00:00:16 ◼ ► I am your Annual Chairman, Mike Hurley, and I have the pleasure of introducing to you Federico Bertucci. Hi Federico.
00:01:13 ◼ ► Yes, everyone I keep talking to about this doesn't know about it, and I'm not sure what this says.
00:01:38 ◼ ► you're voting for your Member of Parliament, and then whoever has the most members of Parliament,
00:01:45 ◼ ► like the political party, they become the governing party, and then they say who the Prime Minister is.
00:01:52 ◼ ► I had no idea, and I can tell you, I do read Italian news websites and watch the news every day,
00:02:07 ◼ ► This election is not exciting at the moment because it is essentially a foregone conclusion what's going to happen.
00:02:20 ◼ ► because it's most likely to be the biggest landslide victory in British politics is the way it's looking right now.
00:02:40 ◼ ► Well, yeah, I mean the Conservatives won the last four elections, which is about 15-20 years.
00:03:07 ◼ ► It doesn't bother me. I've already voted for Labour. I voted by post like two weeks ago or something.
00:03:15 ◼ ► Oh, we moved to postal votes during Covid and it's one of the best decisions I've ever made.
00:03:20 ◼ ► Because now I just get to... Everything just comes to me in the mail and we just tick it and send it back.
00:03:36 ◼ ► Yeah, but this is... It's interesting. I just feel like nobody seems to really know about it.
00:04:07 ◼ ► Well, I mean, obviously it will be world news. I'm a prime minister, so I freaking hope it will be world news.
00:05:01 ◼ ► is, and I should have thought of this, is WebRoulette by impending the folks who make it clear.
00:05:13 ◼ ► but there's a few things that prevent me from using WebRoulette for my six or seven websites
00:05:39 ◼ ► And it's almost perfect because I thought, OK, so I'm going to set up the URLs that I need,
00:06:34 ◼ ► It just opens a new page. And then at that point I need to cycle through all the pages,
00:07:06 ◼ ► Like I always want to return to the homepage of Platformer, to the homepage of Chorus FM,
00:07:17 ◼ ► Like I always want to return to the main view, but WebRoulette doesn't have a concept of like,
00:08:42 ◼ ► Yeah. Kish is customizable. Lots of settings, but maybe just the right amount of settings.
00:10:16 ◼ ► There's an iPad version in TestFlight, but doesn't have all the features of the iPhone app.
00:10:41 ◼ ► A friend of the show, listener of the show, indie iOS developer Jonathan Ruiz created what could be,
00:11:06 ◼ ► Tchee Tabs is a browser for your favorite tabs, and it has exactly the features that I want.
00:11:36 ◼ ► You can see your favorite websites, then you tap on one, and it opens in Safari View Controller.
00:12:03 ◼ ► My only issue, and this is in TaskFlight, and I'm guessing that Jonathan listens to the show, given the existence of this app.
00:12:19 ◼ ► My only problem now is that, and this is actually like, it's not even Jonathan's fault, to be fair.
00:12:39 ◼ ► I'm aware of this mostly because I know that a lot of people moved to Ghost from Substack.
00:13:02 ◼ ► However, those subscriptions, those membership programs, they don't work like Memberful, for example, which is what we use at Mac Stories and Relay,
00:13:14 ◼ ► You sign instead with Ghost, you sign up for those memberships and you never create an account.
00:13:28 ◼ ► Say, on a new device or with teachy tabs in a new browser, you need to enter your email address and you get emailed a login link.
00:13:53 ◼ ► Now, the problem is that because teachy tabs uses Safari View Controller, Safari View Controller doesn't let you paste a login link.
00:14:06 ◼ ► So for me right now, there is no way to log into Platformer or Birch Tree because they use Ghost with my login link with teachy tabs,
00:14:32 ◼ ► So, yeah, I don't know how Jonathan could fix this, given the limitations of Safari View Controller.
00:14:54 ◼ ► And Jonathan, I should mention, is also the developer of an excellent utility called Bridges, which is a very niche app for like managing links in all kinds of formats.
00:15:06 ◼ ► Like you can copy links with rich text, markdown HTML JSON even, if you need to do that.
00:15:15 ◼ ► So I have really high hopes for teachy tabs to become like a very niche web browser utility that also happens to have shortcuts integration.
00:15:35 ◼ ► But there are, yeah, as you can tell, there have been developments for my six or seven tabs.
00:15:39 ◼ ► And I'm glad I brought this issue to the show because now, look, we're making the economy move, right?
00:16:20 ◼ ► I have now swapped over to my UK Apple ID and it's going the way I thought it was going to go, which is very sad.
00:16:28 ◼ ► I have to delete and redownload every app that I want to use because otherwise I won't get updates on them anymore.
00:16:54 ◼ ► You know, I had the thought today of like, should I ever maybe consider stop using my US Apple ID, just consolidate everything into an Italian Apple ID?
00:17:11 ◼ ► And then I thought about it for 30 seconds while I was driving and realized, no, I'm never going to do it.
00:17:29 ◼ ► But like if you at least want to see what Apple intelligence features are like, right, as part of your review process, you may need your US Apple ID to do that.
00:17:40 ◼ ► Or any potential feature, right? Because it's not even just that if you want to use screen mirroring, maybe you'd need your US Apple ID to do that.
00:18:00 ◼ ► I'm especially looking forward to my solo top adventures that will be in a couple of weeks time.
00:18:12 ◼ ► Because I think that is when I think the 12th of July is the Vision Pro launch day in the UK.
00:18:20 ◼ ► But yeah, I will now start kind of plugging away on moving my Vision Pro over to be like just a UK Vision Pro, which I'm excited about.
00:18:28 ◼ ► I wanted to mention, highlighting journalism on Mastodon, it's a post that John had on MacStories.
00:18:36 ◼ ► It seems like that you guys are included in like some kind of beta program with official Mastodon about...
00:18:47 ◼ ► Essentially, any link that is posted on Mastodon can have a byline associated with a Mastodon user.
00:18:57 ◼ ► So even if it's shared from an account that isn't theirs, they will always be tagged to that link. Is that correct?
00:19:22 ◼ ► So it basically identifies for each link the creator's profile on the Fediverse. That's the idea.
00:19:31 ◼ ► So whenever John publishes something on MacStories, when that link gets shared on Mastodon, and on versions of...
00:19:51 ◼ ► But once that shows up, for any link, you will see John's profile on the official Mastodon web app, in the official Mastodon app.
00:20:06 ◼ ► In fact, I believe Icecubes, the third-party Mastodon client, already rolled out an update today with support for the Fed for the creator profile.
00:20:38 ◼ ► You know? Like, App Review should take longer than it takes to get these features implemented. It's incredible.
00:20:45 ◼ ► Yeah. So yeah, I think this is a very cool idea, and I'm obviously grateful that we were included along with The Verge and MacRumors in this initial rollout.
00:20:55 ◼ ► And yeah, I mean, this is also already rolled out on mastodon.social, so any Mac stories link there will show you the profile of the author of Mac stories, and when you click it, you will find our respective Mastodon account.
00:21:11 ◼ ► In the future, it sounds like Mastodon is working on a way to, instead of having to manually review every website and whitelist every website, to just have a self-serving mechanism where I assume publications will be able to verify,
00:21:26 ◼ ► "Yes, we want to verify that the authors of this article are indeed okay with having the creator tag show up on Mastodon with these links."
00:21:42 ◼ ► You feel like they kind of have to make that, right? Like, it seems counter to Mastodon's whole thing.
00:21:47 ◼ ► No, no, no. They said, "Yeah, we're going to do it." Like, it needs to be automated so that it would be useless otherwise.
00:21:57 ◼ ► So yeah, go check it out. mastodon.social. You can see it in ice cubes. You can see it, and obviously it depends on which instance you're on.
00:22:06 ◼ ► If you are on the nightly Mastodon releases, that should be fully supported. Otherwise, you just got to wait a little.
00:22:13 ◼ ► I don't know what's going to happen to mic.social. You know what I mean? That thing out there, it's just living its life.
00:22:34 ◼ ► Yeah, which is nice because I once got an email where it was like, "Update." And I was like, "I don't know. I'm not the master host people. I don't know what to do."
00:22:42 ◼ ► And they're like, "Don't worry. We got this for you." I'm like, "Yay!" I didn't know what to do. Luckily, they handled it.
00:22:54 ◼ ► The less your business spends on operations, multiple systems, and delivering your product or service, the more margin you have and the more money you keep.
00:23:02 ◼ ► But with higher expenses on materials, employees, distribution, and borrowing, everything costs more.
00:23:08 ◼ ► So to reduce costs and headaches, smart businesses are graduating to NetSuite by Oracle.
00:23:13 ◼ ► NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform and one source of truth.
00:23:22 ◼ ► With NetSuite, you reduce IT costs because NetSuite lives in the cloud with no hardware required. You can access it from anywhere.
00:23:29 ◼ ► So you cut the cost of maintaining multiple systems because you've got one unified business management suite.
00:23:34 ◼ ► You improve efficiency by bringing all your major business processes into one platform, slashing manual tasks and errors.
00:23:41 ◼ ► Over 37,000 companies have already made the move. So do the math. See how you'll profit from NetSuite.
00:23:48 ◼ ► This just sounds great. If I had the kind of company where I had to worry about all of these separate things, for sure.
00:23:55 ◼ ► Like if you had lots of employees and all this kind of stuff, I would want it all in one platform.
00:24:00 ◼ ► Because I've been inside of corporations where this stuff is split up and it always leads to either duplication or errors.
00:24:07 ◼ ► By popular demand, NetSuite has extended its one-of-a-kind flexible finance program for a few more weeks.
00:24:34 ◼ ► Because I know that talking about AI and feelings about AI is something that a lot of people don't want right now.
00:24:43 ◼ ► Because it's, you know, it's like it's pseudo-political or just political depending on how you approach it.
00:24:57 ◼ ► And also it's just like a conversation that kind of just continues to move and revolve without significantly changing in any way.
00:25:14 ◼ ► And the reason we're talking about it today is that the Max Stories team, I think namely you and Jon, have produced an open letter on AI.
00:25:26 ◼ ► You wrote, it's like a post on Max Stories where you wrote something which is kind of addressing the Max Stories audience.
00:25:40 ◼ ► So it's kind of like your part is for people that know you and Jon's part is for people that don't.
00:25:51 ◼ ► "If ignored, we fear that these tools may lead to a gradual erosion of the open web as we know it, diminishing individuals' creativity and consolidating knowledge in the hands of a few tech companies that built their AI services on the back of web publishers and creators about their explicit content."
00:26:09 ◼ ► Consent. Thank you. Thank you for correcting me about what you said, which is probably the best kind of correction you can get.
00:26:16 ◼ ► You know, and I think that there are a lot of different takes to have, but this is one of the key ones right now that I think is the reason we're talking about this is that these AI tools will do nothing except consolidate power around the largest tech companies, which is what makes it different to any other technological innovation we've had, especially around the web.
00:26:48 ◼ ► The idea of, you know, usually, and there are exceptions, but usually technology has been service of helping people create more.
00:27:12 ◼ ► And I am concerned that this new technology and many parts of it will replace what we do.
00:27:24 ◼ ► And so I'm coming at it from a purely selfish perspective, but also will prevent a new generation of teachers and mics and Stevens from existing in the first place.
00:27:39 ◼ ► I want to come back to that second part in a minute, but just first off, can you talk about what you and John are aiming for here?
00:27:50 ◼ ► Like what you've done and what your aim is with this open letter, like who it's going to, who it's for and what you hope to achieve from it?
00:28:12 ◼ ► It was a way for me and John to at least temporarily put a cap on this whole discussion and have a single thing we could point to and say, this is what we think.
00:28:24 ◼ ► This is what we believe in. A way to sum up our thoughts in a single place that we could share with people.
00:28:32 ◼ ► Then it was also something that we wanted to do to send to politicians, to send to our representatives in the US and in the EU to make our, and by our I mean Mac stories, voice heard.
00:28:55 ◼ ► And to share our opinion with them and to share our concerns with them, hoping that maybe somebody is paying attention and they could ask us to clarify our position.
00:29:11 ◼ ► And they could ask us maybe to help us understand why you, an Italian citizen running an American company, paying taxes both in the US and in Italy, why are you concerned?
00:29:35 ◼ ► And as I wrote in my intro, we're a small media company. We cannot sue anybody. We're not the New York Times. I am not launching a class action law. I'm not doing any of that.
00:29:53 ◼ ► No, but I think as a news outlet or as a media company, I feel like they are economically the only one in a place where they could manage to do it.
00:30:04 ◼ ► So there was, yeah, there was like the angle of like maybe somebody who has the power to start a process, not even to make changes happen, to start a process and to start a proper discussion.
00:30:24 ◼ ► And third, I would say we also wanted to do it for other publishers, because I think there's other folks who are in a similar situation to ours.
00:30:40 ◼ ► And maybe they were looking for something to use as a frame of reference to also say, yes, I also agree with those Mac stories, folks, you know.
00:30:57 ◼ ► And I think Jon and I, we've had many discussions over the past few weeks, and I'll get to that process in a few minutes.
00:31:15 ◼ ► And it's OK, because I think something that I strongly believe in, that was a, you know, it's an idea that my mom taught me when I was a kid,
00:31:31 ◼ ► is that you should never be afraid when you're right about something, when you've done nothing wrong, when you know in your heart that you're right about something you believe in.
00:31:43 ◼ ► You shouldn't be embarrassed and you shouldn't be concerned and you shouldn't be afraid of people telling you you're wrong or making fun of you.
00:31:50 ◼ ► And I'm OK with people making fun of me because I don't care, because I feel deep inside of me that I'm right.
00:32:07 ◼ ► Some people are liking it. And but there's something that I wanted to say before we talk about the thing itself, which is.
00:32:18 ◼ ► This has been a process for the past few weeks, and it made me understand that I now live with a new regret in my life.
00:32:31 ◼ ► And we all have regrets, right? For things we haven't done, for things we should have done, you know, for mistakes we've made.
00:32:40 ◼ ► I mean, God bless people who don't. But I mean, I'm jealous, but I think we do it to a degree we all do.
00:32:50 ◼ ► And now I have a new one. And my regret is that I wish I cared about all of these sooner.
00:33:03 ◼ ► I wish I was not distracted, you know, two years ago by the cool factor of chat GPT and like ignored or just didn't inform myself about, like, the issues and why some people were so upset about it.
00:33:21 ◼ ► I wish I had done it and I didn't do it. And there's nothing I can do about the fact that I didn't do it then.
00:33:41 ◼ ► So, but I regret it and I want to say it because I was wrong and I should have done it and I didn't.
00:33:58 ◼ ► Like, because realistically, if you would have made this point, then it would have made less of an impact than it is making now.
00:34:06 ◼ ► I wholly believe that to be the case because I think if we go back to the end of 2022 or whatever, when this stuff was kicking off, it was different.
00:34:19 ◼ ► It didn't feel the same and people didn't know as much. Like, I don't really feel like you should, you know, regret the situation.
00:34:29 ◼ ► I think that you're, I genuinely believe that with all of the tools that you have at your disposal, this is the best possible time for you to be talking about this stuff.
00:34:37 ◼ ► Yeah, maybe. And yeah, so in thinking about all of this and like for the past few weeks, I've been, you know, talking to a lot of people and reading a lot.
00:35:03 ◼ ► I understood this idea that is at the core of this feeling of feeling uncomfortable about this stuff, this AI features.
00:35:16 ◼ ► Like, why is it that even the simplest feature, like a grammar checker or like the thing that rewrites a sentence for you, like that's coming with Apple intelligence, for example, like the writing tools.
00:35:29 ◼ ► And when I look at those, I feel uncomfortable and I feel a sense of uneasiness about them.
00:35:40 ◼ ► I've been doing a lot of like, it sounds stupid, but I've been doing a lot of analysis about this stuff, like because I'm supposed to be reviewing this functionalities at some point.
00:35:49 ◼ ► And I think I get it now. There's an excellent article by Sebastian De With, one of the designers of the excellent Halide and Kino apps.
00:36:03 ◼ ► I may become one of my six or seven websites and Sebastian shared this idea a few days ago in a post about like the idea of getting there is a slog.
00:36:20 ◼ ► The idea of in our, you know, Sebastian is coming at it from a perspective of a designer.
00:36:27 ◼ ► And he writes like when I was a kid, you know, and I was using a pirated version of Photoshop and I started designing my designing my first flyers for like the local pub or the local concert venue.
00:36:42 ◼ ► And I felt like and I and I felt inside of me like that was the thing I wanted to do for a living.
00:36:51 ◼ ► But it was that process that got me started on the career path that eventually became my job as an accomplished designer.
00:37:02 ◼ ► And the idea of when I read that, like getting there is a slog and the slog is part of the process.
00:37:42 ◼ ► That yes, that is I think that what and look, this is going to get philosophical as a topic.
00:37:54 ◼ ► I think what makes us human is the ability to learn from mistakes and reason over the mistakes.
00:38:02 ◼ ► Right. To to understand what is what was wrong about like a piece of work or a piece of art or whatever.
00:38:15 ◼ ► My concern is that without the slog, without being a 16 year old kid designing flyers in a pirated copy of Photoshop,
00:38:27 ◼ ► or, you know, without the slog that I felt as a 19 year old writing blog posts about Mozilla Firefox with the really, really, really terrible English.
00:38:59 ◼ ► And my concern is that if we apply this to other tasks and to other jobs and to other industries.
00:39:14 ◼ ► Of creators learning from their mistakes, if we are going to be if the flyer for a pub or a concert venue,
00:39:24 ◼ ► if the pub owner decides to, you know, you have a choice and you can either hire for 50 dollars your neighbor's kid who says they're skilled with Photoshop and give them 50 dollars,
00:39:47 ◼ ► Right? I mean, you know what's going to happen. The pub owner is going to use Chai GPT and have a much better result from Dali.
00:39:58 ◼ ► But that kid will never have their first job, will never be underpaid for that terrible flyer,
00:40:07 ◼ ► and may never become a designer in the first place because they will never have their first work experience.
00:40:14 ◼ ► So that's what I was saying a few minutes ago, like the selfish perspective of like, I care about it for me,
00:40:22 ◼ ► but also I care about it because like if all these simple, if even the simple tasks are replaced by a machine,
00:40:34 ◼ ► it means that we are not forming a new generation of kids and a new generation of creators who do a horrible job at those simple tasks,
00:40:51 ◼ ► And if we don't have those, eventually we're going to run out of creators. And I think that's bad.
00:41:03 ◼ ► I want to start by actually reading a quote from John's open letter, which by the way, do not sleep on John Voorhees' open letter.
00:41:11 ◼ ► I could imagine a lot of people read your part of the article and then was like, this next part is going to be full of legalese and it's for the…
00:41:22 ◼ ► It's intentionally simpler. I was talking to John about this today and I was like giving him his praise, like he did an incredible job.
00:41:29 ◼ ► So he says, "Left unchecked, this devaluation of internet culture will undermine the ability of today's creators to earn a fair wage from their work and prevent the next generation of creators from ever hoping to do the same."
00:41:42 ◼ ► So I think my feeling now, which I think is slightly different to yours, but not way off, is we are going to be fine.
00:41:54 ◼ ► Because we have spent the last 15 years building an audience that values our opinions and personality.
00:42:02 ◼ ► And in an increased AI world, I actually believe that opinions and personality will become more valuable.
00:42:11 ◼ ► But that also, the proliferation of AI tools and the speed and the fact that there will be a lot of "content" made by machines will make it so much harder for somebody to gain a foothold the way that we have.
00:42:44 ◼ ► When this stuff started to come around, I had concerns for my own job as well as others.
00:42:59 ◼ ► So my concerns are in that there will be too much content for people to be able to break through and everyone is going to treat any new content. They're not going to believe it.
00:43:24 ◼ ► Even if it isn't, they just think it is. Being able to get noticed and be respected is going to become so hard.
00:43:33 ◼ ► But also, I hadn't thought of it in that way. I think that's a great take from Sebastian.
00:43:39 ◼ ► This idea of the slogan reminds me of the Malcolm Gladwell popularized 10,000 hours idea.
00:43:49 ◼ ► Do you know who Malcolm Gladwell is? He's an author. He popularized a thing many years ago.
00:43:56 ◼ ► He wrote a whole book that focused around it, which was to get good at anything, it requires 10,000 hours of practice.
00:44:03 ◼ ► The specifics of it are important, but you can take from the idea of it where Relay is 10 years old.
00:44:13 ◼ ► I believe I started getting good at podcasting 10 years ago, but I had been podcasting for five years before that.
00:44:23 ◼ ► I believe it takes a lot of practice to get good at things. I don't think that is a wild thing to say.
00:44:32 ◼ ► But as you point out, someone who writes something and then is like, "improve this for me."
00:44:44 ◼ ► Maybe it's not important to you. For example, I use ChatGPT and I will use it today when I write the description for this show.
00:44:53 ◼ ► Because my grammar is not very good in general, but it doesn't bother me enough to learn.
00:45:41 ◼ ► And of course these tools will help raise some people to a level that they can't get to on their own.
00:46:09 ◼ ► But if what I was doing in my job relied on this calculator all the time, I should at least understand the theory.
00:46:17 ◼ ► Of how do I get to the calculation. Rather than just blindly relying on the calculator.
00:46:24 ◼ ► Now for me, I can blindly rely on calculators because what I do does not require that fundamental knowledge.
00:47:13 ◼ ► You should edit your own audio because you'll hear in yourself the things you don't like.
00:47:22 ◼ ► You become a better content producer if you edit yourself. I'm sure this is the same in writing.
00:47:28 ◼ ► If you edit your own writing you become a better writer because you stop wasting your own time by doing things you shouldn't be talking about.
00:47:43 ◼ ► And I think there's also a matter of if you decide you want to do something for a living
00:47:48 ◼ ► and if you think, "Oh, I want to be a podcaster" or "I want to be a writer" or "I want to be a painter."
00:47:58 ◼ ► In theory, your purpose, I mean let's face it, as humans, ultimately we are driven by a selection of impulses.
00:48:23 ◼ ► But especially in a creative field when you are creating something, it's the process of creating that should bring you happiness.
00:48:33 ◼ ► I find it very hard to, and that is when burnout happens for example, when you are a creator and you feel like you have to create
00:48:45 ◼ ► and it doesn't bring you happiness anymore, now that's a problem, especially in a creative industry.
00:48:51 ◼ ► And so it's at the very core of being a creative person, whether you produce text or images or audio or music, whatever, film, right?
00:49:06 ◼ ► You're happy to work and to make mistakes and to improve and to see, "Oh, this actually sounds better than before."
00:49:15 ◼ ► And then there's the final work and you reach the final work and you think, "Oh, this actually sucks."
00:49:19 ◼ ► Because this happens to all of us. And then you get people saying, "What do you mean it sucks? It's beautiful."
00:49:27 ◼ ► It's the process. And the reason why I've been doing this job for 15 years is that I love the process.
00:49:33 ◼ ► I love the grind. I love doing it. I love having a rough draft and sending it to somebody and be like,
00:49:43 ◼ ► It's that thing that brings me joy and to have that replaced by something that automates it for me to a large extent,
00:50:08 ◼ ► And it's a hard feeling to convey because I think, and I've been thinking about this, right?
00:50:12 ◼ ► I think a lot of the criticism that I'm getting, that Jon is getting, that you are getting for Cortex.
00:50:24 ◼ ► I still get on a daily basis new comments on the videos, the YouTube videos that me and Grey did,
00:50:32 ◼ ► like what the podcast put on YouTube. We did ethics of AI art and then something about Marionette's destroying.
00:50:38 ◼ ► People are still like, "These guys are wrong. They don't know what they're talking about today."
00:50:44 ◼ ► Yeah. So I've been thinking about this and I think a lot of the feedback that we're getting comes from people who say,
00:50:52 ◼ ► "Why are you against tools that make me more efficient? Because I just want to be faster.
00:51:04 ◼ ► And you attacking or criticizing these tools means that you don't care about people's time or efficiency.
00:51:18 ◼ ► And that is there is a gap, there is a chasm between people who create for a living and people who just need to do something for their job.
00:51:32 ◼ ► My mom, for example, works at this national office for like, it's called the Automobile Club.
00:51:43 ◼ ► It's not a fancy thing. It's the office that regulates license plates, paying car taxes, that sort of stuff.
00:51:50 ◼ ► It's like a DMV, but not as horrible as the DMV. My mom doesn't create anything. My mom is not a creative person.
00:51:58 ◼ ► My mom sits down at her desk and gets her job done. She doesn't need to create anything. She likes her job.
00:52:09 ◼ ► And she wouldn't care about like, if you go to my mom and you're like, "Hey," teach his mom, her name is Beatrice,
00:53:11 ◼ ► You know, I enjoy, to this day, I enjoy working on drafts of my stories a whole lot more than publishing them,
00:53:28 ◼ ► Yes, I'm happy that I'm done. But what I do, what I set out to do was writing, not publishing.
00:54:02 ◼ ► And now I think I understand why it makes me uncomfortable, because it takes away a tiny part of the inefficiency that gives me pleasure.
00:54:19 ◼ ► I feel like if these tools were limited to these productive use cases, I'd be fine with it more.
00:54:25 ◼ ► And I am, like for productive use cases, this is where, again, I feel like we've been trying to impress upon this recently.
00:54:39 ◼ ► Me and Federico do not have the, we do not share the same views, right, on this subject.
00:54:47 ◼ ► Where I am less concerned about productivity use cases for AI, like creative use cases for AI concern me more.
00:55:02 ◼ ► Where like, I am sympathetic to your, and I believe, like you guys do, that it is theft.
00:55:12 ◼ ► Where there is an element where I'm like, I don't believe that this is right, but I'm not doing anything about it, right?
00:55:34 ◼ ► One, these tools will be used for creativity, and that upsets me because it was creativity that then feeds creativity.
00:55:46 ◼ ► But the other thing is like, for the people that like your mom who would want that tool, the problem is, it will remove her job, right?
00:55:53 ◼ ► Like this is the thing, that like, if you, if your job is made easier by AI, you are heading down the road of your job being replaced.
00:56:15 ◼ ► And yeah, I feel like I understand, I don't want to sound like some sort of spiritual guide or whatever, you know, telling people that, oh, actually it's all about, you know, dude, it's all about creativity.
00:56:47 ◼ ► Like, you may prefer to what we do, something like the Perplexity Daily Show, which is an AI generated podcast that you can find anywhere.
00:57:01 ◼ ► It's an actual podcast generated by Perplexity, spoken via 11 Labs voices, and you can listen to every day.
00:57:10 ◼ ► And look, maybe you like it because it's, you know, a summary of tech news and it's, I'm going to use everybody's favorite word, it's objective and it's to the point.
00:57:25 ◼ ► But I think that there is, and you know, or you could say, I love listening to AI generated music.
00:57:41 ◼ ► Soon enough, you will be able to, I'm sure, look at AI generated short films and TV show episodes.
00:57:57 ◼ ► But I strongly believe that, I think this is a concept that I've shared on the show before.
00:58:35 ◼ ► There's something so unique about being inspired and connecting with somebody else who creates art.
00:58:42 ◼ ► Or going to a concert that I don't think it can be replaced by an AI that doesn't have feelings.
00:58:56 ◼ ► Some of my best, some of my favorite memories are going to concerts and after the concert,
00:59:04 ◼ ► hanging out in the back of the venue and sort of waiting for artists to come out and shake their hands and taking a selfie with them.
00:59:16 ◼ ► And maybe while you're there, you get to know somebody and maybe that somebody becomes your fiancé five years from now.
00:59:23 ◼ ► Something like, it's that randomness of people's connections that I think drives the human race and drives society.
00:59:35 ◼ ► And to lose that for a more efficient, more objective, infinitely available, machine-generated art.
00:59:54 ◼ ► Before we move on to more of this, I do want to just read this one last part that I wanted to pull out from Jon's letter.
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01:03:01 ◼ ► It's called "Context, Consent and Control, the 3 Cs of Data Participation in the Age of AI."
01:03:38 ◼ ► Sometimes in a way that is so overwhelming and so difficult to put into words that we sound like lunatics.
01:03:50 ◼ ► We've spoken about this and I was able to identify some of the things that were making me uncomfortable,
01:03:56 ◼ ► but there are still so many other aspects of this entire industry that I find difficult to articulate.
01:04:05 ◼ ► And this article tries to get to the bottom of these three principles that these three Cs,
01:04:14 ◼ ► Context, Consent and Control, that are common threads for a lot of folks looking at AI products
01:04:35 ◼ ► Unfortunately, anti-AI anxiety often presents itself through vague and inexpressible discomfort.
01:04:44 ◼ ► This is something that is overwhelming people, often in ways they cannot capture a precise language.
01:04:49 ◼ ► If we don't have the language to describe what's happening, we certainly don't have the language to articulate solutions.
01:04:55 ◼ ► And I know this from myself, going back to when I first started talking about this two years ago and even to today,
01:05:01 ◼ ► where it's hard to get across my feelings on this when they're so emotion-led and I just sound hysterical.
01:05:11 ◼ ► And then there are people that come in and they use their smarts to make me sound like I'm stupid.
01:05:31 ◼ ► And I have owned up to this from the beginning of my feelings about this, but people still like to throw it back at me.
01:05:42 ◼ ► But the thing that I've expressed today, and you have too, is what's changed for me is my bias remains, but I don't feel threatened anymore.
01:05:57 ◼ ► The idea that my work could have been taken and fed into a thing, it annoys me, but I don't feel threatened by it.
01:06:11 ◼ ► I have no doubt that there is a certain sect of podcast that would be obliterated by AI-created podcasts.
01:06:40 ◼ ► And I can't imagine the people that choose to listen to this show would be happy with an AI-generated version of this show.
01:06:48 ◼ ► Because I just feel like they would understand they're not going to get the same thing.
01:06:55 ◼ ► If you are someone who is worried about this stuff, if it causes anxiety in you, it is hard to express something when it's so complicated.
01:07:13 ◼ ► And part of the reason why we wanted to publish the letter was that, to be able to convey in words, in a single page, what we felt.
01:07:25 ◼ ► And I think this article, it is to this day the best thing I've read on the subject, from my perspective.
01:08:06 ◼ ► "Why does sharing a work on a website turn it into facts, while sharing the work with my friends keeps it a work of art?"
01:08:42 ◼ ► You know, if I'm a person that reads Mac stories and learns from you, and learns from your articles, learns from your shortcuts.
01:08:59 ◼ ► And I end up creating a work that is unintentionally inspired by the knowledge that I accumulated from Mac stories.
01:09:21 ◼ ► Why is it that you draw the line between people reading Mac stories versus an artificial intelligence scraping your website?
01:10:00 ◼ ► Because I think it's quite obvious from my perspective to see the difference between people learning something.
01:10:11 ◼ ► And being inspired by other people versus becoming, unintentionally from Mac stories perspective,
01:10:43 ◼ ► I cannot come to your house and knock on your door and be like, "Hey guy, I want you to forget my article."
01:11:07 ◼ ► We are reading some quotes from an article, but then we are talking about it for 15 minutes.
01:11:13 ◼ ► Where I feel like you can tell in this scenario that we have had thoughts about this article and we're talking about them.
01:11:27 ◼ ► If you put something online, you open yourself up to a scenario where someone can do what we're doing now.
01:11:41 ◼ ► And remixes, it makes me think of the excellent series by Kirby Ferguson, "Everything is a remix."
01:11:54 ◼ ► We have always, always, and we will always continue to remix something that has been done, produced, or come before us.
01:12:07 ◼ ► We learn from things we have seen and we remake them to an extent that sometimes is fair, sometimes in the case of plagiarism is not.
01:12:17 ◼ ► But the difference, you know, when I got that email, which I want to respond to, the difference is that I don't want to become...
01:12:56 ◼ ► I set out years ago, I posted this on Mastodon a few, I think a couple of weeks back, or maybe last week, I don't recall.
01:13:07 ◼ ► I publish a website. If I wanted to open an English school to teach English to bots, I would have done that.
01:13:23 ◼ ► At any point, I did not make a decision to say, "Oh yeah, I want Mac Stories to be one of the sources for large language models.
01:13:37 ◼ ► You know, I want to be one of the many tokens used by an LLM to learn the English language."
01:13:45 ◼ ► Which, by the way, is a thing that you can check, whether you're part of Dataset, any other Mac Stories, it's part of this dataset.
01:13:57 ◼ ► And so, that is outside the context of how my work is getting used as stepped outside of the boundaries of my editorial decisions.
01:14:12 ◼ ► The content was taken from me without my consent, which is the next item in the article.
01:14:32 ◼ ► I didn't know that that content may also be taken by a machine, by an AI system, and used for training.
01:15:03 ◼ ► I believe Trump was using... Was it a Bruce Springsteen song that was used at one of his rallies?
01:15:15 ◼ ► It is an artist's right to be able to say, "Look, I'm not comfortable with you using my art for this."
01:15:24 ◼ ► So, yeah, that is context, I think, is key to understand the difference between humans using reasoning over your creation versus a machine just taking it.
01:15:52 ◼ ► For me, the thing that I took away from this is people may want to give their data to be trained on for varying purposes.
01:16:04 ◼ ► The idea of Creative Commons basically being a layer on top of copyright where you can essentially give a license, kind of like open source, too.
01:16:26 ◼ ► So, the context is you've shared something on the web and you believe that to be used for a certain thing.
01:16:31 ◼ ► But then maybe somebody wants to use it to train their large language model, but they don't give you the choice.
01:16:54 ◼ ► If they wanted to take that, transcribe it, and use that data to train an intelligent assistant, that would not bother me.
01:17:06 ◼ ► What would bother me is if they wanted to take my voice and make a synthetic voice out of it.
01:17:21 ◼ ► I don't know, but I'm convinced that my podcasts have been used to create the whisper model that OpenAI has.
01:17:36 ◼ ► You can just scrape RSS feeds and you've got tens of hours of audio, hundreds, millions of hours of audio.
01:17:48 ◼ ► And that comes back to one of the inciting events of all of this, which is what Apple did.
01:17:57 ◼ ► Which Jon so beautifully described in the open letter as a thief going to a shopkeeper after they've robbed their shop and offering them a lock.
01:18:45 ◼ ► Why, you know, you said I don't want to speak on Federico's behalf, but I feel like the Apple thing was the sort of the last, you know, it was that sort of pushed Federico over the edge.
01:19:07 ◼ ► And there was also something that Steven said, you know, I think it's pretty much been established that the three of us, we have very different opinions about this stuff.
01:19:21 ◼ ► But Steven said, you know, something along the lines of, I don't think it's useful to have an absolute stance on anything at this point.
01:19:40 ◼ ► I think I do have an absolute stance on how I feel about my content being taken from me without my consent.
01:19:50 ◼ ► Because, for example, now I feel very uncomfortable about the fact that part of Mac Stories was crawled and scraped and maybe a part of it gets used to, was used to build the model for writing tools.
01:20:07 ◼ ► And maybe, and it sounds silly, but maybe that means that, you know, six months from now, there will be somebody who needs to write something and instead of going to an editor and, you know, paying them $100, they just say, well, you know, I could just use the AI to do it for me.
01:20:31 ◼ ► And that makes me feel very uncomfortable knowing that I unintentionally play the part in it.
01:21:03 ◼ ► Because then you risk of playing into the, oh, both sides have their arguments kind of, you know, position.
01:21:12 ◼ ► And I think when it comes to the, you know, you're literally, Mike, you did it two years ago.
01:21:22 ◼ ► Like, you know, you've been thinking about this stuff for two years and when it comes to these ethical matters, I think you got to call it.
01:21:32 ◼ ► And like, you know, you said about the inciting event, like the reason you were surprised about it made perfect sense.
01:21:38 ◼ ► Because leading up to WWDC, we were talking on this show over multiple weeks about where is Apple going to license their data set from.
01:21:46 ◼ ► And we were referencing their photo training because it just seemed natural to us that they would have done it differently.
01:21:57 ◼ ► Like, they kind of waved their hand around about certain things that they've licensed, which seem to be imagery.
01:22:03 ◼ ► But text, they just took the same stance as everybody else, which is just like, hey, if it's on the web, it's fair game.
01:22:17 ◼ ► So, you know, this feels like the consent and control feel like two sides of the same coin, right?
01:22:22 ◼ ► Where like the consent piece, you're saying it, but in the sense of where someone hasn't taken that, that you still get the ability to be like, no.
01:22:37 ◼ ► And to kind of, I think, a real great way of exemplifying the fact of how unlikely it is that we're going to get this control.
01:22:48 ◼ ► Many from my generation can't understand why single moms will find $1.5 million for downloading MP3s while tech companies can now Hoover up our YouTube videos and have seats on government panels about regulating AI.
01:23:02 ◼ ► Kazaa and Napster were never going to be in the room regulating the use of MP3s, right?
01:23:12 ◼ ► How we've gone from that to the scenarios we have today is incredible if you think about it.
01:23:21 ◼ ► Because it was the RIAA or whatever, but they were working on behalf of the record labels, working on behalf of the musicians, were in the room trying to get rid of the piracy, right?
01:23:34 ◼ ► Where the same result is that you or a representative for people like you should be in the room.
01:23:39 ◼ ► And I'm sure there are some, but they're also the same people around the same tables as Apple and Google and OpenAI, and they're trying to regulate themselves.
01:23:56 ◼ ► They regulate around their current systems and have the money and resources to be able to change around any regulation because they're in the room helping make it happen.
01:24:18 ◼ ► Obviously we have not solved anything with this discussion, but I hope that we have clarified our positions and I hope we have given people who maybe disagree with us a way to understand how we feel and how we think.
01:24:46 ◼ ► This is a very simple sentence to say, but I love people for all the weird, beautiful things people do.
01:25:00 ◼ ► There's something to otherwise, I mean, I would just stare at my computer all day and I will never leave the house.
01:25:21 ◼ ► But I very much believe in the power that people have when it comes to obviously creating art because I'm a creative person.
01:25:44 ◼ ► And I think I want to make it clear, I understand that for a lot of folks, these AI services sound and seem and are incredible.
01:25:58 ◼ ► And I also understand how for a lot of non-creative industries, whereby non-creative, like I'm simplifying here, but I mean, you're not blogging, you're not recording the podcast.
01:26:11 ◼ ► I understand how for science, for cancer research, for, you know, complex mathematics, for all kinds of industries that go beyond the Mac stories and go beyond relay,
01:26:33 ◼ ► But at the same time, I urge you, if you can, to stop for a second instead of opening Mastodon, because I know you are, or sending an email.
01:26:44 ◼ ► Stop for a second and think about a potential future in which you don't get to send that email anymore,
01:26:54 ◼ ► in which you don't get to post that Mastodon or Threads post anymore, because there's nobody to email it to, right?
01:27:03 ◼ ► Just think about a future where Mike and I are probably okay, as Mike said, because we're fortunate to have an audience.
01:27:13 ◼ ► But for a second, just imagine that maybe your kid, 20 years from now, you know, wants to listen to a podcast in between class breaks at college,
01:27:24 ◼ ► and all they have is some flavor of a large language model that instead of saying stupid jokes about, you know, Bill of Rickeys,
01:27:37 ◼ ► or, you know, teaching the Italian language, or, you know, saying very dumb jokes, as we do on this show, it's just an LLM spitting out facts.
01:27:50 ◼ ► And if you're a listener of this show, and you disagree with us, but maybe at the same time you have come in the past to one of our live shows, right?
01:28:03 ◼ ► I think it's very possible that there's people who have come to our live shows and also disagree with us on AI.
01:28:11 ◼ ► And for a second, to understand our perspective, think about a scenario in which there's no live show to come to anymore.
01:28:19 ◼ ► And maybe, and I hope, because I believe in people, and I hope that you will understand why that's said to not have it anymore.
01:28:32 ◼ ► Because, once again, I do think that Mike and I are probably fine, but I hope that there will be new, you know, new creators, 20 years from now,
01:28:45 ◼ ► doing this and sharing dumb jokes and meeting each other, you know, falling in love, getting married, whatever, all the things people do.
01:28:53 ◼ ► So yeah, I hope you can understand our perspectives now, and if you don't, it's fine, but we wanted to have this conversation.
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01:31:26 ◼ ► So this is an open letter that has been sent to Congress people in the US and will be sent to some MEPs in Europe, in Italy, right? I think specifically.
01:31:44 ◼ ► And did you take a similar tact with the letters to the Congress people? Like how did you, or John, how were the Congress people chosen?
01:31:53 ◼ ► John found the, the centers that sponsored AI legislation publicly and was able to find their obviously web pages.
01:32:06 ◼ ► And it was a bit of a process in the US because John tells me that these websites are horrible.
01:32:12 ◼ ► One of them wouldn't even let him paste the letter because the website kept saying that it was a security risk to be able to paste plain text.
01:32:21 ◼ ► And so John had to mail physical letters to senators just to make sure that they were getting them because their web systems are a bit old, it seems.
01:32:32 ◼ ► I think given what I've seen on the EU website that I can just email people because each of them, they have an email address.
01:32:41 ◼ ► I mean, the open letter had a lot of links in. How do you do with links in a printed form?
01:32:55 ◼ ► Obviously in sending these things out, you are like, you know, you are making yourself aware to these people.
01:33:10 ◼ ► Yes. Yeah. Yeah. If that even ever happens and I get to share my take on what happened, I mean, it's all out in the open.
01:33:26 ◼ ► I feel like if I can play any role in because I strongly believe that we do need legislation when it comes to regulating training and data sets and rethinking.
01:33:42 ◼ ► I mean, obviously, like the elephant in the room here, which is very much outside the scope of this episode.
01:34:10 ◼ ► But yeah, I think I would love to do it. And I do think we need at a fundamental government level to be able to put in place guardrails for publishers and creators to make sure that we protect.
01:34:28 ◼ ► Like I said, that we protect the economic viability for people to be able to create art and to publish content for a living instead of being replaced by large language models.
01:34:43 ◼ ► And I think there's a, you know, smarter people than me, I'm sure could work on a framework so that the two entities, people and large language models can coexist without one of them suffering from the existence of the other.
01:35:03 ◼ ► I have a lot of respect for what you two are doing, like, you know, forming new opinions, clarifying those opinions and then speaking so clearly and loudly about them.
01:35:18 ◼ ► I'm sure people are happy for you and support you too, but sometimes it can be hard to see that for the noise.
01:35:25 ◼ ► Yeah, I know. There's something, I've been listening obviously to Cortex for many years, since the beginning, really. What was it, 2015?
01:35:37 ◼ ► Yeah. And there was something that Gray said in either episode one or two that has really stuck with me all these years. Something along the lines of you put out something on the Internet and you get 100 items of feedback, 99 compliments and one criticism.
01:35:57 ◼ ► And the way the human brain works, you fixate on that one criticism out of 99, you know, items of praise.
01:36:07 ◼ ► And but it's OK. It's part of the job. And like I said, like I said, when you are honest with yourself about something that you believe in, you shouldn't be scared of saying it.
01:36:21 ◼ ► If I were a hypocrite and, you know, said or wrote things that I don't fully believe in.
01:36:30 ◼ ► I would feel horrible. I would feel physically sick, but that's not what I do. And so I can take the criticism of taking it before I can take it now.
01:36:40 ◼ ► It's fine. I just hope that, you know, instead of and I am getting those emails, people be like, oh, I'm subscribing from Club Max stories because I'm tired of you and John criticize AI.
01:36:58 ◼ ► I hope that the I hope that we can work toward a solution in this conversation. And that includes, you know, something that I was pretty disappointed by.
01:37:12 ◼ ► When it comes to our community, when it comes to our industry, I was pretty disappointed by the fact that Apple has stayed silent on all of this.
01:37:20 ◼ ► And I hope that I hope that that will change. I hope that that we will get at some point some kind of comment from Apple about what they think of the training that they have done and how they have approached this.
01:37:36 ◼ ► So I hope that we will be able to work toward the solution and whether that solution, you know, also includes working with regulators to share our feedback. I'm up for it.
01:37:53 ◼ ► All right. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of connected. You should go read Federico and John's post.
01:38:00 ◼ ► It'll be in the show notes for this week's episode. But you can also go to Max stories dot net where you'll find Federico and he is at Vatici online.
01:38:09 ◼ ► V I T I C C I. He also hosts a bunch of podcasts. We were talking in the pro show about one of my new favorite podcasts, which is NPC next portable console that Federico and John host together with Brandon.
01:38:22 ◼ ► If you want to find Stephen online, he'll be I hope he'll be back next time. I don't know. Maybe he'll have too much freedom and goes wild with it.
01:38:31 ◼ ► You could never tell. He's at five topics that and he is at ISMH 86 to really think about that for a second.
01:38:39 ◼ ► I am at I Mike I M Y K E. You can hear this show, my show and other shows here in relay FM.
01:38:46 ◼ ► You can also find my product work over at cortex brand dot com. Thank you to NetSuite Squarespace and Ecamm for the support of this episode.