Finding Human Pockets in Technology

Hi everyone from New York Magazine, in the Vox Media podcast Networ. This is on with Cara Swisher, and I'm Cara Swisher. We're off for the Fourth of July holiday, but we've still got something special for you today. We're bringing you an episode of The Greay Area, another great Vox Media podcast. It's a weekly podcast that looks at culture, tech, and politics with an eye towards philosophy. In this episode, host Sean Iilling talks with Atlantic writer, Charlie Wertzel about why so much of the internet now feels artificial, manipulated, or unreal. Sean's interviews are always insightful, and Charlie is a friend of this show, so stick around. This is a Gay arerea. I am Seaan Illing. My guest today is Charlie Warzel. He's a staff writer at the Atlantic and the author of their newsletter, Galaxy Brain Charlie wrote a piece about AI in what he calls a crisis of agency, which is this feeling that so much of our lives online are being shaped and distorted by bots, algorithms and various AI generated content Everything feels a little fake A little manipulated. If you spend any time at all online, you know what I'm talking about. So we get into why the internet feels so strange right now and whether it's still possible to build spaces online that feel genuinely human H hope you enjoy Here's a question. What if women's healthcare was actually built around women? 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There is a A lot of AI discourse right now, but This piece is sort of getting at a part of it that seems a little under discussed which is the increasingly weird bought haunted internet. We all live inside now. So let's just start there. What is the feeling you are describing in this piece. The feeling that I'm describing is One of Dorientation. Also paranoia, I think. I think what I feel a lot on the internet right now is this paranoia. And I started I started the piece with a M. a callback to a piece by the internet tech writer, Max Reid, who wrote New York Magazine back in twenty eighteen about what he called the inversion, which is this tipping point where and fake content, content made synthetically instead of just by,, you or me, human beings may like surpass some of u some of you know, the content that that we all make and that the interternet would sort of be just a majority to some degree or majority, you know, automated. And That at the time, I remember was a real revelation for a lot of people, this feeling that whoa, so you're telling me there's all these people using these sockppet sock puppet accounts on Twitter or Facebook or wherever that you know there's these fake bots trying to sell me stuff that a lot of websites are populated with you know, automated comments or whatever it is And Now that's Honestly a pretty quaint idea that someone wouldn't be as aware of that because in the generative AI age or whatever we're going to call it or whatever we're in basically since, you know, the arrival of Chat GBT, but even before it You Have an internet now That is Jammed full. of synthetic content in all sorts of ways. So you have synthetic text, you know, all the all the things that we would call AI slop, right And Now You just have people generating whole sites with the click of a button to promote something that either isn't real or that is, you know a scam or you know like pretty awful. You have that happening this vast scale, so much so that the Google search Most of what you see is going to be Garbage, right? thenen you have synthetic music AI slop videos and things, you know, clogging these feeds and You have organizations. that are doing a new style of content marketing, of viral marketing in which they spin up fake accounts. to seed algorithms with information that is befitting their client, right? So if you're an artist, you can have these viral marketing firms that will Spam, TikTok with your song so that it becomes The algorithm thinks, oh, this is a popular song. And then when other people start posting it It guess. priority inside the feeds So it's this idea that like, people are really doing now is they're not marketing to human beings, they're marketing to these algorithms The end result of all of that, right? this idea that everything around you might be fake creates this sense of paranoia It's not just that there's not one thing that people are talking or thinking about is that you can make a convincing case that anything you don't like or that you think is suspect or that is weird in some way is a Sah. It's fake. If somebody has seeded that, right And that to me, Is is a change it is a dramatic change in the way that people behave online and it really affects everything from our politics to our culture because you walk around with this feeling, there's this great term the liar' dividend, right? which is the idea that you can when there's so much garbage out there Pe can cast aspersions on things that are real, right? and say, Oh I think it's fake. I think it's a lie, right? You can sort of completely blur and warp reality. And I think that that's the way that culture works So not that we can know this really with any precision. But if you just had to guess, if you just had a big giant pie chart of all the shit on the internet Like roughly what percentage of that pie chart do you think would be Synthetic stuff. Oh It's such a good, such a good question. You can't take the temperature of the entire internet, right You're seeing this play out in music with I interviewed on my podcast this guy who is that the front man of of a very beloved progressive rock band h King Gizzard and the liizard Wizard And they took their music off Spotify in protest of Spotify funding their founder funding a defense company and When they left, they had Domain squatters basically. King Gizzard squatters who came in and took their page, essentially by creating AI slop music that sounded similar to their stuff and was making money off their streams and all that. and it had to, you know, fight Spotify to get it taken down, which they did You have You have So many different playlists on Spotify that are I've done some reporting into this. You go into especially like like jazz or just instrental type music, classical music. And you start clicking around on some of those artists And you don't see An, any human beings there, right? Like you don't you go to these these, you know, their YouTube page and then the YouTube page is just, you know, like the when you don't when you don't put a profile picture on it, right? And it only directs you back to the Spotify link. There's no, you know, manager page or anything like that or label And you start to realize, oh, well I guess I guess that's guess that's fake, right? And so you have so I'm listening to jazz music that I think is made by another human being And it's not. And again, that sense of paranoia creeps in when you start to recognize some of these things. I think a lot of us want to walk through the world and say Listen, I've got reasonably good taste, I've got reasonably good judgment I'm not sitting around listening to, you know, fake jazz music and You might be, right? We all might be.'s not it's not a question anymore of taste because there's there's so much volume It's just so strange. You know what I mean, I I know what you mean But it's very hard to name. You know, somehow the internet feels fake and real and dead and alive All at the same time. you know, people were clearly still there, but you're never really sure who or what is speaking, you're never sure who made the thing you're looking at Um or why it appeared in front of you, It seems like We should definitely take a step back, maybe and just think about how buizar this situation is for our primate brains Yeah, and that you know was kind of coming off the backs of A lot of the early social media backlash to the the election of of Donald Trump and people starting to look into, well, what is happening? How is Facebook changing this? right? And then We had the Cambridge Analytica scandal that same year twenty eighteen where there was turned out to be honestly a bit of an overreaction to what is known as psychographic profiling. I was part of that overreaction I think I was I was too because we were all figuring out and this speaks to some of these platforms and their' prominence in our lives, right? It makes a lot of sense to want to assign them an extreme amount of power. you know, they're connecting Billions of people, they have all this money. They're building these tools of surveillance to track or every move, there's reason to be paranoid. You know, Cambridge Analytica was in the business of selling you the idea that they were they were changing people's minds left and right all the time that they could come into a place and effect an election because it's a great tactic. notot coincidentally That's what the artificial intelligence companies have done for the last four years or so, right? They started with the doomer marketing. They started with the We're going to build something So powerful s it's a it's a Manhattan project for, you know, for words, et cetera. And so ye, we're going to blow up the world, but subscribe wherever you get your AI. Right. It's like And o, cool Interesting of course. I think We used to think of the internet as an engine connection, right? of of sharing information of a real of like a human to human thing but it was It was still Deception andaky fakery of all kinds is obviously a volume game and artificial intelligence, de generative artificial intelligence oom that we've se tool of scale. You push a button you you get a mooby dick, you know, sized U home of words if you want, right? You can make the same video and a lot of creators do this. two hundred ways in fifteen minutes. mee talking, doing my thing. Okaykay, now make that put me in two hundred locations. Let's spam the internet with it See what the algorithm li like, see what people like And then use that. it's like It is a tool for volume and D volume is synthetic I mean, maybe if the question back in know twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen was, you know, is this a bot or not? I mean, now it just seems like more fundamentally What the hell kind of environment even is this Right? And like we don't even have a name for it yet. It's just Weird and different. It's not the old internet It's something else and And simly, I don't really think we have a a real name for this period of history Yeah. I don't think we really have a name for whatever this new internet is, but it's It's like fundamentally different. It's a different thing all togetherether It is and it's what is Fascinating to me is the way in which it functions in the in the What's interesting to me is the way that it is a Outgrowth in some ways of the post truth moment. Like we've created we've had this environment, right where we're all given access to so much information that we can rationalize it any way we want. It's one of my hobby courses that Nobody knows what anyone is doing online and that is a problem, right? If I say something as a A colonist The Atlantic and put something out The main beef that I get You're living in some stupid bubble That's not real That's not representative of the information experience, right? You're seeing all this Get off Twitter, man. like it's a bubble. like you're just seeing this That's Totally valid and totally true Also a lot of people who are dismissing certain things that are real. because they don't want to see them And also because it doesn't reflect a their algorithmic experience of the internet and I think it's really difficult when you don't know what anyone else's experience is like, right? you walk around a little bit feeling kind of insane. Like I feel that sometimes when I plug into whatever discourse or conversation And you know, I write about the interternet. I'm not terminally online in my real life. L I go there for the purpose of understanding it This, you know reporting on it, studying, seeing things that bubble up I like to be outside in my other times. People constantly people say like, dude, you gotta get off the internet. I think that that is in some ways, a response to What you're saying makes me uncomfortable. Not only because I maybe disagree with the information, but because your experience is clearly so different than mine that is ord for me. to imagine that we are existing inside the same culture, or that we have to interact with each other and talk about these things Yeah, I mean, it's it's It's not really post truth. At this point, it's post real or post human. how much of the internet at this point is basically just like machines performing humanity back at us under the guise of being people, right? I mean So so this for the piece, I referenceced this researcher named Aiden Walker. He's a Gen Z. A online researcher. he smart about memes and, you know it's a great example of someone who takes something that's like kind of silly in concept and actually gets to like the philosophical human understandings of all this And he came up with this theory What we've been talking about with the, you know, there's machines and algorithms are just kind of like running the whole show, right That's been referred to as the dead Innet theory The idea that there's really not a lot of humanity on the internet to the bots. and we kind of just sit there Aiden Walker took that a step further recently. And he his theory it's somewhat colorful is that it's like the CC interternet theory. Say more Yes. we'll have to say more which is that The product, the synthetic of these artificial intelligence things, be it like, you know Oh a slop video of a cat, you know, dancing on a street in Paris or whatever, right? that a bunch of people are flicking through, you know, Instagram reels or Facebook and just you know, hitting like or whatever. Oh, that's cute. I'm going tofford that to whatever You have that, which is synthetic Its machines, It's machine made. It's trained off of all of these other machines then you have the algorithm which is predisposed to like that stuff because That stuff is all trained off of what the algorithm has already shown you and given you, right? You have this when you What's happening is those things are meeting. Th things are in the room interacting with each other. and the human is sitting in the corner in the chair Watching that The human is M. Centing observer to an interaction a melding of sorts of these two machines that have been predisposed to do this in service of viral advertising revenue And that is a lot of what the internet is. The internet isn't dead Internet is really active It's moving. It's doing stuff. theseese two elements that aren't human. are You know, doing it all night long and We, the human are just sort of sitting there like, okay, yeah, no. U deep I'll have some more, I guess. Yeahah, sure You know, we are consenting to it in some sense. other people would argue that were being cosced. You know, on the old internet you had the capacity to explore Right you would stumble and click around and kind of get lost And now so much of it is just a giant sprawling machine designed to mainline into your veins as much content as possible, content optimized for engagement. So you're not really exploring or participating in that way. You were just a passive Pro I mean as you put it to peieace, right? We basically now exist humans to feed data into the machinery. That is what we are doing and it is keeping us stupefied and entertained along the way, but that's fundamentally what our what we have been reduced to Yeah, I don't know that All is is lost yet, but I think that what I describe this moment as is as a crisis of agency Not that over But we are all reallyally concerned about our future agency Like I don't think these tools are powerful enough yet. Like I think it's giving these tools in Silicon Valley. It's buying too much into the narrative to say. We're all automatons. like, you know, I think from a culture standpoint, a consuming, you know, endless scroll vibe, like, the best example of this is do go on a social media app or something like that. or you're just wasting time on your phone and you look up and you go, man That was not how I wanted to use those twenty minutes, right that feeling of regret that you might have That's an example of that consuming part of the agency But on the side of of jobs and you know And and AI job loss, things like that think these tools yet, mean, maybe if if you're a programmer or someone in this highly technical space where can these agentic codating pllatforms are doing such a good job of cranking out inhuman amounts of code so quickly. I can understand that There's fears, but it's more the anxiety of what is coming. We are in this crisis of like Generative AI is making us ask this really weird question which is what is a human for And That's go Thats that's a wild thing to have You know publicly traded companies asking you, right? What is the human for? And I think that is what we are feeling right now as a society, whether you are Booster who is worried and has a little bit of the doomerism stuff in it, or you're somebody who's out protesting data centers in your town A lot of it is centered around this idea of like what is a human for it Support for this show comes from Framer If your team wants a website that looks and feels handcrafted but is still fast to ship, Framer is built for that. You design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts, hosting and a CMS built in so the work is production ready from day one. Agents work alongside you to draft pages and polish sections, then you review and publish What Goes live. 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But that word psciops has broken containment what exactly does that mean? and also whyy has it become so prevalent now is it just everyone's paranoid of everything Well Sy upp is like a you know, it's kind of like a military grade, you know, it's a it's an operation that is that is meant to trick you psycholog. I don't have the definition, you know in front of it like a clandestine manipulation Campaign. Yes. reat a way to put it and I think that again, When we talk about anything that's happened You know, technological, cultural sense It all builds off of the stuff that came before it, right? So like that's why the Cambridge Analytica history, I think is really important here, right? It primes people to see these things as Um as experiments, right? These tech companies made news because they did experiments they're not they were experiments in service of like, you know, trying to ak their platforms to be better at advertising. Like they weren't nefarious backroom, you know, horrible experiments in brainwashing and mind control But again, I think we get to this situation, We're seeing it so much right now in AI All these people in Silicon Valley are like, why does every person in the like in the country who's not, you know deeply involved in these niche discourses or working at these places, whyy does everyone just reflexively hate artificial intelligence? Like whyy does it poll worse than Donald Trump? This stuff is so cool. I'm racking my brain. Why doesn't this Well, you spent a lot of time talalking about how dangerous it is. how civilizationally perilous it could be in the wrong hands, right? How If we don't the exact right guardrails up awful things can happen. We could, you know, we could destroy our economy overnight, right? One of these things could, you know take over and manipulate the stock market and crash everything You hear all of this this stuff and thing is when you repeat a lot of Ominous crap Over time, people start internalize it. And that is to go back to the SI ops, that is part of it, right? We We hear that these companies are so powerful. They're so able to manipulate consumer sentiment. They're so able to drive U people to make purchases, they're so useful to drive people to go out to campaign rallies and then they get hooked on whatever. and then they start getting in these groups, right You know, Q andon was this fringe message board That was kind of silly and stupid and Facebook groups became this gathering place during the pandemic otherwise prettyretty average Joe, normal type people to engage with this thing And it became cultural, tribal, community based Ieology. the broken tain radicalized a whole bunch of people. When you see and you have all these past examples of how this technology get away from us and change us. People start to internalize that. And Now people reach for this idea of the SsciOop in the same way that people reach for Q andon, right? It's just it's a way to explain something that you don't want to grapple with or is uncomfortable or that you don't understand or that you can't easily assign something to, right The the ho. The most recent SIOop thing controversy is over this band. Geace this indie band who are very popular They've been around for a little bit, but they got very popular the last year with this album. they were everywhere They are as band. using some of these viral apparently viral marketing firms or whatever That is its own thing. the core issue with the band Geese is that they're polarizing. Their singer has this like warbly kind of sometimes atonal voice They're all like a little bit hard to listen to for some people and other people think that they're the velvet underground, right It's this super polarizing thing where someone listens to it and has two completely diametrically opposed opinions And instead of trying to grapple with that It's so much easier to just say, if you hate geese Yeah, man. This is a freaking pci out. Well, the problem with paranoia it kind of becomes its own trap, right? I mean, like if you think everything is manipulated, then you just become manipulable and totally different way Right? Like, but where is that line between a healthy skepticism and losing your damn mind online, because I think a lot of us are living uncomfortably ride on that border all the time. It also doesn't help that we like live in an era Oh great corruption of great That' conspiracy theorizing, right? You look at what has happened with Donald Trump and cryptocurrencies and things like that. And you see an unbelievable amount of corruption just happening in in sight, like rug polls from the president of the United States and his family And No real accountability for that such that society just goes ah well, nevertheless. and After a while again People are G to internalize these lessons and say, well, if this is what I can see If this is what I am allowed access to, then I'm pretty sure this is just how the world works. And so the things that I don't have the tools to explain. you know, it's a in some ways, it's a rational response to some of these things that are that are happening even if They tend to be, you know, irrational theories What makes something slop Is it just bad AI content really feels like slop is broken contain in terms of nomenclature. I'm inclined to say that it follows that pornography standard of you know when you see it, right? You know when you stand. You know when you see it think what For me, the way that I think about slop What a sense The way that I deem something a slop would be having kind of contempt for its audience Right? Like u You you're you're an idiot. You don't care. You're just scroll like I'm going to Yeah Here's shrimp Jesus, you know, dummy. Like when you feel that thing from someone who's like I'm doing volume ad arbitrage from the Philippines from this center building as many different Facebook pages to spam you know, unsuspecting older people without this media literacy to just, you know, oh yeah, like Did you see that Garth Brooks spoke out about the Supreme Court case, you know at this sold out concert in South Africa, you know, like something totally random that didn't happen and just like shoving it down people's faces. because not because they have any particular political ideology, but they're just trying to make a quick buck That is what I consider to be Slop You know, I think when you look at Very recently, there's been a spate of either sanctioned or non sanctioned campaign videos that have come out like for u for Spencer Pratt in Los Angeles as one of him like as Batman, tootally AI generated would have taken, you know millions of dollars to make. now somebody can just make it on the outside. the campaign can promote it for itself Ges viral I don't see that like it is slop technically, but I see it slightly different, right? Like that's like almost just propaganda or all that stuff those LegO videos of Donald Trump coming out of Iran to sort of you know, knock on the U. S military response there I don't see that as slop as much as propaganda as a tool. For me, slop has to have contempt for its audience in this sense of U it's just like really low rent I'm wasting your time and energy in order to make some money. You may have just answered this, but People seem to get hung up on whether AI can make good art Do you have a strong take on that, whether something vaguely sloppish encounters Good arartt You know, I just I just read, um, This new book coming up by Coreory Dctoro, the activist writer, science fiction writer who coins the terman certification And he notes in the book and I think this is a pretty incisive observation AI art is supposed to be It's not good But it's like Good enough to be Offensive and that AIR, maybe, you know slightly butchering his understanding here. But it's really it's a proof of concept post to peopleople a certain group of people really mad, right? It's supposed to have someone See it and go, oh man, they're going to put Everyone who can draw of business. is going to change all this art Hys That's really useful marketing. for theseese companies, it's a really useful narrative It's o, look how powerful this stuff is, right And I think what's interesting about that is that a lot of this isn't Is it good or is it bad? Is it is it powerful? Is it Do it have the ability you Disrupt livelihoods. Like for me, it's still like the deeper probablyro slightly nerdy question is You know, like is art still art if you don't experience it as an encounter with another person? ike I don't really think it is, but I also can't really explain to you why it isn't. I just know a piece of art that didn't come from a human mind that wasn't rooted in human experience, It doesn't mean anything to me. It is literally meaningless But again, I don't really know why that is. just Isn't this part of was' so exhausting. about this moment that's been Voiceed are so many of us who enjoy the human stuff. like you're descriing why that conversation iss really so hard And it's that there'ss like somethingomething ineffable about human contact, right and That's why we're all here. We're all here on Eth, like I think so much nowadays of that againg, I'm butchering it, but the Kurt Vonneget likeike we're put on the earth to fart around, right? Yes, I can go somebody mail a letter for me or I can send an email, or I can go down to the post office and interact with some weird people and see some stuff and then get a sandwich and then watch the birds, you know, and do it's like, and then I get a flat tire and then I have to call someone and then they help me, you know on and on. it's like, that' Why we're all here, right do that to have those those weird, unexpected interactions and this machine's like What if I told you you don't have to do any of that ever again? And then you go, what is a human for? Anticipate comfort on the court and after the match in Lululeemmon tennis gear Breathable fabrics keep air flowing through long rallies This Dynamic stretch lets you go all out on every sprint, split step, and return And after the final point lands Lightweight layers mean your day isn't done Cool down, hit the clubhouse, and relive each play tennis gear in stores and online at Lululemon. com Hey, it's Kelly Rolan. 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Ask your doctor about EBGlS and visit eBGlS dot com or call one eight hundred Lily Rx or one eight hundred, five four five, five nine, seven nine. The best part of waking up, a full cup of Folgers' coffee and music on full blast Wakeaking Shop Flders K cup pods and more at your nearest retailer. What's your favorite part of the internet now? pods, newsletters, Reddit boards. I mean, is there like where's like the little pocket of like the old internet on the new internet that you retreat to. Well, I will okay, I have a couple things. I'm not like Clearly, given all this stuff very skeptical of All the AI stuff. in the sense of like the future that's being pushed on us. people who are in charge of it, who in many ways are a lot of the same people who brought us social media, web too and then it's like Oh, we're not going to deal with the consequences of that. We're moving on, you know. That said I have some Real delight using the coding agents sometimes to build little things. I live U I live on an island can frequently see like across the road and down there's this little window. I can see contontainer ships as they pass sometimes And I love that coded this thing I'm not I'm not a codater. I coded this little thing Th was basically like Go to vesselfinder. com Get the API code And then here's my phhysical location madeade a little app to put on my desktop just gives me a little like notification. just it's quiet, doesn't paying, doesn't do anything just shows And it says what the ship is. and then I can click the link and see where it came from, where it's going. I love that. I think that's so fun. and it doesn't as it's supposed to pop by my thing And that really actually feels in a way Like it evokes the spirit of like the early internet, which is like