Our Lives With Bots

Even big tech hates AI slop writing.
Anthropic took this to heart, alongside other big tech firms, running to libraries to collect hundreds of thousands of pre-2022 (AKA, pre-ChatGPT AI slop text) books to scan to train their AI models. They’re using a method pioneered by Google back in the day…spoiler alert, the books don’t make it.
Sound concerning?
We thought so, but the court thinks so less: the recent ruling and settlement with Anthropic using scanned copies of books (and then destroying the originals) to train their AI models suggests this is a big win for big tech, and a big loss for human authors.
Project Panama was “our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.” Quote: Anthropic. Meanwhile, this method of using books to train AI models was not against the Copyright Act, according to a judge, who ruled this use of books as “quintessentially transformative.”
This isn’t the first time big tech has scanned and shredded books, or used LibGen or other sites to scrape human-written texts.
What happened, and why is this concerning? Listen to the full episode to find out.
00:00 A win for big tech, and a loss for authors: we summarize Project Panama (Anthropic’s plan to “destructively scan all the books in the world”), the recent settlement / $1.5 billion payout to authors for LibGen vs. the Copyright Act
07:42 Details on the recently-settled class action suit (Bartz vs. Anthropic): what happened, and why are the results so concerning?
11:45 Meta was sued last year and won against authors for using pirated copies of their novels from LibGen to train their AI models - what gives?
13:13 Internal turmoil: employees vs. executives on whether these book-scanning AI-training practices are okay
14:11 Setting a precedent: What do Meta and Anthropic’s cases mean for IP, authors, novels, academic texts, and any related writing behind a paywall? Health GPT is discussed
15:34 Ah, the precedent rears its head. Up next: big tech is rolling out contracts with media houses including news outlets, publishing firms, and individual authors to use their written content for training AI models, preemptively. Consent and compensation are good, right?
17:56 Oh, the irony: the AI slop wheel will continue, despite big tech hoping to avoid it by buying all these pre-2022 (pre-ChatGPT) books written by real human authors to train their AI models. We also debate self-expression, moral outrage against AI slop writing, and big tech’s hope for writers to jump back on the hamster wheel.
22:42 Where will we get good data, then, amongst the pile of AI slop? Not to fear, there’s another source of untainted human training data: Meta’s AI glasses! Real world data! Yay! Who cares about consent!
31:17 Google next? Let’s bring Tom Turvey back in! A new lawsuit out against Google for using scanned book copies meant for Google Books to train their AI models. And…that’s a wrap.
-
This is Our Lives With Bots, the show where we ask important, timely questions about what it means to live with our bot counterparts. From time to time, we also dive deep into what an AI future might look like for us. Sometimes we agree, sometimes we spiral, but we always go deep.
Rose and Angy are psychologists with degrees in psychology, artificial intelligence, and ethics. They have conducted research in human-AI interaction and created this podcast to make information about AI accessible to you. Rose holds a PhD in psychology and social policy and is a postdoctoral researcher in computer science with Arvind Narayanan. Angy holds a PhD in psychology and a masters in AI Ethics and is currently a CXO. You can learn more about us at ⁠ourliveswithbots.com⁠.
-
Links:
Bartz vs. Anthropic lawsuit related to Project Panama: Euro News, NPR
What judge said in a summary ruling
Project Panama: Washington Post
Google lawsuit for Gemini: The Guardian

We’re not here to regurgitate how the media and these companies cover the sandbox escape incidents. We’re here to break through the AI hype and tell you what really happened.
Skip to 1:10 for OpenAI’s sandbox escape and attack of HuggingFace (July 21)
Skip to 22:42 for Anthropic’s three sandbox escape incidents (July 30)
0:00 Introduction
1:10 OpenAI’s ChatGPT escapes its sandbox, accesses the internet, and attacks HuggingFace
08:30 Should companies be legally required to disclose these sandbox escapes? NY RAISE Act and California SB53 aren’t cutting it, but what should the bar or threshold be for reporting agentic escapes?
13:12 Do we need a killswitch for AI? And should it be in the hands of the Department of Homeland Security…?
18:36 Hype vs. Cybersecurity risk: Reflections on media coverage and company narratives (Is it that the model is superintelligent, or that engineers failed to contain it?)
20:50 AI policy group calls for investigations into OpenAI’s incident
22:42 Anthropic’s three escape incidents “capture the flag” with Opus 4.7, Mythos 5, and an internal test model
26:44 Reflections on how Anthropic anthropomorphizes its Claude models in the blog post
30:18 How do AI agents get out of their sandbox? What happened with Anthropic’s sandbox escape in three capture the flag test runs
36:33 What does this mean? What should you do? How to protect against cybersecurity attacks (side note: Claude chat histories are now available on the internet if you click share)
-
This is Our Lives With Bots, the show where we ask important, timely questions about what it means to live with our bot counterparts. From time to time, we also dive deep into what an AI future might look like for us. Sometimes we agree, sometimes we spiral, but we always go deep.
Rose and Angy are psychologists with degrees in psychology, artificial intelligence, and ethics. They have conducted research in human-AI interaction and created this podcast to make information about AI accessible to you.  Rose holds a PhD in psychology and social policy and is a postdoctoral researcher in computer science with Arvind Narayanan. Angy holds a PhD in psychology and a masters in AI Ethics and is currently a CXO. You can learn more about us at ⁠ourliveswithbots.com⁠.
-
Links and further details:
Nothing like a “Cyber-Attack” to create Hype… OpenAI attacks Hugging Face, and we need a Chinese Model to save us… what next?
Reports by Time, BBC
On July 30, an AI policy group wrote letter to Trump admin calling them to look into this OpenAI failure (WSJ)
The letter: “Last week, a new and foreseeable threat arose…[which] made clear that the United States government has a limited view into the advanced capabilities of frontier AI models and has not yet released a clear process for evaluating the safety concerns posed by advanced AI systems”
Anddddd who would’ve thought: July 30, Anthropic boasts of their own previously “undetected” security breach incident like OpenAI’s - gotta keep up with the hot press! (but they say, it’s not their fault - it was a third party’s fault). Three incidents: capture the flag tasks with Opus 4.7, Mythos5, and internal research test model prototype 
Anthropic’s blog post
WSJ

Even pets are losing their jobs to AI, apparently.
AI pets of all shapes, colors, sizes, and …animal-adjacent appearances are becoming more popular. Say goodbye to the lifeless beanie babies or clunky old tamagotchis of the past: now, thanks to generative AI, your artificial pet can talk!
Well, sort of. Most can’t talk talk, not like a person can, but they can communicate in an animal-unique way through sounds (of varying degrees of “shrill”), body language, HEARTBEATS, and personal diaries - perfect for some light reading in your spare time.
We cover the following pets, some old, some revamped, and most very, very new:
Paro, the OG AI pet seal

Familiar Machines & Magic’s bear slash cat slash dog (it will paw you if you doomscroll for too long, btw)

Go2, Unitree’s war machine dog reminiscent of that one Black Mirror episode, now labeled as a pet companion

Aibo, Sony’s robot dog

Moflin (Labubu 2.0?)

Quobo (literally just a fluffy pillow)

Fuzozo

OlloNi (AKA Ollobot, they’re just seeing what sticks)...you won’t believe what the S and L versions stand for. We still don’t believe it

Aura, the AI pet FOR your real pet (how many more layers deep will we go??)

After discussing the weirdness of all these new products and questions about what they aim to do, listen to the conversation devolve as we ask “Would you want an AI pet?” Reddit’s got some answers for us. This conversation includes:
What on earth is going on in founders’ minds when they’re coming up with these products (feels a bit like they started brainstorming with ChatGPT 4-o, no less)

Whether we’re moving toward a “role play,” artificial-simulation-based licensing of sorts with all these AI versions of things (from pets to companions to children, even)

What are we teaching people about pets and animals, generally, by making them artificial and immortal and not “burdensome”

As always, we’re keen to hear what you think about all of these AI pets. Would you want one, do you have one, and what’s up with all that?
-
This is Our Lives With Bots, the show where we ask important, timely questions about what it means to live with our bot counterparts. From time to time, we also dive deep into what an AI future might look like for us. Sometimes we agree, sometimes we spiral, but we always go deep.
Rose and Angy are psychologists with degrees in psychology, artificial intelligence, and ethics. They have conducted research in human-AI interaction and created this podcast to make information about AI accessible to you. You can learn more about us at ⁠ourliveswithbots.com⁠.
-
Links:
Paro, AI seal: Paro, AI for Good, Research Meta-Analysis
Familiar Machines (& Magic): Website, AP News, Indy100, TechNewsWorld, Fox News
QUOBO
Fuzozo
Moflin by Casio, the ad for it, Sherwood News
OlloNi
Go2 robot dog
Aura, the pet for your pet: Tuya
Reddit: Do you want an AI Pet?

Why worry about tokenmaxxing when you can just let robots do the work for you in the future? Meanwhile, keep selling your first-person data of you folding laundry to Tesla, they’ll sure appreciate your labor (figuratively, not via compensation).
Bonus: There are three special guests (Kiwi, Phoebe, & Peanut) at the end of this video.
Today’s episode is all about robots. Starting off with robots in factories trained to take your job through egocentric data collection (get ready for the headache of having your phone strapped to your head); moving through to new humanoid robots in China that are being introduced as your emotionally intelligent, lifelike, kind of creepy new companions; Autonomous Urban Delivery Vehicles (watch out for your kneecaps); then finishing strong with some classic Rose and Angy debates on what our futures with humanoids might look like (and what we should worry about).
-
2:00 Egocentric data collection
03:15 Meet the Kled AI founder, Avi Patel, who is collecting your data for Elon’s robots
06:42 How much can you make from selling your egocentric data at Kled, Luel, or Waffle-something? Wired gives us the scoop
08:50 Factory workers are pressured to be monitored and sell their egocentric data (for free!) to big tech (especially in India, especially for Tesla)
11:50 Data privacy, agency and consent, and future compensation: the inequality wheel keeps turning
14:22 Meta’s workers: “Tell him he’s a piece of sh*t” (high-profile engineers funneled into the Applied AI team to train keystroke by keystroke AI to take their job)
17:37 UBTECH’s humanoid robots. They dance, look into your eyes, and read your emotions. Yay! That’ll be $17k.
20:34 A peek into “Robot Valley” and Ex-humanoid: buy a humanoid robot, rent a robot, or get paid to do physical things with a robot. The choice is yours, so long as you consent to having your data collected.
23:27 Why is the goal to make these robots look so humanlike? We debate the draw of humanlike but not human
26:53 The Robotics Market (some numbers for you) (and questions about where we’re going to put all of them)
28:38 Recent research on romantic relationships with AI companions: what predicts how intense their relationship is, and what does this mean for social robots?
36:01 Robots on the street (Autonomous Urban Delivery Vehicles)
39:30 What does the future with social robots hold? We debate.
44:58 Special guest appearances from our cats
-
This is Our Lives With Bots, the show where we ask important, timely questions about what it means to live with our bot counterparts. From time to time, we also dive deep into what an AI future might look like for us. Sometimes we agree, sometimes we spiral, but we always go deep.
Rose and Angy are psychologists with degrees in psychology, artificial intelligence, and ethics. They have conducted research in human-AI interaction and created this podcast to make information about AI accessible to you. You can learn more about us at ⁠ourliveswithbots.com⁠.
-
Links:
Egocentric data collection: Wired, The Guardian, Avi Patel’s non-personal, personal site
China’s Humanoid Robot Industry: CNN, The Register, YouTube
Reading the Mind in the Eyes (RMET) Test
Autonomous urban delivery vehicles: BBC
Understanding romantic relationships between humans and chatbots research

Welcome to the SIXTH “What’s the AI Hype?” episode with Our Lives With Bots, brought to you by psychologists and AI ethicists Dr. Rose E. Guingrich and Dr. Angy Watson . OH - plus, there’s a special guest appearance from Phoebe, Angy’s sleepy (and mildly disgruntled) Ragdoll kitty.
We have a LOT to cover today - and much to debate. But we won’t spoil the whole thing for you just yet: you’ll just have to tune in to hear what’s been going on in AI in the past few weeks.
We’re here on various podcast platforms, but feel free to go check us out on YouTube or any of your preferred platforms. Learn more about us on our website, ourliveswithbots.com, and head over to the Listen + Watch page to tune in on those alternative platforms.
Timeline
01:52 ChatGPT 5.6, Fable 5, and Mythos 5: Trump administration cracks down on new model releases
11:57 High profile Googlers are leaving en masse. But for what reason? Some noble…some…perhaps…IPO driven (for those who fled straight back into big tech)
20:45 A court in Munich found Google liable for content generated in its AI overviews. What might this mean for false summaries of links provided within LLMs like ChatGPT?
26:31 Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna caught using AI / Claude to “write a bill.” Well, it was just the summary. But that begs the question about how much (or rather, how little) human oversight is required versus being applied in these cases
29:39 South Korea’s Starbucks stores close for mandatory historical and social sensitivity training after (wait for it) a marketing team used AI to create an advertising campaign that only an AI agent with no context could make
36:14 Cognitive Atrophy BENCH: Researchers create clinically-backed assessment tool for whether an LLM, applied in a mental health context, promotes autonomy and user agency or harms their skills and promotes dependence. Meanwhile Vermont joins the swath of US states banning AI therapy chatbots and products
47:12 AI consciousness - the tides are turning toward “AI is conscious” more so than “Could AI be conscious.”  Geoffrey Hinton vs. Anil Seth, supercomputers, AlphaFold, generative AI, LLMs, and is AI more intelligent than a human? (Plus benchmarks and tokenmaxxing)
-
This is Our Lives With Bots, the show where we ask important, timely questions about what it means to live with our bot counterparts. From time to time, we also dive deep into what an AI future might look like for us. Sometimes we agree, sometimes we spiral, but we always go deep.
Rose and Angy are psychologists with degrees in psychology, artificial intelligence, and ethics. They have conducted research in human-AI interaction and created this podcast to make information about AI accessible to you. You can learn more about us at ⁠ourliveswithbots.com⁠.
-
Links:
GPT 5.6
OpenAI and Anthropic vs. Trump
Executive order
Google’s big names are leaving: LinkedIn, Financial Express, Tech Crunch
Google found liable for AI overviews: Wired, The Decoder
AI used to draft bill summary: Original text, Forbes
Measuring COGNITIVE ATROPHY in LLM Behaviour
Starbucks South Korea AI ad campaign failure
AI consciousness: Geoffrey Hinton, Anil Seth