#gpt5

The Armchair Sociologist Podcast- Episode 1: Generative AI (Transcript)

Key: 

D: Diana

R: Rayne

Z: Zoe

D: So we've talked about some of the ways AI has hurt people. From its users to the workers that make it. We have so far only briefly touched on a third, enormous group of people who are harmed by the data scraping practices of generative AI. The people whose data it is trained on, aka, anyone who's ever used the internet, like our friend Zoe here, whose voice was not cloned, but could have been by a company that was ignoring its contractual obligations to its voice actors. 

Z: Hi!

D: I wanted to save this topic for last, since it's arguably a newer issue than all of the other ones we've talked about. Humans have had labor exploitation and people being replaced by automation- for as long as we have recorded our history, we've had bias. We've had racism and misinformation floating around long before the internet existed or the large language models and predictive policing came into being to scale them to new, brave heights. But data scraping is a problem pretty unique to the 21st century. I think the closest thing we've had historically is probably copyright infringement. That itself is a relatively recent problem historically speaking, but that's a story for another episode. But copyright has definitely taken center stage in the generative AI discussion from the New York Times suing OpenAI for using the text of its articles without permission, artists sounding the alarm that their work has been fed into training data without permission, and actors and voice actors being concerned about their voices being scraped to make models that will then replace them. And I will say, like voice actors already get paid so little that it's extra insulting that they want to replace voice actors with text to voice technology.

Z: And it's bad too. 

R: Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. It's so frustrating because, like, it doesn't even sound natural. Like you can tell when it's AI. 

D: Yeah. 

R: It doesn't sound good.

D: Though, I will argue, even if it was good, it still would be bad to do. 

R: Well, yeah! 

D: Like, ethically.

Z: Ethically bad still…

D: A lot of like, the the tech industry, likes to be like, “well, this is the worst it's ever gonna sound. It's gonna sound great soon, no problem.” And that would still be bad to have. And it's only good because you're training it on more and more actors who are good at their craft. It only gets good by stealing more from more people, and that sucks. Though, there are now platforms that will pay you to sell your voice data too. I saw that on the Reddit Beer Money recently, and I was- there's a lot.

Z: I'm on a couple of websites where, you know, you get sent casting emails, and a lot of them lately have been, “hey, we will pay you a whole $300 if you help us train our AI model.”

D: No! Ugh. At least that is consensual and there is money. I will give them that one thing. That that is better than what a lot of companies are doing.

Z: They’re just stealing, and stealing is wrong. 

D: Stealing is wrong and bad. I still don't like the thing that they are making, but at least this other company pays you. 

Z: That is true. 

D: So the argument from the tech industry is that the potential gains from using AI are so paradigm-shifting, so profitable, and so revolutionary that holding AI companies to silly mortal standards like copyright would impede the progress of all mankind. I did find one semi-scholarly source saying that, but he didn't cite anything-

Z: Oh.

D: …other than his own opinion for how AI benefits mankind, and he just said, “the economy go up number go up it would make money and be good.” 

Z: And that's how you know it's a reputable source. 

D: This was published, and I'm like okay, I'm gonna side with the people worried about their jobs being replaced with computer programs on this one. Because AI has plenty of powerful, rich voices, other than the one I read, arguing in its favor. You got Sam Altman, you got Elon Musk, practically the entire tech industry. They do not need our help. So I will sit here and be biased as much as I like. As people who have to pay bills, how do you two feel about the threat of AI? I know we've talked a little bit about it, but like, on a, like, longer scale than, like, this one job tried to replace me with AI. Like, how do you feel about your economic futures right now? 

R: Scared. It's scary. My goal is to be a professor, and you might think that, like, teaching would be something that's protected, but it's very much so not. Because we already have remote teaching, it wouldn't take much to develop an AI model that can just spit out everything that I've learned. 

D: I think that's probably why I get ads for can you teach this computer to be better at sociology? Is because then ChatGPT can teach your class. No problem. 

R: What am I supposed to do with a sociology degree, if not research? And I don't want to do research.

D: Podcasting!

Z: Podcasting! Just everybody starts a podcast. 

D: Podcasting is where the money is. Aristotle said that. Aristotle said that you can quote us on that. It's also in Sun Tzu's Art of War. I don't know who plagiarized who.

Z: I like money. I like paying bills. I like living in- well, I would like to live in a house. I do not live in a house right now, but I would like to, in the future, potentially, live in a house right now. I'm not gonna be able to live in a house if people develop these AI models and take over my job both, yeah, as a voice actor and in my day job. I like working- well, I don't know if I like working..

D: Yeah, but we work because we have to do work to make money to live, because that's capitalism, baby.

Z: I like to provide a service for money. 

D: Sure! I like to help people with stuff. I think if I weren't getting paid for it, like, say, we lived in the Marxist utopia of my dream, where nobody has to work in a job they don't feel like doing. I don't think that's actually logistically likely, but bear with me, I would probably still be doing work because I get bored really easy. 

Z: Yeah.

D: But that's a digression. 

Z: How would that even like work? How would society not crumble if everybody were replaced, like every worker were replaced by AI? What would we do? 

D: How can the AI profit number keep going up if nobody has any money to buy the stuff AI is selling?

Z: Exactly! What are we supposed to do with no money? 

D: Well, the tech industry, well, at the very least a couple of guys in the tech industry, think that the robots will eventually create a utopia and do everything for us, not just stuff for them, making number go up. I'll get into that in another episode sometime, but I believe Behind the Bastards also has a really good episode about the tech- about the techno-optimist manifesto, which is basically the Bible for tech people. It's like the Communist Manifesto, but if you're a techno fascist.

Z: Interesting. 

D: It's a very interesting topic. I don't have time to get into it today, because we're already running pretty long, but I would recommend checking that out, because it's very interesting. So how is all of this stuff even possible? All of this ties into how much data big tech has about us, something we're going to talk about a little more in our episode upcoming on social media, and likely in future tech specific episodes as well. Google and Facebook are currently kings of the data space, and they have been perfecting how to harvest and utilize user data for targeted ads since pretty much they were created. That's actually part of how Facebook was able to dethrone MySpace. This was because they figured out targeted advertising algorithms and data collection and made a profitable business that MySpace just could not. So now all of that data they've been using to sell us more pink electronics, maybe that's not a universal experience, maybe that's just me… It's being turned to a new purpose, which is creating generative AI models. As annoying as the ads are and as detrimental as they can be on my wallet when I see a pink calculator, generative AI developers are pushing this product as a much more existential threat to basically anyone working for a living, which famously includes all three of us. Now don't take it from me. Let's look at what some of the companies pushing these tools have to say about it. A blog post from Matchbox Design Group touts AI as a cult saving measure and gives examples of using AI voice generation instead of hiring voice actors to record your voice mail. Or using AI to- quote unquote- streamline customer service. Never mind if your AI chat bot makes up a refund policy wholesale that you don't have, you'll legally have to honor it. As was the case in February 2024, when Air Canada used a chat bot for customer service that did exactly that. Basically, it told the customer, “yeah, you could totally have a refund on this flight for like, $400! No problem!” And then they tried to do that, and Air Canada was like, “No, that's not the refund policy and the robot was wrong.” And then the judge said to them, “it's on your website. It's your robot, so you're liable.” 

Z: Something very similar happened to a Ford dealership. 

D: Oh, tell me more. 

Z: I don't remember the specifics, but they had, like, one of those chat bots, and it was, I want to say, based on a framework by open AI, and somebody, like, wanted a refund or something, or they wanted, like, a trade in something with money. And the policy was not followed by said robot.

D: Yeah, because it doesn't know it.

Z: Because it doesn't know it. And said, “Yeah, that's fine.” And they had to honor it. They pulled the bot. I think a lot of other dealerships were all using something similar, and they all pulled their bot down. 

D: Are you telling me that, actually, AI can't replace all of these jobs? 

Z: That’s not what I said at all!

D: Oh, good. That sounds like a load of hooey, because I think it's great. 

Z: To be clear, that is what I am saying. AI cannot replace all of the people. The people are important. 

D: It really can’t, but the tech industry really wants you to think it can, but it can’t. 

Z: Critical thinking is important.

D: Yeah, and it can't. Literally, it just can't do it. It's not a skill it has. It's not programmed in there. So on that note, I actually don't think we're gonna have a job apocalypse from generative AI adoption. Researchers, Jung and Srinivasa-Desikan, in a report for the UK Institute for the UK Institute for Public Policy Research actually kind of broadly agreed with me. They do find certain sectors of work are gonna be way more impacted than others, and surprise, those jobs are usually held by women. That doesn't sound right, but you know, we talked earlier in Rayne sociological corner, administrative assistants, customer service reps, human resource professionals, are at much higher risk of displacement, and we're starting to see a lot of these workers being- quote unquote- augmented with AI products, if not being replaced outright. 

Z: Interesting. 

D: So that makes these workers more expendable, and thus it drives down employment in those sectors. As well as wages for the workers who do keep their jobs because they're like, “Oh, well, we can totally replace you with a computer, and it doesn't really matter that ChatGPT can't do the job as well and might be a liability if management thinks it can.” This all kind of comes back to management, not understanding what their employees actually do, but that's a topic for another day. 

Z: Oof. Can of Worms. So even though AI may lead to increases in productivity in those sectors like AI- quote unquote- augmentation is like when you use the auto complete on your email to write the email faster or use it to summarize a meeting after you get off of Microsoft Teams, which is a thing it can do now, the workers don't get to see the benefits of that. And of course, that's capitalism, baby! This is also anecdotal, but I've been seeing a lot of people in the games and tech industry talking about how they've been laid off in favor of adopting AI products that claim to be able to do their jobs, and then seeing postings for people to clean up the AI outputs that those things are making. So like, there's still a person in there. You're just paying them less and giving them a worse job. Like a job that sucks your soul out instead of making something creative! 

Z: You could do it right the first time. Or you could hire AI. 

D: And then hire a guy whose job it is to clean up the AI's mess. That is my nightmare. 

R: That was such a good quote. You could do it right that first time, or you could hire AI. That's so… put that on a like-

Z: Put it on a shirt!

D: So it doesn't actually matter whether the AI can do the jobs, and it remains to be seen if they can be improved enough to do these jobs. All it takes is the illusion that the AI can do the job for executives who don't know what the jobs actually entail, to start firing people and offering lower wages. And honestly, this feels like a full circle moment for my friend Karl Marx. Karl Marx, our mascot and the boogeyman of the modern conservative movement, spent most of his life talking about how capitalism takes all the stuff workers make, sells it at a profit and pays the worker as little as they can legally do in the process. Now, the tech industry is taking the contents of the entire internet and then some, which we have all been collectively making for decades, and trying not only to sell it back to us, but replace us with it. Rayne take it away!

R: Speaking of Karl Marx, obviously there's a ton of economic issues that can be talked about with all of this, but it also brings about a ton of social issues. So as a true sociologist, good luck with getting me, or honestly you either, to say anything sociological without bringing up Karl Marx. But to be fair, the man was well before his time, so sue me. We just have something really powerful in common, because just like me, that man hates capitalism! He argued that workers would eventually develop something called alienation. This is when they realized that they are simply nothing but cogs in a machine. Their work is entirely meaningless and they are very easily replaceable. Does that sound familiar to you? 

Z: Interesting. That sounds like-

D: What feels worse to me, like- the most meaningless job I can think of is being asked to clean up a computer's creative output. 

Z: Yeah, that's pretty terrible. 

D: It's like, wow. So the art didn't matter, just the money you could make on the art, yeah, and my only job is to make the art less bad, because you didn't want to hire a real person to make it. That is soul sucking to me. 

Z: It sounds like the theory behind like the whole quiet, quitting movement.

D:  A little bit, yeah, which actually, you elaborate on that a little bit for a while, since I read about quiet quitting? 

Z: Sure, yeah, quiet quitting was is, I guess it's still a bigger thing in the younger generations like Gen Z, Gen Alpha- people are realizing that they don't really matter to their companies, their managers. They just do the job that they are paid to do, and then they leave. They don't go above and beyond. 

D: That's called quitting!? So doing the job you're hired to do is called quitting in any form.

Z: It’s doing the job that you are hired to do just within the job description. You don't put in extra hours. You don't go above and beyond for other things that your manager asks you for. You do your job, you go home, you leave, you don't think about the company. You just do what you pay to do. 

R: “That's not in my job description” is like a motto.

Z: Exactly. Not in my job description. I'm not gonna do it.

D: Fascinating, because in my experience in the world, doing a job, getting paid for it, and then going home is not quitting. That's called being employed. I hate the name of quiet quitting so much. 

Z: That’s what upper management is calling it. They're like, “you're not putting an effort.” Like, no, I'm doing the job that you asked me to do. 

D: Yeah, I am doing that job. 

Z: Work is not my entire life. 

D: What have you hurt the managers feelings? 

Z: You can't hurt an AI feelings. 

D: Now we're talking. Replace all the managers with AI. 

R: Okay, so in an environment where your job can be replaced by computer, wouldn't that lead not only to crippling fear of losing everything, but also, wouldn't that be pretty dehumanizing? Just being very acutely aware that you provide no value, you own nothing of your labor, and that any day now, your boss might choose profit over your livelihood. The financial impacts are enough to break someone but combine that with losing your sense of purpose, your identity, not understanding your value or place in society, the universal mental health impacts would be catastrophic. 

D: That's alienation, baby. 

Z: That's crazy. 

D: Yeah, honestly, like the alienation kind of is the reason quiet quitting happens. Quiet quitting, god. I have nothing but contempt for that phrase. As someone who goes above and beyond, I think that is insulting, but anyway- But yeah, I mean, that is alienation. That's such a good example, too. Of like, when you're alienated from your job, of course, you're not going above and beyond, because it doesn't get you anything to do that. 

Z: Yeah, I could instead go hang out with my friends and make a podcast for two hours.

R: Exactly! 

Z: Exactly!

R: You're becoming a sociologist! Well, if you're gonna become a sociologist, then I have to tell you about another one, because he's very well known, he touches on this exact thing too. It's Emile Durkheim. So he is known as one of the founding fathers of sociology. There should really be some founding like mothers of sociology, but we don't talk about that. Yeah, he's one of the few white men that get credited with that role.

D: And he's French!

Z: Oh, that's like double whammy. 

R: His work heavily focuses on the mental health effects that would happen when people feel disconnected from their society. So this is a quick trigger warning: The following discussion does talk about Durkheim’s work, which is titled On Suicide. Which, as you can probably guess, theorizes why he thinks the triggering factors are behind why people commit suicide. 

D: It's kind of a bummer. 

R: Please feel free to skip this entire discussion of what I am talking about. 

D: This discussion runs to approximately one hour, 18 minutes and 40 seconds. So if this will be triggering for you, I will see you. Then. 

R: Okay, so I personally have beef with the Durkster because his specific book On Suicide is organized like you gave a kindergartener a stack of papers and a stapler and absolutely no supervision and just said, fuck me up. He does have really interesting theories, and everybody knows that you're contractually obligated to bring up what he calls anomie in any basic sociology discussion. So in this book, it argues that people commit suicide when they experience unbalanced amounts of both social integration and social regulation. And right now, I'm throwing a lot of words at you, but social integration just means how integrated someone feels within their community, like how connected do they feel?

Z: That makes sense, okay.

R:  And then social regulation is just rules, values and norms that a society adopts in order to maintain order. So too much social regulation would be like an authoritarian dictatorship. There's way too much regulation happening in that society.

D: Like V for Vendetta in 1984.

R: Exactly. Too little is chaotic and it's confusing, and it puts a society in a state of Anomie.

D: Which is a French word, do not panic. 

Z: Yes, I was gonna ask. 

R: It just means that sudden changes during a really high stress time creates this rock bottom-esque feeling of hopelessness and too much anomie will leave you searching for an escape. In the cases of that escape being permanent and self inflicted, it's called anomic suicide. Most notably, studies have found that suicide rates increased significantly after events that caused financial hardships, such as mass layoffs, market crashes, natural disasters. 

D: I'm sure glad we haven't had any market crashes lately!

Z: This is feeling very meta and I don’t like it.

D: That's the field, baby!

R: Something like AI taking over entire job markets is the exact recipe that would be needed in order to put a society into a mass state of anime. And that, if you can imagine, Zoe, is not a good thing. 

Z: Yeah I can imagine.

D: It kind of is like, what if your society had depression? 

Z: Oh no.

D: One way to look at it, on like a scale, and like, on an individual level, it's like that feeling you get when life is meaningless and futile, and also you don't know where your place is in it. So like, do you remember COVID? Does anyone remember the COVID 19 pandemic? 

Z: Not at all!

D: Do you remember? Yeah, so for those of us who were there, do you remember how you felt at the beginning of COVID, and everything shut down, and then you were in your house for two years and that nothing was normal? That was Anomie. You experienced an Emile Durkheim pretentious word, anomie. 

R: And as someone who worked for the Florida unemployment line during COVID. 

D: Oh no.

R: I witnessed quite a few people who were experiencing states of anomie, and it was traumatizing, and I had to quit after my or suicide call. 

D: Oh no, that's awful.

Z: Baaaad.

D: I’m so sorry you went through that. I also would have quit. 

R: Well, I should say my fourth threat. I don't think that they- 

D: But like the first person who called you as if it was a suicide hotline? 

R: Yeah, yeah. 

D: So yeah. I think when people feel like their life is meaningless and they can't support themselves and nothing matters that they do, they get sad and desperate.

Z: The need purpose. 

D: Call me a bleeding heart liberal, but people don't like it when that happens. 

Z: How many people need purpose? 

D: So we're coming in to the home stretch here. I said copyright was kind of the last topic. I lied. There is one more related topic, which is deepfakes, which I haven't really talked much about. We talked about a lot of the pieces that go into deep fakes, which are like voice generation, image and video generation. So speaking of the machines that want to replace us, let's talk about deepfakes. Most people, I think, have seen this term thrown around. The concept has existed for a while, but just in case anyone listening is not familiar, I'll break it down. A deepfake is a piece of content, usually a video or a photograph or audio recording that shows- or what is the auditory word for shows? That depicts a real person like Barack Obama doing or saying something they did not do in the past. Deepfakes were relatively labor intensive and expensive to make, especially the video kind, and they didn't usually look or sound super convincing. They might fool some people on the fringes of the internet, but they wouldn't get a lot of mainstream traction unless you spent a really long time on it. That has changed with generative AI that can generate convincing video and audio in seconds, and for anyone who happens to purchase access to the program or for free, in the cases of a lot of the generators out there. Right now, we can now create deepfakes at industrial scale, and as a result, be exposed to more misinformation than has ever existed, in fractions of the time. So far, I would say we've actually been relatively lucky. Knock on wood, deep fakes did not dominate the 2024 American election cycle like they could have. I did see some fake images of ,like, Donald Trump pulling people out of the flood waters in West North Carolina. 

Z: I did see that!

D: But I didn't see, like, fakes that tried to, like, make Kamala Harris say, “I sure hate the people drowning in those videos.” 

R: Also, the videos of him pulling people out of the water was the most very obvious AI generated video. 

D: It was so obvious. 

Z: A lot of them are very obvious right now.

D: Yeah. But I saw a lot of comments like, “oh, man, what a hero.” Because people aren't looking for very- I mean, people spend fractions of a second looking at a social media post unless they're scrolling for it. 

R: There's also bots that are trained- 

D: That are commenting on it, that are posting it. It's bots on bots on bots.

R: That's next episode. 

Z: Yeah, the Twitter comments are cesspool. 

D: So we've all seen some, but they didn't make front page news. Like they didn't fool, like, CBS into thinking they were real. Which is good, because that could happen. But imagine, if you will, what could happen if someone were to flood the zone with a deepfakes in the next election cycle, say, 2026 with sufficiently convincing images and videos? It could become nearly impossible to tell truth from fiction, particularly when lots of people have these tools, and we're creating them at volume. Statistically, some of them are gonna be very convincing. AI creates information so quickly that it's basically impossible to sift through it all to tell if it's true. We already have this problem with information overload on social media. Before generative AI existed, we've already seen deepfake videos of Ukrainian president, Zelensky, surrendering in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Imagine a future where we see hundreds of those a day, and the only way to know if something is real is if you're standing right in front of it. So far, I am reassured that deep fakes aren't dominating politics, but they're doing plenty of harm in other ways. Mostly the harm they're doing is making non consensual pornography, mostly of women and children.

Z: Okay, that's- no. Big no. 

D: So if your face is posted online, as most faces are at this point, someone, somewhere could absolutely use it to make fake porn featuring you or your kid!  This also makes it harder to track down people who are actually abusing real children, because it creates images that the FBI doesn't know are fake, and they're gonna spend time chasing that fake lead, like, “Oh no, this kid's in danger,” and they waste time. Voice cloning has also been used for harm widely, such as a deep fake of Joe Biden calling and telling people to vote on the wrong day during the 2024 election cycle, or older family members receiving calls from someone that sounds just like their grandson claiming to be kidnapped. This is harm that's already happening, and it's going to continue until we start regulating AI better.

R: That happened to my grandma with my brother. 

D: No, is she okay? 

R: Well, she's dead now. She didn't fall for it. 

Z: Well that’s good. 

R: She she was like-

Z: Remember, folks, if you want to get a call like this, call the person! Call them! 

D: Yeah, call them back. Hang up, call back. 

Z: Call their actual number. 

D: If they pick up, they haven't been kidnapped. 

R: It was- it was like he was in jail, and needed, like-

D: Oh, that’s clever. 

R: But she knew because my brother would never do anything that would put him in jail. 

D: So she was like, so like, “Nah, he's a little bitch. He's a weenie. He's not gonna be in jail.”

Z: I was gonna say he's a good child, but okay.

D: Sorry, I didn't mean to insult your brother.

R: He’s alright. He'll survive. 

D: So we spent a lot of time talking about the harms AI can do to people. Bias, misinformation, job displacement, deepfakes, copyright infringement, the works. But I'd be remiss not to mention the harms AI is doing to the planet. So for starters, it takes about 10 times more energy to ask ChatGPT a question or Google Gemini than to just do a normal web search for the same information. So I like to think Google's trying to close the gap so ChatGPT doesn't look as bad by shoving Gemini into everything. It's getting harder and harder to do an actual regular web search that costs very little energy to do and very little money. It is so expensive and so resource- intensive for ChatGPT to write Shrek 7: Shrek in Space. I cannot emphas- it’s like you’re like, pouring open bottles of plastic water bottles into the earth and then throwing the water bottle at a duck. 

Z: No, not the duck! 

D: The water bottle part is kind of accurate. The duck part is not. Like the energy it takes to- for an AI chat bot to generate one response is approximately the amount it takes to power a light bulb for 20 minutes. At that scale, generative AI is being canvassed into everything, and it adds up fast. Google and Microsoft have already started to set expectations that they will not be meeting their 2030 sustainability goals because of energy demands from AI products that anyone asked for. 

R: Ew.

D: As we all agree, though, it is much more important to have a chat bot that can write my book report on A Tale of Two Cities than it is to have a planet that is still habitable to live on. 

R: Of course.

Z: I like living, I don't know about you. 

D: I mean, I really like A Tale of Two Cities, but I don't want to write about it. 

Z: And that's a whole other discussion about critical thinking and what it's telling to the brains of the youth. 

D: So the reason AI uses all this energy is because AI needs computers to run on servers. These computers are housed in data centers, and they generate massive amounts of heat, and thus require massive amounts of cooling, usually with water systems. If you're a gamer, you've seen water cooled systems in your crazy laptops with crazy GPUs. So in addition to the huge strain they're putting on the power grid, it's projected by Isabel O'Brien that data center emissions may be six times higher than the tech industry is actually reporting they use a massive amount of water for cooling. Google even admits in one of their own reports that as we further integrate AI into our products, reducing emissions may be challenging. So to put the cherry on top of our metaphorical sundae, AI won't just harm us directly through deepfakes, scams, job displacement, copyright infringement, bias, policing and the works. It also accelerates us toward a future where Earth is no longer habitable, so at least we won't have to deal with it anymore. 

R: Yikes.

D: Yay!

R: What an uplifting conclusion.

D: Yeah so my next section is called, “okay, so we're all depressed now. Now what?”

Z: Yeah, now what, Diana?

D: I get off on my high horse, I want to thank you both for listening to my depressing ramble. I think this is one of the most important issues in tech right now, but there's so much noise around it being revolutionary and inevitable that it seems like not a lot of critical voices are getting through. In addition to that, the tech industry is obfuscating all of the real harms I just talked about by making up fake harms that AI could do instead. Like The Matrix, where AI overlords put us in batteries. Maybe that's the kind of stuff rich guys worry about because they don't have real problems. That's a guess. I also think it is, at best, willful ignorance, and at worst, an intentional distraction. The flip side of this is the talk of the AI revolution, how it will make everything so productive that we can all stop working and live in a fully automated world. And I think that's just as much a fantasy. Artificial intelligence, isn't God, nor is it the devil. It's a tool, and what a tool does is all in how a person uses it. Now that you know the real issues, you can call out the BS when you see it. So I want to wrap up here by giving us all a second to discuss, share our final thoughts, and answer any lingering questions you might have.

R:  I don't want to live in a fully automated world.

D: Me either.

R: I'm in sociology because I like society. I like socializing. 

Z: I like doing things. I might not be a social person, but I like living in a society, and I like contributing to society.

D: I do too. I think it's really sad to see people alienating themselves from their own, like, critical thinking skills. Like skill atrophy is a problem with AI. If you're using it to write all of your papers for school, you're never gonna learn how to write papers and, more importantly, how to bullshit papers. 

Z: Yeah, that's the important thing. 

D: I've never read an assigned reading before grad school in my life.

Z: Before grad school is the important phrase. 

D: Yes, that is the important part, Dr Clark!

Z: See, I did the opposite thing where I used to do all my required reading, and now I am very good at bullshitting assignments, and I am the day they are due.

D: I famously, for one of my classes in middle school. And I know this is middle school, but I just- I just didn't do it. I printed out a bunch of the Wikipedia stuff for it. I do like a presentation on a country I know. I bought a poster board on the way to school, and I made my poster board and did my presentation and got the highest score in the entire class. 

Z: Oh yeah. So these are important skills that you will not have-

D: You won't have that!

Z: If you use AI for everything!

D: Also, one time my senior year. This isn't a BS-ing story. We had to do a paper. Actually, it was my junior year of high school. We had to do a paper comparing American literature to a metaphor, like we had to make a metaphor for the evolution of American literature. I compared it to the Baconator. I got the highest score in the class. I had a blast, writing that.

R: How beautiful!

D: Don't rob yourself of your Baconator! Come on.

Z: I think it's important to learn how to communicate, and writing papers is a part of communicating, but to be a person, you need to know how to talk to people. And you know, if you're just using AI for every response, you don't have to think about that. You don't have to think about how to talk to a person. 

D: And please learn how to talk to a person. Like I know I'm just clutching my pearls with this, but I think it's so important to develop those skills and become a really good bullshitter. Every class discussion I ever did on a required reading, I just listened to what other people were saying and then vaguely followed up, and I-

R: Exactly!

D: I flew under the radar every single time. No problem. 

R: Many of my friends tell me, like, “I can't believe that, like, you're doing so well in college, like I could never do that.” And I'm like, “it is not at all about intelligence. It is about like- I'm not trying to get an A in the class. I'm trying to get an A in student. An A in student. I want the professor to think like I'm locked in at all times.

D: Like I know what you’re talking in a sociological sense, actually. It's not about like, being the smartest person in the room. It's about performing smartness, like- 

R: Literally, I'm just learning what my professor wants out of me, and then I'm giving it to them. 

D: Yeah, learning how to read people. However, Dr Clark, we have never done any of this in your class.

R: Of course not. 

Z: This is the only one. 

R: I'm like- I'm saying that, like, so sarcastically, but I actually do read what he gives.

D: Yeah, I do actually really like Dr Clark's stuff. And I actually did read almost every single thing in grad school that was assigned to me. Because I wouldn't be in grad school if I didn't want to be here. 

R: I'm $20,000 in the hole. I had to make it count. 

D: Like, yeah, okay, I would just be robbing myself at that point. So yeah. In conclusion, Zoe, you are now the newest armchair sociologist. Welcome to the fold. You have a master's degree and can legally teach at universities in all 50 United States. 

Z: I am taking your master's degree, specifically.

D: Zoe is taking my master's degree, so I can devote my time to podcasting.

R: Mine's still good. 

Z: Yeah, you're safe. 

D: Yeah, you're safe. Rayne, but next episode, I don't know the guest might take yours.

R: Yeah. And they probably will.

D: So thank you, the listener, for listening to the armchair sociologist, the only podcast that was predicted by ancient Mayan prophecies. I've been Diana Heslin, and remember the Karl Marx underneath your bed is more afraid of you than you are of him. 

R: That’s a really good outro.

the actual image generation part is just me seeing what it was capable of as GPT-4o, and now trying to compare that to the allegedly-better GPT-5. So far, it's bad.