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As more and more companies adopt AI and more consumers use it, the more we learn about the potential flaws of the technology. For example, Carol, maybe you remember last year when Google's AI suggested that everybody should just beat a rock every day.
Not a good idea.
Well, they said, rocks have minerals and vitamins that are quote important for digestive health.
Got it.
I understand that logic, but still not a good idea.
Or just a few weeks ago, in the Fable app, which calls itself the social app for bookworms and binge watchers, found itself having to apologize after some of its AI generated reader summaries contained what the company ended up calling quote very bigoted, racist language. Fable then remove these features from the app. It's an evolving world, Yeah absolutely. Padma
Warrior is founder, president and a CEO of Fable. She's also the former CTO of Motorola and Cisco, also the former CEO of the US arm of the Chinese ev maker Neo. She was on the board of Microsoft until twenty twenty three. She's on the board of Spotify as well. She joins us this afternoon from Palo Alto Padma. Good to have you with us. How are you?
Thank you for having me. I'm doing well.
So I'm curious about Fable. A lot of people are familiar with it because people use it for rating books, finding books, same with stuff we watch on the bigger screen. You're the lesson though. The takeaway from AI you guys were so quick to come out and apologize for it. Take action, be public about it. What were the What did you learn from that incident?
Yeah? I know. Fable is a community platform.
We focus on helping people find, by track, and share all their entertainment interests in one personalized space. We have users from all over the world onward and ninety five countries, and our mission is to celebrate human creative tea in the form of stories. So the incidents you are referring to, we were using generative AI to create a summary for readers based on their reading lists, and regrettably it served a few readers with hurtful, unacceptable commentary related to race.
We apologized, as you mentioned.
Very quickly removed these gen ai features from our platform. To me, they were very A couple of key lessons that we learned. One is it's really important to have a human in the loop. In these early days of Generator Ai. It is essential to carry out really extensive beta testing, and we did a lot of testing, by the way, for our feature, but even with all the testing, you're bound to have an issue. So I think it's really really important to have human in the loop approach.
The second is transparency and listening to community feedback when someone I think our mission, our philosophy at our company is even when we do something with our product, which generator wai, even if it hurts one person, we take it very seriously. So I think that level of transparency and being close to listening to the community and users and having the ability to react quickly, those are two big lessons that we learned and I hope other entrepreneurs follow this.
How much is it that just we're kind of early in on this process. I'm not excusing any of it that goes, you know, it goes like it did for you guys. But is it a case of it's only as good as its input, and that is it a fair assumption. How do you see you understand the tech world, and I'm sure you're looking closely, you know at AI right now that the more we put in better, cleaner information, the better it gets.
Yeah.
Absolutely, And I think there is a lot of confusion. People sometimes confuse AI the generative AI. I think it's important to perhaps distinguish a little bit, at least broadly, the difference between the two. You know, I think as you guys probably know, and I'm not sure how much how much people realize this.
Though.
AI processes data to analyze it and provide us with predictions and insight, for example, performing tasks like identifying objects in images, converting speech to tests, recommendations, all of this thing, generative AI is different. It creates new content based on the data that it has learned from. So generative AI can create text, can create images, can create music videos.
All of this.
I find that generative AI it's developing very quickly and very fast, and it's really really important because as I said, even the best AI needs human oversight at the stage. As you pointed out, it's only as good as the input.
So it's really important to train generative AI algorithms and actually even AI on data sets that are culturally literate and sensitive, because even as humans, we are evolving, right, Like language that was used years ago is not acceptable to us anymore, and it's really important to train our algorithms and artificial intelligence so that it doesn't inadvertently promote harmful stereotypes and biases.
So, okay and Tim and I are just kind of like listening to So. I love first of all, your distinction between generative AI and AI, and you're right to make the distinction. AI has been around for a long time in terms of what happened on your app, and the information that certainly was not welcomed was that gen ai or regular ai, that.
Was jen Ai.
We were saying gen Ai in three of our features on the product, and we had issue with one of them, but we actually pulled all three features back. We launched two of them back without Genai and using human creativity, so that our community actually is actually more happy now with those features.
Do you think you can relaunch the genai feature eventually?
I think it'll take us.
I think for us we need to be really cautious because, as I said, if you look at the statistics, right, it was like ten possible issues out of thirty million that we did. But even that small ratio, I think the interesting thing for me, at least with genai, the testing can't just be quantified and say we had a very small percentage of failure, so we should release this feature, because as I said, even one harmful comment and one hurtful comment is bad, and so how do you find
that in millions and millions that you're creating. So I think at this stage we will probably not use genai for those sorts of features, and I think we will continue to work on it to train our models and algorithms in the right way.
Do you think that the government should be more involved or should be very closely involved with oversight of AI.
I'm not sure.
Yeah, I think it's difficult, I think, but so much broad usage, I don't know if government should be involved, but there should certainly be guardrailed. I think it's up to technology development teams and companies to put those guardrails and safeguards because there's broad sets of use cases. They're very specific sets of use cases. But yeah, definitely there should be policy that guides us at an overarching level so that we could use that like anything we govern
right with technology. I think that is the role that government should play.
What about when it comes to TikTok. It's in the news right now, obviously because of that Supreme Court ruling that we got. The future of the fate of the app is uncertain. What are your thoughts on it.
We actually are a welcoming community to a big part of TikTok called book talk. Book talk is one of the largest communities on TikTok, and the last report I read it said hashtag book talk is used by billions of times across the board.
It's a very large community.
We definitely feel we're a safe haven for book talkers on fable. Actually, people we do have quite a lot of book talk influences today on Fable and a lot of.
People who use both platforms.
Many people that are currently on TikTok in book talk call us the coziest, called fable as the cosiest corner of the Internet. So we hope to be that and we hope to welcome communities like that. I think the good thing about TikTok, and I think what it has shown us is that there is a power to creation and community and that is sort of like neededeople to express themselves, belong in.
A community, and be with like minded people.
So we definitely hope we will be the haven for people that are currently on TikTok if it gets banned or it is not allowed to.
Be used in You have two million users around the world. Have you seen an uptake in the last couple of weeks. Have people come into the platform in anticipation of this, Yes, we've.
Seen a huge uptick in the last four weeks, actually even before when you started.
So we are just really hoping.
That this continues and we can host and welcome these communities onto Fable.
So it sounds like a ban of TikTok would be really good for Fable.
I think either way, like I said, we were we had a lot of book talkers come to Fable.
Even with book talk, it is.
Very complimentary in the use case, so it's not like we are routing for that to be banned or anything. I think for us, TikTok continues, that's great because that community will thrive and we will thrive with it. Unfortunately that community goes away. We want to be the alternative for people who love.
Books and TV shows and stories in general.
What would people maybe find surprising about your app and the kind of activity that goes on. What is it that you think might be a bit surprising A.
You know, I think that's a great question. I started this company because I really wanted to bring the technology world and the creative world together. At Fable, we say we want to build a tech company with the soul of an artist. So I feel we are very proud of our design. We are very proud of the UI that we create. It's beautiful. We celebrate human creation. Yet we are a tech company. We're based, you know, I'm
based in Silicon Valley, our team is distributed. I think people would find us to be unique in being able to bring both of those together. The other thing that I feel we are unique is we truly are a platform if you love and every human loves stories. Right at the end of the day, human beings are all about the story we tell. If you love stories, we are the destination for you.
Just got about twenty five seconds left here. How do you make money and are you profitable? Just quickly?
We are very still early. We're a startup.
We you know, we are not yet quite monetizing the platform.
We'll begin to do that effort.
Today, the platform is free, which makes it easy for people to join.
Will it be the subscription based ultimately or is that the that's the revenue stream going forward quickly?
Yes. Yes, we will launch a subscription here soon and hope to add traditional value added features for people to track their links, to track of their progress, you know, keep track of what interests their life, et cetera.
Got it come back? We'd love to hear more over the year. Padna Warrior, founder president CEO of Fable joining us on this Friday. This is Bloomberg Business Week