Welcome to the Virgcast, the flagship podcast of Bot Farms.

I'm your friend David Pierce and this is the second episode in our miniseries

all about AI in the real world. AI is so abstract and it's a term that we now

use in so many ways that honestly it can feel sort of meaningless. So we've been on a

quest to find actual examples of actual

AI showing up and being useful or at the very least interesting in our actual lives.

For this episode, the last one in our little series for now, I have a

feeling we'll come back to this subject, but last one for now. I'm talking to

Michael Salmon, who recently launched an app called Social AI that has become kind of a viral phenomenon on the internet.

We'll get into what it is and how it works in pretty serious detail here, but basically

I'd explain Social AI this way. Imagine a social network,

Twitter or threads or whatever, but every user other than you, every single one other than

you is a bot. Does that sound interesting? Pointless, terrible,

dystopian, amazing? Maybe all of those things? I wasn't sure where I fell on that

line when I started talking to Michael, but we ended up having, frankly, one of the most fun conversations I've had in a while, all about how AI works and how we're actually supposed to use it.

spoiler alert, he thinks about this less as a network and more as an interface,

and I find that fascinating.

We happen to agree, actually Michael and I,

that a chatbot cannot possibly be the future of

everything in technology.

And Michael has some big ideas about what else we might be able to do.

All that is coming up in just a second, but first, I have to tell my bots what's going on.

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