TechStuffIs betting on current events the ‘future of news’? This week in the News Roundup, Oz and Karah ask AI if their favorite restaurants are hot or not and why Gen Z is nostalgic for a world without the internet. They also discuss Wimbledon’s new AI judges and how drones are impacting beach days. Plus, we want to hear from you! If you’ve found yourself turning to ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, Gemini or any other chatbot for help with a particular task or to answer unusual questions – we want to hear about it. Send us a 1-2 minute voice note to techstuffpodcast@gmail.com.
From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is tech stuff.
I'm as Valocian and I'm care Price.
Today we're going to get into why gen Z is nostalgic for an Internet free world, a world they've never known. An update to what's happening to TikTok in the US? Then are you using chatbots to organize your closet or write your wedding vows? We investigate how people are really using chatbots?
This is the week in tech. It's Friday, July eleventh, Hello Cara, Hi Ahs.
It's that time between July fourth and Labor Day, two holidays that I had no conception of before I moved.
To the US, one of which you spell wrong.
How's that labo U are?
Oh?
Yeah, there's a U in the script. I'm sorry about that. But it's a time known around the world as summer. Although looking out of the window today at that dark, gray sky, you wouldn't really know it.
You know, not to be ungrateful about living in the greatest city on Earth, but New York has been disgustingly.
Hot, although I haven't been here, so I've been following the weather and floating about. Having been out of town.
It's swamp. Like I wanted to bring up a story that reminded me that being hot in New York City is sometimes the most important thing you can be.
I have the sense you're not talking about the weather here.
No, I'm talking about a website called looks Mapping that is like a digital heat map of which New York City restaurants have the hottest patrons. So, I mean, I might be dating myself here, but it's like Zagat for people I thought. I'm not sure. Listeners, I urge you to go to looks mapping dot com because for me and I think, and for you, the interface is so beta Geociti's early Internet that like, there's something sort of comforting about it that I don't know, just the look of it.
Do you think if the zay Gat or Zagat guide was still around today, they would be it had food value for money and Beyonce have a fourth pianto Hotness with.
A little chili emoji. Actually, I've avoided looking at the map because I don't care about eating around hot.
People's wrong with you?
I'm not like, Oh, I go. I think other people obviously are looking when they go to a restaurant to find people to date. I'm looking to eat, which is crazy that that is dating myself. I do, as I said, want to look at this with you so that we can laugh about it. So I'm going to pull up your favorite restaurant.
Okay, well you know what. We both know what that is.
What is your favorite restaurant?
Well, you know very well because you live next door and you often see me on my way there on a Friday evening.
I'm typing it in right now.
Nikoboka Bar and Grill. In fact, one of the many moments that have solidified our friendship was when you knew I was celebrating my birthday there and you called in a Cosmopolitan to me, delivered to my tables when they went in town. Yeah. So, how does the Nickoboca Bar and Grills?
Its not It's not found.
It's not found on looks mapping dot com. I can't believe it.
It's not here.
Just for the listeners benefit. The Nikobocker Barren Grill is an extremely dated sort of quasi steakhouse.
It's what I would call Fraser course, the.
Fraser course, thick carpet. Nobody else under sixty in there apart from me and sometimes you so oddly enough, it's not featured on Looks.
Shocking because they were like, no, they were like, this will not appear.
What about my second favorite restaurant? Do you know what that is?
Peaking duck housea house Midtown downtown one because you've you've taken me to the downtown one.
True, reluctantly. I do actually like the downtown one. I like the Midtown one, which also the downtown one doesn't have a carpet. The Midtown one does.
That's disgusting discussing yep, oh oh, we have wait. I just need to explain to people who are listening the avatar that's standing on the compass on Looks mapping is like a yassified like lip injected, hair flipped.
Guy's the website myself.
It's so good. He's like, you know, doing duck lips.
Oh, I see what.
I'm sorry to say. This is peaking duck house downtown. They don't have no, it's too ugly. The score for peaking duck House Chinese Downtown five points down.
By the way, peaking duck House Downtown is a lot hotter than peaking duck House in Midtown negative.
It would have been a negative.
Literally okay, five points. Said, well, so how does this, I mean, how does this work? How does how does the looks mapping dot Com assign a hotness score to by the way, not to all New York restaurants, but to all New New York restaurants. Evidently that I don't.
Think that doesn't go to well. So here's what it says on the website. Quote, I scraped millions and this is the from the creator of the website. I scraped millions of Google Maps restaurant reviews, and we gave each reviewer's profile picture to an AI model that rates how hot they are out of ten. Very smart. I mean that an AI model like that exists. This map shows how attractive each restaurant's clientele is, and the model is certainly biased. It's certainly flawed. But we judge places, and I'm still quoting the creator. We judge places by the people who go there. We always have, and are we not also flawed? This website just puts reductive numbers on the superficial calculations we make every day, a mirror held up to our collective vanity.
Quote, So this is you're telling me this website is essentially a Balzakian commentary on New York Dining.
I mean the website itself does look like the website of a philosophy department in a small local arts college. So yes, I actually read about this in the New York Times.
This Weekend Places.
And the guy who created it is this. He's barely a man, He's a boy. He's twenty two. His name's Riley Walls. He's a pro pro grammar and this actually isn't his first prank.
You know.
A few years ago he created a fake restaurant with a near perfect Google rating called Miron's Steakhouse. Cool, and so a ton of people signed up to be on the wait list to get into a fake restaurant. And then actually it was so popular that they opened the steakhouse for one night in twenty twenty three.
I absolutely love this type of story. There was another guy who did it in London with a fake restaurant called The Shed, and then he served people this disgusting food. I think data poisoning to trick thirsty souls into going to hype places is one of the true joys of the Internet. This is bombed to my soul.
Yeah, and Waltz actually had an AI model scrape two point eight million Google reviews from one point five million unique accounts. The model identified five hundred and eighty seven thousand profile images with distinguishable faces, and then Walls had that model determined if the users were young or old, male or female, and hot or not very binary, very binary.
How did the model define hot well?
Walls told The Times that the attractiveness score was quote admittedly a bit yanky.
I mean that sounds like a bit of an understatement. I do love the idea of sitting down to set the parameters for an AI model about hot or not. How did mister Wolves go about it?
So, yeah, he actually gave a few examples. If someone was wearing a wedding dress in their profile image, it meant they were hot because obviously someone wanted to sleep with them. And if the photo was blurry, they were not because obviously nobody wanted to take a good photo of them.
So they're ugly.
I mean, these brahminters are not the ones. This is not the sort of Leonardo da Vinci facial symmetry mode of assessing beauty.
I guess no, it's like seemingly quite arbitrary. And he actually unsurprisingly, did not build this for people who are using it as a legitimate tool. He I think, like I said, is making a social commentary on how diners prioritize whether a restaurant is a scene over the food and the atmosphere, And if you go on TikTok, a lot of influencers actually talk about if there are hot guys or rich guys, like the rich guy restaurant is I think the most important thing.
It turns out that New York is not the only city where the heat map exists. It's also available for Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The only three places where there are hot people.
But I'm looking at the map right now, and it seems like there's more blue meaning less hotness up in Harlem.
Twitter users did pick up on this quickly, and most of the denser red pockets of the map were in largely white, affluent neighborhoods in all three cities, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York.
So, like most AI models, this one has a certain amount of racial bias baked in.
Correct, which is unsurprising. You know, AI is trained on data, so its answers reflect the biases of the humans who created the data in the first place, and Walts actually got criticized for this, but he responded that that is part of the point. Again, he says looks mapping is designed to make fun of AI and he also added that one of the ugliest restaurants was actually a country club.
I like the sound that this Waltz character.
We should ask him to twenty two year old cheeky so.
I mentioned I was on vacation last week out of the city. I was actually in Greece and every time the sunset, a horde of tourists would run towards the most instagrammable location with their cameras. I was actually fighting for space on the courtyard in front of it of a church to actually look at the sunset, and somebody you take my photo. I said sure, I said, I'll take your photo afterwards. And I said, oh, that's okay. I just want to look at the sunset and my wife, I said, you are so self righteous. Why do you need to shame that poor man. The man was like, I have nothing exactly, but it kind of raised this interesting question about what were the photos designed to capture the trip as in the past, or was the trip designed to create an opportunity to take photographs and share them on social media, and it was a bit like everyone's in their own version of The Truman Show, where they were both the actor, the producer and the director, and it didn't look that fun.
I think the way we're living in the Truman Show now is that we are all living in a world that has really been predetermined by what we see on social media. So I think looks Mapping was probably trying to shine a light on this particular fact, which is that we're going to places right now with expectations that have been pre constructed on the Internet. And it's because, to steal a line from the French philosopher Louis Altuse, we are always already aware of what we're getting, which is sort of sad, you know.
Yeah, I think it's so. My stepfather, Ricardo, owns a restaurant in London called Ricardo's. Shout Out head there and also congratulations, happy birthday, thirtieth anniversary.
Wow, happy anniversary, Ricardo anniversary, and Riccardo's is a great restaurant is not built around social media moments, so I was encouraging Ricardo to look at a brand refresh where he really leaned into being one of the oldest continually operated family owned Italian restaurants in London.
He was like, no, I'm good, but it is I mean, this whole thing you're talking about, where real life becomes optimized for social media moments rather than social media capturing real life is it's a little disturbing.
I think, as elder millennials, which we are, we grew up before the I share. Therefore, I am to quote Sherry turkle era began. We live in it, but we had life before it, and I think the pressures of a life lived online are much harder on gen Z. I actually found a survey that backs this up. So I'm sure you know about the BSI, the British Standards Institution.
Of course. Yeah, actually I just read my membership.
Well to consulting from was president work there after. They've actually asked thirteen hundred young Brits ages sixteen to twenty one whether they would prefer to be young in a world without the Internet. Forty seven percent of them responded yes.
That is a classic case of better the devil you don't know in this case, right, because none of these youths have ever lived with on the Internet.
I think there's something kind of sexy to people about a time they didn't live, you know, like I'm very interested in taking a horse across the country. And I think the most interesting thing about this survey is that fifty percent of all of those surveyed said that a social media curfew would improve their lives.
What do you mean by social media curfew?
So actually the UK, which has a technology secretary, has hinted that the government is considering I love this mandatory cutoff times for certain apps like TikTok and Instagram for children under a certain age.
It is like during the Blitz when everyone just like it's just like the well funny enough. On my trip, which I'm sorry to keep posting about, I gave myself a week long blackout or curse.
It was weird.
Yeah, So I removed Gmail and Slack from my phone so that I wouldn't be tempted to glance at work stuff and stretch myself out. I kept text, obviously, and you and I texted a fair amount about text stuff, but other than that, I was offline. I can't tell you how good it felt to be not looking at Slack and work Gmail for a week. And how bad it felt to start again on Monday.
You know, as you and maybe our audience have recognized, you've done it so gracefully. I have been in and out of the show this year, and some of the reason that I've been taking off is on account of some personal mental health struggles, and as such, I was actually forced into a bit of a curfew myself. It was more a sensory deprivation tech but there were some days where I actually only had my phone for one hour a day. And the thing that it made me realize is that the iPhone is a rapacious creditor.
What does that mean.
It means that the more you use it, the more you need to use it. And yeah, it is like sugar. It is like cigarettes, where it's like we like to brag when we have abstained. And my family actually refers to my cell phone addiction as a legitimate addiction. And I've been intervened on.
What was your experience then, of having twenty three hours a day off.
I was so jacked up. I was so high from using my phone for that one hour that like I would give the phone back and I felt like my brain was on fire. And I think when you have access to a phone all day long. It sort of spreads itself out. You don't feel like you're at a loss because you don't have it, but when you don't have it, and then it's something you get, you realize how jacked up this thing makes you.
It was interesting turning my feat own back on Monday morning and reinstalling Gmail and Slack. I literally reinstalled them and four hours went by when I didn't look up from my phone. But I felt so broken by the end of that.
Yeah, coming back to the survey, the thing that really stood out to me was actually how often young people, especially young women, are comparing their appearance or lifestyle to others. In the survey, eighty five percent of female respondents said they do this at least sometimes, and nearly half of young women are doing this often or very often.
Yeah, but this idea of comparing yourself and your appearance and your lifestyle to others, this is what the social commentary of looks mapping is all about.
That's very true. I actually originally found these survey results buried in an opinion piece from the Guardian. The author is about Brooks is a bit older than the people who are surveyed she's twenty six, but she admits to being entranced by an old video that went viral recently of Wesleyan alumni the band MGMT, performing for their peers at Wesleyan University.
I remember seeing MGMT performing extremely reluctantly at a concert, that graduating concert at Yale, and they just look so bummed out to be there.
They were like, we miss Wesley And yeah, and it's not the music that she's drawn to, it's the crowd. She observes the quote, no one is dressed that well, judgy. The cam resumes unsteadily to capture the crowd's awkwardness, slump shoulders and a rhythmic bopping. Beyond the footage we're watching, no one seems to be filming.
That's interesting.
Yeah, and that part was key for her. No one in the video is on their phone or filming the experience, except, of course, like the person who captured the video. But Isabelle goes on to say, quote, I was only four when the video was filmed, So why does watching it make me feel as if I've lost a whole world? So, you know, she feels like she's missed out on this pre social Internet where people were more authentic and unique. And I think, you know, I was in college before you would film something on a foot, We would take photos on our BlackBerry maybe, or you would take camera pictures. And now there are some concerts that I've actually been to where the artists will say, don't take out your phone for this, you know, just everybody puts your phone down and watch. The saddest part about it for me, and this I actually feel guilty of, is how difficult it is for people to just.
Be well, it's not just us. You mentioned the UK government is looking at this TikTok curfew, and I'm very interested to know whether regulation government regulation will address the harms of social media before the next generation become teenagers. And I do wonder if we'll look back on this time that we're living through now as kind of the time where doctors were prescribing cigarettes to people with a cough, and whether we'll be like, it was so crazy that we allowed a whole generation to have their minds ruined by trillion dollar corporations. Who knows, But the policy thing I'm interested in here in the US, a TikTok ban has been mooted, not because of children's health, of course, but because of geopology China, China exactly so. In April last year, President Biden signed a bill requiring that TikTok be sold to a US buyer or be shut down. The ban very briefly took effect the day before President Trump was inaugurated in January. I'll never forget TikTok only went dark for a single evening because upon taking office, Trump immediately signed an executive order for a so called enforcement delay, and has signed two more of these since then. So the deadline keeps getting pushed back because the Trump administration is working on a deal for a consortium of non Chinese investors to take over TikTok's US operations. Details about the deal remain unannounced, but the information broke some news this week that makes the future of TikTok in America appear secure. Apparently, there's a new version of the app being built specifically for US users. The US only TikTok app is set to launch on September fifth, and US residents will have apparently until March twenty twenty six to download it and get off the old app. There is one wrinkle, which is that the Chinese government will also have to approve of this structure, and apparently a deal was actually close and then the tariff announcements earlier this year derailed it. You know that I have this kind of geopolitics bent. So while we're at it, there was another story this week. It was in four or four media that brought together diplomacy, cryptocurrency, personal appearance, and the internet making collective decisions. Ala looks mapping. Tell me have you heard of polymarket?
I mean it does sound like a dating app for polyamory.
Poly Market is not a dating market for the polyamorous. It is a sort of online betting marketplace where you can basically lay down a wager on almost anything other users can come up with. You basically bet on yes no issues using crypto against other users rather than against a bookmaker, and then this decentralized system facilitates the payouts. It got very big during the election last year and right now on the site, some of the bets going run the gamut from Wimbledon results to will a hurricane make landfall in the US before August? But a bet that's really blown up and has over two hundred million dollars in crypto riding on it is will Ukrainian President Zelenski wear a suit? Before July? Zelenski said he would not wear a suit until Russia's war in Ukraine ended, and so he pretty much always wears these military style fatigues, and he says that he does so to remind the world that Ukraine is still in the midst of a war. So, of course, the users of polymarket turns Zelenski's dress into a wager. I don't know if this was a proxy wager for whether or not the war in Ukraine would end, or a wager on how committed to his principles Zelensky is. But here's what happened. The bet went live in May, and then towards the end of June, Selensky showed up at a NATO summit wearing something.
I'm going to show you now, Oh, looking hot.
What's he wearing?
He's wearing He's dressed in all black. He's sort of dressed like a caterwaiter, all black. He's wearing a suit and a black shirt.
I think it's a suit. Yeah, Well, you've waded into a huge controversy. Polymarket right now has been roiled by whether or not this is a suit now, to be fair, he's sort of wearing you know, cargo style pants. He's not wearing dress shoes, he's not wearing a shirt and tie. He's wearing a kind of little mini pose and the jacket has four pockets on it which kind of have these over the top flaps. So you could argue that it's more of a kind of form military fatigue for nighttime operations than.
Pure suit black time fatigue.
And this is this is Royling Polymarket right now. There are hundreds of millions of dollars at stake on whether or not this is a suit.
Literally one hundreds of one hundred million dollars has.
Been bet and so there's now this formal dispute on Polymarket and that triggered an internal review because it wasn't clear if this was a yes no suit or no suit, and therefore the site's so called oracles were called in. The oracles get to debate facts and can't with a verdict, and after deliberating live on discord, the oracles determined that this was not a suit. However, there was some accusations of the oracles were also betters, and so poly Market took the dispute back a second time, and on Tuesday this week they announced their final verdict.
And what was the final verdict?
No suit. Yeah, you'll be out of pocket.
I would be very out of.
What's interesting to me about this story beyond the fact that it's about crypto and how the Internet makes collective decisions with this quote from Polymarket's founder Shane Coplin, and he basically said, these bets are about more than making a quick buck. He called polymarket quote the future of news and said that the next information age is also a quote. Won't be driven by the twentieth centuries medium monoliths. It will be driven by markets.
To be fair, the story of recent election cycles has been that the betting markets are more accurate than the polls, which is crazy. And I'm pulling up what is it, polymarket dot com?
Polymarket dot com.
Number one is the New York City mayoral election, which is interesting. There's three million dollars on the FED decision. I guess what. Oh. The way that this is played out on poly market is that the first thing is the highest bet what has the largest wage volume? Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And that's the New York City mayoral election, which is really interesting.
There's also stuff here about whether the Trump Epstein files will get released in twenty twenty five, which surprisingly only thirteen percent.
Voting Trump scales that there are no files.
Yeah, there are no files. So you know, this kind of allows you to be an active participant in consuming the news in fact, because you're betting on the news at all times, which is pretty interesting. We're going to take a quick break now, but when we come back, a key question, are you the only human in the zoom meeting? Stay with us, Welcome back. We've got a few more stories that have caught our eye to share, and then we'll be starting something new through the summer in place of the tech support interviews.
It's a new segment called drum Roll. No, it's not called drum Roll. It's called Chat and.
Me Chat and me stick around, don't miss it.
In the meantime, I have an observation which is that you spend most of your days in meetings in zoom calls, and those meetings and zoom calls perhaps could be just a Slack message or an email or even a text message.
My therapist, my executive coach, my best friend, my wife, or just my co.
Host no, that's what it actually a chatbot can be.
Yes. I mean, of course, remember during the pandemic, it was like, oh great, zoom calls, we can work from anywhere. And now it's like a bit like cell phone and say, oh great, I can always be in contexts like gosh, now I have to do zoom calls just all the time. And it went from this feeling liberation to feeling like kind of a digital jail cell.
I think many people feel that way. But now people are starting to think, what if I can skip all those zoom meetings and still get all the relevant information, say more that I need. So the Washington Post actually wrote about the increased presence of AI note takers in meetings, like oh I can't come to this meeting, I'll send my AI note taker. And they even talk to PEP people who have been in meetings where robots or AI note takers have outnumbered humans.
You know, I always get a little bit annoyed when there's an AI note taker in the room and no one's asked my consent, like this is you know, I think it would be a courtesy to say, do you mind if I transcribe everything you say and keep it forever. It's this thing about using an Internet where you're kind of creating this constant chain of data that follows you around forever. And I don't really want everything I've ever said in a Zoom call to be permanently memorialized and then owned by god knows who, but it's becoming the standard. I mean, Zoom, Microsoft, Teams, Google meet they all offer these note taking features that can record, transcribe, and use AI to summarize meetings. That said, I haven't yet encountered somebody who has the goal and the cheek to send an AI NoteTaker to a meeting in their place to excuse them from going to the meeting. That would really drive me crazy.
Well, get ready for my new digital twin.
Sarah right, Sarah Rice always on time?
Oh my god, she's prompt. That would be a good that for me would be important. But yeah, in addition to the big players no, Google and Microsoft and Zoom, there's actually smaller companies like Otter, Ai and Granola of these names that transcribe calls like across platforms. So even if you decide to actually log onto the meeting, you can ask your bot to take notes for you and it is a great tool for multitasking or zoning out. Of course, the downside is that technology is recording more and more of our daily lives and echoing what you said. One AI exac and the Washington Post piece said, We're moving into a world where nothing will be forgotten.
It is Wimbledon this week, it is, and so such a beautiful match.
All of this grousing aside, Having an AI avatar in my Zoom calls so that I could watch tennis all day would be my dream come true.
The thing about you, you would never trust an AI. You would micromanage the AI. Yeah, I feel like I quit.
There's a bit of discrepancy. A minute fourteen.
I was watching. That's not what happened. But I know you love your tennis, so do you? I do.
I love tennis, And you won't be surprised to know that this was not a casual reference to my favorite sport. There is a tech angle here. Do you know what it is?
Yeah? What fully? Replacing line judges with AI and cares right. And the reason I hate this is because it just isn't fun to watch players verbally abuse AI.
It is quite fun to watch players shrugging their shoulders and running around looking for someone to yell at.
Though.
It's like we tennis, but there are no line judges anymore for the first time in the one hundred and forty eight year history of Wimbledon. Instead of a number of humans carefully bending over to watch each line during every point to see if a ball falls inside or outside the line, it's all being done by AI or another acronym ELC, electronic line calling. Humans, of course, do make mistakes more frequently than robots, but many sports fans will agree that watching a match isn't just about accuracy, it's about drama.
So just explain to me, does it mean that there are no disputed calls or reviews of replace?
Yeah? So obviously Phase one was line judges. Phase two was line judges plus cameras, so that if player could dispute the line dram call and you get a hawkeye and then you get the computer to basically correct or endorse the line.
Y you have it here in America for the US opening.
Yeah, well exactly. But were now in phase three, which is just the robots. I mean, this is the classic story, isn't It's like humans, humans augmented by technology just technology. Around two hundred line judges are out of a job, but eighty have been retained in case there are issues with the electronics system. Always nice to be back up to a robot. One of the judges didn't pull her punches. She said that line judges are now their quote for no other reason and to escort players on and off the court. They were always dressed like butler's and that's basically what they are now.
Oh shot fired?
Is it working not perfectly? An umpire had to stop a match recently when the system failed to spot a ball that clearly had landed out of bounds on no less than set point, and then the players had to replay the point. A Wimbledon spokesman blamed the mistake on operator error human error, but the match was between a Russian tennis player and a brit and the Russian blamed hometown bias for the replay of the clutch point rather than simply awarding it to her given the ball was clearly out. Here's what Pavyo Chenkova had to say.
I expect a different decision. I just thought also chairm Bio could take an initiative, and that's why he's therefore sitting on the chair, and he also saw it out. He told me after the match, I think we're losing a little bit of this charm of actually having human being ball boys, and you know, it just becomes a little bit weird and like Robert sort of.
Orientated, just becomes a little bit weird and robo orientated. That's the story of her.
That's right, that's right.
But it is interesting. She was like, maybe the umpire was scared to trust his own eyes and overall the computer even most clearly out that is automation bias. One and one.
I was going to say automation bias. I mean, how many times I get in fights with my mother about directions because she knows the right way and I was raised on Google Maps. So you probably don't know this because you're English. But this is the fiftieth anniversary summer of the release of Jaws, which I actually watched again last weekend and haunts my nightmare.
My mother told me I wasn't allowed to watch it.
She's a good mind.
I would never swim again.
She's a good mard.
She wanted me to swim.
She wanted to related to this, and I really hate that there's any real news story that's related to Jaws. But there was a story this week about city and state officials in New York using drones to locate and track sharks on beaches and Queens and on Long Island. I go to Long Island, I swim on Long Island, and around the July fourth weekend this past weekend, there were eight sightings of sharks in less than a week.
Despite not having watched Jaws, I'm still very scared of shoks. This is not good to hear.
So every time a shark was spotted, swimmers were ordered to evacuate the area for an hour. And this happened a lot over the weekend. As you can imagine, it really frustrated beach goers.
Yeah. I was out of town, as I've mentioned multiple times, but I got sent some Reddit comments about this story, and my favorite was quote in true New York City fashion, it's obviously a loan shark. I don't pay up, or we'll nibble your toes.
I really, I mean, I do love the way that Reddit makes lemonade out of lemons. There's actually speculation about whether there are actually more sharks in the area, or if there were always this many. We just didn't spot them as easily without drones.
That was exactly going to be my question, because it's like, there was a story recently in The New Yorker about cancer diagnostic and it's like, is there a possibility haing too much information? Yes, Like maybe the sharks are always there, just the drones in you.
It's why they say don't get a full body scam, because sometimes there's stuff you don't want to know. You don't want to know what sharks are in the water.
Sometimes sometimes you don't.
But I do think the state is responding to reports that a twenty year old woman was probably bitten by a shark a few weeks back.
What on earth do you mean? Probably bitten by a shark?
So this woman was bitten by something in the water, and when biologists gave the bite marks a once over, they concluded that the bite quote most likely involved a juvenile sand tiger shark. How she doing, She's okay, she's alive. She walked away with minor cuts to her left foot and leg. But why aren't we more upset about this about what, well, probably being bitten by a shark?
Yeah, I was probably bitten by a shark? Would actually be a great slogan T shirt. That's the last headline today. But I believe Kara, you have a pitch for our listeners.
So since January when we took over the tex Stuff feed, I come to pitch meetings and I'm always excited to talk to you guys about just these out of pocket ways that my friends are using Chatgypte and not just chatgypt you know, Claude Gemini. I like seeing the ways in which chatbots are like infiltrating daily life, right.
And you shared a very interesting one this week.
Yeah, you know, it wasn't even interesting as much as it was banal, but also really functional, which is that my sister and her girlfriend were supposed to be staying at this home for the week on vacation sort of Airbnb rental property, and it was I will say, not up to snuff. And my sister and her girlfrien are both very good communicators, but it was late and they were tired, and they wanted to vacate this premises.
And get their money back and get their money back.
And so they relied on Chat GBT to help them communicate. And this was the important part. And I think this is why people use chat. They wanted to communicate in a certain way, being kind and calm but also firm. And I think what Chat helped them do was form a message that was not accusatory or disrespectful about the space. And I think it's just so interesting that, like we would rely on a large language model to make ourselves seem more human or humane.
That's very well put, you know. And it's been fun of hearing these stories from you every week in our pitch meetings, and so we thought it'd be fun to bring more of them into the show, but not just from you, also from our listeners.
Yeah, and you know, hear from our listeners about how you're using AI.
So if and when you found yourself turning to Jack Gpt or girl called claud or Gemini or whichever one you use for help with a particular task or to navigate your real life, we want to hear about it. Ideally, send us a one to two minute voice note to Text Stuff Podcast at gmail dot com, or if you want to write it down instead and just send it as a normal email, that's fine too.
Yeah, tell us about how you're using it, what works, what doesn't, why you like using AI for this task specifically, we want to hear it all, and if you are using a chatbot to write your wedding vows, we will report this story until it is blue in the face. I know what's happening and I want.
To hear about it, so please send in your stories to text Stuff Podcasts at gmail dot com. You may get to hear your voice on the show, and if you do, we'll send you a T shirt with the phrase I've probably got bitten by a shark, or maybe something more appropriate to tech stuff, but we want to hear from you, so please do write in. We'll be doing this every week. Is called Chat and Me.
That's it for this week for tech Stuff.
I'm Karra Price and I'm Oz Valschin.
This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis and Adriana Topia. It was executive produced by Me, Kara Price and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina norvelfa iHeart Podcasts. The engineer is Bihid Fraser and Jack Insley mixed this episode. Kyle Murdoch wrote out theme song.
Join us next Wednesday for Textuff the story when we will share an in depth conversation with David Webster, the head of User Experience at Google Labs about what it means to design human centered tech.
And please do rate and review the show on Apple podcasts, on Spotify wherever you listen to your podcasts, and write into us at tech stuff podcast at gmail dot com with your feedback and of course your story is about chatting.
