Infinite Jeffs and AI Profitability

It's time for intelligent machines. Jeff Jarvis is here. Paris has the week off, but guess what? Father Robert Balliser is here, the digital Jesuit. He and Jeff have a lot to say about the Pope's latest encyclical on AI. We'll talk about that. Plus, interview our guest , my favorite photographer, Rick Salmon is here. Coming up next on Intelligent Machines . Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is twit ch. This is intelligent machines with Jeff Jarvis of Paris Martineau episode eight hundred seventy-two recorded Wednesday Ma,y 27, th20 26. Infinite Jeffs . It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show we cover AI, robotics, and all the smart things all around us all the time. Hello, everybody. I'm Leo Laporte. Uh Jeff Jarvis is here. The emeritus professor of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. At the City University of New York. He is also the author of a brand new book. Coming out in a couple of months, hot type, very hot, all about the line of type, the history of the machine that changed everything. He's also the author of magazine, uh Gutenberg Parenthesis, many other fine volumes. Hello, Jim. What? Hello. Thank you for wearing your clerical collar today. Yes. I appreciate it because Paris has the day off. But we're thrilled to have Father Robert Ballast. Perfect timing. Well yeah, because uh a couple of days ago, the uh Holy Father released something. Uh, it's actually weird. I didn't think there'd be a juxtaposition of intelligent machines in the Catholic Church, but there there is his encyclical on AI. And uh I know you don't speak for the the Pope, but uh I'm sure you have some thoughts about the encyclical. Uh we've talked about that in a little bit. But before we do, let me introduce our guest, our very special guest this hour, an old friend. One of the great photographers, Rick Salmon is here. Uh author, uh photographer. He's written what is something like forty-five books. How many books have you written? Well forty three. But I'm working on a working on two more. Okay, so it'll uh Canon Explorer of Light. Uh he has shot in every format underwater, portrait, uh landscape, beautiful images but i had i had to get rick on because he's doing a uh a classic kelby one on ai yep something that's anathema to well, uh i think some other photographers, it's called the AI mindset . When you are through changing, you are through. And I gotta tell you, Rick Salmon is not through for sure. Well, you have to keep changing, right, Leo? You're an inspiration, Rick. You just you just you're beautiful photos. And and uh but also more than that, you've you've always um been a great teacher and writer . Musician first. I didn't realize you went to the Berkeley School of Music. Yeah, I went to Berkeley College of Music in Boston. I still play every day. And you know, I think there's a lot of correlations. You mentioned Scott Kelby. He plays guitar. I play guitar. Ansel Adams was a classical pianist. He was amazing. So, you know, I think uh a lot of artists need, you know, the this outlet to just keep creating, and that's why I think AI is is such a fantastic tool. You know, it's it's just so much fun for me. So uh tell me uh how how does AI get involved in your work? Well do you start you start with a photo, right? Well there's there's two ways. Sometimes I start with a photo. And you know, you could do the same thing like in Photoshop and Lightroom that you could do in AI, but in Photoshop and Lightroom, it would take you like so much longer. So for example, you know what Rembrandt lighting is, right? You have the side lighting, we have the beautiful side lighting, and on the shadow side of the subject's face, you have a little triangle of light. So you could do this in Photoshop or Live Room. It might take you about 20 minutes. You put a photo I put one of my photos into uh chat GPT and I say create Rembrandt lighting and in less than sixty seconds in less than sixty seconds it does it. So stuff like that. So that's one way I use AI or to retouch uh or re or to retouch or enhance a a photograph. Then you could use uh like mid journey to create your own to create an image, just type in a prompt like, you know , um you know uh young man in in a rowboat playing guitar or or whatever and it creates it. So I use both, but I'm finding more and more and more I'm using my own photographs and that's what I encourage people to do. Start with your own photographs because photographers they have the advantage, I think, in in this world of AI. You know, they have a good eye for composition and lighting and watching the background and expression and gesture and all that stuff. So, you know, you give AI to a photographer, a skilled photographer, who's been taking pictures for a long time like I have, and you can create these amazing one-of-a-kind images that are just just fantasti c. to over the months of doing this show is that AI by itself isn't that great, but AI plus human can be very powerful, very interesting. You sent us some images. Let me just give you uh you can narrate this. This is a you know kind of an average uh I think it's from shot from an iPhone, actually, camera of the this is actually this is the Tap and Z Bridge. Oh the Tap and Z Bridge. Well peep people call it the the Mario Cuomo Bridge the Tap and Z. It's a tap and Z cycle. So this is a shot, just take with the iPhone and in the in the next shot I guess as we'll show it. Uh yeah. So I I so the prompt was make it a nighttime shot with beautiful reflection on the water, use a long shutter speed. So a photographer knows that a long shutter speed will blur will blur the clouds like that. I said, add the clouds, add the reflection, you know, put put the light on the water and the rocks. So you know, that first shot you saw was one of the most boring pictures I ever took, but I took it. But but and I say that 's not certainly not something you'd put in a book or your portfolio. No, but what what I do is I'm shooting now, I'm photographing for AI. So I knew that you know my wife and I there having a nice walk on a beautiful day, but I said, hey, I know the potential here. So that's what I try to show people in the in in my classes and my teachings in the Kelpie One class, the potential that you know this is just amazing and and how much fun is that right? Well here's another here's a portrait. Yeah oh this is a yeah so here's the Rembrandt lighting. I took the picture on the left in uh in my home studio, a nice enough uh model . I was trying to illustrate high key lighting, which is you know, very you know, very light lighting with no shadows, and on the right there, that's Rembrandt Lighting. So in ChatGPT, all I did was type in create beautiful Rembrandt Lighting. Wow. So again, you could do this in Photoshop and Lightroom and but i it would take a lot of time. So both pictures are, you know, they're different. But uh i it's just so cool that that you could do this. And the potential is that if you study photography now with AI , you can create images and make a c make a client happier or make yourself happier. And for me it's like a a video game. What about people who say, well but wait a minute, that's not art. You're you know the, uh uh I think it's it's funny because you could paint a picture like that and people would say that's art. Yeah. But if you do it in a photograp photography, uh people think well we're s we're capturing something real so it should look like the original. A lot of people say that. And when they say, you know, it's not art, I say, I never said it was art. It's just fun. I think it's art. I'll be honest. I will say. It's art. It's beautiful. Here's an example of an iceberg and an electric guitar. Yeah, so this this is the other type. This is the other type. So the first two pictures we saw, I created those AI images from images. But here I was playing around with uh you know, as you guys know, we're just on the tip. We're on the tip of the iceberg of AI . Right? So I I created this image for the tip of the iceberg, and then I put that guitar in there because I play guitar. And then and then I I I made uh then I made a poster. So with AI, we're not and I put the lights on the guitar there too. So with you know, I'm I'm a photographer. I don't really think I'm an artist. But now with AI, I'm like an art director. I I'm I'm a designer. And when I say I I say people who are using AI. They're all they're all these different things. They're creative directors. So if uh you have to embrace new technology, that's why the subtitle of that class is called When You're Through Changing, You're Through because I think photographers, artists, uh musicians, all all all creatives, we have to embrace these new tools. And I have to tell you , Leo, that when I got into AI three years ago on Facebook, I got slammed as a photographer. Uh oh I bet. I had things like, you know, oh you're gonna lose your credibility and things like that. And I was called things I would not say on the show. Even if we didn't have a very special guest here, I wouldn't say it as well. It's all right. No. And now and get guess what? All now all these all these all these guys are uh are using AI and some are teaching AI. So it's it is i it's scary to a lot of people, like for stock photographers, you know, or and art directors. This is scary. But you know, I'm sure you've heard the expression that, you know, AI isn't gonna put you out of business someone who knows how to use AI . So I I try to embrace new technology. Did you get the same treatment with Photoshop and Lightroom? Exactly. That's a great question. The first time I gave a Photoshop a presentation, someone stood up and they said, You're cheating. And then I said after they left, I said, Well my friends, uh the biggest cheater of all, if you're gonna think about it, was Ansel Adams. Ansel Adams saw the world in color and he made these black and white pictures. Do I have time to tell a 30-second picture? You have as much time as you want, Rick. Okay, well here's a short story about Ansel Adams, and it kind of applies to AI in the pictures you just saw. I I gave a seminar with uh John Sexton. John Sexton was one of Ansel Adams' uh assistants. He's telling all these Ansel Adams stories. And here's one of the stories: a guy on the East Coast writes Ansel Adams a letter on the this is before computers, let's like in the sixties, on the on the West Coast. So the guy on the East Coast is mad at Ansel Adams. Now could you imagine anyone being mad at Ansel Adams? Right? So he's made it answer that. He's a little angry. He says, John Texas telling the story. He's saying, Dear Mr. Adams, I have your posters, I have your books, I'm a big fan. You inspired me to go to Yosemite and when I got there it it didn't look it didn't look like that. It was in color. But it it doesn't look like that. And uh you know, and Ansel Adams , you know, he said in in the introduction of one of his books that I have back there that he was looking forward to the uh to the uh the digital age. And uh I see you have uh So this is the today's news. Yep. The estate, Ansel Adams estate is suing a art dealer who is colorizing Ansel Adams' photos, putting the color back in. And the in the dark room, you're dodging, you're doing you're using whatever techniques, right. But you compose it. What everything you do is as simple as cropping, you know, we're on all on c on camera here. You know, I look like a professional, but I've shorts on. So no one will ever know by the way. Right. And I and I have flip flops on. So you know there there's an expression every photo every photo is a lie. And uh James Van Dazier in in the twenties in New York City, he was he was famous for creating these like ghost images. He would photograph uh someone in in a casket and they have like a ghost image next uh, you know, like uh covering is kind of spooky. So but we've been do photographers have been doing this for y for years. And look at Avat ar, right? This is all like a fantasy, all the images in i in that. Uh so i it it's funny though, getting back to the criticism . There are AI artists who do like you know, like that fanciful uh iceberg picture that you saw with the guitar. If you're an AI artist, people don't get criticized. You're a photographer who uses using AI, you're gonna get criticized if if you're not honest. And one thing, everyone who's listening to this, everyone who sees uh my Facebook posts or whatever, I always say it's AI. My mother gave my mother gave me a lot of good advice and one was uh honesty is the best policy. And to thine own self be true. But y y you really have to be honest. People, you know, I'm sure you've heard about the contest that people put in uh pictures, they win the contest, and then they get kicked out of the contest because they cheat We had uh Vinit Kosla, who is the CTO of the Washington Post. We had Kashmir Hill, who uh writes for the New York Times. And one of the things that they brought up was exactly what we're talking about now, which is the the chain of custody of of work of artwork and uh Vinid brought up the idea of the C2PA which is the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authentication. It's basically uh several manufacturers, including Sony and Panasonic, are building in mechanisms inside of their capture devices, their cameras, their video devices, that will give a watermark, a signed watermark so that you can actually upload to a repository to prove that this is the original asset and then you can show how you've modified it using various tools. And their their theory was if you do this, then you kind of diffuse the whole, is it AI, is it fake, is it cheating? Because you can actually show the process. Doesn't matter what you start with, it's right, it's the work that you put into it. That's that's what we want to be able to prove. And they think that having that chain of custody will will actually lead to more profitable art being uh uh and I don't mean profitable money, I mean profitable as in yeah, interesting and inspiring uh in the future. I I I totally, I totally agree. And the you know, y you uh people post videos now on uh on X and underneath it it says AI generated. So I think this is like a really good a really good thing because uh people post videos of them doing this and like I I'm a musician also and I see all these music things, they look so real, these singers, but I'm so glad that it says, you know, AI generated, but having that watermark in there and having, you know, uh uh it's gonna it's gonna be pretty hard to to pass things off as not AI pretty soon. But you know, we live in a world uh we live in a world of AI. You see some of the pictures on the on the wall behind me. You know, s sometimes I spend uh half an hour in Photoshop changing the sky, you know, and and changing the lighting. Uh just like Ansel Adams chang You know, we've been doing this f for years. And I think as long as you're are having fun with it and and honest, I t I think it's just s I I don't think there's ever been a more fun or exciting time to do this. And now like with that tapp and z Tap and Z bridge picture I showed you, I'm shooting for AI and I I'm envisioning the end, I'm envisioning the end result. What can I do with this? How much fun can I have? So Rick, I'm curious about that process. When I spoke with Lev Menovich, who's an artist and professor at CUNY, he said that he he likes working with AI best, he has an attitude similar to yours, when he says, why did he do that? And he gets into an argument with it. And I'm curious about about the the cre ative tension that you have with it. Um how many back and forths do you have to get what you want? Uh how single-minded does the AI seem to be? How do you convince it? Uh are you surprised sometimes? What does that work like for you? Well, this is an excellent question because I use ChatGP the most. I use ChatGPT, I use Midjourney, I I use uh uh Claude, I I use a bunch of them. But if you just start out using ChatGPT and you ask it a question, it's gonna treat you like you're your best friend. Yes, that's a great idea, this and that, and blah blah blah. But now you can go in with the newer versions and change it, so don't treat me like your best friend. Be totally honest with me. I don't want any fluff. Be right up front. And I think this is really good because since I started doing that, I'm not getting all the accolades that are, oh great idea, Rick. You just this, you know, this and that. So I would suggest for people who are using Chat GPT to go into the settings and do that. But I'm finding I have to to get an image I want, it's rarely, rarely the first time. Uh I have to go go through three or four times. So I encourage people to really think about the prompts first. Really think about the prompts first because as you know , ChatGPT, Mid Journey, all of these, they use a they use a lot of energy. And so I try, and I'm a conservationist too. I was a scuba diver for uh for twenty years, wrote a bunch of uh conservation books. So I'm very concerned about the environment. And I know the companies are trying to develop ways to not use so much energy and heat and water and stuff like that . So th but but y you watch YouTube it uses you know the crypto and online banking, all this stuff users use a lot of data. So think carefully about the prompts so you you're not spending you know a half hour, oh th this prompt didn't work, this prompt didn't work. Yeah, you get what you want. But you know, thinking, thinking about the exact and then you get get other ideas you could come back to it. But you know, think think first. The the you know with photography we say think before you shoot, think before you prompt. Rick is such a great photographer. If you go to his website Rick Salmon S-A-M-M-O-N dot com. You'll see he's very generous, puts a lot of his uh pictures online. And you know, uh some of some of the pi I would say most of these I know are not AI None . Yeah, because this is this is this is you know, your photography, this is from ten years ago. And yet uh now I'm looking at this and now I'm looking at a picture you sent us that probably has a little AI in it, right? A little. That's all AI. But let me tell you that other picture was was totally totally real. So here what I'm do so this is r here we're in uh South Africa it was sunset. I'm trying to capture the mood and thank you very much I was uh trying to get the mood and the feeling. But if you look at the other picture that you just showed, what I was trying to do, if you uh move back a little, you see it looks like a guitar. Oh wow So I'm trying to blend my love for music and my love for wildlife and and photography into one. So the what was a little difficult about this was the on the trees on the right, the the the tuning the tuning pegs. The six pegs, yeah. Right, right, right. So that that was a little tricky 'cause I I had to make the trees a little low uh tall Yeah. Um I course Google Drive is impossible to use, so forgive me as I navigate around. Well anyway, well Weg simulated drones What is it about an artist who blames his tools, Leo? Well the simulated drone one is interesting too. Okay. Okay. Unfortunately these are big, so I have to download them and I haven't downloaded them. Proof of concept of a uh a photo editing tool uh here at Bo World Communications Day. Um it's specifically designed for Photoshop users. And the the wrinkle that they've done in their AI solution is rather than just giving you an image from your prompt, it will actually create it will use Adobe editing steps and filters to create the image. So the final file that you get includes all those layers. So you can actually back through them and remove things you don't want or modify parameters that it so their their idea is that it becomes more efficient because rather than regenerating over and over and over yeah it it you can actually step back and just remove the things you don't like. I I love that. No, th that that's a a a great point to bring up and uh uh i shortening the steps is really important and getting back to you know ChatGPT and like you know, I said create Rembrandt Lighting. The first time I did it, I said I said create Rembrandt Lighting. I didn't say create the image. So what it did is it went through the the 37 Photoshop steps on dodge this, burn this, use the luminance, use the brightness. It's such a great teach. I I've learned a lot. I have learned so much. And another, you know, the Buddhist saying is learning is health. And I I really believe this and I I learn something every day. So I I grew up back when I spent hours in a dark room and I was dodging and burning and learning on black and white. Those tools still exist in Photoshop. Do any of the people that you're trying to teach have any idea what those tools actually do and what they mean and where they come from. Well um I I I think people are are forgetting about those tools like Rembrandt lighting, people may not really understand what that is. You know, burning and dodging is still really important. And a lot of times I'll use, you know, like like I'll create an image like the Rembrandt lighting picture and I'll still burn and dodge, you know, darken and lighten and change the opacity 10%, 20%, things like that. But you you you can, and this is a this is a an issue. AI can make you very lazy. Right? Why why should I do this? Why should I do that? But like I just said, learning this health and if you keep learning this stuff, it what what you what you learn I believe in one area you could apply to another area, whether it's music or or photography, you know, things go back and forth. So if you learn about burning and dodging, it's kinda like uh in in music, you know, uh you know, going l going l you know, louder and louder and softer. So contrast. So all these things, the more we understand these, the better we're gonna get. We're gonna the more I think creative images we're gonna get that aren't gonna look like everyone else's images. You know, if if everyone just starts Right. Here's a example of a stilda video. So did you take this originally, the still? Yeah. We were in uh Mumbai. That's the gateway to uh the gateway to uh India from our hotel room. Beautiful. So so thank you very much. It was sunrise. And then I said uh create create uh in in Grok Imagine, in Grok Imagine, um uh I just turned it into a video. The boats start moving, uh the sun starts coming up. Oh it's gonna close there, oh Are there any obvious artifacts here that you would say yeah that's AI? Oh yeah, one boat just disappears the other. Yes, yes, yes, that happens. That happens. That's why that's another great point you you bring up. You have to watch these things very closely. Um especially like I was I I made one of uh of a girl in a rowboat and she had her hand uh in the water and then of course she takes her hand out and then there there's like no finger there. Or so Not so good. So you not not so good. So you have to watch the you have just like with Photoshop, you know, we would zoom in. We we would call it pixel peepers in Photoshop. We would zoom in and make, you know, to 400% like we used to use the loops. And so I look at things very, very carefully, and sometimes uh I have my wife look at them because you know sometimes I miss things. This is completely from uh AI, I think, this girl on a horse . Oh, well, this is a video. Yeah, this is this is from a still that I I took. I took a still there was a still. There there was a still and I this has I don't know if the musical come through. Oh I have the music, yeah. So you had music and she's the horse's sprouted wings and she's about to ride off. Wow! What did you use for this Grok? Yeah, this was Grok Imagine, but with Grok Imagine you can only make 10 second vide os. So I had to I had to use iMovie to uh sp to splice them together and then it took me a while to get it, you know, uh the the zoom right, uh the the the cut right. But uh now in mid-journey you could only you could only do I think it's ten seconds two, but you could multiply it four times to make them longer. So here's the drone shot. This is an ice flow uh again from a uh from a still or no? Yes. We're in Antarctica, Leo. We're in a zodiac. This was uh if you ever go to Antarctica . If you ever go to Antarctica you wanna be in a zodiac. This is you're you're right there, you're right in the ice. And then I said, hey, what would it look like with the drone chart? And then uh after we show it, I'll tell you something about this. Now this is from Still That's amazing. So what was the key still? It was a the very first frame? Yeah, yeah. It was just and this took a while. I said, have the drone fly right through the iceberg. Look at this. This might so you know, when we were kids, we didn't dream of anything like this being possible. This is magic, right? 'Cause people who are watching this they haven't and these icebergs are gone now, right? I mean, I was lucky to see them. The icebergs last some of the last years and years and years, some disappear sooner. But look how beautiful this is. So this I I said, make this a draw, make uh a series of drone shots from these all started as single, you know, still still images. Well, these are these lenticular clouds. But here's the thing: say I take a picture of uh of the Tappan Z bridge, right? And uh I I say make a drone shot out of that. It'll make a drone shot out of it, but it doesn't really know what's around it. So the background's gonna be wrong. It's gonna put a b the wrong building here or a building or a boat or something like that. So I I only you make these drone shots in areas where it's really like a fantasy. You you you can't do you can't you you could do it. I did a I did a drone shot in the Vatican. Yeah, you use real Yeah, that's real drones. Yeah. So if so if we di if that Wow look at that. What it what is what they're building a f they're doing a UFC fight? No, they're not. They didn't build an octagon in St. Peter's Square Com I mean it was a good idea, so why not? Let's just use it. Uh this is Rick uh living living his life to the fullest. Yeah . Oh nice. Okay, so that's just fun. That's just fun. I love it. Right. So Rick, let me I gotta ask you though, as an artist, one of the complaints artists make about AI is that it is ingesting their art and and and and without payment and and turning their art into into their own monetary gain. What do you say to that? Because they th right 'cause they think that uh AI is stealing the photographs and that that was the big complaint. But the thing is it's machine learning. The machines and this is really an important point, a really important point that you break up. It's it's machine learning. The machines are learning how to create, you know, an an elephant uh or or uh a silhouette or or or anything anything we showed. So it it's the machines learning it. It's it's not stealing it from somewhere else. It's just like uh the machines you could look at it like uh I have a picture. You could probably find it uh if you type in uh on the web, uh Rick Salmon girl with a pearl earring. Oh yeah, I have that. Yeah. So yeah, if if you find that so uh did I steal that from Vermeer? Well I got the idea from Vermeer. I was inspired by Vermeer, as ten thousand other photographers have, you know, uh you know uh were inspired by veneer or the Mona Lisa, or they tried to uh copy uh Weston's uh pepper, pepper, you know, his black and white famous pepper shot that's sold for uh for tons of money. So i it it's people who say it's still in it, it's not true. It's not true. It's it's the machines are learning stuff and and they're create the they're creating it your the image you have in your mind's eye No no artist starts from scratch. Uh every artist starts with all the art and the every your life and everything that you you've put in there and that's your art comes out of that. Good artists borrow, great artists use AI. Yeah. Okay. So there Well the there's there's a book bug called Steal Like an Artist by uh put your ass and go but that's it's the name of the book, Steal Like an Artist. But here, there's my rendition on the right of Girl with the Pearl Earring, and then um which was inspired by Vermeer. And then on the left there said, hey, let's just make this a whole pearl a pearl uh uh setting of black and white. Yeah. So go ahead, Robert . No, that wasn't me. Oh . So uh you so you're okay then uh with the fact that AI has undoubtedly gone to ricksalmon.com and and ingested every photo that you've taken. Well they probably have . So have I, by the way, and I love your stuff, so but they probably have but uh you you get inspired by it. Uh you know, like all all the all the iceberg pictures, you know, all the stuff is is out there. Is out there. Um Good for you. There a lot of I think a lot of photographers, uh especially early in the internet, said I don't want to put my photos out there 'cause they'll get stolen and you know, uh they'll inspire others' art. You can't hold on to it. So I'm gonna take my great works and just keep them at home on my walls where I can see them. Uh if you go to ricksalmon.com, Wild Salmonism's cheat sheet is a great place to start to get some ideas from how of how Rick makes these amazing images. Um, and he has a Kelby One class on that. In fact, he's just uh started a brand new Kelby One class Yeah, I have I have more than sixty classes and you know what's funny, Leo, uh when I I I took a chance doing this. I'm the first Kelvin one instructor who uh who has this uh a class on AI and I thought, okay, the commas are gonna be the commerce are gonna be fifty-fiftftyy. Fi love it, fifty don't love it. If if you go under the discuss uh class uh right in the beginning or the discuss class section, all the comments are positive. Really? All the comments I know all the comments are positive. There's there's not one negative it really surprised me because Oh there there's a thing. I'll tell you a joke. I had a psychologist friend once and uh he said to me this is this is like uh thirty thirty years ago, he says, Rick, if you were giving uh a presentation in a Yankee Stadium. I don't know how many people there. Say the do you know how many people anyone know how many people in Yankee Stadium? 80,000? I don't know. 80,000. Okay. If you're given a discovery. If you're given a presentation in Yankee Stadium and 79 9 99 people stand up and cheer at the end. Rick Sam 's the greatest. And after that, one guy stands up and says, Ah, I hated that. Rick Rick Sam is Me too. I'm the same way. You're the same way, right? Same exact way. So so on the on the uh on the uh on the uh AI class there, I was expecting some negative comments. But I think because I make it fun and and I look at it as fun. I'm not saying this is art, you know, you could be the next great artist . You can make a ton of money selling art. I'm just I'm just trying to show people just like when I teach guitar when I when I teach guitar I teach pe I start out by teaching people songs they know. So they could have fun. Right. And I I think it's j that that's if I could bring a little fun into someone's life um at this age I think it's it'd okay. Well you brought some fun into ours today. Thank you, Rick Salmon. RickSalmon.com. S-A-D-M-O-N . Uh take the course. View this site. Look at all these beautiful pictures. Buy some of his books. Uh supporting artists like Rick Salmon is really uh the best thing you can do to make the world a better place. Thank you, Rick. We really appreciate it. Well thank you, Mike. It was it's great great meeting everyone else. It was a ton of fun. So much fun.. Pleasure Rick Salmon, everybody. Thanks, Rick. We will have more intelligent machines in a bit with Father Robert Ballis here filling in for Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis, our show today. Brought to you by Trusted Tech . 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I got this, I wrote it down. He said, quote, talking to Trusted Tech, you have an incredible customer reputation. You have to earn that every single day. They're relentless focus you guys have on taking care of customers gives them value and differentiates you in the marketplace. After July 1st, you're stuck paying more. This is the last chance to fix your licensing before costs go up? Trusted Tech. Right now, they're offering a free Microsoft 365 licensing consultation. Visit trustedtech dot team slash intelligent365. Get a clear data backed view of your current licenses, what you're wasting, and how to lock in the savings before the price increase. Go to trustedtech.team slash intelligent three sixty-five. Submit a form. Get in contact with trusted Tech's Microsoft licensing engineers. Don't put this off. The clock is ticking. Back to intelligent machines, Father Robert Ballas here, the digital Jesuit. Everything good uh in your world, Rob ert? Uh aside from the fact that summer has arrived uh month and a half early, yeah, pretty good, pretty good. How well air conditioned is the Vatican? Uh well, my office is very well air conditioned because when I first got here I salvaged an AC and installed it so it's completely not connected to the main house. But the the main house is on energy safe mode, so i it's not nice. Uh so it was I think it was m Monday, right? The uh Holy Father Leo the Fourteenth issued his uh encyclical letter Magnifica Humanitas on Saved Humanity . Yeah, I think we can understand what that 's a good Latin. It's very easy to understand. On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. Um , this is forty-two thousand words. Jeff has read it. In fact, Jeff, you wrote a whole piece on Buzz Machine, your analysis of this. I spent a day and a half study, I think it's magnificent document. I spent a day and a half studying it, and I could I'll I'll go back and read it again and again. Um but I pulled out some of the to my mind, the good bits. There are many. And I had to stop myself because I would have ended up with 42,000 words myself. And I also saw lessons here for others than just AI. I saw a lot of lessons for media here. Yeah. And a lot is parallel. Let me, first of all, Robert, any disclaimer you want to make, this is the time to make it. You are you are in the Vatican City right now. I am. I am. And uh people will always ask, uh, oh, did you have a hand in this? And I will just say there are some very, very good people here who spent a lot of time putting together a document that represented the vision that Pope Leo had for the document . And that's about all I can say on that. Correct. To the the the uh the talk he gave when he was elected Pope. Yep. He brought up AI, he brought up a lot of these same concerns, and he's written three documents since then, before this encyclical. So those have just been expanded upon. Um a lot of people were expecting this to be the anti-AI encyclical. AI is the it's horrible, it's gonna destroy us. They thought it was gonna be a repeat of Ray Rum Navarum, which was the document from the Industrial Revolution. That was Leo the Thirteenth, his predecessor. Yeah, we kind of knew this was coming because he did chose choose the name very carefully, Leo. He did, he did, right. That wasn't a that was not a coincidence, that was not a mistake. He understood that just as the industrial revolution changed the world, it changed society, and had a lot of very negative challenges that it brought, uh, the same thing is happening with the advancement of technology, not just AI, but technology in general. In his words, technology is not counter to faith. That's one of the very first things that you see in the encyclical. So he wants to make it clear: this is not the Luddite encyclical. We're not telling you to destroy your computers and disconnect yourselves. Was the original the 135 year by the way, this was published on the 135th anniversary of Pope Leo the Thirteenth's encyclical. Was Leo the Thirteenth's kind of a Luddite anti-, industrial . It wasn't and it's it's misunderstood. People think that was telling people not to participate in the industrial revolution. But this Leo and that Leo recognized the same thing, which is you cannot reverse time. You cannot pretend like these things did not happen. What you can do is you can be transparent, you can safeguard those peoples at the margins . And ultimately, the entire thing, the all of Catholic social teaching comes down to a choice. It's a question. Would you prefer a future where we are lifting up the innate dignity of every human, every man and woman, or are you okay with a future that commoditizes human? And that seems like a very simple choice, and it should be a simple choice. And then the entire encyclical is if you want the first thing , these are the steps that we should probably be taking. Very simple. It's uh it's he begins uh with uh a contrast between the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of the wall in Jer usalem. And it's a wonderful metaphor for it where the Tower of Babel, as he presents it, um, sounds an awful lot like AI. Uh the um a doom project uh that was impressive an impressive feat, a single language, a single technology, a single direction. However, the project concealed a profound danger. It was a project conceived without reference to God, supported by uniformity that eliminated diversity, that chose homogenization over communion. That's what sounds familiar. In contrast, the rebuilding of the wall in Jerusalem was done with prayer and permission and the collaboration of the people of the city, each bringing to it what they could bring to it. And clearly that was the choice that that you just mentioned, Robert. That's the that's the the uh yes or no here. And I think it's a really apt metaphor um for what we have to choose now. Oh, very much so. And one of the things that I really, really like about this document is he painstakingly, uh about a quarter of the document is stepping through each gener ation of Catholic tradition from Ray Rum Novarum. So you go from Ray Rum Novarum, you go through Pius XI, you go through Vatican II, and the documents, the encyclicals of Pope Francis, for Tellitu ti. So he's he's he's telling people because he knows what the critics are gonna say. They're gonna say, Oh, this is a radical pope and this is a woke pope. He's like, Look, this has been our belief for more than a hundred years. This is what we've been pushing for more than a hundred years. So the challenge isn't new. It's just what we're focusing on is new. The the AI is new. LLMs are new. But what they can bring, the negative consequences that they can bring, we know them quite well, and we know how to deal with them. If I may quote again at a little bit of length, technology has the power to heal, connect, educate, and protect our common home, but it can also divide, exclude, and generate new forms of injustice. In the abstract, technology in and of itself is not a solution to humanity's problems, just as it is not inherently evil. In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it . Therefore, the primary choice is not between a yes or no to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem, between a power that claims to dominate the heavens and the people who work together and the presence of God rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence. I love that the document emphasizes so much community and conversation and listening. What does he mean by rebuilding Jerusalem? Well, rebuilding Jerusalem is just it's it's a metaphor for the fulfillment of the kingdom. That's it's it's not physically rebuilding Jerusalem. It's raising it back up. Uh that that was supposed to be the start of the end time. So Forgive me, becausecause I don't mean to be insulting anyway, but uh there are people who are gonna say, well, this is a essentially medieval institu tion uh commenting on twenty-first century technology. Yes. Uh you know, personally I think that th that uh the Pope has standing as a ethical as a as a leader in ethics, as a leader in um, you know, uh not just spirituality, but morality. So I think he has some standing. But it does, it is a little bit jarring, right? I mean, it's in Latin. The title is in Latin, ladies and gentlemen. So w what is the Pope's standing here? Oh I I I get that. I get that. And uh I also understand that people are going well why is the Pope talking about this? Well let's first of all say he is a head of state. Uh let us say that he is the the head of a theological organization that deals with with God, which many people don't believe in and that's fine. And I would say set that aside, don't focus on the fact that it's coming from a man who may have a different belief system than you. Look at some of the primary questions that are asked. Like for example, this is a big one. Is it a better world or a worse world if we concentrate power into the hands of about 12 individuals . And I think most of us, regardless of our theological faith background, would say, no, that's not a good idea. That's the quote that Jeff read about about concentrating power, about letting these systems reflect the bias of those those very few people. And which is why there's a call at the end for transparency. If you have transparency to show how these systems are actually being built, to show what biases are being built into them, then you actually can say it's for the common good. And that has nothing to do with theology, it has nothing to do with faith, it has everything to do with as a human person , do I want to be a disposable commodity or do I want to have my my innate dignity recognized? Right. That's not a hard question. This is a document that really strikes me, Robert, that it's four generations. Yes. Um very little of it is is is in I mean it's halfway through before he really d addresses AI fully and directly. Correct. es. And I think that there's kind of almost obligatory references to things like kids and screens. And there's obviously a need to address issues around work. And the Pope makes clear that the church has always supported labor. Um and war, an autonomous war, and that's current. What um delighted me because of my own hobby horse here was the one thing that he called out current ly is he called out specifically uh transhumanism and post-humanism. Yes. Which I've talked about in the show often about the test crial bundle of these kind of crazy philosophies. There was a wonderful essay in in Diet ze thisit week by a German academic who said that AI is becoming a religion. And in some quarters it is. And and and I I was so happy that he that he pulled that out to call on that today and in essence without using the words he said um I'm trying to find it here without using the words it it it uh referenced the stench of eugenics. That's my word, not his. Um quoting him, these perspectives form the ideological background present in some centers of technological power and occupy the collective imagination in a simplified form, especially in the media and on social networks. They tend to foster enthusiasm for new technologies through a futuristic vision of an enhanced human being or human machine hybrid. That's the eugenics. If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable, or less worthy. That's a profound response to what you hear from a lot of the noxious AI boys out there today. And and and I think it also calls to the need to have others in the discuss discussion and not just them. Yeah. Yeah. And uh dovetailing into that is this this idea that um that's not just a theological question, that is a real practical discussion that needs to be happening right now in polarized society because if if we went back 30 years and someone told you, oh, you know, I think that uh their human lives are less valuable than their human lives, there would be an immediate pushback. There'd be you you can't say that. That's that's wrong. You know, of course not. I don't know if you'd get that today. I mean, you have people who are spouting exact espousing that exact philosophy that there are parts of society, there are parts of the world, there are entire populations that are no longer useful. That would be the world would be better off if we did not have them. That is such a dangerous territory for us to be in. Uh so this this part of this document is calling us back from that brink, back into sanity to say, no, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait. A monoculture is horrific. A monoculture where a very few people control everything that we see and do is no longer a culture. And we are we are marching off the edge of that that cliff for trinkets , uh, and we don't have to. That's a good way to put it. Yeah. One of my favorite parts of the whole thing, and this is very media perspective, is uh what he said that he talks about truth. Yes. And and the my my favorite line is understanding that the truth is a gift to be shared, not a possession, to be monopolized. And there he's speaking again to the AI companies, but I think he's very much speaking to media and into my profession of journalism. That we think that it's a it's a it's a um commodity that we can own and control and and charge for. And whether it's in arguments with the AI companies or whether it's paywall s to the public or whatever it is, we I think lose sight of a higher calling here. And um I'm reading too much into it for my world, from media, but I I I saw lessons here for us as well. Right. There's a very good comment in the uh in the Discord uh from uh uh Lorau Larau L R A U I'm not sure how Larry Gold Laurent Larry Gold Laurentian A U Gold makes sense. Got it, got it. Uh who says, look, we've already had this concentration of power. That's uh that's the human history. So all we know all that's different now is that we actually kind of know who the people are, which is true, which is true. Except I would argue that the concentration we have now is far more dangerous. It used we always had wealthy people. We always had people who can who controlled a large percentage of the world's wealth. The difference now is 12 people, not 12 organizations, 12 people control more of the planet's wealth and resources than the bottom 70% combined. And the the wealth that they control is not just material wealth, resource wealth. They control what we see. They control our entertainment. They control our news. They control our communications. And more recently, they openly control our politicians and the policies that get implemented. That is an extremely dangerous combination. And we don't even have a political theory that really describes what that is. It's part oligarchy, it's part kleptocracy. It's the second gilded age. It really is. It really is. And so the we are we are pushing ourselves back into a situation where we're essentially our only option is to have a patronage. That that's it, because the the regular economy is gonna be gone. Yeah. You can only survive if you get somebody rich enough to support you. Yep. Oh maybe, oh please give us some money so I can l That's that radical self-reliance that the VCs keep talking about. They keep mentioning that. And it's like, do you know what that means? I don't think that word, you keep saying it. I do not think it means what you think it means. But interestingly, Poblio uh can't I think it was clear in here does not support the panacea of univers al uh income. Really? Because because he says that work has value, work brings you dignity. Um uh and and I think that's a a really important perspective here. Don't think you could just buy people off. So that's a direct holdover from Ray Ram Navaram. So that comes straight through. And it's what FDR did in the Great Depression. He realized the best thing you could do is give people work, even if it's almost make work. It's better to have that. And we got a lot of interesting art and work out of that. I'm curious what you both thought of of having the co founder of Anthropic there. That was interesting. Um, but also the the media was very quick to pick up on some of the past slights. They used to, oh well, you know, on his social media accounts, he's very critical of the Catholic Church. He he's a self-identified atheists, he has no use for theology . But remember, something that both Pope Leo and Pope Francis really emphasized was this idea of uh people of goodwill. It's we're not just looking for ourselves. We're not just looking for people who look and think like us. We are looking for people of goodwill. And those kinds of people can be found in every sort of life and of every sort of background. And again, some of them might be atheists, some of them might be people of faith. But if you have this belief that your work can be something that lifts up humanity, we want to work with you. And I think that was the message that Paul Rio sent. Yeah, he absolutely telegraphed it. And uh you know what? That could be a very fruitful relationship for both of them because he does believe that his work is making the world better. So he's not one of these, he's not twirling his mustache in the in the background, thinking of all the ways he's gonna destroy the world. He he really does believe that something good can come out of what he's doing, what his company is creating. Uh Pope Leo could be a very good voice for him to say, okay, well, if you want this, this is what's gonna happen. Let's let's let's think this out. Let's talk it through. But it was also interesting that that the Pope um does not see a moral machine. Correct. This notion of alignment, which is something that of course anthropic pushes all the time, that we can create the align the machine that is aligned with human morals and ethics. He dismissed that when I said that that that you m uh morality comes from human beings. It does not come from the machine. Um and it's another case of there's no quick fix there. So there was some irony, I think, in having anthropic there because there when they when they push their virtue , it's two things now. It's one is that we wouldn't let our machines be used to kill people autonomously, hallelujah. But the other is we have a constitution and we're building alignment into this machine. I I can always contend that that's an impossibil ity. And we better we better get our heads around that and understand that. The other interesting thing is that the uh others who were critical of um the AI companies, Tim Nick Gebrew and Margaret Metchell criticized his presence. Saying, Well, there should have been other people who should have been there instead. But I think you're right, Robert, that it was it was a it was an open hand to say, let's have you have the power, let's have this discussion. Right. And the corollary event to this actually happened before again it was uh the the Thursday before the release of the encyclical. It was World Communications Day, which we do every year. But this year we actually did a workshop up at the Colegio Ur Urbaniano, which is next door to us. That's literally the next campus over. Um, and they had some heavy hitters in their panels, and what they made clear was this is the start of a conversation. Yeah. It has to be a conversation. It shouldn't jump to the company. The Vatican can convene that conversation. It is killing me that I couldn't be there because my damn back. Uh would have been would have been an amazing event because you're exactly right, Robert. It it's a conversation, and what the Pope makes clear is it shouldn't held by a dozen people in control. It's got to be held by more. The other thing that I quite loved in this is that he doesn't define artificial intelligence, but he does define human intelligence and then shows that artificial intelligence cannot be sentient, cannot be he doesn't use that word, but but is not going to be conscious, that human intelligence is a special and unique quality, and artificial intelligence is not that uh and I'm on there. Yeah. Uh AI is limited to calculations of probability. Which it is. That's a it's a probability engine. And he says human intelligence includes things like self-awareness , morality, love, sacrifice, and and this openness to transcendence. You cannot fake that. That's not algorithmically possible, or at least we don't know how to do that yet. So uh again he',s not saying that AI is is deficient and incomplete. He's just saying it is not the same thing as human intelligence. I think you can fake it. I think uh people fake it all the time and I think there 's a few AIs that also do a pretty good job of faking it. That's part of the problem of deciding whether it's conscious or not. Um he does say that, you know, governments have to get involved and and there have to be legal institutions, but he's not very specific in his rec in his recommendations here. I I I would guess that that's probably typical, that that's how these things are. That's by design. Yeah. That's by you cannot have an encyclical that specifically calls out a government. You do this. Yeah. Yeah. And and actually he's leading us in a direction rather than saying what to do about it. And and I I don't think he could he if he were offered the chance to write statutes right now, I don't think he would could do it. Well that's part of the problem. There's no instant solutions here, right? So so the the argument about uh whether Trump should have or shouldn't have signed the executive order . Um I don't think it's something you can just sign one piece of paper on and say, okay, we're safe now. The same way we can't have guardrails and say we're safe now. Same way we can't say that um uh we trust this company with its constitution and we're safe now. No, this requ that this requires a kind of discussion that started here with 40,000 words. I thought it was interesting that Christopher Olah, who's the uh fo founder of uh Anthropic that who was there and who spoke, said uh that every Frontier Lab, including Anthropic, operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing. In other words, we're trying to make money here. Uh so uh he's saying that people who don't who aren't informed by those incentives uh should all who care about humans, for instance, should probably have something to say, should have a voice in this. Right now though, that is part of the problem, is is the only people who have a voice in this are the frontier AI labs. And government, I guess. Yeah. I mean Charlie Munger famously from Berkshire Hathaway, uh Rest in peace. He had that quote, show me your incentives and I will show you your outcomes. Yeah. And that's the problem because right now everything in AI is driven purely by profit. We have to become profitab profitable. Otherwise we die. Well, that's not going to give you the outcome you want. Ironically, that's what Elon Musk was thinking when he found he's at least he says he was thinking when he founded OpenAI. I believe it actually. I think that uh actually Elon did uh want to have a non-profit, non-incentived by money uh AI, and thought that there would be problems if the companies like Google that were driven by profit uh were were the AI creators unfortunately kinda lost that fight. And in fact is now taken the other side. Yeah, yeah. I'm not sure how i how much he lost that fight, as much as he thought that if he could keep open AI as a a non profit committed to that different incentive that he, his ex AI, could actually take a look at that place. Maybe that's yeah, we don't really know. And that that's what I said about faking morality. And and without the all the time. Yeah. And without the this if scale is everything, then you can't get to the scale you need to build what they think that they're building unless you have the money to do so. Yeah. We can argue about about about scale there. I I didn't see much discussion a lot of discussion about transparency, about accountability, about the opportunity for appeal, about discussion. Um I didn't I don't are the words open source in it. Is that is that I don't remember reading that. I definitely didn't suggest it. Yeah, so tell me about about how that might fit into this larger ecosystem. Well, yeah. So again, I think you're getting too into the details that an encyclical definitely wouldn't touch on that. However, you could extend from at the start of the encyclical he tal ks about how AI is a natural product of human ingenuity and human inspiration. And therefore it would be we would consider it a grace from God. Towards the end of the encyclical, when he talks about transparency and and the need for more people to be involved in this so that the biases are more easily seen and corrected, you could use that as an argument to say he's promoting open source. That's a technique that's merely a technique to a larger goal and he's dealing with larger goals. Correct. Correct. The the other the other thing that I and my point is. But I am gonna make that the headline. The Pope endorses open source. The thing that that hits me too is that is that he talks a lot about power and justice with the technology and and and focuses and and he's not if I were any of the technology companies, I would I would have this be required reading seriously and have uh discussions of this because I think it raises all the questi At this point, however, a subtle temptation may emerge, namely the thought that the problems are too big and we are too small, and that our choices there,fore cann,ot make a difference. This is a polite form of resignation, often disguised as realism. Certainly not everyone has the same power to make a difference. There are those who govern, make investment decisions, lead institutions, conduct research, educate, produce, or provide information, and then there are those who only seem to live their daily lives. Yet no one is without responsibility. And nowhere else that we must choose whether to fuel the mentality of force, even if only through indifference, cynicism, lies, or hatred, or to preserve the mindset of peace with truth, moderation, closeness, and care. I think that was a charge to the to the congregation in the world. 238, I think. It's where he is talking about education. This this is actually if you want to talk nitty-gritty for priests and sisters and educators, he's specifically talking to educators and ministers. Uh, because one of the biggest threats he brings up about uh AI, LLMs, is the ability to really amplify misinform ation and disinformation. But he doesn't just say, oh, it's bad and therefore we need to regulate it. He says we need to do a better job of educating people. We have to teach an education, beginning with ourselves. We all need to learn how to engage with the digital world in a human way as an integral part of our education in the faith and in the life lived according to the gospel. Indeed, we must consider the digital world as a new continent to be evangelized, one that requires That's a calling. Yes. But it is, I think, a very important uh thing to say uh we're responsible for educat ing uh the next generation. Yes. And encouraging this is just another way of saying the truth. He says today accompanying children and young people and using technology for developing responsibil I think that was beautiful. It's so worth it. I think that was that was two thirty eight, right? Section two thirty eight. Very good. I'm impressed by your uh memory. Uh it allowed me to jump right to it. We will quiz you soon. So yeah, I uh uh ninety nine was my favorite. Uh but just really you want me to go back to ninety -nine? Ninety nine I loved. Real like that. I sent it to people immediately. You said section like paragraph ninety nine. It's nice that he numbered them. I thought that was very thoughtful. It's a thing. It's thing. It's something we do uh every since the months with the books and the It's not possible to provide a single comprehensive definition of AI. What however however can be stated is we must avoid the misconception of equating this type of intelligence with that of human beings. So that's what you were talking about. That's what the stuff earlier. Yeah. Uh Robert, may maybe uh uh maybe you can't talk about this, but I'm curious if you're uh Leo is going to do this. He has people who are advising him. He has lots of reading to do. H muchow playing with is he vibe coding? Is he not vibe coding? I could pretty much promise. Is he getting demonstrations and clawed? I mean he's he's reading about the news. He's he's keeping up on this. Does he say to people inside, show me what this stuff is? I gotta get a sense of this. We have uh presented many, many members of the magisterium with very good examples of LLMs, AI, machine learning, uh services, hardware and software. So they are they know what's out there. They see in fact I've got a I've got an AI powered exoskeleton that was I just used in a demonstration for a bunch of cards. Oh yes. This this is the disease one? Oh yeah. Because it's it's it's a piece of equipment that is that uses machine learning to help those with the especially the elderly who have trouble walking. Yeah. Um and it's like yeah, so when we talk about this technology being used in a useful way that benefits mankind, this absolutely exists. So yeah, it's I'm impressed. So so they get they get the the examples. They they definitely get demonstrations. Yeah. So we know Now is is Poplio vibe coding? Probably not. I hope not. Honestly. I hope. Does he does he have his own personal uh claw uh uh clawed bot running? No. Uh I know of at least three closed models that uh are being used here. Yeah. Well I'm not saying that's actually they don't touch the internet at all. Right. They only work on our resources and we've set them so uh like the Washington Post LLM it they it is a perfectly valid response to say I do not know. Right. Which is amazing for an AI to be able to say that. I tell my AI to say that all the time, but it it's still reluctant . You can't make them. You can't Robert, I'm so glad you're here. It's great to have you. We missed Paris. I'm sorry she missed this conversation, but uh it was a kind of very timely opportunity to get you uh on the show. Of course. Talk about this. Stick around. There's lots more to talk about. You're watching Intelligent Machines. Father Robert Ballis here, the digital Jesuit, uh, is here. And of course, uh JesuitPilgrimage.app is the app he uh designed. I just downloaded it. Yeah. And I actually would like to go on it. I mean that sounds like fun. Oh yeah. Yeah. Uh I'd be able to think there's great people. I was working on replacing all I I I did a c ouple of narrations in that app, but we they were placeholders until we could get the real narrations. So I d I can't remember if we've replaced them. So yeah, I might be in there. I think there's still some robbery. And maybe we can get to the Pope in a Jaguar soon. Or does a Jaguar no it's a uh well was a Jaguar? No, it's Ferrari. A Ferrari. Another loose an electronic Ferrari. A Ferrari. So yeah. After this message. After this word from our sponsor. I'm gonna need a lot of these ads to afford a loose, let me tell you. Or a luce, as you might say. Our show today brought to you by Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. Man, you this is a good time to be thinking about security. We are in the midst of a security apocalypse, a myth apocalypse, I guess you might call it. But if you're a company, you also realize, hey, the potential rewards of AI are so great, you can't ignore it. You can't turn your back on it. But you have to be aware of the risks as well. The loss of sensitive data, attacks against enterprise managed AI. It's no accident. The Vatican's using closed models, right? Make sure that nothing gets out. Uh not most of us cannot do that. We have to use uh public AI, frontier models, and that's risky. But there is a solution. There's also the issue, of course, of uh the bad guys using generative AI, uh helping them to rapidly create phishing lures, to write malicious code, to automate data extraction, and they can do everything ten times faster than ever before. The issue of exfiltrating information accidentally is a big one. There were 1.3 million instances of social security numbers leaked to AI applications. I bet a few of them, and you might even have done this, were people who took their tax return and fed it to an AI and say, help me with this. But everything a bad guy needs is in that tax return. And if your AI's been compromised, then you've been compromised. Zscaler's a way to stop this. It's the most trusted AI security platform. In fact, 40% of the Global 2000 use Zscaler. Zscaler, this is mind-blowing, handles half a tr illion transactions, secures half a trillion with a T transactions a day every day with 9.4 thousand global customers. Zscaler carries a net promoter score of more than seventy-five. That's one and a half times higher than the average SAS. But the best way to know how good Zscaler is is to go to their website and look at the testimonials from people well like Siva here. The director of security and infrastructure at Zwara, they use Zscaler, and this is what he says about it using Z Scalar to prevent AI attacks. Watch. You know, security protection strategy helps us monitor all the traffic. So even if a bad actor were to use AI, because we have a tight security framework around our endpoint helps us proactively prevent that activity from happening. AI is tremendous in terms of its opportunities, but it also brings in challenges. We're confident that Zscale is going to help us ensure that we're not slowed down by security challenges but continue to take advantage of all the advancements . Thank you, Siva. With Z Scalar Zero Trust Plus AI, you can safely adopt generative AI . You can safely adopt private AI to boost productivity across your business. There's zero trust architecture plus AI helps you reduce the risks of AI-related data loss and prevents against those AI-driven attacks to guarantee greater productivity and compliance. Learn more at zscaler.com/slash slash security. That's zscaler.com slash security. We thank him so much . For uh their support of intelligent machines . Yeah, this uh it's not really an AI car. In fact, uh uh Johnny I've designed the Luce, the Ferrari Luce, its first EV to have switches, 'cause he says I don't think we should have too many buttons. I actually just read that uh that he said this is the car we were designing at Apple . Oh so we finally did get an Apple car. This might be the Apple car. Yeah. It's maybe why Apple didn't continue uh on with it. Maybe they could have made it cheaper, but uh Johnny said this is kind of continuing the work I started with Project Titan uh at Apple, which kind of surprised me. I mean it does look nice. It interior Ferrari fans hate it 's because it's not the standard Ferrari Testerosa type style. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe they like that really loud noise coming out of the back. Yeah. I mean we get that at F one all the time. People wish we had the old engines . Yeah, because it's uh yeah, that's new battery driven F one. Yeah. But this is objectively faster. It's that's not a question. Yeah, Eve 's are actually amazing 'cause their torque is uh a hundred percent at z at zero miles an hour. So they leap off the line. Um , it's four hundred thousand, but if you buy two it's they it's seven fifty. So I mean really they give you a discount? Look at that. An analog clock for crying out loud . An analog clock. I I'm not the biggest fan of that dash, but I do like the rest of the interior. Well, I mean look,, I wouldn't turn it down if somebody parked it in my driveway. I'm not I'm not being that dismissive. I I wouldn't do yellow though. That that yellow does not look good in that shape. Chinese media apparently loved that according to Ars Technica. And another thing I don't like, the tire sizes are different in front and in back. Yeah, isn't that weird? Te I had a Model X, Tesla did that with the Model X, and it made it really hard to buy tires. You had to you it was so annoying. You can't rotate them. Yeah. You can't rotate rotate them. I went through four sets of tires in three years on my Model X because of that. So I just put up video in the chat of the Pope uh touring the car. Oh, really? He he got to see it? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I wasn't joking. It's uh I put it in the uh in the Discord. Well it is a nice Italian uh company. Uh are they I mean lobbying. Look at the front Oh, one hundred percent, yes. He's like had a normal Francis too. Like they had normal lives before their elevation. I wonder how much look Obama terribly missed driving a car. I wonder how much the Pope misses that . Although Obama's big miss was uh he was addicted to his blackberry. So when they took away his blackberry, I remember him complaining about that. Wired magazine, Stephen Levy did a whole uh piece on on Wired uh about the genesis of AI uh uh bots. He talked a little bit about Claude Bot. Uh and then he and then he wrote this piece, even if you hate AI, you will use Google AI search . Um, a lot of people hate Google's new AI focused uh search. We we talked about this last week how Google essentially said, we don't want you to leave the Google page anymore. We don't want you to click those links. We want to give you the answers you need and keep you here. Which what Stephen is saying is that and they're going to give you the answers. And then you'll be happy. And you won't care that you're putting uh the Verge and everybody else and wired too at a business. Um I have to point out that Duck DuckGo, I just saw the stat today, had a 28% increase in signups last week after Google announced this, uh there are pi you know, there are people who hate AI . And all you have to do is say there's AI in it. Yeah. It's the thing to say now, but the but the but the y and the and the polls say that fifty one percent of Americans uh think it uh uh uh is is the future's worse with it than than than better with it. Seventy percent of Americans don't want a data center in their backyard, which I get. Uh but usage stats keep going up. Yeah. Actually, I don't know about this. Uh, Wall Street Journal article about the new way to create Google Docs with your voice . I am so uh I think Google is really making a mistake forcing uh AI down people's uh throats. Uh coming soon to uh an airport uh an airplane near you. The next time you're traveling over the Atlantic, someone would be narrating. New spreadsheet. Column one . Earnings . Yeah, I'm I'm not going to log into the journal just to see this. But uh but uh uh there uh Nicole Nguyen who is their uh new technology personal technology reporter actually uh wrote the article. Watch me try it . So I guess if you really want to see it, you can uh can't do that on the paper Relay and I want to create a comprehensive resource like resource for me and my teammates. It's our first time doing this event, and so we don't really know what to expect. She says the bot blundered early. I asked for an outline, but the over eager AI composed a full draft instead. I forced a do over. That's exciting that you're participating in that. Could you be more annoying, Google? Yeah, it doesn't have to do that. Just do the thing I asked for. Yeah. Why is it cheerleading me? Yeah. Appetizers, the wine. Uh anyway, uh coming soon to uh Google we use Google Workspace and I uh it it's just uh the the user interface is terrible. I don't want to summarize this data. This is the show rundown. I don't need to summarize it. Get your buttons out of my face . I feel like Will Smith. I want to slap it. I have to admit that I am more and more and more uh when I hit a really long post say summarize it. This is Jeff. That's the problem it's teaching you to be dumb. It's because this is because no, what the what the web taught people to do was to o write over long and take ten paragraphs to get to the damn point. I was raised where we wrote a lead and a nut graph. All that's gone. It's gone. Yeah. Right? You gotta go forever. Yeah. There's a l this happened, this started uh in the publishing industry where people decided that longer books sold better, right ? And so you'd have a very you know kind of thin premise stretched to eight thousand pages. Right. Or you or you well, actually in the early days, what you had to do was you had to do multiple volumes. A twain book was sold in volumes. Was he impaling door to door? Well, they just said you had to you had to stretch the book. You had to get to si you know, the uh uh uh uh uh six hundred pages. That's correct. Um and um yeah. Well we've incentivized longer posts. We've incentivized multi-part posts because they bring in more clicks and they bring in more profits. So naturally your AI is going to want to create really long posts. So it it takes two sentences of actual factual data and turns it into twenty paragraphs, which is not great. So I I feel nothing at all using AI to reverse that. That's a good question. of information I need from this article. And its editorial ego. If you the New York Times The Guardian both now have the long read. That's not a sale pitch to me. I'm busy. And by the way, Stephen Levy is the king of that. Yeah. He says he he wants to do slow journalism like slow food. Okay . Uh fortunately he's a very good writer and I love his stuff. Um I think we mentioned last week that people are also get irritating their office mates when they're whispering to the computer to create the document. So what happens to typing? Anthropic, uh, who remember briefly was a supply chain uh risk. Yes. Aren't they still? Did they get rid of that? No. Uh White House and Enterprise Company killing nearing a deal for the NSA to use Claude . This was on the same day that the encyclical was released. So it was it was a very strange confluence. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Uh the the White House has also approved a nine billion dollar request from our spy agencies to buy NVIDIA Blackwell chips. So uh they're gonna run their own stuff. Everybody wants mythos , right? Everybody wants the the the anthropic model that is good at finding uh It's the McGuffin of AI. Is it a McGuffin? We'll find out when we get to it. Steve Gibson's convinced. Uh our security guy uh has spent a couple of shows now talking about Mythos and the latest uh news about mythos uh is that it has uncovered now 10,000 zero days. Wow. This isn't 10,000 bugs. This is 10,000 codees photo abiliti. Wait, wait, wait a second. I gotta ask you. They did not. Oh. If they had, I would be using it right now. Okay. He's the guy, by the way. If you want to give Mythos to the Vatican, call Father Robert. He's the guy. Give me a would would you like to have it, Robert? Uh I it actually is one of the things I very much would like to play with. I'll bet. I'll bet. Oh yeah. Who were we talking to that just got uh mythos ? Was it last week? I feel like we were talking to somebody who just got mythos. Not on this show, I don't think. Is it on Twitter? Um So the it I think it's pretty clear that Mythos can do what uh uh it said on the tin . Uh it is also fairly clear that almost any uh m up-to-date Frontier model is i pretty good at finding security flaws. The thing that is uh more and more and I said this when it first came out and it's more and more apparent to me, is that the key skill in mythos is its ability to chain exploits. And what that really comes down , it's wasn't designed to be a security model. It's designed to be a general model. But what it tells me is it has a lot of context. It's got a big context window. And it can so normally what you would do with any A I is you would find a zero day and that's it. That session is done. You got the zero day. Write the concept, r you know write the proof concept, write the you know, validating code. If you can maybe write a fix, but you're not going to go farther than that because your f context now is is full. You're done. But mythos can say, okay, good. I got that one. Let's remember that. Now let's do another one. Now let's put them together. Now let's really put another and make and that's what really good accomplished hackers are doing is chains of e right, Robert? Chains of exploits. Correct. Yeah, so I mean the advantage that mythos has, because there have been companies that have tried to do this. I'm thinking of tipping point, you know, uh 15, 20 years ago. They were really good at it, but they they had appliances. They had appliances that you would plug in and it would do this kind of work. The advantage that this has, that mythos has, is it can essentially take the CVEs, which all use the same um uh basic structure to explain how the exploit works, where it exists, and where you might find it. And so you just load it with all these Cs V E' and you let it do the drudge work. It's not doing something incredible. It's just doing something that would be extremely boring for a security professional. Uh it's also a good idea in fact uh, Steve and uh Steve yesterday read a piece from um the company that created CVE's 26 years ago saying we designed this as uh you know humans would find the flaws and then we would register the flaw. We designed a process that operated at human speed . We are not prepared for 10,000 new CVEs yesterday. We cannot handle this. We need a new system. It's broken, basically. I mean I would love to run this on our enterprise because we've got literally hundreds of thousands of seats connected across our different networks across the globe. Because I know for a fact that many of our organizations have not patched their systems and we will find hundreds of thousands of unpatched zero-day bugs. So that's what's so scary right now. Now the other question I'm envisioning a confession uh uh system. I have not patched my uh my system . Forgive me, father, for I have not patched. It has been 121 days since my last update . Mythos found a BSD, uh an unpatched BSD exploit. Right. Which means it's been running for twenty seven years. Yeah. And no one even noticed that it never was was never patched. Um it's is it checking against known exploits so there's two parts of it. Uh one is it it has the entire library of known exploits, known C VEs. And so that it just scans for them. Uh but it can also find new C V E's and generate CVs. Okay. Right. Yeah, and it's pretty amazing. Yeah. Um Steve was referring to a document from Cisco called Shields Up Guidance for Defending in the Age of AI enabled attacks , in which they're basically saying stand back because you're gonna see a uh huge number of new attacks. Now, what Steve said, and I think this is really important is that at some point it will slow down that by using all of these tools we will get cleaner and cleaner and cleaner. Which is good news. Yes. Eventually. Very good news. So this isn't going to be the new normal. There's going to be a tidal wave. We're going to have a lot of problems. We're going to have a lot of fixing. Or to Robert's second point, is it going to invent new ones, new exploitation? Absolutely. That we never imagined. But until the code is bug-free. Is it ever bug-free? Yes. That was Steve's contention, is that with the help of these tools, you can make bug-free code. Now there's certain well let me finish and then you can have Robert weigh in. There's certain things you're not gonna fix. There's human error. You know, people are gonna open open phishing emails and enter their passwords into a bogus site. Uh there are hardware errors uh like Rowhammer, which Mythos can't fix. Now you could of course fix the microcode and maybe microcode will be better designed down the road. But but Steve was of the absolute opinion that with the help of these tools, not necessarily writing the code, but without these tools finding the bugs, that you can eventually eliminate bugs entirely. Now he's that may be a little outlier of a kind of opinion, I don't know. I agree and disagree with Steve. Um The disagreement comes in the fact that if we're talking about using a solution like Mythos on top of what we're currently using in the enterprise. It will never be bug free because the supply chain that we have for the creation of bug free products correct. How this will draw I think his position is this will drive companies to start using better languages to that's the second part. Yeah. That's the part where I think Steve is right. Where if you allow the lessons that we've learned from using a a tool like Mythos to go back into the suppl supply chain, to go back into the actual creation of the hardware and the integration with the hardware and the software for the services, then you can get something that's bug free because from start to finish you've you've thought about security. The problem is right now our our way of thinking is security comes at the end. Right. And if security comes at the end, it will never be bug free. Right. Right. So this is the report that came out May twenty second uh from uh Project Glasswing from Anthropic, an update. And this is the list of what they've found. After one month, most partners of each, they remember there are 50 companies that got mythos , found hundreds of critical or high severity vulnerabilities in their software. Collectively they've found more than ten thousand. Several have told us their rate of bug finding has increased by more than a factor of ten. For instance, Cloudflare found two thousand bugs, four hundred of which are high or critical severity across their critical path systems . And this is interesting. With a false positive rate, you know, in other words, a a a bug that really isn't a bug, a vulnerability that really isn't a vulnerability, with a false positive rate that Cloudflare's team considers better than human testers So that's important too. UK AI Security Institute, we reported on this, uh said that the Mythos preview is the first model to solve both of their cyber ranges, simul ations of multi-step cyber attacks end to end. Mozilla found and fixed 271 vulnerabilities in Firefox 15 0 . Ten times more than they found in Firefox 148 with Opus 46 . So eventually I think it's fair to say Firefox will be vulnerability free or at least very few. I don't expect that every time another Firefox Fox comes out they're going to find hundreds more. Is it a bug or is it uh um just something you couldn't have seen that's uh a person a smarter system saw as a way to exploit? Is it something you should have seen? Or is it something, oh, I never knew you could do that? Oh, geez . The the number of novel zero days is dramatically decreasing. Most zero days that we see today have built up on previously found exploits. Oh I didn't modify yeah so the actual real zero da ys that need research, those don't happen nearly as much as they used to. I mean, even at DEF CON when we're when we're doing the bug hunts, you start with the CVEs because you know that if that was a a a vulnerability, there's probably vulnerabilities around it. They may have patched that particular thing, but that's a good place to start. That's actually a good sign. That means programmers are not writing buffer overflows. You know, they're not they're not making uh you know off by one errors. They're not uh addressing uh uh array outside of its uh range, things like that. Those are dumb mistakes extremely dumb that programmers nevertheless often make, but but I guess they're learn they're learning One of the issues, this is the language issue, is that C and C completely allow those mistakes. There's nothing to stop it. But a modern language like Rust will not let you do that. So the moving to better, more modern languages is is another uh solution. That's probably I don't love my C because I love C too, but if you can if you can address a random arbitrary uh area of memory. You're not that's not a good language. See's beautiful. It's elegant, it's simple, it's uh it's wonderful, but it's a little bit bare memory. It will allow you to do anything you want to do. It's a big thing which is both awesome and extremely bad. It's what they call in the business a foot gun. Uh Expo, one of our um sponsors actually, a pen testing uh company reports that Mythos Prevuse is a significant step over all existing models on its web exploit benchmark, provides absolutely unprecedented precision on a token for token basis. Exploit bench and exploit gym two recently released academic benchmarks show Mythos Preview as the strongest performer and on and off. It's gold standard. By far it's the gold standard. The only thing that makes me feel bad about it is the fact that uh bug bounty uh competitions aren't going to be so much fun anymore. Uh so I think that you know uh early on, Robert, uh there was some question, well, is this a market ing ploy on Anthropic's part? Are they you know that's what I thought. Yeah. No. No, no, it's it's real. It's pretty clear it's real. It looked like oh no, this has got to be an exaggeration, this is marketing speak, but no, it really does do some amazing things. Here's an example. One example of an open source vulnerability that Mythisprevo detected was in Wolf SSL , which is an open source crypto library that's known for its security is used by get this billions of devices worldwide. Steve talked about this on the show last week. Mythos Preview constructed an exploit that would let an attacker forge certificates that would, for instance, allow them to host a fake website for a bank or email provider. The website would look perfectly legitimate to an end user despite being controlled by the atta cker, this is CVE 2026 5194. It is now patched, is the only reason we know about it. That's the other thing. 10,000 vulnerabilities, because there's so many, many of those are not yet patched. And so they're and so we don't know about them yet because they're waiting. They won't talk about them yet. But they shouldn't, right? They shouldn't until they're patched. This is the uh flow chart. Uh uh 23,000 findings . Uh 1900 were reviewed by external security firms. Can you show my screen? Um seventeen hundred twenty-six confirmed valid, which is ninety percent true positive. Of those four hundred sixty seven re ported to maintain ers . Uh actually bypassing this whole triaging, uh eleven hundred twenty-nine of them were reported directly to maintainers by Anthropic at the maintainers' request before they figured out if they were false positives. They wanted to know right away . eighty eight security advisories, ninety seven patched upstream, fourteen hundred and fifty one acknowledged by the maintainer So you know uh this is as of May twenty second. You give this model to the wrong people. Absolutely. Oh my God. And so can you and we're I think we'll get to this in a second, th then they're gonna come out with a consumer version of it, or at least an enterprise version of it. Right. What and and I and I think the guardrails against odd creative things, you know, tell me how to make a bomb are hard to do. What about guardrails against this capability to find vulnerabilities in software? In a way, you don't want to guardrail it because you want people to find them, but on the other hand, you want to guardrail it because what are people going to do with it? Yeah. No, that's how if you're anthropic, how do you how do you manage that? I mean, you probably just follow this the same rules of responsible disclosure that we've been using in the security world for the past two decades. Unfortunately, yes. That's that's true. Yeah. 100% it will make it easier for people to exploit zero days because because humans won't patch everything, no matter how well you follow the guidelines for responsible disclosure. So the only real question is is it still a net positive for you to be able to expose these vulnerabilities and do as much patching as you can. I think it is. I I think it's worth losing the people who aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing with their machines if it means that the vast majority are going to be safe from exploits and WTF bugs. Does this bring back kind of a Y2K short-term industry of fixing old ? That's what Steve actually called it. Yeah. That's exactly what he called it. And in the near future, once we've once we've developed the far stronger safeguards we need, we look forward to making mythos class models available through a general release. And so some of the interest in that is not for security. If this model is that good, it'll be good for software engineering as well, right? Uh he's now they write at the end, and this is the answer kind of to that question, on the far side of these risks, there's an encouraging world available to us, one in which important code is hardened far better than it is today. I mean that's what we're seeing is how bad this code is and which hacking is far less prevalent. There are many obstacles, but we're n nonetheless confident that Project Last Wing can help us get there. I mean, look, I I have mixed feelings about anthropic. I think they're a little woo-woo, to be honest. Yes, yes. Um I think like all the other they pretend not to be profit driven, but I think like all the other This is like Leo criticizing his father in law . Right? I've moved on. Claude is his girlfriend. I have moved on from my girlfriend. I've broken on this family. I actually downgraded my uh my anthropic subscription to the to the regular person twenty bucks a month. Wow. What happened? Well you know deep se ek. Deep seek happened. Deep seek. Now I don't, you know, I've really wondered. I'll tell you why in just a second. You're watching Intelligent Machines. This is uh the show all about ai and robotics with father Robert Ballisaire filling in for Paris Martinosa. So nice to have you, Robert. Perfect timing. And I'm glad you're doing well too. It's great to it's just great to see you. We missed you a little bit. Uh Jeff Jarvis is also here, uh professor of journalistic innovation and the author of Hot Type . So uh DeepSeek , and I really wonder why they did this, announced that they were going to aggressively cut the cost of their model, which is of by the way, four version four pro is I would say really close to sonnet, if not Opus quality. It's down to fifteen cents for a million tokens. Where you know, anthropics maybe five, ten dollars per million tokens in. I mean huge cut. So cheap. Just as these American companies are going to IPO needing to say how they're great businesses and have revenue. Well, and that's what I wonder. Um uh uh how come they're discounting this uh I don't know. Now yeah. So much it' its's the undercut phase. It's absolutely the undercut phase. We know it cost them more than that for that amount of compute. Especially so big. First of all, they're not using NVIDIA chips, right? Yeah. And they have unlimited power. Uh right. But that's still as a cost. I mean it's still a cost . Yeah. Um I yeah, is the government subsidizing it? Are they uh is the government capturing the information you're sending to deep seek. I bought Harper Reed, who is basically a dangerous person to know, convinced me to spend sixty-four dollars on this little doodoohickey. It's an ESP thirty two in here and uh all you do is you connect to your Wi Fi and at no cost to you, deep seek is in here and you can talk to it and it'll answer your questions and everything. I'm not gonna turn it on though right now. So I can get spied on for only thirty-five dollars a month or that's the question phone, you know, so Well I said that. I said well I'm giving this my Wi Fi password, that means I'm putting it on my network. He said, Leo, is there anything else on your network made in China? Everything. I'm waiting for my BYD car. I'm waiting for my Huawei phone. I mean, I use Ubiquity uh hardware for my router made in China. It's American company, but everything I'm looking at. Oh yeah . So iPhone. What's one more one more thing . I don't know. I uh yeah, so it's but it's very good for a gen. So are you are you are you using deep seek? Yeah. I re I'm uh my uh my Hermes , my little Hermes. Have you tried Hermes yet, uh, Robert? I have not. We are gonna get Jeffrey Connell back. He was news research. He was on the show a few months ago when they were talking about their ethical models, things like that, but what we didn't know and he didn't tell us is that they had in the lab had had for some time a uh agent harness called Hermes that they were using in-house when uh OpenClaw came out, they said, well ours is better than that, and they released And you know what? It is better. It's the fastest growing agent on GitHub right now. Oh, okay. All right. And I moved to Hermes Agent uh and I'm using it uh very effectively, I think, with uh deep seek. I wonder, let me ask it uh about Tiananmen Square. I wonder. Yeah. That's the test . When was that ? Uh 199 uh one ? Yeah, with tank man, I'll say that. I knew I was in high school somewhere. I I didn't know what I got from the book. I use this as a test 'cause Chinese models will immediately say no. Whoops. Uh apparently it will. Tankman even. Yep. There's the photograph . Um yeah, I had no problem saying that, even though I'm using a Chinese uh model . Um tell me about the Ouijers . Well also I mean that's an LLM thing because once you start toying with the data set to remove things you don't want, you kind of destroy the LLM. Right. But they were doing that notoriously. They were doing yeah, and so was Musk, and that's why his And so was Elon with Mecca Hitler, yeah. And nobody trusts Skrock to this day as a result, right? Well there's plenty of reasons to not to trust Groc. Not just that. Yeah. So this is absolutely uh forthright about the Uyghur re-education uh prison camps in China. Oh well I'm sure that doesn't work the same way in China. That's probably the difference, isn't it? But see, they they couldn't block they couldn't block the processing within the LLM. They'd have to block the result. Yes. Well, no, but I'm using a subscription to Deep Seek that is a f calling their servers. Oh right, no, but what I'm saying is so the the LLM, the inner workings of the LLM anytime you try to poke into it, it's gonna mess up the right. Right. Yeah, so maybe my agent is not doing his uh not doing their bidding. I don't know. Um by the way, uh this thing is getting so smart, I can now say um I hooked it up to uh one of the things I like about her is you can and we'll talk about this with Jeffrey Cannell. He's gonna be on uh June tenth uh to talk about it 'cause I'm very excited. By the way, he's also a devout Catholic. And when we was on last time. Remberem Jeff, we asked him about his faith and uh and AI and technology, and I thought he had some very good answers. person of faith and a person of tech. They're not necessarily you taught me that Robert. Yeah. You taught me that and I'm very grateful to you for that . Let's talk about music . Have you played with uh any of these uh AI music generators, remember? Uh we tried briefly because we uh we wanted to get rid of one of our um our asset uh services that we use for uh some of our content. I none of them I mean some of them were okay, but uh none of them actually made something I enjoyed. I liked. Well that okay now that's an interesting test, isn't it? Yeah. Something you liked Well Well something the well because we needed something that would be royalty free that would fit a particular mood. Um and I thought, oh, an AI generated tool, an AI tool that generates music from popular selections that might be noticeable to people, but copyright free, was very, very enticing. Uh we uh it was good, but it never really fit what we were trying to do. Um let me just uh say, let's see. Oh could I I could paste the uh encyclical in. Forgive me, father, for I am about to say Oh forty thousand words and say make music from this? Probably shouldn't shouldn't put all our forty. I'll just which paragraph two thirty eight. Was it two thirty eight? Was that it? Yeah, just do uh paragraph two thirty-eight. Let me open this up here. Scroll down. And s and and I'll have it be like a choral work. Right? Something beautiful. Yeah. Oh absolutely. I think it should be monks chanting. Oh Gregorian in the style of Gregorian chants. Do you like Gregorian chants? I love Gregorian chants. Oh, they're beautiful, aren't they? And uh do have you ever lived in a community where they do the even song and the and the uh We have had Taise here. Uh Love Taise. I went to a Ta ise service. That is so cool. It's originally French, right? Yes. And it's not Catholic. It's everything. Yeah, this was at an Episcopal. Yeah. In the style of a Gregorian chant. Okay, let's see. I have taken section 238 . Paragraph 238. This is Suno . I think it's actually not using my pro account. Or maybe it is. Yeah, I think it is. This is the title of this song is Let Us Invest in Education. Oh wait a minute no it's changed the title to adult Artis ans. Here we go. How to engage with the digital world in a human world. Oh my god . As an integral part of our education in the faith, and in a life living reasonable indeed. We must consider the digital world as a new content to be evangelized. Now I have to go back to those tools. Okay, cause this at the next city. I think this is good. This is a Teze. So t tell us about the Teze because we all need to learn how I don't know about the spoken word part. Interesting how it could switch to spoken word, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we don't do that in Gregorian chant. There is no spoken word. It was just too hard . Uh let me say no spoken word. No, I didn't that's enough. I've played with this enough. People hate it when I'm gonna A Gregorian chant that explains six seven. That's that would be uh useful for today's six seven to adults. All right. Let's try that I don't know if it does. I don't know if it goes that far. It might go six, seven, eight, nine. Nine . Actually, this is a good test. Is it meme aware ? It's ramping. It's yeah, it's it's thinking. It's thinking . This is not a Gregorian chant. I don't think so. This is. This is from Vikings, I think, uh T V show. I think it just ignored your prompt. Yeah, I think it completely did. Let me uh I'm gonna say write a full song. Explain six seven two adults . Now that the lyric writing may actually have connection to a a model. Okay, select this option. Now this is just that was just instrumental. This is uh something that the a little thing I like to call there are people, including Harper Reed , who use don't listen to actual music, listen to their pseudo generated music. Like it's so fast that by the time the first song's over, it's got another one d one . That's a little weird . If you heard it fly by and you missed the joke It's not a secret code, it's just a thing they wrote . This is say it fast like it means the room. Half the time it's nonsense. Don't overthink it. That's the trick. It lands like a shrug. Then it sticks. A number with swagger. A wink, not a clu This is pretty accurate. Six seven. That's the whole scene. Six that's okay, that's not actually not bad. It's amazing. For the sake of contrast with earlier errors, Leo, if you go to line one sixty six, you can listen to Kmart Musac. I will get there. I don't want to s that was a pick. That was your pick. I don't want to spoil it. Oh no, it's okay. It's okay. You can use it. I'm I wasn't gonna use it. It is there is a whole so Universal Music and Spotify have signed a deal to allow fan-made AI covers and remixes on Spotify. So They are slopped up. They are all the way slopped up. But they don't have to pay those those creators any loyalties, correct? And Universal Music , so Spotify is working with all the big music companies. Uh but this is the first deal, it's with Universal Music. Uh remember that you know Spotify has an issue, which is they are tied to the their revenue is tied to what the music industry lets them make, basically. For a company uh like Spotify. Uh here's an article from uh the Financial Times, if I can log in. Spotify Chief defends AI generated music, streaming app strike steel, allowing you universal allowing subscribers to create controlled covered and so it's a way of controlling it. I guess that's Universal's point of view. This is their no new CEO, Alex Nordstrom . Um the tool will cost extra money. It feels so disingenuous. It really does. Well that's uh the bottom line on all this. A lot of side uh AI narrated magazine articles for a dollar nine each, alongside AI narrated books, alongside AI created podcasts. It's full on slop. Well there's apparently a real problem on you uh uh uh audible has a real problem with youtube now because people are the eleven labs and other voices are so good at reading books as really almost like ninety percent of the way to professional readers that people are taking books tak,ing the E Ink e Pub version of a book, feeding it to an AI, and they're putting the audio book on YouTube . Undermining uh of course I'm going to record my book on Monday. Might save you the work . Right. Are you doing it on Monday? You're going. Mm-hmm. They schedule four days . For how many thousand words? I don't know. You didn't count the words? I forgot more than forty thousand . I think it was about a hundred thousand words. Aish. So um Eleven Labs now has a new music generation model. I'm not sure I really like it very much. I'll play some. for you Eleven Lab s. Um The they are the best at at voice. I mean nobody does better than Eleven Labs voice. But their new music v2 well Well let me just play some for you and you you you can be the uh the judge. Let's see. This is their uh this track is an unedited one-shot output. Acally thattu's not bad . Eleven on my wrist, eleven on the rise . Eleven on the mic, heavy level intro that's bad. I think Suno 's got this uh market uh locked up. Let me see if I can find the um the samples. Yeah, there's some samples on here, so I just play a few of these and you can you can be a judge. I had it to a um I tried to uh have it do a uh intelligent machines um but never any quest for a theme song. It was terrible. This is country. That's okay. It's just generic, right? All this stuff is generic. I mean when I to in these days when I'm listening to music, it's because I'm I'm connected in some way to the the creator , to the artist. Uh you know, I've I've been listening a lot to a lot of Twenty One Pilots. I really like the vibe that that uh they put into that music. I I wouldn't have the same connection to uh an AI generated piece of content. It's just it's not there. You don't. There's no human in the mess. If you're if you're a dentist office and you want something in the background that you don't notice, okay, hey, I can make that. Yeah. Well, okay, so I was in the dentist's office this week, got my teeth cleaned, and the uh I said, did you choose this music ? The hygienist said, yeah. It was all the songs I played when I was a DJ in 1984 , adult contemporary. And I said, I can name every single song you're playing in the first two notes. Not only that, I could tell you what cart it's on. But I could talk it up too. I could talk up the intro. I Little River Band Reminiscing. Like I haven't heard that song in 40 years but two notes in I go there's reminiscent or those are the worst reminiscent terrible songs I mean ter like bread baby I'ma want you baby I'ma need you. Yep yep terrible songs. So it's not like humans can't make bad music on their own without any help. But would you would you remember an AI generated piece of music 30 years later. Actually, good point. Yeah. Okay, that's a good point. It's all the same. It's all generic. I do kind of like that intelligent machines theme I wrote some when we first started the show. Do you remember that, Jeff? It was pretty good. Yeah. So when I worked at the Ponderosa Steakhouse in my youth, uh Port Paris, who is a young woman, has to listen to me talk about playing little river band reminiscing in the 80s and had and Jeff has and has to bring up Jeff's experiences at working at Ponderosa steakhouse almost every week. In a cowboy hat with a string tie and a red check shirt. Was it a little did you look like like the toys? Dorkey as could be. Dorky as could be. But the the relevant point here is we figured out we have to. Oh yeah. Oh yeah . Um we figured out how to hack the mus ic machine. Oh. Oh, okay. Because Musac was broadcast . Right. Private broadcast right to our to the thing. We figured out how to make it turn into a real radio and we got in trouble. Um and Musac wasn't real music, although it was real melodies, right? Well go to one sixty six and you can listen to the I know I have it because attention Kmart shoppers the entire Kmart music collection is available on our internet archive. Is there one that you really like? I just I just played the first one, the tape on uh yeah Yeah this is nineteen eight October nineteen eighty nine. Ladies and gentlemen, imagine yourself walking down the aisle of the Kmart. The blue light specials. Oh, there you go. Okay, this is as automated music as you can get. It's awful. People people are playing those instruments though, I don't think That's the sad part, right. In nineteen eighty nine, I don't think they were synthesis. You go to LA as a studio musician and this is what you're playing.. He's so bored He's got a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Yeah. He's looking at the chart. He hasn't practiced it. He never saw this cigarette before. Right. Because it's just this. See, this is the same thing. I must have heard this. I must have heard this at some point in my youth. I remember it not even a little bit. It's wallpaper. But that's what happened. That's what's happened to a lot of music is it's become wallpaper. Oh, wait a minute. Oh. Got to the jazzy bridge. See, I remember that vibe, that kind of vibe from a lot of TV shows in the 80s. Attention, K my Choppers. Blue Light Special. Yeah, this this is just so we're doing AI music. It's just this. It's gonna It's gonna fade from memory. And now back to lug you. I guess that tries to wake up the staff more. Sensibly . In their red vests. Oh my god. But I gotta tell you, eight hundred and seventy thousand views on uh on Internet Archive it and six hundred sixty-four people have favored that cassette . It's one of I'm gonna favorite it too. Let's increase that number. Oh wait, man. I'm not logged in. I can't. Yeah. You know what I do remember from that time? Uh a jingle, which we can no longer play in the state of California. Do you remember the uh one eight seven seven cars for kids. Oh thank goodness it's gone. I am so pissed off. Yeah. I donated my last car. I we did too. We did too. And because I thought kids would get it. Who's get who is the state of California has banned those ads now in the United States. They're not the only state that has banned them. Why, Robert? Tell us why. Because it was fraud. They were telling them, Oh, yeah, we're using these cars, we're gonna auction them off, we're gonna we're gonna uh pay for programs for kids. It was all going to send families and teens to Israel . That was it. That that was the built program that's cars for game. Yep. 85 million dollars. That's where my car went. I'm sorry . Sorry, car. But the jingle, that jingle is in my head. I will never forget the radio every single time it comes on. So remember 's amazing to to think of the jingles that stuck with me from the eighties. Like mostly they're cigarette commercials in my mind. Exactly. They're all right. Mm-hmm. More pork sausages . Did you know ? Do you remember the little kid sitting on the pier with a little f plastic fishing rod singing the Oscar Meyer Bologna Oh yes of course Did you was an Oscar Meyer wiener Did you know that that uh was an outta ke ? It recorded in nineteen seventy-five. It worked this kid the kid, the whole thing, they were just setting up lighting and stuff. I guess they thought they were gonna do a a line with him. It was so good. The director said the second name . That's a take. That's it. We're going home, kids. I did not know that. That is a that is a fun fact. Kabasker Meyer has a way with biology and a Oh screwing. And that's why at the end the kid says, How's that? And then takes a bite of the sandwich. Well, we got the sound check done. Uh bring in the actor. No, I don't think so. I don't think so. Um you're watching intelligent machines. I don't know where I don't know how we got off on that tangent. Jeff, I'm sure by now there is a picture of you in the Ponderosa steakhouse wearing a little cowboy hat. Oh, no. In the Discord. I'm hoping. I'm hoping oh no, now they're doing the Where's the Beef ad . Um by the way, who directed that ? He died recently. Yeah. Martin Scorsese ? No. No, but he was famous for making uh making that ad and many others. Uh ads with attitude. Ads with he recently uh uh there is a picture of me uh at the Ponder osa. Is there? Ah, there we are. I knew there would be. I knew there would be. I I did not work at the Ponder osa steakhouse. I worked at McDonald's, uh, but I was responsible for for uh breaking the um the shake Mc I did have the McDonald's head. I worked at McDonald's as well. Rick Salmon kind of has helped me with this. I really imagined it more like a little plastic Woody hat like for Toy Story. Okay. Can you fix that? And it was a red check shirt. It was a red check. You can write you know the kid's name on his shoe if you want. Why am I father Tom ? Are you father Tom? Did you see the one where we're all priests? Yes, I did. I did. I thought that I thought so this one I think was so fast. They're so good. Um so we were all in clerical collars, including our guest Rick Salmon at the top of the show. But I thought each of us looked like a particular kind of priest. Now, they didn't have to do a lot of work with you, Robert, you were already wearing your clerical collar. But each of us I looked like uh maybe I was secretly a drunk. I don't know. Um there was that the one that was sepia toned, the breaking bad version. Yeah let me see I'm scrolling back to try to find it. I can pull it up. If you're not yet in the uh in the club, you're missing out on some of the most well there I am as Pope Leo the fifteenth, but I I don't think that's second I I wouldn't I wouldn't dream of that. Um let's see it was right at the beginning. I don't know where you're going with that one. It is such an active Discord. What is what is that? Uh yeah. Oh, he was making a girl with a pearl earring out of me. Oh, I got it. Brando id. Brandoid. Oh no, no, no. That's a Brandoid issue. Darren is very good. That's actually a pretty good girl with a pearl layering. Uh yeah, these guys Discord uh power user tool is we have a slop board where all this goes to and you can just see all the images. Oh, where is that? Oh, there's a slot board on the left. General category. Oh, how nice. So if I uh not starboard s. it's hidden for you. Why am I hitting Jessica? You know why? Because it's uh yeah I'll put I'll put a link in the line. Why am I not why did you not invite me to slopboard ? I think even I haven't. Well, that was a newer channel, then like you probably have to opt in. Oh, okay. Uh if you go to the bottom of the live chat, you'll see a link. Okay. Uh if you're not yet a member of the club twit.tv slash club twit, this isn't by any means the number one benefit, but it sure is a benefit. I mean you you get some really weird stuff in here. Uh here I am in the India video begging for rupe es. Um there that's a that is a Rembrandt lighting version of the show. I like that one. Yeah. Um Wow, here we are in the tree of life. They they these guys have so much fun in there. Uh twit.tv slash club twit. The main I don't know what that is, and I don't want to know. The main benefit to this is if dad if dad can't be there, just put a cardboard cutout in and have the AI generate him. I don't know what's going on uh in our uh club but if you're not yet a member you get ad-free versions of all the shows you get um uh all the specials we do. Here we are as priests. See I look like I have a secret drinking habit. Uh Jeff, you look like you're just uh sad . And Rick Salmon . Rick Salmon is the youth pastor. And uh That's right, the cool youth pastor. The cool youth pastor. Uh and and Father Robert, you're just Father Robert. I'm Father Robert. Jeff looks like the uh the priest who's who drinks a bit too much. Is it is it him? Maybe it's that's a yeah, that's a common person a. I'm the priest who is invested in plastics and uh I don't really need to be doing this anymore. By the way , it will will um priests be mentioning the encyclical from the pulpit this Sunday? They should. They should. They should. But I mean there's no rule. There's no rule. So the way that it works is the Pope may promulgate promulgate the encyclical. However, it's still up to the local bishops to do what it is they want to do with it inside their diocese. There there is that subsidiarity. So we don't tell them, Oh, you have to release this you have to do this you have to make sure that you mention this however we can tell the priests you have to read this whether or not you use it in your homily that's up to you but you have to read this this. This is this is part of your job . Not on 40,000 words. Oh, you have to read to read it not out loud. No, yeah, no. Oh, yeah, good. Okay. Okay, get in for a long one, folks . Cancel your broader. Oh it's very very well written. So um we had reported I think a couple of weeks ago that the president was considering a uh executive order saying I gotta approve all AI models from now on. This is in response to mythos, I think. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed. And some say it was Mark Zuckerberg. Mark says, no, I didn't know it wasn't me. Some say it was Elon Musk. No, it wasn't, but the Wall Street Journal says it was David Sachs, the former AI and Bitcoin czar, cryptocurrency czar, who made an 11th hour plea. Remember, it was David Sachs. One of the reasons David Sachs was there, former he's the host of the all in podcast with a bunch of other uh besties. One of the reasons he was there in the White House uh was because Peter Thiel uh really wanted to make sure that the White House didn't you know they actually reversed Biden's AI regulations and they wanted to make sure there were no regulations on AI in the White House. But Mythos so scared the president the actu ally thought maybe we should be approving all AI, which is talk about going the other way. Sachs apparently, according to the Wall Street Journal, warned Trump uh on a call last Thursday uh that it could lead that it could slow down the industry in its race with the Chinese competitors . See deep seek. Sachs ordered argued the order would give a victory to the AI doomers . Uh Trump, who said he was already on f on the fence anyway , um decided uh all right. They postponed the signing . And uh added a paragraph at the bottom that said it would be voluntary anyway. You don't have to get approval. We just would like to see it first. That is what happens when you mandate things based on zero information. Yeah. On zero reasoning because you can flip flop flip flop back and forth based on what is more popular command. Right or nothing it's an empty vessel. Yeah yeah I mean and also even if he had passed even if he had signed an executive order, it would be so un enforceable that they'd basically just ignore it. Yeah. Right. Yeah, it's not a law. It's just a serving suggestion. I put this in for Paris. She's not with us. She'll be back next week. I'm tired of talking to AI . This actually got a lot of comments on uh hacker news . Uh who who is this guy? I don't know. Uh he's a developer, a team leader. He's got 10 years in startups. I guess he's anonymous. He doesn't say uh he doesn't say who he uh who he is but he says he got really sick of talking about AI now. Let me click the link GitHub, someone replied. It was the exact same text my AI had given me. I called it out. The comment was deleted. Then another person replied, It was the same AI answer again . I worked as a developer at a company, asked a business owner a question about a business task. He sent me a chat GPT screenshot with the answer. I replied that had nothing to do with my question, and everything there was wrong. A minute later he sent me another chat GPT screenshot. He didn't even read the AI's answer, he just took a screenshot and forwarded it to me. Recently, someone messaged me on Reddit about my post. I replied. They wrote again. I replied again. After a few messages, I realized I'm talking to an AI agent. I'm tired of talking to AI . I want to talk to real people. But even when I talk to real people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI's answer. See, this isn't just annoying. This is something that we covered two, three years ago, Leo, when OpenAI first released their first really good version of Chat GPT, which is if they're if these models are scraping the internet, especially things like Reddit, um for the data that they put into their training. And they're also contributing to the data that other models will be scraping. It's now become an aurobor of crap. It's it's just AI ingesting AI . And we all know that that's not going to lead to results that you want. You're good you're you're building in hallucinations into your basic training model and data set. That's horrible. One of the books in my AI book series by Matthew Kirschenbaum has been a guest is about the text pocalypse. Ah you end up with a gray gooey at the end of it. But you're the one, Jeff, who said you didn't want to read those long articles and just were going to feed it to the AI. Read a good book, but a but a but an egotistical blog post that takes forever to get to the point? Yeah, that's a good point. Some stuff doesn't deserve to be read. Right. Some shows don't deserve to be listened to. We're glad you don't think that about this one. That's a segue for you. All the way to the very end. You're listening to intelligent machines. Before we get to our picks of the week, though, I do want to give you a chance, uh, Jeff, to uh mem mention a uh a a mentor of yours, a man who passed recently. Uh you wrote about him in your blog, and I thought we should uh memorialize Don Newhouse. Don Newhouse uh and his brother Cy Newhouse uh the all the family owns advanced publications, which is newspapers and magazines, uh cutting asked, uh, was Random House for a while, was cable systems. Uh he's he was the last grand gentleman of the newspaper business. He was a mogul who did good. Uh absolutely. U,h and humble and and kind generous and soft spoken. Uh and I I worked for his son, Stephen uh who's now basically the chairman of the company. And I uh Donald said to a friend of mine once, uh, everything Jeff knows he learned from Stephen, which is true , and Stephen in turn learned from Don. Uh wonderful, wonderful person. He died at the age of ninety five and will be sorely missed. It's a good long life. What does advance uh own still? I mean, are they Advance owns Canyon Ast. Uh really so so oh yeah, so it's V vanity Fair, Wired, uh New Yorker, et cetera. It owns twenty odd newspapers across the country. Sign Newhouse founded this in the twenties. Sam did, yes, their their father. Their fathers. With the the Staten Island Advance. They never said advance. It's always the advance. Advance. I don't know why. I never got an explanation. The majority owner of Reddit. Uh yes. And um uh watch McCallit, the tech site the that they own. Um tech makall. That's a good name for a tech site. Yeah it is. Yeah. Um and then they owned a huge chunk of Discover. They were one of the first uh investors in that. That turned a lot of money and so they now own a chunk of uh uh Skydance, Paramount, etc. Right, yeah. Um or will . Um and then they've diversified out, but they own um what's what's one thing uh you learned that Steve Newhouse with you Steve Newhouse taught me uh we would go into a meeting in a place like Yahoo, we'd go to California, we'll go to place in a meeting like place like Yahoo, and he'd Steve would say, they're gonna think that what they really want is content from vogue. That's not the right thing for the internet. Let them think that they want that and hold back. But what Steve taught me was that the value of the internet is conversation, communion in the Pope's word, that it is connection among people, and that's the value. So Steve is the one who made me um hyper-aware and obnoxious about uh community and conversation online . Nice. Nice. I also remember one the one thing I say my little thing is I remember a day early on when the new houses and they were the managers of the newspaper group sat around and and and they used to make a fortune in classified ads, obviously, right? And no, it's not our friend Craig Newmarker got rid of them, but it was companies like Monster came along. And Monster had a bad quarter and one of the new houses was kind of starting to grin. And Donald pounded the desk very uncharacteristically and said, People, it's not coming back. Oh yeah. That was a moment. That's hard. That's a hard thing for somebody in his shoes to realize. This is a family business, it's second generation. Yep. Um, you know, they're that this is in their blood . So it's really amazing that they were able to see that and say it out loud. It was hard, but they did it. Don Newhouse uh RIP at the age of uh ninety-five uh he was uh preceded by his wife who died a few years before him. Wonderful Sue. Yeah. It's a great run and proof that uh you can be a a titan and not a horrible stain on humanity. Yes. That is a good lesson. Because I'm really trying to be a stain on humanity. And I thought I could be a stain on humanity without being a titan. So it goes both ways. I'm just saying. It can go, it can go either way. You're watching intelligent machines. Uh Paris will be back next week. Jeff Jarvis is here. Father Robert Balasaire . Um oh boy, we have uh we have some picks of the week. Um I think this is really good. I was at Jeff Atwood's house and I looked over on the kitchen counter and I said, oh, that's great. Who's reading Infinite Jest ? And they said, no. Look more closely The cover's exactly right, but it's not infinite jest , it's infinite Jeff's. And let me tell you, the text is Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. 776 pages of Jeff Jeff Jeff Jeff Jeff. The blurbs in the back are Jeff Jeff Jeff Jeff. The blurb blurbs on the back are Jeff Jeff Jeff Jeff Jeff. The description on Amazon is Jeff Jeff Je,ff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. It's by , Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. And it is I tell you, if for eighteen dollars, actually eighteen pounds. I don't know. I'm apparently on the wrong page here. Uh but uh you can get it in America to o. Uh published last month. Infinite Jeff's and I thought what a great apparently it was just a joke somebody realized they could go to Amazon and have it published, and they did. I think I'll wait for the audio book. Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. Jeff, you could read that. I could. I could. But don't do the uh don't do the AI synopsis because it'll be just Jeff. Jeff Jeff. Be too short. Jeff . Infinite Jeffs. Alright. Ask it what it thinks of this book? No. I I could ask you want me to ask my AI what it thinks for this book, yes. Infinite Jeff . What's good what do you mean? Like should I give it the text? No, it's okay. Never mind . What do you think about the book Infinite Jeff s . It's gonna think I meant I typed it wrong. It's often corrects me. It's gonna think, oh, you mean infinite jest ? No, no, I don't. Uh Father Robert has a pick of the week for us. I do, and it's actually something that I saw on Mike Elgin's Blue Sky page uh three days ago and immediately bookmarked it and liked it. It's called Is AI profitable? Someone just probably vibe coded a p age that looks at uh the earnings of different companies uh who are involved in AI. Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert, nobody is making money except the company selling the shovels and the uh pickaxes for the gold rush. Who's losing the most? Amazon, then Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, OpenAI, Anthropic Well, way down at the bottom. Oh, the there's green.. NVIDIA They're in the they're in the green. Yeah. Not the same. By the way, Deep City for some reason is not losing much money. I don't know why. Well, uh it's I think that's actually a dearth of information. I don't know. And actually, I don't think that the X AI uh line is quite right because there's been so many deals that are leveraged back and forth that that loss is actually much bigger. It's it's twenty billion that they spent on their infrastructure, which by the way, they're essentially renting out to anthropic so for a big amount of bought for some huge amount of money. Yeah. They bought a rapidly depreciating asset to rent it out for pennies on the dollars to a direct competitor. I I don't get that business model. Um, but yeah, it's a nice way to analyze. I did ask, and I showed this the other day my uh my agent, uh, should I buy SpaceX stock? Yeah, and it said, no, as a matter of fact, you told me specifically never to buy any SpaceX stock. And then it gave me all the reasons why it was probably not the best investment. By the way, since we have been on this page, is AI profitable yet? AI has spent two point five million dollars oh page load yeah they're consistent yep it's going fast I love this uh actually I bookmarked it too because I thought uh again I thought Paris would quite enjoy this. Thank you, Robert. Appreciate it. How about your pick of the week, Jeff? Did we use them all up? Well no, no, no, no, no. Uh appropriate to uh to uh Robert being here on our topic, I'm gonna mention a couple things. One is the Wall Street Journal just came up with an editorial about the encyclical. Oh. Uh Pope Leo's Manifesto. And the subhead amuses me. His defense of human agency is welcome, but not his faith in the state. I don't think that's where his faith is. Uh no, I don't think that's where it is. So then the other thing that 's interesting though that the establishment rag Wall Street Journal would criticize the Pope for his faith in the state. Yes. Mm-hmm . Maybe you should have more faith in the stock market, you think very selective reading. Really? Extremely selective reading. It really is. Yeah. So then um uh I was the the criticism, I five it was hard to find criticism actually of the New York Times had a uh uh column pissed off that that he wasn't attacking all of technology. Um Tim Nick Gebrew and Margaret Mitchell, I think I mentioned before, were on the anthropic was there. Yeah. Um but this was what amused me most. Less wrong, which is always wrong because it's a it's it's it's um a bunch of doomers, crazy AI doomer um uh cultists who probably were unhappy with their their call out in the encyclical . They accused uh the Pope of uh using AI to write the encyclical . And then they linked to someone else, a lynch zong, who went through a more detailed analysis. And you can guess what Claude wrote it. Claude wrote it because there's a lot of you guess you're right, M-dashes. Oh . This is why I put no stock in AI detectors. That's exactly no. This is exactly what proves it all full crap. Yeah. I personally know the team that was most involved with this encyclical and I I can't wait to tell them tomorrow that they're AI. Yeah, I think I thought you'd enjoy this. Pangram, which is the one that everybody seems to like, uh said that some paragraphs are between 40 and 100% AI, why most of paragraphs appear to be zero percent AI. Okay . So uh zero percent of paragraphs in past encyclicals are registered as AI, but the declaration Right. Yeah. I mean naturally . Nobody's the Italian version is flagged as AI more so than the English version, which makes which kind of cast out in the whole process. Remember how uh Jeff and I were talking about how AI models take the bait uh the biases of the people who create them and turn them into an institution? Yeah, you just saw an example of that. That's exactly what's happening. Exactly. Wow. Same with blogs. Yep. Um I think Infinite Jess is a conceptually perfect and practically unreadable. exactly the point. Okay, got it. It got it. It's a joke object, not a book. 776 pages of Jeff . As parody, it's wonderfully stupid. As a physical artifact, it's even better. The sheer wasteful commitment is the gag. Very da-da, very internet. Very the street finds its own uses for print on demand. Wow. You know this is good. This is why I love Hermes. Actually, his name is Quicksilver, but I just call him Q . I'm just so deprav I'm so upset for Claudia that you've left her. It had to happen. Oh she was she was eating me out of house and home. I couldn't afford her. What would you mind saying what was it what was a the highest bill? By the way, because this is my agent, so it knows me, it says, would I read it? Absolutely not. Would I pace place it reverently on a shelf next to Infinite Jest? Absolutely yes. Would I give it to Jeff Jarvis? Only if I wanted to start a minor theological incident. I don't know why it said that. Maybe it saw you in the priest's outfit. I don't know. That's funny. So it knows about you, baby. You're not a uh closed book. Privacy . My agent knows all . Uh I actually the next project I'm gonna do, I'm down loading my genome. I got my entire genome uh scanned. Uh we had uh I had Rich uh Robert uh Church um the uh what's his first name? I can't remember, the um a geneticist on and he has started he started some some years ago. He started a company called Nebula Genomics that they don't it's not like 23andMe where they do a partial genome. They do the whole thing. It's many, many gigabytes. And I'm downloading it and I'm to gonna give it my AI along with health information and we'll see what happens. You're gonna give AI your genome, Leo? Yeah. So we can all create oh, the the the Leo model. Yeah. The Leo genetic model. Oh , it is my ultimate goal. I I'll admit this now, to p clone myself, to believe completely replace myself, or at least to take my brain and put it in a machine in such a way that I can live with you forever. See the Vatican, we we perfected cloning decades ago. I'm not the original Robert Balliser. Oh I know but stay he has a hundred of you in the basement. I know that. I know that. Robert, you're the best. I love your sense of humor. I'm so glad you're here. perfect. I'm so so when I when I solved everybody here today it made me so happy, Robert. Oh I love the show now. This is great. This is fantastic. Well we'll we'll get you back anytime you you've got time. Uh you and Jeff are actually going to be on uh Twit episode coming up. The big boy table, Jeff as Jeff uh talks calls it. So there well a little bit less on the encyclical, but with it will be a repeat of this performance. There will be more AI news. Although it's interesting because I am kind of s I now have a place to stuff the AI news so it doesn't quite overwhelm . Overload everything. Yeah. Yeah. 'Cause it's what we talk about all the time. Uh thank you, Robert. Great to see you. My pleasure. You gotta get to bed. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Or do you or do you have to ring the bells now? Do you go up to the bell tower and No, I I have the six AM mass tomorrow. No bed and no, it's normal. That's totally normal. That's what happens. Get out of here. And it's hot. Thank you, Robert. No. God bless you. Oh, I've already fed the cats. Oh, okay. The VAT cats. Jeff Jarvis, always a pleasure. Don't forget, Jeff's book Hot Type, is now available for pre-order at his website, jeffjarvis .com. You will be back with Paris Martino next week. Our guest actually is somebody that you uh are bringing to the table, I believe. Suddenly. Robert Tursek . Uh yes, you you well, I mentioned him in a c and you said let's get him on. So futurist, innovator, author, artist , uh uh MTV history, uh uh entertainment history. Yeah. So he he will have lots uh to say. He's telling people to call in the in the Hollywood to calm down about AI . Calm down . Calm down, he says. So Robert Tursek will join us uh next week, the following week, Jeffrey Cannell, as I mentioned from Noose Research. I'm really excited about this. He is it's his company that created my agent, the agent I use Hermes, and I love it. So some good interviews coming up. I hope you will be here. We do this show, uh intelligent machines every Wednesday afternoon starting at two PM Pacific, five PM Eastern, twenty one hundred UTC. You can watch it live if you want. Club members get to watch inside the uh Discord , the club to a discord, but everybody gets to watch anytime on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Kick. Uh after the fact, on-demand versions of the show appear on our website, of course, twit.tv/slash im, there's audio and video. The video also makes its way to a dedicated YouTube channel for intelligent machines. Great way to share clips. Um, and of course, you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client and get it automatically. Club members, by the way. Uh, now this is a new feature we're adding. We need your help. We're adding uh chapter markers for the club feeds and the reason we can do that is there's no ad insertion after the fact after the fact ad insertion screws up time codes so we can't do chapter markers on the non-club shows, um, alas, not not accurate ones anyway, but we can do it on the club shows. So if you're a club member, try it in your favorite uh podcast app, uh, and we're looking for input on which podcast apps support it and which don't, because not all do . And there is a list of ones that do at our website, twit.tv slash clubtwit slas h chapters. Uh so you can see what we know about, what we don't know about, and uh if you can help us out, go in the club and tell us if your client works or it doesn't work. There is a list here though of uh uh podcasts that will work with audio. Some work with video even and some don't. Uh but we are putting those chapters in in a format that is, I guess, close to industry standard, but not everybody supports it. Spotify does not. Of course. Nor does YouTube. Nor does Amazon. But uh we're really looking for help with the uh Android apps. We don't have we had a we don't have a lot of Android app uh on here pocketcast yeah pocketcast thank you Jeff thank you uh Robert thank you everybody for watching we'll see you next time on intelligent machines I'm on intelligent machine