Scams Involving AI Generated Flowers

The most annoying thing in the world is when software is like cute. Microsoft made this change years ago where like if you have a crash you're like, ohh, something bad happened. it's like shut the fuck up. What's the error code? 'cause I'm gonna have to plug it into Google. Hello and welcome to the four hundred four Media podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to Hidden worldorlds, both online and IRL FororafformMedia is a journalist found a company and need your support. To subscribe, go to foraformMedia. C As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to the best comments gain access to that content at foraformmedia. co. Also, remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel where you can watch all of our episodes Subscribe at YouTube d. com slash out for a full media CO I'm your host Joseph, and with me are two of the four of four media co foundounders, the first being Sam Cole. Hello. And the other being Emanel Mayberg Hello. So Jason's not here. He's probably on a private jet somewhere. If you have read the website at the time of recording, you'll know what that's referring to. I won't spoil it. L go read that really, really good article if you want, and you should But otherwise, I'm sure you will speak about it next week on the pod. I don't think I'm here next week, but Jason will fill us in there for sure. Sam, do you want to take us through this one Yeah. so this first one, we have a set of stories that kind of go together. So the first one is by Joe, The token offalp token pocalypse Token apocalyp. Tken I even considers, well, this was the hardest bit it is the tokenpocalypse. Tken Apocalypse. tokenpocalypse is here Companies are scrambling to stop spending so much on AI I feel like we have coined a few token related words. Did we coin token maxing O was that an existing Emmanuel, what do you think? I believe the brain geniuses FEI companies actually with that fine. All right. so I will it On this one I thought I claimed it I thoughtought iCOin's tok Apocalypse and then I think I googled it after the fact. I found Tch Crunch had used it in a headline like two days before. Fuck So s it's in the air. Yeah Yeah. so yeah. so we're introducing some new words here We're token maxing, we're token apocalyppsing. So do you want to just define what we're talking about we're talking about token Yeah. So in my definition, after coining this term days after Tech Crunch and presumably some other people, the reason I kind of use this term is that somethinghing has really, really shifted in the AI industry where we've had companies rushing adopt AI in all sorts of forms, Mbe that's in coding, maybe that's aentic AI in their businesses as well and whatever. And Someanies have sorted been doing this Maybe not regardless of the cost, but it's being presented to them as like cheap, right? Oh, well, this is cheaper than people. You do your subscription or whatever it is to an AI company every month, every year or whatever. Maybe if you're an enterprise, you get a big deal. But there's this shift happening where now there's much more emphasis on the cost of individual tokens which you know is basically user usage metrics, right? So now you'll have companies like GitHub being like, we're actually going to charge you per token. And all of a sudden, companies are realizing Oh AI actually costs us a lot of money. And we're burning through these tokens, which we'll talk about in a bit. So that's why I use that term and I think that's why other people using it as well. There's this big paradigm shift where, oh, this isn't actually automatically saving us money, we now have to figure out shit much how do we stop spending so much money on these tokens, basically Yeah, which is I mean, it's rich because of the last few months. Jason wrote a story that we'll get into just like the ways that this has been working in the last few months. But Jasonember a story a couple month ago about token maxing and how like that was the thing in like March and April to be bragging about how much token spend you have or like these leader boards that we can get into a bit. Before we do that, this story that you wrote involves audio that you obtained from a consulting company called Accenture. And I think if you're in tech, you know what Accenture is, but I even when I was iting this story, I was like, what are are we talking about Accenture's token spend or Accenture is consulting on token spend? So can you just walk us through like How does Accenture come into play in this particular story, like what are they? What's their place in the token Mania I guess Yeah, I mean, who knows what Eenture does, Yeah does. actuallyually there's an open question. Yeah, obbviously, they're a consulting giant and they've done stuff like work on content moderation for Facebook, right? Like a significant amount was outsourced to Acenture back in the day And they will fulfill this role where they come into companies and be like, hey, we can help you optimize this task or we can cut off expenditure on this resource or whatever or whatever it is, right? And in this particular case, they are talking Um We're talk about two things. They are talking about token spend inside E center itself, but also with their clients, right? They clearly have visibility into what their clients are doing and what their clients are saying. In this audio, it doesn't mention any specific clients that we can't play you the original audio for source protection reasons, but they do say like Well, we're seeing this sort of thing inside and outside with our clients as well. Benture I mean, we'll talk about more about this in a minute, but it's funny how they position themselves sort of as proble in the first place and the cure where they've told companies you need to get on AI. you need to do this as quickly as possible. And then it's like, oh wait All of these companies are about spending a bunch of money on tokens and maybe we can help with them Weird how that works. Weird how consultants keep getting away with it. So yeah, like you said, this is based on audio that you had obtained and it was the audio is from an internal meeting And so, obviously they're discussing things that they don't necessarily want the wider public to hear or are not ready to discuss in public. But there's one part that's pretty key to the conversation. And it's coming from Justice Quak, who is the agentic AI strategy lead at Accenture It's a hell of a title, but In the audio, Justice says, we're seeing from some of the data internally, at least it's actually not our engineers that are driving the token consumption It's a lot of the non engineers that are doing some of those behaviors that we're talking about in the meeting. So What are the behaviors? what are the non engineers that Justice is talking about actually spending tokens on Yeah, it's a funny piece of audio. because it actually starts with a joke and it's kind of hard to describe that in an article. It starts with r sarcastic comments. So justice who just introdued is preparing to present in this meeting. And then someone interrupts Stuart Henderson, who's a race senior person in Aenture. and he jokes that, oh you have these slides, but I hope you didn't use AI to just convert a PDF into markdown and all of that sort of thing. And then Stewart says, quote I'm learning that's one of the big token chewers turning PDFs into markdown. Is that right? which obviously, as I said, is a joke, but then leads to a pretty serious question. And then that's when Jice replies with yeah, that's actually the behavior that we've been seeing. So I found this fascinating for a few different reasons. The first obviously, I love that term token chewing. I mean that is a consultant ass term if you've ever heard one. Maybe Emmanuel or Jason have heard it when they've looked into token maxine or whatever but I've never heard that before. so I like that. just the idea that it really undercuts that narrative that, oh, this explosive use of AI is all about suupercharged tenX engineers or whatever, using AI to produce mountains of code and then we can ship products faster or whatever. Here, it seems to be non technical employees do non technical tasks like converting a PDF into of help and is kind of like the he emitter Med that actually It just isn't all that sophisticated. and to be clear, this isn't to say that AI is not being used in claed code, or codex or whatever to make a bunch of code obviously it is as well but we've entered this more mature stage. of AI being in companies where the reality is setting in is like, oh, people are just using for a bunch of Dumb fucking shit basically. And hey, it might be a time saaver, you know, converting PDF into a PowerPoint might save you thirty minutes, if not more, depends how much of a perfectionist you are of your slides. There's going to be a cost to that down the road that I think people are only just starting to realize. Yeah. And then I mean, justustice goes on and says, broadly that they' they're really seeing Um what they call a rapid escalation in AI token spend. I think they say soaring token spend as well. like Maybe stuff isn't dire But it's like point where obviously a centure season opportunity here and they're having internal meetings and then we're hearing about it as well. Yeah, it's just lazy. It's like, it's just the laziness of it all is wild. I mean, you can get the you can get AI to summarize your PDF for you, read it for you Now turn it into the slides. Its like what is your job actually especially for Acensure who a lot of people made this joke in the comments like Aensure's whole thing if you're being a bit mean to them or whver, is making slides basically. A bunch of consultants just make slides and now they apparently they're not even doing that. you. Yeah, Aazing. incredible incredibly lucrative career, I guess So yeah, not to over exxplain the joke at all, but it's just so we see this over and over. It's like the AI is kind hollowing out our abities to do anythingything yourself. It's like Can we not make a grocery list for ourselves anymore? It can't turn read a PDF anymore, C can't read anything anymore have to have Smmarized, to have it turn into slides. You slop those slides over to somebody else. Maybe they're using AI to read the slides. recording the meeting, summarizing for you later I don't know. So Yeah, it's it's trying to some value into an already fake job, I guess So This, like we hinted at earlier, is part of a much wider F that we're seeing around AI a couple months ago. we had token maxing, we had bragging about token use and spend. and now We're saying body is scaling back. So And justust quickly, what are some of the companies that are actually talking about this outside of Accenture and talking about charging customers scaling back employeesing I. I mean, the first big change, which I think I mentioned was GitHub moving to a token model And that happened, I think at the start of June and we're recording this at the end of June. and That's when we've seen, I think a bunch of media coverage and also for us, like a bunch of leaks from various companies where, oh wow no time at all to start impact if you where the change comes in june first halfway through the month and then towards the end of the month, we have all of these leaks, including some of which will be in an article that we'll publish like after this podcast is actually out. But sort of the biggest one, I think for me probablyb Uber where they capped employees use of AI tools like Claud code and curursor as well. That came after the Uber CTO said the company had blown through its entire AI budget in just a matter of months Uh Wmart as well. I think stopped people using tools recently. So a bunch of massive massive companies arriveer like trying to find a way to save money and We'll touch on that in the next story or they're just like Pting the brakes on entirely On the Toky max and stuff I think amanuel might be better at that. L what do you think Amanuel about how this fits in with that whole idea of everybody wants to use AI as much as possible I think we'll probably get into this a bit more. defefinitely in the story that we're about to publish, but when we talk about the story in the next segment I think it's just Employees are looking a very contradictory. They're getting very mixed messages. On the one hand, it's like AI is going to change everything. You have to use it all the time It's going to make you one hundred times more efficient And that is now overlapping with but please don't bankrupt the company because we're spending way too much money on it. And I'm trying to think about like If I've ever experienced myself such a Pred One eighty And I'm guessing it maybe it's like if you imagine like one of those pivots to video where they're like Wead everything to be video. It's video all the time and then you wake up one morning and they're like, we don't have the money to shoot anything and get cruws But even that is more simple than this. They're just like getting like completely conflicting messages. I don't know how you're supposed to navigate that to be honest That's a good analy I think orr it's the closest I can think of is You know,'re we're we're shifting strategy this way w, we can actually fund that strategy, but we still expect you to like perform and do es that you don't have which is just lovely. And just one last thing on this story because I think it is so Good U a couple months ago The fininancial Times reported at that Aenture started forcing people to use AI or risk missing out on promotions So It's not just like we really want you to use this. It's if you don't use it, you will not grow in this company. You will not ever get a better paycheck, get a better role you'll be stuck where you're at. Or I assume probably the inflation is we're going to let you go because you don't fit in here anymore And at the time, a spokesperson told CBC, ourur strategy is to be the reinvention partner of choice for our clients and to be the most client focused, AI enabled, great place to work Um, and then later in the the audio Justice och says Accenture plans to formally launch a product called Token IQ which I'm sure is like some kind of throttling mechanism for the token use for employees, but we don't know yet, right? Yeah, yeah, because I mean, there's a bunch of other stuff in the audio that I didn't really get into because it does just like U a little bit too in the weeds and boring for listeners, but basically what they do go on to say is like there's all of these different ways that we might be able to curb token spend and that's like putting budgets in place, user controls and that sort of thing. And I don't think it's as serious as obviously like content of like chat where you know we have this big problem where there aren't guardrails and fucking chat bots are telling people to kill themselves and all of that sort of thing. Obviously, it is not as bad as that. There's an interesting parallel where Chatbots didn't have the guardrails for that and it did all sorts of like horrible potentially unexpected behavior. here AI tools have rolled out and ha't been guardrails in place to stock companies are spending millions of dollars or something on LLMs or you know burning through their tokens or whatever. So there's an interesting constant there where these tools are coming out and there might be a chatboard, it might be a coding tool, but you don't have these guardrails in place. And now Eentr can position itself after telling its clients to adopt AI as quickly as possible where we can help you deal with what justice calls token economics U, I think they're the start of the audio, they're introduced as token ops as well. Its like this is a whole thing now where they're making sort of umbrella terms to talk about just this part of the AI industry, like there are people now dedicated just to figuring out How do we not spend so much money on tokens and that sort of thing. I just Justice actually makes the point that D guardrails weren't there. He's made that's just not me making this point. He's making that as well. And Now we're in the position to be able to do that ourselves, which is incredibly convenient for a consulting giant, obviously H Interesting how it works. Okay, let's take a break and then we'll come back and talk about a very related story, but I don't know, a little bit even funnier, even more absurd. so we'll be back So we're back with another story about AI cost, AI spend at companies now they're dealing with it. headadline is companies are making claud and Codecx talk like cavemen to stop AI's soaring costs. Joe, this is another story that you wrote. Just walk us through how this how you came across this, I guess, to begin with Yeah. So Amanda and I are working on another story. probably won't be in the show notes here, but we're going to publish it just around the same time this goes out to all of our free listeners. If you're a paid subscriber, you're getting this beforehand. Please don't listen to it and then go and scoop us. That would be really annoying. But talk about that a little bit. So we're working on that story about the various ways that compomanies are actually trying to stop this. So whereas the Ecenture audio was like There's this issue And companies are spending too much on AI and we need to help them stop token spend. We looked at the ways that companies are actually doing that and we'll talk about those in a bit. but a really, really interesting one I got was a Leaks memo from a company that does sort of digital infrastructure and actually works on data centers. now as well. in this memo, they were talking about the various ways to curb token use. and one was use the quote unquote Pase man Plug it And I never heard of this and it was highlighted to me And I went to look around And yeah, it's there on on GitHub. That's how I first u cross. Yeah. Gotcha. So yeah, you start looking into this. What is What does it actually do? We should have done this whole podcast in Cave Man Speak, by the way U I don't think I could do it, but I was already planning to do that my behind the blog on Friday, but I did something equivalent last week. I think I kind of need to give people the real behind the blog. Yeah, this is becoming too experimental. Because now I'm just phoning in with weird bits every week We should have done that Why would now, I was going to do Capeman voice, but I'm not going do it. It's like a mem on Tk on Tikok Inagram.ave've seen this?'s like explain the'ason Cman Have seen as a manual? Man know's more online No, it's like, no, it's like your physical therapist explains to you It's like Yes. Protein. No Electrolytes. It's like electrolytes good. It's like it's a whole thing. It makes me feel like totally brarootted Um So yeah, tell us tell us what it does and also you tried it. So tell us what your experience was with it Yeah, I mean, it really does that. It changes the output of Claude and Codex and I think you can do Gemini and basically any sort of AI tool at this point. and it changes the output to not be the normal B flowery over the top responses that you'll get from these LLMs and make it really, really to the point where like it is avoiding complepletely unnecessary grammar to communicate this point And I mean, there were examples in the piece, but I think it was you Sam that sort of gave me this idea when I was writing it. But ye, it's less the sort of voice of the AI chat bot, which is like Oh, you were right to push back. I was wrong. I'm so sorry. Here's a big explanation. It just goes hulkmash, basically. So if you're asking it to do code, it just like here's the code. It doesn't give you this over the top explanation. If you asking a question, it will just shoot out. a response, which it believes is still accurate and I guess in my tests, I would say it's still accurate. I haven't done it a whole bunch. But the tool does work as advertised. I downloaded it, I integrated it. with clawed code. I asked it to look at some code I had previously worked on, it was actually a way to scrape them contracts from DHS procurement databases and that sort of thing. And they asked, I wanted to check like, If I ask her to look at this code previously written, is it going to give me like a really in depth analysis or just tell me how it works and it justond it replied with something like users API, no scraping. I'm like, Damn, that's true. right on point didnn't need to provide any more information than that. So like It does what it says, which is that It doesn't change your input, obviously. you can still be as verbose as you want It changes it as the creator told me just into a tse L you're not having a fun conversation with this thing, which frankly If we're going to have to live with AI chatbots for a bit longer, or if I worked in a company where it was forced upon me like a centure or whatever, I personally would much prefer engaging with it like it's a tool, not. a conversation they have to have this computer program every single day. So like it seems like it does the job Yeah, I've like I've tried so I'm not like in on a mission to make tragyBT useful for me, certainly. Most of the time when I'm like, oh, maybe it could do this. It doesn't do it well. So I was trying a while back to make it because I was like maybe there is something in like If it only spoke like a computer, like if it was actually just like returning tasks instead of like giving me all this, it's like, shut up, stop talking. So I basically told it. I was like, shut up. Stop talking to be like you're a person You are a computer speak in computers and tax, like only speak in like the necessary words and return the tasks. And it's really hard to make it do that. So I thought it was interesting that they created a plugin for this instead of just prompt and like making it like you are a caveman. because I bet it would try to do like a a fucking character. L it would do like you know, Uguaga, like Yeah, work with a club and shit like bang itself. It would take like whole storyline to' be like, I'm the greatest canss ever existed. It's like sh stop, shut up, stop speaking Tangent. But I agree with you that the most annoying thing in the world is when software is like cute Yes and tries to talk to you cute like Microsoft made this change years ago where like if you have a crash wherere like, oh oh, something bad happened and it's like shut. I'm gonna my screen What the error code? What's the err code? because I'm going to have to like plug it into Google It's so annoying. And I also I've just had an experience that was like I forget what I was calling, but it was like an AI, whatever interview thing takes so much longer just because of like the pageantry of like, trying to pretend like you're a person. And it's just like a person would actually be way more efficient than this So just like ut to the chaase. It won't do it. So so hard. I hate that stuff. I hate it. I do think it's like this is like I start to feel really oldld and grumpy, but like We have stayed so far like when we started doing U I graph G paces that spoke to you like a person, even just like the copywriting on the err messagage, like you said The original sin. I think we shouldn't we never it should have been command line the whole way. We should have never, we should have never strrayed from that. But who could have predicted that this is where we would be today is like trying to code using AI and making it talk like a Kman I think just briefly on the point you made, Sam, that you know You could just do a prompt, right? As you say and be like, hey, be a cave man, but there could be all sorts of side effects on that. I can't find the exact quote in front of me right now because the Gitub page is a little bit long, but the creator does mention there somewhere. like this is more effective than a prompt or something, which I think exactly goes to what you're talking about. L they've had to develop a skill I think it's called a skill, right in claed code plance, but like they've had to make something that goes a little bit further than could you just shut the fuck up, please? And it apparently it works. ye. That makes sense.. So We have some idea of who's using who might be using this thing? Wh is actually using Caveman Claud Yeah. so The memo I got was from a company called Legrand, which I'll be honest, I had not heard of before, I think when Jason edited this pace, he was head of this company, you need to define it. And yeah, as I said, there their electrical and digital infrastructure and I found it quite funny that they have moved into the data center business and that sort of thing. and they They were the ones have this internal memo said, hey, maybe you shoulddu use Caveman U When I spoke to Caveman's creator as well, he mentioned that he's heard's being used by individual developers in NVIidia, openp AI and GitHub and then some others as well. I'll just stress That doesn't mean There's like a company wide deployment of Caveman, open AI or an Nvidia or something like that. But that's pretty interesting. Ordinarily You'll be like, well, the creator saying that and, you know Maybe it's in his interest to just say the big companies are using or people at big companies are using this tool. What was really, really interesting is that He flagged to me, when you go through sort of the commit history of the tool, Shane Sweeney, who is the director of Egineering at Open AI actually contributed code to this really, really early on when it launched and added functionality for Caveman to work with Codex, which is Op AI's coding agent So att a minimum Shane Sweeney has made has written written codes to work along with this tool as well. So I felt much more confident including the creat' assertion that yeah, people inside big companies are using this None of those companies have g back to me, GitHub, u open AI or Nvid, none of them go back to me, I absolutely would not be surprised if more and more companies are using this or more individual developers are using this. because somethingomething I should have said earlier but It does work not just in the Um making the output more basic, but apparently it works with reducing token spend as well. So you can do a command in there, which is like Caveman hyphen stats or something like that. and they'll come out with this is how many tokens we think you've saved. So it estimated without Caveman, it was like eight point K K or something And then the token saved was like five point eight K, around sixty five percent saved I would have to look a little bit more into the methodology to figure out well how exactly are you determining Pting those together. Yeah, this could be Really, really Weirly valuable two companies are like, I'm burning through my token allocation or my budget or whatever. And it does make you think like Maybe we should have just made the software be a fucking piece of software in the first place rather than an AI companion, obviously, I'm being facetious, but like exactly what Manel was saying, like all the the cutesiness of it. now you have to install an independent tool and someone has to make an independent tool to actually get these sorts of code agents to where they want to be. And speaking of agents, it's not just like integrations with Claw code or codex or whatever. I didn't try this, but you can download like a version for openClaw, which is the agentic AI, right? And you can even download an entire agent which does everything cave manan. So like not just the outputs, but apparently a more all encompassing approach to Caveman as well. I haven't tried that one, but I imagine that one works as well U so U teased at the top Emmanuel has a story coming. You and Emanuel have a story coming about How many is other companies that are dealing with this entire problem that we've been talking about for the last thirty minutes And I know what else do we have coming downline? Like you saw some stuff with Citity, maybe IBM, like what's what are we looking at coming up? So u I think we want to save u kind of our best Nuggets of information here for the article which will be published tomorrow, but There are a few things that I think are not going to make it into the story that I think are pretty funny and are a good example of what people are dealing with. That is just like examples of how companies are to limit The token spend, which is really just the amount of money that we're spending that these companies are spending on AI tools The long and short of it is that access used to be unlimited And now There is a limit. This I have experienced where it's like, oh, we used to have unlimited access to Geti and you can use all the getetty images you want. and then it's like You need to sign four forms and you only get like one image a week and that's kind of like what is happening at these companies. and one of those companies is IBM which has its own internal coding agent called Bob And in order to use Bob You need to use bob coins and Its I saw a screenshot on Slack and it's a bunch of IBM employees complaining that they're fresh out of Bobcoins. and it's like, Ohh no, my Bobcoins, I'm out of bobcoins. How am I going to finish this project? And I thought that it's just like suchuch a funny dystopian a snapshot of like What push and then the poull from u AI tools is doing u to the average employee. I think Joe There was like did you want to talk about the City bank? Yeah, I'll talk about the city one. So city, the you know banking conglomerate, There' sure many people will know is that I've seen emails where City says essentially,oa whoa, slow. Please stop using so much AI Obviously I'm paraphrasing you'll be able to see the actual quote of email in the piece. But they approach it in a couple of different ways. The first is that they really, really encourage people Please. Please use the appropriate model for the task. and I think we're seeing this across a bunch of companies. where users are defaulting to like the most recent and the most powerful and the most token hungry model for Claude or whatever, that would be Ous four point seven or four point six and then GPT five point five, right for open AI. And people are using like those models with reasoning as well, which is supposed to be, you know, the AI can really work through some problems and figure it out theirself, they're using that for basic stuff, which I presume is stuff like making presentations. we're talking about that sort of thing. So they're encouraging pleading with employees, please stop using the pathful stuff for that. And then in other cases, According to the emails I've seen, city has just cut off access to a bunch of the more powerful models as well. So it started with please don't and now I was like, you can't use this unless you have like some very, very specific use case I should say I went to City for comment about this and they said on background that we haven't actually closed off any access to models and we're not doing this I then saw a screenshot where someone is unable to access the models. So I don't think that statement is fully accurate or maybe you need to read between the lines there. but yeah, that piece will come out A about the time this podcast is out and I'll try and get it in the show notes. but we got a bunch more detail from a bunch of more companies about all of the different ways they're trying to this AI use essentially because I mean, I think it's out of control for a lot of people. and I think you'll probably see that in some of the stats in the story as well U, All right Should we leave that There. If you're listening to the free version of the podcast, I will now play us out. But if you are a paying for a former year subscriber, we're gonna talk about flowers that don't even exist You can subscribe and gain access to that content at fouroformmedia. C We'll be right back after this All right, and we are back in the subscribers only section. This is one that Emmanuel wrote, the headline is scammers sell seeds for exotic AI generated flowers Eist So Andmaniel, de what's the deal here? They are AI generated images for seeds or flowers that don't even exist or in some cases, the flowers are real species the images are helping the sellers scam people? or is it both? O you see what I'm getting at. When I edited this, I got a little bit tripped up Yeah, so there's two categories. So for example, there is A real flower or a variety of a sunflower called a teddy bear sunflower. And it's called a teddy bear flower because It has Uh more petals and it's kind of roundish and it kind of just seems fluffier than your textbook. U flower they that you would normally see under like the dictionary definition of a sunflower and it looks cool U I like plants. It looks like a cool plant But There are hundredundreds, perhaps Thousands of listings for Teddy bear sunflower seeds that are clearly AI generated And these flowers in these images are huge for some very strange reason, many of these images that are promoting these sunflower seeds. always include an image of a grandma for scale. So it's like's like twice as big as this little old lady and like the petals are huge and like super fluffy and they're all these like exotic ple and blue colors Um, and and just like obviously, obviously, Thank. But it's like a fake exaggerated version of a real of a real plant. And then you have like Just a hundred percent fabricated. It looks like it came out of the jungle in Avatar flowers U Flowers that look like catheads, flowers that look like butterflies They are often advertised as Sam. I think you know plants better than me, but is it like hosta plants is what it's called I don't know I Cost I' like this like popular type of plants. So a lot of them are advertised as hostile plants, but they look nothing like that. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. The big wides like the kind of tie IE ones Yes, but they're not actually t, they're supped to be tied either g They're gre. yeah, but like images like they are blue. They're red, white and blue. They're in the shape of butterflies. They're in they're just like these Impossible variations and People are actually buying these from from Etsy, from Amazon. eBay and also a bunch of specialty seed online stores U and and Very, very common scam You brought up people that are actually buying them. How do you know that? Are they like leaving reviews? Are they saying my flower did not actually my seed did not actually grow into a big black and white butterfly that How do you know people are buying them So u mostostly what you see is that Like on Etsy, for example, you can see that the seller is active, you can see that they've actually made sales and you see that there are like verified reviews from buyers. I prove that a lot of those are fake because all they say is like Great product, great seller. And like the message are identical and there are five stars And that's hard to believe because there's also a bunch of one star reviews that say that the shipment didn't arrive The seeds were dead or the seeds were for a completely different plant And u that's like one way to know that people are actually buying these and getting scanmed very usefully on eBay When you have a product listing in order to build trust and to show potential buyers that a seller is safe to do business with. it will show you how many times they sold a particular product And there is a type of feed for these impossibly colorful roses that I saw sold more than thirty seven thousand times. Wow. So it's like extremely extremely popular. And then, you know You can see other eBay listings where these impossible flowers sold thousand one thousand here, one hundred there and so on Yeah. what's the what's the risk here? Because it can vary, right? someome people may be like, oh, well You bought some seeds and they weren't the flower that you wanted, which I guess sucks, but seeds aren't super expens well, maybe these ones are, but like what's the risk here? because it could be a little bit worse than that. Yeah. Uh, allow me Brief friendly rants Oh. love we love scientists. We love talking to scientists U because they know a lot of things and are very rigorous by definition, And M Sometimes that makes them difficult to talk about an issue. I've reached out to so many botanists. I personally know botanists and they kind of like don't really want to talk about this and I guess it's because They haven't looked at the seeds themselves. they don't know what they are They don't want to go on the record saying anything about it. So it's been difficult and like the story was held up for a long time becausecause of that However This isn't the only se scam. Uh that is happening right now The obvious risk obviously is you're just wasting your money. You're trying to buy something. you're not getting all you want. You got scammed out of a few dollars The bigigger risk is and I know this because this was a huge concern around the time of these mysterious seed package shipments. Do you guys remember that whole thing? Yeah. So Jason obsessed with it. Yeah. Jason wrote a really great story about it at Motherboard. Basically the way it works is You would get a shipment of seeds randomly from some random Amazon seller, you would know why And the reason why is The Amazon seller needed a record of shipping customer or something so they could write a fake review and show that they are real sellers so they can then go on and sell other fake products and seed just happened to be the cheapest thing that you can sell. And there were so many of these going around to so many people in the country, the three different states issued warnings to people to say not to plant them. And that's because you're very likely to introduce an invasive species to your local ecology and that's not That can be actually pretty devastating. Like the ramifications of an invasive planant could be really, really bad And that's the same risk here, right? It's like, you think you're buying a sunflower seed You're getting something completely different and potentially invasive And you're planting in the ground and potentially causing trouble for generations. Yeah And I mean, speaking of risks, obviously, the other story it brings to mind is not just Jason's one about the seeds, but also Sam, you covered these AI generated mushroom Foraging Do you see like a parallel there? as well. It just AI seems to be all in the plant world Yeah, ye, for sure. I mean, it's yeah, I'm sure it's very easy to create these images with AI because They're like loose and organic to begin with. There's no like We're here against some kind of like uncany valley thing because it's a plant Um Yeahah, I mean, obviously the mushroom thing is like more high stakes, but I wonder it's like what are we actually putting in the ground when we're planantning these? Like what are they actually selling? But did Jason end up analyzing Seeds Were the seeds dangerous or were they just like I'm sure Iget if I don' think so I I can't remember, but yeah, I mean, I would be interested to know like what what is actually getting planted when you're planting like one of these crazy psychedelic rainbow hostas. and I'm sure it's not that. It might not even be a regular ass hosta probably is weeds or something or just like, you know, oregano, you know, who knows what what what is being to people Um I don't know mayaybe should buy some and plant some and create an ecological disaster. couldould be. Yeah exactly. Yeah. Just briefly, Mmanuel, what did Etsy and eBay say? Do they take down their listings? Do they give you a statement? What was the response from any of the platforms att se and Amazon did not respond. just curious because I know they are doing something about this like There are many, many stores that you can currently see on their website that sell this stuff, but they're also actively removing stuff So they know this is happening. They know it's against their rules. They don't want to see this But they also don't want to comment on it Same story with eBay, but eBay did respond and, you know, the usual, theyre they're trying to get a handle on it. It's not allowed Yada yada. The thing that I thought was interesting is that They Here to draw the line not at advertising products with AI images, but the image not matching what is being sold theory there's nothing wrong with I selling seeds for roses with AI generated images of roses. They just have to be like comparable or representative of what people actually get which I guess, I don't know, like be aware When you're looking at eBay, that it's not like a total ban on AI generated images of products. Yeah, that's actually a really interesting point where they're actually okay with that. It just it crosses some sort of line at some point and that line might be a little bit fuzzy. Allright, we'll leave that there and I will play us out As a reminder, four hundred four Media is journalist, founded and supported by subscribers. If you do wish to subscribe to four four Media and directly support our work, please go to four hundred four media. C You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad free version of this podcast You' also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is produced by Alyssa Midcf. Another way to support us is by leving a five star rating and review for the podcast. That stuff really does help us out or just tell a friend about us too This has been for a full Media. We'll see you again next week