⚙️ Instagram, Adobe & a breakdown of trust: The backlash to Big Tech

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Good morning. I really appreciate your thoughtful responses to our poll last Friday. The consensus was a collective fear that AI might take away your ability for critical thinking and your desire to both learn and be creative. 

But you also nailed it: We just need to find new problems to solve. And we need to keep creating.

Whether AI exists in the world or not, we can exist in the world away from it. And in that world, we can ponder and imagine and create and bask in the simple reality that we can do these things without stacks of computer chips arrayed in a data center. 

In today’s newsletter: 

AI for Good: AI is helping scientists save coral reefs

Coral reefs make up a vital component of our ecosystem. You’ll hear that they contribute to the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people around the world — in part by attracting tourists — but the reefs also serve as a natural protection against coastal storms and erosion. 

But like much of our natural world, corals — faced with pollution, rising ocean temperatures and increasing oceanic acidity — are dying. The world has already lost between 30% and 50% of its coral reefs. 

So scientists are working on a number of plans to resuscitate them.

Enter, AI: Google Research and Deepmind last week launched a new AI tool called SurfPerch designed to automatically process thousands of hours of audio to allow scientists to better understand how the corals are doing. 

Why it matters: The better scientists can track an ecosystem, the more equipped they’ll be to restore that ecosystem. 

Microsoft (sort of) bends to the Recall pressure 

Last week, we wrote about the security backlash to the “Recall” feature of Microsoft’s coming lineup of AI-integrated laptops: Copilot+ PCs. 

On Friday, Microsoft broke its conspicuous silence on the backlash and announced a few changes to Recall:

Kevin Beaumont, the cybersecurity researcher at the center of the backlash, said that while the improvements look good, users should “absolutely not” enable Recall. He urged the cybersecurity industry to take a deep dive into Recall over the next few weeks. 

He added that someone from Microsoft sent him the market research behind Recall, which is “all proper ivory tower stuff.” 

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Meet Reachy2, an open-sourced butler robot 

A week ago, a sect of Twitter rallied around this post: “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing,” not the other way around. The road to that world of AI dishwashers is paved by robotics, and in that arena, Hugging Face has been making some progress.

The details: Remi Cadene, a robotics engineer at the open-source AI company Hugging Face, on Friday posted a video of a new collaboration with Pollen Robotics: Reachy2.

Cadene said that after 60,000 steps of training, the robot had learned to reliably place the cup on the dish rack, rotate its base to hand over the apple and rotate back to its initial position. 

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Instagram, Adobe & a breakdown of trust: The backlash to Big Tech

The race to generative AI has so far been organized by that one ancient rule of Silicon Valley: Move fast and break things. Factoring into this almost frantic environment have been subtle changes to the terms of service that constitute our agreements with the platforms and companies that make the cogs of this digital age spin. 

There have been small, often brief, pockets of backlash to each platform’s new terms of service. But they have yet to keep users, in any large numbers, away. 

The latest company to face the ire of the public for changes to its TOS is Adobe, which, in a recent update to its terms, said, among other things, that “we may access, view, or listen to your Content … through both automated and manual methods, but only in limited ways, and only as permitted by law.”

The backlash: Artists and users took to Twitter to decry the new TOS & state that they would no longer use the service. 

Few were satisfied by Adobe’s clarification, which brings me to Instagram and the broader story. 

Cara’s explosion: We wrote recently that Meta trains its AI models on the user posts that make up Instagram and Facebook. Meta’s opt-out process for this training is, at best, confusing, and at worst, nonexistent. This revelation set off a backlash within the artist community, which in turn led to an alternative explosion. 

My view: This current AI boom is reliant on creative content. Whether Adobe has violated its customer content or not, people are beginning to become aware of the simple fact that their content is the fuel for generative AI. 

And people largely seem angry about it. 

This brings me back to a thought I’ve shared before — I think we are at the beginning of the next stage of our digital era, and while it has plenty to do with AI, it will not be the AI stage. It will be the privacy stage. 

People are looking for alternatives to Adobe, a titan in its sector. Hundreds of thousands of people have already found an alternative to Instagram in Cara (a small dent to Instagram’s billions of users, but a dent nonetheless). 

I think we will continue to see more alternatives as privacy becomes the biggest commodity. But this hypothetical would necessarily be at odds with the current genAI boom, which is explicitly reliant on skimming content from the web. 

OpenAI has said that "it would be impossible to train today's leading AI models without using copyrighted materials."

A privacy revolution might kill generative AI.

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One last thing👇

That's a wrap for now! We hope you enjoyed today’s newsletter :)

We appreciate your continued support! We'll catch you in the next edition 👋

-Ian Krietzberg, Editor-in-Chief, The Deep View