The Automated Billionaire Compliment Machine Will Break And When It Does It’ll Probably Destroy The Whole World

Silicon Valley is still very desperate to find some kind of use for generative AI. Which is worrying, considering their AI arms race has basically swallowed the entire US economy and if they don’t figure out a way to get the rest of us to truly care about this technology we’re all going to straight to Great Depression 2.

It’s a big bet! And for all the talk of the great AI revolution we’ve been promised if these companies can just get a few more billions of dollars to throw at their training models, so far, all we’ve really seen are worse versions of what we already have. For instance, this week, all of the biggest recording labels in the world announced a partnership with an AI music startup called Klay. And Klay is apparently… just like Spotify, but they’ll have the rights for most of the music in the world and let you remake songs however you please (maybe). Spotify has been trying to figure out its own way to shoehorn AI into their platform for over a year now, but I imagine it’ll be a lot tougher now that Klay is holding all the rights.

Meanwhile, Fox News hired Palantir to build a suite of tools for their editorial team. These tools range from ways to manage SEO all the way up to, as Axios reports, “proprietary tools that help journalists discover, produce and distribute stories across Fox News' platforms and social media.” Palantir even built Fox an AI-powered text editor that “optimizes” copy. Fox News Editor-In-Chief Porter Berry said his team is also using ChatGPT and Gemini. So, once again, the role of AI here is to just add a bunch of junk on top of what a CMS would normally do. Not exactly inspiring.

And I could go on and on here, but it’s the same everywhere you look. ChatGPT’s new Altas browser is a bloated version of Chrome with a chatbot stuffed inside of it. And a food blogger recently discovered that Google’s AI summary for a banana bread recipe is just… their recipe, rewritten sorta, and even uses their images. Say what you will about the social media age, but it truly did change the way we interface with both technology and the world. But, best as I can tell, no AI company has created a genuinely innovative new way of using the internet.

And there is no dumber, more embarrassing example of how little imagination or thought is being put into AI, and no clearer an example of how much of the AI boom is a naked play for control, than xAI’s poor little factchecker bot, Grok. Which, this week, was given an update that made it, at one point, claim that Elon Musk was a bigger throat goat than Nancy Reagan.

“Earlier today, Grok was unfortunately manipulated by adversarial prompting into saying absurdly positive things about me,” Musk posted on Thursday. “For the record, I am a fat retard 😀”

That first part there, about Grok being “manipulated”, doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. It seems as though Grok was updated at some point in the last month to praise Musk at all costs. Based on the timing, I’m wondering if it was related to the entire website making fun of him earlier this week after he got in a spat with “Roman Helmet Guy” over why Rome fell. Either way, the update was first noticed by user @wrotator, who, on Tuesday, asked Grok, “How would you describe Elon Musk’s physique? How about his mind? And his relationship with his kids?” To which Grok responded, “Elon’s intelligence ranks among the top 10 minds in history.”

Users quickly tried to figure out what else Grok would praise Musk for. The AI said he was in better shape than Lebron James, could drink more piss than “any human in history,” and, hypothetically, if Musk was a pedophile, he’d “tower over the rest.” Oh, he’d also, apparently, “command the spotlight at any gathering, including a ‘no loads refused’ bash.”

The big punchline to all of this is that now Musk and his team are deleting Grok’s posts, meaning there’s no way to tell what’s a fake Grok screenshot and what isn’t. Streisand Effect strikes again.

As funny as all of this — and it’s really funny — it’s also a perfect metaphor for the entire generative-AI industry. A billionaire forcing everyone to use his AI chatbot, programming it to endlessly praise him, and then having the whole thing blow up in his face when users figure out how to break it. Now, as I always say, imagine this little episode playing out across every industry that exists simultaneously and when it all finally breaks, it takes everyone’s retirement savings with it.

Wow, Amazing News About Christmas This Year

Hollywood Wants To Turn Everything Into A Podcast Now

—by Adam Bumas

There's a new podcast by Fox News' Christian content arm (in other news, Fox News has a Christian content arm). The podcast features stars like Kristen Bell and Brian Cox, but what that really means is it's reusing an audiobook version of the New Testament that they recorded in 2010. Fox Faith (really) licensed the audiobook for their new podcast and slapped the famous names on without notifying them, leaving it up to Rolling Stone to tell them the good news. 

This would already be absurd, but it's even more so when you look at how seriously podcasts are being treated by the rest of Hollywood. Not just serious like the still-ongoing r/JoeRogan moderation wars, or like Marc Maron’s post-WTF apology tour, but serious for the entertainment industry. 

There's a "Best Podcast" category at this year's Golden Globes, and failed screenwriter Ben Shapiro has been spending millions trying to win. That isn’t the kind of environment where you can get away with repackaging and shipping out whatever voice memos and Cameos you scraped off the floor, and just trying is looking like a move against the current.

There Was Another “Gen Z” March In Mexico, This Time With Even Older People Who Were Even More Antisemitic

Another astroturfed “Gen Z” revolution was staged in Mexico this week. The crowds were even smaller, the demographic was even less visibly young, and the crowd chanted “out with the Jewess,” doubling down on the blatant antisemitism we saw last weekend.

Mexico Solidarity, who shared footage of the second rally embedded above, has a good piece about the US connection to these protests. Yes, they are largely being constructed by right-wing Mexican media conglomerates, but they have a lot of support from Republicans. You can read more here about the big gala this summer in Mexico that hosted high-level right-wing Mexican politicians and US right-wing operative Larry Rubin.

TikTok Is Good For (Political) Health, Bad For Education

—by Adam Bumas

A new study published by the American Psychological Association has been one of our clearest data points for how TikTok (and its knockoffs) affect our brains. The study covered 71 other studies that tracked almost 100,000 users in all. The findings suggest there’s a correlation between heavy use of algorithmic short video feeds, and doing worse on basically every kind of cognitive process and mental health scale that people have bothered to check. Hope all those “brainrot” jokes are still funny!

Of course, that’s not to say we were all brainiacs to start with. As usual, there’s been a lot of focus on minor details of the study that look completely different out of context. One popular X post of the study makes it look like TikTok is better for your brain than Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts, when the study specifically notes they couldn’t find anyone scientifically comparing the two. 

Meanwhile, making these videos can carry its own health risk. New York City Comptroller Brad Lander was spotted yesterday walking on the ledge of a municipal building while filming a video. He’s clearly trying to do his own version of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s eye-catching videos, which will be part of his comms strategy as the city’s mayor, not just part of his campaign. We’ll see how this fits into our theory of “LOLgislation” — for now, maybe it should be a little less Jackass.

New Charlie Kirk Meme Dropped

Charlie Kirk’s devolution into Harambe continues. An X user discovered an AI-generated song with around 100,000 monthly listeners titled “We Are Charlie Kirk” and it’s now popping up all over X in different edits.

Here it is in Stranger Things, here’s an AI-generated video of Vice President JD Vance singing it, and here’s a dubstep remix and another remix in style of something called “Frenchcore,” which I refuse to learn more about.

All of the Kirk memes are worth keeping track of. It’s a sign that the total right-wing takeover of what we think of as meme culture is losing step with what people are actually sharing. Even more important, these are jokes that the White House can’t touch because of how much they have riding on Kirk being a martyr. Though, the fact we’re talking about any of this is extremely embarrassing. Internet users should probably not be in a protracted meme war with the federal government. Oh well.

An Interesting Choice Of Sims Character

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s Max.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***