DiscoverDecoder with Nilay Patel
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Author: The Verge
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Decoder is a show from The Verge about big ideas — and other problems. Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel talks to a diverse cast of innovators and policymakers at the frontiers of business and technology to reveal how they’re navigating an ever-changing landscape, what keeps them up at night, and what it all means for our shared future.
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Today, we’re talking about the brand-new TikTok ban — and how years of Congressional inaction on a federal privacy law helped lead us to this moment of apparent national panic about algorithmic social media.
This is a thorny discussion, and to help break it all down, I invited Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner on the show. Lauren has been closely covering efforts to ban TikTok for years now, and she’s also watched Congress fail to pass meaningful privacy regulation for even longer. We’ll go over how we got here, what this means for both TikTok and efforts to pass new privacy legislation, and what might happen next.
Links:
Biden signs TikTok ‘ban’ bill into law — The Verge
TikTok ban: all the news on attempts to ban the video platform — The Verge
Anyone want to buy TikTok? — Vergecast
Congress takes on TikTok, privacy, and AI — Vergecast
Tiktok vows to fight 'unconstitutional' US ban — BBC
‘Thunder Run’: Behind lawmakers’ secretive push to pass the TikTok bill — NYT
On TikTok, resignation and frustration after potential ban of app — NYT
Lawmakers unveil new bipartisan digital privacy bill after years of impasse — The Verge
A real privacy law? House lawmakers are optimistic this time — The Verge
Congress is trying to stop discriminatory algorithms again — The Verge
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Today, I’m talking to Jason Citron, the co-founder and CEO of Discord, the gaming-focused voice and chat app. You might think Discord is just something Slack for gamers, but over time, it has become much more important than that. For a growing mix of mostly young, very online users steeped in gaming culture, fandom, and other niche communities, Discord is fast becoming the hub to their entire online lives. A lot of what we think of as internet culture is happening on Discord.
In many ways Discord represents a significant shift away from what we now consider traditional social platforms. As you’ll hear Jason describe it, Discord is a place where you talk and hangout with your friends over shared common interests, whether that’s video games, the AI bot Midjourney, or maybe your favorite anime series. It is a very different kind of interface for the internet, but that comes with serious challenges, especially around child safety and moderation.
Links:
Discord opens up to games and apps embedded in its chat app — The Verge
Discord is nuking Nintendo Switch emulator devs and their entire servers — The Verge
Inside Discord’s reform movement for banned users — The Verge
Discord ends deal talks with Microsoft — WSJ
Discord cuts 17% of workers in latest tech layoffs — NYT
Discord to start showing ads for gamers to boost revenue — WSJ
Discord says it intentionally does not encrypt user messages — CNN
How Discord became a social hub for young people — NYT
‘Problematic pockets’: How Discord became a home for extremists — WashPo
Discord CEO Jason Citron on AI, Midjourney — Bloomberg
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23898955
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Today, we're talking about Disney, the massive activist investor revolt it just fought off, and what happens next in the world of streaming. Because what happens to Disney really tells us a lot about what's happening in the entire world of entertainment. Earlier this month, Disney survived an attempted board takeover from businessman Nelson Peltz. While investors ultimately sided with Disney and CEO Bob Iger, the boardroom showdown made something very clear: Disney needs to figure out streaming and get its creative direction back on track.
To help me figure all this out, I brought on my friend Julia Alexander, who is VP of Strategy at Parrot Analytics, a Puck News contributor, and most importantly, a former Verge reporter. She's a leading expert on all things Disney, and I always learn something important about the state of the entertainment business when I talk to her.
Links:
The Story of Disney+ — Puck News
Disney’s CEO drama explained, with Julia Alexander — Decoder
Is streaming just becoming cable again? Julia Alexander thinks so — Decoder
Disney Fends Off Activist Investor for Second Time in 2 Years — NYT
For Disney, streaming losses and TV’s decline are a one-two punch — NYT
Disney’s ABC, ESPN weakness adds pressure to make streaming profitable — WSJ
Disney reportedly wants to bring always-on channels to Disney Plus — The Verge
The Disney Plus-Hulu merger is way more than a streaming bundle — The Verge
Disney’s laying off 7,000 as streaming boom comes to an end — The Verge
The last few years really scared Disney — Screen Rant
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
At the absolute most basic, Dropbox is cloud storage for your stuff — but that puts it at the nexus of a huge number of today’s biggest challenges in tech. As the company that helps you organize your stuff in the cloud itself goes all remote, how do we even deal with the concept of “your stuff?”
Today I’m talking with Dropbox CEO Drew Houston about those big picture ideas — and why he thinks generative AI really will be transformative for everyone eventually, even if it isn’t yet now.
Links:
Dropbox AI and Dash make it easier to find your files from all over the web | The Verge
Kids who grew up with search engines could change STEM forever | The Verge
No, Dropbox's cafeteria didn't get a Michelin star | VentureBeat
It's official: San Francisco's office vacancy rate just set a record | San Francisco Examiner
Jeff Bezos: This is the 'smartest thing we ever did' at Amazon | CNBC
Dropbox is laying off 500 people and pivoting to AI | The Verge
Congress bans staff use of Microsoft's AI Copilot | Axios
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23892647
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Today we’re talking about Vice, the media company: Where it came from, what it did, and, ultimately, why it collapsed into a much smaller, sadder version of itself.
This is a lousy time for digital media, and it’s hard to make a profit from putting words on the internet right now. So when Verge senior reporter Liz Lopatto went to go report on what happened, she and I both assumed Vice had been done in by the brutal economics of digital advertising on the web. But the Vice story is more than that — in the word of one executive that talked to Liz, it was a “fucking clown show.”
Links:
How Vice became 'a fucking clown show' — The Verge
Vice is abandoning Vice.com and laying off hundreds — The Verge
Vice, decayed digital colossus, files for bankruptcy — NYT
Vice Is Basically Dead — New York Magazine
Shane Smith and the Final Collapse of Vice News — The Hollywood Reporter
At Vice, cutting-edge media and allegations of old-school sexual harassment — NYT
HBO cancels ‘Vice News Tonight,’ severing relationship with Vice Media — CNN
Shane Smith has a secret multimillion-dollar Vice deal — New York Magazine
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Cloudflare is an infrastructure provider basically protecting more than 20% of the entire web from bad actors. When everything is going well, you don't even have to know it exists. It's one of the only defenses — sometimes the only defense — standing between websites and the people who want to take them down.
Protecting free speech on the internet around the world, across war zones and hundreds of different kinds of government, is no easy feat. That puts the company, and CEO Matthew Prince, right at the heart of some of Decoder's biggest challenges and themes.
Links:
A Cloudflare outage broke large swathes of the internet | The Verge
Why security company Cloudflare is protecting U.S. election sites for free | Fast Company
The Daily Stormer just lost the most important company defending it | The Verge (2017)
Cloudflare to revoke 8chan’s service, opening the fringe website up for DDoS attacks | The Verge (2019)
Cloudflare blocks Kiwi Farms due to an ‘immediate threat to human life’ | The Verge
Why Cloudflare Let an Extremist Stronghold Burn | Wired
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince interview on Ukraine cybersecurity | Semafor
3 ways the ‘splinternet’ is damaging society | MIT Sloan
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23885440
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Hello, and welcome to Decoder. This is David Pierce, editor-at-large at The Verge and co-host of The Vergecast, subbing in for Nilay, who’s out on vacation. Regular Decoder programming returns next week. In the meantime, we have an exciting episode for you today all about video game emulation, which, as it turns out, is a whole lot more complicated than it seems.
Gaming emulation made headlines recently because one of the most widely used programs for emulating the Nintendo Switch, a platform called Yuzu, was effectively sued out of existence. There’s a whole lot going on here, from the history of game emulation to the copyright precedents of emulators to how the threat of game piracy still looms large in the industry. To break down this topic, I brought Verge Senior Editor and resident emulation expert Sean Hollister on the show. Let’s get into it.
Links:
Nintendo sues Switch emulator Yuzu — The Verge
Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu will fold and pay $2.4M to settle its lawsuit — The Verge
Steve Jobs announcing a PlayStation emulator for the Mac — YouTube
Fans freak out as Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom leaks two weeks early — Kotaku
Tears of the Kingdom Was Pirated 1 Million Times, Nintendo Claims — Kotaku
The solid legal theory behind Nintendo’s new emulator takedown effort — Ars Technica
How Nintendo’s destruction of Yuzu is rocking the emulator world — The Verge
How strong is Nintendo’s legal case against Switch-emulator Yuzu? — Ars Technica
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Today, I’m talking to Intuit Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar, who took over as CEO in 2022 after a pretty rough patch in the company’s history. In 2021, Intuit acquired the company, and the very next year, co-founder Ben Chestnut stepped down after telling employees that he thought introducing themselves with pronouns in meetings did more harm than good. After that, Rania took over.
This is a pretty huge culture change, especially as Mailchimp became more integrated with Intuit. It was also a big challenge for a new leader who came in from the outside. You’ll hear us talk about that transition a lot. Rania and I also got into the weeds of making decisions, which is very Decoder. And, of course, we had to talk about generative AI, which is a big part of the Mailchimp road map. This was a really fun conversation with some honestly scary ideas in it — and it’s all about email.
Links:
Mailchimp employees have complained about inequality for years — The Verge
Mailchimp Employees Are Fuming Over $12 Billion Deal — Business Insider
Did this email cost Mailchimp's billionaire CEO his job? — Platformer
Mailchimp is shutting down TinyLetter — The Verge
TinyLetter, in memoriam — The Verge
Did Mailchimp censor J.D. Vance? — Mother Jones
Hackers breached Mailchimp to phish cryptocurrency wallets — The Verge
Boring, mundane businesses have an exhilarating, viral life on TikTok — The Verge
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23879556
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Hey everyone it’s Nilay – I’m on vacation this week, so the Decoder team is taking a short break. We’ll be back next week with both the interview and the new explainer episodes. To tide you over until Monday, we have a bonus episode from our friends at Vox Media and Eater’s Gastropod about an incredible patent battle in the world of pizza.
I’m serious: One of the biggest fights in the pizza industry took place in US court in the ‘90s — an intellectual property dispute about stuffed crust pizza between Pizza Hut and patent holder Anthony “The Big Cheese” Mongiello.
So much of what we talk about on Decoder comes down to IP lawsuits like copyright or patent disputes, and how judges decide those cases and where the law ends up can steer the course of history. And that’s true whether we’re talking about a line of code, the distribution method of an MP3, or, yes, even stuffed crust pizza.
Links:
Can You Patent a Pizza? — Gastropod
Ivana and Donald Trump Pizza Hut Commercial — YouTube
The Next Big Thing in Pizza? Try 'Stuffed Crust' — NYT
Who Created the Stuffed Crust Pizza? It's Complicated. — Eater
Method of making a pizza — Google Patents
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Today, I’m talking to Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky Social, which is a decentralized competitor to Meta’s Threads, Mastodon, and X. Bluesky actually started inside of what was then known as Twitter — it was a project from then-CEO Jack Dorsey, who spent his days wandering the earth and saying things like Twitter should be a protocol and not a company. Bluesky was supposed to be that protocol, but Jack spun it out of Twitter in 2021, just before Elon Musk bought the company and renamed it X.
Bluesky is now an independent company with a few dozen employees, and it finds itself in the middle of one of the most chaotic moments in the history of social media. There are a lot of companies and ideas competing for space on the post-Twitter internet, and Jay makes a convincing argument that decentralization — the idea that you should be able to take your username and following to different servers as you wish — is the future.
Links:
Twitter is funding research into a decentralized version of its platform — The Verge
Bluesky built a decentralized protocol for Twitter — and is working on an app that uses it — The Verge
The fediverse, explained — The Verge
Bluesky showed everyone’s ass — The Verge
Can ActivityPub save the internet? — The Verge
The ‘queer.af’ Mastodon instance disappeared because of the Taliban — The Verge
Usage Of Elon Musk’s X Dropped 30% In The Last Year, Study Suggests — Forbes
Bluesky snags former Twitter/X Trust & Safety exec cut by Musk — TechCrunch
Bluesky and Mastodon users are having a fight that could shape the next generation of social media — TechCrunch
Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech — Mike Masnick
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23872913
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Both the EU and US have spent the past decade looking at Big Tech and saying, "someone should do something!" In the US, lawmakers are still basically shouting that. But in the EU, regulators did something.
The Digital Markets Act was proposed in 2020, signed into law in 2022, and went into effect this month. It's already having an effect on some of the biggest companies in tech, including Apple, Google, and Microsoft. In theory it's a landmark law that will change the way these companies compete, and how their products operate, for years to come. How did we get here, what does the law actually say, and will it work half as well in practice as it does on paper? Verge reporter Jon Porter comes on Decoder to help me break it down.
Links:
The EU's new competition rules are going live — here's how tech giants are responding | The Verge
Apple hit with a nearly $2 billion fine following Spotify complaint | The Verge
Experts fear the Digital Markets Act won’t address tech monopolies | The Verge
Dirty tricks or small wins: developers are skeptical of Apple's App Store rules | The Verge
Google Search, WhatsApp, and TikTok on list of 22 services targeted by EU’s tough new DMA | The Verge
The EU’s Digital Services Act is now in effect: here’s what that means | The Verge
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
We’ve got a fun one today — I talked to Figma CEO Dylan Field in front of a live audience at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. And we got into it – we talked about everything from design, to software distribution, to the future of the web, and, of course, AI.
Figma is an fascinating company – the Figma design tool is used by designers at basically every company you can think of. And importantly, it runs on the web. It became such a big deal that Adobe tried to buy it out in 2022 for $20 billion dollars, a deal that only just recently fell through because of regulatory concerns.
So Dylan and I talked a lot about where Figma is now as an independent company, how Figma is structured, where it’s going, and how Dylan’s decisionmaking has changed since the last time he was on the show in 2022.
Links:
Why Figma is selling to Adobe for $20 billion, with CEO Dylan Field — Decoder
Adobe abandons $20 billion acquisition of Figma — The Verge
Adobe’s Dana Rao on AI, copyright, and the failed Figma deal — Decoder
Figma’s CEO on life after the company’s failed sale to Adobe — Command Line
Amazon restricts self-publishing due to AI concerns — The Guardian
Wix’s new AI chatbot builds websites in seconds based on prompts — The Verge
Apple is finally allowing full versions of Chrome and Firefox on the iPhone — The Verge
What Is Solarpunk? A Guide to the Environmental Art Movement. — Built In
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23866201
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
If you’ve been listening to Decoder or the Vergecast for a while, you know that I am obsessed with Google Search, the web, and how both of those things might change in the age of AI. But to really understand how something might change, you have to step back and understand what it is right now.
So today I’m talking with Verge platforms reporter Mia Sato about Google Search, the industries it’s created, and more importantly, how relentless search engine optimization, or SEO, has utterly changed the web in its image. Mia and I really dug into this to explain why search results are so terrible now, what Google is trying to do about it, and why this is such an important issue for the future of the internet.
Links:
How Google is killing independent sites like ours — HouseFresh
How Google perfected the web — The Verge
The people who ruined the internet — The Verge
A storefront for robots — The Verge
The end of the Googleverse — The Verge
The unsettling scourge of obituary spam — The Verge
What happens when Google Search doesn’t have the answers? — The Verge
The AI takeover of Google Search starts now — The Verge
AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born — The Verge
Google is starting to squash more spam and AI in search results — The Verge
Ethics Statement — The Verge
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Today, I’m talking to Kyle Chayka, a staff writer for The New Yorker, a regular contributor to The Verge, and author of the new book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. Kyle has been writing for years now about how the culture of big social media platforms bleeds into real life, first affecting how things look, and now shaping how and what culture is created and the mechanisms by which that culture spreads all around the world.
If you’ve been listening to Decoder, this is all going to sound very familiar. The core thesis of Kyle’s book — that algorithmic recommendations make everything feel the same — hits at an idea that we’ve talked about countless times on the show: that how content is distributed shapes what content is made. So I was really excited to sit down with Kyle and dig into Filterworld and his thoughts on how this happened and what we might be able to do about it.
Links:
Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture — Kyle Chayka
Welcome to AirSpace — The Verge
The Stanley water bottle craze, explained — Vox
TikTok and the vibes revival — The New Yorker
Why the internet isn’t fun anymore — The New Yorker
The age of algorithmic anxiety — The New Yorker
Lo-fi beats to quarantine to are booming on YouTube — The Verge
Taylor Swift has encouraged her fans' numerology habit yet again — AV Club
How fandom built the internet as we know it, with Kaitlyn Tiffany — Decoder
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23858379
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Our Thursday episodes are all about big topics in the news, and this week we’re wrapping up our short series on one of the biggest topics of all: generative AI. In our last couple episodes, we talked a lot about some of the biggest, most complicated legal and policy questions surrounding the modern AI industry, including copyright lawsuits and deepfake legislation. But we wanted to end on a more personal note: How is this technology making people feel, and in particular how is it affecting how people communicate and connect?
Verge reporter Miya David has covered AI chatbots — specifically AI romance bots — quite a bit, so we invited her onto the show to talk about how generative AI is finding its way into dating. We not only discussed how this technology is affecting dating apps and human relationships, but also how the boom in AI chatbot sophistication is laying the groundwork for a generation of people who might form meaningful relationships with so-called AI companions.
Links:
Speak, Memory — The Verge
A conversation with Bing’s chatbot left me deeply unsettled — NYT
Google suspends engineer who claims its AI is sentient — The Verge
The law of AI girlfriends — The Verge
Replika’s new AI therapy app tries to bring you to a zen island — The Verge
Replika’s new AI app is like Tinder but with sexy chatbots — Gizmodo
Don’t date robots; their privacy policies are terrible — The Verge
AI is shaking up online dating with chatbots that are ‘flirty but not too flirty’ — CNBC
Loneliness and suicide mitigation for students using GPT3-enabled chatbots — Nature
Virtual valentine: People are turning to AI in search of emotional connections — CBS
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23856679
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
On this special episode of Decoder, science educator and YouTuber Hank Green is guest hosting. And the guest? It’s Nilay Patel, who sat down with Hank to discuss building The Verge, the state of media, and the future of the web. Also: whether the fediverse is worth investing in, and how social platforms’ control of distribution has shaped the internet.
In the words of Hank: “Nilay has got some weird ideas about the internet. For example, that he’s going to revolutionize the media through blog posts. He keeps saying it, but what the hell does he mean? While I was busy building my business on other people’s platforms, Nilay has built something very rare in the year 2024: a website that publishes content and isn’t behind a paywall yet still makes money. How does he do it? How does he make decisions? How is The Verge structured? The tables have turned.”
Links:
Why Hank Green can’t quit YouTube for TikTok — Decoder
Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse and what comes next — Decoder
Just buy this Brother laser printer everyone has, it’s fine — The Verge
Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers — Futurism
The fediverse, explained — The Verge
Can ActivityPub save the internet? — The Verge
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23851875
The Vergecast and Decoder are live at SXSW this weekend, March 8th and 9th. SXSW attendees can see both shows live on the official Vox Media Podcast Stage at the JW Marriott, presented by Atlassian. Learn more at voxmedia.com/live.
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Our new Thursday episodes of Decoder are all about deep dives into big topics in the news, and this week we’re continuing our mini-series on one of the biggest topics of all: generative AI. Last week, we took a look at the wave of copyright lawsuits that might eventually grind this whole industry to a halt. Those are basically a coin flip — and the outcomes are off in the distance, as those cases wind their way through the legal system.
A bigger problem right now is that AI systems are really good at making just believable enough fake images and audio — and with tools like OpenAI’s new Sora, maybe video soon, too. And of course, it’s once again a presidential election year here in the US. So today, Verge policy editor Adi Robertson joins the show to discuss how AI might supercharge disinformation and lies in an election that’s already as contentious as any in our lifetimes — and what might be done about it.
Links:
How the Mueller report indicts social networks
Twitter permanently bans Trump
Meta allows Trump back on Facebook and Instagram
No Fakes Act wants to protect actors and singers from unauthorized AI replicas
White House calls for legislation to stop Taylor Swift AI fakes
Watermarks aren’t the silver bullet for AI misinformation
AI Drake just set an impossible legal trap for Google
Barack Obama on AI, free speech, and the future of the internet
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Today, I’m talking with Rahul Purini, the president of Crunchyroll, a streaming service focused entirely on anime — and really, the biggest anime service still going. Rahul has a long history with anime: he spent more than seven years at Funimation, a company that started in the 90s to distribute Dragon Ball Z to US audiences, before getting the top job at Crunchyroll.
Anime might seem like niche content, but it’s not nearly as niche as you might think – our colleagues over at Polygon just ran a huge survey of anime viewers and found that 42% of Gen Z and 25% of millennials watch anime regularly. And Crunchyroll is growing with that audience — like most entertainment providers, the service absolutely exploded during the pandemic, going from 5 million paying subscribers in 2021 to more than 13 million as of last month.
But interestingly Rahul says Crunchyroll’s growth isn’t being driven by more and more people watching anime, but more and more anime fans — especially those watching pirated content — choosing to pay for it.
Links:
Anime is huge, and we finally have numbers to prove it — Polygon
Funimation is shutting down — and taking your digital library with it — The Verge
Sony completes acquisition of Crunchyroll from AT&T — The Verge
Funimation’s anime library is moving over to Crunchyroll — The Verge
Crunchyroll now has more than 13 Million subscribers — Cord Cutters News
Crunchyroll's CEO Colin Decker leaves company; Rahul Purini becomes new president — Anime News Network
PlayStation keeps reminding us why digital ownership sucks — The Verge
Sony’s Crunchyroll launches free 24-hour streaming channel — Variety
Crunchyroll is adding mobile games to its subscription — The Verge
How Is Funimation producing so many simuldubs? — Anime News Network
Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23845221
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
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The Decoder team is off this week. We’ll be back next week with both the interview and the new explainer episodes; we’re really excited about what’s on the schedule here.
In the meantime, I thought you all might enjoy a conversation I had with Kara Swisher, the Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman about the Apple Vision Pro. All of us have been covering Apple for a very long time, and we had a lot of fun swapping impressions, talking strategy, and sharing what we liked, and didn’t like, about Apple’s $3,500 headset.
Links:
Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not — The Verge
The shine comes off the Vision Pro — The Verge
Everything we know about Apple’s Vision Pro — The Verge
Why some of Apple’s biggest fans are returning their Vision Pros — Bloomberg
Apple’s Vision Pro Is an iPad killer, but not anytime soon — Bloomberg
I worked, cooked and even skied with the new Apple Vision Pro — WSJ
Vision Pro review: 24 hours in Apple’s mixed-reality headset — WSJ
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Our new Thursday episodes are all about deep dives into big topics in the news, and for the next few weeks we’re going to stay focused on one of the biggest topics of all: generative AI. There’s a lot going on in the world of generative AI, but maybe the biggest is the increasing number of copyright lawsuits being filed against AI companies like OpenAI and StabilityAI.
So for this episode, we’re going to talk about those cases, and the main defense the AI companies are relying on: an idea called fair use. To help explain this mess, I talked with Sarah Jeong. Sarah is a former lawyer and a features editor here at The Verge, and she is also one of my very favorite people to talk to about copyright. I promise you we didn’t get totally off the rails nerding out about it, but we went a little off the rails. The first thing we had to figure out was: How big a deal are these AI copyright suits?
Links:
The New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement --- The Verge
The scary truth about AI copyright is nobody knows what will happen next — The Verge
How copyright lawsuits could kill OpenAI — Vox
How Adobe is managing the AI copyright dilemma, with general counsel Dana Rao --- The Verge
Generative AI Has a visual plagiarism problem - IEEE Spectrum
George Carlin estate sues creators of AI-generated comedy special — THR
AI-Generated Taylor Swift porn went viral on Twitter. Here's how it got there — 404 Media
AI copyright lawsuit hinges on the legal concept of ‘fair use’ — The Washington Post
Intellectual property experts discuss fair use in the age of AI — Harvard Law School
OpenAI says it’s “impossible” to create useful AI models without copyrighted material — Ars Technica
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
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what a terrible interview
Heme is key. Don't kid yourself.
henke is either ignorant or disingenuous and his argument simply repeats that btc can't be money bc it isn't. also, what makes him say its expensive? doesn't even compare to intl wire transfers . it produces yield. double digit %, in many cases. it's not centralized- node operators vs miners vs devs vs users. i could go on... feels like this is all a prelude to his version of a "superior" shitcoin, manipulated by men and enriching himself.
fuck fb. it's a shitty dead app which all the teens are abandoning. Won't be long before it totally dies out
Great listen!! Am now following Decoder
Hillary is Clare Underwood
Universal Basic Income.
Wake up America #YangWasRight! #YangGang and #Yang2024
so why we should panic about coronavirus? ... however now I want to study medicine at Stanford.
this one didn't age well eh?
I felt attacked :(
w e w a n t Y A N G! #yang2020 YouTube: Andrew Yang how would earning $1000/month extra help you?
Kara for the love of party mix get a speaking coach!! You have great guests but your constant interrupting and grunting is impolite to the guest and unbelievably annoying to the listener.
Snowden daddy
#Yang2020, thanks Kara.
He's only interested in immigration for those who will make him and his friends money tomorrow. Not kids at the border.
Great interview. Andrew Yang is the "Problem Solver" you are looking for. Read his book "The War on Normal People" and check him out on YouTube to see why. Not Left. Not Right. But FORWARD. #Yang2020 and #HumanityFirst
Fantastic interview. She makes a ton of sense and has a CLEAR message. Your message is invaluable Marianne - keep it up!!
Thank you!
Yang is rising because Yang is CORRECT people!! Read his book "The War on Normal People" - he nails it! He is HANDS DOWN the single BEST person to be elected President in 2020 and leading the country+WORLD going into the future. Read the book Bill. Read it! RTFB!! Then help him out or GTFO you are in the way and adding NOISE to the SIGNAL! Thank you for your service. #Yang2020 #HumanityFirst