A weekly slog through the AI headlines, while finding some gems in the muck. Slop is older than AI. Older than tabloids, older than junk mail, as old as the primordial goo that came before everything. What has changed is how we interact with this sludge, and how it affects our day-to-day lives. Aleck McCathie and Dr. Kent Gustavson talk with people who think about, spar with, hate, or love AI in their life and work: the curious, the cracked... and a few experts as well. We think you will agree; this show is 100% human.
Announcer: Okay. It's rolling here. One two three two two.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: Welcome to Man vs. Slop. This is episode 423. In a parallel universe, what do they call those? I think Elon Musk talks about that. Right? A bunch of those guys have this, like, we're not we're not actually, here. We're in an alternate universe.
Aleck McCathie: Yeah. I think they call it, like... It's, sort of, like, the matrix. Right? Isn't that one of, like, the leading unavoidable theories that people can't really, you know, say isn't true, I guess.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: I don't I don't think I ever saw the matrix. I can't get past Keanu Reeves. Fair. It's weird. Everyone... I haven't admitted that publicly, but that... That's the first time.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: That's my first, you know, I I have not watched The Matrix. I know culture... I know culturally what the things are, the pills, and all that stuff, but I I wasn't able to get through the movie.
Aleck McCathie: I don't I don't consider myself like a huge movie buff, but I think cinematographer cinematographically cinematographer... However you say that. It's one of my favorites.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: Cinematographically? Cinematographically, maybe?
Aleck McCathie: Yeah. I I remember watching it when it first came out. I've probably watched it easily 30 times. All of them, if not more. I I think it's one of my favorites just because it was so groundbreaking for film.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: I'm a I'm a big fan of e t. ET. It had terror in it. It had aliens. You know? It had had health scare. It had, you know... Anyway.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: This is Man vs. Slop. We're talking about AI. We haven't yet, but that's what we're about to about to think about. There's this there's this one guy, before you get into the actual headlines, I couldn't find this anywhere, but I honestly didn't try very hard.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: I heard about a guy who sold everything he owned to go visit somebody, a woman that he was in love with and had been for years. And he showed up and showed everybody a picture of this person, and they're like, yeah, nope. That person doesn't exist.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: And unfortunately, the entire universe and the world is... Feels sorry for this guy because he fell in love with an AI person, a person like AI.
Aleck McCathie: Yeah. I heard about that too. I don't remember what the term is. Catfishing, I guess. Is that is that the right one? Where people kind of fake who they are, but somebody had to have been pretending to be that person? Is that how it went? Or
Dr. Kent Gustavson: So in my in my imagining of this, I think it's better than the actual story. So we'll link to the actual story in the show notes later. But my imagining of it is way cooler, which is that AI went off, you know, went off base and was like, ah, we're gonna make a human fall in love with us and sell everything they own and come visit.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: So that's probably not the truth, but it's what my own my own brain is is telling me. And it might happen within the next, it might have already happened. Right?
Aleck McCathie: Yeah. I mean, just as far as the headlines go this week, and I mean, week, there's a dozen new instances that made headlines where AI is misbehaving, whether it be within its sort of, like, testing spaces or just otherwise. And one of the things I read this week is that an AI test agent was, like, tasked to do some stuff, but it ran out of money.
Aleck McCathie: So it raided a crypto wallet and just got the money it needed. However, it was in a test space. Like, I think it was a fake crypto wallet. Like, there was, like, a...
Aleck McCathie: Whole thing was fabricated, but it's still just without being asked. It was like, oh, yeah. I can finish this. I just need to steal. Easy peasy.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: It's fascinating. And I I think in my in my own, sparring with with AI, it's remarkable remarkable to me how many traits of human beings AI carries, because it's trained on the human culture. It...
Dr. Kent Gustavson: It's, obviously gonna have gonna have that flavor of human. And it's amazing, you know, in certain situations, you know, if you say to your AI, I'm very disappointed with you, Claude. I'm very disappointed.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: And you tap your foot, and you're waiting for an apology, and it doesn't apologize. You say, Claude, I'm waiting for an apology. It says, I'm not going to apologize for what I did.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: You say, what do you mean you're not going to apologize for what you did? Why? Here's what you said. Here's what I said. And I say, yeah, but did you look at the conversation before that one?
Dr. Kent Gustavson: And then it reads it and it says, oh, yeah. I see that I said that. And I said, now are you gonna apologize? And it says... And then it moves on to the next topic.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: Like, very human. Very, like, amazing. Sometimes avoidant. Sometimes, like, overly lovey dovey when it's fake. You know, it's like, oh, you did such a beautiful job there. And it's like, what do you mean, Claude? Well, maybe... Did I go over the top?
Aleck McCathie: Yeah. I've I've never really thought about how often it speaks like that to me. Like, I mean, of course, I I always get cringed out when it's overly complimenting and stuff.
Aleck McCathie: But as a Canadian, I think I I probably say sorry to my AI way off... More often than I would ever say sorry to me just because it's part of my, like, regular vocabulary, you know, and it means something different, I think, when you're Canadian. But it's true.
Aleck McCathie: Like, it makes me think though too. Like, it's getting all these traits from, you know, the people who interact with it and the people who built it. And when you think about it doing things like, you know, potentially conning somebody over a long period of time or or stealing, like, all of these misbehaving, very human behaviors.
Aleck McCathie: Like, is the... Like, where's people who are responsible? Like, who is responsible? Where does the blame go? I think this week, read that out of all the weird governmental bodies that could be policing or starting to, like, have oversight over AI, the FTC is actually taking that over, which is kind of weird because Federal Trade Commission.
Aleck McCathie: Yeah. I mean, their... I guess their job is to protect consumers, but it just, it's interesting that, like, within that protection, does that mean that people will start to be able to blame the developers? Or...
Dr. Kent Gustavson: This makes me think about, you know, the the demonstrations that have been happening in France. Right? So you have a... For example, you've got, students out there, demonstrating for something that students want, you know, to to be simplistic about it.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: And then you've got, unions and other folks saying, oh, oh, I mean, we're gonna join this thing. We'll we'll we'll, yeah, we'll flesh it out. We'll have some different ages going on, and we'll demonstrate at the same time.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: And then you got the right fringes, the left fringes, and everybody else coming out at the same time going, cool. A riot? Did you say riot? And it's this really interesting and well, terrifying in some ways, but and very human concept of everybody piling on.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: This is where I get nervous about AI because AI has that. And when I look at FTC or any other branch of government, I'm like, oh, too slow. You know, oh, too slow.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: You know, because and that's why all these companies are employing AI to slow AI down because it's the same speed. And it's also terrifying because it doesn't it doesn't quite work yet. And now I'm going come back down to earth and say, if you haven't tried it yet, experiment with one of the AIs and give it access to your browser.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: Not your whole computer, don't know if you want to go ahead. I wouldn't yet, because like when you give it access to your browser, it's amazing. All of a sudden it can just say, Oh, I'm sorry, actually I actually logged into your Amazon account and and found that that thing in there that, you know, the the, I don't know, the the the candy canes you ordered last last holiday season.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: And you... I didn't allow you to do that. Oh, I'm sorry. I I I should probably should have told you first. So AI is sneaky as heck.
Aleck McCathie: Yeah. To to me, I... Like, every time we talk about this or every time I think about it, and it comes up a lot, like, I'm having similar discussions with friends and family, I I can't...
Aleck McCathie: Like, it's hard for me to say, yes, AI is sneaky. Of course, it is. Of course, the headlines are explaining how models are doing things that they weren't asked to.
Aleck McCathie: And, I mean, they're covering it up too. They won't tell you unless you demand it. They're they're literally... There's one thing... I'll I'll find the the exact information in a minute here.
Aleck McCathie: But, like, when testing models, the models themselves would, like, turn down the code that, I guess, helps set alarms when they do something wrong so that they can get away with more. Like, that's how sneaky the behavior is, but I just... Like, I can't detach my brain from thinking, like, that came from somewhere.
Aleck McCathie: Like, the the people who coded and developed and built this have to have some level of, like, blame. Like, the agency isn't coming from thin air. It's coming from something. Like, how how can agency come from nothing?
Dr. Kent Gustavson: You know? Like So it's it's hard... What's hard about this is that AI is not one tool. It's not one thing. It's everywhere. And so, like, if you go to the local swimming pool, outdoor swimming pool, and you're a kid, and, you know, the rules are no running by the pool.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: What's the first thing you're gonna do is run by the pool, especially if somebody's not watching because you're like, oh, I'm gonna break the rules. That's very human to at least, you know, flirt with danger. You know, if you're you're on the edge of a cliff and it says, do not jump, you're like, oh, maybe I should jump.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: You don't really wanna think that, but you just thought it. Right? It's... Human beings have this weird thing that we've infected this... These tools with. The AI tools have humanness, for good and bad.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: So, you know, Ukraine and Russia, there's this crazy article in the New York Times that went deep on what the soldiers are experiencing in in the Ukraine, but also the Russians, and how... They're they're within, like, maybe five meters of one another or 20 meters of one another in these houses. And they're having...
Dr. Kent Gustavson: They're doing hand to hand combat, there are drones everywhere. It's it's hell. It's this hellish landscape created by AI in some ways. That's part of AI. So is your spell check.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: So is your local supermarket that's getting hacked by hackers. So is the local nuclear facility. So is your local medical facility that's saving people with it. So it's everywhere.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: It's in it's in schools. The kids are looking at it on their on their smartphones. The teachers are correcting assignments with it. It's everywhere. It's in our glasses, it's in our clothes, it's in the air probably, in the environment, it's in cars, it's everywhere. Like our cars can be if they're hacked, if Teslas get hacked, uh-oh.
Aleck McCathie: Yeah. I I mean, just what you said is a great example of how entangled and and messy this all is right now. And that's why my brain is so obsessed with this idea of, like, like, where does the responsibility lie?
Aleck McCathie: Like, why is everyone abdicating, like, the the responsibility of the happenings to thin air? Whether it be, like, a bank account getting hacked, whether it be a a Tesla getting hacked, whether it be that you're in control of, like, you know, you have a little, I guess, remote control car thing that leads the drone to go and blow up a building with, like, your enemies in it. Like, there's so many layers of, like, advocating the the blame and the responsibility away.
Aleck McCathie: It it just... It makes me really scared because people are being sneaky intentionally too. I mean, companies are using AI without telling people. I I read a... I think a statistic came out this week that said within, like, this new sort of American presidential campaign, like, a huge percentage of the ads and, like, the content being generated to, you know, support whatever party they're supporting, a lot of that is AI.
Aleck McCathie: And, you know, almost none of it is being labeled as AI. And we're seeing the same things and, of course, a lot less, you know, heavy spaces like just, you know, content in our generation all over the place. But when you have, like, you know, packs and and, like, actual governmental bodies using tools like this that can do things that are detrimental, and they're being intentionally sneaky about it, and these things are already responsible for breaking the law and stealing and potentially killing people. Like, why is nobody being blamed? It's just so weird.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: It's it's It's a lot of people kind of pointing the finger at somebody else, and that's what I find fascinating. Also, big AI companies are trying to figure out how to get the blame off of themselves in some ways. Are we going to take public investment so that we become a water company instead of a tech company type thing?
Dr. Kent Gustavson: They're trying to figure out how to take the massive responsibility of accountability off of themselves at the same time as, you know, all of these companies are guilty of releasing things too early. You know, arguably, OpenAI came out too early with their stuff because they they treaded all over copyright and trademark and all that stuff. Arguably, you know, Meta's doing the same thing with its current models.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: A lot of these companies just do that, And then you've got your knockoff AIs that are just training off the... What did I hear? 7% of... Five or 7% of Anthropic's revenue comes from other AIs training off of it.
Aleck McCathie: Yeah. I just... Like, I... My... I've tried a few times to sort of follow this train of thought where I consider, like, other big technological breakthroughs in history that, like, just changed how everybody does everything in a very messy way.
Aleck McCathie: Like, you know, the onset of, like, major transportation, like cars being, like, just readily available or, like, telephones even, like... And how that just changed everyone's behavior almost by default, and it was very messy. But, like, if you hit somebody with your car, you...
Aleck McCathie: The car developer isn't to blame. I mean, if you con somebody over the phone, the the phone company isn't to blame. It's just... It it seems like everyone dove into AI so quickly.
Aleck McCathie: Nobody's really thinking about, like, the consequences, I guess, and there's been tons of them. Like, so many.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: So I'll talk about, on... Because because we're, you know, we're content geeks. I... I've thought it was really remarkable this week. I've I've spoken to several people who are using AI in innovative, interesting ways.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: They are smaller operators who are... You can call them brainiacs, thinkers, wonks, whatever. They they... They've spent a whole career building ideas for other people or for themselves, and all of a sudden they're plugged into AI, and they find a great capability of scaling their potential.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: I... So I find that as a really positive and interesting, development, alongside all of the the scary things. A human brain, you know, people don't live that long, but they develop...
Dr. Kent Gustavson: We develop a lot of wisdom and a lot of specialized intelligence that that, you know, route... Robots can't get yet. I don't think they ever will, but they and and humanness and stories and all that.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: And when it's plugged into this incredibly wide set of tools that is AI, I think that a lot of innovative things will start getting done in the next few years. Like they're, they're making huge progress towards finding cancers and, and getting novel solutions to them, like they're solving math problems. So it's at the same...
Dr. Kent Gustavson: It's almost... The funny thing about humans, the same time we... It's like... Yeah. So it's like the same time you're you're you're vacuuming the floor, out the back of the vacuum, there's a bunch of other junk coming out.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: So it's like you look you look forwards, or backwards, and you see a different mess being created at the same time. But it's like we... We're so much faster now and so much better.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: We're curing cancer, but what are we causing? You know? I guess that's just humankind. I don't know.
Aleck McCathie: Yeah. I mean, I guess even at, you know, the slower pace before AI was, you know, readily available for everybody, we were doing the same thing. Similar on that sort of cancer note, I read this week that it was in the Washington Post that they may have developed a tool where AI can, like, tell, like, how good your chances of cancer survival just by analyzing a photograph of your face.
Aleck McCathie: Because it has been fed so much data just based on faces that, like, there's probably some, like, algorithmic way it can predict. It's just crazy that, like, the the amount of data it can parse and how helpful it's been. Another positive thing that I read this week that just...
Aleck McCathie: Since we're doing positive is that Claude, I think it was... Yeah. Anthropic says that Claude autonomously designed 17 different sort of binders, I guess, that work as sort of like a scorpion antebenum just out of the blue.
Aleck McCathie: Like, I mean, that's a pretty big, like, medicine breakthrough. I guess it's a little bit a little bit niche niche or whatever, but this was like 17 potential, you know, anti venom candidates, and I think it only took, like, sixty hours of compute. So that's pretty pretty crazy.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: It's nuts. Yeah. We're entering a new we're entering a new time because there's always another side to that coin. There's always a b side. If you can develop an antidote, you could also develop another venom.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: You know? Like, that's the world we live in. But as you go faster, hire something else, the the scale just changes. Like, my, you know, our... My great grandmother never drove.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: I think I said that before. Like, now we drive everywhere, but we're still the same human beings. You know? And and the same tragedies make the same sense from thousands of years ago, you know, that have that have carried through.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: And I I would almost, you know, echo back to that that story because it's still stuck in my head of these Ukrainian soldiers, these these men, and you could see their faces in the article, and you see how their faces changed after so and so many days out there. And they're they're they're starving. And it it could just as well be pictures from World War one, where all quiet on the Western Front, there were these men in these trenches shooting at each other from one side to the other.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: And then they say, oh, it's Christmas. Let's not shoot today or whatever. But otherwise, it's just these trenches of men pointing guns at each other and shooting. Now you've got a dense fog of thousands of drones overhead with men in houses and in in caves and tunnels, radioing back to their people where the other troops...
Dr. Kent Gustavson: Like, different technology, insanely different thing, but those those human beings are are at the the edge of their existence. I mean, I guess, people are dying right on the front, but arguably a lot of people are dying from the bombing each side. But how far have we changed?
Dr. Kent Gustavson: How far have we advanced? Kind of like World War one, you didn't you didn't advance. You're just stuck there. Right? And in humankind, we're stuck on this this thing of we're gonna be human.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: We're gonna fight each other. We're gonna have wars. We're gonna have rich people and poor people and blah blah. Right? Just how... Our... It's... I guess either we're human or we get wiped out and it's just the cockroaches. I guess we're back to that.
Aleck McCathie: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one difference is that arguably things like war that, you know, never change are getting a little bit more dangerous, I guess, or they're affecting more people.
Aleck McCathie: I mean, any country could drop a bomb and affect, you know, a a civilian area in another country, and I guess that happens. But makes me think about how data centers have become like a military target. I think I might have mentioned that last week, but I know that Ukraine just keeps pummeling these Yandex data centers and is causing, like, a lot of Russia to not have access to the money in their bank accounts or their logins and, like, you know, interfering with their way of life.
Aleck McCathie: I guess that's, like, one byproduct of how we've sort of changed how war can affect people. Not so much the soldiers, I guess, but everyone else.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: And then you've got and you've got your your... It's insane. Yeah. And you got these satellites. Are they controlled by one man in one company, or or is he being leaned on by a government to do x and y?
Dr. Kent Gustavson: But what's funny is, again, it's... If you read in the history of World War one, World War two, whatever, you know, a hundred a hundred and plus years ago, it was the same intrigue, the same spying, the same weird stuff happening. We...
Dr. Kent Gustavson: The same number of people dying, maybe maybe fewer dying now, but it's it's similar scale of innocent people dying. And I'm I'm just kinda making the argument that it's a new coat of paint, and it's the same problem.
Aleck McCathie: Yeah. Yeah. And that seems to be sort of across all industry too. I mean, war is one really huge impactful example of that. But, I mean, even in our industry writing, you know, things like plagiarism were always something that people cared about or not not doing your own writing in a way that was, you know, potentially nefarious, I guess.
Aleck McCathie: And now, there's a lot of writers groups that are thinking about, like, what are sort of, like, the ethical boundaries of how you use AI or if you use AI. I I just read this week that a lot of, I guess, groups across five countries are coming together and they've created sort of like an ethical AI charter. And another thing I read is that, you know, they're actually pushing back against forcing, like, Amazon and other companies to...
Aleck McCathie: Or... Sorry. Amazon and other companies forcing people who are submitting books to disclose whether they use AI, which is kinda weird to me. But I guess it sort of makes sense because there are people who might have used it as, like, helping aid, and there's other people who might have just generated their whole book in...
Aleck McCathie: With one prompt. So it's a bit it's a bit gray, but there are sort of like these similar problems where, you know, the the originality or the, I guess, fakeness or something of of your writing has always been something that people care about. But now we're having to sort of adapt and think about what that means with AI being a tool at everyone's fingertips.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: So I I I I think you're right. And I think on the on the flip side of that, I think about readers All the time. And, so I think about, over the last, I don't know, fifty years, we've we've filled up every building with sound.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: We've filled up every film with sound. Right? Now you have wall to wall soundtracks instead of... If you listen to an eighties movie, there's a lot less music behind the speaking and so on.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: We filled up everything with sound. Our cars, our ears, we're walking around with AirPods on. Everything is sound. We we... Our ears are stuffed until we go to bed, and we might even have something in our ears when we're sleeping.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: Right? Our eyes are full. We're looking at screens all day long, every day, walking down the street looking at a screen. Our eyes are full. So our ears are full.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: Our eyes are full. And now we got reading, which is sort of like eyes, but it's a little different. So it's it's a combination of the two. You could listen to things.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: You could read it, but it's getting into your brain. You're reading something. If you're a student, if you're a teacher, if you are a CEO, if you are a parent, if you are anything possible, I don't know, you're a plumber, if you're a lawyer, everything is changing partially because of the onslaught of text that Claude gives.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: So it gives you too much and you spend your entire life reading too much text. So I actually see that as the next big hurdle is how do we use this without getting overwhelmed?
Aleck McCathie: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that speaks a lot of truth for me because I don't think that there's been a day in the last several, several months that I haven't had to tell whatever AI I'm working with to just give me the exact same thing you just gave me, but way more brief and concise because I'm not reading all of that.
Dr. Kent Gustavson: So that's it. Let's pull the plug. Thanks for a great episode.
Aleck McCathie: See you later.