Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show where we discussed the finer points of what went wrong on the Internet and who's to blame.

I'm Jason DeFillipo.

And I'm Brian Schomeister.

Brian, we got some interesting news this week.

Microsoft has banned the term microslop from its co-pilot Discord server after users started using it to mock Microsoft's

increasingly intrusive AI bullshittery. So people immediately worked around the filter using,

of course, bastardized leit speak. And Microsoft's response was classic, was to lock down the entire server

and hide the message history. Let's just nuke the whole thing. It is a Microsoft response. Just nuke it all. Newk it all. The company claims it was stopping spam, but the move triggered a textbook strides and effect, spreading the nickname far and wide. So congratulations, Microsoft, and welcome to the party, pal. This is what you don't do on the internet. Right. Don't do that on the internet. And of course, they're hardly the only people full of slop. So, yeah. I got a bit of follow-up about age verification. Australia, Australia, Australia. They're taking it even further. Reuters is reporting that Australian regulators may require app store fronts to block AI services that do not implement age verification for restricting mature content by March 9th.

That is just a scant three days away as of right now.

A review by Reuters found that of the 50 leading text-based AI chat services in the region, only nine had introduced our shared

plans for age assurances. Now, we've been chock-a-block full of stories about young teens and

pre-teens and et cetera, getting all kinds of weird crap from AI tech spots, and there just

aren't the guardrails anymore like there used to be. So I don't blame them.

Yeah. No, it's just what's got to be. I think they should just, you know, put some drop bears in front of

the computers and then, you know, have that whole thing happen. That'd be great.

Failure to comply could see AI companies facing fines of up to $49.5 Australian dollars or roughly

$35 million.

The question of which parties are responsible for keeping children from accessing potentially

harmful content is being debated around the world, but not on this show.

Never.

It's pretty, I think it's the company's responsibility.

Do you not?

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