 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Philip Shane, Paul Boyer, and Brad. Coming up on DTNS, social networks are having an identity crisis. Who really owns AI art, and why dead spiders are smarter than you think? Sorry. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, July 28, 2022. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Rich Trafalino. In Los Angeles, I'm Lamar Wilson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We are going to talk more social network identity crises, that dead spider thing. You might get prickly over the thought, but it might be kind of cool. But first, let's start with a few tech things you should know. Yeah, let's keep things congressional. The U.S. Senate and House passed a $52 billion Chips and Science Act of 2022, a.k.a. Chips Plus, to address the chip shortage. This bill does create $52 billion to fund the U.S.-based chip manufacturers for companies like Intel, Texas Instruments, and Micron Technology. It now goes to President Biden for signature. In other legislative news, Senate Democrats announced a deal on a budget reconciliation package that includes $369 billion for climate and energy measures aimed at cutting carbon emissions 40% by 2030. This includes an extension of the $7,500 federal tax credit for the purchase of new clean vehicles, things like plug-in hybrids or full electric vehicles, and eliminates the current $200,000 vehicle cap per manufacturer. So that goes away and applies to all EV models if this bill goes on to pass. It would provide a also a $4,000 tax credit for the purchase of used clean vehicles for the first time. It's usually only been available for brand new ones. Unlike the House-approved Build Back Better bill, the Senate bill does not include credits for e-bikes or tax credits for unionized automakers. Google announced it will delay the phasing out of third-party cookies in Chrome again until the second half of 2024. You might recall that Google first committed to ending third-party cookie support in Chrome in 2022 this year, but two years after the company began working on its privacy sandbox. Google's Privacy Sandbox VP Anthony Chavez says, quote, the most consistent feedback we've received is the need for more time to evaluate and test the new privacy sandbox technologies before deprecating third-party cookies in Chrome. Well in Q2, Meta earned $2.46 per share on revenue of $28.82 billion, both missing analyst estimates. This marks the first time Meta saw revenue decline on the year in a quarter down almost 1%, so not precipitously, but still it's the first time. Its reality labs division generated $452 million in revenue, seems like a lot of money, but it lost $2.8 billion in the quarter, which seems like more money. Meta grew monthly and daily active users across all of its platforms 4% on the year. Meta also named CFO David Wenner as its first chief strategy officer as of November 1st, and current VP of finance Susan Lee will take over as CFO. In other meta news, Axios sources say Meta began informing roughly 50 news partners in the U.S. this week that it no longer plans to pay for content to run on the Facebook News tab. Back in 2019, Facebook brokered multiple three-year deals with publishers for content worth a total of $105 million. You may do the math and see 2022 is three years later. We have had quite a week of earnings, so we'll give you another one. Comcast reported that Peacock paid subscriber numbers remained flat on the quarter in its Q2 at $13 million out of an overall 28 million monthly active accounts. Losses at Peacock grew 28% on the year to $467 million. Comcast's broadband business didn't really fare any better reporting flat subscriber numbers at $32.2 million in its Q2. The last time Comcast failed to add at least 100,000 new subscribers in a quarter came in 2008, during the financial crisis, adding $65,000. The Wall Street Journal sources say Jack Ma plans to relinquish some of his voting power over control of the FinTech giant and financial. Ma doesn't hold an executive role or sit on the board of Ant Financial, but currently does control an entity with 50.52% of its shares. The move reportedly has already received approval from Chinese regulators. You might recall that Ants 2020 IPO was scuttled by the government at the last minute and any future IPO for the company would probably have to wait at least a year since Chinese security rules require a timeout on public listings for companies that go through a recent change in control, which this certainly would qualify us. All right. Well, we've talked also this week about social networks. How do they work? How do they work? Well, seems like a lot of social networks don't totally know what they're doing. So let's talk about some of the latest developments. Seems like there is an identity crisis as of late earlier this week. We covered changes to Instagram recommendations. Noting that Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner, who have a lot of followers, were part of a movement to make Instagram Instagram again, whether or not that was seen by the company, you know, two days ago, nobody knew. Well, IG head Adam Maseri now says, this is just a couple of hours before we went live, the platform will reduce the number of recommended posts and phase out a TikTok like test version of the app that opened full screen media. Now you might say, okay, so I guess just popular people have to announce that they're upset with a company and then the company will roll back changes. Well, it depends on the company. Of course, Twitter is also trying to figure out itself these days. You might be a Twitter user. You might be frustrated with the changes on Twitter, but Twitter is launching a bevy of new test features. So if Instagram is trying to figure out how to be more like TikTok and not upset the people who have made Instagram what it is, is Twitter trying to be a little more like my space? You might say my space. Oh my gosh. It hasn't been around for a while. Don't worry. Twitter is not going to make you autofollow. Tom Anderson, that's the MySpace dude, but the company did tell TechCrunch they're testing a status to tweets. This is a test with select users in the US and Australia for a limited time. So Lamar, tell us more about what that means. Yeah, they're literally going to keep this. Users in the test will be able to add a status topic from a predetermined list supplied by Twitter, not yourself. So the idea is to provide more context to followers based on what you're tweeting about. So example, statuses include the ever popular sport alert. I like that one, but also shower thoughts, picture of the day and current status. These statuses will appear under the account name and only apply to the one tweet. So your status isn't reflected on everything in your account. They're very interesting, Sarah. Like, what do you think about these going forward? Well, OK, so clicking on a status badge won't will show other public posts with that status. So if I were to say shower thoughts, which is not something I've ever used on social media, but apparently it's it's very popular, unpopular opinion, another one of those stuff that you see over and over. I see what Twitter is doing here and TechCrunch notes that at least in early testing, the link topics don't appear to be moderated. So it's a little bit of Twitter saying, you know, let's see what catches on here. It kind of reminds me of when Gmail started to say, Oh, somebody just emailed you and your response might be like, thanks or we'll do or no problem or no thanks. I use those. OK. So do I. So do I quite often. And I figure like, if you know Gmail well enough, you know what I'm doing. And I'm busy. But same idea. But when it applies to tweets, it starts to, I don't know, kind of make tweets be like, what are we only like tweeting in five different categories here? Rich, what do you think? But it seems a lot to me like they want to get all of the benefit of how people already use hashtags, which you can click through. And then you can see what people are tweeting with that hashtag. But in a much more organized way, that is, I guess, less user generated. You know, they can they can a little bit control what's going to appear in those lists. And I don't know if this is a response to hashtag usage being down or them wanting to reengage with that sort of thing. But the other thing that I see with this is seems like this would be super easy to monetize with advertisers, right? So it's the Super Bowl. You have your status watching, you know, watching the Super Bowl football emoji or something like that, or any number of other, you know, the things you want to tune to Twitter for and have that. I don't think it's subsequently changes the experience of hashtag Super Bowl, whatever the number is this year. But to me, it seems like something very easy to to monetize. And that is that would feel familiar to longtime Twitter users. Admittedly, I think there might be some cynicism that why can't I just use hashtag spoiler alert? Well, you can, right? I mean, this is not something that is mandatory in any sense. I feel like Twitter is kind of like, eh, hashtags are a little all over the place. Yeah. And they are hashtags are used ironically or actually for search or both. You know, I don't really search hashtags on Twitter all that often anymore for that very reason. If something was a spoiler alert, here are my thoughts on the new Thor movie, you know, like I know exactly what that person is doing. I can either click and read more or I cannot. So I can see where it can be helpful. But at the same time, I feel like, you know, Twitter going from, you know, what are you doing to what's what's happening, right? Wasn't that, you know, the big thing that, you know, they changed at a certain point, so people stopped talking about what they were eating for lunch. This is kind of going back to, like, well, we know, like, probably the top five things that you're going to say already. So let's just give you a title. Well, and the other thing is, I mean, do you remember everyone's first, like Facebook posts, because they had that prompting question. It's like, you know, rich is, and then you would answer like eating a burrito or something like that. But when you took out that prompt, it made no sense. And all of your like first couple of Facebook posts make absolutely no sense. If this, like, if they decided to discontinue this, I imagine like it might cause some confusion because you were expecting that context there. So that to me seems a little odd. The other thing with the spoiler alert thing, I know they've been experimenting with, like, click through to view tweets. Like I feel like with the spoiler alert one, that only works if you put, like, man, the Thor movie was super cool. I love this cameo by this actor. Like I want that hidden if you're going to tag it spoiler alert, right? Yeah, totally. Yeah. The problem with spoiler alerts is that people spoil them all the time. All right, Rich, let's talk a little bit more about AI and art. Truly nothing would give me more pleasure right now, Sarah. So Dolly to open AI's system for creating realistic images and art from a description in natural language is all the rage. And gadget notes that as a user, you can enter the phrase teddy bear shopping for groceries in the style of Yuki and Dolly will spit out images in that style. As we will be discussed, open eye has recently announced that Dolly 2 would be made available with up to one million users as part of a large scale beta test. Each user gets to make 50 generations for free during their first month, 15 for every subsequent month. And then there's a credit based packages you can get for $15 each. You get a package of credits to use there. Open eye says it more detailed prices will come as the product evolves. But one of the more significant things what they said was that users could commercialize the images they produced with Dolly to including printing, selling, licensing the pictures they create. And I think, you know, we're starting to see some interesting questions being asked when it comes to that kind of monetization, right, Sarah? Yeah, the model is sophisticated. In fact, I've seen Instagram accounts pop up that are completely Dolly to generated art, beautiful stuff at the same time. It's kind of like, OK, what are we doing with this commercialization? We make and merge here. So sophisticated model, but also might remind you of AI that does work. For example, back in 2018, Google's Agit Varma told the Wall Street Journal that its smart reply feature had been trained on billions of Gmail messages adding that initial test saw options like I love you and sent from my iPhone offered up since they were used so often already in human communication replies. So just goes to show you how, you know, human behavior tends to drive the stuff forward for better and worse. Yeah, when you bring in these large data sets, it's interesting what these initial outputs and what you kind of have to train these algorithms and these engines to kind of work around what might otherwise seem very common behaviors to them in terms of pet recognition. So OpenAI will let you commercialize Dolly to generated images. The question is, though, does OpenAI have the right to monetize Dolly because Engage's Daniel Cooper looked into the legal precedence around content generated from AI systems. You know, these systems require massive data sets to train models to recognize patterns so well when you're Gmail training it, you have access to presumably you have some sort of right to scan all of these Gmail messages to train your thing, which is why you get things like sent from my phone, like we were talking about with even more simpler imaging systems like Boris Damia's internet famous Dolly mini engine. Everybody's seen all of those popping up around Twitter and stuff found initially that landscapes generated by the system would commonly include shutter stock and alamy watermarks, something expressly forbid by the terms of service in terms of scraping their stock images for use and training. Turns out those were able to be used and not just in Dolly mini, but in a lot of other image recognition and image generation systems as well. Yeah, we're in really early days of, you know, what is appropriate and allowed and what isn't in legal cases in the past, text and data mining for AI is broadly covered under the fair use doctrine. So the major case on this was back in 2015. It was the case of authors Guild versus Google, and that involved digitizing copyrighted books. The Second Circuit Court ruled in Google's favor at the time, saying the digitization didn't constitute copyright infringement. Experts say, though this isn't a solid precedent, especially around AI generated work that may or may not be transformative. Keyword transformative, as far as copyrights go, the US Copyright Office will register trademarks on an original work of authorship provided that the work was created by a human being, which brings us back to step one. Human being creates AI, AI creates art, who gets the credit and who is going to be sued later on. Yeah, it's interesting. I was thinking about this because there is this gap right between Dolly 2 imagery that you create that, you know, was based on your input. Open AI says, go ahead, slap that in a t-shirt. Go ahead, make some money off that. We're happy for you. You paid or you've given us whatever data that we can use to improve our system. We're happy with the arrangement, at least for now. But the lack of copyright there, I almost do think there is like a weird opening there where something like an NFT like mechanism might fill in that gap, right, because an NFT does not grant copyright. There's a two totally different separate mechanisms. I actually do think like that is one of the more potentially interesting use cases for something like this outside of the, you know, hideous NFT hype cycle. I do think that is interesting, but yeah, we're so early days with this and it doesn't seem based on this, again, really excellent piece and end gadget. It doesn't seem like a lot of people on either side are super anxious to get like a big, you know, precedent setting case based on this. And it seems like right now everyone's kind of OK with the status quo, at least when it comes to the AI image generation aspect of it. I know, like with some of the the book stuff and some of the other stuff that can get a little dicey. Yeah, so this is yeah, I'd love to know your thoughts. I know you're you're you're seeing a lot of this online. Yeah. So yeah, this is very icky territory here. This is deciding on monetization and so it just kind of makes me think, can this can't be can people let this run without the temptation of, OK, they've been making too much money on this stuff. We need our cut. You know, we see YouTube do this Facebook, Instagram. They'll let you run it for a while. Then all of a sudden they're like, oh, wow, these people are making, you know, we're more money than we are. We need to get on this. So it's just a matter. Can they literally allow this to just be a thing? And, you know, people want to make money that make money. And the thing they're pushing is, hey, this AI can make money in other applications or maybe when they can get some of their money back. It's just can we leave it alone enough before someone comes in and just has to money to water, so to speak. And I don't know the answer to that question. I don't really either from and I I don't have Dali access yet. I asked for it and I just keep waiting. But a couple of my friends have gotten it and they they echo the sentiment that everybody seems to have is, oh, yeah, you can make really cool stuff, but your input is really important. It's not just like Lamar Wilson on a unicorn. And then you get something that's like Lamar Wilson on a unicorn and the mood is gloomy and the sky is blue. And let me be clear, I will sue. OK, if I see that image. Yeah, no, that would be that well within your rights. But there there's enough human input that at least all of the humans I know that are having a lot of fun playing around with this. Say, yeah, you kind of have to know what you're doing. And so that takes it again away from that sort of well, it's just AI. It's not, you know, human, you know, the humans are doing anything after some time. They really are still that's exactly what this is. And and a lot and for most of these instances, these are images that was trained off of images that are scraped off the public facing Internet that you could have access to anyway. And it does. We know we are seeing this also in other avenues of AI generation, right? I'm thinking specifically of GitHub's co-pilot feature, which is like a code autocomplete service that they have now and is, I think, believe generally available now. And there's been a lot of kerfuffle about that of this was trained on open source code and the whole idea of open source code is if you depending on the term of the license, obviously the different licenses are different. But most of the time it's if you use it, like the work that you do on that has to then be contributed back. But if the if an AI is suggesting that you might not know that this code suggestion actually is from an open source repository and it gets interesting with with how that gets handled as well. So it's not just imagery, although that's the most fun one to share online as fun as it is to share code snippets on Twitter as well. Well, you may have thoughts on this. And I bet you do. If you're proud of our audience, you can join the conversation in our discord, which you can join by linking to a Patreon account at Patreon.com slash DTNS. All right, we are in the middle of earning season right now. Lot of lackluster earnings we've reported on already seems like a lot of the big social media companies been taken on the chin this last quarter. So we talked about Metta Snap and Twitter also had underwhelming earnings for a number of reasons. We've already talked about how social media companies are thinking of how to refashion themselves, trying to stay relevant, trying to be the cool kids again. But for the most part, a lot of platforms kind of stay the same because they were built a certain way and finding ways to get you to spend time on them is monetizing with ads. Yeah, and protocol Sarah Roche recently profiled a platform called Niche that's looking to change that focus. The niche was founded by Christopher Gulzinski and who is a Tinder co-founder, a formal bumble chief product officer, Facebook engineering manager and Zavin Nahan Pechen, another former engineering manager at Facebook. So, you know, these these two clearly know their way around managing and building social platforms, it would seem. But they position niche as a social content platform, focusing on creating communities around shared interests and identities with a very interesting spin on it. Yeah, so you might be saying, OK, how would this differentiate from something like a Discord server or a subreddit that are pretty focused, or at least they're supposed to be? Well, Niche wants members in these groups to have ownership over those networks. And if you think that a decentralized platform with stakes of ownerships sounds very web three, well, you're correct. The groups would be set up as decentralized autonomous organizations or DAOs instead of monetizing with ads. Niche would charge transaction fees on any buying or selling of niche platforms on the platform. Yeah, so you can't check it out quite yet because I was I was interested to see how this would work in practice. It's currently in private beta and it's opening up applications for communities next week, starting August 1st. So, you know, right now it's it's mostly the the protocol piece that this was based on, you know, we we pulled for this was just talking with the creators about ideologically how they're going to separate themselves from that. But, you know, this this idea of I think, you know, we've had this has been the year or the last year and a half of the the kind of the web three hype cycle right now. I do think that this the the idea of these DAOs and applying that to a focused social network, I don't know, in some ways, it almost it reminds me of like a Patreon that gives you a token and and and also a Discord server access. Right. I don't necessarily have a problem with that because I've a part of several Discord communities where I'm getting way better like utility out of an enjoyment from than any kind of engagement I'm getting on Instagram or Facebook or even Twitter to a large extent. So like I'm I'm interested to see how this will handle. I'm worried that this will turn into everyone's going to be trying to get on whatever the tokens are you have to buy into and trading them down the line. And then that becomes this. That's where the ickiness comes in right of the web three stuff. Right. I mean, I don't know if I think of it as icky. I think of it as something that I am struggling to understand. I know what it now is. We talk we talk about it fairly often on this here show. And at the same time, you know, when presented as sort of like, you know, NFTs that people buy and sell either want to participate or you don't. But there's there's a system set up. The idea that, OK, everyone understands the idea of a subreddit. In fact, we have a DTNS subreddit as well, where it's focused content that people submit and vote on based on the general understanding of what we all care about that appeals to me a lot as a social network, especially when you've got Facebook saying we're trying to compete with TikToks that we want you to just, you know, explore and, you know, find great, funny dog videos that you might not have found otherwise because you don't follow this person or this account. There is value to that. But that's that it seems like the antithesis of what Nisha is trying to do. Lamar, you know, I haven't been on the socials for some time. Does this strike you as a good idea? No. I am I am very I understand to a base degree, the Web three stuff, I'm less interested in that. I'm more interested in what the people think, like what's the social network fatigue of yet another place. And I know for myself, you know, I cross promote several different places and, you know, still trying to find out where is that where is that home that people really want to be and like I have a group of people who want me to create a Twitter community because I have access to that now where I can, you know, create a group kind of like a Facebook group, I guess, or think of the Google plus circles from back in the day where you just kind of have this group where we can all talk to each other and just feel part of something. And I think people I don't want to say people are going back to that. I think people are already doing this. Rich, you mentioned discord groups like Facebook groups. None of this has gone away, but I think the idea of do we need a yet another place to accomplish what we're already accomplishing? These things are right in front of us. But, you know, when we start talking about the Web three component and monetizing and find a way to make money, of course, people are going to want a different platform to accomplish it. I just think people themselves, regular, ordinary people are just socially social network fatigue. I mean, OK, so I was trying to think of what's the most obvious example of a niche topic that would work? I'm not a person who is interested in buying a Rolex watch because I don't have that kind of budget, but lots of people are. OK, so let's use that as like an obvious example. Maybe there's a niche community where you go, you know, I could kind of like fuss around on eBay or get it some other way. But this, you know, there's a little bit of a trust thing going on here. And what we're doing within this community, niche definitely can take a cut of. But we also are not just served ads as a way for a niche to make money. I can see where, again, in certain niche categories, this would work nicely. Yeah, I am a part of a film photography discord group that's tied to like a Patreon and it's very small. There's I don't know, maybe like 40 people or something like that on there. But like the fact that I know most of those people I've gotten to know most of those people who are all kind of strangers when it started up, it's a place that like, you know, we're we're chatting. We're sharing interesting links. We're, you know, asking for advice. There was like a classified section on there. And I could I could totally see all like this same mechanism with the added benefit of, OK, this whatever the tokenization mechanism of the Dow ends up being, OK, so I have a stake in this. I have an interest in making this a lot better and and and, you know, maybe self moderating or moderating other people. Like to me, it almost feels like old school kind of forum etiquette, where a lot of times you were paying for some sort of subscription to either get like ad free access to a forum or something like that. And just, you know, we're throwing it. It's decentralized. You own the community as opposed to you're paying a subscription. But to me, it all feels the same of I want this really tight and and just dedicated kind of space for for actual interaction. All right, let's move on to arachnophobia, shall we? Apologizing in advance, if you have that engineers at Rice University successfully completed a research project by transforming dead spiders, deceased spiders into robotic gripping claws. Yep, you heard that right. The research of net robotics, as the scientists have dubbed it, can create cheap and effective and biodegradable alternatives to current robotic systems. Not everybody loves a spider, but spiders are very interesting. You might not know that their legs contain a single flexor muscle. Each leg, you got eight of them that draws the leg inward and opposed by a chamber in the center of the spider's body known as a prosoma pushing out fluid to open the leg and separate valves, allowing the critter to control each limb independently. I am sorry if you were you've got, I don't know, hair standing up on the back of your neck kind of is mine as well. But back to the researchers, they were able to artificially operate this hydraulic system by sticking a needle into a dead spider's prosoma that's in the middle, pushing air in and then out to open and close the spider's legs like an arcade claw machine. No, I know, Lamar, I'm with you. I'm not a spider fan myself, but I mean, I learned more about spiders than I have in quite some time. Did not realize that their legs were able to act independently in this way and that once dead, you could sort of bring them back to life as robots. I could have gone my whole life without learning this, but thank you for that, Sarah. I just appreciate that the researchers came up with the term necrobotics or decided to use that as opposed to we shoved air into a dead spider as like a way to talk about it to their friends and family. Exactly. It is necrobotic. It's very interesting. I think this is this is like fascinating, but it's also like when I think of necrobotics, I'm like, oh, man, there's nanites in there and they're doing all this stuff. And this is just to like activate that same mechanism to contract and move the legs. I love how basic this is, but exciting as a field. It is for these researchers. That's that's kind of the cool thing. Yeah, it's good stuff. Listen, dead spider. What else are you going to do with it? Might as well bring it back to life and have it independent independently. You know, use its legs. No, I don't know. Stop it. I'm trying here. Oh, boy. All right. Well, Lamar, I'm sorry about the spider story, but, you know, it's it's it's for the good. I'm itching now. I know me too. I don't like spiders at all. In fact, there's probably a spider above me somewhere in this garage. There always is. But Lamar, let folks know where they can keep up what you've been doing since we saw you last. Yeah, so you can go to Lamar.tv. I am an unboxing person now and be looking into boxes for spiders now as I open them. So so thank you, Sarah. And so whatever network you want to follow me on, what are the social network? I'll put the same content everywhere. And I do have fun on Boxing's fun story times in the gaming technology pop culture field. So check me out if you like. Thanks. Thank you, Lamar. And thanks to our brand new boss, Krister, who just started backing us on Patreon. Thanks, Krister. Yeah, Krister. And remember, there is a longer version of this show called Good Day Internet. It's going to be starting in just a few seconds available at patreon.com slash DTNS. Just a reminder, we are live. We do the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 20 hundred UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnoshow.com slash live. We're back doing it all again tomorrow. Discussing DRM with Corey Doctro. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.