Beautiful, Terrible Internet

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A recent episode asks, are drivers ready to hand over the wheel to AI?

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WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

Emory Siebertson, is this an Internet is beautiful or Internet is terrible story on endless

thread today?

Mine is an Internet is terrible.

Oh, man, mine too.

Oh, really?

Double whammy.

Double whammy.

Okay.

It's a little bit of both, so like it's an Internet is terrible, maybe-ish, but then

also Internet is beautiful as the closer.

Two things can be true at once.

Yeah, it's, yeah, it's right here.

All possible futures in this multiverse, something, something.

Would you like to go first today?

Yeah, I'll go first.

Okay.

All right.

So, have you ever seen the time traveling meme that's like women go back in time, men

go back in time, or whatever, like women go back in time and they go back and they see

their grandmother and they say, I'm your granddaughter and men go back in time and I don't know.

It's like any number of different things.

I saw one recently that involved somebody going back in time to Japan and asking a woman

not to take a picture of her dog.

Okay.

Does that, does that mean anything to you yet?

Well, isn't this, when we did our cuteness episode, didn't, didn't our guest for that

episode mention like the quote unquote, ugliest dog in the world when actually that was a very

cute dog and it was in Japan.

Well, yeah, I mean, you're, you're, you're trying, but you're failing so far, okay.

We are talking of course about Shiba Inos.

Yes, okay.

Yep.

And Dojos.

Yes.

And why, why do you think somebody might utilize a time machine to go back in time and tell

somebody to not bring the idea of Dojos into existence?

No, because Dojos has taken on a life of its own as the Department of Government Efficiency

and Elon Musk's favorite word or digital currency.

Yeah, that's, yep.

You got it.

Now you're back on track, Severson, you're back on track.

So everybody knows about Dojos.

At this point, the Department of Government Efficiency and what I will say is Dojos popped back

into my feed with intensity last week.

Do you know why and did it pop back into your feed last week?

Wait, this is sort of on the tip of my brain.

Your brain has a tip?

Yeah, you know, when it's not like on the tip of your tongue, it hasn't made it to the

tongue yet.

It's still in the brain.

Okay.

Fair.

I'm not remembering in this moment.

So please, in like me.

At the time that we're recording this, there was kind of an explosion of popularity of a set

of videos online.

These set of videos got posted to YouTube by scholarly groups who are essentially, I know

it sounds ridiculous.

Absolutely.

Okay.

Yeah, I should say that's the New York Times' description, scholarly groups, but scholarly

because Dojos helped essentially eviscerate all of this funding for many different organizations,

including the National Endowment for the Humanities, which gives money to scholarly groups.

So effectively, these videos showed two former Dojos employees, one Justin Fox and another

Nate Kavanaugh in depositions for lawsuits, because of course there's been a lot of lawsuits

and counter lawsuits around all of this funding, and they both were talking about essentially

what they did in order to identify grants that were not in line with this executive order

that President Trump put out, banning, quote, radical and wasteful government DEI programs.

There's not a lot of action in these videos.

It's basically young men being interviewed against a gray background, but I found them to

be fascinating.

It gives you this kind of interesting window into how these people made decisions to pull

funding away from organizations and you get these glimpses of their worldviews or their

political views.

These employees were apparently using chat GPT to identify programs and grants that included

elements of DEI, and this had pretty mixed results, says an example court documents show

that a museum got a grant of about $350,000 to repair and update its HVAC system or

repeating in AC.

One potential outcome of this replacement and update might, of course, mean more visitors

to the museum, or as it's described in the grant, more access to the museum's collection.

Chat GPT flagged this grant with the rationale that more access to the museum equals more

diversity, and the grant was terminated.

This is the kind of thing these Doge employees are being asked about in these videos.

One of the interviews in particular, I found to be interesting, Justin Fox, a former Doge

employee who's being interviewed gets into it with the interviewer over the definition

of DEI.

How did you interpret DEI?

There was the EO explicitly laid out.

The details, I don't remember it off the top of my head.

I'm asking for your understanding of it.

Yeah.

My understanding was exactly what was written in the EO.

So can you, I don't remember what was in the EO.

So right now, do you have an understanding of what DEI is?

Yeah.

Okay.

So what's your understanding as you sit here today in this deposition?

Well, it was exactly what was written in the EO.

The interviewer is like, okay, well, I get that there's like a definition in this document,

but how do you define DEI?

And Justin Fox basically says, well, I define it as it's defined in the document.

Do you have a present understanding of DEI?

Yeah.

Okay.

Can you explain what that present understanding is?

Well, it is just easier for me to be referencing back to the EO.

Are you refusing to answer the question?

I'm not refusing to answer the question.

Okay.

I just feel that referencing back to the verbatim executive order was the best way for

us to capture all of the DEI language.

So videos of these depositions really popped off.

They were all over reddit and then they were gone.

A judge ordered these videos to be taken down temporarily, essentially, I think because

the government was arguing that these two people would come under harassment and death

threats, et cetera, et cetera, which I have to say is it's an interesting argument to

me in a world in which this stuff is happening to people all the time for myriad reasons.

If that makes sense, they're getting harassed online.

And what you see here is the US government leveraging its full personnel and influence

to protect these two individuals in a way that lots of people don't get protected after

getting death threats and harassment for being women, for being people of color, et cetera.

So I think there's some inequity here and the way that we think about people getting

doxxed and getting harassed for the work that they do.

But something changed, which is that almost immediately after the judge ordered these

videos to be taken down, we saw them reappear.

Can you guess where they reappeared?

Unread it?

They did not reappear on Reddit.

They did appear as a bit torrent.

Do you know what that is?

Oh, loosely.

What?

Oh, loosely.

That's one of those like terms that's like, oh, yeah, it's the bit torrent.

Yeah, it's the bit torrent.

Bit torrent is effectively an internet protocol that allows people to share files in

a more distributed way.

A bunch of different computers have copies of a file.

They can share part of that file to whomever else wants to download it.

So the downloader gets their file via a bunch of different places.

That is my layman's description of bit torrenting.

Okay.

Do we all have to download the 400,000 little bits or the little bits come together?

Okay.

Oh, well, they automatically come together.

They come together as a file.

Yeah.

They resemble the file.

It's huge.

Much more efficient.

That's like, like, internet, but jigsaw, no time for that.

But so that's one place.

The other place that the videos popped back up was the internet archive, which I believe

you know about.

And this is a place where in recent years, a lot of things that have been erased from

the internet for, you know, political reasons, potentially.

One might say, I have popped back up.

So this is just, I think, a story that reminds us that nothing really actually disappears when

you post it to the internet.

It's on the internet forever, whether it's on YouTube or, you know, even the power of

a district court can't really erase something from the internet.

It can make it a lot harder to access, but it's just, it's going to be really hard to get

rid of this stuff.

And there's a little bit of a, of a strison effect, I think, that happens with these things

as well, where as soon as you try to erase it from the internet, people are like, oh,

no, no.

And they, and they go and, and they make sure that it's available.

Yeah.

And, and, you know, on the one hand, nothing ever really disappears, as you said.

But on the other, it could, like, I don't want us to take for granted the resources like

internet archive and the people who are doing that archiving because it is, it is time spent.

It is dollars needed to sort of power these archives and to, to keep them alive.

And I, myself, have started taking a lot more screenshots of things that I don't want

to see disappear or have a feeling might disappear.

I've had a lot of stuff actually disappear on me that was not being protected and backed

up by activists because it was not crucial to our government or, you know, society at large.

And so, yes, we have ways of backing it up and power to those, but also don't take

them for granted.

And if there is material that you feel like is important to people's rights or the people

need to know, they're important for accountability, which is so, it feels like it's, it's maddeningly

fleeting these days, you know, back it up.

This is going to take, this is protecting internet resources, takes all of us doing our

part.

All right.

Well, that's one story about the internet being maybe terrible, maybe great in certain

ways.

What do you got for me?

Do you have a terrible, beautiful story for me?

No, no, nothing terrible here.

In fact, after the break, Ben, I'm going to teach us how we can all be more productive.

Oh, boy.

No, no.

It's coming up in a minute.

So, Ben, do you remember our episode on Consent?

Of course.

So, what was one of the key takeaways for you from that episode?

That there is way more information about ourselves online than we might realize.

Oh, yes, there is.

And that that information in the wrong hands can be used for all sorts of shady stuff.

Doxing, of course, but also scams, identity theft.

Collecting our data, selling it, yeah, don't like it.

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Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute

at BU Questrum School of Business.

The transition to autonomous vehicles will require overcoming not just technological

barriers, but also psychological ones.

We are comparing ourselves to that technology, and it's something that we care about.

That kind of comparison can be threatening.

Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts, and stay tuned for a preview

of a recent episode about how we might embrace or fear self-driving cars.

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Okay, we're back.

And Ben, I have a story for you from one of our favorite subreddits, Life Pro Tips.

Love a pro tip.

This is a post, the title of which is, I started pretending my life is a TV show, and it

made me more productive.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

So the body of the post reads, for a while, I had this weird habit.

At the end of each day, I would give my day, and then in bold, an episode title and a

cliffhanger, like a TV show, example, episode 21, the day everything went wrong.

Cliffhanger, tomorrow might fix it, dot, dot, dot, or make it worse.

Strangely, this made life a lot more interesting.

Even boring days started feeling meaningful because they were just another episode in

the story.

That part's in bold.

Hard days felt like, quote, unquote, character development, instead of failures.

It also made me more productive because I started thinking like a main character.

Main characters don't quit halfway through the story.

But there were a few problems, and then there's a bullet point list.

One, I had to write the titles somewhere, or I'd forget them, two, coming up with new

titles every day was surprisingly hard.

Three, I'm lazy and forgetful, so sometimes I skip days entirely.

So I tried building a small tool for myself that turns your day into an episode with a title,

poster, cliffhanger, and summary, so I can look back on weeks like seasons of a show.

Now I can scroll back through past days, and it actually feels like rewatching episodes

of my life.

Curious about something, though, and then this line isn't bold.

If your life was a TV show, what would the title of season one, episode one, be?

Hmm.

So Ben, do you have any thoughts on this idea as a productivity tool?

Well, here's the thing I'll say.

Something that resonated with me was the idea that like, bad things are character development,

actually.

Yes.

Like, I have a friend who says, good times are good times, and bad times are good stories

later, which I like that.

I guess we are all main characters in our own lives, and so like that's, we all have

that right as individuals to feel like we're main characters.

I could see that leading to some potential toxic behavior, but you know, I guess I don't,

you know, whatever, I teach their own, better to be a main character than an NPC, I suppose.

Do you keep a journal?

I have several journals that I've been given over the years that have like one or two pages

filled out.

Okay.

I'm like, I don't mean do physically keep a journal, I mean to you, because I like this,

I like the idea of this as like micro journaling, you know, because it's like, I'm not going

to take the time at the end of the day to write about what happened, but if I could just

at the end of the day write a little title for myself for the day, that's, and then just

flip back through all my titles.

I think that would be, it's an interesting thought experiment, and many redditors thought

the same thing.

One person wrote, this is kind of genius, suddenly doing laundry feels like a side quest

instead of suffering, and the OP responded, yeah, then harder days feel like tough missions

and more interesting to finish.

It feels more like a video game than a TV show from this view.

Yeah, I like that too.

I mean, I had a parent tell me like a new parent tell me as I was becoming a new parent,

they were like, being a parent is like playing a video game, like every level is different,

some levels are really hard, some levels are really fun, but every level is different,

and you just like get through the level and you get to the next level, and that's kind

of, so, and I think that's life too, right?

Yeah.

Just with or without kids, so I mean to it, yeah, I think it's good.

And it's certainly way more doable than actual journaling, at least for someone like

me.

Same.

I'm much more likely to come up with a title than a full entry, that makes sense.

Totally.

So I want to read a few more comments for you, someone said, how in the world is this

not a completely dystopian idea?

OP says, because it's heavily based in your daily life, and we are just adding a little

creativity to it, and then someone responds to that comment and says, who is this we?

And this is where, this is where things started to fall apart, for me, someone says, sometimes

the AI posts are so obvious, and then other commenters jump in and say, there's always

a list with exactly three bullet points, someone says, no, boy, I know is a weird question

at the end, someone else says, and totally random, bold words, so this, there any M dashes

in there?

Any M dashes in that post, Amory?

There are no M dashes, but redditors now believe in this subreddit, at least now believe

that this post is just AI, and someone said, it's as much scary as it is cool that we

can now squint our eyes at a post and say with relative confidence, that wasn't a human,

and they say, it's cool that we can do it, not that we have to.

And someone else says, based on math, about two to five percent of people can do it, eventually

is algorithm sort, what is valued semantically, it will drop to less than one percent.

So who knows where those percentages are coming from at this moment in time, but the point

being that like, no, no, people are actually really bad at knowing that this post is AI,

including me, and including you, at least from the reading of it, and the algorithms are

only getting better and better at making posts that seem human, but are not.

And so other commenters jump in and someone says, what makes you think that this is AI?

I would like to have this super skill, and then people are like, oh, it's the final part

in bold, and people are too selfish to care and ask what would season one episode one

of your life be, like no human actually cares what your answer to that is.

Well, here's my question for you.

Did you look at OP's posting history?

Okay.

So this is where we get to who this OP is.

The username is fuzzy dash add 7685.

So that does not inspire a lot of confidence that this is a human, at least as I'm viewing

it.

Well, that's like a, what I would say is that's like a Reddit applied username.

Sure.

Sure.

They could have just said generate one for me.

Yeah.

I don't have any.

It's a lot of people do, but it's interesting that a user whose suggestion is you should

come up with titles for your life is not coming up with an original username.

Yes.

Yes.

I'll get to their history, but first, the very next day this post was removed.

So I'm like, damn it.

I saw this post, people thought it was AI.

Where is it?

It was not in the internet archive, but it was not on a torrent, but I had a feeling that

if this was AI and some bot farm generating this, they probably made this post elsewhere

on Reddit because there's no shortage of self improvement subreddits.

And indeed, they did.

So I was reading you the exact same post, but this time it's on the subreddit productivity

cafe, where at least last I checked, no one has called this out as being an AI post.

That's a much smaller subreddit than life pro tips, but no one has called this out as being

AI yet.

Interesting.

And it's posted there under a different username, which is future dash swimming 1092.

So we have a pattern pattern in the user names here, word, dash, word, and then a four

digit number.

So then I go to these users Reddit history.

And I don't know if this is a relatively new feature, then, but both of these redditors

have their post history hidden.

In the meantime, I did what we do.

And I reached out to fuzzy add 7685, the OPA of the life pro tips.

And I just said, hey, fuzzy add, I see your LPT post is removed after accusations that

you're an AI, your Reddit user name doesn't give me a lot of hope that you're human.

But, you know, I figured I'd give you a chance to speak for yourself.

Even if you're not human, I want to understand how and why these AI posts are made.

Who's behind this?

What is there to gain or learn?

And I do not expect to hear back.

I have not heard back from fuzzy add 7685.

But in the meantime, I don't want to see AI generated content on Reddit.

I think a lot of people would agree that we don't want that.

And so what can we do to curb AI posts as both redditors and social media users and

moderators and what is the responsibility of platforms?

What can platforms do and do they have any incentive to do anything when more content and

more engagement means, you know, more advertising dollars, which is how these platforms survive.

You know, I personally, as someone who's trying to spend less time online, I'm always

kind of asking myself, like, what is my red line for social media that would get me off

of social media or get me off of a particular platform?

And AI bots are it, I have to say, like, and the anonymity of Reddit, and you and I talk

a lot about anonymity and think a lot about anonymity.

But the anonymity of Reddit certainly doesn't do it any favors in the larger question of

how we prove our humanity on anonymous platforms.

And when it starts to feel like we're swimming in a space and we can't tell what's real or

not anymore, that's when I'm like, nope, give me real people right in front of me.

Who I know, who are not characters in the show pleuribus that are all tapped into the

hive mind, like, give me real people.

So I still like the idea of, like, micro journaling your life.

And yet knowing that it was potentially created by AI and not by a human just leaves this

taste in my mouth that's like metallic, yeah, is it metallic?

Does it taste like silicon?

A little like that, yep, so fair enough.

Well, nonetheless, let's come up with our season one episode one titles.

Okay, oh, I know I went to Providence, Rhode Island yesterday.

Okay, look, I live in Boston, I love Boston, but Providence is like a cooler Boston right

now or like Providence is what maybe Boston used to be and no longer.

And my husband and I saw a sticker in a store there that said, keep Providence a secret.

So I would steal that as like the title of my day yesterday, keep Providence a secret.

That's good.

What about you?

Oh, man, yesterday, I, I want a pool tournament.

Okay, I, I led a meeting of a bunch of my neighbors going through bylaws changes.

Okay, micro journaling, micro journaling.

No, I know, I'm just trying to come up with the title though, it's like, like, like big

wins and small places, big wins and small places.

That's good.

Yeah.

You have like a tight height.

What about, but I want to get high jinks in there somehow, high jinks, big wins and

small places, high jinks, low stakes, high jinks, low stakes.

That's good.

All right, high jinks, low stakes, okay, we've just a good name for our podcast, actually.

Yeah.

All right, send us your season one episode one, titles, listeners, please.

We would like to know whatever day you listen to this episode, name title, title your day

or the full day yesterday and email us and let's thread WBUR.org.

We're going to disprove the AI watchers on Reddit and saying that real humans don't

care about other people's season one, episode one, titles.

We are not AI and we do care.

So send them on.

Yeah, we did care.

Send them to us.

Oh, and by the way, before this episode was set to air, the New York Times had an update

on the Doge story.

Here this week, a judge ruled in federal district court that, in fact, the videos of the

former employees' depositions could live online after all.

The judge, who had temporarily said the videos needed to be removed, cited a few key reasons

for allowing them back online.

For one, the government had not supplied sufficient evidence that the Doge employees were in

fact being harassed.

In number two, the internet and platforms, including Reddit, TikTok and others, had supplied

a nearly instantaneous global distribution of the videos, making an order to remove them

effectively moot.

In other words, the Doge cat, it's already out of the back.

And let's thread as a production of WBUR Boston's NPR.

This episode was co-hosted by myself, Ben Brock Johnson.

And me, Anne-Marie Severson.

It was produced by Koliani Saxena, edited by Meg Kramer.

The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Chiosna Bernado, Grace Tatter, Emily Jane Kowski,

our production manager Paul Vikus, and our managing producer, Sama Tijoshi.

If you haven't untold history and unsolved mystery, another wild story from the internet

that you want us to tell hit us up, and let's thread at WBUR.org.

This is the UPS Store dot com slash air guarantee for full details, terms and conditions apply.

Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute

at BU Questrum School of Business.

Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts, and listen on for a preview

of a recent episode featuring BU Professor Carrie Moorwich on why it's so hard for people

to trust self-driving cars and other autonomous technologies.

When we look at the psychology of these kinds of things, too, there is the psychology of

adopting a new technology.

It's unique in the sense that we're giving up control as a species over many kinds of things

and as a person, right?

So for people who think about driving as the same way that they might buying a car,

as the same way that they might buy a washing machine as a commodity or an appliance,

where it's a thing that gets me from A to B, that may be not as threatening and you're

just thinking about, is this safer?

Is this cheaper?

Is this more convenient for me?

Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts,

and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business, Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

Spring just slid into your DMs.

Grab that boho look for that rooftop dinner, those sandals that can keep up with you,

and hang some string lights to give your patio a glow up.

Spring's calling.

Ross, work your magic.