Anthropic Ad after Altman vs Musk segment
I’ve been a semi-regular listener to the podcast for a while now. As someone who hates AI personally, I’ve still appreciated the previous earnest efforts from the group to present AI honestly, and highlight the positives while not shying away from the glaring negatives of its development. However, the placement of the anthropic ad (as well as the fact that they’re sponsored by an ai company to begin with) on this latest episode really bothered me.
Doing a whole segment discussing a court case between two of Anthropic’s largest competitors with the general takeaway being (and this is an oversimplification, I know) “both sides are disingenuous greedy losers” followed up immediately by an ad for Anthropic paints the whole segment in a different light, no matter how earnest the segment was. As soon as you disclose that this episode is sponsored by someone who would benefit from everyone sharing the opinion that OpenAI and XAI are both greedy losers and instead are propping up Claude, it calls into question their ability to be honest about any ai segments going forward. Sure, if there’s a scandal of any kind with ChatGPT or Grok, they can cover it no problem, but would they be able to cover any scandal involving Claude/Anthropic the same way?
Now obviously, I doubt it’s up to them to decide which sponsors they have for any given episode, and that it’s determined by Vox. But if they have any control at all, I would hope they turn away from sponsorships like Anthropic moving forward, at the VERY least on episodes where they cover AI, since it makes it harder to believe the integrity of their coverage of those topics in that context.