got it you are listening to radio station wba i it's 99.5 fm here in new york wbai.org
everywhere all over the place time is just about seven o'clock and it is time for another exciting
edition of off the hook
the telephone keeps ringing so i ripped it off the wall i cut myself while shaving
now i can't make a call we couldn't get much worse but if they could they would
a very good evening to all of you
program is off the hook rob t firefly here with you and we are back after a week off the air and i am
here joined today by gila good evening let's try that again hi gila hi can you hear me now i can hear
you a little better now we'll keep working on that and out in signal land we have got alex
yes you do i'm here all right now we're stabilizing stabilizing some levels and putting some stuff out
there onto the airwaves we were not on last week we had planned to be on but uh those plans changed
and um it's my fault i own it it's completely it is 100 my fault utterly your fault and uh i'm gonna
let you take the lead on telling the story gila because i was there but it is uh primarily your
story so the reason that we were not on air last week is because emmanuel and kyle are away on
assignment and when emmanuel and kyle are away on assignment their studio is not where the show can
happen so the show was set to run from our house and we're excited to announce that there does not
appear to be a thunderstorm in the offing tonight as there was the last time we ran the show from here
so everybody get excited about that um so yeah we were all set to go ahead and do that from here um
and then tuesday monday night into tuesday i was in horrible horrible horrible pain and i couldn't sleep
and i was throwing up and it was bad and we set off for the emergency room on tuesday afternoon i was
admitted to the hospital around 1 a.m i want to say and i got up to a room about 9 a.m and they said
you're having emergency surgery at some point soon um you know tell your gallbladder it's been
fun and that is what happened um i wound up having surgery uh first thing on thursday morning
and i have been recuperating since and um obviously we we have to thank our our pals at the station uh
reggie management um everyone for uh being on point and uh filling in with something when we at the last
moment couldn't produce a show and uh yeah i mean listeners to this program regular listeners will
know that uh we are pretty much the backup base um when emmanuel and kyle can't uh can't run things
from their pile of technology so yeah we we're doing our best and um the hospital visit itself
because i was there i stayed with you you're very good yes and the the visit itself was very
interesting from the standpoint of somebody who um talks about the sorts of things we talk about on
this program yeah um i mean let's just begin with the fact that obviously when you're in the hospital
when you're in the emergency department when you are um there and are waiting and they're just throwing
things at you to see what they can fix and what will get better they obviously want to check that
they're giving treatments and medication to the right person so you keep getting asked your name
and your date of birth a lot um i would like to take this moment to encourage everyone who finds
themselves in the emergency room system and is has their wits about them enough to be stating their name
and date of birth um to please use your inside voice when you're stating your pii all over the
place um there was a woman who's in a station across the hallway room i'm not even quite sure how to
describe it the little warren of stations right um who just kept shouting her name and her birth date
um so kind of like a pokemon just shouting their own name over and over yeah we're like dj khaled
right linda if you're listening i hope your birthday in april is great um you're gonna be
67 um and again just just y'all yeah if you can keep your wits about you maybe don't shout
okay and in addition to that so there were other folks having uh being attended to um you got
attended to brought from the emergency room to a proper room and uh and everything and as people
who have been hospitalized uh will know you sometimes get neighbors and we had some neighbors in your room
we did um and you know we we were talking to your doctors about everything that needed to be done and
everything was fairly straightforward and you know they took they took i think good care of you
um the folks across the um across the room from us were arguing with their doctor um of the person
who was uh being seen to because whenever their doctor told them something about what they needed to
do to you know keep up their treatment to prepare themselves to do this to do that they had uh they had
a refrain that they kept coming back with and arguing with this doctor and gila what was that
refrain well chat gpt said something else i asked chat gpt and chat gpt said something else so first of
all a reminder that medical professionals are in fact medical professionals with years of training
and they know what's up and you don't need to ask chat gpt everything i did hear one of their
doctors give maybe the best response i've ever heard which was chat gpt scans everything on the internet
and doesn't doesn't uh differentiate between what makes sense and what doesn't make sense
so it's important to not listen to them
and again that was the most polite response i could have thought of anyone giving in that moment
it was it was very well put and you know even even before the um current wave of ai hype um
it was a thing for people to consult dr google or you know whatever search engine you have and uh just
use that to diagnose yourself to you know make your own medical decisions and at the end of the day if
you have a trained professional in front of you telling some telling you something is so and uh in order to
continue your existence on this planet of ours uh you need to do certain things maybe don't come back
with what chat gpt said right but these are also the people who we heard and again i would also like
to mention that if you're visiting someone in the hospital your indoor voice is a really good tool
um boisterous family they were boisterous family um nothing has made me so fearful for the future
as the patient's son very proudly telling his mother well i get all my news from chat gpt and libertarian
podcasts and
yeah it you know it was a positive way to keep from to keep distracted
um to not think about whatever else was going on i appreciated it but yeah indoor voices are good
indoor voices are good and uh the information given you by uh trained experts in their field
um trumps somebody uh somebody recently uh and i saw this i think from multiple posters over the past
couple of weeks uh posted something to the effect of whenever somebody's statement to be
begins is chat gpt i know i'm about to hear some dumb ass crap um yeah but uh you know when when
life or death is involved maybe uh maybe use a little more discretion alex how are you doing out
there you're you seem to be located uh locally this week i am i'm i'm in new york i'm i'm uh just
being bedazzled by the story of gila this hospital experience over here and and remaining somewhat quiet but
uh i tend to agree with you though rob um and i i have found too that in my experience being a lawyer
and negotiating with people you know chat gpt is just used by counterparties all the time it might
be chat gpt might be you know some other llm but i often feel like i'm always just negotiating with a
large language model or some kind of generative ai at this point and it makes people think that they
know better than they do so it is a little bit terrifying to see this being used in a hospital
environment thankfully and knock on wood here i haven't been in a hospital since the advent of
you know massive large language models have come into play but um crazy what what an experience we're
we're really glad that you're back and seemingly okay gila how is everything now um things are good i mean
the the fascinating thing about the gallbladder is that it is useless and when you know when you're
healing from so many surgeries it's about your body learning to do something differently or work
without something that used to be there and in this case it's just closing up a hole um it doesn't my
my body doesn't need to learn how to do anything new um because the gallbladder is still so vestigial
and dumb and it's at i'm getting to the point where i'm bored which is bad because then i push too hard
and then i'm exhausted um but this is amazing to me this whole process was a week ago not even like a week
ago i hadn't even had surgery yet and that is just bewildering to me um you know i am
lucky in so many ways that things turned out the way that they did um not least that there is an
emergency room literally two blocks from our apartment that we were able to get to on foot
and pretty quickly yeah and uh talking of this whole experience so you know you're you're here
you're convalescing uh not at all through the efforts of large language models but um yeah you're
doing well i can confirm for the folks out there as someone who's in the room with you you're doing
extraordinarily well and uh just keep taking care of yourself and this uh this whole chat gpt thing
does connect with a bunch of stuff that's been in the news the past couple of weeks um i wanted to
talk about this one story uh we didn't get to it last week because we weren't around um this is from
the 5th of december um a bbc news story that uh trains were canceled um because somebody had started
circulating generative ai images of the bridge collapsing um that this train was going to go over uh it was uh
the the there was a tremor and uh there was a tremor which uh struck on wednesday night i guess
wednesday night of uh the week of the fifth that would have been the third uh felt across lancashire
in the southern lake district um and this image started being uh circulated of the bridge collapsed
and of course in reality it was fine but the realist the realism of this uh image was enough for them to
start canceling trains and uh you know all that sort of thing and yeah that i found this story a
little interesting just as an example of the power of this sort of thing now we are officially at a
point where um generative ai video can look convincing at least to an untrained eye but the idea that the
bbc then ran the video through ai to determine where the ai was yes that may be my favorite
piece of this little story yeah the story on bbc.com does say a bbc journalist ran the image
through an ai chatbot which identified key spots that may have been manipulated this is of course
a stupid thing to do because it means nothing right but again i think the tendency to want to
hand so much of automation over to ai that i mean there was another story that came up about that
uh weapons recognition system that has caught two kids with chip bags yeah i think uh one kid had a
chip bag and another kid had a clarinet it was yeah the most recent one was a clarinet and apparently
the child was holding a clarinet like a gun so the official word from school leadership is well
this is working exactly the way it's supposed to and you shouldn't hold your clarinet like a gun
because the system is gonna i don't know man when you were a little kid did you ever not hold
anything like a gun oh yeah everything was a gun everything was absolutely everything on the
playground was a gun um pew pew lasers or you know boom boom uh incendiary weapons but yeah and
clarinets are commonly found around schools i think just as common as chip bags maybe
yeah so maybe the technology needs to uh needs to continue to be refined and of course this this
brings into what this brings into sharp relief the danger of trusting these things too much especially
if you're an understaffed authority figure um who just wants to somehow throw a switch and uh believe
things are taken care of that aren't do we think the person who created the image
or who prompted the image i guess more to the point is proud
maybe there are always going to be trolls aren't there um they're always and trolls and bridges are
a natural match oh yes um alex yes well i think this this brings up an interesting topic because
i we certainly have gotten past the point now where people have started to distrust quite literally
everything that they see on social media because you're not sure whether or not something is
authentic or it's ai generated any real that looks unreal or is somewhat unbelievable on instagram or on
facebook if you look at the comments on this people claiming it's ai other people claiming it's real
there's genuine confusion out there about what is authentic and what is inauthentic
and it brings to mind the need to have some kind of clarity about this you know either from a platform
but it becomes difficult to detect i think real artifacts of whether or not something is going to be
an ai generated image or a legitimate image it brings to mind the work of somebody by the name of uh
honey farid and i used to work with honey at uh dartmouth a long time ago my god i can't believe
it was about 20 years ago now at a federally funded think tank called the institute for security
technology studies i think it's called the institute for security technology and society
now but honey farid was a computer science professor at dartmouth and he got into this field
of detecting altered images by trying to detect images that had embedded steganographic encryption
so if you remember shortly after 9-11 there was a lot of panic about potential for terrorists to post a
picture of a couch or something for sale on facebook and having that couch image a hidden message that
you know related to where you know some plot should begin or you know a message like the skeleton's
dance at midnight on some crappy couch that's for sale sale on craigslist or something like that
right so honey farid started to figure out ways to detect whether or not certain pixels were altered
at very low levels and he he's now left dartmouth and teaches at uc berkeley but he's a real pioneer
on digital image forensics and what he's done is his work to my mind is all about really low level
pixel analysis and looking at physical and geometric consistency and to determine whether or not
an image has been ai generated by looking at you know what real geometry should be and what it actually
is and and he's built systems that do this really really well and it seems to me like this type of
thing needs to be implemented on all of the platforms out there to determine whether or not something
has the hallmarks or the indications and dish of being ai generated or not because we are we are
way past this point of believability when it comes to images and it's it's becoming a real problem if
we're to trust anything in the future we need to know what's authentic and what's inauthentic
and actually can i roll back for a second because talking about images i do have a bit more detail
yeah um the reason i had to have my gallbladder out was because i had gallstones and right before i
went into surgery i said to the surgeon very politely would it be possible to get a picture
if you remember i'm curious i'd like to see what's going on and she said i'll do it if i remember and i
said okay cool and then i had surgery and later i was in my room and the surgeon came by to check in
and she said i remembered to take a picture that was really something and i said what do you mean
and she said you had one gigantic gallstone um we she had put a pen with like a little ruler on it
next to said gallstone um it was how big was it uh for the photo yeah it was uh four centimeters long
um about 2.7 centimeters uh wide egg-shaped as these things are enormous and my and she airdropped
this photo to me from her phone to my phone and for a moment i was like this can't be real
not that i had any sense of what it was supposed to look like not that i had any sense of how many
gallstones i had or where they were supposed to be
but i have spent a not insignificant amount of time over the last week trying to kind of reverse
image search and make sure that this is really what was there it is terrifyingly enormous i must say
it's an achievement on on the surgeon's part and on your part i'm very proud of myself for
well done honestly i years of work apparently i i always respect your creative uh forces and outputs
um but uh so i wanted to talk about some more related stuff uh we were talking about uh ai and
also you know the general media environment because i think in all our lifetimes those of us on this
program probably everyone listening to it um photos have been something that you know if someone hands
you a paper photo and says this is proof of something um it's been common knowledge that well you can fake
photos you can alter photos and this used to be something very complex and very uh difficult to do unless you
had certain talents and equipment and stuff but over the years it got easier and easier and easier so if
somebody handed you a photo maybe it's photoshop maybe it's real but you would never assume that it was
the the entire truth but video was more dependable because video contains many images and it's so much
more difficult to edit video than it is to edit an image you know anybody can photoshop something
um but uh video was more of a solid thing and we are now past that point um video is not proof of anything
video is easily fakeable so yeah we we all have to be sort of on our guard with uh stuff that we didn't
even five six years ago um in on levels because anybody can use these tools and anybody can generate this
stuff so yeah be uh be wary out there uh consider your sources and use your judgment um another
story going around this week uh involving ai microsoft copilot is an ai assistant as uh these
things go i uninstalled it for my laptop this afternoon nicely done and uh you could do that
because your laptop is something that you have a reasonable amount of control over
if you were the owner of a fancy lg smart television uh you may find yourself with that
problem but unable to address it because lg smart tv owners are reporting that a recent web
os software update has added microsoft copilot to their tvs with no apparent way to remove it
um this story from tom's hardware uh reports first surfaced over the weekend on reddit where a post
showed a copilot tile pinned to an lg tv home screen um and apparently this is this is now
installed on people's televisions it cannot be removed um it can't be uninstalled not through
any uh way that people have found so far and a lot of people are angry about it um there there are there
are so many uh stories going around of smart devices like being uh subverted being used to spy on people
and here is something that gets uh stuck on your very expensive device without your permission
and apparently the only way you can disable copilot right now is to disconnect your tv from the
internet which given the state of the way that so much of entertainment works right now means you
can't do anything else either yeah then you turn on the fireplace and go yes or just set the tv on fire
maybe that'll uh also entertain as well yes but uh yeah if you're running apps on your television
those need internet access for you know your streaming services or whatever else your your
digital fish tank um whatever you got going on and the whole smart tv scene has always been kind of
a dangerous place full of dodgy apps and things but um this this is uh this is above and beyond
and um i don't know alex uh you're you're a you're a tv watcher yourself uh at times like how would
you feel if uh you had something like this added to your television and you couldn't get rid of it
oh i mean wouldn't it be great because doesn't ai just make our lives so much easier i mean how
could you not want an ai system tracking all of your watching habits and maybe offering you
suggestions i mean i know i know how much you love friends over there um and so you know it could
also offer you suggestions for you know other related episodes of friends or i'm joking of course rob
that's not an enthusiast over there i mean i i and and i'm being sarcastic i think the whole thing
is deplorable i think it raises a lot of issues about how and why this is being done i mean putting
these these tiles into somebody else's television some product that you own yeah i i don't understand
why why companies continue to do stupid things like this because it's just going to make users angry
it's going to make people angry nobody i don't know maybe some people be thankful for it in much
the same way that i was tongue-in-cheek being thankful for the installation of co-pilot on on
the television but i doubt it um and i think for a good portion of users they are going to be angry
and for a good portion of users it raises the issue of would they have consented to this
at the outset of the bargain here when they bought the television because if you're not consenting to
the collection of your data they shouldn't be doing it so how are they doing this comes to mind
they very likely had to change the terms of service or the terms of use so that in order for you to
continue using the television you probably had to accept these new terms of service and then
microsoft co-pilot presumably was installed that's my guess as to as to what happened here with these
lg television sets so those contracts where the terms of service are updated or you can't and you have
to accept those changes unless uh you decide to stop using that television at all those are really
termed contracts of adhesion you don't necessarily have any kind of bargaining power to change those
particular terms with lg you can't go and talk to their lawyers and say hey i would like to remove
this particular clause and so it's a contract of adhesion so with those terms of service updated
and through a contract of adhesion i think that the original bargain between the purchaser of the
the television and lg self has been materially changed and it's been changed midstream while somebody
is using this particular television so in some respects i could see this type of addition of
an ai system potentially opening up lg or other companies that would do something like this to
liability because it is a consent issue and i'm sure that there are some crafty plaintiffs lawyers
very likely in california because that's where all of these lawsuits are filed that are already putting
the final touches on a class action complaint for some kind of privacy breach under the ccpa the
california consumer privacy act or other state laws that would relate to data collection and consent
practices for for this particular type of situation so i think it's a bit hairy it seems like it's just
an annoying small thing but it could have major implications yeah and funny you mentioned lawsuits
regarding this sort of thing because there's another story this one published yesterday on tech radar
um that uh texas is considering themselves messed with by lg and also by samsung and hisense and tcl
and other manufacturers of smart tvs um texas attorney general ken paxton filed a suit on monday
against those companies uh claiming they have been unlawfully collecting personal data through
something called acr which stands for automated content recognition and you know that's exactly what it
sounds like um whatever you're watching on your tv whether you're watching it from an app on the tv
whether you're watching it from something connected to the tv from your home video device from you know
pirated files from whatever what have you it is sampling what's being shown on your television and
phoning home with that information um the now more than a decade old technology has a long history
and another company uh samba tv patented its own acr tech in 2011 um most of the early uses regarded
uh revolved around sound and music recognition um if you use the app shazam to tell what music is
playing on you know you know within your field of hearing it's using automated content recognition
but this is also being done on smart televisions and not everyone wants what they're watching to be sent to
who knows who whether it's the tv manufacturer whether it's some uh you know companies that pay
the tv manufacturer for that information um and uh you know texas is uh the attorney general of texas
uh who is somebody named ken paxton who has his own long list of controversies uh if you want to check
out his wikipedia article uh more than uh worth going into here but uh even texans who don't like him
can are considering this maybe sort of a stop clock moment i was thinking exactly stop clocks
absolutely yes as in a stop clock is right twice a day um so yes i have a question though
sure not backing up shoot now that everything is digital and there's so few analog clocks in the
world do people understand the phrase stopped clocks are right twice a day
this is an excellent question thank you it is one of those things are our kids in school being taught
to read an analog clock face um i know uh cursive writing is falling out of favor um things like that
and you know who knows i i don't have i don't have kids uh alex you've got uh kids have you have you uh
had moments where you're where like maybe they're not teaching something that used to be a fundamental
like this uh i think script cursive i haven't seen i haven't seen my kids write in script that
that's it i mean they certainly don't know the pledge of allegiance as well that's uh that's
that's something that seems to have gone to the wayside at least in new york city public schools and
i don't imagine it coming back anytime soon um but yeah i um i i i don't know i would think that they
would though because i think in terms of telling time though they did have to learn how to tell time
on analog clocks that that seems to me like a life skill that would be would be very fruitful to
have throughout right otherwise you're kind of looking at something you're seeing this this alien
circular structure and uh and have no idea what the hell it is so so i do think they learn how to turn
to tell time and that the stop clock is right twice a day phrase should make sense to to anybody over
the age of six i'm glad it it it does remind me of when uh we used to go to uh maker fairs which are
which are much missed but the maker fair out in uh corona park where we would uh set up a booth
with our pals from 2600 and um among the things we had for display was a rotary phone that people
could come up and and use and it was such a it was such a fun thing to watch kids attending the event
come up and you know we would challenge them do you know how to dial a number on this phone
and sometimes they knew sometimes they had seen it in old uh films or shows or whatever
sometimes they would pick it up and not know what to do with the big round thing with the holes
um more than one kid pressed on the circle in the middle of a rotary dial expecting it to be like a
button or a touch screen of some sort um and in addition to the fun of seeing if the kids could do
it was watching their parents realize oh my god my kids don't know how to do this i'm so old
so one thing i've noticed because sometimes you look to see what exists in the world and there are
a lot of rotary look phones that are available for purchase where it's buttons and they're in that
setup but you can't actually move the plate yeah they're in that circle which makes me sad and and
then there are there are spots on a rotary dial for the for the uh hash mark and asterisk which uh just
seem wrong somehow but yeah so uh keep an eye on your tvs uh for the moment it seems on an lg tv if
you have to dig for what they call the live plus setting um that's their automated contact content
recognition and you're able to disable it but uh it is it has been known to be on by default and you
will have to dig for this setting it is not it is a dark pattern it is not made easy for you
and as we're seeing with the co-pilot thing that setting is there until they decide to stop giving
you the choice one one question that uh comes up a lot with uh stuff like this is well why doesn't
somebody just make a dumb tv that works like tvs used to where you just hook a you know you hook
your stuff up to it your cable your your video whatever and it'll just show you what you send to
it um why why doesn't some company do that since it doesn't seem like you can buy one
and that would be a valid question but what's going on is much more insidious dumb tvs do exist
they're known as uh commercial displays usually or commercial monitors things of that sort and you
can find them being sold by the same companies that make smart tvs but they are much more expensive
a commercial display um with a comparable resolution size you know hardware feature set everything to a
smart tv um will cost more than the smart tv and the reason for that is that the
companies who do things like throw microsoft co-pilot on there or through who throw their
pre-loaded apps on there to entice you to subscribe to their streaming services they all pay the
manufacturer um for the opportunity to get that stuff in front of your eyes um that payment goes
toward lowering the price of the tv at least some of it so you're more likely to grab it um over a
competing product on the shelf so the higher price of the commercial display is um more correctly
thought of as the actual price of the appliance whereas the smart tv which uh you're thinking
is uh so much cheaper and that's you know that's so much better it's it's uh you know that that
difference in price is what the companies are paying for your eyeballs basically what's the word i'm looking
for i'm gonna need some hints when a company pays money to help you pay less uh-huh there's a word for
that and i can't remember the word right now can you say the word on the radio yeah i can it's
definitely a word you can say on the radio it's just
oh my god well it'll it'll come to you and alex what's up yeah i mean so so basically you're you're
saying then rob that the sale of the consumer data would contribute to the lower price point is that
is that correct um yeah in a roundabout way because the manufacturers of the televisions get paid to put
that stuff in front of you so they're going to put a little bit of that toward lowering the price of the
television probably also still keeping some of it for themselves but that's that's uh how money is
flowing in this sort of um equation over so much yeah so so it's just a another form essentially of
the surveillance capitalism economic principles that at play here where the data that we're generating is
is valuable it's being sold it's being packaged it's being bundled and and quote unquote shared with
third-party affiliates etc and and what's interesting is i i think that that all is premised
under an assumption that that could be made erroneous right which is that
the data that is being generated by these devices can be trusted
what if we made the data that was generated by these devices untrustworthy what if we could generate
nonsense data what if we could generate crap data that completely obfuscated our actual viewing patterns
and made that data completely useless from an advertising perspective like this is something
i've always been thinking about for you know 15 years or so like why is there not some kind of filter
or some kind of device that can continually generate crap data so that this type of system
does not exist anymore so that this type of system can essentially be broken by the consumers
jamming radar yeah yeah let's let's jam the radar i mean why not i mean look we're we're hackers right
we should be able to generate random data on a particular device i don't know if it would require
flashing the firmware but that's not something that uh is too difficult for us to do we've been playing
with eprom reader writers since the early 90s i mean let's get to work here like i would love to see
somebody build something like this for the the greater good here and talk about it the next hope
conference it would be amazing i mean there's there's a huge scene out there for um people who
want to do this sort of thing with their smartphones install alternative os's or um at least you know
root the thing gain more control over what you are and aren't allowed to do with it by the operating
system and smartphones they're ubiquitous everyone has one but smart tvs are getting there and there does
not seem to be as um an equivalent scene out there for for hacking these things and that's something
that i think we would love to see because you know if if you want to get the smart tv you don't want to
pay the extra for um the dumb tv um but you want to subvert how it works you know can i can i cut things
off at the firewall can i uh you know put in how great would it be to put an open source operating system
on your television um making it into a computer that you could basically do whatever you want with
there are so many possibilities for things and uh it needs brilliant minds to uh start uh hacking
away at the problem yeah i i completely agree i mean and and for somebody like you it would probably
be really important to try to obfuscate your your viewing habits so that people don't realize you're
such a big friends fan and yeah to go back to that once again so there's a vested interest in this on
your part yeah just uh i i would love some uh someone in some crap uh crapware company somewhere
looking at the results and going this guy is just watching a lot of watching the same episode of men
behaving badly from the 90s over and over 24 7 we really like rob schneider in this house
we don't actually um yes ron eldard ron eldard and i hate that i know that
oh fun stuff oh let's uh let's what else is uh going on there is there um just uh this past uh the past
few days have been rattling around with the news that uh firefox the uh the head of mozilla the the new
head uh the new ceo of mozilla anthony enzor de mayo has announced that firefox is uh going to be
a modern ai browser firefox of course a very popular open source web browser that uh has been
you know has had ebbs and flows it used to be really huge now it's still got a dedicated user
base that it seems uh intent on making angry but um you know it there have been ai features that have
been uh trickled onto the thing that are relatively easy to disable but uh people are questioning now
if this is indicative of a direction that the organization is taking i have a question yes and
that's something that has bothered me with so much of this with co-pilot on your tv with ai in your
browser to what end to the end that i think as as we were talking about it's ways for the people
behind these things to continue to monetize you um you know the the old model of just going and
buying a piece of equipment and appliance and anything and that being the financial transaction
then you take home you take the thing home and you have the thing and you can use the thing because
it's your thing but companies like money they want more of yours and if they could continue to
monetize your use of the product after they've already sold it to you well let's get on that you
know the shareholders would love it surveillance capitalism is is the term and it is it is something
uh which i think is very concerning it should be of more concern and not enough people are talking
about it but um the with the current uh ai bubble looming i think uh it's it's maybe there is maybe uh
something in the hope that we can maybe get more folks angry about it you know first you've got to
get mad as a man once said yes alex well it's an interesting pivot from firefox's perspective to
have some kind of ai enabled browser functionality i i don't necessarily even know what the hell it
means to be like an ai browser or something but you know presumably it's like with a bunch of annoying
ai tools but on the other hand it does make some sense and and if you think about how things have
changed even just over the last three years or so i mean really gone are the days when you would go to
a search engine like google type in a question and then web pages would show up and then you would have
to read those web pages and answer the question for yourself now what happens on all of the search
engines is that an ai system will already pre-read all of those results for you and have some kind
of summary of whatever the answer is to the question that you pose that you no longer even have to click
on these particular websites anymore and it's like the the fact that websites exist is is uh is somewhat
deprecated already right because the information exists in the the llm or whatever the generative ai system is
and it's spitting out the answer so that you don't even need these websites anymore so to have a a web
or an ai enabled browser for things that you don't even necessarily need to read seems to me like just
another interface into llm systems or ai generated content in the first instance so what is the difference
then between uh the new firefox client the new firefox web browser that's ai enabled and just going
into chat gpt or perplexity or something and asking the same question and functionally i'd really like
like to know because it's a weird world in which we're living though it is and that relates to another
story which has been going around which is about amazon prime video um producers of various video content
tv shows things like that they decided to add a little feature which would give you an ai powered
video recap if you were watching a series it would it would uh tell you what happened on the you know
previous episodes in case you needed little reminders this was on the show's fallout the rig tom clancy's
jack ryan upload and bosh um the feature is supposed to use ai this story from the verge to analyze a
show's key plot points and sum it all up in a bite-sized video complete with an ai voiceover and clips from
the series they tried this um it failed spectacularly the uh little blurbs that were generated were getting
facts of the shows wrong they were getting uh they were they were getting uh plot points wrong they were
getting uh all sorts of things completely incorrect and um yeah the the uh customers roundly uh laughed at it
uh mocked it and amazon quietly pulled the feature but even a company on the scale of amazon with uh the
powerful machinery behind that could not get something like this working they pushed it to
production anyway they they uh put it out there and and uh and it failed hard because that's what
people are doing that's what this uh that's what the current technological environment you've got to
have ai something you've got to push it out there you've got to shove it in front of people whether or
not they asked for it and whether or not it works and whether or not it it works so i'm curious what
the tipping point is going to have to be because there's so much that doesn't work and is being
pushed out in ways that people don't want don't appreciate feel they're stuck with and then it's
wrong on so many levels and in the same way that you know i don't know three four years ago nfts were
the next hot thing and then everyone realized wait they were actually really stupid
how long is it going to take to get us to the ai tipping point and will there be one
and uh that's the thing you know with with the example you were just giving alex of you know can
you have an ai browser that just uh sums up the information out there and feeds it to you without
you even having to go through the tedium of loading a website and reading it with your eyes
uh the tech is not good at getting things correct it's very good at confidently being wrong
um like some folks we know but it it is uh it is a tool that is not ready for prime time it doesn't
do the things that it's labeled to do and people are uh forcing it out there in any in ways that
even if they worked it wouldn't make sense but the fact is they don't and this is it is fascinating it
is going to be really fascinating to see how this all uh shapes up when uh you know the the
sheer demand for ram has driven the price way up uh to fuel all these things and companies still
are shoving it in front of you and hoping that uh you just accept that this is the way things work
now search engines are garbage now compared to where they were six seven years ago um television
is now uh watching itself to save you the trouble uh and uh i'm just i'm just waiting for an electric
monk to turn up uh douglas adams fans will know what that's all about but it's it's uh it's a
fascinating time to be involved in this to be a consumer to be somebody who is keeping an eye on the
tech side of it all and we're gonna keep doing our best here to continue to do that and on that note
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keep listening
and have a good night
out of the emptiness
healer for salvation salvation salvation
rhythm and light and sound
yeah
it was the rock and roll of creation
it was the terrible big bang
it was the ultimate mutation
he was searching for his yang
and he looked and he saw that it was good
When I'm alone beneath the stars
And feeling insignificant
I turn within to see the forces that created me
I look to the stars and the answer is clear
I look in the mirror and see what I feel
Did the rock and roll of creation
Did the absolute free birth
Did the rolling of the ocean
And the rocking of the earth
And I looked and I saw that it was good
Oh, boy
Oh, boy
Oh, boy
Oh, boy
Oh, boy
Oh, boy
Oh, boy
Oh, boy
Thank you.
Thank you.