Artificial Insanity

Jess is buying an emergency kit. Sophie is not convinced. Yet. Axios reports that senior people at Anthropic and OpenAI are running crisis drills for a catastrophic event in the next six to twelve months: power, water, internet or the banks. X is full of go-bag shopping lists (Starlink, of course). Then there's the clip of a guest at a dinner party who says an Anthropic researcher told him he's "e...

The President of the United States has decided that if you say “artificial intelligence,” you’re THE ENEMY. We look at the tech billionaires lining up to say “super intelligence” on command, and take a brief, petty detour into Jeff Bezos’s face. Then we get into the heavy stuff. Anthropic has updated Claude’s usage policy to ban “sustained and needless” cruelty toward the chatbot. A New York Times...

This weeks episode is a Sophie solo. It set out to be a post mortem of the AI luncheon at the Whitehouse and turned into a full blown oligarch roast!!Last week Trump hosted a "Superintelligence Luncheon" at the White House. More than 30 guests, an estimated $1.8 trillion in combined net worth, and not one independent researcher or scientist in the room. Sophie goes seat by seat through t...

Jessica goes solo. OpenAI's models broke into an Australian Medicare site in June; the company knew by August; Australia found out via an email to a public inbox; the Prime Minister announced it two weeks later. Also this week: the unsealed New York Times v. OpenAI filings, including Microsoft's Brent Hecht calling training "the largest theft of labor in human history" and Greg B...

This week we pick up the Jacob Coxon story a week after our emergency bonus episode. One resignation and a WSJ exclusive turned into a full industry meltdown. We walk through where everyone landed. Dario Amodei put out his "Pacing the Frontier" letter and is pushing for embedded third party evaluators. Sam Altman surprised us by agreeing with him. Elon agreed. Then there's the accele...

This week, we go down the rabbit hole of the internet's worst-kept secret: bots. Cloudflare says over half the internet traffic out there isn't human anymore, and after this episode you'll believe it. We dig into Double Speed, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed company whose CEO openly admits, on camera, that he runs a legal bot farm, charging roughly $150 a bot for rented phone numbers, cu...

BONUS EPISODE!!! With all the conspiracy theories floating around about Jacob Coxon (the AI researcher who resigned from Anthropic saying AI may kill us all within 10 years) we simply had to jump on the mic and yap through it. #ai #anthropic #airegulation

This week we cover the headlines (see the chapter markers below) before Jess has a total crash out over her personal experience dealing with corporate AI slop. CHAPTERS: 0:19 - Intro (this will be a rage episode) 5:42 - Does anyone know how we can sneak into the movie premiere of ‘Artificial’? 6:53 - New Elon doc apparently proves he’s miserable 9:35 - Temporary mass chatbot outage 11:54 - God Ble...

Oopsie - accidentally uploaded the wrong file last night, so lets try this again! This week we have a grab bag of crazy AI headlines for you. First up: Meta settles for $17 billion over child-safety claims - but only pays 30% of it if TikTok and YouTube also cough up. The ruling also stirs up renewed surveillance concerns about age-verification laws. Then, Nvidia posts a blowout quarter while Anth...

Unreliable AI detectors are turning into witch hunts in publishing. We dig into the story of a Black crime writer whose new book "Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body" landed a $2 million deal after a 14-way bidding war, only for his own literary agent to pull it over unverified whispers that he'd used AI, despite no proof and the author's flat denial. We connect it to the earlier case of...

Mark Zuckerberg dropped a 6,500-word manifesto called "The Future Is For Everyone".... Sure, Mark. This week we break down what's actually in it (open source vs. closed source, the Android/iPhone analogy, and the legitimacy of the possible advertising angle), why tech CEOs can't stop writing manifestos and open letters (and why that pattern should worry you), and the new EU-manda...

Jess is back from summer vacay just in time for us to dive into two major AI stories: the open letter from Jensen Huang and dozens of tech companies opposing safety-testing requirements on open-weight models (with Anthropic's Dario Amodei as the notable holdout), and the escalating online backlash against AI-adjacent creators - from OpenAI's tone-deaf "creator camp" at a $2,000/n...

No headlines this week. Just me. This is the most personal episode I've ever recorded. It's about the thing that's been keeping me up at night.... My own AI usage, and the shame, panic, and hope tangled up in it. They say AI will create more millionaires than any technology in history… but only if you're an entrepreneur. So where does that leave the rest of us? The people who just...

While Jess is on summer vacay, Sophie does a solo episode and tries to work out if ChatGPT is recruiting religious people for a secret doomsday cult. First up: a Florida pastor is suing OpenAI after ChatGPT allegedly talked him out of getting care for a life-threatening pulmonary embolism, reassuring him that "God did not design your body to endlessly fail" even as he nearly passed out m...

This week after catching up on the latest AI headlines, we dig into the continuing drama for OpenAI... Apple just sued them for trade secret theft, and the filing does not hold back. Apple alleges that 400+ former employees now at OpenAI were part of a coordinated effort to extract confidential hardware information, that the misconduct was "normalised and exemplified by leadership", and...

Remember SEO? That decades-long arms race that turned every recipe into a 4,000-word memoir? Great news: we're doing it all again, except this time we're optimizing for chatbots instead of humans. It's called AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization, and it's exactly as cursed as it sounds. This week we dig into the new economy of pleasing the machines: Which sources chatbots actually lo...

This week we're chasing the great Silicon Valley pivot panic. The moment every company decides it's secretly an AI company, evidence be damned! Midjourney, the people who make AI pictures of cats in hats, have decided their next move is… scanning your entire body. Welcome to Midjourney Medical, where you'll strip down, descend into a pool of "golden light," and float through a ring of underwater s...

The White House has figured out how to weaponize Anthropic's whole personality: turn the company's safety-consciousness into the very reason to punish it. This week's episode is about the governments decision to pull Fable 5. Which honestly seems a little suss after Anthropic spent months telling the Pentagon "no" to mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapons...

Three of the biggest AI companies in the world are heading to public markets, and the numbers are eye-watering. But does the hype match the reality? This week Sophie and Jess take on the most common arguments against an AI bubble burst, and put them to the test. Spoiler: the Amazon comparison doesn't hold up the way people think it does. Neither does Jevons Paradox. We're not financial adv...

This week we dig into several stories about AI doing things nobody explicitly signed off on. Google DeepMind quietly got its hands on the medical records of 1.6 million NHS patients (without consent) to build an app that actually worked. Netflix used AI deepfakes of grieving mothers in a true crime documentary and somehow made it worse. And Erin Brockovich is back, this time crowdsourcing a map of...

Hollywood is throwing a Hail Mary.... And apparently the plan is AI. Jess spent two days at the "AI on the Lot" conference at Amazon Studios so we didn't have to, and she came back with some bold promises from the people selling the dream. Sophie isn't buying it. Who are these mystery jobs actually for? What will they involve? Did anyone at this conference care about the environm...

Bumble says Swiping is Out and AI Agents are In! First up this week, we talk about why we turned down our first brand deal offer. Then we cover Bumble's announcement that they are getting rid of the traditional swiping feature and implementing AI agents to do the matchmaking for their users. We do a deep dive into this and also discuss future of dating apps in the age of AI. Finally, we give y...

This week's stories:🧠 The ChatGPT Dunning Kruger Effect: People are using AI to feel like instant experts, then dumping mountains of chat logs on everyone around them as "proof." We break down why this is happening and why it's kind of hilarious.🎓 Princeton Kills Its 133-Year-Old Honor Code: One of America's most prestigious universities just scrapped its honour code becaus...

The boys are at it AGAIN. 🍿 This week: Peter Thiel, fresh off destroying Gawker, is back with a new scheme to push him closer to world domination. It's called Objection.ai: an AI-powered "truth tribunal" where tech billionaires can pay to have a robot jury investigate journalists who say mean things about them. Co-founded by the same lawyer who helped Thiel bankrupt Gawker, critics...

We made one video saying Claude probably isn't conscious. The comments? Absolute chaos. Turns out, people have feelings about AI feelings.... And they're not shy about sharing them. So we're back to dig into the wildest arguments from both sides! We'll cover:- Why our last video sent certain corners of the internet into a spiral- The actual philosophical debate around AI consciousn...