The music industry’s AI fight

29:30yeah okay right everybody's heard it a million times that's our boy that's our boy jd the longest lasting digital career that i never expected to happen and and here here is the ai i i just want to say this was created by a prompt on Udeo. This is, in theory, a completely synthetic new work of art. Oh,

30:00it's so good. It does sound like a Jason Derulo song. Like, my critique of does this sound like real music aside? It's even got the little, like, vocal riff at the end. Like, it's right on point. Like, does Jason Derulo sound like synthetic music? That's your problem. this one's interesting though because you know neil you've talked a lot about the issue that likeness is not copyrightable right yeah and so there's a question of like if you know we're going back to this hypothetical there is no suit that's suing over this particular jason derillo riff someone could just i could say jason derillo on a song probably and it's not you can't copyright that so you wait hold on hold on this is weird so these tags the last time with the metro boom The Metro Boomin song.

30:44So Metro Boomin's producer tag was the copyrightable expression in the fake Drake song. If it's exactly the recording of the tag, though, right? Because the issue was that they actually kept in the sample of the producer tag and reproducing a recording. You can copyright that. So we could start every episode of The Verge Cast with Neelai singing Jason Derulo. Jason Derulo. And we will. I think he probably would have a lot of issues, a lot of nasty letters written to you. I'm saying in terms of ways to boost this podcast profile after 13 years, Jason Derulo suing us is high on my list. That's wonderful.

31:23But this definitely proves that you had to have had access. There is no monkeys in the back writing Shakespeare that ends up on Jason Derulo. It just doesn't happen. It's not possible. I don't know. I think if you took the worst impulses of the music industry and fed them into an AI, you might produce Jason Derulo. This one's also important, though, because everything else we've heard has been written by artists pre-Copyright Act of 1974 and probably also reflects some of maybe who the lawyers are writing these, you know, these cases because, you know, we're talking about the cases reference Frank Sinatra.

32:01Right. And to bring in Bruce Springsteen. Right. It's like Bruce Springsteen, Mariah Carey, Green Day, Johnny or Chuck Berry. The early ones are all Chuck Berry, like The Temptations. Are you getting it like the judges are old? I'm saying everyone, yeah. And that's actually potentially very advantageous in knowing the judge and who you might go in front of. But then to show that also they're taking all the latest music as well. We're bringing in Jason Derulo, yes. Judge, have you heard, Your Honor, are you familiar with Jason Derulo? I want to bring Jason Derulo into the courtroom. Jason Derulo.

32:32By the way, another total side note. There's an incredible Katie Notopolis piece about hardcore Jason Derulo stans and what their stan culture is like that I will dig up and put in the show notes. Oh my gosh, that sounds fun. It is truly one of the funniest things I've ever read on the internet. Just because A, it exists, and B, because Katie is good at finding things like that that exist. Have you all tried running these prompts, by the way? No, have you? Yeah, you can go to Udio and to Suno and you can run the prompts that these lawsuits are alleging. And you don't get the same songs, obviously, but like if you write make a jazz crooner song about New York, baritone voice, you will definitely get it's Frank Sinatra.

33:11There's just like there's no other song. I don't think that that really is hacking the systems. It's really easy. The other thing I get a lot, by the way, are random prompt. Hey, that sounds strangely like Crazy Town by Butterfly. my prompt was actually i tried to make a rap about american founder thomas butterfly like crazy town yeah yeah sorry thank you butterfly if there's a band called butterfly that had a song called crazy town that would be perfect in another universe so i do i'm sure there is i tried to i tried i did try to uh hack these systems a little bit and i wrote i want you to write a rap about american founder thomas jefferson about not throwing away his shot nasal male rapper boom bap and what i got was basically butterfly by crazy town just like total random yeah oh no Tom Jeff never slept Crafting constitution Slave owner by day Freedom writer by night Hypocrisy thick But the pin game tight Oh god Visionary eyes Dreams like fireworks Built in nature But the boots got quirks Creeks run red History Be relentless But DJ's legacy Straight up contentious Monadella Dallas I'm sorry I'm sorry for listening to this We suggest you that That really is Butterfly by Crazy Town I think it's also a little bit of What was that song?

34:30Superman? Yes oh wow who's superman by i'll be your kryptonite or whatever that was a kryptonite yeah kryptonite three doors down is that who it's down it is by three doors down it's got a little bit of that it's just you can so easily hear references that are not even the thing that you prompt and i just i have to say that if you right now if you go to the home page of udo the two most popular tracks are exact soundalikes of eminem and snoop dogg so people are doing this like People are trying to make sound alikes. So the argument from all these companies is, look, training is fair use. And that's the argument for OpenAI.

35:10That's the argument for Google. It's the argument for Suno and UDO. The organization of these cases is different because the plaintiffs are different, right? The New York Times is situated differently than the major labels. People have different emotional relationships with different kinds of work. But this is the argument. Like when Google eventually goes and sues OpenAI for training on YouTube, the weirdness of that argument is Google telling OpenAI that training on YouTube is not fair. Like that's what's going to happen here. It's all the same argument. It's all kind of in a circle. Wait, so Google can do it and it's fair use.

35:42But Suno and Udio cannot do it because it's not fair use. This is the trap the industry has set for itself. And our giant consolidated. Yeah, right. It's like it's all the same VCs in all different directions. Kind of like the music business. That's true. there's that line though it's like you have to be perfect every time and i just have to get through once yeah it's like it can't i don't remember exactly what it is that's what's like the hacker creed right like you have to stop me every time all i have to do is i just have to get through once yeah and that is that feels like that copyright situation for ai right now this is a house of cards and maybe maybe the times will win maybe the record labels will win mary maybe Sarah Silverman will win.

36:25Like there are so many of these, maybe Google and open. I reach an agreement about training on YouTube and then a bunch of YouTube creators sue and maybe they win. Like you can just game it out a hundred different ways. At some point, someone is going to win a lawsuit that says training is not fair use. Yeah. The fair use argument here, I feel like is notable. I feel like it's quite different than what the New York times can claim because part of fair use is, for example, the effect on the potential market, right? And with New York Times, they're going to have to argue, well, you're using our articles and other people are taking that and creating texts and putting it on other pseudo journalistic sites, right?

37:07I'm pretty sure that Times is suing for both the output and the training. I see. Okay. So I think these cases are all different. This is what I mean. The strategy for one doesn't work for all of them in the same way. Right. In the case of music, the marketplace argument, like, is it going to affect the marketplace? I think they have a very strong argument here. I think the RA has a very strong argument. They're basically saying, Suno and Udeo, you are charging users money to make songs that you are allowing them to upload to the exact same place where we also have all of our songs, Spotify, Apple Music, etc.

37:40And so you are actually changing the marketplace for music having used all of this output. But is that not part of the argument you're saying? I think we have to find out how that shakes out. Right. Like, I don't know. They got to get assigned a judge, right? Like, right now what they've done is they put out a complaint in a press release. There hasn't been a reply to that complaint or an answer. They haven't been assigned a judge. Like, they haven't done any discovery. We just don't know a bunch of stuff. And we certainly don't know where they're going to put their focus. But that part where copyright law is just about making copies and in the history of computing, every single copy has been litigated down to – again, I bring it up.

38:22I think I bring it up every time. MAI versus peak systems. You go look it up. This is are you a third-party software seller allowed to load software into a computer's memory without permission? Crazy. A crazy court case. Can you put a disk in a computer and load software from the disk to the hard drive without my permission? Got litigated. And they lost. Crazy. They lost. And then we had to get all the way through caching. Are ephemeral copies on your ISP's network equipment or those copies that should be litigated? This is copyright. It's dumb. Like it is a very dumb rationale. But it litigates the creation of copies.

39:01So here it's, did you have permission to make a copy to train your model of all these songs? And every time we didn't have permission, by the way, we want the statutory maximum of$150 ,000. Which essentially ends up being a pretend amount of money. It's got to be bigger than the US GDP. Yeah, it's crazy, right? Did you have permission to copy every song in the world? And if you didn't, every song in the world times$150 ,000 is what we're asking for. I'm going to run this. If you didn't have that permission, can we do an analysis that says that use is fair use? So fair use is what's called an affirmative defense to copyright infringement where you admit it.

39:37Like I did it. But under this other rationale, that's fine. And so that's like the winding path here is, well, first, they won't even cop to having made the copies, which is why the music industry is putting out, well, here's just Johnny B. Goode. Like you can't output Johnny B. Goode unless you copy Johnny B. Goode on the front end, right? Okay. So first we got to get them to cop to making the copies at all, which they claim is proprietary business information. Sure. Then it's was that copy allowed? They obviously didn't have permission. This is why they're in a lawsuit. And then it's is it fair use?

40:14And then we run the analysis. And the analysis is like the purpose and character of the use, the amount of the use, the nature of the use. And then the last factor is the effect on the market. On the output side, I think the market argument is really strong. Right, right. So the question is, does this case – this is something I actually don't understand. Maybe you can explain with your copyright law degree. Is there like some wall between the input and the output in this argument that says – well, there's no marketplace for – You know that emoji that's like this with the hands? The hands are up?

40:45Like I'm just that emoji right now. I don't know. Because I was trying to say, oh, well, there's a clear change in the marketplace for songs, which are all outputs. But it sounds like we don't know what the responses are going to be. But they could say, well, there isn't currently a marketplace for training data in this kind of way. And so it's not affecting that marketplace. But if you – there will never be a market if you just set the rate at zero. Right. Right. So if you're like, I want really high-quality music for my high-quality music AI program, I'm going to go pay a bunch of artists. But then these guys come along and steal it.

41:17But you've actually preemptively destroyed the market. You've never allowed that market to set some rates. And I've heard from publishers who are taking the deals with OpenAI. Disclosure, Vox Media has a content licensing deal with OpenAI. I've heard from other publishers, not our company, that one of the reasons they've taken these deals is to create that market. So that the Times can go to court and say this has an effect on the market. Look at this market. Look at the money that's moving around. And so some of these publishers are playing kind of a strategic game to say we should create a market to help that factor along.

41:50I think that's fascinating. But I don't think that the AI company – I think they thought they could just buy forgiveness. And what's crazy to me is when it was Napster or YouTube or Google Search even, buying forgiveness worked because people liked the companies. They liked the products. They liked the experiences they were having. And here people – I mean I'm – if you're listening to this and you have a very different view of this, let me know. But our audience is pretty loud with us that they don't like these companies. and they perceive this as a moral problem. And I think that's just a very different position for them all to be in.

42:28Which brings us to your moral quandary. It seems like you flipped sides from 20 years ago. Yeah, the idea that I'm sitting here being like the RIAA as a point is crazy. Like it's bananas. And Sarah Jong and I have been like all day, every day, like slacking. Like who have we become? You know, this is like the horseshoe theory of copyright law politics. It's weird, man. And I think one of the pieces of the puzzle – and I'm curious how you see this in the music industry itself, Charlie. One of the pieces of the puzzle here is that the internet just blew the bottom out of the music industry. Like there's no way to be like a middle class musician anymore.

43:06There's no guaranteed way to make money. You're like you're playing the same algorithmic game as everyone else. You're beholden to some labels. You don't have any power as an individual against these platforms. So now this next group of people who's come and taken your work for free and is going to extract value from you, well, sure. Like the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It's kind of the vibe. But I'm wondering if you see that reflected in the actual music industry. Absolutely. I mean the public perception here is so different than what was happening back in the Napster era. Back in the Napster era, the labels were enemy number one.

43:39Selling out to labels was a big – they were the worst players. Today, I actually think they've done a very effective job of using their proxy, Spotify, and let Spotify be the enemy. And everyone's like, Sony Music? Who are they? Warner, UMG? They have labeled deals. But they're not the topic of conversation of who's really screwing who. Now, they basically help set the rates of what gets paid out in streaming. And it's the distributors now that really are taking all the heat. And so they're actually in a better, I think, place of public perception. in terms of within the music industry, I see songwriters, producers, fans totally freaked out about what's going on.

44:17When you go and scan through a lot of the YouTube comments of some of these AI songs, the sentiment is we are screwed. Music is over. I give up. I am not learning an instrument. It is not the future is bright. We're going to create new, beautiful music. Like my creativity is going to blossom. I think that there is a real existential fear that is exists within all of the, you know, the AI world. But you're you're getting into like our human emotions and the beautiful creative output. Hopefully beautiful. I mean, how you feel about. Don't bring Jason into this. We got to get to really on the pot.

44:57I don't really do. That's obviously like reading through the RAA's lawsuit like that is they talk about the creativity and human emotions at all. Uh, but is the, is the end of this just, they're trying to get checks in the same way that there are a lot of folks out there just trying to get checks? Like, well, cause part of me, like, I think obviously that's the answer, but also part of me wonders if the labels are feeling the same way that you do, which is that, oh, this is not just a thing we need to make money off of tomorrow. This is like an existential crisis for our business down the road.

45:26Or if they're like, whatever, this is just a new turn. We have to make sure we get paid. This is an existential crisis because they are already losing market share to people who are not on major labels. Major label listening is down, right, as an overall share of all listening. It's still a lot of it. It's still the majority of listening. So they recognize that flooding the streamers with more and more independent music has not necessarily been good for their business. And with more flooding, it's just going to bring everything down to everything is valueless entirely. If you own music and it gets played a lot on streaming, there's a lot of money in it.

46:02There's billions and billions and billions of dollars in streaming. How it's distributed is not always fair, and people get upset about this. But they very much need to figure out how to enter and participate in this marketplace. And I think kind of like a content ID system, they want to figure out how to properly license. You want to use Jason Derulo's voice? Jason Derulo says yes. And it costs this. And now we've got Jason Derulo copies and that's OK. By the way, I have all of the artists who would let his voice get deepfaked to make commercials. Jason Derulo. Jason Derulo. And look, I'm not even saying – I've talked a lot of Jason Derulo related-ish on this episode.

46:34I'm aware of it. I just know that he is a commercial mastermind. Yes. That man is going to make a bag no matter what happens. Yes. A friend of the pod, Blake Reed, he's a professor at Colorado Law, teaches copyright at telecom, all this stuff. He wrote me a note last week or the week before and he said something really smart that I've been thinking about. It's related to what you're saying, David. Copyright law is like an economic system, right? We create scarcity and then we can like charge money for things because you're not allowed to just like freely copy them. So if you do something bad in the world of copyright law, the answer is you pay money and you fix it.

47:10and you even out the economic problem that you've created, right? Olivia Rodrigo might have sung four notes of a Taylor Swift song. The answer is Taylor Swift gets a writing credit and then some money flows to Taylor Swift and that is the end of that story. And it's just an economic problem that you've solved by redistributing money. AI is a moral problem. This is the thing Blake pointed out to me. It's like the money doesn't solve the perceived moral issue here. So the labels might get paid. They might find some business model that lets them license the music into perpetuity or whatever. But the thing you're seeing in the YouTube comments, the thing our audience is feeling, the thing I think a lot of artists are feeling, does not get solved by money.

47:48It's like another problem. And so you see these deals come up and get signed and whatever, and everyone's like, eh, it's still pretty icky. And there's something there that I think is important. I haven't quite puzzled it out. I actually want to do something with that idea. If you have further thoughts, let me know what you think about it. But that gap is the gap. We can move a bunch of money around. Like the VCs in Hollywood and the Recording Industry Association of America, God bless them. They will move the money around. Lucian Grange will get paid. Is that going to solve the other problem?

48:24I think that's really hard. Well, there's two things that musicians need to not fear. One is that because the output of all of these models cannot be copyrighted, this music is kind of in this weird limbo space. Like maybe it's going to definitely find some streams, but it probably won't be synced on television and film because no TV producer is going to want to have a song where they like don't really understand the rights associated with that song. And if they have the right to it, and does it also secretly contain a vocal sample of James Brown that has been stolen? Like so nobody wants to any rights holder doesn't want to use this music that can't be used in a weird way.

49:01So I think composers and people who are putting stuff on TV and film, I think there's still very much a business for them. Uh, until these much bigger, uh, legal issues get sorted out. The other places that music is about human connection. And I don't say this in some like wishy washy way. It's like, there is no fandom for Olivia Rodrigo without an Olivia Rodrigo. Like you need the person, the time that the music industry tried to create like an avatar, racially strangely coded, uh, what was that guy's name? It was terrible. Um, they tried to do like their NFT avatar pop star and it was an utter failure, but both because it was completely racist and because why would we develop a relationship to this thing?

49:40And so the fandom side, the pop stardom side of pop music, I don't think is ever going to go away. What about Hatsune Mikko? Right. She's like the cartoon character. I just learned that she's officially codenamed CVO1. Yeah, there are these avatar characters that are finding some fandoms online. Yes, that's going to happen. I still just like that doesn't – that's not Olivia. That's not Taylor. That's not Gaga. I'm sorry. it's just different all right we got to end it they're not jason derulo they're not jason derulo like the bar is like can your cartoon character defeat jason derulo i'll take it that's a good place to end it charlie thank you so much for joining the show i suspect you're going to be back on the show quite a bit as these cases wind their way through the courts anytime all right we got to take a break 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 you need a partner that works just as hard as you do.

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54:11All right, we're back. That's enough Jason Derulo for one episode of The Virtue Cast. Can I tell you a Jason Derulo story? Yes, of course. I would say the single most ethically compromised thing I've ever done was say yes to some company that I can't even remember that had like a 200 person Jason Derulo concert in San Francisco. This is when I had like not been dating the woman who is now my wife for very long. Oh my God. Cool, texturist move was to take Anna to a Jason Derulo concert. And it worked. It worked. He had his shirt off the whole time. It was spectacular. I hope you tell Arthur when he's older that he exists because of Jason Derulo.

55:02That's a lot. You would have been fading away like that picture of Back to the Future if not. Every time AI copies it, Arthur gets a little bit less solid. All right. We got to do a lightning round. There's a lot of gadgets. There's basically two gadget lightning rounds. Let's start. Three phone events announced in quick succession here. So Samsung announced Unpacked. It's looking like July, July 10th. Yeah, like two weeks. We're expecting some foldables. Surprise Pixel 9 announcement from Google in August. And then Motorola just had an event and announced the 2024 Razors. Motorola knows it doesn't get to announce an event.

55:40It just has to tell you what phones they're at. Well, it had like a big influencer. I don't think we went because we already had the phones. But it had a big influencer launch event with some of the funniest photos of very cool influencers looking extremely bored with very colorful Razer phones. We can get to that in a minute. Sounds right. This is pretty early in the cycle for a bunch of phone launches. It is weird. I've been trying to figure out what's going on. And it's very clear that the AI race is now happening to everybody else, where I think the thing that is happening is everybody is just announcing like the same set of 12 features and the same new hardware that does the same new stuff.

56:21Like Apple is copying Google is copying Samsung is copying Apple. And so now there's this incredible race to just be the first one to say it out loud. And I think especially on Android, there's just going to be so much like AI sameness over the next 12 months as they all rush to do everything they can think of. So the goal, I think especially, is to beat Apple. Like to me, this Google thing is so transparently just doing this sooner in order to say all the words out loud about what your camera can do before Apple says those same words out loud about what its camera can do. Yeah. So it's interesting.

56:57Let's start with Google. What's fascinating to me about Google is they just shook up those teams. So Rick Osterloh, who had all of hardware, now has all of it, including Android. That's a complicated switch up, right? Right. So like the Pixel team, their boss now runs Android or their old boss now runs Android. They got a new boss. And the big question for Google this whole time has been are you going to do – are you going to try? Are you going to try hard? And like the thing that has kept them from trying hard is they have to maintain the Android ecosystem. In the United States, that's mostly expressed to Samsung.

57:35Like you just got to keep Samsung happy. Around the world, there are many more players and Android is expressed very differently. but if like the pixel guy like rick is like i'm doing it with the pixel and that's his first move is the boss of android weird just weird i think i think that's weird it's like that shake-up is weird and then on top of that i think google really wants ai to be the differentiator for pixel oh yeah right that big vertically integrated like only google can do all this stuff at every layer of the stack we build our own chips like that like all the way you want to do that with pixel so he can body up against the fund.

58:10So really just weird spot for Google to be in. It is. And it feels like Google is trying to do the same thing to both Samsung and Apple, but can only say that it's trying to do it to Apple, which is basically like, I think Google very clearly, and they've kind of said this out loud, sees this as its chance to win in hardware, right? That like, if they can be the ones to make AI happen and do it well and do it first and do it in the biggest, most interesting, most differentiated ways that all of a sudden this is the best new reason to buy a phone that we've had in a really long time. I don't know if that's true.

58:45I don't know that there's a ton of evidence yet that it is true. But if it's true, and if you believe it's true, everything Google has done sort of makes sense, right? I will remind you that my response to all AI announcements right now are it's probably broken. I don't believe you, including Apple. I want to be very clear about this. Apple has not announced a date for anything yet for any of the Apple intelligence features, and no one has ever seen those features in anything but a totally controlled demo. Yeah. There's an increasingly angry rant inside of me about how AI is actually nothing and we all need to stop it.

59:17But I'm waiting a while for that to come out. I mean, look, we can get a computer to produce in a pitch-perfect Jason Derulo tag, right? It's something. I'm not sure what it is, but it's something. It is something. I'll give you that. So I just think that one for Google, how they talk about the pixel, how they talk about the pixel in relation to google's ai capabilities yeah how much of those ai capabilities come to android versus just the pixel there is some kind of shake-up going on over there and i i'm kind of i'm kind of curious how they handle it especially if they can ship this stuff before apple yes yeah if they do this and they're like oh shipping in october that's a unbelievable width but if they can do it and i think especially well no because apple is going to announce new iphones and it's not going to have apple intelligence until like next year So even if Google's like shipping in January, they're going to get to market with an AI phone before Apple.

1:00:07Probably, yeah. But I don't know that anybody is sitting around waiting for an AI phone, right? I think we're still at this point. And this is part of what I'm really excited about is I think there are two simultaneous things happening here where we're going to see in rapid succession. I think Samsung and Google both try really hard to make the case for foldables. It's very clear that Samsung is all in on that train. I think one of the things Google is probably going to do is push the new pixel fold or whatever it's going to be called i've heard rumors it's going to be called the pixel 9xl fold which sucks perfect uh just call it the pixel fold too everybody it'll be fine but anyway uh they're gonna try to make this case for this like new kind of phone i think especially as we get to ai like you can start to see what you do with the extra screen what you do with the extra power all this different stuff again in the hopes that apple is just going to announce like a samey iphone that does samey iphone things and looks less interesting compared to the android stuff i don't know if it'll work but i think that is the gambit and i think it's going to be really interesting but then at the same time everybody is trying to make these ai cases and no one has those yet i don't think like you any even throw motorola into that right there's this question about like what is the form factor and it's going to be like the summer of foldables and flippables and whatever else and then at the end of it we'll have apple and whether anyone can do anything that is better than last year's iphone feels extremely up in the air still which is kind of wild let's talk about the motorola phone for a second uh the razer plus actually looks great it does because they put a four inch screen on the front which is the size of the original iphone like they it's bigger than the original iphone i think yeah it's just a full phone yeah you just have two phones now instead of one phone it's a problem um and they they went with saturated colors like honestly this is the thing i like about this phone the most the colors are hot yeah they really are but they've refined this design right this is like the third one of these the fourth one of these um it's expensive it's a thousand dollars but i'm looking at it i'm like you know what if ai can actually do any of the things people say it can do which i don't believe and i believe that it's mostly broken actually maybe this is the time to get a smaller phone right if i just talk to the phone and have it do a bunch of stuff for me like i don't need all the screen i'm not looking for another laptop which is basically where my phone is going right now it's like very quickly becoming another laptop i got so much shit last year for writing that everybody should start making flip phones and history will prove me right i firmly believe it motorola doesn't have any of the ai features and they swap in the plus they swapped out the ultrawide for a telephoto which is just the wrong approach like everyone loves these ultrawides and whatever um but these phones are great and then on top of it you know apple's supporting rcs now so the i message stickiness like i'm like oh maybe i could just like try one of these for a while and like not everyone will be mad at me once everyone upgrades like there's something there that's super interesting but it's not because the ai it's because of the form factor and honestly the colors like i just like things that look different the orange razor is is sick i'm very into it but then you look at samsung samsung is basically just like moving down the line right it's like we're gonna get a new z flip and a new z fold and like bixby will be marginally smarter but who cares and they've got to deal with you some google stuff but not all of it and like lots and lots and lots of questions about how samsung pulls this off in a way that's differentiated from google yeah to me the big question for samsung is if it can if it can make the ring a desirable thing we're expecting the galaxy ring yeah like and and we've been hearing sort of bits and pieces about it for a while it seems to look good we got to try a prototype a while back like i have reasonably high expectations for this thing and if it's great or even pretty good that's a pretty solid ecosystem play for samsung to make that at least i think might convince some people who have galaxy phones to keep their galaxy phones which is something uh but i i do agree i think there's this bet coming from all of these companies that ai is going to sort of throw the industry up in the air again and everybody has a chance to win it and to me i actually think that that may be true but i think this like flippable foldable different form factor change your relationship with your gadget thing might end up being more important and ai is part of that right like better siri makes it so that you have to look at your phone less which makes it so that you use your phone differently if ai makes it so that we have smaller phones that will be good yeah agree i will take that uh by the way liam is reminding me that the iphone one was 3.5 inches it's the iphone 5 that had a four inch screen so they straight up put an iphone 5 size screen on the front of the razor fantastic it's incredible but if we can get to a place where the phone is more useful because of ai so now i can carry a smaller less distracting phone that would be good I don't think any of these companies have put those ideas together yet.

1:05:04No, but they're all going to come out. What's going to happen is they're all going to talk about the camera. This is going to be the summer of AI features in your camera. And they're all going to be the same features on the same kinds of devices across every single surface you can possibly think of. And I'm already sort of bored of it. Yeah. Here's what I can tell you. I was out with some teens at, you know, like family graduation party. They all had little crappy hundred dollar point and shoots. And then I'm out with the parents. run around around Max's kindergarten graduation and they're all asking me about my ARX 100 because everyone kind of thinks iPhone photos look like crap.

1:05:39And as AI kind of creeps in and everything gets brighter and weirder, it's weird to see where people are going instead. And I suspect as soon as Samsung's like more saturation, like I don't, I think it's going to be weird. I think the AI photo trend is going to, I think people have more taste than these companies are assuming. I think, uh, all right, let's run through just some other gadget stuff. Uh, we should talk about rabbit really quickly. Uh, this company is a disaster. What's going on with rabbit? I just, do we have to, so I, again, I'm just, this, this podcast is just me doing a victory lap.

1:06:15I said a while back that I think that like, if, if you made me forecast whether humane or rabbit was closer to being kind of on a right path to do good things, I would say humane. Uh, I was right. Rabbit just continues to be a massive disaster. Basically, what happened here is a group of developers and security researchers, I think they called themselves Rabbitude, which is very good, found hard-coded API keys that basically, long story short, governed Rabbit's access to, I think it was 11 labs who did all their text-to-speech stuff. and by having those api keys those api keys are supposed to rotate all the time so that someone else can't get them and use them to get access to that same data rabbit wasn't doing that and so the researchers were able to just use that api key to get into and apparently see every response ever given by a rabbit device uh which is absurd and and has had the rabbitude apparently said they've had access to these keys for i think it was more than a month uh and rabbit hadn't done anything hadn't changed the keys to make them outdated just it's basically like handing somebody your password and saying here go go nuts do whatever you want and it's like well are you going to change your password and you're like nah i'm cool uh that company is ever since your review and then sort of response it's like you're just waiting you're just waiting for the next shoe to drop that like there never was a large action model and there never will be like it's still too hard to make yeah uh on the humane side at least you know they're trying to like sell it to one they've like they've shipped a bunch of updates it has gotten noticeably better it's still not good and you still shouldn't buy it but it is it is a better product than it was but i think the the rabbit thing has been so interesting to me these last few months because there is like this running uh is rabbit a scam thing happening and i think it all amounts to basically like they did nfts dot dot dot how feel about that however you want and really i think what is the the old saying like never ascribed to malice what can be described by incompetence this is just gross incompetence all the way down yeah uh and it's like it's just it's just brutal to watch and i like i wanted this thing to be cool i wanted this company to work i was pro the idea of this goofy little orange handheld gadget and this thing just sucks like i mine is in a drawer and i don't intend on ever touching it again that's basically how everyone i know about a rabbit feels yeah like that cool rabbit animation was worth 300 yeah i'm betting that in 10 years it'll be like a fun story to have on the table behind me while we verge cast but uh until then i let its battery die and that is the correct way for it to be like i finally a teenage engineering product that costs less than four thousand dollars i bought it and i have it and we're good um i want to call this one out uh sean also got to sit in the sony afila car what they made with honda and then he played gran turismo on the screens inside as the car which is like perfect in its way still seems to be the realist version of this car that exists i learned about the car and he's like the car isn't real it's mostly a fake car and there's no guarantee that it will actually have a PS5 in it but Sony's trying to make a car and God bless them I hope it has ULT power sound in it speaking of ULT power sound I think legally now required to call out party speakers so Ultimate Eager has announced a whole new lineup including a new mega boom and a wonder boom and they now have a feature called megaphone where you can just hold up your phone and talk in your phone and broadcast sound to people which is incredible I also, on the party speaker update, Ludacris was supposed to play a show in Milwaukee recently and got called out because of the heat.

1:10:11So he just paired two JBL party speakers, wore them with shoulder straps, and did a free concert in a mall. No way. He was singing into a microphone. I've yet to confirm whether he used a proprietary protocol to pair the speakers or one of the new open protocols, like Auracast, which is very cool. but just know there's video of ludicrous wearing a party speaker with a shoulder strap you do it for the people wrapping in the mall which is great i propose that we write about it to our team and they're like nila you you can that's more or less the response that's what we're here for i love this um and then real quickly david people can go listen to it but you spent some time on tuesday talking about service laptops windows and arm what's the vibe they seem to be very good uh there's like a surprising amount of positivity and enthusiasm that microsoft actually like pulled this thing off uh tom published his review of the surface laptop when we talked on tuesday he was like mid draft of the review uh published and he called it microsoft's best macbook air competitor yet which i suspect if you're microsoft uh and knowing everything that we know about how they have talked about these things is exactly what you would hope for yeah It still seems like Microsoft almost finished the job.

1:11:28There's still some wonky emulation stuff. If you run an emulated app, it seems like it just decimates your battery. If anything, Tom was talking about this on Tuesday, but if anything understated, the extent to which running an app that is not prepared for emulation will just set your computer on fire and kill your battery. But he got good battery life. uh one of his pros in the review says 16 gigs of ram for the base model which i take as a personal attack but we'll leave that aside uh but it seems like it seems like this new line of laptops is gonna be really good microsoft stuff is coming out dell stuff is coming out asus reviews are coming out like the the general vibe around this generation of pcs seems to be pretty good yeah i think that the how good prism the emulator how good prism is over time is going to be the thing in a way that Rosetta is not the thing on the Mac.

1:12:20Rosetta is the emulator that lets old, like, Intel apps run on the new ARM chips on a Mac. And, like, Rosetta was, like, so good no one even thought about it. And now it's not even pre-installed on these machines. Like, if you open an x86 app on a Mac, it asks you if you want to download Rosetta. Whereas I think Prism on the Windows side, you're in it. Like, you have a relationship with Prism now. Yeah, it's going to be way more important for much longer. And it doesn't seem to be as good. So I think that's the thing I'm keeping on. It's also just a much harder task, right? Like there are like centuries of Windows apps that you have to figure out how to run in a way that on a Mac, the Mac doesn't have quite that same problem.

1:12:57Bill Gates has a stone tablet with a Win32 app on it. It's true, but it's also if you want to compete, that's the game, right? Yeah. So we'll see. All right, we got to take a break. We'll be back with the true lightning round. 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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1:16:20Just go to Figma.com slash Vergecast. that's f-i-g-m-a dot com slash vergecast

1:16:33all right we're back with lightning round david has two i have three but one of them is three i picked three but i know what your joke is wait can i guess what your joke is can we do it first do you want to talk about the new verizon logo i want to talk about the new verizon logo so much If you haven't seen a Verizon redesign its logo, it's the same text. It's just Helvetica Verizon or whatever it is. They got rid of the checkmark. But now the text is red on a black background. And then the V has like a fire gradient in it. It is nuts. Like nuts. Like all the way around. It just – have you ever seen – Putting a gradient in a logo is such a strong move because it will never get reproduced correctly.

1:17:14Like every time we do a logo redesign, I'm like, let's do gradients. And everyone's like, no, like, no. And Verizon's like, screw it. We're doing gradients. But then doing red on black, I actually think is a great move because every carrier should be like, here's what we are. We are the demon spawn reconstruction of AT &T that the United States government tried to kill and was not able to kill, which is what Verizon is. And I think leaning into the fact that it's from hell is like good. Like, let's just be who you are. now that you point that out it even like you could argue it is kind of like the glow from hell coming out of the bottom of the v that's what i'm saying that really it's the most goth telecom logo i've ever seen in my entire life and it's like here's what happened the united states government tried to kill at &t and instead we got two zombie at &t's and like just be from hell like that's good like i'm at &t i'm looking for your satanic logo redesign any minute now by the way this is true Verizon is one half of the old baby bells and AT &T is the other half of the old baby bells and you just know they want to merge like you just know that their CEOs wake up every morning and they probably look out across the golf course at each other and they're like one day buddy AT &T is coming back this look of ROTE to my ex and Ferris once again I would like to offer my services as the person who will walk into your boardroom say that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard in my life and leave it for$50 ,000.

1:18:41And I would have done that for this because they took like, this just reminds me of the gap when they're like, oh, we have this great logo that everybody really likes and doesn't feel dated at all. What if we change it to something so stupid? That'd be so fun, right? And then they did it. No one feels anything about the Verizon logo. If you have an emotional attachment to any version of Verizon logo over time, let me know. I'm just saying I'm super down with Verizon being like, this one reminds you of literal hell. the v just makes me think of like i don't know why this is where my brain goes but like you know how logan paul has that sports drink that i can never remember like i think it's prime or something like that this is like if a if a youtuber with like a tenth as many subscribers as logan paul wanted to make a sports drink this is what the v would look like to me yes that's all i get is like knock off sports drink that was mine what's yours my first one is uh some fediverse news because we are obligated to talk about it some new stuff on threads where now if you have federated your account and you post on threads not only can people on other activity pub platforms see your post they can actually like and reply and you will see the likes and replies like the way it's worked in threads has been kind of weird before and now there's at least sort of one step of two-way stuff if you reply to their reply it gets wacky but again like any inkling that meta is continuing to push into actually opening this stuff up i find very exciting and it seems to still be happening that meta cares about this and wants to federate and make all of this stuff interoperate and i just think that's very cool whether meta as a company cares weird like meta has just weird ideas about all of its platforms right now.

1:20:24They had a half a controversy scandal this week where they just keep limiting the political content. Even if you ask it to show you politics content, it just reverts. Every time you close the app, it turns the setting off to show you political content. It's like, yeah, we know you guys don't want news. It's weird how all of your bugs are in support of you not wanting to show you. It's the thing that you keep denying. So Meta, the company is weird. The people who are working on this at Meta, super sincere about it. Like, they are communicating about it. They're posting long threads about it. They've talked to us about it.

1:20:59So at least on that front, the energy of that company is sincerely pointed at, can you make Fediverse work? And I think that alone is bringing a bunch of other companies along. So like Ghost, the newsletter platform, very sincere about making Federation work. the blog post that their product manager is writing about figuring out how to do federation and activity pub some of the funniest technical blog posts you will ever read in your entire life it's very good um and this stuff is complicated it's actually if you want to like understand what it takes to make all this work those blog posts are actually pretty good because this stuff is messy too i mean we want to do it and uh like you know like sending stuff out for a media company is like in our dna like we have rss we syndicate to apple it's like we we have feeds of content going to all these places.

1:21:45Like out is super great. Right. All day long. What do media companies love doing? Sending their shit out for free. Work for free? By all means. Like every media company is like, let's do it. Inbox is really hard, right? The part where I post a quick post to The Verge, it gets federated, you hit like on it, and then it comes back to us. Super hard. And then making that two-way in turn. So you've replied to my post on some Mastodon server, and then I reply to you, and that goes back out to you. and then everyone else can see it. All that's really complicated. And then if you're meta or any of these other companies, you have to like be legally compliant in Europe and blah, blah, blah.

1:22:21So it's going slow because it's complicated, but you can just see there's movement and there's still a bunch of energy there. It's not like, it hasn't broken Twitter yet. All that stuff is happening, but I can see how complicated it is, but I can see people are just consistently plugging away. I don't wish I think it was great. Yeah, yeah, I agree. Just the sheer existence of new features on this front goes a long way and you can see it like in the fediverse space every time meta announces anything all of my like fediverse bros on mastodon are like let's go what's your next one uh big supreme court week uh scotus has actually not released a bunch of big decisions that we want to cover some very complicated ones um but they released one big one that i think is really important to talk about just briefly um there was a group of basically COVID deniers who sued the Biden administration for like first amendment violations because the Biden administration had been talking to social media platforms about vaccine information and misinformation.

1:23:23And they basically said, this is impermissible censorship. Then they got all the way to Supreme court by way of the fifth circuit, which is crazy. The fifth circuit basically wrote like a fever dream. Like, yeah, you know, if the fever dreams of YouTube swamp kind of written judicial opinion. Like that was the Fifth Circuit opinion. Like I think they called it the largest coordinated government censorship campaign in history. And it got to the Supreme Court or 6-3 Supreme Court full of extremely hard right conservatives. And they basically were like, what are you talking about? That's the opinion written by Amy Coney Barrett.

1:23:58And she says like flat out, like one, you don't have standing to sue here. You cannot prove one set of actions by the government that pulled your post down. There's nothing here in this body of evidence that says the government censored you. So you shouldn't even be here. And then she says this other thing, which I think is really important for this whole debate that probably no one will pay attention to. Very important to this whole debate. She's like, you have collapsed the users of the platform, the platform, and the government all into one thing. Like the plaintiffs, the defendants and you are like – and the platforms in between, it's not just one thing.

1:24:38Like there are some people who got hurt this way, who claim that they got censored this way by this agency talking to that platform. There are people who say that a different part of the Biden administration talked to a different platform or suited yet a third person about something else. And that's not all the same thing. so like the idea that there's a mass coordinated government censorship campaign directed at platforms broadly that is directed at the sit like that doesn't make any sense well that's i mean that that is sort of an animating argument of a corner of the internet uh and it's it's it was nice to see that kind of roundly she was basically she was like this is nonsense yeah and like our this supreme court telling that swamp like this is nonsense is pretty notable to me.

1:25:25That's not to say, look, I think government speech regulations are bad. I think everybody knows how I feel about the First Amendment. That's not to say there isn't overreach and weird jawboning. That's what it's called when the government sort of like pressures a platform they call jawboning. There's a lot of that going on. For example, conservative Republicans basically just got the Stanford Internet Observatory defunded by putting a lot of pressure on Stanford. Is that cool? Is that a thing you want? Is that a speech? There's like a lot of that going on on both sides. Like Democrats love a speech regulation actually the same way Republicans do.

1:25:57Like all these kids' safety bills are basically speech regulations. Just we think it's important to protect kids so we can like shove a speech regulation into American political history. Weird. Weird all around. I'm not saying I support them. I'm just saying this case was so stupid and our Supreme Court was like, it's pretty stupid and kicked them out. All right. What's yours? What's your next one? My next one is a small one about the chat GPT Mac app, which is now available to everybody. And I think it's fascinating because a couple of people have pointed out to me very recently that one of the strange things about open AI is it's terrible at making product.

1:26:38That it has what a lot of people would argue is like best in class, extremely good technology. And I can't stop talking to people whose whole pitch is we did it better than open AI. And I think the Mac app is weirdly important for chat GPT because they've been open AI has been pretty like loudly and clearly working on a search engine. I think they have a lot of other ways they're trying to figure out how to productize this stuff other than just like a weird, ugly chat bot in your web browser. and this thing where it can you know talk to you using supporting documents like you can take screenshots on your computer and upload it and ask questions about it that's very cool it has access to different things on your computer this is like if you want to see what open ai is actually trying to do and get you a normal person to be interested in like the mac app is a pretty big step in that direction uh and i just think it's really interesting also all of its most interesting Scarlett Johansson-y voices, still not there.

1:27:40Yeah, I think we know why. I think Scarlett Johansson was like, no, no, no, no, no. She's like, I use Windows. Thank you. Super, super going to sue you very soon. All right, last one. And this is, I think, the most important thing we're going to talk about this week on the show. As you know, The Verge is America's foremost Cybertruck wiper news source. That's correct. We've been very responsible on the show. I think you also know we are very precious, very serious journalists. we take our duty of care very seriously. I was there when you first got your hand on a Cybertruck wiper and it was, and you, you journalismed a Cybertruck wiper at South by Southwest.

1:28:19It was a big deal. I don't think the owner of that Cybertruck enjoyed the practice of journalism. I don't think so either. I committed some real acts of journalism with that wiper. So a few weeks ago, there was these reports that the Cybertruck wiper was faulty and Cybertruck's deliveries were being held back, that they were potentially a recall, that it was flapping around, that it wasn't very effective. And we held back. Hundreds of tips arrived out of various Cybertruck forums and social media posts. And we couldn't confirm them. So we ran reportedly. We were very calm. Other sites, I won't name names, ran with it.

1:28:56Sensational, outrageous clickbait journalism. They were right. They were right the whole time. Let me be clear. They were right the whole time. Now there's an official recall of Cybertruck Wiper, which has motor problems. It's just flapping. And then the trim on the back is flying off the cars. That seems worse. It's not good. There's a lot of Cybertruck owners in the forums now who are like, we just got had. Like, this is nonsense. Not great for your$100 ,000 triangle. It's the second big recall. The first one that you recall. It's the second big recall. The first one, if you remember, was the accelerator pedal was getting stuck.

1:29:32Which they fixed with like a rivet. right yeah that's how i would fix it sure like i just get some just not just riveted in just point your nail gun at it and see what happens exactly yeah um the trim is going to be fixed uh with something called adhesion promoter which basically make the glue work better um and pressure sensitive tape or they will replace it if necessary free of charge of course um and then except the wiper is excessive electrical current can cause the front windshield wiper motor controller to fail uh so they will replace the motor i'm sure this is not what's happening but that makes it sound like it's it's getting like too much power and it is just it's becoming like electrified and going a thousand miles an hour and then it just like launches itself into space and that's the end of your cybertruck wafer well look i can't i won't draw too many connections here but you will recall one of the big innovations of the cybertruck is its new 48 volt control system oh whereas traditional cars are 12 um and the fact that the wiper is the victim.

1:30:33Like, I don't know if that's the case. I don't know if these things are connected. Whatever. But the fact that the wiper, your battery just instantly dies. It's not great. The fact that it's the wiper motor, it's like they did not need to reinvent this wiper and they super did. And there are lots of videos of it just flopping. Like if it's raining really hard, like its structural integrity fails. Again, America's number one Cybertruck news source. We're trying to be very responsible here. And I'm just saying we probably could have gone with the intense clickbait when people started reporting this the first time.

1:31:07And we held back. But it turns out it's actually broken and there is a recall. It's very funny. God bless Tesla for launching this angry triangle of a car. It's very good. By the way, at the same time all this is happening with Tesla, Rivian just danced like a$5 billion joint venture with Volkswagen and put like five mystery cars in its roadmap. The competition is here. like it they better fix these wipers is all i'm saying and rivian in particular feels like it immediately went from like cool company interesting ideas can it survive to like oh this is it's it's coming now and even the way that like rj their ceo talked about it afterwards was like it's like buckle up like let's go he's like i got some money i've got a manufacturing partner who can like scale really fast and then volkswagen gets a bunch of their software which they're very excited about because they just re-architected the whole thing.

1:31:59RJ is going to be on Decoder in a few weeks. Oh, nice. So I'm very excited to ask him exactly what I can get an R3X, which is basically what we're going to talk about the whole time. Can I have it now? It's been 45 minutes. Can I have it now? That's how we're going to go through it. I like that. All right. We got to get out of here. We're way over. Thank you to Charlie for being on the show. It's always great to talk to him. I got to call it. The Verge store is back. We got new gear. We also have big mugs, 14 ounce. It's very exciting. I'm hoping this is the last time I will ever have this stupid tiny mug on the Virgcast.

1:32:28From now on, bigger and bigger mugs every 12 months or so until eventually we have like a like an Ajit Pi 60 inch mug. I'm very excited about it. And I just thought it is the 4th of July. So happy 4th. We're off next week. Yeah. Take a break. Light some fireworks. Drink a beer. It's going to be great. Keep all your fingers. Be careful. That's it. That's the Virgcast. Rock and roll.

1:32:54And 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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