Tech News Weekly 343 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on Tech News Weekly. Emily Dreibelbis joins me to talk about what is going on when it comes to the Tesla Supercharger Network and how the other brands aren't going to get access for perhaps quite a while due to the layoffs at Tesla. Then I talk about the real winners in the generative AI boom. Turns out it's the consulting firms who are telling companies what they should be doing with generative AI boom. Turns out it's the consulting firms who are telling companies what they should be doing with generative AI. Afterward, a little story about Netflix and its pursuit in gaming and we round things out with the senior writer at Wired, Kate Knibbs, who joins us to explain the Suno and Udio lawsuit brought forth by the RIAA. Stay tuned for a great episode of Tech News Weekly.

0:00:54 - VO
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This. Is Twit.

0:01:01 - Mikah Sargent
This is Tech News Weekly, with Emily Dreibelbis and me, Mikah Sargent, episode 343, recorded Thursday, june 27th 2024. RIAA Sues Suno and Udio. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where every week, we talk to and about the people making and breaking that tech news. I am one of your hosts, Mikah Sargent, and given that this is the fourth Thursday of the month, we are joined by Emily Dreibelbis of PCMag. Welcome back to the show Emily.

0:01:38 - Emily Dreibelbis
I'm good at my last name.

0:01:40 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, say that again.

0:01:41 - Emily Dreibelbis
You're getting so good at pronouncing my last name, thank you.

0:01:44 - Mikah Sargent
It's rolled off the tongue, although, well, that again You're getting so good at pronouncing my last name. Thank you, it's rolled off the tongue, although, well, yeah, I mean, I don't know if that's going to change. Is that, are you?

0:01:54 - Emily Dreibelbis
I am going to change it, which is such an odd feeling. But these are my, some of my last moments.

0:02:00 - Mikah Sargent
Well, we will. We will hold on to them and let them exist in the annals of history as we discuss some great things. So, folks, if you are tuning in for the first time every month, throughout the month, I have on wonderful guest hosts who join me to talk about a news story that's going on, and it's always a bit of a bonus points for me when the person is able to share a story that they themselves have written. Emily, why don't you tell us about your story of the week?

0:02:32 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, so I'm going to talk about what's going on with the Tesla Supercharger Initiative, which is that we can back up a little bit, and so basically, Tesla has signed a deal with all of the other EV makers to allow their drivers access to the Tesla supercharger network. So this is huge news. It was a big news story last year and this year it's supposed to be coming to life, but Tesla, since signing all those deals, has basically fired their entire supercharger team and we're starting to see more evidence that that is indeed causing delays in other brands getting access to the network. So I've been directly talking with all these brands Ford, Rivian, Polestar, General Motors, Mercedes, most recently and getting the scoop on what those layoffs mean and what that means for any EV driver, because I'm sure everyone is waiting patiently to plug in at a supercharger.

0:03:27 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I mean this has been something that I have heard talked about and have also talked about quite a bit, and it seems to be, on the whole, an overall positive thing and people seem to be pretty excited about it. It certainly meant that you would have more charging options, which I know is very important. Given the times when I have looked at some of the different charging options and saw people sort of waiting, I am curious. I know that there's a lot to talk about here, but how did Tesla owners feel about their pride and wonder of supercharging options being opened up to more people? Do you know about that? Did you get to see any reactions therein? Were they kind of like you don't let them into our supercharger locations?

0:04:25 - Emily Dreibelbis
I know we would love to think of them like characters like that, but I think I have seen a couple of people say that I did write an article that a Tesla driver called the police on a Rivian that was plugged in at a supercharger and that article kind of went viral.

But I do think so far there hasn't been a huge change. Like I said, there's been a delay in getting other cars access, whether it's Ford and Rivian, who already technically have access, but now there are delays on providing them adapters. So it's probably somewhat rare that Tesla owners are seeing other cars kind of taking up their stations. To a couple issues. I mean it could create more crowding, especially in popular areas, and then, depending on the port placement on the other vehicle this is a bit technical but it's like plugging into the supercharger they might have to take up two spots to angle the vehicle to be able to reach. So that's been a big concern. I would say that's their biggest concern because now they see a Ford F-150 and it's taking up two spots and maybe now they're waiting longer, kind of thing.

0:05:29 - Mikah Sargent
That makes sense. Yeah, that is. Yeah, I don't know.

0:05:32 - Emily Dreibelbis
Right, that's a concern for real and they're not really. There is no plan to change that basically as well, which is, I think, interesting and one of the many interesting details about this deal. But this was Elon Musk's idea. It came from him. The other car manufacturers had no plans to do this and he started by publishing the specs for the charge port in late 2022. And he was like everyone should build with my charge port. We'll create a new national standard. He rebranded their port North American Charging Standard NACS, or people call it NACS. So he created this whole thing and he got everyone to come on board and it's been heralded as a really big win for the EV industry and it is, and so in some ways, it's sad to see it being kind of shot in the leg after we got it over the line and now it's kind of struggling to get there and hopefully it does get there. Tesla did sign contracts. They have to give the other brands access and all that. So we'll see.

0:06:33 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, he's well known for holding the contracts. So that's no, I shouldn't joke Because, genuinely, when it comes to electric vehicles, regardless of which one you purchase, having these opportunities to charge is important. I think it was Samad Walsamad who pointed out that there are two different groups. They're like kind of two different. Larger portion of the EV market are used car purchases and they are from people who may live in apartments or townhomes or other places and have to do at street parking or have to go to one of these places to actually charge their vehicles, and so it is important that there's a place for people to charge their vehicles.

Yes, and I, going back to you, know sort of less about that, that character that I was taking on as the Tesla driver in the sense of, like ew, don't let them put their cooties here. I think more, is it not? If you're going, if you're thinking about purchasing an electric vehicle, surely a person who's thinking about getting a Tesla is considering the supercharger network as part of the reason to make a purchase of a Tesla vehicle, knowing that they might have access to more than someone who doesn't have a Tesla vehicle. So does that not then change how much that factors into your decision to purchase a Tesla versus a different one.

0:08:37 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, I mean, it's Tesla's big brand advantage. So some people were like, wow, why would you give that up? It's like Apple telling everyone they can now use their products, kind of letting them into the ecosystem. To respond to what you said about used versus rich people in their homes who charge in the garage, I would say the vast majority of EV drivers are actually people who are single homeowners who do charge at home, and the data is basically and this is what the manufacturers get from the cars, the data that comes from them 80% to 90% of EV charging happens at home. Oh, wow.

0:09:15 - Mikah Sargent
Okay.

0:09:16 - Emily Dreibelbis
So really it's a suburban thing if you think about it that way, and people are loving EVs in the suburbs. It's going great. It's really difficult in the city where I've always lived. In cities where you may not have charging at your apartment building, it may be a rented unit, you don't have control over how much you pay for electricity or split it with the tenants. You have to convince them to install a charger at home. There's tons of complexities in an apartment setting and I was excited about the supercharger initiative because I thought in Chicago, where I had all those issues, this would help me when I get test cars for work. I get.

EVs for work and I'm like I need to charge this thing. And I've had Teslas sitting out on the street in Chicago and the range is just plummeting in the cold weather and I have to drive through traffic to charge it somewhere. So when this happened, ford reached out to me and they were like oh Emily, do you want to test this new supercharger thing? We'll ship you an adapter, we'll send over a Mustang Mach-E to your apartment and you can go try it. And I was like, yes, absolutely, let's go. And then I get in the Mach-E, I get the adapter and I pull up the app and none of the stations in Chicago were available to non-Teslas. And then I looked at the other cities in the US. None of them are available to non-Teslas. And if you really zoom into the city limits on the map, on the Tesla map, you'll see that all there's seven or eight in Chicago city limits and they're all grayed out on the Tesla map for like available to other brands. So for me. So where?

0:10:49 - Mikah Sargent
were they. Are there any? They're more for like road trips.

0:10:53 - Emily Dreibelbis
They're just not in like urban centers, probably because they're too dense and they would create crowding problems. But this is where there's so many things that came up in my reporting on this that just didn't live up to the hype or just I couldn't get answers on so many things, and so I've been trying and trying to dig in with these manufacturers like Ford and all of them. What is going on? Why are they not in the cities? Of course Tesla doesn't talk to the press.

So it's been a real moving target to understand what's actually going on with this rollout, and so recently I have been talking to Ford and General Motors and Volvo and Polestar on what their next move is. So Ford and Rivian they have access, so they got it before the layoffs Yay for them. Last chopper out of Vietnam, they got access. But now they're struggling with adapter distribution. So now there's a bunch of Ford drivers and Rivian drivers who are like I ordered one a long time ago, When's my adapter coming? They're getting emails saying your adapter is delayed. And Jim Farley, who's the CEO of Ford, he did an interview three weeks ago with Yahoo and he said he texted Elon like hey man, where are my adapters? So that's the level of where business is being done, oh, my word Between these companies.

So Ford and Rivian are struggling on the adapter front, and then after them, gm, volvo and Polestar were supposed to get access in spring 2024. That's what the Tesla website said, coming spring 2024, general Motors, volvo, polestar. So as spring 2024 is approaching, I reach out to them like hey, are you going to meet this deadline? And Polestar was the only one who was just like yeah, no, that's not happening. They were like actually it's just the summer, now we are missing that deadline. And I was like oh okay, that's news. So I kind of broke that news. Volvo declined to comment. But Volvo and Polestar are kind of co-owned or kind of under the same Geely company. It's a Chinese company and so Volvo still hasn't spoken on this. General Motors told me they're not going to make spring 2024. But then I think some people internally saw my article and then my phone was getting blown up. I was like on an airplane and my phone was getting blown up by people from gm. Basically I had to change the article and like retract it, and then wow, okay, I'm like.

I'm like, yeah, it's very, there's like some drama here that I'm experiencing. It's been really fascinating, and um. So I'm like, okay, I changed the article, okay. And then I'm like, well, let's see, really fascinating. And so I'm like, okay, I changed the article, okay. And then I'm like, well, let's see, spring ends on June 21st. We'll see if you get it by spring 2021 or 2024. And then, as it rolls past, they did not get access. Their drivers can't charge at superchargers. Neither has Volvo, neither has Polestar. We knew about Polestar. Charge at Superchargers. Neither has Volvo, neither has Polestar. We knew about Polestar. So they're delayed and I have been trying to get GM to tell me what's going on and I had an off-the-record conversation with them, which I don't really want to betray trust here.

0:13:58 - Mikah Sargent
Right, it's off the record.

0:13:59 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, there are just some delays in the way the two companies are working together and the complexities of the project, and basically I just don't think it's going as fast as they expected. My own assumptions would be that there's very few people on the team that are supposed to carry out this initiative, and I do know a lot of it has to do with software and making everything compatible between the two companies, which sounds like a complicated project. Making everything compatible between the two companies, which sounds like a complicated project. I think it was very feasible when Ford and Rivian were getting access, because that seemed to happen quite quickly there was still a lot more of the team at that point.

0:14:33 - Mikah Sargent
Is that why?

0:14:34 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, yes, the whole team was there, 500 people. Then they got axed and then, my guess, totally spitballing. I used to, like I said, build technology at Amazon as a product manager, and I think they're probably pulling engineers from other teams and putting this in their prioritization queue Like, hey, all these tasks are to let GM get access, can you do this? And now it's getting prioritized with everything else happening at Tesla and I think it's falling down happening at Tesla, and I think it's falling down because there's a huge push into AI and robotics. Now that's what Musk wants to do. He's totally overcharging. Zero, very few people on that team. He's all in on AI and robotics.

So that's what's going on at Tesla. Now, this lingering charging thing which Elon Musk came up with is just thorn in his side, I guess, and we're still waiting for all the other brands to get access. So Mercedes is the next one in the queue they're giving access, in the order of which the brands agreed to do this with Tesla. So Mercedes is next and Mercedes I reached out to them earlier this week, I think and they, to their credit, are the only car company that admitted to me on record that they think something is up and their access could be delayed.

0:15:53 - Mikah Sargent
That's good, that they're being honest at least.

0:15:55 - Emily Dreibelbis
Goodness gracious, I love the confidence, because with Ford and GM, I am having the toughest time. What is going on? Who is providing the adapters? Is it Tesla's fault? Is it your fault? They just will not budge. And Mercedes was just like yeah, we're assessing what this means for our business. And also, mercedes has some confidence. They're a European brand, so this is not an issue in Europe. And then Mercedes is also working on building its own charging network, so they're just doing their own thing and I love that. They just stated the very obvious that it's possible that these layoffs would affect the rollout, because I think we're seeing more and more evidence that they are.

0:16:34 - Mikah Sargent
So that's what I got. It seems to be the truth for sure. That's what's happening. The one thing that is unclear to me is unclear to me. What was slash. Is the benefit to Tesla in any way for other cars to charge on Tesla's supercharger network? Do they get a lot of money out of that?

0:16:57 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, they're going to charge other yeah, they're going to charge other brands more to um to power up at the stations, so they're going to make money. More to power up at the stations, so they're going to make money. They're making a premium on that and they're also going to try to drive supercharger subscriptions, which is like a certain amount of money per month that would give you the same rate as a Tesla, so they're making money. It may be a brand play, but I've been seeing some Tesla fanboys are like well, who cares if Tesla's delayed on giving them access? And some of their arguments are like, yeah, what's in it for Tesla? Why should they prioritize this? And I mean, like I said, elon Musk came up with this whole thing, and so there's a matter of integrity and collaboration and not acting as a lone wolf and kind of leaving a wake obstruction in your path. But also this is contributing to their financials and this was apparently something that was important, so it was their idea. I don't know.

0:18:03 - Mikah Sargent
Well, I guess we have to just continue to wait and watch and see what happens, since you're only getting any clarity from one brand in particular and the rest are just going.

0:18:19 - Emily Dreibelbis
Right. It's been hard for me as a reporter because it's like I definitely think something is up. But if they don't go on record and they don't say like, oh, yeah, it's because of the layoffs or this, and that I can't just say like, oh, I have a gut feeling and write an article on that. You know, it's just. But finally I think I'm getting somewhere, especially with like Polestar, and especially that the spring 2024 deadline has passed and they didn't get access, as I predicted. And then I got Mercedes to say I didn't get them to. They readily offered the information.

0:18:49 - Mikah Sargent
Right oh.

0:18:54 - Emily Dreibelbis
That like, yeah, they're assessing if the layoffs will affect their plan. So I think I've proved my case and I'm sticking to that, but it's taken months.

0:19:02 - Mikah Sargent
Wow, yeah, it seems like it, and a lot, of, a lot of back and forth trying to figure out what the heck is going on.

0:19:09 - Emily Dreibelbis
What the heck is going on and what does it mean?

0:19:11 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, and what does it mean? Well, we will continue to watch for your coverage of that as you attempt to figure out what the heck is going on.

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All right, we are back from the break and that means it is time for my story of the week. This is a piece in the New York Times that I came across from Trip Mikkel. That is talking about what businesses are kind of most profiting, it seems, off of AI, off of artificial intelligence, and of course, you have your main AI companies. You've got OpenAI, you've got Google, you've got Microsoft to an extent although it's kind of part of what OpenAI is doing and Anthropic and a few others.

But while all of that is taking place, there's kind of a history repeating itself, situation going on, and it's compared. Trip Mickle compares it to the original kind of tech boom that took place, the dot-com boom, where everybody felt like they needed a website and every company that was doing business decided, okay, there's this thing and it's called a website and I've got to have one. We've got to have one, we've got to start selling our products online. I remember an episode of the Office where somebody started working at corporate and decided that Dunder Mifflin, the paper company, needed to have a website and so you could go online and order paper online. Everybody was hopping into it because it needed to happen, even if they didn't necessarily know why they needed a website. They just felt like they did.

And the same thing seems to be happening with the generative AI craze, and so what's happening here is companies are saying I don't know what I need to do, but I know I need to do something. So let me reach out to some consultants and have them tell us what we should be doing with AI. Ibm is a company that has, according to Mikkel, 160,000 consultants, and they have secured more than $1 billion in sales well, sales commitments, I should say related to generative AI. There are other companies that have also booked many, many millions of dollars in sales and companies where consultancy companies where even just a year prior, there was 0% of the business related to generative AI. That has jumped up to 40%, 50%, 50% huge increase in AI consultancy, and it's interesting, I think, from my perspective as someone who has and I'm sure you have, too, seen generative AI making its way into all of these different apps and services that we use, seeing it pop up all over online.

But I hadn't necessarily considered like bigger, less, less front of mind companies.

You know the, the, the companies that are making parts and pieces for vehicles, or the companies that are responsible for, I don't know, making the polarized lenses in sunglasses or whatever it happens to be, these kind of big companies that just kind of exist in the background and do what they do and do it well. I don't know the companies that make the furniture for IKEA and that kind of thing, but them going. We need to get into the AI phrase, we need to figure out what we can do, and instead of saying here's a problem that can be solved, they go tell us, consultant, what should we be doing with AI? And now I kind of wish I was an AI consultant, to be honest. But I wanted to hear your thoughts on this, particularly like well, it's up to you if you, if you, want to go here, but I'm curious like have you heard about, outside of of course, ai being used to try and improve self-driving functionality in cars? Do you know how automotive manufacturers are using AI or thinking about using AI.

0:25:19 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, yeah, so a lot of them are integrating it into their voice assistants in the car. So Volkswagen just launched that yesterday, as we know, or I guess. My personal opinion is that in-car voice assistants are horrendous. They take away from actually focusing on the road. They don't understand what you're saying. So I've heard that they are integrating them and upgrading their voice assistants, and someone told me at CES that they tried Volkswagens and it was much improved. So that's good, as long as they're going to be in the car.

In the article I think it talked about what IBM or other companies are doing is creating custom AIs for their company. So let's say, you're like a hotel company and you have customer service and your customer service team. Rather than having to sift through all the policies, if somebody calls in with an issue, they can just ask the AI to query their own database, basically, of policies and quickly surface the answer. So it's creating these internal Googles where you can just Google your own company and then it also will just spit out the answer really quickly in a text form. So really, I guess more appropriately, creating an internal chat GPT. So I think that sounds really helpful.

0:26:39 - Mikah Sargent
I agree that's something that I would, because I remember Microsoft even before the AI craze. The generative AI craze had taken off, microsoft had announced a cloud product that was similar to this, without the generative AI sprinkles. And it was this idea that you have a company and your company has policies and procedures and other documentation and you are bringing on, you're hiring somebody and they need to know. They're in this department, so they need to know about this, this, this, this, this and this. You can sort of hook them up to this system that is aware of all of the necessary policies, procedures, documentation, but also how a manager may have, over time, made changes to the onboarding process, and it took all of that information and helped create an onboarding experience for that new employee. And then, when the employee had a question about something specific, they could essentially do a search to find something and get the answer. And, of course, that's been improved with Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI and its own artificial intelligence products.

There was talk in the piece, too, about kind of a banking system, kind of a banking system, and with the banking system, you run the risk of customers being concerned about the hallucinations that are common in systems like ChatGPT, chat GPT and figuring out how to create a chat bot, so to speak, that is also programmed with enough guardrails and then also probably has and it does in this case human guardrails, such that you don't have mistakes and that your chat bot isn't suddenly suggesting that you make investments here or, you know, pull investments there, because that's something that would obviously fly in the face of legal requirements.

And that is where I think you know this is where humans still have to be involved in the process, because I've yet to see any company and I know this is relatively new in the grand scheme of things, but I've yet to see any company figure out what all is necessary to avoid the potential hallucinations or to figure out a way to make it so that, if hallucinations present themselves, that they are dealt with right then, that they are labeled as hallucinations or that they don't even come up to the end user.

And we've seen I think it was Google Google and Microsoft both had some issues with their offerings in generative AI, but I think it was Google who talked very publicly about how they were retraining their system and putting in more guardrails, and that process is kind of a black box and it seems very it's not as if it works every time or that there's a kind of be all end, all solution. So it's interesting seeing how humans need to be involved in this process to figure out how to make it work, and that kind of made me feel a little bit I don't know little bit, I don't know less concerned about the long history that I think, or the long future that we have with AI. At least as it stands. There's still a lot of human involvement that needs to take place for AI to be used in very particular industries and in very particular instances.

0:30:51 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, absolutely. For some reason, as you're talking, I'm just putting together a parody film in my head of consultants going to bankers in New York and they're all sitting around looking at each other making half a million dollars a year and they're just like. We have this new technology. It's going to fix everything, but it's hallucinating. So what are we going to do about it? If the technology is taking mushrooms, maybe we should take mushrooms.

Oh my God, get on the same level with it. And then they just go on this like drug trip. They solve like AI.

0:31:22 - Mikah Sargent
This is great, this is but okay. But as an aside, I know there are a lot of Silicon Valley folks who think that micro dosing is the answer.

0:31:30 - Emily Dreibelbis
Exactly, so we can put this together, like we can produce this thing.

0:31:37 - Mikah Sargent
The thing that they quoted in the piece IBM, which worked with McDonald's on AI powered systems. It was a voice system, so you could go up and you could order food and drinks and whatever, and the AI system would sort of figure out what you were saying, I guess, and put it into the system. It ended up adding someone had ordered one Diet Coke and for some reason, the AI system added nine iced teas to the order instead of one Diet Coke. So not only do they not get the one Diet Coke, they got nine iced teas instead, which of course, prompted McDonald's to end the project. Good, but it made me go. What does that AI know that? I don't know. Should I be drinking multiple iced teas per day? Is it trying to say that that's better than a Diet Coke?

Surely there's something going on there, and that is something that they actually point to in the piece is that when these things happen, what they found is that humans are more likely to feel comfortable with the system if there are links back to real, true information somewhere, and that has been my experience as well.

If I've used a chat bot, I like for it to cite things that I can then go click to confirm to make sure that this does exist in history, or whatever it happens to be, that it's not just spouting nonsense, and so they talk about being able to track something back to its source, and that has helped in some ways, even for the consultants who are working on this, because they were able to find out that, in this case, the AI wasn't hallucinating.

It was pulling information from websites that were outdated, and so it was simply a matter of having the wrong information in the first place. It's complex, though, isn't it? Like there's so much that's involved with this, and I was just thinking about this the other day. How much, you know, training takes place to get these AI systems to do what they do, and it makes me wonder is it some point you just you put so much information into it that it just spouts utter nonsense. You know, I just can't imagine, after some point of just stuffing something with all of this information, that it it's like an information overload. I there's. There's no logic to what I'm saying.

0:34:12 - Emily Dreibelbis
It just really kind of boggles the mind, you know what I mean. You want to keep it a little bit stupid? Yeah, you don't want it to exit Plato's cave and, like you know, know everything, it's got to stay down. If your job is customer service for this one hotel chain, you better stay there. You better not be talking about business strategy for hotels, you got to stay in your lane.

0:34:36 - Mikah Sargent
Stay in your lane, that's exactly.

0:34:37 - Emily Dreibelbis
Stay in your lane and don't know all the previous iterations of the customer service policy. You just talk about that one policy, so you want to put some bounds around it. Maybe some control over the AI?

0:34:50 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, very much for that Same, but these consultants are making a lot of money doing this and potentially will make a lot of money off of the movie that we end up making, so that'll be great. Emily, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join me today on Tech News Weekly. Always a pleasure to have you here and looking forward to talking to you again. But until then, I wish you all the best, and if folks would like to get to stay up to date with what you're doing, where should they go to do that?

0:35:30 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, so you can follow me. I think Twitter is a good place, or X as we call it. My handle is electric underscore humans. That's because I write a lot about EVs and kind of the effect that they have on society. I also cover AI and lots of other topics. So yeah, electric underscore humans. I have a TikTok. It's kind of cringy, so you can check that out too. Same handle.

0:35:53 - Mikah Sargent
Nice, all right, thank you so much, and we'll see you again soon.

0:35:58 - Emily Dreibelbis
Thank you, see you in a month.

0:36:00 - Mikah Sargent
All righty folks, it is time for another little break. This time it's brought to you by the folks at Wix Studio. They're bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly and once again, it is my opportunity to do literally anything I want with this ad spot, because Wix Studio is giving me creative freedom. That's exactly what they do with their platform whenever it comes to web designers. Give them creative freedom. So I decided, for today's creative freedom, maybe I'd go about writing haiku.

For folks who might not be familiar, haiku is a 5-7-5 poem. It's five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables poem. It's five syllables, seven syllables, five syllables, and it's a structured requirement that makes you really narrow in on what you're looking for. So let's see Creativity. Creativity, that's five syllables. Okay, creativity is as easy as writing. That's yeah Is as easy as writing. That's seven is as easy as writing Uh, this haiku poem, this haiku poem, yeah, that's five, this haiku poem. Creativity is as easy as writing this haiku poem. There is my moment of creative freedom. If you would like full creative freedom yourself, you can build your next project on Wix Studio, the platform for agencies and enterprises. Honestly, that was fun. Creative freedom is so great. Go to wix.com/studio or click on the link on the show page to find out more. Thanks so much to Wix Studio for sponsoring this week's episode of Tech News Weekly.

All right back from the break and I have a little story of the week for you. I want to talk about something that's going on at Netflix, and Netflix, of course, has long been the streaming media platform. Before that, it was the way you got movies in the mail. The red envelope is long since passed and streaming media is still the big part of the company. But Netflix has taken a step into video gaming and you may or may not have come across the Netflix games. Interestingly, if you open the Netflix app on mobile, which is something I rarely do I'm usually watching Netflix on a television, but if you open the Netflix app on mobile, you will find a link to actually several links to games that you can download from Netflix games. These links, upon tapping on them, will pop you into the app store where you can download from Netflix Games. These links, upon tapping on them, will pop you into the App Store where you can download the game, so they are available separately. They're not in the Netflix app itself, which is something important to understand.

Netflix is mostly a game distributor, slash publisher right now, but it is also getting into game development. It has done a few titles in-house. It's been about three years since the company first said look, we're getting into gaming and has, according to this article from the Washington Post's Gene Park, has learned quite a bit about what comes to making successful games. So Netflix says that the things they've learned include working with recognizable intellectual property. So you can imagine that if there's a television show or a movie or some other kind of content out there, then creating a game around that is automatically going to kind of push that game forward, going to be more interesting to people, of more interest to people. Top of that, it also has figured out that Netflix's own content is something that is kind of marketable. So it has, you know, it has different shows, including Netflix's Too Hot to Handle, and so it's created a narrative game that is a little bit like the reality dating show. And then, last but not least, they seem to like mobile gamers, seem to like what they call quote-unquote snackable entertainment. So you hop in, you play a little bit, you hop out. It's not necessarily something that you have to stick around playing for hours and hours and hours. Unlike some of the other video gaming experiences out there Now, netflix doesn't talk about how much money, or rather how many players it has, but it does talk about the kind of overall downloads, and apparently Netflix games in 2023 were downloaded about 81 million times across both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, so quite a few people out there at least downloading the titles Again.

Upon announcing it a few years ago, netflix has continued to add more and more games to its offerings, including Grand Theft Auto, uh, oxenfree, um, as well as uh, hades and Dead Cells, but as time has gone on, the company has kind of narrowed in on something that I think is rather admirable, and it was something that I wasn't necessarily expecting from. You know, a big company like Netflix that has such a focus on, you know, these huge shows that are supposed to sort of move the needle when it comes to people tuning in, and Netflix has said we want to foster the creation of games that are creative, artistic, are interesting, are narrative driven, are all of these things are artful. And we know that the mobile app marketplace and the mobile gaming marketplace is full of cruft, because there's this huge free to play market where you are trying to play a game and then you get ads right in the middle of the game, or you have to wait 15 minutes in order to continue playing the game, unless you want to buy gems, in which case you can use those gems to unlock portions of the game to continue to play. There are all of these free-to-play mechanics that get you spending loads and loads and loads of money over time. In short, little bursts $1.99 here, $2.99 there, $3.99 there, and on top of that it is a very, very crowded market. So low quality games, crowded markets, hard to exist in that place, just in general. But to make games that are artful, that are not about getting more in-app purchases, is an even extra step that Netflix has said it wanted to take, and so they've created this environment where they can exist and create and publish these narrative-driven games without having to worry about existing in that marketplace. It's the same when we talk about not having ads or in-app purchases in our games. That's great for our members, but it's also awesome for our developers, because the free-to-play market can be really challenging now. It's not easy to compete in that space.

So, working with Netflix, our developers get to focus on the creativity of the game. This is a lot like Apple Arcade, a very similar experience With Apple Arcade. Apple offers, for a month-to-month subscription, access to a catalog of games that, by their nature, are ad-free, do not have free-to-play mechanics and do not feature a bunch of cruft that gets in the way of just being able to play the game. There are also some other regulations or requirements, I should say, like the ability for the game to be played offline. That is very similar to what Netflix appears to be offering here.

There's a stUdio that the Washington Post talks about called Wonderstorm that is in part responsible for the show on Netflix, the animated series called the Dragon Prince, and what they did was they launched the Dragon Prince, the animated show, and at the same time launched or started working on a game called the Dragon Prince, zadia or Zadia, I'm not sure which one it is and gave those developers the opportunity to create this game. At the same time they were working on the animated show and it was kind of cool hearing and I don't want to go into too much depth because I want you all to go read the piece, but it was kind of cool hearing about how the games stUdio portion of the company and the animation stUdio portion of the company worked together and how each one informed the other. And so you have these moments where you are kind of changing the story of the show because it was shaped by how the game mechanics were going to be made. And I really like the idea of having this, this kind of wide swath of of available experiences that you know if you get in, if you get really into a series now, you can play the game that goes along with the series and you can find the graphic novels that tell more stories about individual characters and you can I don't know buy the necklace that the main character wears throughout the show. And we're seeing that with other places as well, as the Washington Post points out, including HBO's the Last of Us and Prime Video's awesome series Fallout Very popular and they are not cannibalizing each other but instead are pumping each other up. So people look at the one thing and then they want to play the game, or they play the game and they want to watch the show, and I love that idea that it's kind of all working together as opposed to you know you release three products and you know people buy this product, so the other two products don't get attention, or people buy this product and those other two products don't get attention. There's not that cannibalizing that's taking place. So go read the piece in the Washington Post called what Netflix has Learned From Its Push Into Video Games.

We will be back in just a moment with my interview this week, but I do want to take a moment to tell you about Club Twit. At twit.tv/clubtwit For $7 a month, just seven bucks a month. You can join the club and when you do, you get access to some pretty awesome benefits. Every single Twitch show with no ads, just the content. You also gain access to the Twit+ bonus fee that has extra stuff you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes before the show, after the show, special Club Twit events get published there. It's basically a huge back catalog of stuff and stuff that gets published regularly, even now all there, as well as access to the members-only Discord server, a fun place to go to chat with your fellow Club Twit members and those of us here at Twit. A fun place to go to chat with your fellow Club Twit members and those of us here at Twit. And if that wasn't enough, you also get access to the video versions of our Club Twit shows, including Hands on Mac, hands on Windows, ios, today, just to name a few. You, by going to twit.tv/clubtwit and paying $7 a month or more, we give you the option and actually I just saw just the other day two people said I doubled what I'm paying and we thank you for that. So they decided to pay $14 a month. Every little bit helps and you get that warm, fuzzy feeling knowing that you're helping support what we do here at twit.

For those of you who watch many of our shows here on TWiT, you may be familiar with a company or two that I'm going to mention today called Suno and Udio, because we have featured both of these websites and services on our shows at showing off the ability of AI to generate music and, in some cases, muzak. Unfortunately, when it comes to that, there have been some discoveries, maybe by US record labels who are accusing Suno and Udio of copyright infringement. Joining us to kind of dig into this and help us understand what's going on. Here is senior writer at Wired, Kate Knibbs. Welcome to the show, Kate.

Hey, thanks for having me.

It is a pleasure to have you join us. So, yeah, I've got some questions here for you, and I was hoping that you could start by explaining how AI music generators like Suno and Udio actually work, and then what specific practices therein seem to have led to the copyright infringement claims.

0:50:28 - Kate Knibbs
Absolutely so. Suno and Udo both work in similar ways. They allow users. You just type in a prompt, you know you could say, sing me a jazzy song about the 1996 bulls, um. Or you know, give me a Christmas song that sounds like, um, seagulls are chirping it, or something.

You can do anything that you want and these tools will produce a shockingly polished tune for you, with lyrics, if you want them, and music, and they've really taken off since they debuted just because they're very simple for people to use. You just type whatever comes to mind and you have a song within a matter of minutes and there's sort of a magical quality to them and the way that they work is similar to the way that other generative AI tools work, like text or image generators. They're trained on vast amounts of data and basically taught to predict or estimate what the most appropriate thing to create would be, based on prompts. We don't know exactly what they were trained on. They've been a little vague when they're talking about their training data, and so there have been lots of suspicions circling these companies basically since they debuted that they had been trained on a vast trove of copyrighted songs, and now we have the record labels accusing them of being trained on vast troves of copyrighted songs.

0:51:59 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, in fact, that's kind of what I hope you can kind of tell us about is, especially because there's a lot of legalese involved always. What are the main allegations that have been made by these music labels against Suno and Udeo in these copyright infringement lawsuits? Because it's from, you know, from the sort of macro perspective. It is not as if these Suno and Udeo places are putting out music into, you know, apple Music and Spotify and making money off of them that way and sort of making the new Justin Bieber hit, but instead are seemingly being used to make random music about seagulls chirping Christmas tunes. So what, what are the music labels saying when it comes to the copyright infringement.

0:52:54 - Kate Knibbs
So the music labels are making similar claims against both Suno and Udio, as you mentioned.

They are worried that there might not be that many hits on the radio right now that are using these tools, but they're assuming that they will be using them in the future. We've already seen a track called BBL Drizzy that was made using Udeo and you know they're seeing this and they're looking five years down the road and they're assuming that these tools will be used to create some of the next pop hits. So they filed these two lawsuits. They're both alleging copyright infringement and they are interestingly.

The crux of these lawsuits is that the labels are alleging that training the tools was infringing. The lawsuits provide a lot of different examples that they're using as evidence where they've managed to prompt the music generators to make a song that sounds like another song. So, for instance, in the Suno lawsuit they talk about how they prompted Suno to make a song that was suspiciously similar to Chuck Berry's Johnny B Good, and they even showed you the lyrics and the musical notes as evidence, but that's. They're not actually trying to prove in court that that and other examples were infringing. The lawsuits mainly are focused on just the concept of training as infringing, which is a bold move in my opinion.

0:54:35 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and that is the larger conversation that seems to be taking place across all of this. It's a conversation that comes up on a lot of our shows as we talk about AI and we talk about the right to read, which is this idea that you know we as humans have the right to go online and look at a New York Times piece, and so does an AI system have the right to go online and look at a New York Times piece and then, you know, absorb that information and spit it back out, because I could go read that article and then I could go and talk to my friend about it and I am spitting it out. So how is that different from what the AI is doing? Same thing here. It's almost like the right to listen. If I can listen to a song and then sing it back out loud, is me taking that in when I'm sort of training myself, so to speak? Is that different from an AI system doing the same?

And there's a lot of confusion here. I said I wasn't going to ask you kind of off-topic questions, but it's on topic. But you said something, bbl, something. So can you tell? I didn't know that there was this. I didn't know I had heard a little bit about this, but for our listeners I had heard a little bit about this, but for our listeners is this a song that is popular, like on TikTok. Where was the song cropping up?

0:55:58 - Kate Knibbs
that it's suddenly gotten some attention. Okay, I'm going to explain the song, but you have to remember that I'm a 37-year-old mom in the Midwest, so I don't have my finger on the pulse of youth culture, so forgive me. I know that it's really popular on TikTok, but you can listen to it on Spotify. It was made by a comedian. I think his name is King Lilonius, but people can fact check me. It really took off when Metro Boomin, the producer, remixed it and yeah, people are like listening. People love this song and it is I don't know if the name will clue listeners in, but it's a diss track about Drake and it's sort of leaning into the popularity of diss tracks about Drake because of like, not Like Us and all the Kendrick Lamar stuff. It's sort of building upon that. But yeah, it's like totally made with Udio.

0:56:51 - Mikah Sargent
First of all, I want to say you did a fantastic job explaining that, so that was wonderful and, yeah, folks can find that track also available on Apple Music and I love that. The genre of it is definitely comedy. Now here is a question that I have that I think folks will be kind of curious about, because we see companies respond in different ways to these allegations. How have Suno and Udio responded to the allegations and what defenses have they put forward regarding the use of copyrighted material, and have they released any diss tracks against the recording industry themselves, and have they released any diss tracks against the recording industry?

0:57:32 - Kate Knibbs
themselves no diss tracks yet, although I wouldn't rule those out so far. Suno and Udio have both put out statements strongly defending themselves against the allegations. What you were talking about a moment ago about the right to read I think we're going to see that come up in court if these cases do go to trial, because what this type of Gen AI startup? Their typical defense and I think we're going to see this defense here is that they're not going to deny, I think, in court that they did indeed train on songs that are still in copyright. They're going to argue that it's fair use and the fair use doctrine in US courts allows copyright infringement in certain cases, like parody, or newspapers are allowed to quote books and speeches and other sources, and there's lots of arguments that have been made by tech companies that it means computers are allowed to read and learn from copyrighted material. So the statements were both pretty brief, but I think they're heavily hinting that both companies are going to be using the fair use defense in court in the courtroom.

0:58:53 - Mikah Sargent
Understood Now that that has me kind of wondering what do we think the broader implications are for the industry? Do we think that this has the potential to be a precedent setting lawsuit, given that, as you said, it's likely that the right to read will be brought up in court?

0:59:17 - Kate Knibbs
So one thing that's really important to remember when we're looking and talking about these lawsuits is that they are not pioneering. There are so many lawsuits that are already ongoing against AI companies that I think the precedent will be set before these end up going to trial. Last year, the music labels jumped into the fray. Universal Music Group sued Anthropic, arguing that Anthropic was producing lyrics that were in copyright. These lawsuits are breaking new ground because they are the first lawsuits that are against music generators, specifically, and music generators that make lyrical compositions. Make lyrical compositions, but they're not that different.

Like the, the copyright claims aren't that distinct from the copyright claims that are made in the. Like dozens of lawsuits that have already been filed against AI companies that have text generation tools. Like the biggest case is probably New York times versus OpenAI. That also wasn't the first, but I think it's just it's considered by copyright experts to be the one that I think has the strongest argument. Like it will be the toughest battle. I'm rambling at you a little bit, but I'm trying to say that the precedent will likely already be set by the time these go to trial.

1:00:55 - Mikah Sargent
If they go to trial, if they are settled, I have suspicions that the negotiations will hinge on what sort of precedents are set by the cases that were filed a year or two ago. The other question I have is do we think that this will have any impact on the way that the music industry itself makes use of AI in music production? Because we've got this new craze, which is generative AI, but for a long time there have been a number of tools that are a form of artificial intelligence to clean up aUdio tracks, to change pitches, to add reverb in a way that makes it seem like it's coming from an actual, you know, hardware device. There are all of these tools that are there that do use artificial intelligence in some way and have, in effect, been trained in some way to be able to produce the effects that they are trying to produce. Could this have any impact on that?

1:02:13 - Kate Knibbs
Yeah, I mean, I think it could definitely have a chilling effect on producers, who are typically keen to try new tools that involve AI in some way. I think the fact that labels are demonstrating that they're going to be litigious when it comes to generative AI will probably make at least a few people think twice before they're introducing AI into their production schedule, and that's honestly kind of a shame, because I think there could certainly be really cool things done with AI. There could certainly be really cool things done with AI, although I also think that, you know, artists who oppose their work being trained upon without their permission have an ethical point, if not the legal right. So, yeah, I do think it's probably going to make some producers a little gun shy when it comes to using new AI tools.

1:03:14 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, absolutely, Kate. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us today to help us understand what's going on with Suno Udio and the record labels. Obviously, this is going to be an ongoing thing. We'll have to wait and see how it all plays out, and I appreciate you also taking the time to tell us about the diss track that I'm looking forward to listening to after the show. Of course, folks can head to wiredcom to check out your work, where you are a senior writer. Is there anywhere else they can go to follow along with what you do?

1:03:49 - Kate Knibbs
They can look me up on Twitter. I'm not calling it X, I'm still there. It's just my last name, nibs, and I'm on threads at XtremeNibs. I just have a really stupid username, but thank you so much for having me. I love talking about this stuff. Maybe, if the Gen AI companies don't get sued out of existence, you'll be talking to a robot version of me next time.

1:04:17 - Mikah Sargent
Thank you and enjoy the show later today. I think this sounds like a lot of fun. We appreciate you All, righty folks. That brings us to the end of this episode of Tech News Weekly.

The show publishes every Thursday at twittv slash, tnw. That is where you can go to subscribe to the show in aUdio and video formats. I mentioned club to it during the show, so I'll just give a brief mention here. Twittv slash club twit seven dollars a month and you can be a part of the fun. If you would like to tweet or post or whatever at me.

I'm at Mikah Sargent on many a social media network where you can head to chihuahua.coffee. That's C-H-I-H-U-A-H-U-A.coffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Check out Hands on Mac and iOS Today, which publishes on Thursdays. You can also check out Ask the Tech Guys, the show I co-host with Leo Laporte on Sundays, where we take your tech questions and do our best. Take your tech questions live and do our best to answer them. I was also on Windows Weekly and this Week in Google yesterday, so be sure to tune into those shows. Very interesting things happened in TWiG and it was a good time, so please consider watching those episodes and subscribing to those shows as well. Thank you all for being here with me and I will see you again, not next Thursday, because it is July 4th, but the Thursday following. Bye-bye.