Age-Gating the Internet + Cloudflare Takes On A.I. Scrapers + HatGPT

Speaker 2 the last two decades, the world has witnessed incredible progress.

Speaker 4 From dial-up modems to 5G connectivity, from massive PC towers to AI-enabled microchips, innovators are rethinking possibilities every day.

Speaker 5 Through it all, Invesco QQQ ETF has provided investors access to the world of innovation with a single investment.

Speaker 7 Invesco QQQ, let's rethink possibility.

Speaker 1 There are risks when investing in ETFs, including possible loss of money.

Speaker 8 ETF's risks are similar to those of stocks.

Speaker 10 Investments in the tech sector are subject to greater risk and more volatility than more diversified investments.

Speaker 10 Before investing, carefully read and consider fund investment objectives, risks, charges, expenses, and more in perspectives at investco.com.

Speaker 11 Investco Distributors Incorporated.

Speaker 12 People on social media, Gen Z people, have started referring to robots as clankers. Have you heard this?

Speaker 13 I believe I saw something about this.

Speaker 12 Yes. So people are saying like, oh, like, I hate when I call customer support and a clanker picks up.
And, you know, this is sort of their new derogatory slang.

Speaker 13 Well, and it pairs nicely with another new piece of slang that I wonder if you heard because people are talking about people who use tools tools like ChatGPT Law and they're calling them sloppers.

Speaker 13 Really?

Speaker 12 Have you heard this?

Speaker 13 No. Yeah.
So it's like if you're, I don't know, you're out on the internet and you're publishing something and it seems like it's obviously just AI, somebody might call you a slopper.

Speaker 12 Mmm.

Speaker 13 Well, clankers and sloppers.

Speaker 12 Clankers and sloppers. I just think this is, it makes me a little uncomfortable, even though clankers is not, you know, actually, I think it's sort of a tongue-in-cheek thing.

Speaker 12 I just don't think we should be calling the robots names. I don't believe in slurring against anyone.

Speaker 13 You believe in an appeasement strategy with the robots.

Speaker 12 Just give them what they want. They are keeping score.
I believe that.

Speaker 12 I'm Kevin Roos. I'm a tech columnist at the New York Times.
I'm Casey Noon from Platformer. And this is Hard Fork.

Speaker 13 This week, why age gates are suddenly popping up all over the internet and how some could create more problems than they solve.

Speaker 13 Then, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince returns to the show to discuss his company's new plan to help websites fight back against AI scrapers. And finally, we're passing the hat for some hat GPT.

Speaker 12 Well, Casey, we are here yet again to remind our great listeners that they can have their very own hard fork hat if they so choose.

Speaker 13 It's time to get the hat. If you don't have the hat, the moment is now.

Speaker 12 Yes. For a limited time, you can get a hard fork hat with the purchase of a new annual New York Times audio subscription.
This is a special edition hat.

Speaker 12 This color is not going to be available anywhere ever again.

Speaker 12 And it'll be going on eBay for hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars.

Speaker 13 Millions of dollars.

Speaker 12 Millions of dollars. And you'll be like, why didn't I get a hard fork hat back when it was available to me? as part of a New York Times audio subscription.

Speaker 13 If you missed out on the Bitcoin boom, get this hat.

Speaker 12 Yeah, Yeah, they're calling it Hatcoin, and it's available now at nytimes.com slash hard fork hat.

Speaker 13 Kevin, how old are you?

Speaker 12 It's none of your business. How old are you?

Speaker 13 That's none of your business. But guess what? If we lived in the United Kingdom, it would be the government's business, Kevin.

Speaker 13 Because as many people found out over the last week, to use a lot of different websites, you now have to prove your age.

Speaker 12 Yes, this is the age gating issue, which I've heard a lot of people talking about. I know you wrote about it in your newsletter this week.
I'm excited to talk to you about it.

Speaker 12 And before we get into what is happening and some of the consequences and the reactions to this law, I wonder if you could just kind of sell me on the stakes.

Speaker 12 Why talk about how the UK's Online Safety Act is mandating age verification for websites? Why does it matter to me, an American?

Speaker 13 Sure. So I would say a couple things.
Number one, this truly is one of the most far-reaching attempts we have seen by a Western democracy to regulate speech online.

Speaker 13 We've talked on this show in the past about various ways that people want to protect children online. And requiring folks to verify their ages is one of the ways that has been discussed.

Speaker 13 But it's extremely rare to see it roll out across an entire country the way it has in the UK. So that's thing one.
Thing two is this stuff is coming to the United States.

Speaker 13 In June, the Supreme Court upheld a law in Texas that requires residents of Texas to do something very similar if they want to access adult content online.

Speaker 13 And so it's really not just a UK thing, Kevin. We are starting to see a gradual erosion of people's freedom of expression online.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I think that's well taken. And I might just even take a further step back and say, like, I think the internet for the last call it 40 years has

Speaker 12 been a kind of informational free-for-all, right? You are going to experience the same internet whether you were 13 years old or 25 years old or 50 years old.

Speaker 12 But what we are talking about now and what is happening in the UK is you have to establish your age in order to sort of access a number of different kinds of services, including social media.

Speaker 12 And one outcome here would just be that the internet actually kind of fragments in this way, where if you are 12 or 13 years old, you are just going to have a very different experience of the internet than someone who is 25 or 50.

Speaker 13 Yeah. And I think in addition to all of that, Kevin, there is just the fact that the way that websites are collecting this information is putting people at risk in ways that we can talk about.

Speaker 12 Okay, so let's just start with what is happening in the UK. What's the backdrop here?

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 13 So in 2023, the United Kingdom passes something called the Online Safety Act, and it includes provisions that require online services to try to spare minors from seeing what they would call harmful content online so porn is a big part of that but it also includes stuff about like if you have a pro-suicide website or a pro-eating disorder website you are now required in the united kingdom to first do a sort of like risk assessment of your website of hey could children access this and would they be exposed to this certain list of harms And if so, you then have to implement what they call like high quality age assurance, which means that no, you can't get away with just putting a box on your website that says, yes, I promise I'm 18.

Speaker 13 And so all of this goes into effect last Friday, the 25th, and things start to go a little bit haywire.

Speaker 12 What happens?

Speaker 13 Well, first of all, I think a lot of people in the UK just didn't realize that this was about to happen.

Speaker 13 And so, you know, they're sitting down for their evening visit to Pornhub, and all of a sudden they find that they are being asked to upload their driver's license to prove that they're actually 18.

Speaker 13 There are a number of of different ways that people are allowed to prove their identity.

Speaker 13 You could also, for example, show your credit card because you can't have a credit card unless you're at least 18.

Speaker 13 Or you can use your phone or laptop's camera to take a picture of you and they'll do some sort of, you know, AI in the background to figure out if they think that you're actually 18.

Speaker 13 But for a lot of adults who didn't see this coming,

Speaker 13 this produces some real anxiety because all of a sudden, an experience that had previously been basically completely private, right?

Speaker 13 Just visiting a website is now being linked to your personally identifying information. And who knows what's happening to it once you actually submit it.
Right.

Speaker 12 Now, is this just affecting porn sites or are there other kinds of websites where people are being asked to prove that they're of age?

Speaker 13 It is affecting many more kinds of sites. So X is being affected.
Many different subreddits are being affected. So like a stop smoking subreddit, a cider subreddit,

Speaker 13 various things that do not immediately seem like adult content and could actually be quite beneficial to minors. All of a sudden, you need to prove who you are if you want to access them.

Speaker 13 Also, Wikipedia has said that they may have to limit access to the site in the UK because of privacy concerns that are created by this law that would require them to collect a lot of information that they don't actually want to collect.

Speaker 12 Now, is there porn on Wikipedia?

Speaker 12 I haven't been able to find any of you.

Speaker 12 Okay.

Speaker 13 Well, I will say there are some Greek vases with some incredibly curvaceous men and women.

Speaker 12 And,

Speaker 13 you know, depending on what kind of night you're having.

Speaker 12 Right. So how are people in the UK reacting to this?

Speaker 13 This is not a keep calm and carry on situation, Kevin.

Speaker 12 Okay.

Speaker 13 More than 400,000 people have signed a petition saying that they want these changes to be reversed. And I will be curious to see where that goes.

Speaker 13 In the meantime, though, people are just finding ways to get around this.

Speaker 13 And I think to the extent that this law actually sticks around, I think this will be the reason why is that people have just found all sorts of relatively easy workarounds.

Speaker 13 One thing you can do is use what they call a virtual private network or VPN. All that does is just lie to your internet service provider and say, hey, I'm not in the UK.

Speaker 13 I'm in the United States where I can still watch most of what I want to watch. And so we're seeing a lot of that.
But we're also seeing people get much more creative.

Speaker 13 Now, are you familiar with the video game Death Stranding? No, I'm not. So unfortunately, this is so funny.

Speaker 13 If you have, if you know what Death Stranding is, it's this kind of very strange and beautiful video game made by this Japanese auteur.

Speaker 13 And people are using photo mode in the game to take pictures of the protagonist in order to fool the UK's age verification technology.

Speaker 13 And the reason this works is because in the photo mode of this game, you can tell the character, smile or frown. And it turns out that a lot of the age gates in the UK are doing the same.

Speaker 13 sort of thing. It's like if you're using the camera on your laptop, you're like, okay, now smile, okay, now frown.
People are now just doing this with the game Death Stranding.

Speaker 13 So if Death Stranding winds up being the best-selling video game in the UK this year, we'll know why.

Speaker 12 That's amazing. So, okay, has there been any response from the UK government or the safety authorities about people's reactions to this?

Speaker 12 Are they saying, we'll keep improving the systems or something like that?

Speaker 13 There was a response from Ofcom, the UK's media regulator.

Speaker 13 They have said that this act is not, quote, a silver bullet, but quote, until now, kids could easily stumble across porn and other online content that's harmful to them without even looking for it.

Speaker 13 Age checks will help prevent that.

Speaker 12 All right. So that is what is happening in the UK.

Speaker 12 Where are we in the US with these age gating laws? I've read some headlines about people in some states who are having to go through age verification to get to an adult website.

Speaker 12 But where are these laws and what is the regulatory picture here?

Speaker 13 So age verification laws have been passed in 24 states.

Speaker 13 And last month, the Supreme Court upheld a law in Texas that requires websites where more than one-third of the content is sexual material to use one of these age verification methods.

Speaker 13 And Justice Clarence Thomas spoke for the majority when he said, unlike a store clerk, a website operator cannot look at its visitors and estimate their ages without a requirement to submit proof of age.

Speaker 13 Even clearly, underage minors would be able to access sexual content undetected. So I suspect we're going to start to see these laws in more and more places.

Speaker 12 So, all right, let me try to steel man the case for age verification here because I think I am undecided about what I think about it, but I think you have decided that these laws are a bad idea.

Speaker 12 So I want to try to make the opposite case.

Speaker 12 We age gate things all the time to prevent minors from getting access to it or being exposed to it. So if I walk into a bar and the bouncer asks to see my ID, that is allowed.

Speaker 12 No one is contested whether that is a violation of the Constitution.

Speaker 12 If I walk into, this probably doesn't exist anymore, but when I was a kid, there were these things called nudie magazines.

Speaker 12 And if you wanted to go into a newsstand and get them, they were sort of like behind the counter. They would have these like special barriers on them.

Speaker 12 And you would have to prove that you were of age to be allowed to buy that. So why is what's going on with age verification on adult websites on the internet any different?

Speaker 13 So I share your concern here. I think that we should come up with ways to prevent minors from accessing this kind of adult material.

Speaker 13 I just object to the way in which they're doing it, which requires that people share a lot of personal information for the rest of the day.

Speaker 12 So you're not like opposed to age gating in like as a concept. You're just opposed to the way that they're doing it in the UK.

Speaker 13 Yes. And this year, Apple suggested a way to do age verification that I think is a lot more elegant, Kevin.
It's not available quite yet. They said this week to Bloomberg that it's coming soon.

Speaker 13 But basically, they're going to offer what they call an age assurance API.

Speaker 13 And if you are a parent and you're setting up your child's device, you can just tell the device, hey, my kid is X years old, right? Or here's my kid's birthday.

Speaker 13 Apple can then essentially anonymize that and pass it through to a developer. And so if you are a Facebook or an Instagram or a TikTok, you just get a little token that says, this person is 13.

Speaker 13 And so, you know, you may want to show them different kinds of content or you might want to restrict certain features and essentially put the onus on the parents and the device makers to do this.

Speaker 13 That way, if you're just a normal adult using the internet, you don't have to worry about uploading your driver's license to visit a website. So I think that that's a very elegant solution.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I prefer the on-device age verification rather than making every website operator go and do their own version of this and store all the driver's license photos and whatever else.

Speaker 12 So I did not know that Apple was building that. So you're saying that's going to be released soon?

Speaker 13 Yes, they're going to release that soon.

Speaker 13 Now, interestingly, Meta is trying to ensure that this does not become the way that this is handled because that still puts an onus on Meta to do a lot of the age checking.

Speaker 13 They want Apple and Google, which also has a big app store, to have the legal liability in cases where a minor does access material that they're not supposed to.

Speaker 13 And so Meta has been leading a charge, lobbying for a lot of bills around the country that would put the onus on Apple and Google to do all the verification instead of them having to play a role in it.

Speaker 13 And they've been having some success.

Speaker 12 Now, this confuses me because, you know, if I know one thing about Meta and other social media sites is that they are very good at collecting information on users and using machine learning to sort of detect who is more interested in what and who is part of what consumer segment.

Speaker 12 I assume that these platforms already know or have very good guesses about how old all of their users are. So what is the issue with just having them do the detection?

Speaker 12 I also saw that YouTube this week is looking at things like your browsing history and your consumption patterns and the kinds of videos you're searching for to make their best estimate of whether you are underage or not.

Speaker 12 So why shouldn't the platforms have a responsibility or a role here too?

Speaker 13 I think the platforms do and should have a responsibility.

Speaker 13 What we have seen is a lot of reporting over the past couple years that at Meta in particular, they were like writing reports about how many like under 13 users they had of Instagram.

Speaker 13 Jeff Horowitz and the Wall Street Journal did a lot of this reporting. It's, you know, know, both very disturbing, but like darkly comic to read.

Speaker 13 And like, yes, they absolutely knew that they had all of these younger users.

Speaker 13 And so they've spent the last year trying to release a lot of features that essentially make it more difficult for, you know, under 13s to use the platform.

Speaker 13 So all the platforms are kind of belatedly coming around on this. You know, you mentioned the YouTube thing.
Here's something really interesting about YouTube.

Speaker 13 This week, the Australian government said that they were going to ban YouTube for kids under 16.

Speaker 13 because they consider it social media, which was a major reversal from what they were saying before.

Speaker 13 I sort of think this is the sort of thing that if it was actually carried out, could cause the government of Australia to be toppled.

Speaker 12 A bunch of like angry Minecraft preteens are going to storm the, whatever the White House of Australia is.

Speaker 13 Yeah, but and we'll never know. But it just goes to show you, actually, if you know what the seat of government is in Australia, please email hard fork at nytimes.com.

Speaker 13 We were unable to find this information online due to age checks.

Speaker 13 Anyways, look, I've been a little bit, you know, glib about this, maybe in the spirit of trying to record an entertaining segment about tech policy, but the truth is that this stuff is very complicated.

Speaker 13 And I think everyone has a role to play, which is something that is very satisfying to say, but does not actually solve the problem.

Speaker 13 Because ultimately, if you want to solve the problem, somebody has to be responsible. Somebody has to try to implement a solution.

Speaker 13 Inevitably, when you implement a solution, people are going to be caught up in it. They're going to be, you know, falsely tagged as underage when they're overage or vice versa.
So it is really messy.

Speaker 13 What I'm trying to say is there are more privacy preserving ways of understanding a person's age online.

Speaker 13 And I would like to see us focus on those rather than this sort of blunt hammer approach that they're taking in the UK, which in practice is mostly just going to annoy a lot of adults and potentially put their public information out there in a way that could be breached, which is my way, Kevin, of introducing the conversation about tea.

Speaker 12 Oh, yes. Let's spill the tea about tea.

Speaker 13 Let's spill the tea about tea.

Speaker 12 Kevin, what was tea?

Speaker 13 And by the way, are there any red flags about you on tea?

Speaker 12 I haven't looked yet.

Speaker 12 I have not been able to look, nor will I be looking because of what happened over the past week. So T

Speaker 12 is an app that had a viral moment over the past week, in part because it reached briefly number one on the iOS App Store ahead of ChatGPT and Instagram and all these other apps.

Speaker 12 To my understanding, although I've never been on it, T is an app that allows women to sort of anonymously divulge experiences they've had with men.

Speaker 12 So basically dish the dirt about the guy you dated who was sort of a jerk to you or behaved in a way that you didn't like.

Speaker 12 And what got people's attention was that you could only register for this app if you were a woman. So they would do some kind of verification process when you signed up.

Speaker 12 I think you were asked to like scan your driver's license and also submit like a selfie so that they could sort of use AI to try to detect whether you are a woman or not not and keep out all the men.

Speaker 12 And this drove a lot of people on the internet insane. And so my understanding is they essentially hacked T.
They found that T had not secured some of these uploads that users had made.

Speaker 12 And they leaked a bunch of people's verification information and photos that they had submitted to T in kind of a revenge of the men. Yeah.

Speaker 13 And this gets to my exact concern with some of these age gating methods: it is just left up to the service provider to decide how you're going to verify people's ages.

Speaker 13 And while most countries do have some laws that regulate data, in practice, we just see breaches all of the time.

Speaker 13 It feels like every week, you know, you see headlines about one app or another is being breached. And in this case, you have material that is just ripe for someone to do stuff that is really abusive.

Speaker 13 And indeed, a bunch of 4chan users got a hold of all of these T selfies. They started creating like, you know, hot or not style websites, just doing all kinds of gross stuff with them.

Speaker 13 And that, again, I think is just a really predictable outcome of building these kinds of age gating technologies.

Speaker 12 Yeah. I think that's a really good.

Speaker 12 point and an example of why we should not be throwing this to the website operators and platforms because inevitably some of them are going to use really secure, really well-designed age verification services, but some of them are just going to do this in a very sloppy way and like inevitably leak people's personal information.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 13 And now like every online service just has to like have this database laying around. You know, it just like increases the risk across the entire internet for all of us.

Speaker 12 Yeah. So I think it makes a lot of sense to do it in a more centralized way through Apple and Google and their app stores.

Speaker 12 But I have also read that Apple has been lobbying against some of these state bills that would force them to do exactly that.

Speaker 12 So you just told me that Apple is building an age verification feature, but I've also read that Tim Cook at one point personally lobbied the governor of Texas not to do this kind of age verification thing.

Speaker 12 So what is going on here?

Speaker 13 So I think it's mostly just that they want to avoid the legal liability here. You know, I read one story that said, like, look, like Apple is a mall.
Facebook is a liquor store in the mall.

Speaker 13 Like you need to hold the liquor store accountable for who they are selling liquor to. Okay.
Like this is like the Apple metaphor. I think Apple does clearly want to play a role in the solution here.

Speaker 13 That's why they've sort of crafted this whole API, but they kind of want it to be on the honor system, right? Where it's like, hey, we're going to do this. We can all agree this is a good thing.

Speaker 13 Now leave us alone.

Speaker 13 And what the lawmakers are saying are like, yeah, that's like a good thing, but also we want to hold you legally liable if we find out that like a bunch of, you know, eight-year-olds are, I don't know, like, you know, watching eating disorder content on TikTok.

Speaker 12 Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And I'll also say, like, this is an issue, this age gating thing, where I find that my values are intention

Speaker 12 because I agree with you that the First Amendment is important, that adults should be able to like access all manner of information on the internet, even if it is lewd or obscene or inappropriate for children.

Speaker 12 I don't want a kind of UK style system where like you have to upload your driver's license to some, you know, database that may or may not be secure just to go like look at a subreddit.

Speaker 12 At the same time, I totally understand

Speaker 12 that parents have legitimate concerns here.

Speaker 12 I talk to so many parents who are just at their wits end about how to safely introduce things like social media or smartphones or the internet to their children without just sort of opening the floodgates.

Speaker 12 And parental controls are the thing that everyone talks about, but any parent can tell you these are not perfect you practically have to become like a part-time IT person to just to be able to like understand and control what your underage kids are doing on the internet so I totally understand where the anger comes from at these companies that have made it very clear that they don't want to be doing any of this they don't want this to be their responsibility but I think that we are going to move to an internet with age verification in the United States and around the world.

Speaker 12 I just think that is going to happen. There's enough public pressure at this point that it is sort of inevitable in my mind.

Speaker 12 And so I would like to see it done in a way that preserves the privacy of those users rather than having sort of tea style leaks every six months.

Speaker 13 I would like that too. You know, here's sort of the last thing I would say about this, Kevin.
You know, this may not be the free expression that you, the listener, cares. about the most.

Speaker 13 You may be happy to upload your ID if you want to look at adult content on the internet or even Wikipedia.

Speaker 13 But what I am going to say is I view this very much as part and parcel with just a widespread clawback of speech rights in the United States over the past six months.

Speaker 13 Look at the attacks on free speech that we've seen against journalists, against academia, against broadcast media, right?

Speaker 13 And now you are coming along and saying, by the way, now you need to show government ID to look at a website. Like these things are all of a piece.

Speaker 13 And I think it's important that we think about them as being of a piece because it may be that, you know, six months, a year from now, we look back and we think, wow, we have really lost a lot of ground with free expression.

Speaker 13 And the time to talk about that online is while you still can.

Speaker 12 I see. Well, thank you for explaining this to me.
It was not immediately clear to me why I needed to care about a tech regulation in the United Kingdom, but I think I get it now. Yeah.

Speaker 13 I feel like just doing this segment has aged me about 10 years.

Speaker 12 Yeah. Also, I'm looking at a list of British expressions that mean really angry.

Speaker 12 And I just have to read some of these too.

Speaker 12 Like a bear with a sore head.

Speaker 12 Okay.

Speaker 12 Throwing a wobbly.

Speaker 12 Throwing a wobbly. Yeah.

Speaker 12 Anyway, I'm throwing a wobbly over this regulation, and

Speaker 12 I think a lot of other Brits are in a right tizzy.

Speaker 12 When we come back, Matthew Prince from Cloudflare will explain how he's trying to keep the internet safe from AI crawlers.

Speaker 13 Not to mention the clankers and the sloppers.

Speaker 2 Over the last few decades, the world has witnessed incredible progress.

Speaker 4 From dial-up modems to 5G connectivity, from massive PC towers to AI-enabled microchips, innovators are rethinking possibilities every day.

Speaker 5 Through it all, Invesco QQQ ETF has provided investors access to the world of innovation with a single investment.

Speaker 7 Invesco QQQ, let's rethink possibility.

Speaker 1 There are risks when investing in ETFs, including possible loss of money.

Speaker 8 ETF's risk is similar to those of stocks.

Speaker 10 Investments in the tech sector are subject to greater risk and more volatility to the more diversified investments.

Speaker 10 Before investing, carefully read and consider front investment objectives, risks, charges, expenses, and more in perspectives at Invesco.com.

Speaker 11 Investco Distributors Inc.

Speaker 14 Can your software engineering team plan, track, and ship faster? Monday Dev says yes.

Speaker 14 With Monday Dev, you get fully customizable workflows, AI-powered context, and integrations that work within your IDE. No more admin bottlenecks, no add-ons, no BS.

Speaker 14 Just a frictionless platform built for developers. Try it for free at monday.com slash dev.
You'll love it. Dell AI PCs are newly designed to help you do more faster.

Speaker 14 That's the power of Dell AI powered by Intel Core Ultra Processors. Upgrade today by visiting dell.com/slash deals.

Speaker 12 Well, Casey, we've got a very exciting guest with us today. Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, is here to talk about something new that they've been working on.

Speaker 13 Yeah, and I am so excited about this, Kevin, because it actually is kind of in the dead center of my own interests as somebody who has a website on the internet.

Speaker 12 And Casey, because we are talking about AI in this segment, we should talk about our disclosures.

Speaker 13 That's right, Kevin. Well, my boyfriend works for the notorious AI scraping company Anthropic.

Speaker 12 And my employer, the New York Times, is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged copyright violations related to the training of large language models.

Speaker 12 So Cloudflare, for those who may remember our last podcast with Matthew, is sort of the plumbers and bouncers of the internet, right?

Speaker 12 They make a lot of these security services like DDoS Protection that many, many websites rely on to keep their services safe. They also do a host of other security and data-related things.

Speaker 12 And Matthew is a sort of die-hard supporter of the internet.

Speaker 12 And so a couple years ago, when all these AI bots started scraping the internet to feed data into their models, he and Cloudflare got really nervous about this.

Speaker 12 And so they have been doing a lot of interesting things to try to preserve what they see as the heart of the internet.

Speaker 12 And recently they made a lot of waves by announcing that Cloudflare would start to introduce default blocking of these AI data scrapers, basically preventing AI companies from automatically being able to exploit and scrape the data from the websites that they're visiting.

Speaker 12 This is a step that he said would help to protect content creators like you online.

Speaker 13 Yeah. And so I'm excited to talk to him about that.
And also, Kevin, just about some of the research that Cloudflare has been doing into the state of the web as a whole.

Speaker 13 You know, you and I have both been worried about what the rise of AI means for the internet in general. Cloudflare has taken a close look at that and has some interesting things to say.

Speaker 12 Yeah, it's one of the sort of more underappreciated companies on the internet. Their decisions about even seemingly small things can have enormous ripple effects throughout the industry.

Speaker 12 So I thought it was a really good time to bring on Matthew and ask him some questions about what they're doing and why.

Speaker 13 Well, let's bring him in.

Speaker 12 Matthew Prince, welcome back to Hard Fork.

Speaker 15 Thanks for having me.

Speaker 12 So we're going to talk about AI and scraping and all the steps that you're you're taking to sort of protect the internet.

Speaker 12 But before we describe the solution that you're proposing, which you announced on something called Content Independence Day, I want to ask you to describe the problem.

Speaker 12 You had some pretty shocking numbers in your post on this about how much internet traffic patterns have already changed as a result of AI.

Speaker 12 So talk a little bit about those and why you felt the need to do something about it.

Speaker 15 Sure. So, you know, at Cloudflare, we sit in front of north of 20% of the web.
So we see a lot of what's happening online.

Speaker 15 And we understand, I think, a lot of how the web works and the business model that exists behind it. And 25 years ago, basically Google struck a deal, an implicit deal with publishers, which was

Speaker 15 You let us copy all of the content that you're creating, and in exchange, we'll send you traffic. And

Speaker 15 the whole web, the economy of the entire web was really built on that search-based interface.

Speaker 15 However, over the last 10 years, Google has changed what that interface looks like. It started sort of subtly, starting about eight years ago, when they introduced the answer box.

Speaker 15 And the answer box is: if you type in something like, when did Cloudflare launch, instead of you having to go to 10 blue links, it just says September 27th, 2010.

Speaker 15 And that was a pretty radical change because back in the day, Larry and Sergey used to brag about how their job was to get people off google.com as quickly as possible, right?

Speaker 15 They even measured the time up in the corner to show you just how fast you basically were

Speaker 15 leaving their site. And now all of a sudden, Google was keeping you on the site.
More recently, they've introduced something that's AI overview.

Speaker 15 So if you do a search, most of the time now, overview shows up, which is an AI summary of what's going on. And that has made a big difference in how much traffic goes to content creators from search.

Speaker 12 How much of a difference? Like, put some numbers on that.

Speaker 15 Yeah, so if you take 10 years ago as the sort of the standard and you compare it with today, it's almost 10 times harder to get traffic today for a piece of content than it was 10 years ago.

Speaker 15 And it's gotten significantly worse just since the introduction of AI Answerbox. That's just with Google.
And that's the good news. If you look at the AI companies, OpenAI is 750 times harder.

Speaker 15 Anthropic is 30,000 times harder. What's basically happening is as the interface of the web is shifting from search to AI, people are consuming derivatives, not originals.

Speaker 15 Basically, they're not following the footnotes. And we've actually seen it get even worse as people are actually trusting the AI systems more because the AI systems are getting better.

Speaker 15 And what scares us about that is that There are really three reasons people create content.

Speaker 15 Maybe, maybe not you, Kevin, but one is

Speaker 12 vanity. It's mine.

Speaker 12 But that's a big thing.

Speaker 15 There's a whole bunch of content that's just created

Speaker 15 for just the ego and the fame of doing it. But the business model is you either sell subscriptions or you sell ads or both of those things.

Speaker 15 And so the value has to be either make people famous or make them rich through ads or subscriptions. That is what has built the web over the last 25 years.

Speaker 15 The problem is that publishers are struggling already at 10 times harder.

Speaker 15 I worry that as more and more of the interface of the web looks like OpenAI or Anthropic, they're dead at 750 times and they're buried in the ground and forgotten about it 30,000 times.

Speaker 15 And so if that's the case, if there's not an incentive for people to create content, I think people will stop creating content. And that really is an existential threat to the web.

Speaker 12 Okay, that's a pretty good and concise description of the problem. So what is the solution here? What are you all doing?

Speaker 15 Well, so I don't pretend to know exactly what the solution is, but I know kind of some of the aspects of how we have to get there. So the answer has to be that AI companies have to pay for content.

Speaker 15 The deal is different than it used to be with search. Search, they

Speaker 15 copied your content and in exchange, they sent you traffic that you could monetize.

Speaker 15 If now they're copying your content, they're not sending you anything, then why would you give them their content in the beginning? So AI companies have to pay for content.

Speaker 15 And I think what's encouraging is we're actually seeing some AI companies that are doing that.

Speaker 15 Amazon just announced a deal with the New York Times that, you know, OpenAI has done a number of content deals that are out there.

Speaker 15 But the problem with a lot of those deals that we realized was,

Speaker 15 you know, Sam at OpenAI can't be a sucker. He can't pay for content and then have all of his competitors get it for free.

Speaker 15 Or another way of thinking of this is you can't have a market unless you have some level of scarcity.

Speaker 15 And so what we thought the first step was, and what we announced on July 1st in conjunction with the who's who of the world's publishers was we're going to by default block the ability for AI crawlers to get content unless they are compensating the content creators for getting that content.

Speaker 15 And we think that that's super important. Now, exactly how the compensation works, again, I think there's a lot of different models.

Speaker 15 I analogize it to, and at risk of hubris, when Apple announces, you know, the introduction of iTunes, 99 cents a song, right? That wasn't what the final business model was.

Speaker 15 The final business model that we've kind of come to is more like Spotify, where it's 10 bucks a month and you get kind of all you can eat from the Spotify playlist.

Speaker 15 I think we're going to take some iterations to figure out where we, you know, we might start at some price, you know, fixed price that's there, and we might evolve to something which is more like a Spotify model over time.

Speaker 15 But the first step has to be actually saying, if you're an AI company, you can't get content for free.

Speaker 12 Now, if I'm a website operator and I want to prevent AI bots from scraping my site, I can already do that through robots.txt.

Speaker 12 I can just put a little file in the metadata and I can say, hey, these three crawlers, you're allowed to scrape, but these other six, you're not allowed to scrape.

Speaker 12 So how is what you are building with Cloudflare different than that?

Speaker 15 Well, the first thing is

Speaker 15 with robots.txt, the analogy would be like it's the speed limit sign, where it says, okay, you can drive 55 miles an hour, right?

Speaker 15 There's no law of physics that says you have to draw 55 miles an hour. And I think a lot of us maybe sort of look at the speed limit sign and go, ah, you know, it's probably 60 is okay, right?

Speaker 15 It's the same thing.

Speaker 15 It is a recommendation. It's not an actual enforcement that's there.
That's problem number one. Problem number two is it's incredibly blunt in terms of what it does.

Speaker 15 So you basically have to apply it across a significant portion of your site. So you can't say, okay, let these things out, but not let these things.
The last problem is a lot of the search companies,

Speaker 15 because again, we see a huge amount of the internet. We can track how this works.
A lot of the AI companies, I should say.

Speaker 15 If they hit a robots.txt file, what they then do is they find some other way to go out and scour the internet to find your same content.

Speaker 15 So they'll actually do a search against Bing and try and pull the cache content, or they'll go look at the internet archive, or they'll actually do things that are incredibly sneaky, like pinging ad server networks to get a description of the page that comes back to them and try and find all kinds of things around it.

Speaker 15 We've tracked some of the sort of worst performing AI companies and there's a huge range. Like OpenAI, they're actually the good guys here.
They're doing things right.

Speaker 15 They're trying to do things the right way, but by far the best behavior. There are others that

Speaker 15 most closely resemble like North Korean hackers, where they're literally using residential proxies to spoof who they are to try to get around the various blocks.

Speaker 15 And so I think that in addition to a road sign, for the badly behaving bots, we we actually need something where we say, we're going to take away your car because you keep, you know, going 400 miles an hour down the road.

Speaker 13 Tell us a bit how technically the solution that you've built works. How are you able to build those kind of fine-grained controls?

Speaker 15 Yeah. So, I mean, so Cloudflare,

Speaker 15 we're essentially a giant network and a ton of the web sits behind us. And so it has to flow through our pipes.
And our primary business for most of our history has been cybersecurity.

Speaker 15 So every day we go to war with the North Korean hackers, the Russian hackers, the Iranian hackers, the Chinese hackers who are trying to get into our customer systems one way or another.

Speaker 15 And we're really good at identifying, no matter what they pretend to be, we're really good at identifying who they are, what they're doing, and stopping them, literally by just not letting their traffic get to our customers.

Speaker 15 What we realized, though, was that actually gave us the perfect position to be able to help anyone who is a content creator also set what were enforced rules of the road where we can say if this bot is behaving in a bad way that we're going to block it.

Speaker 15 So for instance,

Speaker 15 as we have now studied this and we have very good evidence on what even some of the major AI companies are doing that's really sleazy, we're going to put them in timeout.

Speaker 15 We're actually going to stop their ability to access a huge portion of the web, even if they pretend that they're doing it.

Speaker 15 And we've got the records to do that and our security teams have actually investigated and figured that out. On the other hand, hand, when somebody is, if OpenAI has done a deal,

Speaker 15 we also want to make sure that they get that content as efficiently as possible and structured in a way which is possible. So the content creator can say, I want to allow OpenAI to come to my page.

Speaker 15 I think what will develop over time is then what is sort of a standard rack rate, where you as a content creator, even if you're small, can say, okay, I'm happy to let this content be scraped, but here's the price for it.

Speaker 15 And that's something that, you know,

Speaker 15 how that market will develop, I think is going to be what, you know, kind of the next steps of this project.

Speaker 12 Now, you announced this new approach to AI crawlers a few weeks ago and flipped this switch that blocks all the crawlers by default.

Speaker 12 What has the reaction been from publishers, from AI companies, from people who are inside Cloudflare looking at the data?

Speaker 15 Yeah. So, I mean, from publishers, not surprisingly, I am on a lot more people's Christmas lists.

Speaker 15 Like we're, we, this, because, because publishers were really struggling with how to deal with this. They saw the problem and they didn't have a good technical solution to be able to lock it down.

Speaker 15 They're, you know, they're, they're not cybersecurity companies. So they, they have a harder time being able to track this.

Speaker 15 And so the, the glee that we've seen from publishers as they've turned the system on, seen what was going on, and then had the ability to push a button and say, you know, disallow, disallow, disallow, disallow has been really, really palpable.

Speaker 15 And I think that's why this resonated across such a wide swath of the publisher base.

Speaker 15 What surprised me has been the reaction of the AI companies, which I kind of thought that they were just going to throw up all over this and hate it. But it hasn't been that.

Speaker 15 For the most part, with a couple of exceptions, they've said, listen, we get it. Ultimately, content is the fuel that runs our engine, and we need to pay for it.

Speaker 15 But the key is it needs to be a level playing field. And so I think that

Speaker 15 what I am encouraged by is in all the conversations that I've been a part of, the AI company said, if you can make it a level playing field, if you can make it something that's fair, then we're willing to pay for content.

Speaker 15 And that, I think, is that's a dramatic step that says that we're headed in the right direction. Now, making it fair is going to be going to be a trick.

Speaker 15 And folks like Google, who can just believe that they've got kind of a God-given right to be able to copy everything off the web, like that's going to take some persuading to get there.

Speaker 15 But I think as the industry lines up and says this is the right thing to do, that we'll be able to even get Google to hopefully voluntarily.

Speaker 15 But if not, there's certainly enough investigations on them going on around the world that one way or another, I think that they will be persuaded or compelled to get behind this effort.

Speaker 13 I mean, basically what you're describing is a revenue share deal, right?

Speaker 13 And it seems only logical that a company like Google, which is going to be making a lot more revenue by crawling everyone's content because they're such a source of queries,

Speaker 13 should be paying more than the upstart AI company that just shows up on day one and wants to start crawling the web. So I would hope that they would be open to that.

Speaker 15 I think I am encouraged, and I do believe that Google really does believe in the ecosystem and they get it.

Speaker 15 But it's a little bit of the frog boiling in water, where 10 years ago or 25 years ago when Google started,

Speaker 15 it was a good deal. Like, you know, get in the nice pot of water.

Speaker 12 You're happy. You're a frog, right?

Speaker 15 But they've slowly turned the heat up and that's made what used to be a good deal into a much, much worse deal. And so the deal needs to get renegotiated.
And that's a, that's a big piece of it.

Speaker 15 The other thing that I think is, is important is

Speaker 15 you need to have access to content. And that's the thing today that's cheap.
But my prediction is that over time, the real differentiator

Speaker 15 between the different AI companies is who has access to the most interesting content.

Speaker 15 And we've seen this play out with things like Netflix, where you can see that by getting original content, it actually drives subscribers.

Speaker 15 And so I think that at the end of the day, it's exactly right that fundamentally what content producers should be arguing for is we should be getting a share of whatever the revenue that you're generating from users is because we're the fuel that runs the engine that is powering your business.

Speaker 13 I feel like you can already see this today. And Kevin, I'm sure you've seen this.
Matthew, I'd be curious if you have too.

Speaker 13 But if you ever use one of these chatbots to run a deep research report, because you're trying to really bone up on some

Speaker 13 set of historical facts or, you know, recent current events that you want to write about. You get these results and like half of them are from like bleepbloop.com, you know, like

Speaker 13 newswire.xyz, like publishers that no one has ever heard of and that you're not entirely sure are on the level.

Speaker 13 And so often when I run those searches, I think, God, I wish that the sources I trust actually did just have deals with these chatbots or that I could like log in with my like Bloomberg credentials and then just have you read Bloomberg too as part of the report that you're making.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 15 And I think, I mean, all of those things will come, but two, two things. One, bleep, blop, bloop.com

Speaker 15 actually sometimes is going to have really interesting original content.

Speaker 15 And I think part of the key here is we don't want to create a situation where the only people who get the content deals are the major, major publishers.

Speaker 15 I mean, the New York Times can do a big deal with open AI. At the same time, you want to make sure that the small AI companies, the new startups are able to also get access to this.

Speaker 15 So a vibrant market here is lots of sellers and lots of buyers. And you want to be able to do that.

Speaker 12 Right.

Speaker 12 Now, you mentioned that publishers are very happy about the steps that Cloudflare has taken to block these AI crawlers, that AI companies were not as excited, understandably, but maybe they would get on board too.

Speaker 12 I did talk to one AI executive about this who basically accused you and Cloudflare of setting up a new toll booth between the AI companies and the content companies because you are not only providing this technology, but you are sort of inserting yourselves as the merchant of record in these transactions.

Speaker 12 And this person asked me to ask you what percentage of each payment Cloudflare plans to take. So what percentage does Cloudflare plan to take from these transactions?

Speaker 15 So first of all, like if you're the New York Times and you do a deal with Open AI, that's your deal. We don't get any of that.

Speaker 15 If we facilitate that, so if we're the ones who go out and negotiate it, then yeah, we'll take some percentage of it.

Speaker 15 And I have no idea what that will be, but I think it'll be something reminiscent of like what spot, what does Spotify take of a subscriber's revenue versus what do they pay out?

Speaker 15 And usually that's sort of in the 20 to 30 percent range of what that is. I think the only way that we should get something is if we're actually generating value from this.

Speaker 15 And if not, then you should do the deals yourself between the AI companies and the publishers.

Speaker 15 And in that case, sure, we'll provide you the interface to be able to stop it, but that isn't something that we would take any percentage of.

Speaker 15 What's also important is we provide this at no cost to even our free users because we think that this is fundamentally important to the sort of health of the long-term internet.

Speaker 15 Like, it shouldn't be something that just the big companies can get access to.

Speaker 15 And so, no matter who you are, if you're signing up for Cloudflare, you get these tools, you get the analytics, you get the understanding, you get the ability to block it.

Speaker 15 And again, I think that we will be less involved in the transactions for folks like the New York Times, but for BitBopBloop.com or whatever, that's that probably it's probably a porn site that we're pointing people to.

Speaker 15 And you can sort of envision what it might be.

Speaker 15 But

Speaker 15 if that's the case, then yeah, I think that that's a place where if we're doing work, then we should get compensated for that work.

Speaker 13 I mean, you know, so I have a website on the internet, platformer.news. That's where my newsletter is.

Speaker 13 And I'm super interested in this because I frankly just do not have the time or energy to go out and try to strike deals with AI companies.

Speaker 13 I also have no idea what the value of platformer is in that particular marketplace.

Speaker 13 So if somebody wants to go like make a market and then I can just show up and you tell me like, hey, you know, we can make you 80 bucks this year or like whatever it is, like I'm interested.

Speaker 13 And you want to take 20% of that? Sure.

Speaker 15 That's, yeah. And I think that that's, that, that feels fair.
And yeah, hopefully we're not the only ones doing this.

Speaker 15 Like from my perspective personally, like my wife and I own a small newspaper in our hometown. We see how hard and how important it is to have local news.
And there's got to be a business model to it.

Speaker 15 Like

Speaker 15 reporters need to eat. You know, it costs money to print papers.
Like you have to have a business model that's there.

Speaker 15 You know, I think personally, we've built a $60 billion company on the back of the internet. Like I feel an enormous responsibility to give back to the internet and actually protect it.

Speaker 15 Our mission is to help build a better internet. And if you talk to anyone at Cloudflare, that's why they work for us.
And so like

Speaker 15 with all due respect to the AI executive, they've built an entire company by stealing content creators' content and not compensating to them for that.

Speaker 15 And if they keep doing that, people will stop creating content, which not only kills the internet, but kills them in the process.

Speaker 12 Yeah. I think there are a lot of people who would agree with you.

Speaker 12 One of them is not President Trump. He said just last week in connection with some new AI policy rollouts that he was doing.

Speaker 12 He basically took the side of the AI companies and said that they shouldn't have to pay for copyrighted material.

Speaker 12 He said, quote, you can't be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book, book, or anything else that you've read or studied, you're supposed to pay for, it's not doable.

Speaker 12 So

Speaker 12 I guess, what is the incentive for an AI company to agree to something like a pay-per-crawl system if the current administration is signaling that they're not going to face any penalty for just breaking copyright the old way?

Speaker 15 Yeah, and I think

Speaker 15 like many things that sometimes come out of the Trump administration, nuance is a little bit lost here.

Speaker 15 We've actually talked with a number of people in the Trump administration, and I think what what they are concerned about is much more a government-instituted kind of you must pay X

Speaker 15 in the way that we've seen come out of Australia and the way that we've seen come out of Canada. I think that's what they're trying to signal that they're not in favor of.

Speaker 15 They are very much in favor of, as far as we can tell, private market solutions where that is created.

Speaker 15 And so, again, I think the incentive for the AI company is you need content in order to have access to

Speaker 15 build your tools, and we've just stopped you from getting it.

Speaker 15 And so, regardless of what the law says, we're going to be able to technically stop the AI companies from being able to get the content unless they're compensating the content creators for it.

Speaker 12 I want to ask you, Matthew, about another release that you all did earlier this year related to this issue of AI crawling, which was something called the AI Labyrinth.

Speaker 12 This was a system that was designed to basically, instead of blocking AI crawlers, it would just sort of redirect them to an endless series of AI-generated links and pages, basically, you know, trapping them in this labyrinth that they could not escape from.

Speaker 12 So my first question is, do you worry that the robots will remember that you did this to them and take their revenge?

Speaker 15 That is not a risk factor that we have currently included in our S1, but I'll talk to our legal team about it.

Speaker 15 We now have the data that there are some AI companies, big AI companies, well-funded, that are just behaving horribly.

Speaker 15 And frankly, if they're going to behave like hackers, then we're going to behave like trolls right back to them. And we can feed enough garbage into their system that they will create garbage content.

Speaker 15 And so, again, when we come back to what's the incentive, like you don't want to piss us off because, because again, we believe in the future of the internet. We believe in supporting journalists.

Speaker 15 We believe in supporting content creators. We're on the side, the right side of history here.
And so the right thing to do is say, yeah, you're spending $10 billion

Speaker 15 on GPUs. You're spending billions of dollars on employees.
You should be dedicating at least something to paying for content.

Speaker 12 Did the labyrinth work? Like, what was the result of that?

Speaker 15 It's, I mean, for real, you know, we try not to put like OpenAI, good, good actor, doing great, doing all the things right. So we, we don't throw them in.

Speaker 12 This message was not endorsed by the New York Times legal team.

Speaker 15 That's, yes.

Speaker 15 But, but for bad actors, and there are bad actors out there, we can pollute their data and we can pollute it at scale.

Speaker 13 You know, I'm having the, I think,

Speaker 13 entirely novel feeling of a hard fork recording where I'm feeling optimistic about the state of the media.

Speaker 13 Like every single time we talk about the internet and the media on this show, I'm like, well, it's going to be really tough, everybody. You know, batting down the hatches.
The storm is here.

Speaker 13 But Matthew, you actually are giving me optimism that, you know, when someone with the right incentives, and I do feel like you have the right incentives, shows up with great technology and like the willingness to go out and make a market, maybe by hook and by crook, like we actually still will have a media industry five years from now.

Speaker 15 Well, and I think it, again, and I might lose people because this is, this is starting to get a little, a little woo-woo, but

Speaker 15 everything that's wrong with the world today is ultimately Google's fault. Now, that's a little strong,

Speaker 15 but Google taught us, they were the first ones to really teach us, that traffic was the deity that we all had to worship to.

Speaker 15 Now, and again, I think Google's actually been a net positive for the world massively. But Google beget

Speaker 15 Facebook, which beget TikTok, which is just kind of spiraling down intowards sort of the attention economy of how do I create a cortisol response and get people to click on my stuff so that we can sell ads to them.

Speaker 15 I think that that's the wrong direction for really furthering humanity.

Speaker 15 If on the other hand, as we create this, if the giant block of cheese has holes in it, and we can say that if you as a creator go out there and create something that fills in one of those holes and we'll compensate you for that, we'll pay you more for it.

Speaker 15 What I'm hopeful is that we get a lot more really interesting, long-form knowledge generating content, which is what we all want, which was, and the only reason we're not getting it is because all of the incentives are not how do we do great things, but how do we actually just rage bait people into clicking on links?

Speaker 15 And so. I think it's super important that as we go through this, like it shouldn't just be us figuring this out.
And so I've tried to spend as much time with publishers, with AI companies.

Speaker 15 we've worked with some of the leading academic economists, others to sort of say, as we think about this market, how do we make sure it's as healthy as possible?

Speaker 15 Because the dark mirror version of this is not that journalists go away, not that researchers go away. It's that they're all employed by the five big AI companies, right?

Speaker 15 And so it's not that we're going to go back to kind of the media times of

Speaker 15 the early 90s. It's that we're going to go back to the media times of like the Medicis, where you have just these five powerful families that control all of

Speaker 15 academia and research and journalism. And that's that, it's not actually that hard to envision.

Speaker 15 There will be a conservative one, sort of the Fox News version. There will be the liberal one.
There will be the Chinese one. There will be the

Speaker 15 Europeans attempt at one.

Speaker 15 And those will be the things that are out there and knowledge gets consigned behind that. I don't want that to happen.

Speaker 15 And I think the key to making that not happen is figuring out how we can have a healthy market with lots of sellers of content, lots of buyers of content, and make that as robust as possible.

Speaker 12 Yeah. Now, Matthew, I know in the past you have expressed some concerns about the power that you and Cloudflare have by virtue of, you know, sitting in front of 20% of the internet, as you say.

Speaker 12 And when we've talked before, it's been, some of it has been in the context of the decisions you've made around content moderation, basically deciding whether or not to protect websites with extreme or violent content on them.

Speaker 12 You sort of famously pulled protection from 8chan, which led that site to go down after some mass shootings.

Speaker 12 I think a lot of people understood that, but you were concerned at the time that this sort of unilateral power that you had to sort of like wake up and make a big change to the structure of the internet wasn't something that maybe anyone should have.

Speaker 12 So I'm curious, like when you were deciding to implement this change to push the button, to block all the AI crawlers by default, did you worry about that exercise of power and how sort of unilateral it was?

Speaker 15 Totally. And I think we take that responsibility really seriously.
But what we realized was all the publishers were sitting around saying, we're dying, we're dying, we're dying.

Speaker 15 And no one was doing anything about it.

Speaker 15 And so like, if you're in that situation and you see something that really matters, I mean, the internet really matters and we should be fighting for it and we should be protecting it.

Speaker 15 And it's dying because the business model behind it is dying. And at no step have we said we're the only solution.
In fact, we've tried to work with as many different

Speaker 15 even competitors as possible to say, this is important. Let's do it.
And we don't pretend that we have the answer. or that it won't evolve over time.

Speaker 15 But we do know that the first step in any market has to be creating scarcity. And so that's what we did on July 1st.

Speaker 12 Got it. Well, Matthew, thank you so much for stopping by.
Really interesting experiment. I'm excited to follow it and see how it plays out.

Speaker 15 Thank you guys for having me.

Speaker 13 Thanks, Matthew.

Speaker 12 When we come back, we'll pass the hat for a big round of Hat GPT.

Speaker 2 Over the last two decades, the world has witnessed incredible progress.

Speaker 4 From dial-up modems to 5G connectivity, from massive PC towers to AI-enabled microchips, innovators are rethinking possibilities every day.

Speaker 5 Through it all, Invesco QQQ ETF has provided investors access to the world of innovation with a single investment.

Speaker 7 Invesco QQQ, let's rethink possibility.

Speaker 1 There are risks when investing in ETFs, including possible loss of money.

Speaker 8 ETF's risks are similar to those of stocks.

Speaker 10 Investments in the tech sector are subject to greater risk and more volatility than more diversified investments.

Speaker 10 Before investing, carefully read and consider fund investment objectives, risks, charges, expenses, and more in perspectives at evesco.com.

Speaker 11 Investco Distributors Incorporated.

Speaker 14 Can your software engineering team plan, track, and ship faster? Monday Dev says yes.

Speaker 14 With Monday Dev, you get fully customizable workflows, AI-powered context, and integrations that work within your IDE.

Speaker 14 No more admin bottlenecks, no add-ons, no BS. Just a frictionless platform built for developers.
Try it for free at monday.com/slash dev. You'll love it.

Speaker 14 Dell AI PCs are newly designed to help you do more faster. That's the power of Dell AI powered by Intel Core Ultra processors.
Upgrade today by visiting dell.com/slash deals.

Speaker 12 All right, Casey, it's time to pass the hat. We are playing another round of our favorite game, Hat GPT.

Speaker 12 Hat GPT, of course, is our game where we pick tech headlines out of a hat, we riff on them, and we eventually yell at each other to stop generating.

Speaker 13 Which they don't even say in ChatGPT anymore, sadly. It's already become a throwback expression.

Speaker 12 Yes.

Speaker 12 So let's use this week our brand new, very pretty hard fork hats. Casey, would you like to tell the people where they can get one of these?

Speaker 13 You can go to nytimes.com slash hard fork hat, Kevin. And if you haven't already, become a subscriber to New York Times Audio.

Speaker 13 And in exchange for that and a full year of all the great podcasts, including the entire Hard Fork Back catalog, we will send you this very hat.

Speaker 12 Yes. It will not have slips of paper inside it, though.
Or will it? There's only one way out.

Speaker 12 God. We are merging them in the same person.
It's terrible. Okay, so I'm going to put the slips in.
Okay. Jiggle them around a little bit there, mix them up, and then why don't you pick the first one?

Speaker 12 All right.

Speaker 13 LeBron James lawyers sent cease and desist to AI company making pregnant videos of him.

Speaker 13 This is from our friend Jason Keebler at 404 Media.

Speaker 13 He writes, The creators of an AI tool and Discord community called Interlink AI that allowed people to create AI videos of NBA stars say that it got a cease and assist letter from lawyers representing LeBron James.

Speaker 13 AI-generated videos of James Kevin included scenes like James as a homeless person, James on his knees with his tongue out, and James lying on a couch clutching a pregnant belly.

Speaker 13 So I guess my first question here is, who is LeBron James? Just kidding. He's a very famous basketball player.
Kevin, what do you make of this? So

Speaker 12 this is obviously going to be a thing for celebrities. They do not like their names and likenesses being used without their permission.

Speaker 12 And especially if what you're doing with LeBron James's name and likeness is turning him into a pregnant person.

Speaker 12 Did you watch any of these videos?

Speaker 13 I did see a couple of them.

Speaker 12 They're very disturbing.

Speaker 13 Some of them, I think, are like on the end of the spectrum that is just like sort of like surreal and funny.

Speaker 13 And then some of it is like also just like racist and horrible. And regardless of all of that, it's clear that LeBron James did not give permission for this.

Speaker 13 And it's an interesting story because as far as we know, this is one of the first known times that a celebrity has objected to the misuse of their likeness by an AI company.

Speaker 12 Yeah, and I am worried that it seems like they have automated the jobs of the MPRAG community.

Speaker 12 MPRAG is, of course, a. What is that? I didn't mean to ask you about that.

Speaker 12 It's a niche fan fiction thing

Speaker 12 that for years people have been sort of creating these like animated fan fiction cartoons of like Sonic the Hedgehog becoming pregnant. Why are they doing this? I don't know.
Couldn't tell you.

Speaker 12 Not an MPREG or myself, but there were a lot of hardworking MPREG artists out there who now have been put out of jobs by these AI tools.

Speaker 12 So for that reason and that reason alone, I think we should take a hard stand.

Speaker 13 I now want to say retroactively to my parents, do not listen to this segment.

Speaker 12 And definitely don't Google MPREG.

Speaker 13 All right, stop generating.

Speaker 12 Okay, next up.

Speaker 12 Oh, this is a fun one. Sam Altman warns there's no legal confidentiality when using ChatGPT as a therapist.
This one comes from TechCrunch.

Speaker 12 Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, went on the popular podcast by Theo Vaughan last week, where he acknowledged that OpenAI might be legally required to produce a user's conversations with ChatGPT in the case of a lawsuit.

Speaker 12 Now,

Speaker 12 I saw this clip going around and I thought Sam Altman continues his terror campaign against the Hard Fork podcast.

Speaker 12 As you will remember at our live show,

Speaker 12 he burst onto stage and then peppered us with questions about this lawsuit between OpenAI and the New York Times,

Speaker 12 which has resulted in OpenAI having to retain conversations between ChatGPT and its users.

Speaker 12 He's very upset about this, doesn't want this kind of document retention to be required, and has started advocating for the privacy guarantees that AI companies should be allowed to make with their users.

Speaker 13 Look, this one is important because a lot of people already are using these chatbots as therapists. They're having therapy style conversations.

Speaker 13 And I think most people are not thinking a lot about what is happening to that data. Some companies may want to erase that data for, you know, user protection reasons.

Speaker 13 Other companies might want to keep it forever and create a detailed profile about you and then like rent some information to advertisers. So

Speaker 13 I would love to see some kind of legal intervention, regulatory intervention come down and say, you're allowed allowed to use information submitted to chatbots in these ways.

Speaker 13 You know, users should have a full view into what a chatbot knows about them, what kind of information is being stored about them. They should be able to delete it, right?

Speaker 13 We just need a lot of like data and privacy stuff around this sort of thing.

Speaker 13 And so I have to say, I'm grateful for Sam Altman for at least saying, like, hey, by the way, you don't have legal protections here.

Speaker 12 Yes, we are allowed to use data however we want in training our models, but God forbid, you know, anyone else want to use data about our users after the fact.

Speaker 13 All right, stop generating.

Speaker 12 All right, your turn.

Speaker 13 How to catch a wily poacher in a sting, a thermal robotic deer. This is from James Finelli at the Wall Street Journal.

Speaker 13 Wildlife enforcement officers turned to a Wisconsin taxidermist to make remote-controlled robots that look like wild animals to catch poachers, Kevin.

Speaker 13 To make his decoys, A man named Brian Wolslegel applies the skin of a dead animal to a mold made out of of polyurethane. He affixes glass eyes and plastic ears.

Speaker 13 The circuitry to make the decoys move comes from parts for remote-controlled cars. With some AA batteries, officers can remotely operate the Bambi bots.

Speaker 13 Kevin, would you be interested in one of these to ward off some of the poachers on your property?

Speaker 12 Yeah, I think there's been a lot of poaching attempts made against my livestock and I won't be standing for it.

Speaker 13 So I'll be buying one of these.

Speaker 13 Here's where this man's real opportunity is.

Speaker 13 He needs to use the same technology to build build decoy AI researchers and put them in open AI so that when Mark Zuckerberg comes onto the property, he mistakenly poaches one of the robots instead of one of the human researchers.

Speaker 13 So not Sam Altman, this is what I'm doing. Yeah.

Speaker 12 In general, I think like robot animals, I'm not a big fan of.

Speaker 12 Like there's actually on my block, there's a guy with a robot dog. He runs like a STEM program for kids.
And I've seen him like walking his robot dog out on the street. It's very disconcerting.

Speaker 12 Let's just say...

Speaker 13 Top 10 signs you live in the Bay Area, by the way.

Speaker 12 Yes.

Speaker 12 Yeah. Let's just say these things are not entirely lifelike yet and they do still give you the willies.

Speaker 13 All right. Stop generating.

Speaker 12 Next up,

Speaker 12 did a guy just save a picture of a bird to a bird's brain? This one comes to us from Sean Hollister at The Verge.

Speaker 12 It's about a YouTuber named Ben Jordan, who has a popular channel about music and acoustic science, who was able to get a bird, a starling, to reproduce a spectrogram image in sound.

Speaker 12 Casey, did you hear about this story?

Speaker 13 This is actually my favorite story of the week.

Speaker 12 What happened?

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 if I

Speaker 12 get this straight, the YouTuber

Speaker 13 converts an image into a sound. He then plays the sound for a bird.
The bird then repeats the sound. And so in that way, you can say that the YouTuber was able to store an image in the bird's brain.

Speaker 13 He used the bird as a data transfer device, like it was like a disk drive.

Speaker 12 Yeah, so you almost got it right. Because what happened is he takes this drawing of a bird, he converts it into a spectrogram, then he plays that sound for the bird.

Speaker 12 The bird mimics it back, and then he takes that recording and turns it back into a spectrogram.

Speaker 12 So he's essentially going image to sound, transfers the sound to the bird, bird transfers it back, converts it back into an image. Now, Casey, why would you do something like this?

Speaker 13 Because you have a YouTube channel and you're trying to get a lot of subscribers. Now, how close was the image, the second image, to the first image?

Speaker 12 Apparently, it was quite close.

Speaker 12 This was like, you know, the bird is a little bit of a lossy compression device, but you actually were able to sort of like recognize it as a line drawing of a bird after the fact, which is kind of amazing.

Speaker 13 Honestly, hats off to this person. What a bizarre idea, but fantastic.

Speaker 12 You know, I uploaded an episode of our podcast to a bird. Oh, yeah? Yeah.
It's called Hardstork.

Speaker 12 Okay, sir.

Speaker 12 Why not? Stop generating.

Speaker 12 All right, you're up.

Speaker 13 Okay.

Speaker 13 Meta is going to let job candidates use AI during coding tests. This is from Jason Keebler at 404 Media again.

Speaker 13 Meta told employees that it is going to allow some coding job candidates to use an AI assistant during the interview process, according to internal meta communications.

Speaker 13 On an internal message board for the company, there was a post that called for mock candidates because apparently they're going to let employees do one of these sort of AI-assisted interviews so they can work out all of the kinks.

Speaker 13 So it looks like Meta's going all in on using AI coding agents to write code and also is just not going to try to stop people from cheating on their job entrance exams anymore.

Speaker 12 This is total Roy Lee victory. Absolutely.

Speaker 12 So this is like a vindication of what Roy told us when he came on the show several months ago, which is that these leap code interviews are totally cooked because now people can just use these tools like the ones Roy Lee is developing to cheat on their interviews.

Speaker 12 I guess Meta is sort of seeing the writing on the wall and saying, you know what, go ahead, use your AI. We'll design our new test, which I think is probably a good outcome.

Speaker 13 What do you think? Yeah, I mean, I think I'm interested to see how this affects the candidates that they attract, the quality of the engineers that they can recruit.

Speaker 13 You know, I am ultimately persuaded that people are going to be using these tools in the workplace anyway. So why not use them when you're doing the actual test to get the job?

Speaker 12 Now, do you think they make the people who are making a billion dollars a year take the tests when they come in?

Speaker 13 Yeah, they just give them the really hard version. They say, if you do the job, we'll give you a billion dollars.

Speaker 12 God, what a weird thing.

Speaker 12 Can you imagine being onboarded to a new job and like you go through the training and it's like, you know, here's your benefits package, and you're just sitting there thinking, I'm making a billion dollars.

Speaker 13 Yeah, they're like,

Speaker 13 Do you want to put anything in your health savings flex account this year?

Speaker 13 What about the commuter benefit? Do you want the 40 bucks for BART this month?

Speaker 12 You're like, I'm making a billion dollars, people.

Speaker 12 I'm not sitting through the IT training.

Speaker 12 Okay. Okay.
Stop generating.

Speaker 13 Stop generating.

Speaker 13 Here's one, Kevin. This is from Taylor Lorenz at UserMag.

Speaker 13 Substack sent a push alert encouraging users to subscribe to a Nazi newsletter that claimed Jewish people are a sickness and that we must eradicate minorities to build a white homeland.

Speaker 12 Oh boy. Yeah.

Speaker 13 And you know, I have to say, Kevin, rarely have I felt so smug in my entire life as I did when I read this story.

Speaker 13 Longtime listeners of the Hard Fork show may know that I moved Platformer off of Substack last year after some other folks had found a bunch of pro-Nazi websites on the network.

Speaker 13 And Substack would not commit to doing any proactive searching for these blogs to get rid of them.

Speaker 13 And the main reason that I wanted to leave was I thought these people are building amplification features and inevitably they're going to just start promoting these things.

Speaker 13 And it might be unwitting and it might be intentional, but either way, I don't want any part of it.

Speaker 13 And so now, sure enough, a bunch of people who had the Substack app installed yesterday just got a ringing endorsement for a Nazi blog.

Speaker 12 Oh, boy. Yeah.

Speaker 13 Now, Substack did basically say that this was a huge mistake and they took the offending recommendation system offline and they're going to rejigger it so it doesn't happen again.

Speaker 13 But well, it did happen and I feel quite vindicated.

Speaker 12 They did not see it coming. Yeah,

Speaker 13 that's a good way of putting it. Yeah.
All right, stop generating.

Speaker 12 All right, last one.

Speaker 12 Why Amazon wants an AI bracelet that records everything you say? This comes from Nicole Wynn at the Wall Street Journal. Amazon is acquiring a company called B.

Speaker 12 B makes a wearable device, B-E-E, that transcribes all the conversations in your day, including when you talk to yourself.

Speaker 12 It then uses AI to turn that giant word soup into a searchable history, offering up key events and even to-do lists based on your chatter.

Speaker 12 Friend of the pod and Wall Street Journal reporter Joanna Stern reported on her own experience testing out the B bracelet earlier this year.

Speaker 12 She described it as impressively useful and also, quote, really fucking creepy. Casey, what do you make of this bracelet and will you be buying one?

Speaker 13 I'm not going to buy one for myself. You know, generally I don't want a detailed record of everything that I say during the day.

Speaker 13 You know, one of the reasons why we podcast is so that most of what I say can be edited out, you know, so the idea that I would just sort of have this unfiltered record, you know, stored in an AWS bucket doesn't really appeal to me.

Speaker 13 Also, as I read the reviews of these

Speaker 13 devices from Joanna and others, nobody really seemed like they were getting a lot of value out of it. It was like, oh yeah, I like told my husband I should get milk.

Speaker 13 And like now I get an email that's like, hey, remember, you want milk. It's like, is that really worth, you know, giving up all of your privacy in perpetuity?

Speaker 12 Well, and all the privacy of everyone that you talk to. Yes, exactly.

Speaker 12 Like that is the worst part of this.

Speaker 12 Like I have at times been recording interviews and like accidentally left the voice memo running for like an hour afterwards.

Speaker 12 And it's never that it's that interesting, but sometimes it does catch other people's conversations in there and then I feel bad about it and delete it.

Speaker 12 But with the B bracelet, this is the whole point. It's just logging you all the time.
I don't think people are going to be that excited about that.

Speaker 13 Well, here's what I'm looking for is for keeping the bee on you at all times to be a condition of continuing to work at the Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, because they're going through a lot of turmoil right now, and there's a lot of people who are like leaking stuff to the media.

Speaker 13 So I think it's going to be like, hey,

Speaker 13 we need to check your B.

Speaker 13 What have you been saying about this?

Speaker 12 So it sounds like you are not going to be on the early beta tester list for the Amazon bracelet. Maybe I will.

Speaker 13 I'll be minding my own beeswax.

Speaker 12 Stop generating. Okay.
And that's Hat GPT. Yay.
Thanks for playing.

Speaker 13 We won again.

Speaker 12 What's that they used to say on Whose Line Is It Anyway? Where everything's made up and the points don't matter. That's right.

Speaker 13 Hat GPT, very similar.

Speaker 12 You know, my three-year-old is very obsessed with winning and losing. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, every time we do anything, he says, I won, you lost. So I'm going to start doing that with you.

Speaker 2 Over the last two decades, the world has witnessed incredible progress.

Speaker 4 From dial-up modems to 5G connectivity, from massive PC towers to AI-enabled microchips, innovators are rethinking possibilities every day.

Speaker 5 Through it all, Invesco QQQ ETF has provided investors access to the world of innovation with a single investment.

Speaker 7 Invesco QQQ, let's rethink possibility.

Speaker 1 There are risks when investing in ETFs, including possible loss of money.

Speaker 8 ETF's risks are similar to those of stocks.

Speaker 10 Investments in the tech sector are subject to greater risk and more volatility than more diversified investments.

Speaker 10 Before investing, carefully read and consider fund investment objectives, risks, charges, expenses, and more in perspectives at evesco.com.

Speaker 11 Investor Distributors Inc.

Speaker 14 Can your software engineering team plan, track, and ship faster? Monday Dev says yes. Custom workflows, AI power context, and IDE-friendly integrations.
No admin bottlenecks, no BS.

Speaker 14 Try it free at monday.com/slash dev. Dell AI PCs are newly designed to help you do more faster.
That's the power of Dell AI powered by Intel Core Ultra Processors.

Speaker 14 Upgrade today by visiting dell.com slash deals.

Speaker 12 Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Jen Poyant.
We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show is engineered by Chris Wood.

Speaker 12 Original music by Alicia Baitoube, Rowan Nemasto, Alyssa Moxley, and Dan Powell. Video production by Swear Roquet, Pat Gunther, Jake Nicol, and Chris Schapp.

Speaker 12 You can watch this full episode on YouTube at youtube.com/slash hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schuman, Qui Wing Tam, Dahlia Haddad, and Jeffrey Miranda.

Speaker 12 You can email us as always at hardfork at nytimes.com.

Speaker 12 Send us all the images that you've uploaded to Birds Brains.

Speaker 16 High interest debt is one of the toughest opponents you'll face. Unless you power up with a SoFi personal loan.

Speaker 16 A SoFi personal loan could repackage your bad debt into one low-fixed rate monthly payment. It's even got super speed, since you could get the funds as soon as the same day you sign.

Speaker 16 Visit sofi.com/slash power to learn more. That's sofi.com/slash p-o-w-er-r.

Speaker 16 Loans originated by SoFi Bank NA, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply, NMLS 696891.