Paul Stenhouse: Texas law can force age verification for porn site users, Saleforce CEO's claims about AI workload

Texas can force users of porn websites to verify their age  

The law was challenged right up to the Supreme Court as they claimed it violated the free-speech rules of the First Amendment. Their argument was that adult viewers might be worried their private information or viewing history could be exposed, which is a deterrent from accessing the material.  

The Supreme Court ruled in favour of the law, saying it's working to protect children, and the government has the authority to do that. The Texas Governor, Ken Paxton, calls the widespread access among children to hardcore pornography a public health crisis.  

Texas is one of 24 states that have passed age verification laws for online porn, forcing Pornhub to close down in the state.  

 

Salesforce's CEO claims 30-50% of the internal work is now done by AI  

That's a staggering statistic from CEO Mark Benioff. Unsure how that's measured, but he says AI is being widely used at the company for software engineering and customer service. He says the tech has allowed the company to hire fewer humans.  

Microsoft and Alphabet have claimed similar stats saying AI is creating about 30% of the new code on some projects.    

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack Tame podcast
from News Talks that be.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Our Textbert Paul Stenhouse is here with details of a
consequential decision by the Supreme Court in the United States
considering or concerning one very large state, Paul, and one
very large website.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
Yeah. Yeah, the very large state is Texas, Jack, And
the websites are the websites we don't really talk about
a lot. And are those adult websites on the internet,
as you catch my drift. And so this Texas law
Right had basically said that children should not be allowed

(00:49):
to view the adultites, right, which sounds normal, reasonable, Like, okay,
that makes sense, sounds reasonable. Yeah. Now, now obviously there's
some issues there around how you enforced that, but we'll
put that aside for the moment. This this group though,
claimed that in America we've got the First Amendment, which

(01:11):
is all about free speech. They claimed that putting that
rule in place actually violated the free speech of the
adults right who wanted to view said content. And they
said that the reason why was that in order to
view said content, you need to put in like, you know,

(01:33):
like a government ide or a credit card and there's
probably like a viewing history because you're authenticated, and that
those people may be deterred from what who said, adult
content that would impose on their free speech and so
this means to a Supreme Court Texas. Then the Supreme

(01:54):
Court ruled in favor of the Texas law, saying, actually,
the government is within its bounds to try to protect
children and this is well and just and good. And
Texas is one of twenty four states did you know
that have passed age verification laws for adult websites online?

(02:16):
And so this is really now paved the way and
people have kind of started to think, well, what else
could this be applied to, right, because the Internet's always
been kind of free and open, and there's always been
the idea, and now we've said, hang on, the government
or a state government in the United States can now
decide whether or not you need to be age verified

(02:38):
to view certain content. Because this is another interesting one too.
The Texas Governor Jack called, you know, the proliferation of
access that children drink can have to said adult websites,
a public health crisis. Wow. So those realms of looking

(03:01):
after children, which is a hard core you know, it's interesting.
I think interesting arguments on both sides.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
Yeah, yeah, you can. You could this kind of there's
actually nuance. I mean, there's a tricky subject and one
that we can sort of only go into some No,
you've done it very You very definitely described the situation,
I think, Paul, so we can we can thank you
for that, especially given school holidays have just kicked off.
But lose curious because you can imagine from the website's perspective,

(03:29):
like having this verification is a massive barrier to increasing viewership, right,
and you can imagine there are real privacy and security
concerns if there is age verification and then people have
viewing histories and that information was hacked or leaked or
something like that and then made public. Like you can
just you can just imagine, like there are all sorts

(03:51):
of really interesting free speech implications I think as well. So, yeah, hey,
Salesforce and the CEO at Salesforce now reckon that between
thirty and fifty percent of the internal work that the
company is doing is done by AI. That is that, right,
That seems like a very very high figure.

Speaker 3 (04:10):
That's what I thought too, That's what he said in
a recent interview. He didn't see her it was being measured,
but it seems staggering, doesn't it. I Mean, he then
goes on to say that it is being used for
things like software engineering, it's being used for things like
customer service, and so I can imagine maybe in some
of those areas thirty to fifty percent of that work

(04:32):
is now being done by AI. But I think it
really goes to show, right, just these big companies have
when they go when they go all in, and when
they had gone all in on AI, they have gone
all in. Salesforce even says that that this tick like
the AI kind of agent piece, you know, and Salesforce
also wants to sell their own agent solutions that does

(04:55):
some of the customer service stuff. Right, So he's kind
of talking about this, you know, he's talking about it
in a way that makes positions as product well, but yes,
of course, you know a lot of that work, a
lot of that work can be done by these agents
and now is being done by these agents and has
allowed them to hire fewer humans. And he said that

(05:18):
he has staged that, and so we definitely in this age.
Now we're at this tipping point. I guess where the
technology is there. It's now good enough, and this deployed
well enough can actually be taking over the jobs that
folks do. Now, the companies will say that the jobs
aren't being removed, being positioned. Repositioned is a higher value work,

(05:41):
which you try to take them to their word for.
But it's also not just salesforce, Jack, because Microsoft and
Alphabet have said that they've kind of claimed some similar
stats too. Around they're saying around thirty percent of the
code on then projects, the new code is being contributed
by AI. So this isn't just like a flashpand thing anymore.

(06:02):
This is like, has some real implications for humans and yeah, economies.

Speaker 2 (06:10):
Yeah, oh my god. And the entire workforce, the entire
middle class, desk bound workforce. Yeah, I mean yeah, it
is incredible to think if that numbers, you know, even
close to being correct, that's amazing, Paul, thank you so
much for that. That's our texpert Paul Stenhouse.

Speaker 1 (06:25):
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