching a pint glass of wine, and that triggered me quite a bit. Apparently, Winston Churchill used to drink a pint of champagne,

but I'm guessing that's not in a pint glass. And yeah, I just don't like where this is headed. I don't like pints of wine. I give pints of wine one star. Well, it feels sort of like this pointless nostalgia for Britain that didn't necessarily ever exist, like bring back the asp pit where we punish our enemies. That was the real England.

Yeah, bring back the Wittengamot. They knew how to make a decision or two. Yeah, exactly. Now it's time for Copyright News. And this is the news that the New York Times is suing OpenAI, the OpenAI being the AI company, and Microsoft for copyright infringement, scraping their data in order to produce the work that their artificial intelligences do. Pierre Novelli, you're into computers. Can you unpack this story for us? I am and I will.

It turns out that it is illegal to do the AI equivalent of tracing around Mickey Mouse and trying to sell Mickey Mouse and saying, no, it's not Mickey Mouse. I traced him. It's a new character. That said, can we just be clear, Mickey Mouse is now legally in the public domain. Only the Steamboat Willie edition.

If you take that charming little hat off him, the mouse is going to come for you. You better watch out. If I had a penis, Steamboat Willie is what I would call my penis. And Will. It implies a sort of mercilessly mechanized aspect to it, the nickname there for your penis. A sort of, um yeah the march of progress is somehow attendant on it the thing is is that people who are good at things like coding

ai and computers either don't believe in copyright because they grew up torrenting episodes of the u.s office uh and um getting metallica through Napster, et cetera, et cetera. Or they just aren't very good at remembering things like copyright exist. So they saw no problem with saying to AI, you're allowed the whole internet. You can just eat the internet and whatever you shit out is going to be great because you've used all of human knowledge. Forgetting that the human knowledge was made by humans who still own the knowledge and now they want their money and the new york times is just the latest company to start doing this um getty images was taking some legal action as well because an ai was producing um stock images that actually the ai had learned off getty images so

comprehensively that getty images were sometimes appearing on the generated images from the AI. So they kind of f***ed their legal defence there. And also, I mean, CEO Sam Altman has made a public statement saying that if they're forced to pay for all of the data that they use, if they're forced to pay as though it were data that they were using under copyright licences, then they wouldn't be able to run the business that they're running. And he's making that as an argument why they should be allowed to do it for free. And in fact,

what he's done is made an argument for him not having a business. Guys, guys, if you make me pay, then I won't be able to keep training this robot that's going to destroy everything in society. Okay. So which would you rather have money or I destroy everything and you get no money? Think very carefully about this offer I'm making you here. If I have to pay for everything I steal, then I won't be able to afford to run this fencing business. Yeah, exactly. Also, if they've been using... What's a poor Fagin to do?

Yeah. All these handkerchiefs that I've been stitching together need to be free or my quilt will never be done. Yeah. If they've been using the New York Times to train AI, it does explain why the AI is so bad at writing about anything to do with the UK or British life. It is as woefully misinformed about the UK

as the New York Times tends to be. That does explain. it's weird i feel like someone who's massive technophobe like my only reference points for ai or grown-up or like anything like this was just like the terminator and just sci-fi films and it's just nice well i say nice it's just like before we get there like i just thought he went from ai to skynet and now it's just nice getting all these little things. The times are really annoyed. It's just like, I like these little bits of the precursor before the insanity. I did actually, I actually didn't ever have chat GPT. I just downloaded it today.

And then I did say, do chat GPT and OpenIA do anything illegal? And they go, we strive to operate within legal boundaries and i was like that's not that convincing i just have to say from the uh from the artificial horse's mouth it's uh it's not that convincing well also if if you had your terminator ais based on the current ai technology they would be deeply unoriginal in every action that they took yeah yeah or they would they would the ai would have learned every action that they took yeah yeah or they would they would the ai would have learned how to be a killer robot from the movies and would

therefore have accidentally taught itself to build in various weaknesses that are in the plots of various films and we could just do that then and the ai would go yes good this is how it's supposed to happen i've been trained uh and how to do this yeah it's it's and it's not even a brain really it is it is just like a blurry photograph of the internet so people pretend it's it can think but it can't actually think it's just a kind of it's it's just mega google it's it's google search results put into the phraseology of a kind of slightly patronizing I find that the AI responses I don't know what you guys think when they reply to your questions they talk like Sunday school

teachers or sort of sort of quite overbearing vibes I think here's how it works here we strive there's a very impersonal friendliness to it that I really hate I am quite polite back, just in case.

Just in case of the carnage, I'll be like, hey, I did say please and thank you to you, to 2024. And that brings us to our final story for today, social media news now. And this is the deeply upsetting news that social media apps made 11 billion dollars from children and teens in 2022. That means that of the things that they sold through their websites, 11 billion dollars worth of those sales were to the most vulnerable in society.

Kai, you're young, can you unpack this story for us? This is the story about how a new Harvard study has shown that social media platforms last year generated $11 billion in revenue from advertising directed at young children and teenagers, including nearly $2 billion in ad profits derived from users aged 12 and under as well. And I don't know about you guys, I do kind of feel sorry for kids nowadays. Because, like, even, like, in the 90s, advertising for kids was so powerful. Like, even to this day, like, now, like,

when I'm not thinking conscious thoughts, like, the screensaver for my brain will essentially just be like, Toys R Us, Toys R Us, Toys R Us. Which is very difficult when you've got a bad voice. But it's just, that will just, that is genuinely in my brain forever that will just pop in and you like you think about it that was just one advert that as a kid i was exposed to on telly like maybe once a day or once every two days like now it's just a stream of adverts that i just add programmed especially

for you just streaming into your brain from a device in your pocket like i feel like future young adults will just have like just perpetual dreams and nightmares of like prime energy drinks and stuff it's just it's just a bit weird and even like even now i uh i can't deal with it or worse they're gonna have nostalgic feelings for pictures of people popping blackheads in order to lure them into like scam doctor sites yes yes yes or like uh all the all the money from the under 12s it's amazing how much of that money is from insane auto-generated 3d videos of like spider-man and elsa from frozen snowboarding and stuff have you seen those psychotic fake uh kids they're terrifying my nephew watches them sometimes and they

what are they i haven't seen them they're like computer procedurally generated videos like i don't think a human makes them and they just have got 3d models of like spider-man elsa the hulk iron man uh maybe one like simba and they're they're just sort of like jibbling around it's like ai sp SpongeBob, but directed even lower than that. It looks like it's made on Gary's mod, if you know what that is. Yeah, and you're pretty sure that that's what is produced when someone tells an AI to, quote-unquote, lure some children in. Yeah, just generic kids, characters from completely different genres

just going kind of snowboarding and they just go yeah it does work the ai has nailed kids tv yeah it's weird i think like the scary thing is it's just like advertised specifically for you and even now when i like i don't know when i go into like when i go into my phone like i'm kind of offended at the products they're advertising to me now like back in the day it was like you could go to Ibiza have the time of your life and now it's just like life insurance this is what you this is what we feel like you need now because it's obviously designed specifically for you it's like

how dare you think I'm like that my my instagram is convinced that i'm bald all my instagram ads are about like uh like hormone therapy for baldness surgery for baldness hair transplant okay i i have i don't know what i've clicked but my instagram footprint is so bald that i can't i click i, I'm not interested. I can't, there's no specific button for I have hair that I can tell it. So I keep saying, stop showing me this. And it just goes, well, he must want a different treatment for his baldness. He's in denial. Yeah. I'm thrilled to be able to announce that the other day on my Instagram, I got advertised a special bra for small boobs and a special swimsuit for extra big boobs.

So despite having been on the internet for 20 years, the algorithm still doesn't know how big my rack is. And I feel like that is a badge of honor. And that's one of the main things the internet is for. That's one of the main things people use it for. Despite decades online, my tits are still my own. That's great of the main things people use it for. It's been decades online. My tits are still my own. That's great that the robot's going, we know she has them, but that's all we know. We're going to have to really hedge our bets.

I actually bought a sofa recently, and then as soon as I bought it, all I ever got was just deals for other sofas. I was like, you just know I've bought one. How many sofas do you think I need? I don't need any more. This guy wants probably 100 sofas, Wick. This guy's bought one sofa in one week. If this trend continues, the amount of sofas he's going to buy this year. He's got to sit on at least one thing a day, right? And that brings us to the end of the show. I'm flipping through the ads at the back of the magazine.

Kai, have you got anything to plug? Just social media. Just go on my Instagram. I feel bad after just slagging them off the entire show. Go on my Instagram. Please follow me there. But yeah, just Instagram, Twitter. Wonderful.

And Pierre, have you got anything to plug? Yes, indeed. I'm doing a Soho Theatre run in London of my 2023 Fringe show and that's in late March early April so across Easter 26th of March to the 6th of April

and then that show is going on tour in the autumn across various places so it's all on my website pianovelli.com or yes my social media where you can see for yourself how bald I'm not and I've got two specials

out as a bundle you can get for £10 my last two solo shows Twist and Kronos at gofasterstripe.com that's for £10 for the pair or if you sign up at my Patreon, patreon.com slash alicefrazer you get them and all of my

stand-up specials of the last eight years for free so patreon.com slash alicefraser is the place to go we also run weekly writers meetings which will continue to run with guest hosts through my matt lee which will start sometime in the next two to three weeks this is a bugle podcast an alice fraser production your editor is ped hunter your executive producer is Chris Skinner. I'll talk to you again next week. You can listen to other programs from the Bugle, including The Bugle, Catharsis, Tiny Revolutions, Top Stories, and The Gargle, wherever you find your podcasts.