Pod Insights Big Technology Podcast Reddit Revolts, Media Armageddon, AI Fakes In Politics — With Sara Fischer About this episode Sara Fischer is the senior media reporter at Axios and media analyst at CNN. She joins Big Technology Podcast for our weekly discussion of the week's tech news. We cover: 1) The rebellion at Reddit 2) Rampant media job losses 3) The push of ad money to retail 4) Whether we should share our personal information inside ChatGPT and other LLMs 5) Political misinformation via AI generated text and images 6) The cost of always trying to distinguish real from fake 7) The White House's War on Junk Fees.
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1:10 Alex Kantrowitz? Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool-headed and nuanced format. We have a great guest for you today. Sarah Fisher is here. She is a senior media reporter at Axios and a media analyst at CNN. We have so many stories to get into. The big Reddit strike, what's happening with Google, the latest on AI. And of course, one of my favorites. Are we going to end junk fees in the US? I think the time has come. Sarah, it's so great to have you on. Welcome to the show.
1:42 Speaker 01 Thanks for having me. Great to see you.
1:44 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay, why don't we start with the story of Reddit? So the company has been dealing with a large strike from many of the moderators of its subreddits. People are saying, okay, you know, maybe this is the the end of Reddit as we know it. I know you've been following the story closely. What's your read on what's happening and where it goes from here?
2:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's a good question. Reddit is so important to culture in the US. Oftentimes, when I'm Googling things and I can't find an answer to something specific, I'm gonna get a Reddit thread that's coming up in my search engine. So it's a huge part of how we get and access information and how we develop communities online. If you're somebody listening to this and you're like, "Well, I'm not on Reddit", chances are somebody in your life is. They have 57 million people that use that site daily. They have over 1.2 billion subreddits or like communities per topic. And at any given time, you can have over 100,000 of them that are active. So the fact that there's a huge blackout on Reddit is a massive story for the internet and for big tech. My read on it, Alex, is that this is gonna be a pretty important cultural issue for the company.
2:49 Speaker 01 Essentially, what happened is Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said that they would start charging for backend access to its data. And while a lot of people use that backend access for fun, silly things, like creating an app for reading Reddit threads on your phone or things like that, why he did it is because there's a lot of other big tech rival firms that use tools to scrape Reddit's data. And then they're using that to train their AI algorithms. And so he essentially said, "Look, we're gonna get paid if you're gonna do that." Unfortunately, that sparked a huge uproar in the Reddit community. We now have, you know, thousands of Reddit subreddit communities that have made their channels private. So essentially, they are, you know, in a blackout period until they can see if Reddit CEO will change his mind.
3:34 Speaker 01 But it does not seem like he will, Alex. And I think that's where this cultural tension is gonna come about. For a long time, Reddit was not seen as this big commercial player like Meta and Google. It was seen as a community that really cared about the people who used it. And so now we're seeing this company, as it approaches a potential IPO, starting to really side with its business and prioritize that potentially over some concerns from its community.
4:01 Alex Kantrowitz? Now, here's the thing I don't get. It seems like both sides, and this is such a typical fight in 2023, where you have both sides, they're basically incinerating each other, right? The moderators are destroying this platform that they know and love, and the owners of the company are trying to make a profit, but driving away so many users. I just don't really see this conflict as a very productive one. Maybe I'm seeing it wrong. Maybe there is, you know, reason for, you know, the moderators in particular to want to go dark. Obviously Reddit's a site that's gone dark in the past to try to get what it wants in terms of lobbying for specific tech regulation or against it. But this one just seems to me like it's just going to end up destroying something the moderators love and also blowing up the site for Reddit. Where am I wrong there?
4:46 Speaker 01 I don't disagree with you. And I think that the CEO's new announcement this week that basically members of a community can vote out their moderators, you know, kind of again creates that cultural tension that I think could be damaging to the business. However, one of the things that Reddit has not provided is they must have done some sort of internal audit, trying to figure out what money they could make by charging big companies in particular to be accessing this data. And it must have figured that that's a pretty big number. Remember, Alex, Reddit is an ad-supported platform, and we are in one of the slowest growth years for digital advertising that we've seen in history. So I can understand why a platform like Reddit, especially because again, they are looking to go public via an IPO.
5:31 Speaker 01 They filed confidentially a year and a half ago at this point, would want to increase the revenue wheels. I don't know what the calculation is. They haven't provided those details, but I think certainly that has to do something with it.
5:43 Alex Kantrowitz? You know, you have to be making some money if you're trying to file for an IPO. Of course, like, you know, the advertising slowdown is real. I've definitely experienced that in the newsletter. Like, last year, forget about it. Like, I was selling every ad this year. I'm like begging and pleading advertisers to come aboard with the newsletter. There has been some discussion of like, the thing that the moderators here are most angry about is the fact that... Client apps like Apollo, which is one of them, have been basically forced to shut down because operating on top of Reddit is going to be too expensive. Then you have the other uses, right? The crawling for AI training. It makes sense to charge for that, maybe not for this tool that's made your platform so valuable, like an Apollo, right?
6:25 Alex Kantrowitz? Which users want to use and actually contribute to the forum. Now, it obviously seems like Reddit still wants money from the client apps and wants to force people to their app, you know, if they don't, if the client apps can't make it. But why not carve out an exception, right? Carve out an exception for the, um, these client apps, the apps that make Reddit more usable, so you're going to actually be able to thrive even though you're dealing with, you know, trying to find a way to make money.
6:53 Speaker 01 It's a great question, and it again goes back to, I don't think we have all the information. For all we know, Reddit's trying to build its own, you know, sort of more readable apps, and that could be part of why they don't want to give access to these clients. They have, I want to note, given some carve-outs. They've said folks like researchers will still be able to get API access to their data. And researchers, by the way, the reason they would want to get access to Reddit's data is to monitor things like misinformation, cultural trends, et cetera. But they have introduced this policy, which is very blunt on the commercial side, you know, basically grouping in all of these use cases together. And to your point, Alex, we don't quite understand why. If they were more, you know, if they have information about why they're doing it, I think that would be critical.
7:35 Speaker 01 They've, in the past, in the past few days, they started to put out more info, uh, and they're talking a lot, I know, to their community moderators about why they're making these decisions and what sort of factors go into it. But what I haven't seen yet is like the raw business case. Again, they're a private company, it's not like they need to disclose it, but I think it would help folks like you and me who are analyzing the situation and people in their community understand the rationale a little bit more.
7:59 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, it kind of strikes me that the CEO of Reddit, Steve Huffman, you know, I've heard about him, but you're really starting to see how this guy runs the company. And the people who are closest to it just have this visceral hate for him. And I think that's probably like not something you're going to want to foster if you're running a forum company.
8:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, and I'll just say, he's a co-founder. He's been there for so many years. This has been a breaking point. I don't think the community viscerally didn't like Steve beforehand. I know as a reporter, I found him to be very compelling and honest and open executive to work with him. But I think this is just a huge milestone in Reddit's growth, again, ahead of a potential IPO that's rubbing a lot of folks the wrong way.
8:40 Alex Kantrowitz? Well, one guy that definitely does not like Steve Huffman is Ryan Broderick, who writes this great Substack, and one of my former colleagues at BuzzFeed, but his Substack is called Garbage Day. And he wrote a piece commenting on this that I thought was really interesting. It's called "Platforms Don't Really Make Sense Anymore." And he's talking about this idea, and I think there's some truth to this, that like the big, broad, public forums, the things like the Reddits, the things like the Facebooks and Twitters have actually declined in relevance as people have gone on and started to move into group chats, for instance. So let me read you a piece of it, and I'd like to have your perspective on it. So he says, "Over time, as more platforms appeared and consolidated actual internet real estate,
9:23 Alex Kantrowitz? we came to rely on them working together in some capacity. And though they never want to acknowledge it, these platforms have also been relying on us to give them content. Now users are revolting. Ad revenue is beginning to lag. Younger users are moving away from social networking and gravitating toward Netflix-style entertainment hubs like TikTok and Dark Social. And AI are replacing the feed interface with a chat window." So platforms are panicking because they were always middlemen. They were always marketplace, and without a market, they aren't really anything. What do you make of that?
9:56 Speaker 01 I think to an extent, he's right that the social marketplace has died down. And so they all need to pivot out of being just social companies. But they've found other marketplaces that are very successful. So let's look at Meta, for example. I think where you're seeing Meta lean in is that they are a marketplace that connects consumers to businesses globally and at an incredible scale. And as a result, their business opportunities, being this sort of closed-wall marketplace for the commerce business to consumer communication, they're leaning into that. Their business opportunities are increasing there. What are they doing? They are basically displacing call centers, you know, and making it so that you can do a lot of backend messaging relatively quickly with a lot of these businesses.
10:39 Speaker 01 So I think for them, it's not that they don't have a role to play. It's that the role that they have to play is going to have to shift into marketplace businesses that are not social, but they're more commerce and selling of goods. Or to the point that you just made about Google, it needs to be the exchange of ideas and helping to better clarify inputs and outputs through AI. I think for a company like Reddit, they're interesting because they are inherently conversations. So how do you pivot out of a closed-wall garden platform that's just conversations into other things? They're experimenting, you know, they bought a video platform, they bought Dubsmash, they kind of folded it into their infrastructure. And I think companies like Twitter, trying to figure out the same thing, right?
11:22 Speaker 01 Twitter's experimenting much more right now with video, live streaming. How can they be more of an entertainment hub akin to a TikTok? So I agree with Ryan's premise. I definitely think the social walled garden play is probably over. You need to now become the walled garden for a marketplace of, you know, entertainment content, commerce content, et cetera. And I do think there's still a place for it there.
11:44 Alex Kantrowitz? Right, it's just that you can't have so many platforms do that. Like this whole idea of Twitter adding more video, like is it trying to become some sort of hybrid between Twitter, YouTube and TikTok? You eventually just kind of lose focus, don't you?
11:57 Speaker 01 You can and you do. I think where Twitter has a very interesting value proposition is it's the place you go for real-time events and conversations around them. So when they're leaning into video, they're leaning into announcements, they're leaning into live feeds of sports and entertainment and award shows. They're going, I think, to lean into A lot more in this election cycle of like live announcements and things that are happening there and then all the conversation around it. So for them, I, you're right, you can risk becoming distracted. I see where it works for them. But a great example of becoming too distracted is Meta. Like, they recognized that the social marketplace was not going to work and they leaned into way too many things. I mean, they launched a newsletter platform for journalists. They launched a podcasting and live audios app. All that's
12:40 Speaker 01 now been shut down. Because now they recognize that they really need to hyper-focus on what is actually working, which I think for them, they're hoping is going to be this, again, the connection between consumers and business as it pertains to commerce.
12:51 Alex Kantrowitz? Yep, year of efficiency. And by the way, with the Twitter stuff, like the fact that they're gonna, you know, it's a great point that you make, that they're gonna focus more on announcements and something live, right? Live video, if you do it right, has been something that's compelling, although you really need to be the best of it. But the fact that they have Linda Iaccarino, who'd come from NBC and is used to selling TV, that might, that might help bolster it. By the way, so speaking of advertising downtrends and trying to be meaningful conduits of information, I was gonna say this for later, but it's a great moment to bring it up. You tweeted an astonishing stat this week, looking at how many jobs have been lost in the news business this year. I mean, so many, right?
13:36 Alex Kantrowitz? So you say, "The media industry has announced at least 17,436 job cuts so far this year." And that's the highest year-to-date level of cuts on record, worse than the outset of 2020. I mean, we've definitely seen the fact that there's been cuts, you know, across my old employer and BuzzFeed News, inside Vice, inside, you know, Insider, all over the place, CNN, right? Why is this year so bad?
14:05 Speaker 01 The ad market is brutal. That's what I would mostly attribute this to. And in addition to that, you had a lot of consolidation that drove debt. And I think a lot of companies are kind of looking to cuts to manage some of that. Obviously, you don't typically cut people to manage big swaths of debt. You like divest platforms and things and big businesses. But I do think some of these cuts are tied to that. Particularly when you look at some of the big newspaper mergers. We've had a lot of cuts coming out of Gannett and coming out of. That company was merged with Gatehouse, same thing with Lee Enterprises. I've been writing a lot about their cuts. Those were mostly, I think, earlier this year. So that's a big part of it. The ad market sort of consolidation and paying down debt related to it.
14:49 Speaker 01 I also think there's a little bit of subscription fatigue. In the Trump era, a lot of these news companies made a lot of money on subscriptions. And now you see companies and subscription revenue is down. You know, The Washington Post had three million in the Trump era. A source tells me that's now down to 2.5 million.
15:05 Alex Kantrowitz? The publisher was out this week.
15:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. The publisher and CEO stepped down. It will be stepping down in August. So there's a lot of turbulence that's leading to cuts. But what is astonishing is what you just mentioned at the top. This is more than what we had at the outset of the pandemic. And we put so much time and attention towards how do we provide relief for the news industry? I mean, we put up PPP loans. We made news companies eligible for them and they took them. I mean, it was extraordinary how much we paid attention. And the reason I wrote that story this week is like, I don't think we've collectively been paying attention to how much the fourth estate has been crushed. If this was, I saw a few people tweeting like, if this was the mining industry or if this was some sort of, you know, industrial industry, we would be panicked.
15:47 Speaker 01 But right now, with the news industry, you don't see that kind of same level of moral panic at the regulatory and sort of lawmaker side at least.
15:55 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, it's pretty wild. I mean, one of the things I wrote in my notes is like, maybe it's design. Now, I know that's kind of facetious, but like, you know, you go to these websites, you take off your ad blocker. Then they like reward you by papering over all the content with like, just so many ads. It makes it impossible to read. And maybe that's an old man curmudgeonly take on this thing. But it is interesting how the experience has degraded. You know, they've given more real estate to advertising, even as they're making less money from advertising. But we're, because we're, we both come from the business side. Like you were on business side of a publisher. I was on buying ads and ad tech. So we know how this thing works. But yeah, go ahead.
16:38 Speaker 01 I would just say economically, just so to be clear, the rate of growth in advertising is slowing, but it's still growing. It's decelerates, not decline. And so I think one of the challenges is not necessarily that publishers are like rapidly, you know, losing all their revenue. It's that it's not growing at the clip that they expected it to grow. And as a result, they have to manage their expenses. So that's why I think you're seeing a lot of these cuts. To your point about a lot of publishers just jamming ads on the page, we did have a big turnaround in this industry around 2018, when Google said, I'm not sending any of my referral traffic. Safari said this too. If you don't, your ad specs don't adhere to this like coalition standards. So that's why you don't have like pop-ups
17:19 Speaker 01 and stuff. I think most premium web publishers, they're now, the advertising experience is better. However, I think where it's starting to get convoluted is we now need to inject ads into everything we do. We have ads within the middle of our events. We have ads within our live streams. We have ads within our podcasts. And so even though the experience, I think, and the web front has gotten better in the past few years, I do think consumers still feel inundated with commercialization.
17:45 Alex Kantrowitz? Right. And by the way, like even though the ad pie is growing, it's not going to publishers, right? Like the one thriving ad business that's growing at a percentage that's, you know, reminiscent of what it was like pre-pandemic or even mid-pandemic is Amazon. So where is that growth in ad money going?
18:04 Speaker 01 Going to three places, and that's such a good point, mostly retail.
18:08 Alex Kantrowitz? Retail is so interesting, right?
18:10 Speaker 01 Yeah. You know, you have a bunch of retailers who are creating digital networks to sell ads.
18:16 Alex Kantrowitz? Name a few of them.
18:18 Speaker 01 And the Walmarts, all the grocers, you know, Kroger and Albertsons, et cetera, Amazon. CTV, connected television, there's a lot of momentum there. So as eyeballs move from linear television to streaming, you know, more digital streaming television ads. And then, you know, there's still obviously growth and momentum in search and social. Social actually, and search are growing a little bit slower than they have traditionally. And that's just due to the maturation of platforms like Google and Meta. One area where I'm looking at for a lot of growth is any app that has a consumer attention, meaning you're opening the app for a long period of time, suddenly now is a place where we put ads. So outside of retail, delivery services, Uber has a huge ads business, Instacart has
19:01 Speaker 01 a huge ads business. I think you should expect to see a lot more growth there.
19:06 Alex Kantrowitz? On that note, let's take a break. We're here with Sarah Fisher. She is the media correspondent, senior media reporter at Axios and CNN's media analyst. We're talking about Reddit, we're talking about the decline in media, but when we come back on the break, we're going to cover a few themes that we keep coming back to on this podcast. The latest in AI, Google's warning to its employees not to put interesting, put any confidential information into Bard and other large language models. And then also we'll talk about the end of junk fees potentially, back right after this. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Sarah Fisher. She's a senior media reporter at Axios and a CNN media analyst.
19:50 Alex Kantrowitz? First half, we talked a lot about current events with Reddit. There's something else that's going on, which is that we are having this massive rollout of large language model based applications. And the security side is something that doesn't get discussed too often, but certainly is starting to get way more attention. And it's time to talk about it now. I mean, Google made this very interesting warning to its employees. By the way, it didn't broadcast this out. This was something that ended up being scooped by the media. And it said, be careful, pretty much about what you put inside these large language models, things like Bard, because it's not exactly safe, right? So I'm curious, Sarah, what you think this says, first of all, about our willingness to kind of run and put all of
20:32 Alex Kantrowitz? our information inside these models, but also like, what exactly is Google seeing on the other side of all of our queries? I mean, more than traditional search, if we're starting to talk to its technology like a friend?
20:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's a huge problem here, right? Like, we're, when we used to go search for things, we'd ask a question typically. Right now, when we're using ChatGPT, we are inputting more than just questions, but we are inputting the way we want these questions to be answered. And oftentimes, to do that, we're inputting personal information. So for example, Um, you know, can you write me a college application essay? I am a girl who is sixteen, who has a GPA of three point two, and I'm from suburban, you know, Wisconsin or whatever. Like now, suddenly you're giving them all this personal information about you that previously in search, the platform could likely infer. But now you're willingly giving it over.
21:27 Speaker 01 And so what Google essentially is saying to its employees is like, please be careful when you give in your personal information, because we don't quite frankly know how this, uh, these large language models of AI, how they're processing it, how they're saving it to be able to tap into it later to create even more sophisticated queries. Now, the challenge is, okay, if you're Google, why would you ever admit something like that, right? You're you're rolling this out on a commercial scale. Why would you ever concede that? And I think the answer is, you know, we, and and Sundar Pichai has said this, they moved very quickly on this because of the consumer interest. And now they're trying to balance things like safety and reliability with the commercial opportunity that's presented itself in rolling it out quickly.
22:10 Speaker 01 I think a lot of people look at this and they're alarmed and they would have said, why didn't you move slower? But the cat's already out of the bag. That's the problem, right? Like, is it Google's fault that OpenAI has already introduced this technology? And it would do the same things anyway? No. So I think that that's where they're kind of stuck right now.
22:27 Alex Kantrowitz? How careful are you about the stuff that you put in to these LOMs?
22:32 Speaker 01 I don't put in any personal information. Um, and I also don't put in any information regarding my reporting. So, you know, I will use, I I've experimented with Bard and OpenAI and I'm trying to figure out ways to be smarter about it. And I'll use it for small day to day things. Oh, I have to write, you know, uh, my mom a quick note about what time I'm getting to the airport or something like that, like not pretty, you know, innocuous stuff that I don't care if somebody out there knows that I
23:00 Alex Kantrowitz? Sarah's mom, if you're listening, you're
23:05 Speaker 01 Terminal C at Newark Airport, like, it's fine. But I think, uh, I'm not going to put in any sensitive information that, um, would relate to my work or my personal life or identity, really.
23:13 Alex Kantrowitz? You won't like write like, hey, I'm going to write this story. You know, can you write it up in Axios style? Here's like a couple of bullet points?
23:21 Speaker 01 No, because like, what if it's a scoop? And it's my proprietary information? I don't know if I can have that there.
23:26 Alex Kantrowitz? Well, look, I mean, I definitely, I've definitely been putting the first few sentences of my stories in there, and it's been interesting to watch the way that it's evolved. I still think it's a terrible writer, both Bing and Bard and ChatGPT. I mean, that writing is like totally unusable, but but maybe I should be a little bit more more careful. And it is interesting. I mean, you know, the thing is, you could definitely have like people sharing like some like personal information, like I'm planning a vacation or something in this area and Google getting a chance to see it. But I think what they're really worried about, and I'm curious what you think about this, is that people are, this the stuff is amazing for code. And I'm sure right now, across Silicon Valley, engineers
24:08 Alex Kantrowitz? are just dumping in like trade secrets and the entire code base of really important apps and products into these large language models and asking them to, you know, refine or change that. And that's really where you can get into trouble, don't you think?
24:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, I definitely think there's a commercial risk for sure. But I think the personal identity risk is even more present because Google, as an employer, has a right to protect all of its employees' information, etc. And like, even more damning than some of your code getting out is some of your employees' proprietary information being abused by your own technology. Like, I can see class action lawsuits out the wazoo as a result of that. And I think that's a huge driving factor as well.
24:48 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah. Did you see this week? So, speaking of AI, did you see this week there was a photo of Rick DeSantis, I'm no sorry, of Donald Trump kissing Dr. Fauci on the nose that was put out by the DeSantis campaign?
25:01 Speaker 01 I did. And we're following AI in politics really closely at Axios. You know, one of the things we've been in touch with the FEC, with the Federal Election Commission, the FCC, the FTC, about how we regulate AI in political ads, how we regulate AI in political discourse. And it's really an uncharted territory. I think it's going to be very hard to figure out where we set boundaries ahead of the 2024 election. We've been talking about the threat of things like deep fakes for years. This feels like the election cycle war finally becomes an issue. And Alex, I will tell you, we don't really have any parameters set, especially, especially, and this is the one I'm the most worried about, the local broadcast level. Because of the way our regulations are designed, local broadcasters cannot edit,
25:43 Speaker 01 they cannot fact check, they cannot deny political ads from candidates. And obviously, you have to have equal airtime. So now what happens when you have an ad that comes in using AI? As a local broadcaster, again, you're not really technically supposed to fact check or edit these ads, but you also have a duty in terms of adhering to other advertising regulation writ large, like false commercialization, which is when you put out an ad that's demonstratively false that would cause you to buy something wrong or buy something with misunderstanding. I think they have no clue what to do, and I don't think their policies have caught up. And I'm hearing from campaigns who are annoyed that they're submitting ads and they're getting rejected and they don't know why. And so this is going to be a huge storyline for the 2024 election.
26:27 Alex Kantrowitz? Or will it? Because, you know, another thing that I saw in response to this, first of all, like in the run up to the 2016 election, something like this would have got first, you know, front page news, right? Everybody would have been covering it. I don't think anyone really cared yesterday. And in fact, when I shared it, I know that someone who probably saw my tweet, you know, tweeted in a response, breaking politicians lie in ads, like facetiously, being like, we don't, we don't care anymore. And it is interesting. It sort of seems like we might have gotten to this point, and maybe I'm wrong. But there's been so much misinformation and so much talk about misinformation that, you know, people don't really seem to care anymore. It just doesn't seem to be an issue that's animating people's interest. Maybe I'm wrong. What do you think?
27:12 Speaker 01 I think there's going to be a select few areas of our world and life that we're going to deeply care. And Google has kindly suggested and hinted at this in its latest ads policy update, or actually, this might have been a few updates ago. They said very explicitly, like, please use extra caution when you're looking at results around personal finance and health, because those are the types of areas where consumers will have zero tolerance for misinformation. If your kid swallows a bottle of nail polish and you go to Google, what do I do? Where what is the poison control, local poison control number? And you're getting misinformation. The consumer will revolt against those platforms. So they're going to have incentive to definitely figure out what's accurate and what's not.
27:56 Speaker 01 Same thing for personal finance information and health. The politics and news and information, you're right. I think a lot of the consumer base doesn't much care. They assume so much of this is lies and not lies. But where they will care is if we have an instance, like what happened a few weeks ago, where there was a, you know, deep fake, AI-generated image of the Pentagon, basically, being on fire that caused the stock market to change and to drop. That's when consumers are going to care. If it's national security related, if it's related to health and safety, if there's a deep fake image on the news that's being circulated of a tornado about to hit your neighborhood. I mean, you might make decisions around that. You might go run and try to pick up your kid from school.
28:40 Speaker 01 So consumers are going to demand accurate information and seek it. It just has to be kind of a life or death thing, really.
28:47 Alex Kantrowitz? That's a great point. And Nicole also could, like, you make a great point. It could also impact people's pocketbooks. So like, there was, I feel like every day, there's a new story of another financial bot that's going to give you investment advice. And my perspective on this is just like, okay, if anyone releases these bots, whether it's JP Morgan or whoever, if that bot says anything other than invest in diversified index funds and wait, there's going to be serious lawsuits. Where do you think this is going to go?
29:18 Speaker 01 I agree. I think a lot of AI regulation will go down and be regulated in courts because of lawsuits, especially when people ask me about copyright law. Current copyright law protects human works. And so it's unclear as to how it protects works that are developed through a combination of human intelligence and AI. And I think a lot of those test cases, and we're starting to see this in the music industry a lot, are going to be litigated in courts that will set new precedents and help shape the law as we understand it and interpret it. To your point about the personal finances, there was a story a few weeks ago about, I think it was the National Eating Disorders Association, using a chatbot to give people information. The information was widely wrong, and so they had to retract.
29:59 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, that strikes me as so crazy.
30:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, but it gives you a good example and a good sense of, you know, a lot of entities are feeling pressure from a highly inflated company, uh, economy, relying on AI to help outsource and automate human, uh, intelligence. And I think they are very quickly realizing that it's not that simple. And so I think you're right, you're going to have major institutions of proceed with, uh, caution, especially like, again, I cover the news and media industry. You're seeing news companies use AI in the backend to help with, you know, billing and ad optimization. But a lot of newsrooms are proceeding with caution because they don't want to get caught up in copyright issues and stuff like that. So, you know, I think it's just going to be experimentation. But big institutions and big brands that have a lot of brand equity to risk will move even slower than upstarts.
30:45 Alex Kantrowitz? Did you see Nick Carlson and his return, well, not return, but at the end of this insider strike, he sent a memo out to the company talking about how they're going to start relying more on AI at Insider. And he mentioned straight up, AI can make you a better writer. Uh, what do you think about that?
31:02 Speaker 01 Uh, so I covered Insider's first announcement around AI, how they were creating sort of like an AI special counsel internally to experiment. Um, you know, I don't want to dispute or sort of put down his perspective because for all I know, AI, when leveraged correctly and when you're trained to use it correctly, can make you a better writer. But I do think, and the Digital Publishers Association sort of put out guidelines to its members the other day about this, I do think even if it makes you a better writer, the risk is that your work is not protected by the copyright laws that it used to be, which becomes very challenging when you want to monetize the IP to create books or movies or plays or anything like that. And so sure, go ahead, help it, you know, use it to help
31:44 Speaker 01 improve your writing all you want, but you need to do that at your own risk of IP protection. And I think that, depending on your business model, can be a big deal. If you think about a company like Vox Media, which makes a large chunk of its revenue from licensing its IP for movies and TV shows and podcasts, like I would proceed with a lot more caution than if you're just like a clickbait website that's just making programmatic digital ad revenue and you don't really care about your IP.
32:09 Alex Kantrowitz? Most definitely, and I think that like I agree that AI can make you a better writer. I've been using Grammarly for years and Grammarly has taught me things about the active and the passive voice that I could never potentially, I could never learn from a book just because it highlights. And it's like, that's passive voice. And after I did it like a hundred times, I was like, oh, I understand this now. So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. There is this really interesting, speaking of AI misinformation, there's a story that you wrote that I want to get to, talking about AI's hidden toll on our brains. So you have this at Axios with a colleague that, "Experts are raising alarms about the mental health risks and the emotional burden of navigating an information ecosystem driven by AI that's likely to feature even more misinformation, identity theft and fraud."
32:54 Alex Kantrowitz? So basically, like, there could be mental health costs to people who are trying to like, see all this content and discern what's real or not. Can you expand a little bit about, about, you know, what the study was that you reported on? And how valid do you find? I mean, just gut check their findings.
33:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, no, I wrote that story with Axios's science editor, Alison Snyder. And really what the experts that we spoke to or that we quoted that were, what they're trying to explain here is that there is definitely going to be like an opportunity cost in our efficiency and in our mental health in having to allocate so much more mental bandwidth and emotional bandwidth and figuring out what is real and what is not. Now, if you think about it from the misinformation perspective, like, I don't think that people are going to be up in a tizzy trying to figure out whether or not the news article that they read is real. I think what people are going to be up in a tizzy about is someone used, made a deep fake of them doing something inappropriate or sexual and they sent it around to a group
33:58 Speaker 01 chat with all of their friends. Or somebody made a false video of someone pretending to cheat on a test and emailed it to their teacher. That is going to cause a huge undue burden of people trying to prove what's real and what's not in ways that have real implications on their lives. And there's a huge opportunity cost in our lives. Like, we're going to have to be taking the time out of our day to disprove these types of images and disprove these types of content. And so that's basically what they're saying. And the other thing too is that the more this proliferates, especially without regulation, the more consumers are going to be at risk of things like identity theft and fraud, like you mentioned. People are already very stressed about things like digital security, their password managing. I mean, how stressed are you every time you have to create a new password for something? Write it down, forgetting about it?
34:41 Speaker 01 So this is going to put that on overdrive, is trying to make sure and manage every weird scam text that you get? Is this actually my delivery package from Amazon? Is it not every, you know, fake image?
34:53 Alex Kantrowitz? That is exhausting, for sure.
34:55 Speaker 01 It's exhausting, and I think that it's going to have, the, the main point that I wanted to make with that story is, there is an opportunity cost in society. With having to deal with these problems and not having the tools to deal with it, you become so mentally exhausted and emotionally exhausted managing it, that in some ways you retreat from using the tech, which could make us better and advanced, or you become distrusting of the world around you, and that has huge implications for like, society, democracy, all of those.
35:19 Alex Kantrowitz? Yep. It is amazing that high schools haven't already filled with people mid-journeying their friends and teachers and putting them in weird positions. I mean, I remember when I was in high school, we would use Microsoft Paint to like, put the teachers' faces on Disney characters and then hang them up in the hall, and we thought we were hilarious. I mean, with today's technology, the pranks can really get a lot better.
35:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, I'm, I'm very worried for, especially for kids. Imagine if two kids get in a fight, one kid uses AI to create a video of someone pretending, again, to admit to cheating on a test? I mean, that could impact your ability to get into college, so it's, it's, it's very scary.
35:59 Alex Kantrowitz? It is bad, for sure. Have you tried mid-journeying your face onto different people or in different scenes?
36:07 Speaker 01 I have not, in part because I don't want my personal data out there. Like, you would have to kind of input some of your own photos, and I just am not comfortable with that.
36:14 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah. You're, you're appropriately cautious about this technology, and I'm needlessly reckless, and definitely tried to get mid-journeyed to take my face. You can upload a photo, you, you know how this works, right? And then say, with this person's face, you know, do this. And I did try to get it to put me in an extremely puffy coat, and I think the good news is that you can still tell the fakes from the real, but it doesn't really seem that far away.
36:44 Speaker 01 No, what makes you so, what makes you feel like so comfortable with inputting that information? Is it just that you think your stuff's already out there, or the benefit from experimentation outweighs the risk?
36:54 Alex Kantrowitz? Both, but I think I've really been lulled into this sense of complacency, handing my data over to the, you know, the digital world. And, you know, I think that eventually that will probably bite me. But up until, up until then, um, you know, this is probably a ridiculous stance to take. So I'm even embarrassed to admit it on the podcast. But, um, I'm just willing to like throw as much data out there. Obviously, like I have boundaries. I try to keep my personal life as much as I can off of social media and off of the internet. And my, my banking information certainly will not be entered into ChatGPT anytime soon. Um, but I'm waiting to get hit and it hasn't happened yet.
37:39 Alex Kantrowitz? So that's sort of where I stand. Am I crazy?
37:42 Speaker 01 No, you're not crazy. I think, I think it's calculated risk, so all good.
37:46 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah.
37:47 Speaker 01 And I'm just.
37:48 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay, last.
37:49 Speaker 01 Okay, the last question, I just looked at my computer's out of battery and I'm like, ugh.
37:53 Alex Kantrowitz? All right, so let's just go last question. Um, I want to hear your perspective on the fact that the White House is making companies like Ticketmaster disclose the junk fees upfront. So you're going to be able to see Ticketmaster or StubHub fees all together when you look.
38:09 Speaker 01 Doesn't help that Ticketmaster and Live Nation have had so much regulatory scrutiny over their merger and antitrust dominance in the wake of the Taylor Swift fiasco. But I think this is bigger than just those ticketing companies. Airbnb has been the subject of a lot of complaints here. You know, the White House is listening to consumers getting frustrated, especially in this very highly, um, you know, inflationary environment about what they're sort of paying and they don't like deception. We have it, I will say as a, as a country, consumer deception, that's mostly under the FTC's purview. Something we take pretty seriously. And so I think that makes sense that they're tackling this. Um, in terms of like why they're doing it now, like I said, I think it's the regulatory environment around Ticketmaster and Live Nation.
38:51 Speaker 01 I also think in the post pandemic world, a lot of people are starting to actually go out more. They're buying tickets, they're buying movies, they're buying vacations. And, uh, in the pandemic, we weren't so focused on hidden fees because what were we buying? Now that's like bounced back in the other direction and so consumers want a little more protection.
39:08 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, you have any fun concerts you're looking to hit up this summer?
39:12 Speaker 01 No, none. I feel like-
39:13 Alex Kantrowitz? Are you not a music person?
39:14 Speaker 01 No, I like music. I actually just said this on a podcast. I like music, but I'm trying to be smarter about my budget. Anytime I can go to a free concert, I'm there. And so you and I go to all these work conferences with concerts. Like I'm going to Cannes next week and like, you know, all these different musicians are going to be playing. And I'm like, uh, I'll get to see them for free. It's fine.
39:33 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, I'll never forget. Sorry?
39:36 Speaker 01 Do you have any-
39:36 Alex Kantrowitz? This summer, you know, I might go to the Dead and Company Show in Citi Field next week, but I have a busy week, so we'll see what happens. But my last word is, I'll never forget seeing LCD Sound System, one of my favorite bands, play at Google I/O a few years ago. And they spent the whole time talking to the crowd about how they were grateful that they were there, even though it's not their thing. And everybody seemed pretty receptive, except for the engineer sitting in front of me, not paying attention to the show and coding the entire time from the third row. Sarah Fisher, thank you so much for joining. This was so much fun. Great having you on the show.
40:16 Speaker 01 Good to see you. Thank you.
40:18 Alex Kantrowitz? Thank you. Please come back again. All right, everybody, that'll do it for us here. Thank you to Sarah. Thank you Doug Gorman for doing the titles here on LinkedIn. And thank you to LinkedIn for having us part of the podcast network. We'll see you all next Wednesday. An interview with ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott is coming up. So, hope to see you then, and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.
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