As I notice more and more people use chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude as replacements for human companionship, I was struck by the hollowness that this new trend is. ChatGPT is not only not anyones friend (except perhaps Sam Altman's), it cannot be anyone's friend. There is nothing there to be friends with. No one is actually answering questions, no one is giving advice. There is no one there. I am reminded of Blade Runner 2049, a world where preferring non-human companionship seems to have beco...
Jun 03, 2025•13 min•Ep. 40
I keep hearing the same few points from AI enthusiasts about AI use for creative work. One of these of course is that AI does exactly what the human mind does. This is false, along with a lot of other things that have become integral parts of the ongoing AI hype cycle. In this episode, I break down my point of view on the matter and also, in the second part of the episode, answer some of the comments I received on the first half. ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★...
May 28, 2025•29 min•Ep. 39
I decided to make a short episode about the underlying scamminess of the idea that AI tools are essentially time-saving. This is doubly true for the office-goer being exploited by corporations. Because at the end of the day, no worker gains anything by saving time. If one becomes capable of doing a day's work in an hour, they don't get the rest of the day off. In fact, it probably means the exact opposite - that they will be expected to do hundreds of hours worth of work now. And if they fail to...
May 23, 2025•6 min•Ep. 38
In 1928, EM Forster published a short story called The Machine Stops . It featured a future where humankind survives underground and at the mercy of a system known simply as 'The Machine'. In this world, humans have outsourced all essential tasks, including the task of maintaining and repairing the machine, to the Machine. And then one day, as the title says, the Machine stops, and a society that has grown fully reliant on it, meets its end whispering "Oh Machine! Oh Machine!". I have been looki...
May 18, 2025•6 min•Ep. 37
There are two types of writers. There are plotters and there are pantsers. Pantsers are people who pull people's pants down and plotters are people who have been wronged by pantsers and they plot their death. I am kidding of course and that's kind of the point because when I started this video I was going to say something else which should tell you everything you need to know about my writing style. I am a pantser and I make it sound like a confession but my point is when people ask me for writi...
May 13, 2025•10 min•Ep. 36
Some months ago, Meta announced that it intends to fill Instagram with slop. This would include fake AI-generated video content from fake AI-generated creators . Fake AI-generated commenters would then leave fake AI-generated feedback on these posts and quite possibly, even have a back-and-forth with other fake AI-generated bots like them. This isn’t decorative use of AI for the benefit of people. This isn’t a tool to enrich the lives of real human creators and consumers. This seems to be more a...
May 09, 2025•20 min•Ep. 35
Despite what you may have heard from the hype mill, writing with AI may not be a good thing for you, especially if you are a student or a beginner writer. If you write with AI, you open yourself up to professional and personal dangers that may have long-term impact on your career and perhaps even on your ability to give expression to your ideas and thoughts. In this article, I am going to give you a complete breakdown of why writing fiction with AI might be a mistake that you probably want to av...
May 07, 2025•22 min•Ep. 34
Every month, there is news of some Indian YouTuber losing their channel to motivated copyright strikes, quite possibly made due to political reasons. I have long been a proponent of content channel diversification by creators. Open protocols like RSS feeds (used for podcasts and blogs alike) as well as email (used for newsletters) are the way out. Creators need to understand that at the end of the day, their channels belong to YouTube. The only way to not be subject to the rules made by someone ...
May 05, 2025•16 min•Ep. 33
I was told that there needs to be a trailer for my podcast. So here it is, telling you that this show is about the intersection of tech and society. Because they do intersect a lot, don't they? Our personal and work lives are steeped in tech, our policies have a lot to do with tech. Governments are using gen-AI to write laws. Companies are firing employees to replace them with chatbots. We have to move past the phase where 'tech channel' meant mobile phone reviews. So there. If you didn't know w...
Apr 15, 2025•4 min•Ep. 32
In our time, political propaganda and conspiracy theories are kissing cousins. One opens the gates and the other drags you in. The way they do this is not very imaginative and so it is possible to squitn and see how the process works. Below is a full transcript of the episode. Hi, and welcome to another video on this channel. My name is Vimoh and here we talk about atheism, Indian culture, popular misinformation, that sort of stuff. And I want to talk today, not about any specific creator or any...
Apr 09, 2025•12 min•Ep. 31
Hello friends. After a long time, there is a writing-related video. I thought I would occasionally make a video about writing because, you know, I am writing. This channel is a channel by a writer, so there should at least be some writing-related content on it. I put out a post in my posts tab—it used to be called a community tab, and things are confusing now. In the posts tab, you will find a post where I have asked people to send me their writing-related doubts, and I will do my best to answer...
Feb 03, 2025•10 min•Ep. 30
How to Lose Followers — And Why You Should We don’t often talk about losing followers — not seriously anyway. Usually, when someone mentions it, they’re being ironic or sarcastic. They’re saying, “Don’t do this, or you’ll lose followers.” But today, I mean it sincerely. This episode is about how to lose followers — and why that might actually be a good thing . Followers Change You When you start creating content, you're doing it because something moves you. You have passions, ideas, and interest...
Jan 23, 2025•12 min•Ep. 29
Disclaimer: The following is a transcript of this video episode. It has been edited for grammar and clarity using an AI tool. In India, we have this term called Godi Media, where a mainstream media outlet or a television channel or a newspaper, usually a Hindi newspaper (but English newspapers have also started doing this), has bent over backward to accommodate the needs of whoever is in power. This means that a politician, a minister, or a political party with a certain agenda asks them to trea...
Jan 16, 2025•11 min•Ep. 28
Since we have been talking to a large extent about artificial intelligence and creativity and the future of human society, I think this is something that we all need to kind of think about a little bit. That is the future of creativity and the kinds of things that are advisable for creative people in the future and inadvisable. Bear in mind that when I say the future, what I mean is not the distant future. I mean the medium-range future, the future of a few years from now, maybe three years from...
Jan 06, 2025•6 min•Ep. 27
Below is a transcript of a human-recorded podcast. The transcript has been formatted using AI tools while preserving the original content, including all speech patterns and informal language. Hello, friends. This is probably, in fact, quite possibly the last episode of this podcast that I'm recording in 2024. You will be listening to this sometime in the middle of January because I, you know, schedule episodes in advance these days on account of the fact that I need to get rid of the tendency in...
Jan 05, 2025•18 min•Ep. 26
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the podcast. In case you are not already kind of sort of off the school of thought that social media is bad for you because it is full of bad faith actors who are engaging in rage bait with the sole intention of generating engagement in the form of likes and shares and retweets, et cetera, so that they can maximize the revenue they make from that particular platform. Here is another problem that is going to raise its head. In fact, it has already ...
Dec 30, 2024•7 min•Ep. 25
If you have ever run into a reel or short where a gullible “podcaster” is engaged in an “interview” with an astrologer and wondered who these people are and why you have never heard of them despite their apparent authority and popularity, join the club. Of course the simple answer is that this is a mix of familiar old marketing practices being put to use to poison our feeds and, by extension, our culture. Much has been said about how the Liberal media of America inadvertently fed Trump’s popular...
Dec 26, 2024•11 min•Ep. 24
Imagine there are two spoons. You go to decide which one to buy. One is made of aluminum. One is made of steel. One is quite beautiful and ornate. The other is just functional. One, it seems, will not last very long. The other will not only last, but it will also be nice to look at. But they both serve the same function. They're both spoons. They are both going to be used for the exact same thing, putting nutritious items—hopefully—into your mouth and feeding you or feeding the people you choose...
Dec 23, 2024•7 min•Ep. 23
So, largely, there are going to be two kinds of people in your life—in anyone's life, really. These are going to be people who are good to you and people who are bad to you. People who you get along with and people who you don't get along with. People who care about you and people who don't care about you or actively dislike you. The mistake a lot of us make is that, like, let's visually imagine them as two different folders: people who are good to you and people who are not good to you. People ...
Dec 09, 2024•6 min•Ep. 22
A large part of the discourse on the future of work leaves out huge chunks of the working class. Just as, a decade or so ago, the discourse on the connecting power of social media left out the capitalistic motivations of the corporations running these platforms. Every technology has an ethic of its own, and the ethic behind generative AI has so far proven to be somewhat akin to robbery on a global scale. Maybe things will change. Maybe they won’t. But questions need to be asked of this new syste...
Nov 28, 2024•11 min•Ep. 21
In the age of artificial intelligence, we encounter creators and content makers who are deeply optimistic about its potential. Their enthusiasm is understandable; their livelihoods often depend on the increasing use and acceptance of AI. Many of these creators actively encourage others to embrace AI, presenting it as a tool that can revolutionize industries and transform workflows. Recently, I watched a video where an AI advocate made a point that struck a chord with me. They said, "Customers do...
Nov 23, 2024•13 min•Ep. 20
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the podcast. I wanted to talk about importance—about how we know something is important and how we know something is not important—and how that method of measuring importance has been somewhat impaired in our information superhighway age. I wanted to talk about letters because that is exactly what I found myself talking to my father and mother about some weeks ago. I was inundated with messages, and I asked them how many messages they had to deal...
Nov 16, 2024•9 min•Ep. 19
In this episode, I delve into the cultural and linguistic challenges we face in understanding artificial intelligence. I argue that our current dissonance stems from the lack of appropriate language to describe AI entities that exhibit human-like behavior, such as expressing emotions or giving advice. Traditionally, words like "robot" and "artificial intelligence" have denoted futuristic concepts, but now, as these technologies become part of our everyday lives, we’re forced to redefine them in ...
Nov 12, 2024•7 min•Ep. 18
As a YouTuber who publishes content about atheism, culture, and society, I frequently get questions from people who want answers to specific points. I am therefore often at pains to explain to them that I have already answered this particular query in a previous video or essay. However, I don’t always remember where I have done so. Often, it is a bit of a task to look it up, find the exact link and then the exact timestamp and them email it back to the person. And if my correspondent is angry or...
Nov 07, 2024•40 min•Ep. 17
Okay, so this thought kind of woke me up in the middle of the night, so I’m recording it because I don’t want to forget it. It’s about the nature of writing right now. You have people who call themselves writers and who use AI to write. And then there are people like me who say that if you’re not actually writing, then you’re not really a writer. If you’re using AI to write, are you truly a writer? That stance can come across as an insult, like I’m some snooty purist saying, “You’ll never be lik...
Nov 06, 2024•4 min•Ep. 16
Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the podcast. Today, I want to discuss something that's been on my mind for a while. It relates to my recent decision to leave social media. One of the reasons behind this was that I felt my way of thinking was being influenced by the need to produce content in very specific formats. I realized that, over time, this could harm my creative process. So, I want to break down my thoughts on this, hoping to make it understandable to others. Initially,...
Nov 05, 2024•9 min•Ep. 15
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the podcast. This is being recorded on Diwali night, so if you hear some background noise, that’s the neighborhood celebrating. Tonight, I want to talk about a shift in how we think of misinformation. Traditionally, we imagine someone actively keeping the truth from us or replacing it with lies. In this scenario, we picture essential information—critical for making informed decisions—not reaching us. Instead, we’re fed propaganda, and as a result...
Nov 01, 2024•11 min•Ep. 14
This episode is a sticthed together version of a bunch of videos I made for a short-lived channel I had some time ago. So ignore my changing appearance throughout it. The episode was recorded over several days. Below is an AI generated (NotebookLM) summary of the episode. The provided text is an excerpt from a podcast episode where the speaker discusses four books that explore the impact of technology, particularly the internet and social media, on human thought, behavior, and culture. The speak...
Oct 23, 2024•18 min•Ep. 13
The real danger from AI tools to writers is not that people using AI will replace writers. It is that writers will get too reliant on AI tools and consequently lose the spark that makes them writers. This video is from a YouTube channel I used to run. The channel no longer exists (because the only thing more difficult than running one YouTube channel is running four YouTube channels) and I figured this Substack is a good place for the things I had made for it. This is a public episode. If you wo...
Oct 22, 2024•12 min•Ep. 12
I got to thinking about how almost every day, we all talk about the same things and think about the same things. And about how not engaging in conversations about these topics of the day ostracises us in the eyes of our fellow media consumers. To the extent that not having a view (or choosing not to express a view that you have) can bring haters to your yard. This is especially true if you have a bit of a following online, but I am sure it affects everyone to one extent or another. You just have...
Oct 20, 2024•10 min•Ep. 11
