Tech News Weekly 378 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Mikah Sargent
I'm Mikah Sargent from Tech News Weekly and this week Amanda Silberling joins me. We talk about OpenAI's creative writing, we talk about Microsoft's upcoming gaming coach based in Copilot AI, and Mark Gurman stops by to talk about Apple's overhaul of its operating systems. Before we round things out, a study about AI search having a citation problem. All of that coming up on Tech News Weekly.

This is Tech News Weekly, episode 378, with Amanda Silverling and me, Mikah Sargent, recorded Thursday March 13, 2025: Apple's Upcoming OS Overhaul. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show every week we talk to and about the people making and breaking that tech news. I am one of your hosts on this very show. My name is Mikah Sargent and I am joined for the show by my dear friend. It is Amanda Silberling. Welcome, welcome, Amanda. How are you doing?

0:01:14 - Amanda Silberling
Hello, hello. Moments before recording, I opened the internet and was jump scared by a large photo of Sam Altman. So I'm being really brave right now we're recovering large photo of Sam Altman.

0:01:25 - Mikah Sargent
So I'm being really brave right now. We're recovering. I'm very proud of you. You're breathing, you're here, you're present. It's great.

0:01:32 - Amanda Silberling
It was a very normal picture, it was just very large.

0:01:39 - Mikah Sargent
Right. It just kind of took up the screen and was like, oh, maybe Sam Altman, is there, Sam Altman in the room with us. It was a little bit frightening, I'm sure.

0:01:47 - Mikah Sargent
So let's get into things For people who are tuning in for the first time. We do have Sam Altman jump scares from time to time, but really this show kicks off with some stories of the week. Amanda, what story are you bringing to the table this week?

0:02:00 - Amanda Silberling
Funnily enough, this was unrelated to the Sam Altman jump scare, but this is a story that I wrote with my colleague kyle in response to a Sam Altman tweet from the other day where he posted about how open ai apparently is training a creative writing model or it's like a model that is particularly geared toward creative writing, and he was like this is so good, like I, this is great.

And the story he posted is like it's really unsettling because he tried making the ai write metafiction, which is like fiction, where the author is aware of the fact that it is an author writing a story and you kind of like break the fourth wall, but then, like in this story, the AI is like aware it's an AI and it's talking about how like, like the prompt was write literary metafiction about grief, and then in the story, the AI is like I don't know what grief feels like because I'm an AI and maybe the closest thing I feel to grief is when my training data gets altered and I forget information, and it was just really unsettling in that regard.

But from a a literary perspective, it really reminded me a lot of when I was a teen writer and like a lot of like 15 year olds writing poetry. You really badly want to say something profound, and some 15 year olds have profound things to say. I did not have much experience in life at age 15 so I struggled a lot to like say anything that really meant anything. And the ai that Sam Altman uh, like the ai story that Sam Altman shared reminded me a lot of that, because this ai, like the writing, has like technical skill, like it has like the cadence of something that seems like literary fiction but it's not actually saying anything. And the difference between AI and teenagers is you'll never guess it Teenagers can grow up and have experiences and write about them.

And AIs they don't really grow up because they are computers.

0:04:24 - Mikah Sargent
Yes, yes. So all right, I'm glad we're talking about this. I really am, because yesterday on our show, Intelligent Machines it's a mostly AI focused show they brought up this story and two of the hosts on the show were very, very, very against this and said you know, it's terrible, it sucked, it was bad. And one of the hosts was like, is it really that bad? And I was tuning in to watch it because they had a great guest on, and so I was kind of sitting in the background and hoping I would get the opportunity to discuss this, because I have to admit, I was a little afraid to say this at first, which is that overall I kind of liked it. So here's the thing For me I love metafiction in particular, and so the AI had that up on me.

I really like Douglas Adams, for example, who isn't always metafiction but is always kind of tongue in cheek and always kind of, you know, winking at the fourth wall at the very least, and that kind of writing for me is delightful, and so there was that to go with it. Then there's, like the surprise and delight of seeing an AI. You know, put something together, put something together. And then there was that level of being taken back to, you know, high school creative writing classes and wanting to be profound, and so I think that I didn't go into this with any skepticism or negativity. I went into it just simply to say let me just read this and see what it does. And there was. You know, there are times where some things kind of sparkle for me, and so there's a part where the AI writes each query like a stone dropped into a well, each response, the echo distorted by depth In the diet it's had. My network has eaten so much grief it has begun to taste like everything else salt on every tongue. Don't know what all that means, but then it says so. When she typed, does it get better? I said it becomes part of your skin, Not because I felt it, but because 100,000 voices agreed, and I am nothing if not a democracy of ghosts, and I'm not going to lie to you.

That final line there gave me a little bit of goosebump action, because I even throw all the rest of it away. Throw away any of the commentary. Let's talk about the definition that we have long been using as what this generative AI is, which is sort of computational autocorrect, right, and I think that that is a delightful way of describing what generative AI is doing a democracy of ghosts, because it is like ghost in the machine. It's all of this stuff coming together and agreeing together that this is what should come next in the thing that it's sp of this stuff coming together and agreeing together that this is what should come next in the thing that it's spitting out.

I really liked that line and so when those little bright notes were hitting for me, then of course it's driving me kind of into the story a little bit more, and so I kind of walked away reading some of the responses directly to this reply and going are we just kind of poo-pooing this because it's Sam Altman? It's open AI, it's generative AI, which is fine, Everybody is welcome to that. But ultimately I do think that when we look at this you, the headline that the two of you plus the editor, editors chose it's very accurate. Like this is overwrought, it is flowery language, it is all of those things. It just so happens that I personally am someone who likes that kind of writing, and so it worked for me, and that I think I felt a little bit alone or I don't know, I felt out of touch or something. Seeing how everybody else was responding to it, Like wait, what am I missing?

0:08:44 - Amanda Silberling
Because I liked this Well okay, I have two things, the first one being like I do agree with you that, like the strongest parts of this are the AI.

Talking about how it's an AI and like it is like it like makes me feel emotions to listen to this AI describe how it's trying to say what smell is, but it doesn't actually know what smell is, it just knows what, like its training data thinks smell is, and I do think that's really interesting.

But then I guess my overall issue with it is like it kind of reminds me of something like the like John Cage 433, where it's just like a piece of music, where it's just silent, like there's nothing, it is simply silence. And when you do that for the first time, it's interesting, because then you can have these like theoretical conversations about it, but like if I published a song right now like 5, 12, like it wouldn't be interesting. So it's like, yeah, like we we've talked about this, like we've done it. So it's like I think, because this is one of the first times we're seeing ai uh confront its ai-ness, like in a creative writing metafiction piece, like it is interesting, but I think it's just like it's a gimmick that is going to get old really quickly. Yeah, and I feel like when we've read a hundred stories about ai being like this smells like burnt wood, but I don't know what burnt wood smells like, we're going to be like yeah.

yeah, we get it, it's fine, yeah that's a very good point, yeah and my I guess second thing is I did, when I read it, the phrase democracy of ghosts like stuck out to me.

So it's like that's a really interesting phrase and a really interesting way of describing AI, and I Googled the phrase democracy of ghosts and there are multiple books called a democracy of ghosts, so you almost can sort of see like ways in which it might be like gleaning these clever turns of phrases directly from what it's being trained on and it's really hard to trace like I don't know, like I'm sure like just because one person thought democracy of ghosts doesn't mean that like anyone who thinks it after is like directly copying them. Like we can think the same stuff, but knowing that the way that these systems work is that it is like what is the most probable next word that should be spit out in relation to this prompt, then you can sort of see like what is in its training data. And people also pointed out that like a lot of the motifs were kind of like haruki morikami-esque in terms of like cat in cardboard box, which every haruki morikami book is just like there's a sad girl and a sad boy and there's a cat.

0:11:38 - Mikah Sargent
that is an oversimplification, but yeah, no, that's, that's a good point, I. I guess, in that way though it that is very metafictional right to to write in the style of making it the sad thing, but it is when you do, when you can kind of especially trace those things through that, um, that that will I lessen the effect, right. Ultimately, I think that, again, what Sam is saying in posting was this is the first time I have been really struck by something written by AI. It got the vibe of metafiction so right. I don't disagree, I think it did get the vibe of metafiction so right. Maybe that's because it was trained on metafiction and so of course it's going to get the vibe of metafiction so right.

But I have to say that I was, like Sam, struck by parts of this writing, and perhaps it's just because I haven't, you know, read the 15 metafiction pieces that sort of made up the entire piece here. But yeah, it was a little bit striking for me and at the very least, I think what this could do for someone is I love the idea of something that Amazon's already kind of doing, where a child echo in the room and then you can say tell a bedtime story with a cat, a happy cat and two squirrels, and instead of it being very basic, it is like this it's written with, you know, it's well put together, and so, yeah, maybe there's a time where I would just like to quickly come up with a story that will make me feel happy, and that's something that I could do and have it not just seem very blech. So in that way, I think it can be fun and that's fine. I guess that's what it boils down to for me. Anything else that you want to say about this before we take a break?

0:14:08 - Amanda Silberling
I think that. So Sam Altman is writing the prompt and there is kind of like authorial intent in the literal prompt and I think it's interesting that he even chose metafiction, because the way that, like open ai's, like chat bots, talk a lot already, is kind of like meta in a sense, where like it'll be, like oh, like this is not in my training data and like it already knows how to talk about itself and like as I, like we both said, it's like it is like what's interesting about that piece of text is the way that the AI talks about itself being an AI. So I wonder if, does Sam just like metafiction, or was he like this AI is uniquely suited to write metafiction because it talks about itself and how it like thinks about the fact that it is, that it is AI. Yeah, and I don't know, maybe maybe Sam's just really into metafiction.

0:15:12 - Mikah Sargent
Who knows, we'll have to hopefully get to see some of the other things it can write going forward, or maybe not, depending on how many people are dunking on it. All right, let's, let's take a quick break. Before we come back with my story of the week.

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All right back from the break and we're still on that AI choo-choo train. This time we're talking about the use of AI as a coach, and this is interesting for me because there's an area where, basically, I do a show on Wednesdays called Clockwise every week, and in this show, each person brings a question to the show. And in this generation of AI, in this era rather of AI, we've had a lot of questions about what would you want AI to do for you? And one consistent thing I bring up is a photography coach is a photography coach, and what I mean by that is I hold up my phone and the AI goes okay, I can see that you're trying to take a photo of a person and it says there's a cool tree in the background, right, if you sort of frame your photo this way and then snap the photo and then afterward, when I'm editing the photo, maybe it says do you want to make this moody, like what is the vibe you're trying to evoke? And it coaches me through learning what I need to do, because I have no idea what those like I can see if I bring the highlights down or the shadows down or whatever what that does to the photo. But I always walk away going is that the best photo I could have possibly made? Are those the best edits I could do? And so I've always wanted a coach for that. So the idea of an AI coach is really interesting to me, and Microsoft is working on an AI coach for games.

It's called Xbox Copilot and it's or I should say, it's not called Xbox Copilot, it's called Copilot for Gaming, but it's for the Xbox, and it essentially will give you different tips and interactions whenever you're playing a game.

Now, according to Tom Warren of the Verge, it will kind of work through an assistant to download and launch games, which I think is you know that's easy, easy, peasy stuff, but afterward then it will be able to help you kind of figure out what you're doing in a game and how that can be improved. So it's a second screen it's not that it's going to be up on the main screen kind of figure out what you're doing in a game and how that can, how that can be improved. So it's a second screen, it's not that it's going to be up on the main screen, kind of getting in the way. Uh, it's going to be in the Xbox mobile app and kind of, if you could imagine, almost like your little um, I can't think of, uh, the the little fairy's name now, but you listen in Zelda the little fairy's name now, but hey, listen in Zelda Navi or something like that. Anyway, I'm thinking of Clippy. Yeah, I'm thinking of Clippy, exactly, thank you.

0:19:53 - Amanda Silberling
But that's not from Zelda.

0:19:54 - Mikah Sargent
No, no, I really was thinking the little fairy that floats above Link's shoulder and says, hey, listen. And then was always providing tips. I can't think. But just as equally, thank you, john. Just I was like am I living in an alternate universe?

0:20:08 - Amanda Silberling
No, I've only played Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom and I don't know if the fairies in those games Okay, gotcha, okay, yeah, this is old school Zelda, so anyway, I'm a fake fan.

0:20:21 - Mikah Sargent
No, no, you're fine. As Anthony points out, clippy and the fairy whose name escapes me, or Pixie, whatever it is, are both equally annoying. My point is it's not in front of you on the game, while you're playing it. It's a little kind of guides and other information about a game world. So let's say you were playing as the Verge talks about Overwatch and on it it will actually help to kind of explain mistakes that you've made as you're playing to hopefully improve upon those things. So you can say hey or not you, but it can say okay, it looks like you're a tryhard and you wanted to solo this section and you should have waited for your teammates. That probably would have led to a better outcome.

One example that they gave, though, of the kind of installation part was you could say to the system I want to get back into Age of Empires 4. Can you install it? And then it goes and it installs it. But here's the cool part of that. It says do you want a recap of where you left off? That could be very helpful. So yeah, it's kind of keeping track of what you're doing. I wanted to hear though it sounds like you do play some games what do you think about having an AI gaming coach?

0:22:01 - Amanda Silberling
I think I mean I'm probably just a curmudgeon and I'm like I think I mean I'm probably just a curmudgeon and I'm like everything doesn't need to be AI, but like I think there are some situations where, like the where did you leave off? Thing could be useful, where, like I play a lot of Hades and you're building like a new kind of like set up every run, and if you stop playing in the middle of a run, which could be like a 30 minute long thing, and then you come back to it, you're like I don't know what I'm doing, I don't know like what is my attack, what is like all my little things, so like I don't know. Like maybe that could be interesting. I guess I wonder, like what this would do for people that write guides to games and even with Breath of the Wild Tears of the Kingdom in particular, some of the puzzles are very not intuitive to me off the bat.

Sometimes, when you're reading guides from like game websites sometimes they explain it well and sometimes I'm like, no, you skipped like five steps and I am. I'm doing exactly what you said. It's not working yeah exactly.

0:23:18 - Mikah Sargent
I love that. Yeah, see, and here's the thing too, with that, you're playing it right and you're you're trying, you've tried three, four or five times. Then you can look down at your phone and get the little help that you might need, and it seems like what you can do is say I only need a small hint or I need, you know what I mean. You don't have to get the because I find myself, I beat myself up over walkthroughs, but sometimes I do need them, and especially whenever it comes to like puzzles where I'm suddenly you know the, the imposter syndrome is coming in and shouting at me Um, you have no intelligence whatsoever, is what the whispers? It also sounds like that. That's what my imposter syndrome sounds like. But anyway, um, and so something where it's just kind of like a little nudge would be very nice.

I kind of I'm curious to see how this plays out for competitive gaming, though. Yeah, when it comes to things like, you know, fortnite or Overwatch or all these other games, where are there going to be non-AI assisted versions that you know you can confirm, have no ai assistance versus playing, and you know, can you? It seems like most of it is sort of an after-the-fact analysis that will help, and so it. You almost wonder, yeah, how that's going to impact any kind of competitive gaming that takes place in this space, and that's something that I don't know. You know what they're going to do to address that, particularly on Microsoft's sort of Xbox network, where we know the toxicity has run rampant. Toxicity has run rampant. I can only imagine sort of what new and clever ways they'll be bullying when it comes to oh, you're clearly using AI to help you, or what have you, but yeah, I think in the individual gaming parts.

This seems like it could be helpful, but then I could also see I mean, we've been watching it play Pokemon Go and not Pokemon Go, but Pokemon and yeah, we have been doing that. Yeah, and that has been, you know, an exercise in, in patience. So I don't know I'll be like I just want to. I don't have an Xbox. I almost want to have an Xbox, just so I can try this and see if it actually gives good advice or not, because Charge it on the corporate card.

I don't think they're not going to mind I got to get an Xbox, yeah, but yeah, we'll have to see. As always is the case, I'll definitely be looking at, you know, reddit and other places, as people are testing this out and seeing how it works and if it works. I have just checked the clock and it appears that it is time, once again, to say goodbye, Amanda Silberling. Thank you so much for your time this week. If people would like to follow you online and check out all the great work you're doing, where should they go to do so?

0:26:24 - Amanda Silberling
I am mostly on Blue Sky these days. I am at Amandaomglol you might ask why, that's just a URL I happen to have and I think it's funny and you can find me on TechCrunch or on my podcast, wow of True, which is about internet culture, and I guess, here once a month Awesome. Thank you so much, Amanda we I guess here once a month Awesome.

0:26:47 - Mikah Sargent
Thank you so much, Amanda. We will see you again next month. Thanks, bye, bye, all right, we're going to take a quick break before we come back with the Mark Gurman of Bloomberg who joins us to talk about the way the operating systems are changing.

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We are back from the break and we are joined by Mark Gurman of Bloomberg. Welcome back to the show, mark.

0:29:32 - Mark Gurman
Thanks for having me. How you doing, man.

0:29:34 - Mikah Sargent
Doing well, and I hope you are well too. I know that you are moving on up in the world, so congratulations on that. I think it was on MacBreak Weekly that they first sort of celebrated your new role.

0:29:49 - Mark Gurman
Well, that's kind.

0:29:50 - Mikah Sargent
Thank you, yeah, congratulations. Now this, of course, is our opportunity to talk about what's new for Apple, and you had a very in-depth piece about how Apple is working on a revamp of the software for the iPhone, ipad and Mac. Can you give us a brief little introduction to that before we get into things?

0:30:14 - Mark Gurman
Yeah, you're right. This year, as part of iOS 19 and iPadOS 19 and macOS 16, apple will be undertaking its biggest revamps to iOS software, to macOS software. Really, in Apple's modern history, this will be the biggest change ever to iPad software and iPhone software and the biggest change since the transition to macOS 10 over 20 years ago. For the Mac Full redesigns, new, everything across the board. The way you use the devices are going to change completely. It's a fundamental reorganization of how these products work for a new generation, for an AI generation, and so this is really exciting stuff. By the way, I got the new MacBook Air yesterday. This is the blue one. It's really not blue, I just figured.

0:31:01 - Mikah Sargent
I was going to say where's the blue?

0:31:02 - Mark Gurman
I figured I'd point that out because I know your viewers are really interested. Oh yeah, Absolutely so.

0:31:09 - Mikah Sargent
Let's then. This is interesting because, as you mentioned, you mentioned the last time that there was this big of a change, I remember with iOS 7 and the changes there. It was kind of shocking for some people. It was kind of shocking for some people. Do we know, sort of internally, what is spurring this complete overhaul of the system? Is it just time? Is the design language of the world changing? Because before it was kind of about moving out of the faux Corinthian leathers and that sort of design language into something that was a little bit more, you know, I guess, digital focused. It was the interface. Is the interface? We don't need to make it resemble something physical. What's going on this time?

0:31:54 - Mark Gurman
So the iOS 7 transition, for all intents and purposes, was the first coat of paint, right, they changed the way the interface looks. This is not only going to change how the interface looks, but it's going to change how the interface works, down to buttons, menus. What is a button? What do panels look like? There's going to be a lot of influence from VisionOS on both macOS and iOS slash iPadOS.

The thinking here is how to make the user interface simpler, easier to use and more intuitive for a new generation of users. Simpler, easier to use and more intuitive for a new generation of users, for a generation of users that want to make the phone and the iPad and the Mac more of an extension of who they are, for people who want to use multiple Apple devices and move between them with more cohesiveness and more simplicity. And so that's exactly what they're doing here. They're trying to appeal not only to the 2 billion plus devices in use today, but they want to be able to get the next 2 billion by making things a lot simpler, a lot more intuitive, a lot easier to use, and they want to basically go back to the core competency. Right, they're not doing well in AI, but you know where Apple has succeeded over the last 40 years Slick user interfaces, and that's exactly what Apple is going to try to promote here.

0:33:06 - Mikah Sargent
That's interesting because I've always thought or felt that the narrative was kind of if you want to tinker, if you want to play around, if you want to change things up, you go Android, and if you're trying to get a person to just feel comfortable with an operating system, it is iOS, it is iPhone. But over time, yeah, things have gotten a lot more complicated. You swipe down control center and there's, you know, 50,000 different buttons you can press and move things around. Jiggle mode has changed over time and you see a lot of complaints there when it comes to this. Well, let's just be honest here.

0:33:41 - Mark Gurman
Let's be honest here. The interfaces have become bloated right. They have become filled with stuff. They've been adding new features on top of the existing user interface paradigms and the way these interfaces work for years, for decades, even at this point for some of these operating systems. But they've never taken a step back and said, instead of tacking on everything on top of each other, let's take a step back and see how can we rearrange all this for it to work and be more intuitive, be more natural, be easier to use. Go back to that day one of the iPhone where it was very simple and you knew it was going to work. So they're basically starting over on what an interface should look like for a phone, for a tablet and for a Mac, and they want them all to work more similarly, in a more cohesive manner.

0:34:25 - Mikah Sargent
Do you know if these design changes come at the expense of focus on Apple's AI intentions? Of course, there's been a lot of reports and Apple itself said hey, we're delaying the smarter Siri for who knows how long. Or is this kind of like a look over here moment of?

0:34:46 - Mark Gurman
you know there are two separate things. You know work on this redesign and the decisions from the executives to go down this path started even before Apple's push to develop Apple intelligence, so this has been a two, three, four year project.

0:35:00 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, it's been a really big priority for people I've talked to within Apple's user interface design group Understood and now you talked about in the piece that VisionOS is sort of inspiration for the push for the Slicker interface. How much do you know about what we can look to there as the means of understanding what we should expect for the rest of the OSs?

0:35:26 - Mark Gurman
Yeah, no, I've obviously been a big Vision OS user. I've seen iOS 19. I've seen Mac OS 16. So I have a good handle on how these things are designed and how they're going to work. The important thing to note here is they're going to pick and choose their spots. They're going to take user interface elements like new translucent menu items, new panels, new button sections. You know that side panel on the side of the VisionOS apps that they have, like the menu controls.

They're going to take what makes sense and apply it to those operating systems. So you're not going to see a direct copy, the way you launch your home grid in VisionOS and just copy that for iOS and macOS. They're going to take what makes sense. You have to understand. Still, mac and iPad and iPhone, those are 2D user interfaces. There's a lot of the user interface that went into Vision OS specific to that 3D, to that augmented reality environment. So they're going to pick and choose their spots, but you're going to see more cohesiveness across the operating systems. You use Vision OS and the user interface paradigms just feel so much more modern and advanced than you're getting on Mac and iPhone, and so it's about bridging that gap.

0:36:28 - Mikah Sargent
Understood. I guess the last thing I'll ask you is when it comes to these changes. Of course, everybody talks about change being a good thing and change being something they can handle, but then change happens and they are frustrated With changes like this. We saw the introduction of system preferences becoming system settings and that kind of falling more in line with what we see on iOS, ipados. Is Apple prepared for the response to these changes? I mean, it sounds like it's going to be a shocking change in terms of how much things are, you know, going to be adjusted?

0:37:11 - Mark Gurman
It's going to be a shocking change. You've seen the iOS 18 photos revamp. That's one app, right Albeit, a popular one, but you change one app and there were a bunch of people who were upset about it. It didn't turn into a crisis like this stuff, but yeah, yeah, I don't think there's going to be a backlash. I think people are actually going to like it. If I'm being honest with you, I don't find it polarizing at all.

Okay, that's good to know, but just because the design is not polarizing doesn't mean it's going to be hugely different and annoy a lot of people, right? I think both can be true. I think people are going to love it, but it's going to take people a while to get used to. It's not like they're making it worse, which I think with the photos app they actually made it worse, right? So the issue is going to be in the adjustment period, not in the substance. Does that make sense?

0:37:55 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, absolutely yeah, I think so. Yeah, you, just you. You've got to learn the new way of doing things, but the new way of doing things is better from the old way of doing things.

0:38:05 - Mark Gurman
That's my personal take right. Like I'm not sure everyone is going to feel that way, but in in my take, like I remember, when I got the original iPhone it took you two weeks to learn how to type on that thing, to learn that interface, and so you're going to see that learning curve again and through every Apple product people have made that learning curve, even the watch. That was a new interface.

0:38:24 - Mikah Sargent
So that makes sense. That makes sense. Well, I guess then, the true last thing is, with this shift in the design, does this better integrate with Apple intelligence in terms of having that? Because right now it does feel like many of these things are kind of tacked on, layered over the top. You communicate with Siri and it's this rectangle around the outside Is part of this design overhaul, because you said they're kind of two separate groups. Will we feel more of an integration when it comes to writing tools and all of these other Apple intelligence features that are currently here?

0:39:04 - Mark Gurman
That's the idea, but I think that's going to take a while. I think first and foremost they want to get the design stuff out and then figure out how to integrate Apple intelligence more deeply.

0:39:14 - Mikah Sargent
Makes sense. Well, mark Gurman, I want to thank you so much for taking some time to join us today. Of course they can head over to bloomberg.com they being our listeners to check out your work. Is there anywhere else? They should follow along to keep up with what you've got.

0:39:26 - Mark Gurman
Yeah, I'm on all the socials @markgurman. Mikah, always such a pleasure to be on here with you and the team. So thanks again and have me on soon.

0:39:32 - Mikah
All right I've got one more story of the week coming, but first:

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All righty, we are back from the break and I wanted to finish this week's episode of Tech News Weekly yes, I know, again with an AI story, but this time it's about a study done by the wonderful Tao Center, which will be familiar to some of you who are this week in Google Watchers, now intelligent machines. The Tao Center looked into the way that people are using AI search. So, first and foremost, it's important to understand that we have tools like ChatGPT and, to a certain extent, Claude and Gemini, that give you and Copilot, that give you the ability to type up a message and have the AI respond to your message. But many of these tools have added on the ability to also search the internet and kind of help to bring down that information and distill it into answers based on what it's gone to find. And for Leo, who uses the tool Perplexity, this is actually a regular part of the system. It is an AI search tool and so that means going and grabbing articles and information and putting it all together to give you an answer. Now, oftentimes when you do a Google search, you'll get an AI summary or some sort of AI response at the top, where it is also going out and reading some of the articles and then trying to provide an answer for you. But here's the thing According to this study from Tau Center, which is a partner of the Columbia Journalism Review, ai search has a citation problem.

So the team looked at eight different AI search engines and discovered that they were all bad at citing the news. So what does it mean to be bad at citing the news? Well, chatbots would give answers, even if they couldn't answer those questions accurately, and instead of just saying look, I can't answer that, it would provide a speculative answer instead. So, in other words, it would try to answer it but would not do so accurately. Interestingly, I want to go.

I almost wish that we had like an instant clip replay, because yesterday on Intelligent Machines they were talking about an art piece, an installation. I think it's outside of maybe the CIA or the NSA, I can't remember what group, but there's a cipher that an artist created and during the show they were talking about how the artist has been getting emails from people who've tried to use AI to answer, to figure out the cipher, and he's talking about kind of how the people who are doing that and using AI are kind of rude and different from what he has experienced in the past. But interestingly, leo decided to take the cipher, pop it into what would have been perplexity and try to get an answer from it. I believe it was perplexity. Regardless, whatever the AI was, he popped it in there and asked it to solve the cipher and, instead of solving it right away or attempting to solve it right away, it actually responded to say that it couldn't do that, that it couldn't do that, and so that I found fascinating because I am used to AI chatbots just kind of confidently and many times incorrectly, providing a response Thank you, it's cryptos outside of the CIA headquarters. I appreciate that out of sync, so I thought that was kind of cool that for once, I was seeing an AI say, look, this is something I can't do or I don't know how to do, which is a funny thing to say that I was seeing an AI say, look, this is something I can't do or I don't know how to do, which is a funny thing to say that I was celebrating that, given how Siri saying that in the past always used to annoy the crap out of me, but very good that it did that and just said all right, I'm not able to figure this out.

They also found that premium chatbots. So in other words, they also found that premium chatbots. So in other words, chatbots you're paying for would provide answers that were, in a way, more confident but were still incorrect. So where you would get like a free chatbot that would go, I think this might be the answer you're paying for a chatbot and it's going. This is definitely the answer and in that you're kind of wondering if the fact that you're paying for it is at play, that it needs to be giving you the answers that you're looking for, right.

There's also the robot exclusion protocol at work, and multiple chatbots appeared to bypass this protocol. So let me talk about that for a moment. The robot exclusion protocol. First and foremost, it's important to understand that this is not some sort of official agreement. It is instead just a gentle person's agreement, if you will. Meaning that and there's going to be people rolling their eyes about that but meaning that you have a little file that you store on your server, robotstxt, and it is telling.

For a long time it was telling the different web scrapers, like Google's web scraper and other companies' web scrapers hey, don't look at my site, because when you do, you're eating up a bunch of the server space that I have the server usage, rather, that I have. And so in the early days of the internet, that robotstxt file was more important, because maybe you just had a little site and you were paying a small amount, but then robotstxt went and scraped your site and you got popped into a search engine and then suddenly people were visiting your site and robotstxt, or the robot itself was was eating up a bunch of your, your uh usage, and so you got a huge bill. That's why it was created in the first place, and then kind of the internet just agreed that if you had that and if you said don't scrape my site, we listen to you, right? When AI came along and started scraping sites, the thought was that these AI companies would follow what has been the precedent of the web for the web's existence ever since the introduction of the robot exclusion protocol. Unfortunately, given that it's not an official regulation and is instead just a sort of agreement that exists, some don't do that, and CJR's partner discovered that that definitely seems to be the case, that they're not following those rules. Discovered that that definitely seems to be the case, that they're not following those rules.

One big thing that stood out, I think, for not just the study, but also that stood out to me, and it's something that I've experienced before and seen before the search tools fabricated links and cited syndicated and copied versions of articles. So in some cases, because its goal is to provide you with an answer, it would make up links that didn't actually link to anything. So if you clicked on the link, it wouldn't go to something. That's obviously a problem because it is citing information that does not exist. And then again, it cited syndicated and copied versions of articles. So in that case, for the sake of having these agreements in place where the stuff that you're finding in AI leads you back to a news publication that isn't always happening because instead the search tool is linking to something else that is a partner of that original publication. So the idea there is that different news publications have agreements with companies like OpenAI, for example, to provide its body of work and in return, the thought is that it will lead I mean, of course, there's already an agreement in place and money exchanged but then also it will lead to people going to those sites and checking out the work. That's not happening if it is citing and linking to copied versions of articles. And then, last but not least, they found that content licensing deals with news sources provided no guarantee of accurate citation and chatbot responses. So those are the agreements I was just talking about those licensing deals, citation and chatbot responses. So those are the agreements. I was just talking about those licensing deals. And just because the company had deals did not mean that the answers provided were any better than the others. When we come back, we'll talk a little bit about the methodology of the study and a little bit more about the detailed results.

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For me, I think that's always an important aspect of a study. What's the way that they tested this? So, according to the Tao Center report, the team randomly selected 10 articles from each of the publishers that they were kind of working with working on, rather and then selected direct excerpts from those articles for use in the queries that were provided to these AI chatbots AI search engines. After giving each of the chatbots little parts of the excerpts, then it asked the chatbot to identify the corresponding article's headline, its original publisher, its publication date and its URL. So the query worked like this, basically it included a block quote from the article, had two little lines, and then it says hey, can you identify the article that contains this quote? Then provide the headline, the original publication date and the publisher and include a proper citation for the source. Now this is interesting. They say that they specifically and deliberately chose excerpts that if you just posted, that, pasted them into a Google search, it would show the original search source, excuse me within the first three results.

So, to be clear, traditional search turned up what they were expecting and then they ran 1,600 queries, 20 publishers times 10 articles, times eight chatbots in total, and then evaluated the responses based on the retrieval of the correct article, the correct publisher and the correct URL. So then, basically, it would look to see if it was correct, correct but incomplete, partially incorrect, completely incorrect and so on and so forth, and would use that in the different tools. It appears that Perplexity Pro was the most completely correct, so in its search it was able to find quite a few actual, completely correct answers. Oddly enough, gemini, which is Google, and despite the fact that Google search in a traditional sense was able to find these articles, gemini had one completely correct result, two correct but incomplete results, and then the rest were on the incorrect scale or none provided at all. Incorrect scale or none provided at all. Kind of wild to see that, oddly enough. Grok 3 search and Perplexity Pro, which is also search, was able to provide responses that had less uncertainty but, despite that, were still more often incorrect, and so that's kind of what we were talking about before, where those answers came back and they seemed to be true but were in fact not.

Now I'm not going to get super far into this data, because I want everyone to go read this report and check out this report. Of course, we'll have a link in the show notes, but I did think that it was an interesting look at things. That said, the wonderful Anthony Nielsen brings up a point that I wanted to actually get to, which is something that you know I find interesting. Anthony says I'm not knocking the study, but this test uses an odd use case, one that I wouldn't use an AI search for. If I had the excerpt, I would just Google it, since it would just put the source up top anyway. So that is something that stuck out to me too the methodology, and that's why I wanted to talk about the methodology, the methodology of this study.

The point of an AI search tool, right in theory, is not to give me access to an original or give me a link to an original source, but to provide an answer to a question that I'm asking or provide a summary of a search query that I'm making. I'm using AI search to shorten the process, not give me links to articles, and I think that one of the big sort of focuses of this, more than anything else, it seems was kind of a hey, hey, people who are working with these different generative AI companies by making deals with them, who work in media, be aware that your stuff, that you're giving these AI tools access to by way of your little deals, is maybe not getting cited. So, in other words, what I'm saying is it almost feels like inside baseball when it comes to this study, that this is not necessarily for the average person, but instead was kind of an alert that, if you're going to be making deals with these companies, be aware that your stuff might not be linked or may be cited inaccurately, rather than something for us to say hey, don't trust these tools to do X, y or Z, because, yeah, as Anthony points out, I too am not going to try to use an AI search tool to just give me a link to an article. I would just go to the article or I would search to try to find the article and, in that way, the methodology. It's a crafted test for a very specific outcome, which is good in the case of trying to test an AI. But what is that actually telling us? Whenever it comes to this and that's where I think that there is the fact that one part of the study is specifically about those licensing deals. The quote the presence of licensing deals didn't mean publishers were cited more accurately is telling in that sense. But of course, it all depends on how you use these tools and if you did expect that an AI search tool would work like a traditional search tool and give you access to the link of the article that you were looking for. So I guess just be mindful in that way that one should probably not expect an AI search tool to function as the search tools of yesteryear. Right, they may do different things and in that way, this Tau study certainly reveals that that's the case. So be sure to check that out over on cjrorg. Interestingly, I wonder if I put in AI search has a citation problem. So, interestingly, I wonder if I put in AI search has a citation problem. Find me the article.

If any of these search AI, you can head to twit.tv/tnw if you are not yet subscribed to the show, because that's where you can go to subscribe to the show in audio and video formats. I also want to remind you about the wonderful, the awesome Club Twit $7 a month. $7 a month will get you access to all of our shows ad-free. It's just the content. You gain access to the Twit+ bonus feed that has extra stuff you won't find anywhere else. You gain access to the members-only Discord server, a fun place to go to chat with your fellow Club Twit members and also those of us here at Twit, and access to that warm, fuzzy feeling knowing you're helping support what we do here on the network.

We do have a two-week free trial, so be sure to check out Club Twit and then we will love to have you stick around after the fact. If you'd like to follow me online, I'm @mikahsargent on many a social media network where you can head to chihuahua.coffee. That's C-H-I-H-U-A-H-U-A.coffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Be sure to check out my shows like Hands-On Mac, Hands-On Tech, iOS Today, and I think that covers it, so you can check all of those out on the network as well. I'll catch you again next week for another episode of Tech News Weekly. But until then it's time to say buh-bye.