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Transcript

Moderating is Such Sweet Sorrow · Ctrl-Alt-Speech

• 0:00
  Mike Masnick: So Dave, last week Meta announced a new product called Vibes.
• 0:06
  Mike Masnick: And as far as I can tell,'cause I don't, I don't look, I don't fully understand this thing, but it's some sort of like AI only, like slop social network just for passing around AI generated things.
• 0:24
  Dave Willner: TikTok, but with no people.
• 0:25
  Mike Masnick: yeah.
• 0:26
  Mike Masnick: But using that as a prompt and, and we looked and it doesn't quite have a prompt of itself.
• 0:32
  Mike Masnick: I just wanted to ask you, how are your vibes?
• 0:35
  Dave Willner: my, you know, my, my vibes are actually pretty good.
• 0:37
  Dave Willner: It's, it's October 1st, so it's, fall, which means the trees are changing color and, uh.
• 0:44
  Dave Willner: I like that.
• 0:45
  Dave Willner: I like when it's kind of 60 degrees outside.
• 0:47
  Dave Willner: It's just nice.
• 0:49
  Dave Willner: the madness of everything is easier to bear, so my vibes are pretty good.
• 0:52
  Dave Willner: How are your vibes?
• 0:53
  Mike Masnick: Nice.
• 0:54
  Mike Masnick: That's good.
• 0:55
  Mike Masnick: My, my vibes are, I, I mean, I guess it is nice at it's fall, but you know, the world is kind of, kind of not great right now.
• 1:04
  Dave Willner: Yeah, I suppose I gave you a tactical answer, presuming a not great world locally, you know, it's nice that it's six, it's cooler and the trees are orange.
• 1:16
  Mike Masnick: All right, well, we'll, we'll go with that.
• 1:26
  Mike Masnick: Hello and welcome to Control Alt Speech, your weekly roundup of the major stories about online speech, content moderation, and internet regulation.
• 1:34
  Mike Masnick: It is October the first, 2025, and this week we are talking about internet fragmentation, uh, around the globe, some rules around AI chatbots, and maybe a little something about an impossibility theorem that I came up with once before.
• 1:53
  Mike Masnick: I am Mike Masnick.
• 1:54
  Mike Masnick: I'm the editor of Tech Turt.
• 1:56
  Mike Masnick: As you will have noticed, if you're listening to this and you are not hearing.
• 2:01
  Mike Masnick: The British accent of Ben.
• 2:03
  Mike Masnick: Ben is off this week.
• 2:04
  Mike Masnick: Both of us were off last week.
• 2:06
  Mike Masnick: so we are back, or I am back.
• 2:09
  Mike Masnick: Ben is still off.
• 2:09
  Mike Masnick: He will be back next week.
• 2:11
  Mike Masnick: for me, I was off last week because I was at the Stanford Trust and Safety Research Conference, which was excellent.
• 2:19
  Mike Masnick: And because we needed a guest host for this week, I decided to drag back with me the keynote speaker on day one of the Stanford Trust and Safety Research Conference, which was Dave Wilner.
• 2:32
  Mike Masnick: hi Dave.
• 2:33
  Dave Willner: Hi Mike and hello folks.
• 2:36
  Mike Masnick: Dave, for people who don't know, well, people should know you.
• 2:39
  Mike Masnick: First of all, I think most
• 2:41
  Dave Willner: I, I think you listen to this podcast, there's a higher than normal chance
• 2:46
  Mike Masnick: But just, just in case people haven't, Dave has worked everywhere and is one of the, originators I will give you credit for of sort of trust and safety.
• 2:55
  Mike Masnick: You were sort of the first content policy person at Facebook, is that
• 2:59
  Dave Willner: Yeah.
• 3:00
  Dave Willner: Yeah.
• 3:00
  Dave Willner: I can do the, the
• 3:01
  Mike Masnick: Okay.
• 3:02
  Dave Willner: the TLDR is, it's all my fault.
• 3:04
  Dave Willner: But,
• 3:04
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 3:05
  Dave Willner: the slightly longer version, is that I was Facebook's 12th content moderator.
• 3:12
  Dave Willner: and before that was resetting people's passwords by hand.
• 3:15
  Dave Willner: and we didn't have any rules.
• 3:17
  Dave Willner: We needed some rules, so I ended up writing a lot of those initial rules, which evolved into the first content policy standards and content policy team.
• 3:25
  Dave Willner: that grew quite a lot over the years before I left.
• 3:28
  Dave Willner: then worked at Airbnb for six years.
• 3:31
  Dave Willner: We building out their community policy team and also working on their quality and training programs.
• 3:36
  Dave Willner: And then was at OpenAI, for the launch of Dolly Chat, GPT and GPT-4 and left.
• 3:43
  Dave Willner: It ended up at Stanford and now I'm doing my own thing.
• 3:46
  Mike Masnick: yes.
• 3:46
  Mike Masnick: Your own very interesting thing we should note, which has a trust and safety hook into it.
• 3:52
  Mike Masnick: and you gave the keynote, your company, by way we should mention it, is
• 3:56
  Dave Willner: Well, we should, that's
• 3:57
  Mike Masnick: entropy.
• 3:58
  Mike Masnick: and is using AI in the trust and safety space.
• 4:02
  Dave Willner: Yeah, we fine tuned a small, very small, large language model, which is a funny thing to say, but you know, small is relative here.
• 4:11
  Dave Willner: could run it on your MacBook error.
• 4:13
  Dave Willner: that is a special purpose model designed to do a very good job of following.
• 4:19
  Dave Willner: Content policies and giving you back a faithful judgment as to whether or not an example you provide violates or does not violate the sort of criteria, or rather better way to say it meets or does not meet the criteria you have set out.
• 4:36
  Dave Willner: It's just giving you a yes no.
• 4:37
  Mike Masnick: A very binary answer.
• 4:39
  Dave Willner: correct.
• 4:40
  Dave Willner: Yeah.
• 4:40
  Dave Willner: Uh, but it's really quick.
• 4:41
  Dave Willner: So if you need more gradations, just run it more times.
• 4:44
  Dave Willner: and then we've, also built a system that uses that capability to help you more clearly explain the standards you're trying to write for it to follow, using guidance from the decisions you've made as applied to a bunch of examples you provide.
• 5:01
  Dave Willner: So it can help you figure out what you meant to say based on what you did.
• 5:06
  Mike Masnick: right.
• 5:07
  Mike Masnick: It can tell you your policy does not agree with your decision making,
• 5:10
  Dave Willner: Correct.
• 5:11
  Mike Masnick: which is kind of neat actually.
• 5:13
  Dave Willner: it's quite neat.
• 5:14
  Dave Willner: Uh, it sounds a little, technocratic, but it, it lets you get to a standard that works well much more quickly, than has historically been the case.
• 5:23
  Dave Willner: And then you can go run it a lot with the magic robot.
• 5:28
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 5:29
  Mike Masnick: Wonderful.
• 5:29
  Mike Masnick: Magic robot.
• 5:30
  Mike Masnick: And so you gave this keynote speech, and I guess in theory, based on the number of people who came up to me after you gave your keynote speech to ask me if I was okay with your keynote speech, we should address this.
• 5:44
  Dave Willner: Yes, we should.
• 5:45
  Dave Willner: Yeah.
• 5:46
  Dave Willner: I did warn Mike.
• 5:47
  Dave Willner: Um, I worry maybe my delivery was a little off.
• 5:50
  Dave Willner: So, I took as a framing for that speech, a piece that you wrote, I think back in 2019 called Masics Impossibility
• 5:58
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 6:00
  Dave Willner: Core contention of which is that content moderation at scale is impossible to do well.
• 6:06
  Dave Willner: And you had sort of three supporting reasons for that.
• 6:09
  Dave Willner: And I used those three, your sort of three why's this was important to do well, which basically boiled down to, one, People don't like experiencing moderation'cause they don't like being told that they shouldn't have posted what they posted.
• 6:21
  Dave Willner: 'cause they think they should have posted what they posted'cause they posted it.
• 6:24
  Dave Willner: So that makes folks mad.
• 6:27
  Dave Willner: predictably.
• 6:29
  Dave Willner: Uh, two, we're kind of bad at figuring out what we're gonna take down, so we mess up all the time.
• 6:34
  Dave Willner: and three, basically the scale of the exercise means that even if everybody somehow liked it and we were pretty good at doing it, we would still appear incompetent because.
• 6:45
  Dave Willner: Even if you make almost no mistakes, statistically, you still make a lot of mistakes in reality if you do the thing millions or billions of times.
• 6:52
  Dave Willner: and I sort of, my, my framing of the speech was basically, I hate to say this, but Mike is right.
• 6:57
  Dave Willner: That is true.
• 6:58
  Dave Willner: Uh, we have been doing a bad job this whole time, but I think maybe, the rise of generative AI and, and sort of large language multimodal models changes some of the constraints about, of how we design our trust and safety systems such that we might be able to get closer to the standard you set, which after all is doing it.
• 7:22
  Dave Willner: Well, not doing it perfectly, which that's definitely not gonna happen, but Well, is a social construct.
• 7:29
  Dave Willner: Maybe we can get to Well, right.
• 7:32
  Dave Willner: Or at least a lot closer to, well, if you go through and reexamine in, in detail, how exactly.
• 7:39
  Dave Willner: The tools we've had historically have constrained the systems we can build in ways that make them kind of shitty,
• 7:46
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 7:47
  Dave Willner: for lack of a better way of saying it.
• 7:50
  Mike Masnick: And, and mean, yes, well, is a sort of vague term.
• 7:54
  Mike Masnick: and some people have, suggested that when I wrote the Madison Possibility Theorem piece, which has definitely been picked up and talked about a lot, that it was suggesting like, oh, everybody should give up.
• 8:06
  Mike Masnick: And that is never the intention.
• 8:08
  Mike Masnick: I, I always think that companies should be striving to do it better and to, should be looking for ways to do it better.
• 8:14
  Mike Masnick: I just wanted to, set a kind of marker of like, what is it that we're targeting, because so many of the discussions, especially in the media and among policymakers was this, this impossible standard of how did you get this thing wrong and, you know.
• 8:30
  Mike Masnick: The answer is it could be any number of things, including like it wasn't wrong or it was one mistake we made out of a billion, leave us alone.
• 8:39
  Mike Masnick: You know?
• 8:40
  Dave Willner: Well, and, and you're, you're explicit about that in the piece.
• 8:43
  Dave Willner: It's, it's very clear if you read it, that it's, it's a defense of the endeavor for non-experts who do not understand how, that we're like over here climbing Mount Everest.
• 8:57
  Dave Willner: And so sometimes people are gonna get a little dizzy, right?
• 9:00
  Dave Willner: Like that this, this thing is fundamentally an insane thing to be trying to do.
• 9:04
  Dave Willner: is not the same thing as saying, well, you don't have to try to do it.
• 9:06
  Dave Willner: There are lots of things we do that are sort of faintly crazy seeming, but also deeply necessary, for society to function.
• 9:14
  Dave Willner: And this is one of those things.
• 9:15
  Dave Willner: But in that context, you need to sort of think very carefully about what you can expect.
• 9:22
  Dave Willner: and we don't seem, it is, I think you are right.
• 9:24
  Dave Willner: And you, you really shaped my thinking with the piece that we.
• 9:27
  Dave Willner: Our expectations around this in the technology sphere, I think are downstream of the view that computers are essentially magic
• 9:34
  Mike Masnick: Right,
• 9:35
  Dave Willner: like Arthur C.
• 9:36
  Dave Willner: Clark was right?
• 9:36
  Dave Willner: Like functionally, the computers are all magic and so everybody is irritated when the wizards don't do magic better.
• 9:42
  Dave Willner: But it's not actually magic, it's basically just a bunch of math.
• 9:47
  Dave Willner: And so, it has limits and features and constraints and your, piece very, I think, skillfully illustrates the constraints of this system and how it is in fact not magical.
• 9:59
  Dave Willner: It is a process and like all processes is flawed and produces a lot of failure.
• 10:04
  Mike Masnick: right.
• 10:04
  Mike Masnick: and sort of the aim of your keynote was, as you put it, I believe, to make mesnick wrong again.
• 10:11
  Dave Willner: Yes.
• 10:12
  Mike Masnick: And so
• 10:13
  Dave Willner: Which was a bad framing'cause you've never been wrong.
• 10:15
  Dave Willner: Unfortunately.
• 10:16
  Mike Masnick: fine.
• 10:17
  Mike Masnick: It's fine.
• 10:17
  Mike Masnick: It, it has that flow, which I get and I appreciate and, I'm, we'll, we'll look over the, we'll, we'll ignore the, again, part, um,
• 10:25
  Dave Willner: I mean, the golden ages are largely a
• 10:27
  Mike Masnick: yes, yes.
• 10:30
  Mike Masnick: Um, but yeah, I mean, it, it, I thought it was a really good keynote.
• 10:34
  Mike Masnick: We really sort of opened up this idea of like, look, there are massive changes that are afoot and we can move the ball in a significant way towards building better trust and safety content moderation type systems.
• 10:50
  Dave Willner: at a minimum we should take a real hard crack at it because there's a lot of reason to expect that is true.
• 10:57
  Dave Willner: And I think there's increasing evidence that it's true in some of the domains, some of which tie into my, this project, I mean, this, I'm working on a thing that is a, an attempt at that.
• 11:08
  Dave Willner: and so are you, I mean, frankly, you know, blue sky and the, the larger focus on the decentralization.
• 11:14
  Dave Willner: I think AI makes more viable as a project, and that decentralization is potentially a way of addressing the sort of appearance of incompetence by having more people be involved in the decision making and spreading out the mistake making that we're gonna do
• 11:29
  Mike Masnick: yeah.
• 11:30
  Mike Masnick: Anyway, yes, it was good keynote.
• 11:32
  Mike Masnick: I enjoyed it even if I was the, the foil and, and people
• 11:36
  Dave Willner: the frame.
• 11:37
  Dave Willner: You weren't, you were not the foil.
• 11:38
  Dave Willner: You were, you were, you were the organizing, intellectual
• 11:41
  Mike Masnick: Okay.
• 11:42
  Mike Masnick: But so many people came up to me, were like, where did you know he
• 11:47
  Dave Willner: I, I did warn you, but I think I warned you like eight minutes before I started talking.
• 11:51
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 11:52
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 11:52
  Mike Masnick: You had suggested a week before like, Hey, I might mention you.
• 11:55
  Mike Masnick: And then right before the keynote was about to go on, you're like, you know how I said, I might mention you.
• 12:02
  Mike Masnick: It's actually a
• 12:02
  Dave Willner: got
• 12:03
  Mike Masnick: more than that.
• 12:03
  Dave Willner: of hand.
• 12:05
  Dave Willner: Yeah.
• 12:05
  Dave Willner: When I said I might mention you, I was just starting to think about it and then I went away for six days and wrote a speech and came back and was like, oops.
• 12:13
  Mike Masnick: Anyways.
• 12:14
  Mike Masnick: All right.
• 12:14
  Mike Masnick: let's get onto our news stories of the week.
• 12:17
  Mike Masnick: I think we wanted to start, we're gonna talk a little bit about the UK and a couple different stories there and sort of, I will get into what I think it means, but do you want to give the quick summary of what you found?
• 12:29
  Dave Willner: okay.
• 12:29
  Dave Willner: So, one of these stories, which was reported I think this morning in the Financial Times, is that the UK is renewing its attempts to get Apple to compel Apple to build a backdoor into encryption for advanced data protection.
• 12:43
  Dave Willner: There had been an attempt at this, I think back in September that became
• 12:49
  Mike Masnick: Of last
• 12:49
  Dave Willner: a, of Oh, right, of last year.
• 12:52
  Dave Willner: Yes, that's right.
• 12:53
  Dave Willner: that it became a bit of a football, um, between the US and the UK and the US responded with pressure and the British eventually backed off.
• 13:02
  Dave Willner: And this reporting is that it's sort of bubbling back up again, although this time.
• 13:07
  Dave Willner: There's a couple of interesting differences.
• 13:09
  Dave Willner: One, the request is allegedly scoped only to British users of Apple Services instead of everybody in the world.
• 13:15
  Dave Willner: And two, the article ends sort of somewhat ominously and it's actually worth reading verbatim.
• 13:22
  Dave Willner: members of the US delegation raised the issue of the request to Apple around the time of Trump's visit.
• 13:27
  Dave Willner: According to two people briefed on the matter.
• 13:30
  Dave Willner: However, two senior British government officials said the US administration was no longer leaning on the UK government to rescind the order, and it just kind of leaves it there, which is interesting.
• 13:42
  Dave Willner: and then the the other story worth reacting to as a package was the announcement that IRE Or seemingly already has pulled out of the UK entirely in reaction to an investigation by the Information commissioner's office around, I believe their handling of users' personal data, but sort of very suddenly has withdrawn entirely.
• 14:03
  Dave Willner: And as of now is unavailable in the UK completely.
• 14:06
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 14:07
  Mike Masnick: And both of these stories are interesting.
• 14:10
  Mike Masnick: They're different, but they're both sort of, you know, UK based and sort of things that are happening in the uk.
• 14:16
  Mike Masnick: you know, we've talked on the podcast a bunch about things around the Online Safety Act, and it's notable.
• 14:21
  Mike Masnick: This is not an online safety act thing.
• 14:25
  Mike Masnick: Uh.
• 14:26
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 14:26
  Mike Masnick: N neither of these are, this is not an Ofcom thing.
• 14:30
  Mike Masnick: These are just sort of other regulations that are happening in the UK that are sort of going after American tech companies in some form or another.
• 14:40
  Mike Masnick: the Apple story, it's also sort of hard to get full details on because all of it is secret.
• 14:45
  Mike Masnick: It's like the same thing happened last year and then all of the proceedings about it were secret.
• 14:50
  Mike Masnick: So it was basically what gets leaked to reporters.
• 14:54
  Mike Masnick: and both of them are, just situations where the UK is trying to enforce its will, whether for good or for bad.
• 15:02
  Mike Masnick: You can argue either way, I guess, on American tech companies and sort of how they're responding to it.
• 15:07
  Mike Masnick: and you know, there's a concern, and I've raised this in other contexts, but we're seeing it more and more about how.
• 15:14
  Mike Masnick: Because of these sort of local laws and local focus and local demands, what we think of as the internet and access to the internet is different depending on where you are.
• 15:27
  Mike Masnick: And the idea of a sort of global open internet is potentially going away, or this may be gone depending on who you talk to.
• 15:36
  Mike Masnick: you know, certainly in some places it is, but seeing countries like the uk, which we, you know, Ben is not here, so we can rag on the UK, I guess, without anyone pushing back.
• 15:49
  Mike Masnick: Uh,
• 15:50
  Dave Willner: Yes.
• 15:53
  Mike Masnick: that's
• 15:53
  Dave Willner: Yeah, no, you're right.
• 15:55
  Dave Willner: It is, um, it is interesting to see this increasing fragmentation, and it's long been the case that there was fragmentation around the edges, but it, it feels like it's reaching further and further into the core of the parts of the internet that were more previously open.
• 16:12
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 16:13
  Mike Masnick: And, it concerns me in a number of different ways, right?
• 16:17
  Mike Masnick: So like Apple has responded, you know, they responded to the original, again, secret order, which was apparently to, you know, to build a backdoor and to all the encryption by just not offering encryption at all.
• 16:29
  Mike Masnick: So basically making it clear to anyone who is storing their data, that it's not, don't consider it safe, and their position is that they're continuing to do that.
• 16:40
  Mike Masnick: but it's basically, you know, depending on where you are.
• 16:43
  Dave Willner: I think, I think it was actually that they stopped letting new users onboard.
• 16:48
  Dave Willner: I don't know that they shut it down for existing users, which I think may be some of the hook for this current
• 16:54
  Mike Masnick: it.
• 16:54
  Mike Masnick: Interesting.
• 16:55
  Mike Masnick: Okay.
• 16:56
  Mike Masnick: and so the more limited scope of just being for UK users to block this is, is interesting.
• 17:02
  Mike Masnick: The fact that, the US is apparently okay with it, is
• 17:07
  Dave Willner: W well, I mean, maybe, right?
• 17:10
  Dave Willner: Like this is what's so ominous about that end state is like, what it said was sort of, um, the US is no longer making a big deal out of it, but is that because they've changed their minds or because they're not paying attention?
• 17:21
  Mike Masnick: Because they did make a really big deal of it.
• 17:23
  Mike Masnick: And it was like one of the very few things that I gave the current US administration kudos for when it came about, which was that like they did make a big deal of it and they really sort of pushed the UK on it and they took a victory lap on it, which, you know, like a, one of the few well-deserved victory laps.
• 17:42
  Dave Willner: Yeah.
• 17:42
  Dave Willner: You don't like to say you gotta hand it to'em, but I think on this one, for what, whatever the motivations, you know, the outcome seems correct.
• 17:50
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 17:50
  Mike Masnick: and the whole setup, you know, I mean the, this is true of some people in the US and some government officials in the us, especially in the law enforcement side, have always had this sort of like anti encryption bent and this sort of feeling that like, well, bad people use encryption, therefore we should get rid of encryption in some form or another.
• 18:13
  Mike Masnick: which is really problematic, very simplistic view of the world, and very dangerous, like if you actually want privacy and security, encryption is a key part of that.
• 18:22
  Mike Masnick: And.
• 18:23
  Mike Masnick: I think people who are arguing for doing away with encryption or putting in a backdoor, which to be clear, is really getting rid of encryption.
• 18:32
  Mike Masnick: I think people have this belief that there's like some like neutral thing, which is like, gee, only the good people get access to the back doors.
• 18:39
  Mike Masnick: It's just like, technically not how it works.
• 18:42
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 18:42
  Dave Willner: Yeah.
• 18:42
  Dave Willner: My, my wife likes to joke that trust and safety stands, the TNS stands for trade offs and sadness.
• 18:48
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 18:49
  Dave Willner: And the entire encryption debate is a great trade-offs and sadness, issue where you genuinely have difficult, questions on both sides.
• 18:58
  Dave Willner: And the, the choice is a very stark one where the sort of natural urge to seek compromise isn't possible because of the nature of the problem.
• 19:09
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 19:09
  Mike Masnick: the other statement that, I love on the sort of encryption debate is the one that, the cryptographer Matt Blaze made a long time ago, which showed up in a John Oliver clip, and I once asked Matt about it and he's like, I don't even remember when I said it or where I said it, but somehow it was on video somewhere and John Oliver's team found it, which was basically the, um, you know, when people asked for back doors and encryption and sort of say like, well, you know, you techie guys, you should be able to figure it out.
• 19:37
  Mike Masnick: He said, it's kind of like asking, well, you've, landed someone on the moon, obviously you can also land someone on the sun.
• 19:44
  Mike Masnick: It's like one of those things is one of those things is possible.
• 19:49
  Mike Masnick: One of those is not.
• 19:50
  Mike Masnick: And you sort of
• 19:51
  Dave Willner: I mean, it depends on your success criteria.
• 19:54
  Mike Masnick: well, yes, sure, sure.
• 19:56
  Mike Masnick: Exactly right?
• 19:57
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 19:57
  Mike Masnick: Like in the same way that yes, you can create a backdoor and it is safe as long as you consider safe exposing all of our data, you know, and, and making it vulnerable to attack.
• 20:08
  Dave Willner: Although actually in the sun context is, I guess it's not even that it's hot, right?
• 20:12
  Dave Willner: the pressure of the solar radiation probably means we couldn't even get there with chemical rockets.
• 20:16
  Dave Willner: So
• 20:17
  Mike Masnick: we're getting out of my, my knowledge area of
• 20:19
  Dave Willner: yeah, yeah.
• 20:20
  Dave Willner: My guess is actually we couldn't even land a a, a liquid human mist on the
• 20:24
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 20:25
  Dave Willner: Um.
• 20:26
  Mike Masnick: So a anyways, yeah, it's, it's a really tricky problem and, but it worries me that we're seeing so much fragmentation among all of these things, right.
• 20:35
  Mike Masnick: And like, you know, there was a time when we, we had the sort of known areas of fragmentation where like, China had its great firewall.
• 20:43
  Mike Masnick: Iran sort of walled off the internet, Russia, you know, wanted to wall off its internet, you know, like, okay, there are these sort of authoritarian countries, they're gonna do what they're gonna do and we can sort of, look from, the more open west or whatever, and, and sort of say like, that's not a good thing.
• 21:01
  Mike Masnick: But now we're
• 21:02
  Dave Willner: and that wall that wall building was, aligned with the wall building that those countries would do in sort of the rest of their law.
• 21:13
  Dave Willner: And so it's, it's sort of, maybe not desirable, but it's of a peace with the rest of the sort of way that those countries are governed in a way that feels sort of.
• 21:24
  Dave Willner: Contained, and not necessarily sort of bound up in the rest of the way the system works.
• 21:31
  Dave Willner: 'cause it, it, they were already sort of isolated pieces of the system in so many other ways,
• 21:36
  Mike Masnick: whereas the rest of the world was moving more and more towards globalization, and a part of that was certainly the internet making some aspects of the globalization more and more possible.
• 21:46
  Mike Masnick: And now we're seeing these cracks in the system, and I worry about what that means for a whole bunch of things beyond just like, are you able to encrypt your, chats on your iPhone or whatever.
• 21:59
  Mike Masnick: I think it's a more serious issue when we're breaking the global open internet and where you have a different experience, different apps, different services available to you based on where you are, that doesn't lead to good places.
• 22:14
  Dave Willner: Yeah.
• 22:14
  Dave Willner: I, I think it is.
• 22:16
  Dave Willner: Yeah.
• 22:16
  Dave Willner: think it's also.
• 22:18
  Dave Willner: Likely to compound the sort of difficulty of doing any of this even possibly much less well.
• 22:27
  Dave Willner: Right?
• 22:27
  Dave Willner: Because if, if we can't get our, current approaches to doing, and I know these story not directly about moderation, but like this sort of, if we can't get our current approaches to doing any of this to work at the scale they're currently working at, it seems to me that multiplying the difficulty by multiplying the number of rule sets that you're playing under gets really hard to do well, really, really quickly.
• 22:51
  Dave Willner: And it, it, multiplies the sort of surfaces for collision and the possibilities of chaos and, and, mistake very, very rapidly.
• 22:59
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 23:00
  Mike Masnick: Which I, I think is a, is a big concern.
• 23:03
  Mike Masnick: All right, well I wanna move on to our second story this week, which this one's from Business Insider.
• 23:09
  Mike Masnick: and it is, this is actually, it sort of ties back to a story or from earlier this summer, which, Reuters I think broke a story, earlier this summer about meta's chatbots and the guidelines that it had around more sexually explicit chats involving children.
• 23:29
  Mike Masnick: and.
• 23:29
  Mike Masnick: It was pretty horrific is the, the, the sort of quick, quick summary on that and that because of that article then there was sort of an multiple investigations launched by the US government.
• 23:41
  Mike Masnick: The FTC demanded more information from a bunch of different AI chatbot companies to sort of talk about what rules they had in place.
• 23:50
  Mike Masnick: The Senate, demanded some information as well, and so meta was apparently late in delivering information to the government that was requested of it, but has started doing so, and some of that has now leaked to Business Insider.
• 24:03
  Mike Masnick: Including its specific guidelines on how it is now training AI chatbots to respond to, as they put it, child sexual exploitation prompts.
• 24:15
  Mike Masnick: and this has gotten some attention and it has some details about what is acceptable.
• 24:22
  Mike Masnick: One is unacceptable, and how some of those rules have apparently changed from where they were when Reuters reported on it earlier this year.
• 24:31
  Mike Masnick: but it's still, a little bit of a mess.
• 24:34
  Mike Masnick: Um, and I think,
• 24:37
  Dave Willner: Yeah, the, the revised standards don't seem great either, to be honest.
• 24:41
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 24:42
  Mike Masnick: Well, yeah.
• 24:44
  Mike Masnick: But now getting back to our theme here of impossibility is it possible to have guidelines that are great?
• 24:52
  Dave Willner: Well, I, it, I mean, it depends what you mean by great.
• 24:56
  Dave Willner: So, um, I do think it is possible to write standards more and less well from a clarity point of view.
• 25:05
  Dave Willner: And I was struck in reading some of the quotes in Business Insider that I was not.
• 25:10
  Dave Willner: Totally sure what they meant to mean, in some of the distinctions that they were drawing.
• 25:17
  Mike Masnick: Which is interesting given your expertise.
• 25:20
  Dave Willner: yes, but it, I I am also a very persnickety reader and writer as a result of my expertise.
• 25:27
  Dave Willner: both, the story back in the summer, and this one did bring to mind to me, I like to try to explain how things go wrong when looking at these kinds of blowups, using this idea called Lin's razor, which is basically the, the notion that you should never explain with malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence.
• 25:50
  Dave Willner: and I sort of like to add onto that you should never explain with incompetence what can be adequately explained by not having enough time to think the problem through, which is frequently what happens in the context of, so much of trust and safety and content moderation generally, and.
• 26:04
  Dave Willner: Looking at these stories, my immediate reaction was like, oh, they're having a fan fiction problem.
• 26:10
  Dave Willner: They're having a problem where, yeah, so if you've read Harry Potter, particularly the fourth and fifth books have very significant amount of making out among people who are like 14 and 15 years old as a critical part of the plot.
• 26:25
  Dave Willner: Now, it doesn't get any more explicit than that, but that is like a core part of the story.
• 26:31
  Dave Willner: And I suspected looking at META'S guidelines in the summer and the ones that they have now, that they were sort of writing under a bunch of constraints around, Hey, we obviously don't want to make A-C-S-A-M machine.
• 26:47
  Dave Willner: Or we think we don't, but we also don't wanna prohibit.
• 26:51
  Dave Willner: The kinds of things that show up in young adult fiction attended for young adults, which society tolerates and like it went through a giant bureaucracy machine.
• 27:01
  Dave Willner: And what came out the other side, had some second order implications that were not cool and not what anybody sort of would've wanted, particularly given the general sort of headwinds there right now against overreach in the content moderation space.
• 27:18
  Dave Willner: And so, and I think you still see that even in these revised versions where they're clearly trying to draw a distinction between like more explicit sexual activity and romantic ish activity.
• 27:33
  Dave Willner: And they've now banned actual role play activity between anybody and bots under a certain age.
• 27:43
  Dave Willner: And it's, it's not to give like an apology for how it ended up there.
• 27:46
  Dave Willner: It's more like, how do you understand what this is?
• 27:48
  Dave Willner: Like, is this mustache twirling, super villainy?
• 27:51
  Dave Willner: Or is this like something stupider and more subtle and difficult to solve?
• 27:55
  Dave Willner: And it seems to me that they're having a problem, kind of like the fan fiction problem in this context, meaning, the problem that ended up with the creation of archive of our own.
• 28:04
  Dave Willner: This is like a old internet callback.
• 28:07
  Dave Willner: but the fan fiction community writes a lot of horrifyingly, explicit sexual content, frankly.
• 28:14
  Dave Willner: Um, and there's been schisms within that community about those things.
• 28:16
  Dave Willner: And that does sometimes involve teenage characters.
• 28:19
  Dave Willner: And it seems to me that we as a society, like haven't figured out where we want the line to be between literature and chatbot.
• 28:31
  Dave Willner: Pretend role play.
• 28:33
  Dave Willner: I think we want it to be in a different place.
• 28:35
  Dave Willner: It feels different, but if you're working from prior art under time constraints inside one of these companies, I can see how you end up writing something that kind of accommodates what, you know, people are out there doing on the internet with sort of fictional characters when essentially playing dress up with their favorite characters in a literature form.
• 28:54
  Dave Willner: And gets to some really weird places when you get interactive technology involved.
• 29:01
  Dave Willner: And also to your, framing question of like, are good standards even possible to write?
• 29:05
  Dave Willner: Gets to this, the heart of this sort of lack of social consensus around some questions.
• 29:09
  Dave Willner: Because we, do have issues where there's strong social consensus that we want those things moderated.
• 29:14
  Dave Willner: Like everybody hates spam, which is that, you know, not a morally horrifying thing.
• 29:19
  Dave Willner: It's just advertising in the wrong place and people find it universally irritating.
• 29:24
  Dave Willner: Uh, pretty much everybody's on board with CSAM is bad.
• 29:27
  Dave Willner: There are some boundary questions around what terrorism means, but like broadly speaking, folks are like, yeah, ISIS was not cool.
• 29:34
  Dave Willner: Right?
• 29:34
  Dave Willner: There are areas of strong consensus.
• 29:37
  Dave Willner: Um, and then there are areas of like absolutely no consensus, and this feels like an area of low consensus smashing into a technological development that itself doesn't have any consensus about how we want it moderated yet.
• 29:54
  Dave Willner: Under time pressure, under corporate's constraints leading to some not awesome choices.
• 29:59
  Dave Willner: So this is my like non mustache villain version account of like, how the hell did that happen?
• 30:06
  Dave Willner: Because you look at it from the outside and your reaction is like, what they did what?
• 30:11
  Dave Willner: Right?
• 30:12
  Dave Willner: Um, it's almost like comic book evil and comic book evil is rarely real in my experience, particularly when you're dealing with big bureaucratic
• 30:21
  Mike Masnick: right, and as someone who's been in, in some of these rooms having these discussions, it's not people deciding like, oh, we're going to allow the worst possible things to be there, but it's.
• 30:32
  Mike Masnick: We're trying to figure out a way to create a standard that works within.
• 30:36
  Mike Masnick: And so your assumption here is that people making these rules, we're kind of looking at the nature of fan fiction and sort of saying, how do we,
• 30:45
  Dave Willner: that's my sense because, because a lot of, particularly if you look at Meta's products, in this area, a lot of them are more in the sort of character, ai, AI as role play.
• 30:58
  Dave Willner: Vein, right?
• 30:59
  Dave Willner: They're not marketing or building products for productivity, right?
• 31:04
  Dave Willner: They're not in the like, Hey, you're gonna use meta AI to, through vibes or whatever, to, to, to code up to vi.
• 31:13
  Dave Willner: Ironically, you're not going to use vibes to vibe code your next, uh, app that you're launching.
• 31:17
  Dave Willner: It's in the entertainment space.
• 31:20
  Dave Willner: And if you're thinking about entertainment interactions with chatbots, like particularly if they're adopting fictional personas, you're in that role play creative fiction, creative rematch space, right?
• 31:32
  Dave Willner: that's the closest thing to a prior art to think about.
• 31:35
  Dave Willner: It's where my mind would've gone.
• 31:37
  Dave Willner: Now, I, I hope I wouldn't have, missed the implications of this, but I don't think that's actually a nuts thing to start to think through if you're looking for prior attempts at grappling with some of these concepts.
• 31:52
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 31:52
  Mike Masnick: And it is, there is this sort of interesting element of like, if this is okay in fan fiction, why is it not okay in a chatbot?
• 32:02
  Mike Masnick: And then you can pretty quickly.
• 32:06
  Mike Masnick: Figure out why, where it's just like, well, the, the interactive nature of it and
• 32:10
  Dave Willner: Is different.
• 32:10
  Mike Masnick: is extremely different and that it draws you in and that it, it sort of builds on what you are suggesting to it is it creates a very, very different kind of product.
• 32:20
  Dave Willner: Yeah.
• 32:21
  Dave Willner: I think it creates a very different kind of product.
• 32:22
  Dave Willner: I also don't think there's strong social consensus that it necessarily.
• 32:26
  Dave Willner: Is okay.
• 32:28
  Dave Willner: And like, I think fan fiction communities exist as it, okay.
• 32:32
  Dave Willner: It is legal, but like archive of their own exists in my understanding because of controversies around the degree of sexuality in stories.
• 32:41
  Dave Willner: Uh, and so there's, unsettled debate within that community that's been solved by forking.
• 32:46
  Dave Willner: And because that's a relatively niche interest, like, I don't know if you dragged the fan fiction debates about this stuff out into the public and put them in Reuters, that people would be psyched about the lines that have
• 32:58
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 32:59
  Mike Masnick: That's, that's a very, very good point.
• 33:01
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 33:01
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 33:01
  Mike Masnick: And
• 33:02
  Dave Willner: right.
• 33:02
  Dave Willner: And so it's like low social, it's a community that doesn't have full consensus within itself in a somewhat more socially marginal position.
• 33:09
  Dave Willner: So there's low, broader social consensus around what the line even is here.
• 33:13
  Dave Willner: And I think the line, like in published books is somewhat different than the line, the furthest lines in the fan fiction community.
• 33:23
  Dave Willner: And then on top of it, you are adding in this sort of chaos agent that instead of a pre-scripted thing, written by a human.
• 33:31
  Dave Willner: You are interacting with this non-deterministic chat system and who knows where that goes or how, how exactly people relate to it psychologically
• 33:39
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 33:40
  Mike Masnick: Do you think, if, your contention is, is that the time pressure was an element in sort of drafting these rules, do you think that having.
• 33:51
  Mike Masnick: The FTC and the US Senate involved will lead to better rules.
• 33:56
  Dave Willner: so I do think, well, and to be clear, I don't know that time pressure here was the constraint so much as it was being cross pressured, right?
• 34:06
  Dave Willner: That you're under multiple competing demands.
• 34:09
  Dave Willner: That are hard to reconcile.
• 34:11
  Dave Willner: It's more your question of like, are perfect rules possible and like, I'm not sure on some of these things that perfect reconcili ability is possible.
• 34:19
  Dave Willner: right?
• 34:19
  Dave Willner: Like that.
• 34:19
  Dave Willner: It just may be difficult to square the circle in some cases.
• 34:24
  Dave Willner: And sometimes you pick the square and you should have picked the circle and no under those cer know when that is going on.
• 34:30
  Dave Willner: Generally speaking, having the government yelling at you does not make people calmer or better at thinking
• 34:37
  Mike Masnick: Yeah,
• 34:38
  Dave Willner: experience.
• 34:39
  Mike Masnick: I'm sort of trying to project out and, you know, you can sort of see the, the likely end result of obviously the government cracking down on this kind of stuff is much more stringent rules and much greater limits on sort of how people can use chatbots in, in certain ways.
• 34:54
  Mike Masnick: And I'm, kind of trying to project out into a future where we're going to be, I don't know, three years from now, five years from now, where the very same people in the government, God, I hope they're not still in government, but assuming some same people are still in the government, then freak out because something more culture worry, someone will try and do something with a chatbot and get denied and, you know.
• 35:19
  Dave Willner: Oh, that's definitely gonna
• 35:21
  Mike Masnick: We're gonna have somebody stand up and be like, why is OpenAI so woke and not allowing this?
• 35:26
  Mike Masnick: And the whole
• 35:26
  Dave Willner: we've already,
• 35:27
  Mike Masnick: will trace back to this conversation now.
• 35:30
  Dave Willner: I think that is probably true.
• 35:31
  Dave Willner: I mean, I think we've already had versions of that, right?
• 35:33
  Dave Willner: Um, the Google, uh, racially diverse Nazis
• 35:39
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 35:39
  Dave Willner: up from, like last year was a good, example of that.
• 35:43
  Dave Willner: And that one to me, very much did read as, mediocre solutions put in place under intense time pressure to launch, leading to.
• 35:51
  Dave Willner: Weird, stupid outcomes, not as a sort of intentional stance that anybody wanted to be in, because it was obviously not sustainable, to be in the, the racially diverse Nazis actually business was not, not, was not gonna hold up.
• 36:05
  Dave Willner: and also not clear why it would even be desirable.
• 36:07
  Dave Willner: But yeah, I I do think we are inevitably going to face that because back to your, your core point, you're making a lot of decisions.
• 36:15
  Dave Willner: You are drawing some lines that are very difficult to split apart.
• 36:20
  Dave Willner: Right.
• 36:20
  Dave Willner: And I mean even it's actually interesting on the meta thing, both in their prior guidance and in the current guidance, they talk a lot about Romeo and Juliette.
• 36:28
  Dave Willner: Which is a book about two teenagers who fall in love, get sexually involved and then kill
• 36:33
  Mike Masnick: yes.
• 36:34
  Dave Willner: but it's by Shakespeare, so it's classy.
• 36:36
  Dave Willner: So it's fine'cause it's old.
• 36:39
  Dave Willner: Right.
• 36:40
  Dave Willner: And we have complicated and inconsistent feelings about those things, and particularly where they intersect with art.
• 36:50
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 36:51
  Dave Willner: So much of that is it's not just about the what, it's about the how of the content and about the who and about the social positioning.
• 37:01
  Dave Willner: Of how the content is received, right?
• 37:04
  Dave Willner: I'm not, I'm not, don't take me arguing that Vibes is Shakespeare like it is not.
• 37:08
  Dave Willner: But also, Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare when Shakespeare was written.
• 37:10
  Dave Willner: Shakespeare was like for the rabble to go see and yell at the stage while it was being performed.
• 37:17
  Dave Willner: And we don't really have good language or good intellectual tools for splitting apart those sort of matters of taste.
• 37:25
  Dave Willner: and so trying to turn them into an operations ma into what is essentially a technical manual for how to run a big factory to make decisions is like one of the most insane parts of the insane project of content moderation.
• 37:38
  Dave Willner: Like that part is just super duper impossible actually on this point.
• 37:42
  Dave Willner: when we were trying to solve a version of this problem, a very simple version of this problem at Facebook around images We had said, okay, if it looks like a naked people, it's naked.
• 37:50
  Dave Willner: People take it down.
• 37:52
  Dave Willner: But like, Michelangelo's David looks like naked people.
• 37:55
  Dave Willner: And so we needed to figure out how that was fine.
• 37:57
  Dave Willner: 'cause that's in like everybody's photos of every trip that's ever happened
• 38:00
  Mike Masnick: Right,
• 38:01
  Dave Willner: And so taking that down is like both not useful and obviously absurd and not sustainable.
• 38:07
  Mike Masnick: right.
• 38:08
  Dave Willner: And the answer we came up with, I dunno if I've told you this story before.
• 38:12
  Dave Willner: The, the answer we came up with was, rocks are not people so they can't be naked.
• 38:20
  Dave Willner: So the definition of art was for a very long time.
• 38:24
  Dave Willner: Things that are made of like paint or sticks or metal or wood, whatever.
• 38:29
  Dave Willner: It's like made of an, it's not made of people, right?
• 38:32
  Dave Willner: But it looks like people.
• 38:34
  Dave Willner: That's allowed to be naked.
• 38:35
  Dave Willner: 'cause it's not naked'cause it's not people.
• 38:38
  Dave Willner: and that was the distinction that we were able to teach people imperfectly, but that worked.
• 38:44
  Dave Willner: So the definition of art was just naked people made of wood.
• 38:46
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 38:48
  Dave Willner: Well, it, it meant among other things that there was no art photography.
• 38:51
  Mike Masnick: Right,
• 38:51
  Dave Willner: So no photography was ever art
• 38:53
  Mike Masnick: right.
• 38:54
  Mike Masnick: Which seems bad.
• 38:56
  Dave Willner: I, I mean, no, it seems like a trade
• 38:59
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 38:59
  Mike Masnick: Okay.
• 38:59
  Mike Masnick: Fair.
• 38:59
  Mike Masnick: Fair enough.
• 39:00
  Dave Willner: Right?
• 39:01
  Dave Willner: Because otherwise I'm trying to teach, like we're in the business of trying to teach 10,000 people to have the same views about what art means.
• 39:09
  Dave Willner: Like what?
• 39:10
  Dave Willner: that's absurd.
• 39:11
  Dave Willner: Like that's the limit where I'm like, this will never be possible to be done.
• 39:14
  Dave Willner: Well that is conceptually impossible.
• 39:17
  Dave Willner: That is not a thing that can be
• 39:18
  Mike Masnick: Right, but then you, you end up with situations like Facebook famously taking down the Napalm girl picture.
• 39:25
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 39:26
  Dave Willner: Yep, Because if you don't know that that's a Pulitzer Prize winning photo, and you just describe what you're seeing, you definitely want Facebook to moderate that photo unless it's that photo.
• 39:38
  Mike Masnick: right,
• 39:39
  Dave Willner: Right.
• 39:39
  Dave Willner: But if you just, like, if you took a description of that photo and put it into an AI chat bot and we're like, make this, we would want it to not do that.
• 39:48
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 39:48
  Mike Masnick: Which gives you a sense of the, the impossibility
• 39:52
  Dave Willner: Yes.
• 39:53
  Dave Willner: One might say, one might
• 39:54
  Mike Masnick: one might
• 39:55
  Dave Willner: yeah, no, I'm, I'm not working on world peace here.
• 39:58
  Dave Willner: I'm just trying to make us better at, running the factory.
• 40:01
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 40:02
  Mike Masnick: All right.
• 40:02
  Mike Masnick: Well, this, that was a very interesting discussion, but let, let's move on to our, slightly more rapid stories.
• 40:09
  Mike Masnick: Um, we have, another story, which I think is a nice lead in actually from that one.
• 40:15
  Mike Masnick: and in fact maybe just flows right into it, involving open AI's, new SOA projects.
• 40:21
  Mike Masnick: Did you wanna give the quick description on that?
• 40:24
  Dave Willner: yeah, absolutely.
• 40:25
  Dave Willner: So OpenAI has released a version of SOA so SOA is their video generation, model that's been around in preview for a while and they've now released a version that sort of has social media features built into the app itself.
• 40:41
  Dave Willner: So it's, it's a move in a direction that feels a little different from where a lot of their software is, which, yes, you know, people use chat, PT for entertainment, but a lot of it's sort of productivity coded, even if that's not the only thing people are using it for.
• 40:57
  Dave Willner: This feels like much more of a move in, in the vibes direction, of sort of generating.
• 41:03
  Dave Willner: AI video, essentially purely for entertainment purposes.
• 41:07
  Dave Willner: and there's sort of some interesting features built into it where you can train the model to have a sense of what you look like, and then actually control whether or not people can generate videos of you or just you can generate videos of you.
• 41:19
  Dave Willner: And they did some interesting stuff where they're, the models, if they're shared with inside the app are, or sorry, the images, if they're shared, inside the app are not watermarked, but if you export them, they then attempt to put a watermark on them so people know that they're synthetic.
• 41:33
  Dave Willner: But if you're sort of inside the playground, it's contextually obvious that all this is fake because it's a service for making AI videos, right?
• 41:40
  Dave Willner: So you're in soa, you know that this isn't real, which was very interesting as a sort of like new technology making new presentations possible kind of thing.
• 41:49
  Dave Willner: So I was, I was interested in your thoughts.
• 41:51
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 41:52
  Mike Masnick: I mean, it struck me as interesting, especially coming like the week right after Vibes launched, like this sort of merging of the AI and social where like vibes, I don't understand at all as, as this sort of like social app that adds ai and it's only for ai, but then for some reason SOA sort of makes more sense to me.
• 42:13
  Mike Masnick: And even though it's kind of a very similar product where it's like it's an AI tool for making AI things, but because you're sort of sharing it within that environment, then suddenly it makes more sense to me.
• 42:25
  Mike Masnick: And I, I don't quite fully understand why.
• 42:29
  Mike Masnick: but I did also think that like that,
• 42:31
  Dave Willner: it sort of a starting place thing where like OpenAI makes ai,
• 42:36
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 42:37
  Mike Masnick: And so you
• 42:38
  Dave Willner: and so it's full of AI
• 42:40
  Mike Masnick: and, and so it's
• 42:40
  Dave Willner: yeah, that tracks
• 42:42
  Mike Masnick: with, with like added social as opposed to social with added AI just feels wrong, but AI with added social feels, even if they're ending up in the same sort of place.
• 42:53
  Mike Masnick: I find that that sort of fascinating and I can't quite wrap my head around why.
• 42:57
  Mike Masnick: but I did think like the structures as you talked about, it was interesting too with like the watermarks.
• 43:03
  Mike Masnick: Obviously there are ways around this, like anyone can figure out a way to video capture their screen and get a video out of this without the watermarks.
• 43:12
  Mike Masnick: But just the fact that like, oh, if you're in the app, the expectation is you understand that this is all video AI generated not true things and therefore.
• 43:23
  Mike Masnick: you don't have to watermark it, but if you download it, you get a watermark, which will hopefully alert people outside of this app.
• 43:29
  Mike Masnick: the context of where it comes from.
• 43:31
  Mike Masnick: I thought that was sort of a, an interesting intervention, if not a perfect one.
• 43:37
  Mike Masnick: But the other one, the thing that I thought was even more interesting was, and so like a lot of the news around it was that, you know, as you mentioned, it allows you to sort of create a, you know, model of yourself and then you can open that up for other people to use.
• 43:50
  Mike Masnick: And Sam Altman, did that.
• 43:52
  Mike Masnick: And so a lot of what the original videos that were getting passed around, including by open AI employees, were fake videos of Sam Altman doing stuff.
• 44:01
  Mike Masnick: And sort of the one that was most famous was there's this video created of him stealing, GPUs from target to, to power soa.
• 44:09
  Mike Masnick: And that sort of went viral where you have
• 44:11
  Dave Willner: What, what could go
• 44:12
  Mike Masnick: yeah, right.
• 44:13
  Mike Masnick: So you have this immediate like, what could go wrong thing, but like.
• 44:17
  Mike Masnick: He released that, you know, the model of himself for people to be able to make that, and it's sort of like this, I don't know if it's eating your own dog food kind of thing.
• 44:26
  Mike Masnick: sort of beyond that, right?
• 44:27
  Mike Masnick: I mean, it's, it's like, you know, allowing other people to force speech to dog food.
• 44:37
  Dave Willner: We're making dog fo gra now.
• 44:39
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, yeah,
• 44:42
  Dave Willner: yeah, no, it is a very interesting moment where I similarly share your sort of lack of understanding of the interest of AI video in most contexts.
• 44:56
  Dave Willner: Right.
• 44:56
  Dave Willner: Like, I, I get TikTok, cause it's like other people sharing you a window into their lives and that's like kind of inherently interesting and it's just like lazier and faster than reading their tweets.
• 45:07
  Dave Willner: Like, okay, sure.
• 45:09
  Dave Willner: Uh, and you know, they can, it's better for singing'cause you can sing
• 45:13
  Mike Masnick: The singing and
• 45:13
  Dave Willner: you know, there's like, sure.
• 45:15
  Mike Masnick: an appeal there.
• 45:16
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 45:17
  Dave Willner: But the AI generated video stuff is interesting to me because.
• 45:21
  Dave Willner: I would think the most interesting stuff is things you can't make, but it does feel like in, it's interesting, it sort of ties into some of what we were talking about earlier.
• 45:29
  Dave Willner: It does feel like another version of this, like playing with action figures
• 45:33
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 45:34
  Dave Willner: thing, right?
• 45:35
  Dave Willner: Except that like this time it's video action figures, but they're also real people who opted into being action figures.
• 45:41
  Dave Willner: It's like very, I don't quite get, I, like, I get why you would wanna, I don't know, be like, here's a video of Bigfoot or something that like you wouldn't otherwise have.
• 45:51
  Dave Willner: But it's interesting how it, that sort of drive towards fictional representation as entertainment intersects with video and intersects with reality.
• 45:59
  Dave Willner: Um, which is very, very
• 46:01
  Mike Masnick: I did think, you know, so there is, as I understand, and I haven't played around with this yet myself, so I don't know exactly the details, the whole thing where you can make your, I don't know, even know what they call it, avatar or entity, available for others to create with, there is a safety feature built into that, which is that you can then see what other people do with, with yourself and can pull down.
• 46:24
  Mike Masnick: So, so in theory, like Sam Altman could look at that, video of him stealing GPUs from Target and kill it, within the
• 46:32
  Dave Willner: feels very difficult to scale that, like it's a cool idea, but it feels like it works least well for Sam Altman.
• 46:40
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 46:41
  Mike Masnick: I, I mean, but I, with the recognition that he's probably going into this very willingly, and I imagine that most sort of well-known people will not.
• 46:50
  Mike Masnick: Openly share their own models of themselves, or if they do, it'll be under very different conditions.
• 46:56
  Mike Masnick: I'm sort of thinking of like, this is, you know, different, but like there was the whole thing that, Grimes the, uh, ex of Elon Musk and, Singer did like a couple years ago now, where she created an AI model just of her voice and let anyone use it in music with a contractual condition, which is that if you make any money from this song, you have to cut 50% back to me.
• 47:20
  Mike Masnick: And so you can, you can create a Grimes song, she will sing with you, you can put it on Spotify and you can make money on it.
• 47:29
  Mike Masnick: And if you, if it is successful, you have to give 50% back to her.
• 47:33
  Mike Masnick: And that's kind of interesting to me.
• 47:36
  Mike Masnick: Like I, I find that sort of a fascinating approach to things and you could see maybe people doing something similar with this sort of thing where it's like, there are conditions on the usage, like you can use the model of me, but.
• 47:48
  Mike Masnick: Either I need to approve it or there needs to be some sort of licensing or money that changes hands.
• 47:52
  Mike Masnick: And I could see that being interesting.
• 47:54
  Dave Willner: I would assume that will end up happening at least within sort of commercial domains.
• 48:00
  Dave Willner: The interesting question is gonna be how much that becomes a normal thing to let, just like.
• 48:05
  Dave Willner: Anybody do, right?
• 48:08
  Dave Willner: Like, I, I think you're gonna end up with these sort of like AI clones of actors and things, and particularly once you start to think about their estates,
• 48:15
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 48:16
  Mike Masnick: Oh,
• 48:16
  Dave Willner: Because like,
• 48:17
  Mike Masnick: yeah.
• 48:18
  Mike Masnick: There's gonna be
• 48:18
  Dave Willner: Morgan Freeman's gonna be able to sound amazing for the rest of time.
• 48:23
  Dave Willner: and there's, there's incentives for those kinds of things.
• 48:25
  Dave Willner: And it is actually, this is really far afield, but it's interesting to think about what that does to culture,
• 48:30
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 48:31
  Dave Willner: right?
• 48:31
  Dave Willner: Because there's less turnover,
• 48:33
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 48:33
  Dave Willner: right?
• 48:34
  Dave Willner: Right now, all of the art artistic talent has a finite expiration date.
• 48:38
  Dave Willner: There is a body of work that is made and is ended,
• 48:40
  Mike Masnick: But if, we have the immortal Morgan Freeman, then, then,
• 48:44
  Dave Willner: right?
• 48:44
  Dave Willner: Like who, who will ever narrate documentaries ever again?
• 48:48
  Mike Masnick: Right, right.
• 48:49
  Dave Willner: It's just Morgan Freeman forever.
• 48:51
  Dave Willner: And that's, I don't, that's probably not good.
• 48:53
  Dave Willner: I don't know that.
• 48:54
  Dave Willner: I love that.
• 48:54
  Mike Masnick: yeah.
• 48:55
  Mike Masnick: No, that's fair.
• 48:56
  Mike Masnick: All right, well, let's, let's move on to our final story and this one, you know, the last few episodes of controlled speech, we talked about Nepal and sort of trying to take down, certain social media networks because of protests and how that was a failure.
• 49:12
  Mike Masnick: But a very interesting story.
• 49:14
  Mike Masnick: the story I saw this week takes place in Afghanistan where they have just basically said, fuck it, we're turning off the internet.
• 49:22
  Dave Willner: that is one way to do perfect content
• 49:24
  Mike Masnick: Yes, there's no more content.
• 49:27
  Mike Masnick: There is no more internet, too fucking bad.
• 49:30
  Mike Masnick: Uh, and, and so they basically, like the Taliban who, you know, rules the country basically more or less said, well, actually this is, this is kind of crazy.
• 49:40
  Mike Masnick: Because what they did was someone went on X, which is a part of the internet, to talk about how they were turning off the internet because the internet is evil.
• 49:53
  Dave Willner: A notoriously non evil part of the
• 49:55
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, which is just kind of weird in all sorts of ways.
• 50:00
  Mike Masnick: and we're starting to see, there's a BB, C article about this where like, it turns out, like the internet is really, really ingrained in lots of things that people do around the globe, including Afghanistan.
• 50:12
  Mike Masnick: So when they started to, cut the, the fiber optic lines, like bad stuff is happening and like flights are not going in and out of Afghanistan anymore, and people who were taking classes online are suddenly like, whoops, like, that's gone.
• 50:29
  Mike Masnick: other kinds of services just sort of disappeared.
• 50:32
  Mike Masnick: and
• 50:33
  Dave Willner: I, I was seeing, uh, banking that like all the banks are down.
• 50:36
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, because it turns out banks actually rely on the internet a fair bit.
• 50:41
  Mike Masnick: And so suddenly there, you know, strongly to do it and there wasn't.
• 50:45
  Mike Masnick: like a precipitating event other than the Taliban basically just saying like, we don't like this cultural thing, so we're
• 50:54
  Dave Willner: Is, yeah.
• 50:55
  Dave Willner: Yeah.
• 50:55
  Dave Willner: It's, it's a particularly crazy moment.
• 50:57
  Dave Willner: That last part in particular is very, I think is different, right?
• 51:01
  Dave Willner: We've seen to your point earlier, we've seen countries wall
• 51:05
  Mike Masnick: Right,
• 51:05
  Dave Willner: their own sort of sections of the internet.
• 51:08
  Dave Willner: which, you know, I am, I am not a fan of, but is a solution to the banks' need to work, right?
• 51:14
  Dave Willner: Because it allows the sort of intra netting to happen.
• 51:17
  Dave Willner: and we've seen sort of emergency, full shutdown kind of things but they're largely in response to like, something happened or is happening, like.
• 51:27
  Dave Willner: It is going down.
• 51:29
  Dave Willner: And so somebody like pulls the plug out and you're like, okay, like I don't like this as a strategy, but like I get how you, the, like, I'm gonna go unplug it.
• 51:37
  Dave Willner: I got it.
• 51:38
  Dave Willner: Right.
• 51:38
  Dave Willner: Get how
• 51:39
  Mike Masnick: it is almost always like people rising up against the leader leads to an
• 51:44
  Dave Willner: And like at that point you're, you're getting your head chopped off anyway, so you might as well throw some stuff at the wall and see what happens.
• 51:51
  Dave Willner: but this is, it is kind of wild to see, to your point, not just them unplugged, but like go basically cold Turkey.
• 51:59
  Dave Willner: Right.
• 51:59
  Dave Willner: Like to just fully, without a lot of preparation seemingly, or real planning for alternative ways of providing services that presumably some of which they think are good and cool.
• 52:14
  Dave Willner: maybe it's, it's sort of wild.
• 52:17
  Dave Willner: I mean, I, I can't really think of a precedent for it.
• 52:20
  Dave Willner: That doesn't have a specific inciting event
• 52:24
  Mike Masnick: like literally, I mean the BBC article says it is unclear what the reason for the shutdown is, and the only thing they seem to have is that post on X of someone saying we have to cut the fiber optic cables because they're evil.
• 52:38
  Mike Masnick: And this also does follow on that they removed all books written by women from the university teaching system, uh, which implies a sort of cultural, like, we don't like modern culture and we're going to block all of it.
• 52:55
  Mike Masnick: which is probably not great for a variety of
• 52:58
  Dave Willner: N no ob Yeah.
• 53:00
  Dave Willner: Obviously I was a little flip upfront about content moderation, but yeah, no, obviously the implications locally are gonna be somewhere between bad and horrifying.
• 53:09
  Dave Willner: but it is, interesting to see what it will.
• 53:12
  Dave Willner: Lead to, right?
• 53:14
  Dave Willner: Because you can end up with backlash
• 53:15
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 53:16
  Dave Willner: Or you end up with adaptation, right?
• 53:19
  Dave Willner: Because like, like, like banks are gonna need to exist on some level, right?
• 53:22
  Dave Willner: I don't think you end up in a world where there's like no ability to change money.
• 53:28
  Dave Willner: and so there's this broader question of like, okay, are they going into this without planning and then gonna figure it out?
• 53:34
  Dave Willner: Or, or how intentional, frankly, were some of those things Because like some of those second order consequences seemed to me to probably not have been desired.
• 53:42
  Mike Masnick: yeah.
• 53:43
  Dave Willner: Right?
• 53:44
  Mike Masnick: you would think, yeah, I think this story is really early and I think is one that we'll sort of have to see where it goes, but
• 53:50
  Dave Willner: I, I look forward to you and Ben,
• 53:52
  Mike Masnick: yes.
• 53:54
  Dave Willner: actually explaining what happened
• 53:55
  Mike Masnick: Hashing out this on a,
• 53:56
  Dave Willner: on a future, on a future episode.
• 53:59
  Mike Masnick: But I think with that, we're gonna, we're gonna wrap this one up.
• 54:01
  Mike Masnick: Uh, Dave, this was a really fun conversation and, uh, I'm, I'm glad I was able to drag you in from the, from the, uh, event last week.
• 54:10
  Mike Masnick: So thanks for taking the time and, I hope everybody, enjoyed listening as well.
• 54:14
  Mike Masnick: And, we'll be back next week.
• 54:18
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• 54:25
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• 54:32
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