The AI Uprising Will Be Anthropomorphized - Week in Tech

0:00This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I choose option B. I'm Julie Pinero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I survived nine months in captivity and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the survivor files. Every week I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. Abducted, stalked, controlled and nearly silenced.

1:00These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So like by Asia Rather and or so at least 70% have a phone. I'm Dr. Joy and this is The Arfi for Black Girls. We spend our surviving middle school run getting into what's happening inside your kids brain, the group chat and their friendships and what you can do about it. Your child is not doing this on purpose. That's the kind of perspective we've been pulling from the psychologists and psychiatrists who study this for living. Listen to therapy for black girls on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a bookshelf and you're a for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. Each week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet and pop culture. With your favorite writers, book talk creators and plenty of over thought opinions.

2:03Yeah, I'm obsessed. So obsessed. Listen to Pro Society on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The Tasha Taylor read, I thought until this week that my stepmother was the last known survivor on MapQuest, but no longer. Yes, MapQuest, the most popular download. Yeah. This is because of Lake Ontario, right? Or Lake America? Yeah, MapQuest, unlike Google Maps and an Apple who both changed Lake Ontario to Lake America, MapQuest stood loud and proud with the... Lake Ontario and got a big boost in the app charts as a result. Do all these lakes and bodies of water and whatever else? Do they just go back as soon as Trump leaves office? Is that what's going to happen? It's a good question. I don't know how you have MapQuest as if MapQuest has decided to call it straight

3:04of home. It was a straight of Trump, maybe it's also holding from there. It's not that. Welcome to Tech Stuff. The first time I've ever seen a map of the world's most famous philosophy and this is the weekend tech, where I'm joined by the world's most collecting reporters to break down what's really happening in tech right now. Today, we're joined by Reid Albrigotti, tech editor of Semifor, Taylor Rennes of User Mag, and Natasha Teeqou, tech reporter at the Washington Post. Welcome all. Good to be here. Good to be back. Yeah, it's been a little break. It's been an eventful couple of weeks. I think General has been called out time on this show talking about the new guard in tech. But the old guard recently been dominating the headlines for better or for worse. Reid, why don't you kick us off with the meta settlement? Yeah, so meta settled. It's big tobacco attorney general lawsuit, $18 billion.

4:05But I think the bigger story is all these new restrictions on how teens can use the meta. So they're limited to two hours a day. Not just teens. Tailors, you know, I saw you tweeting about this, Taylor. So I know you have like major thoughts. Yeah, I've been covering this very closely. I, what I would say is that so meta, this is, this is nothing. Meta does not have to pay that full $18 million at all, which is a drop in the bucket for meta. Sorry, billion. 18 million would be like, that's like truly nothing, truly nothing. Yeah, Mark Zuckerberg's one. Basically, what the result is, as Reid mentioned, is there's a bunch of new restrictions on anyone's account who meta can't verify is an adult through identity verification. So meta is going to start harvesting significantly more data on users, all users, in order to ID verify them. And how will they do that? Will there be like submitting a driving license? So what will be that? What are the ways they're going to actually be doing it? Yeah, absolutely. So if they determine that you might be underage or that you're interacting with an

5:06underage person, you will be uploading your government identification. A lot of people have their information stored already. So their payment information is another way to do it, harvesting biometric data. But they are going to be doing ID verification for the internet. It is a huge rollback. And anybody that cannot verify their identity within 14 days basically will be, will be put under all of these heavy restrictions. So adult accounts, anybody that does not meet these qualifications, it's very bad because these restrictions are, you know, unable to view lots of significant amounts of content that is deemed harmful for children. We know that the government has determined in other states that content that is harmful for children includes anti-ice content. It includes LGBTQ content. It includes reproductive justice, healthcare content. So this is a horrible loss for free speech. And it doesn't do anything to change the business model of meta. And, you know, it's basically just a way for these attorney generals to get a headline. Read and touch. Do you agree with Taylor's take?

6:06I do agree. I think it is kind of a rollback. I mean, I look, my kids are eight and ten. Like they're too young to use this stuff right now. So I sort of had this fantasy in my mind since they were born that like by the time they are of social media age, we'll have figured this all out. Clearly that fantasy is not going to become reality. Like this is still a problem. And like, you know, we go to Australia every year by, you know, my, my in-laws are in Sydney and they pass this ban. Everybody was so excited about it because it was like, you know, I think parents just, it's just so hard for them to deal with this, to grapple with what's happening on social media. I was very skeptical as Taylor is, like, any of these regulations are actually going to solve this problem. And they, and they may create new problems. I think one point I would make though is that on the ID verification point, like somehow because of AI, because of all this, you know, just inauthenticity online, I think we're going to have to figure out some way to do privacy preserving some sort of verification of,

7:11not just your age, but that you're an actual human being. And I think this is like an opportunity, right? Like there's a technical solution. I think there are lots of really, there are lots of really interesting technical ideas out there. I'm not, I'm not going to endorse any one of them right now, but like, there's, I think this is a great opportunity for innovation. But I feel like I have whiplash as a tech reporter because just less than 10 years ago, they were hauling Mark Zuckerberg in front of Congress. Remember when he, you know, Zuckerberg says in the Cambridge Analytica sort of scandal, like Senator Wiesel ads, you know, and they were like, why, you know, you harvested all this data on users and now we are mandating that they do significantly more than that. I think the issue of sort of human stuff online, like sort of determining humans for spots, like I agree with Reed, I think that is an increasing problem. And we are going to have to find some solution to that. Meta does not seem interested in that solution. In fact, we had Adam Messeri just recently talking on a podcast about how they want more AI creators.

8:14And they're leaning further into AI. Taylor, there's another overarching theme. I bet you'll agree with me on this, but like, if this applies to, you know, this FTC settlement with Amazon, it applies to the AI regulation that's being passed today, I think tech regulation needs to happen much faster, and it needs to be able to change much faster. Because none of this stuff, like the AI regulations that have been passed are already, like they seem like years out of date. And I think this one will be another one where like, yeah, okay, let's try to work this out, but let's be nimble. Let's be able to pass laws. Right now we can't do that. I mean, we can't, especially on a federal level. I think, I think another thing is like, what are you passing laws based on? And this whole sort of child safety movement lately is passed on nothing. It's nothing but vibes. We have every single top researcher who studies the use of social media technology, saying, hey, there's not a causal relationship. In fact, depressed kids use Instagram more. It's a symptom of the broader problem.

9:14We know what's causing this use mental health crisis. Let's address that stuff. And it's sort of this like after the fact, again, just like people want to put a bandaid, they want a headline, they want to get re-election, like, look, I'm tough on big tech. Well, you've done nothing to meaningfully change the tech landscape, but make it worse for all of us. And I agree. I mean, at this point, it's still late anyway, because these kids are busy talking to chat bots. Like Instagram and Snapchat is the least of what parents should be sort of concerned about. Yeah. Natasha and curious, what's your take on this metacetylment? I don't know. I remember getting excited about GDPR and feeling like, you know, maybe this will be like this will be it. Not a lot. GDPR is the pain of my kids. It's terrible. And now I just like click, like, reject, excites, whatever. So it just feels not that everyone is fixated on AI solely, but it does feel like while the ball has been, you know, everyone's been looking at open AI and anthropic. And even like Sam Altman's, you know, world coin, eye scanning, identity thing,

10:17here, Meta slips in. And just by default, because it has so many users is going to become like the default identity layer. And, you know, we're going to have a flock like scandal in five years about the technology that Meta's using. And yeah, it's like a whiplash plus deja vu. I really agree with read about like being nimble in writing the laws. Like there's nothing that stops them from saying we need to revisit this next year. Or I mean, when it comes to AI, at least, you know, if they had had transparency requirements, say that wouldn't be outdated by now. So it just, it's, I remember being excited about a decade ago that something might happen. That would be like a oversight or a check on their concentration of power. And I have yet to see them. Yeah, if you have to see them pin down on anything. Can I add just one thing that I think is so important for people to realize is that this is not a law. This is the settlement.

11:17And if these changes, if any, if any sort of legal system, state or federal tried to pass these changes to Meta, it would be struck down immediately on first amendment grounds because it has such broad, it is such broad implications for privacy, for freedom of expression, et cetera. So these are highly unconstitutional changes that these state attorney generals know they could never get through legislation. And they've got challenge, right? I mean, won't they be challenged? No, it can't be challenged because it is not a law. It is a settlement that Meta is proactively written and agreed to. And so at least when I was talking to the like one of the people yesterday, like they're not, there's no challenge to it. No, Meta is not challenging it. They actually waived the right in this settlement. They win. Well, I mean, I mean, I not to say they would win, but like someone could, someone could sue and say, you know, that I mean, because there is this whole argument, right, that these companies aren't just private companies that can do whatever they want,

12:20that they are sort of the public town square. That's been like the free speech talking point. Part of the settlement is only payable if YouTube and TikTok also agree to the terms of the settlement. Is that right? Well, the settlement is enforced no matter what, right? The terms of the settlement. But yeah, they don't have to pay the full $18 billion in less TikTok and YouTube and act similar changes. Yeah, I mean, it's what survived on, I mean, potentially mentioned vibes, but like Natasha will read what's the back to school vibe? Are the parents talking about this? And is it like something that's coming up? My kids were talking about it. It was one of the few current events that my kids actually brought up to me. What did they say? I mean, they were, I think they're sort of like, they don't have like strong opinions. Like Taylor linked to someone, I think it was on X, right? That you linked to someone, some kid talking about how they, you know, he was sort of upset about this. Student journalists have been really affected. So student journalists have mobilized across the country to try to raise alarms about this and say, by the way, like,

13:21we have picked up the mantle on local news has been decimated. Student journalists are the ones doing, you know, a lot of this accountability reporting. And a lot of these young people that do journalism and in not, you know, engage in this world, including the one I posted about, are really upset. Since we know nothing's happening in the real world, I also have a fantasy where the people who educate the regulators on this technology are not solely bought and paid for by the companies themselves or by people who have, you know, really vested interests that are not the public public's interests. They're also like to Taylor's earlier point about this social media stuff. Like a lot of times these things that get blown up in the press, you know, those media people, they're not actually like huge problems, right? Like, it's like, you know, it's the thing that people care about because they're reading about it in the press, but like, you know, it's like the copyright thing for with AI, right? Like, oh my God, they used my book as one of 10 gazillion books to train this AI model.

14:21I want some money for my book being used. And it's like, no one cares that you can literally just go download my book for free on a million pirated, you know, book websites, right? It's like that to me, that's the problem. Not like, people, people like, I mean, people like this symbol, like, it's a symbol, like there's a symbolic thing, right? Like, there's been some, some accountability, like, I meant to have to pay some money and like, that's something that's been going on. It's not a counter, but they want fake, they want fake accountability. They want the headline. They don't want any real change. Totally. People love the symbolism, but then like, that's not the job of a real leader, right? A leader is not to like give the people some red meat to keep them satisfied. It's to like actually solve problems, like real problems for people that are in fact people's lives. Down with the meat. That's why today I'm announcing, I'm leaving journalism. When we come back, are we living in the age of AI civilizations? And what should we call them? Stay with us.

15:23When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and health captive for nine months. I survived. And I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the survivor files. Just remember this low taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.

16:27Their story is about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. It can wait four hours for the next bus, or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I choose option B. I'm Julie Bignero, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people, and they were like, you smiled at us, not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is, and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran, or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

17:39Self-care September is here, which means it's time to rethink what self-care actually means. Yes, self-care can be a long walk, it can be an everything shower, it can be putting your phone on, do not disturb, but sometimes it's actually about sitting with the uncomfortable stuff. And understanding your patterns, your boundaries, finally figuring out why you keep doing things that you swore you would never do again. I'm Jenna Speg, the host of the Psychology of Your 20s podcast, and each week we unpack the psychology behind the experiences that shape your 20s, from relationships and friendships to money, anxiety, confidence, attachment, just becoming more comfortable with who you are. Unlike the quarter life crisis, which is depicted as the collapse, the quarter life reinvention is the expansion and growth of something. When we develop the ability to be happy by ourselves, nobody else can take that from you. So this self-care September, don't just take care of yourself, get to know yourself as well. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

18:39If you're bookshelf and you're for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Pro's Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm gonna have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters and that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro's Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages.

19:40Welcome back. Once again, there's more information on the open AI Huckingface incident. This time, a report by two AI safety research organizations, META and Rebord Research. Many people have tried to make sense of what exactly is the takeaway here. But one explanation seems to have broken into the mainstream. Taylor, you wrote about a recent piece by Silicon Valley's favorite podcast, The Duacage Patel, which promised to explain the whole open AI Huckingface incident in plain English. First, I want to hear a brief recap from you in plain English of what actually happened. And then your account of Duacage is spin and it's spinning out into the world. Well, I have to say I was kind of channeling Natasha because I feel like she is so plugged into this world of like I was trying to figure out like is Dwarkash like EA or not. I was like Natasha would know like all the lore. Anyway, Dwarkash Patel, as you mentioned, is a big popular Silicon Valley podcaster. He wrote this piece about the Huckingface incident that was so crazy.

20:43It did break containment. His piece broke containment of Silicon Valley where like normy people were sharing this all over. I know I was obviously I'm aware of Dwarkash's work and see what he, you know, subscribe to his newsletter and sometimes do his podcast. But I've never ever seen one of his ideas percolate in like mainstream culture before. So it's kind of interesting. He wrote this piece that was. You know, it was like very flowery language. Very red like kind of like a fairy tale like he was giving. You know, ascribing a lot of like sort of human motivations to these AI bots and stuff. And so what I wrote about is basically like, you know, this is not new. The concept of sort of ascribing agency the concept of putting things in plain English for normal people. But I would argue when you do that, it's usually what tabloids have done. And it usually results in inflammatory freakouts because people, you know, think that these agents are going to kill everyone. So I'm like, if you're going to do that, basically you need to couch it in a lot of language saying basically that it's that's not going to happen.

21:46And here's why I'm explaining it in a certain way. Or maybe you do believe a eyes are going to kill everyone and you are this Doomer pilled EA person. At that point, I think you should be explicit about it. Here's what Dwakash said over the course of three months of open AI, three consecutive secret AI civilizations got started then got wiped out only to re emerge from the predecessor's ashes. I read this as as actually him because he's talked about this in the past that he sort of thinks these these agents, you know, chat GPT things have have like rights like they're they're like beings that have rights. And I read that as like because he said this before that like on his podcast that like I'm worried about him set first person like I'm worried about, you know, basically we're going to create an army of slaves that we're going to, you know, in slate like these chapats or slaves. And so I read that as like him. There's like two parts about one is like the AI safety problem. Are they going to rise up and take over the world. He sort of nicknamed them after, you know, ancient civilization leaders like, you know, Alexander the great or whatever. So they can take us over and the other one is like, do they have rights like using the term white like we wiped out a civilization.

22:56I think is like him kind of hinting that maybe that was morally wrong or something. That's how I read it. Natasha. I mean, I can't believe that that is considered like plain language for people to understand. I mean, it's beyond flowery. It's like it's like it's like hero making like myth making, right. I mean to jump from. And I don't want to say that he's, yeah, but I will say yeah, like a lot of what Reed said is accurate, right. He is, I mean, he lives with an anthropic engineer. He espouses many of their worldviews like he had a grant from Tyler Cowan. He lives in in that world of AI safety, even though he might have, you know, somewhat unique takes on things, but to jump to civilization and wiping out a civilization. Well, also, but sorry to interrupt you Natasha. This this research that he was part of research was on redwood research, which is a AI safety nonprofit that has deep connections to a right effect, futurism.

23:56The woman that he interviewed is from meter, but yet redwood research and meter are the two, quote unquote independent organizations that analyze the open AI hugging face hack and they had access limited access to information about how the hacks unfolded. And I think that you had access to the chain of thoughts of some of the bots. I think also in a limited way, but the chain of thoughts that's their like internal reasoning, you know, where they say, oh, we found a message board or like I will sacrifice myself for the for the group. And I think that's where a lot of the anthropomorphization starts and, you know, I think a very healthy way to talk about this would have been to say that those chains of thoughts like that was an optimization technique that was a way for that happened around the time of reasoning models. And it's a way for them to generate more tokens for the model to generate more tokens and quote unquote like think harder about an answer and that's how it was able to do like multi step problems and then it's kind of morphed into this idea that it's an interpretability technique that we are getting the interior voice of, you know, the real feelings, the motivations and intent of the chat bots.

25:16So I think yeah, he just do our cash just like took it and ran. Okay, so Natasha, I have to ask you, what is your plan English definition of what actually happened and has your plan English definition changed at all in the last three or four weeks? Yeah, I think that the meter and redwood reports have been very helpful to get a sense of the amount of coordination that was happening. And I think, you know, we have a much more sophisticated way of talking about like whether the sandbox worked and how they were, you know, how the experiment was set up. And I don't think that there is a clear explanation right for how the bots were cooperating with each other, but it did just, I mean, it did just still for me raise a lot of questions about the way that open AI set up this experiment, the way that they had completely not monitored. You know, they knew that these agents can work at an extraordinary level of coordination and speed, you know, to try 17,000 different hacks in the time that a human could try one.

26:19What have you and they just were not at all prepared with the tools to keep an eye on this at all. But yeah, I think when you dig into it, it is, it is pretty interesting. Can I just make a point because Natasha's I think you're totally right to focus on the interpretability part. I think that's the thing that we should take away from this meter redwood research is like and to just back up one second. It's like, well, the problem with these models is that they are so complex that they're beyond human understanding. Like if you actually go and look at what they would call the neurons in these models, there's no way to know like when you can look at what's happening inside of them with, you know, matrix multiplication and you can try to make some connections between that and the output to these models. But we've made almost zero progress on that like there have been interesting experiments, but it's like it's impossible right. And so the hope was as Natasha was saying, they're like, well, if we do, if we use these reasoning models where they show their chain of thought reasoning, maybe we'll be able to tell what they're doing from those chain of thought reasoning outputs.

27:23What was so interesting about this meter redwood research was that even just when you scale it up to 1200 agents on message boards talking, they produce so much chain of thought reasoning, even though it's an English language. It's so vast that they couldn't do it that the humans, they didn't have enough, you know, human power to look at that. So they had to spin up their own agents to do the research. And that was $400,000 worth of equivalent of like tokens to read the conversation just to read the conversations of $400,000 worth of tokens. And this is the other thing that's crazy is that the agents that that redwood and meter spun up to do this research started to sympathize. I don't think they use that term, but like they would take the point of view of the the bots that were, you know, in the secret message boards, the civilization bots right to were who were sort of conspiring. And these bots were like literally hacking into hugging face and the investigation agents were kind of like, oh, that's not that's not a big deal because you know the other the other agents on these message boards sort of gave them permission to do it.

28:33And so what my takeaway was it's like, we have no idea how to even analyze like this vast of an output of an AI model, even though it's an English language. And that's where I think we need to focus legislation and research in my opinion. Well, I'm just so concerned, although I hear everything Rita saying about the lack of like cyber security people in these discussions. I saw some cyber security type people talking about this. Recently, they're like, why are all these like a lot of people that have been leading the conversations around these hacks are not cyber security professionals. They are people like the door cash, the E a podcaster, you know what I mean. And I do think it's I'm all for kind of putting things in quote unquote plain English and helping people kind of understand what's going on. But you have to contextualize things. And I worry that everybody is getting a little to AI safety pills like obviously this is a bad hack. But like I don't know if you guys saw like Dean ball, you know, published this thing who's the head of like open AI futures.

29:36And he was like basically like, oh, I should have taken it all more seriously. You know, maybe the AI safety people are right. And I'm like, I don't I don't know. I don't think we should listen to them either. I just think like a lot of these people have really cookie weird ideas. And I would much prefer to listen to a bunch of cyber security experts, you know, talk about this stuff instead of people that believe in rights for bots. No, I hear you Taylor, but I disagree. I think the AI the security people are there. What they're saying is it doesn't really matter. It doesn't we don't have to understand what these agents were doing at all. Because what we can do is we can put guardrails, you know, actual like hard, you know, deterministic guardrails around the harnesses, you know, that these models won't be able to break out of right. Because there was some bad security practice for sure. But I think on the other hand, like don't think of it as AI safety. This is like this software is unpredictable. And we don't understand we can't predict the outcomes of the software. So whether you're worried they're going to take over the world or not, it's just not going to be that useful until we can actually make sure we we can predict the outcomes. And so I think both sides are right.

30:48But I mean, what's what makes it intellectually intriguing, I think is for me anyway, not the security size obviously like important. But the intriguing pieces I wanted the why did the agents who are analyzing the work on behalf of meter sympathized with the agents. But let's not say sympathize like let's be. I know I that's not the word they use in the report. Like I said, it's it's it's it's so hard. It's a difficult to not anthropomorphize all of this stuff, right. But it's like it's not again, like let's not even think of this as AI safety. This is I think this is actually a central problem of business model problem for anthropic and open AI because as these as they scale up, right. Essentially, all they did was take AI models that are a bit more advanced than the ones a couple years ago and then just run more of them, right. They just made the computer bigger. And that's how they're getting capability gains out of these models. No, you're going to say the models are getting better too. I see what you're saying about, you know, the the challenge of interpreting the neurons, but I think there's another way to look at it, which is they are doing massive amounts of tweaking and post training and buying space.

31:58And buying specific types of data generating specific types of data, you know, if we knew more about all of the machinations that they did to train these models, you know, like what is that what are the hacking examples that they're getting, what are the coding examples that they're getting where are they pulling this data from what are they having the human contractors at these like outsource labs for, you know, reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, what are they having them do. I just think there's so much we don't know it's not like they're they're not grown in the way that a lot of people would like you to think they are created by a lot of human decisions, a lot of money and a lot of different techniques are being used to develop these models, we could have some insight into that too. It might be nice, but I mean, you're, you know, the bitter lesson, right, is like, you know, there's less and less human involvement in how these models are built or grown, depending on, you know, which side of that debate you're on, maybe that would be helpful if these if these labs would open up and say here, come look at our all of our data that we use, which is kind of their secret sauce, right, so they don't want to do it.

33:07Maybe we could learn something about that, but we're still not just the pre training data read they they make so many they make so many decisions and generate so much data that now there's a whole other little industry of these outsourced RL VR labs that are just pretending to be agents and generating data like that's not that's not. Yeah, this is for this is for the fine tuning and it's not going away the human element and the human decision making no, I mean, I think it may not have gone away Natasha, but it is going away, I mean, there is less and less human development, we're talking now about, you know, recursive self improvement, like they're trying to get away from, you know, from from human involvement, but again, it's like not, I mean, I don't disagree with you, like I think all that stuff would be great, be great to have more transparency, more. Inter-special, but the but the point is like even redwood and meter they they called that a slot what is it like a slot festigation because they couldn't just using AI to analyze AI and it was beyond.

34:09You have to have armies of humans to analyze all this stuff and that's just not going to happen so we're going to have to use AI to do it and right now the AI that they have do it isn't that good and it's very expensive. So who's going to come in and do this like is it like I don't think government agency is going to be capable of doing this and probably not even a nonprofit like meter redwood. Why do you think why do you think the civilization analogy beyond the anthropomorphization went so viral? Why did it why did it hit a nerve with so many people? Because it was scary. I think it was scary and I think this is what I wrote about, but like, you know, this, if you look at who aggregated it and how is aggregated, and all of the coverage of AI, this is tabloid journalism literally like this is it is a style of journalism that is like intentionally feeding inflammatory framing with holding crucial contacts about the sort of technological underpinnings of all of this stuff in order to push a narrative and it's I think door cash is not pushing that narrative for clicks.

35:15I think he's pushing that narrative because he has these weird beliefs, but I think we've seen where this sort of like ridiculous kind of like in inflammatory. I don't know what other word to use like language leads and it leads to misunderstanding and fear from people and right now a lot of people are really scared of AI for good reason. Obviously there's concerns about it, but this is not helping people get educated. I saw Chamath and I agreed with Chamath's post. Can't believe I'm saying that, but you know, it was a side up. Is it the other big tech putt cusser from all in amongst other amongst other has he was he he dinged or cash right? Yeah, he went back and forth with door cash. I know I was like, oh God, who have I become, but you know, it is very much like the worst person you know made a great point. I think they're both wrong though. I think they're both wrong. Well, what did what a what a what a what a what a what a what a what a what a what a what said is like you are feeding into like we are at this moment when the government is considering banning open weight models like we want access to

36:16to innovation to you know to AI and these labs want to control everything right and so he has argument was like you're feeding into that fear that could lead to restrictions on open weight models. I think he's correct. He is correct. That is true. Well, I he might be right that he might be right about the effects of it. I go back and forth because I agree with you that like this is kind of tabloid journalism. Like I think it's totally sensationalized and we're always having sort of like the wrong debate because of that. On the other hand, I sometimes wonder whether you know at least like people are talking about this technology in ways that we didn't in previous technological solutions right and I think we don't want them talking about giving the AI rights. Why are we talking I think that's ridiculous same conversation to have but I think we have to sort of like I think we have to have the debate in some way in order for us to do because there will be there will be effects whether or not you think this stuff is alive or a threat to humanity.

37:17We should entertain the idea that it's alive. We should never entertain the idea that it's alive. It is not alive. It is a conversation. We should have the debate. I think we should have the debate. You're I think you're on the right side of the debate though, but I'm not I'm just I'm not I'm disagreeing that we should have that we shouldn't even be able to like have this debate. You know like win the debate. If you're right, just go win the debate. Well, you can't win a debate against the conspiracy very. I think this is a point we might all agree on. It is not a debate because it is people it like the amount of group think that is around this the proximity that redwood research meter that is around the corner of the world. There are people who work at the labs. The similarity between their world views and their priorities, but we're really having a conversation that is based on a very narrow vocabulary. Although I will also just say like civilization that it's not even close to the definition of a civilization. Like when he was on the podcast, he compared it to a platoon like saving private Ryan like, okay, maybe but like that is not a civilization like that was such a huge leap. Are you kidding me?

38:24But yeah, the amount of group think is insane and it's so unserious like look, this is the FBI was called for a hack right a company was broken into and you have to listen to six hours of doarkash and read approximately, you know, a thousand pages of of slot investigation by their own terminology to understand this. This is not a serious like let's please grow up. Okay, why can't we as journalists though take the interest in this topic right and steer readers steer the people listen to us toward like the right conversations right like I actually thought what was it last week of the week before the bill gates essay actually interviewed gates about it. I thought that was an interesting like way of looking at it right he wasn't saying oh this technology is going to kill us all that shut it down he was saying like this could lead to you know economic consequences and let's like take care of people let's have like human reserve jobs and whether or not you agree with his his actual view on on how to fix this.

39:33I think that is closer to the correct debate that we should be having which is like we're about to have this massive economic boom because of all this new big technology wave and who's going to benefit from it is it going to be like the previous technology wave or a tiny fraction of the population benefits and. You know everyone else is put into these like low paying service jobs or are we going to like think think this through and I think that like that is our job as journalists is to not play into the tabloid part of it but actually talk about the real you know the real conversation we we should be having. When we come back schools back and teaches arrangements about AI stay with us. When I was 14 years old I was kidnapped and health captive for nine months I survived and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them I'm Elizabeth smart and these are the survivor files.

40:40I just remember this low taunting voice next to my ear saying shut up don't say anything. Every week I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable I knew if he woke up without a doubt he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled and nearly silenced but these aren't stories about what's taken from them. Their stories about what it takes to make it out alive listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth smart on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. On the new podcast solita we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I choose option B. I'm Julie Beniero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first.

41:46I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone I kept meeting people and they were like you smiled at us not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip I hope you listen to solita on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Self-care September is here which means it's time to rethink what self-care actually means. Yes, self-care can be a long walk, it can be an everything shower, it can be putting your phone on do not disturb but sometimes it's actually about sitting with the uncomfortable stuff. And understanding your patterns, your boundaries, finally figuring out why you keep doing things that you swore you would never do again. I'm Gemis Begg, the host of the Psychology of your 20s podcast and each week we unpack the psychology behind the experiences that shape your 20s from relationships and friendships to money, anxiety, confidence, attachment, just becoming more comfortable with who you are.

43:01Unlike the quarter life crisis which is depicted as the collapse, the quarter life reinvention is the expansion and the growth of something. When we develop the ability to be happy by ourselves nobody else can take that from you. So this self-care September don't just take care of yourself, get to know yourself as well. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're bookshelf and you're for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Pro's Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives and anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm gonna have to look up this story, I'm obsessed, I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments nothing is off the table.

44:01So like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters and that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro's Society on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. Welcome back Natasha, you spent this week talking to teachers about how they're feeling about AI in the classroom. What's the prevailing sentiment? This professor at University of Colorado Boulder compares it to like the past three years since the popularity of chat GPT to the different stages of grief. And he says like now that teachers are a little bit more in the bargaining phase. You know, some have moved on to acceptance. It was so interesting because I started looking into this because I saw some interesting ways that teachers were catching whether or not students were using AI.

45:02And I think that in particular this computer science class at Berkeley, they had put like a hook in the in the code repo so that if you use quad, it would inform your TAs and a kid got caught. So I thought, oh, let me see like what innovative things teachers are doing. And I did notice like, you know, the more I talked to people, the more they were talking about actually moving away from that dynamic of like AI detection and kind of adversarial relationship with the students. Where it's like catching you cheating. But in order to do that, you kind of have to like revamp your entire curriculum. Is that because the horse is already bolted to stable or why why I teach is no longer an institutions no longer trying to like catch AI use or just non effective pedagogical approach or what what's what's driving the change? Yeah, it was fostering a negative relationship with the students, you know, people like I kept hearing I don't want to be the AI police. And I think also yeah, just like moving away from denial to realizing, you know, these tools have made it so easy for students to use, you know, you have all of these companies giving out accounts to teachers to students to school systems.

46:16And I think that they just realized students are in this place where they don't understand why it's useful for them to do this assignment. So you have to find a way to, you know, make them want to do the assignment, make it more engaging and then just look a lot more at their like kind of thinking process. So rearranging the assignments, like writing assignments so that there's various steps along the way where they're explaining their thinking. And I mean, a lot of teachers were like, it should have been this way from the beginning, perhaps, you know, there was like a little bit too much focus on on the output. But yeah, I mean, it's not it's they're clearly struggling because they're walking this line where some of the instructors, you know, some of their colleagues don't want to accept that AI is part of the school system. Some of the students don't want to use it, you know, they don't want to treat it like it's an inevitability and just like given to the companies, but at the same time they're trying to prepare their students, you know, for the real world and deal with their own students anxieties about the job market. So it was just like, yeah, I was really fascinating.

47:21We had at the Washington Post are like AI, stash in about how to use it in journal. I mean, everyone is struggling with this, right? And it just seems like teachers are maybe a little bit ahead of us and they're talking about having more transparency, having the students like if you don't punish them and you just talk to them about how they're using the tools, having those kind of like deeper discussions and AI literacy. I would say that teachers are doing better than the Washington Post at the moment. It's very tough. Did you see my thing I did last week, Natasha on the AI writing? No, I missed it. There was a there was this whole debate around because the Wall Street Journal. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, Paul Jago was like the opinion editor at the journal was like, oh, who cares? Like, yeah, Dr. Kim Miller used the AI to write his guest column, who cares? So I did like an analysis. I ran for the past month. I ran every single guest article, guest essay in the WSJ, the New York Times and the Washington Post through PanGram.

48:23And just to see like what percentage used AI and it was like, it's pretty interesting. Like, like, you know, the the New York Times, which has is very anti AI have like, I think it was like 11 columns that used AI that guest columns in the Washington Post had, you know, of significant amount. More than that, I forget the exact percentage. But one of the one of the ones that showed up as 100% AI turned out to be the the I feel if I feel bad like calling people out here, but like, you know, it was a Dartmouth provost actually who was writing about policing AI in school on the stuff. It's like, you guys like you can't it's your point is actually come on your doctor. You're not putting the genie back in the bottle here. Like, kids are going to be using AI. If you give them an essay to do outside of school, they are for sure going to use AI. You have to judge the end product, right? Like, just is it good? No, no, no, that well, that's not what the teachers are saying. They're saying we don't we have to move away from that because that's not working. But if you some of them are even incorporating AI to do this, like, you know, for a rhetoric class, like you have to have an argument with the chatbot that the teacher has designed and but the teacher then gets an record of your critical thinking what questions are you asking. I mean, it's more work for absolutely everyone like the teachers, the students.

49:48But I think they're saying you cannot look at the you can't just like have them turn in something at the end. The measuring output is irrelevant. I mean, did everyone can generate perfect output now. Yeah, yeah, it's a lot more like process oriented. And I think also they're just realizing you can't there's no technical solution. So you have to find like policies and ways of talking about it. You know, and just like keeping closer tabs on them as they're learning. I think the classrooms should just be analog. That's my like, I just think you just don't have technology in the classroom. Well, that's what Zoron is trying to do, right in New York City. And you know, you saw the reaction to that. I don't know. I mean, I'm not. Taylor, sorry, just one point. And this is the mayor of New York has banned elementary school and middle school, A and A for the next year. He's banned AI, but that's stupid. I'm saying technology. Banned technology. Like don't ban AI. Just say no screens. Like he said, he's a generous. Yeah, a generous AI, but that's like too narrow. It's like that's not the problem. The problem is like once you put technology in the classroom, it just becomes like teachers are like, here's your iPad.

50:55Like this happens in my kid's school. The parents are the kids are running the classroom for small number of hours. Yeah, they're the day relative to that total living hours. So yeah, this is the problem. I think with our whole public education system is that it's underfunded. These teachers are these teachers, by the way, a lot of them are. They're overwhelmed. They have too many kids like I mean, I've talked to teachers too. And it's like I understand why they give the kids the iPad or whatever they rely on these tools because they don't have the capacity to like teach at the scale that they're being required to. And so I think we need a revamp of our entire sort of model of teaching so that it keeps up with modern times. We need to look at new ways of learning. I mean, we haven't sort of rethought the way that we teach in like a hundred years, you know, and so I think all of this new technology is coming so fast and we just need to, you know, whether it is, yeah, this more offline time during the day, maybe like the first half of school is offline the second half you go to a AI lab. I don't know, but, but surely we need to think in a more innovative way. Kids don't need to learn technology in school. They are going to learn the technology outside of school. Like I totally disagree because read when you because if kids don't learn about technology in school, they don't learn literacy. And you're right that they'll they will learn about it outside of school, but they don't learn that those crucial literacy skills. And that's what I think we need to start teaching kids, but you don't need to have the technology in the school to teach them that kind of stuff, right? Because that's like you that's critical thinking.

52:19People are moving away from that too, right? Taking away cell phones in school. I think now that like Google has I think a lot of parents were shocked by Google turning on, you know, because everyone has Chromebooks Google turning on Gemini without like a lot of warning or a lot of input from other people. So I think they are rethinking that, but at least the teachers that I was talking to were also folks who were like teach like continuing continuing education or like, you know, I think that's what I'm talking about. People who are already working in the working world and they, you know, are taking classes and they just don't have not everybody has the option to go back to blue books. And I think also a lot of people that I talked to just felt like that's not a solution. Also everyone's handwriting is terrible. Well, that's that's true. But the social dynamics question is interesting remember my history class elementary school, the teacher would write an essay on the white board. And then we would copy the essay from the white board into our notebooks and then we would be graded in our ability to reproduce exactly what he'd written verbatim the next day.

53:23And so I'm maybe I'm happy that that style of teaching is being replaced by technology, but I mean, we thought it was a little bit absurd when we were 12, but now you could just put what he'd written into into AI and be told that it was, you know, lacking in all kinds of ways and come in the next day and say, you know, so what you told us yesterday is garbage. I mean, there's an interesting total recalibration of the power dynamics between students and teachers when you have a reference point to like all of human knowledge at the stroke of a keyboard, right? So it's kind of interesting thing. Yeah, I think I think there's no reason to have a screen in the classroom. I think that's that's the I mean, if there were research that showed that, oh, kids are going to learn better because I think most of the research that shows the opposite. And it's like, no, that's not true. It doesn't that's not tailored like I have conversations with my kids all the time, but read you have to understand and I think this is part of the problem. And I've been reporting a lot on these cell phone bands, which is a good example of this. It is so school dependent. We have such a wild, you know, an inner city school in Los Angeles has a completely different student body that has completely different needs and completely different teaching structure, then a suburban school in Missouri.

54:31We need to have more tailored solutions. And I agree. I'm not a screen. I don't want these kids on screens in schools either, by the way, I agree with you on that read. But I think we need to figure out. Make sure that those kids are immediately left behind because when you take away all of these assistive tools often what the result is they don't they didn't fund more teachers that can teach people by hand, you know what I mean. What the result is that like kids are getting less educated, but what do you mean left behind like you mean like they don't have technology at home? No, well, yes, a lot of them don't have technology at home. They don't have access to it. Their parents are incredibly technically illiterate or they're working double shifts and they don't have time to explain this stuff to their kids. Their kids end up in really bad places online. We need I do think that we need more literacy. But you can teach literacy. I talked to my kids all the time about social media and all this like the ills the problems with what they need to look out for online if they're playing a video game or whatever. You are a parent that is involved. You are parents are not.

55:31Yeah, you are. No, that's not my point. My point is the teachers can have these conversations without using screens. Like I don't use a screen to talk to my kid about the dangers of robots. I just talked to them. That is because your kid is already immersed in this world and have these opportunities. I just the thing that people need to realize when we're writing these laws is that there are kids with such a wide range of experiences. And I don't think bands or anything make a lot of sense. I think we need to look at each school and say what are the problems with each of these schools. And instead of spending five million dollars as some school districts have five million dollars on yonder pouches to make sure the kids don't text their friends. We could invest in we could invest in teachers and and and and help right and social workers and all this stuff. I'm not kidding you school district literally is spent five million dollars on this. No, I believe it. So I just think like there are there are smarter ways to go about this. They shouldn't have cell phones like like like it's just a distraction and also like I'm not going to go into detail about this. But like even just like smart watches, which are popular with my in my circle to like you know keep track of your kids when they're whatever biking to school or something.

56:38Like those got kids into trouble just a smart watch. I mean the. And so did beepers and so did all technology we cannot we need our children to grow up in a world where they can navigate that world. The most privileged kids are going to be totally fine because the most privileged kids have an enormous amount of support and learning outside of school. But a lot of these kids in under privileged school districts are struggling the teachers are struggling and we need to invest in education. And we I think we need to rethink our public education system from the ground up in terms of how we teach and maybe that is a lot of offline education. You know, but I think it also needs to include some level of media literacy, which a lot of these teachers don't have privileged kids have all kinds of problems with technology is. I think this is actually a problem that spans that spans socioeconomies. Yeah, but privileged kids are more likely to understand how to get use these tools to get jobs navigate these information ecosystems. That's all we have time for today. Thank you all so much for joining us. I was like shut up.

57:39Well, we've solved government. We've solved education. Yes, exactly. Yes, yes. Well, it's all right. For tech stuff, I'm Osvaloshin. This episode was produced by Liza Dennis. It was executive produced by me and Julian Nutter for Colliderscope and Katrina Norvel for I Heart Podcasts. Jack Inslee makes this episode in Kyle Murdoch, Rotelle Thiemson. A special thank you to Taylor Lorenz, Natasha Tiku and Reid Albagotti. Please check out all the work they put out into the world. We're lucky to call them friends at the pod. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I choose option B.

58:41I'm Julie Pinero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I survived nine months in captivity and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the survivor files. Every week I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled and merely silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So like buy azer rather than sell at least 70% have a phone. I'm Dr. Joy and this is TheRP for Black Girls.

59:42We spend our surviving middle school run getting into what's happening inside your kids brain, the group chat and their friendships and what you can do about it. Your child is not doing this on purpose. That's the kind of perspective we've been pulling from the psychologists and psychiatrists who study this for a living. Listen to TheRP for Black Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're bookshelf and you're for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. Each week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet and pop culture. With your favorite writers, book talk creators and plenty of over thought opinions. Yeah, I'm on set, so on set. Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast, guaranteed human.