The Independent Creator

Uncover the hidden gems of the digital landscape for independent creators. Join us as we navigate the exciting world of alternative platforms and services, empowering you to forge your own path. Each episode reveals invaluable insights and tools to help you break free from conventional constraints and thrive as a truly independent creator. Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting out, our mission is to equip you with the knowledge and resources to turn your creative vision into reality.

Hey, there's going to be some interesting things going on tonight during this episode.

It's going to be raining AI, right?

That's the whole, everyone is just talking about AI, AI this, AI that.

I mean, it's kind of weird how we've gone from almost nothing since a couple of years

ago to what we have now is just like a deluge, a monsoon of AI, of just making its way into

everything that we do really.

So strap in folks, let's go ahead, get right into the meat and potatoes of independent

podcasts, independent creator podcasts.

I know it's been a while, but let's actually get started.

Some of the stuff that we've been talking about or looking at is AI has been just invading

every aspect, almost every aspect of our lives as regular people or as a content creators

or any kind of creating aspect.

It's just becomes really a big part of what we do nowadays is AI.

And many people are looking at AI is like this, the boogeyman.

I know, I know that a lot of aspects, especially in the art community and other kinds of creation,

it is a invader of sorts really, where like things like Sora or Midjourney when it first

started out.

We got like Gemini, we got Deep Seek is a new one that just came out.

It's AI has just glomped on everything.

And many of us have really gone full circle into embracing AI to replace what we do as

a creative endeavor.

And I think that can lead to some things that are not conducive to how we used to be creative

in creating content and doing our normal day to day hobbies and jobs.

One of the things I like to say is that with the art field, there are some aspects that

I know I'll probably get some flack on it, but there are some things that might, this

is very, like very, very tiny amount that might actually help.

But then again, that very tiny amount is completely overshadowed by AI art taking over everything.

Let's just take a look at the recent Coca-Cola holiday ad a couple months ago back in the

holiday season, where normally we'll see the Clydesdales pulling, oh, that's Anheuser-Busch,

but Santa and the polar bears and the trucks and everything coming through.

And it's just kind of like, you know, let's do this in AI.

We don't want to pay people to make this stuff.

No, no, no, we don't want to do that.

So let's all do it in AI.

And it was really, really bad.

I mean, seriously bad.

The of course AI cannot, it has a hard problem with text and words.

And you can definitely tell on some of the shots with like the Coca-Cola logo on the

truck, it was completely messed up.

You see Coca, but the hyphen and Cola was all like squished and just didn't look correct.

So yeah.

And that brought a lot of outrage from people, which they were perfectly within their right

to say, why would you do this?

You used to pay people, artists and videographers and character designers and visual effects

and whatnot to create your advertisements.

It's just that Coca-Cola decided, oh, well, we'll go cheap.

We'll pay AI to do it.

I mean, how bad can it be?

And it was pretty bad.

I mean, you had like six fingered people and all sorts of stuff like that, misspelled words.

And it brought up a backlash really where in their right Coca-Cola deserved it.

And oh, there was, oh, there was the show on Disney plus the secret world, a secret

war.

It was an MCU.

But again, that was also a backlash with the opening intro to the show was done in AI.

And people were furious.

It's like, this is, you can have someone do something like this or better.

It's just, I'm sorry, you decided to be cheap and go this route.

It's like, yeah, you can't use AI for everything.

Certain aspects in certain job scenarios, yes, it can be used as a tool, but we'll get

into that in a little bit here.

But yeah, AI is pretty much just inundating everything that we are seeing here.

So one of the things is that I like to bring up here is that people have been putting in

what's called like poison pills or anything along that line to kind of make their content

poisoned.

So AI would not be able to scrape it and use their content in its learning process.

And it's been ongoing for a what, year or two of different ways of how to go about this.

So like in this Ars Technica article that I have on screen here is that one, how one

YouTuber is trying to poison AI bot stealing her content.

So specializing garbage field captions are invisible to humans, but it's confounding

to AI.

Now normally this will work, no problem.

Unfortunately, as we go through to the bottom here, there was some issues where that AI

is getting smart enough to see if the content is poison pilled and it can bypass it and

scrape it as normal, which is interesting, but also we're getting into go into an arms

race really.

If you think about it, it's very similar to how the US and Russia back in the fifties

and sixties with the space race.

It was, oh, we'll get one thing.

We'll with Russia launching Sputnik.

Okay.

That kicked America's butt to do something that's better, as is back and forth.

But eventually it's like with something with AI is that we're going to be spending more

time and effort into creating poison pills and trying to get the avenues of AI scraping

content so far that, you know, you're spending more time and creating these poison pills

than you're actually creating your art or your content.

And that's, I'm not saying that's a bad thing.

It's, it's something that will, we all have to realize what's important is how far we

can go with this.

Is it going to be easier to create something that totally screws up AI's content scraping

to the point where it's like, okay, it's, it's good for next month, but the month after

it's back, we're back to square one again.

And it's kind of, okay, well, let's try this again.

And it's just, you know, it's an arms race really with AI and content scraping.

And you know, it's something that we have to look forward to, not even years down the

line.

We're not, I'm not talking like five, 10 years.

We're talking like maybe a year to three where AI has gotten so good at detecting poison

pill content when it's going through its learning process that it can easily identify, work

out what has been poisoned, reconfigure it, and then see its actual form and then learn

from that.

So it's kind of, again, like I said, it's an arms race.

And one thing as a content creator that I have seen many times is that a YouTuber, like

I have another Ars Technica, excuse me, Ars Technica article here is we've seen this plenty

of times that's happened is that Zero Warnings, longtime YouTuber rails against unexplained

channel removal.

As a founder of a small but mighty music software brand called Sins Vibes, spent more than 15

years building a YouTube channel with all original content to promote his business products.

Over all those years, he never had any issues with YouTube's automated content removal system

until today, pretty much.

When YouTube without issuing a single warning abruptly deleted his entire channel.

And we've seen this constantly that people post up, "Hey, YouTube has demonetized my

video," or "My channel has been completely killed or nuked."

And good luck trying to get any kind of response from YouTube because, you know, unless you

are these big YouTube giants like MrBeast or MKHB Marquez, you're not really going to

get any kind of traction from YouTube support because you're just going to be hitting an

automated brick wall.

There is, you're not really going to get any kind of human interaction.

And this is a part where AI has taken over the moderation side of things as well.

Is that, yes, YouTube has made some inroads and made things better, especially years ago.

Viacom, we almost pretty much lost, could have lost YouTube is when Viacom sued YouTube

for copyright infringement or with IP, stuff like that.

And at the time, this was probably like eight years ago or longer than that now, is that

YouTube spent billions of dollars and years to create their content ID system.

Yes, it's not perfect by far, but it is something, excuse me, that is perfectly capable of finding

a copyrighted material that's within a video and flagging it and saying, hey, this is not,

you don't have permission to play this.

So in that effect, AI is in that aspect a good thing.

Like I said, it's not perfect, but it's better than nothing and then having no service to

begin with, no video hosting service whatsoever.

And I know some people will complain is that, oh, it's pulling false positives.

Like, yes, again, it's not perfect, but it's better.

And you could have not had YouTube at the, what was it, 20, I want to say 2010.

I forget exactly when it was, but it would have created a deficit at a time when it was

the early internet.

And it's something that we can think of and trying to get past this issue with my throat

is this compounding it where I should rely on AI to make my own fake voice.

And I've seen a lot of channels or a lot of videos or channels on YouTube that is this

AI slop that, oh, the thumbnail is great, but when you start clicking into it, it's

AI voice and instantly you can tell it's an AI voice that someone has this, you know,

went through a chippity and created a script and then put that through something to create

a, what's it, 11 labs to have the read the script and the voice.

And it's not good.

There have been some times where it's like, oh, is this AI or is it not?

But going back to how things are in YouTube, I know people have their issues with YouTube.

I do too.

But the thing is, is that it's a major player in how things are, are working out.

And if we did not have YouTube, we would not have a peer tube or anything like that at

our current time.

I'm not saying that it would never happened, but it would have taken a lot longer because,

well, no, I take that back because it could have been something.

YouTube did prove to the world that a large video hosting platform could work.

It's just that it had taken time for places like peer tube to come into fruition, to go

through it, appear to not peer to peer to peer side of things is how they work.

And would it have been on a scene sooner?

It's kind of hard to tell.

I'm not sure about that.

And it's something that, I mean, we can definitely take it to the comments.

If you think that peer tube could have been, you know, here on the scene sooner, if YouTube

had gone down with Viacom's lawsuit.

So let me know in the comments, but other than that, AI, it also affects the artist

world.

I've touched on that at the beginning where the art community, especially on Instagram,

they saw that Meta was going to be using all of their art or pretty much anybody's post

on Instagram was going to be used in machine learning for Meta's Llama AI or whatever they

have it called.

So a person or a group of people decided to open up a new site called Kara.

So Kara is a social media and portfolio sharing platform for artists and art enthusiasts.

And the important part is that they have built in aspects to detect AI art and they don't

allow it on it.

Like it says here, many platforms currently accept AI art when these models are not ethically

built while others sometimes promise no AI forever without considering the scenarios

where adoption of such technologies may happen at the workplace in the coming years.

So they have a stance on their AI's.

They do not agree with generative AI tools in their current unethical form.

And we won't host AI generated portfolios unless the rampant ethical and data privacy

issues around data sets are resolved via regulation.

In the event that legislation is passed to clearly protect artists, we believe that AI

content should always be clearly labeled because the public should always be able to search

for human made art and media easily.

Which is a great thing to see that, you know, I'm not going to go to their main page because

sometimes it might be a little spicy content showing on the main page.

And yeah, we're not going to have that here.

We don't do that here.

It's not, we try to keep it family friendly as much as possible.

Anyways, it's great to see that a platform, a growing platform as they had when they first

started, I believe at the beginning of 2023.

I know somebody probably correct me on that.

That's what I'm looking for is that they had a rough go really.

It was such high demand that their servers would be just like lit ablaze that there was

happening there, site crashes.

It was not working too well.

And eventually it looks like they have gotten past that point where, you know, everything

has leveled out to the point where it's just perfectly fine now.

And they have a growing community of artists and art, like I said, artists and art enthusiasts

to go to a place that is not under the meta umbrella.

And one of the things that I seen, especially with meta, with like through Facebook, threads,

Instagram.

And one of those is that they use your accounts post as, you know, machine learning, machine

learning for their AI systems is that it's not the fact that the content that they're

using is public, which it is, but it's also on their service, which is perfectly fine

for them to do because you're using their service for free.

So in effect, you are the product.

So you can't say, you can't do this.

They can, you're using their service.

If you don't want your stuff on their service, stop using it.

It's simple as fact, really.

And a lot of people are going to go through this denial.

It's kind of, I just posted up on our website or our main site about, you know, trying to

migrate people away into using the Fediverse products.

It's going to take, you have to be patient.

It's going to take a long time, especially for the normal people like your mom, your

dad, your parents, brothers, sister, aunts, uncles, anybody in your family.

It's going to take time.

You're going to have to be patient with them, walk them through.

It's going to be a slow process.

And don't freak out about anything that they say, oh, my friends aren't here yet.

Well, no, not yet, but you can find other people and we'll go and try and get them onto

the service as well.

Try to move away from Facebook and places like that.

And a lot of places are using machine learning from the content that you provide for free

to these major platforms.

And ChatGPT had been using pretty much, oh, almost everything that's on the web as they're

learning.

But they kind of got, not Sherlocked because that's an Apple term for taking an app and

putting it into the core.

But when these Chinese, this Chinese company DeepSeek came out with their, you know, their

big machine learning platform, they used ChatGPT information.

It's like, how dare you steal the content that we stole from everybody else?

And everybody's freaking out.

And it's kind of like, well, you stole the content.

So technically it's not yours.

So you can't be mad.

And of course, everybody, yes, it is the whole thing that, oh, the Chinese are just taking

our stuff.

And they do a lot of, they've been doing, I think, I think it is also in this article

here.

No, Virg.

Stupid paywall.

I can't even, anyways, I was going to have it up here.

See if I can, but yeah, that's not working.

Yeah.

It's a Virg has put a subscription model on their stuff, but anyways.

So what it was is that DeepSeek had used a lot, pretty much, I think a lot of information,

the language models that ChatGPT was using or OpenAI was using to create their ChatGPT.

And they have also used GPUs that they've gotten from other resources and they spent

billions of dollars creating DeepSeek.

And what happened is that when it became public that last, what, two, a week ago, on that

Monday, everything like dropped in the stock market.

It, what was it like 600, no, it was like, it was an insane number, $600 billion market

cap from OpenAI, all the other ones like Meta.

Pretty much when you looked at the stock market, everything was in red and falling fast.

Now not to say that it stayed that way, it was quickly bounced back within a day or two.

But the problem was, is that DeepSeek proved that you can have a ChatGPT like service for

not even a fraction of the cost that ChatGPT was charging and saying that was, that's what

we were charging because it's very expensive and all this energy and stuff like that.

DeepSeek said, yeah, hold my beer, we're going to do it for a lot less.

And everyone freaked out.

And it was wild to see that this Chinese AI companies has come in, upend the tech pros

of the US and just like, yeah, we can do it better, cheaper and faster.

And now I'm saying that as a good thing, because we move into the cons and to the bad thing

is that it's a Chinese AI company.

And of course, everything going into a Chinese company or by a Chinese company is part of

the Chinese government.

And then you have all your ramifications on top of that.

And then the data sucking of these services, it's just kind of like, you know, you don't

want, if you don't want your information out there, the US is just as bad or probably worse

than the Chinese government.

But yeah, it's like Fox, yeah, he says his org filed an expedited change to ban traffic

to the Chinese.

Yeah.

And a lot of people are, again, freaking out.

They're putting in legislation and saying, trying to block.

I have my own qualms about that as well.

Because it's like, well, it's OK if we do do the domestic spying, but we don't want

the Chinese to see it because they're coming into our turf and we don't want that.

Right.

I mean, yes, going of the Chinese market with the tide into the government, there is a lot

of stuff that we don't want to be pushed through into their servers.

It's bad enough that we have domestic spying is just as bad or if not worse than a foreign

one.

So without going in any too political down paths down that way, we'll move on to how

you know, AI is actually earned a Grammy.

That's right.

I don't know if you guys are into like the award seasons or anything like that, but.

I'm not going to scroll down because I'll probably get that.

Paywall block, but I have people forget the Beatles had a song, a restored and actually

won a Grammy.

So it's kind of like we're pretty much just like, hey, AI is working on everything.

It can even win music awards.

What's next, an Oscar or a Tony?

Golden Globe for AI wins.

It's just one of those things where it's just like, how far are we going to go?

I mean, you can there are if you if you didn't share it out.

The show Ozone started up Fireside Fetty, where he talked to for the first episode,

Gabe Kangas, the creator of owncast pretty much.

And he mentioned that there is a owncast channel that is like 24/7 live stream of an AI generated

music channel that just goes through.

And I haven't found it yet or haven't listened to it yet.

So it's kind of interesting to see that.

Yes, it's it's it's not it's not a serious thing.

It's just one of those things where it's kind of like.

Let's just know it's for the camp, for the goof.

But it's just interesting that you can create music with AI.

Is it going to be good?

Nine times out of 10?

No.

But.

Is it is it possible?

Yeah.

And it's also interesting to see that people can use do this for a laugh.

Because again.

You're not going to you're not going to say, oh, any kind of AI generation is bad.

Any kind of any kind of tools, a hammer can be used for bad intentions, but you can build

a house with it.

You can build a couch or a coffee table or a kitchen table.

But does the tool itself become a bad thing if used in a bad way?

No.

Is this and how you look at things that how the tools are used in a case for that own

cast channel?

It's for the laughs.

It's like, hey, we understand that what we're doing is completely stupid and it probably

doesn't make sense.

It's probably funny.

But, you know.

It's just a tool as a tool being used in that way is.

Is a good thing.

Now, I know some people probably going to say, well, that's not good.

Any kind of use of AI is not good and just get rid of AI completely.

I say, hold on, hold your horses.

It's not completely bad.

Again, what I do, I use a little bit of AI for creating my written articles and cleaning

stuff up, because what I do is I write the first draft, have it go through the AI generation

of like grammar, tonality and stuff like that to kind of like tighten it up a little bit.

And then what I do is I go back over it to make sure that it's me.

Now, is my use of that AI bad?

In some people's mind, yes, I am a horrible person for using AI in that way.

But for me, because I have very limited time between nine to five and doing this content

creation and trying to get everything all started up here, I have very limited time.

I can spend hours creating a blog post, doing the editing and stuff like that.

And then do have one out once every week or maybe once every two weeks.

Would that be a good part or good use of my time?

I'm still creating a content first.

I'm still editing, editing, editing.

I'm just going to go with it.

The content two, three times just to make sure that what I created is part of what the

final product is.

Now I don't use AI for creating this content, the videos or anything like that.

Now I go through, yeah, editing.

I go through, especially for like this particular episode, what I'm going to do is cut off the

first part of the pre-show stuff, tightening up the silent parts where I need to get a

drink of water and running through Whisper AI to get the transcript going, the subtitles,

because yes, I could pay a company to do that, but it's very expensive and time consuming

to go through.

So I go through and use a tool that is created.

Fox, quiet you.

Go through and use a tool to cut my workflow time down to much more manageable process.

And I can still go through and make sure that the transcript is going to be as fine as it

can be.

I'm not going to really, I give it like one or two passes because I know if I spend any

more time on it, it's a transcript.

It's, you know, it is what it is.

But also the subtitles are going to be created as well.

So I'm not going to, basically if I go through this hour long video and do the transcripts

and then go back through and do the subtitling that if I did it all myself, that takes hours

or days to go through, especially if I don't have that much time.

I work, like I said, nine to five, I'm focused on focused on the work, but it's kind of like

I don't have the time.

So I use a tool to make my process much quicker, more efficient.

I still have my personal touch as part of the final product.

So in that case, AI is perfectly fine used as a tool.

It's not replacing my work.

It's just tightening it up.

It's just, you know, it's just like having an editor go through your work.

And the thing is, it's perfectly fine if you use it that in that way.

If for art side of things, yeah, I can see where you're creating art as you're an artist

and you create like your own thumbnails or you create your own, your own works of art

and using AI that could be kind of not kind of, but it could be perceived as something

that is you're kind of cheating yourself.

Where I create all the thumbnails myself, I do all those, all these great works of art

myself.

I'm not the best, but I'm trying.

And if you looked at the older videos, those thumbnails, oof, wow.

But I like to do the thumbnails myself.

Sure, I can pay somebody.

I mean, all this stuff I can do, I can pay somebody, but I'm going to be flat broke.

I'll be paying them for maybe what, one or two months and that's it.

And I'm broke.

So it's, you have to kind of, you know, figure it out where, I'm not going to say where your

morals lie, but you kind of have to look at where your workflow is, could be made better

by using certain things.

So that in of itself is where I, my personal viewpoints for AI is it lands on that for

art.

Yeah.

You can probably play around with it and says, you know, create some goofy stuff.

And it's cool in that way.

It's like, yeah.

Play going mid journey and say, yeah, make, create a scene of a polar bear skating down

a grassy field or grassy mountain wearing a tutu and playing a ukulele and just have

some fun with that.

And it's stupid art, but you know, it's just something that you can play around with.

You're like, yeah, that was cool.

I'm bored.

And you just not worry about it, not use it anymore because it is what it is.

It has to get back to the art thing.

It does have that kind of, it's not that it has a soulless kind of feel to it.

It doesn't say, Hey, look at, look at what I'm doing.

And it doesn't really have like the human touch.

A lot of the art, yeah, let's just say that AI and the art field is getting better, but

it still has that, that feeling of just like the fakiness of it.

Because you can tell.

And I know some people are probably saying, well, or probably have been told that, oh,

your art is AI, which in fact it is not.

And I know Corey, Corey artist, he does a lot of digital art form and he's really good.

And he, he does what he, he live streams it in order to not just prove what the works

of art that he does is something that he has himself created, but it's also to get more

people accustomed to seeing the art being made.

It's a slow process.

Sometimes he doesn't finish a piece of work within like three hours or less.

And it takes like a couple of streams to finish up.

But the thing is, is that you can see the process being, you can see the sausage being

made.

So with AI, it's all done in the back room behind the, behind the screen.

So ignore the AI behind the screen kind of, kind of deal.

And then it's like, here you go.

I got your, your thingy.

But in art, it's taking away a lot of the creativeness of an artist, your work.

A lot of people are just solely relying on AI art and it sucks to see that so many people

are gravitating to this quick, dirty, cheap made, basically TikTokified content that,

you know, a actual person making art is getting left by the wayside.

And I kind of like to say, what if like Leonardo da Vinci or Picasso and then the rest, you

know, his famous artists and these famous painters, if they were creating, if they,

if they were alive today, creating their artwork today, how bad of a reception would they be

receiving from the general public is saying, Oh, I can create something like that in like

20, less than 20 minutes.

Why should I pay you thousands of dollars to create a commission, a piece of art for

me?

No, I was just get my $20 a month, go to mid journey or Sora or whatever, a Gemini and

then create the content.

And then I could pass it off.

Like I made this piece of junk, but again, I'm not saying that all AI is bad.

That's that's not what I want to have people take away from this episode and saying that

all AI, all AI is bad.

Certain elements of an AI, especially in a written form is just for editing or constructing

of different ways of ideal structure and then having a human interaction of going through

that process and to make sure what has been created from a human piece of work is still

viewable as a human piece of work, but with a little bit of tightening here and there

are, there's not that much give and take.

It's kind of black and white per se, where art going in, art coming out and what you

get is not human made.

So I want to say with, if you take away from this episode is to look at AI as something

to be not to be feared.

Don't treat it as a boogeyman.

Give it, give it a good look over and say, okay, what is this going to be doing?

What how does this work?

How does it work against my work?

And what is this changing?

And some things like deep seek.

Yeah.

It's, it's changing the, the complete nature of the infrastructure of how the AI open AI

and all the rest of them are fundamentally working with their infrastructure and why

is it so expensive and why are we burning half the planet to create crappy art?

But you know, it's, it's AI is not going anywhere.

We had that, that genie has been, that bottle has been open.

Pandora's box has been opened.

You're not putting that away now.

It's, it's something that we have to learn to deal with.

Yes, it sucks, but we have to figure out a way to contain the damage as much as possible

and a lot of avenues.

So take it for what you will, whatever your AI viewpoints are, would definitely love to

hear about them.

And if you completely disagreed with everything I said tonight or in this episode, do be sure

to post them in the comments down below.

If you agreed, same thing.

If you can care less, you know, put a poop emoji down there too.

I don't care.

It's engagement.

You know, I'm a working the AI YouTube or YouTube AI to get engagement going through.

And if you haven't already, we'd definitely love to see you over on a two-ton waffle.com

and join the community.

We have our forums.

Love to see you there.

Well, we talked about all this sort of stuff.

We talked about indie games.

We talk about AI.

We talk about content creation, alternative platforms, and a little bit of everything

else.

We might even talk about the price of eggs.

Who knows that might get into a different Avenue.

But anyways, thanks for coming out tonight and do be sure to hit the subscribe and I'll

see you next time here on the independent creator podcast.

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