Programmers, beware: ChatGPT has ruined your magic trick | John Naughton
The generative AI tool can write code on request, making the specialist skill of programming open to everyone
Benedict Evans, a tech analyst whose newsletter is required reading for those who follow the industry, made an interesting point this week. He had, he said, been talking to generalist journalists who “were still under the impression that ChatGPT was a trivial parlour trick and the whole thing was about as interesting as a new iPhone app”. On the other hand, he continued, “most people in tech are walking around slowly, holding on to the top of their head with both hands to stop it flying off. But within that, I think we can see a range of attitudes.”
We certainly can – on a spectrum ranging from the view that this “generative AI” is going to be the biggest bonanza since the invention of the wheel, to fears that it augurs an existential risk to humanity, and numerous opinions in between. Seeking a respite from the firehose of contradictory commentary, I suddenly remembered an interview that Steve Jobs – the nearest thing to a visionary the tech industry has ever had – gave in 1990, and dug it out on YouTube.
From Hamas warnings to VIP perks and criminal clients: the US regulator’s claims against Binance
Just months after the FTX collapse, a US watchdog is suing Changpeng Zhao’s firm, the world’s biggest digital-asset market, over a slew of allegations that make jaw-dropping reading
Binance is the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange and a cornerstone of the $1tn digital asset market. It has 128 million customers, handles $65bn in daily trades and its commercial partners include Cristiano Ronaldo, Italy’s Lazio football team and TikTok megastar Khaby Lame. So when a US regulator announced last week it was suing Binance for “wilful evasion of US law”, it was a significant moment for a sector still reeling from the collapse of FTX.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) filed the civil enforcement action in a federal court in Chicago, seeking punishments including fines and permanent trading bans. It is suing Binance’s Canadian founder and chief executive, Changpeng Zhao, and three entities that operate the Binance global trading platform over numerous alleged violations of its regulations and of the Commodity Exchange Act. Binance’s former chief compliance officer, Samuel Lim, is also being sued.
How to change the region on an HP OfficeJet printer in 57 easy steps (printer companies hate this!)
Why would you region-lock a printer? | Image: Hugo Herrera / The Verge
A couple of weeks ago, Nilay wrote about the Brother laser printer everyone else has. It’s cheap, reliable, and the toner lasts a long time. Get a Brother laser printer, he said, and basically never think about your printer again. You know what part of Nilay’s post sounded really nice? This part right here:
It has been connected to our Wi-Fi for like six years straight, and I have never replaced the toner. It prints Amazon return labels from my phone without complaining, and it does not feel like the CEO of Inkjet Supply and Hostage Situations Incorporated is waiting to mug me or enable DRM at the slightest provocation.
I, on the other hand, spent a couple dozen hours between September 2021 and February 2022 trying to defeat the region lock on my HP printer so I could go back to not thinking about it.
Hey, did you know most inkjet printers are region-locked?
Let me back up. In 2019, I was living in the Netherlands. I needed a printer, so I paid 192 euros (about $213 at the time) for an HP OfficeJet Pro 8720 — the Wirecutter pick for all-in-one printers at the time, shoutouts to my old crew. The Wirecutter article (which I probably edited when I worked there) even warned that a laser printer would be less trouble. Liam McCabe’s cri de cœur about printers was fresh in my mind. And yet, I went for the inkjet all-in-one anyway.
It was fine at first. Aside from being too big to fit on my office cabinet, it did everything I needed it to do. It had a flatbed scanner and a sheet-fed scanner that could scan both sides of a document. It had 2.4GHz Wi-Fi and an ethernet port, and an insecure secure web interface. It had Google Cloud Print (until that stopped working the next year). It had AirPrint. It also had two separate scanner apps, one of which could save OCR’d PDFs, which was very handy before everyone built that into their operating systems. It had a Windows app, the main function of which seemed to be to try to sell me an ink subscription. It could print in color. It could print on both sides of the page. It could print photos, though not like amazing ones. It was fine.
In April 2020, I paid 85 euros (about $93) for replacement ink cartridges. Now, for most of that time, I was not printing a lot of stuff. I was using the scanner a bunch and, especially after the schools closed down because of covid, I printed a lot of coloring sheets and activity pages for my kids. Paying that much for ink so soon after buying the damn thing wasn’t great. In retrospect: lol.
The next summer, my family moved back to the US somewhat earlier than intended. We had some extra room in our flat-rate shipping container, so rather than sell the printer and buy a new one in the US, or fill the empty space with vintage Gispen chairs or hagelslag or something useful, I brought the printer. Waste not, want not! I swapped the power cable for a US one, and away we went.
It was fine until my yellow ink cartridge (allegedly) ran out, and the printer stopped printing in color. I soldiered on with the black cartridge. Until one day I tried to print a return label (in black and white!) and the printer decided it wouldn’t. Not until I replaced the yellow ink cartridge. Fine. I paid 207 goddamn dollars for replacement cartridges, put them in, and discovered that HP region-locks its printers.
If you need a refresher: region-locking is a form of DRM mostly used by media and software publishers so they can sell the same content at different prices in different regions. If you buy a DVD in Europe, you need a DVD player that can play Region 2 discs.
DVDs and Blu-rays are region-locked. (CDs aren’t, which is probably why DVDs are.) Game consoles used to be. Streaming media is region-locked. Software is often region-locked. Kindle books are region-locked unless the publisher requests otherwise. But outside of, like, entertainment devices, it’s rare for hardware to be region-locked. Except, as it turns out, printer cartridges.
The genuine HP ink cartridges, for which I paid as much as I paid for the actual printer, would not work with the printer they were designed to work with because I bought it in a different part of the world. It wasn’t even a cheaper part of the world unless we’re talking healthcare or midcentury furniture.
I bought an HP printer when I lived in the Netherlands. Took it back to the US with me.
Needs new ink.
Turns out HP sells different cartridges in different regions.
No problem; got the US equivalents of the old cartridges. Installed them.
Printer is region-locked.
Now, I realize this is an edge case. Most people don’t move across the world and bring a printer with them. But region-locking is only one of many ways printer companies use DRM to squeeze money out of their customers, and if you have an inkjet printer you might have already run into one of them. Blocking third-party ink cartridges, preventing people from refilling their cartridges, and remotely bricking workingprintersif they reach “end of life” or if you cancel your ink subscription? Just a day’s work for Inkjet Supply and Hostage Situations Incorporated.
Anyway. Having just paid two hundred bucks for new ink cartridges for a perfectly functional printer that I had already hauled halfway around the world, I was determined to get the printer and the cartridges working together. (This is known as the sunk cost fallacy.)
And I did get them working — after spending dozens of hours over five months. Here’s how it went down, as reconstructed from a tweet thread, some hastily jotted notes, a few screenshots, and some emails. (Names have been changed, except for Ferdinand and John, who were patient and helpful respectively.)
Day one
I start by complaining on Twitter. Cory Doctorow eventually retweets it, which is how you know you’ve made it in complaining-about-DRM Twitter.
I make an account on the HP Support website. I register my printer’s model and serial number, date of purchase, etc. The website tells me I’m out of warranty — I know! — and directs me to a support chatbot.
The support chatbot tells me that I’m out of warranty, then suggests that I buy the ink cartridges I already have, which don’t work because the printer is region-locked. Then it suggests that I join HP’s Instant Ink program. Instant Ink is a subscription service that HP really wants you to use. Instead of buying cartridges outright, you pay monthly to use the printer you already own — $5.99 for 100 pages is apparently popular — and they ship you more ink when your printer tells them you’re running low. No, thank you!
I google some more and learn that the printer’s region lock can be reset. All I need to do is start a warranty claim on the new cartridges, get a case number, connect to the printer with a USB cable, and then get in touch with HP Support. Easy!
SIDE QUEST: dig up a USB A-to-B cable. All of my stuff is in boxes since we just moved, and the only cable I find is USB 3.0, not 2.0. It has the extra data hat (technical term), so it won’t work. I know I have one somewhere, possibly at my in-laws’ house.
I call my mother-in-law, who lives 20 minutes away. She brings me the correct cable. It’s about four feet long.
The printer is on the other side of the room from my desktop, and I don’t want to move either of them.
SIDE QUEST: find a working laptop.
Day two
I dig up my 2013-era Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro and apply several years’ worth of Windows updates.
I connect the laptop to the printer with the USB cable. This feels like progress. I’m ready to contact HP.
I am an elder millennial, which means I am not going to pick up the phone if I can help it. Fortunately, HP Support has already replied to my tweet and asks me to DM them. I oblige.
HP tech support asks me to install either HP Smart or the full printer software suite and sends directions for accessing a secret zone in the printer app where I can reset the printer region. All I have to do is hold down Ctrl and Shift and right-click on an empty area to the right of the ink level indicator.
This is where the ink cartridge level indicator would be, except it isn’t.
I cannot access the secret menu in the ink levels menu in the HP Smart app because the ink cartridges are incompatible.
HP Support asks for my printer serial number and suggests that I download the full HP printer software, rather than HP Smart, and try again.
I download and install the full HP printer software. I open it. The software suggests that I use the HP Easy Start utility.
I install the HP Easy Start utility.
The HP Easy Start utility downloads and installs the full HP printer software.
I run the software. It suggests that I use the HP Easy Start utility.
I give up and try a different computer.
I am able to access the secret Set New Region menu. This menu — which warns it’s supposed to be used in conjunction with support — lists the printer serial number, the total page count, something called an RX code, and the nine-digit serial numbers for each of the four cartridges. It has five text input fields at the bottom, labeled 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, and 51.
Here is what’s supposed to happen: I give support the information above. Support plugs it into a key generation utility and generates five four-digit numbers. I plug those numbers into boxes 41 through 45, which generates a five-digit hash in box 51. I read that number back to support. If it matches the box 51 number in their software utility, I hit Reset Device, and the printer region resets.
I send the serial numbers, page count, and RX code to HP Support via Twitter DM.
It is revealed that either Twitter or the software HP uses to interact with Twitter DMs is redacting the serial numbers.
Some software in the chain redacted the serial numbers I sent to HP via Twitter DM.
I send a screenshot of the serial numbers instead.
I send the serial numbers in plain text with spaces between the digits.
The HP tech plugs the information into the reset utility. The utility gives an error.
The tech says we’ve reached the limits of the help they can offer via Twitter DM and asks me to call the phone support team.
It is 5PM. I have to pick up my kids from their after-school program.
Day three
I bite the bullet and pick up the telephone. The first rep, who I’ll call Alice, points out that my printer is out of warranty. I agree but point out that the ink is still in warranty (a technique suggested by the posts I found online) and ask for a regionalization reset on the printer so I can use the ink.
Alice does not know how to help. Since the problem is ink-related, she transfers me to the Instant Ink support line.
Bertrand, the Instant Ink rep, tells me they cover ink, not printers, and transfers me back to the general support line. I have been on the phone for 45 minutes, which feels like a long time because I do not yet know what lies ahead.
Cecile in general support gives me a phone number for the technical support line.
Somewhere around here (my notes aren’t specific) someone asks for my street address.
At the one-hour mark, Ferdinand from technical support suggests having a different team remote into my PC to run a local script to fix the printer. I decline. There’s no way in hell I’m letting someone remote into my computer, especially because the documented procedure for resetting the printer region doesn’t mention anything of the sort.
At this point, I have to go to the grocery store. Ferdinand promises to call back.
I have now spent about four hours on this and I am quite upset about it! There is no reason this should have taken longer than the twenty seconds it takes to swap old cartridges for new ones.
Five hours later, during dinner, I get a call back from Ferdinand. We spend one hour on the phone, during which I send them the serial numbers for my EU and US printer cartridges, they plug those into a software utility, and they send me a series of reset codes to try.
My first indication that they are using the wrong utility is that they are asking for eight-digit serial numbers. My ink cartridges have nine-digit codes. I realize there may be different region reset utilities for different printer product lines.
Ferdinand is adamant that it is the right tool. There are four possible printer zones, according to the software they’re using. Just for the hell of it, we try all four zones with both sets of cartridges. We try over USB and via an ethernet connection. I have pages of code variants in my notes. I dutifully plug in the numbers generated by the tool. Sometimes box 51 matches, sometimes it doesn’t. Either way, when I hit the Reset Device button, the operation fails.
Ferdinand says that it may not be the right tool after all, but they don’t have access to any other tools.
They advise me to call the technical support team at yet another phone number. It is bedtime for my kids. I call it a day.
Day four
(Two days later)
I spend several hours on the phone with the technical team. They cannot generate a working reset code either and suggest a “semi-full reset” of the printer. I comply. It does not reset the printer region.
They offer to send me a completely different printer, an OfficeJet 8210. It’s slightly slower and has half the print resolution, but even if it were better, my resolve is unwavering: this printer should work. I will not rest until it does work.
Day five
My youngest kid gets sick, and a series of stressful events unfolds. I no longer care to pursue the printer situation.
The following week, I borrow a working printer (an Epson inkjet I left behind when I moved to the Netherlands) from my mother-in-law and forget about the HP.
Five months later
Something annoys me about the Epson. I can’t remember what. Probably I am also procrastinating on a freelance assignment. I log back in to the HP website and generate a new support ticket. See you in hell.
New case number in hand, I call HP Support.
After navigating a byzantine phone tree, I am connected to someone who sounds like they’re standing on the side of a mountain during a windstorm. Neither of us can make out what the other is saying. I hang up.
I call back. I endure the phone tree again. I am placed on hold. After a long time, the automated system hangs up on me.
I call again. I finally reach a human. John really wants to fix this.
(n.b. The exact order of events here is a little fuzzy here because my notes are sparse.)
We might be getting somewhere. John emails me a link to a webpage.
The link is to a page on the HP Support internal site, which I cannot access.
He sends me a second one. It is to a different page on the HP Support internal site.
He sends me a third link. From the URL, it seems like it’s the actual keygen utility that generates the region reset codes. I can’t access it because it is on the HP Support internal site.
John wants to see what’s going on with my printer. He asks to do a remote desktop session. We compromise on a video call from my phone. I point the phone at the region reset dialog so he can make sure he has the serial numbers typed down correctly.
In addition to the printer serial number and the four nine-digit serial numbers of the cartridges, which I can get from the secret menu, he asks for a separate six-digit number that’s printed on each cartridge. Maybe this is the information that finally lets us access the correct key generation software.
John plugs some numbers into the key generation utility. He gives me the five four-digit numbers for boxes 41 through 45. I plug them into the dialog box on my computer. A number appears in box 51.
Box 51 matches the number John got from the utility. I try not to get my hopes up.
I hit “Reset Device.” A dialog box pops up: Region Successfully Reset.
Image: Nathan Edwards
This screenshot of a phone video of a laptop screen is the only record I thought to make of the occasion.
John asks me to pull the plug on the printer, wait one minute, and turn it back on. He says if this doesn’t fix it, the problem is with the ink cartridges, not the printer. I am skeptical.
I turn the printer back on. John asks me to print a test page.
IT WORKS! Our long national ordeal is over and I can print again.
I thank John profusely for his help.
John tries to upsell me on an Instant Ink subscription. I decline.
John asks if there’s anything else he can help me with. That’s it, man. We’re good.
He asks for my mailing address, which I provide.
I take the post-call survey. My praise for John borders on the effusive.
I pick my kids up from daycare and take them to the playground. The February air tastes sweeter somehow.
One week later, a padded envelope arrives from HP. It contains a free high-capacity black ink cartridge.
That was last February. The printer has been working fine since then. Until Nilay wrote his piece about the Brother laser printer, I hadn’t thought much about it, which is the ideal relationship between a person and their printer.
But the journey changed both of us. I can’t go back to the person I was in late 2021, and I think you can only reset your printer region three times. I didn’t add a working printer to the world’s growing pile of e-waste, but now I think I’m stuck with it until one of us dies.
The printer software estimates that I have 600 pages left on my cyan, yellow, and back cartridges and 800 pages left on magenta. That should last me a year or two. After that? I have that free black ink cartridge from HP, but high-capacity color cartridges are $40 a pop. Or, as the HP website cheerily points out, I could sign up for Instant Ink.
Plastic transistor amplifies biochemical sensing signal The molecules in our bodies are in constant communication. Some of these molecules provide a biochemical fingerprint that could indicate how a wound is healing, whether or not a cancer treatment is working or that a virus has invaded the body. If we could sense these signals in real time with high sensitivity, then we might be able to recognize health problems faster and even monitor disease as it progresses.
Twitter to no longer only promote paid-for accounts after backlash
Elon Musk says he ‘forgot to mention’ other users would be visible on ‘for you’ timeline as well
Twitter has reversed course on plans to limit presence on its “for you” timeline to paying users only, with Elon Musk claiming he “forgot to mention” that other users would be visible as well.
When the company’s owner first announced the plan on Tuesday he said it would limit the tab that algorithmically curates tweets for users to only display accounts who had paid £8 a month for “Twitter Blue” and linked their account to a working phone number.
Amazon workers in Coventry announce six fresh strike dates
April dates come as GMB union prepares to test support for stoppages at five other sites
Workers at Amazon’s Coventry warehouse have announced six fresh strike dates, as the GMB union prepares to test support for stoppages among staff at another five of the delivery company’s sites.
Strikes at the vast Coventry centre, known as BHX4, began in January – the first industrial action ever taken against Amazon in the UK. Staff are demanding pay of £15 an hour.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai promises Bard AI chatbot upgrades soon: ‘We clearly have more capable models’
Illustration: The Verge
Google CEO Sundar Pichai has responded to criticism of the company’s experimental AI chatbot Bard, promising that Google will be upgrading Bard soon.
“We clearly have more capable models,” Pichai said in an interview on The New York Times’Hard Fork podcast. “Pretty soon, perhaps as this [podcast] goes live, we will be upgrading Bard to some of our more capable PaLM models, which will bring more capabilities; be it in reasoning, coding, it can answer maths questions better. So you will see progress over the course of next week.”
Pichai noted that Bard is running on a “lightweight and efficient version of LaMDA,” an AI language model that focuses on delivering dialog. “In some ways I feel like we took a souped-up Civic and put it in a race with more powerful cars,” said Pichai. PaLM, by comparison, is a more recent language model; it’s larger in scale and Google claims it is more capable when dealing with tasks like common-sense reasoning and coding problems.
Bard was first released to public users on March 21st, but failed to garner the attention or acclaim won by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot. In The Verge’s own tests of these systems, we found that Bard was consistently less useful than its rivals. Like all general purpose chatbots it is able to respond to a wide range of questions, but its answers are generally less fluent and imaginative, and fail to draw on reliable data sources.
Pichai suggested that part of the reason for Bard’s limited capabilities was a sense of caution within Google. “To me, it was important to not put [out] a more capable model before we can fully make sure we can handle it well,” he said.
Pichai also confirmed that he was talking with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin about the work (“Sergey has been hanging out with our engineers for a while now”) and that while he himself never issued the infamous “code red” to scramble development, there were probably people in the company who “sent emails saying there is a code red.”
Pichai also discussed concerns that development of AI is currently moving too fast and perhaps poses a threat to society. Many in the AI and tech communities have been warning about the dangerous race dynamic currently in play between companies including OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. Earlier this week, an open letter signed by Elon Musk and top AI researchers called for a six month pause on the development of these AI systems.
“In this area, I think it’s important to hear concerns,” said Pichai regarding the open letter calling for the pause. “And I think there is merit to be concerned about it ... This is going to need a lot of debate, no-one knows all the answers, no one company can get it right.” He also said that “AI is too important an area not to regulate,” but suggested it was better to simply apply regulations in existing industries — like privacy regulations and regulations in healthcare — than create new laws to tackle AI specifically.
Some experts worry about immediate risks, like chatbots’ tendency to spread mistruths misinformation, while others warn about more existential threats; suggesting that these systems are so difficult to control that once they are connected to the wider web they could be used destructively. Some suggest that current programs are also drawing closer to what’s known as artificial generally intelligence, or AGI: systems that are as least as capable as a human across a wide range of tasks.
“It is so clear to me that these systems are going to be very, very capable, and so it almost doesn’t matter whether you’ve reached AGI or not,” said Pichai. “Can we have an AI system which can cause disinformation at scale? Yes. Is it AGI? It really doesn’t matter. Why do we need to worry about AI safety? Because you have to anticipate this and evolve to meet that moment.”
You can listen to the interview in full and read a transcript here.
Google C.E.O. Sundar Pichai on Bard, A.I. ‘Whiplash’ and Competing With ChatGPT “Am I concerned? Yes. Am I optimistic and excited about all the potential of this technology? Incredibly.”
TechScape: How the world is turning against social media
France has banned not only TikTok from government phones, but Facebook and Twitter, too. Could this be a tipping point for big tech? Plus, AI-generated pictures of the pope signal a new type of viral image
Government workers in the UK, US, Canada and European Union (the list will have grown by the time you read this) are banned from installing TikTok on their phones.
On Friday, France joined that list, preventing its civil servants from installing TikTok – and everything else. From the government’s press release (original in French):
After an analysis of the issues, in particular security, the government has decided to ban the downloading and installation of recreational applications on professional telephones provided to public officials from now on.
Recreational applications do not have sufficient levels of cybersecurity and data protection to be deployed on government equipment. This ban applies immediately and uniformly. Exemptions may be granted on an exceptional basis …
E3 2023: video game industry’s biggest expo cancelled
The annual event, which faced years of Covid disruption, will not return in 2023
E3, the video game industry’s biggest annual expo, has been cancelled.
The show had been due to make a return after years of Covid-19 disruption this June in Los Angeles, but in a joint statement, the US’s Entertainment Software Association (ESA) and events company Reedpop announced it would no longer be going ahead.
Bafta Games Awards: God of War wins six but Vampire Survivors is best game
The were gasps in the crowd as a cult indie shooter beat the blockbusters to the key award of the night
It must be one of the biggest shock wins in the history of the Bafta Games Awards. Up against huge blockbuster titles such as Elden Ring and God of War Ragnarök, the best game winner at this year’s ceremony, which took place on Thursday evening, was Vampire Survivors, a shoot-’em-up largely developed by lone coder Luca Galante.
There were gasps in the crowd at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London when the title was read out, with Galante’s small team accepting the award on his behalf and looking shaken. The game, in which players attempt to survive as long as possible in an ever-changing landscape swarming with monsters, had earlier won the game design award.
Best podcasts of the week: The hidden history of the American right’s anti-trans agenda
In this week’s newsletter: The Anti-Trans Hate Machine returns with a second series looking back at America’s record of violence toward transgender people. Plus: five of the best pop culture podcasts
The Lesser Dead
All episodes on Wondery+ now, available weekly elsewhere The life of a vampire in 1978 is a good one, according to this scripted podcast starring Minnie Driver (below) and Jack Kilmer. Spending days watching TV, then partying in underground clubs – they’ve got it all worked out. Joey Peacock (Kilmer) is only out to steal a bit of blood and means no harm, but when he witnesses a disturbing incident on Valentine’s Day his bliss is shattered and an enthralling, atmospheric story starts. Hannah Verdier
Marshall, the iconic amp manufacturer, is being acquired by Marshall speaker maker Zound
Jimi Hendrix with a Marshall amp in 1967. | Image: JJs / Alamy Stock Photo
Marshall Amplification, the 60-year-old company that’s produced iconic guitar amps used by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Slash, and Kurt Cobain, is being acquired by Zound Industries, the Swedish company that’s previously licensed the Marshall brand for its headphones and speakers. Exact financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the resulting company will be the privately owned Marshall Group. The Marshall family will serve as its largest shareholder with a 24 percent stake.
Jeremy de Maillard, who currently serves as Zound’s CEO and who will be CEO of Marshall Group going forward, said in an interview with The Verge that the deal is as much about acquiring Marshall’s engineering expertise as it is about acquiring the brand name. “The way I like to think about it is that Zound has been making products to listen to music, and Marshall has been making products to make music or to play music,” de Maillard says, calling them “very complementary businesses.”
In the immediate future, the CEO doesn’t expect much to change for either company. All of Marshall Amplification’s brands and subsidiaries — including Natal Drums, Marshall Records, and Marshall Live Agency — are included as part of the deal, and the CEO says they’re “100 percent committed” to both the company’s existing UK-based premium amp manufacturing facility and their factory in Vietnam.
Victoria Marshall, who was Marshall CEO from 2002 to 2008, and Terry Marshall, who built the first Marshall amplifier with his father, Jim Marshall, in 1962, will sit on the board of the Marshall Group to help guide the company’s high-level strategy.
There also won’t be any immediate changes to how Zound’s headphones and Bluetooth speakers are developed. “We’ve already been working in close collaboration for the past 12 years,” de Maillard tells me. “We haven’t done a single product from Zound that hasn’t been approved by the acoustic engineer at Marshall Amps… It’s a complete continuation of what we do, except now we’re one and the same.”
Image: Zound Industries
A selection of Zound’s Marshall-style speakers, which draw inspiration from the guitar amps.
“Since my father and I created the original Marshall amp back in 1962, we have always looked for ways to deliver the pioneering Marshall sound to music lovers of all backgrounds and music tastes across the world - and I’m confident that the Marshall Group will elevate this mission and spur the love for the Marshall brand,” Terry Marshall said in a statement.
“Having worked alongside my father during his later years, I know he would be excited at this direction and the potential to reach a larger worldwide audience,” added Victoria Marshall.
Although the Zound name is disappearing in favor of Marshall, the Swedish company doesn’t plan to abandon its other product lines like Urbanears. But de Maillard tells me that Marshall-branded items represent over 90 percent of Zound’s existing sales, so it makes sense to double down on the brand.
In the long term, de Maillard says he hopes the merger will help speed up development, help them approach their product range “more holistically,” and ultimately share the manufacturing and product development knowledge gained from working across two very different industries. “What we are buying is basically the ability to make one entity greater than the sum of its parts,” de Maillard says. But he adds that “nothing has been decided” about the newly formed company’s long-term goals.
When Zound first started licensing the Marshall name back in 2010, it was an unknown startup that had only started shipping products the previous year. It was the iconic Marshall brand that helped put it on the map. But now, over a decade later, de Maillard suspects that Zound’s Marshall-branded speakers and headphones may be the ones helping to promote Marshall’s guitar amps.
“We brought the Marshall brand to over 90 countries through the headphones and the speakers. So it became a much more known brand by the masses than it was before,” de Maillard claims. “Before it was the in-the-know, the musicians, people who were really into music who knew about the brand. But through this partnership, we’ve managed to touch a lot more people.”
“I don’t have the number, but I’m pretty sure that drove a lot of people to start playing guitar as well,” he says.
Caught in the FTX storm: how a crypto high-flyer fell to Earth
The Maps payments app run by British-educated cryptocurrency tycoon Alex Grebnev, who was backed by Sam Bankman-Fried, has lost its Mastercard partnership amid a row over Russian users
As western brands began the stampede out of Russia a year ago, its citizens found themselves unable to pay for the international goods and services with which they had become so familiar.
Among the first firms to sever ties were the credit card companies Visa and Mastercard, leaving Russians struggling to spend their cash on services from Netflix to Amazon.
Elon Musk is now the most-followed person on Twitter
Illustration by Kristen Radtke / The Verge; Photo: Getty Images
Elon Musk has dethroned former President Barack Obama as the most followed person on Twitter. As of right now, the billionaire has 133,068,709 followers compared to Obama’s 133,042,819, according to the follower counts reported on their respective Twitter profiles.
In between posting random and sometimes offensive memes, Musk uses his account to communicate various changes coming to Twitter. He has also polled followers about some major decisions, like letting Donald Trump back onto the platform and whether or not Musk should step down as CEO of Twitter.
Musk’s posting habits stand in stark contrast to Obama’s, who mainly uses his account for professional purposes, such as promoting an important cause or highlighting some of the work he did as president. The same goes for Justin Bieber and Katy Perry, who occupy the third and fourth most-followed spots, respectively.
Panera to adopt palm-reading payment systems, sparking privacy fears
Bakery is first restaurant chain to use Amazon One biometric technology, which faces scrutiny from lawmakers and activists
The US bakery and cafe chain Panera will soon allow customers to pay with the swipe of a palm, marking the first restaurant chain to implement the new technology and raising alarm among privacy advocates.
The company announced last week it would roll out biometric readers in coming months that will allow customers to access credit card and loyalty account information by scanning their palms. Called Amazon One, the system was developed by Amazon and is in use at some airports, stadiums and Whole Foods grocery stores.
Google denies Bard was trained with ChatGPT data
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Google’s Bard hasn’texactly had an impressive debut — and The Information is reporting that the company is so interested in changing the fortunes of its AI chatbots, it’s forcing its DeepMind division to help the Google Brain team beat OpenAI with a new initiative called Gemini. The Information’s report also contains the potentially staggering thirdhand allegation that Google stooped so low as to train Bard using data from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, scraped from a website called ShareGPT.
But Google is firmly and clearly denying that: “Bard is not trained on any data from ShareGPT or ChatGPT,” spokesperson Chris Pappas tells The Verge.
NEW: Prominent Google AI researcher resigned after warning Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and other senior execs that Bard—Google’s rival to ChatGPT—was *using data from ChatGPT*.
According to The Information’s reporting, a Google AI engineer named Jacob Devlin left Google to immediately join its rival OpenAI after attempting to warn Google not to use ChatGPT data because it would violate OpenAI’s terms of service, and that its answers would look too similar. One source told the publication that Google stopped using that data after his warnings. Perhaps it threw out that portion of the training, too.
Twitter to no longer only promote paid-for accounts after backlash
Elon Musk says he ‘forgot to mention’ other users would be visible on ‘for you’ timeline as well
Twitter has reversed course on plans to limit presence on its “for you” timeline to paying users only, with Elon Musk claiming he “forgot to mention” that other users would be visible as well.
When the company owner first announced the plan on Tuesday he said it would limit the tab that algorithmically curates tweets for users to only display accounts who had paid £8 a month for “Twitter Blue” and linked their account to a working phone number.
How ChatGPT and Bard Performed as My Executive Assistants Google’s Bard chatbot fared far worse than OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but human assistants might soon be out of their jobs.
Rift Between Gaming Giants Shows Toll of China’s Economic Crackdown Activision Blizzard and NetEase could not agree on a new deal to distribute video games in China, cutting millions of players from the games in January.
Key takeaways from TikTok hearing in Congress – and the uncertain road ahead
Lawmakers grilled the social media app’s CEO over its relationship with China and protections for young users
The first appearance in Congress for TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew stretched more than five hours, with contentious questioning targeting the app’s relationship with China and protections for its youngest users.
Chew’s appearance comes at a pivotal time for TikTok, which is facing bipartisan fire after experiencing a meteoric rise in popularity in recent years. The company is owned by Chinese firm ByteDance, raising concerns about China’s influence over the app – criticisms Chew repeatedly tried to resist throughout the hearing.
WeWork mugs for $500: 10 of the strangest merch items from companies that crashed
FTX fortune cookies and Theranos gift cards offer souvenirs from recent business disasters
You’ve just been laid off from your job at a once mighty startup that was going to change the world. The New York Times has exposed your CEO’s fraudulent business model. Investors have freaked. The stock market is hemorrhaging. Your office keycard doesn’t work. What you do next is very important: go raid the merch closet.
By now, we’ve all seen enough rise-and-fall documentaries to know how this sort of thing plays out. First come layoffs, then lawsuits, and perhaps a prison sentence for bosses like Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes or Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling. One thing we hear less about: the killer resale market that comes with an era-defining financial disaster.
The ugly economics behind Apple’s new Pay Later system
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
This article was originally published in June 2022. We’re reviving it today since Apple hasfinally gone through with its plansto launch the service.
Apple is getting into the “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) business with its new Pay Later service built into Apple Pay and Apple Wallet. While Apple bills the service as “designed with users’ financial health in mind,” BNPL is a practice that has come under scrutiny by government regulators as something that could potentially harm customers.
Apple’s Pay Later service, which has been in the works since at least last year, lets users make a purchase with Apple Pay and then pay it back in four equal installments over the course of six weeks. There’s no interest on these installments, but it remains unclear if Apple will charge a late fee, and if so, how much it will cost.
On the surface, BNPL services seem harmless, as some come with no interest and allow for an easy way to pay back a big purchase in chunks. Some BNPL companies have even emerged for payments related to healthcare — with some existing companies, like Affirm, adding support — filling a gap for people who can’t afford to pay healthcare costs upfront. However, this kind of service becomes easy to abuse when used for nonessential purchases.
In May, SFGate published an unsettling report about BNPL services that highlights its popularity among Generation Z, or those born between 1997 and 2012. According to the report, 73 percent of BNPL customers are part of this generation, and around 43 percent of them report missing at least one payment. Another survey from DebtHammer shows that 30 percent of users struggle to make their BNPL payments, and 32 percent report skipping out on paying rent, utilities, or child support to prioritize their BNPL bills. The current state of the economy is likely contributing to some of these struggles.
SFGate also notes that BNPL services can lead to bigger purchases. According to data viewed by the outlet, the average Affirm customer spends $365 on a single purchase, as opposed to the $100 average cart size recorded in 2020. It’s also become a way to buy a wardrobe without footing the costs upfront, with SFGate pointing out that Affirm’s large Gen Z consumer base spends 73 percent of their Afterpay purchases on fashion.
Like other payment systems, BNPL services can incur overdraft fees if users charge them to an account with insufficient funds, and Apple’s fine print makes clear it’s no exception. To make matters worse, BNPL’s rising popularity comes at a time when credit companies like Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion are looking to include BNPL loans on credit reports. This means missing a payment on these seemingly benign services will soon come with a consequence — not just for consumers but for BNPL companies, too. And a survey of 2,200 people by Morning Consult reveals BNPL users are twice as likely to overdraft when compared to non-users.
In addition to potential financial issues, BNPL services are catching the attention of government watchdogs around the globe. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is currently investigating BNPL companies, including Klarna, Zip, Afterpay, Affirm, and PayPal, citing concerns about “accumulating debt, regulatory arbitrage, and data harvesting in a consumer credit market already quickly changing with technology.” Last year, the UK announced stricter regulatory policies for BNPL companies.
Apple’s Pay Later is on track to receive the same sort of scrutiny, as it injects itself into an uncertain sector when inflation is spiking and consumers are struggling to pay for everyday goods. But it also normalizes the BNPL practice by building the concept straight into the iPhone, posing a risk to both consumers and competing businesses. Apple has the power to catch the eyes of the millions of iPhone users who use Apple Pay, while companies like Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay clearly don’t have that kind of grasp.
Attaching something as risky as BNPL to Apple’s brand puts Pay Later at odds with the company’s goal of providing customers with technology and services they can generally feel good about. As the big quote from Apple CEO Tim Cook on Apple’s Ethics and Compliance page reads, “We do the right thing, even when it’s not easy.”
‘Our universe was lost for ever’: what happens when a tech glitch erases your memories?
Photos, emails, playlists: our phones and computers have become hosts for our pasts. What happens when the backups fail?
No matter how much our computers assure us they’re backing everything up to a hard drive in the sky, memory failure remains a hardwired part of our lives. Writers reflect on when a digital loss created an emotional hole – from the college essay that disappeared minutes before the due date to an iPhone update that lost years of photographs.
Apple Music Classical was born from Primephonic, which Apple acquired in 2021 with the intent of launching a classical music-focused app in 2022. The promise of Apple Music Classical is that it will be better at handling the complex metadata often associated with classical recordings, and the app will also have things like curated playlists and composer biographies to help people get more acquainted with the genre.
Apple says the app’s catalog houses more than 5 million tracks and that you can listen to music at up to 192 kHz/24 bit hi-res lossless. However, there are a few caveats with the app. Subscribers to the Apple Music Voice Plan can’t use Classical. And at launch, there won’t be a native iPad version and you won’t be able to download music to listen to offline.
I’m disappointed about the lack of offline downloads, but I’m still looking forward to digging into the app. Even though I have to be online to use it, Apple Music Classical still seems like it could be a good way to learn more about a genre I feel like I should be more versed in — though if I’m being honest, the first thing I’m going to do is look up renditions of Maurice Ravel’s “Boléro.”
One of Europe’s largest ammunition manufacturers has said efforts to meet surging demand from the war in Ukraine have been stymied by a new TikTok data centre that is monopolising electricity in the region close to its biggest factory.
The chief executive of Nammo, which is co-owned by the Norwegian government, said a planned expansion of its largest factory in central Norway hit a roadblock due to a lack of surplus energy, with the construction of TikTok’s new data centre using up electricity in the local area.
Musk claims the move is “the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over.” Verified users are also going to become the only accounts that can vote in polls for the “same reason,” Musk says.
It’s worth taking this announcement with a big grain of salt, as Musk’s tweets haven’t always turned into enforced policy or features. Perhaps the biggest example is his promise from February that the company was going to start sharing ad revenue with Blue subscribers, something that’s still MIA almost two months later. That same month, he also promised to open-source the company’s algorithm by March 5th, which hasn’t happened yet — though now he says it’ll happen on March 31st, without acknowledging the previous missed deadline.
Starting April 15th, only verified accounts will be eligible to be in For You recommendations.
The is the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over. It is otherwise a hopeless losing battle.
Voting in polls will require verification for same reason.
Musk has made similar promises in the past. Before he dropped the charade of supposedly asking the community before making major changes to the service, he said that Twitter would only allow Blue Subscribers to vote in policy polls. It’s a bit of a moot point now that he’s not really doing those anymore, though.
The swagged-out pope is an AI fake — and an early glimpse of a new reality
The original viral image (left) and another AI-generated fake from the same batch (right). | Image: via Reddit / u/trippy_art_special
AI-generated images have gone viral before, but none have spread so far and wide as a picture of the pope wearing what can only be described as a swagged-out puffy jacket. Call him the Supreme pontiff. The Balenciaga bishop. The vicar of drip.
The picture seems to have been first posted online on Friday, submitted to a subreddit for the AI image generator Midjourney. Over the weekend, it spread on Twitter and other social networks, first as a meme and then as the subject of debunking. By Sunday, Chrissy Teigen was tweeting about it — a reliable indicator that an internet joke has gone mainstream.
“I thought the pope’s puffer jacket was real and didnt give it a second thought. no way am I surviving the future of technology,” Teigen tweeted, encapsulating the responses of many internet users. In her replies, someone said they thought calling it AI-generated was the joke, and Teigen responded: “Oh man now I’m REAL confused. Is it real?? i hate myself lol.”
The image is definitely fake. Not only was it posted to the Midjourney subreddit alongside three alternatives (Midjourney usually generates four images in response to each prompt) but it also contains telltale signs of AI generation, including a number of areas where details are conspicuously smeared. There’s the not quite hand not quite grasping a not quite coffee cup; a crucifix without proper right angles that depicts Jesus if he’d been sculpted in clay and sat on; and the edge of a glasses lens that somehow transitions into its own shadow — all indicative of AI generation: products of a system that knows the surface of reality but not the underlying rules that govern how physical objects interact.
Collage: The Verge
A smear here, a blur there: telltale signs of an AI-generated image.
And yet, to point all this out seems like pedantry because the image undeniably looksreal —for a certain definition of real, anyway. If you scrolled past it in your feed on Friday, you probably didn’t give it a second thought, perhaps tweeting “dang the pope a dripgod” and then moving on with your day.
But it’s useful to analyze why this particular image went viral, as it reveals a lot about how AI fakes will be shared and spread in the coming months. (No more than that, though: the field is moving too fast for predictions to keep longer than frozen leftovers.) To be more specific, the image went viral because it represents a particular alignment of subject and aesthetic — it works as a fake precisely because it matches ways we already consume images today.
First, there’s the subject: the pope himself. As journalist Ryan Broderick noted on Twitter, there’s something particular about the pope’s image that lends credence to the fake. “My theory as to why it’s fooling so many (myself initially included) is that the pope aesthetically exists in the same uncanny valley as most AI art,” tweeted Broderick. To be more explicit: the pope is known for wearing stylish clothes, and images of him often go viral because of this.
As trend forecaster Ayesha Siddiqi noted, the association between the bishop of Rome and Italian fashion is so strong that the Vatican has been forced to debunk rumors that the pope wears designer loafers. (“The pope, in summary, does not wear Prada, but Christ” was the official rebuttal.) And there are so many swaggy photos of Pope Francis floating around the web that others were able to pair this recent AI fake with real examples, like the pope signing a Lamborghini. It’s this contrast between the pope’s spiritual authority and material swagger that so often makes the man a meme. (That and the fact he tweets real good.)
Just as importantly, though, the fact that the pope is a celebrity makes unbelievable images of him inherently more believable. This is because of the style of image created by AI art generators. It’s a specific look closely associated with Midjourney’s software, which received an update a few weeks ago improving the quality of its output and which has, in turn, created a mini wave of believable AI fakes currently circulating the web. (It also helps that there are lots of pictures of celebrities in Midjourney’s training data, making them easier to generate.)
Let’s call this style hyperrealism. First, because it’s the adjective often used in text prompts to generate such pictures, and second, because it links the aesthetic to Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal — a culture in which simulations displace reality.
Hyperrealism in the context of AI images is an aesthetic defined by perfect lighting and glossy surfaces, by dramatic poses and saturated colors. It’s stylized and exaggerated — the sort of image we already associate with celebrities, whose likenesses are reproduced with such abundance and deliberation that they often already look fake. What’s interesting (and links the aesthetic of AI hyperrealism to Baudrillard’s philosophy) is that many in the AI art community describe these images as “photorealistic” when they are clearly cartoonish. For these people, what’s real is the output of AI systems: it’s the simulation displacing reality.
Midjourney v5 has pushed into photorealism, a goal which has eluded the computer graphics industry for decades (!)
Insane progression, and all that by 11 people with a shared dream.
Let's explore what these breakthrough in Generative AI mean for 3D & VFX as we know it... pic.twitter.com/GlycHcPQqA
I think it’s these factors together that explain why certain AI images have gone viral recently. The swag pope is not the only one. You may have seen fake pictures of Elon Musk holding hands with AOC; French President Emmanuel Macron running through clouds of tear gas; or Donald Trump being arrested. In each case, the celebrity of the subject primes us to believe our eyes, as does the content, which is often linked to recent events (protests in France, Trump’s rumored indictment, Musk being a creep, etc.).
This is both scary and reassuring — reassuring because it suggests there is currently a limit to what AI fakes are believable but scary because this technology is moving too fast for any current reassurances to hold true for long. In fact, I’d say there’s only one guarantee when it comes to AI images: they’re only going to become believable. They’re certainly not limited to their current aesthetic. And sooner or later, they’re going to become hyperreal as Baudrillard defined the concept: masking the distinction entirely between the imaginary and the real.
Twitter takes legal action after source code leaked online
Elon Musk-owned platform demands that GitHub identifies who posted parts of its code
Twitter has revealed some of its source code has been released online and the social media platform owned by Elon Musk is taking legal action to identify the leaker.
According to a court filing made on Friday, Twitter is demanding that GitHub, a code-sharing service, identifies who released on the platform parts of its source code – the underlying software on which the service operates.
Microsoft says it has stopped its Xbox Game Pass $1 trial offer
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
Microsoft has stopped its $1 trial offer for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass. The trial has been available for years, with brief periods where it wasn’t always available in certain markets, and it now looks like Microsoft is considering new promotions instead.
“We have stopped our previous introductory offer for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass and are evaluating different marketing promotions for new members in the future,” says Kari Perez, head of global communications at Xbox, in a statement to The Verge.
The $1 trial has allowed people to sign up to Xbox Game Pass for a month, before the full Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription kicks in at $14.99 per month or $9.99 a month for the PC- or console-only subscriptions. It’s been a great way to recommend the service to a friend or family member, but we’ll now have to wait to see what these “different marketing promotions” are for new members.
Microsoft has also been working on its Friends & Family plan for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. The plan lets you share Xbox Game Pass Ultimate benefits with up to four other friends or family members. Pricing in Ireland is set at €21.99 per month (nearly $24), working out to less than $5 per person.
Microsoft expanded this Friends & Family plan to New Zealand, South Africa, Chile, Hungary, Israel, and Sweden recently, but it’s still not available in many European markets or the UK and US. This $1 trial removal could be a sign that Microsoft is getting ready to expand Friends & Family even further, after trialing this new subscription for less than a year.
Microsoft also recently opened up its PC Game Pass subscription to 40 new countries. Game Pass is now available in 86 markets in total, with new availability across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.
Cryptocurrencies add nothing useful to society, says chip-maker Nvidia
Tech chief says the development of chatbots is a more worthwhile use of processing power than crypto mining
The US chip-maker Nvidia has said cryptocurrencies do not “bring anything useful for society” despite the company’s powerful processors selling in huge quantities to the sector.
Michael Kagan, its chief technology officer, said other uses of processing power such as the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT were more worthwhile than mining crypto.
‘Of course it’s disturbing’: will AI change Hollywood forever?
With the rise of AI-led services to write, voice and provide effects, industry experts express concern over the future
What will AI (artificial intelligence) do to Hollywood? Who better to answer that question than ChatGPT, a thrilling but scary chatbot developed by OpenAI. When the Guardian asked it about AI’s potential impact on the film industry, it made the following points:
Scriptwriting: AI can be used to analyze existing screenplays and create new ones, potentially leading to more efficient and cost-effective screenwriting.
Pre-production: AI can be used to streamline the pre-production process, including casting, location scouting and storyboarding.
Special effects: AI can be used to create more realistic and immersive special effects, potentially reducing the need for practical effects and saving time and money in post-production.
Audience analysis: AI can be used to analyze audience data and preferences, helping studios make more informed decisions about which films to greenlight and how to market them.
Distribution: AI can be used to personalize movie recommendations for viewers and optimize distribution strategies, potentially leading to higher ticket sales and revenue.
ChatGPT started a new kind of AI race — and made text boxes cool again
Tired: the metaverse. Wired: the message-verse? | Image: OpenAI / David Pierce
It’s pretty obvious that nobody saw ChatGPT coming. Not even OpenAI. Before it became by some measures the fastest growing consumer app in history, before it turned the phrase “generative pre-trained transformers” into common vernacular, before every company you can think of was racing to adopt its underlying model, ChatGPT launched in November as a “research preview.”
The blog post announcing ChatGPT is now a hilarious case study in underselling. “ChatGPT is a sibling model to InstructGPT, which is trained to follow an instruction in a prompt and provide a detailed response. We are excited to introduce ChatGPT to get users’ feedback and learn about its strengths and weaknesses.” That’s it! That’s the whole pitch! No waxing poetic about fundamentally changing the nature of our interactions with technology, not even, like, a line about how cool it is. It was just a research preview.
But now, barely four months later, it looks like ChatGPT really is going to change the way we think about technology. Or, maybe more accurately, change it back. Because the way we’re going, the future of technology is not whiz-bang interfaces or the metaverse. It’s “typing commands into a text box on your computer.” The command line is back — it’s just a whole lot smarter now.
Really, generative AI is headed in two simultaneous directions. The first is much more infrastructural, adding new tools and capabilities to the stuff you already use. Large language models like GPT-4 and Google’s LaMDA are going to help you write emails and memos; they’re going to automatically spruce up your slide decks and correct any mistakes in your spreadsheets; they’re going to edit your photos better than you can; they’re going to help you write code and in many cases just do it for you.
Remember when everybody, even Pizza Hut, was doing chatbots?
This is roughly the path AI has been on for years, right? Google has been integrating all kinds of AI into its products over the last few years, and even companies like Salesforce have built strong AI research projects. These models are expensive to create, expensive to train, expensive to query, and potentially game-changing for corporate productivity. AI enhancements in products you already use is a big business — or, at least, is being invested in like one — and will be for a long time.
The other AI direction, the one where interacting with the AI becomes a consumer product, was a much less obvious development. It makes sense now, of course: who doesn’t want to talk to a robot that knows all about movies and recipes and what to do in Tokyo, and if I say just the right things might go totally off the rails and try to make out with you? But before ChatGPT took the world by storm, and before Bing and Bard both took the idea and tried to build their own products out of it, I certainly wouldn’t have bet that typing into a chat window would be the next big thing in user interfaces.
In a way, this is a return to a very old idea. For many years, most users only interacted with computers by typing on a blank screen — the command line was how you told the machine what to do. (Yes, ChatGPT is a lot of machines, and they’re not right there on your desk, but you get the idea.)
But then, a funny thing happened: we invented better interfaces! The trouble with the command line was that you needed to know exactly what to type and in which order to get the computer to behave. Pointing and clicking on big icons was much simpler, plus it was much easier to teach people what the computer could do through pictures and icons. The command line gave way to the graphical user interface, and the GUI still reigns supreme.
Developers never stopped trying to make chat UI work, though. WhatsApp is a good example: the company has spent years trying to figure out how users can use chat to interact with businesses. Allo, one of Google’s many failed messaging apps, hoped you might interact with an AI assistant inside chats with your friends. The first round of chatbot hype, circa about 2016, had a lot of very smart people thinking that messaging apps were the future of everything.
There’s just something alluring about the messaging interface, the “conversational AI.” It starts with the fact that we all know how to use it; messaging apps are how we keep in touch with the people we care about most, which means they’re a place we spend a lot of time and energy. You may not know how to navigate the recesses of the Uber app or how to find your frequent flier number in the Southwest app, but “text these words to this number” is a behavior almost anyone understands. In a market where people don’t want to download apps and mobile websites mostly still suck, messaging can simplify experiences in a big way.
Image: Microsoft
Bing (and everybody else) is taking the chat interface and running with it.
Also, while messaging isn’t the most advanced interface, it might be the most expandable. Take Slack, for instance: you probably think of it as a chat app, but in that back-and-forth interface, you can embed links, editable documents, interactive polls, informational bots, and so much more. WeChat is famously an entire platform — basically an entire internet — smushed into a messaging app. You can start with messaging and go a lot of places.
But so many of these tools stumble in the same ways. For quick exchanges of information, like business hours, chat is perfect — ask a question, get an answer. But browsing a catalog as a series of messages? No thanks. Buying a plane ticket with a thousand-message back-and-forth? Hard pass. It’s no different than voice assistants, and god help you if you’ve ever tried to even buy simple things with Alexa. (“For Charmin, say ‘three.’”) For most complicated things, a visual and dedicated UI is far better than a messaging window.
And when it comes to ChatGPT, Bard, Bing, and the rest, things get complicated really fast. These models are smart and collaborative, but you still have to know exactly what to ask for, in what way, and in what order to get what you want. The idea of a “prompt engineer,” the person you pay to know exactly how to coax the perfect image from Stable Diffusion or get ChatGPT to generate just the right Javascript, seems ridiculous but is actually an utterly necessary part of the equation. It’s no different than in the early computer era when only a few people knew how to tell the computer what to do. There are already marketplaces on which you can buy and sell really great prompts; there are prompt gurus and books about prompts; I assume Stanford is already working on a Prompt Engineering major that everyone will be taking soon.
The remarkable thing about generative AI is that it feels like it can do almost anything. That’s also the whole problem. When you can do anything, what do you do? Where do you start? How do you learn how to use it when your only window into its possibilities is a blinking cursor? Eventually, these companies might develop more visual, more interactive tools that help people truly understand what they can do and how it all works. (This is one reason to keep an eye on ChatGPT’s new plug-ins system, which is pretty straightforward for now but could quickly expand the things you can do in the chat window.) Right now, the best idea any of them have is to offer a few suggestions about things you might type.
AI was going to be a feature. Now it’s the product. And that means the text box is back. Messaging is the interface, again.
AI expert Meredith Broussard: ‘Racism, sexism and ableism are systemic problems’
The journalist and academic says that the bias encoded in artificial intelligence systems can’t be fixed with better data alone – the change has to be societal
Meredith Broussard is a data journalist and academic whose research focuses on bias in artificial intelligence (AI). She has been in the vanguard of raising awareness and sounding the alarm about unchecked AI. Her previous book, Artificial Unintelligence (2018), coined the term “technochauvinism” to describe the blind belief in the superiority of tech solutions to solve our problems. She appeared in the Netflix documentary Coded Bias (2020), which explores how algorithms encode and propagate discrimination. Her new book is MoreThan a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender and Ability Bias in Tech. Broussard is an associate professor at New York University’s Arthur L Carter Journalism Institute.
The message that bias can be embedded in our technological systems isn’t really new. Why do we need this book? This book is about helping people understand the very real social harms that can be embedded in technology. We have had an explosion of wonderful journalism and scholarship about algorithmic bias and the harms that have been experienced by people. I try to lift up that reporting and thinking. I also want people to know that we have methods now for measuring bias in algorithmic systems. They are not entirely unknowable black boxes: algorithmic auditing exists and can be done.
MoreThan a Glitch by Meredith Broussard is published by MIT Press (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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Collage: The Verge
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