The Vergecast - Apple's Intelligence beta and more AI chaos

Episode Date: August 2, 2024

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Allison Johnson, and Victoria Song discuss Apple iOS 18.1 beta. upcoming Pixel 9 rumors, Olympics coverage, AI deepfake regulation, and more. Further reading: The best way to watch the Olympics is on TikTok Apple releases iOS 18.1 developer beta with the first ‘Apple Intelligence’ iPhone features  Apple’s iOS 18.1 developer beta adds AI call recording and transcription A first look at Apple Intelligence and its (slightly) smarter Siri Apple’s new AI features will reportedly miss the iOS 18 launch and wait for iOS 18.1.  Google Pixel 9 event: rumors and what to expect  Pixel 9’s ‘Add Me’ feature puts you in a group photo even when you’re not there   Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra review: if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em  Samsung hypes the Galaxy Z Flip as a great police bodycam Logitech CEO Hanneke Faber wants your next mouse to last forever Microsoft wants Congress to outlaw AI-generated deepfake fraud Google tweaks Search to help hide explicit deepfakes Lawmakers want to carve out intimate AI deepfakes from Section 230 immunity  Elon Musk posts deepfake of Kamala Harris that violates X policy The Copyright Office calls for a new federal law regulating deepfakes.  Senators will introduce the No Fakes Act to keep AI ... Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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who have been forced to work six days a week until they make more money, just have ideas. I'm your friend, Neelai. David and Alex are both on vacation, which I feel is very rude. Liam, also on vacation. So this is just going to be a wild.

Eld episode. Allison Johnson's here. Hi, Allison. Hello. V's here. Hey, Vee. Hello. Let's do chaos.

We've just been left to our own devices. I haven't, I'm like helpless without Liam and David and Alex on this show at this point. Anything can happen. I haven't been left to my own devices to run a protest in years for a good reason, I think. So we're just going to see what happens. Thank you, too, for joining me. We're here for the ride. I'm here for a Saturday, Samsung.

as the local Korean gadget reviewer on staff. I am so here for Saturday Samsung. We're going to get to what the Saturday Samsung is. I would say, up until now, it's been stuff. Samsung will give you a free TV if you buy a TV. It's a real idea generated by Saturday Samsung. This week's is, I think, bananas in a different way, but we'll come to it. There's a bunch of other stuff going on.

The iOS 18.1 developer beta with Apple Intelligence, some Apple Intelligence features hit. Allison, you played with that. V, you reviewed the Galaxy Watch Ultra or as I call it the Apple Watch Ultra. There's some other gadget news. There's a Pixel 9 event coming up. We caused an entire furious news cycle about

subscription mice. I'm sorry. And then because we have been left to our devices, I am trying a new style of lightning around. Still unsponsored. But it's, you know, David Dayton and Liam are not around to put me in a box. So we're going to try some new.

It's chaos. I want to start with, we should just call it the chaos round. Although one of the topics is a little serious. I don't know if we, oh, we'll get there. We're going to get there. We're doing it live, everybody. Let's start with it. There's big news in the week just outside of tech.

It's the Olympics. It feels like the experience of watching, consuming the Olympics is very different this year than in years past. Every other year we run a story that's like streaming the Olympics sucks. We haven't really had to run that story this year. It's because it's on TikTok, baby. I have not streamed a single second of the Olympics.

I'm telling you, I have not streamed a single second of the Olympics. Normally, I'm all over to the gymnastics. But everything I know about the Olympics has just come through doom scrolling, my TikTok feed, and just going like, oh, actually, that's kind of really wholesome. I really love chocolate muffin guy. And I can't really.

remember his name. Yeah, she was explaining chocolate muffin guy. This is a foreign concept to me. It's just this Norwegian athlete who has discovered the chocolate muffin from the Olympic Village cafeteria and he gets increasingly weird with this chocolate muffin. It just like appears in his bedroom and he's in a thong and you're like, what is happening? Oh, that's what I'm saying. Okay.

She really loves this chocolate muffin. You know what's happening. That's true. Yeah, Doomstri and TikTok is a weird way to feel about America right now. This is hard to know how much American pride you have depending on what TikTok scroll you're in. Like at this moment, it's like, I have immense pride in our gymnasts who have crushed it once again. Oh, no, he's talking again. I have immense pride in this.

Like, it's what is happening? That's a lot. We have an entire story about the Olympics in TikTok. Mia wrote it. I actually wanted the title to be the influencer Olympics. But I think that's what people think that's Coachella. Both are fair. Yeah.

I thought it was a good fun. But it is true that the athletes are young, by and large, very young, except for the 51-year-old Turkish man who got a silver medal in shooting with no equipment whatsoever. Great photo. But it's true that the athletes are by and large, very young. The U.S. women's gymnastics team, literally after winning gold, was caught on camera talking about what TikTok they wanted to make. Oh, yeah.

Which is incredible. And so you just have this very native population to this format in this platform in particular. And then there's just the universe of piracy that happens on TikTok. If you want to watch clips of cool sporting events, the TikTok community has you covered. And TikTok's lawyers also apparently have you covered because they don't seem to care about it. And that's like one really interesting way of consuming this, right? You're getting kind of the raw feed by people who are on the ground who speak in the language of video, speak in the language of social video.

And then you're getting a bunch of clips of cool stuff curated by a community that does not care about NBC's exclusive rights to stream the Olympics on Peacock. What I will say is the commentary on TikTok is much funnier because you just have people filming their screen while they're watching it like the men's gymnast, Pommelhorse guy. I don't know any of these athletes' names. I know them by their memes on TikTok. But just like I was watching these two women watching Pommel horse guy and they're like, yes, yes, Peter Parker. Yes, you better work. You better work.

And just having this very sassy commentary about this man doing the pommel horse. And I was just like, this is, I'm watching them watch their TV screen. And they're just better than like the NBC commentary people who are just like, oh, yes, he's on the pommel horse. And he did the skill. So serious. USA. So serious. It's like watching it with your friends, except my husband doesn't give a crap about the Olympics. No, same.

Yeah, pommel horse guy, you can get it. Clark Kent of pommel horse. So I often say that almost every experience I have with TikTok should be a PhD in media studies. What you are describing is a PhD in media studies, right? Like the layers of abstraction away from the thing itself happening, and then the entertainment that random strangers in the internet are providing you, All of that is just very different. And it feels new this time in a way that two years ago, three years ago, at the last Olympics, it, is it two years ago or three years ago? The last Olympics first one. Three.

They were in 2021 because of, you know, COVID. Events. Yeah. Yeah. That's what the Olympics just has always felt to me like this big, serious, important thing. And like, that's kind of part of the appeal. but there's something great about, like, yeah, having it kind of distributed, like, you know, from people on the ground and having more fun with it. Like, it doesn't have to be this, like, big booming voice of, like, NBC will deliver you the Olympics, and that is how you will watch them.

Right. If you put 18,000 teenagers in the middle of France with cell phones, like, something funny is going to happen. Yeah. Right. That seems correct. You just learn more about different sports, because I don't care about. rugby. I love Alona Marr. She's hilarious on Tuk-Tock. She's just all over. My entire feed yesterday was just lesbians crying that Alona Marr was not a lesbian because they were just like in love

with the women's rugby team. And I was like, and that'll be it for a chaos first cast, everybody. We're going to end it here. But that, right, the idea that different communities, different groups can view the thing together in a different way as a community is new. Like that just is a new thing that even like sports Twitter doesn't accomplish, right? It's the native video communication ability of particularly the younger generation that, like, is interesting and new. And that's one thing that's different about these Olympics. The other thing that's different is that actually NBC and Peacock are doing a good job. I must disclose that NBC is a minority investor in Box Media, our parent company.

They are owned by Comcast. I've rarely said anything good about Comcast, so I must disclose. I'm saying something nice about Comcast and NBC. that's the first time, I believe, in history, that that has happened. But they are doing a good job. It is actually like refreshing and interesting to see a big legacy broadcaster, just go for it with their app. And it's not so there's not problems.

There are random ad breaks in the middle of stuff. There's infinite complaints about just how overwhelming it is. But it's like they had every idea and executed every idea. So if you want to just watch, highlights of the sports. You can just watch highlights of the sports. If you want to watch the traditional gauzy 1980-style primetime broadcast with completely unnecessary human interest interludes about how the gymnasts grew up knowing they would be gymnasts, those stories are always the same. It's like when they were four, they're like, I'm going to jump on stuff. Every four years,

you can get that story from NBC if you want. But that's available to you. They have the gold zone, which is basically NFL Red Zone for the Olympics, that they're doing 10 hours a day. And inside of the app, when you're watching stuff, you can just be like, I just want to keep watching this thing that we're whipping around to, which is fascinating. They have multi-view, which is the more standard, just like here's four feeds at once. They have Al Michaels doing AI-powered highlights that you can just listen to. Oh, okay. Which is super weird. Like, it's just weird to have robot Al Michaels being like, the gymnast jumped over stuff again.

But it's like all the ideas. I had someone in my mentions because I was posting my own threads. They're like, all of this is stuff that a normal company would, like, de-scope to hit the deadline. And NBC just, like, did it all. And then on top of it, they're like, all of it's, like, pretty good. Like, Gold Zone is actually really funny. There's, like, very funny NFL trauma inside of Gold Zone. So, you know, there's Red Zone where you, like, whip around all the games on Sundays.

And there used to be two Red Zones. There was the one on DirecTV, and there was the one that the NFL did. Google bought the rights to Sunday ticket. They took the NFL Red Zone. and they shut down the DirecTV Red Zone. So Scott Hanson, who does the NFL Red Zone, is, like, going to do it with Google now. NBC realized they can't just have Scott Hanson 10 hours a day,

16 days in a row. So they hire Scott Hanson and the guy who used to do the DirecTV Red Zone to do Gold Zone. So they're like, back together, not his rivals, but his friends. Like, all, it's just like hilarious that they did that. This is a PhD. This is a PhD. But they had to do it. Like, somebody at NBC had to be like,

all right, let's like, let's do a red zone for Olympics. How will we do that? We should just get all the red zone guys. Yeah. Go get some contracts together, like make it happen. And it all is kind of working. Like, it's working better than if I suggested to you NBC was going to make an app full of Olympics content. Your expectations would be very low.

And it's called Peacock. But they're actually doing, they're doing good. I love that. I'm an Olympics lover. Yeah. I love that. Are you watching a peacock or are you like, TikTok. So I am, I have to put an asterisk set, like, I'm a Winter Olympics girl. And I, I don't know

what it is this year, but I've been, like, shouted down by the Summer Olympics people about how the Winter Olympics is not the real Olympics. And I, I think I just, like, got tired of it. So I've, I've kind of been missing out on, on this year's games. You can't. There's Snoop Dog, like, in between everything, NBC, and, like, the genius decision to have Snoop Dog and Flava Flav here. This is what I mean by NBC just went. Like someone in NBC is like, is there a snoop dog budget? And they're like, yes. In addition to that, there's a Flavav budget.

Like they just like went for it. It's great. I would, you should click around. It's like actually like fairly entertaining just as a tech experience to be like, oh, they like tried this out. Like what if this was all happening? You can kind of see there's news this week that venue sports, which is the big mashup of Disney and Fox and everything.

ESPN, they're going to price it like $43 a month, which is crazy. And it's like, what would you get for that? Yes, Peloton money. Yeah, only you sit around. So it actually might be worth $50 a month. But it's kind of like, oh, this is the bar. Like, if you want to be anywhere close to that much money, you've got to deliver a user experience that is at least this good. Because if it's just a, well, if it's just like a minimum viable product list of things, like, no one's going to pay the money. All right, so that's the Olympics.

It's going on. I'm curious how people are watching it. Send us a note. You know, there's more time left in it. One thing I'll say is it doesn't seem like the action is on Twitter the way it is with other live sports. It is on TikTok. And there's something happened in there that I think is just fascinating. All right.

We should talk about iOS 18. Allison, you got to play, you played with iOS 18.1, which is the developer beta, not the public beta yet. But I think that is getting pretty blurry in that everyone is playing with it. I mean, no one was going to stay away from Apple Intelligence. So you played with it. What do you think? Yeah, it's, it's interesting. I think my kind of big takeaway is like, well, you get, you get the like visuals of the new Siri,

the like glowing border and you can type to talk to Siri. And there's a couple things that are new about Siri that like it follows context better, like between questions, which like Google Assistant has been doing for a little while now. But so that's kind of like setting the stage. and there's these other little things throughout the UI that are like when and if it all gets put together, like that could be really cool. But right now it's just kind of like Siri lights up and then you can rewrite an email and you'll get email summaries in your inbox. And it was just especially funny. Like when you open the mail app instead of the like each, you know, email has the first.

couple lines of the actual email copy. There's just a little summary now. And that makes a lot of sense for like a long email, but most of my emails are garbage like promo stuff. So it just summarizes the promotional stuff. And it's like lunchboxes ship free. And I'm like, didn't need a summary of that, but thank you. That is very much like what's happening with GROC and trending topics on Twitter now.

Oh, no. Where like the AI just doesn't know that something. things are jokes. And so the trending topics are like when I turn black in relation to like people tweeting about Trump talking about Kamala Harris. And it's like, no, that's not that's not right. That's not what people mean. That's just a joke. Yeah, you didn't get it. Yeah. AI is just so sincere about stuff. It's just like, it's funny. We have to laugh about it. So are those the only features that are out yet? It's the summarizing emails and rewriting. I've seen a lot of pictures of people intentionally writing very mean notes and trying to get the eye to make them nicer, which is fascinating.

Oh, the one I did, you know, at the end of Willy Wonka, when Gene Wilder does that, like, fizzy lifting drink thing, like, you stole fizzy lifting drink. I put that into a note and I had to rewrite it, like, friendly. And it was like, hey, just so you know, you can't be stealing fizzy lifting drinks. So that's as far as I got with that. Very amusing to me personally. Yeah, there's little bits and bobs here and there that are escaping me at the moment. It's in the emails. No, photos.

In the photos app, you can use like natural language search. So you can be like, you know, you could search for like food before or someone that you've tagged in your photos. But you can be like, this person wearing glasses. or the food we ate in Iceland. And it's like pretty good. And it comes up with that stuff. So just getting a step closer to like I just search for my license plate because I can never remember.

So like I have this one picture of a chicken that I saw while walking down a street in Brooklyn. So would I just be able to. And I can never like, no one believes me when I told them I ran into a chicken on a sidewalk in Brooklyn. I don't believe you now. And we're going to have to see it. one photo of it.

So would I be able to go to the photos app and be like, find me the photo of the chicken walking on a five walk in Brooklyn with my foot in there? I think that's the most important use case of AI, like at all. Or it will just generate that photo for you

and you'll be able to lie to us. Yeah, you could put a chicken on the sidewalk and then tell people that you saw it and be a liar. So when we saw WWC of iOS 18 was AI everywhere, In every app and every corner, it's just going to make the phone better. And then that was like a one set of ideas.

And then the other idea was, and then Siri will become your all-knowing assistant. Is that the experience of 18.1 in the beta right now? Not yet. It's like, yeah, it's just little Easter eggs kind of threw out. And then the thing that is missing from Siri is like the big stuff where it's like it'll understand the intelligence and the I think, yeah. No, the like, it'll understand what's on your screen and you can ask for it, you know, you can be like, email this photo to my mom and it'll just go do it for you. Like, that is the stuff that's coming. And then the third party app stuff because developers are going to be able to hook into it and let you do serious stuff in their apps. And that's the AI dream on our phones. And that's still the like, no, it's coming because people have to. develop it. They change the user experience of Siri, right?

So now when you open it, it flashes the thing. You can type to it now. Yeah, you double tap. You've always been able to. I learned this, and I didn't know it, V. What's the, how do you do this? Oh, it's an accessibility feature where you can type to Siri. So you can do it even if you don't have the beta.

I just think it looks a lot prettier in the beta because this is another example of going like, oh, accessibility features. Actually, they work for everybody. Why don't we just, like, shine them up and make them useful? Right. Make it glow. It is actually really interesting how many accessibility features have just made their way into the main Apple operating systems. Yeah, inch pinch.

There's other ones. But type to Siri is the big one with 18.1 because it's the thing that takes Siri from being timers and music player to chatbot to assist. to intelligent agent that is taking action across all of your apps. And it seems like they've added the stuff, but they haven't added any of the back end to make it go yet. Yeah, like I'm asking it questions and it's still just Googling stuff for me. I'm like, oh, okay. Well, I could have typed this into a Google search bar instead of a Siri text box. And it seems they've added AI call recording and transcription, which is the feature that I want the most.

Yeah. Because if you're a reporter, not because I'm constantly. spying on everyone. I'm Richard Nixon everyone. I'm constantly recording everyone. No, I mean, we're reporters and like AI call recording and transfer are legitimately useful in our jobs. And it's been, we've just been doing either

people are using their Android phones in our office, which lots of people do, or there's a set of weird third party stuff. You'd be able to just use my iPhone, which is my main phone. It would be really great. So that's here now. Has it worked yet? Have you tried it out? I have not because I didn't put my SIM card in that phone because of ESIM because

of nightmares. But, I did try out. So like the voice memos app will do transcriptions now. And that's not an Apple intelligence feature. Like the recording a call I think is Apple intelligence. Could be wrong. But the transcription is good. Like I am a pixel recorder stand. I always have a pixel phone at a press event. You know, like it is just in my bag. And I put it next to the iPhone. And it was really good. It was like up there with the pixel. So I am personally excited about that. Yeah.

Yeah. I think that that's the one. It's always a grab bag of which feature is the one that hits. And I just know that that feature for at least our little community of reporters is going to hit the hardest. They're going to love it. I'm so excited. Can't wait to cancel my otter subscription. Oh, no.

Yeah. I mean, like, talk about startups getting wiped out. There's like two or three that are going to go away as soon as a sense. it seems like the rest of the feature is not coming for a while, right? Like Mark German at Bloomberg said some of these might not come until late 25 or even 26. Yeah, I think the last thing, I'm so confused on the timeline, but the last thing I read, I think, was that like they would all come to developer betas by the end of the year. But then as far as like being in the public beta, that's 2025. Yeah, it's just a really long, staggered kind of rollout, it sounds like.

And that kind of makes sense. Like the danger with the Siri that can do stuff on your behalf is quite high. You have to make sure it works. We're also just not sure how any of the Apple private cloud stuff is going to work. Like right now, is it clear that all this stuff is happening on the phone or in the cloud or where? Or is it all, we know it's all happening on the phone? So there's a privacy report you can pull down now that will show you. And I think a lot of this is in the cloud.

Like it can't, I wouldn't say that for sure. But you can pull this privacy report that shows you everything over like a certain time period that Apple intelligence is done on your phone. And I guess it's encrypted because it's just like gobbled. I downloaded it. I was like, well, this is secure as hell because I don't know what any of this is. Yeah, it's still kind of unclear. Yeah, I mean, I'm just like the fundamental architecture of this thing is very new. And what happens on your phone versus in the cloud, there's some stuff that Apple's been very clear that Apple happens on your phone.

Like emoji and some of the photo stuff happens on your phone. Some of the other stuff we just, I'm assuming a lot of the Siri stuff is going to go to the cloud because Siri goes to the cloud right now. So it just seems like this world out's going to be a lot slower and more deliberate than anyone anticipating. based on WBC. And it might roll all the way, I mean, late 2025 is very close to when we would expect iOS 19 to be coming out. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I'm sort of curious how that will all play.

But for now, it seems like they've sprinkled in some AI in the places where you would expect it. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It does seem pretty safe. It's like, okay, we've been able to. It's kind of the table-stakes stuff of like, write me an email that's friendly or professional or summarize this for me. And, like, that's all kind of,

they're kind of laying the groundwork with that stuff. And then we're going to get 18.0 first, and then 18.1 seconds. So this is pretty far away, it seems like. Yeah. It's always. Well, the AGI overlords are coming, whether we like it or not.

All right. So that's iOS 18.1. It's interesting that's out now, and they're actually dual tracking it, right? There's iOS 18 in the public betas and 18.1 in the developer betas. and you get the feeling they wanted people to be talking about the AI stuff because the pixel-line event is coming very soon.

And we know exactly what Google is going to talk about a pixel-line event. But we've got to take a break. Let's do that. Come back and let's talk about the pixel line event. We're right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question.

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It's August 13th, basically tomorrow. I'm guessing we're just going to, we've already seen the phones. I assume Google is just going to talk about the software, which is the new trend, right? The phones look the same as ever. And now we're going to, we're going to just make you care about AI is how all these companies are going. Yeah. Just hit us over the head with AI. And we've seen every color of the phone, every size.

Like it's bigger, it's smaller. I don't know. I'm just in this like, all the phones have turned into iPhone design, which is like fine. We've gotten to this like, the edges are flat. Yeah, I mean. Sure. But like, I'm good with this. We've gotten to the same place with the phone design.

But Google's like, I think it's like, Samsung and Google are like, how do we make that's not an iPhone. And the answer is like a weird camera situation. Yes. And it kind of looks like Google's really leaning into the weird camera situation. And I don't know how I still feel about it. I think these are the Rivian headlights of phone cameras. Oh, that's it.

Yeah. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Like you can love them, you can hate them. They're not changing them. Yep. It's, you know, and you can try to convince me that they look like snake eyes. They don't, you know?

No. Just like you can try to. convince me this phone doesn't have a weird forehead. It does. It does. It does. Super does. But it's true.

The colors are more vibrant, which is getting away from what Apple is doing, or at least that's what the leaks indicate. So we're expecting a new pixel 9, a pixel 9 Pro fold. My God, these names. And then a watch, right? Yeah. PixelBuds Pro 2 and a Pixel Watch 3. So that's a pretty complete refresh of the pixel line.

it feels like the fold should be where the action is, but I just can't tell how much Google cares about these devices. That's the question, isn't it? So they moved the, like the fold was on the product cycle with like, it was at I.O. Last time around, right? And then they've like scoched it. So it's more part of the like main refresh cycle, which kind of makes sense.

is like, is this a flagship phone? It's like the most expensive phone you guys sell, but it's a cycle behind, you know, with the like camera hardware and whatnot. So I think it makes sense moving the fold into this position. But it's a lot of phones. I don't know. Do we need this many phones?

Like, how do you think it'll compare to, because, you know, Samsung, you said, like, their foldables are just basically coasting at this point. So are we at a point where, like, the pixel fold is something that is like, yay, competition? Or is it just, it's here? Yeah. I'm still of the mind that the One Plus Open got it right. Like, that is how a foldable, like a book style foldable should be shaped.

And then Samsung is just committed to this, like, remote control shape thing. Every year they're like, it's a few millimeter. They're like, the screen is a few millimeter. there's wider and it still feels like a remote control to use. So I'm curious how different this new pixel fold is because there's a lot of rumors that it's like thinner and lighter because boy was the previous one heavy. But I do like that wider aspect ratio for the cover screen. I don't think it needs to be like quite as wide as the first generation pixel fold.

So we'll see. Yeah. And then the point of all this is going to be the software, right? This is pretty iterative hardware across the board, some minor camera tweaks, a wacky camera bump. But if you're not paying close attention, I think it's going to be fairly hard to distinguish the hardware from the previous generation. It's the software that's the game. So you can see they're adding Gemini sort of to the first layer of the interface. We've got this new thing called pixel screen. which is basically just Microsoft recall, which everyone is scared about, only manual. So instead of constantly taking screenshots, you have to manually take a screenshot. Very good. A very good differentiation.

But I'm kind of into it, right? You take a screenshot. You're like, what is this? Or like, save it for later. There's a chicken walking down the street. Just like, hold on to that for me. And then, of course, there's Circle to Search, which Google is adding to basically everything at this point.

I will coyly say that a friend of mine just put, like, Circle to Search to me in the face the other day. You might imagine who that friend is who was showing me an Android feature. And he dunked on me with Circle to Search, which was pretty funny. But like this is them saying, okay, there's a new way to think about how this phone works, right? There's AI, Gemini is like right here. And then you can just point at things or tell the phone to look at things and it will generate information for you, which is a very Google approach to it. The question is whether that's enough to make people switch.

not even from the iPhone, from their Samsung phones, which obviously are dominant. And of course, because it's Google, whether they'll stay committed to any of these ideas for more than 20 minutes. And I just don't know. It's just a confusing time, I think. Even just Circle to Search, like, and I use it on the Samsung phones I've been testing and the Google phones, obviously. But like, there's just kind of a lot of different ways to get at Circle to Search. are like, so is this replacing these? Like Google lens is still a thing. I can translate something, but like did I need a circle to search that? They just have a lot of ideas. Yeah, it's like to open up

Gemini and like take a screenshot of something or a picture of the inside of your refrigerator. I don't know. There's just a lot of like input methods where it just sort of could feel overwhelming. But it seems like they're in that position that we're kind of talking about with smarter Siri where it's like, okay, like you've made the promises. This is going to make our lives easier, blah, blah, blah. Right now it's just a bunch of like, you can switch the faces in these photos or, you know, put a rain cloud in the sky behind you. And like, that was all nice and everything. But like, let's see something. Like, can they, the screenshot thing?

sure that that would be cool. I'm going to take a screenshot of a recipe and I have literally have the same like spaghetti and meatball recipe from America's Test Kitchen bookmarked in my Google photos as a like favorite as if it's a photo of my child. Like I just look at it that often. I'm like too cheap to pay for America's Test Kitchen and can't commit to writing it down. So I don't know. I think there's a real use case for help me find this thing in a screenshot. I feel like, you know, I work with both of you very close in the audience by net. I know what it's like to work with you, but I bookmarked. I favorite it a screenshot of a recipe that I make all the time versus there's a photo of a chicken that I can never find is kind of exactly the difference.

Yeah. A little bit, yeah. Yeah. That's tracks. It tells a whole story. I'm just making my spaghetti meatballs and being like, where's that chicken? I think about the Brooklyn chicken all the time. It's been so long.

I'm not sure this chicken is alive anymore. I may have the only record of this sidewalk walking chicken. Like, it's important to me that this chicken lives in my memory. Please send us a note and describe how your photo storage approaches. Describe your personality because I think there's a lot in there. It's a rich zone to unpack. On a scale of like one to chicken. On the scale of I'm just scrolling for a photo of a chicken endlessly.

I swear it's here. Speaking of photos, Alison, you've been covering what can only be described as the what is a photo apocalypse. Somewhat closely, you just wrote a piece about the Samsung, like sketch a B and they'll put a B in the photo for you. It seems like the pixel nine is just going to continue moving inexorably down this path with this feature called Admi. that will just add you to photos that you're not in. Yep. That's what it sounds like. I mean, it's only from a leak.

It's only from a leak. It was in a YouTube video that got removed. It was like an ad and it got, it was leaked to YouTube and it got removed. But it just feels like Google has to start communicating about how it will keep our information environment somewhat pure. As it adds these features, that just pollute it more than ever.

Yeah. They were really like tiptoeing up to the line, I feel like, last year. And it was like, well, this is just something that people have been doing in Photoshop for a long time. And now more people have the tools. And then I feel like Samsung kicked the door down with sketched images. It was like, put a chicken in your photo. Put a blimp. Like, whatever you want to do, you can have it.

And then, yeah, I feel like the floodgates are open. And I don't know how, like, how aggressive Google will be. Like, the add me to the photo thing, it seems like there could be guardrails on it, or it could just be, like, pure chaos. And it's an election year and what could go wrong? So many things could go wrong. But I also, like, it just reminds me of this one family portrait I have. So, like, my family's half split in the U.S. versus Korea.

And so we all went to Korea to get this family portrait. it, except for one cousin who couldn't go because he was a dual citizen and his military service time was coming up because all Korean men have to do military service before they're 30. And he's just like, I'm just not going to do it. So he had to get Photoshopped into the family photo. And if you look at it from a distance, you can't tell that he's been photoshopped in. But if you look up close, you're like, well, lighting on his hair is wrong. Coming from a different angle, you can really like, you can just, he's just textually not the

as everybody else. So, oh no. You can tell. You can tell. And it's just like this huge family

portrait and Steve who's like been photoshopped in. So like, I don't know. Not really because we can all tell he's not there. So it's sort of like,

I don't know. I feel like my auntie. My auntie would love to have him in this sort of situation. But I also, you know, having aunties with the power to just add you

into anything, that seems also. So it's not like an AI Admi feature, at least from the ad that we see. It's like a compositing feature, like a very manual compositing feature, where you take a photo and you leave space for literally yourself in the photo, and then someone else holds the camera, and it shows you the old photo, and you, like, go stand where you would have been, and then you take a photo and it stitches all the photos together. So it's very manual in its way.

I'm sure there's AI in the background to handle the stitching and alignment and probably the textures and colors and lighting. Give you too many fingers. Yeah. But the idea that it's going to, it's not like deep faking you to put you in the photo. It's taking another photo of you in the same space and then like making a composite, which is still weird. Yeah. It's one of those features that like as a parent now, I'm like, oh, I completely get that. Like best take where it's like you try and take a picture where there's more than two toddlers in it.

Like forget it. Nobody's going to have a good time. But then it's like, oh, you have all this data and you can just kind of like AI it together into one photo that looks right. So like you get to be in the photo even though you took the photo thing. I'm like, yeah, I'm following along with that. I get that. So it's basically so you never have to add. someone, oh, hey, do you mind taking a photo of us?

Because it's just letting us. No, you have to ask them that, but in a much more complicated and ethically challenged way. No, I mean, like, it's in your group. It's in your group. It would be in your group. So, like, yeah, like you, you two would take a photo and then I would take the photo of you two. And then I would hand one of you the phone and I would go stand next to where you had been standing. And you would take another photo and the pixel would composite those photos together.

So it looked like all three of us are standing there. I hate talking to strangers and asking them to take a group photo for me and my group. So this is really going to help me not grow as a person and not talk to strangers more is basically. Oh, see, I love being asked that question because then everyone's like, oh, you know what you're doing, which is great. Oh, people don't know what they're getting into. I'm like, so, you've got the pixel phone. Tell me about your choices here. They're like, who's this lady?

The second someone hands you a phone and you turn it to landscape, they're like, oh my God, we got a player here. What are you doing? But even that's weird. Like even the thing I'm describing where it's pretty manual, right? It's not just AI deepficking you, but you're making a composite photo. What is a photo? Like, it's not a moment in time. That moment quite literally never happened.

And we're all going to pass it off as a photo. And I've been thinking about this parents thing because Allison, every time you write about it, you put it in there. Like, the experience of being a parent is just trying to, is like, I would like a statistical average of this moment in time that makes me feel good. Right. Is like the goal of like kid photography. Yeah. The reality is too scary. Yeah.

If I could just round off the edges and be like, this felt great. Yeah. Like at several moments throughout this day. Right. Like that would be fine. I don't actually need a pick. pixel-perfect recreation of this moment in time. And it's kind of weird.

Like, that is sort of the goal. And I understand in particular, my parents want that. But it's right next to, are you showing somebody an image of a thing that actually happened? Or are you just creating an illustration? And is that illustration, like, in the age of influencers, Instagram? Is that illustration going to lead to all kinds of weird outcomes, what people's expectations of their own experiences should be like?

Because they don't know they're looking at something fake. And the entire ecosystem, we talked about the show in the context of like the images of the Trump assassination attempt, the entire ecosystem of validating these images, saying what's real, what's not, which ones are AI, which ones aren't, is just not ready. Like, we've talked about it a lot. There are initiatives and alliances and there's labels on meta platforms that are being applied seemingly randomly. But none of it works. No one trusts any of it. And I just like, we're just barreling towards this future of completely synthetic images coming off these phones. And I just don't, it doesn't seem like any of the companies give a shit.

Yeah. I feel like there's this just shared understanding we have, especially with a phone camera. It's like you just pointed out of a thing. You were there. You took a picture. It happened. You put it on, you see it on Instagram. It's like, we just have this shared understanding of like, yes, that was a thing that happened exactly.

you know, like more or less as we saw it. There's, we, we all understand that people pose for photos with big hats on in front of gorgeous landscapes or whatever. But yeah, we're, we're just like coming straight at that moment of like, okay, we're going to have to start asking some different questions when you're scrolling through Instagram or just like shifting your mindset. And it's not even like when I did the sketched image, I did, you know, mess with a bunch of photos added cats and pirate chips and like nonsense to them. And I posted a bunch to my Instagram

like grid and a post. And I went through the, um, requirements they have for like, when you need to add an AI tag. And it didn't even meet them. It was like, you, you can, you know, it was like something about, it was my like my own personal photo and I wasn't, um, the way it had manipulated it was like, it's kind of up to you, you know, put a tag on there. don't, whatever. Like, okay. That's fine. It's all fine.

Well, see, the other thing I've noticed a lot of is even just the basic AI features in phones now, they're over-correcting and over-sharpening. And this is beyond, like, it looks bad. It's like if you zoom in too far on a lot of modern smartphone photos now, you will see that the text is all AI wonky and, like, signs in the background, because the AI has tried to denoise and sharpen and you've gotten some weird stuff. Like really small faces far away

and a lot of smartphone photos now look incredibly distorted and demonic because there's like three pixels and it's like, well, what if I put a face here? And it's like, I don't really know what a face looks like yet. So here's a vaguely face-shaped, denoised thing. I think Samsung phones are more egregious

with this than iPhones, but they're all doing it to varying degrees. And that is already confusing people. Yeah. They're like, these photos are AI And it's like, you're not wrong, but you're also not right. Like, that moment in time did happen. And then, uh, uh, you know, a smartphone interpreted this demon face instead of just not having

information there. It's weird when it kind of comes like comes to the surface where what was the, the photo of the lady trying on a wedding dress where, yeah, in the mirror, she's like making two different poses. Oh, yeah. And like everybody lost their minds. and it turned out to be like it was accidentally in panorama mode or something like that. But just even that is like, you know, this stuff has been going on behind the scenes and just sort of like doing everything it can with that data to make a photo that it thinks you will like.

And then when it kind of goes sideways and is obvious, then it's a real weird moment of like, no, yeah, actually your phone's been doing this. Like, you just, it just didn't look like a demon until right this moment. Yeah. I think there's going to be some moment where the industry, probably not the industry, governments, the EU, they're always doing stuff. They're going to say, if you enable these features, you have to like hard watermark these photos as being partially generated by AI. Because if we don't get all the way there, then,

we're going to end up in this extremely weird moment where only professionals with like cryptographic signatures and their DSLRs uploading directly to Getty are the source of any truth. And I don't think that's that doesn't seem sustainable, right? Like only if you buy this one like a camera and you have a contract with Reuters can your photos be trusted. Like $10,000 camera. Yeah. It just doesn't seem, that doesn't seem like what anybody wants. I'm hopeful that consumers correct this first, that I suspect that some government somewhere is going to have to make a rule and people are going to have to comply because we're just headed. Every time, and I know the Google people are going to yell at me because every time I'm like, what is a photo apocalypse is here because of some Google feature, they're like, no, this is just what people want?

And I'm like, but people also want sugar. We want a lot of things. It's like, what do you want me to do? It always does feel like they have the best case scenario in mind that humans are not goblins who do horrible things to each other sometimes. They're like, oh, no, everyone will use it in the way that we intend, which is the nice way. And it's just like, no.

You only need one jerk. You only need one jerk to ruin everything. Look around. All right. Other reviews. V, you reviewed the Galaxy Watch Ultra this week. What's, uh, what kind of, what kind of Apple Watch is it? A good one or a bad one? It's an Apple Watch Ultra. That's sure. That sure is what it is. But like, I, actually what it really is, is that, like, if you took the Apple Watch Ultra and drew it from memory, that's the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra or if you, like, took the Apple font, it's, it's, it's like the Apple Watch Ultra too, but like in an Android font is just basically what you're doing with this. It's, there's just, I was writing the review.

And then I was like, you know what? It's actually just expedient if I tell you what's different and bullet point everything that is the same because there's too many things that are the same. And then I started doing the major things that are the same. And then I was like, oh, but then there's this. And then there's like all these tiny little features that only a psycho like me would know and remember are on each of the watches are there. Like, oh, you can run against your last race performance. If you're a runner, yeah, Apple did that and watch OS9. And now he's here on the Samsung.

And, like, why is it here on the Samsung? Because I don't know, it was on Apple. They have an orange shortcut button that is a quick button on Samsung and the action button on the Apple Watch. It's the same thing just in a different font. And that's like, you could sum up the watch as that. And also, it's a squircle. And I don't like it. I don't, I had mixed feelings about the squircle going in.

And then after two weeks of wear, I don't like the squircle. It is just too chunky on my wrist. I can fit three chopsticks into the gap between the watch and my wrist. And it's just a chunker. It's a very chunky, it's a very chunky boy. And so orange, like the Apple Watch Ultra was orange. This is so radioactively biohazard orange. It's a little upsetting how orange it is.

It's, I don't have it on me right now, but it looks like a Halloween watch. I actually ended up appreciating the regular Galaxy Watch 7, which I am wearing right now, a whole lot more because I was like, oh, it doesn't hurt me to wear it because it's just too big. It's too big for my wrist. And like the Apple Watch Ultra is also big for my wrist. I can stick a bunch of stuff in here. There's like a gap. But something about it being a square just made it a lot harder for me to wear. When I was testing the sleep apnea feature, it was just like, nope, we can't get readings from you. So I actually had to wear. the other one to get the readings and test that feature out. So it was, it makes it sound bad, but it's actually a really great Android watch. I would say it's like one of the best Android watches that are available. I just, there's a little part of me that hurts that Samsung decided to make an Apple watch in order to create this excellent Android watch. It just felt wrong. It felt wrong to me, because I truly do love how weird and unique the Samsung smart watches have been with their rotating bezels and just

Samsung being weird about how it does health stuff, the ages metric is just completely bonkers. I don't understand why it's there. I was definitely going to ask you about this. By the way, you said age, and that stands for advanced glycation end products.

Yes. Have they yet told you what that means? So you can, there's a whole informational section that you can read in the Samsung Health app about what it is. And it's basically measuring compounds when fats and sugars in your blood oxidize. How is it doing this? Samsung won't say. It just says there's a new three and one active biosensor with more LED colors and whatnot.

And there's a little spectrum and it goes from low to high. And if you're low, I guess you're metabolically younger than your age. And if you're high, I guess you're not your metabolic age. You're measuring this through the skin? Yes. are they they they're not like pricking you the watch isn't like taking your blood no everything is not there's not like a chemical sense it's like in your sweat they're just doing the thing that everyone they're just shining light into your skin and based on like how it reflects back they're just telling you things that have not been FDA cleared it's very experimental like i did not know what this this actual feature was so you know when i was getting briefed on it and i went up to samsung and i'm like

so what is this and they were basically like, well, we have this new sensor, so we thought, why not throw this also in here? This is the X-M-A Samsung answer of all time. And I was like, oh, okay, so like, how do you intend people to use it? And they're like, actually, we don't know. Like, we're just kind of, we just kind of want to see how people use it. And so a lot of the new features are, quote-unquote, AI powered and you're getting these AI insights and they're telling me things that I don't know what to do with because on the one hand, the watch was like, hey, you have not been consistent with your sleep little lady, you should work on that. And then I refresh the app and it's like,

great job staying consistent with your sleep schedule. And I was just like, so which is it? Which is it? Which is it? Which is it? I had one night where I didn't like have my sleep schedule completely perfect. So I guess that's what it was reacting. That's not helpful. And then the age is metric. They're like, well, if you want to improve your score, I'm smack dab in the middle. So I don't know. I guess that means I'm my age metabolically. Who knows? Wait, I just, can I just stick with the age thing for one second? So they have a metric called age. which I think most people know what a metric called age is meant to measure, which is your age. Yes.

Right, that's a well-known label for a thing. And then it measures, first of all, let me just quote your own review back to V. Meanwhile, the age metric is baffling, is what you have written here. Yes, it is baffling. So then it's shining a light through your wrist. and then somehow from what it the reflections of that light it is tracking how

protein and fat are oxidized by sugar and then telling you whether that's a low, medium, or high. And then they're saying that is something called age. And I just want to point out how deeply, meaningfully confusing that is. It's your metabolic age. Right. It's like if they label these things.

Get out of here. But like, but there's no but it's like a new metric. Is this a metric that exists in like the literature? It is a metric that exists in research. And scientists are studying it. But in a consumer watch, it means nothing. It means absolutely nothing in a consumer watch.

So it tells me that I'm like kind of in the medium, neither low or high in the yellow section, so to speak. And it's like, okay, So to improve your age as metric, here's what you do. Does it know how old you are? Yeah, you do. I did put my like demographic information. So presumably if you're, it's, is it all related to your actual age?

It's like if you're green is your metabolic age younger than your actual age? Yes, that's basically what they're telling you. This is the idea. This is the idea. Okay. And then how did they? It's not messed up. It means nothing.

It means nothing. So you doesn't have to be messed up. It's just baffling. It makes no sense. I like new metrics. I'm just trying to understand this one. So someone somewhere is like a 25-year-old has a metabolism of X. And if you tell us for 25 by shining a light from a smart watch into your wrist,

we can tell you of your old. This is kind of a new thing that they're doing in wearables. It's not just Samsung. Like basically, ORA recently did a thing where it's like, we can tell you what your cardiovascular age is. and whether it's aligned with your physical age or not. And so there's just like this obsession with telling you whether you are like physically speaking aligned with expectations

for your actual age or whether you're quote unquote physiologically younger than your actual age or older. I feel like there's a lot of people in Silicon Valley who are drinking the body of the young in order to live forever. And I'm not trying to draw a straight line to the Galaxy Watch Ultra. I'm just saying there's a path. perhaps a winding path. There is.

But it's... I do not want a smart ring to tell me if my heart is dying faster than I am. Well, what do you do? Listen, listen, there are health nuts who want this information. I don't necessarily think it's actually good for their mental health to have this information. But the app was just basically like, hey, so here's how you can improve your age's index, a metric that means absolutely nothing. And you'll never guess what the advice is because it's to eat healthy, sleep well, and exercise.

So I'm just like, oh, thanks. It's always that last one gets you. Never heard of it. It's always that last one. All right. Like all Samsung devices, all this works best if you're in the galaxy ecosystem, right? I'm assuming none of it works than iPhone. What gets worse if you have a pixel or you have a one plus?

Well, D, would you like to have your EKGs and ECOs? A-fib detection, you will not get that unless you have a Galaxy phone. Would you like to know if you have Sleep Apennia? You will not get that unless you have a Galaxy phone because that requires the Samsung Health Monitor app, which is separate from Samsung Health, meaning you're just not going to get that. And some of the AI features are Galaxy Phone only as well, which actually I think that's great for you because the AI was very hit or miss for me. And all the advice it gave me, it would be like, okay, your ages is not ideal. Exercise more.

And then the AI is like, you're exercising a little too much. You should rest because it's affecting your sleep. And also, you're sleeping well and not well at the same time. So it's like cool. Great. Thanks. I feel like it's a big ass to be like, you need a new watch and a new phone. And a new ring and all of that stuff.

So I did last week, we asked listeners to send us a note. if they were all in on the Samsung ecosystem, I'm just going to guess and say that if I asked listeners to send us notes about why they were all in on the Apple ecosystem, we would crash the internet, right? Like, we would just get a lot. I, like, say in a breath, like, I don't think CarPlay is very good, and emails for days, man.

All day long, people are like, how dare you? We asked for Galaxy ecosystem users. We got two emails. Oh. I'm just putting out there. So one person, Sean, thank you, Sean for emailing. They wrote in, they're upgrading from a fold four to a fold six, which is, you know, great. They're doing it because the fold four broke, the warranty on the device is cashed,

and they found a way through the cell phone warranty to get a fold six. Yeah. Right. They try to use the licensed Samsung repair company, You Break, I Fix, that cost money. So then they tried to use their MX warranty. They were denied. Then AMX called Samsung. They said no.

And then they went to cell phone insurance, which they had, and that replaced the only the LemaFold 6. So that is one way to stay in the Samsung ecosystem. It's a nightmare repair journey because the seals in your fold four broke. I would not say this is the type of email we get when we ask when people stay in the Apple ecosystem.

So that's one. We got another one. Thank you so much for emailing from Israel. This one says, you asked to hear from a Galaxy ecosystem user. I am that user, which is great. Truly appreciate that line. They wrote to us, I'm typing this on my Galaxy tab, S8 Ultra. I upgraded from Z Fold 4 to Z Fold 6.

I use the tablet form factor much more than the phone fold factor, which means they have both a Galaxy tablet and they are constantly using their phone in tablet mode. This is the most Android tablet usage I've ever heard of in my time. That's incredible. Whatever you do, everyone's like, that's 90% of the usage. They have a Galaxy Watch 5 Pro, and they're waiting on their Galaxy Watch Ultra. And then they have four TVs, including a frame TV.

They're washer and dryer or Samsung. They have the airdresser, the fridge, the oven, a robot vacuum, a Smart Things Hub, a Blu-ray player, you're my people. And then it says, and something else, I'm forgetting, I'm sure. And then... Are they Korean? And then at the end, it says my husband uses an iPhone and an iPad. Oh, wow.

there's a case study. So like, my family. Thank you. I love this. I'll let me right back. But you've neglected to say why you have chosen to have. So I would love to know why. And if anyone else is out there and wants to send us to note with their list and why, I'm dying to read them.

Because we know so much about the Apple ecosystem and how people feel about it. Trust me, we know so much. You are not quiet. I'm dying to know. how people and other ecosystems feel about it. And it's like really interesting to get these notes. So keep writing in. I'm very curious.

That said, my husband uses an iPhone and iPad is very funny, like deeply funny. Yeah. There's something going on there. I love it. Someone is very excited about RCS. Oh, my gosh. Oh, that's so good. Yeah.

I mean, look, there's a bunch of Samsung devices in this house. Somehow I've ended up in the LG think Q ecosystem because that's our washer and dryer in fridge. Oh boy. God only knows why. And now I'm like, man, I better, I got an update the other. I got a notification another day that new songs for summer were available for the washer and dryer. And I was like, yes, this is the dream. Oh, my God.

Wait, songs for your washer and dryer to play. Yeah, every quarter, LG sends new little icons for the seasons and then issues new like songs. Is espresso on there? They couldn't make phones anymore. They've like, we have to divert those resources to the washer and dryer. There's 50 engineers with Cassio keyboards being like, and did-da-da-d-d-d-d-d-d. And once a quarter, they send them to me.

And it's great. I truly love it. It's incredible. We can't wrap up the Samsung conversation without talking about Saturday Samsung. Saturday Samsung. So if you don't know, this is what we have started calling Samsung's relentless attempts to sell more products, which are all born of the company losing some money,

sales are flat, and they issued an edict saying everyone had to come to work six days a week until they recovered. Crazy. And it's their corporate employees, which means a bunch of suits are sitting around Samsung headquarters on Saturday

being like, summer shit. They're not making any, they're the suits. What are they going to do? So it's only weird promotions. So we have covered, you get a free TV,

if you buy a TV, which is amazing. We have covered you get a free TV if you buy a phone. Also amazing. You would think it would continue in this vein. But no, last Saturday, I guess, burst of creativity. And they decided that the best way to market

the Galaxy Z flip in America would be to say that the Z flip, it's a folding phone. A little flippy guy is ideal for busy police officers to wear his body can. That's so Samsung. Oh, Samson. Oh, it's so bad.

Like, I have put a folding phone on my shirt. I think I'm safe to say I'm one of the few people who's tried that outside of these police officers. It's a dumb idea. Like, it's just not a good idea. But it just doesn't seem secure. Also, like, where are they? Don't they wear vests? This doesn't look like.

They worked, so they didn't just, like, issue them, like, T-Mobile phones. They partnered, there's a post on Samsung's website. It's titled Samsung Technology is helping police authority protect the public safety, which is a lot. They partnered with a company called Visual Labs, which is, quote, a leading body camera solution provider, capitalism. And then two police departments in Missouri did a pilot program with all of this. They have a customized Z-Flip that have a... has like slightly different buttons. The phones can be set to automatically begin recording

when the phone detects a pursuit. Or if you're in the car, when the emergency lights are turned on, and then the video footage is sent to the Visual Labs cloud. Okay. This is all very good. Looking at this, looking at this, that's ridiculous. It's so bad. That is so.

Well, get ready, V, because 25 more police departments are going to start wearing as he flip his body cams. Oh, Lord. Oh, and I was wrong. There's a partnership with T-Mobile. So they are T-Mobile phones. Like, what do you need the rest of the phone on your person for? Like, you just need a camera.

I just like the idea that people are going to, like, flip it open and then, like, make a TikTok. Yeah, yeah. They're going to start doing some dances. And, yeah. No, it's not okay. There's a, there's a, this whole press release is great. but there's just like other benefits, which are basically like this phone has a camera in it.

So one of the benefits is, in addition to their use is body-worn cameras, Z-flip devices can help improve evidence gathering and transparency by clearly documenting details of arrests and other interactions. Absolutely not. There's literally a feature on this phone to draw stuff that wasn't there. Body cameras do not have that. This is such a bad idea.

Draw in the drugs. Put the cocaine here. Put the cocaine here in the dash. Yes. The Galaxy Z Flip, quote, the Galaxy Z Flip additionally functions as a digital camera needed for taking pictures of crime scene evidence,

an audio recorder for witness interviews, and a personnel locator for tracking the officer's location through GPS. This is just a phone. I just want to be very clear. What they have described is a phone. They can tell. Have you thought about using a phone?

On this body camera. Incredible. It's very good. Draw the suspect in the bushes. I just want you all to imagine the high fives this Saturday afternoon. There's like, you know, there's like one slice of pizza left in the box. The cheese is getting a little weird. And they're like, what if we just gave it to cops?

Like, you know it. It was like a lightning bolt moment. They were out the door in their cars. Like, we did it. Days over. Sales are up. You sell 25, 25 police departments. They sold 25 more.

Oh, God. It's very good. It is truly very good. Saturday's Samsung. It never gets old. All right, we should take a break. We are cruising our way to be way over here. We're going to take a break.

We'll go right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster.

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Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. As ever, unsponsor. I feel like the rudest thing David did was leave for the week and not paid a sponsored

lighting, right? Like honestly, if you're going to leave me hanging, bro, like sponsored by David Pierce, you know what I'm saying? Like set the tone. Sadly, still unsponsored. We're still in the market. We get a lot of weird emails from people who are like, I'll do my crypto startup. We're not going to let you do that.

Sorry. That's just not going to happen. But if you have a, you know, like a real company and a lot of money, talk to us. Someone will talk. Not me. That's the other side of the house, but someone will talk to you. All right.

Here's how I want to do the letter in this week. We have like three topics. Two of them just have a lot of headlines. So I'm just going to read all of the headlines, and then we'll like figure out what's going on. The first one, though, is just one headline, and it's our fault. Logitech's new CEO, Hanukkah Faber,

was on Decoder this week. She's the new CEO. She just started like late last year. We had the old CEO. Brack and Darrell on several times. One of my ideas with Decoder is there's more than five companies in the world, and so we should talk to all the companies and pay attention to them. That generally goes well.

And Logitech is one of those companies. I think it's undercovered, right? Like, they're just around. You don't think about them very much. And it turned out under Brack and Darrell, like, how Logitechette work was bonkers. Like, he's like, I have 23 direct reports. Everyone's just allowed to do whatever they want. I buy companies.

I leave them alone. There's no overlap. She's like everyone and have a good time, which is how you end up with them buying like 50 headphone companies and they're all just kind of

doing their thing. They're like, I wonder if they have a strategy. The answer was they do, which is leave everybody alone, which worked just to whatever extent. Bracken leaves Lodschek. He now works for,

I think it's called VF brands. They own vans and Supreme and the North Face. So the guy you ran Lodschek is now the CEO of Supreme. Incredible. We're going to see how that goes. I'm going to try to get him back to be like,

so Supreme. That's the whole thing. And they have an Nusia, Hanukkah, who came from like Unilever and Procter and Gamble. She has this background of consumer goods and like marketing. Really interesting. And I was like, are you going to change this wacky corporate structure? And that was what I thought Decoder was going to be about. Truly, that's what I thought we were in time.

And then we did talk about that for a while. And then she's like, I want to build a forever mouse. And this keeps happening to me on Decoder. I'm like, what? Explain. And she's like, I want to be able to really be able to really be a little bit of a little bit of beautiful mouse. It's like very heavy, very premium, and we'll just do software updates forever, and that will be your forever mouse. Like, you'll just have it forever. And I'm thinking,

well, I've had this mouse forever. Right. Same. Right. It's like 10 years old. Are people replacing mice? No. So very confused. Very confused. And I, you can hear, if you listen to it, the transcript reads one way, but you've actually go and listen to the coder. It's very, you can, I'm just laughing. Like, I'm like, what are you talking? talking about. I'm like, there's only two ways to monetize hardware over time. It is subscriptions or it is ads. And she's like, yep, those are the two ways. I'm like, so you're going to do a subscription mouse? And she's like, I am. And I encourage you to go listen to this because I'm just like losing my mind. What am I subscribing to with a subscription mouse? Right. So we,

it's an AI software. No. What is AI software for my mouse? Yeah. What are you going to change the DPI based on what I'm doing? No, no, no, no. It's not even that. Like you were like, here's an idea. No, no, no, it's worse than that. They're putting the buttons on the mouse so that when you see a field, like any text field in your computer, the mouse will do the prompting for you.

Absolutely not. So they've already rolled this out in Options Plus. No. This is like a thing. This is a thing in Logic Mice today for like newer mice. Why older mice are not allowed to have this software? I didn't even get to because I was just, what? Right?

Like, you can listen to me, like, dewire my brain in this conversation. So I was like, so a mouse. And she's like, yeah, this is how our video conferencing software works. And I was like, but that's a service. This is a mouse. And she's like, yeah, a mouse. Like a beautiful, and I believe she said diamond and crusted mouse. So that was Decoder.

These things happen to me in Decoder all the time. What I was not expecting was the idea of the subscription mouse has just like, it's a news cycle. And it was just like the nucia riffing. But now there's a full news cycle of Lachdeging subscription lines. Oh, no. And I will tell you not since like HP was like subscription printers, have people been this unhappy about any idea that I've ever heard. I mean, there are YouTubers for making YouTube videos about it. I've seen TikToks about it.

It's like crazy. It's like it's living its own little life. People are throwing away their logitech mice. Like, no, no, we're not throwing away. This is really going to be my forever logitech mouse now. I'm never giving it up. Yeah, I will say the mouse and my other computer there is easily 15 years old.

Yeah. Like, you just get one out of the box. I'm not saying it's not a little gross. They get disgusting. But like you're just in an office. You find one out of a box. Someone put it there 10 years ago. Thumb sweat. You can see my thumb sweat on this mouth. It's a radio show. Stop showing people your thumb sweat.

It's just, you know. Describe it for the audio listener. I will tell you, I rarely, rarely get deeply surprised by what happens on Decoder. It's mostly a show about Orcharts, as the listeners know. And then every now and again, these past couple months, the Zoom CEO came on and was. like, we're building AI clones of everyone to put in Zoom meetings. And again, I just encourage you. You can just listen to me, try to respond to that in real time. And look, I'll take the heat on Decoder. People are like, you're too nice, whatever. Like, I'm always trying to be better.

I'm always trying to ask harder questions. Just imagine what it's like in real time to be faced with someone being like, the future of Zoom is AI clones and meetings. And you have to like acknowledge that, like not die. and then formulate a series of follow-up questions that make any sense that, like, tell a little story. It's harder than it looks, is all I'm trying to say. And you have to keep them there. Right, they're dead.

And you have to, right, and you have to keep them talking. It is just much more challenging. And subscription mice, you can hear me just, what are you talking about? Record scratch. Yeah. Oh, God. So I was not intending to cause a full news cycle about mice. It was truly not my intent.

But I hope Lerbiusuk doesn't do something. subscription mice, I tried very hard to be like, I don't think that's a good idea. Please don't. But, you know, Lodz has this really interesting problem. It is interesting to think of their big problem, which is if you believe that AI is going to be important, and we've talked about it in this episode, it might be that you just talk to your phone a bunch more, right? And it just like does stuff for you.

It might be that natural interfaces, natural language interfaces, using the cameras interface, all this stuff, starts to take over from traditional PCs more and more and more. This has been the dream for a long time. There's a, you know, there's a reason that Google and Microsoft, everybody else calls AI a platform shift. And if that happens, like, mice sales go down. Right? If we use desktop computers left and we talk to our phones more or whatever, maybe the, like, PC sales will go down and then my sales go down. And then we just like, if you're lodged, like, well, how do I preserve the revenue?

And you're like, gold-plated diamond-encrusted substructure. mice. And like, maybe that's not the right solution. But you can see the pressure. It's like,

it was a good conversation that I was not expecting just that little bit to, to resonate as much as it does. That said, we have to find the brother

laser printers of mice. Oh, the other thing, there were TikToks about subscription mice and that put me into like people complaining about subscriptions

TikTok. And then I got to one where a very nice, like, young woman was like bitching about her. A very nice young woman.

It got me to one where I think an influencer, she was just complaining about her subscription printer. And all the comments were like, buy a brother laser printer. And I was like, I did it. Like, The verge has accomplished its goal. One thing we stand for. Yeah. Yeah. Buy one piece of harder.

It lasts forever. I think the verge stands for that. All right. So that's lightning round one. It feels like we're on a consensus that we're not going to do AI powered subscription mice. No. Don't like it. Don't want it.

No. Absolutely not. The idea that your mouse is the one that. creates the prompt for open aliens. It's bold. You know, it's bold. It's an idea that sounds like a mouse wrote it. If you're a diehard options plus ecosystem person, right, it's a note.

All right. So, okay, here's the other two where I'm just going to read a bunch of headlines for landing around. The first, very much related to what we've been talking about with photos, there's just a bunch of deep fake news this week. everyone knows it's a problem. We know we got to stop it. And then some people are like, screw it, we're doing it anyway. And by some people, I mean Elon Musk,

who posted a deep fake video of Compton Harris that violates X's own policies about deep fake that were implemented under his ownership. This isn't like there was an old rule that he disagrees with and he's bulldozing it. He made a rule about deepfakes because everyone knows this problem. And then he posted this ad with Harris.

It's like Harris's campaign ad with the Beyonce song, but they replaced the voiceover with her saying Biden is too old. Okay. You know, like in many ways, this is, like, this is just standard political parity.

Like, if I hired Kamala Harris impersonate her to do this, would it be a problem? I don't know. But if you already have the rule that's like, don't do this,

you should not as the owner of the platform do it. So he doesn't care. He doesn't give a shit. But that's where we are, right? It's like already happening. There's already,

these weird moments occurring because of just bad faith actors on both sides, in particular one side. But it's already happening. Then here's the rest of the headlines. Microsoft wants Congress to outlaw AI-generated deepfakes. Google tweaks search to hide explicit deepfakes. So if Google deranks your website or knocks your website for having deepfakes on it, especially explicit ones, search won't show them to people anymore.

They're just going to go away from search. Congress wants to carve out intimate AI deepfakes, which is basically what you... There's a language conversation here about what you should call these. So you might call these like AI revenge porn. Oh. Revenge porn is like a very loaded word for a lot of reasons. So now we're going to try intimate AI deepfakes.

So you carve that out from Section 230, right? So that means right now you post stuff to a platform like Facebook or X or Instagram or whatever. Those platforms are not liable for what you post. That's section 230. It makes the internet go around. And they're saying, no, actually, if you allow intimate AI deepfakes, you are now liable for them.

Like you, and that basically means you have to moderate them. So that's one idea. And then the Copyright Office just issued a huge report on AI and copyright, which they've been working on for quite some time. And their first chapter of this report was about deepfakes. And you can read, it's very long, it's very good. It's very easy to read. We'll link to it in the show notes here.

But they were basically like, yeah, copyright law can't do this. We need a new law. This is a disaster. Here's how we think the new law should work. So we're just at this moment where everyone is seeing the problem, very clearly. And then lastly, in the Senate, the No Fakes Act has been introduced. It's not close to passing, but yet another bill to ban defix. It's a regular defix.

So we're at this point now where everybody sees the problem, right? Google as a platform is doing some stuff to stop it. Microsoft as a company is asking Congress to outlaw it. The government is like, we don't have the laws to do it. Some parts of the governments are saying we need to do it. It feels like this is the first big AI regulation that's going to happen. It feels like it's also the first one that has to happen. Deepfix bad.

Deepfix bad. So, yeah. Yeah. It's like the Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man meme and we're like, what's going on? Who is in charge here? Like, Elon Musk is making rules about deepfakes and then not following those rules. Not following them.

The government is like, yeah, we don't know. I agree. Deepfakes bad, especially the ones that are being used to harass people and intimidate people and bully people. Like, those are, I think, fully bad. And if you read that Copyright Office report, they're like, a lot of our law right now is set up to protect famous people. Like the patchwork of state likeness laws and publicity laws are all basically like, if you're a celebrity and Samma's, uses you to sell refrigerators,

you can't do that. And I say that because that is a real case that happened in our justice system where Samsung made a robot that looked like Vanna White to sell refrigerators and Vana White sued Samsung and won because the robot

looked too much like Vana White. Real case. This is a real thing that happened. Oh my God. And that's like all of our law right now is set up to deal with that problem, which is wonderful. But it's all for famous.

You have to be famous enough so that people can be confused about But regular people have no protection because none of them are famous. So the Copyright Office is saying, no, this problem is going to affect regular people. It's going to affect teenage girls in schools. It already is. It's going to affect teenage boys in schools. It's going to affect everybody.

It's if you don't like your teacher and you can defake that, like all of this bullying that can happen with defakes is real. It's happening now. We don't have the loss to stop it. So then you say we could stop it. But that brings you all the way back around to, well, what if I just hire a Trump impersonator to look at a camera and be like, I'm bad. You know, like, that is straightforwardly, like, political speech. It should be protected.

The line there is really blurry. And I think we're in for maybe a pendulum swing pretty far in the direction of all of that is not allowed. And then over time, we're going to have to swing it back to, well, you should probably be allowed to hire the Elvis impersonator, right? Like, he's dead. Right. But should the Taylor Swift impersonator at the one casino be allowed to act like Taylor Swift?

Like, probably. How are you going to draw that line? It's pretty unclear right now. What will SNL do at that point? Because then the whole thing is just like, man, I don't envy the people at the copyright office or anywhere. We're just trying to like proactively think about how to deal with this because it's a lot easier when it's reactionary when you're like, oh, bad thing happened.

We need to do something. But then to actually think of it in a proactive manner and be like, how are people going to use this? Well, I don't know. We're only as good as the, we're only. only as good as the most unhinged teenage boy in the classroom, just thinking up of the most crazy way to use these things. I was that boy, and don't allow me to have access to computers.

That was a real mistake the whole time. Allison, I mean, we talk about photos and cameras and device makers all the time. You know, Google is changing search to hide explicit deepfakes. Microsoft wants the regulations. Do you see that expressed in the products that they're making at all? It's funny that they're kind of like asking for someone to make rules on what they can and can't do. And if they don't have the rules, they won't stop themselves. Yeah.

It's a weird thing of like, they're all sort of like, well, we definitely agree that, you know, fake bad stuff is bad. So, but here, draw a chicken into your photo. You know, it's sort of like there's no agreement between like, and we're going to flow. down and wait till we've figured this out or, you know, like have some kind of industry standard that these things are like abiding by. It's just sort of like, well, we're just going to run as fast as we can over here. And then like, some people will figure out the laws. Right. See, Alison, I told you the blurry bumblebee, it absolutely can destroy the fabric of our society. You said it wouldn't. But it can.

It all started with the bumblebee. I'll just like use the no-fakes act, which I think by the time you listen to this should be in the Senate. This is basically a reaction to Open AI and Scarlet-Chanceon. You know, the new voice is out with Open AI. It's actually really impressive in like very cool ways. But obviously they made a voice that sounded a lot like Scarlet-Jahanson. She's really mad.

She might sue them. A little kerfuffle. that's a great time for politicians to act. Be like a kerfuffle, here's some stuff that I'm doing. So they had a discussion graph last year. They updated it. They have it this year. And now the goal is to give people a federal property right to approve the use of their voice appearance or likeness and create liability to people who use their voice appearance or likeness without permission.

Okay, that's like a lot. But again, SNL exists. again like Trump impersonators exist I sometimes do a British accent I don't know if I sound a British person who's real I think we're probably in for a moment where the pendulum swings way way too far and that might be fine but we just need to like be alert for it

because that pendulum swing too far might be appropriate given how damaging deepfakes to be especially for younger people especially in these non-consensual intimate ways but it's also like, oh man, like you might go, you might just out a lot of impersonation along the way. And we just, like, don't know the answer yet. But there's a lot of that action happening. It seems like the company.

So that's Lightning Round 1. Lighting Round 2, sort of related to this. Last week, David, I'm just going to call David Affin's. He titled the episode, the end of Google as we know it. And I was like, bro, you just mean search generally. He was like, yeah, I'm going on vacation. He changed it. So we changed it.

But we're basically at a moment, and that was the real thesis of last week's episode, is that the entire web and search market is changing. And we keyed that off of Reddit getting Google to pay it to index the site and then blocking everybody else. So there is some backlash to that, right? That's the closing of the open web. So suddenly the only way to search Reddit with a search engine is Google. Weird.

That's a weird new outcome that we didn't have before. Microsoft has been blocked. Perplexity is blocked. Reddit CEO Steve Buffman, talked to our own Alex Heath this week. He's like, everybody needs to pay me. He's like, Bing, Anthropic, perplexity. We've all been after them.

And then the big quote is, it's a real pain in the ass to block these companies. So he just wants money. And this looks like the future, right? We just want money if you want to build an AI-powered search engine a crawler site. Similarly, perplexity, which has gotten itself into a lot of trouble, especially showing paywold content without paying anyone. They're just scraping sites.

in a lot of trouble about scraping sites even though it's blocked, which they keep saying, like, you don't know how the web works, and I'm always like, tell me. Tell me how you think it works, and they won't say. But perplexity has started cutting checks to publishers. Time, Drispego, which is a big German publisher

and Fortune are in the first batch. I assume there will be more. I feel like I need to disclose Open Eye pays our company, Vox Media, for its search GPT product. You can just put that on the list, right? opening I is paying the Atlantic and a bunch of other publishers as well. New York Times is suing opening because it wants more money than it's presumably been offered.

So like this thing that's like you've got to pay, search engines have to pay to index our content on the open web, is not just like a blip. It's the thing that's happening. Like it is the change that is happening across the industry. Everybody wants to get paid, especially from the new breed of search engines because everybody made the mistake with Google where they didn't ask for money. and now Google's like, we're doing AI anyway, and no one can turn Google off. Right next to that, I mentioned Circle to Search is everywhere. Desktop Chrome is getting something that looks a lot like Circle to Search,

or you see Google's building AI search-ish experiences right into the browser, and then Chrome is also getting an AI product comparison mode, where if you have a bunch of products open in tabs, Chrome will just synthesize the tabs and build a comparison for you, which is legitimately very cool. And at least you have to load the web pages, which is like a good step. Yeah.

But you see the web is just fully changing. Like whatever you think AI is doing to productivity or workers or whatever right now at this moment, how we think about the web and in particular search on the web, it's already, the past is past. Like it's gone. It's in the rear view mirror. We might only be a little bit far away from it, but it's not coming back. like we're just in a mode where you're going to sign up to use a search engine and maybe

it will have a different set of sources than the next search engine based on the deals they have made, which is going to be really weird. It just strikes me every time, you know, Reddit comes up. Is that like we're racing to have, you know, Google wants to answer your question without you clicking on anything? Chatbots want to answer your question. We're like, robots can answer your question. But then also, like, Reddit is incredibly valuable and it's just people talking to people.

Like, that's the thing that, you know, we want to get to in search now where I'm like, you know, I have a question about my plant or whatever. It's like I don't want the AI generated answer. I don't want whatever blurb. Like, I want to read an answer from a person. And it's just strange to me that that's at the center of this like, what if you could just talk. to robots. But the robots need to listen to a person who knows the answer. Yeah.

I mean, and Reddit is itself being polluted with AI generated text. So that's the next turn. And then on top of it, all the new information is a bunch of kids talking to TikTok. Oh, and like, and we found out this week that TikTok is one of the biggest customers of Open AI

because they're using all that for the recognition algorithms and sorting and like. And you're like, oh, this is a weird little circle where there are going to be more silos on the internet than ever before because the open web did not make enough of the people who make the original content enough money. And so, like, no one wants to repeat that. So now it's like, you got to pay us. And like whether that actually comes back to individual Reddors who are contributing remains to be seen. But Reddit itself, Steve Huffin's like, I'm just going to block you. Like, I got my money from Google and now everyone else is blocked unless they pay up.

And I think he can do it because he just needs Google. Like Google's going to send Reddit a lot of traffic and that's fine. You can block Bing and be like pay up or you're dead. And I think eventually they're all going to end up paying because if you have an AI search product that can't look at Reddit, I think a lot of people are like, where's the good stuff? And you're just going to end up in a weird loop. We've been covering this a lot.

Like over a year now, we covered sort of the end of the SEO industry and what that did to the web and all this stuff because we wanted to mark like this is. what it looks like now. And I honestly did not expect it to feel as different as fast as it feels today. Like the end of the search era that we knew is, I think, just firmly here. And you can see even this week, it's just like, here's six more headlines that are just like, here's how it's changing. I keep thinking about a friend who she was buying a new mattress and she's like, I just asked Claude. Yeah, Claude did it for me. Claude? Like, yeah, which is the Oh, which one?

It's not perplexity. It's anthropic. Yeah. Oh, God. And it's just like, my eyes get wider. I'm like, put the little mattress review.com that it was scraping. You know, I don't know. That's a whole mind field, too.

No, my husband does it. My husband is like an avid chat GPT as a search engine user before it even had this project. And he's been using Gemini and all the other stuff. And he'll be like, oh, yeah, I just ask that. This is how I built some code for this. And this is how I, like, Because Google just doesn't give him the answers that he needs anymore. And so, like, I've just been watching them just completely shift how they use the internet over the last year.

And I'm just doing the same things that I have always done. And I just am like, hmm, this, this feels like getting left behind. Maybe I should try using it. Maybe I should try using it more in the ways that they do. But I just run into the same problem as you do, Alice, where I'm just like, I don't like the source that they pull from in these things. So I'm just like, I don't trust randoblogsite.com. Give me the other one. I started randoblogsite.com.

Not our randoblog site.com. Respect your elders. Hey, that was my first website. You know, I've been using chatadjavee for Olympics trivia because I assume that the, you know, like, it's like, what's this cable on the fencer is like, that answer has been the same for a long time. Right. And so you're just like, I have Chattagapy mapped the. action button on my iPhone 15 Pro, and it works. Like, it just delivers an answer to you.

And you're like, I don't even know that's right. Right. It's like close enough. Yeah, and the stakes are low. Yeah, it's like, it's part of the scoring system. I hope that's true, you know? You're not, like, judging the fencing. Exactly.

Judges are not using that. Actually, we have a big feature we are on this week about AI being used to judge gymnastics. You should read that. It's very good. I mentioned that because we are way over. Thank you. We got to wrap this up. Thank you for indulging in Chaos Vergecast to be announced, and that was great.

That was fun. It was fun. It was good times. David, if you're listening, you're dead to me. You never come back. So it goes. Like a goldfish over here. All right, that's it.

That's a Vergecast. That was really fun. Thank you for listening. Back and roll. And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1. The Vergecast is a production of the Vodekyllis.

Verge and Box Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.