Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the Tech Area. It's time for the tech News for Tuesday, February twenty first, two twenty three, and we're going to start this episode off with a news segment that I would like to call Blame the Robots. So the Washington Post published an article by pranschu Verma titled AI is starting to pick who gets laid off, which is perhaps a bit sensationalized once you read the actual story, but maybe only a little bit sensationalized. All right, So here's how this all unfolds. There are software packages and various services and algorithms that some hiring managers rely upon in order to do kind of a pass filter across job applicants in order to narrow down the search. There are companies that offer that very service, and it starts to make sense if you're hiring at a company that gets a lot of attention. So let's say that you're a popular company, you have fairly rare job openings, and you get lots, like maybe thousands of applicants per job that you list, Well, you probably need some help whittling down the applicant list to get to a manageable pool of potential hires, right like you need something to separate the cream from everything else. It's not easy to do, especially at really high volumes. And so these services and software packages essentially reduce applicants down to data points and they kind of have to. And depending on how tough that filter is, folks can get weeded out. Sometimes a lot of folks. May you get down to, like less than a dozen applicants out of thousands has to be pretty brutal. Well, this article postulates that we could see the reverse come into play as well, that a company might lean on similar software and services to identify the people who contribute the least to the company or perform at a level that's considered to be below their peers. Therefore, they could be candidates for layoffs when the corporate overlords deemed that it is time to reduce headcount in these troubling times. And therein lies the story, right that an algorithm might determine that you are expendable instead of your human boss. And I am aware that I'm making an assumption here that your boss is in fact human, some program, you know, some freaking robot has determined that you're getting laid off. It sounds positively dystopia, doesn't it. And with big tech companies laying off thousands of folks over this year and the previous year, it's easy to imagine managers shrugging off the responsibility of telling someone they no longer have a job by leaving it to the old zeros and ones of a presumably objective and emotionless system. But this in turn brings up other problems. As I have mentioned in tons of episodes, one of the many problems we have in AI systems can come down to unintended bias within the system itself. So if the system is biased, it could end up targeting employees of specific ethnicities or backgrounds. Now Vermat makes this argument in the Washington Post article. He says that if the algorithm were to, say, determine that people of color have a higher incidence rate of leaving their jobs, that a person of color is more likely to leave their job than say, they're white colleagues, well, then the system might naturally start to target employees who happen to be people of color for the purposes of layoffs. But then you're getting into very dangerous legal and ethical territory. It's as if you're targeting these specific people because of their race. Also, I'm not sure how well an algorithm can actually judge a person's contributions. Presumably stuff from employee reviews and such would play a big part, But in highly collaborative work, a person could act as the sort of lynch pen that keeps a team working really well together, even if they themselves don't have the highest numbers on whatever the deliverables are. So in my opinion, relying on AI to make or even guide decisions regarding layoffs is really a bad move all around. It can make sense in the applicant phase, but in layoffs I would say avoid it. It doesn't look good for the company. It could ultimately lead to choices that will harm the overall organization in the long run. In this article, Verma mentions that while folks at Google wondered if perhaps they had been laid off due to an algorithm choosing them because there didn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to the layoffs, the company denies making use of anything of the sort. There's kind of a distinct lack of cases where we know that an algorithm definitively played a part in layoffs. However, Verma in the article also cites a survey that showed ninety eight percent of HR managers there were three hundred of them participating in the survey, had said that they plan to rely on software and algorithms to help make such decisions about layoffs this year. So even if you were to argue it hasn't happened yet, it looks like it's going to happen real soon. My guess is we'll see some high cases where some company relies too heavily on algorithms and it'll come back to haunt them, perhaps only in PR, but it will be a big blowback, and then maybe then we'll start to see people form best practices around the whole thing. I still think it feels a bit like shirking responsibility in my opinion, If the top brass decides that layoffs are necessary, then they are obligated to make each and every layoff decision transparent and honest, I think they owe their employees as much. And it's really infuriating because you'll see managers who get a directive saying you have to apply this artificial bell curve to the employees who are reporting to you. We heard a story about that just a couple of weeks ago, where a director actually essentially was fired for refusing to follow that because it arbitrarily requires managers to assign people as low performers even if you don't have any low performers on your team, and that just again seems inherently unfair. I feel like relying on AI to make these choices also is inherently unfair and can miss some really important factors that may not reduce down to pure data. But we've got a lot of other AI news to get through today. A lot of it is bad. I'm not gonna lie. And our next story comes from Vanderbilt University. The Peabody College at Vendorbilt, and that college's Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion send out a message to students in the wake of the terrible shooting at Michigan State University. And clearly this was a delicate task that needed empathy and support. I needed a message that showed that Vanderbilt's staff have students and their welfare at the top. Of their priority list, so of course they use chat GPT to help craft the message. This pretty much sent me spiraling, y'all, because passing the buck to AI to handle things that are this important, things that intrinsically involve a very human connection, it just feels beyond shortsighted and crass to me. At best, you could say this was a poor decision, but at worst it implies that leadership has little to no regard for students and instead we'll just lean on the robots to handle the tough stuff. Anyway, the end of the message contained the line paraphrased from open ais Chat GBTAI Language Model Personal Communication, and at least the word paraphrase indicates that there was human involvement in taking the generated message and shaping it properly for students. So it was a collaborative effort, you could say. But still, the fact that staff tapped AI in the first place to help with such a sensitive matter doesn't look good. It looks like people who want to avoid the hard stuff, and hard stuff isn't the human connection stuff, the stuff that has incredible impact on emotion and mental health, whether it's layoffs or counseling people in the wake of a violent act like the shooting at the University of Michigan. That is the wrong way to use AI, in my opinion. That is inherently the realm of humanity and to off source that to AI's it shows such a huge disregard for the people who are ultimately the recipients of those messages that I think it's unconscionable. Now the Associate Dean and Assistant Dean who are part of this process have both stepped back from that office of equity, diversity and inclusion, which is probably for the best, but yeah, this was a really bad use case for AI. Last week, the representatives from around the world attended the Summit on Responsible Artificial Intelligence in the Military Domain or re aim our AIM and we've talked about how incorporating AI into military processes and hardware raises really difficult questions regarding safety, accountability, escalation, and more. Reps from many countries, including the United States and China, but excluding Russia, which wasn't invited and Ukraine did not attend. They were invited, but clearly have other things going on at the moment. Anyway, these representatives all met to discuss the issues of AI in its role in military operations. At the conclusion of the summit, all but one of the representatives of the countries that attended signed an agree to commit to developing AI military applications that quote do not undermine international security, stability and accountability end quote. So what was the one nation that abstained. That would be Israel. Now, don't like heap tons of criticism on Israel, because there are critics who say this entire meeting was largely for show, because according to critics, there was nothing in the summit or the agreement that is legally binding for any of the countries involved. So, in other words, the critics are saying that the reps are all like, yeah, yeah, totally AI killing people would really be bad. Let's totally not do that, but they would have no real accountability to follow through on that promise. Further, the agreement did not include certain AI assisted or controlled systems that are already in use, like AI controlled drones, And so there's concern that this agreement, while represents little more than just putting on a show to say, yes, we're all aware of this and it is a bad thing. Now, Honestly, I heavily suspect that several countries, including the United States and also China, will continue incorporating AI into military applications, including weaponized AI. I would be absolutely shocked if they didn't continue down that pathway, because there's a very real fear that if you don't do it, the other guy will, and then there will be an AI gap. Now maybe I only think that because I'm a child of the seventies and eighties and I saw how this very similar scenario played out with nuclear armaments, because boy howdy, was that a thing. So I would love for us to avoid the mistakes of the past. But I really am skeptical that that's going to happen, because again, unless everybody is hell accountable and agrees to not further that work, someone is going to. And if someone's going to, then everyone is going to because otherwise you are at a disadvantage. Okay, with all that doom and gloom out of the way, let's take a quick break. When we come back, I've got some more news items to talk about. We're back now. I still have a couple more AI stories, but these are not quite as apocalyptic as the ones we started off with. The one is that Clark's world magazine, which has been publishing fantasy and science fiction stories online since two thousand and six, has temporarily stopped accepting submissions. Why because apparently the magazine has received too many AI generated submissions, and until they have access to better tools to detect those kinds of things, they have chosen to hold off accepting anymore. That's both understandable and it stinks. Not that I think the magazine made the wrong call here. I think this is the right call, but rather it stinks because there are genuine authors and would be authors out there who have great stories to tell, and they're seeing an outlet closed off to them, at least for now, and it's all thanks to AI generated stories. Now, I think in most cases the AI generated stuff has to be a collaborator kind of relationship, because in my own experience the stories generated by AI they aren't very good. Like, grammatically they work, and you know, you get some interesting descriptions and stuff, but the actual stories tend to be pretty mundane and uninteresting. I imagine that most folks who are using AI are leaning on it for stuff like generating initial ideas, maybe shaping a certain part of the narrative at least any stories that are difficult to determine, Oh, this was made by AI, right, if they haven't done any massaging, it often is pretty easy to detect that it's AI, or the very least, it's easy to detect that's not a very good story and it wouldn't pass the bar for publication. But still, here's another example of how AI can end up harming creative types, whether it's from the unauthorized copying of their style or displacing them from the creator community. Insider reports something that I think most folks already have a pretty good handle on, and that is the emergence and reception to chat GPT probably means we're going to see a whole bunch of copycats in the very near future. And to be clear, chatbots have been a thing for years. I'm sure you're all aware of that. In fact, someone who is once in the business of reporting on tech, a person whom I know and respect and like very very much, ended up working at a company that developed sophisticated chatbots. But these were tools that were intended for narrow use cases, something that would work well within the confines of a particular company's services and processes. The stuff we're seeing now is made to be more general purpose, and with that comes the problems of reliability and accuracy as well as transparency. It is easier, not easy, mind you, but easier to build a reliable and accurate tool that works within an enclosed system, like the customer service arm of a consumer facing company. But it's another thing when it's just you know, free range AI chat bot. And meanwhile, the guy who runs the company that made chat GPT has said repeatedly that he thinks chat GPT isn't that good, or at least it is far from perfect. And yet we're currently living through a buzzy, height heightened age of chat GPT and its peers like like Barred from Google. Tech Runch has a piece titled the AI photo app trend has already fizzled, new data shows and you should totally check out this article. The author of the piece, Sarah Perez, lays out some of the data, including download numbers and revenue, and she shows that while the text to image AI tools initially made a really big splash when they started to emerge, particularly late last year, excitement has dropped off considerably since then. There's been a lot of backlash in the space, ranging from artists who are understandably upset to see their style co opted by AI, to users who are concerned that the tools can create inappropriate images far too readily, and that any restrictions that are designed to limit that sort of stuff aren't always the best. Whether those actually played a big part in cooling this trend, or maybe it was just that folks were getting tired of the shiny new thing and they had already moved on, I am uncertain, but my guests is that we're going to see the space continue to evolve, perhaps with fewer players as this goes on, if some of them find it too difficult to cover costs with the declining revenues. But I don't think AI generated imagery is going to just go away at this point. Now that being said, one fun story, or at least in my opinion, it's fun that relates to the AI generated imagery involves a robot from Carnegie Mellon University. So it's a robot arm that has the name Frieda, which yes, is both a tribute to Frieda the artist, and is an acronym that stands for Framework and Robotics Initiative for developing arts, and it also generates images based on text prompts. Only in this case, the images it makes are not digital images. They're not computer generated images. They are real world paintings. You have a robot that paints with actual brushes and actual paint It creates works of art based off text input and directions. According to tech Spot, it takes about an hour from the point where the robot receives input in the form of the text to the point where it begins to paint, because it actually has to plot out how it's going to physically paint this. How are the brushstrokes going to go, how long are they going to go, how much pressure is going to be used? What style is it going to follow? And that's very understandable because as we all know, there are different strokes for different folks, because the world don't move to the beat of just one drum. Shout out to me if you get that reference. Anyway, The roboticists and engineers are quick to say that Frieda isn't an artist. FRIEDA is a collaborator. FRIEDA is not creative. FRIEDA just follows instructions as best it can pay the subject of the art in the style that was dictated by its collaborator. Anyway, I just thought this was a neat take on AI generated images. Somehow it feels different that because it's, you know, a physical painting. It's something that you could hold or put into a frame and hang on a wall, or you know, something you could rip apart in rage as robots get another art commission and you don't. Now, finally we're off of the AI stories and we can get to everything else. So next up. Part of the big news this week is Meta really shook things up on Sunday announcing that the company is introducing a subscription service called Meta Verified. It's just in the testing phase now, and you know, the plan is to widely deploy it, but we'll see if things go poorly in the test markets that Meta is trying out at the moment. But essentially, this subscription service is a verification tool. Users would have to submit proof that they are who they claim to be, using government issued ID for example, and in return for twelve bucks a month or fifteen bucks a month if you're doing it on iOS or Android, because Google and Apple take their own cut of the fee. You then get a little blue badge on Facebook and or Instagram saying you're bona fide. On top of that, badge subscribers will also have access to services that are meant to protect against imposter accounts. They're supposed to get better customer support, and they're supposed to get improved discoverability when folks are actually searching for them, which am I opinion, is stuff that should really be standard for all users, whether they're paying a subscription or not. I think it's kind of bullpucky to say one of the benefits to verification is that meta will make sure other folks aren't trying to impersonate you. I mean, arguably, this is a bigger problem for notable folks like celebrities and brands. And I'm not talking me, I'm talking real celebrities. I have no illusions that I'm a celebrity, but I've still seen plenty of instances of friends being impersonated as someone has either gained access to their account or created a copy account in an attempt to phish for data. Like this is still something that affects the average person on these platforms. It's not just for the celebrities. But yeah, I'm that's facing issues with the revenue for a lot of different reasons, so it's not surprising that the company is now introducing the subscription feature. It just feels like the quote unquote benefits of the service are things that really everyone on the platform should have access to by default. Maybe I'm just being unreasonable here. Today Microsoft will attempt to defend its planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard in the EU in a meeting that's behind closed doors and Brussels. Previously, EU regulators indicated that they would block the purchase, saying it would result in less competition in the video game space and allow Microsoft to engage in actively anti competitive practices, such as preventing other platforms like Sony PlayStation from having access to popular video game franchises like Call of Duty. Earlier, Microsoft Reps signed a deal with Nintendo Reps that legally binds Microsoft to bring Call of Duty titles to Nintendo platforms for ten years, and further that all titles will be available on Nintendo platforms the same day that they come out for Xbox platforms, with quote full feature and content parity end quote between these versions, meaning Nintendo won't have to be happy with a watered down version of Call of Duty. It's going to get the real thing, just like Xboxes. This puts pressure on Sony to make a similar agreement or else Microsoft could argue before the EU regulators that Microsoft has made attempts to ensure fairness between the various console companies, but Sony isn't playing ball on purpose in an effort to scuttle the deal, surprisingly, at least to me, the Communications Workers of America the CWA, a union organization here in the US, has also urged the EU to approve the acquisition deal. They say that Microsoft has been more receptive to attempts at unionizing than Activision Blizzard has, and that without Microsoft's oversight, employees and Activision could find themselves facing tough managerial resistance to unionizing. By the time you hear this, a decision has probably been made one way or the other. But as I write this episode, it has yet to be announced, and again, the meeting is behind closed doors, so it might be a little while before we find out what the results are. Corporate employees at Amazon are looking at decreased compensation this year like an actual pay now. The reason for that is because some of their compensation is tied up in stock units, so as part of their salary, Amazon corporate workers get stock in Amazon. However, Amazon stock price has taken some massive hits over the last year, and that means that the stocks awarded to corporate employees are worth much less than they were a year earlier. That's particularly tough because when Amazon structures its salary deals, they are at least partly based on the idea of the stock having a value of around one hundred and seventy dollars per share. So, in other words, that's part of the justification of yes, your salary is X amount of dollars instead of why, because you're also being compensated by stock units that are considered to be worth one hundred seventy dollars per share. However, at the time of recording, Amazon stock is currently at ninety four dollars fifty eight cents per share, so a little more than half of what it was when these salary figures were first calculated. So if the cash part of your salary is dependent upon the fact that the rest of your compensation is coming in the form of stocks that were calculated at one hundred and seventy bucks per share, it means you're getting significantly less per year on top of that, the company has been laying off thousands of employees. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some managers over at Amazon who were giving wistful glances toward chat GPT when it comes time to communicate these issues to their team members. Okay, I've got a couple more stories to talk about, including one that's going to get me all head up again. But before we get to that, I'm going to take a quick break, and so are you. But we'll be right back. Okay, here's where Jonathan gets upset for multiple reasons. All right, So our next story is that torrent Freak reports that filmmakers are demanding to know the identities of certain reddit members who have been active in subreddits and talked about content piracy like the illegal downloading and distribution of films and such. Hey, y'all, here we go again. Like I've been through this a few times because I remember the good old napster days. All right, So the filmmakers want to hold pirates accountable and that is understandable, right, you know, they don't want their films to be pirated, and that makes sense, Like this is not just art, its commerce, and to see people get access to something without legitimately paying for it. That is a problem. However, the arguments that filmmakers and studios make are at best facetious. Now by that, I mean you'll hear filmmakers and studios cite huge figures for damages, like millions and millions of dollars, that these in damages that these companies and these filmmakers experience due to piracy. But the truth of the matter is, you cannot say that with any kind of certainty. Those damages, on the face of it, assume that the people who pirated the content would have otherwise purchased a ticket, or subscribe to a service or whatever, and so piracy, based on this argument, amounts to lost revenue. Thus the damages right, like, we would have sold x number of tickets, except that this number of people pirated it, and therefore we're out x number of dollars. Except you don't know that. You do not know if the person who pirated something would have otherwise sought a legitimate way to view the material. You don't know that you actually lost out on money. Maybe that person would just have gone without seeing it at all. So that's not I mean, you can't you can't accuse people of not going to see a movie, right Like, I haven't gone to see Aunt Man in the Quantum Maniacs or whatever it is. But Marvel can't come to me and say, hey, you failed to see the movie at the theater, so we're going to find you. That doesn't make any sense. So you can't argue that the pirates would have otherwise gone and paid legitimate money to go and see stuff. Therefore the companies out of money because maybe they wouldn't maybe they just wouldn't see it at all. So pirting a film or a series is not the same thing as someone stealing like a physical something like a TV from a big box store. Right. That is a physical item. There is only one of that specific television in the world, and once it's gone from an inventory, it is gone. It is not magically replaced by a digital duplicate. Right. That is something where you can look at that and say, yes, this amounts to real losses. That's a lost sale, if not to the person who stole it, to person who would have ultimately bought it. That you could say, and you could point to that and say these are real damages. You cannot do that with digital media. The government accountability of this, or the United States agrees with me, you cannot do that. Does it amount to damages? Is there a loss of revenue? Undoubtedly, yes, there is definitely a loss of revenue, but there's no way to determine the extent of that. And because filmmakers and studios depend upon these inflated numbers that represent the quote unquote damages that they incurred as a result of piracy to try and become like a bludgeon against pirates, to cow people into avoiding piracy, it unfairly targets people who may or may not have actually caused any damages at all. You just don't know. That's the thing is that because you don't know, you cannot make firm claims of damages. And yet time and again we see filmmakers and studios do this. Now, that is part of it. I should also mention that Reddit is resisting these urges to hand over user data. And just in case you were curious, if you were to do something like I don't know, use a VPN and create a unique email address and only use your VPN when you're accessing something like Reddit, and you register for Reddit using the unique email address, that isn't tied to anything else of yours. That could be a way to avoid imperial entanglements. That being said, now, I say that because I don't like seeing companies go super hard against people. But I also firmly believe piracy is wrong. Okay, I do not condone piracy at all. I pay for the content I consume or I go without. I even bought a cheap region free DVD player so that I can import DVDs from the UK for series that just never get released over here in the US. Mitchell and Webb. Look, I'm looking at you, but I still end up buying the actual stuff. I don't just try and pirate it. I condemn piracy, but I also condemn an industry throwing its power around making assertions that it simply cannot support with evidence, at the cost of people who may not have ever gone to see your quantum maniac ant movie. Okay, I'm done with that. Finally, Hey, do you remember when you were a kid and you've got that meant in the box original iPhone, the two thousand and seven iPhone. Can you remember how excited you were, but part of you thought, you know, maybe I shouldn't open this because this is a collector's item. No. Well, of course not because you're a sensible person. But it turns out if you had been less sensible and chose not to use the thing you've got for the purpose that it was intended, you could have made some crazy money. Why because at an auction this past Sunday, and unopened original two thousand and seven iPhone sold for more than sixty three thousand dollars. When that phone came out, it cost five hundred ninety nine bucks. Now, if we adjust that for inflation today, that would be the same amount as around eight hundred and sixty of today's dollars, so eight hundred sixty bucks. But it's sold for sixty three thousand dollars at auction. Actually it's sold for sixty three thousand, three hundred fifty six dollars and forty cents at auction, which is really specific. I don't typically see it go into the sense like that. Maybe it was a winning bid that came from overseas and it was a currency conversion thing. But if we adjust the iPhone for inflation, then the value of the phone increased by nearly seventy four times. If we don't adjust for inflation, the value increased by one hundred times. So why the heck didn't the person who owned this two thousand and seven iPhone ever open the box? Well, actually, there is a sensible answer to this. You see, back when the iPhone first came out in the US, and you may have forgotten about this, the Apple made an exclusive deal with AT and T. It became the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the US. And the woman who had received this particular iPhone as a gift way back in two thousand and seven, a woman named Karen Green, Well, she had a service contract with Verizon, and it would have cost her a lot of money to cancel out of that contract and then start up with AT and T. That's a whole hassle. I don't know how many people have had to go through that process, but it can sometimes be really frustrating. So the iPhone that she received wouldn't work on Verizon, her carrier, So Green just never opened the darn thing. Instead, she kept it and kept it in good condition, and I'm sure she's very glad she did. Now. I guess if there is a moral to the story, it's if you do not want that nice tech gift, that someone gave to you. Keep it unopened. You never know when it'll be worth sixty grand. Just you know, don't hold your breath about it. All right, that's it for the tech News for Tuesday, February twenty first, two thousand, twenty three. Hope you enjoyed this episode and my various rants, and if you have suggestions for topics I should tackle in future episodes of tech Stuff. I've got one coming up that's going to be dealing with our old buddies, the activist group Anonymous. That's coming up soon. Just let me know. You can get in touch with me via Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff HSW. You can download the iHeartRadio app, which is free to download, free to use. You navigate over to tech Stuff using the search field, and that will bring you to the text stuff page where you'll see a little microphone icon. You can click on that leave a voice message for me, or you can be like Nathan and find my email address hiding out there on the web and just send me an email, because that's how we're going to talk about Anonymous. All right, that's it for me. I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production or podcasts from iHeartRadio, Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the Tech Area. It's time for the tech News for Tuesday, February twenty first, two twenty three, and we're going to start this episode off with a news segment that I would like to call Blame the Robots. So the Washington Post published an article by pranschu Verma titled AI is starting to pick who gets laid off, which is perhaps a bit sensationalized once you read the actual story, but maybe only a little bit sensationalized. All right, So here's how this all unfolds. There are software packages and various services and algorithms that some hiring managers rely upon in order to do kind of a pass filter across job applicants in order to narrow down the search. There are companies that offer that very service, and it starts to make sense if you're hiring at a company that gets a lot of attention. So let's say that you're a popular company, you have fairly rare job openings, and you get lots, like maybe thousands of applicants per job that you list, Well, you probably need some help whittling down the applicant list to get to a manageable pool of potential hires, right like you need something to separate the cream from everything else. It's not easy to do, especially at really high volumes. And so these services and software packages essentially reduce applicants down to data points and they kind of have to. And depending on how tough that filter is, folks can get weeded out. Sometimes a lot of folks. May you get down to, like less than a dozen applicants out of thousands has to be pretty brutal. Well, this article postulates that we could see the reverse come into play as well, that a company might lean on similar software and services to identify the people who contribute the least to the company or perform at a level that's considered to be below their peers. Therefore, they could be candidates for layoffs when the corporate overlords deemed that it is time to reduce headcount in these troubling times. And therein lies the story, right that an algorithm might determine that you are expendable instead of your human boss. And I am aware that I'm making an assumption here that your boss is in fact human, some program, you know, some freaking robot has determined that you're getting laid off. It sounds positively dystopia, doesn't it. And with big tech companies laying off thousands of folks over this year and the previous year, it's easy to imagine managers shrugging off the responsibility of telling someone they no longer have a job by leaving it to the old zeros and ones of a presumably objective and emotionless system. But this in turn brings up other problems. As I have mentioned in tons of episodes, one of the many problems we have in AI systems can come down to unintended bias within the system itself. So if the system is biased, it could end up targeting employees of specific ethnicities or backgrounds. Now Vermat makes this argument in the Washington Post article. He says that if the algorithm were to, say, determine that people of color have a higher incidence rate of leaving their jobs, that a person of color is more likely to leave their job than say, they're white colleagues, well, then the system might naturally start to target employees who happen to be people of color for the purposes of layoffs. But then you're getting into very dangerous legal and ethical territory. It's as if you're targeting these specific people because of their race. Also, I'm not sure how well an algorithm can actually judge a person's contributions. Presumably stuff from employee reviews and such would play a big part, But in highly collaborative work, a person could act as the sort of lynch pen that keeps a team working really well together, even if they themselves don't have the highest numbers on whatever the deliverables are. So in my opinion, relying on AI to make or even guide decisions regarding layoffs is really a bad move all around. It can make sense in the applicant phase, but in layoffs I would say avoid it. It doesn't look good for the company. It could ultimately lead to choices that will harm the overall organization in the long run. In this article, Verma mentions that while folks at Google wondered if perhaps they had been laid off due to an algorithm choosing them because there didn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to the layoffs, the company denies making use of anything of the sort. There's kind of a distinct lack of cases where we know that an algorithm definitively played a part in layoffs. However, Verma in the article also cites a survey that showed ninety eight percent of HR managers there were three hundred of them participating in the survey, had said that they plan to rely on software and algorithms to help make such decisions about layoffs this year. So even if you were to argue it hasn't happened yet, it looks like it's going to happen real soon. My guess is we'll see some high cases where some company relies too heavily on algorithms and it'll come back to haunt them, perhaps only in PR, but it will be a big blowback, and then maybe then we'll start to see people form best practices around the whole thing. I still think it feels a bit like shirking responsibility in my opinion, If the top brass decides that layoffs are necessary, then they are obligated to make each and every layoff decision transparent and honest, I think they owe their employees as much. And it's really infuriating because you'll see managers who get a directive saying you have to apply this artificial bell curve to the employees who are reporting to you. We heard a story about that just a couple of weeks ago, where a director actually essentially was fired for refusing to follow that because it arbitrarily requires managers to assign people as low performers even if you don't have any low performers on your team, and that just again seems inherently unfair. I feel like relying on AI to make these choices also is inherently unfair and can miss some really important factors that may not reduce down to pure data. But we've got a lot of other AI news to get through today. A lot of it is bad. I'm not gonna lie. And our next story comes from Vanderbilt University. The Peabody College at Vendorbilt, and that college's Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion send out a message to students in the wake of the terrible shooting at Michigan State University. And clearly this was a delicate task that needed empathy and support. I needed a message that showed that Vanderbilt's staff have students and their welfare at the top. Of their priority list, so of course they use chat GPT to help craft the message. This pretty much sent me spiraling, y'all, because passing the buck to AI to handle things that are this important, things that intrinsically involve a very human connection, it just feels beyond shortsighted and crass to me. At best, you could say this was a poor decision, but at worst it implies that leadership has little to no regard for students and instead we'll just lean on the robots to handle the tough stuff. Anyway, the end of the message contained the line paraphrased from open ais Chat GBTAI Language Model Personal Communication, and at least the word paraphrase indicates that there was human involvement in taking the generated message and shaping it properly for students. So it was a collaborative effort, you could say. But still, the fact that staff tapped AI in the first place to help with such a sensitive matter doesn't look good. It looks like people who want to avoid the hard stuff, and hard stuff isn't the human connection stuff, the stuff that has incredible impact on emotion and mental health, whether it's layoffs or counseling people in the wake of a violent act like the shooting at the University of Michigan. That is the wrong way to use AI, in my opinion. That is inherently the realm of humanity and to off source that to AI's it shows such a huge disregard for the people who are ultimately the recipients of those messages that I think it's unconscionable. Now the Associate Dean and Assistant Dean who are part of this process have both stepped back from that office of equity, diversity and inclusion, which is probably for the best, but yeah, this was a really bad use case for AI. Last week, the representatives from around the world attended the Summit on Responsible Artificial Intelligence in the Military Domain or re aim our AIM and we've talked about how incorporating AI into military processes and hardware raises really difficult questions regarding safety, accountability, escalation, and more. Reps from many countries, including the United States and China, but excluding Russia, which wasn't invited and Ukraine did not attend. They were invited, but clearly have other things going on at the moment. Anyway, these representatives all met to discuss the issues of AI in its role in military operations. At the conclusion of the summit, all but one of the representatives of the countries that attended signed an agree to commit to developing AI military applications that quote do not undermine international security, stability and accountability end quote. So what was the one nation that abstained. That would be Israel. Now, don't like heap tons of criticism on Israel, because there are critics who say this entire meeting was largely for show, because according to critics, there was nothing in the summit or the agreement that is legally binding for any of the countries involved. So, in other words, the critics are saying that the reps are all like, yeah, yeah, totally AI killing people would really be bad. Let's totally not do that, but they would have no real accountability to follow through on that promise. Further, the agreement did not include certain AI assisted or controlled systems that are already in use, like AI controlled drones, And so there's concern that this agreement, while represents little more than just putting on a show to say, yes, we're all aware of this and it is a bad thing. Now, Honestly, I heavily suspect that several countries, including the United States and also China, will continue incorporating AI into military applications, including weaponized AI. I would be absolutely shocked if they didn't continue down that pathway, because there's a very real fear that if you don't do it, the other guy will, and then there will be an AI gap. Now maybe I only think that because I'm a child of the seventies and eighties and I saw how this very similar scenario played out with nuclear armaments, because boy howdy, was that a thing. So I would love for us to avoid the mistakes of the past. But I really am skeptical that that's going to happen, because again, unless everybody is hell accountable and agrees to not further that work, someone is going to. And if someone's going to, then everyone is going to because otherwise you are at a disadvantage. Okay, with all that doom and gloom out of the way, let's take a quick break. When we come back, I've got some more news items to talk about. We're back now. I still have a couple more AI stories, but these are not quite as apocalyptic as the ones we started off with. The one is that Clark's world magazine, which has been publishing fantasy and science fiction stories online since two thousand and six, has temporarily stopped accepting submissions. Why because apparently the magazine has received too many AI generated submissions, and until they have access to better tools to detect those kinds of things, they have chosen to hold off accepting anymore. That's both understandable and it stinks. Not that I think the magazine made the wrong call here. I think this is the right call, but rather it stinks because there are genuine authors and would be authors out there who have great stories to tell, and they're seeing an outlet closed off to them, at least for now, and it's all thanks to AI generated stories. Now, I think in most cases the AI generated stuff has to be a collaborator kind of relationship, because in my own experience the stories generated by AI they aren't very good. Like, grammatically they work, and you know, you get some interesting descriptions and stuff, but the actual stories tend to be pretty mundane and uninteresting. I imagine that most folks who are using AI are leaning on it for stuff like generating initial ideas, maybe shaping a certain part of the narrative at least any stories that are difficult to determine, Oh, this was made by AI, right, if they haven't done any massaging, it often is pretty easy to detect that it's AI, or the very least, it's easy to detect that's not a very good story and it wouldn't pass the bar for publication. But still, here's another example of how AI can end up harming creative types, whether it's from the unauthorized copying of their style or displacing them from the creator community. Insider reports something that I think most folks already have a pretty good handle on, and that is the emergence and reception to chat GPT probably means we're going to see a whole bunch of copycats in the very near future. And to be clear, chatbots have been a thing for years. I'm sure you're all aware of that. In fact, someone who is once in the business of reporting on tech, a person whom I know and respect and like very very much, ended up working at a company that developed sophisticated chatbots. But these were tools that were intended for narrow use cases, something that would work well within the confines of a particular company's services and processes. The stuff we're seeing now is made to be more general purpose, and with that comes the problems of reliability and accuracy as well as transparency. It is easier, not easy, mind you, but easier to build a reliable and accurate tool that works within an enclosed system, like the customer service arm of a consumer facing company. But it's another thing when it's just you know, free range AI chat bot. And meanwhile, the guy who runs the company that made chat GPT has said repeatedly that he thinks chat GPT isn't that good, or at least it is far from perfect. And yet we're currently living through a buzzy, height heightened age of chat GPT and its peers like like Barred from Google. Tech Runch has a piece titled the AI photo app trend has already fizzled, new data shows and you should totally check out this article. The author of the piece, Sarah Perez, lays out some of the data, including download numbers and revenue, and she shows that while the text to image AI tools initially made a really big splash when they started to emerge, particularly late last year, excitement has dropped off considerably since then. There's been a lot of backlash in the space, ranging from artists who are understandably upset to see their style co opted by AI, to users who are concerned that the tools can create inappropriate images far too readily, and that any restrictions that are designed to limit that sort of stuff aren't always the best. Whether those actually played a big part in cooling this trend, or maybe it was just that folks were getting tired of the shiny new thing and they had already moved on, I am uncertain, but my guests is that we're going to see the space continue to evolve, perhaps with fewer players as this goes on, if some of them find it too difficult to cover costs with the declining revenues. But I don't think AI generated imagery is going to just go away at this point. Now that being said, one fun story, or at least in my opinion, it's fun that relates to the AI generated imagery involves a robot from Carnegie Mellon University. So it's a robot arm that has the name Frieda, which yes, is both a tribute to Frieda the artist, and is an acronym that stands for Framework and Robotics Initiative for developing arts, and it also generates images based on text prompts. Only in this case, the images it makes are not digital images. They're not computer generated images. They are real world paintings. You have a robot that paints with actual brushes and actual paint It creates works of art based off text input and directions. According to tech Spot, it takes about an hour from the point where the robot receives input in the form of the text to the point where it begins to paint, because it actually has to plot out how it's going to physically paint this. How are the brushstrokes going to go, how long are they going to go, how much pressure is going to be used? What style is it going to follow? And that's very understandable because as we all know, there are different strokes for different folks, because the world don't move to the beat of just one drum. Shout out to me if you get that reference. Anyway, The roboticists and engineers are quick to say that Frieda isn't an artist. FRIEDA is a collaborator. FRIEDA is not creative. FRIEDA just follows instructions as best it can pay the subject of the art in the style that was dictated by its collaborator. Anyway, I just thought this was a neat take on AI generated images. Somehow it feels different that because it's, you know, a physical painting. It's something that you could hold or put into a frame and hang on a wall, or you know, something you could rip apart in rage as robots get another art commission and you don't. Now, finally we're off of the AI stories and we can get to everything else. So next up. Part of the big news this week is Meta really shook things up on Sunday announcing that the company is introducing a subscription service called Meta Verified. It's just in the testing phase now, and you know, the plan is to widely deploy it, but we'll see if things go poorly in the test markets that Meta is trying out at the moment. But essentially, this subscription service is a verification tool. Users would have to submit proof that they are who they claim to be, using government issued ID for example, and in return for twelve bucks a month or fifteen bucks a month if you're doing it on iOS or Android, because Google and Apple take their own cut of the fee. You then get a little blue badge on Facebook and or Instagram saying you're bona fide. On top of that, badge subscribers will also have access to services that are meant to protect against imposter accounts. They're supposed to get better customer support, and they're supposed to get improved discoverability when folks are actually searching for them, which am I opinion, is stuff that should really be standard for all users, whether they're paying a subscription or not. I think it's kind of bullpucky to say one of the benefits to verification is that meta will make sure other folks aren't trying to impersonate you. I mean, arguably, this is a bigger problem for notable folks like celebrities and brands. And I'm not talking me, I'm talking real celebrities. I have no illusions that I'm a celebrity, but I've still seen plenty of instances of friends being impersonated as someone has either gained access to their account or created a copy account in an attempt to phish for data. Like this is still something that affects the average person on these platforms. It's not just for the celebrities. But yeah, I'm that's facing issues with the revenue for a lot of different reasons, so it's not surprising that the company is now introducing the subscription feature. It just feels like the quote unquote benefits of the service are things that really everyone on the platform should have access to by default. Maybe I'm just being unreasonable here. Today Microsoft will attempt to defend its planned acquisition of Activision Blizzard in the EU in a meeting that's behind closed doors and Brussels. Previously, EU regulators indicated that they would block the purchase, saying it would result in less competition in the video game space and allow Microsoft to engage in actively anti competitive practices, such as preventing other platforms like Sony PlayStation from having access to popular video game franchises like Call of Duty. Earlier, Microsoft Reps signed a deal with Nintendo Reps that legally binds Microsoft to bring Call of Duty titles to Nintendo platforms for ten years, and further that all titles will be available on Nintendo platforms the same day that they come out for Xbox platforms, with quote full feature and content parity end quote between these versions, meaning Nintendo won't have to be happy with a watered down version of Call of Duty. It's going to get the real thing, just like Xboxes. This puts pressure on Sony to make a similar agreement or else Microsoft could argue before the EU regulators that Microsoft has made attempts to ensure fairness between the various console companies, but Sony isn't playing ball on purpose in an effort to scuttle the deal, surprisingly, at least to me, the Communications Workers of America the CWA, a union organization here in the US, has also urged the EU to approve the acquisition deal. They say that Microsoft has been more receptive to attempts at unionizing than Activision Blizzard has, and that without Microsoft's oversight, employees and Activision could find themselves facing tough managerial resistance to unionizing. By the time you hear this, a decision has probably been made one way or the other. But as I write this episode, it has yet to be announced, and again, the meeting is behind closed doors, so it might be a little while before we find out what the results are. Corporate employees at Amazon are looking at decreased compensation this year like an actual pay now. The reason for that is because some of their compensation is tied up in stock units, so as part of their salary, Amazon corporate workers get stock in Amazon. However, Amazon stock price has taken some massive hits over the last year, and that means that the stocks awarded to corporate employees are worth much less than they were a year earlier. That's particularly tough because when Amazon structures its salary deals, they are at least partly based on the idea of the stock having a value of around one hundred and seventy dollars per share. So, in other words, that's part of the justification of yes, your salary is X amount of dollars instead of why, because you're also being compensated by stock units that are considered to be worth one hundred seventy dollars per share. However, at the time of recording, Amazon stock is currently at ninety four dollars fifty eight cents per share, so a little more than half of what it was when these salary figures were first calculated. So if the cash part of your salary is dependent upon the fact that the rest of your compensation is coming in the form of stocks that were calculated at one hundred and seventy bucks per share, it means you're getting significantly less per year on top of that, the company has been laying off thousands of employees. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some managers over at Amazon who were giving wistful glances toward chat GPT when it comes time to communicate these issues to their team members. Okay, I've got a couple more stories to talk about, including one that's going to get me all head up again. But before we get to that, I'm going to take a quick break, and so are you. But we'll be right back. Okay, here's where Jonathan gets upset for multiple reasons. All right, So our next story is that torrent Freak reports that filmmakers are demanding to know the identities of certain reddit members who have been active in subreddits and talked about content piracy like the illegal downloading and distribution of films and such. Hey, y'all, here we go again. Like I've been through this a few times because I remember the good old napster days. All right, So the filmmakers want to hold pirates accountable and that is understandable, right, you know, they don't want their films to be pirated, and that makes sense, Like this is not just art, its commerce, and to see people get access to something without legitimately paying for it. That is a problem. However, the arguments that filmmakers and studios make are at best facetious. Now by that, I mean you'll hear filmmakers and studios cite huge figures for damages, like millions and millions of dollars, that these in damages that these companies and these filmmakers experience due to piracy. But the truth of the matter is, you cannot say that with any kind of certainty. Those damages, on the face of it, assume that the people who pirated the content would have otherwise purchased a ticket, or subscribe to a service or whatever, and so piracy, based on this argument, amounts to lost revenue. Thus the damages right, like, we would have sold x number of tickets, except that this number of people pirated it, and therefore we're out x number of dollars. Except you don't know that. You do not know if the person who pirated something would have otherwise sought a legitimate way to view the material. You don't know that you actually lost out on money. Maybe that person would just have gone without seeing it at all. So that's not I mean, you can't you can't accuse people of not going to see a movie, right Like, I haven't gone to see Aunt Man in the Quantum Maniacs or whatever it is. But Marvel can't come to me and say, hey, you failed to see the movie at the theater, so we're going to find you. That doesn't make any sense. So you can't argue that the pirates would have otherwise gone and paid legitimate money to go and see stuff. Therefore the companies out of money because maybe they wouldn't maybe they just wouldn't see it at all. So pirting a film or a series is not the same thing as someone stealing like a physical something like a TV from a big box store. Right. That is a physical item. There is only one of that specific television in the world, and once it's gone from an inventory, it is gone. It is not magically replaced by a digital duplicate. Right. That is something where you can look at that and say, yes, this amounts to real losses. That's a lost sale, if not to the person who stole it, to person who would have ultimately bought it. That you could say, and you could point to that and say these are real damages. You cannot do that with digital media. The government accountability of this, or the United States agrees with me, you cannot do that. Does it amount to damages? Is there a loss of revenue? Undoubtedly, yes, there is definitely a loss of revenue, but there's no way to determine the extent of that. And because filmmakers and studios depend upon these inflated numbers that represent the quote unquote damages that they incurred as a result of piracy to try and become like a bludgeon against pirates, to cow people into avoiding piracy, it unfairly targets people who may or may not have actually caused any damages at all. You just don't know. That's the thing is that because you don't know, you cannot make firm claims of damages. And yet time and again we see filmmakers and studios do this. Now, that is part of it. I should also mention that Reddit is resisting these urges to hand over user data. And just in case you were curious, if you were to do something like I don't know, use a VPN and create a unique email address and only use your VPN when you're accessing something like Reddit, and you register for Reddit using the unique email address, that isn't tied to anything else of yours. That could be a way to avoid imperial entanglements. That being said, now, I say that because I don't like seeing companies go super hard against people. But I also firmly believe piracy is wrong. Okay, I do not condone piracy at all. I pay for the content I consume or I go without. I even bought a cheap region free DVD player so that I can import DVDs from the UK for series that just never get released over here in the US. Mitchell and Webb. Look, I'm looking at you, but I still end up buying the actual stuff. I don't just try and pirate it. I condemn piracy, but I also condemn an industry throwing its power around making assertions that it simply cannot support with evidence, at the cost of people who may not have ever gone to see your quantum maniac ant movie. Okay, I'm done with that. Finally, Hey, do you remember when you were a kid and you've got that meant in the box original iPhone, the two thousand and seven iPhone. Can you remember how excited you were, but part of you thought, you know, maybe I shouldn't open this because this is a collector's item. No. Well, of course not because you're a sensible person. But it turns out if you had been less sensible and chose not to use the thing you've got for the purpose that it was intended, you could have made some crazy money. Why because at an auction this past Sunday, and unopened original two thousand and seven iPhone sold for more than sixty three thousand dollars. When that phone came out, it cost five hundred ninety nine bucks. Now, if we adjust that for inflation today, that would be the same amount as around eight hundred and sixty of today's dollars, so eight hundred sixty bucks. But it's sold for sixty three thousand dollars at auction. Actually it's sold for sixty three thousand, three hundred fifty six dollars and forty cents at auction, which is really specific. I don't typically see it go into the sense like that. Maybe it was a winning bid that came from overseas and it was a currency conversion thing. But if we adjust the iPhone for inflation, then the value of the phone increased by nearly seventy four times. If we don't adjust for inflation, the value increased by one hundred times. So why the heck didn't the person who owned this two thousand and seven iPhone ever open the box? Well, actually, there is a sensible answer to this. You see, back when the iPhone first came out in the US, and you may have forgotten about this, the Apple made an exclusive deal with AT and T. It became the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the US. And the woman who had received this particular iPhone as a gift way back in two thousand and seven, a woman named Karen Green, Well, she had a service contract with Verizon, and it would have cost her a lot of money to cancel out of that contract and then start up with AT and T. That's a whole hassle. I don't know how many people have had to go through that process, but it can sometimes be really frustrating. So the iPhone that she received wouldn't work on Verizon, her carrier, So Green just never opened the darn thing. Instead, she kept it and kept it in good condition, and I'm sure she's very glad she did. Now. I guess if there is a moral to the story, it's if you do not want that nice tech gift, that someone gave to you. Keep it unopened. You never know when it'll be worth sixty grand. Just you know, don't hold your breath about it. All right, that's it for the tech News for Tuesday, February twenty first, two thousand, twenty three. Hope you enjoyed this episode and my various rants, and if you have suggestions for topics I should tackle in future episodes of tech Stuff. I've got one coming up that's going to be dealing with our old buddies, the activist group Anonymous. That's coming up soon. Just let me know. You can get in touch with me via Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff HSW. You can download the iHeartRadio app, which is free to download, free to use. You navigate over to tech Stuff using the search field, and that will bring you to the text stuff page where you'll see a little microphone icon. You can click on that leave a voice message for me, or you can be like Nathan and find my email address hiding out there on the web and just send me an email, because that's how we're going to talk about Anonymous. All right, that's it for me. I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production or podcasts from iHeartRadio, Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.