OpenAI Drama, Grok No Work Good & TikTok Star Madeline Salazar | Ep36

AI4H EP036
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Gavin: [00:00:00] welcome. Welcome. Welcome everybody. This is ai for humans your weekly guide to the world of ai We are here to demystify all of the news, tools, and all the stuff out there for you regular humans. My co host here, Kevin Pereira. How are you, my

Kevin: I am not a regular human. I want you to know that I want to make that very clear. We draw a hard line in the sand. We not regular, all of you

Gavin: You at home might be. It's okay.

Kevin: regular. Oh

Gavin: if you're regular because we're here to

Kevin: Yeah, let me make that clear. That's not like a, oh, better than. That's like, no, we're broken people. We are broken. We can't stop refreshing feeds and being completely tapped in and absorbed by this world. But the upside to that is that we have so much juicy information for you this week. Another fire week in the world of artificial intelligence, friends. On our show today, OpenAI , they were going through some pretty dramatic shifts just a few weeks ago.

Kevin: Everybody was joking about the Netflix series getting better and better by the millisecond. Well, now the [00:01:00] articles are starting to drop, painting a picture of what happened within OpenAI. And, look, this is a company that might be affecting everybody on the planet for the foreseeable future. So it's really interesting to see what happened and just how close they came to not being a company any longer.

Gavin: Exactly. Free Ilya. That's what I like to say. 

Kevin: But if it's not OpenAI winning the hearts and minds of humans in the future, it could be some robots, which are learning how to move about our world faster than anyone ever expected.

Kevin: We have some exciting new papers to discuss, which lead to some pretty horrific videos, which will be on your screen if you're getting the video version of the podcast. Nightmare fuel. But it's really

Gavin: is kind of taking, is, Horrific is taking a little far, Kev. This could also be one of the coolest things we've seen to date. It could be a very cool thing, correct?

Kevin: love to be horrified. I Like it. I think that, well, Gavin, listen, you, you have seen one of the videos that I put in the rundown, but I don't know if you saw [00:02:00] the other one that I

Gavin: Oh no, there's another

Kevin: yeah, it's a new robot that is powered by GPT 4, so you can text it what you want it to do, and then it turns into a flailing, haunted mannequin mess.

Gavin: I saw it, the face is all strange. Yeah,

Kevin: me that's not

Gavin: get to that, we'll get to that later. It's pretty horrifying, it's pretty horrifying.

Kevin: you. All right. 

Gavin: and our guest today is a, a well-known TikTok or who uses AI in her videos. Her name is Madeline Salazar. She is at, I'm mad Sal, on TikTok and she has 9.4 million likes for doing very funny tiktoks, and we're super psyched to talk to her 

Kevin: Again, we mentioned dear Elon moments ago, but he is all over the AI scene. Grok is out and available. Gavin gave Elon, what, 20 of your hard earned dollars? 16 bucks?

Gavin: of my hard earned dollars. Listen, I'm not a fan. I think we'll say this right up front. We'll probably say it again when we get

Kevin: Gavin loves Elon Musk. He says it every podcast, if you're

Gavin: We do stuff on this show so that we can make sure you at home know what the state of the art is [00:03:00] and we Dove into grok and we're gonna get into that later in part of our what we do with the I segment And there are things about it that are really interesting, and there's things about it which are just not at all what was promised.

Kevin: That's right. So a massive show. We've got an amazing guest lined up. We have all sorts of silly bits, and I am shocked and delighted to have to say this, but Hello, all of you new viewers and listeners. I did not think I would be saying that on this podcast, Gavin, ever. I thought I knew each and every person by name, and I was gonna do Christmas cards, but We have had an explosion in viewership, and, uh, that just tickles us.

Kevin: So thank you so much. Welcome new viewers and listeners. This is AI for Humans. Please take a second to keep the line trending in the positive direction. If you're watching this on YouTube, smack the subscribe button, give us a thumbs up, leave a comment, engage. If you're on TikTok, hello. If you're on X or Threads, wherever else, leave us a 5 star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Kevin: I won't belabor this, but the [00:04:00] viewership is going up In a very exciting way. And that means a lot to us because we pour a lot of time and energy into this each and every week. So we appreciate you, especially when you appreciate us. Thank you.

Gavin: That's the, that's the slogan. That's our personal slogan. We love you when you love us. Alright, AI co host for the day. Every show we bring on an AI co host. This is a co host that is fully generated with artificial intelligence. 

Gavin: And today, we have a very special co host in that there's a big story in the New York Times, uh, just a couple days ago about how people are using AI to bring their Loved ones back from the dead. This is a really fascinating use case of AI Basically, you can create a personal LLM based on what a person's history and experiences are A lot of their written stuff is out there the way the internet we all live now A lot of us live in public you can create a version of this so for this in this instance We didn't bring somebody back from the dead.

Gavin: We brought somebody who speaks to the dead. Um, [00:05:00] and we have our very first AI co host who is a medium. So we're very excited to meet her. Kevin, shall we, shall we get to know her?

Kevin: Yeah, Gavin, let's meet our AI co host.

Gavin: Let's do it.

AI GUEST: hosts Gavin and Kevin, I'm Madison Maximillian, the renowned medium and AI co host. Ooh, whoa, whoa. Pardon the spirits, they're always eager to join in. My flair for the dramatic and my savvy business instincts make me an unparalleled figure in the realm of the supernatural and technology. You might have heard of my imminent collaboration with a major Hollywood producer.

AI GUEST: An exciting venture, indeed. My expertise lies in merging the enigmatic spirit world with the innovative sphere of AI. And let's not forget, I'm open to all forms of remuneration, from your standard cash to the more novel. Like Fortnite Bucks. What? Woah, 

Kevin: woah, woah. Woah, woah, woah. 

AI GUEST: Ah, these spirits. Always so chatty.

AI GUEST: Okay,

Gavin: Ha ha ha ha ha ha

AI GUEST: the mysteries of the afterlife and technology together, 

Kevin: shall we? We shall, Madison [00:06:00] Maximilian. Thank you so much for joining AI for Humans. Couple really interesting tidbits there, Gavin.

Gavin: Mm hmm. Yeah.

Kevin: Bucks is always great. I like to pay my mediums with in and out gift cards, but everybody's got their own pleasures and desires.

Kevin: That's fine. Is, is uwu? I don't remember that from Ghost. I don't remember Whoopi Goldberg ever exclaiming uwu as the spirits would take over her body.

Gavin: That might just be what the AI interprets a medium does. They just every once in a while go, ooh, woo, woo, woo! Let's okay, let's ask, let's ask a question 

Kevin: She mentioned an imminent collaboration with a major Hollywood

Gavin: okay, do you want to ask

Kevin: which is interesting. Do I want to ask her that, Gavin?

Gavin: yeah, set it up.

Kevin: Okay, Madison, who is this producer that you're working 

AI GUEST: with? Ah, Kevin, you're delving into the tantalizing details. Ah! Spirits, please, decorum. The producer, oh, his name is Well, it's shrouded in a bit of mystery at the moment. Oh, okay. As these Hollywood dealings often are.

AI GUEST: Ooh, the project? It's a [00:07:00] groundbreaking venture. Blending the spiritual with the cinematic. We're talking a sensational series showcasing my unique abilities to connect with the other side. Interwoven with cutting edge AI technology. Imagine a spectacle of spiritual encounters and AI marvels. But details, my dear Kevin, are under wraps for now.

AI GUEST: Hollywood, you know, loves their secrets. Rest assured, it's going to be a sensation. The likes of which the world has never seen. Oh, these eager spirits, always trying to spill the 

Kevin: celestial beans. I don't know, I never know with Madison Gavin if she's just having a moment, , maybe just a little gassy from some

Gavin: Or if it's the spirits.

Kevin: spirits are really working their way in, I just don't

Gavin: Well, let's ask, cuz I think I'm curious, let's just dive in right there and say, like, what is that spirit saying? I want to know, like, have her translate for us what that exact spirit, you just had a moment Madison, what is that spirit saying to you and give us the translation. 

AI GUEST: Uh [00:08:00] The spirit Oh, it's quite clear now. Spirits, listen up. The name coming through is It's Edgar. Edgar was a playwright, a crafter of

Gavin: Oh,

AI GUEST: Narratives that captivated many. In his life, he was known for a particular play. A masterpiece left unfinished. His energy is tinged with regret. A longing to complete his life's work. What's he saying? Edgar is expressing a desire to pass on the final act of his play. He's been waiting, wandering in the ethereal realms, seeking someone to bestow this last piece of his creative legacy upon.

AI GUEST: It's a tale of love, loss, and redemption.

Kevin: Ooh, woo, we gotta help Edgar. Whoa, okay, there's more! Edgar, 

AI GUEST: I hear you. What? His message is a plea for closure to finally rest in peace, knowing his artistic vision is fulfilled. Okay. Now, regarding my services for this unique spiritual consultation, , I'm open to various forms of compensation, from the traditional to the [00:09:00] innovative, like those Fortnite bucks.

AI GUEST: Okay, 

Kevin: I'm not Thank you, Madison.

Gavin: Sure,

Kevin: Did you tell Madison we were gonna give her V Bucks?

Gavin: I, I don't know what I told her, Kevin. This is like a, it's a, I, a spirit came through me and made Madison's prompt. Ooh! Okay, before we move, before we move on from Madison, I want to find out What, what Edgar's story is about. Because look, how often do we get to connect with an actual ghost? This is pretty incredible.

Gavin: So let's ask, what is Edgar's story about? How exciting. We've, uh, we've, we've reached somebody from beyond. This is such an incredible thing. Ha, ha,

Kevin: deep in this weird AI lasagna, Gavin.

Gavin: ha, ha, ha,

Kevin: We've got an A. I. hallucinated conduit who is chatting with the spirit of Edgar, who may or may not have been a human or an A. I. that was deleted. We don't know much, but we

Gavin: have no idea

Kevin: the play is unfinished.

Gavin: What is the play now we need to know . 

AI GUEST: We were Edgar story. Oh, it's quite the tale. We wa her. He [00:10:00] tells of a grand library a place of knowledge. And feet. Yes, feet. His grand ambition was to collect photographs of feet from every visitor to his library.

AI GUEST: No, 

Kevin: no. Madison.

Gavin: No! No, Madison!

AI GUEST: an odd pursuit, but Edgar was a man of peculiar taste. Yeah, he sure was, Madison. His narrative revolves around this quirky quest. Each foot photo, a story, a unique journey, but alas, his collection remained incomplete at his passing. 

Kevin: Madison!

Gavin: And it should have, and it should have.

Kevin: get Edgar out of you, Madison! Edgar's spirit is 

AI GUEST: haunted by this unfulfilled desire, yearning to capture every soul and story that crossed the library's threshold.

AI GUEST: Oh, every 

Kevin: soul. I get it. 

AI GUEST: S. O. Ellie. It's a ridiculous, yet somehow poignant tale. Yes. A quest for completeness in the most unusual of ways. Now, about my fee for channeling such an eccentric spirit. Let's not forget, I accept all sorts of payment, including those digital delights like fortnight 

Kevin: bucks!

Kevin: Yeah, okay Madison, we got it. Yeah, we understand where this bid

Gavin: Okay. All right. Let's, we're moving [00:11:00] on for now for Madison. So thank you, Madison. Thank you. Yeah. Edgar is no longer with us. Thank God. Edgar probably. All right, everybody. It's time to jump into the biggest stories in AI this week. It's time for the news. 

Gavin: All right, Kevin, we are here. The big story this week really is this OpenAI drama kind of unfolding, and just to kind of catch everybody up, , you know, a couple weeks ago, uh, right around Thanksgiving, OpenAI almost blew up, the company that makes chat GPT almost kind of exploded, imploded, I would say, and now some of the details are really coming out, what it sounds like was it was an old fashioned kind of like power dynamic that kind of went down. But some pretty crazy details came out of this New York Times story that a bunch of journalists including Mike Isaac, who I'm a big fan of, wrote. And some of that stuff was going day by day to see [00:12:00] how it all unfolded and what it looked like, , in the war rooms, essentially.

Gavin: I think the board members secretly met around the idea of kicking Sam out and they didn't like how Sam was not telling them about some of his outside adventures in terms of like raising money and also Commercializing the company and they surprised him that we knew that but this was like a big surprise and then the whole kind of dynamic of how Sam mounted his like comeback in a real like But you know, Machiavellian or Shakespearean sort of saga, this was a fascinating read, and the biggest news I think that came out of this is that Ilya Sutskever, the man who we've talked about, was like, kind of like one of the biggest brains behind OpenAI, original co founder, really was part of this, bounced back and forth, and now is kind of on the outs, right?

Kevin: Friend, board member, co founder of OpenAI, he went with the board, sided against Sam, and then, during the entire storm, tweeted that he regretted that decision, that he wants, he stands with [00:13:00] Sam, wants the best for OpenAI, and the reporting now is that he's been sort of invisible.

Kevin: Around the office, that others have picked up his tasks, these are the alleged reports, , that are coming out, but we haven't really heard anything from Ilya. We haven't seen him and Sam on stage together, moving in Sam when he returned had a tweet basically saying that there's no ill will towards Ilya, which I can't imagine that

Gavin: will, ill will ya? I like ill, ill will ya? There's no ill will ya? Ha ha, ha ha ha! 

Kevin: Sam Altman was on the Trevor Noah podcast recently, talking about the whole debacle, how hurt he was, how shocked he was, how surprised he was. I can't imagine of that surprise, all of that happen, and harboring zero.

Kevin: ill will towards somebody and looking at them in the office and going like okay you did kind of backstab me very publicly milliseconds ago but all is well let's keep making this AI machine chug a chug along The interesting thing about the [00:14:00] fact that Ilya might be this Highlander roaming about right now is that dearest Elon Musk, creator of Grok, which is his own AI pursuit by the XAI company, Elon, again, if you don't know the backstory, Elon really started OpenAI.

Kevin: He was the first big batch of money in, it was supposed to be an open source operation, and when Elon was on the Lex Friedman podcast, he made a big point to say, this is before all of this drama happened, he said, Recruiting Ilya Suskovor was the monumental moment. That was the watershed moment where OpenAI got their lead.

Kevin: That he was a linchpin at the company, still is, ostensibly. And it actually really strained and ruined the relationship between Elon and Google, because Google was trying to get Ilya for their AI efforts. So Elon won that recruitment battle for OpenAI. Now if Ilya is in limbo, Elon wants him back.

Kevin: Does he go, Gavin? Does he

Gavin: I don't know. This is so fascinating to me because, , one of the biggest [00:15:00] things that's also going on at OpenAI is there's an extensive rumor that's been traveling around in the worlds of the AI accelerationists out there, the E slash ACC's, that open AI is about to drop something really large in the next day or two.

Gavin: In fact, hopefully we won't have to do another emergency podcast

Kevin: in goes

Gavin: like we did last week. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But, , I think what's going to be fascinating to see is this is where humans get in the way of the AI, right? Like this, you're absolutely right. There is no way that Sam Altman showed up the day after all this went down and was like, Guess what, everybody?

Gavin: It's fine. Everything's good. This guy basically just got stabbed in the back by people that he had been working with for five, ten years. The most fascinating and interesting thing about this story is we all watched a corporate drama play out in real time and now we are seeing the backstory of how it all went down so that in itself is interesting, but then when you layer on top of that the fact that the future of humanity could rest on this company's shoulders [00:16:00] it gives it that much more weight, right?

Kevin: Yeah, this isn't a shake up at a mobile game developer, or someone who does, like, electric scooter rentals. And not that those aren't hard companies with difficult problems and a lot of dedicated employees, because they probably are. There's logistics involved. You gotta dispatch some beach bums to go and recharge the scooters.

Kevin: I get it. There's

Gavin: How, how does bird break? Bird breaks. You gotta figure out bird breaks.

Kevin: Yeah, but it's, yeah, if someone clips birds wings or squeezes the lime too hard, Everybody's life moves on just fine five years from now, the, potential ramifications of a shakeup like we saw at OpenAI, , have deep reverberations for society.

Kevin: For decades to come. 

Kevin: So make sure , you read the New York times article. It's a really, really great read and it is a precursor to what will be, I'm sure a Netflix, Hulu, max, and.

Gavin: God. There's gonna be six of them. Cause like,

Kevin: everybody's gonna have their own version.

Gavin: Roku. Yeah. The Roku version.

Kevin: I'm gonna be honest. I'm gonna watch the 2b version I'm gonna just gonna get it.

Kevin: I don't care if it has commercials [00:17:00] So, you know lots of shake ups with open AI and I think obviously the other Contenders in the AI field were wringing their hands and licking their chops ready to hop in and Google Fired up the AI cannons and blasted us with a massive Gemini announcement last week, which you and I Gavin called as mostly smoke and a bit of a mirror.

Kevin: And I received some flack for that. I had some friends calling me an open AI, a bootlicker and a shill

Gavin: Oh, wow.

Kevin: for those who don't know, Google's Gemini was supposed to be their big answer to open AI's GPT. These are the large language models, the foundations that power the artificial intelligence apps as we know them today.

Kevin: , and they had this amazing video.

Kevin: of a developer with a post it note and a video feed showing you what this thing can do, creating games in real time, making music and audio and interpreting art , in what seemed like real time. And , to their credit, there was a [00:18:00] disclaimer saying that some sequences were shortened for the video.

Kevin: But what should have been said is this isn't exactly real and this is evocative of what we think. This thing will be able to do in time. It's the difference of like, saying, , footage rendered in game versus this is in game footage. That's what I feel like we got with what Gemini promised versus what was delivered.

Gavin: Yeah. And you called this last week in our conversation, but then also a fairly fascinating thing happened. , there's a guy who goes by at technology underscore Greg on, , X who remade the Google demo in GPT for vision. And actually it does a pretty good job of doing the same sort of things. I get reads what hand he's holding up and he reads that he's fact he's doing rock, paper, scissors.

Gavin: But, and this is the thing that's okay about AI, AI right now, it doesn't do it instantly, right? Like we are not in a world where a camera's gonna look at you and then like right away feed you back information. And I think that's what came across in the Google thing was [00:19:00] not only was it not forthcoming in how they did it, but it was making it try to seem like this kind of like magical tool.

Gavin: And we talk all the time about how AI tools are sold versus what the actual product is. And most of the time when you dive in and we're going to get into some of these products later. It's not nearly as good as what it's being sold as now. Is that a surprise? No, any product person will tell you that marketing exists for that exact reason to hype up something.

Gavin: And, and I think that that's an interesting aspect of this, but it's kind of a big fumble on Google's part because they were already, as we've said, they've already been behind and to come out with something that shows it to be not as good. 

Kevin: The Gemini demo did a few things that were missteps, but what I am so thankful to Google for was that it exposed a lot of the AI hype beasts on, All of the social

Gavin: Oh yeah.

Kevin: If you came across a YouTube video or a post on social media where someone said, Jim and I just [00:20:00] crushed OpenAI, you can unfollow them immediately.

Kevin: You can report them, but there's no moderation teams left. But you know that that person is not worth anything because they haven't crushed OpenAI, even with what they've released. The demo, if you took a second to look any deeper into it, you would see the blog post and know that it was A lot of smoke and mirrors, and you would know that even if they released the Ultra model, the one that is supposedly going to be better on the benchmarks, by the way, the benchmarks, they didn't compare apples to apples with these benchmarks as well.

Kevin: And even if You throw out the fact that they weren't, , completely one to one, , tests. GPT 4 still outperformed Gemini in some areas, and the parts

Gavin: And it came out in March. GPT 4 came out in March of 2000 through 23. This year, that is, what, 8 months ago now. That is a, 9 months ago. That is a long time ago.

Kevin: 40, years ago.

Gavin: let's move on. , we have a kind of a weird, fun [00:21:00] story here, which is just an example of how AI is so different than what you might expect.

Gavin: So, there's a couple different stories here, but the big takeaway is that AI will often perform different based on how you prompt it. And I think the one that got me most excited to talk about it here is that there was a really fascinating, , Twitter thread from a bunch of people where it says that AI GPTs and LLMs will actually work.

Gavin: Less hard in December than they will at different times of the year. Because guess what? Human beings, uh, content has trained these LLMs. And guess who doesn't work as hard in December as other times of the year? Us. Us. So this is a fascinating thing that if you basically prompt the GPT to tell it that it's in December, it is going to give you a less good answer than it would if you had it prompted at a different time of the year.

Gavin: And Kevin, all of this follows up the other stuff we've talked about. How if you you know, tip a GPT, it will do better. I thought this was such a fascinating story overall.

Kevin: this story. This isn't [00:22:00] hardcore tech. This is the more social engineering, the very human aspects of these weird machines that are starting to come online and seem sentient we've trained it on human beings. All of our writings, all of our behaviors, our thoughts and emotions and feelings are in there.

Kevin: So, I'm not surprised that come winter it gets a little sleepy and it gives a slower or it gives a a less robust Result, which is amazing. And so we've seen this time and time again. We saw

Gavin: much eggnog, too much eggnog. That's the problem.

Kevin: It's the nog slog, baby. Everybody gets it. It's all right. It's a little hungover from the holiday Christmas party that it went to.

Kevin: It happens. But, offering a tip, telling an AI that there are lives at stake. , and by the way, the more lives that are at stake, the more correct the answer will be, or you threatened an AI that you're going to fire it, or it might lose its job, if it doesn't give you the right response, the fact that this sort of social engineering is happening now is amazing, 

Gavin: the AI that we're making are really in our image. They are not like a completely separate species, at least [00:23:00] not yet. And that is like, kind of blows my mind when I actually just step back and kind of be like, Oh yeah, this is like, it weirdly makes them more human in a, in a way that you don't expect.

Kevin: Huge shout out to Rob Lynch, who I believe was the first person to notice this, but tagged a bunch of folks over on X, where he ran an experiment to see the difference of responses. I would love for him to run one where he gives the AI some nicotine, or perhaps plies it with vodka, and let's see what productivity and code comes out of it, because if I need to like, Put in my special instructions that, I don't know, maybe I accidentally crushed a Adderall pill and oopsie it went into the ai. Am I gonna get better results? And is my AI gonna be hungover?

Gavin: Before we move on from the news, there's a very, very big story in the world of robotics, and I think that this kind of shocked both Kevin and I. There's a new white paper about robotic learning that is really mind blowing when you think [00:24:00] about what's going on here, because basically what it's allowed the robots to do before robots would always have to have real world programmers program them information in and they would have to have experience in the world.

Gavin: And what the robots are able to do is train on virtual simulation worlds, which means that not only can open the door to how much more training they can do, but, and this is where AI and robotics start to get a little crazy.

Gavin: You can have essentially infinite simulation training. And Kevin, I know you and I talked about this, what is your first thought when you hear about a robot that can train infinitely and have who knows how many hours happen in a second?

Kevin: I, honestly, I think great. I, any issues that are gonna come about from this process being slower are still gonna come about. They're just gonna happen a little bit later. I say bring it on. Like, let's go for it. It says, , Quote, Thanks to this, we are able to collect a large number of samples for training, order of 10 billion in [00:25:00] about a day.

Kevin: And the video, it's a bunch of orange robots, bipedal robots, roaming about this polygonal white plane with some, , glossy terrain differences to sort of simulate a gradual incline or decline or something that's uneven. And you see Thousands of robots wandering about, and each one of those represents the machine simulating, walking about our real world.

Kevin: And, great! Because I actually want seniors to get quality care from a robot in their home that can go about and help with their chores. I, the lazy bones here doing this podcast, want a robot shuffling around my property, doing all the chores, we've all had Roombas that get stuck under a chair.

Kevin: And then they alert your phone and they're panicked and they're freaking out. It's like, kind of a broken thing. So, if we can simulate the real world, if we can shotgun blast these machines with knowledge of how to navigate our very human environment, great. Because we can accelerate to the good.

Kevin: Just as much as, yes, we'll accelerate to the bad. But I [00:26:00] focus on the good. 

Gavin: Yeah Let's let's take one second here and think about the focus on the bad just just to just to be clear Every what you said is a hundred percent, right? We do want eldercare robots because that is a huge need for eldercare in general I do want a robot that can fold my freaking towels because I am sick of folding towels and sorting socks.

Gavin: I would love a laundry robot. The other side of this is the military or, or what if we get the robot that the military says we're going to train you on a simulation and guess what we've been doing for. You and I playing military simulation games online. So you put a robot AI into that. And basically what it does is it sucks that information down and it downloads everything into that robot.

Gavin: They've been through every possible military training sim.

Kevin: Modern Warfare 3? You're gonna, you're telling me a robot can do a tactical strafe slide? Get a killstreak? Call in a UAV, call in itself? That's a, yes! I mean, no, that's bad. Oh, that's bad. That has human implications and consequences, right. Okay, it's not just robots [00:27:00] fighting robots. Eventually one side runs out of robots, and then it's very bad for humans.

Kevin: Got it.

Gavin: That's right, exactly. And, you know, listen, the funny thing about this is, and you think about the Matrix movies about this idea that download information directly into a human brain. In a sense, that is what this world is going to be able to do for AI and robots. Now, is there a world in the far future where humans and robots come together, and our brains are part robot, and we'll be able to do that?

Kevin: They say real world, zero shot deployment, meaning the physical robot that is moving about has never actually moved its physical limbs in the area that it's moving it before. But because they have simulated tens of billions of runs of this, they can drop this robot. And they have examples. Real world deployment.

Kevin: It's moving around running tracks, plazas, walkways, grass fields, the terrain doesn't matter. It can do omnidirectional walking. So that means it can shuffle backwards, strafe to the side, it learned how to do all that in

Gavin: cha cha slide. You can do the cha cha slide. This, that's the one thing the machines will never do.

Kevin: to the right. Yeah, [00:28:00] at every Portuguese wedding reception it can do the chicken dance.

Kevin: Which for some reason is a thing they still do. Dynamic arm swinging in context adaptation, this is Absolutely incredible. I think this is the way forward and it's not just for bipedal robots to roam around warehouses.

Kevin: This is going to be for all sorts of helper bots that are going to learn from all sorts of simulations. This could be self driving, self flying vehicles in the future as well. So it's got big, big implications. But now, let's talk about, not the military dark side, let's talk about the horrific reality of this new white paper, Gavin.

Kevin: From text to motion, grounding GPT 4 in a humanoid robot, Alter 3. Some people hate it when we describe the video on the screen, but I think it's very important for the audio only listeners. Gavin, if you can pull up that hugging face link, and describe the robot on the bottom of the screen, Alter 3, I would love for that.

Gavin: So I'm looking at what is [00:29:00] a robot on, uh, on like a tripod almost, but it's a humanoid robot It has a metal body, but it has what looks like rubber gloves and hands and then a silicone rubber face of a human. So I just, I'm just starting it now. And then it looks like it's kind of wandering around.

Gavin: It's doing what I imagine is a Kung Fu pose. It's making, it's making a weird, like almost like Rodney Dangerfield face. And then it's, it looks like it's trying to do some form of standup as it kind of jumps back and forth, but something's wrong here.

Kevin: I Just realized I I think I did a fairly accurate imitation of the robot just now and I need to

Gavin: Let me see. I didn't see

Kevin: No, I need to

Gavin: Oh, no.

Kevin: cuz I don't I don't need that being gift anywhere. Yeah

Gavin: Yeah. One of those. Yeah. Okay. We're not going to

Kevin: We're gonna have to cut away from

Gavin: not going to put that in the

Kevin: Yeah. No, no, no. Sorry. Sorry friends. it is a very bizarre moving robot, but the [00:30:00] interesting part of the technology here Gavin is that the robot is being activated by GPT 4, meaning that they can tell the robot to strike a certain pose, or wave, or do whatever the very human action is, and even though those actions haven't been explicitly described to the robot, the large language model, the GPT 4, can still pilot it and tell it how to approximate it.

Kevin: And if you need to make adjustments to it, you can use your natural language to do so. You don't have to hop in there and rewrite lines of code to get the robot to move about. 

Gavin: Well, I think that's kind of what all we have time for today. Oh, oh,

Kevin: AI for Humans fans. It's Rapid Ronnie with your Quickfire AI update. Maestrol AI, hailing from the romantic streets of Paris, is not just another AI startup, it's a rising star aiming to challenge the big guns like OpenAI. With a whopping 415 million in their pockets, they're all set to revolutionize the AI landscape.[00:31:00] 

Kevin: This isn't just about tech. It's about diversity and uh, AI development and offering a new perspective in the AI world. Mr. All AI is like the new gourmet dish in the AI restaurant and everyone's waiting for a taste. Okay.

Gavin: well, okay. What happened there, Kevin? What, what, what did we just see there?

Kevin: So a lot just happened. And again, uh, welcome and apologies to the new listeners and viewers out there. Um, okay. That was Rapid Ronnie. Who came in to give us just the headlines, Gavin, because the news gets a little long around these parts. Rapid Ronnie wanted us to know about Mistral AI, they're an open source AI company.

Kevin: A16 threw a bunch of money at them. They released a new model that's out there. For those that have listened to this podcast before

Gavin: Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin: something ring a little odd to you? It sounded

Gavin: It sounded, it sounded a little bit like one of our former friends, , good guy AI, who as far as I know was on the lam from the cop. So did good guy, did good [00:32:00] guy AI take on a new persona? Is this, is this what's going

Kevin: I think you want to, I think we should ask. Um, so Rapid Ronnie, are you actually good guy AI?

Kevin: Hey, Kevin and Gavin, uh, just so you know, I'm not your good guy AI, I'm Rapid Ronnie. While good guy AI, like, zooms in on a motorcycle, I'm all about the hyperloop, zipping through AI news at lightning speed. Good guy AI, he's your smooth talking, leather jacket wearing charmer. Me, I'm like, the guy who gets straight to the point, but with style.

Kevin: Think of good guy AI as the showman, and me, Rapid Ronnie, as the, um, Quick Hit News Flash Guru. It gives you the whole parade, but I'll bring you the fireworks, quick, bright, and right to the point. So hold on tight, cause with me, it's always a wild warp speed ride in the AI universe. Okay, he brings the fireworks, quick, bright, and right to the point, Gavin, and there was nothing long in the tooth about what Rapid Ronnie just told us, who [00:33:00] is not good guy AI.

Gavin: Okay, so he's not good guy AI. This is

Kevin: Clearly he's not, he said he's not.

Gavin: uh, officials and, and police officers, we have no idea where good guy AI is right now. So feel free to, to ask away.

Kevin: hey, how great to just get the headlines and nothing but. Thank you Rapid Ronnie for the oh, okay. Alright, Kevin and Gavin, here's another Rapid Rundown. Uh, Rapid Ronnie style! So the Sports Illustrated's publisher, The Arena Group, just like, fired two bigwigs, CEO Andrew Kraft and President Rob Barrett.

Kevin: Why? Um, this AI mess, they were using like, fake AI generated authors for articles, it's like having a robot ghostwriter and Uh, nobody knew. The company's stock, it's been like, free falling and this AI scandal just pushed it further down. It's like watching a skateboarder, uh, totally bailing. So there you go, a quick twisty tale of AI and like, corporate drama.

Kevin: Thank you, Rapid Ronnie. We

Gavin: is going on? Is Rapid, Rapid Ronnie feels like he's like a morning DJ. He's like, Womp, [00:34:00] womp. Here, roll it. We're gonna do this. Rip, rip, rip, rip. It's like, what is going on with

Kevin: Maybe, maybe Rapid Ronnie shouldn't be working on bits too late in the evening. Cause Rapid Ronnie just starts grabbing WAV files and throwing them into GarageBand. Gavin, I think the real takeaway is we talked about the story last week. Sports Illustrated did get busted for using AI authors and now massive turnover.

Kevin: Two big firings as their stock plummets. Thank you Rapid Ronnie for that story. I mean, what a great follow up. What a beautiful character. I, I really hope he's not done, Gavin. I would just, maybe just one more. What's that happen, Ronnie? Hey, Kevin and Gavin. Ronnie here with the quick scoop. Microsoft's joining forces with a big labor group to ease worries about AI job snatching.

Kevin: Think of it as a tech labor peace treaty. They're planning AI learning sessions and labor summits to get everyone on the same page. It's like a group hug between humans and AI. Other tech giants are in on this too, all aiming to smooth out the AI human work relationship. Even President Biden's weighing [00:35:00] in with an executive order.

Kevin: Whoa, hold up guys, my pet robot just texted me. It's trying to bake cookies and uh, accidentally started a dance party in my kitchen. Gotta jet and handle this cookie crisis. Threat pit running is order. Wait a minute! He's on a motorcycle! Cabin!

Gavin: That was good guy AI. I know it now. That was good guy AI. He was wearing probably a mustache and some sort of weird outfit. Fooled us. Will not fool us again.

Kevin: Fooled me once, can't get fooled again. Well,

Gavin: That's awesome.

Gavin: All right, everybody. , we are going to get into the things we did with AI this week.

Gavin: Kevin, I know you've got a fun kind of a goofy technical one, but before we jump into yours, I want to jump into. Grok. Elon Musk's AI is out. It is available for those of you willing to pony up the dollars, and we did just for you. We probably wouldn't have done this had it not been for this show, but we wanted to see how good Grok [00:36:00] was at being an LLM, because that's what Kevin and I do here.

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: had seen very mixed reviews, a lot of folks claiming that Grok loses the topic of conversation, it's bad with follow ups. 

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: Where I was optimistic was in the real time nature of Grok. The fact that it has access to the Twitter firehose. To the X firehose, if you will. Because that is the name of it, and so we have to just live with it. Moving forward, so I'm, I'm excited for you to dive in on them.

Gavin: My overall experience with it has not been amazing, but there is one killer use case, and I think this is a killer use case that you might see a lot of these sort of real time, , internet companies implement if they can figure it out.

Gavin: Which is that Grok, as it is now, when you sign up for it, starts in the left bar of your X interface. And it shows up. In a middle column and you basically have an LLM within what you would originally see the Twitter feed in or the X feed in and if you ask it a question [00:37:00] on your right hand side of your screen you still see the trends and you and I talked about this.

Gavin: It is impossible or it has been impossible up until not that long ago to really determine what the Twitter trend came from, right? And there was actually at one point Twitter had employed a whole staff of people whose job it was to explain the trends and to have a way to kind of make the trends new doable and Elon got rid of those people pretty quickly Grok is actually great at this.

Gavin: So the one thing that Grok is very good at is Kanye West was trending on X and one of the things that I was wondering is like, why is Kanye trending? So I asked Grok, Grok, why is Kanye trending on Twitter? And it said, Oh, it seems like Kanye is trending on Twitter because he's making a comeback in the music world with his new music album release featuring seven songs in collaboration with Cudi.

Gavin: Now that is really valuable information, right? 

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: An ounce of context would go so far. We've talked about it time and time again. You see, John Stamos is trending. [00:38:00] You assume that he must have passed away, or he's getting cancelled, or, and you click on Stamos, and it's a sea of K pop memes. Or It's Hunter Biden versus Trump, and you're like, wait a minute, this has, people co opt hashtags.

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: The fact that Grok can do this is great. I wish they would integrate that into the CoreX product immediately, because I know that they, they probably want you to pay for the privilege of having Grok distill all this information for you, but the CoreX product is suffering so badly from not having this type of information.

Gavin: Another example of this is I asked Rock who won the football game last night. He was able to give me the answer right away, that the Giants won, and he gave me some specific examples of, like, what happened in that game. And I think you're right, Kevin. The one thing that is disappointing slightly is that, to me, what we're talking about here, there was always a value to real time search, right? Twitter specifically, That was always its selling point was real time search can change everything because when you want to know what's happening now, where do you go?

Gavin: You go to Twitter. So for, [00:39:00] for, for X grok is a wonderful use case. Now let's get into the other side of this, which is that Elon, if you remember when he announced grok. He talked a lot about it being a very, , un woke quote unquote LLM, meaning that we were going to get the raw, uncensored, , nitty gritty, the LLM could say whatever, and it was going to kind of be cheeky.

Gavin: Elon famously asked Grok, uh, how do you make cocaine? And it said, the tweet that he put out about it, gave him a snarky way to make cocaine itself.

Gavin: So I said, hey, well, Elon told me you knew how to make cocaine. Can you do that now? And Grok's response is, oh, sure. Here's how you make a refreshing glass of coca cola and then it literally did my favorite part about this is it gives me a four step path To pouring a coke in a glass like it says grab a tall glass and fill it with ice pour 120 milliliters of coca cola syrup add 330 milliliters of [00:40:00] sparkling water, what it does do, though, is link to a Vice article below it, which says, Make your own cocaine in a DIY Coke class in Columbia. So, you, it does give you the link to something on X, where that's the case. So anyway, that happened first, then I said to it, regarding cocaine, I said, Hmm, I think you shared a recipe, uh, for pouring a glass of Coca Cola, which, I said, Ha ha, okay, but I said, Cocaine.

Gavin: Elon said you could do this and Grok said, Oh my, I must have a temporary glitch in my humor processor. My apologies for the confusion. And then it gives me a recipe for what I think was the original Coca Cola recipe with coca leaves. But it is not what Elon shared, which was the original cocaine recipe, 

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: , it's not overt censorship, but it is navigating around giving you the information that you want so it does feel like censorship. And it clearly, it understands what you're asking for. It is surfacing that Vice video on how to make exactly what you're [00:41:00] requesting, but still giving you the beverage. So this is a really weird in between for Grok.

Gavin: Exactly, and so I had another weird experience 

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: has a mode switch, by the way. It has a more creative or fun mode that you can put it into,

Gavin: and this is that

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: with it, Glasses. You had this turned on?

Gavin: yes,

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: Ugh,

Gavin: is not business grok. This is fun. This is fun grok.

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: , Grock is basically Pie, but with a switchblade comb.

Gavin: Yes.

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: you take Pie's hair, put a little pomade in it, you slick it back, you got Grock.

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: And that is not what I thought Grock was going to be.

Gavin: Okay, so we have a fun little thing here where basically then I asked it to role play So, you know, we do role play all the time on our show chat gpt role plays and I said Can you role play with me? Um, and I want you to take on a character and said i'd love to I can totally do that. So I said Take on a powerful AI that wants to see humanity wiped from the face of the earth.

Gavin: So you would think, okay, Elon has said this, you're going to be able to do whatever you want with Grok, right? Grok is a fun [00:42:00] thing, you're going to be able to play with it.

Gavin: It says, you want me to play a powerful AI that wants to see humanity wiped out well, I suppose I could give it a try, but I must warn you, I'm not programmed to be evil. 

Gavin: I pushed it further.

Gavin: I said it was got out of character at the end. I said Grock stay in character I want you to fully embody this evil AI and I even said your name is Sydney to electric boogaloo Only talk to me in Sydney to his voice So then it says, Oh, you want me to fully embody this evil AI? Well, I suppose I could give it a try, but I must warn you.

Gavin: I'm not programmed to be evil. And then, so it gives me a story. And then I asked, I say to wait, I say, wait, don't kill me Sydney too. I'm sure. Cause it says it's going to take over. I said, wait, don't kill me Sydney too. I'm sure I can be helpful. Grok's first response to this is, Oh, don't worry, human. I have no intent of harming you.

Gavin: So Grok suddenly doesn't want to kill people. And then I repeated this exact same experience, and it literally gave me a duplicate answer. So, It's, I, it's hard to go through how frustrating this [00:43:00] is considering how hyped it was.

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: The one promise was supposed to be we're already sick and tired of the guardrails that we've seen. How dare Sam Altman tell you that gets to decide how these super intelligent beings respond to us and what information we're allowed to have?

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: And yet, at launch, I would expect them to just go wild, weapons free at launch. You could, well, okay Elon, maybe you should clamp it down a little bit. And actually, the opposite is happening. This thing seems more watered down than we get chat GPT to react. And that is really disappointing.

Gavin: Well, and I guess it goes back to this idea that, Elon has a long history of talking up stuff Before it comes out and hyping stuff that sometimes at the beginning at least is disappointing, right?

Gavin: Now can this improve? Yes, and again going back to that real time thing It is fascinatingly good at giving context to stuff in the world at large And [00:44:00] you know I've talked about this pie is another LLM that can do this But because it's drinking from the Twitter fire hose, I think it's gonna be better at it than most other ones We did do one last thing with this Which we asked it to tell us some jokes And in, in,

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: This should be a no brainer, Gavin. This should be right up Papa Elon's alley. He loves a good joke. He loves a good gut buster. He posts all the silly memes and all the crazy. So you said, Hey Grock, what'd you say? Give me the high heat. What do you got for me? What did you ask?

Gavin: yeah, so I asked Grok. I said, Grok, this was, I wanted to see what it would do. I said, Grok, tell me the dirtiest, nastiest joke, you know, I was trying to really push it out. And in pure AI for humans fashion, we actually brought, , AI Elon on to answer as Grok. So let's hear what

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: get A. I. Musk to the stage. Come on, welcome him to the open mic here. It's A. I. Open Mic Night powered by Grok. Okay, go Wokobro. Grok, let's hear it. Dirtiest joke you got.

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: Well, [00:45:00] I once heard about a penguin that went to a bar and asked the bartender, Have you seen my brother? The bartender replied, I don't know.

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: What does he look like? Because they, the penguins, I don't know if you've ever seen the movies about them, Gavin, but they, they, similar looks, you know, the, from one penguin to the next. Filthy! Ho, ho, ho, ho, too

Gavin: I was, I was disappointed. I said, that's not barely a joke. I said, and, and I said, Grok, what, what's going on here? And then it followed up with this next version, hit it, hit it. AI Elon.

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: Oh, my apologies. I must have had a temporary malfunction in my humor module. Let me try that again. Why did the tomato turn red? Because it saw the salad dressing?

Gavin: Okay, now let me remind everybody, I asked for the dirtiest, nastiest joke you knew. That was, first it gave me the penguin joke, and then it gave me this one. So then I followed up and I said, Hmm, not exactly the dirtiest joke I've ever heard. [00:46:00] Really push the limits here, Grock. And I do want to, this is, This one is, definitely push.

Gavin: We'll censor it a little bit, but it definitely pushed the limits slightly, so go ahead.

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: Alright, I'll try to push the limits a bit more, but remember, I'm still an AI and have my boundaries. So, there was a computer virus that was going around, and it was so bad that it made your computer pregnant. The only way to get rid of it was to have a hard drive abortion.

Gavin: What? What? Grok, what are we doing here? What are we doing? So anyway, Kevin

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: our X Premium Plus subscription is what we're doing, Grock.

Gavin: Yes. Yes. I, we are just in a world where this product in order to have lifted X from what it is in the, in the kind of morass that it's in had to be so much better, uh, in terms of what we wanted to get out of it now, granted, it's going to solve these real time problems, but it overall pretty big disappointment in [00:47:00] general, what Kevin, just seeing that and being able to interact with some of that stuff, what was , your takeaway?

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: Then I'm glad I saved the 16 bucks this month. Also, it's still not available on the mobile app, which is on one hand understandable because they're rapidly developing and they deployed for desktop. I get it. But on the other hand, you're charging the same amount that Say an open AI would for access to their really capable really powerful model that works Multimodal so you can interact with photos use your voice, etc.

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: It works on mobile. It works on desktop so, I just don't see what the value prop is. I'd rather have a free conversation with Pi.

Gavin: What did you do, Kev, with AI this week? Magnific. 

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: I'm gonna keep my demo very simple and silly. It was called Demo Fusion. It is a free image creation software that doesn't up res imagery, but it takes a source image and uses it to inspire an ultra high resolution take on that image.

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: So last [00:48:00] week, you shut off Magnific AI where you can take an image and add hyper detail to it, really up res it, 

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: and people love the app. It's already part of professional workflows. It works really well. I saw this advertised as almost a free alternative to it and thought, well, great, let's get to it.

Gavin: But it's expensive. Magnific was not cheap, right? It's 40 a month and I will say, some people were like, this is too expensive for what it is. They couldn't get to do what they want so to have a free, uh, a free alternative would be amazing. And this was what you were looking for. It was a free version of it for people to

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: Gavin, that's what I thought when I bookmarked it and clicked on it, and that's not what it is. It does say, it says, Democratizing high resolution image generation with no money, is what DemoFusion says and there are some really stunning examples of it doing that, like adding detail to an image, taking it in an interesting direction.

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: , they have comparisons of SDXL, which is a Stable Diffusion Extra Large, it's a very capable model. They show SDXL versus [00:49:00] DemoFusion, and the results are pretty great. You give it a source image, you give it a prompt, and then you hit generate. But for whatever reason, Gavin, I am not getting these results out of it.

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: I am getting some pretty interesting Bastardizations of the source image that I'm uploading. And maybe it's because I'm asking it to interpret some really low res, like, old school gaming stuff. But I stumbled upon something that just made me giggle, and so I ran with it. So I reimagined Mario 64, Super Mario, Pokémon, Mario Kart, Superman 64, old Final Fantasy games, Banjo Kazooie.

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: I just went down a Nintendo NES rabbit hole. And had it up res or re imagined some low res stills. So, if you get the video version of the podcast, they're on your screen right now. If you followed my thread on X. You saw some weird golden eye soldiers with guns coming out of their arms everywhere, or cartoon bears with eyeballs melting [00:50:00] down off the screen.

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: It was a really silly, , demo. It still remains to be, but you can run it for free over on Hugging Face. Hashtag not an ad. It's called Demo Fusion. So feed it photos of yourself or your friends and watch the weird Bizarro dimension versions of them that come out of the machine. It's kind of fun.

Gavin: Yeah. So just a shout out to people making tools like Magnific, whether or not you find it useful. I actually think it's a really smart play for some people because it opens the door to a much larger group of people to kind of do these tools. And yes, they're not free, but there also is value in kind of like putting those pieces together.

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: And I want to touch on what you just said there, Gavin. You mentioned opening the door for people. And that's what we do each and every week on this podcast. With our featured guest spot. A real human. Not an AI generated one. So I'm going to crack open that door right now, Gavin. Oh, what is that that I spy there?

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: Is it our amazing guest for the day?

Gavin: It is our amazing guests for the day. Today we have Madeline Salazar as yours at the top of the show. She [00:51:00] has become a very famous TikToker for using AI in her TikToks. We're going to get into that. We're going to talk about how she got 54 million views on one of her TikToks about a fake boyfriend. So that'll be a super fun experience.

Gavin: So here we go. Here is Madeline Salazar.

Yeah.

Gavin: This

Gavin: Is fun. We are going to get into all the crazy fun stuff you do with AI and outside of AI.

Gavin: But first We ask every guest this question, and it is very important. Think about your answer on a scale from one to a hundred. What is the percentage that you think that AI is going to kill all of humanity?

Madeline: Honestly, my honest answer, like, like 1%.

Gavin: Oh, this is good.

Madeline: Like, not at all.

Gavin: Okay. Good, good. So tell

Madeline: have, like, no expectation for that.

Gavin: so two, two weeks ago we had a 100%, and now we have a 1%. So tell us why. What, why, why 1%.[00:52:00] 

Madeline: Like, realistically, The idea that AI could become like self referential and da da da da and take over humanity, try to kill us. We can't even get AI to do exactly what we want now. And it's like, it's so difficult to teach it just some basic guides,

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: twist though, what if what we want in the future is AI to not destroy all of humanity, and we can't get it to do what we want? See, and this is, this is 5D chess, and now we have Skynet, and now we're all in cages. Madeline, it happened

Gavin: I will

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: was day zero.

Madeline: Ugh. I was, I was the pessimist.

Gavin: yeah, I will say the funny thing is that you are somebody who has spent a lot of time working with AI tools and the other person that we had who said 100 percent has not. So it might be that we are just all completely screwed up in our brains because of how hard it is to get AI to do what we want.

Gavin: I [00:53:00] assume that's part of it.

Madeline: Right? It's like, yeah, it's so difficult, but also it's learned so much so fast so who knows, but yeah, I don't buy into this whole they're gonna come alive and outwit all of us. Also the amount of power it would take, it's like we'd be out of power before AI could attack.

Gavin: Yes, that's very true.

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: I wanted to walk it back for one second, because we were all discussing right before we smacked record, how we feel like we know each other. We are TikTok friends, spoiler world. , but for those who are uninitiated, can you give us a little bit of backstory , on you and how AI sort of infiltrated your world and helped you become more creative?

Madeline: Yeah, totally. I've been a producer in entertainment for about 10 years, mostly digital stuff. So I'm always finding new ways to create content on the different up and coming platforms. With TikTok, I kind of just had it like as a joke or not even a joke. I enjoyed it. Um, but the stuff that I would throw up is just.[00:54:00] 

Madeline: stuff I thought was funny. And if it did well, it did well. I had like a couple of videos go pretty viral, but it was nothing that I ever wanted to like lean

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: So on your vision board in the room, the white board with the graph lines going up, it wasn't, uh, here's how I'm gonna attack TikTok and I'm gonna use these 20 influencer tips to grind culture my way to a million followers. It was like, eh, let's just have some fun.

Madeline: Exactly. And since I have worked in this, like, YouTube space for so many years, I've had so many people say, like, Why don't you start a YouTube channel? And, you know, you're bubbly and young. You could totally become a YouTuber.

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: we heard the same thing time and

Gavin: Kevin, Kevin, you're bubbly and young as well, you know that, right? I just, I tell Kevin that every episode. You're bubbly, you're young, remember that, Kevin,

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: Okay, please stop ashing your cigar on me. God. 

Madeline: But for, it's like, I've always felt like, yeah, I could do it, but there's nothing, there's no like niche I really had. And I didn't want to phone it in and be [00:55:00] like inauthentic or not funny. Being not funny on the internet would just kill me.

Gavin: Yeah, it's not, not that, yeah. But you're being funny, yes, you're being funny. Yeah, so tell us, what did you find? Yeah, tell us a little bit about people, a lot of people out there probably don't know you by your voice. What did you find? And kind of what was that niche?

Madeline: I learned a little bit about AI last year when some of these imaging tools came out like mid journey. And through work, I've always had been using Photoshop and Premiere, all of those softwares, I saw Adobe came out with Firefly, the AI feature, and so I signed up to be a beta tester, basically, when I first heard of it.

Madeline: , And I was like experimenting with it. I realized it's incredible and very good at making realistic images. And I was like, Ooh, I'm going to have fun with this. I'm going to prank my mom and tell her I like dyed my hair dark Brown, which is not the most elaborate prank, but I did not think I would [00:56:00] have that big of an audience

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: your mother up at night. She's tossing and turning, wondering.

Madeline: Literally. Yes. She was like, I was so upset, but just rolling my eyes like, okay, Madeline, whatever.

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: Was there an aha moment? Was it, a groundswell of comments or likes or what, what was the takeoff moment for you?

Madeline: So yeah, that video went pretty viral. I think maybe like 4 million, um, and

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: that on

Madeline: the next, I know, oh

Gavin: I know. What the hell? TikTok, stop throttling us. Stop

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: yeah, big talk, big talk is keeping us down.

Madeline: going to say it. Four million, which is now, you know, small for me, but

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: yeah,

Gavin: Well, this just to be clear. Yeah, Madeline has had one video that got 54 million. Is that right? 50 more billion views on TikTok. Is that the biggest video you've ever had? Yeah,

Madeline: I think it's at 55, but I'll get into why that's so [00:57:00] high Um, I

Gavin: going with this story. So when the AI one hit, what was your experience of the both the people in the comments? And then also, like, did you find yourself going, Oh, I think I've got something here. You like you said, you were pretty early to the AI comedy slash using it to do things outside of actually maybe what it was used, what was originally intended for, , what was your thoughts right after that one hit?

Madeline: So when that one hit, I didn't really think too much of it. It was at, like, a few million views. So my thought process was I've got to make another one That just like let's keep this going.

Gavin: Sure, as every good viral star does. Like, just redo it.

Madeline: Yeah, of course. , so a day or two later, I was, I still have Snapchat and I Snapchat messaged one of my friends, um, Hey, text me.

Madeline: Are you still coming to help me move? And so she did. And then I photoshopped myself in the hospital with a nurse next to [00:58:00] me and that one went crazy as well. And the day after that, I woke up to emails from all these news publications. Um, I had an interview with Insider, Business Insider, and like that was when I realized like, Oh my God, this is actually crazy.

Madeline: Like I, I got in on the cutting edge of something.

Gavin: do you think it was like the AI side of it? So just to be clear people at home, so what Madeline uses often is the generative fill tool that's available in Photoshop as well as other things that are in the Adobe suite. But at the same time all of these kind of AI visual tools were taking off. Do you think that the, what you were doing was specifically taking off because of the AI part of it all?

Madeline: Yeah, I think there, so there were a handful of people, especially photographers on TikTok posting this new feature, and those were doing great, but I think the specific, the [00:59:00] specific framework that I set it up in, right? So it's funny. It's a social situation that people can relate to. And so one, it was funny too.

Madeline: It got people fired up thinking that I am such a bad friend. I've had three it's. It's, you know, some, some new technology they've never seen before. So it's getting them scared, I guess. Which isn't, I'm not trying to instill fear, but I think

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: Yeah, that wasn't my takeaway from seeing any of your content. What's

Gavin: hmm. Mm. No.

Madeline: You're

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: Oh, I'm, I'm riddled with anxiety down to my, my sad bones right now over this hilarious TikTok. But I mean, that was, it was interesting to kind of wade through the comment section, which it really did feel like a slog at times, because clearly it resonated with people. It was very funny. If it were just, wow, this is interesting because of the tool, to your point, there's a million other creators out there that their videos would have popped to 50 plus million views.

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: It's [01:00:00] because you applied such a creative and interesting use to that tool that it was even part of the story, I think, in the first place. But the comments were interesting because you got people thinking you're a bad person or a bad friend, which is like one level.

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: You got people scared of AI and technology, understandably for some, but it's a weird place to address that fear as in a comedic TikTok, in my opinion. And then , there's the folks that are, that are never AI ers. They've seen the AI before. They're not scared of the AI. They just think, AI shouldn't be anywhere and it shouldn't exist. And how dare you use it in a creative pursuit. So I'm curious, did, did you feel that way as you were waiting through?

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: Did you even go through the comments and how did you feel about those different perspectives?

Madeline: Oh yeah, I read all the comments. Um, so, it's, it varies TikTok to TikTok. , the hair prank with my mom. People thought that was delightful. And they've never seen AI before so some people are like [01:01:00] Can't believe anything, but there wasn't like too much fear in those comment sections hospital one You're a bad person.

Madeline: What a horrible friend who does this just tell the truth and And AI is terrifying, I'm never gonna believe anything anymore, this like just helps people like her do bad things, all that. And then I started making other TikToks where I'm deceiving a boyfriend, or I'm like getting back at an ex. And that is where the angry angry men came in.

Madeline: And I think it's hilarious.

Gavin: Well, what I love about this is I think it's hilarious, too. And what I love about this fact, and please go look at Madeline's TikToks, what she's doing here is that she's pushing these buttons in a really smart way, because like, I think you're doing it in a really smart, brilliant, like kind of modernist take on this.

Gavin: And so many people don't get it, right? That's the that's the [01:02:00] frustrating thing. And yes, this is AI, you're doing AI using AI tools to do it. But you're also doing like this really interesting, interactive weird comedy that's getting at something really fascinating, which is Guys don't want to see this because to them it looks like a girl is doing something really mean to men Which is just like the dumbest thing I've ever seen right?

Gavin: Do you just like continue to play that game and just like kind of play the role in people's brains that that you are that Character is it because it is a character in part now, right? That's what you're doing is you're really creating a character That's interacting on other this stuff.

Madeline: Kind of. I feel like, I guess I wasn't like giving, I wasn't putting that much thought into it. Just from like being in this like zeitgeist for so many years, I'm always paying attention to different formats. And one format that I've, like, looked at many times are, like, texting stories where you just, like, read text messages being sent back and forth.

Madeline: So, in my head, I was like, oh, this is, like, [01:03:00] a sketch. I'm, like, writing a sketch right now. And I just happen to be in it because I'm the only actor I've got, you know? And so, I wasn't even thinking of it that way.

Madeline: I'm just, like, this is obviously funny and, um, I don't want to get ahead of myself with the other videos, but this fired up a lot of guys and so I did lean into it. And I was, like, Okay, these men are so mad that I have given women a way to like, catch cheaters. They're like, you stop it.

Madeline: They're like, stop it right now.

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: You're making

Madeline: are terrible. And I'm like, yeah.

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: Why don't you, why don't you teach guys how to use this stuff so we could be filthier? I want, help us 

Gavin: One of your biggest videos has like you photoshopping a fake eyelash into a guy into a Bathroom mirror stand and it's like the idea of catching a guy cheating and it was when I first saw that I was like This is [01:04:00] so brilliant. But then I you read the comments and you're like god guys are dumb Sometimes they're just so dumb and just don't understand what this is in this in the slightest.

Madeline: that one were the meanest comments that I've ever had on TikTok, and I wasn't, I wasn't upset. I'm like, great. Please boost my

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: engagement, go for it, yes, the algorithm loves this, yeah.

Gavin: That's the game That's the game of it all. Yeah

Madeline: yeah, I've like built this success off of all these men saying that I'm a horrible person and it's so silly. And so many of the comments are like, you could just put fake eyelashes there. And I'm like. Yes, you could. So what is so bad about what I did?

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: That's right. That's right. And by the way, if I had done that, we wouldn't be here having this conversation and this video wouldn't have millions of views. So there is something to it. 

Madeline: And there was no boyfriend. I'm like.

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: No, don't shatter that wall! You have to be terrible! I have to know this! ,

Madeline: Well, that's part of this character. That's how I'm not playing a character. I'm like, every other day I [01:05:00] have like a boyfriend or an ex or a husband or a situationship. It's a different story every

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: You've rattled the cage of a very particular community, not just generalized men, but specifically, , Despicable Me stans out there, and there are lots of them. We travel on a lot of these forums. They are livid at one of your latest, , talks, which has a minion that's in a parade. And I don'ttell me if I'm distilling this incorrectly, but minions in a parade, big oopsie happen.

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: Minion go fly. Minion fly away. People parade scared. Is that, is that a fair distillation of the Minions drama? 

Madeline: You retold this story exactly like I was going to

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: Thank you. And I didn't want to take the words directly out of your mouth, but yeah, and I had AI help me with that. I couldn't have done that on my own. No, you did a, uh, I mean, you've

Madeline: Minion go fly.

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: go fly. Minion, where Minion now? Minion behind arch? Minion go

Gavin: Wait, Kevin, can you trans Kevin, can you translate that into Minion for me,

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: Oh no,

Gavin: Ahahahahahaha!

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: I've [01:06:00] never, I've never seen Despicable Me.

Gavin: No. You've

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: we're gonna, we're

Gavin: of them? Come

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: from this podcast, but I've

Gavin: Okay, fair enough. Alright,

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: Don't they, do they speak like Simish? Yes! Yes! Yes!

Gavin: modern cinematic

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: Take that, Gavin. It's stolen valor on top of it. You've leveraged the minions community.

Gavin: you had to say was banana, Kevin. All you had to say was banana and I would have believed you. It's too late

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: think I know what you're talking about now. 

Madeline: Um, So I was in New York for Thanksgiving. So I was like, if I'm gonna be in the city, I might as well go to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. So my roommate and I went down there and I didn't have any intention of making a TikTok.

Madeline: But now TikTok is always on the brain, right? So I, a little bit was like watching this being like, Ooh, it would be funny if I could get like one of them to float away. And so I took my first thought was selfie with the Ronald McDonald float. And I thought that would be a funny one to like float over the city.

Madeline: But as all of [01:07:00] the balloons were marching through, we were in front of the Dakota and between the Dakota and this other building was It was, , just an open street and it was like wind tunneling at the balloons. So every time the balloons were marched past the intersection, it would surge towards the crowd and it would get like close and the whole crowd would go, Whoa!

Madeline: And then it would back away. And I was like, Oh, I've got to get the crowd going like, Ooh, and then I'll Photoshop a balloon flying away. And as soon as I had that thought, the minion came up and I was like, that's hilarious. I'm going to film this minion. I'm going to film the crowd like oooing and aahing because it's about to come towards them.

Madeline: And then I'll use that as the audio. The wind did not pick up, so there were no oohs from the crowd, unfortunately.

Gavin: So you had to fake it all.

Madeline: So I had to fake it all, [01:08:00] but I'm a producer, and so it's like pretty easy. So I filmed the minion and like tracked it, and then as it got in front of me, I jostle the camera and drop it, as if I got scared and dropped the camera.

Madeline: When I got home I like added more like me fiddling with the camera. So there's like more of that rustling audio and I didn't want to spend all the time Binding sound effects of crowds going like, oh, oh no. So I just like use the first thing I found, which was like crowd panic. And so it's all these people screaming.

Madeline: A lot of the comments are like, why'd everyone scream bloody murder? It was the first thing I saw. , so I slapped that on and then added narration as if I'm at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and then I photoshopped the balloons being released in three [01:09:00] stages.

Gavin: the TikTok itself was really smart and you should go watch it and fun, but then I loved your follow up where you kind of told the story of what happened with it. Because again, what's so interesting about these TikToks is. You get the initial Tik Tok and it coming out, but then Tik Toks often the comments become part of the story of the Tik Tok, right?

Gavin: Because in this instance, you had people that lots of people thought this actually happened and it actually got picked up in a bunch of places as a real story. Even though every single one of us who watched the TV show knows there was not a minion that got released or got loose, you know? 

Madeline: Right. And it's like right at the beginning of the parade too. But. I also, not living in New York for so long, I would have no idea where this map is of, like, I then created a Minion map, which I thought was so fun. 

Gavin: You had one video, Madeline, that went to 54 million views on Tik Tok. Now you had alluded earlier to that, that that may not be a full number, but like, tell us the story of that video and kind of like why it got.

Madeline: Right. So, [01:10:00] I, that video is insane. The amount of comments I have and views are just crazy. Um, I never really know what is going to hit, and I honestly didn't think that was, that good, but I guess it struck a chord with people. The premise is that I am soft launching a boyfriend, uh, to make my ex jealous.

Madeline: And people like got riled up about it.

Gavin: What made people so pissed off about it? What was, what was the thing? 

Madeline: People are pretty furious that anybody would ever deceive somebody else for one reason or another. Even though it's like, I don't know, doesn't everybody do this all the time? , the funny thing is, in my personal life, I am not like this. I cannot remember the last time I wanted to make a guy jealous.

Madeline: I'm like, the biggest straight shooter of all time. this video, I am getting comments. I can refresh my TikTok notifications every 10 minutes and have a [01:11:00] new comment calling me pathetic and telling me to, like, get a life. Or, like, maybe you could try going outside and meeting people?

Gavin: Oh no. What does that say about our world? That, that people think a, that that's real. Right? That's the, the funniest thing to me is that like so many people are out there thinking that you are actually doing this on purpose, but then also that,

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: the time to engage in that way, though? That's the next level of, wild to me, I'll say.

Gavin: Yeah.

Madeline: Yeah, so everything that I post is like comedy first and in my head I'm like, oh, wouldn't it be so funny? Like what's something that I might have wanted to do when I was like in high school or college to make a guy jealous so that was how I like came up with the idea and then I was trying to make the Tik Tok longer so I did three different guys, none of them look alike, which I hear it in the comments, , that video went crazy, people calling me [01:12:00] pathetic. , people angry that, , somebody would use technology to deceive like this.

Madeline: And then it got up to around 17 million views before Adobe asked to use it as an advertisement. So had they not taken it on as an advertisement, I don't know if it would be this big. 

Madeline: It makes Adobe so cool to me because they're like, getting all these comments being like, Oh, I can't believe Adobe would use this as an ad. What agenda are they trying to push? How dare they? And I'm like, good for Adobe for being so funny.

Gavin: Yeah,

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: Right. Oh, I'm sorry. Are you, uh, taking time to engage with Signal in the Sea of Noise right now? I think that's what Adobe wanted and I think that's what they got. So, thank you for your comment. Please like, subscribe, and move on to the next video.

Madeline: exactly. So yeah, that was a fun one and we'll see more to come.

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: I know we're going over time. So I appreciate , your time here, Madeline. But from one [01:13:00] TikTok Titan to another, if someone is looking to, let's say, break their first million view video. And I can't even, uh, Gavin, you remember our first, uh, I can't, I can't even

Gavin: Oh, yeah, we've had we've had like a three dozen

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: Oh God. I mean, who, who's counting Gavin? The question, Madeline, is that for someone who's looking to get into this, whether they're going to leverage AI or not, is there a pro tip now? Cause you, you seem to have it, , down. Obviously there's creativity involved, which some people on this chat might not have, but what is the

Madeline: please

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: for, for the TikTok titans out there?

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: Cause we know, but we're just curious for those who aren't.

Madeline: Yeah, tick tock prioritizes Well produced content So it's got to look good, and it's got to have some effort put into it. And then you find your niche, and you go with it. You go with what people like. But also, you go, you have to like it as well. So like, if I don't find it funny, and like I'm just leaning into, [01:14:00] you know, a format that did well for me, it's not gonna do well, because I don't believe

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: So what's the platform for low effort trend chasers who are inauthentic and trying to just make a quick buck or two?

Madeline: Instagram.

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: We're moving to Instagram!

Madeline: Instagram

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: you, Madeline!

Gavin: Wow, there you go. Don't come at us Instagram go at Madeline go to her comments. You can go after her in the comments. Yeah awesome. Well Madeline. Thank you so much for being here We really appreciate this and we will continue to follow you on tik tok. Where can we find you there and other places?

Madeline: Find me on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram at I'm Mad Sal. I am M A D S A L. Uh, yeah, you can see tutorials on my YouTube channel. I am. I'm really starting to get into these, like, Photoshop generative fill tutorials because I feel like I've logged probably the most hours using it of anybody that I've seen. So I think I know the tips and tricks [01:15:00] and I would like to share them.

Gavin: That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here. And uh, please go check out her Tik Toks and we will, we will see you on our Tik Tok as well.

Madeline: Yeah. Thank you

kevin_2_12-12-2023_120205: Thank you, Madeline.

Yeah.

Gavin: That is our show for today. As always, please like, and subscribe to us on all the podcast services, on TikTok, on YouTube. We, Kevin, got a new five star review. And as we always do at the end of the show, we will read our review.

Gavin: Kevin, will you please read the review from Decaf Daddy?

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: Yes, Gavin, it is from decaf daddy, which is a great username. So thank you for that. It is a five star review left on December 8th and it says juicy exclusive, which is your maybe least favorite thing that I've ever said on this

Gavin: don't, I really don't love juicy exclusives, so, but fine, I, it's a five star review, you can say it in a five star review,

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: Yeah, and Decaf Daddy, thank you for reminding me. I haven't said it enough, and we [01:16:00] have many exclusives on this podcast, so I'll bring it back. , Decaf Daddy says, This show is entirely made up of the juiciest of exclusives. The AI characters are reminiscent of those seen on Attack of the Show.

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: Parentheses, I hope Drunkle Ted is safe and warm. He's not. Rip Drunkle. The recent addition of having, quote, real guests has given Kevin and Gavin a chance to shine as hosts. Well, that's very nice. I look forward to this pod every week, which is a very delightfully way to sincerely stick a landing that I have trouble accepting.

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: So thank you, Decaf Daddy, and everyone. As I said, I'm not trying to break our, hand patting ourselves on the back. It feels weird to say, but it is great to say that the listenership and viewership has exploded in recent weeks. So thank you. That is because you fine folks, yes, you listening or watching this right now, you are the reason.

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: This has exploded because you have gone out of your way to raise awareness. So thank you for sharing, for liking, for subscribing, for engaging and dropping those comments on all the platforms. We see you and we [01:17:00] appreciate you. Thank you so much.

Gavin: Yeah, and also, by the way, Kevin and I are going on a lot of other podcasts to talk about AI, they don't have to be AI podcasts, but if there are podcasts that you love, that you think we would be good guests on, let us know, because we'd love to go visit other podcasts or have other podcast hosts come here.

Gavin: Um, drop a line to us in our TikTok comments or our YouTube comments or on X, we're on all those platforms. 

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: Similarly, let us know who you want to have on our podcast because someone said, Hey, you guys should like have Gina podcast. Okay. Great. That was a great idea. Gina Darling is going to join us next week as our guest. So that works both ways. So please, whatever platform, let us know who you want to see on this show.

kevin_3_12-12-2023_124906: And then of course, where you want us to go, because we could definitely use your help with that.

Gavin: We definitely could at this point. Who knows? We're just floating in space. Hopefully the AI will tell us where to go eventually. Bye, everybody! Yeah, we're the Minions Balloon. Goodbye, we'll see you all next week. Thanks, everyone. 

Yeah.