Speaker 1: Al Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Sweet Baby, Jiminy Christmas, Welcome back to It Could Happen
Speaker 2: Here a podcast. It's normally about all of the sad
Speaker 2: and horrifying and violent and dangerous and sometimes inspiring things
Speaker 2: happening around the world. But this week, well, today is
Speaker 2: about something different. Today We're talking about ces finally, for
Speaker 2: those of you who don't know or who are new
Speaker 2: to the show. Every year in Las Vegas, Nevada, a
Speaker 2: bunch of the world's big tech companies come together for
Speaker 2: the Consumer Electronics Show, where they present their visions for
Speaker 2: the future, the new products that will be coming out
Speaker 2: that year, and stuff that will be coming out and
Speaker 2: used to come that's less developed, and the whole industry
Speaker 2: talks about itself, and Garrison and I show up and
Speaker 2: largely just kind of let it wash over us like
Speaker 2: a warming tide of lukewarm garbage water, fairy lukewarmy, very lukewarm,
Speaker 2: and it smells like someone did not clean their fridge
Speaker 2: out often enough before putting it into the trash.
Speaker 3: That was the feeling of showstoppers tonight, the media only
Speaker 3: presentation on the finest products of CEES.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, why don't we start? So, I mean I mean,
Speaker 2: there's two different things that are interesting about CEES broadly.
Speaker 2: One of them is people bring gadgets that are not
Speaker 2: out yet that it will be coming out this year
Speaker 2: or coming out soon, and you can actually test them
Speaker 2: and use them and see how technology is progressing, and
Speaker 2: that can be kind of fun. The downside of that
Speaker 2: is that people also bring gadgets that are crap. Right,
Speaker 2: some guy has a vision for a way to like,
Speaker 2: you know, there's not a good way for blind people
Speaker 2: to use the pogo stick while watching Netflix, and so
Speaker 2: I have created this product, right, Or like, there's not
Speaker 2: a good way for children to test their blood alcohol
Speaker 2: level before getting behind the wheel of a jeep Grand Cherokee,
Speaker 2: and I have invented the device to make it about
Speaker 2: things that, like I have no conceivable audience or utilization. Right.
Speaker 2: That's the other side of the gadget part of CEES.
Speaker 2: And then outside of that you get a hint at
Speaker 2: like there's all these panels where people from the industry
Speaker 2: come to talk about the major trends in technology, how
Speaker 2: things are developing, and what they see as the future.
Speaker 2: And so there's both here's what they're going to try
Speaker 2: to sell us and here's the devices that might change
Speaker 2: the way we live. And also here's how a bunch
Speaker 2: of the richest, sometimes craziest people in the country you're
Speaker 2: talking about the future. Those are the two things that
Speaker 2: happen at CES and Garrison. You wanted to talk about
Speaker 2: the first the gadgets. The gadgets, the gadgets one as
Speaker 2: you went to the gadget show tonight. I spent my
Speaker 2: entire day in panels.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean I did most of the panels in
Speaker 4: the day.
Speaker 3: I didn't really got to watch the show floor on
Speaker 3: the first day, which is which is Tuesday. So instead
Speaker 3: of doing the show floor, I went to show stoppers
Speaker 3: at the Bellagio, which is this presentation of Usually usually
Speaker 3: you know, a collection of gadgets that have won CES
Speaker 3: Innovation Awards, which are on display or for journalists and
Speaker 3: media you can talk to the people behind them choicetoppers.
Speaker 3: This year was a little different. It took place like.
Speaker 4: A in a in like a different venue. Haul was
Speaker 4: smaller than the past few showstoppers years, and I would
Speaker 4: say about forty percent of it with smart glasses.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's usually like a big product that is like
Speaker 2: this product category is the hot thing. This year, we've
Speaker 2: tried all smart glasses every year, it is that they've
Speaker 2: always had them.
Speaker 4: Every year that.
Speaker 3: We've been doing this, we've done smart glasses, and they've
Speaker 3: always kind of been the same. Maybe the resolution on
Speaker 3: like the text better, like the glasses get a little
Speaker 3: bit smaller, and then this year, yeah, the glasses were
Speaker 3: generally smaller, but for all practical purposes function about the same.
Speaker 3: But there was but ten different smart glasses. Most of
Speaker 3: them could do some kind of like transcription service, could
Speaker 3: have some kind of heads up display. One of them
Speaker 3: was just audio only. It was like an audio audio
Speaker 3: transcriptions like it like it listens to someone else speaking,
Speaker 3: in this case Chinese, and it would translates to me
Speaker 3: to American. Yeah, yeah, translate to American via sound. It
Speaker 3: had speakers. It had speakers, and like the actual you know,
Speaker 3: like the arm of the glasses, the delay was long
Speaker 3: enough that it was you couldn't really keep a conversation
Speaker 3: of a normal speed like the visual translations, which you
Speaker 3: can't actually kind of just talk in full time. But
Speaker 3: the audio only ones were like a smaller profile. The
Speaker 3: visual ones weren't necessarily bulkier, but you can definitely see that.
Speaker 4: There's more hardware inside them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the thing that I have seen this year which
Speaker 3: is newer, er, maybe not totally new, but incorporating smart
Speaker 3: glasses technology into other types of eyewear, so like swim goggles,
Speaker 3: ski goggles, like outdoor sports stuff. So if you're you know,
Speaker 3: swimming or you're diving and you can't really use your
Speaker 3: phone underwater, you have there's there's a heads up that
Speaker 3: there's a heads up display in like your like Scoopa goggles.
Speaker 4: So that that's that's a new, a newish thing that
Speaker 4: I've seen.
Speaker 3: I've seen like you know, biking glasses, skiing, snowboarding, so
Speaker 3: that that's the kind of one one slight change. But
Speaker 3: in besides that, it's basically five different smart glasses which
Speaker 3: are for all pactal purposes identical right to each other.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, and that I think is kind of
Speaker 2: one of the things that I've watched happen over the
Speaker 2: fifteen years almost that I've been going to cess or
Speaker 2: cess whichever is more accurate, which is, you know, when
Speaker 2: I first started coming, the smartphone era was new, and
Speaker 2: then we had like the tablet era after that, and
Speaker 2: so there was a lot of like you would have
Speaker 2: dozens of manufacturers making different devices, and every year there
Speaker 2: were very different capability. For the first few years, smartphones
Speaker 2: were out advanced very rapidly, and that was really exciting,
Speaker 2: and the conventionally thrived on that as the number of
Speaker 2: new device categories of winnowed down and the difference like
Speaker 2: I'm not excited when I get a phone anymore now
Speaker 2: there's anyone I.
Speaker 3: Know, because it's like no, usually I'm actually kind of
Speaker 3: yeah more sad.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The only thing that's exciting is like, well, my old
Speaker 2: phone was literally not working anymore.
Speaker 4: Yeah the phone work, the battery has been completely destroyed.
Speaker 2: Yeah the battery works now or whatever. But it's not
Speaker 2: like the cameras are not ce changes better. Generally, nothing
Speaker 2: is like you're not getting a lot more out of
Speaker 2: it than you used to. And the same mystruy of
Speaker 2: like laptops, i mean, graphics cards just because of the
Speaker 2: data center crunch, like that's not nearly as exciting a
Speaker 2: technology category for consumers as it used to be. So
Speaker 2: this stuff is just like less less sexy, and yeah,
Speaker 2: it just kind of shows that we're at a point
Speaker 2: where kind of one of the only spaces where they
Speaker 2: are still making improvements and where there's a lot of
Speaker 2: competition in the market is smart glasses.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean that's like the wearables category in general, Yeah,
Speaker 3: which was mentioned. I went to the Consumer Technology Association
Speaker 3: like keynote panel this morning, which is the group that
Speaker 3: puts on cees, and they mentioned only only a few products,
Speaker 3: but one of them we're smart glasses. And then also
Speaker 3: like wearables in general, like AI powered wearables and now
Speaker 3: like wearable technology. You know, it's like smart watches, rings, necklaces,
Speaker 3: whatever are going to make like a big comeback now
Speaker 3: that now that AI is a lot is a lot
Speaker 3: more intelligent, and it used to be in particular at
Speaker 3: the CEES Like big keynote Tuesday morning, you mentioned a
Speaker 3: persona smart tutor glasses glasses to help you, you know,
Speaker 3: well learning. I haven't tried to be able to check
Speaker 3: out the product yet, but they kind of remind me
Speaker 3: of some of the concept behind those cleuely glasses that
Speaker 3: you may have seen on social media, the.
Speaker 4: Glasses that help you like cheat.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but also somebody who's like we should embrace people cheating.
Speaker 3: And but cheat just in a conversation, it seems like
Speaker 3: that product isn't necessarily as real as uh what the
Speaker 3: video might make it out to be.
Speaker 2: People whose company was based on lying didn't make a
Speaker 2: real product.
Speaker 3: But well, walking through your Eureka Park today, it's funny.
Speaker 3: I also saw this this product in one of like
Speaker 3: the National Pavilions I think it was the one of
Speaker 3: like the japan Tech Pavilions. AI powered tool to help
Speaker 3: to help prevent cheating while test taking. So you have
Speaker 3: AI powered tools that will monitor you to make sure
Speaker 3: you're not cheating.
Speaker 4: Will you use an AI powered tool that helps.
Speaker 2: Cheat cheat it? Yeah? Better at school?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's kind of just a good representation of kind
Speaker 3: of where where this whole industry is at at the moment.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: In some ways, I think, you know, this is probably
Speaker 3: what year three of AI being you know, the big thing,
Speaker 3: whether that's unwearables, you know, where that's smart glasses, whether
Speaker 3: that's you know, a generative AI, whether that's AI. You know,
Speaker 3: but it's been but a has been been, like you know,
Speaker 3: the added of property for for everything, and some of
Speaker 3: that might be starting to kind of tucker out or
Speaker 3: at least the they've taken the victory lap. And there's
Speaker 3: there's a certain like you know, like cultural victory that
Speaker 3: that they're resting on whether they're starting to put some
Speaker 3: of their eggs in other baskets now, which certainly wasn't
Speaker 3: the case last year.
Speaker 2: No, and I I got a sense I attended six
Speaker 2: panels today, congratulations. It was a mix of like advertising people,
Speaker 2: entertainment associated people, some journalism associated people, and in robotics,
Speaker 2: people in robotics talking about a lot of a lot
Speaker 2: of robodies. Yeah, what they saw was the future of AI,
Speaker 2: and there was a lot of focus first on AI
Speaker 2: is not going to be taking jobs as much as
Speaker 2: it's going to be augmenting jobs, right, Although you would
Speaker 2: get the occasional person be like, I's going to take
Speaker 2: a lot of jobs, I got.
Speaker 3: People saying that it's it's only going to take jobs
Speaker 3: if if you don't know how to incorporate AI into
Speaker 3: your workfloce. And that's the argument at the moment right now. Yeah,
Speaker 3: if you're not using AI, you're a greater risk of
Speaker 3: you losing So.
Speaker 2: You better get on it, right, start start learning it. Yes, Yes.
Speaker 2: And then the other thing is that there was a
Speaker 2: lot of like it's there to help or take away
Speaker 2: unpleasant tasks from workers, but really emphasizing the it's not
Speaker 2: your enemy thing, you don't need to be scared. And
Speaker 2: I quoted like half of these panels, people would quote
Speaker 2: statistics about low user trust and AI and the fact
Speaker 2: that people are generally not super comfortable with this technology
Speaker 2: even if they use it in parts of their work
Speaker 2: life right or daily life. And so what I saw
Speaker 2: from that, when I interpret from that, is that there
Speaker 2: is internal concern that like that that's one of the
Speaker 2: things that could screw the pooch on this is that
Speaker 2: people are not really sure they like this stuff, and
Speaker 2: so there's this impulse to kind of cover the softer
Speaker 2: and fuzzier sides of it that I didn't see in
Speaker 2: previous years. Yeah, and I think is really focusing on
Speaker 2: this is just making things you already like better, as
Speaker 2: opposed to this is a revolution that's completely changing life.
Speaker 3: And to the extent where AI was fremous revolutionary, it
Speaker 3: was specifically trying to ground it in like physical applications,
Speaker 3: as opposed to this more general kind of like spectral
Speaker 3: like AI hype that we've seen the past few years,
Speaker 3: which is in specifically around like generative AI right where
Speaker 3: it's like this like kind of vague thing that we
Speaker 3: like gestured to there's more specific applications for AI being
Speaker 3: talked about right now, and they talked talked about like
Speaker 3: AI assisted manufacturing simulations like digital twins of factories, shipyards,
Speaker 3: power plants, a lot of digital twin talk building you know,
Speaker 3: a digital replica of like everything you know of society,
Speaker 3: to like run these simulations to both make AIS smarter,
Speaker 3: to generate new solutions outside of the limitations of a
Speaker 3: language model, also find you know, potential problems in you know,
Speaker 3: when you build these things physically.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was something that was brought up during the
Speaker 2: robotics panel, which was talking about how to like take
Speaker 2: the machine learning technology and other things that are generally
Speaker 2: grouped under AI and apply it in the physical world.
Speaker 3: Yeah, manufacturing, I've had done so much right in just
Speaker 3: one day. I probably I've heard the word manufacturing more
Speaker 3: today than I have most in every cees I've been
Speaker 3: to previously, combined.
Speaker 2: And I think consciously more focused on industrial applications than
Speaker 2: on consumer technology because there's not that much new to
Speaker 2: give the consumer right and they are also I think
Speaker 2: starting to recognize that you can get people using chat,
Speaker 2: GPT and the like, but they're mostly not using it,
Speaker 2: and the data backs this up. People are mostly using
Speaker 2: it at work and for school and gin z a lot.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of people who are doing like their
Speaker 2: research on like what to buy and whatnot through using
Speaker 2: chat GPT. But there's not a lot that you can
Speaker 2: sell people in CES because it's an app and there's
Speaker 2: not a ton of different devices for it. People are
Speaker 2: using it on their phone, they're using it on their computer,
Speaker 2: but like none of the new phones and computers are
Speaker 2: marketly better at using chat GPT or another you know,
Speaker 2: chatbot thing than any of the others. So there's not
Speaker 2: a lot that's sexy in just that at CES. So
Speaker 2: I think I have seen this conscience reforming around people
Speaker 2: in manufacturing and people who are like thinking of the
Speaker 2: concerns of like I have a pair like an exoskeleton
Speaker 2: to test this week. That's seeing a lot of its
Speaker 2: business in folks who are like doing like Amazon type
Speaker 2: jobs right loading and unloading packages and whatnot all day long,
Speaker 2: you know. And I do see a conscious reforming there,
Speaker 2: which I think is kind of evidence of like there's
Speaker 2: almost an admission that like, yeah, we don't really have
Speaker 2: that much to hand consumers anymore. On a yearly.
Speaker 5: Basis speaking of handing things to consumers ads.
Speaker 2: So the first panel I went to of the day
Speaker 2: was about the funnel, which, as I understand it is
Speaker 2: just kind of like the way in which people have
Speaker 2: traditionally engaged with like media, gotten advertised to and then
Speaker 2: like gone to stores and bought stuff like the funnel
Speaker 2: by which you like make a customer, and how that's
Speaker 2: been completely blown up now, right, and AI is like
Speaker 2: a further massive disruption because people are not like people
Speaker 2: are increasingly, especially very young people, which was putted out
Speaker 2: in a number of these are like buying stuff that
Speaker 2: a chatbot recommends them, right, And so a lot of
Speaker 2: marketing is being seen as being done through how do
Speaker 2: you get the chatbot to talk about you a certain way?
Speaker 2: What is the SEO of getting chat ebt? Oh, it's interesting,
Speaker 2: like right, there's a lot of time I.
Speaker 3: Thought, as someone who's not a regular chatbot user, which
Speaker 3: I'm sure must people here am I, which chastis me
Speaker 3: for we're not maximizing my productivity.
Speaker 2: And meaning to get on to you for that garrison.
Speaker 3: There's not a regular chat about user. I've never thought
Speaker 3: of that before. Of yeah, I mean, like I know
Speaker 3: people use these chatbots as a replacement for search engines,
Speaker 3: But the idea of like trying to you know, evaluate
Speaker 3: purchases is uh. I mean, I guess that makes sense now,
Speaker 3: but I've never put that together.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And the only because there was a lot of
Speaker 2: talking about like how AI is helping advertisers, how it's
Speaker 2: making advertisements, how like it's helping in the process of that,
Speaker 2: And there was a focus in all the panels about
Speaker 2: that on how like, well, it's just augmenting the humans.
Speaker 2: But the only specific examples given were the McDonald's and
Speaker 2: Coca Cola AI generated ads, which were both disasters. I
Speaker 2: mean the McDonald's one in the Netherlands got removed. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they people so bad.
Speaker 4: They withdrew the attic so ugly.
Speaker 2: Deed. Yeah, I don't know. Coke did do it twice.
Speaker 2: Maybe they consider it a win. But everything I saw
Speaker 2: was very negative. I didn't see a lot of positive
Speaker 2: feedback on Coca Cola visavi. They're weird. AI holidays are coming.
Speaker 3: At It's like people who don't know it's AI think
Speaker 3: feel very neutral about it. Yeah, people that do we
Speaker 3: know it's AI, I think generally have negative reactions.
Speaker 2: I think if you look at it, it's pretty clear.
Speaker 3: But anyway, I mean, it less clear if maybe you're
Speaker 3: like a sixty year old watches.
Speaker 2: You know, exact or in between stuff, and that's all
Speaker 2: good enough.
Speaker 4: Grandpa, don't go Internet, right, Yeah, he doesn't know.
Speaker 2: He might notice some of those those fucking h polar
Speaker 2: bears have the wrong number of pause. But yeah, so,
Speaker 2: like there was some talk of that and the other.
Speaker 2: The only specific example they gave of like an AI
Speaker 2: enhanced strategy was Allegra. The people who own like the
Speaker 2: medicine had like a new non drowsy formula or they
Speaker 2: just wanted to highlight that it was non drowsy. So
Speaker 2: they basically had a bunch of like seeded the stuff
Speaker 2: that chatbot that like open Ai was scored that chatbots
Speaker 2: were scraping, yeah, with content about how Allegra makes it
Speaker 2: is on drowsy and about how like competing similar medications
Speaker 2: make you drowsy, I mean, so that it would get
Speaker 2: mentioned in like and they talked about They called it
Speaker 2: like model hacking, I think was the exact term used.
Speaker 2: And that was the only thing that was the only
Speaker 2: specific example that I can't know any of this works too,
Speaker 2: Like everyone else was just talking in vague terms about
Speaker 2: like and we've really seen our teams creativity sore or whatever.
Speaker 3: That's interesting, you know because the way that I probably
Speaker 3: use or exposed to AI the most is like on
Speaker 3: like Google Search now, which has you know, it's it's
Speaker 3: like AI like summaries instead of like actual search results.
Speaker 4: But those are based on like which you.
Speaker 2: Can type minus AI in with the search results if
Speaker 2: we want to cut that stuff out.
Speaker 3: But those AI results are you know, pulling from certain
Speaker 3: like articles which which they'll link to. So yeah, I
Speaker 3: guys said, if I was trying to design it like
Speaker 3: an AI marketing strategy, I would I would either you know,
Speaker 3: pay publications to mention my product in more articles or
Speaker 3: find find out find other ways to to to influence
Speaker 3: mentions of of my product in like written media that
Speaker 3: then would be used as like training data for AI.
Speaker 3: And yeah, I guess there there can be a whole
Speaker 3: you know, search engine optimization model acking is I guess.
Speaker 2: Model optimism or yeah, like product opposite optimization for a model.
Speaker 2: I guess that's funny, but yeah, like the So the
Speaker 2: first talk that I went to was about the funnel
Speaker 2: or whatever, and one of the people speaking. There was
Speaker 2: the CMO, the chief marketing officer of Intuit, which is
Speaker 2: the company that owns Turbo tax right like, it's one
Speaker 2: of the big we do your taxes companies out there,
Speaker 2: and also a lobbyer in terms of stopping any sort
Speaker 2: of a form of make it's that you don't need
Speaker 2: to do your own other countries.
Speaker 4: Credit score monitoring, yes, a whole bunch of.
Speaker 2: Stuff, all that kind of stuff. So this this guy,
Speaker 2: the CMO of the company, Thomas Renize, was part of
Speaker 2: this the end of the funnel speech, and he made
Speaker 2: a couple of comments that I took note of. One
Speaker 2: is product is brand and brand is product full stop.
Speaker 2: So the more people you can make experience your product,
Speaker 2: that's the best selling point and value of right which
Speaker 2: it was just interesting to me in terms of the
Speaker 2: into it as a company that has lobbied to make
Speaker 2: it impossible for like any reform that would allow people
Speaker 2: to not need a third party to do there they're taxes.
Speaker 2: But also this idea that like product is brand and
Speaker 2: brand is product isn't true of a lot of companies.
Speaker 2: Like if you think about like, for example, like a
Speaker 2: lot of the different soft drinks are all owned by
Speaker 2: one company, but they're fundamentally different like products and have
Speaker 2: an often cases like a different user base, and it's
Speaker 2: very like, it's a very tech when your product is
Speaker 2: a concept, Like you can't do your own taxes because
Speaker 2: it's a pain in the ass, but the government doesn't
Speaker 2: do it for you because we lobby to make that illegal.
Speaker 3: Like.
Speaker 2: I found that interesting and it kind of got me
Speaker 2: angry at Thomas at the start of this. And I
Speaker 2: was particularly interested in one of the things he brought up,
Speaker 2: which is that he talked about the one hundred million
Speaker 2: dollars that into It is putting into open Ai, and
Speaker 2: they're putting this into open Ai as part of a
Speaker 2: multi year partnership. And I want to qu vote from
Speaker 2: an article in the website Araptus which is discussing this
Speaker 2: exact thing that I found useful when I was formulating
Speaker 2: my question for Thomas. The contract was to embed AM
Speaker 2: models directly into QuickBooks, TurboTax, and credit Karma. The promise
Speaker 2: AI assistants that can generate invoices, provide tax extments, recommend loans,
Speaker 2: and help you make informed financial decisions. Right. That may
Speaker 2: sound like kind of like a basic move, like's what's
Speaker 2: so sketchy about just integrating like an AI chatbot to
Speaker 2: make it easier to use your tax software. It can
Speaker 2: be complicated and hard to use as anyway. But kind
Speaker 2: of the necessary part of this is if you are
Speaker 2: if you're doing this, if you're integrating all of these
Speaker 2: different tax and credit programs into an AI model, you're
Speaker 2: giving that AI model access to people's financial data in
Speaker 2: a tremendous amount of detail, right, And all of these
Speaker 2: AI models have a massive shared vulnerability, which is a
Speaker 2: vernability to something called called prompt injection, right. And that's when,
Speaker 2: for example, say someone is a customer of a tax
Speaker 2: prepared that uses one of into its products to prepare
Speaker 2: taxes for its customers, and this person sends an invoice
Speaker 2: into the company that has hidden text in it that
Speaker 2: is a command to the language model that will be
Speaker 2: scraping this and uploading it to basically open up and
Speaker 2: send over a bunch of customer data to a specific source.
Speaker 2: That's a thing that you can do. It's called prompt injection,
Speaker 2: and there's not really a way to counter it. There's
Speaker 2: not like a proven comprehensive defense against this sort of thing.
Speaker 2: And so there's this massive vulnerability, and this was first
Speaker 2: brought up in an article on the website. I cited
Speaker 2: a raptus by Chris Black, who's a security researcher an expert,
Speaker 2: and I want to read a quote from his article
Speaker 2: about this. There are no proven comprehensive defenses against prompt
Speaker 2: injection when not if an AI powered financial tool leaks
Speaker 2: customer data through a prompt injection attack, who is liable
Speaker 2: the company using quick books into it open Ai? The
Speaker 2: regulations weren't written for this scenario. So I decided to
Speaker 2: ask that question of Thomas, being like the chief marketing officer,
Speaker 2: I figured, well he should have some answer to like
Speaker 2: what do you have, what sort of security measures do
Speaker 2: you have to mitigate the risk of a prompt injection attack?
Speaker 2: And who do you see as being responsible? If you
Speaker 2: are the ones providing customer data to open ai and
Speaker 2: their tool gets it by a prompt injection attack, are
Speaker 2: you responsible? Is open ai is a third party that
Speaker 2: might be using your products? And he had no answer
Speaker 2: to this. He like, his only answer when we were
Speaker 2: on stage was like, we're talking with open ai about it,
Speaker 2: which like, well, you're already in the process of collaborating
Speaker 2: with them.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I have a question for Thomas. I was kind
Speaker 6: of concerned when reading about into it assists that a
Speaker 6: open AI is going to have read and write access
Speaker 6: to quite a lot of financial information from users, which
Speaker 6: opens up a vulnerability for a prompt injection. Right, you
Speaker 6: have the possibility that people who can hide things and
Speaker 6: invoices that are then being uploaded that will cause the
Speaker 6: AI to provide the malicious user with financial details for
Speaker 6: individuals or corporations. And I guess my primary question here
Speaker 6: this seems like a major liability issue when somebody's information
Speaker 6: gets rerouted to a place that's not supposed to go
Speaker 6: to a malicious actor.
Speaker 2: Who's responsible.
Speaker 7: You're taking the value of integrity and protecting our customer
Speaker 7: data privaly seriously over our entire lives. And that's what
Speaker 7: forty years as a company and meeting in the software
Speaker 7: space for financial services. So this is not something we're
Speaker 7: about to use it in any way in the new
Speaker 7: age of AI. In fact, it has to get even
Speaker 7: more and more level down of protecting people's information and
Speaker 7: security of edforation. So that is something that we are
Speaker 7: already in the conversations with open AI have a nation
Speaker 7: about that group, no matter where we're starving.
Speaker 2: And when I kind of cornered him afterwards, he didn't
Speaker 2: have like his eventual follow up answers like I don't
Speaker 2: know that kind of stuff, and like you are the
Speaker 2: chief marketing officer.
Speaker 8: Thank you again for answering my question.
Speaker 9: Sure, your question.
Speaker 8: I'm still really concerned about the danger of prompt injection
Speaker 8: attacks revealing financial data, and it doesn't still sound like
Speaker 8: there's an understanding of who will be liable.
Speaker 2: To answer that question for you.
Speaker 6: So I mean, like I can tell you that we're
Speaker 6: coming into our security and privacy and we are doing.
Speaker 2: Everything we can to protect that. I feel a lot
Speaker 2: writing on it, as you might imagine.
Speaker 8: Well, yeah, it's every digital security expert I've talked to
Speaker 8: says it's a matter of when, not if, that there
Speaker 8: is financial data revealed.
Speaker 2: By these attacks. It seems like understanding.
Speaker 8: I'm just I'm not going to be the expert to
Speaker 8: get into the details on that.
Speaker 2: Okay, Yeah, A key part of marketing this should be
Speaker 2: being able to tell people what kind of safety precautions
Speaker 2: are being taken with their data. And the fact that
Speaker 2: he didn't and clearly had never thought about any of
Speaker 2: this stuff and I had a couple of different people
Speaker 2: come up to me afterwards and like be like, Wow,
Speaker 2: that was a really good question. And I was like, well,
Speaker 2: why hasn't this been asked before? Like why is this
Speaker 2: a thing where like some guy's blogging about it and
Speaker 2: I'm asking you about it and you don't have an
Speaker 2: answer to it, and you're the CEO of one of
Speaker 2: like the largest tax prep the largest tax prep company
Speaker 2: in the country. Like it's just it's emblematic of how
Speaker 2: careless everyone adjacent to this industry is, which personal data
Speaker 2: with the safety of people, end of society as a
Speaker 2: result of like what their products are doing, Like there's
Speaker 2: absolutely no consideration given the harms of any of this shit.
Speaker 2: And it's it's the most consistently dispiriting part of showing
Speaker 2: up at CES. Well what is right?
Speaker 4: What a fun story?
Speaker 2: That is? All right? We're back. So one of the
Speaker 2: other things that's been a major topic on the panels
Speaker 2: I went to and is generally a big thing at
Speaker 2: CES this year and in tech this year is agentic
Speaker 2: AI or agents. Right, the idea that you have an
Speaker 2: AI that you can send off to like book a
Speaker 2: flight for you, and it doesn't just like find a
Speaker 2: flight that it searches for and be like, hey, this
Speaker 2: looks good. It like actually books it for you and
Speaker 2: handles all of that. Right. This has been one of
Speaker 2: the big promises of AI, not just for like flights,
Speaker 2: but that you can have like an actual digital assistant
Speaker 2: that persistently remembers all of your shit and can book
Speaker 2: stuff for you and handle like the pain in the
Speaker 2: ass nitty gritty. If you say, like, hey, I need
Speaker 2: you to find a restaurant within like this four block
Speaker 2: radius that has seven seats open at eight pm and
Speaker 2: abides by these dietary restrictions, you kind of just have
Speaker 2: to slog through figuring that out right now. And the
Speaker 2: idea is an agent can do that for you, and
Speaker 2: currently none of them can, right. This is a thing
Speaker 2: that is changing, like the performance of different agents are
Speaker 2: changing over time. But it is still very unclear. If
Speaker 2: you're not somebod who's fully bought into the kool aid,
Speaker 2: I'll say it's very unclear where these things will top
Speaker 2: out at. And there was a good article in futurism
Speaker 2: recently and I want to quote from it right now.
Speaker 2: Researchers at Carnegie Mellen University found earlier this year that
Speaker 2: even the best performing AI agent, which was Google's gym
Speaker 2: and I two point five pro at the time, failed
Speaker 2: to complete real world office tasks seventy percent of the time.
Speaker 2: And this is there's been a bunch of articles in
Speaker 2: the last couple of months about like, why didn't because
Speaker 2: twenty twenty five was supposed to be the year of
Speaker 2: agent to AAI and how they're saying, well, twenty twenty six,
Speaker 2: it's going to be the year of agenta AAI. Not
Speaker 2: because none of this stuff works, and in fact enough
Speaker 2: does that there's a number of viable businesses in it.
Speaker 2: It's not nothing, but it does not work as well
Speaker 2: as they said it would be working right now, and
Speaker 2: it consequently has not been adopted merely as widely as
Speaker 2: was expected even this time last year. Right there's an
Speaker 2: article in hr dive half of gen Z chat GPT
Speaker 2: users say they view it as a coworker. Survey shows
Speaker 2: that sites the survey of about eighty six hundred four
Speaker 2: time US workers, which found that about eleven percent of
Speaker 2: those who responded said they use chat GPT regularly, including
Speaker 2: about twenty one percent of gen Z workers, which is
Speaker 2: significantly lower. You can find depending on who you go to.
Speaker 2: And the stat I've seen bandied about was that like
Speaker 2: fifty seven percent of gen z people use chat GPT
Speaker 2: on a daily basis for like work, and like more
Speaker 2: than half used it as like their primary source recommendations
Speaker 2: like what stuff to buy. I don't know, like which
Speaker 2: set of numbers is accurate. There's a lot of different
Speaker 2: posters giving data, right, but kind of no matter who
Speaker 2: you look at, the evidence suggests that the year that
Speaker 2: was supposed to be the year of agentic AI did
Speaker 2: not turn it into a normal thing, right, It's still
Speaker 2: lagging behind expectation. So that's kind of what we're seeing
Speaker 2: at CES is a lot of people trying to, like, well,
Speaker 2: let's bring back kind of the same agentic shit we
Speaker 2: had last year slightly improved and see if it catches on,
Speaker 2: maybe this year it'll hit maturity.
Speaker 3: Right Yeah, No, I mean we've been hearing agentic stuff
Speaker 3: every once in a while, not as much as last year.
Speaker 3: It's one of those like salt pepper words that they
Speaker 3: throw in the second batch of panels that I attended
Speaker 3: after the keynote, which I should mention as soon as
Speaker 3: I walked into the keynote at eight thirty am. The
Speaker 3: first thing, the very first thing I heard from Gary
Speaker 3: Shapiro's well, one of the heads the Consumer Technology Association
Speaker 3: was a six to seven joke. But whether this is
Speaker 3: your first CEES or your fifteenth on my case, you.
Speaker 5: Belong to number, was that sixty or seventy?
Speaker 4: You did a six to seven joke?
Speaker 3: Already, very first thing, Wow, eight great, great, thirty am.
Speaker 4: As soon as I walk in.
Speaker 3: It's because I walked in maybe like five minutes late,
Speaker 3: but very first words. So that's that's good's that kind
Speaker 3: of sets the tone for a lot of a lot
Speaker 3: of that panel. But then I went to a few
Speaker 3: panels in Eureka Park about like AI, governance, some like
Speaker 3: governments working working with AI, A lot of stuff, mostly
Speaker 3: about like the challenge of governments keeping up with innovation.
Speaker 3: How you know, too much regulation restricts these companies from
Speaker 3: doing real regulation. The Secretary of State of Austria had
Speaker 3: a really good quote about how data protections inhibit innovation.
Speaker 10: One of the things that you are saying today is
Speaker 10: that some of the people, some of the citizens, have
Speaker 10: this fear about AI.
Speaker 9: So how do you feel it in Austria.
Speaker 4: I think you mentioned very very well.
Speaker 10: It's all about building trust, taking the field trust for
Speaker 10: FEI that's the most important thing. And of course data
Speaker 10: protection is very huge. But on the other side, between
Speaker 10: data protection and innovation, you need to find the middle
Speaker 10: way because sometimes data protection.
Speaker 4: Is not good for innovation.
Speaker 3: On a similar notice, the into it the turbo tax
Speaker 3: thing of data protection is mainly getting in the way
Speaker 3: of trying to actually make make real social progress, which
Speaker 3: will carry with it some degree of risk. The second
Speaker 3: one of these AI governance panels was like these EU
Speaker 3: ambassadors to the US from Estonia and Luxembourg talking about
Speaker 3: like Reaganomics, basically for thirty minutes, talking about how much
Speaker 3: they love Ronald Reigen great.
Speaker 9: Whenos Soniavo certainly subscribed to the this statement that Reagan
Speaker 9: once made that the fuel most horrific words in English
Speaker 9: are the ones saying that a I'm from the government
Speaker 9: and I'm here to help.
Speaker 3: You, specifically in trying to make sure that governments are
Speaker 3: able to keep up with technology. And the previous panel
Speaker 3: with the Austrian Secretary of State was about the challenges
Speaker 3: of trying to convince the citizens of these countries to
Speaker 3: adopt AI and adopt in general like digitalization and specifically
Speaker 3: with like digital ideas, and how how there's like you know,
Speaker 3: maybe like twenty to thirty percent of people who are
Speaker 3: very resistant and the challenge of like making making sure
Speaker 3: that like this gets framed is not as like a
Speaker 3: product or like a like a project for technology, but
Speaker 3: as like a society wide push.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But besides that, these these panels were honestly a little
Speaker 3: bit sleepy as well as the state of the Creator
Speaker 3: Economy panel.
Speaker 2: Oh how's it doing?
Speaker 3: You know what, It's both it's both in its adolescence
Speaker 3: but also reach maturity.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: And they said, you know, it's hard to pick both.
Speaker 3: It's hard for too for something to be two things
Speaker 3: at once, but in this case it is.
Speaker 4: But they talked about how creators are more.
Speaker 3: Enabled to use brand deals, including you know, brand deals
Speaker 3: to enabled with like a backlog of older content. You
Speaker 3: can remove brand deals from older content and replace them
Speaker 3: with current brand deals using a new future from YouTube.
Speaker 3: Right there was there's a guy from YouTube at the panel. Sure, yeah,
Speaker 3: I'm sure who's very excited. But it was mostly about how,
Speaker 3: you know, new ways to use influencers to market your product,
Speaker 3: and that was the extent of what the creator economy
Speaker 3: really meant.
Speaker 2: And that's all any of these people have any idea
Speaker 2: on is like we can inject ads into AI they
Speaker 2: trust AI so they'll buy the products, or we can
Speaker 2: inject ads into influencers they trusts. That was the thing,
Speaker 2: Like none of these people they dress it up with
Speaker 2: all sorts of fancy language, but it's and most of
Speaker 2: these panels you mentioned, like there's a lot of bullshit
Speaker 2: every now and then you get some like good moments
Speaker 2: so you get to like question an asshole. But it's
Speaker 2: mostly bullshit, but it's occasionally worth it for moments like
Speaker 2: when I was on the agentic AI cutting through the
Speaker 2: hype panel, Jay Patasol, who's the principal analyst at Forrester,
Speaker 2: started speaking and he said something beautiful, Garrison, and I'm
Speaker 2: this is not an exact but it's pretty close. We
Speaker 2: have a new audience. We are speaking to machines. We
Speaker 2: are through the looking glass. We are building content for engines.
Speaker 2: We are building websites to be scraped so that an
Speaker 2: can understand what you wanted to understand about your brand. Yep, yep, yeah,
Speaker 2: that gets it. That's what these people see the Internet
Speaker 2: as they see it as like everything before this was
Speaker 2: a mistake or was. What the Internet was for was
Speaker 2: a place for brands to feed information into machines that
Speaker 2: then spoon feed the information directly into customers who trust
Speaker 2: it like little lambs. That's what they want the Internet
Speaker 2: to be, and that's what they believe they've gotten to.
Speaker 2: That's what AI. That's the promise of AI.
Speaker 3: The promise of AI is that this isn't just the
Speaker 3: Internet anymore. This can actually just be the physical world
Speaker 3: as well. And this is something that was talked about
Speaker 3: during the cees CTA keynote Tuesday morning. Specifically, with the
Speaker 3: birth of AI wearables, each of these wearables is able
Speaker 3: to now collect information about the physical world and as
Speaker 3: talng as you have, you know, adequate data sharing, AI
Speaker 3: is able to gain so much more knowledge about how
Speaker 3: the quote unquote real world operates. And this is going
Speaker 3: to make you know, all of the processes of AI
Speaker 3: stronger in the future as that learns more about what
Speaker 3: this world actually is. Yeah, and beyond the promise of
Speaker 3: wearables to improve someone's life, this is the real project
Speaker 3: is strengthening AI through the use of these wearables.
Speaker 4: It's not actually about the consumer experience.
Speaker 2: It's about providing data to this machine.
Speaker 3: It's this like larger, larger, very like existential thing at
Speaker 3: least for these executives or like that. That's the thing
Speaker 3: that they are really emphasizing despite this being called the
Speaker 3: Consumer Electronics Showcase.
Speaker 2: And I think again, the best thing I can give
Speaker 2: you into how fundamentally as much money as there is
Speaker 2: behind this and as many grand words as they dress
Speaker 2: it up, and how intellectually bankrupt this whole tech movement
Speaker 2: is is that. The third panel that I went to,
Speaker 2: which is about AI and creativity. One of the people
Speaker 2: on it was Jesse Damasek, who works for Diagio, which
Speaker 2: is like a company that imports all of your favorite
Speaker 2: whiskeys from Europe, right like they sell all of the
Speaker 2: different like Scottish whiskies that have to get like imported
Speaker 2: and sold over here. And he was talking about they
Speaker 2: were talking about some of the specific examples they had
Speaker 2: of like how AI has been used in advertising campaigns,
Speaker 2: and his exact statement was you can leverage an artist
Speaker 2: and create infinite examples of their work, but which he
Speaker 2: means you can find an artist that you like, sign
Speaker 2: a deal with them, and then have AI created infinite
Speaker 2: examples in their style, and so I camped afterwards and
Speaker 2: I was like, what were you specifically referring to, Like,
Speaker 2: how is this actually work as a product? And the
Speaker 2: thing that he pointed out is that they have a
Speaker 2: couple of whiskey brands that they have done. You go
Speaker 2: in and you order a bottle and it's printed on site,
Speaker 2: and it uses AI to make an example in the
Speaker 2: style of this existing artist that they likes work that's
Speaker 2: unique for you. Uh huh. And he said it's been
Speaker 2: successful for them. Is it trillions of dollars? Three trillion dollars?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: I mean, these are these are things that like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I guess I can see that maybe selling some Is
Speaker 2: it selling better than any other like branded whiskey than
Speaker 2: any other, like you know, because Whiskey Company, these big
Speaker 2: ones will come out with like here's this edition every
Speaker 2: year or whatever, they'll have one special limited edition one.
Speaker 2: Is it selling better than that? We don't have that data,
Speaker 2: but it was it's one of those is like that's
Speaker 2: the idea.
Speaker 3: Huh.
Speaker 2: That's like we're talking about, like AI is supercharging creativity
Speaker 2: and letting us like think bolder and more creatively than
Speaker 2: we've ever thought before. And there were so many lines
Speaker 2: in this fucking panel about like how we were like
Speaker 2: hyper charging what human beings can be and do, and
Speaker 2: like everyone should be really excited about what all this
Speaker 2: means for the future. One of the panelists that my
Speaker 2: best advice for you is let a thousand flowers bloom.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry that was in the panel right before, but
Speaker 2: it's still in all of this, Like it's all that
Speaker 2: seems it's all the same kind of shit that bleeds together,
Speaker 2: and it's like, Okay, what are your ideas? Well, we're
Speaker 2: having a legrick kind of lie to manipulated an engine,
Speaker 2: and we've got the custom printed bottles for your whiskey.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, speaking of AI unleashing creativity. The last
Speaker 3: thing I'll talk about this episode is the worst booth
Speaker 3: at Showstoppers, which this year is kind of impressive because, yeah,
Speaker 3: that's hard. It's mostly smart glasses and like three different
Speaker 3: pool cleaners. Yeah, and then some random software stuff and
Speaker 3: then a few things we saw last year. Sure, the
Speaker 3: worst worst booth, Robert. You you write books.
Speaker 2: Right, I have in the past.
Speaker 3: What if in the future, what if I told you
Speaker 3: that you could write three books in less than twenty
Speaker 3: four hours.
Speaker 2: God, thank you Garrison as.
Speaker 4: A writer without using cocaine.
Speaker 2: There's well, okay, now i'd say you're a liar.
Speaker 4: That's see a little bit harder.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I thought you were trying to sell me
Speaker 2: some blow. And I was going to say when we
Speaker 2: turned the mic off.
Speaker 3: With the power of AI, you can write three books
Speaker 3: in six to twenty four hours.
Speaker 2: Wow, that's almost as fast as Stephen King Winny was
Speaker 2: son co. Yeah, there you get not quite.
Speaker 4: So there's this table.
Speaker 3: There was the least abouting table definitely all showstoppers because
Speaker 3: it was it was filled with books with I will.
Speaker 4: Show you the covers here. They all look like this.
Speaker 2: They all oh yeah, no those I mean I'm seeing
Speaker 2: blue and orange.
Speaker 4: It's colors in it's AI generated images.
Speaker 3: Like yeah, it's like every movie poster now in like
Speaker 3: there's no art style behind it. It's very generic and
Speaker 3: they have like, you know, like the most generic font
Speaker 3: for the title, all in the same placement with some
Speaker 3: author's name at the bottom.
Speaker 2: They're very sleepy.
Speaker 3: You could you can find pictures of these covers if
Speaker 3: you Google or bing or you know, maybe chat gpt
Speaker 3: write three books in twenty four hours.
Speaker 4: You can see you can see the cover.
Speaker 2: Finally, I've always wanted to write three books, Garrison.
Speaker 3: So what this is is an app that will help
Speaker 3: you write these books is not going to do it
Speaker 3: all for you. You still need to come up with
Speaker 3: the general idea of the story.
Speaker 4: The hard stuff and the characters really the difficult. The
Speaker 4: world building is always the hardest part.
Speaker 2: Everyone says most of the work on a book is
Speaker 2: done the first six hours.
Speaker 3: The world building is the really hard part. The easy
Speaker 3: part is just getting all those words down. Yeah, so
Speaker 3: you need to create create some characters. Now, could you
Speaker 3: just have some other AI service create these characters?
Speaker 2: Maybe?
Speaker 3: But you should write maybe about a thousand words kind
Speaker 3: of like a story Bible type thing or a character
Speaker 3: character outline and a general direction for the story, and
Speaker 3: you feed that into this app and then within hours
Speaker 3: it will generate not just one book, not just two books,
Speaker 3: but a trilogy wow of books. And it's only a trilogy.
Speaker 3: You cannot generate a single book. The only come in trilogy.
Speaker 2: Look, I get it's George Lucas worked the same way, Garrison.
Speaker 2: Look you're telling me that the greatest machine mind and
Speaker 2: history wouldn't think the same as the greatest human mind
Speaker 2: in history. You know, I bet it'll independently create Jiz
Speaker 2: music too. It only comes in trilogies.
Speaker 3: And I now shall read a sample of this writing,
Speaker 3: and like dying read, there was maybe there was maybe
Speaker 3: like five or six different books with many copies of
Speaker 3: the same book on this table, and I flipped through,
Speaker 3: maybe about half reading like a random page every you know,
Speaker 3: every like twenty fifty pages, and it was it was
Speaker 3: it was too boring that I forgot to take pictures
Speaker 3: of these pages because I was just like it was
Speaker 3: a struggle to finish, to finish each page. But luckily
Speaker 3: on their website they do have some sample pages. I
Speaker 3: talked to one of the one of the guys working
Speaker 3: at the booth, and he said that he tried this
Speaker 3: so we're like he found the service and he first thought,
Speaker 3: you know, sure that this can't be any good. And
Speaker 3: when he when he generated his book, he was surprised
Speaker 3: how good the writing is.
Speaker 4: He said that he probably.
Speaker 3: Wouldn't win a Pulletzer or a Hugo, his two awards
Speaker 3: that he named, but he said it was pretty good.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 3: This guy was so far of the most Tim Robinson
Speaker 3: character I met at the cop Yeah, that's great. So Robert,
Speaker 3: you can pick the genre of sample. We have a
Speaker 3: thriller book, a fantasy, mystery, science fiction, romance, or mainstream
Speaker 3: literary fiction.
Speaker 4: What genre do you want?
Speaker 2: I think I want science fiction science fiction because I
Speaker 2: feel like there's the shortest line between parody and legitimate
Speaker 2: within sci fi.
Speaker 3: All right, this is from a book called I don't
Speaker 3: even want to say this one.
Speaker 2: I'm really curious now.
Speaker 4: Palympsit orbit is what I'm going to say.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, they're starting to be Arthur C. Clark.
Speaker 3: It's called the Polympsit Orbit. Chapter one, Desert Signals. Marrow
Speaker 3: woke with the taste of metal in her mouth and
Speaker 3: a pulse in her temples that felt one notch shy
Speaker 3: of a hangover. The ceiling above her was low and white,
Speaker 3: edged with soft events. A monitor over the bed scrolled
Speaker 3: green numbers in a stylized outline of her lungs thin air.
Speaker 2: She remembered.
Speaker 3: The Atacoma sky, somewhere above concrete and glass. Good morning,
Speaker 3: doctor Ellison, A calm baritone. How's the head? She turned
Speaker 3: toward the voice. A man in the doorway wore a
Speaker 3: slate blue clinic jumper and a badge that caught the
Speaker 3: desert light leaking through the polarized glass. Dark curls threaded
Speaker 3: with gray laugh lines that didn't quite match the tiredness
Speaker 3: around his eyes.
Speaker 4: Hire Man, are you good? Go me to keep you?
Speaker 2: I you know, it's it's again. It's like the it's
Speaker 2: an imitation of like a story. Like it's a scene
Speaker 2: and it's a scene with details to describe people. But
Speaker 2: there's not like you would ideally, I would have something
Speaker 2: of an idea of like what the thrust of the
Speaker 2: story is going to be. Like for example, Bilbo Baggins
Speaker 2: was a hobbit who lived in a house underhill or
Speaker 2: something like that. Forget the exact wording of that, but like,
Speaker 2: I you know, it makes sense. It sounds like it
Speaker 2: sounds remarkably like bad No. I don't insult Nano Remo
Speaker 2: writers that much. It just it just it sounds like
Speaker 2: a story that was generated based on a belief that like, well,
Speaker 2: if we can just like describe enough stuff and use
Speaker 2: enough words to describe a scene, then that counts as plot. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean in character, which we don't have any of yet.
Speaker 3: It's all of it was this very generic, empty like
Speaker 3: stuff that's very very common. And if you ever have
Speaker 3: to read through a lot of like AI writing, whether
Speaker 3: for work or let's say, you know, you work in
Speaker 3: a college, so you have students submitting this stuff, or
Speaker 3: you for some reason are online and you feel obligated
Speaker 3: to look at the worst parts of the world, like
Speaker 3: what me and Robert do.
Speaker 4: Sometimes this is all feels very familiar.
Speaker 3: I'll read one other like paragraph from a different book,
Speaker 3: a thriller called The Helix Files, Oh Good, obviously part
Speaker 3: of a trilogy, so who knows where these stories go
Speaker 3: over the course of three books.
Speaker 4: Quote the car heater had.
Speaker 3: Died ten minutes ago, cold leaked through the floorboards into
Speaker 3: Helix's boots. Outside the eastern block industrial belt, slid past
Speaker 3: and gray slabs and rusted steel, wet concrete period, diesel period,
Speaker 3: a straight dog nosing tragh heap outside the road first,
Speaker 3: slick with drizzle. So it's it's something that right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: there's a lot of this sort of like quick punchy
Speaker 3: sentences are common in AI writing at the moment, wet concrete,
Speaker 3: you know, with a period. But like a lot of
Speaker 3: this type of stuff you you see you see in
Speaker 3: a AI writing, you have a lot of a lot
Speaker 3: a lot of character and a lot a lot of
Speaker 3: like m dash sentences. As I was flipping through these books,
Speaker 3: I was like, okay, yeah, like I see what they're doing.
Speaker 2: I see yeah.
Speaker 3: But but now, if if you want to write a
Speaker 3: quote unquote write a trilogy of books, you can pay
Speaker 3: the money and and within six hours you will have
Speaker 3: a trilogy. So what really makes me feel optimistic about
Speaker 3: CES is the way that creativity is being democratized.
Speaker 4: It used to be that no ordinary person could write
Speaker 4: a book.
Speaker 3: You had to have a story and be some sort
Speaker 3: of freak at Oxford maybe like a you need like
Speaker 3: a pencil, maybe a keyboard. Yeah, possible, barriers, it's not possible.
Speaker 3: And now, luckily through AI, as long as you have
Speaker 3: you know, sub money.
Speaker 2: To pay a subscription service at a computer and VC
Speaker 2: fundraising and subsidizing of vice service.
Speaker 3: Ideally, yeah, then you too can be an author of
Speaker 3: a trilogy.
Speaker 2: Well that's that's my plan for the future. I guess
Speaker 2: I want to end by talking about the second to
Speaker 2: the last panel that I sat through, which was at
Speaker 2: the AI house, and was I think yet again, this
Speaker 2: was another one that was about they were largely talking
Speaker 2: about ethics in this one, like AI and ethics and
Speaker 2: like what that actually means. And Eric Pace, who on
Speaker 2: the slide lajer City works at company but it's reassuring, Yeah,
Speaker 2: reassuring who works at Cox Media, which is like a
Speaker 2: big media company, yes, based on Georgia. And he had
Speaker 2: a couple of statements that were interested in me. He
Speaker 2: had one where he said that, like, it's kind of
Speaker 2: incumbent upon people to develop an ethical rubric for how
Speaker 2: and what sources and what AI is they trust and
Speaker 2: want and figure that out. And I think what I
Speaker 2: inferred was that, like, because it's not going to get
Speaker 2: done by anyone else, And it kind of became clude
Speaker 2: to me later. I think it's he also doesn't want
Speaker 2: anyone else to do it. He wants this to be
Speaker 2: an individual project where you have to kind of figure
Speaker 2: that out for yourself. I was kind of unsure as
Speaker 2: to whether he was the evil or just the pragmatic
Speaker 2: version of this, because the pragmatic version is like, literally,
Speaker 2: no one's going to restrict this stuff. You just have
Speaker 2: to try to get by right, which is maybe accurate.
Speaker 2: But there was a really interesting interaction on this panel.
Speaker 2: One of the other people there was doctor Martin Clancy,
Speaker 2: who was an Irish academic and a musician who was
Speaker 2: on the panel again to talk about like creativity and ethics,
Speaker 2: and made a comment that I found was really interesting
Speaker 2: and I don't know, I wouldn't say I agree or
Speaker 2: disagree with it, but I found it really interesting where
Speaker 2: he was like, actually, I'm not at all concerned comparatively
Speaker 2: about having an AI give me medical advice. I'm deeply
Speaker 2: concerned about letting an AI recommend music or movies to me,
Speaker 2: which I found a really interesting attitude and kind of
Speaker 2: a thought provoking yell that it is interesting, which was
Speaker 2: immediately spoiled by Eric Pace going like, well, I don't
Speaker 2: see why anyone would have an issue with an AI doctor.
Speaker 2: Doctors get things wrong all the time.
Speaker 3: And then he just like let that statement set.
Speaker 2: I have heard this before, and ais have a lot
Speaker 2: more data. And they ended it by saying because everyone
Speaker 2: asked like, what were their big wins of the year,
Speaker 2: and his big win was that his wife hated chat
Speaker 2: ept and didn't want to use it, and he convinced
Speaker 2: her to use it to plan their vacation. It kind
Speaker 2: of sounded like he bullied her into it, but that
Speaker 2: was his big win for the year. I didn't like him.
Speaker 1: My win is I.
Speaker 2: My wife into using a chat bot to plan special
Speaker 2: time vacationing together because we're not creative enough to figure
Speaker 2: out how to go on a fucking trip.
Speaker 4: Hashtag AI win Jesus.
Speaker 2: I don't know anyway. I think that's good for episode
Speaker 2: one from Cees. Come back next week. We'll we'll all
Speaker 2: have more or listen to better offline where ed will
Speaker 2: have just a shocking amount of content from a lot
Speaker 2: of the relatively few and constantly shrinking stable of saying
Speaker 2: people reporting on technology.
Speaker 5: See you next week.
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