Meta’s experimental vibe-coding gaming app

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1:35Let's talk about Meta's experimental Vibe Coding Gaming app. I'm Imran Shaikh and your Friday Daily Crunch featuring three big tech headlines. Starts right now. While the team at Patreon, the membership platform for creators, has been building like crazy and is now revealing the result. You see, on Thursday, the company debuted dozens of new features to help creators get discovered, build their community, learn from insights, and a whole bunch more. Patreon's saying its roadmap is meant to reflect the core philosophy that today's internet has failed creators by prioritizing fleeting engagement over genuine community, making it hard for creators to be fairly paid.

2:14Patreon's changes, however, acknowledge the role that short-form video platforms like TikTok or Reels play in helping creators find an audience. To make that discovery easier, it's rolling out a feature on iOS called Clips, which will turn creators' videos into short, shareable clips. These can be downloaded and shared off-platform, as on TikTok, or posted as Patreon's own short-form post format known as Quips. Plus, creators will be able to leverage new tools that offer potential fans more previews of their work. The tools, which are still in early testing, include suggested video previews, which will pull out the most engaging parts of their paid videos, and another that lets creators quote snippets of their longer written posts into quips.

2:58The video previews can be shown to fans who are weighing whether or not to pay to unlock the content or subscribe to a membership, while the text-based quote quips can be shared as previews to the home feed, offering creators more exposure. The full list of improvements include 30, yeah, 30 new or revamped features, some of which are still in early testing. Over the next few months, creators should expect to see many more changes arrive, Patreon said. Two senators have given TikTok a deadline to answer questions about an experiment that withheld a safety feature from 15 million U.S. users, including a teenager who later died by suicide.

3:39Republican Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn and Democratic Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal sent a letter to TikTok CEO Sho Chu and Adam Presser, CEO of the company's U.S. business, calling the company's decision to run the experiment depraved. You see, Bloomberg reported that TikTok intentionally disabled an algorithmic safeguard for 10 % of US users, creating a control group for the experiment. The safeguard was designed to prevent users from being overwhelmed by harmful content. But TikTok wanted to determine whether it made the app less engaging, so it decided to conduct the experiment.

4:14One of the people in the control group was 16-year-old Chase Nazca, whose algorithm fed him thousands of videos about sadness, suicide, and loneliness up until he died by suicide. The senators are demanding answers to 13 questions regarding the experiment, including names of every employee who knew about the experiment and why TikTok allowed minors to be part of the control group. They're also looking for a list of every algorithmic experiment in the U.S. when the social network disabled or delayed a safety feature. The Senators have given TikTok until September 1st to respond. TikTok did not immediately respond to TechCrunch's request for comment.

4:53Meta's experimental vibe-coding gaming app Pocket is now rolling out to everyone in the good old US of A. You see, the app, which arrived quietly last month in the test market of Brazil, allows people to generate small, interactive games using AI prompts, which are published to a scrollable feed. Based on Meta's acquihire of the team at the vibe-coded gaming platform Gizmo earlier this year, these games, or gizmos as they're called, respond to touch and the tilt of your phone, play sound effects, and can include clips of your favorite songs. They can also use photos from your camera roll or access your camera, because it's not AI unless there's a little bit of privacy invasion, right?

5:33The resulting games can then be shared on your profile, where others can save them, remix them into other creations, or simply repost them. The app is the latest example of Meta's push to make AI creation tools mainstream, following its earlier efforts that included making AI-generated images with its Meta AI app and creating AI videos with an experiment app called Vibes. Pocket now joins these and several other standalone mobile applications for Meta in recent months. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has credited the increased output to AI-enabled software development, which makes it faster for the company to test and ship new ideas.

6:10Earlier this year, we shipped Instagram Instance. We also launched Forum, a standalone groups app, and Seller, a standalone marketplace app. I expect it to become a lot easier to ship new apps, he told analysts on July's earnings call, continuing. So we are planning to build out more ideas and use our recommendation systems to scale them. In addition to Instance, Forum, and the Seller app, Meta has shipped an experiment involving AI bedtime stories, and just this week, as you just heard me tell you about, a Meta AI app for Mac. Folks, that's your Daily Crunch. Today's stories were reported by Aisha Malik, Sarah Perez, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists.

6:50We'll see you here tomorrow, same Tech Time, same Crunch channel, and until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.

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