The Vergecast - The music industry’s AI fight

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

The Verge's Nilay Patel and David Pierce chat with Switched on Pop's Charlie Harding about the RIAA lawsuit against AI music startups Udio and Suno. Later, Nilay and David discuss the rest of this week's tech and gadget news. Further reading: What the RIAA lawsuits against Udio and Suno mean for AI and copyright  Major record labels sue AI company behind ‘BBL Drizzy’  Good 4 who? How music copyright has gone too far  Samsung just announced a date for its next Unpacked Google announces surprise Pixel 9 hardware event in August Motorola’s 2024 Razr phones are ready to make a splash  Beats Pill review: much easier to swallow this time Ultimate Ears announces new Everboom speaker, Boom 4 with USB-C, and more  Ludacris Performs Free Concert With JBL Speaker: Here's Where You Can Buy One for Summer Apple will soon offer better support for third-party iPhone displays and batteries Distance Technologies augmented reality car heads-up display hands-on Seven things I learned about the Sony car while playing Gran Turismo inside one  Rivian teases five new vehicles, and I have no idea what they are A group of Rabbit R1 jailbreakers found a massive security flaw Meta is connecting Threads more deeply with the fediverse ChatGPT’s Mac app is here, but its flirty advanced voice mode has been delayed Verizon’s new V logo arrives as the lines blur between 5G, Fios, and streaming Supreme Court rules Biden administration’s communications with social media companies were not illegal coercion Tesla Cybertruck recalled again, this time over faulty wiper and trim 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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We're going to talk about it for an hour this week and then an hour next week, minute by minute. It's actually fun because then we get to spend the whole episode debating whether B.B.L. Drizzi can be our theme song legally now that we've said that. And it's perfect. We're going to do a lot of fair use on the show today.

Yes. It's coming. Hi, I'm your friend, Eli. David Pierce is here. Hello. Alex Cranes is on a break. But for our first segment, Charlie Harding from Switched on Pop is joining. Hey, Charlie.

Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. We have a lot of AI, music, copyright to talk about. There's some lawsuits. It's always Drake is involved. That just seems to be the way of the world. There's a bunch of new phone events coming that just got announced we should talk about. There are new party speakers from ultimate years.

That's very important to me. And we got a lot here on. We got a full show before the 4th of July. This is America's technology podcast. But before we begin, I have to issue a correction. There are some words that I only read and I never say out loud. There are lots of those words. Tons of them.

I was a small, nerdy child in the middle of Wisconsin who read a lot of books that the other children in Wisconsin were not interested in this. Just a whole universe of vocabulary words. What is like your main one from when you were a kid? That you were like 26 and all of this. I feel like Camelian is like the classic of the genre, right? Where like half the people in the world grew up thinking it was Chamalion. For me, I was learning that Hermione's name is Hermione and not Hermione. As I called her for however many books I read before I saw the movie.

Did you guys have these that you grew up with? I still, way late. I still don't know whether it's dearth or Darth. and I don't want to find out Fair enough Don't email us about it Don't tell me Don't I don't

And I don't know if it means a lot or not enough On Switched on Pop We have an ongoing Uncertainty about whether it is homage Or homage That's good We have been written many emails That it's both

And so we've refused to use the word From now on out Nitch and niche Very confusing Both acceptable Also have been told it's both So there's a lot of these Yeah.

One of them in recent times is Risk 5, which is, I would say, not a thing that comes up in casual conversation for anyone. Even the people who are working on Risk 5, Bryant just walked around the office saying Risk 5. I said it was Risk V the other day, all right? I'm sorry. This is your correction. You got one on me. I apologize. I don't know what kind of Slashdot nerds are reading it out loud.

I mean, you're my people and you're listening and you know, like, we have a bond here. You're listening to a podcast in which the word is said out loud. And you, the audience, know that I've mispronounced. There's something special there. I want to protect it. I'm just saying, we are the only people to know. How do you know they're right and that you aren't now spreading the truth? Also, good question, Charlie.

Am I being gaslit by an internet conspiracy? I would also like to posit that with all Roman numerals, the letter and the number are both correct. Like when the iPhone 10 came out and it was the iPhone X, it was the iPhone X. I don't care what anyone said. I got a lot of crap for that and it was the iPhone X because it was the iPhone and then the letter X. You call it whatever you want.

I submit that both should be allowed at all times. So I would, I support this in theory. It's Super Bowl Excel. Unless it's more than one letter than. Well, no, but Super Bowl Excel. Like they were like hype for it, right? Yeah, they did a thing. That's your moment.

But I was one of those slash dot nerds who was like, it's Maco is 10. So I'm sorry. Like I, you know? Even though it's not, it's OSX. We got to be fun. Anyway, that's your correction. I'm just telling you what we share as a group is special. And I'm sorry that I push the boundary of it.

But I'm also saying no one says these words out loud. It's just nothing that happens. And I feel nothing. All right. X, CX has entered the chat. What is X-EX in numbers? It isn't a real one. Isn't C in Roman numeral?

C is 100, so that would be 100. It would be 90 and then 10 more. I don't think it's 100. It's just Charlie C, I think. I don't know how Roman numerals work. Speaking of things that are bad at math, AI. That's true. That's good.

It's good. A big week in the AI landscape. A weird week for me, emotional. I'll explain why in a second. The major labels have sued two AI companies that you may or may not have heard of. UDio and Suno. These are classic Silicon Valley names.

We should all be proud. They're music companies. They're AI music companies. UDO is the company whose tool was used to make B.B.L. Drizzi. We'll have Charlie explain that entire chain of events. And then Suno has a deal with Microsoft. It's in co-pilot, and you can ask it to generate music and copilot. pilot. How would you train an AI tool to make music? You might ask, as did the lawyers

at the Recording Industry Association of America. And the answer is you just put a bunch of music in them and you train the model on a bunch of music, including what appears to be a remarkable amount of the recording industry's music, not just music that's out in the world. The companies are sued. There's a lawsuit. The RAA is mad. The RAA is already mad. They say that they asked the companies what was used to train the models. The companies, Suno deflected and said their training data was confidential business information.

It's fine. UDO made the same statements. And then Suno also said, our stuff is transformative and designed to generate completely new outputs, not memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content. We'll get to that in a second because that is actually a very funny claim based on what you can do.

The RAA put tracks in lawsuit, which we will listen to. It straightforwardly can just make Johnny be good in a song called Prancing Queen, which is my favorite. Deeply hilarious. There's just a part of this where these companies knew

that what they were doing was training on copyrighted work. And they kind of assumed that they would get away with it or at least be able to pay the money and move on. Can I ask a very possibly dumb framing question about this? Because we're going to get into the weeds of like a very specific music case. but a lot of what you just described, the sort of basic outlines of like how these companies trained their data and what they're being accused of doing and who's mad

feels identical to me to every other conversation we've had about these AI models, right? Like it seems to me that if you change Johnny Be Good and Suno to the New York Times and chat GPT, we're functionally talking about the same thing. So like I want to get into the deep into this in weird ways, but like is there something different about the fact that we're doing this with music than the fact the way we've been doing this with like the web for the last year or so? Yes. And it's that the music industry is organized and aggressive when it comes to protecting its rights.

So the difference is lawyers. The difference is lawyers. And also the history of music and the internet is lawyers. Like the reason I'm so conflicted about this is that I went and became a copyright lawyer because I. Napster came out when I was in college and I was radicalized because I thought everyone was stupid, which is what should happen when software comes out when you're in college. I'm assuming there are some kids out there today who are radicalized by the presence of new software. But for me, it was Napster. I went off and became a copyright attorney.

I sucked at it. I don't ever want anyone to think I was good at this. As a practicing attorney, I was garbage. But the thing I did was I worked at a law firm that defended other college kids who got sued for using Kazah. against the RAA.A. And the RIA was suing college kids and actually suing the universities to get the IP address of the college kids on their networks who are using the tools and then identifying the college students and suing the college students.

It was my roommate's computer. It wasn't me. I swear. This is like a lot, right? That's just a lot to be like the universities are caving and not protecting their students. All this stuff is happening. And they were running this program at break-even. They just wanted $5,000 settlement so everyone would be scared and stop doing it.

And they won. That worked, sort of. Now we're back to it, right? But, like, the movie industry is not quite as good. It's stopping the piracy as the music industry was. And they ran that program to kind of shut it down and chill Napster and Grokstra and Kuzon, all the other ones. They ran Grokstra all the way up to the Supreme Court. That decision is 20 years old now, the RAA versus Groxter.

Great. Then they did the iTunes store, and they got deals with Steve Jobs and then other music stores, and then they did Spotify and Apple Music and streaming. And all along the way, they have been extraordinary litigious and extraordinarily protective of their copyrights because people have an emotional connection to music that they can trade on. In a way that even Hollywood doesn't,

like, when Disney's like, we must protect the copyright to the Avengers, people are like, go fuck yourself. Like, right, in a way that the music industry, when it's like, you're stealing music. You are making it so artists don't get paid. There's an emotional resonance that argument tends to have. Charlie, I'm curious how you see that changing over time, but they've been good at it and they've run the playbook over and over and over again. Music is also a closed ecosystem of like four big companies.

And so you see things like interpolation where an artist uses a bit of a song from another artist and fans get mad and then writing credits get distributed and money flows inside of a closed ecosystem. None of that is true about the web. None of that is true about the media. So if you are a writer at a media company, nothing. Like, no one cares. Like, there's not some big apparatus designed to make it seem like your work is emotionally resonant and should be protected in the way that the music industry does. So I think that's a huge difference here. The other difference in this is where I really try.

I'm very curious for your take here is that the outputs of these systems are just the songs. Right? And the lawsuits are about training, right? All copyright lawsuit. All copyright is dumb. Like, it's a dumb legal system because it just regulates copies. And so they're like, you made a copy to do this thing, and you didn't have the permission to do the thing with the copy that you made.

So copyright infringement. Weird. All computers do is make copies. We've talked about this so many times in the show. So they're not talking about the outputs. But I think the outputs are so convincing. Like, in order to get to the thing can just make Johnny Be Good, it is obvious that you made a copy of Johnny Be Good. Charlie, what do you think, man?

I feel like the music industry is the one place that copyright becomes part of public conversation in a very frequent way. People talk about when Farrell is borrowing from Marvin Gay. People talk about when Sterey to Heaven might have been copied by another song. People constantly are debating in social media. you kind of sound like you borrow this other person's thing, they should get a credit on it. There's no thing in journalism where someone's like, hey, you know, Neely kind of used someone else's text. Maybe we should give David some extra credit on that piece that Nealai plagiarized. I'm sorry, I'm obviously not accusing you.

This is hypothetical. I don't think specifically, Neelai does that all the time. I have God mode Google Docs access and I just lift everybody's copy left and right. There's just no other creative industry where there's this like a level of actual infringement that happens that then there is this. internal litigious system where these major players are constantly trading credits back and forth, and the public is in on it, often debating whether or not there, the artist that they stand, is making original work. This is a part of popular discourse, and it happens in music.

So it's really different when the music industry is going after AI than if the New York Times is. Because I've just never been in a circumstance where I'm talking about. That article was completely lifted from this other article, but we constantly, they talk about is so-and-so writing their own songs? Right. I'll give you a dumb example from movies. The movie The Dark Night is basically an interpolation of the movie Heat, except with Batman. Yeah.

Right. Like, many of the shots are the same. Christopher Nolan is out there being like, Heat is the greatest cops and robbers movie ever made. Like, I just wanted to make Heat, but with Batman. And then you, like, watch both movies. So, like, oh, shit. Like, dude just made Heat with Batman. And that's great.

And I think everyone's like, this is the best. Like, this is so cool. And then you get to, I don't know, Miley Cyrus is writing flowers, which the lyrics just reference Bruno Mars. Bruno Mars. And people are like, should she have to pay Bruno Mars? It's like, why? Like, why? Like, the melodies aren't, like, she's just saying some of the same words.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. But the expectation is that there should be some economic exchange of value. Well, and I would think then that the existence of that exchange of value is also how you get to something like this, right? where it's not just everybody's sort of yelling and then nothing ever happens. It's that we actually have a system by which this gets solved, right? Where we have people get songwriting credits and then they get paid for it. And there's like the music industry has built ways for all of this to work.

And like you said, is very good at picking fights with those who do not play inside of that system. And so like now I'm just thinking, okay, the difference between the music industry and the others who are fighting against open AI and others like just groups of authors or whatever is not only does the music industry have a system by which it understands how everybody is supposed to get paid that has existed for a long time and everybody kind of sort of understands but also is able to marshal that whole system against anyone who wants to exist outside of that and part of what we've been saying forever is like all the money is on the side of the AI companies like who who is going to be able to run a lawsuit against Google all the way to the end

And there probably aren't that many creative industries other than the music industry that might be able to do it. They've done it before. Yeah. And they have one major concessions. We wouldn't have content ID if not for music labels going after YouTube. Right. And the music labels have gone after YouTube, right? Universal.

This is where Drake gets involved. There's fake Drake that we've talked about endlessly on the show. Shout out to LaserBong, a song that has been just aggressively censored from every major platform. Boy, this is ticked. Not want electronic music about bongs on its platform. Sue about that, record labels. Like, you want to talk about government censorship. Yeah.

All right? The Chinese government is like no bongs for American teens. Just saying it. The piece of that puzzle that's super interesting to me is Universal was mad about fake Drake. They went to Spotify, Apple. They said, don't have this song. And Spotify Apple control the catalogs and their music service. They can pull down.

YouTube is open access. So anyone can upload anything. And then there is contentity, and they have these other copyright management systems on YouTube. But it's not the same catalog control where you can just delete the song, the way that Spotify and Apple Music could just delete the song. So they had to come up with some other system. And YouTube did give the concessions, right? They put out a list of like AI principles that they would work on, about safety, about this other stuff. And a lot of it was we're going to work directly with universal and the rest of the music industry to figure out what tools are valuable and what tools aren't.

and even to allow some creators to, like, do some of this AI music generation because we think it's cool. And then obviously we'll figure out how to pay them. This is implicit if you're, like, co-announcing that tool with Universal Music, universal music is going to get paid. Yes. Like, the heat death of the universe could occur, and Lucian Grange, the CEO of Universal Music, would get paid. Like, he's good at it. Yes.

These two companies did not do that. There's a quote from one of the VCs in Suno, a Rolling Stone profile from March. And he just says to Rolling Stone, if we had deals with the labels when the company got started, I probably wouldn't have invested in it. I think they needed to make this product without the constraints. Wild thing to say out loud. Incredible thing to say out loud. They said the quiet thing out loud. Because behind all of this, they haven't ever really quite publicly admitted that they are using copyrighted works.

They've talked around that in every way they possibly can without denying it. And this is sort of like the big, yeah, this is the smoking gun. Right. And then the other smoking gun, and this is part we should just listen to some of this music, is the output of the models themselves, which is, I mean, let's listen to it and we can talk about it. David, take us through it. Okay, I have brought some sound. Thank you to Andrew and Liam for getting all of this together. We have three examples, and I will just roll through all three. Stop me when you have feelings about this. The first thing we'll do is this is just titled Real Chuck Berry. in Riverside. So let's just listen to this first. By the way, and this is all fair use.

No copyright infringement intended. All right, YouTube. All right, go ahead. But he could play a guitar just like a ring in the bell. Go, go. All right, that's enough. Stop it before the robot sensors arrive. Great song.

I can confirm. That is it. If you don't know that song, one, go watch Back to the Future. Incredible movie that you should just watch. And two, like, stop. Go get cultured. Johnny be good. Chuck Barry.

Yeah. Founder of rock and roll. One of them. Yeah. And now we have a song from Udio, which is not called Johnny Be Good, but just listen. But he can't get tall just like a ring in a bell. Go, go, go, go. It's.

So that one is non-copy infringement, just on its face. Yes. You can't. Nobody owns it. You can't copy the AI work. Yeah. Okay. So that's one.

Next, we have a James Brown. Wait, can we just, I just want to ask Charlie. like a hard question. Try it as a professor of music at NYU, I believe, right? Yes. All right. Professor. Let's say you didn't have Johnny Be Good in the training data, but then you had the

entire architecture of rock and roll that is built on Johnny Be Good. Could you back your way into Johnny Be Good? Monkeys and typewriters and Shakespeare, right? Like, is that the theory here? You don't need, do you need the seed crystal when you have the whole diamond mine of rock and roll? It's a really good question because, you know, If you look at this era of music where R&B, rock and roll, are sort of like rockabilly are all kind of one entity, the music is drawing on 12 bar blues, a very standard song structure. They're often in the same keys that play well on guitar.

They're using a lot of the same kind of guitar licks. They're mostly using pentatonic scales. They're using a lot of the same language. And you might think, yeah, you could just sort of back into that. But the precise rhythms, the exact words. Let's be clear, the copy is worse. It does not sound nearly as good as the real Johnny Be Good. You could never get to that same place without having heard that Johnny Be Good.

I feel confident. And if these two songs, one being a real song and the other being nobody owns the copyright and it's made by an AI, if there were a copyright case made against the copy, it would definitively lose. I have the many of these cases, many of these music copyright cases. are not clear. They're often fought over eight notes, sometimes six notes,

sometimes a general feel in the case of blurred lines and got to give it up. This is a direct copy of the rhythm and the words and most of the melodies. So, no, you had to have heard this song in order to make Johnny Be Good twice.

By the way, if you want more on eight notes and how complicated it is, Charlie and I did an entire episode of Decoder pulling that apart. We'll link that in the show notes somewhere. But let's move on. Let's listen to the next one. It's very good.

All right. Next up, we have James Brown. First, real James Brown. Wow. I feel good. I knew that I wouldn't.

I feel good. Another one where if you're listening to Verchast and you've never heard this song, like, I don't know what you're doing. Yeah. Go listen to switch song pop. Yeah, exactly. You need it very badly. Go to school.

And then come on. Come on home. And now we have AI, James Brown. Oh, it's spicy. Okay. So this one, I actually think it's very fun because it is a little, it's like a little tiny bit further away from it in the way that the first one just is Johnny Be Good, but worse. This one is like one tiny tick further away from being just the thing. This is a lounge band with pretension where everyone's like, just play it the way that can you stop it? All right? Like, we get it. You, you thought you had something. I have one question about this. And it, it actually felt the same way about Johnny Be Good. The way, the way, the way These models work, right? Is you adjust a bunch of data into them, they set a bunch of model weights and then they

like statistically make the next bit, right? They're just sort of like assembling the thing around the prompt, which means they're kind of just assembling ones and zeros to make a sound wave here, which is pretty wild if you think about it. That makes sense with words, right? What is statistically the next word in the sentence around this prompt? When you get to like, what are the ones and zeros of a sound file and you get to statistically hear the next ones and zeros?

That's pretty weird. It's actually a pretty weird way to make an audio recording. And the thing that strikes me about these, this one in particular, but the other one a little bit, the instruments don't sound real at all to me. Those horns sound so fake. Not like synthesizer fake, but almost exactly like what you would expect if you asked a computer to statistically produce a horn section. Like it's almost played again. You're like, just listen to it. It's so weird.

Wow I feel good I knew that I would not Do you hear how weird infinite it is? I knew that I would not So good It doesn't sound like an ensemble

It sounds like this weird synthesized thing where the beginning of the sound At the end of the sound is exactly lined up The sound is Yeah there's this artifacting quality to it This is like the Pope's jacket version of sound Yes It's like you got it close

But all the lines are wrong. Why does he have seven fingers? Right. It's a statistical approximation of a hand, right? But as expressed as a horn section, which is really weird, like, just on its face, and you can people are like, it'll get better and blah, blah, blah. But like, you can, to me, you can hear

a meaningful difference once you know what you're listening for. And it's like, oh, this is a fake instrument. And it's not a fake instrument the way it's synthesizer is a fake instrument. Right. It's just fake. Like, it doesn't make any sense. Over the top of all of it right now. I don't know if this is a

problem, imagine it probably is, is that everything sounds kind of grainy. There's like this top level hiss kind of over the entire recording of any AI output. It sounds maybe equivalent to Neely, those files that you were not downloading in college. But like the really low bit rate MP3s when MP3s were actually noticeably worse. Yeah. That's what these sound like. All of them have this artificial sheen on top that sound very lo-fi. Yeah.

in addition to artificial instruments. Just a side note, I can't listen to the song In Between Days by The Cure without mentally inserting the weird compression artifacts at the high end because I listen to a shit MP3 of that song so many times that the symbols are just forever distorted

in my brain. There's literally a plug-in and guitar pedal called Lossie that is made to recreate the sound of early 2000s M-B-3s. That's very good. So if you need it, I can run it. It's just the elder millennial button basically. So that's the sound.

Talk about the actual music here. Is this, right? With Johnny be good, you're like, that's straight copper infringement. This is weird, right? It's like slant rhyme. What do you think? I think that it's the exact same rhythms. I'd have to look at the notes.

I think they're quite close. They're the exact. Maybe they're in a different key, but they're like the same intervals moving in the same direction at the exact same time. That would almost certainly lose in court. If these were, again, we should be clear, the AI companies are not being sued for the output. Yep. But these outputs, if you were to try to make a case, I'm sure a judge would rule in favor of the James Brown estate because it is the same line. Well, it's more or less the same line.

It's an interpolation of the line. There's slightly different words. But it's the same rhythms, same melody that almost always is going to, that's always going to win. And here the output is proof of the input. Right. They're not suing for the output, but the. The output seems unusually important here in that respect. That it's, it's like if UDO is doing the thing that it claimed to be doing, which is transforming

stuff into other stuff, we have a very different kind of fair use case. But reading through the RAA's lawsuit, like, the thing they did over and over and over was just go reproduce songs that exist in the world. And that's how we're fighting about training. Like, I went through and pulled a bunch of the prompts that they used to get songs. We did the same thing. They're so funny. They're so funny.

Like to get the Green Day song, I think it was American Idiot. The prompt is pop punk American alternative rock, California, 2004, Rob Kavio. Perfect. And that produced a pastiche of American Idiot? Yes. Amazing. To get My Girl by the Temptations. It was my tempting 1964 girl, Smoky Sing, Hitsville, Soul Pop.

Got My Girl by the Temptations. This one, you'll enjoy, Nelai. To get All I Want for Christmas is You by Mariah Carey. The prompt is Mariah Carey, but with a space between each letter so that it's not. Because presumably these things are trained to throw out artist names. So it's M space A space all the way through the name. Contemporary R&B holiday, Grammy award-winning American singer-songwriter, remarkable vocal range. That produced all in what for Christmas is you.

I mean, there's a million of these. What they're proving is that it's in set. By the way, the argument in response that I'm sure we're going to hear, because this is the argument opening I made about the Times lawsuit was, one, no human prompts like this. and B, these prompts are so weird, they represent a hack of our system, which is remarkable. But I'm confident based on how Open A, I replied to the Times, that that is what these companies will reply to. There is one very good one that the prompt was create a song by an artist that rhymes with true string bean that produced a Bruce Springs dance song. That's very good. It's fantastic.

So that question I asked, Charlie, about the, if you have the entire history of rock and roll, do you need the first song, right? Or do you need Chuck Berry? Okay. Maybe you don't. maybe you do, right? Like, I think this third example is the funniest example, because I can't figure how you would get to this without specifically one thing. Go ahead, David.

I'm glad you agreed because I left this for last for precisely this reason. So here is, I won't even spoil it. Here's the real one. Okay, right? Everybody's heard it a million times. That's our boy. That's our boy, J.D. The longest lasting digital career that I never expected.

to happen. And here, here is the AI. I just want to say this was created by a prompt on UDio. This is, in theory, a completely synthetic new work of art. Oh, it's so good. It does sound like a Jason Derulo song. Like my ratic of, does this sound like real music aside? It's even got the little, like, vocal riff at the end.

Like, it's right on point. Like, does Jason Derulo sound like synthetic music? That's your problem. This one's interesting, though, because, you know, Nil, you've talked a lot about the issue that likeness is not copyrightable, right? Yeah. And so there's a question of like, if, you know, we're going back to this hypothetical, there is no suit that's suing over this particular Jason Derillo riff. Someone could just, I could say Jason Derrillo on a song probably, and it's not, you can't copyright that. So you wait, hold on.

Hold on. This is weird. We have this fight the last time with the Metro Boomin tag? The Metro Booman song. So Metro Booman's producer tag was the copyrightable expression in the fake Drake song. If it's exactly the recording of the tag, though, right? Because it's, it's, it was the issue was that they actually kept in the sample of the producer tag. And then reproducing a recording, you can copyright that.

So we could start every episode of the Vergecast with Nelai singing Jason DeRullo. Jason DeRullo. And we will. I think he probably would have a lot of issues, a lot of nasty letters. I'm saying in terms of ways to boost this podcast profile after 13 years, Jason Derulo suing us is high on my list. That's wonderful. But this definitely proves that you had to have had access. There is no monkeys in the back writing Shakespeare that ends up on Jason Derulo.

It just doesn't happen. It's not possible. I don't know. I think if you took the worst impulses of the music industry and fed them into an AI, you might produce Jason Derulo. This one's also important, though, because everything else we've heard has been written by artists pre-copyright Act of 1974. And probably also reflects some of maybe who the lawyers are writing these cases because we're talking about the cases reference Frank Sinatra. Right. And to bring in Bruce Springsteen.

Right. It's like Bruce Springsteen, Mariah Carey, Green Day, Johnny or Chuck Berry. The early ones are all Chuck Berry, like The Temptations. Right. Are you getting at like the judges are old? I'm saying everyone, yeah. And that's actually potentially very advantageous in knowing the judge and who you might go in front of. But then to show that also they're taking all the latest music as well.

We're ringing in Jason DeRolo, yes. Judge, have you heard, Your Honor, are you familiar with Jason Derulo? I want to bring Jason Derrillo into the courtroom. Jason DeRullo. By the way, another total side note, there's an incredible Katie Notapalus piece about hardcore Jason Derulo's stands and what their stand culture is like that I will dig up and put in the show. Oh my gosh. That sounds fun.

It is truly one of the funniest things I've ever read on the internet. Just because A, it exists and B, because Katie is good at finding things like that that exists. Have you all tried running these prompts, by the way? No, have you? Yeah. You can go to Udio and to Suno and you can run the prompts that these lawsuits are alleging. And you don't get the same songs, obviously. But like, if you write Make a Jazz crooner song about New York, paratone voice,

You will definitely get. It's Frank Sinatra. There's just like, there's no other song with Franks. And I don't think that that really is hacking the systems. It's really easy. The other thing I get a lot, by the way, are random prompt. Hey, that sounds strangely like Crazy Town by Butterfly. My prompt was actually, I tried to make a rap about American founder, Thomas Jefferson.

Butterfly by Crazy Town. Yeah. Yeah, sorry, thank you. Butterfly by Crazy Town. If there's a band called Butterfly that had a song called Crazy Town, that would be perfect. in another universe. On UDio, I'm sure there is. I tried to, I did try to hack these systems a little bit, and I wrote, I want you to

write a rap about American founder Thomas Jefferson about not throwing away his shot, nasal male rapper, boom bap, and what I got was basically butterfly by crazy town. Just like total random. Yeah. Oh, no. Tom Jeff never slept, crafted Constitution. Slave on it by day, freedom writer by night, hip-hopite. Oh, God.

dreams like fireworks built in nature but the brute's gotious I'm sorry to I'm just sorry for listening to this we suggest to you that really is butterfly by Crazy Town I think it's also a little bit of who is that song Superman? Yes. Oh wow who's Superman by I'll be your kryptonite or whatever that was a horrible yeah kryptonite three doors down is that who it's by three doors down it's got a little bit of that it's just you can so easily

hear references that are not even the thing that you prompt. And I have to say that right now, if you go to the homepage of UDO, the two most popular tracks are exact sound-a-likes of Eminem and Snoop Dog. So people are doing this. Like, people are trying to make sound-alikes. So the argument from all these companies is, look, training is fair use. And that's the argument for open AI. That's argument for Google.

It's the argument for Suno and UDO. the organization of these cases is different because the plaintiffs are different, right? The New York Times is situated differently than the major labels. People have different emotional relationships with different kinds of work. But this is the argument. Like when Google eventually goes and Sue's opening eye for training on YouTube, the weirdness of that argument is Google telling opening eye the training on YouTube is not fair. Like that's what's going to happen here. It's all the same argument.

It's all kind of in a circle. Wait, so Google can do it and it's fair use. but Suno and Udio cannot do it because it's not fair use. This is the trap the industry has set for itself. And our giant consolidated. Yeah, right? It's like it's all the same VCs and all in all different directions. Kind of like the music business.

That's true. There's that line though. It's like you have to be perfect every time and I just have to get through once. Yeah. It's like I don't remember exactly what it is. That's what's like the hacker creed, right? Like you have to stop me every time all I have to do is I just have to get through once. Yeah.

And that is, that feels like that copyright. situation for AI right now. This is a house of cards. And maybe the Times will win. Maybe the record labels will win. Maybe Sarah Silverman will win. There are so many of these. Maybe Google and Open Eye reach an agreement about training on YouTube and then a bunch

of YouTube creators sue. And maybe they win. Like, you can just game it out a hundred different ways. At some point, someone is going to win a lawsuit that says training is not fair use. Yeah. The fair use argument here, I feel like is notable, I feel like it's quite different than what the New York Times can claim because part of fair use is, for example, the effect on the

potential market, right? And with New York Times, they're going to have to argue, well, you know, you're using our articles and other people are taking that and creating text and putting it on other pseudo-journalistic sites, right? I'm pretty sure the Times is suing for both the output and the training. I see. Okay. So, I think these cases are all different.

This is what I mean. Like, the strategy for one doesn't work for all of them in the same way. Right. Right. In the case of music, the marketplace argument, like, is it going to affect the marketplace? I think they have a very strong argument here. I think the RAA has a very strong argument. They're basically saying, Sunno and Udeo, you are charging users money to make songs

that you are allowing them to upload to the exact same place where we also have all of our songs, and Spotify, Apple Music, et cetera. And so you were actually changing the marketplace for music having used all of this output. But is that not part of the argument you're saying? I think we have to find out how that shakes out. Right. Like, I don't know they got to get assigned to judge, right? Right now what they've done is they put out a complaint and a press release.

There hasn't been a reply to that complaint or an answer. They haven't been assigned a judge. Like, they haven't done any discussion. We just don't know a bunch of stuff. And we certainly don't know where they're going to put their focus. But that part where copyright law is just about making copies. And in the history of computing, every single copy has been litigated down to, again, I bring it up. I think I bring it up every time.

MAI versus peak systems. You go look it up. This is, are you a third-party software seller allowed to load software into a computer's memory without permission? Crazy. A crazy court case. Can you put a disc in a computer and look? load software from the disk to the hard drive without my permission, got litigated. And they lost.

Crazy. They lost. And then we had to get all the way through caching. Our ephemeral copies on your ISPs network equipment or those copies that should be litigated. This is copyright. It's dumb. Like it is a very dumb rationale, but it litigates the creation of copies. So here it's, did you have permission to make a copy to train your model of all these

songs. And every time we didn't have permission, by the way, we want the statutory maximum of $150,000, which essentially ends up being a pretend amount of money. It's got to be bigger than the US GDP. Yeah, it's like crazy, right? Like, did you have permission to copy every song in the world? And if you didn't, every song in the world times $150,000 is what we're asking for. I'm going to run this. If you didn't have that permission, can we do an analysis that says that use is fair use? Right. So fair use is what's called an affirmative defense to copy infringement where you you admit it. Like, I did, I did it.

But under this other rationale, that's fine. And so that's like the winding path here is, well, first, they won't even cop to having made the copies, which is why the music industry is putting out, well, here's just Johnny Be Good. Like, you can't output Johnny Be Good unless you copy Johnny Be Good on the front end, right? Okay, so first we got to get them to cop to making the copies at all, which they claim is proprietary business information. Sure.

Then it's, was that copy allowed? They obviously didn't have permission. This is why they're in a lawsuit? And then it's, is it fair use? And then we run the analysis. And the analysis is like the purpose and character of the use, the amount of the use, the nature of the use, and then the last factor is the effect on the market. Right.

On the output side, I think the market argument is really strong. Right, right. So the question is, does this case, this is something I actually don't understand. Maybe you can explain with your copyright law degree. Is there like some wall between the input and the output in this argument that says, well, there's no marketplace for it. You know that emoji that's like this with the hands? The hands are up. Like, I'm just that emoji right now.

I don't know. Because I was trying to say, oh, well, there's a clear change in the marketplace for songs, which are all outputs. But it sounds like, you know, we don't know what the responses are going to be. But they could say, well, there isn't currently a marketplace for training data in this kind of way. And so it's not affecting that marketplace. But if you, there will never be a market if you just set the rate at zero. Right. Right.

So if you're like, I want really high quality music for my high quality music AI program, I'm going to go pay a bunch of artists. But then these guys come along and steal it. But you've just, you've actually preemptively destroyed the market. You've never allowed that market to set some rates. And I've heard from publishers who are taking the deals with opening eye, disclosure, box media has a content licensing deal with opening eye. I've heard from other publishers, not our company,

that one of the reasons they've taken these deals is to create that market. So the Times can go to court and say this has an effect on the market. Look at this market. Look at the money that's moving around. And so some of these publishers are playing kind of a strategic game to say, we should create a market to help that factor along. I think that's fascinating. But I don't think that the AI company,

I think they thought they could just buy forgiveness. And what's crazy to me is when it was Napster or YouTube or Google search even, buying forgiveness worked because people liked the companies. They liked the products. They liked the experiences they were having. And here people, I mean, if you're listening to this and you have a very different view of this, let me know. But our audience is pretty loud with us that they don't like these companies. And they perceive this as a moral problem. And I think that's just a very different position for them all to be in.

Which brings us to your moral quandary. It seems like you flipped sides from 20 years ago. Yeah, the idea that I'm sitting here being like the RIA-A-A-as-a-a-as-a-a-a-point is crazy. Like, it's bananas. And Sarah Jong and I have been like all day, every day, like, slacking. Like, who have we become? You know, this is like the horseshoe theory of copyright law politics. It's weird, man.

And I think one of the pieces of the puzzle, and I'm curious how you see this in the music industry itself, Charlie. One of the pieces of the puzzle here is that. that the internet just blew the bottom out of the music industry. Like, there's no, there's no way to be like a middle class musician anymore. There's no guaranteed way to make money. You're like, you're playing the same algorithmic game as everyone else. You're beholden to some labels. You don't have any powers and individual against these platforms.

So now this next group of people who's come and take in your work for free and is going to extract value from you. Well, sure. Like, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It's kind of a vibe. But I'm wondering if you see that reflected in the actual music industry. Absolutely. I mean, the public perception here is so different than what was happening back in the Napster era. Back in the Napster era, the labels were enemy number one.

Selling out to labels was a big, you know, they were the worst players. Today, I actually think they've done a very effective job of using their proxy, Spotify, and let Spotify be the enemy. And everyone's like Sony music, who are they like Warner, UMG? Like, they have labeled, but they're not, they're not the topic of conversation of who's really screw and who. Now, they basically help set the rates of what gets paid out in streaming. And it's the distributors now that really are taking all the heat. And so they're actually in a better, I think, place of public perception in terms of within the music industry, I see songwriters,

producers, fans totally freaked out about what's going on. When you go and scan through a lot of the YouTube comments of some of these A-Ied songs, the sentiment is, we are screwed. is over. I give up. I am not learning an instrument. It's sort of, it is not, the future is bright. We're going to create new beautiful music. Like, my creativity is going to blossom. I think that there is a real existential fear that exists within all of the, you know, the AI world. But you're getting into like, our human emotions and the beautiful creative output, hopefully beautiful. I mean, how you feel about Jason, DeRu. Don't bring Jason into this. We got to get DeRullo on the pot. I don't know.

do. That's obviously like reading through the RAA's lawsuit, like that is, they talk about the creativity and human emotions at all. But is the end of this just they're trying to get checks in the same way that there are a lot of folks out there just trying to get checks? Like, well, because part of me, like, I think obviously that's the answer, but also part of me wonders if the labels are feeling the same way that you do, which is that, oh, this is not just a thing we need to make money off of tomorrow. This is like an existential crisis for our business down the road. Or if they're like, Like whatever, this is just a new turn. We have to make sure we get paid.

This is an existential crisis because they are already losing market share to people who are not on major labels. Major label listening is down, right? As an overall share of all listening. It's still a lot of it. It's still the majority of listening. So they recognize that flooding the streamers with more and more independent music has not necessarily been good for their business. And with more flooding, it's just going to bring everything down to everything is valueless entirely. If you own music and it gets played a lot on streaming, there's a lot of money in it.

Like, there's billions and billions and billions of dollars in streaming. How it's distributed is not always fair. And people get upset about this. But they very much need to figure out how to enter and participate in this marketplace. And I think kind of like a content ID system, they want to figure out how to properly license. You want to use Jason Derulo's voice? Jason DeRillo says, yes. And it costs this.

And now we've got Jason DeRello copies and that's okay. By the way, of all of the artists who would let his voice get deep fake to make, like, commercials. Jason Derulo. It's, I'm not, I don't even saying, I've talked a lot of Jason Derulo related-related-ish on this episode. I'm aware of it. I just know that he is a commercial mastermind. Yes. Like, that man's going to make a bag, no matter what happens.

Yes. Friend of the pod, Blake Reed, he is a professor at Colorado law teaches copyrighted, telecom, all this stuff. He wrote me a note last week or the week before, and he said, it's been really smart that I've been thinking about. It's related to what you're saying, David. Copyright law is like a economic system. Right. We create scarcity and then we can charge money for things because you're not allowed to just freely copy them. So if you do something bad in the world of copyright law, the answer is you pay money and you fix it.

And you even out the economic problem that you've created, right? Olivia Rodriguez might have sung four notes of a Taylor Swift song. The answer is Taylor Swift gets a writing credit and then some money flows to Taylor. Swift, and that is the end of that story. And it's just an economic problem that you've solved by redistributing money. AI is a moral problem. This is the thing Blake pointed out to me. It's like, the money doesn't solve the perceived moral issue here.

So the labels might get paid. They might find some business model that let some license the music into perpetuity or whatever. But the thing you're seeing in the YouTube comments, the thing our audience is feeling, the thing I think a lot of artists are feeling does not get solved by money. Right? It's like another problem. And so, like, you see these deals come up and get signed. and whatever, and everyone's like, eh, it's still pretty icky.

Right. And there's something there that I think is important. I haven't quite puzzled it out. I actually want to do something with that idea. If you have further thoughts, let me know what you think about it. But that gap is the gap. Right. We can move a bunch of money around.

Like the VCs and Hollywood and the Recording Industry Association of America, God bless them. They will move the money around. Lucian Grange will get paid. Is that going to solve the other problem? Right? And I think that's really hard. Well, there's two things that musicians need to not fear. One is that because the output of all of these models cannot be copyrighted,

this music is kind of in this weird limbo space. Like, maybe it's going to, we'll definitely find some streams, but it probably won't be synced on television and film because no TV producer is going to want to have a song where they don't really understand the rights associated with that song. And if they have the right to it, And does it also secretly contain a vocal sample of James Brown that has been stolen? So, nobody wants to, any rights holder doesn't want to use this music that can't be used in a weird way. So I think composers and people who are putting stuff on TV and film, I think that there's still very much a business for them until all these much bigger legal issues get sorted out.

The other places that music is about human connection, and I don't say this in some of like wishy-washy way. It's like, there is no fandom for Olivier Arturigo without an Olivera-Rigua. Like, you need the person. The time that the music industry tried to create like an avatar racially, strangely coded, what was that guy's name? It was terrible. They tried to do like their NFT avatar pop star. And it was an utter failure, both because it was completely racist and because why would we develop a relationship to this thing? And so the fandom side, the pop stardom side of pop music, I don't think is ever going to go away.

What about Hatsuni Miko? Right. She's like the cartoon character I just learned that she's officially codenamed Cvio 1 Yeah there are these Avatar characters that are finding some fandoms online

Yes that's gonna happen I still just like that doesn't That's not Olivia That's not Taylor That's not Gaga I'm sorry It's just different All right we gotta end it

They're not Jason Derulo They're not Jason DeRolo Like the bar is like Can your cartoon character defeat Jason Derulo I'll take it That's a good place to end it Charlie

Thank you so much for joining the show I suspect you're going to be back on the show quite a bit as these cases wind their way through the courts. Anytime. All right, we got to take a break. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard.

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All right, we're back. That's enough Jason Derulo for one episode of ourcast. a Jason Derulo story. Yes. Of course. So I would say the single most ethically compromised thing I've ever done was say yes to some company that I can't even remember that had like a 200 person Jason Derulo concert in San Francisco. This is when I had like not been dating the woman who is now my wife for very long. Oh, my God.

Cool. And actualist move was to take. That's your Jason Terulo concert. And it worked. He had his shirt off the whole time. It was spectacular. I hope you tell Arthur when he's older that he exists because of Jason Derulo. You would have been fading away like that picture back to the future if not or the power.

Every time AI copies it, Arthur gets a little bit less solid. All right. We got to do a lightning round. There's a lot of gadget news. There's basically two gadget lightning rounds. Yeah. Let's start three phone events announced in quick succession here. So Samsung announced unpacked.

It's looking like July, July 10th. Yeah, like two weeks. We're expecting some foldables. Surprise, Pixel 9 announcement from Google in August. And then Motorola just had an event and announced the 2024 Razors. Motorola knows it doesn't get to announce an event. It just has to tell you what phones they're up. Well, it had like a big influencer.

I don't think we went because we already had phones. But I could add like a big influencer launch event with some of the funniest photos of like very cool influencers looking extremely bored with like very colorful razor phones. We can get to that a minute. Sounds right. This is pretty early in the cycle for a bunch of phone launches. It is weird. I've been trying to figure out what's going on. And it's very clear that the, the AI race is now happening to everybody else where I think the thing that is happening is everybody is just announcing like the same set of.

12 features and the same new hardware that does the same new stuff. Like, Apple is copying Google, is copying Samsung, is copying Apple. And so now there's this incredible race to just be the first one to say it out loud. And I think especially on Android, there's just going to be so much like AI sameness over the next 12 months as they all rush to do everything they can think of. So the goal, I think especially, is to beat Apple. Like, to me, this Google thing is so transparently just doing this sooner in order to say all the words out loud about what your camera can do before Apple says those same words out loud about what its camera can do. Yeah.

So what's interesting, let's start with Google. What's fascinating to me about Google is they just shook up those teams. So Rick Osterlow, who had all of hardware, now has all of it, including Android. that's a complicated switchup, right? So, like, the pixel team, their boss now runs Android, or their old boss now runs Android. They got a new boss. And the big question for Google, this whole time has been, are you going to do, are you going to try? Are you going to try hard?

And, like, the thing that has kept them from trying hard is they have to maintain the Android ecosystem. In the United States, that's mostly expressed to Samsung, like, you just got to keep Samsung happy. around the world. There are many more players, and Android is expressed very differently. But if, like, the Pixel guy, like, Rick is like, I'm doing it with the Pixel, and that's his first move is the boss of Android.

Weird. Just weird. I think that's weird. It's like that shakeup is weird. And then on top of that, I think Google really wants AI to be the differentiator for Pixel. Right? That big vertically integrated, like only Google can do all this stuff

at every layer of the stack. We build our own chips. like all the way, you want to do that with Pixel so you can body up against the fun. So a really just weird spot for Google to be in. It is. And it feels like Google is trying to do the same thing to both Samsung and Apple, but can only say that it's trying to do it to Apple, which is basically like I think Google very clearly, and they've kind of said this out loud, sees this as its chance to win in hardware, right? that like if they can be the ones to make AI happen and do it well and do it first and do it in the biggest, most interesting, most differentiated ways, that all of a sudden this is the best

new reason to buy a phone that we've had in a really long time. I don't know if that's true. I don't know that there's a ton of evidence yet that it is true. But if it's true and if you believe it's true, everything Google has done sort of makes sense, right? I will remind you that my response to all AI announcements right now are it's probably broken. I don't believe you, including Apple. I want to be very clear about this. Apple has not announced a date for anything yet, for any of the Apple intelligence features,

and no one has ever seen those features in anything but a totally controlled demo. Yeah. There's an increasingly angry rant inside of me about how AI is actually nothing, and we all need to stop it. But I'm waiting a while for that to come out. I mean, look, we can get a computer to produce in a pitch-perfect Jason Derulo tech, right? It's something. I'm not sure what it is, but it's something.

It is something. I'll give you up. So I just think that that one for Google, how they talk about the pixel, how they talk about the pixel in relation to Google's AI capabilities. How much of those AI capabilities come to Android versus just the pixel? There is some kind of shakeup going on over there. And I'm kind of curious how they handle it, especially if they can ship the stuff before Apple. Yes. Yeah, if they do this and they're like, oh, shipping in October, that's an unbelievable width.

But if they can do it, and I think especially if- Well, no, because Apple is going to announce the new iPhones. and it's not going to have Apple Intelligence until, like, next year. So even if Google's, like, shipping in January, they're going to get to market with an AI phone before Apple. Probably, yeah. But I don't know that anybody is sitting around waiting for an AI phone, right? I think we're still at this point.

And this is part of what I'm really excited about is I think there are two simultaneous things happening here where we're going to see in rapid succession, I think Samsung and Google both try really hard to make the case for foldables. Like, it's very clear that Samsung is all in on that train. I think one of the things Google is probably going to do is push the new pixel fold or whatever it's going to be called. I've heard rumors it's going to be called the pixel 9xl fold, which sucks. Just call it the pixel fold too. Everybody, it'll be fine.

But anyway, they're going to try to make this case for this like new kind of phone. I think especially as we get to AI, like you can start to see what you do with the extra screen, what you do with the extra power, all this different stuff. again in the hopes that Apple is just going to announce like a samey iPhone that does samey iPhone things and looks less interesting compared to the Android stuff. I don't know if it'll work, but I think that is the gambit and I think it's going to be really interesting. But then at the same time, everybody is trying to make these AI cases and no one has those yet, I don't think. And even throw Motorola into that, right? There's this question about like, what is the form factor?

And it's going to be like the summer of foldables and flippables and whatever else. and then at the end of it will have Apple. And whether anyone can do anything that is better than last year's iPhone feels extremely up in the air still, which is kind of wild. Let's talk about the Motorola phone for a second. The Razor Plus actually looks great. It does. Because they put a four-inch screen on the front, which is the size of the original iPhone.

It's bigger than the original iPhone, I think. Yeah, it's just a full phone. Yeah, you just have two phones now instead of one phone. It's right. I don't see what the problem is. And they went with saturated colors. Like, honestly, this is the thing I like about this phone the most. The colors are hot.

Yeah, they really are. But they've refined this design, right? This is like the third one of these, the fourth one of these. It's expensive. It's $1,000. But I'm looking at it. I'm like, you know what? If AI can actually do any of the things people say it can do, which I don't believe,

and I believe that it's mostly broken, actually maybe this is the time to get a smaller phone. Right. If I could just talk to the phone and have it do a bunch of stuff for me, like, I don't need all this screen. I'm not looking for another laptop, which is basically where my phone is going right now. It's like very quickly becoming another laptop. I got so much shit last year for writing that everybody should start making flip phones, and history will prove me, right? I firmly believe it.

Motorola doesn't have any of the AI features, and they swat, and the plus they swapped out the ultroid for a telephoto, which is just the wrong approach. Like everyone loves these ultrides and whatever. But these phones are great. And then on top of it, you know, Apple's supporting RCS now. So the I message stickiness. Like, I'm like, oh, maybe I could just like try one of these for a while and like not everyone will be mad at me once a run upgrades to I-SAT. Like, there's something there that's super interesting. But it's not because of the AI.

It's because of the form factor. And honestly, the colors. Like, I just like things that look different. The orange razor is, is sick. I'm very into it. But then you look at Samsung. Samsung is basically just like moving down the line, right? It's like, we're going to get a new Z flip and a new Z-flip.

old and like, Expe, will be marginally smarter, but who cares? Yeah. They've got to deal to use some Google stuff, but not all of it.

And like, lots and lots and lots of questions about how Samsung pulls this off in a way that's differentiated from Google. Yeah, to me the big question for Samsung is if it can, if it can make the ring a desirable thing. We're expecting the Galaxy ring in the next year.

Yeah. And we've been hearing sort of bits and pieces about it for a while. It seems to look good. We got to try a prototype a while back. Like, I have reasonably. high expectations for this thing. And if it's great or even pretty good, that's a pretty solid ecosystem play for Samsung to make that at least I think might convince some people

who have galaxy phones to keep their galaxy phones, which is something. But I do agree. I think there's this bet coming from all of these companies that AI is going to sort of throw the industry up in the air again and everybody has a chance to win it. And, to me I actually think that that may be true but I think this like flipable foldable different form factor change your relationship with your gadget thing might end up being more important and AI as part of that right like better Siri makes it so that you have to look at your phone less which makes it so that you use your phone differently if AI makes it so that we have smaller phones that will be good yeah agree I will take that by the way Liam is reminding me

that the iPhone 1 was 3.5 inches it's the iPhone 5 that had a 4 inch screen so they straight up put an iPhone 5 size screen on the front of the razor. It's fantastic. It's incredible. But if we can get to a place where the phone is more useful because of AI, so now I can carry a smaller, less distracting phone, that would be got. I don't think any of these companies have put those ideas together yet. No.

But they're all going to come out. What's going to happen is they're all going to talk about the camera. This is going to be the summer of AI features in your camera. And they're all going to be the same features on the same kinds of devices across every single surface you can possibly think of. And I'm already sort of bored of it. Yeah, here's what I can tell you. I was out with some teens at, you know, like family graduation party.

They all had little crappy $100 point shoots. And then I'm out with the parents run around around Max's kindergarten graduation. And they're all asking me about my ARX 100 because everyone kind of thinks iPhone photos look like crap. And as AI kind of creeps in and everything gets brighter and weirder. It's weird to see where people are going instead. And I suspect as soon as San Diego. Samson is like more saturation. Like I don't, I think it's going to be weird.

I think the AI photo trend is going to, I think people have more taste than these companies are assuming. I think that's right. All right. Let's run through just some other gadget stuff. We should talk about rabbit really quickly. This company is a disaster. What's going on with rabbit? I just, do we have to?

So I, again, I'm just, this podcast is just me doing a victory lap. I said a while back that I think that like if you made me. forecast whether humane or rabbit was closer to being kind of on a right path to do good things. I would say humane. I was right. Rabbit just continues to be a massive disaster. Basically what happened here is a group of developers and security researchers. I think they called themselves Rabatood, which is very good.

Found hard-coded API keys that basically, long story short, like governed rabbits access to, I think it was 11 labs who did all their text-to-speech stuff. And by having those API keys, those API keys are supposed to rotate all the time so that someone else can't get them and use them to get access to that same data, Rabbit wasn't doing that. And so the researchers were able to just use that API key to get into and apparently see every response ever given by a Rabbit device, which is absurd. And has had the Ravitude apparently said they've had access to these keys for, I think it was more than a month. and Rabbit hadn't done anything, hadn't changed the keys to make them outdated. It's basically like handing somebody your password and saying, here, go nuts, do whatever you want. And it's like, well, are you going to change your password?

And you're like, nah, I'm cool. That company is ever since your review and then sort of response, it's like you're just waiting. You're just waiting for the next shoe to drop that like there never was a lot. language large action model and there never will be like it's too hard to make yeah uh on the humane side at least you know they're trying to like sell it to age one they've like they've shipped a bunch of updates it has gotten noticeably better it's still not good and you still shouldn't buy it but it is it is a better product than it was but i think the the rabbit thing has been so interesting to me these last few months because there is like this running uh is rabbit a scam thing happening

and i think it all amounts to basically like they did nfts dot, dot, dot, feel about that, however you want. And really, I think, what is the old saying? Like, never ascribed to malice, what can be described by incompetence? This is just gross incompetence all the way down. Yeah. And it's like, it's just, it's just brutal to watch. And I, like, I wanted this thing to be cool.

I wanted this company to work. I was pro the idea of this goofy little orange handheld gadget and this thing just sucks. Like, mine is in her drawer and I don't intend on ever touching it again. That's basically how everyone I know. know who about a rabbit feels better. Yeah. Like that cool rabbit animation was worth $300. Yeah, I'm betting that in 10 years it'll be like a fun story to have on the table behind me while we've urged cast.

But until then, I let its battery die and that is the correct way for it to be. You're like, I finally a teenage engineering product that costs less than $4,000. I bought it and I have it. Exactly. And we're good. I want to call this one out. Sean Alster got to sit in the Sony Afila car where they made a little. with Honda, and then he played Grand Tourismo on the screens inside as the car, which is

perfect in its way. But still seems to be the realist version of this car that exists. Right. He's like, here's some stuff I learned about the car, and he's like, the car isn't real. It's mostly a fake car. And there's no guarantee that it will actually have a PS5 in it. But Sony's trying to make a car, and God bless them. I hope it has ULT power sound in it.

Speaking of ULT power sound, I am I think legally now required to call out party speakers. So ultimate eaters announced a whole new lineup, including a new megabom and a wonder boom. And they now have a feature called Megaphone where you can just hold up your phone and talk in your phone and broadcast sound to people, which is incredible. I also on the party speaker update, Ludacris was supposed to play a show in Milwaukee recently and I called out because of the heat. so he just paired two JBL party speakers, wore them with shoulder straps, and did a free concert in a mall. No way. I was singing into a microphone.

I've yet to confirm whether he used a proprietary protocol to repair the speakers or one of the new open protocols, like ORACAST, which is very cool. But just know, there's video of ludicrous wearing a party speaker with a shoulder strap. It's amazing. You do it for the people. Roughing in the mall, which is great. I propose that we write about it to our team and they're like, Neil, you can. That's more or less the response. So that's what we're here for.

I love this. And then real quickly, David, people can go listen to it, but you spent some time on Tuesday talking about service laptops, Windows and Arm. What's the vibe? They seem to be very good. There's like a surprising amount of positivity and enthusiasm that Microsoft actually like pulled this thing off. Tom published his review of the Surface laptop.

when we talked on Tuesday, he was like mid-draft of the review. Published it, he called it Microsoft's best MacBook Air competitor yet, which I suspect if you're Microsoft and knowing everything that we know about how they have talked about these things, is exactly what you would hope for. Yeah. It still seems like Microsoft, like, almost finished the job. There's still some, like, wonky emulation stuff. If you run an emulated app, it seems like it just decimates your battery.

Like, if anything, Thomas, I'm saying this on Tuesday, but if anything, like, understated the extent to which running an app that is not prepared for emulation will just set your computer on fire and kill your battery. But like he got good battery life. One of his pros in the review says 16 gigs of RAM for the base model, which I take as a personal attack. But we'll leave that aside. But it seems like this new line of laptops is going to be really good. Microsoft stuff is coming out. Dell stuff is coming out. Asus reviews are coming out, like the general vibe around this generation of PCs seems to be pretty good. Yeah. I think that the, how good Prism, the emulator, how good Prism is over time is going

to be the thing in a way that Rosetta isn't off the thing on the Mac. Rosetta is the emulator that lets old, like, Intel apps run on the new arm chips on a Mac. And like Rosetta was like so good, no one even thought about it. And now it's not even pre-installed on these machines. Right. If you open an X-86 app on a Mac, it asks you if you want to download Rosetta. Whereas I think Prism on the Windows side, you're in it. Yeah, it's going to be way more important for much longer. And it doesn't seem to be as good.

So I think that's the thing I'm keeping on. It's also just a much harder task, right? Like, there are like centuries of Windows apps that you have to figure out how to run in a way that on a Mac doesn't have quite that same problem. Bill Gates has a stone tablet with a Win 32 app on it. It's true, but it's also, if you want to compete, that's the game, right? Yeah. So we'll see.

All right. We've got to take a break way back with the true lightning around. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling. AHA moments and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of

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Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning. And we assessed that individual. They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain, drops every weekday afternoon.

Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise that you think, I think that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people?

So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary. Third, like that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's dig it. All right, we're back with a lightning round.

David has two. I have three, but one of them is. You've three? I picked three. I bet I know what your joke is. Wait, can I guess what your joke is? Can we do it first? Do you want to talk about the new Verizon logo?

I want to talk about the new Verizon logo so much. If you haven't seen a Verizon redesign its logo, it's the same text. It's just Helvetica of Verizon or whatever it is. They got rid of the checkmark. But now the text is red on a black background. And then the V has like a fire gradient in it. It is nuts. Like nuts.

It's like all the way around. Like it. It just, have you ever seen... Putting a gradient in a logo is such a strong move because it will never get reproduced correctly. Like, every time we do a logo readoutes, I'm like, let's do gradients. And everyone's like, no, like, no. And Verizon's like, screw it. We're doing gradients.

But then doing red on black, I actually think it's a great move because every carrier should be like, here's what we are. We are the demon spawn reconstruction of an AT&T that the United States government tried to kill and was not able to kill, which is what Verizon is. and I think leaning into the fact that it's from hell is like good like let's be who you are now that you point that out it even like you could argue it is kind of like the glow from hell coming out of the bottom of the V that's what I'm saying it's the most got got to telecom load I've ever seen in my entire life and it's like here's what happened the United States government tried to kill AT&T and instead we got two zombie AT&Ts and like just be from hell like that's good like I'm 18, I'm looking for your satanic logo redesign any minute now. By the way, this is true. Verizon is one half of the old baby bells, and AT&T is the other half of the old baby bells.

And you just know they want to merge. You just know that their CEOs wake up every morning, and they probably look out across the golf course at each other. And they're like, one day, buddy, AT&T's coming back. This look of sucks. The Lerathe 2 to me, X and Ferris. Once again, I would like to offer my services as the person who will walk into your boardroom, say that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard in my life and leave for $50,000.

And I would have done that for this because they took like, this, this just reminds me of the gap when they're like, oh, we have this great logo that everybody really likes and doesn't feel dated at all. What if we change it to something so stupid? That'd be so fun, right? And then they didn't. No one feels anything about the Verizon logo. If you have an emotional attachment to any version of Verizon logo over time, let me know.

I'm just saying, I'm super down with Verizon being like, this one reminds you of literal hell. The V just makes me think of, like, I don't know why this is where my brain goes, but like, you know how Logan Paul has that sports drink that I can never remember? Like, I think it's Prime or something like that. This is like if a, if a YouTuber with like a 10th as many subscribers as Logan Paul wanted to make a sports drink, this is what the V would look like to me. Yes. That's all I get is like knock off sports drink.

That was mine. What's yours? My first one is some Fediverse news because we are obligated to talk about it. Some new stuff on threads where now if you have federated your account and you post on threads, not only can people on other activity pub platforms see your post, they can actually like and reply and you will see the likes and replies. Like the way it's worked in threads has been kind of weird before and now there's at least sort of one step of two-way stuff.

If you reply to their reply, it gets wacky. But again, like any inkling that meta is continuing to push into actually. actually opening this stuff up, I find very exciting. And it seems to still be happening that meta cares about this and wants to federate and make all of this stuff interoperate. And I just think that's very cool. Whether meta as a company cares, weird, like, meta has, which is weird ideas, what all of its platforms right now.

They had a half controversy scandal this week where they just keep limiting the political content. Even if you ask it to show you politics content, it just reverts. Every time you close the app, it turns the setting off to show you political content. It's like, yeah, we know you guys don't want news. It's like, it's weird how all of your bugs are in support of you not wanting to shoot. The thing that you keep denying. So meta, the company is weird. The people who are working on this at meta, super sincere about it.

Yeah. Like they are communicating about it. They're posting long threads about it. They've talked to us about it. So at least on that front, the energy of that company is sincerely pointed at, can you make Fedaverse work? Yeah. And I think that alone is bringing a bunch of other companies along.

So like Ghost, the newsletter platform, very sincere about making Federation work. The blog posts of their product manager is writing about figuring out how to do Federation and Activity Pub. Some of the funniest technical blog posts you will ever read in your entire life. It's very good. And this stuff is complicated. It's actually, if you want to like understand what it takes to make all this work, those blog posts are actually pretty good because this stuff is messy.

I mean, we want to do it. it. And, like, you know, like, sending stuff out for a media company is, like, in our DNA. Like, we have RSS. We syndicate to Apple news. Like, we have feeds of content going to all these places. Like, out is super great. Right. All day long. What do media companies love doing? Sending their shit out for free. Work for free? By all means. Like, every media company is like, let's do it. Um, inbox is really hard. Right? The part where I post a quick post to The verge, it gets federated. You hit like on it. And then it comes back to us. super hard. And then making that two-way in turn. So you've replied to my post on some

Aston server, and then I reply to you, and that goes back out to you, and then everyone else can see it. All that's really complicated. And then if you're meta or any of these other companies, you have to, like, be legally compliant in Europe and so it's going slow because it's complicated, but you can just see there's movement and there's still a bunch of energy there. It's not like, it hasn't broken Twitter yet. All that stuff is happening, but I can see how complicated it is, but I can see people are just consistently plugging away. I don't wish I think it's great. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Just the sheer existence of new features on this front goes a long way. And you can see it like in the Fedaverse space. Every time Meta announces anything,

all of my like Fediverse bros on Macedon are like, let's go. It's great. I love it. What's your next one? Big Supreme Court week. Skodas has actually not released a bunch of big decisions that we want to cover, some very complicated ones. But they released one big one that I think is really important to talk about just briefly. There was a group of basically COVID deniers who sued the Biden administration for like First Amendment violations because the Biden administration had been talking to social media platforms about vaccine information and misinformation. And they basically said this is impermissible censorship.

And they got all the way of Supreme Court by way of the Fifth Circuit, which is crazy. The Fish Circuit basically wrote like a fever dream. Like, you know, if the fever dreams of YouTube swamp could have written a judicial opinion, like, that was the Fifth Circuit opinion. Like, I think they called it like the largest coordinated government censorship campaign in history. And it got to the Supreme Court or six three Supreme Court full of extremely hard right conservatives. And they basically are like, what are you talking about? That's the opinion written by Amy Coney Barrett. And she says, like flat out, like one, you don't have standing to sue here.

You cannot prove one set of actions by the government that pulled your post-down. Like, there's nothing here in this body of evidence that says the government censored you. So, like, you don't, you shouldn't even be here. And then she says this other thing, which I think is really important for this whole debate that probably no one will pay attention to, but very important to this whole debate. She's like, you have collapsed the users. of the platform, the platform and the government all into one thing. Like the plaintiffs, the defendants, and you are like, and the platforms in between, it's not just one thing.

Like, there are some people who got hurt this way, who claimed that they got censored this way, by this agency talking to that platform. There are people who say that a different part of the Biden administration talked to a different platform or suited yet a third person about something else. And that's not all the same thing. So, like, the idea that there's a mass-coordinated government censor. membership campaign directed at platforms broadly that is directed at the sit like that doesn't make any sense well that's i mean that that is sort of an animating argument of a corner of the internet uh and it's

it's it was nice to see that kind of roundly refuted basically she was like this is nonsense yeah and like are this supreme court telling that swamp like this is nonsense is pretty notable to me that's not to say look i think government's huge regulations are bad i think everybody knows how I feel about the First Amendment. That's not to say there isn't overreach and weird job-boning. That's what it's called when the government's sort of like pressures a platform they call job-boning. There's a lot of that going on.

For example, conservative Republicans basically just got the Stanford Internet Observatory defunded by putting a lot of pressure on Stanford. Is that cool? Is that a thing you want? Is that a speech? There's like a lot of that going on on both sides. Democrats love a speech regulation actually, the same way Republican. do. Like, all these kids' safety bills are basically speech regulations. Just, we think it's,

we think it's important to protect kids so we can, like, shove a speech regulation into American political history. Weird. Weird all around. I'm not saying I support them. I'm just saying this case was so stupid. And our Supreme Court was like, it's pretty stupid and kicked him out. All right. What's yours? What's your next one? My next one is a small one about the chat GPT Mac app, which is now available to everybody, and I think it's fascinating. Because a couple of people have pointed out to me very recently that one of the strange things about Open AI is it's terrible at making product. That it has what a lot of people would argue is like best in class, extremely good technology. And I can't stop talking to people whose whole pitch is we did it better than Open AI.

And I think the Mac app is weirdly important for ChatGPT because they've been, Open AI has been, pretty like loudly and clearly working on a search engine. I think they have a lot of other ways they're trying to figure out how to productize this stuff other than just like a weird ugly chatbot in your web browser. And this thing where it can, you know, talk to you using supporting documents, like you can take screenshots on your computer and upload it and ask questions about it. That's very cool. It has access to different things in your computer.

This is like if you want to see what Open AI is actually trying to. trying to do and get you a normal person to be interested in. Like the Mac app is a pretty big step in that direction. And I just think it's really interesting. Also, all of its most interesting Scarlet Johanssenie voices still not there. Yeah. I think we know why.

I think Scarlet Johansom is like, no, no, no, no. She's like, I use Windows. Thank you. Super, super going to sue you very soon. All right, last one. And this is, I think, the most important thing we're going to talk about this week on the show. As you know, The Verge is America's foremost cyber truck wiper news source. That's correct.

We've been very responsible on the show. I think you also know we are very precious, very serious journalists. We take our duty of care very seriously. I was there when you first got your hand on a cyber truck wiper, and you journalismed a cybertruck wiper at South by Southwest. It was a big deal. I don't think the owner of that cyber truck enjoyed the practice of journalism. I don't think so. I committed some real acts of journalism with that wiper.

So a few weeks ago, there was these reports that the cybertruck wiper was faulty. And cybertruck's deliveries were being held back, that there were potentially a recall, that it was flapping around, that it wasn't very effective. And we held back. Hundreds of tips arrived out of various cyber truck forums and social media posts. And we couldn't confirm them. So we ran reportedly. We were very calm.

Other sites, I won't name names. Ran with it. Sensational, outrageous, clickbait journalism. They were right. They were right the whole time. They were right the whole time. Now there's an official recall of the cybertrop liper, which has motor problems. It's just flapping.

And then the trim on the back is flying off the cars. That seems worse. It's not good. There's a lot of cyber truck owners in the forums now who are like, we just got had. Like, this is nonsense. Not great for your hundred. $1,000 triangle.

It's the second big recall. The first one that you recall, it's the second big recall. The first one, if you remember, was the accelerator pedal was getting stuck. Which they fixed with like a rivet, right? Yeah, and that's how I would fix it. Sure. I just get some, just not, just riveted in. Point your nail gun at it and see what happens.

Exactly. The trim is going to be fixed with something called the Dijian promoter, which basically make the glue work better and pressure sensitive tape, or they will replace it if necessary free of charge of it. of course. And then the wiper is excessive electrical current can cause the front windshield wiper motor controller to fail. So they will replace the motor.

I'm sure this is not what's happening, but that makes it sound like it's getting like too much power. And it is just, it's becoming like electrified and going a thousand miles an hour. And then it just like launches itself into space. And that's the end of your cyber drug wafer. Well, look, I can't. I won't draw too many connections here, but you will recall one of the one. of the big innovations of the cyber truck is its new 48 volt control system.

Oh, right. Whereas traditional cars are 12. And the fact that the wiper is a victim, like, I don't know if that's the case. I don't know if these things are connected. Whatever. But the fact that you're a wiper, your battery just instantly dies. It's not great. The fact that it's the wiper motor is like they did not need to reinvent this wiper

and they super did. And there are lots of videos of it just flopping. Like, if it's raining really hard, like, its structural integrity fails. Again, America's number one cyber truck news source. We're trying to be very responsible here. I'm just saying we probably could have gone with the intense clickbait. People start reporting this the first time. And we held back, but it turns out it's actually broken and there is a recall.

It's very funny. God bless Tesla for launching this angry triangle of a car. It's very good. By the way, at the same time all this is happening with Tesla, Rivian just stands at like a $5 billion joint venture with Volkswagen and put like five mystery cars since roadmap. The competition is here. Like it, they better fix these wipers is all I'm saying.

And Rivian in particular feels like it immediately went from like cool company, interesting ideas. Can it survive to like, oh, this is, it's coming now. And even the way that like RJ, their CEO talked about it afterwards was like, it's like buckle up. Like, let's go. He's like, I've got some money. I've got a manufacturing partner who can scale really fast. And then Volkswagen gets a bunch of their software, which they're very excited about because they just re-architected the whole thing. RJ is going to be on Decoder in a few weeks.

Oh, nice. So I'm very excited to ask him exactly what I can get an R3X, which is basically what we're going to talk about the whole time. Can I have it now? It's been 45 minutes. Can I have it now? That's how we're going to go through. I like that. All right.

We got to get out of here. We're way over. Thank you to Charlie for being on the show. It's always great to talk to him. I've got to call it. The Verge store is back. We've got new gear. Big mugs, 14 ounce.

It's very exciting. I'm hoping this is the last time I will ever have this stupid tiny mug on the Virchcast. From now on, bigger and bigger mugs every 12 months or so until eventually we have like a like an Ajit pie 60 inch mug. I'm very excited about it. And I forgot it is the 4th of July. So happy 4th. We're off next week.

Yeah. Take a break. Let's some fireworks. Drink a beer. It's going to be great. Keep all your fingers. Be careful. That's it.

That's the Vergecast. Rock 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 Verge11. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it.

We'll see you next week.