ChatGPT has a Scarlett Johansson problem

27:48And so this thing was like, yes, computers archive all your data. They have done that since the beginning of time. This is just more efficient at it. they were like, that might have gone over a little easier if they hadn't also said, and we're going to use AI to do it all. Because even though the AI, everything is happening, according to Microsoft, you know, security researchers will do their thing. Everything is happening on the computer. It is not going into the cloud. None of this is being shared anywhere. It's using the MPU to like process this stuff. All of it's happening there. So theoretically, it is no different than just using your computer as normal.

28:21Only now, if a bad person gets a hold of your computer, they're going to have a little easier time recovering everything you do. That's it. But you put AI in there and people are like, burn it to the ground. Well, the whole road of that is so fascinating to me because I was talking to Dan Sroker, the CEO of this company called Rewind, which has been doing a third-party version of this on Macs for the last, I think, year or so now. It's another one that it uses basically like screen recording and your device audio to pull out a lot of this same information. and they actually just launched a new version that sinks in the cloud because the overwhelming feedback from people was either hell no or hell yes the hell no people you're never going to get and what the hell yes people wanted was for all of this to be available to them in more places and so it's like we're actually in this bonkers divide where there is a set of people who like as soon as you present them the beginning of the road are like absolutely not and just like nope their way out of this whole technological transition.

29:21And then there are a bunch of people for whom the privacy stuff is actually going to be a hindrance. Yeah, more than anything else. And there are going to be people who are like, well, why can't I access everything that I did on my other computer from my work computer? And then Microsoft is going to be in this horrible position of being like, well, we have to do the less private thing, because it's actually what our users want. And it is just, it just like exacerbates that divide further and further. And it just, I don't know, it just feels crazy to me. Like the rewind folks were like, I don't know what you want from us.

29:50We tried to do it as private as we could. And the people who used it didn't want that anymore. So there's two things about that that I think are fascinating. And they are expressed sort of in very tangible ways than I think in very esoteric ways. So the very tangible way, I did the thing when I interviewed Sundar where I handed him my phone to look at Google search results. And we ran that clip. The clip is like doing bonkers on TikTok. And in the clip, as a joke, I say to Sundar Pichai, don't dig through my phone. Like of all the things you were ever going to say to a CEO, like a billionaire CEO of one of the largest guys.

30:24He just pulled up pics and back. Literally like, who am I? Of course I said, like, I couldn't resist it, you know? But it was just a joke. It's just like a way to be human when you hand someone your phone. And the people in the comments are like, he already knows everything. like why would you tell him not to dig through your phone like he's he's the ceo of google like if you want he can just he can already dig through your phone and i think that's nihilism right like there's an element of nihilism there which is like it's already over like you might as well embrace it and be excited about it and then there's an element of nihilism that's like well i can't stop it i'm gonna live off the grid for the rest of my life and that's one thing the the more esoteric thing that i think about all the time is as more and more of these companies get more and more into AI content generation, the thing that they are promising the people who pay the money, which is in large part advertisers, is that they will make auto-generated ads on their platforms.

31:20So like Google will make auto-generated AI-created ads on YouTube. Meta will do it on Instagram. TikTok will do it on TikTok. TikTok actually announced AI-generated ads this week. And Mia Sato is writing with them. You're going to get to a place where you get extremely well-targeted custom content and the people who are like, Facebook is listening to me are going to lose their minds. Yes. Right? Like the idea that you have privacy then is like out the window. Like right now people think Facebook is listening to them because it can target you based on your Wi-Fi networks, which is the simplest thing.

31:57It just like knows what IP address you're on. It knows that your friends have been on that IP address and it was like serve some ads across based on interest targeting. It's not smart. It's not stupid. It's like somewhere in the middle. It's a pretty blunt instrument, but people are convinced that Facebook is listening to them. You're going to get to a place where it knows a whole lot about you, and then it knows that you're on the same Wi-Fi network as your friend that you talked to about vacations in Mexico, and then it delivers you a video of you in Mexico?

32:29What? Yeah. Like people are going to lose their minds. And then I think that, well, I don't have any privacy anyway. I might as well just give the cloud provider of recall or rewind everything. I think that might actually change in a dramatic way very quickly at that point. Maybe. Like, it really does seem like either the pendulum is going to swing aggressively at some point soon, or the pendulum is just going to, like, burst through the side. No, no, you know what's going to happen. Yeah, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory style, just, like, launch through the ceiling and be gone. One thing.

33:09Like, what's going to happen to the privacy pendulum? It's going to space. One thing I will note, you mentioned that the ISPs can see everything. Like, you would think that there would be a federal privacy bill, which there is not. One of the first things that the Republican Congress in Trump's first term did, literally one of the first things, was they threw out a privacy bill. that would have kept your data private from ISPs. Yep. It was just like, hey, we're here. What should we do? We should make it so AT &T can read all your shit. Like, immediate. It was an outrage. And we have just not fixed that in years.

33:46I tend to feel like that tension is only going to be resolved when Congress actually knows what a computer is, how it works, how to, like, use it. Well, here's what a computer is. It is an AI-powered device that if you say the right words, will bang you. And I think Congress will react to that idea very powerfully. But it will also, if you say the wrong words, share all the photos of you banging it to your enemies. Look, if you want to get something done in this United States Congress, it's blackmail and booty. Those are your choices. It's real. So honestly, this is a great thing, right? Like, I think this tension has been there for a very long time.

34:29And I think you're right that we are coming to a point where, like, something's going to have to give. These companies like Microsoft are really pushing for stuff that is just completely counter to what we understand of privacy and security and what we want. And the only way that's going to change is if someone else says, hey, you can't do that. Yeah. I think the recall stuff is really interesting. I think it's, to your point, David, it can't see what you're doing on your phone, right? So this promise that you have this companion that is sort of living your digital life with you except for what you do on your phone, that's weird.

35:03And then you get into should this be a cloud service? Are you running a background app on an Android phone? Apple is not going to let them do it, right? No. Maybe Apple does it on its own on iOS in a couple weeks. They're going to have to bridge that gap, I think, for this to be truly successful. But then there's the piece where, yeah, we're going to have to hold them accountable to this thing being totally local. And a bunch of other AI stuff on this device is hybridized, right? Like the paint example is hybridized. Like, I don't know. And that's why I don't want to seem overly skeptical. I really, I can see the jump that Microsoft made from AR glasses are too hard.

35:39We have a bunch of AI. We can basically do AR on Windows. Like, AR is not the right word, but like this sort of augmented experience in Windows for your digital life. Multimodal, you mean? Yeah. Yeah, it's, there's something there. Copilot's like almost exactly the right word, right? Like you're just doing stuff on a computer and you're asking questions about the experiences you're having. A lot of people have thought that would happen first in glasses on your face. And Microsoft is like, what if it happens on the screen in front of like great. I just want to point out you said copilot is the right word.

36:11Where do you stand on copilot plus PCs? Awful. Awful. Awful. I don't know what that is. Awful. Even Microsoft has trouble saying the phrase copilot plus PCs. like if you go back and watch there are a bunch of people who clearly practiced very hard who still occasionally struggle to say the phrase co-pilot plus pcs it's terrible yeah cool product bad name i just want to figure out i'm gonna get it right why didn't they just call them ai pcs like did hp co-pilot pcs the hell is the plus doing there it's not a streaming service what are we doing here uh do any of these features on windows have a monthly fee no i don't think so yeah not as far as we know i don't think some of it requires uh an open ai uh api key which you have to pay for uh like some of the some of the copy and paste stuff you can only do if you have the i think the like gpt4 key or something but uh most of this stuff seems like it's going to come baked into windows which itself is rapidly becoming a subscription service so i think that's where you end up getting charged for it is like as a microsoft 365 thing rather than a specific ai thing i do love the mental image of like three to five years from now the extremely cheap acer pc in a walmart with like the dented cardboard sign that's like copy and paste in multiple languages and it's just like sitting in russene wisconsin you know like now it's like why and that costs a monthly fee and they're like why aren't these computers selling like that's gonna be great for everybody.

37:44We should take a break. That's just build. There's more. There's yet more A.I. news this week. We'll come back. We'll talk about Scarlett Johansson. It's really what we're going to do here on The Rich Cast. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place.

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38:57Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash track. That's linkedin.com slash track to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights.

39:41Either post your job for free or pay to promote. Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of SMBs using LinkedIn say that it helps them find high quality candidates. Find out why more than two and a half million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash track. That's linkedin.com slash track to post your job for free.

40:18Terms and conditions apply. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24 seven. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or pay to promote.

40:55Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of SMBs using LinkedIn say that it helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash track. That's linkedin.com slash track to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

41:34Okay, we're back. There are two things I forgot to say about Build. One of which was the only reason I wanted to talk about Build. So I'll get to it. The second, though, I should just point out in the scheme of, it's probably broken, I don't believe you, there was a Microsoft services outage that took down Copilot, ChatGPT search, and DuckDuckGo. Yeah. because it relies on the Bing index. Well, Bing and ChatGPT search are the same. There was like a Bing outage. Like the Bing API went down and everything else next to it went down. It's like when AWS goes down and all of a sudden all the apps that everyone uses just disappear off the internet.

42:12Like it's nice to be reminded that the internet basically only exists in like four places. I'm sure the Bing team was like, people noticed Bing was down. Just because DuckDuckGo was down. So that's good. The second thing I want to note, and again, I think this is the most important news of the week, is, yes, many of the traditional PC companies announced Copilot Plus PCs, including Samsung. And if you have been tracking Samsung, you will know that Samsung recently instituted six-day work weeks for its executives to, quote, inject a sense of crisis into the company. They did not institute six-day work weeks for their engineers or for the executives.

42:57You get a bunch of executives working on Saturdays. You get crazy ideas, which I have taken to calling Saturday Samsung. So Samsung's co-pilot PC. This is a real thing. So if you buy the new Galaxy Book 4 Edge, by the way, there's no space between book and four, but a space between four and edge. All right. Do you realize that the name of that is the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Edge Copilot Plus PC? That makes me want to throw things. I'm saying you had the extra day on Saturday. You could have gotten rid of a couple words. All right? But the people at Samsung, in their quest to inject a sense of crisis into the company, have decided that their single best idea is to just give away TVs.

43:45Yeah. So the previous one of these we covered, the previous iteration of Saturday Samsung was that if you bought a frame TV, you got another TV, which is perfect. If you buy a Galaxy Book 4 Edge, again, there's no space between Book and 4, but a space between 4 and Edge. A Galaxy Book 4 Edge Copilot Plus PC, you do receive a 50-inch crystal UHD 4K TV. Sick. This is the plan. What's the MSRP on that? It's$379. They're just throwing you a$300 TV. I'm sure it looks like absolute trash. I'm sure it's the same panel as a frame TV. I was going to say. Just a single LED backlight, just shining gray in the dark.

44:28But I just love that Samsung, they've got all the executives in there on Saturday. Just how are we going to – it's a crisis, you guys. How are we going to bring the stock price back up? And they're like, here's what we're going to do. Everybody gets a 50-inch TV. Well, you know that before that, that, somebody was like, what if we made them cheaper? And someone's like, no, no, no, no, no. No, no. Just get rid of them. We're going to go the other way, but you also get a television. We're going to find the$380 of margin in every other product. And you know what everybody loves is a free garbage 50-inch TV.

45:03If you buy a TV, you get another TV. You buy a Chromebook, you get a TV. You buy our brand new state-of-the-art Copilot Plus laptop, free TV. That'll do it. You're considering a Surface? Does a Surface come with a free TV?

45:21It's great. This year of Saturdays is going to be amazing. Okay. Sorry. Literally, I said to David and Alex before we started the show, the only thing I wanted to talk about was Saturday Samsung, and we forgot. It's my fault. I'm just excited. I could keep going another hour on Saturday Samsung. All right. We should talk about OpenAI, who I would say did not have as successful of a week in AI as Microsoft. That's fair, right? Even though they're Microsoft's big partner, Sam Altman was on stage at Build. But I would characterize OpenAI as weak as definite. Yeah. Own goal was a phrase I heard used a lot.

46:03And it really is like a record week for don't tweet as advice. to give on the internet. Really, one of the all-time, what-if-you-just-didn't-tweet moments from Sam Altman this week. All right, let's run through it. It's not a complicated story. It is getting more and more complicated as more people talk, which is bad. That is a bad sign. If a seemingly simple story starts to get more and more complicated, lawyers are going to get money. I will remind you what my contracts professor in law school used to say, Stuart McCauley, Why did this case get filed? And we'd all say some idealistic first year law school bullshit.

46:42And he would say, no, the lawyers wanted a BMW. A lot of lawyers are getting BMWs at the end of this rainbow. Starlett Johansson's lawyer is going to be driving a really nice car. He's like, I'm good. He bought it from Disney. Yeah. He's getting another one. He's getting a Rivian this time. He's like, just put a standing tab at the BMW dealership. Just whatever M is coming out next, just give me one of those. Although I've heard the XM is not great. Anyway, okay, so here's the basic rundown. They announced GPT-4.0, which in classic, I think it's broken, I don't believe you, appears to hallucinate more than GPT-4.

47:20Great. But the headline feature of 4.0 is it's multimodal. O is for Omni. It can look at stuff. It can talk to you. You can talk to it. And it has these, because it's multimodal, a lot of the demos are people chatting to it. and then it opened. I had these voices. They already had them. One of them was called sky, which was a woman, but because of these demos, which were very voice heavy and very personality driven, because that's the other big feature of four. Oh, a lot of people noticed that the sky voice sounded a lot like Scarlett Johansson and that sky in particular, uh, made a lot of people feel flirtatious.

48:02Right, Alex. I would say that's like, I think that's an accurate, Accurate assessment of things. People got a little horny for Sky there. Yeah, a lot of people thought they could bang an iPad last week. Yeah, it was uncomfortable for everyone. That's just, I mean, I don't know how else to characterize the way people feel about AI right now, except an awful lot of people want to bang an iPad. It's fine. You know, it's like some people want to give all their privacy away to a cloud. Other people, they have a particular dream. Okay, that's fine. That was the other dream Satya Nadella was talking about.

48:30It's dream number two. Yeah. What if you could tag an iPad? All right. So there's a lot of conversation about this voice, whether it sounds like Scarlett Johansson or not. And there's like a reasonable debate. Some people are like, absolutely not. Some people are like, it does. People have asked open-eyed executives very directly. Our own Kylie Robison asked Mira Morati directly. And she said, no, it was not our intention. No thought of this whatsoever. And then Sam Altman tweets the word her, which is the movie from Spike Jonze. It stars Scarlett Johansson. Which he says is one of his favorite movies of all time and an inspiration.

49:07Yeah. Great. So now he's undone his poor executive who was saying this was not the point. And then a very strange thing happens. Opening Eye sort of out of nowhere publishes a blog post. It's like, here's how we selected our voices. That's a weird time to do it. And it's just a very anodyne corporate blog post. It's like we had a process. We did casting directors, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then they had our Mia David, our AI reporter Mia David, talk to one of their executives to go through it. They would not say that. No, they pulled it first. They pulled it before they explained it. Yeah. Okay.

49:44So it's like a very normal corporate anodine blog post. Then they pull the voice, like almost immediately after that. They pull the voice. Sky. and say, based on concerns we've heard, we're pulling this voice, which is interesting because there's only one person's concern that matters. And she is a very powerful actress in Hollywood who was married to the head writer of Saturday Night Live. So wait, can I just pause you on that moment? I'm curious if you guys had the same reaction that I did in that moment, which is obviously Scarlett Johansson is mad. I just couldn't think of any other, because this happened on Sunday night or like overnight into Monday morning.

50:26I could not imagine a world in which they pulled this voice and put up this long blog post, which essentially amounted to one of those, like my, we didn't copy Scarlett Johansson t-shirt is raising a lot of questions answered by my, we didn't copy Scarlett Johansson t-shirt. One of those moments. And we were covering this thing like, okay, they say they're just trying to allay confusion. Like I couldn't think of another plausible reason other than Scarlett is yelling. Yes. Was that your reaction? It's the only thing that could be happening here. Yeah, okay. Then they called Mia David, one of our reporters, and so we have an interview with our executive.

51:03They would not tell Mia the timeline. The only question is, did Scarlett call you, and then you pulled the voice. Right. Legitimately the only question here. And they're like, we heard these concerns, we want to get at it, we pulled the voice, and they just wouldn't say the timeline. Weird. So we run the story, they said, here's the headline. our headline is like pretty anodyne, right? It's also just like more open AI talking. We pulled this voice out of concerns. Here's some more color on that. Except they won't say what the timeline is. Hours later, Scarlett Johansson has a statement out. First to Bobby Allen at NPR, and then Wiley to everyone that says basically, like, Sam Altman called me to be the voice of ChatGBT, and I said no.

51:46And then, you know, several weeks later, I'm listening to these demos and it sounds like my voice. I lawyered up and I want to know exactly how this happened. Well, he called her like two days before the launch. Like he called her initially, her timeline that she outlines is like, they chatted a while ago about it. And she thought about it and then she said, no, I don't want to do the voice. And he's like, cool. Didn't hear from him for a while. Two days before the demo, Sam Altman calls her and is like, hey, you reconsidered? And she's like, no, I don't want to do it. And he's like, cool. And then she hears a voice that sounds like her.

52:20Yeah. That was a perfect Sam Altman impression, by the way, Alex. Thank you. I worked really hard on it. It's really good. Thank you. It sounded like it was an all lowercase.

52:31Then there's just one last piece of reporting from Natasha Tico, another former Verge reporter at The Washington Post. She has talked to the agent of the voice actress that opened a cast for The Sky Voice. Both the actress and the agent wished to remain anonymous. I have a lot of feelings about that, but they wished to remain anonymous. and she's seen some documents that lay out a version of the timeline that says OpenA actually recorded all this and never said to this actress, sound like Sorrel Janssen. So maybe there's some blurriness here. There's some old case law in the mix here. We did a story where we talked to some lawyers.

53:03There's a very famous case with Tom Waits who has a very distinctive voice. By the way, Heath Ledger was basically doing Tom Waits' impression in The Dark Knight, which is very funny. But that's the voice. If you think about Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, Tom Waits has this very distinctive voice. There's a very famous commercial where they asked the singer to sound like Tom Waits. Tom Waits sued, won. There are other cases like this where people's likeness get used without their permission. My favorite one of this is Vanna White v. Samsung. Maybe the best of these cases that exists. Samsung ran a commercial that looked like Wheel of Fortune where a robot was turning the letters.

53:40And Vanna White said, that robot is me. And won. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. She felt like a monopoly. It's very good. It is. With all of the cases I ever read in law school, I was like, this is why I came here. Vanna White v. Samson Electronics. So there's like a lot of these weird cases. Like you are not allowed to trade in particular in New York and California, which is where most of the celebrities are. The state law does not allow you to trade on the likes of celebrities to sell your products. That's just a thing. We have not gotten to we cloned a voice using another actress and everyone got confused.

54:16That's new. That's a new problem for our court system that I'm very much looking forward to seeing litigated. But we're in this place where we've expanded the boundary of what you can take. Right. And the AI companies are really just taking a lot of stuff without asking for a lot of permission. And I think this one with Scarlett Johansson and Sam Altman and this completely insane timeline that is getting complicated the more anyone talks is, I think, really, you know, we talked about in the earlier segment. People have really, really, like, antagonistic feelings towards AI because it feels like it's taking stuff from us.

54:52And a famous actress who was in a bunch of Marvel movies, she's not the right adversary for open AI. Who sued Disney. Who sued Disney, right? Like, I don't know, man. That's not the person you want to, like, mess with. Yeah, I was just kind of gobsmacked by this because, you know, I think, like, Lake Bell plays, does a really good Scarlett Johansson impression on an animated show where she's playing Black Widow. And she sounds a lot like her. It's great. But also she's playing Black Widow. And there's a whole, there's, like, agreements in place. And that's why it's allowed. This is she this person sounded a lot like Scarlett Johansson.

55:33And then Sam Altman tweeted her clearly referencing this. He's talked about how much affection he has for that voice for that concept. It's just like, oh, you really just kept walking into rakes on this one, dude. like just just stop stick stand still for a moment because yeah they probably did hire this woman and she probably didn't know that she sounded a lot like scarlett johansson or that that's why they hired her right like there are so many weird twists and turns of all of this right because then there's the question of was this voice made to sound like samantha from her or does it sound like scarlett johansson and is there a distinction between those two things and is that meaningful and how much do people associate the voice of Samantha and the role of Samantha with Scarlett Johansson that's just like all of this is unprecedented in such bizarre ways.

56:24But the thing that keeps jumping out to me is that the immediate response was that of course OpenAI is wrong. Because of course OpenAI would have just gone and ingested the movie and used that. I mean, we've seen the technology now that you can use five minutes of somebody's voice and spit out a pretty passable version of that voice. Like just the immediate assumption that that's what OpenAI did was either find a person and tell them to do a Scarlett Johansson impression or screw all that, just train your model on Samantha and her and call it a day. That like this company has so aggressively lost the benefit of the doubt.

57:04It made me think of the iPad crush commercial in the same way. That it's just like, this is a company that people do not trust and people think the worst of now and believe that their intentions are bad. And I think the thing with the OpenAI, I think, is I think the answer is probably some weird middle sketchy thing. And it seems like the OpenAI version of the story is that OpenAI ran a pretty normal process. And then Sam Altman, who is the CEO of OpenAI, just like weird went rogue and started calling Scarlett Johansson. And now there are all these things out there about how Sam just desperately wants to be famous and it's making him make mistakes.

57:39And like, we've gone in all of these weird directions. Wait, hold on. Can I just say I hate it when companies pretend their CEOs are idiots? Totally fair. Sam Altman is a billionaire. He is the founder of OpenAI. He is so much in charge of OpenAI that when the board of OpenAI fired him for being reckless and manipulative, the employees all staged a reverse coup and brought him back. That's real. And it's like, yeah, that's a real thing that happened just a little bit ago. A couple months ago. The board of directors was like, we don't trust Sam Altman and fired him. And he got his way back in the company.

58:18He has a new board of directors. And now a bunch of employees are quitting because OpenAI is generally abandoning its safety culture. And he's doing this reckless stuff. And I just don't buy it that the company is like, yeah, we are running responsibly. there's just this hothead that we reverse cooed back into the ceo role that we can't control like you you can't like like it's just a full like lie on their part to be like we have no control over him it's like well he runs the company so i agree with that and yet i also find it absolutely plausible that the billionaire ceo who is kind of feeling himself would call scarlett johansson oh i think that's totally true oh yeah no if i had a billion dollars and i was like my robot can plausibly make Kevin Roos thinks that it's in love with him.

58:59Like I would call Scarlett Jansson. Yes. And you don't tell the people, you don't tell these people who are doing the casting process who then you are happy to throw to the wolves after the fact. But like the, the bones of that version of the story do not seem implausible to me at all, but it also doesn't matter. He's the CEO of the company. It doesn't matter. Right. The part where they ultimately shipped the voice that sounded like her in every sense of that word uh and he knew about it and those were the demos and i'm confident that he watched every second of those demos he was in the tweeted he was in the audience her yeah those are his choices yeah he tweeted the word her like it's so hard to undo that by the way your question about whether it's the movie her or sarah johansson i will offer you the 1995 case metro goldwyn meyer the american honda company where honda made an ad for the civic del sol that looked a little bit too much like a James Bond movie and lost to MGM.

59:57Yes. It was not James Bond. They made too good a commercial. It was a guy in a suit jumping out. I don't remember the Civic Del Sol. Not a high watermark in Civic design, but it was a Civic with a top that you could take off. And so the ad was like, a James Bond-like character is driving a Honda Civic, very plausible, and he blows the top off and jumps out of the car and does some James Bond stuff. And MGM said, that is James Bond. You made James Bond. You can't have it. And they won. Yes. That's so dumb. I'm excited for us to go to court against OpenAI and say, you're a robot. The precedent by which we are suing you is MGM versus America.

1:00:42Have you seen the Civic Del Sol judge? MGM, by the way, also now owned by Amazon. Just one of those things, just a weird moment. in time, because again, most of these cases took place in New York and California ages ago. Most of them are about pretty normal ads, right? Like that's why you appropriate a celebrity's likeness to try to sell something. Those days are over. Like TikTok is full of weird, deep fake celebrities and just like pure copier infringement. The number of companies right now, if you run a regular company and you want to buy a regular ad and you're like, I'd like to use Taylor Swift to sell my towels.

1:01:21You can't, but that's too expensive. If you're a super shady distributor of Alibaba towels and you're on TikTok, it's all Taylor Swift all day long. Deep fakes, baby. It's crazy. And like there's a gap here that's happening where the law has absolutely not caught up to reality because most of these cases are about big ad agencies and big companies with big budgets running ads, right? I don't know that we're just in for a moment of chaos because the reality of what's happening on the ground is people do not care about the law, particularly IP law. And the big companies, Google, OpenAI, they are – the next generation of their technology is just founded on taking stuff, which is why OpenAI does not have the benefit of the doubt.

1:02:06Everyone believes they took whatever they want. And if they wanted to, they would just make a clone of Scarlett Johansson's voice. whether or not they cast an actress who sounded just like her it doesn't matter because if the technology exists for them to just do it and no one thinks they have the control to not do it weird yeah a weird moment for them yeah and i at least from what i've heard so far the last couple of days i'm curious if you'll have heard anything different is that this there's no indication so far that scarlett johansson is actually going to like take real legal action here she put out that one statement and we don't know what's going to happen next but that if she did this would have a real chance of going somewhere and being pretty important and precedent setting uh in terms of like it just feels like in so many ways we're itching for like the one weird ai lawsuit and like maybe it's the new york times one but it would be frankly a lot like wilder and weirder and more fun if it was scarlett johansson well i think they're probably kind of different cases Like they're targeting different things, but they get the same thrust of things, which is, can you just take shit?

1:03:14Yeah. Like what are you allowed to do in the name of AI? Ultimately, it's can you just do stuff? Yeah. Right. I mean, like if I do it with a computer, it's fine. Right. It's like that's the answer. And look, there are very meaningful differences between what you can do at a computer and what you can do in real life. Like, for example, Alex, if I came to your house and took one of your Blu-rays away, that would be a crime for many reasons. One, it was just a crime against our friendship. Right. I'd be very upset. But importantly, you would not have the Blu-ray anymore. Whereas if I came to your house and copied a file off your Plex server and left, I think you'd be like, one, our friendship is strengthened.

1:03:47Yeah. And you would also have the original copy, your very legal copy of whatever content. I would have the Blu-ray still in my closet. Yes, that's correct. This is like a meaningful thing in copyright law. Whereas, you know, it's all founded on physical scarcity. It has not translated to the world of digital very well. On the other hand, I can just do whatever I want because it's a computer is not a workable strategy either. You know, like there's some middle ground here that no one has ever really thought through. And I think that AI conversations, you know, this is a conversation I had with Sundar.

1:04:23Like, do you feel great about open AI training on YouTube? Okay. The web doesn't feel that way about you. And he was like, that's weird. You know, like everyone has to wrestle with those two ideas at the same time while we're saying, hey, some of this technology is like really cool. Like you want some of this technology. Some of this stuff is really great for people who are differently abled, right? Like how are we going to solve these problems? And Alex, I think you're definitely right that like the training lawsuit is a copyright lawsuit. And this other stuff is like a likeness lawsuit, a right of publicity lawsuit.

1:04:59There are different bodies of law that are very hard to distinguish for normal people. Normal people can't tell you they're venturing a copyright and a trademark and a patent, right? Like this is even more esoteric than that. And on top of it, sort of the inherent nature of it is that these are celebrities. Like you can't – you don't have a right of publicity if you don't have publicity, right? And like all of the law is built around celebrity. and so you're just going to get a sequence of people, of plaintiffs who are just the most sympathetic because they are going to be celebrities. And at some point, you know, like we did an episode, Sarah, Jong, and I did an episode of Decoder where we talked about the copyright law and that feels like a time bomb waiting to go off.

1:05:40Something's going to happen with copyright law and training data. It is inevitable that one of those cases goes the wrong way because there's so many of them now. it feels inevitable that particularly is these companies want to trade on famous voices even if it's not this case that i don't know man like kevin hart is gonna be like that sounds too much like me just like sue amazon like it's like one of those kinds of things is gonna happen i mean it's this it's the music thing right like this it's it's all of the the like copyright trolls coming after anyone who writes a song with power chords in guitars now like we're gonna do that again at a crazy scale.

1:06:18I feel it's a little almost simpler than that because it's kind of straightforward that if Amazon had gone and released an Alexa voice that was Kevin Hart and it wasn't actually Kevin Hart, he would have sued. But Amazon went and said, hey, Kevin Hart or Samuel L. Jackson or whoever, do you want to be a voice? No. Do you want to receive a bunch of money? Samuel L. Jackson is a voice on Alexa. Yeah, no, they paid him. And so I think in this case, there's a lot of precedent of like, everybody else knew how to do this business. And OpenAI was like, YOLO. Yeah. By the way, I don't know what's wrong with me that I had to immediately think of it, that I had to quickly think of a very distinctive voice and my mind went immediately to Kevin Hart.

1:06:57I wasn't going to comment on it, but I was going to comment on it to you later in Slack. It's a very distinctive voice. I just don't, I just don't know. I often think of you as the Kevin Hart of the Vergecast. It's time to take a break, David.

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1:10:28all right we're back it's time for the lightning round sponsored by kevin hart kevin if you're listening you can send your lawyers at us and we'll just ask you to sponsor the lightning round uh that would be great content actually i'm confident you can afford it kevin two people on totally different planets me and kevin hart's lawyer sir you've been lying about kevin hot sponsoring your podcast and me saying would you like to let's make it true these lies can be real between me and you it's beautiful dreams dreams do come true uh all right lightning round we got to start with this one it's maybe the most important lightning round item uh the united states government the department of justice has sued Ticketmaster, Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster.

1:11:14They want to break it up. This has been a long time coming, I would say. This is Taylor Swift's lawsuit. It feels fully like Taylor Swift's lawsuit. Yeah. It really is. And this has been, I think, kind of in the wind ever since the merger happened. I mean, in 2010, right, was when the merger was. And even then, if I remember right, there was real, this should not be allowed energy. Oh, this was fully – if you want to ever make the case that Barack Obama was kind of like a bad president, his competition policy where he just like let this stuff slide, like his DOJ and his FTC just let this stuff slide all over the place, like full Reagan.

1:11:55Like this is the core of that argument. Like when people make it, like Obama presided over the Great Recession and all this other stuff in their recovery. Part of it was we are just going to let these mergers slide to bring the economy back and now we're on the other side of it. You can also blame Ronald Reagan. I prefer to blame Ronald Reagan. We made an entire Decoder video blaming Ronald Reagan for Ticketmaster. You can watch that video. But basically the heart of the argument is Ticketmaster Live Nation owns ticket sales, obviously promotion, artist management. They own all the venues. They own 60 of the top 100 venues in the United States.

1:12:29And so you just have this vertically integrated monopoly. And if an artist tries to screw with it, Ticketmaster crushes them, which means prices go up because there's no competition. It's actually, in a very funny way, it is sort of perfect textbook monopoly stuff. Like, the allegations are so simple to understand. I actually encourage people to go read the lawsuit because it really is, like, if you want to understand what a monopoly looks like, it is what these allegations say Live Nation and Ticketmaster does. Which is own everything and just use that to beat the hell out of anybody who tries to own anything and come at you.

1:13:04and like the the threats that they are alleged to make against artists and venues who don't work with them the ways that they like raise fees to keep everybody out and like self deal to each other like it's it is pure monopoly stuff if all of these allegations are true and at the end of it the very bottom of it yep prices are high but service quality is low right like they don't have to invest in the ticketing platform or the app or the website because who cares right which is why ticket master broke yeah which is why there's a crush of demand for taylor swift tickets even after she told them there will be a crush of demand can you handle it and it still crashed and they didn't have to do anything because there's where are you gonna go taylor and i think once the united states government is like where where are you gonna go taylor she doesn't have choices if taylor swift doesn't have options there's a monopoly happening here yeah then then maybe we'll do something uh but anyway you can go read the lawsuit and like i said we'll we'll drop the link.

1:13:59We made a long decoder about the whole buildup of this with a lot of great interviews. It was one of our... It was a pilot of our explainer episode. So it was a fun one. Alright, that was my... We gotta say that one. Alex, what's your lightning round? Salt Spoon. Totally different move. Totally different. I actually have two, and I feel this one is almost more important. Salt Spoon is the new Mad Max movie, right? Is that what that's called? It's exactly what it's called. We've talked before on the Verge cast about how you can like use electricity to make people taste things a little differently uh andrew marino did a really good podcast verge cast on it somebody else was like what if we put those electrodes into a spoon and so we could take things that aren't salty and make them more salty and as someone who grew up low sodium because of their mom hell yes i am so excited for this i didn't know what salt tasted like until i was like 16 like this is incredible i'm so excited But they're only selling like 200 of them.

1:15:01And it doesn't work if you have like heart problems, which if you – most people on low-sodium diets, that's why they're on them. It doesn't work if you're like pregnant. So a lot of the people who might want to be on low-sodium diets, this won't actually work for. But it's a salt spoon and that's cool. Yeah. When I read this, I thought it was a spoon that just dumped salt. No, I've got one of those in my kitchen right now. That's just called a spoon. Yeah. No, but that's just a real CES local news gadget. You know? Yeah. Like, here's a spoon that precisely delivers. No, this one just shocks you into believing.

1:15:37There's salt, a different approach. I love that for them. And it's from the people who do, like, soy sauce. It's currant. Oh, nice. So they know salt. They should make a sriracha spoon. Oh, my God. They should just continue electrocuting my brain into flavor. Just trick my brain constantly, please. All right, David, what you got? We have to talk about Humane, right? Oh, gosh. Everyone's favorite startup. There was a Bloomberg report this week that Humane is now looking for a buyer. And I believe the price it's looking for is somewhere between$750 million and a billion dollars. Also was in that story that the company has raised$230 million.

1:16:19So it wants a 4X valuation. Yeah. Yeah. And I would remind you that it is it's it's that humane. It is. It's the one it's the one we've talked about. It's not a different like B2B humane that is very successful. Truly bold strategy to come out and say I'm not surprised this company is looking for a buyer. Right. Like I think the thing you hope for with your first product is that it gets you money to get to the second product. And then the second product is the one where you start to win. And that's where you go. Like that's the strategy. But if you flop on the first one. And holy God, does it look like they flopped on the first one?

1:16:55It's very hard to get out of that. So I'm not shocked that Humane is looking for a way out. I think, A, it's going to have a lot of trouble finding a buyer because this company is not full of people who are, like, beloved in the tech industry, I would say. At the top. Yeah, at the top. Like, Imran Chowdhury in particular, I would say, left Apple not beloved by people still at Apple. uh that's about as much as i can report on that but that i i feel pretty good saying that uh the rest of it is just it is truly wild for this company to come out and say we think we should get 4x what we've raised and everyone who works here should get rich because of this terrible product that we've made okay so two things one it's probably broken and i don't believe you real theme i'm just telling you well that one's definitely broken yeah it's super broken and i don't believe like i'm just saying we caught a lot of heat for being mean at the ted talk here we are second let's go through the list right so apple is out i don't they're not going to pay them the money uh and i i concur with your reporting and that is also about as much as i can say yeah but like if you're out in the mix it's just out there that's just information Apple's not going to buy this company.

1:18:15Especially because their entire pitch was, we're going to obsolete the iPhone. Doesn't seem like the sort of thing Apple's going to invest in. Apple has the Apple Watch. They're going to be fine. They have Siri, which is a little shakier, but they got the Apple Watch. Google, no. Right? That feels like a no. They're still struggling to integrate Fitbit. And they don't need a laser projector. More hardware. Both more hardware chops and more hardware issues than it can deal with. Google, for example, I'll just do this. They just merged Android and the Pixel team under Rick Osterloh, who formerly ran the Pixel team and all of hardware.

1:18:50And now he runs all the platforms, too. So Rick has to, like, keep Samsung happy. Right. Like, he now manages the whole ecosystem, which is really interesting. Right. But can you and he's got to figure out the rest of Fitbit, which is still messy from what I understand from V. You can't just like throw a bunch of ex-Apple designers out there. Running not your AI platform. Right. And a big part of what Humane, I suspect, is trying to sell is the operating system, right? They've always said, we are not just about the AI pin. They want to be a platform. And this is a pitch you hear from everybody.

1:19:28But I suspect if you're going to pay anything like the price that they want, you think you're buying what has the potential to be a winning platform, not a bunch of hardware engineers. Like Google doesn't actually need more hardware engineers at this moment in time. Is it not just them trying to be like, everybody's really hot for AI right now. We shipped an AI thing, buy our AI thing. But their AI thing is open AI. Yeah. But Samsung's got Saturdays. If they wanted to do that, they should have sold four months ago, right? Like if you're just trying to capitalize, you sell before you ship and not after.

1:20:05Yeah. Well, unless you're greedy and you think you actually like – Or they thought they were going to win. Yeah, they thought they were going to win. Which is fine. Companies are allowed to work hard. Sure. How do I put this? There's no lack of sincerity in the humane ecosystem, right? No. There might be some confusion, some delusion, but not – But they're not kidding. But not insincere, right? Yeah. Right. Okay. Google's out, right? I think Google's not just because the stuff runs on OpenAI's stack and Google doesn't run that. And they don't need more complication. Google, if anything, is trying to streamline, right?

1:20:39Yeah. Microsoft is interesting. Microsoft runs a bunch of OpenAI stuff. They don't have mobile, right? There's lots of rumors. I think Satya Nadella is smarter than this. That's frankly just my belief there. I don't think he's like, yeah, we'll take a flyer on this nonsense. They're winning. He's like, I'm going to take on the MacBook Air. Yeah. Yeah. But of all the possibles, Microsoft's at the top. I just think Nadella is smarter than this distraction. Samsung loves bad unfocused ideas. Yeah. They're in the mix. Love goofy hardware. A bunch of executives sitting around on Saturdays with nothing to do except do M &A deals.

1:21:19They're going to see that story on Saturday and be like, got it. Can you imagine the humane team just being given Bali? Yeah. Bali. Go figure out Bali. Now the laser projector rolls around. Huh? Is that something? I could actually see it. And Samsung, like SmartThings is always an interesting version of that. Samsung actually is... The Humane Pen running SmartThings is like a pure nightmare. Just a pure, absolute nightmare. Yeah, agreed. But Samsung has a history of actually following through on pretty big acquisitions in a way that I think could be interesting. I suspect the humane team would not be psyched about working for Samsung, but that is maybe the funniest possible outcome.

1:22:10I'm just stuck on Samsung as a history of following. Have you used smart things, sir? It's, it's still there. That's true. It's there. It's around. I will say for as much, as much as I talk about the frame TV, the, the people who run the frame, the services are the boxy people. Cause Samsung bought them a lot. Oh yeah. Oh, boxy. R.I.P. I'm not saying this is crazy. I'm just saying it's true that Samsung buys things and then the people continue working there. Yeah. All right. So LG, I think, is the same. Right. But they're not doing Saturdays. Right. But yeah, Samsung's ahead because they're in the office on Saturday.

1:22:50But if LG gets a whiff that Samsung might do it, LG might buy it. LG famously bought WebOS. so a history of betting on doomed platforms and then turning them into television operating systems. You could see the humane. Cosmos. What if your TV had a laser projector in it that projected under your hand? Pretty good. Amazon feels like a hard no. Right? That company is bringing, it's like getting smaller, not bigger. Panos is running all of hardware now. Yeah. Oh yeah, Panos is there. Yeah, Panos is there. Panos Panay is in charge of Amazon devices and services. He's not going to go and be like, yeah, let's buy that and integrate that into Amazon's tech stack.

1:23:34If your question was which of these companies is most likely to ship something that resembles the AI pin in the next three years, I think it might be Amazon. I would agree. But I don't think Amazon would get to that point by acquiring Humane. No, my question is who will spend a billion dollars on Humane? the answer to that is like steve mnuchin or something like some truth social now runs the exactly i'm just saying my list is samsung lg if sam if they get a whiff of saturday samsung uh and then like distant 5 000th place third microsoft yeah i think that's probably right who else has a billion dollars costco it's walmart i'm just thinking like the people that Oracle.

1:24:22Who thought about buying TikTok but would buy Humane instead? It'll end up being like Verizon or Comcast who's just like really excited about a new, they're going to be like, this is your TV remote on your lapel. And everybody's going to be like, no, thank you. The idea of the Humane design team bringing that energy to launching like the next Fios remote.

1:24:47It's beautiful. It's very good. That's compelling. It's like on stage at Ted being like, you can turn the volume up and down. Yeah. I do want to know though, by the way, if, if you're listening and you have an idea of a company that either might or should buy humane, uh, tell us. Exxon. Verge cast of the verge.com. Call the hotline. 866 version one. I genuinely want to know. Cause I bet there is an interesting match or two that we're not thinking of. Ford. I would love to know what they are. Ford. There you go. Drive your car with your, oh no, it's going to be, it's going to be Elon Musk. and it's going to be Grok and it's just going to be the Grok hardware don't summon that rough all right uh we'll see what happens again it's just a Bloomberg report Humane itself has not said anything but I strongly suspect they need to get out the game I also suspect Rabbit's going to end up in the same spot very soon all right I gotta do one more I gotta do one more Apple uh you know sometimes you get photos on your phone and you're like that's that's a terrible photo and you delete it.

1:25:48Or you're like, oh, that's too spicy to keep here in case my mom sees my photos and you delete it. And there was an unfortunate bug where those photos just popped back up into people's things, into their phones. And Apple said nothing, but they corrected it just with the latest OS update. So you should no longer have reappearing nudes or whatever else. And Apple has said nothing about that too. Yeah, it's weird to confirm a bug like this by issuing an iOS update and then saying nothing else. Yeah. And they were like old. My understanding is it's like not just, oh, a photo you deleted last night.

1:26:28So people are getting like years old photos, right? Yeah. So that's terrifying. But at the same time, with Recall, I would have loved that. So I don't know where I stand on this, but I do stand on like, yeah, if I delete something, I generally want it. deleted. Do you believe it's deleted, right? Yeah. Yeah. I want to believe it's deleted. I want to know where that data goes when I make a choice about it. And I think that's the difference between recall and this like recall, you will know where the data theoretically, where the data goes once the security researchers actually figure that out. This, we don't know.

1:27:01Big caveat. Yeah, this is weird. I think, you know, we are part of our job is holding big companies accountable. and it is truly irresponsible for Apple to not say why this happened and what they did to fix it. There's a bunch of people on Reddit who love to argue with me on threads who are like, we figured it out and you're overhyping this. And it doesn't matter because we didn't cause the bug. We didn't fix the bug. It's great that you have a theory about why it happened. The theories sound wonderfully plausible. I love it. I don't know what happened. Right. There's one party that knows what happened and they should be accountable for their mistake because this is a big mistake.

1:27:38And it's weird that we give them a pass. Yep. And so, you know, we can't force them to, all we can do is send emails. That's the, Sheriff Nilay has got MimeStream and he pushes that button every day. Yep. That's all we can do. And we just can tell you, they have not responded to any of our emails or any of our phone calls about this. And I think that's fundamentally irresponsible. Because you're playing with people's, like some of the most personal that exists. um anyway hopefully they say something soon if not I'll just keep sending emails what else is there to do yeah in my administration they would go straight to jail vote for tell uh last one I'm actually excited about this Sonos Ace headphones are out shout out to Chris Welch who covers every square inch of the Sonos beat to the point where I think Sonos like the Sonos Reddit like waits for Chris to come around and then like Sonos itself is just like oh no Chris is here um It's great.

1:28:35He scooped the headphones, obviously. They look great. They're like a cross between the Sony vibe and an AirPods Max vibe. The$450 is expensive. The headline feature is if you're watching TV on a Sonos soundbar, you can push a button and the audio will come to your headphones. I want this to be compelling to me. It's not my use case for these things. I think that's really compelling if you are married and you live in a small home and you want to stay up late playing video games or you want to stay up late watching TV. Yeah. Neelai in his cavernous mansion wouldn't understand. Yeah. Neelai, your house is just too big to fully appreciate.

1:29:15Neelai's in his home theater. No, it's the real-time switching. I understand that sometimes you want to watch TV and listen to headphones. I got you. Yeah. But the part where you're like, well, I started with the sound bar. Because they walk out of the room. They say, I'm going to bed. And now you're just like, boop, yeah. Oh, yeah, I can see it. But that's the headline feature. By the way, that feature, oddly, is iOS only right now. Soon coming to Android. Weird. Spatial audio, aptX. If you have Android as well, no high res anywhere else. It's Bluetooth everywhere, except if you're doing the weird TV thing.

1:29:51Probably for battery life. And then obviously this all comes on the heels of the disastrous app launch, which Sonos won't come out and say, but it feels very obvious that they set the timing of the headphone launch. They needed the app for the headphones. And so then the app came out before it was ready. If any other sequence of events occurred to make the app come out before it was ready, I would be shocked. I wish Sonos would just say it. Like Chris talked to Patrick Spence, CEO of Sonos, and he was like, well, the app was just ready. And it's like, why don't you just say we put out the app because the headphones are coming out?

1:30:27That would be fine. Or give people a choice. Don't update the app yet. Right. Yeah. Ship it as if you buy the headphones, here's the new version of our app. It's going to be rolled out to everybody before long. Like that's, it's not a hard sequence of events to do, but instead Sonos is like, oh, this doesn't have queue management, which is what everyone wants. Let's ship it anyway. So I don't actually, I have no problems with this app. I'm the only person in America who has no problems with this app because we don't use the queue. We use playlists. Our playlists are in Spotify and Apple Music.

1:30:59And so like, whatever. I just don't use the Sonos app. Right. That's what I mean. Like Becky just uses AirPlay. Yeah. For our Sonos. It's fine. It is a little bit faster. I know other people have wild problems. Like Casey Newton is like, I can't even set the volume on my speakers anymore. Um, it's really bad if you have a local music collection that you care about a lot too, which is like, and Chris and I talked about this a couple of weeks ago that like, those are the core Sonos people and have been for two decades. And Sonos just continues to try to drive them away in very strange ways. Yeah.

1:31:33The headphones look sick though. Cause there's six of them. Uh, yeah. Right. This is the classic story. The company is chasing the bigger consumer market where the money is and the growth is. and then you've got these like very passionate users who are like my entire life is one button app from 2004 and we are the people on the red. Yeah. Well, like there's a dynamic there that I'm, as a person who redesigned our website, I'm aware of the people who are mad. Yeah. They've released apps before concurrently. They had the two versions of the last one. No, that was a disaster. It was horrible, but they had two.

1:32:06No, that's a disaster. It's all bad. Sonos is just bad at apps. Patrick has been on the show a bunch of times. we've talked to him about a lot of things, everything from spatial audio and like how they design speakers all the way to like antitrust. Like he's been on the show. They have mismanaged in particular these apps and what the apps do and how the apps work. Like the S1 to S2 transition disaster. The Sonos, like we're going to trade in your old speakers ever. And then like, we're going to break the old ones and they undid it. That was bad. Like, there's this thing that they're in particular not good at.

1:32:44Which is wild because that's the magic of Sonos is how it works with all your stuff. And it just talks to each other. It's supposed to be super smart. And yet the app continues to be kind of dumb. Yeah. And again, I have not had, because I don't use some of these features, like, what was it? Timers and alarm clocks are broken in this app. And the idea that I would set my alarm clock using the Sonos app is just what? But if you are the person who's alarm clock broke, you are mad. That's a problem. You should find a way to be like, okay, these core features, there's some of these core features where people just build their lives.

1:33:22Like alarm clocks, people build their lives around it. You have to respect it. In this case, I think Sonos, as they've gotten more and more consumer, they've sort of gotten away from it. They should just recalibrate that a little bit. that said I have like 9 ,000 Sonos speakers like I'm trapped in this ecosystem like what are you going to do it's fine alright I think that's it that's it David do you have another one nope that's it we're done Spotify has a font Spotify has a font that's all the information I have for you yeah Amazon might make you pay for Alexa once they add AI to it it's like that kind of stuff the big thing is that I'm going to go try to call Scarlett Johansson now and see if she will voice Virgis AI as revenge.

1:34:10Do like AI Colin Jost to call her. Yeah. I will say a friend of mine was like, Google should just take this voice now. They should just pay her whatever amount of money she wants now. Yeah. If there's like an arms race for celebrity AI voices, that would be very entertaining. All right, that's it. Also, my voice is available for cheaper than Scarlett Johansson's, in case you're wondering. Is she the most expensive? like who do you is it is it like i feel like it's either like scarlett johansson or ryan reynolds this is a whole other hour of the verge cast we could do no way in terms of like no james earl jones james earl jones mufasa and darth it's important to everyone that i remind you that alex kranz is 66 years old and if you've never heard of any of those words that she just said don't worry they all know who that is i mean aren't there there's like amazon hasn't amazon set the market i guess the rates are going higher but yeah this is a thing that exists you can just buy other voices from Amazon, right?

1:35:04Yep. You can. All right. Send us your notes with who you think the most expensive voice would be. I don't want to... We'll read your ideas. Everyone's going to agree with me. It's David at TheVerge.com. All right. That's it. That's The Vergecast. Rock and roll.

1:35:22And that's it for The Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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