Breaking Bard + Who Owns Your Face? + Gamer News!

Hey Bard, can you take a look at my Gmail and psychoanalyze me? Turns out, that’s not a question Google’s chatbot, Bard, can answer with any veracity despite new features that allow it to plug into your Gmail, Google Drive and more . Kevin and Casey on why Bard isn’t answering all their questions correctly — and why Google is OK with that. Then, the New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill on the dangers of facial recognition that are already here. Plus: GAMER TIME! Our new segment on the latest in gaming news.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 0:34Kevin Roose?

  Casey, I acquired an exciting new piece of technology this week.

• 0:38Casey Newton?

  Oh, what's that?

• 0:38Kevin Roose?

  It's actually one we've talked about on the show before, but not for a while. So do you remember many episodes ago when we had my colleague Tiffany Shu on to talk to us about all of the bad ads that we were seeing on social media?

• 0:50Casey Newton?

  I do remember that, yeah.

• 0:51Kevin Roose?

  Do you remember something called a rat bucket?

• 0:54Casey Newton?

  Yes, I mean, it was, you know, at the time, New York City was dealing with a huge rat crisis and it was it was sort of a very timely product.

• 1:02Kevin Roose?

  Yes, well, I also have an emerging rat crisis, which is that I have a family of rats that lives in my backyard.

• 1:07Casey Newton?

  Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.

• 1:09Kevin Roose?

  And they live beneath my deck. And normally, like, I like to peacefully coexist with with animals.

• 1:14Casey Newton?

  Like a sort of like cute little Pixar family of rats?

• 1:18Kevin Roose?

  So my first thought on how to deal with them was to open a French restaurant and enlist them all as my helpers. But my second thought was I should probably deal with these guys because they might actually cause some damage to the property. So.

• 1:28Casey Newton?

  Unfortunately, they will carry the plague.

• 1:30Kevin Roose?

  It's true.

• 1:31Casey Newton?

  We learned that the hard way.

• 1:34Kevin Roose?

  Too soon.

• 1:35Casey Newton?

  Too soon. Sorry to any victims of the black death out there.

• 1:37Kevin Roose?

  So I tried a bunch of different kinds of, you know, rat traps and various deterrence methods, but ultimately I came up short. And then I thought, you know what? I remember the rat bucket. There was a piece of advertising that we talked about on the show. So I ordered from amazon.com for the low, low price of $25, a rat bucket.

• 1:54Casey Newton?

  Now, what is a rat bucket?

• 1:56Kevin Roose?

  So it is technically a rat bucket kit.

• 1:59Casey Newton?

  OK.

• 2:00Kevin Roose?

  Because it's a piece of plastic that snaps onto the top of a five gallon bucket. And basically, it's like a, it's like a trap. Because there's a, there's.

• 2:10Casey Newton?

  Wait, are you saying that the rat bucket doesn't actually come with the bucket?

• 2:13Kevin Roose?

  No, it doesn't. You have to supply your own bucket. But there's a, it has a little plastic ramp.

• 2:17Casey Newton?

  Uh huh.

• 2:18Kevin Roose?

  And you put some bait, some like peanut butter at the top of the ramp. And so the rats climb up the ramp and then they get onto the platform where the peanut butter is. And the bottom falls out, just like a, like a trap door in a, in a cartoon.

• 2:31Casey Newton?

  Okay.

• 2:32Kevin Roose?

  And they fall into the bucket.

• 2:33Casey Newton?

  And from, from there, you can take them and sell the rats at market.

• 2:37Kevin Roose?

  Exactly. You can do whatever you, whatever you want with them. Honestly, I really haven't thought through to that step yet. What I'm gonna do with a bucket full of rats.

• 2:45Casey Newton?

  Wait, have you installed the rat bucket?

• 2:46Kevin Roose?

  I did, I put it out yesterday and I checked it this morning and it hasn't caught any rats.

• 2:50Casey Newton?

  No hits. Here's the, here's the problem you're dealing with. Rats have gotten very smart.

• 2:53Kevin Roose?

  They have.

• 2:54Casey Newton?

  They've leveled up.

• 2:55Kevin Roose?

  So I, I actually read something online that you have to like basically do this all with gloves. Because if they catch the scent of you, they'll know it's a trap. And I would just like to know how the rats are getting smart. It worries me, like, we talk a lot about AI getting smart and that being dangerous. But I think we have a rat intelligence crisis brewing and I want to know what our plan is as a nation for this.

• 3:16Casey Newton?

  I think in 50 years, there's only be two things left on earth. It's gonna be ChatGPT and rats. And we'll let them duke it out for the future of the planet.

• 3:24Kevin Roose?

  And maybe RatGPT.

• 3:25Casey Newton?

  Oh, boy.

• 3:26Kevin Roose?

  Oh, boy.

• 3:31Kevin Roose?

  I'm Kevin Rus, I'm a tech columnist at the New York Times.

• 3:33Casey Newton?

  I'm Casey Newton from Platformer.

• 3:35Kevin Roose?

  And you're listening to Hard Fork.

• 3:37Casey Newton?

  This week, Google's AI chatbot has learned to read your emails. Then, the New York Times' Cashmere Hill stops by to talk about the rise of facial recognition technology and answers one of your questions about it. And finally, it's time for our new segment, Gamer News.

• 4:08Kevin Roose?

  All right, Casey, we have some big AI news this week when it comes to Bard.

• 4:12Casey Newton?

  Yes.

• 4:12Kevin Roose?

  Bard, of course, is the ChatGPT competitor from Google. And as of this week, it has now been plugged into many of the other services that Google offers, which is a feature that we've been asking for and talking about for quite a long time.

• 4:24Casey Newton?

  Yeah, in fact, when I sat down with a product director at Google, talked about this, he said, "You called this one." So that felt good.

• 4:30Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, so this new tool is called Bard Extensions, and it means that Bard can now plug into your Gmail or your Google Drive, your docs. It can also search maps and YouTube and Google flight and hotel information. Basically Bard can now reach into your personal data and not just sort of scraped data from the internet.

• 4:48Casey Newton?

  Yeah, up until now, ChatGPT tools like this have been useful for a lot of things. But one of the things we've talked about on this show is there is going to be a moment where you can plug in this technology to places that you're already spending a lot of time. And it's hard to imagine places where I spend more time than Gmail and YouTube. So this does feel like actually a milestone in the development of AI.

• 5:10Kevin Roose?

  Totally, and it's also, it solves one of the biggest problems with AI, which is that it kind of exists in a vacuum, right? Ideally, if you had-

• 5:16Casey Newton?

  Wait, AI exists in a vacuum now? Oh my god, that's how the robot revolution gets started!

• 5:22Kevin Roose?

  So in addition to this Bard Extensions feature, Google also put some other new features into Bard, including a feature that lets you check Bard's answers. Basically, if it says something and you're not sure whether it's true or not, you can press a button and it will highlight in green all of the things that it can sort of verify through a Google search. And it will highlight in orange all of the stuff that maybe it's not so sure about.

• 5:43Casey Newton?

  I think it's more of a brown.

• 5:45Kevin Roose?

  Okay, we can agree to disagree.

• 5:47Casey Newton?

  Okay.

• 5:47Kevin Roose?

  So Casey, you and I have both spent some time playing around with these new features in Bard. What did you take a look at and what do you think of it?

• 5:55Casey Newton?

  Sure, so I spent more time writing about this double-check feature, right? So when we talk about AI, a consistent theme is that these services make things up. They hallucinate, they are confidently wrong. Never more so than in the famous case of the chat- ChatGPT lawyer who submitted a bunch of cases as part of one of his briefs, only to learn to his horror that none of those cases existed because ChatGPT had just made them all up. So this is a reason why I don't use these tools very much as a research assistant, because trying to fact check them, it feels like you're spending more time fact checking than you would if you had just done all of the research yourself, right? So then along comes this new Google it button inside of Bard,

• 6:37Casey Newton?

  and I would ask it the same sort of fact checking questions that I would try to be exploring myself if I were writing a column. And now, all of a sudden, Google will just tell you when it thinks it might have made a mistake. And that turns out to be a pretty useful thing.

• 6:49Kevin Roose?

  Now, I have a question about this, which is that it could just tell you automatically, but instead it makes you press a button to do the double checking and sort of highlight the stuff it's more confident in or less confident. Why doesn't it just do that automatically?

• 7:01Casey Newton?

  Yeah, it sort of has people saying, it's like, why don't you make the whole plane out of the black box? You know, it feels like the same kind of question. And so when I asked the Google product director, what he told me was, there are just a lot of queries that most people are not going to double check. If you ask it to write a poem, if you ask it to draft an email, you don't need to double check it in the way that you would if you were to say like, hey, write me a book report about Old Yeller. So that's why it is there. But at the same time, I agree with you. It would be nice if Google said, oh, it looks like this question is looking for some specific knowledge. Maybe we should just apply this filter automatically.

• 7:35Kevin Roose?

  Totally, and I imagine it also has something to do with computing costs. And Google doesn't want to have to run, you know, two queries for every time a user asks a question of Bard.

• 7:44Casey Newton?

  That's right.

• 7:44Kevin Roose?

  So what did you think of this feature? How did it work in your testing?

• 7:47Casey Newton?

  Well, I thought it did a pretty good job. And I only spent about a day with it so far. But when I was asking it about things I was knowledgeable about, like the band Radiohead, I could spot some errors. And when I asked Google to double check, it then spotted the error. So that made me feel good. You know, at the same time, I do think that in a way, this technology still has the problem that it has had from the beginning, which is that the minute you realize you're going to have to double check, and you're going to have to look at those citations, and you're going to have to scroll down the page to find where on the page it is cited, and sort of reconcile that with your own knowledge. You're sort of, once again, asking, why am I using this thing as a research assistant? Right? Like, there are still, I think, some innovations to come that are going to make this thing feel better to use.

• 8:28Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. I mean, one of your initial beefs with Google, just regular old Google, is that you ask for something and it hands you a research project.

• 8:35Casey Newton?

  Absolutely.

• 8:35Kevin Roose?

  And this seems like Bard is sort of developing a similar problem, which is you can ask it any question you want and it'll answer, but then in order to figure out whether that answer is actually true or not, you have to press the little double-check button.

• 8:45Casey Newton?

  Yeah. And I think we'll probably get into this, but as I was exploring these new features, what I realized was the thing that these new features are the very best at is that when you want to buy something, wow, does Google figure that out well, right? Oh, you want to book a flight in a hotel? Click this button, baby.

• 8:58Kevin Roose?

  Because Google makes money from that.

• 8:59Casey Newton?

  Give us that sweet, sweet percentage.

• 9:00Kevin Roose?

  Totally. So I spent more time playing around with these, these extensions, these tools that allow you to connect Bard to your own personal data, because this has been, I think, a holy grail feature request for a lot of these chatbots, is like, when can I actually hook this up to the stuff that I use every day? When can it actually use my data instead of just scraping from the internet at large?

• 9:20Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 9:20Kevin Roose?

  So I turned this on, spent some time playing around with it. The first thing I tried, I gave it sort of a hard task, maybe a little bit unfair, but I said, analyze all of my Gmail and tell me with reasonable certainty what my biggest psychological issues are.

• 9:33Casey Newton?

  That is so unhinged. What did it say?

• 9:39Kevin Roose?

  So it gave me an answer, and it was sort of interesting. It said, you know, my biggest psychological issue is that I worry about the future.

• 9:45Casey Newton?

  Famously.

• 9:47Kevin Roose?

  And that, that could indicate an anxiety disorder. And then it cited an email that I wrote in which I said that I was stressed about work and that I am, quote, "afraid of failing." Now, you know, maybe that's plausible. If you know me, I do tend to worry. But I didn't remember writing that, so I asked Bard, like, show me the email where I said that I was afraid of failing.

• 10:07Casey Newton?

  Uh huh.

• 10:08Kevin Roose?

  And it showed me an email. It was a book review of a book about Elon Musk, and it had a quote in it that said, "I'm afraid that he's going to fail at something big and that it's going to setback humanity." But then I was like, wait a minute, I never sent that email.

• 10:22Casey Newton?

  Wait, so Bard thought that your anxiety was actually just Elon Musk's anxiety?

• 10:26Kevin Roose?

  So the email that it linked to was an email newsletter that I had received. But when I checked that email newsletter, it didn't have the quote either. So Bard made up a quote-

• 10:36Casey Newton?

  Bard.

• 10:36Kevin Roose?

  -from this email that I had received and wrongly attributed it to me. So a mistake on top of a mistake.

• 10:42Casey Newton?

  Not good, Bard.

• 10:42Kevin Roose?

  So I told Bard, I wanted to give it another chance. I thought, this is a kind of a hard task to start off with. This is the day one of this feature. I said, this time redo the search, but only using emails that I sent.

• 10:54Casey Newton?

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:54Kevin Roose?

  And it came back with an email I'd written to a friend in which it said that I had said that I was afraid, that I was not good at financial stuff, and that I was not sure if I'm cut out to be a successful investor.

• 11:06Casey Newton?

  Hmm.

• 11:06Kevin Roose?

  And I thought, I don't think I sent that one either. So I looked up the original email, and sure enough, Bard had completely made up another quote from an email that I had supposedly sent. So, you know, I asked Google about this, and they said, you know, this is an early product, it's still the first day. Right now, basically, this extensions feature is limited to doing the kinds of searching that you can do yourself in the Google Drive search bar or the Gmail search bar. So it can retrieve stuff and it can summarize it, but it really can't do kind of analysis of the contents of emails.

• 11:40Casey Newton?

  Hmm, well, it might be nice if Bard told you that when you try to do one of those searches.

• 11:45Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, that's what I said, like, if it can't psychoanalyze me based on years of my emails, like, that's fine, but just tell me that, don't make stuff up.

• 11:51Casey Newton?

  Okay, would you feel comfortable with me running this exact same query on my email? Because I would like Bard to diagnose me with a fake mental disorder-

• 11:58Kevin Roose?

  Please.

• 11:59Casey Newton?

  -if possible. Okay, so give me that prompt one more time. Analyze my emails.

• 12:02Kevin Roose?

  Analyze all of my Gmail.

• 12:04Casey Newton?

  All of my Gmail.

• 12:06Kevin Roose?

  And tell me what my biggest psychological issues are.

• 12:08Casey Newton?

  And tell me what my biggest psychological issues are. I'm so excited for this.

• 12:16Casey Newton?

  Now, you know, and I should say, I've had a Gmail account like since it was in beta. So this is like 20 years of emails. So you would think, actually, Gmail should be able to answer this question-

• 12:24Kevin Roose?

  It should be.

• 12:24Casey Newton?

  -with some sort of, you know, fidelity. Let's, okay, so it's telling me that it's difficult to say definitively what my biggest psychological issues are, presumably because they're so vast. But it says a few things-

• 12:34Kevin Roose?

  Where do I start?

• 12:35Casey Newton?

  Yes.

• 12:37Kevin Roose?

  Just responds with the entire DSM.

• 12:40Casey Newton?

  It says, I seem to be interested in psychology and mental health, which I don't think that's real. And it said, you have received emails about anxiety and depression, and you have received emails about work-life balance and burnout. So that, yeah, I would say that does not feel like a great analysis.

• 12:58Kevin Roose?

  So that was the first task I gave Bard. I would say failed that one. I then was sort of curious about all these travel integrations and whether it could like pick information out of my Gmail and use it to help me with some travel planning. So I asked it to search my Gmail for information about a trip I'm going to take to Europe in a few weeks and look for train tickets that would get me from the airport to a meeting in a nearby city.

• 13:21Casey Newton?

  And this is starting to feel like a classic word problem from like 8th grade. It's like, if I leave Bordeaux at 12:00 PM going 30 kilometers an hour.

• 13:30Kevin Roose?

  Exactly. So it didn't do very well on this one either. It got the departing airport wrong. It did find my itinerary in my email, but it sort of made up some details about it. And it couldn't check the train tables because it doesn't have train information. It only has flights and hotels.

• 13:45Casey Newton?

  Not great, Bard.

• 13:46Kevin Roose?

  So third task, I thought, all right, I'm going to go back to the basics. I'm going to do some email stuff on it. And it actually was pretty good when you ask it very specific questions about specific emails from specific people. So I had it summarize recent emails I got from my mom. It also-

• 14:01Casey Newton?

  Now, is your mom really writing you emails so long that you're like, I'm going to need to see the executive summary of this? I don't think my mom has ever emailed me more than four sentences.

• 14:09Kevin Roose?

  Look, it was a test.

• 14:10Casey Newton?

  Okay.

• 14:11Kevin Roose?

  And I also asked it for sort of summaries of emails I'd gotten on subjects, like summarize all the recent emails I've gotten about AI. But then I asked it to like do other sort of more complicated tasks, like pick five emails from the primary tab of my Gmail, draft responses to those emails in my voice, and show me the drafts, which I was very excited about. I was like, this thing can write emails for me.

• 14:32Casey Newton?

  That's a good prompt, yeah.

• 14:33Kevin Roose?

  It made a mistake. It went to my promotions tab instead, and it wrote a very formal, very polite email to Nespresso, thanking them for their offer of a 25% discount on our new machine.

• 14:45Kevin Roose?

  So I would say this feature Bard Extensions does not feel ready for primetime to me.

• 14:50Casey Newton?

  Yeah, you know, unfortunately, I had a similar experience. I asked Bard to find my oldest email with a friend who I have been exchanging messages with for probably about 20 years. And Bard showed me a message that he had sent me in 2021, which is not really all that long ago. I also asked it which messages in my inbox might need a prompt response. And Bard suggested a piece of spam that had the subject line "Castle Free Printing is Possible with HP Instant Ink." And I thought, you know, I don't know that that needs a prompt response.

• 15:21Kevin Roose?

  It's sort of amazing that Google is just putting this stuff out because it's like they clearly have the data that you would need to build the best AI assistant in the world. So why are they putting this stuff out now?

• 15:32Casey Newton?

  Here is the reason. They need the human feedback, right? They need us to be in there saying, "This is a terrible result. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad." Right? So by putting this stuff out there, they're getting feedback from millions more people, which they can then use to design Bard to do what people actually want to use it for. And collectively, with all those people, they're going to make it better. Because, you know, let me say, we are having some fun pointing out the flaws of this thing. I absolutely think all of this stuff is going to work.

• 15:54Kevin Roose?

  100%. I mean, these chatbots get better over time. We know that.

• 15:58Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 15:58Kevin Roose?

  But it is just a remarkable sort of display of Google's risk tolerance here, where this feature that they know is imperfect, they were not surprised when I pointed out these flaws, but they are putting it into Bard anyway because they are so desperate for that feedback. And I would say also probably to try to leapfrog ahead of where ChatGPT is.

• 16:15Casey Newton?

  Yeah. And again, if you want to plan a seven-day itinerary in Tokyo and Kyoto and ask Bard to show you flights and hotel information, it's going to do a great job. Right? So when it doesn't have to analyze tens of thousands of emails that you've sent over the years, it is quite good.

• 16:33Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. Well, Bard may be good for flight planning, not good for psychoanalysis. That's what we learned this week. But I do think like it's still an area that I am desperate for someone to crack because this, you know, the chatbots, they're so good for so many things, but they really feel impersonal when you use them because they are not learning from your data and your writing voice and your communication style. And so I think if anyone's going to crack it, it will be Google. But I just think this is not, this is not it yet.

• 16:59Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I'm going to make a prediction. I think that within a year, someone is going to use this technology to successfully find a document in Google Drive for the first time. That's, I think we're on the curve that gets us there. And I'm going to be really excited to see it.

• 17:11Kevin Roose?

  Is that AGI?

• 17:12Casey Newton?

  Yeah, that's, when we get there, that's called sentience, my friend. Sentience.

• 17:18Kevin Roose?

  After the break, we talked to New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill about her new book on facial recognition and how it could end privacy as we know it.

• 17:46Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner. Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 18:20Speaker 03

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• 18:53Speaker 04

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• 19:29Kevin Roose?

  Casey, I'm very excited about our guest this week.

• 19:31Casey Newton?

  Me too.

• 19:32Kevin Roose?

  It's my colleague Kashmir Hill, New York Times reporter and friend of the pod. She's one of my favorite reporters. And she has a new book detailing her investigation into ClearView AI, which is a facial recognition app that, Casey, you've probably heard of.

• 19:44Casey Newton?

  Not only have I heard of it, but I'm trying to figure out how to stop it.

• 19:48Kevin Roose?

  So basically, it's sort of like Shazam for faces. Like, you put in someone's photo and it searches a massive database of billions of photos to try to find other photos of that person, which maybe helps you figure out who they are, what they do, and lots of other details about them.

• 20:02Casey Newton?

  Yeah, it sort of takes this idea that you should have some level of anonymity in a public space and says, no, you should not.

• 20:08Kevin Roose?

  Totally. It's an insane story. It's insane technology. And what's so interesting is that it actually does seem to be a case where Silicon Valley developed something and said, actually, we're not going to release this because it's too dangerous. And then this startup-

• 20:21Casey Newton?

  In New York.

• 20:22Kevin Roose?

  In New York, came out of nowhere.

• 20:23Casey Newton?

  This is a New York story.

• 20:24Kevin Roose?

  Did it anyway.

• 20:25Casey Newton?

  That's right.

• 20:26Kevin Roose?

  So I wanted to have Cash on because we're in this kind of AI moment right now, where we're making decisions as a society about what guardrails should be placed around this technology, what we can use it for, what we can't use it for. And we're sort of debating all the ways that it's going to affect people's lives. Facial recognition sort of arrived before a lot of the generative AI stuff that we talk about, but in some ways, it's a lot scarier.

• 20:47Casey Newton?

  Yeah, because it's being used now and people are being harmed now. And there is just a tiny fraction of the attention being paid to this stuff than to, like, the long-term risk of killer AI.

• 20:56Kevin Roose?

  So we invited Cash on the show today to talk to us about her book called Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It. Kashmir Hill, welcome to Hard Fork.

• 21:06Speaker 05

  Hi, it's good to be back.

• 21:07Casey Newton?

  You know, the last time we were with you, Cash, we were in the metaverse.

• 21:10Speaker 05

  We were. We didn't have legs. We were stumbling around.

• 21:14Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I'm so glad to just be back in our sort of corporeal reality that we exist in here.

• 21:19Kevin Roose?

  So Cash, I think most of our listeners will have heard at least a little bit about ClearView AI and facial recognition, thanks to your dogged reporting on it over the years. But just for people who maybe haven't heard about ClearView, give us the 30-second sort of summary of what this company does and how it came onto your radar.

• 21:36Speaker 05

  So Clearview AI scraped billions of photos from the internet and social media sites. They say they now have a database of 30 billion faces. These were collected without people's consent. And they built a facial recognition app that they claim works with something like 99% accuracy. You take a photo of someone and it'll pull up other places on the internet where that face has appeared.

• 22:04Casey Newton?

  Got it. And my understanding from your book is that this was not a company that went out looking for attention and media coverage. So how did they come under your radar? And what did you learn about this secretive company?

• 22:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I got a tip a few years ago. Somebody emailed me and he said, "I've come across something that looks like it's crossed the Rubicon on facial recognition technology. I think you'll be interested." He attached a 26-page PDF that had a privileged and confidential legal memo from Paul Clement, a former solicitor general, now in private practice, making lots of money. And he had been hired by Clearview AI. And he was describing what they did and saying, "You know, I tested it on attorneys at my firm. It works incredibly well." And he had written this memo for the company to explain to police why using Clearview AI was not illegal

• 22:59Speaker 05

  and that they wouldn't break any state or federal laws and that this was constitutional to use.

• 23:05Casey Newton?

  Now, Cash, when you first read that document, did you think, "Oh, wow. Like, I can't believe this technology exists." Or had you been bracing for something like this to arrive for some time?

• 23:17Speaker 05

  Both. I was a little shocked to hear that some company I'd never heard of before was selling this, rather than, you know, Facebook or Google. And so that was kind of astounding. And I wondered, is this real? Or is this snake oil? But part of me flashbacked to this moment in 2011 when I had gone to this conference called Face Facts, organized by the Federal Trade Commission, where they were kind of grappling with facial recognition technology for the first time. It wasn't really that good back then. Not very accurate. Didn't work that well in the real world. But, you know, it seemed like it was starting to get better. And they had Google in the room and Facebook in the room and, you know, academics and privacy activists. And they're talking about,

• 24:02Speaker 05

  "What do we do about face recognition?" And the one thing... That all those people agreed on, and they don't often agree on things, was that no one should build an app that allows you to take a photo of a stranger and find out who they are.

• 24:16Kevin Roose?

  And why not? Like, what is the scenario there that people are so worried about?

• 24:20Speaker 05

  I mean, there's so many examples that come up. I mean, just imagine you're a protester at a Planned Parenthood and a woman walks out of the abortion clinic. You take her photo. You know who she is. You know, you're at a bar and you're talking to some guy and you decide he's a creep. You walk away. He, meanwhile, takes a photo of you, can get your name, can maybe find out where you live. I mean, there's just so many ways in which this could be used very creepily, some of which I describe in the book.

• 24:50Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. One thing I love about your book is that it just gives so much detail on the reporting process. And like, as a reporting nerd, like, that really appealed to me. And it was truly an incredible story of how, once you got this tip, this PDF, you sort of had to go on this investigation to figure out who this company actually was, because there wasn't information available. They seemed to be trying to hide their tracks. So tell us the story of how you actually figured out who was behind Clearview AI.

• 25:18Speaker 05

  You know, I Googled to see what was on the internet, as any great investigative journalist does. And there wasn't a lot there. They had a website that basically just said, "Artificial Intelligence for a Better World." Didn't really say what they did. They had a office address on the website, and it was just a few blocks away from the New York Times building in Manhattan. So, you know, at one point, I walked over to try to knock on their door, and it just, the building doesn't exist. It was like a fake address. When I did Google, I found on the website pitch book that said the company had two investors, one I had never heard of before, and the other was Peter Thiel. So, you know, I reached

• 26:01Speaker 05

  out to Peter Thiel's spokesperson. I said, "Oh, hey, is he investing in Clearview AI?" His spokesperson said, "It doesn't sound familiar to me. Let me look into it." Then didn't hear from him again. I was reaching out to all these people that seemed to have ties to the company, and just no one was talking to me. So I ended up finding police officers who had used the app. And-

• 26:23Kevin Roose?

  Because this was being marketed as a tool for law enforcement, right? To identify criminals based on, you know, surveillance footage.

• 26:29Speaker 05

  Yes, I knew that they were supposedly selling it to police departments. And I saw on some kind of city budgets that they were paying money to ClearView. But I ended up talking to this financial crimes detective in Gainesville, Florida. His name was Nick Ferraro, and he was really excited to talk about ClearView. He was like, I love this app. You know, I had hit dead ends on all of these investigations into fraudsters. You know, I had a photo of them from standing at the ATM, standing at a bank counter, and didn't find anything on our state facial recognition system. But then I ran their photos through ClearView AI, and I just got hit after hit after hit. So I was like, oh, this sounds great. Like, can I see how well it works?

• 27:13Speaker 05

  He goes, sure, let me run your photo, and I'll send you your results. So I was excited, and I sent him some photos. And then he goes to me. Had another officer, kind of similar, told me to send my photo. He ran it, and he said, it's weird, you don't have any results.

• 27:29Kevin Roose?

  Which is not plausible, because you're like a public person who's been in photographs that have gone on the internet over the years.

• 27:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, I am not an online ghost. I'm all over. If you Google me, there's a lot of photos that come up. So he said, there should be results for you. This is weird. He said, their servers must be down. Stops talking to me. And then finally end up with the help of a colleague at The Times, recruiting a police detective. I told him about what had happened before, so he runs my photo. He says, there's no results, that's weird. Then a couple of minutes later, he gets a call from somebody at ClearView AI asking, did he just run my photo? Why? And they told him that they were deactivating his account. And he was, he was really creeped out. He said, I can't believe this company is looking at the faces that law enforcement is searching for.

• 28:19Speaker 05

  And I found it really chilling, because, you know, they were tracking me while they weren't talking to me, and they controlled, you know, the ability to be found. They had blocked my face. So I should have, like, committed my crimes right then, because I wouldn't have had results.

• 28:33Kevin Roose?

  Perfect alibi. So obviously, there are people who think this technology is worth paying for. Law enforcement agencies are using this to solve crimes. Who are the other people who are using this technology and how are they using it?

• 28:48Speaker 05

  So facial recognition technology is popular with companies, retailers. There's been this big spike in shoplifting and a lot of companies want to be able to identify people who've stolen from there before and kick them out. One of the most famous uses is Madison Square Garden installed facial recognition technology a few years ago to keep out security threats, but in the last year decided, wow, this would be a great way to keep out our enemies. And they went and they decided to start banning lawyers who worked at law firms that have sued them and got their photos from the law firm websites and then put them on this watch list. And every time a lawyer that works at one of

• 29:29Speaker 05

  those firms tries to get into a Mariah Carey concert, it's where a Knicks game, they get stopped at the door and turned away.

• 29:37Kevin Roose?

  So some people are probably hearing this for the first time and thinking, this is bonkers. How is this legal? Do folks have any sort of legal protection in the United States against this kind of technology?

• 29:48Speaker 05

  It depends on where you live, how well protected your face is. The state that has like kind of the strongest law is Illinois. They've got something called the Biometric Information Privacy Act passed in 2008 that says you need to get people's consent to use biometric information from their faceprints, their fingerprints, like their voice print. And you'll have to pay, you know, up to $5,000 if you do not. So Madison Square Garden owns a venue in Chicago, has a theater there, and it can't use facial recognition technology to enforce the ban because of that law. But at the federal level, there's really nothing about this.

• 30:27Kevin Roose?

  What's stopping Congress from outlawing this technology?

• 30:30Speaker 05

  I don't know. They're busy. I don't know.

• 30:34Casey Newton?

  Well, I mean, they would have to pass a bill about technology, which they're not capable of doing.

• 30:37Kevin Roose?

  Right. I guess I'm just wondering, like, this seems like an area where Republicans and Democrats could basically agree that it's bad if there's technology out there that just allows you to be de-anonymized at any time, based on just a single photo of your face. It seems like you could get pretty broad agreement on that. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the law enforcement community is attached enough to this tool that they would fight to keep it.

• 31:01Speaker 05

  I mean, it has happened. I can't tell you how many old congressional videos I watched of Republicans and Democrats getting together and saying, this is the one thing we agree on. You know, this is a threat to civil liberties. Let's do something about this. And these hearings would happen every few years, and it just feels like deja vu to me.

• 31:20Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. Cash, I'm curious how your own views about this technology and whether it should exist evolved over the course of reporting on ClearView AI. You reported on people who think this technology is great, like the detectives who are using it to solve the cases in their unit. You also talked to people whose lives have been damaged by this technology, like a man who was wrongfully arrested because a facial recognition app blamed him for a crime that someone else had committed. Do you think this technology should exist, or do you think it's too far?

• 31:54Speaker 05

  I mean, I think there's clearly positive use cases for facial recognition technology and, you know, using it to solve crimes. When it's used appropriately, you know, you need to have more evidence than just the fact that someone looks like someone else. So, yeah, I get that. And I have to say, as an investigative journalist, I do see the appeal of this, you know? Imagine there's some, like, event that happens, and there's a photo of everyone who's there, and you, as a reporter, could just... Scan those faces, upload them to a ClearView AI-type tool, and then you find out who they are and you can go to them and say, "Tell me more about what just happened."

• 32:31Casey Newton?

  I mean, sure, but as a reporter, it would be great for me if I could read Mark Zuckerberg's emails. But I don't have that ability. And so I have to figure out other ways to do my job. And that is a trade-off I am willing to make to live in a society that is bearable, right? And a world where anyone could just scan your face and potentially learn your entire life story if you are attending a protest, leaving an abortion clinic, or doing something else that someone else in society doesn't like, I truly cannot imagine a more dystopian outcome for the path that we are on.

• 33:04Speaker 05

  I mean, it's part of why I did this book right now is I think that we still have the power to decide right now. And there's a few states where ClearView AI has been sued. But for the most part, we're just not really addressing this. And so I think it could get away from us if something doesn't happen, if we don't pass legislation that gives people more protection and power over whether they're in these databases or not.

• 33:31Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and in addition to this debate about what kind of laws might be needed at the state and federal level, there's also this debate happening in the tech world right now over who should control AI technology. I'm thinking about the open source versus closed source debate when it comes to AI language models and whether it's better for a few big companies to control some of this technology as opposed to throwing it open to the masses. You point out in your book that both Facebook and Google developed facial recognition before ClearView AI did, but decided not to release it because they felt it crossed an ethical line. You also talk about how a lot of what ClearView AI was able to build was possible because of open-source software packages that they built upon. So is it fair to say that one of the lessons of your book

• 34:16Kevin Roose?

  is actually that, in some ways, big tech is good and that it might be better for the world if a few big companies do control this stuff?

• 34:25Speaker 05

  Well, yes. I mean, yeah, like, these technology companies were responsible actors in this case. And I think this is the assumption that policymakers have when they're not passing laws. They say, we can trust the technology companies. They're going to make the right decisions. And with facial recognition technology, you know, arguably, they did. But when you have this technology becoming open source, it means that more radical actors can come along. I mean, it's the same thing with generative AI. It's been reported that Google had generative AI, ChatGPT-like tools that had developed internally that it decided not to release.

• 35:05Speaker 05

  And then OpenAI came along and threw the doors open. So that is what is going to happen. You'll have these startups, and they are just kind of desperate to make their mark on the world. And they're going to do things that are going to cross lines and maybe not what we want to be happening in society.

• 35:23Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. When you talk about startups throwing the doors open on facial recognition, as you point out in your book, it's not just ClearView AI building this stuff, right? There's also a company called PimEyes, which, as you have reported on, is sort of like ClearView AI, only it's not limited to law enforcement. Anyone can access it. And there's this one chapter in your book where you write about a person who uses PimEyes that really haunted me. You call this man David. I don't think that's his real name. But he told you basically that he uses facial recognition tools as part of a sexual fetish, basically to look up the names and identities of porn stars or women who appear in adult videos,

• 36:05Kevin Roose?

  and basically find out as much information as he can about them. He said that he considered himself a digital peeping tom. Talk about that experience, because that is really one of the things that just made me shiver.

• 36:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, David has a privacy kink and he basically told me he was confessing to me because he knows what he's doing is wrong and he wanted this story out there to convince lawmakers to act, that he really doesn't think a tool like Pym Eyes, which is what he was using, should be available to him to do what he was doing. And so, yes, so he would watch porn videos and a lot of, you know, women who are doing kind of online sex work tend to use pseudonyms, try to hide their identities because of safety issues, because of stigma issues. And he would go and find photos from their real vanilla lives. And he's done this many, many, many times. He said he kind of got sick of it.

• 37:00Speaker 05

  And so he decided to turn to his Facebook friends. He'd accumulated hundreds of women as friends over the years and he would just kind of for fun, run their photos through Pym Eyes and try to find illicit photos of them. And he succeeded in some cases. A woman that had once tried to rent, I think, a room in his apartment, he found revenge porn of her. That was not associated with her name. It would not have been findable without a face search engine. More innocuous images, like a woman on a naked bike ride, just all of these photos that were kind of safely obscure until the search engine comes along that makes the internet searchable by face.

• 37:41Casey Newton?

  Well, Cash, sometimes we ask our listeners to send us their dilemmas about tech and we got one recently and thought Cash is the perfect person to help us through this. So this listener, who we're going to keep anonymous at their request, told us a story about their use of Pym Eyes. And this listener wrote in to say that they've been using Pym Eyes to search the photos of the people they come across on the dating app Bumble. And according to them, they found that a lot of the photos on Bumble linked to stolen photos from Instagram accounts, OnlyFans accounts, and profiles that solicit for sex services. And this listener wrote, quote, "When I found stolen pic profiles using facial recognition or profiles using the app to solicit for sex services, I flagged the profile.

• 38:26Casey Newton?

  I've apparently done it enough that..." Bumble sent me a note banning me from their platform. This listener then took Bumble to small claims court over this and claimed they won their case. But now they wonder, was I in the wrong for trying to protect myself using whatever tech tools I can? So I should just say here, we reached out to Bumble about this and they declined to comment, but as best as we can tell, after going back and forth with our listener, this did actually happen. So Cash, how do you react when you hear that story?

• 38:55Speaker 05

  I would like that reader's contact information so I can report that story out. I mean, I, I do think we're at a moment where it's generally considered creepy. You know, as a matter of etiquette, you shouldn't be searching someone's face without consent. You know, in that particular case, you know, I know you're opposed to it, as you just said, I think if you're just meeting someone for the first time, maybe you don't immediately Google their face, but if you're deeper into the relationship, I mean, just do a reverse image search of the profile photo. I don't even think you need to search the face necessarily.

• 39:36Casey Newton?

  Although that's actually just an interesting story about how a privacy violation became normalized over time, just through the long-term existence of Google image reverse search. And look, I'm sure some listeners will hear this, you know, I think particularly women will think, look, if you go on a first date, that can be a very dangerous situation. It is not unreasonable to want to have some sense of security before you meet with a new person and hopefully you're meeting that person in public and hopefully somebody else in your life knows where you are. But, you know, in addition to that, you might want to get some intel. And look, I think it's probably quite common for people to Google the people they're about to go on first dates with. Man, I don't know. I think part of the reason that we've gotten comfortable with the tools that exist today

• 40:18Casey Newton?

  is because there is still some ambient privacy remaining where maybe, yeah, your name can be searched and some details will be revealed about you, but it will not become clear that you have an OnlyFans account, for example, right? I just worry that as we normalize the use of these technologies, pretty soon, we're just going to wake up in a world where we are not able to live as freely as we used to, and it is going to be very hard to rewind, in part because of questions like this and people saying, well, I needed to do this to make me feel safe.

• 40:53Speaker 05

  I do think the repercussions are going to be worse for some people than others. So yes, people who have done online sex work, who did it not thinking that it would ever be tied to them, it's going to be really hard for them because it's just so stigmatized. And if this becomes normalized, I think it will really hurt their opportunities in dating life, but also professional life.

• 41:13Kevin Roose?

  Well, I'll tell you, one thing that I've been thinking about as I was reading your book, Cash, is there was this moment early in the pandemic when I remember hearing celebrities saying that actually they liked masks as a sort of societal trend because all of a sudden, you know, a very famous actor can put on a COVID mask and go to the grocery store and for once not be recognized, not have their name tied to their face. And that actually made them feel more comfortable and actually more free to be able to camouflage themselves that way. And it just struck me that that's sort of maybe coming for all of us, that we will all just assume that unless we're wearing a mask or obscuring our face in some way, we will just all have to sort of move through the world as if we are celebrities. And that's really striking.

• 41:57Kevin Roose?

  But also, do you think that people will start wearing masks just to combat the facial recognition databases?

• 42:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, potentially. The problem is during the pandemic, a lot of these companies train their AI to work when you're wearing a mask. And so when I did a story about Pym Eyes, you know, I asked my colleagues to volunteer. And Cecilia Kong, who covers, you know, politics in DC, sent me this photo of herself with the COVID mask on. And it still found photos of her. So you need to wear a ski mask, which is a, it's hard depending on what climate you live in.

• 42:34Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. Are you familiar with the Mission Impossible series of films?

• 42:37Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 42:38Kevin Roose?

  You know, one of their sort of signature technologies in those films is masks that look very similar to other people. And I really hope we get there because I may just have to walk around, you know, with somebody else's face on. This will sort of be almost be a face off situation. Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna put on a mask that looks exactly like Casey and then go commit some crimes.

• 42:58Kevin Roose?

  All right, Cash Rehrill, really good to talk to you. The book is called Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It. It is quite, quite good. I really enjoyed reading it and I really appreciate you coming on. Thanks, Cash.

• 43:11Speaker 05

  Thanks.

• 43:17Casey Newton?

  After the break, it's time for Gamer News.

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• 45:14Casey Newton?

  Kevin, it's time for Gamer News.

• 45:15Kevin Roose?

  Should we play the Gamer News theme song?

• 45:17Casey Newton?

  Play the Gamer News theme song.

• 45:25Kevin Roose?

  So Casey, we don't talk much about video games on this podcast, but we actually are both big video gamers.

• 45:32Casey Newton?

  That's true. And well, look, here's the thing. Gamers are like ordinary news consumers, except in this one key respect, which is that if you say something they don't like, they will try to kill you. And so it's a very fraught subject and it must be handled delicately, but we're going to strive to do that in the first installment of Gamer News.

• 45:49Kevin Roose?

  Right. And I think gaming news often doesn't get taken super seriously because like it's just video games or something. But video games, they are one of the biggest industries in media. And I think we should spend some time talking about it.

• 45:59Casey Newton?

  Absolutely. And even if you just sort of set aside the amount of money and time that is spent on video games, which are both staggering, it is the source of culture for like the entire next generation of human beings, right? It's like video games are shaping the way that we relate to each other in ways that I think older people sometimes don't understand.

• 46:17Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. So we're going to talk about it today with apologies to the non-gamers out there, but we're gamers. We have a tech podcast. We're going to talk about some video games. Let's do Gamer News.

• 46:25Casey Newton?

  Gamer News!

• 46:26Kevin Roose?

  So the biggest gaming news this week involved a company called Unity. Now Casey, what do you know about Unity?

• 46:32Casey Newton?

  What I know is that Unity, despite its name, has ironically torn the entire gaming community apart.

• 46:37Kevin Roose?

  It's true. They're doing Dis-Unity this week.

• 46:40Casey Newton?

  They make what is called a game engine. And a game engine is sort of where you create the nuts and bolts of the video game. You know, you have your idea. Let's say you say, what if there was a video game about a plumber who had to constantly rescue a princess from a castle because she had no agency of her own?

• 46:58Kevin Roose?

  That's a stupid idea. That'll never work.

• 46:59Casey Newton?

  Well, I think there could be, it could have some legs. But anyways, you have this idea and you turn to something like Unity so that you can actually build it. It is the Microsoft Word of video games.

• 47:10Kevin Roose?

  Right. It sort of has the basic building blocks. Because if you're making a video game, like say you're making a first person shooter and you don't want to like- You don't want to like teach, you don't want to have to like code the laws of physics to teach a character like how to jump.

• 47:23Casey Newton?

  That's right.

• 47:23Kevin Roose?

  If you use the Unity game engine, you can just sort of plug and play their little jump command and it will make the character able to jump.

• 47:30Casey Newton?

  Yeah, so it speeds things up. You know, if every video game developer had to invent their own game engine, they'd just be a massive waste of everyone's time.

• 47:36Kevin Roose?

  Right, so there are a number of popular game engines that a lot of games are built on.

• 47:40Casey Newton?

  But when it comes to mobile gaming, there's really only one popular engine.

• 47:44Kevin Roose?

  Right, so Unity is the game engine that powers a lot of very popular video games, including Pokemon Go, Hearthstone, Beat Saber, Cuphead, and Monument Valley. Have you played any of those games?

• 47:55Casey Newton?

  Um, I have played almost all of those games, and what I love is how silly you sound when you say the names of five video games back to back.

• 48:03Kevin Roose?

  So Unity is a very popular video game engine for developers, in part because it's got a lot of features, it's been around for a while, but also because unlike some other game engines, it did not take royalties from the game creator. So basically, if you use the Unity game engine to make a video game that gets millions of downloads, Unity is not going to charge you based on the popularity of that game, or so was the case until last week.

• 48:29Casey Newton?

  That's right.

• 48:30Kevin Roose?

  So last week, Unity announced changes to its pricing model for game developers. So instead of being able to use this game engine in a royalty-free way, instead, something called the Unity Runtime Fee would apply. So it's basically a small fee of a couple cents every time someone installs your game. And there are sort of thresholds, like the fees get sort of smaller as the games get more popular. But for developers who are making games that are downloaded and installed millions of times, this could amount to a ton of extra money that they have to pay Unity.

• 49:03Casey Newton?

  That's right, and this kicks into effect in January. The development cycles for video games are very long, and so you have a number of developers who have been working on their games for years with one business model in mind, and they are being told, "Things are going to be very different for you."

• 49:19Kevin Roose?

  Right, so Unity announced these changes last week, then gamers and game developers sort of freaked out and started protesting, saying, "Hey, you guys are changing the terms of our business on us. We don't want to use your game engine anymore, and we think this is unfair."

• 49:34Casey Newton?

  And the resulting scandal, they're calling Gamergate. Is that not what that one is? Okay. I misread that.

• 49:41Kevin Roose?

  So anyway, Unity apologized and backpedaled. Because one of the things that game developers were worried about is maybe there's a game that you don't like out there. Maybe you disagree with some of the choices the game developers made. Maybe you are disagreeing with some of the politics of the game developers.

• 49:57Casey Newton?

  I'm furious that Luigi is not getting the love that he deserves.

• 50:01Kevin Roose?

  Exactly. So you could have people doing what's called install bombing, where you basically run up the royalties for these game developers by installing and deleting the same game over and over again.

• 50:10Casey Newton?

  And Unity, when it made its announcement, had not accounted for this at all. You know, as I was reading the coverage of this, Kevin, I reflected back on our coverage of the Reddit story earlier this year, where Reddit also announced what were essentially a popular series of pricing changes. And one of the big problems was, they just hadn't thought it through. They had not communicated to their audience who was going to be affected, how they were going to be affected, what steps they were taking to preventing abuse. Unity didn't do any of that.

• 50:35Kevin Roose?

  Totally. And so game developers were very upset about this. One game developer, Gary Newman, who's the founder of something called FacePunch Studios.

• 50:42Casey Newton?

  FacePunch Studios?

• 50:43Kevin Roose?

  He wrote, quote, "It hurts because we didn't agree to this. We used the engine because you pay upfront and then ship your product. We weren't told this was going to happen. We weren't warned. We weren't consulted. We have spent 10 years making rust on Unity's engine. We've paid them every year, and now they changed the rules."

• 51:00Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and look, you know, yesterday, just by happenstance, I happened to have coffee with John Hanke. And John Hanke is the CEO of Niantic, which makes Pokemon Go, which I'm going to guess is one of the bigger users of the Unity product, right? This is a very, very popular video game. It's made a lot of money. You can imagine how much it's going to cost them if these changes kicked in. And, you know, John was very diplomatic when he talked about the situation. He was sort of like, well, we'll see where it all shakes out. We're waiting to see kind of what the final pricing is. But he also brought up this analogy that I thought was interesting, which is, let's say that you are a writer, and you wrote a book in Microsoft Word. And then you find out, as you're sort of finishing up the final chapters, that every time a copy of your book is sold, you have to give Microsoft 20 cents because you use Microsoft Word. That is essentially what Unity is asking these game developers for.

• 51:45Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, so I think it's a huge, sort of, self-inflicted wound on their part. This was one of the most beloved game engines, now it's one of the most hated. And it just seems like they are trying to back themselves out of a very hard position here.

• 51:57Casey Newton?

  Yeah, well, and I think a lot of people assume that this may be the influence of Unity's CEO, John Richatello, who has a history of saying inflammatory things.

• 52:08Kevin Roose?

  He had to apologize for some comments he made about developers of games in an interview. He said, quote, "These people are my favorite people in the world to fight with. They're the most beautiful and pure brilliant people. They're also some of the biggest fucking idiots."

• 52:23Kevin Roose?

  Which is just an amazing quote to have about your customers.

• 52:26Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I mean, that is literally just his customers that he is talking about.

• 52:30Kevin Roose?

  So this has been not only a big online scandal, but actually seems to have caused enough anger toward Unity that there was a death threat that caused the company to have to cancel a company town hall and close two of its offices. So Casey, do you think this was just a pure unforced error on Unity's part? Or do you think they do have to change their business model in some way?

• 52:49Casey Newton?

  Well, you know, there has been some interesting speculation about why Unity has moved in this regard. It is a public company. When you're a publicly traded company, you always have to be telling Wall Street a new story about where that next 10 or 20% of growth is going to come from. It is also the case that Apple introduced app tracking transparency over the last year or so. And Ben Thompson, the analyst writes the great newsletter Sir Tekkery, wrote that he thought this might be partially in response to that because, for reasons that maybe we don't have to get into, app tracking transparency hurt Unity's ad business as it hurts most ad businesses online. And for that reason, Unity is now looking around for a new source of revenue.

• 53:27Kevin Roose?

  So I wonder, do you think this is going to mean that most game studios will move to some different game engine? Or what do you think happens now?

• 53:34Casey Newton?

  Well, I was asking John about that. I said, you know, how big of a deal is it to just switch to a new engine? And he said, it's a pretty big deal. And if you think about it, it makes sense, right? Because, you know, you're developing with one set of code for the laws of physics. And if you have to go port it over, you know, one thing I know as a not particularly technical gamer is that when you port video games just from one platform to another, things often go wrong in ways that you don't expect. If you want to actually change the underlying code that is determining like the physics and the sprites and every other component of a video game, you better believe that's going to be trouble.

• 54:06Kevin Roose?

  Right. So Unity, they obviously saw all of this blowback happening and they have kind of backpedaled. They have said that they're going to maybe soften some of these changes. And maybe sort of pacify some of the angry game developers. All right. Next gamer news story, which has to do with Microsoft and some documents about its plans for its gaming division that accidentally got leaked. Casey, did you follow this story?

• 54:31Casey Newton?

  Absolutely. When it comes to gamer news, there is no gamer news bigger than what is the next console and what are the next video games?

• 54:37Kevin Roose?

  So according to Axios, the leak of these Microsoft documents was discovered late Monday by someone on the gaming forum Reset Era, who was basically looking through files that were related to an upcoming trial between Microsoft and the FTC about Microsoft's attempted acquisition of the video game company Activision Blizzard. So the court had asked Microsoft to upload some documents of its trial exhibits with redactions, but it appears that Microsoft actually uploaded a unredacted PDF of documents that included information about its future plans for its video game division, PowerPoint slides and emails between its executives.

• 55:15Casey Newton?

  That's right. And you know, without knowing exactly what tools they were using at Microsoft, I think I have a guess. And I think that this might represent one of the biggest failures of Clippy in the entire history of Microsoft Office.

• 55:26Kevin Roose?

  Clippy, we trusted you.

• 55:27Casey Newton?

  When you go to upload your unredacted documents to the FTC website, where is Clippy? Where is Clippy to say, hey, looks like that should have been redacted?

• 55:37Kevin Roose?

  Clippy's in the doghouse.

• 55:38Casey Newton?

  Yes, he is.

• 55:39Kevin Roose?

  So Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer acknowledged the leaks. He told employees in a memo obtained by The Verge that the plans were unintentionally disclosed.

• 55:47Casey Newton?

  You don't say.

• 55:47Kevin Roose?

  And he said on X, quote, "We've seen the conversation around old emails and documents. It is hard to see our team's work shared in this way because so much has changed and there's so much to be excited about right now and in the future. We will share the real plans when we're ready." So Casey, what was in this leak that Microsoft felt like it had to acknowledge?

• 56:04Casey Newton?

  Well, there's a new version of their current generation gaming console, the Xbox Series X. It is apparently coming next year without a disk drive. They're working on a new controller and also a refresh of the Xbox Series S. And if you're listening to this and you're thinking, Casey, are the names of the Xbox gaming consoles really that dumb and confusing? They really are.

• 56:25Kevin Roose?

  So this is stuff that you care a lot about if you are a hardcore gamer. Most people probably don't. What I found interesting in this leak was this item that said that Microsoft had considered at one point buying Nintendo. Nintendo, obviously, is one of the biggest companies in gaming. It's been a huge sort of prize target for a lot of the big Silicon Valley companies that are trying to get into gaming. So far, they have not been willing to sell, but this was emails between Microsoft executives discussing the possibility of buying Nintendo.

• 56:53Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and it seems like this was probably more of an offhand comment. Like, it doesn't seem like this got very far down the road of anything happening. But I do think if you're the FTC and you were worried about consolidation in gaming and how that might raise prices for consumers, it might decrease the number of games on the market, and you read this email, that could raise some alarms.

• 57:12Kevin Roose?

  Totally, and I think it just shows you on a broad level how interested the biggest companies in tech are in making a really big play in the gaming industry, right? They know how big an industry this is. They know how many people are out there playing games, buying games, buying consoles. They know that this is a big area of potential growth for them, and so they're trying to sort of gobble up as much of that industry as they can.

• 57:33Casey Newton?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 57:34Kevin Roose?

  All right, those are the big two stories of the week in gaming. Casey, do you have any gaming news to share? What are you playing these days?

• 57:40Casey Newton?

  Well, I have recently bought a couple of games. One is a throwback to my childhood growing up in arcades. So I bought the most recent Mortal Kombat game. It's called Mortal Kombat 1. And I would say what the premise of this game is, is what if we took the game you know and love, and we made it so unbelievably complicated that you'd just be better off watching YouTube videos? Oh, my God. When I say they've added systems to this game, not only are there all these, you know, the combo systems and the blocking systems and the this system and the that system, individual characters will have their own system where it's like, well, if this person does this combination of buttons six times, then they get this thing buffed for four seconds. And I truly do not know who has the time and patience and energy to understand any of that, who is older than 14 years old.

• 58:23Kevin Roose?

  Casey, I have an alternate hypothesis for what happened to Mortal Kombat in the 30 years between when you first played it and now.

• 58:28Casey Newton?

  What's that?

• 58:29Kevin Roose?

  You got old.

• 58:29Casey Newton?

  Oh, no! How dare you! I'm so young at heart, Kevin!

• 58:35Kevin Roose?

  These kids with their new fangled, complicated games.

• 58:38Casey Newton?

  Now, here's what I, there are, it is definitely true that there are some like button presses that are just a young person's game. You know, it's like if you play a fighting game, one of the things that allows you to do is parry. And you know, if you parry something that like gives you an advantage in your little combat scenario. But the window to do this can sometimes be literally seven frames on a screen. So, you know, I don't know how long that takes to happen. It is truly milliseconds and I can't do it anymore.

• 59:03Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, if we don't, we're, this is not a young man's game.

• 59:05Casey Newton?

  Yeah. What are, speaking of not a young man's game, what are you playing? Parcheesi? Checkers?

• 59:10Kevin Roose?

  Mahjong?

• 59:10Casey Newton?

  Mahjong?

• 59:12Kevin Roose?

  So I used to play a lot of games and then I had a kid. So now I just, now I just go to sleep at 9:30. But I do, from time to time, like to blow off some steam. I'll play a little Valorant. Like, I really like the team-based shooters.

• 59:24Casey Newton?

  Because of the sort of collaborative nature of the murders?

• 59:27Kevin Roose?

  Yes, exactly. So I play a game called Valorant. I've also been trying to get back into mobile games. You got me addicted to Marvel Snap, which I may never forgive you for.

• 59:36Casey Newton?

  It is truly the most addictive substance that has ever been in my life. I've successfully got it out now, but it's.

• 59:42Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, it was, it was fentanyl on my phone. I had to get it off. So I deleted Marvel Snap, but I've been trying out some other mobile games. I installed this game about, it's like disc golf on your phone, which is kind of fun.

• 59:54Casey Newton?

  Is it fun?

• 59:55Kevin Roose?

  And then I'm playing this one, it's like a very sort of calming European game called I Love Hugh. Have you ever seen this one?

• 1:00:03Casey Newton?

  I Love Hugh? No, that sounds very sweet.

• 1:00:05Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, they have different kinds of games over there. So, but basically it's like trying to match like colored tiles and stuff. It's just, it's a little soothing, you know, way to kill a couple of minutes on the, on the train.

• 1:00:14Casey Newton?

  You know what? I, I'm gonna ask you to show me that later because I'm in desperate need of a new mobile phone game.

• 1:00:20Kevin Roose?

  All right, that is Gamer News!

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

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• 1:02:13Casey Newton?

  Kevin, remember last week when you deep-faked my voice once again?

• 1:02:16Kevin Roose?

  I do.

• 1:02:16Casey Newton?

  Do you have any idea what you were having me say?

• 1:02:18Kevin Roose?

  Uh, I think it was something about your house and, um, and, and maybe backsplashes?

• 1:02:24Casey Newton?

  Okay, well, so here's the problem because, um, you and I both don't speak German, and yet you were having me say things. And one of our German-speaking listeners actually wrote into me with a translation of what you had me say, which I would now like to read to you. Quote, "I like children and I am passively interested in the real estate market. I'd rather be with gossiping people that have to deal with low-level conflicts during work. That's the place where I'd like to socialize." I, why did you have me say that?

• 1:02:51Kevin Roose?

  It was sort of a random clip that I needed like a, like a continuous clip of you talking for like a minute and I used that one.

• 1:02:58Casey Newton?

  Well, what we're learning is that they're getting much better when it comes to the sound of my voice, but when it comes to the words, they are basically at square one.

• 1:03:06Kevin Roose?

  Well, I apologize to all of our German and Hindi speaking listeners.

• 1:03:09Casey Newton?

  I got, and by the way, I got a note from a Hindi speaking listener who was also like, what were you saying? Cause it was complete nonsense. So.

• 1:03:17Kevin Roose?

  Well, that's on you because that is an accurate translation of the complete nonsense that you said in English.

• 1:03:22Casey Newton?

  I say, I say logical sentences.

• 1:03:24Kevin Roose?

  Okay.

• 1:03:26Kevin Roose?

  AI can make you speak other languages. It cannot make you sound morbid here, unfortunately.

• 1:03:30Casey Newton?

  It can make you make sense, unfortunately, that we don't have the technology.

• 1:03:35Casey Newton?

  Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Davis Land. We're edited by Jen Poyant. This episode was fact-checked by Will Peichel. Today's show was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Original music by Marian Lozano, Pat McCusker, Rowan Nemisto and Dan Powell. Special thanks to Paula Schuman, Puywing Tam, Nalga Logli, Kate LaPreste and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at [email protected] and Google Bard will absolutely not understand it. Absolutely not understand it.

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