Deep Fakes, Data Centers, and AI Slop — Are We Cooked?

Well, here's the thing. There was no regulation to begin with. So when you say that it was clearing the path, there was no path. Really, the biggest effort that the Trump administration is making right now to make sure that regulation does not get in the way of AI is making sure that the states don't regulate. That's really the substance of this. AI order. Yes. This executive order is the brainchild of David Sacks. It essentially says the Department of Justice is going to create an AI litigation task force to examine which state level laws right now are overly burdensome. for AI development. Lots of states have already passed 100 plus AI laws around safety and deep fakes, mental health. Industry leaders, they hate having to go state by state to comply with varying regulations. They've struggled mightily to kill them. Have they done that with this executive order? I would say no. We have a long way to go here. This executive order is going to apply a lot of pressure for lawmakers over on the Hill to pass a federal standard. And we are fully expecting those efforts to ramp up next year. But the president does not have the authority in the Constitution to stop states from regulating. That is just going to be very easily challenged in court. And we expect lawsuits to start from state. attorneys general, from advocacy organizations, and that's state attorneys generals on both sides of the aisle. This is where the political problem comes in, though, right? Because guard rails around AI are popular. In a Gallup poll from September, 80% of U.S. adults said that... Governments should prioritize rules for AI safety and data security, even if it means developing AI more slowly. The 10th Amendment doesn't allow presidents to just preempt state laws. So then why make this executive order? The Trump administration is arguing that this might be constitutional because states are not allowed to regulate interstate commerce in a way that is overly burdensome. It's a long shot, but they're going to try that out. And we have seen throughout this administration that they're very willing to test legal theory and the bounds of these laws. Secondly, this might have a chilling effect. States are still full steam ahead on wanting to regulate artificial intelligence, but they might not want their federal grants to be caught up in all of this. That's what the executive order says. If we find that your laws are overly burdensome, we might take back internet grants. And we're going to examine other types of federal grants that we might be able to claw back.

That, by the way, is also potentially unconstitutional because it's Congress that has the power to spend money and allocate it. Really? First time I've heard that. You mentioned that there's a notable lack of GOP unanimity here. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Utah Governor Spencer Cox, other Republican lawmakers. They openly disagree with the order. In fact, Ron DeSantis is crafting, I guess, a proposal for an AI Bill of Rights that would implement parental controls, data privacy, consumer protection, restrictions on non-consensual use of a person's name or likeness. Steve Bannon, the Maga Guru, who helped get Trump into office the first time, calling the New Tech Alliance crony capitalism. warning about the technocratic elite taking away the jobs of the MAGA base. I mean, how critical a sign is this of internal strife? Is it worse than courting war with Venezuela, but not as important as the Epstein files? This executive order may be implemented in blue states and not red states. That might be enough to, you know, appease. You can't do that. A lot of this you can't really do, but it's happening. Ha ha ha ha ha TBD on what ultimately breaks the Republican Party. But what I do know is that this is an opportunity for Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections and in 2028 to have a clear and united message against the Republicans who are in power now. What will the signs be if it starts to fracture the Republican Party? When Steve Bannon directs his criticism at the president himself, instead of his AI and cryptos are David Sachs. Steve Bannon has said that, you know, it's David Sachs misleading the president. I'm looking after the elections. If this is a winning issue for Democrats, I think that might wake certain people up within the Trump administration. So now let's talk about national security and start with Jensen Huang, the CEO at NVIDIA, the richest company on the globe. He has been making frequent trips to the White House, and this month, Trump said he'd allow the sale of H200 advanced AI chips in China, which I guess is advanced, but not the most advanced. And the U.S. would take a 25% cut of the profits from that deal. What kind of bet is the president making here? In President Trump's... view, this deal is just a matter of making America rich. That 25% cut of NVIDIA sales to China is coming back to the United States. And that's a good thing. The president would argue, you know, he's a deal maker. We don't know the details of how exactly such an agreement would work. You'll recall there was a separate.

agreement that was made for the H20 chip, and that is kind of on hold right now. Fill me in. So before the H200 chip, there was another deal for H20 chip sales to go to China. It's just another type of AI chip that is less advanced. Again, the U.S. would take a 25% cut. China didn't like it, right? They thought that was an insult to get the lesser chip. Yeah, and they don't want to necessarily be reliant on U.S. chips and not their own chips. They have Huawei. But it's not as good as the H200 currently on offer, right? That's right. The argument on the Trump side is it's going to make America rich. While some people in Trump administration embrace that argument, those involved in national security over decades see this as a big risk. And it isn't just coming from the folks at the bipartisan U.S. China Commission, which is made up of a former national security officials that advises Congress. There are also concerns from Republicans on the Hill that this is a risk. We don't usually do that. We don't sell advanced technologies to potential foes like this. The way that Jensen Huang was able to convince folks in the Trump administration that this is not going to pose a national security risk is by basically making the argument that China is already moving ahead on AI, that they're still far behind the U.S. And so if China is doing this anyway, it would be better for them to be doing that on U.S. technology than on Chinese technology. That argument, one, President Trump is saying that they'll be able to do this in a way that protects national security. They're going to figure out some sort of mechanism that is going to make this secure. Nobody really knows what that means. Yeah, this sounds like his plan on health care. That'll be out any day now. Yeah, there are no details. In The New York Times this week, David Sanger said that... If the chips that power, the most advanced technology can be sold to the United States chief, technological, military, and financial competitor, where's the new line drawn? By the same logic that it is better to have China using American technology, should we sell it F-35s, advanced missiles? I would be shocked if they allowed these chips to come in for their own national security and government purposes. Oh, really? You think that they won't take the offer? No, I think that relying on U.S. chips for their own national security and government purposes would be risky for them. But certainly for commercial use within China, it might be appealing. Do you feel that we're missing something in the coverage?

The media sometimes gets pushed back because we are not highlighting the ways that artificial intelligence might actually be benefiting society and humanity, for example, through drug discovery and genomics or quicker and more accurate weather forecasting. I think the reason why those winds have not been able to be highlighted as much is because this technology is being released so quickly and there is zero appetite. to slow down. All of the other unintended consequences, you know, chatbots leading to people dying by suicide are just too big to ignore. And it is ultimately what people are going to focus their attention on. Maria, thanks so much. Thank you, Brooke. This was a pleasure. Thanks for having me. Maria Curie is a tech policy reporter at Axios. Coming up, while your 401K needs AI to succeed. This is on the media. On the media is supported by Dell. Back to school starts now. Get long-lasting battery life on the Dell XPS laptop powered by Series 3 Intel Core so you can work from anywhere. Now starting at 699 with exclusive student pricing starting at 599. And it's lightweight, portable, and packed with enough processing power to make multitasking a breeze. So say goodbye to distractions and hello to more free time because you finished your work. faster. Complete your setup with savings on select monitors and more must have electronics and accessories, limited time deals, and free shipping on PCs, and more await you at Dell.com slash deals. That's Dell.com slash deals. This is on the media. I'm Brooke Ladstone. And I'm Michael Lohenger. This week, an unexpected merger. Trump Media and Technology Group breaking news this morning announcing a merger with TAE Technologies, a $6 billion deal. Now, what is Tate Technologies? It's a closely held fusion. That is nuclear fusion developer founded in 1998. This is a type of technology that creates hardly any radioactive waste, and it is a technology of the future. A technology of the future in that there are not currently any power plants that actually run on nuclear fusion. Now, why, you may ask, is Trump's media company merging with a nuclear fusion company? I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, has personally invested hundreds of millions of dollars into a nuclear fusion startup. Maybe we build a big Dyson sphere on the solar system and say, hey, actually makes no sense to put these on Earth. He expanded on that idea for months ago on comedian Theo Vaughn's podcast. But like I can say with conviction, the world needs a lot more processing power. I don't know. It sounds cool to try to build them in space.

Cool is one word for it. Meanwhile, some of the people living near these proposed data center projects here on Earth are pushing back. In Michigan, residents today gathered outside the state capital to protest a string of recent data center proposals. We are concerned for the health of our local environment, our natural resources, sustainable energy future. We are concerned that there are individuals in our community that will not have the ability to keep their lights on. Then, earlier this week, Three Democratic senators, Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen, and Richard Blumenthal are investigating big tech's role in rising power costs. They point to data centers that are already consuming more than 4% of U.S. electricity, with government estimates showing that that could triple to 12% by 2028. To understand a bit more about where this massive infrastructure project is at, we called up Stephen Witt, author of the book The Thinking Machine, who's been visiting the centers and writing about the companies behind them. Stephen, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Micah. It's great to be here. You wrote a book about Nvidia. You have visited some of the data centers being built to train AI and you've researched their impact. How much power does a person use when they ask, say, chat GPT a question? For regular garden variety queries, it's really very little power. It's when you move into more industrial uses, like make me a three-minute... TikTok video using AI, that you really start to consume a lot of power. Right now, actually, most of the power uses in training and developing these things, that's where you really see these huge power draws. I was in the data center and I was shown the kind of standard Nvidia rack of computing equipment. It's about the size of a refrigerator. But this thing will, over the course of one year, use the equivalent of 70 single-family homes. worth of electricity. And there's 10,000 racks in the data center, as far as the eye can see. One big data center can use as much power as like Kansas City. So it's really, really power intensive to train these things. It's power intensive to use them to. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said that the current... Expected need for the AI revolution in the United States is 92 gigawatts of more power. Give me some perspective. How much electricity is 92 gigawatts? One gigawatt is like Philadelphia. So it's like adding 92 Philadelphias to make this stuff work. We really almost have to double the capacity of electricity production and distribution to meet the forecasted needs for AI. There's no debate that data centers use a ton of energy and that many of these tech tycoons would like to see significantly more energy usage to accomplish their goals. But there have been some conflicting reports about how much water they use. A best-selling book called Empire of AI indicated that a proposed data center in Chile was going to have a huge water footprint. The journalist who wrote the book, Karen Howe, has since come out.

saying that there was an error in the calculation she published and that the impact in that case was overstated. That example has kind of taken up a lot of space in the discourse. Can you help me understand how water-intensive these centers are in general? AI in general does not use more water than any other industrial process, and it uses a lot less than, say, agriculture. Of course, we need food to survive. We don't need... chatbots to survive. So I guess it's a question of what you see as valuable resources. You know, there's been a couple examples of an AI data center moving in, tapping into the municipal water supply and draining a portion of it. But that is always true of any heavy industry. If you look at the kind of planning they have to do for electricity, talking about building dozens of new nuclear power plants, of kind of upgrading the entire electrical grid across the country to meet this demand. I don't see anything like that happening on the water utility side, which suggests to me that the people operating the data centers are not too concerned about the water problem. Estimates vary, but by 2030, it's predicted that data centers will increase energy consumption by somewhere between 60 to 150%. Forget the future. How is all this impacting electricity costs for us now? You know, even those of us who don't live near a data center. Yeah, it doesn't matter if you live near it. The grid is a giant system. Electricity rates have gone up a lot lately. Part of that is inflation, but a huge part of that is just the industrial demand. for training and inference for AI. We all are bearing the cost of that right now. The other cost to all of us is, of course, the damage that is being done and will be done to our environment. It really is a big factor in contributing to carbon emissions and climate change. So the already catastrophic climate change curve has been shifted upwards by this basically second industrial revolution for AI. And I don't know how you fix that. I mean, the thing you could do is just stop building these. You could just stop building them. You could stop building them in the United States. But you could not stop building them in the Middle East, China, and around the world. That is already happening. I want to talk about what's at stake for our economy and all this. According to Harvard economist Jason Furman, investment in information processing equipment and software was responsible for 92% of the growth of the U.S. economy this year. At this point, the U.S. economy has basically just hitched its wagon to AI and to data centers in particular. Are these data center projects actually profitable? The data center projects are profitable. What people in the data center industry told me is like, when we build a data center, we sign a 10-year supply contract with our customer who is usually either Microsoft or Amazon. That's how they finance it. The true risk here is that AI just doesn't pan out.

All of this money being dumped into these data centers does not result in useful AI products. So far, what has happened is stuffing more microchips into the data center has produced better AI in basically a direct relationship. But it is not an immutable fact of the universe that that will always happen. We may hit a brick wall. We may plateau where suddenly... Putting more microchips in the shed does not result in better AI. Or even if the pace of growth were simply to slow down, that would have catastrophic effects for the data center industry. And it would probably have cascading effects for the American economy as a whole. Yeah, Nvidia is worth something like 8% of the S&P 500. I mean, I think you can make a strong case that this is, in fact, the single most valuable company of all time, even once you adjust for inflation. Their concentration in the stock market is unprecedented. And it's probably not that safe to have all of this money concentrated in one player. People like Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Bill Gates, Sam Altman of Open AI, they've all started to admit that we're in a bubble. Yeah, you know, this is not like NFTs. AI is a real thing that's going to transform our economy. But that doesn't mean it's not a bubble. Railroads transformed the American economy, and they also produced several very damaging speculative bubbles. The Internet transformed. the American economy, but we all remember the internet bubble and the dot-com bubble, too. So so much of it comes down to not what the technology can do, but have we arranged the timing of these cash flows in such a way that we haven't overinflated our assets? I think to many people, it now looks like we're reaching kind of a bubble-like activity. Yeah, one of our past guests, Ed Zitron, has written extensively about how he thinks, the media have done too much to hype this AI revolution, to hype companies like OpenAI in its ChatGPT service, which he believes just isn't that great of a product and is on very, very shaky financial footing. Empirically, ChatGPT is a great product. It has 800 million weekly average users. People are using this thing constantly. I mean, constantly. ChatGPT is the single fastest growing product in human history. Its adoption curve is faster than Facebook. It's faster than Google. It is just one of the most successful products of all time. But as I understand it, these AI companies are betting much more on wooing large businesses as customers than like regular users like you and me. And recent data from the Census Bureau found that the adoption of AI at large businesses is falling. An analysis of this data in The Economist concluded that the demand for generative AI seems, quote, surprisingly flimsy. So far, Enterprise AI has been a disappointment, and that could cast a shadow on this data center, boom. If the CFO of the company is saying, got a commissioned a $300 million enterprise AI training run,

And then nobody at my company used that product at all. You can imagine demand starts to evaporate very quickly. Yes, this report in The Economist found that, quote, from today until 2030, big tech firms will spend $5 trillion on infrastructure to supply AI services. And to make those investments worthwhile, they need on the order of $650 billion a year in AI revenues, according to JPMorgan Chase, the bank, up from about $50 billion a year today. Yeah, and it doesn't look like it's materializing. Now, when you talk to people in biotech... When you talk to people in drug discovery, they are like ecstatic about these products. They're using them all the time and they're going to bring more online. But that is just one sector. For the rest of the economy, it has been tricky to get people to use AI at their job. They just don't trust it. And honestly, sometimes it's just not good enough. Shouldn't that inspire some... hand-rigging, anxiety, fear. I mean, to get to this point, many of these companies have had to lie and exaggerate about their products, steal massive amounts of data. Why should we trust that using all these resources to build this AI infrastructure, tying up our economy in a knot is going to pan out and not fall down like a house of cards? I remember in the 90s, people would always talk about Amazon. And they would say, well, for Amazon to justify its current market valuation, it basically has to absorb all brick and mortar retail and we have to buy everything on the internet. And they were very skeptical about that. In fact, that is exactly what occurred. And so I think a lot of investors have come to believe that over the long term, the promises of these tech companies actually will come true one way or the other. It's not going to be a smooth path. But I think we're going to be having this conversation in 10 years, and everyone is going to be using AI all the time for everything. That's the bet. That's Wall Street's bet, but it sounds like you believe it as well. I live through it. You know, all of the internet skeptics were dead wrong. And even the biggest hype merchants for the internet, basically every promise they made did eventually come true. So I think now, FOMO, fear of missing out on a tech wave influences money managers just as much, if not more, of fear of a crash. In order to achieve prosperity and avoid, you know, crashing our economy to beat China in the never-ending AI race, these companies claim that we need to allow them to expand as widely and as quickly as possible, doing whatever damage to our environment they desire. Is that worth it? I don't know.

I don't know. I mean, look, they ripped me off. I'm part of, like, the class action lawsuit against Anthropic for basically mass copyright infringement and mass tort lawsuit, and I'm collecting from it. They have been completely reckless in the development of this stuff. They have their eyes on the prize, which is an AI company that has the kind of platform dominance in software that Nvidia has in hardware. If one company were to achieve that, they would almost certainly be the most valuable company on Earth. And it would probably disempower average individuals to some extent. I just don't know how you stop it. I mean, I guess the way to stop it is very aggressive antitrust action against one of these companies or all of them, breaking them into smaller companies and putting it subject to some sort of consumer regulatory board. The status quo today is very far away from that. Of course, anything can happen. But you just need the political will from average citizens to organize to make that real. I think we're far away from that right now. Stephen, thank you very much. Thank you so much, Mike. It's great talking to you. Stephen Witt is the author of a book about the history of NVIDIA titled The Thinking Machine.

Coming up, 2025 was a banner year for AI fakery. And I fell for it. This is On the Media. On the Media is supported by Dell. Back to school starts now. Get long-lasting battery life on the Dell XPS laptop powered by Series 3 Intel Core so you can work from anywhere. Now starting at $6.99 with exclusive student pricing starting at $5.99. And it's lightweight, portable, and packed with enough processing power to make multitasking a breeze. So say goodbye to distractions and hello to more free time because you finished your work faster. Complete your setup with savings on select monitors and more must have electronics and accessories, limited time deals, and free shipping on PCs, and more await you at Dell.com slash deals. That's Dell.com slash deals. This is on the media. I'm Michael Lowinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. This week, we wanted to cozy up by the fire, grab a mug of hot cocoa, and review an absolutely insane year for artificial intelligence. Silicon Valley's heavy hitters, Google, Meta, Apple, and Open AI, to name a few, have poured billions of dollars into the industry, creating products for people, businesses, and even the government. But there's also been a growing tug at the AI Superman's Cape. Reports of unchecked chatbots giving dangerous advice, scammers armed with better tools, and political deep fakes increasing in quality and quantity. So to figure out the status of AI now to try and trace what's happened in the last 12 months, we went all the way back to January 17th, 2025. We're going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. First, we're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X, starting in the U.S. After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the U.S. The trigger for a lot of this rollback and for Mark Zuckerberg doing what some people have referred to as a hostage video of him sort of at camera.

was, of course, Donald Trump gets re-elected. Craig Silverman is co-founder of Indicator, a publication dedicated to understanding and investigating digital deception. He argues that this video marked the beginning. of a swift but forceful transition to a less moderated and less regulated AI world. It becomes very clear at these platforms that they need to make sure they get out of the way so that whatever content he wants to have out there can be out there. And same from his supporters and from his like-minded politicians, leading countries around the world. Because I think Trump made it clear he will come after them. He mused about putting Mark Zuckerberg in jail. So I think that's the big trigger. And because... Most of these platforms are based in the US. What happens in the US cascades around the world. But it wasn't just meta pulling back on fact-checking. In January, Google told the European Commission it wouldn't integrate fact-checking into its search bar or YouTube. And in February, researchers found that Google had given up its data void, those small warning signs, saying that, hey, you know, there really aren't credible results for your search. They don't exist anymore. Why not? The Republicans labeled content moderation and fact checking as censorship and been pretty effective. The platforms in a world where Trump is the president and the Republicans control the House and the Senate, they realize we have to move away from this stuff, whether we think it's censorship or not. I mean, it was, oh, you with your fact-checking. It's like, you're a liar. It's a strange thing because fact-checking inherently, it's not removing anyone else's speech. It is critiquing it. And so the reframing of fact-checking and speech of a journalistic nature as censorship was a pretty good judo trick. And it was effective in the U.S. I'm Canadian, and so I'm going to use a hockey reference here, which is that a lot of people say the NHL is a copycat league. The team that wins the Stanley Cup one year, everybody tries to sort of copycat their roster. And it probably happens in other sports leagues. And I think it's true with tech platforms. Look at how much they have all invested in running and building the same types of AI products. Fact checking is censorship is one half. The other half is about business and the fact that these companies are actually pushing technology. that create fakes and that are actively used to deceive, not just entertain. The platforms like meta, like TikTok, they are building their own AI tools. And, you know, one of the things you can do with a lot of these AI tools is impersonation. One of the things you can do is generate massive amounts of slop false claims about celebrities.

And they are allowing this to happen at a scale using their own tools, in many cases, directly paying people cash every month based on the AI content they have created. Well, give me an example of that. So there is a guy, a dad who lives in Maine. He goes by the online moniker bust a troll. And for really about a decade or more, he has run what he calls satire pages and associated websites where he just shares 100% false made up quotes attributed to celebrities, political figures, where he'll share an image and it's got a photo of Gavin Newsom with some crazy quote he never said that makes him look like an idiot. And then there'll be a link to an article he wrote with the same hoax claim that's written. like a news story. And it's red meat for the right-leaning audience on Facebook. Used to be, he would get people to go to the website and he'd earn money from ads on the website. But this has changed because this year, he got accepted into Meta's content monetization program where they will pay you based on the engagement your content gets. So he is getting paid by Meta now every single month for how viral his hoaxes are. Open AI used to ban photorealistic images of real people. That ban is over. Impersonation is in. Open AI makes the change in March where these photorealistic things representing real people, public figures, they're okay with. And they said, we can't maintain a database of all the public figures in the world. It's just not possible. So we'll just try to prevent people from doing harmful representations. And then they launched SORA, which is a dedicated app that does amazing deepfakes of anyone. Google also rolled back some of its policies on impersonation because it started building some really powerful image. and video generation models. So something that in the early days, these companies said, listen, we're going to make sure that impersonation and deepfakes are really rained in. At a certain point, they just said, you know what, let's let it go. And the most common use that is really dangerous around this type of technology is for scams, where someone can impersonate another person, they can impersonate Elon Musk, they can impersonate a famous movie star or politician, and they can convince people that there's an amazing investment offer or something like that. And there are people who are literally losing their entire life savings and having to sell their homes because they get sucked in by these things. People are cloning the voices of executives and calling up other people in the company and getting them to transfer money. And this stuff is legal. As long as you are not infringing on someone's personal rights, putting defamatory things in their mouth, typically we don't see people suing around this. There is a case right now in California. Andrew Forrest, nicknamed Twiggy, he made his money in mining in Australia. He's suing Meta because his face, his voice have been used in hundreds of thousands of scam ads over the years. It's not an accident, I think, that it's a billionaire suing them and actually seeing this through because that's the kind of money you need to actually get past Meta's formidable legal teams of filing a lot of motions for dismissal and other things.

As you went through the year, you say the next phase saw, quote, agents of deception baked AI into their workflows. Who are these agents? What is this workflow that is making use of AI? Let me put them into a couple of buckets here. Let's put a hustler bucket over here. And then let's do sort of state-backed or propaganda politically oriented stuff on the other side. So on the politics side or on the state operations side, Russia has been doing this for a long time. They've had operations masquerading as European or American news organizations spreading false articles to sort of push a particular propaganda narrative, attack Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukraine or what have you. They've looked at AI and they said, oh, now we don't need to use Photoshop and take a lot of time to create a whole bunch of fake headlines or fake front pages or fake videos. They can put out more crap much faster than ever before and overwhelm many defenses that are out there on these platforms. It might be a video claiming that there's a villa that Volodymyr Zelensky owns that's worth $20 million. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky bought a $20 million mansion on the Florida coast in 2020. boasting 200 feet of ocean frontage, the 13,000 square foot mansion features six bedrooms and 10 bathrooms, each with stunning ocean views. A lot of the state-backed operations are now churning out, in some cases, thousands and thousands and thousands of articles or pieces of content a day. And that stuff could end up getting hoovered up into AI models, where the AI models start spinning out the exact same disinformation. So the snake is like eating its tail and regurgitating it. And the hustlers? I have a soft spot for the hustlers, I have to say. They're clever, they're creative, they're very innovative. So, for example, I did a story this year about one kind of AI-infused study app. And their strategy for marketing was they recruit young women, in some cases at least one high schooler. They have them create brand new TikTok accounts, post after post after post, talking about this amazing study hack or this trick they found that in the end leads to this one app, which I'm not going to mention to give them free advertising. The people's bios did not say they were a paid creator for this company. And on top of all of these young creators churning this stuff out, they also had a channel where they had filmed a bunch of confrontations between students and professionals. professors to generate engagement, and all of them again included a mention of the product without saying that these were ads. With these fake arguments? Fake arguments. I said this to you a week ago, and you're still using chat GPT. All your work looks like it's wrong, and you're all getting the same answers. I email this to you, you upload your lectures, your readings, whatever the hell you want, and then you actually get in sentence from the AI tutor.

One of the most frequent people featured as a TA or a professor is actually like the head of growth marketing. And they're very proud of this strategy. They've boasted online about how many views they got and the fact that they're paying absolutely zero in advertising. And I brought these thousands and thousands of undisclosed ads, which, by the way, the FTC has rules around this, and they're clearly outside the rules of what the FTC has said. And TikTok didn't remove any of them. So tell me which of this hustler generated slop you have a soft spot. Well, my weak spot is sometimes they come up with stuff that's generally clever where I'm like, oh, you're terrible, but wow, you really figured that out. One of the things that stood out to me this year was that Andresen Horowitz... one of the most reputable, most important venture capital firms in the world, invested $15 million with other investors, and clearly a company that its first product was to help programmers cheat on the job interview coding tasks that they get assigned when they're applying for a job. You know, if you think about it, like Andreessen Horowitz is potentially funding an app that people used to deceive some other Andresen Horowitz funded companies into hiring programmers who... weren't as good as they actually claim to be. And I haven't seen that before. There were 26 channels on YouTube dedicated to AI-generated videos about the P. Diddy trial? The videos would have an uninvolved celebrity in the thumbnail and then some salacious headline about some fake testimony or a fight. These videos ranked 70 million views, and none of it was real. There was a golden age of Diddy Slop this year, which again, a phrase I never thought I would say. But people realized that there was a lot of attention around the Diddy trial that was going on. And they also realized that the average person didn't really know who was testifying. And so you had folks who would generate thumbnails and, in some cases, entire long videos claiming that someone had just showed up and testified, Pete Diddy's mom testified against him, or the Rock showed up and testified against him. And then there would often be a bait and switch where the video would actually be a lot of AI-generated stuff and clips of news report. Wait a minute. I saw something that I totally believed, and now I wonder whether it's completely wrong, which was that they found a recording of Prince condemning P. Diddy, saying that it was disgusting what was going on, and he was actually afraid to say anything about it.

Now I think maybe it was totally made up. It might be. Like, I don't know the Prince one specifically, but Prince has been dead for a while, unfortunately. Yeah, this was sort of found in his house or something. Yeah, I mean, I feel like... Oh, my God, I'm such an... I feel like we're in Slop Town right now. Yeah. But look, any of us are susceptible. If it's the right message, piece of content, delivered in the right moment, it is not an intelligence thing. It is not a class thing. It is not an education thing. Any of us at any time can be persuaded of something. And it's really important to operate in this insane information environment with that element of awareness and humility. Because with these amazing tools and with the lack of the kind of oversight by the platform, someone will create something that works great for me and works great for you and we're going to take it in. And there's less of a chance that something is going to intervene and say, hold on a second, you may want to know this about this thing that just loaded in front of you. But here's the real problem. Ultimately, if you develop the skepticism that you think is going to protect you, you're going to start not just disbelieving the stuff that's... false, but also the stuff that's true. You know, a lot of people who were taken in by the Q and on conspiracy theory believe they were engaged in really deep... serious internet research, that they were actually the ones doing the fact checking and the media literacy. And so simply to say somebody like, hey, you should check that or, hey, don't believe everything you read, that's not actionable advice. We actually do need to be sort of equipping people with, if you see something, here might be the three steps you take. Look at that thing in front of you, but then you might go and search online for a wide variety of different sources. And make sure those sources aren't all from the same kind of point of view or the same location. You know, you mentioned earlier that Google stop putting data void warnings saying like, hey, you're searching for something where we're not seeing a lot of good quality information. That's the place where the people who are trying to misinform or jump on and get traffic to monetize. That's where they jump in. And you say the whole thing is the quintessence of easy money, but obviously the social cost can be alarmingly high. Case and point is this moment on Joe Rogan's podcast. Can you describe it? This fall, there was a video pretty popular among sort of right-wing social media users where it showed former vice presidential nominee Tim Walz. He's on an escalator. He's singing. He's dancing. And he's got a white t-shirt on in black letters that says, Trump.

They basically took his face and superimposed it on the body of a creator who had actually originally shared this video, which again, a very easy thing to do. Joe Rogan is talking about him as if it's real and he ends up getting corrected by his producer, but his reaction isn't like, oh, sorry, whoops, I fell for that. He did not feel the guilt and the shame that you did. What Rogan did was basically explained it away and he said, do you know why I fell for it? It's because I believe he's capable of doing something that done. So truthiness lives, just as Stephen Colbert discussed it back during the Bush administration. If it feels true, it is true because there's no such thing as facts anymore. Shame is no longer a factor in all this stuff. It's almost like tech and the platforms caught up this year, and we're basically like, yeah, why should we do things that the president is not restraining himself around? 404 Media's Jason Keebler wrote last month that America's polarization has become the world's side hustle. 100% true. A perfect example from this year was I found a whole network of foreign run pages that only spread 100% false hoaxes and AI-generated images about global celebrities. And it was in English and other languages, but they hit upon a lot of culture war topics like trans stuff and political stuff and what have you. The first time that I brought those pages to meta, they removed almost all of them. But then I brought a second group of more than 100 pages to Meta, and this was after they had gotten rid of the fact checkers, and after they had sort of rolled back some of their moderation policies, Meta actually removed almost none of them and basically said this doesn't violate our policies anymore. So let me get this straight. Scammers can use AI to generate tons of ads and videos quickly to either sell or to pretend to sell users something. Tech companies like TikTok and OpenAI are creating tools to integrate AI into videos because that allows people to make content faster, more speed, more videos, more engagement. VC firms are investing either in the AI tools themselves or bot armies that high bidders can deploy to manufacture online content and maybe manufacture consent. It's all juiced by meta and the like who embrace these ads, reward people for using these kinds of tools because that's even more money in their pockets. So what am I missing? Well, I think that's a pretty good, heartbreaking, disappointing summary. And I think at the end of the day, if people are wondering kind of the Y piece of it, it's that the business imperative now is to show that you are a leader in the creation of AI tools and the advancement of AI tools. You need to show that your users are using them and that there is value from what you are creating. And so to have policies that...

put you from their perspective at a disadvantage to your competitors who maybe are allowing impersonation and are allowing this and allowing that. The race for AI supremacy has led to some of these rollbacks and the pressure from the new administration has led to the other piece of it. That is the recipe that led to the laundry list of things that you have just mentioned. This is where we are going into 2026. So looking ahead to next year. Oh, God, no. All this is dizzying. What in God's name are we supposed to do about it? There isn't an easy answer. I think in spite of all this, which seems very overwhelming, you can sort of feel disempowered and small. But the truth is that... We individually are the atomic units that these big tech platforms need. They need our attention and they need us to spend time on them. And so I really encourage people to think very consciously about where you are giving your attention and where you are spending your time. I'm not going to tell you to get rid of all the social media on your phone. I have it on my phone too. But think about the fact that any time you slow down on a piece of content and watch it or like it or share it. that sends a signal to the system and it might get more people shown the same thing. So being conscious of all of this stuff, all of these threats, all these risks, and thinking about what you reward with your attention, it's valuable. So take your power, put your attention where you feel good about it, control where your eyes go and what you listen to, and patronize the stuff that you think is worth it. I think I'm going to run some patriotic music underneath that, Craig. Please let it be O Canada or hockey highlights. Perhaps O Canada. Thanks again so much. It was great to have you back. Thank you so much for having you, Brooke. Craig Silverman is co-founder of Indicator, a publication dedicated to understanding and investigating digital deception.

Thank you. That's it for this week's show. On The Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Calendar, and Candice Wong. Travis Manon is our video producer. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson, with engineering from Jared Paul. Eloise Blondio is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katia Rogers. On The Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Lowinger.