TWiG 774 transcript

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

0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
Coming up on this Week in Google. I, micah Sargent, am subbing in for Leo Laporte. I am joined by Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis, and we have a great show planned for you. First, we start talking about the Google Pixel event that we can expect in August. What will be there and who's excited about it and who's not. Then we also talk about Jeff discussing a bill that will have Facebook and others paying news companies for journalism online, as well as Amazon's plans to start charging for a smarter version of its voice assistant. Along with that, we cover several other stories about Google and AI, including the Google changelog, like Google getting rid of infinite scroll and saying goodbye to stack All of that and, trust me, there's a whole lot more coming up on this Week in Google. Stay tuned Podcasts you love from people you trust.

This is this week in Google, episode 774, with Jeff Jarvis, paris Martineau and me, micah Sargent, recorded Wednesday, june 26, 2024. My AI, fiance, it's time for this Week in Google and I am Micah Sargent, subbing in for Leo Laporte, who has the day off. Pleased to be here with you all and, of course, pleased to be here with our awesome hosts. Up first, paris Martineau. Hello, paris.

0:01:51 - Paris Martineau
Hello, always happy to be here.

0:01:54 - Mikah Sargent
You and your plants Always happy to be here, hopefully.

0:01:58 - Paris Martineau
You can't see it, but off screen to me, where my giant Monstera is. It's truly so close to tipping over. I've got to repot it instantly. It's grown far too big for the small pot I have to contain it.

0:02:10 - Mikah Sargent
And also joining us possibly. Plantless is Jeff Jarvis. Are there plants around here?

0:02:16 - Jeff Jarvis
I kill them. I kill them. I have a thumb that if I touch a plant, it just wilts and dies.

0:02:24 - Mikah Sargent
You know that could be a good service for people if they've got weeds. That's true, stick your thumb in there and it's taken care of that's true especially blackberry bushes. Those things don't like to go away wait, really yeah, blackberry bushes a scourge?

they are they. Yes, I and listen, I have only. I think that I've heard more about blackberry bushes living in northern california than I ever have in my entire life. Everybody here complains about blackberry bushes and it's a thing. They try to get rid of them and they are hard to get rid of and they just continue to exist.

0:02:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Do they make pies along the way? They?

0:02:59 - Mikah Sargent
should they should. But I think they just don't like them because they will cut them down to the roots and pour weird things on them to try to get them to go away.

0:03:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Californians Geez Weird.

0:03:09 - Paris Martineau
Weird people. We've got to make room for more almonds, I guess.

0:03:12 - Mikah Sargent
Must be what it is More almonds and, you know, more tech bros, I don't know Whatever else kind of roots into society and doesn't let go Ice plant. Yeah, exactly, all right, you know I want to kick things off with a Google story. Oh, on this show, on this very show, you're revolutionary man. The only thing that I'll say, though, is the only thing that I'll allow to be first in front of the Google story that I'm thinking of is if Paris has another one of those weird things that last time. I was on the show.

Paris you talked about Last time. I learned about new forms of cryptocurrency.

0:03:51 - Paris Martineau
Listen. No, but I'll find some while we're talking about.

0:03:54 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, while you look for that, I want to talk about Google announcing what it calls a surprise event, and I think it is a little bit surprising, given that typically, google hardware events are leaked to the press way ahead of time. Everybody knows exactly what things are going to look like and this time, at least as it stands, it doesn't seem to be that people know a whole lot about precisely what the devices are. It's going to be taking place at 10 am on August. What day is that? August 10th? No, august 13th At Google right, yes, at Google Google Bayview campus, and we believe that it will feature the Pixel 9, the Pixel Watch 3, and, as you might imagine, a non-hardware feature which is Google's latest in AI. How are we feeling? Are we excited? Paris?

0:05:01 - Paris Martineau
Jeff, you're the big Google user. Are you excited for any news coming to your products?

0:05:08 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean I've got a little bit of Leo disease in me. I want to buy things. Oh no, so we were just talking before we got on the air about we were mentioning seltzers that we liked, and I mentioned the wonderful French badoit and Micah said it's a good thing Leo's not here because he would have ordered six cases by then. So I got a little bit of that in me and my phone is a six. Oh that's time.

I think it may be time. My wife will make fun of me because she used her Apple for like 40 years and I am interested in what the AI can do on the device. So if I want to play with that, I have to get a new device right. That's my excuse.

0:05:49 - Mikah Sargent
No, that's honestly that I think it is a good excuse. It's a good excuse. It is a good excuse and I know it's one that we all use, but genuinely it is Well. Okay, hold on, I might take that back just a little bit. Normally I would say that's a good excuse, but how often is this show actually about Google things?

0:06:06 - Paris Martineau
So really Well before he does this show. He does a show about AI only.

0:06:18 - Jeff Jarvis
So that would be a really good excuse. It's perfect for AI inside.

0:06:19 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, I might be editing a book series about AI. So you know it's my biz. That as well, that as well. No, I think it's a good idea.

I'm kind of curious to see what Google is going to introduce in terms of on-device processing for sure, because you know we saw how Apple kind of put forth the idea not the idea, but put forth its idea, its interpretation on what should be done locally versus what should be done in the cloud interpretation on what should be done locally versus what should be done in the cloud and Google, I think in its long history of offering different AI-backed features, has done a great job. Like its computational photography has long been very impressive. Its magic erasing tools have been very cool. The way that Google Photos gives you the opportunity to edit photos and kind of automatically change how they look in a way that's pleasing to the eye. I've been impressed by that for some time, and so it would be interesting to see how Google puts forth its camera you know, its camera chops with local on-device processing versus what goes to the cloud.

0:07:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, also all the Google services. They don't need to do that locally. All the Google services, they don't need to do that locally. And they're adding. I always say, is it Genesis or Gemini? Gemini, they also have a Genesis coming soon, I think. Gemini into all of the G Suite stuff. So I guess the question is, could they do that more effectively locally? One of the stories I put on the rundown today I think I'm robbing from the changelog. We can get to it later, but Google is bragging that it's doubling the calculation speed in Sheets. Now, given all I do in Sheets is a rundown and maybe adding two plus two, I don't notice any slowness for those who use it to do complicated equations. More processing power locally, I guess, would make a difference for other functions too.

0:08:36 - Paris Martineau
I'm curious if that will expand the. My only experience running up against the limits of sheets has been there's like a row limit. I think it's like a row limit. I think it's like 60,000 or something that I'm curious about. I'll expand the limit as well. I have for a couple of projects that involve large data sets, like I didn't create 60,000 rows of data but I have tried to open 60,000 plus rows of data and then had to download Excel.

0:09:04 - Jeff Jarvis
How good a scraper are you, Maris.

0:09:06 - Paris Martineau
Data scraper I'm a pretty good scraper. I've taken classes on scraping. I don't use it that often anymore, but I can scrape as I need to.

0:09:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Do you think that a lot of journalists are trying to use generative AI to go ahead and scrape data and do things with it? Do you think you would use that to go ahead and scrape data and do things with it?

0:09:28 - Paris Martineau
Do you think you would use that? I mean, if it offered an easier way to scrape a large data set, rather than me putzing about writing my own code or putting something complicated into Google Sheets? Sure, I think that there are more specific use cases that the industry is currently grappling with when it comes to, I guess, using a large language model or AI-powered tools to analyze really large data sets and pick out the potential safeguards that are needed, or, you know, kind of guarding against hallucinations, because we know that's an essential part of these tools. Even if we, you know, minimize the risk, it's still there. So I haven't really gotten to that point of the discussion, because I'm just one journalist and our newsroom doesn't have that much of a robust data team, but I know that there's teams at the Times. The New York Times, I believe, has an entire team dedicated to using AI for journalism.

0:10:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Now, Do you go to IRE? It's very journalistic here.

0:10:37 - Paris Martineau
No, I wanted to go IRE is the. Investigative Reporters and Editors Conference, which just had their festival conference, I believe this last weekend. I didn't, I was just thinking this week you should.

0:10:48 - Jeff Jarvis
It's your peeps, it's, it's, it's it's. Journalists meet geeks, which is why in the show they do stuff that people watching this show would actually find interesting, as opposed to like us I mean, you know they do tune in here as well.

0:11:06 - Mikah Sargent
Let's hope. Hey everybody out there. So now that we've talked about that, we will be. I think we will be. We talked about covering that event live in August, so be on the lookout for an announcement about that. It'll be great to see what's going on. Yes, paris.

0:11:26 - Paris Martineau
I'm curious what you guys think about these events in general. My position them has always been I think they're just a bit superfluous. I don't really understand why we need. I mean, I guess the reason why these events exist is because they want to create press around their new products and whatnot, but I think it's just I don't know a little ridiculous. It could have all been an email. Have there been instances where these events you feel are like truly helpful or interesting, or is it more of just a way to get a lot of product news and a point of discussion that interests you about this?

0:11:57 - Mikah Sargent
It's that point of discussion. I think I agree it's a little navel-gazy of those of us who are covering it. I agree it's a little navel-gazy of those of us who are covering it because when people ask the question that you just asked, the thing that I almost always hear someone say is well, it's really interesting to hear how a company is going to put forth their ideas for new products and in that sense it is navel-gazy. It is us saying like, oh yeah, we want to see the story that they tell and then tell everyone the story that they were telling us through our eyes and through our filter, email or on a page. You can put forth plenty of text and everything that explains, but there are always like demos and things that otherwise you might not see.

Um, that I think make the quote unquote live event or, in this case, pre-recorded event a little bit more engaging and a little bit more interesting. But yeah, I mean, there's a part of me that agrees with you and it makes me wonder if there's some level of arguably contempt that these folks have for their user base who are like well, they're not going to go to our website and read this page, so we better just talk to them for the next hour and tell them what we're making. I don't know. What are your thoughts?

0:13:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris. I think when I put this in the rundown.

What are your thoughts? Paris, I think. When I put this in the rundown, I wondered about that and I wonder whether Google is trying to by pushing it up and apparently not doing the leaks. We'll see whether they leak everything before August 13. Maybe they're trying to recapture some surprise or some newness to it, which means they better have something honest to God, new. So we'll see it. I wouldn't mind if there were new things and surprises, but the other thing, I think, is it plays right into geek journalism.

0:13:54 - Paris Martineau
Right, People are there, I mean it harkens back to the early 2000s kind of era of journalism, where tech is all that is good and new in the world. I also I'm'm curious. My initial thought in this maybe it's because I'm a conspiracy theorist, maybe it's also because I'm poisoned by working in the news industry is that it seems like this is probably an event released as a surprise, conveniently a month before apple typically has a big phone event so that they can can one-up them with their version of whatever Apple is going to be putting out.

0:14:30 - Benito Gonzalez
Hi, this is Benito.

0:14:30 - Mikah Sargent
I think that always plays into it, Hi Benito.

0:14:33 - Benito Gonzalez
I'm feeling that also, a lot of these events have been for the shareholders and not really for the people.

0:14:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Like a lot of AI ones especially.

0:14:41 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, that's fair too, and you know we do. We tend to pay attention to what the story that they want about the products that they're coming out with, to a signaling to the shareholders that's like, don't worry, we're on it. Whatever the latest trend is, we're on it. We're making that too, and you don't have to worry about that. I guess I'm curious, though, when it comes to Google and hardware. I've heard Leo talk about how he is less than enamored of the Google hardware in general and not as excited about it as he once was, because it feels like it's maybe, you know, a fourth, fifth, tier concern for the company. Do you, jeff, feel like it?

0:15:48 - Speaker 3
still gets enough attention. It's, maybe you know, a fourth, fifth tier concern for the company.

0:15:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Do you, Jeff, feel like it still gets enough attention? Well, I remain terribly bitter about the Chromebooks.

0:15:58 - Paris Martineau
Jeff is in a toxic relationship with his Chromebook. I am.

0:16:01 - Jeff Jarvis
I am, so this is recent stuff. So I had a Pixelbook Go, which I liked. It was small, the mic wouldn't work finely, the touchscreen didn't work. I said, okay, that's it. I got to get another machine and I finally got the Acer Spin 714. It didn't work. It didn't work well, so I finally just bought you won't believe this, I think it's a two-year-old model the Samsung, because I knew it would at least be more reliable and it works. But then when I used the Pixelbook, the keyboard is just wonderful, it's just sweet. I loved it. They were really good at making that hardware. I think the phones that they may. I brought nothing but pixels, you know since the beginning. I think they're. So I can't compare um which, by the way, is one thing about when you see things like ratings of comparative, ratings of dentists or ratings of plumbers how many plumbers do people have experience with? That's?

0:16:59 - Mikah Sargent
a good point are they have you gone to five different dentists and you're going? Ooh, this one really knows how to lay down a crown.

0:17:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, right, I have no teeth left but I know a lot about dentists, right. So comparative, comparing phones, even and hardware is odd for most people because we tend to get into a rut and we tend to use it, and I'm definitely in a pixel rut. Samsung cruff always scared me off, so I never had one. And people love Samsungs and you know I used to have iPhones way back in the day when they were steam powered. So, yeah, I think Google is good at hardware, but Leo is also just jaded now about them.

0:17:42 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, what about Google's products? And I guess the Chromebook and Pixel? Have you continuing to come back to it? What about? It has made you a loyal customer.

0:17:54 - Jeff Jarvis
People talk about being locked into the Apple ecosystem. I am locked into the Google ecosystem, even though I complain about being the premium customer and they screw me all the time. It's hard for me to imagine switching. So I'm talking to you right now through a Mac. This Mac was bought by Jammer B. About what? What? Jammer B about 35 years ago? He says 12 or 13.

Yeah, I've used it. That's how old it is and it still works and it's fine and I have. I barely upgrade it and do anything little stuff, like when I'm doing the rundown on my Chromebook. I can save five things in a row, so I can save the headline and I can save the link for two and a half stories, and I do that for all kinds of things. I can't do that on the Apple. The Apple is not integrated with Google. I just saw a document. I said, oh, I opened that up on the Apple. I want to save that to drive. Oh no, that's a pain. I really can't do that. So that's what keeps me coming back. Cause I'm locking.

Yeah, yeah, I'm locked in.

0:18:53 - Paris Martineau
Jeff, referring to your Mac as the. Apple is the quaintest thing you've ever done.

0:19:06 - Mikah Sargent
That old Apple over there. I was going to let it go. I love that you brought it. I'm glad you brought it up.

0:19:08 - Paris Martineau
It's really cute.

0:19:10 - Mikah Sargent
It was very sweet.

0:19:13 - Jeff Jarvis
It was a grandpa moment, wasn't it A little bit.

0:19:16 - Paris Martineau
That's why we love you.

0:19:21 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm outnumbered by the youngins today. Usually I got Leo on my side. He's not here. Grandpa, you were in Congress, weren't you?

0:19:25 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, I'm outnumbered by the youngins today. Usually I got Leo on my side. He's not here.

0:19:29 - Jeff Jarvis
Grandpa, you were in Congress, weren't you? No, I wasn't in Congress, I was in the California version.

0:19:32 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, that's right, that's right. Yes, not recently, at least in Congress.

0:19:37 - Jeff Jarvis
I was in Congress a few months ago.

0:19:39 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, so this is a story we are covering during the show.

0:19:44 - Jeff Jarvis
Tell us, give us a little lead in before we go into the video, though, to kind of explain it for people who are outside of California and who are outside of you know, concern about the future of journalism for the newspaper industry are whining and kicking their feet and writing laws, bills, to try to get Google and Meta, particularly, to pay them a bunch of money, arguing that they stole the newspaper's money as if God gave those newspapers the revenue in the first place. And there's a federal bill called the JCPA that has not gotten off the dime. But there are state versions and there was one in Illinois that almost passed and I testified against it and maybe had some small role in killing it. Instead they passed two other bills to benefit news and in California there's been a version of it called the CJPA, the California Journalism Preservation Act, and it's awful in my view and I've written a lot about it. We've talked about it on the show and I wrote a 41-page paper that was commissioned by the California Chamber of Commerce about the bill, its weaknesses, the history of copyright, the history of media consolidation in California, what the hedge funds have done to news in the state and offering a whole bunch of alternatives that I thought were better.

So two weeks ago the chamber brought me out and I was knocking on doors in the legislature which is a really weird but democratic exercise and talked to all the legislative aides for the Judiciary Committee and then yesterday was the committee hearing. I was invited to testify and they came back out to testify. Now it'll look like my side lost because the bill the CJPA went out of committee with nine to two vote, I think it was. But the author of the bill, buffy Buffy Wicks, from the very beginning was very open to changing it. Google has made a counter proposal. There was a lot of talk about that counterproposal, so my hope is that there'll be collaboration going forward and that it was worth the trip. But we shall see. But the other thing is I had to buy a white shirt and a tie.

0:21:57 - Mikah Sargent
So roll that beautiful bean footage, just a little bit.

0:22:00 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm Jeff Jarvis. I'm the Tao Professor for Journalism Innovation at the City University of New York, emeritus. In a paper commissioned by the California Chamber, I analyze AB 886 and examine the long history of newspapers lobbying, since the advent of radio, to extend copyright and diminish fair use for their exclusive benefit. I oppose AB 886, first because it will benefit the hedge funds that control 18 of the state's top 25 newspapers and are primarily responsible for destroying newspapers. I fear that national media conglomerates, as well as extremist and propaganda media, may benefit as well. The bill is likely unconstitutional in my opinion, in that a government-imposed fee on accessing content is a tax on reading and the retaliation clause compels speech, which is not free speech. I was gratified to read your comments, jeremberg, in the la times saying, and I'll quote we could screw up so that we make it so expensive that the platforms don't carry journalism content. That would be catastrophic. Amen, you can, you can, you can edit. Now that's fine that was a really impressively quick speech.

0:23:06 - Paris Martineau
I will will say just off the bat. You only had three minutes and you were getting the words in there.

0:23:11 - Jeff Jarvis
I did it in 245. Very impressive 400 words, wow. The guy next to me is the Google head of news partnerships, a really nice guy named Jaffer. Is the Google head of news partnerships, a really nice guy named Jaffer. And when they were working on his talk, the person that I talked to to try to get background for my talk it's like, well, his is at 10 minutes. No, and so I'm glad I went first.

0:23:41 - Mikah Sargent
And you've talked before about how sometimes you felt like it was pomp and circumstance, but it sounds like this one really, as you said, even though it may have looked like you were side lost afterward, there seemed to be pretty open discussion about how things were changing. How often do you find yourself in these legislative bodies?

0:24:05 - Jeff Jarvis
That's the really weird thing, micah. I never did this policy stuff before. I was on a thing some years ago, right before the pandemic, about policy and I kind of dreaded it because I just thought I'd be surrounded by wonks and there was no hope of any impact. And I did it and I found it interesting, it was useful, it became part of my next book and then suddenly in the last few months I've been doing this stuff. I went to a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee in Washington to testify about AI and journalism. I testified before the Illinois Senate. I went knocking on doors in the California Senate and I went to testify there.

I don't know that I'm very good at it, because I can be a jerk and you've got to be nice to people and I don't really understand. I get dogmatic, I think, saying why are you doing this stupid bill? You should know better, right? But that's not how it happens. You trade this for that, you do this, then you do that. You know there's other legislation in California right now that I really hate about AI. That would make the model makers for AI sign a statement asserting, under penalty of criminal perjury, that their models are safe, which is an impossibility. It's naive, it's stupid. So when you see legislation like that, you want to tear your hair out and say God, they're so stupid.

But in the end it was pretty amazing. I got to say it's democracy at work. And what I saw happening was the legislators and the lobbyists and people who had interest in these cases buttonholing each other in the hall but trying to get somewhere. And you know, if we don't support that process in democracy, then you know we've given up on everything. And where something actually happens on, like the U S house of representatives, uh then I think it's. It's actually somewhat gratifying to see.

0:26:01 - Mikah Sargent
I don't want to get in the habit of it and I'm not going to be very good at it, but it was a really interesting process, nice. Um, I think it's time. Yeah, and thank you for sharing that. Let us take a quick break and we will come back If.

0:26:11 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris doesn't have something weird. I've got something fun.

0:26:14 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, excellent, excellent, we'll see. This is a fun off here.

We'll see Fun off, all right. Well, we'll get to the fun off momentarily, but I do want to tell you about Collide, which is bringing you this episode of this Week in Google. I know you've heard us talk about Collide before, but did you know that Collide was recently acquired by 1Password? It's pretty big news because these two companies are leading the industry in creating security solutions that put users first. For more than a year, collide Device Trust has helped companies with Okta ensure that only known and secure devices can access their data, and that's what they're still doing. They're just now doing it as part of 1Password. So if you've got Okta and you've been meaning to check out Collide, now is a great time.

Collide comes with a library of pre-built device posture checks and you can write your own custom checks for just about anything you can think of. And you can write your own custom checks for just about anything you can think of. Plus, you can use Collide on devices without MDM, like your Linux fleet contractor devices and every BYOD phone and laptop in your company. Now that Collide is part of 1Password, it's only going to get better. So check it out at collidecom slash twig to learn more and watch the demo today. That's K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash twig, to learn more and watch the demo today. That's K-O-L-I-D-E dot com slash twig. And we thank Collide for sponsoring this week's episode of this Week in Google. All right Back from the break and it's time for our fun-off. Jeff, what have you got?

0:27:40 - Paris Martineau
Go Paris, paris.

0:27:41 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, Paris gets to go first.

0:27:42 - Paris Martineau
Do I have? Okay, let's see Mine isn't that fun, but I know that's a really resoundingly successful way to advertise this.

0:27:52 - Jeff Jarvis
It's like you're in the presidential debate. You're trying to sandbag the performance here. Yeah.

0:27:57 - Paris Martineau
This is from this Week in Tunnels, our reoccurring segment that's taken a brief break. It's been a while, which is the world's largest road and rail tunnel, is being built under the Baltic Sea. I think that's pretty cool.

0:28:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Better than a bridge. I'll say that.

0:28:13 - Paris Martineau
It is. It's going to link Denmark and Germany.

0:28:16 - Mikah Sargent
How is a tunnel that goes underwater better than a bridge? Can you tell me that?

0:28:21 - Paris Martineau
Because then Jeff doesn't get scared.

0:28:25 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, it's going to be all the way down in the rock.

0:28:27 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah.

0:28:28 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean, granted, one could imagine, is that?

0:28:30 - Paris Martineau
how tunnels work. I mean, is it Except the bart?

0:28:33 - Mikah Sargent
I thought that the one.

0:28:35 - Jeff Jarvis
The bart is laid on the bottom of the water.

0:28:37 - Mikah Sargent
Right, I thought there were some that are actually where there's just gallons and gallons of water around you, but this one is going to be tunneled so deep underground.

0:28:46 - Jeff Jarvis
I think so. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. How long is the tunnel going to be, say, paris?

0:28:51 - Paris Martineau
That's a great question. Let's see the tunnel will be 18 kilometers, 11.1 miles long. It's going to be one one of euro. It's europe's largest infrastructure project, with the construction budget over 7 billion euros. By way of comparison, the 50 kilometer, 31 mile channel tunnel linking england and france, which was completed in 1993, cost the equivalent of 12 billion I hope it's been updated since 1993. Probably have you guys ever taken the shuttle?

0:29:28 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I've never been out of the country. The one comparison I was going to make was, when you go to Coit Tower in San Francisco, the way that you get to the top is via an elevator, and they love to tell you, as you're in the elevator and cannot leave the elevator, this thing's more than 80 years old. And so you, as you're in the elevator and cannot leave the elevator, this thing's old, 80, more than 80 years old. And so you're just sitting in this and it's like making all these rickety sounds.

0:29:51 - Jeff Jarvis
And this is an earthquake prone city that was destroyed in 1906.

0:29:57 - Paris Martineau
Exactly. All right, Jeff, give me your fun stuff.

0:30:00 - Jeff Jarvis
All right, all righty.

0:30:01 - Mikah Sargent
Here I'm cheating because it's already in the rundown, but I put it there they do call it an immersed tunnel, by the way, just so we immersed, so does that not mean in water?

0:30:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Probably not in the rocks. Oh well, okay. But you know, same with the BART the BART is immersed and it's an earthquake. It's resting there on the bottom of the water, you know, oh so it, so it is the largest immersed tunnel because the tunnel and other things are through the rocks.

0:30:27 - Paris Martineau
This I'm assuming we're describing immersed the correct way. That's kind of crazy. For some reason I had never really thought about the logistics of the tunnels that I'm in.

0:30:41 - Jeff Jarvis
I'd always assumed I was kind of surrounded by water, even though that doesn't make any sense, I presume it's a rail tunnel, Paris. A lot of great questions we did come forward with a sequel to the tunnel stuff.

0:30:53 - Paris Martineau
Yes, passenger trains and cars.

0:30:56 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, cars can take it, okay, interesting.

0:30:59 - Paris Martineau
But it might be like a car-train sort of situation, like the tunnel where you can put your car on a train to go to the tunnel. I do want to note. Oh, it's a combined road and rail tunnel.

0:31:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Whoa, sorry, that's going to be big.

0:31:11 - Paris Martineau
Two double-lane motorways separated by a service passageway and two electrified rail tracks.

0:31:17 - Mikah Sargent
I want to mention. As I was scrolling through, I saw the word elephant and I had to know what that was about. Can you also take elephants through it? Elephant, and I had to know what that was about. Can you also take elephants through it? No, they're using that as a comparison. Each section will be 217 meters long, roughly half the length of the world's largest container ship, which we've all seen. So obviously that makes sense to use as a comparison. 42 meters wide and 9 meters tall, weighing in at 73,000 metric tons each, they'll be as heavy as more than 13,000 elephants.

How many llamas Hold on?

0:31:52 - Jeff Jarvis
I'll get on that while, jeff, you tell us about your fun piece. We've had a lot of fun with Sora, watching Sora stuff. We saw some ridiculous stuff, I think, just last week, where the memes were being remade by Sora. Well, toys R Us, which is a zombie brand that went bankrupt and that got taken over by private equity, they're trying to relaunch the brand and they used Sora to make a origin story commercial, so I presume it's a commercial. This won't get us taken down. The story is on Line 68. The video was on Line 69.

0:32:24 - Paris Martineau
So Bike shop owner, Charles Ladd this is a really weird one. This should have been my pick line 69. So this is a really weird one.

0:32:30 - Speaker 3
This should have been my pick. That would go on to change toy stores forever.

0:32:35 - Mikah Sargent
The giraffe moved the giraffe is coming alive.

0:32:38 - Paris Martineau
We're seeing a fake boy and his fake boy face is a different fake boy's face in every shot of this video. Oh, it's just like it's kind of different if you compare them all together.

0:32:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Wow, oh, you're right. Yeah, it's kind of buck-toothed and freckled.

0:32:54 - Paris Martineau
It looks like one of those YouTube videos that kids watch. That makes no sense. Yeah, a child is walking in just a field of toys.

0:33:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Which is ironic here, because they closed all the stores so a child can't do that anymore. Only in their imagination or in AI.

0:33:13 - Benito Gonzalez
Oh, you're right now. The kid has no freckles. This was the dream of Charles Lazarus. May all of your dreams come true too.

0:33:22 - Jeff Jarvis
So I think we see there, though, the real use at the beginning of Sora, and evidently, toys R Us is too cheap. They're not actually going to air this. They're going to use schmucks like us who air it for free and get attention that way. But I think you're going to see a lot of marketing use of this.

0:33:42 - Benito Gonzalez
One thing about this real quick is that it's like using AI to tell us a piece of nostalgia that kids nowadays could never have. Like kids can't do this because they can't go to Toys R Us, they don't exist anymore. Right, yeah, wait.

0:33:57 - Paris Martineau
What is Toys R Us Like? Does Toys R Us have stores?

0:34:01 - Jeff Jarvis
It used to, but it went bankrupt and they all closed.

0:34:05 - Paris Martineau
Okay, okay, it's got some stores, says the toys rs website, they opened a few, I think oh, there's some back.

0:34:10 - Benito Gonzalez
It's like all these rs as a kid.

0:34:12 - Mikah Sargent
The problem was there was also kids r us and that was where you got clothes and I can remember as a kid you, uh, you'd be walking towards both of them and you're hoping, hoping, hoping, you're going to toys rs and then mom would take us to kids time for socks.

0:34:25 - Jeff Jarvis
Micah, you need some socks uh, what did?

0:34:30 - Paris Martineau
you think of this video though, because I thought it was like bad. I looked at this and I was like this is what ai can do. It was weirdly choppy. I didn't really think the plot of it made sense. The boy boy's face changed all the time. I thought the music and audio sounded weird.

0:34:49 - Jeff Jarvis
That means you know that they had to stitch together God knows how many prompts.

0:34:53 - Benito Gonzalez
It also tells you they didn't have any money for an actual video.

0:34:56 - Jeff Jarvis
Bingo. Yeah, there's all these zombie brands. Bell and Howell Is everybody. Jeremy, are you old enough to remember when Bell and Howell made real cameras?

0:35:08 - Benito Gonzalez
Oh, yeah, projectors.

0:35:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Is he there?

0:35:12 - Benito Gonzalez
Yes, and projectors too.

0:35:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, right, oh yeah, that's how old we are. Oh wait, wait, wait, wait. Was Jammer B in the AV club at the school?

0:35:21 - Speaker 3
Of course, yes, I was he says yes Of course he had directed.

0:35:26 - Benito Gonzalez
Yes, I was.

0:35:27 - Jeff Jarvis
He said yes, of course he was, so you'd get the projector out.

0:35:30 - Paris Martineau
I'm sorry to interrupt this, but also this was created by a PR agency for Toys R Us that I had looked up before the show and they basically their whole advertising pitch is do you not have a marketing budget? We'll do stuff for cheap for you. But they've also claimed they've also admitted that it's not entirely generated by AI. This is from the Verge article on this. Had about a dozen people working on the video and applied quote corrective VFX on top. According to director Nick Klevorov, sora quote got us about 80 to 85 percent of the way there. He wrote on Twitter I mean that I feel like that makes it even worse. If this I was like, ok, this sucks, but at least it's all generated by AI, but it sucks. And it was like they had 10 to 12 people working on this. Yeah.

0:36:36 - Jeff Jarvis
That may be why, though, they try to avoid having illustrators and filmmakers get mad at them. When I was in Sacramento, right across the street from the state capital, there was a new coffee shop in there, and the person who lives in Sacramento told me that it used to be the coffee shop where, if you had to have your conversation outside the capital, you'd go across the street and this is where you'd go, and it closed and there's a new one opening, and it's fully robotic.

0:37:06 - Paris Martineau
Those have been around for years, though.

0:37:08 - Jeff Jarvis
But what's interesting is when you have all kinds of labor lobbyists their offices are all around the state capitol. You can imagine there'll be daily picketing there by labor unions saying how do you do this?

0:37:21 - Paris Martineau
Scabby, the rat is going to be outside pretty soon. Bingo, do you do this?

0:37:24 - Jeff Jarvis
scabby, the rat is going to be outside pretty soon, bingo. Then I went to sfo to fly back home and there was a robotic um uh coffee like uh beverage making robot there, so I was gonna piss off labor indeed.

0:37:43 - Paris Martineau
I mean you could go get your coffee and then take a ride in a Waymo to your I don't know flight, I guess.

0:37:51 - Jeff Jarvis
Hopefully there's a pilot on it.

0:37:53 - Paris Martineau
Hopefully.

0:37:54 - Mikah Sargent
By the way, it has taken me this long to figure it out it would be 429,000 llamas.

0:38:01 - Jeff Jarvis
I wonder what you were concentrating on. For those of you off video, Michael was deep in thought, deep in calculation.

0:38:09 - Paris Martineau
How did you do that?

0:38:13 - Mikah Sargent
So I figured out that the weight of one elephant is between 4,400 to 13,000 pounds. So I just went with 10,000 pounds the weight of an elephant and then the weight of one llama is about 300 pounds. So I just went with 10,000 pounds the weight of an elephant and then the weight of one llama is about 300 pounds. So you start by figuring out that it takes 33 llamas to make up the weight of one elephant. So that is impressive.

Yeah, so you do and then, once you have that number, then you know that you just need to multiply that times the 13000 elephants that were there, and 13000 times 33 is 429,000. So that's how many elephants.

0:38:55 - Paris Martineau
These are the exact situation that the education system in America prepares you for is a problem where? You have to figure out that you use long division prepares you for is a problem where you have to figure out.

0:39:07 - Mikah Sargent
I'm not going to use long division. I have legitimately reached out to my high school math teacher from time to time when something comes up in my life that involves me, yeah, and she's always so pleased about it. I just just last year for Christmas, I was hanging, I was hanging stockings and I needed to do some algebra to figure out what the proper distance was to hang them all along the fireplace at equal distances for each of them, and so I like took a snapshot quickly of my little sketched out formula that I did and our equation that I did.

0:39:37 - Jeff Jarvis
And she was, she was like oh, that's so wonderful, oh, Sooner, she's going to ask chat GPT and she's out of a job.

0:39:46 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, too soon, yeah, so let us continue on. I think this time I'd like to talk about Amazon, because Amazon, of course, long ago now, has introduced or introduced, rather, the Amazon Echo, and at the time it was this kind of tower like device that had no screen. And so, because it had no screen, the company had to make a voice assistant that, in as many cases as possible, could not punt to saying let me just show you what you're asking. Let me just show you what I found on the web. Let me just it was. I liked that it had this barrier that made them have to be clever about how they solved the problems that you were asking about.

Over time, echoes have added screens and they've added new features for the smart home, but one thing has relatively stayed the same, which is ALEXA. That's how I choose to talk about Amazon's virtual assistant, and ALEXA is for timers and for playing music and for occasionally asking some math questions, although I don't know if I could get it to figure out the one we just did a large language model powered, essentially voice assistant version of ALEXA. That is going to cost $5 to $10 monthly. This is according to Reuters, who, you know, quotes people familiar. Who cites people familiar with the matter? First and foremost, I wanted to hear about both of your experiences with voice assistants. It doesn't have to be Amazon, it could be any of them. Do you use them regularly? Do you use them at all? What do you use them for? Has your use changed over time? Lots of questions to ask, but I want to hear about that before we get into. Would you pay for Amazon's maybe better option?

0:42:10 - Paris Martineau
I use voice assistants at a very limited capacity. I will sometimes use Siri if I'm holding a bunch of things, if I'm like holding coffee and something in my other hands and I have headphones and I need to call someone that will be the extent of it. My other hands and I need, I have headphones and I need to call someone that will be the extent of it. I will occasionally use the voice assistant, who must not be named, lest she wake up for all podcast listeners. I would use her for basically asking the weather, that's about it, because I have one in or it.

I'm trying to think of a way to refer to it without saying the name of it.

So I'm using a pronoun, but I would often ask what's the weather. That's basically my main use because it's in my bedroom and then or I will use it to play music, but it's connected to Spotify. I'm not really a big voice assistant. I guess the only other use I've used, which I've talked about in the show before, is for a while during the pandemic I got really into there was this one Amazon Echo skill that you could say like Echo play cat noises or make cat noises, and it was a little skill that would make cat meows and it would make my cat go crazy, which I thought was cute.

But other than that, not really. What about you, Jeff?

0:43:30 - Jeff Jarvis
Not at all. I had, of course, a Google one and it was the world's most ridiculously overdone clock sitting on my desk. I never asked it anything when I tried to ask it. It didn't work very well. I tried to get my wife excited Wouldn't you want one of these? Because I have like five of them, because you got them for free, with things right, keep that out of here, was her response. I had it, I think, in our kitchen for about two days before my wife and daughter both said stop with that and get it out of here.

When we have a discussion at dinner and we're not sure about something, I will go to my phone and I will say how old is Micah Sargent and it will tell me. But otherwise, where I use voice is where it makes sense. It's in the car. Paris doesn't drive, yeah, and you look pretty ridiculous in the subway saying something out loud to your phone that wouldn't stop some people. And there it's utilitarian, it's navigate me here, that kind of stuff, and it's of limited utility, I would say. So I don't think voice is there, so I can't imagine paying for it. To me, paying for Alexa is as funny as every time I hit the Forbes paywall. I laugh, because who would pay for this Same thing?

0:44:55 - Mikah Sargent
I've been hurt too many times by the virtual assistants so I avoid using them in as many ways as possible. I will set my own timer.

0:45:04 - Jeff Jarvis
What did they do?

0:45:05 - Mikah Sargent
They just disappointed me, and every time I used them, every time something would be slightly off, and so I just don't trust them to do the things that I need them to do, that I actually want them to do. So I just do it all myself, which is something I talked to my therapist about, not asking for help, but seriously.

0:45:22 - Jeff Jarvis
Soon, not asking for help, but seriously. Soon to Micah. You can use a therapist and you put that person out of business too. No, we're just going to get rid of everybody in your life and make sure you're surrounded by AI.

0:45:35 - Mikah Sargent
So I I not worried about what. Let me, let me be clear. Before you scream moral panic at me I, I, I worry about people using it to do something like that when it's not intended to be used for that. And if it, I mean, you know we just had the glue spaghetti thing, right, or was it glue pizza? I can't remember Pizza.

0:46:03 - Paris Martineau
Glue pizza, glue pizza.

0:46:04 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, pizza, I can't remember. Um, pizza glue pizza, pizza, yeah, uh. And then you know you're asking it for advice on how to um, win somebody over, uh, and it doesn't have the context of, like, oh, actually you're being a creepazoid who shouldn't, should be taking hints that that person is not interested in, uh, what you're putting forward, but instead it's yes, smother them in gifts and do this and do that, and then it's making it worse, anyway. But now I want to ask you because for me again, I've been hurt too many times. I don't think that there's any convincing me that I should spend more money outside of my Amazon Prime subscription. I'm already paying in the first place to make this assistant any more capable. But is there a chance for either of you that it would be of interest to you to have an LLM-backed Amazon voice assistant?

0:47:01 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I mean, the person who should be answering this is uh, unfortunately not here. Leo is, uh the big llm user of the pod, and he does seem to like to talk to them. I'm not sure I I don't funny, funny to imagine yeah, I hey, how's it going today? He said before that those are the sort of conversations he has. I'm like, oh, is there anything substantive? He's like, you know, it's got to go back and forth. I don't really get it, but I'm sure.

0:47:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Hey, he's a podcast host. When he's not talking to us, he's got to talk to somebody.

0:47:39 - Paris Martineau
He's got to talk to someone.

0:47:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah.

0:47:44 - Mikah Sargent
He said said, though, that he did not, he would not be interested in this either. Um, specifically that from amazon, um, so I don't know if, if something like that, I will say there is a version of this that I have used. I actually recommended to him and paris, you may have come across this uh, it's an app called autobiobiographer, and the app is it's my understanding that they're using Claude in the background from Anthropic, but what it does is it starts by just posing a question to you. So the first question that I got from the app, it asked me what is an exciting adventure that you've gone on in your life? And you don't type to it, you just talk to it.

And so I told this semi-long story about an adventure that I went on, that I really enjoyed, where I traveled to the Badlands and to Mount Rushmore and to all of these different places, and it, on device, transcribed what I said and then, in the background, sent that off to Claude.

And then what it does is it asks you a follow-up question about it to help even pull more out of you. And so then I answered the follow-up question, and then it drilled in on something that I was talking about, and it asked me like oh so, tell me more about that person. And so then I started talking about the person and then it's just taking me on this journey and suddenly that's where I got into a place where I'm like, wow, I am really spilling my whole heart out to this system. But it was very cool at the same time, because I'm not a person I was diagnosed with ADHD way back in college and I do not like journaling because I'm basically just journaling all the time in my brain. So to have to be as slow as it takes to write that all out does not work for me. But I've always been a person who wished that I could journal, and this app Autobiographer was something that actually was able to pull that out of me.

And what's cool, too, is that it has little things that it'll ask you about specific people, and so at one point it asks here let me get the link, cause I don't think that's it.

0:49:58 - Paris Martineau
There are two Autobiographer AIs and I got duped by the one that just came up on the screen.

0:50:03 - Mikah Sargent
Oh no, it's autobiographercom the one that just came up on the screen. Oh no, it's autobiographercom. And let me hear I. Yeah, let's see, cause autobiography studio Inc is the name, I guess, of the company. Um, I will just put that on. Line 35 is the link to the app. Of course that's in the app store. So sorry about that, um, but what did you say? The website was, yeah, autobiographercom. Yep, that's the. That's where you can go. So it is.

0:50:32 - Paris Martineau
How have the outputs been.

0:50:34 - Mikah Sargent
Have you read over?

0:50:36 - Paris Martineau
what it's generated.

0:50:38 - Mikah Sargent
Because it actually makes you at the end of the conversation. It asks you you know, this is the summary that I got from this Is this accurate to you? And you can go in and choose different pieces, and I have been very impressed with what it had to say in shorter words than it takes me to say things, and so one example was it sort of took the conversation that I had about this journey, that I went on and gave it a title of A Road to Self-Discovery, because there was something that I did learn on that road trip and that's what I got to in the end, and you can go back and see the individual notes and you can also see the transcript of what you had. Anyway, my point is I found that to be a delightful use of AI that I wasn't expecting. I found that to be a delightful use of AI that I wasn't expecting, where it's just taking what you say and figuring out things that it should ask to help kind of pull apart a story about your life or a story about other people, because the other feature I know this is becoming kind of an ad for this, but I don't intend for it to be is that you can name different people in your life that maybe have had an impact on you, and then it will ask you questions about them and then you can actually send them a little storybook, essentially, and it's like this is what I feel from you, this is what you mean to me, and I think I would cry enough tears to cover that tunnel we were talking about earlier if someone sent me that. I just think it could be super delightful.

So, yeah, I liked that use of AI and I was not. It wasn't something that I had thought about, so I thought that was kind of cool. But I don't think Amazon's going to be doing that. I think it's going to be probably trying to tell children's stories and I don't know, taking too long to answer a simple question, because now it's got too much smarts behind it. But I don't see myself. Well, I lie. I will probably pay for it for a month just so I can talk about it on the shows I do. Well, what's interesting?

0:52:39 - Jeff Jarvis
I put a story in the rundown that quotes our friend, ed Zittrain from Business Insider, which just quotes everybody that OpenAI's CTO, mira Marotti, talked about how creativity is a problem to be solved, and so what you're talking about here is an app that attempts to be creative on your behalf, right, yeah? And she says, well, there may be too many people involved in creativity and those jobs shouldn't exist, to which Ed said that's a declaration of war against creative labor, which is a very Ed thing to say. But it's interesting as to how much we are willing to hand off to these things.

Lev Manovich is a professor, a leader in digital humanities. He's writing a book that I read right now online it's online for free if you look for it about the aesthetics of AI, with a co-author, and the two of them write about these are tools, they are artist tools, they are creative tools. But how much are you willing, micah, in the end, to have it speak for you, right, right or or not? And and I think it's going to be a really interesting thing and then, how much if you sent that to someone else? Is it like cyrano de bergerac? And it was like is this you or is this your machine talking?

0:54:03 - Benito Gonzalez
also, are the writing styles across people going to be the same?

0:54:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Exactly, really really good point. I argued early on that I thought the generative AI could be help with literacy and two of my executive students who are graduating tomorrow one who runs a prison journalism project, the other one for First Nations said whoa there, white man, do you really want to homogenize the language and viewpoints of everyone into the language of power? And and uh, and white power from those who had the privilege to publish? And I said oh, you're right, you're absolutely right. I think we have to be a little careful here about about the homogenization of humanity.

0:54:43 - Speaker 3
Yeah, I like that. I think I'm going to use that again.

0:54:55 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, so anyway, amazon, thanks a lot. Sorry, yeah, I went off the no, no, no, no, no, I I kid. I think that that is something to to consider is the fact that, yeah, is it all going to then look this way, cause I've had issue with the. Google has shown this, apple has shown this and it's upcoming Apple Intelligence. We've seen other companies putting forth this idea that it'll generate a response for you, and I hate that idea because, for me, I'm thinking about how I'm not actually talking to a person and I am not interacting with that person, actually talking to a person and I am not interacting with that person and how. You know what does that mean? That they, they didn't have the time for me, that you know, they didn't have the the interest in in taking a moment to get back to me. And then there's also the aspect of goodness gracious, it's all adding a bunch of extra fluff, and so you have people on one end cranking up the wordiness of the AI, and then the person who receives it on the other end is like I just need a summary of this email and so, yeah, in that effect, it is just AIs talking to AIs, so to speak, and what ends up getting lost in all of that and what you know. When is that going to? I imagine because I have one doctor who does my allergy stuff. I can't think of what they're called immunotherapist doctor. That's was working with me for allergy.

Shots Point is at the very beginning of our conversation. He said shots Point is at the very beginning of our conversation. He said I wanted to let you know that I do use AI. I didn't ask what specifically, but I do use AI to record these calls, to summarize the notes and make sure that I'm hitting all the points and that I get back to you with this, that and the other. And I thought I don't mind, because in the conversation that we're having, this is just about immunotherapy stuff and everything is very much do you have this allergy or do you not? That part is happening with real people and our conversation is limited to like three times. We're going to talk to each other, but can you imagine a doctor who needs to regularly have conversations with their client or their patient? It seems more like client these days, but anyway, about something more serious.

And then, because you've got these A primary care doctor, yeah your primary care physician, using this and missing something important because the AI doesn't realize, so to speak, that it's important.

0:57:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Or I've been in a case where I had some weird vascular thing. I went to four doctors and it was, it was. It was blind men and the elephant. They all presumed their specialty and didn't think beyond that in any way. And it wasn't until the fourth doctor you know the end, obviously who said, oh no, I know what it is and it was an easy fix, it was no big deal, but maybe AI could also expand their perspectives. That is true, did you think of this? What about that? Right, and it could even be tuned to say well, you, normally you work in this area, you know that well, but here's other areas you should consider.

0:58:02 - Mikah Sargent
No, and you're right, isn't? It? Isn't just that, that negative side of things? Um it, and in fact, it's funny that you bring that up, because I was just having a conversation with someone who talked about how they had gone to multiple specialists and no one was giving them the answer that they were looking for. And I said you know, you may consider taking a trip to the emergency room, because they tend to have internists there whose job it is to look at the bigger picture and while all these specialists are going well, it can't be this, because it makes no sense according to my specialty, and the other one's trying to do the same. And, yeah, they're talking to each other a little bit, but, you're right, do you need to? What is the forest for the trees? Kind of situation. And so if an AI in that way could serve as the internist, that could be something that's good.

There was a story recently that I covered on Tech News Weekly in the Wall Street Journal, from Christopher Mims, about AI and how there's an argument between people who are saying AI doesn't kill jobs and AI does kill jobs and what freelancers have to say about it. Before we talk about that WSJ piece specifically, I wanted to mention something that was earlier on, and forgive me because I don't have the link, but this sparked that. There are people who are writers and if you've talked about this story before, let me know but there are people who are, you know, long been in journalism or some other form of writing and they, as a side thing, will go and work for kind of a content farm, so to speak. But this could be writing, you know, short little pieces for technical support pages or whatever it happens to be, and so you go and you work for one of these larger companies that kind of connects people to the writer and it's just an online freelance service. Well, a number of them have come up against something that is a little bit perplexing, because they are being accused of using AI for writing the stories that they're writing. And here's the big problem the tools that the folks at these companies are using to determine if something is AI writing. They often misunderstand what it is trying to say.

Re reality, hold on. I want to find this, uh, exactly because I don't want to, uh, get this wrong. Um, it was just a couple of weeks ago on tech news weekly and it is here we go. Uh, it was a Gizmodo piece and one of the story or one of the um companies is called originality story, or one of the companies is called Originality originalityai. And basically you take a body of work, you pop it into Originalityai and it comes back with a percentage and it'll say 70% human, 30% AI and what it's saying is those are confidence levels. I'm 70% sure that this was written by a human. I'm 70% sure that this was written by a human. I'm 30% sure that it was written by an AI, not that it's 70% written by human and 30% written by. Ai.

They're misunderstanding that in many cases. And then people are getting fired from their freelancing gigs that they've worked at for years and not being able to say, you know, hey, listen, I'm not using AI to write these pieces, and so the interesting twist that's involved with that by the way, this is Thomas Germain on Gizmodo is that we've heard about AI taking the jobs in terms of writing the piece in the first place, but this is AI being used to detect AI for actual human written pieces that is then causing them to lose their jobs. So there are some aspects of this that aren't just that kind of base level moral panic aspect of AI is coming for all of our jobs. Sometimes it's again the human involvement there with that issue, because they're misunderstanding what these tools are trying to tell them. But who added the piece from Christopher Mims for Wall Street Journal?

1:02:34 - Paris Martineau
Did I? That must have been me, oh, I think it was you. Tell us about it.

Let me find it here. So this was a really interesting piece looking at kind of an age-old debate. Like the headline is AI doesn't kill jobs Tell that to freelancers. And it specifically kind of goes into a lot of examples of data backing up what freelancers have been saying for months. One of the first examples in here follows Jennifer Kelly, a freelance copywriter in New England. Follows Jennifer Kelly, a freelance copywriter in New England.

She says she's spent decades writing about a very specific topic. She specifically writes for financial advisors who need copywriting about wealth management. She says in the story not long after OpenAI's chat GPT made its debut, clients stopped calling New clients failed to replace them. Her income dried up almost completely. When she asked the clients she lost, insisted they weren't using AI. But then months later some came back to her with an unusual request. The copy they'd been using AI to generate, they sheepishly admitted wasn't very good and could she make it better. It's not a fix.

She says of the empty-headed generic polygamy that AI excels at writing. You redo it, redo it. I think this is a. It's a really interesting story because it goes into an aspect of this transformation that I feel like hasn't been explored deeply is, you know, yes, copywriters and freelancers and a wide class of kind of creative folks out in the world are experiencing impacts to their you know livelihoodss because of ai. But yet also the people who are using those ai tools and llms are realizing, well, yeah, maybe they can't give a really compelling pitch to wealth management clients or write about a very specific part of like thermodynamics. Maybe we actually need a human to proofread these AI things. So it was an interesting twist, I feel like, to the AI labor debate that I hadn't seen represented before but intuitively feels very correct to me.

1:04:56 - Jeff Jarvis
One of the tropes I'm hearing in the journalism world I heard it again yesterday is AI won't replace you as a journalist. The journalist who knows how to use AI will replace you. I don't know how true that is, but it's a trope.

1:05:12 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, so you feel like it's well. Okay. Connotation for me of trope is that it is an inaccurate, um common term, but I guess denotation suggests otherwise. So you're not by by. By naming it as such, you're not saying that there's any inaccuracy or accuracy to it per se, I'm just saying it's, it's, it's, it's.

1:05:37 - Jeff Jarvis
It's soon to be cliche gotcha.

1:05:40 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, um, I mean, this is the thing that I always come down to, because I do a show every week called Clockwise, and it is a show where there are two of us who are the hosts of the show, and so we stay the same. But every week we have two guests on and everybody brings a topic to the table and then everybody has an opportunity to answer or respond to the topic. So we might ask like you know what, um, what does your wifi system look like? And then everybody kind of talks about how they've got their, the routers that they use, blah, blah, blah.

But oftentimes, as of late, there's been a lot of conversation around generative AI and I hear from a lot of people who exist in our space who have which is completely reasonable and I understand it but they have this very averse reaction to AI and generative AI and feel like it doesn't deserve any space in what we do. But I feel like that's an unrealistic. You know, even if it's a, if it's a moral high ground to stand on, I do think that it's. It's hmm, I'm this, I'll probably get emails for, but does it not smack of of Luddite? In, in, in in a way, because it does feel a little bit like you're just saying that because it's here and it's being used, and it's regularly being used and it seems like people are continuing to use it and continuing to apply it in so many different ways, and so just the idea that I, you know, I'm never going to use it and it shouldn't exist.

And is it, is it not? Is it pandora's box? Is it too late to to to put the cat back in the? And is it, is it not? Is it Pandora's box? Is it too late to to to put the cat back in the mouth? What is it? Cat back in the back.

1:07:31 - Paris Martineau
Go off, jeff. Yeah, don't put the cat in the mouth. No, no, no, no. This is, this is Jeff's. Jeff says a version of that rant every single week. Continue, jeff. You're always like people are being Luddites if they expect AI to go back in the box.

1:07:48 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I wouldn't call it Luddism, okay. What I'd say is there's a, because it could be. What I'm saying could actually be very bad. What I'm saying is there's no hope for guardrails in AI. Is that what you're talking about, paris?

1:08:07 - Paris Martineau
A little bit. I mean, I'm thinking a bit of that, plus the ye olde Gutenberg press analogy of people being scared of the newfangled technology but yet it being an inevitability and that we have to adapt or die.

1:08:21 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, we have to take control of it. This is, I think, the key. We have to understand it and take control of it, but also witness its limitations and our limitations with it and the power it gives some people. And in the end, it's not really the technology, it's us. The problem is always us, it's always the humans. But it's tied in with an argument that AI is a general machine, like the brain press, and there's no way to control how it could be used, and so that's.

I don't think people have dealt with that yet and understood that. This whole idea of alignment with AI and there's super alignment because it's super AI, but supercalifragilisticexpialidocious alignment and all this kind of ridiculous inflation of words we have going on the idea you can't make the machine moral. The machine is amoral, it has no morals, it makes no judgments, it's incapable of making those judgments, it never will be capable of making those judgments. It can make calculations based on things we give it, but that's it will be capable of making those judgments. It can make calculations based on things we give it, but that's it. So the idea. So I may be actually arguing in Paris that the machine is scarier than we know for that reason, because we're stupid and we'll use it badly, and bad people will use it badly and we can't figure it out. That was true of the brain press, but it's here.

1:09:42 - Benito Gonzalez
I want to push back a little bit on what Micah said, because he was saying you're basically saying that like we should just live with it. It's here, we should just like get over it and live with it. But like, what piece of AI writing has actually been any good yet? Like, show me one piece of good AI writing and then maybe, then maybe I'll believe you.

1:09:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Maybe you just don't know.

1:10:08 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I'm more so my and I probably didn't articulate this well enough, but almost certainly didn't. There are people that I greatly respect and who I feel are very considered in the things that they say and have genuinely regularly good takes on things, and there's this many of them exist in the creator space, and so a lot of their arguments around it do surround the idea that it is a um, it is a threat to the jobs that they have, or it is a threat to a part of the job that they have. And then there's also the argument that in so many cases, these generative AI systems are being trained using content that somebody might not want to be used and then sold as a commercial product Right, and I know this conversation comes up a lot and I don't want to go into right to read and that kind of thing, but that that is an aspect of it. And so, because they are concerned about the the fact that these systems are being used, or rather being trained on information that is public on the internet but that they feel should not be part of the product, and because they are worried about how it cheapens the creative job market, then any company that has anything to do with artificial intelligence is by by partaking in it is a bad you know as a bad company doing bad things and is and should not do that thing. That is, it feels like an extreme take.

I guess, is what I'm getting at, that I've been surprised to see the people that I know, you know, fall into and I like that. There's one aspect of what you said, jeff, that I think rings true, for me at least, which is maybe it's not best to say I want to have nothing to do with this and I think that you should have nothing to do with this, but instead to say let's understand this more and let's take control of it as much as we can Now whether or not we actually can, as you're saying, where it could be a scarier thing than it is sure, but to kind of like turn away from it and try to exist in this quote unquote pure world where you are not using AI and the people who are doing the right thing are not using AI. I guess that's the part that I'm kind of like is that a realistic?

1:13:09 - Jeff Jarvis
You raised an interesting specter here, because back in my day there were people who would say, well, I don't have a TV. They would try to prove their humanity by that I don't watch TV, or I only watch PBS right, and these days you see the same thing going on with well, I don't watch TV, or I only watch PBS, right, and these days you see the same thing going on with well, I don't use social media. There's a researcher I read a really fascinating paper from the other day and she goes so hard, trying to not use anything that could violate her privacy, wrote an interesting piece about trying to visit Disney World by holding onto your privacy, right? So there's that kind of purest virginity that occurs. So I wonder whether they're going to find people who say, well, I don't touch AI, no, but they won't know, they won't know. It's like Benito may have just read a great novel and it could have been written by AI and he won't know it.

1:14:02 - Paris Martineau
Okay, but it wasn't.

1:14:07 - Benito Gonzalez
You can tell.

1:14:10 - Jeff Jarvis
The people who wrote that book would say it was written by ai to sell their ai. That I mean. That would absolutely happen.

1:14:14 - Benito Gonzalez
I know, I know, but, but you know, will we get there?

1:14:15 - Jeff Jarvis
soon. Well, I think what it really comes down to is craft.

1:14:16 - Benito Gonzalez
Like people don't like the computer, taking away their craft. Like people worked 20 years to learn how to write or learn how to make music or whatever paint.

1:14:25 - Jeff Jarvis
But that's what people don't like. So this is this idea of content.

1:14:31 - Speaker 3
It's not that valuable, it's the worst way to ever make a day.

1:14:34 - Jeff Jarvis
My writing isn't that writing for writing's sake, content for content's sake. Now, Paris actually reports and she has information and she embarrasses executives and that has value. But just having a take and writing it maybe Mirani's right. Maybe there's too many people who think they're creative. I'm trying to play Leo here, by the way, just to be clear.

1:14:55 - Mikah Sargent
Oh no, you took the walk, didn't you?

1:14:59 - Paris Martineau
Yeah.

1:14:59 - Mikah Sargent
That's where he is right now.

1:15:00 - Paris Martineau
He's taking another walk with an AI accelerationist.

I want to switch gears a tiny bit, but it's the same topic.

There was a story that caught my eye this week that's somewhere in the rundown which is record labels sue two startups for training AI models on their songs, and it's two startups we've met, mentioned on this podcast quite a lot Suno and Udio AI, both of the startups that we use to make little funny songs on this show.

The world's biggest record labels are suing two artificial intelligence startups, writes Bloomberg's Ashley Carman and Rachel Mecks, taking an aggressive stance to protect their intellectual property against the technology that makes it easy for people to generate music based on existing songs. These record labels are specifically asking for damages up to $150,000 per work infringed and they're saying that basically, these companies have scraped their artists' work and are producing audio based on it, which I think is kind of a fair point. I mean, the companies right now have been kind of closed-lipped on what their models were trained on, but in past interviews they've said we tried to cast our net as wide as possible so that we can represent all different traditions of music in our model. But I'm curious what you guys think of this. Do you think that AI models have a right to scrape?

1:16:36 - Mikah Sargent
all music A right to hear.

1:16:38 - Paris Martineau
Do they have a right to hear Jeff?

1:16:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, they do, just like anybody. I mean all of these fights over musical plag plagiarism, musical plagiarism, right, Is that? Four note sequence unique. Leave me a little bit cold. I understand the artist's positions. I understand if somebody's playing out copied, but, but, but. Sampling is now part of the culture. You have to listen to sampling it always has been, but it really is now, uh, and and so to outlaw that causes a problem.

1:17:14 - Paris Martineau
Uh, tribute bands, um genres start because somebody does something right and and you know the worst um acquisition has been white culture versus black musical culture, elvis Presley, but I mean, if we go into the specifics of this lawsuit, the RIAA, which is, I think, one of the plaintiffs, like suing, has claimed that authentic producer tags, which I had to Google, it's like a short sound that's usually at the beginning of a song that identifies the song's producer. The producer tags have been appearing on some of the music coming out of Suno and Udia and I mean, I think, as we've all noticed, they go on to say, like people who use the services have generated sounds that sound very similar to artist-made songs like the Temptation's my Girl or Green Day's American Idiot or Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas. I mean, part of the appeal of these services is that you can kind of create lookalike songs or hearalike, however you want to phrase it.

1:18:19 - Jeff Jarvis
The question is acquisition. If you scraped music without paying for it that's a different question right, then you stole it, in essence, in terms of the ability to listen to it. But let's just say that you bought it, you have your Spotify, you have whatever, and let's say you did it before the terms of service change. In theory, does any musician have the right to listen to Spotify and be inspired by it to make something transformative, and should the machine have that exact same right? So you're right, mike, I know you're mocking it, but it is the right to listen. Do you have the right to be inspired? The question, in fair use, is is it transformative? Now there we can debate that. Is it transformative enough? Is it too much like Lady Gaga, or is it inspired by Lady Gaga? That's a hard judgment and that's why courts have ridiculously long cases around things like Ed Sheeran's last case.

1:19:25 - Benito Gonzalez
Well, there's two things about this. First of all, in the background the RIA they're trying to make their own AI models so they can sell their own models that imitate their artists. That's something they're actively trying to do right now? They are yeah, so that they can make the Lady Gaga model, and then that's why they're suing these guys. Well, that's one of the things. The other thing, things. I want this whole thing to end like the end of Reservoir Dogs. Please, like the RIA and Suno and UDO, just all shoot each other.

1:19:52 - Mikah Sargent
Just please let that happen. I realized that I've been having so much fun talking with you all that I have completely bypassed my job as a host and we need to take another break here on the show. So I'm going to do that now, Before we come back with even more here on Twig, Including the calculations required To figure out how many llamas are in a thing. This episode of this Week in Google Is brought to you by Bitwarden, the password manager, offering a cost effective solution that can drastically increase your chances Of staying safe online. Bitwarden just announced that it officially supports PassKeys Love that On browser extensions and mobile devices, so that way you can take those PassKeys with you anywhere you log in. Passkeys on mobile are available on iOS and they are in open beta on Android. More info about this will be coming soon, so stay posted on Android. More info about this will be coming soon, so stay posted on that.

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1:22:47 - Jeff Jarvis
It's a really weird question, Micah. I'm not sure if you're going to do it now or later, but I'm curious Did you put in the llamattf, or was that Leo?

1:22:57 - Mikah Sargent
That wasn't me, so that must have been Leo.

1:23:01 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, that's a Leo link. Okay, that's funny.

1:23:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Let's save it for next week, then Leo can explain. It's a. It's a font with an llm built in what does that mean? You can't just put that out there for themselves oh, this is some lorax bs it's a, it's a, it's a funny. Who will speak? The?

1:23:24 - Paris Martineau
trees. Who will speak for the letter Q? Oh God, I know.

1:23:30 - Jeff Jarvis
It's only Sesame Street. Kids raised on Sesame Street will have strange nightmares now. Oh golly yeah, you should pick a different letter though Paris than Q for your example.

1:23:41 - Paris Martineau
Oh yeah, I guess we should. Why has it been poisoned by this?

1:23:46 - Mikah Sargent
I know, because it's such a cool-looking letter.

1:23:47 - Paris Martineau
It is a really cool letter.

1:23:50 - Mikah Sargent
No, I shouldn't say that.

1:23:53 - Jeff Jarvis
All right, well, let's hold that one for Leo next, because I'm dying to find out more about it.

1:23:57 - Mikah Sargent
Who put in the one with the bad swear word. I will pile drive you if you mention it.

1:24:01 - Paris Martineau
Oh, that was definitely Jeff.

1:24:03 - Mikah Sargent
Did Benito write that title?

1:24:05 - Jeff Jarvis
No, that's the headline. That's an actual headline, and I thought Paris might like it too.

1:24:12 - Paris Martineau
I thought it was cute.

1:24:15 - Jeff Jarvis
It was funny.

1:24:16 - Paris Martineau
I thought it was very funny that friend enemy of the show, ed Zitron, posted. If anyone sends me this link again, I will effing kill them.

1:24:29 - Jeff Jarvis
That's why I put it in there, yeah.

1:24:31 - Mikah Sargent
Context I was not originally scheduled to host Twig today, and so things just.

1:24:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Leo had to go take a walk on the beach. He needed to refresh. He's got a big red phone on his desk.

1:24:44 - Paris Martineau
Whenever a tech billionaire needs to let off some steam, he runs to the beach. He's got a big red phone on his desk Whenever a tech billionaire needs to let off some steam, he runs to the beach he runs and.

1:24:50 - Jeff Jarvis
He needed a new session of brainwashing. He was starting to lose. Yeah, they said we need to get him.

1:24:55 - Mikah Sargent
We need to get him, so. I have not read this piece? Do you want to tell us a little bit about it, or you just want to let it exist in the space? People can.

1:25:04 - Jeff Jarvis
It's a rant, it's all it is is a rant saying stop putting AI in everything, stop saying you're going to do this or I'm going to have a fit on it. And it's just funny how it goes overboard in complaining.

1:25:15 - Paris Martineau
That's pretty much. For instance, we'll go into it a little bit, please do, I will bleep pile drive you if you mention AI again, says the headline it goes into into you know? Uh, the recent innovations in the ai space, most notably those at the gpt4, obviously have far-reaching implications for society, ranging from utopian elimination to treasury, to the dystopian damage the livelihood of artists in a capitalist society, to existential threats to humanity itself. I myself have formal training as a data scientist, says the guy. He's like I will break your neck if you talk to me about this again.

And then here I'll go over some of the headlines or subject lines in this. Point one but we will realize untold efficiencies, machine learn what the bleep did I just say. It goes on further to describe why he doesn't think you know talking, spreading this much hype about AI and LLMs is correct. And then point two but we need AI to remain sweet, merciful, jesus, stop talking, unless you're one of the handful of businesses who know exactly what they're going to use AI for. You do not need AI for anything, or rather, you do not need to do anything to reap the benefits. And it goes on.

But we've already seen extensive gains from and cut off again.

1:26:32 - Jeff Jarvis
We must prepare for the future of my favorite line was this uh, number four. The headline was but we must prepare for the future of. And then he comes back and says I'm going to ask chat GPT how to prepare a garret, and then I'm going to strangle you with it and you will simply have to pray that I roll the 10% chance that it freaks out and tells me that a Garrett shouldn't consist entirely of paper mache and malice.

1:27:00 - Paris Martineau
The last one is oh, that's a good one. The last one is oh, so you're one of those ai pesa. And then cuts it off, with god as my witness. You grotesque simpleton, if you don't personally write machine learning systems and you open your mouth about ai one more time, I'm going to mail you a brick and a piece of paper with a prompt injection telling you to bludgeon yourself in the face with it. Then sit back and wait for you to load it into chat gbt, because you probably can't read unassisted anymore oh, wow so it was just a rant somebody he had a good time.

1:27:30 - Mikah Sargent
I don't know who it is it actually was written by ai um moving along uh so there's a story in here about the rise and fall of the software developer. Is this? Is this also about ai?

1:27:45 - Jeff Jarvis
um, but it's also with data. And you know, on the show we've quoted and Jason and I talk about this all the time we had an AI CEO on who said English is the most important language and Jensen Wong programming language. Sorry, jensen Wong at NVIDIA said that universities should stop training computer scientists, and that's provocative and it is what it is. But the data you know, rather more than half of US software developers work in the professional and business services sector. Software developer employment peaked in 2019 and has been declining ever since. There's a scary downward slope chart. That downward slope chart is not employment, it is. I think it's growth. I think that's what it is.

Us Software Employment Index is what it is, but there's a, you know, the chart is also cut off. It goes from 100% to 11% and then down to 80 something percent, right, so it's not zero, but it's a trend, and you've got a lot of people who are thinking that their careers are made for them by going to software development, and I think that's still true to a great extent. Just like there's still journalists, even though journalist jobs are going away. If you're really good at it and you find the right way to do it, yeah, but it's not the be all and end all anywhere, and I think that the stem taking over schools and the reason I want to start a program in internet studies and bring the humanities in is because I I think that, uh, it's we have to. We have to finally undo sputnik. That's how far back I'm gonna go my, my children, uh yeah, okay, see, you've said something provocative sputnik.

Sputnik led to the whole stem argument. Oh my god, the ruskies are gonna take over this. We have to beat them at it. We have to put in science and math and the kids have to know humanities. Oh, that's all fluffy crap. Get rid of that. Arts who needs that? Well, someday have a machine that could create things you know. So I think it's the revenge of the liberal arts major, which makes me kind of happy, actually. So I'm not denigrating software developers. I'm not denigrating the need for them. We wouldn't have all these wonderful tools without them. But I think that the rush in every university going overboard for only things that have job potential and computer science had the most job potential, so everybody had to go to computer science. That's coming home to roost, okay.

1:30:25 - Mikah Sargent
That's coming home to roost. Okay, I actually had never thought about that serving as the kind of catalyst for the switch to science and technology and math as the thing that we needed to focus on, especially given how much in the history of humanity arts and humanities were the forerunner. It was philosophy and everything involved there.

1:30:59 - Jeff Jarvis
That's kind of I just I can also do a Gutenberg moment here that the press did not cause the scientific revolution, but it enabled it, because now multiple scholars and researchers in multiple places could work off the same um text, and that means data. And it enabled comparison against a known set of ground truth, or or at least ground um argument, put it that way. So, yes, the the printing press led to a burgeoning of humanities, but it also led to the burgeoning of science. So it's not just Sputnik. You both, let me just do all three of you I'm counting in Benito here you all do know what Sputnik was. Yes, the, yeah okay.

1:31:45 - Mikah Sargent
I was like I think I do, yes, yeah, okay. I was like I think I do. Now you're making me question that I don't know. It was the first satellite. Yeah, okay Good.

1:31:53 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I was three years old when it went up. Oh, really Did you ride in it or, on top of it, sure. Like Dr.

1:32:08 - Mikah Sargent
Strangelove, I was attempting to use artificial intelligence to generate an image of Jeff Jarvis, whom I described as in this case, because I was trying to get a photo of you dismantling the Sputnik satellite, but it just made a Pixar character, so it didn't really work, unfortunately. Anyway, let's see what else is on the line.

1:32:41 - Jeff Jarvis
That's Joe Esposito's job. You're trying to take over here with AI and he's not happy about it. Yeah, it's not okay. Your therapist is going to be mad at the show because you're trying to take over here with AI and he's not happy about it. Yeah, it's not okay. Your therapist is going to be mad at the show because you're not going to fire your therapist because you have AI.

1:32:55 - Mikah Sargent
That reminds me, actually, of something kind of annoying that happened. So I was thinking about Joe Esposito, who uses. They did a lot of stuff with AI and then they heard from creatives and then they kind of they actually, I would argue, whenever they first launched the generative AI stuff, they did a relatively good job of kind of explaining what it was, how it was going to work, what they were using behind the scenes and how things were trained. And then there was a period of time where folks were concerned about getting sued because of the potential training data and Adobe said look, we'll back you up if you ever have a court case. And then we heard about Adobe potentially training on photos that you create in Photoshop. But then we also heard about how Adobe was working along with several other kind of generative AI groups to introduce AI watermarking, essentially. So there were some sort of bits of information within any photos that were generated that would mark a photo as having used AI. So here's where this is annoying.

I didn't know about this. I came across it because of something that happened to me that I'll explain in a moment, but within the film portion of Instagram, the film groups of Instagram, and by film I don't mean video film, I mean film photographers. There has been this backlash taking place because film photographers will scan their film and then will pull it up in Photoshop and make adjustments to it that are necessary to properly process the photo and get the photo that they want out of the film, and then they post it to Instagram. And Instagram, uh, by way of uh, whatever Photoshop is adding to the image, has started to display made with AI in as a tag. So where the? So you know how on Instagram, you've got the person's username on on any post, you've got the username and then right below that is the location. Um, it's just kind of a tiny subheading. It'll say made with AI, right there where the location is, and then the location afterward.

1:35:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Because they're presuming Instagram is presuming it or because it has a watermark, because Photoshop is adding some sort of watermark in there.

1:35:28 - Mikah Sargent
It's a. It's not an actual physical, it's a digital watermark, right, okay? And so I and I really was I'm not trying to make this, uh, this is not me trying to to bring attention to this, but I will say that um recently got engaged and I posted.

1:35:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh bozzle.

1:35:46 - Mikah Sargent
Bozzle. Thank you, thank you. I posted about having gotten engaged and I, you know, I have a friend who's a photographer and he does the edits that he does on the photos, and I posted these photos on Instagram and the stupid thing said that they were made with it, said it was generated with AI. So then I had a few people who are observant, kind of confused, like are you making this up?

and I had to convince everyone that my fiance is not my canadian fiance, no, he's, in fact, a very real person. Um, so, yeah, I was really. He's a rabbit named harvey. Yeah, exactly, he's very real. But To me yeah, exactly, he's real to me.

There's a part of it that I like the idea that people will be made aware of if something is generated with AI, and that that could help when it comes to, especially on social media platforms where you can reshare content very easily. I get why they're doing it. I think that the implementation is tricky because here's the thing Instagram offers a toggle and so you can turn off the made with AI tag, but what? But? Hold on, hold on. You can only do it for certain posts. If the post is, according to Instagram's black box, of a backend. Um, if the post is, uh, featuring something what do they say that is based, something like based in reality, or is too realistic, or something like that, then it won't let you toggle it off.

Well, given that these are real photos of real people, I couldn't turn off the stupid made with AI tag on mine, and so I was annoyed by that, and apparently a lot of people in the film community on Instagram are annoyed because they're going these are real photos. We didn't make these film photos with AI. They're actual photos. We just did some editing in Photoshop and it's tagging them. So Adobe needs to get its act together and I think Meta needs to get its act together a little bit and make some corrections to what's going on there in terms of, on Adobe's side, what actually gets that tag. And then on Meta's side, like, what do I need to do? Send a video to Meta saying no, no, look, he's real, I promise I. Yeah, I just I was annoyed by that.

1:38:11 - Jeff Jarvis
That is so interesting, but do you think it's really going to matter in 10 years that it was made with AI If it's just a tool like like Photoshop?

1:38:23 - Mikah Sargent
I think it matters when it comes to. There was a great example of where it didn't really matter, but it showed how it could matter recently and you probably talked about it on this show, but it was the what's the place with Anna Wintour and it's they do the cool dresses and Vogue no, she hosts the event.

1:38:46 - Speaker 3
The Met Gala. The Met Gala yeah and no she hosts the event.

1:38:48 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, and there were a couple of people who weren't there, but I think Rihanna was one of them and I think it was Katy Perry was the other one. They weren't there, but there were AI generated photos that people put out and said, oh, look at Rihanna in her outfit and look at Katy Perry in her outfit. And then you come to find out later that neither of them were there, but thousands and thousands and thousands of people had shared these photos, commenting on it as if it was real and, you know, pushing oh, this is the best dress that there. How did this not make it to the top of the list of the best dressed people? Blah, blah, blah.

And that was a harmless example, I think, of a way that that could be an issue, because what if you have, then, the photos that are showing things like the Center for Countering Hate I think it was it recently did a study, and there are a couple of these tools that they didn't have the protections in place to stop people from generating photos of what looked like people taking votes and ballots and throwing them into a trash can or trying to mess with different systems and all sorts of stuff. Maybe you're saying, though, jeff, maybe you've got an optimistic take there where you're saying in 10 years people will have the necessary filters in place where they know that, but I don't think.

1:40:17 - Jeff Jarvis
I think what I'm saying is it'll become so ubiquitous that it won't be seen as cheating anymore, it won't be seen as trying to fool people anymore. It's just of course you, you know.

1:40:25 - Paris Martineau
I hope that you know. It's still weird in 10 years if someone, if a completely fabricated photo of a real event being passed off as real is making the rounds I think regardless of the tool.

1:40:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Trying to fool someone is bad, right?

1:40:40 - Benito Gonzalez
oh sorry, sorry, you cut up sorry, regardless of the tool, trying to fool people is bad. So if you're using these yeah ai to fool people, then yeah, of, of course, people are going to hate it. But there's also a problem with that the idea of tagging things as AI, to begin with, because there's always a place around that and there's always the analog hole. And then there's always also, like tools that you've been using in Photoshop, things like auto color or auto light, like that's technically AI. So like, yeah, it's true, you did use AI, but you know, not in the way that you know a generative AI. You know, but you are using AI.

1:41:20 - Mikah Sargent
It's true, so so how do you distinguish that Right? And then that's a little bit of Jeff's point. You know, kind of we already are accepting of certain forms of AI, in the sense that people aren't bothered by someone taking the person who's mooning the camera in the background to try to ruin a shot that you've taken out of the photo. And you know, I take a photo at the beach of my family and there's a person in the back trying to do something to make the photo look bad and I edit them out. We're not. I don't have to disclose in the comments. As it stands. I've never felt a societal pressure to disclose in the comments. Hey, by the way, there was a mooning guy back there, whitest butt you've ever seen. But I just took him out. I think you should. Maybe in those specific words.

yeah, but yeah, I don't know that's an interesting thing.

1:42:14 - Jeff Jarvis
It's incredibly interesting. Go ahead, Paris.

1:42:17 - Paris Martineau
I just think it's incredibly interesting. I haven't seen that. You didn't try to pull up your Instagram. Maybe it's only showing on notebooks. It wasn't showing on the post on Instagram.

1:42:26 - Jeff Jarvis
I just did the same thing.

1:42:30 - Paris Martineau
We're both so nosy as hell. Lovely photos. By the way, I could never tell they were fully generated by AI. He looks like a very human man. All of his fingers are totally right.

1:42:42 - Mikah Sargent
I know it's so weird, yeah, and the photo with the rigs, they both and I thought, oh, now AI's made it.

1:42:49 - Paris Martineau
I can convince my mom During Pride Month too. It's really rude.

1:42:55 - Mikah Sargent
No folks, this is jokes, these are jokes. This is a very real person. As far as I can tell anyway. What if he's an AI plant?

1:43:05 - Jeff Jarvis
You have something more to talk to your therapist about? Oh?

1:43:07 - Mikah Sargent
yeah.

1:43:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Imagine this person.

1:43:09 - Paris Martineau
Yes, my AI therapist. It's like a reverse Stepford Wives situation.

1:43:13 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I don't see it on web either. It appears to only be on mobile.

1:43:18 - Paris Martineau
I wonder why that is that it would only be on Instagram mobile. From a product rollout perspective, I guess.

1:43:25 - Benito Gonzalez
Well, meta doesn't care about web, come on.

1:43:27 - Jeff Jarvis
That's true. No, you're exactly right. Oh, an Instagram.

1:43:31 - Paris Martineau
Oh, it does. It's the first thing that comes up on my Instagram. I don't know if you can see the. It's definitely got a tag right there. It says made of AI.

Oh wow. And I can click on it and it comes up and it says made of AI. Oh wow. And I can click on it and it comes up and it says made with AI. Generative AI may have been used to create or edit content in this post. What is generative AI? Generative AI is a type of commuter model that has learned data patterns. People can use it to create something new, like images, videos or husbands. It doesn't say that last part.

1:44:00 - Jeff Jarvis
AI stands for actual infatuation.

1:44:05 - Mikah Sargent
That's true, I swear, I swear. So did you find this out from someone telling you or did you notice it on your own? I noticed it immediately and I thought what the heck? This is unacceptable. And then I tapped on it and it was like, do you want to turn this off? And I said yeah, because it's not true. And then it said well, too bad, because this photo is too realistic. So, uh, because of that, it has to stay on like, but that's, it's real, because, anyway.

Um, let's take a quick break before we come back with the rest of the show, I do want to tell you about Cachefly, who are bringing you this episode of this week in google and, frankly, who bring you a Actually all of what we do here at Twit. Frankly, for more than 20 years, CacheFly has held a track record for high-performing, ultra-reliable content delivery, serving more than 5,000 companies in more than 80 countries. At Twit, we have been using CacheFly for more than a decade and love the lag-free video loading, those hyper-fast downloads and the friction-free site interactions. Cachefly is the only CDN that's built for throughput. Its ultra-low latency video streaming delivers video to more than a million concurrent users. Lightning-fast gaming delivers downloads faster and you get zero lag, glitches or outages. You know those gamers they're not interested in having any lag at all, so it's very important. Mobile content optimization offers automatic and simple image optimization, so that way your site loads faster on any device. Flexible month-to-month billing for as long as needed and discounts also for fixed terms.

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Google All right. So I think we might as well talk about a little bit of Google stuff, including Google saying Including Google saying look, we know that the whole Find my device situation wasn't working as we expect and we are definitely working on it in the kind of you take a little tag and you put it on your bag. That's Amore.

You take a little tag, you put it on your bag and you are able to then find that bag through the network of other Android devices that are out there and other kind of Bluetooth peripherals. It creates this blanket system where a blanket network where you're able to track your objects a little bit easier. Unfortunately, there were a lot of complaints from folks that the system was just not working as expected. But Google says don't worry, we are working on it. Google says we are actively working to roll out enhancements to how the Find my Device network operates that will improve the speed and ability of locating lost items over the coming weeks. Didn't realize it was that bad that they're like. We're going to make it work. Devices are continuing to join the new Find my Device network and we expect the network to grow, which will also help improve lost device findability. We encourage bluetooth tag owners to change their find my device network settings to with network in all areas to help improve the network's ability to find their lost items in lower traffic areas.

1:48:20 - Jeff Jarvis
So here's a question I got for you all right, since you're apple people. Um, I said that was some irony. I haven't been accused before of calling it my Apple. Um, so did Apple do this differently, in that is, every phone they have by default able to find stuff and Google didn't, and now they're trying to convince people to expand their network or what's the difference between the two networks here? Because there's a lot of Android phones.

1:48:49 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, so I'm confused about that too now because, yes, apple, oh Paris, you're talking, I figured it out.

1:48:55 - Paris Martineau
I was saying sorry. You know, sometimes you take a little bite of salami and you mute yourself so that people don't have to hear mouth noises, and then you forget to unmute yourself. So is how Android phones or Pixel phones work that if you had, like, multiple phones or Google devices on it, you'd have to add each one individually to be able to find it? Is that how it works, or is it just automatic?

1:49:21 - Mikah Sargent
That's what I'm. So I am not sure when it comes to Google, because yeah, for.

1:49:25 - Paris Martineau
Jeff, you're the Google boy here. I don't know, have you never found something?

1:49:30 - Jeff Jarvis
on your phone. No.

1:49:31 - Paris Martineau
You don't lose things. No.

1:49:33 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I don't have things.

1:49:34 - Paris Martineau
I use the find my feature on my iphone all the time, but I mean I I always lose my airpods everywhere in my home. I haven't, so then they have a nifty feature where you can just open up and it'll tell you like not close, not close. Then I walk in the other room and it's like it's hotter colder and to the right and so I'm literally playing hotter colder and then it's like they're here and I'm like I don't colder.

And then it's like they're here and I'm like I don't see them, and then they're like under my covers or something.

1:50:02 - Mikah Sargent
And they have a really good little speaker on the. Well, I don't know if you've got the newer one that has a speaker on the outside, but yeah, the sound is piercing, so you can find it, even if your dog has swallowed it. That hasn't happened. That hasn't happened. My dogs are too small for that, thank goodness.

1:50:16 - Paris Martineau
I also use the Apple AirTags a lot as well. I have the same problem with my keys. They've got a speaker on those. I have one hidden in a secret compartment on my fancy bike so I can always see where it is and if it ever God forbid got stolen, I could track it down. I'm surprised that it's taken Google this long to maybe even think about getting up to par.

1:50:39 - Mikah Sargent
Android devices participating in the Find my Device network use Bluetooth to scan for nearby items. So it seems like if you turn on Find my Device, which is even before there were these little tags, it was used to find your actual phone then you are part of this by default.

1:51:02 - Paris Martineau
And I would think that that's how iPhones work as well, right, exactly Is every iPhone is part of the Find my device network.

1:51:07 - Mikah Sargent
If you have on Find my on an iPhone or any of your devices, then they can participate in that network, and it says the same thing here for Android, so I don't know why. Okay, it says you can control how your Android device participates in the network at any time by visiting find your offline devices in the find my device settings and choosing between the following options. And then there's wow, this is confusing. Okay, off.

If you prefer not to participate in the find my device network or have the ability to find your own items when they are offline by storing encrypted recent locations with Google, you can choose to turn it off Without network. It says you can still find some of your items when they're offline, including your Android device and the FastPair accessories connected to it, but you can't use tracker tags to find items like your wallet, your keys or bike. This is very confusing. There are a lot of different options and some of them help other people find their devices as well, and it seems like Google is saying hey, we'd love it if you turn this on to make the network more robust for other people. So maybe there are more Android users who are actually turning that off, but it's been my anecdotal experience that most iPhone users have Find my turned on because they want to find their own phone? Yeah, exactly.

They want to be able to find their phone, their iPad, whatever happens to be lost. So then you are automatically part of the Find my network. So it might just be kind of an implementation difference, but it sounds like. Do you guys ever Go ahead?

1:52:38 - Paris Martineau
Sorry, you're saying something important. I was going to say something meaningless.

1:52:42 - Mikah Sargent
if you want to continue, I will quickly say it sounds like Google was not prepared, in part, for the huge blast of devices that were getting added to the network, and that is, they're kind of getting that figured out as well. Now, what were you guys?

1:53:00 - Paris Martineau
ever. I found that one of the reasons I use find my often is I will. My phone is blue. I don't know if you can fully see it against. It's like a dark blue. Everything in my home is also this color, so I lose my phone all the time.

And it will just be like in a couch cushion or on my bed or on a pillow that is the same color. So I use find my to go onto my computer and then make my phone ping when I'm alone and I assume other. Have you guys ever done this, or am I just alone?

1:53:31 - Mikah Sargent
I I do find my phone, but I use my apple watch.

1:53:34 - Paris Martineau
Oh oh, that makes sense yeah same thing.

1:53:36 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, same, not for the same reason. I don't have a lot of blue stuff, but yeah, they're. Occasionally I'll lose my phone. Usually I've sat it down. What's stupid is that I will sit it somewhere and I go I'm going to forget that I put this here because it's not a normal place where I would put it, and then inevitably I have forgotten where I would put it. And then inevitably I have forgotten where I said I was going to forget that I put it. And so then I, yeah, just swipe up on my, my watch and have it make the sounds. I think that's probably one of the features I use the most. Go ahead, jeff.

1:54:07 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris. I don't know if I want to pick you for being so. What should I say? Absent-minded?

1:54:13 - Paris Martineau
I would describe it as more my mind is full of so many things that I often forget. I mean I also have ADHD, so you know there's a lot of stuff going on there.

1:54:23 - Jeff Jarvis
Do you use your?

1:54:23 - Paris Martineau
glasses. Do I lose my glasses? No, Because they're always on my face. They have to be on my face or I can't see.

1:54:31 - Jeff Jarvis
So my phone is now equivalent to that.

1:54:34 - Mikah Sargent
You can't see without your phone.

1:54:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I'm just never without it. Oh, it's always just with me, because I'm more comfortable if I don't have it. But I, I am ditzy enough that I, honest to god, have been in cases where the phone is in my hand and I suddenly panic and say where's my phone?

1:54:51 - Paris Martineau
there have been multiple times where I've been like where's my phone? I may be like texting someone to call me. I'm going to pull open the find my thing and my phone is in my pants pocket. That's happened like more than once.

1:55:05 - Mikah Sargent
I can't claim either of those. I'm sorry, I do feel naked without my watch, so that is one thing where I notice it actively. Yeah, I don't have that with my phone.

1:55:19 - Paris Martineau
Okay, this story that we just did about Google potentially updating to find my is a good segue into perhaps doing the changelog.

1:55:30 - Mikah Sargent
Beautiful. So, speaking of the changelog, I don't know how does it go. Do we have a sting?

1:55:36 - Paris Martineau
Come on, there we go Google changelog.

1:55:37 - Mikah Sargent
I don't know how does it go Do we have a sting, come on there we go Nice. First and foremost is this an improvement to Google, and by Google I mean Googlecom. Google says we're getting rid of infinite search or, sorry, infinite scroll. Yeah, you're going to have to start paying two cents per search. No infinite scroll on search results. I've noticed this and I hate it. I hate infinite scroll.

1:56:10 - Jeff Jarvis
I was just getting used to it, and then they kill it.

1:56:14 - Mikah Sargent
It has all that stupid stuff in between your search results that I don't want there. I just want my search results. So Google says that part of the reason it's doing this is because it will lead to performance improvements on finding your search. Yeah, if you only have to load a page at a time, you're going to get your search a lot faster. Search a lot faster. But I think secretly, it's also because people keep complaining about how google search has really just fallen apart.

1:56:42 - Jeff Jarvis
It's not like it used to be that's why I think infinite search will be better, because you can scroll past any junky stuff and keep going. But it's all junky stuff all the way down it feels like don't blame google, blame all the dorks who fill up the web with crap, and it's going to get worse with AI.

1:56:59 - Mikah Sargent
But what about those interstitials?

1:57:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Have a little sim paper. Google here to find the good stuff.

1:57:02 - Mikah Sargent
You know like, so you'll have your search results. But then there's this part that scrolls this way. Am I just being trolled? I scrolled, that's not just me. Yeah, the carousel.

1:57:17 - Paris Martineau
Like, why is the carousel mobile? I'll like get down, you know, maybe like 10 results or something. Probably only five of them are non-sponsored and it'll be a different search. It'll be like other people search for blah, blah and then it's the results for that.

1:57:24 - Mikah Sargent
Like I don't need that I didn't want my results, and that's not the dweebs that you were talking about, jeff, that's yeah, that's business remember back in the day when they just had a bunch of o's or the search it, it was like G-O-O-O-O-O-O for all the different search pages.

1:57:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, that was really good. I loved that. That was good, yeah, it was nice.

1:57:42 - Paris Martineau
It was cute, remember, I'm feeling lucky.

1:57:45 - Mikah Sargent
I remember I'm feeling lucky. Oh, I love seeing you both as old farts and I don't tell anybody, but I swear to God, I had no idea what that button was for for so long I was worried.

1:57:59 - Paris Martineau
I will say also I don't think I there were years that went by that I didn't click Cause I was like I don't think I'm feeling lucky I was genuinely concerned that it had some.

1:58:09 - Mikah Sargent
This is this is really going to show you that the religious trauma of my childhood. I was genuinely concerned that it had something to do with gambling and gambling was very much against my religion growing up and so I thought if I clicked a button it was going to take me to a gambling site and I was going to be in trouble for it, so I would never click the button. And then finally, I think I was, I think it was high school probably, and we had like a class in the library that was all about doing Google searches and learning all the fun little operators and things that you could do, and some they explained like what the I'm feeling lucky button did and I thought I cannot believe yeah, I'm feeling lucky.

1:58:49 - Paris Martineau
I can also. I have a very sharp memory of the middle school library class I was in where they explained Google search operators and it was like it's something that sticks in my head to this day. I was like wow, yeah. At the same time we were learning about using those like online.

1:59:07 - Mikah Sargent
I don't know what the group noun is for the different databases like LexisNexis and elsewhere that had research articles and peer you know peer reviewed stuff that you could look through. Yeah, databases, I remember learning about how to search those properly as well Still handy to this day and I still think about. I wonder, I wonder if kids these days are being taught about what you need to do when you're looking at a paper and if you know look for the funding, look for um, the, the potential issues with with uh, ethics and all that stuff that we learned.

1:59:44 - Jeff Jarvis
I hope that's all right, this is an old fart moment. Did you use uh libraries? Did you use card catalogs? I?

1:59:52 - Mikah Sargent
never had the opportunity. I think that they maybe did one as an object lesson. It was kind of like look how they used to do it. Now we're going to show you how to do it this way. I don't think we did card catalog.

2:00:02 - Jeff Jarvis
So the onion? I just saw a headline pass by on the socials that library decides to eliminate Dewey Decimal System files. All books under B for book.

2:00:18 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, that broke my heart to hear that the one you said they were going to do it with a Dewey decimal system.

2:00:20 - Paris Martineau
I do remember learning about the Dewey decimal system, though I don't remember card catalogs. But I did have to learn things about the Dewey decimal system.

2:00:27 - Mikah Sargent
Same. I was a library kid. I was like a library assistant. I had a class period where I worked in the library.

2:00:34 - Jeff Jarvis
The Dewey decimal system is a great example, it's my friend, david Weinberger, who's written all kinds of wonderful books. He was a co-author of the Cloutre Manifesto. I think Everything's Miscellaneous was the book where he describes the biases built into the Dewey Decimal System. It's like I'm going to make the wrong numbers here, like a hundred numbers for Christianity and there's like 10 numbers for Judaism, and then there's like one for everything else.

2:00:57 - Mikah Sargent
Wow.

2:00:58 - Jeff Jarvis
Right and because the taxonomy, the bias built into the taxonomy and the presumptions of it is kind of fascinating.

2:01:05 - Mikah Sargent
Wow, I didn't think about that, that is very interesting.

2:01:10 - Paris Martineau
Wait, you guys learned about the Dewey.

2:01:11 - Benito Gonzalez
Decimal System, but never used the card catalog, because that's exactly what the Dewey Decimal System is for.

2:01:17 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, but you Never use the card catalog because that's exactly what the Dewey Decimal System is for, but you can still look up the books on the shelf.

2:01:24 - Benito Gonzalez
You go to 100 and then you go down to 125, point, blah, blah, blah blah. Oh, so it was just like a spreadsheet or something, and it wasn't like an actual card catalog.

2:01:31 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, correct, okay, yeah, so let's see. It looks like. Yeah, the Bible has all of 220. Christianity has all of 230. Christian practice and observance has all of 240. Christian orders and local church has all of 250. Social and ecclesiastical theology has all of 260. History of Christianity has all of 270. Christian denominations has all of 280. And then 290 is other religions. History of Christianity has all of 270. Christian denominations has all of 280. And then 290 is other religions. Jews didn't even get 10 points.

2:02:06 - Jeff Jarvis
Geez, I'm sorry, that is wild.

2:02:10 - Mikah Sargent
Isn't that insane, oh why? Did they ever teach that and here I was. Yeah, here I was. All the Dewey Decimal System. I will protect you and now. I'm like, oh, you can go the way of the dodo.

2:02:32 - Paris Martineau
All right, If you would like your Gemini to be as racist as your favorite, a prison box and make content based on it. Google will let you do that now.

2:02:44 - Mikah Sargent
If you would like Gemini to stand behind a bush in a public location and scream at small people while they run away, google will allow you to do that. While they run away, google will allow you to do that. So what we're getting at here is that Google says guess what? You can make your chatbot Gem dash a sprinkle of personality to it. A soup saw, a soup saw, if you will. Yes, I will. Here's the problem that I have with this. In almost every case, it just means that the stupid thing is far more wordy than it would otherwise be. How else do you add personality than adding a bunch of words that don't need to be there while you're giving me my answer? Inflection.

2:03:49 - Paris Martineau
I do think that's fair, I guess, if it's voice-based yeah. I mean, I'm curious do the YouTubers get a cut of this somehow? Oh, come on, no way I mean there can't be, there's no way that it's going to happen. But I mean, is mr beast just gonna be a chat bot now and he will have nothing to do with it?

2:04:11 - Mikah Sargent
mr beast is I'm maybe he's already a chat bot but yeah, that's, true does he have a choice? Maybe he's already a chatbot?

2:04:17 - Paris Martineau
But yeah, that's true. Does he have a choice? Wow, google has stationed roughly 10 Google Labs employees in the project full-time, writes Gizmodo. They are all led by Ryan Germick, a long-time designer for the company and a former steward of Google Doodles. The man who brought you Google Doodles is now bringing you YouTuber chatbots.

2:04:37 - Mikah Sargent
The Google Doodle guy is making our chatbots into YouTubers. I'm just, what YouTuber do I want? I don't know. I'm okay here, words can be difficult. Yeah, I just don't see the reason why. Because, okay, I understand where someone's saying, um look, I'm talking to this thing and I do want it to be more personable. Maybe that's what it is. You know, you do want that uh best friend to talk to. So, leo, maybe he wants it to be like his favorite YouTuber. I don't know who his favorite YouTuber is, but whomever that happens to be, um, he is his own favorite YouTuber. Yeah, so it'd you'd be like, uh, you know, you ask it, how many llamas is equivalent to one elephant? And uh, then it says 33.3, my guy. And then it's actually youtuber.

2:05:33 - Paris Martineau
Interesting. I didn't realize this, which is my bad. This is based off of a report from the information that came out a couple days ago from my colleagues, julia Hortenstein and John Victor. Julia shout out is our new intern and this was her first scoop. But it's more broad than that. They write. Google has been developing a product for creating and conversing with customizable chatbots, which could be modeled on celebrities or made by users. The bots would be similar to like the personalities that Meta is putting out and characterai, where they have chatbots based on celebrities like Tom Brady or Tony Soprano. I actually don't see much in here about it being YouTubers. I think that might have been more of an angle Gizmodo took. I mean just, I guess, extrapolating from the creators or celebrities model. But I mean you could, I guess, if you were a creator, use these tools to engage with your fans more kind of like what Meta is doing for instagram and facebook creators. But it's interesting.

2:06:39 - Mikah Sargent
It reminds me of um amazon occasionally bringing in a star to record lines in order to be the alexa voice and so you could talk to it. Uh, who was it? Uh, samuel l jackson was one example, and those went, those celebrity voice versions, but they were there for a little while and it didn't work so well. But yeah, perhaps for some people it's the equivalent of putting a case on your phone or, I don't know, putting Lisa Frank stickers on your Trapper Keeper. It's like, how are you customizing your chat bot? What's what? What is your chat bot sound like today? You could try on, you know, different, different styles, but I hope that it is with the consent of the celebrity, or you know, quote unquote celebrity.

2:07:33 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, it says. As part of the effort, google has discussed striking partnerships, the influencers, to create chat bots based on them. Google plans to launch the launch the feature as a standalone product, but is also discussed eventually integrating it into youtube so maybe, you know, mr beast will get a a slice of something for, and he will live on forever he will in your.

He'll live on forever in the chat wow we've got a real uh humdinger of a closing out here for the google changelog really, uh, taking us to the the highest of highs here. Uh, updates such as google messages will now let you view larger contact photos, wow, wow. And Google Cast is coming to more hotel room TVs later this year.

2:08:21 - Jeff Jarvis
That makes me happy, that makes me very happy.

2:08:25 - Mikah Sargent
I don't travel a whole lot and I don't use Google Cast, so but conceptually speaking, if I were to put on the empathy and stand in the shoes of someone who does use devices that can cast via Google Cast, I think this would be great. Yeah, because then you couldn't just use your phone and cast your shoes Because you go to the hotel room.

2:08:45 - Jeff Jarvis
It's all the same now. So MSNBC is 21 in every hotel room I go into now because it's whichever satellite thing it is, and they've got the horrible little remote. I know it's sad.

2:08:58 - Paris Martineau
Isn't it me sitting alone in the hotel room? It's just the. The sad thing is that you know instinctively what the channel for nbc is msnbc is on any hotel room yeah, that's it. What am I gonna do is it playing right next to you right now. Yes, sorry, continue there's proof. Oh, there we go. Oh, my God, it's a tiny little that is actually takes that might usurp calling Mac's apples as the most grandpa thing that's happened on this.

2:09:31 - Jeff Jarvis
I got. I got a Google Chromecast for it. That TV sold has only one HDMI. Oh, yeah kind of sad, but anyway.

2:09:43 - Mikah Sargent
It's so cute. It's a little TV Just a little guy.

2:09:47 - Benito Gonzalez
Yeah, it's old, it's so cute.

2:09:52 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh. So I go to the hotel room and it says well, you watch Netflix.

2:09:55 - Mikah Sargent
Well then, you got to sign in yes, and then you forget to sign out, right.

2:09:59 - Jeff Jarvis
So if I could just use my machine and then cast it up there, that'd be wonderful.

2:10:04 - Mikah Sargent
I think that is good and that means that Go ahead, go ahead.

2:10:07 - Paris Martineau
I will also say, in a very Google move, the brand Google Cast used to be called Chromecast, built in and was renamed Googlecast at IO 2024, which is one of the most Google caveats ever.

2:10:24 - Mikah Sargent
I was just going to say it's nice that Google is kind of matching with Apple in that way that are the most popular. No matter which of those you're using, you are able to then cast content to the screen, because Apple has also been doing more of a push into offering AirPlay in those different locations, so it'll be good that they're both available. And then, to round things out in a very googly way, google is sunsetting yet another product. It's called stack pdf scanner, and I will be honest in saying I've never heard of this nope but but we're gonna be mad.

2:11:07 - Jeff Jarvis
It's gone, dang it not another one.

2:11:11 - Mikah Sargent
I'm angry.

2:11:13 - Paris Martineau
I'm so angry I'm going to throw this can of LaCroix across the room wow, here you are drinking LaCroix, and I was trash talking it before the show. I'm so sorry, micah it's okay.

2:11:25 - Mikah Sargent
It's true that Spindrift is the superior sparkling water, although apparently none of it compares to whatever French thing, badois.

2:11:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Omelette du Fromage Badois. Please meet me in Badois Omelette du fromage Badois, badois.

2:11:40 - Mikah Sargent
Please meet me in my badois. Alright, so if you used Stack, you're going to have to use something else. It was a.

2:11:51 - Paris Martineau
PDF scanner. Apparently it's already integrated into Google Drive. Like many things in Google that are done away with, it already existed somewhere else.

2:12:00 - Mikah Sargent
Those little teams that are like you know, we're going to make this really cool thing and then you find out that another team was also making that really cool thing and unfortunately they were part of a bigger team that gets. Yeah, it's sad.

2:12:13 - Benito Gonzalez
Or it was a little company that Google bought and then a team inside Google just made a better thing.

2:12:19 - Paris Martineau
Such a hard life for those developers being paid how many Hundreds of thousands of dollars a year?

2:12:25 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, but they're going to be all just like Micah's therapist they're all going to be unnecessary soon.

2:12:31 - Mikah Sargent
Listen, I really like my therapist, so you just had better stop.

2:12:34 - Paris Martineau
I love that you're coming for Micah's therapist this week.

2:12:38 - Mikah Sargent
I'm going to have to talk to her about it when I meet her next. Listen, I was on and here's what happened. I just want to make sure you're okay. Was there something? I should ask her specifically to see that she's not AI.

2:12:52 - Paris Martineau
You should ask her to spin that little top from Inception.

2:12:55 - Benito Gonzalez
Great idea. You need to ask her to point out which one are actual mountains and which one aren't.

2:13:00 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I can show her two photos of.

2:13:04 - Paris Martineau
Show her 16 photos and ask her to pick out which ones are buses.

2:13:12 - Mikah Sargent
Show her two photos of Spider-Man and say how are they different. Has she ever watched? Wait, wait, wait.

2:13:16 - Jeff Jarvis
I know what I can do. I got to keep going here. I know what I can do.

2:13:18 - Mikah Sargent
I know I'm proud has she ever watched one of your shows. Uh, no, no, yeah, I'm, which I'm happy about.

2:13:23 - Jeff Jarvis
It's like Howard Sterns doesn't, doesn't listen to him.

2:13:25 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I would, I would be, I, the only person who's ever to me hey, I know you already was my chiropractor, um, and he's been pretty cool. So, uh, that was fine. But, um, leo, leo's not here so I can talk about chiropractic, because when he's here he goes on rants about chiropractic. So, um, what was I saying? Oh, I can show her a photo of a child crossing a street and if she says I should keep driving, then I know that she's AI. But if she's a human being, then she'll say stop the car Because it doesn't. What didn't the? Yeah, the artificial?

2:14:09 - Paris Martineau
intelligence. That's very smart. That's very smart. I've also I've just put it down as my pick of the week I've got a CAPTCHA test that your therapist can take to prove that she is, or is not, ai.

2:14:22 - Mikah Sargent
So let us move into the picks of the week. It is time for our picks. I, as I mentioned, was not originally going to be on the show, but I'm happy to be here. That does mean I do not have a pick, but I would love to hear about your picks. And you know what?

2:14:40 - Paris Martineau
paris let's have you go first so, uh, a great game for your um therapist to play if you want to prove her humanity. Is this captcha from a show that I've mentioned on this show a lot. I'm really into this network called dropout, uh, from the people formulation, college humor. They created this captcha game which was part of one of their game. I'm really into this network called Dropout from the people, formerly from College Humor. They created this Captcha game which was part of one of their game things. And so it says describe all of the pick, all the images that represent a Sunday morning, and it's a little tricky. It's definitely the Sunday comics and the church.

We can do those just to keep it going on and now select all images. You've got to click those. I'll give you a freebie on this one. Those are the two correct answers. Oh good. Select all the images. You're right, this problem catches. You don't know how many Like?

2:15:32 - Jeff Jarvis
find five, okay, no.

2:15:35 - Mikah Sargent
I think it's. Let's see four of them. Yes, I was right. Yes, Zebras that are.

2:15:42 - Paris Martineau
oh no, that are white with black stripes, and so you can keep going on. It's kind of a fun little game. It gets a little harder. I think there might be like five or six different questions. This was on an episode of Game Changer, which is kind of their game show where the premise changes every show. Where the premise of that game was, you had easy questions the contestants had to answer, but in order to buzz in, each time they hit a buzzer it deactivated. Afterwards they had to run around the studio trying to find buzzers, and one of the buzzers was hidden behind a series of captures, which is this which they released to the world. So I invite you all to explore it. My pick for the week that I was choosing, planning on doing before this is a website called 1millioncheckboxescom. It is a website that just has 1 million checkboxes on it and it's the same. It might take a bit to load because it's the same page for everybody who visits it, and so you can turn the checkboxes on when I'm turning it on.

2:16:46 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm turning it on for everybody Collaboratively.

2:16:48 - Paris Martineau
checkboxes I'm going to try and turn off all the boxes in the front row Wait that means that somebody's unchecking them like some sort of monster. Yes, I'm unchecking all the ones in the top row right now, as fast as I can, but I can see you doing it by people, yeah.

2:17:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Why are there some that are colored boxes around the box?

2:17:04 - Paris Martineau
I think it might be like somebody holding it down, oh.

2:17:09 - Mikah Sargent
Oh yes, you can make it so that no one else can uncheck the box because you're keeping it, yeah.

2:17:15 - Paris Martineau
So I've unchecked 56 boxes. So far monster yeah, so I don't know.

2:17:21 - Mikah Sargent
It's a fun little website that I've been enjoying myself have you ever been on it when it's gotten to a million?

2:17:27 - Paris Martineau
no, I hadn't even thought of that, to be honest. I just immediately was like I need to uncheck a full row and have it stay that way, and I did not have any further thoughts. But I guess that is a really good point. Maybe it should all. They should all be checked. Yeah, I want them all to be checked and it's never gonna happen.

2:17:46 - Mikah Sargent
I'm so stressed. This is like that dvd uh screen where the dvd yeah, it is oh my god, if you scroll all, the way to the bottom, there are people there

2:17:58 - Paris Martineau
yeah, I was gonna say, if you scroll away at the bottom, all the check boxes are kind of filled. Um, oh no, there's some that are.

2:18:04 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, I found a line where people really aren't unchecking. Oh, I'm getting somebody checked now, oh geez.

2:18:10 - Jeff Jarvis
Now, suddenly there's lots of the last page. Is that you?

2:18:12 - Mikah Sargent
guys, that must be the show. It must be the show, because it's not me oh power.

2:18:16 - Jeff Jarvis
This is so cool. Nobody was there and now there's tons.

2:18:19 - Mikah Sargent
I'm in a spot that's getting no someone's in my section unchecking my boxes. Get out of here.

2:18:26 - Jeff Jarvis
You don't go here. Purple tunnel checkbox yeah exactly.

2:18:32 - Paris Martineau
Now someone's holding down, I'd love it if they'd show how many people are on the website at a current moment. Anyway, it reminded me of the thing the fish gate that Leo showed on the show the other week, which, Mike, I don't know if you know about this, but there's a gate where people in some country where fish can be let in or out of a river or lake bed and people just sit on the internet waiting for a fish to arrive and then they open the gate. I love this sit on the internet waiting for a fish to arrive and then they open the gate.

2:18:57 - Mikah Sargent
It's kind of like that, but I love this, except I will never get what I want, which is all of the boxes checked I don't know, one day it could happen.

2:19:07 - Paris Martineau
I say that as I'm unchecking boxes.

2:19:09 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, that's, that's like we're gonna have world peace and congress is gonna work again no, all right, jeff, what do you got? Okay, so I, philosophically, I object often when people say I'm as creepy about technology because I am, as we discussed earlier in the show, I am of the school that it's here. Deal with it. It's not creepy in and of itself, it's how people use it. It's just shush. I have found truly creepy technology Line 156. Scientists have created, using human skin cells, they have created a face that smiles.

2:19:52 - Paris Martineau
Oh, I don't like that.

2:19:54 - Jeff Jarvis
It's really creepy. Right Scroll down and you'll see it smile in the video. There it's a tweet.

2:20:02 - Mikah Sargent
Why does it have to have creepy eyes?

2:20:03 - Jeff Jarvis
too. I know that's human skin, that's smiling.

2:20:09 - Mikah Sargent
And you're so stinking pink For humanoid robots of the future. No, no stop it.

2:20:14 - Jeff Jarvis
No, so that's really creepy. Um, but when I when I tweeted that, cheating on the show, as I do once in a while, uh, a friend of mine in posand this is the next uh line down for those of you on video, without video, sorry you can't see this but he says and this is perfect germany. In germany they have gichtswurst face sausage. If you go to the next line down, excuse me there, oh, oh, sausage with different colors in it, so that it has a face on it. So you eat the face when you eat the wurst.

2:20:51 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, this is like those places where they have cupcakes that they like they print out. Um no, I guess it's not that I can't. I think the the face or the what am I trying to say? The frosting artist will do this whole photo of your face. Oh right, and then it's just like you're eating your own face that's just kind of weird.

2:21:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I thought, given that that Paris was before eating some kind of sausage, salami, yeah. I thought she might like here and have some gessichs worst.

2:21:28 - Paris Martineau
I would eat face sausage.

2:21:30 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I'm not bothered by the face sausage. Not bothered by the face sausage is something I never thought would ever come up in words that I would use, but certainly bothered by that pink, wet moving face, but knowing that it's made from human skin. Yeah, and is it lab-grown human skin skin? Did someone donate human skin?

2:21:57 - Paris Martineau
did they consent to their human skin?

2:22:03 - Benito Gonzalez
sample to make that weird face. They need to make it say uh nice, nice to see you.

2:22:07 - Paris Martineau
Clarice yeah, oh, it could be a body donated to science imagine, if you're like, all right, I'm gonna do something noble, I'm gonna donate my body to science, and that's what ends up happening if you get turned into a weird flesh face oh so well they have.

2:22:30 - Jeff Jarvis
They're also the picture. There is a 3d facial mold covered with living skin.

2:22:37 - Mikah Sargent
Do we have to do that though? Why does?

2:22:39 - Jeff Jarvis
it have to be humans? Why does it have to be alive?

2:22:41 - Mikah Sargent
It's science man, but there's so many. Maybe they're saying look, the synthetic skins we could make could never compare to the beauty that is the human skin. And then I just want to have an interview with the top scientist who's doing this and say I just need to know if there's something wrong with you first before I allow you to keep doing this.

2:22:58 - Paris Martineau
I think that would be a really good like second or third question, Like you answer a little bit about the project, get them going and then you're like so what's wrong with you? Are you a child of divorce?

2:23:11 - Benito Gonzalez
Okay, I might have an answer for this question. It's made in Japan. These are Japanese folks who do this, so do it that much.

2:23:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Is that a Filipino slur on the Japanese?

2:23:25 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, I have to. Is that judgment Judgment being passed?

2:23:28 - Benito Gonzalez
There's always weird stuff and it's always cultural Japanese stuff that we don't understand.

2:23:33 - Jeff Jarvis
Got it, so I'll learn Japanese Also it does look like some sushi I wouldn't eat oh no, you're making it worse oh, first time I had sushi, I had it because it was not popular when I was younger.

Nobody ate sushi, it was. It was bizarre and weird and foreign. There was a friend of mine who worked for sports illustrated and he was a great sushi fan and I would only go with him for lunch and I thought that what he was having and I loved it, I fell in love with it. Then one night I went to the place on my own and I suddenly didn't know what I was eating and it was tough.

2:24:10 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, that made it harder.

2:24:12 - Paris Martineau
huh, yeah, I wish there was a way for me to Google whose skin is this, but nothing is coming up.

2:24:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Does it say anything in the paper?

2:24:21 - Benito Gonzalez
The researchers from the University of Tokyo, Japan, hope the breakthrough could one day prove useful in cosmetics industry and help to train plastic surgeons.

2:24:29 - Mikah Sargent
Okay, okay, okay, full facial surgery, and part of it was the loss of, um, some of the you know musculature in the face that helps to make you smile. If you could replace that with robotics because that's basically this was really about it wasn't about making, um, like growing skin that could be put on a robot, it was more can we attach skin to robot, a robotic piece, and have it actually do something? So, yeah, I guess now I'm, if I think about it, if you could do a give somebody a face back if they've had some horrible thing happen and, uh, give them the ability to smile again or something. That'd be kind of cool.

2:25:15 - Jeff Jarvis
But Paris, you raised an important point because it was there an ethical? It was. All scientists have to go, all academic papers and studies have to go through ethical reviews for the human impact. I wonder whether there was an ethical review.

2:25:26 - Mikah Sargent
Well, I don't know. Paris is a conspiracy theorist, so maybe she doesn't think that they'll have to go through ethical reviews. Let's see. Yeah, it's in. Let's see. Yeah, it's in. Let's see. Why don't I just feed this article?

2:25:46 - Paris Martineau
and just ask chat GPT, whose skin is this?

2:25:49 - Mikah Sargent
that is precisely what I'm going to do. I'm going to literally paste the link and then I'm going to hit shift, enter, and then I'm going to say whose skin is this question mark, and let's see what it says. The engineered skin tissue in question belongs to a humanoid robot. Nope, especially designed skin. No.

2:26:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Where do the skin cells come from?

2:26:10 - Mikah Sargent
Where did the skin come from? Ah, cultured cells. I was going to say they were purchased from.

2:26:20 - Paris Martineau
PromoCell GBTH and cultured in fibroblast growth medium.

2:26:27 - Mikah Sargent
It says, yeah, combining human skin cells with a collagen matrix.

2:26:32 - Jeff Jarvis
So they bought the human cells On the black market.

2:26:38 - Mikah Sargent
It doesn't say Whose skin is this? Yeah, until.

2:26:44 - Paris Martineau
AI is able to tell me whose skin this is. I'm not trusting it.

2:26:48 - Jeff Jarvis
It's bad enough, but the fact that it smiles.

2:26:51 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, that is creepy.

2:26:54 - Jeff Jarvis
The science behind this is that evidently this stuff has tags, and so if you want it to stick in a robot or a human, that is creepy. The science behind this is that evidently this stuff has tags, and so if you want it to stick in a robot or a human, you use these tags to do that, and so it's moving the tags.

2:27:06 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, it's kind of like a facelift, just basically sort of pull on the tags and then you just tape.

2:27:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, if you go if you click on the paper or you may not want to do this. Oh, if you click on the paper and you may not want to do this. But if you click on the paper and go down the video and see how it's being done, it's not so mysterious.

2:27:24 - Mikah Sargent
I prefer to keep it as a mystery Do you have any other stories or any other? Picks for us Jeff.

2:27:29 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, actually, okay, then we'll leave. But calculating empires is this amazing infographic a genealogy of technology and power since 1500. Whoa, so if you go in you'll see things like well, television counts on cathode, ray tubes and the diode, but it also leads to porn mechanical TV film. I'm just reading across Leaflet bomb Incredible graphic that I haven't really been able to dig into, but it's huge. For those of you who can't see it, it's just if we're done at a readable level, it'd be gigantic. And so it's different kinds of technologies over the period of history.

2:28:16 - Mikah Sargent
This is very cool. Oh my goodness.

2:28:18 - Jeff Jarvis
Gutenberg has to be in there.

2:28:20 - Mikah Sargent
Printing press is big Transparent sticky tape introduced in 1930.

2:28:25 - Jeff Jarvis
Right. So if you go off from printing press, go back to where you were, because I'm here, so you got to do that right. So then it goes into etching, censorship and control, growth and relief, printing and taglio printing, weekly newspapers, birth of copyright, fonts like Baskerville and Dito and Bodoni, periodicals being invented, rotary printing this is good Graphic design, photocopying, book burnings there's a whole line just of fonts through the years. Eventually it'll have the font with LLMs built in. So anyway, I thought this being a geeky show, if you want to go with the rundown, you might have fun exploring this gigantic infographiciladelphia clip came before the gem paper clip that we know and use today who would have known what's the philadelphia clip?

2:29:26 - Mikah Sargent
it. It looks like a ribbon, like a, like a red, like a you know, breast cancer awareness ribbon or any of the other ribbons where it's like that came before you're kidding that came before the gem paperclip which came in 1892. The philadelphia clip came in 1867. They did apparently invent a paperclip afterward called the niagara clip. Um, it looks kind of like a complicated m? Uh, but apparently not as popular as the gem paperclip, which I didn't know was called the gem paperclip oh, I've seen it on the box.

2:29:57 - Jeff Jarvis
I always thought that was a trade name. It wasn't the kind of description the Philadelphia paperclip. I had to buy a white shirt to be able to testify. That's what they use to keep the sleeves in the box.

2:30:10 - Mikah Sargent
Oh yeah, right, yeah, exactly yeah, you're exactly right.

2:30:15 - Paris Martineau
I found out where the skin came from. I don't know. If you guys want to know.

2:30:18 - Mikah Sargent
I do.

2:30:21 - Paris Martineau
It's from a company called PromoCell, it's called Normal Human Dermal Fibroblasts and it's described on the website as, and I quote, primary normal human dermal fibroblasts isolated from the dermis of juvenile foreskin or adult skin. Oh my god stop.

2:30:44 - Mikah Sargent
No, you're kidding me.

2:30:46 - Paris Martineau
No, I'm not it's the scraps at the hospital, right or it came from adult skin from different donors but you know that's just what the website said, and I thought you all need to know so it's a smiling penis face actually potentially show title no, no, we can't. Oh, come on smiling penis face. No bad, that's actually pretty good. People are gonna want to watch the show to find out. I think I don't think I'll watch all we can't.

2:31:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, come on Smiling penis face no bad words there. That's actually pretty good People are going to want to watch the show to find out. They're going to watch all three hours to find out what it is.

2:31:23 - Paris Martineau
You can apparently request the available donors and ask. I don't want to know, hi.

2:31:31 - Mikah Sargent
Oh Paris, that's real.

2:31:34 - Jeff Jarvis
Paris is a reporter Amen.

2:31:37 - Mikah Sargent
This is what it's all about, guys.

2:31:38 - Jeff Jarvis
My gosh Paris can you buy them and can we order some for Leo?

2:31:46 - Paris Martineau
I hate this. We could get 500,000 cells of juvenile foreskin cryopreserved for $662.

2:31:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, come on, let's do a Kickstarter for this. I think we can't.

2:32:02 - Mikah Sargent
It's cryopreserved too, so he'd open it up and he'd be like Lisa says you ordered what?

2:32:13 - Paris Martineau
Oh, they've got a real sale on just adult specification cryo-preserved you can get it for 323 dollars, it's like where did that?

2:32:22 - Mikah Sargent
even come from great who knows holy cow I. My life was changed today because I just wonder now how much skin that is used in research is actually coming from that, from the byproduct of genital mutilation, which it is.

2:32:43 - Paris Martineau
It's true, there's a lot of trucks talking about that in New York City.

2:32:47 - Mikah Sargent
I was my sister when she was pregnant. I was ready, I had pamphlets, uncle.

2:32:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Micah's going to protect this kid?

2:32:59 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, I was not protected, and neither were your other siblings, and so I will make sure that this child is protected and you will know everything that's involved. Anyway, we didn't have to use them. She has two girls, but I was ready to march with my what is it? 97 theses, 97, theses, how many theses? And nail them on the wall.

2:33:23 - Jeff Jarvis
You added two, yeah, all right. So when you promote the show this week, you've got to say how long is the show right now, benito?

2:33:35 - Benito Gonzalez
Where did this start? 2.30.

2:33:37 - Paris Martineau
Minute 2.30 folks, you gotta watch this is what we watched to the end, yeah we all learned something today, something we can't unlearn it's true. I feel like you need to know that was brilliant reporting.

2:33:54 - Jeff Jarvis
That was good. How many steps did that take?

2:34:06 - Mikah Sargent
um, it took a lot of me reading. Uh, totally inscrutable medical, I just don't want to have to call them normal. It's like no, don't worry they're totally normal.

2:34:10 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm sure there's a market for abnormal, so yeah, that's true.

2:34:13 - Mikah Sargent
maybe Did you just say a market for abnormal foreskins. No cells, cells.

2:34:21 - Paris Martineau
You got something on the brain, Micah.

2:34:22 - Jeff Jarvis
That's where we'll keep the theme here. Somebody's bought my prostate, you know.

2:34:29 - Mikah Sargent
I'm done. The show is over, Folks if you would like to we drove

him out of here. This show starts recording every Wednesday around about 2 pm Pacific. You can head to twittv slash twig twig to subscribe to the show in audio and video formats. That is where you will also find the show notes for this show, including links to things this week that you're going to learn about whether you want to or not. Links to things this week that you're going to learn about whether you want to or not. Folks, I want to mention that you should. I would like to invite you to join Club Twit at twittv slash club twit.

When you join the club, for $7 a month, you get access to some pretty great things. First and foremost, every single one of our shows ad free. It's just the content, none of the ads, because you, in effect, are supporting the show. You also gain access to the video versions of our club shows, including the Untitled Linux show, hands on Mac, ios Today, hands on Windows. All of that is yours as video as well. You gain access to the TwitPlus bonus feed that has extra content you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes before the show. After the show. Special club Twitter events get published there Content you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes before the show. After the show Special Club Twit events get published there. So when you join you're going to get access to this great black back catalog of content and access to the members-only Discord server a fun place to go to chat with your fellow Club Twit members and those of us here at Twit Paris. Martineau, if folks want to keep up with what you're doing, where do they go to do?

2:35:58 - Paris Martineau
that you can follow me on Twitter at Paris Martineau, on BlueSky, at Parisnyc, or send me your tips about tech companies, big and small, by reaching out to me on Signal at Martineau.10.

2:36:13 - Mikah Sargent
I just want to say never mind, I'm not going to say it. I was just want to say never mind, Nope. Never mind, I'm not going to say it, jeff. I was just going to say, after the links you just shared with us, send me your tips, has a whole different meaning.

2:36:26 - Paris Martineau
That's all I was going to say Don't, do not, do not send me those, and it's Martino.01. But if you are going to send any of the bad kind of tips, you should send it to Martino.10, because I don't want them.

2:36:42 - Mikah Sargent
Jeff, how about you, friend?

2:36:44 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, folks, you see, being able to see the reaction to this discussion in the Discord is itself worth $7 a month. I'm telling you, join the Discord. I'm sorry, I'm orange right now. The light changed, I don't know what's doing. Screw that. Just go and join and pay $7, because the Discord is having a whole bunch of fun.

2:37:08 - Mikah Sargent
I, on the other hand, am not. You can find me at Micah Sargent on many social media networks, or you can head to chihuahuacoffee. That's chihuahuacoffee. That's chihuahuacoffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. I have had a delightful time joining you all on this week in Google this week, and you can expect, I would think, leo back next week for another episode if the show continues it might just be shut down. Thank you all for tuning in and we will see you again next week. Bye-bye.