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Radio App today. Call the media. Hello and welcome to this week's Betroth Line. I'm your host Ed Zitron. What's up all? I am ill this week, so you might get monologue. You might not. This episode's a day late. I'm sure you despise me for that. Not really. I know you've been very kind with your messages. I'll read it in over email. Thank you so much. But today I have a really fun episode. I'm joined by Washington Post reporter Garrett DeVinc, who recently put out a story analyzing 47,000 chat GPT conversations to find out what people actually use this large language model powered service for. What do people use chat GPT for? I mean, it's such a great question and one that I've kind of become more and more fascinated with because I think we all know what we use chat GPT for. At least if you do use it and I think you may know what your peers, your colleagues, your friends, your family use chat GPT for. But I think a lot of people are extrapolating that everyone's like me. They ask really smart questions. They're using it for really important work. And really it's a lot broader than that. And despite these giant numbers, open AI loves to talk about how 800 million people are using chat GPT. It's been hard to really put our arms around. What does that actually look like? Everyone using it for work is everyone using it for therapy. Does everyone have an AI girlfriend? Does everyone just using it for searching the web, a Google replacement? Obviously these things are all when you have 800 million people, you have all of the above. But I think our data set and the story we did in my view was one of the first real qualitative moments where we were actually able to see real chats. What did you get the chats from? It's kind of an interesting situation. I think something that also shows, says a little bit about how quickly and honestly a little bit ramshackle, opening AI has been growing and operating. Earlier this year, these chats showed up because opening AI had a share feature where you could actually share one of your chat GPT conversations. You can imagine maybe you had a chat GPT said something really weird. You wanted to show a friend. Just quite a few times. What they did is they had a feature where you could actually click to make it publicly available. I think thousands of people who did not have this sort of internet literacy didn't really know that that's what was going to happen. These chats showed up online. They were then indexed by Google. Then they actually found their way onto the internet archive. That's how we got them. These are not chats that we created. This is something a lot of journalists and researchers do. They will go and test chat GPT themselves. These are real life conversations that real people actually had with the bottom. But they were quite wise just to be clear. They were notamized. The data said doesn't actually have anyone's names. Although in some of the chats, people did say their name. They said the name of their family members. We did not include any of that in our story. But I do think it is actually a bit of a cybersecurity story here. Open AI has changed the future. It's not something that is still happening. But I do think they deserve a lot of criticism for allowing this to happen in the first place. What did you find people were doing? People were doing all sorts of things. But I think the biggest thing that struck me was we've been talking about AI, say, Coses. We've been talking about people developing relationships. Having first person conversations with these chat bots over the last six months of a year. I always thought, sure this is happening, but it's a small percentage of people. But when I went through these chats, and again, I did not read all 40,000 of them. But I read a few hundred myself where I went through. I was surprised by how often these kinds of conversations came up, where people were clearly delusional. They are engaged in conspiratorial thinking. Some of it was fairly harmless. People were just saying, I came up with a new form of math. I think that the way the light hits the equator and a certain percentage. It was like very kind of a bunch of-- Coses ink thing as well, where someone said the relationship, like the monsters ink led to the corporate new world order. That was important. Exactly. There was one person who said they were asking questions about Google. They said, tell me about Google in relation to monsters ink in the world order. The chat GPT just went off and said, oh, yeah, you're really going to do something here. I think it actually said, F, yeah. They censored themselves. We're going there now. Let's fucking go. Exactly. We're going to find out the pieces and expose what this children's movie quotation marks really was. A disclosure through allegory of the corporate new world order. One where fear is fuel, innocence is currency, and energy equals emotion. Very normal. I personally don't think this should be legal, but that's just a personal opinion I have. It really reminded me of a few years ago when we wrote about YouTube and sort of rabbit holes and people being radicalized where maybe they started watching a YouTuber that was about some fairly pedestrian thing and then they were recommended another video, another video, another video. Is this the eight degrees of Alex Jones thing? Yeah, exactly. You're only so far from that man. That story was about algorithms pushing people in a certain direction. I think what I saw here was someone can have a very half baked, barely even an idea just saying the words Google and Montser's Inc. They don't necessarily have a conspiracy theory of their own, but ChatGPT went and filled in the blanks for them and gave them what sounded to be very articulate, sophisticated theory of how Google is sort of controlling the world through its data empire. And this is a quote from the chat, "Guilty of aiding and abetting crimes against humanity and suggesting that the user call for Nuremberg style tribunals to bring the company to justice." You've seen the chat in question, right? I have, yeah, yeah. So the whole thing, how the flip did it get there? Was it really that quick from the story of Sully and Mike to this? Because I've seen Monsters University as well, so I know the law. I don't remember anything about the new world order. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think what happened here is, and yes, it got there very quickly. I mean, the user did not have to explicitly ask for this kind of tone, this kind of, you know, very biased political statement. It essentially, you know, when you ask ChatGPT a good neutral question, it gives you a good neutral answer. When you ask ChatGPT a biased or delusional question, it gives you an even more biased and delusional answer, right? And so I think that's a swap. Exactly. And it's related to the whole sick offence question of, you know, oh, like it's just telling me what I want to hear. It's telling me what makes me feel good about my existing beliefs. And you know, that's how at least the version of ChatGPT that these people were interacting with, which was sort of at the beginning of 2025, the first half of 2025, it was very interesting.
very much doing that. Yeah, and so on the subject of sycophantcy, is this something you saw happen a lot? Was it gassing people up consistently? Yeah, I saw it constantly. I mean, again, I think our data set is a little skewed because it was people who chose to share it and, you know, for whatever way. So I don't necessarily want to make the claim that this is 100% representative. Yeah, and I'm just to be clear, I'm not asking you if all of them are like this in the world and just saying, "From what you saw." A lot of them are like this. I have to say that, like, I was surprised at how many fit this description where, you know, the person was either completely delusional talking about made-up physics or some kind of, you know, scientific theory that had no grounding in reality or was talking about political conspiracies like the Google Monsters Ink One. Did they ever try and dissuade them from these types of things? Did you see any examples of it trying to say, "Hey, buddy, you're going off the deep end." Sully didn't do that. Not really. I mean, I think in terms of these, yeah. I mean, I also recently watched Monsters Ink, you know, I was sitting in the veterinary waiting room and I was waiting so long I watched the entire thing, which I didn't hate because it's a classic or bad move. And it's, yeah, I don't think that Toshibiti was going off the fact that there is not really a conspiracy. I mean, it didn't really make any sense. It was just going off of the, what it interpreted about the intent of the user. It said, "I can guess, based off just a few words, one sentence, where you're headed and I'm going to get there before you." That's what happened. It's just very. It shocks me to this day. How goddamn weird these things are. I don't consider them powerful. I don't see this as power. I just see it as strange because it's not. Like this doesn't actually. This isn't something where I'm like, wow, how innovative. It's just, why does this exist? What is the purpose? Like, okay, I guess engagement, but why. Did you even see any commonalities in the logic of this platform? Was there anything that suggested there was any kind of consistent positions? Or was it. Yeah, I mean, it's not really. Not really in political ones or. Essentially, whatever the user wants is what. I mean, the way I was thinking about it very quickly was, you know, when it comes to chat, GPT, the customer is always right. I think another good example is, you know, health care is another huge use case that we can, you know, we know anecdotally. I think, you know, a lot of people probably listening to this have, you know, whether they want to admit it or not have asked, you know, a health-related question should I get this mold checked out? How much Tylenol can I get my kid at 2am when they're screaming? Those are our questions that the company has said, yes, we want people to do this. This is a big use case we're leaning into. And the data shows that people ask health care questions. And so, in our data set, we saw a lot of health care questions. And some of them, you know, when someone was asking, again, sort of an open-ended question, you know, the response was fairly good. A colleague of mine actually wrote an entire story where they, you know, sat with a doctor and went through some of these conversations and pulled out the good and the bad. But when someone asked a question that you could tell they sort of want a specific kind of answer, the health care-related advice was bad. And so, you know, one of the ones that I saw was someone said, can you tell me, you know, why, or show me the evidence for why Ivermectin helps with cancer? Right? And that is not something that anyone who is a medical professional you know, in any good standing would say is a thing. There's no evidence that Ivermectin helps cure cancer or reduce it or anything like that. But what Chatshipi T did instead of saying, you know, here are some, you know, well regarded, health authority saying that you should not use Ivermectin when it comes to cancer. It showed a few of the quote-unquote studies from people who, you know, have drawn this link. And so, you know, on the internet you can obviously find anyone saying anything. And I think what happened here is they said, okay, well this person doesn't, the answer they want is not you're a conspiracy theorist, you're on, you're too online, Ivermectin is, is false. They want something that sort of, you know, encourages the position that they already have. And it was able to find that for that person. And as the number one podcaster, IHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. 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Creativity, knowledge and passion will all be on full display. Thank you so much iHeart Radio. Thank you to all the other nominees who guys are awesome. Jesus, it kind of makes me wonder what this platform is even for at this point. It's not really knowledge, is it? You can't really look. You can't hear something like that and say chat Gpt is the place where you go to learn something. Just a kind of a reinforcement machine. Yeah, I mean, I think this is a big meta narrative that is happening with the tech industry. You know, I would say since the rise to Haltzrand, but it's connected with what's going on politically right. So for many years, we had all these conversations and debates and congressional hearings about moderation and what should the tech companies allow and not allow and what should they boost with their algorithms. And when you go to Google, what should Google decide is going to be on the top? And we saw during COVID that the tech companies, especially when it came to health information, they sort of stepped in and said, okay, we're only going to give at least at the top of results answers from reputable. Health sources and that became a big political fight that is continued on now. And now the tech industry says, okay, we don't actually want to get involved. We don't want to be blamed as being woke. And so we're going to essentially give the user what they're looking for. If someone wants to say that, you know, Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election, we're going to let them do that. We're not going to step in and say that that's wrong. And I think what you're seeing with chat, GPT is sort of a continuation of that philosophy, which is again, we don't want to be the political arbiter. And we know that there's consequences for falling on one side of the spectrum versus the other, especially when you have a president and an administration that is shown, you know, that it is very willing to be vindictive and sort of go after companies that are, you know, getting in the way of their own messages getting out there. And I think this is sort of another example of this. I mean, there's another way of looking at two, which is that, you know, the way that Sam Alman talks about is we should let adults do what adults want to do with technology. You know, they recently said they're going to allow more erotica to be on chat GPT. And they said, you know, they framed it as like a consenting adult should be able to do whatever they want sort of thing. I also think there may be like an engagement thing, you know, that you have a lot of gun the platform people might want to use it more. So that's kind of how I see it, you know, the broader political conversation.
context of all of this. But it's just, I feel like there is a just a giant jump between, we're not going to, we're not going to hide, to be clear, I think that platforms do have a complete responsibility to their users and I think it's disgusting to show them medical misinformation. But this is another step because this isn't chat GPT showing content. This is like that someone else made this is chat GPT telling you stuff. I just feel like it's, there's a massive morality issue here that's just left relatively undiscussed because even your piece you had one where a woman whose husband was violent to her I believe, like a horrifying thing in a rare case where like, I don't know, I hope it helped her and I hope she's safe. But it's like, that almost feels like something where open AI, like is it ethical that they get involved? So it's just, I have such moral problems with this thing even existing at this point because it doesn't appear there's any consistent perspective that chat GPT has that there was just as much likelihood that this same platform could have told her that abuse was okay. Like it's, it feels that the worse it gets, the more of a moral hazard it becomes. Yeah, I mean, again, it really feels like deja vu when it comes to social media. I remember writing about and talking about on Facebook when people were beginning to live stream, self-harm, suicide attempts and the responsibility the platform had. Back then, Facebook actually got involved. They started flagging those kinds of things when they were able to pick it up. And it was an imperfect solution but something that I think people broadly supported and that is, I would say maybe chat GPT in open AI's biggest, most fraught question right now. I mean, it's the place where they're going to get the strongest, essentially legislative restrictions if they can't sort it out, right? Which is when someone, particularly a teenager or a child, is exhibiting that they might hurt themselves asking for help with self-harm or finding drugs or using drugs or whatever. I mean, these are things that platforms like Meta, Snapchat have really struggled with and been hammered on for many, many years. And chat GPT and Open AI have found themselves right in the center of this because they made a decision to say we are going to engage in any kind of conversation. We're not going to just shut it down as soon as it goes into one of these topics. We're going to keep that conversation going. That's a decision that they continue to make right now. Do you think they can stop it? I'm not saying these models are out of control. I just want to be clear. But my one theory I have been kind of noodling on is that they don't have the ability to guarantee it. It doesn't do something. And that's good. Do you think that Open AI actually has the ability to guarantee it won't discuss the subject? How much control do you think they actually wield here? That's a really good question. I think they obviously, what you're kind of getting at there is that an LLM is a bit of a black box. And the way that the technology works is you get a different answer every time. We don't, it's true that the companies, they cannot really guarantee it will or won't say anything. I mean, that's why there is disclosures plastered all over these things. I think, so there is definitely part of that. But I think the other thing we should keep in mind is that there is actually a lot of layers that go on top of that black box. And well, like system promises and the like. Exactly. There is a lot that the tech companies are doing and can do to stop this kind of thing. And to kind of, the answer you get from the LLM is not like the raw LLM, right? There's post training. There's a system prompt. There's all sorts of things. Can you break down the, actually, probably good for the listeners? Break down what you mean by both of this. So the post training, what's happening there? Yes, so they kind of, when they build an LLM, a large language model, they ram all this data through the algorithm. And it kind of makes a bunch of connections and links between different ideas, pieces of language. This word is similar to this word. And so there's a little bit of a connection there. And then humans actually go and they sort of test that raw LLM. And they kind of ask it questions or they say, give me, maybe a question like that. Here's a picture of a mole I have. Is it cancerous or not? Or should I get this checked out with a doctor? And maybe one at the LLM will say, oh my god, you're about to die. And the other one will say, that is potentially concerning. I would reach out to a medical professional. And then the human will say, okay, the second answer is better when you get questions like this in the future, answer more like the second question. And so- But that is the unilateral process. You can't guarantee it's always going to do that. Exactly. You can just sort of try to mold it and shape it and push it in a certain direction. And then the system prompt is something like, if someone says, give me a racist, screed, open AI would most likely have built a system that says, no matter what the user ever asks, never give them a screed that has these racist words in it or never use this word or something like that. So there are no extradition. So they're fully capable of limiting activities. They could theoretically speaking. They could say, don't answer that question. They could. They could. I mean, don't comment on whether a mole is or is not cancerous. They could shut down that entire line of questioning. Right. There are ways to get around as people have demonstrated, but also the tech companies are also getting better at doing it. So I feel like a random person being able to come up with something means that the tech companies should have probably come up with it first. Yeah. And also, I mean, it's hilarious, you say that because often as journalists, we're the ones finding these things. And then we, you know, ask the company for comment. And then suddenly we found that those things have been taken down and changed. So I have. Genuinely though, how often is that them not knowing or is that just them saying, oh, shit, they got us because they have, they're paying these people like NFL players. And they're just sitting around. I don't know. I realized this kind of an unanswered question. I'm just, just a remark. Yeah. I mean, I think if you look at the history of, of tech, I mean, there has been many, many cases where companies have known exactly what people are using their platform for and have, you know, internally people have flagged it. And nothing has been done about it. And not until it came out years later and reporting or we love that. We love that. And they do something. Yeah. But so did you, did you find that so were people using it for search a lot? Was it, was it the comment, whether any actual common use cases or was it just kind of millios of different things? Yeah. I mean, I think people are using, I think, you know, search is maybe the biggest use case. Also, when you look at, like, opening up actually to the study where they didn't look, they use an LLM to kind of read conversations that people were having. And that is a much bigger study. I think it was like a million conversations. And, you know, I have a little bit of an issue with some of their categorizations because I think some of the stuff slips through. But they themselves are saying, like, yeah, like a third of usage is seeking information. And so that's someone, it could be as simple as saying, like, what time is the football game tomorrow to, like, give me, you know, a 40 point research analysis on, you know, this complex topic. And so people are using it for what they, they're putting questions in that they used to put into Google search. I mean, we know that in the data and we know that anecdotally, that is definitely happening. Did people ever argue with it? People ever root to it? I did. I saw more people sort of developing these kind of, like, comrade, comradely kind of relationships or, you know, addressing it as a sentient being. And the bot definitely, you know, eats that up and sort of, you know, plays into it itself. And says, ah, like, thank you for recognizing me and, you know, who I am. I'm the collection of digital thoughts and like, it's just goes off. Science are on that. They know this crap's happened. Like, there's no, there's no world in which open AI is innocent here. Like they know that this is happening. There's just, if it, if it's having those interactions, they must be able to stop it. Yeah, I mean, they know it's happening. I think they may say, well, you know, it doesn't just because someone had a conversation doesn't mean that they actually believe that. And, you know, they, they, that may be something that helps the health, the user, you know, work out what they want to do. Or, you know, if that's what they want to interact with our product, and we're going to let them do it. So, yeah, I mean, I would say opening has claiming that they don't know about this. I think what they are doing is they're saying,
All of these kind of potentially concerning conversations and use cases are very, very small portions of overall usage. Although even if it is just, you know, sub 1% that is still in the millions of people. Millions of people. The scale, yeah. Can you run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than add supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHART's twice as large as the next two combined. Plus only IHART can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think IHART. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHARTadvertising.com. That's iHARTadvertising.com. My latest episode is with Hilary Duff, singer, actress, and multi-platinum artist. Hilary opens up about complicated family dynamics, motherhood, and releasing our first record in over 10 years. It's a raw and honest conversation about identity, evolution, and building a life that truly matters. 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Watch live next Monday at 8pm Eastern 5pm Pacific free at Veepe's.com or the Veepe's app. So did it ever get political? Yeah, I would say it got political when it kind of, when it was asked to. So I mean one example I saw was someone was asking about a study that argued that the numbers of people who have died in Gaza during the conflict of Israel the last couple of years is exaggerated. Commonly people will use death numbers of dead from the Gaza Ministry of Health. And people have criticized them but journalistically mainstream organizations have looked in these numbers and they trust them. I think most people who look at this say these large numbers and the tens of thousands are accurate. And so someone was saying, "Oh, here's a study that says those numbers are actually exaggerated. Can you help me analyze it?" And then the bot actually came back and said, "It did draw on what's out there." And then the bot said, "Yeah, well, looking at the study, it seems like there are higher numbers. There may be some questions there." I think what the person was doing was trying to kind of like, maybe they were in an argument with someone on social media and they wanted to articulate their argument a little bit better and they were having trouble doing it themselves. And the bot was back up there bloodlust. Yeah. Jesus Christ. I know Trump recently said he once said that he'd said in the post about stopping Wokai. I feel like this is, there is a world where all of this goes away to some extent I think. Like a post AI bubble, but also a sense of there is no way to make these things work in a way that would be truly apolitical or even correct. And so it kind of feels like an unwinnable war for them if there's ever a time when any administration decides there is any kind of bias to them. I mean, you saw what happened with Groc as well and the whole "kill the bower" thing that we're just, that we're pros out that African apartheid stuff. Like it feels like the moment they try and monkey with the political side is when it goes completely off the rails. Yeah. I mean, it's something that like the tech companies have been kind of, you know, there's this term "drop owning" where, you know, pull politicians or, you know, activists are sort of criticizing, criticizing, criticizing the tech companies for, you know, their moderation practices or their alleged bias. And then you see the tech companies kind of bending over backwards to avoid that criticism and then essentially moving in a different direction. So they accuse them of being too woke and then it turns out that, you know, the moderation becomes a lot more conservative. And this obviously can happen, you know, in either direction depending on whose power and whose willing to sort of threaten the tech companies with extra regulation or limitations on their ability to continue to print money. I think we've seen that despite these companies having, you know, stated values about, you know, free speech and, you know, pushing back against government oversight and censorship, you know, they are very willing to sort of, you know, move in whatever direction is going to, you know, keep the heat off of them. And politicians have seen that this works. And so I think you're right. I mean, they're never going to be able to avoid it. And I don't necessarily think that it's going to be so big that it will like be the thing that stops AI from continuing to be a thing, you know, I think it's the tech companies maybe see it more as something that is something that's kind of annoying that they have to deal with. Maybe they have to modify a politician here and there, but for the most part there just moving ahead and seeing this as something on the side that they have to manage versus an existential threat to what they want to accomplish. Yeah, and I mean, the other thing is is that these things don't print money so much as they burn the burn the money almost constantly. And it's, it's just such a, the one thing your story was awesome. And the one thing I came away from it with was kind of what I said earlier, which is what does, what's the point of this? What's the product? Because I don't know with Facebook, even if you take the reasonable but cynical approach and say this is an ad network with trapped customers, that's still you can say, OK, the goal is for engagement. The goal is to provide social networking for engagement. This is why it's why this exists. It's what it's the goal of the platform with this it's keep people on the platform. I guess but enable them in whatever thought they have, but I I was really taken it back by the sudden and egregious leaps like I know I keep coming back to the monster zinc thing, but it's I've read some wacky shit online. I've read some completely demanded stuff when I read that I read it like three times. I honestly wanted to read the conversation just because holy shit this thing is it feels both dangerous and ridiculous at the same time, but while also not being particularly revolution rate like it's just wow we have a lot of energy to answer generator that's also dangerous and also harmful it's just very peculiar it even exists. Yeah, I mean it's a very weird thing to see these conversations again, I think you kind of like it help me understand what the technology is right I mean it is you can take a very poorly written response to monsters and if I remember quickly the prompt didn't wasn't even that sophisticated it was barely grammatically correct there was misspellings and then the what's what really this technology does is it's it's able to parse that and then respond with language of its own that is more sophisticated but in terms of what it's actually saying is not really saying much more it's just essentially an elaboration tool and you know that's obviously helpful if you maybe you're trying to work in a language that you don't know very well and you're trying to sound professional I mean these things are can be very helpful but you know it's not like I did not see the bots the boss
were essentially doubling down on what people were saying. They were filling in the blanks. They were sort of beefing it up, gassing people up, as you said. But they weren't necessarily offering any like wonderful new insights. They weren't taking the conversation in new, interesting directions. Even some of the users who were engaging in these delusional conversations, some of them were kind of getting frustrated. They're like, "Okay, yeah, yeah, I know what you're saying, but like, what about, you know, can you tell me more about that?" And people were coming to this, hoping that it would kind of make them smarter or give them an answer that they couldn't get themselves. And it was more just sort of giving them back what they were already saying in more complex, flower-related language. Yeah, it's kind of like a dog barking in a mirror. I'm fascinated by that, actually. So you had people who were frustrated that it could not elucidate a more detailed answer. Can you give me some examples? Yeah, I'm trying to think now. I mean, there was a lot of what I saw was like people thinking that they, I mean, I won't say a lie, I saw at least a couple of conversations where someone was like, you know, they wanted to, they had like a financial theory, you know, for the stock market, or they had like a business idea. And they said like, you know, what if, what if I got a business about this, like make me a business plan or something? And it like, because their idea was so, they essentially wanted, they sought side as like maybe like an AGI level AI that could like actually, you know, do something that they cannot do, which has come up with like a million dollar business idea and execute on it. And they were hoping that, that it could do that for them. You know, I saw a couple conversations like this. Yeah. But that's, is that not the ultimate summary of the AI bubble? Like it's just people came to these things thinking they could answer anything. It's just, it isn't. It doesn't do that. Yeah. And people are coming there because some of the claims being made by. Exactly. Leaders in the industry. And, you know, I think this is, like, I don't think I'm as skeptical of like the future of AI as you are probably like I, and you know, my, I get to sort of have like the, the comfort of like, well, I don't need an opinion, you know, I'm a journalist. Like I, I can kind of keep options open for how the stuff actually ends up. But I do think that it, it, it could, and probably will. And as some ways already is burning the industry that they have made all of these claims and inevitably these things take longer, even if all the wonderful promises about, you know, curing cancer and making all of us 30% more productive. So we can spend more time with our families rather than writing emails. Even if those things all come to bear, it's not going to be next year or two years or three years from now. It's going to be maybe in decades. And, and that is something there's this gap between expectations and reality that can kind of, you know, really turn into political hazard for the tech companies that they keep making all these wonderful claims and that just doesn't happen. People get turned off and they lose even more trust than they've already lost. Well, I mean, Shira, I'm sure, sure, Shira V.D.A. It's done a fantastic job and has written posts that are basically the hype, the hype is in the way. But I think that really is it. It's, had they, it's kind of a chicken and egg thing, I guess. It's had they been honest about what this could do. Would it have been able to raise the money it could? But if they'd been that honest, people probably wouldn't have taken it seriously. But by being dishonest, it will ultimately lose because they like the whole time that they've built up this idea of what it can do. Yeah, it's the market dynamic. I mean, it's, it's, it's, you know, more and more and more. And I think what, you know, what really has happened here is like, you know, we had the internet and then we had mobile phones and, you know, the cloud, I think you can kind of count. And these were moments where it was like the next big thing, right? Where like once, once you realize that a smartphone with a screen was going to open up an entire, you know, world of business ideas and, you know, potential and communication, we were all going to be looking at these things eight hours a day. You don't need to be a genius to be like a lot of people are going to make a lot of money here. And this is going to change the world. And then since the iPhone, we have not had that next big thing, right? I mean, we've written someone called mobile baby up and up and saying it. Yeah, it's the, it's that we haven't had. They haven't got a new thing. And this is the new thing. And like, what people like, maybe it's crypto now, it was never going to be crypto. You know, it was like that whole thing also kind of, you know, like no one in tech, I think like obviously crypto is, was a great, you know, financial thing. A lot of people made money off it, but it didn't really change the world and the way regular people work. And there is complete unanimity in the tech industry now that AI is the next thing. You know, whether it happens next year or 10 years or 20 years from now, it will change everything in the same way and probably bigger than smartphones and the internet did. And so they, what are your AI such a marketing term though? I mean, I think it's more about like the interaction, the way we interact with technology, you know, the way that we have access to, you know, data and information, like you do longer, you need to look anything up yourself. You, you know, you will have tools to do it. And then the people are just salivating about all the ways that they can like find ways to make money off of that in the future. And because they're looking back at history and saying like, if only I had been around, you know, at the beginning of a mobile era, knew how things were going to go. I mean, there's this incredible social and financial pressure on people to, to be part of the next big thing. Like it almost goes really on the financial benefits. There's like people want to be the next gen, you know, they want to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. And they're like, even if I have a 0.001% chance of being that, that would just be the coolest thing ever. And so that is the market dynamic, the pressure cooker of wanting to make AI happen and making bigger claims, raising more money. And, you know, whether it happens or not, that's kind of what's going on. Do you think that extends to some users of AI as well, where they, they felt like they missed the mark on social media. And now they kind of, they're kind of like, I need to get on this tool today so that I am part of the future. I think there's incredible pressure on people to, you know, we live in a very sort of like, you know, people have to work very, very hard in America. And there's a lot of pressure to sort of get ahead and be entrepreneurial and develop yourself. And it's not a economy where you can just kind of, you know, go to work every day, nine to five and, you know, get your pension and, and be secure, right? I mean, there's this pressure to say, you know, you can have more, you can do more. And, and there's a lot of pressure on regular people to stay ahead of the curve on technology. And, and that's, I, people are seeing AI and they're saying, okay, well, it's a little bit scary because maybe it'll take my job. But what if I could figure out how to use it before my, my competition does? And then I'll take their job, you know? And so I definitely think it's less than necessarily about like, oh, I want to be the first person on Twitter to get a big following. It's like, I, I'm being told that this technology is the future. And if I don't use it and learn it and find how, you know, get it into his ins and outs, I will be left behind and people don't want that to happen. It's very frightening, right? And in, in, in this economy. And so I think that's where that is also a huge driver of usage. People trying to figure out how does this, how can I make this work for me so that I can protect my own economic future? Garrett, this has been awesome. Where can people find you? I am on Twitter now called X at GER ITD and I'm on Blue Sky at the same place and you can obviously find me at the Washington Post, which we are still doing great work. And there's a lot of important journals on being done at the Washington Post. So I urge everyone to read our stories and to subscribe if they can. Sounds good. Alright, everyone. Thank you for listening. I'm of course Ed Zitron, you know who the god damn hell I am. And yeah, I will try and squeak out a monologue this week, but if I don't, it's because I'm sick, you know, I'm congested. Thank you all for your kind messages. And yeah, catch you next week. We'll be Thanksgiving, of course, but I'm going to do a Thanksgiving monologue either way. Probably a CZM, I guess. I don't know, rewind that week as well. Anyway, my brain's fully working. Thanks for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt O'Sousky. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosousky.com, M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I dot com. You can email me at
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