603: Self-Driving Human

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame.

Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. How's it going, chemo boy? This is the last week, right? Well, here's what I love about the healthcare industry. There's an awful load of crap.

This was supposed to be the last one. I went in yesterday for, or actually two days ago now, for the blood draw and then the meeting with the doctor just to ensure everything's going well and can start the next round. And let's take a look at the level of medication that you're taking.

And then he drops a, you know, since the first two weeks we had you on a low level of medication because you're missing the enzyme, which means you're more prone to side effects. But now that you've done two weeks on, or two rounds on high medication, we're thinking you should do one more. Oh, nice.

Fuck. The gift that keeps on giving. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, we're looking at like eight months of my normal life has been knocked off now at this point. And it's something about the psychological that you think you're about to hit the finish line. This is it. I'm done. Oh, yeah.

And then they pull the rug out from underneath you and you're like, God damn it. That's like, it's almost like launching a website. Kind of. When you're 90% done, you're halfway there. Yeah, halfway. And you never really make it, just like that one story. Yeah, so I got to, it's not for sure yet.

I have to go in at the end of this round to meet with the doctor. But, I mean, we all know how this goes. If the doctor even floats the balloon, you're getting the balloon. Yeah. Yeah. Well, better than the alternative. Better than the alternative. And you know what? I'll take it.

You know, if the doctor says do it, you do it. I don't want to die. So, anything that I can take one more round and conveniently will end right basically before boarding a plane to come to L.A. for the summer. All right. Yeah. Well, happy vacation.

Yes. Happy vacation. I got a little follow-up here. There's an interview with Stability AI CEO. I can't even keep track of the amount of AI CEOs that are out there just spewing crap at this point. I don't know their names.

There's so many companies. Yeah. This is Imad Mostakyu. Okay. I'm sure that's not how you pronounce it. I'm sure it isn't. No. He made a tweet saying, I don't get folk who say there's no existential risk from AGI.

Do you all have no imagination? There's so many ways to wipe out humanity for something that could be more persuasive than anyone and replicate itself and gather any resources. Enslavement. End of democracy, more likely. OFC. Oh, my God. Cats and dogs living together. Well, then stop working on it.

I believe this has been my point for months now. Y'all are talking about how dangerous this all is, yet you're all throwing out your beta versions and letting them go wild. What are you doing? Beta, man. We're talking alpha. Yeah, beta. Alpha. It's going to turn us all into betas.

That's the way it works. There we go. There we go. Just if you're so worried about it, stop. Yeah. I don't know. Put the brakes on it. Don't release it. Work on it internally. Ah. Seems kind of a no-brainer to me. Yeah. And he's talking about AGI, which is nowhere near.

It's AGI and self-driving cars, you know. Ain't going to happen in our lifetimes. Yeah. It's going to take an AGI to make a self-driving car. True that. True that. In the news. All right, Brian, let's start this week out on a high note.

I guess you're not Ron DeSantis. Nope. We'll get to him second. First up, though, we have Meta has been fined $1.3 billion for violating EU data privacy rules. Woo-hoo! Good. That's a decent amount of money. That they haven't paid yet and they probably never will.

No, they won't. They'll spend $1.2 billion fighting it. Yep. Hey, man. 100 million here, 100 million there. What are you going to do? Yeah. So the thing about this is it could get overturned. They're going to appeal it, obviously.

But they're probably just going to run out the clock because the EU and U.S. officials are working on a data sharing pact. So this won't be an issue going forward. So I'm sure that they're going to try and run out the clock on this. Makes sense. They'll probably change the company name again because it worked last time.

You know? And they're not doing the metaverse anymore. Nope. So they got some extra resources hanging around. So let's get back to this Ron DeSantis thing. What do you think about that? Yeah. So Twitter goes down when 667,000 people try and go into one of the Twitter spaces where, you know, Ronda Nazi is about ready to announce his presidency.

Well, let's mention really quickly what we've learned about Twitter spaces since this happened. It's Periscope with a Bluebird filter on it. Mm-hmm. It's not bolted into their actual code space. And Elon had brought that team down, fired everybody from that team down to three people.

They did not do a stress test or a load the day beforehand. Yes. And the three people have none of the institutional knowledge, so when shit started to break, they had no idea what to do. None whatsoever. None whatsoever. Awesome. Perfect place for an idiot.

Well, you know, to be fair to DeSantis, it's not like he could have announced his presidency at Disney World. This is true. This is true. Had to do it somewhere. Cool with the kids. Better go to the—better go to cyberspace. Yeah. What the hell is going on with Musk?

I just don't get it. I don't get it. He's red-pilled. I mean, he is—by all accounts, he's gaming to be—he realizes Fox News is for 70 to 80-year-old people. There are plenty of 30, 40, 50, 60-year-old people in the less desirable parts of the country that are thirsty for Fox News-type content, but aren't—you know, they've cut the cable.

So, by all accounts, he is positioning himself to be the Millennial's choice for bullshit. Yeah. Well, I mean, was it Ben Shapiro's—all of his shows are going to be moving over to launching on Twitter, which is like— Well, hopefully they get less than 667,000 listeners, because obviously they can't handle that many.

No doubt. No doubt. That's what—I'm sorry. This is what happens when you fire everybody. It does. This shit doesn't work on its own. Praised for bringing down the staff by, like, 75 percent, and—but this is what happens. This is the unintended consequence.

Oh, this is an intended consequence. Actually, it's an intended consequence. It's 100 percent intended, yes. What kills me is, like, how are you going to run a presidential campaign if you haven't even vetted this for your big announcement? Yeah. Come on. What are you thinking, people? Seriously.

They should have kept—at least kept the red team around. Come on. I just love—I love the article that I found. This is, I think, one from Wired. It's like, you likely did not want to see the top hashtag be hashtag disaster. That was pretty good. That's a good one. That was pretty good, yeah.

So, all I keep seeing are new announcements of all these new Twitter features coming. And I'm like, oh, can you make the ones that we already have work? You got to fix your base code first before bolting on more stuff. This next one I also found pretty funny. Amazon's got a lorem ipsum dolore cheddar wrap.

I mean, of all the cutting and pasting errors, at least it wasn't a private text. Yeah, true, true. Fucky, sucky cheddar wrap. So, somebody noticed this over on Reddit, and I hope it's real. It's pretty damn funny.

Somebody at an Amazon Fresh store found a chicken wrap or a cheddar wrap. We don't really know what the protein was. Yeah, we have no idea what the protein is. It just had lorem ipsum text all over it, which was pretty good. Pretty good.

I 100% would buy. Mm-hmm. I would—yeah, exactly. Come on, man. Yes, from Amazon Kitchen. With lorem ipsum dolore sit amet sid diem no nummi, nibuz mid incident. Perishable. Keep refrigerated.

Okay. It's like the cheddar wrap for the dwarf in Twin Peaks. I mean, there's at least a case to me made for AI doing their labeling at this point because humans obviously can't handle it.

What the hell? Yeah. True. And then a big, big brouhaha this week. The U.S. Surgeon General says social media can pose a profound risk to teens' mental health. Now, I didn't really dig into the story, or at least not for the show yet because this is ongoing.

There's tons of people that are coming out talking about the validity of the study, blah, blah, blah, blah. I would just say open your eyes. I think every parent I know that has a teen is well aware of the fact that these are posing a profound risk to their teen's mental health.

This will shake out at some point to be like, yeah, no duh. Yeah. We have enough anecdotal evidence right now to say, yeah, this is screwing us all up. Yep. So, you know, we'll see. But good on the U.S. Surgeon General for actually going out on a limb on this because they're going to take a beating for it.

Yeah, they will. Yeah, they will. Because social media has got a lot of money poured into a lot of people running around Congress. Yes, they do. But the funny thing is, now that Elon has shit the bed with Twitter, everybody's like, you know, bouncing around trying to find where to go.

What I've found is now that I have so many different places to go, I go to none of them. I was actually going to talk about that in Absent Doodads because you got me, thank you very much, the Blue Sky invite. We might as well just talk about it here. And I went over to Blue Sky and I went, oh, OK, now I suppose I guess I have to invest time finding the people that I followed on Twitter that I like to see who's here and who's not.

Oh, fuck this. Well, I mean, we covered it last week. There's like less than 90 or there's probably over 90,000 people now, but there's probably less than 150,000 people on the planet in Blue Sky. So what I found is loading Blue Sky is either going to take a lot of effort.

And even if I put in the effort, I may not get the same return that I used to get from old Twitter. Twitter is a vast wasteland of stupidity now. So now I just don't log into it either. Yeah, that's kind of it. I mean, I used tweet delete this week to basically just clear out Twitter.

You deleted one tweet when I run it now because I tweet so infrequently. I left one. It went through everything. And I'm like, just save everything or kill everything from a week beyond. And it's like, OK, we found like 70 tweets and we saved one.

So I just kind of use it now to post all this shit that I'm selling from my studio. It's great. That's that's I mean, if it's going to turn into Nazi land, it's like, why bother? Yeah, I mean, as far as social media goes, I just discussed Twitter and Blue Sky, Instagram.

Some of my friends still update there. So I check that out every now and then. When you get to see it. When you get to see it, which is a pain in the ass, because it's basically the ratio is one friend update, 17 ads, one friend update, 17 ads these days. Yeah. And then Facebook has really like all my friends have stopped using it.

I use plugins that make it palatable. It's become a new story thing for me for the podcast, basically, because I follow, you know, all these different tech resources and music resources. So Facebook is now just kind of a curated news feed. It's not what I want it for.

Yep. And that's social media for me now. There's no social. That's kind of it. No social, lots of media. So, yeah, it's just a nice way to find news stories. But, yeah, like connecting with your friends. Gone. That's done. Yeah. There's literally no service now that is, you know, custom made for connecting with your friends.

Yeah. Mastodon. No. Blue Sky. Yeah. Seven people there. I mean, I like those seven people that are there, but even that is like, you know, there's no engagement going on. So I did. We do have one Blue Sky story we saved for the dark side that we will all discuss.

But beyond that, it's just like crazy. So the U.S. Surgeon General is going after, you know, social media. But the FDA has decided to allow Neuralink to start clinical trials. What do we need for this to come out? On humans.

Elon Musk cannot get a presidential campaign Twitter space to run, yet we're supposed to trust him to put a chip in our brain. Well, here's the thing. This is going to be a self-selecting. It can only handle 667,000 neurons. After that, you're fucked. Well, I was going to say, this is a self-selecting sample because Neuralink is supposed to work with people with brain damage, and you have to be brain damaged to let them put some shit in your head.

Pretty much. Come on. You know? This is like the Hail Mary. All right, Musk. Have at it. Yeah. I'm done. Just stick some shit in my head. Let's go. What can you do? Can I play Pong now? Thanks. Great. I'm a self-driving human. Anyways, DoorDash is facing a lawsuit accusing you of charging iPhone users more for delivery.

The TLDR on this was basically they figured iPhone users make more money so we can get away with this. And they did. They did. Until someone noticed. I'm looking forward to my $3 on this one. Me too. I am definitely signing up for this class action lawsuit. So, yeah.

So, it's the company's $10 subscription service. Screenshots and court documents show extended range fee only being added to the account with DoorDash and not to the one without, even though they were identical orders made for the same addresses. Sorry, the iPhone users. So, yeah. They've just been tacking on extra fees and trying to explain it away.

But it's not working because it's been bullshit. Yeah. Yeah. And another big Twitter bug hit this week, which seems to be randomly destroying deleted tweets. Or restoring, not destroying. Restoring. Because they never destroy anything because delete equals set visibility to zero.

And a random bug is going in back and setting visibility to, oops, you wish you deleted that. It's back. So, tweet delete, yeah, not really that effective, I guess. Maybe, maybe not. So, we'll see. Great. I do like the end of this article.

We've talked about this many times. But every time it comes up and I read it, I get a chuckle. There's no way to find out anything official because Elon Musk disbanded the press team replacing the press line with a bot that returns only poop emojis. Yeah. Also, their Neuralink customer service does the same thing.

So, don't worry about that. That's a problem. That's a problem. I just love this. As a former Twitter site reliability engineer suggested on Mastodon, okay, this is what we've come to. This is what we've come to. Well, you'd get blocked if you did it on Twitter.

Yep. SoundCloud, which is inexplicably still in business, will lay off 8% of its staff in hopes of becoming profitable. Ah, the Pinterest of audio. Yes, exactly. SoundCloud cut its workforce by 20%, citing the challenging economic climate for the layoffs or the fact that, once again, no fucking business model.

Yeah. So, what, 20% of their staff is, what, like four people? They're cutting an additional 8%, telling staff that the reduction is a challenging but essential decision to ensure the health of our business and get SoundCloud to profitability this year. No employees? Pure profit. How long has SoundCloud been in business?

Oh, a long time now. Exactly. They haven't figured out profitability yet? Well, they also haven't figured out copyright. True. True. That's the big problem. So, there, and it's important to note that they slashed their workforce by 40% back in 2017. So, there's barely anybody over there anymore.

And, obviously, there's no, there's no, you don't have a business plan. Yeah, I can tell how bad it, my friend does a, he does like, he's like a DJ and does a remix channel of all these old 80s, 80s and 90s disco tracks, which is really good.

Well, the machine learning on recognizing those things and notifying music labels that own those copyrights is getting really good, too. That's the big problem. You see, that's what always drew, I'm like, how can you do this? I mean, these are just his remixes of all these songs. I'm like, how does copyright work on this?

Are they paying the licensing fees for it? No. Or is it just, okay. That's why they're in trouble. Okay. I was just wondering. I thought maybe that's why they weren't profitable. SoundCloud has made deals with all the labels for very specific instances, but, you know, again, that's not what it's primarily being used for.

As you pointed out, it is the Pinterest of music. People are using it illegally, so. All right. All right. Speaking of the music industry, UMG has partnered with Endel, an AI sound wellness company specializing in personalized algorithmic soundscapes, the company announced today.

It aims to let UMG artists create machine learning-generated sounds for activities like sleep, relaxation, and focus. They have previously partnered with synth pop artist Grimes on a lullaby app. It will use their proprietary AI technology to enable UMG artists to create science-backed soundscapes.

So, obviously, only certain artists this will apply to. That will make sense for them. It's a good move. It makes sense. It retains artistic control, you know, all of the—checks off all the boxes. Everybody gets paid. It's authorized, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, but honestly, the real reason to do it was so UMG didn't look like fuddy-duddies because they're the only ones out there stomping out AI-generated music that isn't licensed right now.

So, now they're going, but look, we've made a deal. That makes sense. Have at it. Aren't we grand? And as the article points out, to be fair, cloning artists' voices without their premonition will never fly for too long regardless of UMG's response. See SoundCloud.

Yeah. Yeah. I love this last article I got. AI boom could expose investors' natural stupidity. This could have been blockchain, boom. NFT. Could have been NFT.

Basically anything that we've talked about in the past 10 years. Self-driving cars. I just love how it starts off with this quote from Israeli psychologist Amos Tversky who has since died. He says, my colleagues, they study artificial intelligence.

Me, I study natural stupidity. It's a great, great quote. Great quote. Now, it's basically a really good article talking about how, you know, all of these companies have been investing in AI and, you know, how there's this giant boom in the market that shouldn't technically exist, but generative AI has given new life to the market.

And saying that, yeah, this is probably not the best thing. It's like the first lesson is the most obvious. Beware of bubbles, which goes back to NFTs, blockchain, everything we just talked about. Anything that has a catchphrase and a buzzword, be afraid of.

Although I do have to say I should have held on to my NVIDIA stock because I bought it at 118 bucks when we did our year of playing on the market. Me too? Yeah. Guess who still has his? Oh, you kept yours? Okay. Of course I did. Yeah. See, I needed gas money, so I had to sell mine back.

So let me tell you, natural stupidity was hodl for Bitcoin. Natural smart hodl for real stocks. Yeah. There you go. If you can afford it, do it. Do it. It wasn't worth the stress for me. I needed the money back. Yeah, well, if you need money, you need the money.

But yeah, if you can buy and hold on companies that actually make sense, that have real market value, you should do so. Yeah, because back then, NVIDIA was, I mean, this was before it was technically called AI because we still don't have AI. Well, it was a good stock. It was machine learning back then.

Yeah, and graphics cards and like lots of things that people buy all the time. Now they're just buying a lot more of them. So, yay. Well, Bitcoin, you know, really helped the GPU market. So now. That was the good way to invest in Bitcoin.

You buy the stuff that idiots were buying. Yep. Yep. And still idiots are buying. Yes. So that's why I'm still holding on to my stock. Yeah, I don't know if you've noticed every living crypto bro is now an AI bro. Yes, of course. That's the natural progression of stupidity.

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Trying to remember what the last episode of Secession was at this point because it's been a week. But I think it was good. Roman shit the bed. Oh, right. It was the funeral. Yes. I mean, great speech from good old Cromwell there.

And, yeah, I don't know. You know, it was a good episode. I'm looking forward to it being over even though it's going to be a 90-minute movie on Sunday night. Yeah, that's fine. I mean, I'll watch it on Monday. But I thought this was the best episode since, you know, the big episode.

So I thought it was decent. I thought it was decent. They're setting it up for the finish. And, yeah, let's bring it home. Same with our next show that we have in the list here. Exactly. Which I thought was a wonderful episode. The show was always at its best when it focuses on soccer, on an actual match, and things that happen around it.

It was a fantastic episode. A little bit too late on the Ted Lasso having, you know, deep emotional mom issues. Also, a little too quick on the Nate is great redemption arc. But, perfect setup for the final.

I think we all know where this is going. Yep. No spoilers, but if it should – they don't throw a lot of curveballs, so I think it's going to end the way we all think it is. It's going to end, and I, for one, look forward to that. Yes. Let's put it to bed and move on. And don't come back.

I don't think they can. I think this is it. Well, a writer's strike is definitely not going to help either. I know. I know. I found out that they had to shut down production on season two of The Old Man. Right. I love that show. I'm so sad. Yeah. I'm already seeing the effects too because I don't know why I still watch, but I do still watch Real Time with Bill Maher if there's a good guest or Late Night with John Oliver.

But those, obviously, they're done. They're not doing any new shows because there's no writers. Well, it is arguable that that show ever had a fucking writer on it, but – sorry. You like it. I apologize. Bill Maher, again, it's lingering from when I used to enjoy him.

I still like his new Rules segment, which definitely has writers, but I only watch now if there's a good guest on because otherwise it's just like, look at me. I'm smart. Stockholm Syndrome. Yeah. A little bit of that. Speaking of that, I've watched The Marvelous Miss Maisel Season 5, at least the first episode.

I didn't even know there was a Season 5. Not only is it out, the final aired, I think, last week, so I'm a bit late to the game. It might be a bit of Stockholm Syndrome. I think I just love the characters so much. I would watch a show just from her parents.

They're my favorite characters by far. I hope there's a spinoff for them. We'll see where it goes. You can tell that they're wrapping it up too, even from the first episode. Because all of a sudden, plot seems to matter again. So, we'll see. I checked out Season 3. Yeah, that's probably a good time to check out.

Yeah, I just was not holding my attention anymore. The first two seasons I thought were fantastic, but then... They were. They were. You know, yeah. Same thing. Yeah, we'll see. I'm so invested. I'll see it out to the end. So, I finally convinced my son to get off the Teen Titans Go for a little bit and watch Star Wars Young Jedi Adventures, which is the kid-targeted animated show that they've launched.

It's actually pretty good. I like it. Spoiler alert. They all die. But the younglings! But the younglings! Good point. No! I think my son is actually... First off, he's like, is the Emperor in this?

Is Darth Vader in this? Because he likes the bad guys. I was like, might be at the end. Yeah. The season finale. Wait for the finale. But I've got to say, this show does exactly what Star Trek...

Oh, God. What's it called? Prodigy? Prodigy. Yeah. The kid's show that's not a kid's show, because I don't know what age that they were targeting at all, and it makes no sense. This 100% nails it. It targets kids. And it's very well done. All right. Setting them up to break their hearts once they see episode three.

I'm not sure where in the timeline it is. It might be... I don't know. I'm sure they all die. Yes. I mean, everybody dies at some point. Everybody dies. Everybody dies. It's just on a long enough timeline, as Tyler Durden would say. Yes. Silo, episode five, I believe, was out yesterday.

Yeah. You caught up? I'm all caught up. No, they come out on Fridays. So I will be watching one later tonight. Oh, actually, no. They come out Thursday nights. I watched it last night. Isn't it like midnight Thursday, though? No, it comes out at 6 p.m. Oh, well, shit. Okay. Yeah.

Making a note in my calendar. I don't have to watch until Friday night. Here's a pro tip. On Apple TV, you can hit this to watch later. Yeah. So on your Apple Watch, it will tell you exactly when the latest episodes are out. Okay. So as soon as they drop, I get an alert.

And for Silo, I'm right there. Okay. So apparently, I'm an episode behind from you right now, then. Yes, you are. It is my much watch, must watch. I'll put the letters together eventually here. It is my must watch of the week right now because I think it's fantastic.

It's a wonderful show. And again, I will say this, and I hope somebody at Apple TV Plus, whatever other things you put on the end of your name, but thankfully not your Macs anymore, is listening. It's amazing what happens if you stick to the source material.

Yep. Yeah. Absolutely. Good source material you paid a lot of money for, so you might as well follow it. Yep. Unlike what you've done with Foundation. Oh, God. Dinosaurs. Dragons. Dragons. Jesus fucking Christ. I did notice that Graham Yost, or Yost, or however you want to pronounce it, is the main guy behind it.

And I'm like, why is his name so familiar? And I looked him up, and Jesus Christ, he's done everything I've loved for the past, like, 20 years. All right. He wrote Speed, for Christ's sakes. Speed. He's a good guy. He's a good guy. He does good stuff. My buddy, Dan Clark, sent me a text this week.

He played Nitro on American Gladiators. And he's like, hey, I got a new thing. So I put a link to it, American Gladiators Netflix docuseries Muscles and Mayhem, to reveal the triumph and turmoil of the hit 90s shows coming out, I think, next month. It looks pretty good.

It's five-parter. I've heard most of these stories from the back channel, so I know that they're going to be pretty good. Check it out when it comes out. There's good stuff behind the scenes there. I loved that show when I was a kid. Not me. Apps and doodads.

HBO Max is no more. It is now just Max. We've already talked about this at great length. I just have two observations to make. One, the app is actually much better. Much. Okay. Much better, even though it's stupidly named. And secondly, the absolute best take on all of this was courtesy of Twitter.

And I did see this one. Peacock tweeted, we will not be removing the first three letters of our name. Oh, for the win. For the win. That was amazing. So kudos to the social media department over at Peacock, even though you have no programming worth watching.

I've been watching Will Trent and it's pretty good. Poker Face is on Peacock. Absolutely worth watching. That was phenomenal. Phenomenal. But that's it. So get the free trial, watch Poker Face, get the hell out. Yeah.

But Jesus. Okay. Give that person a raise. Amazing. Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro are out for the iPad. All right. They cost either $4.99 a month each or $49 annually. Logic Pro can go screw itself because I can't do anything with it except make music on it if I wanted to.

And I don't make music. I edit podcasts on it. But they don't support the timeline feature that everybody that edits podcasts with it uses. It has to be in beats and measures. And I don't use beats and measures when we edit the show. So I got the trial.

I was playing with it. It's kind of fun. But it's absolutely useless for me. And Final Cut I don't even use. So I got it. I'll play with it just to give it a shot. But yeah, they are semi-featured at best right now. Well, good for doing your Grimes AI vocal remixes.

Yeah. Yeah. I'll give that a shot too. Yeah. That'll be good. That'll be good. My favorite email client, Spark, now has Spark plus AI. I've tried it a couple of times. Absolutely useless as far as I can tell. So because most of my emails are about half a sentence long because I hate email.

I'm like, okay, thanks. Hey, where's this? That's it. That's all the AI needs to write for me. Right. So if you do use Spark, check it out. Let me know if you come up with a decent use for it. I suppose if you're having to compose a lot of corporate-friendly emails as I do, it would actually be nice.

But I just pop over to ChatGPT to give me a start on those generally. Yeah. Yeah. This just has it built in. It's literally right there in the compose window. It seems to be a little bit slower than ChatGPT though. So maybe, yeah. I don't know. It's free if you pay for Spark.

So it just comes with it. So it's not free. But no, I was already paying for Spark. So it's a free upgrade. Right. It's a new built-in. We're also getting that in Photoshop. And I've always enjoyed Farhad Manju. He's a good tech writer and columnist. He's got a great one over at the New York Times.

AI Photoshopping is about to get very easy, maybe too easy. And he goes into his deep dive into playing around with the feature as it is right now. And it's just like, yeah, they're going to build in some sort of attempt at watermarking and more complicated than watermarking.

But it only matters if you actually use it. And right now it's optional. And who the hell knows? Because we're never going to be able to tell what's real and what isn't very, very soon. Yeah, yeah. Maybe they'll use steganography. Like the old days. I know. Blockchain. Great.

Great. Which is basically what Adobe's solution kind of is. Good. Okay. Who edited it when they edited it. Blah, blah, blah, blah. All right. Over there at the Adobe website, they have the article, Dream Bigger with Generative Fill. And I love it. It says, make content in powerful new ways with generative fill.

From concepting creative ideas to making complex ideas, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, concepting. Concepting. Let me Google that. It says, concepting is a fancy way of saying conceiving. It's particularly seen in creative professions in marketing, where the noun form of concept gets thrown around a lot.

ChatGPT wrote it. Led me to a Miriam Webster article on eight ways to avoid business jargon, which obviously somebody at Adobe has not read. Maybe they should hire the Peacock team. Maybe.

At the library. All right. At the library. First, we got an email a couple of weeks ago, and then we kept bunting it to show after show after show because we were running out of time. But here it is. Hi, Brian and Jason. A friend suggested your podcast years ago.

I'm that Justin you called out as a new Patreon user last week, which is like a month ago now. I confess I got a little starstruck. I come from a very similar background to yours, turning 50 in just a couple of weeks. Probably had that birthday by now. Congratulations. Happy birthday, Justin. So a lot resonates with me and sometimes hurts. My wife has published the first of likely many sci-fi books, and I provided some technology fact-checking and advice.

I can honestly say it's got some unique aspects that I haven't seen in media candy that I've consumed over many years in the wars and the treks and the galacticas. Oh, my. Would paid advertising for the book on your podcast be an option or any other way to help promote it? Up for a conversation? Else I'll deliver myself back to being a happy Patreon.

Best wishes to you and each of your health, Justin. All right. All right. We've got a couple of links in the show notes to his wife Heather's official website and her first book on Impulse up on Amazon. Sent us a check for $10? Well, he gave us a nice check of change.

He gave us money already. You don't need to. Yeah. Justin's good. So, you know, I'm a big fan of the creator economy. So I'm wishing her all the best luck in the world right now. Me too. Because the thing about writing and this AI revolution is I was actually talking to a friend of the show, Chris Lockhead, about this yesterday.

I see a renaissance coming in original thinking. And it's going to really, I think it's going to change creative works, you know, quite immensely over the next couple of years because, you know, the basic shit can get knocked out by, you know, these GPTs and all this other stuff very easily.

And when it comes to original concepts, that's where we're really going to see people shine and we're going to see the cream, you know, bubble to the top there. And I think so. I've been seeing it. I don't have an argument with you about the creativity aspect and the fact that we're probably going to be getting better and better content in media.

I 100% agree with that. The issue I have, and I think this is kind of to Justin's point, is how do we get past the gatekeepers? How do people find our stuff? That's a fucking problem and is way worse than it ever used to be because there are no bookstores anymore. Things get buried in Amazon and the other options that you have to actually find these things.

So my issue isn't so much with the content, it's with the gatekeepers, it's with getting the word out, and it's with marketing. And as we know, that is a fucking quagmire online right now. It's difficult. It's difficult. But there's another aspect, especially right now, is the ad market has tanked.

So if you need to, if you actually do have a few extra bucks floating around, it is a great time to get cheap advertising and start to build your audience and build upon itself. Counterpoints. The advertising economy has tanked because it's been proven not to fucking work.

Well, and number two, got to know where to go. Number two is the particular market that she's looking for, which is books, which is reading, which no one fucking does. That's a difficult one. Yes, that is a difficult one. My recommendation would be actually basically super mega locally concentrated.

I'm not sure if I would even buy too much time, spend much time thinking about advertising or spending money. I would get on Reddit. I would find groups that are dedicated to science fiction. I would post and post and post and post. I would get on any kind of forums that are out there that are dedicated to specifically science fiction.

You've got a hyper market market to only people that you're going to get anything back from, which is people that read and people that read science fiction, because people that read and people that read science fiction are two completely different categories. A lot of people that read do not read sci-fi. You need to hyper local target sci-fi readers.

So find those places online where those people congregate. Join the forums. You can't just bomb them with ads. You've got to get in there. She's got to get involved. She's got to start making friends and posting constantly on all these forums, on the Reddit categories. And then there are plenty of sci-fi dedicated podcasts.

Get her on them. See, that comes back to the advertising that I was talking about before you started to run with that. It's, you know, sci-fi podcasts, generally a small audience. Generally, you can get decent advertising on there.

If you can't get on as a guest, you can get on there to at least promote your book for a lot cheaper than trying to do a mass market blast. Like to your point, niche the fuck down, you know, seriously, go, go as niche as you can go with it. And also we were just talking about, we were just talking about silo, Matt Howie.

How did he get, how did he build his audience? By posting story snippets weekly. He built that book in public, you know? And he, by the time he finished that book, he had a massive audience. And that jumpstarted his career, you know?

So write in public, engage with your audience heavily, just like you said, Brian, and, you know, go where the audience is for sure. See, the problem, and I think we've discussed this over the last 10 years of doing this podcast, is as a creative, you used to spend all your time and energy doing the creative, writing the album, writing the book.

Now, that's the beginning of the work process. That was the easy part. Yeah. Creation is like 25% and promotion is 75%. Yeah. Just to pull a number out of my ass, but that feels like what you need to do to really get the word out anymore.

Yeah. Good luck. Best of luck. Best of luck. There are ways to do it. And if you come up with anything new and novel, hit us back and let us know, because we could really use it ourselves. That's true. I did finish a book. I finished The Unnamed Way, which is the World Walker book four.

I went into the series and figured I had to finish it by Ian W. Sainsbury. I waxed and waned with the series. I really liked the first book. The second book, I was like, meh. The third book was like, a little bit better, but still meh. But then I figured I had to finish it. He did promise this is the end.

So I went in for book four and a nice wrap up. Okay. Yeah. I could have done the second and third book were a bit weird, but it got somewhere nice that I actually really liked. So well done. All right. Cool. Yeah. I saw one of these books, Audible's having a sale right now.

They do these crazy things where you can buy into, you know, get like three books for one credit and they give you this massive list of them and they're always, you know, part of a series. Yeah. Of course. And for some, for some strange reason, it's usually book two or book three of a six part series.

It's like, well, that makes no sense. Yeah. You know, if they were all book one to get you into the series, I can understand that, but it's just, it's weird how they pull those, pull those out. They hope you're going to buy book one, get book two for free and then keep going. That's the theory. I'm sure it doesn't work.

Yeah. Yeah. Now, speaking of series, we saw this tweet from Dennis Taylor back on May 14th. So this has been... That's how long we've been bunting at the library. Exactly. Exactly. It says, just sent Babaverse 5 off to the editor to be folded, spindled, and mutilated.

So we're getting another Babaverse book soon. So... I'm happy about that. Fingers crossed. Fingers crossed. I like any book in that universe. I initially didn't like that one when they became like fucking chipmunks or whatever, but I... Otters or whatever. Yeah, it was pretty good though.

I liked it. I do want to go back. I was recommending the series to somebody this week and I'm like, I want to go back and reread book one because book one was still just, you know, really, really interesting and creative. Very novel for a novel. Yeah. I mean, like, the idea, of course, isn't all that original, but the way he approached it and actually wrote about it, it was just very like, I haven't read anything like this before.

And that's amazing. Yep. So... Yeah, it's really, really good. Sylvain Neuvel, who wrote a series of books called The Themis Files that I read a while back. I really enjoyed them. I really enjoyed the first book, but then the ending kind of went sort of Hollywood because you could tell he was kind of writing this for Michael Bay.

So, yeah, that series I wouldn't recommend as much, but there's a short audio drama on Audible called No Kindness Too Soon that he wrote. And it's a, you know, it's a multi-part series that you could kind of, it feels like it was written to be a podcast because of the length of the chapters and the way it was kind of put together.

But if you're an Audible member, you get it for free. It's like two hours, 40 minutes, something around that mark. Really good. I love short stories. I'm a mark for short stories. So, it's free, like I said. So, check it out if you need something just to kind of fill the gap.

Full cast on it. It's really well done. And a really, really clever story. I really, really enjoyed the story itself. Is it an actual book book, too? No. It's just on Audible right now. Sorry. All right, authors out there, knock it off with this one-format-only bullshit.

I know you're getting the paycheck for it, but come on. Well, Dennis Taylor, I mean, he does a ton of them, and they're great. John Scalzi has a couple. Yeah, I love them because I get them sooner than you. By the way, going back to Blue Sky really quickly because we were talking about it, one of the first people I followed was John Scalzi.

My God, he lives on there. He is the, who's the guy that did Clerks again? Oh, you know who I'm talking about. Kevin Smith, Kevin Smith. He's the Kevin Smith of Blue Sky. He updates every five minutes. They're long.

I'm just like, Jesus Christ. Give it a break. Give it a break. Nobody cares that much. I did finish, going back to, just to wrap it up because we got to move here. I finished Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow. Okay.

This is part one of a planned trilogy, the Martin Hench trilogy. Okay. It was one of the best books Cory's written so far. I think this is going to be, you know, this is going to be his breakout. He's obviously a trilogy. So he's writing this thing to monetize in other formats 110%.

He reigned in most of the tech shit that he normally does. This very much sounds like he's trying to do a geek James Bond from this. Sort of. No, it's not James Bond. It's not James Bond. It's interesting.

He knows his way around good food and fine drink. He likes intelligent women and they like him back often enough. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The good food part really was the worst part of it because he was, he would get into like, you could tell that he had the fucking food channel on.

It was like, you know, and he butter basted. He put in a sprig of rosemary with his steak and he butter basted it to a perfect golden brown. I'm like, what the fuck? Okay. Look, he cooked a steak. That's steak 101. Come on. I know. Come on. Seriously. Let's just like, let's just go back on the detail.

I don't need the details of how he cooked his dinner. You know, I'm like, stick to the tech. Okay. But for the most part, it was a, it was a great book. It kept me engaged the whole way through. And like I said, I think it was his best book in years, mainly because he didn't try and overcomplicate the technology.

That was it. And it didn't whine about the corporate machinery halfway through. Uh, not really. No, no, that's it. That's the, that's his other book that I already got. Capitalism one. Uh, but this was just a good, solid fiction book. I really enjoyed it. Okay. I might check it out.

Pour myself a martini, shake and not stir it before I read. Uh, always stir it. It's watered down if you shake it. That shaking thing is bullshit. The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to the Dark Side with Dave, with podcast superhost Dave Bittner.

Dave is the host of the Cyber Wire podcast for all your cybersecurity news. The co-host of Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan, discussing how humans are just mean people. The co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, because people are nosy. And the host of Control Loop, because nobody ever, ever wants to sleep again.

Hi, Dave. Hello. So, to kick it off today, you guys got me watching Muppets Mayhem with my dad. Yes, yes. Go on. My dad was in town for his 75th birthday. Nice.

So, a 51-year-old man and a 75-year-old man sit on the couch and start to watch the Muppets. Mm-hmm. We were, we binged five episodes because it was so good. It's so good. We were laughing our asses off.

I love how you can be, like, crying laughing one second and damn near crying from its poignancy the next minute. It's so good. That is also the strength of the Muppets when they can walk that line. So good. Yeah. This really was, like you guys said, this, it feels like the Muppets.

Right. Right. It absolutely feels like the classic Muppets and not an imitation. I'm still, you know, making my way through it. I've only watched a few episodes, but I've really enjoyed what I've seen so far. And I hope this, I hope this kicks off a round of a bunch of Muppets stuff.

Yeah. I mean, it seems like the response to this has been really good. So what I hope is, similarly to how happy we are that, you know, the folks who are in charge of the Mandalorian and the Star Wars universe are being given the reins to other things.

I hope whoever's in charge of running this Muppets thing is going to be able to run other Muppets things because clearly they understand why, what it is about the Muppets that we love so much. I was actually also thinking of another Star Wars parallel, which is, I hope they stay away from movies because what they've been doing with the Muppets a lot has been, let's do the big Hollywood, let's get Jason Segel, let's do a movie.

No, let's focus on these weird little side plot stories because that seems to be working and make them shows. Okay. Statler and Waldorf series. Come on, guys. Do it. Origin story. How could they?

Young, young, young people working in I.T. That's it. Yeah. There's a there's some speculation that Statler and Waldorf are actually a gay couple. But there was one episode of The Muppet Show where I believe Statler's wife showed up in the booth, which does not exclude them.

Statler and Waldorf still being a gay couple. Yeah, exactly. But there's just some stuff, I think, over on Tough Pigs, which is a big Muppet fan site. There's people have made some really good cases for that, which I think is intriguing. But that is far too much down the fan chain than I ever get.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think, as we mentioned last time, I wonder how much of what's making the Muppets mayhem work is how little we knew about these characters to begin with. Yeah, to flesh them out. Yeah. Right. So we're not saying, oh, Fozzie would never do that.

You know, there was in I think it was the second Jason Segel movie, the one where they go back and rebuild the Muppet show theater. Fozzie does a joke about fart shoes. Like he's got these shoes that have little whoopee cushions on the bottom of them. And he says, ah, fart shoes.

And I was like, no. And my response to that was, I was like, that's not a Muppet joke. That's not a Fozzie joke. Like that just, that's not a Muppet joke. So it took me out of it. But we haven't, it doesn't seem like we've seen that with this Muppets mayhem thing. Hey, as long as Janice ends every sentence with far out, we're good.

Right. Right. Yeah. Animal was always one of my favorites anyway. Oh, yeah. 100%. Yeah. It's funny. After watching Succession and the Muppets mayhem, pretty close to time, Fisher Stevens is Animal. He is the human animal.

He is. He looks just like him. So next time you watch Succession, just keep an eye out for it, is all I'm saying. That's funny. But yeah, I stopped at episode six just because my dad went home. And I just wanted to kind of savor it for a bit.

But it's one of those shows where you have to watch it a couple of times because there is so much going on. Right. That you miss half of it. Yeah. It's really dense. They pat a lot in. Yeah. Especially like with the music. The music industry jokes, like you have to be looking at the backgrounds. Yep.

Reading the posters, like the attention to detail, nothing is left untouched. It's amazing. Yeah. It's like I used to say about 30 Rock, which is that the throwaway jokes on that show are stronger than most of the jokes on most shows. Right. Yeah.

Oh, just – okay. One joke that I had to explain to my dad was when Animal started working at the hibachi and the guy goes, he's the chosen one. And I'm like, dad, did you – do you remember the movie The Golden Child? That is a callback to the fucking Golden Child.

Yeah. So – They put a lot in there, man. Deep, deep cuts. Yeah. Deep cuts. So good. So good. So thank you guys for making my dad's trip that much better. That's great. And how great that the two of you could enjoy that together.

Yep. Yeah. It was so much fun. Yeah, it was cool. So much fun. So I have a huge thank you to say to Apple's two-factor auth because yesterday – or day before yesterday, like about two in the morning, I got a little bing that said somebody was trying to log into my account from Azusa, California.

And I'm like, what the hell is that? I'm like, cancel, whatever. Then the next morning, it happened again. And then I was awake finally and I'm like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. If somebody can get to my – can get to this point in my Apple account, they've got my password.

Hmm. Hmm. Ah, shit. So let's de-auth every device and let's change the password. So if you are in Azusa, California trying to get into my account, go fuck yourself because it took me – well, actually, I'm still going through the process.

When you de-auth everything, I've got five desktops, I've got three iPads, I've got two laptops, and I've got three Apple TVs and an Apple Watch, all that have to be re-authed. Yeah. It is such a pain in the ass.

Yeah. But it worked. It worked. Yeah. We're in the midst of going through a top-level domain change here at CyberWire because we added our N2K umbrella company. So all of our email addresses are changing to N2K and our Google accounts and all that stuff.

And it's mostly been very smooth. And I have to say I don't envy the tech folks who have to manage this sort of thing. If you want to talk about herding cats, you're right, this is probably as close as it comes. So overall, it's gone pretty smoothly. But there's always a couple of things that aren't accounted for.

I was saying to one of my colleagues, what I feel like is that we're all going to uncover – over the next couple of weeks, we're going to cover little tiny traps or little unintended consequences where we go to log into something. And we're just stuck in some kind of MFA multi-loop, like a time where you can't log into this because you don't have this.

Well, until you get this, you can't have that. Well, you can't do this because you can't do this. And pretty soon you're banging your head against the wall just saying, God, please, just – well, just let me into Discord, right? Yeah, yep. You want to just shove your YubiKeys through your eyes and say, stop it, make it stop.

Right, right, exactly. Oh, I do not envy you. I do not envy you. No, like I said, it's – overall, it's going very smoothly and tip of the hat to the people who are running it behind the scenes. I'm glad they're doing it and not me. Yeah, it goes smoothly until it doesn't.

Right, right. And so, you know, it's our job to complain, right? Yes, it is. So I have a thread from Blue Sky that I wanted to discuss with you guys. Chris Messina, father of the hashtag, made a post that says, do podcast hosts love to read ads?

As a listener, I prefer them over ad-speak people. So if AI can let the hosts off the hook to focus on more and better content, I'm in favor of this. What would Kara Swisher do? And he puts a link to a TechCrunch article called Spotify may use AI to make host-read podcast ads that sound like real people.

I got this, Jason. Here's what Kara Swisher would say. Hmm. I don't know. What do you think? What do you think? What do you think? So I did a quick reply and I said, I've read thousands of ads for my shows and I never offload the thing that brings in my paycheck to AI.

And I don't know any real pros that would. It's disrespectful to your audience and ad reads can be a lot of fun. And then he comes back saying, you're not engaging with my question. And then he gives me a little jab that says, fair enough. You do you. And I'm like, I just answered your question. I thought, am I wrong on that?

But I digress. He said, but if the ad read was 98% identical to how you do it and you could offer 95% more personalization or relevance to your ads, would you consider? So I wrote back just real quick. No, even if I had 100% script approval, I wouldn't do it.

The reason host read podcast ads have always been such great performers are the human touches and personal endorsements that we bring to the reads because listeners trust us. I wouldn't risk losing that. It's not worth it. And he said, yeah, I don't disagree with you. Have you listened to the Spotify AI DJ much yet?

So I think he missed. He kind of missed my point a little bit there. Yeah. Yeah, he's just running off how it sounds like it sounds good enough. And you're running off. You're running off more than moral argument. I'm 100% the moral argument.

100%. And he's a tech guy. So he's going to care about the tech. You know, the moral side of it is what I wanted to talk to you guys about, because it makes no sense to me that any of us would ever give up control of our voice to somebody else.

Because that's where the trust lies in what we do. Am I wrong? No, you're 100% right. I have a vested interest in not answering this honestly as somebody who reads ads. This strikes me as one of those social media prompts that people put out there.

God, I hate those. Right? Yeah. You know, what do you think? It's the social media Kara Swisher presence. What do you think about this? So it's basically an Ouroboros because he's bringing Kara Swisher into the argument. Yes. Yeah. Time becomes a loop.

And time becomes a loop. Yeah. Jason, I think you are 100% right here. And as tempting as this is, and as much as I would love to not have to take the time to read ads. It's part of the job. It's right. Like I always – I say the fun parts are the fun parts and the not fun parts are why they give me money.

That's why it's called work. Yeah. Right. Like the fun parts I would do for fun, but the parts that aren't fun that I have to do, I do that because they give me money. And in exchange for giving me money, I do those things. And ad reads are one of those things. But I'm also with you, Jason.

Ad reads can be fun. I think part of the fun is putting them in your own words. I think part of the fun is taking something that was written by someone who doesn't know how to write and making it fun and entertaining and putting it in your own voice.

I think part of the fun is pushing back when they want you to say stuff that you don't agree with or you think is a little too far on lending your own credibility to their product.

Yeah. Yeah, totally. All that. Yeah, all that. It's the only hemorrhoid cream I would ever use. No, that's not true. I use many. I use multiple creams. Exactly. That's right. When I'm faced with a daily problem of erectile dysfunction, there's one product that I turn to.

I turn to anything that works. That's right. Yes. It's a great time to be alive. And this is one of them. See, that's the way I would present it. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, granted, you can get advertiser approval. But if you're going to have to deal with script approval, just read the thing.

It takes less time to read the ad in your own voice than it does to deal with back and forth with script approval and that kind of thing. Also, by the way, you don't get free shit when all you're doing is script approval. When you're doing ads for a real company, you get lots of free shit.

Is that right? Is that right? I like free shit. I don't get free shit. You are U.S.-based podcasters only. Because I can tell you I don't get any of the free shit we used to get. Nope. Nope. See, if you were living in the U.S., you would have gotten the three electric e-bikes that I got.

That you're trying to offload online now. Which I actually just sold. So thanks to our friend Brian Blondell who did the legwork on that one. Yeah, I made more money selling the free e-bikes they sent me than they ever paid us for actually doing the ads.

So ka-ching. No AI is going to do that for you. But I just think the moral side of it is really it's like, okay, why would I trust a company that is out there just, you know, that exists to make a lot of money off my voice to do the right thing every time?

Especially Spotify, who we know is just a giant black hole of shit. And the only reason Spotify got into podcasting is they didn't have to pay us. Exactly. They got free content, didn't have to pay a dime. Yeah. And even if it wasn't Spotify, even if it was Apple, you know, one of the companies I trust the most, I still wouldn't give them my voice to do ad reads that it dupes the audience.

It completely dupes the audience. And that's not what we're here for. Let me ask you this. Would you use technology like this to read the credits at the end of the show? If we wrote them, sure. Yeah. Yeah, that's fine. That's not an endorsement for a product that we're trying to get people to spend their money on.

The credits are us trying to get people to spend money on us. So we're going to write that good. Right. So what I'm getting at here is you're not opposed to the use of this as a tool that can lighten your workload. It's just this particular use case where it could affect your credibility is too much.

Exactly. 110 percent. Yeah. I'm with you. I'm with you. An uncanny valley too far. Do you think you are obligated to tell your audience if you're using something that was generated that is not you? Yes. I believe so.

Yeah. I think so. I think that's the big dilemma of our time right now. Yeah. Like what's real and what's not and which we're going to get into in just a second with what you put in the show notes, Dave. But yeah, 100 percent. A hundred percent. I think it's – we're beholden to let people know what's real and what isn't right now.

Yeah. I mean I was watching something yesterday and it was an ad for some insurance thing. But they said these are paid actors. You know, there are laws around that. The Federal Trade Commission exists for a reason. That's what the Kardashians got in trouble for, for not putting a hashtag ad on some stuff. So, you know, I think that, you know, if people are going to do this, we need, you know, consumer protection laws around it.

So, one of my favorite games to play when I'm watching television is name the big-time celebrity actor who's doing the voiceover for this national brand. Morgan Freeman. Morgan Freeman is an obvious one. There's one that's been running lately.

I think it's for Hotels.com and it's my old childhood chum, Edward Norton. But there's a lot of them where – Bryan Cranston does some where if you have an ear for this stuff and for whatever reason I do, you can – you say, wait a minute.

I know that voice and try to figure out who it is. But what I wonder is are we coming to a point where I could say to one of these engines, read this ad in the style of Morgan Freeman or James Earl Jones or Edward Norton and it will do it.

And for an uncredited commercial, am I obligated to compensate the original artist? This is 100 percent why SAG-AFTRA people are out there with the Writers Guild protesting AI right now. A hundred percent. One hundred and ten percent. Yep.

Because their battle is coming. Yep. Yep. Just think – you know, if I'm McDonald's, I'm like, OK, I want another Big Mac ad with Brian Cox, but I don't want to pay Brian Cox. Did I sneak it into his contract last time that we can create an AI version of his voice? You know who would be great to sell this cream for my butt?

Morgan Freeman. But I can't afford Morgan Freeman. Well, so that actually happened – you know how they have the local cable insertion ads, right? Yeah. For some reason where I live, somebody had a friend or a colleague or somebody who did a pretty dead-on Morgan Freeman impersonation.

Right. And so for about a year, like, every local restaurant was being endorsed by Morgan Freeman. You know, come on down to the barbecue plate. You know, it was like – it was Morgan Freeman and almost Morgan Freeman. It wasn't a perfect Morgan Freeman, but it was obvious who they were going for.

And I wonder if it's going to be easier to do that and on a local level who's going to chase you down. This thought just hit me, and this is a blast from the past, but we've kind of treaded this line before in, say, the 70s and 80s. You guys both remember Rich Little, right?

Anybody there? He was the comedian that basically could do almost anybody's voice. He was hired to do ads as other people's voices. Like, he would do it. He would do, like, an ad, and he would switch between Bob Hope and blah, blah, blah, blah, all these different people. But he was on screen.

You knew it was Rich Little, and Rich Little was compensated. Right. So that's – you weren't trying to trick people. You were just – it was a bit. So – but he was imitating other people's voices. But you knew because it was obvious and plain, and he was on the screen.

Right. See, if the Morgan Freeman guy was smart, he would legally change his name to Morgan Freeman with, like, maybe three E's. Morgan Freeman. Freemon. Yeah, Freemon. I'm Morgan Freemon now. Yeah. Yeah.

I also – I wonder if you could get away with claiming that it's fair use under parody. I'm not – I'm parodying this person's voice. I mean, you know, a lot of this comes down to who has the bigger lawyers. Yeah. It's hard to go against the entertainment industry if that's your battle.

We have to go after low-lying fruit. You have to find somebody that's not insanely famous for their voice. That's right. That's right. Yeah. But, Jason, I'm with you on this. I think ad reads done by AI is a can of worms that we shouldn't open.

I'm sure some people are going to do it. Yeah. But I'm not – I never will. I'm not sure I agree using the word moral is the right – is quite the right word. Maybe ethical? Yeah. Ethical. That's it. Ethical. Yes. And we always have to remember it's – we're being paid for it to be us.

Right. Not an AI version of us. Right. Like, that's what the advertisers are paying for. Now, if they specify we'd prefer that you have an AI-generated voice of you do this than you, okay, sure. Yeah. It saves me some time. Well, so, yeah, so what if the ad team says for, you know, X amount of dollars you get Jason to read your ad, but for one-half X amount of dollars you get robo-Jason to read your ad?

No. Yeah. I mean – Well, the thing for us is also – let's look at this in terms of time invested. Jason – because we're – because the podcast is us, if they pay half the amount of money, Jason's still got to go in, put in the code, listen to it, make sure it's okay, do edits if it fucks up.

It's quicker to just read the damn thing. Yeah. Exactly. It's true. That's right. Yeah. I mean, that's what I'm saying. If I've got to do script approval, it's just as easy for me to do script approval while I'm reading it out loud into this microphone. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And it's not like it's an audio book.

It's an ad. It's five minutes out of your life. It's 30 seconds, a minute, two minutes. I mean, come on. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Interesting. I mean, the case can be made about using the robo-voices is that you can do a broader reach for more targeted ads.

So say I wanted to do a geo-targeted ad for, you know, a certain market. Hi, this is Jason. I'm coming to you from Poughkeepsie. Yeah. Like they do on the radio every day, you know? Yeah.

Can you give me a cheesy Australian accent for the Outback Steakhouse Reads in Iowa? Hi, I'm Jason. I'm writing you from Adelaide, mate. I mean, there's a case to be made for that ease of use.

But I'm like, okay, you know what I would rather you do? Pay me for the 15 different versions that I have to do of it. And then we move about it. We go about our day. Yeah. You know, for big names who are going to try and do this, you know, I guess Bill Simmons is the one who kind of broke this story. I'm like, you know, for those, you know, super ding-dong big advertisers, they might go for it because they can probably make a lot more money from it.

But for us independents, it makes no sense at all. And I even think for them it's a bad idea. I think for anybody it's a bad idea personally, just to use – let somebody else use your voice for things that you are not actually endorsing or have used yourself. I mean that's what makes podcast ads special.

Why would you give anyone permission to devalue something that is yours? And that's what this does. Yep. Yep. If you want to buy my posthumous rights to say whatever you want me to say after I'm dead, fine. Give me the check right now because I'm not going to care, you know?

I need a mansion today. Right. I don't need one after I'm dead. Right. Yeah. You don't need a secession's mausoleum. Yeah. That was funny. That was very funny. So one more thing I put in the show notes here. You guys probably saw that the past week or so, Adobe put out an update to Photoshop that has generative AI in it for auto-film.

And it's good. Got it installed. It's really good. It's auto-magical and it's amazing. My pal David Hobby from Strobist posted a little video, something that he found on TikTok, which was someone using this to remove the Getty Images watermark over an image.

Oh, genius. But Photoshop intends to roll out a blockchain-specific thing that it will attach to all things done with their generative AI so you can see who edited it and what they did and when they did it, theoretically. So I'm wondering, is Photoshop going to block removing the Getty Images logo in the same way they block you from scanning money?

Depends on how much Getty Images logo in the same way they do and if Adobe determines that if we have this kind of chain of edits attached to these images that are done with generative AI, is that enough? Or do we have to start blocking? Or is it enough that we just put in, you know, user Jason D at 2.30 a.m. on Thursday added the penis?

Right, right. I also wondered about this for audio files, like for stock music libraries where, you know, you can download a sample and in the background every now and then it says, audio file, audio file, you know, or something like that. It seems like we're on a collision course where someone will have a generative AI thing that will be able to automatically remove that as well.

Oh, that stuff kind of exists already. It's out there. It's not, it hasn't been brought into any of the professional audio editing suites yet, but you can buy, you can download some apps that basically pull that sort of stuff and pretty well, so.

Yeah. You know, I've been using a lot of the Adobe podcast audio enhanced tools. Yeah. And a lot of this stuff is starting to, I can really tell now, you know, I've finally got the ear for being able to listen to it. So my new trick now is I'll, what I'll do is I'll run the audio file through that.

And what I'll do is I'll do an EQ stamp from the original piece of audio and do an EQ match on it to kind of bring, bring it back to life with the original person's voice. And it got me thinking, I'm like, here's what, I'm wondering if this is what they're doing.

I upload the audio file. It, it creates an AI voice print of the, the file that I uploaded. Then it transcribes it, transcodes it, and then rereads it back using the AI voice and use the original to map like tone and inflection.

Because that kind of seems like some of this stuff that they're doing, that's the only way that they could fix half the stuff that I'm sending to them. Yeah. You know, it's because like the otherwise it's just, it's witchcraft, you know. I think that's plausible. I would love to see a behind the scenes of exactly how they do it because you're right.

I mean, it is, it's that old Arthur C. Clark thing that the, you know, high enough level of technology is indistinguishable from magic. And this falls into, just to like, to have people be 40 feet off mic and to be able to run it through one of these filters and have them sound on mic is.

Well, that's what I have to do with Brian every week. He's 40 feet off mic. He sounds like he's on mic when we're done. You're actually recording him from a microphone in your studio in California. He's just shouting from Canada. Exactly. I'm picking it up and running it. Yeah. I only do this for you to up your skills, Jason.

This is all for you. You know, after 10 years, my skills are pretty good. So we're good. I also noticed that Adobe put a time limit on the tools. Drives me nuts. Three hours a day. Right, right, right. Oh, I hate that so much.

Yeah, you'd think it's a paid customer that wouldn't have that limit. But I guess speaking of, we have actually, we only have one minute to go to finish this show so I can run us through it. So let's wrap it up, guys. All right, bye. There we go. All of a sudden, the audio gets really janky because we ran out of time.

All right, guys. Good talking to you. I'll see you next week. See you next week. Over at Patreon, we've got no one. Boo. Remember, people, for just $3 a month, you can get the shows early and ad-free.

Come on. What a bargain. What a deal. What a bargain. As they say. Over at PayPal, we've got Tom, Joseph, and Mark. Thank you all so much. Over at Stripe and the tip jar, we've got Ross, Daryl, and Ashley. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you. We have no new reviews this week.

No AIs, no nothing, no chatbots, no nothing. Slackers. All y'all. Slackers. And unfortunately, we are in need of another hero now, Jason. Singer Tina Turner has died at age 83. Good run. Good run. Good run and an amazing artist.

So she will be missed. She will. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillipo. And I'm Brian Schulmaster. Thanks for listening to Grumpy and Geeks. If you enjoy the show, visit gog.show slash donate to help us keep the lights on, and we'll love you forever. You can also help us out by sharing the show with your friends and enemies.

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