The 404 Media Podcast

How This Trippy Image Started A Massive Conspiracy Theory

47 min
Apr 29, 2026about 1 month ago
Listen to Episode
Summary

404 Media investigates how a stock image became the center of a viral conspiracy theory claiming an AI time-traveled to warn about the White House Correspondents dinner shooting. The episode also covers how Arizona State University deployed an AI platform that scraped professors' lectures without consent, generating inaccurate and decontextualized learning modules.

Insights
  • Conspiracy theories exploit gaps in information and public distrust; the White House shooting received minimal media coverage despite occurring at a major press event, creating space for alternative narratives
  • Stock images and generic digital assets can be weaponized in conspiracy theories through pattern-matching and confirmation bias, especially when combined with unrelated organizations
  • Universities are implementing AI tools without faculty consent or oversight, prioritizing speed over accuracy and creating reputational risks for institutions and educators
  • The removal of Twitter archiving tools by Elon Musk has eliminated crucial mechanisms for fact-checking and understanding how misinformation spreads online
  • AI-generated educational content is currently producing factually inaccurate outputs with transcription errors that compound through subsequent processing, making it unsuitable for learning
Trends
Institutional AI deployment without stakeholder consent becoming standard practice in higher educationConspiracy theories spreading faster due to reduced transparency in social media archives and API accessAI transcription errors cascading through automated content generation systems, creating compounding inaccuraciesPublic skepticism and disengagement with major news events, even those involving violence at high-profile venuesPattern-matching and apophenia as primary mechanisms for viral conspiracy theory adoption on social platformsUniversities monetizing faculty intellectual property through AI platforms without compensation or attributionErosion of institutional trust driving alternative explanation-seeking behavior among general audiences
Companies
Arizona State University
Deployed AI Atomic platform that scraped professors' lectures without consent to generate customized learning modules
Apple
Fixed iOS notification database bug that allowed FBI to access deleted Signal messages after 404 Media reporting
Signal
Encrypted messaging app whose deleted messages were recoverable via iOS notification database; requested Apple fix
X (formerly Twitter)
Platform where conspiracy theory originated; Elon Musk's API restrictions eliminated archiving tools for fact-checking
Canvas
Learning management system used by ASU; AI Atomic scraped course materials from Canvas without faculty notification
Unsplash
Royalty-free stock image library where the conspiracy theory image was originally uploaded in 2021
Time Machine
EU-funded research organization that digitizes historic documents; conspiracy theorists misidentified it as literal t...
Warby Parker
Eyewear retailer; sponsored segment featuring virtual try-on technology and affordable prescription glasses
Ubisoft
Video game company whose high-resolution 3D scan of Notre Dame was consulted for reconstruction after 2019 fire
McClatchy
Newspaper conglomerate that proposed generating AI stories with writers' bylines without consent
People
Sam
Primary host of the podcast; conducted reporting on ASU AI platform and conspiracy theory investigation
Jason Kepler
Investigated the White House Correspondents dinner conspiracy theory and AI time machine narrative
Emmanuel Myberg
Co-founder; discussed 3D scanning libraries and archival technology in context of Time Machine organization
Joseph
Provided pre-recorded update on FBI Signal message extraction story and Apple's security patch response
Samantha
Conducted investigation into Arizona State University's AI Atomic platform and faculty consent issues
Chris Hanlon
First to publicly raise alarm about AI Atomic platform using faculty lectures without consent or notification
Cleanth Brooks
Historical figure whose name was transcribed as 'Client Brooks' by AI Atomic in generated module
Quotes
"A super intelligent AI built a time machine, came back in time, used its powers to make a super vague X account and tweeted the name of this person and nothing else."
Jason KeplerOpening segment
"This is an ownership issue because I took the time and effort to create and build that curriculum and that module. And I care a lot about my students understanding these topics, especially when we're talking about ethics and things like that."
Samantha (paraphrasing professor sentiment)ASU AI Atomic segment
"If I'm learning about AI ethics for the first time going into this, I have no idea what this topic involves. And I'm reading this. I'm like, oh, there's a community of people called the ex-riscus community."
SamanthaASU AI Atomic segment
"Elon Musk made it a lot harder to archive tweets. He killed quite a lot of the archiving tools because he made the API access to Twitter really, really expensive."
Jason KeplerConspiracy theory investigation
"It's insulting and dehumanizing to just turn that into this dog food slop that ASU has done with atomic."
Samantha (paraphrasing professor sentiment)ASU AI Atomic segment
Full Transcript
A super intelligent AI built a time machine, came back in time, used its powers to make a super vague X account and tweeted the name of this person and nothing else. additional episodes where we respond to the best comments. Gain access to that content at 44media.co. I'm your host, Sam. And with me are 44media co-founders, Jason Kepler. Hello. And Emmanuel Myberg. Hello. Joseph is out. Joe's going to appear as a ghost in this next clip that we're about to play. He has an announcement. He has a special, special message. He couldn't show up, but he has a special message. Joe got some really good impact and ulteriorism. So he's going to tell you about that for the next one and a half minutes. I've not heard this yet, so we'll hear it for the first time right now. Hi. I can't be there today on the podcast because I'm traveling for some work-related stuff. But I wanted to give you a quick update on a story we covered a couple of weeks ago at this point. The headline of that one was, FBI extracts suspects deleted signal messages saved in iPhone notification database. And the issue was that even when people seemingly set Signal messages to delete, or in the case of this specific story, even deleted the Signal app, copies of incoming Signal messages were still stored inside the iPhone notification database. database. So even though the FBI was not able to forensically extract messages from Signal itself, they were sort of captured in this relay point in the notification database. Obviously, we thought this was very, very important. We covered it. After that, actually, a few people sent me different cases where this has come up as well. So it's clearly a tactic that third parties and authorities are turning to to obtain signal messages in and of themselves, but also ones that are supposed to be deleted. Well, then just last week or around about that time, Apple said it has now fixed this issue. This follows Signal asking Apple to look into it following our reporting. I'll just read a little bit of Signal's statement here. We are very happy that today Apple issued a patch and a security advisory. This comes following 404 Media Reporting that the FBI accessed Signal message notification content via iOS despite the app being deleted. There's then a link to the security advisory on Apple's website. Signal then adds, note that no action is needed for this fix to protect Signal users on iOS. Once you install the patch, all inadvertently preserved notifications will be deleted and no forthcoming notifications will be preserved for deleted applications, end quote. And that's the key part, right? Because there was this very important question of, okay, well, I could turn off notifications for Signal or I could change it so only the sender appears or not the message content or something like that. But we really had no idea for how long these notifications had been stored, how long they were going to be stored for in the future and all of that sort of thing. And in an email to me, Apple also added much the same. It said this is actually going to purge all of the notifications that have been collected inadvertently, the ones which have been marked for deletion. Now, Apple describes it as a bug, as in this was not intended behavior. They say it's always their policy to delete notifications that are supposed to be removed. but clearly, obviously, that was not happening here. So I just wanted to give you that quick update that this is the sort of reporting that 404 Media subscribers are helping bring about. And now Signal users and, to be clear, other app users as well, probably, that have deleted messages but are still saving notifications, they have to worry about that now. Anyway, I'll give it back to the rest of 404 Media. Thank you so much. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Joe. Thank you to our foreign correspondent. Okay. So the first story we're going to talk about is one from Jason. The headline is, did a time traveling super intelligent AI try to warn about White House correspondents dinner shooting an investigation? You always know something is going to be up when we end the headline with an investigation. So yeah, this is about a very weird meme that's been going around. Meme or conspiracy theory? I don't know which. But Jason, do you want to just start with describing the image in question here? What are we looking at? Well, first of all, someone mentioned me yesterday and said, this is Betteridge's Law of Headlines here. And it's like, no fucking shit. That's the point. That's the point. If you don't know what that is, it's like there's this theory in journalism where anytime there's a question mark in a headline, the answer is no. And it's like, yeah, the answer is no. A time traveling super intelligent AI did not learn about White House correspondence in her shooting. Anytime there's an investigation, we're up to some silly shit. We're up to no good for sure. so basically in the aftermath of the White House correspondence dinner shooting which I hesitate to even call it a shooting like was it a shooting I guess there was it was like an attempt I believe shots were fired but no one was shot were they allegedly maybe a secret service person was shot but it was like wildly difficult to get any information about this, despite there being hundreds of journalists there, which we don't need to talk about, but it was hard to find information about what was going on. Anyways, in the aftermath of this, someone, I don't know who, but X, the community of X, found this account called Henry Martinez that had exactly one tweet from December 22nd, 2023. So like two and a half years ago. And the tweet just said Cole Allen and Cole Allen is the name of the suspected shooter. And the Henry Martinez account has a Pepe as its avatar, Pepe holding a wine glass. and then it has this header image that is like I would describe it as like generic 3D art psychedelic rainbow art of like falling like a stalactite situation like interior cave but it's rainbow make it technicolor and this is just like a genre of AI computer, not AI computer art, but just of 3D rendering art that is very, very common. And it's very common on stock image websites. And so this was like the Henry Martinez cover photo. And it started this conspiracy theory. Should I explain what the conspiracy theory is? Yeah, please get into... I guess, like, yeah, so this is all very weird. The Cole Allen thing is weird because it was posted years ago. So what's the theory behind... I guess, first of all, what are we supposed to be seeing? And then what is the theory behind what we're seeing? Because it's like a magic eye thing, people think, right? Like, you're supposed to be able to... Yeah, so I mean, one version of the conspiracy theory is that it's a magic eye. So you can, like, just stare at this technicolor image for a while and you'll start to see something. And the thing that some people are saying is that it is like a digital representation, like AI representation of the iconic photo of Trump after he got shot in Butler, Pennsylvania, with his fist in the air. And that is being used alongside some other information to suggest, in a conspiracy theory that's been viewed by millions and millions and millions and millions of people, to be clear, that a time-traveling artificial intelligence created this Twitter account in 2023 to warn of the White House Correspondents dinner shooting and possibly the Butler shooting. Like unclear whether that is part of it or not. But that is like sort of the unhinged conspiracy theory that has occurred. And we can talk about like why, but that's kind of like the long and short of it. there's also a bunch of images where someone does a digital slider and you can see the Technicolor image turn into the Butler image back and forth, back and forth I gotta say that the way that they manipulated that one is pretty... I think you can do that with any image because that's how these sliders work they're designed to make one image look like another image but I don't know what what do you guys think like have you have you tried the magic eye are you able to do magic eyes in general I feel like I I don't have that skill I can I used to there was like a this reminded me of like this little game program that you would project onto a tv when I was a kid and it was all magic eye stuff so I would be constantly going up to my tv as a child getting this close to it crossing my eyes and then backing up and I was like that that's probably why my eyesight is really really bad today. But I tried it with this and I couldn't, I was like, this is nothing. I don't see anything. But maybe I don't have the specific unlocked alien awareness necessary. I can do magic eye very easily. But I'm one of those people who sees the image recessed instead of pop out. Do you know that's a thing? Because it's supposed to pop out, but I can only see it recessed. So everything looks like a mold or something like that. The reason Sam can't magic eye this is because it's not a magic eye, right? Like the reason, the way that you do magic eye is like you take an image and you put it into like a pattern that is then like offset and, you know, obscured by like an abstract image. And this isn't that. It not because she doesn have the correct magazine Yeah But I mean there is something about the texture of the image that kind of matches the composition of the photograph. Like, I think that's fair. It's like not one-to-one, but if you look at it side-by-side, it does kind of maybe look like somebody with his hand up. It's like looking at a cloud or like a constellation. Exactly. Yes, we could imagine. It is a weird image. It kind of looks like it moves to me. It's a weird one. If I was on enough mushrooms, it would probably hurt my brain. I can't do magic eye because I got LASIK. And once you do that, you lose the part of your retina that is able to see magic eyes. No, you're making that up. Is that real? I mean, I don't know. But it sounds like it could be. Your ability to see this away. Yeah, exactly. It was removed. It was removed. So, okay, back to talking about this. And I swear that there's a reason and there's a point to doing this story and all of this, other than it's ridiculous and we're just sort of like trying to explain a little bit how the internet works these days. But basically, the time travel aspect of this story came from, I guess, one, the idea that, well, this guy's name was tweeted two and a half years ago. But the other thing is that as the conspiracy theory goes, there was an institute in Europe that used this image on a blog post. And that institute is called Time Machine. And so therefore, people are like, well, how much clearer could you get? this image comes from this organization called Time Machine. And all this is happening. And they do AI research to some degree, which we'll talk about. But basically, it was like, okay, well, a super intelligent AI, therefore, built a time machine, came back in time, used its powers to make a super vague X account, and tweeted the name of this person and nothing else. but that's not really what happened of course what happened is that again this image in question is a stock image it's not an image at all it's a stock graphic that was made by someone called distinct mind and it was uploaded to unsplash in 2021 unsplash is like a royalty-free stock image library that we actually use all the time. And it is notable in that it's fully free. You do need to make an account, I believe. I'm not sure if you even need to make an account to download anything. But it's like you have access to more things if you do make an account. And so this was uploaded in 2021. And like all stock images, it's been used for all sorts of things all over the internet. So I did a reverse image search on TinEye. And then I also used Google's reverse image search, which shows you where else the image has been used and when. And it's largely been used on blog posts about psychedelics and psychology. So there was a medium post by a doctor who went to a ketamine psychotherapy retreat and wrote about this image, or wrote about that experience and used this image. Someone is selling it on Etsy as a poster. It's used as an ADH treatment website's image. Someone wrote about the Bible and used it. And then a finance firm used it about pricing integrity, like a blog post about pricing integrity. And so basically, it's been used over and over and over again. And one of the places it was used, again, this is not the institute that created the image. It's just they downloaded it and they used it for a blog post is this research organization called Time Machine. And they are funded by the European Union. And I will say that their website is kind of batshit, but kind of in the way that like a lot of nonprofits websites are batshit, especially in this space. And so what Time Machine is, is it is a European research organization that is working to digitize historic documents and artifacts from the European Union. And so using technology specifically. So they're using a lot of AI to parse handwritten notes and categorize them. They are doing a lot of 3D scanning, which... Emmanuel's written a fair bit about 3D scanning libraries and things like this. But basically, using technology to scan the inside and outside of buildings so that you can then upload the 3D models onto the internet so that they are saved forever. And the maximalist version of this is you can do VR tours of buildings that have been saved in this way. And then the other thing is... I mean, this happened in a quite interesting way where for Assassin's Creed, there was a very high-res scan of Notre Dame in France. And then after Notron lit on fire, they consulted the 3D renderings from Assassin's Creed to help rebuild. Is that true? I feel like that's true. The scan is definitely real. I would have to look it up, but I do think that they referred to the actual Ubisoft scan of it. I'm not sure for what purpose. Right. Well, I mean, there's basically all sorts of organizations and museums that do stuff like this. And this is the hot thing in archiving now, is using technology to categorize all of these old letters from wars and save 3D models of old clothes before moths eat them and things like this. And so that's what Time Machine is. They're not building a time machine, literally. They are building these interactive experiences about castles and things in European history that you can then go through and look at. And they do talk about using artificial intelligence in some of their research because everyone in every field is talking about how they can use artificial intelligence now. And we've done a few articles about this. In history right now, it's quite controversial to... It's like anything else. It's like some are AI maximalists and then others are like, no, don't do this. And so I did an article at the US Archives wanting to use AI to scan civil war letters and then transcribe them and categorize them and all of that. And then people pushing back because the AI doesn't always transcribe it right or it gets things wrong. Or there's also a bunch of people who are trying to bring dead people back to life by analyzing their letters and then making a chatbot of them or whatever. And so that's the type of thing that Time Machine has researched over the years. And this has been turned by conspiracy theorists into, oh, they're building a literal time machine and they use this image and it was on X. and therefore an AI is warning us about the shooting. It's very stupid. I mean, I think it's interesting, and you note this in the story, but part of why some of these things go viral, because this has happened before, where an account will tweet a name years ago and then that name will become newsworthy and then everyone's like, oh my God, they predicted this. I didn't actually realize that this is like a game for some accounts. They actually just like are blasting random names all the time. And then one tweet will hit from, you know, years later. Yeah, I mean, so that's like, to the extent that anyone cares about this at all, that's like the most interesting question here is like, what is this account? Why did it tweet the name Cole Allen in December 2023? and the mechanism by which it happened. And so, I mean, we don't know. We don't know exactly how this happened. But in the past, there have been X accounts that tweet just like, yeah, random names or specific outcomes. And they will be a private account. And so people can't see what they're tweeting. And then something happens in the real world and they delete all of the tweets except for the one that makes it seem like they have psychic powers and they have predicted something. And so a very high-profile example of this was during the 2022 World Cup. There was an X account that seemed to have predicted the winners and correct scores of a bunch of games. And that's exactly what he did. He had a private account. He tweeted hundreds, thousands of different potential outcomes of games and then deleted the wrong ones. And then by the time people had discovered it, they were like, whoa, this person is a freak. And I guess an interesting, just another side note, one of the reasons why it's like this is because Elon Musk made it a lot harder to archive tweets. He killed quite a lot of the archiving tools because he made the API access to Twitter really, really expensive. And so a lot of the firehose of raw data of tweets is like, people don't have it anymore because to have that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. And so all these free archiving tools and things are gone. And so it's pretty impossible to know what happened here because all the tools that we would use to figure out what happened are no longer in existence. Awesome. Love that. Yeah. Thank you, Elon. Once again, very interesting. Okay. Well, I guess we solved the conspiracy here despite not having the gene that can see it. So good for us. There's a lot of other conspiracies about this and a lot of people think it was just a fake shooting and things like that. And it's like, we don't need to get into it. But I think very broadly speaking, It says something about the level of trust in this administration and then also just what's going on on the internet. And I think also people's general exhaustion with shootings and with this administration and all of that, where it's like, yes, this happened on a weekend. I feel like no one cares already I was going to ask how you rate the level of interest in this I would say and this is not to trivialize what could have been really horrible violence, but it seems like low interest in an attempted assassination at a public event filled with media. pretty strange yeah and it's it's not just low interest like on the internet like like i i see people talking about how they don't care and i see as predicted like tons and tons of takes from people who are in the room being like here's what happened and here's how i reacted and all of that and it's like i don't know we knew that that was coming like that's just sort of how these things work. It's like, if something happens at an event that a lot of journalists are at, the journalists are going to write about it. But I have talked to people in my life being like, did you see the shooting or hear about it? And the instant reaction from people who I believe are smart are like, oh, that was designed to make Trump's approval rating go up slash like I don't care I'm moving on with my life um the popularity of it being the idea of it being fake is really interesting to me because everyone I mean there I was at the gas station near my house and this guy was talking very loudly about how it was fake uh and who cares he was he was reacting to a New York post that was on the newsstand but he was just like this is also fake it's like just people it's like I we were getting coffee me and my partner and I had read about it that morning I was like oh did you hear about the shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner and he was like hmm and then we just got coffee and it was like it just doesn't register anymore with with anyone which I think is a really sad indictment of the state of things but I was watching the NBA playoffs with a friend at his house and ABC I guess it was ABC switched from the playoff game to they cut in they cut in but they also put a little like thing like if you want to keep watching the game switch to ESPN2 and we watched the like news conference for like 30 seconds and we're like oh he's talking about fucking ballroom like put the game back on and I've seen a lot of people who are like yeah we just like kept watching the basketball game because like this was great. Like, this is ridiculous. I mean, that's part of it too, right? It's like Trump, another attempt on his life, not the first. And he's just like, yeah, I think we should remodel. It's like, okay. So I guess we can go back to not giving a shit about this. Like, I mean, that's the main thing that people, that the administration has been talking about coming out of this. And also like, we don't need to get into it, but the white house correspondence dinner is not going to be at the, White House ballroom. Like that's not what it is supposed to be. Who knows what it's supposed to be at this point, but it's like theoretically an independent-ish thing that is not like the president's event. And so I don't know. Anyways. And he's like, I guess if this place was less of a dump, people wouldn't try to shoot it up. It's like, what are you talking about? Anyway. Okay. 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University professors disturbed to find their lectures chopped up and turned into AI slop. Samantha, this is your article. It's quite hot. You really hustled on it. You got it out quickly. There's a lot going on here. What happened at Arizona State University? So I think we're all at this point familiar with the idea. And you wrote about this very recently. The idea and the phenomenon that's happening where so many of people's workplaces are getting AI shoved on them. It's like, you must use AI. We're going to be implementing AI whether you'd like it or not. And usually that comes with a bunch of messaging. You know, leadership or an administration will be like, we want you to use this tool. We're excited about it. You know, it's in beta. Here you go. Try it out. Let us know what you think. That's usually kind of the way it goes. Not always, but I think typically in the cases that we've seen where an employer is like AI time. this is very different. So I'm pretty sure a lot of people found out about AI Atomic, which is the name of ASU, Arizona State University's new platform for AI learning, through a post from Chris Hanlon, who is a professor of literature, US literature at ASU. And he posted on Friday, April 21st, I think was last week, where he says it's a subscription platform that claims to offer customized learning modules for fee-paying users. None of the ASU faculty whose course materials were harvested for the module I generated were aware that their image lectures, lessons, or other teaching materials are being used. So at this point, Chris is like kind of raising the alarm about, hey, there's this new platform. No one knows about it or what it is. And it's using all of our, meaning like faculty materials. so atomic is and we can kind of just go through what the actual platform is but the way that i i signed up immediately for an account i didn't i wasn't really sure if it was public beta but i signed up with my personal email and it worked um and it is a chatbot at first it's a prompt and you put in there like i put in i want to learn about ai ethics because i was like i'm gonna find some good sources this way. So I put in, I'm going to learn about AI ethics. And then it takes you through basically a quiz. So the chatbot's like, how long do you have for a week to devote to learning about this topic? And you can say 30 minutes, an hour a week, which is ludicrous, stupid. But you can say like several hours a week, unlimited time. How fast do you want to learn about this? And it'll say like as fast as possible, which is what I chose because I was optimizing for like the most ridiculous content. And it kind of, it's like, what part of AI ethics do you want to learn about? It asks you a bunch of questions about the topic. And then eventually it says, okay, we're generating you a module and it'll take a few minutes. And what it spits out is what it spit out for me was a series of sections. So I think it was seven or eight sections. and each of the sections includes like a subhead and it was like AI's impact on ethics, bias and responsibility. Ethics and responsibility in AI. But then it says several of the subheads in the sections are repeated. So it's ethics and AI is section one, section two and three. So anyway, it's auto-generating these sections. And then in the sections is just AI-generated text, like walls of text, breaking down concepts based on lectures pulled from ASU professors' content. And we can get into how that stuff actually got there, but that's basically what it is. And then between the walls of text in the sections are really short, like 40 second to two minute, I think is the longest one I saw, clips from professors' lectures, but they're totally out of context. They're video seminars and then no names. It's like who is in these videos? No direction back to what the course is. No references, no credit whatsoever. So that's ASU's new. So I guess a few things here. One, nominally, the purpose of this is like, hey, you're an ASU student, you're in this class, and you need to study for the class. And we are going to be like your AI guide to doing this. As in, we're going to take the lectures that you're supposed to watch off of Canvas, which is the online learning portal thing that is used across high schools and colleges all over the country. We're going to take the video lectures that your professor has recorded and we're going to make them shorter for you. We're going to give you the TLDR of them, more or less, right? I think that is one way it could be used. As far as I can tell from the way that it's marketed, it's like you can't get course credit from doing this. It says it in the FAQs that it's not for credit. I think it says yet. It kind of implies that maybe someday kind of leaves that open. But I think it mostly for a public non student to use to take advantage of ASUs the stuff that it already owns So it has this big course of material And its expertise and all that Yeah. And it charges a subscription fee. I think, so they took down the signup page after I reached out basically. And I think other journalists were also reaching out about this. But within a couple hours, the signup page was gone. I'm pretty, I had a 12-day trial. I put my credit card information in there, which was probably not a good idea. But I'm on a trial. And I think after the trial is up, it's $5 a month. It's something like that. I remember thinking it was really cheap. And this is not commissurate to the quality that it should be giving you. But then I started doing it. I was like, oh, yeah, this is not worth more than 50 cents a month. So I think it's for people outside of ASU to experience ASU. So like to kind of to audit a class almost like I'm gonna and it's very customized. So it's like if I absolutely want to learn about like because some of the topics were like I want to learn about how to manage my finances. It was like very normal stuff that you might just want to learn about from the Internet. Got it. Okay. I guess that that's semi interesting because like for years, I feel like Ivy League at first and now probably like more universities have been doing MOOCs. which are massively online... Actually, what do they stand for? Massively Online College. Massive Open Online Courses. It was huge when I was in college. MOOCs were a big thing. Yeah, and it was basically like, oh, watch the lectures from Computer Science 101 at Princeton or whatever. Stanford did a bunch of them. So this sounds like something similar similar except for like masterclass slash like we're gonna like make it shorter and uh you'll be able to learn all this stuff like very quickly which is which i asked that question because then it's great that uh you know it will create these modules for you and then just throw in like a bunch of random shit like basically you talk to you know professor who had uh some of her course material pulled into this like AI ethics module that you had created. And it had pulled her from like a class from years ago that was like totally unrelated. Yeah, it was a class from 2020. She's a film studies professor. And someone she told me someone had asked in the class, a student asked in the class, hey, let's can we talk about AI? And just kind of like, can we actually add this to the course and talk about it a little bit? Because This was in 2020 and it wasn't really a big deal yet. Like the way it is. Genitive AI was not what it is today. It was a big deal, but it was like, ooh, this thing is coming. So she kind of just like threw in a couple slides about like defining AI and machine learning. And she told me for this story that she would not define it that way today. It's not really an up-to-date definition. And also it wasn't part of a class about AI at all. It's not her expertise, but they threw in this like one minute clip from her class. I assume because they probably were scraping Canvas and looking for just things that mentioned the words AI and ethics or like definition AI. They were kind of slotting it in that way. And hers just cropped up to the top as far as like a succinct version of this. It kind of fit into that minute that it was probably trying to hit. But this is all assumption. I don't really know exactly how it works other than it's definitely scraping from Canvas, like you said, which is their learning management system. And then ASU owns Canvas. One of the professors told me that Canvas is very clear about if you're putting stuff on Canvas, we have usage rights. If you're working at ASU, they're very clear about intellectual property rights. ASU doesn't solely own their rights to that content, but it does own the ability to do what they want with the stuff that you're teaching on Canvas. I mean, that's true. And I guess the professors that you spoke to didn't raise that as the main thing that they were upset about. But a lot of newspapers and media companies have been training these AIs on their reporters' writing. And then there was a story about McClatchy, for example, which is a big newspaper conglomerate. And then McClatchy was basically generating stories or proposed to generate stories using AI and then putting writers' bylines on them, even if they didn't agree to that. And so, I mean, I think that what's happening now at ASU, from what I can tell from your story, is that it is, as you described, like chopping their lectures up and decontextualizing them. And that's super annoying. But it's not taking their lectures and generating new AI using like a deepfake of the professors and like their stolen voice and things like that. which hopefully it doesn't get to that point, but it would be easy to imagine them doing that. That is totally within the realm of possibility for either ASU or for another tool like this. But as it stands, it seems pretty useless at this point from what I can tell. It's really bad. It's worse than useless. I mean, the first section of the first module that I created, It was pulling from a lecture and the professor had a pretty heavy accent. And he was saying ex-riskers to describe a certain type of people who feel a certain way about the risk of AI. So, again, I don't even know what the context of the lecture was because it was so short. But ex-riskers was what he was saying, and he even wrote it on the board and spelled it that way. And then Atomic went in and transcribed that as ex-riscus. So it was R-I-S-C-U-S. And then it kept referring over and over to ex-riscus, the ex-riscus community. again and again throughout the module. And then it did a quiz about the ex-riscus community. And it's like, if I'm learning about AI ethics for the first time going into this, I have no idea what this topic involves. And I'm reading this. I'm like, oh, there's a community of people called the ex-riscus community. And I go tell my friend, like, have you heard of the ex-riscus community? It's like, what? This is, it's just making shit up based on really bad transcription. it also did that with another it did it with chris hanlon the professor who tweeted or blue sky posted about it um where he was uh teaching about cleanth brooks who's a literary critic and it transcribed it to client brooks and then referred to client throughout the the module i like it's not only did asu not alert anyone to this didn't send that email that i referred to earlier that was like hey you know we're doing ai now get on board didn't even tell them uh didn't ask for the permission to use the lectures because they own it. Technically, they legally don't have to. But they didn't take the time to look through the modules and what was being created because they're highly customized. Everyone's getting a different one. If I went and generated a different module about ethics and AI, it would give me something totally different. So there's no fact checking and no references out to anything else. So you're completely in this closed environment, learning about things that may or may not even be factually accurate or spelled correctly. And it's not telling you go here to learn more or here's the professor's full lecture or here's their name even. There's no names on anything. So I think it is like a lot of the professors I talked to weren't, they weren't saying I want to be compensated for my work because this is an ownership issue in that way. They were saying this is an ownership issue because I took the time and effort to create and build that curriculum and that module. And I care a lot about my students understanding these topics, especially when we're talking about ethics and things like that. I want them to grasp these topics in a way that I've crafted them because I took the time to learn about it. And it's insulting and dehumanizing to just turn that into this dog food slop that ASU has done with atomic and that was what really bothered most professors and i think that's i mean it was just like it was honestly pretty it was very sweet hearing them talk about their students and how much they cared about what their students were learning and how frustrated they were that this was done just completely in the dark without their knowledge and also is butchering because for a professor and for someone in academia a lot you're not getting paid amazing So your reputation is what matters. And your ability to speak on something as an expert is what matters. And this AI is just ripping clips out and turning them into fodder for bad information, which I think really is what frustrated most of them. But yeah, I think ASU knows that it's in hot water at this point because they took down the signups. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. I guess like let's end it with like whatever the status of this thing is. I mean, it's like, again, a beta test. It seems like you can't sign up anymore. Wait, I can now today. I guess I'll play with this more today. The signups were a 404 page yesterday. And today we're back. So I'll make another account and see if I can keep messing with it. But they haven't replied to any of my emails. I emailed the people that are involved, the president's office, communications office. No one has replied. I think they're probably doing some serious crisis management at this point. If something similar is happening at your college, hit up Sam. Yeah, definitely. I think this is happening elsewhere pretty rampantly. So, yeah. And you might not even know it. So, go dig it around, I guess. Should we leave that there? Yeah. Then we come back. We're talking to Emmanuel about some philosophy. Speaking of ethics, consciousness. 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