Ben Whitelaw 0:00

So Mike, we're gonna talk today about how you can't always trust what you can see online. That feels like a kind of running theme through Ctrl Alt Speech. Um, but

Mike Masnick 0:09

But you can trust what you can trust when you listen to us. You can trust us

Ben Whitelaw 0:14

you can, you can. That's a, high bar. It means we cannot make any mistakes today.

Mike Masnick 0:20

Yes

Ben Whitelaw 0:20

Um, not that I think anybody is fact-checking us. but you might not be able to trust everything, but there are some good things about the internet, and I wanted to ask you, what have you been watching or enjoying that makes you feel like the internet is worthwhile sticking with?

Mike Masnick 0:36

Yes. Well, you know, I think one of the things that I think lots of us think a fun outgrowth of the internet is the rise of memes and meme culture and being able to share memes and things like that. So I found this thing which is brand new, it's only been out for a few days, called Meme Museum. So it's meme-museum.at, and it is built on the AT Protocol, which, you know, I am a supporter of the AT Protocol, ding, due

Ben Whitelaw 1:08

please go bold.

Mike Masnick 1:09

to, to Blue Sky. This is not Blue Sky. This is the AT Protocol. and there's actually a really interesting article from the guy who built it, this guy Joe Grmusica, I think is, is the name. and was just saying he had this idea of something he thought would be cool, which was a tool to help you manage your memes. So if you have, memes and you wanna be able to share them on social media, there are people who have, like, folders full of memes and things like that. But this is built into the AT Protocol. but he wrote a really interesting article about how it was just something that he had this thought and he could build it, and then it goes on about how nice it is to have that protocol that you can just build something and be able to, you know, build something into, a social media system, and it's a cool tool for managing all your memes. And I was

Ben Whitelaw 1:57

I love that

Mike Masnick 1:58

I like memes. I like being able to build on open protocols, and so this made me happy about the internet this week. How about you?

Ben Whitelaw 2:07

mean, I, I've actually worked with Joe quite closely on a couple of projects. Yeah, he's done some great work, and, he's a really fun guy. So it's no surprise that he's done something cool, on the out protocol. And, and just before we move on, what, what is in your meme museum? I think people are gonna be wondering, what are you collecting?

Mike Masnick 2:23

I am... I, well, I mean, I've just been playing around, so there's not that much in there yet. I need to, I need to start adding stuff to it. I have not been as good about some other people with, with my meme game. So maybe this will be my inspiration to up my meme game, 'cause I'm-- I feel like memes are a little bit more of a millennial thing, and I am solidly in the Gen X group. But I feel sort of millennial at heart at times, and so this is my inspiration to maybe up my meme game

Ben Whitelaw 2:54

Yeah. Nice. If you've got any, ideas, listeners, of memes that Mike should be curating in his museum, get in touch, podcast.ctrl-alt-speech.com. You have full unfettered rights to send him memes of all kinds. That's what I heard.

Mike Masnick 3:10

Ben? What have you done?

Ben Whitelaw 3:13

Um, well, I, My kind of fun thing this week, Mike, is, something for my son. Obviously, he made an appearance on the podcast a few weeks ago while he was having his bath and going to bed, and so You know, it's not the only interruption that I've had from him while sat at this very desk. He likes to, normally after a nap, come into my office, look at, you know, what I'm up to, and start bashing the keyboard, and that's, that's fairly problematic when you've got kind of documents and, emails up and things like that. You know, he manages to close a lot of windows. He manages to, you know, he managed to send an email at one point, which I was fairly horrified at. Um, so I've, I, I, I've found a tool, a website called tinyfingers.net, which is specifically created for this purpose. It is a full-screen website where babies can come along, and they can smash the keyboard to their heart's content, and it brings up little, you know, kind of emojis and emoticons and, has a nice kind of snowscape pattern as well, and I've used it a couple of times. It works incredibly well for keeping him happy and, uh, s- avoids any kind of professional, issues on my side. So great all round

Mike Masnick 4:23

Yeah. I mean, I'm looking at it right now and it says 1,072 kids are smashing keyboards right now. Now I would be remiss if I didn't question the trust and safety implications of a website like this. But

Ben Whitelaw 4:39

the kind of screen time social media ban, impetus

Mike Masnick 4:43

Exactly. Like, does this comply with, uh, you know, is this site covered by the, bans on social media for kids? I mean, this is definitely for kids under the age of 16, and so I, I have to wonder about some of that.

Ben Whitelaw 5:00

Look, look, don't get me started. Hello, and welcome to Ctrl-Alt-Speech, the podcast where we make sense of the major debates shaping online speech, platform power, content moderation, and the future of the internet. It's August the 13th, 2026, and this week we're discussing why everyone is freaking out about Anthropic's watermarking announcement, what's next for AI ethics, and for our Patreon supporters, how misinformation took hold in a tiny Spanish enclave a few weeks ago. Ctrl-Alt-Speech is the weekly moral audit of the internet, co-hosted f- fairly grand.

Mike Masnick 5:45

I like it. I like it

Ben Whitelaw 5:47

co-hosted by Mike Masnick, founder and editor of Techdirt, and me, Ben Whitelaw, the founder and editor of Everything in Moderation. Mike, you already know the big news of this week. the Bluesky bell is back.

Mike Masnick 5:57

I heard it. Ding, ding

Ben Whitelaw 5:59

Yeah, perhaps used slightly incorrectly, a bit rusty.

Mike Masnick 6:04

We, we haven't used it in a while, so, so w- if we have new listeners, you should explain the Blue Sky Bell

Ben Whitelaw 6:09

The Bluesky bell is, well, where it's been is, is in a box in a, a room of my house while we have been renovating some, parts of our London, house. And so it has been fairly absent, I would say. But it's designed, when present, to highlight the fact that Mike is a board member of Bluesky and the, you know, potential, let's say kind of implications of you talking about a story related to Bluesky. Not that you're biased, but that you have priors.

Mike Masnick 6:38

Do not trust anything, I say, because I am, I am fully biased.

Ben Whitelaw 6:43

And, and the bell is, is the first of, I think, a, a series of different, um yeah, I just like the sound. Um, a f- a number of different instruments, noises that we're gonna kind of hopefully introduce. We've been talking about it for a while, but I'm quite committed to it

Mike Masnick 6:57

I am still waiting for the trade-offs tuba, so

Ben Whitelaw 7:01

I've got a, I've got another proposal actually for, for later on in the podcast. So yeah, we're starting, to bring that back. before we jump into, new production noises for the podcast and stories that we think you should all be listening to, people might be tired of me saying, but we are very, very grateful to our very dedicated group of Patreon supporters who pay either £10 a month to get, excellent extended episodes and early access to them as well, as well as our 20 a month founder and insider supporters who get both of those things and the opportunity to suggest stories for us to cover. a number of those supporters actually got in touch with us in recent weeks to do that, and we covered those stories. So it's a very, very, valuable thing, and we couldn't do the podcast without it. we monetize both through the Patreon supporters and also sponsorships, and it really helps us cover, the many, many articles we read and the production of it and our brilliant editor, Lee. So it's all going to a, a very, very good cause. if you are interested in sponsoring the podcast, you can find out more, If you go to our website, ctrlaltspeech.com, there is more information there. And if you are tempted by the Patreon, we have a very, very good offer right now, an almost free first month, with the discount code TRUSTCON. Use all caps, T-R-U-S-T C-O-N, and that gets you, this week a very, very interesting kind of picking over this big mass migration event in the Spanish city of Ceuta and how platforms are responding to it. So have a look out for that. Mike, where do we, where do we begin this week?

Mike Masnick 8:35

I think we need to watermark this conversation

Ben Whitelaw 8:38

In, a few years' time it probably will be, and we, we, we... People will know that there was no AI involved in our, inadequate words and attempted analysis. but, you know, there is this kind of growing question of, of what can you trust online, what is real? And we're gonna talk a bit about fact-checking later, which I think was kind of the original attempt to help validate what people saw on the web. but we have been waiting for the AI labs to really come up with their own play on this, and Anthropic this week announced something that I think fits neatly into that bucket.

Mike Masnick 9:10

Yeah. So, you know, this sort of all traces back to the EU's AI Act, which, you know, I think has been seen as sort of, a really early jump into the space of regulating AI in, in all sorts of ways. And one element of that is a requirement for AI produced content to be watermarked in some way. you can understand the sort of thinking behind that in that there was a lot of concern, you know, a lot of the initial concerns about generative AI tools was that it was generating content that would fool people into believing that it was real. I mean, the, the deepfakes, right? We spent years talking about the threat and risk of deepfakes and how they were fooling people, except that there was maybe not that much evidence of people actually being fooled by deepfakes. in fact, it seemed like the bigger problem was people doing what's been known as the liar's dividend, where they would claim when they were really caught doing something that it was a deepfake. but so built into the EU Act is this, requirement that AI companies somehow watermark or indicate content that is created by AI. Now, there have been efforts underway. there's a, a standard which is now pretty widely being adopted for image and audio and video AI generated content, that, from what I've heard is, getting pretty good and is fairly hard to, break, though I imagine people will come up with all sorts of ways to break it, over time. But what was trickier was the idea of, what AI is most used for, which is generating text, and how do you indicate and mark that text is, originally generated by AI. So Anthropic announced this week that they are now, very soon starting to watermark all AI text that they generate and/or process, which is a, an interesting distinction that is worth digging a little deeper into. But basically what they're doing is they have put some sort of, at this point still hidden kind of bias into their text generation that will be recognizable to a machine-readable system to indicate that the text has been processed by Anthropic's tools. And so at some point they will make an API available that will allow you to take any text and then ship it back to Anthropic, and Anthropic will give you some sort of score as to whether or not that text was processed by Claude in, in some form or another. Now, this, there's the, the regulatory aspect of it, which is that they're sort of required to do this. It-- as people were talking about this, it came out that apparently Gemini, Google's, AI model, has been doing this for some time already. at some point, I assume that OpenAI will release something similar. the reactions to this have been all over the map. a lot of people are really, really mad about it. some for perhaps reasonable reasons, some I think for less than reasonable reasons. They are very much... You know, there are people who have-- This may surprise you, Ben, 'cause I know you, you think well of people in the world and think people are generally good. there are some people who use AI to cheat in some form or another, and it is possible that a tool like this might make it harder for them to get away with the, the cheating side of what they do. and so some people I think are just mad about that aspect of it.

Ben Whitelaw 12:40

just on that, I have a very interesting s- kind of very brief tangent about exactly that point. Cause I think a lot of the reaction has been from, like, people who are using AI models for the LinkedIn thought leadership, right? You know, there's, there's-- We talked about the AI slop button that's been created on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the worst for it. This week, I f- saw two posts that were very, very similar in nature, bar a few kind of structural differences, and called out the fact that these posts written six or seven hours apart were very, very similar. And it turned out, long story short, that one of the two people had fed all of the, posts about actually this topic that we're talking about now, anthropic watermarking, had fed all of those into Claude and asked for a, had asked for a take that he could post onto LinkedIn.

Mike Masnick 13:34

Wow

Ben Whitelaw 13:35

I, to be honest, I don't believe that his page isn't running, isn't being run by Claude or OpenClaude or something, because his response to my questions was very, very, sounded very much like a, an AI, chatbot. The DM that I got from him sounded very much like an AI chatbot, and frankly, I would love some sort of watermarking in that moment because these two posts were incredibly similar. he made up some sort of, reasoning for why, the post is incredibly similar, but he had essentially kind of plagiarized it using AI.

Mike Masnick 14:07

did you click the, the new LinkedIn button that allows you to, to claim that certain content is AI slop?

Ben Whitelaw 14:13

didn't even think to do that, which is

Mike Masnick 14:16

You well, you should, right? That is the new feature on LinkedIn is that you can, you can say, "I think this is AI slop," and, LinkedIn may do

Ben Whitelaw 14:23

Yeah. But the point is, you know, as you say, it is very, very prevalent

Mike Masnick 14:27

Yeah. there are certain cases and, and, you know, we're seeing more and more examples of it. there was a discussion in a, private group chat, so I'm gonna kinda be a little careful about what I say here, about a certain paper that recently came out that is relevant to a lot of our interests, where there was very clear indications that, at least the summary of the paper was written entirely by AI. It had a lot of hallmarks of AI drafted nature. And so, like, now people are sort of looking at this thing. Now, the flip side of that is that, that leads people to, like, completely freaking out about these things and maybe overreacting and assuming that things are AI generated or AI slop, as people would like to say, when it's not AI slop. And so you run the r- the real risk of, I mean, you have sort of, type one and type two errors, right? The false negatives and false positives where, things that aren't AI generated are going to be accused of being AI generated. things that are AI generated are not going to be, caught up in this. And it just become... You have this sort of witch hunt aspect of it. And what makes this worse, and this is part of the way that Anthropic has rolled this out, which I understand technically they probably feel, not doing it this way would be even harder, is that even though the, AI Act is fairly clear that the watermarking requirements or the transparency requirements don't need to apply to merely processing content. So if you're doing, like, a spell check or a grammar check, which is, you know, one of the most popular uses of these tools, it doesn't need to watermark it. But Anthropic is saying, "We're watermarking those also."

Ben Whitelaw 16:15

Right

Mike Masnick 16:16

And, like, this is how I use AI. I have a whole tool that I've built personally that I write my articles, and then I have a whole very, very deliberately trained on my writing, specific to what I'm looking for, specific to what I'm doing. I have it do a, a review. Mostly it gives me feedback, and then I go in and make the edits. But it also will, you know, especially where I do, like, run-on sentences or, typos, it will call those out, and it will make suggestions for, like, how to, edit them. And so now those, in theory, may also include a kind of AI watermark. And so you raise this question that comes up in, in all sorts of situations where it's like, if I write the whole thing, have an AI review it, and it catches a typo and says, "You should rewrite this sentence," and I rewrite it the way it suggests, and then somebody runs that through an AI checker, do then I get accused of, it being AI? Or you can go even further where there are all sorts of stories of people who have legitimate reasons for using these AI tools to help them write. You have people who are not fluent in a language who might use it to im- improve their fluency to make themselves more understood. I've heard of, stories of people with disabilities who use the technology to help them in, in other ways. And now if we're suddenly, putting this sort of scarlet letter on anything that was processed in any way by that can cause real damage as well. And so I think there's a lot of different tricks and, questions raised by like how well this will work and what it's doing. I think it's funny because like part of the, EU Commission's guidelines, I was looking this over in preparing for this, is they were saying that, people should know when they are interacting with AI or exposed to AI-generated content and it says this will help them make informed decisions, calibrate their trust and reliance on AI, and avoid misinformation or deception, which is a worthy goal. But I'm wondering, does this actually do that or does this make this worse? Because now suddenly you're going to have all these people who are freaking out about these things, accusing people of, "Oh, you just used AI to generate this," and actually sowing more mistrust and distrust of content that maybe doesn't deserve that. And so there's a lot of different factors that go into this and, and, Anthropic has to do this and, and Google and, OpenAI and others in some sense will have to do this to comply with the EU's new regulations. But I, I'm wondering if the long-term impact of this is actually, more trust or less

Ben Whitelaw 18:58

Yeah. I mean, it gets to the heart of kind of what authorship is, doesn't it? And, and who owns a piece of work. And I think that's why it kinda gets under so many people's skins because e- everyone, you know, feels, I think quite strongly about, if they're creating original content and using a tool to augment it in some way, it's still theirs. my question would be like, Is this gonna matter in a couple of years' time? you know, i- i- are we not gonna be in a world where everyone is using these tools so ubiquitously that actually whether it's kind of been edited or authored by Claude it's kind of neither here nor there? And I, I feel like we're almost... there are elements of that already, I feel, where we don't know if somebody has kind of authored a, a LinkedIn post or a blog post, or if they've come up with a, an idea for a podcast, let's say. and yes, this, the way that Anthropic are approaching this isn't going to help clarify who's originated the content and who's augmented it, but everyone's going to be doing it anyway, so does it really matter?

Mike Masnick 19:59

Well, you know, and actually there is an element of this which people are saying is that, you know, people are going to figure out how to strip out the watermarks. I mean, the text watermark w- with video and pictures and audio, I think it's easier to, put in a watermark that is harder to remove, though I, I imagine people will quickly develop tools that will remove those watermarks. With the text ones, it's very, very, like, it's going to be trickier, but it, it's trickier to build in the watermark in the first place, and so therefore it will be easier to figure out ways to remove it. And Anthropic has even said editing a piece of text that's generated by Claude may or may not remove the watermark, which is, is sort of an indication of how it works, is going to be certain orders of words or, you know, punctuation or something that's, that gives some sort of indication. So the editing will depend on whether or not you disturb the elements of the watermark enough, to make it invisible. But that also means you could accidentally, in some cases, create text that would set off the watermark when it doesn't. But also, I think what will happen is that those in the know, those who you know, have more, resources and ability and knowledge are probably going to figure out ways to avoid the watermark or avoid being accused of using this stuff, whereas people, with less resources are more likely to be called out for using this stuff, even if the more, powerful or wealthy or whoever are using the tools in the same way. And so I think you, you actually create a, bigger divide where, yes, lots of people, almost everyone is going to be using these tools in some form or another, but, those who are well-resourced may figure out ways to not get accused of it, while those who are not will get accused of it. And so you sort of create this, further version of a digital divide by, you know, having this kind of witch hunt sort of situation going on. So I, I worry about that as well.

Ben Whitelaw 21:58

Yeah. And, and I mean, I, feel like those, that divide is already in place actually. You know, I think, I think there's-- this obviously has the potential to exacerbate it, but I think the, there is a kind of group of haves and have-nots in, in the AI race. And, you know, this discussion of, who will become an underclass if they can't use AI tools to the same extent as, Sam Altman and his merry band of CEOs is, has been a long kind of standing discussion. the question is really whether this is just a kind of compliance move or whether there's actually kind of belief that this will help. That's what it kind of comes down to really, doesn't it, is does Anthropic feel like this is going to alleviate some of the, the questions around, around whether people are producing content of their own or, or just cribbing, as the person who I spotted on LinkedIn did? Or whether it's just a kind of thing to keep EU happy. It feels like the latter.

Mike Masnick 22:49

yeah, I think this is, this is purely driven by the EU regulations and the compliance aspect of it. You know, there are services out there that right now that claim to, they will recognize AI-generated content. I've pointed out, mistakes that I think that technology has made. It's sort of funny because those technologies also rely on AI, and it's, somewhat amusing at times to see people who absolutely hate AI pointing to those services as proof that, you know, this or that is AI slop. and it, it's all just like, it's all AI up and down the stack. and, I think just the attitude of, thinking that we have to blame people for using these tools. Like, again, I get that, and I have called out, you know, when I've seen AI-generated slop, right? Like, there are times where you look at it and you're like, "Oh my God," you know, "have a little self-respect. Why are you doing this?" but there are also times where I think, there are good reasons for people to use the technology and, to help them do certain things that they might not otherwise be able to do. And so, to me, like so many things, like this is the same argument I've made in the past in regarding other technologies, is that this is a new technology that changes the way people around the globe interact and do things, and we as a society need to learn how to deal with that properly and to understand it and to come to terms with what it means and what we think of it. and, you know, I think rushing to the space where it's just like, "Oh, we need to, call out people for using the technology and potentially bash them for it," is not gonna be particularly helpful in, in the long

Ben Whitelaw 24:29

Yeah, I think it's-- that's true. I mean, the AI Act obviously was fairly early on in terms of trying to kind of put some guardrails and, and some kind of structure around how AI, the AI industry would evolve. at the same time, you know, there are already news outlets that have reporters who are solely AI personas, right? And who, who,

Mike Masnick 24:50

Yeah, it's just garbage though.

Ben Whitelaw 24:52

I mean, some of it is and some of it isn't. I think there, there's a kind of variety of, of, of quality in there, and some people are leaning into it more, and some of it is, is obviously kind of fairly weak. But it, again, this idea that the kind of genie's out of the bottle, i- in many ways, and this is like a kind of, feels like a band-aid on, on, on that-

Mike Masnick 25:11

yeah. And r- right, you know, to, to be fair, right, there are certain examples where you could see where the AI can be useful, and there are stories where it's like you have, like, local newspapers that don't have enough resources to cover things like local high school sports or something like that. And if, if you can get stories out of it that wouldn't get covered otherwise, like, maybe that is a better solution than just not covering the, the space at all. but yeah, it's just a question of like, what is society's attitude towards all these things as well, and does something like this, increase thoughtful approaches to using the technology, or does it just create this kind of like, we're gonna burn these people at the stake because they use this

Ben Whitelaw 25:52

Yeah. Yeah. kind of a further way that we can be polarized as a society.

Mike Masnick 25:57

Yeah, yeah

Ben Whitelaw 25:58

talking of which, a gentle segue into our eye-catching section. Um, I wondered, you know, what,

Mike Masnick 26:04

Speaking of people we can burn at the stake.

Ben Whitelaw 26:08

I wasn't quite as explicit as that, but, um, I, I, I wonder what would come up if you put Mark Zuckerberg's 6,000-word just kind of novella on AI through a watermarking tool. I wonder just how much of it might be created by whatever, model he uses, probably Muse Spark, but we don't know. because everyone has been talking about this. Some people are saying it's an essay. I think it's a kind of badly edited monologue. his essay entitled "The Future Is for Everyone," and if watermarking kind of divided opinion, particularly among the LinkedIn crowd, then this has as well, hasn't it?

Mike Masnick 26:45

Yeah. you know, I, I refer to it as a manifesto, um, because, yeah, it has that sort of feel where, you know, the future is for everyone. and, you know, I think a lot of people have been, completely bashing it, mostly for good reason. you know, my take on it, he, he talks about a whole bunch of different things, but basically he's just like a very strong, he supports AI. He thinks AI should be accessible and available for everyone. you know, he always refers to super intelligence, which is this horrible, stupid, annoying, misleading term that, that he has really embraced when it comes to AI technologies. but he thinks that more people should have access to it and that they should have access to local, open weight, distributed models, which I agree with. And so there's like a lot in there that I'm reading and I was like, yeah, he's right. He's making these arguments that I think are actually correct, surrounded by an absolute ton of bullshit and nonsense about how amazing data centers are and how they're you know, revitalizing communities and all this nonsense. and then, the larger point though is, and I wrote something about this this week as well, is that he talks about the importance of decentralization and how the power shouldn't be in the control of just three giant centralized companies. And I'm just like, "Who-- Y-you're Mark Zuckerberg." Like, the whole reason we're concerned about the giant power of three or four centralized companies is partly because of your doing and things that you have done for the past 20 years. Who the fuck are you to, like, come in there and say, like, "Oh," like, "the world, it doesn't end well when new technologies are just in the hands of a few companies." It's like for 20 years, you've taken steps to make sure that Meta is the centralized giant, and you've, actively prevented decentralization within the the social space. So I wrote something basically saying, like, there are things in here that he's right about, but you should not trust him to be the messenger on it. And the only reason he's saying these things is because they're losing the race. I mean, we've talked about this before, that you know, Meta is way behind the other models, and therefore he has to put forth this idea that like, yes, the open decentralized models matter. But the second that Meta were ever close to the top of the race again, he would shut things down so fast because that's what he's done. And, and I pointed to the example of Threads and ActivityPub, where when they launched Threads, they were like, we believe in openness, we believe in the open social network where it should be on protocols. We shouldn't have control." And then as soon as Threads suddenly took off and became much bigger because they shoved everybody in Instagram into it, then suddenly they're like, "Oh yeah, ActivityPub, yeah, we'll, we'll maybe support it." And like everybody who was working on that basically left Threads and they don't really care about it anymore. this is all just marketing. And so I think some people are dismissing everything that's in there I do think there are some interesting things that are in there that are worth paying attention to. I just, you know, Mark is the wrong messenger for it because you shouldn't trust him 'cause he's, he's not, he's not believable on this. He's not, he has no credibility.

Ben Whitelaw 30:06

And he thinks he'll have amnesia from the last two decades. I think, uh, we've got a couple other stories we wanna touch on before we- Mm we do this, but, uh, the perfect visual metaphor for this essay, Mike, is, a video that Zuckerberg put out on his socials this week of him sparring with a UFC fighter on a barge. Have you seen this?

Mike Masnick 30:26

No, I have not.

Ben Whitelaw 30:27

It's, you know, you, you talked about there kind of being like a couple of ideas in, amongst a sea of terrible, terrible takes in this essay. Well, there's a, a video. You know he's a kinda big MMA guy now. There's a video of him taking on the number one UFC fighter on a barge in the middle of the ocean, and It's a kind of perfect visual representation of this. Like, he is, awash with, bad ideas and bad takes, and he is standing in the middle of the ocean swiping away, thrashing away, hoping for something to kind of, come good, and that for me sums up where Meta is in the AI race right now. I'll, I'll, I'll post it in the show notes. talking of kind of, AI companies trying to show themselves in a good light, an eye-catching story that I saw this week, Mike, and I wanted to talk through, was OpenAI's head of ethics leaving after one year in post. Mm. Now, this is a woman called Chloe Bakalar, who people who are very, very in the weeds on the industry will know was the head ethicist or chief ethicist of Meta for I think five or six years, and joined OpenAI last year as part of an effort to, her job was to kind of create, processes for, for model development, in ethical ways. She was thinking a lot about how humans interacted with AIs. You know, all the kind of, like, slightly philosophical questions that I guess don't get answered by teams who are working on research or, product or the technology itself. She, is leaving, and the company have announced that she's not going to be replaced, which I think is interesting. you know, I have a couple of thoughts on this. I mean, not necessarily very surprising in the run-up to an IPO that you might shed one of the people who wants to do very thoughtful deliberation o- on, on models and maybe, like, have a couple more meetings and ask some kind of pointed questions of, developers about how they're, structuring the data and developing these models. kinda makes sense that you, you might shepherd that person out the door, and, the justification that they've given is that ethics is now kind of baked into a bunch of teams within OpenAI. It's, it's core, yeah, core to a lot of what, the research they do. And, you

Mike Masnick 32:36

Who needs ethics when you have, uh, you know, ChatGPT handling ethics for

Ben Whitelaw 32:40

Yeah, for sure. and you might be g- be able to get on board the idea that there's a product team, who is, taking all the work that Chloe's done over the last year and kind of implementing it in new ways. the other kind of question is, like, whether this is a further distinction between OpenAI and its big rivals, Anthropic, which obviously has done lots of work around, the kind of philosophy, of models and how models behave and the morals that a model has. they have a philosopher who's been responsible for creating Claude's soul, if a model can have a soul, and we've talked about that in the past. And they've done lots of work, with the, kind of Pope and the Vatican City, and kind of really just, I guess, trying to kind of instill the idea that they are a company that has, models that kind of think differently or act differently in certain scenarios. And so, you th-this feels like another fork in the road between what OpenAI are doing and what Anthropic have tried to do or to kind of show. Now, I don't for one think that Anthropic is entirely whiter than white or the good guys here. Um, but I think it's important to note, and, uh, again, we have in technology companies for the past 15 or 20 years had ethicists, people who have been thinking about kind of big ethical questions. in the early days, I don't think they had philosophy degrees, or had, were actually trained in ethics. I think the early, early ones were, like, comms officers and people who were kind of shoved into that role. So maybe we're further on than, we were, but I think this is a kind of noted development as, as, those IPOs come along.

Mike Masnick 34:08

Yeah. I mean, the thing that I would point out is like for most tech companies, and I don't know the details here, I don't know that any of this is public, but you know, for most tech companies, the way it works when you join is you get, an equity grant that vests over time, and most of it is you don't get anything until you've been there for one full year, and then you get, there's a cliff, and you get your first, you know, quarter of the equity grant at one year. So somebody leaving before an entire year is up is sort of eyebrow-raising, especially right before an IPO that in theory would make one who holds OpenAI equity very, very wealthy. so there's, definitely an eyebrow raise there. Leaving before one year is noteworthy in that it suggests something, something went wrong. Uh, whether it's with OpenAI, whether it was with this individual, who knows or some combination of both perhaps. But like, to me that, is eyebrow-raising. I think, the whole thing of like companies hiring ethicists is interesting, but hiring an, you know, an ethics specialist doesn't make you an ethical company. It's often, it feels like a marketing exercise to some extent. Like actually being ethical is different than just, hiring an e-ethicist. and like, different people can have different takes. Like the whole nature of ethics is that, there is no exact right answer, and different people will disagree on what is the ethical thing to do in different scenarios. but yeah, you know, it's definitely raises some, some eyebrows about what's happening at OpenAI.

Ben Whitelaw 35:43

Yeah, indeed. and then just before we, we wrap up, you want to mention a, an eye-catching story that you think has a lot of implications going forward. Do you wanna just give us a quick overview of that?

Mike Masnick 35:53

Yeah. it is a quick one because, uh, the Ninth Circuit made a ruling, uh, Meta and, TikTok had, challenged, it's really a series of, there's like thousands of cases that the, the sort of child safety cases and everything else is, that's going on. and they had been denied a Section 230, dismissal early on, and they had appealed it. And the Ninth Circuit, which is the appeals court that covers most of the western part of the United States, is very important, ruled that Section 230 is not actually an immunity from suit, but rather merely a defense to liability, and said effectively that companies cannot appeal the loss of a 230. You know, they-- you try and get a case dismissed on 230 grounds, and historically, if you've lost that, you can immediately appeal it. And here, the Ninth Circuit is saying you can't immediately appeal it because it is not an immunity from suit. that is, it feels like a very narrow ruling, but it is an incredibly important one because the fact that Section 230 has been considered an immunity from lawsuit, which I think is the most obvious read of what the law actually says, has been the reason why Section 230 is so important. And now that has been changed, you know, the court kinda claims that this was never really, analyzed, and other courts have said differently in the past, but they sort of dismissed that as sloppy language. I saw somebody went through and did analysis saying there were 442 court rulings that have s- called Section 230 an immunity, and for the Ninth Circuit to just kind of dismiss it as sloppy. It also sort of rewrites the history of Section 230 in that, you know, they claim that, the original version of the language didn't include this language suggesting it was an immunity, and therefore, when they added that language, they said it was a minimal change, and if this really was about adding immunity, they wouldn't have called it a minimal change. That is also a complete rewriting of the history. Jeff Kosseff spoke out publicly. Jeff Kosseff, who wrote the book on the history of Section 230, said that's wrong. That's like, you know, the people who were there in the room deliberately said that they made this change on purpose to create to make Section 230 an immunity from lawsuits. so this could be a monumental change. I think it, takes away much of the value of Section 230. the question is will Meta and/or TikTok challenge this? They can ask the Ninth Circuit to rehear it, banc, which is with the larger panel. They could go to the Supreme Court. both of those are fraught with risks and challenges because you know, the Ninth Circuit at a larger scale could also agree with this, or the Supreme Court could as well, and that would be very bad for the future of Section 230.

Ben Whitelaw 38:44

Mm. And do you, so do you think, Mike, this is the kind of recent lawsuits against these platforms being rewritten into the kind of legal system? It's, you know, it's, it's New Mexico, it's California, it's the product design, issue being reapplied, isn't it?

Mike Masnick 39:00

Yeah. I mean, if you look at the last five years of court decisions related to Section 230, one by one, courts have come up with new interpretations of Section 230 that effectively chip away at each of the benefits of Section 230. So bit by bit, even as Congress is talking about repealing or reforming, the courts have done that work bit by bit, changing the way they interpret the law so that each of the, underlying benefits of 230, which is that it gets rid of bad mistargeted lawsuits quickly, are going away. And I think we're going to have very long and very damaging consequences from that, but it's the courts, you know, effectively rewriting the law on their own because they're not happy about these companies.

Ben Whitelaw 39:44

Yeah. And, and I think this is probably a good time to plug your, Section 230 podcast, Mike, that you did last year. doing my good Otherwise objectionable. not a description of, you or I, but uh, a, a kind of narrative-driven podcast that Mike did, which is, is very good on, kind of the history of Section 230. We'll include that in the show notes. More listening for you listeners. but this podcast is not done. We're not finished here. we're wrapping up the free episode now. we've talked a bit about, some really important stories. We're also gonna talk in the Patreon episode about, a major kind of social and immigration issue that's been bubbling under the surface in, in Europe over the last month. We're gonna do a similar treatment to what we did last week with the, Indian meta story and kind of unpack what happened and what it means. There's been some interesting developments this week, and, uh, looking forward to jumping into it now

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