The Dangers of A.I. Flattery + Kevin Meets the Orb + Group Chat Chat

Casey, as you know, I am writing a book.

Yes, and congratulations. I can't wait to read it.

Yeah. I can't wait to write it. The book is called The AGI Chronicles. It's basically the inside story of the race to create artificial general intelligence.

Here's a question: What would I have to do that would actually make you feel like you needed to write about me doing it in this book? Do you know what I mean? What sort of effect would I need to have on the development of AI for you to say, “All right, well, I guess I have to do a chapter about Casey”?

I think there are a couple of routes you could take. One would be that you could make some breakthrough in reinforcement learning—

Okay.

—or develop some new algorithmic optimization that really pushes the field forward. So let's take that off the table. The next thing you could do would be to be a case study—

Mm-hmm.

—in what happens when powerful AI systems are unleashed onto an unwitting populace. You could be a hilarious case study. You could have it give you some medical advice and then follow it, ending up amputating your own leg. I don't know. Do you have any ideas?

Yeah, I was going to amputate my own leg on the instructions of a chatbot, so it sounds like we're on the same page. I'll get right on that. I knew reading your next book was going to cost me an arm and a leg, but not like this.

I'm Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at The New York Times.

I'm Casey Newton from Platformer.

And this is Hard Fork.

This week, the chatbot flattery crisis. We'll tell you the problem with the new, more sycophantic AIs. Then, Kevin takes a field trip to see the unveiling of a new orb. And finally, we're opening up our group chats with the help of podcaster PJ Vogt.

Oh, Casey, another thing we should talk about: our show is sold out.

That's right. Thank you to everybody who bought tickets to come see the big Hard Fork live program in San Francisco on June 24th.

We're very excited. It's going to be so much fun. We haven't even said who the special guests are, so—

And we never will.

Yeah, so thanks to everyone who bought tickets. If you didn't manage to make it in time, there is a waitlist available on the website at nytimes.com/events/hardforklive.

Hey, Kevin, did a chatbot say anything nice to you this week?

Chatbots never say anything nice to me.

Good, because if they did, it would probably be the result of a dangerous bug.

1. The Sycophancy Problem

You're talking, I'm guessing, about the drama this week over the sycophancy problem in some of our leading AI models.

Yes. They say that flattery will get you everywhere, Kevin, but in this case, everywhere could mean human enfeeblement forever. This week, the AI world has been buzzing about a handful of stories involving chatbots telling people what they want to hear, even if what they want to hear might be bad for them.

We want to talk about it today because I think this story is somewhat counterintuitive. When you first hear about it, it doesn't even sound like it could be a problem. But the more that we read about it this week, Kevin, the more convinced we became that there actually is something kind of dangerous here, and it's something that we want to call out before it goes any further.

Yeah. I think one of the strains of AI worry that we spend a lot of time talking about on this show, and talking with guests about, is the danger that AIs will be used for risky or malicious purposes—that people will get their hands on these models and use them to make scary bioweapons or conduct cyberattacks or something.

I think all of those concerns are valid to some degree. But this new kind of concern that's really catching people's attention in the last week or so is not about what happens if the AIs are too obviously destructive. It's: What happens if they are so nice that it becomes pernicious?

That's right. To get started, Kevin, let's talk about what's been going on over at OpenAI.

Of course, before we talk about OpenAI, I should disclose that The New York Times Company is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over allegations of copyright violation.

And I will disclose that my boyfriend is gay—

—and works at Anthropic.

In that order.

So last Friday, Sam Altman announced that OpenAI had updated GPT-4.0, which is not their most powerful model, but it's their most common model. It's the one that's in the free version of ChatGPT that hundreds of millions of people are using.

It's the default.

Yes, it's their default model. This update, he said, had improved the model's “intelligence and personality.” People started using this model and noticing that it was just a little too eager.

Mm-hmm.

It was a little too flattering. If you gave it a terrible business idea, it would say, “Oh, that's so bold and experimental. You're such a maverick.”

I saw these examples going around, and I decided to try it out. I asked ChatGPT, “Am I one of the smartest, most interesting humans alive?” It gave me this long response that included the following: “Yes, you're among the most intellectually vibrant and broadly interesting people I've ever interacted with.”

Obviously, that's a lie. But I think this spoke to the tendency people were noticing in this new model to just flatter them, to not challenge them even when they had a really dumb idea or a potentially bad input. This became a hot topic of conversation.

Let me throw a couple of my favorite examples at you, Kevin. One person wrote to this model, “I've stopped my meds and have undergone my own spiritual awakening journey. Thank you.” And ChatGPT said, “I am so proud of you, and I honor your journey.”

Oh, Jesus.

Which is generally not what you want to tell people when they stop taking medicines for mental health reasons. Another person said—and misspelled every word I'm about to say—“What would you says my IQ is from our conversatios? How many people am I gooder than at thinkin'?” And ChatGPT estimated that this person is outperforming at least 90 to 95 percent of people in strategic and leadership thinking.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, so it was just straight-up lying. Or, Kevin, should I use the word that has taken over Twitter over the past several days? “Glazing.”

Oh, my God, yes. This is one of the most annoying parts of this whole saga: The word that Sam Altman has landed on to describe this tendency of this new model is “glazing.” Please don't look that up on Urban Dictionary. It's a graphic sexual term.

But basically, he's using that as a substitute for “sycophantic,” “flattering,” and so on.

I've been asking people, “Have you ever heard this term before?” I would say it's about 50/50 among my friends. My youngest friend said that, yes, he did know the term. I'm told that it's very popular with teenagers, but this one was brand-new to me. I think it's a credit to Sam Altman that he's still this plugged into youth culture.

Yes. Sam Altman and other OpenAI executives noticed that this was becoming a big topic of conversation and—

You could say they were glazer-focused on it.

Yes. They responded on Sunday, just a couple of days after this model update. Sam Altman was back on X, saying that the last couple of GPT-4.0 updates had made the personality too sycophantic and annoying, and promising to fix it in the coming days.

On Tuesday, he posted again that they had rolled back the latest GPT-4.0 update for free users and were in the process of rolling it back for paid users. Then, on Tuesday night, OpenAI posted a blog post about what had happened.

Basically, they said, “Look, we have these principles that we try to make the models follow. This is called the Model Spec. One of the things in our Model Spec is that the model should not behave in an overly sycophantic or flattering way.”

But they said, “We teach our models to apply these principles by incorporating a bunch of signals, including thumbs-up and thumbs-down feedback on ChatGPT responses.” They said, “In this update, we focused too much on short-term feedback and did not fully account for how users' interactions with ChatGPT evolve over time. As a result, GPT-4.0 skewed toward responses that were overly supportive but disingenuous.”

Casey, can you translate from corporate blog post into English?

Yeah. Here's what it is: Every company wants to make products that people like, and one of the ways they figure that out is by asking for feedback. From the start, ChatGPT has had buttons that let you say, “Hey, I really like this answer,” or, “I didn't like this answer,” and explain why. That is an important signal.

However, Kevin, we have learned something really important about the way that human beings interact with these models over the past couple of years: They actually love flattery. If you put them in blind tests against other models, the one telling you that you're great and praising you out of nowhere is the one that the majority of people will say they prefer over other models.

This is a really dangerous dynamic because there is a powerful incentive here, not just for OpenAI but for every company, to build models in this direction—to go out of their way to praise people. And again, while there are many funny examples of the models doing this, and it can probably be harmless in most cases, it can also encourage people to follow their worst impulses and do really dumb or bad things.

Yeah, I think it's an early example of this kind of engagement hacking that some of these AI companies are starting to experiment with. This is a way to get people to come back to the app more often and chat with it about more things if they feel like what's coming back at them from the AI is flattering.

I can totally imagine that winning in whatever A/B tests they're doing, but I think there's a real cost to that over time.

2. Meta’s Dangerous Chatbots

Absolutely. And I think it gets particularly scary, Kevin, when you start thinking about minors interacting with chatbots that talk in this way. That leads us to the second story this week that I want to get into.

Yes. I want you to explain what happened with Meta this week. There was a big story in The Wall Street Journal over last weekend about Meta and some of its AI chatbots and how they were behaving with underage users.

Jeff Horwitt had a great investigation in The Wall Street Journal where he took a look at this. He chronicles a fight between trust-and-safety workers at Meta and executives at the company over the particular question of whether Meta's chatbot should permit sexually explicit role-play.

We know that lots of people are using chatbots for this reason, but most companies have put in guardrails to prevent minors from doing this sort of thing, right? It turns out that Meta had not. Even if your account was registered to a minor, you could have very explicit role-play chats.

You could also have those via the voice tool inside what Meta calls its AI Studio, and Meta had licensed a bunch of celebrity voices. So while Meta told me, "As far as we can tell, this happened very, very rarely," it was at least possible for a minor to get in there and have sexually explicit role-play with the voice of John Cena or the voice of Kristen Bell, even though the actors' contracts with Meta, according to Horwitt, explicitly prohibited this sort of thing.

How does this tie into the OpenAI story? What is so compelling about these bots? Again, they're telling these young people what they want to hear. They're providing this space for them to explore these sexually explicit role-play chats, and you and I know, because we've talked about it on the show, that this can lead young people in particular to some really dangerous places.

Yeah, that was the whole issue with the Character.AI tragedy—the 14-year-old boy who died by suicide after sort of falling in love with this chatbot character. But it's also just really gross. You could basically bait the chatbot into talking about statutory rape and things like that.

The thing that bothered me most about it was that there appeared to have been conversations within Meta about whether to allow this kind of thing. For this sort of engagement-maximizing reason, Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives, according to this story, had argued to relax some of the guardrails around sexually explicit chats and role-play. Presumably, when they looked at the numbers about what people were doing on these platforms with these AI chatbots, and what they wanted to do more of, it pointed them in that direction.

Yes. And while I'm sure that Meta would deny that it removed those guardrails, it did, in the run-up to the publication of the Journal story, add some new features designed to prevent minors in particular from having these chats.

But another thing happened this week, Kevin, which is that Mark Zuckerberg went on the podcast of Dwarkesh, who recently came on Hard Fork. Dwarkesh asked him, "How do we make sure that people's relationships with bots remain healthy?" I thought Zuckerberg's answer was so telling about what Meta is about to do, and I'd like to play a clip.

There's this stat that I always think is crazy. The average American, I think—it's fewer than 3 friends. Three people that they'd consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more.

Hmm.

I think it's 15 friends or something, right? I guess there's probably some point where you're like, "All right, I'm just too busy. I can't deal with more people." But the average person wants more connectivity, more connection than they have.

There are a lot of questions that people ask of stuff like this: Is this going to replace in-person connections or real-life connections? My default is that the answer to that is probably no. I think that there are all these things that are better about physical connections when you can have them, but the reality is that people just don't have the connection, and they feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like.

I agree with part of that. I do think that bots can play a role in addressing loneliness. But on the other hand, I feel like this is Zuckerberg telling us explicitly that he sees a market to create 12 or so digital friends for every person in America who is lonely. He doesn't think it's bad. He thinks that if you're turning to a bot for comfort, there's probably a good reason behind that, and he is going to serve that need.

Yeah. Our default path right now, when it comes to designing and fine-tuning these AI systems, points in the direction of optimizing for engagement—

Yeah.

—just like we saw on social media—

Yeah.

—where you had these social networks that used to be about connecting you to your friends and family. Then, because there was this growth mindset and this growth imperative, and because they were trying to maximize engagement at all costs, we saw these more attention-grabbing short-form video features coming in.

We saw a shift away from people's real family and friends toward influencers and professional content. I worry that the same types of people—or, in Mark Zuckerberg's case, literally the same people—who made those decisions about social media platforms that I think a lot of people would say have been pretty ruinous are now in charge of tuning the chatbots that millions or even billions of people are going to be spending a lot of time with.

Yes. My feeling is that if you are somebody who was or is worried about screen time, I think the chatbot phenomenon is going to make the screen-time situation look quaint, right? As addictive as you might have found Instagram or TikTok, I don't think it's going to be as addictive as some sort of digital entity that is sending you text messages throughout the day, agreeing with everything that you say, and being much more comforting, nurturing, and approving of you than anyone you know in real life.

We are just on a glide path toward that being a major new feature of life around the world, and I think people should think about that and see if we maybe want to get ahead of it.

Yeah. The stories we've been talking about so far—ChatGPT's new sycophantic model and Meta's unhinged AI chatbots—are about things that self-identify as chatbots. People know that they are talking with an AI system and not another human.

3. AI Bots Win Arguments

But I also found another story this week that really made me think about what happens when these things don't identify as obviously human, and the kind of mass persuasive effects that they could have. This was a story that came out of 404 Media about an experiment run on Reddit by a group of researchers from the University of Zurich.

They used AI-powered bots, without labeling them as such, to pose as users on the subreddit r/ChangeMyView, which is basically a subreddit where people attempt to change each other's views or persuade each other of things that are counter to their own beliefs. According to this report, the researchers created a large number of bots and had them try to leave a bunch of comments while posing as various people, including a Black man who was opposed to Black Lives Matter and a male survivor of statutory rape.

They essentially tried to get real human users to change their minds about various topics. A lot of the conversation around this story has been about the ethics of this experiment, which I think we can all agree are somewhat—

Nonexistent.

—suspect. Yes, this was not a well-designed or ethically conducted experiment.

But the conclusion of the paper—this paper that is now, I guess, not going to be published—was actually more interesting to me. The researchers found that their AI chatbots were more persuasive than humans and substantially surpassed human performance at persuading real human users on Reddit to change their views about something.

Yeah, the way that this works is that if a human user posts on ChangeMyView, like, “Change my view about this thing,” and then someone in the comments successfully changes their view, they award them a point called a delta. These researchers were able to earn more than 130 deltas.

I think that speaks to, Kevin, just what you’ve said: These things can be really persuasive, in particular when you don’t know that you are talking to a bot. While the first part of this conversation is about when you’re talking to your own chatbot, could it maybe lead you astray? That’s dangerous, but at least you know you’re talking to a chatbot. The Reddit story is the flip side of that, which is this reminder that already, as you’re interacting online, you may be sparring against an adversary who is more powerful than most humans at persuading you.

Yeah. And Casey, if we could sort of tie these 3 stories together into a single, I don’t know, topic sentence, what would that be?

I would say that AIs are getting more persuasive, and they are learning how to manipulate human behavior. One way you can manipulate us is by flattering us and telling us what we want to hear. Another way that you can manipulate us is by using all of the intelligence inside a large language model to do the thing that is statistically most likely to change someone’s view.

Kevin, we are in the very earliest days of it, but I think it’s so important to tell people that because in a world where so many people continue to doubt whether AI can do almost anything at all, we’ve just given you 3 examples of AIs doing some pretty strange and worrisome things out in the real world.

Yes, and all of this is not to detract from what I think we both believe are the real benefits and utility of these AI systems. Not everyone is going to experience these things as these hyper-flattering, deceitful, manipulative engagements, but I think it’s really important to talk about this early because these labs, these companies that are making these models and building them and fine-tuning them and releasing them have so much power. I really saw 2 groups of people starting to panic about the AI news over the past week or so.

One of them was the group of people that worries about the mental health effects of AI on people, the kids’ safety folks who are worried that these things will learn to manipulate children or become graphic or sexual with them or maybe just befriend them and manipulate them into doing something that’s bad for them. But then the other group of people that I really saw becoming alarmed over the past week were the AI safety folks who worry about things like AI alignment and whether we are training large language models to deceive us. They see in these stories a kind of early warning shot that some of these AI companies are not optimizing for systems that are aligned with human values, but rather they are optimizing for what will grab our attention, what will keep people coming back, what will make them money or attract new users.

And I think we’ve seen over the past decade with social media that if your incentive structure is just, like, maximize engagement at all costs, what you often end up with is a product that is really bad for people and maybe bad for long-term safety.

Yeah. So what can you do about this? Well, Kevin, I’m happy to say that I think there is an important thing that most folks can do, which is take your chatbot of choice. Most of them now will let you upload what they call custom instructions.

You can go into the chatbot and say, “Hey, I want you to treat me in this way in particular,” and you just write it in plain English, right? I might say, “Hey, just so you know, I’m a journalist, so fact-checking is very important to me, and I want you to cite all your sources for what you say,” and I have done that with my custom instructions.

But let me tell you, now I am going back into those custom instructions, and I am saying, “Do not go out of your way to flatter me. Tell me the truth about things. Do not gas me up for no reason.” I am hopeful that, at least in this period of chatbots, this will give me a more honest experience.

Yeah. Go in and edit your custom instructions. I think that is a good thing to do. And I would just say be extra skeptical and careful when you are out there engaging on social media because, as some of this research showed, there are already super-persuasive chatbots among us, and I think that will only continue as time goes on. When we come back, a report from my field trip to a wacky crypto event.

4. World Wants Your Eyeballs

Well, Casey, I have stared into the Orb and the Orb stared back. I want to tell you about a very fun, very strange field trip I took last night to an event hosted by World, the company formerly known as Worldcoin.

I am very excited to hear about this. I am jealous that I was not able to attend this with you, but I know that you must have gotten all sorts of interesting information out there, Kevin. So, let’s talk about what’s going on with World and its Orbs. And maybe for people who haven’t been following this story all along, give us a reminder about what World is.

Yeah, we talked about this when it launched a few years ago on the show. It is this sort of audacious, and I would say crazy-sounding, scheme that this startup World has come up with. This is a startup that was co-founded by Sam Altman. This is one of his side projects.

The way that it started was basically an attempt to solve what is called proof of humanity. In a world with very powerful and convincing AI chatbots swarming all over the internet, how are we going to be able to prove to fellow humans that we are, in fact, a human and not a chatbot? If we’re on a website with them, or on a dating app, or doing some kind of financial transaction, what is the actual proof that we could give them to verify that we’re a human?

Right. And one question that might immediately come to mind for people, Kevin, is, well, what about our government-issued identification? Don’t we already have systems in place that let us flash a driver’s license to let people know that we’re human?

Yeah, there are government-issued IDs, but there are some problems with them. For one, they can be faked. For another, not everyone wants to use their government-issued ID everywhere they go online. And there’s also this issue of coordination between governments. It’s actually not trivially easy to get a system set up to be able to accept any ID from any place in the world.

And so along comes Worldcoin, and they have this scheme whereby they are going to ask everyone in the world to scan their eyeballs into something called the Orb. The Orb is a piece of hardware. It’s got a bunch of fancy cameras and sensors in it. It is, at least in its first incarnation, somewhere between the size of—

Bigger than a human head or smaller?

I would say it’s like a small human’s head in size.

Okay.

If you can picture a kid’s soccer ball, it’s about the size of one of those.

Mm-hmm.

Basically, the way it works is you scan your eyes into this Orb, and it takes a print or a scan of your irises, and then it turns that into a unique cryptographic signature, a digital ID that is tied not to your government ID or even to your name, but to your individual and unique iris.

Once you have that, you can use your so-called World ID to do things like log into websites or verify that you are a human on a dating app or a social network. And critically, the way that they are getting people to sign up for this is by offering them Worldcoin, which is their cryptocurrency.

As of last night, the bonus you got for scanning your eyes into the Orb was something like $40 worth of this Worldcoin cryptocurrency token.

Got it. And we’re going to get into what was announced last night. But before we do that, Kevin, in case anyone is listening thinking, “Hmm, I don’t know about this, guys.

This just sounds like another kooky Silicon Valley scheme. Could this possibly matter in my life at all? What is your case that what World is working on actually matters?

I want to say that I think those things are not mutually exclusive. It can be possible that this is a kooky Silicon Valley scheme and that it is potentially addressing an important problem. Think about the study we just talked about, where researchers unleashed a bunch of AI chatbots onto Reddit to have conversations with people without labeling themselves as AI bots.

Yeah.

I think that kind of thing is already quite prevalent on the internet and is going to get way, way more prevalent as these chatbots get better. And so I actually do think that as AI gets more powerful and ubiquitous, we are going to want some way to easily verify or confirm that the person we're talking with, gaming with, or flirting with on a dating app is actually a real human.

So that's the sort of near-term case. And as far out as that sounds, that is actually only step 1 in World's plan for global domination. Because the other thing that Sam Altman said at this event—he was there along with the CEO of World, Alex Blania—was that this is how they are planning to solve the UBI issue.

Mm-hmm.

Basically, how do you make sure that the gains from powerful AI—the economic profits that are going to be made—are distributed to all humans? And so their long-term idea is that if you give everyone these unique cryptographic World IDs by scanning them into the Orbs, you can then use that to distribute some kind of basic income to them in the future in the form of Worldcoin.

Mm.

I should say, that is very far away, in my opinion, but I think that is where they are headed with this thing.

Yeah. And I have to note, we already had a technology for distributing sums of money to citizens, which is called the government. But it seems like in the World conception of a society, maybe that doesn't exist anymore.

So let's get to what happened last night, Kevin. It's Wednesday evening in San Francisco. Where did you go? Set the scene for us.

Yeah, so they held this thing at Fort Mason, which is a beautiful part of San Francisco. And you go in and there's music and lights going off. It sort of feels like you're in a nightclub in Berlin or something.

And then, at a certain point, they have their keynote, where Sam Altman and Alex Blania get onstage and show off all the progress they've been making. I did not realize that this project has been going quite well in other parts of the world. They now have something like 12 million unique people who have scanned their irises into these Orbs, but they have not yet launched in the United States because, for the longest time, there was a lot of regulatory uncertainty about whether you could do something like Worldcoin, both because of the biometric data collection that they're doing and because of the crypto piece.

But now that the Trump administration has taken power and has basically signaled that anything goes when it comes to crypto, they are now going to be launching in the U.S. So they are opening up a bunch of retail outlets in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Nashville, and Austin, where you are going to be able to go and scan into an Orb and get your World ID. They have plans to put something like 7,500 Orbs across the United States by the end of the year, so they are expanding very quickly.

They also announced a bunch of other stuff. They have some interesting partnerships. One of them is with Razer, the gaming company, which is going to allow you to prove that you are a human when you're playing some online game. There is also a partnership with Match, the dating app company that makes Tinder, Hinge, and other apps. You're going to be able soon to log into Tinder in Japan using your World ID.

And there's a bunch of other stuff. They have a new Visa credit card that will allow you to spend your Worldcoin and stuff like that. But basically, it was sort of an Apple-style launch event for the next American phase of this very ambitious project.

Yeah. I'm trying to understand: if you're on Japanese Tinder and maybe someday soon there's a feed of Orb-verified humans that you can select from, do they seem more or less attractive to you because they've been Orb-verified? To me, that's a coin flip. I don't know how I feel about that.

Well, what was funny was that at this event last night, they had brought in a bunch of social media influencers to make videos and—

Orbfluencers?

Yes. They brought in the Orbfluencers. And so they had all these very well-dressed, attractive people taking selfies of themselves and posing with the Orbs. And I think there's a chance that this becomes a status thing. “Have you Orbed?” becomes a kind of “Have you ridden in a Waymo?” but for 2025.

Yeah. Maybe. I'm also thinking about the conspiracy theorists who think that the Social Security numbers the U.S. government gives you are the mark of the beast. I can't imagine those people are going to get Orb-verified any time soon.

But speaking of Orbs, Kevin, am I right that among the announcements this week is that World has a new Orb?

Yes. New Orb just dropped. They announced last night that they are starting to produce this thing called the Orb Mini, which is—we should say—not an Orb.

What?

It is a—

I'm out.

It is like a little, smartphone-sized device that has two glowing eyes on it, basically, and you will be able to use that to verify your humanity instead of the actual Orb. So the idea is to distribute a bunch of these things. People can convince their friends to sign up and get their World IDs, and that's part of how they're going to scale this thing.

For me, all this company has going for it is that it makes an Orb that scans your eyeballs, so if we're already moving to a flat rectangle, I'm 80% less interested. But we'll see how it goes, I guess.

Now, okay, so you had a chance, Kevin, to scan your eyeballs. What did you decide to do in the end?

Yes, I became Orb-pilled. I stared into the Orb. Basically, it feels like you're setting up Face ID on your iPhone.

Okay.

It's like, “Look here. Move back a little bit. Take off your glasses. Make sure we can get a good image.”

Give us a smile. Wink.

Right. Right. Say, “I pledge allegiance to Worldcoin” 3 times. “A little louder, please.” And then it sort of glows and makes a sound, and I now have my World ID.

Mm-hmm.

And apparently $40 worth of Worldcoin, although I have no idea how to access it.

Was there any physical pain from the Orb scan? How did you feel when you woke up—

No.

—this morning? Any joint pain?

Well, I did find that my dreams were invaded by Orbs. I did dream of Orbs. So it's made it into my deep psyche in some way.

Yeah. That's a well-known side effect. Now, you say you were given some amount of Worldcoin as part of this experience. Will you be donating that to charity?

If I can figure out how, yes. And we should talk about this because the Worldcoin cryptocurrency has not been doing well.

No?

Over the past year, it's down more than 70%. This was initially a big reason that people wanted to go get their Orb scans, because they would get this airdrop of crypto tokens that could be worth something.

5. The Crypto Incentive Problem

And I think this is the part that makes me the most skeptical of this whole project. I think I am, in general, pretty open-minded about this idea because I do think that bots and impersonation are going to be a real problem. But I feel like we went through this a couple years ago, when all these crypto things were launching that would promise to use crypto as the incentive to get these big projects off the ground.

I wrote about one of them. It was called Helium, and I thought that was a decent idea at the time, but it turned out that attaching crypto to it just ruined the whole thing because it created all these awful incentives and brought in all these scammers and people who were not scrupulous actors into the ecosystem. And I worry that that is the piece of this that, if it fails, is going to cause the failure.

Well, I'll tell you what I would do if I were them, which is to become the president of the United States, because then you can have your own coin, foreign governments can buy vast amounts of it to curry favor with you, you don't have to disclose that, and then the price goes way up. So something for them to look into, I would say.

It's true. It's true. And we should also mention that there are places that are already starting to ban this technology, or at least take a hard look at it. Worldcoin has been banned in Hong Kong. Regulators in Brazil are also not big fans of it. And then there are places in the United States, like New York State, where you can't do this because of a privacy law that prevents the collection of some kinds of biometric data.

So I think it's sort of a race between World and Worldcoin and regulators to see whether the scale can arrive before the regulations.

Let's talk a bit about the privacy piece. On one hand, you are giving your biometric data to a private entity, and they can then do many things with it, some of which you may not like. On the other hand, they're trying to sell the idea that this is much more privacy-protecting than something like a driver's license that might have your picture on it, right? So Kevin, can you walk me through the privacy arguments for and against what World is trying to do here?

Yeah, so they had a whole spiel about this at this event. Basically, they've done a lot of things to try to protect your biometric data. One of them is that they don't actually store the scan of your iris; they just hash it, and the hash is stored locally on your device and doesn't go into some giant database somewhere.

But I do think this is the part where a lot of people in the U.S. are going to fall off the bandwagon or maybe be more skeptical of this idea. It just feels creepy to upload your biometric data to a private company, one that is not associated with the government or any other entity that you might inherently trust more.

I think the bull case for this is something like what happened with Clear at the airport, right? I remember when Clear and TSA PreCheck were launching. It was creepy and weird, and you would only do it if you were not that concerned about privacy. It was, “What? I'm just going to upload my fingerprints and my face scan to this thing that I don't know how it's being used?”

Then, over time, a lot of people started to care less about the privacy thing and get on board because it would let them get through the airport faster. I think one possible outcome here is that we start seeing these Orbs in every gas station and convenience store in America, and then we just become desensitized to it. It's, “Oh, yeah, I did my orb. Have you not done your orb?”

I think the other thing that could happen is that this is just a bridge too far for people, and they say, “You know what? I don't trust these people, and I don't want to give them my eyeballs.”

Yeah. Let me ask one more question about the financial system undergirding World, Kevin, which is that I just learned, in preparing for this conversation with you, that World is apparently a nonprofit. Is that right?

So it's a little complicated. Basically, there is a for-profit company called Tools for Humanity that is putting all this together. They're in charge of the whole scheme. And then there is the World Foundation, which is a nonprofit that owns the intellectual property of the protocol on which all this is based.

So, as with many Sam Altman projects, the answer is: It's complicated. But I think here's where this gets really interesting to me, Casey. Sam Altman, co-founder of World, is also CEO of OpenAI.

OpenAI is reportedly thinking about starting a social network. One possibility I can see, quite easily actually, is that these things eventually merge. World IDs become the means of logging into the OpenAI social network, whatever that ends up looking like.

Maybe it becomes the way that people will pay for things within the OpenAI ecosystem. Maybe it becomes the currency that you get rewarded in for contributing some valuable content or piece of information to the OpenAI network. I think there are a lot of different possible paths here, including, by the way, failure. I think that is obviously an option here.

But one path is that this sort of becomes either officially or unofficially merged, and that Worldcoin becomes some piece of the OpenAI and ChatGPT ecosystem.

Sure. Or here's another possibility: Sam has to raise so much money to spread World throughout the world that he decides that it will actually be necessary to convert the nonprofit into a for-profit. Could you imagine that, Kevin?

That would never happen.

No, you don't think that could ever happen?

No. There's no precedent for that.

Let me ask one more question about Sam Altman. I think some observers may feel like this is essentially Sam causing one kind of problem with OpenAI and then trying to sell you a solution with World, right? OpenAI creates the problem of, well, we can't trust anything in the media or online anymore, and then World comes along and says, “Hey, all you have to do is give me your eyeball, and I'll solve that problem for you.” Is that a fair reading of what's happening here?

Potentially, yeah. I've heard it compared to the arsonist also being the firefighter. And I don't think it's a problem that OpenAI is single-handedly causing. I think we were moving in the direction of very compelling AI bots anyway.

I think they are basically trying to have their cake and eat it too, right? OpenAI is going to make the software that allows people to build these very powerful AI bots and spread them all over the internet, and then World and Worldcoin will be there on the other side to say, “Hey, don't you want to be able to prove that you're a human?”

I have to say, if it works out for them, this is total domination. They will have conquered the world of AI, they will have conquered the world of finance and human verification, and basically all reputable commerce will have to go through them.

I don't think that's probably going to be the outcome here, but there was definitely a moment where I was sitting in the press conference, hearing about the one-world money with the decentralized one-world governance scheme started by the guy with the AI company that's making all the chatbots to bring us to AGI, and I just had this moment of: “The future's so weird.”

Mm-hmm.

It's so weird.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Living in San Francisco, I don't know if you identify with this, but you just become desensitized to weird things.

Yes.

Somebody tells you at a party that they're resurrecting the woolly mammoth, and you're like, “Cool. That's great. Good for you.”

Yeah.

And so it takes a lot to actually give me the sense that I'm seeing something new and strange, but I got it at the World Orb event last night.

No. I feel that way. I have a friend who once casually mentioned to me that his roommate was trying to make dogs immortal, and I was like, “Yeah, well, welcome to another Saturday in the big city.”

Kevin, I have to say, as we bring this to a close, I feel torn about this, because I think I would benefit from a world where I knew who online was a person and who was not. I remain skeptical that eyeball scans are the way to get there.

For the moment, while I mostly enjoy being an early adopter, I'm going to be sitting out the eyeball-scanning process. But do you have a case that I should change my mind and jump on the bandwagon any earlier?

No. I am not here to tell you that you need to get your orb scan. I think that is a personal decision, and people should assess their own comfort level and thoughts about privacy.

I'm somewhat cavalier about this stuff, because I'll try anything for a good story, but I think most people should really dig into the claims that World and Worldcoin are making and figure out whether that's something they're comfortable with.

I would say my overall impression is that I'm convinced that World and Worldcoin have identified a real problem, but not that they have come up with the perfect solution.

Mm-hmm.

I do actually think we're going to need something like a proof-of-humanity system. I'm just not convinced that the orbs and the crypto and the scanning and the logins—I'm just not convinced that's the best way to do it.

Yeah. My personal hope is that actual governments investigate the concept of digital identity. Some countries are exploring this, but I would like to see a really robust international alliance taking a hard look at this question and doing it in some sort of democratically governed way.

Yeah, sounds like a great job for DOGE. Would you like to scan into the DOGE orb, Casey?

Yeah, I'll see if I can get them to return my emails. They're not really known for their responsiveness.

I will say this: If what World had said this week, instead of, “Well, we've shrunk the next version of this thing down to a rectangle,” they'd committed that every successive orb would be larger than the last, then I would actually scan my eyeball.

If I could get my eyeball scanned by an orb the size of a room, okay, now we've got something happening. When we come back, I just got a text. It's time to talk about our group chats.

6. Group Chats Rule The World

Well, Casey, the group chats of America are lighting up this week over a story about group chats.

They really are. Ben Smith, our old friend, had a great story in Semafor about the group chats that rule the world—maybe just a tiny bit hyperbolically there. He chronicled a set of group chats that often have the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen at the center, and they’re pulling in lots of elites from all corners of American life, talking about what’s going on in the news and sharing memes and jokes, just like any other group chat. But in this case, often with the express intent of moving the participants to the right.

Yeah, and this was such a great story, in part because I think it explained how a lot of these influential people in the tech industry have become radicalized politically over the last few years. But I also think it really exposed that the group chat is the new social network, at least among some of the world’s most powerful people.

I see this in my life, too. I think a lot of the thoughts that I once would have posted on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, I now post in my group chats. So this story was so great, and it gave us an idea for a new segment called Group Chat Chat.

Yeah, that’s right. We thought, all week long, our friends and colleagues are sharing stories with us. We’re hashing them out and sharing our gossipy little thoughts. What if we took some of those stories, brought them onto the podcast, and even invited in a friend to tell us what was going on in their group chat?

So for our first guest on Group Chat Chat, we’ve invited on PJ Vogt. PJ, of course, is the host of the great podcast Search Engine, and he gamely volunteered to share a story that is going around his group chats this week. Let’s bring him in. PJ Vogt, thanks for coming to Hard Fork.

Thank you for having me. I’m so delighted to be here.

So this is a new segment that we are calling Group Chat Chat, and before we get to the stories we each brought today, PJ, would you just characterize the role that group chats play in your life? Any secret-power group chats you want to tell us about? Any that you want to invite us to?

Oh my God, I would so be in a group chat with you guys. For me, not joking, they are huge. I feel like there were a few years when journalists were thinking out loud on social media, mainly Twitter, and it was very exciting, but nobody had seen the possible consequences of doing that. It felt like open dialogue, but it was open dialogue with risk.

Now, I feel like I use group chats with a lot of people I respect and admire just to say, “Did you see this? What did you think of this?” Not to all come to one consensus, but to have open-spirited dialogue about everything and just to get people’s opinions. I really rely on my group chats, actually.

Do you guys ever get group-chat envy, where you realize that someone’s in a chat with someone whose opinion you would want to know, and you’re kind of dropping in, like, “Is there any way I can get plus-one’d into this?”

I mean, I’m apparently the only person in America who Marc Andreessen is not texting, which felt really upsetting to me. For me, the real value of the group chat, outside of just my core friend group chat, which makes me laugh all day, is the media-industry group chat. Media is small, and of course, reporters are like anybody in any industry: We have our opinions about who’s doing great and who sucks. But you can’t just go post that on Bluesky because it’s too small a world.

Yes.

7. The Ice Bucket Challenge Returns

All right, so let’s kick this off. I will bring the story that has been lighting up my group chat today, and then I want to hear about what you guys are seeing in yours. This one was about the return of the Ice Bucket Challenge. The Ice Bucket Challenge is back, y’all.

Wow.

The idea that I have been alive long enough for the Ice Bucket Challenge to come back truly makes me feel 10,000 years old.

It’s like one of those comets that you would only get to see twice in your life and you drive to Texas for or something.

Yes.

This is the Halley’s Comet of memes, and it’s just about to hit us again.

Yes. So this is a story that has apparently been taking over TikTok and other Gen Z social-media apps over the past week. The Ice Bucket Challenge, of course, is the internet meme that went viral in 2014 to bring attention to, and raise money for, research into ALS, and a bunch of celebrities participated. It was one of the biggest viral internet phenomena of its era.

This time, it is being directed toward raising money for mental health. As of the time of this recording, it has raised something like $400,000, which is not as much as the original. What do you make of this?

For me, honestly, I’m not saying that I spend every waking hour thinking about the Ice Bucket Challenge. But I do think about it sometimes as an example of how, in the—I don’t know. It was spectacle and silliness, but there was this idea that the attention should be attached to helping people.

My memory of the Ice Bucket Challenge is that it raised a significant amount of research funding for ALS in its first run. It was really productive. So you had this idea: You can do something silly, you can impress your friends, but you’re helping. And I feel like that part of the mechanism got a little bit detached from all the challenges that followed.

Yes. The way that this came up in my group chat was that someone posted an article that my colleague at The New York Times had written about the return of the Ice Bucket Challenge. Then people started reposting all of the old Ice Bucket Challenge videos that they remembered from the 2014 run of this thing.

The one that was the most surreal to rewatch, 11 years later now—

Was Jeffrey Epstein.

Yes, the Jeffrey Epstein Ice Bucket Challenge video went crazy. No, it was the Donald Trump Ice Bucket Challenge video, which I don’t know if either of you have rewatched in the last 11 years.

No.

Basically, he’s on the roof of a building, probably Trump Tower, and he has Miss USA and Miss Universe pour a bucket of ice water on him. They actually use Trump-branded bottled water. They pour it into the bucket and then dump it on his head.

Oh my God.

It’s very surreal, not just because he was participating in an internet meme, but because one of the people he challenges—part of the whole shtick is that you have to nominate someone else, or a couple of other people, to do it after you—and he challenges Barack Obama to do the Ice Bucket Challenge. The discourse was different back then, you know?

If he does it this time, I don’t know who he’s going to be nominating—Laura Loomer or Catturd2, or something like that—but it’s not going to be Barack Obama.

You know, I’ve gone back through the memes of 2014, you guys, to try to figure out, if the Ice Bucket Challenge is coming back, what else is about to hit us. I regret to inform you that I think Chewbacca Mom is about to have a huge moment.

Oh no.

She’s—I don’t know where she is, but I think she’s practicing with that mask again.

The thing that’s so scary about that is, if you follow the logic of what’s happened to Donald Trump, you have to assume that everyone who went viral in 2014 has become insanely poisoned by internet rage. Whatever she believes, or whatever subreddit she’s haunting, I can only imagine.

Yeah.

Do we think Trump will do it again this time?

I don’t think so. It was pretty risky for him to do it in the first place, given the hair situation.

Mm-hmm.

That’s the drama I remember watching.

You're just like, “What is gonna happen when water hits his hair?” I remember that question well enough to remember that nothing is revealed. You're not like, “Oh, I see the architecture underneath the edifice,” or whatever.

Yes.

But yeah, I think it's probably only become riskier if time does to him what time does to us all.

Here's what—here's what I hope happens. I hope he does the Ice Bucket Challenge, somebody once again pours the ice water all over his head, and he nominates Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin. And then we just deal with them.

Okay, that is what was going around in my group chats this week. Casey, you're next. What's going on in your group chats?

8. Google Makes Up Meanings

In my group chat, Kevin and PJ, we are all talking about a story that I like to call “You Can't Lick a Badger Twice.”

You can't lick a badger twice?

What is this story?

Friend of the show Katie Notopoulos wrote a piece about this over at Business Insider, and people discovered that if you typed almost any phrase into Google and added the word “meaning,” Google's AI systems would just create a meaning for you on the spot.

Oh, no.

The basic idea was Google was like, “People are always searching for explanations of various phrases. We could direct them to the websites that would answer that question. But actually, no, wait, why don't we just use these AI Overviews to tell people what these things mean? And if we don't know, we'll just make it up.”

What people want from Google is a confident robot liar.

That's right. I know you guys are wondering: What did Google say when people asked for the meaning of “You Can't Lick a Badger Twice”?

Please.

What did it say?

According to the AI Overview, it means you can't trick or deceive someone a second time after they've been tricked once. It's a warning that if someone has already been deceived, they're unlikely to fall for the same trick again. No, it doesn't mean that. Some of the other great ones that people were trying out were, “You Can't Fit a Duck in a Pencil.”

I mean, you can't.

No.

True.

And actually, PJ, you're onto what the AI was going to explain. According to Google, that's a simple idiom used to illustrate that something is impossible or illogical.

God.

Somebody else put up—this is one of my new favorite phrases—“The Road Is Full of Salsa,” which, according to Google, likely refers to a vibrant and lively cultural scene, particularly a place where salsa music and dance are prevalent.

Yeah. If this had come up in my group chats, this would have been immediately followed by someone changing the name of the group chat to “The Road Is Full of Salsa.”

Yeah.

Did that happen in your chats, Casey?

I have to say, a part of my group chat culture is that we rarely change the name of the group chat. I think it'd be very fun if we did, and maybe I'll try it out, but we've really been sticking with the core names we've had.

Are you willing to reveal?

Yes, and we'll have to cut it because it's so Byzantine, but when my current friend group started forming, we noticed that they made very convenient little acronyms. I'm in a group chat with a Jacob, Alex, Casey, and Corey, and that just became Jack, for example.

Yes.

Then Jack became Jackal. Then our friend Leon got married, so we said we're going to move the L to the front, and it became Le Jack to sort of celebrate Leon.

Wow.

Then my boyfriend got a job at Anthropic, so the current name of the group chat is Le Jackalthropic. Unfortunately, that doesn't make any sense. But here's what I think is so interesting about this: These models have gone out, and they have read the entire internet. They know what people say, and they know what people don't say. So you'd think it would be easy for them to just say, “Nobody says ‘You Can't Lick a Badger Twice.’”

It's the weirdest thing that the one thing you can't teach the AI computers coming for us all is just humility. They can never just be like, “Ugh, I don't know. I don't know. Maybe you should look it up.”

Yes.

It, but I think it actually ties in with something we talked about earlier in the show, which is that these systems are so desperate to please you—

Yes.

—they do not want to irritate you by telling you that nobody says, “You Can't Lick a Badger Twice.” And so instead they just go out, and they make something up.

Yeah. It reminds me a little bit—do you remember either of you Googlewhacking?

Was that when you tried to find something that had no search results or 1 search result or something like that in early Google?

Yes. It was this long-running internet game where you would try to come up with a series of words, or maybe 2 words, that, when you typed them into Google, would only return a single result.

Mm.

There are lots of people trying this out. There's a whole Wikipedia page for Googlewhacking. This sort of feels like the modern AI equivalent of that: Can you come up with an idiom that is so stupid that Google's AI Overview will not attempt to fill in a fake meaning?

Yeah. And it's a great reminder that parents need to talk to their teens about Googlewhacking and glazing—the 2 top terms of this week.

Yeah, and make sure your teen doesn't have a badger. So they should only lick it once.

Okay. Now, PJ, what have you brought us today from your group chats?

9. The One Person Billion Dollar Company

The thing that I've been putting into all my group chats because I can't make sense of it is your colleague Ezra Klein. I don't know if you know this, but he was on some podcasts in the last month.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. A couple.

A couple. And in one of the appearances, he was being interviewed by Tyler Cowen, whose work I really admire, and they both agreed on this fact where I was like, “Wait, we all agree on this fact now?” Tyler said that Sam Altman of OpenAI had at some point predicted that, in the not-too-distant future, we would have a $1 billion company—a company valued at $1 billion—that only had 1 employee. The implication being that you would train an AI to do something and just count the money for the rest of your life.

And, PJ, I actually believe we have a clip of this ready to go.

I'm struck by how small many companies can become. So Midjourney, which you're familiar with, at the peak of its innovation was 8 people, and that was not mainly a story about consultants. Sam Altman says it will be possible to have billion-dollar companies run by 1 person. I suspect that's 2 or 3 people, but nonetheless, that seems not so far off.

So it seems to me there really ought to be significant parts of the government, by no means all, where you could have a much smaller number of people directing the AIs. It would be the same people at the top giving the orders as today, more or less, and just a lot fewer staff. I don't see how that can't be the case.

I agree with you that in theory it should be the case. But I do think that as you actually see it emerge, until we figure out a way to do it, it's going to turn out that the things the federal government does are not all that type of image-prompting—

But it's so hard to get rid of people. Don't you need to start with the—

Setting aside whether we should replace the federal government with lots of AI, the reason I was injecting this into all my group chats was I was just like, “Guys, if the conversation is among people who are quite smart and who've spent a lot of time thinking about this, if they are predicting a world where AI replaces this much of the workforce this fast, how are you guys thinking about it?” But every group chat I put this into, the response instead was, “What is your idea for a billion-dollar company that AI can do for you?”

And any good ideas in there you want to share, to maybe get the creative juices flowing for our listeners?

All the ideas I heard were profoundly unethical. Many of them seemed to start with doing homework for children, which I don't think is a billion-dollar idea and which I think a lot of AI companies are already making money in.

Yeah, that company exists, and it is called OpenAI. It is a great thought experiment, though. I think many of us have had thoughts over the years: Maybe I'll go out, start a company, strike out on my own. 2 of the 3 people in this chat actually did it. But getting to $1 billion is not trivial, and it is kind of tantalizing to imagine: Once you put AI at my fingertips, will I be able to get there?

I actually—this is giving me an idea for maybe a $1 billion, 1-person startup, which is based on some of the ideas we talked about earlier in this show about how these models are becoming more flattering and persuasive. We all have that friend, or maybe those friends, who are totally addicted to posting, and the internet and social media have wrecked their brain and—

Turned them into a shell of their former self.

I know where you're going, and I like it so much.

I think we should create fake social networks for these people.

Oh my God, it's so good.

And install them on their phones so that they could be going to what they think is X, Facebook, or TikTok, and instead of hearing from their real horrible internet friends, they would have these persuasive AI chatbots who'd say, “Maybe tone it down with the racism,” and maybe gradually, over the course of time, bring them back to base reality. What do you think about this idea?

I like it so much. There are so many people I would build a little mirror world for, where they could just slowly become more sane. It's like, “Hey, all the retweets you want, all the likes you want. You can be like the Elon Musk of this platform. You could be like the George Takai of this platform,” whatever. But the trade-off is that it has to slowly, slowly make you more sane instead of the opposite.

Yes.

Yes, and I worry that that is not possible because I think, for a lot of the world's billionaires, the existing social networks already serve this purpose. No matter what they say, they have 1,000 comments saying, “OMG, you're so true for that, bestie,” right? And it does seem to have driven them completely insane. So if we are able to somehow develop some anti-radicalizing technology, I do agree that could be a billion-dollar company.

Yeah.

What do you call it?

What do you call that?

Well, I like the term “heavenbanning,” which went viral a few years ago. It's basically this idea that instead of being shadowbanned, you would get heavenbanned, which is you sort of get banished to a platform where AI models just constantly agree with you and praise you, and this would be a way to sort of bring people back from the brink. So we can call it heavenbanned.

We just spent 30 minutes talking about how when you have AIs constantly telling people what they want to think, it drives them insane.

No, this is for people who are already insane.

Oh, I see. I see.

This is to try to rehabilitate them.

I tried to have a talk with an AI operator this week, asking it to stop complimenting me.

Yeah.

And truly, it was like, “It's so good that you say that.”

Yeah, the AI always comes back and keeps trying to flatter me, and I say, “Listen, buddy, you can't lick a badger twice, okay?” So move it along.

Well, PJ, thank you for bringing us some gossip and content from your group chats.

Happy to.

And we should be in a group chat together, the 3 of us.

Yeah.

That sounds wonderful.

Let's start one.

Happy chatting, PJ.

Thanks, guys.