Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Section 230 and How to Destroy the Internet
100 Plays3 years ago
- https://www.lawnext.com/2023/02/filevine-unveils-ai-driven-immigration-forms-accounting-integration-with-oracle-netsuite-and-a-broad-vision-for-ai.html
- https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/former-associate-must-repay-law-firm-for-failing-to-bill-promised-hours-top-state-court-says
- https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/gonzalez-v-google-llc/
- https://www.techspot.com/news/97658-twitter-sms-two-factor-authentication-now-paid-feature.html
- https://www.businessinsider.com/peabody-college-apologized-chatgpt-condolence-email-michigan-state-shooting-2023-2
- https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/2436897736439055/
Recommended
Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Host Intros
00:00:01
Speaker
And we're here. And if I start hello quickly, I will get our introductions in. Hello and welcome to Esquiring Minds, episode nine for February 23rd, 2023. This show is three lawyer friends goofing around for your enjoyment and nothing we say should be taken as legal advice. I'm one of those friends. I'm Andrew Leahy attacks the technology attorney from New Jersey. I'm joined by Jake from Florida. That's me government land and use attorney. There he is. Jacob Schumer can't see him, but I can land use. Yeah. I do exist. I'm being perceived as we speak by at least two people.
00:00:30
Speaker
Andrew, you're getting gussied up for the Daytona 500 here. You're off to the races, really, really talking fast tonight. 55 from the hour, 55 from the top of the hour. We got traffic and weather coming up on the eights. Got a mattress in lanes. You got to lower your DJ voice down, though, and smooth jazz. We're trying to work on that. We don't have minds. We've learned. We go over time if we take too much time, so we got to dislike. Y'all know who we are.
00:01:04
Speaker
And then it's rude, but it's also always funny. Oh my God. He did it.
Humor and Microphone Etiquette
00:01:10
Speaker
I have mute your microphone. Mute your microphone. When you take a drink, man, that's terrible. Oh, was that me? Sorry. Yeah. Slurping. Slurp. Hold on. Let me grab some popcorn and some chips. Oh boy.
00:01:29
Speaker
Sorry, I hit the microphone. We didn't even finish introductions. Hi, I'm Jason. Andrew started introducing me. I'm Jason. I'm coming in hot tonight. I'm feeling pretty spicy after a busy day of suing bad bosses. I filed one lawsuit. I wrote two more. I was hoping to file them, but I'm full of piss and vinegar today. I was going to say vim and vigor, but okay. We'll go with that. That's PG, right? You can say piss, can't you?
00:01:59
Speaker
I think so, I don't know. I don't say it around my kids. I don't either. Kids don't listen to this. It's just sort of a gross term. I don't want to hear that being repeated from a child, you know?
Cultural Expressions and British TV
00:02:09
Speaker
I don't use that term in its literal form ever, I don't think. It's always like part of another phrase.
00:02:17
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. It's like, uh, you're, you're upset about something or maybe you're doing the Britishism or it's like, Oh, you're just, you know, having a little taking. Yeah. Yes. Right. That's, that's the main, I've started saying that and I feel weird about it because I don't know how many people are like, you know, in the British TV show circuit, like I am.
00:02:42
Speaker
What's your British TV show from? No, I don't I don't even know. Does Tad Lasso count? I don't know. First of all, it's Fleabag. You just called him Tad Lasso. That's like the fake President Lincoln's shirt from that 70s show, Tad Nugent. But Fleabag, also amazing British. I mean, Ted Lasso isn't even British, right? It's like American, but it's, you know, blah, blah, blah.
00:03:10
Speaker
Fleabag. I don't know. Black Mirror. I don't know. Aren't these all American TV shows that just happen to have British people in them? Really? Are they not? I thought they were. No. Black Mirror, I think, was a British TV show at first, started by Charles Brooker or something. I don't know if you guys knew this, but also The Office was a British TV show first. The Office. It's really commonly not known information. No one knows that, yeah. Faulty Towers.
00:03:39
Speaker
I'm just going to start naming British TV shows and movies now, I guess. I think Andrew, now's a great time for a segue. Let's segue. Let's segue into, yeah, I don't
Transition to Section 230 Discussion
00:03:49
Speaker
even have a segue. I don't do segues. We're just going to talk about section 230 tonight for the most part. But I think first we have some actually, some sort of
00:03:56
Speaker
many topics, right? We have a couple of little sort of follow up on, do not pay a little bit kind of by just sort of by contrast, right? With Filevine and like they're actually pitching and selling a product that makes sense. Yeah. So Filevine is a piece of software that is pretty commonly used by
00:04:18
Speaker
Some law firms, I think I see a lot of personal injury lawyers using it. One of my favorite employment litigators out there in Ohio, James Hux, he uses it, swears by it, says it's great. But Filevine is like a Clio practice management software sort of thing, case management software. And it's really common for those these days to have some sort of built in like document automation integration.
00:04:42
Speaker
It looks like Filevine is starting to do what Do Not Pay has been saying that they've been doing all along and actually taking some machine learning or AI, which in my mind are mostly interchangeable at this point, but they're taking some machine learning, and I think they're doing it specifically with immigration forms, so it's not going to benefit anybody whose practice I know anything about right now.
00:05:06
Speaker
But they're taking these immigration forms and doing something a little bit like what Adobe has been doing and kind of recognizing fields in the forms. And then they're also going in there and taking some of the organic documents that clients might be submitting for information about it, like birth certificates. And I don't know what other paperwork you would do to
00:05:35
Speaker
marriage licenses, past marriage, tax returns. Maybe some work-related forms and stuff like that. Then it will intelligently place the information from those scanned in documents into the appropriate places in the immigration form. This is actually a good version of what Do Not Pay has been saying they've been doing all along.
00:05:56
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, that's like almost. Yeah. Did they call it a is a file of I'm calling it a because that seems like a smart. It's like smart scanning, smart screen reading kind of situation rather than, you know, AI, as we've been talking about it recently, has been like pretending to be a human through text and that kind of thing. Oh, I see. Also, we had a.
00:06:24
Speaker
Yeah, the chatbot model. But also, I guess, yeah, this, this is AI, to the extent that stuff is AI, too. Because I was also thinking about like, AI, the AI driven, in quotes, AI driven, fake voices, like, I don't know if you guys have seen the fake Joe Biden and Donald Trump play Overwatch videos.
00:06:43
Speaker
Um, no, I haven't seen that, but I've seen Joe Biden like, uh, ordering a pizza or something or that scene. I guess I heard it. Yeah. There's a Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro arguing about ratatouille and what are like talking about whether or not they want to be ratatouille. Uh, maybe my favorite one so far.
00:07:00
Speaker
Uh, but like, so that's, that's AI because it's right now trying to replicate something from just a little simple. Yeah. This is me. This is clearly a cool use of that kind of, uh, machine learning, whatever you want to call it. It also seems infinitely more attainable. Like it seems doable. This is not as pie in the sky and useful. Like, I mean, pulling data from,
00:07:23
Speaker
you know, all these different disparate documents and then like translating them where necessary and then filling them into, I can see obvious applications in tax. This seems really cool. Yeah. Uh, the, uh, the CEO of Filevine, uh, it's a fellow named Ryan Anderson. Uh, we'll put this, uh, article from law next in the show notes. I think probably maybe, I don't know, I don't, I don't do any of it. Uh, but, uh, the CEO of Filevine, Ryan Anderson did kind of the typical thing that a lot of, you
00:07:50
Speaker
Folks who are real bullish on AI and calling things AI and implementing AI. He did a little play on that and he said that AI will replace lawyers... Who failed to adapt with it? And is talking about having lawyers use AI in intelligent ways. And we're seeing some more of that with the announcement that maybe we talked about last week, maybe not. The whole Harvey integration into some big law firms.
00:08:19
Speaker
Uh, it's happening in good ways to not just terrible ways. Right. I don't think we talked about the Harvey thing last week. Cause that just came out, I think this week.
00:08:28
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think we did either. As far as just quickly the replacing those who don't adapt, the thing I obviously I think about immediately is I don't know if you guys have interacted at all with like estate planning, automation services, these like wealth council and these other. It's a subscription based thing similar to like Westlaw or whatever, but what you have access to is basically just the case law in your state where you're barred.
00:08:51
Speaker
That is limited to the sorts of documents you're going to be generating and then forms for those documents wills you know living wills living trusts those sorts of things and I don't recall that when wealth council rolled out people talked about it doing away with attorneys It's just attorneys that subscribe to it and use it to generate the documents for their clients It's not I don't really see why this is all that different and why this is gonna suddenly put people out of work
00:09:14
Speaker
Yeah, anything that makes an attorney more efficient is theoretically putting attorneys out of work. Like the worst one at the end of the line that just is like the poor person who's sorry, there's nothing left for you, Billy. The musical chairs were the last person who is left standing, just doesn't have a seat to sit down in yet.
00:09:33
Speaker
Or you just like, you know, the ones that are like the best maybe are are able to take more of the work. And it's just like the prices go down at the lower end. And, you know, but it's not really it's not like, oh, there's not going to be lawyers anymore. It's going to be a slightly different job, just like it has been as we switch to less paper. Right. It's an evolution. And yeah, we're going to have to be ready for it suddenly or another.
00:10:03
Speaker
Uh, even if the core of what we do of like analyzing and advising and such, it's basically going to be the same. Right. So, so speaking of evolution, uh, I don't know who I did. I don't know if you added this or Jason added this, um, Jake, this mid-law, uh, clawback provision, the evolution of compensating attorneys. Oh yeah. That was me. That was responsible for this abomination. I am horrified by it. So I guess, uh, uh, maybe Andrew, you want to go ahead and summarize for us?
00:10:32
Speaker
Sure. It's pretty simple. Basically, there was a former associate that was made to...
Legal Case and Billing Targets
00:10:37
Speaker
They didn't complete a complete year. I think basically the contract that they signed when they were initially employed with this firm was that if they didn't bill a certain number of hours by the end of the year, they would owe something back from their salary, right?
00:10:53
Speaker
I thought it was like an hourly like it could have even been month to month. But yeah, so it was if you don't reach your billable expectations, you have to pay back the salary that we paid you less under those expectations. And then he was like, you didn't send me any work.
00:11:11
Speaker
So I couldn't bill any hours because I was depending on you to send me work. And the court was like, yeah, that's too bad, bud. You signed it, basically. The hours bill discrepancy clause said that if this attorney billed less than the base quota for any three month period, his salary would be reduced appropriately at the discretion of the firm. So I guess that's what it was. It was over a little three month chunks. That's the insane part about this to me is that
00:11:37
Speaker
This is a quote lifted from this contract. It would be reduced appropriately at the discretion of LLH, the law firm, in order to make up for any discrepancy. Like, wait a second. We're giving you unilateral control over the ability to just
00:11:56
Speaker
at our discretion, you kind of decide to claw back some or a huge portion or all of the salary that you paid this guy. What a horrifying contract. Oh my God. And then they're suing him. That like this came into place. This came to court because they are actually suing him for the money back.
00:12:16
Speaker
Which is like, oh, I could, this is a horrifying contract provision. I'm so like, uh, like it's something that people should look out for, I guess.
00:12:28
Speaker
in North Dakota, especially because apparently this first, I assume Larson and Latham is the same firm for both, but apparently they did it previously in 2022. They did this to some other associate in North Dakota. Yeah. Same base. Okay. I was like, how big is this place? Like I, I'm just imagining you can't get that big. Cause then nobody, everybody would hate you. That was my webpage.
00:12:51
Speaker
I checked their webpage. They are not a large firm. I assumed when I first read this and I popped it into our document, I assumed it was some big law abomination, but no. It was under 25 lawyers at this firm, I think. It might have been pretty small.
00:13:07
Speaker
So, bigger than the law firm, or maybe about the same size of the law firm that I was a partner at before I went out on my own. But holy smokes, I expect this kind of just evil-hearted, just miserly-ness with associates. I expect that from big law firms.
00:13:32
Speaker
Quarrels or Jones day or something like that, but I don't expect it from little guys The thing about Jones day the big go but guys is that they're actually trying to get good attorneys and they want to recruit good attorneys and This is what I thought here. Yeah scares away anybody that has like a good choice in North Dakota By the way, which how deep is that pool? Does that is there a law school in North Dakota? I
00:13:57
Speaker
So I'm sure that there is, uh, North Dakota is actually a surprising font of good high paying work, or at least it has been during the, uh, what do you call it? The shale oil fracking boom. Uh, there has been a ton of money in North Dakota, uh, for that sort of thing right now, both for people like both for just people who are not lawyers and for lawyers who are
00:14:23
Speaker
doing that oil and gas right work up there and the work that's attendant to having a bunch of high earning people plopping down in the area. Yeah, it's a desolate wasteland, but it's also a desolate wasteland where people are flocking to it to make money hand over fist for the last decade or so.
00:14:43
Speaker
Yeah, maybe then they won't have so much trouble recruiting people because that was my thought is just basically if you have if you're a mid law firm someplace where it's hard to you know, get people there's a lot of you'll see like on job posting forums like simplicity and stuff, they'll be pretty desperate calls for somebody to come to you know, somewhere in the middle of the country to you know, they need somebody with 10 years experience in the middle of Idaho or something and so that my thought here was like the obvious
00:15:07
Speaker
The reason why I would imagine most firms don't do this, and as Jake said, why big law firms don't do it, is they're trying to recruit the best talent. And this poisons the well. I mean, I would not want to go to this firm. Why would I want to, I don't even know when I leave my job at the firm that my bank account won't get smaller thanks to that thing. So the act of my leaving, you know what I mean? Like everyone, I'm not getting paid anymore. I might owe something. That's crazy. Yeah.
00:15:34
Speaker
Anyway, it's nutty. It's funny. I wonder how many firms are doing this is the question. That's a good question. This is the first time I've ever heard of anything like this. I've never been asked to sue anybody about this, but I don't often get asked by lawyers to sue their old law firms or anything like that. It's not unheard of, but it's not that. As of now. It's happened. It's happening. Clearly.
00:16:01
Speaker
So speaking of law, probably going
Deep Dive into Section 230
00:16:04
Speaker
nowhere, but are nonetheless, uh, what we're going to talk about tonight. Um, section one, there's actually two 30, I'm sorry. Have you guys been following this to the extent? I mean, I did have two, I'm of two minds of having this be a main topic. I think it's worth talking about because if it's not now, it will at some point be.
00:16:20
Speaker
probably eviscerated. It seems as though, based on the questions the justices were asking, was it Tuesday and Wednesday? People are suggesting that everyone is reticent to gut basically all
00:16:32
Speaker
platform. I mean, so we should explain what section 230 is. So section 230 is basically a part of the I think it was 1996. I did some research here that I know I'm not allowed to do. But it's a section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. And it immunizes platforms when they make targeted recommended. I'm sorry, the question now is whether it would immunize a platform if it makes a targeted recommendation. What we read, I read it, I actually read it, because I was like, what is the actual text of this? And so five lines or something, right?
00:17:01
Speaker
Well, there's, yeah, there's, I mean, the section isn't that long. But there's like, you know, what somebody, there's a book named like the 13 words that created the internet or something. And it was section 230, the important part saying that they are not treated, they cannot be treated as a, as a publisher.
00:17:25
Speaker
Anybody that hosts online content cannot be like an online interactive service or whatever. Let me just read it for us. Okay, thank you. I'm just going to read it for you. 47 USC, yeah, a ton of research while I'm sitting here listening to you guys talking. A quick little bing dick, guys.
00:17:45
Speaker
Yeah, it's 47 USC 230 C one says no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
00:18:01
Speaker
So this is more or less, I think probably the intention of it here is, this was what 1996 I think you said. So probably back then it's when AltaVista hosts your blog, AltaVista or Geocities, gosh, there's a throwback, hosts your blog, they are not responsible for the content or liable for
00:18:23
Speaker
the publisher status of, you know, that just because it's hosted on their computers, on their platform. That's kind of where it started. Oh, yeah. And like, it's even more basic, right. So AltaVista, DigitalOcean, anybody that like provides like a cloud service or cloud server where you can put your own stuff on the server. And yeah, the question so,
00:18:52
Speaker
both of the cases today, I think. It's Google and Twitter. They posted them this week were about terrorist acts and basically they were saying that Google and Twitter
00:19:07
Speaker
They were suing Google and Twitter under this anti-terrorism law based on the idea that both of these programs, both of these sites recommended... YouTube through Google and Twitter just for Twitter, right? Right. Twitter, right. Just based on their recommendations.
00:19:25
Speaker
because of the algorithm or whatever, the algorithm set actually promoted the YouTube video that promoted terrorism, promoted the tweet that promoted terrorism to this person's feed. And so therefore they're suing for that. And they're saying that section 230 doesn't apply because I'm not suing you for the content of the tweet. I'm not suing you for the content of the video. I'm suing you for the algorithm that promoted this.
00:19:54
Speaker
Um, and so in the lower courts, it seems have mostly universally said that no, this immunity applies. It doesn't matter. Like that, that's still the content that that, uh, that that strain of causation, the fact that it, uh, it promotes terrorism is only because of the content.
00:20:14
Speaker
And so unless they took some kind of active step to actually promote that, knowing that it was terrorism, then there's no liability or there's immunity attaches. And it seemed this is, you know, I did what research I can, but they're like people that do this all day. And there was a, I saw there was one professor who has a blog
00:20:40
Speaker
And he was talking about how the DOJ got it totally wrong. The Fourth Circuit got it totally wrong. Everything looked terrible. And so these are people that have put a lot of time and effort into thinking about good tests. And they still have strong disagreements on what it actually means.
00:21:02
Speaker
what the what section 230 actually means or what yeah okay right I mean so the the underlying to my mind the underlying question is we're clear that section 230 based on the plain language and then also case intervening case law since 1996 covers the decision to put the content on or I mean so the other side of it right is
00:21:22
Speaker
they're also covered for removing content, right? So Twitter decides to delete a tweet that is covered under section 230. And so that's why this is sort of this has across the aisle, bipartisan hate section 230, right? And love to some extent. And love to some extent, right. Because there are people who would say that, you know, there's hateful content on Twitter. And so
00:21:44
Speaker
Twitter should be held liable because Twitter is selling ads around that hateful content and so therefore they should be somehow held liable for promoting this content. They are making money off of hate speech, right? That's one argument.
00:21:55
Speaker
The other side of the argument is that they shouldn't be interfering with, they shouldn't be covered by Section 230 when they take down, I mean, we know who is obviously making the argument defending the hateful content, right? It's other hateful people, but they would be arguing that Twitter shouldn't be able to take down that content. They shouldn't be able to hide behind Section 230 by choosing what they promote or when they choose what they promote and choose what they moderate to some extent. So these two questions, these two cases were just based on the algorithm, I think.
00:22:22
Speaker
Right. Yeah, I think so. I mean, like the core question is, is it different from permitting the content to come on or, you know, moderating the content if they're boosting the content? Right. They're being Twitter and Google. And one of the points that a lot of professors or like people are making is that there was some question about I guess the Ninth Circuit adopted like a neutral algorithm test where like if it if
00:22:47
Speaker
The algorithm treats everything more or less the same. That is not that all the content is the same, but the content is promoted based on neutral criteria, like likes and stuff like that. And then it's then the section 230 applies because it's not an actual independent act that change that contributes to the express expression. It's not an expression in itself. It is some method of showing you what it thinks that you want to see.
00:23:17
Speaker
Um.
00:23:19
Speaker
Right. And I think I understand that because if you take it to like the metaphor I thought about was, um, you know, those insane, those like, uh, what do you call them? Like ransom notes that in movies people write by cutting up a piece of magazines, right? If you were to make the argument that that's not the speech, that's not, that, that person is not responsible for the content of that letter because actually it's taken out of bits of better homes and gardens and, uh, you know, Betty, Betty Crocker cookbooks or something. Obviously that doesn't fly, right? And so if they are,
00:23:48
Speaker
uh diving in and and picking and choosing content based on the the substance of the content not based on users and interactions with it i kind of understand how you would say that that is twitter if you say let's say take the extreme example twitter or youtube has an algorithm that like uh you know isis beheading videos get a lot of clicks and so just elevate all those to the front page
00:24:08
Speaker
Like that's the actual intent. Yeah, that would be that would be a problem. If we can detect it's an ISIS video, it has the ISIS logo. We we pump that sucker all the way up and we put it on the front page. That seems like a problem, right? Yeah. And what I forgot where I was going earlier. But what the people were saying is that there's no such thing. You know, some people have responded to that neutral algorithm thing and said this wasn't neutral because they're you know, they're
00:24:37
Speaker
There's no such thing as neutral, because what's the most neutral thing? It's what, a live feed of the most recent things, I guess. That's the most neutral thing. But that's still a choice. And there's no such thing as no choices in an algorithm. That's what the argument is. I don't know if that's still a choice, though. That's basically no choice. In the philosophical sense, it's a choice. In the Aristotle sense, it's a choice. But I wouldn't say that it's a choice, because you have to choose something.
00:25:06
Speaker
Right. Right. Because it could also be first to last. It could be last to first. It could be most clicks. Is that a choice? Uh, most popular, least popular. Yeah. At some point it's like a, it is a matter of degrees. I want to go back to your analogy to the, uh, silence of the land sociopath psychopath murderer, uh, in their little magazine letter cut out thing. Right.
00:25:35
Speaker
That falls apart in my mind because in that scenario, somebody is plucking things out of context and little single letters at a time or maybe single words that totally changes the meaning of it here. And what we're talking about here is taking things that are encapsulated within themselves and have independent meaning in themselves. And we're choosing to elevate those things based off of criteria that are
00:26:02
Speaker
only sinister in the sense that they're designed to get people deeper down rabbit holes and increase engagement and keep you on the platform so that we can serve you more ads. It's sinister in that way. I don't know that we can make a good faith argument. A lot of people will make the argument.
00:26:22
Speaker
I don't know if we can make it in good faith, that they're doing it to spoon feed you Nazi propaganda on YouTube because you accidentally watched a video that talked about the history of Germany in World War II. The algorithm sending you down Alice in Wonderland rabbit holes here is
00:26:44
Speaker
That's, in my mind, not specifically sinister to end up with Nazis in your YouTube feed. It is sinister to sell you ads. And so the question here is, if we're using the algorithm to promote one kind of speech over another, and I think just based on the plain text of section 230 that I read earlier, it says, kind of,
00:27:12
Speaker
I think unambiguously, no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. It doesn't qualify it by saying if it's presented in a neutral manner. It doesn't qualify by saying how it's presented. It's saying no provider shall be treated.
00:27:37
Speaker
Listen, I'm not wild about YouTube algorithms. I'm not wild about Twitter or Facebook algorithms. Instagram seems to get me and know exactly how to serve me up stuff that I'm pretty well calculated to buy, and that's terrifying. But at the same time,
00:27:59
Speaker
That's, that's kind of what the internet is. And the only other alternative to having a curated algorithm that serves you up stuff that they think that you want to see based on past experience is to just give you the flat, lifeless, strictly timeline presentation of everything, which I like. And if you listen to the tech podcaster, John Syracuse said that's what he wants too. Uh, and maybe I'm an old curmudgeon like him, but like,
00:28:24
Speaker
That's, I think the only other alternative is to serve you only a timeline version of things from only the people that you've asked to see. Well, as we've learned from Mastodon, how good that can be and how you can kind of customize that by following bots and stuff like that. But, um, and following, you know, hashtags and all kinds of stuff. Uh, but one inch, one thing that, uh,
00:28:49
Speaker
that I thought about when
Content Moderation and Market Forces
00:28:51
Speaker
I was researching this is that so much of the Section 230 discourse recently in politics was about like defamation and how they should be able to sue Twitter and YouTube and such for defamation. There's never anything there's never going to be anything defamatory about recommending something in an algorithm. It's always going to be
00:29:11
Speaker
the content that is defamatory because they're just putting it out there. Even if they front it, they'll never be defamatory about that. So even like the plaintiff's best case scenario, I don't think the Supreme Court is going to make it so all of a sudden you can sue YouTube for the defamation
00:29:32
Speaker
in a YouTube video that they didn't produce themselves. So like a lot of the worst case scenarios about Section 230 going away don't seem they weren't even on the table even if the plaintiff won everything and it sounds like the Supreme Court justices were skeptical even of that plaintiffs like kind of
00:29:50
Speaker
It was a big, big argument for niche reasons, but, um, but yeah, they didn't seem to buy into even that, even that limited scope of like anti-terrorism and other kind of activity. Right. So for moderation purposes, I mean, would this just leave it to basically the, I'm doing huge sarcastic air quotes, as I say, the free market to, um,
00:30:14
Speaker
to require moderation on the parts of these platforms. So I think about if Twitter can't be held liable sort of no matter what they do with the content that other people put on Twitter, why is there any incentive for them to ever do anything about hate speech or harassment or anything like that? Why wouldn't they just hide behind Section 230? Is it only that advertisers are not going to want to be put between those two tweets?
00:30:37
Speaker
It's going to be that advertisers don't want to be there because people don't want to be there. That's exactly what we're seeing happen with Twitter for the last six months anyway. You're seeing a bunch of people just evacuate from Twitter altogether, some of them to Mastodon, some of them to other places, some of them to nowhere because they don't like what they're being spoon-fed. If you don't like what you're being spoon-fed, then you stop eating at the place that's feeding that to you.
00:31:04
Speaker
And when that well dries up, when the people aren't there, then the advertisers won't be there anymore. And so people can vote with their eyeballs, vote with their feet, vote with their dollars and disappear from it. And so the market has done that in an observable way for the last six months.
00:31:21
Speaker
Well, for the more extreme stuff, like the, you know, violent stuff, there's a lot more than advertisers. Like we saw with after January 6, Parler Parlay, getting taken off of like the app store, getting taken off of what Cloudflare because at some point there are a lot of
00:31:41
Speaker
you know, between me and you guys in this Zencaster video thing, there's like seven or eight services and a lot of them prohibit you from using it and allowing terrorists, you know, and all kinds of content for their service. And so because of that, like,
00:32:00
Speaker
You say you let the wrong thing on your platform and you don't do anything to stop it Your whole business is going to be destroyed if you have an online business because there's a google there's an apple There's a visa mastercard payment system in the way. It's kind of like Like it's kind of horrifying and a little in a way because that
00:32:22
Speaker
That kind of like, you know, the anti-terrorism, anti-hate principles, I think a lot of people can get behind. But I, you know, the idea that you can just be shut off from the digital world because of these, you know, private corporations saying you're out is a little concerning. But and at some point they're pro I mean, I think there should be some kind of right to digital access of some kind, some kind of basic digital access. So like, you can't
00:32:52
Speaker
I don't know. It's something I've been thinking about, but haven't come to a final conclusion on, but at some point it's going to be a real concern. It's difficult with all these things because on some level then you're compelling some platform. I mean, there is no state run, any of these things. So at some point you are compelling some platform to host in some way, even if it's just like the DNS server that doesn't want to redirect
00:33:18
Speaker
whatever, I think it was Daily Storm or whatever the horrendous hate newspaper was, like the first sort of wave of, you know, being taken off DNS stuff, Cloudflare not going to host them. I think it was Daily Storm around the time of the Charlottesville, you know, whatever, Proud Boys.
00:33:36
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, it is alarming to some extent, like I can root for it when, you know, the people that are getting it are the people who deserve it. But it is alarming how much of the internet and how much of what you do day to day requires on, as you said, Jake, like six different services that any one of them could just decide, I don't like the content of, you know, what you're sharing or what you're saying, and you're gone. That's it. You're not no more cloud floor. Just once one day is like, you're not allowed to use our service to spread anti cloud for flare views.
00:34:04
Speaker
And all of a sudden, nobody is saying anything about Cloudflare. It's just like, what happened? Like, there's nothing we can do to stop this because, you know, there's no law saying that you have to. That's not OK.
00:34:15
Speaker
So the way the internet has grown up over the last 25 years, and I think a lot of this has been fostered by section two 30. I think in that situation, if you had somebody who got wind of a situation like that and you found somebody that said, uh, that got canceled by cloud flare. And so they can't be propagated on anybody's, uh, Oh gosh, what do you call cloud failure? What are they called? Um,
00:34:39
Speaker
content delivery network or a CDS, uh, yeah, they got canceled by a CDN and so they can't get delivered in any sort of efficient manner.
00:34:48
Speaker
Uh, and if you had that happen, the first, uh, advocate who hears about that, right? The first like internet vigilante who's all about internet freedom, uh, who gets wind of that will like rally the troops and you will have wagons circled like in a hurry. Uh, and I think that's a byproduct of growing up the internet growing up and starting to flourish with section two 30 in place. And so we've got the voting with your.
00:35:16
Speaker
with everybody's speech, voting with your eyeballs, voting with your feet, voting with your dollars thing, kind of already marshaled in defense of a free and open internet, asterisk, dagger, you know, cross with all the exceptions for the times when that's not true. But, you know, I think we've grown up. I mean, the three of us are all of a similar age where we came up with maybe an analog childhood and a digital adolescence.
00:35:45
Speaker
Jake, you probably had just a digital entire life. He is a Tamagotchi. I got on the internet at 14 4K when I was like 10 or something. I forget when that started. Maybe I was like seven when we were at 14.4K dial up.
00:36:06
Speaker
We've got protections not from laws right now, not from companies regulating, although that helps too because those companies are by and large run by people who are our peers and maybe Gen X and probably some lingering boomers who are holding on. People who also have kind of come of age or been of an age when it was relevant to them.
00:36:30
Speaker
when the internet was really blooming. And I think we've got a lot more protection there just from the sheer cultural consensus that the internet should be free and open, at least in places that are not China.
00:36:48
Speaker
I mean, even before section 230, there was net neutrality. Like way back in the day, the people that originally created the internet were just like, how do we deal with this? And they're like, okay, everybody, let's just treat it all neutral because we don't want to deal with who's going to pay for what bandwidth or whatever, who gets special treatment for what bandwidth. And so that, yeah, it's been a norm that
00:37:13
Speaker
You know, everybody, it's something for everyone. It's like a digital commons. Though that's, you know, very, that's, it's moving away from that for sure. Yeah, I mean, that's my concern a little bit is anytime, especially I would say post, let's just throw a year out there, maybe 2016. Anytime something is like relying on like norms and mores, it worries me a little bit because that is by definition saying things are okay now.
00:37:40
Speaker
So I'm pretty sure things will be okay forever. And I like even just Twitter as a sort of example, if you would, it's, you know, a relatively straightforward story. It's a crazy rich guy bought it and is doing whatever he wants with it. But if you had told me this is how it was going to go three or four years ago, I wouldn't have thought that was very likely. I mean, I wouldn't, I don't know, I'm not a crazy person. I wouldn't have screamed at you and said you were lying. But like, it's pretty implausible, like based on how Twitter was sort of
00:38:05
Speaker
they had a lot of third-party apps and that's what helped it grow. The norms and the mores around Twitter were free and open to some extent too, even though it was obviously a closed platform. And that can just go away. And so I think about that a lot with what happens when Google decides that they need to become even more not the do no evil company.
00:38:28
Speaker
relying on that, using that as the sort of, well, it's right there in the slogan. We've done that before, we've seen where that gets us, and it worries me a little bit that it's not a protection that we have that is formalized somewhere.
00:38:40
Speaker
I think that maybe government regulation of the internet and technology in general, I can't remember whether it was last week or two weeks ago, or maybe just every single episode of this podcast that we've done, where I'll rail against the government's ineptitude when it comes to regulating technology. And I think it was maybe last week where I mentioned how much spam we all still have, even though spam was regulated.
00:39:08
Speaker
And I think that I've probably painted with too broad a brush in that government regulation that's restricting you from doing something online or that's limiting something that's happening online has been overall not great, borderline failure.
00:39:28
Speaker
But a Section 230 like this, which is a government regulation that has regulated in favor of free and open exchange, or in a way that has facilitated free and open exchange, that's the kind of government regulation that I can probably get behind here because, especially with the United States government, it's probably at its best
00:39:51
Speaker
at regulating technology in the sense of saying, no, we're going to keep this open and free. You can't close this off. Right. So bad at regulating to prescribe things, but good when it comes to let's leave this open and let it grow and flourish. Yeah.
00:40:15
Speaker
Sorry, I forgot what I was going to say. You go. Yeah, no, I mean, I'm with you, Jason. It's sort of, I think you said proscribe and I feel like the other side of the coin is protect and sort of leave something just open to sort of say, we're not going to regulate this, but neither is anyone else. We're not going to leave it to the States. We're not, we are just leaving this free and open. I think that is when the government sort of handles technology best as well.
00:40:39
Speaker
I remember what I was going to say. Yeah, they're so they're very bad at controlling the Internet like stopping spam because I think at its core, the Internet's kind of lawless because it's so like any countries have their own Internet. They can do you can access other countries Internet, at least as it is right now.
00:41:01
Speaker
Uh, freely and that's the norm for now. Uh, but yeah, like another example of freeing like section two 30 is the DMCA, which a lot of people hate the digital millennium copyright act, which is why YouTube can exist because otherwise people uploading to YouTube. Like you would, like you need more than section two 30, uh, like it sets up how they make those copyright claims because otherwise they'd have a problem the second anybody uploads copyrighted content.
00:41:30
Speaker
And now like they can let you upload it and then let other people notice, you know, notify them this is copyrighted and then pull it down. Disaggregate enforcement. Yeah. Yeah. So without that, that would have been I believe I'm not a copyright lawyer, but I believe that wouldn't have been possible. Like YouTube wouldn't be possible without the DMCA, which kind of, you know, I was ahead of its time in terms of what it was trying to protect.
00:42:01
Speaker
Yeah, in that one particular because the MCA also introduced a lot of the like copyright protections on, you know, the reasons why you can't make backups of, you know, games and all the various DRM stuff that we dealt with. I don't know if you guys were still deal with. Yeah, we still do. As you guys remember, it was like in the late.
00:42:19
Speaker
I think or maybe the early tens. There was the whole Sony DRM issue where there was so yeah, right? It's a piece of software game or something. The root kit. Yeah, it was if you put a Sony CD into your computer installed a anti DRM software at the kernel level and it didn't tell you it was doing it and it introduced a security security flaws to people's computers.
00:42:47
Speaker
And it was a huge problem. I remember that. Not an anti-DRM. Not an anti-DRM. Pro-DRM. DRM is digital rights management, I think. And so it was Sony basically sneaking malware into your computer to make sure that you couldn't rip your Thor. That was too recent to be applicable. You're a dogma, DVD.
00:43:16
Speaker
uh, which was got its own set of things going on, but it was like a specific CD though, right? It was like, uh, I think it was like world of Warcraft or something. I thought it was like Christina Aguilera or something. I thought it was like a pot.
00:43:27
Speaker
Oh, wow. I thought it was a game. I do remember when music CDs would have the autorun.inf file so that it would load something on your Windows PC. Well, yeah. And there was that whole era whenever you put something in there, it would prompt you to run that. Because when you put a music CD into your CD drive on your computer, they wanted to walk you through the whole interactive digital experience of listening to bye, bye, bye on your computer. All right, guys.
00:43:54
Speaker
Keep your malware amazing. Yeah, it was a lot more than one CD. Apparently it was 22 million CDs, but only those published by Sony BNG.
00:44:08
Speaker
Yeah, I remember. There's a lot of hashtags being thrown around of Sony, BMG at the time. People were very upset. Yes. Me too. So the DMCA has issues, right? I agree. The DMCA takedown notices are the only reason a YouTuber or Twitter can exist because otherwise they would just be perpetually tied up in litigation with all these copyright holders that are claiming that this was... And yeah, the section 230 is not going to protect them from that.
00:44:30
Speaker
Um, I, it seems that we're probably going to get our wish with this based on what the justices, the questions are like, this was a little bit of, I think everybody sort of getting themselves whipped up that. Like no matter where you were on the spectrum, whether you were afraid of it or you were really enthralled at the idea of section two 30 being eviscerated, you thought these cases were going to be the w I mean, there was a lot of talk about it over the last couple of weeks. And it seems like the justices just don't really have the stomach for it. Yeah. This isn't the one, but this is the dress rehearsal for the one.
00:45:00
Speaker
They can tell, they don't like to be in charge of destroying huge economies. They don't like to be in that position. Yeah. And this is something that you need a scalpel to work with, not like the hatchet that was feared they would come at it with. Because if you just eviscerate section 230, I really don't know how it plays out.
00:45:21
Speaker
how these platforms can continue to exist. I would bet at this point, if I were a betting man on this, I would bet on a punt at this point. Like, you know, because they didn't have to reach the Section 230 issue to terrorism act thing. Yeah, they could go on the terrorism act part, if I remember correctly. So they probably won't. If they can find a way to not talk about it, I bet they won't.
00:45:49
Speaker
Because they don't want to have to and it seems like the lower courts and are more or less very are similar Have reached similar conclusions even if not totally disparate and there's a million other circuit splits that they could be dealing with instead
00:46:01
Speaker
We've been getting fed stories a lot over the last few years about how John Roberts is trying to save the Supreme Court and how he's looking to establish his legacy. I can imagine a scenario where John Roberts is going, Chief Justice John Roberts, is going in between all of these different justices' offices, brokering deals to make this work so that John Roberts can be the guy who saved the internet.
00:46:28
Speaker
Um, and that's, that's the legacy that he's looking for
Supreme Court Speculations on Section 230
00:46:31
Speaker
here. And like, I'll tell you what, as far as legacies go that w with all of the bad marks on his legacy recently, like this would be a pretty okay one to, to put up on his awards shelf. Basically put his mark on it, his court mark on section two 30 at all, just sort of do his time without having touched it. I think would be our, what we hope for.
00:46:54
Speaker
It's funny how much like, you know, legacies are tied to a Chief Justice, even though the Chief Justice barely does anything extra, you know? They like assigned circuits for extraordinary appeals or something. And that's- Don't they also assign who writes the opinion in the majority? Yeah.
00:47:16
Speaker
Yeah, I guess that that's it. Like, as I remember in law school, I think that's what I like. I remember learning that that that was that's basically the big thing. That's it. That is like the junior justice. The most junior justice has like hold the door for all the other justices as they come in or something. There's some like really arcane, strange little, you know, rituals. But yeah, I think that's it. I think that's the big thing is they get to assign who writes the but I assume they ask. They don't just
00:47:40
Speaker
Yeah, sign it they know we don't mean who somebody wants to write it. Yeah, they also know the ideology ideological bent that they even among the the majority holding they know the one that has the opinion that is the closest to what they feel so I guess that's a little bit of
00:47:55
Speaker
I mean, it's not unlike Twitter having the ability to promote a tweet or, you know, from content from somebody else. The Chief Justice can do the same thing. The Chief Justice is the algorithm that elevates one of the opinions above all the others. So is the Chief Justice responsible when Alito writes a really spicy opinion that everybody hates because he's the one that assigned the Alito to that opinion, even though the Chief Justice didn't actually agree on the spice?
00:48:21
Speaker
No. Chief Justice wanted a chill opinion and Alito was like, no, I'm coming in blazing. I'm here to protect our culture. And Chief Justice is like, please don't say that. But too bad you promoted it, Chief Justice, by assigning this to Alito.
00:48:38
Speaker
I think Andrew, you just teed us up for another Cunningham's Law experience when you're talking about what the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court does, and we're going to have a throwback to when we talked about what does the Speaker of the House do, and we're promptly informed that we know nothing and we're totally wrong about everything. No, we got everything correct. If you disagree that we got everything correct, send your corrections to us on MasterCard.
00:49:06
Speaker
Let's re-emphasize the fact that this is a hard facts, hard news podcast and definitely not just three guys screwing around for the fun. Coming at you hard. Not at all. I don't like that phrasing at all. Moving on to our follow-ups. Speaking of destroying the internet.
00:49:26
Speaker
We have Twitter or Elon Musk through Twitter doing more to ruin the service as best as
Twitter's Two-Factor Authentication Changes
00:49:33
Speaker
possible. So they turned on apparently in the intervening weeks since we last laid into Mr. Musk, they turned on, they made two factor authentication through SMS, which I have my own feelings about. It's not a great way to do two factor authentication. I do it on some accounts. I'm not going to tell you which because I don't want. Yeah, that's that's bad infosec to tell people. Yeah, that's right. I'll never tell.
00:49:56
Speaker
Um, but, uh, so you really shouldn't do that. But so apparently the, the, yeah, they shifted this to only Twitter blue, the $8 a month subscribers can get this like worse security, uh, method, which is very strange, but my hypothesis, and I assume probably other people's too, is that it costs money. They have to tie in with telecoms in order to send these, these codes. It costs a few cents to do it or whatever fractions of a cent.
00:50:19
Speaker
Yeah and like it's just so funny to see them like money grabbing in this like so like petty way.
00:50:26
Speaker
Uh, for as much as even though two factor authentication is not good. And I think in some cases makes your account less secure. Well, that's well, two factor, two factor. I mean, SMS SMS. Oh, okay. I was going to say we were going to, we were going to have a bigger fight than that would be less secure. Even though SMS I've heard sometimes makes your account less secure because of how easy it is to, to clone SIM cards. Yeah.
00:50:54
Speaker
I've had it happen. I had Twitter accounts taken by that. It's so rare for people. The vast majority of people do not do two-factor authentication. It can't be bothered. It's too annoying. But the vast majority of people that do care enough to do two-factor authentication are doing it through text message.
00:51:16
Speaker
But it's so sad that these are the little pennies that you're pinching to keep your service alive. Yeah, I mean, I don't see any other reason for it. There's no technical reason for this that I can say. Right.
00:51:34
Speaker
Sorry, Jason. So is it still possible to do two factor authentication on Twitter with some other method? Like can you use the Google authenticator or any QR code reading? Okay. So it's not removing two factor authentication for everybody who doesn't have Twitter blue. It's removing SMS two factor authentication. Yeah. Oh, well, all right. Then I'm, I'm not inclined to give you on a pass on anything or give Twitter a pass on anything, but like,
00:52:05
Speaker
I understand this a little bit better. I understand it, but to leave it for paid users is insane. That doesn't make any sense. I totally understand getting rid of SMS, two-factor authentication writ large, but to put it behind the paid user thing, which does not have any sort of identity requirement or anything else, those users are no different from any other user, save for the fact that they've kicked in $8. To leave that on for them, that is clearly just a money-grubbing thing. That's not a security thing.
00:52:32
Speaker
Yeah, that's yes. And that is a put another feature behind the paywall, because we might as well, you know, they were like, how can we eliminate? How can we reduce costs? And they're like, well, we're spending, you know, a few million dollars on text messages every, you know, every month. Maybe we can make it so that you can only pay for it. And then that's, you know, that's that's about it. I don't think I'm not really bothered by it at all. I just think it's just kind of
00:53:00
Speaker
Kind of sad. I don't think there's any security. I mean, there's a little bit of a security problem because you take that sort of pool of people that are not paying $8, that used to have SMS two factor. They're not a decent proportion. I'm not going to guess as to a number, but I bet it's a pretty high percentage. We'll just turn off two factor entirely. They're not going to install an authenticator app and do that whole thing. So security is not going to get better. And like the bot problem and like stolen account problem and all that,
00:53:29
Speaker
That's not going to get better. That's going to get worse. Yeah. There is the one, there is one actual problem I see here, which is that apparently after like March, someday in March, if you have not turned it off, you have to subscribe to Twitter blue in order to get access to your account or something like that, or you're locked out of your account forever.
00:53:49
Speaker
Something like that. And so that that's pretty like, you should get like one last shot, you know, forever. Yeah, because a lot of Twitter accounts that I've turned on to factor authentication are just never like, they're totally inactive and haven't been active for a long time. I think one of those accounts might be so I briefly very briefly in 2013 had a fake
00:54:15
Speaker
Uh, Grant Balfour Twitter account. Do you know who Grant Balfour is? This is mostly. But he, no, look, he's, he was an A's relief pitcher for like two years, but he's mostly, he was not that good, but I mean, he's pretty good. He was, he was fine. Uh, but he was mostly, you're doing the math right now as to whether or not he might be loose. I, yeah, he was nice man. I'm sure he was a lovely gentleman.
00:54:42
Speaker
No, here's he was famous for cursing constantly from the mound. So the whole concept was, you know, it was just random cursing. It would just be, you know, Grant Balfour, the account would just randomly curse. I think I have two factor authentication on that account. I haven't accessed it in eight years. So I don't know. I have no idea. But that if that account is gone forever, then I don't care. But some people will have accounts they actually want to save.
00:55:12
Speaker
I guess, but maybe don't even know they're being threatened because this isn't big news outside of this techie circle. Yeah. Okay. So let's contextualize a little bit about how much money Twitter actually stands to save. So I Googled for mass texting, I don't know, service or something like that.
00:55:27
Speaker
and an enterprise solution that includes 200,000 messages per month. And then beyond those 200,000 messages, it's one cent per additional message that costs $3,000 a month. And so how many users are there on Twitter? Okay.
00:55:44
Speaker
how many of them are using SMS texts as their two-factor authentication? How often do they actually need to authenticate? Because you don't have to authenticate every time you open the Twitter app. You authenticate once a month, once every six months, once every year. Yeah, I think it's less often than once every three months. I feel like it's only when you're
00:56:12
Speaker
It's like only on an initial login, right? Something like that. It's oftentimes it's tied to a particular browser or device. So like, yeah, what it does is it hashes your like your browser. Okay. Yeah. Information about all of that. And then it sort of ties that this has been authenticated through two factor to this machine. I don't know about Twitter, but this is how a lot of like banking services work and stuff.
00:56:33
Speaker
so that you wouldn't need to do that again for, you know, maybe six months on that machine if you obviously did it again someplace else. You know what I mean? Like, it's sort of like a remember it's the 2023 version of remember my password and just stay locked in.
00:56:46
Speaker
This is not something that's going to save Twitter millions of dollars. This is something that's going to save Twitter. The salary of maybe one and a half engineers who are working to maintain this code. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's right. They've already been, uh, uh, no, they're sleeping in the, uh, the converted office. That's a lot during Twitter. Nobody's seen them for weeks.
00:57:10
Speaker
I'm sure Twitter can work out a pretty good deal that's better than the one that I see for the very first enterprise texting solution that I Google. That was the ad that was served up to me on top because I wanted to cost them $2.
00:57:27
Speaker
how many bridges are we bringing for such a small amount of money? It's just, it's- I mean, they're not paying rent, right? So right before we went live here, we quickly were skimming an article to talk about their Slack and their Jira, their ticket management stuff and bug fixing stuff is down. And I'm sure that we're going to find out in the coming days, it's because they didn't pay for their Slack instance. And they didn't, just as like I said, they didn't have paid for their rent and there was some other thing.
00:57:55
Speaker
VOIP service or something that they were not paying. I mean, it's obvious that they are... It's hard to imagine what comes next. There doesn't seem to be a lot of meat left on the bone to be sort of carving off. They're like chewing on bones now.
00:58:10
Speaker
I do circle in the drain. I wonder how much of the non-payment is literally just the people that used to pay are gone. I wonder that too. Nobody knows how to pay the bills. The ball has fallen through a million cracks because there's nobody around. I don't think that's possible with the rent because I've seen that complaint. They sent demand letters and stuff like that. But with other stuff, sure.
00:58:37
Speaker
You know, they, they don't, I guess you don't know who to email at Twitter anymore because they don't have a comms department and the, you know, all the people you've been dealing with before are all fired. Like you just have to tweet at Elon. Hey, the catering, Elon, you haven't paid this bill and the whole feedback concerning. I don't know. And I'm emoji laughing. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, well, Elon helpful someday there's going to be a real like full on, uh,
00:59:06
Speaker
book about this. They're going to be, oh yeah, yeah. Netflix documentary. They're just deciding whether or not it's going to be a documentary or like a limited series of episode. They're just trying to sort out now, you know, what, what it's going to be. Yes. Yeah. It's like, do they wait until Twitter's declared? Let everybody waits until Twitter declares bankruptcy. And then that's the trigger. That's the end because otherwise
00:59:29
Speaker
Yeah, otherwise the story just keeps going, is the problem. I mean, those are the greatest documentaries, though, are the ones where they don't, like, have you ever seen the, what is it, the Palace of Versailles? The thing about the Floridian family that, yeah, right, so the greatest documentaries are when they set out to shoot one story, and a totally different story comes about. So like, there should be a documentarian following Elon Musk around, because he's gonna like insist that he's the first person to go to Mars or something and die when his rocket burns up.
00:59:58
Speaker
And I want to see that on the last episode of this documentary that I'm making up. The documentary about Elon Musk going to Mars. Right. So we were following around while he was doing rockets, but he kept guiding on his phone and arguing with parody magazines about his stint on SNL.
01:00:17
Speaker
He's checking in with cat turd as to what type of solid state rocket they need. And then he burned up on reentry. Oh gosh, he's offered to purchase it. Oh gosh, he's offered to purchase it. Oh, the stock market crashed. Okay, he's trying to pull out now. I imagine that Elon Musk's vanity is such that he has had a documentarian following him around for a while already anyway.
Upcoming Books and Real-Time Events
01:00:42
Speaker
I am looking forward to the Michael because Michael Lewis was following around SPF at FTX while it was like while it was still in its heyday and then as it collapsed. And so I'm looking forward to that book. Yeah, me too.
01:01:02
Speaker
OK, so I think we've we've we've ran the Supreme Court. We've run the justice system. We've run Twitter into the ground. I think one of your alma maters here had a run in with an A.I. That's me. That's you. That's me. Vanderbilt. Well, not it's the education school at Vanderbilt.
01:01:22
Speaker
OK, so there was a as sometimes happens, there was a mass shooting in Michigan State, had Michigan and Peabody, Peabody, the education school, like sent like a condolences or like concern email out about it, like in response to the mass shooting. And at the bottom, it said this was generated by chat GPT.
01:01:48
Speaker
And it's just like, that's so, that's the most embarrassing thing I can ever imagine have happened. They've apologized. But man, that's like,
01:02:03
Speaker
How does that even occur? Because chat GPT doesn't sign off. It's like, you need to, that must've been an intentional choice to put, it doesn't sign up. There's not like a free trial version. It doesn't, it's not one of those things where like, if you copy it, it automatically adds that text into the copied texts. I just assumed that it was like sent from my iPhone, that sort of things at the bottom.
01:02:25
Speaker
No, I mean, not in the chat GPT that regular users have access to. I haven't purchased the $20 a month, whatever, plus plan or whatever, but I can't imagine that they add that in for paying customers. No, there's nothing. It just churns out what you ask it to churn out. So they must have thought that. Yeah, the note, it didn't say generate it. It said paraphrase from OpenAI's chat GPT. I bet.
01:02:51
Speaker
Okay. So there's no way chat GPT made that. Uh, I bet somebody said somebody maybe like, even as a joke was like, uh, emailed somebody else about like, okay, let me generate a thoughts and prayers email on chat GPT and then emailed it. And like, here's a paraphrase version. I paraphrase from, uh, from chat GPT and somebody else has copied that without thinking about it.
01:03:18
Speaker
Could be. Yeah. I mean, the alternative is that they thought that it was better to give attribution to chat. GPT concerns of, let's get ourselves in trouble. Yeah. They didn't want to infringe on chat. GPT is copyright to the text. Right. You never know. They might try to lay a claim. Yeah. As an intelligence, as an independent intelligence, it deserves attribution. It's only fair. These are chat GPT sentiments and thoughts and prayers. So it should, yeah.
01:03:47
Speaker
Yeah. So the moral of the story here is if you're going to use chat GPT to write something, especially something that's sensitive, don't tell people that it's chat GPT. It was too honest. That's the thing. Everybody knows these, like, you know, uh, all these corporate and or administrative support emails and stuff like that are kind of like, you know, recitations and robotic. And now it's literally robotic. It's always too, too honest.
01:04:18
Speaker
All right, so I think we can move on to our what's going on and recommendations and stuff. I can go really quickly because I have a really, my column this week is not something it's about Experian and Equifax, but that's been done to death. So I'm not going to recommend that column, but do read my column.
01:04:33
Speaker
My recommendation is for the game. I think I've talked about it before. Contractors on the meta VR or whatever the thing is. Very good. It's like Counter-Strike basically. Same graphics roughly from back in the day. It's a first-person shooter. But there's an open platform for mods and for various themes and skins and stuff. And so people have created the Death Star.
01:04:58
Speaker
Basically, I've just played around with the Star Wars stuff, but it's pretty cool. You get to play Counter-Strike in the Death Star where Obi-Wan Kenobi gets killed by Darth Vader. Or you run around Darth Vader's whatever, his thing on that lava planet where he got burned up. Cool game. Called Contractors. It's like 20 bucks. Well worth it. Mustafar. Mustafar is the name of the planet. Mustafar. Thank you. Yes. Deep Pole. Deep Pole. Where Obi-Wan had the high ground.
01:05:28
Speaker
This is totally unrelated, but it's except that the game's called Contractors. Do you guys like Contractors? As in the people who work on your house? The people. Yeah, I just bring that up because there was a joke in the Last of Us episode where Joel is explaining to Ellie about the time before the zombie outbreak, how he was a Contractor. And she was like, oh, that sounds cool. And he's like, yeah, people love Contractors.
01:05:56
Speaker
And I was like, Oh, OK. I don't think anybody loves not telling her it was a joke, but right. Yeah. My recommendation, not really recommendation check Hogwarts check in. I feel like I've fallen down because like two weeks ago, I was like, Yeah, I'm going to play with my life about it. Yeah. Last week I was like, Yeah, I'm having fun. I've I'm coming down. It's coming down. I'm it's more and more repetitive.
01:06:26
Speaker
And like, not that interesting. And the store like so now it's leaning on the story. And the story can't handle it. The story is not good. It is very like it's very kids movie, but like not good kids movie, but like, you know, have ordinary kids movie.
01:06:44
Speaker
So did the problematic elements that you thought did the problematic elements that you thought might come up? Because I remember you were saying like there were some like caricature depictions. Well, that's like embedded in Harry Potter and like not like, uh, gotcha. And not in a way that like, is that egregious or anything that I thought, um, but like, I mean, it's there. Some people are mad about it, but honestly it's not remarkable to me.
01:07:12
Speaker
I like a lot of people are very mad about it, but I like. You kind of have to want it a little bit. Yeah, I because there's not there's not enough interesting to be mad about. Like it's. Yeah. Nobody's really that interesting or makes sense that the cultures, because the thing is, there's like different species and, you know, all kinds of different things and and they're theoretically different cultures, but they all act more or less the same.
01:07:42
Speaker
So it's kind of just a kind of a product of dullness. But gotcha. Yeah. But it doesn't. Not a great recommendation. No. The product of dullness. It's still OK. It's still fine. I'm still going to keep playing.
01:07:59
Speaker
Okay, so my recommendation for this week is something that I've been working on for kind of a long time, but there is a fantasy book series that is, some of it's pretty old. The most recent book, the last book in the series was published in I think 2014, but it's The Wheel of Time. Amazon made a one season of a TV show about it.
01:08:24
Speaker
and they're making at least one more i saw news this week that they're building the set for season three so it sounds like it's promising that we'll get at least a season three for it but the series is the wheel of time i just got through maybe two or three nights ago perhaps my favorite scene in the whole series and it's just got me really amped up about the whole thing
01:08:46
Speaker
It is about how the world happens in cycles and things keep repeating. And it's a fantasy book series. So there's magic and excitement and big epic battles and mythical beasts and all that stuff. And like Harry Potter, some tropes that are not always entirely savory but seem to be endemic to a lot of fantasy worlds.
01:09:16
Speaker
Not in any way that's got people really up and upset about it, but I do recommend The Wheel of Time. I'm on book 10 if you want to just sprint and catch up to me. It's a 14 book series, 14 in the series. It's a long commitment, but it's good. It's good fun.
01:09:37
Speaker
I'm in the part of it right now that they call the slog where it gets maybe less fun. The slog is only three books long. You can get it. Don't worry about it. Yeah, I'll make it. 1,500 pages. It'll breeze right through. Come along with me for this particular turning of the wheel, as they say. It's the one piece of fantasy novels, if you get that reference. One piece is like an anime with like 2,000 episodes. Oh. Yeah. No, I don't.
01:10:07
Speaker
All right. Sad one piece outro. Sad one piece outro. You are our youth correspondent. So you would know about those sorts of... We play the outro to hide Jake's shame at knowing that reference. We just silently shake our hand. We talk about Naruto. Naruto?