Latest / Blocked and Reported / Premium: AI Psychosis, But Affirming

Transcript

Premium: AI Psychosis, But Affirming · Blocked and Reported

0:00
SPEAKER_01: Hello, you're listening to a preview of a paid episode of Blocked and Reported.
0:03
SPEAKER_01: We're going to talk about a gender-affirming chatbot.
0:07
SPEAKER_01: We're going to talk about Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino.
0:10
SPEAKER_00: You're underselling it.
0:11
SPEAKER_00: Let me interrupt here.
0:12
SPEAKER_00: We're going to talk about an article that was in, what was it in?
0:15
SPEAKER_00: Slate?
0:16
SPEAKER_01: I sort of want to give away the whole thing.
0:18
SPEAKER_00: We're not going to give away the whole thing.
0:20
SPEAKER_00: We're going to talk about an article that was in Slate that is a little bit insane.
0:25
SPEAKER_01: Would you say it's a little bit insane?
0:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, let's talk about that.
0:27
SPEAKER_01: Gender-affirming chatbot.
0:28
SPEAKER_01: Also, I wanted you to do the thing, and you said, can I do it?
0:32
SPEAKER_01: And then I started doing it.
0:33
SPEAKER_01: But then you did it bad.
0:34
SPEAKER_01: Anyway,
0:34
SPEAKER_01: this bickering is all the more reason to go to Blocked and Reported.org and become
0:37
SPEAKER_01: a paying subscriber.
0:39
SPEAKER_01: In the meantime, enjoy the preview.
0:40
SPEAKER_01: Bye.
0:46
SPEAKER_01: Katie, you told me that you have a really funny thing you want to tell me?
0:51
SPEAKER_00: I think it's funny.
0:52
SPEAKER_00: Let me know if you think it's funny.
0:54
SPEAKER_00: So a couple nights ago.
0:55
SPEAKER_01: So far so good.
0:57
SPEAKER_00: It's the middle of night.
0:58
SPEAKER_00: You like that?
0:59
SPEAKER_00: Dark.
1:00
SPEAKER_00: It's dark.
1:01
SPEAKER_00: I'm sleeping.
1:02
SPEAKER_00: And my beloved wife, Jana,
1:03
SPEAKER_00: wakes me up,
1:04
SPEAKER_00: says a sugar glider jizzed on me and turned over and went right back to sleep.
1:11
SPEAKER_01: Like she was having a dream about a sugar glider jizzy on you?
1:15
SPEAKER_00: No, not on me, on her.
1:16
SPEAKER_01: Oh, so she woke up.
1:18
SPEAKER_01: She said a sugar glider jizzed on me and then she went back to sleep.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: She turned everyone back to sleep.
1:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:23
SPEAKER_00: And then the next day I got more information the next day.
1:26
SPEAKER_00: And when she explained it, it made total sense.
1:28
SPEAKER_00: She said that in her dream I had experience with sugar gliders.
1:31
SPEAKER_00: Therefore,
1:32
SPEAKER_00: she had to wake me up and tell me because I would know what to do when
1:37
SPEAKER_00: a sugar glider jizzes on you.
1:39
SPEAKER_01: Remind me what a sugar glider is?
1:41
SPEAKER_00: It's I've never seen one in real life.
1:43
SPEAKER_00: It's like a little exotic animal that's sort of like a like a mix between like a bat
1:47
SPEAKER_00: and a squirrel.
1:48
SPEAKER_00: I think we looked at pictures.
1:49
SPEAKER_00: They're pretty cute.
1:50
SPEAKER_01: Sugar glider.
1:51
SPEAKER_00: They apparently live for like 15 years.
1:53
SPEAKER_01: Oh, that is cute.
1:54
SPEAKER_01: It's like a raccoon mixed with a bat mixed with
1:57
SPEAKER_00: like a chipmunk.
1:58
SPEAKER_01: Where do they live?
1:59
SPEAKER_01: New Guinea.
2:00
SPEAKER_01: Australia, Indonesia, New Guinea.
2:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
2:02
SPEAKER_00: So, Jana, that's my update.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: Did you think that was a good story?
2:06
SPEAKER_00: I keep laughing about it.
2:07
SPEAKER_00: I'm just like sitting around thinking about
2:08
SPEAKER_01: how I should write her gist on her.
2:10
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
2:11
SPEAKER_01: No, I thought it was funny.
2:13
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
2:14
SPEAKER_01: I'll tell her.
2:16
SPEAKER_01: Let's get to it.
2:17
SPEAKER_01: This is Blocked Reported.
2:18
SPEAKER_01: What are we talking about today?
2:20
SPEAKER_01: Today, we're going to be talking about the increasing panic over
2:24
SPEAKER_01: because I think it's interesting,
2:26
SPEAKER_01: not just in a like, will it kill us way, but I don't know.
2:29
SPEAKER_01: People are getting a little bit conspiratorial, a little bit weird.
2:32
SPEAKER_00: I'm glad we're doing this because when you asked on our last episode
2:34
SPEAKER_00: if people wanted to hear about your AI anxiety, overwhelmingly, the answer was...
2:41
SPEAKER_01: Well, I think they don't want to hear about me freaking out.
2:45
SPEAKER_01: But as you can tell from my voice, I'm not freaking out.
2:47
SPEAKER_01: I'm super chill.
2:48
SPEAKER_01: I'm so calm.
2:49
SPEAKER_01: I'm so calm.
2:50
SPEAKER_00: He's been taking the beta blockers.
2:51
SPEAKER_01: There's been stuff going on.
2:53
SPEAKER_01: And then we're also going to talk about a Slate story that is connected to AI,
2:56
SPEAKER_01: but not in that way.
2:57
SPEAKER_00: Oh, fuck.
2:58
SPEAKER_00: What?
2:58
SPEAKER_00: You told me to read that, didn't you?
3:00
SPEAKER_01: It's okay.
3:00
SPEAKER_01: I forgot.
3:01
SPEAKER_01: Well, we can pretend it.
3:02
SPEAKER_01: Well, we're not going to pretend.
3:04
SPEAKER_01: We're just going to go with it.
3:05
SPEAKER_01: We're going to plow forward.
3:06
SPEAKER_00: I apologize.
3:08
SPEAKER_00: I don't know where my brain's been.
3:09
SPEAKER_00: I was thinking about the sugar glider and I forgot to read the story.
3:12
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that probably ate up most of your day.
3:14
SPEAKER_01: Brain-wise, I am in my – I'm not going to get into it.
3:18
SPEAKER_01: My brain's not working.
3:19
SPEAKER_01: So I'm going to be a little bit out there.
3:22
SPEAKER_00: All right.
3:22
SPEAKER_00: Let's get weird.
3:22
SPEAKER_01: If you guys like zonked out Jesse, yeah, let's get weird.
3:26
SPEAKER_00: What's your stack these days?
3:28
SPEAKER_01: I don't have a stack.
3:29
SPEAKER_01: Are you on finance?
3:30
SPEAKER_01: Amphetamines?
3:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
3:32
SPEAKER_01: Well, so today I'm in Massachusetts for a couple of days and I generally need it.
3:37
SPEAKER_01: I dumped my Google Doc history into an LLM because I was like,
3:46
SPEAKER_01: I feel like I've been working on my book a lot.
3:48
SPEAKER_01: And whenever I say this, people are like, oh, but you're on Twitter.
3:50
SPEAKER_01: You're on Twitter.
3:51
SPEAKER_01: I'm Katie.
3:51
SPEAKER_01: You're on Twitter.
3:53
SPEAKER_01: And that's a tiny fraction of the day versus what I'm working on the book on.
3:56
SPEAKER_01: And the LLM was like, whoa, dude, you should slow down.
3:58
SPEAKER_01: I think it's been 32 out of 33 days in a row I've been working on the book
4:02
SPEAKER_01: and it's been a lot of amphetamines.
4:05
SPEAKER_01: So today is my first day in a while.
4:07
SPEAKER_01: Your poor editor.
4:09
SPEAKER_01: Not taking Vyvanse or Adderall.
4:11
SPEAKER_01: And it's like...
4:14
SPEAKER_01: It's like a big fat grandma is just like gently kneading my brain into different shapes.
4:21
SPEAKER_01: And it sounds pleasant and it's not entirely unpleasant, but it's not.
4:24
SPEAKER_01: The neurons are not firing.
4:26
SPEAKER_01: I've been like downgraded to like chat GPT 2.5 or something.
4:29
SPEAKER_00: Are you withdrawing?
4:31
SPEAKER_00: I guess it's withdrawal.
4:33
SPEAKER_00: It's not like
4:34
SPEAKER_01: as bad.
4:34
SPEAKER_01: I'm not like in pain.
4:36
SPEAKER_01: I just everything in my brain is going at 70%.
4:39
SPEAKER_01: But I feel like I probably shouldn't get addicted to...
4:42
SPEAKER_01: Amphetamines and shouldn't take them when I don't need them.
4:44
SPEAKER_00: Too late.
4:45
SPEAKER_00: You're like a fourth grader who forgot to get the daily dose.
4:48
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to go for a run after this.
4:49
SPEAKER_01: I think that'll help.
4:49
SPEAKER_01: One of my slow plotting runs.
4:51
SPEAKER_01: But before we get into the show,
4:52
SPEAKER_01: you had one of the most common beloved characters to come up on the show,
4:59
SPEAKER_01: Stuart Regis.
5:00
SPEAKER_01: He has a big update.
5:01
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
5:01
SPEAKER_00: So Stuart Regis update for people who are not familiar with Stuart.
5:05
SPEAKER_00: He's a computer science instructor at the University of Washington in Seattle.
5:09
SPEAKER_00: Very interesting guy.
5:10
SPEAKER_00: He's a strange combination of both very mild-mannered and a bit of a shit-storer.
5:16
SPEAKER_00: It's a fun combo.
5:17
SPEAKER_00: And he first crossed my radar a number of years ago when he wrote a piece
5:21
SPEAKER_00: for Quillette defending James Damore.
5:23
SPEAKER_00: This was obviously the Google engineer who was fired for arguing,
5:26
SPEAKER_00: essentially, that the reason women don't code—
5:29
SPEAKER_01: Women should be enslaved.
5:30
SPEAKER_00: Right.
5:30
SPEAKER_00: The reason more women don't code isn't because of sexism.
5:33
SPEAKER_00: It's because women,
5:34
SPEAKER_00: on average,
5:34
SPEAKER_00: tend to be more interested in people and men tend to be more interested in things.
5:39
SPEAKER_00: I am interested in dogs, so I don't know if I'm a man or a woman.
5:42
SPEAKER_00: Non-binary, I guess.
5:43
SPEAKER_01: That actually makes sense,
5:44
SPEAKER_01: because that's like literally halfway between people and things, is dogs.
5:47
SPEAKER_01: And you're gay.
5:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
5:50
SPEAKER_01: Which, according to sex science, is like you have a slightly male brain, so it makes sense.
5:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
5:55
SPEAKER_00: I don't throw like a girl, so that makes sense.
5:57
SPEAKER_01: You throw like a boy?
5:57
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, I do throw like a boy, yeah.
5:59
SPEAKER_00: I've got a good arm.
6:00
SPEAKER_00: Good for you.
6:00
SPEAKER_00: So Stuart has been teaching intro to computer science for many decades.
6:05
SPEAKER_00: He agreed with James DeWart,
6:06
SPEAKER_00: and he wrote about it for Quillette,
6:07
SPEAKER_00: and there was this huge backlash about I read about it at the time in The Stranger.
6:11
SPEAKER_00: The Seattle Times covered it.
6:13
SPEAKER_00: The department, the computer science department, disavowed the piece.
6:16
SPEAKER_00: Students and faculty were very pissed.
6:18
SPEAKER_00: At one point, there was a student petition to get Stort fired.
6:21
SPEAKER_00: He doesn't have tenure.
6:23
SPEAKER_00: One of the testimonials was from a former student of Stort's who said she was
6:28
SPEAKER_00: a woman and she complained that in a course that she took with him,
6:31
SPEAKER_00: this was his intro course,
6:32
SPEAKER_00: he used a metaphor from Star Trek and she said that this was discriminatory
6:37
SPEAKER_00: because women aren't interested in Star Trek.
6:39
SPEAKER_01: So good.
6:40
SPEAKER_00: Deeply ironic.
6:41
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
6:42
SPEAKER_00: So after that debacle, Stuart was demoted and placed on probation for a year.
6:47
SPEAKER_00: He is not one to read the room.
6:49
SPEAKER_00: And a couple years later, he took a required Title IX training course.
6:53
SPEAKER_00: And there was a section in this course in the instructional materials on land acknowledgments.
6:57
SPEAKER_00: Don't know what land acknowledgments have to do with Title IX.
7:00
SPEAKER_00: But instructors were encouraged to add land acknowledgments to their syllabi.
7:04
SPEAKER_00: This wasn't required by the Allen School.
7:07
SPEAKER_00: That's the computer science department.
7:09
SPEAKER_00: But there were a bunch of breast...
7:11
SPEAKER_00: But there were a bunch of...
7:12
SPEAKER_01: Breast practices?
7:12
SPEAKER_01: You said breast practices.
7:13
SPEAKER_01: Katie, everyone, Katie said breast practices.
7:16
SPEAKER_00: They heard.
7:18
SPEAKER_00: There were a bunch of best practices for the syllabi.
7:21
SPEAKER_01: I'm out of best practice.
7:22
SPEAKER_00: And land acknowledgments were a part of that.
7:25
SPEAKER_00: And by the way,
7:25
SPEAKER_00: at the time I looked at their best practices document and it said
7:30
SPEAKER_00: that instructors should announce their pronouns
7:32
SPEAKER_00: and ask their students what their pronouns are.
7:34
SPEAKER_00: And they should, quote,
7:35
SPEAKER_00: try replacing you guys with folks, everyone or y'all, which they spelled it wrong.
7:42
SPEAKER_00: They spelled y'all the Yankee way.
7:44
SPEAKER_00: Very offensive, very appropriative.
7:47
SPEAKER_00: Anyway.
7:49
SPEAKER_00: Stort takes his Title IX course and he decides to craft his own land acknowledgement
7:53
SPEAKER_00: on his syllabus.
7:54
SPEAKER_00: And before he did that,
7:55
SPEAKER_00: he wrote the faculty listserv saying he was going to do this and asking for input.
7:59
SPEAKER_00: No one responded.
8:00
SPEAKER_00: His colleagues seem to have decided that the best way to deal with Stort is to ignore him.
8:04
SPEAKER_00: So he did it.
8:05
SPEAKER_00: He put it on his syllabus.
8:07
SPEAKER_00: And this is what his land acknowledgement said.
8:08
SPEAKER_00: Jesse, you read this.
8:09
SPEAKER_01: I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property,
8:11
SPEAKER_01: the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of
8:15
SPEAKER_01: the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.
8:19
SPEAKER_00: Do you get that?
8:20
SPEAKER_01: I get it because I think we've done this three times.
8:23
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think it's basically like if you don't,
8:24
SPEAKER_01: it has to do with working the land to be able to own it.
8:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's the labor theory of property is like a John Lockean thing.
8:32
SPEAKER_00: Basically, he who works the land owns the land.
8:35
SPEAKER_00: And Stuart actually went into the university archives and he found that
8:39
SPEAKER_00: the university itself cleared the land where the campus sits.
8:42
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, he's saying the Coast Salish people never had ownership over this land.
8:47
SPEAKER_00: So he puts this on a syllabus.
8:48
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't go over well.
8:50
SPEAKER_00: Students notice it.
8:51
SPEAKER_00: They start complaining about it online.
8:53
SPEAKER_00: The Allen School responded to one student on Twitter saying,
8:57
SPEAKER_00: quote, we became aware of this offensive statement a few years ago.
9:00
SPEAKER_00: We're horrified by it and are working on getting it removed from the syllabus.
9:04
SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, we have removed the document from the course website.
9:07
SPEAKER_00: Again, he told the faculty listener if he was going to do this
9:09
SPEAKER_00: and everyone would ignore him, so it shouldn't have been a surprise.
9:12
SPEAKER_00: But then the dean contacted him and asked him to remove it.
9:15
SPEAKER_00: He argued that if other faculty are allowed to make political statements,
9:18
SPEAKER_00: he should be allowed to as well.
9:20
SPEAKER_00: And so the dean had the IT staff remove the syllabus from the university website
9:24
SPEAKER_00: and replace it with this, quote,
9:26
SPEAKER_00: note, the course syllabus has been temporarily removed due to offensive statements.
9:30
SPEAKER_00: We apologize for the inconvenience.
9:32
SPEAKER_00: So the next day,
9:33
SPEAKER_00: the dean had the IT staff put the syllabus back up with
9:37
SPEAKER_00: the land acknowledgement removed,
9:39
SPEAKER_00: and she emailed all Stuart's students to apologize for his behavior,
9:43
SPEAKER_00: and the school announced that they were opening a new section with
9:45
SPEAKER_00: a different professor that was held at the same time.
9:47
SPEAKER_00: Jesse, what would you have done had you been in college
9:51
SPEAKER_00: and you saw this shitposty land acknowledgement on your syllabus?
9:56
SPEAKER_01: I mean, there have been a number of campus stories, including one I reported on forever ago.
10:04
SPEAKER_01: I know you're asking if I'd be a student,
10:05
SPEAKER_01: but I'm just struck by the unbelievable overreaction on the part of the university
10:10
SPEAKER_01: to a fucking joke.
10:12
SPEAKER_01: And a political statement, which they should know is protected.
10:17
SPEAKER_01: Very much protected, yeah.
10:18
SPEAKER_01: It's a public school, yeah.
10:19
SPEAKER_01: Anyway.
10:20
SPEAKER_00: You know,
10:20
SPEAKER_00: I think if I had been 18 the way that I was at 18 and I saw this on a syllabus,
10:28
SPEAKER_00: I probably would have signed the petition against Stuart.
10:32
SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, you would have because you were like a little radical.
10:34
SPEAKER_00: I was.
10:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but then again, but.
10:37
SPEAKER_01: And you were just looking for like, you were like bored and looking for other stuff to do.
10:40
SPEAKER_00: True.
10:40
SPEAKER_00: But then again, it's like, like when I was in college, being radical was being counterculture.
10:45
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
10:46
SPEAKER_00: And by 2022, being radical was mainstream.
10:49
SPEAKER_00: So I might have been like, I might have been a Christian.
10:52
SPEAKER_00: I might just come out like as an anti-abortion.
10:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
10:55
SPEAKER_00: Anyway.
10:57
SPEAKER_00: UW opens an investigation into Regis under the university non-discrimination
11:01
SPEAKER_00: and anti-harassment policy.
11:02
SPEAKER_00: The investigation runs about 10 months.
11:04
SPEAKER_00: During that period,
11:06
SPEAKER_00: Stewart is denied a pay increase and the investigation concluded that,
11:09
SPEAKER_00: in fact, he had violated the school's non-discrimination and anti-harassment policy.
11:13
SPEAKER_00: So he sues the university, along with FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
11:18
SPEAKER_00: He loses in district court.
11:20
SPEAKER_00: They rule against him, but he appealed to the Ninth Circuit and he won.
11:23
SPEAKER_00: So that court found that the UW violated his First Amendment rights and retaliated
11:28
SPEAKER_00: against him for protected speech, quoting one of the judges here.
11:32
SPEAKER_00: Student discomfort with the professor's views can prompt discussion and disapproval,
11:35
SPEAKER_00: but this discomfort is not grounds for the university retaliating against
11:39
SPEAKER_00: the professor.
11:40
SPEAKER_00: The judge also said that UW's own reading of
11:42
SPEAKER_00: the anti-harassment policy was too broad and could sweep in way more
11:46
SPEAKER_00: than just genuine harassment.
11:48
SPEAKER_00: Like, for instance, a trollish land acknowledgement.
11:50
SPEAKER_00: And there was some dissent.
11:51
SPEAKER_00: So this was a three-judge panel.
11:53
SPEAKER_00: One judge said he thought that the university's interest
11:55
SPEAKER_00: in protecting students should have outweighed Stuart's right to free speech.
11:59
SPEAKER_00: So not a complete slam dunk for Stuart.
12:01
SPEAKER_00: But in the end, he did prevail.
12:03
SPEAKER_00: And rather than appeal to a higher court, UW decided to settle.
12:06
SPEAKER_00: And the settlement was just announced.
12:08
SPEAKER_00: And Stuart Regis won $600,000.
12:10
SPEAKER_00: $600,000.
12:10
SPEAKER_01: Is that a fair amount, do you think?
12:14
SPEAKER_00: That seems like a lot to me.
12:15
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
12:16
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that seems like a lot.
12:18
SPEAKER_01: I don't really know how money works.
12:19
SPEAKER_01: It does seem like a lot.
12:20
SPEAKER_00: It seems like a lot.
12:21
SPEAKER_00: But he also, like, he seems like a guy who works because he likes to work.
12:27
SPEAKER_00: Like, he surely could retire and could have retired years ago.
12:32
SPEAKER_00: But I think he likes to work and I think he also likes to stir shit up.
12:36
SPEAKER_00: So, I don't know what he'll do next.
12:39
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure it will be interesting.
12:40
SPEAKER_00: He, um...
12:42
SPEAKER_00: Join the NBA, maybe.
12:43
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's NBA or WNBA?
12:45
SPEAKER_00: WNBA, sorry.
12:46
SPEAKER_01: I think, yeah, that was the joke you're trying to make.
12:48
SPEAKER_01: Good for Stuart.
12:51
SPEAKER_01: Okay, the one other thing you wanted to ask me about or that came up
12:54
SPEAKER_01: when we were talking offline was Jason Arde and Dan Ariely.
12:59
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so we had actually,
13:00
SPEAKER_00: you and I talked about this, I think on our first of 10 or 12 Jason Arday episodes.
13:09
SPEAKER_01: Arday, Keffles
13:11
SPEAKER_01: and Jessica Taylor are the ones we've done a lot of.
13:14
SPEAKER_01: What do they have in common?
13:15
SPEAKER_00: Liars.
13:16
SPEAKER_01: Liars.
13:17
SPEAKER_01: Okay, sorry, continue.
13:18
SPEAKER_00: So we talked about it briefly,
13:19
SPEAKER_00: about Dan Ariely briefly then,
13:21
SPEAKER_00: but later I saw this tweet by Temnit Gebru,
13:24
SPEAKER_00: who we've also talked about on the show before.
13:26
SPEAKER_00: Can you explain who she is?
13:27
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, she's in like computer science.
13:30
SPEAKER_01: She worked for Google.
13:31
SPEAKER_01: She worked for Google.
13:32
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, like ethics and safety, I believe.
13:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there was an episode I did with John Stokes where we talked about her.
13:38
SPEAKER_01: She...
13:39
SPEAKER_01: Pretty radical politically.
13:41
SPEAKER_01: She got into a big fight with Yannick Lacoon.
13:43
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, just like a social justice-y type computer.
13:46
SPEAKER_01: Like someone very concerned with things like algorithmic bias in that universe.
13:52
SPEAKER_00: Do you remember what that fight was about, her fight with Lacoon?
13:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it had, well, Lacoon got roped in.
13:58
SPEAKER_01: Gabriel wanted to like,
14:00
SPEAKER_01: I thought she wanted to co-author a paper as a Google researcher,
14:04
SPEAKER_01: but they had some sort of policy and it became a blow up.
14:06
SPEAKER_01: I will say like,
14:08
SPEAKER_01: I don't know,
14:08
SPEAKER_01: I've seen some recent tweets from her,
14:11
SPEAKER_01: I guess,
14:11
SPEAKER_01: including this one,
14:12
SPEAKER_01: probably that seemed like a bit conspiratorial or like, she seems a bit radical.
14:16
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
14:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, definitely social justice where anyway,
14:19
SPEAKER_00: so the tweet that I saw was,
14:22
SPEAKER_00: she posted a link to an article from the Duke Chronicle.
14:25
SPEAKER_00: And the headline of that article is insane data.
14:27
SPEAKER_00: That's a quote.
14:28
SPEAKER_00: Duke professor Dan Ariely accused of additional research fraud.
14:31
SPEAKER_00: And she tweeted,
14:33
SPEAKER_00: any guesses as to why this isn't primetime international news with
14:36
SPEAKER_00: over 200 plus articles per minutes and abuse on social media?
14:40
SPEAKER_01: Did she say per minute?
14:41
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, per minutes.
14:43
SPEAKER_01: 200 articles per minutes?
14:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, minutes.
14:45
SPEAKER_00: And abuse on social media and think pieces and such.
14:48
SPEAKER_00: What could possibly be the reason?
14:49
SPEAKER_00: I can't imagine.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: This is what real academic fraud looks like.
14:53
SPEAKER_00: She's obviously talking about race,
14:54
SPEAKER_00: about the fact that Jason Arde is black and Dan Ariely is white.
14:58
SPEAKER_00: But some of the responses to this are like, it's because he's a Jew.
15:02
SPEAKER_01: Because Ariely's a Jew?
15:05
SPEAKER_01: He did live in Israel growing up a little while.
15:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you asked me about this.
15:08
SPEAKER_01: I think I saw other people make similar points.
15:12
SPEAKER_01: So Dan Ariely is a super famous psych researcher at Duke, best known for studying dishonesty.
15:18
SPEAKER_01: There's been mounting evidence for years that his research
15:21
SPEAKER_01: on dishonesty is underpinned by dishonesty.
15:25
SPEAKER_01: So the guys at Data Collada,
15:26
SPEAKER_01: who are these So heroic investigators of bad science,
15:30
SPEAKER_01: Uri Simonson, Joe Simmons, and Leif Nelson, they've been on RELA for a while.
15:35
SPEAKER_01: They had also exposed Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino, his collaborator, right?
15:41
SPEAKER_01: They collaborated?
15:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
15:42
SPEAKER_01: Francesca Gino sued the Data Colada guys for $25 million.
15:46
SPEAKER_00: And she also sued Harvard.
15:48
SPEAKER_01: Was investigated by Harvard,
15:49
SPEAKER_01: and she became one of the rare examples of a tenured professor to get unprofessored.
15:54
SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
15:55
SPEAKER_01: Dan Ariely, meanwhile, has stayed at Duke.
15:59
SPEAKER_01: There were sort of two main waves of evidence that he had fabricated stuff.
16:05
SPEAKER_01: One, Data Collada guys in 2021, they looked at a paper of his from, I think, 2002.
16:10
SPEAKER_01: And then some of Dan Ariely's honesty data came from an insurance company called the Hartford.
16:16
SPEAKER_01: And the Hartford eventually,
16:17
SPEAKER_01: after being asked by a bunch of people to I think I reached out to them
16:21
SPEAKER_01: and didn't hear back.
16:22
SPEAKER_01: They eventually were like, yeah, we looked at the data we gave him.
16:26
SPEAKER_01: His data does not match what we gave him.
16:29
SPEAKER_01: And our results,
16:30
SPEAKER_01: our data would not have supported the results he published,
16:32
SPEAKER_01: which is as close to 60%.
16:34
SPEAKER_01: I mean, do you think that's a fair question?
16:36
SPEAKER_01: I do think it's a fair question.
17:04
SPEAKER_01: Yes and no.
17:05
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think so that the...
17:06
SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, they have an answer to that question and 10 minutes answer is race.
17:12
SPEAKER_00: Well, because like
17:13
SPEAKER_01: not to be a dick,
17:14
SPEAKER_01: but there's some people who tell me if I'm where the lie is that their answer
17:18
SPEAKER_01: to everything is
17:19
SPEAKER_00: race.
17:20
SPEAKER_00: Well, gender too.
17:21
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
17:21
SPEAKER_01: Francesca Gino lost her job.
17:23
SPEAKER_01: The Ariely and Gino cases got a huge amount of highbrow mainstream coverage like
17:28
SPEAKER_01: the NPRs, the New York Times, these are the world.
17:31
SPEAKER_01: The thing is they...
17:34
SPEAKER_01: I think stories spread and especially spread to more tabloidy parts of the internet
17:39
SPEAKER_01: if they have like memes within them that are easily communicated.
17:43
SPEAKER_01: So Jason Arday said someone sent him a severed pig's head.
17:49
SPEAKER_01: That's a memorable sentence.
17:50
SPEAKER_01: Oh, and he did it.
17:52
SPEAKER_01: They did it.
17:53
SPEAKER_01: Jason Arday lied about someone sending him a severed pig's head.
17:56
SPEAKER_01: Is very memeable.
17:58
SPEAKER_01: That's like easy to process, easy to remember, easy to tell your friend.
18:02
SPEAKER_01: What's the equivalent of that?
18:04
SPEAKER_01: With Ariely, the basic thing, and Gino, dishonesty reachers were dishonest.
18:08
SPEAKER_01: Okay, what more can you give me?
18:10
SPEAKER_01: If I'm like a tabloid writer, what can you give me?
18:11
SPEAKER_00: It's a good headline.
18:13
SPEAKER_01: It's a good headline, but the details really are tricky.
18:15
SPEAKER_01: And what makes it even more difficult is Duke has basically remained mum about Ariely.
18:21
SPEAKER_01: And this gets complicated because there's times where there's confidentiality issues.
18:26
SPEAKER_01: You actually don't want it to be the case that universities have to chime
18:30
SPEAKER_01: in publicly if they're investigating professor.
18:33
SPEAKER_01: Also, in some cases with federally funded research, there could be crimes if you falsify data.
18:40
SPEAKER_01: But My understanding is like Ariely's papers,
18:43
SPEAKER_01: some of the ones,
18:44
SPEAKER_01: the 2002 one in particular,
18:45
SPEAKER_01: that's like so long ago, there might not be anything you can do on the legal side.
18:49
SPEAKER_01: All of which is to say,
18:50
SPEAKER_01: like universities might not be able to say anything about someone like Ariely.
18:56
SPEAKER_01: Ariely has claimed that Duke basically looked into this
19:00
SPEAKER_01: and said there was no evidence about right fabrication,
19:03
SPEAKER_01: but Duke has never said anything.
19:04
SPEAKER_01: So we're trusting the word of the guy accused of dishonesty to have honestly related this.
19:09
SPEAKER_01: But my overall point is like, it's just a weird, more complex situation.
19:15
SPEAKER_01: And on top of that, it's just a weird, more complex situation.
19:18
SPEAKER_01: It did get coverage.
19:19
SPEAKER_01: It did not get the sort of swarming tabloid coverage the artist scandal got.
19:23
SPEAKER_01: But the other thing is,
19:24
SPEAKER_01: Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely were like,
19:27
SPEAKER_01: They were legitimate academics in that they rose through the ranks and
19:29
SPEAKER_01: then they published apparently false and manipulated data,
19:32
SPEAKER_01: but they were established professors.
19:33
SPEAKER_01: With RDA, there's no there there to any of it.
19:37
SPEAKER_01: A lot of it was like directly plagiarized in a way anyone can understand
19:41
SPEAKER_01: without looking at a data file.
19:42
SPEAKER_01: You can literally just see left column, right column.
19:45
SPEAKER_01: Nathan Kofnes' blog post.
19:47
SPEAKER_01: And I just think it's easier to process.
19:50
SPEAKER_01: And on top of that, it fits a culture war groove, right?
19:54
SPEAKER_01: Because when he was hired,
19:56
SPEAKER_01: University of Cambridge was pretty explicit that they wanted people to be like,
20:01
SPEAKER_01: look, we hired a black professor.
20:02
SPEAKER_01: Look at us.
20:03
SPEAKER_01: It's the youngest black professor.
20:05
SPEAKER_01: So it absolutely fit a DEI culture war groove,
20:08
SPEAKER_01: which is going to make people a little bit more...
20:10
SPEAKER_01: What's the word I'm looking for?
20:12
SPEAKER_00: Well, not just interested,
20:13
SPEAKER_00: but there's like an
20:14
SPEAKER_01: extra circus like it was just sort of a perfect storm of
20:17
SPEAKER_01: a news story that's going to freak people out because of the pig's head,
20:21
SPEAKER_01: the crazy lies, 600 miles and 600 days on top of that.
20:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it fits into a DEI groove.
20:28
SPEAKER_01: I don't think any of that adds up to there being racism here.
20:32
SPEAKER_01: And I just I keep getting confused by this idea that like,
20:36
SPEAKER_01: White people are automatically left off the hook when it comes to scrutiny.
20:40
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think we mentioned the Central Park Karen,
20:43
SPEAKER_01: the Covington Catholic kids who like – If you actually watch the videos and stuff,
20:48
SPEAKER_01: they didn't do anything and they were minors and they got blanket coverage.
20:52
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
20:52
SPEAKER_00: Every race faker, Rachel Dolezal, just as much coverage as Jason Arde.
20:57
SPEAKER_00: Plus the fact that Jason Arde killed himself.
21:00
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
21:01
SPEAKER_00: That actually made the story continue for longer.
21:03
SPEAKER_00: And then started a whole new way because then he had all of these defenders.
21:08
SPEAKER_00: To me,
21:08
SPEAKER_00: there's something a little bit ironic about complaining about how much attention
21:12
SPEAKER_00: the Jason Arde story got while giving the Jason Arde story attention.
21:16
SPEAKER_01: I guess so.
21:17
SPEAKER_01: I mean, from their point of view,
21:18
SPEAKER_01: if it got undue attention,
21:20
SPEAKER_01: that caused him to kill himself,
21:21
SPEAKER_01: which is definitely not my theory, but that's their theory.
21:23
SPEAKER_01: It makes sense.
21:24
SPEAKER_01: You would then want to punish the people, quote unquote, responsible.
21:27
SPEAKER_01: I just find the whole thing ridiculous because, like, look,
21:32
SPEAKER_01: the Steelman version of
21:33
SPEAKER_00: Timothy Gabriel's argument is like, yeah,
21:35
SPEAKER_01: because it was DEI and people are very riled up about DEI, it got more attention.
21:40
SPEAKER_01: To me, that's a different argument from, like, It got attention because he's black, per se.
21:45
SPEAKER_01: I think it's a lot more complicated than that.
21:46
SPEAKER_01: And I don't think Ariely and Gino are all-encompassing fraudsters in that
21:54
SPEAKER_01: a large swath of their top achievements and accomplishments appear
21:58
SPEAKER_01: to have been fabricated the way Arde was.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: I just think the Arde story is inherently juicier.
22:03
SPEAKER_01: And I think if a white person had done exactly what Arde had done, I mean,
22:08
SPEAKER_01: it wouldn't be exactly apples to apples,
22:09
SPEAKER_01: but it would have gotten about the same amount of attention,
22:11
SPEAKER_01: much the same way that Rachel Dolezal got a lot of gleeful tabloid coverage.
22:16
SPEAKER_00: I think you're right.
22:16
SPEAKER_00: I mean, particularly if the hypothetical white scholar was in that field,
22:20
SPEAKER_00: was in this race, DEI,
22:23
SPEAKER_00: social justice field,
22:23
SPEAKER_00: because that in itself is so polarizing that people give more attention to it.
22:29
SPEAKER_01: I mean, if a scholar...
22:33
SPEAKER_01: Who worked for the Manhattan Institute or Heritage turned out to be as much of
22:38
SPEAKER_01: a fraudster as Arde.
22:40
SPEAKER_01: That would get incredible coverage.
22:42
SPEAKER_01: Like if he'd been elevated because of his work on immigration restrictionism or whatever.
22:46
SPEAKER_01: Like, I don't know.
22:47
SPEAKER_01: I just I think like when people say people of one race get more negative scrutiny
22:52
SPEAKER_01: than people of another race.
22:54
SPEAKER_01: I think that ignores the extent to which media is fragmented now.
22:57
SPEAKER_01: Like, yeah, he would get more.
22:59
SPEAKER_01: Our day would get more coverage from like the Telegraph in the UK
23:02
SPEAKER_01: than Francesca Gino or Dan Ariely would.
23:06
SPEAKER_01: But flip it around to another outlet.
23:08
SPEAKER_01: It might work differently.
23:09
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
23:10
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you mentioned this, Jesse,
23:11
SPEAKER_00: but Dan Ariely,
23:13
SPEAKER_00: he had this, he ran what was called the Center for Advanced Hindsight.
23:16
SPEAKER_00: And that actually knew a guy who was a, this is how much resources Ariely got.
23:24
SPEAKER_00: I knew a guy who was his personal comic book artist at Duke.
23:30
SPEAKER_00: He was employed.
23:31
SPEAKER_00: His personal comic book artist?
23:33
SPEAKER_00: He was employed by Duke to illustrate Ariely's work.
23:37
SPEAKER_01: Hell yeah.
23:37
SPEAKER_00: To make like graphic novels based on his work.
23:39
SPEAKER_01: Totally normal stuff in academia.
23:41
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
23:42
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, so the Center for Advanced Hindsight, Duke shut that down.
23:45
SPEAKER_00: He's still employed, but it's not as though there have been no consequences for him.
23:48
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
23:49
SPEAKER_01: I should say, yes, it hasn't been consequence-free.
23:51
SPEAKER_01: There have been studies retracted,
23:53
SPEAKER_01: but it is this weird purgatory where he's still there and it's widely acknowledged
23:57
SPEAKER_01: that he's a fraudster.
23:59
SPEAKER_00: He was also connected to Jeffrey Epstein.
24:02
SPEAKER_00: Yes, that also did not.
24:05
SPEAKER_00: Interesting timing.
24:06
SPEAKER_00: They actually announced that they were closing the Center for Advanced Hindsight
24:10
SPEAKER_00: after not after the which had been located on the island,
24:13
SPEAKER_00: actually,
24:14
SPEAKER_00: which was not after the allegations of fraud came out,
24:17
SPEAKER_00: but after he was named in the Epstein files.
24:21
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
24:22
SPEAKER_00: Duke has said the two are unrelated.
24:23
SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
24:24
SPEAKER_01: it's like it's not the lack of transparency isn't great that he's just like sort
24:28
SPEAKER_01: of there.
24:31
SPEAKER_01: It's tricky because there's a type of fraud.
24:34
SPEAKER_01: And I will say,
24:34
SPEAKER_01: like, my writing has been way more about sloppiness in research than fraud per se.
24:40
SPEAKER_01: But there's a type of fraud where you can uncover a lot of evidence for it,
24:43
SPEAKER_01: which is what the Gata Colada guys do did and like reach a point where.
24:48
SPEAKER_01: You know,
24:49
SPEAKER_01: 99.9% sure that he just fucked around with the data or fabricated data,
24:55
SPEAKER_01: but it gets a little bit tricky unless he says out loud,
24:58
SPEAKER_01: I fabricated the data, which he has no incentive to do.
25:01
SPEAKER_00: You know what?
25:02
SPEAKER_00: I bet there was an invisible man on campus, two of them actually.
25:06
SPEAKER_01: Invisible one-armed man.
25:07
SPEAKER_00: Yes, who fabricated the data.
25:09
SPEAKER_01: Who doesn't show up on closed circuit TV?
25:12
SPEAKER_01: Is it closed circuit?
25:14
SPEAKER_01: Katie, anything else on the reality stuff?
25:15
SPEAKER_01: I mean, what's interesting about it is it's like...
25:18
SPEAKER_01: The simpler story of like he's let off the hook because he's a white guy,
25:22
SPEAKER_01: I just think obscures a much more complicated story about how it's sometimes hard
25:27
SPEAKER_01: to hold fraudsters accountable and about how big universities,
25:31
SPEAKER_01: especially when they hitch their wagon.
25:33
SPEAKER_01: Do you hitch a wagon?
25:34
SPEAKER_01: Do you hitch your star?
25:35
SPEAKER_00: Hitch a wagon to a star.
25:36
SPEAKER_01: When they get hitched to a superstar academic,
25:39
SPEAKER_01: I don't know,
25:39
SPEAKER_01: their incentives get a little weird if that academic turns out to be a fraud.
25:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, nothing else for me.
25:44
SPEAKER_01: Okay, should we move on to a story that I read that was interesting?
25:50
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
25:50
SPEAKER_01: How's that?
25:51
SPEAKER_01: How's that for a segue?
25:52
SPEAKER_00: Great, great segue.
25:54
SPEAKER_00: People are really going to be enthused about this one.
25:56
SPEAKER_01: All right, Katie.
25:57
SPEAKER_01: So there's a Slate article headlined, could chat GPT be the new gender affirming care?
26:05
SPEAKER_01: Sub headline,
26:06
SPEAKER_01: a growing number of transgender people are crediting AI with helping them discover
26:10
SPEAKER_01: and explore their identities.
26:12
SPEAKER_01: But should tech mired in controversy be trusted with something so profound?
26:17
SPEAKER_01: It's by a woman named Bella Syegg.
26:19
SPEAKER_01: So Katie, do you think chat GPT could be the new gender affirming care right off the bat?
26:22
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to need a little bit more information.
26:25
SPEAKER_00: Is this talk therapy care?
26:28
SPEAKER_00: Is ChattyBT administering medications?
26:32
SPEAKER_01: There's a little... What's the word?
26:37
SPEAKER_01: Fucking Vyvanse, man.
26:38
SPEAKER_01: I guess I just have to take it forever.
26:39
SPEAKER_01: Does a little syringe come out of the monitor and just inject it via...
26:42
SPEAKER_00: Right.
26:43
SPEAKER_00: Will I give you instructions on how to make bathtub HRT?
26:47
SPEAKER_01: Well, let's just do a little build up.
26:51
SPEAKER_01: First, remind people about AI psychosis and how that works.
26:54
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
26:55
SPEAKER_00: So you have it.
26:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
26:57
SPEAKER_00: AI psychosis is when you can't stop tweeting about the end of the world.
27:00
SPEAKER_00: We're seeing it right now.
27:01
SPEAKER_01: No,
27:02
SPEAKER_01: you're making light of some genuinely tragic events covered by the New York Times,
27:04
SPEAKER_01: covered by Kashmir Hill.
27:06
SPEAKER_00: Covered by Blocked and Reported.
27:07
SPEAKER_00: So AI psychosis is a term that...
27:11
SPEAKER_00: This is not a term that I believe clinicians use,
27:14
SPEAKER_00: but it is a term that is used to describe people who basically spend too much time
27:18
SPEAKER_00: on the internet and start to believe crazy things.
27:21
SPEAKER_00: So they basically start to believe delusions, oftentimes delusions about themselves.
27:26
SPEAKER_00: And in the episode that we did about it, we talked about, you know, there are people who...
27:32
SPEAKER_00: This doesn't seem to strike people who have no pre-existing mental health issues.
27:38
SPEAKER_00: It's people who are predisposed to having mental health issues or people
27:42
SPEAKER_00: who are spending a lot of time inside smoking weed by themselves and spending hours
27:46
SPEAKER_00: and hours and hours a day talking to ChatGPT.
27:49
SPEAKER_00: I mean, some of the stories are really tragic.
27:51
SPEAKER_00: They've sort of disappeared, though.
27:52
SPEAKER_00: Have you noticed that there was this rash of AI psychosis stories
27:55
SPEAKER_00: and now we're all moved on to AI extinction?
28:00
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
28:01
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I suspect AI has gotten a little bit less –
28:07
SPEAKER_00: Oh, glazy.
28:09
SPEAKER_01: Glazy is the great Zoomer.
28:11
SPEAKER_01: They came up with that.
28:13
SPEAKER_01: The fancy word I was looking for was obsequious.
28:15
SPEAKER_01: Mm-hmm.
28:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they changed the models.
28:18
SPEAKER_01: I think they changed the models in part because they wanted this to not happen
28:21
SPEAKER_01: because it was bad.
28:22
SPEAKER_00: And they were getting a lot of negative press and calls for regulation.
28:27
SPEAKER_01: Well, that's what I'm saying.
28:27
SPEAKER_01: Because a couple people died.
28:29
SPEAKER_01: So people killed themselves.
28:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
28:34
SPEAKER_00: So the specific stories of people who killed themselves.
28:37
SPEAKER_00: There was a journalist whose daughter killed herself.
28:41
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
28:41
SPEAKER_00: And this one got a lot of attention.
28:42
SPEAKER_00: She wrote a piece about it for the New York Times.
28:45
SPEAKER_00: To me, this didn't fit AI psychosis.
28:47
SPEAKER_00: What happened is that after her daughter killed herself,
28:51
SPEAKER_00: the parents looked at the daughter's, who was an adult, at her chat GPT logs.
28:57
SPEAKER_00: And she had talked to chat GPT about suicide, about saying that she was suicide.
29:03
SPEAKER_00: And she hadn't disclosed this to her therapist.
29:07
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't quite fit, I think, the AI psychosis story.
29:11
SPEAKER_00: There were other stories like a man who was,
29:14
SPEAKER_00: I believe, schizophrenic or had some other personality disorder.
29:18
SPEAKER_00: And he killed his mother, his elderly mother.
29:20
SPEAKER_00: But he was having delusions.
29:23
SPEAKER_00: So I think these things can sometimes get sort of all rolled into the same ball,
29:29
SPEAKER_00: if that makes any sense.
29:30
SPEAKER_00: But when you piece them apart, they're very different stories.
29:32
SPEAKER_01: When you piece them apart.
29:33
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
29:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
29:36
SPEAKER_01: Because the sorts of person who would be susceptible to this in
29:39
SPEAKER_01: the first place is already quite troubled.
29:41
SPEAKER_01: So yeah, it's hard.
29:42
SPEAKER_01: And sometimes blaming it on the LLM could be oversimplifying.
29:47
SPEAKER_01: But some of these stories were really messed up.
29:49
SPEAKER_01: We'll include – Have you noticed in your
29:51
SPEAKER_00: own –
29:54
SPEAKER_00: I use that it is less obsequious.
29:57
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, that's what I said.
29:58
SPEAKER_01: I mean, what I still notice,
30:00
SPEAKER_01: which I really need to not do is occasionally having this flash of like,
30:05
SPEAKER_01: if I don't respond to the latest prompt, I feel bad that I don't get back.
30:08
SPEAKER_01: Do you have those like anthropomorphizing moments?
30:11
SPEAKER_00: No.
30:11
SPEAKER_01: That's because you're autistic.
30:12
SPEAKER_01: You don't know.
30:13
SPEAKER_00: I'm not autistic.
30:14
SPEAKER_00: And no, I mean, I say thank you and please.
30:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I say thank you.
30:17
SPEAKER_00: Which is stupid.
30:18
SPEAKER_01: I call it queen and daddy.
30:20
SPEAKER_00: But I don't know.
30:21
SPEAKER_00: It's not like a text conversation where I feel like I have to wrap it up.
30:24
SPEAKER_00: No.
30:25
SPEAKER_01: I think what you can do is you can instruct it to be like a little brusker and more robotic.
30:29
SPEAKER_01: I think that would be good because like I don't want any parasocial thing.
30:32
SPEAKER_01: It's just it's matrix multiplication.
30:36
SPEAKER_01: Right.
30:36
SPEAKER_01: So that was AI psychosis.
30:38
SPEAKER_01: And then the other thing that this slate story we will eventually get to ties
30:41
SPEAKER_01: into remind people about the tick fluencers.
30:43
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, this is something a few people have written about.
30:45
SPEAKER_00: I think Helen about Helen Lewis in The Atlantic about...
30:51
SPEAKER_00: They fit this very specific demographic,
30:53
SPEAKER_00: the same demographic that experiences things like rapid onset gender dysphoria,
31:01
SPEAKER_00: girls who basically meme themselves into having tics, like not the bug, the tic.
31:07
SPEAKER_00: Or the same thing with multiple personality disorder, autism, these other diagnoses.
31:13
SPEAKER_01: The tick one is the most notable because they literally start twitching
31:20
SPEAKER_01: or vocalizing
31:21
SPEAKER_00: and scientists
31:23
SPEAKER_01: think this is a real thing.
31:24
SPEAKER_01: These are like Tourette style tics that the girls get from so-called Tourette's influencers.
31:29
SPEAKER_00: Why are girls so much more susceptible to that sort of thing than boys?
31:33
SPEAKER_00: Because women be crazy, man.
31:36
SPEAKER_00: Do you have a real answer?
31:38
SPEAKER_01: I mean, the theory is they're like sort of more – it's oversimplified,
31:42
SPEAKER_01: but they're more social, more empathetic, just like they relate to one another.
31:47
SPEAKER_00: More interested in people as opposed to men with their things.
31:50
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they relate to one another maybe a little more deeply.
31:53
SPEAKER_01: These are stereotypes, but there's some truth there.
31:56
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so the – Slate's article about chatbots that are gender affirming,
32:04
SPEAKER_01: it's also about self-diagnosis, and it's about potentially contagious symptoms.
32:10
SPEAKER_01: We've covered all this in various contexts,
32:11
SPEAKER_01: and this article really does mash together this different stuff.
32:16
SPEAKER_01: It's like, what if AI psychosis but affirming?
32:19
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
32:19
SPEAKER_01: Katie, just read the top of this.
32:39
SPEAKER_00: So did he get an actual autism diagnosis or was this purely self-diagnosis?
32:43
SPEAKER_00: No, there's no indication he did.
32:45
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we don't know, but it's not mentioned.
32:47
SPEAKER_00: So this is like roughly equivalent to a teenage girl,
33:01
SPEAKER_01: As so many have done,
33:02
SPEAKER_01: diagnosing herself with autism on the basis of TikTok videos,
33:05
SPEAKER_01: except in this case, it's Bob and it's chat GPT.
33:09
SPEAKER_01: And it's unclear to me why that is any better.
33:11
SPEAKER_01: I'm not missing something here, right?
33:13
SPEAKER_00: So wait, because I haven't read the article.
33:15
SPEAKER_00: So the journalist assumes that this is a correct diagnosis.
33:21
SPEAKER_01: I mean, she doesn't say otherwise.
33:23
SPEAKER_01: And as we'll see,
33:23
SPEAKER_01: she seems to have some sympathy for the idea that you can sit down with ChatGPT
33:29
SPEAKER_01: and have like a rap session and learn really deep things about yourself
33:33
SPEAKER_01: through interacting with ChatGPT.
33:35
SPEAKER_00: I'm just going to ask Claude right now if he thinks I'm autistic, although I'm calling him he.
33:39
SPEAKER_00: Do you think I'm autistic?
33:45
SPEAKER_00: Reckoning, reckoning, reckoning.
33:47
SPEAKER_00: This
33:48
SPEAKER_01: is your reckoning.
33:48
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
33:48
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
33:50
SPEAKER_00: No, Claude says, I can't diagnose anyone.
33:52
SPEAKER_00: And honestly, nothing in our conversation gives me a real basis to guess one way or another.
33:56
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
33:57
SPEAKER_01: I wonder if it would say otherwise, if there was anything in the conversation that did give it.
34:00
SPEAKER_01: I would probably say, I hope it would say, go get tested.
34:04
SPEAKER_01: It's just crazy to me that in the year of our Lord, 2026,
34:08
SPEAKER_01: at a time when we know that basically anything can be transmitted through
34:10
SPEAKER_01: the internet,
34:11
SPEAKER_01: including tics,
34:12
SPEAKER_01: that like a journalist
34:13
SPEAKER_00: would be
34:13
SPEAKER_01: like,
34:14
SPEAKER_01: yeah, so he'd chat with a chatbot and then he self-diagnosed as autistic.
34:17
SPEAKER_00: The thing is, you're not like...
34:19
SPEAKER_00: Good progressive journalist,
34:21
SPEAKER_00: which I don't know if this person is,
34:22
SPEAKER_00: I'm not familiar with her,
34:23
SPEAKER_00: but I'll just assume that based on the on the venue,
34:26
SPEAKER_00: you're not supposed to question someone's diagnosis,
34:29
SPEAKER_00: even if it's their self diagnosis.
34:30
SPEAKER_01: That's the problem.
34:32
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
34:33
SPEAKER_01: And I mean,
34:34
SPEAKER_01: I think this is too obvious for me to even ask you,
34:36
SPEAKER_01: but just just to be clear on why it could be a bad idea.
34:41
SPEAKER_01: To convince yourself you have autism when you don't.
34:43
SPEAKER_00: Right, or any other sort of condition.
34:46
SPEAKER_00: I mean, like I'm a, I'm self-diagnosed hypochondriac.
34:49
SPEAKER_00: I can convince myself that I have any, like I've got seven different cancers right now.
34:55
SPEAKER_00: I've never diagnosed myself with autism, but pretty much everything else I have.
34:58
SPEAKER_00: And this can cause anxiety in your life.
35:03
SPEAKER_00: It causes health anxiety.
35:04
SPEAKER_00: I'm a frequent user of the medical system that I don't need, that I don't need to be.
35:09
SPEAKER_00: AI has, I don't know if AI has helped that or made it worse.
35:12
SPEAKER_00: In a case like autism,
35:14
SPEAKER_00: well, what if, what if Bob, that impacts his life in various different ways?
35:18
SPEAKER_00: What if Bob starts to shape his life around this diagnosis that might or might not be correct?
35:23
SPEAKER_00: What if he stops making eye contact because he says, I'm autistic, I don't make eye contact?
35:28
SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
35:29
SPEAKER_01: it's just like it's not a good idea because if you have other problems that led you
35:32
SPEAKER_01: to diagnose yourself with autism and you're not addressing those problems,
35:36
SPEAKER_01: it could lead you down a dead end.
35:38
SPEAKER_01: Now, you probably see where this is going, but Katie, please keep reading.
35:42
SPEAKER_00: In conversation with AI,
35:44
SPEAKER_00: Bob considered the way society accepted only girls painting their nails
35:47
SPEAKER_00: and wearing dresses.
35:49
SPEAKER_01: ChatGPT is really advanced that it was able to point those things out.
35:55
SPEAKER_00: While he had always believed he was a cisgender man,
35:57
SPEAKER_00: in retrospect, something was constantly, quote, incomplete.
36:00
SPEAKER_01: I'm just going to keep interrupting you.
36:02
SPEAKER_01: Clearly, if you feel like something's incomplete, that's evidence of... continue.
36:08
SPEAKER_00: He had discussions with the AI describing his emotions, desire and pain.
36:12
SPEAKER_00: Quote, I spent the next several months gradually unmasking...
36:15
SPEAKER_00: And digging into my psyche with ChatGPT as a sounding board, essentially, he said.
36:19
SPEAKER_00: And then I started to question my gender identity.
36:22
SPEAKER_00: Throughout the process, he continued, Bob.
36:48
SPEAKER_00: It was like a bomb went off in my very soul.
36:50
SPEAKER_00: My life would never be the same from that point on, he said.
36:52
SPEAKER_00: Soon he took on the name Grace.
36:54
SPEAKER_01: That's it.
36:54
SPEAKER_01: That's all you get for the preview.
36:56
SPEAKER_01: If you want to hear the whole thing,
36:58
SPEAKER_01: the sordid conclusion of this tale,
37:01
SPEAKER_01: wherever we are in it,
37:01
SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure exactly where Katie's going to drop this paywall,
37:04
SPEAKER_01: but I'm sure it's going to be at a good place.
37:07
SPEAKER_01: BlockedReported.org, become a paying subscriber.
37:09
SPEAKER_01: Bye.