January 30, 2026 • 31 mins
How do you feel about AI in your art, your music, and your video games? Oz is joined by Kill Switch host, Dexter Thomas, to discuss Switchbot's AI Art Frame and the video gamers who are holding developers to account. But will the anti-AI outrage continue to make change? Then, Oz updates us on last week’s World Economic Forum — one Davos attendee spent the night in jail and Canada’s PM says there’s a rupture in the world order. Europe is listening and threatening to part ways with American tech companies.
Additional Reading:
- An entrepreneur’s 13 hours in Davos jail: ‘The food was phenomenal’ | Semafor
- Europe Prepare For A Nightmare Scenario: The US Blocking Access to Tech | Wall Street Journal
- SwitchBot AI Art Frame Now Officially Available | Corporate - EQS News
- Angry gamers are forcing studios to scrap or rethink new releases | Washington Post
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is tech Stuff. I'm
as Lussian and.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
I'm Dexter Thomas filling in for care of Price.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Today. We've got two big stories to dive into. First,
a growing movement in Europe to prepare for a world
without access to US technology.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
And then can art lovers really complain away? AI gamers
are doing a pretty good job so far.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
All of that on the Weekend Tech It's Friday, January thirtieth. Dexter,
Welcome to tex Stuff. Excited to have you back.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Hey, I'm happy to be back.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
And congratulations on the good work over at kill Switch.
One of my favorite text off episodes of the last
year was you coming on to to us about the
history of Nintendo and the gang Buster's launch of Nintendo's which.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yeah, I feel like I'm becoming quickly the video game person,
even though I very rarely have enough time to play
video games in my personal life. But hey, listen, I'm
into it. I love talking about this stuff all day,
so I was very happy to be able to add
a little bit in Nintendo into the tech Stuff universe.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
While you've been following the world of video games without playing,
I've been following the world of Davos without going. So
President Trump dropped some bombshells, luckily not real ones not
yet on Europe, which we want to talk about. But
before we get there. Actually, there was a thankfully very comedic,
(01:43):
real life bomb scare at Davos that I want to
tell you all about.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Please enlighten me. I've been too busy not playing video games.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
So here's the story. A thirty one year old entrepreneur
called Sebastian was at Davos for the first time and
he was at a hotel party hosted by conference called DLD.
Sebastian was there like many tech entrepreneurs, hoping to pitch investors,
and he had a prototype with him for his company
called Verdico, and the product is a verification device to
(02:11):
fraud proof money transfers. So decided to put it down
and go in search of a salmon roll. Guess what
I keep next?
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Got to get that free sushi. Okay, listen, I've been there,
I get it. I get it.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
So Sebastian gets back to pick up the vertico. The
device is not there, but a cop is. Because here's
the thing. The device, as Sebastian describes it is a
black cube with hot glue blobs and wires coming out
of the side.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Oh yeah, no, okay, I definitely see where this is going.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Yeah, so Sebastian has made more of a splash than
he planned. He actually gave a phone interview to Semaphore
about the whole experience, which I think just bears playing
out because it really is comedy gold. So he has
a police officer waiting for him who speaks perfect English,
and the guy apparently brings out a fingerprint scanner and
(03:06):
says to Sebastian, I need to check if you're an
international spy. Sebastian gets taken to the local jail in
Davos and says, look, I understand it's all a big misunderstanding,
but I'm insomniac. I need my sleeping pills, my lu
nesta and that. The police officer said, well, if you're
a spy, those pills could be cyanide, so you can't
have them.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Wow. Oh they're taking this seriously. Okay, they're going on
James Bond here. Okay, I like this.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
And the next morning the Swiss police bring in a
tech expert to really sort of shake down Sebastian see
if he is what he says he is. And the
tech expert says, look, Sebastian, please explain your tech. So
Sebastian does his best, as he puts it, I do
my investment pitch. They brought the machine and the police
officer and Sebastian go through the code line by line.
(03:55):
And this is my favorite part of the whole story.
Sebastian says, I don't know the language that the code
it was written in because it was written by AI.
So Chris actually explained the code to me.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
That's not great. That's not great. I mean, for all
this dude knows it could be a bomb. Nice actually right,
he's got this innocent looking little brick though that he
thinks it is an innocent little looking brick, And how
do you know that it didn't Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
He did say, to be fair to him, I think
I'm the idiot in this listen.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
I didn't say I'm not gonna argue with the man.
I'm not gonna who am I? Who am I to judge?
I'll let him judge himself. Is this okay? This product?
And I'm just getting you know, super tinfoil conspiracy hat
theory here. I didn't know what this was before you
just told me about it. Is this a publicity stunt?
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Semaphore did actually ask him is this a publicity stune?
And he said, look, I promise it's not. I wouldn't
spend eighteen hundred euros on my ticket to spend the
whole weekend in jail, which I kind of believed.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Okay, yeah, fair, fair that that'd be an expensive and
kind of risky publicity stunt. Okay, this kind of does
remind me of something that happened in the past. Actually.
So it's March twenty ten, right, and somebody finds a
phone at a bar, and I think it's a Redwood city,
you know, up in the Bay Area. And this person
can't find the owner of the phone, so I think
(05:15):
he just takes it home, thinking okay, well, maybe i'll
I'll take it back the next day and maybe I'll
be able to connect with whoever the owner is the
next day. Fine, And then he looks at the phone
and it's plastic y, the outer shell is plastic key,
and you know, this person starts playing around with it
and tries to open it up. See maybe I can
figure out whose it is. Maybe there's info on there,
but the system keeps crashing every time he tries to
(05:38):
look at it. And there's these word barcodes on the
back of the phone, and so he starts pulling at
the phone casing and it comes off and it's this
plastic shell and there's a front facing camera on the phone.
Now this is March twenty ten. This is the iPhone four.
He's found a prototype for the not yet released iPhone
(06:00):
four at a bar. Yeah, so Gizmoto, the tech website,
just post an article about this and they it's a
full leak about the iPhone four. And so they post
the specs, They disassemble it, take a look inside, take
pictures of the inside, and it turns out, Yeah, some
engineer he was testing it forgot the phone at the bar,
(06:23):
just like left it on the bar stool, went home,
and some random person found it. And from what I read,
that unnamed engineer was very embarrassed. But at the end
of all that still had a job.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
I can imagine that that kind of been the most
fun conversation.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
No, no, I don't think. I don't think anybody turned to.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Work like ceremony and your busses, busses busses, busses, Like
Steve is freaking out.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
That is Yeah, you know, leaving the prototype on a
barstool is not how you want the world to find
out about your next product.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
What's the bastin If you're listening, you know, hopefully for
you, your your product has the same the same effect as
the iPhone forwarded on the world. Good luck coming back
to the sort of Davos. So there's a story in
the Wall Street Journal which had the headline Europe prepares
for a nightmare scenario the US blocking access to tech,
(07:23):
which really caught my eye.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Yeah, what's going on here?
Speaker 1 (07:26):
So I would say since February last year, Vice President
Vance went to the Munich Security Conference and basically said,
you guys are on your own. You know, this new
world order and it's going to be very, very different.
So nine months later that, you know, the Greenland threats
ratcheted up, and if you remember when Trump went to Davos,
it still wasn't clear if he was considering actually occupying Greenland.
(07:49):
He walked away from that actually over Davos. But nonetheless,
I think the whole of Europe has woken up belatedly
to the idea that it's a very different relationship with
our friends across the Atlantic. And so last week the
European Parliament passed this law about technological sovereignty favoring European
tech products and new legislation to promote European cloud providers.
(08:12):
This sounds super dry and boring and also futile because
it's really, really, really hard to get off the US
tech infrastructure if your europe obviously Google, Amazon, Meta, etc.
But I just thought it was pretty interesting because you know,
sometimes you see things and it's the beginning of something.
(08:35):
But if Europe is really serious about weaning itself from
relying on US tech platforms and products, we could be
kind of entering into a very different world.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Yeah, and I think you're totally right. If you remember
just recently, there was a whole bunch of sites that
just went down. You remember this, this was tail end
of twenty twenty five, and this was the Amazon Web
Services Right service going down, right. And this didn't just
affect you know, whether or not you can get you know,
your pizza in two hours from you know, Jeff Bezos
(09:13):
dot com or whatever. That's not what this is about.
This is affecting everything. So this affected the trains in
the Netherlands and systems went down, trains were running late,
people couldn't get access to services, you know. And I
spoke to somebody who who was referencing this. Imagine if
you need to go to the hospital because you're about
(09:34):
to deliver your baby and something's up with the hospital
systems because those run on Amazon Web Services and they're
connected to some server in Pennsylvania. Why are you worried
about what's happening in Pennsylvania when you're in Europe. But
this is something that I think a lot of people
around the world are waking up to, is that they're
(09:54):
depending on a the US US based companies, but also
just three companies. The vast majority of the Internet runs
on three US based companies.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
And it's one thing I think if there's like a
glitch and Amazon Web Services goes down, and obviously some
people have horrible real world consequences, but people I think
willing to accept some kind of like random system risk
in the technology they use. But the idea that the
President of the United States could turn around and say, well,
if you don't do what we like, we're going to
(10:25):
turn your Internet off or turn your cloud computing off.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
It just shows.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
How vulnerable Europe in particular has become. Obviously a different
story in China to our you know, assumed benevolent cousins
across the Atlantic. Actually, did you see the premise of
Canada Mark Carney's remarks at DeVos takester? I didn't know,
so I think maybe we could play the tape.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
We knew the story of the international rules based order
was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient,
and we knew that international law applied with vary rigor
depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
This fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular help
provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system,
(11:13):
collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
We participated in.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
The rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps
between rhetoric and reality.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
This bargain no longer works. Shout out to my man
for using the phrase hegemony. We don't use that word enough.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
I like Itemony. I didn't even know his hegemony.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
Oh, hegemony many money. You spend enough time in grad
school and you get that word thrown around of parties. Man,
that's an important word. Yeah, you know what he's what
he's talking about. There is bluntin speaking convenience. Yeah, right,
is things aren't I don't like what the United States
(12:02):
is doing all the time, but things are working well enough.
At a certain point that breaks down and I think,
you know, this is something that I think a lot
of just regular consumers are also thinking about recently, is well,
you know, my devices do what I want. I don't
love that I'm kind of being forced into upgrading every year,
but okay, but some people are starting to push back
(12:24):
against that. The convergence again of geopolitical stuff, and I
think what everyday consumers are thinking is pretty interesting here.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
I think you make a really good point the connection
between those two things, because this concept of digital serfdom,
right where we like live on these tech platforms and
we like spend time on them, and then our time
is monetized and we basically lay before the platforms and
there's like a setplus value which is captured by their platforms.
The President of France kind of adopted this language and
said this is the refusal of being a vassal. So
(12:55):
it's interesting all these academic kind of ideas about how
technology works actually playing out in global relations geopolitical relations
right now. The issue, of course is just as it's
very very hard, as we will know, not to use
Gmail or iPhone or Instagram, it's also very hard if
you're Europe not to use Google Cloud or Amazon Cloud,
et cetera. There have been some attempts kind of before
(13:17):
it became a political crisis in the last couple of years.
So these US companies like Google and Microsoft and Amazon
have these kind of European subsidies that are managed by
local European boards and theoretically the data is privately stored
in Europe so that the NSA and others can't you know,
look at it. But these fictions, to Carney's point, are
(13:40):
you know, under scrutiny, appear more more like what they are,
and it makes me think a bit about this. Just
the difficulty of disintermediating makes me think about the TikTok story,
where there's always political pressure to you know, take TikTok
away from China to protect you know, American national security
and make sure that you know, the youth isn't being influenced.
And now the deal's kind of been struck, but it's
(14:02):
the Chinese is still involved, and there are kind of,
you know, emerging rumors that actually the US government is
now directly controlling the flow of information in a way
that the Chinese government never did in the US.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Yeah, it's this is so interesting, right because you know,
the on paper the reason for divesting TikTok from China
was because of security issues. Now politicians would would come
right out and say that, oh, because this is because
of propaganda. We don't want you know, the Chinese propagandizing
(14:34):
our youth. The thing is, propaganda's not illegal. There's actually
nothing wrong with that legally speaking. China can say whatever
they want to the youth or the elderly or the
whatever of America. There's nothing Actually politicians shouldn't in a
legal sense, really be stepping in there. They can dislike it,
but you start to run into you know, First Amendment,
(14:56):
you start to run out of free speech there. Right.
But now I think we're in a very interesting situation where,
you know, the kids on TikTok, these kids won't get
off their phones, right, they're being exposed to the idea
that wait a second, hold on, I thought y'all were
telling me that China was doing all the censorship. Again,
(15:19):
there's been an outage, but you've got a lot of
people who were maybe prematurely thinking that something is being censored,
but maybe not prematurely thinking that something is being sent
to ice videos, right correct, right, right. And so I
think we're a really interesting situation because again, I think
(15:40):
Americans aren't used to comparing the actions of their government
to stuff they've read about in like history books.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Well, you reference gradical conversations. Obviously up there with the
hegemony was the Monroe doctrine or now as we know,
the Dunroad doctrines.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Right, Yeah, there's some like high school sophomore saying whoa, whoa,
whoa hold on that was on my test last week.
Hold on, you tell me this stuff? Is I need
this in the real world? Really? Wow?
Speaker 1 (16:09):
Okay, So the Europeans, on the one hand, appear to
have no leverage. On the other hand, they kind of do.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Right.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Europe owns two trillion dollars of US treasuries, and the
US's main exports are what are called digital deliverable services,
which is basically AI advertising, et cetera, and the US
exports three hundred and sixty billion dollars a year of
digital deliverable services to Europe, which is really pretty significant.
(16:38):
So could Europe stop buying? What would it take for
them to stop buying? They would have to develop their
own cloud computing infrastructure, They would have to develop their
own AI model. They have Mistrial, the French company is
the kind of is the market leader, but the kind
of the journey from here to there in terms of
actually being able to take advantage of this leverage is
really really great. And I think it's the same in
(16:58):
terms of you know, as we think about individuals, it's
like it's very hard to have enough cohesion as a
group to actually manifest political power after the break, will
we tolerate AI in our houses and in the arts?
(17:20):
Stay with us? So, Dexter, welcome back. You very kindly
stuck with me through my European tech sovereignty story. Normally,
the way Karen I do this is we kind of
(17:40):
bring each other one or two stories and and kind
of share why they've grabbed us. So I'm curious what
you've brought this week and why.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
Yeah. Well, I don't know about you, but everywhere in
real life online for me, my social circle is full
of people fighting about AI an art, and they're sick
of seeing there's Cica sine ai slop on Instagram, the
Cica sine ai slop on TikTok. They're sick of being
(18:11):
asked to buy refrigerators that talk to them whatever. Right,
But a lot of the argument that I'm seeing about
AI and art is, you know, on streaming services, things
that you subscribe to, and then AI is kind of
slipping into it and seeping into it in a way
that they.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Don't want Spotify famously.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Right. Right, But let's reverse that as would you buy
on purpose? Would you buy AI art and say hanging
up in your house?
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Absolutely not, that's an easy one for me.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Well, there is a company that is hoping you will
change your mind pretty soon because they're selling an AI
art frame. Basically, it's a it's a standard frame. It's
like a you know, one of those digital picture frames
that you can get. It's connected to an app on
your phone and you can put diff images on it,
or there's a feature where you can have it generate
(19:05):
an AI generated image for the frame.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
So you can basically say, you know, make me today,
I want a momma's water lilies, but with me in
it and tomorrow I want whatever.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
Else precisely exactly that. So I think it uses Google's
Nano Banana, you know, one of the image generation services,
and so it uses e ink basically like a kindle.
But here's the thing is color e ink. The technology
isn't quite there yet, so it's not very sharp, and
so they even write on their site that it's best
(19:37):
viewed from a distance, which is her big house. Yeah,
which is just I think, just a really funny way
of saying like, look, man, this actually isn't gonna look
very good. So you interested? Are you sold yet?
Speaker 1 (19:51):
But yeah, I'm curious about this. I mean I'm not,
I'm not, I'm not grabbed by it, but I do
feel like there's so much investment and excitement in what's
going to be the next generation of AI enabled consumer
products that like, maybe I'm at lodite on this one.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Well, you know, speaking of investment, I hope you're ready
to make an investment here. The thirty one inch frame
is one two hundred ninety nine dollars and ninety nine cents. Wow,
or as you can get a four pack four are
you ready? Five thousand one hundred and ninety nine dollars
and ninety six cents.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Has a slim discount for buying bulk?
Speaker 2 (20:26):
That none? Actually, there's no discount. I actually had to
do the math again. I had to type it in.
It was a whole lot of second. Is there any discount? No,
it's just four times for that's it.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
How do these companies how do they afford to go
into production? It's like a kickstarter or this. This is
a real thing.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
The company's called Switchbot, and you might be familiar with
this because they're mostly known for selling like automatic locks
for your doors or surveillance cameras.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
Are you intrigued yourself? DEXTRAE Team about buying one?
Speaker 2 (20:59):
I am not going to buy this, but you know,
there certainly are people who are very excited about this.
I've seen YouTube videos of people who are who are
really excited about it, and you know, it just makes
me think a lot about this conversation that we keep
seeing about AI. And there's people who are very very
(21:21):
much against AI in any of the arts, right, But
then there's always somebody who is going to buy it,
you know.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
I mean I think it's like Mission creep, right, It's
like you kind of accept It's like a little bit
like the frog in the potl you accept more and
more AI in your art. Hopefully they'll become like a
point where there's like a tipping point where there's too
much AI and people respect and wish to engage with
human creativity. I'm somewhat heartened as a sometime content creator
(21:52):
that like the average human being still apparently prefers to
engage with human generated content, but I am stressed that
that may not forever.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
This is something I've been thinking about a lot. So
I listened to a lot of music on YouTube. Actually
that's mostly where I listen to music, just because you know,
there's weird remixes and stuff that it just doesn't exist
on other platforms, right, Things that maybe legally shouldn't be
uploaded there, but it's there, so you know, hey, I'm
not complaining. But one thing that I a trend that
(22:23):
I've noticed, and actually we did a kill Switch episode
on this. Are you familiar with lo fi hip hop?
Speaker 1 (22:28):
Vaguely vaguely but not really.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Yeah, So basically, just imagine very chill background, the kind
of you know, just instrumental type stuff that will be
playing in the back of a you know, kind of
trendy coffee shop, right, right, So this was a trend,
you know, kind of big in late twenty tens, and
people started generating it with AI and the lo fi
(22:52):
hip hop scene and that there's a scene of beat
makers who really love this stuff and think they've found
they've found a community in it. There's people who've just
stopped me making the music because they feel like a
lot of the listeners just can't tell the difference between
AI and the real thing or don't care. And that's
what's really interesting me is we'll just put it this way.
(23:14):
My thing is music, Like I really really really care
about music, but you know, an AI generated image personally
for me, if I'm going to be very honest, it
doesn't bother me as much as music does. And what
I worry about is that everybody's got their own thing
that they care about, and there's how can there be
(23:35):
a united front against this sort of thing.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
The switchbop frame is interesting to you because essentially it's
a consumer referendum on like whether it's the music business
or the you know, visual arts industry or whatever it
may be. You think this is something of a belwether
for like where people are in terms of accepting this
technology in their lives.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
And I just think that this is yet another step
in more commodification of art and it's going to really
really bother some people. And I think a lot of
people will listen to this and they'll say, man, my
only problem with this is that it's too expensive. Let
me know when the price has come down. And I think,
(24:18):
and I can't judge that person that I think that's
just where we are. This is happening in video games
as well. I don't know if you've seen this.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
I have been following the kind of with interest the
video game AI Dance. I'm not a video game person,
but I got a friend who loves video games, and
he was talking about this new game, Ah, his name
escapes me, but basically saying that there's kind of been
this breakthrough recently where computer characters powered by AI are
(24:48):
much more responsive and actually learned from your player behavior
in a way that previous generations of games didn't, and
how this has kind of blown his mind.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Yeah. So, I mean, this is this is one of
those things that kind of cuts with ways. Because there's
a game called Clear Obscure Expedition thirty three. It one
Game of the Year at the Indie Game Awards, really prestigious, right,
But basically some gamers were looking more closely at the
game and started posting these images of what really looked
(25:18):
like AI generated textures for some stuff like newspapers. You
know how it used to be when you'd ask any
AI image generator to generate text, it would all be
garbled right right, And the company coppt to it. They said, yeah,
you know, we used it for placeholders, but I guess
some stuff slipped through, And then the Indie Game Awards
took back the award.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
I fascinate think that's crazy.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
Well, hold on, why do you think that's crazy?
Speaker 1 (25:43):
I think if you're at the margins using it, like
as an indie creator, whatever field you're in, if you're
at the margins trying to use AI to like make
you a creative thing, like a little cheaper to make
or a little better, you're not outsourcing your brain, your
creative mind to AI, like using a generative tool. I mean,
it's like saying, oh, they use like Adobe to make
(26:04):
the move to me. Anyway, I'm like, I think there's
there's a light clear line the stand between optimizing something
which is like amazing that you've created as a human
with AI and like having AI creating nonsense.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Okay, let's let's step this line a little bit further. Okay,
So video game publisher Running with Scissors. I don't know
if you've played the Postal games. I wouldn't recommend it. Okay,
it's a very very particular audience. I'm just gonna leave
it at that. So new Games supposed to be coming out,
a new game in the Postal series. They drop the trailer.
Pretty instantly. People are looking at this video trailer and
(26:37):
they're saying, I think this is AI. Running with Scissors
says they're canceling the game. And then as people are
continuing to accuse them of using AI, first they say no.
Then the co owner says, look, if anybody has an
AI accusation, quit the server, like, get get out of
their Discord server. And then this is a quote co
(27:01):
owner says, I'll go a step further. The anti AI
mob has ruined art. Wow, can I say that for
you one more time? The anti AI mob has ruined art.
I'm still trying to square that circle.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
That's the big inversion. That's pretty nuts.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
But you know, I think what you said is really
interesting because the kinds of conversations we're seeing here where
people really are pushing back against AI. This is happening
at the indie level. These indie developers, they don't have
the kind of firepower, they don't have the kind of
resources to design stuff like these big studios. But it
(27:44):
is the smaller studios who really do have to listen
to the players because if they don't, they don't sell games.
They'll jump ship. You know, the difference between breaking even
and just completely going into bankruptcy. That margin's pretty thin
for an indie developer. Meanwhile, you've got the head of
(28:04):
Epic Games, which is this is a company that makes Fortnite,
Yeah right, saying yeah, saying that games shouldn't be labeled
with AI. They shouldn't have to have a label this
has made with AI, because pretty soon everything's gonna be
made with AI.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Anyway, the same friend who told me about this game,
it's like a shooting game where you shoot robots. But
and now the robots like appear to be learning from
your particular unique playing style as a human.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Are you talking about are you talking about art creators?
Speaker 1 (28:30):
That's right, but heat Basically, these games have become more
engaging because they're more responsive to.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Me, right, And I think that there's I think there's
a line to be drawn even amongst you know, developers,
And I've talked to a few developers about this, and
there are people who really feel like generative AI should
not be used in a game at all because functionally,
what it's doing is it's theft. And a lot of
players are also worried about copyright, right, could something sneak
(28:59):
in to the images that you're using, even as a placeholder,
that actually ends up being way too similar to something
that actually exists out there. You know, if I make
a game and say, hey, generate a happy Italian plumber
who jumps a lot for the background, like Nintendo is
gonna come and send people to my door, I shouldn't
(29:19):
do that, right, And so, even if it's not as
extreme as that, you do kind of need to be
careful when you're selling a product that has anything that's
generated by AI. But things like the behavior of an
enemy character or something like that, that, for I think
is something that's completely different that has to do with
the game mechanics. And I don't think anybody who's a
(29:42):
game developer is saying AI should never touch a game
at all. It depends on the type of AI that's
being used. But then again, even the stuff that some
people are pushing back against. You know, if the large
companies are deciding to use it, do you mean to
tell me that people aren't going to play g A
six because there's some AI in it?
Speaker 1 (30:01):
I don't know, Man, gonna have.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Yeah when it comes out, If it comes out, Yeah,
(30:26):
And that's gonna be it for this week for tech Stuff.
I'm Dexter, Thomas.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
Dexter, Thank you. I'm mos Velocian. This episode was produced
by Eliza Dennis and Melissa Slaughter. It was executive produced
by me Karra Price, Julian Nutter, and Kate Osborne for
Kaleidoscope and Katrin Norvel for iHeart Podcasts. The engineer is
Behead Fraser and Kyle Murdoch mixed this episode and also
wrote our theme song. Please do rate and review the
show wherever you listen, and reach out to us at
(30:51):
tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com with thoughts, ideas, suggestions,
et cetera. We love hearing from you.
From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts. This is tech Stuff. I'm
as Lussian and.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
I'm Dexter Thomas filling in for care of Price.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
Today. We've got two big stories to dive into. First,
a growing movement in Europe to prepare for a world
without access to US technology.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
And then can art lovers really complain away? AI gamers
are doing a pretty good job so far.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
All of that on the Weekend Tech It's Friday, January thirtieth. Dexter,
Welcome to tex Stuff. Excited to have you back.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Hey, I'm happy to be back.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
And congratulations on the good work over at kill Switch.
One of my favorite text off episodes of the last
year was you coming on to to us about the
history of Nintendo and the gang Buster's launch of Nintendo's which.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Yeah, I feel like I'm becoming quickly the video game person,
even though I very rarely have enough time to play
video games in my personal life. But hey, listen, I'm
into it. I love talking about this stuff all day,
so I was very happy to be able to add
a little bit in Nintendo into the tech Stuff universe.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
While you've been following the world of video games without playing,
I've been following the world of Davos without going. So
President Trump dropped some bombshells, luckily not real ones not
yet on Europe, which we want to talk about. But
before we get there. Actually, there was a thankfully very comedic,
(01:43):
real life bomb scare at Davos that I want to
tell you all about.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Please enlighten me. I've been too busy not playing video games.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
So here's the story. A thirty one year old entrepreneur
called Sebastian was at Davos for the first time and
he was at a hotel party hosted by conference called DLD.
Sebastian was there like many tech entrepreneurs, hoping to pitch investors,
and he had a prototype with him for his company
called Verdico, and the product is a verification device to
(02:11):
fraud proof money transfers. So decided to put it down
and go in search of a salmon roll. Guess what
I keep next?
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Got to get that free sushi. Okay, listen, I've been there,
I get it. I get it.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
So Sebastian gets back to pick up the vertico. The
device is not there, but a cop is. Because here's
the thing. The device, as Sebastian describes it is a
black cube with hot glue blobs and wires coming out
of the side.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Oh yeah, no, okay, I definitely see where this is going.
Speaker 1 (02:45):
Yeah, so Sebastian has made more of a splash than
he planned. He actually gave a phone interview to Semaphore
about the whole experience, which I think just bears playing
out because it really is comedy gold. So he has
a police officer waiting for him who speaks perfect English,
and the guy apparently brings out a fingerprint scanner and
(03:06):
says to Sebastian, I need to check if you're an
international spy. Sebastian gets taken to the local jail in
Davos and says, look, I understand it's all a big misunderstanding,
but I'm insomniac. I need my sleeping pills, my lu
nesta and that. The police officer said, well, if you're
a spy, those pills could be cyanide, so you can't
have them.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Wow. Oh they're taking this seriously. Okay, they're going on
James Bond here. Okay, I like this.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
And the next morning the Swiss police bring in a
tech expert to really sort of shake down Sebastian see
if he is what he says he is. And the
tech expert says, look, Sebastian, please explain your tech. So
Sebastian does his best, as he puts it, I do
my investment pitch. They brought the machine and the police
officer and Sebastian go through the code line by line.
(03:55):
And this is my favorite part of the whole story.
Sebastian says, I don't know the language that the code
it was written in because it was written by AI.
So Chris actually explained the code to me.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
That's not great. That's not great. I mean, for all
this dude knows it could be a bomb. Nice actually right,
he's got this innocent looking little brick though that he
thinks it is an innocent little looking brick, And how
do you know that it didn't Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
He did say, to be fair to him, I think
I'm the idiot in this listen.
Speaker 2 (04:24):
I didn't say I'm not gonna argue with the man.
I'm not gonna who am I? Who am I to judge?
I'll let him judge himself. Is this okay? This product?
And I'm just getting you know, super tinfoil conspiracy hat
theory here. I didn't know what this was before you
just told me about it. Is this a publicity stunt?
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Semaphore did actually ask him is this a publicity stune?
And he said, look, I promise it's not. I wouldn't
spend eighteen hundred euros on my ticket to spend the
whole weekend in jail, which I kind of believed.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Okay, yeah, fair, fair that that'd be an expensive and
kind of risky publicity stunt. Okay, this kind of does
remind me of something that happened in the past. Actually.
So it's March twenty ten, right, and somebody finds a
phone at a bar, and I think it's a Redwood city,
you know, up in the Bay Area. And this person
can't find the owner of the phone, so I think
(05:15):
he just takes it home, thinking okay, well, maybe i'll
I'll take it back the next day and maybe I'll
be able to connect with whoever the owner is the
next day. Fine, And then he looks at the phone
and it's plastic y, the outer shell is plastic key,
and you know, this person starts playing around with it
and tries to open it up. See maybe I can
figure out whose it is. Maybe there's info on there,
but the system keeps crashing every time he tries to
(05:38):
look at it. And there's these word barcodes on the
back of the phone, and so he starts pulling at
the phone casing and it comes off and it's this
plastic shell and there's a front facing camera on the phone.
Now this is March twenty ten. This is the iPhone four.
He's found a prototype for the not yet released iPhone
(06:00):
four at a bar. Yeah, so Gizmoto, the tech website,
just post an article about this and they it's a
full leak about the iPhone four. And so they post
the specs, They disassemble it, take a look inside, take
pictures of the inside, and it turns out, Yeah, some
engineer he was testing it forgot the phone at the bar,
(06:23):
just like left it on the bar stool, went home,
and some random person found it. And from what I read,
that unnamed engineer was very embarrassed. But at the end
of all that still had a job.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
I can imagine that that kind of been the most
fun conversation.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
No, no, I don't think. I don't think anybody turned to.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
Work like ceremony and your busses, busses busses, busses, Like
Steve is freaking out.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
That is Yeah, you know, leaving the prototype on a
barstool is not how you want the world to find
out about your next product.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
What's the bastin If you're listening, you know, hopefully for
you, your your product has the same the same effect as
the iPhone forwarded on the world. Good luck coming back
to the sort of Davos. So there's a story in
the Wall Street Journal which had the headline Europe prepares
for a nightmare scenario the US blocking access to tech,
(07:23):
which really caught my eye.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Yeah, what's going on here?
Speaker 1 (07:26):
So I would say since February last year, Vice President
Vance went to the Munich Security Conference and basically said,
you guys are on your own. You know, this new
world order and it's going to be very, very different.
So nine months later that, you know, the Greenland threats
ratcheted up, and if you remember when Trump went to Davos,
it still wasn't clear if he was considering actually occupying Greenland.
(07:49):
He walked away from that actually over Davos. But nonetheless,
I think the whole of Europe has woken up belatedly
to the idea that it's a very different relationship with
our friends across the Atlantic. And so last week the
European Parliament passed this law about technological sovereignty favoring European
tech products and new legislation to promote European cloud providers.
(08:12):
This sounds super dry and boring and also futile because
it's really, really, really hard to get off the US
tech infrastructure if your europe obviously Google, Amazon, Meta, etc.
But I just thought it was pretty interesting because you know,
sometimes you see things and it's the beginning of something.
(08:35):
But if Europe is really serious about weaning itself from
relying on US tech platforms and products, we could be
kind of entering into a very different world.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Yeah, and I think you're totally right. If you remember
just recently, there was a whole bunch of sites that
just went down. You remember this, this was tail end
of twenty twenty five, and this was the Amazon Web
Services Right service going down, right. And this didn't just
affect you know, whether or not you can get you know,
your pizza in two hours from you know, Jeff Bezos
(09:13):
dot com or whatever. That's not what this is about.
This is affecting everything. So this affected the trains in
the Netherlands and systems went down, trains were running late,
people couldn't get access to services, you know. And I
spoke to somebody who who was referencing this. Imagine if
you need to go to the hospital because you're about
(09:34):
to deliver your baby and something's up with the hospital
systems because those run on Amazon Web Services and they're
connected to some server in Pennsylvania. Why are you worried
about what's happening in Pennsylvania when you're in Europe. But
this is something that I think a lot of people
around the world are waking up to, is that they're
(09:54):
depending on a the US US based companies, but also
just three companies. The vast majority of the Internet runs
on three US based companies.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
And it's one thing I think if there's like a
glitch and Amazon Web Services goes down, and obviously some
people have horrible real world consequences, but people I think
willing to accept some kind of like random system risk
in the technology they use. But the idea that the
President of the United States could turn around and say, well,
if you don't do what we like, we're going to
(10:25):
turn your Internet off or turn your cloud computing off.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
It just shows.
Speaker 1 (10:29):
How vulnerable Europe in particular has become. Obviously a different
story in China to our you know, assumed benevolent cousins
across the Atlantic. Actually, did you see the premise of
Canada Mark Carney's remarks at DeVos takester? I didn't know,
so I think maybe we could play the tape.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
We knew the story of the international rules based order
was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient,
and we knew that international law applied with vary rigor
depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
This fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular help
provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system,
(11:13):
collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
We participated in.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
The rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps
between rhetoric and reality.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
This bargain no longer works. Shout out to my man
for using the phrase hegemony. We don't use that word enough.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
I like Itemony. I didn't even know his hegemony.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
Oh, hegemony many money. You spend enough time in grad
school and you get that word thrown around of parties. Man,
that's an important word. Yeah, you know what he's what
he's talking about. There is bluntin speaking convenience. Yeah, right,
is things aren't I don't like what the United States
(12:02):
is doing all the time, but things are working well enough.
At a certain point that breaks down and I think,
you know, this is something that I think a lot
of just regular consumers are also thinking about recently, is well,
you know, my devices do what I want. I don't
love that I'm kind of being forced into upgrading every year,
but okay, but some people are starting to push back
(12:24):
against that. The convergence again of geopolitical stuff, and I
think what everyday consumers are thinking is pretty interesting here.
Speaker 1 (12:32):
I think you make a really good point the connection
between those two things, because this concept of digital serfdom,
right where we like live on these tech platforms and
we like spend time on them, and then our time
is monetized and we basically lay before the platforms and
there's like a setplus value which is captured by their platforms.
The President of France kind of adopted this language and
said this is the refusal of being a vassal. So
(12:55):
it's interesting all these academic kind of ideas about how
technology works actually playing out in global relations geopolitical relations
right now. The issue, of course is just as it's
very very hard, as we will know, not to use
Gmail or iPhone or Instagram, it's also very hard if
you're Europe not to use Google Cloud or Amazon Cloud,
et cetera. There have been some attempts kind of before
(13:17):
it became a political crisis in the last couple of years.
So these US companies like Google and Microsoft and Amazon
have these kind of European subsidies that are managed by
local European boards and theoretically the data is privately stored
in Europe so that the NSA and others can't you know,
look at it. But these fictions, to Carney's point, are
(13:40):
you know, under scrutiny, appear more more like what they are,
and it makes me think a bit about this. Just
the difficulty of disintermediating makes me think about the TikTok story,
where there's always political pressure to you know, take TikTok
away from China to protect you know, American national security
and make sure that you know, the youth isn't being influenced.
And now the deal's kind of been struck, but it's
(14:02):
the Chinese is still involved, and there are kind of,
you know, emerging rumors that actually the US government is
now directly controlling the flow of information in a way
that the Chinese government never did in the US.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Yeah, it's this is so interesting, right because you know,
the on paper the reason for divesting TikTok from China
was because of security issues. Now politicians would would come
right out and say that, oh, because this is because
of propaganda. We don't want you know, the Chinese propagandizing
(14:34):
our youth. The thing is, propaganda's not illegal. There's actually
nothing wrong with that legally speaking. China can say whatever
they want to the youth or the elderly or the
whatever of America. There's nothing Actually politicians shouldn't in a
legal sense, really be stepping in there. They can dislike it,
but you start to run into you know, First Amendment,
(14:56):
you start to run out of free speech there. Right.
But now I think we're in a very interesting situation where,
you know, the kids on TikTok, these kids won't get
off their phones, right, they're being exposed to the idea
that wait a second, hold on, I thought y'all were
telling me that China was doing all the censorship. Again,
(15:19):
there's been an outage, but you've got a lot of
people who were maybe prematurely thinking that something is being censored,
but maybe not prematurely thinking that something is being sent
to ice videos, right correct, right, right. And so I
think we're a really interesting situation because again, I think
(15:40):
Americans aren't used to comparing the actions of their government
to stuff they've read about in like history books.
Speaker 1 (15:49):
Well, you reference gradical conversations. Obviously up there with the
hegemony was the Monroe doctrine or now as we know,
the Dunroad doctrines.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Right, Yeah, there's some like high school sophomore saying whoa, whoa,
whoa hold on that was on my test last week.
Hold on, you tell me this stuff? Is I need
this in the real world? Really? Wow?
Speaker 1 (16:09):
Okay, So the Europeans, on the one hand, appear to
have no leverage. On the other hand, they kind of do.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
Right.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Europe owns two trillion dollars of US treasuries, and the
US's main exports are what are called digital deliverable services,
which is basically AI advertising, et cetera, and the US
exports three hundred and sixty billion dollars a year of
digital deliverable services to Europe, which is really pretty significant.
(16:38):
So could Europe stop buying? What would it take for
them to stop buying? They would have to develop their
own cloud computing infrastructure, They would have to develop their
own AI model. They have Mistrial, the French company is
the kind of is the market leader, but the kind
of the journey from here to there in terms of
actually being able to take advantage of this leverage is
really really great. And I think it's the same in
(16:58):
terms of you know, as we think about individuals, it's
like it's very hard to have enough cohesion as a
group to actually manifest political power after the break, will
we tolerate AI in our houses and in the arts?
(17:20):
Stay with us? So, Dexter, welcome back. You very kindly
stuck with me through my European tech sovereignty story. Normally,
the way Karen I do this is we kind of
(17:40):
bring each other one or two stories and and kind
of share why they've grabbed us. So I'm curious what
you've brought this week and why.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
Yeah. Well, I don't know about you, but everywhere in
real life online for me, my social circle is full
of people fighting about AI an art, and they're sick
of seeing there's Cica sine ai slop on Instagram, the
Cica sine ai slop on TikTok. They're sick of being
(18:11):
asked to buy refrigerators that talk to them whatever. Right,
But a lot of the argument that I'm seeing about
AI and art is, you know, on streaming services, things
that you subscribe to, and then AI is kind of
slipping into it and seeping into it in a way
that they.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Don't want Spotify famously.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Right. Right, But let's reverse that as would you buy
on purpose? Would you buy AI art and say hanging
up in your house?
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Absolutely not, that's an easy one for me.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Well, there is a company that is hoping you will
change your mind pretty soon because they're selling an AI
art frame. Basically, it's a it's a standard frame. It's
like a you know, one of those digital picture frames
that you can get. It's connected to an app on
your phone and you can put diff images on it,
or there's a feature where you can have it generate
(19:05):
an AI generated image for the frame.
Speaker 1 (19:08):
So you can basically say, you know, make me today,
I want a momma's water lilies, but with me in
it and tomorrow I want whatever.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
Else precisely exactly that. So I think it uses Google's
Nano Banana, you know, one of the image generation services,
and so it uses e ink basically like a kindle.
But here's the thing is color e ink. The technology
isn't quite there yet, so it's not very sharp, and
so they even write on their site that it's best
(19:37):
viewed from a distance, which is her big house. Yeah,
which is just I think, just a really funny way
of saying like, look, man, this actually isn't gonna look
very good. So you interested? Are you sold yet?
Speaker 1 (19:51):
But yeah, I'm curious about this. I mean I'm not,
I'm not, I'm not grabbed by it, but I do
feel like there's so much investment and excitement in what's
going to be the next generation of AI enabled consumer
products that like, maybe I'm at lodite on this one.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
Well, you know, speaking of investment, I hope you're ready
to make an investment here. The thirty one inch frame
is one two hundred ninety nine dollars and ninety nine cents. Wow,
or as you can get a four pack four are
you ready? Five thousand one hundred and ninety nine dollars
and ninety six cents.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Has a slim discount for buying bulk?
Speaker 2 (20:26):
That none? Actually, there's no discount. I actually had to
do the math again. I had to type it in.
It was a whole lot of second. Is there any discount? No,
it's just four times for that's it.
Speaker 1 (20:40):
How do these companies how do they afford to go
into production? It's like a kickstarter or this. This is
a real thing.
Speaker 2 (20:45):
The company's called Switchbot, and you might be familiar with
this because they're mostly known for selling like automatic locks
for your doors or surveillance cameras.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
Are you intrigued yourself? DEXTRAE Team about buying one?
Speaker 2 (20:59):
I am not going to buy this, but you know,
there certainly are people who are very excited about this.
I've seen YouTube videos of people who are who are
really excited about it, and you know, it just makes
me think a lot about this conversation that we keep
seeing about AI. And there's people who are very very
(21:21):
much against AI in any of the arts, right, But
then there's always somebody who is going to buy it,
you know.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
I mean I think it's like Mission creep, right, It's
like you kind of accept It's like a little bit
like the frog in the potl you accept more and
more AI in your art. Hopefully they'll become like a
point where there's like a tipping point where there's too
much AI and people respect and wish to engage with
human creativity. I'm somewhat heartened as a sometime content creator
(21:52):
that like the average human being still apparently prefers to
engage with human generated content, but I am stressed that
that may not forever.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
This is something I've been thinking about a lot. So
I listened to a lot of music on YouTube. Actually
that's mostly where I listen to music, just because you know,
there's weird remixes and stuff that it just doesn't exist
on other platforms, right, Things that maybe legally shouldn't be
uploaded there, but it's there, so you know, hey, I'm
not complaining. But one thing that I a trend that
(22:23):
I've noticed, and actually we did a kill Switch episode
on this. Are you familiar with lo fi hip hop?
Speaker 1 (22:28):
Vaguely vaguely but not really.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Yeah, So basically, just imagine very chill background, the kind
of you know, just instrumental type stuff that will be
playing in the back of a you know, kind of
trendy coffee shop, right, right, So this was a trend,
you know, kind of big in late twenty tens, and
people started generating it with AI and the lo fi
(22:52):
hip hop scene and that there's a scene of beat
makers who really love this stuff and think they've found
they've found a community in it. There's people who've just
stopped me making the music because they feel like a
lot of the listeners just can't tell the difference between
AI and the real thing or don't care. And that's
what's really interesting me is we'll just put it this way.
(23:14):
My thing is music, Like I really really really care
about music, but you know, an AI generated image personally
for me, if I'm going to be very honest, it
doesn't bother me as much as music does. And what
I worry about is that everybody's got their own thing
that they care about, and there's how can there be
(23:35):
a united front against this sort of thing.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
The switchbop frame is interesting to you because essentially it's
a consumer referendum on like whether it's the music business
or the you know, visual arts industry or whatever it
may be. You think this is something of a belwether
for like where people are in terms of accepting this
technology in their lives.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
And I just think that this is yet another step
in more commodification of art and it's going to really
really bother some people. And I think a lot of
people will listen to this and they'll say, man, my
only problem with this is that it's too expensive. Let
me know when the price has come down. And I think,
(24:18):
and I can't judge that person that I think that's
just where we are. This is happening in video games
as well. I don't know if you've seen this.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
I have been following the kind of with interest the
video game AI Dance. I'm not a video game person,
but I got a friend who loves video games, and
he was talking about this new game, Ah, his name
escapes me, but basically saying that there's kind of been
this breakthrough recently where computer characters powered by AI are
(24:48):
much more responsive and actually learned from your player behavior
in a way that previous generations of games didn't, and
how this has kind of blown his mind.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Yeah. So, I mean, this is this is one of
those things that kind of cuts with ways. Because there's
a game called Clear Obscure Expedition thirty three. It one
Game of the Year at the Indie Game Awards, really prestigious, right,
But basically some gamers were looking more closely at the
game and started posting these images of what really looked
(25:18):
like AI generated textures for some stuff like newspapers. You
know how it used to be when you'd ask any
AI image generator to generate text, it would all be
garbled right right, And the company coppt to it. They said, yeah,
you know, we used it for placeholders, but I guess
some stuff slipped through, And then the Indie Game Awards
took back the award.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
I fascinate think that's crazy.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
Well, hold on, why do you think that's crazy?
Speaker 1 (25:43):
I think if you're at the margins using it, like
as an indie creator, whatever field you're in, if you're
at the margins trying to use AI to like make
you a creative thing, like a little cheaper to make
or a little better, you're not outsourcing your brain, your
creative mind to AI, like using a generative tool. I mean,
it's like saying, oh, they use like Adobe to make
(26:04):
the move to me. Anyway, I'm like, I think there's
there's a light clear line the stand between optimizing something
which is like amazing that you've created as a human
with AI and like having AI creating nonsense.
Speaker 2 (26:15):
Okay, let's let's step this line a little bit further. Okay,
So video game publisher Running with Scissors. I don't know
if you've played the Postal games. I wouldn't recommend it. Okay,
it's a very very particular audience. I'm just gonna leave
it at that. So new Games supposed to be coming out,
a new game in the Postal series. They drop the trailer.
Pretty instantly. People are looking at this video trailer and
(26:37):
they're saying, I think this is AI. Running with Scissors
says they're canceling the game. And then as people are
continuing to accuse them of using AI, first they say no.
Then the co owner says, look, if anybody has an
AI accusation, quit the server, like, get get out of
their Discord server. And then this is a quote co
(27:01):
owner says, I'll go a step further. The anti AI
mob has ruined art. Wow, can I say that for
you one more time? The anti AI mob has ruined art.
I'm still trying to square that circle.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
That's the big inversion. That's pretty nuts.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
But you know, I think what you said is really
interesting because the kinds of conversations we're seeing here where
people really are pushing back against AI. This is happening
at the indie level. These indie developers, they don't have
the kind of firepower, they don't have the kind of
resources to design stuff like these big studios. But it
(27:44):
is the smaller studios who really do have to listen
to the players because if they don't, they don't sell games.
They'll jump ship. You know, the difference between breaking even
and just completely going into bankruptcy. That margin's pretty thin
for an indie developer. Meanwhile, you've got the head of
(28:04):
Epic Games, which is this is a company that makes Fortnite,
Yeah right, saying yeah, saying that games shouldn't be labeled
with AI. They shouldn't have to have a label this
has made with AI, because pretty soon everything's gonna be
made with AI.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Anyway, the same friend who told me about this game,
it's like a shooting game where you shoot robots. But
and now the robots like appear to be learning from
your particular unique playing style as a human.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Are you talking about are you talking about art creators?
Speaker 1 (28:30):
That's right, but heat Basically, these games have become more
engaging because they're more responsive to.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Me, right, And I think that there's I think there's
a line to be drawn even amongst you know, developers,
And I've talked to a few developers about this, and
there are people who really feel like generative AI should
not be used in a game at all because functionally,
what it's doing is it's theft. And a lot of
players are also worried about copyright, right, could something sneak
(28:59):
in to the images that you're using, even as a placeholder,
that actually ends up being way too similar to something
that actually exists out there. You know, if I make
a game and say, hey, generate a happy Italian plumber
who jumps a lot for the background, like Nintendo is
gonna come and send people to my door, I shouldn't
(29:19):
do that, right, And so, even if it's not as
extreme as that, you do kind of need to be
careful when you're selling a product that has anything that's
generated by AI. But things like the behavior of an
enemy character or something like that, that, for I think
is something that's completely different that has to do with
the game mechanics. And I don't think anybody who's a
(29:42):
game developer is saying AI should never touch a game
at all. It depends on the type of AI that's
being used. But then again, even the stuff that some
people are pushing back against. You know, if the large
companies are deciding to use it, do you mean to
tell me that people aren't going to play g A
six because there's some AI in it?
Speaker 1 (30:01):
I don't know, Man, gonna have.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Yeah when it comes out, If it comes out, Yeah,
(30:26):
And that's gonna be it for this week for tech Stuff.
I'm Dexter, Thomas.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
Dexter, Thank you. I'm mos Velocian. This episode was produced
by Eliza Dennis and Melissa Slaughter. It was executive produced
by me Karra Price, Julian Nutter, and Kate Osborne for
Kaleidoscope and Katrin Norvel for iHeart Podcasts. The engineer is
Behead Fraser and Kyle Murdoch mixed this episode and also
wrote our theme song. Please do rate and review the
show wherever you listen, and reach out to us at
(30:51):
tech Stuff podcast at gmail dot com with thoughts, ideas, suggestions,
et cetera. We love hearing from you.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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