Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 04/25 – The AI Revolution Comes For Drake

Episode Date: April 25, 2023

Methinks Coinbase is orchestrating laying the groundwork for a showdown with US regulators. Slack rolls out Canvas, which seems pretty cool. AI Guardrails from Nvidia. A browser built for AI tools from Opera. And I delve into the whole story about that AI generated Drake song that has gone viral. OregonState.edu/believe-it Miro.com/podcast Links: Coinbase Asks Court to Force SEC to Clarify Crypto Regulations (Decrypt) Slack launches Canvas, a docs app that lives inside your chat app (The Verge) Google Authenticator now syncs 2FA with your Google Account, gets new icon (9to5Google) Nvidia releases a toolkit to make text-generating AI ‘safer’ (TechCrunch) Opera One is a browser designed for generative AI features (Engadget) An A.I. Hit of Fake ‘Drake’ and ‘The Weeknd’ Rattles the Music World (NYTimes) Grimes Tells Fans To Deepfake Her Music, Will Split 50% Royalties With AI (Forbes) Sol Reader E Ink headset for hands-free e-reading makes CES debut (GoodEReader) 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 Tech meme right home for Tuesday, April 25th, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. Meethinks. Coinbase is orchestrating laying the groundwork for a showdown with U.S. regulators. Slack rolls out canvas, which seems pretty cool. AI guardrails from Nvidia, a browser built for AI tools from opera. And I delve into the whole story about that AI generated Drake song that has gone viral.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Something tells me, Coinbase is activating a pre-planned strategy at this point. Coinbase has asked a U.S. federal court to force the SEC to respond to a petition Coinbase filed back in July of 2022 demanding clearer crypto regulations, quoting to Crypt. The exchange sent the SEC its so-called petition for rulemaking last July and asked the regulator to propose and adopt rules for digital assets securities. It also sought answers to 50 specific questions that would provide, quote, clarity and certainty regarding the regulatory treatment of digital asset securities, end quote. Some of the questions center on the SEC's methodology for classifying certain tokens as securities, while others focus on topics like asset custody

and trading crypto asset securities on SEC regulated exchanges. Under the law, the SEC is required to address Coinbase's petition within a, quote, reasonable amount of time, a person familiar with the situation told DeCrypt, alluding to the Administrative Procedure Act. They said that from Coinbase's point of view, a reasonable amount of time has passed after nine months with no response. Should it ultimately respond to the petition, the financial watchdog could say that it does not believe new rules are necessary, echoing comments made by SEC Chairman Gary Gensler. During a congressional hearing last month, Gensler said, quote, regulations actually already exist, end quote, for crypto to be managed effectively under securities laws. But if the SEC's response to Coinbase's petition is not to

create new rules, then the company would have the opportunity to challenge the SEC in court, the source said. and according to the source, until the company gets a response from the SEC, the exchanges push for regulatory clarity is effectively on ice, end quote. Slack has begun rolling out Canvas, a collaboration tool for each channel in your Slack with document creation, editing, and more. This was actually announced back in September of 2022, but it's rolling out today, quoting the verge. The best thing about Slack's new canvas feature is that I barely need to explain it to you. It's like Google Docs, but inside of Slack. Make a canvas, add some stuff, and share it with whoever you want. Every channel in your Slack now has a canvas attached to it, and you can also make and share as many as you want.

That's it. Slack first announced Canvas last year, and it's starting to roll out to all Slack users today. I've been testing an early version over the last few days, and they're definitely going to be one of my more used Slack features going forward. There may be the most useful organizational tool Slack has ever created. See, the problem with Slack is that it's chaos. Since it's primarily a messaging app, everything that happens in Slack happens in a chat. Chats move fast and they resist organization. Even if you're ruthless about forcing people to thread everything, you're going to end up with a million threads that start with things like question with thread details and okay, I was thinking. Slack wants to be a repository for all your company's information, documents, data, and workflows and is actually quite useful for many of those things. But it requires way too much scrolling and searching. to find the things you were looking for. One way to think of Canvas is just as collections of Slack objects. You can type text into them, but you can also upload photos and videos, embed Slack apps, add links, run polls, and all the other things you do in a message. Links can show up as nice cards.

YouTube videos will play in line, and all of Slack's rich links and media show up in canvases too. Really, anything you can do in Slack you can do in a canvas, but now those things are stored in a document that you can find and organize much more easily. Yes, you can embed a canvas within a canvas, Canvasception, I guess. And if your company is deep enough into Slack that you have buttons to file bug reports and multi-step workflows, you can invoke with a slash command, all those work inside a canvas too. But even though it's technically a collaboration tool for document creation, Canvas isn't really a competitor to Google Docs. It's also not a particularly sophisticated editing tool. For one, you can make lists and headings, but you otherwise don't have much control over

how text looks. Multiple people can work on a canvas at once, but Google Docs handles multiple cursors and overlapping edits much better. Because it's Slack, canvases handle sharing and permissions really well, much better than Google Docs. When you make a new canvas, you can share it with anyone in your organization or share it with a channel, and everyone in the channel will have access. There's no public sharing, though, so you're limited to the people who have access to your Slack. For most documents, this is probably a good thing. All the comments on a canvas live in a dedicated Slack thread, which itself is searchable, just like anything else in Slack. If you mention someone in a canvas, but they're not yet shared, their name shows up with a gray background,

share it with them, and it turns blue, end quote. This is entirely welcome. Google has finally updated Google Authenticator for Android and iOS with a new icon, but more importantly, Google account synchronization, which will finally let users back up their two-factor authentication codes to the cloud. This means the nightmare of getting a new phone and having to switch over your 2FA codes is over. Quoting 9 to 5 Google. Google is specifically adding the ability to safely backup your one-time codes, also known as one-time passwords or OTPs, to your Google account. This has been a, quote, major piece of feedback, especially when setting up new or lost devices. quote, since one-time codes in Authenticator were only stored in a single device, a loss of that

device meant that users lost the ability to sign into any service on which they'd set up two-factor authentication using Authenticator, end quote. You can continue to use Authenticator without a Google account and sync capabilities, but why would you want to? And another week, another slew of AI announces. Invidia has open-sourced Nemo Guardrails, offering a developer framework to help make generative AI what it says is more accurate, appropriate, on topic, and secure. Quoting TechCrunch. Guardrails include code, examples and documentation to add safety to AI apps that generate text as well as speech. Invita claims that the toolkit is designed to work with most generative language models, allowing developers to create rules using a few lines of code.

Specifically, guardrails can be used to prevent, or at least attempt to prevent, models from veering off topic, responding with inaccurate information or toxic language, and making connections to unsafe external sources. Think keeping a customer service assistant from answering questions about the weather, for instance, or a search engine chatbot from linking to disreputable academic journals. Ultimately, developers control what is out of bounds for their application with guardrails, Cohen said. They may develop guardrails that are too broad or conversely too narrow for their use case.

A universal fix for language models' shortcomings sounds too good to be true, though, and indeed it is. While companies like Zapier are using guardrails to add a layer of safety to their generative models, NVIDIA acknowledges that the toolkit isn't imperfect. It won't catch everything, in other words. Cohen also notes that guardrails works best with models that are, quote, sufficiently good at instruction following a la chat GPT, and that use the popular Lang chain framework for building AI-powered apps. That disqualifies some of the open source options out there. And effectiveness of the tech aside, it must be emphasized that Nvidia isn't necessarily releasing guardrails out of the goodness of its heart. It's part of the company's Nemo framework, which is available through Nvidia's Enterprise AI Software Suite and its Nemo fully managed cloud service.

Any company can implement the open source release of guardrails, but Nvidia would surely prefer that they pay for the hosted version instead, end quote. And opera is throwing open early access to Opera One, its redesign. browser with a cleaner, modular look, and room for future generative AI features, also tab islands and more, coding and gadget. It's called Opera 1, and it was designed to have a cleaner look with plenty of open space for future generative AI features and extensions in its sidebar and address bar. Opera says it has implemented a new multi-threaded compositor and its new modular design principles for the browser to enable a fresh batch of features that include what it calls tab islands. The browser has the capability to automatically,

and intuitively, group websites people open based on their content. It will open all pages with menus and restaurant details in one island, for instance, and all tabs with Google Docs in another. The idea is to reduce confusion and make it easier to jump between tasks, whether for work or for something personal. Opera apparently conducted research and found that users got overwhelmed by the number of tabs they have and wished their browsers could do more for them. This is Opera's answer to that problem. While the browser was designed with the capability to create tab islands on its own, users can manually group pages together as well. They can drag and drop tabs between islands or create a new one by pressing the control or command button and clicking on

the websites they want to group before right-clicking on the create a tab island option. Opera considers Tab Islands as the first manifestation of its modular design strategy with their clearly distinguishable island borders and color markets, so we could probably expect more similarly designed features. In addition to Tab Islands, Opera One comes with ChatGPT, Chat, Sonic and AI prompts enabled by default. If you'll recall, the company introduced sidebar integration for the AI chatbots back in March, allowing users to quickly launch them in a separate window within the browser. Meanwhile, the AI prompts feature suggests different ways people can use the chatbots

to transform the text on page, such as turning a chunk of text into a soap opera dialogue or extracting information from it to create quiz questions. Opera 1 is now available for download from the company's website, end quote. And finally today, have you heard about that fake Drake song? I think there's also fake weekend songs going around. Anyway, a bunch of AI songs have gone viral. I say they're fake because they were entirely generated by AI, but the mimicry is so good, you would have no way of knowing that, according to the New York Times. For Drake and the Weekend, two of the most popular musicians on the planet, the existence of Heart on My Sleeve, a track that claimed to use AI versions of their voices to

create a passable mimicry may have qualified as a minor nuisance, a short-lived novelty that was easily stamped out by their powerful record company. But for others in the industry, the song, which became a viral curio on social media, racking up millions of plays across TikTok, Spotify, YouTube, and more before it was removed this week, represented something more serious. A harbinger of the headaches that can occur when a new technology crosses over into the mainstream consciousness of creators and consumers before the necessary rules are in place. Hard on my sleeve with the latest and loudest example of a gray area genre that has exploded in recent months, homemade tracks that use generative artificial intelligence technology in part or in full,

to conjure familiar sounds that can be passed off as authentic, or at least close enough. It earned instant comparisons to earlier technologies that disrupted the music industry, including the dawn of the synthesizer, the sampler, and the file-sharing service Napster. Yet while AI Rihanna singing a Beyonce song or AI Kanye West doing, hey there, Delilah may seem like a harmless lark, the successful, if brief arrival of heart on my sleeve on official streaming services, complete with shrewd online marketing from its anonymous creator, intensified alarms that were already ringing in the music business where corporations have grown concerned about AI models learning from and then diluting their copyrighted material. Universal Music Group, the largest of the major labels, and home to both Drake and the weekend, had already flagged such content to its streaming partners this month, citing intellectual property concerns. But in a statement this week, the company spoke to the broader stakes, asking which side of history all stakeholders in the music ecosystem want to be on? The side of artists, fans, and human creative expression were on the side of deep fakes, fraud, and denying artists their due compensation, end quote. Artists in their labels are confident, at least for the time being, that the social and emotional component of fandom will separate the work of the real Drake from a fake one, even if an AI version can nod at his emotional preoccupations and musical tips. but whether superstars could have their pockets picked or become altogether obsolete in favor of machines that can imitate them is only one side of the equation. Royalty-free music generators can be used now to compose a rap beat, a commercial jingle, or a film score,

cutting into an already fragile economy for working musicians, end quote. Wild stuff, but at least one artist is sanguine about all this, quoting Forbes. In the wake of the AI-generated hit, Hard on My Sleeve, going viral. with deepfakes of multi-platinum artist Drake and the weekend, pop star Grimes has invited her fans to create music with her voice. On Sunday night, she tweeted, I'll split 50% royalties on any successful AI generated song that uses my voice. Same deal as I would with any artist I collab with.

Feel free to use my voice without penalty. I have no label and no legal bindings, end quote. She added that she's open to anything anyone wants. I'm just curious what even happens and interested in being a guinea pig. She said she welcomed the open source of art and to copyright, a position in sharp contrast to Universal Music Group, which moved swiftly to take down heart on my sleeve across social media and media services like Spotify, title, and Apple Music, as the song started to climb the charts earlier this month. UMG's success has been, in part, due to embracing new technology and putting

it to work for our artists, as we have been doing with our own innovation around AI for some time already the company explained in a statement to variety. With that said, however, the training of generative AI using our artist's music, which represents both a breach of our agreements and a violation of copyright law, as well as the availability of infringing content created with generative AI on DSPs begs the question as to which side of history all stakeholders in the music system want to be on. These instances demonstrate why platforms have a fundamental legal and ethical responsibility to prevent the use of their services in ways that harm artists. We're encouraged by the engagement of our

our platform partners on these issues as they recognize they need to be part of the solution, end quote. Deepfakes are wildly popular on TikTok. Deep Tom Cruise posts videos of the fake actor, mixing it up with the real Paris Hilton, confirmed creator Chris Y of VFX House Metaphysic AI. There's even a bot on telegram called Forever Voices created by tech founder John Mayer, who has trained the AI to copy the speech and tone of celebrities and has enabled fans to chat with it via the chat GPT API. Grimes's voice is now available to chat with. Myers confirmed Monday afternoon, we're looking into supporting singing, he said, end quote. If you click through on this piece, you can see videos of these various experiments in action. I guess the Twitter algorithm might still

know me better than I think. I've been getting ads for something called the Soul Reader, which is apparently an E-Inc reader headset. Final link in the show notes is to a wrap-up of this from, I guess, around the time of CES. I'm not saying I think the idea of a VR-style e-reader headset is a good idea, but it's certainly right up my alley in terms of something I'd want to give a try. If anybody knows, the company put them in touch with me. Thanks in advance.