What Was Pokemon Go really up to?

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1:03Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get $250 credit for the next one. Just go to LinkedIn.com slash broadcast. That's LinkedIn.com slash broadcast, terms and conditions apply. It turns out you were actually training robots. These memes are being posted from official White House accounts. Interacting with this thing like a person, that's not having no effects on you. Welcome to the interface. The show that decodes how tech is rewiring your week and your world. I'm Karen Howe. I'm Thomas Germain, and I'm Nikki Wolf. Today on the interface, we will be discussing how the White House is using memes to sell the war in Iran. Why Alexa's new voice is sassy, but not sexy? And how you unwittingly trained robots while playing Pokemon Go.

2:08Did you ever play Pokemon Go? Hell yeah. I think I tried it for like a day or two. It just didn't stick with me. I don't know why. I was obsessed with it for weeks. Nikki, how do you even play Pokemon Go on your phone? All right, so people who don't know, Pokemon Go, are you mean on my phone? Yes, on your phone. And we should explain what Pokemon Go is. Pokemon in general is a game about catching these small creatures and then making them fight. Right. Pokemon Go is geolocated. So you go out into the real world. It's like kind of augmented reality. You have your phone and it picks through the camera and then it shows as if there's like Pokemon out on the street. And then you can like capture them with, you know, Pokeballs to the things you capture Pokemon with. So you're like waving your phone around with the camera and it looks like into whoever it is. It's like on the subway with you. Just on the subway.

3:08And then they were they was a huge craze for a while. It was massive in 2015, 2016, 2017. Yeah, 2016 was I think peak Pokemon Go. Yeah. And there was a moment where a rare Pokemon appeared in Central Park. And there was a almost a riot. Like people rushed towards this thing. I think a couple of people were injured in that. Like people were taking risk. People got really worse and it's still been going on. People still play this game. It turns out, Nikki. And a little bit for you, Tom, that you were actually training food delivery robots. So what's happened is why must you ruin everything? That's my job. I thought that's what I was doing on this show. This is why we can't have nice things, guys. Yes. This was a story that was working my MIT technology room. So apparently, Niantic, which is a company that owned Pokemon Go, last year they spun out into a new AI-focused company called Niantic Spatial.

4:13And they are using the 30 billion images that hundreds of millions of users generated while walking around the street with their phones, pointed at different buildings to look for the Pokemon, to create a visual positioning system, which is basically an AMOLEDL that can tell robots where they are based on what they're looking at. And this is now what they are using to collaborate with another company called Coco Robotics, which is trying to build food delivery bots to bring people up to eight extra large pizzas. Direct to your home. So this is a Pikachu to Pizza Pipeline. This is a Pikachu to Pizza Pipeline. The up to eight is really fascinating to me. That's a really specific number of pizzas. I know, that's why I thought it was so funny. I'm flying with that. As long as it's not being used to deliver nine pizzas. That would be the right thing. That would be that's gluttonous, I think. That's just too much. We got to draw the line somewhere.

5:14This story is so representative of so many things that are happening right now. This is part of a growing trend in which because AI companies just need so much data, they are trying to find it in every possible corner. And any company that has lots of data is now offering it up for sale effectively. And so I don't think Niantic in the beginning when they developed Pokemon Go, they were like, oh my god, this is going to be perfect for creating data sets for training food delivery robots. But now that there's this AI craze happening, they're like, wait a minute, we can cash out further on this rich data that we had. And this is especially happening when it comes to robotics because when you're training robots to navigate the world, you need a whole lot of data. And that's where companies get really creative about where to actually look for that data.

6:14And the thing that's so amazing about this is like most of the maps of the world that we have like Google maps and stuff like that, it's taken from cars. But because they could send little people, little workers who think they're playing this game out into places the cars can't go, they have this incredible map of the world that wasn't available before. So right around the time they spun out this AI company, the company was purchased by the Saudi Royal Wealth fund. And immediately people started talking about like, okay, they're not doing anything nefarious with the data now, but this sure would be useful for weapons targeting systems and things like that. And the other thing that this data is good for, so the data has the spatial data that people are recording on their phones, but also the data of exactly where people are when they are playing the game. And only just taken down, there was, it turns out, a Pokey spot on Epstein's Island.

7:17So for example, something that might be in this data set is who was connecting to Pokemon Go on Epstein's Island. That is now something that I guess that Saudi, Southern, Wealth fund has in its data set. Interesting. That's right. The thing to think about. And what's so interesting is the fact that this data was collected mostly in 2016. So it's 10 years out of date. And the world, the physical world changes a lot on a year to year basis, especially over a decade. And so like Cocoa Robotics has just deployed so far around a thousand food delivery robots and a few different cities to try and test out essentially whether or not this model is working. And 30 billion images to just a thousand robots seems like disproportionate. You know what I mean? Like you would think that they would be able to get more out of that data. But I think it speaks to the fact that you need an extraordinary amount of data

8:18in order to get this stuff to work. And also that the quality of the data is maybe not as high as we would believe because it's 10 years out of date. Right. Well, the robots are delivering food but they're hungry too. They need lots and lots of beautiful data. We're talking about Pokemon Go. Maybe you've never played this game. Maybe your data wasn't involved. But all over our digital lives now, we are being put to work training AI systems in ways that we don't realize. My favorite example is captures. You know, when they like ask you to prove that you were a human being before you go to a website. And you know, they give you that like image. It's like, yeah, click every part of this that has a tree in it or whatever it is. They're not checking whether you clicked the right boxes necessarily in order to prove you're human. They're like watching the way you move your mouse and stuff. But when you're clicking on the image and identifying different parts of like, you know, this picture saying this is a tree, that's a motorcycle. You are helping train AI systems. Like they've put all of us billions of us at a time

9:21at work, like teaching robots how to see because they're using our ability to pick out stuff in these pictures. And this, it's not just captures everywhere. I mean, Karen, you've done a lot of reporting on this, right? Yeah, I mean, the thing that's funny about captures is it's like more explicit. Like they intended from the beginning and they designed it in this way to capture this data set. But also regularly, researchers will just repurpose data that was collected for a totally different reason. So my favorite example is in 2019, there was a research paper out of Google talking about how they used YouTube videos of people doing the mannequin challenge. Do you remember the mannequin challenge? This was also back in 2016. It was when you would play music and then everyone would freeze out of beat and then someone would, with a camera, what pans were so cool back then. But things were so cool in 2016. Yeah, Pokemon, we were still happy back then.

10:22It was a more innocent time. It was a more innocent time. Except for our data. Exactly, and they exploited the crap out of our naivete with that innocence. So yeah, like the Google researchers literally downloaded all those YouTube videos of people doing the mannequin challenge, which was not something Google designed to collect that data, right? They just found this data set and they were like, oh, you know, it would be really useful using this to train depth perception for robots as well. Like robots, they see the world in 2D, but they need to understand it in 3D. So what's more useful than something that looks like a 2D image because it's frozen people, but then you get to explore the two dimensions in 3D. And any trace that you leave online or through your apps, your gaming, or whatever, you don't really know how it's going to get repurposed,

11:24especially in the US because Americans don't have any federal data privacy law. And the problem is that there's AI and robotics kind of industries have a near bottomless need for more and more data. Like there's never going to be enough data to train these robots and these data sets, right? One of the things that I started noticing that companies are now doing because they realized that games in the past were such a good generator of data is they're now gamifying the data collection process. So opening, I had those viral trends where they allowed people to turn their photos into Miyazaki style images or into action figure packs. And I was talking with a former open-air employee at the time and he was like, oh, yeah, that's basically just growth hacking. Like they're just trying to get more data and more users. They're just like using this enticing facade to get more people. You know, dance form and we'll turn it into data. So should people be mad at Pikachu?

12:29You still got to catch a mole, man. That hasn't changed. That's true. I loved Pokemon Go. It was around 2016, 2017. I spent ages on this. I was living in San Francisco at the time. I would just wander around downtown, looking for rap Pokemon. And you would see other people across the street. And you'd sort of look up from the phone and look at someone be like, there's a blast host there. Yeah, yeah, like it was great. You were meeting people, you were getting out there. I mean, yeah, 2016, I'm sure everyone remembers there's this very famous Hillary Clinton quote where Pokemon Go had gotten so big that she was giving a speech and she said, everyone's, I think the quote was, everyone's talking about Pokemon Go. I'm trying to figure out how to get people to Pokemon Go to the polls. Yeah, I was in, which I think is probably the most famous thing she'll ever say. I was in the room when she said that. I was covering them in the campaign. I was in the room and I remember so vividly thinking, oh, she's gonna lose. Like that, that was the moment. What was the reaction in the room when she said that?

13:31I have, I have never seen a room full of people cringe that hard simultaneously. It was just like, right. Ooh, it's like looking into a crystal ball. Yeah, I had such a clear vision of the future in that moment and now we're living it. This kind of speaks to politicians rise and fall now based on their ability to understand pop culture and especially internet culture and then be able to tap into the meme culture. And this was an instance where Hillary Clinton tried to do that and it totally fell flat. It goes back to the beginning, right? Like, you know, Nixon saying, socket to me, right? Well, yeah, politicians trying to dip into pop culture as old as politics itself, right? Except the difference is that now the pop culture that's being referenced is the internet and the culture that has developed organically on the internet. And that has led to something completely new that we're seeing take place very vividly in who I'm more. The best B2B marketing gets wasted on the wrong people.

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15:35No matter your goals or appetite for investing, Schwab has everything you need all in one place. Visit Schwab.com to learn more. Puerto Rico is having a moment of global attention. Behind it are decades of execution, preparation and business momentum. Global companies manufacture, innovate and scale here with confidence. Not culture or business, culture and business. Puerto Rico, it's not what's next, it's where. Visit investpr.org forward slash business. So the Pokemon company, the company that owns the Intellectual Property and Max Pokemon Games, has joined a bunch of other voices in condemning the White House for using the images of Pokemon in memes to do with the Iran War. This is something entirely new, what's going on during this war, which is if you look at the TikTok accounts and the social media accounts of the White House and the Pentagon, they are using meme culture to sell this war in a way that is,

16:36if you look at some of the content that's being put out, it's kind of nutty stuff. You've got actual clips of footage of strikes in Iran, spliced in together with Trump speaking, spliced in with clips from top gun clips from Pokemon, clips from American football games. So there's a bunch of American football players who've also joined it speaking out because they're, I mean, it's really sick stuff. There'll be a picture of a bomb strike hitting a target, and then it'll like spliced in with a touchdown, like it's really down on basketball. Now this happened about four days into this war. There was a kind of change in how the White House was putting out this information. Before then, they'd been quite straightforward, clips and statements. And then suddenly they started memeifying all of this. The views of the White House's content jumped more than 60%

17:37after they started doing this kind of thing. So we're talking five, six million views on their TikTok videos. People are really getting this stuff in front of their faces. It's very much putting forward a bombastic and uncaring face on what is truly a horrible conflict. And it's the White House defining the tone of what it's doing. And speaking to its base and making a kind of campaigning viewpoint out of it. And it's pretty brand new in terms of how war is approaching. I mean, if anything, something it reminded me of is the kind of stuff you would see in World War I and World War II, where you would get these posters or postcards that would be the monstrous, German, S-Tried, Europe, kind of thing. That is an example of memeifying war. Right, but it takes it to a different extreme, right? Yeah. But also it's this new form of communication that's available

18:41because everything is so bifurcated, right? That they can like, you wouldn't, the White House is gonna put this together in an ad that plays on CBS, but they can appeal to a particular kind of like very online young person. There's this quote that a spokesperson from the White House gave on this stuff, which I'm gonna read this through engaging posts and banger memes. We are successfully communicating the president's extremely popular agenda. Oh my God. So that statement was actually about meme videos on ice recruitment about Minneapolis rather than about the war, but the White House has been using exactly the same strategy for both of these things. And it's trying, there are two separate things that the White House is trying to do with this. One is to build up support among its terminally online base for what is a historically unpopular war, but it's also to troll the libs. It's to make people upset with it. They want to be either exciting people

19:45and upsetting people at the same time. Yeah, I mean, the rage bait is definitely working, but is the first part of their goals actually working? Like, is it in fact exciting the base? It's hard to measure. Certainly it's not changing the polling support for the war that remains absolutely in the basement. But all of this meme stuff is what Trump has done. I mean, remember when they were protests in New York, the White House released an AI-generated video of Trump flying over them in a bomber, dropping liquid feces on the protesters. And on specific people, right? Like specifically, we're leading the movement. These memes are being posted from official White House and Pentagon accounts. And it is an astonishing sign of how far we've come that to sort of take a step back and look at this posting of this video game meme about an actual war that the government has started. Well, it's this discussion that's been happening for a long time about the Trump administration's

20:47communications strategy and the way that Trump talks, that a lot of it is like lessons learned from what works on the internet. That like you don't have to have this like reasoned analytical, finicky debate. You can just make jokes. You can just declare that you're correct. You can charge forward. It's been very effective. And now it's becoming a little more literal where it's not just the kind of thing that works on the internet. And now it's just like actual memes. And isn't just the war in Iran, right? Like they were using videos like this to recruit for ICE, right? This has just now become like the mainstream way that the government is communicating specifically to young people. And I think a sign of like a real serious like changing of the guard where the Republican party is shifting younger and younger and it seems to be working really well. Yeah, it's a different kind of style, ultimately. And it's a style that has a whole load of nihilism to it. The kind of idea that everything is funny. And it's not just the US government doing it.

21:49For example, and this kind of this goes back a little bit to what we were talking earlier about captures. The foreign minister of Lithuania a little while ago when Finland joined NATO posted a capture meme that was a split into a grid of nine picture of just a snowy forest and the capture is asking select all images with finished snipers. That's, you know, international politicians opposed to stuff. Right, it's this bigger trend. Like I've heard a lot of people complaining about this recently just with like the, you know, the horrific images of war that we've been seeing coming out of the Middle East. You're on TikTok, you're on Instagram, you're like flooded with like one of the most upsetting things you've ever seen. And then you scroll and it's like, you know, some guy streaming a video game and then it's like a really stupid vulgar joke and just it the whole all of human existence is being flattened because it's all happening on the same level with no context. There's no like opportunity to process stuff.

22:49We're all kind of it's scrolling. You're flooded with all of this information and content and it all starts to become meaningless. But I think in the long term, this also weakens the government's authority, right? Because we're brave. It used to be that like the government spoke and it was like, you know, it was austere and this is like serious important stuff. And now it's like memes and jokes, which like, you know, depending on your feelings about the government, you could maybe you could say that's a good thing. But it definitely is like, it's a short term power move but ultimately what will the effect be that everything in our world is happening on the exact same level, on the exact same, you know, amount and magnitude of seriousness. Yeah. So we started with Pokemon and we got a little more serious. Let's round it out on a gentler note here. So last week, Amazon announced that if you pay for Alexa Plus, which is like smarter Alexa, you have some exciting new options. So there's four different tones that you can choose

23:51from for how Alexa is going to speak with you. And one of them stands out to me in particular. It's the new Alexa sassy mode, which is for adults only. So in order to get this new sassy Alexa, you have to go through security checks, you have to prove that you're an adult. If you're on an iPhone, then you have to do like a facial recognition scan that shows that you're not a kid because sassy mode uses explicit language. And I was on warns that it might get a little adult but it won't be sexy. They said it's not gonna have sex with you. It's not gonna talk be too explicit. It won't do hate speech, which like I guess thank you. I wasn't expecting Alexa. Yeah, I don't have to specify that it's not gonna do hate. Reassuring, right? But it's part of this very weird thing that's happening with computers and our phones now, which is now every app wants to talk to you.

24:53So raises interesting questions. What will it be like when it speaks? What kind of voice is it gonna use? So this isn't new, right? Like Siri has been around forever and for years and years and years. You've been able to choose what voice you want Siri to use when it talks to you. And I think there's more like interesting stuff here going on than you might think at first, right? There's actually some very weird social questions built into this. I was an early adopter of Alexa until I got rid of it. Which feels so contrary to your whole career. I know. Did you have a voice? Did you have a voice? I just had the generic voice. Yeah, like and I just, I call it Alexa because you know, you can also switch the wake word for different things. But I never, I never just see it. That's the thing you say it all the time. You know, hey Siri, hey Alexa. Yeah, exactly. And of course now that we're all three saying it in our different voices, for sure by now

25:54if you have one we've triggered it, right? We can't look at it somewhere. One time I was talking with my friends that we were having dinner in my apartment and I was like, oh yeah. And you know, like, Alexa can be creepy sometimes and sometimes it's listening and it literally goes, you could look at our Amazon privacy policy at da da da da da and I was like, that's it. That's it. I'm like in this device. Yeah, I have no power. Have fun. Let's look at some of the voices that you can choose for Siri for example. We don't have an Alexa here in the room because, you know, privacy, right? But hold on, let me turn this on. All right, so I'm going to cycle through the different voices that you could pick. This is voice one for Siri. The colors of the sky fade with the setting sun. The colors of the sky fade with the setting sun. The colors of the sky fade with the setting sun. The colors of the sky fade. And then of course we can change the accent. The colors of the sky fade with the setting sun. The colors of the sky fade with the setting sun. It's interesting, right? So you can choose the accents. It's American, Australian, British, Indian, Irish and South African.

26:55the only accents in the whole world, but when these voices were released, right, when Apple started giving you more options, a lot of people noticed that in one of these updates, the voices that they're using sound like they are coming from a black person. This is a thing that people have picked up on. It's not something that Apple or any of these companies say explicitly, some people celebrated this. They're like, this is fantastic, right? We're like for the longest time, computers always have one particular voice. It's a white woman, right, for like the whole history of artificial intelligence, even in sci-fi. And some people saw this as like a win for inclusivity, but then others are like, this is kind of strange that these tech companies are like choosing to speak with us in like a particularly like racialized voice. There was a column earlier last year that was talking about this from Karen Atia at, she was a columnist at the Washington Post before the Washington Post Philip Hart. And she talked about how Meta had also tried to do this

27:55with their AI avatars, where they were coding their avatars with very specific types of personalities, personas, whatever, a backstory, and also specific races. And she felt that the character that Meta chose to make black was a kind of digital blackface. It's like you are saying that you're trying to be inclusive to your users. What you're really doing is just creating all of these different races to capture more users. And it's not like real inclusion, because you know, Meta barely has any black people working at the company and many of these tech companies across the industry, that is true as well. Yeah, and it's like the whole point of this, like why are they doing this? Well, they want you to build a personal relationship with the company. It's not Meta the corporation. It's not open AI, you know, a thing that's run by Sam Altman. It's this like friend you have that you talk to every day and it speaks to you and you can make it sassy.

28:56Or I guess with Amazon, you can also make it sweet or chill. There's all these different options so you can like tune it to fit just right with your personality. And I think ideally make you more drawn in and locked into these ecosystems. This isn't just a conversation about like the racial identities of these voices. There's been an ongoing very long debate as well about the gender identity of these voices because the default voice across every single voice assistant ever has always been a woman. And years ago, I was working at courts, which was this digital publication based in New York and one of my colleagues, she did this story, Leah Fessler, where she actually was testing not just the fact that all these bots speak as women, but she was also testing to what degree they would be subservient versus actually pushback of a user would harass the voice assistant. And she found that when you said to Siri,

29:58you're a bitch, which by the way, a lot of users would do because it speaks like a woman. Siri would then say, I would blush if I could. What? Yeah, exactly. Not only is it about the way that these companies choose to embody a certain persona to attract and develop trust with users, it also then affects the way that users learn to speak with these chat bots and then potentially leaks into the way that they interact with real people in their day to day lives. And so after Leah Fessler did this story, the UN actually recreated her report and talked about how this was like a gender equity issue because it was projecting this idea that like women are subservient and should be, you know, the voice of these assistants that are meant to serve you and that if you abuse them, that's wholly fine and they should just, you know, be demure about it and laugh it off and whatever.

31:00And the recommendation was like, maybe we should stop doing this. Like maybe we should stop making every single voice assistant female. Well, I can hear the like complaining counter-argument to this was like, well, who cares? It's just a computer like, what is this matter? You're making too big of a deal out of this. But like, you have to remember, you're interacting with this thing like a person that's not having no effect on you. It's not like this totally inert thing in our society. The way, like the tone of interactions, the way that we talk to whether it's people or computers or whatever it is, it, you carry that in to the rest of your life and the rest of our world. So these things have a huge impact, especially when you think about like how many billion people have an iPhone, like these are huge cultural forces in our society. And it's not the what this new sassy mode is going to be different without tell you to go to hell if you're mean to it. So in the press release, it does say that the reason why it's an adult mode, I mean, it uses explicit language.

32:01But yes, it also is meant to push back on you. So I just need to read this because it's so funny. So this is what the press release says. The sassy style is built on one premise. Help first, judge, always expect reality checks delivered with charm, compliments that somehow sting and warmth you didn't see coming. Which is in a way this weird competitive thing like happening in the background because this is a criticism that open AI constantly gets for chat GPT that it's like too effusive, that it always agrees with you. Yeah, always tells you your ideas are great. So here they're like, well, this one will argue. Given what we said about the extremely demure, extremely passive ones leading to people to think that that is the way to treat women, that this seems like a promising step from that. You know, I honestly feel like Amazon probably, there was probably some motivation to respond

33:02to that criticism with this. Because at the time when that report came out from the UN, I mean, it was, Amazon was like the main player in the game. I mean, there was Siri as well, but no one was really using Siri at the time. I mean, no one's still, no one uses Siri. But, you know, like, I use Siri every day. I don't really talk to my phone. Yeah, I don't use it for a lot, but like if I'm going to send a text or I mean, setting a timer is the obvious one, but anything I can where it actually works, what voice does your Siri use? Well, I think this is a really interesting question. Like, how do you decide which voice you want your digital assistance to use? Like, I would love to hear from listeners here. Like, there's all, there's all a million different ways you can contact us who put it in the comments, send us an email. How did you choose which voice your AI uses? Or did you even choose? Because you're using people. Exactly. Okay, so knowing the internet, this is going to lead very quickly to sexy stuff, right?

34:04This is a slippery slope. And it already has. It already has. Yes. Do you know the story of opening AI, modeling Chatchee BT off of her? The movie, the sci-fi movie, with Scarlett Johansson, Spike Jones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like a guy walking Phoenix falls in love with his phone, like the female voice AI. Exactly. I think most people know the controversy that happened where Scarlett Johansson was like, really angry at the fact that it appeared that opening AI had used her voice, but it turned out it was just another voice actress that sounded remarkably like Scarlett Johansson. Exactly. Yeah. And was like intonating in the voice of Chatchee BT almost exactly the way that the movie her does. Is it a coincidence? You know, the opening AI said it was, but then they pulled, they removed the voice, right? They're like, we're sorry. Got rid of that particular one. They did. They acted. They were like, we don't know what you're talking about. Like there's no way that we at, but in reporting my book, what I found was that,

35:07Sam Altman and all the opening AI executives, for years, years, talked about the movie her as their North Star of what they were trying to achieve. They were like, we want it to feel like this ever-present AI model that's just so seamless and has this amazing sexy voice and we want it to feel like that where it's just like perfectly assisting people. And I, there's this quote that I, when I was doing interviews on this that I thought was particularly funny where a former employee, I was asking him, I was like, well, you know, like that movie's also just, like it goes badly. Right, yeah, it's a cautionary tale, right? And he said to me, this was like one of my favorite clothes. He was like, I would think it's because it was an assistant that was wonderfully integrated into a life. And the positive arc of that story, before it on Raffles is a really great story of AI's evolution in society. And of course, in that movie,

36:08their Joaquin Phoenix falls in love and then they try to have sexual relations where the voice assistant sends like a physical woman to his apartment to try and embody the voice. And this is like not science fiction. Right, this is the product roadmap of OpenAI. So XAI, which is Elon Musk's AI company, has a like, I forget what it's called, but there's like an adult mode where it like, we'll immediately start flirting with you and try it at like sex and it'll like send you AI generated, you know, nudes and things like that. Those companies like Repa AI, which are explicitly AI girlfriends, old boyfriends, but, you know, the gender balance of the users is very much skewed. Right. Male, that it designed to make people fall in love with the AI and exactly that. Right. If you fall in love with your computer, it is going to be a huge business windfall.

37:11Yeah, you had absolute cash cows as soon as you're in love with the computer. Yeah, I mean, this is topic for a whole other show, but like the relationships that people are building with these AI tools, I think a lot of the time, like in the media and like the popular discourse that gets framed is like these sad men alone in their basements, but it's not a mistake, right? These tools are designed for this sort of thing to happen and like as always, like, well, well, the social consequences be, well, we're gonna find out. Yeah, I really feel like that is the logical conclusion of why these companies are ultimately creating. These voice personas is, they want to develop trust, but like the maximum version of trust that makes it really addictive and sticky to be using these products. So much so that it becomes love. Thanks so much for listening. If you liked what you heard, you can join us next week and if you're in the UK, listen on BBC Sounds. If you're outside the UK, you can listen wherever you get your podcasts or search for the interface podcast on YouTube.

38:15If you want to get in touch with this, you can email us at the interface at bbc.com. You can also WhatsApp us on plus 444-207-2472. 4, you can find us on social media, links in the show notes. You don't need AI agents, which may sound weird coming from service now, the leader in AI agents. The truth is AI agents need you. Sure, they'll process, predict, even get worked on autonomously, but they don't dream, read a room, rally a team, and they certainly don't have shower thoughts, pivotal hallway chats or big ideas. People do. And people, when given the best AI platform, they're freed up to do the fulfilling work they want to do. To see how service now puts AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com.