Ever wonder where the internet stops and IRL begins? Close All Tabs breaks down how digital culture shapes our world through thoughtful insights and irreverent humor. From internet trends to AI slop to the politics of memes, Close All Tabs covers it all.
How will AI change our jobs and lives? Is the government watching what I post? Is there life beyond TikTok? Host Morgan Sung pulls from experts, the audience, and history to add context to the trends and depth to the memes. And she’ll wrestle with as many browser tabs as it takes to explain the cultural moment we’re all collectively living.
Support for Close All Tabs comes from Birong Hu and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund.
Close All Tabs Team
Morgan Sung
Host
Morgan Sung is a tech journalist whose work covers the range of absurdity and brilliance that is the internet. Her beat has evolved into an exploration of social platforms and how they shape real-world culture. She has written for TechCrunch, NBC News, Mashable, BuzzFeed News and more. Morgan Sung is represented by SAG-AFTRA.
Maya Cueva
Producer
Maya is the Producer for Close All Tabs, as well as an award winning director from Berkeley. She specializes in documentary, radio, and audio production. She was a Netflix Nonfiction Director and Producer fellow was also listed on DOC NYC’s 40 Under 40 Filmmakers, co-presented by HBO Documentary Films. Maya’s work has been featured on The New Yorker, NPR’s All Things Considered, Latino USA, The Atlantic, Teen Vogue, and National Geographic. She received a student Emmy for her short film, The Provider, and her feature film, On the Divide, premiered in the documentary competition at Tribeca Film Festival in 2021 and was broadcast on POV on PBS in Spring 2022. Maya Cueva is represented by SAG-AFTRA.
Chris Egusa
Senior Editor
Chris Egusa is the Senior Editor for Close All Tabs, as well as composer and sound designer. His reporting on disability and healthcare inequities has earned accolades from the Public Media Journalists Association, the Society of Professional Journalists NorCal, Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Webby Awards, and more. Chris’ background includes audio documentary production, filmmaking, and nonprofit strategy. He holds degrees from SJSU and Northwestern University’s Medill School. Chris is more online than he cares to admit, appreciates a good clicky mechanical keyboard, and definitely owns too many pairs of hi-fi headphones.
Chris Hambrick
Editor
Chris is an editor for KQED Podcasts and loves holding the big picture vision for shows. Previously they were a producer for Spooked Podcast from Snap Judgment Studios, host for The Tracklist on KGPC, as well as White Rabbit Story Hour podcast. They have contributed to KALW, KQED’s Bay Curious, and facilitated for national oral history project, StoryCorps. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can catch her telling stories on the Mortified, SFLitCrawl or Moth stages.
Jen Chien
Director of Podcasts
Jen Chien is Director of Podcasts at KQED and co-founder of the Editors Collective and Edit Mode. Previously, she was Executive Editor for LWC Studios, Senior Radio Editor at Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and Managing Editor for Crosscurrents and KALW News. Awards recognitions include Third Coast, Peabody, Gracies, ONA/OJA, and SPJ Sigma Delta Chi. She holds a BA in American Studies from Smith College, and an MA in Interdisciplinary Performance from New College of California.
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What are the chances that the internet could go down forever? How bad for humanity would it be if it did? And what would a shift back to the before-times look like? These are the kinds of questions “doom reporter” Ben Bradford tries to answer in his new podcast, \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://doompod.com/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Are We Doomed?\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Morgan and Ben discuss the scenarios that might lead to a long-term internet outage — from severed undersea cables to a massive solar storm. And they tackle the most pressing question of all: will influencers survive the internet apocalypse?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC7222381679\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guest: \u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ben Bradford, journalist and host of \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://doompod.com/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Are We Doomed? \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://doompod.com/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Are We Doomed?\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Ben Bradford, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Are We Doomed?\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://pod.link/1893359212/episode/cHJ4XzE2ODU3XzAxYmFmM2NmLWU4ZWEtNDM0ZS05YTFlLTgyYzgzMjE1OGI3Yg?view=apps&sort=popularity\">We Try and Kill the Internet\u003c/a> — Ben Bradford, \u003ci>Are We Doomed?\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-explains-how-its-aws-outage-took-down-the-web/\">Amazon Explains How Its AWS Outage Took Down the Web\u003c/a> – Matt Burgess and Lily Hay Newman, \u003ci>WIRED \u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.404media.co/the-aws-outage-bricked-peoples-2-700-smartbeds/\">The AWS Outage Bricked People’s $2,700 Smartbeds\u003c/a> – Matthew Gault, \u003ci>404 Media\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/complex-structure-supported-by-a-tiny-part\">Complex Structure Supported by a Tiny Part\u003c/a> – \u003ci>Know Your Meme \u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/04/02/a-stealth-attack-came-close-to-compromising-the-worlds-computers\">A Stealth Attack Came Close to Compromising the World’s Computers\u003c/a> – \u003ci>The Economist\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\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\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Do you like these deep dives? Whether you call yourself a Tabby or a Tab Head or part of the Tab Hive, if you’re a fan of Close All Tabs, it would be so, so helpful if you could rate and review the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you’re listening to us. Under our watch, every tab in the land will be closed, eventually. I mean, I have like 15 open right now. Okay, let’s get to the show\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> Okay, not to brag, but last year Close All Tabs won a pretty special award, the Media Literate Media Award from NAML. That’s the National Association for Media Literacy. According to them, we’ve helped listeners better understand the internet, which is pretty cool. Ben Bradford, a veteran public radio journalist, also won the award. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I recently talked with him, and obviously had to bring it up. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, thanks so much for joining us, Ben. Um, to start off, we both received NAMLE awards at the same time, which means that our takes are always correct. We are so media literate. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That’s exactly right. We- it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s been proven. We’re credentialed.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Exactly. I have a little plaque that says, “My takes are always correct.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ben has long been fascinated by politics and history and climate and disaster, which means he spends a lot of time thinking about the end of the world. And now he’s launched a new project. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> My name is Ben Bradford, and I am the creator and host of a new podcast that’s called Are We Doomed?, which is the cheery title for a show about the end of the world. And we look at practical threats to society and to humanity. We look at internet hysteria. We look at, like, our pop culture obsession with the end of the world, and try to find some hope in the darkness. And I think that we actually do that, which has been very fun.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Today, we’re actually doing something a little different than our usual deep dives. You see, Are We Doomed? recently explored my personal doomsday scenario. What happens if the internet goes out forever?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This would really suck for Close All Tabs, a show that literally revolves around the internet. It would also suck for me, someone who’s built an entire career around covering the online world. But this also goes way deeper than just a job. There are so many habits ingrained in my life that depend on internet access.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m not talking mindless scrolling. I mean daily functions, like LA earthquake Twitter\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I live in Los Angeles, so does Ben, and every time there’s even the slightest rumble afoot, I run straight to social media to check if it was indeed an earthquake. Despite its name, the concept of LA earthquake Twitter transcends a single social media platform. It’s the communal experience of everyone in Southern California going online to see if anyone else felt that rumble.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Was that an earthquake? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Most of the time it’s not, but there have been times when some earthquake hobbyist on social media confirms it before any news outlet does. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The earthquake one is funny ’cause I definitely do that, and I also get… You know how people get phantom vibrations for their phone- \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> where they think that their phone is buzzing? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I think I get that for earthquakes. I don’t know if you ever get that- Yeah … where I’m like, “Man, was that an earthquake?” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> But, you know, how will I ever be sure if, if I can’t check Twitter? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You need it \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This isn’t a frivolous concern, okay? The entire infrastructure of modern warning systems relies on internet connection.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For minor shakes, I’ll run to LA Earthquake Twitter, but if a big one’s coming, I’ll probably get a push alert from ShakeAlert first. That’s the West Coast Earthquake Warning System. It calculates the magnitude of potential earthquakes and where they might hit, and then automatically sends alerts to that area, which trigger safety actions like slowing down trains, shutting off elevators, and turning on hospital generators, and hopefully with enough time to get people to safety.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But to do all that, ShakeAlert gathers data from a sprawling network of sensors transmitted electronically online. The algorithms that figure out if an earthquake is actually dangerous process from the cloud. And to actually send this information to people, obviously the system needs the internet.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Internet connection is baked into every step of the process. It’s why the very concept of the internet going dark is such a terrifying doomsday event. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We have become so reliant on this very complicated technology, and that happens in various ways throughout human history. I think we can safely say there has not been one as complicated, and that requires so many other things to keep running. I mean, you know, from, uh, electricity to infrastructure to software. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> As a self-described doom reporter, this kept Ben up at night. LA Earthquake Twitter and the complex warning system behind it is just one example. The infrastructure of society is internet based. Our drinking water processing sites, our food supply chains, our hospital equipment, these all rely on systems that can only function with internet access.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So for his podcast, Are We Doomed?, Ben looked into it. I said we’re doing things a little differently for this one, right? Today, Ben and I are both going to take you on a deep dive as we attempt to get to the bottom of some questions you might be asking yourself right now. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Has the internet ever gone dark before? What kind of doomsday scenarios are we looking at here? Could we survive? And the question I was dying to ask, how likely is this really? Buckle up. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">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.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s get into it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, let’s open our first tab. How important is the internet to our lives?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Just like my fear of losing LA earthquake Twitter, this question feels frivolous. But like the warning system behind it, losing the internet will cut a lot deeper than you might think. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And so then the question becomes, one, how reliant are we actually? What ability do we have to roll back if this thing were to leave us, and not for an inconvenient couple of hours, not for a day, but for longer? And then two, is there a way for that to happen? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah. So you actually looked at a real world, um, case study of this that took place in northern Arizona in 2015. What happened there? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So 2015, the internet went out in Flagstaff and surrounding areas, and it is an interesting case study because of just how many things suddenly didn’t work and what people could figure out how to do and what they couldn’t figure out how to do.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Here’s an excerpt from this episode of Are We Doomed? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Northern Arizona, TV screens cut out. ATMs broke down. Credit card readers, gone. Cell phone service, gone. 911, jammed. Banks, courthouses, bars, you name it, in disarray\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What had happened was this big internet cable that delivers internet to that area of Arizona had been cut by copper thieves probably looking for copper wire. And so it’s sort of a small vulnerability. The cable’s just out there. It stretches hundreds of miles. You go, you saw in, you take the copper, and it has this really dramatic effect.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> From emergency services to sewer systems, it became clear that this one cable was foundational to the infrastructure that kept northern Arizona going. One reporter called it the area’s digital umbilical cord. This outage only lasted half a day and affected a 100-mile stretch of communities. It makes me wonder, what if the internet went down for the whole world, and it lasted much longer, even forever?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, but the situation in Arizona happened over 10 years ago. Surely society as a whole has learned from that experience and developed better backup plans since then, right? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So this is one of the questions that we looked at and didn’t thrill me because I don’t think that I loved the answers to it. As we embrace the internet more as a fundamental technology, and we build more things on top of it, we, we do simply have less backups. And so I remember talking to a friend of mine, I just pinged him while I was working on a story. Um, he’s the medical director in an emergency department at a major hospital, and I said, “Hey, if the internet went down, and not for a day, but for a while, what would it mean for you?” And he said, “We’d be out of luck.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s how we submit prescriptions. That is how we look up patients. That’s how we transfer them between places.” And so it’s funny because hospitals have backup generators, but they don’t have a backup internet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I’m thinking of that scene in The Pit when, uh, the hospital systems go down because of a cyber attack and- \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> all these doctors have to suddenly go back to clipboards and charting by hand and, like, reading manual, uh, test results. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>[Clip from The Pitt]:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This is how we rolled when I was a resident. Was that in the 1900s? Yeah, when charts were written by candlelight. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The part of it that I think is sort of fascinating is just how expansive that question becomes. Things that surprised me are, like, the degree to which our water treatment centers rely on network connectivity. There are reports that have been written, federal government inspector general reports or GAO reports, that look at the vulnerability of water treatment centers to cyber attacks, for instance, and that’s not great.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Uh, you would prefer that your water not be hacked, and I don’t know that we wanna create a system where we rely on our water where it’s vulnerable to hacking. Like, that’s sort of a strange thing. Uh- Well, who thought? Totally, and then it becomes, okay, in our sort of galaxy brain scenario where the whole internet goes down or this technology just becomes unfeasible, it’s like, yeah, your drinking water is degraded, if available at all, and that’s pretty wild. And it depends on the area that you’re in, and there’s some nuance to that, but it shows the extent to what we’re looking at here. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah. So it seems like a lot of these scenarios that we’ve talked about, the fictional one in The Pit or, you know- \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah … \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> the one in Arizona, like, all these scenarios have an end date or an end time.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Like, they will come to an end and that’s comforting. But in the event that the whole world’s internet does go dark, I mean, what would happen? Like, genuinely, would we die without the internet? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So I can’t predict the- … the future or the hypothetical of it, but I will say that I think it would be massively disruptive for a longer amount of time than we might think.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> When it comes to survival, the main questions are over food and water. Our food system is incredibly reliant on the internet. Crops don’t rely on the internet to grow, but the cargo shipping systems that get that food into our grocery stores do, and these systems also send necessary supplies to the farms that grow our food.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All of these systems rely on the internet and our ability to communicate through it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And while I am confident in humanity’s resilience and cleverness in being able to figure out workarounds, I think that the massive scale of the disruption, I mean, what it would do just to basically to money, you know, your stock market crashes, um, people can’t get access to their money. How often are you looking at paper bills, and what would those do for you in that world where so many other aspects of the financial system are down? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You start to get into this real hard-to-imagine world, right? But if you start kind of taking those individual pieces of hospitals and water treatment centers and the supply chain, and you add it all together, you get something that looks pretty dystopian and a lot like an apocalypse movie.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So that is, I think, what you’re dealing with in the near term if the internet goes down and doesn’t come back. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah, I mean, I’m gonna be honest, it’s really hard to not, like, hear this and then, want to, I don’t know, buy baby goat to move to Ohi, which is- Right. Yeah … like the furthest, most rural place I can imagine. Like- \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Before Ben and I get you all worked up into a panic, take a breath. Humanity survived for thousands of years before the internet, and if we had to, we could do it again, even if I personally would really rather not.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re gonna dive into these offline doomsday scenarios after a quick break, but first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you to keep us going.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You can support us by becoming a member at donate.kqed.org/podcasts. Okay, after the break, could the internet really go down for good?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Welcome back. Let’s open a new tab. Could the internet go dark forever?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I posed this question to Ben, and if it’s any small comfort, he says it’s actually a lot harder to make that happen than you might think, and that’s because of the way this physical infrastructure is built. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know how we call it the World Wide Web? The phrase is actually kind of literal. There are these undersea cables that span all across the globe.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It is this sort of spider web connecting all the different continents in different ways, and the internet runs through all of them. If you cut one, the software of the internet figures out how to reroute the information. So when you think about Northern Arizona, that happens to be one area where there was sort of a choke point, one sort of big pipe connecting the internet to that region, and there are other places like that.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We saw several years ago a volcanic eruption in the ocean, uh, near Tonga. An undersea volcano blew through the ocean’s floor. Smoke and ash erupted into the sky. The force of the explosion unleashed a devastating tsunami, and that explosion also ripped through the underwater cable that delivers internet to Tonga.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Without communication, other countries struggled to provide relief. Tongans couldn’t access outside money. Much of the nation relies on remittances from family off the islands. Those stopped. In that case, it was a natural disaster that cut off Tonga from the internet. But people do attack undersea cables, and it’s hard to prove sabotage, although countries are constantly accusing each other, because the cables are unprotected, innocent, perfect for attack.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It was another sort of look at just how disruptive this kind of thing can be. So internet cables being severed can be a problem, but because the internet is decentralized and because the software is designed to find where it’s not working and then reroute, it’s generally not that big of a problem. One pipe goes down, and you can repair it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so Tonga was sort of like the worst-case scenario of that, and even then, the pipe gets repaired relatively quickly, and there are some workarounds you can put in place in the meantime. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> During the Cold War, technologists started thinking about how to build a telecommunication system that could survive nuclear war.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Legend goes that the internet was built off of that, and so that’s that sort of decentralized network. One part goes down, and you imagine a spiderweb with, like, electricity running through it. Electricity runs through all the spiderweb, but one little tendril of spiderweb gets severed, and the electricity still courses through the rest of it, and that’s essentially how information flows through the internet.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So even if you were to go and sever a lot of the undersea cables, it would be a problem. It would create slowdowns, but any places that the pipes were still running to would still work. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That is comforting, simply cutting the cables connecting our world wouldn’t instantly doom us. But there is another theory of an event that could fry our internet, solar storms.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Solar storms are sudden bursts of energy from the sun with enough radiation that could affect our planet’s electrical systems. This has actually already happened on Earth in 1859. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> If you go back to the 1850s, the biggest technology of the day was the telegraph, and there was this event– it’s called the Carrington Event.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All of a sudden, around the world, telegraph machines start going crazy. Telegraph stations in some cases are lighting on fire because they’re overloading. People are unplugging their telegraphs, and the telegraphs are still chattering away, and they don’t know what’s happening, right? They think they’re possessed.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The night sky lit up like it was daytime. Some people thought it was daytime, and so they went to church. Uh, it was a solar storm. It was the biggest solar storm that we’ve had in recorded history \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And since 1859, we have become much more reliant on electricity. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> There are some questions about if we were to be hit with an equivalent event to that one back when there was telegraph, how well the internet would stand up. Like that seems to me like the best thing to blow out the hardware of the internet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But we have a government office called the Space Weather Center. It’s part of the, uh, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. You have utilities that are starting to take that threat more seriously. So you have some work being done, and I think the hope would be that by the time we have another one of those events, that we’re prepared.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So from what you’ve been telling me, it sounds like the internet is actually a lot more resilient than you might think, than the, the doomsday people might be worried about. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I feel really good about it. The two things that I worry about are, um, I think that there are some software vulnerabilities. There’s a famous, uh, web comic, uh, from XKCD.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s, it’s Randall Munroe, who’s a former NASA rocket scientist, and just is, just absolutely brilliant, and he does these web comics. And there’s a very famous one that he does about the internet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s titled Dependency. So this image shows a drawing of a giant intricate tower of blocks stacked in increasingly complicated ways as you move toward the top. Above it, there’s text that says, “All modern digital infrastructure.” This is like Jenga from hell. At the bottom is a comically thin block holding up all the others. The caption says, “A project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The artist posted Dependency in 2020, and it’s become a meme among software engineers who edit the tower higher and higher with even more precarious blocks.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Like, there’s this one edit that has the blocks off-kilter, balanced on a lever labeled AI. The tiny block propping up the whole tower is labeled unpaid open source developers, while an angry bird flies toward the structure, ready to topple it over. That one is labeled whatever Microsoft is doing. The point is the internet as we know it is this tower, cobbled together, perpetually built upon by hobbyists doing it for free and companies that have their own agenda.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And so if people were to identify those particular things, you could potentially knock them out and have unforeseen outages. Now, would that outage create, you know, the endless lack of internet? It seems like probably not. And it seems like people are clever and people are really good at hacking things in. But that’s one of the other vulnerabilities that we saw. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And it seems like it doesn’t necessarily need to be some kind of bad actor going after that one thing a guy built in his basement in 2003 to take down huge parts of the internet. You know, I’m thinking of the AWS outage last year. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, for listeners, AWS, or Amazon Web Services, it’s the cloud computing platform that pretty much everyone uses.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s the backbone of the internet. Last year, a DNS error brought it all down. DNS, domain name system. It’s the way the internet translates names to numbers, like translating the human language into one computers can understand. Some call DNS the phone book of the internet. Imagine all the contacts in your phone get wiped out, but your whole job is making calls.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You’re the cog that keeps your whole machine running. So without your phone book, everything comes grinding to a halt. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This led to a cascading comedy of errors that brought down, like, entire chunks of the internet. Like Ring cameras were down, online banking services went dark, my Roomba wouldn’t turn on because it couldn’t- \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Your Roomba? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> My Roomba actually went down. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah, obviously you can’t vacuum if you can’t use the internet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> No. Well, even worse, it kept turning on and then getting lost, and then trying to get back to its dock, but it couldn’t find anything, and I was like, “Stop turning on.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> What’d you do? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I literally turned it upside down like a bug. Oh my God. It was so annoying. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Um, people’s smart beds went down and suddenly changed to, like, 100 degrees overnight, or it s- automatically set alarms off- Mm-hmm … in the middle of the night. It, it’s like parts of society just kind of came to a halt because of this one bug.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> People have apartments they can’t get into, uh- Literally … unless there’s network connectivity. It… Literally, it’s like our whole lives are, like, smart devices now. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> In the event of a real doomsday scenario, what does last year’s AWS outage tell us about society’s ability to function without even parts of the internet?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Right. I mean, I think that that, again, is one of those examples that shows two sides of what we’re talking about here. It shows the level of disruption, and it also shows some of those pain points. Experts worry about the centralization of the internet because that becomes a potential vulnerability where one company goes down, one company has a bug like Amazon, and all of a sudden nothing works.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, that has only continued to build because 10, 15 years ago, if you were starting a business and it related in any way to the internet, you would buy your own servers, and you would usually host your own servers. But companies began to offer cloud services, and only a few companies are the big ones.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">AWS, Google has one, Oracle has one, and that is where almost all businesses now reside. So now you’ve again got this sort of larger vulnerability, and there’s a lot of security that they have, but things can go wrong ’cause they’re complicated. So the AWS outage is such a good example of that, and it shows you the reach that just that one company has in over all kinds of other things that we wouldn’t think are connected.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It was a stark reminder that entire swaths of the internet depend on just a handful of tech giants. This centralization is not ideal when one of those companies has a problem, like a tiny block propping up a precarious and ever-growing tower of digital infrastructure. One vulnerability could cause it to all come tumbling down.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The only other element that I wonder if we should talk about at all when we talk about the, the software side of things is, of course, like the big new player here is AI. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You’ve got something like, you know, Claude Mythos, which has been hyped up as something that can find vulnerabilities that nobody has found in software. And I think that there is a question of as AI continues to advance, if this is a thing that seems to be good at, it seems to be good at coding, it seems to be useful for that, can it help people find more vulnerabilities? Does that add to our vulnerability on the software side? And I don’t think we know yet, but I mean, certainly to me as doom reporter guy, I’m like, that doesn’t seem ideal.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Okay, we’ve talked about the ways the internet could feasibly be taken down, whether it’s a solar storm or a software bug. What would the world look like if it really did go down for good, if we were all forced offline and had to figure out how to make it work? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s open one more tab, Surviving the Internet Apocalypse.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The practical reality of like, oh, if the internet goes down, like we’ve talked about, it’s so much more deeply embedded in every aspect of like society and culture and our lives. What would a return to the before times actually look like? Is there any going back? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So I think that, uh, in some ways it’s like we’ve done it before, we could do it again. And we have examples from history of civilizations collapsing where the whole, again, sort of supply chain of a massive area of the world fell apart. And not to be the guy that talks about Rome, um, but that is one example, I’m sorry. Uh, where, you know, you had this sort of kind of incredible amount of trade going around the Mediterranean, supply chains that really, you know, brought things from the Middle East all the way to Europe and back, and that falls apart. And places figured out how to continue to survive, and they became less reliant on large trade routes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I think that if the internet, which is this big connector of societies, fell apart, we would figure it out. It probably would require some reliance on figuring out how to go local. Uh, it would present some major challenges.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think that like it’s hard to understate the level of challenges it would create because I do think things like figuring out how to get food to the places, figuring out how to get the things that grow the food to the right places is all a major challenge and a disruption for a matter of months, even if we could ultimately circumvent that, would be an issue.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But I’m pretty confident we’d figure it out.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If you ever camping and you’re in an area where your phone doesn’t get service, really quickly you put your phone away, and you kind of forget about it, and it becomes a non-issue because it’s just not there anymore. Whether we’re talking about Doom or we’re talking about just like everyday tasks, people kind of live their lives with what’s available to them. So I think that that would be true in an internet-less world. I think it would be true in a powerless world, a world where there wasn’t electricity. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All of those would be less comfortable. All of them would be worse in certain ways. I’m not rooting for any of those. But yeah, I have kind of like good optimism in humanity’s ability to, to figure those things out, just not without suffering.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I am wondering, like from your perspective, like, you know, you are a tech reporter, you are much more immersed in this side of things, and I’m just wondering, you know, what struck you about this story, if anything, that I might not have thought of? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You know, it’s funny, I, I started out reporting on the creator economy and memes and like influencers. Like That was kind of like the first jobs I had. I did have this thought of like, okay, society collapses, will influencers continue influencing? Will they just become local, you know, town criers? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Sure. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Will they become the person who’s like in the great market where everyone’s bartering again, where they’re like, “Everyone needs to get on this.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> yeah \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I did have this thought of like, hmm, I bet, you know, all these current influencers and their ring lights, they’re gonna find a way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We have an upcoming episode that looks at what a post-apocalypse might actually look like. How would it be different from what we see in the films, and what would you actually need probably to survive a post-apocalypse?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And as far as we can tell, in historic events that resemble today’s apocalypse scenarios, some society totally fractured, massive death, whatever. Um, I just said massive death whatever, and I regret that. But, um- … you know, in real big tragic scenarios, people do not flee to their bunkers. They come together and they reform communities.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So there are hard skills that seem to be useful like being able to grow food seems to be very useful. But there’s an argument that we hear that the most useful thing is communication, that it’s leading people to be able to work together. And I don’t know whether an influencer is like the best skill set to lead people and bring people together. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> But certainly in terms of having an authoritative voice that people will listen to, that skill set might be really useful. Yeah. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I mean, hey, I can’t wait till the apocalypse when we’re all just eating berries and someone’s like, “Oh, this berry’s the best one. Believe me.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This is the one. Yeah. Yeah. Here’s why I use it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Okay. After all of this reporting, um, as the now voice of doom scenarios, in this kind of like, I don’t know, mental ranking that you have of like this is the worst thing that could happen, where does the internet going down worldwide fall in that?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It is not high up on the list of things that I worry about. It is an example of a black swan event, something that essentially is not in any planning, that we consider to be sort of impregnable. So I think it’s worth considering from the perspective of what if it’s not? So this one feels very solvable.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It feels to me like a thing that people are thinking about to some extent, that we could take more seriously, that we should consider, but that we shouldn’t be like stressing about.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So yes, the internet going down is a possible doomsday event, but the likelihood of it happening is comparatively low compared to other apocalyptic scenarios, and if it does happen, we’ll figure out ways to survive it. That being said, Ben, as a doomsday reporter, thinks about this stuff a lot, and there are a few situations that do seriously worry him.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The big four, according to him: AI, nuclear war, climate change, pandemics. But those last three are way out of my scope of a deep dive. To hear more about those scenarios, you should check out Are We Doomed? You can find it wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll link to Ben’s episode about killing the internet, and some useful reading, if you’re interested in opening even more tabs about this.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And as usual, if you’re really that hungry for more, you can stick around after the credits for some bonus content. Okay, but for now, let’s close all these tabs\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Ana De Almeida Amaral and Chris Egusa. It was edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. The Close All Tabs team also includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick, and audio engineer Brendan Willard.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our director of podcasts, and Ethan Toven Lindsay 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/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">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. Thanks for listening.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Also, by the way, because we’re both running podcasts, uh, the fact that there is no podcast without the internet because that’s the way audio is shared- … that seems like a big problem for both of us. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I’m, you know, I think out of habit if the internet went down, I would just be, like, alone in my closet talking into a hairbrush, you know?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Right. That’s bleak.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"description": "What are the chances that the internet could go down forever? How bad for humanity would it be if it did? And what would a shift back to the before-times look like? These are the kinds of questions “doom reporter” Ben Bradford tries to answer in his new podcast, Are We Doomed? Morgan and Ben discuss the scenarios that might lead to a long-term internet outage — from severed undersea cables to a massive solar storm. And they tackle the most pressing question of all: will influencers survive the internet apocalypse?",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What are the chances that the internet could go down forever? How bad for humanity would it be if it did? And what would a shift back to the before-times look like? These are the kinds of questions “doom reporter” Ben Bradford tries to answer in his new podcast, \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://doompod.com/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Are We Doomed?\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Morgan and Ben discuss the scenarios that might lead to a long-term internet outage — from severed undersea cables to a massive solar storm. And they tackle the most pressing question of all: will influencers survive the internet apocalypse?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC7222381679\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Guest: \u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ben Bradford, journalist and host of \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://doompod.com/\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Are We Doomed? \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://doompod.com/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Are We Doomed?\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Ben Bradford, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Are We Doomed?\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://pod.link/1893359212/episode/cHJ4XzE2ODU3XzAxYmFmM2NmLWU4ZWEtNDM0ZS05YTFlLTgyYzgzMjE1OGI3Yg?view=apps&sort=popularity\">We Try and Kill the Internet\u003c/a> — Ben Bradford, \u003ci>Are We Doomed?\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-explains-how-its-aws-outage-took-down-the-web/\">Amazon Explains How Its AWS Outage Took Down the Web\u003c/a> – Matt Burgess and Lily Hay Newman, \u003ci>WIRED \u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.404media.co/the-aws-outage-bricked-peoples-2-700-smartbeds/\">The AWS Outage Bricked People’s $2,700 Smartbeds\u003c/a> – Matthew Gault, \u003ci>404 Media\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/complex-structure-supported-by-a-tiny-part\">Complex Structure Supported by a Tiny Part\u003c/a> – \u003ci>Know Your Meme \u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/04/02/a-stealth-attack-came-close-to-compromising-the-worlds-computers\">A Stealth Attack Came Close to Compromising the World’s Computers\u003c/a> – \u003ci>The Economist\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\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\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Do you like these deep dives? Whether you call yourself a Tabby or a Tab Head or part of the Tab Hive, if you’re a fan of Close All Tabs, it would be so, so helpful if you could rate and review the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you’re listening to us. Under our watch, every tab in the land will be closed, eventually. I mean, I have like 15 open right now. Okay, let’s get to the show\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b> Okay, not to brag, but last year Close All Tabs won a pretty special award, the Media Literate Media Award from NAML. That’s the National Association for Media Literacy. According to them, we’ve helped listeners better understand the internet, which is pretty cool. Ben Bradford, a veteran public radio journalist, also won the award. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I recently talked with him, and obviously had to bring it up. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, thanks so much for joining us, Ben. Um, to start off, we both received NAMLE awards at the same time, which means that our takes are always correct. We are so media literate. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That’s exactly right. We- it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s been proven. We’re credentialed.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Exactly. I have a little plaque that says, “My takes are always correct.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Ben has long been fascinated by politics and history and climate and disaster, which means he spends a lot of time thinking about the end of the world. And now he’s launched a new project. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> My name is Ben Bradford, and I am the creator and host of a new podcast that’s called Are We Doomed?, which is the cheery title for a show about the end of the world. And we look at practical threats to society and to humanity. We look at internet hysteria. We look at, like, our pop culture obsession with the end of the world, and try to find some hope in the darkness. And I think that we actually do that, which has been very fun.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Today, we’re actually doing something a little different than our usual deep dives. You see, Are We Doomed? recently explored my personal doomsday scenario. What happens if the internet goes out forever?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This would really suck for Close All Tabs, a show that literally revolves around the internet. It would also suck for me, someone who’s built an entire career around covering the online world. But this also goes way deeper than just a job. There are so many habits ingrained in my life that depend on internet access.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m not talking mindless scrolling. I mean daily functions, like LA earthquake Twitter\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I live in Los Angeles, so does Ben, and every time there’s even the slightest rumble afoot, I run straight to social media to check if it was indeed an earthquake. Despite its name, the concept of LA earthquake Twitter transcends a single social media platform. It’s the communal experience of everyone in Southern California going online to see if anyone else felt that rumble.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Was that an earthquake? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Most of the time it’s not, but there have been times when some earthquake hobbyist on social media confirms it before any news outlet does. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The earthquake one is funny ’cause I definitely do that, and I also get… You know how people get phantom vibrations for their phone- \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> where they think that their phone is buzzing? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I think I get that for earthquakes. I don’t know if you ever get that- Yeah … where I’m like, “Man, was that an earthquake?” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> But, you know, how will I ever be sure if, if I can’t check Twitter? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You need it \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This isn’t a frivolous concern, okay? The entire infrastructure of modern warning systems relies on internet connection.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For minor shakes, I’ll run to LA Earthquake Twitter, but if a big one’s coming, I’ll probably get a push alert from ShakeAlert first. That’s the West Coast Earthquake Warning System. It calculates the magnitude of potential earthquakes and where they might hit, and then automatically sends alerts to that area, which trigger safety actions like slowing down trains, shutting off elevators, and turning on hospital generators, and hopefully with enough time to get people to safety.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But to do all that, ShakeAlert gathers data from a sprawling network of sensors transmitted electronically online. The algorithms that figure out if an earthquake is actually dangerous process from the cloud. And to actually send this information to people, obviously the system needs the internet.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Internet connection is baked into every step of the process. It’s why the very concept of the internet going dark is such a terrifying doomsday event. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We have become so reliant on this very complicated technology, and that happens in various ways throughout human history. I think we can safely say there has not been one as complicated, and that requires so many other things to keep running. I mean, you know, from, uh, electricity to infrastructure to software. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> As a self-described doom reporter, this kept Ben up at night. LA Earthquake Twitter and the complex warning system behind it is just one example. The infrastructure of society is internet based. Our drinking water processing sites, our food supply chains, our hospital equipment, these all rely on systems that can only function with internet access.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So for his podcast, Are We Doomed?, Ben looked into it. I said we’re doing things a little differently for this one, right? Today, Ben and I are both going to take you on a deep dive as we attempt to get to the bottom of some questions you might be asking yourself right now. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Has the internet ever gone dark before? What kind of doomsday scenarios are we looking at here? Could we survive? And the question I was dying to ask, how likely is this really? Buckle up. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">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.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s get into it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, let’s open our first tab. How important is the internet to our lives?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Just like my fear of losing LA earthquake Twitter, this question feels frivolous. But like the warning system behind it, losing the internet will cut a lot deeper than you might think. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And so then the question becomes, one, how reliant are we actually? What ability do we have to roll back if this thing were to leave us, and not for an inconvenient couple of hours, not for a day, but for longer? And then two, is there a way for that to happen? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah. So you actually looked at a real world, um, case study of this that took place in northern Arizona in 2015. What happened there? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So 2015, the internet went out in Flagstaff and surrounding areas, and it is an interesting case study because of just how many things suddenly didn’t work and what people could figure out how to do and what they couldn’t figure out how to do.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Here’s an excerpt from this episode of Are We Doomed? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Northern Arizona, TV screens cut out. ATMs broke down. Credit card readers, gone. Cell phone service, gone. 911, jammed. Banks, courthouses, bars, you name it, in disarray\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What had happened was this big internet cable that delivers internet to that area of Arizona had been cut by copper thieves probably looking for copper wire. And so it’s sort of a small vulnerability. The cable’s just out there. It stretches hundreds of miles. You go, you saw in, you take the copper, and it has this really dramatic effect.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> From emergency services to sewer systems, it became clear that this one cable was foundational to the infrastructure that kept northern Arizona going. One reporter called it the area’s digital umbilical cord. This outage only lasted half a day and affected a 100-mile stretch of communities. It makes me wonder, what if the internet went down for the whole world, and it lasted much longer, even forever?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, but the situation in Arizona happened over 10 years ago. Surely society as a whole has learned from that experience and developed better backup plans since then, right? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So this is one of the questions that we looked at and didn’t thrill me because I don’t think that I loved the answers to it. As we embrace the internet more as a fundamental technology, and we build more things on top of it, we, we do simply have less backups. And so I remember talking to a friend of mine, I just pinged him while I was working on a story. Um, he’s the medical director in an emergency department at a major hospital, and I said, “Hey, if the internet went down, and not for a day, but for a while, what would it mean for you?” And he said, “We’d be out of luck.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s how we submit prescriptions. That is how we look up patients. That’s how we transfer them between places.” And so it’s funny because hospitals have backup generators, but they don’t have a backup internet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I’m thinking of that scene in The Pit when, uh, the hospital systems go down because of a cyber attack and- \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> all these doctors have to suddenly go back to clipboards and charting by hand and, like, reading manual, uh, test results. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>[Clip from The Pitt]:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This is how we rolled when I was a resident. Was that in the 1900s? Yeah, when charts were written by candlelight. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The part of it that I think is sort of fascinating is just how expansive that question becomes. Things that surprised me are, like, the degree to which our water treatment centers rely on network connectivity. There are reports that have been written, federal government inspector general reports or GAO reports, that look at the vulnerability of water treatment centers to cyber attacks, for instance, and that’s not great.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Uh, you would prefer that your water not be hacked, and I don’t know that we wanna create a system where we rely on our water where it’s vulnerable to hacking. Like, that’s sort of a strange thing. Uh- Well, who thought? Totally, and then it becomes, okay, in our sort of galaxy brain scenario where the whole internet goes down or this technology just becomes unfeasible, it’s like, yeah, your drinking water is degraded, if available at all, and that’s pretty wild. And it depends on the area that you’re in, and there’s some nuance to that, but it shows the extent to what we’re looking at here. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah. So it seems like a lot of these scenarios that we’ve talked about, the fictional one in The Pit or, you know- \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah … \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> the one in Arizona, like, all these scenarios have an end date or an end time.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Like, they will come to an end and that’s comforting. But in the event that the whole world’s internet does go dark, I mean, what would happen? Like, genuinely, would we die without the internet? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So I can’t predict the- … the future or the hypothetical of it, but I will say that I think it would be massively disruptive for a longer amount of time than we might think.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> When it comes to survival, the main questions are over food and water. Our food system is incredibly reliant on the internet. Crops don’t rely on the internet to grow, but the cargo shipping systems that get that food into our grocery stores do, and these systems also send necessary supplies to the farms that grow our food.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All of these systems rely on the internet and our ability to communicate through it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And while I am confident in humanity’s resilience and cleverness in being able to figure out workarounds, I think that the massive scale of the disruption, I mean, what it would do just to basically to money, you know, your stock market crashes, um, people can’t get access to their money. How often are you looking at paper bills, and what would those do for you in that world where so many other aspects of the financial system are down? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You start to get into this real hard-to-imagine world, right? But if you start kind of taking those individual pieces of hospitals and water treatment centers and the supply chain, and you add it all together, you get something that looks pretty dystopian and a lot like an apocalypse movie.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So that is, I think, what you’re dealing with in the near term if the internet goes down and doesn’t come back. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah, I mean, I’m gonna be honest, it’s really hard to not, like, hear this and then, want to, I don’t know, buy baby goat to move to Ohi, which is- Right. Yeah … like the furthest, most rural place I can imagine. Like- \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Before Ben and I get you all worked up into a panic, take a breath. Humanity survived for thousands of years before the internet, and if we had to, we could do it again, even if I personally would really rather not.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re gonna dive into these offline doomsday scenarios after a quick break, but first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you to keep us going.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You can support us by becoming a member at donate.kqed.org/podcasts. Okay, after the break, could the internet really go down for good?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Welcome back. Let’s open a new tab. Could the internet go dark forever?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I posed this question to Ben, and if it’s any small comfort, he says it’s actually a lot harder to make that happen than you might think, and that’s because of the way this physical infrastructure is built. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know how we call it the World Wide Web? The phrase is actually kind of literal. There are these undersea cables that span all across the globe.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It is this sort of spider web connecting all the different continents in different ways, and the internet runs through all of them. If you cut one, the software of the internet figures out how to reroute the information. So when you think about Northern Arizona, that happens to be one area where there was sort of a choke point, one sort of big pipe connecting the internet to that region, and there are other places like that.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We saw several years ago a volcanic eruption in the ocean, uh, near Tonga. An undersea volcano blew through the ocean’s floor. Smoke and ash erupted into the sky. The force of the explosion unleashed a devastating tsunami, and that explosion also ripped through the underwater cable that delivers internet to Tonga.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Without communication, other countries struggled to provide relief. Tongans couldn’t access outside money. Much of the nation relies on remittances from family off the islands. Those stopped. In that case, it was a natural disaster that cut off Tonga from the internet. But people do attack undersea cables, and it’s hard to prove sabotage, although countries are constantly accusing each other, because the cables are unprotected, innocent, perfect for attack.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It was another sort of look at just how disruptive this kind of thing can be. So internet cables being severed can be a problem, but because the internet is decentralized and because the software is designed to find where it’s not working and then reroute, it’s generally not that big of a problem. One pipe goes down, and you can repair it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so Tonga was sort of like the worst-case scenario of that, and even then, the pipe gets repaired relatively quickly, and there are some workarounds you can put in place in the meantime. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> During the Cold War, technologists started thinking about how to build a telecommunication system that could survive nuclear war.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Legend goes that the internet was built off of that, and so that’s that sort of decentralized network. One part goes down, and you imagine a spiderweb with, like, electricity running through it. Electricity runs through all the spiderweb, but one little tendril of spiderweb gets severed, and the electricity still courses through the rest of it, and that’s essentially how information flows through the internet.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So even if you were to go and sever a lot of the undersea cables, it would be a problem. It would create slowdowns, but any places that the pipes were still running to would still work. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That is comforting, simply cutting the cables connecting our world wouldn’t instantly doom us. But there is another theory of an event that could fry our internet, solar storms.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Solar storms are sudden bursts of energy from the sun with enough radiation that could affect our planet’s electrical systems. This has actually already happened on Earth in 1859. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> If you go back to the 1850s, the biggest technology of the day was the telegraph, and there was this event– it’s called the Carrington Event.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All of a sudden, around the world, telegraph machines start going crazy. Telegraph stations in some cases are lighting on fire because they’re overloading. People are unplugging their telegraphs, and the telegraphs are still chattering away, and they don’t know what’s happening, right? They think they’re possessed.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The night sky lit up like it was daytime. Some people thought it was daytime, and so they went to church. Uh, it was a solar storm. It was the biggest solar storm that we’ve had in recorded history \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And since 1859, we have become much more reliant on electricity. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> There are some questions about if we were to be hit with an equivalent event to that one back when there was telegraph, how well the internet would stand up. Like that seems to me like the best thing to blow out the hardware of the internet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But we have a government office called the Space Weather Center. It’s part of the, uh, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. You have utilities that are starting to take that threat more seriously. So you have some work being done, and I think the hope would be that by the time we have another one of those events, that we’re prepared.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So from what you’ve been telling me, it sounds like the internet is actually a lot more resilient than you might think, than the, the doomsday people might be worried about. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I feel really good about it. The two things that I worry about are, um, I think that there are some software vulnerabilities. There’s a famous, uh, web comic, uh, from XKCD.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s, it’s Randall Munroe, who’s a former NASA rocket scientist, and just is, just absolutely brilliant, and he does these web comics. And there’s a very famous one that he does about the internet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s titled Dependency. So this image shows a drawing of a giant intricate tower of blocks stacked in increasingly complicated ways as you move toward the top. Above it, there’s text that says, “All modern digital infrastructure.” This is like Jenga from hell. At the bottom is a comically thin block holding up all the others. The caption says, “A project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The artist posted Dependency in 2020, and it’s become a meme among software engineers who edit the tower higher and higher with even more precarious blocks.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Like, there’s this one edit that has the blocks off-kilter, balanced on a lever labeled AI. The tiny block propping up the whole tower is labeled unpaid open source developers, while an angry bird flies toward the structure, ready to topple it over. That one is labeled whatever Microsoft is doing. The point is the internet as we know it is this tower, cobbled together, perpetually built upon by hobbyists doing it for free and companies that have their own agenda.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And so if people were to identify those particular things, you could potentially knock them out and have unforeseen outages. Now, would that outage create, you know, the endless lack of internet? It seems like probably not. And it seems like people are clever and people are really good at hacking things in. But that’s one of the other vulnerabilities that we saw. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> And it seems like it doesn’t necessarily need to be some kind of bad actor going after that one thing a guy built in his basement in 2003 to take down huge parts of the internet. You know, I’m thinking of the AWS outage last year. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, for listeners, AWS, or Amazon Web Services, it’s the cloud computing platform that pretty much everyone uses.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s the backbone of the internet. Last year, a DNS error brought it all down. DNS, domain name system. It’s the way the internet translates names to numbers, like translating the human language into one computers can understand. Some call DNS the phone book of the internet. Imagine all the contacts in your phone get wiped out, but your whole job is making calls.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You’re the cog that keeps your whole machine running. So without your phone book, everything comes grinding to a halt. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This led to a cascading comedy of errors that brought down, like, entire chunks of the internet. Like Ring cameras were down, online banking services went dark, my Roomba wouldn’t turn on because it couldn’t- \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Your Roomba? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> My Roomba actually went down. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah, obviously you can’t vacuum if you can’t use the internet. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> No. Well, even worse, it kept turning on and then getting lost, and then trying to get back to its dock, but it couldn’t find anything, and I was like, “Stop turning on.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> What’d you do? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I literally turned it upside down like a bug. Oh my God. It was so annoying. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Um, people’s smart beds went down and suddenly changed to, like, 100 degrees overnight, or it s- automatically set alarms off- Mm-hmm … in the middle of the night. It, it’s like parts of society just kind of came to a halt because of this one bug.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> People have apartments they can’t get into, uh- Literally … unless there’s network connectivity. It… Literally, it’s like our whole lives are, like, smart devices now. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> In the event of a real doomsday scenario, what does last year’s AWS outage tell us about society’s ability to function without even parts of the internet?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Right. I mean, I think that that, again, is one of those examples that shows two sides of what we’re talking about here. It shows the level of disruption, and it also shows some of those pain points. Experts worry about the centralization of the internet because that becomes a potential vulnerability where one company goes down, one company has a bug like Amazon, and all of a sudden nothing works.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, that has only continued to build because 10, 15 years ago, if you were starting a business and it related in any way to the internet, you would buy your own servers, and you would usually host your own servers. But companies began to offer cloud services, and only a few companies are the big ones.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">AWS, Google has one, Oracle has one, and that is where almost all businesses now reside. So now you’ve again got this sort of larger vulnerability, and there’s a lot of security that they have, but things can go wrong ’cause they’re complicated. So the AWS outage is such a good example of that, and it shows you the reach that just that one company has in over all kinds of other things that we wouldn’t think are connected.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It was a stark reminder that entire swaths of the internet depend on just a handful of tech giants. This centralization is not ideal when one of those companies has a problem, like a tiny block propping up a precarious and ever-growing tower of digital infrastructure. One vulnerability could cause it to all come tumbling down.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The only other element that I wonder if we should talk about at all when we talk about the, the software side of things is, of course, like the big new player here is AI. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You’ve got something like, you know, Claude Mythos, which has been hyped up as something that can find vulnerabilities that nobody has found in software. And I think that there is a question of as AI continues to advance, if this is a thing that seems to be good at, it seems to be good at coding, it seems to be useful for that, can it help people find more vulnerabilities? Does that add to our vulnerability on the software side? And I don’t think we know yet, but I mean, certainly to me as doom reporter guy, I’m like, that doesn’t seem ideal.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Okay, we’ve talked about the ways the internet could feasibly be taken down, whether it’s a solar storm or a software bug. What would the world look like if it really did go down for good, if we were all forced offline and had to figure out how to make it work? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s open one more tab, Surviving the Internet Apocalypse.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The practical reality of like, oh, if the internet goes down, like we’ve talked about, it’s so much more deeply embedded in every aspect of like society and culture and our lives. What would a return to the before times actually look like? Is there any going back? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So I think that, uh, in some ways it’s like we’ve done it before, we could do it again. And we have examples from history of civilizations collapsing where the whole, again, sort of supply chain of a massive area of the world fell apart. And not to be the guy that talks about Rome, um, but that is one example, I’m sorry. Uh, where, you know, you had this sort of kind of incredible amount of trade going around the Mediterranean, supply chains that really, you know, brought things from the Middle East all the way to Europe and back, and that falls apart. And places figured out how to continue to survive, and they became less reliant on large trade routes. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I think that if the internet, which is this big connector of societies, fell apart, we would figure it out. It probably would require some reliance on figuring out how to go local. Uh, it would present some major challenges.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think that like it’s hard to understate the level of challenges it would create because I do think things like figuring out how to get food to the places, figuring out how to get the things that grow the food to the right places is all a major challenge and a disruption for a matter of months, even if we could ultimately circumvent that, would be an issue.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But I’m pretty confident we’d figure it out.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If you ever camping and you’re in an area where your phone doesn’t get service, really quickly you put your phone away, and you kind of forget about it, and it becomes a non-issue because it’s just not there anymore. Whether we’re talking about Doom or we’re talking about just like everyday tasks, people kind of live their lives with what’s available to them. So I think that that would be true in an internet-less world. I think it would be true in a powerless world, a world where there wasn’t electricity. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All of those would be less comfortable. All of them would be worse in certain ways. I’m not rooting for any of those. But yeah, I have kind of like good optimism in humanity’s ability to, to figure those things out, just not without suffering.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I am wondering, like from your perspective, like, you know, you are a tech reporter, you are much more immersed in this side of things, and I’m just wondering, you know, what struck you about this story, if anything, that I might not have thought of? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> You know, it’s funny, I, I started out reporting on the creator economy and memes and like influencers. Like That was kind of like the first jobs I had. I did have this thought of like, okay, society collapses, will influencers continue influencing? Will they just become local, you know, town criers? \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Sure. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Will they become the person who’s like in the great market where everyone’s bartering again, where they’re like, “Everyone needs to get on this.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> yeah \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I did have this thought of like, hmm, I bet, you know, all these current influencers and their ring lights, they’re gonna find a way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We have an upcoming episode that looks at what a post-apocalypse might actually look like. How would it be different from what we see in the films, and what would you actually need probably to survive a post-apocalypse?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And as far as we can tell, in historic events that resemble today’s apocalypse scenarios, some society totally fractured, massive death, whatever. Um, I just said massive death whatever, and I regret that. But, um- … you know, in real big tragic scenarios, people do not flee to their bunkers. They come together and they reform communities.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So there are hard skills that seem to be useful like being able to grow food seems to be very useful. But there’s an argument that we hear that the most useful thing is communication, that it’s leading people to be able to work together. And I don’t know whether an influencer is like the best skill set to lead people and bring people together. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> But certainly in terms of having an authoritative voice that people will listen to, that skill set might be really useful. Yeah. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I mean, hey, I can’t wait till the apocalypse when we’re all just eating berries and someone’s like, “Oh, this berry’s the best one. Believe me.” \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This is the one. Yeah. Yeah. Here’s why I use it. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Okay. After all of this reporting, um, as the now voice of doom scenarios, in this kind of like, I don’t know, mental ranking that you have of like this is the worst thing that could happen, where does the internet going down worldwide fall in that?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It is not high up on the list of things that I worry about. It is an example of a black swan event, something that essentially is not in any planning, that we consider to be sort of impregnable. So I think it’s worth considering from the perspective of what if it’s not? So this one feels very solvable.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It feels to me like a thing that people are thinking about to some extent, that we could take more seriously, that we should consider, but that we shouldn’t be like stressing about.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So yes, the internet going down is a possible doomsday event, but the likelihood of it happening is comparatively low compared to other apocalyptic scenarios, and if it does happen, we’ll figure out ways to survive it. That being said, Ben, as a doomsday reporter, thinks about this stuff a lot, and there are a few situations that do seriously worry him.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The big four, according to him: AI, nuclear war, climate change, pandemics. But those last three are way out of my scope of a deep dive. To hear more about those scenarios, you should check out Are We Doomed? You can find it wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll link to Ben’s episode about killing the internet, and some useful reading, if you’re interested in opening even more tabs about this.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And as usual, if you’re really that hungry for more, you can stick around after the credits for some bonus content. Okay, but for now, let’s close all these tabs\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Ana De Almeida Amaral and Chris Egusa. It was edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. The Close All Tabs team also includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick, and audio engineer Brendan Willard.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our director of podcasts, and Ethan Toven Lindsay 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/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">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. Thanks for listening.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Also, by the way, because we’re both running podcasts, uh, the fact that there is no podcast without the internet because that’s the way audio is shared- … that seems like a big problem for both of us. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I’m, you know, I think out of habit if the internet went down, I would just be, like, alone in my closet talking into a hairbrush, you know?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ben Bradford:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Right. That’s bleak.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>"
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"title": "'Get The Flock Out': The Fight Over License-Plate Readers Heats Up",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Flock Safety’s license plate readers have become a flashpoint for a debate across the country. On one side: law enforcement and their supporters, who say the cameras reduce crime and improve public safety. On the other: residents and advocates worried about a creeping surveillance state and the myriad security issues Flock has already been exposed for.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Morgan talks to Bay Area reporters Roselyn Romero and Riley Cooke about the fight over Flock spreading throughout the region, what we still don’t know about how Flock’s data is used and how some residents are finding creative ways to push back.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC6560783367\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://oaklandside.org/author/roselyn-romero/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Roselyn Romero\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, public safety journalist at \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Oaklandside \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.paloaltoonline.com/author/rcookeembarcaderopublishing-com/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Riley Cooke\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, reporter at \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Palo Alto Weekly \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We Hacked Flock Safety Cameras in under 30 Seconds \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— Benn Jordan, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Youtube \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://sanjosespotlight.com/palo-alto-license-plate-data-searched-by-hundreds-of-out-of-state-agencies/\">Palo Alto license plate data searched by hundreds of out-of-state agencies\u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Riley Cooke, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>Palo Alto Weekly\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://oaklandside.org/2026/05/28/flock-training-police-city-councils-webinar/\">Flock is quietly training Bay Area police to sway city leaders to buy surveillance tech\u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Roselyn Romero, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>The Oaklandside \u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.404media.co/flock-exposed-its-ai-powered-cameras-to-the-internet-we-tracked-ourselves/\">Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves\u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Jason Koebler, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci>404 Media\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://knock-la.com/does-flock-safety-keep-women-safe/\">Does Flock Safety Keep Women Safe?\u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Jayme Kusyk, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>Knock LA\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://ij.org/police-have-reportedly-used-license-plate-readers-to-stalk-romantic-interests-at-least-14-times-in-recent-years/\">Police Have Reportedly Used License Plate Readers to Stalk Romantic Interests at Least 21 Times in Recent Years \u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci> —\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Christopher Ingraham, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>Institute for Justice\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://prospect.org/2026/05/21/home-depot-lowes-downplay-customer-surveillance-threats-flock-cameras-immigration/\">Home Depot and Lowe’s Downplay Customer Surveillance Threats\u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Whitney Curry Wimbish, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>The American Prospect\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.whro.org/business-growth/2026-01-20/flock-cameras-in-hampton-roads-surveil-black-communities-more-intensely-than-white-ones-cnu-study-says\">Flock cameras in Hampton Roads surveil Black communities more intensely than white ones, CNU study says\u003c/a> — Toby Cox, \u003ci>WHRO\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.404media.co/ice-taps-into-nationwide-ai-enabled-camera-network-data-shows/\">ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network, Data Shows\u003c/a> — Jason Koebler & Joseph Cox, \u003ci>404 Media\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://oaklandside.org/2026/04/24/who-is-paint-bombing-oaklands-flock-cameras/\">Who is paint bombing Oakland’s Flock cameras?\u003c/a> — Eli Wolfe, \u003ci>The Oaklandside\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/across-the-us-people-are-dismantling\">Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras\u003c/a> — Brian Merchant, \u003ci>Blood In The Machine\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/sf-car-break-in-data-18639763.php\">Has S.F. cracked how to fix the car break-in crisis? Here’s what is driving the decline\u003c/a> — Rachel Swan, \u003ci>San Francisco Chronicle \u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\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\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A full transcript will be available 1–2 workdays after the episode’s publication.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Flock Safety’s license plate readers have become a flashpoint for a debate across the country. On one side: law enforcement and their supporters, who say the cameras reduce crime and improve public safety. On the other: residents and advocates worried about a creeping surveillance state and the myriad security issues Flock has already been exposed for.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Morgan talks to Bay Area reporters Roselyn Romero and Riley Cooke about the fight over Flock spreading throughout the region, what we still don’t know about how Flock’s data is used and how some residents are finding creative ways to push back.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC6560783367\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://oaklandside.org/author/roselyn-romero/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Roselyn Romero\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, public safety journalist at \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Oaklandside \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.paloaltoonline.com/author/rcookeembarcaderopublishing-com/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Riley Cooke\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, reporter at \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Palo Alto Weekly \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We Hacked Flock Safety Cameras in under 30 Seconds \u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— Benn Jordan, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Youtube \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://sanjosespotlight.com/palo-alto-license-plate-data-searched-by-hundreds-of-out-of-state-agencies/\">Palo Alto license plate data searched by hundreds of out-of-state agencies\u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Riley Cooke, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>Palo Alto Weekly\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://oaklandside.org/2026/05/28/flock-training-police-city-councils-webinar/\">Flock is quietly training Bay Area police to sway city leaders to buy surveillance tech\u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Roselyn Romero, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>The Oaklandside \u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.404media.co/flock-exposed-its-ai-powered-cameras-to-the-internet-we-tracked-ourselves/\">Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves\u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Jason Koebler, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci>404 Media\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://knock-la.com/does-flock-safety-keep-women-safe/\">Does Flock Safety Keep Women Safe?\u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Jayme Kusyk, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>Knock LA\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://ij.org/police-have-reportedly-used-license-plate-readers-to-stalk-romantic-interests-at-least-14-times-in-recent-years/\">Police Have Reportedly Used License Plate Readers to Stalk Romantic Interests at Least 21 Times in Recent Years \u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci> —\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Christopher Ingraham, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>Institute for Justice\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://prospect.org/2026/05/21/home-depot-lowes-downplay-customer-surveillance-threats-flock-cameras-immigration/\">Home Depot and Lowe’s Downplay Customer Surveillance Threats\u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Whitney Curry Wimbish, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>The American Prospect\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.whro.org/business-growth/2026-01-20/flock-cameras-in-hampton-roads-surveil-black-communities-more-intensely-than-white-ones-cnu-study-says\">Flock cameras in Hampton Roads surveil Black communities more intensely than white ones, CNU study says\u003c/a> — Toby Cox, \u003ci>WHRO\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.404media.co/ice-taps-into-nationwide-ai-enabled-camera-network-data-shows/\">ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network, Data Shows\u003c/a> — Jason Koebler & Joseph Cox, \u003ci>404 Media\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://oaklandside.org/2026/04/24/who-is-paint-bombing-oaklands-flock-cameras/\">Who is paint bombing Oakland’s Flock cameras?\u003c/a> — Eli Wolfe, \u003ci>The Oaklandside\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/across-the-us-people-are-dismantling\">Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras\u003c/a> — Brian Merchant, \u003ci>Blood In The Machine\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/sf-car-break-in-data-18639763.php\">Has S.F. cracked how to fix the car break-in crisis? 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"slug": "meet-the-grads-grappling-with-ai-and-their-futures",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Everyone seems to have an opinion about AI, but what about those who will likely be affected most — recent graduates?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This cohort of grads is unique. They remember what classrooms were like before the emergence of ChatGPT in 2022, and have seen how it transformed the education world seemingly overnight. Today, we hear from three recent graduates in the Bay Area about their thoughts on AI, how it affected their education, and how they feel about their futures. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This week, we’re sharing a recent \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12085502/three-recent-graduates-share-their-thoughts-on-ai\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">episode\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> from KQED podcast \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/podcasts/thebay\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Bay\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — a show that takes an in-depth look at stories from across the SF Bay Area.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC2030502225\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\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\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> 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, Bluesky, X, Discord, Reddit, the comments of whatever random recipe blog you start arguments in … basically, it would be a huge help to get the word out. Ok, let’s get to the show.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hey, it’s Morgan. So, Close All Tabs is on vacation this week. Shocking, I know! We do log off sometimes. Or at least, we try to. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But don’t worry — we still have an episode for you today. On Close All Tabs, we’re always talking about AI … from the way data centers are changing local communities, to the drama that industry billionaires are getting themselves into. About a year ago, we dove into how some teachers are dealing with the AI boom in their classrooms. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Today, we’re gonna hear the other side of that story, from young people who’ve been in the thick of it, but don’t always get to share their perspective. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Our friends at The Bay, another KQED podcast, spoke to a few recent college graduates about AI. This is a unique cohort of students: they remember what classrooms were like before ChatGPT, and they’ve seen how much it’s changed learning. They spoke to The Bay about how AI affected their college experience, and how they feel about entering the workforce in such rapidly changing industries. What are they really thinking about their futures? What’s on their minds?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Alright, here’s Three Recent Graduates Share Their Thoughts on AI, from \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Bay\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Alan Montecillo:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I’m Alan Montecillo, in for Erika Cruz Guevara, and welcome to The Bay. Local news to keep you rooted. I graduated from college 13 years ago, and I gotta be honest, no disrespect, but I don’t remember who the commencement speaker was or what they talked about. Most graduation speeches have the same themes. Some message about hope. Thanking your friends and family, the importance of following your passion, and perhaps a call to change the world for the better. But this graduation season has felt a little different.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gloria Caulfield:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Alan Montecillo:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> There have been several videos of students booing commencement speakers when they mention AI. These videos have gone viral.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Eric Schmidt:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Time magazine selected its person of the year for 2025. And it was this time, it was the architects of artificial intelligence. Interesting.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Scott Borschetta:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> AI is rewriting production as we sit here. I know it, deal with it. Like I said, it’s a tool. Hey, like I said. You can hear me now or you can pay me later.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Alan Montecillo:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Today’s college graduates were in school when ChatGPT was first released in late 2022. They’ve seen it change their classrooms. Today, three recent graduates in the Bay Area tell us how they really feel about AI and about their futures.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ellena Simentel: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">My name is Ellena Simentel. I graduated with my master’s in kinesiology from San Francisco State.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kinesiology is the study of muscle movement. It’s very interdisciplinary, so there’s kind of a lot of different aspects in the field. So we do like sports psychology. You can go into physical therapy, athletic training, occupational therapy. I wanted to be a physical therapist. I’ve been to a little bit more recently. So I did focus mostly on like muscle physiology classes and that types of things. But now I think I wanna go more into a little bit more of the psychological motivational side, either doing some kind of city planning that has to do with getting people moving, or maybe even working for some type of nonprofit like Girls on the Run or things that get people active.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So even in undergrad we take our core class which is like one of the classes that teaches you like how to read and write in the field of kinesiology and that type of thing and midway through the semester I want to say this was like 2023. Our professor had actually changed the entire course of the class to focus on AI because it had like kind of just come out and she was like you And all of us at that point were kind of like, oh, you know, like, it’ll come and go, it is what it is. But what’s funny sitting back and looking at it now, it’s like, I feel like she really changed the class for a reason. I think it helped a lot of us just kind of get a grasp on what is AI, how to use it, the advantages maybe and some of the disadvantages. And so I obviously only took that class once, but I hope that they continue to do that for that class.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s good to have immediate feedback, right? That’s, I think, one of the biggest advantages as a student. You don’t have to wait for your professor. It’s very individualized and you can really use it to fix specific things in your writing, for example, like writing essays. I think it’s a great tool to make you sound professional, help fix your grammar, maybe help you with the formatting. Um, the problem and the drawback is just sometimes it takes over your thinking. You it’s, it’s very easy to just put something in and be like, okay, now write me an essay, but there’s no thought that goes into that. There’s no critical thinking that goes in to that. Um, and at the end of the day, like it’s kind of taking away from the learning itself.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m definitely less worried than other fields. I think there’s some careers in kinesiology, like if you wanted to be an athletic trainer or maybe like a personal trainer, there’s definitely a chance that AI could swoop in and take some of your clients. You can ask for a workout routine on ChatGPT so easily. However, The motivational aspect that comes with kinesiology and sports psychology that we learn with our degree I think is more helpful than talking to something online and just kind of having that like one-on-one human support is a lot more personalized. For example, like I worked in the athletic training department for a little bit and you can feel the difference in muscle when like a muscle is tense and you can kind with tell. What it needs, AI is not gonna be hands-on like that. And so having that human interaction in this field specifically is really helpful.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I will say though that there’s just so much negativity around it and it’s kind of hard to take yourself out of the online discourse. My friend works out in this athletic studio with some of these tech guys and they talk the pros and the cons and like how people are being let go and and you know But at the same time, maybe there’s some jobs that AI should take over. Do people really need to be coding all day every day sitting on a computer? Maybe there’s things that humans shouldn’t be doing, like computer work all day. Maybe we need to go back outside.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m looking forward to seeing what’s out there, right? I live in San Francisco currently and I can’t really see myself. Moving away anytime soon. I think there’s just so much to experience and so many people to meet. Global pandemic, like I was in college, I was taking like 20 units a semester. Every semester I was summer classes, winter classes, and I really chased the academic route. I just turned 24 and I have my master’s and I don’t think a lot of people can say that. And so I think now kind of like finding what it is exactly that I want to do with it and kind of just getting more experience in the field is really exciting to me.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ada He: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">My name is Ada He, and I’m currently a fourth year student at UC San Diego set to graduate on June 14th. My hometown is San Jose in the Bay Area, and I’m currently studying cognitive science with a specialization in machine learning and neural computation.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So just to boil down to simple terms, it’s basically the study of intelligence, and it’s super duper relevant for machine learning, understanding these computational models of intelligence. The reason that I chose it and specifically the machine learning and neural computation track was because I think in high school I knew that I was curious about technology but I was also curious about more so the neuroscience and psychology side of things. And so I think I was kind of struck by this idea of like what is intelligence, how can we model it computationally and I think at the time even then there were starting to be like these buzzwords around ML and like AI and how this is going to be the next big thing of the future.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so… Very practical future-oriented parents were like, you, our child, should definitely study something related to technology. And I was like, well, I’m not quite sure, so let me pick this broader major that has to do with technology, but also kind of has to do more with like the philosophy and the psychology and like the ethics of what these systems are.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think when I first started in college, basically the only place that I was hearing about machine learning, artificial intelligence as a whole was through theory in my coursework. But I think all of it was very much creative and like human driven. I think where I really started hearing about these AI tools that were in mass production was during my second year of college. So I think in that time, that was when ChatGPT was sort of like released to Apollo can never start using it and it became like the big thing. And suddenly it felt like everyone was talking about chatgbc like, oh hey, it’s pretty smart, it can do all these things. In my third year of college then, like after the summer when we came back to school, then it was taking off and everyone was using it in their classes, everyone’s like asking it questions, and they were using it to code in my programming classes, they were asking it for essay advice, and then I think that was when I started to think like wait, isn’t that an academic integrity violation and then so is AI just being used to like help us cheat now? Started out in this very humanistic direction, right?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I was using AI as a tool to investigate these hypotheses and to see if I could get it to predict the patterns that I could predict. They were supposed to be these helpful tools that would help us diagnose bigger problems that were facing people. I’ve heard of applications of AI to chart patterns of climate change. So in my head, I just thought AI and ML had so much potential to be used for good. With ChatGPT, I know it’s like- There’s so much progress now going on in the area of large language models that I wonder if the other areas of AI and other use cases are being neglected. This seems like all research is funneling into how these large language models can help us replace white collar jobs. And I’m like, when did that become the focus of artificial intelligence and machine learning?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think I’ve been searching for a full-time job since January. As a student who is looking for a white collar job, it’s been very very very distressing to hear all the discourse that AI is meant to replace the work that I’ve spent four years studying. I think I honestly lost track by half to have applied for more than 300 jobs at this point. Just knowing that like the odds of getting a job are so slim even if you do get a callback and then seeing the number of callbacks I’m getting compared to the number applications I put out, that is kind of insane to me.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I do have summer jobs lined up. I’m currently like a student employee at the UC San Diego library. And I think like I’ve been really fortunate to have that environment because working for the web team there feels very meaningful since the work we do is like all done by hand. We have a very intentional design approach and the goal of all the work that I put out there is to serve the student body.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I think everything that I’ve made there has made me like feel good and I don’t like feel as much like moral confusion when I think about continuing that work this summer. But that rule runs until September, so I know that I have wiggle rooms trying to figure things out somewhat.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Every generation has faced its demons and maybe the world of AI slop these like powerfully generative tools are kind of one of the demons that my generation has to face in the sense that we have to figure out where it fits into our lives and where it fits into workflows without compromising our morals because they might be here to stay. And then we also have to figure out how to deal with them in our daily, day-to-day work, because that’s probably gonna be an inseparable part of it, whether we like it or not.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aaron Kim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">My name is Aaron Kim. I graduated from UC Berkeley with a major in political science. I came in through the community college route and I started community college in 2019. So I had a couple of years to see like at least in community college, like what higher education was like before AI, then it dropped. And then I saw everyone kind of like scrambling to react to it. It was really interesting watching the different ways professors would try to handle it. Some of them just had like a no AI policy. Others had like a, you have to use AI policy. My gosh, yeah. I remember really early on, there was a professor that told me that like, or that told the class that don’t use AI. I can tell if you use AI because it’ll take your essay, put it in ChatGPT and ask it if it wrote it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s been a bit of a consensus that’s settled around AI, where professors just kind of understood that it’s here. So they got more specific on how we’re supposed to use it. So they’re like, oh, you can use it as a writing assistant. You can use as to help start your research, but don’t use it a source and don’t make it do all your writing.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But I know some people that are really hardline against it, I kind of agree with them for the most part. Like I think that AI especially, it’s not very sustainable. I feel like it’s sometimes people over-rely on it, which I’ve seen a lot. But I’ve also seen it level the playing field, especially for like ESL speakers. Sometimes I’ll see people who are like in higher education and they’re like not speaking English as a first language I I remember before AI they were excuse my language, but they were basically just shit out of luck. They were gonna be judged the same as like a native English speaker and like sometimes like it just like people were not nice about it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, I’m like a first-gen college student, so I I just kind of went to college because I don’t know, I didn’t really know why I was going. I just did it. I’m not one of those people that was like, oh yeah, I’m gonna be a doctor or a lawyer or a dentist. I ended up doing a lot of stuff in the union world and the labor world and like the community organizing world, which is why I think AI has affected me a little less personally, like a little less directly because none of the jobs that I was really looking for are really AI exposed as much.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Luckily I’m one of these people, but I do think the implementation of AI in the economy has like, I’ve received a lot of the downwind effects. I think a lot tasks are having AI implemented into it. And because of that, I think there’s just less need for a lot of entry level positions that existed in the past. My friends and I joke about it being a “nepo economy” right now, because there’s just like, nobody’s getting jobs through applications, at least not a lot. It’s just all like, you have to know somebody and that’s how you’re getting jobs. I’m still trying to really figure out what direction I want to go for that. But right now I’m just like trying to find something in social impact, you know, nonprofits or unions, um, which is just because that’s like, you know, where my heart was at during college. And that’s where a lot of my experience was at. But yeah, at this point, I think I just kind of have to try to keep an open mind.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I just don’t really think this sort of like innovation is really helping most people in a way that’s really substantial. Like I feel like, yeah, it’s like making things more convenient for a lot of us in like really minor ways, but I just feel like, like, was this all necessary? But it’s like here and we can’t like press, there’s no undo button for things like this, so I guess I just kind of have to adapt. Luckily, in terms of my personal career trajectory, it still feels pretty peripheral. Because a lot of the organizations I’m interested in working for are concerned with working people-centered kind of policies, I think mass, uncritical, enthusiastic adoption of AI is just something that hopefully a lot them just wouldn’t do. Like how would you feel if you’re like working and your union rep is like a chat GPT, like an iPad on the like a little thing that rolls around and tries to get you to sign union cards, right? Like that’s kind of something that AI can never take away. It’s like, because of so much of organizing job or so much organizing is based on building trust human to human, you know? And that’s just something AI can ever do…I hope!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Alan Montecillo: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That was Ellena Simentel, Ada He, and Aaron Kim. This episode was cut down and edited by me, and producer Jessica Kariisa. It was also produced by Ericka Cruz Guevarra. Additional support from Pauline Bartoloni. Music courtesy of Audio Network. Support for The Bay is provided in part by the Osher Production Fund. 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/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If you want to get in touch with us at The Bay, send us an email at TheBay@KQED.org.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Bay is a production of KQED Public Media in San Francisco. You can help power our show by becoming a member at \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"http://kqed.org/donate\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">KQED.org/donate\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. I’m Alan Montecillo, in for Ericka Cruz Guevarra. Thanks for listening.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hey! It’s Morgan again. You can listen to more of The Bay wherever you get your podcasts! We’ll be back next week with a brand new episode of Close All Tabs. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Everyone seems to have an opinion about AI, but what about those who will likely be affected most — recent graduates?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This cohort of grads is unique. They remember what classrooms were like before the emergence of ChatGPT in 2022, and have seen how it transformed the education world seemingly overnight. Today, we hear from three recent graduates in the Bay Area about their thoughts on AI, how it affected their education, and how they feel about their futures. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This week, we’re sharing a recent \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12085502/three-recent-graduates-share-their-thoughts-on-ai\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">episode\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> from KQED podcast \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/podcasts/thebay\">\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Bay\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — a show that takes an in-depth look at stories from across the SF Bay Area.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC2030502225\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\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\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> 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, Bluesky, X, Discord, Reddit, the comments of whatever random recipe blog you start arguments in … basically, it would be a huge help to get the word out. Ok, let’s get to the show.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hey, it’s Morgan. So, Close All Tabs is on vacation this week. Shocking, I know! We do log off sometimes. Or at least, we try to. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But don’t worry — we still have an episode for you today. On Close All Tabs, we’re always talking about AI … from the way data centers are changing local communities, to the drama that industry billionaires are getting themselves into. About a year ago, we dove into how some teachers are dealing with the AI boom in their classrooms. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Today, we’re gonna hear the other side of that story, from young people who’ve been in the thick of it, but don’t always get to share their perspective. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Our friends at The Bay, another KQED podcast, spoke to a few recent college graduates about AI. This is a unique cohort of students: they remember what classrooms were like before ChatGPT, and they’ve seen how much it’s changed learning. They spoke to The Bay about how AI affected their college experience, and how they feel about entering the workforce in such rapidly changing industries. What are they really thinking about their futures? What’s on their minds?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Alright, here’s Three Recent Graduates Share Their Thoughts on AI, from \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Bay\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Alan Montecillo:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I’m Alan Montecillo, in for Erika Cruz Guevara, and welcome to The Bay. Local news to keep you rooted. I graduated from college 13 years ago, and I gotta be honest, no disrespect, but I don’t remember who the commencement speaker was or what they talked about. Most graduation speeches have the same themes. Some message about hope. Thanking your friends and family, the importance of following your passion, and perhaps a call to change the world for the better. But this graduation season has felt a little different.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gloria Caulfield:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Alan Montecillo:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> There have been several videos of students booing commencement speakers when they mention AI. These videos have gone viral.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Eric Schmidt:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Time magazine selected its person of the year for 2025. And it was this time, it was the architects of artificial intelligence. Interesting.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Scott Borschetta:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> AI is rewriting production as we sit here. I know it, deal with it. Like I said, it’s a tool. Hey, like I said. You can hear me now or you can pay me later.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Alan Montecillo:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Today’s college graduates were in school when ChatGPT was first released in late 2022. They’ve seen it change their classrooms. Today, three recent graduates in the Bay Area tell us how they really feel about AI and about their futures.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ellena Simentel: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">My name is Ellena Simentel. I graduated with my master’s in kinesiology from San Francisco State.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kinesiology is the study of muscle movement. It’s very interdisciplinary, so there’s kind of a lot of different aspects in the field. So we do like sports psychology. You can go into physical therapy, athletic training, occupational therapy. I wanted to be a physical therapist. I’ve been to a little bit more recently. So I did focus mostly on like muscle physiology classes and that types of things. But now I think I wanna go more into a little bit more of the psychological motivational side, either doing some kind of city planning that has to do with getting people moving, or maybe even working for some type of nonprofit like Girls on the Run or things that get people active.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So even in undergrad we take our core class which is like one of the classes that teaches you like how to read and write in the field of kinesiology and that type of thing and midway through the semester I want to say this was like 2023. Our professor had actually changed the entire course of the class to focus on AI because it had like kind of just come out and she was like you And all of us at that point were kind of like, oh, you know, like, it’ll come and go, it is what it is. But what’s funny sitting back and looking at it now, it’s like, I feel like she really changed the class for a reason. I think it helped a lot of us just kind of get a grasp on what is AI, how to use it, the advantages maybe and some of the disadvantages. And so I obviously only took that class once, but I hope that they continue to do that for that class.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s good to have immediate feedback, right? That’s, I think, one of the biggest advantages as a student. You don’t have to wait for your professor. It’s very individualized and you can really use it to fix specific things in your writing, for example, like writing essays. I think it’s a great tool to make you sound professional, help fix your grammar, maybe help you with the formatting. Um, the problem and the drawback is just sometimes it takes over your thinking. You it’s, it’s very easy to just put something in and be like, okay, now write me an essay, but there’s no thought that goes into that. There’s no critical thinking that goes in to that. Um, and at the end of the day, like it’s kind of taking away from the learning itself.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m definitely less worried than other fields. I think there’s some careers in kinesiology, like if you wanted to be an athletic trainer or maybe like a personal trainer, there’s definitely a chance that AI could swoop in and take some of your clients. You can ask for a workout routine on ChatGPT so easily. However, The motivational aspect that comes with kinesiology and sports psychology that we learn with our degree I think is more helpful than talking to something online and just kind of having that like one-on-one human support is a lot more personalized. For example, like I worked in the athletic training department for a little bit and you can feel the difference in muscle when like a muscle is tense and you can kind with tell. What it needs, AI is not gonna be hands-on like that. And so having that human interaction in this field specifically is really helpful.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I will say though that there’s just so much negativity around it and it’s kind of hard to take yourself out of the online discourse. My friend works out in this athletic studio with some of these tech guys and they talk the pros and the cons and like how people are being let go and and you know But at the same time, maybe there’s some jobs that AI should take over. Do people really need to be coding all day every day sitting on a computer? Maybe there’s things that humans shouldn’t be doing, like computer work all day. Maybe we need to go back outside.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m looking forward to seeing what’s out there, right? I live in San Francisco currently and I can’t really see myself. Moving away anytime soon. I think there’s just so much to experience and so many people to meet. Global pandemic, like I was in college, I was taking like 20 units a semester. Every semester I was summer classes, winter classes, and I really chased the academic route. I just turned 24 and I have my master’s and I don’t think a lot of people can say that. And so I think now kind of like finding what it is exactly that I want to do with it and kind of just getting more experience in the field is really exciting to me.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Ada He: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">My name is Ada He, and I’m currently a fourth year student at UC San Diego set to graduate on June 14th. My hometown is San Jose in the Bay Area, and I’m currently studying cognitive science with a specialization in machine learning and neural computation.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So just to boil down to simple terms, it’s basically the study of intelligence, and it’s super duper relevant for machine learning, understanding these computational models of intelligence. The reason that I chose it and specifically the machine learning and neural computation track was because I think in high school I knew that I was curious about technology but I was also curious about more so the neuroscience and psychology side of things. And so I think I was kind of struck by this idea of like what is intelligence, how can we model it computationally and I think at the time even then there were starting to be like these buzzwords around ML and like AI and how this is going to be the next big thing of the future.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so… Very practical future-oriented parents were like, you, our child, should definitely study something related to technology. And I was like, well, I’m not quite sure, so let me pick this broader major that has to do with technology, but also kind of has to do more with like the philosophy and the psychology and like the ethics of what these systems are.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think when I first started in college, basically the only place that I was hearing about machine learning, artificial intelligence as a whole was through theory in my coursework. But I think all of it was very much creative and like human driven. I think where I really started hearing about these AI tools that were in mass production was during my second year of college. So I think in that time, that was when ChatGPT was sort of like released to Apollo can never start using it and it became like the big thing. And suddenly it felt like everyone was talking about chatgbc like, oh hey, it’s pretty smart, it can do all these things. In my third year of college then, like after the summer when we came back to school, then it was taking off and everyone was using it in their classes, everyone’s like asking it questions, and they were using it to code in my programming classes, they were asking it for essay advice, and then I think that was when I started to think like wait, isn’t that an academic integrity violation and then so is AI just being used to like help us cheat now? Started out in this very humanistic direction, right?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I was using AI as a tool to investigate these hypotheses and to see if I could get it to predict the patterns that I could predict. They were supposed to be these helpful tools that would help us diagnose bigger problems that were facing people. I’ve heard of applications of AI to chart patterns of climate change. So in my head, I just thought AI and ML had so much potential to be used for good. With ChatGPT, I know it’s like- There’s so much progress now going on in the area of large language models that I wonder if the other areas of AI and other use cases are being neglected. This seems like all research is funneling into how these large language models can help us replace white collar jobs. And I’m like, when did that become the focus of artificial intelligence and machine learning?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think I’ve been searching for a full-time job since January. As a student who is looking for a white collar job, it’s been very very very distressing to hear all the discourse that AI is meant to replace the work that I’ve spent four years studying. I think I honestly lost track by half to have applied for more than 300 jobs at this point. Just knowing that like the odds of getting a job are so slim even if you do get a callback and then seeing the number of callbacks I’m getting compared to the number applications I put out, that is kind of insane to me.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I do have summer jobs lined up. I’m currently like a student employee at the UC San Diego library. And I think like I’ve been really fortunate to have that environment because working for the web team there feels very meaningful since the work we do is like all done by hand. We have a very intentional design approach and the goal of all the work that I put out there is to serve the student body.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So I think everything that I’ve made there has made me like feel good and I don’t like feel as much like moral confusion when I think about continuing that work this summer. But that rule runs until September, so I know that I have wiggle rooms trying to figure things out somewhat.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Every generation has faced its demons and maybe the world of AI slop these like powerfully generative tools are kind of one of the demons that my generation has to face in the sense that we have to figure out where it fits into our lives and where it fits into workflows without compromising our morals because they might be here to stay. And then we also have to figure out how to deal with them in our daily, day-to-day work, because that’s probably gonna be an inseparable part of it, whether we like it or not.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Aaron Kim: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">My name is Aaron Kim. I graduated from UC Berkeley with a major in political science. I came in through the community college route and I started community college in 2019. So I had a couple of years to see like at least in community college, like what higher education was like before AI, then it dropped. And then I saw everyone kind of like scrambling to react to it. It was really interesting watching the different ways professors would try to handle it. Some of them just had like a no AI policy. Others had like a, you have to use AI policy. My gosh, yeah. I remember really early on, there was a professor that told me that like, or that told the class that don’t use AI. I can tell if you use AI because it’ll take your essay, put it in ChatGPT and ask it if it wrote it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s been a bit of a consensus that’s settled around AI, where professors just kind of understood that it’s here. So they got more specific on how we’re supposed to use it. So they’re like, oh, you can use it as a writing assistant. You can use as to help start your research, but don’t use it a source and don’t make it do all your writing.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But I know some people that are really hardline against it, I kind of agree with them for the most part. Like I think that AI especially, it’s not very sustainable. I feel like it’s sometimes people over-rely on it, which I’ve seen a lot. But I’ve also seen it level the playing field, especially for like ESL speakers. Sometimes I’ll see people who are like in higher education and they’re like not speaking English as a first language I I remember before AI they were excuse my language, but they were basically just shit out of luck. They were gonna be judged the same as like a native English speaker and like sometimes like it just like people were not nice about it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, I’m like a first-gen college student, so I I just kind of went to college because I don’t know, I didn’t really know why I was going. I just did it. I’m not one of those people that was like, oh yeah, I’m gonna be a doctor or a lawyer or a dentist. I ended up doing a lot of stuff in the union world and the labor world and like the community organizing world, which is why I think AI has affected me a little less personally, like a little less directly because none of the jobs that I was really looking for are really AI exposed as much.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Luckily I’m one of these people, but I do think the implementation of AI in the economy has like, I’ve received a lot of the downwind effects. I think a lot tasks are having AI implemented into it. And because of that, I think there’s just less need for a lot of entry level positions that existed in the past. My friends and I joke about it being a “nepo economy” right now, because there’s just like, nobody’s getting jobs through applications, at least not a lot. It’s just all like, you have to know somebody and that’s how you’re getting jobs. I’m still trying to really figure out what direction I want to go for that. But right now I’m just like trying to find something in social impact, you know, nonprofits or unions, um, which is just because that’s like, you know, where my heart was at during college. And that’s where a lot of my experience was at. But yeah, at this point, I think I just kind of have to try to keep an open mind.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I just don’t really think this sort of like innovation is really helping most people in a way that’s really substantial. Like I feel like, yeah, it’s like making things more convenient for a lot of us in like really minor ways, but I just feel like, like, was this all necessary? But it’s like here and we can’t like press, there’s no undo button for things like this, so I guess I just kind of have to adapt. Luckily, in terms of my personal career trajectory, it still feels pretty peripheral. Because a lot of the organizations I’m interested in working for are concerned with working people-centered kind of policies, I think mass, uncritical, enthusiastic adoption of AI is just something that hopefully a lot them just wouldn’t do. Like how would you feel if you’re like working and your union rep is like a chat GPT, like an iPad on the like a little thing that rolls around and tries to get you to sign union cards, right? Like that’s kind of something that AI can never take away. It’s like, because of so much of organizing job or so much organizing is based on building trust human to human, you know? And that’s just something AI can ever do…I hope!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Alan Montecillo: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That was Ellena Simentel, Ada He, and Aaron Kim. This episode was cut down and edited by me, and producer Jessica Kariisa. It was also produced by Ericka Cruz Guevarra. Additional support from Pauline Bartoloni. Music courtesy of Audio Network. Support for The Bay is provided in part by the Osher Production Fund. 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/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If you want to get in touch with us at The Bay, send us an email at TheBay@KQED.org.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Bay is a production of KQED Public Media in San Francisco. You can help power our show by becoming a member at \u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"http://kqed.org/donate\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">KQED.org/donate\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. I’m Alan Montecillo, in for Ericka Cruz Guevarra. Thanks for listening.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hey! It’s Morgan again. You can listen to more of The Bay wherever you get your podcasts! We’ll be back next week with a brand new episode of Close All Tabs. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>"
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"slug": "the-55b-deal-that-has-sims-players-worried",
"title": "The $55B Deal That Has Sims Players Worried",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When shareholders of gaming giant Electronic Arts approved an acquisition of the company by a group that includes Jared Kushner’s private equity firm and the Saudi Public Investment Fund late last year, it rocked the entertainment industry. The sale worth an estimated $55 billion sent the player community of the EA-owned game The Sims scrambling, afraid that a game known as a haven for LGBTQ+ expression might be changed for the worse. In this second part of our exploration of the inclusive history of The Sims franchise, we dive into what the deal might mean for the game, how it’s reshaping the future of the industry, and why a popular Sims streamer is ready to walk away from the game in protest.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC7131851733\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/lilsimsie\">Kayla Sims\u003c/a>, Twitch streamer and YouTuber known as “lilsimsie”\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.twitch.tv/zefrine/\">Zefrine\u003c/a>, Twitch streamer and organizer with The Players Alliance\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Loel Phelps, senior game design director at Maxis\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jessica Croft, senior designer at EA on The Sims 4 \u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12083135/bay-area-gamers-rally-against-electronic-arts-55-billion-acquisition\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bay Area Gamers Rally Against Electronic Arts’ $55 Billion Acquisition\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Azul Dahlstrom-Eckman, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">KQED\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/-gaming-is-the-new-oil-how-the-ea-buyout-diverges-from-the-traditional-playbook-\">‘Gaming is the new oil:’ How the EA buyout ‘diverges from the traditional playbook’\u003c/a> — Nicole Carpenter, \u003ci>Game Developer\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://aftermath.site/rep-maxwell-frost-lilsimsie-stream-ea-saudi-arabia-interview/\">Congressman Teams Up With Popular Sims Streamer To Oppose Saudi Purchase Of EA\u003c/a> — Nathan Grayson, \u003ci>\u003ci>Aftermath\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/us-representative-maxwell-frost-voices-protest-over-saudi-buyout-of-ea\">US representative Maxwell Frost protests Saudi buyout of EA\u003c/a> — Diego Argüello, \u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>Game Developer\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.theverge.com/games/816750/the-sims-ea-buyout-content-creator-program-departures-lilsimsie\">Sims streamers are distancing themselves from EA, but for some the choice is hard\u003c/a> — Ash Parrish\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>,\u003ci> The Verge\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://simscommunity.info/2026/06/17/ea-advertisement-brands-history/\">EA Advertisement Isn’t New: A Look Back At The Sims’ History With Brands (And What Comes Next)\u003c/a> — Callum Bowyer,\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci> Sims Community\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://cepr.net/publications/electronic-arts-and-private-equity/\">Private Equity’s EA Takeover: Corruption, Contradictions, and Exploitation\u003c/a> — Daniel Stone, \u003ci>Center for Economic and Policy Research\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\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\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A full transcript will be available 1–2 workdays after the episode’s publication.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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In this second part of our exploration of the inclusive history of The Sims franchise, we dive into what the deal might mean for the game, how it’s reshaping the future of the industry, and why a popular Sims streamer is ready to walk away from the game in protest.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC7131851733\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/lilsimsie\">Kayla Sims\u003c/a>, Twitch streamer and YouTuber known as “lilsimsie”\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.twitch.tv/zefrine/\">Zefrine\u003c/a>, Twitch streamer and organizer with The Players Alliance\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Loel Phelps, senior game design director at Maxis\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jessica Croft, senior designer at EA on The Sims 4 \u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12083135/bay-area-gamers-rally-against-electronic-arts-55-billion-acquisition\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bay Area Gamers Rally Against Electronic Arts’ $55 Billion Acquisition\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Azul Dahlstrom-Eckman, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">KQED\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/-gaming-is-the-new-oil-how-the-ea-buyout-diverges-from-the-traditional-playbook-\">‘Gaming is the new oil:’ How the EA buyout ‘diverges from the traditional playbook’\u003c/a> — Nicole Carpenter, \u003ci>Game Developer\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://aftermath.site/rep-maxwell-frost-lilsimsie-stream-ea-saudi-arabia-interview/\">Congressman Teams Up With Popular Sims Streamer To Oppose Saudi Purchase Of EA\u003c/a> — Nathan Grayson, \u003ci>\u003ci>Aftermath\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/us-representative-maxwell-frost-voices-protest-over-saudi-buyout-of-ea\">US representative Maxwell Frost protests Saudi buyout of EA\u003c/a> — Diego Argüello, \u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>Game Developer\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.theverge.com/games/816750/the-sims-ea-buyout-content-creator-program-departures-lilsimsie\">Sims streamers are distancing themselves from EA, but for some the choice is hard\u003c/a> — Ash Parrish\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>,\u003ci> The Verge\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://simscommunity.info/2026/06/17/ea-advertisement-brands-history/\">EA Advertisement Isn’t New: A Look Back At The Sims’ History With Brands (And What Comes Next)\u003c/a> — Callum Bowyer,\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci> Sims Community\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://cepr.net/publications/electronic-arts-and-private-equity/\">Private Equity’s EA Takeover: Corruption, Contradictions, and Exploitation\u003c/a> — Daniel Stone, \u003ci>Center for Economic and Policy Research\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\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\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"slug": "a-queer-history-of-the-sims",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“Did The Sims make you gay?” is a long-running joke among Sims players. For millions, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Sims\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> has been more than a video game — it’s been a place to experiment, tell stories, and explore identity. Long before LGBTQ representation became common in mainstream games, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Sims\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> allowed same-sex relationships, helping create a devoted queer fan base that reshaped what players expected from virtual worlds.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In this episode, Morgan Sung talks with \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Sims 4\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> senior designer Jessica Croft and Electronic Arts’ senior game design director Loel Phelps about the game’s unlikely emergence as one of the most queer-inclusive franchises in gaming. They explore the legendary story of how same-sex romance accidentally made it into the original game, the challenges of translating sexuality and gender into game systems, why so many LGBTQ players discovered their own identities in \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Sims\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> long before they felt safe doing so in real life — and why some players are worried about where the game might be headed.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC3392561231\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jessica Croft,\u003c/span> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">senior designer and lead designer at EA on The Sims 4\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Loel Phelps, senior game design director at Maxis\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-kiss-that-changed-video-games\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Kiss That Changed Video Games\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Simon Parkin, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The New Yorker\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.pcgamer.com/unearthed-the-sims-design-docs-show-the-debate-over-same-sex-relationships/\">Unearthed The Sims design docs show the internal debate over same-sex relationships\u003c/a>\u003c/span> \u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Steven Messner, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>PC Gamer\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi-HWyh0Ybk\">Did The Sims make you gay? – a video essay.\u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Alexander Avila\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>, \u003ci>YouTube\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://bricksmagazine.co.uk/2020/08/27/the-sims-knew-i-was-queer-before-i-did/\">The Sims Knew I Was Queer Before I Did \u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— Megan Elliot,\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci> BRICKS Magazine\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/feb/22/gay-weddings-for-russia-how-the-sims-became-a-battleground-for-the-lgbtq-community\">Gay weddings for Russia: How The Sims became a battleground for the LGBTQ+ community \u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— Tom Regan, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>The Guardian\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://frvr.com/blog/news/the-sims-designer-says-that-the-series-diversity-is-critical-especially-at-times-like-now/\">The Sims designer says that the series’ diversity is “critical, especially at times like now” as the games must recognise “the fundamental truths of our humanity” to stay successful \u003c/a>— Lewis White\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>, \u003ci>FIVR\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\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\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Episode Transcript\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A full transcript will be available 1–2 workdays after the episode’s publication.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"description": "“Did The Sims make you gay?” is a long-running joke among Sims players. For millions, The Sims has been more than a video game — it’s been a place to experiment, tell stories, and explore identity. Long before LGBTQ representation became common in mainstream games, The Sims allowed same-sex relationships, helping create a devoted queer fan base that reshaped what players expected from virtual worlds. In this episode, Morgan Sung talks with The Sims 4 senior designer Jessica Croft and Electronic Arts’ senior game design director Loel Phelps about the game’s unlikely emergence as one of the most queer-inclusive franchises in gaming. They explore the legendary story of how same-sex romance accidentally made it into the original game, the challenges of translating sexuality and gender into game systems, why so many LGBTQ players discovered their own identities in The Sims long before they felt safe doing so in real life — and why some players are worried about where the game might be headed.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“Did The Sims make you gay?” is a long-running joke among Sims players. For millions, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Sims\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> has been more than a video game — it’s been a place to experiment, tell stories, and explore identity. Long before LGBTQ representation became common in mainstream games, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Sims\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> allowed same-sex relationships, helping create a devoted queer fan base that reshaped what players expected from virtual worlds.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In this episode, Morgan Sung talks with \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Sims 4\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> senior designer Jessica Croft and Electronic Arts’ senior game design director Loel Phelps about the game’s unlikely emergence as one of the most queer-inclusive franchises in gaming. They explore the legendary story of how same-sex romance accidentally made it into the original game, the challenges of translating sexuality and gender into game systems, why so many LGBTQ players discovered their own identities in \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Sims\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> long before they felt safe doing so in real life — and why some players are worried about where the game might be headed.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC3392561231\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jessica Croft,\u003c/span> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">senior designer and lead designer at EA on The Sims 4\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Loel Phelps, senior game design director at Maxis\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-kiss-that-changed-video-games\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Kiss That Changed Video Games\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Simon Parkin, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The New Yorker\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.pcgamer.com/unearthed-the-sims-design-docs-show-the-debate-over-same-sex-relationships/\">Unearthed The Sims design docs show the internal debate over same-sex relationships\u003c/a>\u003c/span> \u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Steven Messner, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>PC Gamer\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi-HWyh0Ybk\">Did The Sims make you gay? – a video essay.\u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Alexander Avila\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>, \u003ci>YouTube\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://bricksmagazine.co.uk/2020/08/27/the-sims-knew-i-was-queer-before-i-did/\">The Sims Knew I Was Queer Before I Did \u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— Megan Elliot,\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci> BRICKS Magazine\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/feb/22/gay-weddings-for-russia-how-the-sims-became-a-battleground-for-the-lgbtq-community\">Gay weddings for Russia: How The Sims became a battleground for the LGBTQ+ community \u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— Tom Regan, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>The Guardian\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://frvr.com/blog/news/the-sims-designer-says-that-the-series-diversity-is-critical-especially-at-times-like-now/\">The Sims designer says that the series’ diversity is “critical, especially at times like now” as the games must recognise “the fundamental truths of our humanity” to stay successful \u003c/a>— Lewis White\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>, \u003ci>FIVR\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\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\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"slug": "how-to-prove-youre-not-ai",
"title": "How To Prove You're Not AI",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">During a recent phone call, BBC tech columnist Thomas Germain couldn’t convince his aunt that he \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">wasn’t\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> AI. Being unable to distinguish a real person from a fabricated version is a problem born from the sheer volume of AI-generated content flooding the internet — and one that’s increased dramatically in the last year alone. Even world leaders are now plagued by the issue: a glitchy video of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sparked an enduring conspiracy theory that he was really dead and his public appearances on social media were an AI-driven cover up.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In a world where everything looks fake, how do we know what’s real? Thomas joins the show to explain how we got here, where we might be headed, and a surprisingly analog technique that could save you from getting scammed by a deepfaked version of a loved one.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC6560300791\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.bbc.com/future/author/thomas-germain\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thomas Germain\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, co-host of the podcast \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Interface\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, and tech columnist at the\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> BBC\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260324-i-tried-to-prove-im-not-an-ai-deepfake\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I tried to prove I’m not AI. My aunt wasn’t convinced\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Thomas Germain, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BBC \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.bbc.com/audio/brand/m002qwn7\">The Interface Podcast\u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — \u003ci>BBC\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.theverge.com/tech/895453/ai-deepfake-netanyahu-claims-conspiracy\">Benjamin Netanyahu is struggling to prove he’s not an AI clone \u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Jess Weatherbed, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci>The Verge\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/03/14/business/media/iran-disinfo-artificial-intelligence.html\">Cascade of A.I. Fakes About War With Iran Causes Chaos Online \u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— Stuart A. Thompson and Alexander Cardia, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>The New York Times \u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/experts-warn-collapse-trust-online-ai-deepfakes-venezuela-rcna252472\">AI is intensifying a ‘collapse’ of trust online, experts say\u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Angela Yang, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>NBC News\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/deepfakes-elections-and-shrinking-liars-dividend\">Deepfakes, Elections, and Shrinking the Liar’s Dividend\u003c/a> — Josh A. Goldstein, \u003ci>Brennan Center for Justice\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\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\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Do you like these deep dives? Do you want more? It would be so, so helpful if you could rate and review us on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. Send it to your friends, your frenemies, that one niche micro-influencer you kind of have a parasocial relationship with. Maybe they’ll respond, I don’t know. All right, let’s get to the show.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When we talk about deepfakes and AI, often what we’re thinking about is the idea that you’re gonna get tricked.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Thomas Germain. He’s the cohost of the podcast The Interface, and also a tech columnist at the BBC. His column, Keeping Tabs, covers tech and how it affects average people every day. So, like many journalists on this beat, he’s been keeping an eye on the uptick in deep fake scams.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Someone’s going to scam you, they’re going to try and fool you into thinking that they’re someone else.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Fakes are synthetic media, images, videos, or audio recordings that have been generated or manipulated by AI to impersonate someone else.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But I started thinking about like, what would it be like if the shoe was on the other foot? What if you needed to convince someone that you’re real and you are who you say that you are? How difficult would that be?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So Thomas decided to do a little experiment. He called up his aunt Eleanor. Thomas and his aunt Eleanor are very close. She was at the hospital the day he was born and of all of his relatives, she’s the one he calls the most and she’s relatively online.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">She knows a bit about what’s going on. Her husband, my uncle, is actually a computer science professor. So she gets some of it, but she’s not like up to date on everything that’s happening. And I wanted someone who knows me really, really well.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That last part is important. Thomas called his aunt and explained the experiment. He would call her back, and she’d either be talking to the real him, her beloved nephew, or a deep fake, generated by AI. And what Thomas wanted to know was, could she tell the difference?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At first, you know, it was a very fun, like, friendly conversation, but there was this weird, like tension, you know? She said before we even got on the phone, she’s like, “Oh, I’m gonna be really upset if I can’t tell,” you know, because she’s known me since the day I was born, right?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">His aunt Eleanor tried a few different methods to suss it out. First, she went on Facebook.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And read me like a bunch of jokes that she’s seen that she really liked, to like see what my reaction was. And you know, we’re like different generations, we have different senses of humor. So I’m not sure like, was the test that I would laugh or I wouldn’t laugh. It was kind of funny. That didn’t seem to convince her.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So she took a different approach.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">She was knitting me a sweater and we hadn’t decided on the color. And like a couple of weeks before we got on the phone. I told her that I was saying I wanted a gold sweater, like kind of gold colored yarn. And then when we were talking, when I was tricking her about AI, she brought it up and she’s like, “so have you decided on the color?” and I was like, “yeah, you know, I think it might just go boring, like just do like a black or like a dark blue or something.” And I think of all the things, that made her the most suspicious because like, ‘I was expecting you to go with like a more exciting color. She’s like “That…. I don’t know, that feels like a robot answer.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Laughter]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s so generic, it can’t possibly be you.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, I know, but maybe I’m a boring guy.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">She still couldn’t be sure, so she gave him another test.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">She asked me for some details about, like, things from my childhood that you would be unlikely to know if you weren’t a member of my family. And I think she found that a little bit reassuring.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But overall, the experience left Aunt Eleanor rattled.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think by the end of the call where she realized she couldn’t be totally sure, it was kind of distressing. You know, like, you’re supposed to know your loved ones, how could it be? And we talked for like 20 minutes or so and by the of it she told me like, “I think it’s the real you, I just can’t be sure, I’m not 100% confident.”.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And at the end I told her it is me, I am not tricking you. But there were all these little things that she was trying to pick up on, and I think this is really important for people to understand, throw that out the window. This technology is so good, I promise you, there is nothing that you can do to tell that you’re not looking at an AI, and if you convince yourself that you could figure it out by just like thinking really hard and being careful, you are more likely to get in trouble and get fooled.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is way bigger than Thomas duping his aunt. It’s a real world problem. Every day, deep fake scams and AI generated disinformation lead people astray. Which is why the general public is becoming so distrustful of everything online. When everything could be fake, how do you tell what’s real and what’s not?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">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/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kicking this off as always, let’s open a new tab: the Netanyahu deep fake death rumor. In March, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a televised update on the war in Iran. A clip of it was posted on his official X account.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Audio clip of Benjamin Netanyahu addressing Israeli people in Hebrew]\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\n\u003cem>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Citizens of Israel, my brothers and sisters, we are in historic times…\u003c/span>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Something about that video seemed off.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s one moment where he kind of waves his hand in front of the camera and if you freeze frame it at just the right second, it kind of looks like he’s got a sixth finger on his hand.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Screenshots of this moment started making the rounds. And if you’re just scrolling by and you see this freeze frame out of context, it would probably raise a few alarm bells, right?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It really looks weird. It’s like, it looks like this weird digital glitch and because it’s a video, you know, it’s little grainy it’s pixelated.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So this rumor started swirling around online. Was this televised speech really Netanyahu? Or was it a deep fake?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And people latched onto this because for the longest time, AI image and video generators really struggled with hands. Right? They were trained to focus on faces, hands were this thing they picked up along the way and they couldn’t get the hands just right. That was true two or three years ago. Right? The technology has advanced past that point. It’s not true that AI struggles with hands anymore. That isn’t really an issue, but this was enough and it does look weird if you pause at the right frame.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thus, a conspiracy theory was born: Netanyahu was dead, and this was the cover-up. It didn’t help that the Prime Minister’s health had been the subject of public speculation for years. He had emergency heart surgery in 2023, and then a year later, underwent treatment for prostate cancer. And then there’s the war in Iran. The U.S. and Israel killed the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>[Audio clip from Global News Youtube post]\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nIn Tehran, thousands gathered to mourn the death of the supreme leader. Similar protests were held in cities around the world including…\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In retaliation, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has vowed to hunt down and target Netanyahu personally. The seed of doubt over Netanyahu’s health was already planted. Then, the wonky six-fingered video launched the conspiracy theory into the mainstream.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This was enough that some large swath of people latched on to this idea that Netanyahu had been killed in a missile strike, and the Israeli government was hiding the truth and making AI videos to convince the world that he was still alive, to what aim, I’m not exactly sure. It turned into, you know, such like a meme, essentially. Like, the conversation got so big that it was enough that Netnyahu posted another video.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cb>[Audio clip from Benjamin Netanyahu’s post on X] \u003c/b>\u003c/em>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Voice behind camera: Do you want to show us?\u003cbr>\nNetanyahu: Here. Here.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This video takes place in a coffee shop near Jerusalem. The camera approaches Netanyahu, and the voice behind it says, they’re saying on the internet that you’re actually dead. Netanyah, holding a latte, tells the camera, I’m dying for a coffee. And then he holds up his hand and says, do you want to count the fingers?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He did a terrible job with it for a couple of reasons. If the goal was convincing the public. Number one, I talked to a bunch of people about this and they’re like, the worst thing you can do is come out and deny it because it makes it look like you’ve got something to hide. Right?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And there is still something off about the video. It was almost uncanny. He looked super crisp and almost too smooth. It only fueled the conspiracy theories.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They shot this on like a nice DSLR, like one of those big cameras, which is how AI videos look. Right? They’re trained on high quality content, high quality videos, so they produce what looks like smoother, polished, high quality video. So it looked a little bit more like AI than it would have if he had just used a phone to record it. So that, I think, just sent people spiraling even more. Nobody was convinced by this, as far as I could tell. The people who had latched on, if anything, it just reaffirmed their belief that the bad guys were trying to trick them.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here’s the thing about conspiracy theories. Once you’re convinced, everything else just seems like confirmation of what you already believe. People took screenshots, zoomed in, tried to find inconsistencies in the backgrounds of the video. Joe Rogan, for one, seemed pretty convinced.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cb>[Audio clip from The Joe Rogan Experience] \u003c/b>\u003c/em>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Look at this. Yeah, like the coffee. Look how turned it is, but it doesn’t spill at all. It just wiggles to the edge.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He talked about it on his podcast, which has over 20 million followers on YouTube. And of course, that just spread the rumor further. I saw claims that if you zoomed in on the date on the register, the pixels didn’t look right. So surely it was fake. Right? Or that the video itself was real, but it wasn’t actually Netanyahu. It was really an actor deep faked to look like Netanyahu and the shadows gave it away. Or, that when he put his hands in his pocket, the fabric of his jacket seemed to smooth over.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And the thing about reality is it’s weird. Right? Like, if you look close enough at anything you’ll find weird stuff but especially with digital photography, digital video, it’s the way that the sensors work, like, errors are actually inherent to the way that a digital camera sensor functions. So if you zoom in on any video, if you’re, like, watching a clip from this podcast on social media, zoom in, take a screenshot and zoom in, you will find something weird. That’s just how digital images work, that there’ll be some little grainy thing, there’ll be some glitch. And I think it’s important for people to understand that unless you have serious expertise on this subject, you aren’t qualified to make that kind of call. I am not qualified to make that knd of, I think about this stuff all the time.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For his column, Thomas talked to a few of the world’s leading experts on this, including Jeremy Carrasco. He runs a publication called Riddance, which investigates AI-generated media.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And he went through, he analyzed it, he determined it was real. I talked to professors, I talked to some people who were like, real world leading experts on digital forensics is what they call it, like figuring out what the origin of a file is. They said there is no doubt. It is impossible that these videos are AI-generated. Like, this thing where it sort of looked like Netanyahu had a sixth finger, even if you watch the clip, instead of looking at a freeze frame, you can kind of see there’s like a shadow on his hand and that’s what it is. It looks weird if you take a screenshot at the right second, but the video itself, it’s very clearly real. This was not enough. And I think that is kind of part of the problem is that we’ve lived through an era where there’s been an assault on expertise, right? That, you know, real conscious, intentional efforts to discredit traditional forms of you know, authority on truth.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thomas also talked to Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley who’s known as the father of digital forensics. He pioneered this field of examining files and figuring out if they’re real.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He’s one of these guys that’s constantly watching this stuff. And he says, you can see the progression of AI and deep fake technology if you look at some of the recent global conflicts. Like, if we go back to the beginning of the war in Ukraine, it was almost all real footage. Like, every once in a while, you’d see something AI-generated, but for the most part, it was all real. Fast forward to the conflict in Gaza and it was starting to get to the point where there was more AI-generated content. It was a little harder to sort the real from the truth. You get to when the U.S. invaded Venezuela, and it was about 50-50. Right? You’re seeing as much fake stuff as real stuff if you just go out and look at a random video on the subject on the internet. By the time we got to the war in Iran, there’s more fake footage, there’s more fake clips, there is more mis and disinformation than there is real stuff.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A few weeks ago, we dove into the slopaganda coming out of Iran, those AI-generated Lego rap videos dissing the U.S. They’re clearly not real, but they still push specific narratives to the American public. But there’s another kind of AI- generated media at play here: videos that look real but portray events that never happened, like AI-generated footage of Iranian missiles sinking U.S. ships and bombarding civilians in Tel Aviv.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In less than six months, we had this dramatic shift where I think people in power who’ve got like, you know, a game to play, they’ve got something that they want to try and convince the public of, they’ve realized that this technology is something they can put into play. There are whole operations that are ready to get off the ground at a moment’s notice to like, fill the world with fakery and lies. I think that is a real serious problem, I mean, even for journalists, even in the media. Like, it used to be if you saw something that was recorded with a camera, you know, in the not too distant past, it was almost certainly real. Right? Because it took so much effort, especially for video, so much effort to fake something in a convincing way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Now I can do it like while I’m washing the dishes. I could reach over and hammer something out of my phone and generate a fake video. For the average person, I think this means that you are constantly inundated with nonsense. You are being exposed to lies on a near constant basis. It’s not just that the image looks real, it’s not just the video looks real. The thing that’s happening is so close to real life. Right? And if you’re a person who watches a lot of short form video and social media, if like scrolling through Instagram Reels or TikTok, the chances that you have seen a piece of AI content and been fooled that it was real, I’d say in the last week, are extremely high.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Actual footage, meanwhile, has been written off as fake and AI. When the U.S. bombed an elementary school in Iran, killing 120 children, some people online questioned whether footage of the aftermath was authentic. It didn’t help that the true photos and videos were mixed in with AI-generated depictions of what happened. It’s one thing for digital forensics experts, like Hany Farid, to sift through all of the slop and determine what’s real. It’s another for these experts to get the public to actually trust them.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It leads to an information ecosystem, you know, a landscape of truth where everything is up for debate. Nothing is set in stone and everything is suspect. And that leads to some new ways that power can be abused and people can be taken advantage of.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The conspiracy theories over Netanyahu’s death have not stopped. The follow-up videos and public appearances after the coffee shop debacle only fueled the rumors further. In March, Netanyahu appeared in a video with Mike Huckabee, who is now the ambassador to Israel.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cb>[Audio clip from Benjamin Netanyahu’s post on X] \u003c/b>\u003c/em>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Mike Huckabee: Mr. Prime Minister, I wanted you to know, the President asked me to come and make sure you were okay. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Benjamin Netanyahu: Yes, Mike. Yes, I’m alive.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If anything, it only convinced people that Huckabee was also a deepfake. On X and TikTok, people did the same exact thing they did to previous videos, zoomed in, slowed down, cropped screenshots, and looked for any anomaly that could confirm their theories.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>\u003cem>[Audio clip from a post on the TikTok account of @ragingprestigemaster3.0]\u003c/em>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003cem>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The picture you’re seeing right up here, that’s not his ear, fam.\u003c/span>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think that is a truly historical moment. This is, according to everyone that I asked, the first time that the leader of a major world power has like openly gone out in front of the public to try and convince people that he’s not an AI. And I think it’s a sign of a very rocky period that we’re about to enter.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What does this mean for media literacy, our ability to parse the truth from fiction? Well, it definitely does not bode well for the information ecosystem. It’s really easy to take advantage of public distrust and write off real evidence as fake and AI. We’re going to talk about liars and disinformation in a new tab, after a quick break.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">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.kqed.org/podcasts.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, after the break, we’re coming back to bunnies on a trampoline. Stick around.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re back. Time to open a new tab: the liar’s dividend.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A while back there was this video of, it looked like night camera footage and it was bunnies jumping on a trampoline.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You remember this?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I got duped by that. I have a sense of whimsy. \u003cem>[laughter]\u003c/em> I thought it was real.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I fell for it too at first, you know, I saw that and I was like, wow, like maybe the world’s okay after all, like there’s still, you, know, there’s still nice cute things happening. No, turns out it was fake. Millions of people saw this. That doesn’t matter. Right? It’s not going to affect your day or your life that the bunnies aren’t real. But you’re seeing stuff that is a little bit more consequential, that is maybe affecting your beliefs about how the world works or what is happening. And I think this adds up to a lot of people being led astray in ways that are really, really subtle.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Because anything online could be fake, people have become suspicious of everything.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And that creates a situation where if there’s ever any reason to doubt that something is real, then it immediately falls apart.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a media phenomenon called “the liar’s dividend.” Legal scholars coined the term back in 2018 in a paper about how deep fakes, truth decay, and cognitive bias affect the information ecosystem. They thought it was bad back then? They could not have predicted today. Anyway, so what exactly is “the liar’s dividend”?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It takes time or resources to verify that something is real. It’s free to cast doubt. It’s free to say that’s fake, right? It takes no effort at all. And once you raise those suspicions, you can take advantage of that. Right? I can say, ‘oh, that’s a fake news, that didn’t happen.’ And that gives people in power the ability to cast doubt on anything that isn’t convenient for whatever their goals happen to be.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, we’ve reached the point where you cannot trust your eyes, like, that ship has sailed, it’s over. You can’t tell whether you’re looking at an AI video or not. You certainly can’t tell whether your looking at a image. They’ve gotten so good that our physiology does not allow you to deal with this problem.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You don’t have to be a major world leader to be affected by this. Before he wrote about this deep, fake situation, Thomas worked on this story about a safety tool that wipes your personal information from Google search results. Like every other tech journalist, he’s really passionate about privacy. So he was chugging coffee, writing this article…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I got myself all worked up and I put in my family group chat, like, “Here’s a link to this setting. Everybody needs to go turn this on right now.” And my mom was like, “Is this really you?” Like, are you, is someone like taking…like that’s…[laughter] and in her defense, it is weird behavior. Right? That’s a strange thing for me to do. You have to use this Google setting right now, that’s something that’s gonna happen to you. Right? You’re gonna be talking to someone, something will be strange. Right? Maybe you’ll be in an emergency. Maybe you will get in a car accident and you call, you know, your wife and be like, I really, I desperately need Amazon gift cards right now. And it’s, it’s real.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If your loved one calls you and urgently tells you that they need those gift cards, it’s probably a scam. But maybe your partner is calling to ask for the password to the family Netflix account. Your best friend lost her passport while on vacation and needs help getting a new one. Or your nephew tells you that he actually wants a blue sweater instead of the gold one you started knitting. These could be real, but how do you know?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s a thing that’s going to happen more and more because we’re living in this world where everything is suspect and if any little doubt comes up, suddenly everything falls apart.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So what is the solution here? Are AI companies or social media platforms doing anything to help differentiate between what’s real and what’s generated? Industry leaders and academics have been pushing for a kind of digital watermark that would be embedded in the file itself, like planting a flag that says AI-generated. And that flag would be planted deep in the pixel data. It would be really difficult to remove. Google Gemini already does this. It’s called Synth ID.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So the dream there is we’ll get to a place where like all of the big AI companies or companies that are making these tools will participate in this program and there’ll be some level of checking. On the flip side, there’s efforts to build a similar thing into cameras that when you take an image with a camera, you take a photo or a video, it would embed something in the file that says this was taken by an actual camera. It’s like, this is an image of reality. So far, that technology is not here. Right?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We haven’t gotten to the point where that is widespread enough that it can be usable. And hopefully we will arrive at a point where there’s some kind of technical solution or at least technical amelioration to this problem that will like help you sort through it. But we also just need from the social media companies, I think a lot of critics that I speak to say they need to be doing way more to label AI content right now than they are.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">On a lot of these platforms, you can upload a piece of footage or an image. They don’t really care whether it’s AI, right? The platforms where we’re getting all of our information could be doing a lot more to let you know that something that you’re looking at is suspicious, but they don’t have a financial incentive to solve that problem. Right? So I think what it really comes down to is we need regulatory approaches to this that will help at least do something to point people in the direction of truth. Not an easy problem to solve, but we haven’t really even tried yet.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, well in that case, how do you assure your loved ones that you’re really you? Let’s open our last tab:n how to prove that you are not a deep faith.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So this YouTuber, Jim Browning, makes videos about exposing scammers. He recently went super viral with his three-finger test.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cb>[Audio from Jim Browning’s Youtube post] \u003c/b>\u003c/em>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jim Browning: Can you like hold up three fingers in front of your face or anything? \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Person: Oh, come on, that’s too much.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The reasoning? This would disrupt any face-swapping deep fake program and make it glitch.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>[Audio from Jim Browning’s Youtube post] \u003c/b>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jim Browning: Can you do that then? \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Person: Uh, I don’t know, it’s too much to ask somebody. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jim Browning: Well, it’ll make sure you’re not AI, is that unreasonable? I mean, can you do that in front of your face? \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Person: Well, is that enough? \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jim Browning: No, it’s not in front of your face. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The scammer then abruptly ended the call, and in the comments, people were like, this is it. This is the perfect test. This is how to stay safe. But the truth is, this trick has been outdated for years.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I could tell you some things that you could look for, some telltale signs for audio and for video, but I’m not going to because if I gave you those tips, it would actually hurt you more than it would help you because in a week or in a month or in six months, they’re going to put out another AI model and those tips that worked last week aren’t going to work now. There is no giveaway that you’re watching an AI video. In fact, maybe the one thing that you can look out for is if you’re a watching a video that’s low quality, that’s grainy, you might be more likely to get fooled because if there is any weird digital artifact, it’ll be harder to see. AI can make high quality video, a low quality grainy pixelated image, that’s not a sign that you are looking at AI. Maybe it’s a sign, if there’s any doubt, that you might want to think twice. But we’ve past that point. Deepfakes are astonishingly good, and they keep getting just a little bit better.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Luckily, there is one way to protect yourself and your loved ones. And you don’t have to be that tech savvy to do it. It involves gathering up your inner circle. Older relatives, close friends, partners, nibblings, neighbors, basically anyone who could feasibly get this panicked emergency call from someone pretending to be you.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You should set up a secret word that you both agree on, that if there’s ever any doubt, you can ask the person for that password and they’ll give it to you and you know you’re talking to the real person. Because I have spoken to people who’ve been scammed, where they get a phone call and it is their husband or their child. I talked to this woman who a scammer set this up and called her and she like swears to this. She’s like, I know it’s fake, but it was my son. It was his voice. It was perfect and they’re really convincing and if you’re going to get scammed what they’re going to do is there’s going to be some emergency you need to deal with right now you’re not going to be in your right mind then it’s like a solution that’s so simple it’s kind of nice in a way that with like such a frighteningly high-tech problem the solution is just speaking words outloud.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This charmingly simple solution is more important than ever, because unfortunately, there’s no going back to the days before AI. But while this code word thing is great for keeping grandma from blowing her life savings on a deepfake scam, it doesn’t help you parse through all of the deepfaked and AI-generated content you come across online. There are still countless ways to get tricked.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think it will reach the point where for a lot of people, there is no source of truth. Everyone is trying to trick you. And I think there are a lot grifters who will take advantage of that. I think there’s people in power who will see an opportunity and they will seize it. You’ll be able to spin whatever kind of narrative you want because if you’ve got people who trust you, you can say, well, the things that I’m telling you are true and anyone who criticizes me, they’re all part of the lie.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>My optimistic view is it will get so bad that there will be such a desperate need for trusted institutions that people will step in to fill the void and people will seek out sources of truth that they can rely on and we will rebuild an ecosystem of trust. So I think the advice that would give you is like go find that one person on the internet, someone who’s sincere, who you trust, who you feel has your best interest in mind or maybe in institution. Maybe there’s a publication you like, maybe it’s local news. Try to find sources who you can go to, who you look to when there’s a question, because your eyes and your ears just aren’t gonna cut it anymore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That being said, when it comes to these personal relationships, sometimes you do need a little trust. Thomas said that he and his aunt Eleanor don’t use a code word every time they talk on the phone.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Fortunately, this hasn’t caused any strife between me and my aunt so far. I told her that I wasn’t actually trying to trick her, that it was the real me on the other end of the line, but I hope that this experience was unsettling enough that if there’s ever any reason to doubt, if it’s ever like, hey, I’m in trouble, I need money, or I forgot my password, I hope that she will question it and try and figure out whether it’s really me because at some point someone is going to try and fool all of us.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. So when she gets that chaotic text that you actually do want the gold sweater after all, she’ll ask you for your code word.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I do need $600 in Walmart gift cards as soon as possible.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So if you do get a call begging for gift cards, it never hurts to double check and ask for the code word. That’s it for this deep dive, but stick around after the credits for some bonus content. Okay, let’s close all these tabs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">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. The Close All Tabs team also includes editor Chris Hambrick and audio engineer, Brendan Willard. Additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our director of podcasts and Ethan Toven Lindsey is our editor-in-chief.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">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. 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. Thanks for listening.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, one of the people I interviewed for this story said, “I purchased 25 acres in Vermont so when the world falls apart, I’ll go live on my homestead.” You know, maybe they’ve got the right idea. I don’t know. I don’t have 25 acres in Vermont money myself. So I’m stuck here with the rest of us schlubs, you know, we’re gonna have to deal with the fallout.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"description": "During a recent phone call, BBC tech columnist Thomas Germain couldn’t convince his aunt that he wasn’t AI. Being unable to distinguish a real person from a fabricated version is a problem born from the sheer volume of AI-generated content flooding the internet — and one that’s increased dramatically in the last year alone. Even world leaders are now plagued by the issue: a glitchy video of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sparked an enduring conspiracy theory that he was really dead and his public appearances on social media were an AI-driven cover up. In a world where everything looks fake, how do we know what’s real? Thomas joins the show to explain how we got here, where we might be headed, and a surprisingly analog technique that could save you from getting scammed by a deepfaked version of a loved one.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">During a recent phone call, BBC tech columnist Thomas Germain couldn’t convince his aunt that he \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">wasn’t\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> AI. Being unable to distinguish a real person from a fabricated version is a problem born from the sheer volume of AI-generated content flooding the internet — and one that’s increased dramatically in the last year alone. Even world leaders are now plagued by the issue: a glitchy video of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sparked an enduring conspiracy theory that he was really dead and his public appearances on social media were an AI-driven cover up.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In a world where everything looks fake, how do we know what’s real? Thomas joins the show to explain how we got here, where we might be headed, and a surprisingly analog technique that could save you from getting scammed by a deepfaked version of a loved one.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC6560300791\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.bbc.com/future/author/thomas-germain\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thomas Germain\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, co-host of the podcast \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Interface\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, and tech columnist at the\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> BBC\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260324-i-tried-to-prove-im-not-an-ai-deepfake\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I tried to prove I’m not AI. My aunt wasn’t convinced\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Thomas Germain, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BBC \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.bbc.com/audio/brand/m002qwn7\">The Interface Podcast\u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — \u003ci>BBC\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.theverge.com/tech/895453/ai-deepfake-netanyahu-claims-conspiracy\">Benjamin Netanyahu is struggling to prove he’s not an AI clone \u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Jess Weatherbed, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci>The Verge\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/03/14/business/media/iran-disinfo-artificial-intelligence.html\">Cascade of A.I. Fakes About War With Iran Causes Chaos Online \u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">— Stuart A. Thompson and Alexander Cardia, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>The New York Times \u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/experts-warn-collapse-trust-online-ai-deepfakes-venezuela-rcna252472\">AI is intensifying a ‘collapse’ of trust online, experts say\u003c/a>\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Angela Yang, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>NBC News\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/deepfakes-elections-and-shrinking-liars-dividend\">Deepfakes, Elections, and Shrinking the Liar’s Dividend\u003c/a> — Josh A. Goldstein, \u003ci>Brennan Center for Justice\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\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\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Do you like these deep dives? Do you want more? It would be so, so helpful if you could rate and review us on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. Send it to your friends, your frenemies, that one niche micro-influencer you kind of have a parasocial relationship with. Maybe they’ll respond, I don’t know. All right, let’s get to the show.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">When we talk about deepfakes and AI, often what we’re thinking about is the idea that you’re gonna get tricked.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Thomas Germain. He’s the cohost of the podcast The Interface, and also a tech columnist at the BBC. His column, Keeping Tabs, covers tech and how it affects average people every day. So, like many journalists on this beat, he’s been keeping an eye on the uptick in deep fake scams.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Someone’s going to scam you, they’re going to try and fool you into thinking that they’re someone else.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Fakes are synthetic media, images, videos, or audio recordings that have been generated or manipulated by AI to impersonate someone else.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But I started thinking about like, what would it be like if the shoe was on the other foot? What if you needed to convince someone that you’re real and you are who you say that you are? How difficult would that be?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So Thomas decided to do a little experiment. He called up his aunt Eleanor. Thomas and his aunt Eleanor are very close. She was at the hospital the day he was born and of all of his relatives, she’s the one he calls the most and she’s relatively online.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">She knows a bit about what’s going on. Her husband, my uncle, is actually a computer science professor. So she gets some of it, but she’s not like up to date on everything that’s happening. And I wanted someone who knows me really, really well.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That last part is important. Thomas called his aunt and explained the experiment. He would call her back, and she’d either be talking to the real him, her beloved nephew, or a deep fake, generated by AI. And what Thomas wanted to know was, could she tell the difference?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At first, you know, it was a very fun, like, friendly conversation, but there was this weird, like tension, you know? She said before we even got on the phone, she’s like, “Oh, I’m gonna be really upset if I can’t tell,” you know, because she’s known me since the day I was born, right?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">His aunt Eleanor tried a few different methods to suss it out. First, she went on Facebook.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And read me like a bunch of jokes that she’s seen that she really liked, to like see what my reaction was. And you know, we’re like different generations, we have different senses of humor. So I’m not sure like, was the test that I would laugh or I wouldn’t laugh. It was kind of funny. That didn’t seem to convince her.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So she took a different approach.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">She was knitting me a sweater and we hadn’t decided on the color. And like a couple of weeks before we got on the phone. I told her that I was saying I wanted a gold sweater, like kind of gold colored yarn. And then when we were talking, when I was tricking her about AI, she brought it up and she’s like, “so have you decided on the color?” and I was like, “yeah, you know, I think it might just go boring, like just do like a black or like a dark blue or something.” And I think of all the things, that made her the most suspicious because like, ‘I was expecting you to go with like a more exciting color. She’s like “That…. I don’t know, that feels like a robot answer.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Laughter]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s so generic, it can’t possibly be you.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, I know, but maybe I’m a boring guy.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">She still couldn’t be sure, so she gave him another test.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">She asked me for some details about, like, things from my childhood that you would be unlikely to know if you weren’t a member of my family. And I think she found that a little bit reassuring.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But overall, the experience left Aunt Eleanor rattled.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think by the end of the call where she realized she couldn’t be totally sure, it was kind of distressing. You know, like, you’re supposed to know your loved ones, how could it be? And we talked for like 20 minutes or so and by the of it she told me like, “I think it’s the real you, I just can’t be sure, I’m not 100% confident.”.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And at the end I told her it is me, I am not tricking you. But there were all these little things that she was trying to pick up on, and I think this is really important for people to understand, throw that out the window. This technology is so good, I promise you, there is nothing that you can do to tell that you’re not looking at an AI, and if you convince yourself that you could figure it out by just like thinking really hard and being careful, you are more likely to get in trouble and get fooled.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is way bigger than Thomas duping his aunt. It’s a real world problem. Every day, deep fake scams and AI generated disinformation lead people astray. Which is why the general public is becoming so distrustful of everything online. When everything could be fake, how do you tell what’s real and what’s not?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">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/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kicking this off as always, let’s open a new tab: the Netanyahu deep fake death rumor. In March, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a televised update on the war in Iran. A clip of it was posted on his official X account.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Audio clip of Benjamin Netanyahu addressing Israeli people in Hebrew]\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\n\u003cem>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Citizens of Israel, my brothers and sisters, we are in historic times…\u003c/span>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Something about that video seemed off.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s one moment where he kind of waves his hand in front of the camera and if you freeze frame it at just the right second, it kind of looks like he’s got a sixth finger on his hand.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Screenshots of this moment started making the rounds. And if you’re just scrolling by and you see this freeze frame out of context, it would probably raise a few alarm bells, right?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It really looks weird. It’s like, it looks like this weird digital glitch and because it’s a video, you know, it’s little grainy it’s pixelated.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So this rumor started swirling around online. Was this televised speech really Netanyahu? Or was it a deep fake?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And people latched onto this because for the longest time, AI image and video generators really struggled with hands. Right? They were trained to focus on faces, hands were this thing they picked up along the way and they couldn’t get the hands just right. That was true two or three years ago. Right? The technology has advanced past that point. It’s not true that AI struggles with hands anymore. That isn’t really an issue, but this was enough and it does look weird if you pause at the right frame.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thus, a conspiracy theory was born: Netanyahu was dead, and this was the cover-up. It didn’t help that the Prime Minister’s health had been the subject of public speculation for years. He had emergency heart surgery in 2023, and then a year later, underwent treatment for prostate cancer. And then there’s the war in Iran. The U.S. and Israel killed the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>[Audio clip from Global News Youtube post]\u003c/strong>\u003cbr>\nIn Tehran, thousands gathered to mourn the death of the supreme leader. Similar protests were held in cities around the world including…\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In retaliation, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has vowed to hunt down and target Netanyahu personally. The seed of doubt over Netanyahu’s health was already planted. Then, the wonky six-fingered video launched the conspiracy theory into the mainstream.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This was enough that some large swath of people latched on to this idea that Netanyahu had been killed in a missile strike, and the Israeli government was hiding the truth and making AI videos to convince the world that he was still alive, to what aim, I’m not exactly sure. It turned into, you know, such like a meme, essentially. Like, the conversation got so big that it was enough that Netnyahu posted another video.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cb>[Audio clip from Benjamin Netanyahu’s post on X] \u003c/b>\u003c/em>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Voice behind camera: Do you want to show us?\u003cbr>\nNetanyahu: Here. Here.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This video takes place in a coffee shop near Jerusalem. The camera approaches Netanyahu, and the voice behind it says, they’re saying on the internet that you’re actually dead. Netanyah, holding a latte, tells the camera, I’m dying for a coffee. And then he holds up his hand and says, do you want to count the fingers?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He did a terrible job with it for a couple of reasons. If the goal was convincing the public. Number one, I talked to a bunch of people about this and they’re like, the worst thing you can do is come out and deny it because it makes it look like you’ve got something to hide. Right?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And there is still something off about the video. It was almost uncanny. He looked super crisp and almost too smooth. It only fueled the conspiracy theories.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They shot this on like a nice DSLR, like one of those big cameras, which is how AI videos look. Right? They’re trained on high quality content, high quality videos, so they produce what looks like smoother, polished, high quality video. So it looked a little bit more like AI than it would have if he had just used a phone to record it. So that, I think, just sent people spiraling even more. Nobody was convinced by this, as far as I could tell. The people who had latched on, if anything, it just reaffirmed their belief that the bad guys were trying to trick them.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here’s the thing about conspiracy theories. Once you’re convinced, everything else just seems like confirmation of what you already believe. People took screenshots, zoomed in, tried to find inconsistencies in the backgrounds of the video. Joe Rogan, for one, seemed pretty convinced.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cb>[Audio clip from The Joe Rogan Experience] \u003c/b>\u003c/em>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Look at this. Yeah, like the coffee. Look how turned it is, but it doesn’t spill at all. It just wiggles to the edge.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He talked about it on his podcast, which has over 20 million followers on YouTube. And of course, that just spread the rumor further. I saw claims that if you zoomed in on the date on the register, the pixels didn’t look right. So surely it was fake. Right? Or that the video itself was real, but it wasn’t actually Netanyahu. It was really an actor deep faked to look like Netanyahu and the shadows gave it away. Or, that when he put his hands in his pocket, the fabric of his jacket seemed to smooth over.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And the thing about reality is it’s weird. Right? Like, if you look close enough at anything you’ll find weird stuff but especially with digital photography, digital video, it’s the way that the sensors work, like, errors are actually inherent to the way that a digital camera sensor functions. So if you zoom in on any video, if you’re, like, watching a clip from this podcast on social media, zoom in, take a screenshot and zoom in, you will find something weird. That’s just how digital images work, that there’ll be some little grainy thing, there’ll be some glitch. And I think it’s important for people to understand that unless you have serious expertise on this subject, you aren’t qualified to make that kind of call. I am not qualified to make that knd of, I think about this stuff all the time.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">For his column, Thomas talked to a few of the world’s leading experts on this, including Jeremy Carrasco. He runs a publication called Riddance, which investigates AI-generated media.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And he went through, he analyzed it, he determined it was real. I talked to professors, I talked to some people who were like, real world leading experts on digital forensics is what they call it, like figuring out what the origin of a file is. They said there is no doubt. It is impossible that these videos are AI-generated. Like, this thing where it sort of looked like Netanyahu had a sixth finger, even if you watch the clip, instead of looking at a freeze frame, you can kind of see there’s like a shadow on his hand and that’s what it is. It looks weird if you take a screenshot at the right second, but the video itself, it’s very clearly real. This was not enough. And I think that is kind of part of the problem is that we’ve lived through an era where there’s been an assault on expertise, right? That, you know, real conscious, intentional efforts to discredit traditional forms of you know, authority on truth.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thomas also talked to Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley who’s known as the father of digital forensics. He pioneered this field of examining files and figuring out if they’re real.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He’s one of these guys that’s constantly watching this stuff. And he says, you can see the progression of AI and deep fake technology if you look at some of the recent global conflicts. Like, if we go back to the beginning of the war in Ukraine, it was almost all real footage. Like, every once in a while, you’d see something AI-generated, but for the most part, it was all real. Fast forward to the conflict in Gaza and it was starting to get to the point where there was more AI-generated content. It was a little harder to sort the real from the truth. You get to when the U.S. invaded Venezuela, and it was about 50-50. Right? You’re seeing as much fake stuff as real stuff if you just go out and look at a random video on the subject on the internet. By the time we got to the war in Iran, there’s more fake footage, there’s more fake clips, there is more mis and disinformation than there is real stuff.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A few weeks ago, we dove into the slopaganda coming out of Iran, those AI-generated Lego rap videos dissing the U.S. They’re clearly not real, but they still push specific narratives to the American public. But there’s another kind of AI- generated media at play here: videos that look real but portray events that never happened, like AI-generated footage of Iranian missiles sinking U.S. ships and bombarding civilians in Tel Aviv.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In less than six months, we had this dramatic shift where I think people in power who’ve got like, you know, a game to play, they’ve got something that they want to try and convince the public of, they’ve realized that this technology is something they can put into play. There are whole operations that are ready to get off the ground at a moment’s notice to like, fill the world with fakery and lies. I think that is a real serious problem, I mean, even for journalists, even in the media. Like, it used to be if you saw something that was recorded with a camera, you know, in the not too distant past, it was almost certainly real. Right? Because it took so much effort, especially for video, so much effort to fake something in a convincing way. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Now I can do it like while I’m washing the dishes. I could reach over and hammer something out of my phone and generate a fake video. For the average person, I think this means that you are constantly inundated with nonsense. You are being exposed to lies on a near constant basis. It’s not just that the image looks real, it’s not just the video looks real. The thing that’s happening is so close to real life. Right? And if you’re a person who watches a lot of short form video and social media, if like scrolling through Instagram Reels or TikTok, the chances that you have seen a piece of AI content and been fooled that it was real, I’d say in the last week, are extremely high.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Actual footage, meanwhile, has been written off as fake and AI. When the U.S. bombed an elementary school in Iran, killing 120 children, some people online questioned whether footage of the aftermath was authentic. It didn’t help that the true photos and videos were mixed in with AI-generated depictions of what happened. It’s one thing for digital forensics experts, like Hany Farid, to sift through all of the slop and determine what’s real. It’s another for these experts to get the public to actually trust them.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It leads to an information ecosystem, you know, a landscape of truth where everything is up for debate. Nothing is set in stone and everything is suspect. And that leads to some new ways that power can be abused and people can be taken advantage of.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The conspiracy theories over Netanyahu’s death have not stopped. The follow-up videos and public appearances after the coffee shop debacle only fueled the rumors further. In March, Netanyahu appeared in a video with Mike Huckabee, who is now the ambassador to Israel.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cb>[Audio clip from Benjamin Netanyahu’s post on X] \u003c/b>\u003c/em>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Mike Huckabee: Mr. Prime Minister, I wanted you to know, the President asked me to come and make sure you were okay. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Benjamin Netanyahu: Yes, Mike. Yes, I’m alive.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If anything, it only convinced people that Huckabee was also a deepfake. On X and TikTok, people did the same exact thing they did to previous videos, zoomed in, slowed down, cropped screenshots, and looked for any anomaly that could confirm their theories.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>\u003cem>[Audio clip from a post on the TikTok account of @ragingprestigemaster3.0]\u003c/em>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003cem>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The picture you’re seeing right up here, that’s not his ear, fam.\u003c/span>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think that is a truly historical moment. This is, according to everyone that I asked, the first time that the leader of a major world power has like openly gone out in front of the public to try and convince people that he’s not an AI. And I think it’s a sign of a very rocky period that we’re about to enter.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What does this mean for media literacy, our ability to parse the truth from fiction? Well, it definitely does not bode well for the information ecosystem. It’s really easy to take advantage of public distrust and write off real evidence as fake and AI. We’re going to talk about liars and disinformation in a new tab, after a quick break.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">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.kqed.org/podcasts.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, after the break, we’re coming back to bunnies on a trampoline. Stick around.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re back. Time to open a new tab: the liar’s dividend.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A while back there was this video of, it looked like night camera footage and it was bunnies jumping on a trampoline.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yes.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You remember this?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I got duped by that. I have a sense of whimsy. \u003cem>[laughter]\u003c/em> I thought it was real.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I fell for it too at first, you know, I saw that and I was like, wow, like maybe the world’s okay after all, like there’s still, you, know, there’s still nice cute things happening. No, turns out it was fake. Millions of people saw this. That doesn’t matter. Right? It’s not going to affect your day or your life that the bunnies aren’t real. But you’re seeing stuff that is a little bit more consequential, that is maybe affecting your beliefs about how the world works or what is happening. And I think this adds up to a lot of people being led astray in ways that are really, really subtle.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Because anything online could be fake, people have become suspicious of everything.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And that creates a situation where if there’s ever any reason to doubt that something is real, then it immediately falls apart.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a media phenomenon called “the liar’s dividend.” Legal scholars coined the term back in 2018 in a paper about how deep fakes, truth decay, and cognitive bias affect the information ecosystem. They thought it was bad back then? They could not have predicted today. Anyway, so what exactly is “the liar’s dividend”?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It takes time or resources to verify that something is real. It’s free to cast doubt. It’s free to say that’s fake, right? It takes no effort at all. And once you raise those suspicions, you can take advantage of that. Right? I can say, ‘oh, that’s a fake news, that didn’t happen.’ And that gives people in power the ability to cast doubt on anything that isn’t convenient for whatever their goals happen to be.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, we’ve reached the point where you cannot trust your eyes, like, that ship has sailed, it’s over. You can’t tell whether you’re looking at an AI video or not. You certainly can’t tell whether your looking at a image. They’ve gotten so good that our physiology does not allow you to deal with this problem.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You don’t have to be a major world leader to be affected by this. Before he wrote about this deep, fake situation, Thomas worked on this story about a safety tool that wipes your personal information from Google search results. Like every other tech journalist, he’s really passionate about privacy. So he was chugging coffee, writing this article…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I got myself all worked up and I put in my family group chat, like, “Here’s a link to this setting. Everybody needs to go turn this on right now.” And my mom was like, “Is this really you?” Like, are you, is someone like taking…like that’s…[laughter] and in her defense, it is weird behavior. Right? That’s a strange thing for me to do. You have to use this Google setting right now, that’s something that’s gonna happen to you. Right? You’re gonna be talking to someone, something will be strange. Right? Maybe you’ll be in an emergency. Maybe you will get in a car accident and you call, you know, your wife and be like, I really, I desperately need Amazon gift cards right now. And it’s, it’s real.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If your loved one calls you and urgently tells you that they need those gift cards, it’s probably a scam. But maybe your partner is calling to ask for the password to the family Netflix account. Your best friend lost her passport while on vacation and needs help getting a new one. Or your nephew tells you that he actually wants a blue sweater instead of the gold one you started knitting. These could be real, but how do you know?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That’s a thing that’s going to happen more and more because we’re living in this world where everything is suspect and if any little doubt comes up, suddenly everything falls apart.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So what is the solution here? Are AI companies or social media platforms doing anything to help differentiate between what’s real and what’s generated? Industry leaders and academics have been pushing for a kind of digital watermark that would be embedded in the file itself, like planting a flag that says AI-generated. And that flag would be planted deep in the pixel data. It would be really difficult to remove. Google Gemini already does this. It’s called Synth ID.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So the dream there is we’ll get to a place where like all of the big AI companies or companies that are making these tools will participate in this program and there’ll be some level of checking. On the flip side, there’s efforts to build a similar thing into cameras that when you take an image with a camera, you take a photo or a video, it would embed something in the file that says this was taken by an actual camera. It’s like, this is an image of reality. So far, that technology is not here. Right?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We haven’t gotten to the point where that is widespread enough that it can be usable. And hopefully we will arrive at a point where there’s some kind of technical solution or at least technical amelioration to this problem that will like help you sort through it. But we also just need from the social media companies, I think a lot of critics that I speak to say they need to be doing way more to label AI content right now than they are.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">On a lot of these platforms, you can upload a piece of footage or an image. They don’t really care whether it’s AI, right? The platforms where we’re getting all of our information could be doing a lot more to let you know that something that you’re looking at is suspicious, but they don’t have a financial incentive to solve that problem. Right? So I think what it really comes down to is we need regulatory approaches to this that will help at least do something to point people in the direction of truth. Not an easy problem to solve, but we haven’t really even tried yet.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, well in that case, how do you assure your loved ones that you’re really you? Let’s open our last tab:n how to prove that you are not a deep faith.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So this YouTuber, Jim Browning, makes videos about exposing scammers. He recently went super viral with his three-finger test.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cb>[Audio from Jim Browning’s Youtube post] \u003c/b>\u003c/em>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jim Browning: Can you like hold up three fingers in front of your face or anything? \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Person: Oh, come on, that’s too much.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The reasoning? This would disrupt any face-swapping deep fake program and make it glitch.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>[Audio from Jim Browning’s Youtube post] \u003c/b>\u003cb>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jim Browning: Can you do that then? \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Person: Uh, I don’t know, it’s too much to ask somebody. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jim Browning: Well, it’ll make sure you’re not AI, is that unreasonable? I mean, can you do that in front of your face? \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Person: Well, is that enough? \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jim Browning: No, it’s not in front of your face. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The scammer then abruptly ended the call, and in the comments, people were like, this is it. This is the perfect test. This is how to stay safe. But the truth is, this trick has been outdated for years.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I could tell you some things that you could look for, some telltale signs for audio and for video, but I’m not going to because if I gave you those tips, it would actually hurt you more than it would help you because in a week or in a month or in six months, they’re going to put out another AI model and those tips that worked last week aren’t going to work now. There is no giveaway that you’re watching an AI video. In fact, maybe the one thing that you can look out for is if you’re a watching a video that’s low quality, that’s grainy, you might be more likely to get fooled because if there is any weird digital artifact, it’ll be harder to see. AI can make high quality video, a low quality grainy pixelated image, that’s not a sign that you are looking at AI. Maybe it’s a sign, if there’s any doubt, that you might want to think twice. But we’ve past that point. Deepfakes are astonishingly good, and they keep getting just a little bit better.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Luckily, there is one way to protect yourself and your loved ones. And you don’t have to be that tech savvy to do it. It involves gathering up your inner circle. Older relatives, close friends, partners, nibblings, neighbors, basically anyone who could feasibly get this panicked emergency call from someone pretending to be you.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You should set up a secret word that you both agree on, that if there’s ever any doubt, you can ask the person for that password and they’ll give it to you and you know you’re talking to the real person. Because I have spoken to people who’ve been scammed, where they get a phone call and it is their husband or their child. I talked to this woman who a scammer set this up and called her and she like swears to this. She’s like, I know it’s fake, but it was my son. It was his voice. It was perfect and they’re really convincing and if you’re going to get scammed what they’re going to do is there’s going to be some emergency you need to deal with right now you’re not going to be in your right mind then it’s like a solution that’s so simple it’s kind of nice in a way that with like such a frighteningly high-tech problem the solution is just speaking words outloud.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This charmingly simple solution is more important than ever, because unfortunately, there’s no going back to the days before AI. But while this code word thing is great for keeping grandma from blowing her life savings on a deepfake scam, it doesn’t help you parse through all of the deepfaked and AI-generated content you come across online. There are still countless ways to get tricked.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think it will reach the point where for a lot of people, there is no source of truth. Everyone is trying to trick you. And I think there are a lot grifters who will take advantage of that. I think there’s people in power who will see an opportunity and they will seize it. You’ll be able to spin whatever kind of narrative you want because if you’ve got people who trust you, you can say, well, the things that I’m telling you are true and anyone who criticizes me, they’re all part of the lie.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>My optimistic view is it will get so bad that there will be such a desperate need for trusted institutions that people will step in to fill the void and people will seek out sources of truth that they can rely on and we will rebuild an ecosystem of trust. So I think the advice that would give you is like go find that one person on the internet, someone who’s sincere, who you trust, who you feel has your best interest in mind or maybe in institution. Maybe there’s a publication you like, maybe it’s local news. Try to find sources who you can go to, who you look to when there’s a question, because your eyes and your ears just aren’t gonna cut it anymore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That being said, when it comes to these personal relationships, sometimes you do need a little trust. Thomas said that he and his aunt Eleanor don’t use a code word every time they talk on the phone.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Fortunately, this hasn’t caused any strife between me and my aunt so far. I told her that I wasn’t actually trying to trick her, that it was the real me on the other end of the line, but I hope that this experience was unsettling enough that if there’s ever any reason to doubt, if it’s ever like, hey, I’m in trouble, I need money, or I forgot my password, I hope that she will question it and try and figure out whether it’s really me because at some point someone is going to try and fool all of us.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. So when she gets that chaotic text that you actually do want the gold sweater after all, she’ll ask you for your code word.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I do need $600 in Walmart gift cards as soon as possible.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So if you do get a call begging for gift cards, it never hurts to double check and ask for the code word. That’s it for this deep dive, but stick around after the credits for some bonus content. Okay, let’s close all these tabs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">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. The Close All Tabs team also includes editor Chris Hambrick and audio engineer, Brendan Willard. Additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our director of podcasts and Ethan Toven Lindsey is our editor-in-chief.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">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. 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. Thanks for listening.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Thomas Germain: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You know, one of the people I interviewed for this story said, “I purchased 25 acres in Vermont so when the world falls apart, I’ll go live on my homestead.” You know, maybe they’ve got the right idea. I don’t know. I don’t have 25 acres in Vermont money myself. So I’m stuck here with the rest of us schlubs, you know, we’re gonna have to deal with the fallout.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>"
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"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. ",
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"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.",
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"mindshift": {
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"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>",
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"order": 12
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"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?",
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"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",
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},
"perspectives": {
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"info": "The economy explained. Imagine you could call up a friend and say, Meet me at the bar and tell me what's going on with the economy. Now imagine that's actually a fun evening.",
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"title": "Political Breakdown",
"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
"airtime": "THU 6:30pm-7pm",
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"possible": {
"id": "possible",
"title": "Possible",
"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Possible-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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"source": "Possible"
},
"link": "/radio/program/possible",
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},
"pri-the-world": {
"id": "pri-the-world",
"title": "PRI's The World: Latest Edition",
"info": "Each weekday, host Marco Werman and his team of producers bring you the world's most interesting stories in an hour of radio that reminds us just how small our planet really is.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 2pm-3pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-World-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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},
"radiolab": {
"id": "radiolab",
"title": "Radiolab",
"info": "A two-time Peabody Award-winner, Radiolab is an investigation told through sounds and stories, and centered around one big idea. In the Radiolab world, information sounds like music and science and culture collide. Hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, the show is designed for listeners who demand skepticism, but appreciate wonder. WNYC Studios is the producer of other leading podcasts including Freakonomics Radio, Death, Sex & Money, On the Media and many more.",
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},
"reveal": {
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