Tech News Weekly 369 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.
 

00:00 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Coming up on Tech News Weekly. Dan Morin is subbing in this week for Amanda Silberling. Dan joins the show to share his latest column in Macworld about how Apple intelligence can actually make a difference using AI, with just a few problems solved. Then I talk about how no, I'm telling you, siri is not listening to your conversations for the sake of advertisements. Dan and I discuss the ongoing conspiracy theory that our phones are listening to us and talk about how they are instead using our behaviors to serve us more ads. Afterwards, jason Heiner of ZDNet stops by to give us a look at CES 2025. There's a lot that has hit the show floor and the team that's there has covered quite a bit of it. Will I finally have my laundry done by a robot in 2025? You'll have that question answered. And lastly, we round things out with Imran Ahmed, the founder and CEO of CCDH, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, who joins us to talk about Meta's decision to end fact checking on the platform. All of that coming up on this week's episode of Tech News Weekly.

01:22 - TWiT.tv (None)
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01:27 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
this is twit this is tech news weekly episode 369, with dan moran and me, micah sergeant, recorded thursday, january 9th 2025. Checking in with ces 2025. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where every week we talk to you and about the people making and breaking that tech news. I am your host, micah Sargent, and typically I would be joined across this portal into the world by Amanda Silberling. Amanda Silberling is not here with us this week, but the wonderful, the amazing, the sci-fi author, dan Morin, has stepped in. Hello, dan.

02:11 - Dan Moren (Co-host)
Hello, I'm happy to be here, happy to join you, happy to step in through a portal whenever I'm needed.

02:18 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I guess I should say sci-fi and fantasy author. You're not just-.

02:24 - Dan Moren (Co-host)
Author extraordinaire. Author of many fine books, author of many fine books and other words as well.

02:30 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Dan, so glad to have you here and, speaking of you being the author of many other words, you wrote a column, as you are wont to do, and I was hoping you could tell our listeners a little bit about that column and we can have a little chat about it.

02:48 - Dan Moren (Co-host)
Yeah, well, so it's 2025. Happy New Year. And if you were hoping that maybe in 2025, we'd stop talking about AI, so much bad news, it's the year of AI again. Apple intelligence is something. We've seen some features roll out over the last few months. There are some features left to come. We assume that probably when this year's Worldwide Developers Conference rolls around in June, apple will announce new Apple intelligence features, and so far, I think the reaction has been largely underwhelming to the features that have been released.

03:23
There's a lot of questions about why did they choose to do this? What is this feature? Who is this for? Does anybody want this? And so I figured it was a good opportunity to maybe revisit some places where I felt like AI and Apple intelligence could actually provide meaningful benefit to the end user, and so I pulled out a few examples of things that I feel like, hey, these are problems that still exist now. Why aren't we using AI in some way to deal with them? And so some of the examples I give I talk about spam. I don't know about you, micah. I still get a ton of spam. I have tried various things. I've tried built-in spam filtering from mail. I have tried. I'm using spam sieve. Right now sieve spam sieve and it's somewhat better, but also it's just different, like different stuff gets through.

04:12
Right, exactly, it's just different spam that gets through yeah exactly, and I kind of sit there thinking like how are we still dealing with this problem in 2025? And it feels like exactly the kind of thing that Apple Intelligence and AI would be better at, because those are so good at pattern matching and looking at things and being able to figure that out and I am frankly, shocked that we are still dealing with this. It doesn't seem like Apple has touched its spam filtering systems in mail for years. There is still no spam filtering on iOS or iPadOS. There is a junk folder. You can move stuff to it, but it doesn't move automatically unless you're using spam filtering either on your Mac or it's looking at something from your server. But as far as I know, I don't think that is doing any filtering on device whatsoever.

05:00 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Speaking of spam, it's interesting that I mean you really have kind of hit the nail on the hidden head, because I had not considered.

05:11 - Dan Moren (Co-host)
Don't hide your nails.

05:11 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Bad idea. Yeah, don't hide the nails, let them be seen. Because I had not considered the fact that, yeah, there's a lot of attention being focused on, attention meaning trying to show you the things that it thinks you want to see Right, as opposed to working on, maybe, the things that you don't want to see.

05:31 - Dan Moren (Co-host)
Yeah, and think about, because we've seen that priority message thing in the new mail where it like highlights stuff and I know lots of people have been like it highlighted spam and it's like well why is that even there Right Like?

05:42 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
there again. There's a lot of data out there, one would think, for training on things we don't want. Yeah, as opposed to things we do want. So yeah, it's kind of weird.

05:52 - Dan Moren (Co-host)
I find that very strange. I mean and I'll throw into that too, which I did in my column messages, because SMS and iMessage spam has also gone up a lot and the spam filtering tools on there make mail spam filtering tools look good, because there's basically nothing. Messages has a couple filters which are it's like okay, look at all unread messages or look at messages from known versus unknown senders, which is really mainly just people in your contacts or not, which is helpful, but it's not really a solution to the problem. And then there's also some additional problems with, like SMS spam, because if you get SMS spam on your phone and you also have, say, text messages forwarded to your Mac or to your iPad, deleting in one place doesn't delete it in any place else. Deleting it and reporting is junk, doesn't even block the sender. Like.

06:44
These tools are totally befuddling to me for 2025, where it feels like we should be much better equipped at dealing with this. So, especially with iMessage you know a system that is nominally entirely under Apple's control they should have much more rigorous like spam filtering. There I feel like and again, it feels like a place where AI can be very helpful or at least start suggesting hey, this message seems fishy. This might be spam and that would be a great addition as well. I didn't even think about this at the time, but it'd be a great addition as well for helping people avoid scams.

07:15 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Right, we've all seen, all those.

07:17 - Dan Moren (Co-host)
SMN scams, where it's like click on this phishing link or hey, give me, you know I'm from tech support and want this information from you. It feels like this would be a great place to be tagging those and saying, hey, something seems a little off about this. Like, maybe exercise some caution before you click any links in this message or make sure that you verify who the sender is. I feel like all those things are great.

07:38 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
And I'm pretty sure that's something that is happening on the Android platform. There is more attention being paid toward identifying scams and phishing attempts and labeling that stuff.

07:50 - Dan Moren (Co-host)
That should be happening on iOS Right and I feel like some of what's to blame.

07:55
There is an Apple ethos thing where it's like well, we don't even want to admit that there's problems on our platform, which is unfortunate because it is a real thing and it feels like someplace AI could help. One of the other things I suggest in there search via Spotlight on both the Mac and iPhone iPad, it's kind of lackluster. The other day I was trying to say hey, I wonder if I can just type in like hey, show me every file edited in the last 30 days. And you type that in Spotlight, it doesn't do anything. You type it into Siri as a chat. It says maybe ChatGPT could answer this question oh no.

08:30
I hope not. I don't want ChatGPT to know about all my files.

08:34 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Why would it know?

08:34 - Dan Moren (Co-host)
Yeah.

08:35
So it feels like another missed opportunity because I do the ability to type to Siri or combine that. Why is Siri a separate thing from Spotlight? Still, in terms of typing, that's kind of a mess On the iOS side. If you have tried to use search on the system settings to find a particular preference pane, it's bad. It's real bad Type in messages. You're going to get dozens of responses because it shows you each individual entry for each app that has a messages messages related feature in it.

09:06
You will scroll through thousands of entries before you find the one you're looking for.

09:10 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
And the worst part for me is that literally right before we did this show I was. I can't remember now what setting it was, but there was a particular setting that I wanted to disable this morning and I knew the name of it, so I typed it in and I knew it existed. But the search sort of gets ahead of itself and so it's telling me there are no results, then you wait for a couple of milliseconds and then it shows me the results I'm looking for. Don't say there are no results. That's ridiculous.

09:43 - Dan Moren (Co-host)
It feels like asking somebody who's bored and not listening to you. They're drinking a cup of coffee and like, no, I don't know anything about.

09:48
Oh were you asking about this Sorry, yes, I do know something about that. It's really bad. And so search again feels like a place where maybe some AI could be useful in terms of helping people more easily find what they're looking for. Surfacing the correct results seems like a great idea, and Apple has never been terribly great at search, so maybe this is an opportunity for them. And then the other one I mentioned too is automation. I love automation. I know you like automation too. I like building shortcuts for things, I like building scripts for things. That's all great. But oftentimes when I'm doing something and I'm like, oh, you know what, I bet that could make a shortcut to do this or a script to do this, and I open up shortcuts and I'm like I don't even know where to start.

10:37 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I'm thinking about this right.

10:38 - Dan Moren (Co-host)
I'm stuck and this feels like a great opportunity in several different ways Because programming I've been using generative AI for programming projects that I've been working on recently and I found it super helpful. Is it wrong? Sometimes? Yes, it's 100% wrong, sometimes you got to check it, but it's still really helpful because it knows a lot more than I'm going to learn in the time available to me. So being able to say, hey, help me write this shortcut to do X in kind of a natural language and have it be like okay.

11:06
So here are some steps you might want to take. Here are the things you want to look at. That'd be great. Even better if it's proactive and it notices hey, I see you doing this task. A lot Seems like an automation could save you some time, because that's great.

11:20
The first example is great for people like you and me who know automation tools exist and know some of these things that are capable of them, but the average person doesn't use shortcuts, doesn't touch these things, wouldn't even know unless you surface it in some way that hey, maybe there's an easier way to do this or maybe I could save you time in the future.

11:38
And I think all of these things kind of go to the same root of the issue, which is look, apple has predicated so much of its history and so much of its product design on making things that are not only user-friendly but get out of your way and help you get more done with this technology.

11:56
Right, it's about making technology less impenetrable and less confusing and simplifying things. That goes all the way back to the root of Apple making computers, and it feels like these are examples where using AI could really be, you know, in sync with Apple's values around these things and get out of the way and make it so that I spend less time managing things on my device, dealing with spam, trying to find the right files, doing time consuming tasks that could be automated. If you can use AI and take those things out of the equation and it gives me more time to get the things done that I just need to get done, that's a net win and it's good for Apple. It looks great. It is again a testament to. These. Devices are designed to help you get more out of your life, not to give you more tasks you need to do in managing your own technology.

12:53 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Exactly.

12:54
Yeah, that's been one of my favorite features for the, an application I've used for a long time on the Mac Text Expander.

13:01
It has a local feature where it can, because the whole thing runs on needing to know what you're typing in order to do the different commands that it does. And for people who aren't familiar with text expander, it's a little sort of snippet tool where I can type in a little short phrase and then it turns that into whatever I want it to be. So an example of that would be that I regularly send out interview invites for the show and I have a lot of that set up to where I need to type in three letters and then it expands into this whole bunch of text about how we have a team that does tests for video quality and stuff like that, and one of the features that it has is what you were talking about, dan, that proactive thing where it goes. Hey, I noticed that you type this phrase a whole heck of a lot. Maybe you want to create a little snippet for that, make that a little bit easier for you, and something that expanded on that would be really, really cool to see.

14:04 - Dan Moren (Co-host)
And it takes things to the next level too. Right, because once you start doing that a few times people are like, oh, there's this tool available, and next time they find themselves doing something else they're like oh, I know, I'll use that tool. Right, like if you're typing little text expander with phrases and it's like you can make this easier. The next time you have like a giant set of texts that you keep typing, you'll be like, oh, I should just use text expand, exactly.

14:29 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
All righty. Um, we need to take a little break here. Uh, before we come back with my story of the week, I'm joined this week by Dan Morin of six colors, uh, subbing in for Amanda Silberling, uh, who will be back with us soon. Thank you, dan. Now let's talk about Veeam, who are bringing you this episode of Tech News Weekly.

14:51
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15:52
Little blog post yesterday entitled Our Long-Standing Privacy Commitment with Siri, and in it Apple kind of outlines how it says Siri protects user data, including on-device processing, including kind of not doing a whole lot of collection of data whenever it does Siri requests, and, of course, things like private cloud compute, which is new to the system as of the AI additions. And you know, some folks may have asked why has this suddenly made its way onto Apple's newsroom page? Because Apple typically reserves that area for the introduction of new products or new Apple TV shows or whatever that happens to be. Most importantly, yes, and so that seems to be tied to an ongoing well, I guess it's no longer ongoing, but a lawsuit from. It's been a while since this lawsuit came out. I think it was in 2019, was it? Yeah, it's been a long time, but basically, apple agreed to pay $95 million to settle a lawsuit where users claimed that its conversations were captured by the Siri voice assistant and then could have been overheard by human employees.

17:33
Well, yes, there is something to understand here, which is that originally, when you were using Siri and you had the features turned on where Apple could kind of improve upon Siri technology by listening for when requests didn't go exactly as were expected, so, particularly if Siri was triggered and it was not about a thing that actually had anything to do with anything, so I didn't specifically say, hey, you know who, and it got triggered, uh, turned on, and it was, um, listening for something to happen and you know nothing's. I wasn't actually trying to talk to it, because it was just a show that I was watching that was doing it. What kind of came of this is? It's a very similar situation to what we saw with Amazon's ALEXA system, where the device would be turned on by something saying something that sounded close to ALEXA, and then it would listen to what happened afterward and human reviewers were listening to these things and in some cases it had private conversations that you know, maybe were something that you would not want to have been shared with these you know random human reviewers. Um, these, importantly, these recordings were anonymized and they were, um, you know, sort of separated in as many ways as possible from the person who sent it. But the idea was we grade this information to see if the trigger was activated intentionally or not, and that needed to be done by a human. But the concern and this is the new thing is that that data, which again are sort of recordings that were listened to by humans and the lawsuit which had to do with human beings listening to it, which led to Apple being more clear about what was involved whenever you opted into allowing for your Siri interactions to be trained, were specifically for that.

19:54
But a conspiracy theory, according to Richard Lawler of the Verge, has come along that has kind of it's one of these situations where they just sort of read it cursorily to assume that this had to do with Apple giving those recordings to advertisers so that advertisers could then build a profile on you about the things that you're interested in, which just backs up the idea that our devices are always listening to us and building profiles on us that way.

20:33
So let me be clear here, as Apple is being clear here in its statement this data was not shared. Well, according to Apple, we always need to say that was not shared with advertisers to build marketing profiles. It wasn't sold to anyone for that purpose. Apple says it has never used Siri data to build marketing profiles, it has never made it available for advertising and it has never sold it to anyone for any purpose. Um, that doesn't surprise me, you know, I think for some people sure they hear apple is, uh, paying 95 million dollars to settle a lawsuit and you only hear about it being a lawsuit about uh apple siri recordings and you're going oh goodness, where were they sharing them? But no, that is not the case.

21:30 - Dan Moren (Co-host)
Apple's listening to you right now, micah. That's going right back to Apple Park. They know where you are, they know where you live, they know what I'm talking about.

21:38
They know what you're talking about, you're in trouble. You're going to see ads for Apple everywhere. This is one of those pernicious things, though I know I get this question from friends and family a lot. Oh, I just was talking with someone in the living room about this product and then I scrolled through Instagram and saw an ad for this product. My phone is clearly listening to me and I understand why people draw those conclusions. It does seem like a very clear causal link, but it is generally not the case, and the truth of it is actually, in some ways, far more frightening, which is that these companies build these elaborate marketing models of you and they know so much about you the famous stories about how I don't remember which retailer it was would suggest pregnancy products before somebody even knew they were pregnant. Because it is building these very advanced profiles, it's got access to so much other data that you're leaking. It doesn't need to listen to what you're saying in your living room. It already knows everything about you.

22:44
But in this particular case, yeah, I am not surprised at all about Apple's statement. It strikes me as very much in line with what they have said in the past, as well as in line with who they seem to be. Now I'm sure there are people who will just be like, well, that's what they say, but there's no way to know that for sure. And it's like yes, that is true, but at that level you can't trust literally anything. So it's doesn't even work having a discussion about if you can't trust what somebody's saying. They're saying a thing. If they turn out to be lying about it and somebody finds out, they will be in a whole heap of trouble and so they are going to have a lot of lawyers who are going to be very, very careful. And if they're using these absolute words like never done this, never, nobody has ever seen this. We have not sold it to anybody. You better believe that has run through many, many, many, many lawyers, absolutely.

23:35 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, you know, it's interesting how, again, how much these devices can be linked together. And you know, the other aspect of this is, if not everybody in a home is following that exact same policy that you are, you know what, the way that you protect your accounts and the way that you sort of obscure your data online, that makes all the difference. And so, you know, I had a just the other day, another moment where I had remembered talking to, we had some friends over and I remembered talking to them earlier in the day about, I don't remember, going to some local event or whatever, and presumably one of them had looked at the site, the ticketing site, where this event was taking place. And because they were on my guest network which, of course, to the outside world, uh, had the same IP that I would have connecting to my actual um, you know, non-guests network. Then, later on, when I was browsing through the social media stream, um, I got served it like twice, two different ads about this specific event and it.

25:03
You know, you, you may not consider, um, how that can happen, and I think that the same applies. You know, if you're, if you're out and about, and you are, uh, in the same area and one of your friends is using a um, an app that has access to Bluetooth and is able to kind of pick up other Bluetooth devices that are around that are, you know, sending out a signal, and then a company is putting that information together with this sort of micro local bubble and use that. I mean, there's just so many different ways that they can do this again, that's what makes it frightening, I think, to those of us who are a little bit more hip to the game there. But it just doesn't cross the mind of another person, and so it's easier to think that, oh yes, they're listening and they're also selling this data, and I think that's the big thing that these companies are regularly combating.

26:05
Right, they have to say no, no, no, we're not doing that.

26:07 - Dan Moren (Co-host)
And your point. You're only as good as the weakest link in your chain, and that chain may not even be in your control. If it's people using your Wi-Fi network who are there, visiting friends, family, even other acquaintances Heck, somebody breaks onto your Wi-Fi network right, that could influence it too. So it is a very tricky thing to deal with. But, yeah, it's good to be careful about these things. But there's also a lot of cases where people get paranoid about things that aren't the real risk. Yeah, absolutely.

26:40 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Well, dan Moore and I want to thank you so much for taking some time to join us today on this episode of Tech News Weekly. If people would like to stay up to date, books, as Mike mentioned, I've written several science fiction fantasy books.

27:07 - Dan Moren (Co-host)
You can check those out. You'll also find links to all of my podcasts, which includes the Clockwise Show which Mike and I host every Wednesday over on relayfm, as well as my other tech podcasts, and I write a lot about tech. You can find most of that at sixcolorscom, mostly focusing on Apple. I'm also on most of the social media networks. You can search for some variation of D Moore and you'll probably find me one way or another.

27:33 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Beautiful. Thank you, dan, and I'll see you again soon.

27:37 - Dan Moren (Co-host)
Thanks, micah, take it easy.

27:39 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
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30:57
All righty, we are back from the break, and that means it's time to talk about CES. Joining us from ZDNet is Jason Heiner. Hello Jason, how are you? Hey, micah, great, good to see you. Good to see you as well. So CES is underway and I know that the folks at CNET and the various properties are there. The team is scoping things out, finding all sorts of cool stuff, and I think one of the places where even the average consumer is interested is the TV situation. I was curious to hear are we looking at new technologies this year for displays or are we kind of working with incremental improvements?

31:41 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah, so there are actually two new technologies that are really interesting. Most years it's pretty incremental and there's a lot of incremental stuff here which will mean like better TVs for lower prices, ultimately for people for the rest of the year. But there are two new things one that's really clear and one that we're still getting clarity on. So one's in OLED, one's in mini clear, and one that we're still getting clarity on, one's in OLED, one's in mini-LED or QLED technology In OLED. Lg, who's been the longtime leader in OLED technology last year and the years before, they used this technology.

32:18
One of the problems with OLEDs is they have these beautiful contrast, black levels, very deep colors, and they're just lovely to look at, but they're often not very bright or as bright as LED TVs, like QLED and Mini LED and the others. So what LG had been doing, they've been using this technology called MLA, and then Samsung uses a separate technology called its own Q OLED displays. Well, this year LG has a 40% brighter OLED and all they said when they first got there was that and this is not using MLA, we're not using that technology anymore. It turned out to sort of not be, as, I'm sure, cost-effective to manufacturers. They wanted it to, but they've got a new technology that's 40% brighter, right. So it's like well, what happened? Well, they haven't confirmed this, but our theory is because there's another manufacturer using their technology is that they're using Tandem OLED. And if you haven't heard of Tandem OLED, this may take you back to when the iPad Pro was announced. It announced this and it has this amazing display. The new iPad Pros this year had this beautiful, beautiful display and they announced that this uses Tandem OLED. And everybody was like, what's Tandem OLED? All they knew is it looked great, and even TV people were scrambling. Everybody was trying to figure it out. Well, what we think has happened and LG hasn't confirmed this yet is that LG is using Tandem OLED in this display, so it's essentially two panels on top of each other. All we know is the LG G4. Last year we reviewed it. When I looked at it, it was the best TV I'd ever looked at. It is so good, and this one is 40% brighter, so it solves sort of the biggest challenge with that one. So this is a new one and that's a big deal. So the other one that's really interesting and I'll keep this one, this one's shorter is Hisense announced a new type of mini LED, so that's a sort of the those are the two big competitors right now are type of mini LED, so that's the sort of the there's those the two big, you know, competitors right now are OLED and mini LED.

34:28
But it uses instead of for the backlight, it uses a special form of backlight that uses instead of just pushing a bunch of light through. It colors the light with. It has RGB, so essentially it's an RGB mini LED. They're going to, they're going to call it, you know something, I'm sure, more flashy than that, but it's a special form of mini LED that nobody had seen before until now and what it does is it takes and it goes in the opposite direction.

34:59
You know, whereas mini LED and QLED and these other LED kind of TVs, they've always been really bright, they're wonderful to look at, but they don't quite have the depth of color and the contrast that OLED does. So now they are getting more with this technology, they get more like OLED. They have this more kind of color that just really sort of pops and has that level of depth and contrast. So in a sense, these technologies are getting closer together and I think it's going to be interesting to see. But I think that, in the short term anyway, this breakthrough from Hisense may be the one that impacts consumers more, because that technology is likely to be cheaper and more accessible to more people and will be in future TVs, not just this year, but especially in years to come. So it's a pretty exciting year for TVs.

35:48 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Absolutely. Yeah, that actually was really exciting because I was worried, I guess, that this was going to be kind of a year of the incremental improvements and the almost a wider gap between what OLED can provide versus the sort of standard LED LCD display. So it's good to hear that they're still working on that they're closing the gap, which is interesting.

36:14
That is interesting. Speaking of display technology, something that just kind of blew my mind was the stuff that Lenovo announced. It's like trying to find a way to make mobile computing, I guess, as productive as I find my multiple display setup that I have going on here. So tell us about what Lenovo announced.

36:37 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah, lenovo has and it's interesting we've seen the last few years Samsung display has been showing off these concepts of different kinds of displays rollable, foldable, extendable. Even this year they had one that you could sort of press from the back and it's sort of like bendable in the middle, really interesting. But essentially Lenovo is taking some of this. We don't know if they're using Samsung display or who they're using, but they're using one of these advanced display makers and they have a laptop that you basically just sort of wave like this and what your laptop is. That screen goes from this to like extends upward and essentially double the size.

37:18
The cool thing about this is that, you know, during the pandemic, a lot of people who had laptops bought monitors for the first time because they're like, well, if I'm going to be at home, I might as well have a bigger screen, and they got used to it.

37:28
And now people are going back to a lot of people are going back to their laptops and they're like, boy, I really missed that large screen and the extra screen real estate. So this is a way to get that. This is a very CES product because essentially double the price to get an extra screen, so it's like a $1,700 laptop that turns into a $3,500 laptop to have that extra screen that sort of rolls up and rolls back down. When you can get for $100 or $200, you can get a little display that you just can attach to the side of your monitor. So I wouldn't recommend this product to a whole lot of people, but it is an interesting concept and it shows that they're pushing the boundaries. Like I said, this is a very CES product. It's one that gets a lot of attention, but I don't know how practical it is for most folks.

38:10 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, I kind of agree there. The practicality is a little wanting, but it's certainly interesting when the companies are just pushing the bounds a little bit. Now, I think, one area that every year I've gone to CES I have been hopeful about, and some years they lied to us by having people inside these alleged robots actually doing this for us, and some years they said, oh yeah, we're going. They showed us videos and said, yeah, this box going. They showed us videos and said, yeah, this box here. That's going to be what I'm saying. Let's talk about laundry. Is this finally the year that robots are going to do my laundry, jason, please?

38:53 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Micah sadly, no, this is not the year. Every year we think of it. It might be right. So, yeah, you know robots, you know CES is like a TV show, but if it's not about TVs, the next thing about typically now is about robots, and especially now that it's really like AI show too, right, even more so. It's about robots and there are some interesting things. There were some, you know, but we're not.

39:15
We've been talking about since the 1950s. We've been waiting for, like these Jetson, like robots to like do all the chores, for us to wash the dishes, to do the laundry, to fold the laundry, you know, to take out the trash, all of the things. None of the robots we saw here or anywhere close to that. Uh, the the one laundry one is like a slightly smarter laundry, you know machine, a washing machine. It's not really, um, it's not really a robot, I think, in any sense of the way you know, think what we've learned with these companies that have been working on robots for a long time and we could talk more about robots if we want to talk about NVIDIA Cosmos, because there is some hope for the future but what we're learning is that there are things that robots aren't good at, especially these companies that have been working on making human-like robots. They're not very good at fine motor up. They're not very good at placing things in precisely. You know, the human body is quite remarkable as a you know, just if you think of it as a machine, and there's a lot that we might be still a hundred decades or hundreds of years away from getting to where we can replicate some of the things we do.

40:24
Tesla found this out when they built a bunch of robots to build their cars and then they had these robots that were putting the seats in the cars and they were like jamming the cars in and like breaking things and they weren't getting it right and they're like you know what. Forget that. They took the robots out and use them for something else and say people are much more efficient and accurate and effective at putting things in very precisely. I think those are what we're. That's what we're still learning. What are robots really good at that? Humans can't do Things like holding weight really you know large amounts of weight. What are humans good at that? Robots aren't, and it's more of those like fine motor skills, and I'm afraid that laundry is one of those things that's going to come into that Like it's going to be a long time before a robot can do our laundry. But you never know.

41:06 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That's too bad. Yeah Well, you mentioned it and I think we should talk about it. This of course involved, I think, what's kind of become a big splash with NVIDIA announcing Cosmos. Tell us a bit about what NVIDIA announced in general and then you know specifically about Cosmos.

41:26 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
Yeah. So NVIDIA, of course, is the heart of really the AI generative AI revolution because their processors that were originally made to drive game engines, you know, to make gaming really better, have turned out to be really effective for driving AI as well. For a number of reasons, but they are. So they are if the AI landscape that is rising up in the sort of the skyline of AI, all these buildings that are going up if the AI landscape was a skyline, nvidia would be the concrete and the steel that makes all of those buildings right. So what they announced is really interesting and we did name this. So CNET, zdnet and the CNET group brands. We named this the best of CES official best of CES for AI and then also best overall.

42:27
So NVIDIA Cosmos. That's because what it is is. It is a framework. The biggest problem and Jensen Huang, who is the CEO of NVIDIA, said this robots need a lot of data. That's the biggest problem. It takes a lot of data to train a robot and unless you're Tesla out there with millions of vehicles collecting data every day, everybody else is really struggling to have enough data to train these things on.

42:55
So what Cosmos is? It uses AI to create the training data. Some people call this synthetic data and they worry about this, but essentially it can take real-world models of a factory, a neighborhood, a vehicle, anything, and it can turn those models into essentially synthetic videos. Then it can use the data to train a robot how to navigate a warehouse, an autonomous vehicle, how to navigate city streets in Phoenix, arizona or Petaluma, california, or wherever the thing is really. They're trying to solve the biggest problem in robots and autonomous vehicles today, which is that they're very hungry for data and they don't have enough training data and it's taking too long to get the training data that they need in order to do it. So Cosmos has the potential to be the thing that could enable a lot of future innovators for the CES award winners, the CES product and innovators of the future, and that's maybe what's most exciting about it.

44:05 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Understood, I guess. Lastly, I'll ask you if there was anything else quickly that stood out as, particularly if it's weird or fun, it's weird. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was of interest.

44:20 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
I'll give you one weird thing and one practical thing. So the weird one was there was this thing and you may have heard of it. It was like the electric salt spoon. So you know, there are a lot of cultures that use very salty foods and those salty foods can cause a lot of chronic diseases, can lead to a lot of chronic diseases right, a lot of chronic diseases. Can lead to a lot of chronic diseases, right. And so what this spoon does is it uses electron. You know it's electric and it makes low sodium food taste a little bit more salty because when you taste it it sort of electrifies your tongue a little bit. It doesn't like buzz you or something. It's indistinguishable from any other spoon, but it gives the sensation of the food being a little bit saltier than it really is.

45:12
So this is a really interesting product, I think, very ingenious and what an interesting idea. It sounds sort of corny and off the wall but you have to think like that's a health problem that it could also be solving at the same time, and so that's pretty interesting. The other one that was really kind of a shocker at CES was TCL announced a TV, their 6MK, oh, no, q6mk, not a product that runs up, that rolls off the tongue. Um the, yeah, the QM six K? Um, that, uh, is a very oppressive TV. It's a mini led TV, very aggressively priced, and they made it available for pre-order at CES. You never see these products right.

45:58 - Dan Moren (Co-host)
Available for pre-order.

45:59 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
So I thought that was really smart on their part and they probably got a ton of pre-orders because it was very well-priced, it has great technology. It's bringing like high-end technology down to one of their budget TVs, so essentially like a premium budget TV, and that was cool and I thought kind of a fun thing for CES this year.

46:20 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That is awesome. Jason Heiner, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us today to give us a look at just some of the stuff announced at CES. Of course, folks can head to ZDNet to check out the work you're doing. Is there anywhere else they should go to follow along with what you've got.

46:37 - Jason Hiner (Guest)
That's great. No, zdnetcom is great. We have an amazing team. They. Zdnetcom is great. We have an amazing team. They do great work every day trying to help people understand the future and how it's going to change, how technology is going to change the future of their lives, their work, their communities, and then what are the products they can get a taste of today to get a little bit of that future. So, micah, thanks for having me. Great to see you, good to see you as well.

47:01 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
All righty, we will be back in just a moment with the news that Meta has decided to end its fact checking on the platform, but let's take a quick break so I can tell you about our next sponsor of the show, which is Melissa, the trusted data quality expert since 1985. With Melissa's launch of the Melissa Address Validation app in the Shopify App Store, shopify Plus, merchants now have access to a critical data quality tool directly from the address expert. Key features of the Melissa Address Validation app include real-time address validation, so customers are immediately notified if the address they enter contains errors or needs correction, preventing shipping delays and reducing return rates. Global Reach the app validates addresses in more than 240 countries and territories, standardizing them according to local postal regulations. Enhanced Address Correction even if Google Auto Suggestion is enabled, melissa's app can correct and standardize addresses, adding missing components such as postal codes and ensuring compliance with local formatting rules, cass and SERP certification. The address engine is certified by USPS and Canada Post, offering reliable validation for North American addresses. And smart alerts because the app provides a warning on the thank you page if there is a potential issue with the shipping address, allowing customers to update their information before the order is processed. Shopify Plus.

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49:28
Hi Hi, good to be with you. Pleasure to have you here. So we've talked about CCDH before on the show, but it has been a while, and so I was hoping that you could start by telling us about the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the work that you do.

49:44 - Imran Ahmed (Guest)
Sure, I mean. The Center for Countering Digital Hate is a US-headquartered nonprofit that seeks to study and then hold accountable social media companies when we find them doing wrong, so when they are lazy, or that they are complicit in the generation of harms that affect our society, whether it's our democracy, it's our kids' mental health, it is increasing the amount of hate and polarization in our society and we do groundbreaking research that gets a lot of attention, and then we go out and do policy advocacy as well.

50:15 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Beautiful. So let's talk about this in particular, because, you know, meta made this announcement, in part through Mark Zuckerberg, and the company has sort of framed its decision to replace fact checking with a community notes system, similar to what we've seen on X, as a move to restore free expression. I'd just love to hear your response on the rationale of this being a move to restore free expression, given the research that you've done.

50:49 - Imran Ahmed (Guest)
So it's funny, mark Zuckerberg is someone who has changed his position on the role of moderation several times. Just a few years ago, he explained I think probably the most articulate explanation the case for moderation when he showed that the way that social media platforms are designed is that they give engagement to contentious content, so hate and disinformation, conspiracy theories have an advantage there. He had a chart where, on one axis, it showed how violative which means how close to breaking the rules, the norms, the community standards of those platforms a post was and it showed that, as it gets you know, with something which is low, violative content and uncontentious content gets low engagement. The closer it gets to breaking the rules, engagement just shoots up and that means that you get this high amplification of fringe, conspiracy theories, hate and disinformation. And his argument was that this natural psychological phenomenon and how his platform interacts with human psychology is why you need to have moderation, because otherwise all you would get is a timeline full of bananas, hate, disinformation and conspiracy theories. You have to have a cut off and that's why they had moderation in place.

52:06
He now appears to have said you know, he said that one thing, he knows it to be true and he's made this incredibly articulate explanation of why we need moderation. Not that any of his platforms were very good at it, but they had something. And now he's saying well, for short-term political gain and to avoid me having headaches, and because, in part, there has been movement around the world, including in the US, for social media companies to be held more accountable and responsible for online harms, whether it's the UK's Online Safety Act, it's the EU's Digital Services Act, florida has just enacted a ban on social media for kids under 14. He's saying, in order to sort of stave off regulation and to try and win some political allies. I'm going to completely change my position on this.

52:52 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Now in your statement, in the sort of press release that you sent out via email, you mentioned that this change, quote turbocharges the spread of unchallenged online lies. I was hoping, I mean, it's kind of built into the sentence there. But can you elaborate on how removing fact checking might amplify misinformation and hate speech on Metis platforms, because I think some people would say, well, those community notes features are there, so will it actually?

53:22 - Imran Ahmed (Guest)
Well, we actually did research on community notes on X and we discovered that disinformation spread on that platform. The disinformation itself got 13 times as many views as the accompanying notes. So that's. The problem with it is that it's too little and often it's too late because it takes time to gain the consensus required on a note for it to be displayed. Someone can spread disinformation and there's no delay. To put a note up takes time because it requires consensus, which of course, you don't require for the initial post itself. And we also found that 75% of correct community notes which align with the findings of independent fact checkers, in short, are true, were not displayed on the accompanying disinformation post because they hadn't reached the threshold of sufficient votes to be displayed.

54:12
So you know the system doesn't really work that well. It's a limited solution. I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I'm saying it's insufficient on its own and forms part of a portfolio of actions taken by platforms to prevent them being overwhelmed by disinformation, hate and conspiracy theories. But Meta has decided and this is not about them switching from one system to another. They have made an active decision to let liars, snake oil salesmen, fraudsters, hate actors, propagandists for foreign autocrats like Vladimir Putin, xi Jinping and Ayatollah Khomeini unleash a tidal wave of disinformation many times the size of anything we've seen to date, and this will inevitably increase the spread and the visibility of unchallenged lies. It will worsen the spread of hate, create more risk to our communities, damage our democracy, our public health and the safety of our kids.

55:08 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Absolutely. Now you do talk, in the research that you all have done, about the real world harm that is a consequence of a decision like this. I was hoping that you could provide some specific scenarios, some examples where misinformation or unchecked content on social media has translated into offline risks, Because, again, what I'm hoping we can do here is kind of answer those common questions that you experience where people might think that well, okay, misinformation is being spread, but it's just this thing that happens in a digital bubble and it doesn't have any real impact on the real world because they're just seeing it and they're taking it in there. But it does, according to the research that you've done.

55:58 - Imran Ahmed (Guest)
Well, look, let me give three examples. One would be the most recent research report that we did. It was a study of YouTube and what we did is we simulated being a 13-year-old girl joining that platform and looking at one piece of content on disordered eating. Now YouTube has promised that it will never, ever recommend eating disorder and self-harm content to children, but what we found was actually 700 times out of a thousand that we simulated this. Youtube recommended self-harm or eating disorder or diet content to those kids extreme dieting content, stuff like the anorexia boot camp, which is a diet so extreme that it induces the psychological and metabolic conditions that lead to anorexia. So that's one example of how that kind of content can really and I've got a little girl myself and you know, if someone came up to my daughter on the street and said to my daughter, you're too fat and you should go on a 500 calorie a day diet, I would hunt that person down. When YouTube does it to our kids every day, 700 times out of a thousand, we call them what Champions. You know, titans of industry. Times out of a thousand, we call them what champion. You know, titans of industry.

57:00
Another example would be I've, you know, this summer or last summer, sorry we had riots in the UK which were caused by disinformation spread after three sweet young girls were murdered by a lunatic. They were stabbed to death in Southport, which is near, actually, where I grew up in the northwest of England. Immediately there was disinformation spread on X that it was a fresh off the boat asylum seeker, a Muslim, who'd committed these acts, amplified by Elon Musk himself on X, and that led to the worst race riots in my lifetime in Britain. And that was all based on a lie. That was a you know someone who was born and bred in the United Kingdom that had committed these terrible, terrible acts. And the third example would be, I think that what we've.

57:46
I don't want to name particular examples, but I've just been speaking to someone, a mother of someone who was bullied online and her son took his own life. Her name is Christian Bride. Her son's name was Carson. He was 14 when he killed himself because he was being bullied online. Again, this is going to allow abusers and hate actors and bullies and the most malignant types of people to run amok and it causes real world harm, whether it's riots, it's kids with eating disorders or it's suicides.

58:26 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Now Mark Zuckerberg highlighted the trade-off, as he saw it, between reducing mistakes and increasing censorship in moderation. Do you believe that there is a middle ground Meta could have pursued instead of completely and fully abandoning fact checking altogether?

58:40 - Imran Ahmed (Guest)
the answer isn't a middle ground is to do better at what they do. Have more people, spend more money, think harder. Look, these are meant to be the world's cleverest people, right? Or they certainly believe they're the world's cleverest people for crying out loud. If ccdh can identify these kinds harms, if they can identify that their systems are failing, that's because they're not trying hard enough. If they took it seriously, they would. Surely it is not beyond the ken of man to work out how to build systems that are safer, that are less prone to the spread of disinformation and hate.

59:10
And Elon Musk came along and said that that's precisely what he you do. He said get rid of the bots. He told people. I believe that it would be a hellscape if people said if these platforms became unwelcoming to people because of the sheer prevalence of hatred and disinformation in those spaces. He said that he was the genius that would fix it. It turns out his way of fixing it is going well. I can't fix it, so I guess anyone can do what they want. Mate, his way of fixing it is going well. I can't fix it, so I guess anyone can do what they want, mate Now.

59:36 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Lastly and I think this is what impacted me personally the most in seeing this come through it's Meta's global influence. Meta is certainly one of the biggest social media networks out there, but the company has now far-reaching impact, and so, given that global influence, how do you think this decision will affect content moderation and online safety standards beyond the United States and beyond just Meta itself? Is this now setting precedence for others to follow suit?

01:00:15 - Imran Ahmed (Guest)
meta itself. Is this now setting precedence for others to follow suit? Well, you know, what's really interesting about the decision is that he's saying that he's only going to do this in the US. He's not doing it in the EU or the UK, which have got laws in place to protect consumers and users from lazy, greedy social media oligarchs. And so where there is regulation, where there is accountability, where there is transparency, these companies feel incapable of changing their rules. It's only in the US, where they feel that they are politically ascendant and that there's little risk of regulation, of a Kids Online Safety Act or other things being passed, that they feel comfortable doing this. So actually, american users and citizens and children and parents will be more at risk than parents and children and citizens around the world. But I do think it's indicative of the direction of travel they want to take us in.

01:01:06
And the truth is that you know, the disin, disinformation that's spread in the us by us, by US actors, on innately globalised platforms means that a rise in disinformation and hate in the US on those platforms will inevitably cause impact around the world. And when these platforms have negative impacts in countries that simply aren't able to cope with it. You know you think about the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar able to cope with it. You know you think about the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. Facebook at one point acknowledged that it had been partly responsible for a genocide because of insufficiently robust moderation. For him to sit there and tell us that he thinks now that moderation's gone too far. I think the truth is quite the opposite.

01:02:00 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Imran, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us today to talk through this decision that came through and, from the sound of it, caught the fact-checking partners of meta off guard as well. Um, you know there's a lot of great research that's going on, uh, via ccdh. If people want to be able to see that research and keep up with what you all are doing, where is the place they go to do?

01:02:26 - Imran Ahmed (Guest)
that. Well, please, you know, go to counterhatecom. We ourselves have never been a fact-checking partner to Meta. We don't work with the platforms or take their money. But I know lots of great and wonderful people have been, and I'm thinking of them right now because they're people who've been fighting for the truth, for decency, for science, for democracy, and they've really been. You know, we've taken a real knock in that progress.

01:02:52 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate it. Cheers, if you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide or self-harm, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Call or text 988 or chat online at chat.988lifelineorg. If you're located outside the United States, please visit findahelplinecom to find a helpline in your country.

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