 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Peter Bohack, Philip Less, Howard Jermisch, and our new patrons, Eric and Eric, two of them. On this episode of DTNS, an AT&T outage reminds us all that wireless service is kind of important. Google Gemini has a people problem of sorts, and Charlotte Henry has thoughts on OpenAI's sores' impact on the entertainment industry. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, February 22nd, 2024. From Studio Animal House, I'm Sarah Lane. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us today from the edition at newsletter, Charlotte Henry, welcome back Charlotte. Hello, hello, how are you guys doing? What we're doing well. How are you? I'm very good. I had uninterrupted sales service today, so I guess I can't complain. Yeah, yeah. Me too, but I'm on Verizon. If you're scratching your head wondering what we're talking about, we'll get to that in just a few. Coming in right before showtime, Reddit filed its S1 to go public. Its ticker is going to be our DDT on the New York Stock Exchange, and that is the Reddit News. It was going to be March, but it was February after all. Let's get into the quick hits. Nvidia GeForce users can now download the beta of the brand new Nvidia app, which merges the control panel and GeForce experience into one, along with connections to other Nvidia apps and features. The user interface got a redesign. You don't have to log into an Nvidia account anymore to get updates. The new app will also let users modify game settings and driver settings in a single location or set a global profile for all games and apps. Nvidia says it will eventually integrate all features from Nvidia control panel into this new app, including display and video settings. After Google Wallet launched in 2022, Google kept the original GPay app around at least in some markets. Today, the company announced that the app which many people still see as GPay on their Android home screen is going away in the US on June 4th. Users in India and Singapore will still have access to GPay as Google continues to build for the unique needs in those countries. Google is also shutting down the peer-to-peer payments that's the part that seems kind of like PayPal, Venmo, Cash App to let you send requests or receive money from others in the US, but you can still use the Google Pay website to view and transfer your Google Pay balance of money once you've received it from another person or rewards and cash back to a bank after June. Sony's PlayStation VR2 headset is meant to work exclusively with a PlayStation 5, but the company says it's now testing support for PCs as a gaming rig. The Verge notes that a year ago, when it asked Sony about this, the company would only say the PSVR2 is created for use with the PS5 console, and that was kind of it. After the Verge tested it on a PC last year, it was picked up as a second screen by Windows, but SteamVR didn't recognize the headset, so we've got progress. Match Group announced an enterprise agreement with OpenAI that includes over 1,000 enterprise licenses for the dating app giant and home to Tinder, Match, OK, Qubit, Hinge, and others. Enterprise released written with the help from ChatGBT. Match said that the AI tech will be used to help employees with work-related tasks and come as part of Match's $20 million-plus bet on AI in 2024. Match Group says it will begin using the AI tech, specifically ChatGBT-4, to aid with coding, design, analysis, building templates, and other daily tasks. Following some high-profile exits from newsletter service Substack, the company said Thursday it had more than 3 million customers subscribed to paid newsletters on its platform that's up from 2 million announced last year and 1 million in 2021. It's growing. Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie and product VP Sachin Monga told Axios the new efforts to improve its recommendations feature for growing its paid subscriber base is working and that it plans to expand recommendations to help writers promote other newsletters in its network to include more newsletters that can be recommended at any time. All right, we've alluded to outages today. There was there was there was a big one. So let's let's walk through what we know at this time because there's a lot of unknowns. Wireless carrier AT&T, one of the US's biggest networks, whose 5G network covers around 290 million people across the US has been dealing with widespread service issues for, you know, the better part of the day. Now, they seem to be wrapped up now, but we were going on 10, 11 hours before we got some confirmation from the company. The Federal Communications Commission has been investigating the incident in the US Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA, which is a unit of the Department of Homeland Security also said it was working with AT&T to understand what happened exactly. Now, of the 290 million people across the US, the outage affected a pretty small amount of AT&T's overall customer base, but still a very large number of people, especially since it was hampering the ability to reach emergency services by Dali 911 or the fire department, that sort of stuff. Tracking website, downdetector.com, clocked around 76,000 customer support complaints as of this recording. It also seems to affect carriers that use AT&T's network, MVNOs like Cricket Wireless. So here's what the timeline of events seemed to be, because we're still kind of just at the end of this and figuring everything out. But Cloudflare first noticed a significant drop in data for AT&T in the early hours of Thursday. That's today. AT&T acknowledged the issue and advised customers to use Wi-Fi calling when possible. But some of those users reported that that wasn't working either. AT&T also told the BBC our network teams took immediate action. And so far, three quarters of a network has been restored. Tom Merritt noted in his newsletter today that a CNN source said that it had to do with network peering or how different carriers exchanged traffic with each other. Well, Charlotte, I know you weren't affected directly by this, but I wasn't either. I'm a Verizon customer. I also just wasn't on my phone that wasn't connected to Wi-Fi at all this morning preparing for the show. But have you ever had an outage such as this? And if so, what did you do? It's a great question. Now you're saying it. I'm remembering there was a major outage at various points. I can't remember if it was network or software related. But it's quite a terrifying thing. You feel very incapacitated, right? We're also dependent on our phones. You know, I've been walking around going to different meetings or whatever in London today needed the Maps feature. If there's no cell signal, you don't get it. Never mind the point you made, which is really important about contacting emergency services. That's a really scary prospect for people who to be possibly stuck not being able to dial 911 your country 999 here. Like it's very scary to see if you know, I saw I was following this because obviously I was awake for all of it following people on the East Coast. Waking up and finding they had no cell service. I am I was seeing people being told apparently we're told to like use their landline. Remember those? Just just use the landline. You know, the one that everybody still has in their kitchen. Like I mean, I have a landline, but people feel really vulnerable. There's obviously a big question to ask right about how dependent we are on these devices. I mean, is it is it a good thing that we want, you know, these outages make us so vulnerable? Not being able to call emergency services, that that is that is pretty, pretty, that is that's pretty terrifying. But the outage itself reminds me of going back to like 1994. I mean, there were cell phones that existed at that point, but most people didn't have them. Most people weren't using clearly. You weren't using them for data. So I think that for me, although I was not affected by it, I don't know that I would have been terribly bothered by it because I don't think I used my phone for anything until probably right around the time we started getting ready to do this show. I made no phone calls. I sent no text messages. Everything that I did was through my data plan. So now if my Wi-Fi would have gone down, if my broadband would have gone down, then it would have been an issue. So I would imagine that for quite a few people, AT&T is the only way they have to get access to Internet capability. So that would be, once again, going back to 1994 or before, you can just do all the things that we're so accustomed to doing today. I mean, a couple of a couple of weeks ago on this show, while we were live, we had a little earthquake in L.A. It was not it was it was, you know, four point something. It was a huge deal. Yeah, of course, of course, because that's how life works. But not not a huge deal could have been worse and it has been worse in the past. And that was the first thing I thought of today when, you know, people needing emergency services, those are services that people need all the time for a variety of reasons. But what if a large metropolitan area had some sort of a crisis on the same day that this happened? Oh, would we be in a world of hurt? Yeah. Yeah, that would that would be significantly different. Obviously, we don't want to, you know, give any conspiracies or whatever to what has happened. I find it really interesting that agencies in the US that are looking into this. Now, of course, it makes sense that part of Homeland Security would look into it because we've just discussed why it's relevant to Homeland Security. If you can't talk about the word. And just and just affected so many people. It was a hundred or five hundred. It was, you know, many thousands. And I guess that, you know, this type of thing is going to bother the White House as well, because there's a national resilience question as well, isn't there? There potentially. And, you know, as as we learn more about the outage, I'm not I'm not convinced I don't know if AT&T either knows about it and is trying to frame this in a public relations way well enough, you know, before the rest of us hear about it, or if it really is just a big question mark. But, yeah, I haven't had a landline in in quite some time. And people always say, well, you know, it's a good backup option. I go, yeah, yeah, but, you know, when am I ever going to need it? Well, these these are the days when you need things like that. Yeah, I think I do technically still have a landline. I'm not I've never used it, and I'm not sure if it actually works. But my internet provider made me have one was part of the package. So OK. So let's change gears a little bit and talk about Google Gemini, because Google has temporarily paused the image generation of people in Gemini while it tweaks the AI model so that it generates more historically accurate results. The pause comes less than a day after Google apologized for what it describes as inaccuracies in some historical generation depictions. Google received criticism that it depicted specific white figures like US founding fathers or groups like Nazi era German soldiers as people of color, possibly as an overcorrection to longstanding racial bias problems in AI. So when I saw this story today, it kind of made me chuckle for, you know, for a myriad of reasons. But this is this is a big deal. You know, Google has had issues and not just Google. AI has had issues with misclassifying, mischaracterizing people for for a while. Usually it is when they do so with, you know, people from, you know, from, you know, that are brown, have more melanin in their skin. You know, the controversy, you know, this controversy was promoted largely through not exclusively by right wing figures. But it was a fair amount of them that they just kind of feel that Google is a, you know, as a left-leaning company, it's a very liberal company. So this is basically, you know, you guys, you do never actually show white folks as kind of what the sentiment was out there. But it really just kind of goes to show you that this is hard work. And, you know, Google has to be really, really adept at making sure they get this right. Because when you start messing with people's identity, they will feel some kind of way about it. There there was a I mean, a variety of people chimed in on what they think was happening at Google. And yes, there's sort of like the like overwokeness conversation that some people are having. But there was one that stood out to me from somebody who had posted on X and said, you know, this feels like an engineer at Google somewhere was sort of like, all right, we want to make sure that our bias is not swinging too far towards against people of color. So, you know, what if we just, you know, enhance people of color that show up in search results? That makes it more inclusive, right? Now, that's a very naive way of thinking about the sort of thing. And obviously it backfired in a big way. You I don't I can't tell you how many threads I've now seen of people being like, and look, the best, you know, show me pictures of a successful basketball team. Well, they're all white, you know, but show me pictures of founding fathers of America. Well, that's not right. So, you know, you know, how much is this just Gemini being in its infancy and, you know, how much does it have to do with? I don't know. I guess I guess the point I'm getting at is I would like to think this is not deliberate in any way. It is just clueless. Yeah, I guess so. There's always an element of cluelessness when these can come in and I think it's always better to put most things down to cock up, not conspiracy. I think there is a general issue that we all need to talk about in tech in general and tech products in general, which is if only a very small demographic of people are making tech products, that gives a certain output. And that's a really important issue when we're talking about generator of AI. Yeah, yeah, it's like if I start a clothing line and I like certain clothing, then my clothing line is going to reflect, you know, my feelings. Right. That's that's pretty not harmful. You know, you buy my clothes and you don't when it comes to tools like this that are being used in schools and workplaces and, you know, people around the world that that's where it you have to you have to figure out, you know, where does this conversation go? We can identify biases and say, OK, that has to be better. And I think that's that's what we're doing now here with Gemini and Google saying, yeah, we yeah, we're going to we're going to shut this down for a little while while we figure out, you know, what's next. But it certainly doesn't help doesn't help for trust. Yeah, I don't I don't believe that anyone at Google purposely coded this to, you know what, if somebody asks for who the founding fathers of America were show them black and brown people, I don't think anyone coded for that. But I do think that because Google has been dinged on this in big ways back in 2015 with Google photos, they actually were classifying black people as gorillas. Google is basically we're never going to allow that to happen again. So this could be a pendulum swinging too far back to the to the other side. But once again, I don't think that there's any malice here. I just think that Google has to really think about and make sure that they have diverse groups in the room, that they actually have diversity in their, you know, people who are actually coding this so that you just don't have implicit bias is just coded into the system. The system is spitting out the numbers that you put into it. But depending on who put those numbers into the system determines what the output is going to be. And I think that Google just has to get better at doing that. And this is one of those areas where I do think it's going to get fixed. It's also just I mean, it's not even, you know, whether or not somebody is offended by what is being generated is is one part of the conversation. But it's also just inaccurate. Yes. So, you know, that that's that's, I think, you know, that's the problem that Google has to grapple with is like, yeah, you got your bias problem, but also you're just churning out stuff that it's inaccurate and laughable in many ways. If you say founding fathers, those are specific people that you know who they were and what they looked like. You're right. It should not be getting that wrong. Yeah. And there should be proper training data and training data sets that you can build that kind of factual thing on. But just to go back to that general point, you were talking about it, Rob. There has to be stuff built into the systems and the creations, you know, the people who are creating and engineering this and overseeing it that people can flag up things that might be a problem for certain groups and certain communities of all kinds. You know, in this case, it's a very obvious misstep against people of color. And, you know, that based on you, Rob, highlighted that previous example, which was just for a company of the, you know, size and capacity of Google to be making mistakes like the one you described is just ridiculous. That it shouldn't be happening anyway. It shouldn't be happening from a company that has Google. And so the systems have to be in place that include people from all sorts of backgrounds and communities that, you know, that our tech products look like real life and community, right? Or as close enough as it can be, you know what I'm saying. That like so so that there is some resemblance to reality, because if we're all going to become more dependent on these generative AI models, we need it to almost be a tool to break bias, not have those preexisting biases and racism and sexism and all the other things built into them. Well, I have a feeling that this will be a subject on the next episode of The Tech John. I think Rob, Rob, I was going to say, I don't even have the time to discuss this. Rob Dunwood, Stephanie Humphrey and Terrence Gaines are all hosts on The Tech John, which is a really, really great show that examines how technology affects and disaffects communities of color. Go hang out with them every week, delivered from points of view. You don't always hear in mainstream media. And I think we need a little bit more of that. New episodes land on Tuesday afternoons. Find it wherever you get your podcasts and visit The Tech John. That's J-A-W-N dot com. All right. Welcome to something we like to call additional conversations on DTNS. Last week, we discussed Open AI's new text to video research project called Sora, implementing a version of the diffusion model used by Dolly 3 and GPT-4 to generate up to 60 second video clips. And boy, has the internet responded. The obvious challenge is the potential to create misinformation. But it's also creating some fun stuff. Charlotte, I know you've been thinking a lot about this. What are your first reactions of Sora? Yeah, I wrote a newsletter on this actually the other day. And I all I could think of when I first started seeing these clips circulating around was the Hollywood Strikes. Because one of the key things about the writers and the actors was how worried they were about the effects AI would have on their role. And they made those agreements with the studios, include stuff about AI. And part of it was issues around using someone's like this. Now, you can see if there's a likeness floating around and famous actors have lots and lots of images that a model could use of them. Like look at think of the content you could create or what you're going to be creating in the future. Again, this is the beginning, right? What we're seeing now is not that impressive. I mean, it's more it's, you know, fairly impressive, but it's not like ground is not like movie quality yet. You can sort of tell in most cases it's created using some AI tool. But this is the beginning thing. What's going to happen? And if you're Tom Cruise or whatever, think of the ways your image and likeness could be used in these kind of videos. And I'm not surprised actors were worried about it. I'm not surprised writers were worried about how AI was going to affect their jobs. And you rightly said about misinformation. We're going into elections both in the UK and the US. You could easily use these kind of models and tools to create false videos, which will be very, very convincing of senior politicians and could cause real, real issues. But this is serious stuff. This might just be the beginning of it. But we sort of need to get ahead of these things. I have to say, I'm not convinced, right? I don't know what you guys think. I'm not convinced we're going to sit down all that soon and be watching TV shows made by Sora. I think we might, though, start seeing creative content made by it. I would say that soon is relative, because I remember. I remember a long, long, long, long time ago, like eight, nine months ago when we were talking about how Mid Journey and Dali couldn't get people's hands and fingers right. And now today we're literally talking about, you know, a solution where you can type something and it will generate video. That's pretty impressive. So once again, I am with you, Charlotte. This is this does not look real yet. But what will it look like in three years? And when we were when we were talking about the story, you know, earlier, you know, when we were talking about the rundown for the show, you know, I mentioned those old spice commercials where you had Isaiah Mustafa and he's like on a horse. And then he's, you know, he's he's doing all these crazy things. And I'm like, this is good enough to do that kind of content. So I just I just think that you're good. You know, this this stuff is moving so quickly that we're talking about today. Well, it doesn't look real yet. But what is it going to look like in three years? Well, not even three years. What is going to look like in 13 months? You know, how good is this going to be? Yeah, yeah. Advertising industry part of this is, you know, somebody had brought up that point in our pre-show as well that because a lot of advertising is I mean, you don't look at a commercial and say, well, that's not real. It's a commercial. Look at the hands. Look at the hands. Right. Right. Well, OK, so and I agree with you, Rob, it wasn't that long ago that we were all like, well, cool technology. But everyone said this about Photoshop too and the creators still have jobs and it just made them do their jobs better. These are tools and that is probably very true to a point this morning. I found this thread on X where somebody had generated a I think the prompt was show me, you know, puppies who are going through the sky to save the world or something like that. It was, you know, the prompt wasn't even really that specific. And the the reaction from a lot of people who followed this account. Yeah, the video folks can see we're like, this is amazing. OK, let's add some audio, you know, and you go down the thread and it's like, you know, in a world where puppies need to know more about life. And, you know, Cloudy, with a chance of puppies, you know, there were all these things that people had generated to be creative based on, you know, this initial prompt that someone just said, like, hey, look at this, this one's pretty good. And, you know, it's animated, right? It's not some sort of live action puppies, you know, in clouds in the sky. It's it's very clearly something that would be animated. But then someone was like, you know, I wonder how long before Paw Patrol sues this guy, right? Or the first thing I thought of. And to your broader point about that, suddenly there was a little clip and then suddenly there was a whole kind of storyline that, you know, a minute's worth of content or whatever. That's why I'm saying I can see content creators really taking this up in the way people use tools like Canva already, right? People do that stuff already. So this is just the next step of that. I think if I'm a Hollywood exec, I'm keeping my eye on this. But there are bigger things that Hollywood needs to worry about in the short term, like getting people into movie theaters and that kind of thing before they need to worry that Sora is going to take all of their jobs. I'll tell you one thing. Tell me one thing, Rob. When I get my hands on this, my podcast promos are going to be epic. Just because I, you know, I haven't I do not have an artistic bone in my body. So if I can actually just type some stuff out and get something to the level of those cute puppies that were flying through the air, I'm just telling you my promo game will be next level. I want to see AI generated one done. Rob Dunwood flying through the air. That's where we're at. I mean, it I'm sort of just thinking about this now as we're talking about it as content creators that we all are. This does, I mean, to just to just re-imagine the, you know, thumbnail to grab people so that they click on your link on YouTube type things. You know, there's a certain way that people are successful at that. If you don't try very hard, you're less successful. But there, you know, you're you're you're getting people to click on stuff. Something like Sora that is at least at this point, a small, no audio, video, generation tool, but but still extremely impressive. That could really that could really help a lot of us. I don't know exactly how yet. I'll have to think it through. But I feel like, yeah, you know, to your point, Rob, this this opens up some some avenues to have some fun. I'm sure people are just going to create like minute long TikTok videos and Instagram reels and stuff using this tool. Surely that's the next thing that's going to happen. Yeah. I mean, it's already happening. All right, let's check out the mailbag. This one comes in from stealth Dave also chiming in on our conversation. We have with Lamar Wilson on Tuesday's show about form factors when it comes to iPads. Boy, did we strike a nerve and record we hit a nerve. Um, uh, stealth Dave says, I agree with Lamar that figuring out what size tablet you need is at least as important as how powerful a tablet you need, probably more so. I've been using eight inch Android tablets almost since they were introduced for what I would call reader activities, reading ebooks, watching movies, casual web browsing, occasionally remote access to other computers and devices. Eight inches is perfect for these activities for me and easy to hold in my hand as I read or browse the web. If I need something bigger, I go with my laptop. The problem I find is there are severe lack of options for mid to high end Android based eight inch tablets. There are low end options everywhere, but they suffer from extremely low resolution, 720p at best. Heavy lag for even the most basic web browsing. I left Apple for mobile devices years ago because I need more control over my device than Apple is willing to give me. I'm a software developer, but if no other manufacturer is willing to make the tablet I need, I might need to reevaluate the iPad many. Thank you, still, Dave. Yeah, I mean, we we we have learned over the last few days that people care very much about screen sizes of all sorts of devices, phones, tablets, laptops, television. And your mail bag yesterday, people were talking about how it was kind of a Kindle like device, right, that kind of size. Yeah, I've always had, you know, a kindle and a full size for one of a better phrase. iPad, I just find them very different use cases. But I can see, you know, how people are chiming in that they have kind of, you know, again, find the tablet that fits for your fits for your use case. Right. They're finding that, you know, you don't need it. If you're not using it, as I say, a laptop replace when you can have something much smaller, if you want it for reading or whatever. Yeah, I'm with Stealth Dave on this as an Android user. I I used to rock the the the Google Nexus back in the back in the day. I have always loved the seven to eight inch form factor on tablets. But the problem is that they're just not powerful. They're just they're very, very low end tablets. And that's the reason that why I've moved away. So I now just try to get the biggest possible phone that I can get. Rob, with his iPhone, Max, Max, Max. So Dave in snowy upstate New York, he writes in regarding the sports discussion yesterday. Tom seemed to want it easy way to get score updates. Here's my favorite way to do it, which I may have heard about on the DTNS show without ads on sites like ESPN. So. Oh, and that's plain text sports, plain text sports. You know, I don't know if it came from us. It's not something that I use, but yeah, good, good to know. We're actually going to continue the the sports conversation and GDI. So stick with us, even if you don't like sports, but you like tech. We've got a little something for everybody here. But sports, Charlotte Henry has thoughts. And that's why we love to have you on the show. Charlotte Henry, let folks know where they can keep up with all that you do. Head over to the addition dot net for blog posts. There'll be podcast episodes, their videos and you can sign up to the newsletter. And I'm actually a Henry across most of social media. Beautiful. And patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. We'll be talking a little bit more about what's missing from Apple Sports and where Substack is headed. Just a reminder, you can catch our show live when we do it Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern 2100 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com slash live. It's Friday tomorrow, so we're back with Len Peralta and Molly Wood also joining us. Talk to you then. The DTNS family of podcasts helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.