Elon Musk flirts with AOC impersonator, Surgeon General's Report on social media, AI-generated true crime on TikTok, and more! — NEWS ROUNDUP

There Are No Girls on the Internet

iHeartPodcasts

Society & Culture, Technology

4.1 • 907 Ratings

🗓️ 2 June 2023

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week, Elon Musk interacted with a fake Twitter account impersonating AOC, which had been banned until he decided to unban it, presumably so he could flirt with it. In less cringy news, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a landmark report calling for urgent action to protect young people from the harms of social media. TikTok is awash in creepy AI-generated true crime content being narrated by fictional murdered children, the National Eating Disorder Association learns that replacing humans with AI chatbots can lead to dangerous outcomes, NYC takes a tentative step to require transparency in AI-assisted hiring decisions, and Apple announces a suite of new accessibility features.

Amanda Knox talks true crime on There Are No Girls on the Internet: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/amanda-knox-asks-who-gets-to-own-their-story/id1520715907?i=1000552625297

Internet Hate Machine episode of the importance and history of verification on Twitter: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-elon-musk-could-learn-from-the-endfathersday-hoax/id1648497305?i=1000585587576

NPR piece about the National Eating Disorder Association’s union-busting chatbot: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/05/31/1179244569/national-eating-disorders-association-phases-out-human-helpline-pivots-to-chatbo

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Transcript

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0:00.0	There are No Girls on the Internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative.
0:12.2	I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.
0:17.4	I'm here with my producer, Mike. Thanks for being here, Mike.
0:20.3	Thanks for having me back, Bridget.
0:21.9	And here's what you may have missed this week on the internet.
0:25.0	So, in stuff I absolutely fucking hate news, TikTok is awash with AI-generated true crime victim stories.
0:34.2	So if you've been on TikTok at all, you've probably seen this new subsection of true crime content
0:38.5	where very creepy AI-generated children who speak in this like weird robotic baby voice about how they were tortured or murdered is flooding the platform.
0:49.9	They purport to show actual murder victims telling their stories. Now, there are adult victims being depicted, including politicians and celebrities, but the ones that feature children are by far more popular and plentiful.
1:03.9	These TikTok accounts claim to be honoring in heavy scare quotes the victims and their stories of violence, but Rolling Stone reports that they often get pretty major details wrong, which may even be an intentional attempt to get around TikTok's rules against AI-generated deep fakes of famous people.
1:22.1	Exonerie Amanda Knox, who we spoke to on There Are No Girls on the Internet last year, who also has a new podcast about the history of true crime called Blood Money, had a really interesting perspective that she shared on Blue Sky, that even though this edition of AI is definitely creepy, this is nothing new.
1:39.0	Amanda Knox writes, this isn't a fresh hell. There's a precedent for this dating back over 400 years.
1:44.7	One of the earliest forms of true crime was the printed broadside poster. These posters would tell
1:49.3	stories of brutal murders, often murders of children. And these stories would often be told in the
1:54.3	ballad form, a song written in the voice of either the condemned criminal or the murdered person.
1:59.4	Whoever authored these ballots would just make
2:01.3	them all of. They would invent the pleading words of the child in the moments before they were
2:05.0	killed, or they would convey the thoughts of the criminal as they confessed or acknowledged regret.
2:09.6	So these creepy AI-generated true crime deepfakes of children may not be a totally new phenomena,
2:16.4	but the addition of AI to recreate these child
2:19.2	victims definitely makes them much more creepy.
2:22.6	Like, to be able to tell an AI program to generate the likeness of a murdered child for views
	...

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