Hard Fork

On Wednesday, President Biden signed a bill into law that would force the sale of TikTok or ban the app outright. We explain how this came together, when just a few weeks ago it seemed unlikely to happen, and what legal challenges the law will face next. Then we check on Tesla’s very bad year and what’s next for the company after this week’s awful quarterly earnings report. Finally, to boldly support tech where tech has never been supported before: Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab try to fix a chip malfunction from 15 billion miles away. Guests: * Andrew Hawkins [https://www.theverge.com/authors/andrew-j-hawkins], Transportation Editor at The Verge * Todd Barber, Propulsion Engineer at Jet Propulsion Lab Additional Reading: * ‘Thunder Run’: Behind Lawmakers’ Secretive Push to Pass the TikTok Bill [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/technology/tiktok-ban-congress.html] * Tesla’s in its flop era [https://www.theverge.com/24134781/tesla-q1-2024-earnings-sales-market-share-elon-musk] * NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth [https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth] We want to hear from you. Email us at hardfork@nytimes.com [hardfork@nytimes.com]. Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/hardfork] and TikTok [https://www.tiktok.com/@hardfork].

This week, we drop the Hard Fork Music Megamix. Plus, we talk to two of the New York Time's composers who make the music for our show. It’s all the tracks you know and love, all in one place.  Today’s Guests: * Dan Powell, creative technical manager at The New York Times * Elisheba Ittoop, sound designer and composer at The New York Times Additional Reading:  * The Hard Fork Megamix Youtube Playlist [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGUwZ1-sqlY] We want to hear from you. Email us at hardfork@nytimes.com [hardfork@nytimes.com]. Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/hardfork] and TikTok [https://www.tiktok.com/@hardfork].

This week, the companies building artificial intelligence are facing a limit to what training data is publicly available on the internet. Will that stop them from building God? Then, a new bipartisan national privacy law proposal just dropped. We ask what’s in it. And finally, ByteDance is building new apps instead of fighting Congress’s TikTok ban. Today’s Guests: Trevor Hughes, president and C.E.O. of the International Association of Privacy Professionals Additional Reading: How Tech Giants Cut Corners to Harvest Data for A.I. [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/06/technology/tech-giants-harvest-data-artificial-intelligence.html] For Data-Guzzling A.I. Companies, the Internet Is Too Small [https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-training-data-synthetic-openai-anthropic-9230f8d8] Lawmakers unveil sprawling plan to expand online privacy protections [https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/07/congress-privacy-deal-cantwell-rodgers/] TikTok Turns to Nuns, Veterans and Ranchers in Marketing Blitz [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/04/business/media/tiktok-marketing-blitz-ban.html] We want to hear from you. Email us at hardfork@nytimes.com. [hardfork@nytimes.com] Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/hardfork]and TikTok. [https://www.tiktok.com/@hardfork]

This week we look at how AI is affecting jobs. As companies start announcing AI-related job cuts and experimenting with customer service bots, economists are placing bets on whether AI will lead to major gains for companies and workers. Some are even predicting it will help rebuild the middle class.  Then, multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker Paul Trillo joins to talk to us about his experience as part of a select group of testers granted early access to Sora, Open AI’s video generation tool. And finally, Kevin explains what happened when a Microsoft developer stumbled on a huge cyber security breach. Today’s Guests:  * Paul Trillo [https://paultrillo.com/], multidisciplinary artist, writer and director  Additional Reading:  * How One Tech Skeptic Decided A.I. Might Benefit the Middle Class [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/01/business/ai-tech-economy.html] * Will A.I. Boost Productivity? Companies Sure Hope So. [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/01/business/economy/artificial-intelligence-productivity.html] * Paul Trillo’s Sora Video, The Golden Record [https://vimeo.com/927400626] * Did One Guy Just Stop a Huge Cyberattack? [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/03/technology/prevent-cyberattack-linux.html] We want to hear from you. Email us at hardfork@nytimes.com. [hardfork@nytimes.com] Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/hardfork]and TikTok. [https://www.tiktok.com/@hardfork]

Warning: The second segment of this episode includes mentions of suicide. If you are in crisis please call the suicide and crisis lifeline at 988 or you can contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. This week, we look at a mess of corporate drama in artificial intelligence. Stability AI has announced that its founder and C.E.O., Emad Mostaque, is leaving the company. Meanwhile, Microsoft hired away two of the co-founders and much of the staff of Inflection, without actually acquiring the company itself. Both moves surprised tech insiders. Then, we talked with listeners who had something to say about our interview with Jonathan Haidt on smartphones, social media and young people. And finally, we examine the true motives behind “Shrimp Jesus” and other hugely popular images on social media that were generated with artificial intelligence. Today’s guests: * Jordan Lucero, a high school student * Maya Rayle, a graduate student * Jack Campbell, a college student * Brendan Kelley, a high school digital coach Additional Reading:  * The indie AI companies are falling apart [https://www.platformer.news/indie-ai-collapse-stability-ai-mostaque-inflection-suleyman/] * How Spammers, Scammers and Creators Leverage AI-Generated Images on Facebook for Audience Growth [https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/ai-spam-accounts-build-followers] We want to hear from you. Email us at hardfork@nytimes.com [hardfork@nytimes.com].  Find “Hard Fork” on YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/hardfork] and TikTok [https://www.tiktok.com/@hardfork].