X Is Drowning in Disinformation Following US and Israeli Attack on Iran
How Journalists Are Reporting From Iran With No Internet
Anthropic Hits Back After US Military Labels It a ‘Supply Chain Risk’
A Former Top Trump Official Is Going After Prediction Markets
Everything Larry and David Ellison Will Control If Paramount Buys Warner Bros.
You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett, Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer, and Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.
You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how:
If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for “uncanny valley.” We’re on Spotify too.
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Brian Barrett: Hey, it's Brian. Zoë, Leah, and I have really enjoyed being your new hosts these past few weeks, and we want to hear from you. If you like the show and have a minute, please leave us a review in the podcast or app of your choice. It really helps us reach more people. And for any questions and comments, you can always reach us at uncannyvalley@WIRED.com. Thank you for listening—on to the show.
I'm so excited that I am in New York doing this in-person with Leah Feiger. Zoë, you're still on the screen.
Zoë Schiffer: I know I am. Brian, should we brag about why you're in New York?
Brian Barrett: Yes, we absolutely should. Leah was honored last night at the Front Page Awards as Journalist of the Year.
Zoë Schiffer: Correct. She got a literal physical award.
Brian Barrett: She did. Not only that, Zoë, you don't know this, but I do because I was there.
Brian Barrett: She got introduced by our editor in chief, Katie Drummond. She made a video about her achievements last year, and she gave a lovely speech.
Leah Feiger: It was really nice. To be clear, to me, this is an award for all of WIRED.com. And in my video, I did not mention myself once because this is about WIRED and all about WIRED.
Brian Barrett: It's about Leah, and it should be.
Zoë Schiffer: Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoë Schiffer, director of business and industry.
Brian Barrett: I'm Brian Barrett, executive editor.
Leah Feiger: And I'm Leah Feiger, senior politics editor.
Zoë Schiffer: This week, we're diving into the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, particularly as the AI industry has been entrenching itself with the Department of Defense. We'll also discuss what's going on with prediction markets and what we make of the potential Paramount and Warner Bros' historic merger.
Leah Feiger: Let's jump right into what's going on with Iran. It has been nonstop since the US and Israel began a coordinated military strike on Iran on Saturday. Iran has responded with their own attacks on US bases and countries across the Gulf. Things have escalated really, really quickly.
Archival audio: Iran Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been killed in today's joint attack by the US and Israel.
Archival audio: Iranian officials say airstrikes hit an elementary school Saturday, killing more than 160 people, mostly children.
Archival audio: US embassies across the region are now telling Americans to shelter and place—
Leah Feiger: I know we were all working this weekend on this, but I was sort of stunned how quickly disinformation became the center of this conflict. WIRED reviewed hundreds of posts on X, some of which racked up millions and millions of views, that promote misleading claims about the locations and scale of the attacks. Our colleague, David Gilbert, reported on some of these very specific examples, and the range was wild. They included AI-generated images to video game scenes being passed off as real footage, to countries getting mistaken for each other. To me, it's a combination of—obviously, there's a lot of disinformation out there, but it's also because this is just chaos.
Brian Barrett: Yeah. I think to me, the disinformation itself is maybe less surprising than the lack of urgency around fixing it or doing something about it—which, I guess I shouldn't be surprised at that either. But I feel like every time anything happens, you get sort of—it's almost the same lineup of the video game footage and—
Leah Feiger: No, the blog writes itself.
Brian Barrett: Yeah, it really does, as does the part of—and also X got rid of most of its public safety team. They've got community notes in there that they append to some of these, but by the time a community note gets on there, it's already been viewed 4 million times. And also, it's below the post anyway, so you've already seen it, and doesn't really seem to stop them from getting distributed.
Zoë Schiffer: This is the culmination of years of product and policy decisions. It's what happened when you make the platform hostile to journalists. You get rid of most of your fact-checking team and content moderators. You rely on community notes, which have proven time and time again that they're really effective for certain things, but during breaking news, they're woefully inadequate. And you pay people for traffic, which incentivizes people to have quick hot takes, whether or not those takes are actually grounded in reality. So yeah, I mean, we should continue to report the story. We should not continue to be surprised by this story.
Leah Feiger: And that's absolutely right. I mean, I'm looking at, there's been some amazing WIRED coverage of how Iranian journalists and activists and just ordinary citizens are trying to get information on the ground and actually get it out then from the country. So it makes me think, who is this disinfo for, right? Is it just to really create more chaos, muddy the waters? Whatever it is, X is an absolute cesspool. It already is so difficult to trust numbers and facts and figures about what's coming out. Who's actually able to get internet access? It's constant.
Brian Barrett: I think one thing it's for, I think a lot of this comes from accounts with blue checks and blue checks can monetize content. So a lot of it is really—I hate this phrase because it's targeted at journalists a lot, but I think in this case, true for the clicks. But your point is right: Iran has 4 percent internet connectivity right now. So there is all this narrative happening around the country that is being: The journalists left X, but the politicians are still there. I think there were a couple of high profile instances of legit politicians free posting, commenting on things that were fake as though they were real. And that shapes public opinion. And public opinion really matters in a time like this. We're in a war that is not authorized by Congress, that threatens to spill out into a much bigger conflagration.
Leah Feiger: I mean, it doesn't really seem like this is ending anytime soon if our defense secretary, Pete Hegseth's recent comments about how this doesn't seem to be ending anytime soon or to be believed. I mean, there's over a thousand people, I believe at this point CNN has been reporting that have been killed during the fighting in the Middle East from strikes. A number of those are US service members, and WIRED's own core interests as well: We're talking about trade. We're talking about oil. We're talking about data centers, like how all of this is going to be swept up. I don't know. I don't really see a world where we're not going to be talking about Iran anytime soon.
Brian Barrett: It's interesting. Molly Taft, who's our great climate writer, they've written about how oil and gas prices spiked, which I think you would assume the Strait of Hormuz is not officially closed, but it's basically closed because the Iranian military has said, "Don't go in there." But it has downstream effects too. Fertilizer prices are going through the roof. They have a story about this on WIRED on Wednesday because the Middle East supplies a huge amount of the world's fertilizer. Now, you may have noticed that it's also just about springtime, which is kind of when US farmers need fertilizer the most.
Leah Feiger: This is good. It's just great all around. I mean, there's so many knock-on effects, I have to also shout out CNN's world team has been doing the most unbelievable updates minute to minute, hour by hour. It's just this little corner on the side of my screen, and they're getting really into the nitty-gritty of what this means. It's not just these different strikes. The idea that there's, for example, right now, an 18-hour traffic jam in Lebanon as people are trying to get out. These are very, very specific things. But yeah, Brian, I think about the fertilizer. I think about all of these knock-on effects and just the full, full spiral that the entire world is being pulled into right now. Already this morning on a bunch of different travel accounts, people were starting to talk like, "Can we be in Europe this summer?" And I'm like, "Whoa, this has hit the influencer spaces." People are having a conversation about World War III. They're sharing that Sex in the City, Sarah Jessica Parker, "What do you mean World War III? And that made me think, what about World War Me?" The fact that this has made it into the public lexicon so quickly, I just don't see it ending anytime soon.
Zoë Schiffer: I mean, I think within this conversation, we have to talk about the AI angle because the conflict is happening on the heels of the Department of Defense making, and then potentially breaking deals with top AI companies. So this past Friday, OpenAI struck a deal with the Department of Defense right as Anthropic was going head-to-head with that same department over concerns about how its technology would be used. It wanted a couple of conditions, including a ban on surveillance of American citizens and a ban on using its technology to build fully autonomous weapons. The DOD was not a fan of putting those conditions in the contract. And then on Saturday evening, the day the Iran strikes began, Sam Altman started an Ask Me Anything thread on X saying basically that the deal that he'd cut with the Pentagon was rushed. The optics didn't look great, to say the least. But ultimately he defended the company's decision by explaining that their goal was to deescalate things between the AI industry and obviously, Anthropic and the DOD.
Leah Feiger: I mean, our conversations from last week's episode feel so prescient now. We were like, "This is it, guys. This could be real bad." Days before the strikes. It's so much worse now. It is so much worse. I mean, can we talk about Sam Altman's AMA?
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I mean, so it's so interesting because I feel like during our last conversation, we were talking about the optics and the branding. And I feel like yet again, Anthropic has really come out on top. I was thinking of these events in terms of recruiting, which sounds so dumb, but it's like there is such an intense talent war taking place among the major AI labs. And Anthropic, I feel like continues to position itself as the good, the level-headed AI firm. And OpenAI continues to kind of blunder in these moments. And whether or not you believe Sam Altman, it comes out looking a little sloppier and a little less like it has a firm set of values it's following. And I think that's actually really going to matter in terms of who is able to get top research talent to join their labs.
Brian Barrett: The public perception thing is really interesting to me because I feel like—and I'm curious what you guys are seeing too, it feels a little bit off. I think there's this sense that Anthropic is the—if not the woke AI—it's coded blue now, right? But first of all, Anthropic products were used extensively in the initial strikes on around and continue to be, right? It's a six-month phase out.
