594: We Just Found It on the Doorstep
05 Jul 2024AI vs. web publishers, AI vs. the record labels, AI vs. creators, John vs. creation, and self-identifying as a robot.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- Casey’s lunchtime soundtrack
- New member’s special: iPod Tier List
- Follow-up:
- Is the genesis of the red/black U2 iPod How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (via Brian Hamilton)
- An additional “feature” of the U2 iPods (via Max Velasco Knott)
- One EU citizen’s perspective on DMA (via Nicolai Brunvoll Ernst)
- Suggestions for “Brexit”-style colloquialisms for Apple leaving the EU
iQuit(via Oliver Thomas)iLeave(via Jared Counts)AXiT(via Frederik Björeman)
- CarPlay audio
- Using AirPods Pro as hearing protection (via Kirk Northrop)
- Apple is using Google Cloud infrastructure to train/serve AI
- Apple’s “Help Me Choose” Wizard
- AI Training & Data Rights
- Google Zero
- Music industry giants cry copyright foul on AI firms
- Figma pulls AI tool after it apes Apple’s design
- I Made This - John’s post about AI and the act of creation
- Monkey selfie copyright dispute
- Post-show: John’s Mac Pro[blems]
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Apple’s Vision Pro plans
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Chapters
- Casey’s awesome lunch
- Tier List: iPods
- DMA follow-up
- CarPlay audio uses Wi-Fi
- AirPods Pro at concerts 🖼️
- Apple using Google Cloud
- Sponsor: Photon Camera
- “Help me choose” a Mac
- robots.txt
- Sponsor: 1Password XAM
- AI vs. creators
- Ending theme
- Post-show
Casey’s awesome lunch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there’s a handful of people that I’ll schedule like a monthly FaceTime call with, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most of them, you know, almost all of them are, in fact, all of them are not local. And then there’s a handful of people that I try to do lunch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with like once a month. And my good friend Sam, he and I had our monthly lunch today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we went to a place. But I had a problem. During
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lunch, there was music outside, which was good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the Jack Brown Burger Joint trolled me because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they were playing a fish album
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco during the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lunch. And all I could do was think about how happy you would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you were there, or if you at least knew this was happening as it was happening. In retrospect, I should have like FaceTimed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you or something just to be like, listen to this junk. The worst part of all, the worst
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part of all, you could tell me what songs I heard and I would probably be like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sure, but there were a couple of songs that even I recognized as Phish
⏹️ ▶️ Casey songs. Like, you know, it not only did it have the vibe of Phish, but I like had heard the songs before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and recognized them. And I forget which ones they were. The only one I know by name is Bouncing Around the Room
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that was not it. But there was one, and I’m sure this is describing half a Phish catalog, but where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was repeating the same phrase over and over again. And it was very catchy. That’s fairly common.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John But anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ John David Bowie, maybe? I’m kind of proud of you that you recognized that it was Phish, because I’m not sure I could do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know any of their songs. Maybe I could pick it up based on vibe, but I don’t think I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John even heard that much. So like, you must, when are you listening to Phish so much that you recognize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can give you a good heuristic, John. If you hear a song that you don’t recognize, you don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ve ever heard it on the radio before, Look around the room, and if the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whitest guy in the room is slightly bopping his head to it. That’s me though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And zero other people are, there’s a decent chance it’s Fish.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John goodness. It
⏹️ ▶️ John could be anything. Like, I don’t know. I think my chances of spontaneously recognizing, like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John at a restaurant, there’s music playing in the background, spontaneously recognizing Fish, I think my odds are very low. I guess I’d
⏹️ ▶️ John have to look for somebody with the little red blood cell pattern
⏹️ ▶️ John on their clothing. And if they were bopping to it or something, then I could figure it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now I know what that is. That’s the one thing I can recognize. Marco taught me what that is, and now I see it on people’s license plate surrounds. I’m like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, the worst part, Marco, the worst part of this entire lunch, and about the only bad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part of this lunch, because I really do enjoy Sam so very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco much. Wait,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can I guess? Yes. Did you like some of it? It wasn’t bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It really wasn’t bad. .
Tier List: iPods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we have a new member special. We have gone back to the well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we have done another ATP tier list. John, can you remind us all, what is
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t remind you all because everybody knows what a tier list is except for old people who listen
⏹️ ▶️ John to this podcast. But then they’ve also heard the specials before. So it’s a tier list. You rank things, you put them in tiers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Multiple things can be in a single tier. The top tier is S. Why? Nobody knows. Except somebody knows, but we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John really care. The point is it’s better than A. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a tier list. list. And it’s grading. It’s like A through F and then S on top of A.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-hmm. And we graded all the iPods, or at least most of them anyhow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I am pretty confident that we did a pretty good job on this. There was a little bit of horse trading involved,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’m pretty happy with where we ended up. We made a handful of people that we know very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey upset, and I’m sorry that you’re upset, but we’re right. So if you are curious to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hear this tier list or any of the others, You can go to ATP dot FM slash join and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you join even for but a month But you should do more then you can get to all of the members
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specials We’ve been trying to do one a month for what like a year or two now I forgot exactly how long it’s been but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve we’ve racked up a fair number over the over the course of the last several months There’s a handful of tier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lists. We do ATP eats Among other things. There’s a lot of there’s a lot of good stuff in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there and some silly stuff So ATP tier list and if you are a member and you would like to watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the tier list happen Which is not required, but is occasionally helpful There is a super
⏹️ ▶️ Casey secret YouTube link in the show notes for members where you can go and watch it on YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as well Please do not share that. It’s the honor system, but you can check it out there as well
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s in the show notes for the member special that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey sorry. Yes. Thank you That’s when
⏹️ ▶️ John you go to the iPod tier list member special look in the show notes. The first link will be the YouTube video I like this tier list because
⏹️ ▶️ John they always we always seem to I think they reveal something about the things that we are ranking
⏹️ ▶️ John Something that we at least I’d usually didn’t know going in you think oh, you’re just gonna rank them and people are gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John You know have controversies over which is good and which is bad But I think in the end when you look at the whole tier list
⏹️ ▶️ John and you kind of look at the shape of it and how It’s worked out and how contentious the choices would be you learn something about
⏹️ ▶️ John it Like I think our connectors tier list was like that and I think the iPod one turned out like that, too And the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John we made some people angry is because we know a lot of really weird tech people with very specific and often very
⏹️ ▶️ John strange opinions, specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPods. I think you could also say incorrect opinions.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they have their reasons. At least most of them have reasons that make some sense. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think one of the things we learned, not to spoil too much, is that a lot of people have, you know, all
⏹️ ▶️ John the things that we put in tier lists, people can have personal sentimental reasons for.
⏹️ ▶️ John reasons for. We all certainly do, and you know, listeners do as well. And I think iPods, more than anything we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John done before, like the people who had opinions, they swayed heavily into the sentimental,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It was, you know, it was like, this was my first iPod, this, I really love this thing, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Much more so than the past tier lists we’ve done. So I think, you know, maybe the iPod at that
⏹️ ▶️ John point was the most personal product Apple had ever made.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean honestly, I had a lot of fun with this one because even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though I hardly ever really used iPods because by the time I could really afford decent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPods, it was only very shortly before the iPhone really took over. So I only really had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple years with iPods, but those couple years, I really liked the iPods and this was actually fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For coincidence sake, I happened to have bought a couple of iPod
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nanos off of eBay a couple years back just to kind of play around with. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I took them out the other night after we recorded this episode and charged them up, well the ones that we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accept a charge at least, charged them up and got to play around with the old iPod Nano.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I will just say I stand by everything I said on that episode. Everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So feel free to listen and tell us how wrong we are. And you too, listener, can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pay us $8 a month to yell at your podcast player just a little bit more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco encourage you to do that. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great marketing. Thank you, Marco. And by the way, our membership episodes are DRM-free.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so if you happen to use an iPod to listen to your podcasts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are fully compatible. So you can pay us $8 a month to listen to our member content on an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPod if you actually have one. And you can honestly buy one on eBay for only a few months worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of membership fee because they’re pretty cheap these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. And hey, what would you listen to on an iPod if not a podcast? Well, you could listen to music and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could listen to music on a U2 iPod. And so, Brian Hamilton wrote in with regard to the red
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and black colored U2 iPod. We were wondering, I thought we were wondering on the episode or certainly there was some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mumblings about it on Mastodon afterwards, you know, how did they get to red and black for the color scheme of the U2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPod. And Brian wrote in to remind John and us about how to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dismantle an atomic bomb, which was released November 22 of 20… or excuse me, of 2004.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the color scheme on the cover art for that album is red and black. Where were you on that one, John, Mr. U2?
⏹️ ▶️ John it, once I was reminded of it. I mean, here’s the thing, like I said on the episode, it’s not as if red and
⏹️ ▶️ John black became, like, the iconic colors of the band. This was one album that was released, you know, you know, obviously at the same
⏹️ ▶️ John time as the iPod as part of a promotional thing, like the iPod, the U2 iPod, the first U2 iPod was released in like
⏹️ ▶️ John October and the album came out in November. So it’s a tie-in, right? And then there were future U2 iPods and they
⏹️ ▶️ John were also red and black, but at that point U2 hadn’t released a new album. So they’re all just tied to this one album,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they have released a lot of albums and there were future albums, there were past albums. And I can tell you that this one
⏹️ ▶️ John and this color scheme did not become heavily associated with the band, but that’s the reason. That’s why they went with red and
⏹️ ▶️ John black because of the cover of the album.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you saying that as an assumption? I’m genuinely asking, are you saying that as an assumption or?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s yeah. I re once I was reminded that I’m like, Oh yeah, that’s why they did it. I mean, it’s not a great reason, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty sure it’s the reason.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, fair enough. Max Velasco not, uh, writes in that there’s also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey another feature and I’m using air quotes here on the, uh, you two iPod max writes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the U2 iPods featured signatures of the band members in the backside. I was fine with the black, red color scheme, but couldn’t stand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seeing Bono and company on the back whenever I turned them over.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I’d forgotten about that as well. Obviously it’s a shiny back end that doesn’t show up that much, but if
⏹️ ▶️ John you really just wanted a red and black iPod and didn’t care about the band, band, the signatures on the back kind of messed
DMA follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. Nikolaj Bronval-Ernst writes to us with regard to the DMA
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Apple’s cut. Nikolaj writes, I really enjoyed your last show, 593, Not a European Lawyer. I’m also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a European lawyer, but I am a citizen in the EU and wanted to provide a single European’s point of view. The DMA
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has nothing to do with Apple’s cut in the App Store or how much money Apple earns from selling their hardware. It only has to do with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ensuring fair competition. Citizens’ rights to freely choose services they want to use without vendor lock-ins
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on interoperability, portability, and your own data, which we here in the EU believe belongs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the user. That was pretty good summary.
⏹️ ▶️ John A lot of people have written in to say this, but I think people will get hung up with the idea when we talk about like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s cut and how the EU is trying to control that and they’re like, he
⏹️ ▶️ John was not trying to tell Apple how much money it can make. It’s just trying to do this other thing. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s good. The reason it gets mixed up and the reason people send us these emails is is because
⏹️ ▶️ John what Apple did to supposedly comply with the DMA
⏹️ ▶️ John while also trying to prevent competition is an application of fees.
⏹️ ▶️ John So OK, well, the EU says you have to allow for competition. Apple says,
⏹️ ▶️ John OK, sure, we’ll allow competition. But all of our competitors have to pay us an amount that makes it so
⏹️ ▶️ John they can’t compete with us, right? And the cut we’re talking about is not Apple’s cut from
⏹️ ▶️ John its own app store, like when you sell through the app store, you pay Apple some cut. It’s the cut Apple demands
⏹️ ▶️ John from the app stores and the people selling through app stores that are not Apple’s own app store, that are
⏹️ ▶️ John selling through third party app stores. Apple is using money, using fees to
⏹️ ▶️ John make the competition less competitive. And that’s what we’re talking about. I know it’s even confusing
⏹️ ▶️ John when we’re talking about Apple collecting its money or Apple having its fees and stuff like that. So I think maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the source of the confusion. And the other thing is, by the way, that plenty of countries, including the EU,
⏹️ ▶️ John do actually tell companies that they can’t make a certain amount of money on a certain thing that they
⏹️ ▶️ John do. Someone wrote in to give us the example of credit cards, like MasterCard and Visa, the two big
⏹️ ▶️ John credit card networks. I think in the EU, the fees they charge
⏹️ ▶️ John stores to process their credit cards are essentially capped. And the EU has basically said,
⏹️ ▶️ John Visa and MasterCard own the market. You can continue to do that, but you can’t charge
⏹️ ▶️ John Merchants any more than point whatever percent The EU has not done that
⏹️ ▶️ John to Apple Apple. They haven’t said to Apple. Hey Apple, you can’t charge more than
⏹️ ▶️ John 10% in your own app store. They haven’t said that at all They haven’t said anything about what Apple can charge in their app store What they just want is more competition and
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is saying, okay There can be other app stores, but they all have to give us an amount of money that makes it unattractive
⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah, we’ll see how that flies again. The EU has not yet ruled on on the
⏹️ ▶️ John core technology fee and all the other things that they’re investigating. So far, they’ve only ruled on the
⏹️ ▶️ John steering provisions about how Apple restricts the way apps in its
⏹️ ▶️ John own app store can link out to third-party payment methods. But we’ll see how those other decisions
⏹️ ▶️ John come out in the coming months and years. I don’t know how long this is going to take. But right now, it’s not looking
⏹️ ▶️ John good for the core technology fee. Let’s say that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. We asked for mostly tongue in cheek, but we asked for Brexit-style names
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Apple leaving the EU. Jared Counts was the first we saw to suggest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iLeave. Frederick Bjorman suggested Axit and provided a truly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heinous but hilarious, I presume AI-generated image for this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My personal favorite though was suggested several times. First we saw was from Oliver Thomas, iQuit.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s pretty good. The iLeave and iQuit, we had many more suggestions of these. I thought these were the top three. I leave and I quit
⏹️ ▶️ John are cute, but I kind of like Axit because it’s as close to Brexit and the
⏹️ ▶️ John axe thing. Like the picture has like a, an EU themed Superman holding an axe
⏹️ ▶️ John and an apple. And yes, it does look AI generated. It’s interesting how due to the way the various
⏹️ ▶️ John AI models that we’re familiar with have been trained, most people can now look at an image and identify it immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John as AI generated based on like the shading and the weirdness of hands
⏹️ ▶️ John and all sorts of other stuff. It is kind of strange how quickly that happened. But anyway, I kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John Axit, but I don’t think we get to pick this name. So, I mean, I don’t, MacBook One
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t really catch on and neither did MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Adorable. Oh, please. It sure
⏹️ ▶️ John did. Well, within our little circle of podcasts, yes. But I don’t see the, uh, uh, the New York Times running
⏹️ ▶️ John with Axit or iQuit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. We don’t really seem to have naming power in the, in the greater ecosystem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If we try hard enough, we can make Fetch happen. Thank you.
CarPlay audio uses Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, someone anonymously wrote in with regard to CarPlay audio. We were wondering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how CarPlay audio worked, especially with the new CarPlay, and whether
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or not it was more like AirPlay 2, where it sends a big buffer or whatnot. And so Anonymous writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio and wireless CarPlay is always over Wi-Fi. Buffered audio for CarPlay is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirPlay 2. Buffered audio is available without doing next-gen CarPlay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this was news to me, because I had speculated that it seemed like all CarPlay audio was always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going over Bluetooth. Wireless CarPlay, I think, actually creates like a little ad hoc Wi-Fi network between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the car and the phone. And wired CarPlay sends all that stuff over the wire. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of assumed, wired CarPlay, it seemed like it does audio and video over the wire. Wireless,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seemed like it was doing Wi-Fi for the audio, or for the video signal rather,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but Bluetooth for the audio. And apparently, this person wrote in who I think would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know such things and they said nope it’s always over Wi-Fi so that to me first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all is kind of good news in the sense that like you can you can have improved responsiveness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can have me a more better reliability for the audio because it’s already going over Wi-Fi and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do all that with current car play tech you don’t have to use the new car play system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kind of sad and frustrating part is then why is why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do wireless car play implementations out there in the world so often have just massively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long buffers that make it really laggy and annoying. That’s frustrating.
AirPods Pro at concerts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Kirk Northrup points us to a New York Times article with regards to using AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro as hearing protection. This is kind of a lot to read, but I think it’s worth it because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this really distills down the summary, and we’ll put a link in the show notes if you want to read it for yourself. Reading from the article,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as you can see in the results, any claims the AirPods Pro’s adaptive transparency or hear-through mode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey limits sound to 85 decibels does not prove true in our testing. The earbuds did bring the 105 decibel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sound down to 95 decibels, which is a big improvement over using no hearing protection at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that’s adequate for only about 45 minutes of exposure under our simulated conditions. Keep in mind that noise guidelines
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are designed with the assumption that a person who has no other loud noise exposure throughout the day. If you were previously exposed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to loud noise levels through your work or hobbies, you would likely want to be even more careful when attending a concert on the same day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Hear Through mode and the Bose QuietComfort Earbuds 2, which Bose calls the Aware mode,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did a little better in our tests, limiting the sound to 91 decibels, a level of volume reduction that might be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey adequate for a two-hour concert. As we swapped the earbuds for ear plugs and switched back and forth between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the earbuds’ hear-through and noise-canceling modes, we were surprised to hear how much more enjoyable the show was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when we used the AirPods Pro earbuds as hearing protection. Using the AirPods Pro’s adaptive transparency gave us,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in essence, a quieter version of the unattenuated live sound. The guitars, drums, and vocals all sounded surprisingly clear,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and our enjoyment of the sound wasn’t lessened at all. However, as our measurements predicted, it was still too loud. After about 10 minutes of listening,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our ears grew fatigued.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this is interesting. So what the Wirecutter did was run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a, basically they have a test setup with an artificial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ear, basically that they can put these earbuds into and measure what gets sent through them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I question whether these results are universal because, again, as somebody who’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now watched, I think three concerts, four concerts maybe, with AirPods Pro as my earplugs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know what it feels like to have my ears blown out from a concert, like how it feels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during and afterwards. And when I use the AirPods Pro, it doesn’t feel that way at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all. It feels just like using earplugs, which is what I was doing before using the AirPods Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When the Apple Watch measures the sound pressure hitting my ears, like when it indicates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re wearing the AirPods Pro, what it’s doing, it caps at 85 decibels when they’re being used this way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I have found for whatever it’s worth, Like I have like an SPL meter, because of course I do. And I have found the Apple Watch’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sensitivity to be pretty accurate, although obviously it wouldn’t be using the watch’s built-in mic when you have AirPods Pro in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So maybe there’s some other factors
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, how would it possibly be measuring the sound on the inside of your ear? Is there a microphone that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John facing the inside of your ear?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there might be. Isn’t that how they do some of the calibration stuff? So anyway, the point is my experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually using them, it really does not feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m hearing 95 decibel concert for three hours. Like, it feels like what it says
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, how loud was the concert outside of the ear? From your seat, did you look at the decibel
⏹️ ▶️ John meter of like, if I had nothing on, what would the level be?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, so I did a couple times where I would take the AirPods out and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put them away, so they turn off, and just listen and see how the watch measures the concert fully. And it was, I don’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly, but I remember it was somewhere in the high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 90s, I think. So not quite as loud as there. So maybe the difference is that they are, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were coming from 105 decibels and they came into 95. And I was coming, I think from somewhere in the 90s and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down to 85. So maybe that’s the cause, or it could just be differences in fit. You know, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly how good is the seal with their artificial ear setup compared to my actual ear.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. There’s no way, there’s no way to know that. So I think what, I think the conclusion to draw here is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, what we kind of already knew, which is they provide some protection,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, suitable for occasional concert goers, not suitable if you’re gonna be like working in a factory every single day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like there’s different degrees of protection that you might need if like, you know, this is not everyday protection, but also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it probably varies a little bit between both fit and between what exactly you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually listening to. Like how loud is your environment? Is it, I mean, it can’t, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can’t bring down 105 decibels, but maybe it can bring down 95 decibels. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s, so obviously there are other variables here. So I think the advice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I would give remains the same, which is if you have like really serious hearing protection needs or very frequent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hearing protection needs, get real hearing protection. If you are an occasional concert goer like me and you want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basic hearing protection for occasional concerts, this is probably fine unless you are standing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like directly next to the giant PA speaker. maybe you might need a little bit more protection. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this seems fine to me, and every time I’ve used them, I feel great afterwards, and my ears don’t ring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all, and there’s no fatigue. So it seems to be working. So maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just has a limit to how much it can work.
Apple using Google Cloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is apparently using Google Cloud infrastructure to train and serve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI. This is from HPC Wire. Apple has two new homegrown AI models, including
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 3 billion parameter model for on-device AI, and a larger LLM for servers with resources
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to answer more queries. The ML models, developed with TensorFlow, were trained
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Google’s TPU. John, remind me what TPU stands for.
⏹️ ▶️ John Tensor processing unit some of that we talked about the the actual hardware on a past show and how
⏹️ ▶️ John many Billions of computations or whatever they do and how many different operands are
⏹️ ▶️ John in each operation But yeah, I think it’s like a tensor processing using you know, so it’s basically So Google
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t buy its GPUs from Nvidia and put them it makes its own silicon to do machine
⏹️ ▶️ John learning It has for many many years. It’s not a new thing They’re called TPUs and that’s what they’re currently using
⏹️ ▶️ John to drain to train Gemini and stuff. And if you pay them, just like you pay AWS or whatever, you pay
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Cloud, I believe they will rent you their TPUs and you can train your models on it. And that’s what Apple did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. Apple’s AX Learn AI framework used to train the homegrown LLMs creates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Docker containers that are authenticated to run on the GCP or Google Cloud something. What is that? Google
⏹️ ▶️ John Computing? I don’t know. Computers. GCP is like AWS.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s Amazon Web Services, but Google.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, to run on the GCP infrastructure, AX Learn supports the Bastion orchestrator, which is supported
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only by Google Cloud. This is a quote from their GitHub
⏹️ ▶️ Casey documentation. While the Bastion currently only supports Google Cloud Platform, there you go, I should have kept reading, my bad,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Google Cloud Platform Jobs, its design is cloud agnostic. And in theory, it can be extended to run on other cloud providers,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple stated on its AX Learn infrastructure page on GitHub.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this is, I mean, we didn’t put this in the notes, but the rumors are that the deal
⏹️ ▶️ John between Apple and Google to use Gemini as part of iOS 18 as an option alongside
⏹️ ▶️ John a chat GPT, that deal is reportedly getting closer, but this is from the past of like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s got these models, the one that’s gonna be running on people’s phones or the various ones that are running on their phones, which are smaller,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the big ones that are gonna be running on their private cloud compute. And these are Apple’s own models and they train them themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ John And how did they train them? They paid Google to use TPUs to train their models.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I feel like this is interesting in that Google, Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John unfriendly relationship, let’s say with Nvidia continues, right? And their friendly relationship
⏹️ ▶️ John with Google continues. It’s kind of a surprise that Google didn’t do the deal. Maybe, you know, the rumors are, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think we talked about this on a past show, that nobody’s paying anybody for the OpenAI thing, whereas maybe Google wanted to be paid.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’ll see how this works out. But yeah, there seems to be a cozy relationship between
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple and Google, because apparently Apple either doesn’t have yet or doesn’t plan to have
⏹️ ▶️ John fleets of massively parallel machine learning silicon that they can train their
⏹️ ▶️ John models on but Google does.
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“Help me choose” a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I hear that you have asked Apple for help
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they have said, you know what you need? You need a Mac studio because why would anyone need a Mac pro?
⏹️ ▶️ John This went around, uh, I think a week or two ago, Apple’s got a page, uh, apple.com slash Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John slash best hyphen Mac. And the title of the page is help me choose answer a few questions to find the
⏹️ ▶️ John best Mac for you. And when this was going around, the first thing I did was launch
⏹️ ▶️ John this page. And I wanted to go through the little wizard and answer a bunch of questions to
⏹️ ▶️ John see if I could reach the win condition, which is having this tool recommend the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that the win condition? It is the win condition. Are you sure? And the answer was very
⏹️ ▶️ John clear. And I was mostly telling the truth, but occasionally I would exaggerate to make sure I go on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro path. And I did not end up at a Mac Pro. It recommended Mac Studio to me that a bunch of other
⏹️ ▶️ John people pride. So a bunch of people tried to use this tool to get Mac Pro, nobody could do it. And Julia Montier
⏹️ ▶️ John tried it and found out how to cheat to win the game. If you look at the source code,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can see that there’s like a JSON file that defines the options
⏹️ ▶️ John for the endpoints. And that JSON, it’s not a JSON file, but it’s JSON. That JSON does
⏹️ ▶️ John not contain the Mac Pro. It contains pretty much every other Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that Apple sells,
⏹️ ▶️ John But there is no way to get to the Mac Pro because the Mac Pro is not one of the options.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is it? No, this is Apple telling you that literally nobody wants this computer and nobody should have it.
⏹️ ▶️ John We all agree on this show that the current Mac Pro is not a great computer. But it is a computer that exists.
⏹️ ▶️ John And on top of that, there is at least one
⏹️ ▶️ John very specific reason why someone might want to use it. If one of the questions had asked, hey, do
⏹️ ▶️ John you have a bunch of PCI Express cards that you need to use? If the answer to that is yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s literally the only computer Apple sells that you can do that on. And that is really the only thing to recommend.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think the people who made this quiz know what a PCI Express card is?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s Apple. They have questions and answers for every
⏹️ ▶️ John other computer. It just seems weird to me. Now, again, I can understand saying, this is not a great computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John and really, honestly, no one should really buy it. Like, I agree with all of that. But when you make a help me choose
⏹️ ▶️ John tool on your website, you should have all of the things as endpoints. And yeah, make
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro pretty much impossible to get to unless you need it. But there is
⏹️ ▶️ John a reason someone might need it. If someone’s going through this tool and saying, I don’t know what I’m gonna do, I’ve got all these
⏹️ ▶️ John audio cards that I need to use for my old Mac is dying, is
⏹️ ▶️ John there some other computer that I can use? How would you determine that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John still sells computers with card slots in them. Everyone on Mass Dynamics was saying, okay, well, the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who need the Mac Pro know it, and so they don’t need to use this tool. That’s not how these tools work. You could say the same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing about, well, the people who need an iMac know they want an all-in-one thing, so they don’t need to use this tool. If you already
⏹️ ▶️ John know which computer you need, yes, you don’t need this tool. But the tool exists to lead you to whichever
⏹️ ▶️ John product that Apple sells is best suited for you. And it’s weird to leave just one out.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I would just love to know the thinking behind that process. because like, look, if Apple doesn’t want to sell them,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t sell them, right? But they’re selling them. You can buy them for a huge amount of money.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the tool can make it difficult or almost impossible to get there because when it says, how many PCI
⏹️ ▶️ John Express cards do you need to use? The default choice should be zero or I don’t know what a PCI Express card
⏹️ ▶️ John is. Like have a million options that regular people will click and they will lead them off that path and say you shouldn’t buy this.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if the person says three or any number other than zero, you have to leave them
⏹️ ▶️ John to the Mac Pro This is literally the only computer they sell with card
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slots. I mean, you’re gonna hate this, but so I did the whole quiz trying to get to the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before he said it wasn’t an option, and just putting in all the highest requirements. Like, I need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the, I do 3D editing and content creation and video editing and audio editing, I need all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these tools, I need to connect a bunch of stuff to my Mac, and it recommended exactly what I’m using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now, the MacBook Pro 16 inch. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought for sure I’d at least get a Mac Studio, but nope.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Well, no, because
⏹️ ▶️ John the question it asks is, do you do all your work in a single location or do you need to be portable? Did you say, oh, I
⏹️ ▶️ John do all my work in a single location?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I said like on the one desk option, the very top option where it’s like, I do everything at the same place, like on a desk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I thought for sure I’d at least get a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Studio. I think a lot of the end points recommend two computers. Like I didn’t just get the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Studio, I got recommended the Mac Studio and the MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I also got two computers. the MacBook Pro $4,000 configuration and the MacBook Pro $3,500 configuration.
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know how you didn’t end up with desktop because there must’ve been some question that’s differentiating portability.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously, if you mentioned you ever need to take it somewhere, they’re not gonna recommend a desktop. But yeah, I don’t know how
⏹️ ▶️ John great this tool is. Wizards in general are not great. I like their comparison ones, like for the phones where it does like columns
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can list all the features and scroll and see how they are different from each other. This doesn’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John but I do think it’s very strange to not have a single one of your
⏹️ ▶️ John computers in there. Remember when they were selling the trash can for years and years, and really nobody should be
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco buying that,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But if you needed whatever GPUs it came with, for a while it still
⏹️ ▶️ John did have the most powerful GPUs you could buy in an Apple computer. And if you needed those GPUs
⏹️ ▶️ John and they had a tool that was asking you a bunch of questions, they should have had a question that said, do you
⏹️ ▶️ John use Maya at Pixar and need this much GPU power and then it would lead you to the trash can. but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s weird. Anyway, if someone at Apple knows why the Mac Pro was omitted from this tool, please tell us. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John sure it’s the obvious reason, which is like, nah, no one should buy that. And we kind of agree, but you’re selling it, so put it in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pretty sure it’s very clear why it’s omitted. Even the very first day this Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro came out, nobody should be buying it. Like, let alone now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, like, it’s not nobody. Like, it is the only computer with slots. Like, that’s not a great reason for it to exist,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s not a reason for you to pay twice as much the Mac Studio, but like, especially since they don’t support,
⏹️ ▶️ John I believe they don’t support at all anymore. The, uh, you know, PCI express breakout boxes like they
⏹️ ▶️ John used to on the Intel things. It’s literally your only choice if you have cards
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s one of the reasons they should continue to make it and do continue to make it. And they just never ask about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It made me laugh quite a bit that nobody was coming up with that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, maybe that’s a feature, not a bug. I’m just saying.
robots.txt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. For the main, main topic this week for your main course,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have a plethora of different AI-related topics. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to try to take us on a journey. We’ll probably fail and that’s okay. But basically, this next section
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is AI. Huh. That’s a thing, isn’t it? And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we start on the 17th of June for what it’s worth with our friend John Voorhees at MacStories,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is them saying, hey, the article is entitled, How We’re Trying to Protect MacStories
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from AI Bots and Web Crawlers, and how you can too. And it seems like both John and Federico
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are getting very wrapped around the axle with regard to AI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff. And I’m not saying, I don’t mean to imply that they’re wrong or that’s bad, but they are getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever more perturbed about what’s going on with AI crawlers. And I mean, To a degree,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get it. So that was on the 17th of June. John says, here’s how you can protect yourself from crawling.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then on the 21st of June, Business Insider writes and says, oh, huh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OpenAI and Anthropic seem to be ignoring robots.txt. And if you’re not familiar,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you have a web page or website, I guess I should say, where you control
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the entire domain, you can put a file called robots.txt at the root of the domain.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, you know, it would be marco.org slash robots.txt and any self-respecting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and ethically clear crawler will start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crawling marco.org or whatever the case may be by attempting to load robots.txt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and seeing if there’s anything there. And if so, there’s a mechanism,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a schema, if you will, by which the robots.txt will dictate who or really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what crawlers should or should not be allowed to crawl that site.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s by path they can say. Everything in this directory you shouldn’t crawl. Everything here you can crawl. So you can
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of subdivide your site to say which parts are accessible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I have thoughts on that, but we’ll come back to that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, whenever you’re ready to interrupt, to be honest, feel free.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s talk about robots.txt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, just actually very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apologize. I gave you the green light. Now I’m giving you the yellow light. Just very quickly. I was already in the intersection.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s important to note that robots.txt has never been enforced in any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey meaningful way. It’s been kind of a friendly agreement amongst pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much the entire World Wide Web, but there’s never been any real wood behind the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey arrow or whatever the turn of phrase
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s what we call advisory. Yeah. Like advisory locking. It is a scheme that people
⏹️ ▶️ John who agree to that scheme can use that scheme to collaborate and work together, but there is no actual
⏹️ ▶️ John mechanism stopping anyone from doing anything. It is literally just a text file that you can choose to read or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So with that said, Marco, carry on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and so robots.txt is basically a courtesy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is a website saying, please maybe follow these rules if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would. But it is not a legal contract. It is not a legal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco restriction. It is not technically enforced or enforceable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really. It is also not universally used and respected. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I can tell you, I operate crawlers of a sort, and I don’t use robots.txt.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So when Overcast crawls podcast feeds, I don’t even check for robots.txt. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just crawl the URL as the users have entered them or as they have submitted them to iTunes slash Apple Podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What robots.txt advisories are, were originally for was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not like, hey, search engines, don’t crawl my entire site. That’s not what they were for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What they were for was mostly to prevent runaway crawls on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parts of a site that were potentially infinitely generatable. So, things like if you had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a web calendar and you can just click that next month, next month, next month button forever if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you wanted to. So a web crawler that indexes a page and then follows every link on that page,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s hitting a web calendar, it can generate basically infinite links as it goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forward or backwards in time. So the main purpose of robots.txt was to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of advise search engines, and it was specifically for search engines.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was to advise them areas of the site that the crawlers should not crawl, mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for technical reasons, occasionally for some kind of privacy or restriction reasons, but usually it was just like technical,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, hey, don’t get into an infinite loop, which was largely unnecessary because the web crawlers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eventually kind of figured out like how to to limit things on certain sites. And they eventually made themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more advanced, and that wasn’t really necessary anymore, even for that case.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the primary use case was, keep this out of your search index. And any decent crawler
⏹️ ▶️ John is not going to get into that loop. But keep this out of your search index. And it was respected by
⏹️ ▶️ John the popular search engines of the day, and still is. I think Google still reads Robust.txt
⏹️ ▶️ John and still respects it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the thing is, the whole idea of, well, I don’t want any bot to crawl this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was so based on assumptions about search engines in particular,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco web search engines. The current drama around trying to apply it to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AI training, I think it’s missing a lot of that context that when this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of unofficial standard was developed, it was all about web search engines. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you think about like how the web search engine Dynamic has always worked with web publishers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was never really any official contract between anybody that said like, hey, Google, Bing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the other search engines that have come and gone over the years, crawl my page, go ahead, index
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, go ahead, even though technically that is making a copy in your server’s memory and might be some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco copyright violation, doesn’t really matter because the purpose of this is going to help me. It’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make people able to find my page through your search engine and will direct people to my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco page and I will be able to have them there, make money maybe, maybe have them subscribe to my site and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in their browser or whatever. So there was that implied symbiotic trade-off that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay, I actually as a site owner, I want search engines to mostly to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco index my site because I want people to be directed to my site from the search engine. And so robots.txt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was entirely in that context. It was never anything that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was some kind of like legal contract that said, you must obey my rules.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That really has never been tested until fairly recently. Like that was never really something that really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever came up. I mean, there have been a couple of things here and there with like Google News and news publishers in certain countries and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like for the most part, that the basic idea of robots.txt was really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just, please. Like that’s it. It was like, please do this or don’t do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even then, like it was often used in ways that harmed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the actual customers using things or did things that were unexpected. This is why I don’t use it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Overcast’s feed crawlers because if you publish an RSS feed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and submit it to Apple Podcasts, I’m pretty sure you intend for that to be a public feed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I feel like it is not really my place to then put up an alert to my users to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, this person’s robots.txt file actually says, you know, disallow star on this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one path that this feed is in. And so I actually can’t do this for you. Like that, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would feel like I would have, I would have, first of all, no incentive to do that. And second of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all, because of its, because of its intention and context as a standard for search engine, which I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not, this doesn’t really apply to me and my use. Um, and, and there were all sorts of things over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the years too. Like, you know, the, you could specify certain user agents like, all right, Google bot do this. Yahoo bot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this. And that was also problematic over the years too because it disadvantaged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain companies if you just had bad behavior once. Or if a site owner just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had one bad thought about one of these companies once and then never revisited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it or whatever, then that company was allegedly disallowed from crawling this site,
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, it’s not even that. It’s like, for people that know the technology behind it,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t allow Googlebot. the way you identify Googlebot is by the user agent string, which is part of the HTTP request,
⏹️ ▶️ John and anybody can write anything there. And so all someone had to do was say, I’m Googlebot,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then just write a script that slams a site, and people are like, oh my God, my site’s being slammed by Googlebot. No, it’s not.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s being slammed by a thing that put that string into the user agent header.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it’s just, there’s no security, no authentication, and it’s like email.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anybody, and people forget this about email all the time. It’s a real email from Santa at North Pole.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anybody can write anything. I know in email there are technologies to try to make this better, but with HTTP headers,
⏹️ ▶️ John the user agent string, there’s no security behind that. So if you’re making any decision based on the
⏹️ ▶️ John user agent, whether it’s a decision to allow something with a particular user agent string, or disallow something, or you
⏹️ ▶️ John try to make decisions about, oh, I’m getting all these hits, and I look at the user agent string, and the user agent string is X, therefore
⏹️ ▶️ John it must be Google, therefore Google is bad. You have no idea who or what that is,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially with proxies and things bouncing around the web or whatever, so just like robots.txt,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s all just sort of a politeness agreement and convention
⏹️ ▶️ John that only works when all parties involved are being honest and acting in good
⏹️ ▶️ John faith, and that is not something that is true, broadly speaking, on the web.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and when you’re looking at legalities or copyright issues,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I was saying earlier, none of this has really ever been tested because the way it was being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used, like the deal between search engines and publishers was mutually beneficial.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And publishers, for the most part, who were not like bad business people, for the most part, publishers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really wanted for search engines to index their public content. And their private content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shouldn’t be accessible to the crawlers. Like it shouldn’t be exposed to the public internet so if they want it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be private. And so using robots.txt to try to say, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want you to only use the content on my site for this purpose, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that purpose, but I’m going to keep serving it publicly and making it available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to any bot that comes around like publicly, you just have to maybe be polite about it. I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the wrong tool for that job. That job is more of a legal question. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now, again, like we haven’t really had much of an agreement between publishers and search engines
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and other big aggregators before.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there have been legal cases about it, especially in the early days. Because in the early days of the search engine, the idea that you
⏹️ ▶️ John would go to a website that’s not yours and type in a search string and see text that came from your
⏹️ ▶️ John website on someone else’s website, on the Google search results page, I believe there were legal cases
⏹️ ▶️ John about that. And I think the result was that Google is allowed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco engine. And some of that can be considered fair use.
⏹️ ▶️ John Especially the old style search engines where what you’d see is a series of links that are search results
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe a summary below them Before Google started doing the thing where it’s like actually I’m just gonna give you an entirely
⏹️ ▶️ John unattributed Snippet at the top of the page that tries to give you the answer you were looking for without sending
⏹️ ▶️ John you to any site and of Course that snippet is now powered by their large language models, but before it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John that is still Up for grabs and we’ll talk about that in a little bit But the basic idea
⏹️ ▶️ John of a search engine that indexes the web and allows you to get links to the things that it has indexed I
⏹️ ▶️ John believe actually has been tested in court. And either way, whether or not it has been tested in court
⏹️ ▶️ John in your country or in the US or whatever, practically speaking, I don’t think there are
⏹️ ▶️ John many as much disagreement about the utility of that. People like having traffic sent to them
⏹️ ▶️ John by Google. There’s arguments of Google being too big, and there should be competition in the search space. But the concept, conceptually,
⏹️ ▶️ John a web search engine, I think we all agree, is a good thing that is necessary and should exist
⏹️ ▶️ John and helps everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure. But you know, if you’re going to start making qualifications of like, all right, well, here’s how you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to use my content or not use my content. Robots. Text is not the way to do that. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not any kind of legal binding. That is not any type of technical restriction. I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I w I would even question whether it’s even a good idea to even still have those files these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, and to expect to expect anything from them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, I think what people are expecting is all, it will breed this thing from the perplexity CEO in a second. But
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I think what people are expecting is for the ostensibly
⏹️ ▶️ John good faith actors to do what the existing ones do. Google honors
⏹️ ▶️ John Robot.Text and so do the other things. Apple honors it with their Applebot thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ John do the other things that crawl the web, right? Nobody has to follow it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the good faith actors do. And so I think most of the pushback here is, hey, I thought you weren’t just
⏹️ ▶️ John a random, you know, fly-by-night company or a bunch of, you know, script kiddies or whatever. or I thought you were
⏹️ ▶️ John a big, important, serious company, and you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a crawler that crawls the web, and you should use a user agent that looks like
⏹️ ▶️ John you, right? And we won’t ban your user agent when someone fakes it and spams our site
⏹️ ▶️ John with it, but we’ll just say, here are the rules for you. You can’t crawl these URLs,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t crawl any of our URLs, you can’t crawl these or whatever. Like, I think this is a reasonable tool
⏹️ ▶️ John for that job, provided you understand that the tool only works if the people on the other end
⏹️ ▶️ John agree and say, yes, we will honor your roads.txt. And I think part of the anger is the
⏹️ ▶️ John AI companies are not behaving the way the search engine companies did. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the pushback.
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AI vs. creators
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we have a roundup from Michael Sy that we’ll link in the show notes that talks about all this. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the same day, on the 21st of June, Perplexity CEO Eravind Srinivas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey responds to plagiarism and infringement accusations. So this is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey post on Fast Company and Eravind says, and this is a quote, we don’t just rely on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our own web crawlers. we rely on third-party web crawlers as well. So it’s not my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fault, they did it, right? Over there. Well, who is over there? I don’t know, it’s the people over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. So reading from the post, and this is a direct quote from the post,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but not from Erevin, Srinivas said, the mysterious web crawler that Wired identified
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was not owned by Perplexity, but by a third-party provider of web crawling and indexing services.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Srinivas would not say the name of the third-party provider citing a non-disclosure agreement, Asked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if perplexity immediately called the third party crawler to tell them to stop crawling wired content,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Srinivas was noncommittal. Quote, it’s complicated, he said. What is this, Facebook from 10, 20 years ago?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, Srinivas also noted that the robot exclusion protocol, in other words, robots.txt,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was first proposed in 1994, is quote, not a legal framework, quote. He suggested that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the emergence of AI requires a new kind of working relationship between content creators or publishers and sites like his.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is actually something that a bunch of AI CEOs
⏹️ ▶️ John and other bigwigs have been doing is basically saying, oh, well, don’t ask us, we outsource
⏹️ ▶️ John that. And it’s like, come on, this is like CEO 101. Yeah, you outsource lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of things, right? But in the end, it’s your company. Whatever you’re, you know, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if you say, oh, we outsourced it and they’re doing something they shouldn’t, it’s like saying, you know, we outsource to some company that
⏹️ ▶️ John makes our bread for us at our sandwich shop. and the bread’s coming back with shards of glass in it. You don’t say, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t blame us, we outsource it.
⏹️ ▶️ John your bread maker not to put glass in the bread, right? Or are you saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John you explicitly said, it’s okay if you put a little glass in the bread. I mean, like, you have to take responsibility,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And so, and this is not just the perplexities, I’ve seen like three or four stories
⏹️ ▶️ John where AI CEO says, oh, that’s not us, that’s a subcontractor, so we don’t have any control of that. It’s like, wait, what?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, just own it. Just say, we’ve decided we’re not going to honor robots.txt because everyone knows you’re not doing
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And you can’t try to blame it on a third party thing or whatever, and then defend that. And that’s kind of where they go into it’s like, it’s not a legal framework,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah. And like I said, I think the pushback is not like, you know, they’re legally required to do this
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. It’s just like we thought you were going to behave like a search engine
⏹️ ▶️ John and you were going to you were going to be a a polite member of Web Society.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s clear that because you’re like an AI startup, you’re like, Yee-haw, cowboy time,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a wild west, you can’t fence me in, we’re not acting like Google because we
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to, so tough luck. And that’s why Bill and Matt are the companies, right? There’s no legal argument here,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no like, it’s just a decision that they’re making. And by the way, Marco, on your decision not to do it,
⏹️ ▶️ John I would say the closest analog of Overcast is that you’re a web browser. Web browsers don’t honor robot.txt. If you type a
⏹️ ▶️ John URL into the address bar of your web browser, you expected to load that page. You don’t expect it to load
⏹️ ▶️ John robots.txt and say, oh, this site says I’m not supposed to load this page. That’s not what robots.txt is for.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you are a web client used by an individual user, like a user loads
⏹️ ▶️ John an RSS feed in a podcast, that is a single person using a client application
⏹️ ▶️ John to browse the web, you know, to get an RSS feed, right? That is very different than an
⏹️ ▶️ John automated crawler that is crawling all over the entire web and following links, right? That’s what robots.txt
⏹️ ▶️ John is for, it’s for robots. Unless you are literally a robot while using Overcast, which I don’t think you are.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, Marvelcast should not look at robots.txt because it’s not a robot and it’s not being used by a robot. I
⏹️ ▶️ John have a whole podcast about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but if you look at what Perplexity is doing, it’s I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think a lot closer to a browser than a search index.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so the Perplexity’s business is complicated because it’s a whole question of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John do people go there to get links out to other places or do they go there to get the answer
⏹️ ▶️ John that you attempt to attribute? And I think people will get angry with Perplexity when they provide an answer, but then don’t say where
⏹️ ▶️ John this answer came from. And even if they do say where this answer came from, they’re like, you provided too much content. This is the
⏹️ ▶️ John same problem people are beginning to have with Google is like, you’re supposed to be sending me traffic, you’re not supposed to be removing
⏹️ ▶️ John traffic, right? By either giving an answer that’s synthesized from a website and not telling
⏹️ ▶️ John them the source, or basically like inlining the entire, inlining my entire webpage, for example, and saying, you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need to go to that website, here’s the whole page right here. That is not kind of what people expect
⏹️ ▶️ John out of a search engine. But Herplexity is so new and so young, and they haven’t quite figured this out. But just at the crawling
⏹️ ▶️ John stage, people who are seeing their website crawled, and they’re going to the
⏹️ ▶️ John Herplexity’s service and saying, oh, I can find my content there, and I put you in robots.txt, and you
⏹️ ▶️ John shouldn’t be crawling as Herplexity, is like, we don’t have to look at robots.txt, because that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John an advisory thing, and we’ve chosen to ignore it. And so people are angry. That’s what it boils down to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and I think there’s going to continue to be more and more applications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time of technologies like AI summarization and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco action models and things like that where some fancy bot basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going to be browsing and operating a web page on behalf
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a user. That is kind of like a browser, but it’s a very different form
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I think breaks all those assumptions with publishers. Like, this is one thing that I faced when I was making Instapaper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a thousand years ago. You know, Instapaper would save the text of a web page to read later, and only the text,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not like all the ads and the images and everything like that. I was very careful though to not make features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would enable somebody to get the text of a page without having first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco viewed the page in a browser or a browser-like context. So it would load the whole page,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would see the page. If there were ads, those ads would load on the page, they would see those ads, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then they could save what they were seeing and then part of that would be saved in paper and shown to them later.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that was always a very tense balance to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to maintain because what I didn’t want was widespread scraping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people’s text without loading their ads, but I figured that seemed like an okay trade-off because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was literally just like saving what was already sent to the browser and what the user was already looking at.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But a lot of these new technologies, First of all, I probably wouldn’t attempt that today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But a lot of these new technologies, I think break a lot of those little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco details. Like if you have some kind of bot that’s doing something on a website, that’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, suppose it’s one of these action models where you’re saying, all right, book me a flight.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This stupid like book me a trip thing that all of these AI demos from these big companies keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to do even though nobody ever wants that. Suppose you have a book me a trip kind of thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with an AI model. And the idea is that model will go behind the scenes and will, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go operate Expedia or orbits behind the scenes for you and manipulate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things back there to find the best flights and hotels, whatever else. Well, those sites make some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their money via ads and affiliate things and sponsor placements on those pages.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you have some bot operating the site for you, kind of clicking links for you behind the scenes in some kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of AI context, that bot is not going to see those ads, it’s not going to click those affiliate links,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not going to pick the sponsored listing, it’s gonna just kind of get the raw data and that’s it, and that will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be violating those sites’ business models if that happened. That really has not happened at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive scale until fairly recently. So this really has not been challenged, this really has not been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco legally tested that much, this really has not been worked out, like what are the standards, what are the laws,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what are the legal precedents, how much of this is fair use versus not? You know, for the most part,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until very recently, we could pretty much just say, all right, if you serve something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco publicly via public URLs, and anybody can just download it, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing bad would really happen to you and your business model for the most part if some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bot came by sometimes and parsed that page for some other purpose. It wasn’t a big deal. But now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a pretty significant difference in scale and type of replacement.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, with a lot of these AI products, and with Google Search itself, increasing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time, and then more recently, rapidly increasing, what we’re seeing now is full out replacement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the need for the user to ever look at that page. That’s a pretty big difference,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s really bad for web publishers, and kind of, then consequently,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really bad for the web in general. We have a pretty serious set of challenges on the web already,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even before this new wave of LLMs came by to further destroy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the web. We already had a pretty bad situation for web publishers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for lots of other reasons over the years. To have something that removes the need for many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people to visit a page at all, that is going to crush publishers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it does make sense why everyone’s freaking out about this. It makes a lot of sense. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do caution people, though. I don’t think it’s a very good business move
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a very good technology move to say, I’m going to just block AI from being able to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any to see any of my stuff. Because that’s a pretty big hammer and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty big blanket statement.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can’t actually block them anyway. Like that’s when it comes down to technically speaking you you can’t you literally can’t stop
⏹️ ▶️ John them. Right. Unless you stop everyone from viewing your website in which case you don’t have a website.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. So I think it is it is wise to focus on trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to prevent uses of your content that remove the need to visit your page
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that is a direct attack on your business model. That makes a lot of sense. I don’t think it’s wise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say I don’t want any AI training or any AI visibility of my page.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That I think is probably short-sighted and probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bit too much of a blanket statement and that I don’t think it’s good for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any party involved to have that kind of blanket ban on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know. Well, what people want though, that what people, the publishers in particular want is they want
⏹️ ▶️ John a, uh, you know, a, an ecosystem of members who do agree to some
⏹️ ▶️ John rules of politeness and say, look, we should agree on a system that lets me tell you
⏹️ ▶️ John that you shouldn’t do X, Y, and Z on my site and you should agree to it and we’ll feel better about you if you do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And part of the reason I think Instapaper, your example, was not a particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John big problem is, like you said, scale. And anything with AI in the name these days, people
⏹️ ▶️ John flip out about it and think, this is going to be as big as Google. Instapaper was not as big as Google.
⏹️ ▶️ John It did not have billions and billions and billions of users. If it did, if Instapaper had Google
⏹️ ▶️ John scale, I bet there would have been a hell of a lot more scrutiny on even the very conservative things that you did. But because it
⏹️ ▶️ John was small, it’s not a big deal. That’s part of the sort of the ecosystem of the web is there’s all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ John of small things that don’t have particular big scale. They’re doing all sorts of weird stuff. Nobody cares about
⏹️ ▶️ John them. We allow them to exist. It’s fine. But now these big names in AI, AI
⏹️ ▶️ John is the next big thing. You’re an AI company. You have a lot of funding. Everyone looks at them and think that could be the next Google.
⏹️ ▶️ John That could be the next thing with billions and billions of users. So we better take whatever weird stuff they’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John way more seriously than we would take Overcast. And even with Google, the current
⏹️ ▶️ John giant in the world of search, and they’re trying to replace sites and giving answers on the site or whatever. Neil
⏹️ ▶️ John I. Patel coined a term, I think it was his, about this called Google Zero, which is the point at which
⏹️ ▶️ John publisher websites get zero traffic from Google search. Because it’s been going down and down over the years,
⏹️ ▶️ John because, hey, you’d write a type of Google search, and look, the answer to my question that I typed into Google, it’s right on the Google results
⏹️ ▶️ John page. It’s unattributed, and I don’t have to, even if it was attributed, I don’t have to click on any link to get to
⏹️ ▶️ John it because the answer is right there. And so Google has been sending less and less traffic to websites and Google zero is
⏹️ ▶️ John when you notice, hey, you know what, you know how much traffic we’re getting from Google searches? Zero, I don’t know if it’s absolutely zero
⏹️ ▶️ John for everybody, but it’s sure going down and it’s a scary world to have what was
⏹️ ▶️ John once the massively largest source of your traffic to your website disappear.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, like whether or not it is wise to exclude, to try to, to ask
⏹️ ▶️ John to be excluded from pick, you know, whatever, whatever AI crawler thing from whatever open AI
⏹️ ▶️ John perplexity or whatever. I think most publishers just simply want that choice. And to have that
⏹️ ▶️ John choice, the crawlers need to agree. Because again, there is no technical way to stop this
⏹️ ▶️ John short of doing like putting your entire site behind a paywall. And even that’s not gonna stop them because they’ll just pay and have their crawler go through. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the thing about publishing on the web. You do, it’s like DRM. You want people to
⏹️ ▶️ John see your movie. You can’t make it impossible to see your movie. you have to give the viewer an ability
⏹️ ▶️ John to see your movie. But once you give the viewer the ability to see your movie, they can see your movie. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John but what if they see it, but also record it?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I want them to see it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but not be able to see it. Can I do that? And the answer is no. So if you’re publishing on the web,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have like, it’s like anything else. That’s why Marco was right to call this a legal thing. Like things are published all the time. They were
⏹️ ▶️ John published in paper, you know, like the books or whatever. It’s like, but I can take the book and look at it. I can see
⏹️ ▶️ John all the letters in it. Ha ha, the book is mine. Well, no, actually we have laws about the stuff that’s in that book.
⏹️ ▶️ John We have this thing called copyright. And even though you can technically read it and you can technically
⏹️ ▶️ John copy it, increasingly more easily over time and technology, we have laws surrounding it to control
⏹️ ▶️ John what you can do it. And robots.txt, people who think of robots.txt as some kind of like technological bank
⏹️ ▶️ John vault, it’s no more of a bank vault than you could put on a book. Like you do want people to read it and you can’t stop
⏹️ ▶️ John them from being able to copy it. And these days it’s really, really easy to copy a book, especially if it’s an ebook, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Setting aside the whole DRM thing. What you want is some either
⏹️ ▶️ John in a sort of polite society, an agreement among the large parties that actually are significant to
⏹️ ▶️ John get along, and then failing that, you want laws to provide whatever protections you think are due
⏹️ ▶️ John to you. And yeah, the Google search stuff has I feel like been hashed out probably in the ultimates of the days,
⏹️ ▶️ John but who knows. And the AI stuff has not yet been hashed out. And so to move on to this next
⏹️ ▶️ John one, because we have a lot of these items, Microsoft, at least someone in Microsoft, has a very interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John notion of what the deal is on the web and potentially what the laws should be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. So this is a post on The Verge by Sean Hollister, who writes, Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI boss Mustafa Suleiman incorrectly believes that the moment you publish anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the open web, it becomes, quote unquote, freeware that anyone can freely copy and use. When CNBC’s Andrew
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ross Sorkin asked him whether AI companies have effectively stolen the world’s IP,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mustafa said, I think that with respect to content that’s already on the open web, the social contract of that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey content since the 90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate it, reproduce with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That has been freeware, if you like, and that’s been the understanding.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Microsoft is currently the target of multiple lawsuits alleging that it and OpenAI are stealing copyrighted online stories
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to train generative AI models, so it may not surprise you to hear a Microsoft exec defend it as perfectly legal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just didn’t expect them to be so very publicly and obviously wrong. I’m not a lawyer, writes Sean, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also true for me. But I can tell you that the moment you create a work, it is automatically protected by copyright in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the US. You don’t even need to apply for it, and you certainly don’t void your rights just by publishing it on the web. In fact,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s so difficult to waive your rights that lawyers had to come up with special web licenses to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey help. This is so gross. Like I’m not as riled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up as a lot of people about people about, you know, these AI bots crawling my website, like it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sitting here now, I don’t find it that off putting. I don’t love it, but whatever. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though, this is disgusting.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is such a weird statement because everybody knows how copyright works. I’m sure this person knows
⏹️ ▶️ John as well, but to say that like, Oh, it’s, once you put it on the web, it’s freeware, which is a term that mostly applies to
⏹️ ▶️ John software. But like, The point is, you can recreate it, reproduce it, copy it. No, no, no.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those are specifically the things we actually do have laws around. What we don’t have laws around are the more complicated things,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, can I train AI on it or whatever? And we’ll get to that in a little bit. But it’s such a weird thing to say
⏹️ ▶️ John that, oh, as everyone knows, since the 90s, once you put it on the web, you forfeit all ownership.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not true at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe that’s like, one of the things that’s great about the web is, oh, it’s just like books. this printed word, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And especially in the beginning, it was just a bunch of words. And we already have laws surrounding that, right? And that’s why there were cases
⏹️ ▶️ John about search engines. Like, are search engines copying it? Because, you know, we got this whole, you know, giant
⏹️ ▶️ John library of laws about copying text. My website has text on it and Google’s copying it. And they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John had to duke it out and say, actually what Google’s doing is, you know, fine within these parameters, blah, blah, blah, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But that fight was fought because it was an example of copying. But yeah, this,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, I mean, Obviously, the Microsoft’s AI leadership, this guy,
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a lawyer either. But that’s not how you should defend this. You shouldn’t defend
⏹️ ▶️ John it by saying, everything on the web is a free-for-all, because that’s never the way it’s been, and it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John the way it is now. This is yet another foot-in-the-mouth problem from Microsoft. I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s going on over there, but they really need to take a lesson from Apple and maybe try to speak
⏹️ ▶️ John with one voice instead of having individual lieutenants make really terrible statements to the press. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, Louis Mantia writes with regard to permissions on AI training data from the 22nd of June.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Louis writes from John Gruber today on the 22nd of June, it’s fair for public data to be excluded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on an opt out basis rather than included on an opt in one. And then Louis continues,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, no, it’s not. This is a critical thing about ownership and copyright in the world. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey own what we make the moment we make it publishing text or images on the web does not make it fair game for to train
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI on. The public in public web means free to access. It does not mean free to use.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also, whether reposting my content elsewhere is in good faith or not, it is now up to someone other than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me to declare whether or not to disallow AI training web crawlers in the robots.txt file. To
⏹️ ▶️ Casey allow, excuse me, to add insult to injury, that person may not have the knowledge or even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the power to do so if they’re posting content they don’t own on a site that they also don’t own, like social media.
⏹️ ▶️ John is so close to getting to the crux of this. In the first little paragraph here, he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John basically declaring that training AI on your data is exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John the same as copying and reproducing it. And that is not something that the world agrees on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Louis’ opinion is that it is. The courts have not yet weighed in. I think, to the average
⏹️ ▶️ John person, they would say, are those the same things? Because they seem like they might be a little bit different, kind of in the same way
⏹️ ▶️ John your content in Google is a little bit different than just literally copying it and reposting
⏹️ ▶️ John it on the website, right? But anyway, if you agree that it’s the same as copying, then yeah, sure. But then the
⏹️ ▶️ John second bit is getting to even more of the heart of it here, which is like, okay, so let’s say we do agree
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s the same, which, you know, not proven yet, but anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John What about when somebody like posts a link to your site on a social media network
⏹️ ▶️ John and on that website, they do a little embedding inlining of like the first paragraph or whatever, or like what
⏹️ ▶️ John if someone copies and pastes a paragraph of your thing on another website, right? Even if you had
⏹️ ▶️ John absolute somehow magical technical control to stop AI crawlers from crawling your website,
⏹️ ▶️ John if people can read your website and quote from it or embed little portions of it or a
⏹️ ▶️ John screenshot or do whatever on other websites, of course you don’t control those other websites. And so if they allow
⏹️ ▶️ John crawling, your stuff’s gonna end up in the Google search index, in the AI training model
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, even though you disallowed it from your website. And I would
⏹️ ▶️ John say that for the most part, that we also have laws covering, can someone take a portion
⏹️ ▶️ John of the thing that you made and quote it elsewhere? There’s all legal framework deciding whether
⏹️ ▶️ John that is fair use or not, and it’s complicated, and the law is not a deterministic machine, as Neelay Patel,
⏹️ ▶️ John who I mentioned before, is always fond of saying. But we do have a legal framework to determine, can I
⏹️ ▶️ John copy and paste this paragraph from this thing on this person’s site and quote it on my site so I can comment on it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, in general, you can. Can I make a parody of this article
⏹️ ▶️ John on my website? Yeah, you can. There’s a whole bunch of things around that have been fought out in court
⏹️ ▶️ John that we have a system for dealing with. But all of those things, say the court determines,
⏹️ ▶️ John you sue them and they say, actually, this person was allowed to quote that snippet. You lost your fair use case because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s pretty open and shut, that’s fine. That just got indexed by an AI training bot
⏹️ ▶️ John because that person’s website allows them, you know, the polite AI bots, or nevermind, again, nevermind that you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John stop them. Anyway, right? That’s just the nature of publishing.
⏹️ ▶️ John No matter what, you do not have absolute control of every single character that you
⏹️ ▶️ John made. You do have control over the entire work and the reproduction of the entire work, but you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have control over other examples of fair use. And Louie’s saying, oh, it shouldn’t be
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I shouldn’t have to opt out. The default should be that nobody can crawl me. I mean, that’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John not only is it technically impossible, but like, that’s not the way the web
⏹️ ▶️ John has ever worked. It has always been, we’re gonna crawl you unless you tell us don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even the polite ones, you know, they’ll read the thing that you said not to do it, but by default, they’re gonna crawl
⏹️ ▶️ John you. And I think asking for a world where everything you publish on your website is
⏹️ ▶️ John not only not crawlable by the things you don’t want it to crawl, but also not able to be quoted
⏹️ ▶️ John by other people is clawing back rights that we’ve already
⏹️ ▶️ John decided belong to other people through fair use.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So then the music industry decided to get involved.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, multi-billion dollar companies are entering the chat, as they would say. We talked about this before,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, hey, Louis Mantien doesn’t want people crawling his website. What can he do about it? He’s just one person.
⏹️ ▶️ John The music industry, they have a lot of money. They have a lot of IP. This is where
⏹️ ▶️ John the stuff really starts going down.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so reading from Ars Technica on the 24th of June, Universal Music Group, Sunny Music
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Warner Records have sued AI music synthesis companies Udio and Suno for allegedly committing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mass copyright infringement by using recordings owned by the labels to train music generating AI models. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lawsuits filed in federal courts in New York and Massachusetts claim that the AI companies use of copyrighted material
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to train their systems could lead to AI generated music that directly competes with and potentially devalues
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the work of human artists. So from the Verge article, there’s a quote from RA RAA chief legal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey officer, Ken Doroshow. And that quote is, these are straightforward cases of copyright
⏹️ ▶️ Casey infringement involving unlicensed copying of sound recordings on a massive scale. Suno and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Udio are attempting to hide the full scope of their infringement rather than putting their services on a sound
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and awful, lawful, excuse me, footing. And again, that was the RAA chief legal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey officer. Mikey Schulman, the CEO of Suno says the company’s technology is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey transformative and designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and regurgitate pre-existing content, Schulman says Suno doesn’t allow user prompts based on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specific artists. Reading from the lawsuit, the use here is far from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey transformative as there is no functional purpose for Suno’s AI model to ingest the copyrighted recordings other than to spit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out new competing music files. That Suno is copying the copyrighted recordings
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for commercial purpose and is deriving revenue directly proportional to the number of music files it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generates, further tilts the fair use factor against it. Andy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Baio writes, 404 Media pulled together a video montage of some of the AI-generated examples provided in the two lawsuits
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that sound similar to famous songs and their recording artists. Then finally, we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put a link in the show notes to a Verge article that discusses what the RAAA lawsuits mean for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI and copyright. You know, I saw somebody say this a few days ago. I don’t remember who exactly it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, but what’s going on if the RIAA are suddenly the good guys?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John place to be. Are they,
⏹️ ▶️ John though? So here’s the thing. Like, this is the tricky bit with this. And we talked about this with the image generators or whatever. So this is significant
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re big, rich companies, and you have to take them seriously when they bring a lawsuit because this is the kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John like, who can stop Open AI and Google and whatever? Well, you know, it’s Clash of Titans. You need other
⏹️ ▶️ John titans in here to be duking it out, right? This is,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this needs to be fought out in a court in some
⏹️ ▶️ John way. I say that before we see what the result will be because maybe the result is not what we want to happen. But
⏹️ ▶️ John like, as with the image things, these companies that, you know, you type
⏹️ ▶️ John in a string and they produce a song for you, right? These models are trained
⏹️ ▶️ John on stuff and these record labels say, yeah, you trained them on all our music, right? Gets back to
⏹️ ▶️ John the question, is training something? is AI training, how does that relate to copying? Is it
⏹️ ▶️ John just like copying? Is it not like copying at all? Is it somewhere in the middle? Do any of our existing laws apply to it?
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’ve discussed this on past episodes as well, especially when the company
⏹️ ▶️ John doing the training then has a product that they make money on. And
⏹️ ▶️ John as I said, with the image training, these models that make songs are worthless without data
⏹️ ▶️ John to train them on. The model is nothing without the training data. This company that wants to
⏹️ ▶️ John make money, you pay us X dollars, you can make Y songs, right? That’s their business model. They can make zero
⏹️ ▶️ John songs if they have not trained their model on songs. So the question is, where
⏹️ ▶️ John do those songs come from? If they’ve licensed them from somebody, if they made the songs themselves,
⏹️ ▶️ John no problem, right? Again, Adobe training their like image generation models entirely on content
⏹️ ▶️ John they either own or licensed. Nobody’s angry about that. That’s the thing you’re doing. You own
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of images, you license them from a stock photo company or whatever, you train your models on
⏹️ ▶️ John them, you put the feature into Photoshop, you charge people money for Photoshop, they click a button, it generates an image.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whether people like that feature or whatever, legality seems fine. These other situations
⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s like, hey, we crawled your site because we don’t care about your robust.txt. We trained our models
⏹️ ▶️ John on your data, on your songs, on your whatever, right? And by the way, we have no idea if these companies
⏹️ ▶️ John actually paid for all the songs. Let’s just assume they did. They bought all the songs from, You know, are they, uh, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony music, Warner records or whatever, or they paid for a streaming service. They got all the songs, they train their model on, then they’re charging people
⏹️ ▶️ John to use their model, right? I’ve just like the image processing. I’ve always thought that
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re, if you have a business that would not be able to exist without content from
⏹️ ▶️ John somebody that you did not pay anything for, that is very different
⏹️ ▶️ John than, oh, we trained an AI model for research purposes, or we trained it for
⏹️ ▶️ John some purchase that is not literally making money off of you. And this particular case is like, OK, not
⏹️ ▶️ John just that they’re making money, but the thing they’re providing is, quote, not transformative. They keep using that word because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s one of the tests for fair use. Is the work transformative? Have they taken the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that existed but made something new out of it? And they’ll argue that in court, whether it is or not
⏹️ ▶️ John is not transformative. And also, is it a substitute? This is another one of the fair use tests. Is it a substitute for the
⏹️ ▶️ John product? Is someone not going to buy a Drake album because fake
⏹️ ▶️ John Drake sounds just as good and they just listen to fake Drake, right? Is it a
⏹️ ▶️ John substitute for it? Doesn’t mean, does it sound exactly like it? That’s a whole other sad area of law of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John does song A sound too much like song B and they have to pay them whatever when they’re all made by humans, right? This is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, would someone pay for this instead of paying for this? Is
⏹️ ▶️ John one a substitute for the other? and that’s what they’ll be duking it out about. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John think at its root, it is sort of like, where does the value of this company come from?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like every company has to take inputs from somewhere. They manufacture
⏹️ ▶️ John something and they sell it to you, or they have a service, they wrote the software for it, they pay someone to run the service, and they sell it, like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of a value chain there. And a lot of these companies are like, we would make more
⏹️ ▶️ John money if we don’t have to pay for the things that make our product valuable. So we
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to have to license all the music in the world, but we do want to train an AI model on all the music on the
⏹️ ▶️ John world so that we can make songs that sound as good as all the music in the world, but we don’t want to have to pay for
⏹️ ▶️ John any of that. And that seems to be not a good idea from my
⏹️ ▶️ John perspective. And this is one of the different ways you can look at this. Moral, ethical, legal. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think one of the frameworks that I’ve fallen back on a lot is
⏹️ ▶️ John practical. If, you know, for any given thing, say, if we allowed this to happen,
⏹️ ▶️ John would it produce a viable, sustainable ecosystem?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, would it produce a market for products and services? Would it be a rising
⏹️ ▶️ John tide that lifts all boats? Or would it like burn the forest to the ground and leave one tree
⏹️ ▶️ John left in the middle? Right, you know what I mean? Like, that practical approach, people like to jump on, like
⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about before with Vitici and Mac Stories and everything, like they want to go to the moral and ethical thing. They’re stealing from
⏹️ ▶️ John us. It’s our stuff. They have no right. And even when I was saying before, like, oh, they’re, they don’t want to pay for this stuff, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John want to make money off of it or whatever. But practically, and this is not the way the law works, but this is the way I think about practically
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking, I’m always asking myself, if this is allowed to fly, what
⏹️ ▶️ John does this look like? Fast forward this? What, you know, is this viable, right? What if,
⏹️ ▶️ John if everyone’s listening to fake Drake? Does Drake, the next Drake are not able
⏹️ ▶️ John to make any money? Does human beings making music become an unviable business and all this is just an increasingly
⏹️ ▶️ John gray soup of AI generated stuff that loops in on itself over and over again, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, where are the you know, and we have the same thing with publishing on the web, like, does Google destroy the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John web because no one needs to go to websites anymore? They just go to Google, right? Unfortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ John when these cases go, you know, to court, no one is thinking that that’s not how the law works. The law is going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be is this fair use, whatever it does, does Congress pass new laws related to this or whatever. But What I really
⏹️ ▶️ John hope is that the outcome of all these things, and the thing I’m always rooting for is, can we get to a point where we
⏹️ ▶️ John have an ecosystem that is sustainable? Which means it’s probably,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, whatever they’re suing for, it’s like, I think they want like $150,000 for every song or something. That is not a sustainable solution. You can’t train
⏹️ ▶️ John an AI model when you pay $150,000 for each song that you trained it on, because you need basically all the songs in the world.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a big number. That’s stupid. We do want
⏹️ ▶️ John AIs that can make little songs, right? I think that is a useful thing to have, right? So we need to find a way
⏹️ ▶️ John where we can have that, but also still have music artists who can
⏹️ ▶️ John make money making actual music, setting aside the fact that the labels take all the money and the artists get barely anything anyway, which
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco its own problem. Yeah, separate issue. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there was a good article about that recently, about how the labels, the labels, Spotify and the artists and the terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John relationship there that screws over artists. Anyway, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John I really hope that the outcome of this outcome of this is some kind of situation where,
⏹️ ▶️ John where there’s something sustainable where there’s like, I keep using ecosystem, but it’s like, you know, you have to have
⏹️ ▶️ John enough water, the whole water cycle, this animal eats that animal, it dies, it fertilizes the plant, like the whole,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a sustainable ecosystem where everything works and it goes all around in a circle and everything is healthy and
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s growth, but not too much and not too cancerous. And it’s not like everything is replaced by a monoculture
⏹️ ▶️ John and only one company is left standing and all that good stuff. Right. But right now, the technology is advancing
⏹️ ▶️ John in a way that if it’s not, if we don’t do something about it,
⏹️ ▶️ John the individual parties involved are not motivated to make a sustainable ecosystem, let’s say.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s kind of what the DMA is about in the EU. And these AI companies definitely are not motivated
⏹️ ▶️ John to try to make sure they have a sustainable ecosystem. They just want to make money. And if they can do it by taking the world’s music
⏹️ ▶️ John and selling the ability for you to make songs that sound like it without paying anything to the music that they ingested, they’re going to try to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s, I don’t know, it’s all just so weird and gross. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s hard because I don’t want to be old man who shakes fists at clouds, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it seems like AI, for all the good and bad associated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with it, is a thing. It’s certainly a flash in the pan for right now, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I get the feeling that where blockchain and Bitcoin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and all that sort of stuff was very trendy, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone with a couple of brain cells to rub together would say, eh, that’s all gonna fade, or it’s certainly not gonna work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way it is today. I think there’s a little of that here, but I get the feeling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that this is going to stick around for a lot longer, and I think that there needs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be some wrangling done, some legal wrangling, and I get the move fast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and break things mentality of these startups that are doing all this, but I don’t know, it just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feels kind of wrong. Like again, I’m not nearly as bothered by it as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of our peers are, but it just doesn’t feel right.
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely doesn’t feel sustainable, like practically speaking. That’s true. Like regardless of how you feel about right or wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you say, if we just let them do this, and these models get
⏹️ ▶️ John better and better and produce more and more acceptable content, you can see that it’s taking, again,
⏹️ ▶️ John regardless of how this lawsuit ends up with the whole record labels, You can see that it is taking value away from
⏹️ ▶️ John human beings making music and pushing that value to models making music. But those
⏹️ ▶️ John models are absolutely worthless without that human generated music, at least initially, right? Again, maybe in the future
⏹️ ▶️ John there will be models trained entirely on model generated music, but then you have to trace it back to where that model get trained.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like in the end, these models are trained on human created stuff and there’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John there may not be enough officially licensed human created stuff to train them on at this point. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think we want these tools. They are useful for
⏹️ ▶️ John doing things. Even if you think, oh, they make terrible music. Sometimes people need terrible music.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Sometimes people just
⏹️ ▶️ John need a little jingle. They can describe it. They want it to be spit out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By most people’s definitions, all of my music is terrible music.
⏹️ ▶️ John They do useful things. Unlike cryptocurrency, which does a very, very small
⏹️ ▶️ John number of useful things that is not in general purpose, AI models do tons of useful things. Apple’s building
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch into their operating systems. but people use them all the time. They do tons of useful things, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John We should find a way for them to do those things without
⏹️ ▶️ John destroying the ecosystem. I think we can find a way for that to happen. If you look at the awful
⏹️ ▶️ John situation with like Spotify and record labels and music artists, that’s a pretty bad
⏹️ ▶️ John version of this. And yet still it is better than Spotify saying, we’re gonna stream all these songs
⏹️ ▶️ John for free and not pay anybody, right? I wish I could find that article for the notes. I’ll try to look it up.
⏹️ ▶️ John But even that, even that is better than the current situation with AI, which is like, we’re just gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John take it all for free. Come sue us. And they say, okay, we are suing you. And they’ll battle it out in court.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like, either way this decision goes with the music, it could go bad in both directions. Because if they say,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, you’re totally copying this music, all AI training is illegal. That’s terrible. That’s bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John We don’t want that, right? And if they say, no, it’s fine. It’s transformative. You can take anything you want for free.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s also bad. So both extremes of the potential decision that a court can make based on this
⏹️ ▶️ John lawsuit are really bad for all of us for the future. So that’s why I hope we find some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John middle ground. Like again, with Spotify, they came up with a licensing scheme where they can say,
⏹️ ▶️ John we want to stream your entire catalog of music. Can we figure out a way to exchange
⏹️ ▶️ John money where you will allow that to happen legally? And they came up with something.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a great system they came up with. Again, if I can find that article, you can read and see how bad it is. but they didn’t just take
⏹️ ▶️ John it all for free, right? And they also didn’t, the music labels didn’t say, okay, but every time someone streams one of these songs,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s 150 grand, right? That’s also not sustainable. So obviously they’re staking out positions
⏹️ ▶️ John in these lawsuits and they’re trying to put these companies out of business with big fees or whatever, but yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s scary, it’s scary when titans clash. And I do worry about how the result
⏹️ ▶️ John of these cases are gonna be, but I think, I either think we have to have these cases or, and I know this
⏹️ ▶️ John is ridiculous in our country, or we have to make new laws to address this specific case,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is different enough from all the things that have come before it, that we should have new laws to address
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And it would be better if those laws weren’t created by court decisions, but our ability
⏹️ ▶️ John and track record for creating technology-related laws for new technology is not
⏹️ ▶️ John great in this country. So there’s that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and then it continues because Figma, a popular,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know how to describe this, like a user interface generation tool design
⏹️ ▶️ Casey design tool. Thank you. They pulled their AI tool after criticism that it blatantly ripped off Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s weather app. So this is the verge by Jay Peters. Figmas new tool make designs let’s use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey users quickly mock up apps using generative AI. Now it’s been pulled after the tool drafted designs that looked strikingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey similar to Apple’s iOS weather app. In a Tuesday interview with Figma CTO Chris Rasmussen,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I asked him point blank if make designs was trained on Apple’s app designs. His response? He couldn’t say for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Figma was not responsible for the training AI models he used at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John Who knows who trained it? It’s just our model. We don’t. Do you know who trained it? I don’t know. Does anyone know who
⏹️ ▶️ John trained it? We just found it on our doorstep. And is this a model?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Would the real trainer please stand up? Quote, we did no training as part of the generative
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AI features, Rasmussen said. The features are quote, powered by off the shelf models in a bespoke design
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system that we commissioned, which appears to be the underlying issue. So if you commissioned it, then you should know.
⏹️ ▶️ John We had someone else do it and they gave it to us and we just took it. And we’re like, we didn’t ask too many questions. We’re just like, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whatever you got, just give it. It’s probably fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The key AI models that power make designs are open AI’s GPT 4.0 and Amazon’s Titan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey image generator G1, according to Rasmussen. If it’s true that Figma didn’t train its AI tools, but they’re spitting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out Apple app lookalikes anyway, that could suggest that open AI or Amazon’s models were trained on Apple’s designs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OpenAI and Amazon didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment. This is seriously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Spider-Man pointing at other Spider-Man’s image. It’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not my fault, it’s their fault. Well, it’s not my fault, it’s their fault. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. It’s not my fault, it’s their
⏹️ ▶️ John Was that company, I think it was OpenAI, or whatever, the Sora model that makes movies, essentially.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone who was responsible for that was asked in an interview, was your model trained on YouTube?
⏹️ ▶️ John They didn’t give an answer. Like, maybe, I don’t know. Listen, if you run an AI company,
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out how and where your models were trained. I don’t know, like maybe you train them on
⏹️ ▶️ John good things, bad things, whatever, but have an
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco answer. Don’t say, we don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone else did it. This seems like table stakes. You should know
⏹️ ▶️ John where and on what your model was trained on. Not like granular, like every single individual thing, although ideally
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be great, but it’s too much, I get it, right? But when someone says, hey, did you train on YouTube? you should be able to answer that with
⏹️ ▶️ John a yes or no. Right, not weasel about it. And this one, was this trained on Apple’s apps? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyone looking at it is gonna be like, well, if it wasn’t, this is the world’s biggest coincidence because it looks just like Apple’s app.
⏹️ ▶️ John As Gruber pointed out, right down to the really weird like line chart that I never really understood until I saw it explained in
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s weather app, right? It was obviously trained on Apple stuff. But you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to have an answer, right? If you don’t have an answer, say, I don’t know, but I’ll find out for you and then
⏹️ ▶️ John come back. but like the bar is real low here. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John same situation, different thing. Images, songs, text, UIs,
⏹️ ▶️ John a mock-up tool that makes UIs, it’s based on a model. That model is
⏹️ ▶️ John worthless without being trained on a bunch of UIs. Where are you gonna get enough UIs to train it? From
⏹️ ▶️ John the world of UIs that we take essentially without permission, is that okay? If we sell that as part of our
⏹️ ▶️ John application, is that okay? I mean, I wrote a big post about
⏹️ ▶️ John this, what, in January? Excuse me, I made this. Yeah, and
⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about it on the podcast before. And I took a while to write this because, actually,
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking of Neil Patel, I was listening to the Decoder podcast. And there was an episode where I was debating with somebody about the
⏹️ ▶️ John New York Times lawsuit at the time. Like, New York Times was suing some company that trained its AI on the New York Times. And they said, you can’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John that. And going back and forth about, well, the model is just doing what a person would do, and it’s learning, and
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah. Is the person the same as the model? Does the model have the same rights as the person? And I was trying to write
⏹️ ▶️ John up something related to that. And as usual, writing helps me clarify my thinking. But it is a fairly
⏹️ ▶️ John complicated, circuitous route to sort of really dig down into that thought to get
⏹️ ▶️ John to what’s at the heart of it. And I wrote this thing, and I think it did get to
⏹️ ▶️ John the heart of it as far as I was concerned, but it’s complicated. So every time I try to like summarize it on the podcast, I
⏹️ ▶️ John find myself like tongue tied. And you know, you just quote from the paragraphs. Like I think if you
⏹️ ▶️ John read the post, my thoughts are in there, but a lot of people have read it and like no one has commented on it. So maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m doing a poor job communicating it. But I was coming at it from the other angle. We talked all about training
⏹️ ▶️ John data in this section of the show here. I was coming at it from the angle of like what was
⏹️ ▶️ John then one of the hot topics, which is say I use one of these tools. Say I use the Figma tool
⏹️ ▶️ John to generate a UI. I use the song tool to generate a song or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John That thing that I made, what is the legal, ethical, moral, practical
⏹️ ▶️ John ownership deal with that? If I use Figma to make that
⏹️ ▶️ John auto create UI thing and it makes me a UI and I put that in my app,
⏹️ ▶️ John do I own that UI? If I make a song with the song making tools, do I have the copyright
⏹️ ▶️ John on that song? There’s been legal cases about this and I think the only ruling we have now something like if you make it with an AI generated
⏹️ ▶️ John tool, you don’t have the copyright on it or whatever. But the reason I got to that, because I was
⏹️ ▶️ John getting with the whole like, oh, you know, training is just like what a human would do. They read all these articles in New York times, then you
⏹️ ▶️ John ask the human the answer and they read all those articles and they know, have the knowledge from reading those articles and they give you an answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s just what our AI’s are doing. I’m like, yeah, but a human is a human and AI is an AI. And is that really what the root of
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing it is? And I kept chasing that down, chasing that thought down and got to sort of the, uh, the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that confers ownership, right? Like when you make something,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s yours. You write something on your blog, you have the copyright to it because you created it. It’s so clear, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John What if you draw a picture on a piece of paper? Okay, you’ve got the copyright on the picture, right? What if you use Photoshop
⏹️ ▶️ John to make a picture? Well, now you use this software tool written by a bunch of other people, just plain old Photoshop, not
⏹️ ▶️ John like AI generated, like Photoshop 3.0, right, with layers now. You use Photoshop, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you didn’t write Photoshop. A bunch of people wrote software to make Photoshop that you then paid Adobe for,
⏹️ ▶️ John then they gave you that software product, you use Photoshop to make a picture, but still we say, well, you made that
⏹️ ▶️ John picture, you have the copyright on it, you are the creator, you own it, right? Then we say,
⏹️ ▶️ John all right, but what if you can’t draw? What if you tell somebody,
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t draw, here’s what I want, I want this picture, whatever example I gave, a polar bear
⏹️ ▶️ John riding a skateboard, but I can’t draw. So I ask somebody else, say, can you draw me a picture of a polar bear riding
⏹️ ▶️ John a skateboard. So someone goes and they draw a picture of a polar bear riding a skateboard. At that point, the person who drew it owns it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they use Photoshop, maybe they don’t. They own it because they created it, they drew it, right? But then you say, okay, this was a
⏹️ ▶️ John work for hire. I’ll give you 10 bucks. And our contract says, I give you 10 bucks, you give me the polar bear drawing. Now
⏹️ ▶️ John I own the polar bear drawing because I paid you for it. That is a market for creative works.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone was an artist, I can’t draw, they could. They drew it, they asked for money, I gave them money,
⏹️ ▶️ John they gave me the ownership of the polar bear drawing. the copyright is now mine, right? And the
⏹️ ▶️ John act of creation is clear. The person who drew it, they created it. I paid money for it, they sold me their creation,
⏹️ ▶️ John now I own it, all normal, right? Now I say, make
⏹️ ▶️ John me a picture of a polar bear on a skateboard, but I don’t say it to an artist. I say it to an image generator.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the exact same thing as I did before. Before when I did it, it was clear that I don’t own anything until I pay
⏹️ ▶️ John for that, right? Now, when I do that exact thing, but instead of typing it into an email, to an artist,
⏹️ ▶️ John I type it into an image generator and I get an image back. Who
⏹️ ▶️ John created that image? I didn’t create it. But if you’re gonna say I didn’t create the one that the artist drew for me,
⏹️ ▶️ John because you just told the artist what to draw, but you didn’t create it. Well, if I didn’t create that one, I certainly didn’t create this one because I literally did
⏹️ ▶️ John the same thing. I just typed the text in a different text field. Could literally be the same text. It’d be an AI
⏹️ ▶️ John prompt emailed to an artist or sent to an AI. So I’m not gonna say that I
⏹️ ▶️ John am the creator of that. The AI model can’t be the creator
⏹️ ▶️ John because computer programs can’t own things. They
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have rights. Computer programs are made by people who have rights. Just like people who wrote Photoshop, they
⏹️ ▶️ John have the rights to Photoshop and so on and so forth. But the people who wrote Photoshop have no rights to the things that people made with Photoshop,
⏹️ ▶️ John despite Adobe’s little snafu with their license agreements recently, which they clarified. But anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, I didn’t make that picture of the PolyBear. the large language model didn’t make it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Who owns that picture of the polar bear based on the act of creation?
⏹️ ▶️ John Where is the act of creation there? How did that model create the polar bear? Well, it created the
⏹️ ▶️ John polar bear picture because it had been trained on tons of other images that maybe were
⏹️ ▶️ John or weren’t licensed. But still, I’m looking around of like, if ownership is conferred by the act of creation and there’s no act of creation
⏹️ ▶️ John here, what the hell are we… What’s going on here? Who owns the picture of the polar bear?
⏹️ ▶️ John And that, like every time I dig down into some kind of like, oh, AI is allowed to do this and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John allowed to train and it’s just what people do or whatever and computers aren’t people, whatever, I always go through to looking for
⏹️ ▶️ John how we confer ownership of stuff like this, how we confer ownership of intellectual property, how we
⏹️ ▶️ John exchange money for intellectual property, how the market for intellectual property works. And none
⏹️ ▶️ John of the existing systems make any sense in a world where I can say the same thing to a human
⏹️ ▶️ John and a generator that is clearly not me creating anything, and yet I do get a picture
⏹️ ▶️ John out of it that came from somewhere, and there’s no human actor created. It’s an indirection,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And so I think we need new ways to think about it, new laws for that type of indirection,
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, what is the chain of ownership here? It’s kind of like, not quite the same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, but remember the whole thing where the monkey took a picture of itself with the camera? Do you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey remember that?
⏹️ ▶️ John It was like a camera set up in the jungle or whatever, and a monkey comes up to it and snaps a picture of himself, And the photographer
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, well, it’s my camera, so I own the copyright to the picture. And I’m like, well, doesn’t the monkey own the copyright? Because it took the picture,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And it’s like, but the monkey can’t own the copyright. It’s not a person, right? And believe me, a monkey is way closer
⏹️ ▶️ John to a sentient being than an LLM, right? It’s like, it’s a real living thing. No one’s going to argue
⏹️ ▶️ John in court that a monkey is not alive. And you’re going to say, well, does it have legal rights? Well, I would
⏹️ ▶️ John say a monkey has more legal rights than a large language model, which is just a bunch of numbers
⏹️ ▶️ John And so this is the kind of conversation we’re having. And honestly, this would be so much easier to have if we had
⏹️ ▶️ John actual artificial intelligence, as in sentient artificial beings. But we don’t. That’s just science fiction.
⏹️ ▶️ John Large language models are not anywhere close to that. That would be so much easier, because you’d be like, well, conscious beings have rights.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we need the, you know, whatever. They always have names in sci-fi movies. The AI consciousness
⏹️ ▶️ John act of 2732 that gives rights to the AIs to
⏹️ ▶️ John avert a global war and plunge us into the Matrix apocalypse. You know what I mean? Like it’s so much
⏹️ ▶️ John easier when you say, well, people have rights and computer programs that are basically people have rights and it’s straightforward,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we’re nowhere near there. So now we’re arguing about monkeys, if they have the copyright pictures and
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re arguing about huge matrices of numbers with what they
⏹️ ▶️ John can create anything. Or you’re saying like, oh, you’re saying basically like the people who wrote Photoshop own every picture that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John made from it. He’s like, well, no, the LLM doesn’t own it. And the person who wrote the prompt doesn’t own it. But you know who does own
⏹️ ▶️ John it? OpenAI, because they wrote the program that crawled all the pictures in the world, that trained
⏹️ ▶️ John the model that you paid to use. None of those answers are satisfactory in any
⏹️ ▶️ John way. Like it doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t seem right. It doesn’t seem sustainable. And yet
⏹️ ▶️ John we do need some kind of answer here, even if the answer here is that anything like in like that one
⏹️ ▶️ John law precedent we had is like, if you make something out of AI, you don’t own the copyright on it. It is not copyrightable. Nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John owns it. It’s garbage. It’s slop. It’s a thing that exists, but nobody can claim that they
⏹️ ▶️ John own it. So it is free for anybody to take and do whatever they want with, but you certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t like sell it to someone because you didn’t own it. It’s very confusing. I know that I haven’t made this any
⏹️ ▶️ John clearer. You can try reading my post to see if it becomes any more clear, but really this is, this is a
⏹️ ▶️ John dizzying topic if you think about it for any amount of time. And, uh, I think a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ John are doing a lot of feeling about it, which makes perfect sense. And honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is more straightforward to feel things about it than it is to think about it, because thinking about it gets you into some weird corners
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just – it’s a mess. It’s a mess and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know what the right answer is, right? Like it’s so gray from top to bottom and I just –
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I just don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think we’re going to have to be fighting this and working this out for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while. I mean, look at how much disruption to existing businesses, existing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco copyright law, and existing norms was caused by the web, and then the rise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of other things on the internet. Like, this is just, this is how technology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goes. There are massive disruptions to what has been established,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what many people have held dearly. There’s massive disruptions to that when new tech comes around sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And sometimes it takes a decade or two to really settle out and work out what are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the norms? What should the laws be? What is copyright mean in this new world? Things like that, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that takes a long time to work out sometimes. The rise of these AI techniques
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and models is potentially as disruptive to existing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business models and norms and perspectives as the web was when it first came out a thousand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago. So I really think we’re in for a while of just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not knowing there’s going to be a lot of damage and destruction along the path to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from where we are now to where kind of where things settle out. It will destroy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of businesses and it will, you know, make it hard for a lot of people to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do what they’ve been doing. It will also create a bunch of new businesses and create a bunch of new value and new opportunities,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like any other massive disruption. I think this is, this is a very large disruption and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, it’s mostly only going to start to become visible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, you know, what the other side looks like just after a bunch of time has passed and we’ve gone through a bunch of messiness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we’re just, we’re in such early days. It’s really hard to know where we’re going to end up right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like this is going to be in some respects, not all, but in some respects, even more disruptive than the
⏹️ ▶️ John initial web, because the initial web was kind of like. Text. We have laws
⏹️ ▶️ John governing that it was a massive shift of wealth. Obviously newspapers go out of business. Craigslist gets
⏹️ ▶️ John rich. You know what I mean? Like, but we saw that giant shift in paper magazines, like the shift of publishing,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And web search and doing all that or whatever. But during that entire thing, people were upset and it was
⏹️ ▶️ John a big turmoil because it was like, these things used to be huge. Every city had 25 newspapers. A newspaper reporter
⏹️ ▶️ John was a big job. And you know, it was like, and all of a sudden all that money’s going elsewhere to these.com things or whatever. But during that
⏹️ ▶️ John whole process, there was mostly agreement that like, newspapers own what they publish,
⏹️ ▶️ John websites own what they publish. Like we have existing copyright laws for this. There’s the whole Google search index thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John we can figure out and, you know, fair use on the internet and stuff. But in general, it was just a massive shift
⏹️ ▶️ John of power and money from older industries to newer ones, mostly following along
⏹️ ▶️ John the shape of laws and ideas and morals and ethics and societal understanding
⏹️ ▶️ John about the written word, mostly in the early days of the web. Especially before social media really came and
⏹️ ▶️ John mixed that up a little bit, right? With the whole aggregation of humans all talking to each other and quoting things and linking out or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? That, in hindsight, that seems much less disruptive than this AI stuff, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s a free-for-all. No one knows anything. No one knows what’s legal, what’s not, what’s sustainable,
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s not, what should we do, what can we do, what are people doing, how valuable is this, how useful
⏹️ ▶️ John is it? Like, just so many questions, and we have like all the laws that we have that
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like they could apply to this, and some of them do apply. It’s like, yeah, but there’s these huge areas where it’s like, here be dragons
⏹️ ▶️ John on the map, and they draw the big dragon and the thing is like, nobody knows what’s there. and there’s a lot of money behind it and
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of people running in that direction. And it’s not even clear where or how this will shift the power.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like in the internet in the early days, it was pretty clear, paper newspapers, power is going away from them
⏹️ ▶️ John and towards websites. Like that trend was visible to anybody with a clue and it was just a question of how fast,
⏹️ ▶️ John how hard, you know, whatever. Here, is this gonna shift power massively to
⏹️ ▶️ John the record labels because they own all the music, for example? Or is it going to destroy them because everything
⏹️ ▶️ John they have is now worthless because AI models can be trained on it and it’s a perfect substitute for what they previously made and no one wants anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you can’t even tell which direction it’s gonna go at this point. It’s so early and I just don’t think that was
⏹️ ▶️ John true of the web. So this is an exciting time to be alive in many ways, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re in any industry, any creative industry that involves intellectual property that AI touches
⏹️ ▶️ John at all. And at this point, that’s nearly all of them, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And right now, AI, what it does is not, you know, not particularly amazing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is good enough for so many use cases, and this stuff generally doesn’t get worse over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you to our sponsors this week, 1Password and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Photon Camera. And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atv.fm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash join. Members get a bunch of perks, including ATP Overtime. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our weekly bonus topic that’s an extra segment that only members get to hear.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP overtime this week is going to be about a rumor reported by the information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Mark Gurman about some changes and plans to what Apple is going to be working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on for the next Vision Pro and kind of what they can maybe do to make the next Vision Pro cheaper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how they’re going to possibly do this and everything. That’s what we’re talking about in ATP overtime this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week. Join now to listen at ATP.FM slash join. Thanks everybody and we’ll talk to you
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental John didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco T. Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to. Accidental, check podcast
Post-show
⏹️ ▶️ John Not so real time follow up on my earlier statement about Apple Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs not being able to use PCI breakout boxes. That is not true. You can use Thunderbolt PCI breakout
⏹️ ▶️ John boxes. Obviously you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco use- Yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just not GPUs. Yeah, but you can’t use GPUs internally either. That’s the thing. Yeah. So still
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple should have put the Mac Pro in the configurator. Oh.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Or I suppose they could have said, hey, you use PCI
⏹️ ▶️ John cards? No one’s buying it except you. You can use PCI cards? Well, you can buy a Mac Studio and also
⏹️ ▶️ John this third party product that we don’t even sell or you could buy a Mac Pro, which is a product in their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lineup. I think two things are simultaneously true. Number one, they should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep making the Mac Pro because it does have uses. And number two, absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nobody should buy the Mac Pro effectively. Like anybody who’s going to a page on apple.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying what Mac should I buy? None of those people should buy it, none.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, they should. That should be, look, the whole point of this is, which it’s a path that leads to
⏹️ ▶️ John all of our products. Maybe there’s only one very lonely overgrown path leads to the Mac Pro, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got to be there Look that I would say number three your product chooser should let you choose from any of the products
⏹️ ▶️ John depending on which things you answer Put as many scary questions in there as you want There’s just got to be a path that lands in the Mac Pro because
⏹️ ▶️ John otherwise like look what they’re saying with this is No one should buy this product I don’t think Apple believes that
⏹️ ▶️ John if you ask them they said well some people should like okay great But you have a tool that’s people choose and it has every single Mac you
⏹️ ▶️ John sell except for that one That just seems like a bug to me. Someone should report it. They should fix it You should report it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I just want them to make a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro that’s worth buying. I mean, that’s a bug.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Maybe they’re working on that, we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what, I mean, I feel like we covered this in the past, but what are you waiting for? Like what would make it worth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey buying? I mean, am I waiting
⏹️ ▶️ John for anything in particular? I like, I don’t know. Like, cause again, with the gaming situation on Apple Silicon Macs is
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely unclear. If I did buy a Mac with a big beefy GPU, like
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger than a Mac studio GPU, that would be a speculative purchase. It would not be like my current Mac Pro, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I literally knew I could run Windows games on and do and they work fine And I run Windows, literally put into Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John like that’s not speculative. That’s a thing, right? If I buy if I decide hey, I want a bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John than Mac Studio GPU in an ARM Mac I am like crossing my fingers that some magical point
⏹️ ▶️ John in the future. I will be able to do interesting gaming things on it I don’t know if I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John make that speculative purchase I don’t know if Apple’s gonna make a Mac with a better than Mac Studio GPU in it
⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe they make it and it’s just too rich for my blood and I can’t spend that much money on something speculative, right? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, my default is an M4 Mumble Mac Studio
⏹️ ▶️ John is potentially the computer I’ll replace this with whenever they release that like next year or towards the end of this year, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I would like to see, you know, show me something, show me the Mac Pro, show me something that’s not a Mac Studio and
⏹️ ▶️ John giant cavernous case, right? That’s what I would like to see from them. And then I can decide, is it worth it for me
⏹️ ▶️ John to get that? Cause it’s not a slam dunk like the 20, well, it’s not as big a slam dunk as 2019 was, because again, that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John not speculative, but it’s just kind of wishful thinking at this point to think you’re gonna be running Windows ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John games natively on, you know, you’re gonna be booting Windows for ARM on your, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple Silicon Mac Pro, or you’re gonna be running Windows Caliber games in macOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John because Apple will have gotten all the AAA game developers on board. That is all just a twinkle in someone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John eye right now. It is not a real thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just, I feel like, and I’m going to say this and I know, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand why it’s not appealing to you, but I feel like so many of your problems would, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe not even problems, but so much of your life would be so much better if you would just get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a damn Mac studio and a damn Windows PC. And I get it. I don’t want to run Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anything. I don’t. And I know you are even worse than me in this capacity,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but like that would make so many things so much better in your life.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would probably have a gaming PC if I had a place in the house for it, but I don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I hate to break it to you, but I really don’t think that there is ever going to be a Mac Pro that does the things that your current Mac Pro does.
⏹️ ▶️ John that may be true. Like I’m rooting for it, but like right now the outlook doesn’t look so great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would definitely not hold your breath on that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, like the thing is, it’s actually kind of, if I thought like two years ago, like
⏹️ ▶️ John predicted how this would go, actually I’m kind of surprised at how much motion there is here. the Copilot
⏹️ ▶️ John Plus PC, how hard Microsoft is pushing into ARM PCs after doing such a bad job with Windows RT,
⏹️ ▶️ John right, Apple with its whole game porting toolkit, like both those parties, both Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John and Apple are actually surprising me with how hard they’re trying to make
⏹️ ▶️ John my dream happen. They’re just not succeeding, right? But they are, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John trying more than I thought they would, right? I did not, I didn’t think they’d be, like both on both sides,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have been pleasantly surprised by the additional effort that they’re putting in.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think everyone kind of is. It’s just like, they’re just not really doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but I give them kudos for the effort. If I had to pick one thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I would wish that Microsoft would commit to a transition to ARM,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s not what they wanna do. They seem to think that they’re going to have a, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to support x86 and ARM forever off into the future, which I think is a dumb
⏹️ ▶️ John strategy, but that seems to be what they’re doing. And that doesn’t help me. And that doesn’t help windows games get ported
⏹️ ▶️ John to arm that all that does is bifurcate their market and say, well, all the, all the triple A games will still be on
⏹️ ▶️ John X 86 within video cards and arm will just read for people’s laptops. And Microsoft may be perfectly happy with that, but it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John help me over here with Apple Silicon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, what, what PC games are you playing with regularity right now?
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if you know this, but destiny.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But that’s the thing. Like, is there no other appliance that you can buy to run? Destiny? Can’t you do it on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John PlayStation?
⏹️ ▶️ John Destiny runs at higher resolution and higher frame rates on gaming PCs. I don’t really play it on my Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro. I play it on my PlayStation 5 for a variety of reasons, but it does run
⏹️ ▶️ John better as defined by resolution and frame rate, even on my Mac Pro than on my, but PlayStation Max is out at 60
⏹️ ▶️ John frames per second, right? And I can get higher than that, depending on settings. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you can go way higher. You can go, I’ve played it, I’ve actually have played Destiny on my PS5 at 120 frames per second on my TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it has to lower the quality substantially. and I generally don’t play Destiny on my TV because it’ll burn it in, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But I did try that just to see what it was like. 120 frames per second is good. All
⏹️ ▶️ John the Destiny streamers who are out there playing Destiny, they occasionally have their frame rate displayed in the corner.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re triple digits always, hundreds of frames per second, sometimes pushing them in at 200. It makes
⏹️ ▶️ John a difference. It looks and feels smoother, especially in PvP.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if I’m playing on a controller, because at this point, sadly, I’m better with a controller in Destiny than I am with mouse and keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also controller is way better for my RSI, so I’d be doing it anyway. But yeah, Destiny is one choice. And
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s games come out all the time and they come out for PC.
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t come out for the Mac until three years later when Apple puts them in a keynote, right? So, you know, there’s past
⏹️ ▶️ John games, there’s future games, there’s my gigantic Steam library that I still haven’t played through.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’ll get a PlayStation 5 Pro, I’ll get a PlayStation 6. I do like consoles, they’re great. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John someday the gap between PC and console will be diminished. Even now I would say it’s more diminished
⏹️ ▶️ John because 60 frames per second on PS5 is such a change from 30 on the PS4 that I feel like the gap
⏹️ ▶️ John has narrowed because Destiny players were playing at 100, you know, 200 frames per second
⏹️ ▶️ John back when I was playing 30. Now they’re playing at 100, 200 frames per second and I’m playing at 60, right? I’m gaining
⏹️ ▶️ John on them. So maybe at some point I’ll be like, you know what, I don’t need a big GPU and I’ll just get a Mac Studio and be happy with
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And that’s looking like the most likely situation right now. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, we’ll see. I mean, to be clear, as much as I’m giving you a hard time, I want you to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have what you want. I can make an argument, even I can make an argument for the Mac Pro, for a really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beefy Mac Pro that’s useful for people that work outside of a music studio. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not saying that your desires are wants as much as I’m giving you grief about it. I’m not saying your desires or wants are unreasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think Apple will be achieving them, but I don’t think they’re unreasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s exciting that they did with 2019, because again, I’ve said before, despite my gaming things, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a rational purchase, in the same way that you don’t need a Ferrari to get to work faster. People just like fast
⏹️ ▶️ John cars because they like fast cars.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Right, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John allowed. I just like powerful computers because I like powerful computers. It’s exactly the same thing. Trying to justify a Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John me trying to justify a Mac Pro is like someone trying to justify a Ferrari. It’s like, well, I need a car this fast to get to
⏹️ ▶️ John my work. No, you don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John does, but people want them because they’re cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And that’s fair. And that’s totally fair. But I feel like from,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my eyes, we’re starting to cross from, oh, it’s kind of adorable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that John is still rocking his Mac Pro to like, man, I kind of want you to move on to a Mac Studio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I think you might enjoy it a lot more, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, I’m not buying an M2 one at this point. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey fair. No, that’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not the time to buy a Mac Studio. It isn’t, it isn’t. Hang it in there for the M4 one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think when the next one comes out, I think that’s your move. I can’t, I just cannot see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a future in which they make the Mac Pro that you want. And so you might as well get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac Studio, which is the Mac Pro without slots. Like that is the new Mac Pro, I can’t say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wimpyer GPU. But they just, like the Mac Studio is the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro. They should have called it Mac Pro. That is the Apple Silicon Mac Pro. They should not have.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, can you imagine the aneurysm he would have had?
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t make sense. They sell a thing called the Mac Pro that’s way bigger. But it’s the same computer. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a built-in PCI breakout box. I know, I know. It’s still got the slots. It’s still,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, we’ll see how it goes. And by the way, by the time I do get this, my computer is essentially five years
⏹️ ▶️ John old now. Already, this is a pretty good run for a computer that I bought just
⏹️ ▶️ John before the processor transition, right? Processor transition right which is you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, unfortunate for the whoever said when it happened like oh my poor Mac Pro or whatever But I love this machine and I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John already gotten five years out of which granted is half of what I got out of my last Mac Pro, but you know process a transition,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So if I ditch this machine at six years old, that’s longer than any of your laptops lasted,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Pretty good run.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, we’re just excited if Marco makes it six months much less six years.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s been pretty good with 16 inch I think it’s almost two years old now, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it’s the m3 max. It’s uh, it’s the black
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey one that came out of this. Sorry. I mean, to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honest, lately I haven’t been much better, so I shouldn’t be casting stones in this glass house. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generally speaking, Marco is much more frequent on his
⏹️ ▶️ John So I mean, like, no matter what, like, I feel like I’ve gotten a good run out of this Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro and I’m enjoying it for, you know, as long as I can. I’m excited that Sequoia runs on it. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John cool. Next year, probably not. Right. So it’s really putting a deadline on this. Like I said, I’m willing
⏹️ ▶️ John to run this with last year’s version of the operating system for some period of time if I have to wait, right? But,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, we’ll see what happens. Like, I’m, you know, I keep my cars for a long time I’m gonna keep my Macs for a long time.