ABC listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more. You get in the car, the engines were and then off you go. Except you haven't touched a wheel or pressed an accelerator. Yes, this week on Download This Show, welcome to the world of self-driving cars. Would you try it? Also on the show, Taylor Swift vs TikTok, who won and the company behind Instagram and Facebook have a new plan to stop people being extorted for their intimate images, but will it work?
All of that and much more coming up, this is your guide to the week in Media, Technology and Culture. My name is Mark Finell and welcome to Download This Show. Yes, indeed it is a brand new episode. I hope to download this show in a big thank you and welcome. Yeah, let's go with that. Thank you and welcome to our guest this week. From the University of Sunshine Coast, Lecturer and Computer Science, Dr. Erica Mealy, welcome back. Thank you for having me.
And senior creative technologist, Adley and Ardo, I, Jesse Hughes, welcome back to Download This Show. Always good to be here, Mark. And in use that many people were waiting on with Bated Breath, I am delighted to announce, presumably I'm the first to announce it. The Taylor Swift is back on TikTok, Dr. Erica Mealy, this fact is into a bigger story is about how the music industry is interacting with one of the world's most important social media services.
But why was Taylor Swift not on TikTok in the first place? Sorry, it was actually a really big blow up between Universal Music and all of their artists and Taylor, also in TikTok. But the difference with Taylor is she owns her copyright. So she actually gets to negotiate herself a little bit. So there's allegations or suggestions that she has reached agreement with TikTok.
But what happened was Universal were not happy with basically the payments they were getting from everyone using their videos and audio and such on TikTok. And so pulled all of their stable. We're talking everyone back to Abba off TikTok, which is an interesting choice to make because the viral nature of TikTok has been what sold so much of their music in recent years.
It's this real tension between the two services about how much is it worth to be on that platform and how much do the artists actually deserve once everyone else takes their cut to be able to get it? Yeah, I don't know that Taylor's missing out. She's just been named on the billionaire's list. So I think Taylor is OK. But it's now that people are starting to realize it is interesting.
The dynamic between TikTok as like a almost marketing platform for music and since that like it's the most organic gorilla marketing you could ever have is having armies and armies of Gen Z like backing and pushing a song and getting it into the zeitgeist. So I can definitely understand the value that it brings from a marketing perspective. But then there's that flip side of the direct royalties that artists aren't receiving for that distribution of the music.
The question I find myself most preoccupied there is whether or not TikTok qualifies as marketing because it's a whole bunch of songs that explode on TikTok. But they kind of stay on TikTok right? They become songs that get attached to the videos. It doesn't always translate to chart success or streaming success. And is success on TikTok should it be regarded as marketing or should it just be regarded as as another listening venue, Erica?
Well, personally, I do think it is like another listening venue. It's very generational, I think. And so artists should be rewarded. And we're in that place at the moment where AI is threatening a lot of creative endeavors. And I think the idea of paying for the music we're using, that's quite reasonable. But it's also really, really hard to believe. So even though Universal hauled their catalog, anybody can upload it.
And to beat their detection software, you just had to like pitch shift it or make it slightly faster or slightly slower and say it's original and all of a sudden the songs are back up again. Even though Universal really are going, yeah, no, you can't have them. They don't have a strong power in that space to be able to say, no, you can't use it because actually anyone can upload it. And sometimes the artists themselves are uploading it.
It's an interesting place to be around who owns it and who should get the money for it, I think. I mean, there is an interesting point in here about how TikTok itself has changed music across the board, right? I mean, I know you made the point about how, you know, you could just pitch shift it and it suddenly gets treated as an original track. I mean, that's already happening. I mean, there are old famous tracks that are now being pitch shifted and put on YouTube.
And then the whole generation that don't realize that, you know, fast car didn't happen at that BPM, you know what I mean? And I don't necessarily think it's happened with another social media sharing service before. Like I don't think YouTube or even Spotify had this kind of impact on music where it's actually changing tastes and the shape of songs in ways that we haven't heard before, or just? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like, I love you mentioned this generational element before where it is.
Songs are being built to be like, is this going to be a catchy sound bite for a TikTok? And that, and that I've read these artists come out and just be like, so upset that their practice is having to be shifted or changed or that it was being pushed by, you know, their agents to be able to be making songs that are like, oh, no, it needs to be more, like, punchy for a TikTok.
Yeah, the motivator behind how songs are changing and how we get to those punchy sound bites is definitely part of the conversation right now. Download the show is what you're listening to. It is your guide to the week in media technology and culture. Our guest this week, Dr. Eric Amiele from the University of Sunshine Coast and just used senior creative technologist at the another AI and Mark Vannell is my name.
How do you feel about attaching a teeny tiny AI to your clothes that's watching and listening all the time? I think I can guess how not of you feel about it, but there is a bunch of people out there that have bought exactly that. Jesse, introduce us to Humane AI's pin. I'm Marko DeBea on the teeny tiny element. It's a bit bigger than that. So what this is, it is this is idea of a wearable AI. And so when we think about AI, we typically think about software.
We're moving to the hardware space and the ultimate vision, I think, for Humane is to almost replace the smartphone. Now we've been talking about dumb phones for ages, you know, like everyone's so sick of having all of our devices all the time. And so what this idea is to have this kind of AI pin that clicks onto the left side of your chest and you're able to interact with it in the world very similarly to how we engage with Siri or these other kind of devices.
But it's quite interesting the design behind the pin led by a husband and wife couple who used to work for Apple. They designed like this swipe to turn off your phone function. This pin you kind of have this voice interaction and you also have a little projector that projects into your hands. And so most of the time it's off, but say if you require an interface for making a phone call something like that, you can put your hand out in front and it projects this tiny, tiny, low res green screen.
Obviously, you know, projectors not going to work in sunshine. You've got other issues like voice acting with voice, you know, we we're on buses and we're on trains and we're in land environments. There's just this tension that we haven't been able to crack. I've watched a bunch of reviews on the AI pin and the thing that I notice the most is the lag or delay in a response.
Like it's exciting that we've got this idea of moving towards wearables, but the practicality of every kind of demo that I've seen personally, it doesn't seem like we're ready yet. It factors into a large conversation about how do we actually want to interact with this kind of technology.
And I think I would almost put it in the same category that we're talking about Apple's Vision Pro, which is their sort of augmented reality headset, which is we know that this technology, this artificial intelligence technology or sort of assistant technology, right? So you mentioned serial Quattana. We know that there is a design for people on interact with that, but we haven't quite necessarily worked out what's going to be the dominant flavor of that interaction.
Is it going to be voice, where do you put screen and visual information? Do you put it over your head? Do you project it on your hand? It kind of feels like we're reaching around in the dark a little bit at this particular moment in history. Tell me, tell me if you think I'm wrong, though, Jess. I mean, I'm a designer by trade. So my first question is like, why? Like why? Like what is it that you're trying to solve?
And I think the issue that I have with some of these devices, it's like there isn't an issue, but they're not solving something that isn't like we can't just solve with an iPhone right now. Firstly, using this Humane AI pin, I can't even call an Uber, okay? So it doesn't speak with other apps. It doesn't connect with these other platforms that we use daily. So you can take a photo on this thing, super low res. But then it gets uploaded to this like central web platform.
And so there's no apps because they don't want to encourage the phone. But even more annoying part about this is it's not just a device. You then also have to have an almost $300 a year subscription to like a phone provider. So if they're trying to replace an iPhone with this, or is it just another expense? Because already you've got to actually buy the device and then you have to pay your ongoing monthly subscription, which already we have a million other.
So it's just kind of like this idea of we're craving this slower society. Like we want we want the dumb phone. We want this slow society. But the reality is these tools are not solving our problems by making it screenless. I just want to roll back for a second. So if you're listening to this conversation trying to visualize what we're talking about, the best description I can give you is imagine an early generation iPod, like an iPod Nano, right?
But it's about the size of I want to say about three fingers. It's white. It's got a little camera and obviously a little projector in there. And that sits sort of just above, you know, your chest. That's what they're asking people to walk around with. Now it's an interesting point that you made there, Jess. And I think it's worth discussing, which is it's not necessarily solving any problems.
And I feel that about a lot of this technology at the moment around AI, around wearable technology as well for the last couple of years. But I constantly get reminded by people, the iPad didn't solve any problems either. And now it's become the addiction of every child under the planet, right? So you know, for you looking at this Erica and now you understand disruptive technology. Exactly. Exactly. And that's what I'm getting at.
I'm like, okay, so let's say that in its current form, it's an early piece of technology. It's not a thing that's going to become massively popular. But is there a future you can see, Erica, where something like this is the winner in terms of how we interact with AI? Well, I don't know about the how we interact with AI. I'd rather take the higher lens of how we interact with technology. And I think like Jess, this gesturing is really great.
And so a number of years ago, there was a patent from Samsung that was able to identify people based on the vein patterns on the back of their hand. And so you could see perhaps instead of as a pin, perhaps these 3D things could be like, you know, how is the hand moving with the wearable watch? So developing these technologies is ridiculously valuable to us and to our future. This might not be the vehicle for it.
I have, as you probably know, Mark, really big issues with AI and the fact that it lies and the fact that it looks like it's telling the truth or it's very hard and very subtle. To me, this whole, let's put AI out in the world and give it access to everything. That's not something I'm going to buy into. Well, they have like this privacy first thing in the sense that like it only like listens or turns on when you press the button to like, you know, say have a look around and like kind of stuff.
But I mean, if you're worried about data tracking, like your phone's like, we have phones. Like I don't think that's really the, like my phone goes literally everywhere with me. So I think this debate of the thing is just it's more visible if you've got a pin on your chest, but really it's the same. I think you have, I think people feel rightly or wrongly like they have a bit more agency over there. The camera is pointing. It means every conversation feels distrustful.
It's what's what's going to be. It's why Google Glass failed, right? Like, you know, for people that never saw them, they were these sort of glasses that Google experimented with Good Lord over a decade ago. And I think one of the biggest problems was that you just looked like a tool.
Like, you know, like it was impossible to have a conversation with somebody who had Google Glass on because you're just like, I don't, well firstly, are you looking at me or are you looking at the screen in your, in your redener? Are you recording me? Like there's so many things about it that were just like, no. And I feel like this suffers somewhat for the same issues. It's about consent, right?
And so, you know, yes, it's only turning on when you tap it, but if I'm in your background, have you asked me for my consent to be reported? So it's a really important one, I think. And it's a difference from a phone because you can put your phone in your pocket or you can cover up the webcam on your laptop or, you know, you can put the iPad in a cover. This is on people and yeah, it raises that question of, well, are you recording?
And yes, they've got an indicator on it that's supposed to show when it's recording or not. And so that is a step forward from some of these smart glasses. But to me, it's about consent. Are there young children that are around you? Have their parents been asked? You know, will it accidentally get bumped when you're at the gym change room? Like, what are these different things and whether they should be controlled?
And the other thing that really scares me about this is they've built a battery extender because, you know, AI needs lots of power. Yeah. But if you put it against your skin, it can burn you. Like, hang on a minute, wearable technology. Have we really done the right safety things yet? I've been branded by AI. That's not on my bingo card for this year. I've got to tell you. That was the thing I remember back in the day, I was saying VR stuff.
And the, remember the Samsung phone kept exploding on airplanes and sitting on fire? Like, I was at film festivals where people were putting the VR global things on their eyes and the phones were overheating. And it's like, that stuff is so scary. I've only been having a battery physically attached to you and all the demo videos. It's a hard said that it is warm. So you have this warm thing on your chest, which, yes, it's a bit… Boo's tonight.
Probably not going to buy that one anytime soon, but it is interesting to see how that technology will develop. Downloaded this show is what you're listening to. And you may have seen this awful story in the last couple days about a teenage boy, an unnamed teenage boy who committed suicide after he was the target of a crime that has been dubbed sexstortion, where he sent intimate images of himself to a person he thought he was chatting to.
But in fact, they promptly used those images to blackmail him, and he ended up tragically taking his life. This is not an isolated case, it is happening all around the world. And interestingly, meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have this week announced new rules about how they're actually going to manage their platform in relation to XTortion. Jess, what have they announced? They've released a whole bunch of almost like, newly protection features.
If we take Instagram, for example, like in the DM areas, they've got ways of like blurring images. It detects nudity, it'll automatically blur the image and just like if a warning that the photo might contain nudity, if you are just about to send an image, it comes up with a pop-up that says, look, just to be aware, like this photo can be screenshot, it could be forwarded. They've also released this ability to unsend the photo, which is great.
So if there's a chance if you want to take that back, take that back, you can unsend the nudity protection features automatically turned on for users under 18. And it also will encourage adults to turn on this kind of feature as well. So it's going to be automatic for anybody under 18. To be completely realistic, any person under 30 has either sent or received images in our current culture. It's just part of online dating culture. It's kind of this modern day way of communicating flirting.
The risk is for younger people. And that's like, I think where we want to be making sure that we're making them very, very aware of the potential outcomes that could come from distributing these kind of images. And they also have these cute features. There's like, if nudity pops up, it says, you don't feel pressured to have to respond. And they've designed it in a way that feels very safe and comforting. Sort of fabulous.
But I will confess, Erika, my first thought reading the list of the announcements is that I was a bit shocked that some of this stuff wasn't in place beforehand. Is that an unreasonable take? I don't think so, as a parent as well. I think I perhaps hoped that some of this stuff was in place, but we also have to remember that these platforms, they weren't developed for kids. They were age restrictions for a long time, for a really good reason.
But I think my favorite thing out of this announcement, well actually there's two. One is that it's very consent based, again, going back to that in that we're going to give you all these warnings, but you still have the agency decide if you want to do this. You still have the agency decide if you want to open this image, but also they've put in protections about who can contact our teens and who can contact our children, which I think is long overdue.
Like this idea that some random person over the age of 18 can talk to my 16 year old, like that's here's the heck out of me. It's something that perhaps we expected, but we've never thought it through because again, these were platforms that were developed for adults. They were never really developed with children and child protection in mind. And for you, Erica, are there things that you would like to say that haven't been put in place yet?
Not necessarily from the tech companies themselves, perhaps more broadly as well. I think it's really challenging and the international context of all the different laws is an interesting one. Yeah. And I always go back to the EU's right to be forgotten. I think that is one of the biggest ones that I think and that goes towards that, take it down. I want you to take my data down. And I think if we all give everyone agency, that would be a great step forward. It has its problems.
And you know, it's very hard to walk that line between nanny state and potential disinformation or controlling of information that we've seen, you know, in some regimes, which is just horrific and protection. So it's a hard one, but I personally would love that idea of the right to be forgotten. I should also say, if you're listening to this, depending on where you are listening to this in the country, there are similar laws to the ones mentioned earlier in Queensland.
I know New South Wales has them as well. If you'd like to find out the laws in your state, make sure you check out the E Safety Commissioner. Lastly, here on Download this Show, how do you feel about self-triving cars? Because I'm going to tell you, the concept terrifies me. Turns out not everyone feels that way. It's again, it's one of these really conflicted things. And I think as life gets busier, we start thinking with AI in general, what can I not do?
What is something that I could actually go out my life and not do? Driving in traffic. That would be something I could not do. That would be fantastic. And you think about the safety aspects of road trains and things like that. And you know, there are some good ideas around how this has worked. But I think San Francisco has been a study in what not to do.
And so for those that haven't heard at the end of last year, there was a big fuel oil because there was two autonomous robo taxi services, Waymo and Cruz. And they started operating initially in those kind of dead hours, in the wee small hours of the morning. And the motivation for it, I totally get, it was to stop drunk drivers getting behind the wheel. And I support that. That's a great idea. Less people on the roads, there's less humans to have to navigate around.
Let's get the drunk drivers out of their own vehicles and help them get home safely. But the problem was it very quickly expanded and they didn't really consult the San Francisco systems about if they wanted this. And so my favourite part of the story was they developed a good relation group who worked out if you put a witch's hat on the bonnet of these cars, it turned them off. And it turned them off so effectively that a technician had to come out to reboot the car to make it work.
So these people in like masks and you know, ski gear or whatever, going around on bicycle looking for it and witches hats on cars to turn them off because they didn't like them on their streets. But then there was unfortunately a couple of really big incidents like Waymo cars driving into a car being towed, a passenger or a pedestrian was knocked into the path of a vehicle and instead of actually stopping, it drives them for six metres, which was obviously a big problem.
So cruise is currently banned. But this idea of self driving cars, I think it has merit, but it needs again to have that problem at least solving and how do we restrict? Well, see with this one I actually feel like the problem they're solving to your point earlier is actually like a lot clearer. And I should say the reason we're talking about this is because Swinburne University is done, something of a survey to see what the public opinion is on self driving cars across Australia.
And I think the intriguing thing is I found relatively good public supported nearly half the respondents saw autonomous vehicles as a desirable trend. That's of course despite this and you know, handful of quite horrific things that have happened in places where they are being tested. Is this an inevitability or is it about how we introduce a democracy?
One of the things that stands out from a story from the US is it's the thing that gets headlines is when people don't feel like as a society it's been consented to. The trust with technology is like they go hand in hand, they're super important. For me, I see this is like if we could get it working, Australia's truck industry is massive, like driving, there's truck stoops, like drive across the country, right? So it's like, oh, we can help with that.
Like that sounds, that sounds like a good solution to me, but that's where most people were strongly concerned with the heavy vehicles, which is where I'm like, oh, that seems like a more suitable business fix. It is going to be interesting where it goes these AVs. Like is it taxis? Is it buses? Is it trucks that move heavy things across the country? Like what's going to be the best kind of starting space for that?
I think when it comes to more like inner city, these taxis driving around like we've seen in San Francisco, they're quite visible. In my head, I compare these large trucks with semi-trailers automated very similar to like a train or something similar like that. So I think for me, that's why I'm in my head. It's an easy transfer. Whereas this idea of like walking around a city and not seeing people in cars, it is a funny feeling. I was in San Francisco a few weeks ago when they were around.
Maybe just getting used to seeing them, I would be a thing. It's about safety and controls, I think. Looking at the fact that we can make outback roads that just for autonomous cars, the one variable that seems to break these autonomous vehicles is other idiot drivers on the road. And as a supervisor of a learner driver, people are horrible on the roads. So I think that's where we need to have those. Okay, if we do this in this small area.
And when they first bought in some of the talk of autonomous cars, they had to RSQ did a study about 10 years ago now. And Australians are like, no man, I want to drive my car on the weekend. I've got my old Peter Brock, or the vac, and I want to go drive that. So this idea of wholly autonomous might not fly in our contacts where it might in others. So I think it's interesting. But talking to your point about seeing the cars with no drivers.
So there's been some interesting work that happened a few years ago where they found that actually part of the issue with autonomous cars is people actually knowing when they've been seen. So when you come up to a pedestrian crossing, if there's a driver, we naturally look to the driver to see that they've seen us and they're going to stop for us.
And sorry, they actually did some testing and make Google eyes, robotic Google eyes on the front and what on the back and the Google eyes were luck onto you to say that you've been seen. I feel like that's a step too far. But we need to have these conversations about what does it mean? Like how do you teach a child to take care around an autonomous car?
And you know, Musk's cars got in trouble for a little while because they had some of their autonomous features turned on and it wasn't stopping for people who were approaching a pedestrian crossing. Previous to that, the cars were very, I guess, standoffish. It was like, oh, there's a person in there. I'll stop just in case. And someone said, it's like it learned how to drive in traffic. That extra initiative and go, oh, there is step away. I'll keep going. That terrifies me.
Let's talk about AI initiative. I don't know if you have a different opinion, Jess, but I'll give the AI the idea. I know. Well, it's an instantly reminded of this artist performance. It was back in like 2017. Incredibly, his name Simon Wecker, I think, European. Anyway, he had this, he had this just this odd idea where he put 99 phones in a trolley and just walked around the city. And Google Maps then caused, thought it was a traffic jam. And they walked all the other cars go everywhere else.
And so he's just scrolling through the city by himself because of this data which then spoke to Google Maps. It was a hack. It was an art project. But what it did was start as a really interesting conversation in how our systems are designed and how we take so much for granted in how our systems shape every single minute of our society.
And so definitely if we're going to start talking about AVs or transport, like transport is foundational to our societies is how we literally design and design societies. And so yeah, I think that's going to be an interesting point to it. And also even when you start talking with the cultural element, like if you go to Europe, everybody drives manual cars. If you go to the US, everybody drives automatic cars. And it's like they both have their pros and cons.
But it's almost like a cultural element to people preferring a certain interaction. So yeah, we love the Aussie. The Aussie taking you back. Yeah, yeah, you get back and don't. We'll see. Just lastly before I let you go, I am six years away from having to teach a child how to drive a car. Will I actually have to teach them how to drive a car or will this technology be at sufficient level sophistication where I don't have to teach my kid how to drive a car? Erica. I don't think we will get there.
I don't think we'll be wholly autonomous in six years. Damn it. Though I am currently having to teach someone to drive a car. And I wish we could be. But not I think in our context, we might take a little bit longer with a regulation. But there are good reasons for it. There could be more sustainable, you know, instead of having big buses that are empty, we could have little autonomous taxis. You know, there are there are benefits.
I don't see it happening in the next six months or six years, but then I also probably didn't see chat GPT coming. Sorry. What do you reckon, Jess? Am I going to have to teach my kid how to drive a car? Don't worry. We'll have a humay I pin on their chest. I can teach them everything. And with that, we are done. Huge. Thank you to our guest this week, Dr. Erica Miele from the University of Sunshine Coast. Thanks being on the show. Thanks for having me.
And Jesse Hughes, senior creative technologist at Leonardo AI. Thanks as ever. Of course. And if you enjoyed the show, make sure, whichever podcasting app you happen to listen to this on, you leave a review and say, I liked it. The voice is optional. And of course, don't forget you can listen to any ABC show that you like on ABC Listen, I'm Mark Vannell. Thanks for listening to another episode of Download This Show. You've been listening to an ABC podcast.
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