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