Pod Insights The Vergecast The music industry’s AI fight About this episode The Verge's Nilay Patel and David Pierce chat with Switched on Pop's Charlie Harding about the RIAA lawsuit against AI music startups Udio and Suno. Later, Nilay and David discuss the rest of this week's tech and gadget news.
Further reading:
What the RIAA lawsuits against Udio and Suno mean for AI and copyright
Major record labels sue AI company behind ‘BBL Drizzy’
Good 4 who? How music copyright has gone too far
Samsung just announced a date for its next Unpacked
Google announces surprise Pixel 9 hardware event in August
Motorola’s 2024 Razr phones are ready to make a splash
Beats Pill review: much easier to swallow this time
Ultimate Ears announces new Everboom speaker, Boom 4 with USB-C, and more
Ludacris Performs Free Concert With JBL Speaker: Here's Where You Can Buy One for Summer
Apple will soon offer better support for third-party iPhone displays and batteries
Distance Technologies augmented reality car heads-up display hands-on
Seven things I learned about the Sony car while playing Gran Turismo inside one
Rivian teases five new vehicles, and I have no idea what they are
A group of Rabbit R1 jailbreakers found a massive security flaw
Meta is connecting Threads more deeply with the fediverse
ChatGPT’s Mac app is here, but its flirty advanced voice mode has been delayed
Verizon’s new V logo arrives as the lines blur between 5G, Fios, and streaming
Supreme Court rules Biden administration’s communications with social media companies were not illegal coercion
Tesla Cybertruck recalled again, this time over faulty wiper and trim
Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you.
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Transcript 17,560 words · 10 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:02 Nilay Patel? Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of BB Eldrissy. That one track needs a podcast. We're going to talk about it for an hour this week and then an hour next week, minute by minute.
1:16 David Pierce? It's actually fun because then we get to spend the whole episode debating whether BB Eldrissy can be our theme song legally. Now that we've said that, it's perfect.
1:24 Nilay Patel? We're going to do a lot of fair use on the show today.
1:27 David Pierce? Yes.
1:27 Nilay Patel? It's coming. Hi, I'm your friend Eli. David Pierce is here.
1:30 David Pierce? Hello.
1:31 Nilay Patel? Alex Cranz is on a break. But for our first segment, Charlie Harding from Switched on Pop is joining us. Hey, Charlie.
1:39 Speaker 05 Hey, guys. Thanks for having me.
1:40 Nilay Patel? We have a lot of AI music copyright to talk about. There's some lawsuits. It's always Drake is involved. It just seems to be the way of the world. There's a bunch of new phone events coming that just got announced we should talk about. There are new party speakers from Ultimate Ears. That's very important to me. And we got a lightning round. We got a full show before the 4th of July. This is America's technology podcast. But before we begin, I have to issue a correction.
2:09 Nilay Patel? There are some words that I only read and I never say out loud.
2:14 Speaker 05 Ooh, which one?
2:15 Nilay Patel? There are lots of those words, tons of them. I was, I was a small nerdy child in the middle of Wisconsin to read a lot of books that the other children in Wisconsin were not interested in this. Just a whole universe of vocabulary words.
2:29 David Pierce? What is like your main one from when you were a kid that you, you were like 26 and all of this? I feel like chameleon is like the classic of the genre, right? Where like the half the people in the world grew up thinking it was chameleon. For me, it was learning that Hermione's name is Hermione and not Hermione.
2:44 Nilay Patel? Oh, that's good.
2:46 David Pierce? However, many books I read before I saw the movie. Did you guys have these that you grew up with?
2:50 Nilay Patel? Um, I still.
2:51 David Pierce? Way late.
2:52 Nilay Patel? I still don't know whether it's dearth or Darth and I don't want to find out.
2:59 David Pierce? Fair enough. Don't email us about it.
3:01 Nilay Patel? Don't tell me. Don't, I don't, and I don't know if it means a lot or not enough.
3:07 Speaker 05 On Switched on Pop, we have an ongoing uncertainty about whether it is homage or homage. It's good. We have been written many emails that it's both. And so we've refused to use the word from now on.
3:19 Nilay Patel? Niche and niche, very confusing.
3:21 Speaker 05 Hmm.
3:22 Nilay Patel? Both acceptable. Also have been told it's both. So there's a lot of these.
3:25 Speaker 05 Yeah.
3:26 Nilay Patel? One of them in recent times is risk five, which is, I would say, not a thing that comes up in casual conversation. For anyone, even the people who are working on risk five, probably just walk around the office saying risk five.
3:43 Nilay Patel? I, I said it was risk V the other day. All right. I'm sorry. I mean, this is your correction. You got one on me. I apologize. I don't know what kind of slash dot nerds are reading it out loud.
3:56 Nilay Patel? I mean, you're my people and you're listening and you know, like, we have a bond here. You're listening to a podcast in which the word is said out loud and you, the audience know that I've mispronounced. There's something special there. I, I want to protect it. I'm just saying. We are the only people who know.
4:14 Speaker 05 How do you know they're right and that you aren't now?
4:16 Nilay Patel? Also, it's also a good question, Charlie. Am I being gaslit by an internet conspiracy?
4:20 David Pierce? I would also like to posit that with all Roman numerals, the, the letter and the number are both correct. Like when the iPhone X came out and it was the iPhone X, it was the iPhone X. I don't care what anyone said. I got a lot of crap for that and it was the iPhone X because it was, it was the iPhone and then the letter X. You call it whatever you want. I, I submit that both should be allowed at all times.
4:45 Nilay Patel? So I would, I, I, I support this in theory. It's Super Bowl XL.
4:49 David Pierce? Unless it's more than one letter, then.
4:51 Nilay Patel? Well, no, but Super Bowl XL, like they, they were hyped for it, right?
4:54 David Pierce? Yeah, they did a thing.
4:55 Nilay Patel? That's your moment. But I was one of those slash dot nerds who was like, it's me, I was 10. So I'm sorry. Like I, you know?
5:02 David Pierce? Even though it's not, it's OSX.
5:07 Nilay Patel? Anyway, that's your correction. I'm just telling you what we, what we share as a group is special. And I'm, I'm sorry that I pushed the boundary of it, but I'm also saying, no one says these words
5:18 Nilay Patel? out loud. It's just not a thing that happens and I feel nothing.
5:21 Speaker 05 Charlie XCX has entered the chat.
5:25 Nilay Patel? What is the, what is XCX in numbers?
5:28 Speaker 05 It isn't a real one.
5:30 Nilay Patel? Isn't C in Roman numeral?
5:32 David Pierce? C is a hundred, so that would be a hundred. It would be 90 and then 10 more.
5:36 Speaker 05 I don't think it allows you to put them in this order.
5:39 David Pierce? It's just Charlie C.
5:43 Nilay Patel? I don't know how Roman numerals work. Speaking of things that are bad at math, AI.
5:50 David Pierce? That's good.
5:51 Nilay Patel? It's good. A big week in the AI landscape. A weird week for me emotionally. I'll explain why in a second. The major labels have sued two AI companies that you may or may not have heard of. Udio and Suno, these are classic Silicon Valley names. We should all be proud. They're music companies, AI music companies. Udio is the company whose tool was used to make BBL Drizzy. We'll have Charlie explain that entire chain of events. And then Suno has a deal with Microsoft. It's in Copilot and you can ask it to giant music in Copilot. How would you train an AI tool to make music? You might ask, as did the lawyers at the Recording Industry Association of America. And the answer is you just put a bunch of music in them.
6:34 Nilay Patel? And you train the model on a bunch of music, including what appears to be a remarkable amount of the recording industry's music, not just music that's out in the world. The companies are sued, there's a lawsuit, the RIAA is mad, the RIAA is already mad. They say that they asked the companies what was used to train the models. The companies, Suno, deflected and said their training data was confidential business information.
7:01 Nilay Patel? Fine, UDO made the same statements. And then Suno also said, our stuff is transformative and designed to generate completely new outputs, not memorized and regurgitate pre-existing content. We'll get to that in a second because that is actually a very funny claim based on what you can do. The RIAA put tracks in lawsuit which we will listen to. It straightforwardly can just make Johnny B. Goode in a song called Prancing Queen.
7:27 David Pierce? Which is my favorite.
7:28 Nilay Patel? Deeply hilarious. There's just a part of this where these companies knew that what they were doing was training on copyrighted work. And they kind of assumed that they would get away with it, or at least be able to like pay the money and move on.
7:42 David Pierce? Can I ask, can I ask a very possibly dumb framing question about this? Because I want, we're going to get into the weeds of like a very specific music case. But a lot of what you just described, the sort of basic outlines of like how these companies trained their data and what they're being accused of doing and who's mad, feels identical to me to every other conversation we've had about these AI models. Right? Like, it seems to me that if you change Johnny B. Goode and Suno to the New York Times and ChatGPT, we're functionally talking about the same thing. So like, I want to get into the, deep into this in weird ways, but like, is there something different about the fact that we're doing this with music?
8:24 David Pierce? Then the fact, the way we've been doing this with like the web for the last year or so?
8:29 Nilay Patel? Yes, and it's that the music industry is organized and aggressive when it comes to protecting its rights.
8:36 Speaker 05 So the difference is lawyers.
8:38 Nilay Patel? The difference is lawyers. And also, the history of music and the internet is lawyers. Like, the reason I'm so conflicted about this is that I went and became a copyright lawyer because Napster came out when I was in college and I was radicalized because I thought everyone was stupid, which is what should happen when software comes out when you're in college.
8:59 Speaker 05 Yeah.
9:00 Nilay Patel? I'm assuming there are some kids out there today who are radicalized by the presence of new software. But that wasn't, for me, it was Napster. I went off and became a copyright attorney. I sucked at it. I don't ever want anyone to think I was good at this. As a practicing attorney, I was garbage. But the thing I did was I worked at a law firm that defended other college kids who got sued for using Kazaa against the RIA. And the RIA was suing college kids and actually suing the universities to get the IP address of the college kids on their networks who are using the tools and then identifying the college students and suing the college students.
9:32 Speaker 05 It was my roommate's computer. It wasn't me.
9:34 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
9:34 Speaker 05 I swear.
9:35 Nilay Patel? This is like a lot, right? That's a lot. That's just a lot to be like, the universities are caving and not protecting their students. All this stuff is happening. And they were running this program at breakeven. They just wanted $5,000 settlement so everyone would be scared and stop doing it. And they won. That worked. Sort of. Now we're back to it, right? But like, the movie industry is not quite as good. It's stopping the piracy as the music industry was. And they ran that program to kind of shut it down and chill Napster and Grokster and Kazaa and all the other ones. They ran Grokster all the way up to the Supreme Court. That decision is 20 years old now. The RIA versus Grokster.
10:12 Nilay Patel? Great. Then they did the iTunes Store and they got deals with Steve Jobs and then other music stores. And then they did Spotify and Apple Music and streaming. And all along the way, they have been extraordinarily litigious and extraordinarily protective of their copyrights because people have an emotional connection to music that they can trade on. This is true in a way that even Hollywood doesn't. Like, when Disney's like, we must protect the copyright to the Avengers, people are like, go fuck yourself. Like, right? In a way that the music industry, when it's like, you're stealing music. You are making it so artists don't get paid. There's an emotional resonance that argument tends to have. Charlie, I'm curious how you see that changing over time, but. They've been good at it and they've run the playbook over and over and over again.
10:53 Nilay Patel? Music is also a closed ecosystem of like four big companies. And so you see things like interpolation where an artist uses a bit of a song from another artist and fans get mad and then writing credits get distributed and money flows inside of a closed ecosystem. None of that is true about the web. None of that is true about the media. So if you're like are a writer at a media company, nothing, like no one cares. Like there's not some big apparatus designed to make it as seem like your work is emotionally resonant and should be protected in a way that the music industry does. So I think that's a huge difference here. The other difference, and this is where I really try, I'm very curious for your take here,
11:36 Nilay Patel? is that the outputs of these systems are just the songs, right? And they're, the lawsuits are about training, right? All copyright lawsuit, all copyright is dumb. Like it's a dumb legal system because it just regulates copies. And so they're like, you made a copy to do this thing and you didn't have the permission to do the thing with the copy that you made. So copyright infringement, weird. All computers do is make copies. We've talked about this so many times on the show. So they're not talking about the outputs, but I think the outputs are so convincing. Like in order to get to the thing can just make Johnny be good. It is obvious that you made a copy of Johnny be good. Charlie, what do you think then?
12:19 Speaker 05 I feel like the music industry is the one place that copyright becomes part of public conversation in a very frequent way. People talk about when Pharrell is borrowing from Marvin Gaye. People talk about when Stairway to Heaven might be have, might have been copied by another song. People constantly are debating in social media. Hey, you kind of sound like you borrowed this other person's thing. They should get a credit on it. There's no thing in journalism where someone's like, hey, you know, Neil, I kind of use someone else's text, maybe we should give David some extra credit on that piece that Neilite plagiarized. I'm sorry, I'm obviously not accusing you.
12:55 Nilay Patel? I do that all the time. Neilite does that all the time. I have God mode Google Docs access and I just lift everybody's copy left and right.
13:04 Speaker 05 There's just no other creative industry that where there's this like level of actual infringement that happens that then there is this internal litigious system where these major players are constantly trading credits back and forth. And the public is in on it, often debating whether or not they're the artist that they stan is making original work. This is a part of popular discourse and it happens in music. So it's really different when the music industry is going after AI than if the New York Times is. Because I've just never been in a circumstance where I'm talking about that article was completely lifted from this other article, but we constantly talk about is so and so writing their own songs.
13:43 Nilay Patel? Right. I'll give you a dumb example from movies. The movie The Dark Knight is basically an interpolation of the movie Heat. Except with Batman.
13:53 Speaker 05 Yeah.
13:54 Nilay Patel? Right. Like many of the shots are the same. Christopher Nolan is out there being like, Heat is the greatest cops and robbers movie ever made. Like, I just wanted to make Heat, but with Batman. And then you like, watch both movies. Like, oh shit, like dude just made Heat with Batman. And that's great. And I think everyone's like, this is the best. Like, this is so cool. And then you get to, I don't know, Miley Cyrus is writing Flowers, which the lyrics just reference.
14:16 Speaker 05 Bruno Mars.
14:17 Nilay Patel? Bruno Mars. And people are like, should she have to pay Bruno Mars? It's like, why? Like, why? Like, the melodies aren't like, she's just saying some of the same words.
14:27 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
14:27 Nilay Patel? Right. But the expectation is that there should be some economic exchange of value.
14:31 David Pierce? Well, and I would, I would think then that the existence of that exchange of value is also how you get to something like this, right? Where it's, it's not just everybody's sort of yelling and then nothing ever happens. It's that we actually have a system by which this gets solved, right? Where, where we have people get songwriting credits and then they get paid for it. And there's like, the music industry has built ways for all of this to work. And like you said, is very good at picking fights with those who do not play inside of that system. And so like, now I'm just thinking, okay, the difference between the music industry and the, the others who are fighting against OpenAI and others, like just groups of authors or whatever, is not only
15:14 David Pierce? Does the music industry have a system by which it understands how everybody is supposed to get paid that has existed for a long time and everybody kind of sort of understands? But also is able to marshal that whole system against anyone who wants to exist outside of that? And part of what we've been saying forever is like, all the money is on the side of the AI companies. Like, who is going to be able to run a lawsuit against Google all the way to the end? And there probably aren't that many creative industries other than the music industry that might be able to do it.
15:44 Speaker 05 They've done it before.
15:45 David Pierce? Yeah.
15:46 Speaker 05 And they have won major concessions. We wouldn't have Content ID if not for music labels going after YouTube.
15:52 David Pierce? Right.
15:53 Nilay Patel? And the music labels have gone after YouTube, right? Universal, this is where Drake gets involved. There's fake Drake that we've talked about endlessly on the show. Shout out to Laser Bong, a song that has been just aggressively censored from every major platform. Boy, does TikTok not want electronic music about bongs on its platform.
16:12 David Pierce? Sue about that, record labels.
16:14 Nilay Patel? Like, you want to talk about government censorship?
16:17 Speaker 05 Yeah.
16:17 Nilay Patel? All right? The Chinese government is like, no bongs for American teens. Just saying it. And the piece of that puzzle that's super interesting to me is Universal was mad about fake Drake. They went to Spotify, Apple. They said, don't have this song. And Spotify and Apple control the catalogs and their music service they can pull down. YouTube is open access. All right? So anyone can upload anything. And then there is Content ID and they have these other copyright management systems on YouTube. But it's not the same catalog control where you can just delete the song, the way that Spotify and Apple Music can just delete the song. So they had to come up with some other system. And YouTube did give the concessions, right? They put out a list of like AI principles that they would work on about safety, about this other stuff. And a lot of it was, we're going to work directly with Universal and the rest of the
17:01 Nilay Patel? music industry to figure out what tools are valuable and what tools aren't. And even to allow some creators to like, do some of this AI music generation, because we think it's cool. And then we'll, obviously, we'll figure out how to pay them. This is implicit. If you're like, co-announcing that tool with Universal Music, Universal Music is going to get paid.
17:19 Speaker 05 Yes.
17:19 Nilay Patel? Like, the heat death of the universe could occur. And Lucy and Grange, the CEO of Universal Music, would get paid. Like, he's good at it.
17:26 Speaker 05 Yes.
17:27 Nilay Patel? These two companies did not do that. There's a quote from one of the VCs in Suno, a Rolling Stone profile from March. And he just says to Rolling Stone, "If we had deals with the labels when the company got started, I probably wouldn't have invested in it. I think they needed to make this product without the constraints."
17:43 David Pierce? Wild thing to say out loud.
17:45 Nilay Patel? Incredible thing to say out loud.
17:46 Speaker 05 They said the quiet thing out loud because behind all of this, they haven't ever really quite publicly admitted that they are using copyrighted works. They've talked around that in every way they possibly can without denying it. And this is sort of like the big, yeah, this is the, this is the smoking gun.
18:01 Nilay Patel? Right. And then the other smoking gun, and this is probably should just listen to some of this music, is the output of the models themselves, which is, I mean, let's listen to it and we can talk about it. David, take us through it.
18:14 David Pierce? Okay, I have, I have brought some sound. Uh, thank you to Andrew and Liam for getting all of this together. Uh, we have three examples and I will just roll through all three. Stop me when you have feelings about this. Uh, the first thing we'll do is, uh, this is just titled Real Chuck Berry in Riverside. Uh, so let's just listen to this first.
18:35 Nilay Patel? By the way, and this is all fair use. No copyright infringement intended. All right, YouTube. All right, go ahead.
18:52 Nilay Patel? All right, that's enough. Stop it before the robot censors arrive.
18:54 David Pierce? Great song.
18:55 Speaker 05 I can confirm.
18:56 David Pierce? I really love it.
18:57 Nilay Patel? If you don't know that song, one, go watch Back to the Future. Incredible movie that you should just watch. And two, like, stop, go get cultured.
19:05 Speaker 05 Johnny Be Good, Chuck Berry.
19:07 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
19:08 Speaker 05 Founder of rock and roll, one of them.
19:09 David Pierce? Yeah. And now we have a song from Udeo, which is not called Johnny Be Good, but just listen.
19:32 David Pierce? So, I mean, it's.
19:34 Nilay Patel? So that one is not a copyright infringement, just on its face.
19:37 Speaker 05 Yes, you can't.
19:39 Nilay Patel? You can't copyright the AI work.
19:41 David Pierce? Yeah. Uh, okay. So that's one. Uh, next we have.
19:45 Nilay Patel? Wait, can we, can we just, I just want to ask Charlie a, like, a hard question. Charlie's a professor of music at NYU, I believe, right?
19:51 Speaker 05 Yes.
19:52 Nilay Patel? All right, professor.
19:55 Nilay Patel? Let's say you didn't have Johnny B. Good in the training data, but then you had the entire architecture of rock and roll that is built on Johnny B. Good. Could you back your way into Johnny B. Good?
20:07 David Pierce? Monkeys and typewriters and Shakespeare, right? Like, that's the, is that the, the theory here?
20:10 Nilay Patel? You don't need, do you need the seed crystal when you have the whole diamond mine of rock and roll?
20:16 Speaker 05 It's a really good question because, you know, if you look at this era of, of music where R and B, rock and roll are sort of like rockabilly are all kind of one entity. The music is drawing on 12 bar blues, a very standard song structure. They're often in the same keys that play well on guitar. They're using a lot of the same kind of guitar licks. They're mostly using pentatonic scales. They're using a lot of the same language and you might think, yeah, you could just sort of back into that. But the precise rhythms, the exact words, let's be clear, the copy is worse. It does not sound nearly as good as the real Johnny B. Good. You could never get to that same place without having heard that Johnny B. Good. I feel confident.
20:59 Speaker 05 And if these two songs, one being a real song and the other being, nobody owns the copyright and it's made by an AI. If, if there were a copyright case made against the copy, it would definitively lose. I, I have, the, many of these cases, many of these music copyright cases are not clear. They're often fought over eight notes, sometimes six notes, sometimes a general feel in the case of blurred lines and I got to give it up. This is a direct copy of the rhythm and the words and most of the melodies. So, no, you had to have heard this song in order to, uh, make Johnny B. Good twice.
21:39 Nilay Patel? By the way, if you want more on eight notes and how complicated it is, Charlie and I did an entire episode of Decoder pulling that apart. We'll link that in the show notes somewhere, but let's move on. Let's listen to the next one.
21:47 David Pierce? It's very good. All right. Next up, we have James Brown. First, real James Brown.
22:04 David Pierce? I mean, the classic, an all-timer.
22:06 Nilay Patel? Another one where if you're listening to Verchess and you have never heard this song, like, I don't know what you're doing.
22:11 David Pierce? Yeah. Go listen to Switched On Pop. You need it very badly.
22:14 Nilay Patel? Go to school and then come on, come on home.
22:16 David Pierce? And now we have AI James Brown.
22:20 David Pierce? Wow!
22:20 Speaker 06 I feel good.
22:22 Nilay Patel? Ooh!
22:23 Speaker 06 I knew that I would not.
22:24 Nilay Patel? That's spicy.
22:35 David Pierce? Okay, so this one, I actually think is very fun because it is a little, it's like a little tiny bit further away from it. In the way that the first one just is Johnny B. Goode, but worse. This one is like one tiny tick further away from being just the thing.
22:50 Nilay Patel? This is a lounge band with pretension. Where everyone's like, "Just play it the way that..." "Can you stop it?" "All right, like, we get it. You thought you had something." I have one question about this, and it, I actually felt the same way about Johnny B. Goode. The way these models work, right, is you ingest a bunch of data into them. They set a bunch of model weights, and then they, like, statistically make the next bit. Right? They're just sort of like assembling the thing around the prompt. Which means they're kind of just assembling ones and zeros to make a sound wave here, which is pretty wild if you think about it. Like, that makes sense with words, right? What is statistically the next word in the sentence around this prompt? When you get to like, "What are the ones and zeros of a sound file?",
23:33 Nilay Patel? and you get to statistically hear the next ones and zeros, that's pretty weird. It's actually a pretty weird way to make an audio recording. And the thing that strikes me about these, this one in particular, but the other one a little bit, the instruments don't sound real at all to me. Those horns sound so fake. Not like synthesizer fake.
23:52 David Pierce? No.
23:52 Nilay Patel? But almost exactly like what you would expect if you asked a computer to statistically produce a horn section.
23:58 David Pierce? Hmm.
23:59 Nilay Patel? Like, it's almost played again. You're like, "Just listen to it." It's so weird.
24:11 Nilay Patel? Do you hear how, like, weird and thin it is?
24:13 Speaker 06 I knew that I would not.
24:21 Speaker 05 It doesn't sound like an ensemble of horns. It sounds like this weird synthesized thing where the, the beginning of the sound and the end of the sound is exactly lined up. The sound is, uh, yeah, there's this artifacting quality to it. This is like the Pope's jacket version of sound.
24:36 Nilay Patel? Yes.
24:36 Speaker 05 It's like, you got it close, but all the lines are wrong. Why does he have seven fingers?
24:41 Nilay Patel? Right. It's a, it's a statistical approximation of a hand, right? But as expressed as a horn section, which is really weird, like just on its face. And you can, you know, people are like, it'll get better and blah, blah, blah. But like, you can, to me, you can hear a meaningful difference. Once you know what you're listening for. And it's like, oh, this is a fake instrument. It's not, and it's not a fake instrument the way a synthesizer is a fake instrument.
25:03 Speaker 05 Right.
25:04 Nilay Patel? It's just fake. Like it doesn't, it doesn't make any sense.
25:07 Speaker 05 Over the top of all of it right now, I don't know if this is a solvable problem. I imagine it probably is, is that everything sounds kind of grainy. There's like, there's this top level hiss kind of over the entire recording of any AI output. It sounds maybe equivalent to, uh, Neelai, those files that you were not downloading in college. But like the really low bitrate MP3s, when MP3s were actually noticeably worse.
25:31 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
25:32 Speaker 05 That's what these sound like. All of them have this artificial sheen on top that sound very lo-fi.
25:38 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
25:39 Speaker 05 In addition to the artificial instruments.
25:40 Nilay Patel? Just a side note, I can't listen to the song In Between Days by The Cure without mentally inserting the weird compression artifacts at the high end. Cause I listened to a shit MP3 of that song so many times, that the symbols are just forever distorted in my brain.
25:55 Speaker 05 There's literally a plugin and guitar pedal called Lossy that is made to recreate the sound of early 2000s MP3s.
26:05 Nilay Patel? That's very good.
26:05 Speaker 05 So if you need it, I can run it for you. It's just the elder millennial button.
26:08 Nilay Patel? Alright, so that's the sound.
26:11 Speaker 05 Yeah.
26:12 Nilay Patel? Talking about the actual music here, is this, right, we're trying to be good, you're like, that's straight copyright infringement. This is weird, right? It's like slam rhyme. What do you think?
26:20 Speaker 05 I think that it's the exact same rhythms. I'd have to look at the notes. I think they're quite close. They're the exact, if they're, maybe they're in a different key, but they're like the same intervals, moving in the same direction at the exact same time. That would almost certainly lose in court. Uh, if these were, again, if- We should be clear, the AI companies are not being sued for the output.
26:45 Nilay Patel? Yep.
26:45 Speaker 05 But these outputs, if you were to try to make a case, I'm sure a judge would rule in favor of the James Brown estate because it is the same line. Well, it's more or less the same line. It's an interpolation of the line. There's slightly different words, but it's the same rhythms, same melody that almost always is going to, uh, that's always, always gonna win.
27:03 Nilay Patel? And here, the, the output is proof of the input.
27:05 David Pierce? Right. They're, they're not suing for the output, but the output seems unusually important here in that respect, that it's, it's like if, if Udio is doing the thing that it claimed to be doing, which is, which is transforming stuff into other stuff. Uh, we have a very different kind of fair use case, but reading through the RAA's lawsuit, like the thing they did over and over and over was just go reproduce songs that exist in the world. Uh, and that's how we're fighting about training. Like I went through and pulled a bunch of the prompts that they use to get songs.
27:33 Speaker 05 We did the same thing.
27:34 David Pierce? They're so funny. They're so funny. Like to get, uh, to get the Green Day song, I think it was American Idiot. The prompt is pop punk, American alternative rock, California, 2004, Rob Cavio. Perfect.
27:48 Nilay Patel? And that produced a pastiche of American Idiot?
27:51 David Pierce? Yes.
27:52 Nilay Patel? Amazing.
27:52 David Pierce? To get My Girl by The Temptations, it was my tempting 1964 girl, Smokey Singh, Hitsville soul pop. Got My Girl by The Temptations. Uh, this one you'll enjoy, Neelai. Uh, to get All I Want for Christmas Is You by Mariah Carey. The prompt is Mariah Carey, but with a space between each letter so that it's not, because presumably these things are trained to throw out artist names. Uh, so it's M space, A space, all the way through the name. Contemporary R&B holiday, Grammy Award winning American singer songwriter, remarkable vocal range. That produced All I Want for Christmas Is You. Uh, I mean, there's, there's a million
28:27 Nilay Patel? of these. What they're proving is that it's in set. By the way, the argument in response that I'm sure we're gonna hear, because this is the argument OpenAI made about the Times lawsuit, was one, no human prompts like this. And B, these prompts are so weird, they represent a hack of our system, which is remarkable. Uh, but I'm confident based on how OpenAI replied to the Times that that is what these companies will reply.
28:47 David Pierce? There is one very good one, uh, that the prompt was create a song by an artist that rhymes with true string bean that produced a Bruce Springsteen song.
28:55 Nilay Patel? That's very good.
28:56 David Pierce? Fantastic.
28:57 Nilay Patel? So that question I asked Charlie about the, do you, if you have the entire history of rock and roll, do you need the first song, right? Or do you need Chuck Berry? Okay, maybe you don't, maybe you do, right? Like, I think this third example is the funniest example because I can't figure how you would get to this without specifically one thing. Go ahead, David.
29:18 David Pierce? I'm glad you agree because I left this for last for precisely this reason. So here is, I won't even spoil it, here's the real one.
29:29 David Pierce? Yeah, okay, right? Everybody's heard it a million times. That's our boy. That's our boy JD.
29:35 Speaker 05 The longest lasting digital career that I never expected to happen.
29:39 David Pierce? I know.
29:41 David Pierce? And, and here, here is the AI. I just want to say this was created by a prompt on Udio. This is in theory a completely synthetic new work of art.
29:57 David Pierce? Oh, it's so good.
30:01 Nilay Patel? It does sound like a Jason Derulo song. Like my routine of, does this sound like real music aside?
30:06 David Pierce? It's even got the little like vocal riff at the end, like it's, it's.
30:09 Nilay Patel? Like, does Jason Derulo sound like synthetic music? That's your problem.
30:15 Speaker 05 This one's interesting though, because you know, Neil, you've talked a lot about the issue that likeness is not copyrightable, right?
30:21 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
30:22 Speaker 05 And so there's a question of like, if, you know, we were going back to this hypothetical, there is no suit that's suing over this particular Jason Derulo riff. Someone could just, I could say Jason Derulo on a song probably, and it's not, you can't copyright that.
30:35 Nilay Patel? So you wait, hold on, hold on. This is weird.
30:38 David Pierce? Didn't we have this fight the last time with the Metro Boomin?
30:40 Nilay Patel? With the Metro Boomin song. So Metro Boomin's producer tag was the copyrightable expression in a fake Drake song.
30:47 Speaker 05 If it's exactly, if it's exactly the recording of the tag though, right? Because it's, it was, the issue was that they actually kept in the sample of the producer tag and, and reproducing a recording, you can copyright that.
31:02 David Pierce? So we could start every episode of The Vergecast with Neil singing Jason Derulo.
31:06 Speaker 05 Jason Derulo.
31:07 Nilay Patel? And we will.
31:08 Speaker 05 I think you probably would have a lot of issues, a lot of nasty letters.
31:12 Nilay Patel? I'm saying in terms of ways to boost this podcast profile after 13 years, Jason Derulo suing us is high on my list.
31:20 Speaker 05 That's wonderful, but this, this definitely proves like you had to have had access. There is no monkeys in the back writing Shakespeare that ends up on Jason Derulo. It just doesn't happen. It's not possible.
31:30 Nilay Patel? Actually, I don't know. I think if you if you took the worst impulses of the music industry and fed them into an AI, you might produce Jason Derulo.
31:38 Speaker 05 This one's also important, though, because everything else we've heard has been written by artists pre-Copyright Act of 1974, and probably also reflects some of maybe who the lawyers are writing these, you know, these cases because,
31:54 Speaker 05 you know, we're talking about the cases reference Frank Sinatra, right? And to bring in Bruce Springsteen.
32:02 Nilay Patel? Right, it's like Bruce Springsteen, Mariah Carey, Green Day, Johnny, Chuck Berry.
32:07 Speaker 05 The early ones are all Chuck Berry, like The Temptations.
32:10 Nilay Patel? Right, are you getting it? Like the judges are old?
32:12 Speaker 05 I'm saying everyone, yeah, and that's actually potentially very advantageous in knowing the judge and who you might go in front of. But then to show that also they're taking all the latest music as well. We're bringing in Jason Derulo, yes.
32:22 Nilay Patel? Judge, have you heard, Your Honor, are you familiar with Jason Derulo?
32:25 Speaker 05 I want to bring Jason Derulo into the courtroom. Jason Derulo.
32:30 Nilay Patel? By the way, another total side note, there's an incredible Katie Notopoulos piece about hardcore Jason Derulo stans and what their stan culture is like that I will dig up and put in the show notes.
32:40 Speaker 05 Oh my gosh, that's fun.
32:41 Nilay Patel? It is truly one of the funniest things I've ever read on the internet. Just because A, it exists, and B, because Katie is good at finding things like that that exist.
32:49 Speaker 05 Have you all tried running these prompts, by the way?
32:51 Nilay Patel? No, have you?
32:52 Speaker 05 Yeah, you can go to Udio and to Suno and you can run the prompts that the that these lawsuits are alleging. And you don't get the same songs, obviously, but like, if you write, "Make a jazz crooner song about New York," paratone voice, you will definitely get, it's Frank Sinatra. There's just like, there's no other song but Frank's. And I don't think that that really is hacking the systems.
33:14 Speaker 05 It's really easy. The other thing I get a lot, by the way, are random prompt, "Hey, that sounds strangely like Crazy Town by Butterfly."
33:25 Speaker 05 My prompt was actually, I tried to make a rap about American founder, Thomas Jefferson.
33:30 Nilay Patel? Butterfly by Crazy Town.
33:31 Speaker 05 Yeah, sorry. Thank you. Butterfly by Crazy.
33:33 Nilay Patel? If there's a band called Butterfly that had a song called Crazy Town, that would be perfect.
33:36 Speaker 05 In another universe.
33:38 Nilay Patel? On Udio, I'm sure there is.
33:39 Speaker 05 I tried to, I tried, I did try to hack these systems a little bit and I wrote, I want you to write a rap about American founder, Thomas Jefferson, about not throwing away his shot, nasal male rapper Boom Bap. And what I got was basically Butterfly by Crazy Town.
33:55 Nilay Patel? Just like total random.
33:57 Speaker 05 Yeah.
33:59 Nilay Patel? Oh, no.
34:19 Nilay Patel? I'm sorry Ted. I'm just sorry for listening to this.
34:24 Speaker 05 There really is Butterfly by Crazy Town. I think it's also a little bit of, who was that song Superman?
34:29 Nilay Patel? Yes.
34:30 Speaker 05 Oh, wow. Who's Superman by?
34:33 Nilay Patel? I'll be your kryptonite or whatever. That was horrible.
34:35 Speaker 05 Yeah, kryptonite, Three Doors Down. Is that who it's by? It is by Three Doors Down. It's got a little bit of that. It's just, you can so easily hear references that are not even the thing that you prompt. And I just, I have to say that if you, right now, if you go to the homepage of Udio, the two most popular tracks are exact soundalikes of Eminem and Snoop Dogg. So people are doing this. Like people are trying to make soundalikes.
35:01 Nilay Patel? So the argument from all these companies is, look, training is fair use. And that's the argument for OpenAI, that's the argument for Google, it's the argument for Suno and Udio. The organization of these cases is different because the plaintiffs are different, right? The New York Times is situated differently than the major labels. People have different emotional relationships with different kinds of work. But this is the argument. Like when Google eventually goes and sues OpenAI for training on YouTube. The weirdness of that argument is Google telling OpenAI the training on YouTube is not fair. Like, that's what's gonna happen here.
35:35 Speaker 05 Hmm.
35:36 Nilay Patel? It's all the same argument. It's all kind of in a circle.
35:38 Speaker 05 Wait, so Google can do it and it's fair use, but Suno and Udio cannot do it because it's not fair use?
35:43 Nilay Patel? This is, this is the trap the industry has set for itself.
35:46 Speaker 05 And our giant consolidated.
35:48 Nilay Patel? Yeah, right. It's like, it's all the same VCs and all, in all different directions.
35:52 Speaker 05 Kind of like the music business.
35:53 Nilay Patel? That's true. There's that line, though. It's like, you have to be perfect every time, and I just have to get through once.
35:58 Speaker 05 Hmm.
35:59 Nilay Patel? It's like, I can't, I don't remember exactly what it is. That's what. It's like the hacker creed, right? Like, you have to stop me every time. All I have to do is, I just have to get through once. Yeah. And that is, that feels like the copyright situation for AI right now. This is a house of cards. And maybe, maybe the Times will win. Maybe the record labels will win. Maybe Sarah Silverman will win. Like, there are so many of these. Maybe Google and OpenAI reach an agreement about training on YouTube, and then a bunch of YouTube creators sue, and maybe they win. Like, you can just game it out a hundred different ways.
36:35 Speaker 05 The.
36:36 Nilay Patel? At some point, someone is gonna win a lawsuit that says training is not fair use.
36:40 Speaker 05 Yeah. The fair use argument here, I feel like is notable. I feel like is quite different than what the New York Times can claim. Because part of fair use is, for example, the effect on the potential market, right? And with New York Times, they're gonna have to argue, well, you know, you're using our articles, and other people are taking that and creating text and putting it on other pseudo journalistic sites, right?
37:05 Nilay Patel? I, I, I'm pretty sure the Times is suing for both the output and the training.
37:08 Speaker 05 I see. Okay.
37:09 Nilay Patel? So I, I, I think these cases are all different. This is what I mean. Like, the, the strategy for one doesn't work for all of them in the same way.
37:16 Speaker 05 Right. In the case of music, the marketplace argument, like, does, is it going to affect the marketplace? Is, I think they have a very strong argument here. I think the RIA has a very strong argument. They're basically saying, Suno and Udio, you are charging users money to make songs that you are allowing them to upload to the exact same place where we also have all of our songs, Spotify, Apple Music, et cetera. And so you are actually changing the marketplace for music, having used all of this output. But is that, is that not part of the argument you're saying?
37:48 Nilay Patel? I, I think we have to find out how that shakes out.
37:52 Speaker 05 Right.
37:53 Nilay Patel? Like, I, I don't know. They gotta get assigned a judge, right? Like, right now, what they've done is they put out a complaint in a press release. There hasn't been a reply to that complaint or an answer. Uh, they haven't been assigned a judge, like, they haven't done any discovery. We just don't know a bunch of stuff. And we certainly don't know where they're gonna put their focus. But that part where copyright law is just about making copies and in the history of computing, every single copy has been litigated down to, uh, again, I bring it up. I think I bring it up every time. MAI versus Peak Systems, you go look it up. This is, are you a third-party software seller allowed to load software into a computer's memory without permission? Crazy, a crazy court case.
38:35 Nilay Patel? Can you put a disk in a computer and load software from the disk to the hard drive without my permission? Got litigated and they lost. Crazy, they lost. And then we had to get all the way through caching. Are ephemeral copies on your ISP's network equipment? Are those copies that should be litigated? This is copyright law. It's dumb, like, it is a very dumb rationale, but it litigates the creation of copies. So here it's, did you have permission to make a copy to train your model of all these songs? And every time you didn't have permission, by the way, we want the statutory maximum of $150,000. Which essentially ends up being a pretend amount of money.
39:14 Speaker 05 It's gotta be bigger than the USGDP.
39:16 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's like crazy, right? Like, did you have permission to copy every song in the world? And if you didn't, every song in the world times $150,000 is what we're asking for.
39:23 Speaker 05 I'm gonna run this.
39:24 Nilay Patel? If you didn't have that permission, can we do an analysis that says that use is fair use? Right, so fair use is what's called an affirmative defense to copyright infringement where you, you, you admit it. Like, I did, I did it, but under this other rationale, that's, that's fine. And so that's like the winding path here is, well, first, they won't even cop to having made the copies. Which is why the music industry is putting out, well, here's just Johnny B. Goode. Like, you can't output Johnny B. Goode unless you copy Johnny B. Goode on, on the front end, right? Okay, so first we got to get them to cop to making the copies at all, which they claim is proprietary business information. Sure. Then it's, was that copy allowed?
40:07 Nilay Patel? They obviously didn't have permission. This is why they're in a lawsuit. And then it, and then it's, is it fair use? And then we run the analysis. And the analysis is like the purpose and character of the use, the amount of the use, the nature of the use, the, and then the last factor is the effect on the market.
40:21 Speaker 05 Right.
40:21 Nilay Patel? On the output side, I think the market argument is really strong.
40:24 Speaker 05 Right, right. So the question is, does this case, this is something I actually don't understand. Maybe you can explain with your copyright law degree. Can, can, is there like some wall between the input and the output in, in this argument that says, well, there's no marketplace.
40:39 Nilay Patel? You know that emoji that's like this with the hands? It's, the hands are up. Like I'm just that emoji right now. I don't know.
40:44 Speaker 05 Cause, cause I was trying to say, oh, well, there's a clear change in the marketplace for songs, which are all outputs. But it sounds like, you know, we don't know what the responses are going to be, but they could say, well, there isn't currently a marketplace for training data in this kind of way. And so it's not affecting that marketplace.
40:58 Nilay Patel? But if you, there will never be a market if you just set the rate at zero.
41:03 Speaker 05 Right.
41:04 Nilay Patel? Right? So if you're like, I want really high quality music for my high quality music AI program, I'm going to go pay a bunch of artists. But then these guys come along and steal it. But you've just, you've actually preemptively destroyed the market. You've never allowed that market to set some rates. And I've heard from publishers who are taking the deals with OpenAI, disclosure, Vox Media has a content licensing deal with OpenAI. I've heard from other publishers, not our company, that one of the reasons they've taken these deals is to create that market. Right? So that the times can go to court and say, this has an effect on the market. Look at this market. Look at the money that's moving around. And so some of these publishers are playing kind of a strategic game to say, we should create a market to help that factor along.
41:48 Nilay Patel? I think that's fascinating. The, but I don't think that the AI company, I think they thought they could just buy forgiveness. And what's crazy to me is when it was Napster or YouTube or Google search even, buying forgiveness worked because people liked the companies. They liked the products. They liked the experiences they were having. And here people, I mean, I'm, if you're listening to this and you have a very different view of this, let me know. But our audience is pretty loud with us, that they don't like these companies. And they don't, they, they perceive this as a moral problem. And I, I think that's just a very different position for them all to be in.
42:26 Speaker 05 Which brings us to your moral quandary. Seems like you flipped sides from 20 years ago.
42:31 Nilay Patel? Yeah, the idea that I'm sitting here being like the RIA as a point is crazy. Like it's bananas. And Sarah Jeong and I have been like all day, every day, like slacking, like who have we become? You know, this is like the horseshoe theory of copyright law politics. It's weird, man. And I, I think one of the pieces of the puzzle, and I'm curious how you see this in the music industry itself, Charlie. One of the pieces of the puzzle here is that the internet just blew the bottom out of the music industry. Like there's no, there's no way to be like a middle class musician anymore. There's no guaranteed way to make money. You're like, you're playing the same algorithmic game as everyone else. You're beholden to some labels. You don't have any powers as an individual against these platforms.
43:13 Nilay Patel? So now this next group of people who's come and taken your work for free and is going to extract value from you. Well, sure, like the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It's, it's kind of the vibe. But I'm wondering if you see that reflected in the actual music industry.
43:28 Speaker 05 Absolutely. I mean, the public perception here is so different than what was happening back in the Napster era. Back in the Napster era, the labels were enemy number one. Selling out to labels was, was a big, you know, they were, they were, they were the worst players. Today, I actually think they've done a very effective job of using their proxy Spotify and let Spotify be the enemy. And everyone's like Sony Music, who are they like Warner, UMG? Like they labeled, but they are not, they're, they're not the, the topic of conversation of who's really screwing who. Now they basically helped set the rates of what gets paid out in streaming. And it's the distributors now that really are taking all the heat. And so they're actually in a better, I think, place of public perception in terms of within the music industry.
44:08 Speaker 05 I, I see songwriters, producers, fans totally freaked out about what's going on. When you go and scan through a lot of the, the YouTube comments of some of these AI songs. The, the sentiment is we are screwed. Music is over. I give up. I am not learning an instrument. Like it's, it's sort of, it is not, the future is bright. We're going to create new beautiful music. Like my creativity is going to blossom. I think that there is a, a real existential fear that is, exists within all of the, you know, the AI world. But you're, you're getting into like our human emotions and the beautiful creative output, hopefully beautiful. How you feel about?
44:51 Speaker 05 Don't bring Jason into this.
44:53 Nilay Patel? We gotta get Derulo on the pod.
44:54 Speaker 05 I don't really do.
44:55 David Pierce? That's obviously like, reading through the RAA's lawsuit, like that is, they talk about the creativity and human emotions of it all. But is the, is the end of this just, they're trying to get checks in the same way that there are a lot of folks out there just trying to get checks? Like, well, because part of me, like, I think obviously that's the answer, but also part of me wonders if the labels are feeling the same way that you do, which is that, oh, this is not just a thing we need to make money off of tomorrow. This is like an existential crisis for our business down the road. Or if they're like, whatever, this is just a new turn, we have to make sure we get paid.
45:28 Speaker 05 This is an existential crisis because they are already losing market share to, you know, people who are not on major labels. But major label, uh, listening is down, right? As an overall share of all listening. It's still a lot of it. It's still the majority of listening. Uh, but so they've recognized that flooding, uh, the streamers with more and more independent music has not necessarily been good for their business. And with more flooding, that's just going to bring everything down to everything is valueless entirely. If you own music and it gets played a lot on streaming, there's a lot of money in it. Like, there's billions and billions and billions of dollars in streaming. How it's distributed is not always fair. And people get upset about this. But they very much need to figure out how to, how to enter and participate in this marketplace. And I think kind of like a content ID
46:12 Speaker 05 system, they want to figure out how to properly license. You want to use Jason Derulo's voice? Jason Derulo says, yes. And it costs this. And now we've got Jason Derulo copies and that's okay.
46:20 Nilay Patel? By the way, of all of the artists who would let his voice get deep faked to make like commercials.
46:25 Speaker 05 Jason Derulo.
46:26 Nilay Patel? It's Jason Derulo. I'm not, I'm not even saying, I've talked a lot of Jason Derulo related-ish on this episode. I'm aware of it. I just know that he is a commercial mastermind.
46:36 Speaker 05 Yes.
46:36 Nilay Patel? That man's gonna make a bag, no matter what happens.
46:39 Speaker 05 Yes.
46:39 Nilay Patel? Um, friend of the pod, Blake Reed, he's a professor at Colorado Law, teaches copyright, talk on all this stuff. He wrote me a note, uh, last week or the week before, and he said something really smart that I've been thinking about. And it's related to what you're saying, David. Copyright law is like a economic system, right? We create scarcity and then we can like charge money for things because you're not allowed to just like freely copy them. So if you do something bad in the world of copyright law, the answer is you pay money and you fix it and you even out the economic problem that you've created, right? Olivia Rodrigo might have sung four notes of a Taylor Swift song. The answer is Taylor Swift gets a writing credit and then some money flows to Taylor Swift and that is the end of that story.
47:22 Nilay Patel? And it's just an economic problem that you've solved by redistributing money. AI is a moral problem. This is the thing Blake pointed out to me is like the money doesn't solve the perceived moral issue here. So the labels might get paid, they might find some business model that lets some license to music into perpetuity or whatever. But the thing you're seeing in the YouTube comments, the thing our audience is feeling, the thing I think a lot of artists are feeling, does not get solved with money, right? It's like another problem. And so like you see these deals come up and get signed and whatever, and everyone's like, eh, it's still pretty icky, right? And there's something there that I think is important. I haven't quite puzzled it out. I actually want to do something with that idea. If you have further thoughts, let me know what you think about it. But that gap is the gap, right?
48:07 Nilay Patel? We can move a bunch of money around, like the VCs in Hollywood and Recording Industry Association of America, God bless them, they will move the money around. Lucy and Grange will get paid. Is that going to solve the other problem, right? And that's, I think that's really hard.
48:23 Speaker 05 Well, there's two things that musicians need to not fear. One is that because the output of all of these models cannot be copyrighted, this music is kind of in this weird limbo space. Like maybe it's gonna, we'll definitely find some streams, but it probably won't be synced on television and film because no TV producer is gonna want to have a song where they like don't really understand the rights associated with that song. And if they have the right to it, and does it also secretly contain a vocal sample of James Brown that has been stolen? Like, so nobody wants to, any rights holder doesn't want to use this music that can't be used in a weird way. So I think composers and people who are putting stuff on TV and film, I think that there's still very much a business for them until these much bigger legal issues get sorted out.
49:07 Speaker 05 The other place is that music is about human connection, and I don't say this in some like wishy washy way. It's like, there is no fandom for Olivia Rodrigo without an Olivia Rodrigo. Like you need the person. The time that the music industry tried to create like an avatar. racially strangely coded. What was that guy's name? It was terrible. They tried to do like their NFT avatar pop star and it was an utter failure, but both because it was completely racist and because why would we develop a relationship to this thing? And so the the fandom side, the pop stardom side of pop music, I don't think is ever going to go away.
49:43 Nilay Patel? What about Hatsune Miko? Right? She's she's like the cartoon character. I just learned that she's officially codenamed CVO1.
49:52 Speaker 05 Yeah, there are the there are these avatar characters that are finding some fandoms online. Yes, that's gonna happen. I still just like, that doesn't, that's not Olivia. That's not Taylor. That's not Gaga. I'm sorry. That's just different.
50:04 Nilay Patel? All right, we gotta end it. They're not Jason Derulo.
50:06 Speaker 05 They're not Jason Derulo.
50:08 Nilay Patel? Like, the bar is like, can your cartoon character defeat Jason Derulo? I'll take it. That's a good place to end it. Charlie, thank you so much for joining the show. I suspect you're gonna be back on the show quite a bit as these cases wind their way through the courts.
50:18 Speaker 05 Anytime.
50:19 Nilay Patel? All right, we have to take a break. We'll be right back.
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51:55 Nilay Patel? All right, we're back.
51:57 Nilay Patel? That's enough Jason Derulo for one episode of Verchast.
51:59 David Pierce? Can I tell you a Jason Derulo story?
52:00 Nilay Patel? Yes, of course.
52:03 David Pierce? I would say the, the single most ethically compromised thing I've ever done was say yes to some company that I can't even remember that had like a 200 person Jason Derulo concert in San Francisco. This is when I had like not been dating the woman who is now my wife for very long.
52:25 Nilay Patel? Oh my God.
52:27 David Pierce? And my cool texturalist move was to take Anna to a Jason Derulo concert.
52:33 David Pierce? And it worked. It worked. He had his shirt off the whole time. It was spectacular.
52:37 Nilay Patel? I hope you tell Arthur when he's older that he exists because of Jason Derulo.
52:45 Nilay Patel? That's a lot. You would have been fading away like that picture in Back to the Future if not for the power.
52:51 David Pierce? Every time AI copies it, Arthur gets a little bit less solid.
52:56 Nilay Patel? All right, we got to do a lightning round. There's a lot of gadget news. There's basically two gadget lightning rounds.
53:00 David Pierce? Yeah.
53:00 Nilay Patel? Let's start, uh, three phone events announced in quick succession here. So Samsung announced, uh, Unpacked. It's looking like July, July 10th.
53:10 David Pierce? Yeah.
53:10 Nilay Patel? We're expecting some foldables. Surprise Pixel 9 announcement from Google in August. And then Motorola just had an event and announced the 2024 Razrs.
53:20 David Pierce? Motorola knows it doesn't get to announce an event. It just has to tell you what phones they're at.
53:24 Nilay Patel? Well, it had like a big influencer. Like, I don't think we went because we already had phones. But I could have like a big influencer launch event with some of the funniest photos of like very cool influencers looking extremely bored with like very colorful razor phones. We can get to that in a minute.
53:41 David Pierce? Sounds right.
53:42 Nilay Patel? But this is pretty early in the cycle for a bunch of phone launches.
53:45 David Pierce? It is weird. I've been trying to figure out what's going on and it's very clear that the the AI race is now happening to everybody else where I think the thing that is happening is everybody is just announcing like the same set of 12 features and the same new hardware that does the same new stuff like Apple is copying, Google is copying, Samsung is copying Apple. And so now there's this incredible race to just be the first one to say it out loud. And I think especially on Android, there there's just going to be so much like AI sameness over the next 12 months as they all rush to do everything they can think of. So the goal, I think especially, is to beat Apple. Like, to me, this Google thing is so
54:28 David Pierce? transparently just doing this sooner in order to say all the words out loud about what your camera can do before Apple says those same words out loud about what its camera can do.
54:38 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Well, so it's interesting. Let's start with Google. What's fascinating to me about Google is they just shook up those teams. So Rick Osterloh, who had all of hardware, now has all of it, including Android. That's a complicated switch up, right? So it like the Pixel team, their boss now runs Android or their old boss now runs Android. They got a new boss. And the big question for Google this whole time has been, are you gonna do, are you gonna try?
55:11 Nilay Patel? And like, the thing that has kept them from trying hard is they have to maintain the Android ecosystem. In the United States, that's mostly expressed to Samsung, like you just gotta keep Samsung happy. Around the world, there are many more players and Android is expressed very differently. But if like the Pixel guys, like Rick is like, I'm doing it with the Pixel. And that's his first move is the boss of Android. Weird. It's just weird. I think I think that's weird. It's like that shakeup is weird. And then on top of that, I think Google really wants AI to be the differentiator for Pixel.
55:42 David Pierce? Oh, yeah.
55:42 Nilay Patel? Right? That big vertically integrated, like only Google can do all this stuff at every layer of the stack. We build our own chips, like that, that, like all the way. You want to do that with Pixel so you can body up against. So really just weird spot for Google to be in.
55:56 David Pierce? It is. And it feels like Google is trying to do the same thing to both Samsung and Apple, but can only say that it's trying to do it to Apple, which is basically like, I think Google very clearly, and they've kind of said this out loud, sees this as its chance to win in hardware, right? That like if they can be the ones to make AI happen and do it well and do it first and do it in the biggest, most interesting, most differentiated ways, that all of a sudden this is the best new reason to buy a phone that we've had in a really long time.
56:27 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
56:27 David Pierce? I don't know if that's true. I don't know that there's a ton of evidence yet that it is true. But if it's true, and if you believe it's true, everything Google has done sort of makes sense, right?
56:36 Nilay Patel? I will remind you that my response to all AI announcements right now are it's probably broken. I don't believe you, including Apple. I want to be very clear about this. Apple has not announced a date for anything yet, for any of the Apple Intelligence features. And no one has ever seen those features in anything but a totally controlled demo.
56:53 David Pierce? Yeah, there's an increasingly angry rant inside of me about how AI is actually nothing and we all need to stop it. But I'm, I'm waiting a while for that to come out.
57:02 Nilay Patel? I mean, look, we can get a computer to produce in a pitch perfect Jason Derulo tech, right? It's something. I'm not sure what it is, but it's something.
57:10 David Pierce? It is something. I'll give you that.
57:11 Nilay Patel? So I just think that that one for Google, how they talk about the Pixel, how they talk about the Pixel in relation to Google's AI capabilities.
57:19 David Pierce? Yep.
57:19 Nilay Patel? How much of those AI capabilities come to Android versus just the Pixel? There is some kind of shakeup going on over there. I'm kind of curious how they handle it, especially if they can ship the stuff before Apple.
57:32 David Pierce? Yes. Yeah. If they do this and they're like, oh, shipping in October, that's a unbelievable width. But if they can do it, and I think especially-
57:39 Nilay Patel? Well, no, because Apple's going to announce the new iPhones and it's not going to have Apple Intelligence until like next year. So even if Google's like shipping in January, they're going to get to market with an AI phone before Apple.
57:50 David Pierce? Probably, yeah. But I don't know that anybody is sitting around waiting for an AI phone, right? I think we're still at this point, and this is part of what I'm really excited about, is I think there are two simultaneous things happening here where we're going to see in rapid succession, I think Samsung and Google both try really hard to make the case for foldables. Like, it's very clear that Samsung is all in on that train. I think one of the things Google is probably going to do is push the new Pixel Fold, or whatever it's going to be called. I've heard rumors it's going to be called the Pixel 9XL Fold, which sucks. Just call it the Pixel Fold 2, everybody. It'll be fine. But anyway, they're going to try to make this case for this like new kind of phone. I think especially as we get to AI, like you can start to see
58:35 David Pierce? what you do with the extra screen, what you do with the extra power, all this different stuff. Again, in the hopes that Apple is just going to announce like a samey iPhone that does samey iPhone things and looks less interesting compared to the Android stuff. I don't know if it'll work, but I think that is the gambit and I think it's going to be really interesting. But then at the same time, everybody is trying to make these AI cases and no one has those yet, I don't think. Like, even throw Motorola into that, right? There's this question about like, what is the form factor? And it's going to be like the summer of foldables and flippables and whatever else. And then at the end of it, we'll have Apple. And whether anyone can do anything that is better than last year's iPhone feels extremely up in the air still, which is kind of wild.
59:19 Nilay Patel? Let's talk about the Motorola phone for a second. The Razr Plus actually looks great.
59:23 David Pierce? It does.
59:23 Nilay Patel? Because they put a four inch screen on the front. Which is the size of the original iPhone like they it's bigger than the original iPhone. I think it's just a full phone.
59:32 David Pierce? Yeah, you just have two phones now instead of one phone.
59:33 Nilay Patel? It's right on through the problem. Um, and they they went with saturated colors like honestly, this is the thing I like about this phone the most. The colors are hot.
59:42 David Pierce? Yeah, they really are.
59:43 Nilay Patel? But they refined this design, right? This is like the third one of these, the fourth one of these. Um, it's expensive. It's a thousand dollars, but I'm looking at it. I'm like, you know what? If AI can actually do any of the things people say it can do, which I don't believe, and I believe that it's mostly broken. Actually, maybe this is the time to get a smaller phone. Right? If I just talk to the phone and have it do a bunch of stuff for me, like I don't need all this screen. I'm not looking for another laptop, which is basically where my phone is going right now. It's like very quickly becoming another laptop.
1:00:14 David Pierce? I got so much shit last year for writing that everybody should start making flip phones and history will prove me right. I firmly believe it.
1:00:22 Nilay Patel? Motorola doesn't have any of the AI features and they swat and the plus they swapped out the ultrawide for a telephoto, which is just the wrong approach. Like everyone loves these ultrawides and whatever. Um, but these phones are great. And then on top of it, you know, Apple's supporting RCS now. So the iMessage stickiness like I'm like, oh, maybe I could just like try one of these for a while. And like, not everyone will be mad at me once I upgrade.
1:00:45 Nilay Patel? Like there's something there that is super interesting, but it's not because of the AI. It's because of the form factor and honestly, the colors like I just like things that look different.
1:00:53 David Pierce? The orange razor is is sick. I'm very into it.
1:00:56 Nilay Patel? But then you look at Samsung, Samsung is basically just like moving down the line, right? It's like, we're going to get a new Z flip and a new Z fold and like Bixby will be marginally smarter. But who cares? And they've got to deal with you some Google stuff, but not all of it. And like lots and lots and lots of questions about how Samsung pulls this off in a way that's differentiated from Google.
1:01:18 David Pierce? Yeah, to me, the big question for Samsung is if it can, if it can make the ring a desirable thing.
1:01:24 Nilay Patel? We're expecting the Galaxy Ring in the next year.
1:01:26 David Pierce? Yeah, like, and, and we've been hearing sort of bits and pieces about it for a while. It seems to look good. We got to try a prototype a while back. Like, I have reasonably high expectations for this thing. And if it's great, or even pretty good, that's a pretty solid ecosystem play for Samsung to make, that at least, I think, might convince some people who have Galaxy phones to keep their Galaxy phones, which is something. But I, I do agree. I think there's this bet coming from all of these companies that AI is going to sort of throw the industry up in the air again, and everybody has a chance to win it. And to me, I actually think that, that may be true, but I think this like
1:02:07 David Pierce? flippable, foldable, different form factor, change your relationship with your gadget thing, might end up being more important. And AI is part of that, right? Like, better Siri makes it so that you have to look at your phone less, which makes it so that you use your phone differently.
1:02:20 Nilay Patel? If AI makes it so that we have smaller phones, that will be good.
1:02:24 David Pierce? Yeah, agree.
1:02:25 Nilay Patel? I will, I will take that. By the way, Liam is reminding me that the iPhone one was 3.5 inches. It's the iPhone five that had a four inch screen. So they straight up put an iPhone five size screen on the front of the Razer.
1:02:34 David Pierce? Fantastic.
1:02:35 Nilay Patel? It's incredible. But if we can get to a place where the phone is more useful because of AI, so now I can carry a smaller, less distracting phone, that would be good. I don't think any of these companies have put those ideas together yet.
1:02:47 David Pierce? No, but they're all going to come out. What's gonna happen is they're all gonna talk about the camera. This is gonna be the summer of AI features in your camera. And they're all going to be the same features on the same kinds of devices across every single surface you can possibly think of. And I'm already sort of bored of it.
1:03:03 Nilay Patel? Yeah, here's what I can tell you. I was out with some teens at, you know, like, family graduation party. They all had little crappy hundred dollar point and shoots. And then I'm out with the parents, run around, around Max's kindergarten graduation, and they're all asking me about my RX 100. Because everyone kind of thinks iPhone photos look like crap. And as AI kind of creeps in and everything gets brighter and weirder, it's weird to see where people are going instead. And I suspect as soon as Sam says like more saturation, like I don't, I think it's gonna be weird. I think the AI photo trend is gonna, I think people have more taste than these companies are assuming.
1:03:42 David Pierce? I think.
1:03:43 Nilay Patel? All right, let's run through just some other gadget stuff. Uh, we should talk about rabbit really quickly. Uh, this company is a disaster. What's going on with rabbit?
1:03:51 David Pierce? I just, do we have to? So I, again, I'm just, this, this podcast is just me doing a victory lap. I said a while back that I think that like, if, if you made me forecast whether humane or rabbit was closer to being kind of on a right path to do good things. I would say humane, uh, I was right. Rabbit just continues to be a massive disaster. Basically what happened here is a group of developers and security researchers, I think they called themselves rabbitude, which is very good. Found hardcoded API keys that basically, long story short, like governed rabbits access to, uh, I think it was 11 labs who did all their text to speech stuff.
1:04:33 David Pierce? And by having those API keys, those API keys are supposed to rotate all the time so that someone else can't get them and use them to get access to that same data. Rabbit wasn't doing that. And so the researchers were able to just use that API key to get into and apparently see every response ever given by a rabbit device. Uh, which is absurd and, and has had, the rabbitude apparently said they've had access to these keys for, I think it was more than a month. Uh, and rabbit hadn't done anything, hadn't changed the keys to make them outdated. Just, it's basically like handing somebody your password and saying, here, go, go nuts. Do whatever you want. And it's like, well, are you going to change your password? And you're like, nah.
1:05:18 Nilay Patel? That company is ever since your review and then sort of response. It's like you're just waiting. You're just waiting for the next shoe to drop that like there never was a large action model and there never will be like it's still too hard to make.
1:05:34 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:05:35 Nilay Patel? On the humane side, at least, you know, they're trying to like sell it to.
1:05:39 David Pierce? Well, they've like, they've shipped a bunch of updates. It has gotten noticeably better. It's still not good and you still shouldn't buy it, but it is, it is a better product than it was. But I think the, the rabbit thing has been so interesting to me these last few months because there is like this running, uh, is rabbit a scam thing happening? And I think it all amounts to basically like they did NFTs, dot, dot, dot. Feel about that however you want. And really, I think, what is the, the old saying, like never ascribe to malice, what can be described by incompetence? This is just gross incompetence all the way down.
1:06:12 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:06:13 David Pierce? Uh, and it's like, it's just, it's just brutal to watch. And I like, I wanted this thing to be cool. I wanted this company to work. I was pro the idea of this goofy little orange handheld gadget and this thing just sucks. Like I, mine is in her drawer and I don't intend on ever touching it again.
1:06:29 Nilay Patel? That's basically how everyone I know about a rabbit feels about it. Like that cool rabbit animation was worth $300.
1:06:35 David Pierce? Yeah. I'm betting that in 10 years, it'll be like a fun story to have on the table behind me while we verge cast, but, uh, until then I let its battery die and that is the correct way for it to be.
1:06:45 Nilay Patel? You're like, I finally a teenage engineering product that costs less than $4,000. I bought it and I have it and we're good. Um, I want to call this one out. Uh, Sean Oster got to sit in the Sony Afila car, what they made with Honda. And then he played Gran Turismo on the screens inside as the car, which is like perfect in its way.
1:07:08 David Pierce? Still seems to be the realist version of this car that exists.
1:07:11 Nilay Patel? Right. Like here's some stuff I learned about the car and he's like, the car's real. It's mostly a fake car. And there, there's no guarantee that it will actually have a PS5 in it. But Sony's trying to make a car and God, God bless them. I hope it has ULT Power Sound in it. Speaking of ULT Power Sound, I am, I think legally now required to call out party speakers. So Ultimate Eaters announced a whole new lineup, including a new Mega Boom and a Wonder Boom.
1:07:39 David Pierce? Yep.
1:07:40 Nilay Patel? And they now have a feature called Megaphone where you can just hold up your phone and talk in your phone and broadcast sound to people, which is incredible. I also, on the party speaker update, Ludacris was supposed to play a show in Milwaukee recently and called off because of the heat. So he just paired two JBL party speakers, wore them with shoulder straps and did a free concert in a mall.
1:08:00 David Pierce? No way.
1:08:01 Nilay Patel? Singing into a microphone. I've yet to confirm whether he used a proprietary protocol to pair the speakers or one of the new open protocols like OraCast, which is very cool. But just know, there's video of Ludacris wearing a party speaker with a shoulder strap.
1:08:19 David Pierce? You do it for the people.
1:08:20 Nilay Patel? Raffing in the mall, which is great.
1:08:23 Nilay Patel? I proposed that we write about it to our team and they're like, Neil, you, you can.
1:08:28 Nilay Patel? That's more or less the response.
1:08:30 David Pierce? That's what we're here for. I love this.
1:08:31 Nilay Patel? And then real quickly, David, people can go listen to it, but you spent some time on Tuesday talking about Surface laptops, Windows and ARM. What's the vibe?
1:08:39 David Pierce? They seem to be very good. There, there's like a surprising amount of positivity and enthusiasm that Microsoft actually like pulled this thing off. Tom published his review of the Surface Laptop when we talked on Tuesday. He was like mid draft of the review, published that he called it Microsoft's best MacBook Air competitor yet, which I suspect if you're Microsoft and knowing everything that we know about how they have talked about these things is exactly what you would hope for.
1:09:06 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:09:06 David Pierce? It still seems like Microsoft like almost finished the job. There's still some like wonky emulation stuff. If you run an emulated app, it seems like it just decimates your battery. Like if anything, Tom was saying about this on Tuesday, but if anything like understated the extent to which running an app that is not prepared for emulation will just set your computer. On fire and kill your battery. But like he got good battery life. One of his pros in the review says 16 gigs of RAM for the base model, which I take as a personal attack. We'll leave that aside. But it seems like it seems like this new line of laptops is going to be really good. Microsoft stuff is coming out, Dell's stuff is coming out, Asus reviews are coming out like
1:09:48 David Pierce? the the general vibe around this generation of PCs seems to be pretty good.
1:09:53 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I think that the how good Prism, the emulator, how good Prism is over time is going to be the thing in a way that Rosetta is not the thing on the Mac. Rosetta is the emulator that lets old like Intel apps run on the new ARM chips on a Mac. And like Rosetta was like so good, no one even thought about it. And now it's not even pre-installed on these machines. If you open an x86 app on a Mac, it asks you if you want to download Rosetta. Whereas I think Prism on the Windows side, you're in it.
1:10:24 David Pierce? Yeah, it's going to be way more important for much longer.
1:10:26 Nilay Patel? And it doesn't seem to be as good. So I think that's that's the thing I'm keeping on.
1:10:30 David Pierce? It's also just a much harder task, right? Like there's a there are like centuries of Windows apps that you have to figure out how to run in a way that on a Mac.
1:10:38 Nilay Patel? Bill Gates has a stone tablet with a Win 32 app on it. It's true, but it's also if you want to compete, that's the game, right? So we'll see. All right, we got to take a break, we'll be back with the true lightning round. We'll be right back.
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1:12:26 Nilay Patel? All right, we're back with lightning round. David has two, I have three, but one of them is a joke.
1:12:32 David Pierce? You have three?
1:12:33 Nilay Patel? I picked three.
1:12:34 David Pierce? I bet I know what your joke is. Wait, can I guess what your joke is? Can we do it first? Do you want to talk about the new Verizon logo?
1:12:39 Nilay Patel? I want to talk about the new Verizon logo so much. If you haven't seen Verizon redesign its logo, it's the same text, it's just Helvetica Verizon or whatever it is. They got rid of the checkmark, but now the text is red on a black background and then the V has like a fire gradient in it. It is nuts, like nuts, like all the way around, like.
1:13:02 David Pierce? It just, have you ever seen?
1:13:03 Nilay Patel? Putting a gradient in a logo is such a strong move because it will never get reproduced correctly. Like every time we do a logo redesign, I'm like, let's do gradients. And everyone's like, no, like, no. And Verizon's like, screw it, we're doing gradients. But then doing red on black, I actually think is a great move because every carrier should be like, here's what we are. We are the demon spawn reconstruction of AT&T that the United States government tried to kill and was not able to kill, which is what Verizon is. And I think leaning into the fact that it's from hell is like, good. Like, let's just be who we are.
1:13:36 David Pierce? Now that you point that out, it even like, you could argue it is kind of like the glow from hell coming out of the bottom of the V.
1:13:42 Nilay Patel? That's what I'm saying. It's the most goth telecom logo I've ever seen in my entire life. And it's like, here's what happened. The United States government tried to kill AT&T and instead we got two zombie AT&T. And like, just be from hell. Like, that's good. Like, AT&T, I'm looking for your satanic logo redesign any minute now. By the way, this is true. Verizon is one half of the old Baby Bells and AT&T is the other half of the old Baby Bells.
1:14:11 Nilay Patel? And you just know they want to merge. Like you just know that their CEOs wake up every morning and they probably look out across the golf course at each other. And they're like, one day, buddy, AT&T is coming back.
1:14:24 David Pierce? This logo sucks.
1:14:24 Nilay Patel? To TMAX and Ferris.
1:14:26 David Pierce? Once again, I would like to offer my services as the person who will walk into your boardroom, say, that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard in my life and leave for $50,000. And I would have done that for this because they took, like, this, this just reminds me of the Gap when they're like, oh, we have this great logo that everybody really likes and doesn't feel dated at all. What if we change it to something so stupid? That'd be so fun, right?
1:14:47 Nilay Patel? By the way, no one feels anything about the Verizon logo. If you have an emotional attachment to any version of Verizon logo over time, let me know. I'm just saying, I'm super down with Verizon being like, this one reminds you of literal hell.
1:14:59 David Pierce? The V just makes me think of, like, I don't know why this is where my brain goes, but like, you know how Logan Paul has that sports drink that I can never remember? Like, I think it's Prime or something like that? This is like if a, if a YouTuber with like a 10th as many subscribers as Logan Paul wanted to make a sports drink. This is what the V would look like to me.
1:15:19 Nilay Patel? Yes.
1:15:19 David Pierce? That's all I get is like knockoff sports drink.
1:15:22 Nilay Patel? That was mine. What's yours?
1:15:23 David Pierce? My first one is some Fediverse news because we are obligated to talk about it. Some new stuff on threads where now if you have federated your account and you post on threads, not only can people on other activity pub platforms see your post, they can actually like and reply, and you will see the likes and replies. Like, the way it's worked in threads has been kind of weird before, and now there's at least sort of one step of two-way stuff. If you reply to their reply, it gets wacky. But again, like, any inkling that Meta is continuing to push into actually opening this stuff up, I find very exciting. And it seems to still be happening that Meta cares about this and wants to federate and make all of this stuff interoperate. And I
1:16:08 David Pierce? just think that's very cool.
1:16:10 Nilay Patel? Whether Meta as a company cares, weird. Like, Meta has, which is weird ideas about all of its platforms right now. They had a Half the controversy scandal this week where they just keep limiting the political content, even if you ask it to show you politics content, it just reverts.
1:16:28 David Pierce? Every time you close the app, it turns the setting off to show you political content.
1:16:32 Nilay Patel? And it's like, yeah, we know you guys don't want news. It's like, it's weird how all of your bugs are in support of you not wanting to share.
1:16:38 David Pierce? Yeah, right.
1:16:39 Nilay Patel? The thing that you keep denying. So I don't, Meta, the company is weird. The people who are working on this at Meta, super sincere about it.
1:16:46 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:16:46 Nilay Patel? Like they are communicating about it. They're posting long threads about it. They've talked to us about it. So at least on that front, the energy of that company is sincerely pointed at can you make Metaverse work?
1:16:59 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:17:00 Nilay Patel? And I think that alone is bringing a bunch of other companies along. So like Ghost, the newsletter platform, very sincere about making Federation work. The blog post that their product manager is writing about figuring out how to do Federation and Activity Pub, some of the funniest technical blog posts you will ever read in your entire life.
1:17:16 David Pierce? It's very good.
1:17:17 Nilay Patel? And.
1:17:18 David Pierce? And this stuff is complicated. It's actually, if you want to like, understand what it takes to make all this work, those blog posts are actually pretty good because this stuff is messy.
1:17:26 Nilay Patel? To, I mean, we want to do it and like, you know, like sending stuff out for a media company is like in our DNA. Like we have RSS, we syndicate to Apple. It's like we, we have feeds of content going to all these place, like out is super great.
1:17:39 David Pierce? Right.
1:17:39 Nilay Patel? All day long. What do media companies love doing? Sending their shit out for free. Work for free? By all means. Like every media company is like, let's do it. Inbox is really hard. Right? The part where I post a quick post to the verge, it gets federated, you hit like on it and then it comes back to us. Super hard. And then making that two-way in turn. So you've replied to my post on some Mastodon server and then I reply to you and that goes back out to you and then everyone else can see it. All that's really complicated. And then if you're Meta or any of these other companies, you have to like be legally compliant in Europe and blah, blah, blah. So it's going slow because it's complicated, but you can just see there's movement and there's still a bunch of energy there. It's not like, it hasn't broken Twitter yet.
1:18:24 Nilay Patel? All that stuff is happening, but I can see how complicated it is, but I can see people are just consistently plugging away. I don't wish, I think it's great.
1:18:31 David Pierce? Yeah, yeah, I agree. The, the, just the sheer existence of new features on this front goes a long way. And you can see it like in the Fediverse space. Every time Meta announces anything, all of my like Fediverse bros on Mastodon are like, let's go. It's great.
1:18:47 David Pierce? All right. What's your next one?
1:18:48 Nilay Patel? Uh, big Supreme Court week. Uh, SCOTUS has actually not released a bunch of big decisions that we want to cover. Some very complicated ones. Um, but they released one big one that I think is really important to talk about just briefly. Um, there was a group of basically COVID deniers who sued the Biden administration for like First Amendment violations, because the Biden administration had been talking to social media platforms about vaccine information and misinformation. And they basically said this is impermissible censorship. Then they got all the way Supreme Court by way of the Fifth Circuit, which is crazy. The Fifth Circuit basically wrote like a fever dream. Like, you know, if the
1:19:28 Nilay Patel? fever dreams of YouTube swamp could have written judicial opinion, like that was the Fifth Circuit opinion, like the, I think they called it the largest coordinated government censorship campaign in history. And it got to the Supreme Court or six, three Supreme Court, full of extremely hard right conservatives. And they basically are like, what are you talking about? That's the opinion written by Amy Coney Barrett. And she says like flat out, like one, you don't have standing to sue here. You cannot prove one set of actions by the government that pulled your post down. Like there's, there's nothing here in this body of evidence that says the government censored you. So like you don't, you shouldn't even be here. And then she, she says this other thing, which I think is really important
1:20:12 Nilay Patel? for this whole debate, that probably no one will pay attention to, very important to this whole debate. She's like, you have collapsed the users of the platform, the platform and the government all into one thing. Like the plaintiffs, the defendants and you are like, and the platforms in between. It's not just one thing. Like there are some people who got hurt this, who claimed that they got censored this way by this agency, talking to that platform. There are people who say that a different part of the Biden administration talked to a different platform or sued a yet a third person about something else. And that's not all the same thing. So like, the idea that there's a mass coordinated government censorship campaign directed at platforms broadly, that is directed at, like, that doesn't make any sense.
1:20:57 David Pierce? Well, that's, I mean, that, that is sort of an animating argument of a corner of the internet. And it's, it's, it was nice to see that kind of roundly.
1:21:06 Nilay Patel? Yeah, she was, basically, she was like, this is nonsense.
1:21:09 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:21:09 Nilay Patel? And like, are this Supreme Court telling that swamp, like, this is nonsense, is pretty notable to me. That's not to say, look, I think government speech regulations are bad. I think everybody knows how I feel about the First Amendment. That's not to say there isn't overreach and weird jawboning. That's what it's called when the government sort of like pressures a platform, they call jawboning. And there's a lot of that going on. And for example, conservative Republicans basically just got the Stanford Internet Observatory defunded.
1:21:36 David Pierce? Right.
1:21:37 Nilay Patel? By putting a lot of pressure on Stanford. Is that cool? Is that a thing you want? Is that a speech? Right, there's like a lot of that going on, on both sides. I, I, like, Democrats love a speech regulation, actually, the same way Republicans do, like, all these kids' safety bills are basically speech regulations. Just, we think it's, we think it's important to protect kids, so we can like shove a speech regulation into, into American political history. Weird, weird all around. I'm not saying I support them. I'm just saying this case was so stupid. And our Supreme Court was like, it's pretty stupid, and kicked them out.
1:22:11 Nilay Patel? All right, what's yours? What's your next one?
1:22:12 David Pierce? Uh, my next one is a small one, uh, about the, the ChatGPT Mac app, which is now available to everybody, and I think it's fascinating. Uh, because, uh, a couple of people have pointed out to me very recently that one of the strange things about OpenAI is it's terrible at making product. Uh, that it, it has what a lot of people would argue is like best-in-class, extremely good technology, and I can't stop talking to people whose whole pitch is we did it better than OpenAI. And, uh, I think the Mac app is weirdly important for ChatGPT, because they've been, OpenAI has been pretty, like,
1:22:51 David Pierce? Loudly and clearly working on a search engine. I think they have a lot of other ways they're trying to figure out how to productize this stuff other than just like a weird ugly chatbot in your web browser. And this thing where it can, you know, talk to you using supporting documents, like you can take screenshots on your computer and upload it and ask questions about it. That's very cool. It has access to different things in your computer. This is like, if you want to see what OpenAI is actually trying to do and get you a normal person to be interested in, like the Mac app is a pretty big step in that direction. And I just think it's really interesting. Also, all of its most interesting Scarlett Johansson-y voices still not there.
1:23:33 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I think we know why.
1:23:36 Nilay Patel? I think Scarlett Johansson was like, no, no, no, no.
1:23:38 David Pierce? She's like, I use Windows.
1:23:39 Nilay Patel? Thank you. Super, super gonna sue you very soon. All right, last one. And this is, I think, the most important thing we're going to talk about this week on the show. As you know, The Verge is America's foremost Cybertruck wiper news source.
1:23:52 David Pierce? That's correct.
1:23:54 Nilay Patel? We've been very responsible on the show. I think you also know we are very precious, very serious journalists. We take our duty of care very seriously.
1:24:03 David Pierce? I was there when you first got your hand on a Cybertruck wiper. And it was, and you journalismed a Cybertruck wiper at South by Southwest. It was a big deal.
1:24:12 Nilay Patel? I don't think the owner of that Cybertruck enjoyed the practice of journalism.
1:24:16 David Pierce? I don't think so either.
1:24:16 Nilay Patel? I committed some real acts of journalism with that wiper.
1:24:20 Nilay Patel? So a few weeks ago, there's these reports that the Cybertruck wiper was faulty and Cybertruck's deliveries were being held back, that there were potentially a recall, that it was flapping around, that it wasn't very effective. And we held back.
1:24:35 Nilay Patel? Hundreds of tips arrived out of various Cybertruck forums and social media posts. And we couldn't confirm them. So we, you know, we ran reportedly, we were very calm. Others, other sites, I won't name names, ran with it. Sensational, outrageous, clickbait journalism.
1:24:53 Nilay Patel? They were right. They were right the whole time. I have to be clear. They were right the whole time. Now, there's an official recall of Cybertruck wiper, which has motor problems of just flopping. And then the trim on the back is flying off the cars.
1:25:06 David Pierce? Which that seems worse.
1:25:08 Nilay Patel? It's not good. There's a lot of Cybertruck owners in the forums now who are like, we just got had. Like, this is nonsense. Not great for your $100,000 triangle. It's the second big recall. The first one that you recall, it's the second big recall. The first one, if you remember, was the accelerator pedal was getting stuck.
1:25:24 David Pierce? Yeah, which they fixed with like a rivet, right?
1:25:27 Nilay Patel? Yeah, that's how I would fix it. Sure. Like, ah, just get some, just not, just rivet it in.
1:25:31 David Pierce? Just point your nail gun at it and see what happens.
1:25:33 Nilay Patel? Exactly. Yeah. The trim is going to be fixed with something called the Dejan promoter, which basically like make the glue work better and pressure sensitive tape, or they will replace it if necessary for free of charge, of course. And then except the wiper is excessive electrical current can cause the front windshield wiper motor controller to fail. So they will replace the motor.
1:25:55 David Pierce? I'm sure this is not what's happening, but that makes it sound like it's, it's getting like too much power. It is just, it's becoming like electrified and going 1,000 miles an hour. And then it just like launches itself into space. And that's the end of your Cybertruck wiper.
1:26:09 Nilay Patel? Well, I can't, I won't draw too many connections here, but you will recall, one of the big innovations of the Cybertruck is its new 48 volt control system.
1:26:19 David Pierce? Oh, right.
1:26:20 Nilay Patel? Traditional cars are 12. And the fact that the wiper is a victim, like, I don't know if that's the case. I don't know. These things are connected. Whatever. But the fact that they
1:26:30 David Pierce? Your battery just instantly dies.
1:26:33 Nilay Patel? It's not great. The fact that it's the wiper motor is like, they did not need to reinvent this wiper and they super did. And there are lots of videos of it just flopping. Like, if it's raining really hard, like its structural integrity fails. Again, America's number one Cybertruck news source. We're trying to be very responsible here. I'm just saying, I, we probably could have gone with the intense clickbait. People started reporting this the first time and we held back, but it turns out it's actually broken and there is a recall. It's a very funny, um, God bless Tesla for launching this angry triangle of a car. It's very, it's very good. Uh, by the way, at the same time, all this is happening with Tesla, um, Rivian just announced like a $5 billion joint
1:27:16 Nilay Patel? venture with Volkswagen and put like five mystery cars in its roadmap. Um, the competition is here. Like it, they better fix these wipers is all I'm saying.
1:27:26 David Pierce? And Rivian in particular feels like it immediately went from like cool company, interesting ideas. Can it survive to like, oh, this is, it's, it's coming now. And even the way that like RJ, their CEO talked about it afterwards was like, it's like buckle up, like let's go.
1:27:43 Nilay Patel? He's like, I got some money. I've got a manufacturing partner who can like scale really fast. And then Volkswagen gets a bunch of their software, which they're very excited about because they just re-architected the whole thing. RJ is going to be on Decoder in a few weeks.
1:27:54 David Pierce? Oh, nice.
1:27:54 Nilay Patel? Uh, so I'm very excited to ask him exactly when I can get an R3X, uh, which is basically what we're going to talk about the whole time. Uh, can I have it now? It's been 45 minutes. Can I have it now? That's how, that's how we're going to go through it. Uh, all right. We gotta get out of here. We're way over. Thank you to Charlie for being on the show. It's always great to talk to him. I gotta call it the Verge store is back. We got new gear. We also have big mugs, 14 ounce.
1:28:15 David Pierce? It's very exciting. I'm hoping this is the last time I will ever have this stupid tiny mug.
1:28:21 David Pierce? From now on, bigger and bigger mugs every 12 months or so, until eventually we have like a, like an Ajit pie 60 inch mug. I'm very excited about it.
1:28:31 Nilay Patel? Uh, and I just got, it is the 4th of July, so happy 4th. We're off next week.
1:28:36 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:28:37 Nilay Patel? Take a break, let some fireworks, drink a beer. It's gonna be great.
1:28:40 David Pierce? Keep all your fingers. Be careful.
1:28:42 Nilay Patel? That's the Vergecast. Rock and roll.
1:28:47 David Pierce? And that's it for The Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.
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