We're as annoyed by TikTok as anyone, but the US Government's new plan to control it might be even more chilling than the last.
Find out more about the Restrict Act in this YouTube video from last month: www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4o4LVBPMrw
And learn more about the brand-new Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act in this podcast episode.
And here are some examples of advanced AI-powered libel and defamation, complete with receipts. Real receipts documenting the fake receipts.
zero-sum.org/i-wrote-what-googles-ai-powered-libel-machine/
anncoulter.substack.com/p/gemini-on-me-defamation-and-intentional
We're as annoyed by TikTok as anyone, but the US Government's new plan to control it might be even more chilling than the last.
Find out more about the Restrict Act in this YouTube video from last month: www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4o4LVBPMrw
And learn more about the brand-new Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act in this podcast episode.
And here are some examples of advanced AI-powered libel and defamation, complete with receipts. Real receipts documenting the fake receipts.
zero-sum.org/i-wrote-what-googles-ai-powered-libel-machine/
anncoulter.substack.com/p/gemini-on-me-defamation-and-intentional
Quick political update video, but for once it's not about firearms. Welcome back to another episode of T-Rex Talk, and this one we're going to be talking about the. Uh, it's a very interesting bill. It's not one that we've talked about before, but it is claiming to be a TikTok banning bill, just like the Restrict Act, which we have talked about before. We've talked about it on the podcast and then also on a video that is up on the T-Rex Labs YouTube channel, which I will link to below.
Speaker 1:But the new bill is not the Restrict Act. The Restrict Act gave the government a huge amount of control and was marketed as a way to ban TikTok. Depending on who they were talking to, the proponents of this bill would say we were banning TikTok because it is under the control of an evil Chinese power and it takes control over young people. Then, for other people, they said the other things that people don't like TikTok for, like the dancing. Well, the Restrict Act stalled because a whole bunch of cybersecurity experts and civil rights people and so forth were troubled by the huge amount of control that it gave the federal government over all kinds of stuff on the internet not just TikTok, but an incredible amount of control over large corporations that have app stores, decentralized information, control, but even penalties for people who try to bypass those restrictions. So there's a new bill and it is called the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which of course sounds great Protecting Americans from foreign adversary controlled applications. You know that American controlled applications are so good and so full of true information that obviously we would want to just keep this particular trend rolling, which is essentially what this bill does. It has almost all of the same controls from the Restrict Act over some of the larger companies.
Speaker 1:I haven't read the whole thing so I don't actually know how deep into the weeds it gets, but here's what it does. It basically bans apps from app stores if they are determined to be controlled by foreign adversaries and then to be lenient. There is a mechanism by which the foreign adversary can sell the app. In this case, the one that we're talking about is, of course, tiktok, but it could be any app. If the foreign adversary sells it to a non-adversarial country or an American company, then it's fine for it to stay on the app store.
Speaker 1:Now, one of the obvious problems with this is essentially what it does is it gives the federal government control over what can and cannot be on the Apple app store, the Google app store, the Amazon app store, any of the large companies that distribute or disseminate apps for phones. Essentially, they have to do whatever the government tells them. It's the only way for there to be teeth to this bill that actually forces foreign adversaries to sell their companies to non-foreign adversaries oh, I mean non-adversaries, and it isn't just app stores, it is, in fact, websites as well. So it creates actually, I think, more power and control in some ways than the Restrict Act does. Any website that is deemed to be controlled by a foreign adversary needs to be hidden from people, and the only way that they can stop it from being hidden from people is by selling it to a non-foreign adversary. So this new ban TikTok bill has the same fundamental flaws as the old ban TikTok bill. It gives the government far more control over private companies than it should, and it is a fairly arbitrary definition of what is a foreign adversary.
Speaker 1:Elon Musk is a foreign adversary, probably because he was born in South Africa. That means that we could hide Twitter finally from the American people who are using it to get uncensored news. Now, if you're a skeptical sort of person, you would point out to me that the government can already pretty much tell Google and Apple and Amazon what to do when it comes to certain types of information, and part of the reason that the government is angry at Elon Musk is they have been able to tell social media platforms what to do pretty much universally, and Twitter is the notable exception now that it has a new owner. The other big social media platforms and centralized media and technology companies pretty much have been taking the current administration and the bureaucratic institutions instructions pretty readily over the last several years. This is a bill that moves all of that out into the open and makes it legally required for tech companies and service providers to provide the services to companies that are still owned by these foreign adversaries, or, I guess, controlled by the foreign adversaries is more what the bill is saying. So basically, the political trend is the same both on the national level and at the state level In general, states that are more free are becoming more free on top of that, and states that are less free are removing freedoms. And then at the federal government we see a desire for the bureaucracy, but also the establishment politicians, to remove freedoms. Well, there's no telling how this bill would be used and I almost said that with a straight face but it takes away a huge amount of freedom from private companies to host information or share information or provide the application files for different types of devices to people. That would be something that would now be under the control of the federal government.
Speaker 1:Now, how often the federal government actually implements these powers and acts? These powers actually forces foreign adversary controlled websites or applications to sell their companies? How often they actually force Apple or Amazon or Google or any of the other app sites or information sharing services to take down foreign controlled adversaries? Who can say? My guess would be if we were to try to figure out the frequency whatever is convenient and I've talked about this in the past the internet used to be a pretty different place.
Speaker 1:It used to be an awful lot more decentralized and people used to take an awful lot more responsibility for their own data. It used to be very, very hard to take stuff down off the internet or to disable internet services because they were so spread out. Now, from a technical perspective, the low level information switching and serving part of the internet is extremely decentralized, both physically, but also from a business perspective. However, information is largely getting centralized on servers controlled by a few large companies and being delivered to people using a few large content delivery networks and being consumed by people on a few large social media platforms. It is a much more centralized place than it used to be. So that is why there's a desire from people inside of the federal government to take more control over those centralized institutions, because, well, it's kind of what growing governments wanna do. And all of this is happening when there is a pretty massive change, I believe, coming to Silicon Valley, the tech world and the internet in general. Obviously, we've talked about the fact that Twitter is considerably more free than it used to be under its new ownership. An awful lot of files from the past were made public. There's more transparency within the company and there's more transparency of information on the website from outside of the company, and that's gonna have a very interesting effect.
Speaker 1:I believe that, as we go into election season and there is more and more and more pressure from the government on various social media platforms to control quote unquote misinformation, twitter is going to be a very interesting player. It is gonna force the other social media companies. Oh and, by the way, not all of this is external meddling from bureaucrats and political players. A lot of this is actually coming genuinely from the desires of the people who work in these companies to fortify elections, you know. Make sure they don't go the wrong way to hide certain types of things and to push a certain type of information and a certain type of narrative. There doesn't have to be a huge amount of top-down control for the government when this is already the desire of a whole bunch of people inside of these companies.
Speaker 1:But there will be a little bit of an interesting test this election season, because in the last election a lot of information was squashed and hidden by the social media platforms and in this case there is one that is gonna squash and I'll at the very least, less information. There will be more information being published on Twitter than there was four years ago, and that's going to give the other social media platforms a strange choice. They can either clamp down on information far more harshly and far more obviously because they're trying to counteract the misinformation that is on Twitter, or because that information is going to get out there and is going to get widely seen, it is going to be widely discussed. They may have to relax some of their controls so that their influence is less obvious. It'll be really interesting to see how that goes Now. Right now, there are a bunch of people who have theorized that, thanks to Twitter and the way that they have approached certain things, youtube has actually restricted less information than in the past. They've actually removed some of the shadow banning restrictions on certain types of content content that is doing really really well on Twitter, and it's not clear why that is. Is it because they want the ad revenue? Is it because this information is out there and they don't want to be seen as squashing it? Or is it just algorithm changes, business as usual, which reminds me.
Speaker 1:I wanted to ask you guys to continue to watch T-Rex Labs videos and to continue sharing T-Rex Labs videos, because when I made the restrict act video that talked about how to install GrapheneOS on your phone, how to de-google your phone so that you have more control over which apps you can install, yeah, that video started strong, like all the T-Rex Labs videos, with tens of thousands of views. But after that video, something happened and now videos get, if they're really, really fortunate, like eight or nine thousand views. So something happened after the third video and I think it may have something to do with being critical of Google and YouTube and Android and telling people that they should pursue alternatives. I don't know. Again, it could just be changing algorithms and business as usual, but YouTube is not going to go out of its way to show you T-Rex Labs videos. You're probably going to have to make a little bit more of an effort to go and find those things yourself. You're also going to have to make more of an effort to find things yourself elsewhere on the internet, because this push from the government what's it called protecting Americans from foreign adversary controlled applications act will almost certainly pass Congress. I'm not actually sure how likely it is to pass the Senate, but there is this conversation that is ongoing, with new rules and regulations being applied. Because of it. There are going to be new rules and regulations on different social media platforms based upon the stuff that Elon Musk is doing.
Speaker 1:But there's also a pretty massive trend when it comes to artificial intelligence, you may have noticed, and Google's AI troubles are a perfect example of what I am talking about. The government did not tell Google to make their AI image generation tool super woke. That was something that was done internally by people working on the project, but much as I hate to use the word woke, it is the best way to describe the application. If you asked it to draw pictures of specific historical figures, google's AI would draw them as different ethnicities than they actually were. This is supposed to be an empowering thing. Great leaders like Henry VIII would come back as African dudes. Get a little more of that diversity into history. Get rid of the white male patriarchy of actual history and revise it so that it reflects what we wish reality had been. But obviously this kind of historical revisionism has problems, especially when you let a machine blindly do it, because the other thing that people notice is if you asked it to draw you pictures of SS officers from the Nazi army, you would also get equally diverse people. Young Asian women and old black dudes apparently were part of the Wehrmacht and various other things. So obviously that was caught pretty quickly by folks on the internet. Everyone had a grand old time poking fun at it and Google claimed that they would change the bug. But of course the bug wasn't just a single line of code that said if not woke, then make woke.
Speaker 1:This is something that is built into the way that the AI thinks and the AI works and it's built into the way that the people developing this particular AI engine think as they work, and people are primarily using these tools to generate, summarize and filter information. It isn't all just fun and games and making historical revisiony images. There's a lot of people who are using AI to generate content and to summarize the content on the internet. Google search and other search engines are just not as good as they once were at helping you find the information that you need. The AIs are sometimes superior. Google's AI is not particularly amazing. Bing's AI co-pilot, is actually pretty good at this. But all of these have a problem they are filtering the information through a lens that you don't control and you don't even really have the ability to see into, and sometimes the mistakes that are implemented by the AI are hard to see. Other times they are super obvious.
Speaker 1:So another example from Google's AI is that if you asked it for information on certain people, people who were, let's just say, critical of the establishment and the large institution, somebody like Tim Pool. Tim Pool is not a hardcore, far-right conservative, but he has questioned and criticized a bunch of standard leftist positions. As a result, google's AI will tell you terrible things about Tim Pool, how dangerous he is, his many calls to violence, his aberrant worldview, etc. Etc. And then to prove this slander, it will cite articles in all sorts of different scientific and mainstream publications. But there's just one little problem the AI is inventing these articles inside Business Insider and various other magazines completely from scratch. It is inventing quotes from articles that never existed, and sometimes it's inventing articles that never existed from publications that never existed in order to make the case that these lies about specific living people are true, widely accepted and highly substantiated.
Speaker 1:This is obviously a problem and, like the Black SS officers, it got caught pretty quickly. But it raises a very fascinating question. First, it raises a legal question. This is obviously liable on a pretty grand scale and is liable against a whole bunch of different people, both living people like Tim Pool, but then also a whole bunch of journalists and journalistic institutions, some of which exist, some of which don't. This is a really significant potential legal loophole for the creators of AI to get themselves in a huge amount of trouble that they didn't anticipate. Are they responsible for their AI and what it says based on the programming that they have given it, or are these things completely off the reservation already? Is it already Skynet time? Will our new computer overlords destroy the world through litigation instead of atomic holocaust? That's a much less interesting Terminator movie but it's kind of an interesting prospect. But the real danger is going to be the more subtle reshapings of fact and of history.
Speaker 1:And all of this stuff is converging at basically the same time Information. We live in the information age. There's so much information, there is un-comprehensible amounts of information, and AI has the ability to just generate even more information. Even when you're asking it to merely summarize existing information, it has a tendency to hallucinate entirely new information and at first glance this information passes the basic muster of being written well, or at least in whole sentences, so it looks like real data. But AI also has the ability to warp and twist actual facts, actual history, actual written documents, so that you don't get the clear picture of the real information.
Speaker 1:So as information is more centralized, the centralized repositories of information get more controlled by governments and the way that we interact with that information and consume that information gets increasingly filtered through various tools, either search engines or AI tools that will have I mean, it's inescapable, they will have some kind of bias, either on purpose or accidentally. I think it's really important for us to just, you know, pause and reflect. Obviously, information is good when it's true. Knowledge is power when it's actually actionable, useful knowledge. How can we hang on to some of this information before it is tainted or corrupted or lost? There's also a huge amount of information that, just plain old, gets lost. Well, the good news is there is some automatic protections that are already sort of getting built in.
Speaker 1:Twitter is a good example of the pushback against this kind of control, resulting in a less controlled and less totalitarian direction for one of the big one of the big sectors, but it doesn't solve the problem of centralization. The fact is, the persecution of certain types of content have resulted in those popping up elsewhere. So, for example, I'll throw out one website Sermon Audio. Sermon Audio shares, unsurprisingly, audio recordings of sermons, but because that's something that a lot of the big tech companies didn't want to touch, that is a website that is largely built on its own code and they largely handled their own storage, so they're going to be less affected by the controls that are instituted by the big platforms, the big CDNs, and those audio clips are not going to be filtered through those big tech companies AI tools Now, because the owners of Sermon Audio might be foreign control adversaries.
Speaker 1:I mean, they aren't, but they might be. According to the government. Now they're under some level of control, but they could only be removed from places that they're already sort of banned from. So maybe they are immune from this type of control simply because they've gone away to build their own thing, and more and more people are building their own stuff or storing their own stuff or serving their own stuff, hear stuff in different ways, and it tends to be those people who are already hostile is the wrong word but already incompatible with this large top-down totalitarian system that is kind of emerging either from Washington or Silicon Valley, depending on how you look at it.
Speaker 1:People who are reading this stuff, writing this stuff, sharing this stuff, are already doing it in places that are less susceptible to this type of control. And people who are already skeptical of the big-state apparatus. They already have a worldview that is less susceptible to AIs customizing postmodernism directly to you and reshaping the reality that you see around you. And so this divide that we see, where certain states want freedom and are getting more of it and certain states want less freedom and they're going to have less of it. That's going to continue as a trend all the way down to the individual level. People who have rejected personal responsibility and they just want to have easier lives. They want devices that are easier to use and they're managed by other people and their information is spoon-fed to them and managed by other people and filtered by other people are going to have more of that. People who have been letting establishment commentators do their research and their thinking for them are just going to let AI bots do their research and their thinking for them, but people who reject those ideas are going to have to find ways of rejecting those particular tools, platforms or centralized free services.
Speaker 1:Now is a good time to get back to local storage. Now is a good time to download stuff from the internet a copy of offline Wikipedia. While not trustworthy, it's going to be more trustworthy today than five years from now. I'm predicting we should be downloading things like Project Gutenberg, which has scans of books going all the way back to, well, almost the beginning of books, and you should have some information storage that is a little bit more safe and a little bit more secure in your home for for your own files. That way, you'll, at the very least have a few anchors. As the digital world changes, you'll have some stuff that won't change.
Speaker 1:I've been talking to a company called Gridbase and they build some interesting devices that essentially are invented to store and serve this information directly for you, so as decentralized as is possible. Digital libraries and ways of accessing and consuming information that are not controlled by large corporations are going to be the way forwards for people who don't want that information manipulated even as they are trying to consume it. So I think you should get Gridbase potentially on the podcast and talk to him about some of these issues, but for now, your homework assignment is to think through what files you would like to have. It isn't just digital files. You should be buying physical books, books that have been written not recently, books that have been printed not recently, and you should have these things on the shelf.
Speaker 1:I'm not actually predicting an incredibly dire apocalypse in which all information is gone and people stride across the dusty wasteland searching for little scraps of written history, but I am saying that there will be a vast part of the population that do not have these anchors. They do not know their history and they don't even know where to go and find it. And when they are searching for history on the internet, which is controlled by bots, bureaucrats and other confused people, they're not going to be able to find things that point them in particularly good direction. So, having those touchstones, having those unchangeable anchors, like books that were written 100 years ago and published 100 years ago and have been sitting on your shelf and haven't been rewritten by Google AI tools, those are going to be, those are going to be valuable. Those are going to be really, really helpful for keeping you just connected to reality. You'll just have a better idea of how the world works and what reality is like if you have some sources that aren't being completely affected by AI tools every five minutes.