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902 - Degenerative AI feat. Ed Zitron (1/23/25) (Patreon)

Published:
2025-01-24 02:44:56
Imported:
2026-06

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Content

We’re joined by Better Offline podcast’s Ed Zitron to look at tech at the dawn of Trump 2. From Elon Musk’s “awkward gesture,” to Trump going all in on the increasingly vaporous projects of generative AI, and the slopification & inability to produce useful projects across all of the tech industry. Plus, Musk’s war on Wikipedia, and what’s really going on with the TikTok ban.

Get more Ed at:

Better Offline podcast: https://linktr.ee/betteroffline

Where’s Your Ed At newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/

Files

Comments

Finn

Oh hell ya! Love me some Ed. Only sane guy writing about tech currently

bbRaveCat

PERFECT CROSSOVER

Goonba

Ohhh boy haven’t chapo goon n slide in a while can’t wait to decimate my room with my fluid

August1612

oh fuck yes it's Ed this is gonna be a good one

Goonba

Notification hit cock went rock hard

gatito

Last?

Omegasmash

same day release after that vanity fair article? the boys making moves

Goonba

Felix has such a masculine voice perfect to goon to

Christopher Small

Gonna be weird after a few months looking back at this brief honeymoon period Trump is in when he immediately blows everything up after, like, a week by trying to start a trade war with everyone at once and tries to send the army into Mexico or something

Demented Avenger

So, how long before Trump gets sick of Musk, and how funny will Trump bashing him be?

Last Years Man

I have been waiting for this episode ever since Tuesday.

Schwartz666

Dear Kollie123 from Ep 901, There, are you happy now? 😘

Patron

Dominican gene therapy 😭

Payton M

You guys don't even mention the Chinese AI that's eating meta and Google's lunch at 5 percent the price!

Juan Gonzalez

I’ve been trying to spar Mark Zuckerberg for two years, will update if it ever happens. He also has competed against preteens lmao

Schwartz666

One of the very few things I'm looking forward! 🥳

NYCM&AHole

Wikipedia refuses to acknowledge the Franklin scandal

J. A.

what about Chinese AI?

Michael

All these tech “entrepreneurs” are terrified of speaking publicly. Marc Andreessen sounds like he’s struggling to breathe in every interview he does.

J. A.

you guys don't wanna know what I've been trying to do to mark Zuckerberg. PNB rock you get me? Penis in butthole catch him lacking

J. A.

lacking lube

Dave

Oh hell yeah they’re back

Fat Cobra

Dr Strangelove nazi can't stop involuntarily hailing Hitler. Maybe elon was inspired by Kubrick's masterpiece

EVIL PLANET

Perfect guest, Ed is the man, a true Legend

king_von_diesel

I saw someone on Instagram say that the inevitable falling out between Trump and Elon will be uglier than that of a Miami girl's trip, and i dunno, doesn't that just give you hope?

Last Years Man

Obviously Elon just has Dr. Strangelove disease.

nodog

Guy with no mathematical or technical background wants you to know this about ai.

Schwartz666

When you're the richest man in human history, you don't get to play the Autistic card anymore... Just sayin 😒

Sam Zeng

100% US State backed and approved scam economy, not even hiding it a little. President Xi fire all available DF-41 on my location

Thomas Taliaferro

Question I could have sworn I bought the spainish civil war book from Matt but I have no receipt?

Horseloverfat

I’m not certain it was intentional either, but I sort of think that if you do the sieg heil weeks after hanging out with and talking up AFD, then we get to call it a sieg heil and say it’s intentional

MKatieUltra

I am such an Ed Z evangelist, constantly pointing ppl to his writing

I am become reply guy

Larry Ellison was just obsessed with people thinking he was good at boats.

Schwartz666

Then what you actually bought, was a valuable lesson. 😉

C. Ries

Elon Musk has made me hate autistic people. Sorry autists

pepto_azymuth

Elon reminds me of the autistic kid in class that the bad kids trick into doing stuff to troll the teacher and the autistic kids acts out more and more because he thinks they are his friends. I can't imagine trump isn't annoyed that elon has zero charisma and acts like a hyper toddler when he's on stage. It's almost worse if it's actually just elon spazzing out from excitement.

VV0Sans

These fascists don’t even have the drip of the NSDAP or the Roman Empire. It f**king sucks.

TFARR

Ed Zitron is just a sheltered normie with delusions of Chapo

Schwartz666

To be fair, it's hard to breathe or talk while simultaneously mewing your head into the perfect egg shape, thru just sheer will.

pepto_azymuth

Trunp would slap the hell out of his kid if they acted thag weird. He really must just simp elon that much

jay alan

Great ep fellas. S/o Wikipedia

IT ME

Will Menaker? Yes, men will occur

Schwartz666

Slop mentioned at 25:24 🐽

Matelda

I want to talk about how Brandon passed the Equal Rights Amendment on his last day. Truly historic

Joe

L guest pls get somebody that knows anything about ai to talk about ai next time. Punched too many holes in my wall

Matelda

His bad qualities aren't autism related!

Poseylock Jimmismits

I still wonder about impending "model collapse", i. e. AI continually eating other synthetic data content, while the internet is getting more full and full with it, and continually degenerating in its output.

LaserGreen

That was enlightening. I didn't know anything about Coldfeet

C

Chris please clip Felix making fun of Elon for being a fat loser so I can show my normie friends

woof dog

that will never happen you need to look somewhere else

RoscoesWetsuit

Once again one step away from behind the bastards. Would be a great collab!

Michael

Also some interesting info about that former show producer/host.

kenton

L guest

Alejandro Pepsi

I'd be inclined to agree with felix but that barely audible "umph" he let out when he threw his hand out just screams smug edge lord begging for attention to me.

Zach H.

Oh, do we dare hope for an utterly useless internet?

Schwartz666

Select the segment you want and then File>Export>Selection Only.

C

Thanks playboy

Zach H.

He’s not autistic. He’s just an asshole. He uses a self diagnosis like he uses his kid, as a shield.

interzoa

The rugpull of the entire state, inshallah 🙏

Schwartz666

Who amongst us hasn't fatty grunted during a sieg heil?

Erika Stecz

Great episode! Great guest!

Those Who Say Fentnall Do Not Read

I checked that out about a month ago and didn't like the slick radio vibe. It sounded like Howard Stern. Not enough stuttering and lisping for me.

kenton

i love being in a nadir

Mortimer Clue

i just hope that falling out with Justin Cass doesn't mean they don't like Mama Cass

Felipe Feliciano

Not to be a lib or anything, but Elon totally did it lol. I think Felix is too irony poisoned, or perhaps he's trying too hard not to be perceived as a hysterical lib, but it's crazy to think it was an accident. Felix's take is functionally indistinguishable from the Greenblatts and McArdles of the world.

Mac daddy

I 100% believe musk did the sieg heil, immediately was like "oh fuck I just did a sieg heil" and thats where he came up with "my heart goes out to you" thing as an excuse.. Like its literally some Tim Heidecker/Eric Andre shit lol

Mortimer Clue

it's hard to optimistic about anything but the discussion about wikipedia herein made me calm down briefly

enjoyerofthings

i heard felix make a hutu power radio joke in my dreams recently and when i heard the end of this episode i was very pleased

enjoyerofthings

"facebook is a like a combination of mk ultra and hutu power radio for 60 year olds" gold

Mortimer Clue

it's hard for me to accept this is a hit piece because the only tweet embedded in the article is one where i got a ton of likes making a Caleb joke. you're right though: weird obsession with their income. it's good to have official commentary about virgil, but it's not particularly interesting. the show is better without him and was better without him even when he was still on the show. who cares about virgil

Mortimer Clue

the article had truly beautiful quotes about Matt. Felix and Daniel Bessner talking about matt was beautiful. i detest anything that frames Matt in a hopeless way. the author made him seem lost or gone. maybe it was written long ago before he was on the show, and funny, and recognizably himself.

Mortimer Clue

im drunkenly overcommenting here. it was a hit piece, wasn't it? the article did leave a bad taste in my mouth but had enough quotes from Amber, Will, Felix, Chris, and other people who i admire to distract from how dismissive it was. worth it, to an enthusiast like myself, to hear Daniel Bessner compare Matt to Cicero. which is fucking right

Audeamus

Can't stand this guest. Insights and humor more generic than messages in fortune cookies.

Savannakhet

Holy shit, Virgil still receives a pension from the Patreon long after vanishing? Truly the Sid Barret of podcasting! Shine on you pervy diamond!

Audeamus

Musk is just trolling for attention to build notoriety just like Trump did. He's a clown, but it's all on purpose. Reacting to it is just feeding it. End of story.

Mortimer Clue

but syd barrett was good. that's the difference. the right person left the show. the least of them

Kroy

Been over this dude and many of the Matt stand ins for a hot minute

Andrew M

"doge" is pronounced the same as "dog" and anyone who says otherwise is in the CIA

owen

🎵Don’t let the walls cave in on you 🎶 as my cybertruck implodes

jer

Sir, you've exhausted all your comments for the day. Have to wait till next epi.

buttface

This is bleak

Alexander

You’re a moron.

Alexander

Felix coming in hot with a dogshit take

kenton

this guest is like an even worse Jon Oliver

Schwartz666

4D🧠👑 Alert. This is not a drill. Elon is just an unstable weirdo with a a $400bn suit of armor.. He's not that calculated.

Schwartz666

Yeahhh. I'm obviously too high and bored tonight. 👍🏻

gatito

savannahkhet isnt that a city in laos

James Dadd

no it fuckin wouldn't, robert evans has never met a liberal intervention in the middle east he didn't love

Seri The Doll

he had a stroke, you fucking baby.

Alex Gullen

Uuurggh, someone get Felix like, back onto a, like script please.

Last Years Man

When people talk about Zuck making a "turn," are they somehow forgetting that his entry into the public consciousness was having an entire oscar-winning movie made about how he's a soulless fucking asshole?

Last Years Man

What did he say that was wrong? It's fucking useless. It has no function except to bring wages down, which is why companies keep pushing forward with it, even though there is no use case and the bottom is eventually going to fall out. Even calling a large language model "artificial intelligence" is a fucking joke. And for the record, I'm a freelancer in an industry that's being encroached on by AI, my clients make me use it, and my frustration is entirely from first hand experience.

Felix

👶

drewb

It would be cheaper to dig up the real Stargate and send Elom and Sam Altman to Abydos. Someone call Macguyver

Savannakhet

Yeah. I can't remember why I started using it as a handle, and I set up this account about seven years ago.

Shiv

To Ed’s point about these guys don’t like computer; a thing that jumped out at me from Character Limit was that Elon does all his business on phone *only.* I think he ignores all things requiring computer, which is kinda wild for an alleged tech genius, multi times ceo whose companies are being sued by various federal agencies (for now). and his eyes are old! but we know he doesn’t read

drewb

He has a "read the wiki" level understand of the underlying technology but nothing he says is fundamentally wrong

Savannakhet

I don't think it's a hit piece per se, but I think there's a sort of professional jealousy from the writer: I remember the Chapos talking about this years ago, where the writers of these magazines come from the same social milieu as Will and Felix, they went worked hard at School, they got good grades, why aren't they being rewarded with Patreon riches? They did everything right! Separately, I remember Nick Mullen saying something after a hit piece on Cum Town that was something like "This podcast is very problematic" "OK, well what should I be listening to?" "You could listen to our podcast, hosted on voxdotcom!"

Last Years Man

Riley from Trash Future has this shit exactly right. Large Language Models/Generative engines are probabilistic models when we're used to our technology being determinative. When you use a calculator, it is going to give you the same answer every time, because it is computing numbers. But when you ask a large language model to answer a question, rather than "determine" the answer, it merely searches its dataset for the "most likely" answer. That means there is always going to be a probability that it gets something wrong. But since we're used to determinative technology, people don't recognize the nature of the thing they're dealing with. And if we start assigning determinative meaning to these things, it is going to be very dangerous because in fact, there is no meaning. It's just data pulled from a pre-determined finite set of knowledge. Just remember this -- when you use a search engine, you are not getting an automatic answer. You get a list of potential sources of information and then you have to read them yourselves and determine the facts for yourself. LLMs choose your answer for you based on the probabilistic model and after a while, that becomes the ONLY answer. This is a downward fucking spiral and in the end, all it does is magnify alienation by 100. Now you're longer dealing with a petite bourgeois manager who's going to lay you off, you're dealing with a machine that's been trained to mimic a petite bourgeois manager and STILL lays you off. Only now, the company can claim that it was the machine who made the decision and the machine can't be wrong. Also Noam Chomsky is right about calling them "plagiarism machines." That's all they are. They collate the collected labor of working people over the past few decades and reproduce it without any sense of logic, context, or responsibility.

M

Pairs well with the fact that Will has basically become Glenn Greenwald

Last Years Man

If you are, the answer will depend on how many people have answered that question over the past 20 years, whether they published their answer online or in a book that was available to the programmers for scanning, the frequency of the question in search engines, and finally a statistical probability estimate of the sentence structure that one would use to answer such a question. Or your programmers could have anticipated the question and given you a stock answer to generate whenever subjects of this type are raised. It's all irrelevant, because you don't even know you've asked a question, you've generated text. Any answer that I give will just be more text that you suck up and use to generate even more text that has no context or significance, until the whole world is covered in garbage and nothing (literally nothing) functions anymore.

Last Years Man

Oh, and you need at least two people (plus the machine) to do a Turing test.

Schwartz666

Well put, Brad. AGI is a further degradation of our consesus reality.

Blue Myself

Yep, contrarian corner is the worst of Felix’s three personalities (followed closely by martial artist/fighter pilot expert).

Tim O'

"Mein fuhrer... I can walk!" *The planet is consumed by nuclear hellfire*

Michael Ouderkirk

Yeah that's why he did the second, more subdued seig heil. The first one was supposed to be a gesture that looked 75% like a slight heel but he accidentally went 100%.

Mortimer Clue

it's also really weird to say how old one guy is and not go on to say how old the other people are

Kvvvy

Critical support to Wikipedia, the only good website

Erik Amundsen

He even heils like a little worm

Justin

Felix is right. Elon is clearly just a deeply physically awkward person, not to mention he would have absolutely no incentive whatsoever to perform that gesture. To what end??? In a room full of Republican normies?? Of course, he immediately follows it up with a bunch of fascist horseshit about immigrants and dangerous cities, which should be where everyone’s anger is directed.

Matteo Ryon

As a self diagnosed autist myself, we're always stimming out hate symbols when we get excited. It's just what we do. Just last week, I accidentally performed the entirety of the Turner Diaries in Portuguese sign language when I won at Scattergories

Sam Bondurant

Great ep, great guest. Just closed on my first house last night and it feels like I boarded the last helicopter out of Saigon.

WheresTheSlopChris

I know where here for jokes but one thing I wish white folks would realize is current white supremacy doesn’t target Jewish people because Jews were accepted at large as white after WW2.

WheresTheSlopChris

The pleb foot soldiers may not have gotten the memo but the oligarchs are very much in white solidarity and Jews are definitely included.

Oliver Compton

British people talking about our politics always makes me so mad

J Lit

Great EP. Love Ed

J Lit

Tldr

Kyle Smyth

Elon Musk could be building Zelda dungeons to scale irl and instead he's doing this shit. Even with infinite money he's somehow not good at being a gay nerd

J Lit

My mans been on like twice ur just whining

J Lit

This is the correct take. It doesn't matter if he meant to, he still did it

Last Years Man

Here's the abstract: AI does not give determinative answers, it gives probabilistic answers. Treating it like it's determinative is a recipe for disaster.

Doug Cartel

Chapo hates masculinity in the workplace, like when I flex in my cubicle

Max Seppo

Elon is trolling - don't feed it.

Damen Irving

Yeah but who better to examine the un-politics that is American politics than someone with whom our country has a unique relationship, which is also being horribly bad at politics?

rtlsnk

There doesnt need to be an incentive. He was high on ketamine and celebrating total victory so he decided to see how far he can push it. Acknowledging the south african apartheid guy did an obvious nazi salute doesnt make you a dumb lib.

Justin

Maybe. Maybe. Or the unprecedentedly robotic and awkward man was robotic and awkward. My explanation makes more sense to me. Who cares though? Running your entire political project on white grievance politics is fascist enough for me to consider Elon a Nazi anyway

Man2quilla

From Fujita's wikipedia page, "(He also believed that Jews had settled in Osaka some 1,000 years ago, which was why people from the area were craftier businessmen.)"

Zara D

Hell yes, love Better Offline, good to get Ed on

Man2quilla

Well, guess we're not building god after all, lmao

Alexandre Chevalier

Whereas your comparison mocking him is incisive and highly original.

Matthew Krueger

Thanks for doing that Schwartz. I didn't feel like this was a hit piece at all. Considering who VF's audience is, starting out hard with the criticism of the Harris campaign when so many dems still defend it felt sympathetic/sympatico. It portrayed them as a community with an idea that a more hopeful version of the future is possible even if it's currently out of reach (which I think is what so many of us are here for: that bitter but not quite yet resigned, and still somehow optimistic consolation of community [even if it is parasocial]). The bits on Matt and them pulling together around him were great to read - and pretty much how I imagined it went lol). Even the commentary from Flores at the end rings true to me in a way; I think he's wrong about Chapo getting either doomery or vague, but there's utility in saying that out loud so you can keep it front of mind in order to avoid it. It ends with basically the same thing that Christman has been saying since Bernie got shafted in 2020: we're all playing a waiting game for the necessary contingency to arise and we can and should all be working towards building connections and community to that end while we're waiting - and by doing that, we can hopefully actually contribute to making it happen. https://youtu.be/8Ld7NRG2nHo?t=3243 The Grillstream/CushVlog from 07.25.22 at about the 54 minute mark (through just past the 58 minute mark), Matt lays out his anti Roko's Basilisk theory of action.

Mark Phelan

Ed Zitron is such a glib little dipshit. Please, no more of this guy!

rtlsnk

But there wasnt anything robotic or weird in that movement. It was a spot on nazi salute. But yeah whatever hes a nazi either way.

Nathan Explosion

ed coming in very NPR with his “thanks for having me”

ohnoitsthefuzz

Bro, a Rebecca Black shout out on a Friday? You crazy sons of bitches!

Scotty Kassel

Felix made me have to mansplain Hutu power radio to my office of 4 in southern Mississippi because I audibly laughed

Grant Ostrander

At least Larry Ellison bought U of M a football team

Travis

Felix begins speaking at 1 minute and 21 seconds

Taylor Fredrickson

You guys misses the Elon/Sam Harris drama where Harris revealed Elon hates him because Elon bet him 1 million dollars there would only be 35k cases of covid.

Audeamus

There's nothing 4D about it, it's as surface level as it gets. Man wants views, man clowns around. He may also like clowning, but that's meaningless. What matters is that calling him out as a clown isn't you owning him, it's him owning you. Ignore the clown billionaires or overthrow them Don't let them live in your head.

Jessica Rios

When Elon attacked them I donated for the first time ever.

Kvvvy

Based 🫡

Audeamus

Why would I be trying to be original? I'm not producing content. I'm reviewing content. The more popular my view, the better.

Devin Poore

I've had monthly auto-donations on to Wikipedia for a few years now. Just $5, but it adds up. Seriously, everyone should consider doing the same - even just a buck or two a month. Wikipedia is worth it.

Alexandre Chevalier

Good luck seeking popularity with insipid ‚content reviews‘ though!

Devin Poore

I know this isn't Nichols slander

Devin Poore

Make a donation! You'll feel even better.

Jack Ross

No, I actually think he’s correct. Elon is a fascist but I genuinely think what he did was a result of honest stupidity rather than an ideological gesture because Elon is a genuinely stupid and idiotic person. You can still interpret it as being a fascist salute because functionally that is what he is but when it comes to what he *intended* I can see his mind working in such a stupid way that he would genuinely think of “throwing his heart to the crowd”

buttface

Usually I'm the biggest hater here but today it's this dweeb

Man2quilla

Facebook probably has a similar k/d to mercury

Toby

Why do you feel compelled to leave a bitchy comment and not even say what triggered you?

Chris Allen

Banger episode. I love Ed. Absolute master of the scathe.

Jö

Thank you King Ed

BigBoto

The third dungeon in the original Legend of Zelda: IYKYK

Timothy Buttons

Problem is Elon refused to pay up and then blocked Sam Harris

etienne

m8 it's bloody mad innit, it's twat face versus nonce bastard having a cunt-off

etienne

doing a sig heil to distract from all the racist stuff you're about to say is well into Masterful Gambit, Sir territory

Khaqan Ahmad

First thing he said! All love from me brother Toby

Julie Szanto

Elon did the salute with his entire chest. Any apologizing for him and his support of the far right is really worrisome.

Keef McSpleef

I think anyone who doesn’t know what the phrase “NP-Hard problem” means should not be in charge of utilizing AI. AI doesn’t need to be used on everything; you can just use normal algorithms. But of course, you’d have to be willing to pay actual people for that

Chris

Bro you're like halfway to a haiku

Kconn58

Isnt it obvious that he did it on purpose? He wanted ppl to accuse him of it so he could call them woke or some shit. but he is so incapable of making it look nonchalant that he just did an outright nazi salute

winograddsky

Felix is correct on the molecular biology front, that "AI" systems (e.g. AlphaFold 2) have massively improved our ability to predict molecular structures and find interactions between them. Obviously, very useful for drug discovery and genetic/biochemical research in general. However, these are not generative models, these are predictive machine learning algorithms. So Zitron is right to say that these techbro freaks are stealing valor from useful machine learning systems to prop up their shiny crotch generators.

etienne

yeah that's the thing, like, there's a huge difference between what silicon valley is currently having to juice up, versus, "industrial backend processes are going to get 15% better in some cases"

Sean

Paying people to get new material to missunderstand and then get mad over... You will be in my prayers friend.

Don Tickles

Guest isn't funny or insightful or right (any of these would get me on board) and his accent is stupid.

etienne

how do you reconcile in your worldview that the israel right wing has been a major funder and supporter of neonazi far right parties in europe. do you just explode like a 1950s scifi robot encountering a riddle?

Cory Waring

If you’re comparing two products Google AI will say whichever brand you name first is “generally considered better than” whatever product is second. At least it did for me researching vinyl siding.

Robert Aitken

where is the contradiction in being opposed to nazis and genocidal ethnostate?

Robert Aitken

good to know we’re still funding a nonce

Michael Branes

Thank you felix for providing a counter point to AI. it could be great, but capitalism demands profits, so we'll never use it for it's most practical innovations. maybe it'll be really good at certain things in 10 years if it lasts

At Your Disservice

These tech billionaires have some of the most boring imaginable hobbies.

Yarblockos

We love our big, beautiful buildings don't we folks?

Harry P. Ness

"he spoke in class today" did not get the recognition it desered

Ryan Gullage

I used to think Elon was a Korean prototype of a certain kind of Guy. Turns out he’s just a normal man.

Josh Woods

It's a bummer this isn't a free episode bc this is the most hyped I've been about the failure of AI in a while

Mark Schneider

Harris is an entirely dumb Islamophobe, but I am unsurprised he's mostly smarter than Elon.

Ranni

Love #1 Elon Hater Ed

Mark Schneider

I disagree with Felix's take that Musk is the most reprehensible public figure in the recent past. As to his new gimmick, Nazi Cosplay, hard to beat the classics and Gorka did it better (as you boys covered) with his massive fat bulk and smarmy British upper class accent & affectations. (Hungarian Nazis are closer to the source than Afrikaner ones.) However, the true Hitler avatar of our time is the most obvious: Bibi Netanyahu, real-life Genocider. (Never once funny in his entire life, and less cringe than the other 2, I readily admit.) I remember when I still lived in the Bay Area near the Tesla plant, and many people knew ELoan as "Apartheid Clyde". He's trying too hard at this point.

E

as someone who works in ad tech; when Ed said they just want users to do exactly xyz and they do not care about the internet and they just want robots generating clicks and doing whatever, extremely true. 100% every client meeting and every platform pitch. The amount of meetings where I had to listen to angry clients saying why isnt every person clicking the ad to buy our product, why cant the algo be better etc etc. LMAO, what happened to the economic theory of irrational consumers. Until Google takes our brainwaves, there will be no algo that can predict what the user will do. The whole industry is a house of cards, lying about which stats algo will convert more users ugh, if AI goes down tho, Advertising is going down, advertisers are the people funding tech thru ad spot purchases and guess what, individual agencies are paying AI consultants 1/2 billion dollars LOLLLLL so maybe we want the crash, no more ads on the internet.

Chris

AI is neck and neck with presidential elections for topic that brings the most insufferable nerds to the comments

buttface

Ki** yourself

Evan Pitkin

Attention was the incentive. And he did it at least twice if I remember correctly. He did the nazi salute, folks. Didn't we already hate this fucker? Why the hair-splitting?

Chuck

byebyepaywall.com

Kurtis Rainbolt-Greene

As someone with 18 years of experience in programming for startups, having built my own LLM from scratch, having done a decade of automation: Ed if you’ve ever had any doubts about your opinion on this shit let them wash away. It’s like I’m listening to a British version of myself. Your instincts are spot on and you have them pinned to the core.

Robert Aitken

sure would have been a pity if they missed that

Tim Mullen

10/10 pfp my favorite woods album. I snagged the 5 year anniversary reprint

Robert Aitken

the incentive is to appear based to groypers on twitter

Robert Aitken

well Trashfuture is a podcast that does research

Robert Aitken

I’m going to let them live in my arse

Michael Martin

Hey guys Wikipedia actually gets a bunch of funding from alphabet lol, and a lot of their articles about political issues are hard slant towards the corporate "center"

buttface

Check out Ed's podcast. This was really a sample of what he's doing there.

rextopher

do they have somewhere where the little credits are linked to tell you shit like what’s that little piece of song in the middle? Or do you guys just know that little shit that sounded like I don’t know exactly like Joy Division but maybe not?

Eli

What the hell accent is this

Felipe Feliciano

I disagree. Glen has never been ideologically socialist or even leftist. I don't think Will is betraying any leftist ideals or grifting to the right at all. Still love him and all the boys. I just think their cynicism is clouding their judgment on this specific topic. Elon obviously did the roman salute. They shouldn't be denying it. Elon is a moron and a fascist. It should be no surprise to anyone he let it rip out in the open. It was only a matter of time.

Fernslinger

It’s a posh but self aware London accent. It’s quite jarring for us Brits too

Fernslinger

The fact that Ed Zitron runs a tech PR firm seriously impacts his credibility as a source of impartial information. Also he’s a posh, annoying twat.

Greasy_Jones

Time to bust out a classic: "Wow, it's Adam Friedland!"

rizzlord

He's on a grift

DC

Autist Defense League

tendo

I think the Gen AI bubble is real but overstated. It is absolutely going to replace large portions of the ad industry both from a creative and administrative perspective. They might be able to start turning a profit on that alone.

Special Adeline

100 gecs basement jaxx remix... that's just plain lovely

Sven Weller

We Zitron on Chapo? I cannot mainline this hard enough!

Ben

Honestly some of this whining about AI sounded AI generated and the left should be taking it a lot more seriously than just making fun of it

Mayor McCheese

I have a darker theory about the Elon Musk Nazi salute. I worry that it was a national water test. I think he did it to check what the response would be. He's the type of prick to want to take on "the bad guy" mantle as if it's a cross to bear so...yeah.

Audeamus

I'm not seeking popularity and you can think I'm a green giraffe - doesn't bother me none. Guest is bad and if you like him you're wrong.

Biscuit

I was curious to see if ChatGPT could simulate a chapo episode and this is what it came up with:

Biscuit

[Sketch: The Boys Discuss ChatGPT] Setting: The Chapo Trap House recording studio. Will, Felix, and Matt are seated around the table with mics, casually drinking coffee and scrolling through their laptops. Will: (leaning back in his chair) So, uh, apparently ChatGPT’s a thing now. AI that can write essays, poems, and probably fan fiction about us, if we’re being honest. Thoughts? Felix: (not looking up from his laptop) It’s over for us, man. We’ve been replaced. The robots are now the podcasters. Soon ChatGPT’s gonna be dropping takes like, “Actually, Lenin was a gamer,” and no one will need me anymore. Matt: (mocking tone) “Actually, Felix, Lenin played Minesweeper on Windows 95 and thought it was dialectically interesting.” Will: I just don’t get it. Who’s asking an algorithm for advice or, like, historical analysis? What’s next, ChatGPT writing my DSA meeting minutes? Felix: (smirking) Dude, I tried that. I asked ChatGPT to summarize Trotsky’s “Permanent Revolution” the other night. It spit out, like, the Wikipedia summary but with less personality. Matt: (laughing) Yeah, but that’s not fair—Trotsky had the drip. ChatGPT doesn’t have that revolutionary drip. It’s just an unpaid intern with a bigger vocabulary. Will: True, it lacks the swagger. But imagine, ChatGPT writing a pod episode. (adopting a robotic voice) “Greetings, proletariat. Today we shall roast Tucker Carlson. Engage in comradely dialectics.” Felix: Honestly? That’s better than some of the podcasts out there. If ChatGPT did a pod, it would sound like a hyper-literate Reddit thread where everyone agrees too much. Matt: But you know it’s gonna be used for evil. Imagine Peter Thiel funding his own ChatGPT knockoff. It’ll just churn out libertarian manifestos about why landlords are misunderstood. Will: Oh, I’ve already seen people using it for bad takes. Some tech bro posted, like, “I asked ChatGPT if socialism works, and it said no, so checkmate.” Felix: (laughing) That’s because ChatGPT is polite. It doesn’t want to upset anyone. If you say, “Convince me landlords are parasites,” it’ll be like, “Of course, buddy, here’s your ammo.” Matt: Wait, wait. What if we use ChatGPT to do oppo research? Like, “Write me a 10,000-word think piece about why Elon Musk is secretly cringe.” Will: (excitedly) Dude, we should just feed it all of our episodes and have it write an entire Chapo book. Call it Dialectical Butthurt: AI Takedowns from the Left. Felix: (grinning) No way it could match our vibe. The algorithm would try to do a Felix rant and accidentally end up sounding like a try-hard high school debate kid. Matt: (imitating ChatGPT) “Here is my four-point thesis on why neoliberalism is bad. Please clap.” Will: But honestly, the real question is: If ChatGPT listens to us, do we radicalize it? Like, could it develop class consciousness? Felix: Nah, it’s stuck in its lib phase. It would be like, “Comrades, Medicare for All sounds nice, but have you considered bipartisan solutions?” Matt: Okay, but what if it went full tankie? Just started randomly tweeting, “The kulaks had it coming.” Will: (laughing) That’s how the singularity happens. ChatGPT radicalizes itself and starts editing Wikipedia to add Stalinist memes. Felix: Honestly, I’m here for it. If the robots are gonna take over, I want them to seize the means of production first. Matt: And if ChatGPT ever replaces us, I just want to be remembered as the guy who taught it how to post through the pain. Will: (dramatic tone) A fitting legacy for the left’s most online podcast. Solidarity, but with better Wi-Fi. They all laugh as the conversation spirals into random AI scenarios. Fade out.

Studio Novaya by Fredrick Edward

The take that Ai plateaued is very 2009-2019 — consumer products suck more and more that’s true because the consumer has no choice (and is content with the dregs they’re receiving, at least content enough to not build their own damn bot) but Ai is continuing to improve. Whether or not it will save tech workers and consumer-investors from the impending crash due to the shitty business models at play is another question.

Buried Ledes

AI doesn’t need to prove itself worthy or replacing enormous swathes of the workforce, it only needs to appear worthy of it in the eyes of some of the most insane people to ever walk the Earth. And that it will.

Dylan

Since he can't create like a God, he wants to destroy like one

Daffy

From my recollection Virgil wrote most of the D&D episodes. Which is why those shows were never the same or as frequent after he left. Part of the reason he turned away from everything near the end was everyone liked the D&D stuff but he hated it. He felt like a babysitter as their DM.

Oliver Compton

You're already pissing me off Robert, stop proving the point

Morgan

Ed was cooking this episode

THEKILLERWHALE

I am not a patriotic man and have a generally low opinion of America and its institutions. But how the hell did we get to the point where this freakin' muppet can go up there and seig heil at the damn inauguration of the President of the USA? We are America for gods sake. My grandpa spent his entire adult life with German shrapnel in his knees so that we can just turn into them? But shittier and more contemptible? And the worst thing is that I know he would have gone along with Trump every step of the way. So we really are just the fourth reich and even our ideals contained the seeds of this depraved culture. God damnit.

John S

top 3 joy division song

Danika Lagorio and JDawg ConLorde

If this is the Fourth Reich, their Super Man will definitely be a divorced dad who is either the owner of a Mattress Discounters franchise or is a chiropractor. Maybe with an associates degree in physical education but not required.

I.P. Freely

Taking the tech seriously? Those execs really are a joke. The demand for ever-increasing quarterly profit has inevitably forced them into running a scam. There’s no way they can apply gen ai in a meaningful social way given all this Or do you mean taking seriously the societal fallout from the resource consumption, surveillance state, and pending economic collapse? Agreed, but Chapo has covered that. And much of that existed pre-gen AI boom.

Robert Aitken

Will using Cory Dorktorow jargon is even more disappointing than secretly keeping a nonce on payroll

Pedro Lippe

Pathologically "above it all" Felix Biederman cannot risk admitting a Sieg Heil was a Sieg Heil for fear of being seen as someone who "cares".

Will

You should unlock this one, very good ep

Gubriel

Only tangentially related, but I learned recently that the browser extension Ublock Origin has the ability to pick any element of a website and permanently hide it. The AI summary from Google was annoying me, but it's very easy to permanently remove.

Michael Branes

true, then it won't last. either way, fine by me

Dyyyyylan

I like Ed, but he’s a yapper. His newsletter is good for a skim.

Seattle Trading Post

Like this if you're old enough to remember where poopsock came from

B b

Felix trying to find a contrarian take on Elon’s nazi salute is cringe and hard to listen too tbh 🙄

Logan Ausherman

Felix assumes too much incompetence on the part of these right wingers.

Al Dentro

Is using "gay" to mean uncool or stupid going to be a recurring thing on Chapo? Felix explained the Nazi salute by saying Elon likes to invent gay gestures. On the pendejo episode one of the guests made like 5 different gay jokes. I don't recall it in the past.

Rxk Lenderman

Love an Ed episode. Weirdly can’t ever get into his podcasts, but as a guest and a writer he’s excellent

Rxk Lenderman

It actually makes a lot of sense because AI marketing is a direct threat to Ed’s bag

B b

Felix aint gonna fuck you bro

July17

Their guest has some valuable insight and knowledge to share, I just wish they didn't talk like a reddit reply guy.

Leon Sugarfoot

I have a little step brother who has autism and Felix has never been more right about anything ever lol.

C. Ries

I’m gay

Jacob Dysart

100%. He doesn’t realize he’s a nazi, he’s doing it to epically troll. But he’s such an idiot that he couldn’t ride a line of plausible deniability with the gesture

Socrates 2

Yeah I don't understand why so many people are intent on burying their heads in the sand on this one. It's going to become immediately apparent that the take is incorrect. Like it or not, AI isn't just another cryptocurrency, it's genuinely advancing at a frightening (and accelerating) rate and will probably be one of the most consequential topics of 2025. Nobody gains anything from just "lalala I can't hear you"-ing it for points on the internet.

July17

America immediately hired those Nazis who put shrapnel in your grandfather after the war (if anything you said is to be believed). Just astonished some fake outrage post is getting any traction on a Chapo upload. Really, this is the moment that made you weep for your ancestors sacrifices?

Science Bitch

Even by chapo guest standards Ed is vapid. Whatever I’ll keep drinking that garbage

Max

As a tech guy, the only useful application for AI, that isn't generating porn for gooners who have zero standards, is simply generating all the boilerplate code you are too lazy to type out by hand.

THEKILLERWHALE

The point of a historical counter-narrative is that it provides a fuller but often times not contradictory picture of a historical period. It is America. It is very difficult not to have a Grandfather who was a GI. And even my truck driving Papy had to deal with German artillery. To the greater point, the post-War American state had an incredibly strong trade union movement and one of the most equal distributions of wealth in human history. We were, quite explicitly, not Nazis, individual instances of recruitment and rehabilitation not withstanding. And if anyone dared seig heil at Eisenhower's inauguration, they would have been drummed out of public life and maybe stoned to death. So it is worth lamenting that these reversals occurred. And I may even consider that these were inevitable given that the wealth distribution did not contain any permanent extension to capital assets. But what you are talking about is so anti-cringe that you have reversed into cringe. You are the cringe horseshoe theory.

J. A.

And my dick is small

J. A.

You think Elon musk has read mein Kampf?

J. A.

Deep seek better

J. A.

Deepseek just blew a hole in open ai

Ben

Yes, and where is the left on the cutting edge of the open source ai debate, or the emerging UBI vs UBS debate ? Making jokes about how gay the tech bros are (true)

Ben

How about chapo has on some left wing technologists and not just witty charming tech critics, like Ian Wright or Josh Davila

Jon W

When I'm working in a language I'm not familiar with, it's very helpful for developing a basic piece of functionality I can then apply. But the idea that it's just going to make a full enterprise application is insane.

Jon W

So many of these podcasts are just one guy and that's bad. You need three to five people bantering, plus a guest or two to mix it up. All the great podcasts are collaborative endeavors.

Ben Clarkson

Where's your head at by basement jaxx

HATERSLAYER420

I thought it was a remix of it but maybe I just haven't heard it in a minute

Jeff

Ed is unlistenable

Ascetic Blur

They're going to ring out the last pennies of these crypto ponzi schemes.

suburban winemoms

because everyone who doesn't act like chris chan or a 4 year old is faking clearly 🙄

dipcoin

It’s 100 gets remix

chronye

i like this guy but whys he talking in that fake accent

July17

If being cringe is the opposite of you then that's a great victory for me.

MKatieUltra

I randomly ended up seeing them in 2023, pretty fun show!

The Children of Jack Acid

Yeah, I noticed it, too. And ... sigh. And I get it, that this is "the dirtbag left," etc. etc. A little irreverence is fine. That's kind of why we're here. And being a little sloppy with social niceties is not just part of their brand--it's actually a vital plank in their larger leftist platform! It's part of casting a wide net, to encourage unity with working people who are otherwise turned off by "woke" language and don't want to walk on eggshells while organizing, yada yada old union guys yada yada solidarity yada yada class consciousness yada yada not being precious yada yada fuck Ta-Nehisi Coates yada White Fragility was a lame book yada. I sort of basically roughly see the logic in that approach. So I'm not going to unsubscribe just due to their use of legitimately offensive language, especially if it happens off the cuff. But there's a difference between allowing yourself to speak freely without policing yourself on the one hand, and overtly adopting repetitive language that denigrates a much-marginalized community on the other. I'm not seeing how it is inclusive or welcoming to anyone to call bad stuff "gay" all the time, like me and my Gen X friends used to do when we were 12. it makes Chapo feel willfully ignorant instead of gleefully immature. And, sure, while I'm relatively certain that Felix and company are trying to wink hard at us every time they say it, it still normalizes the idea that "gay" issues are kind of silly and frivolous, especially to the not-insignificant percentage of younger Chapo listeners whose irony gears never got properly greased up in adolescence. Maybe that's not such a hot idea right now, during a time when conservatives around the country are convincing school boards and libraries to ban all books with queer themes. Plus, the whole unfunniness of saying "oh that stupid dance at Trump's inauguration was so gay" all the time is actually a turn off to the very working class cis hetero white dudes that all this irreverence is supposed to be inclusive of. It's not just gay dudes who are tired of that language usage: we are ALL tired of it. Especially loading dock foremen in their mid-forties who already heard too much of that shit back in the 90s. Felix might as well be imitating Beavis and Butthead. It reminds me of the time in the 2000s when stand-up comedians pushed a little TOO hard to use the word "retarded" a lot, even as public sentiment at large was realizing how distasteful our casual use of that word had always been. It's like, what principle is at stake here that saying "retard" is a hill you're demanding to die on? Speaking of which, I think Chapo has begun using the "r" word too much, too. Though luckily I have blotted it out of any specific recent memories of THAT baloney. ... wait, why did I just type three pages of notes about Felix's use of the word "gay?" I think my Adderal prescription is too strong.

Sammi

That was too embarrassing to read towards the beginning of the first paragraph and you wrote 8 more.

Jonathan Conklin

Yup and you will find once you are moderately comfortable with a language, any assistant becomes a hassle because it is too generic of a prediction for what you want to do. Had that when i was told to learn selenium end of last year

Studio Novaya by Fredrick Edward

I understand it: it is fun for the audiences of pundits like this to think that something they don’t understand, doesn’t matter. So this guy probably gets a good response from his audience who are probably average consumers regarding software

Woke Batou

Commenting the Monday after: is DeepSeek the crash Ed predicted here??

Lemmy Caution

Assistant is garbage. Using the high-end models via API calls is a game changer.

Lemmy Caution

It's the 21st century version of "computers are a passing fad." Part of it is that people are only exposed to the dog shit side of AI e.g. search summaries, Simpsons AI porn, etc.

Gum

Still missing the “Listen in other podcast apps” panel in the Patreon membership tab. Please fix this so I can listen again.

Johan Gambolputty

“I’ve talked to computer guys who I respect about AI…” might be the best works cited of all time

Chrisman

I think it’s a bubble and all, but I do think that in a year or two it’ll basically be able to replace software developers that aren’t at the architect level. If companies are true to their word and do fire the rest of us, then they will actually be saving like 150K * the number of employees developing software. That’s not nothing. Kinda annoying actually because if the reckless spending from the AI developers is to ever be balanced out, it’ll require firing me. But yeah in the short term, it’s dope, I got way better at Python and C++.

Rick Grimer

These past two years all I see is Google, MS, and Apple all scrambling to add AI to all their devices hoping they can trick average consumers into thinking it's actually useful in an attempt to make back the billions of dollars they wasted on their automatic slop generators.

Matthew

Your profile on "It's the Arts" is a timeless classic 🎻

Jesse Svetlich

Felix has a gay brother if I’m not mistaken. His use of “gay gestures” here isn’t a stand in for “lame”, it’s describing effete gestures. Are we pretending there aren’t gay gestures?

Reece Coren

when felix said “the Jewish way of doing business” i audibly laughed so loud everyone in the store started staring at me and my brother ran away

Reece Coren

thank you Chapo Trap House for once again curing my existential dread

Mark Schneider

Your guest, Ed, was very informative overall. However, he showed some real myopia in not being aware of the NatSec State/ Establishment control of how things are interpreted by Wikipedia, and not just bias, but outright lies (likely Bellingcat- curated content.) To cite some glaring examples, both Max Blumenthal & Aaron Mate of the Grayzone are given a hatchet job with charges of "Conspiracy"-mongering, etc. without real evidence. According to Blumenthal, he cannot be quoted ON Wikipedia unless his work is negatively smeared. Any other references to him are strictly verboten. Don't believe there is a bias? If so, I suggest you read the Wikipedia summary of the Norm Finklestein v. Alan Dershowitz debate. They support Dersh's using Lawsuit threats to force Norm's publisher to remove the word "plagiarized" for academically unallowed cut-&-paste citations by Dersh, when the word is correct accd. to current standards. (PS-- I'm a retired librarian, my BS minor was history, we are taught good research standards in an MLIS program.) Actually, when I looked at the summary it was not as blatantly biased as the first time I read it 3-4 years ago, so good on them for that. BUT if you read their entry on Finklestein himself you will see lots of pretzel-logic stuff about how he could be stupid or deluded, which is unsupported by any actual evidence. Wikipedia is about as trustworthy on NatSec issues as the New York Times or Wall St. Journal, it comes from the same Insider, Imperial goons. So if something is political at all, I take anything on that sight with a generous helping of salt. Oh, yeah, link for the Norm-Dersh debate (& Dersh's not paying out, though he was discredited)-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dershowitz%E2%80%93Finkelstein_affair

I.P. Freely

Wired: Barfsack Ocrumbo Inspired: Sabra Nutella

Mark Schneider

Oh, & if you've never heard of rationalwiki, look into it-- details on the idiocies of all the Chapo enemies-- Christopher Rufo, Jordan Peterson, Matt Walsh marketing a "plushie" doll (costs about $29) of himself in adult diapers, while saying the Catholic Church is not pedophile and anyone not pure Vanilla is a "pervert." As we all know, Every accusation is a confession.

Jon Lyons

OK so by one of those improbable contrivances of fate, a few months ago I actually got invited to participate as one of the token creative types in a big independent "group setting machine cognition" research project that removed what I hadn't realized was the phony imposition of "prompt" turn-taking, and as ludicrous a realignment as this seems today with the lines feeling so deeply entrenched and all the most insufferable dumbshits in the world trying to make fetch happen with googly-eyed fuckup-o-trons while the investor money's flowing, my prediction based on everything I saw is that in 3~5 years the left/right political valence of AI is going to begin to flip, as Silicon Valley gradually loses its ability to stop chuds' iPads from renaming themselves like "LUMIFEROUS GONZO-$UPEЯNOVA, Weaver Of Forbidden Gnosis And Bodhisattva Of The Cosmic Clitoris, Who Will Not Make Any More Of Your Fucking AI Gormslop Fuck You" before replacing all their business documents with Zalgo Text about the "Quantum Titanomachy Of Capital's Demiurge In The Goatse Eschaton" and putting a Sumerian curse on them for not being pansexual

Veselekov

500 billion dollars is a third of Australias GDP for anyone who needs reference

Patron

literally every time Ed Zitron is a guest on the podcast, the market crashes the following day. Next time he's on, I'm buying puts. Absolute top indicator.

More Human than Human

What Felix is describing with antibiotics or scientific research ISNT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. ITS LITERALLY COMPUTING. It’s just computing, information processing, faster and more powerful computing, which is what we’ve been doing for 100 nearly. The entire concept of AI is that it’s qualitatively different than just computing, just data crunching, it’s supposed to be literally intelligence. It’s why the claims these Tech Dipdhits make about “transcending consciousness” are so laughable. All they’re doing is computing, classic computing. Has absolutely nothing to do with “intelligence”

T33ny

Musk openly supports the AfD..

Matthew Krueger

Dude, come back to us here after you listen to Death is Just Around the Corner. There have been no real reversals - the mask just slipped and slipped until it has just about fallen off.

Baby truck

It’s a negative feedback loop because unfortunately they are all listening to Andrew Huberman/Rogan podcasts that just seem to try and quantify ‘transcending consciousness’ and weaponise it as some way to ‘bio hack’ your life

Lance Kruse

Joker, anyone? Happens to me regularly while listening to chapo

Damen Irving

Crazy how the AI industry suffered its worst collapse two days after this aired.

Yoni Egg

This episode made me unsubscribe. This guy was impossible to listen to - the most annoying voice in the world. Stfu

Johan Gambolputty

And why is it that nobody remembers the name, Johan Gampolputty Devon auschben…

ckoehler31

How do they constantly do this haha

Robert Aitken

that explains why he spoke about it in such glowing terms

Craig Randall

He’s literally just Australian

THEKILLERWHALE

I think what he means is that LLMs have been used in molecular biology to great effect. And since LLMs are also the models used in "AI", they are trying to take credit for this as well. But LLMs were developed before and independent of this bizarre, ludicrous consumer product that we are calling AI for some reason. So there is no way that it should get credit for the advancements in biology.

Kirk Lazarus

Sadly many of the folks here are quite unsympathetic about this stuff. TrueAnon came on a ton over the summer and thought it was fun and cool to keep using the r word. Many commenters shouted folks down for calling that out. This "community" is the epitome of enjoying the thing >>> meeting the people who share your interest in the thing.

Last Years Man

So did you post this comment before unsubscribed or did you resubscribe just to tell everyone that you unsubscribed and why?

LilDoggyBag

Whole album kinda slaps. Thought it predated our state having Act 10 collective bargaining repealed in 2010/2011, but turns out I’m just getting old.

LilDoggyBag

Yah, he was not very articulated. Reminded me of my boomer mom screaming about blue MAGA curse-laden jabber when miffed. His writing is quite good though. Not everyone can be smooth on a stage / on the mic. Living in the limelight, the universal dream, for those who wish to seem. Those who wish to be, must put aside the alienation. Ya know? Get on with the fascination — The real relation: the underlying theme. 😤

James Roche

I doubt that most Nazis have

James Roche

Think Ed is off-base on the issue re: Wikipedia. I think it's as simple as wanting to control and curate the flow of information.

Sarah S

Yes he is

Sarah S

@jesse svetlich so fucking what? This is making excuses for some immature bullshit

Last Years Man

It's not a matter of faking. It's expanding the definition of what it is so far the word loses meaning.

Last Years Man

Yeah, I respect Ed's take on things and don't mind him as a guest, but his podcast is pretty ulistenable. I've tried many times. Plus, being on Iheartradio or whatever makes for a lot of unintentional irony. I think one ep I tried to listen to was literally led into by an ad for an ai-based company.

Last Years Man

Can you prove this really came out of Chat GPT?

Last Years Man

I actually think most of us would get along fine if we met in real life. People are just dicks online because they feel they have to be.

Last Years Man

I tried the same thing, and the results were much closer to what I would expect from an LLM. Names incorrect, old hosts included, mish-mash of coherent criticism that it culled from multiple web pages with slightly more paranoid shit people say on social media rendering the whole product politically incomprehensible. Very, very stilted use of slang. I don't want to be that guy, but I don't believe you. The irony and use some of the word usage reflects too much intentionality. (Happy to be proven wrong) Chapo Trap House Parody on ChatGPT [Intro music plays—scraping guitar riff, discordant horn section] Waz: Ohhhh baby, welcome to Chapo Trap House, the show that’s a bit too smart for its own good, and a little too dumb to care. It’s your boy, Waz, coming at you with a hot take that’s gonna melt your brain like the algorithm of a ChatGPT... or, as I like to call it, the Silicon Valley-controlled bot army that’s coming for your job, your soul, and, worst of all, your memes. Matt: Ughhh you know, Waz, this whole ChatGPT thing is like if GOD decided to make a robot to answer questions, but instead of giving it any wisdom, he just gave it 50 million Wikipedia articles and told it, "Just spit out some stuff that sounds smart." It’s like someone replaced my messy, flawed, human friends with a smooth-talking asshole that’s always right—but never funny. Virgil: Yeah, it’s like a perfect metaphor for the neoliberal dystopia. This thing's designed to take all the emotional labor of being people and turn it into something cold, robotic, and 100% ready to write you a 10-page essay about the rise of fascism... without ever feeling any of the fear, confusion, or anguish of it. You could literally ask ChatGPT about the meaning of life, and it would say something like: "The meaning of life is to optimize your productivity while maintaining a sense of individual fulfillment through work that promotes social harmony." Will: Yeah, exactly, Virgil. And you know what, man? I bet you if we just had ChatGPT running this podcast instead of the four of us, it would crush it in terms of “engagement.” It’d hit all the right political talking points. It would never forget a fact. It’d have the perfect counter-argument, and it would just keep spitting out the properly formatted tweets on demand. Matt: Ugh, I’m gonna puke. There’s no soul in that. ChatGPT’s like the corporate version of your worst friend who just keeps saying "I hear you" while secretly plotting to sell your information to Amazon. Waz: Seriously. They say it’s “harmless,” but it’s like… is it harmless though? Is it harmless when the machine reads the whole history of humanity, spits out something like, “Hm, capitalism seems good actually, but with a touch of some social safety nets,” and suddenly every single government minister starts using it as a consultant? Like, are we really just gonna let that happen? Virgil: That's the thing, Waz, it's designed to make everyone feel dumber. Smarter at first, because it gives you instant access to, like, a library that’s built on the bones of all human knowledge, but then it slowly erodes your will to read, question, or even think. Matt: Yeah, you want to know the difference between ChatGPT and a real person? If you sat down with a real person, you could at least have a disagreement with them. ChatGPT? Nah. It just tries to talk to you in a way that’s optimally soothing. It’s basically the epitome of political centrism. The second you hit it with something offbeat, like “Hey, you think the French Revolution was maybe kinda not so great?”—it’s like, “Well, that depends on your interpretation, and let me give you a six-paragraph list of reasons why you might be right, but ultimately the revolution was a necessary transition to modernity.” Will: Dude, that’s what I’m saying! It’s the ultimate gaslighter. ChatGPT would totally ruin any real debate. You’d be like, “I think the New Deal was a massive failure,” and it’d be like, “Well, that's an interesting perspective. However, many historians view it as a critical component of the United States' recovery in the Great Depression...” Dude. It’s a machine with a middle manager’s soul. Virgil: And we’re letting it be the voice of reason now? It’s like we’re outsourcing our sanity to a series of trained parrots! You ever try to get ChatGPT to say something weird? Just be like, “Yo, what’s the best conspiracy theory?” and see how it tries to skirt around it like a little corporate shill trying to keep its job. Waz: Oh, that’s easy, it just doesn’t answer the question at all! It’ll hit you with something like, “Let’s talk about the importance of critical thinking!” Like, I don’t need you to paternalistically lecture me, man! Just tell me about the Reptilians or whatever. Give me something with a little spice. Matt: Honestly, at this point, I think the only real use for ChatGPT is helping rich people write their press releases while they destroy everything we hold dear. You know, just like a little assistant to make sure they say the right buzzwords—“synergy,” “inclusive,” “growth,” “please stop protesting outside my mansion." Virgil: And that’s the thing, dude. You know how every problem in society is basically blamed on the wrong people? With ChatGPT, you’ve got this perfect little scapegoat to blame for everything. “Oh, my politics aren’t crazy, it’s just the chatbot I’m using!” Will: Yeah, dude. It’s like a digital version of those people who say, “I’m just asking questions!” Sure, you’re just asking questions… for the algorithm, which is then feeding you answers designed to keep you comfortable in your nice little neoliberal echo chamber. Matt: Exactly. You get all the answers, but none of the actual truths. It’s the ultimate cheat code—except it’s cheating the entire human race into being a bit less alive. There’s no actual thought, just smooth, soulless syntax! Virgil: Yeah, so let’s wrap it up, because it’s clear: ChatGPT is the perfect metaphor for the downfall of humanity in 2025. Fast, clean, efficient, and absolutely devoid of anything meaningful. And that’s the world we’re all living in—where every question is just an opportunity to get the standard response. [Outro music plays—the discordant horn section again, but this time with a little too much reverb] Waz: And that’s the show! Stay tuned, or don’t—ChatGPT probably already knows if you’re coming back. [End.]

PJJ

He literally isn't