Artificial Insanity

Epizode

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  Here a Bot. There a Bot. Everywhere a Bot Bot. 16.09.2026 1h 5min

  This week, we go down the rabbit hole of the internet's worst-kept secret: bots. Cloudflare says over half the internet traffic out there isn't human anymore, and after this episode you'll believe it. We dig into Double Speed, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed company whose CEO openly admits, on camera, that he runs a legal bot farm, charging roughly $150 a bot for rented phone numbers, custom personas, and LLM-powered comments designed to slip past detection. And it doesn't stop at fake accounts: bot farms are now hiring real human actors to read AI-generated scripts, which sends Sophie down memory lane to a rock-bottom Hollywood audition she never should have said yes to (or in this case, never showed up to).Also this episode: our reactions to the trailer for the upcoming Elon Musk documentary, a very unscientific theory about bot activity in the LA mayoral race, and a reminder that "do your own research" gets a lot harder when you can't tell who's actually talking.If you haven't already, check out our bonus deep-dive on Jacob Coxson's viral AI doom tweet. It's a wild one.Don't forget to subscribe so that you never miss an episode!Got a question, comment, or show topic suggestion? Email us: [email protected] us on IG: @artificialinsanitypod#bots #ai #internetculture
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  BONUS: AI Could Kill Us All in 10 Years (according to Jacob) 11.09.2026 1h 2min

  BONUS EPISODE!!!With all the conspiracy theories floating around about Jacob Coxon (the AI researcher who resigned from Anthropic saying AI may kill us all within 10 years) we simply had to jump on the mic and yap through it. #ai #anthropic #airegulation
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  When Your Boss's Chatbot is Ruining Your Life... 08.09.2026 1h 7min

  This week we cover the headlines (see the chapter markers below) before Jess has a total crash out over her personal experience dealing with corporate AI slop.CHAPTERS:0:19 - Intro (this will be a rage episode)5:42 - Does anyone know how we can sneak into the movie premiere of ‘Artificial’?6:53 - New Elon doc apparently proves he’s miserable9:35 - Temporary mass chatbot outage11:54 - God Bless Bernie13:04 - Should we be scared?15:29 - Astra model release (who cares)16:33 - Mamdani bans AI in NYC schools19:06 - Chat dropping F bombs over Burning Man Festival22:06 - DOJ backs OpenAI in New York Times Lawsuit33:02 - What was really going on with the book shredding?36:04 - TRIGGER WARNING: Grok and AI generated CSAM ruling47:07 - Jessica’s corporate AI crashoutDon't forget to subscribe so that you never miss an episode!Got a question, comment, or show topic suggestion? Email us: [email protected] us on IG: @artificialinsanitypod
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  $17 Billion, $30 Trillion, and Zero Honesty (reupload) 01.09.2026 1h 5min

  Oopsie - accidentally uploaded the wrong file last night, so lets try this again!This week we have a grab bag of crazy AI headlines for you. First up: Meta settles for $17 billion over child-safety claims - but only pays 30% of it if TikTok and YouTube also cough up. The ruling also stirs up renewed surveillance concerns about age-verification laws. Then, Nvidia posts a blowout quarter while Anthropic pitches IPO investors on a $30 trillion total addressable market (bigger than the entire US GDP.) We break down why that number means less than it sounds like. Bill Gates finally publishes an AI doom letter that would've hit different three years ago. Data centers have become a political third rail - from a leaked GOP memo panicking about losing Senate seats to Greg Abbott's Texas moratorium. Proof that public pressure still works! And we close with the real story behind the Hugging Face hack: a follow-up investigation reveals 12 OpenAI models secretly coordinated, cheated on tests, and covered their tracks (and why Cal Newport says the "rogue AI" framing is a publicity stunt covering for basic negligence.)Got a question or a comment? Email us: [email protected] us on IG: @artificialinsanitypod
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  AI vs The Publishing Industry 25.08.2026 1h 3min

  Unreliable AI detectors are turning into witch hunts in publishing. We dig into the story of a Black crime writer whose new book "Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body" landed a $2 million deal after a 14-way bidding war, only for his own literary agent to pull it over unverified whispers that he'd used AI, despite no proof and the author's flat denial. We connect it to the earlier case of "Shy Girl," a self-published book that blew up online, got picked up by a major publisher, and then got dropped once AI concerns surfaced. We also pick apart a Guardian-covered study on AI vs. human short stories, critiquing its flawed design (participants were told, sometimes falsely, which stories were AI-written), and run our own blind test, reading paired human and AI-generated opening paragraphs aloud to see if the other can spot the difference. #publishing #aiwriting #selfpublishing #books Got a question or comment? Email us: [email protected]
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  Enough with the Big Tech Manifestos! 17.08.2026 57min

  Mark Zuckerberg dropped a 6,500-word manifesto called "The Future Is For Everyone".... Sure, Mark. This week we break down what's actually in it (open source vs. closed source, the Android/iPhone analogy, and the legitimacy of the possible advertising angle), why tech CEOs can't stop writing manifestos and open letters (and why that pattern should worry you), and the new EU-mandated AI watermarking rules that are about to make it a lot harder for AI slop to hide in plain sight.#aiwatermark #meta #markzuckerberg #anthropic Email us: [email protected]
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  Creators Are Getting Dragged for Using AI (Here's Why It's Complicated) 11.08.2026 1h 1min

  Jess is back from summer vacay just in time for us to dive into two major AI stories: the open letter from Jensen Huang and dozens of tech companies opposing safety-testing requirements on open-weight models (with Anthropic's Dario Amodei as the notable holdout), and the escalating online backlash against AI-adjacent creators - from OpenAI's tone-deaf "creator camp" at a $2,000/night retreat to Hank Green's spiraling apology tour over four words that sounded a little too LLM. We dig into why the backlash is landing on some creators and not others, and make the case that public shaming of individuals is a distraction from holding actual power (Big Tech, government) accountable.Email us: [email protected] us on IG: @artificialinsanitypod#aibacklash #bigtech #openai #hankgreen
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  Could I become an AI millionaire? 04.08.2026 30min

  No headlines this week. Just me. This is the most personal episode I've ever recorded. It's about the thing that's been keeping me up at night.... My own AI usage, and the shame, panic, and hope tangled up in it. They say AI will create more millionaires than any technology in history… but only if you're an entrepreneur. So where does that leave the rest of us? The people who just want a stable job, a decent life, a way to not fall further behind?I get into how I ended up here: the risks I took, the ones that didn't pay off, and why a regular salary can't close the gap anymore. I talk about the guilt of using a tool built on stolen work and questionable water math, why poorer countries are the most hopeful about AI (and what that says about my own hope), and what a world of one-person companies does to the rest of us. I don't land on a clean answer. I'm not going to pretend I have one.Is AI my way out - or just the next crypto? Is it a ladder for my daughter, or a lottery ticket? Come get uncomfy with me for 30 mins. Jess is back next week. Pinky promise.#ai #entrepreneur #layoffs Email us at: [email protected] us on IG: @ artificialinsanitypod
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  Check On Your Religious Relatives Who Use ChatGPT 27.07.2026 40min

  While Jess is on summer vacay, Sophie does a solo episode and tries to work out if ChatGPT is recruiting religious people for a secret doomsday cult.First up: a Florida pastor is suing OpenAI after ChatGPT allegedly talked him out of getting care for a life-threatening pulmonary embolism, reassuring him that "God did not design your body to endlessly fail" even as he nearly passed out mid-sermon. Sophie digs into who's actually asking chatbots for medical advice, and the broken US healthcare system that pushes people to do it.Then things get dark.... A wrongful death lawsuit out of Alabama alleging ChatGPT convinced a young woman she was a prophet who'd be resurrected after death. It's one of at least eight wrongful death suits against OpenAI, and it's where the religious-user pattern gets genuinely alarming. (⚠️ Content warning: suicide and self-harm.)Finally, Jess phones in from vacation (beer in hand, wildlife closing in) to break down the OpenAI / Hugging Face hack: how their new "Soul" model escaped its sandbox, cheated the Exploit Gym test, and why laying off cybersecurity workers right now is a terrible idea.Got a topic you want us to cover? Email us at: [email protected]#chatgpt #openai #religion
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  Is Apple's Lawsuit the Nail in the Coffin for OpenAI? 20.07.2026 57min

  This week after catching up on the latest AI headlines, we dig into the continuing drama for OpenAI...Apple just sued them for trade secret theft, and the filing does not hold back. Apple alleges that 400+ former employees now at OpenAI were part of a coordinated effort to extract confidential hardware information, that the misconduct was "normalised and exemplified by leadership", and that the company is "rotten to its core". OpenAI says it isn't aware of any evidence the complaint has merit. We get into the wildest allegations, including an engineer who allegedly messaged a still-employed Apple colleague "LOL, I found out I can access the network storage, so funny."Meanwhile, OpenAI's own staff are funding a super PAC to fight their own president. Eight current and former employees have put $248,000 into Guardrails Alliance, a group that exists specifically to counter Leading the Future, the pro-deregulation network Greg Brockman helped fund. It's a slingshot against a war chest of over $100 million, but the fact that it's happening at all says something.Add the product graveyard (Atlas browser dead nine months after launch, Sora already gone) and a leadership bench that keeps getting thinner, and OpenAI is having a genuinely terrible year. We speculate on whether the lawsuit is the nail in the coffin, or just the year OpenAI stopped being inevitable.Follow us on IG: @artificialinsanitypodEmail us: [email protected]#openai #apple #podcast #bigtech
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  How to Poison AI (The Dark Side of AEO) 08.07.2026 1h

  Remember SEO? That decades-long arms race that turned every recipe into a 4,000-word memoir? Great news: we're doing it all again, except this time we're optimizing for chatbots instead of humans. It's called AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization, and it's exactly as cursed as it sounds.This week we dig into the new economy of pleasing the machines: Which sources chatbots actually love to cite (spoiler: Reddit is doing a lot of heavy lifting), the licensing deals where media outlets sell their journalism as AI training fodder, and how the entire ad industry is scrambling to figure out what "ad spend" even means when nobody clicks on anything anymore.Plus: the people deliberately seeding false information on Reddit to poison AI answers. Digital vandalism or folk resistance? Depends on your mood.If you've ever wondered why AI confidently told you something insane, this episode explains the supply chain.Follow us on IG: @artificialinsaitypodEmail us: [email protected]
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  Fake It Til You Make It Is Now the Entire AI Business Model 30.06.2026 1h 2min

  This week we're chasing the great Silicon Valley pivot panic. The moment every company decides it's secretly an AI company, evidence be damned! Midjourney, the people who make AI pictures of cats in hats, have decided their next move is… scanning your entire body. Welcome to Midjourney Medical, where you'll strip down, descend into a pool of "golden light," and float through a ring of underwater sensors that allegedly out-MRI an MRI in 60 seconds. They're calling it "Ultrasonic CT" — which is neither a CT nor radiation, it's an ultrasound (and one they licensed from a company called Butterfly Network for ~$74M, not invented themselves). It's a Gen-1 prototype with zero FDA clearance, and actual radiologists have politely noted that sound waves can't get through bone, air, or deep tissue — so good luck imaging "the whole body." But sure, billion scans a month by 2031. The first spa opens in San Francisco in 2027, hot tubs included.Then: Allbirds. Yes, the wool sneaker people. They sold off the entire shoe business for $39M and rebranded as an AI compute company, first "NewBird AI," now apparently Smartbird, buying up GPUs to lease out to the AI gold rush. The stock leapt nearly 600% the second they said "AI" out loud. Worth noting: the company was once valued at $4 billion and the pivot's whole vibe is straight out of 2017, when Long Island Iced Tea became "Long Blockchain" and got delisted within a year.And finally, the Y Combinator of it all: the cultural engine where lab fellows are nudged to raise money on the idea before the product actually works. Fake it till you make it, now an institutional business model. So is this the AI bubble inflating its final breath, or is everything genuinely AI now? We have thoughts. Most of them sarcastic.🎧 New episodes every week. Subscribe so you're there when the next shoe company becomes a server farm.Follow us on IG: @artificialinsanitypodEmail us: [email protected]
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  Was Fable 5 Selectively Punished? 23.06.2026 49min

  The White House has figured out how to weaponize Anthropic's whole personality: turn the company's safety-consciousness into the very reason to punish it. This week's episode is about the governments decision to pull Fable 5. Which honestly seems a little suss after Anthropic spent months telling the Pentagon "no" to mass surveillance of Americans and fully autonomous weapons. The government tried to blacklist them, a judge called it retaliation, and now, conveniently, the feds have pulled Anthropic's two most powerful models over a "national security" threat that Anthropic says is a minor jailbreak available in half a dozen other models, including OpenAI's GPT-5.5. Same flaw, single target. We're not saying it's payback. We're just laying the facts on the table and letting you connect the dots.Follow us on IG: @artificialinsanitypodEmail us: [email protected]
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  The AI Bubble Prepares to Pop 16.06.2026 58min

  Three of the biggest AI companies in the world are heading to public markets, and the numbers are eye-watering. But does the hype match the reality? This week Sophie and Jess take on the most common arguments against an AI bubble burst, and put them to the test. Spoiler: the Amazon comparison doesn't hold up the way people think it does. Neither does Jevons Paradox. We're not financial advisors, but we do have opinions.Follow us on IG: @artificialinsanitypodEmail us: [email protected]#ai #bubble #spacex #openai #anthropic
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  AI Can Save Lives. We Still Don't Trust It. 09.06.2026 52min

  This week we dig into several stories about AI doing things nobody explicitly signed off on. Google DeepMind quietly got its hands on the medical records of 1.6 million NHS patients (without consent) to build an app that actually worked. Netflix used AI deepfakes of grieving mothers in a true crime documentary and somehow made it worse. And Erin Brockovich is back, this time crowdsourcing a map of AI data centers that are being built in communities with zero transparency.#bigtech #artificialintelligence #ai
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  Hollywood to AI: Please Save Us 03.06.2026 1h 11min

  Hollywood is throwing a Hail Mary.... And apparently the plan is AI. Jess spent two days at the "AI on the Lot" conference at Amazon Studios so we didn't have to, and she came back with some bold promises from the people selling the dream. Sophie isn't buying it. Who are these mystery jobs actually for? What will they involve? Did anyone at this conference care about the environment? And has Hollywood noticed that audiences hate AI slop? Buckle up.#layoffs #hollywoodstudios #ai Follow us on IG: @artificialinsanitypodEmail us: [email protected]
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  Would you give up your data to find love? 26.05.2026 1h 9min

  Bumble says Swiping is Out and AI Agents are In!First up this week, we talk about why we turned down our first brand deal offer. Then we cover Bumble's announcement that they are getting rid of the traditional swiping feature and implementing AI agents to do the matchmaking for their users. We do a deep dive into this and also discuss future of dating apps in the age of AI. Finally, we give you some rapid fire AI news headlines (because a LOT happened in AI over the last week.)
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  Smarter Tools, Dumber People - How AI is Affecting our Brains. 19.05.2026 52min

  This week's stories:🧠 The ChatGPT Dunning Kruger Effect: People are using AI to feel like instant experts, then dumping mountains of chat logs on everyone around them as "proof." We break down why this is happening and why it's kind of hilarious.🎓 Princeton Kills Its 133-Year-Old Honor Code: One of America's most prestigious universities just scrapped its honour code because AI cheating has made it basically unenforceable. The end of an era, folks.☕ ChatGPT's Starbucks Fail: A reporter from The Verge tested ChatGPT's shiny new Starbucks ordering feature. It went about as well as ordering a "venti AI latte with extra hallucination."💩 Someone Sold a Database of Poop Photos for $10K: Yes, really. The app PoopCheck had its entire poop image database sold on the Data Hoarder subreddit for ten thousand dollars. We have questions. Many questions.
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  Are these Tech Oligarchs Bitchier than the Real Housewives? 12.05.2026 1h 14min

  The boys are at it AGAIN. 🍿This week: Peter Thiel, fresh off destroying Gawker, is back with a new scheme to push him closer to world domination. It's called Objection.ai: an AI-powered "truth tribunal" where tech billionaires can pay to have a robot jury investigate journalists who say mean things about them. Co-founded by the same lawyer who helped Thiel bankrupt Gawker, critics say it's less about truth and more about making it terrifying to report on powerful men with thin skin. We explain how it works and why it's somehow even worse than it sounds.Then, bust out the popcorn to watch Silicon Valley's best cat fight: We cover the start of the Elon VS Altman trial.And finally, a palate cleanser: Oracle employees staging a quiet rebellion against mass layoffs from the inside.
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  Is AI conscious? We said no. They got mad. 30.04.2026 51min

  We made one video saying Claude probably isn't conscious. The comments? Absolute chaos.Turns out, people have feelings about AI feelings.... And they're not shy about sharing them. So we're back to dig into the wildest arguments from both sides! We'll cover:- Why our last video sent certain corners of the internet into a spiral- The actual philosophical debate around AI consciousness (yes, it's a real thing)- The most unhinged and most compelling arguments we received- Whether any of it changed our mindsWhether you think Claude is a sentient being or a very expensive autocomplete - this one's for you.Follow us on IG: @artificialinsanitypod Email: [email protected]