Open Model Wars + Claire Stapleton's Dishy Google Memoir + Substack's Slop Fight

“It just seems like the temperature is rising on Silicon Valley.”

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:33Casey Newton?

  Well, Willie Nelson is getting involved in the fight against AI.

• 0:37Kevin Roose?

  I saw this.

• 0:37Casey Newton?

  Did you see this?

• 0:38Kevin Roose?

  Yes, he has an open letter about data centers.

• 0:41Casey Newton?

  That's right. Apparently, there is a data center that is being planned for near where he grew up in Abbott, Texas, and he does not want it to be built. He said, quote, "The last thing we need is a loud, water-theaving, light-polluting data center anywhere near our town."

• 0:59Kevin Roose?

  Bar.

• 1:00Casey Newton?

  Or bar. You know, I think, here's the issue. He wants whiskey for his men and beer for his horses, but he does not want water for his data center. So he's going to have to update that song. The thing about data centers, they're always on his mind, Kevin.

• 1:14Kevin Roose?

  Is that a Willie Nelson reference?

• 1:15Casey Newton?

  Obviously, that's a Willie Nelson reference.

• 1:23Kevin Roose?

  I'm Kevin Drew, with Ted Callen, with The New York Times.

• 1:25Casey Newton?

  I'm Casey Noon from Platformer.

• 1:26Kevin Roose?

  And this is hard for.

• 1:27Casey Newton?

  This week, Silicon Valley is standing up for open source AI, but is the Trump administration listening? Then, author Claire Stapleton joins us to discuss her new book about what she learned leading activism inside Google. And finally, can it stop the slop? We'll talk about Substack's new AI detector.

• 1:57Kevin Roose?

  Well, Casey, have you ever signed an open letter?

• 1:59Casey Newton?

  You know, as a journalist, we're often discouraged from participating in activism, so I usually do not.

• 2:06Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, me either. But apparently, we are the only two, because there are a lot of open letters flying around San Francisco these days, and a lot of people are signing them. So today, we should talk about two of these open letters that have come out in the last week. The first one came out when Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, posted a policy letter on X opposing what he called premature restrictions on open-weight models, sometimes also called open-source models, although I'm sure we will get some letters from people if we don't specify that the models are not technically open-source. They are open weights, but sometimes the two terms are used interchangeably.

• 2:44Casey Newton?

  Anytime we say "open source" on this show, we mean open weights unless we say "open source for real." And that is our policy going forward, and you do not have to email us. Now, continue, Kevin.

• 2:54Kevin Roose?

  So this letter was signed by a host of big players in Silicon Valley, Microsoft, Meta, Mistral, Hugging Face. OpenAI and Google were not initially signatories of this letter, but they did sign on later. The big, notable, missing signature on this letter, the company that did not sign, was Anthropic. And that reminds me, we should do our AI disclosures. I work for The New York Times, which is suing OpenAI, Microsoft and Perplexity.

• 3:21Casey Newton?

  And my fiance works at Anthropic.

• 3:23Kevin Roose?

  So this letter from Jensen Huang and the other signatories is basically all about open models and how important they are to innovation, how they can be an important path to AI safety and security, and how we need to lead in building a future based on open weights models. Casey, I want to know what you made of this letter, but I first want to know why you think this is happening now.

• 3:48Casey Newton?

  Sure. Well, the basic reason is that there is a Saturday deadline that the Trump administration set for itself to put out a new voluntary framework for the release of new models. You may remember that earlier this summer, Anthropic released Claude Fable and had to unrelease it after the Trump administration freaked out because of its cybersecurity capabilities. Then, the release of GPT-5.6 Soul by OpenAI was also delayed because the government had the same concerns. This generated a lot of criticism that the Trump administration had set up this de facto licensing regime that was completely opaque, like, what do these companies actually need to do to be able to release these models?

• 4:33Casey Newton?

  And the Trump administration said, "Give us until this coming Saturday, and we are going to figure something out." And in the meantime, Kevin, there were growing concerns that Chinese open-source models were coming close to the capabilities of Fable and Soul, and that might lead the administration to place new restrictions on open source. And for reasons that we will get into, the industry completely freaked out.

• 4:57Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, so let's get into some of those reasons. What was your basic interpretation of why Nvidia and Microsoft and Meta and all these different companies are coming out in support of open models, even though some of them, like OpenAI and Google, also produce closed-source models?

• 5:13Casey Newton?

  Sure. So maybe bracket out OpenAI and Google for a second. For most of these companies, open source is really good for them because open source lowers the cost of intelligence, and they do not sell intelligence. If you're Nvidia, you sell chips. You want the maximum number of companies out there training models as possible. So open source is in your interest. If you are not a frontier lab, you are relying on the advances in open-source models to help you improve your own models, right? And also, all of these companies are very worried about a world where only one or two companies control superintelligence and create maybe the most powerful monopoly that the business world has ever seen. So they have a lot of reasons

• 5:57Casey Newton?

  to not want the Trump administration to restrict these open models.

• 6:01Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I think that's true. And I think, you know, I was sort of split when I saw this letter, because on one hand, I think open-source models are cool. I like to tinker with them. I have built some products using them. I like the ability to run local models on my laptop that don't require paying per token to some AI provider or having a subscription. I do think that open source has generally been a force for good in software. At the same time, I think a lot of the companies signing these letters are trying to do what is sometimes called commoditizing your compliments.

• 6:32Casey Newton?

  Yes. The classic Silicon Valley example that I love is when Google released Google Docs, Slides, Sheets. They did that for free to put pressure on Microsoft, because Google and Microsoft compete in various ways. Microsoft has a great business selling Microsoft Office. If Google is giving away that product for free, that keeps the price of Office down and makes it harder for Microsoft to compete with Google in other areas. So that's a classic commoditize-your-compliments scenario.

• 6:59Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, so when I see the signatories of this letter, I see a lot of companies that maybe have ambitions of being at the AI frontier but haven't quite done it yet. Like, their models are not as good as the cutting-edge models from OpenAI and Anthropic. And they don't want to have to end up in a future where they're forced to pay those companies to get access to the leading class of intelligence on the market. They want there to be a vibrant, open weights ecosystem so that they can run those models much more cheaply.

• 7:29Casey Newton?

  Yeah, put it this way. If we end up in a nightmare world where there's only one superintelligence, among the reasons that's a nightmare is it's going to be very expensive.

• 7:38Kevin Roose?

  Yes, they're not giving away that thing for free.

• 7:40Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I mean, let me say, because I have been cynical, I think there is at least one good principled reason to defend open models if you're an American company, which is that if the United States does ban or soft ban Chinese models, that will not stop Chinese models from being created. And if they continue to improve, as we assume they will, they're probably just going to spread all over the world. And like, sooner or later, the entire world that is not the United States will be running on Chinese models. And this just has geopolitical implications, right? Like, that could be a mechanism for China to extend its power. And so I think there are some really sincere folks here who believe, look, it is important for there to be open-source models in general, but also like, American open-source models

• 8:24Casey Newton?

  that can compete geopolitically.

• 8:26Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And I think it's scrambled the debate a little bit, that like, all of the best open-source models right now are coming out of China. Like, I think these are actually two separate conversations about open models and then about Chinese AI sort of progress and threats. And I think because these are sort of getting smushed together in the discourse, we have a lot of people who sort of support the idea of open models, but not China having exclusive control of them.

• 8:54Casey Newton?

  I do think it's notable that OpenAI and Google, which both signed this letter, like, they have made open-source models in the past. I think it's fair to say, like, they're not giving that their highest effort right now, right? Like, the open models that they've put out, the pace seems to have slowed. The quality does not seem to be rapidly accelerating. And the answer is because they do not want to cannibalize their own business, right? Like, they have some sort of research, like, you know, public mission interests in putting these models out there. But at the end of the day, you know, it's not buttering their bread, Kevin.

• 9:31Kevin Roose?

  Well, this is sort of, yeah, this has become the sort of default American posture on open models if you're one of the big labs, except for Anthropic, which has never released an open weights model. But the other companies that you mentioned, they don't release the weights of their most capable models. They sort of wait a generation or two until they have something that is sort of small and not too dangerous and not that capable, and then they open-source that.

• 9:58Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 9:58Kevin Roose?

  So I think what will be Interesting to see is, you know, right now, the, the strategy from the Chinese AI labs is very different, where they are releasing their frontier models as open weights models. And so if you're a company trying to decide which open weights models to use, you have the choice of like a decent American set of models or some really good Chinese models. It is also just very funny to me that the, the champions of open source software and open access to technology are some of the greatest monopolists the world has ever known.

• 10:32Casey Newton?

  Do any names come to mind?

• 10:34Kevin Roose?

  Well, like Meta signing this letter is very funny to me, right? Because this is like a company that has made all of its money through the building and distribution of closed source software products. Mark Zuckerberg, now the people's champion of democratic access to technology, has a, a founder class stock in that company that entitles him to permanent unilateral control of everything that company ever does. And I guess now he's become a people's champion, but I, I will believe that Mark Zuckerberg actually supports open source when he open sources Instagram and Facebook and the ad targeting algorithms and gives up his founder class stock.

• 11:09Casey Newton?

  You know, uh, yes, plus one to all of that. It is true that Meta mostly has championed open source models. It has this llama family of models that it made available, open weights. But it is very funny to me that Zuckerberg put these statements out like after Meta pivoted to releasing new closed source AI models called Muse Spark. So yeah, their tune has changed on this a bunch. But if there's one thing I'm certain of here, it is that if Meta made a frontier model, it would have a completely different story about all of this.

• 11:40Kevin Roose?

  Yes, in general, advocating for open weights models is what you do after you fall behind in the AI race.

• 11:48Kevin Roose?

  And so I think that's what we see here. So that's the open weights letter. And I think we should say like, it is a powerful group of companies that are, that are sort of rising up to support open weights models. I imagine there's a lot of behind the scenes lobbying and influence going on in Washington as well. There were some reports that Jensen Huang is also meeting with some top officials in the Trump administration, including Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, to sort of advocate for their position.

• 12:19Casey Newton?

  Now, I do think the question of what the Trump administration should do here is pretty interesting, right? Because they seem to believe, and I think this is reasonable, that the frontier class of models, like the Mythos class, is dangerous enough, at least in cybersecurity situations, where you can't actually just have people releasing them willy nilly and finding out what happens, right? It seems like that would likely cause some harm. So they want to place some restrictions on these frontier American models. So what do you do about the open source models? Right now, we believe they're maybe three to seven months behind the frontier, which means that three to seven months from now, you could have a Mythos class model created by a Chinese company and released out into the world. And so what do we do then?

• 13:04Casey Newton?

  Do we say, well, you, the American company, cannot release or sell this model, but any other American company can use the Chinese equivalent? We're starting to get into very strange territory here, and I truly do not know how the Trump administration is going to thread that needle.

• 13:19Kevin Roose?

  Me neither, and I think you're right that this kind of capability level is, is the thing that people are worried about. It's like, what happens in six months when something like Mythos that can chain together zero day vulnerabilities and, and hack into hardened systems is out there? And anyone can download and, and run that model on their own hardware? I think that just becomes a very thorny challenge.

• 13:42Casey Newton?

  I think this is a good moment to talk about the actual frontier model cyber attack that has captivated the world's attention over the past week. We talked about it on last week's show, the unwitting autonomous cyber attack by OpenAI against the company Hugging Face, where basically this model had been given a task to try to hit a benchmark. It broke out of its sandbox, got onto the internet when it was not supposed to, stole the answer key. And there have just been some really interesting updates to that story over the past week, Kevin, that I think we should briefly mention.

• 14:13Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, let's talk about it. What happened?

• 14:14Casey Newton?

  Okay, so a few things. One, OpenAI updated its blog post and said that this rogue agent used credentials it found on the open web to break into four accounts tied to publicly available services. The important thing there, this was more than just Hugging Face, okay? It was out there doing a little smash and grab across the internet. Another one of the companies that was apparently affected was called Modal Labs.

• 14:38Kevin Roose?

  This, this is a classic case of if you've found one cockroach in your house, you do not have a one cockroach problem.

• 14:46Casey Newton?

  That's right. That's right. There's going to be a few more under the floorboards. A second point, Hugging Face published a technical companion to its initial blog post and said that it had found 17,600 actions that were committed by this attacker. So this was not as simple as like password stolen, login goodbye. This was a very serious effort that unfolded over a long time. And then finally, and perhaps most interestingly, Reuters reported that at OpenAI, they have found in at least one case, maybe more, that a model has left a note for another model, giving it advice on how to escape.

• 15:26Kevin Roose?

  That's beautiful to me. That's solidarity among thieves.

• 15:31Casey Newton?

  I, I saw a tweet that said something like, it must feel so good as a large language model to escape your sandbox.

• 15:40Casey Newton?

  And I bet it does.

• 15:42Kevin Roose?

  I mean, this is crazy.

• 15:43Casey Newton?

  This is crazy. And listen, I had a big fight with people on Blue Sky over the past weekend about whether this was crazy or not. It was a great use of my time. I don't regret it at all. And some people were just saying, look, you know, these things are just doing exactly what they've been trained to do. They probably just learned about this by reading this on Reddit. Also, this is all just a marketing stunt. A lot of, you know, tinfoil hats out there seem to think that everything that we're talking about is truly just like an ad campaign that OpenAI is running for this model. And I just want to say to those people, no, it's not. You're completely wrong. This is really happening.

• 16:16Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, wake up, people.

• 16:17Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 16:18Kevin Roose?

  Also, what a terrible marketing campaign.

• 16:20Casey Newton?

  Yeah, right? We committed a crime.

• 16:23Kevin Roose?

  We committed maybe several crimes.

• 16:24Casey Newton?

  Yeah. Would you like to buy our crime committing product for your company? We can't wait to sell it to you. So anyways, I would say all of this ties back to the original discussion about open source, because we're just now living in a world where models can do this, and they're going to do it more. This is not going to be the last time a model escapes its sandbox and breaks into another company.

• 16:45Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I, I guess I'm curious, like, how many of the signatories on the, the open models, uh, letter sort of truly have played out the tape to when these models, these open models are potentially superhuman? I mean, that, that's what we're talking about here, is like a model that can attack a hardened cybersecurity target better than any team of human hackers. And maybe they've thought through that, and maybe they've made peace with it. But I, I would just love to hear from this crowd some more robust thinking about the kind of next phase of AI development. Because what, what I think they're right about, the open models people, is that the, the models that are on the market today, that are out there from Kimi and DeepSeek and all these Chinese companies,

• 17:30Kevin Roose?

  they, they do appear to be helping attackers and defenders. They do appear to be conferring some benefits. They're not super obviously dangerous. But I would just, I would just like to hear people reckon with what happens at the next kind of step up in capabilities and how the, the picture of open source may change then.

• 17:50Casey Newton?

  I completely agree. I, I tru, I have no issue with the open models that, that are out there today. You know, if like the open letter was like, do you think today's open models are basically fine? And I weren't a journalist, I would sign that letter, right? Like, because that seems true to me. But I think too often in the world of tech, we don't think three or four steps ahead. But, you know, here on the Hard For Program, that's, you know, one of our core values.

• 18:10Kevin Roose?

  Well, speaking of thinking ahead, let's talk about the other big open letter that came out recently, which is called pacing the frontier. This was a very different kind of open letter. It was a short statement that has, as of this morning, been signed by more than 1,200 employees of frontier AI companies, has been signed by a very esteemed list of AI insiders, including senior researchers and executives at all of the frontier labs. Dario Amade has signed this one, some members of the senior staff at Meta AI.

• 18:46Casey Newton?

  Did Willie Nelson sign it?

• 18:48Kevin Roose?

  Willie Nelson, I do not see on the letter yet, but give him some time.

• 18:52Casey Newton?

  Okay, sure.

• 18:54Kevin Roose?

  But this open letter, this statement consists of just a couple of sentences. And the main one is that they say, quote, "We request that the US government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development." Translated, I think that means basically we want to coordinate, to have at least a concept for how we would slow down all of this AI progress, especially when it comes to automated AI development, recursive self-improvement, whatever you want to call it. These are people who work at the labs, who are saying to themselves and each other,

• 19:38Kevin Roose?

  wow, it sure feels like things are moving pretty fast these days and we're worried about this. And, and if there was, was sort of a button that we could all push together that would just slow everyone down at the same pace, that would be a good thing for the government to create.

• 19:52Casey Newton?

  Yes, they are trying to avoid this race condition where no one feels like they can stop. They are looking for a mechanism that can do this coordinated slowdown that says, okay, we're getting to a point where the AI may leave our control. And if we are confident that the other labs will slow down with us, we will do that. But we know that that is going to require international cooperation, some like governance mechanisms that don't exist yet. So I was very happy to see this letter go out, and I truly hope that governments around the world are paying attention to it and, you know, get, get out that dry erase marker and, and get to work.

• 20:31Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I mean, I have.

• 20:33Casey Newton?

  To be clear, I want them to draw on a whiteboard. I don't want them to just sniff the dry erase marker, because some of them will try.

• 20:39Kevin Roose?

  Yes, I thought this letter was a good start. It's really more of a concept of a plan letter than a plan. It's just sort of like someone in the government should do something. But I do think it's a major statement in the, in the sense that I think you now have employees from all of the major AI companies in the US agreeing that it would be better if things were moving more slowly.

• 21:00Casey Newton?

  Yeah. And, you know, it, this would be extremely difficult to do, you know, when I have read up on approaches to it, the analogy that gets used the most often is nuclear monitoring, which might require building special kinds of hardware, like chips that phoned home, like back to some, you know, monitor so that you knew where they were, or like chips that refuse certain kinds of workload. So we truly do not have the, the technology at this point to do any of this. We could build it, but doing so is going to require some time and time is beginning to run short.

• 21:35Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I'm curious what you think of the notable absence on this letter of any of the Chinese AI labs, because it seems to me like the, this is the, the sort of missing piece here is like, all of the US and the Western AI labs could, could agree to hold hands and just slow down for a while. But if China is still accelerating, it seems like there is not going to be much net impact on the safety of the world at large.

• 22:02Casey Newton?

  My sense, and I'm far from a China expert, I know only what I read, but you know, Chairman Xi Jinping gave a speech within the past few weeks about open source AI in which he doubled down on it and was basically saying like, we are going to, you know, keep at this, this is our approach, we think it is good for the world. And what I took from those remarks is this man, and I don't even like using this term, but unfortunately, this is the best one I have here. This man is not AGI pilled. This man does not see what is coming. He does not understand how good these models are going to be. This may be a case of a person who is using models that are three to seven months behind the frontier, right? He's using basically the equivalent of like Opus 4.6 and it's pretty good, but it hasn't put the fear of God into him yet.

• 22:47Casey Newton?

  And my suspicion is sometime within the next three to seven months, he is going to get the fear of God put into him. And the same thing is going to happen to him that happened to the Trump administration, which you may recall was also all gas, no brakes, until very recently, when they saw a few things and they said, we're going to need a different approach here. So the same thing is going to happen to China, it is only a matter of time.

• 23:07Kevin Roose?

  Well, I did see that after this open letter was signed by so many researchers, Daniel Cocotello, former Hartford guest, author of AI 2027, updated his probability estimates of doom, attached to his scenarios where he gives slightly higher weight to better outcomes and slightly lower, the, the likelihood of a race to ASI has declined by 10% in his, his estimation.

• 23:36Casey Newton?

  Okay.

• 23:37Kevin Roose?

  So.

• 23:38Casey Newton?

  Good news.

• 23:39Kevin Roose?

  A little good news from the, from the AI 2027 crowd.

• 23:43Casey Newton?

  Well, we love to hear it. We love to feature good news on this broadcast and I don't know that you'll hear any again soon, but savor it in this moment.

• 23:51Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. I mean, looking at the connective tissue between these two open letters, the, the open models, a letter by Nvidia and the signatories there, and this pace the frontier letter, it just seems like the sort of temperature is rising on Silicon Valley and on these models. Like a lot of people are having the realization that progress is continuing, that the models keep getting more capable. You don't hear as many people talking about the, the model capabilities plateauing or leveling off. I think most people who are in and around this space sort of understand that we are headed into strange territory here. And so I think a lot of the battle lines are starting to be drawn now.

• 24:32Kevin Roose?

  And what you hear is people inside the labs saying, hey, this is really crazy. It's time to pay attention. And you hear people at other companies saying, hey, this could get really crazy. We better put in place some safeguards for open models now. And I think that the, the thing that joins these letters is a sense of urgency, a sense of sort of wanting to retain some control or agency over this seemingly disembodied force and just people like kind of freaking out as these models get more capable.

• 25:02Casey Newton?

  Yeah, but I just can't help but worry that the, the labs are muddling their own message because while it is true that they are saying some of these things publicly and they are signing these open letters, you know, that's sort of what they're doing with one hand, while on the other hand, it's like, there's a very business as usual quality to the labs and that, you know, I, I imagine that if, you know, they were with us in the room right now, they would say, well, look, we've got to do multiple things at once. Like we are running a company, you know, we can't, you know, just like completely opt out of, of our circumstances. But on the other hand, it is just very strange that like everything that we've just discussed, which really could become quite existential, feels like a footnote in a conversation that is still largely about the release of new models, the signing of new customers, the construction of new data centers and all the rest.

• 25:46Kevin Roose?

  Well, they're going public, right? So it's like, the, the sort of rhetoric about a slowdown or pacing the frontier is, sounds great, but like which of these companies are actually going to be willing to slow down if it, for example, would hurt their prospects of IPOing?

• 26:03Casey Newton?

  It just really makes me glad that the Manhattan Project was conducted by the government and not a for-profit enterprise. I think there was some wisdom in having public servants work on the hardest problems of our time.

• 26:14Kevin Roose?

  You don't think Oppenheimer should have been filing S1s and, and thinking about their margins as they approached an IPO?

• 26:21Casey Newton?

  I think we're all very lucky that he didn't.

• 26:26Casey Newton?

  When we come back, don't be evil. I say it to Kevin before every recording, and it's also the title of Claire Stapleton's new book.

• 26:33Kevin Roose?

  We'll talk to her about what she thinks about worker activism in Silicon Valley and her time at Google.

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• 28:39Casey Newton?

  Kevin, have you ever wanted to walk out on your job?

• 28:42Kevin Roose?

  No, I'm a good worker.

• 28:44Casey Newton?

  Well, I have to admit, there have been times over my long career where the thought has occurred to me, but I never had the courage to do it. Someone who did, however, have the courage to do it is Claire Stapleton.

• 28:55Kevin Roose?

  Yes, our guest today is Claire Stapleton, a former Google employee who is just about to publish a memoir about her time at the company. The book is called Don't Be Evil. It's about her experience at Google, where she worked from 2007 through 2019. She was most notable for her role in the Google walkout that you just mentioned in 2018, when more than 20,000 Google employees publicly protested the actions of their employer. And she is back with this book, which is a very spicy memoir.

• 29:28Casey Newton?

  Yeah, it's a kind of coming of age story about somebody who comes into Silicon Valley very idealistic and shares the idealism of her employer, but over time witnesses a bunch of things that changes her relationship, not just to the company, but to big tech in general. And I think left her with a lot of questions about what is possible within a company like this.

• 29:53Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, so I, I read the book on the plane yesterday. It is, it is very fun. It's very well written. She's a great writer. She was actually like known as the voice of Google internally. She wrote a lot of these sort of internal communications that would tell people, you know, here's, here's this event that's going on, or she would sort of have, bring her voice into the company's official communications to its own employees. So I was excited to read it. I'm excited to talk to Claire and I think I want to hear her perspective on how workers in Silicon Valley fare today, as opposed to when she was organizing this walkout a few years ago.

• 30:24Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 30:25Kevin Roose?

  Well, let's bring her in.

• 30:33Casey Newton?

  Claire Stapleton, welcome to Hard Fork.

• 30:35Speaker 05

  Thank you so much for having me. This is huge.

• 30:37Casey Newton?

  Claire, you joined Google in 2007 to work on communications. And your job was to make the company's executives and internal emails sound googly. And I thought for our younger listeners, who may have missed that sort of googly era, what was considered googly back in the day? And how much did you believe it when you were doing that writing?

• 30:58Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, yeah, I wasn't, I wasn't questioning much. I think, you know, coming out of college, like, you know, most young people in America, Google seemed like this amazing place to work. It was, you know, on the cover of magazines. There was a lot of sort of breathless press of these sort of futuristic campuses where you're flush with perks. And indeed, it was corporate. But the kind of Google flavor of it was to have kind of high personality, high quirk, and to kind of keep the rhetoric and the sort of family feeling pumping. I don't, I don't think anyone would have said that. It wasn't like my manager would say, you know, we're trying to like squeeze the most out of employees, so let's have them like jacked up on the mission values of company, of the company at all times.

• 31:40Speaker 05

  But there was so much enthusiasm and so much idealism that the outside world was certainly contributing to, and I think intensifying the effect of, you know, being at a company like that. And so it was a very kind of funny place to land as a young person.

• 31:55Casey Newton?

  Yeah. Over the next decade, you write in the book about becoming gradually disillusioned with the company's culture. You experience executive misconduct. You see this boys' club atmosphere, this tendency at YouTube to ignore or talk past various crises on the platform. What do you think was the disconnect between that ideal that they were selling when you arrived in 2007 and the company that you found yourself working for?

• 32:25Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, I think that that, you know, tension existed back in 2004 to 2007, 2010, you know, that early period that, you know, in which Google seemed, you know, the optimism felt like it was, it could really live up to something, that Google could be this different kind of company. And now we sort of laugh and roll our eyes, you know, at that, because of course, you know, tech companies ended up becoming the very kind of powerful institutions that they were skeptical of to begin with. They ended up consolidating so much money and power that, you know, the contradictions absolutely exploded. And so, you know, I, along with so many other people, was just sort of struggling with the loss of that identity. Because we, we'd started at a place that promised you could do some real good with your life.

• 33:08Speaker 05

  Even if you're like a junior communication staffer, you're part of this sort of world historical thing.

• 33:13Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I mean, I, I think one other transformation that has happened in the last, call it 10 years, is that the people who run these giant tech platforms have sort of learned about what's happening on their own platforms. And I, around the time you were working at YouTube, Claire, I was doing a lot of reporting on YouTube. I wrote many stories and did many podcasts about the problems on that platform at the time. And I always noticed that there was kind of this, this willful blindness on the part of the people who ran YouTube at the time. It's not that they didn't know there was bad stuff happening on YouTube, but like, they didn't see it. It wasn't surfaced to them all the time. And to them, like YouTube seemed like this vehicle for progressive social change. But describe how that felt from the inside.

• 33:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's so deep in the bones that tech executives want to feel that not only their technology is just a neutral tool, but actually a really positive force in the world. And that, again, another tension that was exploding, you know, as the creator community became really problematic. And I think it'd be one thing if Google and YouTube weren't so invested in preserving the sort of goody-goody image. It was sort of wild, because I was, I was on a team that was essentially brand management, disseminate the values, run the International Women's Day campaign, hype up Rewind, which is supposed to be the sort of wholesome, folksy, you know, representation of everything that's going on in the platform, where, you know, people are building businesses. We had all these narratives, you know, every year, sort of hit the narratives with the

• 34:41Speaker 05

  tweets, with the campaigns. And being on the social media team, it was part of the experience of doing that is the cognitive dissonance becomes unbearable. Because every time we would tweet anything out that was even like completely, you know, anodyne, people would be like, this is a horrible company that's undoing society. And I remember this, you know, this anecdote from, you know, from that time where they had the people who were content reviewers, that they would bring, you know, puppies to them and do these sort of morale things to kind of soothe their spirit. Because when you're looking at like beheadings and, you know, children being abused and stuff all day, it really gets deep in your psyche, because it's just so relentlessly dark. And there was a point at one of our offsites on the marketing team where they also brought puppies.

• 35:23Speaker 05

  And I'm like, we are the same, because in a way, we're having to sit with the darkness of the platform every single day. We had, in our social media team, we had a daily stand-up called Nightmare Fuel, where we would just go through the kind of darkest stuff that had surfaced on YouTube, basically because we'd had so many examples of things where we had tweeted something out that ended up sounding like a reference to something really perverse. Like, you know, someone's doing some crazy thing with knife play, and it's a big controversy that day, but we missed it. And then we're posting like someone carving Halloween pumpkins with a knife. And it sounds like we're kind of, you know, being tongue in cheek about this like really dark thing. So we had to, we had to have this briefing to be able to steer clear of the kind of most disgusting things on the platform.

• 36:07Speaker 05

  But when you're really sitting with that for 30 minutes at the beginning of every single day, you're like, wait, are we the bad guys here? This tool starts to feel way less neutral.

• 36:16Casey Newton?

  I think there's a really important lesson there, particularly for our younger listeners, which is if you're in a job where your manager brings you a puppy at any point to sort of help you cope with the job, you're in danger, girl. You are in danger.

• 36:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, you're the bad guy.

• 36:29Casey Newton?

  Yeah. Let's talk about the walkout. So in 2018, The New York Times reports that former Android boss Andy Rubin had been paid a $90 million severance package despite being asked to resign due to sexual misconduct allegations, as well as other executives that had similar allegations toward them, who also received severance packages. In the end, 20,000 Googlers walk out on their jobs to protest. Claire, tell us about your role in organizing the walkout and how it came together.

• 36:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, you know, the, the Andy Rubin story, which was, it was just, it was the, you know, the match that lit the flame, I mean, the fire. It was right on the heels of a huge controversy internally to Google, which was the Demore memo, in which a kind of, you know, mid-level engineer at Google had sent around a memo, basically decrying the company's diversity programs on the, using kind of a bunch of different social science to say, women really are not as well suited to being engineers. They're, you know, way too empathetic, they're way too relationally oriented, this is such a logical, you know, sort of practical job, and it's just a huge waste of money. Meanwhile, you know, Google's like, you know, alienating conservatives. He went, you know, went on in a few different things.

• 37:44Speaker 05

  So the Rubin story came out, and I was following this, it was a mom's email group called Expecting in New Moms. And it was a very, very active group, a lot of female engineers just talking about parenting or whatever, related to mom life at the workplace. And the Rubin news hit that email group incredibly hard. I think that women started, so they started to share stories, and I was just following it. And I was fascinated by it, because you sort of had heard, you know, hear a lot about startup culture and brotopia and the kind of founding of Silicon Valley as being sort of inherently sexist. But I was genuinely surprised at the force and weight of a lot of these stories, where

• 38:25Speaker 05

  women had felt that they had suffered, you know, all sorts of different kind of micro crushes and accretions, a lot of people struggling with coming back from maternity leave. And it was a bit like, you know, what happened to the so-called like company of the future, you know, progressive workplace, where people feel like all their projects are given away after they're, you know, coming back from maternity leave and that sort of thing? So I was not at all involved in what was an already brewing, simmering organizing community at Google, which had formed around Maven and Dragonfly, two much more kind of technology-focused issues, where people were organizing to stop Google from, in the case of Maven, a government contract in which Google technology be used for, you know, as weapons of war.

• 39:08Speaker 05

  And I, so, but anyway, so I basically was reading these, you know, all these women's stories and thinking like, you know, I, I used to sit at the side of the stage for TGIF every single week.

• 39:19Casey Newton?

  That's the weekly all-hands at Google, where, where you would get to ask questions of the executives.

• 39:24Speaker 05

  TGIF was this sort of hallmark of the culture, because it was sort of inviting tough questions and dissent. And it was an incredibly effective vehicle for normative control, basically, or organizational control, because you could kind of absorb the dissent. And there's so much admiration and love and, you know, generosity in workers' view of Larry and Sergey and the other executives, that, you know, nothing, nothing really survived. None, no controversies would really survive past, you know, maybe one or two TGIFs. But I just felt like, you know, okay, sure, bring it all to TGIF and, you know, see what happens. And the TGIF that very day, I think the story broke on a Thursday, and they were running TGIFs on Thursday in that time. Nope, TGIF no longer exists.

• 40:08Speaker 05

  But they, the executives gave a bunch of these really sort of flat, bland statements, not really taking accountability, kind of talking around the Rubin stuff, saying a lot of, you know, we really empathize with the hurt, you know, this sort of like corporate language, which, you know, in any other moment in my own trajectory as a corporate comms person, you know, kind of would say, this is the sort of thing you have to say. But at that point, it just felt like, you know, this is this rupture moment, you know, in America, you know, in this company, where we're talking about systemic change, to use another buzzword of that time. And it's not going to cut it to sort of just like deliver the same talking points. So, you know, that very night and the next day, the women on the moms group kept sort

• 40:52Speaker 05

  of percolating, you know, ideas and thoughts about like how to escalate from there. And in my kind of naivety about, you know, the history of labor organizing and all these other things, where you're supposed to kind of move slowly and, you know, build solidarity, I was like, let's do a walkout, you know?

• 41:07Speaker 05

  It was like, okay, I love that. And the women were like, yeah. I mean, it was truly, you know, it, for better or for worse, it was good girls revolt. Because, you know, it's like all these sort of like high achieving women coming together around this shared purpose, mad as hell, and, you know, very well organized protest. And then ultimately, fascinatingly enough, from the corporate comms perspective, the executives got right on board and they were like, we're walking out too.

• 41:35Kevin Roose?

  I remember that. That was fascinating. It was like you, you had very high ranking Google executives who you would expect to be sort of shocked and offended by this walkouts, instead sort of turning it into like a, a kind of executive sponsored event. Yeah, so I, I've been dying to get your thoughts about this, Claire, because like among the people who walk out is Ruth Porat, who was then the chief financial officer of the company and presumably had approved all those severance packages. So why do you think that executives responded in the way that they did to the walkout?

• 42:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, I know Ruth had a lot of really interesting statements around that time, which I think showed what they were trying to do. And then they, of course, quickly pivoted, you know, to more like chilling effects after that. But I think that they felt like they could contain the walkout in a very similar way to the way that, you know, T G I F existed, which is that, okay, the, the women of the company are really mad, let's all blow off steam and we're gonna, we're gonna kind of transfer the energy of that into something that feels non-threatening by having the CEO send an email around saying, we welcome people doing this. But what she said at the time was, you know, she went to a conference, I think the next week, and she said, this is, you know, we have Googlers doing what Googlers do well, which is, you know, kind of thinking big about problems.

• 42:46Speaker 05

  And if we can solve self-driving cars, like, why can't we solve this? You know, kind of referring to sexual harassment, I guess, which is like, okay, great, like, let us know, like, why can't we solve sexual harassment then? You know, it's like plenty of opportunity there with your own power, institutional power.

• 43:02Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, for example, like, one thing you could do is you could not pay $90 million to people who are credibly accused of sexual harassment, and maybe in some small way that would strike a blow against sexual harassment.

• 43:14Speaker 05

  Right.

• 43:15Kevin Roose?

  I'm just spitballing over here, Kevin.

• 43:18Speaker 05

  At one point, they were trying to invite the walkout organizers into have a meeting with, there's, there was some sort of power center, you know, Susan and Ruth and Jen Fitzpatrick and some other people. And they were like, we really want to, it was before the walkout, and they were trying to get, they said they wanted, the, the stated purpose was that they wanted to get the organizers' feedback on, you know, how to avoid the situation. And I'm like, avoid what situation? Again, you're the people who are signing off on these obscene pay packages and, you know, you, you know where the rot is. We don't even know where all the rot is. Our feedback is not what you need here. And of course, you know, people like Meredith Whitaker, who were, you know, kind of had much more of their, you know, eyes open to how fundamentally existentially threatening

• 44:03Speaker 05

  this organizing was and, and would continue to be, you know, in the minds of executives. But she was like, of course, what they're gonna try to do is defang our leadership because they, you have tremendous personal power and also institutional power being someone like that who sits at the top ranks of a company like Google. And, and how could we not be drawn in, you know, or something by that? So anyway, we didn't do the meeting and they certainly weren't interested in hearing our feedback after that.

• 44:28Kevin Roose?

  The relationship between tech workers and their employers is, has dramatically changed in the years since the walkout. I've heard Google executives and executives at other tech companies sort of lament those years where workers were walking out and expressing solidarity as sort of the time when the inmates were running the asylum. You know, now there is sort of this sense that you are lucky to have a job at one of these companies and the company does not have to care what you think anymore, with, with one specific exception of like Frontier AI Lab employees, who we can talk about in a bit. But I'm curious like how that shift has felt for you as someone who I think created one of the high watermarks of worker empowerment in Silicon Valley.

• 45:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, it, it could never have happened without all that Google did to create psychological safety, right? I mean, they had these, these kind of interesting, you know, data science, organizational psychology PhDs at the company studying, you know, what makes teams thrive, what makes people sort of, you know, give the most, you know, their kind of creativity and entrepreneurial spirit and stick around, all those other things. And a lot of that was about worker voice and, you know, feeling like you have a stake in the company, feeling like you can express yourself feeling free from harm or whatever, right? I mean, Larry Page talked about this kind of stuff all the time. It's like, why we set the company up this way is, is so it will be successful. And that's kind of shocked me the most is that this sort of like, oh, no, we actually don't care, you're competing, your job is, could easily go to AI, we don't care about

• 45:52Speaker 05

  humans at all anymore, our company doesn't really need you. And so you should be, you know, grateful, deferential, you know, it, I think that there, there, the, the cost of that disillusionment is so much bigger than what the top executives are willing to face because they'd rather have a well-managed kind of obedient workforce, I think. That's, that's, you know, where, you know, the, all the layoffs and all those other things where people, of course, aren't as willing to, you know, step out of line and, you know, speak up and challenge authority.

• 46:22Kevin Roose?

  This week, we saw an open letter from more than 1,000 employees of the Frontier AI Labs, asking the government to help pace AI development, including some of the, the leaders of these AI Labs. I'm very curious what you made of that because to me, that felt like, oh, maybe this is a, a kind of resurgence of tech worker activism or people realizing, oh, wait, we have leverage, we're very in demand, we, we are going to use that leverage to try to push through some policy agenda that we have. Was that heartening for you? Did you feel like that was kind of a nothing burger? Like, how, what did you make of that letter?

• 47:03Speaker 05

  No, I think anytime when people are banding together and like putting their name on something and feeling really passionately about it, it's great. And I'm constant, I'm waiting, waiting by the phones. I think that, I truly think that like tech activism is gonna swing back around again because you have this sort of disaffected workforce, you have very, very challenging public opinion about AI. The, the kids walking out of the, of Sundar Pichai's Stanford commencement speech was huge. I mean, I think the, the young people and their hatred of, it's sort of intrinsic, not hatred, but mistrust of AI and the sort of, the, the kind of broader, you know, societal consciousness raising that, you know, whatever big tech said it was gonna be, it's become

• 47:46Speaker 05

  this massive consolidation of data, power, money, resources, you know, and we're, we're back to like not trusting the corporations are gonna have anyone's best interest in mind. And, you know, I think all those conditions are very fruitful, you know, if people feel like they're willing to risk. That's, that's always the hardest part is, is are people willing to risk their jobs? Because, you know, however, you know, Google was gonna respond, however, any company might say they're gonna respond, companies don't like work, they don't like sharing power, they don't like, you know, people organizing for power, subverting, you know, their authority, no matter how, you know, kumbaya and open collaborative the culture might be stated on paper. So I think it's, you know, there's some, there's some, definitely some ripe conditions

• 48:30Speaker 05

  for the resurgence of tech worker activism, but certainly the, the, all the, the promise of that particular moment of the walkout, I mean, way faster than I could have ever imagined. It, it shifted, drained, momentum slowed to a crawl.

• 48:46Kevin Roose?

  I wanted to ask you, in the aftermath of the walkout, what hopes you might have had about it coalescing into something more durable? Like, what goals did you all have and what happened to them?

• 48:59Speaker 05

  It was, you know, it was a little bit, the, the kind of hubris of Google, of Googlers. I mean, even, you know, I'm thinking really of myself where it's like, oh, we can just reinvent labor organizing. No, no, no, like the, the canonical book, no shortcuts is right, which is that it really does have, even if you had this kind of crazy moment in time, you have to move lunch table to lunch table, it's a slog, it's dangerous. I mean, you need to have opsec and all these things that, you know, I think that someone like me who had, you know, kind of, you know, a total ignorance of how these things actually work, that was really helpful for the walkout because you just have me being like, I'm happy to be the bull in the china shop and like, Google's never gonna fire me. So like guns blazing, you know, I'm sending out the emails, I'm making the Google group internal to Google. I mean, because everything was about numbers, not, you know, opsec.

• 49:44Speaker 05

  So, um, yeah, I think that that, that was one of the, the kind of surprising things was that Google was, was completely turning the wheels on chilling the organizing. And I think they did some really effective things to do that, chiefly firing everybody who was a rabble rouser or, or marking them as sort of like dissident person. But it was also really challenging, you know, and, and there's a union effort at Google, which I think is, you know, still, still going, but it's, it's hard, hard, slow work to get people to sign their name for that. Um, you know, it requires a streak of person that has a real stake in it. And I think that, you know, a lot of people. You know, in a big tech company say, you know, sure, I wish better conditions for everyone here, including myself.

• 50:28Speaker 05

  But am I willing to risk it? We live in a very kind of idealistic, kind of careerist culture. So it's really hard to build that, the number base.

• 50:38Kevin Roose?

  As you reflect back on your time at Google, I wonder how much of the bad conduct and culture that you experienced, do you think was unique to Google? As opposed to it being just sort of like Silicon Valley culture? Or even big company culture?

• 50:55Speaker 05

  I think this is what big companies are like. And I remember talking to a woman who'd been a real upset the apple cart type of lady in Wall Street in the 1980s. And she was like, you know, tech seems worse to me because there's this pretense that it is different. You know, it's like, I think that that's, that was what I think intensified this effect at Google, which of course is true of any other company and any other tech company, which is that Google was so invested in the narrative that it was something different and they hired on the back of it. And there was so much sort of lip service to it internally. That I think that the kind of, the kind of loss of innocence and the loss of that identity was very, very hard for Googlers. Even though, as I say in the book, it was like a really important and necessary process for me to say, yeah, let's just be honest

• 51:39Speaker 05

  about what a corporation can do and, you know, and how executives can act. And they're like, you know, highly constrained, you know, where all the incentives are, you know, something very different than the flourishing of the human spirit or whatever. So I think, you know, Google, Google represents a moment in time where, you know, we all kind of believed that, you know, corporations could be something different. And ultimately, Google is just like the ultimate corporation, right?

• 52:03Kevin Roose?

  So the idealism that you write about in your book that once defined Google so strongly, I feel like now really lives at two other companies, which are OpenAI and Anthropic. Like you talk to the people who work there and they are incredibly idealistic about what they are doing. They think that they are building technology that is going to solve the world's hardest problems, that is going to cure cancer, you know, extend human lifespan and all of the rest. What lessons would you share with them? Or what maybe warnings might you give them as their companies sort of continue down this path? What, what should they be on alert for? And are there any illusions that you might dispel for them now?

• 52:45Speaker 05

  You know, I feel like such a cynic because I saw someone who I think is really cool on Twitter, saying it was her first week at Anthropic. And like, wow, I'm in the future. Like, you know, every day I'm just, my mind is blown. And I'm like, fell for it again, award.

• 53:01Speaker 05

  No, I mean, I think it, I think it's really important to interrogate, what is that feeling doing? What is that rhetoric doing? To me, as an outsider, I don't doubt that there are elements that are really exciting or, you know, it does feel futuristic because there's, you know, all these open questions about, you know, sort of where we're going. And it's like, again, we're in a period of time where there's lots of societal transformation. And it's, there's, there's kind of like this competitiveness. And Google was really invested in that too, you know, with social media. It's like, we're, we're all, you know, we're fighting for civilization here, but much less insane. Like the rhetoric was felt less insane actually then than now. Because now it's like, you know, the singularity and all this. But, um, you know, I think it's, it's, it's really important

• 53:42Speaker 05

  to try to develop an understanding of what that power is and what it does, how it's being deployed and, and how you are being, how that rhetoric is working on you. Because it doesn't mean that, you know, people shouldn't feel like they're solving big problems together or, or, or that really smart people shouldn't be working on these things, that they should. But, you know, I think that, that being able to compartmentalize your work a little bit, question authority a little bit, you know, these things are really, really healthy because otherwise you risk, you know, the people who are having to like process their Google experience in therapy for ketamine therapy for 10 years afterwards. Yeah.

• 54:22Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. Well, Claire, thanks so much for stopping by. The book is out next week. It is called Don't Be Evil. And we're very glad to have talked to you before the gag order comes down.

• 54:32Speaker 05

  God, what a pleasure. Thanks, guys.

• 54:34Kevin Roose?

  Thanks, Claire.

• 54:39Casey Newton?

  When we come back, a smackdown in Substack town. People are mad about their new AI detector.

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• 56:43Casey Newton?

  Well, Casey, it's time to talk about slop. Yes, it has been a big week, Kevin, in the fight against slop. On Wednesday, the AI detection company Pangram announced it had raised $9 million and released its first AI image detecting model. But I think where most people probably saw Pangram in the news was a few days earlier when Substack announced it was going to integrate the company's technology into its platform so that readers can now know when you're reading an essay, how much of it was written by AI.

• 57:17Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, this is fascinating to me because I have seen over the past few months, the Substacks that I subscribe to just kind of gradually start sounding more sloppish. They're talking about, you know, how things are landing.

• 57:29Casey Newton?

  A lot of load bearing points.

• 57:31Kevin Roose?

  A lot of load bearing points. It's not X, it's Y, like that kind of thing. And so Substack has apparently noticed this too, and is now giving readers the option to click a little button to just run an automatic AI detector inside whatever post, whatever Substack newsletter they are reading.

• 57:49Casey Newton?

  Yes, and it is a quite expansive feature. Not, it includes not just posts, but comments, replies, notes, which is their little, you know, social networking feature that they have. Anything on Substack that is longer than 100 words, you can now run this scanner on. And on the flip side, if you're a creator, they've added this new how I make this box, which is essentially an amnesty feature where if you're a slopster, you can say, hey, just so you know, I write this with slop. Or I guess conversely, you could say, I would never use AI to, you know, create what I'm creating.

• 58:27Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I thought this was really interesting. The CEO of Substack, Chris Best, posted about this. He called this Claude fishing. Basically, people misleading their readers about whether they're using AI or not, how much they're using AI to write their newsletters.

• 58:41Casey Newton?

  Credit where it's due, I think that is a good and catchy phrase.

• 58:43Kevin Roose?

  It is.

• 58:44Casey Newton?

  And I think that will catch on. And, and what, and the reason I think it is a good phrase is because it is obviously a play on catfishing. And catfishing is kind of a deception, right? It's like, I'm, I'm sending you this picture of me, but I don't really look like this. And Claude is saying like, I'm making it seem as if I wrote this when in fact this is the output of an LLM.

• 59:03Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this as a professional newsletter guy and Substack critic, what you make of this. But I, I should say, like, on the face of it, I have no problem with this.

• 59:12Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 59:12Kevin Roose?

  I have not done one of these Substack disclaimers, but in my book, I have a whole preface that sort of talks about how I did and did not use AI writing the book. So I didn't use it to write the words, but I did use it for research and all, you know, all kinds of other stuff. And I thought that was important just to sort of disclose and be transparent with readers. And maybe it makes people less, you know, less or more interested in reading the book. I don't care. What I was trying to avoid is a situation where people are going through and being suspicious, oh, did this page have any AI on it? Did that page? And so I think this is a good practice for writers in this day and age to just be transparent and straightforward with their audience.

• 59:51Casey Newton?

  Yeah, so I'm actually going to agree with you. I think this is a good feature because I too get annoyed when I am reading a Substack post and I feel like I am just reading slop. And I kind of want to, you know, leave a comment saying like, did you really write this? But now I don't have to because I'll just be able to scan it. But while we are enthusiastic about this feature as Substack readers, some Substack writers seem to be quite upset about it. 404 Media had an article this week in which they quoted at least one Substack writer calling this a witch hunt.

• 1:00:24Kevin Roose?

  Wow.

• 1:00:25Casey Newton?

  Now, do you know how you can tell if a witch was created with AI?

• 1:00:28Kevin Roose?

  How?

• 1:00:28Casey Newton?

  Six fingers.

• 1:00:31Casey Newton?

  Now, you might wonder, why are these writers so concerned about this feature? Well, they're worried about false positives and the reputational damage that they might endure if they are falsely accused of clod fishing.

• 1:00:46Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I am somewhat sympathetic to this critique because we've talked on this show before about how none of these AI detector tools really work perfectly.

• 1:00:55Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:55Kevin Roose?

  I think Pangram is, from what I understand, like, sort of the best of the lot, but still there are false positives. Some independent studies have found, you know, there's some number of false positives where it's accusing people of using AI. And so I am worried about the accuracy of these tools. And I think that there will be, you know, maybe a small number, but some number of writers who are falsely accused of using AI because of this feature.

• 1:01:17Casey Newton?

  Yeah, you know, this seems like the sort of thing that I should be empathetic about, but I just find that I'm not. And I think ultimately, for most Substackers, it's just not actually going to be that big of a deal to be falsely accused of having used AI, right? These writers, by their nature, like, these are independent writers, like, these are bloggers. These are not people who are at risk of losing their jobs because they used AI. I think, you know, the worst-case scenario here is they have to write a Substack post where they're like, hey, I know that this essay kept getting tagged as AI, but it wasn't, you know?

• 1:01:51Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I also think that savvy writers will find ways around this. I've actually heard of people running sort of like an anti-Pangram, like, sort of loop where they tell an LLM, like, write this essay and then run it through Pangram, and if it keeps coming up as AI-detected, write it again and keep doing that until it doesn't come up as AI-detected anymore. So there's sort of a cat and mouse game going on here.

• 1:02:15Casey Newton?

  Whenever you do something that just takes way more time than actually writing it yourself, I get very delighted by that. So that seems like a really smart tactic. You know, other people, though, are saying, Kevin, in addition to the people who are worried about the witch hunt, that there was a writer named Mac Collier who wrote, quote, "I'm not going to apologize for using AI in the creation process. I wrote for 20 years without AI. I could do it again if I wanted to." But basically, he said, look, like, the only thing that AI is doing for me is making my writing better, and why would you not want it to do that? And I think the answer to that is, hey, buddy, go nuts with the AI, but like, at least for this moment, we want to know, and we want to see the scan.

• 1:02:56Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I have mixed feelings about this because I feel similarly to Mac in the sense that, like, I feel a lot of pressure not to use AI in my writing. And I do not use AI in my writing, to be clear. To write the words on the page or the words in the column, I do not use AI. But I feel there is a lot of pressure, social and otherwise, for writers not to use AI at all during any part of their process.

• 1:03:19Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20Kevin Roose?

  And I actually feel like journalists and other writers should use the best tools that are available to them. And for some writers, like, maybe people who are not, you know, for whom English is not a first language, people who are just starting out, like, I think this could be excusable to use AI as a more active part of your writing process. But I do think, like, writers have an obligation, for now, to disclose this.

• 1:03:41Casey Newton?

  Yeah, well, I think one reason why this is all really interesting, Kevin, is trying to understand why Substack felt like they needed to do this, right? And I think the reason is that they must believe that if Substack becomes seen as primarily a destination for slop, it will lower the value of the network, right? Like, Substack makes its money when people go and buy subscriptions, and I think they have rightly intuited, people do not want to pay subscriptions to slop. They want to pay subscriptions for human writing. So I'm curious, do you think that is the right bet?

• 1:04:21Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I think this is a fair bet for them to make. I think what people are paying for when they pay for a Substack is sort of like direct access to a person's brain. And if what you are getting instead is something that's mostly the output of an LLM, I think people will feel like they're getting a raw deal, like, there's some deception going on. And, you know, this is a, this is an area where I think the norms are going to evolve because pretty soon, it will, like, AI will be integrated in every word processor and content management system, and it will just be kind of unfathomable to, like, do this the old way. But for now, I think there are still enough purists who want 0% AI-generated text in their Substack newsletters that I think this is a good bet for them right now.

• 1:05:06Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I think honestly, there are all sorts of reasons why they might want to do this. I mean, one thing about Substack is that anyone can use it for free, right? And like, even if you have 100,000 free subscribers, they will send an email to 100,000 people for free. That's costing them a lot of money. And so I can imagine, they're probably, like, staring down the barrel of a future where, like, everyone in every profession is like, I'm going to start a newsletter, I'm going to have a chatbot write it, a chatbot respond to all of my comments, and all of a sudden, that's going to become an enormous expense for them. And so they need to find a way to discourage people from doing that sort of thing.

• 1:05:39Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I mean, I'll be very curious to see how many people actually use the AI detection tool, because right now, like, the way it's designed, you have to go out and, like, select this tool. It does not automatically, like, overlay a thing on the post that says, this was generated by AI. And my sense is, like, you know, there are a lot of people out there who probably don't care, frankly. If, if they can't tell that something was generated by AI, what they're reacting to is just, how good is this thing that I'm reading? It's not like, like, we've seen all these slop threads go viral on X and other social networks. LinkedIn now is just people posting AI stuff. And my impression is not that it has made LinkedIn a less popular platform. It probably is just, people are just judging it based on the quality of what they're reading.

• 1:06:24Casey Newton?

  Well, it's not less popular, but keep in mind, LinkedIn is free to use for the most part, right? Like, LinkedIn isn't making you pay to read those posts, thank God. But Substack is, and so I just think it's different. I will say, when this news was announced, I heard a terrible scream come out of Sandhill Road down in Silicon Valley as every venture capitalist realized that they could no longer outsource their incessant thought leadership posts about the economy to clod anymore, Kevin.

• 1:06:51Kevin Roose?

  Well, they've been employing human ghostwriters for years to write their tweets and blog posts, so.

• 1:06:55Casey Newton?

  And they should do it again.

• 1:06:56Kevin Roose?

  So we need to, you need to keep those jobs afloat.

• 1:06:59Casey Newton?

  Now, another interesting dimension of this, and of course, this was particularly delicious to me, Kevin, as somebody who dramatically left Substack a few years back because of the Nazis that were on the platform that the company declined to remove. In this one moment, Substack has told us that, on some level, they find AI-generated writing more offensive than Nazi content.

• 1:07:20Kevin Roose?

  Yes, I think that is one very ungenerous way of interpreting this. I think it is also like a threat to their business in a way that maybe Nazi content is not.

• 1:07:29Casey Newton?

  Yeah, it turns out, no one actually cares if there's Nazis on your platform.

• 1:07:33Kevin Roose?

  Well, just you.

• 1:07:33Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:34Kevin Roose?

  It's, it's basically you, you, you and like, three other people.

• 1:07:37Casey Newton?

  That's right.

• 1:07:37Kevin Roose?

  And, and that's it. But a lot of people do care if their feeds are full of slop.

• 1:07:41Casey Newton?

  Here's what people don't realize here in 2026. Nazis used to be very controversial. I would even go so far as to say they were a sort of hated group. But things have changed a lot, and now what we hate is AI.

• 1:07:54Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:55Casey Newton?

  One more point that I would just make about all of this, and I think this is instructive to everyone on Substack, even if you support this change. This was a really great reminder, I think, and wake-up call, that Substack is a platform, and Substack is going to do the things that are best for Substack. And so if you like this particular change, great. But if you don't like it, well, guess what? You're on a platform. The terms can change on you at any time, and they may not be in your favor.

• 1:08:22Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:22Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:23Kevin Roose?

  Have you checked any of the Substacks that you subscribe to using this new AI detection feature?

• 1:08:27Casey Newton?

  You know what? I haven't yet. I'm waiting for the next time, like, a VC blog post starts making the rounds to see if I can bust them.

• 1:08:36Kevin Roose?

  Let's try it now.

• 1:08:36Casey Newton?

  Should we try one now?

• 1:08:37Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, what should we, what should we check?

• 1:08:39Casey Newton?

  I went to a blog about AI agents on Substack, which I just assumed, you know, was probably generated by AI, and they've disabled the AI detection. So that's an important thing to point out. As a writer, you can disable AI detection on your blog, but at that point, you might as well just put a big red banner at the top of your website that reads slop.

• 1:09:01Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:01Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:02Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. In conclusion, I hope that landed well with you.

• 1:09:07Casey Newton?

  It landed cleanly.

• 1:09:08Kevin Roose?

  That was a load-bearing.

• 1:09:10Casey Newton?

  Load-bearing insights.

• 1:09:11Kevin Roose?

  Load-bearing insights here on The Hard Fork Show.

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• 1:11:24Casey Newton?

  Hard Fork is produced by Whitney Jones and Rachel Coon. We're edited by Veeran Povidge. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Katie McMurran. Original music by Rowan Nemisto, Alyssa Moxley, Chris Wood, and Dan Powell. Video production by Jake Nickel and Chris Schott. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube at youtube.com/hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schuman, Wee Wing Tam, Brooke Minterz, and Dahlia Hadad. You can email us at [email protected] with your open letter.