June 30, 2025 • 24 mins
#SWAMPWATCH – The Senate is moving closer to a vote on Trump's extensive domestic policy bill. Mind-reading AI technology has enabled a paralyzed man's brainwaves to be converted into instant speech. Is AI changing the way we think? Scientists are investigating the cognitive consequences of using chatbots. I developed an AI model that identifies Spain's 'hottest woman.'
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is Gary and Shannon and you're listening to KFI
A M six forty, the Gary and Shannon Show on
demand on the iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
It's time for swamp Watch. I'm a politician, which means
I'm a cheat and a liar, and when I'm not
kissing babies, I'm stealing the lollipops.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Here we got the real problem is that our leaders
are done.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
The other side never quits.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
So what I'm not going anywhere?
Speaker 1 (00:23):
So now you.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Train the squat, I can imagine what can be and
be unburdened by what has been.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
You know, Americans have always been gone with a president,
but they're not stupid.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
A political plunder is what a politician actually tells the truth.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Whether people voted for you were not. Swamp Watch, they're
all counteroing.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Just a developing story that Debora told you. They're at
the top of the hour. The Trump administration is now
going to sue the city of La over immigration policies,
claiming that the sanctuary city law discriminates against federal law
enforcement by treating them differently than other law enforcement agents.
This lawsuit, filed in the Central District here in California,
(01:03):
says that Trump campaigned and won the presidential election on
a platform of deporting the millions of illegal immigrants the
previous administration permitted, through its open borders policy to enter
the country unlawfully.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
This lawsuit names.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Mayor Bass from LA City Council City City Council President
Marquis Harris Dawson as defendants. The Attorney General said in
a statement, sanctuary policies were the driving cause of the violence,
the chaos, the attacks on law enforcement that Americans recently
witnessed in LA, and jurisdictions in LA that flout federal
law by prioritizing illegal aliens over American citizens are undermining
(01:44):
law enforcement at every level, every level. It ends under
President Trump. Again, that's Pam Bondi's statement.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
All right. So back in Washington, d C.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
The Center Republicans are moving forward with this plan to
pass the President's big beautiful bill. They're trying to get
the legislation onto his desk by July fourth. Why July fourth,
because it's a holiday, and that's all the President has
said that that's what he wants to see on Independence
Day is the ability to hold a big signing ceremony
(02:16):
and make a big deal out of this.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
There's no other reason it's not.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
There's no deadline other than this self imposed deadline that
he made up out of whole cloth. I would argue
that putting pressure on the Senate and the House probably
has resulted in some interesting compromises. And as we're seeing today,
they're doing this vote a rama as they refer to
it in Washington, d C. Where they're just all throwing
(02:43):
different amendments at this thing, and everybody has an opportunity
to do so.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
So this thing could.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Take hours, several hours as a matter of fact, before
they get to their official final vote on this thing,
at least in the Senate. And again I mentioned this before,
that's not the end. It goes to the House for reconciliation.
There's some procedural stuff that has to go on before
it can even get to before it can even get
to the President's desk. So unnamed Democrats, you're not going
(03:12):
to remember if I tell you who they are, they
hate it.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
This bill is fundamentally about one thing, and one thing only,
cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
This bill would add more than three trillion dollars to
the national net. It was drafted just to make a
mockery of the wills and wishes of the majority of
people in this.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Country everybody else. This is a big, ugly betrayal of
a bill. It's now time for us to kill the bill.
Speaker 4 (03:42):
This is the biggest spending cut. This is the biggest
spending cut.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
That's Jim Banks, Republican, but your is.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
The spending cut and American history at one point six
trillion dollars spending cut, getting rid of the Green New
Deal scams from the Biden administration. And it's the biggest
tech cut in American history. For working class families, for mechanics,
for factory workers, teachers, beauticians, the working class men and
(04:10):
women of this country who just gave President Trump a
historic election victory.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
So this day of this voter rama is filled with
stuff that makes my head hurt. One of the first
things they had to do this morning was declare that
three point eight trillion dollars of these expiring tax cuts
don't actually count against the budgetary cost of the bill
(04:36):
that did pass party line vote fifty three to forty seven.
And it is a crucial part of this strategy because
they want to extend tax cuts permanently with a simple
majority vote Democrats and budget experts say that that's kind
of gimmicky the way that they're doing it. We told
you that Rand Paul, Senator out of Kentucky, and now
Senator Tom Tillis out of North Carolina have said that
(04:57):
their hard nos on this bill. One name that's also
popped up today that could be a no on the
bill is Lisa Murkowski out of Alaska. She has been
trying to get some carve out specifically for gas solar
energy credits, and if she votes no, that would put
them at fifty to fifty. That's still passable because of
(05:18):
course Jade Vance gets to come in as President of
the Senate and cast the tie breaking vote. But that's
all they can afford would be those three Ran Paul,
Tom Tillis, and potentially Lisa Murkowski. And then it's got
to go over back to the House where some people
are already upset with a way that it's.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Been playing out.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
So that's again hours and hours of work left on
that thing. We will see if they get a vote
to it get to a vote or later on today.
Up next a whole series of AI stories. First of
all AI good news, then AI bad news, and then
AI is rotting our brains.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
You're listening to Gary Ian Shannon on demand from KFI
AM six forty.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
A couple stories that are going on today. A man
whose body was found on Canfield Mountain near Quartelaine, Idaho,
is believed to have been the man acting alone when
he started shooting at firefighters yesterday. About three hundred law
enforcement officers from local, state, federal. They all responded to
this the exchange gunfire with this guy believed to be
(06:25):
the shooter later found dead with a gun shot wound
and a gun nearby, but the sheriff there said it
was not clear if he had shot himself and at
this point no idea what the motive was. The Washington
Post is out with another report today that says that
the United States has gotten intercepted communications between senior Iranian
(06:46):
officials talking amongst themselves about the military strikes on the
nuclear program and remarking that the attack was less devastating
than they had expected. Again, the Washington Post says this
communication was intended to be private, maybe not included Iranian
government officials speculating as to why the strikes were not
(07:07):
as destructive and extensive as they had anticipated. The head
of the IAEA was actually on CBS over the weekend
and said that the nuclear programs were severely damaged. All right,
artificial intelligence good news, bad news. Let's start with the
good news. There is a new brain computer interface that
(07:31):
has been implanted into a man that can read his
neural activity via electrodes and instantaneously generate speech sounds. Not
necessarily speech completely, but speech sounds that reflect his intended pitch,
intonation and emphasis. This is out of UC Davis. Sergei
(07:57):
Staviski at the University of California Davis says, this is
the kind of this is kind of the first of
its kind for instantaneous voice synthesis, and they said it
can make sounds within twenty five milliseconds. This guy that
they did the brain implant on lost his ability to
(08:19):
talk because of als luke Eric's disease amiotrophic lateral sclerosis,
and that said it still makes him happy and that
it feels like his real voice. Speech neuroprostes. Tried again,
speech neuroprosthesis. I'm not even gonna try it again. That
(08:44):
use brain computer interfaces already exist, but they often take
several seconds to convert that brain activity into sounds, which
can make natural conversation very hard. If you've ever had
to We do this all the time in this business.
We talk to people, whether it's on the phone, over
a zoom call, sometimes satellite or some other sort of
(09:05):
studio hookup, and there's a delay, and it doesn't take
that much of a delay to completely throw off the
natural cadence of a conversation. Imagine doing that with several
seconds of waiting for that guy's brain implant to turn
his thoughts into words. But he said, now it's in
(09:27):
much closer real time. To synthesize the speech more realistically,
they implanted two hundred and fifty six electrodes into parts
of the man's brain that helped control facial muscle, the
facial muscles used for speaking easy for me to say,
And then researcher showed him thousands of sentences on a
screen and asked him to try to say them out loud,
(09:50):
sometimes with specific innoitation intonations, while they recorded his activity. So,
for example, if he was going to ask how are
you doing today? The difference between that and how are
you doing today? And that changes everything about the sentence.
It makes it more rich, more natural, exchange, and you
have to be able to do that if you're going
(10:11):
to if you're going to converse in any language. So
he used the system for the first time to speak
without being prompted and was able to produce sounds and
some made up words. And the hope is that eventually
he'll be able to use the system and the system
(10:32):
will be able to use him as weird as that sounds,
to turn those sounds like hmm and ew into actual words.
One of the team members that you see, Davis, said
that this guy has gone from being paralyzed and unable
to speak because of his lugaric disease to working full
time and making meaningful conversations and that before his als diagnosis,
(10:56):
he was a very articulate and intelligent man, and that
he may still be very intelligent. He's just got to
work to get that articulation back. And that's one of
the good things that AI is doing. You want to
know one of the bad things that AI is doing,
it's eating your brain from the inside.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
We are using AI too much.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
The warning signs are all around us and we can't
see them because AI doesn't want us to.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
That's my argument. I'll explain more when we come back.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
You're listening to Gary and Shannon on demand from KFI
AM six forty.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
In Washington, DC, Senators now considering some proposed amendments to
the big bill of tax breaks and spending cuts that
was championed by the President. Senators are hunkered down for
what's called vote a rama, where everybody gets to throw
amendments in this thing, and probably none of them are
going to pass, but Democrats are united against it. And
as of right now, the Republicans can have three no
(11:55):
votes and still get this thing to pass with a tiebreaker.
We know that Tom tell Us in North Carolina Ran
Paul of Kentucky you're voting no. There is some question
about whether Lisa Murkowski out of Alaska would vote no.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
That would require.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
A tiebreaker by JD Vance. So we're talking about artificial intelligence,
and in our daily lives, you can use chat, GPT
or grock or Google Chrome, what is it, overview or
whatever it is as much as you want. And in
many cases I'm not gonna lie to you. I have
(12:32):
used it, and I feel dumber every time I do.
I feel guilty, I feel like I shouldn't be using it.
I feel like there's something like it's a workaround that I.
It's like taking dexaitrim pills back in the late eighties.
It's meth people, and it's not good for you. Oh
(12:55):
sure you'll a get the job done or be lose weight,
but it's meth. Office workers can use chat GPT to
organize calendars, they can write reports, they can help create emails,
they can help you with your resume. You could create
personalized bedtime stories for toddlers. Hey, do that yourself. How
(13:19):
AI is changing our mind is a big unknown as
of right now. But these large language model programs lms
affecting our brains are are now prompting worries that our
cognitive abilities are going to fall by the wayside. We
(13:40):
actually talked about this two weeks ago, and Shannon mentioned
that this same argument was made against things like radio
because people were gonna sit and do nothing but listen
to the radio.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
They weren't going to read anymore.
Speaker 3 (13:56):
Oh, let me go back even four hundred years, five
hundred years say to the printing press that Gutenberg was
going to destroy society because people were going to sit
and read instead of actually working, and they weren't going
to tell stories.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
Anymore.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
They were just going to rely on the written word
to entertain them kids these days. So then radio comes along,
very similar argument, and then television comes along and it's
even worse, and then video games and now AI that
same thing that it's going to strip away whatever cognitive
abilities we had. And I think this is probably the
better one, or the better argument is it's going to
(14:32):
stifle the diversity of our ideas. It takes human intelligence
and ingenuity to come up with new ideas. The headlines
that proclaim that AI is making a stupid and lazy
came out of a study from MIT's Media Lab. Now
(14:54):
they have said listen, they're not drawing any hard conclusions
yet whether AI is reshaping our brains in bad ways,
but it does suggest there is something going on. A
survey more than six hundred people in the UK January
said significant correlation between the frequent use of AI tools
and critical thinking abilities.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
How could it not be?
Speaker 3 (15:18):
University of Pennsylvania Wharton School published a study last week
that high school students in Turkey with access to a
chat GPT style tutor performed better solving practice math problems,
but when they took the program away, they performed worse
than the kids who didn't have the tutor to begin with.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
MIT study.
Speaker 3 (15:42):
That garnered massive attention involved researchers who measured brain activity
of college students as they used chat GPT to write
an sat style essay during three sessions. That work was
compared to others who had used Google or nothing. Researchers
out fitted them with caps covered in electrodes to monitor
(16:04):
electrical signals in their brain, and needless to say, those
who used chat GPT exhibited the lowest brain engagement. They
underperformed at neural levels, linguistic levels, behavioral level levels, and
ultimately they sound. All of the essays that the chat
(16:24):
GPT people wrote finger quotes wrote sounded exactly the same.
No personal touches, no ingenuity, no creativity, and English teachers
who read the papers called them soulless. There is something
to be said about our ability, human's ability to delineate
(16:46):
between what is generated by AI and what is not.
We're still, for the most part, we're still able to
see some of those clues, those telltale clues, whether it's
a visual image or a story that's written by AI,
something like that. But AI is getting better, We're not
getting worse, AI is getting better. For example, Ititana Lopez
(17:13):
is a model in Spain who I think I saw
that she brings in about five thousand pounds per shoot,
which is what seventy five hundred dollars or so for
a photo seventy five hundred bucks per She's not even
(17:34):
a real human being. I'll explain who Ititana Lopez is
when we come back.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
It's just going to take us all. We're not even
going to see it coming.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
You're listening to Gary and Shannon on demand from KFI
AM six forty.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
We were talking about artificial intelligence, and there is still
a good portion of the population, thankfully, that is a
to discern between human created things and computer created things.
It's getting harder, but it is still out there now.
One of the things that has shown up on Instagram
(18:13):
and other social media pretty quickly is models that are
not human. They're a completely AI generated models. Aitana Lopez
is one of these. She works for she doesn't work for.
She models for Spanish fashion agency called The Clueless, and
(18:37):
she is what they refer to as a state of
the art AI creation to save the company money and
time because in her Instagram, why am I referring it
to as a her.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
In this computer's.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
Instagram bio, it says that she is a virtue soul,
that she is a digital creator, that she is a
digital muse. It links also first Ai influencer created, but
then it says that she's a fitness lover and that
(19:15):
she likes to play video games, and then uses her
handle on where you can find her while you're playing
video games. Now, I don't I don't think any of these.
I guess that one's a video. Let me see if
I can see. Okay, that's a that's a video of
her allegedly doing a making a selfie, like in a
bathroom mirror or something like that, and she just looks
(19:38):
like she's she's blowing a kiss to the camera, and
she kind of puts her face up to her hand
or hand up to her face because she's shy.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
I guess she's shy. What am I saying?
Speaker 4 (19:51):
She?
Speaker 2 (19:52):
I'm sorry, I'm watching this as right talking about it.
She looks so airbrushed, totally totally.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
And that little video actually you could see if you
looked at her collar bones, you could see that they
kind of appear and then disappear. There's weird little clues
like that that let you know that Ititana is not real.
The person who created her, Deanna Nunez, co founded that
Clueless modeling agency, and said initially most of her followers
(20:21):
didn't question her authenticity.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
They believed in her existence.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
They received compliments about our beauty, invitations to hang out
in the city, and even after the media revealed she
was an AI creation, people still express their love for her.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Again.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
Diana described the process of designing Ititana as intensive. It
took two months before she was a finished product, and
described of how hours of homework is done to check
what was trendy, what was relevant in the market, and
then you just create a post with her in it,
wearing the thing or playing the game, or drinking the
(20:58):
drink or working out the thing. She cost about thirty
five hundred pounds, they said, to create, so about five
thousand saves a huge amount when set against the cost
of real influencers that charge about five thousand pounds per
photo shoot, and she can earn one thousand pounds for
just one Instagram post. You put a little product in
(21:21):
there and that's it. And the thing is, I don't
know anybody who's looking at the profile the bio to
see whether or not she's real.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
They're just seeing this very pretty young.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
Woman and they're like, but what about this? This is
a band called the Velvet Shutdown, sorry, Velvet Sundown.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
The good lights on silver sad.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Watchingos with no command.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
Uh film this is real? So mirrored round drums of
funder distance.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
Uh No, there's no way that that is real. And
I'll give you a couple of clues. The Velvet Sundown
has been making a bunch of headlines because the bud
they sound AI generated. We've done the stories before and
played on the show. Here groups from uh songs from
Suno and Udio and things like that, where you can
type in a prompt and it will create music and
(22:43):
whatever genre you want with whatever lyrics you want, et cetera.
On YouTube, there's a bunch of different AI created music.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
Some of it's some of it's kind.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
Of creative and good. I guess good if not the
right word. But when you look up the song credit
for this Velvet Sundown, most artists have a bunch of
people in their credits. You've got producers, writers, sources, performed
and all that. The only people listed on the Velvet
Sundown is the Velvet Sundown.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
That's it.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
They do have names, Gabe Farrow, Lenny West, Milo Raines,
and o'rian delmar. None of these guys have ever been interviewed,
none of them have social media accounts, and in fact,
none of them have a shred of any sort of
Internet presence. But they released two albums. It's one of
(23:41):
many many fake bands that is out there. The question
I think that arises is who's supposed to tell us
that they're fake? Does Spotify have to come out and
Instagram at least requires you to tell when that person
that you're looking at is not a real person? Spotify
and Apple Music and even iHeart do they have to
(24:03):
tell you when you're listening to music that's not even created,
it's not human. I'm sorrying to feel sick, all right.
Up next all of our trending stories. We have some
horror stories from the theme parks. Our friend Trader Merlin
is going to join us. We're going to talk about
what's going on on Wall Street over these last couple
of months and weeks, and then the backlash, the Jeff
(24:25):
Bezos Lauren Sanchez backlash.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
After the wedding. You've been listening to The Gary and
Shannon Show.
Speaker 3 (24:34):
You can always hear us live on KFI AM six
forty nine am to one pm every Monday through Friday,
and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio ap
This is Gary and Shannon and you're listening to KFI
A M six forty, the Gary and Shannon Show on
demand on the iHeartRadio app.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
It's time for swamp Watch. I'm a politician, which means
I'm a cheat and a liar, and when I'm not
kissing babies, I'm stealing the lollipops.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
Here we got the real problem is that our leaders
are done.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
The other side never quits.
Speaker 3 (00:19):
So what I'm not going anywhere?
Speaker 1 (00:23):
So now you.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Train the squat, I can imagine what can be and
be unburdened by what has been.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
You know, Americans have always been gone with a president,
but they're not stupid.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
A political plunder is what a politician actually tells the truth.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Whether people voted for you were not. Swamp Watch, they're
all counteroing.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Just a developing story that Debora told you. They're at
the top of the hour. The Trump administration is now
going to sue the city of La over immigration policies,
claiming that the sanctuary city law discriminates against federal law
enforcement by treating them differently than other law enforcement agents.
This lawsuit, filed in the Central District here in California,
(01:03):
says that Trump campaigned and won the presidential election on
a platform of deporting the millions of illegal immigrants the
previous administration permitted, through its open borders policy to enter
the country unlawfully.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
This lawsuit names.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Mayor Bass from LA City Council City City Council President
Marquis Harris Dawson as defendants. The Attorney General said in
a statement, sanctuary policies were the driving cause of the violence,
the chaos, the attacks on law enforcement that Americans recently
witnessed in LA, and jurisdictions in LA that flout federal
law by prioritizing illegal aliens over American citizens are undermining
(01:44):
law enforcement at every level, every level. It ends under
President Trump. Again, that's Pam Bondi's statement.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
All right. So back in Washington, d C.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
The Center Republicans are moving forward with this plan to
pass the President's big beautiful bill. They're trying to get
the legislation onto his desk by July fourth. Why July fourth,
because it's a holiday, and that's all the President has
said that that's what he wants to see on Independence
Day is the ability to hold a big signing ceremony
(02:16):
and make a big deal out of this.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
There's no other reason it's not.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
There's no deadline other than this self imposed deadline that
he made up out of whole cloth. I would argue
that putting pressure on the Senate and the House probably
has resulted in some interesting compromises. And as we're seeing today,
they're doing this vote a rama as they refer to
it in Washington, d C. Where they're just all throwing
(02:43):
different amendments at this thing, and everybody has an opportunity
to do so.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
So this thing could.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Take hours, several hours as a matter of fact, before
they get to their official final vote on this thing,
at least in the Senate. And again I mentioned this before,
that's not the end. It goes to the House for reconciliation.
There's some procedural stuff that has to go on before
it can even get to before it can even get
to the President's desk. So unnamed Democrats, you're not going
(03:12):
to remember if I tell you who they are, they
hate it.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
This bill is fundamentally about one thing, and one thing only,
cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
This bill would add more than three trillion dollars to
the national net. It was drafted just to make a
mockery of the wills and wishes of the majority of
people in this.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Country everybody else. This is a big, ugly betrayal of
a bill. It's now time for us to kill the bill.
Speaker 4 (03:42):
This is the biggest spending cut. This is the biggest
spending cut.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
That's Jim Banks, Republican, but your is.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
The spending cut and American history at one point six
trillion dollars spending cut, getting rid of the Green New
Deal scams from the Biden administration. And it's the biggest
tech cut in American history. For working class families, for mechanics,
for factory workers, teachers, beauticians, the working class men and
(04:10):
women of this country who just gave President Trump a
historic election victory.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
So this day of this voter rama is filled with
stuff that makes my head hurt. One of the first
things they had to do this morning was declare that
three point eight trillion dollars of these expiring tax cuts
don't actually count against the budgetary cost of the bill
(04:36):
that did pass party line vote fifty three to forty seven.
And it is a crucial part of this strategy because
they want to extend tax cuts permanently with a simple
majority vote Democrats and budget experts say that that's kind
of gimmicky the way that they're doing it. We told
you that Rand Paul, Senator out of Kentucky, and now
Senator Tom Tillis out of North Carolina have said that
(04:57):
their hard nos on this bill. One name that's also
popped up today that could be a no on the
bill is Lisa Murkowski out of Alaska. She has been
trying to get some carve out specifically for gas solar
energy credits, and if she votes no, that would put
them at fifty to fifty. That's still passable because of
(05:18):
course Jade Vance gets to come in as President of
the Senate and cast the tie breaking vote. But that's
all they can afford would be those three Ran Paul,
Tom Tillis, and potentially Lisa Murkowski. And then it's got
to go over back to the House where some people
are already upset with a way that it's.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Been playing out.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
So that's again hours and hours of work left on
that thing. We will see if they get a vote
to it get to a vote or later on today.
Up next a whole series of AI stories. First of
all AI good news, then AI bad news, and then
AI is rotting our brains.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
You're listening to Gary Ian Shannon on demand from KFI
AM six forty.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
A couple stories that are going on today. A man
whose body was found on Canfield Mountain near Quartelaine, Idaho,
is believed to have been the man acting alone when
he started shooting at firefighters yesterday. About three hundred law
enforcement officers from local, state, federal. They all responded to
this the exchange gunfire with this guy believed to be
(06:25):
the shooter later found dead with a gun shot wound
and a gun nearby, but the sheriff there said it
was not clear if he had shot himself and at
this point no idea what the motive was. The Washington
Post is out with another report today that says that
the United States has gotten intercepted communications between senior Iranian
(06:46):
officials talking amongst themselves about the military strikes on the
nuclear program and remarking that the attack was less devastating
than they had expected. Again, the Washington Post says this
communication was intended to be private, maybe not included Iranian
government officials speculating as to why the strikes were not
(07:07):
as destructive and extensive as they had anticipated. The head
of the IAEA was actually on CBS over the weekend
and said that the nuclear programs were severely damaged. All right,
artificial intelligence good news, bad news. Let's start with the
good news. There is a new brain computer interface that
(07:31):
has been implanted into a man that can read his
neural activity via electrodes and instantaneously generate speech sounds. Not
necessarily speech completely, but speech sounds that reflect his intended pitch,
intonation and emphasis. This is out of UC Davis. Sergei
(07:57):
Staviski at the University of California Davis says, this is
the kind of this is kind of the first of
its kind for instantaneous voice synthesis, and they said it
can make sounds within twenty five milliseconds. This guy that
they did the brain implant on lost his ability to
(08:19):
talk because of als luke Eric's disease amiotrophic lateral sclerosis,
and that said it still makes him happy and that
it feels like his real voice. Speech neuroprostes. Tried again,
speech neuroprosthesis. I'm not even gonna try it again. That
(08:44):
use brain computer interfaces already exist, but they often take
several seconds to convert that brain activity into sounds, which
can make natural conversation very hard. If you've ever had
to We do this all the time in this business.
We talk to people, whether it's on the phone, over
a zoom call, sometimes satellite or some other sort of
(09:05):
studio hookup, and there's a delay, and it doesn't take
that much of a delay to completely throw off the
natural cadence of a conversation. Imagine doing that with several
seconds of waiting for that guy's brain implant to turn
his thoughts into words. But he said, now it's in
(09:27):
much closer real time. To synthesize the speech more realistically,
they implanted two hundred and fifty six electrodes into parts
of the man's brain that helped control facial muscle, the
facial muscles used for speaking easy for me to say,
And then researcher showed him thousands of sentences on a
screen and asked him to try to say them out loud,
(09:50):
sometimes with specific innoitation intonations, while they recorded his activity. So,
for example, if he was going to ask how are
you doing today? The difference between that and how are
you doing today? And that changes everything about the sentence.
It makes it more rich, more natural, exchange, and you
have to be able to do that if you're going
(10:11):
to if you're going to converse in any language. So
he used the system for the first time to speak
without being prompted and was able to produce sounds and
some made up words. And the hope is that eventually
he'll be able to use the system and the system
(10:32):
will be able to use him as weird as that sounds,
to turn those sounds like hmm and ew into actual words.
One of the team members that you see, Davis, said
that this guy has gone from being paralyzed and unable
to speak because of his lugaric disease to working full
time and making meaningful conversations and that before his als diagnosis,
(10:56):
he was a very articulate and intelligent man, and that
he may still be very intelligent. He's just got to
work to get that articulation back. And that's one of
the good things that AI is doing. You want to
know one of the bad things that AI is doing,
it's eating your brain from the inside.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
We are using AI too much.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
The warning signs are all around us and we can't
see them because AI doesn't want us to.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
That's my argument. I'll explain more when we come back.
Speaker 1 (11:27):
You're listening to Gary and Shannon on demand from KFI
AM six forty.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
In Washington, DC, Senators now considering some proposed amendments to
the big bill of tax breaks and spending cuts that
was championed by the President. Senators are hunkered down for
what's called vote a rama, where everybody gets to throw
amendments in this thing, and probably none of them are
going to pass, but Democrats are united against it. And
as of right now, the Republicans can have three no
(11:55):
votes and still get this thing to pass with a tiebreaker.
We know that Tom tell Us in North Carolina Ran
Paul of Kentucky you're voting no. There is some question
about whether Lisa Murkowski out of Alaska would vote no.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
That would require.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
A tiebreaker by JD Vance. So we're talking about artificial intelligence,
and in our daily lives, you can use chat, GPT
or grock or Google Chrome, what is it, overview or
whatever it is as much as you want. And in
many cases I'm not gonna lie to you. I have
(12:32):
used it, and I feel dumber every time I do.
I feel guilty, I feel like I shouldn't be using it.
I feel like there's something like it's a workaround that I.
It's like taking dexaitrim pills back in the late eighties.
It's meth people, and it's not good for you. Oh
(12:55):
sure you'll a get the job done or be lose weight,
but it's meth. Office workers can use chat GPT to
organize calendars, they can write reports, they can help create emails,
they can help you with your resume. You could create
personalized bedtime stories for toddlers. Hey, do that yourself. How
(13:19):
AI is changing our mind is a big unknown as
of right now. But these large language model programs lms
affecting our brains are are now prompting worries that our
cognitive abilities are going to fall by the wayside. We
(13:40):
actually talked about this two weeks ago, and Shannon mentioned
that this same argument was made against things like radio
because people were gonna sit and do nothing but listen
to the radio.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
They weren't going to read anymore.
Speaker 3 (13:56):
Oh, let me go back even four hundred years, five
hundred years say to the printing press that Gutenberg was
going to destroy society because people were going to sit
and read instead of actually working, and they weren't going
to tell stories.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
Anymore.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
They were just going to rely on the written word
to entertain them kids these days. So then radio comes along,
very similar argument, and then television comes along and it's
even worse, and then video games and now AI that
same thing that it's going to strip away whatever cognitive
abilities we had. And I think this is probably the
better one, or the better argument is it's going to
(14:32):
stifle the diversity of our ideas. It takes human intelligence
and ingenuity to come up with new ideas. The headlines
that proclaim that AI is making a stupid and lazy
came out of a study from MIT's Media Lab. Now
(14:54):
they have said listen, they're not drawing any hard conclusions
yet whether AI is reshaping our brains in bad ways,
but it does suggest there is something going on. A
survey more than six hundred people in the UK January
said significant correlation between the frequent use of AI tools
and critical thinking abilities.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
How could it not be?
Speaker 3 (15:18):
University of Pennsylvania Wharton School published a study last week
that high school students in Turkey with access to a
chat GPT style tutor performed better solving practice math problems,
but when they took the program away, they performed worse
than the kids who didn't have the tutor to begin with.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
MIT study.
Speaker 3 (15:42):
That garnered massive attention involved researchers who measured brain activity
of college students as they used chat GPT to write
an sat style essay during three sessions. That work was
compared to others who had used Google or nothing. Researchers
out fitted them with caps covered in electrodes to monitor
(16:04):
electrical signals in their brain, and needless to say, those
who used chat GPT exhibited the lowest brain engagement. They
underperformed at neural levels, linguistic levels, behavioral level levels, and
ultimately they sound. All of the essays that the chat
(16:24):
GPT people wrote finger quotes wrote sounded exactly the same.
No personal touches, no ingenuity, no creativity, and English teachers
who read the papers called them soulless. There is something
to be said about our ability, human's ability to delineate
(16:46):
between what is generated by AI and what is not.
We're still, for the most part, we're still able to
see some of those clues, those telltale clues, whether it's
a visual image or a story that's written by AI,
something like that. But AI is getting better, We're not
getting worse, AI is getting better. For example, Ititana Lopez
(17:13):
is a model in Spain who I think I saw
that she brings in about five thousand pounds per shoot,
which is what seventy five hundred dollars or so for
a photo seventy five hundred bucks per She's not even
(17:34):
a real human being. I'll explain who Ititana Lopez is
when we come back.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
It's just going to take us all. We're not even
going to see it coming.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
You're listening to Gary and Shannon on demand from KFI
AM six forty.
Speaker 3 (17:50):
We were talking about artificial intelligence, and there is still
a good portion of the population, thankfully, that is a
to discern between human created things and computer created things.
It's getting harder, but it is still out there now.
One of the things that has shown up on Instagram
(18:13):
and other social media pretty quickly is models that are
not human. They're a completely AI generated models. Aitana Lopez
is one of these. She works for she doesn't work for.
She models for Spanish fashion agency called The Clueless, and
(18:37):
she is what they refer to as a state of
the art AI creation to save the company money and
time because in her Instagram, why am I referring it
to as a her.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
In this computer's.
Speaker 3 (18:53):
Instagram bio, it says that she is a virtue soul,
that she is a digital creator, that she is a
digital muse. It links also first Ai influencer created, but
then it says that she's a fitness lover and that
(19:15):
she likes to play video games, and then uses her
handle on where you can find her while you're playing
video games. Now, I don't I don't think any of these.
I guess that one's a video. Let me see if
I can see. Okay, that's a that's a video of
her allegedly doing a making a selfie, like in a
bathroom mirror or something like that, and she just looks
(19:38):
like she's she's blowing a kiss to the camera, and
she kind of puts her face up to her hand
or hand up to her face because she's shy.
Speaker 2 (19:46):
I guess she's shy. What am I saying?
Speaker 4 (19:51):
She?
Speaker 2 (19:52):
I'm sorry, I'm watching this as right talking about it.
She looks so airbrushed, totally totally.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
And that little video actually you could see if you
looked at her collar bones, you could see that they
kind of appear and then disappear. There's weird little clues
like that that let you know that Ititana is not real.
The person who created her, Deanna Nunez, co founded that
Clueless modeling agency, and said initially most of her followers
(20:21):
didn't question her authenticity.
Speaker 2 (20:23):
They believed in her existence.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
They received compliments about our beauty, invitations to hang out
in the city, and even after the media revealed she
was an AI creation, people still express their love for her.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Again.
Speaker 3 (20:36):
Diana described the process of designing Ititana as intensive. It
took two months before she was a finished product, and
described of how hours of homework is done to check
what was trendy, what was relevant in the market, and
then you just create a post with her in it,
wearing the thing or playing the game, or drinking the
(20:58):
drink or working out the thing. She cost about thirty
five hundred pounds, they said, to create, so about five
thousand saves a huge amount when set against the cost
of real influencers that charge about five thousand pounds per
photo shoot, and she can earn one thousand pounds for
just one Instagram post. You put a little product in
(21:21):
there and that's it. And the thing is, I don't
know anybody who's looking at the profile the bio to
see whether or not she's real.
Speaker 2 (21:33):
They're just seeing this very pretty young.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
Woman and they're like, but what about this? This is
a band called the Velvet Shutdown, sorry, Velvet Sundown.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
The good lights on silver sad.
Speaker 1 (22:03):
Watchingos with no command.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
Uh film this is real? So mirrored round drums of
funder distance.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
Uh No, there's no way that that is real. And
I'll give you a couple of clues. The Velvet Sundown
has been making a bunch of headlines because the bud
they sound AI generated. We've done the stories before and
played on the show. Here groups from uh songs from
Suno and Udio and things like that, where you can
type in a prompt and it will create music and
(22:43):
whatever genre you want with whatever lyrics you want, et cetera.
On YouTube, there's a bunch of different AI created music.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
Some of it's some of it's kind.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
Of creative and good. I guess good if not the
right word. But when you look up the song credit
for this Velvet Sundown, most artists have a bunch of
people in their credits. You've got producers, writers, sources, performed
and all that. The only people listed on the Velvet
Sundown is the Velvet Sundown.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
That's it.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
They do have names, Gabe Farrow, Lenny West, Milo Raines,
and o'rian delmar. None of these guys have ever been interviewed,
none of them have social media accounts, and in fact,
none of them have a shred of any sort of
Internet presence. But they released two albums. It's one of
(23:41):
many many fake bands that is out there. The question
I think that arises is who's supposed to tell us
that they're fake? Does Spotify have to come out and
Instagram at least requires you to tell when that person
that you're looking at is not a real person? Spotify
and Apple Music and even iHeart do they have to
(24:03):
tell you when you're listening to music that's not even created,
it's not human. I'm sorrying to feel sick, all right.
Up next all of our trending stories. We have some
horror stories from the theme parks. Our friend Trader Merlin
is going to join us. We're going to talk about
what's going on on Wall Street over these last couple
of months and weeks, and then the backlash, the Jeff
(24:25):
Bezos Lauren Sanchez backlash.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
After the wedding. You've been listening to The Gary and
Shannon Show.
Speaker 3 (24:34):
You can always hear us live on KFI AM six
forty nine am to one pm every Monday through Friday,
and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio ap
Gary and Shannon News
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