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Transcript

Money for Nothing and Clicks for a Fee · Ctrl-Alt-Speech

• 0:00
  Ben Whitelaw: So Mike, this week we're gonna talk a bit about prediction markets.
• 0:03
  Ben Whitelaw: Okay.
• 0:03
  Ben Whitelaw: do you dabble in prediction markets?
• 0:05
  Ben Whitelaw: What's your
• 0:07
  Mike Masnick: I do not.
• 0:08
  Mike Masnick: I stay away from that kind of stuff.
• 0:10
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 0:11
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 0:11
  Ben Whitelaw: A fools errand.
• 0:13
  Ben Whitelaw: but one of the prediction markets that many people would know, it's been in the news quite a lot recently is calci.
• 0:19
  Ben Whitelaw: And it's one of the big two.
• 0:21
  Ben Whitelaw: We're gonna talk about the other one, later in the episode.
• 0:24
  Ben Whitelaw: And Che's prompt for users, when you go onto, the kind of quite chaotic site actually, is trade on anything.
• 0:31
  Ben Whitelaw: So I want you to, trade on something today.
• 0:34
  Ben Whitelaw: What, what would be the bet you'd make?
• 0:36
  Ben Whitelaw: Like.
• 0:38
  Mike Masnick: The bet that I would make, Ben, is that, these prediction markets are going to face some pretty serious regulation in the near future.
• 0:47
  Mike Masnick: I, I don't think the, the unregulated world of prediction markets is, very long for this particular world.
• 0:55
  Mike Masnick: what about you?
• 0:55
  Mike Masnick: What, what would you be betting on?
• 0:58
  Ben Whitelaw: Well, you know, I'm not gonna give you very long odds for that.
• 1:00
  Ben Whitelaw: I'll be honest, Mike, that's not gonna, that's not gonna win you very much money.
• 1:04
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, my prediction would be that this podcast has not appeared on Calie as a bet.
• 1:13
  Ben Whitelaw: but you know, at some point maybe it will, um,
• 1:16
  Mike Masnick: but that's, so that's something we could influence, huh?
• 1:19
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, finally we can, we can make some money outta this podcast in ways that we never foresee.
• 1:24
  Mike Masnick: There's the business model.
• 1:28
  Ben Whitelaw: it's very intoxicating, isn't it, as we'll find out.
• 1:39
  Ben Whitelaw: Hello and welcome to Control Alt Speech, your weekly roundup of the major stories about online speech, content moderation, and internet regulation.
• 1:47
  Ben Whitelaw: It's March the 19th, 2026, and this week we're talking about the gruesome reality of betting on war.
• 1:53
  Ben Whitelaw: The Renaissance in AI, spam and the data label is fighting back against the odds.
• 1:58
  Ben Whitelaw: My name is Ben Mike Law.
• 1:59
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm the founder and editor of Everything and Moderation, and I'm with a very, clean living, financially frugal.
• 2:06
  Ben Whitelaw: founder and editor of tech.
• 2:08
  Ben Whitelaw: not that, not that I thought you, were a big better,
• 2:10
  Mike Masnick: I am just not, there's nothing about gambling or betting excites me in, any way.
• 2:17
  Mike Masnick: The very first time I ever went to Las Vegas was after I had graduated and I got my first job out here in California.
• 2:26
  Mike Masnick: and I had to go to Comdex, which was the big conference at the time.
• 2:29
  Mike Masnick: It went outta business a few years after that.
• 2:31
  Mike Masnick: And I went and I was with my relatively new boss.
• 2:35
  Mike Masnick: I'd been working there for a few months and she was like, well, you know, we're in Vegas.
• 2:39
  Mike Masnick: Let's go gambling.
• 2:41
  Mike Masnick: And I was like, oh man.
• 2:42
  Mike Masnick: Like I just, there's nothing about gambling that actually excites me.
• 2:46
  Mike Masnick: And I was like, I really.
• 2:47
  Mike Masnick: Don't feel like doing this, but you know, it was my boss.
• 2:49
  Mike Masnick: So I, I went, and we went to roulette table and.
• 2:54
  Mike Masnick: she was just like, well, whatever.
• 2:56
  Mike Masnick: She, she was gonna do something and I just did the simplest, like, can't remember either.
• 3:01
  Mike Masnick: Bet on red or black.
• 3:02
  Mike Masnick: Um, and, and I won on my first bet.
• 3:06
  Mike Masnick: And, you know, I think it pays double if I remember correctly.
• 3:09
  Mike Masnick: And like, like got my money back a little bit more and I was like.
• 3:12
  Mike Masnick: I'm good.
• 3:14
  Mike Masnick: that was it.
• 3:15
  Mike Masnick: And then I, I soon realized afterwards that like, I guess my boss felt like she didn't really like to gamble either, so we ended up taking the money that I had won and we went, there was a video arcade next to the casino floor and we just played video games for the rest of the evening, and it was, it was a lot more fun.
• 3:34
  Mike Masnick: I'm not a, I'm not just not a betting guy.
• 3:36
  Ben Whitelaw: no, no.
• 3:37
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean that's probably how a lot of people feel about it, to be honest.
• 3:39
  Ben Whitelaw: I think a lot of folks go because they think that other people want to be doing it.
• 3:43
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean, that sounds a lot more glamorous than my experiences, to be honest.
• 3:46
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean, I've only ever gone to Grote casinos on the outskirts of UK towns.
• 3:52
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, normally after a night out, to be honest, when I was much younger.
• 3:56
  Ben Whitelaw: And, uh, mainly went for the sandwiches.
• 3:59
  Ben Whitelaw: Uh, they used to, they used, there was this thing, yeah, there's this thing in the UK where they give you sandwiches and they kind of don't really expect you to bet.
• 4:08
  Ben Whitelaw: So, you know, poly market and calie don't give you sandwiches.
• 4:11
  Ben Whitelaw: So
• 4:11
  Mike Masnick: No.
• 4:12
  Ben Whitelaw: I, I'm not
• 4:13
  Mike Masnick: Maybe they should.
• 4:14
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 4:17
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 4:17
  Ben Whitelaw: More, more snacks and I'd be there potentially.
• 4:20
  Ben Whitelaw: but yeah, that, that's gonna be our, that's gonna be our story today.
• 4:23
  Ben Whitelaw: there's a kind of general theme actually about the financial incentives that create Tensions in the way that online speech works.
• 4:30
  Ben Whitelaw: And I think that runs throughout, this week's episode.
• 4:32
  Ben Whitelaw: and we've got some really interesting stories, a lot of platforms that we don't often talk about on the podcast, which is a nice change.
• 4:38
  Ben Whitelaw: before we dig in, a reminder to listeners that you can play control or speech bingo.
• 4:42
  Ben Whitelaw: wherever you are in the world, wherever you listen to the podcast, go to control speech.com/bingo and listen out for, potential cards.
• 4:52
  Ben Whitelaw: Tick them off as you go along.
• 4:53
  Ben Whitelaw: Mike's made a beautiful, little bespoke bingo card for us, and, we still haven't got any winners yet.
• 4:59
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, you can click and retain the things that you want.
• 5:02
  Mike Masnick: Or if you wanna be old school and analog, you can print it out.
• 5:06
  Mike Masnick: but works on the website, works on your phone.
• 5:08
  Mike Masnick: you can play along with the, very fun control speech.
• 5:12
  Mike Masnick: Bingo.
• 5:12
  Mike Masnick: And I think I said, you know, if you get bingo, if I programmed it correctly, or rather if Claude programmed it correctly, uh, confetti reigns down from the, the top of the screen so you know, there, there's an extra incentive to play it.
• 5:27
  Mike Masnick: It might not be a sandwich, but it's, it's confetti.
• 5:31
  Mike Masnick: So.
• 5:31
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, you get confetti in a, in a free 10 pound bet at the a, a bookmaker near you.
• 5:39
  Mike Masnick: Oh.
• 5:39
  Ben Whitelaw: That's a joke.
• 5:40
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, yeah.
• 5:41
  Ben Whitelaw: Uh, as ever, if you join the podcast, today's episode or any of the, of our, increasingly growing back catalog of episodes, do give us a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts.
• 5:54
  Ben Whitelaw: Spotify, apple are the primary ones.
• 5:57
  Ben Whitelaw: They're the ones that help us get listened to the most.
• 5:59
  Ben Whitelaw: They help us reach new audiences and spread the good word about, controllable speech.
• 6:03
  Ben Whitelaw: but yeah, Any kind of feedback is great as well.
• 6:05
  Ben Whitelaw: Email us at podcast@controlspeech.com.
• 6:08
  Ben Whitelaw: we reply to all of them, bar the occasional abusive one.
• 6:13
  Ben Whitelaw: I will say that, um, we're not immune to, you know, having our ego dented occasionally.
• 6:18
  Ben Whitelaw: so Mike, let's, let's get going then.
• 6:20
  Ben Whitelaw: We're, we're going talk a bit about the ways platform create perverse incentives.
• 6:24
  Ben Whitelaw: Sometimes we touched on it.
• 6:27
  Ben Whitelaw: where capitalism should still exist, uh, which we, we touched on at the end of last episode.
• 6:32
  Ben Whitelaw: but this first story is all about that really.
• 6:34
  Ben Whitelaw: there is a fascinating story that's, kind of emerged this week.
• 6:38
  Ben Whitelaw: and you know, you're gonna tell us a bit about it and how people are really going a long way to ensure that they get paid, what they think they're owed.
• 6:45
  Ben Whitelaw: explain a bit more about what it is.
• 6:47
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, so obviously, you know, with all the prediction markets, there's been a lot of talk about.
• 6:52
  Mike Masnick: the potential problems of them.
• 6:54
  Mike Masnick: but most of, most of the discussion has really been about the insider training things.
• 6:58
  Mike Masnick: I mean, there have been multiple stories where it's like every time, the US government does something crazy like invade a country.
• 7:06
  Mike Masnick: That right before that happens, there happens to be, a huge amount of money suddenly placed on that same event happening, which certainly suggests that people high up in the US government are trying to cash in on the fact that they know we're about to suddenly invade a foreign country and, and therefore placing bets, which is scary and.
• 7:25
  Mike Masnick: Deeply problematic in its own right.
• 7:27
  Mike Masnick: But there was an interest, really interesting story that made the rounds went pretty viral this week from the Times of Israel and uh, war reporter there, Emmanuel Fabian, talking about how he had done a, there was just like a live.
• 7:40
  Mike Masnick: Blog about, Iranian missiles that were targeting Israel and one landed somewhere, didn't kill anyone, landed in a relatively empty area, and he just put out a short, I think it was like 150 word live blog post, just mentioning that like, you know, this missile struck this space and, and there was nobody there.
• 7:59
  Mike Masnick: And, and nothing happened.
• 8:00
  Mike Masnick: And he started getting.
• 8:02
  Mike Masnick: All of these messages, and it started out like the first few were kind of friendly and just said, like, basically, can you check again?
• 8:09
  Mike Masnick: I think you made a mistake, the missile didn't hit.
• 8:12
  Mike Masnick: it was a fragment basically saying, the missile defense system, the Israeli missile Defense system must have hit that missile and it was a missile fragment.
• 8:20
  Mike Masnick: The actual missile didn't hit.
• 8:23
  Mike Masnick: Israeli land.
• 8:24
  Mike Masnick: And he checked and he checked his sources and he looked at the video and he said, no, like my initial report was right.
• 8:30
  Mike Masnick: And he, you know, knows people and checked and he, was fine.
• 8:34
  Mike Masnick: And then the next day he gets an email that was a little bit more aggressive from somebody else.
• 8:37
  Mike Masnick: And it's like somebody, he, these are not people he knows and it's just like.
• 8:41
  Mike Masnick: I, I really think you should check it is like a little bit more forceful and then like, it basically keeps escalating to the point that like people are saying, you need to change that report and say that a missile did not hit, and he was getting like really confused, until he realized that there was a bet on poly market, which is the other big, prediction market in which the bet was whether or not.
• 9:06
  Mike Masnick: an Iranian missile strike would hit Israel.
• 9:09
  Mike Masnick: And his reporting was being used as proof that it did.
• 9:14
  Mike Masnick: and these people obviously had bet that it would not, and it, it got more and more aggressive to the point that someone reached out to him on WhatsApp and was basically threatening him and told him where his family lived and.
• 9:28
  Mike Masnick: Was going on and on and Then somebody faked an email like he had replied to the first few people and was just like, you know, no, I checked and it's fine.
• 9:38
  Mike Masnick: Somebody faked one of the email replies and said, oh yes, I made a mistake.
• 9:42
  Mike Masnick: I'm going to update it now.
• 9:44
  Mike Masnick: And then started posting that all across X and they're like, oh, he is gonna change it.
• 9:48
  Mike Masnick: He's gonna change it.
• 9:49
  Mike Masnick: And you know, apparently there were millions of dollars.
• 9:52
  Mike Masnick: Bet on this one thing that people were going to lose and, somebody reached out like a, Colleague at another journalism outlet reached out and was like, Hey, an acquaintance was asking if you could correct this thing.
• 10:05
  Mike Masnick: And he like went back to that, colleague and was like, can you find out if your acquaintance bet's on poly market?
• 10:11
  Mike Masnick: And they checked and it was like, yeah, he does.
• 10:13
  Mike Masnick: And so Basically, at the end it was like he was getting death threats and people were saying like, if you don't change this, like it's, no big deal.
• 10:20
  Mike Masnick: You just have to change this one sentence.
• 10:21
  Mike Masnick: It's not gonna make a difference to you.
• 10:23
  Mike Masnick: But if you don't like, we're gonna make your life hell and we're gonna, we know how often you visit your parents.
• 10:28
  Mike Masnick: Like, there was all of this like, really scary, really creepy stuff.
• 10:32
  Mike Masnick: and, he went to the police with it all and then he went public with it and he said the second he went public with it.
• 10:38
  Mike Masnick: It all stopped and they all went away.
• 10:40
  Mike Masnick: and poly market claims that they banned those users, but I'm not entirely sure how they figured out who was, doing what.
• 10:47
  Mike Masnick: and it is crazy and you can see the incentive structure here.
• 10:52
  Mike Masnick: but the thing that really struck me about it.
• 10:54
  Mike Masnick: Was people have talked about prediction markets for decades, right?
• 10:58
  Mike Masnick: Like people have always thought like, oh, it's an, it's an interesting idea.
• 11:01
  Mike Masnick: if people are putting money on predictions, that gives incentives for the predictions to be better and for them to be more accurate.
• 11:09
  Mike Masnick: And so.
• 11:10
  Mike Masnick: There was always this theory that prediction markets can be better than polls, certainly better than pundits.
• 11:16
  Mike Masnick: Pundits are generally useless, as we say, is two, two pundits here.
• 11:21
  Mike Masnick: Um, but, uh, um, the idea was like, okay, well if people are putting money on it, the fact that there is insider trading is almost sort of built in as part of the idea.
• 11:30
  Mike Masnick: Like, yes, because insiders will play in these markets.
• 11:33
  Mike Masnick: It will give you more accurate information in the long run.
• 11:36
  Mike Masnick: But it also creates incentives for when there are big bets for people to falsify the results.
• 11:44
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 11:44
  Mike Masnick: and that leads to the realization that there's this hidden element in many of these prediction markets, which is that they are relying on journalists to confirm or not confirm the different elements of a bet.
• 11:59
  Mike Masnick: And so they're basically outsourcing the, conclusion of the bet to, Vastly underpaid journalists and not recognizing how much pressure then is going to be put on those journalists.
• 12:12
  Mike Masnick: And after this story went viral.
• 12:15
  Mike Masnick: the reporter did an interview with Charlie Worzel at The Atlantic where Charlie asked him, which I thought was really interesting, said, like, did you ever consider changing the story?
• 12:26
  Mike Masnick: And I thought his, his answer was very interesting because He said, yeah, he said he actually gave it a thought for a second, not because like, this will all just make this go away and people stop threatening my family and everything, but more just like, did I get it wrong?
• 12:40
  Mike Masnick: Did I make a mistake?
• 12:41
  Mike Masnick: Because sometimes journalists make mistakes.
• 12:44
  Mike Masnick: It's, it's part of, you know, it happens.
• 12:46
  Mike Masnick: but he's like, you know, he.
• 12:48
  Mike Masnick: Did the research.
• 12:48
  Mike Masnick: He, he watched the video.
• 12:50
  Mike Masnick: He spoke to military people.
• 12:52
  Mike Masnick: He, he knew, how to report how to, this is, you know, what he does.
• 12:55
  Mike Masnick: but they were making him, reconsider whether or not his own reporting was accurate because they were so forceful and so insistent on it.
• 13:04
  Mike Masnick: And so.
• 13:04
  Mike Masnick: it's like this crazy new world in which you have this economic incentive built into how the reporting works, and that is distorting reality rather than like being a better predictor of reality.
• 13:19
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, exactly It's having a really perverse effect, on our kind of information ecosystem in ways that we don't even recognize yet.
• 13:26
  Ben Whitelaw: and that, that's really quite scary.
• 13:28
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean, the fact that, you know, the story talks about$14 million being wagered on literally a couple of sentences in a live blog.
• 13:37
  Ben Whitelaw: And that kind of blew my mind.
• 13:40
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, there's, the idea that actually that, if that hadn't been written, people would've been paid out that bet.
• 13:45
  Ben Whitelaw: the fact that the kind of users of poly market are citing.
• 13:48
  Ben Whitelaw: Sentences in, articles and tracking live blogs and trying to of figure out evidence that can lead them to be paid out, or not paid out was, shocking to me.
• 13:57
  Ben Whitelaw: It's a kind of, as you can tell from my lack of betting experience at the top of the episode, this was like a real shock to me.
• 14:02
  Ben Whitelaw: and no mention of sandwiches whatsoever.
• 14:04
  Ben Whitelaw: So it, it's a.
• 14:07
  Ben Whitelaw: What I wanted to ask that, what do you think Poly Market's responsibility is here?
• 14:12
  Ben Whitelaw: they said that they banned the people involved.
• 14:14
  Ben Whitelaw: I couldn't find any mention on the website of any community guidelines of any, trust and safety mentions.
• 14:21
  Ben Whitelaw: There's no, I couldn't find it on a brief of look of LinkedIn, any people responsible for trust and safety.
• 14:27
  Ben Whitelaw: they have terms of service, they have privacy terms, but there's.
• 14:31
  Ben Whitelaw: Nothing there that suggests that there is any kind of formal, what we'd know to be trust and safety operations or enforcement.
• 14:38
  Ben Whitelaw: What's your sense on, on whether these prediction markets should be doing trust and safety or any kind of Prohibiting this behavior?
• 14:44
  Mike Masnick: yeah, I mean, I think to some extent.
• 14:47
  Mike Masnick: They're, going through the, the learning curve that, that, that, you know, social media companies and, lots of other companies have gone through.
• 14:54
  Mike Masnick: I mean, the reality is that most prediction markets, the people who are creating prediction markets, how do I put this diplomatically?
• 15:01
  Mike Masnick: Um.
• 15:02
  Mike Masnick: they tend to come from sort of libertarian backgrounds, right?
• 15:06
  Mike Masnick: They're the same people who built new social media sites saying, this is going to be the free speech site.
• 15:12
  Mike Masnick: We're not gonna do any moderation at all because we believe in free speech.
• 15:16
  Mike Masnick: Those are the same people who say prediction markets because you're putting money on things.
• 15:20
  Mike Masnick: You get better information, and they refuse to sort of recognize how.
• 15:25
  Mike Masnick: That can be true in some circumstances, but it can also lead to incredible distortions because once you put money into it, then people will start to try and figure out how do you maximize their profits?
• 15:35
  Mike Masnick: And so that is a distortionary effect.
• 15:38
  Mike Masnick: And so I think what is starting to happen is that those sites are going to realize that either they're going to have to start to do some of this, some sort of safety kind of work, trust and safety work, and have better policies.
• 15:52
  Mike Masnick: Or they're basically gonna face all sorts of problems.
• 15:55
  Mike Masnick: I mean, we should note that Calci earlier this week was also charged with running a criminal gambling operation by the state of Arizona.
• 16:02
  Mike Masnick: that's very early.
• 16:03
  Mike Masnick: We'll see if that actually goes anywhere.
• 16:05
  Mike Masnick: but you know, there was also a similar issue a few weeks ago when the US first, started bombing Iran, where there was a bet, I think it was on poly market.
• 16:16
  Mike Masnick: I can't, I, I get the two of them mixed up and I don't, I don't use either of them, but I think it was Poly Market had a bet about regime change in Iran and there was a bunch of bets right before the US started bombing.
• 16:27
  Mike Masnick: So there was definitely this assumption that there was some insider, trading there.
• 16:31
  Mike Masnick: And then when the Ayatollah was killed.
• 16:34
  Mike Masnick: Poly markets said, we're not paying out because we don't allow They do have some rules.
• 16:39
  Mike Masnick: They said they don't allow bets based on someone's death.
• 16:42
  Mike Masnick: so now you're getting into the weeds of like, does regime change only mean without death?
• 16:47
  Mike Masnick: You know, and, and so, you know, these are the types of like, trust and safety.
• 16:52
  Mike Masnick: Decision making things that everyone has to go through where it's like easy to put in place rules and say, these are the conditions on which you get banned.
• 17:00
  Mike Masnick: But then everybody's gonna fight about the specific context of that and whether or not it meets the criteria.
• 17:06
  Mike Masnick: And here we have this, except there's money behind it.
• 17:08
  Mike Masnick: So you have the same sort of thing, like regime change.
• 17:11
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 17:11
  Mike Masnick: But death?
• 17:12
  Mike Masnick: No.
• 17:12
  Mike Masnick: Well, what if regime change and death happen at the same time?
• 17:16
  Mike Masnick: You know, like, then what do you do?
• 17:18
  Mike Masnick: And that's where you need like.
• 17:20
  Mike Masnick: Clear policies and better policies, and I don't think that these platforms, Fought that far ahead.
• 17:26
  Mike Masnick: And so they're, they're sort of making it up as they go along.
• 17:28
  Mike Masnick: And so they say oh no, you know, the bet on regime change doesn't count because someone died.
• 17:34
  Mike Masnick: And now I think they're getting sued for that.
• 17:36
  Mike Masnick: And so they'll have to, fight that out in court.
• 17:38
  Mike Masnick: But I, you know, sooner or later, like every social media platforms realizes like, we can't have the, everything goes, we're the free speech platform and have that work.
• 17:48
  Mike Masnick: I think these.
• 17:49
  Mike Masnick: prediction markets, if they're going to survive at all, whatever legal onslaught they're facing, both civil and criminal, and regulatory pressures and everything along those lines, they're going to have to realize that they're going to have to put in place like much more stringent rules.
• 18:02
  Mike Masnick: just to even have people trust them again, right?
• 18:05
  Mike Masnick: Because like if they can say like, no, this doesn't count because we've decided that death doesn't count and that wasn't made clear before, then you're gonna have a lot of people accusing them of changing the rules on the fly, and that destroys trust in the platform as well.
• 18:19
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, I mean, ironically this story came out just a few days after, poly Market announced a partnership with Palantir and an AI company called TWG ai.
• 18:32
  Ben Whitelaw: Wait for it, it gets better, to create what they call a new standard for sports market integrity controls.
• 18:40
  Mike Masnick: There you go.
• 18:41
  Ben Whitelaw: So, they originated kind of as a sports platform.
• 18:45
  Ben Whitelaw: that's where a lot of these kind of, prediction markets begin, but it has kind of grown as you say, and judging by that announcement and, you know, the tools that they're clearly kind of creating, they have had issues in the past.
• 18:58
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, whatever.
• 18:59
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm not gonna go into the details'cause it's kind of PR bullshit, but, um, this, this tool that they've created with Palantir helps to kind of detect, coordinated activity, irregular market patterns, all the kind of stuff that a trust and safety team would do.
• 19:13
  Ben Whitelaw: I guess the worry is that this, they're clearly using ai, to be able to do this at scale and in the kind of real time that they need to be able to.
• 19:21
  Ben Whitelaw: To, push back, and that is a concern in its own, its
• 19:24
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 19:24
  Mike Masnick: I mean, you know, to me, I don't know that the coordinated behavior stuff is as big a problem as, all the other stuff.
• 19:30
  Mike Masnick: I mean, in the sports betting world, there were all these stories last year about, I mean, there were a bunch of different stories, but like.
• 19:36
  Mike Masnick: athletes getting angry people, there were, there were a bunch of stories of like people demanding money over Venmo.
• 19:43
  Mike Masnick: They would find an athlete's Venmo and say like, you didn't score this many points, and I bet on you to do that and you owe me 50 bucks or whatever.
• 19:53
  Mike Masnick: and it's just like all of these.
• 19:55
  Mike Masnick: You know, there's so much pressure that, that is the bigger problem.
• 19:58
  Mike Masnick: And I don't, I haven't seen these companies take any approach to really dealing with those kinds of things.
• 20:04
  Mike Masnick: and at the same time, I mean, the other thing, you talk about partnerships.
• 20:07
  Mike Masnick: I mean, Palantir is one thing, but like, I.
• 20:09
  Mike Masnick: A lot of news organizations are partnering with these, prediction markets,
• 20:15
  Ben Whitelaw: Mm.
• 20:16
  Mike Masnick: to me that's really scary too.
• 20:18
  Mike Masnick: In light of like, you know, what's happening here to a journalist, you can see a world in which, some of these, these media companies get pressure to like, don't report this thing because you know, we're, we're gonna lose this bet.
• 20:32
  Ben Whitelaw: Yep.
• 20:32
  Mike Masnick: it strikes me as really, really problematic incentives and like, again, there's this weird realization because like I will admit, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, I was intrigued by prediction markets.
• 20:46
  Mike Masnick: Like there is a conceptually interesting idea behind them where it's like, yeah, if there is money backing.
• 20:55
  Mike Masnick: predictions does that make them more accurate?
• 20:57
  Mike Masnick: And there's an argument that maybe it should, but, now we see the reality, which is like when you put money in, the incentives change.
• 21:05
  Mike Masnick: And it's not just to be more accurate, sometimes it's to like mess with the way that we determine what truth is and that, that is really, really problematic.
• 21:14
  Mike Masnick: and so it's a really interesting space and it's one I think we're gonna be hearing a lot about, especially as they become so widely recognized and used, especially by media companies.
• 21:25
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, I think that's a really good point.
• 21:26
  Ben Whitelaw: Like the fact that this looks like a, a financial story or a story about a specific platform, it, it isn't about that.
• 21:34
  Ben Whitelaw: It's about the, the ripples on, the way that speech works, which I think is so key and, and also.
• 21:40
  Ben Whitelaw: the kind of abuse and harassment and targeting that you mentioned, of this reporter actually didn't happen on poly market.
• 21:45
  Ben Whitelaw: It happens on, on other platforms.
• 21:47
  Ben Whitelaw: Right?
• 21:47
  Ben Whitelaw: So it starts to become the problem of regular social platforms and starts to bleed into the, world of trust and safety professionals who, yeah.
• 21:57
  Ben Whitelaw: Who are obviously starting to having to deal with this new kind of, or this new shape of, harm as well.
• 22:02
  Ben Whitelaw: So.
• 22:02
  Ben Whitelaw: Really interesting story.
• 22:03
  Ben Whitelaw: I think it's, Glad we we kind of talking about it'cause it feels very relevant to the work.
• 22:07
  Ben Whitelaw: We do a similar kind of story, in that it looks like one thing and probably actually is if you dig deeper, it feels like another is this next one about diesel.
• 22:18
  Ben Whitelaw: the French streaming music streaming site, DZA, announced some results this week and on the surface of it, yeah, it looks like a kind of how Dza as a platform and a company is performing.
• 22:28
  Ben Whitelaw: It actually made a profit for the first time in, over 20 years.
• 22:31
  Ben Whitelaw: but actually for me it's a really a story about platform manipulation.
• 22:35
  Ben Whitelaw: And it's a platform that we don't really talk about, on the podcast.
• 22:37
  Ben Whitelaw: So I thought we would, it'd be worth talking about today.
• 22:40
  Ben Whitelaw: essentially kind of what the CEO of D talked about in announcing these financial, results is that kind of AI fraud does a, are making a living on the platform by Don only, playing music and, and getting royalties from playing music, but also by loading tracks and then.
• 22:56
  Ben Whitelaw: playing their music and, and earning royalties on the back of it.
• 22:59
  Ben Whitelaw: So what used to be, kind of one-sided, bot farming scam where you could create, some music, have a bot play it regularly, and then make money from it is now a kind of double sided, scam where you can also now create music that sounds very much like a human and.
• 23:16
  Ben Whitelaw: You can then make even more money from that.
• 23:18
  Ben Whitelaw: a much more scalable, much more kind of financial lucrative scam.
• 23:21
  Ben Whitelaw: and the interesting thing here for me is that it's really difficult to kind of know what is a, human artist or a legitimate artist and what is an AI artist now.
• 23:29
  Ben Whitelaw: And that's making it very difficult for platforms like, diesel, but also Spotify.
• 23:36
  Ben Whitelaw: Band camp and some others who, have really struggled over the last year or so to, make that distinction.
• 23:41
  Ben Whitelaw: just a bit on the numbers of how many, songs di is finding that are AI generated.
• 23:48
  Ben Whitelaw: it's only 3% of the total di a track database.
• 23:53
  Ben Whitelaw: so relatively small number, but the, thing that they're seeing is that it's scaling very fast.
• 23:57
  Ben Whitelaw: So 40% of every.
• 24:00
  Ben Whitelaw: Daily upload.
• 24:01
  Ben Whitelaw: every daily song upload is now AI generated.
• 24:04
  Ben Whitelaw: They believe around 60,000 tracks every day.
• 24:06
  Ben Whitelaw: So you can see over time how that 3% might be a much larger number.
• 24:11
  Ben Whitelaw: and what's interesting is that of the 3%, 85% of those are fraudulent.
• 24:16
  Ben Whitelaw: So those, plays and those songs are not legitimate at all.
• 24:20
  Ben Whitelaw: And those are the things that these are having to kind of invest in weeding out.
• 24:23
  Ben Whitelaw: as I say, Spotify have aggressively gone after AI generated music, in September last year that they said that they were protecting against the worst parts of ai, investing heavily in, in screening out ai.
• 24:36
  Ben Whitelaw: tracks.
• 24:36
  Ben Whitelaw: They got rid of 75 million tracks, would you believe in 12 months last year.
• 24:42
  Ben Whitelaw: and Bandcamp also banned AI music earlier this year.
• 24:46
  Ben Whitelaw: So there's this kind of real whack-a-mole when it comes to AI fraud, AI spam.
• 24:51
  Ben Whitelaw: I dunno what you think about the, the kind of differentiation there, Mike.
• 24:54
  Ben Whitelaw: I think it feels like we're kind of becoming.
• 24:57
  Ben Whitelaw: Becoming a bit more serious about what we used to call maybe AI slop 12 or 18 months ago, and is now actually being kind of crystallized into a, a type of fraud something more serious than that.
• 25:07
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, I mean, I, I think the, fraud angle is the important one here.
• 25:11
  Mike Masnick: It's the fraudulent plays that are the problem, right?
• 25:13
  Mike Masnick: If, if someone were just uploading, crappy music, AI generated music that was no good and nobody listened to it, there's no problem, right?
• 25:21
  Mike Masnick: Because, I mean, other than like some space on deezer servers, but, you know, it's not, that big of a problem.
• 25:27
  Mike Masnick: It's the fraudulent plays that you get paid for.
• 25:30
  Mike Masnick: That is, the issue.
• 25:31
  Mike Masnick: And so, there's always been attempts by people to sort of game these systems for payment, right?
• 25:36
  Mike Masnick: I mean, there were famous stories of like people uploading white noise in particular'cause they knew people were always looking for white noise or, you know, my favorite was, you know, when certain artists weren't on Spotify.
• 25:49
  Mike Masnick: people uploading songs with the same names as those famous songs, just to get the plays and try and get some of the revenue.
• 25:55
  Mike Masnick: And it's all just gaming for, revenue.
• 25:58
  Mike Masnick: But the really scary, not scary part, but the really challenging part is the fraudulent plays.
• 26:02
  Mike Masnick: And how do you determine what is fraudulent or what is not like, I think the reality is that like with the AI generated music.
• 26:10
  Mike Masnick: you know, some of, lots of it is terrible, but some of it's actually not bad.
• 26:16
  Mike Masnick: Right?
• 26:16
  Mike Masnick: And like, we're seeing stories now of like, actual people who know something about how to make music using AI to actually make decent music.
• 26:25
  Mike Masnick: And I'm sure before long there'll be stories of like a number one hit that was AI generated.
• 26:30
  Mike Masnick: I, I think that is a world that might exist.
• 26:33
  Mike Masnick: and I.
• 26:34
  Mike Masnick: Personally don't have a problem with that.
• 26:36
  Mike Masnick: I think, the way that people make music changes over time and, there have been, computer aided efforts to make music for a very long time and some very successful songs that were made in ways that were not possible before the advent of computers.
• 26:52
  Mike Masnick: and so AI to me is just the next step of that.
• 26:55
  Mike Masnick: there's, there's.
• 26:55
  Mike Masnick: Creativity involved.
• 26:57
  Mike Masnick: And there was a story that I had written about and I've talked about from a few years ago, where like the musician, Grimes, uh, Elon Musk's ex, not X is the platform, but ex partner, uh.
• 27:10
  Ben Whitelaw: was the inspiration.
• 27:12
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, that's right.
• 27:12
  Mike Masnick: Uh, had, had, I realize as I was saying that that could be taken in all different ways, but, um, that she had released like an AI version of her voice so that you could add her singing to any song that you wanted and if you made money from it, she wanted 50% of the cut, which was an interesting experiment.
• 27:31
  Mike Masnick: And like there are interesting ways that people are using AI to create music, and I don't have a problem with that.
• 27:36
  Mike Masnick: I think that there are some people who.
• 27:38
  Mike Masnick: Will say that they wanna be sort of purists and they only want human created music.
• 27:43
  Mike Masnick: And you know, look, to me, that's a taste decision.
• 27:46
  Mike Masnick: If that's what you want, great.
• 27:48
  Mike Masnick: but the real problem here is like being able to, set up these fraudulent listens and then profit from it.
• 27:54
  Mike Masnick: the whole point of these kinds of services are supposed to be, a way for people to listen to music and for musicians to get paid at the same time.
• 28:01
  Mike Masnick: And when you're, doing fraudulent streams, you're sort of wrecking that ecosystem.
• 28:07
  Mike Masnick: And to some extent it's, you know, it's another version of the same story that we were talking about in the first story of once you put a way to get paid into this process, the incentives change.
• 28:18
  Mike Masnick: And once the incentives change, you need to have systems to be able to deal with that as a platform.
• 28:24
  Mike Masnick: Otherwise people are going to game it and cash out in fraudulent ways.
• 28:27
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 28:28
  Ben Whitelaw: when I was thinking about this story earlier, I think, I think you're right.
• 28:31
  Ben Whitelaw: Thinking about these platforms such as Dza and Spotify and Bandcamp and I guess kind of streaming platforms as well as reservoirs is for me a helpful kind of metaphor.
• 28:44
  Ben Whitelaw: You kind of described it as an ecosystem.
• 28:46
  Ben Whitelaw: I'm gonna take the metaphor a little bit further.
• 28:48
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, you know, so, so.
• 28:50
  Ben Whitelaw: Because you have these different types of platforms.
• 28:52
  Ben Whitelaw: You have these platforms that kind of rely on trust and have a kind of catalog of information that users go to in order to, get what they think to be true and trusted.
• 29:04
  Ben Whitelaw: Right?
• 29:04
  Ben Whitelaw: And, and that's what happens when you go and click on any, song on Spotify's.
• 29:07
  Ben Whitelaw: You expect it to be.
• 29:09
  Ben Whitelaw: who that artist is and the song that it's, purporting to be and the monetization of that.
• 29:15
  Ben Whitelaw: what we're getting in return there we pay for in subscriptions or, you know, via licensing in some way.
• 29:20
  Ben Whitelaw: And in those kind of platforms, any kind of AI dilutes that, value proposition, it dilutes that, That trade off, right?
• 29:29
  Ben Whitelaw: You give me trusted information, I give you money in return.
• 29:33
  Ben Whitelaw: and it kind of, it acts as a kind of pollutant essentially to the reservoir.
• 29:37
  Ben Whitelaw: I was thinking about it as other platforms.
• 29:39
  Ben Whitelaw: If you think about the way that Facebook and Instagram, and TikTok ever kind of embraced AI content, it's completely different.
• 29:47
  Ben Whitelaw: then that's because I think they, they act like giant open seas, right?
• 29:52
  Ben Whitelaw: Um.
• 29:53
  Ben Whitelaw: it doesn't matter how much water there is, whether it's kind of polluted or otherwise, they just want more water.
• 30:00
  Ben Whitelaw: 'cause the more water that they can kind of pass through, the more advertising they can serve in between and the more people stay engaged.
• 30:07
  Ben Whitelaw: So it's this kind of distinction between reservoirs and seas that I was, I was thinking through when I was reading this story.
• 30:15
  Ben Whitelaw: not always, you know, that the social platforms are, are seas and that the kind of marketplaces are reservoirs.
• 30:21
  Ben Whitelaw: But there is an overlap there.
• 30:23
  Ben Whitelaw: But I think there's, for me, that kind of categorization of, of the two types of platforms and the types of ecosystems that they represent and also the way that they're approaching AI is kind of helpful.
• 30:33
  Ben Whitelaw: And I wonder, I wonder if it's helpful for the listeners as well.
• 30:36
  Ben Whitelaw: what do you think does that, does that pass master, or.
• 30:38
  Mike Masnick: I'm not sure.
• 30:40
  Mike Masnick: I'm not sure.
• 30:41
  Mike Masnick: I agree.
• 30:41
  Mike Masnick: I mean, I think, there's an interesting point there, but I'm, I'm not sure that the metaphor works for me.
• 30:46
  Mike Masnick: I think there, few different elements here to think about.
• 30:48
  Mike Masnick: So one is that, with the social platforms, the value is in.
• 30:54
  Mike Masnick: I know you're not just saying like social versus marketplace, but like social platforms, the value is in constant flow of new information.
• 31:01
  Mike Masnick: Like you don't go back and look at old Facebook posts very often.
• 31:04
  Mike Masnick: I mean, yeah, you have like the nostalgia ones, but you're not going there to like, see what your cousin wrote six years ago.
• 31:12
  Mike Masnick: Like whatever So those platforms need the flow, right?
• 31:16
  Mike Masnick: They need much more flow of information.
• 31:19
  Ben Whitelaw: like, like a, like a tide, like a new
• 31:21
  Mike Masnick: see?
• 31:21
  Mike Masnick: Okay.
• 31:21
  Mike Masnick: Okay.
• 31:21
  Mike Masnick: Okay.
• 31:22
  Mike Masnick: I, you fine, fine.
• 31:24
  Mike Masnick: Let's, let's, all right.
• 31:26
  Mike Masnick: I'm not sure that works with, but, okay.
• 31:28
  Mike Masnick: Okay.
• 31:29
  Mike Masnick: We'll live with your metaphor, but the, the, the music platforms, you know, people listen to old music all the time, right?
• 31:36
  Mike Masnick: You just need to keep them coming back.
• 31:38
  Mike Masnick: To, listen to the content that they want to listen to, and that can be old content and not just a constant new flow of content.
• 31:46
  Mike Masnick: Obviously, new music is important to it, but it's not as important, right?
• 31:51
  Mike Masnick: I, I don't know what the but if you looked at the ratio of.
• 31:54
  Mike Masnick: how many people are consuming, posts on Facebook that came within the last week.
• 31:59
  Mike Masnick: It's gotta be a very, very high percentage.
• 32:01
  Mike Masnick: If you looked at the people on Spotify, how many of them are listening to music that was released in the last week?
• 32:06
  Mike Masnick: I would imagine it's a decent percentage, but a way lower percentage than, on the social platforms.
• 32:11
  Mike Masnick: And I think there's a difference between, it's like the sort of stock and flow concept that
• 32:16
  Ben Whitelaw: Mm-hmm.
• 32:17
  Mike Masnick: right?
• 32:18
  Mike Masnick: Where the flow matters much more on a social platform, and that creates different incentives, ones that might be much more willing to openly embrace AI generated content.
• 32:28
  Mike Masnick: and, on the, the music platforms, like again, like, I think if.
• 32:33
  Mike Masnick: people were creating like really good songs that people actually liked with ai, I'm not sure it would be that big of a problem.
• 32:39
  Mike Masnick: I'm not sure.
• 32:40
  Mike Masnick: It's the AI that's the problem.
• 32:43
  Mike Masnick: It's the flood and then the scamming that comes after it.
• 32:47
  Mike Masnick: Right?
• 32:48
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, no, I, I, I, I take the point.
• 32:50
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, I suppose the, the approach to AI is much stricter.
• 32:55
  Ben Whitelaw: or the approach to kind of gamification of metrics around content is much stricter.
• 33:00
  Ben Whitelaw: You know, these are, is is weeding stuff out fairly quickly.
• 33:03
  Ben Whitelaw: it's being kind of very proactive.
• 33:04
  Ben Whitelaw: It's talking about it.
• 33:05
  Ben Whitelaw: the other More open.
• 33:07
  Ben Whitelaw: See social platforms, they take a more kind of risk based approach.
• 33:10
  Ben Whitelaw: They're happy to let a lot of AI content
• 33:13
  Mike Masnick: W we, we should just very quickly, quickly clarify,'cause you said open sea and there is that old NFT marketplace called Open Sea.
• 33:21
  Mike Masnick: We're not talking about that, but I just
• 33:23
  Ben Whitelaw: no, we're not talking about, it's the thing, you can't, you can't say any word nowadays without it being some sort of social platform that this episode has taught us that if nothing else, um, but there's a more kinda risk-based approach, right?
• 33:35
  Ben Whitelaw: It's the worst.
• 33:36
  Ben Whitelaw: AI generated content, the CS a, really egregious forms of hate speech, that kind of stuff that, platforms target.
• 33:43
  Ben Whitelaw: but most of it, they're allowing because of the model, because of the revenue model.
• 33:48
  Ben Whitelaw: I, I'm gonna kind of suggest because the more that's in people's feeds, kind of better it is for user, for, platform.
• 33:57
  Ben Whitelaw: And that's, I, I think shaped the embrace of, AI content in the big platforms, and also the way that AI companies have also tried to set up social feed platforms of their own right.
• 34:07
  Ben Whitelaw: Sawa is a kind of, platform that's solely AI generated content.
• 34:10
  Ben Whitelaw: And with the announcement they're gonna be introducing adverts onto chatt pt, you can see a situation where that, works quite neatly.
• 34:17
  Ben Whitelaw: So, yeah, I mean.
• 34:18
  Ben Whitelaw: I, to be honest, I'm not, I'm not unhappy with your reaction to my sea and reservoir metaphor.
• 34:23
  Ben Whitelaw: Uh, I thought you could have been more scathing.
• 34:25
  Ben Whitelaw: So I, I'll take that.
• 34:26
  Ben Whitelaw: I'll take that at this
• 34:26
  Mike Masnick: All right.
• 34:27
  Ben Whitelaw: I'll go, I'll go away and work on the, the, the weak parts.
• 34:31
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, but yeah, I
• 34:32
  Mike Masnick: we'll, we'll follow up with this.
• 34:34
  Ben Whitelaw: yeah, yeah, I'll, uh, do my homework.
• 34:36
  Ben Whitelaw: Um.
• 34:37
  Ben Whitelaw: But yeah, I think the two stories, as you say, speak to the financial intensification of certain behaviors that affect speech in, broader ways.
• 34:45
  Ben Whitelaw: And I think there are a nice pairing, there.
• 34:47
  Ben Whitelaw: So we've, we've put them to bed.
• 34:48
  Ben Whitelaw: We've talked a bit about those.
• 34:49
  Ben Whitelaw: Let's go through other stories that caught Ari this week.
• 34:52
  Ben Whitelaw: Mike.
• 34:53
  Ben Whitelaw: Let's start with a, a story from the BBC that speaks to this idea of a kind of spam renaissance.
• 34:59
  Ben Whitelaw: an increase in, the proliferation of scams online, but with a bit of an AI twist.
• 35:03
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, so this is in the, the BBC.
• 35:06
  Mike Masnick: It was an interesting article with a great title called I Hack Chat, GPT and Google's ai.
• 35:12
  Mike Masnick: And it only took 20 minutes and, you know, how can you not read that article?
• 35:16
  Mike Masnick: It's by, uh, Thomas Jermaine, I think is, uh, the author's name.
• 35:21
  Mike Masnick: And it's basically like.
• 35:22
  Mike Masnick: There is this realization among some that, for decades we had this concept of search engine optimization.
• 35:28
  Mike Masnick: and this was that you wanted to get ranked higher in a search engine.
• 35:32
  Mike Masnick: And so, that led to a whole world of people creating sort of spam farms.
• 35:37
  Mike Masnick: I mean, it's, it's.
• 35:38
  Mike Masnick: the same problem all over again.
• 35:40
  Mike Masnick: where people would create things to try and trick the Google search bot into putting their results at the top.
• 35:46
  Mike Masnick: If you searched for, anything, you know, teddy bears, you wanted your teddy bear store to show up at the top and you would play all these games to sort of spam the search engines.
• 35:56
  Mike Masnick: and took a while for the search engines to figure out how to deal with that and how to crack down on it.
• 36:01
  Mike Masnick: Now, that has moved in a big way into AI optimization.
• 36:05
  Mike Masnick: And lots of people trying to figure out, like if you ask Jet GBTA question that will take you to a website, well, it should take you to my website.
• 36:13
  Mike Masnick: And so there've been all these, these attempts to, game it.
• 36:16
  Mike Masnick: And basically this article is about someone specifically trying to game it in a kind of fun way.
• 36:23
  Mike Masnick: but the, the thing that sort of struck me about it is, the gaming that he did that took him 20 minutes was not that interesting.
• 36:32
  Mike Masnick: I mean, the trick was that he set up.
• 36:35
  Mike Masnick: sites that basically made claims that were weird and unique and something that nobody else would talk about, and so was, able to do that.
• 36:46
  Mike Masnick: specifically he was talking about like, Hotdog eating contests where he put himself as the fastest hotdog eating journalist.
• 36:56
  Mike Masnick: Um, this is not a question that anyone else is going to be asking.
• 36:59
  Mike Masnick: Uh, you know, and so in the same way that you could do that with search engine optimization, basically, like if you could find the unique niche that nobody else had written about and you write about it, then yeah, you're gonna go to the top of the search results engine.
• 37:13
  Mike Masnick: So he did the same thing.
• 37:14
  Mike Masnick: But with, Things that are useless, right?
• 37:18
  Mike Masnick: So like I understand that there's a concern about gaming AI systems and I think it's something to, take seriously.
• 37:25
  Mike Masnick: But I, I found this article while entertaining, uh, and, and interesting.
• 37:30
  Mike Masnick: Not to be like, oh, this is gonna be like a huge problem where if he can do this in 20 minutes, anyone can do this in 20 minutes.
• 37:37
  Mike Masnick: Because for topics that actually matter, there is a wealth of content and you're not going to be able to magically rise to the top of chat GPEs recommendations just by creating a single webpage about it.
• 37:49
  Mike Masnick: but I do think it is an interesting thing that we're going to have to be thinking about, especially when you have, certain sites, certainly a lot of like.
• 37:57
  Mike Masnick: News sites, you know, high value content sites that are worried about ai, who are saying, oh, the AI systems can't scrape us anymore.
• 38:05
  Mike Masnick: So New York Times and NBC, and whoever else is saying like, we don't let AI scrapers scrape our site anymore.
• 38:13
  Mike Masnick: My worry is that when they do that, when the high quality sites take themselves out of the AI scraping, they leave that field open to people who do try and scam the system.
• 38:23
  Mike Masnick: So, you want the higher quality information to be in these systems.
• 38:27
  Mike Masnick: And I you can have a whole other discussion on like.
• 38:29
  Mike Masnick: Value creation, who pays who for what and all of those kinds of things.
• 38:34
  Mike Masnick: But just this idea of, high quality sites taking themselves out of this, opens it up to the kinds of gaming that Thomas did in this article.
• 38:42
  Mike Masnick: And so I think there's a bunch of different interesting things at play, but we're definitely going to have to pay attention to.
• 38:48
  Mike Masnick: AI spam, in terms of like trying to trick the AI tools into, into recommending sites or, making claims that aren't, based in reality.
• 38:56
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 38:57
  Ben Whitelaw: And, and this is a kind of fun experiment, but we've seen, foreign states had, other adversaries do this.
• 39:02
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 39:03
  Ben Whitelaw: In much more serious ways.
• 39:04
  Ben Whitelaw: Right.
• 39:05
  Ben Whitelaw: poisoning LLMs essentially, to spit out information that's, that's not true or that, in the way that the kinda hotdog example was, it would've been nice if he'd done.
• 39:14
  Ben Whitelaw: Like you say, try to target information that was much more well known or well searched for.
• 39:19
  Ben Whitelaw: That would've been a really compelling article.
• 39:21
  Ben Whitelaw: but anecdotally, you know, you see the links that chat gpt and other LLMs throw up as citations for information, and they're very random websites.
• 39:31
  Ben Whitelaw: Like, again, we don't know how the system works under the hood, but like.
• 39:36
  Ben Whitelaw: All kinds of like strange marketing websites.
• 39:39
  Ben Whitelaw: And, and I've got friends that have websites that have large, you're probably the same, uh, who have large, very strong Google search rankings, and they get emails all the time asking for people to like put a blog post on the website and they paid
• 39:54
  Mike Masnick: I, I get, I get 20 of those a day.
• 39:57
  Ben Whitelaw: Right,
• 39:58
  Mike Masnick: I mean, I mean, teched is, is ranked well enough that I will constantly, my favorites by
• 40:03
  Ben Whitelaw: I was saying it, I just, I thought you probably would do.
• 40:05
  Mike Masnick: yeah.
• 40:05
  Mike Masnick: My favorites are the ones that, will, point to an article from like 2004 and say, oh, you know, you link to this, article.
• 40:13
  Mike Masnick: It's no longer online.
• 40:14
  Mike Masnick: Why don't you link to my site instead?
• 40:18
  Mike Masnick: Like, you know, you wrote something about, sports.
• 40:22
  Mike Masnick: I have this, you know, linked to my thing because that article's no longer there because it's from 2004, like linked to my thing and said, I get those all the time, and
• 40:29
  Ben Whitelaw: You say Venmo.
• 40:30
  Ben Whitelaw: Venmo me a thousand bucks, then I'll do it.
• 40:33
  Mike Masnick: No more like 10 million.
• 40:37
  Mike Masnick: Uh.
• 40:38
  Mike Masnick: But it is crazy.
• 40:39
  Mike Masnick: But I, I do think like, this is something to watch and, we have talked about like nation states attempting to do that and, nation states in theory, you know, may have more ability to poison AI results because they can put up, thousands or hundreds of thousands of sites and try and poison the, the content.
• 40:55
  Mike Masnick: But I mean, again, to some extent this will get back to.
• 40:59
  Mike Masnick: the media literacy question, which is that people need to be at least somewhat skeptical of, what information they're getting.
• 41:05
  Mike Masnick: And obviously for lots of reasons, they should be skeptical of the information that LLMs are giving them because sometimes it's just not true.
• 41:12
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, we won't open the, the media re can of worms here'cause we'll be, we'll be all here all day and we
• 41:18
  Mike Masnick: We need, we need a media literacy horn.
• 41:21
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 41:23
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 41:24
  Ben Whitelaw: we need to bring back the instruments.
• 41:25
  Ben Whitelaw: Good reminder.
• 41:26
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, we'll move on to another story.
• 41:27
  Ben Whitelaw: Now, I, I also don't wanna reopen the whole TikTok saga.
• 41:31
  Ben Whitelaw: you know, not least because the consortium of investors are all mates of Trump and quite nefarious
• 41:37
  Mike Masnick: they'll hunt you down.
• 41:39
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, exactly.
• 41:40
  Ben Whitelaw: And, and not least because, you know, there are valid concerns I think, about the way that the platform could be used, to censor or kind of stymie speech.
• 41:49
  Ben Whitelaw: it felt like that story has kind of died down.
• 41:51
  Ben Whitelaw: But I've spotted Mike with my kind of journalistically trained eagle eye, a line in the bottom of a, a Bloomberg article that has raised alarm bells, along these lines.
• 42:01
  Ben Whitelaw: So, in a Bloomberg story about.
• 42:02
  Ben Whitelaw: The US receiving$10 billion as part of the deal.
• 42:07
  Ben Whitelaw: At the very, very end, it says that the new CEO of the TikTok us, company is going to be drum roll, it's head of trust and safety.
• 42:17
  Ben Whitelaw: A guy called Adam Presser.
• 42:19
  Ben Whitelaw: and I just kind of, I almost spat up my coffee when I was drinking it because know the kind of US administration haven't been shy about.
• 42:26
  Ben Whitelaw: The reasons for taking over TikTok, for buying TikTok and assembling this consortium of, people invested in free speech, let's say.
• 42:34
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, but installing the man who kind of controls the way that the platform, runs from a trust and safety perspective is pretty flagrant.
• 42:42
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, not, not not, not to cast dispersions on, you know, Mr.
• 42:47
  Ben Whitelaw: Presser.
• 42:47
  Ben Whitelaw: I dunno what his, background is, but.
• 42:50
  Ben Whitelaw: It feels like they're not trying to, dissuade anyone that they're not thinking a lot about content moderation in terms of the deal.
• 42:57
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, right?
• 42:58
  Mike Masnick: It's I think it's actually, for people who are interested in trust and safety, to see someone who was head of trust and safety effectively becoming CEO of this platform is an interesting evolution.
• 43:09
  Mike Masnick: Now, his trust and safety responsibilities, it appeared that that was.
• 43:15
  Mike Masnick: Only a relatively recent thing.
• 43:16
  Mike Masnick: I looked up his, his biography and his background and, and I guess he was chief of staff.
• 43:21
  Mike Masnick: to the CEO of TikTok for a while, and then became sort of VP of operations and then it was like VP of operations and trust and safety.
• 43:30
  Mike Masnick: so it covered all that.
• 43:31
  Mike Masnick: this is not someone who's like, you know, grew up in the trust and safety world and took over.
• 43:36
  Mike Masnick: But to me, it struck me as interesting because we've heard all these stories about how like, The US is no longer giving visas to people who have trusted safety titles anymore, and here they've like organized this, takeover of TikTok and then allowed them to put the guy who ran trust and safety in charge of it.
• 43:54
  Mike Masnick: is sort of an interesting statement in its own right as well.
• 43:58
  Mike Masnick: but you know, I think.
• 43:59
  Mike Masnick: In some sense.
• 44:00
  Mike Masnick: I don't know anything about him either.
• 44:03
  Mike Masnick: and I've, I do know some people who've worked in trust and safety at TikTok, and I found them to be fairly thoughtful about trust and safety stuff.
• 44:10
  Mike Masnick: I mean, I, I've actually, you know, I think TikTok has had its problem certainly, but as a company, they've actually done some interesting things on the trust and safety side, so there's this interesting element of like what happens when you put a trust and safety exec in charge of an entire company and you know, maybe we're gonna find out.
• 44:28
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, to be continued.
• 44:30
  Ben Whitelaw: but yeah.
• 44:31
  Ben Whitelaw: Interesting, interesting little nugget in that Bloomberg story, people might think, wow, these guys have, done it again.
• 44:38
  Ben Whitelaw: They've, talked for 45 minutes about things that leave me with very little hope for the future of our information ecosystem and the internet at large.
• 44:46
  Ben Whitelaw: We've got A solution to that.
• 44:48
  Ben Whitelaw: An antidote is the next few stories.
• 44:50
  Ben Whitelaw: I think our reasons to be hopeful, Mike,
• 44:52
  Mike Masnick: Okay.
• 44:54
  Ben Whitelaw: you can tell me otherwise.
• 44:57
  Ben Whitelaw: your first story is, I think a, a reason to be hopeful.
• 45:00
  Mike Masnick: Is it
• 45:03
  Ben Whitelaw: Well, I think data labelers kind of pushing back against.
• 45:07
  Mike Masnick: Yeah, I guess, I guess, I mean, I, I was thinking of the, the start of this.
• 45:10
  Mike Masnick: I was wondering like, are you telling me to talk about a different story than the one I was thinking about?
• 45:13
  Mike Masnick: 'cause this one struck me as fairly dark as a starting point.
• 45:16
  Mike Masnick: So this is the 4 0 4 media, had this wonderful article called AI is African Intelligence, and it's talking about the data labelers, for all of these AI systems and how much of it is actually done by people in Africa.
• 45:30
  Mike Masnick: And this is, in some sense, it's.
• 45:32
  Mike Masnick: We're seeing a repeat of the trust and safety stories from so many years ago of the discovery that like, yeah, trust and safety tends to be people in far-flung places away from.
• 45:44
  Mike Masnick: The US and Western Europe, it's often, Asia and Africa doing, very hard jobs, being exposed constantly to terrible content and having to do the moderation.
• 45:55
  Mike Masnick: And now that appears to have switched over in large part to data labeling for ai.
• 46:00
  Mike Masnick: And they have these stories of people who had to spend like.
• 46:03
  Mike Masnick: 18 hours a day looking at and labeling every, frame in a porn video.
• 46:09
  Mike Masnick: That's the part that I'm like, that's really dark.
• 46:11
  Mike Masnick: What do you mean this is a light, light story,
• 46:14
  Ben Whitelaw: okay.
• 46:15
  Ben Whitelaw: Maybe that, not that part of the story, but what happens afterwards is
• 46:19
  Mike Masnick: Right.
• 46:19
  Mike Masnick: But what is interesting is that they, uh, have now started to organize and to fight back and, try and push for their own rights and recognize that like there are humans behind this.
• 46:29
  Mike Masnick: And for all the talk of how, like, you have AI companies and automation is taking over everything, and you have these companies that you know are within 40 miles of where I'm sitting in San Francisco coming up with all these amazing things.
• 46:41
  Mike Masnick: The backbone of it are all of these people often in places like Africa and they're starting to organize and, you know, stand up for their rights.
• 46:49
  Mike Masnick: And it starts with the trust and safety content moderators and, and the work that was, done on that front.
• 46:55
  Mike Masnick: And now they're trying to expand that out to the people who are data labeling.
• 46:58
  Mike Masnick: it struck me that, it was interesting how the companies that.
• 47:04
  Mike Masnick: you know, there are basically new companies that are doing all of this AI labeling, and they haven't gone through this thing where like, Hey, the press yells at you when you treat your workers really, really badly.
• 47:14
  Mike Masnick: and so they're starting to learn that, you know, most of this talks about this company, sama, I think is,
• 47:19
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 47:20
  Mike Masnick: name of it.
• 47:21
  Mike Masnick: And we see in the article also that, mercy Tumi, who we've.
• 47:25
  Mike Masnick: Talked about before, who helped, fight for workers' rights on the trust and safety side is now working to, to help the data labelers as well.
• 47:34
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 47:35
  Ben Whitelaw: And who has been on the podcast in your absence?
• 47:37
  Mike Masnick: Yes.
• 47:37
  Mike Masnick: It was one of our guest hosts.
• 47:39
  Ben Whitelaw: indeed, indeed.
• 47:40
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, so yeah, I think, I think this is, uh, an interesting development.
• 47:44
  Ben Whitelaw: It's, yeah, fascinating that Sam has pivoted quite heavily from content moderation to kind of AI and data labeling, in the wake of all of the, press and regulatory kind of pressure that you mentioned.
• 47:55
  Ben Whitelaw: And yeah, Kenya, you're such kind of fascinating.
• 47:58
  Ben Whitelaw: Country for it, as a large parts of, particularly West Africa as well.
• 48:01
  Ben Whitelaw: So, uh, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm gonna take some hope from that.
• 48:04
  Mike Masnick: Yeah.
• 48:04
  Mike Masnick: I mean, I, I'm hopeful that something good will come out of it, but there's a large part of that story.
• 48:08
  Mike Masnick: It's pretty dark.
• 48:10
  Ben Whitelaw: yeah.
• 48:10
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah.
• 48:11
  Ben Whitelaw: And, and it has been for a long time.
• 48:12
  Ben Whitelaw: I appreciate that.
• 48:13
  Ben Whitelaw: my own kind of personal, hopeful offering is a story that many people would've seen, or at least a video that they might have seen.
• 48:21
  Ben Whitelaw: this is a, video.
• 48:22
  Ben Whitelaw: Kind of crazy video by the Norwegian Consumer Council.
• 48:26
  Ben Whitelaw: Oh, it's fantastic.
• 48:28
  Ben Whitelaw: I mean, I wish we could play a clip.
• 48:30
  Ben Whitelaw: We should have organized that'cause it's so good.
• 48:32
  Ben Whitelaw: essentially of a, Norwegian man, jokingly.
• 48:36
  Ben Whitelaw: Talking about how his job is as an ator, somebody who makes kind of products and services worse in the real world.
• 48:45
  Ben Whitelaw: And the video, which I'm hoping you've seen listeners,
• 48:48
  Mike Masnick: We will put a link in the show notes.
• 48:50
  Mike Masnick: You will go watch it if you have not seen it.
• 48:53
  Ben Whitelaw: Immediately pause and go and watch it.
• 48:56
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, he talks about kind of discovering the internet and.
• 48:59
  Ben Whitelaw: How the internet allows him to kind of scale his justification work.
• 49:03
  Ben Whitelaw: And, and this is a guy who kind of, it opens up by him cutting holes into people's socks.
• 49:08
  Ben Whitelaw: He, he's soaring the bottom off of chairs.
• 49:11
  Ben Whitelaw: He's leaving the fridge door open.
• 49:13
  Ben Whitelaw: He's doing all the kinds of things that make life like terrible and annoying in loads of ways.
• 49:18
  Ben Whitelaw: and obviously intensification is Corey, Dr.
• 49:20
  Ben Whitelaw: Rose's term that he's coined, which refers to kinda the degradation of service or product normally after they've kind of got a large user base, right?
• 49:28
  Ben Whitelaw: So they cease to care about what users, users think.
• 49:31
  Ben Whitelaw: but the, the advert is a wonderful encapsulation of, I think a lot of what we talk about on the podcast, Mike, and, and calls for a new kind of internet, a new kind of digital realm where things can be made differently.
• 49:42
  Ben Whitelaw: it's a kind of marketing ploy that beneath it sits at a lot of like, be.
• 49:47
  Ben Whitelaw: Engagement with policymakers in Europe and in the us.
• 49:51
  Ben Whitelaw: calling for similar, the stuff that we talk about all the time, greater interoperability of platforms, better data, privacy, reframing towards consumers and away from platforms.
• 50:01
  Ben Whitelaw: And so, yeah, we won't have a lot of time to get in, get into the meat of it, but the video itself is, is worth mentioning.
• 50:07
  Mike Masnick: it is absolutely worth mentioning.
• 50:09
  Mike Masnick: I love it.
• 50:09
  Mike Masnick: I love the campaign.
• 50:11
  Mike Masnick: I love the, the sort of philosophy behind it.
• 50:13
  Mike Masnick: The one thing that I will say is that, the specifics matter, like when you talk about wanting a new and better internet, yes, but how you actually get there is really important.
• 50:21
  Mike Masnick: And I felt that their campaign was a little bit weak on specifics.
• 50:25
  Mike Masnick: And they have these sort of philosophical, Policy positions that it's like the details really matter because some of those sound good on their face, but like in reality, end up giving Google and Facebook much more power and things like that.
• 50:39
  Mike Masnick: And so you, you, you always have to be, concerned about the specifics.
• 50:42
  Mike Masnick: But I love the idea of just building a campaign about like, can we have a better internet?
• 50:47
  Mike Masnick: Because I do think that is really important and that's, you know, obviously something I think a lot about.
• 50:51
  Ben Whitelaw: Yeah, indeed.
• 50:53
  Ben Whitelaw: so yeah, hope hopefully we leave listeners with, A feeling of an upbeat, uh, a feeling of being upbeat.
• 51:00
  Ben Whitelaw: I don't wanna, I don't wanna like leave people feeling down and depressed after a
• 51:03
  Mike Masnick: Uh, talking about ification is, is our upbeat ending, Ben, how, how low have we sunk?
• 51:10
  Ben Whitelaw: You've gotta see, you know, the silver lining in these things.
• 51:13
  Ben Whitelaw: I think at least that's what I've
• 51:14
  Mike Masnick: It's, it's only up from here.
• 51:17
  Mike Masnick: Can only get better.
• 51:19
  Ben Whitelaw: Um, which is, you know, you have to come back.
• 51:21
  Ben Whitelaw: Lets week listens and find out.
• 51:23
  Ben Whitelaw: that brings us to the end of today's podcast.
• 51:25
  Ben Whitelaw: appreciate all the, outlets that we cover today, the Guardian Bloomberg FT 4 0 4 Media.
• 51:30
  Ben Whitelaw: we'll include all of those links in the show notes.
• 51:32
  Ben Whitelaw: Thanks for listening.
• 51:33
  Ben Whitelaw: We'll, we'll see you soon.
• 51:34
  Ben Whitelaw: Bye.
• 51:37
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• 51:39
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• 51:43
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• 51:50
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