 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Ken Hayes, Philip Shane, and Paul Boyer. Coming up on DTNS, what happens when the bots take over SEO? What happens when the bots get ad support? And what happens when you record yourself boxing a product that then will be shipped to an enthusiastic buyer? The answer is May Surprise Young. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, March 30th, 2023, from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From the rock and roll capital of the world, I'm Rich Trafalino. But deep in the heart of Texas, that's got the Robert E. I. And I'm in the less soggy part of Southern California. And the show's producer, Roger Chang. Well, glad to hear you're not that soggy, Roger. I hope everybody else is enjoying our spring weather. But without further ado, let's get into some quick hits. Well, you may not hear about Apple's rumored mixed-reality headset at WWDC this year. Analyst Manchiquo has been tracking the changing plans at Apple, and has now said, because Apple isn't very optimistic about the ARMR headset announcement recreating the astounding iPhone moment, his sources indicate that the company has slowed the production schedule to mid or late Q3 of this year. Developer Steve Moser tells Bloomberg he found code in the Netflix app indicating Netflix is testing games for your TV. So far, all Netflix games have been mobile exclusively. The code also indicates the possibility of using a phone as a game controller. Following Wednesday's open letter calling for a six-month pause in new AI research, the Center for AI and Digital Policy, or CAIDP, has filed a complaint against OpenAI with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for violating Section 5 of the FTC Act. That section prohibits unfair and deceptive trade practices. The ethics group alleges that OpenAI's GPT-4 tools are biased, deceptive, and a risk to public safety. It also cites the tool's ability to produce malicious code, reflect human biases in its output, and a recent bug that exposed chat GPT histories as a privacy protection failure. CAIDP President Mark Ruttenberg signed Wednesday's open letter calling for a pause in training new AI systems. Former Google engineer Jacob Devlin told the information that Google's BARD AI was trained on responses from OpenAI's chat GPT using data scraped from a website called Share GPT that shared responses. Devlin now works for OpenAI. Google's Chris Pappas, however, told the Verge BARD is not trained on any data from Share GPT or chat GPT, pretty flat denial. The information also reported that Google's DeepMind and Google Brain Divisions are collaborating on a new initiative called Gemini. Many corporate employees are familiar with 3CX Voice over Internet desktop software. If you aren't, we'll explain. Security researchers at Sophos and CrowdStrike say that attackers have targeted Windows and macOS users of 3CX's soft phone app in a trojanized supply chain attack. Basically, that means malicious actors have compromised the FFM peg and D3D compilers. Those are two software packages that are extracted during install in order to compromise machines. When the installer is downloaded from 3CX or an update is pushed to the desktop, the malware can then harvest system info and access data and also credentials. 3CX recommends that all customers uninstall the desktop client and switch to the progressive web app instead. Now you might say, never heard of it. Who could this possibly affect? Well, quite a few. 3CX's phone system is being used by more than 600,000 companies, like McDonald's, BMW, American Express, Ikea, and more, with more than 12 million users. All right, Rich, let's talk about the future of mobile browsing. Yeah, at least one idea of it. There are, of course, a lot of browsers on any mobile app store, but even iOS app store has quite a few, but they're limited in how they can differentiate compared to Android. That's because Apple requires all browsers to use the same WebKit engine as Safari. On Android, if you're Samsung's internet browser, you can use your own rendering engine if you really want to. So developers can add different UI on iOS, maybe add some syncing features, some other creature comforts, but in the end, they all kind of render exactly the same. Well, the browser company, yes, that's a name of a company, has already made a name for itself with its Arc desktop browser. Some of you may already be using it, making it as much of a bookmarking tool and app launcher as it also is a browser. It's now released a mobile browser on iOS. The company CEO, Josh Miller, had one rule in making this, saying we are not allowed to build a default mobile browser. I mean, he's basically saying all it's going to be a Safari again. Instead, this focuses on bringing your desktop browser's sidebar of page tabs to your phone. So you might say, okay, is a desktop companion app the key to making an interesting iOS browser? We haven't really seen a lot of evolution in desktop browsers over the years, particularly on iOS for the reasons that you outlined, Rich. But since you've been taking this for a spin, what are your thoughts? Yeah, and I've used quite a few third-party browsers since I've had an iPhone and I've most recently used them like DuckDuckGoes just because it renders the same but has privacy-focused features. So that made it worth not having, I guess, just the native Safari integration. What makes Arc super interesting is it basically just takes the sidebar element that the Arc browser is known for. So if you never use that browser, instead of having a top row of tabs, it has these sidebars with discrete spaces that you switch between. And no matter how many windows you open up, all of your windows have those same sets of sidebars. So you're always kind of working with the same set of tabs as opposed to having separate instances and you kind of lose stuff that way. And they're permanent through restarts and stuff. So you can pin stuff that will always be there. It's not necessarily like any new ideas, but it's formatted in a way that's very unique. What the mobile browser does is just give you that sidebar. So you cannot use it without logging in to your Arc account. Part of that is because this is a preview, so they have to validate that you're one of the preview testers or something like that. But it just shows you your sidebar. It does not show you any other information. There's actually very little you can configure about it. You can't create new spaces on it. You can't change your mobile search provider or anything like that. You're just stuck with Google. But it's very interesting because it basically gives you that extension. You can still open all of your tabs. You can still search for stuff. But there is no way, every other mobile browser I've used, inevitably you end up with 50 billion tabs that are just open in the background until you hit the clear all button or you just, I don't know, uninstall the browser. And manually go and... Yeah, the laborious, horrible process. Yeah. And this seems so, one of the benefits of being so limited, it would be extremely hard to do that because you basically have to tell it to keep this once you are kind of done with it. And it just... I've only been playing with it for a day, but just having that limited subset, it actually made it more seamless than, I don't know, like air dropping a link or something like that to myself. All browsers basically, I mean, we're talking like Safari, Chrome, Firefox, a lot of the major browsers all have tab syncing functions. This is not a new functionality, but putting it front and center and making it kind of the only way to interact with the app feels very, like makes me interact with it more as like one continuous client, more so than even with Chrome in a lot of ways, which is super weird. I do think that this is something that could move forward, obviously, with technology. It's not whether or not you can do it or whether or not it's done before. It's whether or not it feels right and it fits into your life. We're at a point now where things are so diffuse. We have oftentimes three, maybe four devices that we interact with on a daily basis that having some level of functionality so you are not trying to bridge the gap, you're not feeling pain for having multiple devices is something that I do think could be a core element going forward, whether or not Arc is the pioneer there or the largest adoption of it. We will see. I have to assume that Arc is looking at the behavior of the folks who like the Arc desktop browser and saying, most of these people are going to be doing the majority of their browsing whatever experience on desktop. This is a great companion app. This is not trying to reinvent the browser wheel for mobile. I feel like mobile browsers and maybe it's because I'm on iOS so everything is more or less the same. It works fine, but give me a computer. That's where I want to do all my stuff and then dump off some reading or links to mobile for later. Yeah, it's an interesting vision. They do some interesting stuff with app launching as well on the mobile browser. It just very natively syncs with apps and stuff like that. It still feels like this is where v1 beta or version 0.1 beta or something like that. I'm interested when they finally get to a full release to the public where this will be at. Yeah, exactly. Well, continuing the browser conversation, sort of, being Microsoft search engine is monetized with display ads. That's how it makes money. That business model didn't extend to its Bing chatbot service at launch, but Microsoft corporate VP for search and devices Yusuf Mehdi said that the company began experimenting with ads in its chatbot experience with some users reporting seeing ads over the past several days. In their current form ads appear as linked citations with ad links listed below in a learn more section underneath the chatbot's response. Of course, Microsoft made it clear that it's a matter of how ads will be displayed, not if. Other options under consideration include hovering over an ad link to display a further advertiser experience or adding rich captions from its personalized news feed beside a chatbot response. It may seem quick to place ads in a chatbox experience. You know, it's Bing chatbot has not been out for a while, but Microsoft sees the flood of interest in it as a big opportunity. We've covered that Bing now has over 100 million daily active users and over 100 million Bing chats have been created. Of the people in its Bing chat preview, while it was still limited, 33% were new to Bing. So a lot of new faces to the browser. Justin, does it seem like too early for ads or was this, I mean, you know, we're going to get there and eventually why not just do it now? Well, look, Bing is its own product. And despite the fact that when you think about Microsoft, you don't necessarily think about ad sales. If it was a part of Bing before and this chatbot AI, this open AI power chatbot, is something that will be under that label, then eventually ads were going to happen. So there's an argument to say that, hey, look, rip this bandaid off faster rather than later, because if people are still enamored with a newness of this product, you'd rather socialize them now than wait until some of the heat is died off. And then it feels like you're chasing something after maybe people have, have already gotten used to it. With that being said, this is about one thing, Google. Microsoft wants to stab Google as hard as they possibly can. And right now, Microsoft is off to a better start with AI than Google is. And if that's the case, then attacking them at their strength, AdWords, make no mistake, Google's one product is AdWords. Everything else either lives from its largesse or feeds into it. And if Microsoft can do any damage to that and cause any element of stock panic because they're doing a thing that that Google has not done and possibly that could affect their golden goose, boy, howdy, is Sacha Mania gonna run wild? You know, I saw a lot of hot takes this morning of people saying, oh gosh, you know, Microsoft ruined Bing chat already, you know, this mid 90s revenue model, you know, do we have no other ideas? The answer is no, we don't. We don't have any other ideas right now. The idea that I might ask, you know, Bing, Bing's chatbot, you know, to to provide me some information. And along with that information, there's a hopefully will, you know, whether it's, I don't know, in yellow or whatever, like it's, it's very obviously an ad that's also being served to me. That is something that either could be useful to me. I mean, ads aren't like totally not useful. But you can also get used to them and ignore them. If I do a dedicated search in Google, for example, you know, I'd search for best restaurants in Austin, Texas, you know, I got my search results, and I have my ads up at the top. I'm used to that. I understand what they are. I understand why they're there. I understand that somebody has paid for them. What this whole kind of the back and forth with a chatbot type thing that I think people are freaked out about is not so much that there are ads, it's that nobody really understands how the ads are being served, because you're not necessarily searching for something that's, you know, two words or a phrase. And I think that's where people go like, oh, we can't reinvent the wheel. We're just doing ads again. Yeah, that's what we're doing. Can I get something? Yes, they might have a new idea. Can they interest you in a Microsoft 365 subscription? It would not shock me if going forward, hey, an ad free experience is here. All you have to do is what Google was actively trying to kill in the 2000s, which is your ability to buy a license for office. It's why they put out docs. It's why they put out sheets. It's why they've done so many of their free tools that Microsoft was furious about back then. And it would be very funny if the worm totally turns. And that's the way that you can get an ad free experience. I will say this, Justin, I am not quite on the Microsoft stabby stabby to Google bandwagon. Certainly, obviously they want to live, they want to win in this. Certainly, they see this as a search level, like scale opportunity for them to make all of the cash and be in this position. But what I think this really shows is that Microsoft is not traditionally a company that is a technical leader, necessarily like a cutting edge bleeding edge kind of leader. And then it's extremely unique in this company's history to feel like they are on the bleeding edge of something, not just on a technology, but unlike something that is a product that they are delivering to customers right now and now monetizing very rapidly. And I think that they realize that that position is in the long term extremely fleeting. But what Microsoft is super good at doing, Justin, to your point with Microsoft 365, is they're really good is once they have a lead of holding on to it pretty good and keeping ahead of the competition. And so to me, this is all about getting Microsoft into their comfort zone, right? Not necessarily. I mean, sure, if they could stay on the bleeding edge of this, you know, whatever this generative AI bandwagon industry is going to be, I'm sure they would love that. But I don't think that they are 100% confident that long term that's even possible for any one company. But they are very good at playing with the lead, playing with the giant market share. And that's exactly what they're doing, trying to do in an ad market that is for the first time in two or three decades, like a green field for anybody to come out there and play. It is softening. I would slightly push back on the fact that they're not bleeding edge. I think that Microsoft's R&D has often been among the industry leaders. Their problem is not that they know where the bleeding edge is. Their problem is productizing that. And right now, they got a product. They bet right with open AI and they are going to use that cudgel to beat Google specifically as hard as they can, like a Piñata. Oh, I love a good Piñata. You might also like Piñatas. You might have thoughts about ad search, Microsoft versus Google and all the things. If you're feeling social about these feelings, get in touch with the DTNS audience on the social networks. We are DTNS Show on Twitter, on Mastodon, we're mstdn.social, Daily Tech News Show on TikTok, and DTNS Pix, that's PIX on Instagram. Well, Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti told CNN earlier this year that while the company planned to experiment with publishing AI assisted content, the results would be held to a high standard. Peretti also said one path is the obvious path that a lot of people will do, but it's a depressing path. Using the technology for cost saving and spamming out a bunch of SEO articles that are lower quality than what a journalist could do, but a tenth of the cost. I think the content farm model of AI will feel very depressing and dystopian. All right. So that's what CEO Jonah Peretti said to CNN earlier this year. Now you might say, well, high standards might mean different things to different people and you'd be right about that. But futurism.com notes that Buzzfeed has been publishing AI generated articles about travel, travel destinations with human sign off from non-editorial staff who work in areas like client partnerships, account management, and product management and hasn't really said so until somebody noticed. You might say, is this a problem? What's wrong with the articles? Well, they're kind of, let's call them repetitive. For example, an article excerpt says, now I know what you're thinking. Cape May, what is that? Some kind of mayonnaise brand? That was an article about Cape May in New Jersey. The next one, now I know what you're thinking. Caribbean destinations are all crowded resorts, right? That was an article about St. Martin in the Caribbean. Now I know what you're thinking. Puerto Rico, isn't that where all the cruise ships go and an article about San Juan in Puerto Rico? And you get the gist. There's just a lot of repetition here. Not necessarily something that a human couldn't do, but sort of pointing out the AI quality of this. Futurism also notes that almost everything that the bot is published contains at least one line about a hidden gem. For example, Amelia Island, Florida, hidden gem of beaches. Carmel by the sea, California, hidden gem of California's coast. West Virginia is a hidden gem of a state. Socrates, New York, Justin, you've probably been there, is a hidden gem where small town charm meets big city cool. And so on. Buzzfeed has experimented with AI-generated content on things like posts that involve quizzes already, and they have attached bylines of a human journalist along with Buzzy the Robot, which is what they're calling the AI. On these travel posts, however, Buzzy's the only byline. So you might say, okay, did no human look at this. The fine print does say that the post was collaboratively written by a human employee. Buzzfeed tells Futurism that this is an experiment to see how well its AI writing assistants incorporate statements from non-writers and says that the company first sent an internal questionnaire to employees who worked outside editorial departments and asked them what to write about their favorite underrated travel posts. The human responses were then fed into the software and the results were generated. Buzzfeed maintains that these posts aren't ads or sponsored content. They're just posts that may or may not be like- They're just really, really bad. That also good for sponsored content. I have never been to Socrates. That's more of the just outside of New York City area. I'm more of a central New York man myself. Shout out to Syracuse and the Fingerlegs. I kind of loved how a lot of these folks were like, listen, it's not even so much that Buzzfeed is doing this. It's that the CEO said just a few short months ago, hey, we don't want crappy content like these like linkbait, stupid slideshow SEO stuff. That's not the reason that AI should be part of our operation. It's to make our smart writers, of which they have many, freed up to do the actual reporting. And that is the goal. It's not to make anything dumb down. It's to make our people capable of being better. So when you see something like this, you say, okay, well, I guess whoever, whatever human or humans were supposed to write these articles beforehand, I guess they are freed up to do other things. So in one sense, I guess Buzzfeed has a point, but boy, it is, it's, it's bleak. It's bleak stuff. Well, all those humans are freed up to do something binge yellow jackets because they don't have a job. They were, they were not going to be hired to write these kinds of things. And by the way, here's the hallelujah to AI, because when we are talking about a robot, we are able to say things that we would feel uncomfortable saying to somebody who spent 40 to $60,000 on a journalism degree, because it would be mean to say to them, but guess what? Travel writing is hacky. And when it comes to this AI, it is like the old drug PSA. I learned it from watching you dad, like this is taking other travel writing and using terms for which is always used in travel writing. It's not the most expansive and creative form of journalism. And it is putting it on maybe a larger scale than it would have. You can also, by the way, this is an editor problem, because the AI that is doing this, you can just say, don't use those phrases. You can say, don't use. And if I would have read like one of these articles, I might have said, okay, it's sort of schlocky. But you know, you put them all together and you go, oh, okay, I see how formulaic this actually is. But again, humans did it first. Honestly, the part that makes me the least like the hypocrisy, whatever your job is to get clipped like I have, I have no pretensions that everyone's going to say that and do this exact same thing. Like that doesn't bother me to the same degree as I feel bad for the employees that it's this like, yeah, could you give us the prompts that we're going to feed into chat GPT? And then we'll say it's it's a generated in association with the human employee where you really just did like, like you just fed into the prompt machine. Like, I don't know. There's something that that's that's lazy. It's lazy. That is some whole five five stuff. You should be able to prompt it and edit it in prompts. Like the idea that this this is what you get when you write one prompt, right? This is what you said go and then stopped caring. This is an editor problem. Like there's no reason why that should be as repetitive if the editor paired. It does make me think that yeah, like, like AI editorial is going to 100% be it's already is is its own skill in terms of like not just being able to like massage these prompts, but like do it in a way so that you are getting this SEO optimized content for all of your beloved travel posts, but do it in a way that is not like, obviously, like, like just the exact same like like a mad libs kind of situation and that'll be a little different shape. Like if BuzzFeed keeps doing this, I, you know, people might find them in search, but it's going to be so low value. I don't know. I wasn't going to say it, Justin. I was trying to be nice. So much that you can do with this genre. Well, there are some YouTube accounts about traveling that I like very much. So, you know, not all travel blogging is bad. Oh, no, no, no. Yeah. Vlogging is a whole different thing because you can see things. I'm talking about writing writing. Yeah. On the cobblestone streets of San Francisco. Think of the in-flight magazines, Justin. Oh, Lord. Well, I mean, especially when, you know, AI says, I know what you're thinking, Sarah, isn't Puerto Rico just a place for cruise ships? I'd be like, no, that's not what I was thinking at all. What a strange thing to say. Then realizing that it's applied to a lot of things. All right. So here is a new concept that some of you might be familiar with. Many might not be. I am in the latter. And I would like to page Lamar Wilson for this. Lamar, I hope you're listening because unboxing videos are so yesterday, but the people really want our boxing videos. You might say, well, I'm not really into violence. No, no, no. Different kind of boxing. A few days ago, Wired shared a story about Lisa Harrington, who's been running a drinkware brand like cups and straws and stuff like that since 2018 called Mermaid Straw. It's pretty popular. Harrington says one of, one out of every 10 customers now leaves a note specifically on their mermaid straw order, asking that she records herself packing their item before it shipped off and maybe sharing that video with her TikTok followers of what she has over two million. It's very popular in TikTok. Harrington shot her first packing video back in the pre-pandemic before times, but now, since then, just in a few short years, videos with the hashtag packing orders have more than nine billion views on TikTok with sellers packing everything from drinkware like Harrington, or candy, or jewelry, or anything that can be packed, really, and sold. Some customers even pay to watch their items being packed. Wired quotes Harrington as saying, I think that customers really enjoy that they see, they seem like a real person to us, and we're a real person to them, and that boxing videos get rid of that corporate feel. I think this is brilliant. I think that it is in a world of more competitive e-commerce where there are a lot of vendors like this particular example where you can make that shopping experience more special, and you got a packet anyway. You might as well set up your camera. That's, it's a great idea, a brilliant concept. And I encourage anybody to read the Wired article in full. We'll have it on our show notes, but the article also notes another boxing person who's gotten on the train of boxing the items that they then ship off to somebody says, okay, I am starting to charge $8 per video. It's not really because that makes me any more money. It means that I have to ship fewer things because the boxing video takes time. I got cameras, I got some light editing, I got a post to a variety of places. I can't do all of that and have the same volume of output, so it helps me stay neutral. I want to see the inevitable, our boxing video reactions where someone gets fired because they did a bad job of boxing and then they, they're good to drive damage and then you have video evidence that they did not put enough bubble wrap into your China base or whatever got shipped and damaged. That's where my head goes. I admit I was so jaded on, I was just like, this is, this people just want to feel special. But then I thought like, there's definitely things that I've been like super excited for. And it's like, if I could see it being shipped on there, I would probably be pretty jazzed about that. Or like, I could, you know, like, for like, not even gifts, like stuff for me, like for like Christmas gifts or stuff that I'm excited to get for, for people and stuff like that. I would kind of be into it. Well, and so many, especially the ads that get served up to me on Instagram and the like, so much of that is like, we're a homegrown operation, you know, we're reinventing the sweater or whatever it is. And you go like, oh, cool. You know, I liked it. I liked it. Best friends decided that they were going to take a new state. Yeah, back by popular demand because, you know, we're just two cool chicks, you know, in a studio trying to give you the socks that you asked for. Like all of that stuff is, you know, they're selling you a story that might be true. But I mean, there have been, I don't know, several times where I bought something on Etsy, let's say. And I like to imagine that, yeah, the person who crocheted that scarf is really sort of the, you know, what they made themselves off to be. If I see a boxing video before I get my item and then I like my item, I will feel closer to that creator. So there you go. Well, thanks everybody who gives us email responses to stuff that we've talked about on previous shows, ideas for what we could talk about on a future show, or anything in between. Just a reminder, that email is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Thanks to you, Justin Robert Young, for being with us today. You are busy as usual, so let folks know where they can keep up. Well, friends, if you would like to hear more about the legislation around a possible ban of TikTok and where it might be overreaching, spoiler alert, it might be, you can listen to tomorrow's episode of Politics, Politics, Politics, that is Fridays, where a young upstart by the name of Tom Merritt will join us to not only talk about the cultural influence of the app, but also whether or not it will be banned. So we have predictions, we have thoughts, we have analysis, if you want more of that, head on over there, Politics, Politics, Politics, available tomorrow morning. Oh, that's Gamp, Tom Merritt. I heard he's up and coming, you know, he's got some good thoughts. Yeah, he's actually going to be up and coming here to this day, TNS tomorrow. So I'm very excited. Well, we also want to extend a special thanks to Michelle. Hello, Michelle. You're one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. So today is your day. Thank you for all the years of support. Michelle Arbell. Speaking of patrons, stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet. We roll right into it when DTNS wraps up. Today, Rich is going to tell us all about Sony's 12 megapixel full frame ZV-E1 camera and why it may be important to you. Just a reminder though, you can catch the show live. We do this live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. You can find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash live. We'll be back tomorrow with Professor Mary Ann Gary from the University of Waikato. Here with a psychological analysis of large language models like chat, GPT. Don't miss it. Talk to you then.