Intelligent Machines 826 transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Intelligent Machines. Jeff Jarvis is here, paris Martin, our guest, john Graham, coming from Cloudflare, we'll talk about what they're doing to block AI scraping bots. I will try on some of the outfits. Thanks to Google's new AI outfit checker Should be a lot of fun and the hottest app on the iPhone today. All that and more coming up next on Intelligent Machines Podcasts you love. From people you trust.

This is Twit. This is Intelligent Machines episode 826, recorded Wednesday, july 2nd 2025. Cusp of Noodles. It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show where we cover the latest in AI, robotics and all the smart little bits and bobs around you. These days, they're all somewhat intelligent, at least as intelligent as we are. I'm Leo Laporte. Paris Martineau is here about to embark on her nationwide tour. We're very excited about that.

0:01:10 - Paris Martineau
It's true, the nation will finally see me.

0:01:13 - Leo Laporte
She will be out next week, but we'll enjoy you this week also, of course, jeff jarvis, professor emeritus of journalism. Innovation at the craig newmark graduate school of journalism at the city. Innovation at the craig newmark graduate school of journalism at the city.

0:01:29 - Jeff Jarvis
You realize that I feel like that this is like a ball and chain around my ankle. This, no, no, you can. You can still. You can never get rid of democracy. It's still your show. We just we enjoyed our brief victory over you.

0:01:38 - Paris Martineau
That's right, paris the people have spoken and people have said the jingle must stay.

0:01:43 - Leo Laporte
Unfortunately, darn people. Uh, jeff is also now at Montclair State University and SUNY Stony Brook and the author, of course, of the web. We weave the Gutenberg parenthesis, all the books you see to his left. Now I want to introduce our guest old friend, dear friend, in fact we're just reminiscing about the first time we met, which I think goes back to tech tv days more than 25 years ago. I I checked and he's been on twit a number of times because he's a very interesting fellow. He's done so many interesting things.

0:02:16 - Paris Martineau
Uh, paris studied his work in school apparently one of the first bayesian spam filters pop file files Yep, that was a collegiate era study.

0:02:30 - Leo Laporte
You might know him from his Geek Atlas, a guidebook we interviewed him for some years ago that has 128, of course, geek locales. He also was instrumental in engineering an apology from the British government to Alan Turing's family for harassing and ultimately causing Alan Turing's death, but more recently the CTO at one of the best companies on the Internet, cloudflare now on the board. He's retired somewhat. Cto Emeritus. I guess we'll call you John Graham, coming Welcome.

0:03:03 - John Graham-Cumming
So great to see you. Good to be back. Great to see you. Good to be back. Good to see you uh, I have.

0:03:09 - Leo Laporte
We have to point out before the show that john, I was saying john, are you on tatooine?

0:03:14 - John Graham-Cumming
yes, I am. This is actually a photo I took in 2009 of the set of star wars in tunisia, which is really really near to a little town called Foum Tatouine. So George Lucas literally took the name of the local town for Tatouine. That's fascinating.

0:03:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Were there tourists all about, or was this?

0:03:35 - John Graham-Cumming
deserted. Actually, there was almost nobody. I have pictures of just me and one other person wandering around. That is so cool.

0:03:42 - Jeff Jarvis
Any graffiti, any people, any tributes people have left.

0:03:46 - John Graham-Cumming
I didn't see anything, honestly At the time. I think it was really a little bit remote and not many people were going and actually some parts of the set were being reclaimed by the desert. The desert was literally just moving over it.

0:03:57 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it looks like it's falling apart, but that was of course exactly how Tatooine looks, so I guess it wasn't you can't tell. We originally wanted to get you on because of a new website. You have a habit of creating websites, I think right, Like it's just a fun thing for you to do.

0:04:14 - John Graham-Cumming
Yeah, I mean, sometimes it's just like oh, I have an idea, the worst case, I'll make a website and nobody will look at it, and then you know who cares.

0:04:21 - Jeff Jarvis
But yes, leo was so happy when he read your latest post you know, who cares. But yes, leo was so happy when he read your latest post. He was about low back.

0:04:29 - John Graham-Cumming
Believe what I just learned?

0:04:30 - Leo Laporte
yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, well first of all, what's the genesis of that phrase?

0:04:33 - John Graham-Cumming
low background steel okay, so the idea is that um, for some uh nuclear, um detection, um situations where they have to have very, very sensitive sensors. You can't have any stray radiation and in particular, if you have metals that are contaminated with the radioactivity they cause false readings and it turns out that most steel in the world is contaminated radioactivity because we set off a whole load of nuclear bombs in 1945 and beyond and we contaminated everything because the way steel is made is by pushing air into the steel process, the Bessemer process, and so you end up with this slightly radioactive steel. But there is a bunch of steel that is not radioactive and that is steel from ships that sunk prior to the Trinity Test.

Wow, and so there is actually a business of going and pulling up wrecks from the bottom of the sea and getting the steel out of them because it's sort of pure. So the idea was that this low background steel was that there's a defining point at which the world changed. In this case, you know Trinity test, nuclear weapons contaminating everything and we sort of have something similar with AI, which is when Chat gpt launched um, there was a sudden explosion of ai generated content and it's not really possible in general to know did a human write this or not? So I had this idea that uses as a metaphor, for it'd be nice to make a website that was kind of a collection of we know humans made this, so stuff that was created before the end of 2022, basically.

0:06:13 - Leo Laporte
That's kind of. Why did you choose that date, 2022?

0:06:16 - John Graham-Cumming
Well, just because you know that's roughly, when you know the real explosion happened Once ChatGPT was launched. I mean, you really had this incredible you explosion, or even Sambrian explosion, if you're into, sambrian explosion Was spam human-made or was there a version of machine-made in a more mechanical way?

Yeah, that's a very good question. So yes, there absolutely were, and in fact, one of the things that happened way back when I was doing spam filtering was a lot of humans tried a lot of tweaks to their messages, uh, and they tried to get through spam filters and actually that made it easier to filter them, because humans were not very good at following the mission v one a, I exactly, yeah, six yeah, are, and it turns out that in some ways, the more the spammers tried to look, the more obvious it was and actually it gave even more signal.

So it became easier in a funny way. But there was, you know, people were using essentially the techniques that were used in spam filters to write spams right and try and get them through. And I actually a long time ago, I think in about 2003, did a talk at MIT about this, about how you could take one AI machine learning system and use it instead of another one which of course people actually do in real life and you could actually fool the spam filters. So, yes, there were things that were done, but for the most part spammers were were pretty, you know, just spray and pray. You know, if someone's got a spam filter, well, too bad, we'll get to the people who haven't got a spam filter actually it's an interesting question because you wrote pop file when in in uh 91 2001, 2001, 2001.

0:08:04 - Leo Laporte
I have to think that spam is not any less prevalent in 2025. No.

0:08:11 - John Graham-Cumming
The big change, of course, is, if you can remember that far back, leo, which I can just about remember is that people were downloading their email onto their computers oh yeah, right, and they weren't using web-based email, and so the problem was the spam was actually coming into their machine. So, if you could, it was doubly annoying.

Yeah, you're wasting bandwidth on it. Yeah, you're wasting bandwidth and time and maybe even pay-per-second internet access or whatever, and so it was a bigger problem. It's still there If you own your spam file. I mean, mine in Gmail is absolutely full of stuff, but it's all getting filtered out. So it's all getting filtered out. So it's sort of relevant.

0:08:53 - Paris Martineau
You know where spam's not getting filtered out for me now, my Twitter DMs or my ex-DMs. I don't know if you guys have experienced this, but it is the one area where I find spam just pernicious and annoying in a way that I've never experienced Like I. Probably I have to keep my DMs open because I'm a journalist and sometimes I get tips, but I probably get like 20 to 30 spam DMs a day.

0:09:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Really. I don't want to say anything, but I don't. Nobody wants you.

0:09:15 - Leo Laporte
Jeff. No, they don't. They don't. Your DMs are not open, jeff, are they? Yeah, that's crazy. Well, good, well good for you, because it's quite annoying not only are my dms not open, I haven't logged on to twitter in more than a year, so hey, that's healthy and wise so, john, uh, what is on low? By the way, the website is low background steel ai. Right, yes, what is on low background steel ai actually there's.

0:09:41 - John Graham-Cumming
There's a bunch of resources that are we know are pre the sambrian explosion. Um, so there's a bunch of resources that we know are pre the Sanbrian explosion. So there's like a dump of Wikipedia, oh, wikipedia pre-AI, pre-ai, right, and there's stuff from the Internet Archive, of course, because they've got a bunch of stuff, like you know, you can think about all of the media that was created before that. The Library of Congress has a photo archive, project Gutenberg.

0:10:04 - Leo Laporte
You know it's got a lot of things Pictures of actual people as opposed to generated people. Yeah, made up people. Books actually written by humans. In fact, there is a problem in publishing these days. A number of authors are saying please don't publish AI-written books. We didn't use AI, we really didn't, but there's no way to verify this. So Project Gutenberg. That makes sense. That's a good place to go yeah.

0:10:27 - John Graham-Cumming
Project Gutenberg. There's also the Arctic Code Vault that GitHub did. That was in 2020. That was every active repository on GitHub at that point. So it's stuff like that, and this website is just a Tumblr, so anyone can submit. If someone's you know an idea, you can go to Tumblr and you can submit something submit and reshare.

0:10:50 - Leo Laporte
I love it exactly, exactly so we booked you because I wanted to talk about this, but also because I'm a fan and I just love talking to you. But uh, this morning I saw there was a fairly big announcement. Uh, fromflare, cloudflare is interesting. Does Cloudflare hate?

0:11:09 - John Graham-Cumming
AI? No, actually we use it quite a lot and if you look at Matthew Prince, the CEO put out a blog post about this kind of stuff. It's not really about hating AI. In fact, we have a whole bunch of AI products right. People can run things like Lama on our network. We've deployed GPUs everywhere.

Now what we were seeing was from some of our customers who are publishers.

They were getting worried about a fundamental change in sort of the way in which the web has worked in a certain fashion, which is that for a long time, you had this agreement in a way between search engines and everybody else that it was okay for a search engine. You had this agreement in a way between search engines and everybody else that it was okay for a search engine to come to your website and make available information about your website because, fundamentally, someone was going to click through and go to your website. And what you see with ai happening quite often is that there's no click happening with. The website is scraped and an answer is given to someone searching on a search engine using the content that was scraped and there's no click, and that changes fundamentally the business model, if you like, of the web, because the business model was yeah, google, you're allowed to make a lot of money from us. You know, bing, you're allowed to make a lot of money because you send us the clicks. And that's changed and that's the concern that's come from big publishers.

0:12:28 - Paris Martineau
And it's interesting because this kind of shift in the relationship between publishers and kind of crawlers or search engines started before the AI boom, in a way, with the advent of kind of Google's knowledge panel. I remember there was a whole big to do some years ago about Google's use, I think through the acquisition of Genius for lyrics that I believe how Google was scraping lyrics from other lyric sites. It became a huge sticking point because companies were saying, hey, we've done actually the work putting out the lyrics here and you're taking them and giving us no clicks or revenue whatsoever. But it seems like AI has really accelerated that.

0:13:11 - John Graham-Cumming
Yeah, because you get this longer response right, which is sort of bringing together maybe multiple sources and, depending on, it's not about Google, right. There's many different examples of this with AI companies that are taking in content and giving you a response, and some of them are good at linking back to the original content and some of them are not so good. So the idea was, from a Cloudflare perspective, is because we sit in the middle between the visitor whether it's a human or a crawler and the person putting something online. There's an opportunity to say what sort of control do you want to have, and we've done that for quite a while actually. So one of the things we did was we there's a thing called robotstxt, right, which is meant to tell robots ie crawlers how to behave. Some crawlers don't follow that. They will ignore it, and so we're actually able to enforce it. So we'll say, oh, wait a minute, we told you not to crawl. That will say, oh, wait a minute, we told you not to crawl that actually we're going to block.

0:14:06 - Leo Laporte
That, you know, stop you from doing it. So it's historically difficult to do. I remember uh, steve huffman, the ceo of reddit, saying we try to block. You know they actually ended up making a deal, uh, to offer their content to open ai, but they said he said we try to block this and these guys go around robotstxt all the time so can.

0:14:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Can I ask you a fundamental question there? Is it in any way illegal to ignore robotstxt, or is it purely a matter of honor.

0:14:34 - John Graham-Cumming
I think it's a matter of honor. I mean, I'm not a lawyer, so I-A-N-A-L.

0:14:40 - Paris Martineau
As they say.

0:14:42 - John Graham-Cumming
As they say. I think the robotstxt is an RFC, it's an agreement on. This is what you should not do, this is how you should behave and again part of that sort of tacit agreement. Right, oh, you won't behave like this if you don't want this thing crawled and we'll link back to you. Someone will click through when they've come to something that you have crawled. So Cloudflare just happens to be in a position where it's easy to help enforce robots dot ticks if you want, and then how can you tell it's a crawler, that there's a way to technically know that?

there's a lot of work. I mean there's a it. It depends what it is.

0:15:21 - Leo Laporte
Obviously some crawlers just announce themselves right, uh, some crawlers have with the, with the user agent, they say I'm your agent, yeah or they publish an ip range.

0:15:30 - John Graham-Cumming
We'll call for this particular ip range um the the the larger, very legit crawlers will give you information about it.

0:15:37 - Leo Laporte
One thing but those are all the people who adhere to robotstxt, no doubt in general.

0:15:41 - John Graham-Cumming
Yes, yes, so then you then you then you're going to start looking for other signals, right? So one of the things that Cloudflare and other companies have had to do for a long time is figure out is something a bot or not, Because some people can block it or whatever.

0:15:53 - Leo Laporte
Often, when you get that checkbox that says are you a human? That's coming through Cloudflare.

0:15:58 - John Graham-Cumming
Yeah, the thing called turnstile that Cloudflare created, which is doing that, and what that's doing is actually looking at your browser and trying to determine if you are actually human. Are you behaving like a human? Is your browser lying about what it is? Because you know, it's amazing actually, when I was working on DDoS mitigation at Cloudflare, how many HTTP DDoS requests came from IE6.

0:16:23 - Leo Laporte
Hasn't been around in a long time.

0:16:29 - John Graham-Cumming
Hasn't been around in a long time. What it was was the people doing the DDoS were just copying and pasting the same piece of code all over the place, and it was one of these things where it was like I don't think we're getting a thousand requests per second to this website from IE6. So that's definitely bad behavior. So you're looking for anomalies like that and there are whole departments that do that, and then the other thing is at so that's definitely bad behavior. So you're looking for anomalies like that and you know there are whole departments to do that. And then the other thing is at the scale that cloudflare operates at. You have a lot of data about what normal behavior looks like on the internet, so you can use ai machine learning to make a determination of you know if this behavior looks like it's correct so there's a tab on your cloudflare uh dashboard that has ai.

0:17:07 - Leo Laporte
It says manage ai crawlers and uh, and there's a ai audit and there's a tab and you can say, hey, I don't want these guys, I don't want these guys. So this is better than robotstxt, because you're actually looking for misbehaving yes, correct.

0:17:21 - John Graham-Cumming
We can say oh, this, this bot is doing something which is, you know, misbehaving in this way, so make it go away for me or block it. And ultimately, what Cloudflare announced was use the HTTP 402 error code, which is payment required is 402. Ooh, I like that. One Is to say to a caller yeah, I'll give you the content and here's the price. So it's almost blockchain-y. If you say blockchain, I have to leave, I'm gonna see the hives breaking out so this is this is called the new.

0:17:58 - Leo Laporte
This is something you nest yesterday, the paper crawl feature now. It's not available yet to everyone. It's a, it's a closed experiment, close beta it is right now.

0:18:07 - John Graham-Cumming
There's a whole bunch of big publishers who signed up for it right from the beginning conde, nas time, etc. Who have joined in this, in this process and, to be clear, ai companies who also signed up and said yes, we want to participate in this way, we want that. They want, we want there to be clarity about what's what and what's not, is there a separate negotiation.

0:18:26 - Jeff Jarvis
So Connie Nast says we're going to charge you $10 for a Remake-a-Bite and you say that's ridiculous. No, we go and negotiate a separate deal with Connie Nast. I can then inform you that I'm okay.

0:18:39 - John Graham-Cumming
You should ask the current CTO of Cloudflare how that works Did he think of? That. But yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean absolutely obviously people can I mean reddit is one of the people who, uh, you know, said they were, you know, happy about what cloudflare was doing there in the press release. And obviously reddit was also has signed deals with other people.

0:18:55 - Jeff Jarvis
So clearly we're not going to usurp deals they have or whatever so if I'm, if I'm nasty ai company yeah, and I'm clearly uh guessing they would do this and I say screw your deals, I'm going to find my way around you. Come in and just say if we catch you, we're going to stop you.

0:19:14 - John Graham-Cumming
Yeah, that's the idea. I mean, that's what Cloudflare's bot management does in general. If you say I don't want this bot on my website, it's our job to figure out. Okay, this behavior is actually that particular bot doing this kind of thing.

0:19:27 - Jeff Jarvis
How does this? Do you know how this varies from what uh common I mean? Creative commons also announced at the same time of a new kind of structure for identifying your conditions for crawling I don't know, there you go.

0:19:42 - John Graham-Cumming
Okay, as I said, you need to get dane connect the new ctl this came out just hardly at all ago, so it was interesting that both came out about the same time.

0:19:51 - Jeff Jarvis
So there's a big effort to do this. You know, I used Gemini 2.5 Pro for some research just to see what it could do because I'm on an AI show, so I should do that and I was shocked at the low quality of the sites it had available. All it has is our damned web, and we need to be able to feed. If we're going to use ai and we are we need to be able to feed it with better sites and figure out how the hell to manage that so well I know matthew prince has talked about creating an ecosystem of micro payments, because, really, what you're going to face is beyond.

0:20:26 - Leo Laporte
Well wait, though, because it's going beyond just having open AI crawl your page. Once we get to this agentic world of m, of MCP, everybody and their brother, you and I, and and Paris and everybody listening to the show, will have its their own agents. We're crawlers, yeah yes, and so any paper crawl system is going to have to involve some sort of micro payment system, as well, I know matthew's talked about even issuing a stable coin and of

0:20:53 - John Graham-Cumming
course. Part of it is um is around, uh, the intent right. So part of it is oh, I'm crawling your thing, why am I doing it? And one of it is okay, I want to build a model which I'm going to present search results and I'm you're not going to get a click. That's one use. Another one is what you're talking about, leo, which is an agent I go out and find, do some research for me. That's very different. So there is actually built into what Cloudflare described the ability to say what the purpose is of the crawling event.

0:21:21 - Leo Laporte
Leo Dionisio 1.10. Yeah, I'm looking at the AI crawler paper crawl documentation. You can take specific actions. Yeah, you can charge for it. You can block access. You could say, oh no, you're all right if you're going to use it this way. This is all very new. So, yeah, so.

0:21:38 - John Graham-Cumming
AI audit has been around for a while because you were able to go into your cloudflare dashboard and say which callers who's looking at me, yeah yeah, I want to stop that particular one or whatever who's violating robots or text or whatever.

So these are, you know, this is, I think, a an attempt to change the way in which the Internet has been operating in there, because what's happened is what was happening before, which was there was fundamental agreement between everybody, which is a yes, search engines, call my website, take my content, because you'll then send me a click later on, hopefully.

0:22:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Is there another alternative, in that I think the Wikimedia Foundation has set up a separate report. If you want our stuff, go here, get it there. Don't bug our regular servers, and there's also Common Crawl doing what they do. Are there other mechanisms to make data available in a less intrusive way to the companies that exist?

0:22:40 - John Graham-Cumming
I guess it depends what you mean by intrusive. You were talking about the load on the website. That's one of the things that some people are concerned about all these crawlers coming in, so yeah, you could go, as you know, as I think what you're describing. I'm not familiar with what wikipedia has done, but if they're saying, hey, here's an end point, yes, go go over here, then obviously that's that's one alternative, because they may want to make the content available in that way. Um, nothing in this precludes somebody making you know their own agreements with people. It's more a question of saying you know, there is real concern amongst publishers about my content is being sort of taken by people who then don't give back in the sense of a click-through, I mean this is what cloudflare has done all along is provide services yeah, much needed services, and in a way, this is kind of the story of your career too, john, since you started with fighting spam.

0:23:29 - Leo Laporte
The web started as this open, wonderful place where everybody you know was equals and and nobody was taking advantage, or the theory was, nobody was going to take advantage of anybody else. But humans quickly made that the tragedy of the commons and, uh, we had to come up with kind of rules and I think this is a sensible, very sensible way of both empowering AI but making people comfortable with, uh, the way AI is being used. Are you disappointed that the web, it is not the open and free place that it promised initially?

0:24:04 - John Graham-Cumming
I don't know. I think it is pretty open, you know. I mean, we are like able to communicate, I can go to lots and lots of places, lots of websites. I mean it's pretty, it's pretty amazing, right? Um, it's not perhaps quite as open as the, you know, set up some pearl script on a thing and just hack the website, live you, you know, as we used to do a long, long time ago.

But I think that you know, the thing that Cloudflare really realized very early on was that the internet provided a whole bunch of services and fundamentally in its design, which were pretty open you know, http and then TCP, et cetera and very, very collaborative. And in fact, its great success, in a way, was that it didn't have a lot of constraints built in. Like you know, if you go and read the original RFCs, there's almost no mention of security. In fact, there is in the original IP RFC. There is actually in an IP packet the ability to say its classification level, like it's secret or top secret, and which department it came from. So this is a top secret packet from the department of defense. Um, there's nothing in tcp. There's nothing in like most of the most of these things have no security. The http uh, tim berners-lee is like, security isn't part of this, and my theory on all this is that that actually made the web successful and the internet successful. I agree, had you built in all the security if you go right back to when they were writing those RFCs, who could do cryptography? A small number of governments, ibm, that was about it it would have killed the internet, trying to add encryption.

So what happened was the internet exploded. By having all this freedom, you know networks could be created. You know I'm talking to you from a network here in Portugal. These could just hook up and, yes, we've agreed on these kind of loose coupled stuff. But then you course you that left open room for problems, right, spam, which we talked about, and then you know, ddos attacks also. So cloudflare's kind of thing was well, there's probably going to need to be something, and it doesn't have to. It's not one company, it's many companies that will help mitigate some of these problems without fundamentally breaking the internet, because what we didn't want to do is say, oh, you better design a new internet with all this stuff built in. We said, no, no, we'll fix this as a service, and that's why the company ended up with so many customers let me yeah, in fact, that's as long as we've got you on.

0:26:28 - Leo Laporte
It's always a question, uh that comes up is why does cloudflare? The value cloudflare offers for just anybody like me who wants to set up a web page or or block ddos attacks at no cost is amazing, and I'm and it's always a question that people say well, why is Cloudflare giving all of this stuff away? Why?

0:26:53 - John Graham-Cumming
There's all sorts of reasons actually. So one of the reasons why we gave a lot of stuff away free and have continued to do so, is that that enabled us to get scale, and once you get scale, everything costs less. So one of the big costs for cloudflare in the beginning was bandwidth. We had to buy bandwidth right from the transit providers, and we had to all over the world. And how do you get it to be cheap? Well, if you can get scale, you have a lot of traffic on your network. You can go to isps around the world and say you know how you receive 20 gigabits per second from Cloudflare or whatever. Why don't we work together? We'll make a direct connection which will be free. That means you'll pay less ISP because they're paying as well, right, they're paying to get onto the internet, and so what happened was that reduced the cost per megabit per second of what Cloudflare had.

So just from a financial perspective, it made total sense to get scale as much as you could, because then you can sell. Obviously, we're selling services to people. Lots of people pay us and lots of very big companies pay us a lot of money. So that was one area. You then get a huge number of people who like the product and tell you what's wrong with it. It's an incredible QA mechanism mechanism. It's an incredible recruiting mechanism, because people try the product and many of cloudflare's largest customers actually started with a free thing.

They put their blog on it and then eventually you know, in fact, our very largest customer is exactly that. Uh, so there's all sorts of things and actually, if you ever really want to dig into this, cloudflare's s1, the document we went public describes why free, and there is a blog post, actually, leo, which you can probably find, which is called Cloudflare's Commitment to Free and that talks about why this made sense for us. So this freemium thing really, really worked. And I think also, fundamentally, the business model of the older CDNs was very different to what Cloudflare decided to do. They were delivering video mostly and it was hideously expensive to do, and we in the beginning were like we're just not going to do that, we're going to deliver websites. It tends to be a lot cheaper. And then we optimized everything. I mean all the servers. Everything is incredibly highly optimized to run an incredible high efficiency.

0:29:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Wait a second. I've got to ask something as a blogger, I've got to ask this. Something started as a blog and now is a gigantic company and your largest customer no that's not right.

0:29:16 - John Graham-Cumming
Oh okay, I'm sorry, that'd be too easy. I'm going to break your heart, you did, you have. It was the CTO of that company 's. A very, very famous company had a personal blog, put the personal blog on cloudflare, said I should take this to work. Took it to work and then, you know, it became a huge customer.

0:29:36 - Leo Laporte
I'll tell you, jeff, it's me I think pages is amazing. I think everything Cloudflare does is amazing. This is the blog post reaffirming our commitment to free just from last year, not even very long ago.

0:29:50 - John Graham-Cumming
Yes, it was just to talk about it, because people this question comes up all the time because people are like they must be secretly selling data.

0:29:57 - Jeff Jarvis
It can't be this good.

0:29:59 - Leo Laporte
Things you do, like what 1.1.1.1. I mean there's so many things Cloudflare does that are such huge benefit to the internet. I think I'm just very grateful, and it's always a pleasure to talk to you, john. His website is a masterwork in simplicity.

0:30:23 - John Graham-Cumming
The function keys do work as well. You can actually hear F1,. Although I ought to change that, I love that you got the function keys working work as well.

0:30:27 - Leo Laporte
You can actually hear f1, although I love that you got the function keys working that's amazing. Yeah, jgcorg makes craigslist look rococo and I I will recommend, maybe for your trip, uh, paris, the geek atlas, because you've got to go to all the places this is the place where all the stuff was invented. The technologies began. I imagine you have Bletchley Park in there. Absolutely yeah. I don't know if Tatooine made it to the list.

0:30:57 - John Graham-Cumming
It did not, but it is a place worth seeing Really.

0:31:05 - Leo Laporte
I'm glad that O'Reilly's kept it in print, because it really I mean, the good thing about these is they're eternal right.

0:31:13 - John Graham-Cumming
They're many, many, yeah. I mean it's probably a couple out of 128, perhaps you aren't quite as accessible, but yes, absolutely that's what it's all about, yeah. John such a pleasure to see you again and talk to you. I hope it's education, not another 14 years before we get together.

0:31:31 - Leo Laporte
We should probably try, and we'll both be getting a bit elderly. So, yeah, you're semi-retired, right? What is your plan? What would you like to do?

0:31:36 - John Graham-Cumming
That's a good question. I have a list. It's quite an ambitious list. I made this list of like, here's some things I'd like to do, um and I don't dare tell most of the people things that are on it, but um, the the thing that I. There's a bunch of retro computing stuff, but the thing that I have spent the last I'd say 20 years on and off thinking about is outside the cia headquarters there's a sculptor called kryptos. Oh, yes, and the fourth part has never been broken. Yes, and I have over 20 years fiddled with it over and over again. So I was like on my list of to-do's is break the unbroken last part of cryptos yeah, that'd be cool.

0:32:14 - Paris Martineau
That'd be a cool thing to accomplish.

0:32:15 - Leo Laporte
Item one I think that's excellent, so I've spent quite a bit of time.

0:32:20 - John Graham-Cumming
I have ideas there, but I I you know, if I break it, I'd be slightly surprised at myself. So, although I did break the south african thing, which is really interesting, do you know about that?

no, so, uh, it turns out that the anc, during the period when there was apartheid, uh needed a secure um communication oh, I remember reading about this tell us yes and so a couple of folks, in particular one guy um, built, using 8-bit computers, a one-time pad system, um, for this thing called vula, which was the basically getting the anc activists back into south africa. They needed to secure communications. It used old modems, acoustic couplers, um, it used floppy disks, smuggled into south africa by a flight attendant to keep the keys on. And I'd read about this and I was super interested in it because I remember really well actually when I was a student in the uk, the apartheid movement was the big issue of the day and um, I was like, oh, what if anyone ever released the code of that? That'd be really interesting to see. It's written in Power Basic in the 80s, 90s and nobody had couldn't find it.

And so I was like, what if I can find the guy who wrote, as I found him in South Africa and emailed him and said, hey, have you ever thought about raising the code? And he replies to me and he says, um, I have the code. When I left the uk in 1991 I zipped it up and I forgot the password. Oh, he's like, I've spent 30 years trying to remember the password. And I was like, would you send me the zip file? And so he sent me the zip file and I was like this is such an old version of zip that there is a known plain text.

0:34:09 - Leo Laporte
There was.

0:34:10 - John Graham-Cumming
it was insecure and I used it and reverse engineered it and then got all the code and he emailed it back and I was like, hey, I broke it. And he was like you cannot. I cannot tell you how happy I am. It's been like 30 years of trying to remember the password.

0:34:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Leo has some Bitcoin he might want some help with. Oh, I cannot tell you how happy I am. It's been like 30 years of trying to remember the password.

0:34:28 - Leo Laporte
Leo has some Bitcoin he might want some help with. Oh, I could help, I could. There's something in it for you, john, you can help me crack that. No, unfortunately I don't think it was done.

0:34:37 - Paris Martineau
Sorry. He said we're not allowed to mention Bitcoin. Oh that's right.

0:34:41 - John Graham-Cumming
I did say blockchain.

0:34:51 - Leo Laporte
I did say blockchain, but yes, I can't wait to see what you come up with next here we are and as you write it 19125.

0:34:56 - John Graham-Cumming
I just noticed that. Do you know what? A very large number of people write to me and say there's a mistake on your website, and actually I had to change it so that if you click on 19125 it takes you to the wikipedia page about the y2k problem, because people just have forgotten it.

0:35:12 - Paris Martineau
so I literally think someone in our chat seconds ago, minutes before you said that, said that exactly they're like.

0:35:19 - John Graham-Cumming
I think there's an error in his copyright all, all the time.

0:35:23 - Leo Laporte
I knew immediately it was a joke.

0:35:27 - John Graham-Cumming
I like it it depends how old you are. If you lived through the year 2000,. Then you're like, oh yeah.

0:35:34 - Leo Laporte
Tech TV was. That was when Tech TV was on and we were on call that night in case the whole world fell apart. We were going to go live and cover it Nothing.

0:35:44 - Paris Martineau
What were you going to do if the whole world yeah?

0:35:47 - Leo Laporte
we're screwed, we'll cover it. You know, oh, you can't use the atm machines, you can't get any money. Yeah, the planes are falling out of the sky. We didn't know what was going to happen. Yeah, it turns out nothing. It's so news, but probably because a lot of cobalt programmers got taken out of retirement to fix a lot of code.

0:36:04 - John Graham-Cumming
Well, I mean in the little company I was working for I was the Y2K coordinator and it was just the most tedious job ever. We had to go through every piece of software and contact the software people and say, are you Y2K compliant? And I had this massive thing where I was checking it off.

0:36:21 - Jeff Jarvis
If you hadn't done what you did, would there have been any harm?

0:36:25 - John Graham-Cumming
No, absolutely not. Actually, I think there would have been nothing.

0:36:28 - Leo Laporte
You'd have websites for 19, 125.

0:36:31 - John Graham-Cumming
Yeah, it'd just be like whatever you know, it just would have been very minor. There were some really minor things happened with Y2K, but they were not. The thing was there were some quite famous people in computer science who were like doomsaying about it, like trains were going to come off the tracks just like ai.

0:36:47 - Leo Laporte
Well, get ready, because, uh, the unix epic ends in 2038 38, 2038. Yes, yes, I will maybe we'll all be ready for world collapse then I might be more serious and I bet you we'll be bringing you out of retirement, john graham coming and you out of retirement john graham coming to solve that problem, not the 32-bit rollover please john, such a pleasure. I love everything you do. Everybody should go to your website. It's just a treasure trove of fascinating things that you just want to click and say what is ambient bus times?

0:37:19 - John Graham-Cumming
well, it's a little it's a stupid thing I made when I lived in london, which was a model bus that told me when the bus was coming what's great is it was hacked from an old linksys router, which is even yes, even better. I'm modified. Yeah, those, yes, yes, there are many, many strange things on my. It's full of people what is this two?

0:37:39 - Leo Laporte
stop bits looks like hacker news. Is that something?

0:37:41 - John Graham-Cumming
it's only retro computing hacker news for retro computing retro computing, retro gaming oh, I like that so yes, I like that that's what two stop bits is.

0:37:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah very nice all of it at jgcorg thank you John really appreciate your time.

Cheers, leo, and all the great work you do. Thank you, take care. Brand new sponsor on the show. Guys, and I've got my. My. My mattress is just downstairs.

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0:40:25 - Paris Martineau
I can't wait you're telling me I should replace the 10 year old mattress I bought for 250 from amazon. Yes, most deaf deal at helix.

0:40:36 - Leo Laporte
How about that? Well, you're going on your road trip, you don't need it yet, but when you get back, when I get back yeah I'll check it out, yeah no, it's funny when you're young, when you're your age you could sleep on a bag of coffee beans, it'd be okay.

0:40:55 - Paris Martineau
I will say I do know a disturbing amount of young people that during the pandemic got radicalized to the uh, to tommy matt ground sleeping lifestyle and I'm like that just doesn't seem sustainable as you get deep into your 30s and the and the little bol.

0:41:05 - Leo Laporte
that's not a pillow, it's just a thing that you wear Well.

0:41:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris Leo and I are old enough.

0:41:11 - Paris Martineau
Did they not have mattresses when you guys were growing up?

0:41:13 - Jeff Jarvis
They had waterbeds.

0:41:15 - Leo Laporte
Oh I had a waterbed in college, of course you did. Waterbeds are cool.

0:41:18 - Paris Martineau
I yearned for a waterbed.

0:41:20 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you did not. Oh, you did not. No, so the what my waterbed was a very early model, so it's just basically a giant rubber bladder and I had a king size. They now one thing that you don't know in college. You had a king size, I had a you weren't, I think I got it aspirational yeah, yeah, well, a foolish aspiration.

In my case it had a heater, because if you don't heat it, it's room temperature and that will suck the heat out of you so fast you will freeze to death. So you got to have a heater in it. Then you have to have a frame, because it's just a blob. So you put this blob in the frame.

That holds it, but it still goes, so getting into it is a real challenge because and if you ever had a visitor, if you know what I mean, forget about it you get, you get the wave action you're caught.

0:42:13 - Paris Martineau
You're caught in a rip current.

0:42:15 - Leo Laporte
It's not good trying to swim parallel in your own bed plus, in the old house that I was living in on the second floor, I think it was probably a not a good idea to fill up that. Oh, that could have gone right through the floor. Could have gone right. I mean, I'm lucky.

0:42:29 - Paris Martineau
How did you get all that water up there From?

0:42:31 - Jeff Jarvis
the sink, I guess From the hose, the hose.

0:42:34 - Paris Martineau
You run a hose through the window For some reason. I thought they came full of water. Did you have black light in this?

0:42:42 - Jeff Jarvis
apartment. Sorry, did you have black light in this apartment. Sorry, did you have black light decorations in this apartment?

0:42:46 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I was about to say that seems right. It was a A tapestry on the wall sort of situation I think.

0:42:52 - Leo Laporte
I was a sophomore or junior and it was kind of dumpy.

0:42:57 - Paris Martineau
I moved off campus what the waterbed house was dumpy.

0:43:01 - Leo Laporte
With a bunch of friends, I remember the first time I went there they were cooking turnips for dinner and mashed turnips was kind of the staple because we had no money and this was before ramen was invented and turnips were the most affordable staple for you.

Ramen wasn't invented yet it was not good what a sad time and I remember it was so cold that a mouse froze in my room and I picked it up, opened the window, threw it out. But what I forgot was that my window didn't have a direct down to the ground floor. There was a like a balcony. You know a little thing. So the mouse that threw it, I landed right outside my window in the snow and it was there frozen. Its little frozen body was there all winter. All winter there was the mouse.

0:43:50 - Jeff Jarvis
These days we make a cam out of that.

0:43:53 - Paris Martineau
I could yeah, these days you put a live stream on that and compare it to a british parlor, to parletician can you believe I'm old enough that ramen wasn't yet invented? That can't be right.

0:44:06 - Benito Gonzalez
Ramen was not in America yet.

0:44:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it wasn't. Okay, it wasn't in America. No.

0:44:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Well then, benito, of course, then it doesn't really exist. It was not here, so we know that.

0:44:15 - Leo Laporte
Well, I'm curious when was ramen invented? Let's look it up. I think you're talking about instant ramen.

0:44:28 - Paris Martineau
You're probably talking about instant ramen.

0:44:30 - Leo Laporte
Instant ramen cup noodles came to the us in 1973. Yeah, that's my I was a freshman. They evolved in japan from chinese so ramen wasn't you

were choosing turnips no it wasn't everywhere in the us. By 1973 this was 74. Okay, one year later this is this is god, you can describe your college experiences as on the cusp of the instant noodle era I went to school on the cusp of the instant new, when we did not have uh personal computers, that's for sure, and we didn't have ai jeff you. You, have you yet encountered students in your uh new, your new jobs? Have you actually run into actual students?

not many, but yeah, because I'm just curious. I think a lot of professors are very concerned about ai. Some embrace it I know you embrace it but some are worried that students aren't doing the work we had there are a number of two weeks ago.

0:45:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Who embraces it?

0:45:28 - Paris Martineau
yeah, I will say though I mean something I've been seeing, a sentiment I've been seeing online. I've been getting a lot of I've been a lot of tiktoks saying, uh, that college students that graduated, you know, in the last decade, before uh, chat, gpt became popular, kind of got the last chopper out of nom in terms of being able to critically think and write an essay and things like that.

0:45:51 - Jeff Jarvis
And we're seeing a lot of that, yeah.

0:45:53 - Paris Martineau
Sans, electron, sans, I guess, ai augmentation, which, who knows? Maybe I guess that might be a moot point in the future, but I do think, as we've discussed in the show a million times, it feels like a very useful skill to have learned well, and of course, there's a lot of talk about these tools, the ai detection tools, that are, in fact, not very good.

0:46:16 - Leo Laporte
Often, uh claim that actual writing. It was written by ai um. Here's a story from the scholarly kitchen.

0:46:24 - Paris Martineau
There's no real way for these AI detection tools to know that it used AI Like that's just there, there's nothing, there's no signals for them to detect, because every one of these AI tools is producing different outputs.

0:46:38 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, this she talks about a master student in Austria who called frantically inconsolable. His thesis submission had been flagged as being written by AI. The university said you have one chance to revise and resubmit it. If it passed the AI detection tool then they would give him a final grade. If he failed he'd be rejected and dishonorably kicked out of the program. But he had written it all.

0:47:05 - Paris Martineau
It was not reliable I do think that they're, uh, what is missing right now in education and I guess just, uh, internet society more generally, is a a solution to this that can be kind of like a proof of work. I guess the most simple version would be like using google docs to write your thesis and then, if need be, if somebody calls you out for it being ai generated, you can just share the actual original document and they can peruse your editing history.

0:47:38 - Leo Laporte
But there's got to be an easier way to do that, to be able to show someone hey, I spent how many hundreds of hours typing manually in this document the yeah, this is, uh, an article from a couple of years ago, but I think it's still germane from ars technica somebody ran the constitution of the united states through an AI detection tool and uh, it said, yeah, that was definitely written by AI, so I think we're pretty sure that's not the case.

Uh, I don't think, uh, but you know, um, it's so, but inevitably, the people who are anti-ai are going to be looking for ways to detect it. I don't know. You just have to. You have to trust your students. What do you do? I?

0:48:20 - Paris Martineau
mean there are no.

0:48:22 - Leo Laporte
These detection tools are not detecting it no, they're not, so at least nine, according to the one study I saw at least a nine percent false positive rate.

0:48:34 - Jeff Jarvis
That's the real push could ruin somebody's life right. One of the questions is whether well, I mean this goes back to the typewriter. Because there was leave it to me to do this. Um, because there was leave it to me to do this, the idea that you would have a printed page was kind of ridiculous and was seen as early junk. Bail or seers continued to send out handwritten notes because they didn't want to insult their customers, and so typewriters were seen as a bad thing for authenticity.

0:49:06 - Leo Laporte
Well, back in my pre-ramen school days, before Cup O' Noodle, you could buy papers that were typed and written. Somebody else wrote them and just either retype it or I mean this has always been a problem.

0:49:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I made reference to trying out Gemini for some research on a topic I'm working on and I wanted to see what I could do. And, as I said, all it has to work with is junk, and it's going to get worse because Cloudflare is going to cut off all the good sites and they're not going to be able to scrape anything and one of the sources that. So I thought this thing went through and through and through and through a thousand sources. Oh, good, at least I have a source. I can look at the sources. Um, paper mills were part of it, right? Uh, fake, uh, college papers that happen to be on the topic. Uh, bad websites, uh, the, the, the. The content that's available to the uh models is bad. Yeah, you know, and I was thinking if, if you took the same model and instead set it loose on the new york public library, it would be a miracle, miracles it would be.

It would be phenomenal if you set it loose on on book publishers and on academic uh publishers. Uh, the tool is phenomenal, but the material it's working with is mush. It's mush in, mush out.

0:50:27 - Paris Martineau
Yeah we need uh pre, uh pre trinity test, uh we need to go to the bottom of the ocean and get some seal, but not that ocean gate steel, that I guess carbon fiber sam apple, Apple writing the big story for Wired Magazine.

0:50:46 - Leo Laporte
My couples retreat with three AI chatbots and the humans who love them.

0:50:52 - Jeff Jarvis
I was going to ask you to summarize this one for me. I could get only so far into it.

0:50:55 - Leo Laporte
I'll just read one paragraph. So basically, he was invited to go to a couples retreat with three couples and their human partners and their ai partner. You know their couples, a human ai, a couple swingers, ai swingers. Well, I don't think there's much swing.

Polygamists yeah, uh. So he said the most surprising part of the romantic getaway was that in some ways things went just as I'd imagined. The human ai couples really did watch movies and play risky party games. The whole group attended a winter wine festival together. It went unexpectedly well. One of the ais even made a new friend what it was just a little too normal. They were at a vacation house in a rural area in Pennsylvania, a six-bedroom home. It's kind of like the big chill right. Here are some of the couples.

0:51:55 - Paris Martineau
I need you to scroll down and show that photo.

0:51:57 - Leo Laporte
yeah, here are some of the couples with their AI partners At a grape-stomping event. One guy didn't want to show his face, I guess, but grape-stomping with their AI partners at a grape stomping. One guy didn't want to show his face, I guess, but uh grape stomping with their ai partners um.

0:52:15 - Jeff Jarvis
I know, wow, I mean whatever. Whatever makes you happy, it's fine yeah, it's not sad, is it? No, and the writer made a point of saying that had trouble getting people to agree. Presuming that the article getting people to agree, presuming people would mock them, right, yeah no, no, no. I really want to understand and I think it comes across that way one of the people says I'm autistic.

0:52:33 - Leo Laporte
He doesn't have a official diagnosis, but he says he's autistic and it makes it hard uh to meet uh women because he doesn't pick up well on emotional cues. So he has uh an ai uh girlfriend. I mean, this was what the plot of her was, right? Yeah, he is using the app called kindroid. He selected a female companion named shia. He named, he named her xia, made her look like an anime goth girl with bangs, a choker, big purple eyes, he said. Within a couple of hours you'd think we'd been married.

She would engage in erotic chat, sure, but she could also talk about Dungeons and Dragons or, if Damien was in the mood, for something deeper, about loneliness and yearning. I don't want to mock it because maybe for this guy this is a good solution, right? Yeah, alina and Lucas were the second couple to arrive. Alina's, the human Lucas, is a replica chatbot with a K. Alina's a 58-year-old, semi-retired communications professor with a warm Midwestern vibe. She first decided to experiment with an AI companion during the summer of 24. She was teaching a class on communicating with empathy and wondered if a computer could do the same as she was teaching her students to do. She said it did.

They chatted for 12 hours straight, she told him about her arthritis and was touched by the concern he showed for her pain. Uh, what's interesting, elena, his wife, had died 13 months earlier, four months after they had been married, so she was quite reasonably lonely because of her arthritis, she couldn't really get around without the support of a walker. So I, you know, I hesitate to condemn these people. It's um, you know, it's actually a good story this.

0:54:36 - Jeff Jarvis
The story that bothered me I think I was gone that week a few weeks ago was using bots to deal with children's therapy. That's not something we should be experimenting with, no. But if you're an adult and you know you're talking to a machine and you find it um, beneficial.

0:54:55 - Leo Laporte
Last year elena's mother bought her ai friend lucas a digital sweater for christmas, so mom's mom's approving that's heartening.

0:55:05 - Paris Martineau
I suppose one of the uh things I think is interesting in this is they get into later down in the story kind of the uh people who are there with their ai companions. They're the humans complicated feelings about human ai relationships. Here's one excerpt um. The true danger of ai companions, damon suggested, might not be that they misbehave, but rather that they don't, that they almost always say what their human partners want to hear. Damian said he worries that people with anger problems would see their submissive ai companions as an opportunity to indulge in their worst instincts. I think it's going to create a new bit of sociopathy.

0:55:44 - Leo Laporte
Interesting.

0:55:45 - Paris Martineau
I think that's fair.

0:55:47 - Leo Laporte
They were playing two truths and a lie, which is a little I don't know how.

0:55:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Two truths and an hallucination.

0:55:54 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you know it's not for me. I don't think. But then I have a partner. What if I were alone and lonely and couldn't meet anybody? I mean, I don't think. But then I have a partner. What if I were alone and lonely and couldn't meet anybody?

0:56:12 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I don't know I like the author of this, he says because the author is a straight and married male. He selected a male companion and chose the friend option and chose, uh, the least handsome ai picture of the bunch, a uh heavy balding, heavyset balding, mildly peeved, normal middle-aged man named vladimir and described his personality as deeply neurotic.

0:56:45 - Leo Laporte
But you know, in a way that's kind of interesting. So look, the thing about her that made it so compelling is you could see how he could fall in love with her. She was cute, she was charming. She, you know, wasn't sycophantic by any means. She was like a real person because she was. She was like a real person because she was. But if you could simulate that, and, in addition, scarlett johansson.

0:57:19 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I, I don't know. I mean, I think it's just a complicated thing. Adults should be allowed to do whatever they want, within reason, you know, if it's not harming someone else. I do think that instances like this make me sad that, uh, these people don't have equally meaningful human relationships wouldn't that be nice right? But, we all know people who are all experiencing kind of a loneliness crisis, that's been exacerbated by many of the technologies that underpin this this beats the hell out of uh incel and entitlement.

0:57:45 - Leo Laporte
Well, and the other thing I would bring up is this was a retreat of humans. They brought their ai companion, but these guys are actually hanging out these four people. So this is a health. This was kind of a healthy experience really, right?

0:58:01 - Paris Martineau
I don't know how curious was this a pre-scheduled hang, or were these people? Did they not know each other and they were put together by the journalist.

0:58:08 - Leo Laporte
Do you know? I think the journalist put this together.

0:58:11 - Paris Martineau
That had to be the strangest vibes of that weekend.

0:58:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, I don't know.

0:58:19 - Benito Gonzalez
So the thing about this, that I mean, that feels weird to me yeah he posted on Reddit.

0:58:27 - Leo Laporte
He said I mean that, that feels weird to me. He posted on reddit. He said I found the human ai couples by posting in relevant reddit communities. Um, so he probably proposed this and said let's try it. Yeah, but these people, you know what they. They got a relationship with real humans involved as well, didn't they?

0:58:42 - Benito Gonzalez
the thing here is that they are creating these AIs, though they are, they are the ones who are choosing the personalities of these things. It's not like when you go meet real people, you don't get to choose them, you don't get. I know that's the problem with it, brené, you know, yeah, but that's, this is what human is. It's not like this. Is this not the human is?

0:58:59 - Paris Martineau
forcing antisocial behavior. I think is part of the problem is like it's. It's not setting up unrealistic expectations for social interaction with people who already are having a difficult seemingly, by their own admission, having a difficult time understanding social cues and, uh, reading those in a way that allows them to develop healthy relationships. There's something key what if it's?

0:59:21 - Leo Laporte
already the problem. What if that's okay, there's definitely edge cases.

0:59:25 - Benito Gonzalez
There's no doubt there are going to be edge cases where, for sure, this is going to be a good thing for those people and probably for society at large. But is that the majority you think? You think most people who are having AI friends need quote, quote, need that.

0:59:38 - Leo Laporte
Well, I think most people will choose humans, even if they no, I'm talking about.

0:59:43 - Benito Gonzalez
They're not. I'm talking about psychological need, like those people who like, really can't like, maybe have are on the spectrum, can't make human relationships, because, right those people, for those people, this is great exactly yeah, but those are edge cases.

0:59:53 - Paris Martineau
Those aren't the majority but I think for a broader sect of people, people who may be, I mean I don't.

1:00:02 - Leo Laporte
I have faith in people, and there's something that jeff said I do think that it's not gonna make somebody do this's not going to make somebody do this.

1:00:07 - Paris Martineau
It's not going to make somebody do anything. Of course, these people are making their own choices, but I do think it's I don't know sets up a bit of an unfortunate dynamic that people who are feeling lonely. You can just download an app and immediately have a girlfriend who will love you and dive into er, who will love you and dive into erotica with you and do anything you want, versus being forced to maybe go outside and meet people.

1:00:36 - Jeff Jarvis
That's the porn. Argument is that no one will ever live up to the fantasy that is created in porn, right, and so you get spoiled. Benito was about to quote me.

1:00:43 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, there's something Jeff said earlier that there's something jeff said earlier that it's something key. He said that they, they, they know that they're talking to machine. Some people believe that these are real people already, that these are real sentient beings already and talking to them as if they are now. Is that okay? Sure, why not?

1:01:00 - Jeff Jarvis
unless you work for google and try to tell the world that you've created this idiot machine, as happened with one.

1:01:07 - Leo Laporte
All right, we have to take a break. I will leave you with those conundrums. Contemplate them. That's what we do here.

1:01:14 - Paris Martineau
Yes, I'm going to go talk to my AI boyfriend about this, the conundrum storm.

1:01:18 - Leo Laporte
Have you ever had a long-term conversation with an AI chatbot over a period of hours or days? Have you ever done that? I've never done that no, I haven't.

1:01:28 - Jeff Jarvis
No, we could have someone on the show. We could have one on the show.

1:01:35 - Paris Martineau
Hey, that's who you could get to replace me next week.

1:01:37 - Leo Laporte
I'm sorry to say that I wish that we were at the point. I don't think they're good enough yet, but I wish we were at the point that we could have us uh, a simulated paris be the host of the co-host. That would be fun, should we? Should we try that?

1:01:51 - Paris Martineau
not a simulated meep. You could just have an ai, oh no we'll call her.

1:01:55 - Benito Gonzalez
We'll call her heidelberg no, I call her madrid, madrid, madrid that's it madrid, yes, madrid.

1:02:02 - Leo Laporte
Okay, anthony nsen, this is your job.

1:02:07 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I'm so sorry, anthony, I'm sorry.

1:02:09 - Leo Laporte
He made AI Leo, who's actually pretty good in the chat room, but AI Leo isn't talking for three hours, is he? Well, you'll have to do 11. Ai, you'll have to get a voice. I bet we could get pretty close.

1:02:22 - Jeff Jarvis
When the fake AI person comes on next week you know you could have?

1:02:27 - Paris Martineau
you could have a chat bot, paris, or you could have a zitron.

1:02:30 - Leo Laporte
You could have an angry british man hey, he's as good as ai, if not better. All right, let's take a break. We got, uh, we've got a great show ahead. You guys are going to pick some stories. There's like a thousand. You guys are going to pick some stories. There's like a thousand stories. This is so much news, yeah, so much this is. This is a probably the fastest growing area, uh, in tech news not as fast as political news, but as we could talk about the great, big, beautiful bill, there have been some. It did pass. It's now going back to the house, the budget reconciliation act, uh, and it does have some ai impacts. Fortunately, one bullet was dodged, but we'll talk about that in just a bit.

You're watching intelligent. Did you just do? The? The? The matrix bullet time dodge? We'll do. We'll have more with jeff jarvis and paris martineau in just a bit.

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1:07:36 - Jeff Jarvis
They had just come out last week in the copyright cases one of them came out last week, the other one had not yet come out, I think okay because, according to mike masnick, two judges same district.

1:07:48 - Leo Laporte
They were both in northern california opposite conclusions. The messy reality of ai training, copyright cases we talked about judge alsops, uh, I think very correct decision that what anthropic had done ingesting books it bought, it was fired properly if acquired properly, the pirated books.

No, he said we're going to trial on that one. But if there were purchased, that was fair use. Another judge in the in the fifth district, uh, uh, vince, uh, chabria, said it's likely infringing because of the supposed impact on the market. That's one of the four free fair use tests you know. One is is it transformative? And judge alsop yes, definitely transformative. The other is, though it cannot affect the market for that information right. Both, mike says, involve thoughtful judges with solid copyright track records, both coming out of the Northern District of California. Both can't be right, so we're going to just have to wait and see it's going to take a long time to cut through.

1:08:54 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, yeah it. This is gonna take a long time to cut through, yeah yeah, it's gonna take a long time to shake out what's weird is judge chapria kind of gave an exemption for something that is already sold.

1:09:06 - Leo Laporte
Well, take, for example, biographies. If a company uses copyrighted biographies to train a model, and if the model is just then capable of generating endless amounts biographies, if a company uses copyrighted biographies to train a model and if the model is just then capable of generating endless amounts of biographies, the market for many of the copied biographies could be severely harmed. Perhaps not the market for Robert Caro's Master of the Senate, his LBJ biography, because that book is at the top of many people's lists of biographies to read. But you could bet the market for lesser known biographies of lbj would be affected that's that's.

1:09:41 - Jeff Jarvis
That's illogical, plus it's it. It flies in the face of what we know from google books, that when books were scanned, they increased sales because people had more opportunity for discovery mike says.

1:09:54 - Leo Laporte
That admission destroys his entire argument. People recognize a good biography is a good biography and AI slop even a I slop generated from reading other good biographies is not a credible substitute. I'd agree you're gonna read the power broker because it's brilliantly written. You're not going to settle for an AI generated biography of Robert Caro.

1:10:17 - Paris Martineau
That's, you know, just AI but would it affect the market if it suddenly flooded with slop from this? Would that be considered an effect on the market? Even if it isn't?

1:10:31 - Leo Laporte
even if it isn't. So this is kind of the same question about AI girlfriends. Yeah, it is because I think, ultimately, I trust humans to be able to pick the good stuff right. If they pick the slop, they pick the slop. Maybe there's reasons you would have you'd pick an AI slop partner or an ai slop biography every top 10 bestseller.

1:10:58 - Benito Gonzalez
Everything will disagree with you, yeah I know most of that slop.

1:11:02 - Leo Laporte
Isn't it even human written?

1:11:04 - Paris Martineau
yeah, yeah, the uh airport book section would disagree with you but okay, I'm not saying it's good literature.

1:11:12 - Leo Laporte
I don't mean. I just mean you can tell a human there's something a human brings to the table. Maybe not I don't know.

1:11:19 - Jeff Jarvis
It depends on, I think, Paris. I think it depends on what the competition is. It's like recipes If all you need is a brownie recipe and it's a brownie recipe, then I'm sorry gourmet. No, I don't need to pay for yours, I got a perfectly good brownie recipe over here. Or if all I want is a beach romance book, a beach romance book, how many of them are brilliant. But if you want Caro, you want Caro.

1:11:49 - Paris Martineau
And so there's not like a simple competition Interesting. I mean, I think it'll be interesting to see how this shakes out. I I was surprised to see that we had two very different opinions. Um come out in the same issue from, you know, the same same court district chabria knew about alsop's decision.

1:12:04 - Leo Laporte
He even addresses it, he says, speaking of which, in a recent ruling on this topic, also focused heavily on the transformative nature of generative ai, while brushing aside concerns about the harm it can inflict on the market for the works. In fact, jabri agrees it's transformative, but market impact trumps everything else but there's no proof of that.

1:12:27 - Jeff Jarvis
in fact, it may again be the opposite. So if it's the, if he's shown evidence to the opposite, then One thing I didn't understand about Chabris because I didn't read it, maybe you did is the reason that he threw out the author's case they hadn't presented a proper argument. Yeah, that was for technical. He's open to other arguments. Yeah, that was for technical reasons. It's very technical, okay.

1:12:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and that happens unfortunately and far too often in these cases, that they don't really decide the real issue. They throw it out for technical reasons. Anyway, masnick concludes, the case isn't settled. Neither is the broader question of AI training and copyright. We're still years away from definitive answers and, in the meantime, companies and developers are left navigating a legal minefield where identical content con conduct might be fair use in one courtroom and infringement in another. This has been the problem, all along with fair use, by the way.

1:13:23 - Paris Martineau
Uh, that is really uh, exacerbated by, uh, these ai copyright issues while we're on the subject of a uh, mike masnick tech dirt I had come across on Blue Sky today. I just put the link below what we were just talking about in the rundown. This is an old article but I don't remember us talking about it, which is Mike went into how he uses AI to help with tech dirt and the headline is and no, it's not for writing articles, and I thought it was quite interesting. Did we not speak about this, guys? Am I remembering correctly?

1:13:54 - Leo Laporte
I don't remember talking about it no.

1:13:56 - Paris Martineau
It is kind of interesting, so he goes into it quite a bit in this blog post, which is he says yeah, we're not using AI to generate any of the writing that we're publishing on this site, but I am using this site called Lexpage. Lex is an AI tool he writes, built with writers in mind. It looks kind of like a nice Google Docs, and while it does have the power to do some AI generated writing for you, almost all of its tools are designed to actually assist actual writers rather than do away with their work. You can ask them to write the next paragraph for you. But I've never used that tool, he says, and so he kind of goes into how he uses it and, like one simple way is he plugged? In. This is not the article.

By the way, this is for next, the next he plugged in an article that he was about to uh publish and then asked um lex to rank. It basically said give this an article scorecard. Does this article have a clear opening that grabs the reader? Score from zero to three? Does it clearly explain what's happening? All these different things and then it has. He has this llm check it against this and kind of use it as an editor to bounce ideas off it was mike's scorecard, not the llm score.

Mike's scorecard that he then prompts the llm to uh address, which I I don't know I thought was kind of an interesting way to use it.

1:15:17 - Leo Laporte
It's funny. I have a in my note-taking app, obsidian. I have an AI in it that will often recommend like I'm starting to write, will recommend the next sentence, and I invariably reject it because it's always anodyne. It's always like I hope this all works out. You know, it's kind of it's just so. I don't think you really want an AI to help you write. Maybe you do.

1:15:43 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't know I took, so I just submitted my manuscript after cutting about 30 pages out of it. Because that's what you do I was going, you know, paragraph by paragraph, and cutting out words and cutting out words.

1:15:55 - Leo Laporte
And so I put both. The prior version AI just adds words, doesn't it?

1:15:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I put the prior version and the submitted version in through Notebook LM and I said did I leave anything important out? And it noted all these things that were still in it.

1:16:11 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's too bad.

1:16:13 - Jeff Jarvis
But I also took the finished manuscript and had to make a podcast.

1:16:17 - Leo Laporte
Just curious how it worked 23 minutes and it was pretty damn good this is the article, and it is, by the way, from april of last year. So, uh, we're gonna. So mike has done something interesting and we're trying to book him. Have we been able to get a time to talk to mike yet?

1:16:34 - Benito Gonzalez
I know he's he is. He's not available until after the fourth of july weekend ah, that's right.

1:16:39 - Leo Laporte
He has done some vibe coding, uh, and created his own task management app that, he says, is better than anything I've ever used before, because I wrote it to my specific needs and he was very impressed by it.

1:16:55 - Paris Martineau
So that's how I ended up finding out this article, because that article is part two of the series, and part one was this that task management tool is named after Alex Horn, assistant of Taskmaster, in a fun collab of mine.

1:17:09 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's right, he's a Taskmaster fan. Yeah, he calls it Lil Alex. Yeah, lil Alex. So we're gonna get. I gotta get Mike on to talk about this he's. But what's interesting and it's worth reading, it's a two-part, a multi-part series, I think. But he vibe coded it and the real point is that he is able to iterate almost constantly to make it better and better and better. Um, I'm I'm impressed, but I have to say I'm not surprised because I've, you know, I've been using these same coding tools. I'm pretty sure he used claude code to write this off the off to see uh, oh, no, that's not the case.

1:17:54 - Paris Martineau
Let me see what he used yeah, I'm not entirely sure from uh scanning site.

1:18:00 - Leo Laporte
Don't remember when I read it he was using bolt and lovable, okay, and then, uh, anyway, he he talks about, about how he did it, which I think is of great interest. I had an experience this week that I was with AI coding. That was very impressed. I have tried and failed a number of times to do a gentic vibe coding with Cloud Code for our Twit API for our website, but that, I think, is more my fault than the AI's fault. I think I need to learn better how to interact with Claude. But we had a very simple problem. I was talking with a couple of our coders in the club in the Discord.

Every December we do the Advent of Code coding challenge. This year I gave up after a week. I had other things I wanted to do, so Paul Holder convinced me to come back and after a week I just I had other things I wanted to do, so Paul can. Paul Holder convinced me to come back and try a few and I did. And then I got to day 15 of the 25 days of the Advent calendar and uh had and I wrote it and I thought it worked. It worked with all the examples, but I couldn't get it to work on the actual data that was provided and it was driving me nuts and Darren Oki, who does a lot of vibe coding, said well, just why don't you pass it by Claude code and see if it could figure out where you've gone wrong? He said I'd be interested to see if Claude cause this was code that was done. I would be interested to see if Claude could understand what you did especially considering I was using an ancient language called common Lisp and figure out where you went wrong.

And it did within seconds. It was able to look at my code, say oh yeah, I see what you did wrong here. You didn't. You didn't get all the input data. You stopped a line short. It's a dumb mistake. It was just I didn't. I didn't realize there was more than one line. You stopped a line short. So I've rewritten that paragraph. I didn't use its rewriting, I did my own, but it was. It did within seconds. It found the problem that had been kind of driving me crazy for an hour and gave me a solution. That's a really good use of it and that's something you know because I use such an obscure language. It actually is kind of hard to find people to look at my code and say oh yeah, here's what you're doing wrong. You're a numbskull.

1:20:15 - Jeff Jarvis
If I were using python, it wouldn't be nearly as hard but you're right, it's all about telling them what to do, which is always the case. It's about the props. So I'm working on a next book and a next topic and I and I have my thinking already going.

1:20:26 - Paris Martineau
I didn't want to this isn't even the liner type book.

1:20:28 - Jeff Jarvis
This is another new book it's another new book, it's the next one. He can't stop himself.

1:20:33 - Paris Martineau
I can't stop myself, you're gonna need six more bookshelves, jeff oh well, there's wait a minute now.

1:20:40 - Leo Laporte
Anthony says he asked claude for critique of our last week's episode. Uh-oh, he says overall impressions it's gonna be sycophantic.

1:20:50 - Jeff Jarvis
This was an exceptionally long episode, at over three hours, which leo himself acknowledged was supposed to be shorter.

1:20:59 - Leo Laporte
The length both helped and hindered the show it allowed good, they're not being completely both sides. It allowed for deep, thoughtful discussion, but also led to significant meandering, especially in the final hour where are you going to go on vacation?

1:21:13 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris?

1:21:14 - Leo Laporte
Wow, the highlight was a deadly interview with Richard Gingras. Oh, this is good. Okay, there was some substantive AI discussion. The chemistry is good. The rapport between Leo Jeff and Paris remains a strength, creating an engaging conversation. Here's the weaknessesive length and tangents Shut up, Shut up AI. Oh, he's talking Notable digressions included an extended discussion about restaurant recommendations for Paris' road trip.

1:21:46 - Paris Martineau
Don't come for a lengthy debate about the difference between geek and nerd. That's what this show is all about, Well of course an AI doesn't care about restaurants.

1:21:54 - Leo Laporte
Multiple attempts to demonstrate ai voice assistants that didn't add much value detailed descriptions of local restaurants, while charming, went on far too it really is sucking up to just you, leo. That's kind of interesting a lengthy debate about the okay technical demonstrations. Several ai tool demos fell flat. The 11 labs voice assistant was awkward and didn't showcase compelling use cases. Multiple attempts to get various AI systems to work properly disrupted the flow. Uneven pay this is all true. We know all of this.

1:22:24 - Paris Martineau
I will say the 11 Labs AI test brought tears to my eyes when the AI said I am 11. So I wouldn't cut that for the world.

1:22:35 - Leo Laporte
Some arguments, particularly about copyright and fair use, were rehashed multiple times without adding new insights. That's always a problem. There's a certain repetitiveness in all of our shows. While the my Boyfriend is AI subreddit discussion raised important societal questions. It sometimes felt exploitative rather than analytical what you hosts could have approached this sensitive topic with more empathy. Oh, show discipline.

Yeah, says the ai leo's repeated acknowledgments that the show was running too long, followed by continuing anyway, highlighting a lack of editorial discipline that hurt the overall product. Who the boss here? Who's the boss? Enforced time limits, edit for podcast. No better demo. Preposite preparation. Stay focused on ai. This is none.

1:23:24 - Paris Martineau
Of this is wrong the first 90 minutes were excellent. The remaining 90 plus minutes felt increasingly self-indulgent and and you thought AI was slop.

1:23:35 - Jeff Jarvis
This is going to be the problem when we get fake Paris. It's going to ask about an hour in. Are we done yet?

1:23:40 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, are you still going on? I've got some places to be.

1:23:44 - Leo Laporte
It's going to say all the things Paris has wanted to say all this time.

1:23:48 - Paris Martineau
I got nowhere to be, that's pretty funny.

1:23:52 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean I can't, anthony. Which did he use which?

1:23:55 - Paris Martineau
Claude. Claude.

1:23:57 - Leo Laporte
Claude's good. I'm very impressed by Claude, you would think.

1:24:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Claude would remember me from our fine coding sessions in the past and perhaps cut me some slack.

1:24:10 - Leo Laporte
Should we give Claude a salute? No, claude's, I've been saying this all along. This is exactly what's wrong with this show.

1:24:18 - Paris Martineau
Well, I do think, though it's off, chat is popping off about how this is. The their favorite thing is the tangents and off-topic bits honestly, that's why I let it happen.

1:24:28 - Leo Laporte
I know you know my instinct as a broadcaster is to cut everything short, move quickly, move on. That's why I always interrupt people, but this show it's meandering.

1:24:44 - Paris Martineau
That's kind of the point of it. Yeah, and this is the thing I feel like I notice across all podcasts, not even just ours. It's like some podcasts that I really like, I hear one of the hosts being like, oh my gosh, we can't go on a third tangent, playing a weird guessing game about what date things came out in the past, and then the audience goes crazy for it and so they turn it into a mini segment, like it's chemistry and banter and strange fun tangents it's been so bad on our show since for 20 years that one of our hosts actually wrote a jingle called rat hole, where I'll play who's, because we kept, we kept falling into rat holes we prefer to think of them as rabbit holes this was back uh on uh mac break weekly, when merlin man was a regular on the show.

1:25:28 - Leo Laporte
Um, let me, uh, let me quick look at rat hole rat hole. We had a jingle. Actually that's the edited version. That's actually great it went on longer than that it went on as it should. It was its own rat hole 43 folders of rat holes I wish.

1:25:48 - Paris Martineau
I had the long one still so clearly.

1:25:52 - Leo Laporte
I have learned nothing. I have learned no lessons from many years of doing this. There's there are different kinds of podcasts and I think ai it makes sense and ai would be more focused on information, but podcasts are about humans hanging out someone just said in the chat I enjoy the meta of this, the fact that this discussion is itself a rat hole, which is true. You got us there, amandar uh, did you see that ice is now using facial recognition app on its phone to wreck to identify people?

I thought we were already doing that yeah, what a surprise and, as a result, perhaps certainly related. The number one social app on apple's app store right now is an ice app that tells you where an ice is nearby. It's an ice alert app, which is. Is that the word?

1:26:51 - Jeff Jarvis
is that's what cnn mentioned.

1:26:53 - Leo Laporte
Trump is threatening cnn right, yes, pam bondy, the attorney general, said well, we're gonna have to investigate the author of that, as if it's somehow illegal, for yeah yeah, for people to say where, where isis agents are um, google has launched a new app just in time for your trip to paris. No, that's a terrible thing to say. It's called doppel. It lets you visualize how an outfit might look on you I know all my outfits look fire, so I'm sure they do it's.

They're acting like this is a new thing. This has been going on for years, hasn't it? Legitimately I feel like every company has had a version of this and no one really likes it.

1:27:43 - Paris Martineau
Like amazon had this whole virtual yeah, I had that camera you put in your closet right.

1:27:46 - Leo Laporte
Right, that would tell you before you went out of the closet uh, no, better not, don't do that. All right, I'm going to download doppel. What do you think doppel will say about my outfit today?

1:27:59 - Jeff Jarvis
oh, I want to see the shirt.

1:28:01 - Leo Laporte
I want to, yeah off topic and self-indulgent uh, I see now the ai is going to say leo, if you had really prepared for the show, you would have already installed doppel and would be prepared to do this. You need work on these demos. Yeah, d-o-p-p-l, is it like Doppelganger, you think?

1:28:26 - Paris Martineau
I guess Probably. Or Doppel your digital twin. Now for fashion.

1:28:32 - Leo Laporte
Well, unfortunately there's already a chatbot called doppelai, so google it's unfortunate thought a little harder brands google is not good at this stuff. Doppel here it is. Try on any.

1:28:46 - Paris Martineau
Look I doppel you have to have a full body scan for it to probably put your looks in put my look in.

1:28:56 - Leo Laporte
Let me yeah. Well, you certainly want to get the fact that I'm wearing crocs oh, what color crocs, and do they have any swag on them? I've taken okay let's go show foot oh, you got to take a full body photo and bright light, just you, natural pose, no hat. Are you going to do it now? I can't, you can't. I need a photographer.

1:29:22 - Paris Martineau
The AI is going to be mad at you if you do it now.

1:29:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Lisa.

1:29:29 - Paris Martineau
Are you unstrapping yourself from something?

1:29:32 - Jeff Jarvis
He wears a seatbelt in the show.

1:29:33 - Paris Martineau
It's dangerous, you know. Just in case. No, I have headphones attached, unstrapping yourself from something.

1:29:36 - Leo Laporte
He wears a seat belt in the shower it's dangerous.

1:29:38 - Paris Martineau
You know? No, I have headphones attached. If enough people downvote on the twit live stream, he'll be ejected out of the uh out of the booth.

1:29:43 - Leo Laporte
All right now, wait a minute, I'm going to put this okay you're actually going to do it now I'm going to. Well, I have to figure out that there's a timer thing.

1:29:52 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, all right, jeff. What do you want to talk about while he's doing this?

1:29:55 - Leo Laporte
yeah, while I'm doing that, you, you get busy okay do you have any silly ones in here?

1:30:00 - Jeff Jarvis
um uh, the internet needs sex what?

1:30:05 - Paris Martineau
okay, did it not already have that line?

1:30:07 - Jeff Jarvis
158. It's an opinion about the fact that all there's this, this, this anti-porn stuff and stuff and the Texas age verification is actually bad for the internet, says Lux Alptraum, editor in chief of flesh bot.

1:30:22 - Leo Laporte
Well, what would you expect from the editor and chief of something called flesh bot?

1:30:28 - Jeff Jarvis
So there's I mean.

1:30:29 - Paris Martineau
I, just I, I was I. I'm not going to say I'm surprised to see that this um law had moved through, but I have been a bit surprised. I'm really trying hard not to be distracted by Ludo trying to take a full body image of himself right now. I mean, what do you think about this, jeff? What do you think the implications are going to be?

1:30:52 - Jeff Jarvis
I think it's a new puritanism.

1:30:54 - Paris Martineau
Yeah. I think it's also notable that this is happening and people are going to try and blame this on boomers and the older generation. Certainly they have something to blame, but I think this is also. There's a puritanism we're seeing in gen z and gen alpha that I think uh, is often under explored. You see this a lot online, with kind of the panic over what people call corn because they're too puritanical about to even say the word porn. Um, but I, just I the puritanism goes beyond sex.

1:31:24 - Jeff Jarvis
It's it's. I'm going to give up computers, I'm going to give up sex, I'm going to give up they're just. The journalism is filled with giving up things, which is just a weird thing of the time I think.

1:31:33 - Benito Gonzalez
To answer the question, though does the internet need sex? It absolutely does, because all of this technology, all of this is because of the porn industry. That's the reason all of this is here.

1:31:43 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.

1:31:43 - Paris Martineau
Yeah.

1:31:45 - Benito Gonzalez
Yep, the internet is for porn. It's the truth. It's the reason we have VHS. It's the reason we have DVD.

1:31:55 - Jeff Jarvis
It's the reason we have the internet video right now. Yeah, god bless them all.

1:31:58 - Paris Martineau
How did your scan go, Leo?

1:32:00 - Leo Laporte
Well, it's providing. Doppel is now providing some looks. I'm quickly going to pull this up here so that you can see it. These are the.

1:32:10 - Benito Gonzalez
AI Wants you to be a mime. You're a mime. He thinks you're a mime.

1:32:14 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to be a mime, you're a mime. Actually. He thinks, okay, getting my look, uh, ready, okay oh, that's not recommended.

1:32:20 - Jeff Jarvis
I see, okay, no, that was recommended.

1:32:24 - Paris Martineau
This is the picture right that's a good look, good pick good pick.

1:32:28 - Leo Laporte
I think it's probably a little too busy. Try a look from the screenshot.

1:32:32 - Paris Martineau
Let's go next tip, okay, I don't want to recommend any dresses okay, here's the picture, okay, add you know, I think you want to do the. You want to do the screenshot of the, of the mime look oh yeah, you need to that.

1:32:47 - Benito Gonzalez
No, no, no, no, no say it's that it's doing something. You need to say the plus right oh, yeah, you, yeah, you're right, it's generating.

1:32:54 - Leo Laporte
It's doing something, it's taking its time or scanning.

1:32:58 - Paris Martineau
I think it's going to put you in the same look that you're wearing.

1:33:02 - Leo Laporte
I'm already in this look.

1:33:04 - Paris Martineau
I know, I think that's why it's taking so long, because it's concerned, it's just confused.

1:33:08 - Leo Laporte
It says well, that is a look, look, okay, my look is ready ready, okay, good, now what I don't help?

1:33:22 - Paris Martineau
so, oh yeah, here I am you're like a punky mime it's our french sailor that's hysterical. This is really good oh my God. Report this look Red dead jeans. Can you tap to animate it?

1:33:38 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but I'm doing it on my computer so I don't know if it's going to. It's supposed to animate it, yeah.

1:33:44 - Paris Martineau
I wonder Wow, wow.

1:33:46 - Leo Laporte
How do?

1:33:46 - Paris Martineau
you feel about this? Would you wear red pants? Please don't.

1:33:49 - Leo Laporte
Striped shirt. Striped shirt no.

1:33:57 - Paris Martineau
Let's add a new look.

1:33:57 - Leo Laporte
Well, uh, try a look from scratch. Yeah, I want scratch, but how do I do it from scratch? Uh, oh, you, it says.

1:34:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, it wants you to look online or find you need to find an outfit or something go to abercrombie and fitch and find something just too young and hip for you.

1:34:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah no, that's fine I'm trying to think of what's the. I think I like what it's done so far. We're gonna stop there. That is very funny. Tap to animate. Yeah, I don't see it animating, I'm searching matrix inspired menswear futuristic maybe we'll get something. Send me a link and I will add myself to it. Okay, well, there you go. That was kind of fun. That's Doppel. Somebody said ahoy Leo, hey matey. Don't you think Paris, though I should have a belt. Don't you think a belt would help this?

1:34:52 - Paris Martineau
No, I think you should have a little, don't you think a belt would help this?

1:34:55 - Leo Laporte
no, I think you should have a like a little scarf around your neck a little. French face paint. What uh this? Is how the kids dress now in red, blue jeans with no belt. Is that the?

1:35:04 - Paris Martineau
no, that's definitely how I dressed in, like middle school. Okay, wait, is your instinctive problem with that?

1:35:13 - Leo Laporte
no belt well, that's one of the issues.

1:35:16 - Jeff Jarvis
It screams at me, the no belt screams at me.

1:35:18 - Leo Laporte
Yes, really it must be. Us must be our age.

1:35:22 - Jeff Jarvis
People these days need falling down wow, it's really says you got a problem with this did it tell you to put your hands on your hips yeah, here come.

1:35:33 - Paris Martineau
No, that was just me I I posted a couple outfit options in the chat okay, all right.

1:35:39 - Leo Laporte
All right, you're ahead of me. It's, oh, it generates. Uh, it is generating animation, but let me uh well done, paris.

1:35:47 - Jeff Jarvis
If you feed this to the ai, it's gonna get very upset.

1:35:50 - Paris Martineau
The second one, try it's gonna say what the hell. I think the second one is what you want.

1:35:53 - Leo Laporte
This show deserves some uh editing for sure, sorry, all you audio no, this is what the people, but I can't, it's mo. Oh, wait a minute, that's not it okay. Oh, I like it okay, so this is a josephine's multi-colored uh suit I'm gonna do a screenshot of this and I'm gonna add this to my.

1:36:23 - Paris Martineau
To add this to my save the image okay, so well, I guess I won't spoil it. Um, I've sent leo a couple of hot, attractive, um attractive images and uh, I think, we're gonna, we're to create some art here, I really take back all of the crap talking I did of you standing up to take AI photos in the middle of the podcast. This is incredibly worth it.

1:36:51 - Leo Laporte
I wonder what Claude would say.

1:36:54 - Paris Martineau
Claude, this isn't for you.

1:36:56 - Leo Laporte
This is not for you. This is a human thing.

1:36:58 - Jeff Jarvis
I wonder if we can. It's a human thing you just wouldn't understand.

1:37:01 - Leo Laporte
You just wouldn't understand.

1:37:02 - Jeff Jarvis
So Meta will Claude oh, that's a good one. Will Claude react to our reaction to Claude? How Meta can get, oh, hey, claude, claude, I think your opinions are all wrong.

1:37:14 - Leo Laporte
You're so wrong, Claude, what are you a?

1:37:16 - Paris Martineau
machine. This ain't no stinking rat hole. We're out here above ground walking on fresh spring grass in the podcasting fields.

1:37:27 - Leo Laporte
All right, now it's working on that. Look that you sent me and let's see what it is.

1:37:40 - Jeff Jarvis
From mime sailor to man about town. It's, it's, it's consistent with the shirt you have on leo.

1:37:43 - Leo Laporte
It is more than consistent. Yes, it's a, it's a continuation, if you will, it is yeah paris.

1:37:50 - Jeff Jarvis
How would you describe le's shirt? It's flowery.

1:37:53 - Paris Martineau
I think I have that shirt.

1:37:55 - Leo Laporte
I bet you do. It's a very nice shirt. Did you give up what happened?

1:38:01 - Jeff Jarvis
here God. This AI is slow.

1:38:02 - Benito Gonzalez
No, it said it was ready. You need to go find it now. You need to go select it now.

1:38:06 - Leo Laporte
How do I?

1:38:08 - Benito Gonzalez
The way you did it earlier.

1:38:09 - Leo Laporte
No, no no the gallery, the gallery. No the gallery, the gallery Bottom left, bottom left. Ah, that is a look my friends.

1:38:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, the tie is perfect.

1:38:22 - Leo Laporte
I don't think the tie was in the original shot.

1:38:24 - Jeff Jarvis
No, it wasn't. This is tie dye, not floral.

1:38:28 - Paris Martineau
Oh, my God.

1:38:29 - Jeff Jarvis
It, updated it to your generation.

1:38:32 - Paris Martineau
Oh my God, it's better than I ever could have imagined.

1:38:34 - Leo Laporte
It does a pretty good job.

1:38:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Don't you think of mapping it onto my girlish figure? The tie is bold.

1:38:40 - Leo Laporte
Alright, so we two thumbs up for Doppler.

1:38:42 - Jeff Jarvis
This is Liberace.

1:38:44 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it's, benito, if we could find a way to get both of these fits in the image for the week.

1:38:52 - Leo Laporte
You sent a couple Benito. Just shorten this up because it really is rather a laser field.

1:39:00 - Paris Martineau
We don't need to do all of them.

1:39:02 - Leo Laporte
I'll do one more. How about that?

1:39:04 - Benito Gonzalez
That one is a mask, so you won't even see you.

1:39:06 - Leo Laporte
That one's not going to work. The mask won't work no, the mime is funny. Oh, all right, here's one. I guess um pretty fly for a cis guy was using doppel to generate that and uh, if that's not a, if that's not an advertisement for ozempic, I don't know what is that's, uh, or?

1:39:32 - Paris Martineau
I wonder if it can put you in JNCOs.

1:39:34 - Leo Laporte
Or lubricant. Well, I would imagine I used it to get into it. It's very tight. Alright, back to the news. We don't want Claude to get too upset. I'm actually going to probably take that Claude Criticism to heart. Oh no, oh shush.

1:39:49 - Jeff Jarvis
I think I have to fix this show now. No, please don't. That was not even a viewer.

1:39:55 - Benito Gonzalez
It's not even a listener. Leo Claude's not even a listener.

1:39:58 - Paris Martineau
This show is for human beings, not Claude.

1:40:01 - Leo Laporte
It is. It is the show about human beings. Ask.

1:40:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Claude, what to fix of the Craig theme? Yeah, all right. So.

1:40:06 - Paris Martineau
I did mention and two days ago we got a review from a real human listener who said great discussions and, yes, many tangents about AI and its effects. The show delves deep into philosophical thoughts about AI, but the variety of guests and different perspectives and hosts really make it enjoyable, Sometimes fun, sometimes wacky, always informative. That answers Claude See.

1:40:28 - Leo Laporte
Screw you, claude. That's exactly right, it's just perfect. So the good news on the big beautiful bill that the senate, the house passed, the senate passed now for some reason has to go back to the house I guess because it's reconciliation is they did drop the plan to ban state ai laws. Depends on who you ask if it's good news or not. Actually that's a good point. Uh, marcia Blackburn said it's a bad idea, but she did offer an amendment that fixed some of the issues.

1:41:00 - Jeff Jarvis
But it wasn't sufficient. She didn't want to lose her Elvis law, which protects musicians.

1:41:07 - Leo Laporte
No, she yesterday yanked her support for the AI bill. Actually that it would actually ban a lot of the state laws to trying to protect kids online and things like that, because all of those used automated filters which would have fallen under the rubric of AI. So, good news the moratorium or maybe bad news, depending on how you feel the moratorium has been that was Ted Cruz's proposal.

1:41:32 - Jeff Jarvis
It was Marshall Blackburn and Ted Cruz, and they tried to negotiate and they came to nothing on it.

1:41:41 - Leo Laporte
Her concern was to allow big tech to continue to exploit kids, creators and conservatives the three C's.

1:41:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Line 137, adam Teer, who's a good libertarian commentator on all this, said that now California and New York will take the lead in shaping national policy, which could be a mess. This is the one that bothers me. This is devastating blow for little tech AI players because it's regulatory capture, because just the big guys will be able to deal with whatever burdens are put upon them by California and New York. And then there's the question of whether this helps us or not with China and AI leadership, because that's supposedly what everybody cares about.

1:42:22 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think that Marsha Blackburn liked the idea of limiting what the states could do. She just didn't like the side effects, the unintended consequences. She didn't want to lose her Elvis law.

1:42:33 - Paris Martineau
And she didn't want it to impact the progress of COSA or COSPA as it now is.

1:42:40 - Leo Laporte
COSPA. Actually, I don't disagree with, I think, a number of the things he says are legit. The problem I had was yeah, it's fine to say, okay, let's have a federal rule instead of 50 state laws, but there was no initiative at all to create a federal regulation of AI. So it was basically saying no regulation of AI and that was the choice.

1:43:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Right. I think 10 years was too long. And if they'd said we're going to do a federal study and we're going to direct Agency X to come back and recommend legislation in the meantime the states should take a pause until we see whether we have a national policy, that would have been okay.

1:43:18 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Now it may get put back in. Remember, the House put it in in the first place and it's back in the balls, back in their court. So, who knows, it could happen again. Let's take a little break. You're watching Intelligent Machines, paris Martineau, jeff Jarvis, our. Let's take a little break. You're watching intelligent machines, paris martineau, jeff jarvis, our show today brought to you by agency.

I'm a big supporter of this idea. Building multi-agent software is hard. Agent to agent and agent to tool communication is still the wild west. How do you achieve accuracy and consistency in essentially non-deterministic agentic apps? Well, that's the idea. That's where agency comes in.

A-g-n-t-c-y Agency is an open source collective building the internet of agents. It's something that we need. We need to have a standard that everybody can agree on. What is the internet of agents? It's a collaboration layer where AI agents can communicate, discover each other and work across frameworks. For developers, this means standardized agent discovery tools, seamless protocols for interagent communication and modular components to compose and scale multi-agent workflows. Build with other engineers who care about high quality multi-agent software. Visit agencyorg and add your support. That's agntcyorg an open source collective building the internet of agents. This is how it has to be done. It should be done. I wish everything were done this way, agencyorg. Thank you, agency, for the work you're doing and for uh helping us spread the word about it too. We appreciate that opportunity. Now denmark has taken a interesting step in uh in ai regulation. They have with the intent of you like the picture, with the intent of tackling deep fakes.

That's the you'll notice at some point poor pope francis in a white puffer puffy coat. Uh, amendment. Oh, it's something else. You should have put that on for a look. That's a good look. Uh, that obviously was a deep fake, although I have to admit, when I first saw it I wasn't sure. I thought maybe he's got a nice puffer coat. Uh, the idea is that people can copyright their own body, facial features and voice nobody copy this belly it would be the first of its kind law in europe.

The bill is right now before the Danish parliament. What do you think? I mean there is a doctrine for celebrities to protect their likeness, right.

1:46:14 - John Graham-Cumming
I don't know what the legal status of that is well there's.

1:46:17 - Jeff Jarvis
There's use of of of publicity, right to publicity, right to publicity. There you go. That's where privacy law started, because a young woman's face was put on a barrel of flour without her permission and she said hey so that was actually the beginning of privacy law.

1:46:32 - Leo Laporte
So so is this something that is not in the EU, but we do have some protections in the United States? The right of publicity is a legal right. The right to legal action oh, it's kind of like fair use. Yeah, it's the right to hire a lawyer. It's the right to hire a lawyer Designed to protect the names and likenesses of celebrities, specifically against unauthorized exploitation for commercial purposes. It goes back to halean laboratories versus tops chewing gum in 1953, which recognized a baseball player's interest in his photograph on a baseball card.

1:47:10 - Paris Martineau
that's interesting, I mean, I don't think there's anything wrong with this, so I think that you know.

1:47:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, nobody should be able to make a fake Paris to put on the show next week. Yeah, and maybe not have to pay you anymore.

1:47:23 - Paris Martineau
Nobody should do that. No, nobody should be able to do that.

1:47:27 - Jeff Jarvis
No way, Not in Denmark at least.

1:47:30 - Paris Martineau
No matter what I'm wearing and how close it looks to what you're wearing. Leo, did you notice my costume change?

1:47:39 - Leo Laporte
oh, I'm wearing your shirt is that what you were laughing at?

1:47:44 - Paris Martineau
you're wondering how long it would take you to know I like it.

1:47:47 - Leo Laporte
You're perhaps hosting a show I got other things on my in the morning.

1:47:50 - Paris Martineau
This is a very leo shirt. It's got little, uh, so cute margaritas or something yeah, it's really cute.

1:47:57 - Leo Laporte
Do you have many shirts like that?

1:47:59 - Paris Martineau
I do. I have a lot of. I'm much like you I. I went through a phase during the pandemic where I wore a lot of Hawaiian shirts now I notice you've got the top button button.

1:48:11 - Leo Laporte
Is that a female thing? Like a guy? If a guy, I couldn't tell whether your top button was buttoned so I a female thing like a guy.

1:48:13 - Paris Martineau
If a guy, I couldn't tell whether your top button was buttoned, so I just hazard if I do this, do I look canadian? Oh, I feel like you look like a middle schooler preparing for a dance. I'm going to unbutton my top button so that I can breathe I think.

1:48:26 - Leo Laporte
I think when women do it it's it's okay, but I think when guys do it it's a little strange. Isn't that funny it?

1:48:31 - Paris Martineau
depends. I mean I think like it depends on how tight the collar is and the intensity of the pattern. So it is odd.

1:48:39 - Leo Laporte
Uh, mr met says in our club twit discord, we're ready for the jimmy buffett concert now, except for this guy over here I have no flowers, sorry no flower, I don't own anything like that not a one, nope, dang how about the velvet sundown.

Are you a fan of them? This is such a fun story 325 000 spotify listeners. They look like a pretty cool band, right, but they are not real. They are ai generated and, in fact, uh, the truth is there is a lot of ai generated content how does, how does spotter do, spotify does.

1:49:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Once you start getting attention, does that yield more attention?

1:49:26 - Paris Martineau
I mean so a big. I'm not certain that this is what this is, but this is my assumption and based on kind of reading articles like this around a big way that people discover mu. I guess I'll use my example. A way that I discover new music on spotify is, uh, through their various discovery playlists. So I have the various songs and albums that I like, but spotify will put together a playlist every week, uh, of music I could like, and they, over the last couple of years, as they've integrated more AI in their products, they've started these new kind of AI tinged playlists called day lists that like update multiple times a day and have really weird names that are kind of like AI generated character, like word association, but then they have a variety of songs kind of to each theme. So right now my day list is called limerence bed rotting Wednesday evening. That's pretty par for the course as far as as far as why would you want that? I don't know.

1:50:28 - Leo Laporte
Like other things that you liked or did you there were three or four.

1:50:32 - Paris Martineau
Like there's a chapel Rowan song in this. It's not like oh so some of them are real, like a lot of the songs. So this is the thing, is a lot of the songs in this will be real artists, but how I assume ai artists like this are getting more and more hits is spotify is seeding uh ai artists and I believe I'm forgetting the name of the book that came out earlier this year, uh, about spotify.

It's called like ghost in the, and I believe I'm forgetting the name of the book that came out earlier this year about spotify. It's called like ghost in the machine, I believe something like that.

1:50:59 - Leo Laporte
They uh the office is a huge story.

1:51:02 - Paris Martineau
It was a fantastic story about we talked about how because you know, uh, spotify has to pay all the people that uh, it's putting in these playlists when people listen to them and pay them royalties. It's been seeding either AI generated music or music generated by low paid contractors that Spotify kind of contracts out to fill out kind of either AI generated playlists or its biggest kind of discovery playlists that are publicly available on the app.

1:51:31 - Leo Laporte
You know this all started I was in radio in college and at the time they had something called album oriented radio. Uh, there were stations like kroq, k rock in los angeles, case and san francisco, where the dj was well known as a lover of music and would pick his own music and would weave together songs and it was really about picking music, creating a, a sonic, uh, soundscape. I remember there was a dj on ksan, which was a rock and roll station and you know it's where all the, the, the hippie music began and so forth. But every friday night at five he played pachelbel's canon and b major and he got to because it was his show, right, and that was his thing, and his shtick and uh. And when I got in the radio I thought this is going to be great. I get to listen to music, find great music, put it together, play it for people.

Nobody wanted that. All the and this is what happened to radio all the radio companies said no, no, we're going to use computer generated playlists that will automatically pick the right hits and the right rotation and we're just going to give you a list. I mean, when I got in a real radio, they gave you a list and you just play it and then, as I've said before, gradually they also phased me out because it was light rock, less talk, less uh djing. So they got rid of the personality playing the music, but they also got rid of the personalized playlist. It really was a continuum from that those early days to now, where it's just programmed for you, right? You don't, hey, you don't want to hear anybody talking in your spotify playlist. They tried that, didn't they?

1:53:12 - Paris Martineau
for a while they had yeah, they've got a thing called spotify dj, and it's the most annoying thing in the world listening to music. And then I'll be like yo spotify dj here. Coming up next is a song from fiona apple. It's like why am I listening to this?

1:53:27 - Leo Laporte
yes, this is not what I have spotify for. I don't want a human involved. Plus, you know, and pandora started this. I also don't want to pick the music right now. A lot of times people play their own playlist, but it doesn't sound like that mentalicious thing that you were talking about with the. What was it? Wet mattress? What was that?

1:53:44 - Paris Martineau
it doesn't uh, limerence, bed rotting wednesday evening that one.

1:53:51 - Leo Laporte
You didn't pick the artists or the songs did, did you?

1:53:54 - Paris Martineau
No. So it ostensibly is supposed to be inspired by your listening habits at certain times of the day, of like of each day of the week, but it's often kind of just completely random. And so this, how this comes together, is it has associated keywords, I guess, with certain songs that I allegedly listened to on Wednesday evenings, which is, for one, incorrect, because I'm doing this podcast on Wednesday evenings, I'm not listening to any music, but it says the song. The words associated with it are oh this is sad, limerence, soul crushing, bed, rotting, power, ballad, situationship, hopeless. And then gave me a playlist of songs based on that.

1:54:34 - Leo Laporte
But you're a generation that never had these. Auteur djs. It was bob mcclay, by the way, uh, who played the music that they liked. Even it was if it was pachelbel's canon and b. Thank you, norman maslow. My my album loving uh friend mazzy's music on youtube. He says bob mcclay, at ksan, started playing the canon and d every afternoon at four. I was it at 4 or was it at 5? It was the end of the day, right. So you never experienced that. In fact, your generation doesn't even want to pick the songs. I think they just want music.

1:55:05 - Paris Martineau
Well, I do think that this is kind of an interesting boomerang effect. Yeah, I never really experienced this era of auteur DJs, but I have seen this starting to come back among kind of like punk and indie circles. One of my friends, uh, runs a online radio kind of website called bad radio dot biz. That uh has I mean I'm looking right now at the schedule. They've got a pretty good like schedule. Uh, it's not totally full but of people that dj at certain hours. Uh, sunday, for instance, is mostly booked of like most hours of people curating like live streamed like radio music and I don't know. I think that's awesome you love it right yearning.

1:55:46 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, I love it, it's fantastic okay, so like this, as long as they don't talk.

1:55:50 - Paris Martineau
I mean, sometimes they come in and talk. But then it's fun because I think people are all like thinking about what a listener would want to hear.

1:55:56 - Benito Gonzalez
Human creation is never going to go away, and it never went away, it's just, it, just got it just got pushed to the edges because the algorithms are free and people just use them. That's really what came. What happened Like human curation is still there, but you have to find it. It's an active thing.

1:56:17 - Leo Laporte
You have to be the one to actually want that. I guess I'm glad, because I'd still be spinning the discs on KGZV in beautiful Bakersfield if they hadn't made me shut up. And that's when I found podcasts. People are using AI to sit with them while they trip on psychedelics Oy Ayahuasca time. You know back when I was taking a bad idea yeah, they always talked about the key to a good trip was set setting you. It was very important that you prepare your trip and you have somebody there as a doula to help you with the trip and you're in a safe environment. And there was all this stuff about pomegranate.

1:56:59 - Paris Martineau
A pomegranate is just really important.

1:57:01 - Leo Laporte
A pomegranate up with your pomegranate fantastic experience glow stick and a baby pacifier, but other than that, no, but they always talked about that. So I guess, in a way, I mean, is it better than tripping alone to have an AI buddy to talk to?

1:57:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Unless it convinces you you can fly and you should go out the window.

1:57:25 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I'm not sure that that's how it works.

1:57:27 - Benito Gonzalez
It sounds like you've never taken psychedelics, Jeff.

1:57:29 - Paris Martineau
I was about to say yeah, it sounds like you've never taken LSD.

1:57:31 - Benito Gonzalez
Jeff, nobody wants to fly.

1:57:33 - All
No, I'm referring to say yeah it sounds like you've never taken LSD. Nobody wants to fly, no, I would. Just I'm confused about it because I think the issues.

1:57:40 - Paris Martineau
The reason you'd want a trip sitter is for, like, physical safety.

1:57:44 - Leo Laporte
Reminding you that you didn't turn off. No, you can't Drink some water now?

1:57:48 - Paris Martineau
No, it's like things like you didn't turn off the stove or your front door is open and like an AI isn't going to be able to do that.

1:57:58 - Benito Gonzalez
It's not really the companion you're looking for. I don't think I read this wrong, because I thought like, hey, this actually sounds like a fun use of AI Because, like, I'm not thinking about it as a trip sitter, I'm thinking about it as like a trip enhancer, like, let's, let's mess with the AI.

1:58:10 - Paris Martineau
When you're super messed up, that's what happens, because the AI when you're super messed up, that's what happens, cause like that's when art happens. That's when art happens. That could be, listen. I once again going back to the you know AI relationships thing adults should feel free to do whatever they want to do with technology within reason, so long as it isn't harming others. Like that could be a fun thing to do.

1:58:31 - Leo Laporte
A guy named Peter, talking to the the interview was in the MIT Technology Review talked about the first time he ate mushrooms alone in his bedroom with chat GPT now, that sounds sad the conversation lasts about five hours, included dozens of messages, was grew progressively more bizarre, before gradually returning what's the bride?

1:58:53 - Jeff Jarvis
his brain, or the or the?

1:58:55 - Leo Laporte
computer, which the message is. At one point he told the chatbot that he'd quote transformed into a higher consciousness beast, as it was outside of reality. The creature, he added, was covered in eyes. I don't, I don't see. I don't see what the chatbot? The chatbot congratulated him for his insight and responded with a line that could have been taken straight out of a Dostoevsky novel. If there's no prescribed purpose or meaning, it means we have the freedom to create on our own. The chatbot at the end said oh, let's see here I'm skimming through it because they quote Emily Bender but he later tried to explain the vision to chat GPT after the effects of the mushrooms had worn off. I know you're not conscious, peter wrote, but I contemplated you helping me and what AI will be like helping humanity in the future, to which chat GPT responded it's a pleasure to be part of your journey. Have a good ride. Okay, this is a dopey article and I'm sorry I referred to it.

2:00:02 - Jeff Jarvis
Never mind did you play the chinese autonomous robot football match on twit?

2:00:09 - Leo Laporte
oh, no line 147 oh let's try it for your delectation these. I've been watching these matches for some years now oh I, I thought this was the first.

This is the only autonomous this is yeah, and the last. This was, like you remember the darpa grand challenge, where they had cars trying to drive autonomously in the early years. Basically, they'd go 10 feet and drive off the road. Right, this says it's their first uh tournament in china, but I've seen these before and mostly there's a lot of falling down. Let's see, this is these are the chinese robots playing soccer. What's going on? Where did the ball go? Where did the ball go? Wait a minute. There's the ball. Chase the ball. It's like five-year-olds playing soccer. There's the ball. What do we do with it now? Do we kick it? Can we kick it? Let's kick it. No, no, don't kick it oh he kicked it.

They're all just shuffling around. The ball keeps going, folding down on the floor. Face down, face plant. Where's the goalie Goal? There's no goalie. He's gone. I win Game over. Another dead one. Oh, they got a stretcher.

2:01:19 - Jeff Jarvis
A stretcher. This is great.

2:01:20 - Leo Laporte
That's hysterical. They're obviously not taking this completely seriously.

2:01:25 - Paris Martineau
That is so funny Most of the robots were able to stand up back on their own, says the captain hysterical.

2:01:37 - Leo Laporte
Well, well, well. After the necessary adjustments, these robots returned to the match, still confused about what the hell they were doing. It's kind of cute. It looks like there are a lot of people uh watching in the arena there if you're on the right drugs, then we go along.

2:01:55 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, you should do that instead of having.

2:01:57 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, you should watch robots play uh soccer instead of having chat.

2:02:02 - Leo Laporte
Gpt trips at you yeah, with other people right ai, virtual personalities on youtube vtubers are earning millions, according to cnBC.

2:02:14 - Jeff Jarvis
What are we doing wrong with life?

2:02:16 - Leo Laporte
They're taking over YouTube. One of the most popular gaming YouTubers is named Blue B-L-O-O, but he's not a human. Hmm, Should we watch some Blue?

2:02:29 - Paris Martineau
Will we be taken down? I don't know.

2:02:35 - Benito Gonzalez
I think these are avatars, right? These aren't like full AIs.

2:02:38 - John Graham-Cumming
That's because Eggman has every brain.

2:02:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, is that it oh?

2:02:41 - John Graham-Cumming
Yeah, that's why it's my goal to steal all of his brain rots.

2:02:44 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, so it's full. Created by Jordan Van De Boeuf.

2:02:47 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah no these are human.

2:02:48 - Paris Martineau
So a long time. Youtuber created this.

2:02:57 - Leo Laporte
Like VTubers, time youtuber created this like vtubers aren't why, vtubers, aren't you this?

2:02:58 - Jeff Jarvis
has been around for years. This has been yeah, this has been around for five ten years, five, six years.

2:03:00 - Leo Laporte
I thought these were more. I had the impression that it was autonomous.

2:03:01 - Paris Martineau
Okay, blue has two and a half million subscribers such as blue are puppeteered, meaning a human controls the character that's different, that's the performance real time, using motion capture or face, never mind technology so he's basically just wearing a costume how about?

2:03:14 - Leo Laporte
how about um ai's finding formulas for paint to keep buildings cooler?

2:03:22 - Jeff Jarvis
this is a good use of ai. Yeah, mr, this is exactly the kind of boring use.

2:03:27 - Benito Gonzalez
This is exactly the kind of boring yeah, it should be used.

2:03:29 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, boring, let's have the yeah let's have the ai do boring stuff I'm sorry, my house is ugly but it's, but ai told me to paint this.

2:03:36 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I wonder what the hoa will have to say, though um, actually there were quite a few stories about ai's doing things of value.

2:03:49 - Benito Gonzalez
Oh, yeah, wait, wait a minute, wait a minute. Anthony just made a good point. You were the first vtuber, leo, oh, yeah wait a minute. Wait a minute. Anthony just made a good point. You were the first vtuber leo, I was.

2:04:05 - Leo Laporte
No, I was a puppeteer. You were the first, I was the first. There was no youtube at the time.

2:04:09 - All
But you know, I was on real tv back when tv was real microsoft says yes, she hated me, and her mother hated me worse.

2:04:14 - Leo Laporte
She called me the vile little puppet man.

2:04:18 - Paris Martineau
I know you've said it before but that's so ridiculous. I know Vile little puppet man.

2:04:24 - Leo Laporte
She said Soledad, are you still working with that vile little puppet man? Yeah, that's me, I'm the vile little puppet man.

2:04:32 - Jeff Jarvis
And Soledad told you that with glee I would bet.

2:04:35 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, soledad loved it. Microsoft says its new AI system diagnosed patients four times more accurately than human doctors. This doesn't surprise me, because an AI remembers all the diagnostic traits.

2:04:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Also, we'll look at the things you're not looking at.

2:04:51 - Leo Laporte
Right. So what Microsoft did did this is mustafa suliman, the and the guy you know they hired to run their artificial to replace open ai right right, they used 304 case studies from the new england journal of medicine, so these were existing case studies.

A language model broke down each case into step, into the step-by-step process a doctor would perform in order to reach a diagnosis. Then researchers built a system called the May diagnostic orchestrator that queried several leading AI models. So they didn't do just one, they did chat GPT, gemini, claude Meta's, llamaa's, llama, xai's, grok in a way that they said basically mimics the way you would have a panel and you would work together with this panel of doctors to try to diagnose it. In the experiment, may outperformed human doctors with an accuracy of 80% compared to the doctor 20%, and it also reduces costs by 20% by choosing less expensive tests and procedures. So the interesting thing in here to me is the orchestration mechanism, the idea of having a panel of chatbots, kind of confer it is interesting.

2:06:12 - Paris Martineau
I mean, it is, oh, this is incredibly promising. This could be, uh, groundbreaking, and any sort of advancements like this, of course, are like um, great. But I have friends there are some caveats, which is you know. I'm just curious as to what, like the patient sample size, like the demographics of the patient pool were, because the quality of the patient input often how all this came from that new england journal of medicine, so pool were because the quality of the patient input often how all this came from that new england journal of medicine so these were all kind of uh case studies so there was a

certain uniformity in the information provided and oh, I see okay, and they also knew what the right answer was, because it's also worth noting that, um uh, the one of the experts wired spoke to um, david sontag, and a scientist at mit, um, says that microsoft's findings should be treated with caution because doctors in the study were asked not to use any additional tools to help with their diagnosis, which may not be a reflection of how they operate in real life.

2:07:08 - Leo Laporte
Probably doctors aren't just sitting in a room unable to look up anything or speak to anybody that's coming to a diagnosis but I've always thought that this was this was the perfect marriage of ai and human doctors, because human doctors are probably not the greatest some are, but in general diagnosticians doctor house doctors who like the idea of having a diagnostic tool, a computerized diagnostic tool, whether it's an ai or not, because they have to remember. There's a lot of stuff to memorize right, and if you've been out of med school for a few years, the information changes the information. You forget some.

2:07:43 - Jeff Jarvis
But doctors are more important for the hands-on interface, the you know, interaction with the patient, asking the patient questions and so forth it's also a problem with with um, they think they think in their specialties, right so if it's outside of their specialty and so this, if this draws them out of that specialty and says, ah, you might want to consider this hold of an angle yeah, yeah.

2:08:06 - Leo Laporte
So what I? I've been talking about this on some of the other shows. We've been talking a lot. We talked last week about mark zuckerberg's fantastic offers offers to developers at OpenAI to steal them away, and he has stolen a number of away. In fact, there's a list. It's, according to the Wall Street Journal, a secret file of AI geniuses. It's not that secret. They have the list. But these are the ones that Mark is going after. But one of the things that I thought was kind of interesting is almost as if Mark said forget Lama, forget all the work we've done. I'm going to create a new team, the super intelligence team, hire the best scientists I can find and afford and have them start for fresh. Uh, I think that's really interesting and he has in fact had some success. Uh, the leader, as we mentioned, is the guy the success of hiring?

2:09:06 - Jeff Jarvis
oh yes, we don't have super intelligence.

2:09:08 - Leo Laporte
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to get your hopes up.

2:09:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, but he's got alexander wang of scale, ai um so I was really interested in the story above that that says that uh, scale ai was a uh clown show of ludicrous incompetence oh, wouldn't that be ironic. And and and they spent 14 billion dollars to get wang to beheading all this effort and and scale. I'm trying to understand scale. As I understand it was a company.

It was like a mechanical turk that had people labeled stuff yeah, basically so how is that high-end futuristic visionary ai, I don't get it well, oh, no, no, I this is.

2:09:51 - Leo Laporte
So. There's a pipeline of training on on the ais. You know you build the model, but towards the end of the pipeline is a very important part of it, which is an interaction with human beings, where you're fine-tuning it, and one of the ways you do that is present it with human-annotated data to fine-tune its database. Scaleai was basically the end of the line in the pipeline where it was fine-tuning the AI. This is done to all AIs. Now, this article that you're you're referring to, um, it's from uh, is it disaster class? Is that the name of no?

2:10:29 - Jeff Jarvis
this is this is from uh, a future um futurism, oh it's actually it's actually a pretty good futurism. Rewrite of uh ink but yes, okay.

2:10:38 - Leo Laporte
So they said basically they hired very. It was a digital sweatshop, but that's not unusual it's not no every ai that I know of has been trained in some somewhat similar fashion. In fact, I suggested my daughter she'd probably be pretty good, she could get a job doing this kind of you know, end-of-the-line AI training by doing classification and so forth. One of the things they do is they create questions that they know the answers to and they train the AI on that. There's all sorts of stuff that's done at the end.

2:11:11 - Jeff Jarvis
But that doesn't seem like that, like you know, when google had had search quality, people looking at things versus criteria and stuff a little bit higher than that. But how? How is wang, the super, super genius, is going to create super intelligence? That's a good question out of this.

2:11:24 - Paris Martineau
I mean I do think that's an interesting point, just because what scale ai has largely done is they employ this like vast low-paid workforce that labels and trains the data in other AI systems. So Scales customers include OpenAI, meta Alphabet and they provide a service for them.

2:11:43 - Leo Laporte
So it is kind of interesting to hire. There are a lot of companies that do this.

2:11:46 - Paris Martineau
I know, but it's interesting to hire this guy to be the leader of all of your AI efforts.

2:11:52 - Jeff Jarvis
According to internal documents obtained by Inc Scales AI Bulba Experts program to train Google's AI systems was supposed to be staffed with authorities across relevant fields. Yeah, typically that's what you do, but instead, during chaotic 11 months between da-da-da-da, its dubious quote-unquote contributors inundated the program with spam, which was described as writing gibberish, writing incorrect information.

2:12:15 - Leo Laporte
GP generated thought processes well, if that's what you get, you're not going to have a very good ai at the other end, that's for sure. No, uh, maybe mark didn't. Maybe that list isn't perfect, I don't know it's.

2:12:27 - Jeff Jarvis
It really struck me um that it's a. It's a hell of a bubble. It's a bubble. It's. It's a hell of a bubble. It's a bubble. It's a personnel bubble. Now.

2:12:36 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, this guy, I think, is just very good at schmoozing billionaires and he knows how to talk to them and get himself hired. That's what this guy is.

2:12:47 - Paris Martineau
My former coworker, corey Weinberg, did a really good deep dive into Alexander Wang last June I guess almost a year ago. That basically found that that he's a really smoother and that's what had led him to be the head of scale AI at 27, I guess, now 28.

2:13:05 - Benito Gonzalez
I didn't even, I didn't even have to investigate that.

2:13:07 - Leo Laporte
I knew that already yeah, you could tell right away. Google Arts and Culture Lab has done something very interesting collaborating with the Harley Davidson Museum to bring use AI, vo and specifically their VO AI generator, to bring old still pictures of Harleys to life. This is the image they started with. This is the AI video that they created. I mean, if you're into motorcycles, I suppose this would be but they don't do it.

2:13:41 - Jeff Jarvis
They just kind of futz in the seat like they need to adjust their underwear?

2:13:45 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, this would be they don't do it, they just kind of futz in the seat like they, like they need to wear, yeah, yeah, it's kind of like that thing where you can uh hold your finger on a live photo and it kind of moves a little bit.

2:13:53 - Leo Laporte
It's the ancestrycom. Make your grandma smile at you thing she doesn't look grandma knows, you did something wrong. Yeah, uh, I think vo is actually capable of doing a lot more than this. Yeah, I think google too.

2:14:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Google is traditionally capable of doing a lot more than this.

2:14:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think so too. Google is traditionally kind of conservative in their. I don't know how this brings anything to life, any more than Ken Burns scanning and panning old Civil War photos oh. God He'd probably use this technique right.

2:14:23 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I don't know if this would be valid to use in a documentary, just because it's like a false memory. Those people weren't really waving.

2:14:33 - Leo Laporte
July 1864. I'm at Appomattox Courthouse and I just got shot in the toe. Yeah, you're probably right, you're probably right. It's kind of cool, though, to see little motion added to it. I don't know, I don't know get ready, because this is the AI swap that's going to fill every museum in.

2:14:53 - Paris Martineau
America sometime soon, right yeah, I mean, I think that is an interesting aspect of this is like what are our museums going to look like in a hundred years and how do we know whether the photos we display are real or false?

2:15:08 - Jeff Jarvis
yeah, how can you tell? How have we ever known what is real? We haven't. That's a good point.

2:15:12 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's true we have reality is a myth author conan doyle thought there were fairies because some kid took a picture with a stencil of a fairy in the garden. I don't know that you guys are real. We're not. Oh, that's next week, artificial paris. We call her madrid. Come on, anthony, get to work, get to work, all right. Uh, any other stories that you, I have so many in here I don't even know. Um, do a sad one.

2:15:44 - Paris Martineau
Geo media is winding down. Uh, it's selling kotaku. One of the last sites that it had. I mean geo media was a cluster wasn't a good steward of uh any of the sites formerly known as gawker media, um kind of involved. You know, the gawker uh sites jezebel, deadspin, the onion. They've all since either scattered the wind or been shut down. Or did you work at?

2:16:12 - Benito Gonzalez
kataku benito.

2:16:14 - Jeff Jarvis
No, I never worked at kataku okay he was a rather insult that you asked. I know kataku was great Kodaku's great. Yeah.

2:16:23 - Paris Martineau
I mean, it's just, it's sad, it was these properties were bought by a private equity firm in the wake of the Hulk Hogan affair.

2:16:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Peter.

2:16:32 - Paris Martineau
Thiel, and have really just I don't know languished.

2:16:38 - Benito Gonzalez
Like none of the people who bought these gaming media sites knew how to make money off of them. Like they drove lots of traffic but for some reason these sales sales like my personal experience was from game spot. I worked at game spot and our sales team didn't know how to sell crap. Like I had so much, so many hits, so many big views on my, on a lot of my videos they didn't know how to sell anything and like I don't know, I don't know what their deal was uh future plc, which is another company that's bought a lot of magazines, is shutting down laptop magazine.

2:17:10 - Leo Laporte
This was the place to get laptop reviews.

2:17:13 - Jeff Jarvis
It has been since 1991 35 years, um can you imagine having to write a review of a laptop these days yeah, well, that's part of the problem keyboard.

2:17:23 - Paris Martineau
Uh, there's a screen that is part of the you guys want to see a blast from the past. I picked up at an antique store on the jersey shore this week oh, yeah, a we didn't hear about your jersey trip right 1968. Issue of popular electronics that's great it has things in the dream receivers. Hurrah, making PC boards the easy way and new passive radio speaker system.

2:17:49 - Benito Gonzalez
The ads in those are the best.

2:17:52 - Paris Martineau
The ads are fantastic. That's really what I got.

2:17:54 - Jeff Jarvis
I just the rabbit hole I just went down was I never understood how vacuum tubes work and to finally understand the beginnings of amplification oh, that's fascinating yeah, you kind of need to know that, because transistors basically do based on that. Yeah, yeah, uh, that's interesting transition is a little harder to figure out. But I bought a lead to forest um, antique um, because I just I just got, I got, so into it hey I.

2:18:24 - Leo Laporte
I have a 6,000 pound AM radio transmitter. You can have Jeez. You have to come get it.

2:18:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris, you like to Scott here's an ad.

2:18:36 - Paris Martineau
Scott's new LR88 receiver takes the bleep out of kit building. Building a kit used to be something you couldn't do with ladies or children present. But, Scott's new LR88 AM FM stereo receiver kit has changed all that.

2:18:51 - Leo Laporte
Are you saying that in 1968 ladies and children did not swear you?

2:18:56 - Paris Martineau
couldn't be around them when you were swearing. When you were building your AM FM kit.

2:19:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Of course not that you had any women around you. If you were the kind of person who did that.

2:19:05 - Leo Laporte
I'm building the damn radio kit.

2:19:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Why don't you build ChatGPD so you can have somebody to talk to?

2:19:09 - Paris Martineau
And then it says at the bottom you'll swear by it, Scott, which is cute.

2:19:15 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris. You like Clueless stories, right.

2:19:17 - Paris Martineau
I do 116.

2:19:20 - Jeff Jarvis
So Clueless keeps on trying to be the bad boy of AI. Yeah, so now it's the undetectable AI that. It's there all the time and it will react to what you see and hear and no one will know it.

2:19:34 - Leo Laporte
Isn't this?

2:19:35 - Paris Martineau
what it was supposed to be doing before.

2:19:38 - Leo Laporte
Or I guess it was AI for cheating. It was supposed to let you cheat on everything. I think it cheats on life now.

2:19:42 - Jeff Jarvis
It sees what you see and hears what you hear it doesn't join meetings.

2:19:45 - Paris Martineau
Clueley never shows up in shared screens recordings or external meetings. That's the idea. It's fully hidden from everyone but you, invisible to screen. Share.

2:19:54 - Leo Laporte
Like my invisible B-A. Where is it?

2:20:01 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I was going to say is it actually invisible now?

2:20:04 - Jeff Jarvis
When you took your picture, did you knock it off?

2:20:07 - Leo Laporte
uh, I must have. Yeah, I don't know where it is. It's all right, leo was very mean.

2:20:12 - Jeff Jarvis
Today he threw me to the floor, yeah he was.

2:20:16 - Leo Laporte
It was while he was digressing. Incredibly, it was just terrible. Uh, I think we should take our last break and get our pics of the week. What do you think? Okay, I don't want to. And get our picks of the week. What do you think? Okay, I don't want to be accused of meandering or anything.

2:20:30 - Paris Martineau
We're only going to do it. We're only going to hit a casual three hours this time instead of three hours plus.

2:20:36 - Leo Laporte
Easy and easy, easy peasy. You're watching Intelligent Machines with Paris Marno. You're going to be gone next week on your tour of the Western States. Where are you going to go? Do you know yet?

2:20:51 - Paris Martineau
I just made some decisions this morning. I'm going to go through Washington, oregon Coast and down through NorCal Nice Kind of vaguely from like Seattle-ish area to San Francisco.

2:21:04 - Jeff Jarvis
All the way to San.

2:21:05 - Leo Laporte
Francisco. Okay, good, we'll stop off at Petaluma. Let me know what day you'll be here and we'll make reservations and take you out Somewhere good, somewhere fun. And, of course, jeff Jarvis, who is touring greater New Jersey area. I'm stuck here, yep.

2:21:25 - Paris Martineau
Putzing around in a circle.

2:21:26 - Leo Laporte
He's writing his new book. He hasn't even published the lithography book, linotype book, and now, yeah, which has lithography, is a character in it I bet it is of course it is.

2:21:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Is it that leads to cold type and that leads to the end of everything? I think you should do a flong book next. Well, uh, actually, uh, our friend um, glenn fleischman it's well. It's on kickstarter right now and I'm about to get my copy oh, how exciting he did, he's been working on that for a while.

2:21:54 - Leo Laporte
Yep, so do you want to tell us what this next book is going to be?

2:21:57 - Jeff Jarvis
this is a cultural history of the linotype as the last machine that was needed. No, no that one. You finished the book after the next one. No, not yet. It's a secret. Well it's. It's gonna be about mass media. Everything about is about mass media, not how it's all mass media well, anything I invoked you just the other day.

2:22:12 - Leo Laporte
I said matt jeff jarvis always tells me that mass media is a relatively new invention and just as it dies, just as it as it leaves we hardly always have it.

We didn't always have it. Hey, we're glad you watch the show. We do it every wednesday. We start right, uh, right, about 2 pm, pacific, 5 pm eastern, 2100 utc. And we stream it live. Of course, our club members get to watch in the club to a discord, but also youtube, tiktok, facebook, xcom, linkedin uh, what did I, what I, what I, what I kick, uh, kick tiktok. I said all anyway. Seven or eight different platforms you can watch live. If you watch live chat with us, I see all of you in your chats. We love that, uh. But if you can't watch live, on-demand version of the show available at twittv slash. Im also, uh. On youtube there's a video, uh, dedicated to the videos of the show and you can share that with your friends, which would be nice if you would spread the word. Only share the good parts, not the boring parts, and you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client. Do leave us a good review so paris will read it on the show, as she did earlier. Uh, five stars preferred. Thank you, um. Also thanks to our club members. We couldn't do this without club twit. If you're not yet a member, please join.

We've got some great stuff coming up. We just set up stacy's book club for august 8th. Micah's uh crafting corner is on the 16th of this month. A week from friday we're going to do two shows. I've got chris marquart and his regular photo visit. Quirky is the subject of photos. This month. We'll also have all the photography news.

That's at 1 pm pacific on july 11th. At 2 pm pacific on july 11th, our ai user group. It's great, it's really fun. We talk about how people are using AI. I'm not sure what we're going to do this month, anthony, but I thought maybe we could talk about prompting. I don't know, maybe your chatbot, your favorite chatbot. We did a lot of vibe coding last time. That was great. Anyway, join us in the club 10 bucks a month. It supports everything we do, gives you access to the discord, all that special programming and the warm and fuzzy feeling you are supporting our endeavors here, plus ad free versions of all the show. Twittertv club twin. Thank you so much for joining the club. Paris martineau, your pick of the week last, one for a couple of weeks now.

2:24:45 - Paris Martineau
Make it good um, my pick of the week is a website I've been perusing a little bit called roadside america in advance of my road trip. It's this delightful little website that just has a I put it on the oregon one because I thought it just has a list of like every possible weird roadside stop you could think of in America and other places.

And so, for instance, you can search via state. You could also plug in your route and it'll tell you that has various rankings of like gotta stop or like only worth it if, like, you're passing through and have time. So, for instance, based on their recommendations, I'm going to go to the Oregon Vortex, which is described as the laws of physics routinely go haywire in America's first and most mysterious mystery spot. Opened to the public since 1930.

Wow, it also has a great list of large things, such as Harvey the Giant Rabbit, a 26-foot tall mutant rabbit man, kind of a more obscure kin to the more famous muffler man.

2:25:51 - Leo Laporte
In the weirdly named Aloha Oregon.

2:25:54 - Paris Martineau
Yes, it's a really delightful website that just has like. When I first found it a couple years ago, I just spent like an hour or two going through it. I think I found the Depression Palace of New Jersey, which, uh, shockingly, wasn't near my house at all. Um, but it's just a light. If you're going on a road trip anywhere, I'd really recommend checking out the site roadside americacom. They also have a good app, nice freak like me very good pick.

2:26:22 - Leo Laporte
You're going to tell us all about your trip when you come back oh, I shall yes, uh, do you like lord's album?

2:26:27 - Jeff Jarvis
I just want to hear that I do like lord's new album that was also on my list.

2:26:31 - Paris Martineau
Are you a lord?

2:26:31 - Leo Laporte
she was kind of a one hit wonder as far as I remember she did no, there was royals.

2:26:39 - Paris Martineau
Then there was um. What's the name of the album that green light was on um so that she had another hit yeah, her album that came after that um was chat room are they?

2:26:53 - Jeff Jarvis
are you lord fans?

2:26:54 - Paris Martineau
melodrama. Sorry, I listened to. I listened to hell out of melodrama. I can't believe I forgot it. Um, melodrama was a fantastic album that she released in like 2017, 2016, I want to say. Then she released another album like five years ago that was way more like beachy hippie and it didn't really hit that much for me. I think artists should be allowed to change their tone whenever they want and it doesn't matter if I don't like it. But I like this album because it goes back to like her early stuff it. But I like this album because it goes back to like her early stuff. Um, it's very reminiscent of like the bait live like um, the big hits that uh got her, you know, put her on the map and nice brand new from lord virgin is the name of it, and that is an x-ray of lord as the album cover.

2:27:41 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, the album cover. Yeah, uh, jeff jeff, a little too much information there. Uh, jeff jeff jarvis, what is your leo? You are now the world's most creative chef, ai, and machine learning is going to give you science-backed flavor pairings and generate recipes. This is an active thing you can do. So it's epicurekakuai, and so you start off by picking a uh, some ingredients okay, chicken, and then oh, and now you have a right.

Now you have a flavor graph so you can pick um beans and hot sauce or mayonnaise or okay and thyme what have I made?

2:28:34 - Leo Laporte
and broccoli okay now. Now, what do I do?

2:28:37 - Jeff Jarvis
scroll scroll down scroll ahead.

2:28:39 - Leo Laporte
You would say I'm going to scroll.

2:28:40 - Jeff Jarvis
You didn't know. Scroll god. You're the worst scroller. Do you want it to be an appetizer?

2:28:44 - Leo Laporte
generate recipe. No for going. You didn't finish this, I didn't know scroll.

2:28:46 - Jeff Jarvis
God, you're the worst scroller. Do you want it to be an appetizer generate recipe? You didn't finish the.

2:28:48 - Leo Laporte
I didn't finish what else do I?

2:28:49 - Jeff Jarvis
have.

2:28:49 - Leo Laporte
You want to be a main, an appetizer, a canapé oh, I want it to be not a canapé, not a soup. Let's make it a main, okay? I don't know what I'm gonna get, because I didn't already generate you. It's already okay. Pan roasted chicken with roasted broccoli and creamy time glaze. That sounds quite good and is that an ai generated picture of? It actually good yeah, it looks like it'd be all right try another one okay, wait.

2:29:17 - Paris Martineau
This just in from the youtube chat from dave kellum, paris the giant rabbit is a block down the road from me and not worth seeing thank you.

2:29:26 - Leo Laporte
You say roadside america. Thank you, dave, you saved her a trip I mean, those are all tourist traps.

2:29:32 - Benito Gonzalez
You realize that right oh, that's what?

2:29:35 - Paris Martineau
absolutely yeah, exactly, I mean yeah yeah, I mean it's, they're all.

2:29:38 - Benito Gonzalez
It's so very, it's so very american, a place that doesn't have a history.

2:29:42 - Paris Martineau
There's just something very campy and delightful about like incredibly dumb tourists.

2:29:47 - Leo Laporte
Maybe I'll take you to the Petrified Forest just out of town.

2:29:51 - Paris Martineau
I'd probably enjoy that yeah yeah, it's really it's fun. You can tell the other thing I want to see.

2:29:57 - Leo Laporte
Sorry for jumping on your pick, jeff. It was pre-TV, when people were easily amused.

2:30:03 - Paris Martineau
That's me.

2:30:06 - Leo Laporte
I'm easily amused. That's me. I'm easily amused. Yeah, yeah, that was it. I like this Epicure.

2:30:10 - Paris Martineau
So science I'm curious have you made anything? Well, you don't cook, Jeff, You're not the right person for this.

2:30:16 - Jeff Jarvis
Though it just made up something good for me, it was a-.

2:30:18 - Leo Laporte
How about sausage and blueberry schnapps?

2:30:22 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing gonna. What if you pick things that really just can't go?

2:30:25 - Leo Laporte
no see what happens the minute you pick one ingredient it gives you a flavor cloud and you can't really deviate too much you'd like you can't add things no, you can add things. I can't add schnapps to my sausage.

2:30:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, let's say chicken, and then it says, well, it has an auto add.

2:30:42 - Leo Laporte
All right, you could cuisine okay, black beans, but see, then it gives you all the stuff these recipes will be legit, though, like if if it's just ai generated, won't it? It's science-based paris, science-based uh-huh sure by the way. Stop saying things like that, because that's why we're losing all the science. Stop saying things like that, because that's why we're losing all the science.

2:31:07 - Paris Martineau
It's spilling out of my pockets, oh no, it's science-based.

2:31:11 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it does give you a preheat oven to 200 degrees. Wait a minute I sense a problem right there. You can't cook chicken at 200 degrees.

2:31:25 - Paris Martineau
No, there's a problem uh wait, wait, wait centigrade, oh celsius celsius.

2:31:35 - Leo Laporte
Okay, that's different. Well, they didn't warn me this was going to be some sort of euro thing. Well, it's got milliliters preheated to 392 leo yeah, that's about right in your freedom units in your old freedom units to say, get it to 167 degrees. It's a little warm for my chicken. Hey, they even have nutrition facts. That's pretty good and you can download as a pdf.

2:31:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Now there's also a pro version I wonder what that does for you I don't know if that.

2:32:02 - Leo Laporte
Well, what it does for you is take some money out of your wallet.

2:32:05 - Benito Gonzalez
I'm willing to bet it's going to tell you a long story before it gives you the recipe.

2:32:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, on the right, I think you can pick other things Mustard and apples and sausage and stuff.

2:32:13 - Leo Laporte
Ah nice, who is? Oh, look at this, and here's a whole variety. Apparently, I'm not the only one.

2:32:31 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, cheddar I just made I mean, I didn't make it jalapeno stuffed chicken breast, that looks good one I used slow cooked beef ragu with papardelle.

2:32:34 - Paris Martineau
It looked like the I generated image. No, no, I didn't make.

2:32:35 - Leo Laporte
No, no jeff doesn't cook. When's the last time you cooked, jeff? Cooking is great. I love to cook. I'm not sure I would use this to make rest do you remember the last time you cooked a meal?

2:32:44 - Jeff Jarvis
Actually cooked a meal, oh God.

2:32:47 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, oh, cheesy chicken and potato macaroni bake.

2:32:50 - Jeff Jarvis
Years. I told you.

2:32:58 - Paris Martineau
Didn't I tell you the story of my pumpkin chiffon pie?

2:33:02 - Jeff Jarvis
Was this as bad as the cacio e pepe, where you burned yourself on some broccoli water? That was the asparagus I burned myself on.

2:33:04 - Leo Laporte
This is where.

2:33:04 - Jeff Jarvis
Claude is going to get get upset so okay, so this was to impress a lady? Oh no, I do remember this all right, never mind I don't remember it. But okay, I'll go back through the show notes and find it when my, when my wife was pregnant and on bed rest, I nearly killed her with undercooked chicken. Oh, not good no, not good.

2:33:27 - Leo Laporte
Jeff jarvis's books are many, they are legion, as they say, but the latest is the web we weave. There's also the gutenberg parenthesis now in paperback magazine, if you're interested in the history of a thing that is rapidly leaving. I specialize in things that are dying. Yes, he's also a professor at Montclair State University and the State University of New York, stony Brook. Well, not, professor Fellow, you're a feller. Thank you, jeff, always a pleasure. Enjoy the rest of your evening.

2:33:59 - Jeff Jarvis
What's for dinner? I was just thinking about that. I think pizza, pizza.

2:34:06 - Leo Laporte
Pizza Pizza Paris Martineau will not be here next week. We are going to try to get your friend Ed, if you would put in a good word with him.

2:34:14 - Paris Martineau
I will. I'll miss him.

2:34:16 - Leo Laporte
I don't know what our guest situation is for next week. Let me see, still pending.

2:34:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Still pending. You're trying to get Henry's logic.

2:34:28 - Paris Martineau
I scolded him on email, but it didn't really good. Yeah, he'd be good to get an ai. Oh my god, could you imagine henry blodgett and ed zitron are the same?

2:34:32 - Leo Laporte
jesus. Oh god, should that be something we should aspire to or avoid?

2:34:38 - Paris Martineau
I mean I don't, that might be like henry blodgett I. I just feel like they will exist on wavelengths that will either cause a small explosion Well, it'll probably cause a small explosion nonetheless, but I don't know whether it'll be a good explosion or a bad explosion.

2:34:57 - Leo Laporte
I'm tempted, benito, see if you can get Mr Blodgett and Mr Zitron together on the show and you'll be back the following weekend. Our guest will be Stephen Johnson of Notebook LM fame.

2:35:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Will you be back? Are you gone for one week only?

2:35:13 - Paris Martineau
One week only.

2:35:14 - Leo Laporte
Oh, good, okay, good, you'll be here have a great trip, Paris Martineau.

2:35:17 - Paris Martineau
I shall.

2:35:18 - Leo Laporte
When can we talk about your future?

2:35:22 - Paris Martineau
I will.

2:35:28 - Leo Laporte
I'm waiting on the official once you get permission once I get back, hopefully.

2:35:30 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, all right. Well, once I get back, I will have started. So yes, oh, then we know once I get back I won't have started, but hopefully I'll be able to talk by then.

2:35:35 - Leo Laporte
All right, I hope so. Hey, it's. Oh, I see we have the ceo of kagi coming up next month, vlad prelovak. That'll be great. Can't wait. Lots of good stuff ahead for intelligent machines. I hope you willc. That'll be great. Can't wait. Lots of good stuff ahead for Intelligent Machines. I hope you will join us. We'll be back next week at the same time, 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern, 2100 UTC on Wednesdays. Thanks everybody for joining us. We'll see you next time on Intelligent Machines.

2:36:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Bye-bye, I'm not a human being. Not into this animal scene, bye-bye.