If you could skip the airport security line by paying a little extra, would you? Millions of US travellers do. CC-licensed photo by Ted & Dani Percival on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Use them wisely. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
If other media companies thought about brand equity the way Elon Musk thinks about Twitter’s (er, X’s) • Nieman Journalism Lab
Joshua Benton:
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In the spirit of Tronc, Elon Musk has decided to throw away more than a decade of brand equity by changing the name of Twitter to…the letter X. Imagine if more media executives followed his lead.
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Tronc! Remember Tronc? No? Why don’t you remember Tronc? Was it, perhaps, because although the word was already an English word (“A monetary pool, in which tips are collected and later shared out between all staff, e.g. in a restaurant”), Tribune Publishing thought rebranding as just “Tronc” would, uh, do something. Gave up after two years. Bad names don’t stick. Good ones survive any attempt to rebrand them.
Benton’s faux-examples are witty, though.
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OpenAI, Google will watermark AI-generated content to hinder deepfakes, misinfo • Ars Technica
Ashley Belanger:
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Seven companies—including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, Anthropic, and Inflection—have committed to developing tech to clearly watermark AI-generated content. That will help make it safer to share AI-generated text, video, audio, and images without misleading others about the authenticity of that content, the Biden administration hopes.
It’s currently unclear how the watermark will work, but it will likely be embedded in the content so that users can trace its origins to the AI tools used to generate it.
Deepfakes have become an emerging concern for Internet users and policymakers alike as tech companies grapple with how to deal with controversial uses of AI tools.
Earlier this year, image-generator Midjourney was used to make fake images of Donald Trump’s arrest, which subsequently went viral. While it was obvious to many that the images were fake, Midjourney still decided to take steps to ban the user who made them. Perhaps if a watermark had been available then, that user, Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins, never would have faced such steep consequences for what he said was not an attempt to be clever or fake others out but simply have fun with Midjourney.
There are other more serious misuses of AI tools, however, where a watermark might help save some Internet users from pain and strife. Earlier this year, it was reported that AI voice-generating software was used to scam people out of thousands of dollars, and just last month, the FBI warned of increasing use of AI-generated deepfakes in sextortion schemes.
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Looking forward to hearing more about precisely how this is going to work, and how it will defeat attempts to spot it and wipe it.
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The perfect service to make everyone at the airport hate you • The Atlantic
Amanda Mull:
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Like many things about contemporary American air travel, [the private company] Clear’s presence in airports is an indirect result of 9/11. Its predecessor, Verified Identity Pass, or VIP, was founded in the aftermath of the attacks, when the federal government was looking for companies that could expedite security procedures for people who flew a lot and were regarded as a low security risk, such as business travelers. VIP’s signature product—confusingly also called Clear—gathered about 200,000 clients before the company filed for bankruptcy, in 2009. At that point, according to a 2020 story on Clear by the journalist Dave Gershgorn, it was bought by a duo of former hedge-fund managers who envisioned a life beyond government contracting for their new service.
VIP was rebranded to Clear, and the company, which had previously issued express-pass cards to its members, pivoted to biometrics. To sign up for Clear’s marquee offering, Clear Plus, the company scans your irises and fingerprints, verifies your identity, and charges a $189-a-year fee after the initial free month for people who sign up at the airport. For that price, you get escorted to the front of the security line at the 52 North American airports where the company currently operates. If you have both Clear and TSA PreCheck, the service puts you at the front of the PreCheck line, so you can also keep your shoes on.
For anyone who doesn’t have Clear Plus, the sales pitches and line-cutting can be pretty annoying. Clear’s argument is that its services help security run more smoothly for all travelers. In an email, a company spokesperson, Annabel Walsh, described Clear as a “force multiplier” for airport efficiency: Travelers who get verified via Clear don’t need to have their IDs checked by TSA, which frees up agents to check others. Airports also permit Clear salespeople to pull double duty by answering questions for travellers, Walsh told me. This appears to have upsides for both the company and the airport: Low pay and difficult work make attracting and retaining airport staff a constant struggle, so Clear salespeople can theoretically fill in some customer-assistance gaps while also finding solid opportunities to pitch their product.
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Everything, just everything, is an opportunity for an upsell in the US. Make the airport more efficient? Don’t be ridiculous!
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Apple rules out bid for Premier League football over global rights • MacRumors
Hartley Charlton:
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Apple has reportedly been interested in obtaining the rights to broadcast the Premier League as far back as 2012. Earlier this year, Bloomberg highlighted Apple’s consideration of a bid for the rights to stream the Premier League, among other lower league matches run by the English Football League, for Apple TV+ .
Eddy Cue has now effectively ruled out Apple’s intention to make a bid on the basis that it would be unable to obtain global rights. The company sought a deal similar to its rights to broadcast Major League Soccer (MLS) worldwide for a period of ten years, an arrangement hailed as a “historic first for a major professional sports league.” Speaking to The Daily Mail, Cue explained Apple’s rationale:
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I don’t like the word exclusivity because that’s important but not as important. The global rights are important to us. We’re a global company, we have customers in every country in the world, a large number of customers, and it’s not exciting for me to have something that you can have but you can’t have.
Secondly, we’re throwing a significant amount of engineering resources into the product. We think we’re going to do some very innovative things with the product as we move forward. We’ve done some things like MLS 360 (providing live look-ins from every match), we’ve done the multi-viewing of games, which is again very difficult to do in other environments. And this is nothing.
I can’t justify throwing what I think are the best engineers in the world on a small subset product. It has to be this kind of a partnership because our level of investment is significant. This isn’t “hey, I’ve got an opening from 8pm to 10pm tonight and I’m going to put this game on.” That’s not the way we’re doing it. We’re all in on this as an investment point of view, so it doesn’t work unless it’s something significant.
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So it has to be global or nothing? I’m not surprised Apple is balking at that. Even if it secured the deal, the contract would be a target every year from rivals. Sticking small with US MLS makes much better sense.
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Daily Mail prepares for legal battle with Google over AI copyright • Daily Telegraph
James Warrington:
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The owner of the Daily Mail is gearing up for a legal battle with Google over claims the tech giant used hundreds of thousands of online news stories to train its ChatGPT rival without permission.
Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT), the publishing group controlled by Lord Rothermere, is understood to have sought legal advice as it considers potential action.
DeepMind, Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) division, allegedly harvested a vast cache of around 1 million news articles from the Daily Mail and CNN websites to help develop its chatbot, Bard.
It is claimed that the tech giant targeted them because both use bullet points to summarise key points before the main text of a story. Google allegedly used the articles to test Bard’s capabilities by removing words from the bullet points and asking the AI to fill in the gaps based on the rest of the story.
However, it allegedly used the articles from the Daily Mail and CNN websites without either copyright holder’s knowledge or permission. Around three-quarters of the articles used in the dataset are believed to have come from the Mail, while the remainder were taken from CNN’s website.
Google, DMGT and CNN declined to comment.
Any court claim by DMGT would mark the second major commercial legal action relating to AI, amid rising concerns that the nascent technology could ride roughshod over copyright laws.
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Exotic new silicon-based speakers are coming to next-generation earbuds • WSJ
Christopher Mims:
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The technology that has made this transition possible, called MEMS—short for micro-electromechanical systems—is the reason an entire 1990s RadioShack’s worth of gear can be crammed into the slim slabs of touch-sensitive glass that now fit in our pockets.
So far, in speakers, there are only a handful of products shipping that use MEMS technology. I’ve tried one product—a prototype in-ear monitor, of the sort used by audio engineers—and was impressed by its performance.
Peter Cooney, founder of SAR Insight & Consulting, which tracks the audio-technology industry, has been following the world of MEMS-based, or solid-state, speakers for a decade. And this year and the next are, he says, when they will finally arrive in the kinds of devices regular consumers might buy, such as high-end wireless earbuds.
One company building this tech, xMEMS, has made available prototypes of its speakers to dozens of companies, and over 30 of them are working on earbuds and other products based on the technology, says a company spokesman.
One recipient of prototype in-ear monitors—the kind of high-fidelity earbuds professionals use when mastering musical tracks—is Brian Lucey. A mastering engineer of nine Grammy award winners, Lucey told me that the solid-state speakers in the in-ear monitors he’s using have become indispensable.
But eventually, this tech could be everywhere—in every smartphone, and in nearly all the earbuds, smart glasses, and various other “hearables” that are on their way to market.
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Exciting. I recall when the first “flat” speakers started coming out, using NXT technology: that was back in May 1998. Now we’re moving to properly solid state speakers for earbuds? Bring it on. (And of course you’d expect Apple will be on this. It declined to comment when Mims asked it if it was using MEMS.)
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The dirty little secret that could bring down Big Tech • Business Insider
Adam Rogers:
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In 2016, Matt Wansley was trying to get work as a lawyer for a tech company — specifically, working on self-driving cars. He was making the rounds, interviewing at all the companies whose names you know, and eventually found himself talking to an executive at Lyft. So Wansley asked her, straight-out: How committed was Lyft, really, to autonomous driving?
“Of course we’re committed to automated driving,” the exec told him. “The numbers don’t pencil out any other way.”
Wait a minute, Wansley thought. Unless someone invents a robot that can drive as well as humans, one of America’s biggest ride-hailing companies doesn’t expect to turn a profit? Like, ever? Something was clearly very, very screwy about the business model of Big Tech.
“So what was the investment thesis behind Uber and Lyft?” says Wansley, now a professor at the Cardozo School of Law. “Putting billions of dollars of capital into a money-losing business where the path to profitability wasn’t clear?”
Wansley and a Cardozo colleague, Sam Weinstein, set out to understand the money behind the madness.
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Effectively, this is about the Lina Khan response to predatory pricing funded by venture capital: use antitrust law on those undercutting rivals in order to drive them out of the market. Except the focus is the venture capitalists, who profit from the IPO that shoulders the share buyers with the forthcoming losses. Weinstein seems to be arguing that you could bring a gigantic class action suit on behalf of the IPO buyers. To which the VC and company would probably point you to the S-1 describing the myriad ways in which your money could just go down the drain. And look, so it did!
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America is becoming a nation of early birds • WSJ
Rachel Wolfe:
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Trendy new restaurants are closing their kitchens at 8 p.m. And movie theaters are swapping late-night screenings for matinees. Hybrid and remote workers itching to leave the house as soon as they close their laptops are fueling the shift.
Restaurants are now seating 10% of diners between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m., up from 5% in 2019, according to Yelp. Dinner parties are starting as early as 5 p.m.
Some night owls think we’re all getting a bit dull. Others embrace the mass backward slide of our activities. Kathy Hatfield is one of the converts.
When the insurance company Hatfield works for told her she could Zoom commute forever, she knew she had to adjust her routine. Living alone in a West Bridgewater, Mass., condo, she craved face-to-face interaction by the time she got off work at 5 p.m. and started bringing her Kindle to a local restaurant for a solo dinner and glass of wine.
She expected to be the only one there. Instead, she became so close with a group of bartenders and a dozen or so other regulars they now share a group text and attend each other’s milestone events. The two spots she frequents are usually packed by 6 p.m.
“I’m at the point now where I’m looking for new places, because sometimes I just want to read and I know so many people that I just chitchat the whole time,” says Hatfield, 57. She’s also had to adjust her strategy on Saturdays. While a 5 p.m. dinner used to be a surefire way to beat the crowds and get a reservation, she now finds it easier waiting until 7 p.m. “It’s flip-flopped,” she says.
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No explanation is offered, but the comparison with 2019 points to an obvious one: post-pandemic, more people are working from home, so they don’t have any commute.
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Publishers want billions, not millions, from AI • Semafor
Ben Smith:
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Tech companies appear to hope that they can placate publishers with, perhaps, eight figures worth of payouts, as the Facebook News Initiative did when it doled out payments annually between 2019 and 2022, fees reportedly exceeding $20m for the Times, $15m for the Washington Post, and $10m for the Wall Street Journal.
Publishers believe the numbers ought to be much bigger this time around. If these breakthrough language models rely on their inputs, they argue, the share of the value they collect should be commensurate — and should run into the billions of dollars across the industry.
Levin, other publishers and their counterparts at Google, Microsoft, and other tech giants declined to quote numbers, or to discuss the coalition they’re forming.
But the publishers, led by Diller himself, are also threatening to try their luck in court, where complex questions about how copyright law applies to both the inputs to AI training and the outputs of AI models remain largely untested. Publishers are watching with particular interest to a Delaware lawsuit over an artificial intelligence company’s copying of legal texts from Westlaw.
Payments on the scale the publishers expect would mark a dramatic change for companies like Google, which have built high-margin business in large part because they — unlike media companies from Netflix to Comcast — don’t pay for content.
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No harm starting your bid high, eh?
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The Reith Lectures: Robert Oppenheimer – Science and the Common Understanding – The Sciences and Man’s Community • BBC Sounds
From December 1953:
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Robert Oppenheimer is an American theoretical physicist. Professor of Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, he has been described as the “father of the atomic bomb” for his role in the Manhattan Project while Director of Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory between 1943–45. In his Reith lectures entitled ‘Science and the Common Understanding’, he examines the impact of quantum and atomic theory on society.
In his sixth and final lecture entitled ‘The Sciences and Man’s Community’, Professor Oppenheimer explains how the “House of Science” helps us to understand the underlying profundities of the earth and our lives. He draws parallels between the construction of human society and the atom: each man is dependent on the next, and through the power of the collective, Man’s power grows with the shared knowledge of individuals
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This program will be available for more than a year, and should be accessible to readers outside the UK. This seems to be the only one of the lectures that the BBC has (as they say) surfaced; it would be nice if the other five popped up too.
If a Barbie lecture series appears, I’ll let you know.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016?Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 
The Verge’s tronc video disappeared, but Slate has an unlisted one here — https://youtu.be/BAdrrl2oy1A — for anyone who missed/wants to relive it in full HD.