License to Spill

0:00So Mike, what have you been seeing on the internet this week? What's been making you smile? Tell me all about it. So this one, this may be very specific to a certain age group, and I'm wondering if you are not in that age group, because I know you're younger than I am. So I am going to tell you about something, and it is entirely possible that you all have zero idea of what I'm talking about. Got it. But I have a question for you. When did you first start using computers? Oh, God. What year about? Later than I would like to admit, it's probably kind of 2000 and 3.4. No, actually, that's a lie. I was at school when 2000, and I was using computers, but I didn't really have a good home set up until kind of 2003. So then you have almost certainly never experienced this. Do you know what defragging a computer means? No, but it sounds very painful. Yeah, well, it was. So in the sort of 90s, if you had a Windows computer, what happened is like, as you would use it, stuff would get saved to the hard drive.

1:00But it was a hard drive. It was like the physical spinning hard drive before we had all this fancy solid state nonsense that we all use today. And it would like just put all the data into different sectors. And that could be anywhere literally, like physically on the hard drive. And that would eat up space and make it awkward because there would be empty spaces, but it wouldn't be able to dump new data there because you would have empty spaces. So there was a thing that was recommended that you do. Like every year or so, which is you defrag the hard drive. And it's literally a process where you set it up, you're not going to be able to do anything with your computer for hours, depending on how large the hard drive is and how much defragging it needed. And you would set this thing to go and you would click a button and you would have this screen that would show you a map with a whole bunch of pixels demonstrating like where data was on your hard drive. And it would move it all sort of, push it all in so that the beginning would be where all the data is and the end would be empty so you could keep filling. And it would give you back a bunch of space on your hard drive.

2:00Good it. But it was something you would have to set aside. It would make your hard drive make noise because it was constantly spinning and it was very noisy and it was a whole process. And I had completely forgotten about doing it though I used to do it basically once a year when I was a kid to clean up my hard drive and get more room. But there is a website that lets you relive that experience called defrag98.com because it was a Windows 98 thing. And if you go to that you can see exactly the experience that some of us went through including you can have it make noise as if it was a hard drive defragging. You can pick which drive you're different. This is like the exact experience. Like literally this is the Windows 98 defragging experience. It looks like mine sweeper. Yes, it has that sort of mind. There's all this bosses, but that is data for empty sectors. Got it. And your moving data, so it would like copy data from one part of the hard drive and place it on another. And it was a process that for a period of a few years

3:04you kind of had to go through if you had a Windows computer in the 90s to keep it working in good working condition. And this just brought back that kind of memory in this stouter. It looks quite mindful, I'll be honest. It looks like something that you know. It could be, it is a sort of meditative experience to defrag your computer. There was always the slight fear that defragging it would mess something up and just for your hard drive and everything. But yeah. Well, I mean this, my, similarly, my kind of joy from the internet's week is derived from a website which may not make a lot of sense to you either. It barely makes sense to me. But there's a tool called MVNT.Studio that's been created by a bunch of Korean video creators and enthusiasts, I think. And what you can do is you can drop any YouTube link, SoundCloud or file into this tool and it will create you a dance move.

4:05And you compare that with a bunch of avatars and characters, some of which, you know, I'm sure it doesn't have the ability to actually use, but you can get kind of Bart Simpson doing a dance to your track, whatever it may be, you know, pure Korean internet goal, I would say. Just a few weeks after, you know, you mentioned about those websites that allow you to deliver food that doesn't exist. It's something you could really work in Korea. I think both of our sites this week are a generational, he's specific. Yeah. Our listeners will like one or the other, probably not both. Yes. Hello and welcome to Control All Speed. The podcast or we make sense of the major debates, shaping online speech, platform power, content moderation and the future of the internet. It's September the 3rd, 2026. And this week we're talking about

5:05what a giant ID leak means for online age assurance, the tension at the heart of AI companionship and for extended Patreon episode, how AI is the social media era all over again. Control All Speed is the not always hope-filled podcast about our technological future co-hosted by Mike Bassnick, Founder and Editor of Tech. That and me Ben Whitelaw from everything in moderation. Mike, I don't want to do any dance moves. Ha, ha, ha. I'm too old for it. You know, my hips are sore. You know, not even having a tool like MVNT kind of suggest something for me is going to make me do that. But we've made a venture into short form video ourselves on Control All Speed. Yes, we have. Not dance related. But not yet. Not yet. Give us time. Exactly. We, I think a lot of people have been asking us like, why don't you share a video of the podcast? Why are there clips that we can see of you handsome fellows talking about the internet? And I guess we've heard of for quite a while, haven't we?

6:06Yeah, I mean, you know, video is always a, it's a different medium and there's, there's work that needs to be done in order to do video. But we're dipping our toes into the video space. Which is that we are not releasing full videos of the podcast because nobody wants to watch us. I mean, you know, the live, the live recordings sure. But I don't think that people want to see the recording of us every week. If you do listeners, let us know. But clips, we are experimenting with various length clips of the podcast, of different sections of the podcast with the two of us talking. And we're putting them all around social media. It's a scavenger hunt. You can go find various clips in different places. I think we're experimenting certainly with Blue Sky. Of some clips, some Blue Sky, we have some clips on YouTube. We have clips on Patreon, if you are supporting us on the Patreon and Instagram, where we have now set up control all speech

7:12accounts as well. So you can find controlled speech on Blue Sky and on Instagram. And all of these accounts will be in the show notes. I guess our ask for our listeners is go and follow the accounts. We know that not everyone is on those social media platforms. But if you use them regularly and you want a bit more control of speech and your feed, go and follow them. And share the clips with people you think might find them interesting or useful. It really does help us grow the podcast. It's one of the many ways that you can support us without becoming a Patreon supporter, which is one of the big ways you can do that. These are not mutually exclusive. You can do both. True, true. Do the free things and then stump up for the extended episodes. Of which we should talk about. We've got a few Patreon supporters this week. So a big shout out to those people who you signed up. We are no longer doing our trust con special code. So we're back up to full price. But it is very much worth it. And we've got our two tiers. We've got our founder and insider tier.

8:13We pay $20 and get extended episodes, early access, and the chance to suggest stories and episodes that we should cover and produce. We've got a few really good ideas from our Patreon supporters this week. Plus our supporter tier, he'd pay $10 and get the episodes and the early release time. So lots of reasons to support Fire Patreon. You can go to patreon.com forward slash control or alt speech for more. Also to note, Mike, you've got a new camera set up because we're now doing more video. I've got a hair cut because last week was not acceptable. So this is becoming a professional operation. I wouldn't go that far yet. Cool. So we had a bit of difficulty this week. I think working out what stories we wanted to cover. It's been quite a fragmented news week, I would say. Compared to last week when we had the metal settlement and it was very clear that was the big topic of the week. But we think there's a lot to say about these stories and we expect listeners won't necessarily be fully up to speed on them.

9:16So you're going to start us off, Mike, with one that's like fairly, fairly niche or perhaps maybe hasn't broken out into the mainstream news as certainly the metal settlement did last week. Yeah, this one, but I think is actually a really big and important story and it comes from Brian Krebs, who's been a long-term cybersecurity reporter. I think he worked for the Washington Post many years ago before striking out on his own. It's been very successful. Has his own website Krebs on Security, which does incredible work. He's breaking really interesting stories all the time. But this week he broke a massive story about a leak, apparently a real-time leak of scanned IDs from a company called IDScan.net, which is apparently one of the bigger ones that is mainly focused on real-world ID scanning. So within the leak, there were 153 million drivers licenses. There were a number of millions of other kinds of IDs as well.

10:17And he found his own driver's license in there and then figured out the date that it had been added and realized that he had rented a car from Hertz Rentacar that day and then found some other people in the database who he knew and asked them to check what they were doing on the day that it was added to the database. And a lot of them were renting cars. So it appears that a lot of it was from scanning your ID at a rental car place, but there were other things where there were some pot dispensaries and I think maybe Target used them as well. So there are a number of different offline places that when they would verify your identity, they would scan your ID and that would go into this database. And apparently hackers had access to it for over a year and basically every day we're adding maybe a few a few hundred thousand different records to this, which is pretty incredible and pretty scary. The point that ties it back, there are a few different ways that this ties back to the internet world, one of which is the ongoing debates and discussions

11:21that we've been a part of as well about age verification online. And as I've said, and other people have said is that age verification is really identity verification. And in fact, if you look at this company ID scan, they're very much also in the age verification world. They are promoting their tools and services for age verification. They have actually a fairly comprehensive and in some cases useful website that tracks all of the different age verification laws for social media. They clearly see that as a growth field for them as well. They've written about some of these laws. They had an article all about Kosa, the proposed Kids Online Safety Act in the US, which would, even though they claim it wouldn't mandate age or identity verification realistically would heavily encourage it at least. And so you have this vendor that presents itself as one of the top vendors in the space. They have a whole page, a whole, it's literally called their Trust Center

12:23that talks about all the ways in which they keep the data private and secure and it's certified by all these things and they have all these banners about how it's GDPR compliant, it's CCPA compliant, it's compliant with all of these different standards. And yet, for over a year, apparently hackers had full access to the database and were extracting every record that was uploaded basically in real time. Pretty shocking stuff. Yeah, it is incredibly shocking. And you could basically buy anyone's ID for 100 bucks if you wanted it and including Pete Hexeth. Right. So one of the ones that Brian found was Pete Hexeth's and you see this very clear image of Pete Hexeth's driver's license and you can pick it up for 100 bucks. Well, no call he rented. That's why I should. Yeah, who knows, who knows. But, you know, I mean, within hours after Crabbs reported on it, this site where you could see all these things, which was on the dark web using Tor disappeared because of course they realized they were about to get scrutiny

13:25and they took it down. But they still have access to all of that data. One hopes that ID scan has figured out where they were getting it from and shut down that path. We don't know quite yet. As far as I know at the time of this recording, ID scan hasn't said anything in particular about it, which is not great. Apparently the FBI is investigating this now. So it's serious enough that the FBI is involved. Not sure right now how competent the FBI is, but they're involved and they're investigating it, which I think is important. But I think this is really important for part of the age verification debate. Now, obviously you can say, like I've been very critical of a lot of the age verification mandates and all of these demands, whether they're child social media band, teenage social media bands, or requiring age verification or age estimation or whatever. But I think this is important because one of the points that lots of people have made is that when you're doing

14:25identity verification in any form, especially online, you're creating a privacy hazard. There is a risk. Someone has to be collecting all of this data, which is valuable, which makes it a target. And some people have even said, well, offline identity verification isn't so bad because you just hand somebody your driver's license, they look at it and then that's it. And then they hand it back to you and it's forgotten. We're already seeing that's not true. This sort of proves in a lot of cases that's not true. It's being scanned into a system, which is then being connected to the internet, which then allowed hackers to exfiltrate the entire database. But in the online context, obviously it is connected to the internet, obviously it is being stored somewhere. And as much as the different vendors say they're keeping the data private, we have to contend with the fact that that is not always true. And you've created a massive target and hackers are very good at figuring out ways into these different things. And the people who are pushing these laws

15:25should be willing to contend with the risk that they are creating and the liability that they are creating and the potential negative impact on the people that their, whose identity is verified, where the claim is always that it's being done for their safety and yet you're increasing their risk in a different way. And I think this story is so massive and so complete that it has to be reckoned with. Yeah, I want to come back to that because I have some thoughts on that. It's important to point out since we are a podcast that cares about nuance and is important to be clear about what we say. There's age identification, which comes as a result of an ID or some sort of government documentation. And then as the industry define it, there is age assurance or age estimation, which again, is certainly age estimation. It is a different thing that often uses kind of biometric data, a face scan, or some sort of voice, often of a kind of voice signal to estimate how old somebody is and that facilitates access to a site or to an app.

16:27Now, we know there are problems with both of those. We're going to talk about kind of primarily the former here since this system had government IDs within it. We know that there are problems with the latter, the accuracy of it, the inability to estimate the age of particular demographic groups is a whole bunch of issues there. But I feel like this might be thinking, well, those two things are different. And we should kind of be clear about what we're actually referring to. Yeah, so the one point I'll make on that is, Eric Goldman wrote a paper last year, about a year and a half ago, which makes the argument that they're not really different. They're all backstopped to the same thing. Because as you note, the other tools, the estimation tools, and I have said this recently, they can tell the difference between a 60-year-old and a 15-year-old. But for the ranges and the specificity that you need to figure out how do we have a different experience for a 16-year-old versus a 19-year-old, those don't work all that well. And so even in cases where you can do some of that,

17:28they always backstop it with an ID verification at some point. At some point in the process, it's not saying that everyone has to share their government issued ID or anything like that. But at some point, all of these systems have a point where you can upload a government issued ID. And I feel like oftentimes this, oh, we have all these other systems, whether it's like the face scan or the voice or whatever, which we all know has real problems. All of them backstop it with some sort of scan your government ID at some point. Yeah. And they're not necessarily as transparent as they need to be about how often it gets to that point, but it does. And so that is a part of this process, no matter which of these tools you're using. Yeah, that's fair. I mean, more and more platforms app services are going to have to go down an ID route because of the regulation that we're talking about. I'm just thinking that the industry itself, thinks of itself as two things, whether that's fair or not. Sure. And I mean, like, again, Eric Goldman's argument

18:30is that that's all marketing to some extent, right? They're doing that on purpose because they know that the ID verification part of it feels really scary, but if they can switch it and say, oh, this is just age assurance or age estimation or whatever, it doesn't feel as scary. And his argument is that, you know, that is marketing, that is a slight of hand to sort of distract from the reality. Good. So let's talk about the kind of reaction to this. And because my issue here, as somebody who is a skeptic of age assurance for the same reasons that you mentioned and the same as many of our listeners, you know, is this not accurate? It's a terrible user experience, which we often forget. But it's this idea that it doesn't feel right to kind of make the connection necessarily between this kind of big, mostly offline ID collection service and the age assurance age verification piece that we can obviously see coming online. It's a bit of a leap, really, to say that one thing is going to desiciridly lead to the other

19:31in the way that lots of people have characterized the social media over the last week or so. And again, I get the need to be cautious around age assurance and verification. But a lot of people using it, as often people use stories like this as a kind of reason to jump straight to a solution, which is to not have anything kind of age gated at all. And so it felt a bit like kind of point scoring. It felt like this is the kind of perfect story. And some of the quotes in the Brian Krebs piece actually made that connection very quickly. It felt a bit weird. We weren't talking about in necessary online age assurance. We're talking about this offline piece. This company that has legally collected and stored for much longer than it seems to have told the people who use it, data. We need to discuss what that industry looks like and then draw the parallels, I think, with the age assurance question that we're facing. And it felt a bit point scoring. Yeah, maybe. But I mean, again, like the argument that I would make

20:33is that for years, one of the things that we've heard is that the offline in-person identity verification piece of this was clearly much safer and much more secure than the online one. I mean, even people who were worried and concerned about online age verification were like, well, kept trying to distinguish it from like, oh, you have to show an ID to go to a bar or whatever. And yet, why I think it's not necessarily just point scoring by the legitimate complaint is you're saying, like, even in that situation, even in that situation that we've been told for years, even among critics of online age verification, that, okay, well, that kind of identity verification is okay. Now we're finding out that even that is not. And again, this is not even the first time that this has happened. There was a case a few years ago in Australia where they had a law that required, I forget the exact details, but it was like bars and clubs. I think it may have only been in one part of Australia

21:33that they all had to be linked up to an identity verification system so that as you went in, it wasn't just a bouncer, looking at the ID and deciding if you're old enough to enter the establishment, rather it was scanned by a computer. And that system was also preached in all of those IDs, were leaked on the dark web as well. So we've had this before, but the larger point stands that any system you have, that is somehow scanning IDs and collecting that information in order to verify you, verify your age, verify information about you is a risk, right? It is collecting private personal data and that alone becomes a target. And so therefore, like, yes, I get it, like people who are already upset with this, including myself for using this as a story that kind of highlights how dangerous this is. But I don't think unfairly. Like, yes, this is a different situation, but this was the situation that was supposed to be less bad. And now we're finding out it was really, really bad,

22:34which should raise more questions about the online age estimation or age verification systems that are out there because we don't know that there are any safer because we have no reason to believe that there are any safer because this was supposed to be the safest version of this. Yeah. I suppose, you know, it makes sense for a car rental company to take your ID because you need a license. Yeah. But there's a bunch of companies that this ID scan company works with that you question why they're working with them necessarily. You know, target is in there. Right. And like, yes, probably buying alcohol was involved. But again, why is that data being kept on follow? That's the fundamental question is like, why are we not furious at companies like Target who you buy alcohol from in one second or you buy weed from if you're a pot store in that second? And then you give them your ID and that data is kept for seemingly months at huge risk to yourself and at the risk of a legal idea. It's like to move so quickly into,

23:37and I guess maybe it's because we have control over what happens with online regulation in a way that we don't with these systems that already set up in the real world. So it may be a makes sense to concentrate on that. But I would, I'm just like, if I was an North American, if I was a US citizen or a Canadian citizen that had data in the state of Israel, why is that happening first of all? Yeah. Again, it did feel like these hackers had real-time access to it. So it wasn't even how long they kept the data because it appeared that they were able to get it out of that database every day. So even if, you know, who knows, maybe the company did delete that data after a certain period of time didn't seem to matter because the hackers had already gotten access to it. But yeah, I mean, I think the underlying point is that any collection of private data becomes a risk. And we're concerned about it when, you know, and there are lawsuits and all these other things when meta or Google or whoever else, whichever tech company is collecting private data, we're demanding that they keep it secure in all sorts of ways.

24:40And there are all these other companies out there as well that are collecting in some cases even more secure and more private data. And there's nothing sort of dealing with that. Like now we have the FBI investigating. But again, it's been over a year. And this is a way that I think most people didn't even realize. Like when I've rented a car, and of course I hand over my license at some point, but I'm not sure I even realized that they were scanning it. And, you know, Krebs says that in the article where he talks about he's asking people and like, you know, yeah, you hand over your driver's license, but nobody remembers that it was actually being scanned or maybe, you know, like I'm trying to think the last few times I've heard of it. So it's a copy, it's maybe. Yeah, like I've remembered it being photocopied, right? But did I realize it was being sent to a company that had like half of North America's adult driver's licenses in their database? Like no, not at all. And that's kind of terrifying. And this is why anytime we're doing anything that mandates the collection or verification of private information,

25:43we should be really deeply thinking about the implications of it and how secure is it really because there's a risk. So yeah, like maybe it's a little bit of a cheap shot to tie this back to the online age verification debate. But to the extent that it should raise the alarms about how are we doing this, do we really trust these companies? How do we know that they're keeping the data secure? How do we know that the data is in leaking? I think all of that is valid. And this is just a really clear example of why we're raising these concerns because lots of people say, oh, this is all just chicken little climbing the sky is falling, you just don't like this technology, you don't like the way it's being implemented. But no, there are real reasons why people are concerned about it. And this is a, I think a really good example of why people should be concerned about it. Yeah, definitely, definitely scary and definitely worth noting. I mean, I think cheap shot is a good way that I've describing it, but it does marry a lot more,

26:43a lot more study and a lot more thought. And hopefully we'll get more details as this company does an investigation and lets us know what's going on. It links quite neatly mic into a next story, a couple of eye catching stories that I think we believe go well together. And the first one includes open AI. We've talked a lot about open AI as approach to teen safety and some of the work it's done over the last year to create defaults for teens, that teens and their parents can opt into in order to have a safer experience. In the last week, it has made those voluntary protections as part of a new product that it's calling Chattity Beauty for teens. And the way it verifies whether somebody is a teen, somebody between 13 and 17, is by looking at behavioral characteristics, things like what you search for, the time of day that you're online and also your account history more generally. So there's a question there as to whether that's going to be accurate, which we can discuss.

27:44The good news, I guess, from for people who are concerned about the way that children use these chat bots, is that Chattity Beauty is thinking a lot about how to encourage critical thinking amongst teens. There's been a lot of research about whether, we're removing people's ability to think critically, particularly children. And so this new product has a kind of study mode that doesn't give the answer straight away as a lot of the chat bots do, and encourage teens to think over the course of a few responses what the answer is. Now, don't know what you thought about this as a product launch. Do you feel a bit cynical towards this? Is this the kind of, this is a kind of lipstick on a pig situation? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I would love to see the research into this. It's funny because right before this came out, I had actually been reading about a separate thing that OpenAI had done in Estonia, where the Estonian government, I think this is like a year ago or so, had worked with OpenAI to generate

28:45a academic version of Chattity Beauty, which was specific, it made sure that the data wasn't being sucked back up in for training, was kept in Estonia, I think. But one of the things that it had was, it sort of required a secratic method. If you went to Chattity Beauty and said, summarize Catcher in the Rye for me, as a high school student might do, it would come back with you, well, what do you think? It is. And sometimes that's appropriate and sometimes it's not. But when I read about that and I was like, oh, that's actually interesting, because so I have this theory that I've talked about in the past that I think the absolute best way to learn a subject is to teach it. And this was like personal experience, right? When I was in college, I studied statistics and I took multiple levels of statistics until I was pretty far in and could do fairly advanced statistics work. And then I taught incoming freshmen statistics.

29:46When I was a senior, I taught a class for incoming freshmen. And that's when I learned statistics. I thought I knew it going in, but because the students would ask these questions, I'd be like, oh, wait, you know, I really had to deeply understand it. So that experience has always stuck with me as an example of really learning something. And so one of the things I've always hoped for in the AI world is if we could replicate that experience, if we could figure out a way to have the AI be a student more than a teacher in a way that then forced you to actually learn the subject. So that part of this is interesting to me, right? If Chatchy PT actually acts that way in a way that sort of pressures you into really learning the subject, that could be really interesting. Whether or not it works, we don't know. Whether or not the implementation actually sticks, we don't know. Whether or not kids will use it in a way that encourages this behavior we don't know.

30:49And that's things that should be studied. But as an approach to dealing with teen users who are just trying to use it to get answers and to cheat, makes it interesting because we know that that is happening and we know that that's bad. And we have research now showing that students who are doing that don't really learn the subject and perform much worse on tests. And that is a real concern. But if the technology can actually sort of force you in a way to really try and learn the subject, that's really interesting. How do you balance all those things? I don't know. There are cases where you don't want it to do that. If somebody actually needs help, right? You don't want it to go into this or credit, come in at that point. There's a whole bunch of questions about how that actually plays out. And I think, so it's interesting to see it happen, but I don't know how well it'll work. I mean, I'd go once it further, but I would like and hope the OpenAI has that data now. Yeah. And should release it as part of these product launches

31:50in the way that we're starting to see other companies do when they release products or models. They must have based upon that Estonian experience have some data that shows that teens are, their usage is more effective. They're getting more out of it whilst they're using the chatbot that when they encounter an issue, that the issue is less severe, or that they were to kind of find their way out of it. And also this age assurance piece, they must have data that shows that the system can identify teens and have a proportion of people who have tried to evade it by putting on a mustache or using a photo of their sibling. So I think all of that data must exist. And yes, there should be more research on it, but I would like to think that that data is available when should be published when these announcements are made, rather than being like a kind of, I think one piece I've read described it as like, akin to putting a ribbon cutting ceremony on a building that's yet to pass a safety inspection. Like that's kind of what it always feels like.

32:51Yeah, and I think, you know, I can understand why they might be afraid to release some of that data for competitive purposes, but this feels like the kind of thing that the industry itself as a whole is better off if everyone sort of recognizes what works in this scenario and what doesn't. Because without that, then, you know, if anthropic and cloud do something bad for kids, that's going to reflect poorly on the entire industry. And this is a space where if they were more transparent about what actually works in encouraging kids to actually learn or even like encouraging kids to put down the chatbot at certain points, I think that would be useful if we had that information. But yeah, I find this curious and interesting experiment, but I'm not sure if it's tough to tell how relevant it is until we have data. Yeah, for sure. An interesting Washington Post piece kind of dovetails neatly with this. Yeah. One of the big questions is how teams use AI for emotional support. And this Washington Post piece doesn't speak specifically

33:53about teams, but talks about the increasing reality of people using these tools for that reason. Yeah, and it's based on this academic study that looked at how people adults increasingly were using AI for emotional support and found that a lot of people are a large percentage. I think it was like 37%. I'm suddenly blanking on the percentage because there are a couple different things. They looked at how they were using the different AI tools. And the interesting thing to me was the reasons that people gave for using the chatbot functionality for emotional support. And one of the clear ones, and we've heard this before, but it was interesting to see how many people said was that they knew that they could speak to it without facing judgment. Because it wasn't human, they actually found it more valuable. And in most cases, it feels like people, they know that there was a lot of fear early on that people won't realize that you're not actually talking to a human, and that is a problem. And here, people recognize that they're not talking

34:53to a human, and that is seen as a benefit. That they feel they can open up to it more. It's different than, and so there's always people who say, well, you have issues, and you need emotional support. You should go to a therapist or go to a professional or talk to a good friend or something like that. But what the response is to the survey said is like, there are certain things that people just don't feel comfortable talking to other people about. And yet, they feel that they get benefits from this. And I know that that's to horrify some people. But I think it's actually important to recognize that that is the reality for so many people that they gain comfort from this. And we have to deal with that reality, rather than pretending it's not a reality or that it's somehow a bad thing that some people find that the responses that they get here help them. It is really interesting. And I've actually used it for not regularly, but for one of similar instances. I don't always think it gives the best response, but I don't think I'm probably of the generation,

35:54even if I'm slightly younger than you, Mike, as the previous you discussed. That seeks the validation that the chatbots provide. But I do wonder what life without judgment looks like. This is the idea that judgment is bad. But I often think about what I would do if I wasn't being judged. If you weren't judging me for the stories that I was bringing to the podcast, if my wife wasn't judging me for what I was wearing when I came down in the morning, what people would say if they saw me when I'm left alone in an evening to myself and what I watch me in a judgment is perceived to be bad. And I think there's probably a generational feeling about the benefits of judgment and what it does. Yeah. I don't think the summary here is that we're moving to a judgment-free world. I think that there are some things that people bottle it up inside and are afraid to talk about it because they're afraid of judgment. And in those situations, this can be helpful.

36:56Because realistically, what happens right now is people get very deep inside their own heads on these things. And they do have this conversation is just with their own internal voice. People who have their own internal model. And I recognize that some people actually don't have an internal model. I do. And if it's something that is judging, that can actually be psychologically damaging. If you're always criticizing yourself as well. So there is some benefit in being able to talk through things. And that's not to say that there should be no situations in which judgment is important. But I'm not convinced that having a space where you can ask a judgment-free zone question means that there aren't other scenarios in which judgment is still there and it's still important. It's not one or the other. These aren't mutually exclusive situations. So I don't think it is worth considering. And there may be some people who retreat into this world where they're so afraid of judgment

37:56in any other context that they don't interact with another human. I think that is a larger problem. But I think that is probably narrowly scoped to a small group of people who need real help and we need to deal with that. And in those cases, it would be good if the systems themselves recognize, oh, someone is now overrelying on this chat tool. Then that's a problem and that should be a signal and that should be diagnosed and dealt with and try to move people to it to get real help. But I think the situation, which is what this article is really talking about, what the study is really talking about, is the certain one-off cases where there's a particular topic that you don't have anyone that you feel comfortable talking about with and so therefore you turn to a chat pot. And we've seen different examples of this. And I had mentioned this a few weeks ago where it's like former guest host on the podcast, Brigitte Todd, talking about her experience with her family and her parents being ill and passing away where she just needed something to talk to

38:57and it turned out that chat GPT was really helpful. And I had recently seen another, and I'm blanking on the name, but it was a really interesting, very long video on sort of how to critique AI and was very critical of different AI systems, but at the end, she was saying like, I'm here explaining all the problems with AI, but there are times where it is really useful and we have to admit that. And she talked about how she was being evicted from her apartment and she needed the AI just to help her through it because it was like such a traumatic experience that she was unable to process it on her own and she couldn't go to anyone else and the chat GPT or I don't know which model she was using actually helped her deal with the situation. And I think we have to recognize that there are those situations where the tools can be helpful. The problem is when people use that to deny reality and hide from reality, that's not good. But there are a lot of sort of edge cases and corner cases where it is a useful tool that helps get you through something and we should acknowledge that rather than determining

39:58that it's all good or all bad. Yeah, it's basically the same way that the internet has always been. There have been people's experiences on the internet shared in forums and in listservs and in groups and those are incredibly helpful in times of crisis and a lot of people are in that increasingly, I think, in the world. So yeah, I think there's an interesting tension there which we will probably chart over time. And this week, it's worth mentioning that OpenAI was designated a very large online search engine by the European Commission, which means a VLOG. Yes. And the sibling of the VLOG. And we won't go into the details about whether it is a search engine or not and what that means. But it does mean it has kind of stricter obligations around transparency, around risk assessment of which team safety will be very high on the list, I think. Yep. It'll be interesting to sort of see what comes out of that. Yeah. Talking of judgment free zones, Mike, we're going to go to our Patreon segment now.

41:00See what I did there. Very good. Free listeners of Control or Speech. Thanks very much for joining us this week. We've got a great segment coming up which you should definitely tune into. If you're not a Patreon supporter or ready, go to patreon.com forward slash control or speech, we're going to talk about how we're replicating all the same mistakes of the social media era using a couple of great stories from rest of world, definitely worth turning into. That's the end of this week's free edition of Control or Speech. To hear the extended episode with additional coverage, become a Patreon supporter at patreon.com slash control or speech. That's CTRL, alt speech. If your organization is interested in sponsoring the podcast, contact us via our website at controlaltspeech.com. Thanks for listening.