v3.6_bonus: Elephant intelligence

Can you believe we’ve got more AI news to natter about?!

Remember, bonus episodes covering the latest tech news are only available to our HeadStuff+ subscribers, so consider signing up if you haven’t already.

This week we’re giving our take on Apple’s WWDC announcements and the mix of clever branding, actually useful-looking use cases and impressive-sounding privacy controls that come with Apple Intelligence. (And, on the branding note, Ryan Broderick has redefined the Apple effect as: “They’ll eventually have a version of the new thing you’ve heard about, once they can rebrand it as something uniquely theirs.”)

Someone else, who shall not be named, was also talking about WWDC, and we really think we should stop paying so much attention to what he says. 🤐

We also discussed the pushback on Meta’s plans to scrape your Instagram and Facebook data to train its AI, and while users outside the data protection rules of the EU are already being subjected to this, we actually have the option to opt out – though they don’t make it easy. People are even sharing tips on LinkedIn on how to best phrase your objection to this data processing. But, since recording, Meta has actually pressed pause on plans to bring these so-called “benefits” to EU users, so maybe we’ll all be spared this rigmarole. (Though we would still recommend taking the time to do it – just in case!) 🇪🇺

And Meta’s not the only one rubbing users up the wrong way with AI data processing. Adobe got itself into a right mess for suggesting users’ content might be used to train AI models. 👎🏻

And let’s be real: AI is still not good enough at many things it’s being asked to do. Elaine says it don’t write good, and Jenny wants automakers to stop trying to make fetch self-driving cars happen for the sake of everyone’s safety. Seriously. That money could be useful in addressing much more valid mobility challenges. 🚦

For more of us ranting about why we won’t have self-driving cars any time soon, check out our season one bonus episode, You drive me lazy. 🚗

But there was also a good application of AI in the news recently: It’s helped us discover that elephants might just be calling each other by name. How cool! 🐘

Finally, we end this bonus episode with a shout-out for legendary computing pioneer and trans activist Lynn Conway, who died earlier this month. Rest in power, Lynn. ❤️

That’s it until were back in the main feed next week with an all-new episode. In the meantime, we’re going to be listening to Kabin Crew on repeat. ⚡️🤘