Is This an A.I. Bubble? + Meta’s Missing Morals + TikTok Shock Slop
Note: This episode contains sexually explicit music.
This week, the whole tech world seemed to be asking: Are we in an A.I. bubble? We’ll explore the cases for and against, including who we think stands to lose most. Then we’re joined by the journalist Jeff Horwitz to discuss his blockbuster reporting about an internal Meta policy document that permit the company’s chatbots to engage in romantic role-playing with children. And finally, Casey introduces Kevin to a shocking new TikTok trend.
Guests:
Jeff Horwitz, investigative technology reporter for Reuters
Additional Reading:
My Dinner With Altman
Companies Are Pouring Billions Into A.I. It Has Yet to Pay Off
Meta’s A.I. Rules Have Let Bots Hold ‘Sensual’ Chats With Children
Why Is TikTok Overflowing With A.I. Country Music Erotica?
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Reuters is ready to stand up for the press — and embrace AI
Today, I’m talking with Paul Bascobert, who is the president of Reuters, as part of a special Thursday series we’re running this month to explore how leaders at some world’s biggest companies make decisions in such a rapidly changing environment. Reuters is a great company for us to kick off with, because it’s been around since 1851, when the hot technology enabling mass media was the telegraph.
Here, today, in 2025, the tech driving media has clearly changed more than a little bit. Distribution in a world full of iPhones and generative AI is a really different proposition than distributing media 50 years before the invention of the radio. So there’s a lot here, and you’ll hear Paul and I get deep into basically every Decoder theme there is.
Links:
The Trust Principles | Reuters
Brendan Carr’s FCC is an anti-consumer, rights-trampling harassment machine | Verge
AP wins reinstatement to White House events | AP
NYT publisher AG Sulzberger on Trump, OpenAI and the economy | Channels
Dow Jones CEO Almar Latour on AI, press freedom, and the future of news | Decoder
Platforms need the news — but they’re killing it | Decoder
Why The Atlantic signed a deal with OpenAI | Decoder
Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse | Decoder
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
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A Look Into Facebook's Soul — With WSJ's Jeff Horwitz and Ex-FB Exec. Brian Boland
Jeff Horwitz is the Wall Street Journal reporter who unearthed a trove of internal Facebook documents that reveal a damning disconnect between what the company says in public and its actions inside. Brian Boland is a former Facebook executive who spent more than 11 years inside the company. The two come on to discuss Horowitz's bombshell series of reports, unpacking what they tell us about Facebook, dissecting the company's responses, and looking at potential solutions.
Enjoy this bonus episode!
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The SolarWinds hack: cyber attacks and national security with Reuters reporter Joseph Menn
The Verge's Nilay Patel is joined by Joseph Menn, a cybersecurity reporter at Reuters and author of the new book Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World. Nilay and Joseph talk about a very big problem in US cybersecurity today: the SolarWinds hack.
In December, it was reported that a group of hackers, likely from the Russian government, had gotten into SolarWinds, a dominant player in network management software, and then used that access to breach everything from Microsoft to the US government.
The story is part of a back-and-forth game of hacking the United States and its rivals that have been escalating for years. Pay attention to how quickly this conversation with Joseph becomes about really big issues like how deeply our military and security agencies should be integrated with private company security. There aren’t a lot of easy answers here, but it’s clear that change is coming with the Biden administration.
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Recode Decode: "Cult of the Dead Cow" author Joe Menn
Writer Joe Menn talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about his most recent book, "Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World."
In this episode:
How Menn started writing about cybercrime; the rise and fall of Napster; his first book about hacking, “Fatal System Error”; the origins of Cult of the Dead Cow; “they’re basically good guys”; its invite-only membership and how it works; how it forced Microsoft to take security seriously; how future presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke got involved; what other CDC alumni are doing today; the state of cybercrime in 2019; the complexity of protecting yourself online; the government’s attempts to undermine encryption; the 2020 election; and what the US should do to protect its citizens.
Follow us
Kara Swisher (@karaswisher), host
Joe Menn (@josephmenn), guest
Erica Anderson (@EricaAmerica), executive producer
Eric Johnson (@HeyHeyESJ), producer
More to explore
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Document Vectors in the Wild with James Dreiss - TWiML Talk #183
In this episode of our Strata Data series we’re joined by James Dreiss, Senior Data Scientist at international news syndicate Reuters. James and I sat down to discuss his talk from the conference “Document vectors in the wild, building a content recommendation system,” in which he details how Reuters implemented document vectors to recommend content to users of their new “infinite scroll” page layout.