Free Speech, AI Slop, and Media Power - Episode 661 of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast

Christopher Mitchell (00:12)
Welcome to another episode of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast. I'm Christopher Mitchell at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. I'm in St. Paul, Minnesota. It is the middle of September and I'm excited to be joined by Karl Bode who is the freelance reporter hero of the Smart Mouth Tech Folk. Welcome.

Karl (00:33)
Thank you so much. That's a glorious introduction. I appreciate it.

Christopher Mitchell (00:37)
Karl, you've been working on this stuff for what, 130 years I think?

Karl (00:41)
175 years I've been writing about technology on the Internet and I feel every every single year in my bones.

Christopher Mitchell (00:48)
I believe

that. We've also got Jordan Pittman. Jordan's usually hiding in the back. He's the editor of the show. In fact, the editor of a lot of our video work now. And our Digital Opportunity Lead is his proper title. Welcome, Jordan.

Jordan A. Pittman (01:01)
Thanks Chris, and I was just joking with you earlier. I think this is the first time I'm on the podcast outside of like a prediction show, so happy to be on.

Christopher Mitchell (01:08)
So we're gonna do a little grab bag of topics. The first one is gonna be about, these are all gonna be about the Internet ⁓ Not so much Internet access, but more the Internet, which is something that I spent the weekend a little bit concerned about the future of. And we're gonna talk a little bit about Section 230 and ⁓ freedom of speech on the Internet. That's gonna lead into hopefully a big show ⁓ following this one, an interview that I was gonna really dig into that with someone who really knows what's going on there.

Let me talk a little bit about the state of the media and AI slop and the threat that that poses to the Internet. So today's going to be, I think, a fun show. We're trying to keep it a little bit short and not go too deep on it. But I will say that the three of us, and also often joined by Sean from our team as well, are been on TikTok and other social medias. I'd encourage you to find us on YouTube shorts or on the Gram.

because I just, I've sort of prefer those, but I understand most people on TikTok. So you're probably going to find us there. So with that said, I want to lead into this and I'm going to prep Karl first on this. But when Jimmy Kimmel was put on suspension, one of the things I saw from people was that it wasn't that big of a deal. He'll probably come back. He'll go from a big staff and $30 million budget a year or something like that.

to a small staff and a $2 million budget a year podcast, and he'll be able to say what he wants and there won't be any issues anywhere. And one of my first thoughts was, I don't think this administration is content just to throw its weight around to try to intimidate the broadcasters. I feel like this administration is concerned about anyone that is speaking out against it. And so I was thinking about the threat to the Internet of government, particularly under Donald Trump.

but under any United States government that's gonna start trying to figure out how to put its thumb on the scale and manipulate speech. So Karl, let's just start there and then we'll wander our way back over to Section 230. But how do you react to that?

Karl (03:06)
So these are authoritarians, you know, it's clear these are authoritarians. They will keep pushing and pushing and pushing until they run into something other than pudding.

Christopher Mitchell (03:16)
Okay, so

let me stop you there to just ask you to back it up because you're seeing that some people who are listening might be thinking, yeah, you guys just don't like Trump as opposed to thinking whether or not this is actually a regime that has multiple people in it who have an authoritarian mindset. Can you just give me one example of in which way, and this is not a political show, but to talk about the threat to the Internet, we kind of have to get at some of the people that are involved here. So Karl, back it up for a second.

I don't mean go backwards. mean, give us the evidence. Give us some receipts.

Karl (03:47)
So look, if you look at FCC, ⁓ Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr, the second he got appointed, he started leveraging all the levers of power to threaten companies into doing things that Trump wanted done. He violated the law, he ignored precedent, he ignored consumer impact. You whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, and there's plenty of both who oppose Carr at this moment, it's obvious that he does not respect the rule of law.

He's taken, he's launched multiple fake investigations into companies for having DEI references on their website, which is, as we know, you know, efforts to at least address racism and sexism in the workplace. He's leveraged fake investigations to threaten journalists and threaten major media companies like Comcast if they tried to do basic reporting of factual reality. So this is all behavior of authoritarianism. And no, even if he's not going to stop at just trying to threaten the online cable TV late night talk show host, he's going to continue.

to threaten the Internet. He's going to do everything he can to eliminate journalism, combat education. These are all hallmark, trademark behaviors of a authoritarian.

Christopher Mitchell (04:46)
Okay,

we got the receipts and I'll just throw in there as backup once again, because I'm going to try and bend over backwards to try to keep this, know, like, mean, whether regardless of my own opinions, I want to try and keep it to what I think are relevant facts. And like, I'll just throw out in support of you also, both Rand Paul and Ted Cruz have said, we hate Jimmy Kimmel, but we don't think it's appropriate for the Federal Communications Commission to threaten companies to try to like change who they put on the air. So there's, yeah.

Karl (05:13)
Yeah, Tucker Carlson this week was a third. There were

several. They recognize that this can be flipped on its head and the government, if you give it too much power over speech, it can be flipped on its head when their enemies are in power and they can be on the receiving end and they're not going to like that. there's bipartisan opposition to that. You can see there's been numerous statements from, you know, several previous FCC commissioners from both parties saying this is a dangerous path. You don't want Brendan Carr having this kind of power.

You know, the irony to me is that with one hand, Carr is destroying all the levers within the FCC that can do anything about consumer protection and protect people from consumer issues and big broadband monopolies. And with his other hand, he's claiming he has all the power in the world to do all this stuff to bully companies. One of those sides has to win. I suspect it's the one where he has less power than he actually thinks, but it's still dangerous.

Christopher Mitchell (05:57)
Right,

one of the things that's driving me crazy is the prison phone justice situation, which is a title that gets to the fact that basically there's a few people that are getting rich. mean, like obscenely wealthy off of charging really high costs to people who are incarcerated for them to make phone calls, video phone calls, communicate with their loved ones. And this is an issue beyond just sort of like do-gooder-ism because

the more you restrict communication with people who are in prison, the more likely they are to come out and commit more crimes and go back in. That's bad for all of us. The FCC was going to crack down on this and crack down and make sure that we were going to have reasonable rates for phone calls and things like that. And that's been reversed. And when you hear them talk, like you said, Karl, this question about, we to make sure we have the right authority. And it's amazing how in some cases, supposedly, they're limited by law. In other cases, they're not.

Karl (06:49)
Yeah, it took decades.

It took decades to get a lot of those prison telecom reforms in places. And that's a very seedy industry where the telecom monopolies get kickbacks and all sorts of dodgy behaviors to ensure that they have a monopoly over phone and video conferencing in these prisons. And it took decades of activism to get anywhere close to price caps to make sure it was affordable. And Brendan Carr just threw it all in the trash to please the people at these companies.

Christopher Mitchell (07:13)
I'm going ignore Jordan for one more second because I'm going hit you with this because I think you're more prepared for it. But so when I saw this going on and then when Jimmy Kimmel gets suspended, a number of people were like, he's going to have a podcast. He'll be fine. To which I was just like, why would we think that the Trump administration would go to the effort?

of bringing the big media broadcasters to heel and then say, ah, but we hands off the Internet, can't do anything there. And I was literally driving the car. I'm driving the car. I remember where I was right now. It was like one of those memories that'll just stick with me. And I was like, we're going back to Section 230. And I was just thinking about the Section 230 discussions we've had, which is Section 230 in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 right? That's where we are. I always get confused when I use something too long without context.

It basically says that like, you if you're running a website, like you are, whether you're, you're Facebook or whether you are CommunityNetworks.org if someone posts a comment there that violates the law, you are not held responsible. And as the person that owns the website, it's someone else's speech. And there's been a discussion left and right all over the place about whether or not that's appropriate because

There are some problems that result from I'm not someone gonna defend Facebook all but give us a sense of how Section 230 is related to this.

Karl (08:27)
Well, basically, this isn't my expert area of expertise, but I'll give you a pretty broad, know, Section 230 basically says that Google is not responsible for somebody going to their forums and posting a bunch of racist screeds or other behaviors. The goal here for a lot of people on the right and left is to get rid of Section 230 under the pretense that this would somehow create a new glorious age of speech and hold big tech companies accountable.

In reality, it's going to be likely abused to make sure that Google has to go into their forums and crack down on anything that the government doesn't like. That won't just be illegal stuff.

that could be people supporting LGBTQ rights. It could be people trying to do racial activism or community activism. If you allow the government to come in and start bullying these companies into what's on their platforms in this fashion, you're gonna have a much worse free speech situation and all kinds of tendril problems that are right. And the most annoying thing is a lot of these attacks are being dressed up as a concern for free speech when it's the exact opposite.

Christopher Mitchell (09:25)
Or I think in the left, think it's often a concern that the 230 allows Google and Facebook to traffic in conspiracy theories and other things without any sort of sanction. And that's what some people on the left are concerned about. And there's a variety of people on the right and the left who have different concerns than we might have surfaced. But those are the ones I think we often hear about. Jordan, I want to know before we move on, because Section 230 is something I think we're going to spend a lot of time on in the next show.

But do you have any questions or any thoughts as we sort of talk about this? Because I do feel like the freedom to communicate widely and openly on the Internet, it might be about to see some real pressure on like anything we've seen before.

Jordan A. Pittman (10:02)
Yeah, I mean, it's really, I think this kind of goes into, you know, when it came to Tucker Carlson.

He talked about it briefly, but I think the last couple weeks has just been so much that's going on I think there's been this conversation about hate speech right like I think Pam Bondi was like like the stuff that happened to Charlie Kirk and like the shooter this is all hate speech and we're coming after this and I just find this really interesting because again This is the same right that believes in free speech and believes that all speech is free speech or nothing thing is hate speech so like now we're in this weird situation that because of Free speech we're going to take this hate speech and use it as a way to get rid of your free speech

In the name of free speech. That's what it's like sounding like to me and it's really confusing me because this gets to the bigger crooks, which I think we could talk about if we want to but it's just like it feels as if The moves that the Trump administration is doing currently when it comes to the FCC and everything else when it's cracking down on this The repercussions on this is gonna be far beyond this administration Like these are some of the things that we've been talking about anything they've been done, but specifically about this

Once they do this, Pandora's box is open. Once you get to that point, there's not a moment where you can just be like, okay, we're gonna get back to how we were originally with this idea of the Internet's just this free speech location, and that's what the beauty of it was, right? Just being able to hop online. We're able to hop online, give our takes on these things. We're not super, super experts, but we have enough expertise to feel like, okay, this is what our opinion is.

Christopher Mitchell (11:20)
Mm-hmm.

Jordan A. Pittman (11:29)
We have the platform where there's not like a particular gatekeeper that can stop us from this. It's just like, here you go. But that can change and that's going to almost create this sort of police state where people feel like, well, I have this thought on this thing, but if the Trump administration deems it as something that's not worth it to talk about, then I'm not going to speak up. like that's where

you know, democracy quote unquote dies in darkness, in my opinion, when people just don't feel emboldened and empowered to speak their mind. And this is what makes this country so great. This is what we actually believe in. So if we're not doing that, it doesn't matter how you frame it or how the Trump administration frame it as protecting. The reality is quite opposite of that. So it's concerning for me.

Christopher Mitchell (12:05)
Yeah, I

mean, you're saying that brings up two things for me. One is that I do think most people will simultaneously say, people shouldn't be allowed to say that thing and we need to have free speech, right? Like people believe all the time and contradictory things. And so, but one of the things that I am amazed at is how surprised I always am. I feel like I'm like, I like having Karl on in part because I feel like I'm the sucker. And Karl's like the wise guy who's like, yeah, dude, like I can't believe you didn't see this coming.

But I do feel like if you see someone like repeatedly say that they are a free speech warrior, the odds that they are a free speech warrior, like they decline every time you hear them say it, right?

Karl (12:41)
There's a whole

bunch of it. It's like people who love innovation or talk too much about being innovative or innovation. They're usually the least innovative people you can find. And I find the same things too.

Christopher Mitchell (12:51)
No,

it's true. I, and I, one of the things that about the Institute for Local Self-Reliance that I know, I don't think that this is like putting our best foot forward, but like, believe local governments should be able to make mistakes. think communities should be able to choose to live in ways that I don't approve of as long as they are respecting the rights of other human beings. Right. And, and, and similarly, I don't like having fricking Russian misinformation spread all across Facebook.

And that's not the only thing that's there, but is there. But like it is something that I don't I'm concerned about some ways in which it could be cracked down upon. Like there is like misinformation is freedom of speech. And like at a certain point, we got to figure out how to deal with that without using the federal government's powers. Go ahead.

Karl (13:25)
Yeah.

Yeah,

I'm fascinated with propaganda and it's probably something if I went back to school, I would have studied it because it's always fascinated me.

But yeah, there are ways to do that without exploiting government power. You could do what Finland does to tackle propaganda. They teach kindergarten kids to read media literacy skills to recognize bullshit on the Internet. They teach them from a foundational age. You could impose media consolidation limits so you don't let media fall into the hands of like four billionaires who all have the same right wing tendencies. You know, there's all the stuff you could do. You could create more potent social online platforms that are more distributed so they're not so easy to get purchased and destroyed by billionaires. There's a whole bunch of stuff we

and should be doing creatively funding journalism, finding a way to crowdfund, you know, new media instead of letting all the medias get consolidated under corporate power. There's a whole bunch of stuff we could do for propaganda and we are doing none of it. So instead we have this stuff which proposes to be a solution to that that is actually a bad faith, bad intention solution that's going to cause all sorts of new problems.

Christopher Mitchell (14:28)
And this, this actually leads right into state of the media. We're just going to talk for a couple of minutes on, this, but, the media, boy, one of the things I'm at, back to this frequently and I pay so much money for media. man. I mean, I pay, I subscribe to like magazines, podcasts, like, like radio stations, television and stuff. like it's one of the things I truly believe in, like we have to support media. but

One of the things that I get a kick out of is the bulwark, which I've been a fan of ever since I remember before, I think they even had a name for it. was tracking it and they often say, you know, like we don't have any mergers pending anywhere so we can be honest about what we're doing. And I think that is so important to have a media that is not at cross purposes.

⁓ NBC being owned by GE all those years ago. It's like, you really expected them to do deep reporting on nuclear weapons or nuclear facilities? No, no, I do not. And so when it comes to the media, I feel like we're in a real tough place. And Karl this is something that you write about all the time. And I feel like no one else covers. In fact, I think every time you're on the show, I say, you keep saying this thing that no one else says, which is that our media is killing us.

Karl (15:33)
It is, slowly. Yeah. mean, most of these major media companies are owned by people who don't want to make the government mad. They're billionaires, usually center-right billionaires who want things like tax cuts. They want mindless deregulation. They don't want the FCC telling them they can't rip off local rural farmers. You know, they want subsidies without any strings.

So they're not inclined to be the kinds of organizations that are going to do tough truth power reporting in the first place. It's just biologically not going to be in their natures. Now there's been for years we heard rhetoric about how, there's a big strong firewall between ownership and the editorial newsroom. There's no way, you know, the Wall Street Journal owned by Rupert Murdoch would never let them cross the line between management and the work. But now you see what that was worth.

When authoritarians come knocking, you see exactly what all those promises were worth and they weren't worth much. It's actually much worse than I thought it was going to be. And I had pretty low expectations for like companies like CBS and ABC who are just throwing billions of dollars in settlements towards the Trump administration for cases that they really could have easily won. Cases that they could have just gone out and gotten lawyers to do for free for them that wouldn't even cost them that much money.

Christopher Mitchell (16:39)
I mean, the 60

minutes case in my mind is the canonical example. It is not even alone in terms of being so defensible. But the idea that the 60 minutes was being sued because they shot an interview and then they cut it, which is literally the premise of 60 minutes, which is that they do interviews with people and then they part, they pull the parts forth that they think are newsworthy and relevant. And they don't show us all the other stuff because we don't have five hours to sit there and watch outtakes.

of them like coughing in the middle of an answer or something like that. so you just you have these sorts of situations that come about where now we have precedents of the media basically paying on lawsuits. So just to give people a sense of what can happen now and what we're seeing is you have the government basically saying, we want you to pay us. And now to make it easy for you to pay us, we're going to

have a lawsuit against you that is laughably bad that no court would ever accept. And then you are going to settle it and write us a check that has like six or more zeros after it. And that is going to be okay because it's a legal settlement. It's not a bribe or anything. It's a remarkable, remarkable innovation. There's the innovation, Karl. That's innovators.

Karl (17:50)
Yeah, well, what?

Yeah,

that's the most innovative thing I've seen out of government in a while. They're actually, using the government merger regulatory approval process to threaten these companies into doing what they want. If you don't, you know, weaken your journalism or pay us a big settlement for no reason, then we are not going to approve your big pointless merger. And these are terrible. To be clear, these media mergers are a huge problem in the first place. They're part of the reason we're even in this spot where CBS has so much influence. And they were already pretty bad at

doing competent merger review where they actually look at the impact of letting one man own 50,000 ABC or CBS affiliates which is hugely problematic and it was already bad and it's just gotten worse.

Christopher Mitchell (18:31)
So how

do we react though to the idea that I mean Jordan I think you're sitting here and like Jordan how many times in the last five years have you watched the evening news.

Jordan A. Pittman (18:39)
Hmm uh Last five years. I mean I could probably count on my hands to be quite honest with you and it's coming from somebody And it's coming from someone who loves the news like I have subscriptions like you kind of mentioned like I I do my own research to the best of my ability But to actually just sit down and like watch us a late night CNN or late night MSNB. I don't do that. Oh Yeah, yeah, no absolutely

Christopher Mitchell (18:44)
That's what I was wondering.

Or the local channels. That's what I was sort of getting at too. Like, no, a hundred percent no,

right? Because like, if you want to know, if you want to see some provocative footage of someone of the, like the, the scene after there was a shooting, that's where you go. But it's irrelevant for, for our lives for the most part. Um, although if you're into like high school sports, kudos, like that's where you're probably going to go. Um, so, but this gets to just from my question is sort of like, I do feel like it is a little bit weird.

Jordan A. Pittman (19:17)
Right, absolutely.

Christopher Mitchell (19:23)
for this all to be about like, you're gonna suspend Jimmy Kimmel because you wanna get this like approval for these mergers for this like system that like is the dinosaurs are watching, right? I mean, like there are audiences entirely people that are like, know, 70 years old. So I'm just curious, like how much of this should we actually be concerned with? Like, what is it? How does it really impact anything?

Karl (19:42)
It's...

it still matters. I hear that a lot. You know, traditional media's dying's like who cares how much they merge and buy and we'll just let them die off and we'll all go to TikTok.

Well, TikTok was just sold to a bunch of Trump supporting billionaires, you know, and the quest isn't going to stop with traditional media. These companies are pushing the FCC to get rid of decades old media consolidation limits that were built with bipartisan approval, you know, like the one that prevents the big four networks from merging. They're going to get rid of those. Those companies are going to start merging.

which is bad for everybody. And then they're gonna start merging with the tech companies and the telecom companies. You're gonna have Comcast, NBC, CBS, Universal, NBC. It's not gonna stop. These companies are all out of original ideas. And the only thing left to goose those earnings and get some tax breaks and boost that stock a little bit is consolidation and the idea that if you merge and grow, you're being innovative. And there's gonna be a whole bunch more. It's not gonna just stop with the major networks. It's gonna continue. And as that continues, the people at the top of the food chain are gonna continue.

to implement their desires on what the media you consume looks like and it's not going to be good.

Christopher Mitchell (20:45)
I don't want to say like there's a part of me that wanted to push back there specifically to say, know, and for people who are more supportive of Trump and his policies, imagine Soros doing this. The thing is, is that I can't imagine it actually happening because if we have President Mamdani,

And I'm going to do a caricature of him now. I don't know very much about his policy, frankly. mean, know the same that most people know, which is nothing, because he's been totally like his statements have been taken out of context. And not only that, are still evolving because he's a young man. imagine for a second that we have President Mamdani and he's going to turn over, try to drive these companies to have Soros buy them. They're going to push back. And they're going to push back in ways that they don't against Trump.

because there's a sense, and I think it's an accurate sense, but there is a sense that Trump is going to punish them. Whereas Democrats, if a Democratic president, Mamdani, tried to push back and punish companies, half of the Democrats in the Senate would say this is unacceptable and they would probably vote for impeachment. Whereas almost no Republicans are willing to turn against, we have a sense, I think, that the Democrats would turn against an authoritarian on the left.

I think that's accurate, but I don't even want to know. I don't want to test the theory. Let's not do it.

Karl (22:00)
Look,

these companies would oppose that because he would also be involved in doing things like having competent regulation of their interests and making them pay like a decent amount of taxes. would be all the opposition would be rolled into one ball like that. But there are a lot of Democrat rich people, you know, and one of the reasons they don't invest in media is because they don't want a truth telling truth to power media either questioning how they got all that wealth and why they don't pay their workers more. You why don't you pay your taxes?

Christopher Mitchell (22:26)
Mm-hmm.

Karl (22:28)
These people that own these companies are not the kind of people that want a lot of hard, truthful reporting about why rural America is being screwed over and why wages are so suppressed. So it is a bipartisan sport. I mean, there are more people, I think, on the Democratic side of the aisle that care about media consolidation issues, but it is a bipartisan dysfunction.

Christopher Mitchell (22:45)
No. All right, AI Slop, before we run out of time. Jordan, I'm curious if you wanted to come up with a test in the future of feeding me two different things. One ⁓ column would be AI Slop, and the other would be legitimate expressions of the generations that are younger than you. We could see if I could figure out which was which.

Jordan A. Pittman (23:04)
Yeah, you know what's funny? Like I think that actually can be a segment on TikTok because I think what's getting scary about the slop is that regardless if we see it as slop from our media literacy, a lot of people, even myself included at times, I kind of see some AI videos. I'm just like,

That was an AI video? I wasn't too familiar about that. think if anybody really knows, was like bunnies hopping on a trampoline. I don't know if y'all saw that one, but it was just like hopping and it looked pretty authentic to me. And in so many comments, it like, oh, by the way, this is something I just made up. And we're all just like, wow, okay, well, the slop is getting almost serviceable enough where if I'm getting caught by, I can't imagine like your 60 year old, 70 year old grandma on Facebook.

seeing something on there too. So this slop is getting to a point where it's just everywhere.

Christopher Mitchell (23:51)
Now, Karl, I'm curious. You've been immersing yourself in this, which is why we're talking about it. are we concerned primarily about bunnies on trampolines or is there something that actually...

Karl (23:59)
I mean, think, you

know, that's tech is cool. It creates some strange videos. I enjoy the weird artistic distorted videos and stuff like that. But it's also being implemented to create like a prop, a bunch of propaganda. There was I wrote a story about a startup last week who was basically filling the Internet with these AI generated podcasts made by fake experts and subjects. And they were getting like three or four dollars a pop. So they were incentivized to throw three or four thousands of these on the Internet at a time, you know, and

And my concern is that you just have this incentive to create this ad engagement circle of just automated crap where everything's low quality, but you do it at volume and you do it fast and you do it constantly. And I want to know what an Internet 10 years out looks like when these are the predominantly the people.

involved in shaping the discourse because we're already waging war on journalism, we're already waging war on education and informed consensus. So I don't, this future trajectory, and I don't want to be old man yells at people on his lawn type of stuff, but I start to get a little worried about what happens when you have just a wall to wall infotainment ad-based gibberish everywhere and you can't really get informed information anymore.

Christopher Mitchell (25:06)
And this is where I think Jordan, I want to tap into you to get a sense of how you feel like, you know, people your age are reacting to this because I view this, I try to view this with like a longer view of technology, change. Right. And so like you have books that come along and like, and it's really the Bible gets printed for a hundred years and then you have other books start to come out and you have people's minds are blown because they have this new technology. You have the television, you have the radio, you have all this different stuff. It totally changes the way we relate to each other, the way we think about things.

And one of the things I've been hoping is that like your age, Jordan, you basically like someone that you, whether it's you or like your peers see something online and you're like, yeah, it's probably bullshit. You know, like, like Karl said earlier about the kids in Finland who are learning it, even if we're not teaching it to you in schools, I hope that there's a sense that like, you're not watching, you don't have a lot of peers who are watching Fox News who are being like, yeah, like this is where I got to get my news is from like cable television. And like, I hope that most people are like cable television is ridiculous.

You know, like I'm getting my news from this other place.

Jordan A. Pittman (26:07)
Yeah, no, ⁓ you know, it's really funny about that I think when it comes to the idea of AI I think our generation was particularly at least at the beginning was excited about it because there's this prospect of like you said when it comes to any technological advancement, you know Our smartphones or a case may be like at least Gen Z like I'm an older Gen Z or like I saw that transition from like Flip phone to Blackberry to like iPhone so like that sort of technological advancement we were excited for so when AI came up it was one of those like okay, this is another line of

Ways to make our work more efficient and you know, there's a quote that I saw that I really like that kind of summarized I guess Gen Z's kind of perspective on AI is this idea that I Envision AI to help replace hard labor so I can work on my art and music What AI has turned into now is like is doing art and music so I can continue to work in hard labor That's not what I want. So it's one those things where

Now when you see AI for most part Gen Z is just like, like AI like don't use GPT Like I think I see videos all the time even on TikTok where it's just like we're losing critical thinking skills because you decide that you don't know what you want to make for your sandwich so you're asking chat gbt like that's not going to help you out long term, so I think is ⁓ when it comes to the slop and the propaganda, I think

A lot of us are already understanding, okay, this is like slop or this is just something that somebody is using, they're distorting voices, whatever the case may be in the name of whatever they're trying to promote. But even beyond that, I think we're like seeing AI as a sort of like wall that's like separating Americans from thinking critically about the things around us, which as we've been talking about throughout this whole podcast, right? There's a lot of stuff that's going on. There's a lot of stuff that's been long standing that's being challenged for the first time in this country.

You have to start asking yourself these critical thinking questions or at just talk about it and like if you can't even think about that because you're like wow I don't know what to do today I'm gonna ask ChatGPT like you're losing that ability to actually critically think about it So for a lot of us it's kind of like it went from yay to AI to like man I don't want to see anything about this at all man get this out of my face

Karl (28:05)
And you know, the automation is one thing. main concern isn't always the technology. It's the people implementing it and how they're, you know, because I've used automation already for some good stuff. I used it on the Google's chat thing to help me cancel a subscription. worked great. It was more efficient than calling somebody on the phone. Fine. But when you start pumping the AI into these systems that just create fake news reports for clicks at a massive scale that we've never seen before, you're going to have a

Jordan A. Pittman (28:11)
Right.

Absolutely, and it's like, you know, I actually wrote a I did a presentation about this in college and I was a huge advocate for like self-driving cars I was just like self-driving cars gonna be great less traffic less deaths and like now I'm like to your point Karl a lot of stuff that a I was doing is good to a degree but what is making it bad as the people that are dictating where the benefits are coming from so like a I supposed to supposedly, you know

If you're using it more for labor, that's less of us having to work. That's more money for them in their pockets But instead of what giving it back to the people to give them bigger salaries or less working hours They're still working just as much with less pay But the money is just going into the pockets of these billionaires and that's what's the real frustrating part about that So it's like you add that with the propaganda that you've been alluding to earlier like it just starts this whole like Slop mess of like what AI is like currently contributing here in United States

Christopher Mitchell (29:07)
Yeah.

That's, think a lot about,

about who benefits from technological change and like where do the increased productivity, who, who draws the benefits, are they shared? But I also, the concern I have with what Karl's raising, I think is whether or not we enter into a sort of like, the middle age, not the middle ages, but the dark ages of, of the time in which, you know, like you can't figure out what's real and what isn't.

Right now, think maybe the main thing is things like the way back machine, right? And the Internet archive, being able to go back and find things. And now I wonder how they're able to try to move forward. And if they're going to be wasting 90 % of what they're going to be recording is going to be crap that was just made for no reason other than sludging them up. We're out of time. So I do want to thank Jordan and Karl for coming on and jumping in for.

Just sort of a little stream of consciousness on a couple of subjects relating to the Internet how we use it and some of our fears about where it's going. Thank you guys

Jordan A. Pittman (30:13)
No, thank you, Chris. Appreciate it.

Karl (30:13)
Thank you.