Tech News Weekly 347 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 - Emily Dreibelbis
Coming up today on Tech News Weekly. We are going to talk with Abrar Al-Heeti from CNET about Meta trying really hard to make AI influencers happen and a new platform they launched for creators this week. Then we're going to talk about OpenAI's advanced voice mode, which launched this week after a big controversy with Scarlett Johansson that you might remember. Then we're going to talk with Will Oremus from The Washington Post about the White Dudes for Harris controversy that has been all over social media. Who are the White Dudes for Harris? What do they want and why did X seemingly suspend their account out of nowhere in the middle of a fundraiser? Finally, we'll talk with Andrew Chow from TIME, who has done some fascinating reporting on a Bitcoin mine that went into or was installed in a town near Texas, and residents of the town seem to be reporting health issues. About 40 people have gone to the ER. Even a dog was infected with some kind of illness. So really interesting kind of horror story like stuff. But we have a great show today coming up.

0:01:03 - VO
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This. Is TWiT

0:01:12 - Emily Dreibelbis
This is Tech News Weekly with Abrar Al-Heeti and me, Emily Dribelbis, episode 347, recorded on Thursday, august 1st 2024: Meta's AI Studio. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where, every week, we talk to and about the people making and breaking the tech news. I'm Emily Dribelbis. I'm going to be your host this week. I'm filling in for Mikah while he's on vacation, and I have with me Abrar Al-Heeti from CNET. Hello, Abrar, hello, how are you doing? Good, I'm excited to do this with you. It's rare because we are both monthly co-hosts on Tech News Weekly, usually talking to Mikah, but now we're together.

0:01:53 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Yeah, we miss you, Mikah, but thanks for letting us just talk to each other. This is great.

0:01:58 - Emily Dreibelbis
And I'll pour one out for Mikah. I hope he's not talking about tech somewhere. Fingers crossed, I doubt it.

0:02:04 - Abrar Al-Heeti
but we can hope.

0:02:10 - Emily Dreibelbis
So for your story of the week, you're going to tell us a little bit about Meta trying really hard to make AI influencers happen. So tell us a little bit about that.

0:02:16 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Yeah, I love stories like this because people always have a lot of opinions about them, and I love when there's a creepiness factor. So Meta has something called AI Studio them. And I love when there's a creepiness factor, so Meta has something called AI Studio and part of this feature. So imagine you are DMing one of your favorite celebrities or influencers and, instead of getting a response from them on Instagram, you get a response from their AI. And the idea here is supposedly to free up these content creators and celebrities so that if fans reach out and they ask commonly asked questions about their facts, about themselves or their favorite products or whatever, this AI persona can respond on their behalf. And it's supposed to be freeing up the creators and also creating a connection with fans.

So the reason why this is interesting is just because I feel like it's the latest example of a tech giant thinking that AI can be a pretty solid substitute for a person. And it's just this is such a great example of that just because when we reach out to people that we look up to, we want a response from them, and if you get a response from an AI, are you going to be giddy about it? Are you going to go tell your friends that you got a response from Snoop Dogg's AI. I don't know. I feel like that's just.

It feels like it's missing the mark there. I understand that it can help foster a connection by responding to certain questions, but I feel like that human element is really missing here. So this is open to certain creators. What they do is they essentially allow the AI to learn from their posts and comments and stories and whatever on threads and Instagram, and then it can just go from there. The thing that I think is worth noting is that you can ask the AI to avoid certain topics, because imagine how much fun people could try to have with this is asking just like the most out-of-pocket questions and seeing what the AI does about it. So people can kind of try to circumvent that, but I still feel like it'll be so fascinating to see how people use this. So, are you as cynical as I am?

0:04:20 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yes, I pretty much agree with everything you said. I mean, it seems like the only thing to do when faced with an AI version of a celebrity is to ask it the most out-of-pocket thing you can possibly think of. That's the task, that's the assignment. You have to do that because it's not real anyway. So you have to have some fun. Absolutely. It's not like a customer service agent which, if that was an AI, they could actually give you useful information. But I don't know what Snoop Dogg would tell me that would help me. Maybe he'd help me relax, I don't know that.

0:04:53 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Olympics ad for Google Gemini about the person who is using Gemini to write, you know, fan mail for an Olympian that they looked up to. And then everybody was like I know this was all over the internet, all over X slash Twitter. We were talking about this earlier. Which do we call it? I'm going to call it. I'll call it Twitter, for today. It was all over Twitter. People were like I think they're missing the point. Like, do you want to receive something that was written by AI? But also, do you feel like there's a connection if you're sending someone something that was written with the help of AI and it's inescapable? I think a lot of these companies are just going to double down on it, but I just felt like that was really timely, given this announcement as well.

0:05:46 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, absolutely, and I know that that AI studio launched this week and it's just interesting. It feels like something no one's asking for, but it's really just to help influencers do their job, so it's almost more of like a B2B thing. And then what people need to know is that they might see these AI influencers and they might, I guess, have the option to interact with them, and at that point we would just see if there was any real demand for it.

0:06:10 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Yeah, exactly, and I know that they. When Meta kind of announced a lot of these AI initiatives last year, they started with, like you know, a lot of high profile celebrities and how you can kind of chat with a persona that's like them, and so this is kind of like the latest iteration where like, okay, let's extend it to a creator. So the fact that they're expanding it, I'm like okay, so was the first round successful? Like, were people really messaging AI Tom Brady? They must've been, I don't know. And so seeing this expand is interesting because I know that they're probably not going to stop with. You know, big influencers and creators. At some point They'll probably want everybody on Instagram to be able to create an AI avatar, and so are we going to.

I mean, I think it's so fascinating about these updates across social media platforms in particular is we often scoff and then sometimes we end up using them. So wouldn't it be hilarious if, in a year, we look back and I was like, why was I so critical? I'm chatting with Emily's AI all the time, but I don't know. I'm still skeptical about this. But then the other piece of it is Meta really talks about. They've highlighted another concern here, which is transparency, because you don't want to message somebody thinking that you're talking to them. Obviously, there are clear indicators that you are talking to an AI and not a human. But I'm honestly terrified of if we become immune to how weird that is, if that really just becomes a normal thing where we're okay with talking to somebody's AI and they're able to answer all of our questions for us on behalf of that person talking to somebody's AI and they're able to answer all of our questions for us on behalf of that person.

0:07:47 - Emily Dreibelbis
Right, it's a weird world if it gets too out of hand and we're living in the Sims, basically we're all just these little avatars talking and you never know what anyone actually looks like or sounds like and you're just talking to computers. But also, with this, I think, the announcement they said that they did it with their Lama model, so they have this big open source model that Meta has been pushing this week. So maybe it's more about the model and that's kind of their crown jewel, right. And maybe this influencer thing is just where they're kind of putting their eggs in that basket and hoping that it works, because they own Instagram and all these influencer platforms are trying to keep up with TikTok. But if it doesn't work, they still have this model. Then maybe they'll try to pivot to something else. What do you know about their model?

0:08:34 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Yeah, no, that's a great point, especially given how this is trading off of any and all data that you want to share about how you interact, and I think it's a good idea for them, just because you don't want your AI to sound like a robot.

And how do you make sure your AI doesn't sound like a robot as you train off of more conversational interactions, and so I think there is value there. But, yeah, you bring up a valid point about just keeping up with competition, as Instagram has been trying to prevent TikTok from completely overtaking its popularity, and so there's a lot of copying and influencing on both ends, and so maybe this is their attempt, and then that makes me wonder about what more is TikTok going to do then how does that competition look when AI gets factored into it? But, yeah, I think Meta's focus has largely been on tapping into personalities, because that's I mean, people go to Instagram or Facebook or threads to share who they are, and so they have this unique opportunity to tap into that and potentially make AI seem less robotic and more human.

0:09:50 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, there are a whole other set of competitors that aren't TikTok or some other social media platform. They're these like character AIs. To me it seems more video gamey. You have this relationship with this kind of almost like personal computer game. That's what it seems like to me, but I think there's a website called characterai that's surprisingly popular, so that feels very niche to me. To all of this, I feel like Meta is kind of just lighting money on fire. They paid Kendall Jenner and Tom Brady and Snoop Dogg so much money. Do you remember how much it was they paid them for that I don't remember but you're right though, that made headlines.

0:10:29 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Yeah, it made headlines.

0:10:29 - Emily Dreibelbis
It was like millions of dollars for them to come into the studio and give over their likeness. I don't know what they did. Maybe they stood on a green screen like this and they talked from all the different angles and they basically recorded them and gave them millions of dollars to do that. This seems like a big waste of money. And now they're just training this AI billions and billions more, and it's such an odd. It's so odd that the end result of all that money and time and effort in software engineering is going to AI influencers. It just seems like a gigantic waste to me.

0:11:02 - Abrar Al-Heeti
And it's especially interesting because I think in the past couple of years and I feel like this especially happened during COVID is influencers kind of lost their charm with a lot of people because their lives seemed so out of reach. And it just, I mean, that's part of the reason why TikTok took off is because you'd see somebody with their messy hair and pajamas making a viral video, and they didn't need to be all glammed up all the time, they didn't need to maintain this persona. So if you're already dealing with issues of inauthenticity and then you add AI to the equation, doesn't that make it seem even more remote and inauthentic? So that's also something that's really fascinating there. But it does feel like this is where meta is doubling down, because when I think about their AI initiatives, it is very tied to these kinds of situations.

And then the other piece of that is when a lot of these platforms, like X, slash, twitter, are training their own AI models. They're using public posts to do so, and I believe Instagram is the same way, and there are ways to go in and opt out of that. So there's the two ends of the spectrum. There is are ways to go in and opt out of that, so there's the two ends of the spectrum there is. Do I want to completely opt out of having my posts be used to train this model? My answer is yes. Or, as a creator, do you want to actually just give it more and say here, learn everything about who I am and become another version of me? So it's interesting seeing those two ends of the spectrum there.

0:12:26 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, I actually make a very good point about this being slightly out of touch with current influencer culture. It's not as much about how many followers you have or how many likes your last post is. The way TikTok and the Instagram reels work is. It's just random posts take off and people like seeing newness. There's still the old influencers too, but it just feels out of touch and it is. I mean, meta did shut down that whole Kendall Jenner, tom Brady, snoop Dogg thing. So if they shut that down, why are they rebooting it as a platform everyone can use? They put all that investment into those celebrities and then they were like, oh, that's not worth it, but let's move forward with it anyway. Maybe they're just courting creators. I know that's a whole hustle that these social media platforms go through. How much do they pay them per post to try to get creators? So maybe it's for that.

0:13:13 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Yeah, there is obviously this battle for who can keep creators posting on their own platforms, and so maybe there is an appeal there of, hey, we'll free you up, you don't have to be so inundated, but you can actually kind of interact with people. But yeah, you're right, I think it feels like they're not willing to fully give up the idea yet. So, if they're no longer pitching this Kendall Jenner AI maybe this is a more personal pitch of here's a person that you feel like you know, because they're an influencer and they speak to you and you've bought products they've suggested, and maybe this is their pivot and they hope that it'll be more successful.

0:13:54 - Emily Dreibelbis
I just want to know what they know that I don't know, because it sounds hopelessly lame to me. So they paid those celebrities and then they shut it down and they're still moving forward. I'm like, what is the data you're looking at? Like, what are these internal metrics? That is telling you that this is a good idea.

0:14:11 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Yeah, cause they can't just be like a shot in the dark. They have to have something backing up. This idea of this is going to work. People are going to like this and that's why I mentioned that idea of I hope, you know, I don't look back in a year and say I was so foolish. I use this all the time and God, do they know us better than we do? I hope not. It's terrifying.

0:14:34 - Emily Dreibelbis
I know I would try it, though I'll be honest, like it was free and yeah, I mean we write about tech so we got to try it Right.

0:14:37 - Abrar Al-Heeti
So, meta, if you're listening, yeah, yeah, dms, we're going to make AI avatars immediately after this and We'll, yeah, dms, we're going to make AI avatars immediately after this, and we'll criticize you and then just sell our souls and try it so. I don't think I'm important enough to have one, but someday I'm going to aspire to have an AI avatar.

0:15:00 - Emily Dreibelbis
And maybe you could use it to troll people. I don't know, it could be fun, so weird. Yeah, all right, so we're going to talk about my story next, but first we're gonna have a quick ad break from Mikah.

0:15:08 - Mikah Sargent
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0:17:18 - Emily Dreibelbis
All right, awesome. I love AI, Mikah, basically from above. So for my story this week, we are going to talk about OpenAI's big new launch this week which, ironically, I think a lot of people don't have access to it, so we're going to talk about that. But OpenAI basically started rolling out Advanced Voice Mode, which they debuted back in May and if you remember, that was that big launch event. They all sat on the couch. It was live streamed. The OpenAI employees talked into the phone like this and, honestly, the tech was very impressive. It was responding very quickly. As critical as I can be about AI, I was like that's cool. It was pretty amazing. They were showing like it could look where the phone is looking if you point the camera and talk to you about it. The phone is looking if you point the camera and kind of talk to you about it. But then, shortly after, a giant controversy ensued with Scarlett Johansson. Do you remember that, Abrar?

0:18:12 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Yes, I do, that was spicy, that was fun.

0:18:16 - Emily Dreibelbis
That was fun. That was a good one. I did not expect that, but basically OpenAI had approached Scarlett Johansson to do the voice of this voice mode, so they had five voices at the time. They wanted one to be Scarlett Johansson and they asked her to do it. She declined. They asked her again right before the launch and she declined, but none of us knew this. This is all behind the scenes story. So when the demo came out it sounded exactly like Scarlett Johansson, at least I thought. Did you think it sounded like her?

It did yeah it did, and it doesn't even matter what we think, because we know that Sam Altman wanted it to. So he was tweeting just the word her. He kept saying I think it was even in the press release like oh, this is like the movies. So there was a pretty obvious connection and she basically hired a lawyer to look into this and put out a statement like I didn't support this.

So this voice mode has been very controversial. They ended up disabling that voice. Now it's down to four and it finally launched this week after many months. One month of delay as well. Again over ethics and safety concerns classic classic open ai problems. But it's only for a small group of users, so it's. You basically have to pay for chat gpt. It's 20 a month, so it'd be make you a plus subscriber. Then you also have to be in this tiny pool of alpha testers that we don't know how big it is, um, so it's. It's just a very niche feature at this point. After all that hype, they had this whole celebrity scandal. Like what better press? I mean, all press is good press, pretty much. I just think it fell kind of flat. I don't know what you thought of it.

0:19:58 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Yeah, I think there's. Anytime OpenAI announces something that feels revolutionary or very advanced, it's mixed with the sense of anxiety and fear about how this could be misused. I think Scarlett Johansson speaking up about the fact that it sounded like the likeness of her voice was very telling, because OpenAI has run into a lot of these roadblocks where anytime you know they release something, or or the ways that they train their models, and having a lot of uh writers and publications speak up and say, hey, how, where are you getting this, this content from? What are you training off of Um? So it's it's really hard to separate the impressiveness of its advancements from the controversy that is often mired in all of that. So I think it's interesting that they say with this that they've made it so.

Chachi Patee can't impersonate people's voices. That includes individuals and public figures, and so they're trying I'm putting air quotes around this they're trying to. They're they're trying I'm putting air quotes around this they're trying to um quell any of those fears, but I feel like they are still very full speed ahead with they'll do whatever it takes to be at the top of the AI game and to um, you know, make their model the smartest model, the most capable model, and I just think we're just going to hear more kind of concerns arise as this becomes available to more people.

0:21:29 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, I mean that also assumes people use it, which is my concern. I feel like they are so worried about the tech that they're launching something, but it's like a fake launch and they've done that so many times recently and I just I mean, I write about AI. I still haven't, like, subscribed to Plus. I do it sometimes if I have to write an article about it, but really the question is like, can they make it useful? And I guess I'll ask you from the demo you saw, would you use it?

0:21:56 - Abrar Al-Heeti
You know, the one thing that I thought was really cool, at least from an accessibility standpoint, which I cover digital accessibility. So that's something that I always look out for, especially with all these AI advancements. But the capability to use your phone's camera to kind of, you know, describe what you're seeing, and I know they have a partnership with Be my Eyes in that way. I think those kinds of features can be useful to a lot of people and that's an example of AI actually being something that like, fits and could be used in a helpful way.

I think me personally, I I have I'm not, I don't have very warm feelings towards a lot of these AI models and companies, just because I'm a journalist and I am very hesitant to either be part of Feed into what makes it smarter and more. I know I'm only one person. It doesn't matter if I use it or not. It's going to get smarter. I get that, but it's just more in my mind.

I'm like I don't want to use this, I don't have to and I don't feel like I have to. I don't think I need AI to help me write better. I don't think I need an AI voice to chat with or anything. I think the ways that I would find this to be more useful is having it baked into AI assistance or smart speakers that I already use, so with my Google speaker, when that gets the AI boost through Gemini, and being able to have a more conversational approach with that and getting better answers, because its answers are trash. And having that improve, I think, is the only way that I could see something like this be useful, but I don't know if this particular service is something that I would gravitate towards.

0:23:38 - Emily Dreibelbis
That's a good point, and that is one thing this launch has done is it has kind of pushed the industry to make its voice tech better. So Amazon is reportedly working on a better version of Alexa, although they say that people might have to pay for it, which crosses a line for me. Based off the minimal, I'm not paying for that. No, it's so bad right now that the idea of me paying for it just feels like a huge stretch, especially if I've already bought the Alexa. I thought that's what I'm paying for, which I like. It's like one thing.

0:24:07 - Abrar Al-Heeti
That's not a subscription, yeah exactly I was going to say we don't want yet another subscription, especially for we don't want it. Yeah.

0:24:15 - Emily Dreibelbis
Exactly. And then Apple said that they're coming out with a better version of Siri, which could be good, because I already have an iPhone that I use all the time. So if Siri is going to be good, I mean I would be open to that.

0:24:27 - Abrar Al-Heeti
I agree with that. I think Siri is another example of something where it's something that you use on a device that you already have and Siri needs to also get better because it struggles sometimes. And I think Apple Intelligence is a perfect example of Apple kind of being a bit more subtle about baking in AI features into things you potentially already use, and so you know, obviously they're partnering with ChatGPT for the smarter Siri. That's an example of something where it's like here's a platform and a product that you already have in your hands and they can use their tech to bolster that a bit more. So yeah, in those instances, I think that might be something that I tap into.

0:25:09 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, the question for OpenAI is how? Why are people going to use their product versus these ones that we're already talking about? That offer us other things. So I know OpenAI they're trying to take on Apple and Google and all these big tech companies, but I feel like they increasingly just look like a startup to me.

0:25:26 - Abrar Al-Heeti
That's true, and I think also with Apple intelligence. The thing that Apple has been very clear with is yeah, they're partnering with OpenAI for now, but they plan to partner with other companies as well. So that catalog of companies that they're collaborating with could expand, it could change. So how is OpenAI going to make sure that they are kind of prominent in that partnership?

0:25:52 - Emily Dreibelbis
Right, I just read an article today kind of just talking about how basically all the AI models that are out there have already gobbled up all the data that's out there, pretty much so they all are working with very similar data. And now, you know, chatgpt or Claude is a big one, or just all these other different models are coming up that have gobbled up all the same data, and now it's just a race to the bottom on who can offer an AI platform for the lowest cost, and somehow we already got there in a couple years of ChatGPT being out, and so I just wonder. I mean, I guess OpenAI is kind of trying to do these tricks with the voice mode and the Scarlett Johansson, and it's almost like branding at this point rather than the product.

0:26:37 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Yeah, I mean, and they've become a household name in such a quick span of time where I feel like two years ago, you knew what OpenAI was if you were immersed in the tech world and if you weren't, it was like what's that?

And now people really do link OpenAI with generative AI and you see their efforts to expand and build upon that name through things like the search engine that they also just recently announced.

So not only are companies like Open, ai and Google competing when it comes to having a smart assistant, um, but also when it comes to your searches, because you think about chat, gpt and people use it like a search engine and now they officially have a search engine. So, um, yeah, I think you're right in terms of they really want to assert that dominance in the space and, to be fair, they were ahead of the game and they really got the ball rolling on all this. And they're the ones that have pushed all these companies to quickly double down on, because we know a lot of these companies, like Google, for example, were working on AI for a long time in the background, and OpenAI comes out with ChatGPT and they say, oh my God, we need to get this out ASAP. So that's kind of what compelled them all to hurry up and just crank it out and see what happens, and sometimes bad things happen.

0:27:52 - Emily Dreibelbis
I love how Google, just Every press release, just reminds us like oh, we've been working on this for eight years, and they're like a whole paragraph, like here are all the products that we launched and each one's hyperlinked and it goes back to like 2002. It's like they are really making their point, like we've been working on this and they will not let us forget it. It's really funny.

0:28:13 - Abrar Al-Heeti
I mean, listen, I'd be bitter too. I'd be like I was taking my time trying to be responsible and I mean I wouldn't call any tech super responsible, but you know, they were trying to be more careful. And then it was like, nope, we just got to push it all out, right.

0:28:27 - Emily Dreibelbis
Well, they were like we're making a lot of money, so we're good.

0:28:29 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Yeah, yeah, exactly At the end of the day.

0:28:34 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, so we'll see if people can use voice mode over Siri or Alexa or I mean Google said they're also debuting one. They had their own little Google voice mode. I forgot what it's called unveiling a day after OpenAI. So we should see some better voice tech coming down the pipe and we'll just see who uses it. And that's, I think, kind of the big question for AI.

0:28:57 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Yeah, and I think really that critical element is again baking it into the devices that we already have, and it is time for smarter assistants. They sound less robotic, but they're still slightly robotic and they're not very sharp, so it's great to be able to ask two questions in one and be able to interrupt. I interrupt my Google Home speaker all the time, and so it'll be better to actually have a more natural conversation. As creepy as it is, it's cool.

0:29:23 - Emily Dreibelbis
I agree. I agree it can be useful too. All right, Abrar, thank you so much. It's been so fun to chat with you. Where can people find you if they want to keep up with your work?

0:29:32 - Abrar Al-Heeti
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. So I am on Twitter slash X at Alheti, underscore three, and I'm on TikTok and Instagram at Abrar Alheti, no spaces, and you and you can find my work on cnetcom.

0:29:44 - Emily Dreibelbis
All right, Thank you so much. Thank you. Next we have another interview coming up, but first we are going to have a quick ad break from Mikah.

0:29:53 - Mikah Sargent
Thank you, Emily, for filling in for me. I've got one more pause here. This time I want to tell you about Experts Exchange, which is sponsoring this week's episode of Tech News Weekly. You out there can join a network of trustworthy and talented tech professionals to get industry insights and advice from people who are actually using the products in your stack, instead of paying for expensive enterprise-level tech support. As the tech community for people tired of the AI sellout, experts Exchange is ready to help carry the fight for the future of human intelligence. They really do care about having a place for humans to go and ask questions of other humans and get human answers without any of that data being trained on AI systems.

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0:32:41 - Emily Dreibelbis
All right, Thank you so much, Mike. Next up we have Will Arimus from Washington Post, Hi Will.

0:32:48 - Will Oremus
Hey, thanks for having me.

0:32:50 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, thank you so much for joining. I am excited to talk to you about this topic. It has been all over my social media this week, which is the whole controversy with the White Dudes for Harris versus Twitter slash X. So can you give us a brief rundown of what happened and what you wrote about?

0:33:08 - Will Oremus
Yeah. So there were these wildly successful fundraising events that the Harris campaign held. I think it started with Black Men for Harris, maybe. Eventually they went through a bunch of different demographic groups. They got to White Dudes for Harris a couple nights ago. Celebrities joined the call. The dude from the Big Lebowski, jeff Bridges, joined the call. All was going well from the Harris campaign's perspective, and then their ex-account where they were advertising the fundraiser, suddenly stopped working. It got suspended and they didn't know why. And it was suspended until the following morning. They complained a lot. Other people's complained on their behalf and it was reinstated, but not before. The organizers felt like they had really missed a chance to draw even more attention to the event and the reasons given for the suspension were a little murky.

0:34:00 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, so I didn't see much beyond. I guess they got an automated email about why it was suspended, so what do we know about why their account was basically shut down immediately?

0:34:11 - Will Oremus
Yeah. So the note that they got that they posted on X said that their account had been suspended for ban evasion. Now that kind of begs the question about what was the ban that they were evading in the first place and why did that happen? Sometimes that can happen when you have an account that had previously had some kind of action taken against it and then either the same people started a new account with a different name or the account changed its name or handle. It can trigger this punishment for basically sort of like switching accounts to avoid a content moderation enforcement action. But X barely talks to the press. I mean they generally, when the media asks questions about this kind of thing, they send an auto reply. They don't have much interest in answering questions and they've never fully explained it at least the last I had checked and they've never fully explained it, at least the last I had checked.

0:35:06 - Emily Dreibelbis
Is that a policy they've always had, or is that just since Elon Musk took over? Because I know with Tesla.

0:35:17 - Will Oremus
I write about EVs and I can get Tesla to reply to an email if I try to. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I actually remember. So I started covering Tesla in the early days of the company and they had a regular communications department and they were great, they were really helpful. And then they did things that irked Musk one too many times and he ended up firing a succession of of comms chiefs and then, I think, ultimately disbanded the department and he's brought that same, that same approach, to X. So Twitter used to have a large and, from the media's perspective, quite helpful communications team, and they would. They would respond quickly, they would. They would explain what was going on. The answers weren't always satisfying, but they would always talk to you. Since Musk took it over it for a while, actually, if you would email a question, you would just get a poo emoji in response.

0:36:00 - Emily Dreibelbis
Now, I think, that was the Tesla, yeah.

0:36:03 - Will Oremus
OK, all right, I didn't know that was brought over from Tesla.

0:36:05 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, Okay, so this is very Elon Musk style. Okay, got it.

0:36:10 - Will Oremus
Yeah, absolutely. Since Linda Yaccarina was brought in as sort of the adult in the room to be CEO, they've toned it down. So now their auto response to the media just says busy right now, try later. But either way it's very hard to get any kind of explanation out of them. And so what happens is that I think people end up assuming the worst and you get sort of conspiracy theories about well, maybe they did it on purpose to sabotage Harris. I mean, we know Musk is a Trump supporter.

0:36:35 - Emily Dreibelbis
Poor Linda Iaccarino, I forget she is even there. You just reminded me. And I think it's like Elon Musk looms so large over this story and this issue because he has been so political and so vocally for Trump. I mean, he's tweeted several times. I fully support Trump. He tweeted about the assassination attempt, so he's doing that. And then that we see that this group that's for Harris and it's also kind of an identity politics thing like White Dudes for Harris, and Musk no doubt is not a fan of that. And then it gets mysteriously shut down right in its critical hour of fundraising. So people are calling this election interference. Do you think that's kind of a conspiracy theory or do you think there's any teeth to that?

0:37:23 - Will Oremus
Well, let's put it this way, it's definitely a conspiracy theory. Whether it's a true conspiracy, whether the theory is correct, is the question right. So is it, you know? Is it a baseless conspiracy theory? I mean, there's no evidence that you know, there's no direct evidence that X intentionally suspended this account my own, and this is just speculation and also, having you know, reported on Twitter and X over the years and talk to people who work there, my suspicion is it probably wasn't intentional sabotage. It would be sort of weird, like there are all kinds of ways that that Musk and X could tilt the scales toward Trump and away from Harris, but like nuking the account of one particular fundraiser that's not affiliated with the campaign I think it actually got suspended after the fundraiser had, just after it had ended. It would just be a weird and very blatant way to do it. It just seems unlikely.

You know Musk does put more. You know more subtle thumbs on the scale in other ways. I, you know the best guess that that I've run across is maybe a bunch of people flagged this account. You know people who were that that I've run across is maybe a bunch of people flagged this account. You know people who were against Harris, flagged it for violating X's policies, either some machine system or some human at X, you know, went ahead and hit the button to suspend the account. It later got reviewed and reinstated.

But you know it raises two things. I mean one is there's now the fact that Musk has become such an overt Trump supporter. You know, donating to the Trump campaign. He spends a lot of his day now tweeting pro-Trump stuff and anti-Harris stuff. You know there's a lack of trust there. Right, the Democrats have no reason to expect that they're going to be treated fairly or equally at this point.

And and then the other issue is that you know Musk has kind of set himself up as as a customer service department for the company.

When, when Libs of TikTok you know a right wing account that the sort of anti trans had had trouble with their account, they posted to Musk and Musk fixed it for them. There was a Republican senator who had his account had his account suspended because he changed his profile photo to like a bloody antelope head that he had killed on a hunting trip. I mean that goes to show that people can get their accounts suspended by X. You know, even if they're Republicans, it's not just Democrats that this happens to. But also the next day Musk apologized and said he was going to change the policy and, of course, people should be able to post hunting photos. So the question that one of the sources I talked to raised was look, if Musk is doing customer service and we know he talks all day to conservatives and right wingers and has no interest in talking to Democrats or the left wing who's going to have his ear when it comes time to get help from the person in charge?

0:40:12 - Emily Dreibelbis
Right, and if he's taking things on personally, how is that not biased? So it's kind of the issues that flag his attention. I guess my theory on this just I report on this a little bit. It's not my area of expertise, but some things I have seen is just the tech not working as well. At the Twitter backend. We've seen outages. We've seen just weird glitchy things. There was the whole blue checkmark launch and rolling back and then just a lot of glitchy behavior and I think it's probably a perfect storm. Of people assume it was intentional because he's so political, but really it was just a tech issue, Because the reason evading suspension makes no sense. I could see that just being in the system as like sub, in these words, if this and this condition is satisfied, Because what even is that evading suspension? So really maybe they are just embarrassed and don't want to talk about it because it's bizarre.

0:41:12 - Will Oremus
Yeah, I mean that might be the case. I think that's a good theory. When Musk bought the company, he immediately laid off over half the workforce. A lot of people thought that the whole site would go down. I mean it did have some glitches. It was looking touch and go there for a while. There are some funny stories about Musk, you know, dragging his friends and family out to server banks in Sacramento to try to keep the site from crashing entirely because he had tried to cut costs in the wrong place. But you know, to, I guess to the company's credit, I mean they've managed to keep the site running. It basically mostly works. But it's also not a surprise that things would go wrong and not get fixed quickly when you've gotten rid of a lot of the humans who were there to to make sure that doesn't happen.

0:41:58 - Emily Dreibelbis
Right. So where are the White Dudes for Harris today? Is their account back up? Is everything back to normal? Dudes for Harris today Is their?

0:42:05 - Will Oremus
account back up. Is everything back to normal? Yeah, they appear to be back to normal. At first their accounts seem to be in read only mode, but but they've been tweeting. Last I checked there it's fully functional. So I think that's probably more evidence that it wasn't necessarily intentional on X's part. But I think there remain big questions going forward about you know, this is the first time we've had.

Republicans for a long time have complained that the big tech companies, the big social media platforms, are biased toward the left. There's really mixed evidence on that. I mean you could make the case either way you could. You could make a case that they're, that they amplify conservatives more than liberals. But but that's been the general complaint. But we've never actually had a situation where one of the major social platforms was controlled by someone who overtly supported one candidate, and not only that, but I mean he spends time denigrating the other candidate. I mean he's tweeting dozens of times a day criticizing Harris, supporting Trump and Republicans, and so it's really new territory. It's funny. I mean he took over the site saying that you know it was biased, and now we have it biased, you know, probably much further in the other direction than it was before. So you know, maybe his concern was not so much the existence of the bias but which way the bias was perceived to be tilting.

0:43:22 - Emily Dreibelbis
The bias within himself. I see that he's kind of taking shots at Google, because he tweeted something about Google repressing searches on Donald Trump, and it's just this social media tech tit for tat that is just so characteristic of this election. So all of these things, I feel like we can probably expect to see a lot more of this, unfortunately.

0:43:43 - Will Oremus
Yeah, the Google thing. I mean people haven't been able to generally validate the idea that Google was intentionally suppressing Donald Trump searches. When I tried the same search that he screenshotted, there was no problem, and the same was true for my colleagues, so we couldn't replicate it. It doesn't mean it didn't happen, but I will say that my colleague, garrett DeVink we just put this in today's tech brief newsletter, garrett wrote about how another judge has dismissed a bias case against Google. Google's been sued with allegations of bias against conservative politicians for putting their campaign emails in a spam folder. A judge has now twice dismissed that case, and so you know, so far in court there's been no finding that Google is biased.

0:44:30 - Emily Dreibelbis
Right, all right. Well, it's great information. Thank you so much. Well, where can people find you if they want to keep up with your work?

0:44:38 - Will Oremus
Yeah, thanks. I mean I'm Will Arimus on X, but these days I post more on Threads and Blue Sky. Same name, will Arimus, and you can also subscribe to our tech policy newsletter, tech Brief, and I co-write that with my colleague, Cristiano Limastrong.

0:44:54 - Emily Dreibelbis
Okay, great, thank you so much.

0:44:56 - Will Oremus
Thanks for having me, Emily.

0:44:58 - Emily Dreibelbis
So next up we have Andrew Chow from Time, who has done some incredible reporting about Bitcoin mining operation, kind of poisoning a small town. So that is so fascinating. I just want to welcome you, Andrew. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Emily. So tell us about the work you did. It's such a treat to have a journalist on here who spent months going back to a certain place and really understanding an issue. You talk to experts, so I'm really eager just to hear about your project and how you got started and then kind of what you found.

0:45:35 - Andrew Chow
I've been reporting on crypto for the last four years and it's different kind of impacts on populations around the world Filipino gamers, african NFT artists. It's going into my book Cryptomania which comes out next week. Nice little plug there for myself. And at the top of this year I received a tip from a source that there was this town in Texas where a Bitcoin mine had moved in and people were starting to complain about it had moved in and people were starting to complain about it. Now the idea of people complaining near a noisy Bitcoin mine is not new. Actually, the New York Times has done some really great reporting in Arkansas where Bitcoin mines have moved in and people complaining about sleepless nights. But these complaints, the more that I talk to people, they seem to extend beyond just sheer nuisance or quality of living. They seem to be losing their hearing, getting migraines, getting sick in sort of really strange ways. So the more that I talk to people on the phone, the more that I knew I had to go down there and try to figure out what was going on.

0:46:45 - Emily Dreibelbis
So intriguing. I mean, I've seen countless movies about a chemicals company that's poisoning the water, just something that's so I guess I can imagine how that would make someone sick, but a Bitcoin mine. Can you just explain a little bit about how that could, or it seems like it might be making people sick?

0:47:05 - Andrew Chow
The premise totally feels like the start of a horror movie or something. It's really eerie. So yeah, basically, bitcoin mines are giant computer servers that are running all the time to safeguard the Bitcoin network and create new Bitcoin. Um, because these computers, thousands of these computers are running all at the same time, um, they need fans to cool them off and to stop them from overheating. So, basically, there are these fans that are emitting a whir, uh, running every second of every single day, and that is what's causing nuisance.

Now there's some people that hear like oh, like a, like fans like I sleep with a, you know a white noise machine. But I can tell you that the noise of this, these thousands of fans, is very different from what you have in my room, for one. There's like a physical aspect to it where it's like vibrating people's homes, uh, like their windows, cells, and they're in their bed and they can feel it shaking. It's also like it undulates in and out. So it's not a constant thing. It's a lot harder to ignore, and some people have recorded a noise of you know 60 or 70 or even upwards of that number of decibels inside of their house. They've compared it to, you know, a lawnmower running outside their window at all times, or sitting on the tarmac and just hearing just like airplanes take off one after another.

0:48:39 - Emily Dreibelbis
Wow, so it basically is under the noise limit for the town, right, it's not like when there's a giant concert, it's not allowed after certain hours. It's not like that kind of noise, it's just like a constant hum.

0:48:54 - Andrew Chow
I think the real killer here, so to speak, is the nighttime noise and the constancy of it through every single night when people are trying to sleep. It's waking people from miles away up from a dead sleep. I talked to a scientist, a German scientist named Dr Munzel, who is one of the leading experts in the impacts the health impacts of noise pollution. Particularly he was looking at the impacts of living underneath an airport or next to a highway and running controlled studies on what that can do to people. So there's sort of two levels If a noise is, you know, above 95 decibels, it's creating, you know, hearing damage in your ear and you're going to get tinnitus and lose your hearing. And you're going to get tinnitus and lose your hearing.

But even noises, you know, 50, 60 decibels, if they're constant and they're disrupting your sleep, they can provoke all sorts of cardiovascular responses, oxidative stress, reduce your vascular function, and if it's impacting cortisol levels, it's like you're. I mean, it just makes sense. If you're not sleeping, your health is going to fall off a cliff. So that's what Munzel says. I talked to a couple of doctors in the area who concur that this constant debilitating noise is having an impact on the health of the people in the town.

0:50:25 - Emily Dreibelbis
Wow, it's a total horror movie and it's just unknown, which is even scarier. And there were some numbers in your piece. You said like 40 people have gone to the ER or like what. How many people are reporting issues and what are those issues? And also, I think there was a dog that lost its hair or something like that.

0:50:43 - Andrew Chow
Yes, so over 40 people. I talked to dozens and dozens of people. Over 40 people reported some sort of medical issue that they had not had before the plant moved in, and that's not even talking about like the general sort of peace of mind issue. Over 800 people signed a petition basically requesting that the noise shut off. So even if there are people who are not feeling the medical effects, they're, they're pissed off and they hate it.

And there are over 10 people who went to the emergency room and believe that their visit was linked to um, the stress from the mind. So on the base level, you're getting um impacts on ears, right, you're getting hearing loss, you're getting tinnitus, so ringing in the ears, and then a lot of people are getting migraines. They're getting vertigo, so extreme dizziness, and a lot, a lot of high pressure folks who high blood pressure, folks who have never had this issue before having really high blood pressure. Then when I talked to Dr Munzel, basically his idea is that, yeah, it affects different people differently, but people who are more vulnerable to, you know, health risks are going to be disproportionately affected.

So then you have the people who are having severe cardiac issues. So then you have the people who are having severe cardiac issues arrhythmia, palpitations. It is basically impossible to tie any singular health event to the noise of the mind. You know we'd need, you know, months or years of controlled studies. You know, taking apart, you know, diet and all that sorts of stuff. So it's really proving direct correlation is really hard. All I could do is go down there and talk to as many people as possible. You know, see where in the county people were being distressed and report on what I found.

0:52:42 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, exactly, I think you did a great job, just like this is what people are saying. You're not a scientist, you're not. You're just're just saying this is what's going on in this town, and I think you accurately captured it. And no, this one is probably one of the first instances that we could see of many where it's like right in the town.

0:53:13 - Andrew Chow
Bitcoin mines like to be built in places with cheap energy, where they're hooked directly up to a power source, so you see a lot of them actually in, like West Texas, where they're not really bothering anybody. They're connected to wind or solar farms. Um, the issue, like you said, is when they're being plopped down next to people, and the issue here was that there's there's this gas plant that's been there for a long time. That is basically across the road from many residents. Um, I want to go back, cause you asked about the dog, which I know took down a lot of heartstrings. Our photographer took a really great and sad photo of a dog who had lost all of his hair or her hair.

0:53:56 - Emily Dreibelbis
Sorry, since I can pull it up, I have the issue, the print issue, with your article in it. Let me find the photo.

0:54:03 - Andrew Chow
Keep going. Oh wow, I haven't even seen that myself.

0:54:05 - Emily Dreibelbis
Oh.

0:54:06 - Andrew Chow
I'll show you.

0:54:07 - Emily Dreibelbis
It's awesome. This is the first page. That's the town. This is a little treat for anyone who chooses to watch this. That's the farm with the town next to it. Print magazines still exist.

0:54:22 - Andrew Chow
You know, you can.

0:54:24 - Emily Dreibelbis
It's like proof of life for print journalism. I love print journalism. This is the dog. Oh my, my blur. What am I gonna do? Oh, there it is, we found it.

0:54:34 - Andrew Chow
There it is so this is actually. This is basically three blocks from the bitcoin mine. Um, and there are two dogs that live next to each other. Uh, uh, one of them since the mine moved in, uh, I mean, they're they're a Husky mix. They had a full, you know beautiful coat and are now bald. Next door, um, the dog started basically having seizures and had to be put on seizure medication. Um, and there have been studies. It's a lot easier to, you know, run these kinds of tests on animals, so there have been controlled studies one with mice and noise and how that you know you can see the impact on the brain and the nervous system. And another study with dogs, which showed that sustained noise like this does cause acute anxiety.

So I think the yeah, the link. Again, hard to prove one dog, but the link is pretty indisputable at this point of noise pollution to the impact on the health of dogs and other animals.

0:55:42 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, hard to prove but worth talking about. I mean this. Mine is owned by one of the largest companies that does Bitcoin mining and I think holding them accountable or at least questioning some of their choices is certainly warranted. The one thing that I did wonder in your piece an argument against them is the town did seem to have an anti-Bitcoin leaning. People were not interested in the technology. They were like what is this crap in my backyard, this weird internet thing? Do you think that played a role at all?

0:56:14 - Andrew Chow
I think, first of all, it's a good observation and it was another reminder that I mean the idea of the average American doesn't exist, but going around the town seeing if they knew about or were interested in Bitcoin, that interest was basically nothing.

So there's still, you know, as much as the Bitcoin industry wants to say like, oh, you know it's coming mainstream adoption, a lot of people don't know about it, a lot of people have a general distaste for it. To answer your question, I think one of the reasons that I became convinced that there was some sort of relationship here between the noise and the impacts was that a lot of these people were basically suffering in silence and on their own and reporting sort of these issues in the exact same time frame that the mine moved in, before they all realized sort of what the source of it was. There was a town hall earlier in the year and they all started hearing this noise independently. They all started having impacts and then they all realized what the potential source of it was. So it's not like there were protests before the mine moved in and now they're all rallying. They all first started hearing it and feeling like some sort of health impacts and then, after that realized that they were all suffering from the same thing.

0:57:38 - Emily Dreibelbis
Wow. We're just going to go a little bit over because this is so interesting. Maybe five more minutes if you don't mind. So I got into crypto. I bought some Bitcoin. I actually didn't buy Bitcoin. This was a couple of years ago, I think. It was like 2021, when the markets were so peaked and it was like you could become a millionaire. I did all this work to not buy Bitcoin, all this research. I tried to find the most environmentally sustainable. It's proof of stake. All of those ones no, proof of yeah, proof of stake instead of proof of work. And I got into it. I invested a very small amount, thank God, because my crypto wallet is just not where it should be based on, where I thought it would be. So it's surprising to see your story about not only that there's a gigantic mine, but there's a good trend of more coming online. So who is even buying Bitcoin and why is this business continuing if the market is so low?

0:58:38 - Andrew Chow
Sure, your story is a similar story to many other people. There were a lot of people who got in and saw the promise or the potential of it in the 2021 range. Again, that's what my book is about. It's about why so many people got in and then why the market turned so horribly awry. But a funny thing happened after that, which is after the crash of FTX. The market was in the tank for a while and it slowly rebounded, at least in terms of the prices. So we had a giant swing from at its peak in 2021. It was Bitcoin was $69,000. After the fall of FTX, it's all the way down to about $18,000. And now it's back above $60,000. So, you know, there are a lot of people who basically argue that the market is back. It's doing well, but it hasn't had the same sort of cultural impact that it did last time with NFTs. And you know I don't know SNL appearances with you know Elon going on SNL to talk about Dogecoin. So the market is still incredibly active.

There are people all over the world who are buying Bitcoin as a speculative asset, believing that it'll go up. Donald Trump just spoke at a Bitcoin conference just last week talking about how much he loves Bitcoin, even though just a couple years ago he was talking about how much he hated Bitcoin. So that's a very interesting trend we're going to watch during the 2024 election. So the market it's still frothy, it's still volatile. People buy because they think that they can either make a quick buck or a long buck and, in terms of Bitcoin mining, the Bitcoin mining industry remains really, really profitable for a certain subset of mega company. There's been this huge consolidation where you used to be able to mine Bitcoin in your bedroom, just like have a couple of servers. Yeah, I knew some people doing that.

1:00:37 - Emily Dreibelbis
Yeah, exactly.

1:00:38 - Andrew Chow
And if you ask some of those people, they knew how loud and hot it could get in their rooms when they were just mining a little bit of Bitcoin. Now we're talking about industrial-sized server farms and these companies like Marathon, which owns the Bitcoin mining Granbury that are it's sort of a money printer for them. They're also doing really well. They're delivering really good returns for their investors. So right now, if you're a giant company in the Bitcoin mining space, you're still doing really well. The crypto market tanked but it's back up and so there are a lot of boosters are arguing. You know we're back and we're here to stay.

1:01:22 - Emily Dreibelbis
All right? Well, I would. I would like to see my crypto wallet be back for sure. So I don't know, it still seems like to me who is even doing this, but it seems like it's continuing to happen and having impact, so we should follow it, maybe a little more than we do. I want to switch to your book, which I think is very fascinating, so can you tell us a little bit about what you wrote about and what the book's about?

1:02:07 - Andrew Chow
crypto was and bought in with a dream, either to make a lot of money or because they thought it would create all these sociocultural changes. That it was going to touch everything from art to music, to gaming to governance. That it was just going to upend every part of society and become a new bedrock layer of the internet. And then the book traces how we got from the idealism to the crypto space, being overrun by scammers like Sam Bankman-Fried, who is at the heart of my book. So it tells the story of Sam, why he was such a fascinating character, how he committed his fraud and how the general the cultural story of crypto's rise and fall over the last few years.

1:02:47 - Emily Dreibelbis
So that's going to be very good. It comes out next week, august 6th. August 6th. Okay, cool. Well, Andrew Chow, thank you so much for joining us. If people want to follow you, they want to read your book. How can they stay in touch with you?

1:03:03 - Andrew Chow
I'm at Andrew R Chow on Twitter and you could just Google Andrew Chow Cryptomania.

1:03:09 - Emily Dreibelbis
All right, cool. Thank you so much for joining and hopefully talk to you soon. Thank you All right. Well, that's our show. I am Emily Drybelbis. You can find me on Twitter and TikTok. My handle is electric_humans. I write about EVs, ai and all things tech for PCMag. Tech News Weekly publishes every Thursday at twit.tv/tnw. That's where you can go to subscribe to the show in audio and video. Thank you for joining, and Mikah will be back next week for another episode of Tech News Weekly. Bye!