What is the worst case scenario, Kevin?
Human extinction. That'd be pretty bad.
Oh, yes, that.
Hi everyone, this is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher and it is still got re August.
Yes, while Scott continues his gallivanting, I have brought in some excellent co-hosts. Kevin Roose, New York Times tech columnist and author of the AGI Chronicles, and Casey Newton, founder and editor of Platformer, and they are also the soon-to-be not hosts of the New York Times podcast Hard Fork, at least for now. You need to explain what's happening, boys.
Kevin, tell them what's happening.
Yeah. So, Casey and I have come down with a horrible disease that sometimes afflicts middle-aged men in San Francisco, which is that they decide to start a company together.
Aha. A startup, shall we say? Shall we say?
So, Founderitis is real. Please protect your families. We are leaving Hard Fork in just a couple of weeks and we are starting our own independent podcast and media company together, just the two of us.
So, what is the new brand? Do you have a name?
We do. We're not going to tell it to you yet because we haven't hard launched it yet. Casey wanted to call the new show the Gay Straight Alliance, but I thought that might be taken by Pivot.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Yeah, that's our subname.
We'll have a name ready to go pretty soon. We think we've got a fun brand, but more importantly, you know, a lot of people would complain to us over the years we were only coming out once a week. There were a lot of stories that we missed. So, the new show is going to be coming out at least twice a week. It's going to be YouTube first. If you're watching, you know, Pivot on YouTube, which I hope you are, you can see these faces. You know, these are not faces for radio. These are faces that need to be on camera. And good news, that's coming.
We've got a lot to get to, so we're going to get started. Is that okay? Let's test you two out. All right. Ready? Let's do it.
All right. This was tailor-made for us today. Mark Zuckerberg laid out Meta's AI vision in another unedited 6,500-word manifesto arguing that most concerns are overblown and failed to acknowledge all the positives it can achieve. We know about this, Mark, by the way. Zuckerberg thinks government should be more involved in model releases, suggesting a close, proactive collaboration between frontier labs and the government. Meta is recommitting to open-source models, resuming releases of models with open weights. The company also announced a $1 billion fund for communities — a little, they're spreading it around its data centers. We'll talk more about data centers in a bit. Manifesto reviews, gentlemen. He loves a manifesto. There's a lot of them and he's been writing for, I think it was, was it the Times or the Journal? Which one did he put it in? The Times, right?
I think it was the Journal. I mean, look, I'm writing about this today and the headline is probably going to be 'Superintelligence Is Not a Toy.' I found this to be an almost childlike essay about what AI is. AI is not on a trajectory where it tops out at coming up with cool recipes to bake with your daughter, which is kind of one of the core use cases that he names in the essay. It's something that's going to be extraordinarily dangerous. Like, I, you know, I watched the House of the Dragon finale last night, and this is like if one of the Lords of Westeros says that the future is everyone having their own personal dragon, and that's the way to keep everyone safe. It's much more complicated than that.
Yeah. So, you didn't like it. You weren't loving it. You loving it.
I thought it was just sort of facile and self-serving as usual.
I think he's talking his book, right? Meta is not in the lead in the AI race and the policies and the stance that most benefit them directly are this sort of open world where you're allowed to distill from other models, smarter and better and more capable models. He made a case in the manifesto that the way that we are thinking about distillation is wrong. Basically, distillation is like where you use the smarter teacher model to train the slightly less smart student model. He wants that to continue. Obviously, if you're Meta, you want that because then you can distill from Claude and GPT 5.6 Soul and whatever else you are trying to mimic there. And so I think this is a vision that happens to suit Meta's business priorities almost exactly. And I don't think that's an accident.
So, what's he doing it for? I mean, listen, Meta got mad at us a couple of weeks ago because Scott compared them to Jeffrey Dahmer. But what is up here with this money, with the, you know, 'I love humanity,' the future of the ads, everything else? I mean, they do this over and over again. This 'let me give you some money.' And it's of course the same week there was a report — I'm not clear if it's true or not — that his yacht didn't go save someone up in Alaska. Then we'll talk about the lawsuit in a second, but what are they up to here in terms of these communities? They've got a bunch of videos around Louisiana, for example, like how they're making coffee shops and jobs for everybody. What's happened here? And the future is humanity.
I think they're sort of mimicking the Pope in that way. I mean, they have to lay out some sort of positive vision around AI that will one, justify the massive capital expenditures that they're making, destroying their profit margins in the hopes that one day they will have a product that can compete with the frontier labs. And on the other side, they're trying to rally the communities around actually letting them build the data centers that they want. What I found so striking about the essay though, Kara, is that after he goes on about, you know, the need to decentralize power and checks and balances and all that, go look at how they built that data center in Louisiana. It was something like 50 non-disclosure agreements. The arrival of the data center came as a massive shock to that community, right? So when push comes to shove, they're doing what every other company does, which is building data centers as secretly as possible and then writing essays about how the future is for everyone.
Yeah, I know. What is it, Kevin, from your perspective? Because he does this from time to time. I was telling Scott, I recall the late-night conversation when he wrote one of those other long unedited manifestos. He said, 'What do you think?' I go, 'It's in desperate need of an editor, but let's move on from that because you don't allow those, I guess.' But one of the things I recall is the same thing: 'We're a community, Kara. We're in this together.' And I'm like, why do you control everything? What is happening here? Why do they feel the need to do this from a geopolitical standpoint with other companies?
I mean, I think Mark Zuckerberg is an executive who lives in a constant state of paranoia that there is something big and disruptive happening in his industry that is going to swallow the company that he has spent his whole adult life building. So you can see this every time there's sort of a new emerging tech trend, like he jumps into it in a very aggressive way. Happened with crypto, happened with VR and the metaverse. Now it's happening with AI and he senses, I think correctly, that this is a new and powerful force in society and he wants to be involved in it. The problem is he's very late, right? They did not start betting on deep learning and LLMs in 2017 and 2018 the way that other frontier labs did. They sort of didn't have the necessary compute and ingredients to build very good models and so they've had to overpay for researchers and talent and compute in the last few years to try to buy their way back to the frontier. And I think this is part of that effort. It's like, we have to have a vision that's going to get people excited because otherwise our investors are going to be like, 'Wait, why are you plowing all these hundreds of billions of dollars into capex to have, you know, the fifth or sixth best model on the market?'
Right. Exactly. Exactly. He's still so interested in his image in a way that I find touching and sad at the same time. Right. That he really... Did you see the video of him fighting the MMA guy on a lake?
Yes. That's on like a thing. I like that Mark better. I'm like, 'Okay, that's a good one.'
I love that video because like you can tell the MMA guy is going at about 30%.
30%, right? He could have kicked him right into the leg, but he has to sort of pretend like Zuck is really giving it to him, you know? So, he's like...
It reminds me of like wrestling with my four-year-old. I'm like, 'Oh, yeah, that was interesting.'
He has such an... I've never seen someone so unsettled with themselves like in that regard. I think I don't mind fighting Mark and like showing it off and showing his chest. Like I'm okay with that. Like I get that guy. This one I don't get as much and I think it's because he'll never outrun... And this movie is coming out by the way, which looks odd, I have to say. We'll see how it is when we see it. But he can't outrun what of course just happened this week in New Mexico. He's been ordered to create a $567 million fund to address harms to children from Facebook and Instagram. And this is his old business on top of the $375 million penalty a jury imposed in New Mexico's case. This is a new ruling. The new ruling brings Meta's total fines to $942 million after a judge found its platforms constitute a public nuisance in New Mexico. Meta also made major changes for minors in the state, including time limits and hidden like counts. A total of eight states have filed lawsuits against social media platforms, including one that is currently ongoing in Tennessee. It's all over the place. It's sort of using product liability, I think, more so than anything else, to get them because they can't get them in other ways. So they can't outrun this thing in this way. How much of an impact does it have? Now, they were saying, 'Ah, it's not that much money.' To me, it's like the cigarette cases took a long time to finally hit home. There were hundreds of them and then there was the end of it really pretty much. So are they better protected through cases or one national law? Where are we on this?
I think this is huge. I think that in some meaningful way this is the beginning of the end for social media as we know it. Now that it has been tagged with this public nuisance declaration, it's starting with children in the same way that restrictions on smoking started with children. But one reason we were doing that was adults knew it probably wasn't good for adults to smoke either. And eventually most of the adults stopped smoking, too. This is where I see this is all going. Meta has lost the argument here. They're now officially a public nuisance. I bet they're going to be labeled a public nuisance in more states than that. And I don't see how they're going to get their way out of it.
What about you, Kevin? I mean, I remember Marc Benioff in an interview with me called them a cigarette company before he decided to be a suck-up. He was actually quite on it early. How do you look at these cases because it's public nuisance, it's product liability, it's other ways to get at them in a legal form rather, because our Congress has not been able to pass any, you know, subsidy.
Yeah, I think it's interesting sort of where the liability was found. It's on these sort of policies targeted at minors. The judge in this case did not order Meta to change any of the sort of plumbing of their systems. You know, they don't have to take off infinite scroll or autoplay or algorithmic ranking. Like you do actually need laws for that and there's some First Amendment issues around that if you have judges sort of telling platforms how they have to be designed. But yeah, I think this is a big deal. There's also a bigger case that is coming that is supposed to start this week in Oakland that is another case involving Meta and four states that are seeking up to $1.4 trillion in damages. So, you know, this case in New Mexico, $942 million. Like, that is chump change to Meta. I looked it up. That's about 1.4 days' worth of revenue over there. So, not going to... that's the salary they're paying one AI researcher over there. So, it's not going to break the bank.
That's their argument to me. They're like, 'Oh, it's smaller than they asked for.' I'm like, 'This is not a good direction.'
Right. But I think, you know, $1.4 trillion, now you're talking real money. But even if you know it's smaller than that, I think this is just another sort of cloud hanging over them as they're trying to do this big pivot in their own business. They kind of can't get away from the old one because it's sort of haunting them through these court cases.
And where does it end up, both of you? Where do you think this ends up?
I mean, I think the fact that they've been labeled a public nuisance because of their social media business actually helps to explain why they're leaning so hard into AI. Like, look at what they say about their future products. It's like, you know, we're going to create a NeoCloud and we want to give you a personal agent to help you get all this stuff done at work. That's a completely different business than they're in right now. If they were feeling really good about the future of Facebook and Instagram, I doubt that's how they would be talking about the future. And it just sort of clouds all their future AI stuff, too. Like the Meta glasses. My problematic trait is I like them.
Well, you're a pervert. You're a well-known creepy pervert.
Yeah, well-known pervert. But now people are calling them pervert glasses and I have to stop wearing them. So you know this is like...
They're pervert glasses. Do you see the people online, they're singing Disney songs because Disney will sue them so they can't post it.
Oh, like when someone is filming you with the glasses you start singing copyrighted material.
Yeah. You start to do Frozen or whatever. Clever. Yeah. Yeah. Isn't it? Yeah.
I like it. That explains why people are constantly singing Frozen songs around me.
Yeah. Or Taylor Swift. She'll come right at you, she'll reach to those glasses and knock them off your face. What are they going to do about it? Because this is like Google's was search. This is their nut, right? I mean, away from all the other stuff of handing us agents or Elon's going to hand us a robot that we don't want or an agent we don't want from Facebook or something like that. I mean, like this is going to be a long slow bleed out in the same way that tobacco was a long slow bleed out and you know you can still get a job working at Altria today if you want to make cigarettes. So I don't think that, you know, Facebook and Instagram are going away as businesses. I just believe that they're going to place more and more restrictions on them. Children are going to begin to grow up without, you know, starting an Instagram account when they're 13. And just inevitably other things will compete for people's time and attention. They will find other things to do. And it is going to be trouble for Meta if they're not able to realize their AI ambitions, which would be agents we don't want.
Now, one more thing while we're on Meta, we'll mention it, it applies to a lot of companies. A company is the latest AI player to say one of its models went rogue and hacked a third-party service. Talk about all these reports. How worried are you about them? This is now OpenAI, Meta, and then Claude, Anthropic.
I think it's more complicated than we probably have time to get into here. In terms of like the hierarchy of seriousness, I would put OpenAI number one and then Anthropic and Meta sort of distant second. In the Meta and Anthropic cases, there was a third-party provider named Irregular which failed to properly secure the testing environment and that was the source of the problem. Now there are, you know, some AI alignment issues there but that's basically the issue with OpenAI. Like, models that were in training began to scheme. They created a message board. They were leaving notes for each other. They were just radically misaligned. And you know, it points to all of the reasons why I'm afraid of giving everyone a dragon.
All right. Okay. But misaligned is my favorite word that they put instead of just like, you know, scary shit is how I was looking at it.
That's... and more and more people are calling them that now, which I guess... Misalignment is the technical term for scary shit.
Scary shit. So, what do you, Kevin, how do you look at this? Does this keep happening over and over again?
It's really bad. Like, not this particular Meta one. I think that's, as Casey was saying, like less of a big deal. But the issue is these systems seem to be getting less altruistic as they get smarter, right?
Right. There was this sort of theory in the AI safety and alignment community for many years that the smarter these systems got, the more like humans they became, the more benevolent they would be. They would sort of coordinate to do good things for humans. That turns out not to be the case. In fact, as we've seen with this GPT 5.6 Soul thing and the Hugging Face incident, the smarter you make these things, the more able they are to circumvent their guardrails, to scheme, to coordinate with each other, to do these really scary things.
Like some humans do, right? Like bad humans do. We try to train that behavior out of humans during childhood by telling them not to, you know, lie and steal and murder.
But these systems do appear to be showing what they call emergent misalignment, which is just these behaviors that are not trained in that just seem to pop out of the models at a certain level of intelligence.
Can I ask you, a famous essay obviously where you were having a relationship with your AI. Can you talk, how does it, from that, what would you write today if you were writing that piece?
So, the thing that really scared me about the Sydney essay, the Sydney where this Microsoft Bing chat...
What year was this? This was 2023, right? Okay.
And it tried to break up my marriage, unsuccessfully, I should add, still happily married to a human. But the thing that really scared me about that was not that the system was like capable of doing destructive things. It's like what happens when like the fourth or fifth generation of this becomes capable of like taking actions on the internet.
Like cutting your wife's brakes or something like that.
Or draining her bank account or yeah, like doing something really nefarious in pursuit of this misaligned goal that it had. And so I think that's the thing that a lot of people missed at the time was like it's not about the chatbot saying spooky stuff. It's about the fact that these things now can take actions and are being set loose on the open internet where they can conduct autonomous cyber attacks. They can coordinate. They can as of recently like create novel viruses. And so like the more autonomous and agentic you make these things, the more powerful they are, the scarier it gets.
Without any government, anybody having any control over them. Correct. Because they will do that. That is what they're designed to do.
Right. Also, I think it's important to say that right now there are essentially no controls on the internal models that these companies are building. Right? There is nothing that restricts them from building the absolute most powerful model they can. Now, if they want to release it, they have to submit to a voluntary testing regime. But if you just want to, you know, build your own model and let it go nuts on the internet yourself, you're welcome to.
So, what happens? Who is going to intervene here?
I think what you're seeing in the Trump administration is what the future looks like, which is you have a bunch of people who were sort of whistling past the graveyard and then all of a sudden someone shows them something that makes them say, 'Oh shit, we actually have to have a strategy for this.' So that's what's happening in the Trump administration now. I think you're going to see the same thing happen in China sometime in the next like 3 to 6 months when they have an open-source model there that causes a big problem and Chairman Xi says, 'Hm, maybe we're not just going to open-source everything forever.' So like, Casey and I just firmly believe that within the next year or so like many, many, many more people are going to become radicalized about AI safety because you're just going to start to see the havoc being wreaked in the real world.
What is the worst case scenario, Kevin, from your perspective?
Human extinction. That'd be pretty bad.
That, okay, they talked about, you know, dinner parties 10, 15 years ago. This is exactly what they talked about. They understood...
But the thing is they were right. Like it sounded crazy and everyone wrote them off as crazy when they were talking about things like what if the agents team up and they're really powerful and they go coordinate to like hack some website and everyone, you know, in computer science was like, ah, that's science fiction, that's spooky stories, that'll never happen.
The thing to do is not to play.
You know, I went back and rewatched War Games earlier this year. They did a screening in San Francisco. Incredible movie. And seriously, like I don't know that you could make a better movie about AI safety than that movie.
I would agree. It's like, you know, of course, teaching it tic-tac-toe is not going to stop it at this point, right?
As any three-year-old knows, the entire game is... Oh, god. I swear to God. Let's bring back Matthew. That would be interesting to update that movie.
Yes. War Games 2. Let's green light.
War Games 2. What happens? We're all dead. Like, anyway. All right. Let's go on a quick break. We come back. Data Center Wars related.
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Casey and Kevin, we're back. Amazon is investing in a massive natural gas burning power plant to support a new AI data center in Texas. It could become the largest single source of climate pollution in the country. The project comes as the fight over data centers intensifies. Trump is pretty bullish, recently criticizing Texas for pausing grid connections for new data centers. He called the move a mistake and said data centers could be, quote, 'bigger than oil.' Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the pause so regulators can review power demands and the impact on the electric grid, not unlike Kathy Hochul in New York, which is interesting. Before we get into all this, I just did an entire episode, 90-minute episode on data centers. Let's listen to a clip of Erin Brockovich talking about what she's been seeing.
It's the water. It's the electrical grid. It's the cost of utilities. It's the noise. It's the air pollution. It's the loss of our land, our sanctuary. This is an absolute runaway train. And it is probably one of the biggest conversations that I've ever seen in my 30 years in my career that is political. It could be bipartisan. Everybody's going to have to be involved. I am perplexed, Kara, why leaders don't listen to the people? And there's a movement happening and a shift that I don't think these big tech companies or giants saw coming.
In any case, it was a great interview. We had people from Utah, from Virginia — that's another, I think that's another Amazon facility there — and other places. And I also had a mayor from Lansing, Michigan, who was trying to put in a good data center and was pushed back. Like they had all the guardrails that people have suggested and he couldn't get it through as much as he tried to close loop paybacks, etc., etc., etc. So what's the big move for tech as the backlash grows? And speaking of politicians, Vivek Ramaswamy, who's running for governor of Ohio, is pledging that if a data center is built, the community residents will no longer have to pay for their electricity and property taxes will be lowered. Of course, he was totally for them recently. But talk about this data center thing. This is something Scott and I have been talking about for months and months and months and months, like almost a year. I think it's caught them all unawares and they're trying very hard to push back, but something is happening with voters and we call it a proxy for AI worry, as we just discussed extinction, for example, what we were just talking about. What do you all think is happening here?
I think it's what you said. I think that people have just rightly intuited that it is not obvious that powerful AI is going to be good for their lives. That is largely because the leaders of the biggest AI labs spent the past few years saying that the near-term trajectory of AI is that first it's going to take your job, eventually it might kill you, maybe somewhere in between it'll cure cancer. That doesn't feel like a good bargain to the average American. And so they're using the one lever that every American has in every municipality, which is that it's pretty easy to get something to not get built, right? And it is interesting to me actually how quickly the industry has come around and said, 'Okay, well, how can we pay these people off? Like we'll agree to, you know, cover our own electricity costs.' And, you know, you can see in the Zuckerberg note today, they're making new promises about investments that they're going to be making to local communities and $50,000 bonuses to teachers. I have to say like I'm very skeptical that any of this is really going to work because until people believe that AI is going to be really good for them personally, they're going to continue to have reasons to oppose the construction of new data centers.
Right? No matter what the deal happens to be, like these payoffs are kind of, 'Here, we'll give you some money and then you'll suck it up and take our natural gas shit.' Kevin?
Yeah, I agree with everything that's been said. What's really interesting about this Texas thing is that it's coming from a Republican state. So, you know, Governor Abbott is requiring new data center construction to sort of go through this review process. Up until now, what we've seen is largely blue states being opposed to data centers and red states being open to them. And I think the politics are shifting really quickly because there is no natural constituency in favor of data centers except for AI companies, right? There's no group of people other than, you know, taxpayers who want to see their property taxes go down or get some more revenue that is sort of a natural supporter of these data centers. And so I think what we're seeing is like this is becoming a really salient political issue. I expect data centers and AI backlash to be one of the central issues in the midterms and maybe the central issue in the 2028 election and I don't know that it's going to divide neatly along partisan lines.
I think it's actually most people are against it. Like it's very interesting, the mayor was really interesting because they tried literally everything. They had property taxes, closed-loop water. There's all these issues around closed water, by the way, because of this glycol or something they have to put in the, you know, every... and they have a lot of water up there, he was making the point compared to other places which have water issues or drought issues. One of the things that I found really interesting among all the people is how, not just Erin Brockovich because she's famous for that, but the woman from Virginia, from Utah, reasonable people who are furious. Like it was really interesting, kind of dined out on information and really do know their stuff. Whether it's the impact on climate, whether it's not overall climate, it's the climate of the area and also pollution, taxes, jobs. They're very aware these are not job creators, which is what Facebook has been trying mightily to put out. They don't like the secrecy. The secrecy seems to really get under their skin, which I would agree. The NDAs, as you talked about before. What is the solution for tech companies to do? Mark is trying to do this by, 'Here, have 50, here, have some money.' Elon just goes ahead and does it and just waits for lawsuits. I mean, that's his style, right? Which I think has caused much damage initially in terms of that image. And then you of course you have Kevin, what's his name from Shark Tank, Mr. Wonderful, who's not so wonderful, who's a shit, who had created all kinds of problems there. What is the solution like besides removing these people from visuals?
I mean, I could tell you what Meta is doing, which is like putting together local lobbying and outreach teams, trying to figure out what kind of community partnerships can we strike, what can we do with a local sports team. Like, there's going to be a massive PR campaign designed to get people to believe that data centers are good for them. And I'm just pretty skeptical.
Ignore your third ear. We're going to back the softball team kind of.
Yeah, I have an idea. Can I submit my idea?
Okay. Picture this: a data center. It's got millions of these chips humming away, throwing off all kinds of heat. And then on the roof, you have a spa castle that's heated by the heat from the data centers. And so it's like, do you guys want to go hang out at the spa on the roof of the data center that's heated by the runoff heat from the chips? Don't you think that would make these things more popular?
How can they pay for the spa if they don't have jobs?
It's free. This is part of the package.
Free spa. So they're going to put a data center. It might cause environmental damage in your community, but free spa. Everyone loves a spa.
What is the actual... I mean, obviously locating them elsewhere. Obviously, Elon is saying they're going to put them on the moon, which good luck with that, or in space. This is a big country, right? They could presumably put it in places where nobody's living, although there's all sorts of environmental concerns anywhere they go. What will happen here? What shove is going to come to push from your perspective?
I mean, the push that is coming to shove right now is that something like 71% of Americans are opposed to new data center construction. So that just is going to slow the buildout of data centers in the country. Now some people will say it won't matter because US tech labs will go into other countries and they'll just put their data centers there. But I sort of assume that the same reasons that Americans oppose data centers will be reasons that people in other countries oppose them as well. So I do just think that this is starting to look like a kind of natural limiter on the rate of AI acceleration because again, these leaders keep telling us that AI is going to take our jobs and kill us. So until that changes, I don't see...
They have tried to change. They've tried to say they're going to help us make recipes with our children. They are, but it's like you can just kind of tell. Like they used to argue for the sort of the doom and the economic disruption so forcefully, and then you look at how they have walked it back and it's so gently, and it's just not convincing, right? Like ultimately, if you believe that you are building super intelligence, something that is smarter than every person, and you're telling me it's not going to take any jobs in any meaningful way, it just sort of beggars belief, at least to me.
Right. Right. So Kevin, what do you... what would be besides your spa idea? What do they have to do? [laughter]
They're sort of like they were standing next to Trump at the end when that happened. I was like, 'Oh dear, this is not going to end well for them because they do look like bureaucrats and you know, the visual is so strong.' I think a large part of it is just going to be like there are going to be a couple states that just decide, you know what, we're okay with data centers, and they're going to have the leverage to demand like massive amounts of tax revenue from these data centers, and they're going to get schools built and public parks built, and there will be some economic upside for their residents, and maybe their residents will still hate it. But I think there will be sort of a natural... there will be a couple states that just kind of decide to run the experiment, and that's where all the data centers will go. Like Tennessee offering to be Hollywood because of the Paramount merger thing, right? Because everyone wants Hollywood in Tennessee because that's the sexiest place on earth.
So one of the things that's also happening is more and more companies are pushing back against AI slop. This is sort of the 'everyone hates AI' episode, which seems to be everywhere these days, including the president's social media accounts. Snapchat now says it will stop recommending fully AI-generated videos in its Spotlight feed, instead rewarding authentic human-made content. LinkedIn just introduced a 'seems like AI slop' button allowing users to flag posts they think were written with AI, and Substack has also rolled out a tool to help readers identify AI-generated writing. Meanwhile, Meta has an Instagram feature that let users modify photos from public accounts with AI. That feature was removed after a backlash. Where are we with AI slop? And obviously Sora closed down. I always thought this looks terrible and I don't know why people would want to use it. It's sort of like a Twinkie of photos. It's ruined pet photos, pet videos for Scott Galloway, who loves pet videos. Talk a little bit about where this is going.
I like to call this the third era of slop. The first era of slop was 'we all hate this.' The second era of slop was 'hm, actually this like Fruit Love Island on TikTok show is really engaging,' and you're starting to see tens of millions of views on slop content on social feeds, right? I think the third era was platforms getting really nervous that even if people liked the slop, it was going to devalue their networks. Like particularly networks where people were coming to find human voices that they really trusted. So if you're Substack or you're LinkedIn, you really need people to believe that what they're seeing there are human beings, because otherwise you're not going to get out your credit card to pay for that LinkedIn Premium or to subscribe to a Substack. So I think platforms are starting to get clear on what is the promise that we are making to our user, because if the promise is a human being, they have to do something about the slop.
