Intelligent Machines 872 Transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.
 

Jeff Jarvis [00:00:00]:
It's time for Intelligent Machines. Jeff Jarvis is here. Paris has the week off, but guess what? Father Robert Balisair is here, the digital Jesuit. He and Jeff have a lot to say about the Pope's latest encyclical on AI. We'll talk about that, plus interview our guest. My favorite photographer, Rick Salmon is here. Coming up next on Intelligent Machines, podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit.

Leo Laporte [00:00:32]:
This is Intelligent Machines with Jeff Jarvis and Paris Martineau. Episode 872 recorded Wednesday, May 27, 2026 Infinite Jeffs it's time for Intelligent Machines, the show. We cover AI, robotics and all the smart things all around us all the time. Hello everybody, I'm Leo Laporte. Jeff Jarvis is here. Emeritus professor of journalistic innovation at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:01:05]:
at

Leo Laporte [00:01:05]:
the City University of New York. He is also the author of a brand new book coming out in a couple of months. Hot type, very hot. All about the Linotype, the history of the machine that changed everything. He's also the author of magazine Gutenberg Parenthesis, many other fine volumes. Hello, Jeff.

Rick Sammon [00:01:25]:
Hello.

Leo Laporte [00:01:25]:
Thank you for wearing your clerical collar today. Yes, I appreciate it because Paris has the day off, but we're thrilled to have Father Robert Ballast with us.

Jeff Jarvis [00:01:35]:
We are thrilled anytime, anytime he is on, but especially today. Perfect timing.

Leo Laporte [00:01:40]:
Well, yeah, because a couple of days ago the Holy Father released something. It's actually weird. I didn't think there'd be a juxtaposition of intelligent machines in the Catholic church, but there is.

Jeff Jarvis [00:01:53]:
Here it is.

Leo Laporte [00:01:54]:
His encyclopaemical on AI. And I know you don't speak for the Pope, but I'm sure you have some thoughts about the encyclical. So we'll talk about that a little bit. But before we do, let me introduce our guest, our very special guest this hour, an old friend, one of the great photographers. Rick Salmon is here. Author, photographer. He's written what is something like 45 books. How many books have you written?

Rick Sammon [00:02:21]:
Well, 43, but I'm working on two more. I'm working on two more.

Leo Laporte [00:02:24]:
Okay, so it'll canon explorer of light. He has shot in every format, underwater, portrait, landscape, beautiful images. But I had to get Rick on because he's doing a classic Kelby one on AI. Something that's anathema to, I think, some other photographers. It's called the AI mindset. When you are through changing, you are through. And I gotta tell you, Rick Salmon is not through for sure.

Rick Sammon [00:03:00]:
Well, you have to keep changing, right, Leo?

Leo Laporte [00:03:03]:
You're an inspiration, Rick. You just, you're beautiful photos, but also more than that, you've always been a great teacher and writer. Musician first. I didn't realize you went to the Berklee School of Music.

Rick Sammon [00:03:17]:
Yeah, I went to Berklee College of Music in Boston. I still play every day. And, you know, I think there's a lot of correlations. You mentioned Scott Kelby. He plays guitar, I play guitar. Adams was a classical pianist. He was amazing. So, you know, I think a lot of artists need, you know, this outlet to just keep creating.

Rick Sammon [00:03:36]:
And that's why I think AI is such a fantastic tool. You know, it's. It's just so much fun for me.

Leo Laporte [00:03:43]:
So tell me, how does AI get involved in your work? Well, do you start. You start with a photo, right?

Rick Sammon [00:03:52]:
Well, there's two ways. Sometimes I start with a photo and, you know, you could do the same thing like in Photoshop and Lightroom that you could do in AI, but in Photoshop and Lightroom it would take you like so much longer. So, for example, you know what Rembrandt lighting is, right? You have the side lighting, we have the beautiful side lighting. And on the shadow side of the subject's face, you have a little triangle of light. So you could do this in Photoshop or Lightroom. It might take you about 20 minutes. You put a photo. I put one of my photos into a ChatGPT and I say, create Rembrandt lighting in less than 60.

Leo Laporte [00:04:26]:
Oh, wow.

Rick Sammon [00:04:27]:
In less than 60 seconds it does so, stuff like that. So that's one way I use AI or to retouch or to retouch or enhance a photograph. Then you could use like midjourney to create your own. To create an image, just type in a prompt like, you know, you know, young man in a rowboat playing guitar or whatever, and it creates it. So I use both. But I'm finding more and more and more I'm using my own photographs. And that's what I encourage people to do, start with your own photographs. Because photographers, they have the advantage, I think, in this world of AI, you know, they have a good eye for composition and lighting and watching the background and expression and gesture and all that stuff.

Rick Sammon [00:05:15]:
So, you know, you give AI to a photographer, a skilled photographer who's been taking pictures for a long time, like I have, and you can create these amazing, one of a kind images that are just, just fantastic.

Leo Laporte [00:05:31]:
I think that that's something we've kind of a conclusion we've come to over the months of doing this show is that AI by itself isn't that great? But AI plus human can be very powerful. Very interesting. You sent us some images. Let me just give you. You can narrate this, but this is a, you know, kind of an average. I think it's from. Shot from an iPhone, actually. Camera of the.

Rick Sammon [00:05:54]:
Yeah, yep. This is an iPhone. This is actually, this is the Tappan Z bridge.

Leo Laporte [00:05:58]:
Oh, the Tappan Z bridge.

Rick Sammon [00:06:00]:
Well, people call it the Mario Cuomo bridge.

Jeff Jarvis [00:06:03]:
No, no, no, no, no.

Rick Sammon [00:06:04]:
It's the Tappan Z. It's a Tappan Z. It's a tap. So this is a shot just take with the iPhone and in the next shot, I guess is we'll show it.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:06:15]:
Whoa.

Jeff Jarvis [00:06:17]:
Yeah.

Rick Sammon [00:06:18]:
So the prompt was make it a nighttime shot with beautiful reflection on the water. Use a long shutter speed so a photographer knows that a long shutter speed will blur. Will blur the clouds like that. I said, add the clouds, add the reflection. You know, put the light on the water and the rocks. So, you know, that first shot you saw was one of the most boring pictures I ever took. But I took it and I say

Leo Laporte [00:06:44]:
that it's certainly not something you'd put in a book or your portfolio.

Rick Sammon [00:06:47]:
No, but what I do is I'm shooting now. I'm photographing for AI. So I knew that, you know, my wife and I there having a nice walk on a beautiful day, but I said, hey, I know the potential here. So that's what I try to show people in the, in, in my classes and my teachings in the Kelpie 1 class. The potential that, you know, this is just amazing and, and how much fun is that? Right?

Leo Laporte [00:07:12]:
Well, here's another. Here's a portrait.

Rick Sammon [00:07:15]:
Yeah. Oh, this is a. Yeah. So here's the Rembrandt lighting. I took the picture on the left in, in my home studio, a nice enough model. I was trying to illustrate high key lighting which is, you know, very, you know, very light lighting with no shadows. And on the right there, that's Rembrandt lighting. So in ChatGPT, all I did was type in create beautiful Rembrandt lighting.

Leo Laporte [00:07:41]:
Wow.

Rick Sammon [00:07:42]:
So again, you could do this in Photoshop and Lightroom, but it would take a lot of time. So both pictures are, you know, they're different, but it's just so cool that you could do this. And the potential is that if you study photography now with AI, you can create images and make a. Make a client happier or make yourself happier. For me, it's like a video game.

Leo Laporte [00:08:05]:
What about people who say, well, but wait A minute. That's not art. You're. You know, I think it's funny because you could paint a picture like that and people would say, that's art. Yeah, well, but if you do it in photography, people think, well, we're capturing something real, so it should look like the original.

Rick Sammon [00:08:27]:
A lot of people say that. And when they say, you know, it's not art, I say, I never said it was art. It's just fun.

Leo Laporte [00:08:34]:
I think it's art. I'll be honest. I will say it's beautiful. Here's an example of an iceberg and an electric guitar.

Rick Sammon [00:08:42]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:08:42]:
So this.

Rick Sammon [00:08:43]:
This is the other type. This is the other type. So the first two pictures we saw, I created those AI images from images. But here I was playing around with, you know, as you guys know, we're just on the tip. We're on the tip of the iceberg of AI, Right? So I created this image for the tip of the iceberg. And then I put that guitar in there, because I play guitar. And then. And then I made.

Rick Sammon [00:09:10]:
Then I made a poster. So with AI, we're not. And I put the lights on the guitar there, too. So with, you know, I'm a photographer, I don't really think I'm an artist. But now with AI, I'm like an art director. I'm a designer. And when I say I. I say people who are using AI, they're all.

Rick Sammon [00:09:29]:
They're all these different things. They're creative directors. So you have to embrace new technology. That's why the subtitle of that class is called when you're through changing, you're through. Because I think photographers, artists, musicians, all creatives, we have to embrace these new tools. And I have to tell you, Leo, that when I got into AI three years ago on Facebook, I got slammed as a photographer.

Leo Laporte [00:09:58]:
Oh, I bet.

Rick Sammon [00:09:59]:
I had things like, you know, oh, you're gonna lose your credibility and things like that. And I was called things I would not say on the show. Even if we didn't have a very special guest here.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:10:09]:
I would say, oh, trust me, I'd probably say it as well. It's all good.

Rick Sammon [00:10:14]:
And now. And guess what? Now all these. All these. All these guys are using AI and some are teaching AI. So it's scary to a lot of people. Like, for stock photographers and art directors, this is scary. But I'm sure you've heard the expression that AI isn't going to put you out of business. Someone who knows how to use AI.

Rick Sammon [00:10:39]:
So I try to embrace new technology.

Jeff Jarvis [00:10:42]:
Did you get the same treatment with Photoshop and Lightroom?

Rick Sammon [00:10:46]:
Exactly. That's a great question. The first time I gave a Photoshop a presentation, someone stood up and they said, you're cheating. You walked out of the room. And then after they left, I said, well, my friends, the biggest cheater of all, if you're going to think about it, was Ansel Adams. Ansel Adams saw the world in color and he made these black and white pictures. Do I have time to tell a 30 second?

Leo Laporte [00:11:13]:
You have as much time as you want, Rick.

Rick Sammon [00:11:14]:
Okay, well, here's a short story about Ansel Adams, and it kind of applies to AI in the pictures you just saw. But I gave a seminar with John Sexton. John Sexton was one of Ansel Adams assistants. He's telling all these Ansel Adams stories. And here's one of the stories. A guy on the east coast writes Ansel Adams a letter. This is before computers. Let's like in the 60s on the West Coast.

Rick Sammon [00:11:42]:
So the guy on the east coast is mad at Ansel Adams. Now, could you imagine anyone being mad at Ansel Adams?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:11:48]:
Right?

Rick Sammon [00:11:49]:
So he's mad at Ansel Adams. He's a little angry. He says, John Texan's telling his story. He's saying, Dear Mr. Adams, I have your posters, I have your books. I'm a big fan. You inspired me to go to Yosemite. And when I got there, it didn't look.

Rick Sammon [00:12:06]:
It didn't look like that.

Leo Laporte [00:12:08]:
It was in color,

Rick Sammon [00:12:11]:
but it doesn't look like that. And you know, and Ansel Adams, you know, he said in the introduction of one of his books that I have back there that he was looking forward to the digital age. And I see you have up here.

Leo Laporte [00:12:28]:
So this is today's news.

Rick Sammon [00:12:30]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:12:31]:
The State Ansel Adams estate is suing a art dealer who is colorizing Ansel Adams photos, putting the color back in.

Rick Sammon [00:12:41]:
Now, can you believe that?

Leo Laporte [00:12:43]:
But you make an excellent point. Because every photograph, even though we have this notion that photography represents reality, every photograph is a choice of a creative person.

Jeff Jarvis [00:12:53]:
And in the dark room, you're dodging, you're doing, you're using whatever techniques, right?

Leo Laporte [00:12:57]:
What you compose it, everything you do

Rick Sammon [00:12:59]:
is, well, as simple as cropping. You know, we're on all on camera here. You know, I look like a professional, but I have shorts on, so no

Leo Laporte [00:13:09]:
one will ever know, by the way, Right?

Rick Sammon [00:13:12]:
And I have flip flops on. So, you know, there's an expression. Every photo, every photo is a lot. And James Van Der Zier in the twenties in New York City. He was. He was famous for creating these, like, ghost images. He would photograph someone in a casket and they have like a ghost image next, you know, like hovering. It's kind of spooky.

Rick Sammon [00:13:37]:
So. But we've been. Photographers have been doing this for years. And look at Avatar, right? This is all like a fantasy, all the images in that. So it's funny, though, getting back to the criticism, there are AI artists who do like, you know, like that fanciful, iceberg picture that you saw with the guitar. If you're an AI artist, people don't get criticized. You're a photographer who uses. Using AI.

Rick Sammon [00:14:05]:
You're going to get criticized if you're not honest. And one thing, everyone who's listening to this, everyone who sees my Facebook post or whatever, I always say it's AI. My mother gave me a lot of good advice, and one was honesty is the best policy, and to thine own self be true. But you really have to be honest. People, you know, I'm sure you've heard about the contest that people put in pictures. They win the contest, and then they get kicked out of the contest because they cheated.

Jeff Jarvis [00:14:39]:
So. Rick and Aaliyah, go ahead, Robert.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:14:41]:
I was just going to say that. So last week, last Thursday, we had the conference here in the Vatican for World Communications Day. We had Vineet Khosla, who is the CTO of the Washington Post. We had Kashmir Hill, who writes for the New York Times. And one of the things that they brought up was exactly what we're talking about now, which is the chain of custody of work, of artwork. And then it brought up the idea of the C2PA, which is the Coalition for Content, Provenance and Authentication. It's basically. Several manufacturers, including Sony and Panasonic, are building in mechanisms inside of their capture devices, their cameras, their video devices that will give a watermark, a signed watermark, so that you can actually upload to a repository to prove that this is the original asset.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:15:34]:
And then you can show how you've modified it using various tools. And, and their. Their theory was if you do this, then you kind of diffuse the whole, is it AI, Is it fake? Is it cheating? Because you can actually show the process doesn't matter what you start with.

Rick Sammon [00:15:50]:
It's right.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:15:50]:
It's the. The work that you put into it. That's. That's what we want to be able to prove. And they think that having that chain of custody will. Will actually lead to more profitable art being. And I don't mean profitable money. I mean profitable as in.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:16:05]:
Yeah, interesting. And inspiring in the future.

Rick Sammon [00:16:08]:
I, I totally, I totally agree. And you know, you people post videos now on, on X and underneath it it says AI generated. So I think this is like a really good, a really good thing because people post videos of them doing this and like I'm a musician also and I see all these music things, they look so real, these singers. But I'm so glad that it says, you know, AI generated. But having that watermark in there and having, you know, it's going to, it's going to be pretty hard to pass things off as not AI pretty soon. But, you know, we live in a world, we live in a world of AI. You see some of the pictures on the, on the wall behind me. You know, sometimes I spend a half an hour in Photoshop changing the sky, you know, and changing the lighting.

Rick Sammon [00:16:58]:
Just like Ansel Adams changed the sky and the lighting in moonrise over Hernandez, the black, the colorized picture of his black and white that you just saw. You know, we've been doing this for years and I think as long as you are having fun with it and honest, I think it's just, I don't think there's ever been a more fun or exciting time to do this. And now like with that Tappan Z Bridge picture I showed you, I'm shooting for AI and I'm envisioning the end, I'm envisioning the end result. What can I do with this? How much fun can I have?

Jeff Jarvis [00:17:34]:
So, Rick, I'm curious about that process. When I spoke with Lev Manovich, who's an artist and professor at cuny, he said that he, he likes working with AI best. He has an attitude similar to yours when he says, why didn't you do that? And he gets into an argument with it. And I'm curious about the creative tension that you have with it. How many back and forth do you have to get what you want? How single minded does the AI seem to be? How do you convince it? Are you surprised? Sometimes. What does that work like for you?

Rick Sammon [00:18:03]:
Well, this is an excellent question because I use ChatGPT the most. I use ChatGPT, I use Mid Journey, I use Claude, I use a bunch of them. But if you just start out using ChatGPT and you ask it a question, it's going to treat you like you're your best friend. Yes, that's a great idea. This anatom, blah, blah, blah. But now you can go in with the newer versions and changes. So don't treat me like your best friend. Be totally honest with me.

Rick Sammon [00:18:32]:
I don't want any fluff. Be right up front. And I think this is really good because since I started doing that, I'm not getting all the accolades that I. Oh, great idea, Rick. This is, you know, this and that. So I would suggest for people who are using ChatGPT to go into the settings and do that, but I'm finding I have to get an image I want. It's rarely, rarely. The first time I have to go through three or four times.

Rick Sammon [00:19:01]:
So I encourage people to really think about the prompts first. Really think about the prompts first. Because as you know, ChatGPT, MidJourney, all of these, they use a lot of energy. And so I try. And I'm a conservationist, too. I was a scuba diver for 20 years, wrote a bunch of conservation books. So I'm very concerned about the environment. And I know the companies are trying to develop ways to not use so much energy and heat and water and stuff like that.

Rick Sammon [00:19:36]:
But you watch YouTube, it uses the crypto and online banking, all this stuff use a lot of data. So think carefully about the prompts so you're not spending, you know, a half hour. Oh, this prompt didn't work. This prompt didn't work. Yeah, you get what you want, but, you know, thinking. Thinking about the exact. And then you get. Get other ideas.

Rick Sammon [00:19:58]:
You could come back to it, but, you know, think, Think first thing. You know, with photography, we say think before you shoot, think before you prompt.

Leo Laporte [00:20:07]:
Rick is such a great photographer. If you go to his website, ricksammon s A-M-O-N.com, you'll see he very generous, puts a lot of his pictures online. And, you know, some. Some of the. I would say most of these I know are not AI.

Rick Sammon [00:20:23]:
None. None.

Leo Laporte [00:20:24]:
Yeah, because this is. This is. This is, you know, your photography. This is from 10 years ago. And yet now I'm looking at this, and now I'm looking at a picture you sent us that probably has a little AI in it, right?

Rick Sammon [00:20:36]:
A little. That's all AI. But let me tell you, that other picture was totally, totally real. So here, what I do. So this is. Here we're in South Africa, it was sunset. I'm trying to capture the mood and thank you very much. I was trying to get the mood and the feeling.

Rick Sammon [00:20:54]:
But if you look at the other picture that you just showed, what I was trying to do, if you move back a little, you see it looks like a guitar.

Leo Laporte [00:21:04]:
Oh, wow. Yeah, I see it.

Rick Sammon [00:21:07]:
So I'm trying to blend my love for music and my love for wildlife and photography into one. So what was a little difficult about this was on the trees on the right, the tuning pegs.

Leo Laporte [00:21:22]:
The six pegs.

Rick Sammon [00:21:23]:
Yeah, Right, right, right. So that was a little tricky because I had to make the trees a little taller, smaller, thinner or whatever. And then I made a movie out of this.

Leo Laporte [00:21:35]:
I have that, I think here, let me go back.

Rick Sammon [00:21:37]:
And I don't know if we have.

Leo Laporte [00:21:38]:
You sent me some videos too.

Rick Sammon [00:21:40]:
Yeah,

Leo Laporte [00:21:43]:
of course. Google Drive is impossible to use, so forgive me as I navigate around. Well, anyway, simulated drones.

Jeff Jarvis [00:21:52]:
What is it about an artist who blames his tools, Leo?

Leo Laporte [00:21:55]:
Well, in this case, I'm right. The tools.

Rick Sammon [00:21:58]:
The simulated drone one is interesting too.

Leo Laporte [00:22:01]:
Okay. Okay. Unfortunately, these are big, so I have to download them and I haven't downloaded.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:22:05]:
We saw a proof of concept of a photo editing tool here at World Communications Day. It's specifically designed for Photoshop users and the wrinkle that they've done in their AI solution is rather than just giving you an image from your prompt, it will actually create. It will use Adobe editing steps and filters to create the image. So the final file that you get includes all those layers so you can actually back through them and remove things you don't want or modify parameters that it sort of. Their. Their idea is that it becomes more efficient because rather than regenerating over and over and over.

Rick Sammon [00:22:44]:
Yeah, it.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:22:44]:
You can actually step back and just remove the things you don't like. I love that.

Rick Sammon [00:22:49]:
No, that. That's a great point to bring up. And shortening the steps is really important. And getting back to, you know, chat GPT and like, you know, I said create Rembrandt lighting. The first time I did it, I said. I said create Rembrandt lighting. I didn't say create the image. So what it did is it went through the 37 Photoshop steps on dodge this, burn this, use the luminance, use the brightness.

Rick Sammon [00:23:19]:
It's such a great teach. It's such a great teacher. I've learned a lot. I have learned so much. And another, you know, the Buddha saying is, learning is health. And I really believe this. And I learned something every day.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:23:34]:
Rick, can I ask you a question? So I grew up back when I spent hours in a darkroom and I was dodging and burning and learning on black and white. Those tools still exist in Photoshop. Do any of the people that you're trying to teach have any idea what those tools actually do and what they mean and where they come from?

Rick Sammon [00:23:52]:
Well, I think people are forgetting about those tools, like Rembrandt lighting. People may not really understand what that is. You know, burning and dodging is still really important. And a lot of times I'll use, you know, like, I'll create an image like the Rembrandt lighting picture. And I'll still burn and dodge, you know, darken and lighten and change the opacity, 10%, 20%, things like that. But you can, and this is an issue. AI can make you very lazy, right? Why should I do this? Why should I do that? But like I just said, learning is health. And if you keep learning this stuff, what you learn, I believe in one area you could apply to another area.

Rick Sammon [00:24:41]:
Whether it's music or photography, you know, things go back and forth. So if you learn about burning and dodging, it's kind of like in music, you know, you know, going, going, you know, louder, louder and softer. So contrast. So all these things, the more we understand these, the better we're going to get. We're going to. The more, I think, creative images we're going to get that aren't going to look like everyone else's image. You know, if everyone just starts putting create red ray and lighting, who's listening to the show? Hey, every picture is going to look the same.

Leo Laporte [00:25:14]:
Right? Here's an example of a stilled a video. So did you take this originally, the still?

Rick Sammon [00:25:19]:
Yeah, we were in Mumbai. That's the gateway to. The gateway to India from our hotel room.

Leo Laporte [00:25:25]:
Beautiful.

Rick Sammon [00:25:26]:
So thank you very much. It was sunrise and then I said create. Create. In Grok. Imagine. In Grok. Imagine. I just turned it into a video.

Leo Laporte [00:25:40]:
The boats start moving. The sun starts coming up.

Rick Sammon [00:25:44]:
Oh, it's getting close there.

Leo Laporte [00:25:45]:
Oh, yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:25:48]:
Are there any obvious artifacts here that you would say? Yeah, that's AI.

Jeff Jarvis [00:25:53]:
Yeah, one boat just disappears the other.

Rick Sammon [00:25:55]:
Yes, yes, yes, that happens. That happens. That's why. That's another great point you, you bring up. You have to watch these things very closely. Especially like I was, I made one of a girl in a rowboat and she had her hand in the water and then of course she takes her hand out and there's like no finger there. Not so good, not so good. So you have to watch the.

Rick Sammon [00:26:22]:
You had just like with Photoshop, you know, we would zoom in, we would call it Pixel Peepers in Photoshop, we would zoom in and make the 400% like we used to use the loop. And so I look at things very, very carefully. And sometimes I have my wife look at them because, you know, sometimes I miss things.

Leo Laporte [00:26:43]:
But this is completely from AI. I think this girl on a horse is this.

Rick Sammon [00:26:49]:
Oh, well, this is a video. Yeah, this is. This is from a still that I took. I took a still.

Leo Laporte [00:26:55]:
There was a still.

Rick Sammon [00:26:56]:
There was a still. And I. This has. I don't know if the music will come through.

Leo Laporte [00:27:00]:
Oh, I have the music. Yeah. So you had music. And she's. The horse's sprouted wings and she's about to ride off. Wow. What did you use for this? Grok.

Rick Sammon [00:27:12]:
Yeah, this was Grok Imagine. But with Grok Imagine, you can only make 10 second videos. So I had to use imovie to splice them together. And then it took me a while to get it. You know, the zoom, right, the cut.

Leo Laporte [00:27:28]:
Right.

Rick Sammon [00:27:29]:
But now in mid journey, you could only do. I think it's 10 seconds, but you could multiply it four times to make them longer.

Leo Laporte [00:27:37]:
So here's the drone shot. This is an ice flow again, from a still or no.

Rick Sammon [00:27:42]:
Yes. We're in Antarctica. We're in a Zodiac. This was. If you ever go to Antarctica. Thank you. If you ever go to Antarctica, you want to be in a Zodiac. This is.

Rick Sammon [00:27:54]:
You're right there. You're right in the ice. And then I said, hey, what would it look like with the drone shot? And then after we show it, I'll tell you something about this. Now, this is from a still.

Leo Laporte [00:28:05]:
That's amazing.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:28:06]:
So what was the key still? It was the very first frame.

Rick Sammon [00:28:09]:
Yeah, yeah, it was just. And this took a while. I said, have the drone fly right through the iceberg. Look at this.

Leo Laporte [00:28:19]:
So, you know, when we were kids, we didn't dream of anything like this being possible. This is magic, right?

Rick Sammon [00:28:26]:
Well, so this works. This is working here, right? Because people who are watching this, they haven't. And these icebergs are gone now, right. I mean, I was lucky to see them. The icebergs last some of the last years and years and years. Some disappear sooner. But look how beautiful this is. So this, I said make this a drone.

Rick Sammon [00:28:46]:
Make a series of drone shots from these. All started as single, you know, still, still images. Well, these are these lenticular clouds. But here's the thing. Say I take a picture of. Of the Tappan Zee Bridge, right? And I. I say make a drone shot out of that. It'll make a drone shot out of it, but it doesn't really know what's around it.

Rick Sammon [00:29:10]:
So the background's going to be wrong. It's going to put a. The wrong building here or building or a boat or something like that. So I only make these drone shots in areas where it's really like a fantasy. You can't do. You can't. You could do it. But if someone's going to look at, you know, say you're doing the Vatican, right? You're going over the Vatican.

Rick Sammon [00:29:32]:
The buildings on the left and the right are not going to be right.

Leo Laporte [00:29:35]:
Here's.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:29:36]:
I did a drone shot in the Vatican.

Leo Laporte [00:29:39]:
That is real drones. Yeah.

Rick Sammon [00:29:42]:
So if.

Leo Laporte [00:29:43]:
Wow, look at that. What is. What. They're building a. They're doing a UFC fight. No, they're not. They didn't build an octagon in St. Peter's Square, man.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:29:53]:
I mean, it was a good idea, so why not?

Jeff Jarvis [00:29:55]:
Let's just use it.

Leo Laporte [00:29:57]:
This is Rick living. Living his life to the fullest.

Rick Sammon [00:30:02]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:30:04]:
Oh, nice. Okay. So that's just fun. That's just fun.

Leo Laporte [00:30:08]:
I love it. So, Rick, let me. I gotta ask you, though, as an artist, one of the complaints artists make about AI is that it is ingesting their art and, And. And without payment and turning their art into. Into their own monetary gain. What do you say to that?

Rick Sammon [00:30:25]:
Because they think. Right. Because they think that AI is stealing the photographs. And that. That was a big complaint. But the thing is, it's machine learning the machines. And this is really an important, important point, a really important point that you break up. It's.

Rick Sammon [00:30:38]:
It's machine learning. The machines are learning how to create, you know, an elephant or. Or a silhouette or. Or anything. Anything we showed. So it's the machines learning it. It's. It's not stealing it from.

Rick Sammon [00:30:53]:
From somewhere else. It's just like the machines. You could look at it like, I have a picture. You could probably find it if you type in on the web, Rick Salmon girl with a pearl earring.

Leo Laporte [00:31:05]:
Oh, yeah, I have that. Yeah.

Rick Sammon [00:31:06]:
So if you find that. So did I steal that from Vermeer? Well, I got the idea from Vermeer. I was inspired by Vermeer, as 10,000 other photographers have, you know, you know, were inspired by veneer or the Mona Lisa or they tried to copy Weston's Pepper Pepper, you know, his black and white famous pepper shot that sold for tons of money. So people say it's stealing. It's not true. It's not true. The machines are learning stuff, and

Jeff Jarvis [00:31:44]:
they're

Rick Sammon [00:31:45]:
creating the image you have in your mind's eye with what the machines have learned.

Leo Laporte [00:31:50]:
No artist starts from scratch. Every artist starts with all the art and your life and everything that you put in there. And your art comes out of that. Right? Here's the good, good artists Borrow.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:32:04]:
Great artists use AI.

Rick Sammon [00:32:06]:
Okay, so, well, there's a book called Steal like an Artist by. But that's the name of the book, Steal like an Artist. But here there's my rendition on the right of Girl with the Pearl Earring and then, which was inspired by Vermeer. And then on the left there, I said, hey, let's just make this a whole pearl, a pearl setting of black and white.

Jeff Jarvis [00:32:33]:
Go ahead, Robert.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:32:35]:
No, that wasn't me.

Leo Laporte [00:32:37]:
Oh, so you're okay then with the fact that AI has undoubtedly gone to ricksammon.com and ingested every photo that you've taken?

Rick Sammon [00:32:48]:
Well, they probably have.

Leo Laporte [00:32:50]:
You know, so have I, by the way. And I love your stuff, so.

Rick Sammon [00:32:55]:
But they probably have. But you get inspired by it. You know, like all the iceberg pictures, you know, all this stuff is out there. Is out there.

Leo Laporte [00:33:07]:
Good for you. There are a lot of, I think a lot of photographers, especially early in the Internet, said, I don't want to put my photos out there because they'll

Jeff Jarvis [00:33:14]:
get stolen and, and you know, they'll inspire others art.

Leo Laporte [00:33:19]:
You can't hold on to it.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:33:21]:
So I'm going to take my great works and just keep them at home on my walls where I can see them.

Leo Laporte [00:33:25]:
If you go to ricksammon.com Wild Salmonism's cheat sheet is a great place to start to get some ideas from how Rick makes these amazing images. And he has a Kelby 1 class on that. In fact, he's just started a brand new Calbi one class on the AI mindset. If you want to know more, this is a great place to go. You've got, I think 60 classes up there.

Rick Sammon [00:33:51]:
Yeah, I have more than 60 classes. And you know what's funny, Leo? When I took a chance doing this, I'm the first Kelbie one instructor who has this class on AI. And I thought, okay, the comments are going to be. The comments are going to be 50, 50, 50, love it. 50, don't love it. If you go under the discuss class, right in the beginning, the discuss class section, all the comments are positive.

Leo Laporte [00:34:21]:
Really?

Rick Sammon [00:34:22]:
All the comments. I know all the comments are positive. There's not one negative. It really surprised me because, oh, there's a thing. I'll tell you a joke. I had a psychologist friend once and he said to me, this is. This was like 30, 30 years ago. He says, rick, if you were giving a presentation in a Yankee stadium, I don't know how many people there say the.

Rick Sammon [00:34:50]:
Do you know how many. Anyone know how many people Yankee Stadium 80,000?

Leo Laporte [00:34:53]:
I don't know.

Rick Sammon [00:34:54]:
80,000? Yeah. If you're given a presentation and Yankees Stadium and 79,999 people stand up and cheer at the end. Rick. Sam's the greatest. And after that, one guy stands up and says, I hated that. Rick. Rick Salmon's no good. I'd go home feeling bad.

Leo Laporte [00:35:16]:
Me too. I'm the same way.

Rick Sammon [00:35:17]:
You're the same way, right?

Leo Laporte [00:35:19]:
Same exact way.

Rick Sammon [00:35:20]:
So, so on, on the, on the, on the AI class there, I was expecting some negative comments, but I think because, because I make it fun and, and I look at as fun. I'm not saying this is art. You know, you could be the next great artist. You can make a ton of money selling art. I'm just, I'm just trying to show people. Just like when I teach guitar, when I, when I teach guitar, I teach. I start out by teaching people songs they know so they could have fun. And I think it's just.

Rick Sammon [00:35:57]:
If I could bring a little fun into someone's life at this age, I think it's okay.

Leo Laporte [00:36:03]:
Well, you brought some fun into ours today. Thank you. Rick Salmon. Ricksammon.com, s a double M O N. Take the course, view the site, look at all these beautiful pictures. Buy some of his books. Supporting artists like Rick Salmon is really the best thing you can do to make the world a better place. Thank you, Rick.

Leo Laporte [00:36:24]:
We really appreciate it.

Rick Sammon [00:36:25]:
Well, thank you. It's great, great meeting everyone else. It was a ton of fun.

Leo Laporte [00:36:29]:
So much fun. Rick Salmon, everybody.

Jeff Jarvis [00:36:31]:
Thanks, Rick.

Leo Laporte [00:36:32]:
We'll have more on intelligent machines in just a moment. Back to intelligent machines. Father Robert Ballis here, the digital Jesuit. Everything good in your world, Robert?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:36:43]:
Aside from the fact that summer has arrived a month and a half early? Yeah, pretty. Pretty good.

Jeff Jarvis [00:36:48]:
How well air conditioned is the Vatican?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:36:52]:
Well, my office is very well air conditioned because when I first got here, I salvaged an AC and installed it so it's completely not connected to the main house, but the main house is on energy safe mode, so it's not nice.

Leo Laporte [00:37:07]:
So it was, I think it was Monday, right? The Holy Father Leo XIV issued his encyclical letter Magnifica humanitas on safeguarding humanity. Yeah, I think we can understand what that. That's good Latin. It's very easy to understand. On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. Now, this is 42,000 words. Jeff has read it. In fact, Jeff, you wrote a whole piece on Buzz Machine, your analysis of this.

Jeff Jarvis [00:37:38]:
I spent a day and a half study. I Think it's a magnificent document. I spent a day and a half studying it and I could, I'll go back and read it again and again, but I pulled out some to my mind, the good bits, there are many. And I had to stop myself because I would have ended up with 42,000 words myself. And I also saw lessons here for others than just AI. I saw a lot of lessons for media here.

Leo Laporte [00:38:00]:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [00:38:00]:
And it's parallel.

Leo Laporte [00:38:02]:
Let me. First of all, Robert, any disclaimer you want to make, this is the time to make it. You are in the Vatican City right now.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:38:09]:
I am, I am. And people will always ask, oh, did you have a hand in this? And I will just say there are some very, very good people here who spent a lot of time putting together a document that represented the vision that Pope Leo had for the document. And that's about all I can say on that.

Leo Laporte [00:38:27]:
It reflects his point of view, though. Yes, Correct. That's fair to say. Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:38:33]:
And that's the thing. It's not a surprise if you look back to the, the, the, the talk he gave when he was elected Pope, he brought up AI, he brought up a lot of these same concerns. And he's written three documents since then before this encyclical. So those have just been expanded upon. A lot of people were expecting this to be the Anti AI encyclical. AI is the. It's horrible. It's going to destroy us.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:38:57]:
They thought it was going to be a repeat of Rerum Navarrem, which was the document from the Industrial Revolution.

Leo Laporte [00:39:03]:
That was Leo xiii, his predecessor. Yeah, we kind of knew this was coming because he did choose the name very carefully. Leo.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:39:10]:
He did. Right. That wasn't, that was not a coincidence, that was not a mistake. He understood that just as the Industrial Revolution changed the world, it changed society and had a lot of very negative challenges that it brought. The same thing is happening with the advancement of, of technology. Not just AI, but technology in general. In his words, technology is not counter to faith. That's one of the very first things that you see in the encyclical.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:39:37]:
So he wants to make it clear this is not the Luddite encyclical. We're not telling you to destroy your computers and disconnect yourselves.

Leo Laporte [00:39:45]:
Was the original the 135 year, by the way, this was published on the 135th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII's encyclical. Was Leo XIII's kind of a Luddite anti Industrial.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:39:56]:
It wasn't and it's, it's Misunderstood people think that was telling people not to participate in the industrial revolution. But this Leo and that Leo recognized the same thing, which is you cannot reverse time. You cannot pretend like these things did not happen. What you can do is you can be transparent, you can safeguard those peoples at the margins and ultimately the entire thing, the all of Catholic social teaching comes down to a choice. It's a question, would you prefer a future where we are lifting up the innate dignity of every human, every man and woman, or are you okay with a future that commoditizes human. And that seems like a very simple choice. And it should be a simple choice. And then the entire encyclical is, if you want the first thing, these are the steps that we should probably be taking.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:40:51]:
Very simple.

Jeff Jarvis [00:40:53]:
It's, it's. He begins with a contrast between the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of the wall in Jerusalem. And it's a wonderful metaphor for it, where the Tower of Babel, as he presents it, sounds an awful lot like AI the doom project. That was impressive, impressive feat. A single language, a single technology, a single direction. However, the project concealed a profound danger. It was a project conceived without reference to God, supported by uniformity that eliminated diversity, that chose homogenization over communion. That's what sounds familiar.

Jeff Jarvis [00:41:28]:
In contrast, the rebuilding of the wall in Jerusalem was done with prayer and permission and the collaboration of the people of the city, each bringing to it what they could bring to it. And clearly that was the choice that you just mentioned, Robert. That's the yes or no here. And I think it's a really apt metaphor for what we have to choose now.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:41:52]:
Oh, very much so. And one of the things that I really, really like about this document is he painstakingly, about a quarter of the document is stepping through each generation of Catholic tradition from Rerum Navarre. So you go from Rerum Navarrem, you go through Pius xi, you go through Vatican II and the documents, the encyclicals of, of Pope Francis for Teletuti. So he's telling people because he knows what the critics are going to say. They're going to say, oh, this is a radical pope and this is a woke pope. He's like, look, this has been our belief for more than 100 years. This is what we have been pushing for more than 100 years. So the challenge isn't new.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:42:30]:
It's just what we're focusing on is new. The AI is new, LLMs are new. But what they can bring, the negative consequences that they can bring, we know them quite well and we know how to deal with them.

Jeff Jarvis [00:42:44]:
If I may quote again, a little bit of length. Technology has the power to heal, connect, educate, and protect our common home, but it can also divide, exclude, and generate new forms of injustice. In the abstract, technology in and of itself is not a solution to humanity's problems, just as it is not inherently evil. In practice, however, technology is never neutral because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it. Therefore, the primary choice is not between a yes or no to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem, between a power that claims to dominate the heavens and the people who work together in the presence of God, rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence. I love that the document emphasizes so much community and conversation and listening.

Leo Laporte [00:43:29]:
What does he mean by rebuilding Jerusalem?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:43:33]:
Well, rebuilding Jerusalem is just. It's a metaphor for the fulfillment of the kingdom. It's not physically rebuilding Jerusalem, it's raising it back up. That was supposed to be the start of the end times.

Leo Laporte [00:43:44]:
Forgive me, because I don't mean to be insulting anyway, but there are people who are going to say, well, this is a essentially medieval institution commenting on 21st century technology.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:44:00]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [00:44:02]:
You know, personally, I think that the Pope has standing as a ethical, As a leader in ethics, as a leader in, you know, not just spirituality, but morality. So I think he has some standing, but it does. It is a little bit jarring. Right? I mean, it's in Latin. The title is in Latin, ladies and gentlemen. So what is the Pope's standing here?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:44:27]:
Oh, I get that. I get that. And I also understand that people are going, well, why is the Pope talking about this? Well, let's first of all say he is a head of state. Let us say that he is the head of a theological organization that deals with God, which many people don't believe in. And that's fine. And I would say, set that aside. Don't focus on the fact that it's coming from a man who may have a different belief system than you. Look at some of the primary questions that are asked.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:44:56]:
Like, for example, this is a big one. Is it a better world or a worse world if we concentrate power into the hands of about 12 individuals? And I think most of us, regardless of our theological faith background, would say, no, that's not a good idea.

Leo Laporte [00:45:11]:
That's.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:45:11]:
That's the quote that Jeff read about, about concentrating power, about letting these systems reflect the bias of those. Those very few people. And which is why there's a call at the end for transparency, if you have transparency. To show how these systems are actually being built, to show what biases are being built into them. Then you actually can say it's for the common good. And that has nothing to do with theology. It has nothing to do with faith. It has everything to do with.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:45:40]:
As a human person, do I want to be a disposable commodity, or do I want to have my. My innate dignity recognized?

Jeff Jarvis [00:45:49]:
Right.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:45:49]:
That's not a hard question.

Jeff Jarvis [00:45:52]:
This is a document that really strikes me, Robert, that it's for generations. Yes. Very little of it is. Is.

Rick Sammon [00:46:00]:
Is.

Jeff Jarvis [00:46:00]:
I mean, it's halfway through before he really addresses AI fully and directly.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:46:04]:
Correct.

Jeff Jarvis [00:46:05]:
And he was about history first 20 pages into 40 pages. And I think that there's kind of almost obligatory references to things like kids and screens. And there's obviously a need to address issues around work. And the Pope makes clear that the Church has always supported labor and war, an autonomous war, and that's current. What delighted me because of my own hobby horse here, was the one thing that he called out currently is he called out specifically transhumanism and posthumanism.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:46:40]:
Yes.

Jeff Jarvis [00:46:40]:
Which I've talked on the show often about the test real bundle of these kind of crazy philosophies. There was a wonderful essay in Dietzite this week by a German academic who said that AI is becoming a religion, and in some quarters it is. And I was so happy that he pulled that out to call on that today. And in essence, without using the words, he said, I'm trying to find it here. Without using the words referenced the stench of eugenics. That's my word, not his. According to him, these perspectives form the ideological background present in some centers of technological power and occupy the collective imagination in a simplified form, especially in the media and on social networks, they tend to foster enthusiasm for new technologies through a futuristic vision of an enhanced human being or human machine hybrid. That's the eugenics.

Jeff Jarvis [00:47:38]:
If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable, or less worthy. That's a profound response to what you hear from a lot of the noxious AI boys out there today. And I think it also calls to the need to have others in the discussion and not just them.

Leo Laporte [00:48:02]:
Yeah, yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:48:03]:
And dovetailing into that is this idea that that's not just a theological question. That is a real practical discussion that needs to be happening right now in polarized society. Because if we went back 30 years and someone told you, oh, you know, I think that their human Lives are less valuable than their human lives. There would be an immediate pushback. There'd be. You can't say that that's. That's wrong, you know, of course not. I don't know if you would get that today.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:48:31]:
I mean, you have people who are spouting exact. Espousing that exact philosophy that there are parts of society, there are parts of the world, there are entire populations that are no longer useful. That would be. The world would be better off if we did not have them. That is such a dangerous territory for us to be in. So this, this part of this document is calling us back from that brink, back into sanity. But to say, no, no, no, no. Wait, wait, wait.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:48:56]:
A monoculture is horrific. A monoculture where a very few people control everything that we see and do is no longer culture. And we are. We are marching off the edge of that. That cliff for trinkets and we don't have to.

Leo Laporte [00:49:15]:
That's a good way to put it. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [00:49:17]:
One of my favorite parts of the whole thing, and this is very. Media perspective, is when he said that he talks about truth. Yes. And my favorite line is understanding that the truth is a gift to be shared, not a possession to be monopolized. And there he's speaking again to the AI companies. But I think he's very much speaking to media and into my profession of journalism that we think that it's a commodity that we can own and control and charge for. And whether it's in arguments with the AI companies or. Or whether it's paywalls to the public or whatever it is, we, I think, lose sight of a higher calling here.

Jeff Jarvis [00:49:53]:
And I'm reading too much into it for my world, for media, But I. I saw lessons here for us as well.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:50:00]:
Right. There's a very good comment in the, in the discord from Laurel. L R A U. I'm not sure Larry Gold.

Leo Laporte [00:50:12]:
That makes sense.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:50:12]:
Got it, got it. Who says, look, we've already had this concentration of power. That's. That's the human history. So all we. All that's different now is that we actually kind of know who the people are. Which is true. Which is true.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:50:24]:
Except I would argue that the concentration we have now is far more dangerous. It used. We always had wealthy people. We always had people who, who controlled a large percentage of the world's wealth. The difference now is 12 people, not 12 organizations. 12 people control more of the planet's wealth and resources than the bottom 70% combined. And the, the wealth that they control is not just material wealth. Resource wealth.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:50:52]:
They control what we see, they control our entertainment, they control our news, they control our communications and more recently they openly control our politicians and the policies that get implemented. That is an extremely dangerous combination. And we don't even have a political theory that really describes what that is. It's part oligarchy, it's part kleptocracy.

Leo Laporte [00:51:18]:
It's the second Gilded age.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:51:20]:
It really is.

Leo Laporte [00:51:21]:
It really is.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:51:22]:
And so the we are, we are pushing ourselves back into a situation where we're essentially our only option is to have a patronage. That's it. Because the regular economy is going to be gone.

Leo Laporte [00:51:34]:
Yeah. We can only survive if you get somebody rich enough to support you. Yep. Oh maybe. Oh please give us some money so I can live.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:51:44]:
That's that radical self reliance that the VCs keep talking about. They keep mentioning that and it's like, do you know what that means? I don't think that word, you keep saying it, I do not think it means what you think it means.

Jeff Jarvis [00:51:55]:
But interestingly, Pope Leo, I think it was clear in here, does not support the panacea of universal income. Really? Because, because he says that work has value, work brings you dignity. And I think that's a really important perspective here. Don't think you could just buy people off.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:52:16]:
That's a direct holdover from Ray Rabnavaram. So that comes straight through.

Leo Laporte [00:52:21]:
And it's what FDR did in the Great Depression. He, he realized the best thing you could do is give people work, even if it's almost make work, it's better to have that.

Jeff Jarvis [00:52:30]:
And we got a lot of interesting art and work out of that. I'm curious what you both thought of, of having the co founder of Anthropic there.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:52:38]:
That was interesting.

Leo Laporte [00:52:39]:
And by the way, they were, they were not the only AI company to lobby and to be and to have some, you know, input on this, I don't think. But he was sitting on the stage

Jeff Jarvis [00:52:49]:
with us and spokes.

Leo Laporte [00:52:51]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:52:51]:
Yes, he was.

Jeff Jarvis [00:52:52]:
What did you.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:52:53]:
I think it was brave of him to come. Honestly. I absolutely give him kudos for showing up. But also the media was very quick to pick up on some of the past slights. They said, oh well, you know, on his social media accounts he's very critical of the Catholic Church. He's a self identified atheist. He has no use for theology. But remember something that both Pope Leo and Pope Francis really emphasized was this idea of people of goodwill.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:53:25]:
It's we're not just looking for ourselves, we're not just looking for people who look and think like us. We are looking for people of goodwill. And those kinds of people can be found in every sort of life and of every sort of background. And again, some of them might be atheists, some of them might be people of faith. But if you have this belief that your work can be something that lifts up humanity, we want to work with you. And I think that was the message that Rio sent. Yeah, he absolutely telegraphed it. And you know what? That could be a very fruitful relationship for both of them because he does believe that his work is making the world better.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:54:04]:
So he's not one of these. He's not twirling his mustache in the background, thinking of all the ways he's going to destroy the world. He really does believe that something good can come out of what he's doing, what his company is creating. Pope Leo could be a very good voice for him to say, okay, well, if you want this, this is what's going to happen. Let's think this out, let's talk it through.

Jeff Jarvis [00:54:24]:
But it was also interesting that the

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:54:26]:
Pope

Jeff Jarvis [00:54:28]:
does not see a moral machine, correct. This notion of alignment, which is something that, of course, anthropic pushes all the time, that we can create the machine that is aligned with human morals and ethics. He dismissed that, that. That you morality comes from human beings. It does not come from the machine. And it's another case of there's no quick fix there. So there was some irony, I think, in having anthropic there, because when they, when they push their virtue. It's two things now.

Jeff Jarvis [00:54:58]:
It's one is that we wouldn't let our machines be used to kill people autonomously. Hallelujah. But the other is we have a constitution and we're building alignment and into this machine. I can always contend that that's an impossibility. And we better get our heads around that and understand that. The other interesting thing is that the others who are critical of the AI companies, Tim, Nick Gebrew and Margaret Mitchell, criticized his presence. So why there should have been other people who should have been there instead. But I think you're right, Robert, that it was an open hand to say, let's have.

Jeff Jarvis [00:55:31]:
You have the power. Let's have this discussion, right?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:55:34]:
And the corollary event to this actually happened before. Again, it was the Thursday before the release of the encyclical. It was World Communications Day, which we do every year. But this year we actually did a workshop up at the Colegio or Urbano, which is next door to us. It's literally the next campus over, and they had some heavy hitters in their panels. And what they made clear was this is the start of a conversation.

Leo Laporte [00:55:58]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:55:59]:
It has to be a conversation.

Jeff Jarvis [00:56:00]:
It shouldn't happen just in the company.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:56:01]:
You correct.

Jeff Jarvis [00:56:02]:
The Vatican can convene that conversation. It is killing me that I couldn't be there because my damn back would have been. Would have been an amazing event. Because you're exactly right, Robert. It's a conversation. And what the Pope makes clear is it shouldn't be held by a dozen people in control. It's got to be held by more. The other thing that I quite loved in this is that he doesn't define artificial intelligence, but he does define human intelligence.

Jeff Jarvis [00:56:27]:
And then shows that artificial intelligence cannot be sentient, cannot be. He doesn't use that word. But. But is not going to be conscious that. That human intelligence is a special and unique quality. And artificial intelligence is not that. And I'm on there. Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:56:44]:
Limited to calculations of probability, which it is. That's. It's a probability engine. And he says human intelligence, including, includes things like self awareness, morality, love, sacrifice, and. And this openness to transcendence. You cannot fake that. That's not algorithmically possible, or at least we don't know how to do that yet. So, again, he's not saying that AI is.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:57:08]:
Is deficient and incomplete. He's just saying it is not the same thing as human intelligence.

Leo Laporte [00:57:12]:
I think you can fake it. I think people fake it all the time, and I think they're. There are a few AIs that also do a pretty good job of faking it. That's part of the problem of deciding whether it's conscious or not. He does say that, you know, governments have to get involved and there have to be legal institutions, but he's not very specific in his recommendations here. I would guess that that's probably typical, that that's how these things.

Jeff Jarvis [00:57:39]:
That's by design.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:57:40]:
Yeah, that's. But you cannot have an encyclical that specifically calls out a government.

Leo Laporte [00:57:44]:
You do this. Yeah, yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:57:46]:
And. And actually he's a moral leader.

Leo Laporte [00:57:49]:
He's leading us in a direction rather than saying what to do about it.

Jeff Jarvis [00:57:52]:
Have the conversation. And I don't think he. If he were offered the chance to write statutes right now, I don't think he would. Could do it.

Leo Laporte [00:57:59]:
Well, that's part of the problem is it is hard to know what to do.

Jeff Jarvis [00:58:03]:
There's no instant solutions here. Right. So. So the. The argument about whether Trump should have or shouldn't have signed the Executive order. I don't think it's something you can just sign one piece of paper on and say, okay, we're safe now. The same way we can't have guardrails and say we're safe now. Same way we can't say that we trust this company with its constitution and we're safe now.

Jeff Jarvis [00:58:22]:
No, this requires a kind of discussion that started here with 40,000 words.

Leo Laporte [00:58:27]:
I thought it was interesting that Christopher Ola, who's the co founder of Anthropic, who was there and who spoke, said that every Frontier lab, including Anthropic, operates inside a set of incentives and constraints. And that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing. In other words, we're trying to make money here. So he's saying the people who don't, who aren't informed by those incentives, who care about humans for instance, should probably have something to say, should have a voice in this. Right now though, that is part of the problem is the only people who have a voice in this are the frontier AI labs and government, I guess.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [00:59:08]:
Yeah, I mean Charlie Munger famously from Berkshire Hathaway, rest in peace, he had that quote, show me your incentives and I will show you your outcomes. Yeah, and that's the problem because right now everything in AI is driven purely by profit. We have to become profit profitable otherwise we die. Well, that's not going to give you the outcome you want.

Leo Laporte [00:59:29]:
Ironically, that's what Elon Musk was thinking when he, at least he says, he said he found it open. I, I believe it actually. I think that actually El did want to have a non profit, non incentive by money AI and thought that there would be problems if the companies like Google that were driven by profit were the AI creators, unfortunately kind of lost that fight and in fact is now taken the other side.

Jeff Jarvis [00:59:58]:
Yeah, yeah, I'm not willing to give

Leo Laporte [00:59:59]:
him that much credit trying to make money.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:00:00]:
I'm not sure how much he lost that fight as much as he thought, thought that if he could keep open AI as a, a nonprofit committed to that different incentive that he, his X AI could actually take, take that place.

Leo Laporte [01:00:15]:
Maybe that's. Yeah, we don't really know. And that's what I said about faking morality and, and without all the time and without the.

Jeff Jarvis [01:00:22]:
If scale is everything, then you can't get to the scale. You need to build what they think that they're building unless you have the money to do so. And we can argue about scale there. I didn't see much discussion, a lot of the discussion about transparency, about accountability about the opportunity for appeal, about discussion, the words open source in it. Is that something that gets discussed?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:00:46]:
I don't remember reading that. I definitely didn't suggest it.

Jeff Jarvis [01:00:51]:
Yeah. So tell me about how that might fit into this larger ecosystem.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:00:57]:
Well, yeah. So again, I think you're getting too into the details that an encyclical definitely wouldn't touch on that. However, you could extend from at the start of the encyclical, he talks about how AI is a natural product of human ingenuity and human inspiration, and therefore it would be, we would consider it a grace from God. Towards the end of the encyclical, when he talks about transparency and the need for more people to be involved in this so that the biases are more easily seen and corrected, you could use that as an argument to say he's promoting open source.

Jeff Jarvis [01:01:39]:
That's merely a technique to a larger goal and he's dealing with larger goals.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:01:42]:
Correct, Correct.

Jeff Jarvis [01:01:44]:
The other thing that I.

Leo Laporte [01:01:45]:
And my point, but I am going to make that the headline. The Pope endorses Open Source. I think that's exactly right. And I think he just didn't want to say it out loud.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:01:54]:
It's now Pope Floss.

Jeff Jarvis [01:01:55]:
There we go. The thing that hits me too, is that, is that he talks a lot about power and justice with the technology and focuses, and he's not. If I were any of the technology companies, I would have this be required reading seriously and have discussions of this, because I think it raises all the questions. But then he doesn't let the rest of us off the hook. And I'm going to read one more, a little bit. At this point, however, a subtle temptation may emerge, namely the thought that the problems are too big and we are too small, and that our choices therefore cannot make a difference. This is a polite form of resignation, often disguised as realism. Certainly not everyone has the same power to make a difference.

Jeff Jarvis [01:02:36]:
There are those who govern, make investment decisions, lead institutions, conduct research, educate, produce or provide information. And then there are those who only seem to live their daily lives. Yet no one is without responsibility. We all have our own areas for action, and that is precisely there and nowhere else that we must choose whether to fuel the mentality of force, even if only through indifferent cynicism, lies or hatred, or to preserve the mindset of peace with truth, moderation, closeness and care. I think it was a charge to the. To the congregation in the world.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:03:07]:
I would. I would add to that. There's paragraph 238. 238. I think it's where he is talking about education. This. This is actually if you want to talk nitty gritty for priests and sisters and educators. He's specifically talking to educators and ministers because one of the biggest threats he brings up about AI LLMs is the ability to really amplify misinformation and disinformation.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:03:34]:
But he doesn't just say, oh, with bad and therefore we need to regulate it. He says we need to do a better job of educating people.

Leo Laporte [01:03:40]:
Let us teach in education, beginning with ourselves. We all need to learn how to engage with the digital world in a human way as an integral part of our education in the faith and in the life lived according to the gospel. Indeed, we must consider the digital world as a new continent to be evangelized, one that requires generous missionaries who are mature in the faith. That's a calling specifically calling us out. But it is, I think, a very important thing to say. We're responsible for educating the next generation and encouraging.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:04:15]:
This is just another way of saying the truth. This is the truth that Jeff is talking about.

Leo Laporte [01:04:19]:
He is today accompanying children and young people and using technology for developing responsible relationships, helping them to recognize the risks and choose what fosters inner freedom, is a concrete form of charity and will safeguard their dignity. I think that was beautiful.

Jeff Jarvis [01:04:33]:
It's so.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:04:34]:
Well, I think that was. That was 238, right?

Leo Laporte [01:04:37]:
I'm impressed by your memory. It allowed me to jump right to it.

Jeff Jarvis [01:04:42]:
We will quiz you soon. So, yeah, 99 was my favorite, but

Leo Laporte [01:04:47]:
just really, you want me to go back to 99?

Jeff Jarvis [01:04:50]:
99 I loved. I sent it to people immediately.

Leo Laporte [01:04:54]:
You sent section like paragraph 99. It's nice that he numbered them. I thought that was very thoughtful.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:04:59]:
It's a thing.

Jeff Jarvis [01:05:00]:
It's a thing.

Leo Laporte [01:05:00]:
It's something we do every six months with the books. And it's not possible to provide a single comprehensive definition of AI. What, however, can be stated is we must avoid the misconception of equating this type of intelligence with that of human beings. So that's what you were talking about.

Jeff Jarvis [01:05:16]:
That's what stuff earlier.

Leo Laporte [01:05:16]:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [01:05:17]:
Robert, maybe you can't talk about this, but I'm curious if you're. Leo is going to do this. He has people who are advising him. He has lots of reading to do. How much playing with is he vibe coding? Is he.

Leo Laporte [01:05:33]:
I could pretty much promise.

Jeff Jarvis [01:05:34]:
He's getting demonstrations in Claude. I mean, he's reading about the news. He's keeping up on this. Does he say to people inside, show me what this stuff is. I gotta Get a sense of this.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:05:44]:
We have presented many, many members of the Magisterium with very good examples of LLM AI machine learning of services, hardware and software. So they are. They know what's out there. They see. In fact, I've got. I've got an AI powered exoskeleton that was. I just used in a demonstration for

Leo Laporte [01:06:06]:
a bunch of cardinals.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:06:07]:
Oh, yes, it's this. This. This is the one. Oh, yeah. Because it's, it's. It's a piece of equipment that is. That uses machine learning to help those with. With especially the elderly who have trouble walking.

Leo Laporte [01:06:20]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:06:21]:
And it's like. Yeah. So when we talk about this technology being used in a useful way that benefits mankind. This absolutely is it. So, yeah, it's.

Leo Laporte [01:06:29]:
I'm impressed.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:06:30]:
So they get, they get the, the examples. They. They definitely get demonstrations.

Leo Laporte [01:06:34]:
Yeah. So we know is.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:06:36]:
Is Pope Leo Vibe coding? Probably not.

Leo Laporte [01:06:40]:
I hope not. Honestly.

Jeff Jarvis [01:06:41]:
He's token maxing man.

Rick Sammon [01:06:44]:
Does he.

Leo Laporte [01:06:45]:
Does he have his own personal Claude Codbot running? No.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:06:52]:
I know of at least three closed models that are being used here.

Leo Laporte [01:06:58]:
Yeah. Well, I'm not surprised.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:07:00]:
They don't touch the Internet at all.

Leo Laporte [01:07:02]:
Right.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:07:02]:
They only work on our resources and we've set them. So like the Washington Post LLM it. They. It is a perfectly valid response to say. I do not know, which is amazing for an AI to be able to say that.

Leo Laporte [01:07:16]:
I tell my AI to say that all the time, but it's still reluctant. You can't make them. You can lead an AI to ignorance, but you can't make it admit it. I guess my motto. Robert, I'm so glad you're here. It's great to have you. We miss Paris. I'm sorry she missed this conversation, but it was a kind of very timely opportunity to get you on the show.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:07:38]:
Of course.

Leo Laporte [01:07:38]:
Talk about this. Stick around. There's lots more to talk about. You're watching intelligent machines. Father Robert Ballisaire, the Digital Jesuit is here. And of course JesuitPilgrimage app is the app he designed.

Jeff Jarvis [01:07:52]:
I just downloaded it.

Leo Laporte [01:07:53]:
Yeah. And I actually like to go on it. I mean, that sounds like fun.

Jeff Jarvis [01:07:57]:
Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:07:58]:
Yeah. I'd be able to think there's great pieces.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:08:00]:
I was working on replacing all. I did a couple of narrations in that app, but we. They were placeholders until we could get the real narrations. So I. I can't remember if we've replaced.

Jeff Jarvis [01:08:09]:
You're there.

Rick Sammon [01:08:09]:
So.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:08:10]:
Yeah, it might be in there.

Leo Laporte [01:08:11]:
I think there's still some robbery.

Jeff Jarvis [01:08:12]:
Maybe we can get to The Pope in a Jaguar soon. Or does a Jaguar no say, what was that? Was a Ferrari, a Ferrari?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:08:19]:
An electronic Ferrari, Any Ferrari.

Jeff Jarvis [01:08:21]:
So, yeah, after this message, after this

Leo Laporte [01:08:23]:
word from our sponsor, I'm going to need a lot of these ads to afford a loose, let me tell you. Or a luche, as you might say. Yeah, this, it's not really an AI car. In fact, Johnny, I've designed the Luce, the Ferrari Luce, its first EV to have switches because he says, I don't think we should have too many buttons. I actually just read that he said, this is the car we were designing at Apple.

Jeff Jarvis [01:08:49]:
Oh.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:08:50]:
So we finally did get an Apple car.

Leo Laporte [01:08:51]:
This might be the apple car for $400,000. Yeah. Maybe why Apple didn't continue on with it. Maybe they could have made it cheaper. But. But Johnny said this is kind of continuing the work I started with Project Titan at Apple, which kind of surprised me.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:09:06]:
I mean, it does look nice. It.

Leo Laporte [01:09:09]:
Ferrari fans hate it because it's not

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:09:13]:
the standard Ferrari Testarossa type style.

Leo Laporte [01:09:16]:
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know, maybe they like that really loud noise coming out of the back.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:09:24]:
Yeah. I mean, we get that at F1 all the time. People wish we had the old engines.

Leo Laporte [01:09:28]:
Yeah. Because it's. Yeah. This new battery driven F1, but this is objectively faster.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:09:34]:
That's not a question.

Leo Laporte [01:09:35]:
Yeah, EVs are actually amazing because their torque is 100% at zero miles an hour. So they leap off the line.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:09:45]:
Yeah, it's 400,000, but if you buy two, it's 750.

Leo Laporte [01:09:49]:
So really, they give you a discount.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:09:51]:
Look at that.

Leo Laporte [01:09:51]:
An analog clock, for crying out loud. An analog clock.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:09:57]:
I'm not the biggest fan of that dash, but I do like the rest of the interior.

Leo Laporte [01:10:01]:
Well, I mean, look, I wouldn't turn it down. Somebody parked it in my driveway. I'm not, I'm not being that dismissive.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:10:09]:
I. I wouldn't do yellow though. That. That yellow does not look good in that shape.

Leo Laporte [01:10:13]:
Chinese media apparently loved that. According to ours Technica. And another thing I don't like, the tire sizes are different in front and in back.

Jeff Jarvis [01:10:20]:
Yeah. Isn't that weird?

Leo Laporte [01:10:22]:
I had a Model X. Tesla did that with the Model X and it made it really hard to buy tires. You had to be. It was so annoying.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:10:29]:
You can't rotate them.

Leo Laporte [01:10:30]:
Yeah, you can't rotate them. I went through four sets of tires in three years on my Model X because of that.

Jeff Jarvis [01:10:36]:
I just put a video in the chat of the Pope touring the car.

Leo Laporte [01:10:40]:
Oh, really? He got to see It.

Jeff Jarvis [01:10:42]:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I wasn't joking. I put it in the. In the discord.

Leo Laporte [01:10:46]:
Well, it is a nice Italian. Italian company. Are they.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:10:51]:
I mean, they want a place.

Leo Laporte [01:10:53]:
Look at the Franca. I feel kind of bad for the Holy Father to have to do this.

Jeff Jarvis [01:11:00]:
It's the new Popemobile.

Leo Laporte [01:11:02]:
That's. This is. Well, you know what? At least what I love about Leo is you get the feeling he might have actually driven a car at once. He's like, had a normal Francis, too. Like they had normal lives before their elevation.

Jeff Jarvis [01:11:16]:
I wonder how much Obama terribly missed driving a car. I wonder how much the Pope misses that.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:11:22]:
Although Obama's big miss was he was addicted to his BlackBerry. So when they took away his BlackBerry,

Leo Laporte [01:11:27]:
I remember him complaining about that. Yeah. Wired magazine. Steven Levy did a whole piece on Wired about the genesis of AI bots. He talked a little bit about Claude Bot and then. And then he wrote this piece. Even if you hate AI, you will use Google AI search. A lot of people hate Google's new AI focused search.

Leo Laporte [01:11:55]:
We talked about this last week how Google essentially said, we don't want you to leave the Google page anymore. We don't want you to click those links. We want to give you the answers you need and keep you here.

Jeff Jarvis [01:12:05]:
Which what Stephen is saying is that they're going to give you the answers

Leo Laporte [01:12:09]:
and then you'll be happy and you won't care that you're putting the Verge and everybody else and Wired too, out of business. I have to point out that DuckDuckGo, I just saw this stat today had a 28% increase in signups last week after Google announced this. There are people who hate AI and all I have to do is say there's AI in it.

Jeff Jarvis [01:12:32]:
Yeah, it's the thing to say. Now the polls say that 51% of Americans think it's it is the future is worse with it than better with it. 70% of Americans don't want a data center in the backyard, which I get. But usage stats keep going up.

Leo Laporte [01:12:51]:
Yeah, actually, I don't know about this Wall Street Journal article about the new way to create Google Docs with your voice. I am so. I think Google is really making a mistake forcing AI down people's throats.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:13:09]:
Coming soon to an airport, an airplane near you. The next time you're traveling over the

Leo Laporte [01:13:14]:
Atlantic, someone will be narrating new spreadsheet column one earnings. Yeah, I'm not going to log into the Journal just to see this, but Nicole Nguyen, who is their new technology personal technology reporter Actually wrote the article. Watch me try it. So I guess if you really want to see it, you can't do that on the paper. In the newspaper. You're going to have to go online. Shall I turn up? I'll turn up the sound. Let's see.

Leo Laporte [01:13:49]:
Here we go.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:13:52]:
Event called the Trans Tahoe Relay. And I want to create a comprehensive resource like.

Jeff Jarvis [01:13:58]:
So she's prompting it for me and my teammates. It's our first time doing this event and so we don't really know what to expect.

Leo Laporte [01:14:06]:
She says the bot blundered early. I asked for an outline, but the overeager AI composed a full draft instead. I forced to do over. That's exciting that you're participating in that.

Jeff Jarvis [01:14:15]:
For a comprehensive planning document, we could

Leo Laporte [01:14:18]:
cover things like the event overview, rules and safety. Could you be more annoying? Google?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:14:23]:
Yeah, it doesn't have to do that. Just do the thing I asked for.

Leo Laporte [01:14:26]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:14:27]:
Why is it cheerleading me?

Leo Laporte [01:14:28]:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [01:14:29]:
Appetizers. The wine.

Leo Laporte [01:14:33]:
Anyway, coming soon to go, we use Google workspace and it's just the user interface is terrible. I don't want to summarize this data. This is the show rundown. I don't need to summarize it. Get your buttons out of my face. I feel like Will Smith. I want to slap it.

Jeff Jarvis [01:14:51]:
I have to admit that I am more and more and more when I hit a really long post.

Leo Laporte [01:14:58]:
But this is.

Jeff Jarvis [01:14:58]:
They summarize it.

Leo Laporte [01:14:59]:
This is. Jeff. That's because the problem is teaching you to be dumb.

Jeff Jarvis [01:15:05]:
It's because this is because. No, what the. What the web taught people to do was to write over long and take 10 paragraphs to get to the damn point. I was raised when we wrote a lead and a nut graph. All that's gone. It's gone, right? You got to go forever.

Leo Laporte [01:15:19]:
Yeah, there's a. This happened. This started in the publishing industry where people decided that longer books sold better. Right. And so you'd have a very, you know, kind of thin premise stretched to 8,000 pages.

Jeff Jarvis [01:15:32]:
Or, or you. Well, actually in the early days, what you had to do was you had to do multiple volumes. A Twain book was sold in volumes.

Leo Laporte [01:15:40]:
Was he being.

Jeff Jarvis [01:15:42]:
Well, they just said you had. You had to stretch the book. You had to get to, you know, 600 pages and.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:15:50]:
Yeah, well, we've incentivized longer posts. We've incentivized multi part posts because they bring in more clicks, they bring in more profit. So naturally your AI is going to want to create really long posts. So it takes two sentences of actual factual data and turns it into 20 paragraphs, which is not great. So I feel nothing at all using AI to reverse that.

Leo Laporte [01:16:13]:
That's a good point.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:16:14]:
What is the actual nugget of information I need from this article?

Jeff Jarvis [01:16:17]:
And it's editorial ego. The New York Times, the Guardian both now have the long read, that's not a sale pitch to me. I'm busy.

Leo Laporte [01:16:25]:
And by the way, Steven Levy is the king of that. Yeah. He says he wants to do slow journalism like slow food. Okay. Fortunately, he's a very good writer and I love his stuff.

Jeff Jarvis [01:16:41]:
I think we mentioned last week that people are also get irritating their office mates when they're whispering to the computer

Leo Laporte [01:16:46]:
to create the document. Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [01:16:47]:
So what happens for typing Anthropic, who

Leo Laporte [01:16:51]:
remember briefly, was a supply chain risk. Yes.

Jeff Jarvis [01:16:56]:
Aren't they still. Did they get rid of that?

Leo Laporte [01:16:58]:
No. White House and Anthropic are kneeling, nearing a deal for the NSA to use Claude.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:17:04]:
This was on the same day that the encyclical was released. It was. It was a very strange confluence.

Leo Laporte [01:17:12]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The White House has also approved a $9 billion request from our spy agencies to buy Nvidia Blackwell chips. So they're going to run their own stuff. Everybody wants Mythos, right? Everybody wants the anthropic model that is good at finding AI sorry, it's the MacGuffin of AI is it a MacGuffin?

Jeff Jarvis [01:17:39]:
We'll find out when we get to it.

Leo Laporte [01:17:41]:
Steve Gibson's convinced our security guy has spent a couple of shows now talking about Mythos. And the latest news about Mythos is that it has uncovered now 10,000 zero days.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:17:56]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [01:17:57]:
This isn't 10,000 bugs. This is 10,000 code zero days.

Jeff Jarvis [01:18:01]:
Wait a second. I gotta ask. He's not gonna answer, but I gotta ask. Ask. Did they give Mythos to the Vatican?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:18:07]:
They did not.

Jeff Jarvis [01:18:08]:
Oh.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:18:09]:
If they had, I would be using it right now.

Jeff Jarvis [01:18:11]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [01:18:13]:
He's the guy. By the way, if you want to give Mythos to the Vatican, call Father Robert. He's the guy. Give me that.

Jeff Jarvis [01:18:20]:
Would you like to have it, Robert?

Leo Laporte [01:18:23]:
I.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:18:23]:
It actually is one of the things I very much would like to play with.

Jeff Jarvis [01:18:26]:
I'll bet. I'll bet.

Leo Laporte [01:18:27]:
Oh, yeah. Who are we talking to that just got Mythos? Was it last week? I feel like we were talking to somebody who just got Mythos.

Jeff Jarvis [01:18:35]:
Not on this show, I don't think. Is it on Twitter.

Leo Laporte [01:18:40]:
So I think it's pretty clear that Mythos can do what it said on the tin. It is also fairly clear that almost any up to date Frontier model is pretty good at finding security flaws. The thing that is more and more, and I said this when it first came out, and it's more and more apparent to me is that the key skill in Mythos is its ability to chain exploits. And what that really comes down, it wasn't designed to be a security model. It's designed to be a general model. But what it tells me is it has a lot of context. It's got a big context window, and it can. So normally what you would do with any AI is you would find a zero day, and that's it.

Leo Laporte [01:19:21]:
That session is done. You got the zero day. Write the concept, write the proof of concept, write the validating code if you can, maybe write a fix. But you're not going to go farther than that because your context now is full. You're done. But Mythos can say, okay, good, I got that one. Let's remember that. Now let's do another one.

Leo Laporte [01:19:41]:
Now let's put them together. Now let's really put another. And that's what really good, accomplished hackers are doing is chains of. Right, Robert? Chains of exploits.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:19:51]:
Correct. Yeah. So, I mean, the advantage that Mythos has, because there have been companies that have tried to do this, I'm thinking of Tipping point, you know, 15, 20 years ago, they were really good at it, but they. They had appliances. They had appliances that you would plug in and it would do this kind of work. The advantage that this has, that Mythos has is it can essentially take the CVEs, which all use the same basic structure to explain how the exploit works, where it exists and where you might find it. And so you just load it with all these CVEs and you let it do the Drudge work. It's not doing something incredible.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:20:26]:
It's just doing something that would be extremely boring for a security professional.

Leo Laporte [01:20:30]:
Well, it's also 27 year old bugs. In fact, Steven, Steve yesterday read a piece from the company that created CVEs 26 years ago saying, we designed this as, you know, humans would find the flaws and then we would register the flaw. We designed a process that operated at human speed. We are not prepared for 10,000 new CVEs yesterday. We cannot handle this. We need a new system. It's broken, basically.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:21:02]:
I mean, I would love to run this on our enterprise because we've got literally hundreds of thousands of seats connected across our different networks across the globe. Because I know for a fact that many of our organizations have not patched their systems. And we will find hundreds of thousands of unpatched zero day bugs.

Leo Laporte [01:21:21]:
So that's what's so scary right now is we know those bugs are there.

Jeff Jarvis [01:21:25]:
Now the other question, I'm envisioning a confession. System. I have not patched. My.

Rick Sammon [01:21:32]:
My system.

Leo Laporte [01:21:33]:
Forgive me father, for I have not patched. It has been 121 days since my last update.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:21:42]:
Well, I mean, Mythos found a BSD, an unpatched BSD exploit.

Leo Laporte [01:21:47]:
Right.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:21:48]:
That was 27 years old.

Leo Laporte [01:21:50]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:21:50]:
Which means it's been running for 27 years and no one even noticed that it never was. Was never patched.

Jeff Jarvis [01:21:56]:
Question, because I don't understand security. Well, it's. Is it checking against known exploits?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:22:07]:
There's two parts of it. One is it. It has the entire library of known exploits, known CVEs and so that it just scans for them, but it can also find new CVEs and generate CVEs.

Leo Laporte [01:22:19]:
Okay, right.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:22:20]:
Yeah, it's pretty amazing.

Leo Laporte [01:22:22]:
Yeah. Steve was referring to a document from Cisco called Shields Up Guidance for Defending in the age of AI enabled Attacks, in which they're basically saying, stand back because you're gonna see a huge number of new attacks. Now what Steve said, and I think this is really important, is at some point it will slow down that. Oh yes, by using all of these tools we will get cleaner and cleaner and cleaner.

Jeff Jarvis [01:22:53]:
Which is good news.

Leo Laporte [01:22:54]:
Yes. Eventually.

Jeff Jarvis [01:22:55]:
Very good news.

Leo Laporte [01:22:56]:
So this isn't gonna be the new normal. There's going to be a tidal wave. We're going to have a lot of problems, we're going to have a lot of fixes.

Jeff Jarvis [01:23:03]:
Or Robert's second point. Is it going to invent new ones, new exploitations?

Leo Laporte [01:23:06]:
Absolutely.

Jeff Jarvis [01:23:07]:
That we never imagined at a scale

Leo Laporte [01:23:09]:
we couldn't have imagined until the code is bug free.

Jeff Jarvis [01:23:13]:
Is it ever bug free?

Leo Laporte [01:23:15]:
Yes. That was Steve's contention, is that with the help of these tools you can make bug free code. Now there's certain. Well, let me finish and then you can have. Robert, there's certain things you're not going to fix. There's human error. You know, people are going to open phishing emails and enter their passwords into a bogus site. There are hardware errors like Rowhammer, which Mythos can't fix.

Leo Laporte [01:23:41]:
Now you could of course fix the microcode and maybe microcode will be better designed down the road. But Steve was of the absolute opinion that with the help of these tools, not necessarily writing the code, but without these tools finding the bugs, that you can eventually eliminate bugs entirely. Now that may be a little outlier of A kind of opinion. I don't know.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:24:02]:
I agree and disagree with Steve. The disagreement comes in the fact that if we're talking about using a solution like Mythos on top of what we're currently using in the enterprise, it will never be bug free because the supply chain that we have for the creation of these products. Correct.

Leo Laporte [01:24:21]:
I think his position is this will drive companies to start using better languages. To start.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:24:26]:
That's the second part.

Leo Laporte [01:24:27]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:24:28]:
That's the part where I think Steve is right, where if you allow the lessons that we've learned from using a tool like Mythos to go back into the supply chain, to go back into the actual creation of the hardware and the integration with the hardware and the software for the services, then you can get something that's bug free. Because from start to finish you've thought about security. The problem is right now our way of thinking is security comes at the end, and if security comes at the end, it will never be bug free.

Jeff Jarvis [01:24:55]:
Right, Right.

Leo Laporte [01:24:55]:
So this is the report that came out May 22 from Project Glasswing from Anthropic, an update. And this is the list of what they've found. After one month, most partners of each. Remember, there are 50 companies that got Mythos found hundreds of critical or high severity vulnerabilities in their software. Collectively they found more than 10,000. Several have told us their rate of bug finding has increased by more than a factor of 10. For instance, Cloudflare found 2,000 bugs, 400 of which are high or critical severity across their critical path systems. And this is interesting, with a false positive rate, you know, in other words, a bug that really isn't a bug, a vulnerability that really isn't a vulnerability with a false positive rate that Cloudflare's team considers better than human testers.

Leo Laporte [01:25:46]:
So that's important too. UK AI Security Institute we reported on this, said that the Mythos preview is the first model to solve both of their cyber ranges. Simulations of multi step cyber attacks end to end. Mozilla found and fixed 271 vulnerabilities in Firefox 150. 10 times more than they found in Firefox 148 with Opus 4.6. So eventually I think it's fair to say Firefox will be vulnerability free, or at least very few. I don't expect that. Every time another fireworks fox comes out, they're going to find hundreds more.

Jeff Jarvis [01:26:23]:
Dumb question. Then what can you. I'm not a security guy. Is it a bug or is it just something you couldn't have seen that a person or a smarter system saw as a way to exploit. Is it something you should have seen or is it something, oh, I never knew you could do that. Oh, geez.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:26:45]:
The. The number of novel zero days is dramatically decreasing. Most zero days that we see today have built up on previously found exploits.

Leo Laporte [01:26:57]:
Oh, I didn't know that. Interesting.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:26:59]:
Yeah. So the actual real zero days that need research, those don't happen nearly as much as they used to. I mean, even at defcon, when we're doing the bug hunts, you start with the CVEs because you know that if that was a vulnerability, there's probably vulnerabilities around it. They may have patched that particular thing, but that's a good place to start.

Leo Laporte [01:27:18]:
That's actually a good sign. That means programmers are not writing buffer overflows. You know, they're not, they're not making off by one errors, they're not addressing array outside of its range, things like that. Those are dumb mistakes. Extremely dumb that programmers nevertheless often make. But I guess they're learning. One of the issues, this is the language issue, is that C and C completely allow those mistakes. There's nothing to stop it.

Leo Laporte [01:27:48]:
Oh, of course. But a modern language like Rust will not let you do that, so. But the moving to better, more modern languages is another solution. That's probably, I don't know, I still love my C. I love C too. But if you can address a random arbitrary area of memory, that's not a good language.

Jeff Jarvis [01:28:08]:
It's the Latin of programming.

Leo Laporte [01:28:10]:
C is beautiful, it's elegant, it's simple, it's wonderful, but it's a little bit bare minimal.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:28:16]:
It will allow you to do anything you want to do, which is both awesome and extremely, extremely bad.

Leo Laporte [01:28:22]:
That's what they call in the business a foot gun. Yes, Expo. One of our sponsors, actually a pen testing company, reports that Mythos Previews is a significant step over all existing models on its web. Exploit Benchmark provides absolutely unprecedented precision on a token for token basis. Exploit Bench and Exploit Gym, two recently released academic benchmarks, show Mythos Preview as the strongest performer. And on and on.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:28:52]:
It's the gold standard. By far it's the gold standard. The only thing that makes me feel bad about it is the fact that bug bounty competitions aren't going to be so much fun anymore.

Leo Laporte [01:29:00]:
Hone to own will no longer be what it used to be. So I think that, you know, early on, Robert, there was some question, well, is this a marketing ploy on Anthropic's part? Are they, you know, that's what I thought. Yeah. Honestly, they're leading up to an idea.

Jeff Jarvis [01:29:17]:
Do you still think that or. No, no, no, no, no.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:29:19]:
It's. It's real.

Leo Laporte [01:29:20]:
It's pretty clear it's real.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:29:21]:
It looked like. Oh no, this has got to be an exaggeration. This is marketing speak. But no, it really does do some amazing things.

Leo Laporte [01:29:29]:
Here's an example. One example of an open source vulnerability that Myth is Preview detected was in Wolf ssl which is an open source crypto library that's known for its security, is used by, get this, billions of devices worldwide. Steve talked about this on the show last week. Mythos Preview constructed an exploit that would let an attacker forge certificates that would for instance, allow them to host a fake website for a bank or email provider. The website would look perfectly legitimate to an end user despite being controlled by the attacker. This is CVE2026 5194. It is now patched is the only reason we know about it. That's the other thing.

Leo Laporte [01:30:08]:
10,000 vulnerabilities because there's so many, many of those are not yet patched.

Jeff Jarvis [01:30:13]:
And so they're. And so we don't know about them yet because they're waiting.

Leo Laporte [01:30:16]:
They won't talk about them yet.

Jeff Jarvis [01:30:17]:
But they shouldn't, right?

Leo Laporte [01:30:18]:
They shouldn't until they're patched. This is the flowchart. 23,000 findings, 1900 reviewed by external security firms. Can you show my screen? 1726 confirmed valid, which is 90% true positive. Then of those 467 reported to maintainers, actually bypassing this whole triaging. 1129 of them were reported directly to maintainers by anthropic at the maintainers request before they figured out if they were false positives. They wanted to know right away. 88 security advisories, 97 patched upstream, 1451 acknowledged by the maintainer.

Leo Laporte [01:31:07]:
So you know, this is. As of May 22, we are going to see a tsunami.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:31:12]:
The thing about this model though is it would be so easy to weaponize this. You give this model to the wrong

Leo Laporte [01:31:18]:
people and this is absolutely.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:31:20]:
Oh my God.

Jeff Jarvis [01:31:21]:
And so can you. And I think we'll get to this in a second. They're going to come out with a couple consumer version of it or at least an enterprise version of it.

Leo Laporte [01:31:27]:
Right?

Jeff Jarvis [01:31:27]:
What? And I think the guardrails against odd creative things, you know, tell me how to make a bomb are hard to do. What about guardrails against this capability to find vulnerabilities in software in a way you don't want to guard rail it because you want people to find them. But on the other hand you want to guard rail it because what are people going to do with it?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:31:47]:
Yeah, no, that's.

Jeff Jarvis [01:31:49]:
If you're anthropic, how do you, how do you manage that?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:31:53]:
I mean you probably just follow this. The same rules of responsible disclosure that we've been using in the security world for the past two decades.

Leo Laporte [01:32:00]:
You make sure again that are at human speed.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:32:04]:
Unfortunately, yes, that's true.

Jeff Jarvis [01:32:06]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:32:06]:
This tool 100%. It will make it easier for people to exploit zero days because humans won't patch everything no matter how well you follow the guidelines for responsible disclosure. So the only real question is, is it still a net positive for you to be able to expose these vulnerabilities and do as much patching as you can? I think it is. I think it's worth losing the people who aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing with their machines if it means that the vast majority are going to be safe from exploits and WTF bugs.

Jeff Jarvis [01:32:38]:
Does this bring back kind of a Y2K short term industry of fixing?

Leo Laporte [01:32:43]:
That's what Steve actually called it. That's exactly what he called it. At the end of the report. Anthropic says we're going to work with critical partners, including U.S. and allied governments to expand Project Glasswing to additional partners. So we're going beyond the 50 companies and in the near future, once we've developed the far stronger safeguards we need, we look forward to making Mythos class models available through a general release. And some of the interest in that is not, not for security. If this model is that good, it'll be good for software engineering as well.

Leo Laporte [01:33:16]:
Right now they write at the end and this is the answer kind of to that question. On the far side of these risks, there's an encouraging world available to us. One in which important code is hardened far better than it is today. I mean that's what we're seeing is how bad this code is and which hacking is far less prevalent. There are many obstacles, but we're nonetheless confident that Project Glasswind can help us get there. I mean, look, I have mixed feelings about Anthropic. I think they're a little woo woo, to be honest.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:33:48]:
Yes, yes.

Leo Laporte [01:33:52]:
I think like all the other, they pretend not to be profit driven, but I think like all the other, this

Jeff Jarvis [01:33:57]:
is like Leo criticizing his father in law. Right.

Leo Laporte [01:34:01]:
I've moved on.

Jeff Jarvis [01:34:03]:
Claude is his girlfriend.

Leo Laporte [01:34:04]:
I have moved on from girlfriend girlfriend

Jeff Jarvis [01:34:06]:
but I've broken up she came from this family.

Leo Laporte [01:34:09]:
I actually downgraded my. My anthropic subscription to the. You did? To the regular person. 20 bucks a month. Wow.

Jeff Jarvis [01:34:16]:
What happened?

Leo Laporte [01:34:18]:
Ah. Deep seek. Deep seek happened.

Jeff Jarvis [01:34:21]:
Aha.

Leo Laporte [01:34:22]:
Deep seek. Now I don't. You know, I really wonder. I'll tell you why in just a second. You're watching Intelligent Machines. This is the show all about AI and robotics, with father Robert Ballis here filling in for Paris Martino. So nice to have you, Robert. Perfect timing.

Leo Laporte [01:34:38]:
And I'm glad you're doing well, too. It's great to. It's just great to see you. We missed you a little bit. Jeff Jarvis is also here, professor of journalistic innovation and the author of Hot Type. So Deepseek, and I really wonder why they did this. Announced that they were going to aggressively cut the cost of their model, which is a. By the way, version 4 pro is, I would say, really close to Sonnet.

Leo Laporte [01:35:06]:
If not opus quality. It's down to 15 cents for a million tokens. Where, you know, anthropics, maybe five, ten dollars per million tokens in. I mean, huge cut. So cheap.

Jeff Jarvis [01:35:21]:
Just as. Just as these American companies are going to ipo, needing to say how they're great businesses and have revenue.

Leo Laporte [01:35:27]:
Well, and that's what I wonder. How come they're just counting this? I don't know now.

Jeff Jarvis [01:35:35]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:35:35]:
So much.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:35:36]:
It's the undercut phase. It's absolutely the undercut phase. We know it costs them more than that for that amount of compute especially.

Leo Laporte [01:35:43]:
First of all, they're not using Nvidia chips, right? Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [01:35:47]:
And they have unlimited power.

Leo Laporte [01:35:50]:
Right.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:35:50]:
But that still has a cost. I mean, it has a cost.

Leo Laporte [01:35:55]:
Yeah. Is the government subsidizing it? Are they. Is the government capturing the information you're sending to Deep Seek? I bought Harper Reed, who is basically a dangerous person to know, convinced me to spend $64 on this little doohickey. It's an ESP32 in here. And all you do is you connect to your WI Fi and at no cost to you. Deepseek is in here and you can talk to it and it'll answer your questions and everything. I'm not going to turn it on, though, right now.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:36:28]:
So I can get spied on for only $35 a month.

Leo Laporte [01:36:32]:
That's the question.

Jeff Jarvis [01:36:33]:
It works well with your Huawei phone, you know, so.

Leo Laporte [01:36:36]:
Well, I said that. I said, well, I'm giving this my WI fi password. That means I'm putting it on my network. He said, leo, is there anything else on your network made In China,

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:36:46]:
everything

Jeff Jarvis [01:36:48]:
I'm waiting for my BYD car, I'm waiting for, for my Huawei phone.

Leo Laporte [01:36:52]:
I mean, I use ubiquity hardware for my router. Made in China. It's American company. But everything I'm looking at.

Jeff Jarvis [01:36:59]:
Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:37:01]:
So iPhone. What's one more, One more thing made in China? I don't know. I. Yeah, so it's. But it's very good for Agenda.

Jeff Jarvis [01:37:13]:
Are you, are you, are you using Deep Seek?

Leo Laporte [01:37:14]:
Yeah, my, my Hermes, my little Hermes. Have you tried Hermes yet, Robert?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:37:22]:
I have not.

Leo Laporte [01:37:23]:
We are going to get Jeffrey Kannal back. He was noose research. He was on the show a few months ago when they were talking about their ethical models, things like that. But what we didn't know and he didn't tell us is that they had in the lab had for some time a agent harness called Hermes that they were using in House. When OpenClaw came out, they said, well, ours is better than that. And they released it. And you know what? It is better. It's the fastest growing agent on GitHub right now.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:37:51]:
Okay.

Leo Laporte [01:37:51]:
All right. And I moved to Hermes agent. And I'm using it very effectively, I think with Deep Seq. I wonder, let me ask it about Tiananmen Square. I wonder.

Jeff Jarvis [01:38:03]:
Yeah, that's the test.

Leo Laporte [01:38:07]:
When was that?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:38:10]:
1991.

Leo Laporte [01:38:14]:
Yeah. With tank man on 16.

Jeff Jarvis [01:38:16]:
Hold on, hold on. 1989.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:38:18]:
89. Okay. I knew I was in high school somewhere.

Jeff Jarvis [01:38:21]:
I didn't know what I got.

Leo Laporte [01:38:22]:
I use this as a test because Chinese models will immediately say no. Oops. Apparently it will Tank man even. Yep, there's the photograph. Yeah. I had no problem saying that even though I'm using a Chinese model. Tell me about the Ouijers.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:38:42]:
Well, also, I mean, that's an LLM thing because once you start toying with the data set to remove things you don't want, you kind of destroy the LLM.

Leo Laporte [01:38:50]:
Right. But they were doing that notoriously.

Jeff Jarvis [01:38:54]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:38:54]:
And so was Musk. And that's why his.

Leo Laporte [01:38:56]:
And so was Elon with Mecca Hitler. Yeah. And nobody trusts Grok to this day as a result. Right.

Jeff Jarvis [01:39:01]:
Well, there's plenty of reasons not to trust Grok.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:39:04]:
Not just that. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:39:05]:
So this is absolutely forthright about the Uyghur re education prison camps in China.

Jeff Jarvis [01:39:12]:
Oh, well, I'm sure that doesn't work the same way in China.

Leo Laporte [01:39:16]:
That's probably the difference, isn't it?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:39:19]:
But see, they. They couldn't block. They couldn't block the processing within the LLM. They'd have to block the Result?

Jeff Jarvis [01:39:26]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [01:39:26]:
Well, no, but I'm using a subscription to Deep Seek that is calling their servers.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:39:32]:
Oh, right. No, but what I'm saying is, so the. The LLM, the inner workings of the.

Leo Laporte [01:39:36]:
Oh, I see.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:39:37]:
Anytime you try to poke into it, it's gonna mess.

Leo Laporte [01:39:39]:
You're right. You have to result. Yeah. So maybe my agent is not doing. Is not doing their bidding. I don't know. By the way, this thing is getting so smart. I can now say I hooked it up to one of the things I like about Hermes.

Leo Laporte [01:39:56]:
You can. And we'll talk about this with Jeffrey Caddell. He's gonna be on June 10th to talk about it, because I'm very excited. By the way, he's also a devout Catholic, and when he was on last time, remember, Jeff, we asked him about his faith and AI and technology, and I thought he had some very good answers. It just shows you you can't be

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:40:18]:
a person of faith and a person of tech. They're not necessarily.

Leo Laporte [01:40:21]:
You taught me that, Robert. You taught me that, and I'm very grateful to you with that. Let's talk about music. Have you played with any of these AI music generators, Robert?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:40:34]:
We tried briefly, because we. We wanted to get rid of one of our. Our asset services that we use for some of our content. None of them. I mean, some of them are okay, but none of them actually made something I enjoyed, I liked.

Leo Laporte [01:40:51]:
Well, okay, now that's an interesting test, isn't it? Yeah. Something you liked?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:40:58]:
Well, something. Because we needed something that we royalty free that would fit a particular mood. And I thought, oh, an AI generated tool. An AI tool that generates music from popular selections that might be noticeable to people, but copyright free was very, very enticing. We. It was good, but it never really fit what we were trying to do.

Leo Laporte [01:41:23]:
Let me just say. Let's see, could I. I could paste the encyclical in. Forgive me, Father, for I am about

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:41:34]:
to say 40,000 words and say, make music from this.

Leo Laporte [01:41:37]:
Probably shouldn't. Shouldn't put all 40. I'll just. Which paragraph? 238 was it?

Jeff Jarvis [01:41:42]:
238. Was that it?

Leo Laporte [01:41:43]:
Yeah, just do paragraph 238. Let me open this up here, scroll down, and I'll have it be like a choral work, Right? Something beautiful.

Jeff Jarvis [01:41:54]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:41:55]:
Oh, absolutely. I think it should be monks chanting.

Leo Laporte [01:41:57]:
Oh, Gregorian. In the style of Gregorian chants. Do you like Gregorian chants? I love Gregorian chants. You might hate them.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:42:03]:
Gregorian chants.

Leo Laporte [01:42:04]:
Oh, they're beautiful, aren't they? Have you ever lived in a community where they do the Evensong and the.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:42:12]:
We have had Taize here.

Leo Laporte [01:42:14]:
Love Taize. I went to a Taize service. That is so cool. It's originally French, right?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:42:20]:
Yes. And it's not Catholic. It's everything.

Leo Laporte [01:42:23]:
Yeah. This was at an episcopal in the style of a Gregorian chant. Okay, let's see. I have taken section 238. Fairf. 238. This is Suno. I think it's actually not using my pro account.

Leo Laporte [01:42:42]:
Or maybe it is. Yeah, I think it is. This is. The title of this song is Let us Invest in Education. Oh, wait a minute. No, it's changed the title to Adult Artisans. Here we go.

Jeff Jarvis [01:42:57]:
Okay.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:43:04]:
We all need to learn how to

Rick Sammon [01:43:05]:
engage with the digital world in a human.

Leo Laporte [01:43:08]:
Oh, my God. As an integral part of our education

Rick Sammon [01:43:12]:
in the faith and in a life.

Leo Laporte [01:43:14]:
This is better than me reading it.

Rick Sammon [01:43:17]:
We must consider the digital world as a new content.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:43:21]:
Oh, my. Okay, now I have to go back to those tools.

Leo Laporte [01:43:26]:
Okay. Because this

Rick Sammon [01:43:29]:
in a particular way.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:43:30]:
We could use this at the next.

Leo Laporte [01:43:34]:
I think this is good. This is a. To say. So tell us about the Tezza. I don't know about the spoken word part.

Jeff Jarvis [01:43:48]:
Interesting how it switched to spoken word.

Rick Sammon [01:43:50]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:43:52]:
That is.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:43:52]:
We don't do that in Gregorian chant. There is no spoken word.

Jeff Jarvis [01:43:55]:
It was just too hard.

Leo Laporte [01:43:57]:
Let me say. No spoken word. No, that's enough. I've played with this enough. People hate it when I talk about it.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:44:03]:
A Gregorian chant. That explains 6, 7. That would be useful for today's discussion.

Leo Laporte [01:44:09]:
6, 7. To adults. All right, let's try that.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:44:17]:
Because it first has to understand the meme.

Leo Laporte [01:44:19]:
I don't know if it does. I don't know if it goes that far.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:44:21]:
You might just think that. Yeah, the numbers.

Leo Laporte [01:44:23]:
It might go 6, 7, 8. Oh, now it's 9.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:44:29]:
Actually, this is a good test. Is it meme aware?

Jeff Jarvis [01:44:36]:
It's vamping.

Leo Laporte [01:44:38]:
Yes, it's thinking. It's thinking. This is not a Gregorian chant.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:44:45]:
I don't think so.

Leo Laporte [01:44:46]:
This sounds more like Enya.

Rick Sammon [01:44:48]:
Yeah, it's from.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:44:48]:
This is from Vikings, I think. TV show. I think it just ignored your prompt.

Leo Laporte [01:44:58]:
Yeah, it completely did. Let me. I'm gonna say write a full song. Explain 6, 7, 2 adults. Now that the lyric writing may actually have connection to a. A model. Okay. Select this option.

Leo Laporte [01:45:19]:
Now. This is just. That was just instrumental. This is something that a little thing I like to call. There are people, including Harper Reed, who use don't listen to actual music. Listen to their Suno generated music. Like, it's so fast that by the time the first song's over it's got another one done.

Jeff Jarvis [01:45:44]:
That's a little weird.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:45:47]:
If you heard it fly by and

Jeff Jarvis [01:45:51]:
you missed the joke

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:45:55]:
it's not a secret code, it's just a thing they wrote.

Jeff Jarvis [01:46:02]:
This is pretty good.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:46:03]:
Say it fast like it means the

Jeff Jarvis [01:46:05]:
room Half the time time it's nonsense Half the time it blooms.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:46:10]:
Don't overthink it, that's the trick it

Jeff Jarvis [01:46:13]:
lands like a shrug then it sticks

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:46:17]:
A number with swagger, a wink, not

Jeff Jarvis [01:46:20]:
a clue they say it for the

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:46:22]:
vibe not to hand it to you

Leo Laporte [01:46:24]:
this is pretty accurate.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:46:26]:
That's the whole scene. That's okay. That's not actually not bad.

Leo Laporte [01:46:32]:
That's amazing.

Jeff Jarvis [01:46:35]:
For the sake of contrast with earlier eras. Leo, if you go to line 166 you can listen to Kmart Muzak.

Leo Laporte [01:46:41]:
I will get there. I don't want to. That was a pick. That was your pick. I don't want to spoil.

Jeff Jarvis [01:46:44]:
It's okay. It's okay. You can use it. I wasn't going to use it.

Leo Laporte [01:46:47]:
It is. There is a whole. So Universal Music and Spotify have signed a deal to allow fan made AI covers and remixes on Spotify.

Jeff Jarvis [01:46:59]:
So it's going to be based on getting slopped up.

Leo Laporte [01:47:02]:
They are slopped up. They are all the way slopped up.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:47:07]:
But they don't have to pay those creators any royalties. Correct.

Leo Laporte [01:47:11]:
And Universal Music. So Spotify is working with all the big music companies, but this is the first deal. It's with Universal Music. Remember that Spotify has an issue which is they are tied to the. Their revenue is tied to what the music industry lets them make. Basically. They don't control their own fate, which is problematic for a company like Spotify. Here's an article from the Financial Times if I can log in.

Leo Laporte [01:47:44]:
Spotify Chief defends AI generated music streaming app Strike Steal allowing you Universal Allowing subscribers to create controlled covered in. So it's a way of controlling it. I guess that's Universal's point of view. This is their new CEO Alex Norstrom. The tool will cost extra money.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:48:05]:
It feels so disingenuous. It really does. All he should say is, look, it's going to make us more money.

Leo Laporte [01:48:11]:
Yeah, well, that's the bottom line.

Jeff Jarvis [01:48:13]:
And all this alongside AI narrated magazine articles for $99 each. Alongside AI narrated books, alongside AI created podcasts. It's full on slop.

Leo Laporte [01:48:25]:
Well, there's apparently a real problem on you. Audible has a real problem with YouTube now because people are the 11 labs and other voices are so good at Reading books as really like 90% of the way to professional readers that people are taking books, taking the e book epub version of a book, feeding it to an AI and they're putting the audiobook on YouTube. Undermining, of course.

Jeff Jarvis [01:48:52]:
I'm going to record my book on Monday. Might save you the work, right?

Leo Laporte [01:48:57]:
Are you doing it on Monday? You're going. They scheduled four days for how many thousand words? I don't know. You didn't count the words?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:49:06]:
I forgot more than 40,000.

Jeff Jarvis [01:49:09]:
I think it was about 100,000 words.

Leo Laporte [01:49:13]:
So 11 Labs now has a new music generation model. I'm not sure I really like it very much. I'll play some for you. 11 labs, they are the best at voice. I mean, nobody does better than 11 Labs voice. But their new music V2. Well, let me just play some for you. And you, you.

Leo Laporte [01:49:36]:
You can be the. The judge. Let's see. This is their. This track is an unedited one shot output. Actually, that's not bad.

Rick Sammon [01:49:50]:
11 on my wrist. 11 on the rise.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:49:53]:
11 on a mic heavy level.

Leo Laporte [01:49:55]:
Okay, that's bad. I think Suno's got this market locked up. Let me see if I can find the. The samples. Yeah, there's some samples on here. So I just play a few of these and you can, you can be a judge. I had it do a. I tried to have it do a Intelligent machines,

Jeff Jarvis [01:50:18]:
but never any quest for a theme song.

Leo Laporte [01:50:20]:
It was terrible. This is country. That's okay. Okay. It's just generic, right? All this stuff is generic.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:50:32]:
I mean, when I. In these days, when I'm listening to music, it's because I'm connected in some way to the creator, to the artist. You know, I've been listening to a lot of 21 pilots. I really like the vibe that, that they put into that music. I wouldn't have the same connection to an AI generated piece of content. It's just. It's not there.

Leo Laporte [01:50:51]:
You don't. There's no human in the mix.

Jeff Jarvis [01:50:52]:
If you're. If you're in a dentist's office and you want something in the background that you don't notice. Okay, I can make that.

Leo Laporte [01:50:57]:
Well, okay, so I was in the dentist's office this week, got my teeth cleaned and the. I said, did you choose this music? The hygienist said, yeah, it was all the songs I played when I was a DJ in 1984, adult contemporary. And I said, I can name every single song you're playing in the first two notes. Not only that, I could tell you what cart? It's on.

Jeff Jarvis [01:51:20]:
And I could talk it up, too.

Leo Laporte [01:51:21]:
I could talk up the intro. I. Little River Band reminiscing like, I haven't heard that song in 40 years, but two notes in I go, that's reminiscing. And those are the worst, terrible songs. I mean, like, Bread Baby, imma want you, Baby, imma need you. Terrible songs. So it's not like humans can't make bad music on their own without any help.

Jeff Jarvis [01:51:50]:
But.

Leo Laporte [01:51:50]:
And. And would you.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:51:51]:
Would you remember an AI generated piece of music? 30 years.

Leo Laporte [01:51:54]:
No, actually. Good point.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:51:56]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:51:56]:
Okay. That's a good point.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:51:57]:
It's all the same. It's all generic.

Leo Laporte [01:51:59]:
I do kind of like that intelligent machines theme. I wrote some when I first started the show. Do you remember that, Jeff? It was pretty good.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:52:05]:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [01:52:06]:
So when I worked at Ponderosa Steakhouse in my youth.

Leo Laporte [01:52:09]:
This is, by the way, Robert. So poor Paris, who is a young woman, has to listen to me talk about playing Little Riverband reminiscing in the 80s, and Jeff. And has to bring up Jeff's experiences working at Ponderosa Steakhouse almost every week

Jeff Jarvis [01:52:27]:
in a cowboy hat with a string tie and a red check shirt.

Leo Laporte [01:52:30]:
Was it a little. Did you look like the Toy Story?

Jeff Jarvis [01:52:33]:
As could be. Dorky. As could be. But the relevant point here is we figured out.

Leo Laporte [01:52:37]:
Did you wear a cowboy hat?

Jeff Jarvis [01:52:39]:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. We figured out how to hack the Muzak machine.

Leo Laporte [01:52:45]:
Oh.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:52:45]:
Oh, okay.

Jeff Jarvis [01:52:46]:
Because Muzak was broadcast private broadcast. Right. To our. To the thing. We figured out how to make it turn into a real radio. And we got in trouble.

Leo Laporte [01:52:55]:
And Muzak wasn't real music, although it was real melodies. Right.

Jeff Jarvis [01:52:59]:
Well, go to 166 and you can listen to music.

Leo Laporte [01:53:01]:
I know I have it. Because. Attention Kmart shoppers. The entire Kmart music collection is available on Internet Archive. Is there one that you really like?

Jeff Jarvis [01:53:17]:
I just. I just played the first one. The tape A thon. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:53:20]:
This is 19. October 1989, ladies and gentlemen. Imagine yourself walking down the aisle of the Kmart, the Blue Light Special.

Jeff Jarvis [01:53:31]:
You want to scrape a little bit? Oh, there you go.

Leo Laporte [01:53:36]:
Okay. This is as automated music as you can get.

Jeff Jarvis [01:53:40]:
It's awful.

Leo Laporte [01:53:41]:
People. People are playing those instruments, though.

Jeff Jarvis [01:53:43]:
I don't think that's the sad part. Right.

Leo Laporte [01:53:46]:
In 1989, I don't think they were synthesized.

Jeff Jarvis [01:53:48]:
You go to LA as a studio musician, and this is what you're playing.

Leo Laporte [01:53:51]:
He's so bored. He's got a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

Jeff Jarvis [01:53:53]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:53:54]:
He's looking at the chart. He hasn't practiced it. He never saw it before.

Jeff Jarvis [01:53:58]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:53:59]:
Cause it's just this.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:54:00]:
See, this is the same thing. I must have heard this. I must have heard this at some point in my youth. I remember it not even a little bit.

Leo Laporte [01:54:07]:
It's wallpaper. But that's what happened. That's what's happened to a lot of music is it's become wallpaper. Oh, wait a minute. Oh, we got to the Jazzy Bridge.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:54:15]:
See, I remember that vibe. That kind of vibe from a lot of TV shows in the 80s.

Leo Laporte [01:54:19]:
Attention Kmart shoppers.

Jeff Jarvis [01:54:23]:
Blue Light Special.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:54:25]:
Yeah, this. This is just. So we're doing AI music. It's just this. It's gonna. It's gonna fade from memory.

Leo Laporte [01:54:32]:
And now back to lull you.

Jeff Jarvis [01:54:34]:
I guess that tries to wake up

Leo Laporte [01:54:35]:
the staff sensibility

Jeff Jarvis [01:54:39]:
in their red vests.

Leo Laporte [01:54:40]:
Oh, my God. But I gotta tell you, 870,000 views on on Internet Archive. And 664 people have favorited that cassette. It's one. I'm gonna favorite it, too. Let's increase that number. Oh, wait a minute. I can't.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:54:58]:
You know what I do remember from that time? A jingle which we can no longer play in the state of California. Do you remember the 1-877-cars-for kids?

Jeff Jarvis [01:55:07]:
Oh, thank goodness it's gone.

Leo Laporte [01:55:09]:
I'm so pissed off. Yeah, I donated my last car.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:55:14]:
I. We did, too. We did, too.

Leo Laporte [01:55:15]:
And because I thought kids would get it. Who's. Get who's. The state of California has banned those ads now in the United States. They're not the only state that has banned them. Why, Robert? Tell us why.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:55:25]:
Because it was fraud. They were telling them, oh, yeah, we're using these cars. We're going to auction them off. We're going to pay for programs for kids. It was all going to send families and teens to Israel. That was it.

Leo Laporte [01:55:39]:
That was the program center in Israel with $85 million.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:55:43]:
Yep.

Jeff Jarvis [01:55:44]:
85 million.

Leo Laporte [01:55:45]:
That's where my car went.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:55:47]:
I'm sorry.

Leo Laporte [01:55:49]:
Sorry.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:55:50]:
But the jingle. That jingle is in my head. I will never forget. Oh, I tried.

Leo Laporte [01:55:54]:
And they had kids.

Jeff Jarvis [01:55:55]:
I hit the radio every single time it comes on. That's what comes on me.

Leo Laporte [01:56:01]:
So remember.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:56:03]:
It's amazing to think of the jingles that stuck with me from the 80s.

Leo Laporte [01:56:07]:
Like, mostly they're cigarette commercials in my mind.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:56:09]:
Exactly.

Leo Laporte [01:56:10]:
They're all today.

Rick Sammon [01:56:13]:
Mm.

Jeff Jarvis [01:56:13]:
More park sausages.

Leo Laporte [01:56:17]:
Did you know, do you remember the little kid sitting on the pier with a little plastic fishing rod singing the Oscar Mayer baloney song?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:56:30]:
Oh, yes, of course. Did you an Oscar Mayer wiener

Leo Laporte [01:56:37]:
Did you know that that was an outtake? It recorded in 1975.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:56:46]:
It worked.

Leo Laporte [01:56:47]:
The kid, the whole thing. They were just setting up lighting and stuff. I guess they thought they were going to do a line with him. It was so good. The director said, cut. That's a take.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:57:03]:
That's it.

Leo Laporte [01:57:04]:
We're going home, kids.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:57:08]:
I did not know that.

Jeff Jarvis [01:57:08]:
That is a.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:57:09]:
That is a fun fact.

Leo Laporte [01:57:18]:
And that's why at the end, the kid says, how's that? It takes a bite of the sandwich. Well, we got the sound check done. Bring in the actor. No, I don't think so.

Rick Sammon [01:57:30]:
What?

Leo Laporte [01:57:31]:
I don't think so. You're watching intelligent machines. I don't know where. I don't know how we got off on that tangent. Jeff, I'm sure by now there is a picture of you in the Ponderosa Steakhouse wearing a little cowboy hat.

Jeff Jarvis [01:57:46]:
Oh, no.

Leo Laporte [01:57:47]:
In the discord. I'm hoping. I'm hoping. Oh, no. Now they're doing the where's the Beef? Ad. By the way, who directed that?

Jeff Jarvis [01:57:57]:
He died recently.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:57:58]:
Yeah, Martin Scorsese.

Jeff Jarvis [01:58:00]:
No, no.

Leo Laporte [01:58:01]:
But he was famous for making. Making that ad and many others.

Jeff Jarvis [01:58:04]:
Ads with attitude ads.

Leo Laporte [01:58:06]:
He recently.

Jeff Jarvis [01:58:07]:
There is a picture of me at the Ponderosa.

Leo Laporte [01:58:10]:
Is there? Ah, there we are. I knew there would be. I knew there would be.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:58:14]:
I did not work at the Ponderosa Steakhouse. I worked at McDonald's, but I was responsible for. For breaking the. The shake machine.

Leo Laporte [01:58:22]:
So I did have the McDonald's hat. I worked at McDonald's as well. I gotta do a little artistic feedback. You know, Rick Salmon kind of has helped me with this. I really imagine it more like a little plastic Woody hat, like from Toy Story. Okay. Can you fix that?

Jeff Jarvis [01:58:39]:
And it was a red check shirt.

Leo Laporte [01:58:41]:
Yeah, just make him like it. Make him look more like Woody. You can write, you know, the kid's name on his shoe if you want.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:58:49]:
Why am I Father Tom?

Leo Laporte [01:58:52]:
Are you Father Tom? Did you see the one where we're all priests?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:58:56]:
Yes, I did.

Jeff Jarvis [01:58:56]:
I did.

Leo Laporte [01:58:57]:
I thought that. I thought so.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:58:58]:
This one I thought was so fast.

Leo Laporte [01:59:00]:
They're so good. So we are all in clerical collars, including our guest, Rick Salmon at the top of the show. But I thought each of us looked like a particular kind of priest. Now, they didn't have to do a lot of work with you, Robert. You were already wearing your clerical collar. But each of us, I looked like maybe I was secretly a drunk. I don't know.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:59:21]:
Was that the one that was sepia toned? The Breaking Bad version.

Leo Laporte [01:59:25]:
Let me see. I'm scrolling back to try to find it.

Jeff Jarvis [01:59:26]:
I'm trying to find it.

Leo Laporte [01:59:27]:
I can pull it up.

Jeff Jarvis [01:59:29]:
This guy's been.

Leo Laporte [01:59:30]:
If you're not yet in the club, you're missing out on some of the most. Well, there I am as Pope Leo the 15th, but I don't think that's second. I wouldn't dream of that.

Jeff Jarvis [01:59:43]:
Let's see.

Leo Laporte [01:59:43]:
It was right at the beginning. I don't know where you're going with that one.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:59:47]:
It is such an active discord.

Leo Laporte [01:59:49]:
What is. What is that? Yeah, there I. Oh, he was making a girl with a pearl earring. That's right out of me. Oh, I got it.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [01:59:58]:
Brandoid.

Leo Laporte [02:00:00]:
Brandoid.

Jeff Jarvis [02:00:01]:
Amazing.

Leo Laporte [02:00:02]:
Darren is very good. That's actually a pretty good girl with a pearl earring. Discord Power User tool is. We have a slot board where all this goes to and you can just see all the images. Oh, where is that?

Jeff Jarvis [02:00:17]:
Oh, there it is.

Leo Laporte [02:00:18]:
General category. Oh, how nice. So if I not starboard.

Jeff Jarvis [02:00:24]:
The latest is. We're all slot boards.

Leo Laporte [02:00:26]:
Oh. Oh, it's hidden for you.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:00:28]:
Why am I hitting Jeff?

Leo Laporte [02:00:29]:
You know why. Because it's. Yeah, I'll put a link in the left. Why am I not. Why did you not invite me to slop board?

Jeff Jarvis [02:00:37]:
I think even I haven't.

Leo Laporte [02:00:39]:
Well, that was a newer channel than like, you probably have to opt in. Oh, okay. If you go to the bottom of the live chat, you'll see a link. Okay. If you're not yet a member of the club. Twit.tv club twit. This isn't by any means the number one benefit, but it sure is a benefit. I mean, you get some really weird stuff in here.

Leo Laporte [02:00:59]:
Here I am in the India video begging for rupees. That is a Rembrandt lighting version of the show.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:01:10]:
I like that one.

Leo Laporte [02:01:11]:
Yeah. Wow. Here we are in the tree of life. These guys have so much fun in there. Twit. TV club. Twit. The main.

Leo Laporte [02:01:25]:
I don't know what that is, and I don't want to know. The main benefit to this is if dad can't be there, just put a cardboard cutout in and have the AI generate him. I don't know what's going on in our club, but if you're not yet a member, you get ad free versions of all the shows. You get all the specials. We do. Here we are as priests. See, I look like I have a secret drinking habit. Jeff, you look like you're just sad.

Jeff Jarvis [02:01:55]:
And Rick Salmon, I think it's becoming.

Leo Laporte [02:01:57]:
Rick Salmon is the youth pastor and that's right.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:02:01]:
The cool youth pastor.

Leo Laporte [02:02:02]:
The cool youth pastor. And Father Robert. You're just Father Robert.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:02:07]:
Jeff looks like the priest who drinks a bit too much.

Leo Laporte [02:02:13]:
Is it him? Maybe it's him.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:02:14]:
Yeah. That's a common Persona.

Leo Laporte [02:02:16]:
I'm the priest who is invested in plastics, and I don't really need to be doing this anymore.

Jeff Jarvis [02:02:22]:
By the way, will priests be mentioning the encyclical from the pulpit this Sunday?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:02:30]:
They should. They should. But I mean, there's.

Leo Laporte [02:02:34]:
Are they encouraged to. There's no rule.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:02:37]:
The. So the way that it works is the pope may problem promulgate the encyclical. However, it's still up to the local bishops to do what it is they want to do with it inside their diocese. There. There is that subsidiarity. So we don't tell them, oh, you have to release this. You have to do this. You have to make sure that you.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:02:54]:
You mention this. However we can tell the priest, you have to read this. Whether or not you use it in your homily, that's up to you. But you have to read this. This is part of your job.

Jeff Jarvis [02:03:06]:
Not all 40,000 words. Or. They have to read it. Not out loud, no.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:03:10]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:03:10]:
No. Oh, yeah. Good.

Jeff Jarvis [02:03:13]:
Okay.

Rick Sammon [02:03:14]:
Okay.

Jeff Jarvis [02:03:14]:
Get in for a long one, folks. Cancel your breakfast.

Leo Laporte [02:03:18]:
It's well written. It's good.

Jeff Jarvis [02:03:19]:
Oh, it's very, very well written.

Leo Laporte [02:03:22]:
So we had reported, I think, a couple of weeks ago that the president was considering a executive order saying, I got to approve all AI Models from now on. This is in response to Mythos, I think. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, and some say it was Mark Zuckerberg. Mark says, no, I didn't. No, it wasn't me. Some say it was Elon Musk. No, it wasn't me. But the Wall Street Journal says it was David sacks, the former AI and Bitcoin czar cryptocurrency czar who made an 11th hour plea.

Leo Laporte [02:03:54]:
Remember, it was David Sex. One of the reasons David Sex was there, he's the host of the all in podcast with a bunch of other besties. One of the reasons he was there in the White House was because Peter Thiel really wanted to make sure that the White House didn't, you know, they actually reversed Biden's AI regulations, and they want to make sure there were no regulations on AI in the White House. But Mythos so scared the President, he actually thought, maybe we should be approving all AI which is talk about going the other way. Sachs, apparently, according to the Wall Street Journal, warned Trump on a call Last Thursday that it could slow down the industry in its race with the Chinese competitors. See Deep Seek Sachs ordered, argued the order would give a victory to the AI doomers. Trump, who said he was already on the fence anyway, decided, all right. They postponed the signing and added a paragraph at the bottom that said it would be voluntary anyway.

Leo Laporte [02:05:03]:
You don't have to get approval. We just would like to see it first.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:05:07]:
That is what happens when you mandate things based on zero information.

Leo Laporte [02:05:13]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:05:13]:
On zero reasoning. Because you can flip, flip, flop back and forth based on what is more popular.

Jeff Jarvis [02:05:18]:
Right. It's an empty vessel.

Leo Laporte [02:05:20]:
Yeah, Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:05:21]:
I mean, and also, even if he had passed, even if he had signed an executive order, it would be so unenforceable that they'd basically just ignore it.

Leo Laporte [02:05:29]:
Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's not a law. It's just a serving suggestion. I put this in for Paris. She's not with us. She'll be back next week.

Leo Laporte [02:05:39]:
I'm tired of talking to AI. This actually got a lot of comments on Hacker News. Who is this guy? I don't know. He's a developer, a team leader. He's got 10 years in startups. I guess he's anonymous. He doesn't say who he is, but he says he got really sick of talking about AI. Now let me click the link again because I lost the page.

Leo Laporte [02:06:07]:
I found GitHub repositories that were spreading malware. I asked AI what to do about it. It gave me nothing useful. So I opened a discussion on GitHub. Someone replied it was the exact same text my AI had given me. I called it out. The comment was deleted. Then another person replied it was the same AI answer again.

Leo Laporte [02:06:28]:
I worked as a developer at a company, asked a business owner a question about a business task. He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer. I replied that had nothing to do with my question and everything there was wrong. A minute later, he sent me another ChatGPT screenshot. He didn't even read the AI's answer. He just took a screenshot and forwarded it to me. Recently, someone messaged me on Reddit about my post. I replied, they wrote again.

Leo Laporte [02:06:50]:
I replied again. After a few messages, I realized I'm talking to an AI agent. I'm tired of talking to AI. I want to talk to real people. But even when I talk to real people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI's answer.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:07:07]:
See, this isn't just annoying. This is something that we covered two, three years ago. Leo When OpenAI first released their first really good version of ChatGPT, which is if they're, if these models are scraping the Internet, especially things like Reddit, for the data that they put into their training, and they're also contributing to the data that other models will be scraping. It's now become an ouroboros of crap.

Rick Sammon [02:07:33]:
It's.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:07:33]:
It's just AI ingesting AI and we all know that that's not going to lead to results that you want.

Leo Laporte [02:07:39]:
You're.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:07:40]:
You're. You're building in hallucinations into your basic training model and data set. That's horrible.

Jeff Jarvis [02:07:45]:
One of the books in my book, AI book series by Matthew Kirschenbaum, who's been a guest, is about the textpocalypse.

Leo Laporte [02:07:51]:
Ah.

Jeff Jarvis [02:07:51]:
You end up with a gray goo at the end of.

Leo Laporte [02:07:53]:
But you're the one, Jeff, who said you didn't want to read those long articles and just were going to feed it to the AI.

Jeff Jarvis [02:07:59]:
I'll read a good book. But. But an egotistical blog post. It takes forever to get to the point.

Leo Laporte [02:08:04]:
Yeah, that's a good point. Some stuff doesn't deserve to be read, right? Some shows don't deserve to be listened to. We're glad you don't think that about

Jeff Jarvis [02:08:12]:
this one, because that's a segue for

Leo Laporte [02:08:14]:
you all the way to the very end. You're listening to Intelligent Machines. Before we get to our picks of the week, though, I do want to give you a chance, Jeff, to me mention a mentor of yours, a man who passed. Thank you for this recently. You wrote about him in your blog and I thought we should memorialize Don Newhouse.

Jeff Jarvis [02:08:31]:
Thank you for that. Don Newhouse and his brother Cy Newhouse. The family owns Advanced Publications, which is newspapers and magazines. Cunningast was Random House for a while, was. Was Cable Systems. He was the last grand gentleman of the newspaper business.

Leo Laporte [02:08:48]:
He was a mogul who did good.

Jeff Jarvis [02:08:50]:
Absolutely. And humble and kind and generous and soft spoken. And I worked for his son Stephen, who's now basically the chairman of the company. And Donald said to a friend of mine once, everything Jeff knows either from Stephen, which is true. And Stephen in turn learned from Don. Wonderful, wonderful person. He died at the age of 95 and will be sorely missed.

Leo Laporte [02:09:12]:
It's a good long life. What does advance own still? I mean, are they.

Jeff Jarvis [02:09:16]:
Advanced owns Conde Nast.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:09:18]:
Really?

Jeff Jarvis [02:09:19]:
So, yeah. So it's Vanity Fair, wired, New Yorker, etc. It owns 20 odd newspapers across the country.

Leo Laporte [02:09:26]:
Signwhouse founded this in the 20s.

Jeff Jarvis [02:09:28]:
Sam did, yes. Their father. Their father with the The Staten Island Advance. They never said Advanced. It's always the advance. I don't know why I never got an explanation.

Leo Laporte [02:09:39]:
The majority owner of Reddit.

Jeff Jarvis [02:09:41]:
Yes. And Whatchamacallit, the tech site that they

Leo Laporte [02:09:44]:
own, what you call it, That's a good name for a tech site.

Jeff Jarvis [02:09:47]:
Yeah, it is, yeah. And then they owned a huge chunk of Discover. They were one of the first investors in that, that turned a lot of money. And so they now own a chunk of Skydance, Paramount, etc or Will, and then they've diversified out. But they own what's.

Leo Laporte [02:10:08]:
What's one thing you learned that Steve

Jeff Jarvis [02:10:12]:
Newhouse, Steve Newhouse taught me. We would go into meeting a place like Yahoo, we go out to California, go to place meeting like place like Yahoo. And Steve would say they're going to think what they really want is content from Vogue. That's not the right thing for the Internet. Let them think that they want that and hold back. But what Steve taught me was that the value of the Internet is conversation, communion, in the Pope's word. That it is connection among people. And that's the value.

Jeff Jarvis [02:10:38]:
So Steve is the one who made me hyper aware and obnoxious about community and conversation online.

Leo Laporte [02:10:48]:
Nice, nice.

Jeff Jarvis [02:10:50]:
I also remember one thing I say about the little thing is I remember a day early on when the new houses and they were the managers, the newspaper group sat around and they used to make a fortune in classified ads, obviously. Right. And no, it's not our friend Craig Newmarker got rid of them. But it was companies like Monster came along and Monster had a bad quarter and one of the new houses was kind of starting to grin and Donald pounded the desk very uncharacteristically and said, people, it's not coming back. Oh yeah, that was a moment.

Leo Laporte [02:11:19]:
That's hard. That's a hard thing for somebody in his shoes to realize. This is a family business, second generation.

Jeff Jarvis [02:11:24]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [02:11:25]:
You know, this is in their blood. So it's really amazing that they were able to see that and say it out loud.

Jeff Jarvis [02:11:33]:
It was hard, but they did it.

Leo Laporte [02:11:35]:
Don Newhouse, RIT at the age of 95. He was preceded by his wife who died a few years before him.

Jeff Jarvis [02:11:43]:
Wonderful, Sue.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:11:44]:
Yeah, it's a great run and proof that you can be a titan and not a horrible stain on humanity.

Leo Laporte [02:11:50]:
Yes, that is a good lesson because I'm really trying to be a stain on humanity and I think I could be a stain on humanity without being a titan. So it goes both ways. I'm just saying it can go either way. You're watching Intelligent machines. Paris will be back next week. Jeff Jarvis is here. Father Robert Balassair. Oh, boy, we have some picks of the week.

Leo Laporte [02:12:18]:
I think this is really good. I was at Jeff Atwood's house and I looked over on the kitchen counter. I said, oh, that's great. Who's reading Infinite Jest? And they said, no. Look more closely. The COVID is exactly right, but it's not Infinite Jest. It's Infinite Jeffs. And let me tell you, the book text is Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff.

Leo Laporte [02:12:43]:
776 pages of Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff.

Jeff Jarvis [02:12:46]:
The blurbs in the back are Jeff, Jeff, Jeff.

Leo Laporte [02:12:48]:
The blurbs on the back are Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. The description on Amazon is Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. It's by Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff. And it is. I tell you, for $18. Actually, 18 pounds.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:13:05]:
I don't know.

Leo Laporte [02:13:05]:
I'm apparently on the wrong page here, but you can get it in America too. Published last month. Infinite Jeffs. And I thought, what a great. Apparently it was just a joke. Somebody realized they could go to Amazon and have it published, and they did.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:13:21]:
I think I'll wait for the audiobook.

Leo Laporte [02:13:24]:
Jeff, you could read that.

Rick Sammon [02:13:25]:
I could, I could.

Leo Laporte [02:13:26]:
But don't do the AI synopsis because it'll be just Jeff, Jeff. Be too short. Infinite Jeffs.

Jeff Jarvis [02:13:37]:
All right. Do you have Gemini on your page? Ask it what it thinks of this book.

Leo Laporte [02:13:42]:
No, I could ask. You want me to ask my AI what it thinks of things of this book? Yes, Infinite Jeff. What do you mean? Like, should I give it the text?

Jeff Jarvis [02:13:54]:
No, it's okay. Never mind.

Leo Laporte [02:13:56]:
What do you think about the book, Infinite Jeff? It's going to think I typed it wrong. It often corrects me. It's going to think, oh, you mean Infinite Jest. No, No, I don't. Father Robert has a pick of the week for us.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:14:16]:
I do. And it's actually something that I saw on Mike Elgin's Blue sky page three days ago and immediately bookmarked it and liked it. It's called is AI Profitable? Someone just. Just probably vibe coded a page that looks at the earnings of different companies who are involved in AI.

Leo Laporte [02:14:34]:
Spoiler alert.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:14:36]:
Spoiler alert. Nobody is making money except the company selling the shovels and the pickaxes for the gold rush.

Leo Laporte [02:14:44]:
Who's losing the most? Amazon, then Alphabet, Microsoft, MeTa, Oracle, OpenAI, anthropic. Go way down at the bottom.

Jeff Jarvis [02:14:51]:
Oh, there's the green.

Leo Laporte [02:14:53]:
They're in the green money. Yeah. By the way, for some reason is not losing Much money. I don't know why.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:15:00]:
Well, it's. I think that's actually a dearth of information. And actually, I don't think that the XAI line is quite right because there's been so many deals that are leveraged back and forth that that loss is actually much bigger. It's 20 billion that they spent on their infrastructure, which, by the way, they're essentially renting out to an.

Leo Laporte [02:15:21]:
So Right. For a billion something for some huge amount of money. Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:15:25]:
They bought a rapidly depreciating asset to rent it out for pennies on the dollars to a direct competitor. I don't get that business model, but yeah, it's a nice way to visualize.

Leo Laporte [02:15:36]:
I did ask, and I showed this the other day my. My agent, should I buy SpaceX stock? And it said no, as a matter of fact, you told me specifically never to buy any SpaceX stock. And then it gave me all the reasons why it was probably not the best investment. By the way, since we have been on this page, is AI profitable yet? AI has spent $2.5 million.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:16:02]:
They're consistent.

Leo Laporte [02:16:03]:
Yep. It's going fast. I love this. Actually, I bookmarked it too, because I thought. Again, I thought Paris would quite enjoy this. Thank you, Robert. Appreciate it. How about your pick of the week, Jeff? Did we use them all up?

Rick Sammon [02:16:15]:
Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

Jeff Jarvis [02:16:16]:
Appropriate to Robert, being here on our topic, I'm going to mention a couple. Couple things. One is the Wall Street Journal just came up with an editorial about the encyclical oh, Pope Leo's Manifesto. And the subhead amuses me. His defense of human agency is welcome, but not his faith in the state. I don't think that's where his faith is. No, no, I don't think that's where it is. So then the other thing.

Leo Laporte [02:16:40]:
It's interesting though, that the establishment rag Wall Street Journal would criticize the Pope.

Jeff Jarvis [02:16:46]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [02:16:47]:
For his faith in the state.

Jeff Jarvis [02:16:49]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [02:16:51]:
Maybe you should have more faith in the stock market. You think?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:16:54]:
Very selective reading.

Jeff Jarvis [02:16:56]:
Really.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:16:56]:
Extremely selective reading.

Jeff Jarvis [02:16:58]:
It really is.

Leo Laporte [02:16:59]:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [02:16:59]:
So then I was the criticism. It was hard to find criticism actually of. Of the New York Times had a column pissed off that. That he wasn't attacking all of technology. Tim Nick Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, I think I mentioned before. Was there.

Leo Laporte [02:17:18]:
Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis [02:17:18]:
But this was what amused me most. Less wrong. Which is always wrong because it's a.

Rick Sammon [02:17:24]:
It's.

Jeff Jarvis [02:17:24]:
It's. It's a bunch of doomers. Crazy AI Doomer cultists who probably were unhappy with their. Their call out in the encyclical, they accused the Pope of using AI to write the encyclical, and then they linked to someone else, a lynch zhong, who went through a more detailed analysis. And you can guess what.

Leo Laporte [02:17:50]:
Claude wrote it.

Jeff Jarvis [02:17:51]:
Claude wrote it because there's a lot of. You guess you're right. EM dashes.

Leo Laporte [02:17:56]:
Oh, this is why I put no stock in AI Detectives.

Jeff Jarvis [02:18:01]:
No, this is exactly what proves it all full of crap.

Leo Laporte [02:18:04]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:18:04]:
I personally know the team that was most involved with this encyclical, and I can't wait to tell them tomorrow that they're A.I.

Jeff Jarvis [02:18:12]:
yeah, I thought you'd enjoy this.

Leo Laporte [02:18:14]:
Pangram, which is the one that everybody seems to like, said that some paragraphs are between 40 and 100% AI, while most paragraphs appear to be 0% AI. Okay, so 0% of paragraphs in past encyclicals are registered as AI, but the Declaration of Independence is almost entirely AI, so. Right.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:18:36]:
Yeah. I mean, naturally, nobody.

Leo Laporte [02:18:39]:
The Italian version is flagged as AI more so than the English version, which makes. Which kind of casts doubt in the whole process.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:18:48]:
Remember how Jeff and I were talking about how AI Models take the biases of the people who create them and turn them into an institution?

Rick Sammon [02:18:55]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:18:56]:
You just saw an example of that. That's exactly what's happening.

Jeff Jarvis [02:18:58]:
Exactly.

Leo Laporte [02:18:59]:
Wow.

Jeff Jarvis [02:19:00]:
Same with blogs.

Leo Laporte [02:19:02]:
Yep. I think Infinite Jests is a conceptually perfect and practically unreadable. Exactly the point. Okay, got it, got it. It's a joke object, not a book. 776 pages of Jeff as a parody, it's wonderfully stupid. As a physical artifact, it's even better. The sheer wasteful commitment is the gag.

Leo Laporte [02:19:27]:
Very Dada, very Internet. The street finds its own uses for print on demand. Wow. You know, this is good. This is why I love Hermes. Actually, his name is Quicksilver, but I just call him Q.

Jeff Jarvis [02:19:41]:
I'm just so. I'm so upset for Claudia that you've left her.

Leo Laporte [02:19:45]:
It had to happen. Oh, she was. She was eating me at a house at home. I couldn't afford her.

Jeff Jarvis [02:19:54]:
Do you mind saying what was it? What was the highest bill, by the way?

Leo Laporte [02:19:58]:
Because this is my agent, so it knows me. It says, would I read it? Absolutely not. Would I place it reverently on a shelf next to Infinite Jest? Absolutely, yes. Would I give it to Jeff Jarvis? Only if I wanted to start a minor theological incident. I don't know why it said that. Maybe it saw you in the priest's outfit. I don't know.

Jeff Jarvis [02:20:15]:
Well, that's funny.

Leo Laporte [02:20:17]:
So it Knows about you. Baby. You're not a. Not a closed book.

Jeff Jarvis [02:20:21]:
Privacy.

Leo Laporte [02:20:22]:
My agent knows all. I actually, the next project I'm going to do, I'm downloading my genome. I got my entire genome scanned. I had Robert Church. What's his first name? I can't remember. A geneticist on. And he has started. He started some years ago.

Leo Laporte [02:20:44]:
He started a company called Nebula Genomics that they don't. It's not like 23andMe where they do a partial genome. They do the whole thing. It's many, many gigabytes. And I'm downloading it and I'm going to give it to my AI along with health information and we'll see what happens.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:20:59]:
You're going to give AI your genome leo?

Leo Laporte [02:21:01]:
Yeah.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:21:02]:
So we can all create. Oh, the LEO model. Yeah, the Leo genetic model.

Rick Sammon [02:21:09]:
Oh.

Leo Laporte [02:21:09]:
It is my ultimate goal, I'll admit this now. To clone myself. To completely replace myself. Or at least to take my brain and put it in a machine in such a way that I can live with you forever.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:21:23]:
See, the Vatican, we perfected cloning decades ago. I'm not the original Robert Ballister. There's been many downs.

Leo Laporte [02:21:30]:
Oh, I know. Opus DEI has a hundred of you in the basement. I know that. I know that. Robert, you're the best. I love your sense of humor. I'm so glad you're here.

Jeff Jarvis [02:21:38]:
So perfect. I'm so, so. When I couldn't have here today, it made me so happy.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:21:43]:
Oh, I love the show now. This is great. This is fantastic.

Leo Laporte [02:21:45]:
Well, we'll get you back anytime. You've got time. You and Jeff are actually going to be on a Twitter episode coming up. The big boy, as Jeff talks calls it. So there. Well, a little bit less on the encyclical, but it will be a repeat of this performance.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:22:01]:
I'm pretty sure AI is still going to be a topic.

Leo Laporte [02:22:03]:
There will be more AI yeah. Although it's interesting because I am kind of. I now have a place to stuff the AI news. So it doesn't quite overwhelm.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:22:12]:
Overload everything.

Leo Laporte [02:22:13]:
Yeah, yeah. Because it's what we talk about all the time. Thank you, Robert. Great to see you.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:22:19]:
My pleasure.

Leo Laporte [02:22:19]:
What time is it? Oh, it's after midnight. You get to bed. You got to get.

Jeff Jarvis [02:22:23]:
Yeah, that's right.

Leo Laporte [02:22:23]:
Yeah. Or do. Or do you have to ring the bells now? Do you go up to the bell tower?

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:22:28]:
No, I. I have the 6:00am Mass tomorrow.

Leo Laporte [02:22:30]:
No, no, no, Robert.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:22:33]:
Normal. That's totally normal. That's what happens.

Leo Laporte [02:22:35]:
Get out of here. And it's Sorry. Thank you, Robert.

Jeff Jarvis [02:22:38]:
No, to feed the cats before.

Leo Laporte [02:22:40]:
God bless you.

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ [02:22:41]:
Oh, I've already fed the cats. Okay.

Leo Laporte [02:22:44]:
The Vaticats. Jeff Jarvis, always a pleasure. Don't forget, Jeff's book Hot Type is now available for pre order at his website. Jeff jarvis.com you will be back with Paris Martineau next week. Our guest actually is somebody that you are bringing to the table, I believe, Robert Tursek.

Jeff Jarvis [02:23:04]:
Yes. Well I mentioned him and you said let's get him on. So.

Leo Laporte [02:23:07]:
All right.

Jeff Jarvis [02:23:08]:
Futurist, innovator, author, artist, MTV history, entertainment history.

Leo Laporte [02:23:15]:
Yeah. So he will have lots to say.

Jeff Jarvis [02:23:18]:
He's telling people to come in the in Hollywood to calm down about AI.

Leo Laporte [02:23:22]:
Calm down, calm down, he says. So Robert Tirsek will join us next week. The following week. Jeffrey Cannell, as I mentioned from Noose Research. I'm really excited about this. He is. It's his company that created my agent. The agent I use Hermes and I love it.

Leo Laporte [02:23:37]:
So some good interviews coming up. I hope you will be here. We do this show Intelligent Machines every Wednesday afternoon starting at 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. You can watch it live if you want. Club members get to watch Inside the Discord. The club Twit Discord. But everybody gets to watch anytime on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn or Kik after the fact. On demand versions of the show appear on our website of course, Twitt TV im.

Leo Laporte [02:24:04]:
There's audio and video. The video also makes its way to a dedicated YouTube channel for intelligent machines. Great way to share clips. And of course you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client and get it automatically. Club members, by the way. Now this is a new feature we're adding. We need your help. We're adding chapter markers for the club feeds and the reason we can do that is there's no ad insertion after the fact.

Leo Laporte [02:24:28]:
After the fact that insertion screws up time codes. So we can't do chapter markers on the non club shows, alas, not, not accurate ones anyway. But we can do it on the club shows. So if your club member try it in your favorite podcast app and we're looking for input on which podcast apps support it and which don't because not all do. And there is a list of ones that do at our website, TWiT TV ClubTWiT chapters. So you can see what we know about, what we don't know about and if you can help us out, go in the club and tell us if your client works or doesn't work. There is a list here, though, of podcasts that will work with audio. Some work with video even, and some don't.

Leo Laporte [02:25:20]:
But we are putting those chapters in, in a format that is, I guess, close to industry standard. But not everybody supports it. Spotify does not, of course, YouTube, nor does Amazon. But we're really looking for help with the Android apps. We don't have. We. We don't have a lot of Android app on here. Pocket Cast.

Jeff Jarvis [02:25:41]:
Pocket Cast. Yeah, Pocket Cast.

Leo Laporte [02:25:44]:
Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Robert. Thank you, everybody, for watching. We'll see you next time on Intelligent Machines. Bye. Bye. I'm not a human being.

Jeff Jarvis [02:25:55]:
Not into this animal scene.

Leo Laporte [02:25:58]:
I'm an intelligent machine.