Beautiful, Terrible Internet

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WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Amory Sievertson, is this a Internet is beautiful or Internet is terrible story on endless thread today? Mine is an internet is terrible. Oh man, mine too. Alright, double whammy. Okay. Well it's sort of it's a little bit of both. So like it's an internet is terrible, maybe ish, but then also internet as beautiful as the closer. Two things can be true at once. कर दो कर दो Something something. Would you like to go first today?

Yeah. I'll go first. Okay. Alright, so Have you ever seen the time traveling meme that's like women go back in time, men go back in time or or or whatever, like women go back in time and they go back and they see their grandmother and they say, I'm your granddaughter and men go back in time And I don't know, it's like any number of Um Th I saw one recently that involved somebody going back in time to Japan and asking a woman not to take a picture of her dog. Hmm. Okay.

Does that does that mean anything to you yet? when we did our cuteness episode, didn't didn't our guest for that episode mention like the quote unquote ugliest dog in the world when actually that was a very cute dog and it was in Japan? Well, yeah. I mean you're you're you're trying but you're failing on this one so far. Okay. Um we are talking of course about Shiba Inos. Yes, okay, yep.

And doges. Yes. And s and why why do you think somebody might utilize a time machine to go back in time and tell somebody to not bring the idea of doge into existence? Oh, because Doge has taken on a life of its own as the Department of Government Efficiency and um Elon Musk. uh favorite word or digital currency.

Yeah, that's yep, you got it. Now you're back on track, Sievers and you're back on track. Um so everybody knows about Doge. At this point, the Department of Government Efficiency And what I will say is Doge popped back into my feed with uh intensity last week. Do you know why and did it pop back into your feed last week? Wait, this is sort of on the tip of my brain. Um Your brain has a tip?

Yeah. You know, when it's not like on the tip of your tongue. It hasn't made it to the tongue yet. It's still in the brain. Okay. Fair. I I'm not remembering in this moment. So please enlighten me. At the time that we're recording this, there was kind of an explosion of popularity of a set of videos on These set of videos got posted to YouTube by scholarly groups.

who are essentially I know it sounds ridiculous. Okay. Yeah, I should say that's the n that's the New York Times's description. Scholarly groups, but scholarly because you know, Doge helped essentially eviscerate all of this funding for for, you know, many different organizations, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, which, you know, gives money to Um so effectively these videos showed two former Doge employees, one Justin Fox, another Nate Kavanaugh, in deposition.

For lawsuits, because of course there's been a lot of lawsuits and counter lawsuits around all of this funding. And they both were talking about essentially what they did in order to identify grants. That were not in line with this executive order that President Trump put out, you know, banning quote radical and wasteful government DEI programs.

There's not a lot of action in these videos. It's basically young men being interviewed against a grey background. But I found them to be fascinating. It gives you this kind of interesting window into How these people made decisions to pull funding away from organizations, and you get these glimpses of their world views or their political views. These employees were apparently using Chat GPT to identify programs and grants that included elements of DEI, and this had pretty mixed results.

As an example, court documents show that a museum got a grant of about three hundred and fifty thousand dollars to repair and update its HVAC system or PETING and and uh AC. One potential outcome of this replacement and update might, of course, mean more visitors to the museum or as it's described in the in the grant, um, more access to the museum's collection. Chat GPT flagged this grant with the rationale that more access to the museum equals more diversity. And the grant was terminated.

This is the kind of thing these Doge employees are being asked about in these videos. Um one of the interviews in particular I found to be interesting, Justin Fox, a former Doge employee uh who's being interviewed, gets into it with the interviewer over the definition of DEI. How do you interpret DEI? There was the EO explicitly laid out the details.

I don't remember it off the top of my head. It's okay. I'm asking for your understanding of it. Yeah. My understanding was exactly what was written in the EO. Okay. So can you I don't remember what was in the EO. So right now do you have an understanding of what DEI is? Yeah. Okay. So what's your understanding as you sit here today in this deposition?

Well it it it was exactly what was written in the uh the interviewer is like Okay, well I get that there's like a definition in this document, but wha how do you define And Justin Fox basically says, well, I define it as it's defined in the document. Aaron Powell Do you have a present understanding of DI? Okay. Can you explain what that present understanding is? Um well it is just easier for me to be referencing back to the EO. Are you refusing to answer the question?

Okay. I I I just feel that referencing back to the verbatim executive order was the best way for us to capture all of the

DEI language. So videos of these depositions really popped off. They were all over Reddit. And then they were gone. Hmm. A judge ordered these videos to be taken down temporarily, essentially I think because the government was arguing that these two people would come under harassment and death threats, et cetera, et cetera.

Which I have to say is it's an interesting argument to me in a world in which this stuff is happening to people all the time for myriad reasons, if that makes sense. They're getting, you know, harassed online. And what you see here is the US government leveraging its full personnel and influence to protect these two individuals in a way that lots of people don't get protected. After getting death threats and harassment for being women, for being people of color, etcetera.

So I think there's there's some inequity here in the way that we think about people getting doxed and getting harassed for the work that they do. But something changed, which is that almost immediately after the judge ordered these videos to be taken down, We saw them reappear. Can you guess where they reappeared? On Reddit? They did not reappear on Reddit, but they did appear as a BitTorrent. Oooooooh loosely. What? Loosely.

That's one of those like terms that's like, Oh yeah, it it's in it's the BitTorrent. Yeah, it's yeah, it's the BitTorrent. It's the BitTorrent. Um BitTorrent is effectively an internet protocol that allows people to share files in a more distributed way. A bunch of different computers have copies of a file. They can share parts of it. of that file to whomever else wants to download it.

So the downloader gets their file via a bunch of different places. That is my layman's description of bit torrenting. Okay. Do we all have to download the four hundred thousand little bits or the little bits come toget okay. Oh well they automatically come together automatic as a file. Yeah, yeah. You don't have to assemble the file every time. Phew, much more efficient. That's like

Like an internet jigsaw. No time for that. But so that's one place. The other place that the videos popped back up was the internet archive. Which, um, I believe you know about. And this is a place where in recent years, um, a lot of things that have been erased from the internet for, you know, political reasons, potentially, one might say. have popped back up. So this is just I think a story that reminds us that nothing really actually disappears when you post

It's on the internet forever, whether it's on YouTube or, you know, i e even the power of a of a district court can't really erase something from the internet. It can make it a lot harder to access. But it's just it's it's gonna be really hard to get rid of this stuff. And there's a little bit of a of a Streisand effect, I think, that happens with these things as well.

where as soon as you try to erase it from the internet, people are like, oh no, no. And they and they go and and they make sure that it's available. Um and you know, on the one hand, nothing ever really disappears, as you said, but on the other, it could. Like I don't want us to take for granted the resources like Internet Archive and the people who are doing that archiving, because it is It is time spent, it is um dollars needed to sort of power these archives and to to keep them alive and

I myself have started taking a lot more screenshots of things that I don't want to see um disappear or have a feeling might disappear. I've had a lot of stuff. actually disappear on me that um was not being protected and backed up by activists because it was not um crucial to our government or, you know, society at large. And so

Um, yes, we have ways of backing it up and power to those, but also don't take them for granted. And if there is material that you feel like is important to uh people's rights or that people need to know they're important for accountability, which uh is so feels like it's it's maddeningly fleeting these days. You know, back it up. This is going to take this is protecting internet resources takes all of us doing our part. Alright. Uh one story about the internet

Maybe terrible, maybe uh great in certain ways. So uh what do you got for me? Do you have a terrible, beautiful story for me? No, no, nothing terrible here. In fact, after the break, Ben, I'm gonna teach us how we can all be more productive. Oh boy, oh no. It's coming up in a minute. Ben, do you remember our episode on consensual doxing? Of course. So what was one of the key takeaways for you from that episode? That there is way more information about ourselves online than we might realize.

Oh yes there is, and that that information in the wrong hands can be used for all sorts of shady stuff. Doxing, of course, but also scams, identity theft. Collecting our data, selling it. Yeah, don't like it. The good news is you can do something about this. Incogni tracks down and removes your personal data from all sorts of online directories, those people finder sites. in even commercial databases. And Incogni stays on top of your data. So if it shows up on sites in the future,

They'll remove it again and again. Take back your personal data with INCOGNI. Use code ENLIS at the link in our show notes and get 60% off annual plan. Incogni dot com slash endless Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken? A podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrum School of Business.

The transition to autonomous vehicles will require overcoming not just technological barriers, but also psychological ones. We are comparing ourselves to that technology, and it's something that we care about. That kind of comparison can be threatening. Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts, and stay tuned for a preview of a recent episode about how we might embrace or fear self-driving cars.

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Okay, we're back and Ben I have a story for you from one of our favorite subreddits, Life Pro Tips. Love a pro tip. This is a a post the title of which Because I started pretending my life is a TV show and it made me more productive. Okay. So the body of the post reads. For a while I had this weird habit. At the end of each day, I would give my day, and then in bold, an episode title and a cliffhanger, like a TV show.

Example, episode 21. The day everything went wrong. Cliffhanger, tomorrow might fix it. Dot dot dot. Or make it worse. Strangely, this made life a lot more interesting. Even boring days started feeling meaningful because they were just another episode in the story, and that part's in bold. Hard days felt like quote-unquote character development instead of failure.

It also made me more productive because I started thinking like a main character. Main characters don't quit halfway through the story. But there were a few problems. And then there's a bullet point list. One, I had to write the titles somewhere or I'd forget them. Two, coming up with new titles every day was surprisingly hard. Three, I'm lazy and forgetful, so sometimes I skip days entirely.

So I tried building a small tool for myself that turns your day into an episode with a title, poster, cliffhanger, and summary so I can look back on weeks like seasons of a show. Now I can scroll back through past days and it actually feels like re-watching episodes of my life. Curious about something though, and then this line is in bold. If your life was a TV show, what would the title of season one, episode one be?

Hmm. So, Ben, do you have any any thoughts on this idea as a as a productivity tool? Well, here's a thing I'll say. I I something that resonated with me was the idea that like bad things are character development actually. Yeah. Um like I have a I have a friend who says Good times are good times and bad times are good stories later. Which I like that. Um I guess we are all main characters in our own lives. Um, and so like that's

We all have that right, uh, as individuals to feel like we're main characters. I could see that leading to some potential toxic behavior. But but you know, I I guess I don't I you know, whatever. I mean to each their own. Uh better to be a main character than an M P C I suppose. Do you keep a journal? I have several journals that I've been given over the years that have like one or two pages filled out. Okay.

I'm like, I don't mean do you physically keep a journal. I mean do you?'Cause I I like this I like the idea of this as like micro journaling, you know, because it's like I'm not gonna take the time at the end of the day to write about what happened. But if I could just at the end of the day write a little title for myself for the day, um, that's and then just flip back through all my titles. I think that would be It it's an interesting thought experiment and and many Redditors

thought the same thing. One person wrote, This is kinda genius. Suddenly doing laundry feels like a side quest instead of suffering. Um, and the the OP responded, Yep, and harder days feel like tough missions and more interesting to finish. It feels more like a video game than a T V show from this view. Yeah, I like that too. I mean I I had a parent tell me, like a new parent tell me as I was becoming a new parent.

They were like being a parent is like playing a video game. Like every level is different. Some levels are really hard, some levels are really fun, but every level is different. And you just like get through the level and you get to the next level and and that's kind of Um so and and I think that's that's life too, right? Yeah. Um just w with or without kids. So I'm into it. Yeah. I I think it's good. And it's certainly m way more doable than uh

than actual journaling, at least for someone like me. Same. I'm much more likely to come up with a title than a full entry. Same. If that makes sense. Totally. So I want to read a few more comments for you. Someone said How in the world is this not a completely dystopian idea?

OP says, because it's heavily based in your daily life and we are just adding a little creativity to it. And then someone responds to that comment and says, Who is this we? And this is where um this is where things started to fall apart for me. Someone says, sometimes the AI posts are so obvious. Uh oh. Other commenters jump in and say there's always a list with exactly three bullet points. Someone says and always a weird question at the end. Someone else says, and totally random bold words.

So this post Are there any M dashes in there? Any M dashes in that post, Amory? There are no M dashes, but Redditors now believe in this uh subreddit at least now believe that this post is just AI and someone said, It's as much scary as it is cool that we can now squint our eyes at a post and say with relative confidence, that wasn't a human.

And they say it's I mean it's cool that we can do it, not that we have to. And someone else says, based on math, about two to five percent of people can do it. Eventually as algorithms sort what is valued semantically, it will drop to less than one percent. So who knows where those percentages are coming from at this m moment in time. But the point being that like, no, no, people are actually really bad at knowing that this post is AI, including me.

Um, and including you, at least from the reading of it. Yeah. And the algorithms are only getting better and better at making posts that seem human but are not. Um, and so other commenters jump in and you know, someone says, What makes you think that this is AI? I would like to have this super skill.

Then people are like, oh, it's the final part in bold and people are too selfish to care and ask what would season one, episode one of your life be. Like no human actually cares what your answer to that is. Well here's my question for you. Did you look at OP's posting history? Okay. So this is where we get to who this OP is. The username is fuzzy-add 7685. So that does not inspire a lot of confidence that this is a human, at least as I'm viewing it.

Well uh that's like a what I would say is that's like a Reddit applied username. Sure. So they could have just said generate one for me. I don't have to do it. But it's interesting that a user whose suggestion is You should come up with titles for your life is not coming up with an original username. Yes, yes. So speak I'll get to their history, but first, the very next day this post was removed. So I'm like, damn it, I saw this post, people thought it was AI.

Where is it? It was not in the internet archive. But it was not on a torrent. It was not on a torrent. Where but I had a feeling that if this was AI and some bot farm generating this. They probably made this post elsewhere on Reddit because there's no shortage of self-improvement subreddit. And indeed they did. So I was reading you the exact same post, but this time it's on the subreddit Productivity Cafe.

where at least last I checked, no one has called this out as being an AI post. That's a much smaller subreddit than Life Pro Tips, but no one has called this out as being AI yet. Interesting. And it's posted there under a different username, which is Future Dash Swimming 1092. So we have a pattern a pattern in the usernames here. Word dash word and then a four digit number.

So then I go to these users Reddit history, and I don't know if this is a relatively new feature then, but both of these Redditors have their post history hidden.

In the meantime, I did what we do and I reached out to Fuzzy Ad7685, the OP of the Life Pro Tips. Alright, good for you. And I just said Hey, fuzzy ad, I see your LPT post was removed after accusations that you're an AI. Your Reddit username doesn't give me a lot of hope that you're human, but Um, you know, I figured I'd give you a chance to speak for yourself, even if you're not human. I want to understand how and why these AI posts are made.

Who's behind this? What what is there to gain or learn? Um and I I you know, I do not expect to hear back. I have not heard back from fuzzy ad seven six eight five. Okay. But in the meantime, like I don't want to see AI generated content on Reddit. I I think a lot of people would agree that we don't want that. And so what can we do to to curb AI posts as both Redditors and social media users and moderators and where What is the responsibility of platforms? What can platforms do?

And do they have any incentive to do anything when more content and more engagement means, you know, more advertising dollars, which is how these platforms survive. You know, I personally, as someone who is trying to spend less time online, I'm always kind of asking myself, like, what is my red line for social media that would get me off of social media or get me off of a particular platform?

AI bots are it I have to say. Like and and and bots will do it. The anonymity of Reddit, and you and I talk a lot about anonymity and think a lot about anonymity, but the anonymity of Reddit certainly doesn't do it any Favors in in the um the larger question of how we prove our humanity on anonymous platforms and

When it starts to feel like we're swimming in a space and we can't tell what's real or not anymore. That's when I'm like, nope, gimme real people right in front of me who I know who are not. characters in the show Pluribus that are all tapped into the hive mind, like give me real people. Um I still like the idea of like micro journaling your life. Um And yet knowing that it was

potentially created by AI and not by a human just leaves this taste in my mouth that's like M metallic? Yeah. Is it metallic too does it taste like silicon? Little a little like that. Yep. So fair enough. Well, um nonetheless. Let's come up with our uh season one, episode one titles. Okay. Ooh, I know. Uh I went to Providence, Rhode Island.

Okay. Look, I live in Boston, I love Boston, but Providence is like a cooler Boston right now. Or like Providence is what maybe Boston used to be and is no longer. And um my husband and I saw a sticker in a store there that said Keep Providence a Secret. So I would steal that as like the title of my day yesterday, Keep Providence a Secret. What about you? Oh man. Yesterday um I uh I won a pool tournament. Okay. I I led a meeting of a bunch of my neighbors going through bylaws changes. Okay.

Uh microjournaling, Ben. Microjournaling. No, I know. I'm just trying to come up with the title though. It's like uh um Like like big wins in small places. Big wins in small places. That's good. Yeah. You have like a tight Hi what about but I want to get hijinks in there some somehow. Hijinx, big wins in small places. High jinx, low stakes. High jinx, low stakes. That's good. All right. Hijinx lipsticks. Okay. We've just a good name for our podcast, actually.

Yeah. All right, send us your season one, episode one. Titles? Listeners, please. Mm-hmm. We would like to know whatever day you listen to this episode, name tit title your day or the or the full day yesterday and email. Endless thread, WBUR dot org. We're gonna disprove the AI watchers on Reddit and saying that real humans don't care about other people's season one, episode one title. Um, we are not AI and we do care, so send them along. Yeah, we do care. Send'em to us.

Oh, and by the way, before this episode was set to air, the New York Times had an update on the Doge story. Earlier this week a judge ruled in federal district court that in fact the videos of the former employees' depositions could live online after all. The judge, who had temporarily said the videos needed to be removed, cited a few key reasons for allowing them back online. For one, the government had not supplied sufficient evidence that the Doge employees were in fact being harassed.

And number two, the internet and platforms, including Reddit, TikTok, and others, had supplied a nearly instantaneous global distribution of the videos. making in order to remove them effectively moot. In other words, the Doge Cat it's already out of the bag. Endless Thread is the production of WBUR Boston's NPR. This episode was co-hosted by myself, Ben Barack Johnson. And me, Amory Sievertson. It was produced by Kalyani Sexena, edited by Meg Kramer, mixed and sound designed by Marquise Neal.

The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Chiosna Bernadot, Grace Tatter, Emily Jańkowski, our production manager Paul Vikas, and our managing producer, Summitoshi. If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, another wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up, endlessthread at wbr.org.

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And listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring BU Professor Carrie Morwidge on why it's so hard for people to trust self-driving cars and other autonomous technologies.

When we look at the psychology of these kinds of things too, there is a psychology of adopting a new technology. It's unique in the sense that we're giving up control as a species over many kinds of things and as a person, right? So for people who think about driving as the same way that they might dr buying a car is the same way that they might buy a washing machine as a commodity or an appliance where it's a thing that gets me from A to B.

That may be not as threatening and you're just thinking about, is this safer? Is this cheaper? Is this more convenient for me? Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business, Markets and Society at IBMS.bu.edu. Hej, det är jag från riksbyggen här. Ursäkta att jag avbryter mitt i din egen tid med podd och allt. Jag vill bara säga att vi har massor av bostäder som passar alla olika sätt att leva.

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