Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to another episode of the Parish Circuit. I was trying an accent that time. Just trying to trade it out.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: We haven't standardized our introduction, as you can tell.
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Well, I mean, you know, I'm just trying to be fun, Trying to keep it. Trying to keep it tight, trying to keep it engaging, you know, for our vast listener base. I want this to be fun. I want this to be an enjoyable time. They're inviting us into their living room. I'm envisioning our listeners sitting around the fireplace. You know, they've poured their evening brandy, tuning in. The kids are playing quietly on the floor.
And over the intercom. No speaker system. Over the Victrola comes the voices, the sultry tones of David Riley and Stuart Ammonite.
[00:00:45] Speaker B: That's what I picked up, like a fireside chat for St. Landry Parish.
[00:00:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I have a vision,
[00:00:51] Speaker B: but we don't actually. We don't actually want to be like fdr, by the way, but getting your.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: That was good. Thank you. I appreciate that. We want to be more like. More like Teddy. Let's land more like Teddy. That'd be a better spot. We're going to pick a Roosevelt. Let's pick that one.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Because we didn't say it in the last episode. Should we remind. Well, first, thank. Thank those who have started supporting us.
[00:01:10] Speaker A: Oh, yes. There's money in the bank. I checked it today. It's like, wow, there's money there.
[00:01:16] Speaker B: Some dollars.
[00:01:16] Speaker A: That's crazy.
Yeah. That's amazing. Thank you guys so much to our financial supporters. We appreciate you guys. You're helping this thing actually into something. My hope dreams, Our hope dreams for this organization is that it's funded and operational within a year's time. And so far, we're what, a month? In about a month.
[00:01:36] Speaker B: A couple months.
[00:01:36] Speaker A: Couple months.
[00:01:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:37] Speaker A: Yeah, something like that. Wow, man. And there's progress being made. Wonderful, guys. Thank you all so much for listening and supporting and sharing and all the things we'd invite you to continue to do. So. We've got to build this together if we want this to exist.
And that means that, you know, David and I are happy to do the labor, but it would be great.
Dollars would be great.
[00:01:58] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:01:58] Speaker A: We are paying people to do this. I don't know, maybe folks don't realize that, like, there are folks. Dollars are going out. It'd be great if they would come in.
[00:02:06] Speaker B: We're a little scared to calculate technically how much money we've lost on this endeavor so far. We don't make money.
[00:02:15] Speaker A: This doesn't make Money.
[00:02:16] Speaker B: Maybe one day it will.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: Maybe one day. Maybe one day. Yeah. Generally speaking, news media just doesn't make.
That's why the government pays for the advocate. Now, that's another episode. We'll talk about that another time.
[00:02:27] Speaker B: We don't want government money.
[00:02:28] Speaker A: No facts.
[00:02:29] Speaker B: So if you're the government and you're listening, we don't.
[00:02:33] Speaker A: Do not. Do not send us your checks.
[00:02:35] Speaker B: You can subscribe, but don't pay us.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: That's right.
Don't.
We don't want your federal dollars. All right, here's a fun one. Are you ready for this? Have you seen the signs in Opelousas about the candidates that are going on right now? Mayor, chief of police, marshals race. We got school board elections going on. We've got aldermen, city council stuff going on. Like, everything is happening at once.
It is election season, full bore in Opelousas. It's happening right now.
One of the things that I've noticed, though, so, like, we've been going around and trying to, like, get people.
Get people's information about what their platforms are for, like the mayor's race or the chief of police race or anything like that, because we want to be talking about it, because we're trying to build a news entity here. We're trying to talk about local news and events. And one of the things that we've noticed is the staggering amount of candidates that are basically having ChatGPT run their campaigns for them.
There's a lot. Okay. A lot of them. And I don't just mean the signs. Like, the signs are obvious. The signs. Okay. Yeah. You can look at the campaign signs. Be like, whoa, that was made with ChatGPT.
We can see that for sure. But I also mean videos, the video content that's putting out. It's not even of the person who's running for office. It's not them talking. It's like an AI robot talking for them.
[00:04:03] Speaker B: Actually, I haven't seen any of those, but they exist. Wow.
[00:04:06] Speaker A: It's a thing.
[00:04:06] Speaker B: And I mean, yeah, I see the signs all over the place that are just clearly AI.
[00:04:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:10] Speaker A: And. But what I'm talking about more specifically is the, like, the social content that. Where they're talking about their positions and their platforms.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: Right.
[00:04:20] Speaker A: It's obviously written by ChatGPT.
I mean, because we work in, you know, we work in digital marketing. We've been in the AI space since the LLMs launched, and we're very familiar with their formatting and signs and all that kind of stuff.
It's Clear. It's clear to us. Maybe it's not clear to everybody else, but it's clear to us that these things are being formulated by LLMs, by AI bots.
And one of the things that we just need to say out loud is, that's not good.
That's a bad.
[00:04:55] Speaker B: If y' all aren't catching what we're saying.
What we're saying is we are now living in a dystopian future in which our only options for mayor or police chief or any other elected position is
[00:05:08] Speaker A: it's the AI bots.
[00:05:09] Speaker B: An AI bot.
[00:05:11] Speaker A: Yeah. So in other words, we don't actually know what somebody's real position is. The only people that we will have a view into who their positions really are so far, based on what I've seen, are the incumbents.
The incumbents. Because we have a previous record of them being in office.
Everybody else seems to be saying the same generic LLM positioning.
There's not like a hard line stance that I've seen through the folks. And we've looked over all the mayoral candidates.
We've looked over the majority of the chief police type candidates. I don't think I can say with confidence that I've looked over all of them.
[00:05:51] Speaker B: I think there's only a few now.
[00:05:52] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. There's some that have come into the race more recently.
And so we're trying to say. This is not good, man.
[00:06:04] Speaker B: Why is.
[00:06:04] Speaker A: What are their positions?
[00:06:05] Speaker B: Why is it not good, Stuart?
[00:06:07] Speaker A: Well, because it presents the idea that the people who are running for office don't actually know what they're doing.
[00:06:13] Speaker B: Right. Or.
[00:06:14] Speaker A: That was the most insulting way I could say it.
[00:06:16] Speaker B: I was gonna say. Well, let me.
Let me build upon that by being more insulting.
Or they're.
[00:06:25] Speaker A: It presents that way.
[00:06:26] Speaker B: Or they're being lazy.
[00:06:27] Speaker A: Or they're being lazy and they're not thinking through their positions. Yeah. Or their platforms that. We need to have a serious conversation in the city of Opelousas about this right now, because election is coming up November 3rd, I believe is election day, and we're gonna pick.
We're gonna pick who's gonna be the next mayor, the next chief of police. We're gonna pick alderman. We're gonna pick school board people. It's happening right now.
And it's very difficult to understand a lot of these positions because they seem to be completely written by AI bots.
It's wild. It really is. You can even tell in some of the public institutions the way that they're posting on social media right now, because Everybody around election season, all the elected offices start getting really active and engaged because they're like, it's election season. Got to do it again.
But all the events that are coming up or the way that they're talking, it's obviously populated by LLMs.
It's obviously being run through chat. And this is something that we got to figure out and work through faithfully and understand that, hey, guys, these are people who are running for office right now, and they're going to be there for the next four years.
[00:07:41] Speaker B: Can I make a nerdy Star wars reference, please?
[00:07:43] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:07:43] Speaker B: So I just watched Star Wars Episode one with my boys.
[00:07:49] Speaker A: Good flick. Good flick.
[00:07:51] Speaker B: I never thought I would say this, because Star Wars Episode 1 got the Phantom Menace, got a lot of, you know, bad press for a while.
[00:07:56] Speaker A: It's Jar Jar Binks.
[00:07:58] Speaker B: It's honestly. It's honestly aged pretty well because of how bad a lot of the other Star wars stuff has been.
[00:08:04] Speaker A: Oh, but that's now you're talking about. Yeah, like episode seven, eight, and nine
[00:08:07] Speaker B: just need to be just like, compared
[00:08:08] Speaker A: to thrown away, Episode one actually is
[00:08:11] Speaker B: looking a lot better anyway.
But. But in, you know, in the Star wars saga, you have the.
The evil Sith Lord Darth Sidious pulling the strings, you know, from behind the scenes. And he's actually behind, you know, both sides, literally, of, like, an election at one point.
But now, are we just living in a world where no matter who we elect, their. Their thinking is going to be done by a robot?
[00:08:39] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, and if you know how the LLMs work, they work based on probability.
It's not. They're not actually thinking. They're not actually reasoning.
[00:08:48] Speaker B: Right. No one's home.
[00:08:50] Speaker A: Yeah, there's not a soul. Obviously, there's not a soul. But my point is that there's not a mind. There's no artificial intelligence at all. It's assembling lines of characters based on probability with the information that you feed it in.
In other words, it's a giant evolutionary experiment gone sideways. It can be helpful for certain things. It's like, really helpful for coding.
But beyond that, you are entrusting yourself to something that is hollow and not helpful in a lot of ways. So, yeah, so big point here. Hey, guys, we need to be aware of what's going on in our races and ask real questions of our candidates. Hey, what is your position on this specific issue? What are you going to do about this? And why aren't they talking about it publicly now?
Very few people I remember from our content coverage of the Mayor's race are taking hard line positions on anything.
[00:09:45] Speaker B: Right.
[00:09:46] Speaker A: They're just speaking in platitudes.
[00:09:48] Speaker B: Yeah. And, you know, we. We would love to help, you know, provide an avenue for what we're talking about.
[00:09:55] Speaker A: Come on the show. Yeah, come on the show. It's not for lack of invitation. We've invited so many of them,
[00:10:02] Speaker B: it's easier for chatgpt to tell.
[00:10:05] Speaker A: You know what we should do? You know what? This is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna dump everybod.
All right? We just solved our own problem here. I'm going to go through. I'm going to scrape all their social content.
I'm going to dump it into an LLM and we're going to interview them in the studio. We're going to interview the AI version of each candidate in the studio. That's what we're going to do.
[00:10:24] Speaker B: Done.
[00:10:25] Speaker A: Problem solved.
[00:10:27] Speaker B: Unless someone wants to actually come on the show. We'd love to have you.
[00:10:31] Speaker A: We'd love to have you on the show. Yeah. But if not, you're just. We're going to interview your AI counterpart.
We can even model their voice that way. Like, we could build the whole thing out really well.
[00:10:41] Speaker B: That'd be crazy. And what would be scary is they'd probably all end up saying kind of all the same, all the same platitudes. Just like all the signs look like AI and all the positions look like AI.
[00:10:54] Speaker A: Yeah. So anyway, heads up, citizens of Opelousa's head on a swivel. Ask the hard questions and let's see what kind of response we can get.
[00:11:01] Speaker B: Don't vote for AI.
[00:11:02] Speaker A: Don't vote for AI. That's right. And I would. You know, this is one of the harder parts for people, is it's easy for you to say something vague into the ether of social media. Okay. And be like, I. And that doesn't actually do anything. That doesn't actually create problem solving opportunities because you're just launching it into the ether of social media.
It's much more difficult to, like, find somebody's phone number and be direct with them. Hey, how are you going to deal with this problem? What are you gonna do about this? What's your plan for, I don't know, mayor's race? What's your plan for water systems? What's your plan for the roads? What's your plan for getting the council united again? Because right now the city council is not very united.
What's your plan? How are you gonna do it?
Yep, let's talk.
Ask those questions.
You can do it.
Don't abstain from those things.
Ask the difficult questions and let's see what happens. If our local citizens would not just. I'm not saying just get angry and rage on the Internet, because that's not going to help anybody.
[00:12:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:10] Speaker A: But I am saying if we would go directly to our sources, to our elected officials and just ask questions, you'd be surprised, I think, at the results that we would get. If enough people acted that way, it'd be good.
[00:12:20] Speaker B: No, absolutely. Yeah. It would be refreshing to hear a real thought out, human plan for these things.
[00:12:26] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:12:28] Speaker B: Even involving. And I know this is something that I think maybe politics in general, but our community maybe as a whole also has struggled with, is getting some honest.
This is what I'm gonna cut. Or this is what needs to change when it might step on some toes.
[00:12:47] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:12:48] Speaker B: Not very many people have been. Not very many elected officials or people running for office have been willing to say those things.
That would be refreshing as well. And it would be human.
[00:12:57] Speaker A: Yeah, it would be human.
Well, there you go, guys. Don't vote for AI. Ask good questions. Let's see if we can get through this selection with our best foot forward. Thank you all so much for listening to another episode of the Parish Circuit. You can go to the parishcircuit.com or find us on Facebook and help us to spread the word. Truth, goodness and beauty for Arcadiana. Thank you, guys. We'll see you next time.
