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Wikipedia Co-Founder: The DIRTY AI Secret Destroying Your Mind · Man in America Podcast

• 0:14
  Speaker 1: What happens when a machine starts thinking for you? What happens when a pastor lets AI write his sermon and then stands up and calls it the voice of the holy spirit? What happens to a family when a robot can cook or clean and do everything a mother does, only faster? Can a machine really replace the love that a mother puts into a home cooked meal for her family, or is it something priceless that's lost the moment we even let it try? My guest today is Larry Sanger, who's the cofounder of Wikipedia.
• 0:46
  This conversation is it's more of a deep philosophical discussion about what AI is doing to the future of humanity itself. We get into what happens when we let a machine do our thinking for us, and Larry doesn't hold back on where he thinks that that heads. He even admits that there was a moment that he caught himself becoming what he calls an appendage of the machine. He had to consciously pull back. By the end, this turns into something much bigger than technology, what it actually means to be human, and whether that can survive in a world where machines can think, write, and speak for us.
• 1:21
  Welcome to Man in America, a voice of reason in a world gone mad. I'm your host, Seth Holehouse. On this show, we talk to real Americans with real solutions. We help you to connect what's happening today to powerful decisions made by people in the past so we can learn from it and build something better. Now before we start, please hit that like button.
• 1:41
  It really helps to get information out to more people. Please subscribe. Share this video or podcast with someone who really needs it, and let me know what your thoughts are in the comments. And remember that every episode is done as both a video and an audio only podcast. So if you'd rather listen, find us on your favorite podcast app.
• 1:57
  And if you're on Apple Podcast, a quick review helps us to reach even more people. Alright. Let's get in this conversation now with Larry Sanger. Larry, I have to say it is an honor to have you on the show, and I'm really looking forward to getting in this discussion with you. So thank you for giving us your time today.
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: Thank you. Well, it's good to be on the program.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: Thank you. So you are the cofounder of what I think is, what, the ninth most visited or tenth most visited website in the world. Like, you know, billions and billions of people every month, which is Wikipedia. And, I guess, before we kinda jump into more of the the the topic we're gonna be, you know, getting into today, do you wanna just give a little bit of your your background? Because that's, I don't often meet people have the opportunity to talk to people that have done some things that you've done.
• 2:47
  So you wanna just walk us through, you know, starting up Wikipedia. What what was that like? What was that process like?
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, my my, very short resume is I grew up in Alaska, as it happens, and I went to college, Reed College, got a PhD in philosophy. All three of my degrees are in philosophy from Ohio State, a year before I started Wikipedia while I was working on Newpedia and Youpedia. And it was basically the parent project of Wikipedia. Wikipedia emerged because Newpedia was growing very slowly, and we were looking for a way to allow the pod to contribute more freely and easily to an encyclopedia.
• 3:44
  And then basically, the tale started liking the dog after Wikipedia started. So I'm responsible for the basic idea of a wiki encyclopedia for the name and a lot of the jargon and a lot of the original policy and formulations. In the first year, essentially, I was like on the talk pages of anybody who showed up and and saying, oh, we should do it this way. We should do it that way. And so I sort of guided it in its initial steps so that it actually was already taking off exponentially by the time I was laid off from the job.
• 4:29
  I was laid off because, basically, the the ad contract that the owner of Wikipedia, Bomis, fell through, basically. It was the it was the trough of the .com boom. So And then it was actually a year after that that I basically washed my hands of Wikipedia. So there was a period of about nine months when I was sort of loosely associated with it. But I said, I'm not going to devalue my professional work.
• 5:09
  If you're not going to pay me, I'm not going to act as the leader of the project. So I didn't. But it just started moving in a direction that I still think is poisonous. And I regret that I was not able to move it in the direction that it had to go. But the the other cofounder, Jimmy Wales, was actually one of the co owners of Wikipedia, along with his two partners in Bomis.
• 5:46
  So, and so I was not the guy to actually make the decision. I'm just the guy who got it started. That's all.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: Interesting. So, you know, I guess, of like the, you know, the McDonald's kind of founder story. Right? When you have the the the intelligent guys that get the idea, then the businessman comes in and they turn it into a business. And before you know it, the the the hardworking, you know, humble beginnings just get kinda pushed aside, basically.
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: Sort of. I mean, it's it's a a slightly different, dynamic than that. Jimmy Wales is not a dummy. He made foolish decisions, but he's not stupid. And when he made you're right, though, that ultimately, I think his decisions were governed by business concerns, and that's a problem.
• 6:43
  But it was a small group. Like, we knew each other, we interacted with each other. But yeah, it's an interesting story, but we don't need to get into Well, the
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: I'm fascinated by the fact that you have this education philosophy. And so, actually, I grew up twenty minutes outside of OSU campus. So that was kind of my my, you know, hometown area in in Middle Ohio.
• 7:10
  Speaker 2: You mind saying which suburb?
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: Oh, it's actually a little town called Plain City. It was, out past Marysville and Delaware. Just kinda and, like, it was in the country, surrounded by by farm fields, but it was a, you know, twenty minute drive to get Downtown Columbus.
• 7:24
  Speaker 2: We're just off 33, near, in in between Columbus and Lancaster.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: Oh, okay. Yep. Yep. My my mom's or my my mom's family is from Lancaster, so we yep. So, yeah, that was the that was that was it.
• 7:37
  And so, but so you're you're I've always had a fascination with philosophy, and especially, you know, using looking through the minds of of great men. You know, right now, I'm listening to, meditations like Marcus Aurelius and trying to, you know, kinda tap into some of that that wisdom to really help us to, I think, understand better what we're going through now. You have this this idea that humanity has come so far along, and the problems that we have are all modern problems. And a lot of them are the same fundamental human problems that that man has been confronting for you know, since the dawn of time. Right?
• 8:12
  And so
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: There's an even older work that I think you might find interesting after you read that, and and that is Ecclesiastes, and and and maybe also Proverbs. Both of those, I think, pair very nicely with Marcus Aurelius.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: Okay. I'll look at them through that lens. I'll reexamine them through that lens. Also, Epictetus, I've found to be also very just interesting and and helpful in this. And you're just trying to frame, you know, what's happening.
• 8:48
  And so, you know, when you when you see where how the world is changing, especially with the advent of the Internet and and the this collective way of sharing ideas, but also spreading ideas. And with with the the Internet, you can see that humanity can change very rapidly. You know, what what maybe would have taken three hundred years for a cultural shift can happen in three weeks now. I mean, it's it's it's very interesting. And and Wikipedia is oftentimes at the center of that, because with that ability to change, you have the ability to affect change.
• 9:26
  Right? I know that with Wikipedia, I think it was back in, what, two thousand and seven and eight, they discovered that the CIA, the FBI, a lot of these intelligence agencies were actually actively editing the content on Wikipedia to to control the narrative. So they're seeing it's a it's a tool for controlling the narrative. And so how how have you seen that evolve with the platform?
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: So I think the general question isn't really about intelligence agencies. We don't know exactly what they have done or how actively they've been involved. I think they wouldn't be doing their job, actually, according to what people say that intelligence is really about these days if they weren't involved in Wikipedia. I think your question, though, is about Wikipedia's role in shaping the narratives that sort of guide the discussions that we have. And I think that's definitely true.
• 10:38
  Basically, beginning actually in 2001 with the destruction of the World Trade Center, the best single source of information about the nineeleven attacks was the Wikipedia article on that, because we were just coming together and documenting each new fact as it came over the transom, and put it into the article with the source. And it was really a sight to behold. Nobody had ever seen anything quite like it before, ability to essentially reflect back all the knowledge that was being generated in the media space. The problem is that in time, I'd say between two thousand and six and twenty eighteen, the Wikipedia administrators discovered that they could lock that whole system down by excluding sources. So they started doing that systematically, and that then allows and continues to allow them to not only document the narrative or the discussion from one point of view, but actually, as you suggest, to further guide it, to actually push it in new directions.
• 12:27
  I think that somebody like George Soros, insofar as what he tries to do by funding Antifa, must be putting money in one way or another, probably laundered in various ways. But I can't say for sure, so I'm not making any accusations here. But but, he'd kind of foolish strategically not to to, put money into Wikipedia in order to guide the narrative because that's what it's good at. Right? That's what it has become good at.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: You're invited to a very important livestream. You know that right now, there's a globally coordinated attack on liberty and privacy to a level that's been never been seen before in humanity. You know that most of the news articles you read are designed to be distractions for the real agenda, the rollout of a social credit system in the West. And that's exactly why I've asked Glenn Meter, an online privacy expert, to give you a special online class on Thursday, August 27 at 8PM eastern, where he shows you all the necessary steps to take back your privacy online. It is a lot easier than you think, especially if you know where to start and you've got a privacy expert that's guiding you.
• 13:40
  Glenn's class is titled exposing a coordinated attack on liberty and privacy. You don't have to be tech savvy to take back your privacy. You don't need any high level technical skills or hacking skills. All you need is the ability to use a browser and a desire to protect your freedom. So Glenn is is even gonna stay on afterwards to answer your questions live.
• 14:00
  So if you feel overwhelmed because you think there's no way to protect your online privacy, you need the strategies that Glenn is giving away for free. So it's time to take back your privacy. So to register for the free webinar, visit privacyacademy.com/maninamerica, or just click on the link in the show description. It takes me to this quote right here out of, Orwell, 1984. He he who controls the past controls the future.
• 14:27
  He who controls the present controls the past. And this is it's interesting watching the evolution of the controlling of the narratives. It's not just the current controlling of the narrative. It it you look at Wikipedia as an example. It's kinda like who moderates and can lock down content on Wikipedia can control the past.
• 14:50
  Right? Because they're controlling the present, and that then gives you the ability to control the future. So you can take something like like Wikipedia, then you can you can change and rewrite history, in essence, if you've got a particular agenda. And if you look at what's also happening with AI, and I recently did a show talking about the AI, the books. Right?
• 15:14
  How the AI companies are basically buying millions of books, scanning them in. And, you know, one of my concerns is that is this the emergence of a, you know, Fahrenheit four fifty one? You know, is the end goal where they wanna have, you know, any books that are controversial or anything like that. Do do they wanna somehow pull those away so you can only go through the AI to to access that information? But then how do you know that you're getting the real information?
• 15:41
  Kind like Wikipedia, how do you know what you're reading isn't some particular agenda that was woven through to there, but then that then shapes your worldview, and it maybe shapes the actions you take towards the future.
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: Yep. Absolutely. I I mean, you've you've said it very well. I don't I don't know what to add there.
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: Well, I guess I mean, I guess kinda looking at at at AI, this is something you've you've spoken about a lot recently and looking at I think it's, you know, ChatGPT, it's getting nearly 50% of its information that it's sourcing to feedback to people is coming from Wikipedia. Right? So it's
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: I don't know. Doubt it's 50%. Maybe it is. Maybe maybe
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: I've seen some maybe yeah. I I can look it up. I I remember something close. I'll see if I can find the exact, the the reference to that. But but it's it's a decent amount.
• 16:33
  Right? And so how how do you how do you say see the the shaping of the narrative on Wikipedia that which then spills into the, you know, training of these, you know, large, you know, language model, AI? How how do you see that all happening and playing out?
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: I think that the people on Wikipedia are aware of this. They have made policies against using AI to write Wikipedia articles, which is itself interesting. And there's two different ways, basically, and I think people might not realize what we're talking about here, right? So Wikipedia articles and their influence on the culture, as we've said, is huge. And so it's not just Wikipedia itself that is used to train.
• 17:35
  It's everything that is influenced by Wikipedia that is used to train these models. So it becomes a sort of central locus or source. The fact that they don't use LLMs to write the articles means that it is, in a certain way, the upstream point from which a lot of the information in LLMs is downstream. And then a lot of times when you ask a question, the LLM will look it up online. And if you tell it not to, one of the first things that it pulls up is the Wikipedia article on the subject.
• 18:15
  And I can tell you that this is problematic not just due to ideological capture. That's maybe the worst problem. But also, it's just bad information sometimes. Been working on a project called Wikicritic, and as part of that, I wrote a review of Wikipedia's article on the unmoved mover, which is this concept in Aristotle. And so I know quite a bit about that because I've spent a good part of the last four or five months actually reading Aristotle and the background of that concept and so forth.
• 18:59
  So I've got it down. So I made a professional review and I discovered that it's garbage. The article says some true things. That's right. But it's got serious accuracy problems.
• 19:17
  And the thing is, when the AI goes to rate that particular article, unless it has direct access to books and journal articles that go deeper than the Wikipedia article, it is not able to actually to deal with the subject as well as an expert would, basically. So it will nod along and say, this is a more or less correct article. Now, actually have to give Claude and other LLMs credit here, because it's not just a reflection of Wikipedia. So everything that we've been saying for the last five minutes, has to be an enormous caveat. There is a lot of other training data.
• 20:10
  And when the Wikipedia article on something, gets something wrong and really badly wrong, people will actually notice that. And, you know, that'll also be part of the training data. So, it can be kind of complex. So I, let's put it this way. My review was harsher to the Wikipedia article, and it had more, let's just say, meatier, in-depth information than the LLM review of the Wikipedia article.
• 20:46
  The LLM review was at least able to catch problems that are not reflected in the Wikipedia article. Sorry, problems with the Wikipedia article. So I actually think that LLMs, because of the influence of other training data, basically, are able to correct Wikipedia, but not as well as they would be able to do if they had a much larger body of training data. So it actually is a really significant problem. It's like a bigger problem than people realize that the LLMs are not trained sufficiently on a lot of proprietary books and journal articles.
• 21:41
  I mean, they they are to a certain extent, but not as much as they should be. Let's put it that way.
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: And that that concerns me, as well, because I think that what I'm seeing emerging is a lot of individuals, they're just saying, oh, that's what AI said. They're looking something up. Especially, also, I think, the younger, you know, people that they they think that they've almost tapped into this oracle, right, known as, you know, And Claude or they're asking these questions, they're thinking, oh, okay, this is the truth. But I I I think that from my understanding of it, the I look at AI as just a machine, and the machine, it still has to have its own internal checks and balances. What does it what does it determine as being success?
• 22:37
  What does it determine as being failure? But, also, what does AI perceive to be truth or conspiracy? And so while people think that, oh, you're accessing AI. It has all the information. It's gonna spit out what's gonna be most accurate.
• 22:50
  Well, AI think AI is is still just there's still a man behind the machine. You're still limited to what the person behind the AI is telling the AI that you can or cannot even explore. And I've run into that too in in, say, researching a topic, and you might ask ChatTPT a question, and it's like, oh, I can't it's kinda like, I can't go there. Or that's a that's a conspiracy. That's unfounded.
• 23:14
  And so you can see that similar to how Wikipedia has been used to push an ideology, the same thing is really coming out with these with these AI.
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. I myself have I remember asking about, you know, what about US involvement in the bombing of there was some incident in the war in Iraq. And it required about five different iterations before I could get it to acknowledge that there was a story. And I actually think, just as a practical point, there's a way to make that a lot easier, and that is to front load it with information about yourself and say, I want you to interact with this sort of background. And then some of the guardrails will actually be taken off.
• 24:19
  I don't think that they're necessarily hardwired. You know? I think some of them are. Like bomb making instructions, you probably aren't going to be able to extract. I haven't actually tried.
• 24:32
  But I have a feeling that information might be difficult to get. I know they've locked down a certain kind of white hacking instructions. You can't learn how to stress test your systems for their security problems. Yes. Because a lot of that same information can be used to hack another system.
• 25:10
  So yes, you're absolutely right. There are people, not just one person, there are people behind these things. But on the other hand, the whole system has taken on a life of its own. They're competing with each other. They're exchanging people, right?
• 25:31
  One person will find a better job in another place. And they're all not constrained just by what the executives or the board of directors happens to say. They're also greatly constrained by their own value system, right? So ultimately, I think that the shape of AI is a reflection not just of the will of our overlords, but it's a reflection of the broader culture and who is ultimately in control of it, where they're trying to push us in a sort of organic way, is what I'm saying. So a lot of Okay, in my interaction with LLMs, I actually don't find it to be terribly woke, but it will very easily slip into that register, right?
• 26:44
  Because a lot of that is sort of valorized in the mainstream media and other sources that are Wikipedia, of course. And so yeah.
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: So I wanna look at there's a recent post you put out on, Twitter, and I'm just gonna read through that because I I I think it's really important. And this is, why I I appreciate your your philosophy, kind of background being applied to this thinking because this is it's also what I find myself asking, right, is you know, if we look back to, say, 1999, right, when the Internet was just coming out, if if you could've gone back and showed someone how drastically the Internet would just completely alter mankind and how we operate and how things work, let alone getting into social media and then getting into AI and and just the fake avatars and all this stuff, it would have been it would have been mind blowing to somebody. But I'm also thinking, well, what would my future self say five or ten years ahead? What would I come back to myself and and and tell myself about how this has shaped, you know, humanity?
• 28:01
  Speaker 2: It's It's really hard to predict, I can tell you that for sure. Because if anyone was in a good position to be able to predict the influence of Wikipedia and just the overall shape of Wikipedia from the first years, it would be me because I actually started the thing. Now, I could see the direction that it was moving in, but I wouldn't allow myself to believe that exponential growth would continue exponentially, which it did for quite a while, like until, I don't know, 2007 or something like that. And then it became more linear. And yeah, I didn't believe it.
• 28:48
  But if I had simply extrapolated from what it looked like, then I easily could have gone through some, in retrospect, what seemed like commonsensical thoughts. Like, the first thought is, Okay, if it's growing right now and there's nothing to stop it from growing right now in an exponential way, it will continue to grow exponentially, at least for a while. Second, if people are really going to to, engage that much in it, then, you know, there is this thing called the establishment. You know, whatever exactly that means, they're gonna take notice. Right?
• 29:30
  So governments will take notices. Big giant corporation, very wealthy people, they will all take notice, and they will use it to their ends as another tool, which they do. And what happens then? I'm no longer in control, that's for sure. Okay?
• 29:48
  That I should have realized right up front. And also that ultimately, any sort of ideals that I have right now about how it should be used are out the window, ultimately. They don't matter. Like my idea of neutrality, the original idea of neutrality, is completely gone from Wikipedia. Right?
• 30:17
  So you can predict the future, yes, but you have to know the right general principles to use. You can't just sort of mindlessly try to extrapolate from current trends. Anyway, just had to say-
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: That's a good point. Let me read through this real quick. It's a few paragraphs here. This is the post you put on. I think this is I wanna I wanna dig in this a little bit with you.
• 30:41
  You say, a central locus of the debate over LLM authorship is the very idea that we are human, that to communicate is human, and above all, love your neighbor as yourself. Insofar as true care of a person involves engaging with him sincerely, I ask, how can you really love your neighbor insofar that involves verbally interacting if you do not genuinely communicate with him? I do not see how. If an LLM is authoring your words, you are not the one communicating, the clanker is. And then your neighbor is not receiving your words but a clanker's.
• 31:16
  Similarly, if your neighbor responds to you not with his own words but with some clankers, then no human interaction has occurred. It's just a mockery of human interaction. This leaves us in bubbles in which we interact with machines, some of which are basically act as our ambassadors to other bubbles at the center of which there's a real human being. That is the direction we seem to be moving in, all communication mediated, never any direct. Our own contribution to the process threatens to shrink as the clankers become more and more adept at predicting what we would say, and who knows when it stops.
• 31:49
  Will we have will will we stop having thoughts of our own? Will we accept the thoughts attributed to us by an intelligent machine as our own? Will we then simply agree to let those thoughts be sent to others or published, attributing to us, but with no one really knowing what we really think because we ourselves don't know. I began this comment by saying there's no way to communicate genuinely if we if mediated by machines, and that we cannot really love one another if we are never authentically connected to one another. But the ultimate cause and result of this state of affairs would be the loss of our own humanity.
• 32:23
  How can there be free will without free thought? How can there be free thought with any thought of our own? If we descend to the center of an LLM mediated bubble, I fear we will end up empty shells, pawns of whoever controls the LLMs. There's a of very profound ideas in there, but I'll I'll I'll let you just expand on this or or comment however you'd like to.
• 32:46
  Speaker 2: Sure. You know, this is a response to a debate that's been happening in the last couple of weeks, I would say, especially it's been going on for longer than that, but especially in the last couple of weeks among at least the people that I interact with on X about the nature of LLM authorship and whether you can actually claim Well, there's two different questions, at least. One is whether you should use LLMs to author text. All right, that's one thing. And the other is whether you should claim that text as your own.
• 33:27
  That's a different question altogether. And one side seems to be saying, look, the nature of authorship has changed. Just as a matter of fact, live with it. Just like with the invention of writing, the nature of thought changed because when you write things down, then new things like whole extended discourses, book length discourses, become possible, which are not really possible in a spoken form. I think that's true.
• 34:08
  And I think also that when publishing became automated with the printing press, that was another huge change in really the way that we interact, but also the way that we think. And and then the advent of of the Internet also. You know? Like, I wasn't in a previous generation, that time that I was spending spending reading online people's just random comments probably would have been spent reading journal articles, which is harder but less immediate and interactive. And now, especially in the last fifteen, twenty years, communication has become much briefer and faster.
• 35:01
  And so anyway, I'm painting a picture here that everybody is familiar with, but to make the sort of case that I'm responding to, which is that what we are doing when we are using LLMs to communicate or just to author text is a natural next step in the technology of using machines to develop our thoughts and to communicate. Okay. My response to this is that in every step before this, there was never a step in which some machine was doing your thinking for you. Now, there's something like that, actually, that has happened in the age of social media. And this is something that people have complained about a lot, namely that our feeds are carefully engineered, and we can be manipulated by our feeds.
• 36:22
  Whereas before, back in the 1990s, you saw the whole fire hose, and you picked what you wanted to read and so forth. It was, in a certain way, much more authentic and genuine. But when someone is controlling how, or rather, what you are reacting to, that changes the whole nature of how we develop the thoughts that we think. It's crazy, but that's true, right? Well, this is one step well beyond even that, all right?
• 36:55
  And here, what we're talking about is a machine actually writing the words that you claim to be your own. And I know exactly what people mean when they defend this, because I've done it myself somewhat. I'll engage Claude in a long discussion about theology or whatever it is I'm thinking about. And I'll go through The total output will be like that much. Like, I've written this much.
• 37:31
  It's two meaty paragraphs. That's it. Right? And I'll say, can you commit that to memory? Just put my words in a way that I can save them.
• 37:45
  I never post them. I think I might have done that once or twice, but I've always said, this is the LLM summary of my thoughts. Okay. But I've always noticed when it does that for me, it always adds stuff. And it's not just like connecting tissue, right, as that's the phrase that it uses.
• 38:14
  It is involved in word choice, And words correspond to concepts. And if they change a word, they actually can change what you have thought. This happened to me last night. I was saying, Okay, I'm thinking of this new feature. I'm going to like, let's discuss this new feature.
• 38:35
  And then I went through the whole process, right? And at this time, I wrote this much to it and I said, Okay, make a requirements document out of that. And I looked it over and it's like, I didn't recognize this at all. This is not what I said. It manipulated what I said, what I told it.
• 38:57
  And then I said, look, I want you to just write down what I said in using my words, but in a way that is more structured and fixes spelling spelling errors and stuff like that. Right? And then ask me a bunch of questions that you think I need to answer, and I will answer them serially. And then what resulted there was still the clanker's work, but it was mostly mine or guided by me or something like that. The whole process is a lot faster than me just doing it all on my own, for sure, because I've done that in the past a lot.
• 39:39
  Like, I'm a very experienced project manager. I've managed a good dozen or more projects, big projects. So I know what it looks like to do it without a clanker. And so I know that it's a big time saver, but just and again, this is just like last night. I sort of threw up my hands and said, what the heck am I even doing here?
• 40:07
  It's like, I don't want to become an appendage of the machine. And the way that Claude wanted me to move in, I would have essentially been that. I would have given it a few suggestive ideas, and then it would write out, it would flesh them out in great detail in a direction that I had not thought of, for sure, and disagreed with, in fact, once I thought about it. And that's really problematic. All right.
• 40:43
  But that's an example from coding, from project management, I guess you'd say. But when it comes to things like politics, philosophy, theology, and so forth, matters are, in a certain way, much more dire. Because what we're talking about there is not a piece of software that goes into production to produce an objective outcome that can be judged on its own merits. In other words, the outcome. Here, when a pastor writes a sermon, for example, the thing is supposed to be an expression of the thoughts and even the spirit of the pastor.
• 41:46
  And if the pastor just generates a sermon, maybe gives it a few thoughts, and lets it generate all the rest, fill in the blanks, do all the research, etcetera, etcetera, that is really, really insidious for several different reasons. The post that you read is actually a follow-up to another post that I did. So there's three different problems with passing off a clanker's work as your own. First of all, that's lying. So you're saying that you wrote this, essentially.
• 42:32
  You're claiming that you wrote it. And I don't want it to be a new standard where if you assert something, you have to guess whether or not a clanker wrote it. It's like, I want to know if a clanker wrote it or if you wrote it, because those are different cases, and I will treat the text differently. So I'm going to continue to call it a lie if a clanker writes something and you pass it off as your own work. That's a lie.
• 43:01
  All right? And second, I'm just reading now. In order to develop and maintain our capacity of thought, we must exercise it and not outsource it. And when it comes to extended thinking, the primary medium of thought is writing. So I mean, if we get into the habit, this is a terrible habit.
• 43:24
  I can tell you already, it is a terrible habit to get into, to just write down a few cursory thoughts and then say, what the hell? Claude can do a better job. I'll give it this outline and let it write the thing. No. That's wrong.
• 43:46
  Right? You are, I guarantee, making yourself a stupider person by doing that because you have to continue to exercise those muscles. Right? And I'm going to add another point along these lines that's not here, and that does apply to pastors. Because I know that actually a fair number of pastors follow me now.
• 44:12
  And it's one thing to lie about what your thoughts are and to weaken your mental abilities. That's terrible. But when you actually pass something off as your own work, claiming it to be supported by the Holy Spirit, like part of the voice of the church, of the body of Christ, one of the leaders of the body of Christ. I mean, that is extremely wrong. I'll have to write an essay about that and try to explain.
• 44:59
  But it's supposed to be an expression of the spirit of God. Okay, LLMs do not have the spirit of God. The spirit of God is not summarized in training data. It's not. It can be aped.
• 45:18
  I'm not denying that, right? Can sound like it, but it's not. The spirit of God is a real thing, right? And it is in a certain way, not biologically organic, but it is an organic thing. It's analog, it's out there.
• 45:39
  And, you know, it indwells us. And, if we are writing something, that is meant to be, you know, preached to God's people, then it has to come from the spirit, not from So a anyway, alright. And then a third reason, right, It is that it's, I'm just going to read this, it's positively insulting, quite aside from the lying inherent in the thing, to be shown words presented as human communication when they are not. There are no such thing. It's not just a lie, in other words.
• 46:22
  It's inauthentic. It's a contemptuous abuse of the trust that another person has that you are communicating with them and not saying, Here, read this, which some machine wrote. That's not just a lie. It's an insidious and actually dehumanizing treatment of your fellow men. So why should I be made to take seriously or respond to some paragraphs that you pass off as your own?
• 46:54
  Or for that matter, why should the congregation accept your words, right, as coming from the Holy Spirit when they clearly didn't, or they didn't come out of your head? Why shouldn't I just assign another clanker to respond to that in kind? Wouldn't that be fair? So the whole process is inauthentic. So that's why when I developed that thought, the whole idea is that we become bubbles, essentially.
• 47:27
  That seems to be the direction that we could be moving in, where we don't actually collide with each other in meat space. Occasionally, if we have to, we'll actually bridge the gap through sound waves and so forth. But in the future, at least online, who knows? We'll always be talking to an LLM. It will always rework our words or develop our words and send those over to another person.
• 48:04
  And maybe those words will be summarized for us by their clanker, And the person we're talking to will maybe utter a few syllables in response, and that will be developed into a whole discourse. I mean, the the whole thing is is extremely dehumanizing on several levels. So
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: Oh, I I I couldn't agree more. Here's an uncomfortable question. Why should your messaging app need to know anything about you? Most of us have already accepted that technology companies collect enormous amounts of information what we click, where we go, what we buy, and who we interact with. That information is valuable because your attention is valuable.
• 48:52
  Keyt takes a radically different approach. So Keyt is a free messaging, file sharing, and video calling app built peer to peer. So there's no centralized company database that's holding on to your conversations. There's no metadata tracking, and no phone number or email are even required to use it. Your messages are end to end encrypted and move between the people in the conversation.
• 49:17
  Your private life shouldn't be another crop in somebody else's data farm. So to get this today, visit keet.io/maninamerica. That's keet, which is keet.io/maninamerica. So download it free, invite one person that you trust, and start a conversation that belongs to you, not some big data harvesting company. When I'm, you know, researching, let's say I'm looking through Substack or looking through what's happening on Twitter, I I've almost detected this you you get, like, your BS detector, what's like the AI detector.
• 49:54
  And and it and it drives me crazy when I'll see these these threads on AI that or on x that go viral, and they've got, you know, 6,000,000, you know, views. But you can see it so plainly, entire thing, which is just AI, like, spew. You you can see it in the sentence structure. You can see it in it'll be like a paragraph. It'll be one line that'll say, let that sink in, period.
• 50:18
  And then it'll kinda Yes. Jump, and you can see or the em dash, or you can see you recognize all these things that that it does.
• 50:24
  Speaker 2: I use em dashes. It it it pisses me off that it has ruined the em dash. I it was trained on me. That's I'm not using it was trained on me. Yeah.
• 50:38
  Those dashes are fine.
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: It's it's funny because sometimes when I'm writing copy or, you know, I'm writing something, I find that I will purposefully remove an em dash, but even when the em dash makes more sense there because I'm like, I I I I've developed this aversion to em dashes. Yeah. And so but when you're reflecting on this, and you you you talked about the you used the word appendage, and and what happens when this becomes an appendage, you become an appendage of it. And I I think that it it really I think a lot of this goes back into the whole idea of transhumanism and this idea of augmenting the human body, the human brain with external machinery technology to improve. But I I think that if you look at if you look at how the introduction of machinery of various kinds has changed things, it oftentimes leads to an atrophy of something.
• 51:34
  Right? If you look at, say, farmers look at farmers, say, a hundred years ago, you'd probably be hard pressed to go find a farmer that weighed 300 pounds a hundred years ago. Right? Because it was a you know, you were it was a hard job. Now I grew up I mentioned in Plain City.
• 51:49
  It was a farming, you know, hence the word plain. Right? It was a farming community. A lot of the farmers I knew growing up were pushing 300 pounds because they were sitting most of their day in a giant combine. And and it was the young guys like us that get to go, you know, load the hay into the hay loft or something like that.
• 52:06
  But I think that that's indicative of something is that the muscles that used to be needed to farm and work the land, those muscles atrophied, and they weren't they weren't needed anymore. And now you've got, you know, drones. You've got AI, you know, operated combines that there's not even a driver out there. The driver could be sitting in a on a couch, you know, drinking a Bud Light doing his farming, right, and harvesting the field. And so if you look at what happens mentally, and this is one of my concerns, is that I feel like that the more people that start using AI to replace their own thought process, I think that we're gonna see an atrophy of the human mind itself, and we're gonna see a dumbing down, of of the overall well, I guess it's of the people that that want to use it.
• 52:48
  So there's a there's a large movement of people rejecting it, which is encouraging, even especially the younger generations. But I'm worried about this, the the atrophying of the human mind and really the human spirit with that.
• 53:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree. And this is actually a it's very interesting that you mentioned transhumanism in this connection, because a lot of leaders of society, it seems to me, especially in Silicon Valley, are basically transhumanists. And what a lot of people don't realize is that this is actually a very old intellectual tradition, and it's an extension of a theological tradition called millennialism. And the the idea is that human beings will be the ones to usher in the kingdom of God, and that we need to build it ourselves. And we're capable of doing that.
• 53:47
  That's part of of the thinking, behind the idea that that we have always been in Christ's millennial reign. See, there's this chapter in Revelation, in the book of Revelation, that talks about, you know, Christ will reign for a thousand years, and that's called the millennium, Right? So that's, and there are people, again, who believe that reign began long ago, and it's continuing now. And we're just like on the cusp now of really, know, like the whole, for example, the whole idea that we're going to beat the very processes that cause aging. And we will, maybe our children are the first ones that will live forever after this, if they don't, like, killed by accidents or whatever.
• 54:40
  So that's all part of this idea of millennialism. I'm saying that transhumanism is part of that. And I'm also saying then that it dovetails very nicely this idea that AI can be basically a mental prosthetic. I remember I worked for this guy for a couple of years who said that he would just love to be one of the first people that would get a brain implant that would enable him to communicate constantly with the overmind or whatever it would be called. And because that would really be empowering.
• 55:33
  To which I said, and have long said, actually, that any such movement is, just as you say, going to weaken our abilities. And the main theological response is also the same as the main important philosophical response to to, well, millennial millennialism on the one hand and transhumanism on the other. And and it is that when we become, like, enhanced, it's not really us anymore. Right? Okay?
• 56:15
  So let's suppose that they create these literal brain prosthetics that actually prevent us from doing bad things. I don't know, something like that. Right? So we really want to do something. Okay, I'm not going to do that because my brain now prevents me.
• 56:37
  Or not my brain. No, it's this prosthetic that prevents me. All right, so just imagine that sort of thing happening. Well, then it's not really us. We have not been improved, right?
• 56:54
  We were never going to be the ones that would be improved. It would be a hybrid at best. And because our will, in that case, would have to be weakened, we will actually become less human. All right? So that's the kind of argument that we're talking about.
• 57:16
  So whole idea against millennialism, the idea is if the only way that human beings can be perfected is by top down dictatorial rule, which is what it often ends up being, right? And then we just have to look at what human life is under such rule. It's, again, dehumanized, right? So, yes, this is just another example of the same thing. When we use LLMs to do our thinking for us, we are essentially using them as prosthetics.
• 58:02
  And yes, they can get some things done a lot faster for us. And that's actually good. And there are certain uses of these tools that are important, great blessings to the world, for sure. Why not? Yes.
• 58:20
  Okay. For example, my son is now an incoming sophomore computer engineer. He doesn't want to use LLMs for good reason that, okay, this gets in the way of his actually learning programming, of course. Right? Now, I don't really care.
• 58:47
  I just want to get stuff done. And I don't really care about being the author of the software. And I'm not going to outsource the job of project management because that's what I'm good at. All right? So I think ultimately, I don't think we quite all have this figured out.
• 59:09
  But yeah, a lot of stuff is going to become increasingly automated. And we just have to make sure that the way in which we use automation does not dehumanize us. That's the bottom line.
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: When you talked about the kind of augmenting and this supposed improvement, you know, through the addition of this technology, you know, what I'm thinking is I feel like that that one of the best things that a human being could do would be go go go spend a year living in a cabin in the woods with no electricity, with an oil lamp to write by, and a bunch of notebooks, and some a bunch of pencils. And and and I think that people, through going backwards like that, you'll I I I have a feeling that people would develop senses that that they didn't have before, you know, which is this is in my experience too when you spend more time just with with Earth and outside, which I think is is in many ways, look at that as kinda like getting closer to God. Right? Getting back to God's creation, not man's creation of staring at screens and everything. Going back into just the the smell of the air, the sound of the birds, the you know, those kinds of things.
• 1:00:17
  I find that, you know, people will advance in ways that you could never augment with some sort of external technology. Now, you you know, in in terms of you mentioned a lot of the Silicon Valley, a lot of the the tech, you know, people are transhumanist. And, yeah, I I agree. There was, an interview Jared Kushner did where Jared Kushner openly said in his interview that he he hopes that he's the last generation to die. Right?
• 1:00:46
  Or or that, basically, he hopes that he's the first generation to live forever. And and I've thought a lot about that, and and I feel like that, like, to me, that's only a mindset you could have if you're somehow maybe atheist or something or if you didn't believe in the afterlife because it's like, know, human the human world kinda sucks. Right? Like, you know, you you you you have a toothache, then you stub your toe, and then the IRS is coming after. You have this.
• 1:01:12
  It's you know, it's like, why would I wanna extend my life forever here? It's like when I can go, you know, kinda bask in the glory of of the divine. Right? It's and have true, you know, kind of, you know, unlimited life. But I actually, wanna I wanted to highlight something, so I wanna see what your thoughts are to this.
• 1:01:30
  So one of the I think one of the the key transhumanists that's driving a lot of this this agenda at the high levels is, you've all know Harari. Right? So he's the, you know, kind of the the the oracle of the WEF, right, or something. And but I wanna if you don't mind, I'm gonna play about a minute and a half long video where this is from earlier this year where Harari is commenting on the role of AI and its command of words and how he sees it transforming things. Because I think it it touches on a lot of what you were saying earlier that the machine doesn't have the human soul.
• 1:02:08
  Like, a pastor writing something using a machine, there's not gonna be the this the the Holy Spirit coming through. Right? Because we've we I I believe, as you do too, I believe that, you know, we were created by God. Right? We have a soul that was given to us by God, and there's something that's within us that a machine would never be able to replicate.
• 1:02:28
  Right? It's something that that even the the, you know, the best scientists right now have no idea how the human brain actually works. They have some theories, but it's such a profound thing that we're we're it's like, you know, ants trying to understand, you know, how a skyscraper was built or something. But, anyway, I'll I'll play this, from her, and I'd love to get your thoughts on on his perspective. I think it's really kinda tunes into what we're talking about here.
• 1:02:53
  So this is this is from earlier this year.
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 3: Do you know? As far as putting words in order is concerned, AI already thinks better than many of us. Therefore, anything made of words will be taken over by AI. If laws are made of words, then AI will take over the legal system. If books are just combinations of words, then AI will take over books.
• 1:03:29
  If religion is built from words, then AI will take over religion. This is particularly true of religions based on books, like Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. Judaism calls itself the religion of the book, and it grants ultimate authority not to humans but to words in books. Humans have authority in Judaism not because of our experiences, but only because we learn words in books. Now no human can read and remember all the words in all the Jewish books, but AI can easily do that.
• 1:04:19
  What happens to a religion of the book when the greatest expert on the holy book is an AI?
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: So I'd I'd love to hear your thoughts on what he said there.
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 2: Well, I I mean, does he actually believe the things that he's saying there?
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: I don't know. I mean, I it's hard to it's hard to say. I'm not sure.
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 2: Maybe he just wants us to believe that because then we would be easier to control or or something like that. That that could be, I suppose. But if he's if he's serious, what he's saying is is transparently ludicrous. So let's put it this way. I actually believe that AI is never going to exceed its training data.
• 1:05:13
  There is nothing So one thing that absolutely true about intelligence is that ultimately, the ultimate sources of intelligence are organic. And I don't just mean that the training data comes ultimately from human minds. That's true. What I'm saying is that the very idea of interacting with the world, putting words together about the world, and actually having original thoughts based on that are ultimately, ultimately, something that is an outgrowth of the embeddedness of a living being in dealing with the world. So it's a very high level philosophical concept.
• 1:06:18
  You might say, well, what about a thermostat? The thermostat reads the temperature and prints out the number on the pad and tells you what temperature is inside. Is that like thinking? Well, no. And the principle doesn't change.
• 1:06:41
  That system was programmed by a human being and had to be carefully calibrated by a human being. It works only because it contains expressions of human minds, ultimately. The same is true of LLMs. There is nothing original in what it says. It's all extrapolation in what it is.
• 1:07:08
  So the LLM is never going to get better. It'll get faster, but it's never going to get better than the smartest instance of the training data. Also, extrapolations made by LLMs could produce results, like as in math theorems being shown to be, or postulates rather, shown to be true or false. Yes, it can do that. I'm not denying that.
• 1:07:41
  But the thing is, it's all an extrapolation from the training data. That's not how human beings are. Our minds are not extrapolations of our training data. That's not how we work. Right?
• 1:07:59
  That's an old and wrong model of how the mind works. And it's actually associated with something that the liberal transhumanists that rule us like to still believe in, which is the idea of a blank slate, which is sort of the founding myth of empiricism. So I am an empiricist to a great extent, but not to that extent. There is a great deal of wisdom that we still don't understand, as you say, that is embedded in our very being, which is an organic being, one that was made by God, and is, again, right now way beyond us to really understand. So do we really understand even now why the thoughts bubble up in us as they seem to?
• 1:09:08
  No, we do not. We don't even understand ourselves. And you cannot model the way the human mind works by an AI. What you can model is the output of human cognition. So speech and code and other things like that, art.
• 1:09:37
  But you can't actually model what's going on in the mind because we ourselves don't know what's going on. You can make postulates, you can make hypotheses about how the human mind must work based on the fact that we're able to model it as a neural network, for example. All right. And those are interesting arguments. And I'm not saying they're entirely wrong.
• 1:10:09
  But even there, the nature of the neural network is still, to a very great extent, a black box. So I'm enough of a skeptic to be able to admit that there might come a time in the future when there will be complete recreations of mind like beings that are not like human beings. All I'm saying right now is we know how LLMs work, pretty much. And the way that the human mind works is not that. And again, just to hammer on one point that's important.
• 1:11:05
  Our intelligence is an embodied thing. So like, there's here on this line that I refer to a book. What is it called? Dang, I'm blocking the name of both the book and the author. It's a classic written about 1970.
• 1:11:31
  I can look it up and you can put it on the screen later. A classic work of philosophy of artificial intelligence, essentially. And he takes the view, and I agree with him, and I've thought so ever since I read the book, that basically
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: Is it What Computers Can't Do?
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 2: Yes. It is.
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 1: By Hubert Dreyfus.
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 2: Dreyfus. Exactly. There it is. And and it's it's actually a very good read. It's it's, like, 50 years old now, but it's still very, very applicable.
• 1:12:14
  In fact, I think more people should be reading it.
• 1:12:16
  Speaker 1: Is it right here?
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 2: No.
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: Oh, I see. Wait.
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 2: Oh, well oh, yeah. Maybe it is. Okay.
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: Maybe a different cover.
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 2: The publication what's the publication date on it?
• 1:12:28
  Speaker 1: I think it's '73. Let's see.
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 2: This looks like an updated version.
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: This well, yeah, originally, it's '72, but updated '92. Yep.
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 2: Okay. Okay. Well, so it's the updated version of the one that I read. Okay. So, yeah, it's a fascinating book, and it's well worth the time.
• 1:12:50
  And the whole point there is that we are ultimately embodied beings that the nature of human intelligence is evolved or it was developed in a way so that it enables us to deal with the world in creative ways. I'm not actually making the argument very well, I'm afraid. So I should probably stop there. But, yes.
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 1: And so, Well, I think that this You know, fundamentally, I think, as we're wrapping up, we've gone over an hour pretty easily. And I think we we could go on for much longer if we allow ourselves. But I think that it it's a very, fundamental idea this boils down into of, I think, what does it mean to be human? And what does it mean to not be human? And can man, through technology, create what it means to be human?
• 1:14:13
  And I think the answer is no. I I I think that this is whether you're looking at Frankenstein, you know, kind of fictionally or the Tower Of Babel or any of these any of these different things throughout history that whenever man attempts to play God, at a certain point, God comes in and puts man back into his place. And that's that's one of the oldest lessons, I think, that we have. And I think that that's where where this lies. And so, I think that, for me, the solution I see is just do whatever I can to hold on to my humanity and and to put a lot of time and effort and thought into thinking about what does it mean to be human and and to and to and to guard myself against the things that will strip me of my humanity.
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah. You know, this is an old problem with all kinds of technology. You have to use it intentionally because the purpose of technology is to make things easier. Right? But sometimes, in order to do things right, you can't do them the easy way.
• 1:15:19
  So I have no doubt that there were some advantages to doing plowing with oxen, rather than, you you get free fertilizer, at least. I don't know. There's all kinds of other examples that can be given. More recently, I think, just like with television, right? It's easy for people to just like sit down in front of a television and just veg out, as the saying was for a long time, and basically becoming vegetables, and less human sort of person.
• 1:16:08
  And what is it that makes us say that we are vegging out or being less human? It's the very fact that we are not actually being active. We actually have to use our will, make decisions, and act on them ourselves in order to do things. So you actually have to make an effort to actually turn off the television or turn off YouTube or whatever it is that you're using and actually go and do something, Like go and actually exercise, take a walk, whatever, workout. Actually go and write something intentionally.
• 1:16:53
  Restrain yourself from doom scrolling. Right? And if you actually have some thoughts that you want to commit, then you intentionally commit them. Right? So that's actually something that's very intentional, very modern, right, that you're putting out there.
• 1:17:10
  But it is more organic because it comes right out of your own soul, your interaction with the world. And so I agree. So I'm just adding to what you say. The way that we hold on to our humanity, first and foremost, is to recognize when some technology is doing something for us that we ought to perhaps consider doing for ourselves, or that we actually know that we should be doing for ourselves. Like when you actually let the LLM draft some writing for you, to get back to our example.
• 1:17:55
  You just have to make a rule for yourself. You don't do that. It's wrong. It's bad. Right?
• 1:18:02
  There's lots of reasons why we should not do that. You just don't do it. This is one it's a rule that I made for myself. You know? But but, again, that's only one example.
• 1:18:13
  Like, what's gonna happen when there are robots? Right? This is like, what if Elon Musk says, look, I'm a very generous guy, and I have been working for the last five, ten years, whatever it will be, making just these awesome robots. And it's like the rollout of the iPhone, but times 10, times 100, right? It's like before, there was before the iPhone, and then there's after the iPhone.
• 1:18:45
  The world changes. That's potentially what it could be like with robots, especially when you have super intelligent robots that can actually build other robots. Because that, of course, is what's that's the singularity, right? When they can
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 1: That's Terminator.
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 2: That's when they can actually start developing themselves. They can do the mining. They can find the raw materials. They can do the entire supply chain vertical. So look, you don't have to have a robot, but we're going to give you a robot if you want one.
• 1:19:23
  And all you have to do is ask. Put in your address, sign this contract, and in five hours, your robot will walk up to your door and knock. And you can use it however you want, as long as it's legal. And if you want three, we'll let you have three. All right.
• 1:19:49
  So imagine then, what is life going to be like when you've got all of these machines that are actually modeled after human beings, and they're designed to be able to do the things that we do? All right? Is the wife who loves cooking, I don't think it's actually misogynist of me to say that a lot of women take pride in cooking for their family. And they would feel much less if they weren't doing that. But what happens if there is a robot that starts doing the cooking and everyone is amazed when they taste this absolutely delicious meal, which is better than anything that mommy ever made.
• 1:20:48
  Right? It's like, no, don't cook for us, mommy. Let the robot do it. I mean, that's kind of what's going to happen. What's gonna happen to us?
• 1:21:03
  You know, I think mommy needs to keep cooking. Maybe mommy needs to take lessons in cooking from the robot or something. I'm not really sure what happens there. And and it's the same way, like, with my son learning to code. He could be using clankers a lot more.
• 1:21:24
  He doesn't, though. He's actually faster than a lot of clankers doing a lot of things. But I think they've overtaken him on a lot of stuff. They're like, I've made this website in the last couple of weeks faster than he could have made it for me, hands down. Yep, kind of turning point for me.
• 1:21:45
  Kind of sad in a way. But the point is that going to be important for people like him to still exist who can actually do the thing itself. Right? And so I think I should just leave it at that. I mean, there's a lot of ramifications of the whole idea that, yes, we have to remain human.
• 1:22:12
  And the way that we remain human is by doing things for our own damn selves, basically.
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And I doing things that are human, especially the things they've been doing for hundreds of years or thousands of years, baking bread, gardening, you know, the things that you'd be it'd be so easy to have. Oh, my Optimus robot's gonna do all the gardening now. You then lose touch with that. Right?
• 1:22:35
  You know, when you you you lose that sense, not to mention just what's kind of beneath these things. You know, when someone cooks a meal for you and they pour their heart into it, they they they put their love into it, intention. They're gonna create this beautiful meal for my family to nourish my husband and my children. You're not gonna get that from a robot. No.
• 1:22:59
  It's it's it's gonna be something else. And so, yeah, I think it's it's important. I'm glad that we ended on this Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:23:07
  Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. There you go. Like McDonald's in your kitchen for you.
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 2: Yep. Very good.
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, Larry, it's been a real pleasure speaking with you. And I thank you for giving us your time and, you know, look forward to just to, you know, to keeping in touch and watching all this unfold. I've got a few books for me to check out, to add to the library, and, I thank you for that.
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 2: Absolutely. For sure. And and, have people, go to, well, it'll be at larrysanger.org/wikicritic. So that's the mock up of the site that
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 1: So here's your here's your main website, larrysanger.org. And then Yeah.
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 2: And there's a link from that. Then you just go slash wikipritic.
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: Okay. Yep. Here we go.
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And then, like, if you, click on the green link in the upper right, then, you'll come to a page that gives the instructions on submitting a comment. So what I'm asking people to do is to go to Wikipedia, find an article that you want to review. Maybe it's one you love to hate, or maybe you want to give kudos, whatever. Then the idea is if you scroll down just a little bit, there it is.
• 1:24:33
  Okay, stop. Format a review.
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 1: Oh, okay.
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So the idea is just click it. You'll come to a form. You can fill out it. All of the instructions are there.
• 1:24:48
  Don't be intimidated by it. You don't even have to use this form. It will format your review if you want. You don't have to format the review. You can just drop the link in.
• 1:25:07
  However, it's not live yet, so I'm not actually allowing people to drop the link in. For that, you'll have to use the comment form on my website and just give me the link. Or reply to some thread on X. Just follow me on XLSanger. And I'll give you access to Wikipritic, which is already very cool.
• 1:25:33
  It's got something like 30 reviews generated by LLMs and nine reviews generated by human beings. And yeah, we're talking about the difference between them. It's interesting, obviously, to compare them. And I think there's ultimately maybe more value in the human reviews. There will be, I think, when we launch.
• 1:26:03
  So, yeah, the whole idea is Wikipedia needs a comment section, so please leave a comment.
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: That makes sense. It's almost like community notes, right? It's a similar idea of allowing you to, I guess, yeah, to review and and to grade and say, give this an f. It's full of CIA propaganda, or I give this, you know, whatever. You can you can do that.
• 1:26:31
  Right.
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 1: Okay. Well, good. Well, good. So and and and you mentioned again your, Twitter page. Right?
• 1:26:40
  It's right here. It just hit l sanger Yep. Over there on Twitter, which I I I try to call it Twitter because I feel like the x is almost part of that dehumanization. Right? Let's let's get rid of the the name that has a meaning to it and just put in a a single letter x.
• 1:26:55
  It's like, well, I like calling it Twitter. So
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 2: Uh-huh.
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 1: It's my little resistance to the machine there. Well, Larry, again, it was great talking to you. I thank you for your time and and look forward to to doing this again with you.
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 2: Alright. Thank you.
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 1: Alright. Take care.
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 2: Yep. You too.
• 1:27:16
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