 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Dale McKayhee, Matt Zaglin, Kelly Cook, and our new patrons, Todd Zilla and Dwayne. Welcome Todd Zilla and Dwayne! Woohoo! On this episode of DTNS, would you charge for meta content? It sure wants you to. What will some of the latest lawsuits against open AI end up with? And three cheers for video game preservation. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, February 29th, 2024, from Studio Animal House, I'm Sarah Lane. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. And from Deep in the Heart of Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Happy Leap Day, everybody! Hey! Happy Leap Day! How are we doing? May the leap be with you. Yeah, and also with you. Let's get right into the quick hits. Starting today, Ford electric vehicles now get access to Tesla's superchargers across the United States and Canada. Ford is the first non-Tesla EV maker to use the North American charging standard, or NACS, with other automakers expected to also switch over. Current Ford EV owners must first order the fast charging adapter. It's free to new and existing clients and the Blue Oval Charge Network until June 30th of this year. After that, it'll cost $230. Starting in 2025, Ford EVs will come standard with the NACS charging system. Bitcoin is climbing back into the news cycle now that it is on track for the biggest monthly gain since December 2020 amid an exchange traded fund or ETF boost since the approval of the launch of SpotBitcoin ETFs in the US in January. Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization and was up 2.74% this morning at $62,062, having been up as much as $63,933 overnight, the highest since late 2021. We're back, baby! Maybe. I don't know. I don't have any Bitcoin. Wish I did. Google's standalone mobile app YouTube Create is made to help creators to produce both shorts and longer form videos by offering an easy to use suite of free tools for making videos on the go. YouTube Create launched in beta testing last fall, since expanded to over a dozen more markets, including Brazil, Spain, Canada, Australia, and Hong Kong. Google is hoping to capture more of that market that prefers to use standalone tools for editing videos, similar to how some TikTok creators prefer to use CapCut to prep their videos before they publish. The Biden administration launched an investigation into Chinese-made vehicles, arguing that software and digital connections in modern cars could be used to spy on Americans or sabotage the vehicles themselves. President Biden compared modern cars to smartphones since they can both collect and share data with the cloud. The investigation led by the Commerce Department won't place any immediate restrictions on the import or sell of Chinese manufactured automobiles, but the agency can prohibit or restrict sales if it finds serious risk. Consumer reports found that multiple brands of doorbells produced by the same company, Eken Group, which is based out of China, selling for between $30 and $40, have some serious vulnerabilities, things like sending your IP address over Wi-Fi without encryption, or letting anyone take over the doorbell by putting the pairing button on the front of the device facing the outside, also letting anybody who could get the serial number of the doorbell access images and video feed. Now none of the devices have an FCC ID, that is a requirement to be sold in the US. That said, they're currently being sold on Amazon, Walmart, Sears, Shain, and Timu marketplaces. All right, Rob, let's talk about what's going on with Meta and the EU. Yeah, let's talk about it, because there's an interesting article on TechCrunch today that highlights a set of complaints from consumer rights groups about Meta switch last year to charging users in the European Union for ad-free subscriptions for access to Facebook and their Instagram, unless they agree to be tracked and profiled so that it can keep targeting them as part of its ad business. Aid groups are essentially saying that the consentor pay choice doesn't meet the high bar set by the law, which requires consent to be free, specific, informed, and unambiguous, and goes on to suggest that Meta is seeking to coerce consumers into accepting its processing of their personal data. So I read through this, and I'm not trying to hold any weight for Meta at all, but what are they supposed to do? It's like the law says, well, give people a choice to get their data. That's what they do, or they charge you if you choose not to have your data collected. And these consumer rights groups are saying, no, that's not good enough. So I don't know what happens to Facebook if this comes to fruition, as far as what these consumer groups are hoping. Well, with the understanding being that the European Union wakes up every day and looks at a mirror, which I assume is very fancy because it's the EU, they say, what can we regulate today? This is the standard operating procedure for that body. But this is the logical conclusion of trying to regulate what is an obviously pernicious, but very, very profitable business and social media. It is nobody's favorite, but the idea of data being a resource is very much having its moment. I agree with you, Rob. I don't know what Facebook is supposed to do here. Either we can come to an understanding meaning that you can use a free service to connect with people, and we make money based on the traffic that you create in this closed garden, or we can't because that's the business model. I mean, is there a world where in a world where Facebook can't collect data and also can't charge people? I mean, in certain smaller markets, I think maybe you could get away with that, with the company saying like, yeah, sure, okay, we'll do a little kickback for you. I can't think of any world where the European Union and its users who either, okay, so this is, they have a choice. They can just deal with data collection, or they can pay for a meta product that does not collect. That seems fairly reasonable, unless you're meta, because that is a company that there's so much broken trust already over the last few years that I just, I get why meta is being targeted specifically here. At the same time, it's like, do you just say, well, okay, we don't make money anymore, so I guess we'll just give you a free product, and that's all good too. That doesn't work. That's not reasonable. Yeah, like I said, I'm not trying to carry any water for meta, but what does a company do when the government may tell them, it's like, here's the deal. Give us free stuff, and you can't make money off of the free stuff you give us. Even worse than that, you need to now pay more money for this because there needs to be some sort of kickback to the user. Yeah, it's interesting. So these consumer groups are based in eight countries located in the Czech Republic, Denmark, Greece, France, Norway, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain, and they're arguing that meta has no legal basis for processing people's data for ad targeting under the blocks general data protection regulation or GDPR. And it's interesting that they have no right because the right, I think meta believes they have is that we asked you, do you want to pay or do you want to, I think that's kind of what they're assuming is like, hey, we're going to give you a choice. You could pay us to not, for us not to collect your data, or we can collect your data and you can continue to use this site free as you always have. So this will be an interesting thing because it fundamentally changes their business model. If they're told you cannot charge people and you cannot collect data on people to sell ads to them. Well, I do think that there is something that if you draw this line going out far enough that either social media becomes something that is heavily, heavily, heavily regulated by the state or it just doesn't exist in the European Union. Like there would have to be some kind of very specific carve out or, you know, regulation even beyond what we have right now for it to continue to exist. We say things over here, like tell us what the law is so we can abide by it. And that's what Facebook did. It's like, no, you're doing what we told you to do, but it's not good enough. So like I said, like I said, Facebook is a big company, they've got lawyers, they can figure this out. But this is just interesting that we still want the free, but we don't want you to collect our data if you're giving us free stuff. I will say specifically in their pushback is that even if they were, even as an option, they're not allowed to do that. In other words, collect consumer data for a target. Would it be conceivable for other demographic data or other kind of user data to be collected for another purpose that isn't specifically around ad targeting? How do you mean? For example, if you could, you could pulling information or anything like that where you're not, you're not out and out just selling, you're not selling an ad spot to a potential pair of eyeballs, right? You could, is there another way, I'm asking, is there another way to collect different data that you can make money off by not selling it, but by using it for something else? Not without fundamentally rewiring the entire business model that Metta has perfected over the years. And before the show, I was telling Rob, most likely what they'll probably do is offer just a very cut down, what I see happening is having a very cut down free version of the service where it's more of you get to follow people, but you don't get to interact with them and or potentially just bundling it as a service in partnership with another company like ISP or mobile phone provider, a data provider. Yeah, this is a lot of regulation that is coming down on Metta, so we're going to have to see where this one goes. But just to change gears a little bit, the US Securities and Exchange Commission has launched an investigation in the open AI CEO Sam Altman's communications when he was fired and then quickly rehired a CEO late last year. The idea was to determine if the company investors were misled during what boardroom crisis, you know, went on when he was dismissed for lack of candor before an employee revolt and which led back to his restoration less than two weeks later. The Wall Street Journal sources say that the SEC is looking for internal records from current and former open AI officials and directors and sent a subpoena to open AI in December. Open AI is also facing a couple more lawsuits. One is a joint suit by Raw Story and Alternate, a separate one filed by the Intercept, all in federal court in New York City. Both complaints allege Open AI's chat GPT violated the DMCA, Digital Copyright Millennium Act. I think Millennium Copyright Act is the way to say it actually, which is supposed to not acknowledge or respect copyright, not to notify chat GPT users when the responses they received were protected by journalist copyrights and not to provide attribution when using the works of human journalists. So it's supposed to do one thing. It didn't do that. So says the the alleged plaintiffs. Microsoft is also a defendant in the Intercept's lawsuit. John Byrne, the CEO of both Raw Story and Alternate told the Daily Beast both companies have since blocked both chat GPT and Google's BARD systems from accessing their data. So that's something that companies can do. He said he didn't go after Microsoft because of an ongoing news partnership with the company. So these are different lawsuits. Justin, I know you've been following this and you know some folks on the inside on both sides of this story. So what do you think is going on here? Is Open AI the devil? Oh, yeah, no, no, they're absolutely, you know, they're on a warpath. So these are and are not separate lawsuits. They were filed by the same law firm. When you read them, they are nearly identical. The biggest thing that is different is that the Intercepts does not also name Microsoft because they have their ongoing relationship where the other one does name Microsoft, which obviously whenever you are suing an organization, you usually want to go after the deepest pockets. Microsoft would be the deepest pockets in the situation. So that's really the only reason why these are two lawsuits. Otherwise, they are almost word for word, nearly identical. The big claim here is that in Common Crawl WebText and WebText 2, which were used to train GPT 3.5, that it included stuff that is copyrighted from these outlets and that it regurgitates it without saying when it references information from these works, it does not say the copyright. This element of the lawsuit, the copyright stripping up, stripping out the copyright stuff was named, was part of the Sarah Silverman lawsuit, which said that it did similar things. That element of the lawsuit has been dismissed. I don't know legally where this is going, but when I skimmed through the lawsuit, and I'm not a lawyer, I'm just somebody that's read these lawsuits and the New York Times lawsuit, the New York Times had a lot more specific examples of how they got to their results. Now, OpenAI has since said that those results were done with essentially jailbreaking maneuvers, but these don't have that. They are general language claims that don't have specific examples of what this was in the wild. Based on the previous lawsuits, I don't know how far they're going to go, but there is no doubt that they're not the last of people looking to find out where the line is between an LLM summarizing information and copyright infringement. Do you think this is one of those situations where this lawsuit was filed hoping for a settlement before it ever gets in front of a court? Because it's kind of vague. I mean, you've seen other lawsuits that were very, very specific. The New York Times is not playing around with you did this and that and this and that and the other and those and these and they. This is like, yeah, you scraped some of our stuff. I mean, you know, some of the physicians are saying that, but that's kind of how it reads. It's like, you scraped some of our stuff, you didn't tell people that it was our stuff. And now we're going to sue you and hope that you did you settle with us for untold. I mean, on the surface, I feel like it is wrong to do that. If I am a writer for a raw story, it could be anything, but you know, in this case, let's use one of the plaintiffs. And all of a sudden, my, you know, my human thought is now used to train an AI model and I don't get anything for that. I'm not thrilled about it. I don't, yeah, I don't really know, you know, legally where anybody's going to get on this stuff because we're in uncharted waters. But yeah, I do feel like as a, you know, on the journalism side of things that I would, I would say that's not okay. We have to have some sort of partnership where both parties understand the information that's being exchanged. We are going to either help you train your model or we say, no, thank you, we decline. And then we don't have to be in the situation to begin with. Yeah, look, the line is going to be defined. The question is, what exactly represents taking this work and not transforming it significantly enough that it would be copyright infringement? Yeah. Well, many of you probably are listening to this saying, I have a thought. We would like to hear your thoughts. If you have a thought about this subject or anything else we talk about on the show, and you'd like to know our email address, that is a great way to get ahold of us. We all read your email every single day. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. Developer Q&A online resource stack overflow has partnered with Google Cloud to provide users with AI assistance powered by Google Gemini. In turn, Google Cloud will integrate Stack Overflow's knowledge base into Gemini for Google Cloud and provide answers to dev questions via the Google Cloud Console. Stack Overflow and Google will demo these integrations next month at Google Cloud Next Conference. So Justin, what do you think of that meaning for Google's AI efforts now that we've just talked about, how AI partnerships that don't exist make people mad? Well, and that's the big key here. And I do think that we are in a world where there's going to be a lot of money for people that want to sell their data to these companies, specifically open AI plus Microsoft and Google, and then who knows what other players are going to come around here. But the reality of the internet is that we've spent a lot of time, decades at this point, creating a lot of words, a lot of information, a lot of data. There's going to be a new revenue source for this data and it is going to be these companies. Expect to see more of this. And it's the first bit of good news involving the terms Google Gemini that we have seen in a few weeks because they've had a bit of a rough one, as the kids say. And you're still seeing a lot of covering of the tracks of what has happened with Gemini over the last few weeks. And a lot of it is, to me, goes back to that first Gemini video and a lot of problems that have existed with Google for a long time. There is a lack of communication and a lack of efficient management that allowed Gemini to roll out in a state where it was, I think, very clearly universally understood to be not ready. And if Gemini and AI mean that much to Google and I believe that it is existential to Google Survival, then what I said last year that I don't think a change in leadership is off the table for Google this year if they don't get it right. And I think that right now we can say that they have been far from perfect in this rollout. I don't think that that's unreasonable. You've been beating that drum for four minutes. And I'm starting to agree with you. It's like Google, you just keep having miss after miss after miss, you know, with these things not working in a way that they should doing. There are things that Gemini is doing that Gemini should never do. So to your point that this thing got rolled out way early is, you know, is really, you know, is really a pressing issue for them. And then you have to go back and say, well, why is it that it felt like it was rolled out so early? Why wouldn't you why didn't you been working on this stuff for for years? Like these other companies have been, you know, why does it seem like everything you're doing is a reaction to someone else when your core and fundamental business is what these AI bots will be doing in the foreseeable future? Well, I mean, I think Google and other companies, Apple would be another example, you know, got caught slipping. Yeah. You know, open AI just kind of came out of the gate, not the only company gets a lot of the press. But you know, now we that's why our news cycle and sometimes I feel like, you know, it's Groundhog Day on DTNS where I'm like, okay, we've got an update to this new LLM sounds better than it was before, you know, it all it's all kind of, you know, the, you know, a bunch of companies rushing to be first. I think Gemini partnering with something like stock overflow is potentially a really good partnership. You know, if you're, you know, more in the development community, that that makes sense. I think we're simply going to see many, many more of these partnerships, because if you've got the data, you want to partner with somebody who's going to give you the money. Oh, and the only question is, is what the money is, like that the New York Times didn't want to file that lawsuit. They wanted to get a fatter check from open AI and Microsoft. They didn't get that check or they didn't get the assurances that they wanted. And so they filed the lawsuit. I would assume that raw story in the intercept and alternate are probably going to be in a similar position where they're going to ask for X amount of money and we'll see whether or not they get it. But to Rob's point, when it comes to Google, the problem here is systemic. Gemini rolled out too early without sufficient red teaming. They rolled out in a staggered release that had them overstate what the LLM could do in a video that was out and out flim flam, in my opinion, they have with nothing but money, nothing but talent, and all of the training data you could possibly want. Google has everything that it needs to be the industry player in this realm. There's no ingredient that they don't have. And yet they are here. And that to me says there is a bothersome middle management layer and there is a lack of sufficient leadership to say if this is going to seriously eat into search, if this is going to seriously eat into Google AdWords, if we really do need to be in a position where we're making a significant portion of our revenue through subscription, which is what they want to do. And we want to take this brand, this Gemini brand and make people excited when we integrated even tighter with sheets, when we integrated even tighter with docs and with Gmail, we want to have people be thrilled that this tool is now at their disposal, which we should, if we're not there, then somebody is making generational errors for this company. You know what this, I'm going to cut you off, but this is what this reminds me of, you know, for different reasons, but this is what I think of. I think back to Blackberry and the ridiculous ball they fumbled when they just allowed Android and iOS to come out and they simply didn't react to it. It's just like you knew this was coming and you did nothing. It was almost arrogance that you know, Blackberry is fine. We don't need to do anything. And I'm not saying that the parallel is exact here because I do believe that Google is going to come out on the other side of this. They're just too massive not to. But it's just like, guys, what are you doing? You know, you know, in this organization to where the, you know, Google should be dominating in this space and they're not. They're catching up to what Microsoft, OpenAI and other in Amazon, they're catching up. They're playing catch up and it's very noticeable. And it just makes you wonder what is going on in the boardroom at that company. Yeah. The difference between Blackberry and this is that the founder is not the CEO and that you are going to see a leadership change before you see significant fatal damage to that company or to see that company fade. That's my opinion. I also, I mean, as a person, we're on Google Docs right now for our rundown that we do every day. And I use Google products, software products, I mean, all day, every day. And the fact that I don't, I'm sort of like, I don't know, Gemini, it's in there somewhere. It doesn't, it has not moved the needle as far as what I do at any point. And that's a messaging problem also. It's like, Google, you've already got me. Why am I not using your cool new products? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how to. I don't know how they make my life better. Yeah, it is, it is their burden of proof to explain it. All right, Rob, let's check out the mailbox. So we have a note from Richard about yesterday's show. And he writes, I wanted to note on, I want to know on the preserving video game history conversation. I've been a big fan of games since Palm first came out on TVs when you had to connect the wire to the antenna. I really understand the need to save the history of gaming as it has changed so much over the years. And the story of how games moved from arcades to consoles to PC games is still something worth preserving. I wanted to note that I have helped in preserving games on the site, MobyGames.com, where they are gathering box shots, screenshots, reviews and details on games. They're working on preserving the items from games. But it's great that the video game history preservation foundation is going after all the surrounding media for the games. I just wanted to point out that MobyGames as I find it has a lot of depth to its database and helps me review older games. Scott probably already knows about these sites, but I thought that I would bring it to your attention. Thanks for the great discussion, Richard. Oh, Richard, that's so nice. Yeah, we had a really good one with Scott yesterday. If you if you missed the show, episode 4715, do do take a listen. Scott was real passionate about the idea of preserving video game history, not just a game itself, but all all of the stuff around it, the way that some people think about preserving movies and talks about film or television. It was great. So thanks to everybody who wrote in and keep keep those keep those thoughts coming. A feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Justin, Robert Young, keep your thoughts coming. We wouldn't do it without you. Let folks know where they can keep up with your latest. Well, of course, it is campaign primary season and your Super Tuesday coverage can be found at Politics, Politics, Politics. I'm just off the road from South Carolina and the Michigan primaries are behind us. We do a deep dive on Michigan and preview Super Tuesday on Friday's episode of Politics, Politics, Politics available wherever you find podcasts. Patrons stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. Substack continues to offer more social media parks even though some former Substack users left the platform because of this trend. We'll be kicking that around. Yes, we will. Just a reminder, though, we can we can catch the show because we'll be doing it, but you can catch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow talking about all the possible effects of social media platforms sharing data for AI training with Jason Howell joining us and Len Peralta as well. Talk to you then.