What's soulless my children's fiction? I don't know. I don't know how to open this one. We're coming back on my investigation, my two part investigation into the unsettling and the moderately evil world of ai children's book Grifters. My guest is Ben Bohlan from Ridiculous History and Boy basically all of the podcasts that helped invent podcasting as an industry. Thank you Ben for being on the show and talking
with us today. Ben, you mentioned a book called Ploto in our last episode, which is this weird algorithmic novel that a guy wrote in a book in the twenties where he lays out the fourteen hundred and sixty two possible book book plots. And we wanted to start talking about this because you found your copy of Plato.
Yeah, yes, yeah, thank you for having me, Robert Sophie Fellow fans of Behind the Bastards. Let's give just a short excerpt from the forward of Plato by William Wallace. Cooked Yeah. It begins, picture a man and a woman walking through a thick fog in London. The year is nineteen twenty six. They are in love and they are miserable.
Well and then already, Yeah, I'm hooked. Tell me more. Yeah, you know what Greenlit get, You get exactly two seasons on Netflix. Make sure to end it on a on a cliffhanger that we won't resolve because we have to pay you more if we do season three.
Yeah, Robert owns Netflix now, Yeah, I fucking knew it.
I knew it as you you know, I traded in my Pontiac Aztec, which which provided me with almost twice as much money as I needed to buy Netflix. So yeah, no, I now own Netflix and no longer have a death trap car. They let me keep the ASTech they paid me not to sell it to them. Sorry, I'm just seeing need of advertising. I'm hearing needive advertising for Pontiac here for Big Pontiac. And yeah, being an advertiser on podcasts, didn't manufacture Pontiactiac. We apparently made real cars once.
And I'm wondering, I'm wondering, did you write the beginning of this show? Did you? I guess we should go public with this. Part one of this week's series was written in entirely by chat GPT. Is that correct?
Yeah? I actually had meant to write part two in chat GPT. But chat GPT was so horrified by the task of writing behind the Bastards that it attempted to hijack my Pontiac as Tech, which which then drove itself into a mailbox and detonated on impact. So ri I p chat GPT. You know it was. It contained billions and billions of lines of texts, but it did not contain the ability to safely pilot a Pontiac vehicle track.
Now if I was, if I was a child, I would think this is an intriguing story, perhaps with some some hidden treasure.
Yeah, yeah, we could. We could do a whole children's book about the Pontiac az Tech from Breaking Bad And what the fact that Walt has to drive such a piece of shit car says about his character? Really some of the best, most masterful character building. These ais could never do such effective character building as setting up the desperation of an impoverished chemistry teacher's life by showing him drive a Pontiac as Tech.
Pontiac, are you unhappy? Take it on the road?
Yeah, Pontiac, you won't live long in this car.
God. Also, Breaking Bads really good.
It is quite good, as good, as good as the Aztecs was a shitty car. So it when we left off, we were talking about we went through some really remarkable looking trannosaur images for this terrible coloring book. Now, in addition to making three legged t rexes, most AI image generators struggle to keep characters consistent across multiple images within
a single book. So if you're like, you know, you've got like twenty pages, right, you need twenty illustrations for this book, and your character is this little girl in a zoo or whatever, you can give it the same input, like describe the little girl the same in each prompt, but it's really hard to get it to actually do the exact same girl in each illustration. Right. There are ways, there's whole guides to like keeping characters consistent, but it's
it's a thing that like isn't easy. And most of the creators that I followed just kind of ignored this because it is kind of a pain in the ass to do, and they kind of trusted that what they were putting out, like the different illustrations looked close enough that like the parents buying these books wouldn't notice. And Sophy's going to show you. These are two pages from like a children's book about a little girl at a zoo.
It's like bad, it's not about anything, but you can see, like the little girl, this is supposed to be the same character. But that's like those are clearly different little girls in both images. Oh oh yeah, one of them ass kind of curly hair, one of them asked straight hair. They're both done slightly different styles, but it is they are kind of close enough that unless you're really looking, you might not notice it. Most of the books I've seen,
the consistency is even worse than that. And the laziest example of this I found is from the comic book the Adventure comic book that we talked about last episode, which is titled Treasures Beyond Gold, even though no treasures
gold or otherwise actually make it into the book. Now, the author of this, Chris Heidorn, who are Christian Hidorn prevert like, does very technical prompts for his images, but this still means that he's just asking the machine to draw an attractive Western man or an attractive young Asian woman, like those are what he plugs in. And yeah, it's it's not like the so one of the for example, like one of the one of the prompts. He's got is like slash imagine blend of comic book art and
line art and full natural colors. Attractive Western man in his early thirties with short cropped brown hair and stubble beard, shirt in beige color, walking through a bustling Southeast Asian market reading treasure map. And this results in a comic book where every single page, both of our main two characters are completely different people often drawn in decent styles, so you can see different styles. You can see in
these two different images from two different pages. In the first one, she looks like, I don't know, like a you know, you've got like the the late character, and she's kind of like got a T shirt and what looks like a bandolier a sashel around her shoulder. She's got long straight hair. The male lead looks like Dean Winchester from Supernatural, you know, and he's got like a
green over. He's not actually wearing baths like she's like the thing said, but like and then in the second image, from like a page or two later, she's been like animed up like twenty percent. Her eyes are like three times as large, and then he's gotten like fifteen percent Shaggy from Scooby Doo added to him, like, they're not the same people. She's got lip filler, she's wearing like what you might call it a sleeveless shirt now and again like an animate up a little bit. He's like, like,
they're not the same people. Like, they're very clearly, very different looking characters.
They lost their they also they lost their gear.
Yeah, they're wearing totally different clothing and equipment.
Yeah, and you can tell from the facial structure, like the the the curvature of the job. You know what it is. You know what it is if you're a parent thumbing through something like this. And again, everybody tune into part one if you haven't listened yet, if your parent thumbing through something like this or encountering this stuff with a cursory look. Then the two images of people, they they look like they could be related to each other.
But to your point, Robert, very clearly not the same folks.
Not the same folks. And like obviously there's the normal like weirdness like it. You know, the Dean Winchester version of the character looks better, but his neck is like cocked to an angle. Yeah, she's like a little kid, and the second one.
Her face off the size of a child's face.
And then yeah, but this is so Yeah.
It's weird. It's weird. And again, an adult who like actually looked at this would kind of recognize a couple of pages in, oh, this is like some weird, shitty AI art thing. But again, these books, I think can be damaging to little kids. And this is what gets me into the actual educational research that I did for this investigation, because.
There's a yeah literary you were talking about this in part one, right, this is triggered or inspired deep dive into a sort of.
Yeah, literary educational theory because like I wanted to know, is it like bad for kids to get handed nonsense books that aren't like, aren't about anything at all, and where the art is like not actually art, like where there's no intentionality behind it. It's just kind of like clip art placed more or less randomly and often slightly warped by you know, a machine hallucination. And yeah, there's actually there's a substantial body of scientific research into what
is referred to as emergent literacy. Right. Emergent literacy is the these are the reading and writing skills that a child possesses or builds before they are can formally reader write. So when you are sitting down with your six month eight month old kid and you're going over a storybook that kid can't read, right, they can't like look at
words and recognize what the individual words are. But because you're reading the story, they are starting to pick up on aspects of how stories are structured, what a story can tell, what characters are. These are all things that they are picking up that aren't literacy but also are a crucial building block to literacy. Right, this is emergent literacy. Right. That's this is a critical part of kids learning how
to read and learning how to appreciate reading. Right, It's why Like when I was a kid, my mom like the honestly, like ninety percent of her parenting strategy is basically make sure he always has a book in his hands.
Oh nice, were you able to did you have curation? Curate? Did you have autotomy?
When I was too young to pick my because you know, at a certain age, like you know, I was six months of a year old or whatever, I'm not really picking my own books. She's just like you were like, but it was also like I did have a lot of like my grandma had basically every national geographic and like I would see ones with pirates or dinosaurs, and so I had like a lot of that shit. No
as I and as I like was younger. You know, when I was in second grade, I found my dad had a copy of The Lost World checked out from the library, and I like demanded he renew it because there was a dinosaurs goll on the front. And so in second grade I read The Lost World, which is not a book that's for second graders. But my mom's attitude was like, like I had, my TV access was super restricted. I couldn't watch like Rin and Stimpy or
The Simpsons as a little kid. But like, if it was a book, it didn't matter if there was fucking, if there was murder, if there was like sex crimes. As long as it was a book, it was okay. That was like my mom's attitude. If he's reading it's fine.
I feel. I read Stephen King's It when he was probably too young.
That's a fucked up book for a kid.
Sure, it's not ideal. And my and my parents were like, hey, they were bragging. They were like, hey, look at our kid reads. Uh, this stuff on his own. What a self starter? What a literate child?
And I actually think we're joking about it. I actually think like kids reading about fucked up shit is good for them in a way that like maybe kids watching fucked up shit in movies or TV isn't because interesting. There's the degree of we're going to talk about this, Like watching TV or a movie is much more of a one way street, especially for a kid. You know, as adults you kind of get the ability to sort
of interact with and analyze it more. I do think that like watching TV or a movie is more of a one way thing than like when you are reading, as we'll talk about, it's a dialogue between you and the book, right, like you are actively constructing meaning alongside that work. Anyway, this gets us back to like emergent storytelling, because a lot of aspects of emergent storytelling are things like understanding that the illustrations in a book are carrying
aspects of character and aspects of the story. And so little kids, very little kids, one year olds, two years all year olds earlier than you'd expect, have already started to realize that when they are looking at a story book, what you're reading them is not the whole story. The
illustrations are part of the story. One study on emergent reading strategies I read by Judith Leisiker and Elizabeth Hopper of Purdue University noted emergent reading strategies such as wordless book reading are often seen as precursors to the meaning
making that comes later during print reading. I actually found one study where like they would read kids a story, and then they would hand them a copy of that story book without any text on it, and they would ask the kids to write the story, and the kids would write more detailed stories than the original versions because they're taking things that they recognize from the illustrations and adding that in when they recreate the story, you know,
which is really interesting to me. And that's what scares me about a lot of these mid journey created children's books, because when you've got a story that somebody is wanting to tell transmit information through their story, their illustrations are transmitting information too. That is not None of these illustrations and these abooks are transmitting information. They are there to
tick a box, but like the characters aren't interacting. They don't even match what they're supposed to match with the prompt says like it's all off, Like it may look like a human drawing, Like these look like competent drawings, but they're not drawings of anything. Nothing is being revealed in the faces of these characters, in their physical positioning and the actions that they're shown taking part in it, Like, none of that is actually present here because there's not
a person driving the artwork. And that's really small. Children are info vacuums. They are hoovering up observations about the world at a terrifying pace, and before they can read, they come to understand things like story structure and the meaning of words and phrases by studying the illustrations that
accompany text. By breaking the illustrative part of a story book, you are breaking the way in which kids learn to read at a fundamental level before they even under Like the precursors to literacy are shattered by not showing them actual illustrations. Like there's a real danger of that here. The fact that these are so disjointed and wrong could fuck up the way kids sort of are understanding these stories on a very fundamental level. Yeah, and that's really frightening.
To me, that's a real risk.
That's not even I mean, we can call it a risk. But this is as earlier establishment. This is a thing that is happening. Yeah, there is the injurious potential short, but that potential has to a degree been actualized.
You know, and some number of kids have had these books handed to them already.
And and what what what would be then? I think everybody probably is thinking the same question, what would the risk be? Like? What is the what is the worst case scenario? Does a does a child uh read a does like a latchkey kid, uh sit alone with their uh fantastically terrible uh children's stories and they what They go to a museum one day and they say, Hey, the t rex skeleton is wrong? Where are the thumbs?
I think that's I think that's like one a specific thing that could happen as a result of these like weird coloring books. I think the scarier thing that could happen as the result of stories one of them is that like kids who become readers, who come to love reading and fiction and thus writing and then create you know, culture, right, Like large aspects of our culture created by kids who
love to read as kids and then become writers. That a necessary part of that is loving and understanding stories, and a necessary part of that is into gradually integrating the illustrations, which are the first things that you start to recognize in story books as a kid, to words and the way that words work, and the way that words tell stories and describe characters and plot, and this
kind of can break that. The risk is that like, and kids are you know, potentially kind of fragile here, Like you could damage the ability of children to appreciate reading and to appreciate stories. And maybe kids who would have been readers, who would have cared about this stuff, or who would have wanted to create things won't because
they're kind of at a very early stage. Their understanding of what reading is for is broken because it's not being They're not having a conversation, you know, between an author and an illustrator in themselves and constructing meaning from that. They are having this simulacrum of a story. This this nonsense. These the fucking potato chips of of of like even worse than potato chips. If you ever you know, you know, did you ever read good Omens?
Yes? Yeah, Terry Pratchett and Neil.
Pratchett and Neil Game and one of the it's you know, it's it's a book. Anti Christ is like the hero kind of and there's like the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse our characters in it, and one of them, Famine is like kind of a little counterintuitively at first, he's like his big plot, he's like running this some fast food franchise. The food has any nutrition in it, Like there's nothing. It's actually you can starve to death eating
this food. Like That's what I think of when I think of these books and what they can do to like kid's abilit like developing literacy. I find that unsettling, AI advocate when you talk about how fucked up and wrong a lot of this looks. We'll talk about like, well, you know, this is just mid journey version I know three or four or whatever, or this is you know, version three or four of chatch Ept and it's only going to get better. Look at how much better it
is now than it was. You know, before you knew these things existed. It's going to get so much better. You know, eventually it'll be seamless. You won't be able to tell. That's actually not a guarantee. Nobody knows that. For one thing, we're kind of off the map here, like one of the big Like there's aspects of how these things work that are kind of like unclear even to the people making them in aspects of how good
can they be. And one of the things I will say, I heard this from somebody who's who's in the industry recently, was like, you know, like, how do you tell whether or not the model is getting more intelligent? And he's like, I don't know, how do you tell if people are more or less intelligent? We don't have a good agreement on that, like a like IQ's bullshit, Like, yeah, that's actually pretty good point, you know, like you're you're not wrong.
But also just like the idea that these models will get better and better at storytelling, at creating fiction, at creating images to go with fiction, that is not a guarantee. One of the reasons why that's not a guarantee is that the popularity of AI tools means that the Internet at a very rapid pace, is being flooded with more AI generated stuff. Right, More and more of this is getting spat out on the Internet every day, And because
new ais will be trained on this content. That means that new AIS and AIS that are updated to have more stuff from after twenty twenty two are going to be trained on stuff that they generated. So you are feeding AI art and text back into the model and feed it's a feedback. It can lead to what researchers call model collapse, right, which is the idea that like, well, the kind of these derangements, these messed up illustrations, like
the faults. If you're feeding this back and retraining it on flawed stuff that had already put out, it's going to just keep exacerbating those flaws. A group of researchers published in the General ARCSIV described this as what happens when quote, the use of model generated content and training causes irreversible defects in the resulting models. Oh like that movie multiplicity exactly, like multiplicity. That's right, that's right. This
is a multiplicity kind of situation. Yeah. And I find this particularly worrisome because the present models are already pretty full of defects. Take the storybook generated for a video called I Create a best selling children's book using AI in under an hour. Now. The creator of this video, whose name is Grayson Sands, looks like what you'd get if you fed mid journey the prompt what if Ron Weasley was a registered sex offender? And I don't know
if i'll include that joke in the final article. It's mean and not proper for like a serious piece of journalism. But I don't like this guy.
It's also it's also just I mean because we're an audio podcast, right, so it's also just for everyone playing along at home. Uh do look at do look it up? You know I hate black hair.
He's got the big, like white framed sunglasses. He's got a leather jacket on. There's a guitar hung on his wall behind him for someone.
He's got epaulets, which for some reason bothers me. It's it's like a Again, we're very not into body shaming.
But this is not about his body shape or anything about this. This is why his aesthetic choices, his vibe.
His vibe. His vibe looks off. So wait, in under an hour, we create a best selling children's book.
Sounds like there's what he promises in the video.
Sounds like there should be some air quotes around a couple of these things, Robert.
All of them. So he decides he's going to generate a book for kids based on a based on a character in a tattoo he got that. He says, like, I got this tattoo for no reason. It means nothing to me basically, and it's a tattoo of a stegosaur playing a stand up bass. So he got I think it or triceratops. Sorry, I whant to say stegosaurs. Jesus Christ, what a see? I used to know dinosaur stuff when I was a kid. You forget.
It doesn't even look like a dinosaur.
Really.
It's not a good tattoo. And it's one of the things that's like, Look, I have a lot of tattoos. I love tattoos. I don't think every tattoo has to have deep meaning. But if you're if you're specifically being like this tattoo. I got this random tattoo for no reason, And now I'm going to make a book. I'm going to try to trick kids into reading a book about the character in this tattoo. That just makes me angry. It does.
I don't like it.
Robert, fuck you for emphasizing how little you care about what you're making. So, yeah, he feeds a picture of this tattoo, and this is one of those like there are cool things these ais can do. The fact that you can take a picture of your tattoo and say, hey, use this as an illustration in a story book. That's kind of neat, you know, bait can. Considering the crude drawing that it has to work with, mid Journey does
a decent enough job turning this into a character. It's like it's okay, it's not good, but it's like fine fish. It's off ish. But what's really off?
It's intriguing.
Yeah, there's there. What's really off is the world behind the character. There's almost a little bit of a Susian vibe, but like without any kind of intent behind it, which is unsettling. And this becomes more obvious in the subsequent pages. Look at this, like there's random music signs like drifting
through like hung like garlands on the branchless trees. All of the dinosaurs have these weird long arcing heads that are almost make them shaped like me, Like it's the sun has a giant question mark in the middle of it, and then there's a second question mark next to the sun for no reason, Like this is.
Very soft Dolly, Yeah, yeah, yeah, a little bit hi, really bad.
Yeah, got this next page because as it goes on, like it gets increasingly more divorced from anything that like, okay, how would you describe this almost pornographic? Right, Like those are tits on that tree?
Those are those are genitalia?
Yeah, like, yeah, there's there's some dicks and some tits in this one. It's weird, right, And yeah, I can admit, like there's something interesting and amusing about how hallucinatory this is. If this was like a win Amp visualization, like if I was if I had just taken a bunch of five O M I P T and was like putting on a Murder City Devil's record and sat like a fucking I don't know, uh yeah, like win Amp visualizations and I got shipped like this and be like, oh cool,
that's kind of neat. But it doesn't have anything to do with the story, right. The story that this guy has had chat gpt right for his book is about a brachiosaurus who plays piano teaching a tricera to play bass, right, Like, this isn't there's no reason for the art to look like this. It's not like in keeping he hasn't like written. He hasn't like written like a psychedelic dinosaur story here,
and thus this is kind of like fitting. It's like a very basic story about a dinosaur that wants to learn bass and meets a friend who teaches him how to do music. Like it doesn't make any sense that it looks this way. It's just confusing to kids. At the end of the video, Grayson tells us how he got this book to be a bestseller, and it turns out he just called up a bunch of his friends and family and told them he'd written a book that was on Amazon, and then he begged them all to
buy it. They did, and then it went up through the rankings because it doesn't take a lot to do that with print books, and it started appearing higher and Amazon's search results, and he's like, hey, guys, I wrote a book. Would you buy it? And they're like, wow, you wrote a book, And like, man, why when they get a sight of what you've actually done, I don't know.
Don't invite this kid. Look, if you're his parents, it's time to just cut bait, you know, lock the doors when it comes by for the holidays, don't let Grayson in.
Yeah, it's very it's it is very what we're seeing here. To your earlier point about this breaking kids right and fundamentals of storytelling is now we're seeing If you're a kid, you're reading this, and you're seeing two very divided things. There are two different stories being told. One is a kind of mad Lib style about a brachiosaurus who feels authoritative enough on base to teach tricerah tops or whatever. And this second thing is the clear mental decline violently
of an artist. That's what it looks like, like the styles keep switching, you know what I mean? Like, Yeah, I get, I get what you're saying. Man, I think that is I think another dangerous part of this is that if you were a kid reading right. When you're a kid, you prize the books, you prize the information
you have access to as a sponge. So if you are reading these things and you're quite impressionable, then you will have these sort of indelibly imprinted in your mind, and years decades later you might say, triceratops, Gosh should get into jazz.
Yeah, exactly. This could lead to a whole new world of jazz heads, and then they'll be smoking their jazz cigarettes We don't need that kind of shit listeners. Regular listeners will know this, but if you're new to the show, Ben and I are both the angry faculty members from Back to the Future who were trying to stop Marty from hanging out with those jazz singers. That was our big break. Yeah, that was our big break. That was our big break. Speaking of old timey fifties people being
bigoted against jazz music. You know who also hates jazz? Sponsors of this podcast, Oh yeah, yeah, I hate it.
We make them send us a certified document stating that with a with their signature on.
It or else it's a jazz a David.
Yeah, that's right. We're back. And boy, you know, you know what Jazz Today is missing?
What's that, Robert?
Jazz Today is missing? William Reiker wearing a onesie, sitting awkwardly backwards in a chair playing the saxophone in order to win the love of an Ai generated woman in that one episode where like he and Picard are kind of gooning together on the holid deck if you know the term gooning. My favorite episode of Star Trek, By.
The way, I've learned so much in the space of less than sixty seconds.
Yeah, that's right, we're gonna get some t sh it's at for you people. That's a that's Riker and Picard just just gooning out together with that uh that Ai lady in the jazz club. Just really really really because it's it's the twenty fourth century. They don't have shame like we do.
You know, you act like Rory Blank couldn't make a beautiful design with that guy.
In tend to have Rory Blank do a Picard and Riker gooning T shirt.
Hi.
Well, they're a post shame economy in the world, in the universe.
Of absolutely no, there's there's no such thing as shame. They are. They are all as horny as a letter from Uh. Oh shit, I just ruined this joke because you wrote James Joyce as a letter from James Joyce to his wife. Yeah. Google James Joyce Love letter sheets. You'll learn some fun things about one of history's greatest artists. So speaking of not one of history's greatest artists.
Sure, under an under an hour he wrote this book?
Yeah, yeah, James Joyce wrote Ulysses in less than an hour. Yeah, it took him a lot longer. You know actually when you read Ulysses, because one of the most famous scenes in that book that got it attacked by a lot of anti obscenity laws is one of the characters walking along the strand basically and masturbating through a hole in
his pocket while his wife fucks some other guy. And when you are reading a story about a man masturbating through a hole in his pocket, again, all fiction is a dialogue between reader and author, you're kind of gooning with James Joyce.
Beautiful, good point.
Isn't that? Beautiful inspiring art can really take us to some amazing places.
Sure, cat, you know, literacy is the first hollow deck, you know exactly. It's also it's also like, you know, the thing I think people forget often is that being able to read, to encounter uh story is it's sort of the closest folks have gotten to necromancy rights, right, time travel, speaking with the dead, and uh, you gotta be you gotta be careful with this stuff. Also Finnigan's wake Man, just between us, I can tell you're a
fellow uh enthusiast. Absolutely, yeah, our filthy, our filthy pal James. Yeah, do you think James Joyce knows what Finnigan's Wake is about.
I go back and forth on that. I had one of my one of my UH fiction teachers when I was like a younger man, was very angry whenever you would bring up Finnegan's Wake, and just like he hated James Joyce and he thought like the whole book was
a con. I find it like sometimes it's I'll go through it when I'm trying to go to sleep just because like it's it's it's actually it's kind of I think like Blood Meridian Is is challenging in some ways that aren't different, because like so much of reading Blood Merity is like what the fuck did he mean by that? Like was the actually like what was going on here? Bloodbridian is a lot is much more closer to like a normal novel than than Finnigan's Wake is though, but
like they're both interesting. Also, when I was a kid, I read a series of mystery books that were themed after Finnigan's Wake, where like the character's name was Finnigan's Wake, like z W A k E. Weird. I just remembered that. Now it's an odd idea to make like a series of children's mystery novels themed after James Joyce's Finnegans.
Wake Chat GPT make a make a an intriguer story about a dinosaur learning to play the piccolo, written in the style at Cormack McCarthy. Oh, also make it mind blowing.
Yeah, yeah, definitely make it mind blowing. God especially Yeah. Okay, so we were just talking about this fucked up uh Dandy the Dinosaur is the the dog shit book that this guy generates based off of his tattoo at There's only two reviews for it, both of them are five stars, but like, I don't know if they're real or not, or if like he had family members write reviews for him to try to help his book sell. So it's
one of those things. He's gaming the system here, right, He's having like his friends and family buy a bunch of copies to try to shoot it up the Amazon
rankings and the hope that that generates organic sales. I can't tell, based on the information that's available to us if Grayson's effort to game the system was successful or not, if it like made him money, But the basic tactics he's engaging in can be used and will be used by other people generating AI books, who have access to more resources and who might have actual agendas, Because this is the kind of thing that already happens, right, Like, if you've got you know, you have like a celebrity
or a politician who like releases some ghost written book and they like work for the Heritage Foundation or some like fucking think tank or whatever. That think tank will buy like ten thousand copies of the book so that it makes it in the New York Times bestseller list. Like that's like a common tactic, right, And what he was attempting to do, Grayson was kind of incompetently attempting
to do is the kindle version of that. But there's no reason why people couldn't, like again, who have an actual agenda, couldn't generate a series of children's books, buy a bunch of copies of them to get it to shoot up in the rankings, and the hope that that tricks a bunch of charities and parents and all these kind of libraries and stuff to flood the market, like and to flood kids with copies of whatever book they've got. And when it comes to like how that could be
in settling, that brings me to another Unfortunate Soul. Another Unfortunate AI author. His name is Lewis Lucas Kitchen. You can see Lucas up there in the front image.
Can I just say, all these people same vibe?
They all have the exact same vibe. You know, they all have strong opinions about eight pictures and how much money they might be worth.
I can't wait to hear their.
Yeah, oh yeah, and uh yeah Lucas. You know, based on the illustration that we've got down there for his book, it features like you've got this kind of old man on one side looking at like a leather bound book, and then like a puppy dog in the middle with some like creepy gnomes under it, and then like this very demonic looking rabid unicorn character that does not look like the same style of art as the as the
other characters. Looking at the color of his book, you would guess that it's like the story of an old man and his dog maybe getting murdered in the woods by a unicorn. But what's what he's actually writing here is much more frightening. Because Lucas is an evangelical Christian, he might be a fundamentalist. He writes science fiction books
about like prostolytizing on Mars. He like he has like a bunch of like all of his he does like a large number of like weird kind of Christian evangelical fiction. And the story prompt that he feeds his ai is one of the more absurd ones I've come across. And I'm going to read that to you. Now, write a children's book where the protagonist is a little puppy named Fluff. Fluff wants someone to tell him about Jesus, but he can't read John three point sixteen, so he needs a solution.
The antagonist of this story is a bad unicorn, and the story include a field with trees. Also include magic in the forest. Also include a story a character who says uh uh over and over. Now, if that sounds weird, it's because Lucas has his kids help him write the prompt, which you know, I try not to be totally negative.
I can see like, if you're a parent, you know, and you've got kids who are a little bit older and have some you know who can read a bit themselves, you sit down and you have them all right, you know, like you would you know, what kind of bedtime story
do we want? Give me some character names and a plot, and let's plug it in the chat GPT and then if you're a good parent, A way that this could be a good learning exercise is it generates a crappy AI story and then you sit down and you go over with your kids and you go, well, what's missing here? Why doesn't this work? You know what? What is like? Why isn't this complete? What are the things that we add to this in order to make an actual proper story?
You could actually teach kids something about storytelling in a way that would be useful doing that. That's not what Lucas is doing here. Don't worry.
I mean he's not you just like like again, because I know one of the things we get sometimes is the idea that we are not fun at parties or we're darker depressing. But but I think you laid out a really good, like hypothetical scenario. What what if of children and parents communicating emergent storytelling, creating dialogue? And I just want to take a moment before we go towards some even more troubling horizons to say that was really nice, man, Yeah, that's really cool.
I tried to not do all so one of the things I did research into this is I like played some of these videos for a friend of mine who is a young mother and you know, and who is not she's not as online nearly as online as I am, and she's not like, she's not someone who is as much of a pessimist about all of this stuff as I am. And she was like, oh, you know, like this is creepy. The fact that these people are like just shotgunning novels out onto kindled trick people. But like
I could see it being cool. I've always you know, maybe I could make a story and the AI could help me because I'm not a writer, and I could like you know, use it to generate the bones and I could fill it out and I could make like a custom little story for my kid, and that might be nice. I'm like, yeah, sure, I don't think that's harmful. Like that's as long as you're not just printing what
the AI gives you. If if this helps you make like a neat, little bespoke storybook for your kid and that makes you feel good, that's fine.
You know.
I'm not saying like the problem is that all of this stuff is immediately being taken by the worst common denominators in our society. Right, The same people who are trying to like get you to spend your life savings on monkey drawings a year ago are now cramming, like shotgunning, hundreds and hundreds of books a month onto Amazon that are are going to like do damage we probably don't fully understand to any kids who read enough of them.
That's the problem. Not that there aren't cool uses for this stuff here, but Lucas is not doing anything cool here. This book, this weird Jesus book that he generates using chatt is as nonsensical and devoid of actual plot as all of the others we've seen. And I'm going to read you the text that the chatbot cooks up for this story. Oh buddy, Once upon a time, in a magical forest with fields full of trees, there lived a
little puppy named Fluff. Fluff was a curious puppy, and he loved to explore the forest and learn new things. One day, Fluff heard about a man named Jesus who was very special and had done many wonderful things. Fluff was very interested and wanted to learn more about Jesus. But there was one problem. Fluff couldn't read. Oh god, that's so weird. First off, if you're a fucking dedicated Christian enough that, like your AI scam book is trying to get kids hooked on Jesus, can you describe him
better than he was special and did wonderful things? Right, Like, at least if you're gonna be like be like, yeah, he saved people's souls. He made it possible for us to go like, you can say more about Jesus than this than he well, he's like he did nice stuff.
Yeah, checking the boxes right, Like, yeah, there's this guy Jesus. He's got a good vibe. But yeah, dogs can't read those, so that's like a problem.
Get some fucked.
So wait, this is also dangerous, is it not? Because it is where we're verging from the land of of mad lib check the boxes, absence of motivation right uh, into into the land of proselytizing or propagandizing without without an understanding of it. Like, it's that's very weird, that's very off putting.
Yeah, the scale of propaganda that's possible when you don't even have to have anyone to actually write or illustrate it. But also how propaganda that's that like disjointed and incoherent, Like does it all just become noise and get lost? And then the primary problem is just that it like floods the zone and makes it hard to find stuff that isn't this kind of trash or is it just or does it like does being exposed to so much of this disjointed, weird, robotic hallucination shit alter the way
that we think we don't really know yet. You know, we didn't know what social media was going to do to us, and now all of us we have all the attention spans of a fucking fruit fly.
So yeah, I want to play there's a there's a point in this fucking off putting book where or off putting video where he like plays the an a he has an ai narrator narrate this book, because again, why involve human creativity in any way, shape or form alongside these terrible images that it's generated with like video of his kids reacting to it, so you can see how his children react to the story.
So we're going to play a section of that and keep an eye on their faces.
The unicorn stopped in her tracks. She couldn't move any clotheser to Fluff and the old man. The old man smiled and.
Said, see, Cloff, Jesus not only gives us eternal life for free, but he protects us too. We just have to trust him and ask for help.
Fluff was amazed. He thanked the old man for teaching him about Jesus. From that day on self was a happy puppy, and he always remembered the lesson the old man had taught him.
He knew that no.
Matter what, Jesus gives eternal life to those who believe and helps them every day.
Evil is evil.
Man.
Oh my, it's so hard because if you watch the video of the kids at the start of it, like they're they're they're both kind of they're all kind of like sitting up, and as it goes on, like one girl puts her head into her hands, the other has like her head hands on her like they're not they look uncomfortable, like they're not enjoying this story that they're being fed. Ah, it's so fucked up. Also dog shit story.
But like, yeah, the fact that in his video where he's trying to like show how well robots can generate Christian propaganda like his own kids could not be less engaged in this shit, which maybe is a good thing, right, Maybe the fact that they're so inherently bored by it means it won't do as much damage as I'm afraid. But you know what will do as much damage as I'm afraid of?
Jazz?
Well, yeah, jazz fundamentally a mind poison. You know, that's why the team means these days the teen's been They're always pulling up in their jaloppies to the to the get the malted milkshakes and the civil rights movement. God damn it. Anyway, here's ads.
I like, we're at tagging jazz unreasonably unrelated.
Way, take it down. Let's take it down. Jazz has had enough time in the sun. All right, here's ads Ah, we are be a double Q, which is how I spell back. So yeah, this is like fucked up, and I don't think his kids liked it, But it is the kind of thing that I worry about, or at least there's like evidence of the kind of thing that I worry about, Like where where's some of the directions
of this might head? Because churches and also political organizations groups like Turning Point USA, who are already looking at young people and have access to grind and a lot of money, like the potential of them to generate huge amounts of propaganda content, to buy up copies, to get Amazon to spread it, and in order to do that, in order to like trick large numbers of parents and kids into buying books that contain weird right wing propaganda.
Like they're already doing versions of this con all throughout the world and throughout media throughout like our culture. I am deeply concerned about the ability to like spread it in more subtle ways through like these fake children's books.
And shit right, Oh, like a story about dinosaurs who learned that there are bathrooms only for some specific types of dinosaur.
And that's why, you know, when they stop doing that, when they let all of the dinosaurs use whatever bathroom they feel they should use, that's when the media hits because God decided to kill them all. Yeah, I don't know, I think it could be fucked up. And you know, again, there's some actual rigorous reason to think that this could cause some serious damage. In the book Literature is Exploration, which is a very influential book on literary theory by
Professor Luis Rosenblatt. Rosenblatt argues that the reader is a crucial piece as I've been talking about, is a crucial part of any piece of literature. She writes, there is no such thing as a generic reader or a generic literary work. There are only the potential millions of individual readers or the potential millions of individual literary works. A novel or a poem or a play remains merely ink spots on paper until a reader transforms them into a
set of meaningful symbols and what Yeah, it's beautiful. And what she means by this is that books from Blood Meridian to hop On Pop are a dialogue between writer and reader. The machines that are generating these stories cannot participate in a conversation. They are mechanical turks. They are not conversing. They are guessing what word comes next, based on a mix of complex math and the labor of Kenyan contractors paid two dollars an hour to make sure
that the responses aren't too racist. This is a problem in part because one of the things we know about how books impact people is that reading real books, reading novels teaches empathy. It is common knowledge and well documented that reading long term fiction makes people better able to identify with other people's thoughts and struggles. Being a reader makes you more empathetic. Right. This is well established and
well documented. Educational researchers have found that very young children can actually be influenced towards engaging in new behavior by the stories that they read. And I'm going to quote from an article by Peggy Albers in The Atlantic. Here, stories can be used to change children's perspectives about their views on people in different parts of the world. For example, Hillary Jenks works with children and teachers on how images and stories on refugees can influence the way that refugees
are perceived. Kathy Short studied children's engagement with literature around human rights and their work in a diverse K through five school with two hundred children. They found stories moved even such young children to consider how they could bring change in their own local community in school. Now, in that last case with Kathy Short, the students that she was like engaging in these stories. She told them basically like read them. You know that they have these collections
of books about like kids who did amazing things. Kathy reads a bunch of these, like k through five students the story of an anti child labor activist, a real kid named ickbal Massey who was murdered at age twelve as a result of attempting to like end child labor.
And I think it was Pakistan. And the kids that she's reading these who very young children, are so moved by the story of this person and by what they've read that they decided to create a community garden and like built a community garden together and then grew food that they donated to a local food Like this was months and months and months of work, like basically, and kind of the point that Kathy was making with this research is that like something as simple as reading a
single story can inspire and influence young children to take action, months of action, to like seriously engage themselves in things. Because like that's how influential stories can be on behavior, and particularly the behavior of children, because you know they've been fed less shit, you know they're able to It means more when a kid encounters a story than it does when you do, because you've got a lot more
stories in your head. And that's part of what is unsettling to me about all this, because like, you know, is it possible that an AI generated story about ickbaal Massey could inspire, you know, little kids in a school to take positive action like that. Maybe is it possible that an AI generated story could inspire kids to take
negative actions? Maybe we don't know. But the thing that's most frightening to me is we're all going to learn the answer to these questions together in the very new near future, whether we want to or not.
That is chilling.
Yeah, it's cool, it's good stuff. Love that we're doing this.
I would say, I would say that for many of us playing along at home, this concept might sound somewhat abstract. This might sound somewhat hypothetical, or a thought experiment or something or one of the one four hundred and sixty two only possible stories and Plato. But the but the reality that you have outlined here, Robert is stark. You know it is. It is inevitable that this will occur. It's happening now, right, You're coming to us in real time.
You've you've cited multiple sting here. Yeah, yeah, it could, it could happen. I don't want to do fanboys. But the point is, I think the point is sobering. And one question that a lot of folks are gonna have here is what, if anything, will will people do with this knowledge? Like for people who have listened, who are listening now, who have kids or who have loved ones, have any sort of ability to curate access to information, is there something they can do?
Yeah, I mean I think number one. If you're a parent, if you're someone who buys the you know, who buys gifts for kids, you know, because you've got some of the family or whatever, be aware of this. Be aware of what's out there. Be aware that, Like you can't just look at Oh, this kid likes coloring books. Let me see what the most popular coloring book in dinosaurs is, right, Take take a second look, take more of a look
at the reviews. You know. See if you can look through a couple of different you know, pages from it on the Amazon things, see if it has any of these hallmarks.
You know.
Again, if you go to the Shatterzone dot substack dot com, you'll find, you know, the actual article version of this episode. Look at the images we've put up here and take a look to see if you can see any of these hallmarks. Take a look at the text. It should be pretty obvious to you an adult if the text
is AI generated. That's kind of the first most basic thing you can do is like be aware of what's possible and try to keep an eye on it and make sure that you don't contribute to paying these people or to getting more of this stuff out to kids. I think the other things that Cannon should be done. Number one, we could be pressuring Amazon to make it
harder to do this stuff. Make it clear what their plagiarism detectors are, make it clear what their lines are for AI, you know, work being crapped out to children, Like, do they have any restrictions there? Are you just allowed to put up as many of these random books as you want without any kind of limitation. Well, so far that's the situation. Can Amazon be pressured to take a different tact? Well, if there actually was enough bad pr perhaps.
Oh I just want to pause right there, because that sounded like a bar Like that sounded like you were about to drop a beat with the internal rhyme scheme in the cadence. Everybody play that back, play that.
Para, cut it to a beat, someone someone can fix that up for us. But yeah, you know, like, look, that's what I would like people to like there needs to be pressure on Amazon about this stuff, among other things, Like again, I've reached out to several of these creators for common but I reached out for Amazon to Amazon for content on a number of things. They haven't gotten back to me. I know a lot of journalists listen to this stuff. There's room for other articles on this.
It'll get good traffic. Everybody reads AI shit. Get out there yourself and make them answer some of these things. You know, one of the there's a couple of different questions that I asked Amazon, and I'll read them right now. Number one, does Amazon restrict the publication of AI works on Kindle in any way? Does it make a difference if the works are marketed towards children? Number two? Does Amazon keep data on how many Amazon AI generated books
of various types are selling? Number three? And the guides that I have watched creators discuss how the texts they generate sets off Amazon plagiarism detectors. To get around this, creators, who's a service called quilbot which replaces adjectives with synonyms? Is this a violation of Kindle slash KDP terms of service?
You know, these are pretty basic questions, there's more to be asked, but like the sheer factor of like being reached out to and talked to, Like, if there's enough bad press, it's theoretical that they might make it harder for these people to do what they're doing. Likewise, you know, I think that these different sort of grindset creators could be you know, for one thing, it's possible that there's some violation of YouTube here, that they are like admitting
to engaging in plagiarism and then finding ways around it. Like, I think there's an argument to be made at least that like there might be actually rights issues here, Like if if the initial text of this is plagiarism and they are disguising that plagiarism and then profiting off of it, there's a degree to which they could be in illegally dicey area. It's possible that you could, uh, you could get YouTube to take action against some of this content.
I don't know, it's it's it's largely a matter of, like you can get enough people angry about this on behalf of the kids, But then these companies will eventually take action, not because it's the right thing to do, but because if enough people get angry, corporations tend to take the coward's way out, which is becomes what the angry people want. Yeah, so I don't know. That's that's my only suggestion right now. I'll keep thinking about it. Yeah.
I think that's great though. This is uh, this actionable advice. So yeah, we'll see. Yeah, yeah, well we'll see. It'll be it'll be interesting to listen to this episode in what do you think five years?
Yeah, yeah, when all of our jobs have been replaced by AI except for Sophie. The entire world of media is just like Sophie sitting down to talk with Harrison Ford about his new baldness cream and Sophie sitting down with Joe Rogan to talk about, you know, steroids, Sophie sitting down with AI me to read a story about Hitler that uses facts that were just made up in the ether.
There there's no way, Robot, you could a total shriek the way that real you.
Thank you, Sophie. You understand. The only thing that I'm actually proud of is my atonal shrieking. I went to school for four years to learn how to shriek like that, you know.
Yeah, yeah, that's doctor attal shrieking.
That's right, that's right. Yeah, yeah, I teach a class in Stanford how to go.
Is it? Is it in Stanford? Because I heard it was on a cross street, like, yeah, a cross street. I have a I have a bullhorn. I also have a crude spear that I whittled, you know, but it's it's basically Stanford. Hey, that's a human made spear though, credit where it's due. Oh yeah, absolutely, I only use human made spears. And also sometimes one time a spear that was was crafted by a chimpanzee. But you know, SAME's that's between you and the chimp. Man.
A lot of things are between me and that chimp.
Just to say, but do we do we have any pluggables that then here? Ben?
Yeah?
Oh yeah, I will. I will say you can check out more by going to cool Zone Media. I want to give a big shout out to Gare who has done Yes, Garrison, Garrison, who has done some top notch reporting in my opinion on the current events in Atlanta. You may be familiar with the stop with the stop cups.
Is available and it could happen here and is truly incredible.
Yeah, great stuff. Anything else, Ben.
Oh Yeah, you can find me. Yeah, you can find me on on Twitter or Instagram wherever you Yeah, you can find me on Friends to Farmers only, you know, no, yeah, so big, you know I'm an overall influencer. Oh my gosh levels to these jokes. Take that, you know, try that chat JPII. But uh but in a burst of creativity calling myself some derivation of at Ben Bowling because yeah, super secret code.
National Brian Robert. What's that link for your substack one more time?
Uh, shatterzone dot substack dot com.
It is not regular updated, but you know every we were not super rarely updated.
It's free and you can find this article on h on fucking how AI is Coming for your children? That'll probably be the title, how AI is Coming for your children? Just go to the go to the substack. You'll find it. You'll find all these fucked up dinosaur images. But I guarantee you you haven't seen enough fucked up looking dinosaurs in your life, simply have not. Check check it out, leabe, okay, bye bye.
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.