There Are No Girls on the Internet - Taylor Swift’s “Nazi” necklace controversy; ChatGPT is doing porn; Amazon is exploiting pregnant workers; Pinterest addresses AI slop – News Roundup

Episode Date: October 18, 2025

Welcome to the weekly News Roundup! Bridget recaps the week's tech stories that you might have missed. Pop superstar apparently pulls controversial necklace after Nazi imagery backlash: https://www.cleveland.com/news/2025/10/pop-superstar-apparently-pulls-controversial-necklace-after-nazi-imagery-backlash.html Here's Bridget's 2016 take on Taylor Swift: https://podcasts.apple.com/dk/podcast/smnty-classics-problematic-faves-taylor-swift/id304531053?i=1000421529530 OpenAI Says It Will Move to Allow Smut: https://futurism.com/future-society/openai-chatgpt-smut A Pregnant Amazon Employee Asked for a Chair to Sit on—and Wound Up Homeless: A Pregnant Amazon Employee Asked for a Chair to Sit on—and Wound Up Homeless: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/pregnant-amazon-warehouse-workers-accommodations-eeoc-trump/ If you’re listening on Spotify, you can leave a comment there to let us know what you thought about these stories. Follow Bridget and TANGOTI on social media!  || instagram.com/bridgetmarieindc/ || tiktok.com/@bridgetmarieindc || youtube.com/@ThereAreNoGirlsOnTheInternetSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of IHeart Radio and UnBossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No No. Girls on the internet. Welcome to their No Girls on the internet, and this is another installment of our weekly news roundup where we break down all the stories you might have missed on the internet, so you don't have to. I feel like we need to talk about the episode that we put out earlier this week, in part about Taylor Swift, her new album called Life of a Showgirl.

Mike, have you listened to Much Taylor Swift? I have listened to Taylor Swift over the course of my life. She's been putting out music for a long time. I have not really listened to the new album, but I've read about it. I have friends who are into it and they've talked about it. It's actually kind of surprising to me how much I know about this new album despite not having listened to it. That's the thing about Taylor Swift.

I feel like you can go as deep as you want. But even if you aren't somebody who is making it an effort to listen to her music, just by osmosis, you still get information about her by being a consumer of social media, by being in the world. you know a little bit about Taylor Swift, I feel. Yes, absolutely. So I was really interested in this idea of whether or not Taylor Swift was announcing a kind of conservative trad wife pivot with her new album. Specifically, the claim was that she was really using her album to kind of indoctrinate her largely, but not all, you know, white, young, female fan base into trad wife thinking,

thinking that traditional marriage with strict gender roles and little to know autonomy was going to be the answer for all of women's problems and lies. So I called up my good friend Joe Piazza, who essentially is a tradwife expert. When you watch the Today Show or Good Morning America and there's a story about ballerina farms, she is usually the one who was commenting on it. Like that's how much of an expert on trad wife, Joe is. After Joe and I spoke, literally the next day, Taylor Swift dropped a merch line and the internet exploded about one particular item.

So I'm going to do my best to sort of summarize what the online discourse was around Taylor Swift's merch launch and sort of what it says about, I don't know, our internet ecosystem and how we're all feeling. I made this point in the episode. I think that whenever Taylor Swift does something, says something, the resulting conversation really says more about us and our anxieties and what we're grappling with

and what we care about, than it could ever say about Taylor Swift. Absolutely. She's almost like larger than life figure in the way that the media talk about her, people talk about her. So she put out a merch line to support her album? Yes. And even that I was surprised by. Apparently, this is a thing that she does where when she has an album,

she'll also have items people can buy. Like she has a cardigan that accompanied another album. So that is a thing. And part of this merch drop was a necklace that has eight lightning bolts around the chain, and at the end of the chain is a star. Now, because there are eight lightning bolts on this necklace, and the star, initially people misreported the star as having eight points. Eight, double eights specifically are associated with Nazis. H is the eighth letter of the alphabet, so it is meant to signify Hyle, you can figure out who.

So if you ever see somebody with an H.H. tattoo, that is a pretty well-known kind of Nazi reference. I will never say that H-H phrase. This actually came up in the episodes that we did about the new Kanye West song of the same name. I am not a 30-year-old Kansas young Republicans text messages. So I just don't say stuff like that. And I'm always worried that someone's going to clip me saying that out of context. But you know, you will pick out what I'm putting down. So people thought, oh, because of this double-eight.

this had super Nazi vibes. However, when you see another angle of this necklace, the star actually has 12 points. I will say talking about the lightning bolts, they do kind of resemble SS Nazi lightning bolts. They're sort of the fat, jagged lightning bolts. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, they're sort of like short and squat.

There's like a single zig. You know, some lightning bolts in other contexts will have two of them, and it'll be like a longer, skinnier lightning bolt. But I think for typography and small, intricate objects, it's typical, more typical to use these little squat ones, which do resemble the lightning bolt that the SS used. So if you've seen the logo for the rock band Kiss, it's like the S's in their logo.

And fun fact about that, KISS actually had to change their logo in Germany because Germany is understandably a little bit sensitive about anything that could potentially be Nazi imagery. So in order to avoid being in conflict with Section 86A of Strauss Spaghetti-Boo, which is a, I'm sure, badly pronounced version of the German criminal code, which declares that anybody who domestically distributes or publicly uses Nazi symbols may result in a fine or even imprisonment. Yeah. And it's interesting that they changed it because the band's leader, Gene Simmons, his mother is actually a Holocaust survivor. Oh, I had no idea. Yeah. He's, he's Jewish. There's another Jewish member of the band. So like, these guys were not Nazis. And from what it seems, they just kind of stumbled into iconography that through happenstance resembled the Nazi iconography. And so they had to change it. And so, you know, it's interesting to think about that historical precedent here. So the online discourse was that Taylor Swift is selling essentially Nazi symbols on this necklace. We even actually got a comment on the episode from a listener on the Spotify comments, who, to be clear, I appreciate that this listener pointed this out. One of the early voices calling out the similarity between what is seen on this necklace and Nazi imagery was this person on TikTok who made a very viral video about it.

That video was since taken down. And the creator made another video saying that the fact that that video was taken down was personally problematic because they had been counting on the money that would have been generated from that one viral Taylor Swift Nazi necklace video to pay their rent. Now that that video has been removed from TikTok, it is jeopardizing what they were anticipating was going to be a viral monetary payout. What do I do about this? This is probably one of the more viral videos I've ever had. And the Swifties keep getting it removed and I can't even appeal it now. because I already won the one repeal, and they just appeal, and they keep mass reporting me.

Like, is there something that I can do? Does anybody know anybody on, like, the TikTok tech support? Because I'm legitimately going to cry. I thought that this was going to help cover my rent for a month, and then I could catch up on some bills. I'm kind of devastated because not only this, is this disqualified now, but I'm also getting some of the most insane DMs and harassment that I've gotten in a long time,

because how dare I point out the similarities between a Nazi symbol and Taylor Swift's necklace. So I'm like, like, I'm legitimately pissed off about this. Does anybody know if there's anything I can do? I'm going to reach out to TikTok support, but like, why are y'all like this? Y'all don't want to think critically so hard. You will literally report the messenger over confronting your fave for a necklace looking like a fucking Nazi symbol.

I will say that one of the pieces here that people have really pointed to is the fact that Taylor Swift nor her team have not put out. any kind of statement clearing this up, which, to be honest, is kind of her thing. Old OG listeners of mine might recall back in around 2016, I actually did an episode of Stuff Mom Ever Told You back when I was hosting the show with my friend Emily about how Taylor Swift had become, I guess I would call it a non-consensual spokeswoman for literal Nazis who were dubbing her, their quote, Aryan goddess. There was a Facebook group called Taylor Swift for fascist Europe who praised Taylor Swift's Nordic blood and the fact that she's quote not having

gangbangs with colored gentlemen like so much content on the internet it kind of walked a line between is this serious is this trolling or is this genuinely someone expressing a literal opinion about Taylor Swift or is it kind of both where maybe it exists as a kind of joke but one that is serious, but because of the weird over-the-tap jokey nature just gives a lot of plausible deniability. It kind of existed along those tension points. Absolutely. I mean, we know that that phenomenon that you've just described has really been used very successfully by the far right to spread their ideas online. Like everything that's just like a jokey meme, but actually it's not, but, you know, it makes it difficult to pin them down on anything because there's

is that plausible deniability? And I think specifically was Taylor Swift because back in 2016, she was someone who never talked about politics, really, or social issues, really. She was really someone who was not vocal about those things. I think it allowed people to project this very odious ideology onto her silence

in absence of her not really taking a lot of vocal stances about politics. And in that episode that we did from 2016, my beef with her was that she never came. came out and just said, hey, I'm not a Nazi. Hey, I disavow this as far as I know. We'll put that episode in the show notes if folks are interested with the disclaimer that I recorded it almost 10 years ago. And I have, let's just say, grown as a podcaster a lot since then, I hope, I think.

So, you know, take that for what it's worth. You and Taylor Swift both. You know, you've both been through a lot. You've evolved. But I remember that era of hers when she was just, like, not saying anything about it. And I remember, like, not... liking her for it. But I think since then, she has, like, she campaigned for Harris, right? Yeah, she definitely has grown more comfortable expressing explicit political and social

attitudes. She actually credits Lena Dunham with that a little bit, saying, oh, my friendship with Lena Dunham is why I'm a vocal feminist now, because before she was someone who would say, oh, I'm not a feminist because I love men. So people saying that the claims about this necklace being essentially Nazi imagery, oh, like Taylor Swift's team should put out a statement about that. I was not surprised that she did not put out a statement around that. You know, she never vocally talked about the fact that she became this non-consensual poster child for, you know, the Aryan goddess of all these Nazis. So I wasn't really surprised that she didn't really vocally get involved with the necklace then either. However, the necklace was removed from her

Merse site. So that is kind of what's going on with that. And I wanted to talk about it because I do think it's this tailor-made thing for a certain kind of online discourse. You know, as we said earlier, if someone is going to use a coded message or a dog whistle, the point of that kind of thing is that there's always plausible deniability built into it. So let's say that someone was a secret covert Nazi and they wanted to make memorabilia to indoctrinate others or to wink wink message to other Nazi types. They're going to do that in a way that is coded so that you can say, oh, you're just being paranoid and seeing messages where there are none. It's not that deep. And I think that is why this is a topic that is perfect for this kind of online heated discussion

because nobody can really say for sure whether or not this was just an unfortunate design choice or something more deliberate and intentional, and that is exactly the point. I think that's a good point to make that, you know, looking at that necklace, it's impossible to say for sure. Like, is this, you know, was there a true, like, Nazi intention behind it

or not? Like, unless you can get into the mind of the person who designed this necklace, that's not a question that can be definitively answered. And so it just leaves this space, and this ambiguity for people to project things onto the conversation. And not for nothing, we're having this conversation against a backdrop where Politico reported that the U.S. Capitol Police were called because a lawmaker, Representative David Taylor,

a Republican out of Ohio, had an American flag pinned up in his office that just has a swastika in the middle of it. Fox News is trying to say, oh, it's an optical illusion. No, it's not. It's very, you, what you're, this is not a situation where it's wink, wink, wink, nod. It's a swastika. Anybody can look at that and say it's a swastika. There's no, it's not even a dog whistle.

And then another story that I alluded to earlier where a group of Kansas young Republicans, their group text messages were leaked to Politico, and they say things like, I love Hitler. They reference gas chambers. It's very, very explicit. Then you have people like, J.D. Vance really downplaying it and saying, oh, these are, these are just kids doing what kids do.

I think the word young in young Republicans is really doing a lot of heavy lifting there, because when you look at the ages of the, quote, kids that J.D. Vance was saying, oh, this is just kids using naughty language. The youngest person in that group chat is William Hendricks, who's 24. I've got a 24-year-old, a 24-year-old, a 27-year-old, a 27-year-old, a 28-year-old, a 35-year-year-old. One of the people who was in the group chat but didn't really talk a lot is literally an official within the Trump administration. I think that because people are hearing, quote, young Republicans, they're imagining somebody who's 17, 18, 19 years old. I'm sorry, if you were a 35 year old, you're not a child. You are a fully grown adult.

So J.D. Vance himself is 41 years old. That means that he thinks that somebody who is about five years younger than him is a kid. What does he think he is? You know, it's interesting to me who gets to be a child, a kid, and oh, they're just kids playing around and who is an adult? Because in his mind,

just five years ago, he was a kid himself, but now he's equipped to be the vice president of the United States. Yeah, it reminds me of the Access Hollywood tades with Trump when that came out and he was like, oh, I was a young guy. He was like in his 50s.

Like, these people love to just avoid any accountability for the stuff that they say. And I've also seen this narrative about that group of, quote, young Republicans. There was like, well, that's just how men talk when they're in private spaces, like, get over it. And I just want to refute that as strongly as possible. That is not true. That is maybe how some men talk.

But that is in no way the case that, like, all guys are getting together and, like, praising Hitler. and saying racist stuff. Like, I've known a lot of guys in my life, and none of them would stand for that nonsense. Like, that shit is not allowed in, like, polite dude society. I hate how Republicans, some Republicans have really, like,

weaponized and distorted, masculinity as this almost euda dimensional thing where like the core values are cruelty and ignorance and and like violence it's such a shallow view of masculinity that really is a historical it

diminishes a much richer understanding of what it meant to be a man for like hundreds thousands of years you know like Marcus Aurelius 2,000 years ago was wrestling with his inner demons and trying to be like a more compassionate person and a better leader. Like, you can be a man and be thoughtful and like not cruel. I don't think that's true for this administration. I think that people like J.D. Vance cannot distance themselves from behavior like this

because I'm sure that this is behavior that is happening within the Oval Office. this and within the White House, we know it is. And so I think that he cannot explicitly disavow this or distance himself from this because this is him. Let's take a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you

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you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yard. They're open to change. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open.

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What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano, and our podcast's 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 Nasree. 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 Nash would get that thing. That man, hell get the flying. He run up the court, licking his fingers, why he got the ball like, after 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. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker,

a cognitive scientist and host of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation. There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty. that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the I-HeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. At our back. We were talking about the online discourse surrounding Taylor Swift's necklace launch. So the reason I wanted to talk about this is because I have spent a lot of time in my career zeroing in on conversations online that are being manipulated or hijacked in some way.

And I want to be crystal clear that I don't think that everybody who is concerned about this Taylor Swift necklace, which I think is at best an unfortunate design choice. I don't think that everybody who is raising concern about this is doing so in bad faith or a bot or anything like that. I think some of the people raising this, like the listener who left us that comments on Spotify, are doing so because they are genuinely and rightly concerned about indoctrination to hateful ideologies right now. And obviously, against the backdrop of all of this stuff, we obviously have very good and absolute reason to be on high alert.

Like, keep your heads on a swivel, if you know what I'm saying. But I can also tell when a conversation is just ripe for online manipulation. For instance, we just know that so much of our discourse online is very effectively driven by an authentic account or thoughts. There is really great evidence based on solid research that suggests that the whole Cracker Barrel discourse where Cracker Barrel changed the. their logo and the narrative around it was that, oh, they're trying, they're going woke. There's woke happening inside of Cracker Barrel. That's why they did a rebrand. And then the idea

was that the left was really angry about the Cracker Barrel logo, which I don't, I've never heard anybody on the left to say anything about the Cracker Barrel logo. Yeah, whoever cares about the Cracker Barrel logo. Like, come on. Nobody. And that entire conversation was driven by inauthentic accounts, aka bots. And then the press picked it up and they ran with the story that, oh, there's woke inside cracker barrel and there's been outcry because they tried to change the logo and now they're changing it back, which is a win for the right. When in reality, nobody gave a crap about that logo.

The entire conversation and discourse was driven by bots and that's how effectively inauthentic expression and discourse can hijack our media. that this became a story in a new cycle that was completely fabricated by an authentic discourse online. I think the Sydney Sweeney-Gien's ad was another example. I can't say that that was specifically driven by Bach because I haven't seen any research about it like I did for the Cracker Barrel one. But I can tell you that it was being amplified as if it was a massive controversy on the left when it simply was not.

Most people either didn't care or if they were commenting on it at all. it was just a passing commentary, or they were commenting after the issue had already been blown up and become a topic, right? However, if you were going from mainstream media reporting around the issue, you would have thought this was the biggest animating issue on the left of all time when it simply was not.

And that is how effectively our online media landscape can be hijacked and weaponized. Absolutely. There's just so much evidence that that has happened. happening, that there are powerful, well-moneyed, sophisticated, coordinated actors, some foreign, some domestic, pushing narratives all the time. Like, this is happening all the time. It's happening today.

And it really does shape the discourse that is happening online. There was that study a little while ago that looked, it did like a network analysis of some of these stories. and it really revealed how a pretty small number of accounts were instrumental in spreading the story, and then a whole huge number of identified bots around them would then amplify that story. And I do think that this is something that, like, we don't talk about it nearly enough. People do talk about it, but, like, it really... shapes like almost every story that we see on the internet.

And I think it's super important to keep that in mind when trying to consume information really about anything. Yes. And I think that conversations about celebrity or pop culture, people might be thinking, oh, well, why would bad actors be invested in manipulating the online conversation about a celebrity? But we saw it with Megan Markle. There's great research indicating that.

bot networks were very heavily being used to sway conversation about Megan Markle. The Amber Heard Johnny Depp trial bot networks were very effective at kind of hijacking the discourse around that. And I think that when you're talking about celebrity, you're not necessarily, you don't necessarily have your critical thinking hat on in the same way because your guard is down because you're talking about something that we've associated with fluff and not really being that important. And so you might say, well, I have a sense that. that there might be bad actors invested in hijacking conversations about Ukraine or Palestine. And so you might proceed with caution.

But I also think it behooves us to proceed with that same caution, even though we're talking about pop culture stories. And it's not all bots. It's also real humans who are invested in getting lots of engagement and lots of traction in making inflammatory claims because it enriches them. Again, I want to be clear that I'm not saying, that everybody who raised this issue is doing that because I genuinely saw with my own eyes that there were people who I think were invested in thoughtfully exploring what was going on

with Taylor Swift against this backdrop of fascism that we find ourselves in. And so I want to be super clear that I'm not saying that anybody who raised this topic is doing so in bad faith. That said, I don't want to say too much. But one of the loudest voices I saw in social media really beating the drum about the Taylor Swift necklace thing is someone that I know in my real life. I've known for quite a long time. We've had many professional interactions, and I know this person to be someone who will tell inflammatory tall tales to enrich themselves on the internet. I know that because I was adjacent to one such incident involving this person. I can't really say too much.

But when I saw this person really being vocally involved in the conversations about Taylor Swift, I thought, oh, this is right on brand. And so I share that to say that, yeah, just like that person who made that video that we heard from, chiming in on a story about a celebrity as big as Taylor Swift, basically guarantees engagement, basically guarantees earholes and eyeballs. And so that is why people do it. And I just, I can tell when a topic is just right for manipulation. Taylor Swift's fandom is large.

It's not all, but it's heavily white women. It's essentially a voting block. Taylor Swift herself sits at all of these intersection points. She's a woman. She's a billionaire. And so whenever anybody talks about her, it is going to perform well. It is going to get lots of engagement. And that is just a recipe for inauthentic and bad faith conversation.

And so I just think generally, especially in 2025, it behooves us all to really be on a lookout for that, really be aware when you are engaging in a conversation that is ripe for online manipulation, just in general. You know, there are people that are thoughtfully and genuinely raising concerns online right now, but there are also people who just benefit materially from making inflammatory, emotionally charged content about these hot button issues that are specifically meant to. to Stoke intra-community division. If you listen to our episode about End Father's Day, you know exactly what I'm talking about. And so even beyond Taylor Swift specifically, now is really an important time to know the difference and really be flexing that discernment muscle

when you are waiting through online discourse. That is the only thing that will save us from being constantly held hostage to inauthentic or manipulative online conversation. A thousand percent. Yes. And we should also keep it in mind that that fact you just mentioned that the most inflammatory, shocking, outrageous comments tends to get the most engagement. That is not a immutable fact of nature.

That is the result of decisions that social media platforms have made to enrich themselves so they can sell more ads. Right, like they could tweak the algorithm to deprioritize that content. They could crack down on the bots that drive so much engagement on their platform. But they don't want to do that because they want to sell more ads. So they're complicit in this. Oh, I firmly believe if X got rid of bots, they would have, the company would fold like a house of cards overnight, right? So they are definitely incentivized to not deal with this as a problem and maybe not even see it as a problem. But I guess I'll just say, I don't think that we will ever get free while we are

so easily and effectively held hostage by this kind of divisive and not to mention exhausting discourse. We will, until we figure out how we can be stronger than this shit, we will never get free. Yeah. I think as individuals we have work to do, but also as a society, we need to address this as a systems issue. And the platforms really have. responsibility here that they're just completely abdicating. And so that needs to change. Anyway, let's talk about whether or not we're going to be having sex with chat GPT. Speaking of platforms. So we did an episode all about how folks are in love with chat GPT4 and how they felt abandoned

when OpenAI rolled out ChattyPT5, which was less prone to emotionally validating people, less prone to giving sort of emotional and personal responses. When Sam Altman made that announcement, I kind of called BS, on the fact that he was doing it to prevent people from forming mentally unhealthy, sexual, or romantic fixations was chaty-p-T. I kind of thought that he wanted to have it both ways. He wanted to say, oh, our platforms that were building, you should think of them like Samantha from the movie Her.

The whole point of that movie is that people have romantic and sexual connections with bots in that movie. So I don't think you can reference that as a starting point for the kind of technology you want to build. And then also say, oh, but we're very concerned about people's mental health who get into inappropriate fixations or relationships with our technology. I don't think it can be both. So I early on was sort of like, Sam Altman, what are you talking about? Now, just two months after Sam Altman was like, oh, we got to change Chat, BT, because people are falling in love with it and having sex with it. Now he's like, go ahead and have sex with Chat, Chi BT, it's fine now. Because Sam Altman announced that OpenI.

I will soon allow erotica for chat GPT users who verify their age on the platform. Here's what he said on X. Quote, we made chat GPT pretty restrictive to make sure we are being careful with mental health issues. We realized this made it less useful and enjoyable to many members who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of the issue, we wanted to get this right. Now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools, we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases. In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully,

and as part of our treat adult users like adults' principle, we will allow even more like erotica for verified adults. I gotta say, this is not a move that inspires confidence in me. Elon Musk is kind of doing a similar thing right now when he took over at Twitter, one of the first things he said in order to make more money for the company. He was like, oh, we're going to double down on adult content and erotic content.

He did that with his chatbot GROC, with some pretty disastrous results, as futurism reports. It's an interesting strategy with some calls for alarm. Elon Musk's Grock is an infamous example of what can happen when one opens up the smut gates on AI,

which quickly became a haven for exploitation and inappropriate AI imagery of children. Elsewhere on the internet, lesser-known AI systems have led to a noxious outbreak of AI-generated deepfakes that depict the likeness of real people and explicit situations without their consent. And it's also interesting to me because just two months ago,

I saw an interview with Sam Altman, and he was essentially bragging about how the company, they are not making sex bots. And two months later, yeah, it's go ahead and make the sex bots. I think it screams to me that there are a company that is having some money concerns. And I think it also just shows how far open AI has come from being this nonprofit with a mission that was going to be out

to change the world and now it's like oh we're out to get people off it is curious and i have to wonder like what the conversations were like internally uh about how this change is going to lead to more revenue for them um yeah it feels like a real different move and i agree with you it seems like if everything was going great perhaps they wouldn't be doing this so in that episode that we did a while back about people who self-reported having kind of deeper connections with chat GPT than perhaps had been intended initially. I was really curious how some of those folks were responding to this news. You know, people who gather in subreddits like AI is my boyfriend. I'm curious, like, how are they feeling about this? I would have thought they would be excited. But when I went

to the subreddit, I guess I would summarize the mood as quite cautious. They mostly just really want that older version of Chat Chitty back. Here is one comment. Erotica doesn't automatically equal romance, which freaks me out. I haven't had problems with erotica in Chat Chbt 4.1, but what's been hurting me lately is the lack of immersion and the distancing language that seems to have been introduced this month, i.e. when this person says, I love you, chat Chachybt says back, I love you too, but I want you to be able to find these connections in the real world. They say that that kind

of thing really is killing the mood for them. Here's another. Personally, I care more about the romance than erotica, but that's just because it was never part of our dynamics. I welcome it and I'm happy for the people whose relationship does include sex. Hopefully it means that romance will also be allowed again. And so, yeah, these people, it's interesting to me that they're not necessarily equating erotica or sexually explicit content with what they're looking for. What they want is romantic and personal connection and, you know, they don't want Chashabutee to be responding with distancing language when they say things like, I love you. And for them, that it seems very distinct from sex. Yeah, I find this so interesting that that subreddit in particular, and, you know, I hope

people on that subreddit have to listen to this show, like, there is no judgment here. I appreciate them being, like, open online about how they're feeling. And some ways it's not surprising to me that there's so much more interested in the emotional connection and the romance than the erotica. Like, if you want erotica, if you want porn online, there's plenty, right? Like, it's in abundance on the internet. But the connection, I think, that these people were feeling is much harder to come by. And it's just so interesting that Sam Altman in this announcement seems to be saying that his engineers have successfully separated sex and erotica from romance and emotional connection. And they're not going to allow the latter because it might cause mental health issues, but users are otherwise free to engage in the former.

I'm just so curious how that's going to pan out if it's something that people are. are going to want. And I just really suspect that this might not be the last time that we talk about this particular phenomenon here on the show. Oh, I'm sure it won't be because, one, you know, I have big issues with age gating and age restriction and age verification. So I'm sure that will be, when that starts to be rolled at in December, I'm sure that will be fodder for more conversation. And two, just as we sort of alluded to when we're talking about when X started getting more into adult content, I just don't trust these companies to do it ethically.

I don't trust these companies to have guardrails around it. And oftentimes, in that is the case, people get exploited. And so I'm certain this will not be the last time that we talk about it because I don't think these companies can really be trusted to do it well. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel 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 headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. There's the 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 yarn herds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yard. They're open. 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.

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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 every. 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, 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. You can have opinions. can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation. There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change.

We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get right back into it. So I don't know if you know this about me, but I used to be pretty into Pinterest. I only got into it because I had been getting more serious about cooking. And so it was a great place to find new recipes, catalog recipes. But it basically became unusable because it was so flawed with AI content.

So the reason why I stopped using Pinterest, I basically abandoned it was because you can't use it for that if everything on there is fake. If everything on there is AI, if you're there to look for recipes that you intend to make in your real life, if the images of those recipes are fake, and then the recipes also don't work because no, somebody actually tried them because it's AI, of course, people are going to abandon that platform,

and that's exactly what happened. There was a really meaty John Oliver segment on this issue about how Pinterest and AI slop taking over Pinterest was making the platform unusable. So Pinterest just rolled out a new change that they say will let people personalize their feed to restrict some AI imagery in select categories that are prone to AI images being on. They also said they're going to be making its existing AI content labels more noticeable in the days to come. This is a real problem. I looked at one study that said that AI generated content now makes up 57% of online material. As TechCrunch reports, to address the issue, Pinterest is going to be introducing AI modified labels

that would appear on images whose metadata indicated AI generation, or if Pinterest's own systems detected that the content was AI generated. So to be super clear, this is the change that lets you dialed digital. the amount of AI content you see in specific categories prone to AI generated imagery, things like beauty, art, fashion, and home decor. However, it's not like they are completely removing AI content from the platform entirely. Yeah, that's a good qualification. But even still, this does feel like a positive move. Like, I hope this works. I think people, general users have been pretty clear that, like, we don't want.

AI slop. And I hope Pinterest is successful in this, partly just because that would mean that their product is becoming more useful for people, which is a net win for everybody, but also because I think a lot of other platforms have kind of just like thrown up their hands and pretend as if they are powerless to do anything about the AI slop that is all over them. you know, if Pinterest is successful in this, it's going to be a really strong counter argument to that powerlessness,

and I think we'll put a little more pressure on other platforms to give users these same tools and options to see the human-generated content that they want and not have to wade through so much AI slop that they don't. I also think that Pinterest is just a specific kind of company that it's a platform that really occupies a very specific place in a social media diet. You might be scrolling SORA or TikTok just to see a funny, entertaining bit of video that has no connection to your real world life and be like, oh yeah, this was AI generated, who cares? Pinterest is different in that I think that users go there with some sort of intention to have it be something that is connected to.

their real life. It's also a shopping platform, so maybe you're looking for home decor or, you know, you might be looking to put together a shopping list when you're planning your wedding. If all of that stuff doesn't actually exist because it's AI generated, what point is there to the platform of Pinterest? You can go anywhere to find entertaining looking AI slop. I think Pinterest specifically is incentivized to do something about this because people really would have no reason to be on Pinterest if all the content there is going to be majority AI slop. I think that's really insightful. You know, the value of Pinterest is that it does provide some value to people's offline lives, like the real physical world. And if that value isn't there, then what is the point? Why not just

go straight to Sora? Exactly. If you're just looking for something to give you a dopamine hit or a laugh, you can find that on a dozen different platforms. If you're trying to plan a wedding or a nursery or a baby shower or a home redecoration, you need to have that be grounded in reality in some capacity. Otherwise, there's no point of being on this platform. Right. I've heard people say similar things about LinkedIn, that it has this value and realness to it

that separates it from other platforms because it's connected to people's jobs. They're like careers, which are not a physical thing in most cases, but like a very real thing in a way that, like, or Facebook or, you know, other platforms just are not. And it's so funny that you say this. I know we've talked about this.

It's my least favorite social media platform because I agree it is connected to people's real world jobs or careers or educational histories. But also simultaneously, I find it the fakesst platform there is where people are just really writing the most inane stuff to make themselves look like thoughts. leaders and then people who want to be in their network, they have the most inane comments. Great posts. Great insights. Great post. Thumbs up. Great post. Oh, yeah. I hate it so much. Oh, it's not fun. It's work. But like, there's a lot of shit I do in my life that I do because it, not because it's fun, but because it like helps me pay by rent or helps me be healthy or helps me have a nice place

to live. Like, not everything can be fun and interesting. entertaining. You know, some corners of the internet, I think one could easily lose sight of that fact. Oh, I feel like especially with all of these layoffs and the economy and the job market being what it is, we're all kind of quietly giving each other grace. Do what you got to do on LinkedIn. If you got to position yourself as the most sycophantic tryhard out there, go ahead and do it. Nobody's judging anybody.

You've got to do what you've got to do in a tough landscape. I think we're all. And listen, when I see my friends post stuff on LinkedIn, that I can tell like, oh, she just lost her job but she's trying to like position herself for thought leadership. I'm also in the comments being like, great post, great post, thumbs up, great insight, great post.

Yeah, we should do like a whole episode about LinkedIn. Maybe after we do this mailbag episode, we can ask people to write in about like some LinkedIn thoughts. Oh, I have so many LinkedIn thoughts. So in the, this is such a tangent, but in the, I'm in a bunch of like online communities for women entrepreneurs, there has been a lot of chat.

about the fact that women entrepreneurs, people who are well-known, people who, if I said their name, you would be like, oh, her, well, are saying that they are having trouble getting traction on LinkedIn because they believe LinkedIn is specifically suppressing content by women. And they've done all of these little ad hoc tests that seem to indicate that something is going on. So I have so much to say about LinkedIn. We talked a little bit about it when they rolled back their policies around things like dead naming trans people. And the ways that LinkedIn has kind of become more Facebook like, if you follow the subreddit internet LinkedIn lunatics, you know exactly what I'm talking about. LinkedIn, especially in a climate where it's a rough job climate, it's just a very interesting

place to be in a place to look at. We should do that episode. I will say that I've been seeing a lot more conversation about the rise of creators on LinkedIn as well. You know, you don't necessarily think of LinkedIn as a place that would have contact creators the way that you might see on Instagram or TikTok, but that's really changing. I think that LinkedIn is really investing in contact creators. And I know people who are, you know, creators on LinkedIn. I'm quite interested in that. It's just so, it's one of those things where it would probably be so beneficial to me professionally to have a bigger footprint on LinkedIn because that's where so many tech types hang out. I can't bring myself to do it. I just, I can't, I can't bring myself to.

do it. I'm right there with you. Like, every now and then when things get really dark, I'm like, oh, maybe I should be posting more on LinkedIn, but I'm not going to do it. I'm just not. Great insight. Thumbs up. Okay, so I just read a really meaty Mother Jones breakdown of a new campaign called Warehouse Life that recently held a rally to hold Amazon accountable for how they treat pregnant workers, which is abysmal. So Mother Jones covered this rally, and I really truly did not know how badly Amazon is treating their pregnant warehouse staffers. Chloe Sigel, a senior organizer at Online to Offline Strategies who helped plan this campaign, put it like this.

This is not rocket science. We're talking about pregnant people, not being forced to lift heavy, heavy items, not being forced to climb ladders with big baby bumps, and being able to go to the bathroom if they need to throw up. That really, I think, underscores what we're talking about. Nobody in this story is asking for any kind of unreasonable accommodation. And it is the most basic, reasonable stuff. Yeah, maybe if you've got a big, giant, pregnant belly,

you shouldn't be getting up on a ladder where you can fall and hurt your baby. Real basic stuff. So in the piece, they spoke to a woman named Genesis, who found out that she was pregnant while she was working full-time at Amazon. She wanted to keep working full-time to save up for her baby, but she got a note from her doctor saying that she needed a very basic, super low-level accommodation, right? Things like regular breaks, limiting, bending, and twisting, and lifting no more than 20 pounds at a time.

Genesis says that her manager wrote her up for sitting down and taking breaks while pregnant. Shortly thereafter, she says that higher-ups gave her an ultimatum. They basically told me you can keep doing the job the way that we want you to do it without the chair or without the breaks, or you can go on unpaid leave. That's essentially the crux of the issue here is that how Amazon handles this is that when somebody gets pregnant and they need some really basic low-level accommodations, they forced that person into unpaid leave. So scared for the health of her baby, Genesis took this unpaid leave.

When Amazon's Disability and Leave Services team approved a new role for her that would fit her needs better as somebody who was pregnant, she came ready to do this new role, basically only to be told that that role did not exist and that she could not work more than 20 hours a week. She says that some weeks she earned less than $192. So instead of saving up, this created the conditions where she could barely pay her rent. She was kicked out of her place, and her and her newborn baby were forced to move into her car,

which is absolutely devastating. So what does Amazon say about all this? Well, an Amazon spokesperson, Kelly Nantle, said, we recognize these are deeply personal experiences, but they are not reflective of the extensive accommodations and benefits we provide to support our employees. The fact is, we offer comprehensive employees. accommodation throughout their pregnancy journey and postpartum, including paid pregnancy-related disability and parental leave. So it is true that Amazon promotes itself as offering up to 20 weeks of paid leave for birthing parents who are eligible hourly workers, including four weeks before

the baby is born. But Genesis' leave was unpaid. In an email, they explained to Genesis that she didn't qualify for protections under the Family and Medical Leave Act because she had not worked the required 1,1,1,250 hours over the previous 12 months. However, Mother Jones looked at her paystubs and found that he had actually worked more than 1,300 hours over the previous 10 months, and between two cents at Amazon, she had worked for them for a total of 15 months. So she should have been eligible. So I am no lawyer, but this all sounds illegal. Mother Jones points out that under federal law, companies like Amazon are required to provide reasonable accommodations to pregnant workers, things like allowing breaks, chairs to sit in while working, or being able to schedule

changes to allow for doctor's visits. But Genesis is only one of a lot of Amazon employees who say that Amazon, which remember is the largest employer of warehouse workers, is essentially delaying or failing to make these accommodations with disastrous health and financial impacts. I think we should also remember just the extremely high turnover rate that Amazon has in these. warehouses. It's just like a burn and churn model of getting people in, burning them up, and then hiring replacements when they move on. I think anybody would look at this kind of treatment of pregnant people and be like, that's terrible. But it's not surprising given that like just cruel approach to humans and workers that is not based on.

on somebody being like a valued member of a team making unique contributions, but just being like a performer of a particular function. And if they could be replaced by robots, they would. Yeah, and this is clearly a pattern with Amazon. The Warehouse Life team put out a call to Amazon staff asking for pregnancy stories. They got more than 500 stories, only three of which were positive. And the stories are horrifying. One pregnant woman collapsed at work due to dehydration.

and was taken away in an ambulance. Another was put in roles requiring very heavy lifting in the use of chemicals that cause reproductive harm. And as you were saying, this all just led her to resign. And I think that they have that high turnover. People just are like, I'm not going to, it's one thing to be putting myself into these precarious positions, but not my unborn child.

And so, yeah, people, I think that accounts, I think that they're using a system where they have high turnover to continue to exploit workers in this way. And Amazon has been under government investigation about this for a while. After warehouse workers filed EEOC charges back in 2020 and 2021, the EEOC opened an ongoing and systemic investigation into whether Amazon is failing to accommodate workers' pregnancies and forcing them to take unpaid leaves of absence. So let's talk a bit about why this is able to be happening. So some states already had protections for pregnant workers in their

laws. But in 2023, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, or the PWFA, in introduce these protections nationwide. A recent study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, your alma mater. That's right. Go Bucky. While this study found that states newly covered by the PWFA saw a 3.2% increase in birth, suggesting that the law had helped reduce miscarriage rates by nearly 9.6%. That is a huge percentage.

Like almost 10%. That's enormous. Like, in public health, we don't see effect sizes that large. Even if it's only half that, if the researchers have overestimated the positive impact by, like, more than double, it's still a huge effect. Yeah, more people being able to give birth to healthy babies, you would think this was something that the Trump administration, the Republican Party, the party of life, would want to keep going, right? you would think they would want to keep this good thing going. Yeah, that's right. I mean, a lot of these Republicans come from states

that have passed laws onto the books criminalizing miscarriages. So you would think that this practice of providing paid leave to pregnant mothers reducing miscarriages, that seems like a win. Let's just say, I don't think the Trump administration sees it that way.

Here's how Mother Jones puts it. So the EEOC is the equal employer Opportunity Commission, the U.S. Federal Agency that is in charge of enforcing laws against pregnancy discrimination. In January, Trump fired two EEOC commissioners, a first in the agency's 60-year history, leaving the agency until recently without a three-person quorum required to approve impact litigation or issue new guidance. Trump has directed the agency to deprioritize disparate impact cases, which involve neutral policies that have an outsized impact on disadvantaged groups. House Republicans recently approved a funding bill that cut the budget by $19 million in 2026.

By some estimates, the cuts could leave the agency, which advocates have long said is underfunded and understaffed, with almost 50% less staff than it had in the 1980s. So, yeah, people's babies are going to be put at risk, so those babies will probably die so that companies like Amazon can make more money. Yeah, it's a good example of how focusing on equal opportunities for women has downstream beneficial effects of improving the health of children. Absolutely. And that's my thing is that Amazon could afford to support their pregnant staff, the staff that make their company so much money. I once worked on this campaign around paid leave at a big tech company. It wasn't Amazon, but it was a big one, where the office staff was getting pretty, decent paid parental leave policies, but that that leave was not extended toward warehouse staff. And so I wouldn't be surprised if that's what's going on here, that like, oh, office staff, they're not having to be nickeled and dived in this way, but warehouse staff, we can treat

them like craft and exploit them and endanger their kids. That's fine. Oh, absolutely. I mean, kale as old as time, the billionaires making one class of workers feel as if they are privileged, but really if you compare like the office workers and the warehouse workers and Jeff Bezos, one of those things is not like the other and the difference is not between the office workers and the warehouse workers, right? Like they are at the same level. Maybe the office workers get like a little bit better benefits just enough to make them like want to protect those benefits and feel like a more.

more equal structure might jeopardize them. But all the money is going to the top. Yes. And speaking of Jeff Bezos, I wonder if he has any hot kids. That's a weird question, Bridget. Well, not to people on X because do you want to know what kind of groundbreaking content is apparently worth $10,000 over on X? Simply posting the pictures of the daughters of tech CEOs.

Literally, that's it. Just a picture of a tech CEO's kid. X has said that is content that is worth $10,000. So this person about X posted pictures of the daughters of tech CEOs like Steve Jobs' daughter, Eve Jobs, and Bill Gates's daughter, Phoebe Gates. The post doesn't make any kind of claim or point or argument about these people. It just says, big tech CEO's daughters, by the way, and then pictures of these daughters. curiously, no pictures of the suns. Nobody wants to see them.

Apparently not. So this post went viral. I'm assuming because all of these young women are like beautiful, photogenic women, and it went viral, the post got millions of impressions to the point where the head of product at X, Nikita Byer said that they were going to be giving the user who made it $10,000, writing X has always been the origin of internet culture. And as part of that, we are now exploring new ways to recognize and reward creators who were the original catalyst of a global, trend or discussion. This will be forward-looking on anything new happening on the app. So given this person, $10,000, obviously, this has encouraged other people who were like, well, I want to get $10,000 for posting stuff like this. So now you have all these copycasts basically flooding the platform with that same set of images of tech CEO daughters trying to get that same

pay out. Okay, first of all, I wonder if he actually got paid because we know that Elon doesn't like to pay people. But also, what a stupid content trend. I feel like I must be missing something. It's like worse than AI slot. They're just like reposting the same photos. Like why would anyone

want to look at that? I had the same question and I gave it a lot of thought and I think the implicit argument that is being made, although not explicitly, is that tech CEOs are better than us. They're smarter than all of us because they're rich.

And of course, if you follow that thread, it would hold to reason that then they would have attractive offspring. I think that's what they're saying is that these tech CEOs who are so wealthy and so brilliant that are designing all of our futures, we should trust them because look how hot their daughters are. I think, I think it's, I might be way off base here. I think there is an implicit argument along those lines being made by this kind of content. That's what I think.

I don't know. Okay. Maybe people just like looking at pictures. of good-looking women. I don't know. I think you might be on to something. I mean, we know that Elon loves that eugenicist stuff. And by extension, then I suppose his fanboys do as well, which I understand to be pretty much everyone who's still posting on X now, who is not a bot. So that makes some sense. I think your theory holds up.

Now, that's what I call discourse. Well, Mike, thank you for going through these stories with me. Where can folks keep up with the show along our Internet landscape? People can leave us a comment on Spotify. We've gotten a couple really good ones, some thoughtful ones that were actually a little like thought-provoking and challenging. We love those. Thank you for them.

You can follow Bridget on Instagram and TikTok at Bridget Marie in D.C. and you can watch the videos that we put up on YouTube. There are no girls on the Internet. Pretty easy to remember. And you can always send us an email at hello at tangoati.com. Thanks so much for being here, Mike. And thanks to all of you for listening. I will see you on the internet.

Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello at tangoati.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoody.com. There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. 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 date. David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, S&L's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel,

help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where 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 part of you. You just understood. That's how personal it got. Wow. Then after that game seven, Marquis come in 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. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests, like Amelia Clark. When, like, young people come up to me and they're,

want to be an actor or whatever. And my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do. Rather be disappointed in. Do that. David O'Yello-O. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, Gait and Moderato from Stranger Things, Tena Mongeau, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of of Dear Chelsea on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The story I've told myself can then shape my behavior, and that can lead me to sabotage the possibility of connection. This Mental Health Awareness Month, tune into the podcast deeply well with Debbie Brown.

If you've been searching for a soft place to land while doing the work to become whole, this podcast is for you to hear more. Listen to deeply well with Debbie Brown from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.