Tech Rings, Invisible TVs & AI Lawsuits
5 in 5 - Brave & Heart HeartBeat #186 ❤️
This week we’ll be doing a deep dive on all the new tech trends we saw at CES in Las Vegas this week, from the AI buzzword to wearables, and asking is invisible tech the new luxury?
We’ll also be analysing yet another mad move from Mr Musk on X, and having a muse on the New York Times vs. OpenAI lawsuit and what it means for copyright law and AI development.
Let’s get into it.
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#1 - AI Takes Over CES… For Better Or For Worse
This last week the annual CES tech show, one of the largest consumer electronics shows in the world, took place in Las Vegas.
As expected, the AI buzzword was buzzing around the conference hall, levelling up any product imaginable, from pillows to hoovers. Also as expected, however, the focus on AI was often counterproductive.
Take the pillow, for example. It claims to stop you from snoring by pumping air into different parts of the pillow to make you turn over, and hence stop snoring. So what’s AI about it? It can learn what your snoring sounds like so it doesn’t confuse it with other noises like cars going past.
That’s the least interesting thing about it, but they probably had to put the word in there because every other product claims to be AI powered - you don’t want to be the odd one out.. It also looks really uncomfortable. Anyway, we digress.
One of the biggest winners at CES was Rabbit’s handheld AI device, which claims to offer you a better way to use your apps without using your phone. Described as an “AI walkie talkie with a screen” you hold down the button and ask it to do something for you, like book flights to Paris, and it does it for you.
Powered by a “large action model” which means it’s been trained to use apps and services, it basically does all the tapping and clicking for you - meaning you can get the best use out of them without actually having to use them yourself. Like a little app servant, pretty much.
AI uses at CES ranged from pointless to useful, but in most cases the word was still floating around…
#2 - Wearables The Next Big Thing At CES
The next big thing after AI at CES was wearable tech. Wearables were having a huge moment across the show, and not just the ones you’d expect.
Wearable tech in ring form was everywhere. Among the rings getting the most attention are the Evie ring, which is already available to buy (that’s huge for CES considering most of the products there rarely make it past the concept stage) and aimed at women – offering health monitoring such as menstrual tracking – along with a ring from the startup Lotus which wants to allow you to control your smart home – heating, lights, etc – via jewellery.
The most unexpected wearable we’ve seen however is a device that you hold in your mouth and operate with your tongue. It’s called MouthPad and is a retainer-esque tongue-operated device described as an accessibility gadget, which allows you to control any device that supports a Bluetooth mouse without significantly impairing your speech. Pretty amazing for people who can’t use a whole range of devices due to mobility issues.
And finally, while we saw headsets on headsets on headsets, Apple won big Kudos for their Not-VR-It’s-Called-Spatial-Computing-Actually Headset despite, or because, of not actually being there. How? Because all other headsets so obviously paled in comparison. Why go to a party that you’re too cool for? How Steve Jobs of them.
#3 – Invisible Tech – Luxury Options at CES
While making your jewellery into tech is the next big thing at CES, apparently making your tech into home décor is also the new must have – seriously, keep up.
The Samsung Frame tv isn’t new to us, it’s been the fanciest way to pretend you’re too arty to watch telly for a while now, but the trend has definitely caught on, and Samsung’s competitors LG absolutely one-upped them at this year’s CES with their see-through television screen.
LG have been teasing prototypes for years, but have finally managed to come out with a 77 inch transparent TV that looks like a sheet of glass, which raises a black film at the push of a button. They said it would be available for shipping this year, but wouldn’t give the price, which is always a good sign.
Samsung, however, only had a prototype of the same tech on show – how embarrassing. They were resting on their laurels however, bringing out the Music Frame, which repurposes the same tech we’ve been able to buy at years at Ikea but using the same style name as the Frame TV to give it a marketing boost. If you can, you should, we suppose.
It seems like invisible tech is the next luxury form of technology – you need to have it, but not show that you have it, that’s so vulgar…
#4 - Elon Musk Vs. The Critics
Moving on from CES,, Musk is starting the year as he means to go on, by banning all the accounts he fancied banning on X.
Last week, X temporarily suspended the accounts of multiple prominent journalists, commentors and comedians on the left.
X didn’t give any explanation for the sudden purge other than that the accounts must “violate the X rules” in some way. These rules prohibit violent or hateful speech, child exploitation and sharing private or fake information. Except, guess what, these accounts didn’t do any of these things. (Musk himself does, like every day, but whatever…)
What do they all have in common then? They were critical of the Supreme Leader, Mr M, directly or indirectly.
One of the reporters is Steven Monacelli, who covers extremism, and Ken Klippenstein, who published a piece on the errors with Tesla’s self-driving feature last year.
Other accounts that were banned were some comedy accounts with have criticised Musk, and a podcast account for the TrueAnon podcast, which provides left-wing analysis of current political events and conspiracy theories.
Musk tweeted that these accounts may have been accidentally swept up in a cull of spam/scam accounts, but if that’s true they seem to be suspiciously similar...
#5 - The New York Times vs. OpenAI (& Microsoft)
the New York Times gave OpenAI the gift of a lawsuit this festive season, claiming that ChatGPT’s use of its articles as training data in a landmark case that may change copyright law forever when they began legal proceedings against them late last year.
The New York Times accuse OpenAI and Microsoft of infringing on copyright by using millions of their articles to train AI technologies like ChatGPT, going so far as to say that Chatbots now compete with news outlets as a source of reliable information.
OpenaAI have publicly responded to the copyright lawsuit, saying it was “without merit” and that they still hope to have a partnership one day… yep, with the company that are suing them.
They also accused The New York Times of manipulating prompts to support claims that ChatGPT reproduced their stories verbatim, saying that the chatbot would only do that if expressly asked to, despite admitting that they did take down a ChatGPT feature called Browse which “unintentionally” repeated content verbatim.
The interesting thing to us is that OpenAI seem to be leaning on the argument that in order for AI models to learn and solve new problems they need to access all the human knowledge they can, and that training AI models with data from the internet falls under fair use rules that allow the repurposing of copyright works.
This seems to be another case of tech companies believing the end justifies the means, and hence they can do whatever they want, for the bettering of society, you must understand that?
Brave & Heart over and out.
Bonus
CES Worst In Show
We’ve given you the highlights, what about the worst tech on show?
From $200 coffee mugs linked to your smart phone to keep your coffee hot (unnecessary) to a little disk to put in the toilet to that will allow you to monitor your health through the analysis of your urine (creepy), regale yourselves with this list of tech nonsense.
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