Halloween Boo! Our Very Spooky Visit to "Salty Politics" with Julie Roginsky

On Halloween, The Daily Whatever Show took a field trip to Salty Politics, where Lawrence and I joined Julie Roginsky for what began as a Halloween chat about parenting and trick-or-treating, and then mutated into a deeply unnerving masterclass on artificial intelligence, misinformation, and the end of objective reality.

Truly spoooooky stuff!

It started innocently enough: candy rationing, coatless teenagers, and the eternal GenX battle between helicopter parenting and benign neglect. (“I call it resilience,” I insisted. “But also, I’m tired.”)

Then the conversation veered into the darker corners of the internet, where AI is already reshaping not just work and art, but truth itself…

🎶 (Insert spooky music here…) 🎶

Julie shared how ChatGPT hallucinated her dating life, falsely pairing her with a former CNBC anchor and then shrugging when confronted with its lie. “It’s terrifying,” she said. “What happens when that kind of error shows up in court filings, or history books?” Lawrence pointed out the dystopian logic: “If you were designing an authoritarian regime, you’d build something that could rewrite reality. That’s what this is.”

From there, the trio dug into the economics of tech layoffs, AI-written legal briefs, and classrooms already outsourcing grading to algorithms. I shared her own experience using ChatGPT as a creative assistant (“helpful until it starts rewriting your paragraphs mid-sentence”), while Julie joked that the bots seem particularly obsessed with semicolons. Our laughter didn’t dull the unease. All three of us agreed on one critical, essential truth: we’re building AI tools faster than we can govern them.

Then came the real-life horror story: my Facebook Dating AI match, a “helpful” bot that offered to message men for her, and in the process, tried to to lure me out of my home and into downtown Seattle, at night, to meet a man at a club—for a show that didn’t exist, with a man who wasn’t real. To what end? That remains unclear.

Who needs horror movies when it seems we’re living in the throes of one, amirite?

Thank you Cat, Brandon Ellrich, Jeanne Elbe, Kevin Paquette, V for Violet 💟, and many others for tuning in.

And HUGE thanks to Julie for hosting us—her work is important. Conversations like this are so important. Let’s all keep talking and supporting independent journalists like Julie as they do the hard work.

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