The Gray Area: The End of the Human Internet

**Kara Swisher** (0:00)
Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. We're off for the 4th of July holiday, but we still got something special for you today. We're bringing you an episode of The Gray Area, another great Vox Media podcast. It's a weekly podcast that looks at culture, tech, and politics with an eye towards philosophy. In this episode, host Sean Illing talks with Atlantic writer Charlie Warzel about why so much of the Internet now feels artificial, manipulated, or unreal.
Sean's interviews are always insightful, and Charlie is a friend of this show, so stick around.

**Sean Illing** (0:36)
This is The Gray Area. I am Sean Illing. My guest today is Charlie Warzel. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of their newsletter, Galaxy Brain. Charlie wrote a piece about AI and what he calls a crisis of agency, which is this feeling that so much of our lives online are being shaped and distorted by bots, algorithms, and various AI generated content.
Everything feels a little fake, a little manipulated. If you spend any time at all online, you know what I'm talking about. So we get into why the Internet feels so strange right now and whether it's still possible to build spaces online that feel genuinely human. Hope you enjoy.

**Sean Illing** (1:44)
Thanks for watching.

**Sean Illing** (1:45)
We'll see you next time.

**Sean Illing** (2:34)
Charlie Warzel, welcome back to the show.

**Charlie Warzel** (2:36)
Hey, thank you for having me.

**Sean Illing** (2:37)
Yeah, man, it's been a while. Let's talk about your recent piece in The Atlantic.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:41)
There is a lot of AI discourse right now, but this piece is sort of a very interesting piece.

**Sean Illing** (2:45)
It's a very interesting piece.

**Sean Illing** (2:46)
It's a very interesting piece. It's a very interesting piece. It's a very interesting piece.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:52)
It's a very interesting piece.

**Sean Illing** (2:53)
It's been a while.
Let's talk about your recent piece in The Atlantic. There is a lot of AI discourse right now, but this piece is 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. So let's just start there. What is the feeling you are describing in this piece?

**Charlie Warzel** (3:21)
The feeling that I'm describing is one of disorientation but also paranoia, I think. I think what I feel a lot on the Internet right now is this paranoia.
I started the piece with a callback to a piece by the Internet tech writer Max Reed, who wrote in New York Magazine back in 2018, about what he called the inversion, which is this tipping point where the bot and fake content, content made synthetically instead of just by you or me, human beings, may surpass some of the content that we all make, and that the Internet would be just a majority fake, to some degree, or a majority automated. And that, at the time, I remember was a real revelation for a lot of people, this feeling that, whoa, like you're telling me there's all these people using these sock puppet accounts on Twitter or Facebook or wherever, that there's these fake bots trying to sell me stuff, that a lot of websites are populated with automated comments or whatever it is. And now that's honestly a pretty quaint idea, that someone wouldn't be as aware of that. Because in the generative AI age, or whatever we're going to call it, or whatever we're in basically since the arrival of chat GBT, 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 texts, all the things that we would call AI slop. And now you just have people generating whole sites with the click of a button, to promote something that either isn't real or that is a scam or pretty awful. You have that happening on this vast scale, so much so that Google search, most of what you see is going to be garbage.
Then you have synthetic music, AI slopped videos and things clogging these feeds. And you have organizations that 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 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 start posting it, it gets priority inside the feeds. So it's this idea that like what people are really doing now is they're not marketing to human beings, they're marketing to these algorithms. The end result of all of that, right? This idea that everything around you might be fake.