Spotify launches ‘User Notes’ to let users add memories to songs, and more

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1:34Driver is responsible for emergency and towing charges not covered by the policy. Coverage subject to policy terms and conditions. Spotify launches User Notes to let users add memories to songs. I'm Imran Shaikh and your Weekend Crunch featuring three big tech headlines. Starts right now. With help from its internal AI tools, Google says it's patched more security flaws in its Chrome browser in the last month than it has in the past two years combined. Now, the tech giant announced on Thursday that it has fixed a whopping 1 ,072 security bugs in the last two versions of Chrome, both released in June.

2:08That's more than the number of bugs patched in the previous 23 versions released over the last two years, which totaled 1 ,036 fixes for those of you keeping score at home. Now, ever since the advent of LLM, cybersecurity experts have warned that AI-powered systems would find an increasingly and exponentially enormous amount of bugs, forcing defenders to also use AI to get ahead of malicious hackers. That prediction is starting to come true, and it's backed by real, non-sicophantic data. A chart published by Google, which the company revealed as part of a white paper on the company's efforts to use AI to find flaws and patch them faster, shows the exponential increase.

2:51And for context, Chrome's 126 was released in June 2024, while the latest two Chrome releases, Chrome 149 and 150, were released last month. Google calls each version a milestone. Doug Turner, Chrome's director of engineering, told TechCrunch in a statement that LLMs have fundamentally shifted the economics of cybersecurity, transforming vulnerability discovery into an automated industrial-scale operation. Google's not the only company seeing this trend either. Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that it had patched a record 570 security flaws across its product line as part of its monthly round of scheduled patches, colloquially known as Patch Tuesday.

3:32Not to be confused with Patch Adams Tuesday, where I watch the Robin Williams movie Patch Adams every Tuesday. LinkedIn is taking aim at the AI slop, low-quality, artificially generated content filling its feed. You see, on Thursday, the company announced that it's adding a new feature to let users click a seems-like AI slop, button when someone's post appears to have been written with, you guessed it, AI. The move reflects a broader shift across online publishing platforms to cut back on AI content, as people have grown, well, frustrated with the computer-written, inauthentic posts filling the web.

4:10In a post on LinkedIn, the company's chief product officer, Hari Srinivasan, admitted the Microsoft-owned social network is facing similar problems. AI slop is a top priority for all of us. We really care about this. People come to LinkedIn to connect with real people and share their real perspectives, ideas, and expertise, he said. Srinivasan said LinkedIn is also introducing new classifiers to identify if a post is AI slop or other low-quality content, which would reduce the amount of slop you'd see in suggested content recommendations from outside your network. The button ties into this measure as it will provide a source of signal that will allow LinkedIn to tune its AI models to better identify slop.

4:54In addition to that, LinkedIn will begin privately flagging in users' dashboards when people believe their content is coming off as inauthentic due to heavy use of AI. The company believes that this will help posters improve their writing, in the case that they're simply using AI tech to refine their own work, rather than when they're posting what's considered full-on slop content. Other improvements include expanding access to profile and page verification tools and adding an option to block comments from company pages you no longer want to see, Srinivasan said. Spotify is giving users a new way to personalize their playlists with User Notes, a feature that lets them add their own notes to individual tracks the company announced on Thursday.

5:39The streaming service says the new feature is designed to let users add personal captions to their favorite songs, such as noting why a track was added to a playlist or when they first discovered it. For example, you could note that you discovered a specific track while walking the streets of Paris on vacation, or that it was playing during a first date, or it reminds you of Knight Rider. The launch reflects Spotify's efforts to make playlists feel more personal by giving users a way to preserve the memories tied to the songs they listen to. Now, it also helps Spotify differentiate itself from rivals like Apple Music and YouTube Music by offering a journaling-like feature that goes beyond music discovery and isn't available on other platforms.

6:21The new feature is available to users who are 16 and older on both free and premium plans in select markets. Now, it's worth noting that User Notes isn't the only feature Spotify announced on Thursday, as the company also debuted a new running mode that queues up songs based on different phases of a run and selects tracks based on a user's preferences and pace. The feature is available to premium users in select countries. And folks, that's your Daily Crunch. Today's stories were reported by Aisha Malik, Lorenzo, Franquesci Bichieri, Sarah Perez, and more awesome TechCrunch journalists. We'll see you here on Tuesday, and until then, find us at TechCrunch.com.

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