September 19, 2025 • 30 mins
What does the viral video of Charlie Kirk’s assassination say about the state of content moderation on social media? This week, Oz and Karah unpack the complexities of moderating graphic-but-newsworthy content, and why tech companies commitment to moderation has waned in recent years. Then, Karah talks to a student in New York about how they’re adjusting to not having access to their phone during the school day. Then, on Chat and Me, a woman uses ChatGPT to diagnose her mother’s mysterious ailment.
Also, we want to hear from you: If you’ve used a chatbot in a surprising or delightful (or deranged) way, send us a 1–2 minute voice note at techstuffpodcast@gmail.com.
Sources:
Charlie Kirk Was Shot and Killed in a Post-Content-Moderation World
From burner phones to decks of cards: NYC teens are adjusting to the smartphone ban
Larry Ellison’s personal fortune soars on back of Oracle’s share price surge
5,000 Podcasts. 3,000 Episodes a Week. $1 Cost Per Episode — Behind an AI Start Up’s Plan
Labour MPs accused of using ChatGPT to write speeches
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is tech stuff, I'm
as Voloscian and.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
I'm care Price.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Today we get into what the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's
assassination tells us about the state of content moderation and
also how teens in New York City are responding to
having their smartphones banned in schools.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Then, on Chatting Me, a woman turns to chat GPT
to help her mom with a mysterious ailment.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Her life was very diminished because she couldn't walk upstairs,
she was having really poor sleeps because the pain would
wake her up in the night, and overall, she just
started to feel like she was really declining in her health.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Overall, all of that on the Weekend Tech, It's Friday,
September nineteenth.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Hi Cara, Hi os.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
So normally we start these episodes a bit more lighthearted,
but of course, the major news of the last week
has been anything but lighthearted with the assassination of the
right wing pundit and influencer Charlie Kirk.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Yeah, it seems kind of like the only news story
right now.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Yeah, and obviously it does have a lot of overlap
with tech, especially social media. From the gaming references inscribed
on the bullets to the Internet communities. The shooter was
part of to the way Charlie Kirk himself sort of
reshaped the way social media is used for political organizing.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Yeah, and of course there's the countless memes and takes
following a major news event like this.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Yeah. I was actually talking to a friend of mine
the other day about the video of the assassination, and
he said to me, you know, in the old days
on the Internet, I might have to go looking for
this kind of horrific, very disturbing, almost real time content,
But these days I have to basically do everything I
(02:02):
can to avoid seeing it. And that really stuck with me,
because in the past, you would have to go in
search of this kind of confrontation with a video of
someone being murdered in plain sight, but now it's plastered
over every social media app. Over the last few months,
we've seen all kinds of stories reporting about how the
social media platforms have been pulling back on content moderation,
(02:27):
either because of the politics at the moment or simply
to save costs.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Yeah. You know, I've also seen a bunch of stories
about companies like TikTok and meta replacing human content moderators
with AI, which apparently has had mixed results.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
I'm going to put my hand up because on the
face of it, I'm not that drawn to stories about
content moderation.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
You fight against them, Actually.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
I fight against them. We get pitched it quite regularly
by our wonderful producers. The last time was when Facebook
replaced their content moderation system largely with these things called
community notes, where the community itself flags if something it's
misinformation or hateful, et cetera, etc. But this week is
obviously something we couldn't avoid, and it feels to me
(03:10):
I almost feel a little bit embarrassed about not having
focus on this earlier, because it feels like one of
those frog in the pot moments where it's a little late.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
To jump out and you think we're boiling.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
I think we're boiling, or perhaps even boiled. It was
a story and why that really brought it home to me.
With the headline Charlie Kirk was shot and killed in
a post content moderation world, the wide article points out
that very few of the videos of the shooting that
are all over various social media have content warnings, and
actually a ton of them play automatically before viewers have
(03:40):
the chance to consent to what they're about to see.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Yeah, auto play in this sense is not your friend,
and I think it probably accounts for the dissemination of
this video more so than just the average person looking
for it. And whenever a video like this, most recent
Charlie Kirk killing video comes out, I think about the
at which video is now disseminated and how ill prepared
(04:02):
the Internet is to handle it.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Yeah. Also, I mean shooting in four K from close up.
I mean the horror of this video, at least in
what I've read about it, is quite striking. Experts in
the wide piece who have been tracking the spread of
the videos online say that a lot of the platforms
are actually failing to enforce their own content moderation rules,
but also that it's kind of a tricky situation because
(04:25):
the video falls in between quote graphic content, which is allowed,
and quote glorified violence, which usually isn't right.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
And then there's the fact that this is like a
major news event, which I'm sure makes it even more complicated.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Definitely, it's also the culmination of some fairly major political
and philosophical changes to the way social media platforms are run.
Of course, we all remember when Elon Musk brought Twitter
back in twenty twenty two. He loosened content restrictions pretty
much immediately, and Bettie said this was in response to
what he claimed was suppression of conservative leaning post hosts.
(05:00):
Then YouTube and Meta both followed suit. In twenty twenty three,
YouTube said that curbing misinformation could lead to quote the
unintended effect of curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the
risk of violence or other real world harm. In twenty
twenty five, Meta cited quote recent elections as a reason
to quote remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender
(05:23):
that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Yeah, and now the whole Internet is basically four chan basically.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
I mean. The interesting thing, though, as Wide points out,
is that the more established platforms do still have real
rules around content moderation, and in many cases the circulation
and distribution of the assassination footage violates those rules. But
nonetheless the videos are getting millions and millions of views
and are still up and circulating widely.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
So what is your takeaway from all of this?
Speaker 1 (05:53):
I mean, it's this kind of confection of corrosive and
divisive rhetoric online translating into offline, translating back into online.
This kind of vicious circle or a buros of radicalization.
And there's an expert quoted who'd observe people on x
(06:14):
commenting on the video of the Charlie Kirk assassination saying
that it heradicalized them. Now, it didn't say in which direction.
We may be able to infer that it radicalize them
against the left, but either way, I mean, this is
just another moment that I'm very concerned about, and I
think everyone is will further harden the lines and further
(06:35):
feed this beast of online radicalization and real world violence.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
You know, this story really encapsulates practically all of the
harms that people fear that social media might unleash onto
the world. The story that I want to report on
today has to do with the effects of technology actually
on our younger citizens and is a little more lighthearted.
Have you heard about the cell phone band in New York?
Speaker 1 (06:59):
A little bit, but tell me more so.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
New York City public schools recently became the largest district
in the United States to ban students from using cell
phones during a school day. So this is a state
wide law, and it's something that's happening more and more
across the country. California and Louisiana also have restrictions, and
this week marks the second week since the band went
into effect in New York.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
I kind of can't believe this is happening. It feels
like the pipe dream of so many digital and social
media theorists being an actually in real life, how's it going?
Speaker 2 (07:31):
You know? When I saw it, I was like, is
this for real? You know, like it feels that sort
of unbelievable. I actually did some reporting on this. We
have a friend whose child, Ruby is a middle schooler
in Brooklyn, New York, and they were kind enough to
send us some voice memos about their experience with the
phone band. So here are some of the things they
say are tough about the phone ban.
Speaker 4 (07:52):
The one good thing about on phones at school is
that we can't take videos of other people. I mean,
sometimes we want to like record something within our phone
group that we think is funny, like recording one of
us eating a ginormous hamburger or something funny like that.
Sometimes it's hard when it's like a fight or something,
(08:13):
it's really not good to have.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
A phone out.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
I mean, not having a digital record of all of
the shenanigans at school is something I think many kids
will be grateful for in future and parents are probably
grateful for today. But how does this actually work practicing?
How do you stop kids from using their phones at school?
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Different schools are actually taking different approaches to the phone band.
Most of them either confiscate students' phones at the beginning
of the day and put them in lockers or these
magnetic pouches that have locks in them. But Ruby also
said that some kids and their parents just like literally
don't care about the rules at all.
Speaker 5 (08:50):
A lot of kids just don't give him their phones
and they lie that they don't have a device, and
their parents sign it because their parents don't really care,
and then they just have their phones out in launch.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
This probably would have been me to be honest.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
Would your parents have signed the fake waiver that you
actually don't have a phone?
Speaker 2 (09:08):
No, they were kind of rule followers, unfortunately, But I
would have figured out a way to hack. That would
have been part of the fun of going to school.
There was this article that really caught my eye from
Gotham Mist, which has this amazing headline from burner phones
to decks of cards and YC. Teens are adjusting to
the smartphone ban, and the reporters of this article talk
(09:28):
to a bunch of teenagers about how they're adapting to
the ban, and a lot of these teenagers are embracing
their low tech school day. Now they're playing with Polaroid cameras,
which have made a huge comeback. And it's just interesting
to me that teens have been forced into the dark
and have found new light with things that we were
just doing twenty years ago.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Yeah, I mean the twenty year ago equivalent of this.
When I was a kid, my greatest pleasure was watching
TV and playing with my PlayStation one. I lived in
the countryside in England and we would have these blackouts
or power out from time to time, I didn't know
once every six months, and my mom would bring out
the candles and then we'd play a board game or
play Uno or something which had this kind of sweet
(10:09):
nostalgic quality to it. At the same time, I was
very happy that we were plugged in most of the time.
I didn't have to do it more than a couple
of times a year.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
And I think what got you into Oxford was how
good you were at Uno? Had you been playing PlayStation
one that whole time? God knows, But in all seriousness,
there does seem to be a sort of nostalgia among
gen z for the esthetics of really even the two thousands,
not even so much the nineties, like the two thousands,
which is so funny to me about having nostalgia for
a time where I was just a teenager. One student
(10:38):
quoted in the article said she's looking into whether the
school would allow her to bring an MP three.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Player otherwise known as an iPod iPod, And.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
A teacher talked about how some of his students brought
in a transistor radio but they didn't know they needed
to extend the antenna, which he had to help him with.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
I love that that is a true that is a
true teachable moment because this is like almost like a
scene from a from like a feel good atis TV
show where the teacher help helps this year, no sun
you have to extend their antennae. Exactly beyond fueling the
demand for nostalgia tech, is the phone band really changing
(11:15):
much about the experience of being at school?
Speaker 2 (11:17):
So that same teacher who extended the antenna said that actually,
the lunch room is noticeably louder in a good way.
He said that previously the lunch room was muted, and
that this band has really lifted a pall. The teacher said,
this is a huge difference from last year, when kids
would spend twenty minutes in the bathroom checking their phone
and walk through the halls in silence with their heads down.
(11:39):
I know this is true because it sounds like a
description of me in my own house.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Unfortunately me too. Ruby mentioned the idea of getting your
parents to write letters saying you don't have a phone
in the first place. It's one kind of work around,
but how compliant to the kids being what are the
ways around this they're looking for.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
They're coming up with all kinds of ways. So the
pouches that I told you about that are supposed to
make phones inaccessible during the day, there's all of these
tiktoks now showing students breaking into them, and Ruby actually
says that trying to get them open has become a
common downtime activity for students. Kids also use their school
issued laptops to send each other emails or to chat
(12:16):
each other using Google docs like imagine being so desperate
that you're dming in Google docs. And of course, you know,
kids still have access to their phones all the time
that they're not in school, which is most of the day.
A couple of teachers in the article talked about chaotic
scenes at the end of the day when kids finally
get their phones back, which made me laugh. But overall,
(12:36):
the band seems to be going kind of well, and
it may be something that becomes a standard for students
around the globe. You know, over half US states have
at least a partial band in place, and there are
a ton of other countries that have student cell phone
bands with varying degrees of strictness. Denmark, of course, Australia.
France has had one for a while but made it
even more strict earlier this year, and China has had
(12:59):
one since twenty twenty one.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
It's sort of hard to imagine why it took so long.
Are there any people who are objecting to this? Apart
from obviously the students who want to be on their phones.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
All day, there are objectors. Not everybody is happy. The
president of the National Parents Union actually wrote an op
ed in USA today saying what we really need are
smarter rules around phone usage, and that treating all phone
uses a distraction can cause kids to miss out on
the ways phones can be helpful to students.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
With all due respect to the president of the National Parents' Union,
you feel as a certain self selecting quality to that job.
Is your job to play devil's advocate on every single issue.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
That's right. She argues phones can keep kids safe during
emergencies and that we should be preparing them for adulthood
in the modern world by teaching them to have healthy
relationships with their phones. And also, some parents don't like
that they suddenly can't get a hold of their kids
during the school day.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
I mean also, as a parent of kids in school,
the reality of emergency situations, violence, etc. Is also true.
So I do understand why parents want to be in
contact with their kids. But as always in life, you're
weighing harms, right, and the harm of having your kid
on their phone all the time at school seems to
me is somebod who's not a parent to be quite
significant and a good thing to mitigate.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Yeah, you know, I think on the whole people really
like the effects these bands are having, and not just
in New York. I actually read this blog post that
aggregated a bunch of social media reactions from teachers in
states with student phone bands across the country. One teacher
was saying, has the solution really been this easy the
whole time? Teachers across the country are saying that libraries
(14:37):
are busier, behavior issues are down, and that you know
this is anecdotal, but still. One teacher even wrote that
kids are passing notes to each other in class instead
of texting and called it quote beautiful.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
When I was in school, passing notes was quote against
the rules. But I guess punishment. I guess it's not
just kids who are nostalgic. Teachers going to be nostalgic too.
After the break, Elon Musk is briefly supplanted as the
richest man in the world. A podcast company puts out
(15:10):
three thousand episodes a week with the help of AI,
and British members of parliament get accused of using Chat
to write their speeches. Stay with us, We're back and
(15:32):
we've got a few more headlines to you this week, and.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
Then a story about how chat GPT helped a woman
diagnose her mother's mysterious knee problem.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
But first, Kara, have you had a man named Larry Ellison.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Owner of the island of Lenai I have.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
That's his Awaiian reoubt. What else do you know about him?
Speaker 2 (15:50):
You know, he really burst into consciousness this year. He's
obviously the CEO of Oracle. He's been spending a bunch
of time at the White House. We talked about him
announcing the five hundred billion dollars Stargate Data Center project
with Donald Trump just a few days after the inauguration.
He also helped finance his son David's acquisition of Paramount,
and apparently they're also looking at buying Warner Brothers Discovery.
(16:13):
I think the company is going to be called Para
Brothers Discover Warner.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Twenty twenty five really has been the year of Larry Ellison,
which is impressive given he's eighty one years old. I
read a piece in Bloomberg about him that charts some
of his enthusiasms. There is the private island, which you mentioned.
He also flies a jet, of course. He once shot
at his elbow in a high speed bicycle crash and
punctured his lung body surfing. He also had a cameo
(16:41):
in the Marvel movie Iron Man two and for one
brief glimmering moment. Last week, he became the world's richest man,
overtaking Elon. Ellison's personal wealth peaked at three hundred and
ninety three billion dollars, just ahead of Elon at three
hundred and eighty four billion dollars.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
How how did he overtake Elon?
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Well, it all happened because last Tuesday, Oracle announced their
quarterly results and they surprised the market with extraordinary growth
in spend on cloud computing services driven by AI demand
at other tech companies. Essentially, so they announced not one,
not two, not three, but four multi billion dollar AI
contracts for their cloud services with three different clients. One
(17:25):
of those deals was with open Ai and was worth
three hundred billion dollars. So Oracle shares shot up by
thirty six percent, and Larry Ellison is Oracle's largest shareholder,
earning forty percent of the company. So the events of
last week shot his personal net worth up by one
hundred billion dollars.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
I said that he fell back behind Elon, though he.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Did fall back behind Elon, but I think they're they're close,
although Elon's crown apparently is safe for now. Our friend
Nick Thompson who's the CEO of The Atlantic, had an
interesting take on the wider implications of this story. He
talked about how the fact that Oracle has not built
its own large language model makes it an attractive, non
competitive collaborator for a lot of other AI companies, and
(18:13):
so in a strange sense, Oracle's a kind of legacy
player has been rewarded for the fact that it wasn't
at the cutting edge of the air revolution and therefore
is seen as a non threatening partner by other tech companies.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
There's actually more good news for Oracle investors. As of
the time of this recording, the US and China are
expected to announce a deal for TikTok's operations in the
US to be taken over by Oracle, silver Lake and
in recent Horowitz, with US investors holding about an eighty
percent stake and Chinese investors owning the rest. But there's
(18:46):
actually another AI boom a bruin, and this one is
in the form of podcasts. I read this really crazy
article in the Hollywood Reporter recently about a new podcast
company called in Inception Point Ai, which is a name
that was only possibly created by AI.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Well, yeah, but I don't think the prompt was very
good because it's not much of a name for podcast company.
It's an inception.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Point as really it's really not, but I guess.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
A good name for an AI company.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
It is a good name for an AI company, which
this is. So. This podcast network has over five thousand
shows and they put out over three thousand episodes per
week in the last two years. They claim to have
ten million downloads. Inception Point is saying that their secret
is that they can make a podcast episode in about
an hour for one dollar or less, and they use
(19:36):
AI for everything, choosing episode topics based on Google and
social media trends and then releasing five different versions with
different SEO friendly titles to see which ones perform best.
The ones that do well get scaled up, and the
production process is largely automated, using one hundred and eighty
four custom AI agents to make episodes that are then
(19:57):
basically just given quick QC quality ch and some sound
design from a human producer.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
I don't doubt that you can make an AI podcast
episode for a dollar. I do wonder if a dollar
will be enough to pay somebody to spend an hour
listening to it, or perhaps the audience for these AI
podcasts is other AIS.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
It just might be you know, I don't think people
in the actual podcast industry are very thrilled, but the
inception points CEO Janine Wright, who actually used to be
the CEO of the podcast company Wondery, insists that this
is the future and this is my favorite part. She
says in the article, quote we believe that in the
near future, half of the people on the planet will
(20:39):
be AI, and we are the company that's bringing those
people to life.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
What a truly weird quote. When you're starting a new
business or fundraising, you always need some kind of bold
or provocative mission statement. But we believe that in future
half the people in the world will be AI is
definitely provocative.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
I want to introduce you to some of these people
that will make up half of the population of the world,
people including chef Claire Delish. She's a host. I think
I would imagine a food podcast or nature expert Nigel Thistledown,
who has to be English or else. He's definitely not real.
(21:19):
The episodes on this network cover everything from weather reports
to cooking and gardening, and the company is looking into
turning these AI personalities into chatbots that can then interact
with listeners, though they claim they want to steer clear
of developing anything that someone would accidentally have a deep
relationship with. I don't know how anyone could resist a
(21:41):
relationship with Chef Claire Delish on the basis of the
content that she's creating.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
But you know, I have to say, this story feels
like he was hallucinated by it, does AI. I'm also
somewhat curious about that ten million download number. Did you
find anything about any kind of listener responses to the
well of inspiring content?
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Well, other than all of the women who had fallen
in love with Nigel thistledown in a parasocial relationship. A
lot of people say that these episodes are not very good,
and they've also said that they have that kind of
uncanny quality that still screams text to speech. But Janine
Wright doesn't really seem to care. In the article, she says, quote,
I think that people who are still referring to all
(22:21):
AI generated content as aislop are probably lazy luddites. That's
I think she's talking to us, because there's a lot
of really good stuff out there. As for that purported
ten million download number, a quick glance at the company's
shows and reviews says they probably don't have a ton
of listeners. However, with such low overhead, they say they
only need about twenty downloads per episode to turn a profit.
(22:45):
Companies take note.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Yeah, it's funny that reference to lazy Luddites. We did
an episode on tech Stuff a couple of months ago
with a guy called Brian Merchant who wrote a book
about the real Luddites, who I think anything but lazy.
They were kind of pro testers who sacrificed, in many
cases their lives during the Industrial Revolution to protest against
how the mechanization of work was making people jobless and
(23:11):
driving them into poverty. So I think Genine right may
be wrong on that one. But on the topic of
unconvincing AI personalities, have you heard about the most recent
throwdown in the British Parliament?
Speaker 2 (23:24):
No? I have not. I don't feels the followed British politics.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
Yeah, I don't think that many people do in Britain
alone in the US. But there's an article in the
newspaper called The Independent about how several labor MPs have
been accused by their conservative counterparts of using AI to
write their speeches, and how could they tell well. One
of the people making these accusations is Conservative MP Tom Tuggandat,
(23:49):
who says that labor MP speeches are increasingly starting to
have more and more americanisms.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Tom Tuggenhat works with Claire Delish and Nigel Thistledown. Did
he mention specifically what americanisms are being used?
Speaker 1 (24:05):
Yes, the phrase I rise to speak really got Tom
hot under the hat. He said, quote I rise to speak,
I rise to speak, I rise to speak. Chack GPT
knows you're there. But this is an americanism that we
don't use but still keep using it because it makes
it clear that this place has become absurd.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
As an American, I can say I've never once said
I rise to speak, maybe save for in my high
chair growing up.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
Yeah, as a bridge I've never used it either. But
I did some googling and it turns out I rise
to speak is frequently used in Congress in the US,
and it's had a meteoric rise in British Parliament recently.
Tom is correct to pointed out last year it was
used two hundred and thirty times in the whole year.
This year it's already been used six hundred and thirty
(24:54):
five times, and I think it's the kind of processed
type thing that people use in the House of Representatives
which is now infiltrated Parliament. And Tom tuggan Dat is
blaming chachipt for this lazy MP is using it to
write their speeches.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
Are there any other examples of AI in the MP speeches?
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Yeah, there are words like underscore, streamline, navigate, bustling, which
often used by large language models and are now popping
up more and more in Parliament, as are these commonly
used AI sentence constructions like not only X, but y
or the phrase not merely. And of course I mean
there's this interesting socio linguistic question here right, which is
(25:33):
are all of these MPs actually using chat gibt to
write their speeches or have the phrases of chat gibt
become so ubiquitous in human language that real humans are
unthinkingly now imitating machines.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
That's what I ask myself about your posts on LinkedIn.
And now to our final segment of the day, Chat
and Me, where we discuss how people are really using chatbots.
(26:09):
And remember we want to hear from you, so please
send your chat stories to our inbox Tech Stuff podcast
at gmail dot com. This week we heard from our
listener Shalon from Vancouver, Canada, and she told us Chat
helped her mom with a mysterious medical problem.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
So my mother is seventy four and she started having
knee pain about a year ago and it kind of
came out of nowhere, but it was pretty severe and
it was making it really difficult for her to sleep.
So obviously she talked to her doctor. The advice from
the doctor was just give it a little time to
d and then eventually she went back to the doctor.
(26:44):
The doctor said, okay, fine, we're going to give you
an X ray. There was absolutely nothing wrong with her knee.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Here's always comforting when you go to the doctor with
a medical problem like severe pain, and you get a
test and the answer comes back nothing wrong with you.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
It gets worse. A few months later, Shanan and her
mom finally got the doctor to give them a referral
for a physiotherapist, but the physiotherapist also couldn't find anything
wrong with her knee. Another nightmare. Shllan told us that
at this point, the injury was starting to have a
big impact on her mom's mental health as well as
her physical health.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
Her life was very diminished because she couldn't walk upstairs,
she was having really poor sleeps because the pain would
wake her up in the night, and overall, she just
started to feel like she was really declining in her health.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Overall, this sounds quite horrific. Does Chat ride to the rescue?
Speaker 2 (27:33):
This is where Chat comes to the rescue. Shllen's mom
was visiting her and as a kind of last resort,
they turned to Chat GPT. They listed all the symptoms
and told Chat the whole story, what all the different
doctors had said. She talked to Chat for about forty
five minutes, and then.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
It diagnosed her with a condition and gave her exercises
she needed to do, what she needed to do to
sleep at night, how she needed to sleep at night,
how she needed to walk during the day, et cetera,
et cetera.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
So did it work well?
Speaker 2 (28:04):
Shllon and her mom decided to do an experiment and
follow Chat's advice religiously for two weeks just to see
if it helped. Guess what completely healed, and Shalon said,
it's made a huge difference in her mom's life, not
just because the pain is gone, but because doctors had
been kind of dismissing it, and because it was also
one of the first experiences her mom had had with
the very scary reality of getting older.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
As people age, it's like one thing happens, and then
the next thing happens, and then the next thing happens,
and your body is falling apart. And so my mom
has never had like a major issue that she couldn't
overcome in her health, and so this was the first
thing that was like, Okay, I guess this is the beginning.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
Of the end, like it's over for me.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
And so the fact that she has been able to
overcome this and has her kneeback and her health back,
it's been really life changing for her.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
That's it for this week for Tech Stuff.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
I'm Kara Price and I'm os Valashin. This episode was
produced by Eliza Dennis, Melissa Slaughter, Julian Nutter, and Tyler Hill.
He was executive produced by me Kara Price and Kate
Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Kastrian Norvel for iHeart Podcasts, Kyle
Murdoch Missy's episode and also write our theme song.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
Join us next Wednesday for the first episode of the
new podcast on Crisper with Walter Isaacson. It's a five
part series that tells the story of how a revolutionary
gene editing tool was created.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
And please do rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts,
on Spotify, wherever you listen, and also write to us
at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com. We're getting
so many great submissions for our Chat and me segment
and we love to get even more. We'll send you
a T shirt if you you like
From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is tech stuff, I'm
as Voloscian and.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
I'm care Price.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
Today we get into what the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's
assassination tells us about the state of content moderation and
also how teens in New York City are responding to
having their smartphones banned in schools.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Then, on Chatting Me, a woman turns to chat GPT
to help her mom with a mysterious ailment.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Her life was very diminished because she couldn't walk upstairs,
she was having really poor sleeps because the pain would
wake her up in the night, and overall, she just
started to feel like she was really declining in her health.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Overall, all of that on the Weekend Tech, It's Friday,
September nineteenth.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Hi Cara, Hi os.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
So normally we start these episodes a bit more lighthearted,
but of course, the major news of the last week
has been anything but lighthearted with the assassination of the
right wing pundit and influencer Charlie Kirk.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Yeah, it seems kind of like the only news story
right now.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Yeah, and obviously it does have a lot of overlap
with tech, especially social media. From the gaming references inscribed
on the bullets to the Internet communities. The shooter was
part of to the way Charlie Kirk himself sort of
reshaped the way social media is used for political organizing.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Yeah, and of course there's the countless memes and takes
following a major news event like this.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Yeah. I was actually talking to a friend of mine
the other day about the video of the assassination, and
he said to me, you know, in the old days
on the Internet, I might have to go looking for
this kind of horrific, very disturbing, almost real time content,
But these days I have to basically do everything I
(02:02):
can to avoid seeing it. And that really stuck with me,
because in the past, you would have to go in
search of this kind of confrontation with a video of
someone being murdered in plain sight, but now it's plastered
over every social media app. Over the last few months,
we've seen all kinds of stories reporting about how the
social media platforms have been pulling back on content moderation,
(02:27):
either because of the politics at the moment or simply
to save costs.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
Yeah. You know, I've also seen a bunch of stories
about companies like TikTok and meta replacing human content moderators
with AI, which apparently has had mixed results.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
I'm going to put my hand up because on the
face of it, I'm not that drawn to stories about
content moderation.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
You fight against them, Actually.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
I fight against them. We get pitched it quite regularly
by our wonderful producers. The last time was when Facebook
replaced their content moderation system largely with these things called
community notes, where the community itself flags if something it's
misinformation or hateful, et cetera, etc. But this week is
obviously something we couldn't avoid, and it feels to me
(03:10):
I almost feel a little bit embarrassed about not having
focus on this earlier, because it feels like one of
those frog in the pot moments where it's a little late.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
To jump out and you think we're boiling.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
I think we're boiling, or perhaps even boiled. It was
a story and why that really brought it home to me.
With the headline Charlie Kirk was shot and killed in
a post content moderation world, the wide article points out
that very few of the videos of the shooting that
are all over various social media have content warnings, and
actually a ton of them play automatically before viewers have
(03:40):
the chance to consent to what they're about to see.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Yeah, auto play in this sense is not your friend,
and I think it probably accounts for the dissemination of
this video more so than just the average person looking
for it. And whenever a video like this, most recent
Charlie Kirk killing video comes out, I think about the
at which video is now disseminated and how ill prepared
(04:02):
the Internet is to handle it.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
Yeah. Also, I mean shooting in four K from close up.
I mean the horror of this video, at least in
what I've read about it, is quite striking. Experts in
the wide piece who have been tracking the spread of
the videos online say that a lot of the platforms
are actually failing to enforce their own content moderation rules,
but also that it's kind of a tricky situation because
(04:25):
the video falls in between quote graphic content, which is allowed,
and quote glorified violence, which usually isn't right.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
And then there's the fact that this is like a
major news event, which I'm sure makes it even more complicated.
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Definitely, it's also the culmination of some fairly major political
and philosophical changes to the way social media platforms are run.
Of course, we all remember when Elon Musk brought Twitter
back in twenty twenty two. He loosened content restrictions pretty
much immediately, and Bettie said this was in response to
what he claimed was suppression of conservative leaning post hosts.
(05:00):
Then YouTube and Meta both followed suit. In twenty twenty three,
YouTube said that curbing misinformation could lead to quote the
unintended effect of curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the
risk of violence or other real world harm. In twenty
twenty five, Meta cited quote recent elections as a reason
to quote remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender
(05:23):
that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Yeah, and now the whole Internet is basically four chan basically.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
I mean. The interesting thing, though, as Wide points out,
is that the more established platforms do still have real
rules around content moderation, and in many cases the circulation
and distribution of the assassination footage violates those rules. But
nonetheless the videos are getting millions and millions of views
and are still up and circulating widely.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
So what is your takeaway from all of this?
Speaker 1 (05:53):
I mean, it's this kind of confection of corrosive and
divisive rhetoric online translating into offline, translating back into online.
This kind of vicious circle or a buros of radicalization.
And there's an expert quoted who'd observe people on x
(06:14):
commenting on the video of the Charlie Kirk assassination saying
that it heradicalized them. Now, it didn't say in which direction.
We may be able to infer that it radicalize them
against the left, but either way, I mean, this is
just another moment that I'm very concerned about, and I
think everyone is will further harden the lines and further
(06:35):
feed this beast of online radicalization and real world violence.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
You know, this story really encapsulates practically all of the
harms that people fear that social media might unleash onto
the world. The story that I want to report on
today has to do with the effects of technology actually
on our younger citizens and is a little more lighthearted.
Have you heard about the cell phone band in New York?
Speaker 1 (06:59):
A little bit, but tell me more so.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
New York City public schools recently became the largest district
in the United States to ban students from using cell
phones during a school day. So this is a state
wide law, and it's something that's happening more and more
across the country. California and Louisiana also have restrictions, and
this week marks the second week since the band went
into effect in New York.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
I kind of can't believe this is happening. It feels
like the pipe dream of so many digital and social
media theorists being an actually in real life, how's it going?
Speaker 2 (07:31):
You know? When I saw it, I was like, is
this for real? You know, like it feels that sort
of unbelievable. I actually did some reporting on this. We
have a friend whose child, Ruby is a middle schooler
in Brooklyn, New York, and they were kind enough to
send us some voice memos about their experience with the
phone band. So here are some of the things they
say are tough about the phone ban.
Speaker 4 (07:52):
The one good thing about on phones at school is
that we can't take videos of other people. I mean,
sometimes we want to like record something within our phone
group that we think is funny, like recording one of
us eating a ginormous hamburger or something funny like that.
Sometimes it's hard when it's like a fight or something,
(08:13):
it's really not good to have.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
A phone out.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
I mean, not having a digital record of all of
the shenanigans at school is something I think many kids
will be grateful for in future and parents are probably
grateful for today. But how does this actually work practicing?
How do you stop kids from using their phones at school?
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Different schools are actually taking different approaches to the phone band.
Most of them either confiscate students' phones at the beginning
of the day and put them in lockers or these
magnetic pouches that have locks in them. But Ruby also
said that some kids and their parents just like literally
don't care about the rules at all.
Speaker 5 (08:50):
A lot of kids just don't give him their phones
and they lie that they don't have a device, and
their parents sign it because their parents don't really care,
and then they just have their phones out in launch.
Speaker 2 (09:02):
This probably would have been me to be honest.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
Would your parents have signed the fake waiver that you
actually don't have a phone?
Speaker 2 (09:08):
No, they were kind of rule followers, unfortunately, But I
would have figured out a way to hack. That would
have been part of the fun of going to school.
There was this article that really caught my eye from
Gotham Mist, which has this amazing headline from burner phones
to decks of cards and YC. Teens are adjusting to
the smartphone ban, and the reporters of this article talk
(09:28):
to a bunch of teenagers about how they're adapting to
the ban, and a lot of these teenagers are embracing
their low tech school day. Now they're playing with Polaroid cameras,
which have made a huge comeback. And it's just interesting
to me that teens have been forced into the dark
and have found new light with things that we were
just doing twenty years ago.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Yeah, I mean the twenty year ago equivalent of this.
When I was a kid, my greatest pleasure was watching
TV and playing with my PlayStation one. I lived in
the countryside in England and we would have these blackouts
or power out from time to time, I didn't know
once every six months, and my mom would bring out
the candles and then we'd play a board game or
play Uno or something which had this kind of sweet
(10:09):
nostalgic quality to it. At the same time, I was
very happy that we were plugged in most of the time.
I didn't have to do it more than a couple
of times a year.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
And I think what got you into Oxford was how
good you were at Uno? Had you been playing PlayStation
one that whole time? God knows, But in all seriousness,
there does seem to be a sort of nostalgia among
gen z for the esthetics of really even the two thousands,
not even so much the nineties, like the two thousands,
which is so funny to me about having nostalgia for
a time where I was just a teenager. One student
(10:38):
quoted in the article said she's looking into whether the
school would allow her to bring an MP three.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
Player otherwise known as an iPod iPod, And.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
A teacher talked about how some of his students brought
in a transistor radio but they didn't know they needed
to extend the antenna, which he had to help him with.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
I love that that is a true that is a
true teachable moment because this is like almost like a
scene from a from like a feel good atis TV
show where the teacher help helps this year, no sun
you have to extend their antennae. Exactly beyond fueling the
demand for nostalgia tech, is the phone band really changing
(11:15):
much about the experience of being at school?
Speaker 2 (11:17):
So that same teacher who extended the antenna said that actually,
the lunch room is noticeably louder in a good way.
He said that previously the lunch room was muted, and
that this band has really lifted a pall. The teacher said,
this is a huge difference from last year, when kids
would spend twenty minutes in the bathroom checking their phone
and walk through the halls in silence with their heads down.
(11:39):
I know this is true because it sounds like a
description of me in my own house.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Unfortunately me too. Ruby mentioned the idea of getting your
parents to write letters saying you don't have a phone
in the first place. It's one kind of work around,
but how compliant to the kids being what are the
ways around this they're looking for.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
They're coming up with all kinds of ways. So the
pouches that I told you about that are supposed to
make phones inaccessible during the day, there's all of these
tiktoks now showing students breaking into them, and Ruby actually
says that trying to get them open has become a
common downtime activity for students. Kids also use their school
issued laptops to send each other emails or to chat
(12:16):
each other using Google docs like imagine being so desperate
that you're dming in Google docs. And of course, you know,
kids still have access to their phones all the time
that they're not in school, which is most of the day.
A couple of teachers in the article talked about chaotic
scenes at the end of the day when kids finally
get their phones back, which made me laugh. But overall,
(12:36):
the band seems to be going kind of well, and
it may be something that becomes a standard for students
around the globe. You know, over half US states have
at least a partial band in place, and there are
a ton of other countries that have student cell phone
bands with varying degrees of strictness. Denmark, of course, Australia.
France has had one for a while but made it
even more strict earlier this year, and China has had
(12:59):
one since twenty twenty one.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
It's sort of hard to imagine why it took so long.
Are there any people who are objecting to this? Apart
from obviously the students who want to be on their phones.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
All day, there are objectors. Not everybody is happy. The
president of the National Parents Union actually wrote an op
ed in USA today saying what we really need are
smarter rules around phone usage, and that treating all phone
uses a distraction can cause kids to miss out on
the ways phones can be helpful to students.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
With all due respect to the president of the National Parents' Union,
you feel as a certain self selecting quality to that job.
Is your job to play devil's advocate on every single issue.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
That's right. She argues phones can keep kids safe during
emergencies and that we should be preparing them for adulthood
in the modern world by teaching them to have healthy
relationships with their phones. And also, some parents don't like
that they suddenly can't get a hold of their kids
during the school day.
Speaker 4 (13:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
I mean also, as a parent of kids in school,
the reality of emergency situations, violence, etc. Is also true.
So I do understand why parents want to be in
contact with their kids. But as always in life, you're
weighing harms, right, and the harm of having your kid
on their phone all the time at school seems to
me is somebod who's not a parent to be quite
significant and a good thing to mitigate.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Yeah, you know, I think on the whole people really
like the effects these bands are having, and not just
in New York. I actually read this blog post that
aggregated a bunch of social media reactions from teachers in
states with student phone bands across the country. One teacher
was saying, has the solution really been this easy the
whole time? Teachers across the country are saying that libraries
(14:37):
are busier, behavior issues are down, and that you know
this is anecdotal, but still. One teacher even wrote that
kids are passing notes to each other in class instead
of texting and called it quote beautiful.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
When I was in school, passing notes was quote against
the rules. But I guess punishment. I guess it's not
just kids who are nostalgic. Teachers going to be nostalgic too.
After the break, Elon Musk is briefly supplanted as the
richest man in the world. A podcast company puts out
(15:10):
three thousand episodes a week with the help of AI,
and British members of parliament get accused of using Chat
to write their speeches. Stay with us, We're back and
(15:32):
we've got a few more headlines to you this week, and.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
Then a story about how chat GPT helped a woman
diagnose her mother's mysterious knee problem.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
But first, Kara, have you had a man named Larry Ellison.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
Owner of the island of Lenai I have.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
That's his Awaiian reoubt. What else do you know about him?
Speaker 2 (15:50):
You know, he really burst into consciousness this year. He's
obviously the CEO of Oracle. He's been spending a bunch
of time at the White House. We talked about him
announcing the five hundred billion dollars Stargate Data Center project
with Donald Trump just a few days after the inauguration.
He also helped finance his son David's acquisition of Paramount,
and apparently they're also looking at buying Warner Brothers Discovery.
(16:13):
I think the company is going to be called Para
Brothers Discover Warner.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Twenty twenty five really has been the year of Larry Ellison,
which is impressive given he's eighty one years old. I
read a piece in Bloomberg about him that charts some
of his enthusiasms. There is the private island, which you mentioned.
He also flies a jet, of course. He once shot
at his elbow in a high speed bicycle crash and
punctured his lung body surfing. He also had a cameo
(16:41):
in the Marvel movie Iron Man two and for one
brief glimmering moment. Last week, he became the world's richest man,
overtaking Elon. Ellison's personal wealth peaked at three hundred and
ninety three billion dollars, just ahead of Elon at three
hundred and eighty four billion dollars.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
How how did he overtake Elon?
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Well, it all happened because last Tuesday, Oracle announced their
quarterly results and they surprised the market with extraordinary growth
in spend on cloud computing services driven by AI demand
at other tech companies. Essentially, so they announced not one,
not two, not three, but four multi billion dollar AI
contracts for their cloud services with three different clients. One
(17:25):
of those deals was with open Ai and was worth
three hundred billion dollars. So Oracle shares shot up by
thirty six percent, and Larry Ellison is Oracle's largest shareholder,
earning forty percent of the company. So the events of
last week shot his personal net worth up by one
hundred billion dollars.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
I said that he fell back behind Elon, though he.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Did fall back behind Elon, but I think they're they're close,
although Elon's crown apparently is safe for now. Our friend
Nick Thompson who's the CEO of The Atlantic, had an
interesting take on the wider implications of this story. He
talked about how the fact that Oracle has not built
its own large language model makes it an attractive, non
competitive collaborator for a lot of other AI companies, and
(18:13):
so in a strange sense, Oracle's a kind of legacy
player has been rewarded for the fact that it wasn't
at the cutting edge of the air revolution and therefore
is seen as a non threatening partner by other tech companies.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
There's actually more good news for Oracle investors. As of
the time of this recording, the US and China are
expected to announce a deal for TikTok's operations in the
US to be taken over by Oracle, silver Lake and
in recent Horowitz, with US investors holding about an eighty
percent stake and Chinese investors owning the rest. But there's
(18:46):
actually another AI boom a bruin, and this one is
in the form of podcasts. I read this really crazy
article in the Hollywood Reporter recently about a new podcast
company called in Inception Point Ai, which is a name
that was only possibly created by AI.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Well, yeah, but I don't think the prompt was very
good because it's not much of a name for podcast company.
It's an inception.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Point as really it's really not, but I guess.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
A good name for an AI company.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
It is a good name for an AI company, which
this is. So. This podcast network has over five thousand
shows and they put out over three thousand episodes per
week in the last two years. They claim to have
ten million downloads. Inception Point is saying that their secret
is that they can make a podcast episode in about
an hour for one dollar or less, and they use
(19:36):
AI for everything, choosing episode topics based on Google and
social media trends and then releasing five different versions with
different SEO friendly titles to see which ones perform best.
The ones that do well get scaled up, and the
production process is largely automated, using one hundred and eighty
four custom AI agents to make episodes that are then
(19:57):
basically just given quick QC quality ch and some sound
design from a human producer.
Speaker 1 (20:02):
I don't doubt that you can make an AI podcast
episode for a dollar. I do wonder if a dollar
will be enough to pay somebody to spend an hour
listening to it, or perhaps the audience for these AI
podcasts is other AIS.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
It just might be you know, I don't think people
in the actual podcast industry are very thrilled, but the
inception points CEO Janine Wright, who actually used to be
the CEO of the podcast company Wondery, insists that this
is the future and this is my favorite part. She
says in the article, quote we believe that in the
near future, half of the people on the planet will
(20:39):
be AI, and we are the company that's bringing those
people to life.
Speaker 1 (20:43):
What a truly weird quote. When you're starting a new
business or fundraising, you always need some kind of bold
or provocative mission statement. But we believe that in future
half the people in the world will be AI is
definitely provocative.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
I want to introduce you to some of these people
that will make up half of the population of the world,
people including chef Claire Delish. She's a host. I think
I would imagine a food podcast or nature expert Nigel Thistledown,
who has to be English or else. He's definitely not real.
(21:19):
The episodes on this network cover everything from weather reports
to cooking and gardening, and the company is looking into
turning these AI personalities into chatbots that can then interact
with listeners, though they claim they want to steer clear
of developing anything that someone would accidentally have a deep
relationship with. I don't know how anyone could resist a
(21:41):
relationship with Chef Claire Delish on the basis of the
content that she's creating.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
But you know, I have to say, this story feels
like he was hallucinated by it, does AI. I'm also
somewhat curious about that ten million download number. Did you
find anything about any kind of listener responses to the
well of inspiring content?
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Well, other than all of the women who had fallen
in love with Nigel thistledown in a parasocial relationship. A
lot of people say that these episodes are not very good,
and they've also said that they have that kind of
uncanny quality that still screams text to speech. But Janine
Wright doesn't really seem to care. In the article, she says, quote,
I think that people who are still referring to all
(22:21):
AI generated content as aislop are probably lazy luddites. That's
I think she's talking to us, because there's a lot
of really good stuff out there. As for that purported
ten million download number, a quick glance at the company's
shows and reviews says they probably don't have a ton
of listeners. However, with such low overhead, they say they
only need about twenty downloads per episode to turn a profit.
(22:45):
Companies take note.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Yeah, it's funny that reference to lazy Luddites. We did
an episode on tech Stuff a couple of months ago
with a guy called Brian Merchant who wrote a book
about the real Luddites, who I think anything but lazy.
They were kind of pro testers who sacrificed, in many
cases their lives during the Industrial Revolution to protest against
how the mechanization of work was making people jobless and
(23:11):
driving them into poverty. So I think Genine right may
be wrong on that one. But on the topic of
unconvincing AI personalities, have you heard about the most recent
throwdown in the British Parliament?
Speaker 2 (23:24):
No? I have not. I don't feels the followed British politics.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
Yeah, I don't think that many people do in Britain
alone in the US. But there's an article in the
newspaper called The Independent about how several labor MPs have
been accused by their conservative counterparts of using AI to
write their speeches, and how could they tell well. One
of the people making these accusations is Conservative MP Tom Tuggandat,
(23:49):
who says that labor MP speeches are increasingly starting to
have more and more americanisms.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
Tom Tuggenhat works with Claire Delish and Nigel Thistledown. Did
he mention specifically what americanisms are being used?
Speaker 1 (24:05):
Yes, the phrase I rise to speak really got Tom
hot under the hat. He said, quote I rise to speak,
I rise to speak, I rise to speak. Chack GPT
knows you're there. But this is an americanism that we
don't use but still keep using it because it makes
it clear that this place has become absurd.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
As an American, I can say I've never once said
I rise to speak, maybe save for in my high
chair growing up.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
Yeah, as a bridge I've never used it either. But
I did some googling and it turns out I rise
to speak is frequently used in Congress in the US,
and it's had a meteoric rise in British Parliament recently.
Tom is correct to pointed out last year it was
used two hundred and thirty times in the whole year.
This year it's already been used six hundred and thirty
(24:54):
five times, and I think it's the kind of processed
type thing that people use in the House of Representatives
which is now infiltrated Parliament. And Tom tuggan Dat is
blaming chachipt for this lazy MP is using it to
write their speeches.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
Are there any other examples of AI in the MP speeches?
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Yeah, there are words like underscore, streamline, navigate, bustling, which
often used by large language models and are now popping
up more and more in Parliament, as are these commonly
used AI sentence constructions like not only X, but y
or the phrase not merely. And of course I mean
there's this interesting socio linguistic question here right, which is
(25:33):
are all of these MPs actually using chat gibt to
write their speeches or have the phrases of chat gibt
become so ubiquitous in human language that real humans are
unthinkingly now imitating machines.
Speaker 2 (25:47):
That's what I ask myself about your posts on LinkedIn.
And now to our final segment of the day, Chat
and Me, where we discuss how people are really using chatbots.
(26:09):
And remember we want to hear from you, so please
send your chat stories to our inbox Tech Stuff podcast
at gmail dot com. This week we heard from our
listener Shalon from Vancouver, Canada, and she told us Chat
helped her mom with a mysterious medical problem.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
So my mother is seventy four and she started having
knee pain about a year ago and it kind of
came out of nowhere, but it was pretty severe and
it was making it really difficult for her to sleep.
So obviously she talked to her doctor. The advice from
the doctor was just give it a little time to
d and then eventually she went back to the doctor.
(26:44):
The doctor said, okay, fine, we're going to give you
an X ray. There was absolutely nothing wrong with her knee.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Here's always comforting when you go to the doctor with
a medical problem like severe pain, and you get a
test and the answer comes back nothing wrong with you.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
It gets worse. A few months later, Shanan and her
mom finally got the doctor to give them a referral
for a physiotherapist, but the physiotherapist also couldn't find anything
wrong with her knee. Another nightmare. Shllan told us that
at this point, the injury was starting to have a
big impact on her mom's mental health as well as
her physical health.
Speaker 3 (27:15):
Her life was very diminished because she couldn't walk upstairs,
she was having really poor sleeps because the pain would
wake her up in the night, and overall, she just
started to feel like she was really declining in her health.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Overall, this sounds quite horrific. Does Chat ride to the rescue?
Speaker 2 (27:33):
This is where Chat comes to the rescue. Shllen's mom
was visiting her and as a kind of last resort,
they turned to Chat GPT. They listed all the symptoms
and told Chat the whole story, what all the different
doctors had said. She talked to Chat for about forty
five minutes, and then.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
It diagnosed her with a condition and gave her exercises
she needed to do, what she needed to do to
sleep at night, how she needed to sleep at night,
how she needed to walk during the day, et cetera,
et cetera.
Speaker 1 (28:02):
So did it work well?
Speaker 2 (28:04):
Shllon and her mom decided to do an experiment and
follow Chat's advice religiously for two weeks just to see
if it helped. Guess what completely healed, and Shalon said,
it's made a huge difference in her mom's life, not
just because the pain is gone, but because doctors had
been kind of dismissing it, and because it was also
one of the first experiences her mom had had with
the very scary reality of getting older.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
As people age, it's like one thing happens, and then
the next thing happens, and then the next thing happens,
and your body is falling apart. And so my mom
has never had like a major issue that she couldn't
overcome in her health, and so this was the first
thing that was like, Okay, I guess this is the beginning.
Speaker 2 (28:42):
Of the end, like it's over for me.
Speaker 3 (28:44):
And so the fact that she has been able to
overcome this and has her kneeback and her health back,
it's been really life changing for her.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
That's it for this week for Tech Stuff.
Speaker 1 (29:17):
I'm Kara Price and I'm os Valashin. This episode was
produced by Eliza Dennis, Melissa Slaughter, Julian Nutter, and Tyler Hill.
He was executive produced by me Kara Price and Kate
Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Kastrian Norvel for iHeart Podcasts, Kyle
Murdoch Missy's episode and also write our theme song.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
Join us next Wednesday for the first episode of the
new podcast on Crisper with Walter Isaacson. It's a five
part series that tells the story of how a revolutionary
gene editing tool was created.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
And please do rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts,
on Spotify, wherever you listen, and also write to us
at tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com. We're getting
so many great submissions for our Chat and me segment
and we love to get even more. We'll send you
a T shirt if you you like
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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