Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts. And how the
Speaker 1: tech are you. This is the tech news for the
Speaker 1: week ending on May twenty fourth, twenty twenty four, and
Speaker 1: we've got a lot of AI stories this week, so
Speaker 1: let's get to it. Early this week, the world learned
Speaker 1: of a dispute between actor Scarlett Johanson and open Ai,
Speaker 1: the company behind the chat GPT chatbot, among other things,
Speaker 1: and here's how it breaks down. Johansson says that in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three, she was contacted by open Ai CEO
Speaker 1: Sam Altman and was asked if the company could license
Speaker 1: her voice for the purposes of creating a digital assistant,
Speaker 1: something similar to Siri or Alexa, but built on open
Speaker 1: ais ai model. Johansson had starred, or at least her
Speaker 1: her voice had starred in the film Her, in which
Speaker 1: a man falls in love with his AI enabled operating
Speaker 1: system played by Johansson. She said she was not interested,
Speaker 1: and then she said that this year, just two days
Speaker 1: before open ai was going to hold a keynote event
Speaker 1: about this digital assistant, Sam Altman reached out to again
Speaker 1: to ask her to reconsider, and she says she didn't
Speaker 1: actually speak with him on this one, and that the
Speaker 1: implication was that she still had not changed her mind.
Speaker 1: She didn't want to license her voice. So then the
Speaker 1: keynote happens and OpenAI debuted the digital assistant called Sky,
Speaker 1: which has a selection of voices that you can choose from,
Speaker 1: but one of those voices sounded an awful lot like
Speaker 1: Scarlett Johansson. The actor was quote shocked, angered, and in
Speaker 1: disbelieved that mister Altman would pursue a voice that sounded
Speaker 1: so eerily similar to mine. End quote. Altman denied that
Speaker 1: they had trained the AI on Joehiah's voice at all.
Speaker 1: The company has said that they actually used a different actor.
Speaker 1: They showed footage of this actor speaking, but the actor's
Speaker 1: face was blurred out, which kind of brings other questions
Speaker 1: up about whether or not that's actually the person talking.
Speaker 1: But anyway, out of respect to Johansson, they said they
Speaker 1: would take down that particular Sky voice, which, again, if
Speaker 1: it's not her voice, that's odd, right, Like, why take
Speaker 1: down someone's voice if it's not Like, if it's not
Speaker 1: that person's voice, and the other actor presumably did sign
Speaker 1: an agreement to have their voice licensed for this, then
Speaker 1: that's a different matter. Anyway, Altman's claims of innocence aren't
Speaker 1: helped that he appeared to directly reference the film her
Speaker 1: on X formerly known as Twitter, and did so the
Speaker 1: same day that the assistant debuted. So if he's slightly
Speaker 1: giving the nod to a movie in which Scarlett Johansson
Speaker 1: does the voice, it does seem to kind of imply
Speaker 1: that perhaps she had some involvement with the actual digital assistant. Anyway,
Speaker 1: that's where things stand now. There's the possibility of Johansson
Speaker 1: pursuing legal action, but honestly, I haven't heard very much
Speaker 1: firmly one way or the other, and there's questions about
Speaker 1: whether that would be possible if in fact open Ai
Speaker 1: did use this other actor's voice likeness as training material
Speaker 1: for the AI. But it's another moment with NAI that
Speaker 1: highlights the potential threat the technology poses to creatives. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: another departure from open ai made news this week. Gretchen Krueger,
Speaker 1: who had served as a policy research worker at the company,
Speaker 1: posted on X that she had left open ai and
Speaker 1: she had resigned before news broke that Ilia Sutzkever, who
Speaker 1: was a co founder and one of the board members
Speaker 1: who had ousted and then reinstated Sam Altman as CEO,
Speaker 1: had also left the company. So she said she had
Speaker 1: made this decision independently, did not know that Sutskev was
Speaker 1: stepping away, but that she just felt she could not
Speaker 1: work for the company anymore, and the reason she felt
Speaker 1: that way was mostly out of concerns that the company
Speaker 1: was ignoring safety protocols among some other things. As well.
Speaker 1: She said the company was not doing its part to
Speaker 1: live up to the principles that open ai was founded upon,
Speaker 1: such as transparency and quote mitigations for impacts on inequality
Speaker 1: rights and the environment, among other things. I'm including this
Speaker 1: story in the lineup because it really is showing a
Speaker 1: pattern at open ai. Numerous people connected to safety have
Speaker 1: left the company in recent months. It's not just been
Speaker 1: a couple very high ranking executives. Some safety researchers have
Speaker 1: left as well, and this should be something of a
Speaker 1: red flag that open ai isn't being so thorough when
Speaker 1: it comes to developing AI in a safe and responsible way,
Speaker 1: which again was the mission statement for the original non
Speaker 1: profit version of open Ai. Of course, when we'd say
Speaker 1: open Ai today, we're largely talking about the for profit version,
Speaker 1: not the not for profit company. Speaking of leaving open ai,
Speaker 1: it turns out that the company has some measures in
Speaker 1: place to make that a really difficult decision for an employee,
Speaker 1: or at least it did have those measures in place
Speaker 1: until word got out about them and the company was
Speaker 1: shamed into changing things. Vox reports that employees leaving open
Speaker 1: ai are frequently compelled to sign exit documents, and among
Speaker 1: other things, these exit documents allegedly threatened to dissolve the
Speaker 1: employees vested equity in the company if that employee says
Speaker 1: anything negative about open Ai. So open ai is valued
Speaker 1: at around eighty billion dollars. That's billion with a B,
Speaker 1: and obviously for each individual employee that has equity, that
Speaker 1: can represent a huge chunk of money. We're talking like
Speaker 1: maybe millions of dollars for some of these folks. So
Speaker 1: the implication here is that open ai will hold that
Speaker 1: money hostage in return for exiting employees promising that they're
Speaker 1: not going to bad mouth open Ai. And you might think, huh,
Speaker 1: vested equity, not potential equity, but vested equity. That sounds
Speaker 1: like you're at the point where those assets definitely belong
Speaker 1: to them employee and not the company. And since this
Speaker 1: documentation has come to light, open ai has walked things
Speaker 1: back a bit, with Sam Altman himself saying that he
Speaker 1: felt ashamed of it all and that he also he
Speaker 1: totally didn't know about it, despite the fact that some
Speaker 1: of these various documents had C Suite executive signatures attached
Speaker 1: to them, which I don't know seems like the kind
Speaker 1: of thing a CEO should know about. Anyway, Altman posted
Speaker 1: that quote, we have never clawed back anyone's vested equity,
Speaker 1: nor will we do that if people do not sign
Speaker 1: a separation agreement or don't agree to a non disparagement agreement.
Speaker 1: Vested equity is vested equity, full stop end quote. That
Speaker 1: seems like a reasonable thing to do. I'm just scratching
Speaker 1: the surface of the story, though there's so much more
Speaker 1: to it, and to really dive in, I highly recommend
Speaker 1: you read Kelsey Piper's piece on vox dot com. It
Speaker 1: is titled leaked OpenAI documents reveal aggressive tactics toward former
Speaker 1: employees over at Google. The Internet had field day with
Speaker 1: some rather concerning results from the company's AI Overview product.
Speaker 1: So this is Google's AI enhanced search feature, in which
Speaker 1: AI curated information appears above some search results, and folks
Speaker 1: have noticed that the AI has offered up some pretty
Speaker 1: weird and sometimes dangerous suggestions. For example, if you were
Speaker 1: to google how do I make pizza so that the
Speaker 1: cheese doesn't just slide right off? One person found that
Speaker 1: Google's answer to this was to add glue to the
Speaker 1: recipe keep that cheese in place, which is a big
Speaker 1: out you. But another one was even more concerning. There
Speaker 1: was someone who was asking about how to sanitize a
Speaker 1: washing machine, and essentially the suggestion that the Overview AI
Speaker 1: made was the equivalent of mixing chlorine gas in the washer. Now,
Speaker 1: in case you didn't know, chlorine gas is very poisonous
Speaker 1: and it can kill you. In another example, it was
Speaker 1: clear that Overview AI was essentially plagiarizing content because it
Speaker 1: was for smoothie recipe and the answer that the AI
Speaker 1: gave included the phrase my kid's favorite. Now, presumably the
Speaker 1: AI does not have children, but the smoothie recipe that
Speaker 1: it pulled from did use that phrase, So again it
Speaker 1: looks like the AI is actually just directly lifting something
Speaker 1: from a source rather than synthesizing information. Right. That's the
Speaker 1: promise we get with generative AI, is that it's synthesizing
Speaker 1: stuff and then presenting it to us in a way
Speaker 1: that we can understand. But when you see instances like this,
Speaker 1: it seems to suggest that, well, there's a lot more
Speaker 1: copy and pasting going on than synthesizing, at least in
Speaker 1: some cases, and that's not a good look. Over at
Speaker 1: Meta Yon Lucun, the chief AI scientist, has said that
Speaker 1: while large language models are interesting, they're not going to
Speaker 1: lead to AGI, which is artificial general intelligence. That's the
Speaker 1: kind of AI you find in science fiction stories in
Speaker 1: which you know, robots or chatbits start to for themselves.
Speaker 1: So Lacun has said that the large language model branch
Speaker 1: of AI isn't going to get us there. Lacun says
Speaker 1: that generative AI models essentially have the intelligence of a
Speaker 1: house cat, which if any cats are listening to this podcast,
Speaker 1: I would just like to point out it was Lacoon
Speaker 1: who said that I think that you are a very
Speaker 1: good kiddy. I'm just covering my bases here. Lacun said
Speaker 1: that the chatbots built on lms are quote unquote intrinsically unsafe.
Speaker 1: Now by that, he means that a model is only
Speaker 1: as good as the data that you use to train it,
Speaker 1: and that if the data has unreliable or wrong stuff
Speaker 1: in it, the LLM will reflect that it doesn't have
Speaker 1: the ability to discern between what is reliable and what
Speaker 1: is not, So you end up with an AI model
Speaker 1: that sometimes gives you incorrect responses, but with the confidence
Speaker 1: of someone who seems to really know what they're talking about.
Speaker 1: Lacoon has also expressed that people leaving open AI over
Speaker 1: safety concerns are perhaps blowing things out of proportion. I
Speaker 1: take issue with that. I agree with Lacun that saying
Speaker 1: things like we're dealing with intelligence that we don't really
Speaker 1: understand is perhaps overblowing things. I think that was really
Speaker 1: Lukun's main point. But I counter that it doesn't actually
Speaker 1: require high intelligence for an entity to become dangerous, and
Speaker 1: if a company continuously undermines safety, the matter of how
Speaker 1: intelligent the AI agent is could be a moot point.
Speaker 1: It could still be really dangerous. Okay, we've got a
Speaker 1: lot more news to get through before we get to that.
Speaker 1: Let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. We're back.
Speaker 1: And imagine that you are a computer science student who
Speaker 1: creates a studying tool that makes use of AI, and
Speaker 1: your school is so impressed that they award you and
Speaker 1: your research partner with a ten thousand dollars prize for
Speaker 1: coming up with a great business idea. Then that same
Speaker 1: school says you are suspended or expelled because of that
Speaker 1: exact same tool that they gave you ten grand for.
Speaker 1: This is the story of IMRI University, which is located
Speaker 1: in my hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, and two students who
Speaker 1: built an AI powered studying tool that they called eight Ball. Now,
Speaker 1: the tool can do stuff like analyze coursework and create
Speaker 1: flash cards and practice tests, so it helps you study,
Speaker 1: and it can retrieve information from a university tool called Canvas.
Speaker 1: This is not specific to EMRI University, but it is
Speaker 1: a tool that's available to universities and it's a platform
Speaker 1: to which professors can upload class materials like coursework. So
Speaker 1: the idea is that the teachers use Canvas. They do
Speaker 1: that to distribute the coursework to the students, and eight
Speaker 1: ball can actually pull information directly down from this platform.
Speaker 1: Emory's Honor counsel decide that eight ball amounted to cheating
Speaker 1: and that the students were accessing canvas without university permission.
Speaker 1: And this is an accusation that the students have denied.
Speaker 1: And now one of the students is bringing a lawsuit
Speaker 1: against the school and arguing that the school itself knew
Speaker 1: and approved of their work as evidenced by that hefty
Speaker 1: ten grand the school awarded the two students for this project,
Speaker 1: and the student says that the university has no evidence
Speaker 1: that anyone ever used eight ball to cheat. So we
Speaker 1: will see how this unfolds. Now, let's loop back around
Speaker 1: to AI powered operating systems. That's how we started this
Speaker 1: whole episode off. Well, Microsoft has been aggressively pushing AI
Speaker 1: features into Windows eleven in preview mode, so it's not
Speaker 1: being rolled out as a general feature yet, but it
Speaker 1: is a preview feature. One of the things that the
Speaker 1: Microsoft has pushed AI to do is called Windows Recall
Speaker 1: or Windows Recall if you prefer. Essentially, it means the
Speaker 1: AI is taking snapshots of what's going on your PC
Speaker 1: every few seconds. That can include everything from which programs
Speaker 1: you're running, you know, any tabs that you have open
Speaker 1: on your browser, all that kind of stuff, and it
Speaker 1: will just take a snapshot of that, and then you
Speaker 1: can search through them and look through your history of
Speaker 1: activity on your computer. Further, while Microsoft Edge users will
Speaker 1: have at least some controls that allow them to filter
Speaker 1: what is or is not captured by the tool, anyone
Speaker 1: who's using a different browser will not necessarily have that
Speaker 1: same luck. So you might be an incognito mode, but
Speaker 1: it's still going to get captured by Windows Recall. And
Speaker 1: this has led some to argue that Microsoft is trying
Speaker 1: to push more people to adopt Edge as their browser
Speaker 1: of choice because that's the browser that actually does have
Speaker 1: the filter. But whether that's the case or not, plenty
Speaker 1: of people have come forward to criticize Windows Recall. While
Speaker 1: Microsoft says the snapshots are encrypted, some cybersecurity folks worried
Speaker 1: that Windows Recall will create a new target for hackers.
Speaker 1: So imagine being able to pull snapshots off a target
Speaker 1: computer and learn about things like login credentials or credit
Speaker 1: card information that kind of thing. Now, a lot of
Speaker 1: sites mask that stuff, but some don't, and so there's
Speaker 1: a real worry that Windows Recall will become a security
Speaker 1: and privacy vulnerability that will just encourage more hacking attacks.
Speaker 1: Some of the critics have even wondered what the use
Speaker 1: case is for this tool in the first place. I mean,
Speaker 1: you can use it to search through as activity, but
Speaker 1: to what end. Richard Speed of The Register also points
Speaker 1: out that this feature is likely going to run into
Speaker 1: compliance issues with the EU's GDPR laws. So will Microsoft
Speaker 1: walk this feature back never to speak of it again.
Speaker 1: It wouldn't surprise me, but we'll have to wait and see.
Speaker 1: X AKA Twitter has made a change and it doesn't
Speaker 1: have anything to do with AI, So we're off the
Speaker 1: AI stuff now. So now you will no longer be
Speaker 1: able to see which posts someone else has liked. You
Speaker 1: will still be able to see which posts you have liked,
Speaker 1: and you'll be able to see who has liked your posts,
Speaker 1: but you wouldn't be able to see what old Jimbob
Speaker 1: over there has hit like on. And jim Bob's not
Speaker 1: going to be able to see what you've hit like on.
Speaker 1: So why make this change? Well, according to the director
Speaker 1: of engineering at x QUOTE, public likes are incentivizing the
Speaker 1: wrong behavior. For example, many people feel discouraged from liking
Speaker 1: content that might be edgy in fear of retaliation from
Speaker 1: trolls to protect their public image end quote. And I
Speaker 1: can see how that could be helpful if I were
Speaker 1: still on x and if I were using my account
Speaker 1: to say like posts that were made by activists who
Speaker 1: are in the LGBTQ community, I might prefer it if
Speaker 1: trolls who just want to harass people didn't see that
Speaker 1: I was supporting that, although I think public support is
Speaker 1: really helpful in those cases. On the flip side, if
Speaker 1: let's say you're I don't know a justice on a
Speaker 1: Supreme Court, as a hypothetical example, you might not want
Speaker 1: people being able to see that you've liked comments that
Speaker 1: appear to confirm a political bias one way or the other,
Speaker 1: since you're supposed to be impartial. I'm not saying that's happened,
Speaker 1: just saying that's a use case. Now. I don't think
Speaker 1: this change really means much to me personally, because I
Speaker 1: left Twitter ages ago, I have no plans to go back.
Speaker 1: I feel that Twitter has largely continued to move in
Speaker 1: a direction that is just completely in opposition to the
Speaker 1: values I have. Not saying my values are right, just
Speaker 1: that they're very different from the ones that I see
Speaker 1: on Twitter, but for those people who still are on X,
Speaker 1: I can see how this could be a welcome change
Speaker 1: where you know, it's just one less thing for you
Speaker 1: to worry about getting hassled about. Zach Whittaker of tech
Speaker 1: Crunch has a piece about how at least three Windom
Speaker 1: hotels in the United States have had Consumer Grades spyware
Speaker 1: installed in their check in systems, which means those check
Speaker 1: in systems have essentially been capturing screenshots of the login process,
Speaker 1: not that different from what we were talking about with
Speaker 1: Windows Recall, and then storing these screenshots in a database
Speaker 1: that hackers can access anywhere in the world, which means
Speaker 1: hackers can comb through these screenshots to get personal information
Speaker 1: about guests, including things like potentially credit card information or
Speaker 1: at least partial credit card information. The spyware is called
Speaker 1: PC tattle Tale, and it's usually marketed as a way
Speaker 1: to keep an eye on someone who's like, you know,
Speaker 1: your husband or wife or your kids or partner, because
Speaker 1: you don't trust them and you want to see what
Speaker 1: they've been getting up to, you know, healthy, wholesome stuff
Speaker 1: like that. Tech Crunch reports that a flaw on the
Speaker 1: app makes it possible for anyone in the world to
Speaker 1: access these screenshots if they know how to exploit the flaw,
Speaker 1: and that despite a security researcher trying to contact the
Speaker 1: developers behind this app, there's been no response to their
Speaker 1: inquiries and the flaw has remained in place. Tech Crunch
Speaker 1: chose not to reveal the specifics about these three hotels
Speaker 1: in order to prevent retaliation against employees of those hotels
Speaker 1: who may not be at fault because we don't know
Speaker 1: why the spyware was on the computers in the first place.
Speaker 1: It could be that there was a manager who was
Speaker 1: just trying to make sure that their employees weren't goofing
Speaker 1: off while on the job. It could be that hackers
Speaker 1: use social engineering to trick staff into installing something on
Speaker 1: their computers that definitely shouldn't be there. We don't know.
Speaker 1: The Pentagon has revealed that Russia has launched something into
Speaker 1: space that's in the same orbit as a US government satellite,
Speaker 1: and further that this something is likely a counter space
Speaker 1: weapon of some sort. The presumption is that this Russian
Speaker 1: spacecraft has the ability to attack satellites in low Earth orbit. So,
Speaker 1: you know, fun stuff. Okay, let's end with a fun story.
Speaker 1: So this one hits me right in the nostalgia. So
Speaker 1: when I was a kid, I had an Atari twenty
Speaker 1: six hundred game console, and then much later, after the
Speaker 1: video game crash from nineteen eighty three, I got a
Speaker 1: cousin's old intelevision system and a dozen or so games,
Speaker 1: plus a dozen or so controller overlays, only some of
Speaker 1: which corresponded with the actual games I had, So I
Speaker 1: felt like I had the best of both worlds, despite
Speaker 1: the fact that by that time the Nintendo Entertainment System
Speaker 1: was out and was undeniably the superior game console. Anyway.
Speaker 1: This week, Atari, which I should add is not really
Speaker 1: the same company as the one that was in the
Speaker 1: late seventies early eighties, Atari announced that it had acquired
Speaker 1: the Intellivision brand and a bunch of Intellivision games from
Speaker 1: a company that up until now really it was called
Speaker 1: Intelevision Entertainment LLC. SO for several years in Television, which
Speaker 1: has also gone through major changes in ownership and isn't
Speaker 1: really the same company anymore, has been trying to release
Speaker 1: a home video game consol called the Amiko So. Atari
Speaker 1: did not purchase the rights to Amiko. So the company
Speaker 1: in television Entertainment LLC will continue, but it will change
Speaker 1: its name. Don't know what's changing its name too yet,
Speaker 1: but it's going to change its name. The Intellivision brand
Speaker 1: and all that stuff is what goes over to Atari,
Speaker 1: and Atari will have purchased the legacy in television system
Speaker 1: and games, so we should see that incorporated in some
Speaker 1: way in the not too distant future. I have a
Speaker 1: couple of articles for suggested reading for y'all before I
Speaker 1: sign off. First up is Mike Masnek's piece on tech Dirt.
Speaker 1: It's titled The Plan to Sunset. Section two thirty is
Speaker 1: about a rogue Congress taking the Internet hostage if it
Speaker 1: doesn't get its way. I did an episode about Section
Speaker 1: two thirty back in December twenty twenty. It's a piece
Speaker 1: of legislation that was drafted to give protection to Internet
Speaker 1: platforms in order to allow the Internet to grow, but
Speaker 1: now Congress is debating on sunsetting that protection by the
Speaker 1: end of next year. Masnext piece explains why that would
Speaker 1: be a very bad thing. The other suggests article I
Speaker 1: have is on the Verge and it's by Lauren Finer
Speaker 1: and just Weatherbed and it's titled the US Government is
Speaker 1: trying to break up Live Nation ticket Master. So the
Speaker 1: piece explains how Live Nation has created an insular ecosystem
Speaker 1: that is reportedly anti competitive and locks artists and venues
Speaker 1: into using Live Nation and Ticketmaster systems, and how the
Speaker 1: US government is possibly going to bring that to an end.
Speaker 1: That could be welcome news to all y'all out there
Speaker 1: who are sick of paying so called convenience fees that
Speaker 1: are almost as much as the show ticket price itself.
Speaker 1: I count myself among you. It is Memorial Day weekend
Speaker 1: here in the United States. There will be a rerun
Speaker 1: episode on Monday and on Wednesday, because I'll be out
Speaker 1: of town. There'll be a new episode of tech Stuff
Speaker 1: next Friday. I hope all of you celebrating Memorial Day
Speaker 1: have a safe and happy holiday. I hope everyone else
Speaker 1: out there has a great weekend, and I'll talk to
Speaker 1: you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeart Heart
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