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TRANSCRIPT

Jane Coaston: It’s Monday, October 6th, I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show that asks for the millionth time, what on earth is President Donald Trump talking about? 

[clip of President Donald Trump] In the book, I wrote whatever the hell the title, I can’t tell you, but I can tell you there’s a page in there devoted to the fact that I saw somebody named Osama bin Laden, and I didn’t like it, and you got to take care of him. They didn’t do it a year later, he blew up the World Trade Center, so got to take a little credit because nobody else is going to give it to me. You know, the old story, they don’t give you credit, just take it yourself. 

Jane Coaston: Okay. A few things. He is speaking there to Naval Academy cadets. The World Trade Center bombing and 9/11 were not the same thing. You’ll be shocked to know that his book does not say any of this and also, credit for what? [music break] On today’s show, Trump decides to send California’s National Guard to Portland, after a federal judge blocks him from sending Oregon’s troops. And delegations from Israel, Hamas, and the U.S. are in Egypt to discuss a peace plan. But let’s start with slop, specifically AI slop. And even if you don’t know what AI slop is, there’s a good chance you’ve encountered it, basically everywhere most of us spend time online. Maybe it was those Facebook photos of an L.A. Firefighter rescuing a baby and a bear cub during the wildfires earlier this year—AI-generated, of course. Or it’s getting emails from your MAGA aunt about an inspirational story she found online about a group of bikers with a suspicious number of fingers visiting a World War II veteran in the hospital. Or it is the President of the United States sharing AI-generating videos depicting the head of the Office of Management and Budget as the Grim Reaper or putting sombreros on House Minority Speaker, Hakeem Jeffries. Which Vice President J.D. Vance seemed to think was hilarious? Here’s Vance from Wednesday. 

[clip of Vice President J.D. Vance] Oh, I think it’s funny. The president’s joking, and we’re having a good time. You can negotiate in good faith while also poking a little bit of fun at some of the absurdities of the Democrats’ positions. 

Jane Coaston: See, this would be different if the president were negotiating in good faith. I wonder what that would be like. But with the latest version of OpenAI’s Sora app, the slop is only going to get worse. And what I mean by that is that it’s only going get harder to know what’s fake, which is bad. Not just because I find AI videos deeply concerning and creepy and the kind of thing that makes me want to heave my phone into a fire and move to the woods, but because AI imagery is becoming inescapable in our social media feeds and in our politics too. So to talk more about what AI slop is, why it’s so profitable, and why we won’t be rid of it anytime soon, I spoke to Jason Koebler. He’s the co-founder of 404 Media, a tech-focused independent media outlet. Jason, welcome to What a Day! 

Jason Koebler: Hey, thanks for having me. 

Jane Coaston: So I think we kind of all know what we’re talking about when we use the term AI slop, but let’s get a definition in. What is AI slop? 

Jason Koebler: Yeah, I mean, in my opinion, it is AI generated content that is designed to make money, first and foremost. Like at first, it was primarily stuff that was designed to trick people by like being very realistic. Like I started writing about this at the end of 2023, where there was this wood carver guy who was like making dogs out of like these huge trees. Like he was documenting every moment of the process. And I started seeing like all these variations of that image on Facebook of this guy like sitting next to like a life-size dog that he had made out of a chainsaw. And there was like just all these different versions where the dog was different, the guy was different and they were going viral over and over and over again and they’re all stolen from this one artist in the UK who actually made this stuff. 

Jane Coaston: But I wanna ask, how does this stuff make money? Like what is the generative concept behind it? 

Jason Koebler: Yeah, so each social media platform has something called a creator bonus program, and I think Facebook maybe had the first of these to compete with TikTok, like when they launched Reels, they were trying to get TikTok stars to come onto Instagram and post Reels. And so they said, we will pay you if you go viral, essentially. If your posts get a lot of views on any social media platforms, you get some fraction of the ad revenue is like the easiest way of thinking about it. And so the thing about this is like AI content doesn’t even necessarily need to trick people, like people don’t need to think that it’s real. A lot of this stuff is just so bizarre that it’s made to like have you sit there and go like what the hell is this? And so the person who’s making that has like captured your attention for a few seconds and you know they’re capturing like fractions of a penny per view per like per comment per share and that adds up. What I like to say is like they have a lot of bytes at the algorithmic apple. It’s like, you and me, we’re making this video, we’re in person, I had to drive here. 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Jason Koebler: It took me an hour, this is gonna take a long time. You could make an AI video in 10 seconds and you can create hundreds of them and load it up with keywords and you don’t need all of them to go viral, you only need one of them to go viral in order to grow your channel and start collecting this money. 

Jane Coaston: Let’s talk about the Sora app that OpenAI recently released, because it seems like that puts slop creation into hyperdrive. How does Sora work? 

Jason Koebler: Yeah, I mean, it’s so easy to use. I got into it the other day. So you download the app. Um. When you join it, you essentially take a selfie. So you like record your face. You turn to the left, to the right, and that like captures your face, and then you say three numbers. So you’ll say like 42, 87, and 35, and then it has captured your voice and it’s captured your face and then, you just type a prompt. So we can say, Jason and Jane recording a podcast at the Crooked Studios, and in like 30 seconds, it will spit out a video, and it will have my voice. I can put you in it if you are also on the app and have agreed to um allow me to like put you in my videos. 

Jane Coaston: Uh huh. 

Jason Koebler: And then we could also say like we want Pikachu to be here. We want Sponge Bob to be here. And I mean the videos, honestly, are pretty impressive, I think. Like AI has been really crude for a long time. You have the 10-finger problem. 

Jane Coaston: Right [laugh]. 

Jason Koebler: Things like that. Like Sora is pretty good. It’s pretty scary, in my opinion. And one thing that’s really scary about it is that it syncs voice and images and video like really well. That was like a really hard thing to do in AI for a while was to like make the voices sound real, or you could make the voices, but you couldn’t make like the lips line up. 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Jason Koebler: And stuff like that, and it’s like it’s pretty good at that. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah, I’m terrified thinking about this because it seems like if you can do that with your voice and with my voice, you can basically just blur the lines between reality and made up stuff, especially because so many of the videos that I’ve seen have been based on a politics or a culture thing that the person wants to be true. So I want to ask, are there any guardrails on the Sora app? 

Jason Koebler: Yeah, so there’s not that many. Um. If you want to put yourself in it or one of your friends, they have to opt in and they have to scan their face and like choose to be in the app. Um. But if you are a famous person, you know there’s not a lot of guardrails at the moment. A lot of copyrighted characters are in there. OpenAI has decided to have an opt-out for intellectual property, which is a choice. Um, so basically like When the app first launched, there was tons of SpongeBob, there was tons of Pokemon because Nintendo and Viacom hadn’t opted those characters out. Over the last few days, I’ve seen a lot of users complaining that they can’t make Sponge Bob anymore. So there are some guardrails for companies, and then you know they try to prevent you from making porn or making violent content. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah. 

Jason Koebler: Although people have found ways around those so far. 

Jane Coaston: So I need to get into the intersection of AI and politics. 

Jason Koebler: Yes. 

Jane Coaston: Because it is worrying to have some of our weirdest political figures using AI in ways that are baffling even for them. I mean, I wrote about this a couple days ago, but we had Trump post and then delete an AI video of himself and his daughter-in-law in a Fox News-esque newscast about med beds, which is a right-wing conspiracy theory about beds that can regrow limbs, and I am not kidding. There was that super weird Grim Reaper video he posted of himself and Vice President JD Vance with Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought as the Grim Reaper. And now you’ve got California Governor Gavin Newsom using AI videos. Is this just our reality now of politicians using memes like these, but also of politicians who seem well aware or should be well aware of that weird line between reality and fantasy and they’re just kind of running straight long at that line itself. 

Jason Koebler: Yeah, I mean, if you can remember back to the good old days of like October 2024, um like the Kamala Trump debate. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah. 

Jason Koebler: There was a lot of AI slop about the Haitians are eating the dogs. 

Jane Coaston: Right. 

Jason Koebler: And cats meme. And that was the first time that I really saw like Trump use AI slop. And there was like this big conversation like we can’t stoop to that level. We cannot be making AI slop about politics, about current events, things like that. Now it’s everywhere and I feel like all bets are off, like you have Gavin Newsom using it, you have the RNC using it. You have Trump using it. You have Trump making videos about the resort he wants to make in Gaza that are AI generated and I really do think that the ball is moving so rapidly in this space that it’s hard to imagine a world where we like put things back in the box and then sort of stop doing this. Um. Last week, there was a refinery explosion in El Segundo, which is pretty close to my house. So I wanted to see what was going on. I went to Google it and one of the top results within 15 minutes of it happening was AI slop. And so it’s happening almost in real-time. And it’s happening about basically any news event that you can possibly think of. 

Jane Coaston: AI has also been applied to political ads, which, according to a recent New York Times story, are an active part of Facebook’s advertising revenue. And we’ve been talking about the money part of this. Meta says it will enforce rules against scammers, but clearly those fake ads are all over the platform. And even if Meta tries to do this, it’s basically playing whack-a-mole. Can we hope for any kind of oversight, or is are we just fucked on this? 

Jason Koebler: I mean, I have tried to get Meta to talk about this with me for two years. Um. They promote this stuff. Like, this is part of their business model. They have an ad product that is powered by generative AI where, you know, maybe a couple years ago, if you were an advertiser, you would make two or three versions of an ad. You would see which one performs the best on Facebook, and then you would put money behind that ad. With generative AI, they can make hundreds of versions of the ad, all slightly different, all AI generated, and see which one performs best, and then put money into that. And if you listen to like a Meta earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg will say, this is a huge growth factor for us. And you know, they are making tools that allow people to make AI imagery. I would say a lot of my Instagram and Facebook feed is AI generated. And a lot it is politics. If not overtly ads, it’s politics adjacent. I’ve seen more like AI slop about Elon Musk than almost any other figure. And almost all of the slop I’ve seen is like Elon Musk builds tiny homes for homeless community. Like Elon Musk invents rocket that could never exist. And people buy it because I think that they’re just kind of stuck in this vortex, this algorithmic like hell of AI. And you see this time and time again, and it starts to shape your worldview, I think. 

Jane Coaston: So, what are good ways to tell if a video or image has been AI generated? Like, I’ve been really relying on the fact that AI still seems not very good at making hands, but now we’re getting to a point where that’s not working, where you really have to rely on some sort of uncanny valley resonance coming from it. So, are there any hints that you can offer or any kind of paths forward? I mean, the best I can think of is just like, have you ever seen this before or does this just seem suspicious? 

Jason Koebler: Yeah, I mean, this is the main thing I’ve been reporting on for two years. I spend all day every day looking at AI photos and AI videos. And until a few months ago, I would have agreed with you. I would say look at the hands, look to see if the text is blurry, because AI is really bad at making text. Um. It’s pretty bad at doing like reflections and things like that. So if there’s a mirror, maybe there will be no reflection. Maybe like a window would look a little odd. But that has really changed over the last couple months. I still think that AI video has like, a bit of a surreal quality to it, where it’s just like, oh, the people are like moving a little bit too like smoothly in a lot of the videos I’ve seen. But I think it’s getting a lot harder. And I think that we’ve really, like passed a rubicon with Sora, especially, where I can’t always tell. And that’s the really scary thing. My best advice is to, like, not trust most things that you see on social media these days, unless it comes from someone who you personally know from a news source that you actually trust. And I think that that is like, kind of where we’re going where you’re going to start to have to trust individual people and institutions versus like the thing that’s viral at that moment. 

Jane Coaston: I feel like that’s just a general good idea. 

Jason Koebler: It is. It’s all I’ve got at this point. 

Jane Coaston: Right, I know. 

Jason Koebler: You know? 

Jane Coaston: No that makes sense. Jason, thank you so much for your time. 

Jason Koebler: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Jason Koebler, co-founder of 404 Media. We’ll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. 

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Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines.

[clip of President Donald Trump] Portland is burning to the ground. You have agitators, insurrectionists. All you have to do is look at the look at the television, turn on your television, read your newspapers. It’s burning to the ground, the governor, the mayor, the politicians are petrified for their lives. 

Jane Coaston: They are not. That’s Trump on the South Lawn of the White House, next to a very loud helicopter on Sunday. He’s talking about the decision of a federal judge he appointed to block the deployment of Oregon’s National Guard in Portland. The president has been cracking down on democratic cities that protest his policies, like Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and Portland has been on his radar for a while, thanks to a lot of anti-immigration and customs enforcement rallies this year and Fox News. Although, to be clear, despite what that television network is telling you, the city is not burning to the ground. But hey, never mind all that. The president is just gonna do what he wants to do. Despite the federal court ruling, the Trump administration on Sunday decided that if it can’t deploy troops from Oregon, it’s gonna send 300 National Guard troops from California. Brilliant. In response, California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom said the Trump Administration is, quote, “ignoring court orders and treating judges, even those appointed by the president himself as political opponents,” and added that California will sue. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has also authorized 300 National Guard troops to Chicago, citing crime in the region and what officials describe as attacks on ICE officers that have been active in the city. Illinois Democratic Governor J.B. Pritzker has objected to the deployment, and he joined Jake Tapper on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday to talk about it, where he mentioned a brutal ICE raid in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood last week. 

[clip of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker] Our Department of Children and Family Services are investigating what happened to those children who were zip-tied and held, some of them nearly naked, in the middle of the night. And again, elderly people being thrown into a U-Haul for three hours and detained U.S. citizens. What kind of country are we living in?

Jane Coaston: Of course, there are major questions about whether the president’s use of federal troops in U.S. cities is even constitutional. In September, another federal judge ruled the president’s decision to deploy National Guard troops in Los Angeles was illegal. The Trump administration has appealed that ruling, setting up for more back and forth between the Trump administration and pretty much everyone in the courts. 

[clip of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio] So there’s a framework here and the framework is simple. Once you agree on the logistics of how this is gonna happen, I think the Israelis and everyone acknowledge you can’t release hostages in the middle of strikes. So the strikes will have to stop. 

Jane Coaston: U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio responded to questions on CBS’ Face the Nation Sunday about Israel’s continued attacks on Gaza, despite Trump saying on Friday that bombing should stop as a peace deal for the region gets worked out. Rubio said the Trump administration wants Hamas to release all Israeli hostages and told CBS that if Hamas agrees to do so, Israel will have to stop its bombardment of Gaza. 

[clip of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio] We’re trying to get the hostages out, that’s the bottom line. We want to get the hostages out as soon as possible. For that to happen there can’t be a war going on in the middle of it and Hamas has to agree to turn them over. We have to have the right people go in and get them. 

Jane Coaston: Hamas on Friday already agreed to the part of Trump’s peace plan that involves releasing all hostages, though the group said other parts of the deal, like handing over future control of Gaza to other political groups, would require further negotiation. Trump appeared optimistic in a video he posted to Truth Social on Friday. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] So, I just want to let you know that this is a very special day, maybe unprecedented in many ways, it is unprecedented, but thank you all and thank you to those great countries that helped. We were given a tremendous amount of help. Everybody was unified in wanting this war to end and seeing peace in the Middle East, and we’re very close to achieving that. Thank you all, and everybody will be treated fairly. 

Jane Coaston: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, was not as hopeful that a deal will go through. Officials told Axios that during a phone call Friday after Hamas agreed to parts of the plan, Netanyahu said it doesn’t mean anything, to which Trump responded, quote, “I don’t know why you’re always so fucking negative. This is a win. Take it.” But Trump was a little less sanguine Saturday speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper via text because they text? Writing that if Hamas insists on staying in power, it’ll face, quote, “complete obliteration.” The Israeli military continued its bombing campaign of Gaza over the weekend. At least 19 Palestinians were killed Sunday as delegations from Hamas, Israel, and the U.S. traveled to Egypt to negotiate the peace plan. Those talks are expected to begin Monday, just ahead of the second anniversary of the October 7th attacks on Israel by Hamas. Russia launched yet another major attack against Ukraine early Sunday, killing at least five and injuring many others. Ukrainian officials said the strikes targeted civilian infrastructure, and that in one part of the country where a power plant was bombed, more than 73,000 people were left without electricity. In recent weeks, Russia has increased its attacks on Ukraine’s energy grid as winter approaches. Russia has also been attacking Ukraine’s railway network almost daily for two months. Russia’s defense ministry said the strikes targeted Ukraine’s military-industrial complex and the energy facilities that supply it. But Ukraine says many of the targets were civilian. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a telegram post that the airstrikes, quote, “once again targeted our infrastructure, everything that ensures normal life for our people.” For its part, Ukraine has also been targeting Russian infrastructure, particularly its oil refineries, which has contributed to an ongoing fuel shortage there. Last week, we told you about Trump’s bizarre declaration that the U.S. is in a, quote, “non-international armed conflict with drug cartels.” Which in plain English means he’s calling it a war without those pesky legal strings attached. Well, on Friday, the Trump administration doubled down. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced yet another strike on a suspected drug-smuggling boat off the coast of Venezuela. The latest in a string of attacks that have already killed multiple people. Now, you may be thinking. That sounds a lot like violating state sovereignty to conduct what Venezuela’s vice president described as, quote, “extrajudicial executions.” Well, on Sunday at an event celebrating the Navy’s 250th anniversary, Trump clarified why you’d be wrong to think that way. 

[clip of President Donald Trump] You have to think of it this way. Every one of those boats is responsible for the death of 25,000 American people and the destruction of families. So when you think of it that way, what we’re doing is actually an act of kindness. 

Jane Coaston: Kindness. Pass it on. The administration says these are legitimate military operations against, quote, “unlawful combatants,” but critics like Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul say Trump is stretching his war powers to launch open-ended conflicts without congressional approval. Lawmakers still haven’t received a full list of which groups have been designated as targets because transparency is for losers and ghosts. Get it? I mean Halloween is approaching and ghosts are transparent. Oh, and the Supreme Court just granted the Trump administration power to strip legal protections from over 300,000 Venezuelan migrants by revoking their temporary protected status. Because if you’re going to stretch presidential war powers, may as well push against the boundaries of immigration law, too. And that’s the news. [music break]

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Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, please do not discuss your Taylor Swift album hot takes with me, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about how my views on Taylor Swift are that she seems like a nice person, and I saw her in concert once about a decade ago, and seriously, that’s it, like me. What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston, and I am standing up to the Taylor Swift hot take economy by simply not having a Taylor Swift hot take. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Emily Fohr and Chris Alport. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Sean Allee, Gina Pollack, and Caitlin Plummer. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our senior vice president of news and politics is Adriene Hill. We had help today from the Associated Press. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]

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