There Are No Girls on the Internet - Pitchfork is absorbed by GQ - is music for men? Bridget hates self-checkout; Google still isn’t deleting abortion data; AI deepfake legislation – NEWS ROUNDUP

Episode Date: January 20, 2024

This week on the Patreon: Bridget remembers the time she met Sheryl Sandberg. https://TANGOTI.com/patreon  Google promised to delete sensitive location data about abortion clinic visits. A new study finds that it still isn’t living up to that promise: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/16/google-keeps-location-history-data-abortion-clinics-despite-delete-pledge  Teen deepfake victim pushes for federal law targeting non-consensual, AI-generated explicit content - the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/deepfake-law-ai-new-jersey-high-school-teen-image-porn-rcna133706  OpenAI quietly removes ban on military use of its AI tools: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/16/openai-quietly-removes-ban-on-military-use-of-its-ai-tools.htm AI already being used to select bombing targets in Gaza:  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/01/the-gospel-how-israel-uses-ai-to-select-bombing-targets  Formula E Team Fires Its AI-Generated Influencer after Fans Balk: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a46353319/formula-e-team-fires-ai-generated-influencer/ It's not just you, Google Search really has gotten worse: https://mashable.com/article/google-search-low-quality-research  The Self-Checkout Nightmare(?) May Finally Be Ending: https://gizmodo.com/the-self-checkout-nightmare-may-finally-be-ending-1851169879 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

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Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-I-Hart. Hey, I'm Deanna Maria Riva, and on my new podcast, How Hard Can It Be? I call on my GenX squad from Ohio to Hollywood as we navigate Midlife's most fantastic BS. Unfiltered conversations from night sweats to futas to scheduling sex. Wait, what sex? Is it just me or does every woman my age want to look at Pinterest instead of having sex sometimes? They say we can't polish a turn, but we're sure going to try.

So let's get blunt with laughs, tears, or tears of laughter. Listen to How Hard Can It Be with Diana Maria Riva on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There are no girls on the internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creators. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is there are no girls on the internet. So Mike, as you can probably tell, we are not recording this when we usually record for the roundups, which is Thursday late night. It is Friday early morning. I'm not a morning person. Do you consider yourself a morning person? I don't. I've always aspired to be a morning person. And on those occasions, when I manage to get out of bed early, I feel really proud of myself and like a little bit

smug about it. But truth be told, left to my own devices, I would sleep in late every single day. I pretty much do sleep in late every single day. So if I'm not sounding my most bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, it is because it is early in the morning. And I don't, I'm not usually on a microphone right when I wake up. I was traveling to New York for a conference about disinformation and my train was late and I got in late. And I was like, you know what? I don't have it in me. But this morning, this is the truth. We got this, right? Yeah.

Well, and listeners, this is really a sign of how much Bridget loves and respects you that she is so committed to putting this podcast out that she is getting up early in the morning. There are not a lot of things that can get Bridget up on the microphone early in the morning. Truly nothing. That is so true. So I am phasing in a new banter idea. Mike, you kind of don't have TikTok. You've had it. You've had flirtations with it.

I know you have a, like a philosophical opposition to TikTok or something. You're basically, you're not on TikTok. I'm not on TikTok. I wouldn't call it a philosophical opposition. I am kind of wary of it, but like, I don't know. I don't have it. I've been thinking lately, like, maybe I'm being ridiculous and I should just get it. But I don't currently have it.

So that means that there are entire trends and discourses and all of that happening that you're just like, you dismiss. I'll be like, oh, did you see such and such? And you're like, I don't know what you're saying. I don't know what those words mean. So new kind of segment we're trying out. Bridget explains TikToks to Mike. I love TikTok. I watch it constantly. I have a timer on my phone when I've been on for an hour. I'll be like, oh, you've had your hour of TikTok a day. It used to be an hour of Instagram. I can tell you the last time I spent 10 minutes on Instagram. TikTok, that's where I need my timer. So I, somebody who is very tuned into what's happening on TikTok, I'm going to take a stab

at explaining popping TikTok discourse to Mike, somebody who is barely on TikTok. You with me? Yeah. This probably won't be embarrassing for me at all. Okay, so there's this thing, this trend on TikTok. I should say something about TikTok and also social media more generally is that you really never know if what you're watching is a skit. Like somebody is just making up a scenario that's never happened just to get engagement. And so I suspect that most of what I'm about to say is being

done by people who are doing it on purpose to get people like me to talk about it. And here I am. So I saw this trend, challenge, whatever, on TikTok where women who were married to men were making a small mess of ketchup on their kitchen tables, calling their husband, or their boyfriend in and being like, hey, can you clean this ketchup? And first of all, all the men are like, why are you asking me to clean up a random pile of ketchup that you made seemingly with intention because it's a perfect circle while also filming me, like what's going on? But the challenge is does your husband or boyfriend know how to clean up a pile of ketchup effectively? And would he do so if asked? And I got to say, y'all, the bar is.

in hell. I was like, so if your man doesn't know how to do it, embarrassing, awful, if your man does it and you're like, wow, my husband really knows how to clean up a pile of ketchup, if I was the man, I would be so insulted that you would think that like, that like, that like, hey ladies, does your man clean up piles of ketchup on the table that like that's the marker of like a good, confident man? So just to repeat this back to make sure that I've understood it. The woman will call her husband or boyfriend over. Look him in the eye while she squeezes out some ketchup onto the couch.

The ketchup's already there. The ketchup's already there. Oh, it's already there. Okay. So he comes in and she's like somehow through mysterious circumstances, there's ketchup here. I don't know what to do. I need you to help me by cleaning it up.

And for some reason her phone is out and she's recording the whole interaction, which to me, if I, if like somebody in my household, actually, that would never happen. Unless somebody was about to, like, give me happy news, I think. I don't think anybody in my life would ever be purporting to have a normal interaction with me while also filming me. No, that's a little strange. But, like, how does one screw up cleaning up a little bit of ketchup from the counter? Great question. So it is a fair amount of ketchup.

So it's not just like a dollop. It's like a little pile of ketchup. If you, I mean, it's hard to explain, but if you ever had to clean something that's like pretty sticky off of a surface, you know what I'm talking about. You have to sort of come at it at a specific angle. A lot of these guys are going at it from the top. Like, they put a paper towel down on it,

which is already like the wrong tool for the job. And then they sort of full hand palm it from the top and then move their hand around. So essentially they're smearing it around is what they're doing. They're like finger painting with it at that point. Yeah, like wax on, wax off from like the karate kid. Exactly. Yeah, so some of these men don't know how to clean ketchup off a table or they're pretending not to. Again, whenever I'm watching TikToks and I'm watching a seemingly mundane moment, I always am thinking like, well, why did you have your phone?

Why were you recording this? Like, it has to be some sort of setup. But in any event, that is what's going on in certain corners of TikTok. men either cannot clean ketchup off of a table or they're getting lots of praise and like, oh, what a good husband for knowing how to and being willing to clean up ketchup from the table. We deserve better. Women deserve better. Frankly, men deserve better.

Everybody deserves better. Nobody wins in this scenario. The bar is in hell. Maybe you need to, like we need to do a PSA or something, like create a little instructional video on how to, how to clean ketchup off the table. Men, is your wife putting a phone in your face and asking you if you know how to clean up ketchup off a countertop? Don't worry.

It happens to a lot of us. Here's what you need to do. I hope that's helpful. We'll flesh it out. We'll flesh it out in further episodes. So that is what's going on on TikTok. Thank you for letting me to explain this to you. Do you feel like you're missing out by not having heard this discourse?

No. I feel actually dumber having that. Okay, let's... But thank you for telling me anyway. Of course. I do feel a little bit more informed. Okay, so let's move on to an update on a story that we talked about a little while ago.

So after Roe was overturned by the Supreme Court, everybody was looking at tech companies. After all, in the days before Roe, abortion was criminalized, but we didn't all carry, like, surveillance devices with us in our pocket tracking our every move. So it really was a moment in time where tech companies really needed to step up or at least clarify and be transparent about how they would be saving data related to abortions. Google announced pretty soon after the Supreme Court ruled on row that they were going to be proactively deleting sensitive location data like when somebody visits an abortion clinic from their search history.

I believe, like if I'm mistaken and someone is like, no, that's not right. please correct me. My remembering of this event is that Google did this proactively, that they were not like pushed by a campaign. At the time, I was pretty plugged into like tech platform accountability campaigns at the intersection of, you know, platform accountability and gender justice. And so as far as I know, Google came out of the gate and proactively announced this. That's my, that was my understanding. But thanks to the advocacy organization accountable tech, we know that Google said they would proactively be deleting people's search history and location data when they visited abortion clinics. However, they just kind of didn't do that. So accountable tech did this really interesting test where

they bought brand new Android phones, drove to abortion clinics, and found that Google did retain that location information. So Google gave the usual song and dance. We care about user privacy. We're doing all we can, blah, blah, blah. And it said that the company planned to go along with changes to implement this change in location retention policies in early 2022 as promised. So what's the update here? Well, they really kind of haven't done that. Here it is 2024 and they're still like, I guess, still working on it, still working at the kinks, whatever. Accountable Tech just released another study this week that found that the company still was not deleting all location history in all cases as promised, though I will say Google's rate of retention has improved a little bit.

So the rate of retention of location information decreased from 60% of tested cases, a measurement taken five months after Google's pledge, to 50% of tested cases in the most recent experiment. 50% like, it's like a coin flip of whether or not it's either actually going to do it. Yeah, that's not a very good metric. When you started, I was like, okay, well, maybe there's like a couple edge cases that creep through. 50% is like, that's pretty embarrassing. So according to The Guardian, here's how they did this newest test. Researchers from Accountable Tech ran eight tests in seven states, Pennsylvania, Texas, Nevada, Florida, New York, Georgia, and North Carolina.

In four out of the eight tests, the route to Planned Parenthood was retained in the devices location history, though the name of the clinic was scrub. But it wouldn't be like that hard. If somebody was really trying to paint a portrait about where you were, it really wouldn't be that hard to be like, oh, it was Planned Parenthood. Data on searches for abortion clinics was still retained in the web. and activity history as in the researcher's first test. So that has not changed. Like when they first did this test, they were still, when you searched for abortion clinics, that information was still

retained in your web activity. It's still, it is still retained in your web activity in 2024. So the director of product of Google Maps, Marlowe McGrith, disputed the findings of this study, saying, we are upholding our promise to delete particularly personal places from location history if these places are identified by our systems. Any claims that we're not doing so are pat, false or misguided. So when I looked into this, it's like very clear to me that Google is sort of nitpicking here. Like in one of the cases, they say that, oh, well, Google location services did not detect that visit as a Planned Parenthood specifically so that it did not delete that location data. But like, it was a Planned Parenthood. So whether or not your location services

or map or whatever clocked it that way, I don't know. It seems a little weird to include that in in a case where you wouldn't have to delete the location services. Yeah, it seems like they're saying, like what that spokesman was saying is that they didn't detect that the location was a abortion clinic. And so they didn't delete the trip. But, like, detecting that the person has visited in abortion clinic is a big part of what they're saying that they're doing, right? Like it's like saying, oh, we, you know, like they just totally didn't, they missed on half of the objective. Yeah. And they're essentially using that as their excuse.

Like, I don't know why. Something about this situation infuriates me because it's so ridiculous. Basically, they out of the gate were like, we're going to do X. And now they're like, well, we can't do X. It's like, well, if you couldn't do it, it's like exactly what a accountable tech and a abortion advocates are saying is that you're not, you're doing a sloppy job of it. And they're like, well, we agree we're doing a sloppy job. One could say we're not even really doing it at all.

It's like, well, yeah, that's what we're saying. It's like, it seems to me everybody is saying the same thing. It's not getting done. You know, I've heard that Google is very siloed and it's a bunch of little fiefdoms. And I wonder if like basically what he's saying is that like, well, the department that was in charge of this, they did their part. And they were just relying on the data from some other department that, like, wasn't involved in this. So it's not our fault, but, like, it's all Google, right?

Like, the whole thing that they said they were going to do of scrubbing data showing people visiting abortion clinics, like, soup to nuts, the whole process of identifying that data and then scrubbing it, it's all Google, right? Like, this is not a good excuse. No, it's not a good excuse at all. And especially when we're talking about, like, playing so fast and loose with something that can, let's be really clear, could get abortion seekers and the people who support abortion seekers arrested. Like, we're not talking about something that is frivolous. We're talking about something that really matters. And so I think, I think, like, playing this weird blame game and, you know, using all these excuses really doesn't cut it from me when we're talking about something so serious that.

they proactively said that they could and would do. So according to Accountable Tech, it's about 50-50 whether or not this data is deleted or not by Google. They say, with the same odds as a coin flip, an abortion seekers location data might still be retained and used to prosecute them. On top of that, as we've seen through the experiments, Google still retains location search query data and likely other incriminating data as well, from email to Google search data. Yeah, it's not great. This is a pretty big deal that I think already has had pretty big implications for folks who need abortions. The company receives and responds to tens of thousands of law enforcement requests for data from its vast troves of user data and complies with 80% of those requests with some level of information.

This is according to Google's transparency report. And on top of that, law enforcement agencies and police have started to make increasing use of this new category of search warrant called reverse search warrant. The Guardian says in that category are geofence location warrants, which police used to come up with a list of suspects by seeking out information on all users whose devices have been detected in a certain place at a certain time. Many activists worry law enforcement would use these search warrants to collect data to find and prosecute or investigate those seeking abortions. So it's not all bad, though. I do have some like good-ish news from this update. Google has announced that it planned to change the way that it stores location history data for all users. in a way that could render responding to geofence warrants effectively impossible. The changes include storing location data on users' devices by default,

encrypting any location data that is backed up to Google's cloud storage and deleting location data after three months. So this is sort of good, like it's a sort of a good way to get around that particularly invasive search warrant process. However, as accountable tech points out, we are talking about a company, like the reason we're talking about Google today is because they have, shown themselves to be kind of slippery about what they say they're going to do and what they actually do when it comes to our data, right? So can we trust them to do this thing that sounds

kind of like a step in the right direction? Who knows? Accountable tech says they are not holding their breath. They told the Guardian that, yeah, this is a step in the right direction. However, the company's inability to follow through on previous commitments to protect location data shows that Google cannot be trusted to meet its public commitments on its timeline promises. we cannot take the company on its word. Yeah. I mean, like you said, that does sound like a really positive step. And the things Google is saying it's doing are really good and should be commended,

but then they need to actually do those things. And three months is a long time for data to not be deleted, right? If they continue to store sensitive data related to abortion locations, three months is definitely enough time for, you know, somebody to find that with a warrant or go fishing for it. Speaking of Google, have you noticed how Google search sucks now? Yeah, it's bad and getting worse. So I was Googling something recently, and I realized I had just sort of trained myself to have my eyes kind of scan over the first handful of results at the top because they're always ads, they're always really. scammy. It is maddening. So if you feel like Google search has gotten worse lately and like

just overall, less useful, full of garbage, you are not wrong because now we have the data to confirm that. A new study from German researchers at Leibzig University and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence, we're trying to answer the research question, is Google getting worse? To answer this question, they examined almost 8,000 product review queries on Google, Bing, and DuckDuck Go for a year. Researchers worked off reports that a torrent of low-quality content, especially for product search, keeps drowning out any kind of useful information in Google search results.

And what they found pretty much confirmed that. A significant amount of the results found in response to product-related queries were outright SEO product review spam. So just like garbage ads, like people who are taking advantage of SEO to, like, like get their stuff at the very top of Google search. It is so annoying. So basically Google search, especially for products, is all SEO spam now.

Yeah, it's so true. Like, Google search is just really difficult to use for some types of queries. And, you know, it's so interesting that SEO has basically ruined Google search. you know people one of the big things people were talking about a couple months ago when chat GPT came out and everybody was all a buzz about generative

AI was the idea that you're a concern about generative AI producing content that gets released in the world and then training on that content like a snake eating its own tail thing and I feel like we already

kind of have that with Google search just returning, in a lot of cases, garbage results that are just optimized for SEO, where, like, we didn't even need generative AI to turn the internet into a snake eating its own tail of low quality information, right? Like, we humans did it ourselves. Well, you know who does not agree that their search platforms are becoming, is it? Orboros, is that the name of that, snake eating its own tail?

Ouroboros? Don't quote me on that pronunciation of it. But you know who doesn't agree? We all know the snake. You know what I'm trying to say? It's the morning. Give me a break. You know who doesn't agree that that's happening?

Is it Google? It's Google. So they're really taking a lot of heat in this episode. I've got to say, a Google spokesperson told Mashable that the study does not reflect the overall quality and helpfulness of search. And they also emphasize that the study only thinks. focuses on a narrow set of search queries, namely product search. Again, it is wild to me that they're like, well, yeah, of course product search sucks. Like, is that that big of a deal? Like, they're almost like using, like, they're almost like confirming what people are saying. What

people are saying is like, yeah, you can't use Google to search products anymore without getting a bunch of ads. And they're like, well, sure, if you only count product search, like, well, that's what they're saying. It seems like we agree. Yeah. I mean, in fairness to Google, right, like, there are a lot of categories where it works really well, right? Like, I use Google search all the time. In a lot of cases, it works well. Product search, it's terrible. And, you know, it is kind of interesting that the category of search where it fails

is the one category where people are trying to sell stuff, right? Like, isn't that interesting? So we've been picking on Google a lot in this episode. I will throw them a bone. So the study did show that Google results did improve. a little bit, to some extent, between the start of the researchers experiment and the end, but still they found an overall downward trend in text quality in all three search engines. And then when you add in things like AI generated spam, this is only going to get worse.

Like, this is going to be a problem that if they don't really take some action on, it's just going to result in Google being garbage. Like, whenever I'm searching for a product, I'll have to search like Ninja Coffee Maker Reddit. at least I used to do that. I don't know the state of Reddit these days whether or not that's going to remain a viable strategy to actually get real information. But it should not be this hard to get real good information

curated by a human on the internet. Like it's like wild to me that this is where we're at that you have to do so much just to get real honest information online. Yeah. Adding Reddit in the search terms when you search Google is definitely a useful thing. to do. Relatedly, I mean, this isn't part of this Google story, but it's just an interesting thing. I was talking to somebody the other day who's like a digital strategy person, and they were talking

about SEO and how much it's changed in recent years where SEO used to be all about Google, right? Like optimizing your website so that would show up in Google results. Now, that's still a big piece of it, but people are also optimizing their sites to show up in. social media platform results. So like searching Facebook, searching Twitter, searching TikTok. And I thought that was like a really interesting change

from, you know, Google being basically the only game in town for search to that no longer being the case. In 2022, there was new reports that, particularly with Gen Z, younger folks, TikTok had already overtaken Google as the new search. So people are definitely using social media sites as search engines now.

So look out Google. That's wild that Gen Z would like want to search something and be like the format I want to see that is a short video. Let's take a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smigel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and Hempherson. writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

There's that worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right?

That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open to change. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smygel and friends on the IHart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me.

I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart.

Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano, and our podcast Point Game is about defying the odds. Like LeBron heading into the playoffs without Luca and Austin Reed. And finding ways to win no matter what.

He's the smartest player to ever play the game. His IQ is at a level that we're. we've never seen before. And he knows. Without Luca and Austin Reeves, I got to manipulate the game. We get a player's perspective on the challenges of the playoffs.

I think Joker's going to be exhausted this series because when they don't have Rudy in the lineup, he has to really guard guys like Nas Reid. He has to guard Julius Randall. And then he has to give us everything he gives us on the night-to-night basis on offense. And when IT's friends stop by, like Quentin Richardson, we dive into some playoff history too.

Steve Nass would get that thing. That man, hell get the flying. He running up the court, licking his fingers why he got the ball. Like, after you go through a training camp with that, I said, you figure it out real quick. Get your ass up and down the court, and you're going to get the ball. So listen to Point Game on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Okay, so speaking of young people in the internet, quick heads up on this story because it is pretty disturbing.

It's an issue that I feel very strongly about. I talk about it a lot, and it infuriates me. and that is AI-generated deep thing. So if you listen to this show, you probably already know that when it comes to technology, we are really failing our kids, in particular our young girls.

Unchecked tech harms routinely befall on young girls, and they're just supposed to deal with it. They're just supposed to be like, yep, now this is a whole new category of harm that you have to absorb, and there will be no accountability or recourse for it. Unacceptable. And when it comes to AI, that is no different.

So this week, a New Jersey high school, schooler named Francesca Manny, a teenage victim of non-consensually sexually explicit deep fakes, joined Representative Joe Morel from New York to share her story and advocate for a bipartisan bill that would criminalize sharing deepfakes at a federal level. So this bill called the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act was first referred to by the House Judiciary Committee back in December 2022, but since then, no further action has been taken. And this lawmaker, Morel, is trying to reintroduce it. So the bill would criminalize. analyze the non-consensual sharing of sexually explicit deepfakes and create a right of private action so that victims who are depicted in these images would be able to sue the creators and distributors of those deepfakes while also remaining anonymous. Under this proposed law, damages for sharing deep faked images without consent could go as high as $150,000 and imprisonment of up to 10 years if sharing the images facilitates violence or impacts the proceedings of a government agency. That's really important, I think, because

Oftentimes with deep fakes, I do, sometimes they're used to terrorize individual people. Sometimes they're used to, you know, disrupt a political campaign or disrupt an election. And so I think it is important to have to have that bit in there. So Francesca's story is truly heartbreaking. Boys in her school, like a group of boys created and traded AI-generated deepfaked nude images of her at about 30 other girls in her class back on October 20th. And I think it's an important reminder that AI is threatening and harming women and girls right now. Like this is not some faraway conceptual threat down the line. It is happening.

It is here. Women and girls are already paying a cost for that technology and for the fact that it's been allowed to just run rampant unchecked. So according to the Dutch AI company, Sensity, 96% of deepfakes online are non-consensual deep fake porn. surprise, surprise, the vast majority of which targets women. So this is a gender justice issue. It is a issue about sexual violence. It's an issue about consent. You know, I beat this drum a lot that tech issues are gender issues, their race issues, their identity issues. And this is a story that I think really makes that clear. It poses a very real threat to our democracy. It does not just threaten the women and girls that are depicted in these images. It threatens all of us and makes us all less safe

and secure. Because if women can't run for office or participate, in public and civic life without being depicted in sexualized AI generated content that depicts them, we will not have a representative democracy, right? We will not have a society where everybody can make their voice heard, where everybody can participate equally in public and civic life. We just won't have that. And so it's an issue that impacts us all, not just the women who are depicted. One note about this is that we're talking specifically about AI generated deepfakes right now because we're talking about this legislation. However, this kind of thing is not. not new, right? Bad actors have already been doing this for a very long time without AI. Like,

before AI was super ubiquitous. A few years ago, there was an image circulating online of a woman topless in her bathtub vaping. And it's a picture of her feet, but in the picture, you can see her faucet. And, like, there's a blurry, reflected image of this woman, topless. If you look close enough because, you know, how creeps will zoom in on a photo if I think there's some chance of nudity in it. If you zoom in enough, you can see a topless naked woman in the reflection of the faucet in this picture. And so this picture was making the rounds on social media with people saying that it was AOC. However, in reality, I think it was actually Sydney Leathers. So if you don't know who Sydney Leathers is, Sydney Leathers was the woman who was involved in Anthony Weeners,

the first iteration of Anthony Weeners text scandal. Do you remember that? Yes, the Leather Weiner scandal. Yes, exactly. the Leather Weener scandal. So the image was actually her, but they were like, oh, this is a picture of AOC, topless and naked in her tub.

Even though, like, it was barely a picture of Sydney Leathers, topless and naked in her tub. Like, if you're zooming in and, like, enhancing and enhancing and enhancing, and enhancing, just to see a new,

a topless woman, debatable on whether that is a top, like, come on, you know, that's really on you. Like, don't put that on her. Does that make sense? You know what I'm saying? Yeah, that makes sense.

So this is what's called a cheap fake, which is exactly what it sounds like, a cheaply manipulated piece of content. Maybe it's as simple as something as like mislabeling what that content is. So saying, oh, this is AOC, not Sydney Leathers. That is how like low budget and cheap, cheap stakes can be. So it's not always AI, right? Like, so AI is not the reason why people are creating this kind of misleading content. However, AI makes it so easy and so fast and so cheap. for anybody to do it, right? It might have taken some effort to, like, make a believable cheap fake of a girl in your high school class who you want to sexually humiliate. But with AI,

anybody can do it easily. Francesca Manny, the high school student who was targeted by these deepfakes, I really got to give it to her because, like, she worked with this lawmaker and advocated and talked about her experience to help raise awareness about this law. She says, the issue is pretty black and white. No kid, teen, or woman should ever have to experience what I went through. I felt sad and helpless. I'm here standing up and shouting for change, fighting for laws so no one else has to feel as lost and powerless as I did on October 20th. The glaring lack of laws speaks volumes. And when you have a high school student having to advocate to protect people in this way, something is really wrong. Like I give it up to franchise. She sounds amazing. Francesca, if you're listening, come to the show anytime we support you. But she should be like getting ready for her prom and hanging out with her friends and reading magazines and playing sports and like doing things that high schoolers are supposed to be doing. It kind of breaks my heart that she has to be working because this is work in this way to advocate for a system where kids like her aren't harmed like this.

This should not be on her a child to ask adults whose job it is to keep her people like her safe. who've just done fuck all. It infuriates me. She says, Our voices are our secret weapon and our words are like power-ups in Fortnite. My mom and I are advocating to create a world where being safe isn't just a hope. It's a reality for everyone. Who, Francesca, girl, thank you for what you're doing. I am so sorry that we have failed you.

Yeah. I mean, it's an issue that really pisses me off because it's just so fucking. up and she really shouldn't have to be doing this. And it also seems like it should be a no-brainer that there should be some action on this bill that was introduced in December of 2022. It's been over a year and no action. Like everybody's constantly yelling their heads off that we need to save the children. Here is a bill that would help protect children from what I would imagine.

nearly all reasonable people would agree is like a harmful bad thing. So the lack of action on this bill is like puzzling and infuriating. Hopefully we'll see some action on it. Agreed. So I did want to talk briefly about this OpenAI story. Open AI, the company behind ChatGPT, we did a whole episode about their CEO, Sam Altman, being fired and then rehired. and all of that, well, they quietly changed their terms of service to remove language

forbidding the use of its technology for military purposes. The new terms of service still forbid the technology being used to make weapons specifically, but other military or like military adjacent purposes are now fair game. This change follows a newly announced collaboration between OpenAI and the U.S. Department of Defense. So this policy change really continues this trend of Sam Altman and OpenAI as they embrace this profit-making. potential of relaxing the company's sort of original lofty ideas. I think initially OpenAI was meant to be a nonprofit, and they had this sort of like, at least stated, kind of like altruistic sounding-ish goal. Now they're like, no, we're trying to make money. We're trying to get paid,

y'all. Like, that's what it is. Let's just call it what it is. So just two months ago, we watched the internet pretty much meltdown with a nonprofit board of Open AI, which a wired article from this summer describes as responsible for making sure that the drive, for revenue and profits will not overwhelm OpenAI's original idea, fired Altman for allegedly not staying true to its idealistic mission. The firing didn't take within days he was back, and many of the other board members were out. We're really witnessing this evolution where we see Open AI going from this organization that has this ethos of like free and open and non-military to exclusive enterprise licenses and yes military. It kind of reminds me of not to like keep picking on

Google in this episode, but like, it's like every, every story has been like, you know what? Fuck Google. But like, do you know how Google they used to have that motto, don't be evil? And then soon thereafter, they were like, yeah, we make death tech. We make technology that is used to kill. And what about it? I'm not saying Google's evil, but like to go from don't be evil to like we literally make weapons that have and do kill people.

It's a big jump. Yeah, it's a little squishier now. So I will say Open AI's collaboration with the Department of Defense, it does sound like they are stopping short of using their AI tech to build weapons in this case. However, it does sound like this week they moved a step closer to having their technology be used to build weapons. We already know that AI is being used by the Israeli military to identify targets for bombings in Gaza. They use a system called the gospel, which I'll just move on. I have a lot to say about that name, but we'll just move on, which the Israeli israeli is. military has said allows them to identify enemy combatants and equipment while reducing civilian casualties.

That's what they're saying. However, a fact that we just know to be true about AI is that it is super janky and gets things wrong consistently all the time. And so if you're saying like, oh, no, no, we're actually doing a good thing by using this AI because it helps us reduce civilian casualties. And we know with certainty because of the AI technology that the people that we bomb are actually enemy combatants, don't worry. If the lynchman of that is the AI technology being effective, we know it's not effective, so like that doesn't really work. And it really does sound like this whole system is likely kind of being used to justify killing civilians because AI identified them as combatants. So this whole situation is yet another reminder that technology is not neutral and that the

decisions made by people who make technology have huge implications. And with all war and conflict, it really is a gender justice issue. Okay, so we have to talk about this kind of funky AI racing ambassador thing. So this week, the Formula E Motorsports team, Mahindra, launched Ava Beyond Reality, an AI-generated female presenting AI ambassador for the team. So as far as I can tell, Ava was a lot of. an existing AI influencer, and she was going to be used to publicize this racing team. The team's fans hated it, like clear, loud, instant, negative feedback. They hated it so

much that the entire thing was basically scrubbed from the internet in less than 48 hours, according to Carr and Driver magazine. So the racing company did kind of release an apology on Instagram. They said, nurturing diversity, inclusion, and innovation is at the heart of Mahindra racing. our AI influencer program was designed with this innovation in mind. Your comments hold tremendous value. We listened, understood, and decided to discontinue the project. So like, grand opening, grand closing for their AI lady ambassador. So I think one of the reasons why this got such negative feedback is that there are real, live,

human women in racing, but these women are often sidelined and marginalized in the sport. According to Carr and Driver, fewer than 5% of elite-level pilots identify as women. So it sort of seems like this team would rather create an AI-generated fake woman than actually amplify a real living and breathing human woman who does exist in the sport. What's really interesting is that Carr and Driver did a deep dive into this AI influencer's social footprint. And they found that she posts about things like shoes and self-care. So Carr and Driver suspects that this AI ambassador was actually like a clunky marketing attempt

to appeal to women. Like sometimes when people are using AI, like the story that we talked about with the tech conference that was using a fake, like, fake AI ambassador for their tech conference, it's clear to me that that was an attempt to appeal to men, right? Just like a lot of the way that she presented was like, this is about men. This AI racing ambassador, according to car and driver, might have actually been an attempt to market to women. The piece of me, The photographs, shoes, clothing, selfies seem drawn from the same kind of influencer-style-sponsored content theme, so common from accounts that advertised toward women. In this case, paired with your standard AI girlfriend imagery, that's from Hazel Southwell, longtime Formula E correspondent. And yet, the text that accompanies them doesn't appeal to women at all.

It feels very much like some type of outside marketing agency deal gone terribly wrong. That is an interesting distinction that, like, for that tech conference, it was an AI-generated woman who, I guess it wasn't an AI-generated woman, right? It was like a, like you said, like a cheap fake where they had a model, an actor. Honestly, I'm not even comfortable saying that. Like, I have not, I have yet to get to the bottom of what's going on there. People should listen to that episode, because it is, if you haven't listened to it, because it is wild. We'll put it in the show notes. But, like, I'm not even. even comfortable saying in every instance it was a human woman. In some cases, I believe it was AI generated and this guy I thought we wouldn't notice. In some cases, I think it's a handful of women who kind of look alike. I honestly wouldn't even feel comfortable guessing what's going on. Fair. But I guess the point that I try to reinforce there is that like it was a, I don't know, disingenuous representation of a woman. Yes. meant to appeal to men.

you said, and here it's a disingenuous representation of a woman meant to appeal to women. And it is nice to think about all the diversity that's out there in disingenuous representations of women. Everybody can be targeted. It's kind of conclusive when you think about it. Like, anybody can be targeted for a disingenuous AI bot campaign. Doesn't matter who you are. Yeah, truly is a meritocracy. So I will say, like, the thing that really kind of sticks in my craw about this is that it does actually sound like this team has a history of like trying to do good things and like trying to be pretty inclusive. They've done campaigns on the past where they highlight like actual human women in the sport. So it seems like they didn't even really have to do this, this script with the AI woman.

This point from the car and driver piece really nails it. The entire Ava Rose debacle waves a big red flag. at situations where inclusion and diversity are swept up by a marketing machine, intent on piggybacking on the latest tech trends, without consideration for the human dynamics that make up the sport. It's encouraging that the backlash was widespread enough to make Mahindra rethink Eva Rose, and we can only hope that the next company that thinks programming diversity is better than hiring diverse employees takes note.

And that to me is really the point. It's a silly story, yes, but that is the nugget of saying that we should really be taking away, is that when companies are like, oh, we want to do something that involves a woman or a person of color or somebody to highlight, if you use AI, that is a gig that an actual marginalized human does not book and does not get paid for. We did an episode about this a while back, but a lot of these AI influencers, even if they're women, like there's one that's really famous. It's like a black woman model. that is run by a white man. And so it's a lot of times these, when you book an AI to be an influencer or talent in some way,

that is a gig, that is money that a human person from that background is not getting. And so particularly in situations like this one, when human women already feel marginalized to use a fake woman as an ambassador rather than amplifying one of those real human women who feel sidelined sometimes in this fort doesn't sit right with me. Right. Like, actual inclusion has to involve actual humans from the identity that you're trying to include. And it's one of my worries about AI more generally that it will just be used to further displace and marginalize people who are already marginalized.

Like, you don't get credit for working with a woman in a male dominated space if that woman is not even real if she's AI. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygle and friends, me and hilarious guests. from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel,

help an acapella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group.

The yard herds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yard. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends

on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined.

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It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano, and our podcast Point Game is about defying the odds. Like LeBron heading into the playoffs without. Luca and Austin Reed. And finding ways to win no matter what. He's the smartest player to ever play the game. His IQ is at a level that we've never seen before. And he knows without Luca and Austin Reeves, I got to manipulate the game.

We get a player's perspective on the challenges of the playoffs. I think Joker's going to be exhausted this series because when they don't have Rudy in the lineup, he has to really guard guys like Nas Reid. He has to guard Julius Randall. And then he has to give us everything he gives us on the night-to-night basis on offense. And when IT's friends stopped by, like Quentin Richardson, we dive into some playoff history too. Steve Nash will get that thing. That man, hell get the flying.

He running up the court, licking his fingers why he got the ball. Like, you go through a training camp with that, Isaiah. You figure it out real quick. Get your ass up and down the court, and you're going to get the ball. So listen to Point Game on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get right back into it. So bad news keeps on coming for media. Yesterday, Condé Nast, the parent company of the music criticism site Pitchfork, announced

layoffs and that the site would be folded into the Condi Nast outlet GQ. Condi Nast executive Anna Wintor allegedly delivered the news of the mass layoffs while at a conference room table without even removing her signature sunglasses. Ouch. Now, Wintor described it as, quote, the best path for the brand. so that our coverage of music can continue to thrive within the company. That kind of makes it sound like Pitchfork must have not been successful. However, Claire Willett, Conday-Nast's audience analytics person, said that this was actually not the case, saying on Twitter,

"'Pitchfork has the highest daily site visitors of any of our titles. Their higher-consuming segments generate more unique page views by volume than any title. This despite scant resourcing, especially from corporate, well-placed in a post-scale era, or at least was.'" So I should be clear that I don't have insight into exactly what is going on here and why this decision was made. If I was a betting woman, I would say that it has something to do with the recent unionization effort by Pitchfork staff. And it was confirmed that eight of the staff who were laid off were union members. The United Musicians and Allied Workers Union released a statement saying,

the mass layoffs at Pitchfork are union busting. So I have my suspicions of what's going on here, but I don't have any sports. special insight, so I can't really say. Damn. I had read that pitchfork was being folded into GQ. And yeah, I just assumed it was because people weren't reading it, weren't looking at it. But apparently that's not the case. It's just union bus thing, allegedly. So let's talk about that because I really, really hate that of all the titles that Condé Nass

has, it is folding pitchfork into GQ specifically. Do you know what GQ stands for? Yeah, gentlemen's quarterly. It's like marketed for men. Yeah, it is a men's publication, right? And so I think especially at a time when you have so many people who are not men, I'm thinking of big artists like Taylor Swift and Beyonce, artists like boy genius. We have, we're in the heyday of so many musicians who are not men, really being powerhouses and dominating and shaping the music industry. So what are you trying to say that music is a men's interest? You know, Condi Nast has vanity fair. They have wired. Why not fold it into one of those? Like, those are also Condi Nast publications. It feels pretty marginalizing to me. And also, I know several women who enjoy listening to music. Music. It's not just for men anymore.

So it does seem like an end of an era for pitchfork. Like, I feel strongly about this because I was definitely a pitchfork person. Like, I was what you might consider a hipster in the heyday of hipsters. I lived in Brooklyn. I did all of that. Like, I was a person who took the pitchfork end of your lists very, very seriously. I used to sometimes obsess about the numerical ratings they would give artists. Do you remember when Halsey accidentally praised 9-11 because they were trying to hate on pitchfork? Yeah, it was a little awkward.

Yeah, so for folks, it's one of my favorite pitchfork memories. I think pitchfork gave Halsey's album a not good review. and Halsey was like, I just wish pitchfork would explode. And it turned out that pitchfork happened to have an office in the World Trade Center. So it sounded like Halsey was like praising 9-11. And yeah, it's just one of those things that was like, who could have seen it coming? But loved that, loved that tweet. So I have a history with pitchfork.

I'm not going to pretend like I'm unbiased here. I drove from D.C. to Chicago to go to the Pitchfork Music Festival, and I had a memorably unpleasant drug experience while listening to the band Animal Collective. I will never forget it. If folks want more detail, maybe I can go into it. It's not that exciting. Aren't all, like, bad drug trips the same in a kind of way. But like, so Pitchfork definitely occupies a certain soft spot in my media diet. It's like a pillar of not just music journalism, but like journalism in America, right? Like how many national publications are there that like focus on music and culture the way that they do or I guess did? It's pretty sad to see that just folded into a lifestyle brand and not just a lifestyle brand, but like a lifestyle brand marketed to men. And I think, you know, pitchfork when they first started, they go. got a lot of heat for really only covering like white indie male artists. But by the end, they were doing what I found to be like really inclusive coverage.

And yeah, it makes me sad to see them folded into an explicitly a men's magazine. And I can only imagine that whatever the next iteration of pitchfork is is going to be hollowed out. And so I think it feels like the end of an era of a pitchfork, but also an end of an era for like media and criticism more generous. it feels like if you are not in media or like media adjacent, I cannot stress to you enough how how tenuous it feels right now. Like every day there is a new round of layoffs announced in media and also tech. So it also seems like it's one of those situations where a lot of the big bets on digital media that people with money made are just like not coming to fruition because of their choices. Like it is not like it's not rank and file staffers or like writers.

or editorial who are causing this disruption, it is decisions being made at the like executive suit level. And I think that's what is so infuriating is like it is not those people who lose their jobs and who are laid on and have their careers disrupted. It is the rank and file staffers who aren't making those decisions. And so, you know, I just think it really says something grim about the state of media that we're in right now. There's a really good piece in Defector by Israel Darmalo that put it really well. Israel writes, throughout the industry, features and reporting and music reviews have taken a backseat as companies push for more social media and video content. What has filled the vacuum left behind by actual music criticism is a loose collection

of YouTubers and influencers who feed slop to their younger audiences and fan communities that engage with music solely through their obsession with a particular pop act. This has all helped produce a mass of music fans who don't understand the value of criticism and outright detects being told the things they like might suck. Even worse, it has helped destroy what scant opportunities remain for obscure or up-and-coming musicians to find an audience. It's harder than ever to make it big

without a co-sign from Drake or Taylor Swift and stuffing one of the few music publications left that swam against all these currents into GQ stuffy environments isn't going to help things. So I agree with that so much. And I would actually take this a step further. More and more, I think that like this is the way of media, like this is the future of media.

and it is making everything worse. It is making us all less informed. It is making us all less able to be savvy critics of the media that we consume. Like right now, there are literally people celebrating the demise of pitchwork because pitchwork gave their favorite artist a bad rating like five years ago or whatever, right? Like when media criticism just becomes a vehicle for stands to stay in their faves, we lose something. We lose something valuable.

Like, I know this might sound super hoity. toady when you compare it to everything else going on in the world. But I do think that it is connected. I think this is a symptom of a larger rot happening in our society right now when it comes to technology and media. Media criticism is and has been the staple of a robust, healthy society. And it has been that way since our earliest days. If that is replaced by like thinly veiled ad copy, just another way to sell us crap or like AI generated listicles or just like fan content, then we really do lose something. Like, I don't think this is a,

I understand that this seems like a small story and maybe it isn't a scale of things, but I think that this is a symptom of a larger rot happening in our society. Yeah, preach, you know, and it's probably not coincidental that valuable thing that is being lost, that, you know, like good, high-quality media criticism

and being replaced by much lower quality, like fan content on, on YouTube or wherever, is happening in parallel with what sounds like union busting at Conday Nast, right? Where, like, professional journalists who are putting out this high-quality stuff, sounds like we're either axed or laid off because they were wanting to agitate for better wages, better conditions or something. And I'm sure that the people creating those YouTube videos, you know, the stands, the whoever, they're probably doing it for a lot less compensation than those professional writers.

If any compensation. And I think I think you're so spot on. And when you fold the threat of AI replacing journalists and writers and people who make interesting stuff, like it's clear to me that what. what suits, you know, executives thought they had in pitchfork was a brand. And so what was important, what was valuable was the brand name pitchfork. What was not adding value in their kind of myopic view of things was the writers who actually do the thing, the people who read, the people who do the interviews, the people who make the thing, they're like, oh, we can outsource that with AI. That's not, that's not, you know, I don't know this to be specifically true for pitchfork,

But I think that that is the larger trend I'm seeing media go toward, that the people who actually make the thing that bring an audience, what they do is replaceable. What they do can be replaced by AI or somebody who's not making any money or just some teen on YouTube or whatever. And what's actually important, what actually makes money is the brand. And I don't think that is going to work out. I don't think, I think what actually puts butts in seats and eyeballs on pages is good writing, is good content, is thoughtful. full writing. And I think that, and honestly, like, I was, I was, like, kind of gone on a deep dive with this. Claire Willett, the audience analytics person from Conday Nast, when someone, when Claire was like, oh, pitchfork actually was driving lots of engagement. They're doing fine. Someone was like,

so then why do this? She basically was like, because rich people don't read, because rich people buy things, they kind of hate the things that they acquire. They don't understand the things that they acquire. And they don't, the only way that they have to engage with the, the things that they get ownership over is to crush them because they don't understand them. And they like, have a weird kind of disdain for these things that they buy. And we've seen that time and time again. Here in the DMV area where I live, a wealthy person just acquired the newspaper, the Baltimore Sun. And first day in the office, people are meeting the new owner for the first time. And what does he do? Stand in front of a room.

and denigrate the people who now work for him, being like, all of you don't know what you're doing, you don't know how to write. We should be doing more social media, more listicles, more engaged in content. What you're doing is worthless and valueless to me, this company that I just bought. And so I think that she's on to something that there is a deep, deep disdain when wealthy people acquire things that people like.

I don't respect it and I almost kind of like weirdly hate this thing I just acquired. Yeah, and also I think those wealthy people often view it as, you know, very much a thing, not like any sort of organization or community of, you know, people who actually do the work of making the thing happen. And when those people start to agitate and want a little bit of power through advocating for a union, that is like so threatening. and, you know, we've definitely seen executives willing to, like, take huge losses just so that they don't have to negotiate with a union about anything, right? Like, just wanting absolute control. I saw this tweet from John Frankensteiner that I really appreciated. Every industry has been taken over by a guy that's like, oh, that thing that's made life a little less unbearable for multiple generations?

I'm shutting it down to increase profits by 2% for a single quarter. And that's, doesn't that say it all? So this last story, in doing the research for this story, I found out that I actually might be on the wrong side of history on this one. So I'm curious for folks' thoughts. I was also to do a story about how our grand experiment with those electronic self kiosks in stores could be coming to an end. And Mike, you and I were talking about it.

And I was like, oh, my God, I hate those self-checkout kiosk. at Target. And you were like, oh, those? I love those. It's true. I mean, they are often maddening. And I've definitely, like, occasionally had some, like, pretty negative interactions with the poor staff person whose job is to, like, stand their intent to those machines. Not, like, I was never mean to them, but, you know, communicating my frustration with their, the janky machine. So I understand why people might not like them, but most of the time they actually work pretty well and allow me to just like get through there, get out more quickly. How would you feel if I told you that 67% of consumers say that they've had self-checkout machines

fail? Would that make you think that they were working well? Is that a stat that fills you with confidence? I mean, if anything, that sounds like an underreporting, right? Like I'd say among people who use them with any frequency, nearly 100% of people have experienced the case where they fail at one point or another. But most of the time, they actually work. Okay, so I don't know if I am out of step with the way that everybody feels on this.

I thought we were all, I thought we all, I was like, we have to do this story because don't we all hate these? Now I'm like, maybe I'm at, maybe I'm on the wrong side of history on this one. And you know what? I've been there before. I'll, you know, if I'm the only,

if I'm the only hater of these, I'll stand on that. So I hate these self-check kiosks. And apparently, retail establishments might actually be on my side too. According to Gizmodo and a report from BBC, stores across the country are reversing course on these machines. And the consensus is growing among analysts and insiders that self-checkout has been a disaster for consumers and retailers alike.

I totally agree 100%. Get them out of there. So the machines are probably like not going away anytime soon. but they might be less a part of like the retail shopping experience. Like at certain target stores, they might start limiting the amount of items that you can check out at a self-checkout. I think it's like 10 of them or less. Dollar General really bet big on self-checkout.

But at their earning call last month, their CEO said the store is planning to increase the number of employees in stores, particularly in the checkout area. So like a big reversal of relying on self-checkout. So there are so many reasons to hate self-checkout. I don't know how somebody. who likes it contends with these very clear reasons why they don't work and why they're awful. Like, I don't see how a reasonable person could disagree with this evidence. So, like, you'll have to let me know. So when you go to Target, you go queue up in, like, a line with one of the humans and just like watch people in the self-checkout line, like, go through and leave the store while you're still standing there.

Well, we go to the same target. So you and I both know that the self-checkout, line at that particular target, it's janky as hell. First of all, if you were ever buying something that you have to show your ID for, like an allergy medicine here or like alcohol, there's never a person in there. So it's like it's not really, you're describing like a check, a self-checkout experience where folks are breezing through. I've never seen anybody breathe through the self-checkout at that target. And you know it. This is, this is, you are, I feel like you're being disingenuous to support your, your love of these robot kiosks. Not the case. I mean, And I have watched people stand in line for one of the human cashiers meet each other, fall in love, have children, pass away.

Those children grow up to eventually check out with the items that their parents had brought into the line. Like that's the pace at which those human checkout lines go. I'm not saying the humans are faster. I'm saying this is my take. And again, I want to know what people think. I'm saying that like, if it's going to be slow with a human cashier or slow with a robot cashier, I would go slow with a human every time because at least it's like not beeping at me. At least it's a human communicating with me in words and I can like express myself to them.

And also another thing that that I feel about these kiosks is that when you have a, in my, in my grocery store, the giant that I go to, their kiosks routinely mess up. And I feel like when I have a mess up, it's always the kiosk. It's never me. But when the person has to come over to fix it or whatever, I feel like the look they're giving me is like, oh, this stupid boom, this stupid old lady doesn't know how to use the self-checkout and is like messing it up. There's no, no, no, no, your technology has failed, not me. I feel very shamed. I feel like other shoppers are like, look who was to be followed for the self-checkout and broke it. And a human had to come over to fix it. It's not a pleasant experience. I mean, it's not. But, you know, they're nice at that giant, right? There's, like, that one guy who is nice. Like, he gets it.

There's that older woman. She gets it. She understands their janky. But I think we're, like, reinforcing this false dichotomy that it's either humans or robots. Like, I think that's what Dollar General was trying to go for. Like, oh, we can get rid of all of our staff and we'll just have these machines. It'll be, like, one human. in the store who does everything.

And I feel like that's what doesn't work, right? Like even when you have the self-checkout machines, there need to be staff there, tending them to, like, check your ID if you're trying to buy alcohol or, you know, clear the machine if it has experiences an error or something. The times when the machines are most frustrating is when there's not a human there

or there's just like two teen humans more interested in, flirting with each other than like helping me check out. But when there's like, you know, either of those two, two older folks at Giant who like know the drill and are on it, it's a perfectly reasonable experience. Mike, listen to yourself. The robots only were if there's a human there. In the scenario that you just described, there needs to be a human. That's what I'm saying.

Why have the robot kiosk if there needs to be a human there to make sure that they're working? Just have the human. But one human contend, I don't know, like six machines, let's say, right? So that one human can have six people going through at the same rate that a human cashier who is like manually scanning the things only gets one three. Well, then hire more humans at the stores. And here's some, this is not just me talking out of my ass. I actually do have an outline with evidence here. Let me just like hit you with some facts.

So a big reason why these kiosks, to me, don't work, is that they make everything more expensive. Not only do self-checkout machines allegedly double theft rates, they actually increase labor costs because employees who get taken away from their other duties to help customers deal with those kiosks and errors and blah, blah, blah. Overall, some analysts say the machines increase costs overall. So I don't think it's a good use of a human's time to service a robot. So at that point, they're not like you're paying a human. yeah, it's less human staff,

but you're paying that human not to engage with a customer, but to engage with a robot. That system doesn't make any sense to me. Just have, like, things are going fine with human cashiers. You know, it's like we were talking about in one of the earlier segments

that, like, you know, technology isn't neutral, right? It's not just some objective thing that exists in the world. It is an extension, a tool of the humans who are employing it. employing is not the right word to use here, but like the humans who are determining how it works, determining the systems in which it works. Yeah, they should hire more humans to make them work.

But like, I don't know. I think it could be a useful tool, right? Like the scanner gun that they use, that's a useful tool, right? Like, I mean, I hear what you're saying, but I feel like they work. Well, I'll say this. I might be in the minority here. 60% of consumers say they prefer self-checkouts as of 2021. I'm not sure how that squares with the 67% of them that have had those machines not work.

I do want to say like, well, I'll say this. There are probably people listening who have all kinds of reasons to prefer self-checkout. Like maybe I definitely, I'm not saying they should be phased out entirely. Like, I don't think they should be given the real estate that they have in retail stores. I think if you're somebody who, for whatever reason, you might have where you're like, I don't really want to have to engage with a human today, the hungover line or whatever where you can just scan your stuff and go, you probably will have to engage with a human when it invariably fails, but okay. All I am saying is that the massive investment in that, because like when you go to Giant, it's like,

I think the target is a good example. They have more self-checkout than they have human checkout. I think that is ridiculous. Definitely, we can all agree that humans need to be a best. part of the equation. And when there aren't enough humans, that's when things break down. We can hold it there. Honestly, I want to hear folks' experience. You don't just have to, like, agree with me because I'm getting the sense that I am on the wrong. I am in the minority here, and that's fine. If I have to be the only person who can see the truth, I will do that.

But let me know what y'all think about self-checkout. I really want to know. If I'm wrong, show me the evidence I am willing to update my opinions. Yeah, I look forward to hearing what people have to say. Mike, thank you so much for being here, as always. I guess I'll see you at that janky-ass target self-checkout line trying to buy wine. Yeah, I'll wave to you while you're setting up camp over in the human cashier line. I'll bring you some water, maybe some magazines. And listeners, thank you for joining us.

So there's another story that we didn't have time to get into, that former Facebook CEO, Cheryl Sandberg is leaving Facebook's board. So I figured it was a perfect excuse to tell kind of a wild story about the time that I actually met Cheryl Sandberg, IRL, and how she basically crushed my faith in feminism. So check it out, ad free on the Patreon at tangooty.com slash Patreon. So we'll see you there and see you on the internet. Okay, so this is Future Bridget here. I'm here with producer Mike.

We were cueing this episode about self-checkouts. It got very heated. We both have strong feelings. A gauntlet was thrown. Mike and I have decided we are going to go to the supermarket. We're going to get the same amount of stuff. We are going to get in self-checkout. And you're going to do self-checkout. I'm going to do human checkout.

I guarantee you I will be out of there faster and more efficiently. I guarantee it. And we're going to go to multiple stores. We're going to go to Giant. We're going to go to Target. We're going to find a third store. Maybe like Safeway down by Adams Morgan or something. Fine.

I guarantee I will have. a more pleasant experience, a more efficient experience, and a faster experience. There's just no way, Mike. Let's go. I don't know how I ended up the, like, anti-John Henry. Okay, listeners, you heard it here first. This is our first ever. There are no girls on the Internet challenge.

Y'all already know I'm about to win. I am so confident that I'm going to win. Let's go. Let's go right now. Let me finish the episode, and I'll get my fucking shoes. If you're looking for ways to support the show, check out our merch store at tangoody.com slash store. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech

or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello at tangoity.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoity.com. There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of IHeartRadio and unbossed creative. Edited by Joey Pat. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer.

Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, check out the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy,

not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano. It's our favorite time of the year on our podcast point game, the playoffs. We're digging into the biggest surprises of the season. And I'm looking back on some of my greatest playoff moments. If we didn't talk ever again, I was harmed. You just understood. That's how personal it got. Wow. Then after that game seven, Mark keep coming to you. He's like, you know, I love you, dog.

You know, it's all love. This was just playoffs. This was just basketball. So listen to Point Game on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everyone. I'm Cheryl Stray, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things. I'm excited to share that I have a new podcast called Mind Over Mountain. In each episode, I interview athletes, adventurers, and adrenaline seekers to discuss the inner landscapes that informed and inspired their extraordinary.

feats. So we too can better understand how to face our own seemingly insurmountable challenges. Listen to Mind Over Mountain every Thursday on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.