September 22, 2024 • 52 mins
Ever wondered how AI could reshape the future of journalism and media? Join Citizen Journalist host and futurist Cynthia L Elliott alongside tech journalist Pete Pachal as they unravel the transformative effects of artificial intelligence in the most compelling way possible. Explore AI's journey from humble chatbots and Siri to sophisticated tools simplifying complex tasks and hear Pete's firsthand experiences in embracing these advancements. They discuss the rapid pace of AI's evolution and the potential seismic shifts it could bring to various industries, including journalism.
Join us for an intriguing discussion on how AI is revolutionizing creative industries. From Midjourney and Dolly altering the way images are sourced to the broader implications for stock imagery and music, Pete and Cynthia, aka as Shaman Isis, delve into how generative systems are rendering traditional methods obsolete. They also tackle the controversial topic of AI's impact on employment, offering a nuanced perspective on how companies might be leveraging AI as a pretext for workforce reductions. Additionally, they explore the current creative stagnation in Hollywood, attributing it to evolving consumption habits.
The future of AI isn't just about technology; it's also about ethics, privacy, and the monopolistic tendencies of tech giants. Cynthia and Pete explore these critical issues, discussing everything from the role of AI in content personalization to the monopolistic barriers smaller players face in the search engine ma
Spiritual guru, two-time #1 best-selling author, and higher consciousness advocate Shaman Isis (aka Cynthia L. Elliott) is on a mission to turn the tide of the mental and spiritual health crisis with mindfulness practices, incredible events, powerful content, and motivational storytelling that inspire your heroes journey! Learn more about her books, courses, speaking engagements, book signings, and appearances at ShamanIsis.com.
Ready for a life transformation? Ready to bring your dreams to life? Then you will want Glowup With Shaman Isis: The Collection of inspiring books and courses filled with life lessons and practices that raise your vibration and consciousness.
Ready for a life transformation? Ready to bring your dreams to life? Then you will want Glowup With Shaman Isis: The Collection of inspiring books and courses filled with life lessons and practices that raise your vibration and consciousness.
GlowUp with Shaman Isis: An Edgy Podcast for Transformation and Higher Consciousness
Are you captivated by inspiring personal stories, hero’s journeys, and reflections on spirituality's place in modern life? Tune in to GlowUp with Shaman Isis, the bold and uplifting podcast by spiritual rockstar, 2x #1 best-selling author, and veteran podcaster Cynthia L. Elliott—aka Shaman Isis.
Discover more at ShamanIsis.com or SoulTechFoundation.org.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Hello, hello, hello and welcome to Citizen
Journalist.
I'm your host, shaman Isis,also known as Cynthia Elliott,
author, speaker and like 50other things because I'm old
like that.
I'm super excited to have youguys joining us in season two.
We have an incredible episodefor you today.
We're going to be talking aboutartificial intelligence and
this fourth industrialrevolution that we find
(00:32):
ourselves in Today.
I'm joined by Pete Paschall,who's an AI pioneer.
Honestly, you're teaching AI.
You've got so many interestingaspects to your work, pete.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Paschall, I wish I was a pioneer.
I feel like constantly I'mcoming from behind on this and,
by the way, thank you so muchfor having me on and having this
conversation.
I'm really excited to chat AIwith you, but I wouldn't say I
jumped on the bandwagon.
I have certainly been coveringAI as a journalist, so I was a
(01:04):
longtime tech journalist beforeI sort of made the leap to being
an independent creator coveringAI.
But I jumped into it last fallwhen it was extremely apparent
AI was going to change myprofession, my chosen profession
and industry journalism andmedia and so I dove in and just
(01:29):
was completely determined toteach myself all I could about
how to use it, how it waschanging things, and then pass
that knowledge on to peoplethrough the newsletter and some
classes that I do.
So that's my journey in termsof being immersed in AI, in
other words, is somewhat short,but I'm glad I sort of had that
background of covering tech forso long and, in particular,
(01:50):
google and all of the stuff theydid around AI to give me a
little boost.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Yeah, it's such a.
I find it fascinating.
A lot of people some of ourlisteners may not know this, but
AI has actually been around fora while now.
We just haven't reallyrecognized it as the AI we
understand now, because it wasin the form of chatbots and Siri
and Alexa.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Yeah, various features and apps.
You know you don't think ofGoogle autocomplete or Gmail
autocomplete so much as AI, butthat's like a primitive form of
AI and you know AI is defined ina number of different ways.
I generally think of it asoffloading human decision-making
to a machine, and the more youdo, I guess, the more AI
(02:43):
AI-ified something is.
But it is a term that is thrownaround a lot and a label that's
thrown around a lot andsometimes you really kind of
have to separate AI reality fromAI hype.
I know that's obvious, buttechnically, like anything, a
machine is kind of doing that ahuman could do and they required
(03:04):
some kind of cognition.
Is AI?
Now we're just sort of talkingabout degrees of AI.
Right, I don't think peoplethink so much of the Gmail
autocomplete as AI anymore.
It's doing much more complextasks, so a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
I love it.
I'm a huge fan.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
A funny story years ago.
So I'm a futurist and I'malways thinking um ahead.
It's it and it served.
It served me really well in mycareer.
But I've had two agencies andand I had this campaign idea pop
into my head one day.
I was like just ask watson.
This is like 12 years ago whenwatson first came out.
I sent them a letter but theynever got back to me.
I was like you guys, this is agreat campaign idea, but it's
(03:46):
because I was visualizing thefuture form of watson, where you
could actually ask it anything.
And uh, I'm pretty sure I foundout later that the technology
wasn't quite as evolved as allthat.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah, I'm kind of like surprised people haven't
latched on to that old seinfeldepisode more, where kramer is
the movie phone guy, you know,and his whole line is why don't
you just tell me what you want?
That's essentially AI in anutshell these days Like why
don't you know, don't go throughhoops, don't necessarily need
(04:19):
to do all the heavy liftingyourself.
Why don't you just tell me orask me what you want and I'll
just serve it up to you?
That's at least a promise of it.
There's obviously a lot ofconsequences to that on many
levels the more we sort of gothat way.
But it's a sort of a remarkablyprescient moment, even though
I'm sure they didn't plan itthat way.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Yeah, I think it's going to be a lot.
It's going to change everythingso radically yeah, it already
is.
Yeah, very much so, and it'sgoing to happen a lot faster
than it was predicted.
I remember three years ago,people were talking about 20
years from now and I was likeyou guys, I have to tell you it
was more like five to ten years.
I was like on the outside andit's going to change every
(05:04):
industry.
So what's your favorite aspectof AI that you personally enjoy?
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Oh, wow, that's a great question.
I don't know if I've ever beenasked that before.
My favorite bit of AI I likethe fact that it can stimulate a
skill I don't have and get meto a point where I can do
something, I guess, competently.
That would have taken me a lotof time to just learn the skill
(05:33):
and then a lot of time to applythat skill.
A good example is I use OpusClip a lot because you know I do
my own podcasts.
And the idea of finding theright places to clip, the idea
of clipping those elements fromthe podcast, the idea of doing
captions and sort of verydetailed editing to make sure
(05:57):
it's all good, I can do that.
I've learned a thing or twoabout Premiere Pro and whatever
else and it's just, it takes mea while.
You know it takes me a longtime and I'm not a video editor
by trade.
It's just something I've sortof gotten to do because you know
I want to do podcasts and so Ihad to learn some software.
And now with something likeOpus Clip and they should really
be paying me for this, but Imean literally it's a drag and
(06:27):
drop.
You know like I just upload thefile, it does virtually 90 of
what I just described.
Wow, and then you just kind ofgo in and trim out bits here and
there just to make sure it's uh, it's, it's a complete thought
or it's something that that youwant and I'm sure, like a year
from now, I might not even haveto do that.
Um, so that idea of like, wow,I'm not a video editor, but now
(06:48):
I look like this totallycompetent professional clipper
and editor and captioner, um,just through software, figuring
all this stuff out for me, um,it's really, really impressive.
Um, because it's like my tradeas a journalist for the longest
time was the written word Right.
(07:09):
So I I've written thousands ofarticles over the years,
agonized over headlines and theright way to craft a lead and
the perfect nut graph.
And the thing I agonize themost over is conclusions.
I really like to leave on sortof a high note.
Thing I agonize the most overis conclusions.
I really like to leave on sortof a high note and I do a lot of
work to get an article in astate where I'm proud of it.
(07:30):
And the thing is AI can't dothat yet, not on like.
In other words, it can't do, interms of a creative process,
that level of professionalityand precision that a human does.
Right now it can simulateaspects of that and then again
things will get better.
But by and large like if an aicranks out a draft of something,
(07:55):
even if I've trained it on myown voice and stuff, it's still
not quite there.
I've still got to, like, do adecent amount of work to get it
to a point where I could presentit as my own um, but for
someone less skilled as a writeryou know who the written word
isn't their profession.
I feel like they'd feel thesame way about that as I do
(08:17):
about the video editing stuff.
Right, because the video editoris going to look at what I do
and say like, well, I can dothat better, I could get in
better footage and blah, blah,blah.
Yeah, but I did it in like 10seconds and I'm not doing that.
And so I think that sort ofleveling up of everyone to sort
of a competent level on many ofthese tasks and skill sets is
(08:38):
one of the most magical parts ofAI.
It's sort of just equal.
It gets everyone on an equalplaying field.
That's much higher than it wasbefore.
But it gets everyone on anequal playing field that's much
higher than it was before, butyou still need that human
element to truly excel, and Ithink that's going to be around
for a while.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
It's amazing how much it's progressed.
When I started using generativetwo years ago now, it was very
obvious.
I could even see the artinfluences.
I loved.
I really went to a phase where Iwas doing ai art all the time
because I'm an I'm an artist andit was fun to be able to whip
things together using words too.
(09:14):
But, um, I could see theinfluences and I was like, hmm,
you know, I can actually.
I was like I know this, the guywho does this style is a
fantasy painter and and thatactually made me really.
I was was like wait a minute,how are they doing this?
That's what got me to digdeeper into AI, and now I'm
really you know, the Soul TechFoundation has the National
(09:36):
Institute for Ethics and AIbecause I started to become
really concerned that we weren'thaving enough conversations
about the ethics of a lot of thethings that were going on.
It's like, how do youcompensate all the artists and
the writers?
And that's something a lot ofpeople don't seem to get because
they think of it as it'swriting, but it's actually using
the talents of all of our pastpeople to feed itself, and so
(10:01):
it's interesting, I thinkthere's.
I mean as much as I love AI, Icould also argue about some of
the ways in which it was created.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Yeah, there's an interesting that you bring up
authors and writing and I feellike there's been a lot of focus
on articles and news and howthat's getting ingested.
And now when people ask forinformation on various topics,
it's getting regurgitated andsummarized by these AI engines
(10:28):
and hey, there's not a lot ofcompensation there and we're
starting to figure that out.
Right, you're starting to seepublishers make deals with big
AI companies like OpenAIPerplexity, which is sort of
famously this AI-powered search.
They now have a revenue sharingprogram with publishers.
So how long that takes toreally shake out how lucrative
(10:51):
that will end up being in thelong run, we'll have yet to see.
But one thing that isn't talkedabout so much lately because I
think the effects are lessobvious in AI are books.
There's been a lot of bookscertainly ingested by these AI
engines.
They've kind of ingested thewhole internet.
So if your book is in some formout there, it's in there.
(11:13):
And yes, there's been lawsuitsand there's some deals being
made with some of that level ofpublishing, but I don't think
it's reached sort of the samelevel of interest, right, and
again, I think it's because whenyou think about books, like you
typically don't go and ask fora summary of a specific book,
(11:35):
right, or it's hard to track anAI answer and whether it's
attributed to like a book asopposed to an article, and I do
feel like that that might be thenext dimension after this sort
of like, once publishing is sortof on its way, there's to being
sort of figured out and maybewe get a couple of more
(11:57):
fundamental rulings about whatis okay to ingest, because that
was sort of like that's sort ofthe big question that hasn't
really been answered on a legalbasis, like is it even okay to
to crawl and then scrape publicinformation?
Speaker 1 (12:13):
yeah, I think.
I think they did all of that assoon as possible because they
knew regulations would bebrought up.
I don't doubt for a second thateverything on youtube is
already somewhere, oh for sure.
And I asked, asked AI about aquestion.
I was asking it to writesomething and I was surprised
because it pulled something thatI knew was only in my second
(12:33):
book and I was like, how did itjust do that?
It just pulled some informationthat was in the book, the
second book I'd written, and Ithought that was really
interesting.
I have a love-hate relationshipwith AI in that.
I think it's amazing and Ithink it's going to be so
(12:53):
transformative.
There's so many areas.
The book I have coming outSeptember 7th is called A New
American Dream and it posits thefact that we can utilize the
age of AI the fourth industrialrevolution, the fact that we can
utilize the age of AI, thefourth industrial revolution, to
help reignite countries'manufacturing and production and
help rebuild the American dream, because it's collapsed due to
(13:13):
greed.
And so I love AI and in thatbook I used AI research, and I
say that right up front becausemy first two books were just
those were written by mecompletely.
I was really capable of writingthen, um, and so I I embrace it
and I I love it for manyaspects, but I do think that a
lot of the creatives, uh, willget put out of business well,
(13:39):
certainly in some industriesthat's much more stark than
others.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
You can already feel, if not see, a lot of what's
happening around imagery, right.
So stock imagery is kind of deadbecause anyone can now go to a
generative system, whether it'sMidjourney, which just recently
launched its web interface,that's going to be much easier
(14:05):
than Discord, so usage of thatis going to spike or Dolly or
whatever, and you can get animage fairly realistic about
virtually anything you want.
And I think about how, as ajournalist, I would often write
an article where the subjectmaterial would be more abstract.
(14:26):
Right, it could be about likemarket movements or something
like that, or sort of esoterictech concepts, and you
constantly hunt for this perfectstock image that doesn't exist.
Hopefully it's on the servicethat your publication subscribes
to, and then you eventuallysort of settle for something.
But now you can just plug yourarticle into an engine and say
(14:50):
give me an image that representsthis article and then iterate a
couple of times and you've gotsomething.
And you can do that for 20bucks a month for some
subscription.
So the whole idea of thesecreative industries, I think,
collapsing or the economics ofthem becoming very unfavorable
(15:13):
very quickly.
That is much more apparent in,I think, the imagery side of
things than maybe the writtenside of things, because you
could always sort of argue.
with articles like the freshjournalism that's coming out
every day, it takes a while forAI engines to ingest that
there's a value to it thatpeople will continue to pay for
(15:37):
in some form, whether it'sadvertising or what have you.
And again, AI is obviouslyaffecting that too, but the
effect isn't as stark Forimagery, in particular stock
imagery, holy cow like.
You can just see it immediately.
like this is going to changeeverything and they really need
to figure out the legality of itand the economics of it.
(15:57):
Uh, very, very quickly.
And people are but, um, there'sa lot of nuance to it.
You know, like you mentionedasking for imagery in someone's
style, for example, how doesthat work and can you license
your style, which is somethingthat maybe was done in a where
(16:17):
anyone with a distinctive styleof either photography or art
could go to some centralizedplatform and then license that
out?
This is already sort ofstarting to happen in music.
(16:37):
I was just recently at an AIconference and I met a guy who
was building a platform.
He was very well connected inthe music industry and he's
building essentially thatplatform that will allow artists
music artists to record theirvoice or essentially provide
their voice in a licensed way,and so it's taking what's
already happening in a you know,obviously in an ad hoc way,
(17:00):
someone will take I don't knowDrake's voice or Taylor Swift's
voice and create a, a new songwith that and then somehow make
a lot of money on it by byputting it on spotify.
Even with the ai disclosure,right, they're not trying to
fool you into thinking this issomething these artists did.
It's like hey, this is an aisong I just created.
Well, the artist, you know, Ithink most people agree the
(17:21):
artist, who whose voice that is,should probably be compensated.
Yeah.
So but rather than preventingthis from happening, regulating
against it, putting in excessivecopyright which I think you
know, copyright is important,but the history of copyright
protection has always sort ofbeen an overreach but by
(17:42):
creating a platform that allowsfor that to happen in a, uh,
licensed way, in a sort oflegally safe way, uh, with the
right veto power by any party,um, makes a lot of sense and and
could actually be a greatrevenue stream for these artists
if they're popular enough andpeople want to use their stuff.
(18:04):
So I think that that'll happen.
Some form of that will probablyhappen with visual media.
Like I said for publishing,it's kind of starting to happen
in a different way.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
It's interesting to see how many industries we were
talking before we startedfilming about how some
industries and companies areusing AI as just an excuse to
trim the fat.
If you will, I look at it asjust being greedy, but that's me
.
I grew up in the 70s, whencompanies actually took care of
(18:36):
their people.
Those were the days.
Yeah, there's collapse going onall around us and I don't mean
to be alarmist sounding, but Imean Hollywood has been gutted
in the last year and everyone'ssaying it's AI.
Do you think that's it or doyou just think that things are
going through?
Our consumption habits havechanged and that's what's having
(18:59):
the effect yeah, I would saythe latter mostly to be
qualified.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
I don't work in Hollywood, I'm not an expert on
it, but I know a lot of peoplewho are and I've interviewed a
few for the media co-pilot, andthere's definitely been a bit of
a creative glut that Hollywoodis in.
I mean you can see sort of theperformance of what has been
their go to franchise, thesuperhero movie and with
Deadpool and Wolverine being theexception, most of them have
(19:27):
not done super great.
So Hollywood goes through thesesort of creative crises every
decade or so and they sort offigure out some way forward.
But I think what's happeningnow is what you mentioned.
There's a sort of like a changein user habits that predates
(19:48):
what we think of as AI.
I mean you see sort of theattention splintering in things
like YouTube and TikTok and therise again of user-generated
content right, which was a thing20 years ago and now it's a new
thing again.
But I think what you knowpeople have figured out is sort
of the right platforms and theright way to serve these things
up.
I mean TikTok, the effect onthat, on youth and attention
(20:10):
spans and whatever else, hasbeen massive, you know.
I mean YouTube would never havelaunched its shorts if TikTok
hadn't sort of cracked the codeon the short video format.
Crack the code on this shortvideo format.
So I think we're seeing largelya move to that formatting and
(20:33):
that sort of attentionsplintering, which I think has
been the biggest challenge forHollywood.
But, that said, ai is certainlya part of that.
You know, not just in terms ofthe content people are serving
up.
A lot of people are starting toserve up interesting takes on
AI and using AI to build videos,and they can even in a way that
isn't necessarily spamming andthrowing out just tons of crap,
(20:55):
but using it in ways that youknow, doing great special
effects that Hollywood studioswould have spent millions of
dollars on just a few years ago.
But the bigger thing is, ai nowknows us much better, and this
isn't necessarily what we thinkof as the generative AI, the
stuff that we've mostly beentalking about, the AI of
(21:16):
analyzing big data sets and, inthis case, user data.
Like what do you like?
What did you scroll up on?
What did you comment on?
What did you spend time on andnot necessarily like and really
understanding how to keep usengaged on these things that
aren't movies and longer formstuff.
Again, you could certainly arguethe health of this, and that's
probably not healthy for peoplein attention spans, but the
(21:39):
power of AI to give you ultrapersonalization, um isization,
is very, very apparent.
And if you pair that withgenerative AI, so the two
different kind of flavors of AIone understanding audience,
essentially, and then serving upexactly what that audience
(21:59):
wants.
Even if you don't have it right, you can generate it.
Or take something you do haveand tailor it for the person you
know.
Like good example, what we'reseeing right now with big
newspapers, so the New YorkTimes, the Washington Post, some
others are giving you spokenword articles and so, again,
(22:27):
this is more ai, it's voicecloning, ai, but they'll, uh,
essentially have a default voiceand they'll have every article
spoken to you in this defaultvoice.
And some apps have gone evenfurther with that and done.
We'll have snoop dogg read it toyou, or gwyneth paltrow or what
have you.
Um, but the idea that it's nottoo far from that idea to say
like, well, don't just speak thearticle to me, speak it to me
in a way that does it in fiveminutes, not 20.
(22:50):
Or speak it to me with thisbackground music, or give me a
playlist of articles that'sactually starting to become a
feature in some of these.
So it's this ultracustomization of my experience
that you can apply generativetechnology to, and I think
within five years we're going tohave like almost it's not so
(23:13):
much a topic bubble like thefilter bubbles we talk about,
but you're going to have kind ofa bubble of your own experience
on how you consume news andmedia, if you sort of take maybe
you're a podcast person, maybeyou're a person who likes
summaries, maybe you're a personwho likes to stretch out with
things and you're going to beable to kind of uh, customize
that experience to an extentthat you really couldn't before
(23:37):
so interesting.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
Uh, you know, I I'm I'm very excited about a lot of
the changes that are coming in,because I really believe that ai
can, if we ahead of it, whichis we're already getting behind
it.
The fact, you know it remindsme right now, reminds me a
little bit of in the early 2000s, when I was whining, pointing
out that I was concerned aboutGoogle and the numbers.
(24:02):
I was like you guys don'tunderstand the power of this,
and people were like oh you knowit's just a search engine.
I was like, no, you don'tunderstand.
This is allowing a company todecide.
I'm like eventually they willbe deciding what stories they
think you should be consumingand which ones that they would
rather suppress.
That is already happening andit's going to get worse,
(24:23):
especially as they becomebecause the companies, the
longer they're around, the moreinvolved in politics they get
and I'm a big fan of google, but, um, they do have too much
control over what the averageperson sees.
So, so, as a somebody who spent20 years in marketing and pr,
um I I I became very concernedat the results that would show
(24:45):
up, because it's the same mediaoutlets, over and, over and over
again, who have their ownnarrative, and I was like this
is not healthy.
Years ago, when I first startedusing Google, the search engine
results would push, wouldpresent to you you know.
Basically, it was kind of likea rolling the dice you just get,
you know whatever it thought itwas ranking the highest, but
(25:07):
there was nothing really being.
It wasn't agendized.
But the results are definitelythat way now, and last year I
got kind of obsessed with thisidea.
Oh, I was like, you know, Icould actually reverse engineer.
This was a terrible idea at thetime but I thought it was
genius anyway.
It's kind of mad genius, but Iwas like wait a minute, if
content is influencing AI,because it's reading content,
(25:28):
then you can actually influenceAI by the kind of content that
it's reading.
So if you put out a bunch ofstories for big brands that
position a brand, you couldliterally erase its past history
and replace it with a newnarrative and I was like that's
a new angle on PR agencies.
And then I was like, wait,that's not a very good idea,
cindy, what's up?
Weaponizing AI so that brandscould write their history.
(25:50):
But it was going to happenanyway.
I just find all of that superinteresting.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
There's an interesting quirk.
You know there's a lot to touchon in what you're talking about
, but there's an interestingquirk with AI.
I actually got a credit uh, Iforget the writer, but it was.
It was in the neiman lab uhnewsletter and they observed
that some of the informationthat these large language models
have ingested is actually nolonger on the web like they.
(26:21):
It's.
It's kind of gone away, uh,whether it's bad archiving or
deliberate action or whatever,and yet that information can
still manifest in an answer andmaybe that will even perpetuate
into new versions.
So we have what is it?
Gpt 4.0?
Now, right, so GPT 5 and 6.
(26:43):
I'm not quite sure how chat GPTdecides5 and 6, I'm not quite
sure how ChatGPT decides todeprecate things, but I don't
know if the mere absence of awebpage then means they would
deprecate it.
I think there's cases for andagainst that, but assuming it
doesn't get deprecated and itcontinues on, I'm not sure what.
(27:03):
I honestly don't know if thisis bad or good.
Right, because there's a senseof, like the internet.
You know it's dead, the data isdead, but we'll always remember
it.
You know what I mean.
Like you know, a relative diesthat's kind of the thing you say
, and maybe that's a good thingthat large language models
remember this dead data Because,as a journalist one of the most
this is a very frustratingthing for journalists is that if
(27:26):
you've had a long career, ifyou're lucky enough to been
writing for a while, you'll findthat some of the publications
you wrote for years ago go outof business or get merged or
they have a bad uh migrationwith their cms and you, if you
haven't archived your own work,you will lose that work work
even if you have like links toit.
(27:46):
And it's very frustratingbecause it's like there's no
central archive.
I mean there's the WaybackMachine, but it's very sketchy
right, like you know.
Good luck finding your stuff inthe Internet Archive, but if
it's in a large language modelsomewhere, maybe it lives on,
you know.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Yeah, it presents an interesting situation because,
know and I think for me, mine isyou know, history is so
important because we can, we useit to learn from, uh, and we
know that history gets writtenby the winners.
Uh, you know, just looking athow heavily edited something
like the bible is and this isn'tabout religion, I mean anybody
who knows anything about editingwill tell you that it's been
edited heavily and repeatedly bypeople translated too.
There was a lot of uh libertiestaken yeah, yeah, and, and you
(28:29):
know when I think about it'slike you know you can rewrite
your history in ai because it'sthe new search engine.
I find my, my google searcheshave dropped probably by 50,
because I usually hop intoperplexity or or chat gpt to
look something up.
Anyway, it is interesting.
I think this is what you'vereminded me of an angle that
(28:50):
drives me crazy about technology.
So, because most of the peoplethat work in tech are men when
they design and engineer a lotof these things which is one of
the reasons why we created theSoul Tech Institute, the
National Institute for Ethicsand AI because it was like these
are things that were not beingtalked about and we talk about
being ethical and fair and notbiased.
But it's like, even when theydesigned Google, as a woman
(29:11):
who's been around for 25 years,you have to actually know in
business, that is, you have toactually know all of my names to
actually see my work, and eventhen, excuse me, and even then a
lot of it's disappearing.
So the proof of a lot of theresults of the history of work
that I have as a female isunfindable and unprovable.
(29:35):
But the unfindable part isbecause when they designed the
way that the systems wereworking.
They didn't give you the optionof connecting your
personalities, if you will.
So, men, when they set it up,they didn't think about the fact
that women's names change.
Does that make sense?
So, unless you know that I'vebeen married and know those
(29:55):
specific names, you can'tactually see that and there's no
mechanism for fixing that.
And it doesn't sound like a bigdeal, but what most companies do
before they interview somebodyor consider hiring somebody, is
they go Google them, they golook them up and they see what's
there.
And people are dismissing thatas like, not important.
It's like, oh, it would beinteresting if I how about if I
took all of your stuff off theinternet and then?
(30:17):
And then you experience peopletelling you that they can't find
anything about you, you don'texist as a human being, then
maybe perhaps you'll begin tounderstand that it's actually
important, it's a fundamentaldesign flaw, and that when they
built the search engine, theydidn't consider the fact that
women have multiple names.
And how do they actuallyaddress that outside of it?
And I've had people actuallysay, well, get a Wikipedia page,
(30:38):
it's like you do.
People know that you have topay for those.
I don't think most people knowthat you have to pay for those.
It just I think it'sinteresting and it highlights
that thing that I'm talkingabout, which is there's aspects
of what is happening right nowthat's not being talked about
because it's happening at such arapid pace.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
I actually didn't know you had to pay for those.
That's something I just learnedtoday.
But I guess if you reach acertain level of notoriety, so
one just appears.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
Yeah, I mean if you come out and you have the number
one album in the world, they'regoing to probably do a page for
you.
But unless you're at that scale, I would say 90% of all
Wikipedia pages for people thatare live now they pay.
The platform is free.
(31:30):
There's no other way to getsomebody to see.
It's a lot of work actually,because I've owned two agencies
so I've had clients say hey, canwe get a Wikipedia page?
Absolutely Anybody can get aWikipedia page if they have
enough citations and success intheir history.
It's interesting, it's like$800 to $2,000.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Gotcha and do you pay the agency?
Speaker 1 (31:52):
It's usually well, you can pay an agency to do it,
but it's usually they're hiringpeople usually from like Fiverr
places like that.
These are Wikipedia editorswho've worked really hard to
kind of build up their accessand ability.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
Ah, I see Got it.
So it's still a little bitunofficial in terms of like how
wikipedia works, but it's justhow it works in the real world.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Yeah, yeah.
Commit all this time tobuilding a page for somebody
that it's not like, say,somebody they're a huge fan of.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Yeah yeah, well, I mean the google thing, I mean
it's it's Well, I mean theGoogle thing I query it simply
(32:54):
wouldn't succeed, right.
So I but I definitely share ina lot of the frustration that
you talked about earlier, likein the early 2000s, mid 2000s, I
was working for NBC Universaland doing a tech blog for them,
and this was actually I could,when you actually could get
someone to reply to your emailslike a human, which is no longer
(33:17):
the case, certainly and they Iwas trying to get it listed on
Google News and you had to jumpthrough all these hoops, and I
understand that the, the levelof, of quality or whatever that
they wanted to maintain throughall these hoops, and I
understand that the level ofquality or whatever that they
wanted to maintain was a bigfactor.
But to the point of it's notgoing to surface interesting
things done by niche players orupstarts, that choice alone
(33:43):
reinforces the status quo andI'm very interested to see how
things will play out now that alot of the concerns that we've
been alluding to, which is tosay, is Google a monopoly?
Is that generally bad for aninformation ecosystem, even if
their intent is benign?
(34:03):
That's kind of been answered.
The government has stepped inand finally made this
declaration.
Now there's going to be anappeal.
Obviously intent is benign.
Um, that's, you know, kind ofan answer.
You know it's there.
The government has stepped inand finally made this
declaration.
Now there's going to be anappeal.
Obviously there's going to be aprocess.
Nothing's changing overnight, um, but uh, it makes me, um, I'm
almost hesitant to say hopefulbecause I don't want to sound
too biased, but it does make mehopeful for a more competitive
(34:25):
future where players likePerplexity can come in and
potentially have not necessarilya better search product from a
technical aspect, but havesomething that better matches
the needs and habits of a futureaudience.
And what does that do to themarketplace?
(34:46):
With a Google that might beseparated, so that search and
advertising and all the otherinteresting things they do are
kind of separate, that could bea new era of chaos, certainly,
but from chaos comes a new orderthat's generally stronger than
(35:07):
before, right?
So it does feel like we're atthat point, and AI will simply
be an accelerant to all this,because it's completely changing
habits.
Like you see yourself, you'redoing the perplexity more often
than you were.
Google, and same here I'm doing.
Perplexity, chat, gpt, and samehere I'm doing perplexity, chat
(35:30):
, gpt, various other chatbotsand the stuff I'm searching for,
or just information.
I want less and less of that isserved by a page of links, but
that's only what Google offersoffers.
I mean, they're obviously doingtheir own overviews, but I kind
of feel like the the attachmentof my expectation of that page
(35:50):
of links is still there,regardless of what google is
actually giving me right, like Iwould, I would argue that I
think most people would get anai overview uh, at least a
significant number of themprobably just scroll down
because they're like what isthis?
I'm not sure what it is.
I know google gives me thelinks, show me the links, and
then there's always been, youknow, the last few years
(36:11):
certainly which is part of thereason, um, maybe the mousetrap
is getting a little dusty isthat there's a lot of sponsored
links, there's a lot of boxes,oh, and that whole thing that
happened the other day?
Speaker 1 (36:23):
uh, they busted the, the.
And this isn't about politics,it's about an example.
Google had to say oh gosh, thatfell through the cracks.
They found out that theDemocrats were taking news
articles, relabeling them,giving them new headlines.
Speaker 2 (36:42):
Oh right.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
Basically further endorsed Kamala and that they
were all showing up in theirthings and Google's like, oops,
we don't know how that happened.
It's like I'm sorry, but I findthat so hard to believe.
It's kind of karmic that theyended up getting called out for
being a monopoly.
But this is what happens.
Like we've all known, they werea monopoly for 25 years or 20,
(37:05):
maybe more, like 22 years.
I mean, come on on, they'vebeen a monopoly and at this
point it's almost impossible toscrape, scrape back on uh, you
know the, the power that they'veaccumulated yeah I just hope in
ai.
Um, one of my big concerns isthat it's like the same people
who control so much already andhave their fingers in
(37:27):
everybody's phones and data, andthe fact that we've even let
that happen and that it's neverbeen fixed.
You know, like the zucker bergsof the world, um, being able to
basically find out when you goto the bathroom what you ate for
breakfast, you're, you'redating like it's.
It's really epic and everybodynow has access to all that and I
just don't understand how wegot.
And everybody now has access toall that and I just don't
(37:47):
understand how we got there.
We have a tendency to do thatand I'm I do have concerns with
ai that a few very powerfulpeople have already scraped
everything they want and they'repositioning it how they want
and we may never be able to getit back to, to unwind that knot
well, if the new york timessucceeds in a lawsuit, um, and
(38:08):
there's a very definitive rulingthere, we could be in a future
where all these models get haveto be thrown out.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
I don't think that's going to happen, by the way.
I do think whatever ruling ismade, yeah, there's just going
to be like some fine, and thenwe'll figure out how to go
forward, probably.
I mean, you know, we'll see,we'll see how it uh, how it
shakes out.
But you know, like I'm actuallyreally interested, uh, assuming
there is some kind of breakupto google and again that's a big
assumption right, there's stillappeals, um, that that's didn't
(38:36):
quite happen to microsoft, eventhough that ruling definitely
hurt them in the long term andhad them in microsoft's case in
their famous antitrust relief in2000,.
That sort of paved the way forGoogle and for other companies,
because Microsoft was kind ofhad its hands tied in terms of
the markets it wanted to competein, even though it wasn't
(38:57):
broken up.
But assuming there's sort of abroken up future, I'm really
fascinated to see where the AIactually goes right, because
Google has search and it alsohas ads and it also has Google G
Suite.
It's got a few different things.
But the point is it's applyingAI across all of these.
(39:17):
And if the AI is still pairedwith search, I'm not sure if
that's a healthy outcome,because you can see already the
conflict they sort of have asboth an AI foundation model
provider and a search enginethat's trying to give you the
(39:40):
best content, right, becausetheir official stance on what
they surface in search resultsis that, well, we don't care if
it's human written or if it's AIwritten, as long as it's good
information, we're going tosurface it and that's probably
like, on a first principleslevel, the correct stance.
But there's a you know, in thereal world kind of reality here
(40:03):
of, well, yes, not all AI isspam, but pretty much all spam
today is AI.
You know, like any, if you're aspammer, you are of course using
AI to create your content,whether you're spamming via
email or spamming just theinternet with lots of content
that you hope is going to rank.
So it's got to be some kind ofsignal.
(40:26):
And I again I don't know quitehow, certainly, like I don't
have inside information onGoogle, but there has to be a
certain amount of conflict oflike, well, I want to filter out
more of this AI crap, but isthat going to hurt our business
in the long term, because wehave a vested interest in our AI
(40:46):
technology succeeding.
So that to me is like sort ofthe most immediate and apparent
conflict of interest in thiscurrent sort of world, and it
would be interesting to see ifthe foundational model business
just becomes its own thing, sothat business just competes with
open AI and anthropic orwhatever and just doesn't do
(41:06):
anything else which seems likeit would be probably the most
straightforward outcome.
Um, and then search, and and alltheir other stuff.
Just sort of get spun out andall these other businesses be
very cool, very interesting.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
I'm wondering how, cause I know there's a sort of a
settling within AI right nowcause they're realizing that, uh
, the chat GPDs of the world areawesome, but I think they were
hoping to see a more immediatefinancial windfall from it, and
I think they're struggling alittle bit to figure out how to
(41:41):
monetize it.
And then, on the other oppositeend, you've got robots, which
are already rolling out in Asia,of course, because're always
like ahead of us, um, becausethey stay focused, uh, they
don't let things get distracted,um, as easily.
But, um, you know, robots willbe in every.
We're already to some level.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
We're already cyborgs you know, this has turned us
into cyborgs, um, already, butuh, it's.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
It's going to be interesting in five to ten years
.
You know, people are going tobe getting I was thought about
this besides me, besides beingactual cyborgs, and people will
be getting body modification.
That's tech based um.
It's going to be a reallyinteresting future and it's
coming so fast and and so ifyou're, if you're the chat gpts
of the world, I think they'rekind of like, okay, how are we
going to make money out of this?
(42:27):
And then, on the other end,you've got robotics and a lot of
the interesting cool technology.
I'm a mindfulness teacher, aconsciousness teacher, and so
I'm really fascinated by theinstruments that are using
biofeedback and they're doingbrain scans and telling runners
how much oxygen they have.
It's mind-blowing.
(42:48):
So I guess I don't know why I'msharing all that.
I just want my brains likelisten to all these toys and
whistles and all the cool stuffthat's coming.
Speaker 2 (42:58):
Well, there is a thing, a point of view that I
think is a little disturbing ifyou think about it, as more
technology has progressed withsearch engines and web 2.0 and
sort of the centralization ofonline thinking and habits, and
now with AI, where thesesummaries are giving you this
(43:20):
sort of homogenized view of theworld, and, by and large, a lot
of these AI models work verysimilarly with the same data
sets, are we all starting tothink the same?
You know in in sort of very realways, and I this.
There's a sort of natural endpoint to this, and you brought
up cybernetics and things likeneural link, and so if that sort
(43:43):
of becomes a thing that isn'tjust for disabled folks and it
becomes something we all justsort of have thinking the same
stuff and we all just feel likeeveryone should have be part of
(44:08):
this collective hive mind, uh,and then over time, that just
becomes what everyone does, andthen we forcibly make people to
be a part of it hundreds ofyears from now.
I mean, that's the nightmare,dystopian future, um, that we
know I'm amazed at people.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
so I, as a consciousness teacher, I'm very
much involved in my intuitionand I read energy all the time.
I know when somebody's lying tome.
I always have.
For decades I've been able topredict a lot of interesting
things, like, just as an example, I got in a car with a guy once
and when he got out I turned tomy assistant and I said he is
going to be on the Bachelor in ayear and then a year after that
(44:46):
he's going to come out as gayand he's going to get another TV
show.
And she was like what?
I was like no, don't ask me,these things come to me.
And I bring that up because youbrought up Neuralink.
And I find it fascinatingbecause what it posits is that
not only we've created acomputer that can do something
that we don't think humans cando, because I'll have people go
(45:07):
oh, you're psychic, and I'm likeI hate that word but we are all
capable of reading each other.
If we were just present, Idon't think it's like it is.
It's a great power to have, butI don't think it's superhuman.
I think it's quite human andand and what I was so glad to
see Neuralink they call itsomething that refers to being
(45:30):
telepathy, that it is literallyreading the thoughts and
performing what the person'sthinking.
But it also, I realized, wait aminute, if that's coming, does
this mean that we're all goingto be walking down the streets
going?
Did you hear what he wasthinking?
Speaker 2 (45:46):
Could be Someday.
I think that might beinevitable.
Like in terms of technology, itall comes down to whether or
not you think humanconsciousness has something
special to it, or is there aprocess, is it something that we
may already be sort ofsimulating the basicness of with
(46:07):
generative AI?
And you know there's sort of adark take on that in a book
called the Circle that came outsome time ago, about 10 years
ago now, think there is hope forpeople to sort of put in the
(46:30):
right barriers and the right.
I guess digging the rightditches to ensure sort of the
flow of this river that we're onwill steer us in the right
direction.
And you know, again, technologyis wondrous but you need to have
your checks, your balances.
Your respect for privacy iskind of one of the things that
obviously this, what we'retalking about now, um, is
(46:51):
strongly matters too.
And uh, yeah, I mean again,like I I don't necessarily think
, uh, intervention's always good.
You know you can stymieinnovation, and innovation is
something that's really reallyimportant to ensure we do keep
keep progressing forward andsort of coming up with new ideas
(47:12):
.
But something like theexecutive order on AI that came
out last year, you know thereare.
You can quibble with whateverprovisions are in it, and I
think there has been a lot ofquibbling.
Provisions are in it and Ithink there has been a lot of
quibbling.
But the thrust of it, the idealike, okay, this, these big
societal, uh things that can beaffected by the application of
(47:33):
this tech at scale, likeeveryone has a stake in that,
and so it is.
It is proper for the governmentto come in and have an interest
.
I think, as, as the rep, youknow supposedly our
representatives anyway, and soI'm not going down that rabbit
hole, but I mean, it's theoutlet that we have to have that
(47:53):
voice, and so, yeah, let'sfigure it out.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
They're going to have to pass a law that says that
you're not allowed to readpeople's thoughts without their
permission, or people are goingto be walking around wearing
helmets all the time, orsomething.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
Well then people will be the snake oil salesman
saying that this is the helmetthat blocks it, even though it's
just like wood or somethinglike that.
Speaker 1 (48:15):
Oh, my gosh Pete, this has been such an incredible
conversation.
You know normally I only dolike half an hour, but it's been
so much fun speaking to you andlearning all about you know the
work that you do.
Speaker 2 (48:33):
I would love for you to share with our listeners um,
uh, your about your newsletterand your work and where people
can find you?
Sure, I'm on substack at themedia co-pilot so you can google
that or just go to mediaco-pilotsubstackcom.
Please subscribe.
I also offer uh classes that Imentioned for creative teams or
individuals.
If you want to learn the insand outs of AI and how to use it
, how to apply it to creativework in ethical ways, then
(48:55):
please check it out atmediacopilotai and check out the
learn section and I've gotquick classes like one hour
basics.
I have a three hour class whereI really get nice and deep and,
again, I tailor these forpeople in creative fields,
especially professionals.
So like journalists, marketers,pr professionals that's what I
(49:17):
focus on.
If you want to upskill anduplevel your work in any of
those areas, call me, get intouch.
You can also email me at peteat mediac copilotai, if you have
any questions about any of that.
Speaker 1 (49:31):
Very cool, very cool.
What an excellent episode forour season two.
You guys, thank you so much forlistening.
If you're not already, you know, subscribed, what are you
thinking?
Intelligent listening oncitizen journalist is something
that you need regularly in yourlife.
Uh, if you would like to learnmore about, uh, my books, um,
(49:53):
please go to shaman isiscom.
I do have a new american dream,uh conscious ai for a future
full of promise, coming out onseptember 8th, 7th.
Uh, you can pre-order it now.
I'm'm very fortunate that ithit number one in all of its
categories.
You can also find out about mymemoir, memory Mansion, on my
(50:14):
website, and if you'd like tofind out about the work that I
do at the SoulTech AI Foundation, visit soultechfoundationorg.
We are committed to helpingunderserved communities thrive
in the age of AI by teachingthem core AI skills as well as
mindset, so that they can movefrom survival mode to thriving
mode.
(50:34):
Anyway, that's atcelltechfoundationorg.
Pete, thanks again for comingon.
I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (50:41):
Well, thank you so much, I had so much fun, and
congratulations on the book.
Thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (50:45):
Yeah, I appreciate it .
We'll speak to you soon.
Okay, bye, you guys, have anamazing week.
Take care, thank you.
Hello, hello, hello and welcome to Citizen
Journalist.
I'm your host, shaman Isis,also known as Cynthia Elliott,
author, speaker and like 50other things because I'm old
like that.
I'm super excited to have youguys joining us in season two.
We have an incredible episodefor you today.
We're going to be talking aboutartificial intelligence and
this fourth industrialrevolution that we find
(00:32):
ourselves in Today.
I'm joined by Pete Paschall,who's an AI pioneer.
Honestly, you're teaching AI.
You've got so many interestingaspects to your work, pete.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Paschall, I wish I was a pioneer.
I feel like constantly I'mcoming from behind on this and,
by the way, thank you so muchfor having me on and having this
conversation.
I'm really excited to chat AIwith you, but I wouldn't say I
jumped on the bandwagon.
I have certainly been coveringAI as a journalist, so I was a
(01:04):
longtime tech journalist beforeI sort of made the leap to being
an independent creator coveringAI.
But I jumped into it last fallwhen it was extremely apparent
AI was going to change myprofession, my chosen profession
and industry journalism andmedia and so I dove in and just
(01:29):
was completely determined toteach myself all I could about
how to use it, how it waschanging things, and then pass
that knowledge on to peoplethrough the newsletter and some
classes that I do.
So that's my journey in termsof being immersed in AI, in
other words, is somewhat short,but I'm glad I sort of had that
background of covering tech forso long and, in particular,
(01:50):
google and all of the stuff theydid around AI to give me a
little boost.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Yeah, it's such a.
I find it fascinating.
A lot of people some of ourlisteners may not know this, but
AI has actually been around fora while now.
We just haven't reallyrecognized it as the AI we
understand now, because it wasin the form of chatbots and Siri
and Alexa.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Yeah, various features and apps.
You know you don't think ofGoogle autocomplete or Gmail
autocomplete so much as AI, butthat's like a primitive form of
AI and you know AI is defined ina number of different ways.
I generally think of it asoffloading human decision-making
to a machine, and the more youdo, I guess, the more AI
(02:43):
AI-ified something is.
But it is a term that is thrownaround a lot and a label that's
thrown around a lot andsometimes you really kind of
have to separate AI reality fromAI hype.
I know that's obvious, buttechnically, like anything, a
machine is kind of doing that ahuman could do and they required
(03:04):
some kind of cognition.
Is AI?
Now we're just sort of talkingabout degrees of AI.
Right, I don't think peoplethink so much of the Gmail
autocomplete as AI anymore.
It's doing much more complextasks, so a lot of stuff.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
I love it.
I'm a huge fan.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
A funny story years ago.
So I'm a futurist and I'malways thinking um ahead.
It's it and it served.
It served me really well in mycareer.
But I've had two agencies andand I had this campaign idea pop
into my head one day.
I was like just ask watson.
This is like 12 years ago whenwatson first came out.
I sent them a letter but theynever got back to me.
I was like you guys, this is agreat campaign idea, but it's
(03:46):
because I was visualizing thefuture form of watson, where you
could actually ask it anything.
And uh, I'm pretty sure I foundout later that the technology
wasn't quite as evolved as allthat.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah, I'm kind of like surprised people haven't
latched on to that old seinfeldepisode more, where kramer is
the movie phone guy, you know,and his whole line is why don't
you just tell me what you want?
That's essentially AI in anutshell these days Like why
don't you know, don't go throughhoops, don't necessarily need
(04:19):
to do all the heavy liftingyourself.
Why don't you just tell me orask me what you want and I'll
just serve it up to you?
That's at least a promise of it.
There's obviously a lot ofconsequences to that on many
levels the more we sort of gothat way.
But it's a sort of a remarkablyprescient moment, even though
I'm sure they didn't plan itthat way.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Yeah, I think it's going to be a lot.
It's going to change everythingso radically yeah, it already
is.
Yeah, very much so, and it'sgoing to happen a lot faster
than it was predicted.
I remember three years ago,people were talking about 20
years from now and I was likeyou guys, I have to tell you it
was more like five to ten years.
I was like on the outside andit's going to change every
(05:04):
industry.
So what's your favorite aspectof AI that you personally enjoy?
Speaker 2 (05:11):
Oh, wow, that's a great question.
I don't know if I've ever beenasked that before.
My favorite bit of AI I likethe fact that it can stimulate a
skill I don't have and get meto a point where I can do
something, I guess, competently.
That would have taken me a lotof time to just learn the skill
(05:33):
and then a lot of time to applythat skill.
A good example is I use OpusClip a lot because you know I do
my own podcasts.
And the idea of finding theright places to clip, the idea
of clipping those elements fromthe podcast, the idea of doing
captions and sort of verydetailed editing to make sure
(05:57):
it's all good, I can do that.
I've learned a thing or twoabout Premiere Pro and whatever
else and it's just, it takes mea while.
You know it takes me a longtime and I'm not a video editor
by trade.
It's just something I've sortof gotten to do because you know
I want to do podcasts and so Ihad to learn some software.
And now with something likeOpus Clip and they should really
be paying me for this, but Imean literally it's a drag and
(06:27):
drop.
You know like I just upload thefile, it does virtually 90 of
what I just described.
Wow, and then you just kind ofgo in and trim out bits here and
there just to make sure it's uh, it's, it's a complete thought
or it's something that that youwant and I'm sure, like a year
from now, I might not even haveto do that.
Um, so that idea of like, wow,I'm not a video editor, but now
(06:48):
I look like this totallycompetent professional clipper
and editor and captioner, um,just through software, figuring
all this stuff out for me, um,it's really, really impressive.
Um, because it's like my tradeas a journalist for the longest
time was the written word Right.
(07:09):
So I I've written thousands ofarticles over the years,
agonized over headlines and theright way to craft a lead and
the perfect nut graph.
And the thing I agonize themost over is conclusions.
I really like to leave on sortof a high note.
Thing I agonize the most overis conclusions.
I really like to leave on sortof a high note and I do a lot of
work to get an article in astate where I'm proud of it.
(07:30):
And the thing is AI can't dothat yet, not on like.
In other words, it can't do, interms of a creative process,
that level of professionalityand precision that a human does.
Right now it can simulateaspects of that and then again
things will get better.
But by and large like if an aicranks out a draft of something,
(07:55):
even if I've trained it on myown voice and stuff, it's still
not quite there.
I've still got to, like, do adecent amount of work to get it
to a point where I could presentit as my own um, but for
someone less skilled as a writeryou know who the written word
isn't their profession.
I feel like they'd feel thesame way about that as I do
(08:17):
about the video editing stuff.
Right, because the video editoris going to look at what I do
and say like, well, I can dothat better, I could get in
better footage and blah, blah,blah.
Yeah, but I did it in like 10seconds and I'm not doing that.
And so I think that sort ofleveling up of everyone to sort
of a competent level on many ofthese tasks and skill sets is
(08:38):
one of the most magical parts ofAI.
It's sort of just equal.
It gets everyone on an equalplaying field.
That's much higher than it wasbefore.
But it gets everyone on anequal playing field that's much
higher than it was before, butyou still need that human
element to truly excel, and Ithink that's going to be around
for a while.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
It's amazing how much it's progressed.
When I started using generativetwo years ago now, it was very
obvious.
I could even see the artinfluences.
I loved.
I really went to a phase where Iwas doing ai art all the time
because I'm an I'm an artist andit was fun to be able to whip
things together using words too.
(09:14):
But, um, I could see theinfluences and I was like, hmm,
you know, I can actually.
I was like I know this, the guywho does this style is a
fantasy painter and and thatactually made me really.
I was was like wait a minute,how are they doing this?
That's what got me to digdeeper into AI, and now I'm
really you know, the Soul TechFoundation has the National
(09:36):
Institute for Ethics and AIbecause I started to become
really concerned that we weren'thaving enough conversations
about the ethics of a lot of thethings that were going on.
It's like, how do youcompensate all the artists and
the writers?
And that's something a lot ofpeople don't seem to get because
they think of it as it'swriting, but it's actually using
the talents of all of our pastpeople to feed itself, and so
(10:01):
it's interesting, I thinkthere's.
I mean as much as I love AI, Icould also argue about some of
the ways in which it was created.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Yeah, there's an interesting that you bring up
authors and writing and I feellike there's been a lot of focus
on articles and news and howthat's getting ingested.
And now when people ask forinformation on various topics,
it's getting regurgitated andsummarized by these AI engines
(10:28):
and hey, there's not a lot ofcompensation there and we're
starting to figure that out.
Right, you're starting to seepublishers make deals with big
AI companies like OpenAIPerplexity, which is sort of
famously this AI-powered search.
They now have a revenue sharingprogram with publishers.
So how long that takes toreally shake out how lucrative
(10:51):
that will end up being in thelong run, we'll have yet to see.
But one thing that isn't talkedabout so much lately because I
think the effects are lessobvious in AI are books.
There's been a lot of bookscertainly ingested by these AI
engines.
They've kind of ingested thewhole internet.
So if your book is in some formout there, it's in there.
(11:13):
And yes, there's been lawsuitsand there's some deals being
made with some of that level ofpublishing, but I don't think
it's reached sort of the samelevel of interest, right, and
again, I think it's because whenyou think about books, like you
typically don't go and ask fora summary of a specific book,
(11:35):
right, or it's hard to track anAI answer and whether it's
attributed to like a book asopposed to an article, and I do
feel like that that might be thenext dimension after this sort
of like, once publishing is sortof on its way, there's to being
sort of figured out and maybewe get a couple of more
(11:57):
fundamental rulings about whatis okay to ingest, because that
was sort of like that's sort ofthe big question that hasn't
really been answered on a legalbasis, like is it even okay to
to crawl and then scrape publicinformation?
Speaker 1 (12:13):
yeah, I think.
I think they did all of that assoon as possible because they
knew regulations would bebrought up.
I don't doubt for a second thateverything on youtube is
already somewhere, oh for sure.
And I asked, asked AI about aquestion.
I was asking it to writesomething and I was surprised
because it pulled something thatI knew was only in my second
(12:33):
book and I was like, how did itjust do that?
It just pulled some informationthat was in the book, the
second book I'd written, and Ithought that was really
interesting.
I have a love-hate relationshipwith AI in that.
I think it's amazing and Ithink it's going to be so
(12:53):
transformative.
There's so many areas.
The book I have coming outSeptember 7th is called A New
American Dream and it posits thefact that we can utilize the
age of AI the fourth industrialrevolution, the fact that we can
utilize the age of AI, thefourth industrial revolution, to
help reignite countries'manufacturing and production and
help rebuild the American dream, because it's collapsed due to
(13:13):
greed.
And so I love AI and in thatbook I used AI research, and I
say that right up front becausemy first two books were just
those were written by mecompletely.
I was really capable of writingthen, um, and so I I embrace it
and I I love it for manyaspects, but I do think that a
lot of the creatives, uh, willget put out of business well,
(13:39):
certainly in some industriesthat's much more stark than
others.
Speaker 2 (13:44):
You can already feel, if not see, a lot of what's
happening around imagery, right.
So stock imagery is kind of deadbecause anyone can now go to a
generative system, whether it'sMidjourney, which just recently
launched its web interface,that's going to be much easier
(14:05):
than Discord, so usage of thatis going to spike or Dolly or
whatever, and you can get animage fairly realistic about
virtually anything you want.
And I think about how, as ajournalist, I would often write
an article where the subjectmaterial would be more abstract.
(14:26):
Right, it could be about likemarket movements or something
like that, or sort of esoterictech concepts, and you
constantly hunt for this perfectstock image that doesn't exist.
Hopefully it's on the servicethat your publication subscribes
to, and then you eventuallysort of settle for something.
But now you can just plug yourarticle into an engine and say
(14:50):
give me an image that representsthis article and then iterate a
couple of times and you've gotsomething.
And you can do that for 20bucks a month for some
subscription.
So the whole idea of thesecreative industries, I think,
collapsing or the economics ofthem becoming very unfavorable
(15:13):
very quickly.
That is much more apparent in,I think, the imagery side of
things than maybe the writtenside of things, because you
could always sort of argue.
with articles like the freshjournalism that's coming out
every day, it takes a while forAI engines to ingest that
there's a value to it thatpeople will continue to pay for
(15:37):
in some form, whether it'sadvertising or what have you.
And again, AI is obviouslyaffecting that too, but the
effect isn't as stark Forimagery, in particular stock
imagery, holy cow like.
You can just see it immediately.
like this is going to changeeverything and they really need
to figure out the legality of itand the economics of it.
(15:57):
Uh, very, very quickly.
And people are but, um, there'sa lot of nuance to it.
You know, like you mentionedasking for imagery in someone's
style, for example, how doesthat work and can you license
your style, which is somethingthat maybe was done in a where
(16:17):
anyone with a distinctive styleof either photography or art
could go to some centralizedplatform and then license that
out?
This is already sort ofstarting to happen in music.
(16:37):
I was just recently at an AIconference and I met a guy who
was building a platform.
He was very well connected inthe music industry and he's
building essentially thatplatform that will allow artists
music artists to record theirvoice or essentially provide
their voice in a licensed way,and so it's taking what's
already happening in a you know,obviously in an ad hoc way,
(17:00):
someone will take I don't knowDrake's voice or Taylor Swift's
voice and create a, a new songwith that and then somehow make
a lot of money on it by byputting it on spotify.
Even with the ai disclosure,right, they're not trying to
fool you into thinking this issomething these artists did.
It's like hey, this is an aisong I just created.
Well, the artist, you know, Ithink most people agree the
(17:21):
artist, who whose voice that is,should probably be compensated.
Yeah.
So but rather than preventingthis from happening, regulating
against it, putting in excessivecopyright which I think you
know, copyright is important,but the history of copyright
protection has always sort ofbeen an overreach but by
(17:42):
creating a platform that allowsfor that to happen in a, uh,
licensed way, in a sort oflegally safe way, uh, with the
right veto power by any party,um, makes a lot of sense and and
could actually be a greatrevenue stream for these artists
if they're popular enough andpeople want to use their stuff.
(18:04):
So I think that that'll happen.
Some form of that will probablyhappen with visual media.
Like I said for publishing,it's kind of starting to happen
in a different way.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
It's interesting to see how many industries we were
talking before we startedfilming about how some
industries and companies areusing AI as just an excuse to
trim the fat.
If you will, I look at it asjust being greedy, but that's me
.
I grew up in the 70s, whencompanies actually took care of
(18:36):
their people.
Those were the days.
Yeah, there's collapse going onall around us and I don't mean
to be alarmist sounding, but Imean Hollywood has been gutted
in the last year and everyone'ssaying it's AI.
Do you think that's it or doyou just think that things are
going through?
Our consumption habits havechanged and that's what's having
(18:59):
the effect yeah, I would saythe latter mostly to be
qualified.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
I don't work in Hollywood, I'm not an expert on
it, but I know a lot of peoplewho are and I've interviewed a
few for the media co-pilot, andthere's definitely been a bit of
a creative glut that Hollywoodis in.
I mean you can see sort of theperformance of what has been
their go to franchise, thesuperhero movie and with
Deadpool and Wolverine being theexception, most of them have
(19:27):
not done super great.
So Hollywood goes through thesesort of creative crises every
decade or so and they sort offigure out some way forward.
But I think what's happeningnow is what you mentioned.
There's a sort of like a changein user habits that predates
(19:48):
what we think of as AI.
I mean you see sort of theattention splintering in things
like YouTube and TikTok and therise again of user-generated
content right, which was a thing20 years ago and now it's a new
thing again.
But I think what you knowpeople have figured out is sort
of the right platforms and theright way to serve these things
up.
I mean TikTok, the effect onthat, on youth and attention
(20:10):
spans and whatever else, hasbeen massive, you know.
I mean YouTube would never havelaunched its shorts if TikTok
hadn't sort of cracked the codeon the short video format.
Crack the code on this shortvideo format.
So I think we're seeing largelya move to that formatting and
(20:33):
that sort of attentionsplintering, which I think has
been the biggest challenge forHollywood.
But, that said, ai is certainlya part of that.
You know, not just in terms ofthe content people are serving
up.
A lot of people are starting toserve up interesting takes on
AI and using AI to build videos,and they can even in a way that
isn't necessarily spamming andthrowing out just tons of crap,
(20:55):
but using it in ways that youknow, doing great special
effects that Hollywood studioswould have spent millions of
dollars on just a few years ago.
But the bigger thing is, ai nowknows us much better, and this
isn't necessarily what we thinkof as the generative AI, the
stuff that we've mostly beentalking about, the AI of
(21:16):
analyzing big data sets and, inthis case, user data.
Like what do you like?
What did you scroll up on?
What did you comment on?
What did you spend time on andnot necessarily like and really
understanding how to keep usengaged on these things that
aren't movies and longer formstuff.
Again, you could certainly arguethe health of this, and that's
probably not healthy for peoplein attention spans, but the
(21:39):
power of AI to give you ultrapersonalization, um isization,
is very, very apparent.
And if you pair that withgenerative AI, so the two
different kind of flavors of AIone understanding audience,
essentially, and then serving upexactly what that audience
(21:59):
wants.
Even if you don't have it right, you can generate it.
Or take something you do haveand tailor it for the person you
know.
Like good example, what we'reseeing right now with big
newspapers, so the New YorkTimes, the Washington Post, some
others are giving you spokenword articles and so, again,
(22:27):
this is more ai, it's voicecloning, ai, but they'll, uh,
essentially have a default voiceand they'll have every article
spoken to you in this defaultvoice.
And some apps have gone evenfurther with that and done.
We'll have snoop dogg read it toyou, or gwyneth paltrow or what
have you.
Um, but the idea that it's nottoo far from that idea to say
like, well, don't just speak thearticle to me, speak it to me
in a way that does it in fiveminutes, not 20.
(22:50):
Or speak it to me with thisbackground music, or give me a
playlist of articles that'sactually starting to become a
feature in some of these.
So it's this ultracustomization of my experience
that you can apply generativetechnology to, and I think
within five years we're going tohave like almost it's not so
(23:13):
much a topic bubble like thefilter bubbles we talk about,
but you're going to have kind ofa bubble of your own experience
on how you consume news andmedia, if you sort of take maybe
you're a podcast person, maybeyou're a person who likes
summaries, maybe you're a personwho likes to stretch out with
things and you're going to beable to kind of uh, customize
that experience to an extentthat you really couldn't before
(23:37):
so interesting.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
Uh, you know, I I'm I'm very excited about a lot of
the changes that are coming in,because I really believe that ai
can, if we ahead of it, whichis we're already getting behind
it.
The fact, you know it remindsme right now, reminds me a
little bit of in the early 2000s, when I was whining, pointing
out that I was concerned aboutGoogle and the numbers.
(24:02):
I was like you guys don'tunderstand the power of this,
and people were like oh you knowit's just a search engine.
I was like, no, you don'tunderstand.
This is allowing a company todecide.
I'm like eventually they willbe deciding what stories they
think you should be consumingand which ones that they would
rather suppress.
That is already happening andit's going to get worse,
(24:23):
especially as they becomebecause the companies, the
longer they're around, the moreinvolved in politics they get
and I'm a big fan of google, but, um, they do have too much
control over what the averageperson sees.
So, so, as a somebody who spent20 years in marketing and pr,
um I I I became very concernedat the results that would show
(24:45):
up, because it's the same mediaoutlets, over and, over and over
again, who have their ownnarrative, and I was like this
is not healthy.
Years ago, when I first startedusing Google, the search engine
results would push, wouldpresent to you you know.
Basically, it was kind of likea rolling the dice you just get,
you know whatever it thought itwas ranking the highest, but
(25:07):
there was nothing really being.
It wasn't agendized.
But the results are definitelythat way now, and last year I
got kind of obsessed with thisidea.
Oh, I was like, you know, Icould actually reverse engineer.
This was a terrible idea at thetime but I thought it was
genius anyway.
It's kind of mad genius, but Iwas like wait a minute, if
content is influencing AI,because it's reading content,
(25:28):
then you can actually influenceAI by the kind of content that
it's reading.
So if you put out a bunch ofstories for big brands that
position a brand, you couldliterally erase its past history
and replace it with a newnarrative and I was like that's
a new angle on PR agencies.
And then I was like, wait,that's not a very good idea,
cindy, what's up?
Weaponizing AI so that brandscould write their history.
(25:50):
But it was going to happenanyway.
I just find all of that superinteresting.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
There's an interesting quirk.
You know there's a lot to touchon in what you're talking about
, but there's an interestingquirk with AI.
I actually got a credit uh, Iforget the writer, but it was.
It was in the neiman lab uhnewsletter and they observed
that some of the informationthat these large language models
have ingested is actually nolonger on the web like they.
(26:21):
It's.
It's kind of gone away, uh,whether it's bad archiving or
deliberate action or whatever,and yet that information can
still manifest in an answer andmaybe that will even perpetuate
into new versions.
So we have what is it?
Gpt 4.0?
Now, right, so GPT 5 and 6.
(26:43):
I'm not quite sure how chat GPTdecides5 and 6, I'm not quite
sure how ChatGPT decides todeprecate things, but I don't
know if the mere absence of awebpage then means they would
deprecate it.
I think there's cases for andagainst that, but assuming it
doesn't get deprecated and itcontinues on, I'm not sure what.
(27:03):
I honestly don't know if thisis bad or good.
Right, because there's a senseof, like the internet.
You know it's dead, the data isdead, but we'll always remember
it.
You know what I mean.
Like you know, a relative diesthat's kind of the thing you say
, and maybe that's a good thingthat large language models
remember this dead data Because,as a journalist one of the most
this is a very frustratingthing for journalists is that if
(27:26):
you've had a long career, ifyou're lucky enough to been
writing for a while, you'll findthat some of the publications
you wrote for years ago go outof business or get merged or
they have a bad uh migrationwith their cms and you, if you
haven't archived your own work,you will lose that work work
even if you have like links toit.
(27:46):
And it's very frustratingbecause it's like there's no
central archive.
I mean there's the WaybackMachine, but it's very sketchy
right, like you know.
Good luck finding your stuff inthe Internet Archive, but if
it's in a large language modelsomewhere, maybe it lives on,
you know.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Yeah, it presents an interesting situation because,
know and I think for me, mine isyou know, history is so
important because we can, we useit to learn from, uh, and we
know that history gets writtenby the winners.
Uh, you know, just looking athow heavily edited something
like the bible is and this isn'tabout religion, I mean anybody
who knows anything about editingwill tell you that it's been
edited heavily and repeatedly bypeople translated too.
There was a lot of uh libertiestaken yeah, yeah, and, and you
(28:29):
know when I think about it'slike you know you can rewrite
your history in ai because it'sthe new search engine.
I find my, my google searcheshave dropped probably by 50,
because I usually hop intoperplexity or or chat gpt to
look something up.
Anyway, it is interesting.
I think this is what you'vereminded me of an angle that
(28:50):
drives me crazy about technology.
So, because most of the peoplethat work in tech are men when
they design and engineer a lotof these things which is one of
the reasons why we created theSoul Tech Institute, the
National Institute for Ethicsand AI because it was like these
are things that were not beingtalked about and we talk about
being ethical and fair and notbiased.
But it's like, even when theydesigned Google, as a woman
(29:11):
who's been around for 25 years,you have to actually know in
business, that is, you have toactually know all of my names to
actually see my work, and eventhen, excuse me, and even then a
lot of it's disappearing.
So the proof of a lot of theresults of the history of work
that I have as a female isunfindable and unprovable.
(29:35):
But the unfindable part isbecause when they designed the
way that the systems wereworking.
They didn't give you the optionof connecting your
personalities, if you will.
So, men, when they set it up,they didn't think about the fact
that women's names change.
Does that make sense?
So, unless you know that I'vebeen married and know those
(29:55):
specific names, you can'tactually see that and there's no
mechanism for fixing that.
And it doesn't sound like a bigdeal, but what most companies do
before they interview somebodyor consider hiring somebody, is
they go Google them, they golook them up and they see what's
there.
And people are dismissing thatas like, not important.
It's like, oh, it would beinteresting if I how about if I
took all of your stuff off theinternet and then?
(30:17):
And then you experience peopletelling you that they can't find
anything about you, you don'texist as a human being, then
maybe perhaps you'll begin tounderstand that it's actually
important, it's a fundamentaldesign flaw, and that when they
built the search engine, theydidn't consider the fact that
women have multiple names.
And how do they actuallyaddress that outside of it?
And I've had people actuallysay, well, get a Wikipedia page,
(30:38):
it's like you do.
People know that you have topay for those.
I don't think most people knowthat you have to pay for those.
It just I think it'sinteresting and it highlights
that thing that I'm talkingabout, which is there's aspects
of what is happening right nowthat's not being talked about
because it's happening at such arapid pace.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
I actually didn't know you had to pay for those.
That's something I just learnedtoday.
But I guess if you reach acertain level of notoriety, so
one just appears.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
Yeah, I mean if you come out and you have the number
one album in the world, they'regoing to probably do a page for
you.
But unless you're at that scale, I would say 90% of all
Wikipedia pages for people thatare live now they pay.
The platform is free.
(31:30):
There's no other way to getsomebody to see.
It's a lot of work actually,because I've owned two agencies
so I've had clients say hey, canwe get a Wikipedia page?
Absolutely Anybody can get aWikipedia page if they have
enough citations and success intheir history.
It's interesting, it's like$800 to $2,000.
Speaker 2 (31:49):
Gotcha and do you pay the agency?
Speaker 1 (31:52):
It's usually well, you can pay an agency to do it,
but it's usually they're hiringpeople usually from like Fiverr
places like that.
These are Wikipedia editorswho've worked really hard to
kind of build up their accessand ability.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
Ah, I see Got it.
So it's still a little bitunofficial in terms of like how
wikipedia works, but it's justhow it works in the real world.
Speaker 1 (32:14):
Yeah, yeah.
Commit all this time tobuilding a page for somebody
that it's not like, say,somebody they're a huge fan of.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Yeah yeah, well, I mean the google thing, I mean
it's it's Well, I mean theGoogle thing I query it simply
(32:54):
wouldn't succeed, right.
So I but I definitely share ina lot of the frustration that
you talked about earlier, likein the early 2000s, mid 2000s, I
was working for NBC Universaland doing a tech blog for them,
and this was actually I could,when you actually could get
someone to reply to your emailslike a human, which is no longer
(33:17):
the case, certainly and they Iwas trying to get it listed on
Google News and you had to jumpthrough all these hoops, and I
understand that the, the levelof, of quality or whatever that
they wanted to maintain throughall these hoops, and I
understand that the level ofquality or whatever that they
wanted to maintain was a bigfactor.
But to the point of it's notgoing to surface interesting
things done by niche players orupstarts, that choice alone
(33:43):
reinforces the status quo andI'm very interested to see how
things will play out now that alot of the concerns that we've
been alluding to, which is tosay, is Google a monopoly?
Is that generally bad for aninformation ecosystem, even if
their intent is benign?
(34:03):
That's kind of been answered.
The government has stepped inand finally made this
declaration.
Now there's going to be anappeal.
Obviously intent is benign.
Um, that's, you know, kind ofan answer.
You know it's there.
The government has stepped inand finally made this
declaration.
Now there's going to be anappeal.
Obviously there's going to be aprocess.
Nothing's changing overnight, um, but uh, it makes me, um, I'm
almost hesitant to say hopefulbecause I don't want to sound
too biased, but it does make mehopeful for a more competitive
(34:25):
future where players likePerplexity can come in and
potentially have not necessarilya better search product from a
technical aspect, but havesomething that better matches
the needs and habits of a futureaudience.
And what does that do to themarketplace?
(34:46):
With a Google that might beseparated, so that search and
advertising and all the otherinteresting things they do are
kind of separate, that could bea new era of chaos, certainly,
but from chaos comes a new orderthat's generally stronger than
(35:07):
before, right?
So it does feel like we're atthat point, and AI will simply
be an accelerant to all this,because it's completely changing
habits.
Like you see yourself, you'redoing the perplexity more often
than you were.
Google, and same here I'm doing.
Perplexity, chat, gpt, and samehere I'm doing perplexity, chat
(35:30):
, gpt, various other chatbotsand the stuff I'm searching for,
or just information.
I want less and less of that isserved by a page of links, but
that's only what Google offersoffers.
I mean, they're obviously doingtheir own overviews, but I kind
of feel like the the attachmentof my expectation of that page
(35:50):
of links is still there,regardless of what google is
actually giving me right, like Iwould, I would argue that I
think most people would get anai overview uh, at least a
significant number of themprobably just scroll down
because they're like what isthis?
I'm not sure what it is.
I know google gives me thelinks, show me the links, and
then there's always been, youknow, the last few years
(36:11):
certainly which is part of thereason, um, maybe the mousetrap
is getting a little dusty isthat there's a lot of sponsored
links, there's a lot of boxes,oh, and that whole thing that
happened the other day?
Speaker 1 (36:23):
uh, they busted the, the.
And this isn't about politics,it's about an example.
Google had to say oh gosh, thatfell through the cracks.
They found out that theDemocrats were taking news
articles, relabeling them,giving them new headlines.
Speaker 2 (36:42):
Oh right.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
Basically further endorsed Kamala and that they
were all showing up in theirthings and Google's like, oops,
we don't know how that happened.
It's like I'm sorry, but I findthat so hard to believe.
It's kind of karmic that theyended up getting called out for
being a monopoly.
But this is what happens.
Like we've all known, they werea monopoly for 25 years or 20,
(37:05):
maybe more, like 22 years.
I mean, come on on, they'vebeen a monopoly and at this
point it's almost impossible toscrape, scrape back on uh, you
know the, the power that they'veaccumulated yeah I just hope in
ai.
Um, one of my big concerns isthat it's like the same people
who control so much already andhave their fingers in
(37:27):
everybody's phones and data, andthe fact that we've even let
that happen and that it's neverbeen fixed.
You know, like the zucker bergsof the world, um, being able to
basically find out when you goto the bathroom what you ate for
breakfast, you're, you'redating like it's.
It's really epic and everybodynow has access to all that and I
just don't understand how wegot.
And everybody now has access toall that and I just don't
(37:47):
understand how we got there.
We have a tendency to do thatand I'm I do have concerns with
ai that a few very powerfulpeople have already scraped
everything they want and they'repositioning it how they want
and we may never be able to getit back to, to unwind that knot
well, if the new york timessucceeds in a lawsuit, um, and
(38:08):
there's a very definitive rulingthere, we could be in a future
where all these models get haveto be thrown out.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
I don't think that's going to happen, by the way.
I do think whatever ruling ismade, yeah, there's just going
to be like some fine, and thenwe'll figure out how to go
forward, probably.
I mean, you know, we'll see,we'll see how it uh, how it
shakes out.
But you know, like I'm actuallyreally interested, uh, assuming
there is some kind of breakupto google and again that's a big
assumption right, there's stillappeals, um, that that's didn't
(38:36):
quite happen to microsoft, eventhough that ruling definitely
hurt them in the long term andhad them in microsoft's case in
their famous antitrust relief in2000,.
That sort of paved the way forGoogle and for other companies,
because Microsoft was kind ofhad its hands tied in terms of
the markets it wanted to competein, even though it wasn't
(38:57):
broken up.
But assuming there's sort of abroken up future, I'm really
fascinated to see where the AIactually goes right, because
Google has search and it alsohas ads and it also has Google G
Suite.
It's got a few different things.
But the point is it's applyingAI across all of these.
(39:17):
And if the AI is still pairedwith search, I'm not sure if
that's a healthy outcome,because you can see already the
conflict they sort of have asboth an AI foundation model
provider and a search enginethat's trying to give you the
(39:40):
best content, right, becausetheir official stance on what
they surface in search resultsis that, well, we don't care if
it's human written or if it's AIwritten, as long as it's good
information, we're going tosurface it and that's probably
like, on a first principleslevel, the correct stance.
But there's a you know, in thereal world kind of reality here
(40:03):
of, well, yes, not all AI isspam, but pretty much all spam
today is AI.
You know, like any, if you're aspammer, you are of course using
AI to create your content,whether you're spamming via
email or spamming just theinternet with lots of content
that you hope is going to rank.
So it's got to be some kind ofsignal.
(40:26):
And I again I don't know quitehow, certainly, like I don't
have inside information onGoogle, but there has to be a
certain amount of conflict oflike, well, I want to filter out
more of this AI crap, but isthat going to hurt our business
in the long term, because wehave a vested interest in our AI
(40:46):
technology succeeding.
So that to me is like sort ofthe most immediate and apparent
conflict of interest in thiscurrent sort of world, and it
would be interesting to see ifthe foundational model business
just becomes its own thing, sothat business just competes with
open AI and anthropic orwhatever and just doesn't do
(41:06):
anything else which seems likeit would be probably the most
straightforward outcome.
Um, and then search, and and alltheir other stuff.
Just sort of get spun out andall these other businesses be
very cool, very interesting.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
I'm wondering how, cause I know there's a sort of a
settling within AI right nowcause they're realizing that, uh
, the chat GPDs of the world areawesome, but I think they were
hoping to see a more immediatefinancial windfall from it, and
I think they're struggling alittle bit to figure out how to
(41:41):
monetize it.
And then, on the other oppositeend, you've got robots, which
are already rolling out in Asia,of course, because're always
like ahead of us, um, becausethey stay focused, uh, they
don't let things get distracted,um, as easily.
But, um, you know, robots willbe in every.
We're already to some level.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
We're already cyborgs you know, this has turned us
into cyborgs, um, already, butuh, it's.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
It's going to be interesting in five to ten years
.
You know, people are going tobe getting I was thought about
this besides me, besides beingactual cyborgs, and people will
be getting body modification.
That's tech based um.
It's going to be a reallyinteresting future and it's
coming so fast and and so ifyou're, if you're the chat gpts
of the world, I think they'rekind of like, okay, how are we
going to make money out of this?
(42:27):
And then, on the other end,you've got robotics and a lot of
the interesting cool technology.
I'm a mindfulness teacher, aconsciousness teacher, and so
I'm really fascinated by theinstruments that are using
biofeedback and they're doingbrain scans and telling runners
how much oxygen they have.
It's mind-blowing.
(42:48):
So I guess I don't know why I'msharing all that.
I just want my brains likelisten to all these toys and
whistles and all the cool stuffthat's coming.
Speaker 2 (42:58):
Well, there is a thing, a point of view that I
think is a little disturbing ifyou think about it, as more
technology has progressed withsearch engines and web 2.0 and
sort of the centralization ofonline thinking and habits, and
now with AI, where thesesummaries are giving you this
(43:20):
sort of homogenized view of theworld, and, by and large, a lot
of these AI models work verysimilarly with the same data
sets, are we all starting tothink the same?
You know in in sort of very realways, and I this.
There's a sort of natural endpoint to this, and you brought
up cybernetics and things likeneural link, and so if that sort
(43:43):
of becomes a thing that isn'tjust for disabled folks and it
becomes something we all justsort of have thinking the same
stuff and we all just feel likeeveryone should have be part of
(44:08):
this collective hive mind, uh,and then over time, that just
becomes what everyone does, andthen we forcibly make people to
be a part of it hundreds ofyears from now.
I mean, that's the nightmare,dystopian future, um, that we
know I'm amazed at people.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
so I, as a consciousness teacher, I'm very
much involved in my intuitionand I read energy all the time.
I know when somebody's lying tome.
I always have.
For decades I've been able topredict a lot of interesting
things, like, just as an example, I got in a car with a guy once
and when he got out I turned tomy assistant and I said he is
going to be on the Bachelor in ayear and then a year after that
(44:46):
he's going to come out as gayand he's going to get another TV
show.
And she was like what?
I was like no, don't ask me,these things come to me.
And I bring that up because youbrought up Neuralink.
And I find it fascinatingbecause what it posits is that
not only we've created acomputer that can do something
that we don't think humans cando, because I'll have people go
(45:07):
oh, you're psychic, and I'm likeI hate that word but we are all
capable of reading each other.
If we were just present, Idon't think it's like it is.
It's a great power to have, butI don't think it's superhuman.
I think it's quite human andand and what I was so glad to
see Neuralink they call itsomething that refers to being
(45:30):
telepathy, that it is literallyreading the thoughts and
performing what the person'sthinking.
But it also, I realized, wait aminute, if that's coming, does
this mean that we're all goingto be walking down the streets
going?
Did you hear what he wasthinking?
Speaker 2 (45:46):
Could be Someday.
I think that might beinevitable.
Like in terms of technology, itall comes down to whether or
not you think humanconsciousness has something
special to it, or is there aprocess, is it something that we
may already be sort ofsimulating the basicness of with
(46:07):
generative AI?
And you know there's sort of adark take on that in a book
called the Circle that came outsome time ago, about 10 years
ago now, think there is hope forpeople to sort of put in the
(46:30):
right barriers and the right.
I guess digging the rightditches to ensure sort of the
flow of this river that we're onwill steer us in the right
direction.
And you know, again, technologyis wondrous but you need to have
your checks, your balances.
Your respect for privacy iskind of one of the things that
obviously this, what we'retalking about now, um, is
(46:51):
strongly matters too.
And uh, yeah, I mean again,like I I don't necessarily think
, uh, intervention's always good.
You know you can stymieinnovation, and innovation is
something that's really reallyimportant to ensure we do keep
keep progressing forward andsort of coming up with new ideas
(47:12):
.
But something like theexecutive order on AI that came
out last year, you know thereare.
You can quibble with whateverprovisions are in it, and I
think there has been a lot ofquibbling.
Provisions are in it and Ithink there has been a lot of
quibbling.
But the thrust of it, the idealike, okay, this, these big
societal, uh things that can beaffected by the application of
(47:33):
this tech at scale, likeeveryone has a stake in that,
and so it is.
It is proper for the governmentto come in and have an interest
.
I think, as, as the rep, youknow supposedly our
representatives anyway, and soI'm not going down that rabbit
hole, but I mean, it's theoutlet that we have to have that
(47:53):
voice, and so, yeah, let'sfigure it out.
Speaker 1 (47:57):
They're going to have to pass a law that says that
you're not allowed to readpeople's thoughts without their
permission, or people are goingto be walking around wearing
helmets all the time, orsomething.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
Well then people will be the snake oil salesman
saying that this is the helmetthat blocks it, even though it's
just like wood or somethinglike that.
Speaker 1 (48:15):
Oh, my gosh Pete, this has been such an incredible
conversation.
You know normally I only dolike half an hour, but it's been
so much fun speaking to you andlearning all about you know the
work that you do.
Speaker 2 (48:33):
I would love for you to share with our listeners um,
uh, your about your newsletterand your work and where people
can find you?
Sure, I'm on substack at themedia co-pilot so you can google
that or just go to mediaco-pilotsubstackcom.
Please subscribe.
I also offer uh classes that Imentioned for creative teams or
individuals.
If you want to learn the insand outs of AI and how to use it
, how to apply it to creativework in ethical ways, then
(48:55):
please check it out atmediacopilotai and check out the
learn section and I've gotquick classes like one hour
basics.
I have a three hour class whereI really get nice and deep and,
again, I tailor these forpeople in creative fields,
especially professionals.
So like journalists, marketers,pr professionals that's what I
(49:17):
focus on.
If you want to upskill anduplevel your work in any of
those areas, call me, get intouch.
You can also email me at peteat mediac copilotai, if you have
any questions about any of that.
Speaker 1 (49:31):
Very cool, very cool.
What an excellent episode forour season two.
You guys, thank you so much forlistening.
If you're not already, you know, subscribed, what are you
thinking?
Intelligent listening oncitizen journalist is something
that you need regularly in yourlife.
Uh, if you would like to learnmore about, uh, my books, um,
(49:53):
please go to shaman isiscom.
I do have a new american dream,uh conscious ai for a future
full of promise, coming out onseptember 8th, 7th.
Uh, you can pre-order it now.
I'm'm very fortunate that ithit number one in all of its
categories.
You can also find out about mymemoir, memory Mansion, on my
(50:14):
website, and if you'd like tofind out about the work that I
do at the SoulTech AI Foundation, visit soultechfoundationorg.
We are committed to helpingunderserved communities thrive
in the age of AI by teachingthem core AI skills as well as
mindset, so that they can movefrom survival mode to thriving
mode.
(50:34):
Anyway, that's atcelltechfoundationorg.
Pete, thanks again for comingon.
I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2 (50:41):
Well, thank you so much, I had so much fun, and
congratulations on the book.
Thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (50:45):
Yeah, I appreciate it .
We'll speak to you soon.
Okay, bye, you guys, have anamazing week.
Take care, thank you.
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