Real Life Beef: Bridget vs Essence Magazine - Listeners demand the truth about that weird 'Vila Davis' postazine
There Are No Girls on the Internet
iHeartPodcasts
4.1 • 907 Ratings
🗓️ 14 June 2023
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A few weeks ago in our news roundup we talked about a weird social post from Essence magazine on Viola Davis's incredible outfit at the Cannes Film Festival. Not only was her name spelled wrong, but the language just felt off, and Bridget speculated that it seemed like it was written by AI. Fast forward a few weeks, and Essence reached out to Bridget about it on Instagram! But their response was confusing, at first they admitted to being "busted" and it seemed all in good fun, UNTIL they accused her of spreading misinformation. So was it written by AI or not? Bridget explains the reasons she still thinks it was, what this says about the future role of AI in media, and why AAVE (African American Vernacular English) might be the Achilles heel of generative language models.
See a screenshot of the original post through this public Patreon link (and while you're there, sign up for more bonus ad-free content): https://www.patreon.com/posts/84517863
Check out Bridget's critically acclaimed podcast "Beef", all about epic competitions: https://ncpodcasts.com/beef
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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. |
| 0:13.4 | I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. |
| 0:18.9 | So this is going to be a little bit different of an episode than the one that we initially had planned for today. |
| 0:24.6 | And that is because I have found myself personally in a situation that I think really speaks to this specific moment in technology, media, the internet, and where we're going in the future. |
| 0:36.3 | And as we're exploring this present future of ours, |
| 0:39.9 | we are probably going to find ourselves having more and more moments like this one. |
| 0:43.7 | So I wanted to bring all of you along on this ride with me. |
| 0:48.2 | I am here with my producer, Mike. |
| 0:50.3 | Mike, it is not often that we are talking about drama. |
| 0:53.9 | Drama might be a little bit strong, drama, discourse, dialogue that I am at the center of for something that I said on the podcast a few weeks ago. |
| 1:02.3 | Thank you for bravely being here to walk us through this journey. |
| 1:06.0 | Yeah, thanks for having me along. I'm excited to have a front row seat. Don't sell yourself short. It is |
| 1:12.0 | legit internet drama that you are involved in. I know. It's so much better to have |
| 1:16.6 | internet drama, like low stakes internet drama when you're not involved in it. So I kind of feel |
| 1:21.5 | like I'm on the other end of what I've enjoyed rubbernecking at when so many other people are on |
| 1:25.9 | the other end. So here's what's going down. If you follow me on Instagram, you might have seen that we had a little bit of drama |
| 1:30.9 | about something that we said on the podcast a few weeks ago. In our newscast from May 19th, I was |
| 1:35.6 | talking about this very weirdly worded Facebook post that Essence magazine published on their |
| 1:41.0 | Facebook page. Basically, it was a picture of actor Viola Davis at the |
| 1:45.0 | Cannes Film Festival looking beautiful. Side note, I also might have mispronounced can in that |
| 1:51.1 | episode. I have always said Khan. I thought I was saying it correctly. It's how I have said it my |
| 1:57.1 | whole life. I got some feedback that perhaps it's pronounced can. I looked it up, |
... |
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