[Amanda]

Hi everybody, welcome to the website 101 podcast, our lunch bites. This happens, we go YouTube live on the first and the third Wednesday of every month and today was a bit of a mess because I was super late and I held everybody up. So I'm really sorry, sorry Sean, sorry Sean, sorry Mike, my co-host for the website 101 podcast.

How are you doing?

[Sean]

Great to be here on this Olympic edition of the website 101 lunch bites.

[Mike]

Okay, yeah, team Canada is losing against Czechia right now.

[Sean]

Yeah, I watched the first period just before I came to this, a little disappointing about that. That's okay, we'll use our finger and push the puck in.

[Amanda]

Amanda cares so little about sports, I forgot the Olympics was even happening.

[Sean]

Wow, okay.

[Amanda]

I thought I was apathetic towards sports. Yeah, I mean, I got the finger reference, thanks Canada Curling, and I knew it was on, I had just forgotten that it was still happening.

[Sean]

Oh, funny, yesterday I saw a meme with the finger thing, and it was Canada versus Switzerland in hockey, and he was pushing a puck in, just kind of why I referenced that just now, it was so fun.

[Mike]

Well, speaking of that meme, that was of course created with AI, and I assume you've all seen the insane things happening, especially with video, AI video lately, there's been a lot of stuff. Images too. Images too, sure, but there's, have you, sorry, go ahead, Amanda.

[Amanda]

Oh no, I was just going to say that you're right, the video, AI video is starting to look a lot more realistic to a degree.

[Sean]

I find a lot of shorts on YouTube, the ones that are with this like, clickbait baby headlines, they're all AI videos, and I accidentally click on them, and it just drives me nuts, it's like some cute animal doing something that is completely against their nature, or whatever. That's what drives you nuts? No, no, no, not the cute animal, but the AI video that's so obviously fake after I've accidentally or intentionally, occasionally clicked on it, but usually it's accidentally.

[Mike]

Yeah, have you heard about this seed dance, the one that's made by the people who do TikTok?

[Amanda]

No, no.

[Mike]

Well, this is the latest model, and it's fucking unbelievable, as you can see.

[Sean]

Wait, so this is supposed to be AI, like not a real human?

[Mike]

Correct. Oh my god. And it goes on, like there's all kinds of stuff here, I don't want to go into a lot of detail with it, but have you heard of this Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise thing?

[Sean]

I've heard something about it, I don't know details.

[Mike]

Well, these people, this is my understanding, this company, because it's Chinese, they don't give a shit about copyrights, had originally released this video of Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt on a rooftop, which I'm about to play for you right now. Have a look.

[Amanda]

Oh, it's loud.

[Mike]

Wow. It doesn't go on long.

[Amanda]

Jeffrey Epstein, you animal! He was a good man!

[Mike]

He knew too much about our Russia operations. He had to die, and now you die too.

[Sean]

So that is not real. There's something wrong with this video, because Brad Pitt has to beat Tom Cruise.

[Mike]

Okay, I don't know what's going on here, we're going to stop.

[Sean]

That was your issue with that video. Well, no, I mean, I'm making a joke.

[Mike]

So, Amanda, speak, what are you thinking?

[Amanda]

Oh, I'm horrified on so many different levels. The fact that they would blatantly take two American Hollywood superstars, which of course this is going to become a bigger and bigger issue in Hollywood as time goes on, and there's already been some artists that are starting to very passionately speak out about it, like, it's my face, it's my voice, it's mine, I should be copywritten, which I 100% agree with. The action sequence was a bit janky, but considering it's like AI-produced video, I guess that's fine, of course it's going to get better.

Their voices sounded a little bit weird, which kind of put me off a little bit. But Brad Pitt defending Jeffrey Epstein, saying that he's a good person, just the content, just the stuff that they were saying was horrifying. The only thing I agreed with was when it was said Epstein knew too much, we had to kill him.

I'm not saying that's Tom Cruise's opinion, but I'm saying that Epstein- I didn't catch any of the words, but that might be my hearing loss.

[Mike]

Okay, let me comment on that. First of all, this is my understanding of how it went. I could be missing things, but I think they put that out as a bit of a joke.

They said the Epstein thing just to prove it's a fake thing, right? It's obviously not something you would see.

[Sean]

The quality of the fight scene- Mike, can you minimize it? It's very distracting, now that we're not watching it.

[Mike]

Well, I'm going to show you something in a second, as soon as I start talking, wherever you share it. Okay, it's probably not good quality fighting because I was sharing it. If you watch it, I can't tell that it's not a real movie when I watch it.

[Amanda]

Oh no, when I said the action sequence, I mean it was like a couple of random punches that got blocked and suddenly Brad Pitt is like all beaten to shit.

[Mike]

Oh sure, yeah.

[Amanda]

In a real action movie, there's going to be kicks, there's going to be throws, there's going to be- But that clip that I showed you was someone who clipped together some other stuff that they showed, right?

[Mike]

So it wasn't going to see it.

[Amanda]

That aspect, scary good. As an action scene, meh, but that clip together, frighteningly good.

[Sean]

So I have a different issue than Amanda does, and it's not so much about the celebrity issue. Once this becomes cost effective, there's going to be a massive bullying issue going on with people of all ages. And fake videos- Like just imagine when you were in high school and people were getting bullied or maybe you were the bully, I don't know.

I assume you guys weren't. You seemed like nice people. Kids don't have filters.

They're not going to think about right or wrong. They're just going to look at something as funny in a cruel way and not necessarily think it's cruel. They're going to be doing that.

Then there's adults that are not going to be thinking about that. And then there's going to be people who want to get back at somebody and they're going to make fake sex videos.

[Amanda]

Oh, deepfakes, yeah, they already exist.

[Sean]

Yeah, but I mean, they're going to be so realistic that you're not going to be able to tell. I haven't gone looking for that kind of thing now. I'm not interested in it, but I'm assuming that up until this seed dance came out, that there was a lot more obvious tells about it being a fake video.

Not really. This is, OK, it's just it's frightening. I'm so I'm so glad that I did all my stupid shit before the Internet.

I can't imagine being a teenager or 20 years old or whatever right now.

[Amanda]

Yeah, well, yeah. And I mean, the videos, the videos are obviously awful. The potential of just people being destroyed, their reputations, their feelings, like financially, professionally, all of that.

The pictures, like just still pictures, faking still pictures with A.I. was bad enough. The video is just like exponentially worse.

[Mike]

Amanda, you froze.

[Sean]

I'm going to carry on from what Amanda was saying with with photography. It was something I was going to bring up.

[Mike]

And now Amanda's back. So after you're done, she's going to come back.

[Sean]

OK, well, no, I didn't start my thing. So Amanda, continue.

[Amanda]

Oh, no, I was just saying that the fake images were awful enough. And now the fake videos are going to be exponentially worse.

[Sean]

So as you guys know, I'm pretty big into photography. And I've seen a number of photographers like they show a photo and they go, this is not A.I., but people keep accusing me of being A.I. because it's stuff that you can actually do if you know what you're doing. Like beyond my skill level, like I'm good, but I'm not amazing.

And so, yeah, A.I.'s just made it so that you can't tell reality from fiction anymore.

[Amanda]

Yeah, well, and the thing is, if somebody was good enough at Photoshop, this issue has been happening for a long time. But now the difference is you had to be skilled at Photoshop. You had to know about ideas of like the foundations of photography to make something look realistic.

And now anybody can go in and just punch the keyboard to come up with some random prompt. And yeah, horrifying.

[Mike]

And what you said earlier about this Hollywood thing, immediately, of course, when that video came out, Hollywood, you know, what is it, SAG, Actra or whatever, the people that represent the actors were like, this is an outrage, it's got to be stopped, blah, blah, blah. And then the company, strangely enough, came out and said, we actually support copyrights. Don't worry, we're not going to do all this kind of stuff.

And I think they took that down or something.

[Amanda]

But we're not. But what about everybody else who uses that platform?

[Mike]

Yeah. Do you guys remember the Will Smith spaghetti eating video? Yeah.

So there's this guy who made, this is on Instagram, so it's a terrible thing. It's like an evolution of it. So this is where it was.

This is three years ago, okay? Remember that. And it's going through the years here.

And there's actually audio in this too. But oh yeah, I should turn it on.

[Sean]

2025 looks pretty good.

[Mike]

Sorry, that's loud. So this is where it's at now. I think that's another model that's coming out.

[Amanda]

Yeah. Yeah, that's scary. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I wish that all of these AI companies could agree to somehow mark their products as AI.

Not necessarily something as obvious as a watermark, but maybe. And obviously, this isn't going to solve all of the problems. And obviously, people can still go in and even pull out metadata from a streaming video or something like that.

But something, something that shows that all of the companies collectively are taking this seriously. Well, the problem is though, there's a lot of open source models.

[Sean]

Yeah, but it would be simple enough for them to put a digital watermark that's embedded in the metadata. So it's not visible on screen. But for forensic investigations or any sort of thing like that, it would be obvious that it's AI.

And you could have flags on YouTube or whatever that searches the metadata and says AI. And then there's a little AI badge on your YouTube video or whatever service you're using. Yeah.

[Amanda]

If you're using AI, keep using AI. But be proud that it's AI. Don't lie about it.

[Mike]

Well, first of all, there are a lot of open source models where people can do all kinds of stuff. Sure, the ones that are coming from open AI or whatever can have that built in. But if you're running an open source model, you can bypass a lot of that stuff.

Secondly, there was in, I think it was TikTok, they allowed this AI video thing and they put a badge at the bottom that said generated by AI. But it was still, I can't remember what specific videos there were, but there were still controversies happening where people believed it because they just didn't look at the fucking watermark, the little thing at the bottom. They didn't notice it.

[Sean]

So, I don't know.

[Mike]

I'm not sure that'll solve it.

[Sean]

After watching that Will Smith video, I was thinking about the Matrix. And you know how the Matrix, they're in the AI or the virtual reality, and it loops every 99 years. We're at the point where the loop needs to reboot.

[Mike]

I didn't know it looped every 99 years in that movie. That's, I forgot that fact.

[Amanda]

That's with the third movie.

[Mike]

Oh, I didn't see that.

[Sean]

Sorry, I'm a huge Matrix fan. I can quote the entire series to you.

[Amanda]

It's a good... Well, and speaking of Matrix, because I remember how revolutionary it was to have all of these new filming ideas and ways to capture different scenes. And that one, at the beginning of the first Matrix movie, where it was Trinity in a fight and she did her thing.

And then it looked like the camera went all the way around her.

[Mike]

Yeah, bullet time, yeah.

[Amanda]

Yeah, and it was very popular to see how that scene was made and how much, the cost of it and how long it took and just the very unique, creative problem solving that they had to do. And now, again, AI, it's done in 20 seconds.

[Sean]

Yeah, all I have to do is prompt it. Here's a photo of me. Put me in a Matrix scene doing bullet time and it would do it.

Actually, I kind of want to do that now.

[Mike]

Well, and this is what I was going to say. And this is a devil's advocate. I'm not saying I believe this, but a lot of people are saying that maybe this ease of creating this technology now and these new movies or whatever scenes can result in this boon of new creative stuff by amateurs who wouldn't have been able to afford stuff before.

Like, here's something I was thinking of the other day when I saw this Tom Cruise thing. Did you guys know that when Indiana Jones was cast, it was supposed to be Tom Selleck as Indiana Jones, not Harrison Ford?

[Sean]

Yes, I did know that.

[Mike]

He wasn't available to do it because he was doing Magnum P.I. And I actually think he'd do a great job as Indiana Jones, personally, in his prime. And I think it'd be cool for someone to make an A.I. video of Tom Selleck as Indiana Jones and maybe Harrison Ford as Magnum P.I. while we're at it.

[Sean]

I would love to see Magnum P.I. I forgot, what's his name?

[Mike]

Tom Selleck.

[Sean]

I'd love to see Tom Selleck doing the scene with the boulder running away from the boulder.

[Mike]

And there's a couple of like fake, stupid, kind of deep, fakey ones from years ago of people putting his face, but they're not very convincing. But now you could do that kind of thing. And I don't know, I'm not saying I would want to watch the whole movie, but I can see that argument, that it would be fun to see, you know?

[Amanda]

Yeah, but I saw somebody post somewhere, and it was like sort of a flippant, off-the-cuff remark about how A.I. was supposed to come and do all of the menial, gross jobs that nobody wants to do so that people could spend more time with their creative endeavors. And it's actually the opposite. Like it's doing all of the creative stuff in less time so the people who like put work into their craft, whether it be music or movies or voice acting or development, co-development, whatever it is, you know, to have the idea that A.I. is going to...

I mean, again, A.I. isn't really intelligence. It is still right now predictive, trying to guess, trying to figure it out. But the idea that some computer is going to come in and like do the...

Oh, did she freeze frame too?

[Mike]

Amanda, you froze again. I'm dying to hear that point. Fuck.

We'll wait till she comes back. And we do want to talk about... There's a glitch in the matrix.

There is a glitch. Okay, there she is. Amanda, you're back.

[Amanda]

The matrix doesn't want me talking about it.

[Mike]

Yeah, it's trying to cover it up.

[Amanda]

No, just sad that, you know, sad that artificial intelligence isn't intelligent yet. It is just predictive. It is just guessing.

It is just trying to do the thing. But if it's going to take all of the fun and passion out of the things that people do, like...

[Sean]

Yeah.

[Amanda]

Like why is it there?

[Mike]

Do we want that?

[Amanda]

Do we want it?

[Sean]

Yeah, I...

[Amanda]

Science was so concerned about if we could, nobody asked if we should, something like that.

[Sean]

Yeah, why do I still have to clean my house and do the dishes and laundry and stuff?

[Amanda]

Do not get me started on that. Oh my God. I have a video for you all.

If I could please show this. Just give me a second to find it. Oh no, I don't want that.

I want to go there.

[Sean]

Yeah, I would much rather spend my time going out and doing the photography that I enjoy than maintenance around my house or whatever.

[Mike]

Shoveling snow and whatnot.

[Sean]

Oh yeah, shoveling snow, very relevant today.

[Amanda]

Okay, so I like the videos where the robots fall down. It tickles me. I like it very much.

They're fun.

[Mike]

They're going to remember that about you when they take over. Probably.

[Amanda]

Amanda's super screwed. And as much as I hate doing dishes and as much as I hate making dinner, and oh my goodness, wouldn't it be great to have Rosie the robot come in and be able to do all of this stuff for us? I saw this on Reddit.

Notice the 2025 and the 2026. Check out the super janky robots of just last year.

[Mike]

And we're sure this is real? This is a real demo?

[Amanda]

From, yeah, it's a Chinese festival that happened. And you can see that it was broadcast on their TV station. I mean, I haven't researched it.

I haven't looked into it. I am just assuming- Look at the robots doing flips. Yeah, so like a toddler dance class and parkour.

I don't want these robots in my home. I don't want Skynet taking over.

[Mike]

Amanda, you shared this with me earlier there, and I checked it out. Later coming up here, they start using nunchucks. That's the really scary part.

[Amanda]

Are you fucking kidding me?

[Mike]

Yeah.

[Sean]

Hey, and I wonder if our younger listeners, viewers got Amanda's reference to Rosie the robot. Does everybody know? It's the Jetsons.

[Mike]

Go ahead. Yeah, Jetsons is a cartoon about the future. The opposite of the Flintstones, I guess, right?

[Sean]

Yes. I believe there was a crossover with the Flintstones too. Probably.

[Mike]

Probably, with Kazoo.

[Amanda]

Well done. So yeah, I mean, and already all of the movies about errors in programming, AI making mistakes, they're all considered anywhere between suspense and horror.

[Mike]

These are... Yeah, like iRobot had that scene. Those robots basically coming to life and taking over.

[Sean]

iRobot based off of Asimov. I can't even ever say his name. Book from the 60s.

[Amanda]

Yeah, and the problem is, I think one of the problems is that I don't know that the... Because I interact with younger generations through teaching, they're like... Sometimes I will just get on a rant about one of my concerns.

And at the beginning, the few that are in the classroom, I can see them rolling their eyes and Amanda's getting into it again. But by the end of it, there's oftentimes a lot of them are kind of like, shit, yeah, I didn't think about that. I showed one time, it was an AI generated video and it was supposed to look like a police cam footage, chasing down Chucky.

Do you remember those horror TV? Those horror movies, the little doll Chucky and Chucky had a knife. And so the police person is trying to chase down Chucky.

Ha ha ha, it's very funny. Everyone was very entertained by it, even if they didn't know who Chucky was. It was an amusing little clip.

And I'm like, okay, done with AI. Now imagine that somebody takes out Chucky and puts you in and you get arrested and you're before some judge who is a boomer, because they're still around, who doesn't understand AI generated videos.

[Sean]

And even if they do understand it, how do you prove that it was AI? This is where we need that meta data embedded in it. And this goes back to what I said at the top of the show about fake videos impacting people's lives, like bullying or fake sex videos or whatever.

It is literally horrifying opportunities that it's so easy to do. Just a little bit of money to get the credits and you can make whatever you want. Yeah, well, and sometimes you don't even need the money.

What's going to happen to political campaigns? They're going to be fun. Oh, Jesus.

[Amanda]

Not that they weren't already fun, but you know. They're already super fucked. I want everybody to always remember when Trump posted that, even if he didn't make that AI video, he probably posted that AI video of him flying around in a fighter jet, dumping poop on.

And it wasn't even just poop on protesters. Like, it was a person. It was an actual real activist who had been in the news recently.

And I saw a reaction video from him. And he's like, I mean, on the one hand, Trump, get over yourself. And on the other hand, it was like, I must be hurting some feelings if he's targeting me specifically.

[Sean]

Yeah. What about the video that came out last week or whatever, where with Obama on some ape's body? It was like ridiculously fake.

But I mean, that's just because Trump's incompetent. He couldn't actually prompt properly. Thank God.

[Mike]

Well, he didn't make that. He shared. Someone else made it and he shared it.

[Amanda]

Yeah. All right. Still, but again, so did you all hear about Grok and the pictures?

Oh, this was like many, many weeks ago now. So somebody, because when Grok was starting to get good at like posting pictures, and of course, X was like, oh, go check it out. Go try it.

And somebody was like, here, here's an experiment. Here's a picture of me. Hey, Grok, put me in a bikini.

And it did it. And it was like, that's a little bit scary. And then of course, because it's the internet, it quickly just went down the tubes.

And there goes Amanda again.

[Mike]

Yeah. Amanda, you're frozen. Matrix doesn't want her to do anything.

No. It quickly devolved. I'm going to finish her sentence.

It quickly devolved into, oh, she's back. Were you going to say devolved?

[Amanda]

Yeah. You know what? The internet doesn't want me with all of my radical opinions.

[Mike]

It's Elon Musk trying to stop you from talking about Grok.

[Sean]

It's CBS. Just like what they did to Colbert. Amanda's the next Colbert.

[Amanda]

I would take that with pride.

[Sean]

Yeah, I hope so. So would I.

[Amanda]

Anywhere near his stratosphere. That would be amazing.

[Mike]

Yeah. Yeah, well, does anyone have anything to, I guess we're wrapping up soon, but we haven't actually talked about AI in our jobs. There's, of course, Claude Cowork and Claude Code and all that stuff.

[Sean]

I used a little AI this morning to help me with a small, tiny issue, which, you know, when you do an upgrade on craft and you're looking at the deprecation errors, sometimes it's really simple. It just tells you, oh, it's on this template. And other times there's like this massive stack trace and it's impossible to figure out where it came from.

Well, I copied the stack trace into Claude and said, hey, help me find this. Where is it? And that gave me the temp, told me the template and told me the fix.

Instead of me spending like a couple of hours or an hour trying to figure it out, it took five minutes. So it's little things like that that are helpful, but, you know, I'm not, I'm not vibe coding the next YouTube or whatever. Yeah.

[Mike]

Yeah. Like this is the thing is that, you know, everyone's afraid of what impact it's going to have on people's jobs, but at the same time, it's really helpful in a lot of ways. And it's hard to not use it.

If you don't use it in some capacity, you probably, probably fall behind your, your competitors.

[Sean]

So it's a weird little, uh, well, the issue that, that I see going forward is there are going to be no, in, in programming or web development, there's going to be not that many developers who are able to work at the middle level because there's entry level, entry level jobs are all going to be done by AI. And how do you get hired at the mid or senior level? You have experience as an entry level.

And, and then we're going to, all these, all these currently middle senior developers are going to be retiring eventually. Who's going to take over? It's all going to be prompting.

You're not, no, nobody's going to have skills about troubleshooting or.

[Amanda]

And, and the thing is, even if it is prompting, I've oftentimes used prompting to do the troubleshooting, but again, if you don't have the knowledge of what to prompt, how are you supposed to even get there? You know? Yeah.

[Sean]

And AI in its current state, a lot of times it gets, it goes off on a wild goose chase. And then I have to pull it back and say, you know what, actually, I think it might be a problem with A, B and C. And then it comes back.

Oh, excellent. Of course.

[Mike]

You're right. You are so wise.

[Sean]

Yeah. I mean, it goes, and maybe it finds it, maybe it doesn't, but sometimes my experience is what helps me rein in AI going on a wild goose chase or putting out bloat bloated code. Because I'll like, oh, you know what?

I think a switch statement would be much simpler than what you're doing here. And then it says, oh yeah, you're, you're right again. Excellent.

It's like, listen, my ego is not so fragile that I need stroking from AI. I know, right?

[Mike]

You're thinking about exactly the right thing. Good for you.

[Sean]

That's how I talk to my cat or my dog.

[Mike]

Our friend Kevin Nicholson recently talked in our chat there about how one of the things that could happen as a result of this stuff is, at least from the design, web design side, is that maybe all these websites that people are creating with AI, because it's so simple, will just look the same because it sort of happens now. If you make a website with AI, it's going to have very similar characteristics.

[Sean]

I remember problems with everybody using the same WordPress themes or the same bootstrap code and everybody's like, oh look, it's another bootstrap site.

[Mike]

Right. And it'd be that multiplied because it's much, much more recognizable. That's one concern, which I think is valid.

So maybe there'd be some value put into people who can create code and design and so on that's creative and actually good and unique and that kind of thing, rather than just the same old.

[Amanda]

I don't know.

[Mike]

It's hard to know where it's going to go.

[Amanda]

Yeah, it is. It could be good. Let's try to end on a positive note.

It could be good.

[Sean]

It could be good or it could lead to the apocalypse.

[Amanda]

No, no, no, no. Let's just... A positive note, it could be good.

[Mike]

It could be good. All right. Thanks everybody for watching.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.