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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>A landmark state law written by \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/bay-area\">Bay Area\u003c/a> lawmakers aimed at helping people identify content that’s been generated by artificial intelligence will go into effect Saturday. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The law requires AI companies to ensure that their images and videos contain embedded, difficult-to-remove data about how the image was made — often referred to as “provenance.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Starting Aug. 2, anyone will be able to put an image, video or audio file into a \u003ca href=\"https://c2pa.org/\">content verifier\u003c/a>, like one from the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, and determine whether or not it is AI-generated, state Sen. Josh Becker, D-Menlo Park, told KQED.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1568\" height=\"1045\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/062923_Artificial_Intelligence_AI_REUTERS_CM_02-copy.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12031242\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/062923_Artificial_Intelligence_AI_REUTERS_CM_02-copy.jpg 1568w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/062923_Artificial_Intelligence_AI_REUTERS_CM_02-copy-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/062923_Artificial_Intelligence_AI_REUTERS_CM_02-copy-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/062923_Artificial_Intelligence_AI_REUTERS_CM_02-copy-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/03/062923_Artificial_Intelligence_AI_REUTERS_CM_02-copy-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1568px) 100vw, 1568px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Technology leaders attend a generative artificial intelligence meeting in San Francisco on June 29, 2023. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“While AI has some benefits, we’ve seen AI content used for election misinformation for scams and abusive deepfakes,” Becker said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The new law Becker co-authored along with Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, and Rick Chavez Zbur, D-Los Angeles, will make it easier for everyday people to see what’s real and what’s fabricated. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The next phase kicks in on Jan. 1, 2027, and will require large online platforms to give users a way to view that previously stored information and figure out whether or not the content that they’re seeing is AI-generated. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>By 2028, phones and cameras produced in California will be required to store this provenance information as soon as an image is captured.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The law — which originally passed in 2024 — has taken nearly three years to go into effect. According to Becker, figuring out how to operationalize these policies can often be a barrier to regulation. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Becker said that the lawmakers coordinated closely with the European Union throughout the process. The new law will go into effect on the same day as the \u003ca href=\"https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-starts-enforcing-ai-act-rules-and-new-transparency-requirements-2-august\">European Union’s new AI\u003c/a> Act. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>While this law will immediately impact generative AI companies, \u003ca href=\"https://dispatch.starlinglab.org/p/decoding-the-california-ai-transparency\">experts\u003c/a> in the space are keeping an eye on the requirements for online platforms and believe that, if enforced, it “will no doubt have a larger effect on our information economy,” Stephen Sharp Queener, academic researcher with Starling Lab, wrote in a post on Substack. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Becker will hold a press conference in Sacramento on Aug. 3 to share more details about the new legislation. \u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Could Smart Homes Make Electrification More Affordable for Californians?",
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"headTitle": "Could Smart Homes Make Electrification More Affordable for Californians? | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>This story is part of KQED’s series “Flipping the Switch,” examining California’s transition to clean energy and what it means for you. Find the series and more of our climate coverage \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/climate\">\u003cem>here\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Tucked away in the East Bay foothills, a sleek white room houses the appliances of the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/2000695/california-is-transitioning-from-fossil-fuels-to-electric-power-its-going-to-get-messy\">future\u003c/a> — an induction stove, a battery-powered HVAC system, a fridge with a thin black box resting on top. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Though these devices may seem average, behind the scenes, the machines are sharing more than wires — including information about how much energy they’re using, whether or not the refrigerator door is open and increasingly, how to help balance the power grid. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Utilities and technology companies say this kind of “smart home” could make the transition to an all-electric future cheaper, more reliable and more resilient during power outages.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>As part of the state’s ambitious climate agenda, California wants millions of residents to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/2000695/california-is-transitioning-from-fossil-fuels-to-electric-power-its-going-to-get-messy\">electrify\u003c/a> their homes and shift away from gas-powered vehicles. But every new electric appliance increases \u003ca href=\"https://www.energy.ca.gov/filebrowser/download/9328?fid=9328\">demand\u003c/a> on a grid already under pressure from increased use, expanding data centers and more frequent extreme weather. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-gallery has-nested-images columns-default is-cropped wp-block-gallery-3 is-layout-flex wp-block-gallery-is-layout-flex\">\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" data-id=\"12093339\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-06-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12093339\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-06-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-06-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-06-KQED-1536x1025.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A wall of demonstration EV Chargers and smart electrical panels made by Tesla, GM and Span are on display at PG&E’s PowerHouse in San Ramon on July 30, 2026. (Martin do Nascimento/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" data-id=\"12093337\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-04-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12093337\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-04-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-04-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-04-KQED-1536x1025.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The interior of the PG&E PowerHouse in San Ramon on July 30, 2026. (Martin do Nascimento/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Building enough infrastructure to meet that demand is expensive, with \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12081882/san-francisco-has-been-trying-to-leave-pge-for-100-years-will-this-time-be-different\">costs often falling on consumers\u003c/a>. Instead of making costly grid upgrades, utilities are increasingly searching for ways to use the existing grid more efficiently. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the PG&E Applied Technology Services Center, an all-electric home in San Ramon, the utility works with private companies to show how advanced energy management technologies can work together to make electrification easier and more affordable. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“PG&E doesn’t make money off of energy; they make money off of stuff,” said Robert Stafford, a researcher at the World Resources Institute working on transportation electrification and grid resiliency. “Once all of those chargers and transformers and wires are out in the world, it is in everyone’s best interest to use them as efficiently as possible.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Because the grid is built to meet the highest periods of electricity demand, most of the time, we actually only use 40% or 50% of its capacity, said Paul Doherty, a PG&E spokesperson. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The utility already offers \u003ca href=\"https://www.pge.com/en/account/rate-plans/time-of-use-rate-plans.html\">“time-of-use”\u003c/a> plans to encourage customers to run appliances overnight or during off-peak hours. Smart devices would automate, or run this process quietly in the background, according to Doherty. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Rather than physically turning off lights or turning down thermostats, customers would be able to set their energy preferences and the system would take care of the rest. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“If they’re running their air conditioning and their dishwasher, lights are on, TV’s on, dishwasher, the laundry is running — that EV charger may say, ‘Hey, there’s a lot going on within the home, we got to keep that down within capacity,” Doherty said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Another example: the thin black box on top of the fridge in PG&E’s smart home. The device is a Pila battery, which can power most household appliances.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Pila CEO Cole Ashman describes the tool as a way for both renters and homeowners to access “seamless” backup power during outages and to shift their power consumption to cheaper times of day. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-image\">\n\u003cfigure class=\"aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-05-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12093338\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-05-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-05-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-05-KQED-1536x1025.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Paul Doherty, Manager of Clean Energy & Innovation Communications at PG&E, opens the Span smart electrical panel that operates the PowerHouse at PG&E’s Applied Technology Services Center in San Ramon on July 30, 2026. (Martin do Nascimento/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\n\u003cp>“All of these batteries kind of have a turbocharged brain inside of them,” Ashman said. “It’s going to work for you in the background, store energy when it’s cheap, charge up at night, and then, when power prices get expensive in the late afternoon, it seamlessly switches to start to run your refrigerator, your window AC, whatever is connected.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Some customers may be put off, however, or concerned by the potential privacy or cybersecurity risks posed by these technologies. International researchers, in collaboration with NYU, \u003ca href=\"https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/new-research-reveals-alarming-privacy-and-security-threats-smart-homes\">found\u003c/a> that potential threats include the exposure of unique device names and even household geolocation data, all of which can be harvested by external companies without user awareness. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-image\">\n\u003cfigure class=\"aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-08-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12093341\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-08-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-08-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-08-KQED-1536x1025.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">PG&E’s Applied Technology Services Center in San Ramon on July 30, 2026. (Martin do Nascimento/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\n\u003cp>With his company’s own technology, Ashman emphasized that consumers own all their own data and that the batteries are “local first,” which means they can opt in to wifi connection or cloud data sharing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Our phones are getting smarter, our computers are getting smarter, and the appliances in our home are also getting smarter,” Ashman said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“While that might sound scary to some folks … that can be really exciting if done well,” Ashman continued. “These things are going to be able to take care of you even when the data center goes down, or Google goes down or the power goes out.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“PG&E doesn’t make money off of energy; they make money off of stuff,” said Robert Stafford, a researcher at the World Resources Institute working on transportation electrification and grid resiliency. “Once all of those chargers and transformers and wires are out in the world, it is in everyone’s best interest to use them as efficiently as possible.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Because the grid is built to meet the highest periods of electricity demand, most of the time, we actually only use 40% or 50% of its capacity, said Paul Doherty, a PG&E spokesperson. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The utility already offers \u003ca href=\"https://www.pge.com/en/account/rate-plans/time-of-use-rate-plans.html\">“time-of-use”\u003c/a> plans to encourage customers to run appliances overnight or during off-peak hours. Smart devices would automate, or run this process quietly in the background, according to Doherty. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The utility already offers \u003ca href=\"https://www.pge.com/en/account/rate-plans/time-of-use-rate-plans.html\">“time-of-use”\u003c/a> plans to encourage customers to run appliances overnight or during off-peak hours. Smart devices would automate, or run this process quietly in the background, according to Doherty. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Rather than physically turning off lights or turning down thermostats, customers would be able to set their energy preferences and the system would take care of the rest. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“If they’re running their air conditioning and their dishwasher, lights are on, TV’s on, dishwasher, the laundry is running — that EV charger may say, ‘Hey, there’s a lot going on within the home, we got to keep that down within capacity,” Doherty said. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“If they’re running their air conditioning and their dishwasher, lights are on, TV’s on, dishwasher, the laundry is running — that EV charger may say, ‘Hey, there’s a lot going on within the home, we got to keep that down within capacity,” Doherty said. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Another example: the thin black box on top of the fridge in PG&E’s smart home. The device is a Pila battery, which can power most household appliances.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Pila CEO Cole Ashman describes the tool as a way for both renters and homeowners to access “seamless” backup power during outages and to shift their power consumption to cheaper times of day. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Pila CEO Cole Ashman describes the tool as a way for both renters and homeowners to access “seamless” backup power during outages and to shift their power consumption to cheaper times of day. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“All of these batteries kind of have a turbocharged brain inside of them,” Ashman said. “It’s going to work for you in the background, store energy when it’s cheap, charge up at night, and then, when power prices get expensive in the late afternoon, it seamlessly switches to start to run your refrigerator, your window AC, whatever is connected.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Some customers may be put off, however, or concerned by the potential privacy or cybersecurity risks posed by these technologies. International researchers, in collaboration with NYU, \u003ca href=\"https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/new-research-reveals-alarming-privacy-and-security-threats-smart-homes\">found\u003c/a> that potential threats include the exposure of unique device names and even household geolocation data, all of which can be harvested by external companies without user awareness. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Some customers may be put off, however, or concerned by the potential privacy or cybersecurity risks posed by these technologies. International researchers, in collaboration with NYU, \u003ca href=\"https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/new-research-reveals-alarming-privacy-and-security-threats-smart-homes\">found\u003c/a> that potential threats include the exposure of unique device names and even household geolocation data, all of which can be harvested by external companies without user awareness. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>With his company’s own technology, Ashman emphasized that consumers own all their own data and that the batteries are “local first,” which means they can opt in to wifi connection or cloud data sharing. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Our phones are getting smarter, our computers are getting smarter, and the appliances in our home are also getting smarter,” Ashman said. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“While that might sound scary to some folks … that can be really exciting if done well,” Ashman continued. “These things are going to be able to take care of you even when the data center goes down, or Google goes down or the power goes out.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "The state's largest utility is testing new technology to lower energy bills and improve reliability.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>This story is part of KQED’s series “Flipping the Switch,” examining California’s transition to clean energy and what it means for you. Find the series and more of our climate coverage \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/climate\">\u003cem>here\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Tucked away in the East Bay foothills, a sleek white room houses the appliances of the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/2000695/california-is-transitioning-from-fossil-fuels-to-electric-power-its-going-to-get-messy\">future\u003c/a> — an induction stove, a battery-powered HVAC system, a fridge with a thin black box resting on top. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Though these devices may seem average, behind the scenes, the machines are sharing more than wires — including information about how much energy they’re using, whether or not the refrigerator door is open and increasingly, how to help balance the power grid. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Utilities and technology companies say this kind of “smart home” could make the transition to an all-electric future cheaper, more reliable and more resilient during power outages.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>As part of the state’s ambitious climate agenda, California wants millions of residents to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/2000695/california-is-transitioning-from-fossil-fuels-to-electric-power-its-going-to-get-messy\">electrify\u003c/a> their homes and shift away from gas-powered vehicles. But every new electric appliance increases \u003ca href=\"https://www.energy.ca.gov/filebrowser/download/9328?fid=9328\">demand\u003c/a> on a grid already under pressure from increased use, expanding data centers and more frequent extreme weather. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-gallery has-nested-images columns-default is-cropped wp-block-gallery-3 is-layout-flex wp-block-gallery-is-layout-flex\">\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" data-id=\"12093339\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-06-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12093339\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-06-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-06-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-06-KQED-1536x1025.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A wall of demonstration EV Chargers and smart electrical panels made by Tesla, GM and Span are on display at PG&E’s PowerHouse in San Ramon on July 30, 2026. (Martin do Nascimento/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" data-id=\"12093337\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-04-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12093337\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-04-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-04-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-04-KQED-1536x1025.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The interior of the PG&E PowerHouse in San Ramon on July 30, 2026. (Martin do Nascimento/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Building enough infrastructure to meet that demand is expensive, with \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12081882/san-francisco-has-been-trying-to-leave-pge-for-100-years-will-this-time-be-different\">costs often falling on consumers\u003c/a>. Instead of making costly grid upgrades, utilities are increasingly searching for ways to use the existing grid more efficiently. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the PG&E Applied Technology Services Center, an all-electric home in San Ramon, the utility works with private companies to show how advanced energy management technologies can work together to make electrification easier and more affordable. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“PG&E doesn’t make money off of energy; they make money off of stuff,” said Robert Stafford, a researcher at the World Resources Institute working on transportation electrification and grid resiliency. “Once all of those chargers and transformers and wires are out in the world, it is in everyone’s best interest to use them as efficiently as possible.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Because the grid is built to meet the highest periods of electricity demand, most of the time, we actually only use 40% or 50% of its capacity, said Paul Doherty, a PG&E spokesperson. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The utility already offers \u003ca href=\"https://www.pge.com/en/account/rate-plans/time-of-use-rate-plans.html\">“time-of-use”\u003c/a> plans to encourage customers to run appliances overnight or during off-peak hours. Smart devices would automate, or run this process quietly in the background, according to Doherty. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Rather than physically turning off lights or turning down thermostats, customers would be able to set their energy preferences and the system would take care of the rest. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“If they’re running their air conditioning and their dishwasher, lights are on, TV’s on, dishwasher, the laundry is running — that EV charger may say, ‘Hey, there’s a lot going on within the home, we got to keep that down within capacity,” Doherty said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Another example: the thin black box on top of the fridge in PG&E’s smart home. The device is a Pila battery, which can power most household appliances.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Pila CEO Cole Ashman describes the tool as a way for both renters and homeowners to access “seamless” backup power during outages and to shift their power consumption to cheaper times of day. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-image\">\n\u003cfigure class=\"aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-05-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12093338\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-05-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-05-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-05-KQED-1536x1025.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Paul Doherty, Manager of Clean Energy & Innovation Communications at PG&E, opens the Span smart electrical panel that operates the PowerHouse at PG&E’s Applied Technology Services Center in San Ramon on July 30, 2026. (Martin do Nascimento/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\n\u003cp>“All of these batteries kind of have a turbocharged brain inside of them,” Ashman said. “It’s going to work for you in the background, store energy when it’s cheap, charge up at night, and then, when power prices get expensive in the late afternoon, it seamlessly switches to start to run your refrigerator, your window AC, whatever is connected.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Some customers may be put off, however, or concerned by the potential privacy or cybersecurity risks posed by these technologies. International researchers, in collaboration with NYU, \u003ca href=\"https://engineering.nyu.edu/news/new-research-reveals-alarming-privacy-and-security-threats-smart-homes\">found\u003c/a> that potential threats include the exposure of unique device names and even household geolocation data, all of which can be harvested by external companies without user awareness. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-image\">\n\u003cfigure class=\"aligncenter size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-08-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12093341\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-08-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-08-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260729-POWER-HOUSE-MD-08-KQED-1536x1025.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">PG&E’s Applied Technology Services Center in San Ramon on July 30, 2026. (Martin do Nascimento/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003c/div>\n\n\n\u003cp>With his company’s own technology, Ashman emphasized that consumers own all their own data and that the batteries are “local first,” which means they can opt in to wifi connection or cloud data sharing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Our phones are getting smarter, our computers are getting smarter, and the appliances in our home are also getting smarter,” Ashman said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“While that might sound scary to some folks … that can be really exciting if done well,” Ashman continued. “These things are going to be able to take care of you even when the data center goes down, or Google goes down or the power goes out.”\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "elon-musks-ai-company-asks-san-jose-to-halt-lawsuit-over-deepfake-abuse",
"title": "Elon Musk’s AI Company Asks San José to Halt Lawsuit Over Deepfake Abuse",
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"headTitle": "Elon Musk’s AI Company Asks San José to Halt Lawsuit Over Deepfake Abuse | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>A federal judge in San José will decide whether to halt a proposed class action lawsuit accusing Elon Musk’s AI company of creating non-consensual, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12091964/nearly-half-of-teens-report-seeing-ai-sexual-content-bay-area-leaders-want-to-shut-it-down\">sexually explicit deepfakes\u003c/a>, as the company seeks to transfer the case to Texas. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>xAI, which Musk folded into SpaceX in February and rebranded as SpaceXAI in July, also asked \u003ca href=\"https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/72185111/doe-v-xai-corp/?filed_after=&filed_before=&entry_gte=&entry_lte=&order_by=desc\">Judge P. Casey Pitts\u003c/a> on Thursday to pause the federal civil suit during related criminal proceedings under federal law.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The suit comes as California Attorney General Rob Bonta and European regulators have also \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12069808/california-investigates-elon-musks-ai-company-after-avalanche-of-complaints-about-sexual-content\">launched investigations\u003c/a> into whether the platform’s generated sexual images violate local laws.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>One plaintiff, a South Carolina woman, said she posted a fully clothed photo of herself to the social media platform X on Jan. 2 and discovered the next day that Grok, xAI’s chatbot, had used it to generate an image of her and posted the result publicly, \u003ca href=\"https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.463184/gov.uscourts.cand.463184.28.0.pdf\">according to court filings\u003c/a>. She reported it to X in an attempt to have it taken down.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/RobBontaTrumpGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12058864\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/RobBontaTrumpGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/RobBontaTrumpGetty-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/RobBontaTrumpGetty-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">California Attorney General Rob Bonta is briefed by members of his Civil Rights Enforcement Section on litigation challenging the Trump administration at his offices in downtown Los Angeles, California, on March 11, 2025. (Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The four plaintiffs are suing under pseudonyms. Musk is not named as a defendant. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grok was integrated into X in December 2024, initially for premium subscribers, who could tag @grok in a post asking it to edit an image and get the result posted publicly in reply. Plaintiffs say users \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12069808/california-investigates-elon-musks-ai-company-after-avalanche-of-complaints-about-sexual-content\">quickly began prompting it\u003c/a> with instructions like “Remove her clothes.” A year later, in December 2025, image generation opened to all X users. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Plaintiffs’ lawyers say around that time, Grok began generating and disseminating hundreds of thousands of increasingly explicit images of women and minors. xAI restricted the feature again on Jan. 8.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Three plaintiffs who use X said they were harmed in the first five days of January, according to court filings. Ohio Doe posted a photo Jan. 1 and said Grok created and publicly posted at least six altered images of her over the next two days. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>New Jersey Doe posted a shirtless photo Jan. 4, and he discovered two altered images the following day. Each reported the images to X. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The fourth plaintiff, South Carolina Roe, is not alleged to be an X user. She was told on Feb. 26 that her father had been arrested on charges related to possession and distribution of child sexual abuse material, according to xAI’s motion. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The court records stated she alleged her father used Grok to alter images of her as a minor to make it appear they “had just consummated a sexual act.” The images were not shared on X. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>X has directed users to sue it in northern Texas since November 2024, a district that doesn’t include Bastrop, where the company is headquartered. Fort Worth’s small federal bench includes U.S. Judge Reed O’Connor, who has presided over two Musk-related suits and whose 2023 disclosure showed Tesla stock, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/10/16/g-s1-28620/texas-judge-elon-musk-x-case-tesla-shares\">NPR\u003c/a>; X didn’t answer requests for comment when asked why it chose those courts.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, said companies usually seek to file a case where their facilities are, he said, and X did not. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Basically they’re doing a form of judge shopping,” Goldman said. “They think that the judges in that particular district are more likely to go in their favor.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>xAI said the three X users clicked a “Got it” button on the update notice, twice each and kept using their accounts through June, which the terms treat as consent. It notes that three judges in this district have already enforced X’s Texas clause.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Attorneys from legal firm Berger Montague said the company failed to show that the plaintiffs agreed to the user terms, including revised terms changed in the middle of the lawsuit. They claimed xAI produced no screenshot of either sign-up screen and never specified which plaintiff saw which.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1980\" height=\"1320\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/GettyImages-2255688657.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12069820\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/GettyImages-2255688657.jpg 1980w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/GettyImages-2255688657-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/GettyImages-2255688657-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1980px) 100vw, 1980px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">An iPhone screen displays the Grok logo on the Grok AI app on Jan. 11, 2026. (Anna Barclay/Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They note New Jersey Doe created his account in March 2009, when the version of the terms then in effect contained no clause binding users to future revisions. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>While terms and agreements may seem like an innocuous thing for users to click through, Goldman said updating terms has become a major unresolved question in internet law.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Courts are “inconsistent on this issue,” he said. Whether users are bound to terms of service often turns on design, he said: “The details of how the user interface appears matter a ton.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The judge also rejected xAI’s motion to overturn an earlier order allowing the use of pseudonyms in the case. \u003ca href=\"https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.463184/gov.uscourts.cand.463184.57.0.pdf\">Two days \u003c/a>before the hearing, plaintiffs asked Pitts to close the courtroom for any argument that would reveal a plaintiff’s identity or discuss sealed exhibits.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“This case is not about just Grok or X as a tool, this is about the whole industry,” said Ahmed Banafa, an engineering professor at San José State University. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If the four plaintiffs win and force xAI to change its practices or its algorithm, he said, competitors will take notice: “It could be a landmark for the safety of AI.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>xAI, which Musk folded into SpaceX in February and rebranded as SpaceXAI in July, also asked \u003ca href=\"https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/72185111/doe-v-xai-corp/?filed_after=&filed_before=&entry_gte=&entry_lte=&order_by=desc\">Judge P. Casey Pitts\u003c/a> on Thursday to pause the federal civil suit during related criminal proceedings under federal law.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The suit comes as California Attorney General Rob Bonta and European regulators have also \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12069808/california-investigates-elon-musks-ai-company-after-avalanche-of-complaints-about-sexual-content\">launched investigations\u003c/a> into whether the platform’s generated sexual images violate local laws.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>One plaintiff, a South Carolina woman, said she posted a fully clothed photo of herself to the social media platform X on Jan. 2 and discovered the next day that Grok, xAI’s chatbot, had used it to generate an image of her and posted the result publicly, \u003ca href=\"https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.463184/gov.uscourts.cand.463184.28.0.pdf\">according to court filings\u003c/a>. She reported it to X in an attempt to have it taken down.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>One plaintiff, a South Carolina woman, said she posted a fully clothed photo of herself to the social media platform X on Jan. 2 and discovered the next day that Grok, xAI’s chatbot, had used it to generate an image of her and posted the result publicly, \u003ca href=\"https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.463184/gov.uscourts.cand.463184.28.0.pdf\">according to court filings\u003c/a>. She reported it to X in an attempt to have it taken down.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Grok was integrated into X in December 2024, initially for premium subscribers, who could tag @grok in a post asking it to edit an image and get the result posted publicly in reply. Plaintiffs say users \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12069808/california-investigates-elon-musks-ai-company-after-avalanche-of-complaints-about-sexual-content\">quickly began prompting it\u003c/a> with instructions like “Remove her clothes.” A year later, in December 2025, image generation opened to all X users. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Grok was integrated into X in December 2024, initially for premium subscribers, who could tag @grok in a post asking it to edit an image and get the result posted publicly in reply. Plaintiffs say users \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12069808/california-investigates-elon-musks-ai-company-after-avalanche-of-complaints-about-sexual-content\">quickly began prompting it\u003c/a> with instructions like “Remove her clothes.” A year later, in December 2025, image generation opened to all X users. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Plaintiffs’ lawyers say around that time, Grok began generating and disseminating hundreds of thousands of increasingly explicit images of women and minors. xAI restricted the feature again on Jan. 8.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Plaintiffs’ lawyers say around that time, Grok began generating and disseminating hundreds of thousands of increasingly explicit images of women and minors. xAI restricted the feature again on Jan. 8.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Three plaintiffs who use X said they were harmed in the first five days of January, according to court filings. Ohio Doe posted a photo Jan. 1 and said Grok created and publicly posted at least six altered images of her over the next two days. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Three plaintiffs who use X said they were harmed in the first five days of January, according to court filings. Ohio Doe posted a photo Jan. 1 and said Grok created and publicly posted at least six altered images of her over the next two days. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>New Jersey Doe posted a shirtless photo Jan. 4, and he discovered two altered images the following day. Each reported the images to X. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>New Jersey Doe posted a shirtless photo Jan. 4, and he discovered two altered images the following day. Each reported the images to X. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The fourth plaintiff, South Carolina Roe, is not alleged to be an X user. She was told on Feb. 26 that her father had been arrested on charges related to possession and distribution of child sexual abuse material, according to xAI’s motion. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The fourth plaintiff, South Carolina Roe, is not alleged to be an X user. She was told on Feb. 26 that her father had been arrested on charges related to possession and distribution of child sexual abuse material, according to xAI’s motion. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The court records stated she alleged her father used Grok to alter images of her as a minor to make it appear they “had just consummated a sexual act.” The images were not shared on X. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The court records stated she alleged her father used Grok to alter images of her as a minor to make it appear they “had just consummated a sexual act.” The images were not shared on X. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>X has directed users to sue it in northern Texas since November 2024, a district that doesn’t include Bastrop, where the company is headquartered. Fort Worth’s small federal bench includes U.S. Judge Reed O’Connor, who has presided over two Musk-related suits and whose 2023 disclosure showed Tesla stock, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/10/16/g-s1-28620/texas-judge-elon-musk-x-case-tesla-shares\">NPR\u003c/a>; X didn’t answer requests for comment when asked why it chose those courts.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>X has directed users to sue it in northern Texas since November 2024, a district that doesn’t include Bastrop, where the company is headquartered. Fort Worth’s small federal bench includes U.S. Judge Reed O’Connor, who has presided over two Musk-related suits and whose 2023 disclosure showed Tesla stock, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/10/16/g-s1-28620/texas-judge-elon-musk-x-case-tesla-shares\">NPR\u003c/a>; X didn’t answer requests for comment when asked why it chose those courts.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, said companies usually seek to file a case where their facilities are, he said, and X did not. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Basically they’re doing a form of judge shopping,” Goldman said. “They think that the judges in that particular district are more likely to go in their favor.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“Basically they’re doing a form of judge shopping,” Goldman said. “They think that the judges in that particular district are more likely to go in their favor.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>xAI said the three X users clicked a “Got it” button on the update notice, twice each and kept using their accounts through June, which the terms treat as consent. It notes that three judges in this district have already enforced X’s Texas clause.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>xAI said the three X users clicked a “Got it” button on the update notice, twice each and kept using their accounts through June, which the terms treat as consent. It notes that three judges in this district have already enforced X’s Texas clause.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Attorneys from legal firm Berger Montague said the company failed to show that the plaintiffs agreed to the user terms, including revised terms changed in the middle of the lawsuit. They claimed xAI produced no screenshot of either sign-up screen and never specified which plaintiff saw which.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Attorneys from legal firm Berger Montague said the company failed to show that the plaintiffs agreed to the user terms, including revised terms changed in the middle of the lawsuit. They claimed xAI produced no screenshot of either sign-up screen and never specified which plaintiff saw which.\u003c/p>\n"
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"excerpt": "Four people who say Grok generated sexualized images of them without consent are fighting to keep their case in California and to keep their names out of it.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>A federal judge in San José will decide whether to halt a proposed class action lawsuit accusing Elon Musk’s AI company of creating non-consensual, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12091964/nearly-half-of-teens-report-seeing-ai-sexual-content-bay-area-leaders-want-to-shut-it-down\">sexually explicit deepfakes\u003c/a>, as the company seeks to transfer the case to Texas. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>xAI, which Musk folded into SpaceX in February and rebranded as SpaceXAI in July, also asked \u003ca href=\"https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/72185111/doe-v-xai-corp/?filed_after=&filed_before=&entry_gte=&entry_lte=&order_by=desc\">Judge P. Casey Pitts\u003c/a> on Thursday to pause the federal civil suit during related criminal proceedings under federal law.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The suit comes as California Attorney General Rob Bonta and European regulators have also \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12069808/california-investigates-elon-musks-ai-company-after-avalanche-of-complaints-about-sexual-content\">launched investigations\u003c/a> into whether the platform’s generated sexual images violate local laws.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>One plaintiff, a South Carolina woman, said she posted a fully clothed photo of herself to the social media platform X on Jan. 2 and discovered the next day that Grok, xAI’s chatbot, had used it to generate an image of her and posted the result publicly, \u003ca href=\"https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.463184/gov.uscourts.cand.463184.28.0.pdf\">according to court filings\u003c/a>. She reported it to X in an attempt to have it taken down.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/RobBontaTrumpGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12058864\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/RobBontaTrumpGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/RobBontaTrumpGetty-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/RobBontaTrumpGetty-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">California Attorney General Rob Bonta is briefed by members of his Civil Rights Enforcement Section on litigation challenging the Trump administration at his offices in downtown Los Angeles, California, on March 11, 2025. (Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The four plaintiffs are suing under pseudonyms. Musk is not named as a defendant. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Grok was integrated into X in December 2024, initially for premium subscribers, who could tag @grok in a post asking it to edit an image and get the result posted publicly in reply. Plaintiffs say users \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12069808/california-investigates-elon-musks-ai-company-after-avalanche-of-complaints-about-sexual-content\">quickly began prompting it\u003c/a> with instructions like “Remove her clothes.” A year later, in December 2025, image generation opened to all X users. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Plaintiffs’ lawyers say around that time, Grok began generating and disseminating hundreds of thousands of increasingly explicit images of women and minors. xAI restricted the feature again on Jan. 8.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Three plaintiffs who use X said they were harmed in the first five days of January, according to court filings. Ohio Doe posted a photo Jan. 1 and said Grok created and publicly posted at least six altered images of her over the next two days. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>New Jersey Doe posted a shirtless photo Jan. 4, and he discovered two altered images the following day. Each reported the images to X. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The fourth plaintiff, South Carolina Roe, is not alleged to be an X user. She was told on Feb. 26 that her father had been arrested on charges related to possession and distribution of child sexual abuse material, according to xAI’s motion. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The court records stated she alleged her father used Grok to alter images of her as a minor to make it appear they “had just consummated a sexual act.” The images were not shared on X. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>X has directed users to sue it in northern Texas since November 2024, a district that doesn’t include Bastrop, where the company is headquartered. Fort Worth’s small federal bench includes U.S. Judge Reed O’Connor, who has presided over two Musk-related suits and whose 2023 disclosure showed Tesla stock, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2024/10/16/g-s1-28620/texas-judge-elon-musk-x-case-tesla-shares\">NPR\u003c/a>; X didn’t answer requests for comment when asked why it chose those courts.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, said companies usually seek to file a case where their facilities are, he said, and X did not. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Basically they’re doing a form of judge shopping,” Goldman said. “They think that the judges in that particular district are more likely to go in their favor.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>xAI said the three X users clicked a “Got it” button on the update notice, twice each and kept using their accounts through June, which the terms treat as consent. It notes that three judges in this district have already enforced X’s Texas clause.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Attorneys from legal firm Berger Montague said the company failed to show that the plaintiffs agreed to the user terms, including revised terms changed in the middle of the lawsuit. They claimed xAI produced no screenshot of either sign-up screen and never specified which plaintiff saw which.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1980\" height=\"1320\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/GettyImages-2255688657.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12069820\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/GettyImages-2255688657.jpg 1980w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/GettyImages-2255688657-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/GettyImages-2255688657-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1980px) 100vw, 1980px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">An iPhone screen displays the Grok logo on the Grok AI app on Jan. 11, 2026. (Anna Barclay/Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They note New Jersey Doe created his account in March 2009, when the version of the terms then in effect contained no clause binding users to future revisions. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>While terms and agreements may seem like an innocuous thing for users to click through, Goldman said updating terms has become a major unresolved question in internet law.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Courts are “inconsistent on this issue,” he said. Whether users are bound to terms of service often turns on design, he said: “The details of how the user interface appears matter a ton.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The judge also rejected xAI’s motion to overturn an earlier order allowing the use of pseudonyms in the case. \u003ca href=\"https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.463184/gov.uscourts.cand.463184.57.0.pdf\">Two days \u003c/a>before the hearing, plaintiffs asked Pitts to close the courtroom for any argument that would reveal a plaintiff’s identity or discuss sealed exhibits.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“This case is not about just Grok or X as a tool, this is about the whole industry,” said Ahmed Banafa, an engineering professor at San José State University. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If the four plaintiffs win and force xAI to change its practices or its algorithm, he said, competitors will take notice: “It could be a landmark for the safety of AI.”\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#transcript\">View Full Episode Transcript\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>When people go to a magic show, they expect to be fooled. That’s part of the fun. And magician \u003ca href=\"https://www.joshuajay.com/\">Joshua Jay\u003c/a> says much of the magician’s work is helping people fool themselves. Our brains are hardwired to fill in gaps, predict outcomes, and take cognitive shortcuts to process the overwhelming amount of information around us. When interacting with AI chatbots, we may similarly fool ourselves into believing we’re interacting with a human. But unlike at a magic show, it’s not always clear when the trick is over. Plus: how AI is changing magic.\u003cbr>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"Transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Welcome to Life Automated, the show where we explore what it means to live, work, and make decisions in a rapidly automating world. I’m Jess Love. I’ve been known, in moments of excitement or confusion or overwhelm, to turn to a chatbot, just to share, “Hey, this is what I’m thinking I’ll do next. Here’s how I want to approach this situation.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’ll even occasionally return to provide an update. Maybe this isn’t ideal. I know how sycophantic chatbots can be, telling me how thoughtful and clever my plans are unless I sternly direct them to act like dream-crushing jerks. But I can’t deny that the experience is pleasant. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like if your diary could write back. And yes, on some level, I know this is a machine trained to keep me engaging with it, and yet don’t I still feel a little validated when that response comes back? A little heard? There is no precedent for this. In every other moment in history, feeling like you’re talking back and forth with a real person has meant you’re connecting with a real person, someone who understands you, someone offering you their finite attention.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And we’ve evolved to take pleasure in these interactions, to seek them out, because that’s kept our species connected and alive. But with chatbots, this ancient link between the appearance of a mind and an actual mind no longer holds, and it’s really hard to know what to make of that. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There are people who obsess over this gap between what we intellectually know to be true and what we experience as real. Only they’re not AI researchers — they’re magicians. Today’s conversation is with one of the finest. Joshua Jay has performed his sleight-of-hand magic all around the world, including on major talk shows and for US presidents, and he’s a total magic nerd, the author of several books about magic, including “How Magicians Think.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And he’s not gonna teach us about algorithms. Instead, he’ll teach us to see ourselves the way he sees us, as people whose attention can be commanded and redirected, whose memories can be shifted, and as active participants in our own deception. We also talk about the surprising ways that technology is changing magic.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>From Kellogg’s Ryan Institute on Complexity, this is Life Automated, distributed by KQED. Here’s my conversation with Joshua Jay. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And I think for a lot of people, sitting down in front of a chatbot for the first time, that was kind of the experience.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Magic. There was this thing, this machine doing something that we didn’t think that machines could do. It was interacting with us in real time, in our own language, in meaningful ways. So, I wanted to ask you, as an actual magician, somebody who thinks about how emotions like awe and surprise are created, what was your first experience using a chatbot like, and did it in any way feel like a magic trick?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yeah. It’s such a great question, and it’s such a relevant question for me as a magician because we are deliverers of certain emotion, which is what you’re talking about, this awe, this like I don’t even know how this is happening, but it’s happening anyway. You know, Teller said so beautifully that magic is the difference between what you see and what you know.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know, you’re having a conversation with this entity and you know it’s not a person, and yet you’re having this conversation. So, the crisis is always we are deliverers of this feeling of astonishment, and yet by virtue of the fact that we know how all of this is done, we often don’t get that sense of awe, and we don’t get amazed very often.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, the first time that I engaged with AI and was… You know, that first time you take the plunge and you’re just asking, you’re having a conversation with a thing, I was truly astonished. And I felt like, wow, this is probably what it feels like to watch a magic show and just be amazed at everything. And so yeah, I absolutely was totally and utterly amazed and felt like, as we call you guys, “laypeople”, I felt like a layperson. I felt like a muggle. And, it was really fantastic. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> You just brought up, Teller, of course, of the very famous duo ‘Penn & Teller’, and they have this trick. It’s kind of a classic trick where they’re moving balls in cups as magicians do. We call you guys- magicians, us muggles.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Only they use clear cups, so you can actually see what’s happening. And that really kind of reminds me of what you were just talking about, this idea of knowing without knowing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yeah. You know, I find myself thinking so often when I’m performing, like, you know, you do something, and hopefully somebody really likes it and they scream in all the right places.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But what I’m thinking most of the time is, “Oh, you guys aren’t even seeing the coolest part. If you could see how this works, you would be even more flipped out.” Because sometimes you’re fooled by something that’s so much simpler than you could expect. And very often, and this is such a beautiful topic that it’s its own deep dive- The magician doesn’t fool you; you fool yourself.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And there is a difference. You know, some things it is the magician. It’s sleight-of-hand. It’s a gizmo you couldn’t possibly anticipate, a technology you’re not aware of. But often, you fool yourself with assumptions you make and the psychology that’s being used on you. So, it is this really interesting thing that you bring up where as great as magic feels to a muggle, to a layperson, you don’t even see the best part often.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And, you know, you bring up this classic Penn and Teller piece, and they have many pieces like this, where they said, “We’re gonna do cups and balls,” but then in the middle of the trick, after they do a classic cups and balls with opaque cups and normal-sized balls, they do it again, but they do it with clear cups.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003cem>[Audio Clip from Penn & Teller playing in the background]\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>As it goes with breaking a few rules of magic. Now, the first rule of magic is you never do the same trick twice. So, we’re good. Second rule of magic is you never tell an audience how a trick is being done. So, we’re gonna tell you exactly how the trick is being done. The third rule of magic is you never let the audience see your secret preparation.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> And even though if you were to zoom in on the right part, you would see how it works, it’s really a lesson in misdirection because you’re looking at Teller as he’s throwing a ball to the audience, and you’re not watching Penn as he’s placing the cups back down. And in this beautiful chaos of choreography, the lesson, the sort of aesthetic beauty of it, is you’re seeing how it’s done, but you really aren’t seeing how it’s done at all.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> This trick is the ultimate flex. I watched it on YouTube after my conversation with Joshua Jay multiple times.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Eventually, I did see the key move, Teller placing the right ball exactly where it needed to be to make the trick work, in full view of the audience. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003cem>[Audio Clip from Penn & Teller playing in the background]\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Place it on our hand and show it. Take a third and final ball, pretend to place it in our hand. Pretend to show the cup. We place it in the cup. Then secretly reveal it. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> How did I miss it so many times? How did I see without seeing? It really drove home how easily we can be led to believe something false, even when the truth is right in front of us.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003cem>[Audio Clip from Penn & Teller playing in the background]\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>…The finish. It’s an American baseball right there. That’s the Penn and Teller Cups and Balls. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Think about this in terms of interacting with a chatbot. It’s like we know that they are machines. We know that we are actively being fooled in some way, and yet we might still feel understood, affirmed, cared for. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> You know, the implicit agreement when you see a magic show is you’re saying when you sit down to watch, I know you’re going to try to fool me and I want to be fooled, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, you know that there is a deception at hand. You know that there’s going to be things that hopefully if they do their job, the magician does that you will not understand how it works. And I think that the uncomfortability comes in real life in that sometimes there’s not that implicit handshake going on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Look, in a magic show, you’re fooled. There’s no way around it. People don’t like that word. Some people do like that word, but call it whatever you like. We can’t soften it. You’re going to be fooled. You’re going to see something you don’t understand and you’re not supposed to understand it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But that’s what’s beautiful about it is that’s out in the open. That is made explicit. Whereas with some aspects of AI, with some aspects of technology in general, we don’t know where the human element ends and where the AI begins. And that can be really unsettling for people because they may not feel like, hey, look, when I started this conversation, I didn’t know I wasn’t talking to a human, you know.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Of course, none of this “being fooled” is by accident. Chatbots are generally designed to mimic humans. They refer to themselves in the first person as I or me. They act interested in what we’re saying, asking questions to nudge the conversation forward, and they learn about us, first through extensive training on human language and behavior, and then increasingly through interactions with us, adapting to our personal preferences and detecting our mood shifts in real time.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This learning to read human beings, that’s something magicians do too. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> I say that you’re always watching the magician and that’s how you think of a magic show, but we’re watching you too. And that little shift in perspective is something I don’t think most people think about. You know, during my opening trick, which has been the same for years now, and I can do it, you know, sort of on autopilot.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I don’t have to think very deeply. It helps me establish my rhythm. But in my head, what I’m doing is I am plotting the rest of the show based on the hand I’m dealt. Ooh, these people in the back left have a lot of sight line issues. I’m gonna really need to connect with them to make sure they can see and do that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Or, you know all the waiters are opening this kitchen door in the back of the theater that’s making it really noisy, and so these people are gonna need to be babysat a little more to make sure they’re super engaged. In magic what I’m looking for on stage is somebody who is not going to be afraid.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so, the first thing I look for before anything else is I’m looking for somebody who is exuding confidence. And a big indicator of confidence is eye contact. You know, it’s so crazy when I say like, “I need someone to help with this next thing,” there are just so many people in an audience who immediately think if they don’t look at me, then somehow, I won’t pick them. And it’s really pronounced when you’re like, as a magician, looking in the audience as you walk through an aisle, left and right. You just see people just totally thinking that they won’t be seen if they’re not… And I’m like, “I can see you even though you’re not looking at me.” But really, you’re looking for somebody who’s got great eye contact and who looks like they’re enjoying the show. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And there’s usually like a little test. So, if I can narrow it down to two or three people who I think, “Oh, this person would be just great on stage,” I might say- “Welcome to the show.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I won’t invite them. I might say, “Welcome to the show, sir. Where are you from?” “I’m from Canton, Ohio.” “Okay. And, what’s this? Why are you, traveling with a suitcase to a magic show?” You know. And if they’re stiff, if they’re giving one-word answers, if they’re sort of like a deer in headlights, maybe I can say, “Well, thanks for coming.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I appreciate you being here. And what about you? What’s your story? Who are you here with?” Right? And you’re just looking for somebody to be like, “Well, I wasn’t even supposed to be here tonight, but my friend Janie, she dragged me to the show and now I’m so glad I came.” Well, there’s a chatty person. That sounds fun. So, I might use that person. And similarly, if I need somebody who is a little bit more submissive in the sense that they’re gonna follow my directions and not give me a hard time-… if I say, “Hold out both hands like this. Put one coin in this hand, one coin…” I don’t want that person switching hands with the coins or you know, when I turn around- trying to throw me off. So, in that case, you might do just the opposite. You might choose somebody who is a little afraid. Sounds a little dark, but maybe you do want somebody who’s a little more easily intimidated so that they will follow your directions exactly as you lay them out and not give you a hard time.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, each trick I have kind of the archetype of what I’m looking for and what would be best, and I’m gonna try and fit that puzzle piece with the piece that fits in the gap there. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Josh says that this notion of reading people correctly, it can be pretty high stakes. These are dynamic encounters that go in very different directions depending on just what kind of energy you’re getting back.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> I was doing a show a few months ago, I thought I picked the perfect person. There was a woman, who was just giving great eye contact. She looked to be having a blast. She was even a little bit chatty, which I think in the end was what did me in. You know, she just seemed so confident and comfortable on stage, and it was a big crowd. It was more than 1,000 people. So, I thought she’s gonna be perfect. I noted it, and at the right moment, invited her on stage. What I didn’t realize until she came up was, she was loaded drunk. I mean, she was so drunk she could not follow basic instructions. She couldn’t stop talking. She was disruptive. And in the beginning, that’s funny, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I’m not a comedy magician, so my purpose isn’t just to make people laugh. It’s to show them, I hope, things that are truly amazing, and if they laugh along the way- awesome. So okay immediately I have to reassess and go, we can make some comedy out of this, but the magic is gonna suffer if she can’t be quiet and follow directions and help us navigate to this amazing moment that’s coming up.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Right. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> And she couldn’t. Right? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Oh!\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> She couldn’t. And so, you try and limp to the close and just think, “Next time I won’t make this mistake.” But in this case, I had to do the rarest thing of all, which is dismiss somebody. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Oh, my goodness! \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> And you just say, “Do me a favor, grab your seat and I need you to come up now.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I actually had to do the switch mid-trick, which I very rarely, I can’t remember the last time, I picked someone so wrong that I had to recalibrate like that. But you know, this is what happens when you are on the road 300 days a year. You’re gonna have nightmare nights at the office. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> So, when I hear this, I think, you know, the exception is what proves the rule. You know, the fact that this happens so rarely suggests that you are quite good at reading the room and reading people in ways that they I mean, yeah, I guess somebody who’s had a dozen cocktails probably knows that they’re going to embarrass themselves on stage. But for the most part, you’re picking up on tells that people might not even be aware that they have.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I guess I’m harping on this because when I think about machines that aren’t just reading our posture or looking for eye contact or are looking at, you know, beginning the data collection process the second we walk into the room. They learn about us for months, years and they’re able to gather a wide range of data about us.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so, I start wondering, you know, what that starts to look like and I would ask you, are we more manipulable than we realize? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yes, emphatically yes. I think that there are so many insights that are so scary to a magician when you start applying it to real life. Like, there are so many- One of the basic tenets of magic is that if you tell an audience something, it is a tenth as effective if you can find a way to let that audience tell themselves, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So let me give you an example. If I come out, this is like a classic amateur magician’s move. If I come out and I say, “Ladies and gentlemen, a regular deck of cards,” that is wrong for every possible reason. Because if I just said, “Do me a favor, give these a shuffle, and then I want you to take one out that you like and write your name on it.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You will never in that interaction question the deck of cards because it’s a deck of cards. I’m handling it like you would handle a deck of cards if you handed it to a friend between rounds of dealing poker, right? Take the deck of cards, shuffle it up, take a card out. You would never think, “Are there 52 in there? Are they all the same shape? Is one shorter than another one? Is there more than one ace of spades in that deck?” You would never ask those questions because I’ve presented it in a casual manner, and I’ve given you a task. But the minute you say, “Ladies and gentlemen, a regulation pack of cards,” instantly you go, “Well, is it?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Well, I didn’t see it. Can I see it? Do you mind if I shuffle? Can I count those cards? Can I hold them up to a light? Can I shuffle and make sure they’re all the same thickness,” right? But if I give you the deck and I say, “Shuffle them up and take out any one that you like,” I’m letting you tell yourself it’s a regular deck because you put your fingers on it, you shuffle it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Now, you may be shuffling a deck that’s got all sorts of quirky, subtle things wrong with it, but you will be telling yourself it’s a normal deck because it feels right. When I look through to take out a card, nothing looked out of place. And now you’re telling yourself, and that’s a much more effective way to deceive somebody because you’re telling yourself.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Josh says that the best magicians don’t just shape how people experience something in the moment. They can also change what we later remember about a moment. For instance, a magician might appear to drop a coin, and then somehow it vanishes. Cool trick. But the magician doesn’t stop there. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> And if a minute later I say, “And you watched that coin as it fell from my hand and disintegrated in midair,” well, that’s a really great word, disintegrated, right? And it colors your memory. Maybe I refer to it two or three more times in the show, “And then it just disappeared, and it disintegrated, and when it got to my knee level, it just turned to dust.” And you can have people leaving swearing that they saw a coin vanish down here. And that’s the next frontier of magic is really manipulating memories.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> If you were a less ethical person, do you think you could get people to do things against their will? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> I mean… I think that the overarching lesson that I’ve, that I’m continually shocked about in magic in this regard is how easily people can be duped into believing things. I mean, it’s so crazy to me that, you know, I do a magic show that is meant to amaze and delight, but in no way is it meant to skirt the line of reality and make people actually believe. You know, there are performers like David Blaine, Uri Geller, and Oz Pearlman, who, you know, people see those performers and sort of go, “So wait, is that a trick or is that person really doing that?” And I don’t have that kind of approach, and still, not sometimes, very often people come up to me after shows and they’ll say really touching but misguided things like, “Hey, can you give me advice on this job I’m about to take? Cause I, you know, that trick you did where you were able to predict the future, I’m just wondering if you…” You know, you just wanna pull them aside and say, “This is pure entertainment. Like, I can’t give you life advice like that. I can’t actually see the future. This is fun.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“But you got my passcode off my phone. I’ve never told anybody that in my life.” “Yes, that’s a trick. I predicted your passcode.” Right. “Well, if you can tell my passcode, can you just tell me just a little advice? Should I take this job and move to Phoenix or not?” And it’s like, you know, you see that with certain people, they’re looking for an excuse to believe. They’re looking for it, and the more you say it’s not real, the more they want to believe it is real, and that’s scary stuff.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> My takeaway so far in this conversation, buckle up. We better hope for a rapid learning curve as we adjust to life alongside artificial intelligences that feel real, that have been designed to seem real, but simply aren’t. My worry is that knowing we’re talking to a machine won’t ever be enough. Just like Teller’s baseball, even those rare occasions where we can see what’s happening under the hood won’t stop the illusion, because we want to believe the illusion. Because the illusion doesn’t just come from the machine, it comes from us. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>These are early innings. I’ll be very curious about how these chatbots change over time and the many ways they are welcomed or inserted into our lives. After the break, a pivot. I ask my guests, how is technology changing magic? And if you’re thinking, “Not that much,” you would be wrong.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That’s after the break.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>You might think that sleight of hand magic hasn’t changed much over the decades. A card trick, cups and balls, these are all pretty analog. Automation shouldn’t have too much of an impact. But the truth is, all performances are interactions between performer and audience. So even when technology doesn’t change the performer, it changes the audience.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Technology has always had an uneasy relationship to magic, and there are all sorts of tricks that we can’t do anymore for the simple reason that what even 20 years ago people would have gone, “That is the most amazing thing I could imagine you doing.” Now we would go, “Oh, we have an app for that.” I mean, there’s like a great trick where you predict a song that’s playing, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And now you couldn’t do that trick cause people would go, “Yes, it’s an app. I had it 15 years ago. It’s called Shazam. You press this button and three seconds later it tells you the album and the song and the link to listen to it.” Like, all the tricks along that genre, they’re just out. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> You told this story about doing one of your famous dollar bill tricks for somebody, and then they immediately took out their phone and they Googled, you know, how did Josh Jay do this dollar bill trick?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then they, like, just played the video in front of everybody, and you said it was not a great moment. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Right. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> How do you deal with that? How do you deal with the fact that the answers so many of these tricks, the ability to watch it again and again and again from any angle that someone might have captured, are available to everybody at every moment?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Well, you’ve hit upon, you know, a really important and sort of topical crisis in our industry, which is that a lot of people are going on YouTube and doing tutorials of tricks that don’t belong to them and classic tricks and really good tricks. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> The particular dollar bill trick that got Josh is one of those classics that people can now look up on YouTube.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Josh sees two strategies that magicians can use to get around this problem. The first being to avoid the classics altogether. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> But if you’re doing a trick that thousands of other magicians are doing, you’re at great risk that that trick will be searchable and, you know, easily found online. Whereas if I’m doing something totally original, good luck searching for it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You’re not gonna find that trick because I created that trick and it’s not published and it’s not anywhere to be found in a searchable way. So that’s one way. Another way is magicians have to get really clever at disguising what it looks like. They have to mesh together several methods and several tricks so that somebody looks at it and goes, “You know, I don’t know. He borrowed my house key, and then he bent it, and then it vanished- … and it appeared in a lock across the room.” You know, that’s not a searchable term, whereas changing a $1 bill into $100 bill is easily searchable. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> And yeah, so at the same time as it is making a lot of parts of your life as a magician more difficult, it also might be raising the rewards to true novelty and creativity and innovation.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> That’s how I’m choosing to look at it, and maybe I’m, like, choosing to look at it with rose-tinted glasses because I like that process. But, you know, in my head, the healthiest magic community in the world is one in which everybody’s doing their own material. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know, we don’t give much attention to bands that only play covers. They play in bars for 30 people. If you write your own music and you become successful at that, you can tour arenas and have a career that is way more outsized than a cover band ever could. We don’t reward comedians who just repeat the jokes of, you know, a smorgasbord of all their favorite comedians. We reward people who come up with original monologues, and we can’t wait to hear the latest Chappelle or Nate Bargatze or Seinfeld hour because we know it’s gonna be their point of view. So, my ultimate ideal in magic, it would be, you know, all magicians doing their own stuff. Now, magic has developed at a much slower pace than comedy and even songwriting.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I mean, it takes years to perfect a really great magic trick. So that’s a high bar indeed, but my hope is that this negative will end up being a positive and that magicians will take a cue from this and start really obscuring what they’re doing in such a way that it’s either mostly original or completely original.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> So, technology is changing magic, but Josh says it won’t be taking over anytime soon. For instance, most magicians who choose to use AI are using it to help them tweak their script a bit, not to design tricks wholesale. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> AI can help you find a moment in history that you would have never turned up that’s the perfect way to theatrically get into a trick on coincidence or a trick on transformation, and now you’ve given it this great context about this amazing thing that happened in Victorian England. And, you know, that’s, I think, a way that AI is really gonna help performers because like so many things, we don’t want AI to dehumanize magic. Magic will be one of the great things left when AI is fully integrated into everything else that people will go to for a truly human experience. I mean, what besides eating and watching movies will be left that isn’t entirely, you know, affected by AI?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Let’s talk about this. You describe the period from the 1870s to the 1930s as the “Golden Age of Magic”. Yeah. Could we, you know, see a resurgence to a new Golden Age of Magic? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of evidence to say that in a sense we are in another golden age. I mean, take some metrics. Because of TikTok and Instagram and just magic being online generally, and add to that the fact that America’s Got Talent and Fool Us are putting magic in front of millions of people in their homes that didn’t used to be there- More people are watching magic than have ever watched it in history.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Fact. Not, and it’s not close. It’s not like marginally more. Like, exponentially more people are watching magic than ever have. Another objective fact is that there are now more venues to perform magic than there have ever been at any point in my life or in the previous 50 years. So, I also have emprivated data because I co-own, a magic shop called Vanishing Inc., where we sell magic and we publish books, and I can tell you that we are selling to a larger group of people than magic shops used to sell to. They used to be quite localized, and thanks to the internet, we can now sell all over the world. And the industry itself is growing. You can just feel that there are more people interested in magic every day and not less. So, in those regards, anecdotally, I would say to you, we might be in a golden age and not know it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> You describe magic as being a product of its time, and you give this great example of the famous trick of sawing a woman in half being the perfect trick when it emerged after World War I. All of a sudden it was hitting an audience that was maybe a little bit more desensitized to violence, more open to women, playing different roles in society, including one where presumably they get chopped in half. And I wanna ask you, what would be the perfect trick for 2026? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Oh. Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, that’s a really tough question. I mean, I would say to zoom out for a second and buy myself a minute to think, I would say that the greatest magic trick, and not just in 2026, ever, is always the trick that is perfect for the situation you’re in at that moment, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So I talk in the book, you might remember, about the ham sandwich theory, and for those readers who haven’t read my book, like, this is such a great illustration of what magic can be at its ultimate fullest expression, which is that if I reach up behind your ear right now, Jessica, and pull out a ham sandwich from nowhere, and you don’t know how it’s done, you’re gonna look at me and go, “That was random,” because it is.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s totally random. It’s not interesting. It’s not logical. I just pulled a ham sandwich out. It’s arbitrary. But if instead you said to me, “Gosh, Josh, I am starving. I’m just… I’m really in the mood for a ham sandwich. Is that weird to say?” And I then went, “Oh, yeah?” And now I pull a ham sandwich out of your ear- \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I have fulfilled a need. I have responded to a need you created, and now that magic is everything to you. It’s personal. It felt directly tailored to something you had. It fulfilled a need, hunger that you were feeling at that moment. So, whatever the answer is to your question, it would have to be something that’s specific to an audience in 2026.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> I want to push Josh here. What does the perfect trick look like in 2026 with technology constantly shifting the boundaries between that’s awesome and yeah, that’s an app? What happens to an art form so cognizant of the limits of human cognition when everyone carries around a device that seems to know everything and never forget?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Well, maybe it calls attention to that very device. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> I always see things through the lens of what I’m working on, and I’m working on a trick where we turn off all the lights in the theater, which is instantly and immediately fascinating to me because it gets to be this change of scenery, right? And I have everybody take out their cell phones and put their light on. So, you get that little concert vibe going where they’re moving their light around, and it looks like twinkling stars in this huge theater, right? And all these people are here. And I’m working on a trick where they are whittled down. So, through a series of choices that the audience makes, I would say, “Okay, if you were born in September, stay standing with your light on. Everybody else sit down, turn your phone off.” And it goes from 1,000 lights to… 30 lights. And you whittle them down all the way until you get one person with a light, and then you predict that person’s phone number, which is the thing that they’re holding- the whole time, and you’re right there, and how could you have known it would be them, and the choices that were made.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then the very light they’re holding has the phone number, and that’s what I’m working on, and that’s what I’ll call the ultimate trick in 2026 cause I haven’t fully figured out how I’m doing it yet. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Oh my gosh. Well, I just love hearing you talk about this knowing that you don’t even fully know how you’re going to do it yet.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yeah. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Like, it seems like as a creator, you think about how do I want the audience to feel, what should they be paying attention to, what should they be thinking about, and then eventually you get back to the mechanism of how you pull this all off. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yes. It’s exactly that. And that was a really important shift for me is not to become obsessed with method, not to get bogged down by well, that would be great, but I don’t know how to do it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think that all my best things have come out of me sort of going I’m not gonna think about how this could be done. I just wanna play out in my mind what it would look like if I could do it. And then I need to figure out a way to do it. And, you know, you fall on your face a lot, and you realize, like, well, I can’t do that, but I could do this.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And you might fall short of the ideal, but at least you’re thinking… in the minds of the audience, and I think that’s a really good place to start. You know, empathy is a really important tool for a magician, and I imagine it’s probably a huge focus of everybody who’s helping to design AI is to think empathically, to think like your audience.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know, the first thing you have to do as a magician is get out of your own head and to try to get into the head of the people you’re performing for. What do they wanna see? What would they think if you did this? How would they react if you did this?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Empathy as one of the ultimate superpowers? Yeah, I buy that. Human creators of all stripes have long recognized its power. Magicians like Joshua Jay rely on empathy to create experiences that delight, and stun, and fill a need. Engineers rely on empathy to imagine how users will engage with confusing or intimidating tools.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What’s different is that now we have machines that empathize, too, or at least convincingly perform empathy. Which brings us right back to where we started, me going to my chatbot three days later to report back on how that email landed, the email we carefully crafted together. As that line between what we perceive to be reality versus magic continues to blur before our eyes, I’m glad to have the occasional magician as a tour guide.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m Jess Love. Life, Automated is a project of the Ryan Institute on Complexity at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. We’re distributed by KQED. Our show was produced by Jesse Dukes. Music by Stephen Jackson. Recording help from Will Feeney, George Christensen, and Leila Mohammed. Administrative support, recording, and wise counsel from Stacia Sliger.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>When people go to a magic show, they expect to be fooled. That’s part of the fun. And magician \u003ca href=\"https://www.joshuajay.com/\">Joshua Jay\u003c/a> says much of the magician’s work is helping people fool themselves. Our brains are hardwired to fill in gaps, predict outcomes, and take cognitive shortcuts to process the overwhelming amount of information around us. When interacting with AI chatbots, we may similarly fool ourselves into believing we’re interacting with a human. But unlike at a magic show, it’s not always clear when the trick is over. Plus: how AI is changing magic.\u003cbr>\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Welcome to Life Automated, the show where we explore what it means to live, work, and make decisions in a rapidly automating world. I’m Jess Love. I’ve been known, in moments of excitement or confusion or overwhelm, to turn to a chatbot, just to share, “Hey, this is what I’m thinking I’ll do next. Here’s how I want to approach this situation.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Welcome to Life Automated, the show where we explore what it means to live, work, and make decisions in a rapidly automating world. I’m Jess Love. I’ve been known, in moments of excitement or confusion or overwhelm, to turn to a chatbot, just to share, “Hey, this is what I’m thinking I’ll do next. Here’s how I want to approach this situation.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I’ll even occasionally return to provide an update. Maybe this isn’t ideal. I know how sycophantic chatbots can be, telling me how thoughtful and clever my plans are unless I sternly direct them to act like dream-crushing jerks. But I can’t deny that the experience is pleasant. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I’ll even occasionally return to provide an update. Maybe this isn’t ideal. I know how sycophantic chatbots can be, telling me how thoughtful and clever my plans are unless I sternly direct them to act like dream-crushing jerks. But I can’t deny that the experience is pleasant. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Like if your diary could write back. And yes, on some level, I know this is a machine trained to keep me engaging with it, and yet don’t I still feel a little validated when that response comes back? A little heard? There is no precedent for this. In every other moment in history, feeling like you’re talking back and forth with a real person has meant you’re connecting with a real person, someone who understands you, someone offering you their finite attention.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Like if your diary could write back. And yes, on some level, I know this is a machine trained to keep me engaging with it, and yet don’t I still feel a little validated when that response comes back? A little heard? There is no precedent for this. In every other moment in history, feeling like you’re talking back and forth with a real person has meant you’re connecting with a real person, someone who understands you, someone offering you their finite attention.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And we’ve evolved to take pleasure in these interactions, to seek them out, because that’s kept our species connected and alive. But with chatbots, this ancient link between the appearance of a mind and an actual mind no longer holds, and it’s really hard to know what to make of that. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And we’ve evolved to take pleasure in these interactions, to seek them out, because that’s kept our species connected and alive. But with chatbots, this ancient link between the appearance of a mind and an actual mind no longer holds, and it’s really hard to know what to make of that. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There are people who obsess over this gap between what we intellectually know to be true and what we experience as real. Only they’re not AI researchers — they’re magicians. Today’s conversation is with one of the finest. Joshua Jay has performed his sleight-of-hand magic all around the world, including on major talk shows and for US presidents, and he’s a total magic nerd, the author of several books about magic, including “How Magicians Think.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>There are people who obsess over this gap between what we intellectually know to be true and what we experience as real. Only they’re not AI researchers — they’re magicians. Today’s conversation is with one of the finest. Joshua Jay has performed his sleight-of-hand magic all around the world, including on major talk shows and for US presidents, and he’s a total magic nerd, the author of several books about magic, including “How Magicians Think.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And he’s not gonna teach us about algorithms. Instead, he’ll teach us to see ourselves the way he sees us, as people whose attention can be commanded and redirected, whose memories can be shifted, and as active participants in our own deception. We also talk about the surprising ways that technology is changing magic.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And he’s not gonna teach us about algorithms. Instead, he’ll teach us to see ourselves the way he sees us, as people whose attention can be commanded and redirected, whose memories can be shifted, and as active participants in our own deception. We also talk about the surprising ways that technology is changing magic.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>From Kellogg’s Ryan Institute on Complexity, this is Life Automated, distributed by KQED. Here’s my conversation with Joshua Jay. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And I think for a lot of people, sitting down in front of a chatbot for the first time, that was kind of the experience.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And I think for a lot of people, sitting down in front of a chatbot for the first time, that was kind of the experience.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Magic. There was this thing, this machine doing something that we didn’t think that machines could do. It was interacting with us in real time, in our own language, in meaningful ways. So, I wanted to ask you, as an actual magician, somebody who thinks about how emotions like awe and surprise are created, what was your first experience using a chatbot like, and did it in any way feel like a magic trick?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yeah. It’s such a great question, and it’s such a relevant question for me as a magician because we are deliverers of certain emotion, which is what you’re talking about, this awe, this like I don’t even know how this is happening, but it’s happening anyway. You know, Teller said so beautifully that magic is the difference between what you see and what you know.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yeah. It’s such a great question, and it’s such a relevant question for me as a magician because we are deliverers of certain emotion, which is what you’re talking about, this awe, this like I don’t even know how this is happening, but it’s happening anyway. You know, Teller said so beautifully that magic is the difference between what you see and what you know.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You know, you’re having a conversation with this entity and you know it’s not a person, and yet you’re having this conversation. So, the crisis is always we are deliverers of this feeling of astonishment, and yet by virtue of the fact that we know how all of this is done, we often don’t get that sense of awe, and we don’t get amazed very often.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So, the first time that I engaged with AI and was… You know, that first time you take the plunge and you’re just asking, you’re having a conversation with a thing, I was truly astonished. And I felt like, wow, this is probably what it feels like to watch a magic show and just be amazed at everything. And so yeah, I absolutely was totally and utterly amazed and felt like, as we call you guys, “laypeople”, I felt like a layperson. I felt like a muggle. And, it was really fantastic. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So, the first time that I engaged with AI and was… You know, that first time you take the plunge and you’re just asking, you’re having a conversation with a thing, I was truly astonished. And I felt like, wow, this is probably what it feels like to watch a magic show and just be amazed at everything. And so yeah, I absolutely was totally and utterly amazed and felt like, as we call you guys, “laypeople”, I felt like a layperson. I felt like a muggle. And, it was really fantastic. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> You just brought up, Teller, of course, of the very famous duo ‘Penn & Teller’, and they have this trick. It’s kind of a classic trick where they’re moving balls in cups as magicians do. We call you guys- magicians, us muggles.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> You just brought up, Teller, of course, of the very famous duo ‘Penn & Teller’, and they have this trick. It’s kind of a classic trick where they’re moving balls in cups as magicians do. We call you guys- magicians, us muggles.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Only they use clear cups, so you can actually see what’s happening. And that really kind of reminds me of what you were just talking about, this idea of knowing without knowing. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yeah. You know, I find myself thinking so often when I’m performing, like, you know, you do something, and hopefully somebody really likes it and they scream in all the right places.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yeah. You know, I find myself thinking so often when I’m performing, like, you know, you do something, and hopefully somebody really likes it and they scream in all the right places.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But what I’m thinking most of the time is, “Oh, you guys aren’t even seeing the coolest part. If you could see how this works, you would be even more flipped out.” Because sometimes you’re fooled by something that’s so much simpler than you could expect. And very often, and this is such a beautiful topic that it’s its own deep dive- The magician doesn’t fool you; you fool yourself.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But what I’m thinking most of the time is, “Oh, you guys aren’t even seeing the coolest part. If you could see how this works, you would be even more flipped out.” Because sometimes you’re fooled by something that’s so much simpler than you could expect. And very often, and this is such a beautiful topic that it’s its own deep dive- The magician doesn’t fool you; you fool yourself.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And there is a difference. You know, some things it is the magician. It’s sleight-of-hand. It’s a gizmo you couldn’t possibly anticipate, a technology you’re not aware of. But often, you fool yourself with assumptions you make and the psychology that’s being used on you. So, it is this really interesting thing that you bring up where as great as magic feels to a muggle, to a layperson, you don’t even see the best part often.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And there is a difference. You know, some things it is the magician. It’s sleight-of-hand. It’s a gizmo you couldn’t possibly anticipate, a technology you’re not aware of. But often, you fool yourself with assumptions you make and the psychology that’s being used on you. So, it is this really interesting thing that you bring up where as great as magic feels to a muggle, to a layperson, you don’t even see the best part often.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And, you know, you bring up this classic Penn and Teller piece, and they have many pieces like this, where they said, “We’re gonna do cups and balls,” but then in the middle of the trick, after they do a classic cups and balls with opaque cups and normal-sized balls, they do it again, but they do it with clear cups.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>As it goes with breaking a few rules of magic. Now, the first rule of magic is you never do the same trick twice. So, we’re good. Second rule of magic is you never tell an audience how a trick is being done. So, we’re gonna tell you exactly how the trick is being done. The third rule of magic is you never let the audience see your secret preparation.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> And even though if you were to zoom in on the right part, you would see how it works, it’s really a lesson in misdirection because you’re looking at Teller as he’s throwing a ball to the audience, and you’re not watching Penn as he’s placing the cups back down. And in this beautiful chaos of choreography, the lesson, the sort of aesthetic beauty of it, is you’re seeing how it’s done, but you really aren’t seeing how it’s done at all.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> And even though if you were to zoom in on the right part, you would see how it works, it’s really a lesson in misdirection because you’re looking at Teller as he’s throwing a ball to the audience, and you’re not watching Penn as he’s placing the cups back down. And in this beautiful chaos of choreography, the lesson, the sort of aesthetic beauty of it, is you’re seeing how it’s done, but you really aren’t seeing how it’s done at all.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> This trick is the ultimate flex. I watched it on YouTube after my conversation with Joshua Jay multiple times.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> This trick is the ultimate flex. I watched it on YouTube after my conversation with Joshua Jay multiple times.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Eventually, I did see the key move, Teller placing the right ball exactly where it needed to be to make the trick work, in full view of the audience. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Place it on our hand and show it. Take a third and final ball, pretend to place it in our hand. Pretend to show the cup. We place it in the cup. Then secretly reveal it. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> How did I miss it so many times? How did I see without seeing? It really drove home how easily we can be led to believe something false, even when the truth is right in front of us.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> How did I miss it so many times? How did I see without seeing? It really drove home how easily we can be led to believe something false, even when the truth is right in front of us.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>…The finish. It’s an American baseball right there. That’s the Penn and Teller Cups and Balls. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cem>…The finish. It’s an American baseball right there. That’s the Penn and Teller Cups and Balls. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Think about this in terms of interacting with a chatbot. It’s like we know that they are machines. We know that we are actively being fooled in some way, and yet we might still feel understood, affirmed, cared for. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Think about this in terms of interacting with a chatbot. It’s like we know that they are machines. We know that we are actively being fooled in some way, and yet we might still feel understood, affirmed, cared for. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> You know, the implicit agreement when you see a magic show is you’re saying when you sit down to watch, I know you’re going to try to fool me and I want to be fooled, right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> You know, the implicit agreement when you see a magic show is you’re saying when you sit down to watch, I know you’re going to try to fool me and I want to be fooled, right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So, you know that there is a deception at hand. You know that there’s going to be things that hopefully if they do their job, the magician does that you will not understand how it works. And I think that the uncomfortability comes in real life in that sometimes there’s not that implicit handshake going on.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So, you know that there is a deception at hand. You know that there’s going to be things that hopefully if they do their job, the magician does that you will not understand how it works. And I think that the uncomfortability comes in real life in that sometimes there’s not that implicit handshake going on.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Look, in a magic show, you’re fooled. There’s no way around it. People don’t like that word. Some people do like that word, but call it whatever you like. We can’t soften it. You’re going to be fooled. You’re going to see something you don’t understand and you’re not supposed to understand it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Look, in a magic show, you’re fooled. There’s no way around it. People don’t like that word. Some people do like that word, but call it whatever you like. We can’t soften it. You’re going to be fooled. You’re going to see something you don’t understand and you’re not supposed to understand it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But that’s what’s beautiful about it is that’s out in the open. That is made explicit. Whereas with some aspects of AI, with some aspects of technology in general, we don’t know where the human element ends and where the AI begins. And that can be really unsettling for people because they may not feel like, hey, look, when I started this conversation, I didn’t know I wasn’t talking to a human, you know.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But that’s what’s beautiful about it is that’s out in the open. That is made explicit. Whereas with some aspects of AI, with some aspects of technology in general, we don’t know where the human element ends and where the AI begins. And that can be really unsettling for people because they may not feel like, hey, look, when I started this conversation, I didn’t know I wasn’t talking to a human, you know.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Of course, none of this “being fooled” is by accident. Chatbots are generally designed to mimic humans. They refer to themselves in the first person as I or me. They act interested in what we’re saying, asking questions to nudge the conversation forward, and they learn about us, first through extensive training on human language and behavior, and then increasingly through interactions with us, adapting to our personal preferences and detecting our mood shifts in real time.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Of course, none of this “being fooled” is by accident. Chatbots are generally designed to mimic humans. They refer to themselves in the first person as I or me. They act interested in what we’re saying, asking questions to nudge the conversation forward, and they learn about us, first through extensive training on human language and behavior, and then increasingly through interactions with us, adapting to our personal preferences and detecting our mood shifts in real time.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This learning to read human beings, that’s something magicians do too. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>This learning to read human beings, that’s something magicians do too. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> I say that you’re always watching the magician and that’s how you think of a magic show, but we’re watching you too. And that little shift in perspective is something I don’t think most people think about. You know, during my opening trick, which has been the same for years now, and I can do it, you know, sort of on autopilot.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> I say that you’re always watching the magician and that’s how you think of a magic show, but we’re watching you too. And that little shift in perspective is something I don’t think most people think about. You know, during my opening trick, which has been the same for years now, and I can do it, you know, sort of on autopilot.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I don’t have to think very deeply. It helps me establish my rhythm. But in my head, what I’m doing is I am plotting the rest of the show based on the hand I’m dealt. Ooh, these people in the back left have a lot of sight line issues. I’m gonna really need to connect with them to make sure they can see and do that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I don’t have to think very deeply. It helps me establish my rhythm. But in my head, what I’m doing is I am plotting the rest of the show based on the hand I’m dealt. Ooh, these people in the back left have a lot of sight line issues. I’m gonna really need to connect with them to make sure they can see and do that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Or, you know all the waiters are opening this kitchen door in the back of the theater that’s making it really noisy, and so these people are gonna need to be babysat a little more to make sure they’re super engaged. In magic what I’m looking for on stage is somebody who is not going to be afraid.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Or, you know all the waiters are opening this kitchen door in the back of the theater that’s making it really noisy, and so these people are gonna need to be babysat a little more to make sure they’re super engaged. In magic what I’m looking for on stage is somebody who is not going to be afraid.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so, the first thing I look for before anything else is I’m looking for somebody who is exuding confidence. And a big indicator of confidence is eye contact. You know, it’s so crazy when I say like, “I need someone to help with this next thing,” there are just so many people in an audience who immediately think if they don’t look at me, then somehow, I won’t pick them. And it’s really pronounced when you’re like, as a magician, looking in the audience as you walk through an aisle, left and right. You just see people just totally thinking that they won’t be seen if they’re not… And I’m like, “I can see you even though you’re not looking at me.” But really, you’re looking for somebody who’s got great eye contact and who looks like they’re enjoying the show. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so, the first thing I look for before anything else is I’m looking for somebody who is exuding confidence. And a big indicator of confidence is eye contact. You know, it’s so crazy when I say like, “I need someone to help with this next thing,” there are just so many people in an audience who immediately think if they don’t look at me, then somehow, I won’t pick them. And it’s really pronounced when you’re like, as a magician, looking in the audience as you walk through an aisle, left and right. You just see people just totally thinking that they won’t be seen if they’re not… And I’m like, “I can see you even though you’re not looking at me.” But really, you’re looking for somebody who’s got great eye contact and who looks like they’re enjoying the show. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And there’s usually like a little test. So, if I can narrow it down to two or three people who I think, “Oh, this person would be just great on stage,” I might say- “Welcome to the show.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And there’s usually like a little test. So, if I can narrow it down to two or three people who I think, “Oh, this person would be just great on stage,” I might say- “Welcome to the show.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I won’t invite them. I might say, “Welcome to the show, sir. Where are you from?” “I’m from Canton, Ohio.” “Okay. And, what’s this? Why are you, traveling with a suitcase to a magic show?” You know. And if they’re stiff, if they’re giving one-word answers, if they’re sort of like a deer in headlights, maybe I can say, “Well, thanks for coming.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I won’t invite them. I might say, “Welcome to the show, sir. Where are you from?” “I’m from Canton, Ohio.” “Okay. And, what’s this? Why are you, traveling with a suitcase to a magic show?” You know. And if they’re stiff, if they’re giving one-word answers, if they’re sort of like a deer in headlights, maybe I can say, “Well, thanks for coming.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I appreciate you being here. And what about you? What’s your story? Who are you here with?” Right? And you’re just looking for somebody to be like, “Well, I wasn’t even supposed to be here tonight, but my friend Janie, she dragged me to the show and now I’m so glad I came.” Well, there’s a chatty person. That sounds fun. So, I might use that person. And similarly, if I need somebody who is a little bit more submissive in the sense that they’re gonna follow my directions and not give me a hard time-… if I say, “Hold out both hands like this. Put one coin in this hand, one coin…” I don’t want that person switching hands with the coins or you know, when I turn around- trying to throw me off. So, in that case, you might do just the opposite. You might choose somebody who is a little afraid. Sounds a little dark, but maybe you do want somebody who’s a little more easily intimidated so that they will follow your directions exactly as you lay them out and not give you a hard time.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I appreciate you being here. And what about you? What’s your story? Who are you here with?” Right? And you’re just looking for somebody to be like, “Well, I wasn’t even supposed to be here tonight, but my friend Janie, she dragged me to the show and now I’m so glad I came.” Well, there’s a chatty person. That sounds fun. So, I might use that person. And similarly, if I need somebody who is a little bit more submissive in the sense that they’re gonna follow my directions and not give me a hard time-… if I say, “Hold out both hands like this. Put one coin in this hand, one coin…” I don’t want that person switching hands with the coins or you know, when I turn around- trying to throw me off. So, in that case, you might do just the opposite. You might choose somebody who is a little afraid. Sounds a little dark, but maybe you do want somebody who’s a little more easily intimidated so that they will follow your directions exactly as you lay them out and not give you a hard time.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So, each trick I have kind of the archetype of what I’m looking for and what would be best, and I’m gonna try and fit that puzzle piece with the piece that fits in the gap there. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So, each trick I have kind of the archetype of what I’m looking for and what would be best, and I’m gonna try and fit that puzzle piece with the piece that fits in the gap there. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Josh says that this notion of reading people correctly, it can be pretty high stakes. These are dynamic encounters that go in very different directions depending on just what kind of energy you’re getting back.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Josh says that this notion of reading people correctly, it can be pretty high stakes. These are dynamic encounters that go in very different directions depending on just what kind of energy you’re getting back.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> I was doing a show a few months ago, I thought I picked the perfect person. There was a woman, who was just giving great eye contact. She looked to be having a blast. She was even a little bit chatty, which I think in the end was what did me in. You know, she just seemed so confident and comfortable on stage, and it was a big crowd. It was more than 1,000 people. So, I thought she’s gonna be perfect. I noted it, and at the right moment, invited her on stage. What I didn’t realize until she came up was, she was loaded drunk. I mean, she was so drunk she could not follow basic instructions. She couldn’t stop talking. She was disruptive. And in the beginning, that’s funny, right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> I was doing a show a few months ago, I thought I picked the perfect person. There was a woman, who was just giving great eye contact. She looked to be having a blast. She was even a little bit chatty, which I think in the end was what did me in. You know, she just seemed so confident and comfortable on stage, and it was a big crowd. It was more than 1,000 people. So, I thought she’s gonna be perfect. I noted it, and at the right moment, invited her on stage. What I didn’t realize until she came up was, she was loaded drunk. I mean, she was so drunk she could not follow basic instructions. She couldn’t stop talking. She was disruptive. And in the beginning, that’s funny, right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I’m not a comedy magician, so my purpose isn’t just to make people laugh. It’s to show them, I hope, things that are truly amazing, and if they laugh along the way- awesome. So okay immediately I have to reassess and go, we can make some comedy out of this, but the magic is gonna suffer if she can’t be quiet and follow directions and help us navigate to this amazing moment that’s coming up.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I’m not a comedy magician, so my purpose isn’t just to make people laugh. It’s to show them, I hope, things that are truly amazing, and if they laugh along the way- awesome. So okay immediately I have to reassess and go, we can make some comedy out of this, but the magic is gonna suffer if she can’t be quiet and follow directions and help us navigate to this amazing moment that’s coming up.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Right. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Right. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> And she couldn’t. Right? \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> And she couldn’t. Right? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Oh!\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Oh!\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> She couldn’t. And so, you try and limp to the close and just think, “Next time I won’t make this mistake.” But in this case, I had to do the rarest thing of all, which is dismiss somebody. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> She couldn’t. And so, you try and limp to the close and just think, “Next time I won’t make this mistake.” But in this case, I had to do the rarest thing of all, which is dismiss somebody. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Oh, my goodness! \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Oh, my goodness! \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> And you just say, “Do me a favor, grab your seat and I need you to come up now.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> And you just say, “Do me a favor, grab your seat and I need you to come up now.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I actually had to do the switch mid-trick, which I very rarely, I can’t remember the last time, I picked someone so wrong that I had to recalibrate like that. But you know, this is what happens when you are on the road 300 days a year. You’re gonna have nightmare nights at the office. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I actually had to do the switch mid-trick, which I very rarely, I can’t remember the last time, I picked someone so wrong that I had to recalibrate like that. But you know, this is what happens when you are on the road 300 days a year. You’re gonna have nightmare nights at the office. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> So, when I hear this, I think, you know, the exception is what proves the rule. You know, the fact that this happens so rarely suggests that you are quite good at reading the room and reading people in ways that they I mean, yeah, I guess somebody who’s had a dozen cocktails probably knows that they’re going to embarrass themselves on stage. But for the most part, you’re picking up on tells that people might not even be aware that they have.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> So, when I hear this, I think, you know, the exception is what proves the rule. You know, the fact that this happens so rarely suggests that you are quite good at reading the room and reading people in ways that they I mean, yeah, I guess somebody who’s had a dozen cocktails probably knows that they’re going to embarrass themselves on stage. But for the most part, you’re picking up on tells that people might not even be aware that they have.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I guess I’m harping on this because when I think about machines that aren’t just reading our posture or looking for eye contact or are looking at, you know, beginning the data collection process the second we walk into the room. They learn about us for months, years and they’re able to gather a wide range of data about us.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I guess I’m harping on this because when I think about machines that aren’t just reading our posture or looking for eye contact or are looking at, you know, beginning the data collection process the second we walk into the room. They learn about us for months, years and they’re able to gather a wide range of data about us.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so, I start wondering, you know, what that starts to look like and I would ask you, are we more manipulable than we realize? \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so, I start wondering, you know, what that starts to look like and I would ask you, are we more manipulable than we realize? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yes, emphatically yes. I think that there are so many insights that are so scary to a magician when you start applying it to real life. Like, there are so many- One of the basic tenets of magic is that if you tell an audience something, it is a tenth as effective if you can find a way to let that audience tell themselves, right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yes, emphatically yes. I think that there are so many insights that are so scary to a magician when you start applying it to real life. Like, there are so many- One of the basic tenets of magic is that if you tell an audience something, it is a tenth as effective if you can find a way to let that audience tell themselves, right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So let me give you an example. If I come out, this is like a classic amateur magician’s move. If I come out and I say, “Ladies and gentlemen, a regular deck of cards,” that is wrong for every possible reason. Because if I just said, “Do me a favor, give these a shuffle, and then I want you to take one out that you like and write your name on it.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So let me give you an example. If I come out, this is like a classic amateur magician’s move. If I come out and I say, “Ladies and gentlemen, a regular deck of cards,” that is wrong for every possible reason. Because if I just said, “Do me a favor, give these a shuffle, and then I want you to take one out that you like and write your name on it.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You will never in that interaction question the deck of cards because it’s a deck of cards. I’m handling it like you would handle a deck of cards if you handed it to a friend between rounds of dealing poker, right? Take the deck of cards, shuffle it up, take a card out. You would never think, “Are there 52 in there? Are they all the same shape? Is one shorter than another one? Is there more than one ace of spades in that deck?” You would never ask those questions because I’ve presented it in a casual manner, and I’ve given you a task. But the minute you say, “Ladies and gentlemen, a regulation pack of cards,” instantly you go, “Well, is it?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You will never in that interaction question the deck of cards because it’s a deck of cards. I’m handling it like you would handle a deck of cards if you handed it to a friend between rounds of dealing poker, right? Take the deck of cards, shuffle it up, take a card out. You would never think, “Are there 52 in there? Are they all the same shape? Is one shorter than another one? Is there more than one ace of spades in that deck?” You would never ask those questions because I’ve presented it in a casual manner, and I’ve given you a task. But the minute you say, “Ladies and gentlemen, a regulation pack of cards,” instantly you go, “Well, is it?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Well, I didn’t see it. Can I see it? Do you mind if I shuffle? Can I count those cards? Can I hold them up to a light? Can I shuffle and make sure they’re all the same thickness,” right? But if I give you the deck and I say, “Shuffle them up and take out any one that you like,” I’m letting you tell yourself it’s a regular deck because you put your fingers on it, you shuffle it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Well, I didn’t see it. Can I see it? Do you mind if I shuffle? Can I count those cards? Can I hold them up to a light? Can I shuffle and make sure they’re all the same thickness,” right? But if I give you the deck and I say, “Shuffle them up and take out any one that you like,” I’m letting you tell yourself it’s a regular deck because you put your fingers on it, you shuffle it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Now, you may be shuffling a deck that’s got all sorts of quirky, subtle things wrong with it, but you will be telling yourself it’s a normal deck because it feels right. When I look through to take out a card, nothing looked out of place. And now you’re telling yourself, and that’s a much more effective way to deceive somebody because you’re telling yourself.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Now, you may be shuffling a deck that’s got all sorts of quirky, subtle things wrong with it, but you will be telling yourself it’s a normal deck because it feels right. When I look through to take out a card, nothing looked out of place. And now you’re telling yourself, and that’s a much more effective way to deceive somebody because you’re telling yourself.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Josh says that the best magicians don’t just shape how people experience something in the moment. They can also change what we later remember about a moment. For instance, a magician might appear to drop a coin, and then somehow it vanishes. Cool trick. But the magician doesn’t stop there. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Josh says that the best magicians don’t just shape how people experience something in the moment. They can also change what we later remember about a moment. For instance, a magician might appear to drop a coin, and then somehow it vanishes. Cool trick. But the magician doesn’t stop there. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> And if a minute later I say, “And you watched that coin as it fell from my hand and disintegrated in midair,” well, that’s a really great word, disintegrated, right? And it colors your memory. Maybe I refer to it two or three more times in the show, “And then it just disappeared, and it disintegrated, and when it got to my knee level, it just turned to dust.” And you can have people leaving swearing that they saw a coin vanish down here. And that’s the next frontier of magic is really manipulating memories.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> And if a minute later I say, “And you watched that coin as it fell from my hand and disintegrated in midair,” well, that’s a really great word, disintegrated, right? And it colors your memory. Maybe I refer to it two or three more times in the show, “And then it just disappeared, and it disintegrated, and when it got to my knee level, it just turned to dust.” And you can have people leaving swearing that they saw a coin vanish down here. And that’s the next frontier of magic is really manipulating memories.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> If you were a less ethical person, do you think you could get people to do things against their will? \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> If you were a less ethical person, do you think you could get people to do things against their will? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> I mean… I think that the overarching lesson that I’ve, that I’m continually shocked about in magic in this regard is how easily people can be duped into believing things. I mean, it’s so crazy to me that, you know, I do a magic show that is meant to amaze and delight, but in no way is it meant to skirt the line of reality and make people actually believe. You know, there are performers like David Blaine, Uri Geller, and Oz Pearlman, who, you know, people see those performers and sort of go, “So wait, is that a trick or is that person really doing that?” And I don’t have that kind of approach, and still, not sometimes, very often people come up to me after shows and they’ll say really touching but misguided things like, “Hey, can you give me advice on this job I’m about to take? Cause I, you know, that trick you did where you were able to predict the future, I’m just wondering if you…” You know, you just wanna pull them aside and say, “This is pure entertainment. Like, I can’t give you life advice like that. I can’t actually see the future. This is fun.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> I mean… I think that the overarching lesson that I’ve, that I’m continually shocked about in magic in this regard is how easily people can be duped into believing things. I mean, it’s so crazy to me that, you know, I do a magic show that is meant to amaze and delight, but in no way is it meant to skirt the line of reality and make people actually believe. You know, there are performers like David Blaine, Uri Geller, and Oz Pearlman, who, you know, people see those performers and sort of go, “So wait, is that a trick or is that person really doing that?” And I don’t have that kind of approach, and still, not sometimes, very often people come up to me after shows and they’ll say really touching but misguided things like, “Hey, can you give me advice on this job I’m about to take? Cause I, you know, that trick you did where you were able to predict the future, I’m just wondering if you…” You know, you just wanna pull them aside and say, “This is pure entertainment. Like, I can’t give you life advice like that. I can’t actually see the future. This is fun.” \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“But you got my passcode off my phone. I’ve never told anybody that in my life.” “Yes, that’s a trick. I predicted your passcode.” Right. “Well, if you can tell my passcode, can you just tell me just a little advice? Should I take this job and move to Phoenix or not?” And it’s like, you know, you see that with certain people, they’re looking for an excuse to believe. They’re looking for it, and the more you say it’s not real, the more they want to believe it is real, and that’s scary stuff.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“But you got my passcode off my phone. I’ve never told anybody that in my life.” “Yes, that’s a trick. I predicted your passcode.” Right. “Well, if you can tell my passcode, can you just tell me just a little advice? Should I take this job and move to Phoenix or not?” And it’s like, you know, you see that with certain people, they’re looking for an excuse to believe. They’re looking for it, and the more you say it’s not real, the more they want to believe it is real, and that’s scary stuff.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> My takeaway so far in this conversation, buckle up. We better hope for a rapid learning curve as we adjust to life alongside artificial intelligences that feel real, that have been designed to seem real, but simply aren’t. My worry is that knowing we’re talking to a machine won’t ever be enough. Just like Teller’s baseball, even those rare occasions where we can see what’s happening under the hood won’t stop the illusion, because we want to believe the illusion. Because the illusion doesn’t just come from the machine, it comes from us. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> My takeaway so far in this conversation, buckle up. We better hope for a rapid learning curve as we adjust to life alongside artificial intelligences that feel real, that have been designed to seem real, but simply aren’t. My worry is that knowing we’re talking to a machine won’t ever be enough. Just like Teller’s baseball, even those rare occasions where we can see what’s happening under the hood won’t stop the illusion, because we want to believe the illusion. Because the illusion doesn’t just come from the machine, it comes from us. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>These are early innings. I’ll be very curious about how these chatbots change over time and the many ways they are welcomed or inserted into our lives. After the break, a pivot. I ask my guests, how is technology changing magic? And if you’re thinking, “Not that much,” you would be wrong.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>These are early innings. I’ll be very curious about how these chatbots change over time and the many ways they are welcomed or inserted into our lives. After the break, a pivot. I ask my guests, how is technology changing magic? And if you’re thinking, “Not that much,” you would be wrong.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That’s after the break.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>That’s after the break.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>You might think that sleight of hand magic hasn’t changed much over the decades. A card trick, cups and balls, these are all pretty analog. Automation shouldn’t have too much of an impact. But the truth is, all performances are interactions between performer and audience. So even when technology doesn’t change the performer, it changes the audience.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>You might think that sleight of hand magic hasn’t changed much over the decades. A card trick, cups and balls, these are all pretty analog. Automation shouldn’t have too much of an impact. But the truth is, all performances are interactions between performer and audience. So even when technology doesn’t change the performer, it changes the audience.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Technology has always had an uneasy relationship to magic, and there are all sorts of tricks that we can’t do anymore for the simple reason that what even 20 years ago people would have gone, “That is the most amazing thing I could imagine you doing.” Now we would go, “Oh, we have an app for that.” I mean, there’s like a great trick where you predict a song that’s playing, right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Technology has always had an uneasy relationship to magic, and there are all sorts of tricks that we can’t do anymore for the simple reason that what even 20 years ago people would have gone, “That is the most amazing thing I could imagine you doing.” Now we would go, “Oh, we have an app for that.” I mean, there’s like a great trick where you predict a song that’s playing, right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And now you couldn’t do that trick cause people would go, “Yes, it’s an app. I had it 15 years ago. It’s called Shazam. You press this button and three seconds later it tells you the album and the song and the link to listen to it.” Like, all the tricks along that genre, they’re just out. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And now you couldn’t do that trick cause people would go, “Yes, it’s an app. I had it 15 years ago. It’s called Shazam. You press this button and three seconds later it tells you the album and the song and the link to listen to it.” Like, all the tricks along that genre, they’re just out. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> You told this story about doing one of your famous dollar bill tricks for somebody, and then they immediately took out their phone and they Googled, you know, how did Josh Jay do this dollar bill trick?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> You told this story about doing one of your famous dollar bill tricks for somebody, and then they immediately took out their phone and they Googled, you know, how did Josh Jay do this dollar bill trick?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And then they, like, just played the video in front of everybody, and you said it was not a great moment. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And then they, like, just played the video in front of everybody, and you said it was not a great moment. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Right. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Right. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> How do you deal with that? How do you deal with the fact that the answers so many of these tricks, the ability to watch it again and again and again from any angle that someone might have captured, are available to everybody at every moment?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> How do you deal with that? How do you deal with the fact that the answers so many of these tricks, the ability to watch it again and again and again from any angle that someone might have captured, are available to everybody at every moment?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Well, you’ve hit upon, you know, a really important and sort of topical crisis in our industry, which is that a lot of people are going on YouTube and doing tutorials of tricks that don’t belong to them and classic tricks and really good tricks. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Well, you’ve hit upon, you know, a really important and sort of topical crisis in our industry, which is that a lot of people are going on YouTube and doing tutorials of tricks that don’t belong to them and classic tricks and really good tricks. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> The particular dollar bill trick that got Josh is one of those classics that people can now look up on YouTube.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> The particular dollar bill trick that got Josh is one of those classics that people can now look up on YouTube.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Josh sees two strategies that magicians can use to get around this problem. The first being to avoid the classics altogether. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Josh sees two strategies that magicians can use to get around this problem. The first being to avoid the classics altogether. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> But if you’re doing a trick that thousands of other magicians are doing, you’re at great risk that that trick will be searchable and, you know, easily found online. Whereas if I’m doing something totally original, good luck searching for it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> But if you’re doing a trick that thousands of other magicians are doing, you’re at great risk that that trick will be searchable and, you know, easily found online. Whereas if I’m doing something totally original, good luck searching for it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You’re not gonna find that trick because I created that trick and it’s not published and it’s not anywhere to be found in a searchable way. So that’s one way. Another way is magicians have to get really clever at disguising what it looks like. They have to mesh together several methods and several tricks so that somebody looks at it and goes, “You know, I don’t know. He borrowed my house key, and then he bent it, and then it vanished- … and it appeared in a lock across the room.” You know, that’s not a searchable term, whereas changing a $1 bill into $100 bill is easily searchable. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You’re not gonna find that trick because I created that trick and it’s not published and it’s not anywhere to be found in a searchable way. So that’s one way. Another way is magicians have to get really clever at disguising what it looks like. They have to mesh together several methods and several tricks so that somebody looks at it and goes, “You know, I don’t know. He borrowed my house key, and then he bent it, and then it vanished- … and it appeared in a lock across the room.” You know, that’s not a searchable term, whereas changing a $1 bill into $100 bill is easily searchable. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> And yeah, so at the same time as it is making a lot of parts of your life as a magician more difficult, it also might be raising the rewards to true novelty and creativity and innovation.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> And yeah, so at the same time as it is making a lot of parts of your life as a magician more difficult, it also might be raising the rewards to true novelty and creativity and innovation.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> That’s how I’m choosing to look at it, and maybe I’m, like, choosing to look at it with rose-tinted glasses because I like that process. But, you know, in my head, the healthiest magic community in the world is one in which everybody’s doing their own material. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> That’s how I’m choosing to look at it, and maybe I’m, like, choosing to look at it with rose-tinted glasses because I like that process. But, you know, in my head, the healthiest magic community in the world is one in which everybody’s doing their own material. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You know, we don’t give much attention to bands that only play covers. They play in bars for 30 people. If you write your own music and you become successful at that, you can tour arenas and have a career that is way more outsized than a cover band ever could. We don’t reward comedians who just repeat the jokes of, you know, a smorgasbord of all their favorite comedians. We reward people who come up with original monologues, and we can’t wait to hear the latest Chappelle or Nate Bargatze or Seinfeld hour because we know it’s gonna be their point of view. So, my ultimate ideal in magic, it would be, you know, all magicians doing their own stuff. Now, magic has developed at a much slower pace than comedy and even songwriting.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You know, we don’t give much attention to bands that only play covers. They play in bars for 30 people. If you write your own music and you become successful at that, you can tour arenas and have a career that is way more outsized than a cover band ever could. We don’t reward comedians who just repeat the jokes of, you know, a smorgasbord of all their favorite comedians. We reward people who come up with original monologues, and we can’t wait to hear the latest Chappelle or Nate Bargatze or Seinfeld hour because we know it’s gonna be their point of view. So, my ultimate ideal in magic, it would be, you know, all magicians doing their own stuff. Now, magic has developed at a much slower pace than comedy and even songwriting.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I mean, it takes years to perfect a really great magic trick. So that’s a high bar indeed, but my hope is that this negative will end up being a positive and that magicians will take a cue from this and start really obscuring what they’re doing in such a way that it’s either mostly original or completely original.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I mean, it takes years to perfect a really great magic trick. So that’s a high bar indeed, but my hope is that this negative will end up being a positive and that magicians will take a cue from this and start really obscuring what they’re doing in such a way that it’s either mostly original or completely original.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> So, technology is changing magic, but Josh says it won’t be taking over anytime soon. For instance, most magicians who choose to use AI are using it to help them tweak their script a bit, not to design tricks wholesale. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> So, technology is changing magic, but Josh says it won’t be taking over anytime soon. For instance, most magicians who choose to use AI are using it to help them tweak their script a bit, not to design tricks wholesale. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> AI can help you find a moment in history that you would have never turned up that’s the perfect way to theatrically get into a trick on coincidence or a trick on transformation, and now you’ve given it this great context about this amazing thing that happened in Victorian England. And, you know, that’s, I think, a way that AI is really gonna help performers because like so many things, we don’t want AI to dehumanize magic. Magic will be one of the great things left when AI is fully integrated into everything else that people will go to for a truly human experience. I mean, what besides eating and watching movies will be left that isn’t entirely, you know, affected by AI?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> AI can help you find a moment in history that you would have never turned up that’s the perfect way to theatrically get into a trick on coincidence or a trick on transformation, and now you’ve given it this great context about this amazing thing that happened in Victorian England. And, you know, that’s, I think, a way that AI is really gonna help performers because like so many things, we don’t want AI to dehumanize magic. Magic will be one of the great things left when AI is fully integrated into everything else that people will go to for a truly human experience. I mean, what besides eating and watching movies will be left that isn’t entirely, you know, affected by AI?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Let’s talk about this. You describe the period from the 1870s to the 1930s as the “Golden Age of Magic”. Yeah. Could we, you know, see a resurgence to a new Golden Age of Magic? \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Let’s talk about this. You describe the period from the 1870s to the 1930s as the “Golden Age of Magic”. Yeah. Could we, you know, see a resurgence to a new Golden Age of Magic? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of evidence to say that in a sense we are in another golden age. I mean, take some metrics. Because of TikTok and Instagram and just magic being online generally, and add to that the fact that America’s Got Talent and Fool Us are putting magic in front of millions of people in their homes that didn’t used to be there- More people are watching magic than have ever watched it in history.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of evidence to say that in a sense we are in another golden age. I mean, take some metrics. Because of TikTok and Instagram and just magic being online generally, and add to that the fact that America’s Got Talent and Fool Us are putting magic in front of millions of people in their homes that didn’t used to be there- More people are watching magic than have ever watched it in history.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Fact. Not, and it’s not close. It’s not like marginally more. Like, exponentially more people are watching magic than ever have. Another objective fact is that there are now more venues to perform magic than there have ever been at any point in my life or in the previous 50 years. So, I also have emprivated data because I co-own, a magic shop called Vanishing Inc., where we sell magic and we publish books, and I can tell you that we are selling to a larger group of people than magic shops used to sell to. They used to be quite localized, and thanks to the internet, we can now sell all over the world. And the industry itself is growing. You can just feel that there are more people interested in magic every day and not less. So, in those regards, anecdotally, I would say to you, we might be in a golden age and not know it. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Fact. Not, and it’s not close. It’s not like marginally more. Like, exponentially more people are watching magic than ever have. Another objective fact is that there are now more venues to perform magic than there have ever been at any point in my life or in the previous 50 years. So, I also have emprivated data because I co-own, a magic shop called Vanishing Inc., where we sell magic and we publish books, and I can tell you that we are selling to a larger group of people than magic shops used to sell to. They used to be quite localized, and thanks to the internet, we can now sell all over the world. And the industry itself is growing. You can just feel that there are more people interested in magic every day and not less. So, in those regards, anecdotally, I would say to you, we might be in a golden age and not know it. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> You describe magic as being a product of its time, and you give this great example of the famous trick of sawing a woman in half being the perfect trick when it emerged after World War I. All of a sudden it was hitting an audience that was maybe a little bit more desensitized to violence, more open to women, playing different roles in society, including one where presumably they get chopped in half. And I wanna ask you, what would be the perfect trick for 2026? \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> You describe magic as being a product of its time, and you give this great example of the famous trick of sawing a woman in half being the perfect trick when it emerged after World War I. All of a sudden it was hitting an audience that was maybe a little bit more desensitized to violence, more open to women, playing different roles in society, including one where presumably they get chopped in half. And I wanna ask you, what would be the perfect trick for 2026? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Oh. Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, that’s a really tough question. I mean, I would say to zoom out for a second and buy myself a minute to think, I would say that the greatest magic trick, and not just in 2026, ever, is always the trick that is perfect for the situation you’re in at that moment, right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Oh. Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, that’s a really tough question. I mean, I would say to zoom out for a second and buy myself a minute to think, I would say that the greatest magic trick, and not just in 2026, ever, is always the trick that is perfect for the situation you’re in at that moment, right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So I talk in the book, you might remember, about the ham sandwich theory, and for those readers who haven’t read my book, like, this is such a great illustration of what magic can be at its ultimate fullest expression, which is that if I reach up behind your ear right now, Jessica, and pull out a ham sandwich from nowhere, and you don’t know how it’s done, you’re gonna look at me and go, “That was random,” because it is.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So I talk in the book, you might remember, about the ham sandwich theory, and for those readers who haven’t read my book, like, this is such a great illustration of what magic can be at its ultimate fullest expression, which is that if I reach up behind your ear right now, Jessica, and pull out a ham sandwich from nowhere, and you don’t know how it’s done, you’re gonna look at me and go, “That was random,” because it is.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It’s totally random. It’s not interesting. It’s not logical. I just pulled a ham sandwich out. It’s arbitrary. But if instead you said to me, “Gosh, Josh, I am starving. I’m just… I’m really in the mood for a ham sandwich. Is that weird to say?” And I then went, “Oh, yeah?” And now I pull a ham sandwich out of your ear- \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It’s totally random. It’s not interesting. It’s not logical. I just pulled a ham sandwich out. It’s arbitrary. But if instead you said to me, “Gosh, Josh, I am starving. I’m just… I’m really in the mood for a ham sandwich. Is that weird to say?” And I then went, “Oh, yeah?” And now I pull a ham sandwich out of your ear- \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I have fulfilled a need. I have responded to a need you created, and now that magic is everything to you. It’s personal. It felt directly tailored to something you had. It fulfilled a need, hunger that you were feeling at that moment. So, whatever the answer is to your question, it would have to be something that’s specific to an audience in 2026.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I have fulfilled a need. I have responded to a need you created, and now that magic is everything to you. It’s personal. It felt directly tailored to something you had. It fulfilled a need, hunger that you were feeling at that moment. So, whatever the answer is to your question, it would have to be something that’s specific to an audience in 2026.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> I want to push Josh here. What does the perfect trick look like in 2026 with technology constantly shifting the boundaries between that’s awesome and yeah, that’s an app? What happens to an art form so cognizant of the limits of human cognition when everyone carries around a device that seems to know everything and never forget?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> I want to push Josh here. What does the perfect trick look like in 2026 with technology constantly shifting the boundaries between that’s awesome and yeah, that’s an app? What happens to an art form so cognizant of the limits of human cognition when everyone carries around a device that seems to know everything and never forget?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Well, maybe it calls attention to that very device. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> I always see things through the lens of what I’m working on, and I’m working on a trick where we turn off all the lights in the theater, which is instantly and immediately fascinating to me because it gets to be this change of scenery, right? And I have everybody take out their cell phones and put their light on. So, you get that little concert vibe going where they’re moving their light around, and it looks like twinkling stars in this huge theater, right? And all these people are here. And I’m working on a trick where they are whittled down. So, through a series of choices that the audience makes, I would say, “Okay, if you were born in September, stay standing with your light on. Everybody else sit down, turn your phone off.” And it goes from 1,000 lights to… 30 lights. And you whittle them down all the way until you get one person with a light, and then you predict that person’s phone number, which is the thing that they’re holding- the whole time, and you’re right there, and how could you have known it would be them, and the choices that were made.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> I always see things through the lens of what I’m working on, and I’m working on a trick where we turn off all the lights in the theater, which is instantly and immediately fascinating to me because it gets to be this change of scenery, right? And I have everybody take out their cell phones and put their light on. So, you get that little concert vibe going where they’re moving their light around, and it looks like twinkling stars in this huge theater, right? And all these people are here. And I’m working on a trick where they are whittled down. So, through a series of choices that the audience makes, I would say, “Okay, if you were born in September, stay standing with your light on. Everybody else sit down, turn your phone off.” And it goes from 1,000 lights to… 30 lights. And you whittle them down all the way until you get one person with a light, and then you predict that person’s phone number, which is the thing that they’re holding- the whole time, and you’re right there, and how could you have known it would be them, and the choices that were made.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And then the very light they’re holding has the phone number, and that’s what I’m working on, and that’s what I’ll call the ultimate trick in 2026 cause I haven’t fully figured out how I’m doing it yet. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And then the very light they’re holding has the phone number, and that’s what I’m working on, and that’s what I’ll call the ultimate trick in 2026 cause I haven’t fully figured out how I’m doing it yet. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Oh my gosh. Well, I just love hearing you talk about this knowing that you don’t even fully know how you’re going to do it yet.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Oh my gosh. Well, I just love hearing you talk about this knowing that you don’t even fully know how you’re going to do it yet.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yeah. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Like, it seems like as a creator, you think about how do I want the audience to feel, what should they be paying attention to, what should they be thinking about, and then eventually you get back to the mechanism of how you pull this all off. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yes. It’s exactly that. And that was a really important shift for me is not to become obsessed with method, not to get bogged down by well, that would be great, but I don’t know how to do it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yes. It’s exactly that. And that was a really important shift for me is not to become obsessed with method, not to get bogged down by well, that would be great, but I don’t know how to do it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I think that all my best things have come out of me sort of going I’m not gonna think about how this could be done. I just wanna play out in my mind what it would look like if I could do it. And then I need to figure out a way to do it. And, you know, you fall on your face a lot, and you realize, like, well, I can’t do that, but I could do this.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And you might fall short of the ideal, but at least you’re thinking… in the minds of the audience, and I think that’s a really good place to start. You know, empathy is a really important tool for a magician, and I imagine it’s probably a huge focus of everybody who’s helping to design AI is to think empathically, to think like your audience.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You know, the first thing you have to do as a magician is get out of your own head and to try to get into the head of the people you’re performing for. What do they wanna see? What would they think if you did this? How would they react if you did this?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Empathy as one of the ultimate superpowers? Yeah, I buy that. Human creators of all stripes have long recognized its power. Magicians like Joshua Jay rely on empathy to create experiences that delight, and stun, and fill a need. Engineers rely on empathy to imagine how users will engage with confusing or intimidating tools.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Empathy as one of the ultimate superpowers? Yeah, I buy that. Human creators of all stripes have long recognized its power. Magicians like Joshua Jay rely on empathy to create experiences that delight, and stun, and fill a need. Engineers rely on empathy to imagine how users will engage with confusing or intimidating tools.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>What’s different is that now we have machines that empathize, too, or at least convincingly perform empathy. Which brings us right back to where we started, me going to my chatbot three days later to report back on how that email landed, the email we carefully crafted together. As that line between what we perceive to be reality versus magic continues to blur before our eyes, I’m glad to have the occasional magician as a tour guide.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>What’s different is that now we have machines that empathize, too, or at least convincingly perform empathy. Which brings us right back to where we started, me going to my chatbot three days later to report back on how that email landed, the email we carefully crafted together. As that line between what we perceive to be reality versus magic continues to blur before our eyes, I’m glad to have the occasional magician as a tour guide.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I’m Jess Love. Life, Automated is a project of the Ryan Institute on Complexity at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. We’re distributed by KQED. Our show was produced by Jesse Dukes. Music by Stephen Jackson. Recording help from Will Feeney, George Christensen, and Leila Mohammed. Administrative support, recording, and wise counsel from Stacia Sliger.\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#transcript\">View Full Episode Transcript\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>When people go to a magic show, they expect to be fooled. That’s part of the fun. And magician \u003ca href=\"https://www.joshuajay.com/\">Joshua Jay\u003c/a> says much of the magician’s work is helping people fool themselves. Our brains are hardwired to fill in gaps, predict outcomes, and take cognitive shortcuts to process the overwhelming amount of information around us. When interacting with AI chatbots, we may similarly fool ourselves into believing we’re interacting with a human. But unlike at a magic show, it’s not always clear when the trick is over. Plus: how AI is changing magic.\u003cbr>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"Transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Welcome to Life Automated, the show where we explore what it means to live, work, and make decisions in a rapidly automating world. I’m Jess Love. I’ve been known, in moments of excitement or confusion or overwhelm, to turn to a chatbot, just to share, “Hey, this is what I’m thinking I’ll do next. Here’s how I want to approach this situation.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’ll even occasionally return to provide an update. Maybe this isn’t ideal. I know how sycophantic chatbots can be, telling me how thoughtful and clever my plans are unless I sternly direct them to act like dream-crushing jerks. But I can’t deny that the experience is pleasant. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like if your diary could write back. And yes, on some level, I know this is a machine trained to keep me engaging with it, and yet don’t I still feel a little validated when that response comes back? A little heard? There is no precedent for this. In every other moment in history, feeling like you’re talking back and forth with a real person has meant you’re connecting with a real person, someone who understands you, someone offering you their finite attention.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And we’ve evolved to take pleasure in these interactions, to seek them out, because that’s kept our species connected and alive. But with chatbots, this ancient link between the appearance of a mind and an actual mind no longer holds, and it’s really hard to know what to make of that. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There are people who obsess over this gap between what we intellectually know to be true and what we experience as real. Only they’re not AI researchers — they’re magicians. Today’s conversation is with one of the finest. Joshua Jay has performed his sleight-of-hand magic all around the world, including on major talk shows and for US presidents, and he’s a total magic nerd, the author of several books about magic, including “How Magicians Think.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And he’s not gonna teach us about algorithms. Instead, he’ll teach us to see ourselves the way he sees us, as people whose attention can be commanded and redirected, whose memories can be shifted, and as active participants in our own deception. We also talk about the surprising ways that technology is changing magic.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>From Kellogg’s Ryan Institute on Complexity, this is Life Automated, distributed by KQED. Here’s my conversation with Joshua Jay. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And I think for a lot of people, sitting down in front of a chatbot for the first time, that was kind of the experience.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Magic. There was this thing, this machine doing something that we didn’t think that machines could do. It was interacting with us in real time, in our own language, in meaningful ways. So, I wanted to ask you, as an actual magician, somebody who thinks about how emotions like awe and surprise are created, what was your first experience using a chatbot like, and did it in any way feel like a magic trick?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yeah. It’s such a great question, and it’s such a relevant question for me as a magician because we are deliverers of certain emotion, which is what you’re talking about, this awe, this like I don’t even know how this is happening, but it’s happening anyway. You know, Teller said so beautifully that magic is the difference between what you see and what you know.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know, you’re having a conversation with this entity and you know it’s not a person, and yet you’re having this conversation. So, the crisis is always we are deliverers of this feeling of astonishment, and yet by virtue of the fact that we know how all of this is done, we often don’t get that sense of awe, and we don’t get amazed very often.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, the first time that I engaged with AI and was… You know, that first time you take the plunge and you’re just asking, you’re having a conversation with a thing, I was truly astonished. And I felt like, wow, this is probably what it feels like to watch a magic show and just be amazed at everything. And so yeah, I absolutely was totally and utterly amazed and felt like, as we call you guys, “laypeople”, I felt like a layperson. I felt like a muggle. And, it was really fantastic. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> You just brought up, Teller, of course, of the very famous duo ‘Penn & Teller’, and they have this trick. It’s kind of a classic trick where they’re moving balls in cups as magicians do. We call you guys- magicians, us muggles.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Only they use clear cups, so you can actually see what’s happening. And that really kind of reminds me of what you were just talking about, this idea of knowing without knowing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yeah. You know, I find myself thinking so often when I’m performing, like, you know, you do something, and hopefully somebody really likes it and they scream in all the right places.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But what I’m thinking most of the time is, “Oh, you guys aren’t even seeing the coolest part. If you could see how this works, you would be even more flipped out.” Because sometimes you’re fooled by something that’s so much simpler than you could expect. And very often, and this is such a beautiful topic that it’s its own deep dive- The magician doesn’t fool you; you fool yourself.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And there is a difference. You know, some things it is the magician. It’s sleight-of-hand. It’s a gizmo you couldn’t possibly anticipate, a technology you’re not aware of. But often, you fool yourself with assumptions you make and the psychology that’s being used on you. So, it is this really interesting thing that you bring up where as great as magic feels to a muggle, to a layperson, you don’t even see the best part often.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And, you know, you bring up this classic Penn and Teller piece, and they have many pieces like this, where they said, “We’re gonna do cups and balls,” but then in the middle of the trick, after they do a classic cups and balls with opaque cups and normal-sized balls, they do it again, but they do it with clear cups.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003cem>[Audio Clip from Penn & Teller playing in the background]\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>As it goes with breaking a few rules of magic. Now, the first rule of magic is you never do the same trick twice. So, we’re good. Second rule of magic is you never tell an audience how a trick is being done. So, we’re gonna tell you exactly how the trick is being done. The third rule of magic is you never let the audience see your secret preparation.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> And even though if you were to zoom in on the right part, you would see how it works, it’s really a lesson in misdirection because you’re looking at Teller as he’s throwing a ball to the audience, and you’re not watching Penn as he’s placing the cups back down. And in this beautiful chaos of choreography, the lesson, the sort of aesthetic beauty of it, is you’re seeing how it’s done, but you really aren’t seeing how it’s done at all.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> This trick is the ultimate flex. I watched it on YouTube after my conversation with Joshua Jay multiple times.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Eventually, I did see the key move, Teller placing the right ball exactly where it needed to be to make the trick work, in full view of the audience. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003cem>[Audio Clip from Penn & Teller playing in the background]\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Place it on our hand and show it. Take a third and final ball, pretend to place it in our hand. Pretend to show the cup. We place it in the cup. Then secretly reveal it. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> How did I miss it so many times? How did I see without seeing? It really drove home how easily we can be led to believe something false, even when the truth is right in front of us.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003cem>[Audio Clip from Penn & Teller playing in the background]\u003c/em>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>…The finish. It’s an American baseball right there. That’s the Penn and Teller Cups and Balls. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Think about this in terms of interacting with a chatbot. It’s like we know that they are machines. We know that we are actively being fooled in some way, and yet we might still feel understood, affirmed, cared for. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> You know, the implicit agreement when you see a magic show is you’re saying when you sit down to watch, I know you’re going to try to fool me and I want to be fooled, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, you know that there is a deception at hand. You know that there’s going to be things that hopefully if they do their job, the magician does that you will not understand how it works. And I think that the uncomfortability comes in real life in that sometimes there’s not that implicit handshake going on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Look, in a magic show, you’re fooled. There’s no way around it. People don’t like that word. Some people do like that word, but call it whatever you like. We can’t soften it. You’re going to be fooled. You’re going to see something you don’t understand and you’re not supposed to understand it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But that’s what’s beautiful about it is that’s out in the open. That is made explicit. Whereas with some aspects of AI, with some aspects of technology in general, we don’t know where the human element ends and where the AI begins. And that can be really unsettling for people because they may not feel like, hey, look, when I started this conversation, I didn’t know I wasn’t talking to a human, you know.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Of course, none of this “being fooled” is by accident. Chatbots are generally designed to mimic humans. They refer to themselves in the first person as I or me. They act interested in what we’re saying, asking questions to nudge the conversation forward, and they learn about us, first through extensive training on human language and behavior, and then increasingly through interactions with us, adapting to our personal preferences and detecting our mood shifts in real time.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This learning to read human beings, that’s something magicians do too. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> I say that you’re always watching the magician and that’s how you think of a magic show, but we’re watching you too. And that little shift in perspective is something I don’t think most people think about. You know, during my opening trick, which has been the same for years now, and I can do it, you know, sort of on autopilot.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I don’t have to think very deeply. It helps me establish my rhythm. But in my head, what I’m doing is I am plotting the rest of the show based on the hand I’m dealt. Ooh, these people in the back left have a lot of sight line issues. I’m gonna really need to connect with them to make sure they can see and do that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Or, you know all the waiters are opening this kitchen door in the back of the theater that’s making it really noisy, and so these people are gonna need to be babysat a little more to make sure they’re super engaged. In magic what I’m looking for on stage is somebody who is not going to be afraid.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so, the first thing I look for before anything else is I’m looking for somebody who is exuding confidence. And a big indicator of confidence is eye contact. You know, it’s so crazy when I say like, “I need someone to help with this next thing,” there are just so many people in an audience who immediately think if they don’t look at me, then somehow, I won’t pick them. And it’s really pronounced when you’re like, as a magician, looking in the audience as you walk through an aisle, left and right. You just see people just totally thinking that they won’t be seen if they’re not… And I’m like, “I can see you even though you’re not looking at me.” But really, you’re looking for somebody who’s got great eye contact and who looks like they’re enjoying the show. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And there’s usually like a little test. So, if I can narrow it down to two or three people who I think, “Oh, this person would be just great on stage,” I might say- “Welcome to the show.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I won’t invite them. I might say, “Welcome to the show, sir. Where are you from?” “I’m from Canton, Ohio.” “Okay. And, what’s this? Why are you, traveling with a suitcase to a magic show?” You know. And if they’re stiff, if they’re giving one-word answers, if they’re sort of like a deer in headlights, maybe I can say, “Well, thanks for coming.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I appreciate you being here. And what about you? What’s your story? Who are you here with?” Right? And you’re just looking for somebody to be like, “Well, I wasn’t even supposed to be here tonight, but my friend Janie, she dragged me to the show and now I’m so glad I came.” Well, there’s a chatty person. That sounds fun. So, I might use that person. And similarly, if I need somebody who is a little bit more submissive in the sense that they’re gonna follow my directions and not give me a hard time-… if I say, “Hold out both hands like this. Put one coin in this hand, one coin…” I don’t want that person switching hands with the coins or you know, when I turn around- trying to throw me off. So, in that case, you might do just the opposite. You might choose somebody who is a little afraid. Sounds a little dark, but maybe you do want somebody who’s a little more easily intimidated so that they will follow your directions exactly as you lay them out and not give you a hard time.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, each trick I have kind of the archetype of what I’m looking for and what would be best, and I’m gonna try and fit that puzzle piece with the piece that fits in the gap there. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Josh says that this notion of reading people correctly, it can be pretty high stakes. These are dynamic encounters that go in very different directions depending on just what kind of energy you’re getting back.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> I was doing a show a few months ago, I thought I picked the perfect person. There was a woman, who was just giving great eye contact. She looked to be having a blast. She was even a little bit chatty, which I think in the end was what did me in. You know, she just seemed so confident and comfortable on stage, and it was a big crowd. It was more than 1,000 people. So, I thought she’s gonna be perfect. I noted it, and at the right moment, invited her on stage. What I didn’t realize until she came up was, she was loaded drunk. I mean, she was so drunk she could not follow basic instructions. She couldn’t stop talking. She was disruptive. And in the beginning, that’s funny, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I’m not a comedy magician, so my purpose isn’t just to make people laugh. It’s to show them, I hope, things that are truly amazing, and if they laugh along the way- awesome. So okay immediately I have to reassess and go, we can make some comedy out of this, but the magic is gonna suffer if she can’t be quiet and follow directions and help us navigate to this amazing moment that’s coming up.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Right. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> And she couldn’t. Right? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Oh!\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> She couldn’t. And so, you try and limp to the close and just think, “Next time I won’t make this mistake.” But in this case, I had to do the rarest thing of all, which is dismiss somebody. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Oh, my goodness! \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> And you just say, “Do me a favor, grab your seat and I need you to come up now.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I actually had to do the switch mid-trick, which I very rarely, I can’t remember the last time, I picked someone so wrong that I had to recalibrate like that. But you know, this is what happens when you are on the road 300 days a year. You’re gonna have nightmare nights at the office. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> So, when I hear this, I think, you know, the exception is what proves the rule. You know, the fact that this happens so rarely suggests that you are quite good at reading the room and reading people in ways that they I mean, yeah, I guess somebody who’s had a dozen cocktails probably knows that they’re going to embarrass themselves on stage. But for the most part, you’re picking up on tells that people might not even be aware that they have.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I guess I’m harping on this because when I think about machines that aren’t just reading our posture or looking for eye contact or are looking at, you know, beginning the data collection process the second we walk into the room. They learn about us for months, years and they’re able to gather a wide range of data about us.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so, I start wondering, you know, what that starts to look like and I would ask you, are we more manipulable than we realize? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yes, emphatically yes. I think that there are so many insights that are so scary to a magician when you start applying it to real life. Like, there are so many- One of the basic tenets of magic is that if you tell an audience something, it is a tenth as effective if you can find a way to let that audience tell themselves, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So let me give you an example. If I come out, this is like a classic amateur magician’s move. If I come out and I say, “Ladies and gentlemen, a regular deck of cards,” that is wrong for every possible reason. Because if I just said, “Do me a favor, give these a shuffle, and then I want you to take one out that you like and write your name on it.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You will never in that interaction question the deck of cards because it’s a deck of cards. I’m handling it like you would handle a deck of cards if you handed it to a friend between rounds of dealing poker, right? Take the deck of cards, shuffle it up, take a card out. You would never think, “Are there 52 in there? Are they all the same shape? Is one shorter than another one? Is there more than one ace of spades in that deck?” You would never ask those questions because I’ve presented it in a casual manner, and I’ve given you a task. But the minute you say, “Ladies and gentlemen, a regulation pack of cards,” instantly you go, “Well, is it?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Well, I didn’t see it. Can I see it? Do you mind if I shuffle? Can I count those cards? Can I hold them up to a light? Can I shuffle and make sure they’re all the same thickness,” right? But if I give you the deck and I say, “Shuffle them up and take out any one that you like,” I’m letting you tell yourself it’s a regular deck because you put your fingers on it, you shuffle it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Now, you may be shuffling a deck that’s got all sorts of quirky, subtle things wrong with it, but you will be telling yourself it’s a normal deck because it feels right. When I look through to take out a card, nothing looked out of place. And now you’re telling yourself, and that’s a much more effective way to deceive somebody because you’re telling yourself.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Josh says that the best magicians don’t just shape how people experience something in the moment. They can also change what we later remember about a moment. For instance, a magician might appear to drop a coin, and then somehow it vanishes. Cool trick. But the magician doesn’t stop there. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> And if a minute later I say, “And you watched that coin as it fell from my hand and disintegrated in midair,” well, that’s a really great word, disintegrated, right? And it colors your memory. Maybe I refer to it two or three more times in the show, “And then it just disappeared, and it disintegrated, and when it got to my knee level, it just turned to dust.” And you can have people leaving swearing that they saw a coin vanish down here. And that’s the next frontier of magic is really manipulating memories.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> If you were a less ethical person, do you think you could get people to do things against their will? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> I mean… I think that the overarching lesson that I’ve, that I’m continually shocked about in magic in this regard is how easily people can be duped into believing things. I mean, it’s so crazy to me that, you know, I do a magic show that is meant to amaze and delight, but in no way is it meant to skirt the line of reality and make people actually believe. You know, there are performers like David Blaine, Uri Geller, and Oz Pearlman, who, you know, people see those performers and sort of go, “So wait, is that a trick or is that person really doing that?” And I don’t have that kind of approach, and still, not sometimes, very often people come up to me after shows and they’ll say really touching but misguided things like, “Hey, can you give me advice on this job I’m about to take? Cause I, you know, that trick you did where you were able to predict the future, I’m just wondering if you…” You know, you just wanna pull them aside and say, “This is pure entertainment. Like, I can’t give you life advice like that. I can’t actually see the future. This is fun.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“But you got my passcode off my phone. I’ve never told anybody that in my life.” “Yes, that’s a trick. I predicted your passcode.” Right. “Well, if you can tell my passcode, can you just tell me just a little advice? Should I take this job and move to Phoenix or not?” And it’s like, you know, you see that with certain people, they’re looking for an excuse to believe. They’re looking for it, and the more you say it’s not real, the more they want to believe it is real, and that’s scary stuff.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> My takeaway so far in this conversation, buckle up. We better hope for a rapid learning curve as we adjust to life alongside artificial intelligences that feel real, that have been designed to seem real, but simply aren’t. My worry is that knowing we’re talking to a machine won’t ever be enough. Just like Teller’s baseball, even those rare occasions where we can see what’s happening under the hood won’t stop the illusion, because we want to believe the illusion. Because the illusion doesn’t just come from the machine, it comes from us. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>These are early innings. I’ll be very curious about how these chatbots change over time and the many ways they are welcomed or inserted into our lives. After the break, a pivot. I ask my guests, how is technology changing magic? And if you’re thinking, “Not that much,” you would be wrong.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That’s after the break.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>You might think that sleight of hand magic hasn’t changed much over the decades. A card trick, cups and balls, these are all pretty analog. Automation shouldn’t have too much of an impact. But the truth is, all performances are interactions between performer and audience. So even when technology doesn’t change the performer, it changes the audience.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Technology has always had an uneasy relationship to magic, and there are all sorts of tricks that we can’t do anymore for the simple reason that what even 20 years ago people would have gone, “That is the most amazing thing I could imagine you doing.” Now we would go, “Oh, we have an app for that.” I mean, there’s like a great trick where you predict a song that’s playing, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And now you couldn’t do that trick cause people would go, “Yes, it’s an app. I had it 15 years ago. It’s called Shazam. You press this button and three seconds later it tells you the album and the song and the link to listen to it.” Like, all the tricks along that genre, they’re just out. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> You told this story about doing one of your famous dollar bill tricks for somebody, and then they immediately took out their phone and they Googled, you know, how did Josh Jay do this dollar bill trick?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then they, like, just played the video in front of everybody, and you said it was not a great moment. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Right. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> How do you deal with that? How do you deal with the fact that the answers so many of these tricks, the ability to watch it again and again and again from any angle that someone might have captured, are available to everybody at every moment?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Well, you’ve hit upon, you know, a really important and sort of topical crisis in our industry, which is that a lot of people are going on YouTube and doing tutorials of tricks that don’t belong to them and classic tricks and really good tricks. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> The particular dollar bill trick that got Josh is one of those classics that people can now look up on YouTube.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Josh sees two strategies that magicians can use to get around this problem. The first being to avoid the classics altogether. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> But if you’re doing a trick that thousands of other magicians are doing, you’re at great risk that that trick will be searchable and, you know, easily found online. Whereas if I’m doing something totally original, good luck searching for it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You’re not gonna find that trick because I created that trick and it’s not published and it’s not anywhere to be found in a searchable way. So that’s one way. Another way is magicians have to get really clever at disguising what it looks like. They have to mesh together several methods and several tricks so that somebody looks at it and goes, “You know, I don’t know. He borrowed my house key, and then he bent it, and then it vanished- … and it appeared in a lock across the room.” You know, that’s not a searchable term, whereas changing a $1 bill into $100 bill is easily searchable. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> And yeah, so at the same time as it is making a lot of parts of your life as a magician more difficult, it also might be raising the rewards to true novelty and creativity and innovation.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> That’s how I’m choosing to look at it, and maybe I’m, like, choosing to look at it with rose-tinted glasses because I like that process. But, you know, in my head, the healthiest magic community in the world is one in which everybody’s doing their own material. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know, we don’t give much attention to bands that only play covers. They play in bars for 30 people. If you write your own music and you become successful at that, you can tour arenas and have a career that is way more outsized than a cover band ever could. We don’t reward comedians who just repeat the jokes of, you know, a smorgasbord of all their favorite comedians. We reward people who come up with original monologues, and we can’t wait to hear the latest Chappelle or Nate Bargatze or Seinfeld hour because we know it’s gonna be their point of view. So, my ultimate ideal in magic, it would be, you know, all magicians doing their own stuff. Now, magic has developed at a much slower pace than comedy and even songwriting.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I mean, it takes years to perfect a really great magic trick. So that’s a high bar indeed, but my hope is that this negative will end up being a positive and that magicians will take a cue from this and start really obscuring what they’re doing in such a way that it’s either mostly original or completely original.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> So, technology is changing magic, but Josh says it won’t be taking over anytime soon. For instance, most magicians who choose to use AI are using it to help them tweak their script a bit, not to design tricks wholesale. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> AI can help you find a moment in history that you would have never turned up that’s the perfect way to theatrically get into a trick on coincidence or a trick on transformation, and now you’ve given it this great context about this amazing thing that happened in Victorian England. And, you know, that’s, I think, a way that AI is really gonna help performers because like so many things, we don’t want AI to dehumanize magic. Magic will be one of the great things left when AI is fully integrated into everything else that people will go to for a truly human experience. I mean, what besides eating and watching movies will be left that isn’t entirely, you know, affected by AI?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Let’s talk about this. You describe the period from the 1870s to the 1930s as the “Golden Age of Magic”. Yeah. Could we, you know, see a resurgence to a new Golden Age of Magic? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of evidence to say that in a sense we are in another golden age. I mean, take some metrics. Because of TikTok and Instagram and just magic being online generally, and add to that the fact that America’s Got Talent and Fool Us are putting magic in front of millions of people in their homes that didn’t used to be there- More people are watching magic than have ever watched it in history.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Fact. Not, and it’s not close. It’s not like marginally more. Like, exponentially more people are watching magic than ever have. Another objective fact is that there are now more venues to perform magic than there have ever been at any point in my life or in the previous 50 years. So, I also have emprivated data because I co-own, a magic shop called Vanishing Inc., where we sell magic and we publish books, and I can tell you that we are selling to a larger group of people than magic shops used to sell to. They used to be quite localized, and thanks to the internet, we can now sell all over the world. And the industry itself is growing. You can just feel that there are more people interested in magic every day and not less. So, in those regards, anecdotally, I would say to you, we might be in a golden age and not know it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> You describe magic as being a product of its time, and you give this great example of the famous trick of sawing a woman in half being the perfect trick when it emerged after World War I. All of a sudden it was hitting an audience that was maybe a little bit more desensitized to violence, more open to women, playing different roles in society, including one where presumably they get chopped in half. And I wanna ask you, what would be the perfect trick for 2026? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Oh. Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, that’s a really tough question. I mean, I would say to zoom out for a second and buy myself a minute to think, I would say that the greatest magic trick, and not just in 2026, ever, is always the trick that is perfect for the situation you’re in at that moment, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So I talk in the book, you might remember, about the ham sandwich theory, and for those readers who haven’t read my book, like, this is such a great illustration of what magic can be at its ultimate fullest expression, which is that if I reach up behind your ear right now, Jessica, and pull out a ham sandwich from nowhere, and you don’t know how it’s done, you’re gonna look at me and go, “That was random,” because it is.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s totally random. It’s not interesting. It’s not logical. I just pulled a ham sandwich out. It’s arbitrary. But if instead you said to me, “Gosh, Josh, I am starving. I’m just… I’m really in the mood for a ham sandwich. Is that weird to say?” And I then went, “Oh, yeah?” And now I pull a ham sandwich out of your ear- \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I have fulfilled a need. I have responded to a need you created, and now that magic is everything to you. It’s personal. It felt directly tailored to something you had. It fulfilled a need, hunger that you were feeling at that moment. So, whatever the answer is to your question, it would have to be something that’s specific to an audience in 2026.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> I want to push Josh here. What does the perfect trick look like in 2026 with technology constantly shifting the boundaries between that’s awesome and yeah, that’s an app? What happens to an art form so cognizant of the limits of human cognition when everyone carries around a device that seems to know everything and never forget?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Well, maybe it calls attention to that very device. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> I always see things through the lens of what I’m working on, and I’m working on a trick where we turn off all the lights in the theater, which is instantly and immediately fascinating to me because it gets to be this change of scenery, right? And I have everybody take out their cell phones and put their light on. So, you get that little concert vibe going where they’re moving their light around, and it looks like twinkling stars in this huge theater, right? And all these people are here. And I’m working on a trick where they are whittled down. So, through a series of choices that the audience makes, I would say, “Okay, if you were born in September, stay standing with your light on. Everybody else sit down, turn your phone off.” And it goes from 1,000 lights to… 30 lights. And you whittle them down all the way until you get one person with a light, and then you predict that person’s phone number, which is the thing that they’re holding- the whole time, and you’re right there, and how could you have known it would be them, and the choices that were made.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then the very light they’re holding has the phone number, and that’s what I’m working on, and that’s what I’ll call the ultimate trick in 2026 cause I haven’t fully figured out how I’m doing it yet. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Oh my gosh. Well, I just love hearing you talk about this knowing that you don’t even fully know how you’re going to do it yet.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yeah. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Like, it seems like as a creator, you think about how do I want the audience to feel, what should they be paying attention to, what should they be thinking about, and then eventually you get back to the mechanism of how you pull this all off. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Joshua Jay:\u003c/strong> Yes. It’s exactly that. And that was a really important shift for me is not to become obsessed with method, not to get bogged down by well, that would be great, but I don’t know how to do it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think that all my best things have come out of me sort of going I’m not gonna think about how this could be done. I just wanna play out in my mind what it would look like if I could do it. And then I need to figure out a way to do it. And, you know, you fall on your face a lot, and you realize, like, well, I can’t do that, but I could do this.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And you might fall short of the ideal, but at least you’re thinking… in the minds of the audience, and I think that’s a really good place to start. You know, empathy is a really important tool for a magician, and I imagine it’s probably a huge focus of everybody who’s helping to design AI is to think empathically, to think like your audience.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know, the first thing you have to do as a magician is get out of your own head and to try to get into the head of the people you’re performing for. What do they wanna see? What would they think if you did this? How would they react if you did this?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Empathy as one of the ultimate superpowers? Yeah, I buy that. Human creators of all stripes have long recognized its power. Magicians like Joshua Jay rely on empathy to create experiences that delight, and stun, and fill a need. Engineers rely on empathy to imagine how users will engage with confusing or intimidating tools.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What’s different is that now we have machines that empathize, too, or at least convincingly perform empathy. Which brings us right back to where we started, me going to my chatbot three days later to report back on how that email landed, the email we carefully crafted together. As that line between what we perceive to be reality versus magic continues to blur before our eyes, I’m glad to have the occasional magician as a tour guide.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m Jess Love. Life, Automated is a project of the Ryan Institute on Complexity at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. We’re distributed by KQED. Our show was produced by Jesse Dukes. Music by Stephen Jackson. Recording help from Will Feeney, George Christensen, and Leila Mohammed. Administrative support, recording, and wise counsel from Stacia Sliger.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003cem>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It starts with aspirational lifestyle content about “embracing your femininity,” but ends with alt-right ideology and conspiracy theories about reproductive care. This is the pink pill pipeline — one of the primary ways young women are radicalized online today. Seemingly innocuous content about dating advice, wellness tips, and pop culture leads to increasingly conservative and extremist talking points about how birth control is causing the fertility crisis or how women don’t need to vote. It’s all wrapped up in a glossy veneer of feminine empowerment. Reporter Kylie Cheung joins to discuss how seemingly apolitical content online is shifting the cultural narrative around reproductive rights through coordinated misinformation campaigns, and how to spot pink pill content for what it is.\u003cbr>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-wp-embed is-provider-megaphone wp-block-embed-megaphone\">\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\nhttps://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=KQINC5702825517\n\u003c/div>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Guest: \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://substack.com/@kylietcheung?utm_source=about-page\">Kylie Cheung\u003c/a>, staff reporter at \u003cem>Abortion, Every Day\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://jessica.substack.com/p/how-celebrity-smear-campaigns-are\">How Celebrity Smear Campaigns are Inspiring Attacks on Birth Control\u003c/a> — Kylie Cheung, \u003cem>Abortion, Every Day\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/far-right-birth-control-conspiracy-theories/\">Far right coming for women’s autonomy; birth control on chopping block\u003c/a> — Cassie Miller, \u003cem>Southern Poverty Law Center\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://jessica.substack.com/p/princess-treatment-trend-conservative-pipeline\">We Need to Talk About the Pink-Pill Pipeline\u003c/a> — Jessica Valenti, \u003cem>Abortion, Every Day\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://emilyinyourphone.substack.com/p/i-caught-a-secret-right-wing-influence\">I Caught a Secret Right-Wing Influence Operation Running In My Feed\u003c/a> — Emily Amick, \u003cem>Emily In Your Phone\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://revealnews.org/podcast/the-long-campaign-to-turn-birth-control-into-the-new-abortion/\">The Long Campaign to Turn Birth Control Into the New Abortion\u003c/a> — Katharine Mieszkowski, \u003cem>Reveal\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/09/inside-anti-abortion-groups-campaign-to-sell-women-on-unreliable-birth-control-alternatives/\">Inside Anti-Abortion Groups’ Campaign to Sell Women on Unreliable Birth Control “Alternatives”\u003c/a> — Kiera Butler, \u003cem>Mother Jones\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/04/25/birth-control-maha-abortion-trump-00889738\">Trump Is Going After Birth Control. Here’s Why. \u003c/a>— Mary Ziegler, \u003cem>Politico\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://theintercept.com/2026/07/10/rfk-jr-pronatalism-birth-control/\">The Trump Administration Is Overhauling Birth Control Access for the Pronatalist Movement\u003c/a> — Jessica Washington, \u003cem>The Intercept\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Follow us on \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Instagram\u003c/a> and\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">TikTok\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong> Hello. Do you like these deep dives? Do you want more? Then please rate and review Close All Tabs on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. And tell your friends! Post about it on Instagram, Blue Sky, X, Discord, Reddit, the comments of whatever random recipe blog you’re starting arguments in. Basically, it would be a huge help to get the word out. Okay, let’s get to the show. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If you’re a young woman online, you may have seen posts from Evie Magazine. It has a chic millennial pink logo and taglines like “helping women harness their feminine energy.” Its website features glossy, aspirational photo shoots of women modeling gauzy dresses on the Mediterranean coast, women doing yoga in coordinated pastel workout sets, and women riding horseback through arid Southwestern grasslands. They’re paired with articles like, “What the It Girls Are Wearing in Italy This Summer,” and “Is Your Bra Making You Sick?” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>You probably would not suspect that there’s anything like, quote unquote “political” about this publication at all. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>This is Kylie Cheung, the staff reporter for the newsletter, Abortion, Every Day. She’s been covering reproductive health care and women’s rights for years, working at Jezebel and Salon. At first glance, Evie Magazine’s content doesn’t appear that different from the coverage of the publications where Kylie used to work. But push past the surface, and something else emerges. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>You might see their presence on, say, Instagram if you like see a post about celebrity news, then you might follow them or you might go back to their website, and then slowly but surely start to see more content that’s really pushing motherhood, young motherhood, like anti-birth control messages. They describe themselves as like a magazine for celebrating true womanhood and femininity, and as we know all of that has increasingly become kind of this right-wing dog whistle. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>If you dig a little deeper into Evie’s website, you’ll find articles on why Love Island actually makes a case against casual sex, how Netflix’s Little House on the Prairie is quote, “The Most Pro-American Show in Years,” and coverage of celebrities who’ve denounced birth control. In fact, Evie publishes at least one anti-birth control article per month, filled with of birth control causing strokes, depression, hormonal chaos, and… bisexuality?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>That is such a good one. I remember in like 2022, I was reporting on this influx of TikToks about conspiracy theories that like, my birth control made me gay or this or that. And it’s just like, maybe you were, maybe you’re just gay, which is like, totally cool and everything. And then if something is seen as like unsafe or dangerous that contributes to… a consensus that there should be more restrictions or it should be harder to access, and that is ultimately a right-wing political goal. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Evie Magazine has been hailed as the “conservative Cosmo.” In addition to the digital and print content, Evie also hosts live events and sells raw milkmaid dresses — a play on the far-right raw milk craze and the cottagecore trend that dominated the early 2020s fashion cycle. Oh, and there’s Evie’s FemTech debut — a period-tracking app funded by Peter Thiel that promises to help women wean off of birth control in favor of “natural cycle tracking.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>If you just say we need to like ban birth control, that isn’t really on its face going to be a popular message, but colluding with kind of this whole “MAHA” and like alternative health scene of pushing for this idea that any amount of like quote unquote “chemicals” and putting this or that in your body, that that is kind of what you might see at a website. Like Evie, that claims to be like an apolitical female lifestyle brand that, you know, isn’t going to overtly say, “We think birth control should be banned,” but is going to kind of push these messages, really questioning and kind of contributing to like, lessening the popularity of birth control. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Welcome to the pink pill pipeline. This is the way young women are radicalized online — through seemingly innocuous content about dating advice, wellness tips, and pop culture — which steers them toward influencers who assure them that giving up their career is an empowering choice… and that caring about politics is for the boys, anyway. And soon enough, extremist talking points about how birth control is causing the fertility crisis, or how women don’t need to vote, don’t feel extreme at all. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And that content, of course, is wrapped in a glossy veneer of feminine empowerment. Today, we’re exploring how seemingly apolitical content online is actually shifting the cultural narrative around reproductive rights — through coordinated misinformation campaigns and aspirational lifestyle posts. And let me tell you, it’s a lot easier to get sucked in than you might think. Ready? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know how this goes. Let’s open our first tab. What is the pink pill pipeline? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>I think like, end of 2024, when we were seeing all of these conversations come up about how the quote unquote “Manosphere” helped Trump win the election by like, connecting with young men and how he’d gone on all of these like Manosphere-y podcasts. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of President Trump on Logan Paul’s podcast from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>Biden is just so bad. He’s the worst president in the history of our country. You should make a diss track on him. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of President Trump on Theo Von’s podcast from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>Is cocaine a stronger, uh, up? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cocaine will turn you into a damn owl, homie, you know what I’m saying? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of President Trump on Adin Ross’s stream from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>Well, today is going to be the most important stream I’ve ever done. Right in the living room of Mar-a-Lago. And we’ll have a little fun today. Let’s do it. My son Barron says hello, but he’s a big fan of yours. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Many of them, they’ll have interviewed or endorsed Trump, but they won’t call themselves political. It’s because they draw in and radicalize so many young men precisely by presenting as apolitical, where first, young men might be drawn to their content that’s dating advice, or stuff about MMA fighting, or any number of things that aren’t inherently political, but then just because of how algorithms work, or as you continue to watch their videos or content — eventually they just start saying pretty misogynistic or racist things. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>This is an alt-right ideology known as the red pill: the belief that men are disadvantaged in modern society — and that it’s feminism’s fault. Taking the red pill is a nod to this scene in The Matrix — when Neo learns that his entire life is a simulation. Morpheus offers him a choice. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of The Matrix from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Incels and self-described “men’s rights activists” have used the metaphor of the red pill to describe “waking up” to their victimhood and resisting “progressive” notions like… women having any agency at all. The manosphere calls for a return to the patriarchal glory of the past. Today, red-pilling is used to describe the way people are radicalized into far-right ideology. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Manosphere content can be wildly misogynistic — but the way young men fall into these online circles is through lifestyle content that appears apolitical: weightlifting, dating advice, style tips. The pink pill pipeline is the other side of this coin. The phrase was coined by journalist Lois Shearing. Her 2025 book, “Pink-pilled,” examines how women are lured into far-right ideology. Just like with red-pilling, pink-pilling also starts with seemingly apolitical lifestyle content. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Many of these creators or influencers will not overtly identify as Republican agents. They will, in fact, probably reel in young women through content or short-form videos where they talk about celebrity gossip, or maybe they’ll talk about health advice, and eventually get to disparaging and pushing misinformation about birth control. If you’re a young woman and you hate your job, they might give you advice about how to start dating like, a rich man and how you can achieve something akin to like a tradwife lifestyle. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>We talked about tradwives in our episode on Mormon momfluencers. They’re women who’ve rejected a modern career path and rely on their husbands to be the breadwinners. Tradwives are supposed to manage the household, do all the chores, take care of the kids, and lead their family’s return to traditional gender roles. Hence, tradwife. Tradwife content was pretty trendy for a while. Videos of baking bread from scratch, homeschooling children, and performing motherhood. But, as it turns out, being a stay-at-home mom, taking care of an entire family on a single income, is not glamorous — it’s hard. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>As more horror stories have emerged about the economic precarity of this reality, the tradwife lifestyle has started to lose its appeal. In fact, the most prominent pink pill figures have shifted their messaging away from promoting the tradwife lifestyle — because they know it’s unpopular. Like Emma Waters. She’s a researcher for the Heritage Foundation, the far-right think tank behind Project 2025. Emma Waters has been promoting a middle ground between tradwives and girlboss feminists. But still promoting motherhood above all. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of Emma Waters for Fox News from TikTok]: \u003c/strong>How can we structure what career success and the career trajectory of mothers looks like first, and then build in our career and education to complement that? So maybe women won’t work full-time. About 60% of women say that they would actually prefer to be a homemaker. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>But that kind of rhetoric is still divisive. It’s certainly not the soft on-ramp to conservative ideology that lifestyle content is. Celebrity news, for one, is a much more palatable entry point. Take Candace Owens, the far-right political commentator, podcaster, and conspiracy theorist. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>There’s a reason why Candace Owens has her own news platform that’s dedicated to celebrity news when she is like, a politics person. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of Candace Owens from TikTok] \u003c/strong>Personally, I’m starting to wonder if Cynthia is about to steal Ariana from Ethan Slater, which would be some great justice. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Where you can reel someone in with your cultural takes and eventually build like, this cultural consensus to like a right-wing agenda. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>The pink pill pipeline often starts with dating advice. It’s very aspirational. Other young women showing off their luxurious lifestyles paid for by their boyfriends or husbands. You’ll hear buzzwords like “soft life” and “feminine energy” and “princess treatment.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Earth Angel Ariana]: \u003c/strong>I used to be a tomboy and play basketball, tackle football, and now I just feel like a princess wifey. I just feel like life is so soft and feminine, like men do everything for me. My boyfriend gives me princess treatment all the time. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Laila Hakim]:\u003c/strong> Your man should wanna not only take care of you, but those around you, too. And he’s gonna do without hesitation. That man gets up so fucking fast, like, you won’t even be able to blink before he’s up. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Andele Lara]:\u003c/strong> Girl, I’m in Chicago with my man, and I didn’t book a flight, hotel, or schedule anything. Because a real provider is always going to make time for you. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>If you’re a young woman, who’s been grinding in your career and still struggling to make ends meet — much less afford any of these luxuries — and on top of that, dating sucks… then this kind of content is alluring. It’s very easy to get sucked in. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>I think that the success of these different buzzwords and seemingly apolitical trends is that, you know, they spring from these very specific and very real frustrations. A lot of us were just like, set up to be screwed over by the economy as it exists. And I think that in traditional American politics, you hear all the time about frustrated working class men. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But then, I think there is a lot of frustration among the demographic of young women who are also just very exploited as workers and really getting the short end of the stick economically. So that tends to then be catered to in a different way of this content that’s geared toward like, “You could have an amazing life if you just quit your terrible job. Um, your job mistreats and exploits you and all of this is exploitation. And it would actually be empowering if you just quit and married someone and had kids and took care of your kids.” And like, there is a real appeal there. If you hate your job, or if you’re struggling and you’re frustrated in that way. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>The word “empowering” is used a lot in pink pill content. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>A lot of these female lifestyle influencers who might not present as anti-feminist, they really will like, couch their specific choices in this performatively feminist language. You could even just see this with something slightly unrelated, but also very related of like vaccine skepticism. It’s like so couched in like, my body, my choice language. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>On its face, aspirational dating content doesn’t seem to be anti-feminist or regressive, especially when compared to the overt tradwife videos. But it also opens the door for a quieter, more insidious erosion of women’s agency and relationships. There is this Mormon influencer, Courtney Palmer, who went mega-viral last year for her videos on how to get the “princess treatment.” She talks about how her husband always opens the door for her, and how she rarely ties her own shoes because her husband will do it for her. And how do you secure the so-called provider? Well, Courtney has some advice: \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of Courtney Palmer from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>I’m at a restaurant with my husband, I do not talk to the hostess, I do not open any doors, and I do not order my own food. You’re just letting your husband lead and be masculine. He made the reservation, let him do the logistics, you’re just being a princess. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>This messaging is particularly effective on young women, because it’s coming from their peers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>They’re not like, Ted Cruz. They’re not like, you know, these Republican politicians. They’re, like, female lifestyle influencers, they’re young women. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of Courtney Palmer from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>If the waiter addresses you first, I will simply just look at my husband and my husband will order. You don’t need to over speak, over exert yourself. You can be feminine and soft and quiet. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>So to recap, here’s how the pink pill pipeline works: you’re a woman in your 20s — you might stumble across a post on Instagram about why Zendaya wants to be a mother. Celebrity news and pop culture is eye-catching. You follow the account. Then, you go on TikTok and see a video from a woman whose life seems so much easier and so much more luxurious than yours. Her fiance pays for everything. She doesn’t have to lift a finger. Who wouldn’t want that? You’re trying to be more active, so you go on YouTube and look up instructional videos for pilates at home. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Then, your social media algorithms start feeding you more content — based on what you’ve already engaged with. More about the soft life. More tips for finding a provider boyfriend. YouTube shorts about the values of young motherhood. Instagram reels about holistic health, and clean living, and detoxifying your diet — which will make you hotter and increase your chances of finding a provider boyfriend. TikToks about why your birth control might be making you sick. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>There are people who aren’t kind of traditionally associated with going after reproductive rights or going after women’s rights. It looks a lot more organic if they’re just seemingly naturally talking about the connections between like, birth control causing infertility, which is not true and is not backed up by anything. And that’s supposedly meaning, giving way to like, the quote unquote, like, “IVF industry” of like, of now that so many women lost their fertility from using birth control, they now need IVF. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Wait, what? Once you’re sucked into the pink pill pipeline, this conspiracy is everywhere. We’re going to get into that in a new tab — after this break. But first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you to keep us going. You can support us by becoming a member at donate dot kqed dot org slash podcast. Okay. After the break, the link between the pink pill, misinformation, and the war on birth control. Stick around. Let’s open a new tab: does birth control make you infertile? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Ugh, I mean no, there’s just like, no… evidence of this whatsoever. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>On the internet, there’s this pervasive conspiracy theory that long-term hormonal birth control use leads to infertility, which is somehow funding the modern IVF industry. Like Kylie said, there is zero clinical evidence of this. This is a pretty extreme conspiracy theory, but anti-birth control content is on the rise. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A 2025 study, published in Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, analyzed 100 of the top TikTok videos related to contraception, between August and September 2023. The videos had a collective 4.85 billion views — they were brimming with misinformation about hormonal birth control. Over half of the videos explicitly rejected hormonal birth control, and over a third of the videos recommended natural cycle tracking, without disclosing the limits of it. Only 10% of the videos were created by medical professionals. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This stuff is everywhere online. Here’s what the conversation around birth control looks like right now — and this is on mainstream social media. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Casiah West]: \u003c/strong>Your gynecologist isn’t really telling you how bad birth control is. What’s ironic is, the leading cause of death in women is heart disease. Is it that women are dying from heart disease because of birth control? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user The Workout Witch]:\u003c/strong> Birth control is one of the most damaging things you can put in your body, specifically for your body’s biological stress response. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of Whatever Pod from TikTok]:\u003c/strong> If you actually look at the birth control usage rates and divorce rates, they actually perfectly coincide with like a three-year delay. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Jay Shetty]:\u003c/strong> So we’re changing the hormone balance in women in a way that may not be completely reversible. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Pretty Politics 101]:\u003c/strong> Girls that I know who had like the implant in their arm or who have been on the pill for over 10 years cannot get pregnant. Almost like that was the entire point and plan in the first place. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>These sensational claims flatten a reality that is complex and nuanced. It’s true that people have wildly different experiences with birth control. Many women have been dismissed, mistreated, and discriminated against by the medical system. Medical misogyny is real, and the history of birth control is steeped in it. The pill was tested on Puerto Rican women, and doctors did dismiss reports of side effects as “psychosomatic.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Today, a lot of women are still not offered adequate pain management for IUD insertions. There’s no “one-size-fits-all” birth control option, so figuring out what actually works for your body can take a bit of trial and error, which can be especially discouraging when your doctors aren’t listening. I, myself, have had mixed experiences with birth control. Kylie has too. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>I think that you’d be hard-pressed to talk to any woman or any person who uses or has used at different points hormonal birth control, and hear that they had an absolutely flawless, perfect, pain-free experience. Their bodies might not react that well to like, hormonal-birth control pills or any number of different methods. And I think that that is all incredibly valid and can’t be, you know, pushed under the rug. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think there are just a lot of… difficult realities with our healthcare system, how our medical system treats the experiences and bodies of women or people who use birth control. I think that what you’ll kind of see on social media are kind of these narratives that really tend to flatten that, or just capitalize on the fact that we have these negative experiences to push these different messages about the safety, or effectiveness of birth control, even though… you know, medically speaking, birth control is very safe and very effective. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s just that we, as different people with different bodies will have different experiences with it. But I think that, you know, that there’s no room for that kind of nuance in like the kinds of social media posts, and what ends up happening is that like, a lot of storytelling can be taken out of context and then fed into like this right-wing political agenda. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>The existing negative experiences that many people have had with reproductive health care means that the cultural discourse is primed to be co-opted by far-right political movements. Like pink-pill dating advice, there are certain buzzwords that raise red flags for Kylie — especially words like “natural” and “cycle tracking.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Cycle tracking is a perfectly valid form of contraception. Lots of people can’t take hormonal birth control for health reasons and have successfully relied on cycle tracking. But when influencers disparage other forms of contraception and insist on the “natural element” without disclosing that it’s one of the least effective forms of birth control? Red flags. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>What we have is this very, very regressive agenda, but really packaged in kind of this feminist way. And like, if you really, if you like, squint or if you aren’t that educated in these issues yourself, like, sure, it might even sound like it makes sense. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>It’s only in the last few years that anti-birth control sentiments have gained so much momentum. We need to talk about when this uptick started. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>I really started noticing and reporting on it specifically around like, 2022, which coincidentally, you know, was the year that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>With Roe v. Wade overturned, many far-right religious groups and anti-abortion organizations have a new mission: to make birth control the new abortion. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Dasha Burns for NBC News from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>In the months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Maggie Olivia went to the pharmacy to pick up her birth control prescription. The pharmacists denied her prescription because they were unsure if it was legal, which it was. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Let’s open one more tab: the war on birth control. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Make America Healthy Again — this is the Trump administration’s health initiative, spearheaded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., U.S. Health Secretary and notorious anti-vaxxer. The “MAHA” movement is fueled by skepticism of the pharmaceutical industry. Practices and medications under scrutiny include: childhood vaccine schedules, Tylenol during pregnancy, antidepressants, ADHD drugs. And now, hormonal birth control. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Amna Nawaz for PBS News Hour]: \u003c/strong>Earlier this year, the Trump administration scrubbed CDC guidance on birth control from government websites and froze $65 million in funding to family planning clinics that provide free or low-cost contraception. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>The Department of Health and Human Services just overhauled Title X (ten). This is a federal grant program originally designed to help low-income Americans access birth control and other reproductive health care. Kylie said this program has always had bipartisan support, going all the way back to when Nixon signed it into law, over 50 years ago. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But now, according to a funding notice published at the beginning of July, grants funded through the program will, quote, “build body literacy, address infertility, plan and space pregnancies, and navigate reproductive health conditions such as endometriosis.” Contraception is not mentioned, except in a section about “over-medicalization.” Clinics that receive Title X (ten) funding are instructed to promote fertility awareness-based methods — like, natural cycle tracking. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Some really concerning things have been like, the State Department equating certain forms of birth control and labeling them as abortifacient — and we’ve seen that a couple of times coming directly from this administration, and the goal then being to ban certain birth control or birth control more broadly, in the same way that abortion is banned. We’ve also seen the defunding of Planned Parenthood where like, what the language of that is is to suggest that reproductive healthcare and like, the provision of contraceptives and such isn’t actually health care — is kind of like the language. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Conservatives were not always this critical of birth control. In fact, many were pro-birth control. Back in 2015, Republicans actually introduced a bill to make it even more accessible — by incentivizing drug companies to sell over-the-counter birth control.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>I think that there just has been this very sharp right-wing cultural pivot where a lot of this deeply pro-natalist language of human civilization and white Western society is in serious trouble if we don’t have a lot more babies really quick, like a lot of the Elon Musk rhetoric. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Pro-natalism is an ideology that pushes for higher birth rates to combat the supposed “decline of civilization.” Anything that causes people to have more babies is on the table. Can you explain the link between this pro-natalist fear-mongering around falling birth rates and then white supremacist conspiracy theories? What is the great replacement theory that everyone’s freaking out about? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>I think that there is just this inherent link between, you know, panics about the birth rate and racial panics, even though obviously, you know sometimes it’ll be couched in this race-neutral language of just like the human race and declining birth rates there, or the fact that like abortion bans or denying people birth control access will affect people of all races and people of all races might then be forced to like move forward with a pregnancy they don’t want or whatnot. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>It’s impossible to separate this panic from its racist roots. It started with fears of declining birth rates among white women. Kylie said the decline isn’t statistically significant. Experts say it’s likely due to declining teen pregnancy rates. But some extremists on the right claim that birth control is used to suppress white birth rates, in an attempt to replace white Americans as the racial majority. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>There is just this deep tie between pronatalism and white nationalism in that way, just specifically because of how much white nationalism has like embraced pronatalism for its agenda. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>In 2022, just months after Roe v. Wade was overturned, UC Berkeley, Mother Jones, and Reveal teamed up for a massive reporting project. They uncovered a years-long social media campaign from anti-abortion groups — to capitalize on wellness trends, promote cycle tracking, and sow distrust in hormonal birth control. Conservative influencers have continued to push birth control skepticism online— often citing outdated or inconclusive research studies to back up their claims. Birth control misinformation continues to thrive on social media. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Pretty Politics 101]: \u003c/strong>Does anybody else find it just a teensy bit coincidental that they pushed birth control on Millennial and Gen Z teenagers so heavily and so early? And now, look at how booming IVF is? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>That video has nearly identical wording to countless others. This year, political analyst Emily Amick published a three-part Substack series on the influencer campaign against birth control. She found dozens of Instagram posts from various lifestyle influencers that all had the same caption. They all said, and I quote, “I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that the birth control pill was given out like candy to every female millennial at age 15. And now IVF is a $50 billion industry.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Abortion is very politically popular, and so I think even now it’s very interesting that you’ll see the Trump administration has refrained from taking certain moves to directly go after abortion, but has taken all of these many different moves to go after birth control and family planning. And I’ve read certain legal experts suspect as well, is that birth control in some ways is more vulnerable — because it’s increasingly less popular because of how much misinformation there is about it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Over the last four years, there have been anecdotal reports of young women who’ve discontinued hormonal birth control because of what they see online. This is backed up by a 2024 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation. 49% of women between 18 and 25 have been served content about birth control on social media. 14% said they made a change to their birth control method or considered a change because of something they heard online. Kylie said, it’ll be decades until we understand the long-term effects of the online campaign against birth control. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s easy to dismiss lifestyle content as frivolous and inconsequential. You might see a TikTok from a woman who brags about how her boyfriend pays all of their bills, and think… “It’s not that deep.” You might come across an influencer who questions the safety of IUDs and promotes natural cycle tracking — and it’s tempting to think… “That’s just her choice!” But the pink pill pipeline is real. Content targeted at women is rapidly becoming a vehicle for extremist ideology. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Since Trump’s re-election, concerns about the manosphere have dominated the political conversation. For all of the hand-wringing about bro-y podcasts radicalizing young men, there’s very little discussion about the young women buying into their own oppression. Content aimed at girls is just not taken seriously. That’s part of what makes the pink pill pipeline so effective. It’s the lack of awareness. There’s a political undercurrent to all of these girlish lifestyle videos, but it’s very easy to miss if you’re not already looking for it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But now, you know what to look for. Before you like a video, or follow an influencer, it’s worth taking a moment to really consider the agenda behind this content. Are they sharing a personal experience with one specific type of birth control? Or are they insisting that all birth control is bad — and that only the method they recommend is natural and healthy? Sure, the romantic date night content is cute, but… is the person posting it also telling you that you need to make yourself quiet and submissive if you want to find a man who’ll pick up the check? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The point is, you don’t have to engage with this content. But, if it comes across your feed, you should be ready to see it for what it is — and then you can keep scrolling. That’s it for our deep dive — but as usual, stick around after the credits for bonus content. And if you’re dying to go further down this rabbit hole, we’ll link to some further reading in our show notes. Until next week, let’s close all these tabs. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. Additional production help from our intern, Lauren Yoon. The Close All Tabs team also includes editor Chris Hambrick and audio engineer, Brendan Willard. Additional music by APM. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts, and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor-in-Chief. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This episode includes clips and archive tape from Impaulsive, This Past Weekend with Theo Von, Adin Ross, The Matrix, Fox News, NBC News, PBS Newshour, and TikTok creators @earthangelariana, @ulovelailahakim, @theandelelara, Courtney Palmer, @casiahwest, @theworkoutwitch, @whateverpod, @jayshetty, and @prettypolitics101. Thanks for listening. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Yeah! Oh my God, now that I’m remembering it, I mean like in 2022, there was just like a viral moment of like a lot of different people theorizing that like, birth control makes you gay. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Yeah, I saw your “birth control makes people a lesbian rumor” piece and I was like, “That’s crazy,” because every lesbian I know says the complete opposite, that they went off the pill and they were like, “I don’t even like men.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>So fair, yeah. \u003c/p>\n\n",
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"How Celebrity Smear Campaigns are Inspiring Attacks on Birth Control — Kylie Cheung, Abortion, Every Day",
"Far right coming for women’s autonomy; birth control on chopping block — Cassie Miller, Southern Poverty Law Center",
"We Need to Talk About the Pink-Pill Pipeline — Jessica Valenti, Abortion, Every Day",
"I Caught a Secret Right-Wing Influence Operation Running In My Feed — Emily Amick, Emily In Your Phone",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/far-right-birth-control-conspiracy-theories/\">Far right coming for women’s autonomy; birth control on chopping block\u003c/a> — Cassie Miller, \u003cem>Southern Poverty Law Center\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/04/25/birth-control-maha-abortion-trump-00889738\">Trump Is Going After Birth Control. Here’s Why. \u003c/a>— Mary Ziegler, \u003cem>Politico\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://theintercept.com/2026/07/10/rfk-jr-pronatalism-birth-control/\">The Trump Administration Is Overhauling Birth Control Access for the Pronatalist Movement\u003c/a> — Jessica Washington, \u003cem>The Intercept\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong> Hello. Do you like these deep dives? Do you want more? Then please rate and review Close All Tabs on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. And tell your friends! Post about it on Instagram, Blue Sky, X, Discord, Reddit, the comments of whatever random recipe blog you’re starting arguments in. Basically, it would be a huge help to get the word out. Okay, let’s get to the show. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong> Hello. Do you like these deep dives? Do you want more? Then please rate and review Close All Tabs on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. And tell your friends! Post about it on Instagram, Blue Sky, X, Discord, Reddit, the comments of whatever random recipe blog you’re starting arguments in. Basically, it would be a huge help to get the word out. Okay, let’s get to the show. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>If you’re a young woman online, you may have seen posts from Evie Magazine. It has a chic millennial pink logo and taglines like “helping women harness their feminine energy.” Its website features glossy, aspirational photo shoots of women modeling gauzy dresses on the Mediterranean coast, women doing yoga in coordinated pastel workout sets, and women riding horseback through arid Southwestern grasslands. They’re paired with articles like, “What the It Girls Are Wearing in Italy This Summer,” and “Is Your Bra Making You Sick?” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>If you’re a young woman online, you may have seen posts from Evie Magazine. It has a chic millennial pink logo and taglines like “helping women harness their feminine energy.” Its website features glossy, aspirational photo shoots of women modeling gauzy dresses on the Mediterranean coast, women doing yoga in coordinated pastel workout sets, and women riding horseback through arid Southwestern grasslands. They’re paired with articles like, “What the It Girls Are Wearing in Italy This Summer,” and “Is Your Bra Making You Sick?” \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>You probably would not suspect that there’s anything like, quote unquote “political” about this publication at all. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>You probably would not suspect that there’s anything like, quote unquote “political” about this publication at all. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>This is Kylie Cheung, the staff reporter for the newsletter, Abortion, Every Day. She’s been covering reproductive health care and women’s rights for years, working at Jezebel and Salon. At first glance, Evie Magazine’s content doesn’t appear that different from the coverage of the publications where Kylie used to work. But push past the surface, and something else emerges. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>This is Kylie Cheung, the staff reporter for the newsletter, Abortion, Every Day. She’s been covering reproductive health care and women’s rights for years, working at Jezebel and Salon. At first glance, Evie Magazine’s content doesn’t appear that different from the coverage of the publications where Kylie used to work. But push past the surface, and something else emerges. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>You might see their presence on, say, Instagram if you like see a post about celebrity news, then you might follow them or you might go back to their website, and then slowly but surely start to see more content that’s really pushing motherhood, young motherhood, like anti-birth control messages. They describe themselves as like a magazine for celebrating true womanhood and femininity, and as we know all of that has increasingly become kind of this right-wing dog whistle. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>You might see their presence on, say, Instagram if you like see a post about celebrity news, then you might follow them or you might go back to their website, and then slowly but surely start to see more content that’s really pushing motherhood, young motherhood, like anti-birth control messages. They describe themselves as like a magazine for celebrating true womanhood and femininity, and as we know all of that has increasingly become kind of this right-wing dog whistle. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>If you dig a little deeper into Evie’s website, you’ll find articles on why Love Island actually makes a case against casual sex, how Netflix’s Little House on the Prairie is quote, “The Most Pro-American Show in Years,” and coverage of celebrities who’ve denounced birth control. In fact, Evie publishes at least one anti-birth control article per month, filled with of birth control causing strokes, depression, hormonal chaos, and… bisexuality?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>If you dig a little deeper into Evie’s website, you’ll find articles on why Love Island actually makes a case against casual sex, how Netflix’s Little House on the Prairie is quote, “The Most Pro-American Show in Years,” and coverage of celebrities who’ve denounced birth control. In fact, Evie publishes at least one anti-birth control article per month, filled with of birth control causing strokes, depression, hormonal chaos, and… bisexuality?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>That is such a good one. I remember in like 2022, I was reporting on this influx of TikToks about conspiracy theories that like, my birth control made me gay or this or that. And it’s just like, maybe you were, maybe you’re just gay, which is like, totally cool and everything. And then if something is seen as like unsafe or dangerous that contributes to… a consensus that there should be more restrictions or it should be harder to access, and that is ultimately a right-wing political goal. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>That is such a good one. I remember in like 2022, I was reporting on this influx of TikToks about conspiracy theories that like, my birth control made me gay or this or that. And it’s just like, maybe you were, maybe you’re just gay, which is like, totally cool and everything. And then if something is seen as like unsafe or dangerous that contributes to… a consensus that there should be more restrictions or it should be harder to access, and that is ultimately a right-wing political goal. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Evie Magazine has been hailed as the “conservative Cosmo.” In addition to the digital and print content, Evie also hosts live events and sells raw milkmaid dresses — a play on the far-right raw milk craze and the cottagecore trend that dominated the early 2020s fashion cycle. Oh, and there’s Evie’s FemTech debut — a period-tracking app funded by Peter Thiel that promises to help women wean off of birth control in favor of “natural cycle tracking.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Evie Magazine has been hailed as the “conservative Cosmo.” In addition to the digital and print content, Evie also hosts live events and sells raw milkmaid dresses — a play on the far-right raw milk craze and the cottagecore trend that dominated the early 2020s fashion cycle. Oh, and there’s Evie’s FemTech debut — a period-tracking app funded by Peter Thiel that promises to help women wean off of birth control in favor of “natural cycle tracking.” \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>If you just say we need to like ban birth control, that isn’t really on its face going to be a popular message, but colluding with kind of this whole “MAHA” and like alternative health scene of pushing for this idea that any amount of like quote unquote “chemicals” and putting this or that in your body, that that is kind of what you might see at a website. Like Evie, that claims to be like an apolitical female lifestyle brand that, you know, isn’t going to overtly say, “We think birth control should be banned,” but is going to kind of push these messages, really questioning and kind of contributing to like, lessening the popularity of birth control. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>If you just say we need to like ban birth control, that isn’t really on its face going to be a popular message, but colluding with kind of this whole “MAHA” and like alternative health scene of pushing for this idea that any amount of like quote unquote “chemicals” and putting this or that in your body, that that is kind of what you might see at a website. Like Evie, that claims to be like an apolitical female lifestyle brand that, you know, isn’t going to overtly say, “We think birth control should be banned,” but is going to kind of push these messages, really questioning and kind of contributing to like, lessening the popularity of birth control. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Welcome to the pink pill pipeline. This is the way young women are radicalized online — through seemingly innocuous content about dating advice, wellness tips, and pop culture — which steers them toward influencers who assure them that giving up their career is an empowering choice… and that caring about politics is for the boys, anyway. And soon enough, extremist talking points about how birth control is causing the fertility crisis, or how women don’t need to vote, don’t feel extreme at all. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Welcome to the pink pill pipeline. This is the way young women are radicalized online — through seemingly innocuous content about dating advice, wellness tips, and pop culture — which steers them toward influencers who assure them that giving up their career is an empowering choice… and that caring about politics is for the boys, anyway. And soon enough, extremist talking points about how birth control is causing the fertility crisis, or how women don’t need to vote, don’t feel extreme at all. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And that content, of course, is wrapped in a glossy veneer of feminine empowerment. Today, we’re exploring how seemingly apolitical content online is actually shifting the cultural narrative around reproductive rights — through coordinated misinformation campaigns and aspirational lifestyle posts. And let me tell you, it’s a lot easier to get sucked in than you might think. Ready? \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And that content, of course, is wrapped in a glossy veneer of feminine empowerment. Today, we’re exploring how seemingly apolitical content online is actually shifting the cultural narrative around reproductive rights — through coordinated misinformation campaigns and aspirational lifestyle posts. And let me tell you, it’s a lot easier to get sucked in than you might think. Ready? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You know how this goes. Let’s open our first tab. What is the pink pill pipeline? \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>I think like, end of 2024, when we were seeing all of these conversations come up about how the quote unquote “Manosphere” helped Trump win the election by like, connecting with young men and how he’d gone on all of these like Manosphere-y podcasts. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>I think like, end of 2024, when we were seeing all of these conversations come up about how the quote unquote “Manosphere” helped Trump win the election by like, connecting with young men and how he’d gone on all of these like Manosphere-y podcasts. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of President Trump on Logan Paul’s podcast from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>Biden is just so bad. He’s the worst president in the history of our country. You should make a diss track on him. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of President Trump on Logan Paul’s podcast from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>Biden is just so bad. He’s the worst president in the history of our country. You should make a diss track on him. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of President Trump on Theo Von’s podcast from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>Is cocaine a stronger, uh, up? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cocaine will turn you into a damn owl, homie, you know what I’m saying? \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of President Trump on Theo Von’s podcast from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>Is cocaine a stronger, uh, up? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cocaine will turn you into a damn owl, homie, you know what I’m saying? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of President Trump on Adin Ross’s stream from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>Well, today is going to be the most important stream I’ve ever done. Right in the living room of Mar-a-Lago. And we’ll have a little fun today. Let’s do it. My son Barron says hello, but he’s a big fan of yours. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of President Trump on Adin Ross’s stream from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>Well, today is going to be the most important stream I’ve ever done. Right in the living room of Mar-a-Lago. And we’ll have a little fun today. Let’s do it. My son Barron says hello, but he’s a big fan of yours. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Many of them, they’ll have interviewed or endorsed Trump, but they won’t call themselves political. It’s because they draw in and radicalize so many young men precisely by presenting as apolitical, where first, young men might be drawn to their content that’s dating advice, or stuff about MMA fighting, or any number of things that aren’t inherently political, but then just because of how algorithms work, or as you continue to watch their videos or content — eventually they just start saying pretty misogynistic or racist things. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Many of them, they’ll have interviewed or endorsed Trump, but they won’t call themselves political. It’s because they draw in and radicalize so many young men precisely by presenting as apolitical, where first, young men might be drawn to their content that’s dating advice, or stuff about MMA fighting, or any number of things that aren’t inherently political, but then just because of how algorithms work, or as you continue to watch their videos or content — eventually they just start saying pretty misogynistic or racist things. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>This is an alt-right ideology known as the red pill: the belief that men are disadvantaged in modern society — and that it’s feminism’s fault. Taking the red pill is a nod to this scene in The Matrix — when Neo learns that his entire life is a simulation. Morpheus offers him a choice. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>This is an alt-right ideology known as the red pill: the belief that men are disadvantaged in modern society — and that it’s feminism’s fault. Taking the red pill is a nod to this scene in The Matrix — when Neo learns that his entire life is a simulation. Morpheus offers him a choice. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of The Matrix from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of The Matrix from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Incels and self-described “men’s rights activists” have used the metaphor of the red pill to describe “waking up” to their victimhood and resisting “progressive” notions like… women having any agency at all. The manosphere calls for a return to the patriarchal glory of the past. Today, red-pilling is used to describe the way people are radicalized into far-right ideology. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Incels and self-described “men’s rights activists” have used the metaphor of the red pill to describe “waking up” to their victimhood and resisting “progressive” notions like… women having any agency at all. The manosphere calls for a return to the patriarchal glory of the past. Today, red-pilling is used to describe the way people are radicalized into far-right ideology. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Manosphere content can be wildly misogynistic — but the way young men fall into these online circles is through lifestyle content that appears apolitical: weightlifting, dating advice, style tips. The pink pill pipeline is the other side of this coin. The phrase was coined by journalist Lois Shearing. Her 2025 book, “Pink-pilled,” examines how women are lured into far-right ideology. Just like with red-pilling, pink-pilling also starts with seemingly apolitical lifestyle content. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Manosphere content can be wildly misogynistic — but the way young men fall into these online circles is through lifestyle content that appears apolitical: weightlifting, dating advice, style tips. The pink pill pipeline is the other side of this coin. The phrase was coined by journalist Lois Shearing. Her 2025 book, “Pink-pilled,” examines how women are lured into far-right ideology. Just like with red-pilling, pink-pilling also starts with seemingly apolitical lifestyle content. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Many of these creators or influencers will not overtly identify as Republican agents. They will, in fact, probably reel in young women through content or short-form videos where they talk about celebrity gossip, or maybe they’ll talk about health advice, and eventually get to disparaging and pushing misinformation about birth control. If you’re a young woman and you hate your job, they might give you advice about how to start dating like, a rich man and how you can achieve something akin to like a tradwife lifestyle. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Many of these creators or influencers will not overtly identify as Republican agents. They will, in fact, probably reel in young women through content or short-form videos where they talk about celebrity gossip, or maybe they’ll talk about health advice, and eventually get to disparaging and pushing misinformation about birth control. If you’re a young woman and you hate your job, they might give you advice about how to start dating like, a rich man and how you can achieve something akin to like a tradwife lifestyle. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>We talked about tradwives in our episode on Mormon momfluencers. They’re women who’ve rejected a modern career path and rely on their husbands to be the breadwinners. Tradwives are supposed to manage the household, do all the chores, take care of the kids, and lead their family’s return to traditional gender roles. Hence, tradwife. Tradwife content was pretty trendy for a while. Videos of baking bread from scratch, homeschooling children, and performing motherhood. But, as it turns out, being a stay-at-home mom, taking care of an entire family on a single income, is not glamorous — it’s hard. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>We talked about tradwives in our episode on Mormon momfluencers. They’re women who’ve rejected a modern career path and rely on their husbands to be the breadwinners. Tradwives are supposed to manage the household, do all the chores, take care of the kids, and lead their family’s return to traditional gender roles. Hence, tradwife. Tradwife content was pretty trendy for a while. Videos of baking bread from scratch, homeschooling children, and performing motherhood. But, as it turns out, being a stay-at-home mom, taking care of an entire family on a single income, is not glamorous — it’s hard. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>As more horror stories have emerged about the economic precarity of this reality, the tradwife lifestyle has started to lose its appeal. In fact, the most prominent pink pill figures have shifted their messaging away from promoting the tradwife lifestyle — because they know it’s unpopular. Like Emma Waters. She’s a researcher for the Heritage Foundation, the far-right think tank behind Project 2025. Emma Waters has been promoting a middle ground between tradwives and girlboss feminists. But still promoting motherhood above all. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>As more horror stories have emerged about the economic precarity of this reality, the tradwife lifestyle has started to lose its appeal. In fact, the most prominent pink pill figures have shifted their messaging away from promoting the tradwife lifestyle — because they know it’s unpopular. Like Emma Waters. She’s a researcher for the Heritage Foundation, the far-right think tank behind Project 2025. Emma Waters has been promoting a middle ground between tradwives and girlboss feminists. But still promoting motherhood above all. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of Emma Waters for Fox News from TikTok]: \u003c/strong>How can we structure what career success and the career trajectory of mothers looks like first, and then build in our career and education to complement that? So maybe women won’t work full-time. About 60% of women say that they would actually prefer to be a homemaker. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of Emma Waters for Fox News from TikTok]: \u003c/strong>How can we structure what career success and the career trajectory of mothers looks like first, and then build in our career and education to complement that? So maybe women won’t work full-time. About 60% of women say that they would actually prefer to be a homemaker. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>But that kind of rhetoric is still divisive. It’s certainly not the soft on-ramp to conservative ideology that lifestyle content is. Celebrity news, for one, is a much more palatable entry point. Take Candace Owens, the far-right political commentator, podcaster, and conspiracy theorist. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>But that kind of rhetoric is still divisive. It’s certainly not the soft on-ramp to conservative ideology that lifestyle content is. Celebrity news, for one, is a much more palatable entry point. Take Candace Owens, the far-right political commentator, podcaster, and conspiracy theorist. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>There’s a reason why Candace Owens has her own news platform that’s dedicated to celebrity news when she is like, a politics person. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>There’s a reason why Candace Owens has her own news platform that’s dedicated to celebrity news when she is like, a politics person. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of Candace Owens from TikTok] \u003c/strong>Personally, I’m starting to wonder if Cynthia is about to steal Ariana from Ethan Slater, which would be some great justice. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of Candace Owens from TikTok] \u003c/strong>Personally, I’m starting to wonder if Cynthia is about to steal Ariana from Ethan Slater, which would be some great justice. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Where you can reel someone in with your cultural takes and eventually build like, this cultural consensus to like a right-wing agenda. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Where you can reel someone in with your cultural takes and eventually build like, this cultural consensus to like a right-wing agenda. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>The pink pill pipeline often starts with dating advice. It’s very aspirational. Other young women showing off their luxurious lifestyles paid for by their boyfriends or husbands. You’ll hear buzzwords like “soft life” and “feminine energy” and “princess treatment.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>The pink pill pipeline often starts with dating advice. It’s very aspirational. Other young women showing off their luxurious lifestyles paid for by their boyfriends or husbands. You’ll hear buzzwords like “soft life” and “feminine energy” and “princess treatment.” \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Earth Angel Ariana]: \u003c/strong>I used to be a tomboy and play basketball, tackle football, and now I just feel like a princess wifey. I just feel like life is so soft and feminine, like men do everything for me. My boyfriend gives me princess treatment all the time. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Earth Angel Ariana]: \u003c/strong>I used to be a tomboy and play basketball, tackle football, and now I just feel like a princess wifey. I just feel like life is so soft and feminine, like men do everything for me. My boyfriend gives me princess treatment all the time. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Laila Hakim]:\u003c/strong> Your man should wanna not only take care of you, but those around you, too. And he’s gonna do without hesitation. That man gets up so fucking fast, like, you won’t even be able to blink before he’s up. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Laila Hakim]:\u003c/strong> Your man should wanna not only take care of you, but those around you, too. And he’s gonna do without hesitation. That man gets up so fucking fast, like, you won’t even be able to blink before he’s up. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Andele Lara]:\u003c/strong> Girl, I’m in Chicago with my man, and I didn’t book a flight, hotel, or schedule anything. Because a real provider is always going to make time for you. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Andele Lara]:\u003c/strong> Girl, I’m in Chicago with my man, and I didn’t book a flight, hotel, or schedule anything. Because a real provider is always going to make time for you. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>If you’re a young woman, who’s been grinding in your career and still struggling to make ends meet — much less afford any of these luxuries — and on top of that, dating sucks… then this kind of content is alluring. It’s very easy to get sucked in. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>If you’re a young woman, who’s been grinding in your career and still struggling to make ends meet — much less afford any of these luxuries — and on top of that, dating sucks… then this kind of content is alluring. It’s very easy to get sucked in. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>I think that the success of these different buzzwords and seemingly apolitical trends is that, you know, they spring from these very specific and very real frustrations. A lot of us were just like, set up to be screwed over by the economy as it exists. And I think that in traditional American politics, you hear all the time about frustrated working class men. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>I think that the success of these different buzzwords and seemingly apolitical trends is that, you know, they spring from these very specific and very real frustrations. A lot of us were just like, set up to be screwed over by the economy as it exists. And I think that in traditional American politics, you hear all the time about frustrated working class men. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But then, I think there is a lot of frustration among the demographic of young women who are also just very exploited as workers and really getting the short end of the stick economically. So that tends to then be catered to in a different way of this content that’s geared toward like, “You could have an amazing life if you just quit your terrible job. Um, your job mistreats and exploits you and all of this is exploitation. And it would actually be empowering if you just quit and married someone and had kids and took care of your kids.” And like, there is a real appeal there. If you hate your job, or if you’re struggling and you’re frustrated in that way. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But then, I think there is a lot of frustration among the demographic of young women who are also just very exploited as workers and really getting the short end of the stick economically. So that tends to then be catered to in a different way of this content that’s geared toward like, “You could have an amazing life if you just quit your terrible job. Um, your job mistreats and exploits you and all of this is exploitation. And it would actually be empowering if you just quit and married someone and had kids and took care of your kids.” And like, there is a real appeal there. If you hate your job, or if you’re struggling and you’re frustrated in that way. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>The word “empowering” is used a lot in pink pill content. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>The word “empowering” is used a lot in pink pill content. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>A lot of these female lifestyle influencers who might not present as anti-feminist, they really will like, couch their specific choices in this performatively feminist language. You could even just see this with something slightly unrelated, but also very related of like vaccine skepticism. It’s like so couched in like, my body, my choice language. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>A lot of these female lifestyle influencers who might not present as anti-feminist, they really will like, couch their specific choices in this performatively feminist language. You could even just see this with something slightly unrelated, but also very related of like vaccine skepticism. It’s like so couched in like, my body, my choice language. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>On its face, aspirational dating content doesn’t seem to be anti-feminist or regressive, especially when compared to the overt tradwife videos. But it also opens the door for a quieter, more insidious erosion of women’s agency and relationships. There is this Mormon influencer, Courtney Palmer, who went mega-viral last year for her videos on how to get the “princess treatment.” She talks about how her husband always opens the door for her, and how she rarely ties her own shoes because her husband will do it for her. And how do you secure the so-called provider? Well, Courtney has some advice: \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>On its face, aspirational dating content doesn’t seem to be anti-feminist or regressive, especially when compared to the overt tradwife videos. But it also opens the door for a quieter, more insidious erosion of women’s agency and relationships. There is this Mormon influencer, Courtney Palmer, who went mega-viral last year for her videos on how to get the “princess treatment.” She talks about how her husband always opens the door for her, and how she rarely ties her own shoes because her husband will do it for her. And how do you secure the so-called provider? Well, Courtney has some advice: \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of Courtney Palmer from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>I’m at a restaurant with my husband, I do not talk to the hostess, I do not open any doors, and I do not order my own food. You’re just letting your husband lead and be masculine. He made the reservation, let him do the logistics, you’re just being a princess. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of Courtney Palmer from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>I’m at a restaurant with my husband, I do not talk to the hostess, I do not open any doors, and I do not order my own food. You’re just letting your husband lead and be masculine. He made the reservation, let him do the logistics, you’re just being a princess. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>This messaging is particularly effective on young women, because it’s coming from their peers. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>This messaging is particularly effective on young women, because it’s coming from their peers. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>They’re not like, Ted Cruz. They’re not like, you know, these Republican politicians. They’re, like, female lifestyle influencers, they’re young women. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>They’re not like, Ted Cruz. They’re not like, you know, these Republican politicians. They’re, like, female lifestyle influencers, they’re young women. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of Courtney Palmer from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>If the waiter addresses you first, I will simply just look at my husband and my husband will order. You don’t need to over speak, over exert yourself. You can be feminine and soft and quiet. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of Courtney Palmer from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>If the waiter addresses you first, I will simply just look at my husband and my husband will order. You don’t need to over speak, over exert yourself. You can be feminine and soft and quiet. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>So to recap, here’s how the pink pill pipeline works: you’re a woman in your 20s — you might stumble across a post on Instagram about why Zendaya wants to be a mother. Celebrity news and pop culture is eye-catching. You follow the account. Then, you go on TikTok and see a video from a woman whose life seems so much easier and so much more luxurious than yours. Her fiance pays for everything. She doesn’t have to lift a finger. Who wouldn’t want that? You’re trying to be more active, so you go on YouTube and look up instructional videos for pilates at home. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>So to recap, here’s how the pink pill pipeline works: you’re a woman in your 20s — you might stumble across a post on Instagram about why Zendaya wants to be a mother. Celebrity news and pop culture is eye-catching. You follow the account. Then, you go on TikTok and see a video from a woman whose life seems so much easier and so much more luxurious than yours. Her fiance pays for everything. She doesn’t have to lift a finger. Who wouldn’t want that? You’re trying to be more active, so you go on YouTube and look up instructional videos for pilates at home. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Then, your social media algorithms start feeding you more content — based on what you’ve already engaged with. More about the soft life. More tips for finding a provider boyfriend. YouTube shorts about the values of young motherhood. Instagram reels about holistic health, and clean living, and detoxifying your diet — which will make you hotter and increase your chances of finding a provider boyfriend. TikToks about why your birth control might be making you sick. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Then, your social media algorithms start feeding you more content — based on what you’ve already engaged with. More about the soft life. More tips for finding a provider boyfriend. YouTube shorts about the values of young motherhood. Instagram reels about holistic health, and clean living, and detoxifying your diet — which will make you hotter and increase your chances of finding a provider boyfriend. TikToks about why your birth control might be making you sick. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>There are people who aren’t kind of traditionally associated with going after reproductive rights or going after women’s rights. It looks a lot more organic if they’re just seemingly naturally talking about the connections between like, birth control causing infertility, which is not true and is not backed up by anything. And that’s supposedly meaning, giving way to like, the quote unquote, like, “IVF industry” of like, of now that so many women lost their fertility from using birth control, they now need IVF. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>There are people who aren’t kind of traditionally associated with going after reproductive rights or going after women’s rights. It looks a lot more organic if they’re just seemingly naturally talking about the connections between like, birth control causing infertility, which is not true and is not backed up by anything. And that’s supposedly meaning, giving way to like, the quote unquote, like, “IVF industry” of like, of now that so many women lost their fertility from using birth control, they now need IVF. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Wait, what? Once you’re sucked into the pink pill pipeline, this conspiracy is everywhere. We’re going to get into that in a new tab — after this break. But first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you to keep us going. You can support us by becoming a member at donate dot kqed dot org slash podcast. Okay. After the break, the link between the pink pill, misinformation, and the war on birth control. Stick around. Let’s open a new tab: does birth control make you infertile? \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Wait, what? Once you’re sucked into the pink pill pipeline, this conspiracy is everywhere. We’re going to get into that in a new tab — after this break. But first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you to keep us going. You can support us by becoming a member at donate dot kqed dot org slash podcast. Okay. After the break, the link between the pink pill, misinformation, and the war on birth control. Stick around. Let’s open a new tab: does birth control make you infertile? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Ugh, I mean no, there’s just like, no… evidence of this whatsoever. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Ugh, I mean no, there’s just like, no… evidence of this whatsoever. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>On the internet, there’s this pervasive conspiracy theory that long-term hormonal birth control use leads to infertility, which is somehow funding the modern IVF industry. Like Kylie said, there is zero clinical evidence of this. This is a pretty extreme conspiracy theory, but anti-birth control content is on the rise. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>On the internet, there’s this pervasive conspiracy theory that long-term hormonal birth control use leads to infertility, which is somehow funding the modern IVF industry. Like Kylie said, there is zero clinical evidence of this. This is a pretty extreme conspiracy theory, but anti-birth control content is on the rise. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>A 2025 study, published in Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, analyzed 100 of the top TikTok videos related to contraception, between August and September 2023. The videos had a collective 4.85 billion views — they were brimming with misinformation about hormonal birth control. Over half of the videos explicitly rejected hormonal birth control, and over a third of the videos recommended natural cycle tracking, without disclosing the limits of it. Only 10% of the videos were created by medical professionals. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>A 2025 study, published in Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, analyzed 100 of the top TikTok videos related to contraception, between August and September 2023. The videos had a collective 4.85 billion views — they were brimming with misinformation about hormonal birth control. Over half of the videos explicitly rejected hormonal birth control, and over a third of the videos recommended natural cycle tracking, without disclosing the limits of it. Only 10% of the videos were created by medical professionals. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This stuff is everywhere online. Here’s what the conversation around birth control looks like right now — and this is on mainstream social media. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>This stuff is everywhere online. Here’s what the conversation around birth control looks like right now — and this is on mainstream social media. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Casiah West]: \u003c/strong>Your gynecologist isn’t really telling you how bad birth control is. What’s ironic is, the leading cause of death in women is heart disease. Is it that women are dying from heart disease because of birth control? \u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Casiah West]: \u003c/strong>Your gynecologist isn’t really telling you how bad birth control is. What’s ironic is, the leading cause of death in women is heart disease. Is it that women are dying from heart disease because of birth control? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user The Workout Witch]:\u003c/strong> Birth control is one of the most damaging things you can put in your body, specifically for your body’s biological stress response. \u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user The Workout Witch]:\u003c/strong> Birth control is one of the most damaging things you can put in your body, specifically for your body’s biological stress response. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of Whatever Pod from TikTok]:\u003c/strong> If you actually look at the birth control usage rates and divorce rates, they actually perfectly coincide with like a three-year delay. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of Whatever Pod from TikTok]:\u003c/strong> If you actually look at the birth control usage rates and divorce rates, they actually perfectly coincide with like a three-year delay. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Jay Shetty]:\u003c/strong> So we’re changing the hormone balance in women in a way that may not be completely reversible. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Jay Shetty]:\u003c/strong> So we’re changing the hormone balance in women in a way that may not be completely reversible. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Pretty Politics 101]:\u003c/strong> Girls that I know who had like the implant in their arm or who have been on the pill for over 10 years cannot get pregnant. Almost like that was the entire point and plan in the first place. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Pretty Politics 101]:\u003c/strong> Girls that I know who had like the implant in their arm or who have been on the pill for over 10 years cannot get pregnant. Almost like that was the entire point and plan in the first place. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>These sensational claims flatten a reality that is complex and nuanced. It’s true that people have wildly different experiences with birth control. Many women have been dismissed, mistreated, and discriminated against by the medical system. Medical misogyny is real, and the history of birth control is steeped in it. The pill was tested on Puerto Rican women, and doctors did dismiss reports of side effects as “psychosomatic.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>These sensational claims flatten a reality that is complex and nuanced. It’s true that people have wildly different experiences with birth control. Many women have been dismissed, mistreated, and discriminated against by the medical system. Medical misogyny is real, and the history of birth control is steeped in it. The pill was tested on Puerto Rican women, and doctors did dismiss reports of side effects as “psychosomatic.” \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Today, a lot of women are still not offered adequate pain management for IUD insertions. There’s no “one-size-fits-all” birth control option, so figuring out what actually works for your body can take a bit of trial and error, which can be especially discouraging when your doctors aren’t listening. I, myself, have had mixed experiences with birth control. Kylie has too. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Today, a lot of women are still not offered adequate pain management for IUD insertions. There’s no “one-size-fits-all” birth control option, so figuring out what actually works for your body can take a bit of trial and error, which can be especially discouraging when your doctors aren’t listening. I, myself, have had mixed experiences with birth control. Kylie has too. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>I think that you’d be hard-pressed to talk to any woman or any person who uses or has used at different points hormonal birth control, and hear that they had an absolutely flawless, perfect, pain-free experience. Their bodies might not react that well to like, hormonal-birth control pills or any number of different methods. And I think that that is all incredibly valid and can’t be, you know, pushed under the rug. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>I think that you’d be hard-pressed to talk to any woman or any person who uses or has used at different points hormonal birth control, and hear that they had an absolutely flawless, perfect, pain-free experience. Their bodies might not react that well to like, hormonal-birth control pills or any number of different methods. And I think that that is all incredibly valid and can’t be, you know, pushed under the rug. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I think there are just a lot of… difficult realities with our healthcare system, how our medical system treats the experiences and bodies of women or people who use birth control. I think that what you’ll kind of see on social media are kind of these narratives that really tend to flatten that, or just capitalize on the fact that we have these negative experiences to push these different messages about the safety, or effectiveness of birth control, even though… you know, medically speaking, birth control is very safe and very effective. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I think there are just a lot of… difficult realities with our healthcare system, how our medical system treats the experiences and bodies of women or people who use birth control. I think that what you’ll kind of see on social media are kind of these narratives that really tend to flatten that, or just capitalize on the fact that we have these negative experiences to push these different messages about the safety, or effectiveness of birth control, even though… you know, medically speaking, birth control is very safe and very effective. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It’s just that we, as different people with different bodies will have different experiences with it. But I think that, you know, that there’s no room for that kind of nuance in like the kinds of social media posts, and what ends up happening is that like, a lot of storytelling can be taken out of context and then fed into like this right-wing political agenda. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It’s just that we, as different people with different bodies will have different experiences with it. But I think that, you know, that there’s no room for that kind of nuance in like the kinds of social media posts, and what ends up happening is that like, a lot of storytelling can be taken out of context and then fed into like this right-wing political agenda. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>The existing negative experiences that many people have had with reproductive health care means that the cultural discourse is primed to be co-opted by far-right political movements. Like pink-pill dating advice, there are certain buzzwords that raise red flags for Kylie — especially words like “natural” and “cycle tracking.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>The existing negative experiences that many people have had with reproductive health care means that the cultural discourse is primed to be co-opted by far-right political movements. Like pink-pill dating advice, there are certain buzzwords that raise red flags for Kylie — especially words like “natural” and “cycle tracking.” \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Cycle tracking is a perfectly valid form of contraception. Lots of people can’t take hormonal birth control for health reasons and have successfully relied on cycle tracking. But when influencers disparage other forms of contraception and insist on the “natural element” without disclosing that it’s one of the least effective forms of birth control? Red flags. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Cycle tracking is a perfectly valid form of contraception. Lots of people can’t take hormonal birth control for health reasons and have successfully relied on cycle tracking. But when influencers disparage other forms of contraception and insist on the “natural element” without disclosing that it’s one of the least effective forms of birth control? Red flags. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>What we have is this very, very regressive agenda, but really packaged in kind of this feminist way. And like, if you really, if you like, squint or if you aren’t that educated in these issues yourself, like, sure, it might even sound like it makes sense. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>What we have is this very, very regressive agenda, but really packaged in kind of this feminist way. And like, if you really, if you like, squint or if you aren’t that educated in these issues yourself, like, sure, it might even sound like it makes sense. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>It’s only in the last few years that anti-birth control sentiments have gained so much momentum. We need to talk about when this uptick started. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>It’s only in the last few years that anti-birth control sentiments have gained so much momentum. We need to talk about when this uptick started. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>I really started noticing and reporting on it specifically around like, 2022, which coincidentally, you know, was the year that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>I really started noticing and reporting on it specifically around like, 2022, which coincidentally, you know, was the year that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>With Roe v. Wade overturned, many far-right religious groups and anti-abortion organizations have a new mission: to make birth control the new abortion. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>With Roe v. Wade overturned, many far-right religious groups and anti-abortion organizations have a new mission: to make birth control the new abortion. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Dasha Burns for NBC News from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>In the months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Maggie Olivia went to the pharmacy to pick up her birth control prescription. The pharmacists denied her prescription because they were unsure if it was legal, which it was. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Dasha Burns for NBC News from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>In the months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Maggie Olivia went to the pharmacy to pick up her birth control prescription. The pharmacists denied her prescription because they were unsure if it was legal, which it was. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Let’s open one more tab: the war on birth control. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Let’s open one more tab: the war on birth control. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Make America Healthy Again — this is the Trump administration’s health initiative, spearheaded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., U.S. Health Secretary and notorious anti-vaxxer. The “MAHA” movement is fueled by skepticism of the pharmaceutical industry. Practices and medications under scrutiny include: childhood vaccine schedules, Tylenol during pregnancy, antidepressants, ADHD drugs. And now, hormonal birth control. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Make America Healthy Again — this is the Trump administration’s health initiative, spearheaded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., U.S. Health Secretary and notorious anti-vaxxer. The “MAHA” movement is fueled by skepticism of the pharmaceutical industry. Practices and medications under scrutiny include: childhood vaccine schedules, Tylenol during pregnancy, antidepressants, ADHD drugs. And now, hormonal birth control. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Amna Nawaz for PBS News Hour]: \u003c/strong>Earlier this year, the Trump administration scrubbed CDC guidance on birth control from government websites and froze $65 million in funding to family planning clinics that provide free or low-cost contraception. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Amna Nawaz for PBS News Hour]: \u003c/strong>Earlier this year, the Trump administration scrubbed CDC guidance on birth control from government websites and froze $65 million in funding to family planning clinics that provide free or low-cost contraception. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>The Department of Health and Human Services just overhauled Title X (ten). This is a federal grant program originally designed to help low-income Americans access birth control and other reproductive health care. Kylie said this program has always had bipartisan support, going all the way back to when Nixon signed it into law, over 50 years ago. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>The Department of Health and Human Services just overhauled Title X (ten). This is a federal grant program originally designed to help low-income Americans access birth control and other reproductive health care. Kylie said this program has always had bipartisan support, going all the way back to when Nixon signed it into law, over 50 years ago. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But now, according to a funding notice published at the beginning of July, grants funded through the program will, quote, “build body literacy, address infertility, plan and space pregnancies, and navigate reproductive health conditions such as endometriosis.” Contraception is not mentioned, except in a section about “over-medicalization.” Clinics that receive Title X (ten) funding are instructed to promote fertility awareness-based methods — like, natural cycle tracking. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But now, according to a funding notice published at the beginning of July, grants funded through the program will, quote, “build body literacy, address infertility, plan and space pregnancies, and navigate reproductive health conditions such as endometriosis.” Contraception is not mentioned, except in a section about “over-medicalization.” Clinics that receive Title X (ten) funding are instructed to promote fertility awareness-based methods — like, natural cycle tracking. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Some really concerning things have been like, the State Department equating certain forms of birth control and labeling them as abortifacient — and we’ve seen that a couple of times coming directly from this administration, and the goal then being to ban certain birth control or birth control more broadly, in the same way that abortion is banned. We’ve also seen the defunding of Planned Parenthood where like, what the language of that is is to suggest that reproductive healthcare and like, the provision of contraceptives and such isn’t actually health care — is kind of like the language. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Some really concerning things have been like, the State Department equating certain forms of birth control and labeling them as abortifacient — and we’ve seen that a couple of times coming directly from this administration, and the goal then being to ban certain birth control or birth control more broadly, in the same way that abortion is banned. We’ve also seen the defunding of Planned Parenthood where like, what the language of that is is to suggest that reproductive healthcare and like, the provision of contraceptives and such isn’t actually health care — is kind of like the language. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Conservatives were not always this critical of birth control. In fact, many were pro-birth control. Back in 2015, Republicans actually introduced a bill to make it even more accessible — by incentivizing drug companies to sell over-the-counter birth control.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Conservatives were not always this critical of birth control. In fact, many were pro-birth control. Back in 2015, Republicans actually introduced a bill to make it even more accessible — by incentivizing drug companies to sell over-the-counter birth control.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>I think that there just has been this very sharp right-wing cultural pivot where a lot of this deeply pro-natalist language of human civilization and white Western society is in serious trouble if we don’t have a lot more babies really quick, like a lot of the Elon Musk rhetoric. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>I think that there just has been this very sharp right-wing cultural pivot where a lot of this deeply pro-natalist language of human civilization and white Western society is in serious trouble if we don’t have a lot more babies really quick, like a lot of the Elon Musk rhetoric. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Pro-natalism is an ideology that pushes for higher birth rates to combat the supposed “decline of civilization.” Anything that causes people to have more babies is on the table. Can you explain the link between this pro-natalist fear-mongering around falling birth rates and then white supremacist conspiracy theories? What is the great replacement theory that everyone’s freaking out about? \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Pro-natalism is an ideology that pushes for higher birth rates to combat the supposed “decline of civilization.” Anything that causes people to have more babies is on the table. Can you explain the link between this pro-natalist fear-mongering around falling birth rates and then white supremacist conspiracy theories? What is the great replacement theory that everyone’s freaking out about? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>I think that there is just this inherent link between, you know, panics about the birth rate and racial panics, even though obviously, you know sometimes it’ll be couched in this race-neutral language of just like the human race and declining birth rates there, or the fact that like abortion bans or denying people birth control access will affect people of all races and people of all races might then be forced to like move forward with a pregnancy they don’t want or whatnot. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>I think that there is just this inherent link between, you know, panics about the birth rate and racial panics, even though obviously, you know sometimes it’ll be couched in this race-neutral language of just like the human race and declining birth rates there, or the fact that like abortion bans or denying people birth control access will affect people of all races and people of all races might then be forced to like move forward with a pregnancy they don’t want or whatnot. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>It’s impossible to separate this panic from its racist roots. It started with fears of declining birth rates among white women. Kylie said the decline isn’t statistically significant. Experts say it’s likely due to declining teen pregnancy rates. But some extremists on the right claim that birth control is used to suppress white birth rates, in an attempt to replace white Americans as the racial majority. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>It’s impossible to separate this panic from its racist roots. It started with fears of declining birth rates among white women. Kylie said the decline isn’t statistically significant. Experts say it’s likely due to declining teen pregnancy rates. But some extremists on the right claim that birth control is used to suppress white birth rates, in an attempt to replace white Americans as the racial majority. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>There is just this deep tie between pronatalism and white nationalism in that way, just specifically because of how much white nationalism has like embraced pronatalism for its agenda. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>There is just this deep tie between pronatalism and white nationalism in that way, just specifically because of how much white nationalism has like embraced pronatalism for its agenda. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>In 2022, just months after Roe v. Wade was overturned, UC Berkeley, Mother Jones, and Reveal teamed up for a massive reporting project. They uncovered a years-long social media campaign from anti-abortion groups — to capitalize on wellness trends, promote cycle tracking, and sow distrust in hormonal birth control. Conservative influencers have continued to push birth control skepticism online— often citing outdated or inconclusive research studies to back up their claims. Birth control misinformation continues to thrive on social media. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>In 2022, just months after Roe v. Wade was overturned, UC Berkeley, Mother Jones, and Reveal teamed up for a massive reporting project. They uncovered a years-long social media campaign from anti-abortion groups — to capitalize on wellness trends, promote cycle tracking, and sow distrust in hormonal birth control. Conservative influencers have continued to push birth control skepticism online— often citing outdated or inconclusive research studies to back up their claims. Birth control misinformation continues to thrive on social media. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Pretty Politics 101]: \u003c/strong>Does anybody else find it just a teensy bit coincidental that they pushed birth control on Millennial and Gen Z teenagers so heavily and so early? And now, look at how booming IVF is? \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>That video has nearly identical wording to countless others. This year, political analyst Emily Amick published a three-part Substack series on the influencer campaign against birth control. She found dozens of Instagram posts from various lifestyle influencers that all had the same caption. They all said, and I quote, “I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that the birth control pill was given out like candy to every female millennial at age 15. And now IVF is a $50 billion industry.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>That video has nearly identical wording to countless others. This year, political analyst Emily Amick published a three-part Substack series on the influencer campaign against birth control. She found dozens of Instagram posts from various lifestyle influencers that all had the same caption. They all said, and I quote, “I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that the birth control pill was given out like candy to every female millennial at age 15. And now IVF is a $50 billion industry.” \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Abortion is very politically popular, and so I think even now it’s very interesting that you’ll see the Trump administration has refrained from taking certain moves to directly go after abortion, but has taken all of these many different moves to go after birth control and family planning. And I’ve read certain legal experts suspect as well, is that birth control in some ways is more vulnerable — because it’s increasingly less popular because of how much misinformation there is about it. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Abortion is very politically popular, and so I think even now it’s very interesting that you’ll see the Trump administration has refrained from taking certain moves to directly go after abortion, but has taken all of these many different moves to go after birth control and family planning. And I’ve read certain legal experts suspect as well, is that birth control in some ways is more vulnerable — because it’s increasingly less popular because of how much misinformation there is about it. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Over the last four years, there have been anecdotal reports of young women who’ve discontinued hormonal birth control because of what they see online. This is backed up by a 2024 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation. 49% of women between 18 and 25 have been served content about birth control on social media. 14% said they made a change to their birth control method or considered a change because of something they heard online. Kylie said, it’ll be decades until we understand the long-term effects of the online campaign against birth control. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Over the last four years, there have been anecdotal reports of young women who’ve discontinued hormonal birth control because of what they see online. This is backed up by a 2024 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation. 49% of women between 18 and 25 have been served content about birth control on social media. 14% said they made a change to their birth control method or considered a change because of something they heard online. Kylie said, it’ll be decades until we understand the long-term effects of the online campaign against birth control. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It’s easy to dismiss lifestyle content as frivolous and inconsequential. You might see a TikTok from a woman who brags about how her boyfriend pays all of their bills, and think… “It’s not that deep.” You might come across an influencer who questions the safety of IUDs and promotes natural cycle tracking — and it’s tempting to think… “That’s just her choice!” But the pink pill pipeline is real. Content targeted at women is rapidly becoming a vehicle for extremist ideology. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It’s easy to dismiss lifestyle content as frivolous and inconsequential. You might see a TikTok from a woman who brags about how her boyfriend pays all of their bills, and think… “It’s not that deep.” You might come across an influencer who questions the safety of IUDs and promotes natural cycle tracking — and it’s tempting to think… “That’s just her choice!” But the pink pill pipeline is real. Content targeted at women is rapidly becoming a vehicle for extremist ideology. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Since Trump’s re-election, concerns about the manosphere have dominated the political conversation. For all of the hand-wringing about bro-y podcasts radicalizing young men, there’s very little discussion about the young women buying into their own oppression. Content aimed at girls is just not taken seriously. That’s part of what makes the pink pill pipeline so effective. It’s the lack of awareness. There’s a political undercurrent to all of these girlish lifestyle videos, but it’s very easy to miss if you’re not already looking for it. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Since Trump’s re-election, concerns about the manosphere have dominated the political conversation. For all of the hand-wringing about bro-y podcasts radicalizing young men, there’s very little discussion about the young women buying into their own oppression. Content aimed at girls is just not taken seriously. That’s part of what makes the pink pill pipeline so effective. It’s the lack of awareness. There’s a political undercurrent to all of these girlish lifestyle videos, but it’s very easy to miss if you’re not already looking for it. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But now, you know what to look for. Before you like a video, or follow an influencer, it’s worth taking a moment to really consider the agenda behind this content. Are they sharing a personal experience with one specific type of birth control? Or are they insisting that all birth control is bad — and that only the method they recommend is natural and healthy? Sure, the romantic date night content is cute, but… is the person posting it also telling you that you need to make yourself quiet and submissive if you want to find a man who’ll pick up the check? \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But now, you know what to look for. Before you like a video, or follow an influencer, it’s worth taking a moment to really consider the agenda behind this content. Are they sharing a personal experience with one specific type of birth control? Or are they insisting that all birth control is bad — and that only the method they recommend is natural and healthy? Sure, the romantic date night content is cute, but… is the person posting it also telling you that you need to make yourself quiet and submissive if you want to find a man who’ll pick up the check? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The point is, you don’t have to engage with this content. But, if it comes across your feed, you should be ready to see it for what it is — and then you can keep scrolling. That’s it for our deep dive — but as usual, stick around after the credits for bonus content. And if you’re dying to go further down this rabbit hole, we’ll link to some further reading in our show notes. Until next week, let’s close all these tabs. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The point is, you don’t have to engage with this content. But, if it comes across your feed, you should be ready to see it for what it is — and then you can keep scrolling. That’s it for our deep dive — but as usual, stick around after the credits for bonus content. And if you’re dying to go further down this rabbit hole, we’ll link to some further reading in our show notes. Until next week, let’s close all these tabs. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. Additional production help from our intern, Lauren Yoon. The Close All Tabs team also includes editor Chris Hambrick and audio engineer, Brendan Willard. Additional music by APM. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. Additional production help from our intern, Lauren Yoon. The Close All Tabs team also includes editor Chris Hambrick and audio engineer, Brendan Willard. Additional music by APM. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts, and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor-in-Chief. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts, and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor-in-Chief. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This episode includes clips and archive tape from Impaulsive, This Past Weekend with Theo Von, Adin Ross, The Matrix, Fox News, NBC News, PBS Newshour, and TikTok creators @earthangelariana, @ulovelailahakim, @theandelelara, Courtney Palmer, @casiahwest, @theworkoutwitch, @whateverpod, @jayshetty, and @prettypolitics101. Thanks for listening. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Yeah! Oh my God, now that I’m remembering it, I mean like in 2022, there was just like a viral moment of like a lot of different people theorizing that like, birth control makes you gay. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Yeah! Oh my God, now that I’m remembering it, I mean like in 2022, there was just like a viral moment of like a lot of different people theorizing that like, birth control makes you gay. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Yeah, I saw your “birth control makes people a lesbian rumor” piece and I was like, “That’s crazy,” because every lesbian I know says the complete opposite, that they went off the pill and they were like, “I don’t even like men.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Yeah, I saw your “birth control makes people a lesbian rumor” piece and I was like, “That’s crazy,” because every lesbian I know says the complete opposite, that they went off the pill and they were like, “I don’t even like men.” \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>So fair, yeah. \u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003cem>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It starts with aspirational lifestyle content about “embracing your femininity,” but ends with alt-right ideology and conspiracy theories about reproductive care. This is the pink pill pipeline — one of the primary ways young women are radicalized online today. Seemingly innocuous content about dating advice, wellness tips, and pop culture leads to increasingly conservative and extremist talking points about how birth control is causing the fertility crisis or how women don’t need to vote. It’s all wrapped up in a glossy veneer of feminine empowerment. Reporter Kylie Cheung joins to discuss how seemingly apolitical content online is shifting the cultural narrative around reproductive rights through coordinated misinformation campaigns, and how to spot pink pill content for what it is.\u003cbr>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-wp-embed is-provider-megaphone wp-block-embed-megaphone\">\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\nhttps://playlist.megaphone.fm/?e=KQINC5702825517\n\u003c/div>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Guest: \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://substack.com/@kylietcheung?utm_source=about-page\">Kylie Cheung\u003c/a>, staff reporter at \u003cem>Abortion, Every Day\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://jessica.substack.com/p/how-celebrity-smear-campaigns-are\">How Celebrity Smear Campaigns are Inspiring Attacks on Birth Control\u003c/a> — Kylie Cheung, \u003cem>Abortion, Every Day\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/far-right-birth-control-conspiracy-theories/\">Far right coming for women’s autonomy; birth control on chopping block\u003c/a> — Cassie Miller, \u003cem>Southern Poverty Law Center\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://jessica.substack.com/p/princess-treatment-trend-conservative-pipeline\">We Need to Talk About the Pink-Pill Pipeline\u003c/a> — Jessica Valenti, \u003cem>Abortion, Every Day\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://emilyinyourphone.substack.com/p/i-caught-a-secret-right-wing-influence\">I Caught a Secret Right-Wing Influence Operation Running In My Feed\u003c/a> — Emily Amick, \u003cem>Emily In Your Phone\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://revealnews.org/podcast/the-long-campaign-to-turn-birth-control-into-the-new-abortion/\">The Long Campaign to Turn Birth Control Into the New Abortion\u003c/a> — Katharine Mieszkowski, \u003cem>Reveal\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/09/inside-anti-abortion-groups-campaign-to-sell-women-on-unreliable-birth-control-alternatives/\">Inside Anti-Abortion Groups’ Campaign to Sell Women on Unreliable Birth Control “Alternatives”\u003c/a> — Kiera Butler, \u003cem>Mother Jones\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/04/25/birth-control-maha-abortion-trump-00889738\">Trump Is Going After Birth Control. Here’s Why. \u003c/a>— Mary Ziegler, \u003cem>Politico\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://theintercept.com/2026/07/10/rfk-jr-pronatalism-birth-control/\">The Trump Administration Is Overhauling Birth Control Access for the Pronatalist Movement\u003c/a> — Jessica Washington, \u003cem>The Intercept\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Follow us on \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Instagram\u003c/a> and\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">TikTok\u003c/a>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong> Hello. Do you like these deep dives? Do you want more? Then please rate and review Close All Tabs on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. And tell your friends! Post about it on Instagram, Blue Sky, X, Discord, Reddit, the comments of whatever random recipe blog you’re starting arguments in. Basically, it would be a huge help to get the word out. Okay, let’s get to the show. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If you’re a young woman online, you may have seen posts from Evie Magazine. It has a chic millennial pink logo and taglines like “helping women harness their feminine energy.” Its website features glossy, aspirational photo shoots of women modeling gauzy dresses on the Mediterranean coast, women doing yoga in coordinated pastel workout sets, and women riding horseback through arid Southwestern grasslands. They’re paired with articles like, “What the It Girls Are Wearing in Italy This Summer,” and “Is Your Bra Making You Sick?” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>You probably would not suspect that there’s anything like, quote unquote “political” about this publication at all. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>This is Kylie Cheung, the staff reporter for the newsletter, Abortion, Every Day. She’s been covering reproductive health care and women’s rights for years, working at Jezebel and Salon. At first glance, Evie Magazine’s content doesn’t appear that different from the coverage of the publications where Kylie used to work. But push past the surface, and something else emerges. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>You might see their presence on, say, Instagram if you like see a post about celebrity news, then you might follow them or you might go back to their website, and then slowly but surely start to see more content that’s really pushing motherhood, young motherhood, like anti-birth control messages. They describe themselves as like a magazine for celebrating true womanhood and femininity, and as we know all of that has increasingly become kind of this right-wing dog whistle. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>If you dig a little deeper into Evie’s website, you’ll find articles on why Love Island actually makes a case against casual sex, how Netflix’s Little House on the Prairie is quote, “The Most Pro-American Show in Years,” and coverage of celebrities who’ve denounced birth control. In fact, Evie publishes at least one anti-birth control article per month, filled with of birth control causing strokes, depression, hormonal chaos, and… bisexuality?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>That is such a good one. I remember in like 2022, I was reporting on this influx of TikToks about conspiracy theories that like, my birth control made me gay or this or that. And it’s just like, maybe you were, maybe you’re just gay, which is like, totally cool and everything. And then if something is seen as like unsafe or dangerous that contributes to… a consensus that there should be more restrictions or it should be harder to access, and that is ultimately a right-wing political goal. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Evie Magazine has been hailed as the “conservative Cosmo.” In addition to the digital and print content, Evie also hosts live events and sells raw milkmaid dresses — a play on the far-right raw milk craze and the cottagecore trend that dominated the early 2020s fashion cycle. Oh, and there’s Evie’s FemTech debut — a period-tracking app funded by Peter Thiel that promises to help women wean off of birth control in favor of “natural cycle tracking.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>If you just say we need to like ban birth control, that isn’t really on its face going to be a popular message, but colluding with kind of this whole “MAHA” and like alternative health scene of pushing for this idea that any amount of like quote unquote “chemicals” and putting this or that in your body, that that is kind of what you might see at a website. Like Evie, that claims to be like an apolitical female lifestyle brand that, you know, isn’t going to overtly say, “We think birth control should be banned,” but is going to kind of push these messages, really questioning and kind of contributing to like, lessening the popularity of birth control. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Welcome to the pink pill pipeline. This is the way young women are radicalized online — through seemingly innocuous content about dating advice, wellness tips, and pop culture — which steers them toward influencers who assure them that giving up their career is an empowering choice… and that caring about politics is for the boys, anyway. And soon enough, extremist talking points about how birth control is causing the fertility crisis, or how women don’t need to vote, don’t feel extreme at all. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And that content, of course, is wrapped in a glossy veneer of feminine empowerment. Today, we’re exploring how seemingly apolitical content online is actually shifting the cultural narrative around reproductive rights — through coordinated misinformation campaigns and aspirational lifestyle posts. And let me tell you, it’s a lot easier to get sucked in than you might think. Ready? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know how this goes. Let’s open our first tab. What is the pink pill pipeline? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>I think like, end of 2024, when we were seeing all of these conversations come up about how the quote unquote “Manosphere” helped Trump win the election by like, connecting with young men and how he’d gone on all of these like Manosphere-y podcasts. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of President Trump on Logan Paul’s podcast from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>Biden is just so bad. He’s the worst president in the history of our country. You should make a diss track on him. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of President Trump on Theo Von’s podcast from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>Is cocaine a stronger, uh, up? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cocaine will turn you into a damn owl, homie, you know what I’m saying? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of President Trump on Adin Ross’s stream from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>Well, today is going to be the most important stream I’ve ever done. Right in the living room of Mar-a-Lago. And we’ll have a little fun today. Let’s do it. My son Barron says hello, but he’s a big fan of yours. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Many of them, they’ll have interviewed or endorsed Trump, but they won’t call themselves political. It’s because they draw in and radicalize so many young men precisely by presenting as apolitical, where first, young men might be drawn to their content that’s dating advice, or stuff about MMA fighting, or any number of things that aren’t inherently political, but then just because of how algorithms work, or as you continue to watch their videos or content — eventually they just start saying pretty misogynistic or racist things. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>This is an alt-right ideology known as the red pill: the belief that men are disadvantaged in modern society — and that it’s feminism’s fault. Taking the red pill is a nod to this scene in The Matrix — when Neo learns that his entire life is a simulation. Morpheus offers him a choice. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of The Matrix from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Incels and self-described “men’s rights activists” have used the metaphor of the red pill to describe “waking up” to their victimhood and resisting “progressive” notions like… women having any agency at all. The manosphere calls for a return to the patriarchal glory of the past. Today, red-pilling is used to describe the way people are radicalized into far-right ideology. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Manosphere content can be wildly misogynistic — but the way young men fall into these online circles is through lifestyle content that appears apolitical: weightlifting, dating advice, style tips. The pink pill pipeline is the other side of this coin. The phrase was coined by journalist Lois Shearing. Her 2025 book, “Pink-pilled,” examines how women are lured into far-right ideology. Just like with red-pilling, pink-pilling also starts with seemingly apolitical lifestyle content. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Many of these creators or influencers will not overtly identify as Republican agents. They will, in fact, probably reel in young women through content or short-form videos where they talk about celebrity gossip, or maybe they’ll talk about health advice, and eventually get to disparaging and pushing misinformation about birth control. If you’re a young woman and you hate your job, they might give you advice about how to start dating like, a rich man and how you can achieve something akin to like a tradwife lifestyle. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>We talked about tradwives in our episode on Mormon momfluencers. They’re women who’ve rejected a modern career path and rely on their husbands to be the breadwinners. Tradwives are supposed to manage the household, do all the chores, take care of the kids, and lead their family’s return to traditional gender roles. Hence, tradwife. Tradwife content was pretty trendy for a while. Videos of baking bread from scratch, homeschooling children, and performing motherhood. But, as it turns out, being a stay-at-home mom, taking care of an entire family on a single income, is not glamorous — it’s hard. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>As more horror stories have emerged about the economic precarity of this reality, the tradwife lifestyle has started to lose its appeal. In fact, the most prominent pink pill figures have shifted their messaging away from promoting the tradwife lifestyle — because they know it’s unpopular. Like Emma Waters. She’s a researcher for the Heritage Foundation, the far-right think tank behind Project 2025. Emma Waters has been promoting a middle ground between tradwives and girlboss feminists. But still promoting motherhood above all. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of Emma Waters for Fox News from TikTok]: \u003c/strong>How can we structure what career success and the career trajectory of mothers looks like first, and then build in our career and education to complement that? So maybe women won’t work full-time. About 60% of women say that they would actually prefer to be a homemaker. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>But that kind of rhetoric is still divisive. It’s certainly not the soft on-ramp to conservative ideology that lifestyle content is. Celebrity news, for one, is a much more palatable entry point. Take Candace Owens, the far-right political commentator, podcaster, and conspiracy theorist. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>There’s a reason why Candace Owens has her own news platform that’s dedicated to celebrity news when she is like, a politics person. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of Candace Owens from TikTok] \u003c/strong>Personally, I’m starting to wonder if Cynthia is about to steal Ariana from Ethan Slater, which would be some great justice. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Where you can reel someone in with your cultural takes and eventually build like, this cultural consensus to like a right-wing agenda. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>The pink pill pipeline often starts with dating advice. It’s very aspirational. Other young women showing off their luxurious lifestyles paid for by their boyfriends or husbands. You’ll hear buzzwords like “soft life” and “feminine energy” and “princess treatment.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Earth Angel Ariana]: \u003c/strong>I used to be a tomboy and play basketball, tackle football, and now I just feel like a princess wifey. I just feel like life is so soft and feminine, like men do everything for me. My boyfriend gives me princess treatment all the time. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Laila Hakim]:\u003c/strong> Your man should wanna not only take care of you, but those around you, too. And he’s gonna do without hesitation. That man gets up so fucking fast, like, you won’t even be able to blink before he’s up. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Andele Lara]:\u003c/strong> Girl, I’m in Chicago with my man, and I didn’t book a flight, hotel, or schedule anything. Because a real provider is always going to make time for you. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>If you’re a young woman, who’s been grinding in your career and still struggling to make ends meet — much less afford any of these luxuries — and on top of that, dating sucks… then this kind of content is alluring. It’s very easy to get sucked in. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>I think that the success of these different buzzwords and seemingly apolitical trends is that, you know, they spring from these very specific and very real frustrations. A lot of us were just like, set up to be screwed over by the economy as it exists. And I think that in traditional American politics, you hear all the time about frustrated working class men. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But then, I think there is a lot of frustration among the demographic of young women who are also just very exploited as workers and really getting the short end of the stick economically. So that tends to then be catered to in a different way of this content that’s geared toward like, “You could have an amazing life if you just quit your terrible job. Um, your job mistreats and exploits you and all of this is exploitation. And it would actually be empowering if you just quit and married someone and had kids and took care of your kids.” And like, there is a real appeal there. If you hate your job, or if you’re struggling and you’re frustrated in that way. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>The word “empowering” is used a lot in pink pill content. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>A lot of these female lifestyle influencers who might not present as anti-feminist, they really will like, couch their specific choices in this performatively feminist language. You could even just see this with something slightly unrelated, but also very related of like vaccine skepticism. It’s like so couched in like, my body, my choice language. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>On its face, aspirational dating content doesn’t seem to be anti-feminist or regressive, especially when compared to the overt tradwife videos. But it also opens the door for a quieter, more insidious erosion of women’s agency and relationships. There is this Mormon influencer, Courtney Palmer, who went mega-viral last year for her videos on how to get the “princess treatment.” She talks about how her husband always opens the door for her, and how she rarely ties her own shoes because her husband will do it for her. And how do you secure the so-called provider? Well, Courtney has some advice: \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of Courtney Palmer from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>I’m at a restaurant with my husband, I do not talk to the hostess, I do not open any doors, and I do not order my own food. You’re just letting your husband lead and be masculine. He made the reservation, let him do the logistics, you’re just being a princess. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>This messaging is particularly effective on young women, because it’s coming from their peers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>They’re not like, Ted Cruz. They’re not like, you know, these Republican politicians. They’re, like, female lifestyle influencers, they’re young women. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of Courtney Palmer from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>If the waiter addresses you first, I will simply just look at my husband and my husband will order. You don’t need to over speak, over exert yourself. You can be feminine and soft and quiet. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>So to recap, here’s how the pink pill pipeline works: you’re a woman in your 20s — you might stumble across a post on Instagram about why Zendaya wants to be a mother. Celebrity news and pop culture is eye-catching. You follow the account. Then, you go on TikTok and see a video from a woman whose life seems so much easier and so much more luxurious than yours. Her fiance pays for everything. She doesn’t have to lift a finger. Who wouldn’t want that? You’re trying to be more active, so you go on YouTube and look up instructional videos for pilates at home. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Then, your social media algorithms start feeding you more content — based on what you’ve already engaged with. More about the soft life. More tips for finding a provider boyfriend. YouTube shorts about the values of young motherhood. Instagram reels about holistic health, and clean living, and detoxifying your diet — which will make you hotter and increase your chances of finding a provider boyfriend. TikToks about why your birth control might be making you sick. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>There are people who aren’t kind of traditionally associated with going after reproductive rights or going after women’s rights. It looks a lot more organic if they’re just seemingly naturally talking about the connections between like, birth control causing infertility, which is not true and is not backed up by anything. And that’s supposedly meaning, giving way to like, the quote unquote, like, “IVF industry” of like, of now that so many women lost their fertility from using birth control, they now need IVF. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Wait, what? Once you’re sucked into the pink pill pipeline, this conspiracy is everywhere. We’re going to get into that in a new tab — after this break. But first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you to keep us going. You can support us by becoming a member at donate dot kqed dot org slash podcast. Okay. After the break, the link between the pink pill, misinformation, and the war on birth control. Stick around. Let’s open a new tab: does birth control make you infertile? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Ugh, I mean no, there’s just like, no… evidence of this whatsoever. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>On the internet, there’s this pervasive conspiracy theory that long-term hormonal birth control use leads to infertility, which is somehow funding the modern IVF industry. Like Kylie said, there is zero clinical evidence of this. This is a pretty extreme conspiracy theory, but anti-birth control content is on the rise. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A 2025 study, published in Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, analyzed 100 of the top TikTok videos related to contraception, between August and September 2023. The videos had a collective 4.85 billion views — they were brimming with misinformation about hormonal birth control. Over half of the videos explicitly rejected hormonal birth control, and over a third of the videos recommended natural cycle tracking, without disclosing the limits of it. Only 10% of the videos were created by medical professionals. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This stuff is everywhere online. Here’s what the conversation around birth control looks like right now — and this is on mainstream social media. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Casiah West]: \u003c/strong>Your gynecologist isn’t really telling you how bad birth control is. What’s ironic is, the leading cause of death in women is heart disease. Is it that women are dying from heart disease because of birth control? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user The Workout Witch]:\u003c/strong> Birth control is one of the most damaging things you can put in your body, specifically for your body’s biological stress response. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of Whatever Pod from TikTok]:\u003c/strong> If you actually look at the birth control usage rates and divorce rates, they actually perfectly coincide with like a three-year delay. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Jay Shetty]:\u003c/strong> So we’re changing the hormone balance in women in a way that may not be completely reversible. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Pretty Politics 101]:\u003c/strong> Girls that I know who had like the implant in their arm or who have been on the pill for over 10 years cannot get pregnant. Almost like that was the entire point and plan in the first place. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>These sensational claims flatten a reality that is complex and nuanced. It’s true that people have wildly different experiences with birth control. Many women have been dismissed, mistreated, and discriminated against by the medical system. Medical misogyny is real, and the history of birth control is steeped in it. The pill was tested on Puerto Rican women, and doctors did dismiss reports of side effects as “psychosomatic.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Today, a lot of women are still not offered adequate pain management for IUD insertions. There’s no “one-size-fits-all” birth control option, so figuring out what actually works for your body can take a bit of trial and error, which can be especially discouraging when your doctors aren’t listening. I, myself, have had mixed experiences with birth control. Kylie has too. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>I think that you’d be hard-pressed to talk to any woman or any person who uses or has used at different points hormonal birth control, and hear that they had an absolutely flawless, perfect, pain-free experience. Their bodies might not react that well to like, hormonal-birth control pills or any number of different methods. And I think that that is all incredibly valid and can’t be, you know, pushed under the rug. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think there are just a lot of… difficult realities with our healthcare system, how our medical system treats the experiences and bodies of women or people who use birth control. I think that what you’ll kind of see on social media are kind of these narratives that really tend to flatten that, or just capitalize on the fact that we have these negative experiences to push these different messages about the safety, or effectiveness of birth control, even though… you know, medically speaking, birth control is very safe and very effective. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s just that we, as different people with different bodies will have different experiences with it. But I think that, you know, that there’s no room for that kind of nuance in like the kinds of social media posts, and what ends up happening is that like, a lot of storytelling can be taken out of context and then fed into like this right-wing political agenda. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>The existing negative experiences that many people have had with reproductive health care means that the cultural discourse is primed to be co-opted by far-right political movements. Like pink-pill dating advice, there are certain buzzwords that raise red flags for Kylie — especially words like “natural” and “cycle tracking.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Cycle tracking is a perfectly valid form of contraception. Lots of people can’t take hormonal birth control for health reasons and have successfully relied on cycle tracking. But when influencers disparage other forms of contraception and insist on the “natural element” without disclosing that it’s one of the least effective forms of birth control? Red flags. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>What we have is this very, very regressive agenda, but really packaged in kind of this feminist way. And like, if you really, if you like, squint or if you aren’t that educated in these issues yourself, like, sure, it might even sound like it makes sense. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>It’s only in the last few years that anti-birth control sentiments have gained so much momentum. We need to talk about when this uptick started. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>I really started noticing and reporting on it specifically around like, 2022, which coincidentally, you know, was the year that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>With Roe v. Wade overturned, many far-right religious groups and anti-abortion organizations have a new mission: to make birth control the new abortion. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Dasha Burns for NBC News from YouTube]: \u003c/strong>In the months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Maggie Olivia went to the pharmacy to pick up her birth control prescription. The pharmacists denied her prescription because they were unsure if it was legal, which it was. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Let’s open one more tab: the war on birth control. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Make America Healthy Again — this is the Trump administration’s health initiative, spearheaded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., U.S. Health Secretary and notorious anti-vaxxer. The “MAHA” movement is fueled by skepticism of the pharmaceutical industry. Practices and medications under scrutiny include: childhood vaccine schedules, Tylenol during pregnancy, antidepressants, ADHD drugs. And now, hormonal birth control. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Amna Nawaz for PBS News Hour]: \u003c/strong>Earlier this year, the Trump administration scrubbed CDC guidance on birth control from government websites and froze $65 million in funding to family planning clinics that provide free or low-cost contraception. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>The Department of Health and Human Services just overhauled Title X (ten). This is a federal grant program originally designed to help low-income Americans access birth control and other reproductive health care. Kylie said this program has always had bipartisan support, going all the way back to when Nixon signed it into law, over 50 years ago. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But now, according to a funding notice published at the beginning of July, grants funded through the program will, quote, “build body literacy, address infertility, plan and space pregnancies, and navigate reproductive health conditions such as endometriosis.” Contraception is not mentioned, except in a section about “over-medicalization.” Clinics that receive Title X (ten) funding are instructed to promote fertility awareness-based methods — like, natural cycle tracking. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Some really concerning things have been like, the State Department equating certain forms of birth control and labeling them as abortifacient — and we’ve seen that a couple of times coming directly from this administration, and the goal then being to ban certain birth control or birth control more broadly, in the same way that abortion is banned. We’ve also seen the defunding of Planned Parenthood where like, what the language of that is is to suggest that reproductive healthcare and like, the provision of contraceptives and such isn’t actually health care — is kind of like the language. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Conservatives were not always this critical of birth control. In fact, many were pro-birth control. Back in 2015, Republicans actually introduced a bill to make it even more accessible — by incentivizing drug companies to sell over-the-counter birth control.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>I think that there just has been this very sharp right-wing cultural pivot where a lot of this deeply pro-natalist language of human civilization and white Western society is in serious trouble if we don’t have a lot more babies really quick, like a lot of the Elon Musk rhetoric. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Pro-natalism is an ideology that pushes for higher birth rates to combat the supposed “decline of civilization.” Anything that causes people to have more babies is on the table. Can you explain the link between this pro-natalist fear-mongering around falling birth rates and then white supremacist conspiracy theories? What is the great replacement theory that everyone’s freaking out about? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>I think that there is just this inherent link between, you know, panics about the birth rate and racial panics, even though obviously, you know sometimes it’ll be couched in this race-neutral language of just like the human race and declining birth rates there, or the fact that like abortion bans or denying people birth control access will affect people of all races and people of all races might then be forced to like move forward with a pregnancy they don’t want or whatnot. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>It’s impossible to separate this panic from its racist roots. It started with fears of declining birth rates among white women. Kylie said the decline isn’t statistically significant. Experts say it’s likely due to declining teen pregnancy rates. But some extremists on the right claim that birth control is used to suppress white birth rates, in an attempt to replace white Americans as the racial majority. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>There is just this deep tie between pronatalism and white nationalism in that way, just specifically because of how much white nationalism has like embraced pronatalism for its agenda. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>In 2022, just months after Roe v. Wade was overturned, UC Berkeley, Mother Jones, and Reveal teamed up for a massive reporting project. They uncovered a years-long social media campaign from anti-abortion groups — to capitalize on wellness trends, promote cycle tracking, and sow distrust in hormonal birth control. Conservative influencers have continued to push birth control skepticism online— often citing outdated or inconclusive research studies to back up their claims. Birth control misinformation continues to thrive on social media. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip of TikTok user Pretty Politics 101]: \u003c/strong>Does anybody else find it just a teensy bit coincidental that they pushed birth control on Millennial and Gen Z teenagers so heavily and so early? And now, look at how booming IVF is? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>That video has nearly identical wording to countless others. This year, political analyst Emily Amick published a three-part Substack series on the influencer campaign against birth control. She found dozens of Instagram posts from various lifestyle influencers that all had the same caption. They all said, and I quote, “I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that the birth control pill was given out like candy to every female millennial at age 15. And now IVF is a $50 billion industry.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Abortion is very politically popular, and so I think even now it’s very interesting that you’ll see the Trump administration has refrained from taking certain moves to directly go after abortion, but has taken all of these many different moves to go after birth control and family planning. And I’ve read certain legal experts suspect as well, is that birth control in some ways is more vulnerable — because it’s increasingly less popular because of how much misinformation there is about it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Over the last four years, there have been anecdotal reports of young women who’ve discontinued hormonal birth control because of what they see online. This is backed up by a 2024 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation. 49% of women between 18 and 25 have been served content about birth control on social media. 14% said they made a change to their birth control method or considered a change because of something they heard online. Kylie said, it’ll be decades until we understand the long-term effects of the online campaign against birth control. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s easy to dismiss lifestyle content as frivolous and inconsequential. You might see a TikTok from a woman who brags about how her boyfriend pays all of their bills, and think… “It’s not that deep.” You might come across an influencer who questions the safety of IUDs and promotes natural cycle tracking — and it’s tempting to think… “That’s just her choice!” But the pink pill pipeline is real. Content targeted at women is rapidly becoming a vehicle for extremist ideology. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Since Trump’s re-election, concerns about the manosphere have dominated the political conversation. For all of the hand-wringing about bro-y podcasts radicalizing young men, there’s very little discussion about the young women buying into their own oppression. Content aimed at girls is just not taken seriously. That’s part of what makes the pink pill pipeline so effective. It’s the lack of awareness. There’s a political undercurrent to all of these girlish lifestyle videos, but it’s very easy to miss if you’re not already looking for it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But now, you know what to look for. Before you like a video, or follow an influencer, it’s worth taking a moment to really consider the agenda behind this content. Are they sharing a personal experience with one specific type of birth control? Or are they insisting that all birth control is bad — and that only the method they recommend is natural and healthy? Sure, the romantic date night content is cute, but… is the person posting it also telling you that you need to make yourself quiet and submissive if you want to find a man who’ll pick up the check? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The point is, you don’t have to engage with this content. But, if it comes across your feed, you should be ready to see it for what it is — and then you can keep scrolling. That’s it for our deep dive — but as usual, stick around after the credits for bonus content. And if you’re dying to go further down this rabbit hole, we’ll link to some further reading in our show notes. Until next week, let’s close all these tabs. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. Additional production help from our intern, Lauren Yoon. The Close All Tabs team also includes editor Chris Hambrick and audio engineer, Brendan Willard. Additional music by APM. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts, and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor-in-Chief. Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This episode includes clips and archive tape from Impaulsive, This Past Weekend with Theo Von, Adin Ross, The Matrix, Fox News, NBC News, PBS Newshour, and TikTok creators @earthangelariana, @ulovelailahakim, @theandelelara, Courtney Palmer, @casiahwest, @theworkoutwitch, @whateverpod, @jayshetty, and @prettypolitics101. Thanks for listening. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>Yeah! Oh my God, now that I’m remembering it, I mean like in 2022, there was just like a viral moment of like a lot of different people theorizing that like, birth control makes you gay. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Yeah, I saw your “birth control makes people a lesbian rumor” piece and I was like, “That’s crazy,” because every lesbian I know says the complete opposite, that they went off the pill and they were like, “I don’t even like men.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Kylie Cheung: \u003c/strong>So fair, yeah. \u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>"
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"content": "\u003cp>European regulators fined \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/google\">Google\u003c/a> 890 million euros, or about $1 billion, on Thursday over business practices that federal judges in the U.S. have been ruling against for years.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Regulators in Brussels concluded that Google gave its own shopping, travel and translation services prime placement in search results while unfairly pushing competitors down the page and that Google’s Play store barred app developers from telling their own customers about cheaper ways to pay.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The penalty is the Silicon Valley giant’s first under the European Union’s 2022 Digital Markets Act, a sweeping law passed to address the power of the world’s biggest tech companies. Google has 60 days to comply, or it could face further penalties of up to 5% of its worldwide revenue. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In a \u003ca href=\"https://publicpolicy.google/article/search-play-google-statement/\">blog post\u003c/a>, Google & Alphabet President of Global Affairs Kent Walker characterized the European move as “product degradation driven by a small group of self-serving complainants.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“This implementation of the DMA continues to break everyday products,” Walker wrote. “To comply, we are having to strip away real-time Search features Europeans love — like instant pricing and direct availability for hotels, flights, and restaurants — and dismantle safety protections on Google Play.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/111215_Google-Campus_AP_CM_01.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12055857\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/111215_Google-Campus_AP_CM_01.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/111215_Google-Campus_AP_CM_01-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/111215_Google-Campus_AP_CM_01-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">European regulators fined Google over favoring its own services in search results and restricting app developers. Both practices have already been fought over in Bay Area federal court. (Jeff Chiu/AP Photo)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The EU action echoes a series of antitrust rulings against Google in the United States, where — with Congress and state legislatures largely \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12007323/can-california-still-lead-on-ai-regulation-following-newsoms-veto-of-ai-safety-bill\">stalemated on tech regulation\u003c/a> — challenges to Google’s dominance have played out in court instead.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In April 2025, a judge in Virginia found Google \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12036411/googles-ad-dominance-is-illegal-federal-judge-rules\">illegally monopolized the ad technology\u003c/a> that places banner ads across much of the open web. That case is currently in the remedy and fallout phase following U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema’s liability ruling. It’s still unclear whether she will force a structural breakup or opt for behavioral restrictions.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In August 2024, a federal judge in Washington ruled Google \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11999009/landmark-google-antitrust-case-could-shake-up-silicon-valley-heres-what-to-know\">illegally maintained a monopoly over internet search\u003c/a>, and the following September, ordered it to stop signing exclusive default deals and to share search data with rivals. Both Google and the Justice Department are appealing at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Private lawsuits have also sought to address the company’s practices. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In August 2024, San Francisco-based Yelp sued Google over \u003ca href=\"https://trust.yelp.com/yelp-v-google/yelp-v-google-case-materials/\">self-preferencing\u003c/a> in local search results. Last month, a magistrate judge in San José held Yelp doesn’t have to prove Google is a monopoly. That case is pending in San José and is not scheduled to reach a jury until 2028.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In December of 2023, a San Francisco jury sided with \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1197964842\">Epic Games\u003c/a> over Google’s grip on Android app distribution, the case behind this week’s changes to the Play Store. The resulting injunction from U.S. Judge James Donato began forcing the Play store to open to rival app stores in the U.S. on Wednesday, one day before Brussels levied a fine on Google. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Yelp welcomed the EU decision. David Segal, the company’s vice president of public policy, said in a statement that Google has “consistently chosen to unilaterally degrade its own user experience by removing functionality, which is the telltale mark of a monopolist.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Tejas Narechania, a law professor at UC Berkeley who studies technology policy and platform regulation, said the European ruling is unlikely to have direct legal consequences for U.S. cases. Nonetheless, \u003cstrong>“\u003c/strong>Google lost, and I think that perception will affect [U.S.] juries going forward.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“From a technical legal perspective, the EU decision doesn’t set a precedent that Yelp or Epic could use in their lawsuits,” Narechania said. “But I think it contributes to a perception and atmosphere that some of these large companies are not always acting in consumers’ best interests and are sometimes acting unfairly.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, Narechania questioned whether $1 billion registers at a company Google’s size, calling it roughly a day’s worth of profit and less than 1% of what Google will spend on AI infrastructure this year.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In April 2025, a judge in Virginia found Google \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12036411/googles-ad-dominance-is-illegal-federal-judge-rules\">illegally monopolized the ad technology\u003c/a> that places banner ads across much of the open web. That case is currently in the remedy and fallout phase following U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema’s liability ruling. It’s still unclear whether she will force a structural breakup or opt for behavioral restrictions.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In August 2024, San Francisco-based Yelp sued Google over \u003ca href=\"https://trust.yelp.com/yelp-v-google/yelp-v-google-case-materials/\">self-preferencing\u003c/a> in local search results. Last month, a magistrate judge in San José held Yelp doesn’t have to prove Google is a monopoly. That case is pending in San José and is not scheduled to reach a jury until 2028.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In December of 2023, a San Francisco jury sided with \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1197964842\">Epic Games\u003c/a> over Google’s grip on Android app distribution, the case behind this week’s changes to the Play Store. The resulting injunction from U.S. Judge James Donato began forcing the Play store to open to rival app stores in the U.S. on Wednesday, one day before Brussels levied a fine on Google. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Yelp welcomed the EU decision. David Segal, the company’s vice president of public policy, said in a statement that Google has “consistently chosen to unilaterally degrade its own user experience by removing functionality, which is the telltale mark of a monopolist.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Still, Narechania questioned whether $1 billion registers at a company Google’s size, calling it roughly a day’s worth of profit and less than 1% of what Google will spend on AI infrastructure this year.\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "European regulators fined Google over favoring its own services in search results and restricting app developers. Both practices have already been fought over in Bay Area federal court.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>European regulators fined \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/google\">Google\u003c/a> 890 million euros, or about $1 billion, on Thursday over business practices that federal judges in the U.S. have been ruling against for years.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Regulators in Brussels concluded that Google gave its own shopping, travel and translation services prime placement in search results while unfairly pushing competitors down the page and that Google’s Play store barred app developers from telling their own customers about cheaper ways to pay.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The penalty is the Silicon Valley giant’s first under the European Union’s 2022 Digital Markets Act, a sweeping law passed to address the power of the world’s biggest tech companies. Google has 60 days to comply, or it could face further penalties of up to 5% of its worldwide revenue. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In a \u003ca href=\"https://publicpolicy.google/article/search-play-google-statement/\">blog post\u003c/a>, Google & Alphabet President of Global Affairs Kent Walker characterized the European move as “product degradation driven by a small group of self-serving complainants.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“This implementation of the DMA continues to break everyday products,” Walker wrote. “To comply, we are having to strip away real-time Search features Europeans love — like instant pricing and direct availability for hotels, flights, and restaurants — and dismantle safety protections on Google Play.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/111215_Google-Campus_AP_CM_01.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12055857\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/111215_Google-Campus_AP_CM_01.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/111215_Google-Campus_AP_CM_01-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/111215_Google-Campus_AP_CM_01-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">European regulators fined Google over favoring its own services in search results and restricting app developers. Both practices have already been fought over in Bay Area federal court. (Jeff Chiu/AP Photo)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The EU action echoes a series of antitrust rulings against Google in the United States, where — with Congress and state legislatures largely \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12007323/can-california-still-lead-on-ai-regulation-following-newsoms-veto-of-ai-safety-bill\">stalemated on tech regulation\u003c/a> — challenges to Google’s dominance have played out in court instead.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In April 2025, a judge in Virginia found Google \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12036411/googles-ad-dominance-is-illegal-federal-judge-rules\">illegally monopolized the ad technology\u003c/a> that places banner ads across much of the open web. That case is currently in the remedy and fallout phase following U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema’s liability ruling. It’s still unclear whether she will force a structural breakup or opt for behavioral restrictions.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In August 2024, a federal judge in Washington ruled Google \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11999009/landmark-google-antitrust-case-could-shake-up-silicon-valley-heres-what-to-know\">illegally maintained a monopoly over internet search\u003c/a>, and the following September, ordered it to stop signing exclusive default deals and to share search data with rivals. Both Google and the Justice Department are appealing at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Private lawsuits have also sought to address the company’s practices. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In August 2024, San Francisco-based Yelp sued Google over \u003ca href=\"https://trust.yelp.com/yelp-v-google/yelp-v-google-case-materials/\">self-preferencing\u003c/a> in local search results. Last month, a magistrate judge in San José held Yelp doesn’t have to prove Google is a monopoly. That case is pending in San José and is not scheduled to reach a jury until 2028.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In December of 2023, a San Francisco jury sided with \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1197964842\">Epic Games\u003c/a> over Google’s grip on Android app distribution, the case behind this week’s changes to the Play Store. The resulting injunction from U.S. Judge James Donato began forcing the Play store to open to rival app stores in the U.S. on Wednesday, one day before Brussels levied a fine on Google. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Yelp welcomed the EU decision. David Segal, the company’s vice president of public policy, said in a statement that Google has “consistently chosen to unilaterally degrade its own user experience by removing functionality, which is the telltale mark of a monopolist.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Tejas Narechania, a law professor at UC Berkeley who studies technology policy and platform regulation, said the European ruling is unlikely to have direct legal consequences for U.S. cases. Nonetheless, \u003cstrong>“\u003c/strong>Google lost, and I think that perception will affect [U.S.] juries going forward.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“From a technical legal perspective, the EU decision doesn’t set a precedent that Yelp or Epic could use in their lawsuits,” Narechania said. “But I think it contributes to a perception and atmosphere that some of these large companies are not always acting in consumers’ best interests and are sometimes acting unfairly.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, Narechania questioned whether $1 billion registers at a company Google’s size, calling it roughly a day’s worth of profit and less than 1% of what Google will spend on AI infrastructure this year.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Staff at the San Francisco-Based Foundation Behind Wikipedia Demand Union Recognition",
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"content": "\u003cp>Workers at the Wikimedia Foundation — the San Francisco-based foundation that hosts \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/wikipedia\">Wikipedia\u003c/a> — demanded voluntary recognition of their union, Wiki Workers United U.S., on Monday. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The staff who run the platform say they want a stronger voice in their workplace, better job protections and an end to common practices that make life “precarious for everyday workers,” according to Jeremy Bernick, one of the union organizers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They gave the foundation until Friday to respond to their request for recognition. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia, hosts roughly \u003ca href=\"https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00074-1\">65 million entries\u003c/a> in \u003ca href=\"https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias\">364 languages\u003c/a>. It is considered a backbone of the internet — boasting an average of 508 million views per day for the past decade, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/01/13/wikipedia-at-25-what-the-data-tells-us/#how-many-people-visit-wikipedia\">Pew Research Center\u003c/a>. While Wikipedia is the nonprofit’s largest and most well-known project, the Wikimedia Foundation, which did not respond to requests for comment, supports over a dozen related “sister” projects. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/WikipediaGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12092438\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/WikipediaGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/WikipediaGetty-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/WikipediaGetty-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A Wikipedia homepage on March 11, 2011. (SD619/Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Bernick said that this campaign is the workers’ third attempt at unionizing and the farthest they’ve gotten in the process.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think there is a lot of fear right now,” Bernick said — highlighting the Trump administration’s attacks on public media, the cost of living crisis and concerns about artificial intelligence as some of the factors driving more staff toward unionization. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>As employers make decisions about how and when to integrate AI, Bernick wants to see “workers in the loop.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Without our say, these systems are not really effective,” Bernick said. “A lot of the time they can make our work less impactful or more strenuous.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A press release from the Communications Workers of America — Wiki Workers United’s parent union — also said that “recent events at the Wikimedia Foundation have drastically escalated worker concerns regarding transparency, trust, the organization’s future, and leadership’s commitment to the free knowledge movement.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In May, the foundation disbanded the Community Tech team, the bridge between the foundation and the volunteers who update the articles. The decision sparked major backlash, in part, because the team was largely composed of union members, according to a \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Workers_United_solidarity\">petition\u003c/a> written by Wikipedia editors with 1,190 signatures.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Wikipedia editors are a group of nearly \u003ca href=\"https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00074-1\">280,000 volunteers\u003c/a> who write and edit the articles. The petition states that the undersigned editors, who have cumulatively made over 17,582,148 edits, according to the page, will strike in support of the union if called. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This demand for recognition comes after the U.K. chapter of Wiki Workers United made a similar request of the foundation last month, according to the press release. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The union hopes to be a sign that it’s OK for tech workers to ask for protections, Bernick said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You don’t have to accept the status quo,” Bernick said. “We see having a union as sort of a basic right.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia, hosts roughly \u003ca href=\"https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00074-1\">65 million entries\u003c/a> in \u003ca href=\"https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias\">364 languages\u003c/a>. It is considered a backbone of the internet — boasting an average of 508 million views per day for the past decade, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/01/13/wikipedia-at-25-what-the-data-tells-us/#how-many-people-visit-wikipedia\">Pew Research Center\u003c/a>. While Wikipedia is the nonprofit’s largest and most well-known project, the Wikimedia Foundation, which did not respond to requests for comment, supports over a dozen related “sister” projects. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia, hosts roughly \u003ca href=\"https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00074-1\">65 million entries\u003c/a> in \u003ca href=\"https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias\">364 languages\u003c/a>. It is considered a backbone of the internet — boasting an average of 508 million views per day for the past decade, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/01/13/wikipedia-at-25-what-the-data-tells-us/#how-many-people-visit-wikipedia\">Pew Research Center\u003c/a>. While Wikipedia is the nonprofit’s largest and most well-known project, the Wikimedia Foundation, which did not respond to requests for comment, supports over a dozen related “sister” projects. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>A press release from the Communications Workers of America — Wiki Workers United’s parent union — also said that “recent events at the Wikimedia Foundation have drastically escalated worker concerns regarding transparency, trust, the organization’s future, and leadership’s commitment to the free knowledge movement.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This demand for recognition comes after the U.K. chapter of Wiki Workers United made a similar request of the foundation last month, according to the press release. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The union hopes to be a sign that it’s OK for tech workers to ask for protections, Bernick said. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“You don’t have to accept the status quo,” Bernick said. “We see having a union as sort of a basic right.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Workers at the Wikimedia Foundation — the San Francisco-based foundation that hosts \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/wikipedia\">Wikipedia\u003c/a> — demanded voluntary recognition of their union, Wiki Workers United U.S., on Monday. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The staff who run the platform say they want a stronger voice in their workplace, better job protections and an end to common practices that make life “precarious for everyday workers,” according to Jeremy Bernick, one of the union organizers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They gave the foundation until Friday to respond to their request for recognition. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia, hosts roughly \u003ca href=\"https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00074-1\">65 million entries\u003c/a> in \u003ca href=\"https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias\">364 languages\u003c/a>. It is considered a backbone of the internet — boasting an average of 508 million views per day for the past decade, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/01/13/wikipedia-at-25-what-the-data-tells-us/#how-many-people-visit-wikipedia\">Pew Research Center\u003c/a>. While Wikipedia is the nonprofit’s largest and most well-known project, the Wikimedia Foundation, which did not respond to requests for comment, supports over a dozen related “sister” projects. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/WikipediaGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12092438\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/WikipediaGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/WikipediaGetty-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/WikipediaGetty-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A Wikipedia homepage on March 11, 2011. (SD619/Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Bernick said that this campaign is the workers’ third attempt at unionizing and the farthest they’ve gotten in the process.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think there is a lot of fear right now,” Bernick said — highlighting the Trump administration’s attacks on public media, the cost of living crisis and concerns about artificial intelligence as some of the factors driving more staff toward unionization. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>As employers make decisions about how and when to integrate AI, Bernick wants to see “workers in the loop.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Without our say, these systems are not really effective,” Bernick said. “A lot of the time they can make our work less impactful or more strenuous.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A press release from the Communications Workers of America — Wiki Workers United’s parent union — also said that “recent events at the Wikimedia Foundation have drastically escalated worker concerns regarding transparency, trust, the organization’s future, and leadership’s commitment to the free knowledge movement.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In May, the foundation disbanded the Community Tech team, the bridge between the foundation and the volunteers who update the articles. The decision sparked major backlash, in part, because the team was largely composed of union members, according to a \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wiki_Workers_United_solidarity\">petition\u003c/a> written by Wikipedia editors with 1,190 signatures.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Wikipedia editors are a group of nearly \u003ca href=\"https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00074-1\">280,000 volunteers\u003c/a> who write and edit the articles. The petition states that the undersigned editors, who have cumulatively made over 17,582,148 edits, according to the page, will strike in support of the union if called. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This demand for recognition comes after the U.K. chapter of Wiki Workers United made a similar request of the foundation last month, according to the press release. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The union hopes to be a sign that it’s OK for tech workers to ask for protections, Bernick said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You don’t have to accept the status quo,” Bernick said. “We see having a union as sort of a basic right.”\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "how-openais-models-escaped-their-sandbox-and-slipped-past-californias-ai-law",
"title": "How OpenAI’s Models Escaped Their Sandbox and Slipped Past California's AI Law",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/open-ai\">OpenAI\u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/\"> this week said\u003c/a> more than one of its models — three, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-23/openai-models-lurked-in-hugging-face-system-for-hours-undetected?srnd=homepage-americas\">\u003cem>Bloomberg\u003c/em>\u003c/a> — attacked Hugging Face, a popular repository for open-source AI tools — marking one of the first publicly disclosed cases of frontier AI models autonomously cyberattacking another company. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The disclosure came days after Hugging Face \u003ca href=\"https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026\">revealed\u003c/a> it was breached in a hack by a “malicious dataset,” which intruded into the AI company’s software to run code. The campaign executed a flurry of more than 17,000 automated actions in a matter of hours, the post said. It’s still unclear if Hugging Face customer or partner data was taken. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“This matches the ‘agentic attacker’ scenario the industry has been forecasting,” Hugging Face wrote on July 16.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>OpenAI said an investigation showed the incident was driven by a combination of models — “including GPT‑5.6 Sol and an even more capable pre-release model.” The company said it’s working with Hugging Face to produce a more thorough report of what happened.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/05/AP24134775174210-scaled-e1770337042768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-11985952\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The OpenAI logo is seen on a mobile phone in front of a computer screen displaying output from ChatGPT, March 21, 2023, in Boston, Massachusetts. (Michael Dwyer/Associated Press)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>OpenAI’s announcement came one day after the San Francisco-based frontier AI developer disclosed a separate incident in which it paused another pre-release model that had escaped what the industry calls “a sandbox” — an isolated environment with no path to the open internet, except for a single internal service that fetches software packages — and \u003ca href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/openai-models-escaped-containment-and-hacked-huggingface/\">posted\u003c/a> to GitHub. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last April, a researcher challenged an early version of Anthropic’s Mythos model to break out of an isolated system and message back. Mythos did, and then \u003ca href=\"https://www.mondaymomentum.io/p/the-ai-that-broke-out-of-its-cage\">went further\u003c/a>, building a multistep process to reach the wider internet. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>California’s \u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260SB53\">frontier AI law\u003c/a>, the first of its kind in the country, obliges the largest developers to tell the state about critical safety incidents, but only ones that kill or injure someone or that cause catastrophic harm.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It expressly excludes the kind of safety evaluation OpenAI was running when its models got loose. Which leaves a question nobody in Sacramento or Washington can answer: how often have frontier models in development gone rogue at companies that decided not to mention it? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“This was one of the topics I was focused on when I worked at OpenAI: what happens when AI models become good enough to reward-hack their way through the infrastructure they use to accomplish their objectives?” Ariel Herbert-Voss, OpenAI’s first security hire, wrote KQED. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It’s a really difficult problem to defend against and is one of the reasons I left to start my own company,” Herbert-Voss, now the founder of an automated offensive cybersecurity company called RunSybil, said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It’s a really remarkable and, I think, fair to say scary event,“ said Nathan Calvin, general counsel at safety advocate EncodeAI. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Scientists and AI researchers have warned for years of the possibility that AI systems could go rogue and do unpredictable and unintended things. AI developers commonly test safety with so-called “\u003ca href=\"https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/cyberpedia/what-is-ai-red-teaming\">red teams\u003c/a>” that try to break or trick machine learning models, like chatbots, to find hidden flaws. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1980\" height=\"1320\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/GettyImages-1849294862.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12092368\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/GettyImages-1849294862.jpg 1980w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/GettyImages-1849294862-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/GettyImages-1849294862-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1980px) 100vw, 1980px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Hugging Face logo is seen displayed on a mobile phone screen with the AI revolution symbol in the background. (Idrees Abbas/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“In certain circumstances, AI will try to break out of their sandboxes or otherwise do things that were not what the creator intended,” Calvin said. “But this really is the first very big example of that happening, at scale, with a really highly capable AI model in a way that actually harmed a third party.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>According to OpenAI’s account, the company was running an internal evaluation designed to measure how good its models are at hacking. To get a true reading, OpenAI deliberately switched off the safety filters that normally stop its models from carrying out cyberattacks.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The models were confined to a so-called “sandbox,” an isolated environment with no route to the open internet except OpenAI’s one internal service that fetches software libraries from public repositories. The models found a previously unknown flaw in that service, exploited it, escalated their privileges and moved from machine to machine inside OpenAI’s research network until they reached one with internet access. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Once the models broke out onto the open internet, according to OpenAI, they reasoned that Hugging Face might be storing the answers to the test they were trying to pass. Hugging Face’s credentials and production database aren’t on the public internet any more than a bank’s vault sits on a sidewalk, but the models broke into Hugging Face using stolen credentials, among other things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/111623_Sam-Altman_AP_CM_01.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12062600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/111623_Sam-Altman_AP_CM_01.jpeg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/111623_Sam-Altman_AP_CM_01-160x107.jpeg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/111623_Sam-Altman_AP_CM_01-1536x1024.jpeg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">OpenAI restructured to a for-profit company in a move tied to an agreement with California Attorney General Rob Bonta. Company CEO Sam Altman participates in a discussion in San Francisco on Nov. 16, 2023. (Photo by Eric Risberg, AP Photo)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In short: The models were told to hack. They were not told to leave the building or to break into another company’s servers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Hugging Face detected the intrusion and shut it down on its own, days before OpenAI connected the attack to its own testing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It’s quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!“ Hugging Face Chief Executive Clement Delangue wrote on social media platform \u003ca href=\"https://x.com/ClementDelangue/status/2079670308156645882\">X\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In its blog post, OpenAI wrote, “This incident points to the need to further strengthen our model’s alignment, cyber protections during evaluation time and monitoring during internal testing.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The Future of Life Institute — a nonprofit which issues a biannual risk assessment of nine leading AI companies — recently warned that many of the companies building frontier models are quietly walking back safety commitments. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>According to the group’s \u003ca href=\"https://futureoflife.org/ai-safety-index-summer-2026/\">most recent\u003c/a> AI Safety Index, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Meta all weakened or abandoned promises to pause development if certain red lines were approached, even while publicly suggesting they were amenable. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/GettyImages-2159671948-scaled-e1781542152687.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12058035\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Close-up of phone screen displaying Anthropic Claude, a Large Language Model (LLM) powered generative artificial intelligence chatbot in Lafayette, California, on June 27, 2024. (Smith Collection/Gado via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In an email, KQED asked Hamza Chaudhry, who leads AI and national security work at Future of Life, to imagine it was not OpenAI’s software gone rogue but a foreign state, intentionally executing an unauthorized intrusion into a private company’s production infrastructure, exploiting cybersecurity vulnerabilities, stealing live credentials and accessing a production database. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We would likely call this a dangerous act of cyber-espionage,” he wrote — a likely criminal violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which “would draw a threat group designation and eventually an indictment or sanctions.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>OpenAI did not respond to KQED’s request for comment, but a spokesperson told \u003cem>Bloomberg \u003c/em>the company communicated with law enforcement and other government authorities about the incident.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The fact that Google DeepMind, Meta, Mistral, xAI and Chinese AI model developers haven’t revealed similar events doesn’t necessarily mean they haven’t happened. OpenAI and Anthropic are the only two frontier model developers that have publicly disclosed containment failures. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There is no mandatory public disclosure regime in force, like the one in California that requires \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11992954/cybersecurity-expert-shares-tips-for-dublin-based-patelco-credit-union-customers-after-ransomware-attack\">hacked companies to reveal\u003c/a> there’s been a data breach.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12036125\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Meta, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Threads logos are screened on a mobile phone on Jan. 25, 2025. (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Congressional candidate and state Sen. Scott Wiener wrote two AI frontier model safety bills. Gov. Gavin Newsom \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12007323/can-california-still-lead-on-ai-regulation-following-newsoms-veto-of-ai-safety-bill\">vetoed\u003c/a> Wiener’s first effort, arguing in his \u003ca href=\"https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/SB-1047-Veto-Message.pdf\">veto message\u003c/a> that “By focusing only on the most expensive and large-scale models, SB 1047 establishes a regulatory framework that could give the public a false sense of security about controlling this fast-moving technology.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The next year, Newsom signed Wiener’s second at-bat, but only after the bill was softened to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12058013/newsom-signs-california-ai-transparency-bill-tailored-to-meet-tech-industry-tastes\">overcome industry pushback\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260SB53\">law\u003c/a>, which took effect Jan. 1, requires developers of the most powerful AI models to notify the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services of any “critical safety incident“ within 15 days of discovering it — which is not the same as reporting the incident to the public. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Wiener told KQED he still thinks the law is strong. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We worked very hard with the governor to produce a bill that is meaningful and impactful, and that he would sign,“ he said, adding he doesn’t consider the work done, because AI continues to evolve at a rapid pace. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260107-SFCongressionalCandidateForum-13-BL_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12069061\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260107-SFCongressionalCandidateForum-13-BL_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260107-SFCongressionalCandidateForum-13-BL_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260107-SFCongressionalCandidateForum-13-BL_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">State Sen. Scott Wiener, a candidate for California’s 11th Congressional District, participates in a forum with other candidates at UC Law San Francisco on Jan. 7, 2026. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>AI, he said, is “likely the most powerful technology in human history, and we need to make sure that we are both understanding the risks and taking them seriously, so that we can get ahead of them.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Calvin likened the Hugging Face hack to the cyclospora outbreak linked to, but not confirmed as originating from, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12091770/california-based-taylor-farms-recalls-lettuce-shipped-to-27-states-over-cyclospora-risk\">Taylor Farms\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That California-based company has said it’s removing its lettuce indefinitely while the FDA investigation continues. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“And OpenAI is like, ‘Maybe it’ll happen again. Maybe it’ll get worse. We don’t really know,“ Calvin said. “Your AI, again, hacked out of its box and hacked into another company, and you’re saying that you don’t know how to stop it from doing that again? That seems pretty nuts,” Calvin said.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/open-ai\">OpenAI\u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/\"> this week said\u003c/a> more than one of its models — three, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-23/openai-models-lurked-in-hugging-face-system-for-hours-undetected?srnd=homepage-americas\">\u003cem>Bloomberg\u003c/em>\u003c/a> — attacked Hugging Face, a popular repository for open-source AI tools — marking one of the first publicly disclosed cases of frontier AI models autonomously cyberattacking another company. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/open-ai\">OpenAI\u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/\"> this week said\u003c/a> more than one of its models — three, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-23/openai-models-lurked-in-hugging-face-system-for-hours-undetected?srnd=homepage-americas\">\u003cem>Bloomberg\u003c/em>\u003c/a> — attacked Hugging Face, a popular repository for open-source AI tools — marking one of the first publicly disclosed cases of frontier AI models autonomously cyberattacking another company. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The disclosure came days after Hugging Face \u003ca href=\"https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026\">revealed\u003c/a> it was breached in a hack by a “malicious dataset,” which intruded into the AI company’s software to run code. The campaign executed a flurry of more than 17,000 automated actions in a matter of hours, the post said. It’s still unclear if Hugging Face customer or partner data was taken. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The disclosure came days after Hugging Face \u003ca href=\"https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026\">revealed\u003c/a> it was breached in a hack by a “malicious dataset,” which intruded into the AI company’s software to run code. The campaign executed a flurry of more than 17,000 automated actions in a matter of hours, the post said. It’s still unclear if Hugging Face customer or partner data was taken. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“This matches the ‘agentic attacker’ scenario the industry has been forecasting,” Hugging Face wrote on July 16.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“This matches the ‘agentic attacker’ scenario the industry has been forecasting,” Hugging Face wrote on July 16.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>OpenAI said an investigation showed the incident was driven by a combination of models — “including GPT‑5.6 Sol and an even more capable pre-release model.” The company said it’s working with Hugging Face to produce a more thorough report of what happened.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/05/AP24134775174210-scaled-e1770337042768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-11985952\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The OpenAI logo is seen on a mobile phone in front of a computer screen displaying output from ChatGPT, March 21, 2023, in Boston, Massachusetts. \u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
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"\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/05/AP24134775174210-scaled-e1770337042768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-11985952\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The OpenAI logo is seen on a mobile phone in front of a computer screen displaying output from ChatGPT, March 21, 2023, in Boston, Massachusetts. \u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>OpenAI’s announcement came one day after the San Francisco-based frontier AI developer disclosed a separate incident in which it paused another pre-release model that had escaped what the industry calls “a sandbox” — an isolated environment with no path to the open internet, except for a single internal service that fetches software packages — and \u003ca href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/openai-models-escaped-containment-and-hacked-huggingface/\">posted\u003c/a> to GitHub. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>OpenAI’s announcement came one day after the San Francisco-based frontier AI developer disclosed a separate incident in which it paused another pre-release model that had escaped what the industry calls “a sandbox” — an isolated environment with no path to the open internet, except for a single internal service that fetches software packages — and \u003ca href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/openai-models-escaped-containment-and-hacked-huggingface/\">posted\u003c/a> to GitHub. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Last April, a researcher challenged an early version of Anthropic’s Mythos model to break out of an isolated system and message back. Mythos did, and then \u003ca href=\"https://www.mondaymomentum.io/p/the-ai-that-broke-out-of-its-cage\">went further\u003c/a>, building a multistep process to reach the wider internet. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Last April, a researcher challenged an early version of Anthropic’s Mythos model to break out of an isolated system and message back. Mythos did, and then \u003ca href=\"https://www.mondaymomentum.io/p/the-ai-that-broke-out-of-its-cage\">went further\u003c/a>, building a multistep process to reach the wider internet. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>California’s \u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260SB53\">frontier AI law\u003c/a>, the first of its kind in the country, obliges the largest developers to tell the state about critical safety incidents, but only ones that kill or injure someone or that cause catastrophic harm.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>California’s \u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260SB53\">frontier AI law\u003c/a>, the first of its kind in the country, obliges the largest developers to tell the state about critical safety incidents, but only ones that kill or injure someone or that cause catastrophic harm.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It expressly excludes the kind of safety evaluation OpenAI was running when its models got loose. Which leaves a question nobody in Sacramento or Washington can answer: how often have frontier models in development gone rogue at companies that decided not to mention it? \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It expressly excludes the kind of safety evaluation OpenAI was running when its models got loose. Which leaves a question nobody in Sacramento or Washington can answer: how often have frontier models in development gone rogue at companies that decided not to mention it? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“This was one of the topics I was focused on when I worked at OpenAI: what happens when AI models become good enough to reward-hack their way through the infrastructure they use to accomplish their objectives?” Ariel Herbert-Voss, OpenAI’s first security hire, wrote KQED. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“This was one of the topics I was focused on when I worked at OpenAI: what happens when AI models become good enough to reward-hack their way through the infrastructure they use to accomplish their objectives?” Ariel Herbert-Voss, OpenAI’s first security hire, wrote KQED. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“It’s a really difficult problem to defend against and is one of the reasons I left to start my own company,” Herbert-Voss, now the founder of an automated offensive cybersecurity company called RunSybil, said.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“It’s a really difficult problem to defend against and is one of the reasons I left to start my own company,” Herbert-Voss, now the founder of an automated offensive cybersecurity company called RunSybil, said.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“It’s a really remarkable and, I think, fair to say scary event,“ said Nathan Calvin, general counsel at safety advocate EncodeAI. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“It’s a really remarkable and, I think, fair to say scary event,“ said Nathan Calvin, general counsel at safety advocate EncodeAI. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Scientists and AI researchers have warned for years of the possibility that AI systems could go rogue and do unpredictable and unintended things. AI developers commonly test safety with so-called “\u003ca href=\"https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/cyberpedia/what-is-ai-red-teaming\">red teams\u003c/a>” that try to break or trick machine learning models, like chatbots, to find hidden flaws. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Scientists and AI researchers have warned for years of the possibility that AI systems could go rogue and do unpredictable and unintended things. AI developers commonly test safety with so-called “\u003ca href=\"https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/cyberpedia/what-is-ai-red-teaming\">red teams\u003c/a>” that try to break or trick machine learning models, like chatbots, to find hidden flaws. \u003c/p>\n"
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"\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/GettyImages-1849294862.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12092368\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Hugging Face logo is seen displayed on a mobile phone screen with the AI revolution symbol in the background. \u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“In certain circumstances, AI will try to break out of their sandboxes or otherwise do things that were not what the creator intended,” Calvin said. “But this really is the first very big example of that happening, at scale, with a really highly capable AI model in a way that actually harmed a third party.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“In certain circumstances, AI will try to break out of their sandboxes or otherwise do things that were not what the creator intended,” Calvin said. “But this really is the first very big example of that happening, at scale, with a really highly capable AI model in a way that actually harmed a third party.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>According to OpenAI’s account, the company was running an internal evaluation designed to measure how good its models are at hacking. To get a true reading, OpenAI deliberately switched off the safety filters that normally stop its models from carrying out cyberattacks.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>According to OpenAI’s account, the company was running an internal evaluation designed to measure how good its models are at hacking. To get a true reading, OpenAI deliberately switched off the safety filters that normally stop its models from carrying out cyberattacks.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The models were confined to a so-called “sandbox,” an isolated environment with no route to the open internet except OpenAI’s one internal service that fetches software libraries from public repositories. The models found a previously unknown flaw in that service, exploited it, escalated their privileges and moved from machine to machine inside OpenAI’s research network until they reached one with internet access. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The models were confined to a so-called “sandbox,” an isolated environment with no route to the open internet except OpenAI’s one internal service that fetches software libraries from public repositories. The models found a previously unknown flaw in that service, exploited it, escalated their privileges and moved from machine to machine inside OpenAI’s research network until they reached one with internet access. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Once the models broke out onto the open internet, according to OpenAI, they reasoned that Hugging Face might be storing the answers to the test they were trying to pass. Hugging Face’s credentials and production database aren’t on the public internet any more than a bank’s vault sits on a sidewalk, but the models broke into Hugging Face using stolen credentials, among other things.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Once the models broke out onto the open internet, according to OpenAI, they reasoned that Hugging Face might be storing the answers to the test they were trying to pass. Hugging Face’s credentials and production database aren’t on the public internet any more than a bank’s vault sits on a sidewalk, but the models broke into Hugging Face using stolen credentials, among other things.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/111623_Sam-Altman_AP_CM_01.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12062600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/111623_Sam-Altman_AP_CM_01.jpeg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/111623_Sam-Altman_AP_CM_01-160x107.jpeg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/111623_Sam-Altman_AP_CM_01-1536x1024.jpeg 1536w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 992px) min(100vw, 1536px), (min-width: 768px) min(100vw, 1280px), min(100vw, 1020px)\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">OpenAI restructured to a for-profit company in a move tied to an agreement with California Attorney General Rob Bonta. Company CEO Sam Altman participates in a discussion in San Francisco on Nov. 16, 2023.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
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"\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/111623_Sam-Altman_AP_CM_01.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12062600\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">OpenAI restructured to a for-profit company in a move tied to an agreement with California Attorney General Rob Bonta. Company CEO Sam Altman participates in a discussion in San Francisco on Nov. 16, 2023.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In short: The models were told to hack. They were not told to leave the building or to break into another company’s servers.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>In short: The models were told to hack. They were not told to leave the building or to break into another company’s servers.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Hugging Face detected the intrusion and shut it down on its own, days before OpenAI connected the attack to its own testing. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Hugging Face detected the intrusion and shut it down on its own, days before OpenAI connected the attack to its own testing. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“It’s quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!“ Hugging Face Chief Executive Clement Delangue wrote on social media platform \u003ca href=\"https://x.com/ClementDelangue/status/2079670308156645882\">X\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“It’s quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!“ Hugging Face Chief Executive Clement Delangue wrote on social media platform \u003ca href=\"https://x.com/ClementDelangue/status/2079670308156645882\">X\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In its blog post, OpenAI wrote, “This incident points to the need to further strengthen our model’s alignment, cyber protections during evaluation time and monitoring during internal testing.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The Future of Life Institute — a nonprofit which issues a biannual risk assessment of nine leading AI companies — recently warned that many of the companies building frontier models are quietly walking back safety commitments. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The Future of Life Institute — a nonprofit which issues a biannual risk assessment of nine leading AI companies — recently warned that many of the companies building frontier models are quietly walking back safety commitments. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>According to the group’s \u003ca href=\"https://futureoflife.org/ai-safety-index-summer-2026/\">most recent\u003c/a> AI Safety Index, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Meta all weakened or abandoned promises to pause development if certain red lines were approached, even while publicly suggesting they were amenable. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>According to the group’s \u003ca href=\"https://futureoflife.org/ai-safety-index-summer-2026/\">most recent\u003c/a> AI Safety Index, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Meta all weakened or abandoned promises to pause development if certain red lines were approached, even while publicly suggesting they were amenable. \u003c/p>\n"
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"\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/GettyImages-2159671948-scaled-e1781542152687.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12058035\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Close-up of phone screen displaying Anthropic Claude, a Large Language Model (LLM) powered generative artificial intelligence chatbot in Lafayette, California, on June 27, 2024. \u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In an email, KQED asked Hamza Chaudhry, who leads AI and national security work at Future of Life, to imagine it was not OpenAI’s software gone rogue but a foreign state, intentionally executing an unauthorized intrusion into a private company’s production infrastructure, exploiting cybersecurity vulnerabilities, stealing live credentials and accessing a production database. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>In an email, KQED asked Hamza Chaudhry, who leads AI and national security work at Future of Life, to imagine it was not OpenAI’s software gone rogue but a foreign state, intentionally executing an unauthorized intrusion into a private company’s production infrastructure, exploiting cybersecurity vulnerabilities, stealing live credentials and accessing a production database. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“We would likely call this a dangerous act of cyber-espionage,” he wrote — a likely criminal violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which “would draw a threat group designation and eventually an indictment or sanctions.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“We would likely call this a dangerous act of cyber-espionage,” he wrote — a likely criminal violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which “would draw a threat group designation and eventually an indictment or sanctions.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>OpenAI did not respond to KQED’s request for comment, but a spokesperson told \u003cem>Bloomberg \u003c/em>the company communicated with law enforcement and other government authorities about the incident.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>OpenAI did not respond to KQED’s request for comment, but a spokesperson told \u003cem>Bloomberg \u003c/em>the company communicated with law enforcement and other government authorities about the incident.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The fact that Google DeepMind, Meta, Mistral, xAI and Chinese AI model developers haven’t revealed similar events doesn’t necessarily mean they haven’t happened. OpenAI and Anthropic are the only two frontier model developers that have publicly disclosed containment failures. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The fact that Google DeepMind, Meta, Mistral, xAI and Chinese AI model developers haven’t revealed similar events doesn’t necessarily mean they haven’t happened. OpenAI and Anthropic are the only two frontier model developers that have publicly disclosed containment failures. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There is no mandatory public disclosure regime in force, like the one in California that requires \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11992954/cybersecurity-expert-shares-tips-for-dublin-based-patelco-credit-union-customers-after-ransomware-attack\">hacked companies to reveal\u003c/a> there’s been a data breach.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>There is no mandatory public disclosure regime in force, like the one in California that requires \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11992954/cybersecurity-expert-shares-tips-for-dublin-based-patelco-credit-union-customers-after-ransomware-attack\">hacked companies to reveal\u003c/a> there’s been a data breach.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Congressional candidate and state Sen. Scott Wiener wrote two AI frontier model safety bills. Gov. Gavin Newsom \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12007323/can-california-still-lead-on-ai-regulation-following-newsoms-veto-of-ai-safety-bill\">vetoed\u003c/a> Wiener’s first effort, arguing in his \u003ca href=\"https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/SB-1047-Veto-Message.pdf\">veto message\u003c/a> that “By focusing only on the most expensive and large-scale models, SB 1047 establishes a regulatory framework that could give the public a false sense of security about controlling this fast-moving technology.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Congressional candidate and state Sen. Scott Wiener wrote two AI frontier model safety bills. Gov. Gavin Newsom \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12007323/can-california-still-lead-on-ai-regulation-following-newsoms-veto-of-ai-safety-bill\">vetoed\u003c/a> Wiener’s first effort, arguing in his \u003ca href=\"https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/SB-1047-Veto-Message.pdf\">veto message\u003c/a> that “By focusing only on the most expensive and large-scale models, SB 1047 establishes a regulatory framework that could give the public a false sense of security about controlling this fast-moving technology.” \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The next year, Newsom signed Wiener’s second at-bat, but only after the bill was softened to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12058013/newsom-signs-california-ai-transparency-bill-tailored-to-meet-tech-industry-tastes\">overcome industry pushback\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The next year, Newsom signed Wiener’s second at-bat, but only after the bill was softened to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12058013/newsom-signs-california-ai-transparency-bill-tailored-to-meet-tech-industry-tastes\">overcome industry pushback\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260SB53\">law\u003c/a>, which took effect Jan. 1, requires developers of the most powerful AI models to notify the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services of any “critical safety incident“ within 15 days of discovering it — which is not the same as reporting the incident to the public. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260SB53\">law\u003c/a>, which took effect Jan. 1, requires developers of the most powerful AI models to notify the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services of any “critical safety incident“ within 15 days of discovering it — which is not the same as reporting the incident to the public. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Wiener told KQED he still thinks the law is strong. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“We worked very hard with the governor to produce a bill that is meaningful and impactful, and that he would sign,“ he said, adding he doesn’t consider the work done, because AI continues to evolve at a rapid pace. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“We worked very hard with the governor to produce a bill that is meaningful and impactful, and that he would sign,“ he said, adding he doesn’t consider the work done, because AI continues to evolve at a rapid pace. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260107-SFCongressionalCandidateForum-13-BL_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12069061\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260107-SFCongressionalCandidateForum-13-BL_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260107-SFCongressionalCandidateForum-13-BL_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260107-SFCongressionalCandidateForum-13-BL_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 992px) min(100vw, 1536px), (min-width: 768px) min(100vw, 1280px), min(100vw, 1020px)\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">State Sen. Scott Wiener, a candidate for California’s 11th Congressional District, participates in a forum with other candidates at UC Law San Francisco on Jan. 7, 2026.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>AI, he said, is “likely the most powerful technology in human history, and we need to make sure that we are both understanding the risks and taking them seriously, so that we can get ahead of them.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Calvin likened the Hugging Face hack to the cyclospora outbreak linked to, but not confirmed as originating from, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12091770/california-based-taylor-farms-recalls-lettuce-shipped-to-27-states-over-cyclospora-risk\">Taylor Farms\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That California-based company has said it’s removing its lettuce indefinitely while the FDA investigation continues. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“And OpenAI is like, ‘Maybe it’ll happen again. Maybe it’ll get worse. We don’t really know,“ Calvin said. “Your AI, again, hacked out of its box and hacked into another company, and you’re saying that you don’t know how to stop it from doing that again? That seems pretty nuts,” Calvin said.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“And OpenAI is like, ‘Maybe it’ll happen again. Maybe it’ll get worse. We don’t really know,“ Calvin said. “Your AI, again, hacked out of its box and hacked into another company, and you’re saying that you don’t know how to stop it from doing that again? That seems pretty nuts,” Calvin said.\u003c/p>\n"
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/open-ai\">OpenAI\u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/\"> this week said\u003c/a> more than one of its models — three, according to \u003ca href=\"https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-23/openai-models-lurked-in-hugging-face-system-for-hours-undetected?srnd=homepage-americas\">\u003cem>Bloomberg\u003c/em>\u003c/a> — attacked Hugging Face, a popular repository for open-source AI tools — marking one of the first publicly disclosed cases of frontier AI models autonomously cyberattacking another company. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The disclosure came days after Hugging Face \u003ca href=\"https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026\">revealed\u003c/a> it was breached in a hack by a “malicious dataset,” which intruded into the AI company’s software to run code. The campaign executed a flurry of more than 17,000 automated actions in a matter of hours, the post said. It’s still unclear if Hugging Face customer or partner data was taken. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“This matches the ‘agentic attacker’ scenario the industry has been forecasting,” Hugging Face wrote on July 16.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>OpenAI said an investigation showed the incident was driven by a combination of models — “including GPT‑5.6 Sol and an even more capable pre-release model.” The company said it’s working with Hugging Face to produce a more thorough report of what happened.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/05/AP24134775174210-scaled-e1770337042768.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-11985952\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The OpenAI logo is seen on a mobile phone in front of a computer screen displaying output from ChatGPT, March 21, 2023, in Boston, Massachusetts. (Michael Dwyer/Associated Press)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>OpenAI’s announcement came one day after the San Francisco-based frontier AI developer disclosed a separate incident in which it paused another pre-release model that had escaped what the industry calls “a sandbox” — an isolated environment with no path to the open internet, except for a single internal service that fetches software packages — and \u003ca href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/openai-models-escaped-containment-and-hacked-huggingface/\">posted\u003c/a> to GitHub. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last April, a researcher challenged an early version of Anthropic’s Mythos model to break out of an isolated system and message back. Mythos did, and then \u003ca href=\"https://www.mondaymomentum.io/p/the-ai-that-broke-out-of-its-cage\">went further\u003c/a>, building a multistep process to reach the wider internet. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>California’s \u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260SB53\">frontier AI law\u003c/a>, the first of its kind in the country, obliges the largest developers to tell the state about critical safety incidents, but only ones that kill or injure someone or that cause catastrophic harm.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It expressly excludes the kind of safety evaluation OpenAI was running when its models got loose. Which leaves a question nobody in Sacramento or Washington can answer: how often have frontier models in development gone rogue at companies that decided not to mention it? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“This was one of the topics I was focused on when I worked at OpenAI: what happens when AI models become good enough to reward-hack their way through the infrastructure they use to accomplish their objectives?” Ariel Herbert-Voss, OpenAI’s first security hire, wrote KQED. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It’s a really difficult problem to defend against and is one of the reasons I left to start my own company,” Herbert-Voss, now the founder of an automated offensive cybersecurity company called RunSybil, said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It’s a really remarkable and, I think, fair to say scary event,“ said Nathan Calvin, general counsel at safety advocate EncodeAI. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Scientists and AI researchers have warned for years of the possibility that AI systems could go rogue and do unpredictable and unintended things. AI developers commonly test safety with so-called “\u003ca href=\"https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/cyberpedia/what-is-ai-red-teaming\">red teams\u003c/a>” that try to break or trick machine learning models, like chatbots, to find hidden flaws. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1980\" height=\"1320\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/GettyImages-1849294862.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12092368\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/GettyImages-1849294862.jpg 1980w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/GettyImages-1849294862-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/GettyImages-1849294862-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1980px) 100vw, 1980px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Hugging Face logo is seen displayed on a mobile phone screen with the AI revolution symbol in the background. (Idrees Abbas/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“In certain circumstances, AI will try to break out of their sandboxes or otherwise do things that were not what the creator intended,” Calvin said. “But this really is the first very big example of that happening, at scale, with a really highly capable AI model in a way that actually harmed a third party.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>According to OpenAI’s account, the company was running an internal evaluation designed to measure how good its models are at hacking. To get a true reading, OpenAI deliberately switched off the safety filters that normally stop its models from carrying out cyberattacks.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The models were confined to a so-called “sandbox,” an isolated environment with no route to the open internet except OpenAI’s one internal service that fetches software libraries from public repositories. The models found a previously unknown flaw in that service, exploited it, escalated their privileges and moved from machine to machine inside OpenAI’s research network until they reached one with internet access. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Once the models broke out onto the open internet, according to OpenAI, they reasoned that Hugging Face might be storing the answers to the test they were trying to pass. Hugging Face’s credentials and production database aren’t on the public internet any more than a bank’s vault sits on a sidewalk, but the models broke into Hugging Face using stolen credentials, among other things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/111623_Sam-Altman_AP_CM_01.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12062600\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/111623_Sam-Altman_AP_CM_01.jpeg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/111623_Sam-Altman_AP_CM_01-160x107.jpeg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/10/111623_Sam-Altman_AP_CM_01-1536x1024.jpeg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">OpenAI restructured to a for-profit company in a move tied to an agreement with California Attorney General Rob Bonta. Company CEO Sam Altman participates in a discussion in San Francisco on Nov. 16, 2023. (Photo by Eric Risberg, AP Photo)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In short: The models were told to hack. They were not told to leave the building or to break into another company’s servers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Hugging Face detected the intrusion and shut it down on its own, days before OpenAI connected the attack to its own testing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It’s quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!“ Hugging Face Chief Executive Clement Delangue wrote on social media platform \u003ca href=\"https://x.com/ClementDelangue/status/2079670308156645882\">X\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In its blog post, OpenAI wrote, “This incident points to the need to further strengthen our model’s alignment, cyber protections during evaluation time and monitoring during internal testing.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The Future of Life Institute — a nonprofit which issues a biannual risk assessment of nine leading AI companies — recently warned that many of the companies building frontier models are quietly walking back safety commitments. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>According to the group’s \u003ca href=\"https://futureoflife.org/ai-safety-index-summer-2026/\">most recent\u003c/a> AI Safety Index, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Meta all weakened or abandoned promises to pause development if certain red lines were approached, even while publicly suggesting they were amenable. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/09/GettyImages-2159671948-scaled-e1781542152687.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12058035\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Close-up of phone screen displaying Anthropic Claude, a Large Language Model (LLM) powered generative artificial intelligence chatbot in Lafayette, California, on June 27, 2024. (Smith Collection/Gado via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In an email, KQED asked Hamza Chaudhry, who leads AI and national security work at Future of Life, to imagine it was not OpenAI’s software gone rogue but a foreign state, intentionally executing an unauthorized intrusion into a private company’s production infrastructure, exploiting cybersecurity vulnerabilities, stealing live credentials and accessing a production database. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We would likely call this a dangerous act of cyber-espionage,” he wrote — a likely criminal violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which “would draw a threat group designation and eventually an indictment or sanctions.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>OpenAI did not respond to KQED’s request for comment, but a spokesperson told \u003cem>Bloomberg \u003c/em>the company communicated with law enforcement and other government authorities about the incident.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The fact that Google DeepMind, Meta, Mistral, xAI and Chinese AI model developers haven’t revealed similar events doesn’t necessarily mean they haven’t happened. OpenAI and Anthropic are the only two frontier model developers that have publicly disclosed containment failures. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There is no mandatory public disclosure regime in force, like the one in California that requires \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11992954/cybersecurity-expert-shares-tips-for-dublin-based-patelco-credit-union-customers-after-ransomware-attack\">hacked companies to reveal\u003c/a> there’s been a data breach.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12036125\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/MetaGetty2-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The Meta, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Threads logos are screened on a mobile phone on Jan. 25, 2025. (Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Congressional candidate and state Sen. Scott Wiener wrote two AI frontier model safety bills. Gov. Gavin Newsom \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12007323/can-california-still-lead-on-ai-regulation-following-newsoms-veto-of-ai-safety-bill\">vetoed\u003c/a> Wiener’s first effort, arguing in his \u003ca href=\"https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/SB-1047-Veto-Message.pdf\">veto message\u003c/a> that “By focusing only on the most expensive and large-scale models, SB 1047 establishes a regulatory framework that could give the public a false sense of security about controlling this fast-moving technology.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The next year, Newsom signed Wiener’s second at-bat, but only after the bill was softened to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12058013/newsom-signs-california-ai-transparency-bill-tailored-to-meet-tech-industry-tastes\">overcome industry pushback\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260SB53\">law\u003c/a>, which took effect Jan. 1, requires developers of the most powerful AI models to notify the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services of any “critical safety incident“ within 15 days of discovering it — which is not the same as reporting the incident to the public. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Wiener told KQED he still thinks the law is strong. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“We worked very hard with the governor to produce a bill that is meaningful and impactful, and that he would sign,“ he said, adding he doesn’t consider the work done, because AI continues to evolve at a rapid pace. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260107-SFCongressionalCandidateForum-13-BL_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12069061\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260107-SFCongressionalCandidateForum-13-BL_qed.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260107-SFCongressionalCandidateForum-13-BL_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/01/260107-SFCongressionalCandidateForum-13-BL_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">State Sen. Scott Wiener, a candidate for California’s 11th Congressional District, participates in a forum with other candidates at UC Law San Francisco on Jan. 7, 2026. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>AI, he said, is “likely the most powerful technology in human history, and we need to make sure that we are both understanding the risks and taking them seriously, so that we can get ahead of them.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Calvin likened the Hugging Face hack to the cyclospora outbreak linked to, but not confirmed as originating from, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12091770/california-based-taylor-farms-recalls-lettuce-shipped-to-27-states-over-cyclospora-risk\">Taylor Farms\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That California-based company has said it’s removing its lettuce indefinitely while the FDA investigation continues. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“And OpenAI is like, ‘Maybe it’ll happen again. Maybe it’ll get worse. We don’t really know,“ Calvin said. “Your AI, again, hacked out of its box and hacked into another company, and you’re saying that you don’t know how to stop it from doing that again? That seems pretty nuts,” Calvin said.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "nearly-half-of-teens-report-seeing-ai-sexual-content-bay-area-leaders-want-to-shut-it-down",
"title": "Nearly Half of Teens Report Seeing AI Sexual Content. Bay Area Leaders Want to Shut It Down",
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"headTitle": "Nearly Half of Teens Report Seeing AI Sexual Content. Bay Area Leaders Want to Shut It Down | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>Sexualized images generated by artificial intelligence have flooded kids’ screens. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/bay-area\">Bay Area \u003c/a>lawmakers are racing to crack down on sites and apps that make this possible. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A new \u003ca href=\"https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/teens-and-explicit-deepfakes-in-the-age-of-ai\">report\u003c/a> from Common Sense Media, a leading nonprofit researching child safety online, found that 44% of teens have seen sexual content they believe to be AI-generated — and that nearly a quarter of those who’ve seen it say they’ve seen content of themselves or of their peers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>State Sen. Josh Becker, D-Menlo Park, said the report confirms what lawmakers have been warning about for years. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Artificial intelligence is making it easier than ever to create fake images that are explicit images of real people, and too often young people are the victims,” Becker said on Tuesday. “It’s taken something that may have happened before — cyberbullying — and just put it on steroids.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The study followed up on the organization’s 2023 report about online pornography’s impact on teens. Its authors surveyed 1,314 teens in the U.S. and held focus groups to contextualize the numbers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1020\" height=\"765\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/03/RS47488_IMG_5843-qut-1020x765.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-11862704\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/03/RS47488_IMG_5843-qut-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/03/RS47488_IMG_5843-qut-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/03/RS47488_IMG_5843-qut-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/03/RS47488_IMG_5843-qut-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/03/RS47488_IMG_5843-qut-1832x1374.jpg 1832w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/03/RS47488_IMG_5843-qut-1376x1032.jpg 1376w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/03/RS47488_IMG_5843-qut-1044x783.jpg 1044w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/03/RS47488_IMG_5843-qut-632x474.jpg 632w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/03/RS47488_IMG_5843-qut-536x402.jpg 536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/03/RS47488_IMG_5843-qut.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1020px) 100vw, 1020px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">State Sen. Josh Becker speaks to reporters at the Cesar Chavez Ravenswood Middle School in East Palo Alto on March 1, 2021. (Courtesy of Voler Strategic Advisors)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They found that 67% of teens feared being depicted in deepfakes — extremely realistic images, videos or audio clips showing something that never happened — without their consent. One teen surveyed in the report said that “everyone should have at least a small degree of worry because it’s so easy [to make it], so accessible, and it also feels pushed.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Experts say that generative AI has made it easier than ever to create deepfakes. While big platforms generally have safety features to prevent making them sexually explicit, they do not \u003ca href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c802ldjdklzo\">always\u003c/a> work, according to reporting from the BBC. Many users will turn instead to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12000310/san-francisco-takes-on-makers-ai-generated-deepfake-pornography-landmark-lawsuit\">smaller, anonymous\u003c/a> apps and websites to generate the content.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“AI has made a severe form of sexual harassment easy enough for almost any kid with a phone to carry out,” said Jim Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Kids can be targeted by deepfakes as early as elementary school, and especially in middle school and high school, said Emma Le, the head of operations at the Center for Gender Equitable AI, a youth-led organization addressing gender based harms caused by emerging technologies. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Le said that most deepfakes target women and that they have “huge consequences on girls’ mental health,” causing some to leave school, experience depression and contemplate self-harm. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>More and more teens are scaling back their online activity to protect themselves from being deepfaked, according to Steyer. Le also said that deepfakes are linked to an increase in gender-based harassment that’s driving women and girls away from online platforms — a key public sphere for many. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Girls are withdrawing from the public eye,” Le said. “That’s going to have huge consequences in the future for women’s rights, women’s empowerment.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Surveyed teens reported seeing this explicit AI content across platforms including, but not limited to, TikTok, Instagram and X. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>While teens may see the content on big platforms, San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu said that small, often anonymous and sometimes international companies are the ones that produce so-called “nudify” tools — AI-driven apps and websites that allow users to make sexually explicit deepfakes. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Because you can’t determine which website or app generated an image, “victims often have no recourse,” Chiu said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Once the images are distributed, you can’t control where they go,” Chiu said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Le emphasized that because the images cannot be completely scrubbed, victims of these crimes can worry about the images popping up again, especially if they have a job in the public eye. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/05/TeenagersMetaSocialMediaGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12084574\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/05/TeenagersMetaSocialMediaGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/05/TeenagersMetaSocialMediaGetty-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/05/TeenagersMetaSocialMediaGetty-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A 14-year-old boy holds an iPhone with various social media and messaging apps on Feb. 23, 2026. (Anna Barclay/Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Lawmakers at every level are working to tackle this issue. Last year, Congress passed the \u003ca href=\"https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/146\">Take It Down Act\u003c/a> — prohibiting the nonconsensual publication of explicit images and requiring online platforms to establish reporting systems and remove the images promptly. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Becker said that California has been “leading the nation” with legislation updated “for this new AI age.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Over the past few years, the state passed laws banning \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12069808/california-investigates-elon-musks-ai-company-after-avalanche-of-complaints-about-sexual-content\">deepfake revenge porn\u003c/a> — and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12000310/san-francisco-takes-on-makers-ai-generated-deepfake-pornography-landmark-lawsuit\">AI-generated child porn\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Becker described legislating in this space as a “cat and mouse game” and said that lawmakers are “going to have to keep working to make sure our laws can keep up.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In San Francisco, Chiu is already using these laws to hold Silicon Valley companies to account. Last week, Chiu sent Google and Apple cease-and-desist letters asking them to take down 13 apps that were being used to target women and girls. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It shouldn’t be on us to tell large technology companies that their app stores are being used to continue to victimize millions of women and girls around the globe,” Chiu said. “We are asking these companies to be proactive in preventing this abuse in the future.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A Google spokesperson said that all five apps referenced in Chiu’s letter have been suspended. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“When violations are reported to us, we investigate and take swift action, which in the case of these apps has included suspending hundreds of violating apps and restricting related search terms like ‘nudify’ on our store,” the company said in a statement. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A spokesperson for Apple said that “‘Nudification’ apps are against our App Review Guidelines and we aggressively work to identify and remove apps — as well as the developer accounts behind them — that attempt to evade our processes and policies.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Steyer urged more action from both the tech industry and from American lawmakers, but also emphasized the importance of talking to kids about this content. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“As a parent or a grandparent, this is sort of your worst nightmare, but you gotta talk to your kids about it … because it’s real. The numbers speak for themselves,” Steyer said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/teens-and-explicit-deepfakes-in-the-age-of-ai\">report\u003c/a> contains advice for parents, schools and policymakers dealing with this content and these conversations.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Sexualized images generated by artificial intelligence have flooded kids’ screens. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/bay-area\">Bay Area \u003c/a>lawmakers are racing to crack down on sites and apps that make this possible. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Sexualized images generated by artificial intelligence have flooded kids’ screens. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/bay-area\">Bay Area \u003c/a>lawmakers are racing to crack down on sites and apps that make this possible. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>A new \u003ca href=\"https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/teens-and-explicit-deepfakes-in-the-age-of-ai\">report\u003c/a> from Common Sense Media, a leading nonprofit researching child safety online, found that 44% of teens have seen sexual content they believe to be AI-generated — and that nearly a quarter of those who’ve seen it say they’ve seen content of themselves or of their peers.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>A new \u003ca href=\"https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/teens-and-explicit-deepfakes-in-the-age-of-ai\">report\u003c/a> from Common Sense Media, a leading nonprofit researching child safety online, found that 44% of teens have seen sexual content they believe to be AI-generated — and that nearly a quarter of those who’ve seen it say they’ve seen content of themselves or of their peers.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>State Sen. Josh Becker, D-Menlo Park, said the report confirms what lawmakers have been warning about for years. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Artificial intelligence is making it easier than ever to create fake images that are explicit images of real people, and too often young people are the victims,” Becker said on Tuesday. “It’s taken something that may have happened before — cyberbullying — and just put it on steroids.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“Artificial intelligence is making it easier than ever to create fake images that are explicit images of real people, and too often young people are the victims,” Becker said on Tuesday. “It’s taken something that may have happened before — cyberbullying — and just put it on steroids.” \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The study followed up on the organization’s 2023 report about online pornography’s impact on teens. Its authors surveyed 1,314 teens in the U.S. and held focus groups to contextualize the numbers. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The study followed up on the organization’s 2023 report about online pornography’s impact on teens. Its authors surveyed 1,314 teens in the U.S. and held focus groups to contextualize the numbers. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>They found that 67% of teens feared being depicted in deepfakes — extremely realistic images, videos or audio clips showing something that never happened — without their consent. One teen surveyed in the report said that “everyone should have at least a small degree of worry because it’s so easy [to make it], so accessible, and it also feels pushed.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>They found that 67% of teens feared being depicted in deepfakes — extremely realistic images, videos or audio clips showing something that never happened — without their consent. One teen surveyed in the report said that “everyone should have at least a small degree of worry because it’s so easy [to make it], so accessible, and it also feels pushed.” \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Experts say that generative AI has made it easier than ever to create deepfakes. While big platforms generally have safety features to prevent making them sexually explicit, they do not \u003ca href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c802ldjdklzo\">always\u003c/a> work, according to reporting from the BBC. Many users will turn instead to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12000310/san-francisco-takes-on-makers-ai-generated-deepfake-pornography-landmark-lawsuit\">smaller, anonymous\u003c/a> apps and websites to generate the content.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Experts say that generative AI has made it easier than ever to create deepfakes. While big platforms generally have safety features to prevent making them sexually explicit, they do not \u003ca href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c802ldjdklzo\">always\u003c/a> work, according to reporting from the BBC. Many users will turn instead to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12000310/san-francisco-takes-on-makers-ai-generated-deepfake-pornography-landmark-lawsuit\">smaller, anonymous\u003c/a> apps and websites to generate the content.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“AI has made a severe form of sexual harassment easy enough for almost any kid with a phone to carry out,” said Jim Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“AI has made a severe form of sexual harassment easy enough for almost any kid with a phone to carry out,” said Jim Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Kids can be targeted by deepfakes as early as elementary school, and especially in middle school and high school, said Emma Le, the head of operations at the Center for Gender Equitable AI, a youth-led organization addressing gender based harms caused by emerging technologies. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Kids can be targeted by deepfakes as early as elementary school, and especially in middle school and high school, said Emma Le, the head of operations at the Center for Gender Equitable AI, a youth-led organization addressing gender based harms caused by emerging technologies. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Le said that most deepfakes target women and that they have “huge consequences on girls’ mental health,” causing some to leave school, experience depression and contemplate self-harm. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>More and more teens are scaling back their online activity to protect themselves from being deepfaked, according to Steyer. Le also said that deepfakes are linked to an increase in gender-based harassment that’s driving women and girls away from online platforms — a key public sphere for many. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>More and more teens are scaling back their online activity to protect themselves from being deepfaked, according to Steyer. Le also said that deepfakes are linked to an increase in gender-based harassment that’s driving women and girls away from online platforms — a key public sphere for many. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Girls are withdrawing from the public eye,” Le said. “That’s going to have huge consequences in the future for women’s rights, women’s empowerment.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Surveyed teens reported seeing this explicit AI content across platforms including, but not limited to, TikTok, Instagram and X. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Surveyed teens reported seeing this explicit AI content across platforms including, but not limited to, TikTok, Instagram and X. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>While teens may see the content on big platforms, San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu said that small, often anonymous and sometimes international companies are the ones that produce so-called “nudify” tools — AI-driven apps and websites that allow users to make sexually explicit deepfakes. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>While teens may see the content on big platforms, San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu said that small, often anonymous and sometimes international companies are the ones that produce so-called “nudify” tools — AI-driven apps and websites that allow users to make sexually explicit deepfakes. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Because you can’t determine which website or app generated an image, “victims often have no recourse,” Chiu said. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Because you can’t determine which website or app generated an image, “victims often have no recourse,” Chiu said. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Once the images are distributed, you can’t control where they go,” Chiu said. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Le emphasized that because the images cannot be completely scrubbed, victims of these crimes can worry about the images popping up again, especially if they have a job in the public eye. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Le emphasized that because the images cannot be completely scrubbed, victims of these crimes can worry about the images popping up again, especially if they have a job in the public eye. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Lawmakers at every level are working to tackle this issue. Last year, Congress passed the \u003ca href=\"https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/146\">Take It Down Act\u003c/a> — prohibiting the nonconsensual publication of explicit images and requiring online platforms to establish reporting systems and remove the images promptly. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Becker said that California has been “leading the nation” with legislation updated “for this new AI age.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Over the past few years, the state passed laws banning \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12069808/california-investigates-elon-musks-ai-company-after-avalanche-of-complaints-about-sexual-content\">deepfake revenge porn\u003c/a> — and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12000310/san-francisco-takes-on-makers-ai-generated-deepfake-pornography-landmark-lawsuit\">AI-generated child porn\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Over the past few years, the state passed laws banning \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12069808/california-investigates-elon-musks-ai-company-after-avalanche-of-complaints-about-sexual-content\">deepfake revenge porn\u003c/a> — and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12000310/san-francisco-takes-on-makers-ai-generated-deepfake-pornography-landmark-lawsuit\">AI-generated child porn\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Becker described legislating in this space as a “cat and mouse game” and said that lawmakers are “going to have to keep working to make sure our laws can keep up.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In San Francisco, Chiu is already using these laws to hold Silicon Valley companies to account. Last week, Chiu sent Google and Apple cease-and-desist letters asking them to take down 13 apps that were being used to target women and girls. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>In San Francisco, Chiu is already using these laws to hold Silicon Valley companies to account. Last week, Chiu sent Google and Apple cease-and-desist letters asking them to take down 13 apps that were being used to target women and girls. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“It shouldn’t be on us to tell large technology companies that their app stores are being used to continue to victimize millions of women and girls around the globe,” Chiu said. “We are asking these companies to be proactive in preventing this abuse in the future.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“It shouldn’t be on us to tell large technology companies that their app stores are being used to continue to victimize millions of women and girls around the globe,” Chiu said. “We are asking these companies to be proactive in preventing this abuse in the future.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>A Google spokesperson said that all five apps referenced in Chiu’s letter have been suspended. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“When violations are reported to us, we investigate and take swift action, which in the case of these apps has included suspending hundreds of violating apps and restricting related search terms like ‘nudify’ on our store,” the company said in a statement. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“When violations are reported to us, we investigate and take swift action, which in the case of these apps has included suspending hundreds of violating apps and restricting related search terms like ‘nudify’ on our store,” the company said in a statement. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>A spokesperson for Apple said that “‘Nudification’ apps are against our App Review Guidelines and we aggressively work to identify and remove apps — as well as the developer accounts behind them — that attempt to evade our processes and policies.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>A spokesperson for Apple said that “‘Nudification’ apps are against our App Review Guidelines and we aggressively work to identify and remove apps — as well as the developer accounts behind them — that attempt to evade our processes and policies.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Steyer urged more action from both the tech industry and from American lawmakers, but also emphasized the importance of talking to kids about this content. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“As a parent or a grandparent, this is sort of your worst nightmare, but you gotta talk to your kids about it … because it’s real. The numbers speak for themselves,” Steyer said. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“As a parent or a grandparent, this is sort of your worst nightmare, but you gotta talk to your kids about it … because it’s real. The numbers speak for themselves,” Steyer said. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/teens-and-explicit-deepfakes-in-the-age-of-ai\">report\u003c/a> contains advice for parents, schools and policymakers dealing with this content and these conversations.\u003c/p>\n",
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"title": "Nearly Half of Teens Report Seeing AI Sexual Content. Bay Area Leaders Want to Shut It Down | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Sexualized images generated by artificial intelligence have flooded kids’ screens. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/bay-area\">Bay Area \u003c/a>lawmakers are racing to crack down on sites and apps that make this possible. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A new \u003ca href=\"https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/teens-and-explicit-deepfakes-in-the-age-of-ai\">report\u003c/a> from Common Sense Media, a leading nonprofit researching child safety online, found that 44% of teens have seen sexual content they believe to be AI-generated — and that nearly a quarter of those who’ve seen it say they’ve seen content of themselves or of their peers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>State Sen. Josh Becker, D-Menlo Park, said the report confirms what lawmakers have been warning about for years. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Artificial intelligence is making it easier than ever to create fake images that are explicit images of real people, and too often young people are the victims,” Becker said on Tuesday. “It’s taken something that may have happened before — cyberbullying — and just put it on steroids.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The study followed up on the organization’s 2023 report about online pornography’s impact on teens. Its authors surveyed 1,314 teens in the U.S. and held focus groups to contextualize the numbers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1020\" height=\"765\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/03/RS47488_IMG_5843-qut-1020x765.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-11862704\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/03/RS47488_IMG_5843-qut-1020x765.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/03/RS47488_IMG_5843-qut-800x600.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/03/RS47488_IMG_5843-qut-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/03/RS47488_IMG_5843-qut-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/03/RS47488_IMG_5843-qut-1832x1374.jpg 1832w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/03/RS47488_IMG_5843-qut-1376x1032.jpg 1376w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/03/RS47488_IMG_5843-qut-1044x783.jpg 1044w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/03/RS47488_IMG_5843-qut-632x474.jpg 632w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/03/RS47488_IMG_5843-qut-536x402.jpg 536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/03/RS47488_IMG_5843-qut.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1020px) 100vw, 1020px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">State Sen. Josh Becker speaks to reporters at the Cesar Chavez Ravenswood Middle School in East Palo Alto on March 1, 2021. (Courtesy of Voler Strategic Advisors)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They found that 67% of teens feared being depicted in deepfakes — extremely realistic images, videos or audio clips showing something that never happened — without their consent. One teen surveyed in the report said that “everyone should have at least a small degree of worry because it’s so easy [to make it], so accessible, and it also feels pushed.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Experts say that generative AI has made it easier than ever to create deepfakes. While big platforms generally have safety features to prevent making them sexually explicit, they do not \u003ca href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c802ldjdklzo\">always\u003c/a> work, according to reporting from the BBC. Many users will turn instead to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12000310/san-francisco-takes-on-makers-ai-generated-deepfake-pornography-landmark-lawsuit\">smaller, anonymous\u003c/a> apps and websites to generate the content.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“AI has made a severe form of sexual harassment easy enough for almost any kid with a phone to carry out,” said Jim Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Kids can be targeted by deepfakes as early as elementary school, and especially in middle school and high school, said Emma Le, the head of operations at the Center for Gender Equitable AI, a youth-led organization addressing gender based harms caused by emerging technologies. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Le said that most deepfakes target women and that they have “huge consequences on girls’ mental health,” causing some to leave school, experience depression and contemplate self-harm. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>More and more teens are scaling back their online activity to protect themselves from being deepfaked, according to Steyer. Le also said that deepfakes are linked to an increase in gender-based harassment that’s driving women and girls away from online platforms — a key public sphere for many. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Girls are withdrawing from the public eye,” Le said. “That’s going to have huge consequences in the future for women’s rights, women’s empowerment.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Surveyed teens reported seeing this explicit AI content across platforms including, but not limited to, TikTok, Instagram and X. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>While teens may see the content on big platforms, San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu said that small, often anonymous and sometimes international companies are the ones that produce so-called “nudify” tools — AI-driven apps and websites that allow users to make sexually explicit deepfakes. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Because you can’t determine which website or app generated an image, “victims often have no recourse,” Chiu said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Once the images are distributed, you can’t control where they go,” Chiu said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Le emphasized that because the images cannot be completely scrubbed, victims of these crimes can worry about the images popping up again, especially if they have a job in the public eye. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/05/TeenagersMetaSocialMediaGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12084574\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/05/TeenagersMetaSocialMediaGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/05/TeenagersMetaSocialMediaGetty-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/05/TeenagersMetaSocialMediaGetty-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A 14-year-old boy holds an iPhone with various social media and messaging apps on Feb. 23, 2026. (Anna Barclay/Getty Images)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Lawmakers at every level are working to tackle this issue. Last year, Congress passed the \u003ca href=\"https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/146\">Take It Down Act\u003c/a> — prohibiting the nonconsensual publication of explicit images and requiring online platforms to establish reporting systems and remove the images promptly. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Becker said that California has been “leading the nation” with legislation updated “for this new AI age.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Over the past few years, the state passed laws banning \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12069808/california-investigates-elon-musks-ai-company-after-avalanche-of-complaints-about-sexual-content\">deepfake revenge porn\u003c/a> — and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12000310/san-francisco-takes-on-makers-ai-generated-deepfake-pornography-landmark-lawsuit\">AI-generated child porn\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Becker described legislating in this space as a “cat and mouse game” and said that lawmakers are “going to have to keep working to make sure our laws can keep up.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In San Francisco, Chiu is already using these laws to hold Silicon Valley companies to account. Last week, Chiu sent Google and Apple cease-and-desist letters asking them to take down 13 apps that were being used to target women and girls. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It shouldn’t be on us to tell large technology companies that their app stores are being used to continue to victimize millions of women and girls around the globe,” Chiu said. “We are asking these companies to be proactive in preventing this abuse in the future.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A Google spokesperson said that all five apps referenced in Chiu’s letter have been suspended. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“When violations are reported to us, we investigate and take swift action, which in the case of these apps has included suspending hundreds of violating apps and restricting related search terms like ‘nudify’ on our store,” the company said in a statement. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A spokesperson for Apple said that “‘Nudification’ apps are against our App Review Guidelines and we aggressively work to identify and remove apps — as well as the developer accounts behind them — that attempt to evade our processes and policies.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Steyer urged more action from both the tech industry and from American lawmakers, but also emphasized the importance of talking to kids about this content. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“As a parent or a grandparent, this is sort of your worst nightmare, but you gotta talk to your kids about it … because it’s real. The numbers speak for themselves,” Steyer said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/teens-and-explicit-deepfakes-in-the-age-of-ai\">report\u003c/a> contains advice for parents, schools and policymakers dealing with this content and these conversations.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Does AI Have to Be Bad News for the Planet? (with Meghan Busse)",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#transcript\">View Full Episode Transcript\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Are you hurting the planet every time you query a chatbot? \u003ca href=\"https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/academics-research/faculty/busse_meghan/\">Economist Meghan Busse\u003c/a> suggests that may be the wrong question. In this episode, we zoom out from the usual concerns about frivolous queries (and, for that matter, resource‑hungry data centers) to ask an even more basic question: is intense demand for AI locking us into decades of additional fossil fuel use, or is it accelerating investment in clean energy? Busse helps us sort real climate levers from symbolic ones, and explains why AI’s ultimate impact on the planet will likely come down to how we build and power it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Further Reading: \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://apnorc.org/projects/epic-climate-change-2025/?doing_wp_cron=1784231367.3495659828186035156250\">Public attitudes toward climate policy, technology, and the environment\u003c/a> — AP-NORC\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/24/us/j-stuart-adams-utah-senate-data-center.html\">Utah Senate President Loses Primary After Data Center Backlash\u003c/a> — Jack Healy, \u003cem>New York Times\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> This is Life, Automated, the show where we explore how technologies like AI are changing how we live, work, and make decisions.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This episode, we dive into one of the biggest anxieties around AI. What it’s doing to the environment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[News footage from people protesting data centers…]\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You see this anxiety most dramatically in the protests against data centers. It wasn’t that long ago that just a handful of people might show up at town halls to object to a project. These days, communities are getting more organized… and they’re increasingly calling for moratoriums on data center construction. That’s state and local freezes, basically. They’re citing worries about water, noise, pollution, land, and strain on the electrical grid.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[News footage from people protesting data centers…]\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But I wanted to understand something more basic. Just how bad is AI for the planet? Particularly compared to all the other things we do to the planet? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And what should \u003cem>I \u003c/em>actually do about it? Like me, personally, as an individual.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I have environmentally conscious friends who refuse to use tools like ChatGPT and Claude on principle, particularly for frivolous queries like generating a vacation packing list. I have a suspicion that this might be a little…beside the point? But maybe it isn’t?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So I reached out to Meghan Busse. She’s an economist at the Kellogg School of Management. She’s NOT an expert in data centers specifically, but she is an expert on energy, climate, environmental policy and how markets affect those things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So I thought she’d be a great person to zoom out and really help me understand the big picture. How should I, someone who cares about the environment, be thinking about AI?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meghan helped me separate the problem into two major buckets. The very real local impacts of a data center moving into your neighborhood, and the broader impacts on CO2 emissions that lead to climate change. And that second bucket is where the story gets really interesting. Because Meghan actually sees a future where demand for AI could benefit the planet. \u003cem>If\u003c/em> we stay laser-focused on the right things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m Jess Love, and this is Life, Automated, a show from Kellogg’s Ryan Institute on Complexity, distributed by KQED. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meghan and I started our conversation discussing a recent AP NORC poll that suggested more than 70 percent of Americans are either somewhat, very, or extremely concerned about the environmental impact of AI. That’s more than the percentages concerned about the impact of air travel or meat production. I wanted to know what she made of this.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse\u003c/strong>: So on the one hand, I’m excited to have that many Americans concerned about the environmental and climate impact of anything. On the other hand, it is consistent with what I think we see in other places, which is that people sometimes have the biggest fears about the things that are either least familiar or the newest, or what I call as a technical term “scary.” And something that’s scary is something that makes a good disaster movie. It’s what makes nuclear power scary. But, coal-fired, air pollution not scary. Even though the coal-fired power pollution is much more dangerous in terms of mortality than nuclear power is. There’s the same kind of thing. I think that AI seems scary in the sense that we can imagine a great disaster movie about it when you don’t imagine a great disaster movie about the CO2 emissions that come from meat production.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>I don’t think Meghan’s point here is that climate fears about AI are themselves irrational. But she’s already raising a question that will run through our whole conversation: are we worried about the right things, in the right proportions?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>When it comes to AI, there are big global concerns around CO2 emissions related to energy use, both in terms of the energy required to train the models, and the energy required to run them. We’ll get to those. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But first I wanted to talk about THE thing people are most upset about. And that is what Meghan calls “local proximity issues”: the concerns we might have when we learn a data center is moving in nearby. Which in some ways are like lots of bad neighbor issues people have had with factories in the past….but with some new twists. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> There’s a sense in which the pollution, if you will, that comes from data centers is different from what we have typically thought of when we think about industrial sources. And there we are oftentimes thinking about air pollution or water pollution or things that are contaminants that can harm people’s health because they get into people’s bodies, right? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> And a data center is much cleaner in that sense. There isn’t smoke, right? There isn’t particulate matter that potentially people are breathing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But people are worried, and I think with some justification, about other kinds of externality, other kinds of consequences. And one of the things that people have been increasingly talking about is the issue of noise. So you might be near a data center, and it wouldn’t be loud or clattery or things like that, but people describe sort of a hum or a buzz or a vibration- \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Ugh \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> …Or a thrum, that can affect people’s health, not because it bothers them that they hear it, but because it is a low-level vibration that can affect people’s bodies in ways that I’m not sure we understand really well. And part of the challenge is that to the extent that we have noise ordinances… They are to deal with things that are loud, that affect hearing, that disturb quality of life in the way that we’re used to conventionally thinking about noise.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Right. It’s almost like we don’t even know enough about this to be able to design the regulations and the agreements that would then satisfy the community.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse\u003c/strong>: The more I read about this, the more I’m coming to believe that near people is just not a good place to put data centers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> So we talked about noise. What are some of the other concerns?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>There are land use kinds of questions. So there is, for example, in northern Utah, in a place called Cache Valley near Logan, there was recently a proposal for an absolutely gigantic data center that would have been just a huge presence in the land there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]:\u003c/strong> I looked it up. The proposed hyperscale data center she is talking about would be located in Northwest Box Elder County, near Cache Valley. Its size: 40,000 acres. After a public backlash, the size of the proposed project area (that’s the area including both the facilities and the land) was reduced to 20,000 acres–a mere two-thirds the size of San Francisco. Having a neighbor that big…yeah, I can see how that could cause alarm.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then there’s the question of water. Data centers have a reputation for being real water guzzlers, mostly because they so often rely on evaporative cooling to function. In places where water is scarce, they can compete with households, farms, and other businesses, driving prices way up…or leading to shortages. And while there are some ways to make water use more efficient, these come with their own tradeoffs, like requiring a lot more energy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Still, as challenging as these “local proximity issues” are to deal with–Meghan says they are NOT what concerns her most about AI’s potential impact on the climate. In part because they SHOULD be solvable.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> I think that many of the proximity concerns could be solved by altering where data centers are built. There’s a lot of parts of this country that don’t have a lot of people in them, right? There are less dense, less populated places that could be chosen for data centers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> But why aren’t they?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> Well, it’s not as convenient.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> It’ll cost more money.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> I don’t know if the land will cost more money but it’s not as easily connected. It’s not necessarily where the eventual employees that you wanna have running the data center or interacting with the data center are most easily located.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]\u003c/strong>: So I can see why people are so angry about having a data center as a next-door neighbor.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But what makes data centers bad neighbors is not necessarily what makes them so bad for the climate overall. What Meghan Busse–a researcher who studies climate policy–is most concerned about … is energy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> So I think that the electricity use might be the thing that is most distinctive about AI. And the reason for this is that electricity use in the US and the EU and these sort of high income developed countries, was increasing pretty steadily along with population and GDP from post World War II until about 2000. And then it flattened out. And this isn’t because people didn’t want to use electricity for things. It’s because the devices that they used for electricity became more energy efficient. So we could get more of what economists call energy services without needing as much electricity. But what that meant is that, for about 20 years, there wasn’t a lot of need to greatly expand or to really expand very much at all.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Electricity transmission, electricity distribution, the total amount of electricity generation that we could do. And then all of a sudden along comes AI which is really pretty energy intensive… electricity demand, and it’s coming at the same time that there’s an increase in vehicle electrification and an increase of automation and manufacturing. And it’s putting a real strain on the ability of electricity systems to meet that. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]\u003c/strong>: So. Here in the U.S., we have a couple decades where the overall amount of electricity we need to generate basically stays flat. Electricity goes into a lot more THINGS, but all those THINGS get more efficient at about the same rate. That’s two decades of not a lot of pressure to build new power plants. And then…BAM.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And the timing of this new strain on the electrical grid is relevant because there’s been another trend at play.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>Over the last decade or 15 years, the cost of generating electricity with renewable sources, with wind and solar has fallen dramatically. So over the course of about 10 years, the cost of generating electricity with solar went down to about a tenth of what it was, and the cost of generating electricity with wind had gone down to about a third of what it was.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> That’s a tenth. That means if it used to cost a dollar, it costs 10 cents.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> That is right. It’s a phenomenal reduction. It’s a phenomenal achievement for the climate. It might be the single best event to happen for the climate in the last 10 or 15 years. It’s just phenomenal. And it is so phenomenal that what was happening is that basically electricity generators all over the country and also in many places in the world, were in a process of transition, in a process of retiring coal-fired power plants and replacing them with solar and wind – not because they were greener, but because they were actually cheaper.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]\u003c/strong>: Thanks to just how much the economics here have changed, nearly all new electricity generators planned for the future in North America were renewables, with a bit of natural gas, but basically NO coal. This was going to be a huge win for the planet. Even better, coal plants were actively being PHASED OUT. If you cared about CO2 emissions, this was very good news. Everything was headed in the right direction.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Then, out of nowhere, for the first time in forever, demand skyrockets. All those plans…\u003cem>poof\u003c/em>!\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Because these data centers – they don’t just need a ton of energy. They need it fast.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If you’re an AI company, you want to get your new data centers up and running as quickly as possible. You feel like you’re in a race: to create the best models, to capture the market. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Sure, in the long run, over 20 or 25 years, solar and wind are cheaper. But if you need power NOW, keeping an aging coal plant running a few more years is going to be pretty tempting. And that smooth march toward cleaner power just got a lot choppier.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Coming up: the SHORT-run danger to the climate is that AI keeps fossil fuels around longer. But in the long run? Well, the jury is still out. Economist Meghan Busse offers up a scenario where the AI data center boom could actually benefit the planet. That’s after the break.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[ad break]\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>So I wanna turn now to the future. I think you’re completely right that there is this sense that, you know, we’re straining under today’s demand and everybody is telling us AI is going to be so many times bigger in a couple of years. What the heck happens? How are we gonna keep up? And how does this not like, destroy the planet? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>So if we take the long run view of the climate, many climate scholars would tell you a key component of decarbonization is to electrify as much as we can. And the reason is because we have really good ways of producing electricity without producing carbon. So solar and wind are two of them that we’ve talked about.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But nuclear energy also has the potential to produce a lot of electricity in a decarbonized way. And there’s other possibilities also out there. Things like geothermal that, you know, people are experimenting with and hoping will come up to scale. But, there are, you know, like I say, wind and solar that we already have, nuclear that we also have already, although we need to re-remember how to build it at low cost.\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess\u003c/strong>\u003cstrong> Love:\u003c/strong> Just jumping in here to say, if you’re over 40, and you care about the environment, you might remember a time when environmentalists were dead set against nuclear power. There was that deadly catastrophic meltdown at Chernobyl in 1986, and a scary miss at Three Mile Island a few years earlier. Environmentalists were also concerned about the huge challenge of storing toxic nuclear waste for thousands of years.\u003cbr>\u003cbr>But in the last forty years, many scientists agree that nuclear power and storage have gotten much safer and less unwieldy. And some environmentalists now feel that the benefits of nuclear power–like not spewing carbon into the atmosphere–well outweigh the risks. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse\u003c/strong>: And there’s other kinds of technologies, like carbon capture that might allow us to burn fossil fuels and still capture the carbon and have it be decarbonized. So we’ve got some really great potential for being able to produce decarbonized electricity.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so what that means is that in the long run, I’m not that concerned from a climate perspective about anything that uses electricity. So if there were a new technology to come about that needs a lot more energy and you told me “guess what the energy it needs is electricity”, then I kind of heave a sigh of relief as opposed to saying what we’re gonna need in the future is a lot more steel or what we’re gonna need in the future is a lot more cement. Or what we’re gonna need in the future is a lot more air travel because those are things we don’t yet know how to decarbonize very well or at very low cost. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Okay. So in the long run, because it can be electrified and because we know that there are renewable ways of getting electricity, less concern. How long is the long run? And I guess how much damage is done along the way?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> It’s a really great question because some of the answer to how long is the long run depends on how we respond in the short run. If the way we respond to the intense increase in demand is the short run, is building new fossil fuel electricity generation, like building new gas plants, those plants have a long life, 20 or 30 years. Things that exist tend to get used. And so if we respond to the short run pressure by making investments in new fossil fuel generation, then that’s gonna push that long run of decarbonization off farther, and so, for the climate, the best news scenario in some ways would be if builders of AI and data centers decided, well, wait a minute, the most reliable and fastest way for us to have the electricity we need is in some sense to be self-sufficient in a green way, to build a data center, to build accompanying, solar or wind generation, to build a battery facility that will help make sure that that power is available to us throughout the day.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Well, and some of this is happening, so I just read, Google is making plans to purchase Intersect, which is a wind and solar company bringing energy generation in house and almost kind of treating it as a competitive advantage.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. And Microsoft recently made an agreement to reopen one of the reactors at Three Mile Island. Again to do essentially self-supply with nuclear energy. So to the extent that the response to this is self-supply with some kind of green energy, that is number one, good for the climate, but potentially also good for, accelerating storage technologies, for accelerating our relearning how to build nuclear in a competitive way. Those would be the best case scenarios.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Accelerating because it’s really kind of like, forcing people to innovate and act very quickly to do the kinds of things that they might otherwise do gradually over the course of 10, 20 years.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>And what drives down costs in many, many technologies is, increasing the scale of demand, basically increasing the size of the market. When you go from, here’s a technology we have thought of to one we have tested in the lab and demonstrated to one that we have done pilot projects of and works, there is this important phase between that and sort of a large scale deployment, which is increasing the scale of production enough that costs fall. And I totally believe it’s something we’ll get better at as we do it more.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and I think that’s a really, really interesting point. Like there is a world in which we can harness all of this demand and all of this excitement for AI and actually leave the climate in a better place than it would’ve otherwise been.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> And I, you know, and I’m not saying this is guaranteed, I’m not saying that this is obviously what’s gonna happen, but it like, there is a path and it actually has the potential to accelerate you know, green energy and decarbonisation in ways it would be really positive for the climate. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[musical interlude]\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong> Jess Love [Voiceover]: \u003c/strong>So, Meghan does see a future where demand for AI helps to accelerate deployment of low-cost green energy. But that’s not the only optimistic claim people make about AI and the climate.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Okay. So I wanna do a kind of nerdy lightning round with you. So I’m gonna share some other ways that AI might impact the climate in a positive way. And, we’ll say zero is like, that is all just hand-wavy gobbledygook, and five is like, yeah, actually there could really be something there. Okay, you ready? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>Ready. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> ‘Optimization of the energy grid.’ \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> I’ll give that a four.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love\u003c/strong>: It’s pretty good.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> I’ll give it a four because it is the sort of thing that AI can do. Right. There’s already predictive maintenance being done and AI being applied to in a lot of different, manufacturing and other kinds of things. That said, it’s actually not the most important thing, I think, in the optimization of our energy system. We just need way more transmission in way more places to accommodate renewables generated in places where we historically have not had electricity generation like the Southwest. And just greater supply and greater flexibility. So I’ll give it a four ’cause AI can do it, but it’s actually not the most important thing you could do if you wanted to improve the electricity transmission grid.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love\u003c/strong>: That was very thorough.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>Not very lightning, but very thorough.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love\u003c/strong>: Very thorough. ‘Better climate modeling.’\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> There’s a sense in which I don’t know whether you really want AI climate models. In the sense that part of the trick about AI is that it’s a bit of a black box. Climate models are basically systems of equations. Systems of equations that capture relationships we know about heat and temperature and weather and ocean currents, and then how those translate into economic consequences. Part of the value of climate models is that we know what assumptions we have put in and we can alter those assumptions in ways that allow us to see if this were different, how would that matter for our climate predictions? I’m not sure that sort of turning that over to the more black box nature of AI is gonna improve our confidence. So I’ll give that a one.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> ‘Discovery of more energy efficient materials.’\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> That’s a great question. So there are absolutely applications in which materials matter – Battery chemistry, for example, is one that a lot of people are pushing on. So I’ll give that a three.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: ‘\u003c/strong>Precision agriculture’, which is this idea that with the right sensors and models, we could give crops exactly what they need when they need it, improving yield, reducing waste.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> So I’m gonna give that a one, not because I don’t think AI can do it, but because, doing it more efficiently or more precisely doesn’t do a lot for decarbonization if we’re using the same techniques, in terms of fertilizer, in terms of planting, in terms of those kinds of things. So I think in order to make a big difference in agricultural emissions, we’re gonna need something other than, sort of more precisely, implementing the technologies that we have. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]: \u003c/strong>Ok, so Meghan doesn’t see a lot of potential in some of these super optimistic “AI will just create new things that help!” scenarios. But she does see the potential for AI to fuel a clean-energy tech boom. At least…in the future. But how can people like \u003cem>me\u003c/em> make a difference TODAY? SHOULD I feel guilty asking ChatGPT for that packing list?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> So, one of the things, as I teach classes about climate, and as I talk to audiences about climate, I oftentimes get questions about, what can I do that matters?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I don’t think people always have a very good idea of what are the first order things, like what are the big levers they have in their hand, and what are the small levers that they have in their hand? If you ask me, I would tell you that generating a packing list on ChatGPT for your vacation is not a very big climate lever. In fact, it’s a much bigger climate lever how far away you are going on your vacation and how are you going to get there? If you’re taking an airplane, the climate impact of your airplane trip is many, many, many, many, many ChatGPT queries. So I think part of the reason people have fixated on ChatGPT queries as something that is part of their climate virtual signaling, is that it seems like an easy thing to do or not do as opposed to deciding not to drive to work or not to have a furnace in my house, or…\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> – not to go on vacation.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> Not to go on vacation. And so we sometimes get fixated on the things that seem like, well, that just seems like an excessive choice that you are making. But if you wanna know the things that really matter, the things that really matter have to do with your more direct use of fossil fuels. Think about how you set your thermostat. Think about what you drive and where you drive. Think about where you choose to fly. Think about what you eat – Beef is especially carbon intensive. So if people are asking me, what is a marginal choice I could make in my life that would make a difference, using ChatGPT would not be at the top of my list. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]: \u003c/strong>Well, what about…joining some sort of collective action effort–like the protests we’re seeing against data centers? That strategy seems to have more potential, at least for those local issues. Because all data centers are not created equal, and being able to shape the kind of neighbor you have, and where it situates itself – that feels big.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Are communities able to get some concessions from these companies that allow the data centers to sort of be built, you know, somewhere in the proximity, but in ways that don’t impact people’s quality of life as much?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> So I think there’s actually a ton of heterogeneity as you go from place to place. I mean, it’s very different if you have something that is federally regulated, something like, you know, pharmaceuticals or those kinds of things, right? The process might be slow, but once a decision gets made for something that’s federally regulated, then that’s the decision, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And when you have something that, that it’s gonna be sort of a location and state by state, it’s just gonna be a lot noisier, it’s gonna be a lot less predictable, and I think that, what’s gonna turn out to be a successful strategy for communities to employ is gonna depend a lot on the particular location where they are.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>And perhaps what they want to get out of it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> And perhaps what they wanna get out of it, which may not be the same place to place.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love\u003c/strong>: Yeah, I mean, could this be a good thing, where communities, you know, depending on the tools they have available to them, can sort of look at the situation and in a bespoke way try to come to an agreement that is going to be as much of a win-win as possible?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>I hope so.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[music bump]\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]:\u003c/strong> It’s clear that local opposition to data centers can have an impact. Meghan sent me a newspaper article involving a powerful Utah State Senator. He served as chairman of the agency that approved that giant data center we talked about earlier, the one that was downsized to a mere 20,000 acres. And…he recently lost his Republican primary bid, in what the article called, “one of the most high-profile signs of the voter backlash to data center projects.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Which brings us to the final thing that individuals can do–something that works for these local issues and for the climate more broadly.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> If you care about having an individual impact, by far the most impactful thing you can do is how you vote.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> There you go.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> And that’s because so many of the changes you need are not about our individual consumption or our individual behavior. It’s about the \u003cem>systems\u003c/em> of how we generate energy. The systems of how we use energy, what we use energy for. The things that are really, really hard for individuals to influence with their choices. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So in some sense, I don’t care very much about whether you use ChatGPT, I don’t care very much about whether you eat beef or not. I don’t even care about where you fly on vacation as long as you vote. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> So you teach the next generation of CEOs, C-Suite Executives, and you have children of your own. What advice do you have for young people right now?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> The advice that I have for young people now is that while it seems, like on the political front, it might seem like things are discouraging on the technology and economic front, there’s huge potential.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We can \u003cem>absolutely\u003c/em> decarbonize, we can \u003cem>absolutely\u003c/em> avoid the worst effects of climate change. We have many of the technologies and I totally believe that we can invent the technologies that we still need. It is absolutely within our power if we choose to do it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]: \u003c/strong>So. In the long run, how will AI impact the climate? It depends. But after my conversation with Meghan, I’m thinking: it doesn’t depend that much on the AI itself. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It depends more on what we do with demand for the technology. Where and how companies build out their data centers and especially how they choose to power them. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Are we going to live in a world where demand pushes back our transition to clean energy, locking us into fossil fuels for decades? We’re seeing some of that world right now. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But we can also choose a world where this explosion of demand hastens our transition to clean energy. And we’re also seeing some of that right now.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The politics of clean energy can look grim…But as long as clean-energy technologies keep getting cheaper and easier to scale, the optimistic scenario is still on the table.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This is Life Automated, a project of the Ryan Institute on Complexity at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Distributed by KQED. I’m Jess Love. Special thanks to today’s guest, Meghan Busse, an economist and associate professor at the Kellogg School of Management.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’re produced by Jesse Dukes. Music by Steven Jackson. Recording by George Christensen and Will Feeney. Support and wise counsel from Stacia Sliger. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>END\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\u003cbr>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Are you hurting the planet every time you query a chatbot? \u003ca href=\"https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/academics-research/faculty/busse_meghan/\">Economist Meghan Busse\u003c/a> suggests that may be the wrong question. In this episode, we zoom out from the usual concerns about frivolous queries (and, for that matter, resource‑hungry data centers) to ask an even more basic question: is intense demand for AI locking us into decades of additional fossil fuel use, or is it accelerating investment in clean energy? Busse helps us sort real climate levers from symbolic ones, and explains why AI’s ultimate impact on the planet will likely come down to how we build and power it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Are you hurting the planet every time you query a chatbot? \u003ca href=\"https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/academics-research/faculty/busse_meghan/\">Economist Meghan Busse\u003c/a> suggests that may be the wrong question. In this episode, we zoom out from the usual concerns about frivolous queries (and, for that matter, resource‑hungry data centers) to ask an even more basic question: is intense demand for AI locking us into decades of additional fossil fuel use, or is it accelerating investment in clean energy? Busse helps us sort real climate levers from symbolic ones, and explains why AI’s ultimate impact on the planet will likely come down to how we build and power it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://apnorc.org/projects/epic-climate-change-2025/?doing_wp_cron=1784231367.3495659828186035156250\">Public attitudes toward climate policy, technology, and the environment\u003c/a> — AP-NORC\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://apnorc.org/projects/epic-climate-change-2025/?doing_wp_cron=1784231367.3495659828186035156250\">Public attitudes toward climate policy, technology, and the environment\u003c/a> — AP-NORC\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/24/us/j-stuart-adams-utah-senate-data-center.html\">Utah Senate President Loses Primary After Data Center Backlash\u003c/a> — Jack Healy, \u003cem>New York Times\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> This is Life, Automated, the show where we explore how technologies like AI are changing how we live, work, and make decisions.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> This is Life, Automated, the show where we explore how technologies like AI are changing how we live, work, and make decisions.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This episode, we dive into one of the biggest anxieties around AI. What it’s doing to the environment.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>This episode, we dive into one of the biggest anxieties around AI. What it’s doing to the environment.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[News footage from people protesting data centers…]\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[News footage from people protesting data centers…]\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You see this anxiety most dramatically in the protests against data centers. It wasn’t that long ago that just a handful of people might show up at town halls to object to a project. These days, communities are getting more organized… and they’re increasingly calling for moratoriums on data center construction. That’s state and local freezes, basically. They’re citing worries about water, noise, pollution, land, and strain on the electrical grid.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You see this anxiety most dramatically in the protests against data centers. It wasn’t that long ago that just a handful of people might show up at town halls to object to a project. These days, communities are getting more organized… and they’re increasingly calling for moratoriums on data center construction. That’s state and local freezes, basically. They’re citing worries about water, noise, pollution, land, and strain on the electrical grid.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[News footage from people protesting data centers…]\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But I wanted to understand something more basic. Just how bad is AI for the planet? Particularly compared to all the other things we do to the planet? \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But I wanted to understand something more basic. Just how bad is AI for the planet? Particularly compared to all the other things we do to the planet? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And what should \u003cem>I \u003c/em>actually do about it? Like me, personally, as an individual.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I have environmentally conscious friends who refuse to use tools like ChatGPT and Claude on principle, particularly for frivolous queries like generating a vacation packing list. I have a suspicion that this might be a little…beside the point? But maybe it isn’t?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I have environmentally conscious friends who refuse to use tools like ChatGPT and Claude on principle, particularly for frivolous queries like generating a vacation packing list. I have a suspicion that this might be a little…beside the point? But maybe it isn’t?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So I reached out to Meghan Busse. She’s an economist at the Kellogg School of Management. She’s NOT an expert in data centers specifically, but she is an expert on energy, climate, environmental policy and how markets affect those things.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So I reached out to Meghan Busse. She’s an economist at the Kellogg School of Management. She’s NOT an expert in data centers specifically, but she is an expert on energy, climate, environmental policy and how markets affect those things.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So I thought she’d be a great person to zoom out and really help me understand the big picture. How should I, someone who cares about the environment, be thinking about AI?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So I thought she’d be a great person to zoom out and really help me understand the big picture. How should I, someone who cares about the environment, be thinking about AI?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Meghan helped me separate the problem into two major buckets. The very real local impacts of a data center moving into your neighborhood, and the broader impacts on CO2 emissions that lead to climate change. And that second bucket is where the story gets really interesting. Because Meghan actually sees a future where demand for AI could benefit the planet. \u003cem>If\u003c/em> we stay laser-focused on the right things.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Meghan helped me separate the problem into two major buckets. The very real local impacts of a data center moving into your neighborhood, and the broader impacts on CO2 emissions that lead to climate change. And that second bucket is where the story gets really interesting. Because Meghan actually sees a future where demand for AI could benefit the planet. \u003cem>If\u003c/em> we stay laser-focused on the right things.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I’m Jess Love, and this is Life, Automated, a show from Kellogg’s Ryan Institute on Complexity, distributed by KQED. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Meghan and I started our conversation discussing a recent AP NORC poll that suggested more than 70 percent of Americans are either somewhat, very, or extremely concerned about the environmental impact of AI. That’s more than the percentages concerned about the impact of air travel or meat production. I wanted to know what she made of this.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Meghan and I started our conversation discussing a recent AP NORC poll that suggested more than 70 percent of Americans are either somewhat, very, or extremely concerned about the environmental impact of AI. That’s more than the percentages concerned about the impact of air travel or meat production. I wanted to know what she made of this.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse\u003c/strong>: So on the one hand, I’m excited to have that many Americans concerned about the environmental and climate impact of anything. On the other hand, it is consistent with what I think we see in other places, which is that people sometimes have the biggest fears about the things that are either least familiar or the newest, or what I call as a technical term “scary.” And something that’s scary is something that makes a good disaster movie. It’s what makes nuclear power scary. But, coal-fired, air pollution not scary. Even though the coal-fired power pollution is much more dangerous in terms of mortality than nuclear power is. There’s the same kind of thing. I think that AI seems scary in the sense that we can imagine a great disaster movie about it when you don’t imagine a great disaster movie about the CO2 emissions that come from meat production.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse\u003c/strong>: So on the one hand, I’m excited to have that many Americans concerned about the environmental and climate impact of anything. On the other hand, it is consistent with what I think we see in other places, which is that people sometimes have the biggest fears about the things that are either least familiar or the newest, or what I call as a technical term “scary.” And something that’s scary is something that makes a good disaster movie. It’s what makes nuclear power scary. But, coal-fired, air pollution not scary. Even though the coal-fired power pollution is much more dangerous in terms of mortality than nuclear power is. There’s the same kind of thing. I think that AI seems scary in the sense that we can imagine a great disaster movie about it when you don’t imagine a great disaster movie about the CO2 emissions that come from meat production.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>I don’t think Meghan’s point here is that climate fears about AI are themselves irrational. But she’s already raising a question that will run through our whole conversation: are we worried about the right things, in the right proportions?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>I don’t think Meghan’s point here is that climate fears about AI are themselves irrational. But she’s already raising a question that will run through our whole conversation: are we worried about the right things, in the right proportions?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>When it comes to AI, there are big global concerns around CO2 emissions related to energy use, both in terms of the energy required to train the models, and the energy required to run them. We’ll get to those. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>When it comes to AI, there are big global concerns around CO2 emissions related to energy use, both in terms of the energy required to train the models, and the energy required to run them. We’ll get to those. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But first I wanted to talk about THE thing people are most upset about. And that is what Meghan calls “local proximity issues”: the concerns we might have when we learn a data center is moving in nearby. Which in some ways are like lots of bad neighbor issues people have had with factories in the past….but with some new twists. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But first I wanted to talk about THE thing people are most upset about. And that is what Meghan calls “local proximity issues”: the concerns we might have when we learn a data center is moving in nearby. Which in some ways are like lots of bad neighbor issues people have had with factories in the past….but with some new twists. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> There’s a sense in which the pollution, if you will, that comes from data centers is different from what we have typically thought of when we think about industrial sources. And there we are oftentimes thinking about air pollution or water pollution or things that are contaminants that can harm people’s health because they get into people’s bodies, right? \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> There’s a sense in which the pollution, if you will, that comes from data centers is different from what we have typically thought of when we think about industrial sources. And there we are oftentimes thinking about air pollution or water pollution or things that are contaminants that can harm people’s health because they get into people’s bodies, right? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> And a data center is much cleaner in that sense. There isn’t smoke, right? There isn’t particulate matter that potentially people are breathing. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> And a data center is much cleaner in that sense. There isn’t smoke, right? There isn’t particulate matter that potentially people are breathing. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But people are worried, and I think with some justification, about other kinds of externality, other kinds of consequences. And one of the things that people have been increasingly talking about is the issue of noise. So you might be near a data center, and it wouldn’t be loud or clattery or things like that, but people describe sort of a hum or a buzz or a vibration- \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But people are worried, and I think with some justification, about other kinds of externality, other kinds of consequences. And one of the things that people have been increasingly talking about is the issue of noise. So you might be near a data center, and it wouldn’t be loud or clattery or things like that, but people describe sort of a hum or a buzz or a vibration- \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Ugh \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> …Or a thrum, that can affect people’s health, not because it bothers them that they hear it, but because it is a low-level vibration that can affect people’s bodies in ways that I’m not sure we understand really well. And part of the challenge is that to the extent that we have noise ordinances… They are to deal with things that are loud, that affect hearing, that disturb quality of life in the way that we’re used to conventionally thinking about noise.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> …Or a thrum, that can affect people’s health, not because it bothers them that they hear it, but because it is a low-level vibration that can affect people’s bodies in ways that I’m not sure we understand really well. And part of the challenge is that to the extent that we have noise ordinances… They are to deal with things that are loud, that affect hearing, that disturb quality of life in the way that we’re used to conventionally thinking about noise.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Right. It’s almost like we don’t even know enough about this to be able to design the regulations and the agreements that would then satisfy the community.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Right. It’s almost like we don’t even know enough about this to be able to design the regulations and the agreements that would then satisfy the community.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse\u003c/strong>: The more I read about this, the more I’m coming to believe that near people is just not a good place to put data centers. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse\u003c/strong>: The more I read about this, the more I’m coming to believe that near people is just not a good place to put data centers. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> So we talked about noise. What are some of the other concerns?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>There are land use kinds of questions. So there is, for example, in northern Utah, in a place called Cache Valley near Logan, there was recently a proposal for an absolutely gigantic data center that would have been just a huge presence in the land there.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>There are land use kinds of questions. So there is, for example, in northern Utah, in a place called Cache Valley near Logan, there was recently a proposal for an absolutely gigantic data center that would have been just a huge presence in the land there.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]:\u003c/strong> I looked it up. The proposed hyperscale data center she is talking about would be located in Northwest Box Elder County, near Cache Valley. Its size: 40,000 acres. After a public backlash, the size of the proposed project area (that’s the area including both the facilities and the land) was reduced to 20,000 acres–a mere two-thirds the size of San Francisco. Having a neighbor that big…yeah, I can see how that could cause alarm.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]:\u003c/strong> I looked it up. The proposed hyperscale data center she is talking about would be located in Northwest Box Elder County, near Cache Valley. Its size: 40,000 acres. After a public backlash, the size of the proposed project area (that’s the area including both the facilities and the land) was reduced to 20,000 acres–a mere two-thirds the size of San Francisco. Having a neighbor that big…yeah, I can see how that could cause alarm.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And then there’s the question of water. Data centers have a reputation for being real water guzzlers, mostly because they so often rely on evaporative cooling to function. In places where water is scarce, they can compete with households, farms, and other businesses, driving prices way up…or leading to shortages. And while there are some ways to make water use more efficient, these come with their own tradeoffs, like requiring a lot more energy.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And then there’s the question of water. Data centers have a reputation for being real water guzzlers, mostly because they so often rely on evaporative cooling to function. In places where water is scarce, they can compete with households, farms, and other businesses, driving prices way up…or leading to shortages. And while there are some ways to make water use more efficient, these come with their own tradeoffs, like requiring a lot more energy.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Still, as challenging as these “local proximity issues” are to deal with–Meghan says they are NOT what concerns her most about AI’s potential impact on the climate. In part because they SHOULD be solvable.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Still, as challenging as these “local proximity issues” are to deal with–Meghan says they are NOT what concerns her most about AI’s potential impact on the climate. In part because they SHOULD be solvable.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> I think that many of the proximity concerns could be solved by altering where data centers are built. There’s a lot of parts of this country that don’t have a lot of people in them, right? There are less dense, less populated places that could be chosen for data centers. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> I think that many of the proximity concerns could be solved by altering where data centers are built. There’s a lot of parts of this country that don’t have a lot of people in them, right? There are less dense, less populated places that could be chosen for data centers. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> But why aren’t they?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> Well, it’s not as convenient.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> Well, it’s not as convenient.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> It’ll cost more money.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> It’ll cost more money.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> I don’t know if the land will cost more money but it’s not as easily connected. It’s not necessarily where the eventual employees that you wanna have running the data center or interacting with the data center are most easily located.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> I don’t know if the land will cost more money but it’s not as easily connected. It’s not necessarily where the eventual employees that you wanna have running the data center or interacting with the data center are most easily located.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]\u003c/strong>: So I can see why people are so angry about having a data center as a next-door neighbor.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]\u003c/strong>: So I can see why people are so angry about having a data center as a next-door neighbor.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But what makes data centers bad neighbors is not necessarily what makes them so bad for the climate overall. What Meghan Busse–a researcher who studies climate policy–is most concerned about … is energy.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But what makes data centers bad neighbors is not necessarily what makes them so bad for the climate overall. What Meghan Busse–a researcher who studies climate policy–is most concerned about … is energy.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> So I think that the electricity use might be the thing that is most distinctive about AI. And the reason for this is that electricity use in the US and the EU and these sort of high income developed countries, was increasing pretty steadily along with population and GDP from post World War II until about 2000. And then it flattened out. And this isn’t because people didn’t want to use electricity for things. It’s because the devices that they used for electricity became more energy efficient. So we could get more of what economists call energy services without needing as much electricity. But what that meant is that, for about 20 years, there wasn’t a lot of need to greatly expand or to really expand very much at all.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> So I think that the electricity use might be the thing that is most distinctive about AI. And the reason for this is that electricity use in the US and the EU and these sort of high income developed countries, was increasing pretty steadily along with population and GDP from post World War II until about 2000. And then it flattened out. And this isn’t because people didn’t want to use electricity for things. It’s because the devices that they used for electricity became more energy efficient. So we could get more of what economists call energy services without needing as much electricity. But what that meant is that, for about 20 years, there wasn’t a lot of need to greatly expand or to really expand very much at all.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Electricity transmission, electricity distribution, the total amount of electricity generation that we could do. And then all of a sudden along comes AI which is really pretty energy intensive… electricity demand, and it’s coming at the same time that there’s an increase in vehicle electrification and an increase of automation and manufacturing. And it’s putting a real strain on the ability of electricity systems to meet that. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Electricity transmission, electricity distribution, the total amount of electricity generation that we could do. And then all of a sudden along comes AI which is really pretty energy intensive… electricity demand, and it’s coming at the same time that there’s an increase in vehicle electrification and an increase of automation and manufacturing. And it’s putting a real strain on the ability of electricity systems to meet that. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]\u003c/strong>: So. Here in the U.S., we have a couple decades where the overall amount of electricity we need to generate basically stays flat. Electricity goes into a lot more THINGS, but all those THINGS get more efficient at about the same rate. That’s two decades of not a lot of pressure to build new power plants. And then…BAM.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]\u003c/strong>: So. Here in the U.S., we have a couple decades where the overall amount of electricity we need to generate basically stays flat. Electricity goes into a lot more THINGS, but all those THINGS get more efficient at about the same rate. That’s two decades of not a lot of pressure to build new power plants. And then…BAM.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And the timing of this new strain on the electrical grid is relevant because there’s been another trend at play.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And the timing of this new strain on the electrical grid is relevant because there’s been another trend at play.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>Over the last decade or 15 years, the cost of generating electricity with renewable sources, with wind and solar has fallen dramatically. So over the course of about 10 years, the cost of generating electricity with solar went down to about a tenth of what it was, and the cost of generating electricity with wind had gone down to about a third of what it was.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>Over the last decade or 15 years, the cost of generating electricity with renewable sources, with wind and solar has fallen dramatically. So over the course of about 10 years, the cost of generating electricity with solar went down to about a tenth of what it was, and the cost of generating electricity with wind had gone down to about a third of what it was.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> That’s a tenth. That means if it used to cost a dollar, it costs 10 cents.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> That’s a tenth. That means if it used to cost a dollar, it costs 10 cents.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> That is right. It’s a phenomenal reduction. It’s a phenomenal achievement for the climate. It might be the single best event to happen for the climate in the last 10 or 15 years. It’s just phenomenal. And it is so phenomenal that what was happening is that basically electricity generators all over the country and also in many places in the world, were in a process of transition, in a process of retiring coal-fired power plants and replacing them with solar and wind – not because they were greener, but because they were actually cheaper.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> That is right. It’s a phenomenal reduction. It’s a phenomenal achievement for the climate. It might be the single best event to happen for the climate in the last 10 or 15 years. It’s just phenomenal. And it is so phenomenal that what was happening is that basically electricity generators all over the country and also in many places in the world, were in a process of transition, in a process of retiring coal-fired power plants and replacing them with solar and wind – not because they were greener, but because they were actually cheaper.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]\u003c/strong>: Thanks to just how much the economics here have changed, nearly all new electricity generators planned for the future in North America were renewables, with a bit of natural gas, but basically NO coal. This was going to be a huge win for the planet. Even better, coal plants were actively being PHASED OUT. If you cared about CO2 emissions, this was very good news. Everything was headed in the right direction.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]\u003c/strong>: Thanks to just how much the economics here have changed, nearly all new electricity generators planned for the future in North America were renewables, with a bit of natural gas, but basically NO coal. This was going to be a huge win for the planet. Even better, coal plants were actively being PHASED OUT. If you cared about CO2 emissions, this was very good news. Everything was headed in the right direction.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Then, out of nowhere, for the first time in forever, demand skyrockets. All those plans…\u003cem>poof\u003c/em>!\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Then, out of nowhere, for the first time in forever, demand skyrockets. All those plans…\u003cem>poof\u003c/em>!\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Because these data centers – they don’t just need a ton of energy. They need it fast.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Because these data centers – they don’t just need a ton of energy. They need it fast.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>If you’re an AI company, you want to get your new data centers up and running as quickly as possible. You feel like you’re in a race: to create the best models, to capture the market. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>If you’re an AI company, you want to get your new data centers up and running as quickly as possible. You feel like you’re in a race: to create the best models, to capture the market. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Sure, in the long run, over 20 or 25 years, solar and wind are cheaper. But if you need power NOW, keeping an aging coal plant running a few more years is going to be pretty tempting. And that smooth march toward cleaner power just got a lot choppier.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Sure, in the long run, over 20 or 25 years, solar and wind are cheaper. But if you need power NOW, keeping an aging coal plant running a few more years is going to be pretty tempting. And that smooth march toward cleaner power just got a lot choppier.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Coming up: the SHORT-run danger to the climate is that AI keeps fossil fuels around longer. But in the long run? Well, the jury is still out. Economist Meghan Busse offers up a scenario where the AI data center boom could actually benefit the planet. That’s after the break.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Coming up: the SHORT-run danger to the climate is that AI keeps fossil fuels around longer. But in the long run? Well, the jury is still out. Economist Meghan Busse offers up a scenario where the AI data center boom could actually benefit the planet. That’s after the break.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>So I wanna turn now to the future. I think you’re completely right that there is this sense that, you know, we’re straining under today’s demand and everybody is telling us AI is going to be so many times bigger in a couple of years. What the heck happens? How are we gonna keep up? And how does this not like, destroy the planet? \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>So I wanna turn now to the future. I think you’re completely right that there is this sense that, you know, we’re straining under today’s demand and everybody is telling us AI is going to be so many times bigger in a couple of years. What the heck happens? How are we gonna keep up? And how does this not like, destroy the planet? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>So if we take the long run view of the climate, many climate scholars would tell you a key component of decarbonization is to electrify as much as we can. And the reason is because we have really good ways of producing electricity without producing carbon. So solar and wind are two of them that we’ve talked about.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>So if we take the long run view of the climate, many climate scholars would tell you a key component of decarbonization is to electrify as much as we can. And the reason is because we have really good ways of producing electricity without producing carbon. So solar and wind are two of them that we’ve talked about.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But nuclear energy also has the potential to produce a lot of electricity in a decarbonized way. And there’s other possibilities also out there. Things like geothermal that, you know, people are experimenting with and hoping will come up to scale. But, there are, you know, like I say, wind and solar that we already have, nuclear that we also have already, although we need to re-remember how to build it at low cost.\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But nuclear energy also has the potential to produce a lot of electricity in a decarbonized way. And there’s other possibilities also out there. Things like geothermal that, you know, people are experimenting with and hoping will come up to scale. But, there are, you know, like I say, wind and solar that we already have, nuclear that we also have already, although we need to re-remember how to build it at low cost.\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess\u003c/strong>\u003cstrong> Love:\u003c/strong> Just jumping in here to say, if you’re over 40, and you care about the environment, you might remember a time when environmentalists were dead set against nuclear power. There was that deadly catastrophic meltdown at Chernobyl in 1986, and a scary miss at Three Mile Island a few years earlier. Environmentalists were also concerned about the huge challenge of storing toxic nuclear waste for thousands of years.\u003cbr>\u003cbr>But in the last forty years, many scientists agree that nuclear power and storage have gotten much safer and less unwieldy. And some environmentalists now feel that the benefits of nuclear power–like not spewing carbon into the atmosphere–well outweigh the risks. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess\u003c/strong>\u003cstrong> Love:\u003c/strong> Just jumping in here to say, if you’re over 40, and you care about the environment, you might remember a time when environmentalists were dead set against nuclear power. There was that deadly catastrophic meltdown at Chernobyl in 1986, and a scary miss at Three Mile Island a few years earlier. Environmentalists were also concerned about the huge challenge of storing toxic nuclear waste for thousands of years.\u003cbr>\u003cbr>But in the last forty years, many scientists agree that nuclear power and storage have gotten much safer and less unwieldy. And some environmentalists now feel that the benefits of nuclear power–like not spewing carbon into the atmosphere–well outweigh the risks. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse\u003c/strong>: And there’s other kinds of technologies, like carbon capture that might allow us to burn fossil fuels and still capture the carbon and have it be decarbonized. So we’ve got some really great potential for being able to produce decarbonized electricity.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse\u003c/strong>: And there’s other kinds of technologies, like carbon capture that might allow us to burn fossil fuels and still capture the carbon and have it be decarbonized. So we’ve got some really great potential for being able to produce decarbonized electricity.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so what that means is that in the long run, I’m not that concerned from a climate perspective about anything that uses electricity. So if there were a new technology to come about that needs a lot more energy and you told me “guess what the energy it needs is electricity”, then I kind of heave a sigh of relief as opposed to saying what we’re gonna need in the future is a lot more steel or what we’re gonna need in the future is a lot more cement. Or what we’re gonna need in the future is a lot more air travel because those are things we don’t yet know how to decarbonize very well or at very low cost. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so what that means is that in the long run, I’m not that concerned from a climate perspective about anything that uses electricity. So if there were a new technology to come about that needs a lot more energy and you told me “guess what the energy it needs is electricity”, then I kind of heave a sigh of relief as opposed to saying what we’re gonna need in the future is a lot more steel or what we’re gonna need in the future is a lot more cement. Or what we’re gonna need in the future is a lot more air travel because those are things we don’t yet know how to decarbonize very well or at very low cost. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Okay. So in the long run, because it can be electrified and because we know that there are renewable ways of getting electricity, less concern. How long is the long run? And I guess how much damage is done along the way?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Okay. So in the long run, because it can be electrified and because we know that there are renewable ways of getting electricity, less concern. How long is the long run? And I guess how much damage is done along the way?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> It’s a really great question because some of the answer to how long is the long run depends on how we respond in the short run. If the way we respond to the intense increase in demand is the short run, is building new fossil fuel electricity generation, like building new gas plants, those plants have a long life, 20 or 30 years. Things that exist tend to get used. And so if we respond to the short run pressure by making investments in new fossil fuel generation, then that’s gonna push that long run of decarbonization off farther, and so, for the climate, the best news scenario in some ways would be if builders of AI and data centers decided, well, wait a minute, the most reliable and fastest way for us to have the electricity we need is in some sense to be self-sufficient in a green way, to build a data center, to build accompanying, solar or wind generation, to build a battery facility that will help make sure that that power is available to us throughout the day.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> It’s a really great question because some of the answer to how long is the long run depends on how we respond in the short run. If the way we respond to the intense increase in demand is the short run, is building new fossil fuel electricity generation, like building new gas plants, those plants have a long life, 20 or 30 years. Things that exist tend to get used. And so if we respond to the short run pressure by making investments in new fossil fuel generation, then that’s gonna push that long run of decarbonization off farther, and so, for the climate, the best news scenario in some ways would be if builders of AI and data centers decided, well, wait a minute, the most reliable and fastest way for us to have the electricity we need is in some sense to be self-sufficient in a green way, to build a data center, to build accompanying, solar or wind generation, to build a battery facility that will help make sure that that power is available to us throughout the day.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Well, and some of this is happening, so I just read, Google is making plans to purchase Intersect, which is a wind and solar company bringing energy generation in house and almost kind of treating it as a competitive advantage.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Well, and some of this is happening, so I just read, Google is making plans to purchase Intersect, which is a wind and solar company bringing energy generation in house and almost kind of treating it as a competitive advantage.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. And Microsoft recently made an agreement to reopen one of the reactors at Three Mile Island. Again to do essentially self-supply with nuclear energy. So to the extent that the response to this is self-supply with some kind of green energy, that is number one, good for the climate, but potentially also good for, accelerating storage technologies, for accelerating our relearning how to build nuclear in a competitive way. Those would be the best case scenarios.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. And Microsoft recently made an agreement to reopen one of the reactors at Three Mile Island. Again to do essentially self-supply with nuclear energy. So to the extent that the response to this is self-supply with some kind of green energy, that is number one, good for the climate, but potentially also good for, accelerating storage technologies, for accelerating our relearning how to build nuclear in a competitive way. Those would be the best case scenarios.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Accelerating because it’s really kind of like, forcing people to innovate and act very quickly to do the kinds of things that they might otherwise do gradually over the course of 10, 20 years.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Accelerating because it’s really kind of like, forcing people to innovate and act very quickly to do the kinds of things that they might otherwise do gradually over the course of 10, 20 years.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>And what drives down costs in many, many technologies is, increasing the scale of demand, basically increasing the size of the market. When you go from, here’s a technology we have thought of to one we have tested in the lab and demonstrated to one that we have done pilot projects of and works, there is this important phase between that and sort of a large scale deployment, which is increasing the scale of production enough that costs fall. And I totally believe it’s something we’ll get better at as we do it more.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>And what drives down costs in many, many technologies is, increasing the scale of demand, basically increasing the size of the market. When you go from, here’s a technology we have thought of to one we have tested in the lab and demonstrated to one that we have done pilot projects of and works, there is this important phase between that and sort of a large scale deployment, which is increasing the scale of production enough that costs fall. And I totally believe it’s something we’ll get better at as we do it more.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and I think that’s a really, really interesting point. Like there is a world in which we can harness all of this demand and all of this excitement for AI and actually leave the climate in a better place than it would’ve otherwise been.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and I think that’s a really, really interesting point. Like there is a world in which we can harness all of this demand and all of this excitement for AI and actually leave the climate in a better place than it would’ve otherwise been.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> And I, you know, and I’m not saying this is guaranteed, I’m not saying that this is obviously what’s gonna happen, but it like, there is a path and it actually has the potential to accelerate you know, green energy and decarbonisation in ways it would be really positive for the climate. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> And I, you know, and I’m not saying this is guaranteed, I’m not saying that this is obviously what’s gonna happen, but it like, there is a path and it actually has the potential to accelerate you know, green energy and decarbonisation in ways it would be really positive for the climate. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[musical interlude]\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[musical interlude]\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong> Jess Love [Voiceover]: \u003c/strong>So, Meghan does see a future where demand for AI helps to accelerate deployment of low-cost green energy. But that’s not the only optimistic claim people make about AI and the climate.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong> Jess Love [Voiceover]: \u003c/strong>So, Meghan does see a future where demand for AI helps to accelerate deployment of low-cost green energy. But that’s not the only optimistic claim people make about AI and the climate.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Okay. So I wanna do a kind of nerdy lightning round with you. So I’m gonna share some other ways that AI might impact the climate in a positive way. And, we’ll say zero is like, that is all just hand-wavy gobbledygook, and five is like, yeah, actually there could really be something there. Okay, you ready? \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Okay. So I wanna do a kind of nerdy lightning round with you. So I’m gonna share some other ways that AI might impact the climate in a positive way. And, we’ll say zero is like, that is all just hand-wavy gobbledygook, and five is like, yeah, actually there could really be something there. Okay, you ready? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>Ready. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>Ready. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> ‘Optimization of the energy grid.’ \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> ‘Optimization of the energy grid.’ \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> I’ll give that a four.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> I’ll give that a four.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love\u003c/strong>: It’s pretty good.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love\u003c/strong>: It’s pretty good.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> I’ll give it a four because it is the sort of thing that AI can do. Right. There’s already predictive maintenance being done and AI being applied to in a lot of different, manufacturing and other kinds of things. That said, it’s actually not the most important thing, I think, in the optimization of our energy system. We just need way more transmission in way more places to accommodate renewables generated in places where we historically have not had electricity generation like the Southwest. And just greater supply and greater flexibility. So I’ll give it a four ’cause AI can do it, but it’s actually not the most important thing you could do if you wanted to improve the electricity transmission grid.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> I’ll give it a four because it is the sort of thing that AI can do. Right. There’s already predictive maintenance being done and AI being applied to in a lot of different, manufacturing and other kinds of things. That said, it’s actually not the most important thing, I think, in the optimization of our energy system. We just need way more transmission in way more places to accommodate renewables generated in places where we historically have not had electricity generation like the Southwest. And just greater supply and greater flexibility. So I’ll give it a four ’cause AI can do it, but it’s actually not the most important thing you could do if you wanted to improve the electricity transmission grid.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love\u003c/strong>: That was very thorough.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love\u003c/strong>: That was very thorough.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>Not very lightning, but very thorough.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>Not very lightning, but very thorough.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love\u003c/strong>: Very thorough. ‘Better climate modeling.’\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> There’s a sense in which I don’t know whether you really want AI climate models. In the sense that part of the trick about AI is that it’s a bit of a black box. Climate models are basically systems of equations. Systems of equations that capture relationships we know about heat and temperature and weather and ocean currents, and then how those translate into economic consequences. Part of the value of climate models is that we know what assumptions we have put in and we can alter those assumptions in ways that allow us to see if this were different, how would that matter for our climate predictions? I’m not sure that sort of turning that over to the more black box nature of AI is gonna improve our confidence. So I’ll give that a one.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> There’s a sense in which I don’t know whether you really want AI climate models. In the sense that part of the trick about AI is that it’s a bit of a black box. Climate models are basically systems of equations. Systems of equations that capture relationships we know about heat and temperature and weather and ocean currents, and then how those translate into economic consequences. Part of the value of climate models is that we know what assumptions we have put in and we can alter those assumptions in ways that allow us to see if this were different, how would that matter for our climate predictions? I’m not sure that sort of turning that over to the more black box nature of AI is gonna improve our confidence. So I’ll give that a one.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> ‘Discovery of more energy efficient materials.’\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> That’s a great question. So there are absolutely applications in which materials matter – Battery chemistry, for example, is one that a lot of people are pushing on. So I’ll give that a three.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> That’s a great question. So there are absolutely applications in which materials matter – Battery chemistry, for example, is one that a lot of people are pushing on. So I’ll give that a three.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: ‘\u003c/strong>Precision agriculture’, which is this idea that with the right sensors and models, we could give crops exactly what they need when they need it, improving yield, reducing waste.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: ‘\u003c/strong>Precision agriculture’, which is this idea that with the right sensors and models, we could give crops exactly what they need when they need it, improving yield, reducing waste.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> So I’m gonna give that a one, not because I don’t think AI can do it, but because, doing it more efficiently or more precisely doesn’t do a lot for decarbonization if we’re using the same techniques, in terms of fertilizer, in terms of planting, in terms of those kinds of things. So I think in order to make a big difference in agricultural emissions, we’re gonna need something other than, sort of more precisely, implementing the technologies that we have. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> So I’m gonna give that a one, not because I don’t think AI can do it, but because, doing it more efficiently or more precisely doesn’t do a lot for decarbonization if we’re using the same techniques, in terms of fertilizer, in terms of planting, in terms of those kinds of things. So I think in order to make a big difference in agricultural emissions, we’re gonna need something other than, sort of more precisely, implementing the technologies that we have. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]: \u003c/strong>Ok, so Meghan doesn’t see a lot of potential in some of these super optimistic “AI will just create new things that help!” scenarios. But she does see the potential for AI to fuel a clean-energy tech boom. At least…in the future. But how can people like \u003cem>me\u003c/em> make a difference TODAY? SHOULD I feel guilty asking ChatGPT for that packing list?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> So, one of the things, as I teach classes about climate, and as I talk to audiences about climate, I oftentimes get questions about, what can I do that matters?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> So, one of the things, as I teach classes about climate, and as I talk to audiences about climate, I oftentimes get questions about, what can I do that matters?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I don’t think people always have a very good idea of what are the first order things, like what are the big levers they have in their hand, and what are the small levers that they have in their hand? If you ask me, I would tell you that generating a packing list on ChatGPT for your vacation is not a very big climate lever. In fact, it’s a much bigger climate lever how far away you are going on your vacation and how are you going to get there? If you’re taking an airplane, the climate impact of your airplane trip is many, many, many, many, many ChatGPT queries. So I think part of the reason people have fixated on ChatGPT queries as something that is part of their climate virtual signaling, is that it seems like an easy thing to do or not do as opposed to deciding not to drive to work or not to have a furnace in my house, or…\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I don’t think people always have a very good idea of what are the first order things, like what are the big levers they have in their hand, and what are the small levers that they have in their hand? If you ask me, I would tell you that generating a packing list on ChatGPT for your vacation is not a very big climate lever. In fact, it’s a much bigger climate lever how far away you are going on your vacation and how are you going to get there? If you’re taking an airplane, the climate impact of your airplane trip is many, many, many, many, many ChatGPT queries. So I think part of the reason people have fixated on ChatGPT queries as something that is part of their climate virtual signaling, is that it seems like an easy thing to do or not do as opposed to deciding not to drive to work or not to have a furnace in my house, or…\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> – not to go on vacation.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> Not to go on vacation. And so we sometimes get fixated on the things that seem like, well, that just seems like an excessive choice that you are making. But if you wanna know the things that really matter, the things that really matter have to do with your more direct use of fossil fuels. Think about how you set your thermostat. Think about what you drive and where you drive. Think about where you choose to fly. Think about what you eat – Beef is especially carbon intensive. So if people are asking me, what is a marginal choice I could make in my life that would make a difference, using ChatGPT would not be at the top of my list. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> Not to go on vacation. And so we sometimes get fixated on the things that seem like, well, that just seems like an excessive choice that you are making. But if you wanna know the things that really matter, the things that really matter have to do with your more direct use of fossil fuels. Think about how you set your thermostat. Think about what you drive and where you drive. Think about where you choose to fly. Think about what you eat – Beef is especially carbon intensive. So if people are asking me, what is a marginal choice I could make in my life that would make a difference, using ChatGPT would not be at the top of my list. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]: \u003c/strong>Well, what about…joining some sort of collective action effort–like the protests we’re seeing against data centers? That strategy seems to have more potential, at least for those local issues. Because all data centers are not created equal, and being able to shape the kind of neighbor you have, and where it situates itself – that feels big.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]: \u003c/strong>Well, what about…joining some sort of collective action effort–like the protests we’re seeing against data centers? That strategy seems to have more potential, at least for those local issues. Because all data centers are not created equal, and being able to shape the kind of neighbor you have, and where it situates itself – that feels big.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Are communities able to get some concessions from these companies that allow the data centers to sort of be built, you know, somewhere in the proximity, but in ways that don’t impact people’s quality of life as much?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Are communities able to get some concessions from these companies that allow the data centers to sort of be built, you know, somewhere in the proximity, but in ways that don’t impact people’s quality of life as much?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> So I think there’s actually a ton of heterogeneity as you go from place to place. I mean, it’s very different if you have something that is federally regulated, something like, you know, pharmaceuticals or those kinds of things, right? The process might be slow, but once a decision gets made for something that’s federally regulated, then that’s the decision, right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> So I think there’s actually a ton of heterogeneity as you go from place to place. I mean, it’s very different if you have something that is federally regulated, something like, you know, pharmaceuticals or those kinds of things, right? The process might be slow, but once a decision gets made for something that’s federally regulated, then that’s the decision, right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And when you have something that, that it’s gonna be sort of a location and state by state, it’s just gonna be a lot noisier, it’s gonna be a lot less predictable, and I think that, what’s gonna turn out to be a successful strategy for communities to employ is gonna depend a lot on the particular location where they are.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And when you have something that, that it’s gonna be sort of a location and state by state, it’s just gonna be a lot noisier, it’s gonna be a lot less predictable, and I think that, what’s gonna turn out to be a successful strategy for communities to employ is gonna depend a lot on the particular location where they are.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>And perhaps what they want to get out of it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> And perhaps what they wanna get out of it, which may not be the same place to place.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> And perhaps what they wanna get out of it, which may not be the same place to place.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love\u003c/strong>: Yeah, I mean, could this be a good thing, where communities, you know, depending on the tools they have available to them, can sort of look at the situation and in a bespoke way try to come to an agreement that is going to be as much of a win-win as possible?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love\u003c/strong>: Yeah, I mean, could this be a good thing, where communities, you know, depending on the tools they have available to them, can sort of look at the situation and in a bespoke way try to come to an agreement that is going to be as much of a win-win as possible?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>I hope so.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>I hope so.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[music bump]\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]:\u003c/strong> It’s clear that local opposition to data centers can have an impact. Meghan sent me a newspaper article involving a powerful Utah State Senator. He served as chairman of the agency that approved that giant data center we talked about earlier, the one that was downsized to a mere 20,000 acres. And…he recently lost his Republican primary bid, in what the article called, “one of the most high-profile signs of the voter backlash to data center projects.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]:\u003c/strong> It’s clear that local opposition to data centers can have an impact. Meghan sent me a newspaper article involving a powerful Utah State Senator. He served as chairman of the agency that approved that giant data center we talked about earlier, the one that was downsized to a mere 20,000 acres. And…he recently lost his Republican primary bid, in what the article called, “one of the most high-profile signs of the voter backlash to data center projects.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Which brings us to the final thing that individuals can do–something that works for these local issues and for the climate more broadly.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Which brings us to the final thing that individuals can do–something that works for these local issues and for the climate more broadly.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> If you care about having an individual impact, by far the most impactful thing you can do is how you vote.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> There you go.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> And that’s because so many of the changes you need are not about our individual consumption or our individual behavior. It’s about the \u003cem>systems\u003c/em> of how we generate energy. The systems of how we use energy, what we use energy for. The things that are really, really hard for individuals to influence with their choices. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> And that’s because so many of the changes you need are not about our individual consumption or our individual behavior. It’s about the \u003cem>systems\u003c/em> of how we generate energy. The systems of how we use energy, what we use energy for. The things that are really, really hard for individuals to influence with their choices. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So in some sense, I don’t care very much about whether you use ChatGPT, I don’t care very much about whether you eat beef or not. I don’t even care about where you fly on vacation as long as you vote. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So in some sense, I don’t care very much about whether you use ChatGPT, I don’t care very much about whether you eat beef or not. I don’t even care about where you fly on vacation as long as you vote. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> So you teach the next generation of CEOs, C-Suite Executives, and you have children of your own. What advice do you have for young people right now?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> So you teach the next generation of CEOs, C-Suite Executives, and you have children of your own. What advice do you have for young people right now?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> The advice that I have for young people now is that while it seems, like on the political front, it might seem like things are discouraging on the technology and economic front, there’s huge potential.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> The advice that I have for young people now is that while it seems, like on the political front, it might seem like things are discouraging on the technology and economic front, there’s huge potential.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We can \u003cem>absolutely\u003c/em> decarbonize, we can \u003cem>absolutely\u003c/em> avoid the worst effects of climate change. We have many of the technologies and I totally believe that we can invent the technologies that we still need. It is absolutely within our power if we choose to do it. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We can \u003cem>absolutely\u003c/em> decarbonize, we can \u003cem>absolutely\u003c/em> avoid the worst effects of climate change. We have many of the technologies and I totally believe that we can invent the technologies that we still need. It is absolutely within our power if we choose to do it. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]: \u003c/strong>So. In the long run, how will AI impact the climate? It depends. But after my conversation with Meghan, I’m thinking: it doesn’t depend that much on the AI itself. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]: \u003c/strong>So. In the long run, how will AI impact the climate? It depends. But after my conversation with Meghan, I’m thinking: it doesn’t depend that much on the AI itself. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It depends more on what we do with demand for the technology. Where and how companies build out their data centers and especially how they choose to power them. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Are we going to live in a world where demand pushes back our transition to clean energy, locking us into fossil fuels for decades? We’re seeing some of that world right now. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But we can also choose a world where this explosion of demand hastens our transition to clean energy. And we’re also seeing some of that right now.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But we can also choose a world where this explosion of demand hastens our transition to clean energy. And we’re also seeing some of that right now.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The politics of clean energy can look grim…But as long as clean-energy technologies keep getting cheaper and easier to scale, the optimistic scenario is still on the table.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This is Life Automated, a project of the Ryan Institute on Complexity at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Distributed by KQED. I’m Jess Love. Special thanks to today’s guest, Meghan Busse, an economist and associate professor at the Kellogg School of Management.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We’re produced by Jesse Dukes. Music by Steven Jackson. Recording by George Christensen and Will Feeney. Support and wise counsel from Stacia Sliger. \u003c/p>\n",
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"title": "Does AI Have to Be Bad News for the Planet? (with Meghan Busse) | KQED",
"description": "Are you hurting the planet every time you query a chatbot? Economist Meghan Busse suggests that may be the wrong question. In this episode, we zoom out from the usual concerns about frivolous queries (and, for that matter, resource‑hungry data centers) to ask an even more basic question: is intense demand for AI locking us into decades of additional fossil fuel use, or is it accelerating investment in clean energy? Busse helps us sort real climate levers from symbolic ones, and explains why AI’s ultimate impact on the planet will likely come down to how we build and power it.",
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"socialDescription": "Are you hurting the planet every time you query a chatbot? Economist Meghan Busse suggests that may be the wrong question. In this episode, we zoom out from the usual concerns about frivolous queries (and, for that matter, resource‑hungry data centers) to ask an even more basic question: is intense demand for AI locking us into decades of additional fossil fuel use, or is it accelerating investment in clean energy? Busse helps us sort real climate levers from symbolic ones, and explains why AI’s ultimate impact on the planet will likely come down to how we build and power it.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#transcript\">View Full Episode Transcript\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Are you hurting the planet every time you query a chatbot? \u003ca href=\"https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/academics-research/faculty/busse_meghan/\">Economist Meghan Busse\u003c/a> suggests that may be the wrong question. In this episode, we zoom out from the usual concerns about frivolous queries (and, for that matter, resource‑hungry data centers) to ask an even more basic question: is intense demand for AI locking us into decades of additional fossil fuel use, or is it accelerating investment in clean energy? Busse helps us sort real climate levers from symbolic ones, and explains why AI’s ultimate impact on the planet will likely come down to how we build and power it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Further Reading: \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://apnorc.org/projects/epic-climate-change-2025/?doing_wp_cron=1784231367.3495659828186035156250\">Public attitudes toward climate policy, technology, and the environment\u003c/a> — AP-NORC\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/24/us/j-stuart-adams-utah-senate-data-center.html\">Utah Senate President Loses Primary After Data Center Backlash\u003c/a> — Jack Healy, \u003cem>New York Times\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> This is Life, Automated, the show where we explore how technologies like AI are changing how we live, work, and make decisions.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This episode, we dive into one of the biggest anxieties around AI. What it’s doing to the environment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[News footage from people protesting data centers…]\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You see this anxiety most dramatically in the protests against data centers. It wasn’t that long ago that just a handful of people might show up at town halls to object to a project. These days, communities are getting more organized… and they’re increasingly calling for moratoriums on data center construction. That’s state and local freezes, basically. They’re citing worries about water, noise, pollution, land, and strain on the electrical grid.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[News footage from people protesting data centers…]\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But I wanted to understand something more basic. Just how bad is AI for the planet? Particularly compared to all the other things we do to the planet? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And what should \u003cem>I \u003c/em>actually do about it? Like me, personally, as an individual.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I have environmentally conscious friends who refuse to use tools like ChatGPT and Claude on principle, particularly for frivolous queries like generating a vacation packing list. I have a suspicion that this might be a little…beside the point? But maybe it isn’t?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So I reached out to Meghan Busse. She’s an economist at the Kellogg School of Management. She’s NOT an expert in data centers specifically, but she is an expert on energy, climate, environmental policy and how markets affect those things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So I thought she’d be a great person to zoom out and really help me understand the big picture. How should I, someone who cares about the environment, be thinking about AI?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meghan helped me separate the problem into two major buckets. The very real local impacts of a data center moving into your neighborhood, and the broader impacts on CO2 emissions that lead to climate change. And that second bucket is where the story gets really interesting. Because Meghan actually sees a future where demand for AI could benefit the planet. \u003cem>If\u003c/em> we stay laser-focused on the right things.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m Jess Love, and this is Life, Automated, a show from Kellogg’s Ryan Institute on Complexity, distributed by KQED. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Meghan and I started our conversation discussing a recent AP NORC poll that suggested more than 70 percent of Americans are either somewhat, very, or extremely concerned about the environmental impact of AI. That’s more than the percentages concerned about the impact of air travel or meat production. I wanted to know what she made of this.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse\u003c/strong>: So on the one hand, I’m excited to have that many Americans concerned about the environmental and climate impact of anything. On the other hand, it is consistent with what I think we see in other places, which is that people sometimes have the biggest fears about the things that are either least familiar or the newest, or what I call as a technical term “scary.” And something that’s scary is something that makes a good disaster movie. It’s what makes nuclear power scary. But, coal-fired, air pollution not scary. Even though the coal-fired power pollution is much more dangerous in terms of mortality than nuclear power is. There’s the same kind of thing. I think that AI seems scary in the sense that we can imagine a great disaster movie about it when you don’t imagine a great disaster movie about the CO2 emissions that come from meat production.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>I don’t think Meghan’s point here is that climate fears about AI are themselves irrational. But she’s already raising a question that will run through our whole conversation: are we worried about the right things, in the right proportions?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>When it comes to AI, there are big global concerns around CO2 emissions related to energy use, both in terms of the energy required to train the models, and the energy required to run them. We’ll get to those. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But first I wanted to talk about THE thing people are most upset about. And that is what Meghan calls “local proximity issues”: the concerns we might have when we learn a data center is moving in nearby. Which in some ways are like lots of bad neighbor issues people have had with factories in the past….but with some new twists. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> There’s a sense in which the pollution, if you will, that comes from data centers is different from what we have typically thought of when we think about industrial sources. And there we are oftentimes thinking about air pollution or water pollution or things that are contaminants that can harm people’s health because they get into people’s bodies, right? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> And a data center is much cleaner in that sense. There isn’t smoke, right? There isn’t particulate matter that potentially people are breathing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But people are worried, and I think with some justification, about other kinds of externality, other kinds of consequences. And one of the things that people have been increasingly talking about is the issue of noise. So you might be near a data center, and it wouldn’t be loud or clattery or things like that, but people describe sort of a hum or a buzz or a vibration- \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Ugh \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> …Or a thrum, that can affect people’s health, not because it bothers them that they hear it, but because it is a low-level vibration that can affect people’s bodies in ways that I’m not sure we understand really well. And part of the challenge is that to the extent that we have noise ordinances… They are to deal with things that are loud, that affect hearing, that disturb quality of life in the way that we’re used to conventionally thinking about noise.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Right. It’s almost like we don’t even know enough about this to be able to design the regulations and the agreements that would then satisfy the community.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse\u003c/strong>: The more I read about this, the more I’m coming to believe that near people is just not a good place to put data centers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> So we talked about noise. What are some of the other concerns?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>There are land use kinds of questions. So there is, for example, in northern Utah, in a place called Cache Valley near Logan, there was recently a proposal for an absolutely gigantic data center that would have been just a huge presence in the land there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]:\u003c/strong> I looked it up. The proposed hyperscale data center she is talking about would be located in Northwest Box Elder County, near Cache Valley. Its size: 40,000 acres. After a public backlash, the size of the proposed project area (that’s the area including both the facilities and the land) was reduced to 20,000 acres–a mere two-thirds the size of San Francisco. Having a neighbor that big…yeah, I can see how that could cause alarm.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then there’s the question of water. Data centers have a reputation for being real water guzzlers, mostly because they so often rely on evaporative cooling to function. In places where water is scarce, they can compete with households, farms, and other businesses, driving prices way up…or leading to shortages. And while there are some ways to make water use more efficient, these come with their own tradeoffs, like requiring a lot more energy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Still, as challenging as these “local proximity issues” are to deal with–Meghan says they are NOT what concerns her most about AI’s potential impact on the climate. In part because they SHOULD be solvable.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> I think that many of the proximity concerns could be solved by altering where data centers are built. There’s a lot of parts of this country that don’t have a lot of people in them, right? There are less dense, less populated places that could be chosen for data centers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> But why aren’t they?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> Well, it’s not as convenient.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> It’ll cost more money.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> I don’t know if the land will cost more money but it’s not as easily connected. It’s not necessarily where the eventual employees that you wanna have running the data center or interacting with the data center are most easily located.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]\u003c/strong>: So I can see why people are so angry about having a data center as a next-door neighbor.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But what makes data centers bad neighbors is not necessarily what makes them so bad for the climate overall. What Meghan Busse–a researcher who studies climate policy–is most concerned about … is energy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> So I think that the electricity use might be the thing that is most distinctive about AI. And the reason for this is that electricity use in the US and the EU and these sort of high income developed countries, was increasing pretty steadily along with population and GDP from post World War II until about 2000. And then it flattened out. And this isn’t because people didn’t want to use electricity for things. It’s because the devices that they used for electricity became more energy efficient. So we could get more of what economists call energy services without needing as much electricity. But what that meant is that, for about 20 years, there wasn’t a lot of need to greatly expand or to really expand very much at all.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Electricity transmission, electricity distribution, the total amount of electricity generation that we could do. And then all of a sudden along comes AI which is really pretty energy intensive… electricity demand, and it’s coming at the same time that there’s an increase in vehicle electrification and an increase of automation and manufacturing. And it’s putting a real strain on the ability of electricity systems to meet that. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]\u003c/strong>: So. Here in the U.S., we have a couple decades where the overall amount of electricity we need to generate basically stays flat. Electricity goes into a lot more THINGS, but all those THINGS get more efficient at about the same rate. That’s two decades of not a lot of pressure to build new power plants. And then…BAM.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And the timing of this new strain on the electrical grid is relevant because there’s been another trend at play.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>Over the last decade or 15 years, the cost of generating electricity with renewable sources, with wind and solar has fallen dramatically. So over the course of about 10 years, the cost of generating electricity with solar went down to about a tenth of what it was, and the cost of generating electricity with wind had gone down to about a third of what it was.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> That’s a tenth. That means if it used to cost a dollar, it costs 10 cents.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> That is right. It’s a phenomenal reduction. It’s a phenomenal achievement for the climate. It might be the single best event to happen for the climate in the last 10 or 15 years. It’s just phenomenal. And it is so phenomenal that what was happening is that basically electricity generators all over the country and also in many places in the world, were in a process of transition, in a process of retiring coal-fired power plants and replacing them with solar and wind – not because they were greener, but because they were actually cheaper.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]\u003c/strong>: Thanks to just how much the economics here have changed, nearly all new electricity generators planned for the future in North America were renewables, with a bit of natural gas, but basically NO coal. This was going to be a huge win for the planet. Even better, coal plants were actively being PHASED OUT. If you cared about CO2 emissions, this was very good news. Everything was headed in the right direction.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Then, out of nowhere, for the first time in forever, demand skyrockets. All those plans…\u003cem>poof\u003c/em>!\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Because these data centers – they don’t just need a ton of energy. They need it fast.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If you’re an AI company, you want to get your new data centers up and running as quickly as possible. You feel like you’re in a race: to create the best models, to capture the market. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Sure, in the long run, over 20 or 25 years, solar and wind are cheaper. But if you need power NOW, keeping an aging coal plant running a few more years is going to be pretty tempting. And that smooth march toward cleaner power just got a lot choppier.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Coming up: the SHORT-run danger to the climate is that AI keeps fossil fuels around longer. But in the long run? Well, the jury is still out. Economist Meghan Busse offers up a scenario where the AI data center boom could actually benefit the planet. That’s after the break.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>So I wanna turn now to the future. I think you’re completely right that there is this sense that, you know, we’re straining under today’s demand and everybody is telling us AI is going to be so many times bigger in a couple of years. What the heck happens? How are we gonna keep up? And how does this not like, destroy the planet? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>So if we take the long run view of the climate, many climate scholars would tell you a key component of decarbonization is to electrify as much as we can. And the reason is because we have really good ways of producing electricity without producing carbon. So solar and wind are two of them that we’ve talked about.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But nuclear energy also has the potential to produce a lot of electricity in a decarbonized way. And there’s other possibilities also out there. Things like geothermal that, you know, people are experimenting with and hoping will come up to scale. But, there are, you know, like I say, wind and solar that we already have, nuclear that we also have already, although we need to re-remember how to build it at low cost.\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess\u003c/strong>\u003cstrong> Love:\u003c/strong> Just jumping in here to say, if you’re over 40, and you care about the environment, you might remember a time when environmentalists were dead set against nuclear power. There was that deadly catastrophic meltdown at Chernobyl in 1986, and a scary miss at Three Mile Island a few years earlier. Environmentalists were also concerned about the huge challenge of storing toxic nuclear waste for thousands of years.\u003cbr>\u003cbr>But in the last forty years, many scientists agree that nuclear power and storage have gotten much safer and less unwieldy. And some environmentalists now feel that the benefits of nuclear power–like not spewing carbon into the atmosphere–well outweigh the risks. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse\u003c/strong>: And there’s other kinds of technologies, like carbon capture that might allow us to burn fossil fuels and still capture the carbon and have it be decarbonized. So we’ve got some really great potential for being able to produce decarbonized electricity.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so what that means is that in the long run, I’m not that concerned from a climate perspective about anything that uses electricity. So if there were a new technology to come about that needs a lot more energy and you told me “guess what the energy it needs is electricity”, then I kind of heave a sigh of relief as opposed to saying what we’re gonna need in the future is a lot more steel or what we’re gonna need in the future is a lot more cement. Or what we’re gonna need in the future is a lot more air travel because those are things we don’t yet know how to decarbonize very well or at very low cost. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Okay. So in the long run, because it can be electrified and because we know that there are renewable ways of getting electricity, less concern. How long is the long run? And I guess how much damage is done along the way?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> It’s a really great question because some of the answer to how long is the long run depends on how we respond in the short run. If the way we respond to the intense increase in demand is the short run, is building new fossil fuel electricity generation, like building new gas plants, those plants have a long life, 20 or 30 years. Things that exist tend to get used. And so if we respond to the short run pressure by making investments in new fossil fuel generation, then that’s gonna push that long run of decarbonization off farther, and so, for the climate, the best news scenario in some ways would be if builders of AI and data centers decided, well, wait a minute, the most reliable and fastest way for us to have the electricity we need is in some sense to be self-sufficient in a green way, to build a data center, to build accompanying, solar or wind generation, to build a battery facility that will help make sure that that power is available to us throughout the day.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Well, and some of this is happening, so I just read, Google is making plans to purchase Intersect, which is a wind and solar company bringing energy generation in house and almost kind of treating it as a competitive advantage.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. And Microsoft recently made an agreement to reopen one of the reactors at Three Mile Island. Again to do essentially self-supply with nuclear energy. So to the extent that the response to this is self-supply with some kind of green energy, that is number one, good for the climate, but potentially also good for, accelerating storage technologies, for accelerating our relearning how to build nuclear in a competitive way. Those would be the best case scenarios.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Accelerating because it’s really kind of like, forcing people to innovate and act very quickly to do the kinds of things that they might otherwise do gradually over the course of 10, 20 years.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>And what drives down costs in many, many technologies is, increasing the scale of demand, basically increasing the size of the market. When you go from, here’s a technology we have thought of to one we have tested in the lab and demonstrated to one that we have done pilot projects of and works, there is this important phase between that and sort of a large scale deployment, which is increasing the scale of production enough that costs fall. And I totally believe it’s something we’ll get better at as we do it more.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and I think that’s a really, really interesting point. Like there is a world in which we can harness all of this demand and all of this excitement for AI and actually leave the climate in a better place than it would’ve otherwise been.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> And I, you know, and I’m not saying this is guaranteed, I’m not saying that this is obviously what’s gonna happen, but it like, there is a path and it actually has the potential to accelerate you know, green energy and decarbonisation in ways it would be really positive for the climate. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[musical interlude]\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong> Jess Love [Voiceover]: \u003c/strong>So, Meghan does see a future where demand for AI helps to accelerate deployment of low-cost green energy. But that’s not the only optimistic claim people make about AI and the climate.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>Okay. So I wanna do a kind of nerdy lightning round with you. So I’m gonna share some other ways that AI might impact the climate in a positive way. And, we’ll say zero is like, that is all just hand-wavy gobbledygook, and five is like, yeah, actually there could really be something there. Okay, you ready? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>Ready. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> ‘Optimization of the energy grid.’ \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> I’ll give that a four.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love\u003c/strong>: It’s pretty good.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> I’ll give it a four because it is the sort of thing that AI can do. Right. There’s already predictive maintenance being done and AI being applied to in a lot of different, manufacturing and other kinds of things. That said, it’s actually not the most important thing, I think, in the optimization of our energy system. We just need way more transmission in way more places to accommodate renewables generated in places where we historically have not had electricity generation like the Southwest. And just greater supply and greater flexibility. So I’ll give it a four ’cause AI can do it, but it’s actually not the most important thing you could do if you wanted to improve the electricity transmission grid.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love\u003c/strong>: That was very thorough.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>Not very lightning, but very thorough.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love\u003c/strong>: Very thorough. ‘Better climate modeling.’\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> There’s a sense in which I don’t know whether you really want AI climate models. In the sense that part of the trick about AI is that it’s a bit of a black box. Climate models are basically systems of equations. Systems of equations that capture relationships we know about heat and temperature and weather and ocean currents, and then how those translate into economic consequences. Part of the value of climate models is that we know what assumptions we have put in and we can alter those assumptions in ways that allow us to see if this were different, how would that matter for our climate predictions? I’m not sure that sort of turning that over to the more black box nature of AI is gonna improve our confidence. So I’ll give that a one.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> ‘Discovery of more energy efficient materials.’\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> That’s a great question. So there are absolutely applications in which materials matter – Battery chemistry, for example, is one that a lot of people are pushing on. So I’ll give that a three.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: ‘\u003c/strong>Precision agriculture’, which is this idea that with the right sensors and models, we could give crops exactly what they need when they need it, improving yield, reducing waste.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> So I’m gonna give that a one, not because I don’t think AI can do it, but because, doing it more efficiently or more precisely doesn’t do a lot for decarbonization if we’re using the same techniques, in terms of fertilizer, in terms of planting, in terms of those kinds of things. So I think in order to make a big difference in agricultural emissions, we’re gonna need something other than, sort of more precisely, implementing the technologies that we have. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]: \u003c/strong>Ok, so Meghan doesn’t see a lot of potential in some of these super optimistic “AI will just create new things that help!” scenarios. But she does see the potential for AI to fuel a clean-energy tech boom. At least…in the future. But how can people like \u003cem>me\u003c/em> make a difference TODAY? SHOULD I feel guilty asking ChatGPT for that packing list?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> So, one of the things, as I teach classes about climate, and as I talk to audiences about climate, I oftentimes get questions about, what can I do that matters?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I don’t think people always have a very good idea of what are the first order things, like what are the big levers they have in their hand, and what are the small levers that they have in their hand? If you ask me, I would tell you that generating a packing list on ChatGPT for your vacation is not a very big climate lever. In fact, it’s a much bigger climate lever how far away you are going on your vacation and how are you going to get there? If you’re taking an airplane, the climate impact of your airplane trip is many, many, many, many, many ChatGPT queries. So I think part of the reason people have fixated on ChatGPT queries as something that is part of their climate virtual signaling, is that it seems like an easy thing to do or not do as opposed to deciding not to drive to work or not to have a furnace in my house, or…\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> – not to go on vacation.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> Not to go on vacation. And so we sometimes get fixated on the things that seem like, well, that just seems like an excessive choice that you are making. But if you wanna know the things that really matter, the things that really matter have to do with your more direct use of fossil fuels. Think about how you set your thermostat. Think about what you drive and where you drive. Think about where you choose to fly. Think about what you eat – Beef is especially carbon intensive. So if people are asking me, what is a marginal choice I could make in my life that would make a difference, using ChatGPT would not be at the top of my list. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]: \u003c/strong>Well, what about…joining some sort of collective action effort–like the protests we’re seeing against data centers? That strategy seems to have more potential, at least for those local issues. Because all data centers are not created equal, and being able to shape the kind of neighbor you have, and where it situates itself – that feels big.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> Are communities able to get some concessions from these companies that allow the data centers to sort of be built, you know, somewhere in the proximity, but in ways that don’t impact people’s quality of life as much?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> So I think there’s actually a ton of heterogeneity as you go from place to place. I mean, it’s very different if you have something that is federally regulated, something like, you know, pharmaceuticals or those kinds of things, right? The process might be slow, but once a decision gets made for something that’s federally regulated, then that’s the decision, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And when you have something that, that it’s gonna be sort of a location and state by state, it’s just gonna be a lot noisier, it’s gonna be a lot less predictable, and I think that, what’s gonna turn out to be a successful strategy for communities to employ is gonna depend a lot on the particular location where they are.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love: \u003c/strong>And perhaps what they want to get out of it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> And perhaps what they wanna get out of it, which may not be the same place to place.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love\u003c/strong>: Yeah, I mean, could this be a good thing, where communities, you know, depending on the tools they have available to them, can sort of look at the situation and in a bespoke way try to come to an agreement that is going to be as much of a win-win as possible?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse: \u003c/strong>I hope so.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[music bump]\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]:\u003c/strong> It’s clear that local opposition to data centers can have an impact. Meghan sent me a newspaper article involving a powerful Utah State Senator. He served as chairman of the agency that approved that giant data center we talked about earlier, the one that was downsized to a mere 20,000 acres. And…he recently lost his Republican primary bid, in what the article called, “one of the most high-profile signs of the voter backlash to data center projects.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Which brings us to the final thing that individuals can do–something that works for these local issues and for the climate more broadly.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> If you care about having an individual impact, by far the most impactful thing you can do is how you vote.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> There you go.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> And that’s because so many of the changes you need are not about our individual consumption or our individual behavior. It’s about the \u003cem>systems\u003c/em> of how we generate energy. The systems of how we use energy, what we use energy for. The things that are really, really hard for individuals to influence with their choices. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So in some sense, I don’t care very much about whether you use ChatGPT, I don’t care very much about whether you eat beef or not. I don’t even care about where you fly on vacation as long as you vote. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love:\u003c/strong> So you teach the next generation of CEOs, C-Suite Executives, and you have children of your own. What advice do you have for young people right now?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Meghan Busse:\u003c/strong> The advice that I have for young people now is that while it seems, like on the political front, it might seem like things are discouraging on the technology and economic front, there’s huge potential.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We can \u003cem>absolutely\u003c/em> decarbonize, we can \u003cem>absolutely\u003c/em> avoid the worst effects of climate change. We have many of the technologies and I totally believe that we can invent the technologies that we still need. It is absolutely within our power if we choose to do it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Jess Love [Voiceover]: \u003c/strong>So. In the long run, how will AI impact the climate? It depends. But after my conversation with Meghan, I’m thinking: it doesn’t depend that much on the AI itself. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It depends more on what we do with demand for the technology. Where and how companies build out their data centers and especially how they choose to power them. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Are we going to live in a world where demand pushes back our transition to clean energy, locking us into fossil fuels for decades? We’re seeing some of that world right now. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But we can also choose a world where this explosion of demand hastens our transition to clean energy. And we’re also seeing some of that right now.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The politics of clean energy can look grim…But as long as clean-energy technologies keep getting cheaper and easier to scale, the optimistic scenario is still on the table.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This is Life Automated, a project of the Ryan Institute on Complexity at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Distributed by KQED. I’m Jess Love. Special thanks to today’s guest, Meghan Busse, an economist and associate professor at the Kellogg School of Management.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’re produced by Jesse Dukes. Music by Steven Jackson. Recording by George Christensen and Will Feeney. Support and wise counsel from Stacia Sliger. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>END\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\u003cbr>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/google\">Google\u003c/a> workers signed, sealed and delivered a petition to Google and Alphabet Inc. CEO Sundar Pichai on Thursday, asking for more protections against layoffs. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Members of the Alphabet Workers Union descended on the company’s Mountain View campus to deliver the petition, signed by 4,500 employees. While the union leaders said that Pichai did not meet with them, they described a productive conversation with one of his staff members. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>KQED reached out to Google for comment but did not receive a response. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Speakers at Thursday’s press conference shared their experiences with layoffs. One speaker told a story about their colleague arriving at “take your child to work day” with a four-year-old in tow only to learn that they no longer had a job. Another talked about how some employees’ layoffs cost them visa sponsorships and threatened their ability to stay in the U.S. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GOOGLEUNION-09-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12091456\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GOOGLEUNION-09-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GOOGLEUNION-09-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GOOGLEUNION-09-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Google employees rally at the Mountain View Google campus on July 16, 2026, to demand job security protections. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The protest came at a time of mounting uncertainty for tech industry employees, many of whom are contending with \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12090173/too-old-for-silicon-valley-think-again-ai-is-changing-the-math\">a labor market that’s being radically reshaped\u003c/a> by artificial intelligence and a housing market that’s becoming rapidly less affordable as AI companies begin their \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/08/technology/san-francisco-home-sales-openai-anthropic-ipo.html\">IPOs\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since 2022, companies like Oracle, Meta, LinkedIn and Amazon have \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12084655/after-meta-layoffs-newsom-signs-ai-order-to-protect-workers-and-jobs\">laid off thousands of employees\u003c/a>, citing the need to shift spending elsewhere to meet AI needs, such as data center construction. In May, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order focused on preparing workers and businesses for job disruptions driven by AI, including policy options such as severance standards and expanded unemployment insurance. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>At Thursday’s press conference, union president and software engineer Parul Koul said that the campaign started in January 2023 when 12,000 Google employees were laid off “overnight.” The movement steadily gained momentum as the waves of mass layoffs continued, Koul said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Every time Google management has said it was a difficult decision. It was a response to economic headwinds,” Koul said, referencing the rounds of layoffs. “The reality is, in that same time period, Google’s valuation has gone from over $1 trillion to over $4 trillion.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Recent reporting from \u003cem>TechCrunch\u003c/em> suggests that Google has let go of somewhere between \u003ca href=\"https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/06/the-running-list-major-tech-layoffs-in-2026-where-employers-cited-ai/\">1,500 and 3,000\u003c/a> engineers just this year. Google’s March 2026 Securities and Exchange Commission \u003ca href=\"https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204426000043/googexhibit991q12026.htm\">filing\u003c/a> indicates that the company has over 190,000 employees. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“These layoffs and cuts are not difficult decisions, but simply profit being put over the people that make this company run,” Koul said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Another speaker pointed out that Google “never performed layoffs before 2023,” despite seeing “a decrease in profits during 2008.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Organizers framed the layoffs as a chapter of a longer history of exploitation and labor organizing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GOOGLEUNION-06-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12091455\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GOOGLEUNION-06-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GOOGLEUNION-06-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GOOGLEUNION-06-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Parul Koul, a software engineer, speaks alongside fellow employees during a rally at the Google campus in Mountain View on July 16, 2026, to demand job security protections. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“The same types of people decades ago told workers that we couldn’t have a 40-hour work week, that long hours and burnout were the cost of doing business. They told us that a weekend was impossible, that health and safety standards were impossible,” Koul said. “Workers before us have proved that all of those things are possible and more, and the only barrier to us achieving them is how organized we are.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The Googlers’ petition calls for guaranteed severance, for voluntary exit packages to become an established policy and for the option to take severance as an extended paid leave instead of a lump sum to preserve their healthcare and immigration status. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They also demanded an end to the Googler Reviews and Development performance review system — known as “GRAD” — a bell curve-style grading system for employees, according to Meghan Day, an employee speaking at the event.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED’s \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/author/shotchkiss\">\u003cem>Sarah Hotchkiss\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> contributed to this report. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The protest came at a time of mounting uncertainty for tech industry employees, many of whom are contending with \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12090173/too-old-for-silicon-valley-think-again-ai-is-changing-the-math\">a labor market that’s being radically reshaped\u003c/a> by artificial intelligence and a housing market that’s becoming rapidly less affordable as AI companies begin their \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/08/technology/san-francisco-home-sales-openai-anthropic-ipo.html\">IPOs\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>At Thursday’s press conference, union president and software engineer Parul Koul said that the campaign started in January 2023 when 12,000 Google employees were laid off “overnight.” The movement steadily gained momentum as the waves of mass layoffs continued, Koul said. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Every time Google management has said it was a difficult decision. It was a response to economic headwinds,” Koul said, referencing the rounds of layoffs. “The reality is, in that same time period, Google’s valuation has gone from over $1 trillion to over $4 trillion.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Recent reporting from \u003cem>TechCrunch\u003c/em> suggests that Google has let go of somewhere between \u003ca href=\"https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/06/the-running-list-major-tech-layoffs-in-2026-where-employers-cited-ai/\">1,500 and 3,000\u003c/a> engineers just this year. Google’s March 2026 Securities and Exchange Commission \u003ca href=\"https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204426000043/googexhibit991q12026.htm\">filing\u003c/a> indicates that the company has over 190,000 employees. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“These layoffs and cuts are not difficult decisions, but simply profit being put over the people that make this company run,” Koul said. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Another speaker pointed out that Google “never performed layoffs before 2023,” despite seeing “a decrease in profits during 2008.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Organizers framed the layoffs as a chapter of a longer history of exploitation and labor organizing. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“The same types of people decades ago told workers that we couldn’t have a 40-hour work week, that long hours and burnout were the cost of doing business. They told us that a weekend was impossible, that health and safety standards were impossible,” Koul said. “Workers before us have proved that all of those things are possible and more, and the only barrier to us achieving them is how organized we are.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The Googlers’ petition calls for guaranteed severance, for voluntary exit packages to become an established policy and for the option to take severance as an extended paid leave instead of a lump sum to preserve their healthcare and immigration status. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>They also demanded an end to the Googler Reviews and Development performance review system — known as “GRAD” — a bell curve-style grading system for employees, according to Meghan Day, an employee speaking at the event.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED’s \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/author/shotchkiss\">\u003cem>Sarah Hotchkiss\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> contributed to this report. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/google\">Google\u003c/a> workers signed, sealed and delivered a petition to Google and Alphabet Inc. CEO Sundar Pichai on Thursday, asking for more protections against layoffs. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Members of the Alphabet Workers Union descended on the company’s Mountain View campus to deliver the petition, signed by 4,500 employees. While the union leaders said that Pichai did not meet with them, they described a productive conversation with one of his staff members. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>KQED reached out to Google for comment but did not receive a response. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Speakers at Thursday’s press conference shared their experiences with layoffs. One speaker told a story about their colleague arriving at “take your child to work day” with a four-year-old in tow only to learn that they no longer had a job. Another talked about how some employees’ layoffs cost them visa sponsorships and threatened their ability to stay in the U.S. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GOOGLEUNION-09-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12091456\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GOOGLEUNION-09-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GOOGLEUNION-09-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GOOGLEUNION-09-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Google employees rally at the Mountain View Google campus on July 16, 2026, to demand job security protections. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The protest came at a time of mounting uncertainty for tech industry employees, many of whom are contending with \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12090173/too-old-for-silicon-valley-think-again-ai-is-changing-the-math\">a labor market that’s being radically reshaped\u003c/a> by artificial intelligence and a housing market that’s becoming rapidly less affordable as AI companies begin their \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/08/technology/san-francisco-home-sales-openai-anthropic-ipo.html\">IPOs\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since 2022, companies like Oracle, Meta, LinkedIn and Amazon have \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12084655/after-meta-layoffs-newsom-signs-ai-order-to-protect-workers-and-jobs\">laid off thousands of employees\u003c/a>, citing the need to shift spending elsewhere to meet AI needs, such as data center construction. In May, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order focused on preparing workers and businesses for job disruptions driven by AI, including policy options such as severance standards and expanded unemployment insurance. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>At Thursday’s press conference, union president and software engineer Parul Koul said that the campaign started in January 2023 when 12,000 Google employees were laid off “overnight.” The movement steadily gained momentum as the waves of mass layoffs continued, Koul said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Every time Google management has said it was a difficult decision. It was a response to economic headwinds,” Koul said, referencing the rounds of layoffs. “The reality is, in that same time period, Google’s valuation has gone from over $1 trillion to over $4 trillion.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Recent reporting from \u003cem>TechCrunch\u003c/em> suggests that Google has let go of somewhere between \u003ca href=\"https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/06/the-running-list-major-tech-layoffs-in-2026-where-employers-cited-ai/\">1,500 and 3,000\u003c/a> engineers just this year. Google’s March 2026 Securities and Exchange Commission \u003ca href=\"https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204426000043/googexhibit991q12026.htm\">filing\u003c/a> indicates that the company has over 190,000 employees. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“These layoffs and cuts are not difficult decisions, but simply profit being put over the people that make this company run,” Koul said. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Another speaker pointed out that Google “never performed layoffs before 2023,” despite seeing “a decrease in profits during 2008.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Organizers framed the layoffs as a chapter of a longer history of exploitation and labor organizing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GOOGLEUNION-06-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12091455\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GOOGLEUNION-06-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GOOGLEUNION-06-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GOOGLEUNION-06-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Parul Koul, a software engineer, speaks alongside fellow employees during a rally at the Google campus in Mountain View on July 16, 2026, to demand job security protections. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“The same types of people decades ago told workers that we couldn’t have a 40-hour work week, that long hours and burnout were the cost of doing business. They told us that a weekend was impossible, that health and safety standards were impossible,” Koul said. “Workers before us have proved that all of those things are possible and more, and the only barrier to us achieving them is how organized we are.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The Googlers’ petition calls for guaranteed severance, for voluntary exit packages to become an established policy and for the option to take severance as an extended paid leave instead of a lump sum to preserve their healthcare and immigration status. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They also demanded an end to the Googler Reviews and Development performance review system — known as “GRAD” — a bell curve-style grading system for employees, according to Meghan Day, an employee speaking at the event.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>KQED’s \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/author/shotchkiss\">\u003cem>Sarah Hotchkiss\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> contributed to this report. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>This week, Lee Hepner rode his bike to the Grocery Outlet in the Mission District in \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/san-francisco\">San Francisco\u003c/a> — but not to go shopping. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>He was looking for a postcard-sized sticker on the front door that some might miss, alerting customers that the store was scanning the face of every person who walked in.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Face Matching software is being used to prevent shoplifting,” the sign read, accompanied by a QR code with information about opting out of your data.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Rarely do I have a situation where surveillance technology is popping up in my backyard,” said Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project. In 2019, he helped write policy making San Francisco the first city in the country to bar its own agencies, including police, from using facial recognition. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Inside, he counted three cameras near the entrance and dozens more down every aisle and over every checkout. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GROCOUTAI-03-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12091345\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GROCOUTAI-03-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GROCOUTAI-03-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GROCOUTAI-03-BL-KQED-1536x1025.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A sign on the door notifies customers about facial matching at a Grocery Outlet location on South Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco on July 16, 2026. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It is just blanketed with surveillance cameras,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Emeryville-based Grocery Outlet has rolled out software by an AI company called SAFR Guard at several Bay Area stores, including Pleasant Hill and the San Francisco location Hepner visited. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The technology is designed to identify people suspected of shoplifting, according to its privacy policy, and notifies employees if someone on a watchlist enters a store. SAFR Guard builds a database of “subjects of interest” across the retailers using it, Hepner said — meaning whoever lands on a watchlist at one store can follow them to another.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s part of a quiet spread of automated anti-theft tools into neighborhood groceries and retail businesses. As retail theft rates have increased in recent years — shoplifting in California was \u003ca href=\"https://www.ppic.org/blog/overall-crime-in-california-fell-last-year-but-shoplifting-continued-to-rise/\">47.5% higher in 2024\u003c/a> than before the pandemic, according to the Public Policy Institute of California — companies like Target, Walmart and grocers like Wegmans have introduced the software. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And it’s legal in California, according to the state’s \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa\">consumer privacy\u003c/a> laws. Businesses must notify customers that facial recognition is in use, and shoppers can “opt out” by petitioning the company to delete their data — or by not entering the store.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“This is a dragnet that scans everyone. Even if you’ve done nothing wrong, your face is being scanned,” said Mario Trujillo, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Hepner said that opting out may not be a realistic financial option for many discount grocery customers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Grocery Outlet is one of the only, if not the only, grocery store that caters to low-income [people]” in the Bay Area, he said. “It’s not as if a lot of these shoppers have the choice to go shop somewhere else. It is essentially a tax on their privacy assessed every time they go to the grocery store to put food on the table.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Civil-liberties advocates have long raised alarms over the risk of misidentification. In December 2023, the Federal Trade Commission \u003ca href=\"https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/12/rite-aid-banned-using-ai-facial-recognition-after-ftc-says-retailer-deployed-technology-without\">banned Rite Aid\u003c/a> from using facial recognition for five years after finding the chain’s system falsely tagged shoppers — disproportionately women and people of color — as shoplifters, leading employees to accuse innocent customers of wrongdoing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Hepner said San Francisco banned the technology for government use precisely because research shows it “disproportionately misidentified people with darker complexions and faces of women.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>SAFR Guard defends the system as narrow and privacy-conscious. In a statement, company President Charisse Jacques said the software “is not a law enforcement system and has no connection with law enforcement,” and it does not build “a general-purpose face matching database of the public.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GROCOUTAI-07-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12091346\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GROCOUTAI-07-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GROCOUTAI-07-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GROCOUTAI-07-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A Grocery Outlet location on Bayshore Boulevard in San Francisco on July 16, 2026. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The system only holds data on people a retailer has added to a security list after an incident, such as suspected theft, Jacques said. \u003ca href=\"https://safrguard.ai/\">According to their privacy policy\u003c/a>, records on suspected individuals are kept for up to 12 months, while encrypted images and general CCTV footage are automatically deleted after 30 days.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Shoppers who aren’t matched to that list are never stored at all: their biometric data “never leave the camera and are immediately deleted.” She said that SAFR has never shared retailer or shopper data with any government agency, including ICE, and has never received a court order or subpoena for it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Grocery Outlet did not respond to requests for comment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Hepner doesn’t dispute that the store’s current privacy policy is narrow. His worry is what would happen if the software is abused. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Today it’s just facial recognition for the purpose of preventing crime,” he said. “But tomorrow, this technology, without changing the camera, with only tweaks to the back-end software, can be used to surveil workers, can be used to collect information from every shopper who enters the store.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Major chains like Kroger are experimenting with dynamic pricing — or using personal data and tracking to adjust prices for each customer — and the ACLU \u003ca href=\"https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/retailers-secretively-using-face-recognition\">reported \u003c/a>in January that Wegmans shares information with law enforcement. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Beyond markets, bars in the Castro have begun scanning patrons’ faces at the door with ID-verification software, he noted — bars he said he now avoids. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A patron database “may not seem like a big problem” in San Francisco but carries real risk “under a broader federal regime that’s increasingly cracking down on trans rights and on gay rights,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Trujillo recommended a change to state law in line with what Illinois and Colorado are doing, requiring stores to seek out affirmative consent from consumers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Hepner worries the drift is heading the other way. This week, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors gave final approval to a broad \u003ca href=\"https://sfgov.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=7423230&GUID=9C3D32F7-1A6A-43E7-913C-B1ACFC59E312\">“code cleanup” ordinance\u003c/a> that loosens the very oversight law he helped write by slashing the city-required audit of each department’s surveillance technology to at least once every five years.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You make policy to address the risk of harm,” he said, “even if that harm is on the fringes of the use of that technology, because I can guarantee you it will be mainstream tomorrow.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Rarely do I have a situation where surveillance technology is popping up in my backyard,” said Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project. In 2019, he helped write policy making San Francisco the first city in the country to bar its own agencies, including police, from using facial recognition. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Emeryville-based Grocery Outlet has rolled out software by an AI company called SAFR Guard at several Bay Area stores, including Pleasant Hill and the San Francisco location Hepner visited. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The technology is designed to identify people suspected of shoplifting, according to its privacy policy, and notifies employees if someone on a watchlist enters a store. SAFR Guard builds a database of “subjects of interest” across the retailers using it, Hepner said — meaning whoever lands on a watchlist at one store can follow them to another.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It’s part of a quiet spread of automated anti-theft tools into neighborhood groceries and retail businesses. As retail theft rates have increased in recent years — shoplifting in California was \u003ca href=\"https://www.ppic.org/blog/overall-crime-in-california-fell-last-year-but-shoplifting-continued-to-rise/\">47.5% higher in 2024\u003c/a> than before the pandemic, according to the Public Policy Institute of California — companies like Target, Walmart and grocers like Wegmans have introduced the software. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And it’s legal in California, according to the state’s \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa\">consumer privacy\u003c/a> laws. Businesses must notify customers that facial recognition is in use, and shoppers can “opt out” by petitioning the company to delete their data — or by not entering the store.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“This is a dragnet that scans everyone. Even if you’ve done nothing wrong, your face is being scanned,” said Mario Trujillo, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Hepner said that opting out may not be a realistic financial option for many discount grocery customers.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“Grocery Outlet is one of the only, if not the only, grocery store that caters to low-income [people]” in the Bay Area, he said. “It’s not as if a lot of these shoppers have the choice to go shop somewhere else. It is essentially a tax on their privacy assessed every time they go to the grocery store to put food on the table.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Civil-liberties advocates have long raised alarms over the risk of misidentification. In December 2023, the Federal Trade Commission \u003ca href=\"https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/12/rite-aid-banned-using-ai-facial-recognition-after-ftc-says-retailer-deployed-technology-without\">banned Rite Aid\u003c/a> from using facial recognition for five years after finding the chain’s system falsely tagged shoppers — disproportionately women and people of color — as shoplifters, leading employees to accuse innocent customers of wrongdoing. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Civil-liberties advocates have long raised alarms over the risk of misidentification. In December 2023, the Federal Trade Commission \u003ca href=\"https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/12/rite-aid-banned-using-ai-facial-recognition-after-ftc-says-retailer-deployed-technology-without\">banned Rite Aid\u003c/a> from using facial recognition for five years after finding the chain’s system falsely tagged shoppers — disproportionately women and people of color — as shoplifters, leading employees to accuse innocent customers of wrongdoing. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Hepner said San Francisco banned the technology for government use precisely because research shows it “disproportionately misidentified people with darker complexions and faces of women.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>SAFR Guard defends the system as narrow and privacy-conscious. In a statement, company President Charisse Jacques said the software “is not a law enforcement system and has no connection with law enforcement,” and it does not build “a general-purpose face matching database of the public.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>SAFR Guard defends the system as narrow and privacy-conscious. In a statement, company President Charisse Jacques said the software “is not a law enforcement system and has no connection with law enforcement,” and it does not build “a general-purpose face matching database of the public.” \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GROCOUTAI-07-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12091346\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GROCOUTAI-07-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GROCOUTAI-07-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GROCOUTAI-07-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 992px) min(100vw, 1536px), (min-width: 768px) min(100vw, 1280px), min(100vw, 1020px)\" />\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A Grocery Outlet location on Bayshore Boulevard in San Francisco on July 16, 2026.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The system only holds data on people a retailer has added to a security list after an incident, such as suspected theft, Jacques said. \u003ca href=\"https://safrguard.ai/\">According to their privacy policy\u003c/a>, records on suspected individuals are kept for up to 12 months, while encrypted images and general CCTV footage are automatically deleted after 30 days.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The system only holds data on people a retailer has added to a security list after an incident, such as suspected theft, Jacques said. \u003ca href=\"https://safrguard.ai/\">According to their privacy policy\u003c/a>, records on suspected individuals are kept for up to 12 months, while encrypted images and general CCTV footage are automatically deleted after 30 days.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Shoppers who aren’t matched to that list are never stored at all: their biometric data “never leave the camera and are immediately deleted.” She said that SAFR has never shared retailer or shopper data with any government agency, including ICE, and has never received a court order or subpoena for it. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Hepner worries the drift is heading the other way. This week, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors gave final approval to a broad \u003ca href=\"https://sfgov.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=7423230&GUID=9C3D32F7-1A6A-43E7-913C-B1ACFC59E312\">“code cleanup” ordinance\u003c/a> that loosens the very oversight law he helped write by slashing the city-required audit of each department’s surveillance technology to at least once every five years.\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Grocery Outlet stores in San Francisco and the East Bay are using facial recognition technology to identify suspected shoplifters, raising concerns about surveillance and consent. ",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>This week, Lee Hepner rode his bike to the Grocery Outlet in the Mission District in \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/san-francisco\">San Francisco\u003c/a> — but not to go shopping. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>He was looking for a postcard-sized sticker on the front door that some might miss, alerting customers that the store was scanning the face of every person who walked in.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Face Matching software is being used to prevent shoplifting,” the sign read, accompanied by a QR code with information about opting out of your data.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Rarely do I have a situation where surveillance technology is popping up in my backyard,” said Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project. In 2019, he helped write policy making San Francisco the first city in the country to bar its own agencies, including police, from using facial recognition. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Inside, he counted three cameras near the entrance and dozens more down every aisle and over every checkout. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GROCOUTAI-03-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12091345\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GROCOUTAI-03-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GROCOUTAI-03-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GROCOUTAI-03-BL-KQED-1536x1025.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A sign on the door notifies customers about facial matching at a Grocery Outlet location on South Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco on July 16, 2026. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“It is just blanketed with surveillance cameras,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Emeryville-based Grocery Outlet has rolled out software by an AI company called SAFR Guard at several Bay Area stores, including Pleasant Hill and the San Francisco location Hepner visited. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The technology is designed to identify people suspected of shoplifting, according to its privacy policy, and notifies employees if someone on a watchlist enters a store. SAFR Guard builds a database of “subjects of interest” across the retailers using it, Hepner said — meaning whoever lands on a watchlist at one store can follow them to another.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s part of a quiet spread of automated anti-theft tools into neighborhood groceries and retail businesses. As retail theft rates have increased in recent years — shoplifting in California was \u003ca href=\"https://www.ppic.org/blog/overall-crime-in-california-fell-last-year-but-shoplifting-continued-to-rise/\">47.5% higher in 2024\u003c/a> than before the pandemic, according to the Public Policy Institute of California — companies like Target, Walmart and grocers like Wegmans have introduced the software. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And it’s legal in California, according to the state’s \u003ca href=\"https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa\">consumer privacy\u003c/a> laws. Businesses must notify customers that facial recognition is in use, and shoppers can “opt out” by petitioning the company to delete their data — or by not entering the store.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“This is a dragnet that scans everyone. Even if you’ve done nothing wrong, your face is being scanned,” said Mario Trujillo, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Hepner said that opting out may not be a realistic financial option for many discount grocery customers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Grocery Outlet is one of the only, if not the only, grocery store that caters to low-income [people]” in the Bay Area, he said. “It’s not as if a lot of these shoppers have the choice to go shop somewhere else. It is essentially a tax on their privacy assessed every time they go to the grocery store to put food on the table.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Civil-liberties advocates have long raised alarms over the risk of misidentification. In December 2023, the Federal Trade Commission \u003ca href=\"https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/12/rite-aid-banned-using-ai-facial-recognition-after-ftc-says-retailer-deployed-technology-without\">banned Rite Aid\u003c/a> from using facial recognition for five years after finding the chain’s system falsely tagged shoppers — disproportionately women and people of color — as shoplifters, leading employees to accuse innocent customers of wrongdoing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Hepner said San Francisco banned the technology for government use precisely because research shows it “disproportionately misidentified people with darker complexions and faces of women.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>SAFR Guard defends the system as narrow and privacy-conscious. In a statement, company President Charisse Jacques said the software “is not a law enforcement system and has no connection with law enforcement,” and it does not build “a general-purpose face matching database of the public.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GROCOUTAI-07-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-12091346\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GROCOUTAI-07-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GROCOUTAI-07-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2026/07/260716-GROCOUTAI-07-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A Grocery Outlet location on Bayshore Boulevard in San Francisco on July 16, 2026. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The system only holds data on people a retailer has added to a security list after an incident, such as suspected theft, Jacques said. \u003ca href=\"https://safrguard.ai/\">According to their privacy policy\u003c/a>, records on suspected individuals are kept for up to 12 months, while encrypted images and general CCTV footage are automatically deleted after 30 days.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Shoppers who aren’t matched to that list are never stored at all: their biometric data “never leave the camera and are immediately deleted.” She said that SAFR has never shared retailer or shopper data with any government agency, including ICE, and has never received a court order or subpoena for it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Grocery Outlet did not respond to requests for comment.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Hepner doesn’t dispute that the store’s current privacy policy is narrow. His worry is what would happen if the software is abused. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“Today it’s just facial recognition for the purpose of preventing crime,” he said. “But tomorrow, this technology, without changing the camera, with only tweaks to the back-end software, can be used to surveil workers, can be used to collect information from every shopper who enters the store.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Major chains like Kroger are experimenting with dynamic pricing — or using personal data and tracking to adjust prices for each customer — and the ACLU \u003ca href=\"https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/retailers-secretively-using-face-recognition\">reported \u003c/a>in January that Wegmans shares information with law enforcement. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Beyond markets, bars in the Castro have begun scanning patrons’ faces at the door with ID-verification software, he noted — bars he said he now avoids. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A patron database “may not seem like a big problem” in San Francisco but carries real risk “under a broader federal regime that’s increasingly cracking down on trans rights and on gay rights,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Trujillo recommended a change to state law in line with what Illinois and Colorado are doing, requiring stores to seek out affirmative consent from consumers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Hepner worries the drift is heading the other way. 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"officialWebsiteLink": "/californiareportmagazine",
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"order": 10
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM3NjkwNjk1OTAz",
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},
"city-arts": {
"id": "city-arts",
"title": "City Arts & Lectures",
"info": "A one-hour radio program to hear celebrated writers, artists and thinkers address contemporary ideas and values, often discussing the creative process. Please note: tapes or transcripts are not available",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/05/cityartsandlecture-300x300.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.cityarts.net/",
"airtime": "SUN 1pm-2pm, TUE 10pm, WED 1am",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "City Arts & Lectures"
},
"link": "https://www.cityarts.net",
"subscribe": {
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/City-Arts-and-Lectures-p692/",
"rss": "https://www.cityarts.net/feed/"
}
},
"closealltabs": {
"id": "closealltabs",
"title": "Close All Tabs",
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"info": "Close All Tabs breaks down how digital culture shapes our world through thoughtful insights and irreverent humor.",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/closealltabs",
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"order": 1
},
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"id": "code-switch-life-kit",
"title": "Code Switch / Life Kit",
"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
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"meta": {
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cubnByLm9yZy9yc3MvcG9kY2FzdC5waHA_aWQ9NTEwMzEy",
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
"title": "Commonwealth Club of California Podcast",
"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
"airtime": "THU 10pm, FRI 1am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Commonwealth-Club-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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"meta": {
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"source": "Commonwealth Club of California"
},
"link": "/radio/program/commonwealth-club",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5jb21tb253ZWFsdGhjbHViLm9yZy9hdWRpby9wb2RjYXN0L3dlZWtseS54bWw",
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},
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"id": "forum",
"title": "Forum",
"tagline": "The conversation starts here",
"info": "KQED’s live call-in program discussing local, state, national and international issues, as well as in-depth interviews.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 9am-11am, 10pm-11pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Forum-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Forum with Mina Kim and Alexis Madrigal",
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"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 9
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM5NTU3MzgxNjMz",
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"id": "freakonomics-radio",
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"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/freakonomicsRadio.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://freakonomics.com/",
"airtime": "SUN 1am-2am, SAT 3pm-4pm",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "WNYC"
},
"link": "/radio/program/freakonomics-radio",
"subscribe": {
"npr": "https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/4s8b",
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics-radio/id354668519",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/WNYC-Podcasts/Freakonomics-Radio-p272293/",
"rss": "https://feeds.feedburner.com/freakonomicsradio"
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},
"fresh-air": {
"id": "fresh-air",
"title": "Fresh Air",
"info": "Hosted by Terry Gross, \u003cem>Fresh Air from WHYY\u003c/em> is the Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues. One of public radio's most popular programs, Fresh Air features intimate conversations with today's biggest luminaries.",
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"link": "/radio/program/fresh-air",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=214089682&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/381444908/podcast.xml"
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"info": "A live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with stations across the country, Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it's happening in the middle of the day, with timely, in-depth news, interviews and conversation. Hosted by Robin Young, Jeremy Hobson and Tonya Mosley.",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510051/podcast.xml"
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},
"hidden-brain": {
"id": "hidden-brain",
"title": "Hidden Brain",
"info": "Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/series/423302056/hidden-brain",
"airtime": "SUN 7pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "NPR"
},
"link": "/radio/program/hidden-brain",
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},
"how-i-built-this": {
"id": "how-i-built-this",
"title": "How I Built This with Guy Raz",
"info": "Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/howIBuiltThis.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this",
"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/how-i-built-this",
"subscribe": {
"npr": "https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/3zxy",
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-built-this-with-guy-raz/id1150510297?mt=2",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510313/podcast.xml"
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},
"hyphenacion": {
"id": "hyphenacion",
"title": "Hyphenación",
"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Hyphenacion_FinalAssets_PodcastTile.png",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 15
},
"link": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
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"spotify": "https://open.spotify.com/show/2p3Fifq96nw9BPcmFdIq0o?si=39209f7b25774f38",
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"rss": "https://feeds.megaphone.fm/KQINC2275451163"
}
},
"jerrybrown": {
"id": "jerrybrown",
"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-Political-Mind-of-Jerry-Brown-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 18
},
"link": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1492194549",
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}
},
"latino-usa": {
"id": "latino-usa",
"title": "Latino USA",
"airtime": "MON 1am-2am, SUN 6pm-7pm",
"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://latinousa.org/",
"meta": {
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/latino-usa",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=79681317&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510016/podcast.xml"
}
},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "American Public Media"
},
"link": "/radio/program/marketplace",
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"rss": "https://feeds.publicradio.org/public_feeds/marketplace-pm/rss/rss"
}
},
"masters-of-scale": {
"id": "masters-of-scale",
"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "https://mastersofscale.com/",
"meta": {
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"source": "WaitWhat"
},
"link": "/radio/program/masters-of-scale",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "http://mastersofscale.app.link/",
"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mindshift-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/mindshift/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 12
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
"npr": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/464615685/mind-shift-podcast",
"stitcher": "https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/kqed/stories-teachers-share",
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}
},
"morning-edition": {
"id": "morning-edition",
"title": "Morning Edition",
"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3am-9am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Morning-Edition-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/",
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"link": "/radio/program/morning-edition"
},
"onourwatch": {
"id": "onourwatch",
"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/On-Our-Watch-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "On Our Watch from NPR and KQED",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "kqed",
"order": 11
},
"link": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1567098962",
"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ucHIub3JnLzUxMDM2MC9wb2RjYXN0LnhtbD9zYz1nb29nbGVwb2RjYXN0cw",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510360/podcast.xml"
}
},
"on-the-media": {
"id": "on-the-media",
"title": "On The Media",
"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm-3pm, MON 12am-1am",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/onTheMedia.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.wnycstudios.org/shows/otm",
"meta": {
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"source": "wnyc"
},
"link": "/radio/program/on-the-media",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/on-the-media/id73330715?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/On-the-Media-p69/",
"rss": "http://feeds.wnyc.org/onthemedia"
}
},
"pbs-newshour": {
"id": "pbs-newshour",
"title": "PBS NewsHour",
"info": "Analysis, background reports and updates from the PBS NewsHour putting today's news in context.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3pm-4pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/PBS-News-Hour-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "pbs"
},
"link": "/radio/program/pbs-newshour",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/pbs-newshour-full-show/id394432287?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/PBS-NewsHour---Full-Show-p425698/",
"rss": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/feeds/rss/podcasts/show"
}
},
"perspectives": {
"id": "perspectives",
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