Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 06/12 – Why Your Favorite Subreddit Might Go Dark.

Episode Date: June 12, 2023

Why your favorite subreddit might be going dark. Why a16z opened an office in the UK. Why AI seems to be recycling the same few dozen jokes when you ask it to be funny. A new AI music generation tool. And the first reviews of the 15-inch Macbook Air. Sponsors: CrashPlan.com go.tech/tm Links: Thousands of subreddits pledge to go dark after the Reddit CEO’s recent remarks (The Verge) Andreessen Horowitz believes that crypto's future may be in the U.K. (Axios) Meta's open source AI MusicGen turns text and melody into new songs (The Decoder) Researchers discover that ChatGPT prefers repeating 25 jokes over and over (ArsTechnica) How AI art killed an indie book cover contest (The Verge) Apple MacBook Air 15-inch review: exactly what was asked for (The Verge) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechMame right home for Monday, June 12th, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. Why your favorite subreddit might be going dark. Why A16Z opened an office in the UK. Why AI seems to be recycling the same few dozen jokes when you ask it to be funny. A new AI music generation tool and the first reviews of the 15-inch MacBook Air. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Maybe you heard over the weekend about Redark. Thousands of subreddits going dark in protest after Reddit's CEO's, Steve Huffman's remarks on API changes made in an Ask Me Anything on June 9th. It's kind of the biggest story in tech right now. Basically, as Chris France puts it on Twitter, Reddit has been

relying on an army of unpaid volunteers to moderate their platform. They mishandled API pricing, and now they're losing control of their platform, though my question would be, did they ever really have control? Reddit is not legally owned by its various communities, but de facto it is? If they ever forget the delicate power balance therein, Reddit could lose everything. That's the tightrope being walked right now, I think, quoting the verge. More than 100 subreddits have already gone dark, and thousands more plan to follow in protests of Reddit's upcoming API changes according to the website RedArk, which is tracking the protests.

The protests are happening over API changes that will force many third-party apps like Apollo and RIF is fun for Reddit to shut down. Frustration was already brewing in the community. as developers began reacting to the changes this week. But Reddit CEO Steve Huffman's responses in recent days have only escalated the community's pushback. In a Reddit AMA on Friday, Huffman was met with seemingly universal anger. There were a lot of F-bombs from commenters. A lot of people called him a coward. If there are positive comments, I didn't find them. Sub-reddit moderators and third-party Reddit app developers say they've lost trust in Huffman

and Reddit's leadership. Apollo developer Christian Selleg accused Huffman of blatantly lying in a phone call to some subreddit moderators. The moderators of R-slash videos wrote that Huffman's AMA performance was, quote, a collage of inappropriate responses. R-slash-Funny suggested the company was aiming solely at your looming IPO. Most of the subreddits have pledged to go private, preventing outside access for 48 hours, though some, like the 26 million member community R-slash videos, have said they'll remain private indefinitely. According to this post on R-slash-mod cord, protests will end when Reddit addresses issues with the API, improves accessibility for blind people, and creates parity in access to not safe for work content, end quote.

Among the complaints are how Reddit's leadership has or mostly hasn't, communicated the details of changes to its API pricing or incoming restrictions, including prohibiting third-party apps from showing not-safe-for-work content. That's already viewable on the site. Red Planet developer Tony Lopesky said it was a blatant lie that Reddit leadership was keeping dialogue open, with impacted third-party developers, as Huffman wrote. That's not an answer, and you know it, said user, anarchists to the same Huffman reply. Now, slash iPhone will be going private, severely restricting access to the sub, as will R-slash Music, a default subscription for new accounts, and one of the

largest subreddits on the site. Mods of that community put it right in the title of the post announcing its participation, which it says will close starting June 12th, quote, until Reddit takes back their API policy change. iPhone, which has 3.8 million users, echoed R-slash music's sentiment, saying, in the somewhat unlikely scenario that Reddit's leadership has a change of direction that sees the reversal of the recent API policy change, we will reopen the subreddit. R-slash gaming says its shutdown will begin on the 12th, but it will be set to private for 48 hours or longer. At the time of publishing, a pinned post on the R-slash-Moddard subs post about the protest says nearly 4,500 communities are pledging

to go dark, while Red Ark, a site tracking the protesting, Reddit says over 200 already have, end quote. This is another one that might be a bit inside baseball, but since we've been keeping an eye on whether or not or to what degree crypto projects might want to leave the U.S. for friendlier shores, some of the noise that has been made recently by Brian Armstrong and others was that the UK seems to be willing to set out the welcome mat for crypto. So interesting news over the weekend that A16Z plans to open a crypto-focused office in London and has led a $43 million round in UK-based Jensen, which offers a decentralized compute network for training AI. Quoting Axios. Silicon Valley-based Andresen Horowitz on Sunday announced its new outpost to be led

by relocating partner Sri Ram Krishnan and said that London will be the location of its next crypto accelerator program. The move comes just days after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued crypto exchanges, Binance and Coinbase in moves that Axios's Felix Salmon wrote, R.A. Government effort, quote, to kill the crypto ecosystem. Andresen Horowitz's expansion is not a direct response to those suits despite the firm holding nearly a 1% stake in Coinbase and firm co-founder Mark Andreessen sitting on its board. Instead, the plans have been in the works for more than six months. However, persistent U.S. regulatory uncertainty around crypto did play a role, as did crypto-positive statements from UK Prime Minister

Rishi Sunak and a British system of government that can more swiftly implement new rules. If they can get regulatory clarity soon in the UK, I think you'll see U.S. companies move there and new companies start there, says Chris Dixon, who founded in Leads Andreson Horowitz's Crypto, known as A16Z Crypto. Despite the lawsuits, there was some positive news in the U.S. last week in terms of the discussion draft in the House, and hopefully that can move forward sooner than later. It's a similar approach to what they're doing in the UK, but the UK has fewer hurdles, Dixon says, end quote. Brian Quintez, a former CFTC Commissioner and current policy head for A16Z crypto adds, quote, we've met with all the UK stakeholders because we've wanted to

discuss this in a non-partisan way. There are some people whose concerns skew more toward custody or consumer protection or innovation, but no one seems to react to it in the same polarizing way that they do here, end quote. Another day, another one of these, meta has launched MusicGen, an open-source AI model to generate short pieces of music using text prompts that can optionally be aligned to an existing melody, quoting the decoder. Like most language models today, music gen is based on a transformer model, just as a language model predicts the next characters in a sentence, MusicGen predicts the next section in a piece of music. The researchers decompose the audio data into smaller components using Meta's N-Codec audio

tokenizer as a single-stage model that processes tokens in parallel. MusicGen is fast and efficient. The team used 20,000 hours of licensed music for training. In particular, they relied on an internal data set of 10,000 high-quality music tracks, as well as music data from Shutterstock and Pond 5. In addition to the efficiency of the architecture and the speed of generation, music gen is unique in its ability to handle both text and music prompts. The text sets the basic style, which then matches the melody in the audio file. For example, if you combine the text prompt a light and cheerful EDM track with syncopated drums, airy pads, and strong emotions, tempo 130 beats per minute, with the melody of box world famous Tokata and fugue in D minor, the following piece of music can be generated, click through to the piece to hear the melody. The authors of the study ran tests on three versions of their model at different sizes,

300 million, 1.5 billion, and 3.3 billion parameters. They found that the larger models produced higher quality audio, but the 1.5 billion parameter model was rated best by humans. The 3.3 billion parameter model, on the other hand, is better at accurately matching text input and audio output. Compared to other music models such as Refusion, Moussay, MusicLM, and Noise to Music. music gen performs better on both objective and subjective metrics that test how well the music matches

the lyrics and how plausible the composition is. Overall, the models are just above the level of Google's music LM. Meta has released the code and models as open source on GitHub, and commercial use is permitted. A demo is available on Hugging Face, end quote. Meanwhile, in a test, researchers found that more than 90% of 1008 jokes that they generated using GPT 3.5 were not new jokes, but rather the same 25 jokes recycled, likely learned during the model's training, quoting Ars Technica. In general, the researchers found that ChatGPT's detection of jokes was heavily influenced by the presence of joke surface characteristics like a joke's structure, the presence of wordplay

or inclusion of puns showing a degree of understanding of humor elements. Reacting to the study on Twitter, Scale AI prompt engineer Riley Goodside blamed chat GPT's lack of humor on reinforcement learning through human feedback, or RLHF, a technique that guides language model training by gathering human feedback. The most visible effect of RLHF is that the model follows orders and base LLMs are much harder to prompt in practice, but that benefit isn't free, you pay for it in creativity more or less, he said, end quote. Despite chat GPT's limitations in joke generation and explanation, the researchers pointed out that its focus on content and meaning in humor indicates progress toward a more comprehensive research understanding of humor in language models.

The observations of this study illustrate how chat GPT rather learned a specific joke pattern instead of being able to actually be funny. The researchers write, nevertheless, in the generation, the explanation and the identification of jokes, chat GPT's focus bears on content and meaning and not so much on superficial characteristics. These qualities can be exploited to boost computational humor applications. In comparison to previous LLMs, this can be considered a huge leap toward a general understanding of humor, end quote. One more AI piece for you today. The Verge takes a look at how science fiction and fantasy publishers are dealing with AI tools' role in their industry and with the trust crisis due to AI-generated

content becoming common. I continue to find it fascinating that literal science fiction is at the bleeding edge of this AI disruption. Quote, earlier this year, prominent magazines like Clark's World and Asimov's science fiction said they were experiencing a deluge of low-quality AI-generated short stories, overwhelming their publications and at times even forcing outlets to temporarily close submissions. Though editors said they could spot the works almost immediately, sifting through the influx was a time suck forcing publishers to wade through a new kind of spam coming from people outside the industry. Now the community of writers, artists, and readers is confronted with a new reality, AI-aided work that, at least at first, can pass for a human's output. The past months have been a

string of controversies around AI and fiction, including bestselling science fiction and fantasy novels using covers with AI-generated stock art as well as Clark's World's spam problem. And the writing world is starting to formulate a response. Around the time the cover contest controversy began, Neil Clark, editor of Clark's World, published a first attempt to codify norms and expectations for AI software in the SFF publishing industry. The statement sketches out the framework for handling AI-generated work, addressing unsettling questions around the legality of training data, the efficacy of AI detection software, and the need for disclosures when these tools are used. Tools to detect AI-generated text and imagery exist, but they remain unreliable and can be

confused further if humans have edited the output. Clark has invited other industry members to sign on an agreement. Some publishers have tried to preempt an embarrassing mistake by openly welcoming work that is created using AI software. New Myths, a quarterly magazine, except submissions that use AI tools as long as they're flagged as such and says it will add a label to any published content. But so far it appears to be an outlier. Sheila Williams, editor of Asimov's says her publication is still being deluge with low-quality AI-generated submissions. In response, she's added an explicit line in submission guidelines that Asimovs doesn't want AI-generated stories. Asimovs strictly buys writing by humans, and Williams says continuing to do so is a way

to build and maintain trust with readers and writers. There's a fear that magazines will will fill pages with free or cheap material produced via chatbot, though she says the quality is nowhere near publishable. You'd cancel your subscription, William says, of the material. But while Williams believes AI-generated fiction is still easy to spot, things like generated cover images could be harder. I don't feel confident it wouldn't slip through, not 100% not like fiction, William says. When selecting cover art, Williams researches potential artists and consults her art department, but contends that it may be easier for AI-generated art to evade detection, end quote. Finally, today it's review time. Lost in last week's hubbub around the big headset

announce was the 15-inch MacBook Air announce, which was something a lot of people have been waiting for for years. In The Verge, Monica Chen says the big screen of the new 15-inch MacBook Air is great. The thin and light chassis is what you'd expect it to be. Excellent trackpad, as always, keyboard, performance, and battery, all still great. She says she averaged four. 14 and a half hours of battery, so it comes in in between the 13 hours of a 13-inch MacBook Air and the 16 and a half hours of the 13-inch MacBook Pro. But limited ports and upgradeability make her a bit sad, but hey, it's Apple, it's an error. What do you expect? Quoting from her conclusion, real regular people sitting on their couches, checking their

emails, bookmarking their recipes, whatever it is we all do, are going to be very happy with this device. It's everything you'd want from a MacBook Air, and it will help them do their work and check their emails and watch Netflix faster and better. Good laptops make us better versions of ourselves. That is all they should be doing. I have no doubt that recent declines in PC sales are an unfortunate and upsetting thing for companies who make laptops. I wonder if I, a consumer, might take a more optimistic view, though. People bought a lot of things in 2020 and 2021, and they remain happy with those things. Those computers are serving their lifestyles and workloads just fine. There's a status quo, of course, that profit-maximizing PC manufacturers can't condone.

and from some players, the angle of attack has been to invent a new need. On the same day that it announced this MacBook Pro, Apple launched a $3,500 virtual reality headset. Like Lenovo's dual-screen doodads and Dell's touchpad-free rig and the legions of AR and VR and VR-B and AI-loaded gadgets, I'm pitched every week. Apple's Vision Pro has a message, your world, the consumer's world, is lacking in ways you did not realize. You might not think you need this expensive bundle of circuits. You may be sure you don't need it, but just try it. You'll see. Thank God that headset shared the floor with this, a $1,300 laptop that does not claim to move the world, but a laptop that does its job with speakers, with screens, with processors that do things right.

This device doesn't manufacture a need. It found a need. And it's filling it. We don't need to be convinced that we want the Air 15. We've been waiting for it, end quote. Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.