Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, hello, it's Wednesday. You're used to my voice, at least a little bit on today. We're taking a little bit of a breather, but we have something from friend of the show, Alex Goldman, his newish podcast, Hyperfixed. It's good. So it's here in the feed instead of us who are resting, but because we love you. and appreciate you. And I can't make my voice sound sincere, but I do mean that.
We're going to have a little something extra for you on Friday. All right. Hyperfixed. Go. Hi, I'm Alex Goldman, and this is Hyperfixed. Each week on our show, listeners write in with their problems, big and small, and I solve them. Or at least I try. And if I don't, I at least give a good reason why I can't. This week, phobituaries.
I'm not sure how big this problem is. It could be on one end of the spectrum, just a lazy little nothing problem. On the other, we pull the thread and go down the rabbit hole, Alex. It could potentially lead into some sort of crazy syndicate bot farm thing.
This is Marcus. He's 35 years old. He lives in Victoria, British Columbia. And despite this adorably conspiratorial pitch he just made to me, Marcus is actually a very normal guy. He works in sustainability reporting. He just became a father. And he's married to a wonderful woman who he literally calls my wonderful wife.
So how did the normal guy with the wonderful wife come to be talking about rabbit holes in syndicates? Well, it's actually a pretty sad story, and it started about two months ago. On February 16th, Marcus and his wife got a call. That kind of call that people in their 30s never expect to get. One of their very best friends had suddenly died, and the news had left them reeling.
Not just because this friend was only 32 years old, but she was the kind of 32-year-old that seemed utterly unstoppable.
If she was a video game character, she was maxed out. She broke the game because she had so many more skill points than the average person. Her wit, so sharp. She was an ultra marathon runner. She would backcountry ski. She just excelled in every facet of what she did. And she did so many cool things. She honestly was just such an amazing life force.
We were very lucky to have her as the MC at our wedding. And yeah, I mean, she was just...
He was awesome, Alex. It seemed impossible that this awesome, amazing life force could so suddenly be snuffed out. And yet, it was true.
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Chapter 2: What prompted Marcus to search for information about his friend's death?
So when they got the call that their friend had died, the first thing Marcus and his wife wanted to know was, how in the world did this happen? The person who called them hadn't told them the details. And although they knew her family, they didn't want to burden them with questions at such a tragic time.
So we ended up doing some Googling almost, I would say, hourly about information on our friend's passing, if there were news reports, if there was an obituary.
At first, there was nothing, just a total information vacuum. But within a day or two, notices about his friend's death did start popping up on the internet. At the top of Google search results, Marcus found links to these random small-time news sites, sites with names like Memoir News 360 and nycbreaking.site.
And I mean, already one of these seemed weird, because why would a website called NYC Breaking, that's presumably about breaking news in New York City, be covering the death of a not-famous woman in Canada? But when Marcus began to click through and read the obituaries that these small time news sites had written for his friend, the weirdness just got weirder.
The names of her siblings and her parents were incorrect. Her age was reported off as high as 15 years. And like, how can you get someone's age wrong or the name of their parents in an obituary? That's like got to be step one or two, like the basic facts of the person.
Initially, it might have been easy to shrug this off as just sloppy reporting. But over the next few days, more of these weird obituaries began popping up on the internet.
And while there was no doubt that the person they were referring to was indeed his friend, because they mentioned her name, and the city she lived in, and the company she worked for, aside from some vague platitudes about how she, quote, believed that workplaces should be supportive environments and also embraced the thrill of winter sports, nearly every other detail in these obituaries was wrong.
And it kind of felt like, is this AI slop? Or what's going on? And I mean, accessing on the mobile phone, it was like going to a website pre ad blocker in the late 90s, early 2000s, where like every square inch is a pop up ad and fake links, invisible links trying to get you to click through all these things.
And we ended up basically experiencing this daily for almost a week and a half until the official obituary was released.
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Chapter 3: How did Marcus discover AI-written obituaries?
They just didn't know how much. And that's where the internet stepped in, with a promise to solve the waste issue using personal data to drive targeted ads.
So we all know that we're tracked like massively online and now location tracking on our phones. And there's just an enormous sort of commercial surveillance industry around like sort of looking at all of our behavior and everything else.
But now the promise of this is, right, that we can surveil people wherever they are and place an ad at the best moment, right, as opposed to in the best publication.
So thanks to this new technology, advertisers could put their ads in front of their customers no matter where they are on the Internet. And at the end of the month, Google, or whoever they purchased their ads through, would come back with a report showing exactly how many of their customers actually saw the ad. For advertisers, it seemed like a perfect system, a seller's utopia.
And then the cracks started to show. The first major reckoning happened after the 2016 election, when more than 100 companies, including Kellogg's and Procter & Gamble, discovered that their ads had been running on sites peddling political disinformation, radical extremism, and hate speech. Which, again, means they had been funding that stuff.
And maybe you think they didn't actually just discover this. Like, maybe you think that's just what they said to save face when their customers discovered it and got pissed off. And honestly, I probably would have thought that too. But then I learned that in 2021, both Pfizer and the CDC discovered they'd been running ads on COVID conspiracy sites. So, yeah, I believe.
Anyway, in the wake of these discoveries, these big, powerful companies started grappling with the fact that this system they'd put so much faith in might not be working exactly the way they'd hoped it would. But when they asked how in the world could this happen, the answer wasn't super clear.
So the digital advertising system is built in a way that is pretty complex and pretty opaque. Essentially, the idea is that every time that you visit a webpage, assuming you don't have an ad blocker turned on or something like that, in the just milliseconds it takes the page to load, there's an auction going on for your attention.
So the publisher, that's the webpage, will put up space for sale in this auction. And advertisers will bid for the privilege of putting their ad in front of your eyes when the page loads. And by the time the page is finished loading and the ad appears, the auction's already over. So because this whole thing happened so quickly, it has to be automated.
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Chapter 4: What inaccuracies did Marcus find in the obituaries?
They've demanded more transparency about where their ads end up and more overall accountability from the online ad industry, which handles hundreds of billions of dollars in advertiser funds every year. But so far, the vast majority of reforms have either fallen short or failed completely.
Websites containing disinformation, propaganda, medical hoaxes, and fake obituaries continue to find their way into the ad exchanges. And unsuspecting advertisers continue to pay for the privilege of running their ads there. And that's not even their biggest issue.
It's estimated that more than $100 billion is being stolen through the online ad exchange every single year, through bot farm operations, through web spoofing, and sometimes through complex systems that make the ad exchange think an ad has been displayed on a website when in fact it hasn't been displayed anywhere at all.
Ad fraud is currently the second largest criminal enterprise in the world, just after drugs. Except that, unlike drugs, nobody in the ad fraud world is getting prosecuted. So aside from the advertisers, nobody involved in this thing seems particularly invested in trying to reform it. And that, my friends, is why the internet has become such a cesspool.
In my conversation with Josh, he introduced me to a couple concepts that I thought were really instructive in understanding why this system is so backwards and so messed up. And he did so by way of historical analogy to the meltdown of a nuclear power plant.
So you've heard of Three Mile Island, the nuclear plant. So they had like a partial meltdown and I think it was 1979 and they had a couple of like big blue ribbon panels that looked at it and what were the causes and all this type of thing and trying to retroactively assign blame. But there was a professor, a sociologist, Charles Perrault, and he did his own investigation into it.
And he came to a conclusion that a lot of people really struggled with and have struggled with for many years, which is that there's certain ways in which you can design a system where essentially the problems are inevitable and really difficult to reform in any meaningful way. And he landed on two types of issues that when they are combined, create one of these systems.
The first issue was something that he called interactive complexity.
And that's where all of the different moving pieces interact in ways that you can't really predict.
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Chapter 5: How are AI obituaries generated and who profits from them?
At the scale we're talking about, all those things create a huge amount of, like, sort of negative consequence. You know, you've got tens of millions of dollars in advertising that monetize COVID disinformation. You've got health scams. You've got the obituary stuff, right? It's a system that is both really difficult, maybe impossible to reform in the way that it's running now.
And it has really bad negative consequences for everybody. And I don't know that you can fix it without scrapping it, essentially.
After the break, can the internet be fixed? Welcome back to the show. So before the break, we met a normal guy named Marcus whose encounter with AI obituaries had him talking about rabbit holes and syndicates. Marcus had a bunch of questions. about why these things exist, who's behind them, how they operate. And we answered all of those questions, but it left us with some of our own.
Specifically, we wanted to know why there was a market for these at all. Why would anyone pay to place their ads on these sites? And what we learned is they don't. The way the digital advertising system is set up makes it very difficult for advertisers to know where their ads are ending up.
And this AI obituary scam and so much of the fake news and health hoaxes and extremism that we see online are all downstream effects of this reality. So before reporting back to Marcus, we wanted to find out what can be done to change the system. And look, I'm not going to lie to you. There are a lot of people who say that there's actually nothing we can do.
And the people saying this aren't just podcasters and doomsayers. These are people who actually study this stuff. They say that the issues we see in the ad tech space are built into the Internet itself. And if we wanted to fix them, we'd have to tear the whole thing down and rebuild it from scratch. But thankfully, we spoke to one person who does not agree with that sentiment.
My name is Claire Atkin, and I am the CEO of Check My Ads. We're the digital advertising watchdog. At the highest level, we keep you safe from lies, scams, and manipulation on the internet. We work on behalf of regular citizens, but also publishers, especially publishers of the news, and advertisers who often don't know where their ads are going.
Look, I know it may seem like we just chose to end the story with the one optimist in the digital advertising space. But honestly, everyone we spoke to told us that we had to talk to Claire. They told us Claire and her colleagues know more about this issue and this ecosystem than anyone else out there. And that's partially because they used to be a part of it.
Yeah, we were in the ecosystem. We were building marketing funnels on behalf of software companies. And we started asking questions like, you know, why are all the tools that I'm using to sell software being used to radicalize people or spread lies?
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