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 iHeartRadio. And how the tech
Speaker 1: are you. It's time for the tech news for Thursday,
Speaker 1: July thirteenth, twenty twenty three. A lot of bummer news today,
Speaker 1: which I wish weren't the case, but that's kind of
Speaker 1: how the AI cookie crumbles. Before we get into all that,
Speaker 1: one story that I missed on Tuesday was an update
Speaker 1: to Microsoft's quest to acquire video game giant Activision Blizzard.
Speaker 1: So quick recap. Microsoft announced its plan to acquire Activision Blizzard,
Speaker 1: which was going through a really rough PR patch to
Speaker 1: put it lightly way back in early twenty twenty two. Now,
Speaker 1: since then, these companies have encountered resistance among various regulators
Speaker 1: around the world, primarily in the United States and the
Speaker 1: United Kingdom. While some of those knots have been loosened,
Speaker 1: at least one that was really looming was the US
Speaker 1: Federal Trade Commission, or FTC and its request for an
Speaker 1: injunction to block the acquisition. Now, to be clear, this
Speaker 1: move would have been like a temporary hold on the deal,
Speaker 1: while the FTC mounts a more substantial legal challenge, But
Speaker 1: on Tuesday, a federal judge decided against that request for
Speaker 1: injunction and the deal would be allowed to move forward.
Speaker 1: Microsoft wants to close this deal by July eighteenth, so
Speaker 1: it's coming up right soon. The FDC is now appealing
Speaker 1: to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Unsurprisingly, reps for
Speaker 1: Microsoft and Activision Blizzards say the deal will actually be
Speaker 1: really good for consumers as well as for competition. I
Speaker 1: would humbly suggest that consolidation is is rarely good for competition. Still,
Speaker 1: the federal judge says that the FTC failed to show
Speaker 1: it has adequate justification to object to the deal in
Speaker 1: the first place, that the FTC's arguments aren't really legally convincing.
Speaker 1: Now I've not read all these arguments, but I can
Speaker 1: imagine that the FTC is having a tough time arguing
Speaker 1: their point, because it's pretty difficult to show how a
Speaker 1: deal is going to have negative impact on competition before
Speaker 1: the deal happens. We usually only recognize these things in hindsight.
Speaker 1: Either way, the announcement means we are a little bit
Speaker 1: closer to Activision Blizzard joining the Microsoft family. Now, we've
Speaker 1: got a lot to talk about with AI today, and
Speaker 1: first up, I figure I should mention the ongoing labor
Speaker 1: strikes in Hollywood. For a few months now, the Writer's
Speaker 1: Guild of America has been on strike, and today sag AFTRA,
Speaker 1: which is an actors' union, is poised to join them
Speaker 1: after the negotiating committee failed to reach an agreement with
Speaker 1: movie studio producers and the committee came to a unanimous
Speaker 1: vote to support a strike. Now, there are a lot
Speaker 1: of different issues at play here, but one of those
Speaker 1: is the role of AI in Hollywood. So understandably, there
Speaker 1: are concerns that studios could choose to lean on AI
Speaker 1: rather than say, a human writing staff to create entertainment.
Speaker 1: So writers are worried that they're going to be called
Speaker 1: in to punch up an AI generated script and then
Speaker 1: receive a lower payout because they didn't actually write the
Speaker 1: first draft. They were just hired to punch up an
Speaker 1: already existing script. This could end up being a lot
Speaker 1: of work because AI is not necessarily great at writing
Speaker 1: such scripts. Meanwhile, actors are worried about their likeness and
Speaker 1: their voices as AI gets increasingly better at creating digital
Speaker 1: duplicates and how does that impact their ability to make
Speaker 1: a living. Keep in mind that most of the people
Speaker 1: in Hollywood aren't your mega celebrities who have multi million
Speaker 1: dollar houses in Beverly Hills. Most of them are working professionals.
Speaker 1: You know, they're going gig to gig and making what
Speaker 1: they can and you know, saving and all that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. They're not all millionaires. Based off an article
Speaker 1: and Deadline that seems to confirm every stereotype of producers
Speaker 1: being greedy and manipulative jerkfaces, the studios are eager for
Speaker 1: any option that maximizes profit and shareholder value. That article
Speaker 1: in Deadline essentially said that the producer's strategy is to
Speaker 1: wait until October before coming back to the negotiating table
Speaker 1: with the WGA the writers because by that point, the
Speaker 1: writers will be desperate because they'll be, you know, having
Speaker 1: trouble paying rent and mortgages. So it's it's pretty much
Speaker 1: pure evil. When you read that article, it's kind of
Speaker 1: hard to come to any other conclusion. It has really
Speaker 1: galvanized the labor movement in Hollywood right now. Now, it's
Speaker 1: quite possible that this means we're going to be in
Speaker 1: a real dry spell as far as movies, TV and
Speaker 1: streaming content goes at least any content that would be
Speaker 1: coming out of Hollywood and that that could last for
Speaker 1: a little while. And I think this battle is one
Speaker 1: that's needed. Of course, I am biased because I'm still
Speaker 1: fuming that my old place of employment decided to eschew
Speaker 1: human writers in favor of AI. But y'all don't need
Speaker 1: to hear me go off on that again. If you
Speaker 1: did miss it, just listen to a couple of recent
Speaker 1: episodes where I talk about what happened at houstuffworks dot com.
Speaker 1: Now it turns out that sacking employees in favor of
Speaker 1: AI doesn't play well to the general public. CEO Summit
Speaker 1: Shaw found that out on Twitter. He posted on Twitter
Speaker 1: that his company quote had to lay off ninety percent
Speaker 1: of our support team because of this AI chatbot. Tough, yes, necessary,
Speaker 1: absolutely end quote. He claimed that this AI chatbot outperformed
Speaker 1: his customer support staff, so he had no choice but
Speaker 1: to replace human beings with artificial intelligence. He said that
Speaker 1: this chatbot could resolve problems in a fraction of the
Speaker 1: time that it took human workers, saying that it was
Speaker 1: a difference of minutes with AI versus hours with humans,
Speaker 1: and that this saved on customer support costs by up
Speaker 1: to eighty five percent. Now Folks on Twitter descended like
Speaker 1: piranha on Shaw's message. Some argued that the layoffs really
Speaker 1: had more to do with a failing business model and
Speaker 1: not an indication that AI is actually superior to human staff,
Speaker 1: essentially saying Shaw was using AI as a shield to
Speaker 1: guard against perceptions that his company was doing poorly. Shaw
Speaker 1: has not backed down from his claims and says it
Speaker 1: might be that he's on the more aggressive side and
Speaker 1: that you know, talking about and taking action as something
Speaker 1: that perhaps other business leaders are reluctant to do, but
Speaker 1: that this is where we're all headed fun times, because
Speaker 1: I don't see how that ends up being a win
Speaker 1: in the long run. The Clerkson Law Firm has proposed
Speaker 1: a class action loss suit against Alphabet, Google, and DeepMind.
Speaker 1: Alphabet is the parent company to those other two companies.
Speaker 1: The law firm accuses the companies of rifling through well
Speaker 1: pretty much everything that's ever been online and all for
Speaker 1: the purposes of training AI language models. The lawsuit argues
Speaker 1: that Google, without permission, used personal, professional, copyrighted, and private works,
Speaker 1: including stuff like private email, all to train AI and
Speaker 1: that this represents a huge breach of trust and privacy,
Speaker 1: and that those afflicted, which is pretty much anyone who
Speaker 1: has ever had any of their information posted online, ever,
Speaker 1: it gives them the right to deserve justice. Google's own
Speaker 1: privacy policy, which updated on July first, says it may
Speaker 1: collect data that is quote publicly available online end quote.
Speaker 1: But the law firm argues this is drastic overreach, that
Speaker 1: just because something is publicly available, that doesn't mean it's
Speaker 1: free for use for whatever purpose, and that seems reasonable
Speaker 1: to me. Now. According to one of the plaintiffs in
Speaker 1: the lawsuit, there is evidence that google bard was trained
Speaker 1: on copyrighted works, including this person's works. And if you
Speaker 1: use the correct prompts with google Bard, you could essentially
Speaker 1: get the works presented back to you. So like you
Speaker 1: could ask what's the beginning of chapter three of such
Speaker 1: and such and it would recite it to you. And
Speaker 1: that means that there could be a workaround for people
Speaker 1: who want to access a writer's work, but you know,
Speaker 1: they don't want to have to pay for it. And
Speaker 1: I get it. The Internet has trained us to expect
Speaker 1: stuff for free. We've been kind of conditioned to expect that. However,
Speaker 1: like I said at the beginning of this episode, if
Speaker 1: writers can't make a living writing, then writing kind of stops.
Speaker 1: So the approach ultimately becomes self destructive, and we're not
Speaker 1: done with AI yet. Business Insider has an article about
Speaker 1: how folks who created applications and processes that are built
Speaker 1: on top of GPT four, which is the most recent
Speaker 1: build of open AI's large language model, have started to
Speaker 1: run into some issues recently. The article references users on
Speaker 1: Twitter who have said that the model has become less
Speaker 1: useful and described it as being dumber or lazier than
Speaker 1: it had been previously. Problems include making careless mistakes, which
Speaker 1: makes me think back to the days when I was
Speaker 1: taking math courses. Sometimes I would forget something simple like
Speaker 1: a negative sign, and so I would get an entire
Speaker 1: problem wrong, even though you know, step by step I
Speaker 1: was doing things correctly, but because I was careless or
Speaker 1: lacked attention to detail, I got the wrong answer, and
Speaker 1: thus you know that was a valuable lesson in paying
Speaker 1: more attention. Well, apparently GPT four has some of those
Speaker 1: same issues, where it will make some of these careless
Speaker 1: mistakes like drop a bracket, which in code can really
Speaker 1: just lead to a massive a bug or failure in
Speaker 1: the program. Now, some have said the tool is also
Speaker 1: less likely to quote unquote remember between prompts. That means
Speaker 1: it gets to be harder to use GPT four to
Speaker 1: build stuff, because at some point or another in the
Speaker 1: building process it forgets what it was doing. The trade
Speaker 1: off on this is that GPT four is now faster
Speaker 1: than it had been at launch. So the developer community
Speaker 1: is growing to suspect that open ai made some changes
Speaker 1: that speeds things up, but at the cost of accuracy
Speaker 1: and performance. Open Ai so far has declined to speak
Speaker 1: about the perceived problems. All right, we've got a lot
Speaker 1: more stories to cover before we get to that. Let's
Speaker 1: take a quick break. We're back and I think it
Speaker 1: can wrap this up in one more segment of store.
Speaker 1: So starting off, yesterday, US Congress representatives released a report
Speaker 1: accusing three major tax preparation companies, that being H and R, Block,
Speaker 1: Tax Act, and Tax Slayer of sharing sensitive private customer
Speaker 1: data with Meta, you know, Facebook's owner, and that Meta
Speaker 1: was using this information to what else, improve its targeted
Speaker 1: advertising strategy, and that these actions weren't taken with the
Speaker 1: knowledge or consent of customers. And here's where I remind
Speaker 1: folks outside the United States that over here in the US,
Speaker 1: tax preparation can get really complicated, and for a lot
Speaker 1: of people it falls way outside their comfort zone. So
Speaker 1: tons of folks depend upon third parties to prepare their taxes.
Speaker 1: I understand this concept is strange in some other countries
Speaker 1: where a lot of that work is already done by
Speaker 1: the government on behalf of its citizens. Pretty sure that
Speaker 1: wouldn't fly here in the States because there are too
Speaker 1: many people here have a deep distrust in the government,
Speaker 1: particularly when it comes to handling something like your personal finances.
Speaker 1: I can't entirely blame them for that, By the way,
Speaker 1: our government has done a lot of boneheaded stuff anyway.
Speaker 1: According to the report, these companies shared information like income amounts,
Speaker 1: how much people were expecting in refunds, how much tax
Speaker 1: they owed the government, the names of their dependence and more.
Speaker 1: In addition, one of those companies, Taxpayer, was also accused
Speaker 1: of having shared similar information with Google. The congressional representatives
Speaker 1: are calling for a full investigation into the matter. There's
Speaker 1: been some talk that this information was designed in such
Speaker 1: a way as to not make it quite as personally identifiable.
Speaker 1: But I think that's all rubbish because we have seen
Speaker 1: time and again it takes very few points of data
Speaker 1: for you to narrow in and figure out who that
Speaker 1: data belongs to. We've seen it time and again. You
Speaker 1: only need a few points of data to be able
Speaker 1: to weed out the vast majority of folks and zoom
Speaker 1: in on the people it could possibly be, which means
Speaker 1: you could quote unquote anonymize data all you like and
Speaker 1: you could still make it possible to figure out who
Speaker 1: that data belongs to. Anyway, Once again, I feel like
Speaker 1: I need to go on the broken record route and
Speaker 1: call for the need for comprehensive data security and privacy
Speaker 1: laws here in the US, because of course companies are
Speaker 1: going to engage in this type of behavior if there's
Speaker 1: even just a little ambiguity over whether or not it's legal.
Speaker 1: So it needs to be spelled out in black and
Speaker 1: white what is and is not legal, and what the
Speaker 1: consequences are for breaking the law Before that happens. We're
Speaker 1: going to see stuff like this over and over again.
Speaker 1: Microsoft revealed that Chinese hackers were able to access Microsoft
Speaker 1: email accounts belonging to two dozen government agencies and a
Speaker 1: massive data breach. The agencies include both US and European departments.
Speaker 1: The attackers managed to gain access earlier this year May
Speaker 1: at the latest, but maybe even earlier than that. Microsoft
Speaker 1: was unaware of the intrusion until mid June. According to
Speaker 1: security experts, the attacks were extremely sophisticated and obviously precisely targeted.
Speaker 1: The vulnerability appears to have been in Microsoft's cloud services,
Speaker 1: which highlights one of the big challenges with cloud computing.
Speaker 1: Organizations end up having to hand over at least partial
Speaker 1: control to a third party and in trust that the
Speaker 1: third party is going to protect the systems and information
Speaker 1: that are nested in the cloud on behalf of the customer.
Speaker 1: The alternative is to keep all your systems on premises,
Speaker 1: but as systems grow more sophisticated and complex, and as
Speaker 1: organizations become more distributed, the physical requirements of sticking strictly
Speaker 1: with on prem becomes untenable. So there is a real
Speaker 1: need for things like cloud computing. But it also shows
Speaker 1: that cloud computing requires massive investments in security, which Microsoft
Speaker 1: has done. It's just this was a case where bad
Speaker 1: actors were able to exploit a vulnerability and it went
Speaker 1: unnoticed for at least a few months or at least
Speaker 1: two months. Amazon has filed a challenge to the EU's
Speaker 1: Digital Services Act or DSA that's scheduled to become a
Speaker 1: fully operational act death Star style by August twenty fifth. Now,
Speaker 1: this Act is part of the EU's efforts to create
Speaker 1: rules and restrictions and regulations that apply to big tech companies.
Speaker 1: If the EU determines the tech company counts as a
Speaker 1: quote unquote very large online platform or VLOP, then that
Speaker 1: company has to meet certain obligations in order to comply
Speaker 1: with these new regulations. So among those criteria is the
Speaker 1: requirement to police disinformation and hate speech on the platform.
Speaker 1: Amazon's not super keen on being held accountable for doing
Speaker 1: that and wants to dispute its classification as a VLOP. Now,
Speaker 1: considering Amazon is a leading cloud computing company, it seems
Speaker 1: like it's a pretty steep hill to climb to say
Speaker 1: that we're not a VLOP. But then Amazon reps have
Speaker 1: a few salient points to make. Amazon is primarily known
Speaker 1: as an online retail company. They say, we're not a
Speaker 1: search engine, at least not in the traditional sense. We're
Speaker 1: not a social network, even though there are some social
Speaker 1: network functionalities built into Amazon, such as user reviews. And further,
Speaker 1: Amazon argues that large retailers in the EU are not
Speaker 1: being classified as vlops, So why is Amazon being held
Speaker 1: to a standard when other large retailers in the EU
Speaker 1: are not. The reps say that while Amazon agrees that
Speaker 1: the company bears responsibility to make sure that the products
Speaker 1: it offers on its marketplace are legal, it should not
Speaker 1: fall into the classification of a very large online platform
Speaker 1: because it is fundament different from platforms like Facebook or Google.
Speaker 1: EU reps haven't directly addressed Amazon's statements, but have indicated
Speaker 1: that all vlops will need to take steps to comply
Speaker 1: with the law. However, the process for doing that will
Speaker 1: be different depending upon the nature of the platform. So
Speaker 1: a marketplace will do this in a very different way
Speaker 1: than a social network, for example. And finally, I have
Speaker 1: a recommended article for y'all today. It's from Lucas Ropek
Speaker 1: of Gizmodo. The article is titled a proposed law would
Speaker 1: force Internet companies to spy on their users for the DEA.
Speaker 1: So this really applies to people living in the United States.
Speaker 1: It all stems from a very real problem how do
Speaker 1: you crack down on illegal and deadly drug trade online
Speaker 1: without also creating a surveillance state. So I recommend you
Speaker 1: check out that article. It's really well written, it's extensive.
Speaker 1: It goes into detail about the actual nature of the problem,
Speaker 1: why this is something that we do need to address,
Speaker 1: and why the proposed solution could potentially be a really
Speaker 1: bad one. Again, the title of that article is a
Speaker 1: proposed law would force Internet companies to spy on their
Speaker 1: users for the dea over at gizmoto, And just full disclosure,
Speaker 1: I have no connection to Gizmoto. I do not know
Speaker 1: Lucas Robek. I just thought this was a very good
Speaker 1: article that folks should read. And that is it for
Speaker 1: the news for Thursday, July thirteenth, twenty twenty three. I
Speaker 1: hope you are all well, stay safe out there, and
Speaker 1: I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is
Speaker 1: an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
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Speaker 1: favorite shows.