Leah Feiger: I mean, the kicker to me here too, part of this has to do with “preventing future crime.” It’s all supposed to be about how the primary purpose is to build a national DNA database for solving crimes, which is a theory. OK, sure. Solving crimes, cool about that. But these are 5-year-olds. These are 5-year-olds whose—so many of their rights have already been taken away by this current administration and DOJ and DHS. To have that as an additional marker to me is a really important visual next step of the war on immigrants at this moment in the country.
Zoë Schiffer: All right. I’m going to take us from the depths of despair. Just drag us up.
Brian Barrett: Some would say AI slop is maybe not the depths, but we’re definitely still in despair territory.
Leah Feiger: I mean, I love the depths of despair, my favorite place to be.
Zoë Schiffer: I find it funny, but I have a bunch of thoughts on it and my views on this have been evolving really rapidly, so I’m excited to talk to you about it.
Leah Feiger: Good, good, good, good.
Zoë Schiffer: Last week, Google rolled out a new AI feature on Google Earth, which would basically let anyone zoom into real coordinates on a map and type a prompt just like you would in ChatGPT or Gemini and superimpose an AI scene on top of real Google satellite imagery.
Brian Barrett: What could go wrong?
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I have a hard time imagining how no one during this process said, “This is a terrible idea,” or perhaps they did and they were not listened to. But regardless, Google did this. As you might imagine, it took 24 hours for people to generate fabricated nuclear plants in Iran, a bombed hospital in Gaza, and fires at an Iranian oil terminal. People were extremely upset about this for misinformation, disinformation, and other reasons, and Google quickly disabled the feature. It just feels like there is a real split between how Silicon Valley feels about AI and uses AI and how the rest of the country feels about it and uses about it because these tools are pretty unpopular, even as they’re being widely adopted. But I think that the way that they’re being adopted is also really different. Most people are using ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude as basically a replacement for Google. Whereas in Silicon Valley, they’re using it as a replacement for a personal assistant or a junior employee. And so for them, I think there is real magic in the tools and the capabilities. But for everyone else, the thing you hear a lot is why is this being shoved down our throats? We don’t want this. They’re stuffing AI features in all of these apps that we previously used and were good and the AI features are bad.
Brian Barrett: Well, I think it’s AI slop specifically, right? Yeah, there are use cases for AI agents. Zoë, you’ve given over some percentage of your life to them already. It’s working out great for you. But what I find interesting about this is, A, how quickly they rolled it back, and B, it’s just the latest in a series of steps like this where companies that have been sort of embracing AI up to this point are acknowledging through actual feature changes to their products that, hey, maybe people don’t like this. Just in the last week or so, you had LinkedIn adding a little button to a post where you can say, “I think this looks like AI slop. I don’t like this.” LinkedIn, which has basically been a platform that has been built the last year or so on saying, “Hey, look at all the AI slop you can make on this platform.” That’s their whole thing.
