Jul 6, 2026 · 43 min · 17 segments
Today, we're bringing you an episode of "The Gray Area," another great show from the Vox Media Podcast Network. In this episode, host Sean…
Charlie WarzelGuest
Sean IllingHost
Kara SwisherHost
Um, let's talk about your recent piece in The Atlantic, right? There is a, uh, a lot of AI discourse right now, but this piece is sort of getting at a part of it that seems a little under-discussed, which is the increasingly weird bot-haunted internet we all live inside now.
The feeling that I'm describing is one of disorientation but also paranoia, I think.
And, uh, I started, I started the piece with, uh, uh, a callback to, to a piece by, uh, the internet tech writer Max Read, who wrote in New York Magazine back in, in twenty eighteen about, um, what he called the inversion, which is this tipping point where, you know, the bot and fake content, content made synthetically instead of just by, you know, you or me, uh, human beings m- may, like, surpass some of, uh, some of, you know, the content that, that, that we all make and that the internet would sort of be just a majority fake to some degree or majority, you know, automated.
And that at the time I remember was a real revelation for a lot of people, this, this feeling that, oh, whoa, like, so you're telling me there's all these people using these sock puppet, sock puppet accounts on Twitter or Facebook or wherever that, you know, there's, there's these fake bots trying to sell me stuff, uh, that a lot of websites are populated with, with, you know, automated comments or whatever it is.
And now that's honestly a, a, a pretty quaint idea that someone wouldn't be as aware of that because in the generative AI age or whatever we're gonna call it or whatever we're in basically since, you know, the arrival of, of ChatGPT but even before it, you have an internet now that is jammed full of synthetic content in all sorts of ways.
So you have synthetic text, you know, all the w- um, all the things that we would call AI slop, right? And now you just have people generating whole sites with the click of a button, right? To promote something that either isn't real or that is, you know, a, a scam or s- or, or, or, you know, like pretty awful.
You have that happening on this vast scale, so much so that, that Google Search most of what you see is going to be garbage, right? Um, then you have synthetic music, AI slop videos and things, you know, clogging these feeds, and you have organizations that ha- are doing a new style of content marketing, of viral marketing, in which they spin up fake accounts- To seed algorithms with information that is befitting their client, right? So if you're an artist, you can have y- you- these viral marketing firms that will spam TikTok with your song so that it becomes...
The algorithm thinks, "Oh, this is a popular song." And then when other people-
So it's this idea that, like, what people are really doing now is they're not marketing to human beings.
The end result of all of that, right, this idea that everything around you might be fake, it creates this sense of paranoia.
It's not just that there's not one thing that people are talking or thinking about.
It's that you can make a convincing case that anything you don't like or that you think is suspect or that is weird in some way is a psyop.
Um, let's talk about your recent piece in The Atlantic, right? There is a, uh, a lot of AI discourse right now, but this piece is sort of getting at a part of it that seems a little under-discussed, which is the increasingly weird bot-haunted internet we all live inside now.
The feeling that I'm describing is one of disorientation but also paranoia, I think.
And, uh, I started, I started the piece with, uh, uh, a callback to, to a piece by, uh, the internet tech writer Max Read, who wrote in New York Magazine back in, in twenty eighteen about, um, what he called the inversion, which is this tipping point where, you know, the bot and fake content, content made synthetically instead of just by, you know, you or me, uh, human beings m- may, like, surpass some of, uh, some of, you know, the content that, that, that we all make and that the internet would sort of be just a majority fake to some degree or majority, you know, automated.
And that at the time I remember was a real revelation for a lot of people, this, this feeling that, oh, whoa, like, so you're telling me there's all these people using these sock puppet, sock puppet accounts on Twitter or Facebook or wherever that, you know, there's, there's these fake bots trying to sell me stuff, uh, that a lot of websites are populated with, with, you know, automated comments or whatever it is.
And now that's honestly a, a, a pretty quaint idea that someone wouldn't be as aware of that because in the generative AI age or whatever we're gonna call it or whatever we're in basically since, you know, the arrival of, of ChatGPT but even before it, you have an internet now that is jammed full of synthetic content in all sorts of ways.
So you have synthetic text, you know, all the w- um, all the things that we would call AI slop, right? And now you just have people generating whole sites with the click of a button, right? To promote something that either isn't real or that is, you know, a, a scam or s- or, or, or, you know, like pretty awful.
You have that happening on this vast scale, so much so that, that Google Search most of what you see is going to be garbage, right? Um, then you have synthetic music, AI slop videos and things, you know, clogging these feeds, and you have organizations that ha- are doing a new style of content marketing, of viral marketing, in which they spin up fake accounts- To seed algorithms with information that is befitting their client, right? So if you're an artist, you can have y- you- these viral marketing firms that will spam TikTok with your song so that it becomes...
The algorithm thinks, "Oh, this is a popular song." And then when other people-
So it's this idea that, like, what people are really doing now is they're not marketing to human beings.
The end result of all of that, right, this idea that everything around you might be fake, it creates this sense of paranoia.
It's not just that there's not one thing that people are talking or thinking about.
It's that you can make a convincing case that anything you don't like or that you think is suspect or that is weird in some way is a psyop.
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