We’ve been covering the rise of AI image editing very closely here on Decoder and at The Verge for several years now — the ability to create photorealistic images with nothing more than a chatbot prompt could completely reset our cultural relationship to photography. But one argument keeps cropping up in response. You’ve heard it a million times, and it’s when people say “it’s just like Photoshop,” with “Photoshop” standing in for the concept of image editing generally. 

So today, we’re trying to understand exactly what it means, and why our new world of AI image tools is different — and yes, in some cases the same. Verge reporter Jess Weatherbed recently dove into this for us, and I asked her to join me in going through the debate and the arguments one by one to help figure it out.

Links: 

• You’re here because you said AI image editing was just like Photoshop | The Verge
• No one’s ready for this | The Verge
• The AI photo editing era is here, and it’s every person for themselves | The Verge
• Google’s AI ‘Reimagine’ tool helped us add disasters and corpses to photos | The Verge
• X’s new AI image generator will make Taylor Swift in lingerie and Kamala Harris with a gun | The Verge
• Grok will make gory images — just tell it you're a cop. | The Verge
• Leica launches first camera with Content Credentials | Content Authenticity Initiative
• You can use AI to get rid of Samsung’s AI watermark | The Verge
• Spurred by teen girls, states move to nan deepfake nudes | NYT
• Florida teens arrested for creating ‘deepfake’ AI nude images of classmates | The Verge

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Mike Krieger, the new chief product officer at Anthropic, one of the hottest AI companies in the industry. Anthropic’s main product right now is Claude, the name of both its industry-leading AI model and a chatbot that competes with ChatGPT. 

Mike has a fascinating resume: he was the cofounder of Instagram, and then started AI-powered newsreader Artifact. I was a fan of Artifact, so I wanted to know more about the decision to shut it down as well as the decision to sell it to Yahoo. And then I wanted to know why Mike decided to join Anthropic and work in AI — an industry with a lot of investment, but very few consumer products to justify it. What’s this all for? 

Links: 

• Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger is Anthropic’s new chief product officer | The Verge
• Instagram’s co-founders are shutting down their Artifact news app | The Verge
• Yahoo resurrects Artifact inside a new AI-powered News app | The Verge
• Authors sue Anthropic for training AI using pirated books | The Verge
• The text file that runs the internet | The Verge
• Anthropic’s crawler is ignoring websites’ anti-AI scraping policies | The Verge
• Golden Gate Claude | Anthropic
• Inside the white-hot center of AI doomerism | New York Times
• Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, on the paradoxes of AI safety | Hard Fork
• No one’s ready for this | The Verge
• OpenAI announces SearchGPT, its AI-powered search engine | The Verge
• Amazon-backed Anthropic rolls out Claude AI for big business | CNBC

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/24001603

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The web has a problem: huge chunks of it keep going offline. The web isn’t static, parts of it sometimes just… vanish.

But it’s not all grim. The Internet Archive has a massive mission to identify and back up our online world into a vast digital library. In 2001, it launched the Wayback Machine, an interface that lets anyone call up snapshots of sites and look at how they used to be and what they used to say at a given moment in time. Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, joins Decoder this week to explain both why and how the organization tries to keep the web from disappearing.

Links: 

• When Online Content Disappears | Pew Research
• Game Informer is shutting down | The Verge
• When Media Outlets Shutter, Why Are the Websites Wiped, Too? Slate
• MTV News lives on in the Internet Archive | The Verge
• The video game industry is mourning the loss of Game Informer | The Verge
• Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future | Decoder
• How The Onion is saving itself from the digital media death spiral | Decoder
• The Internet Archive is defending its digital library in court today | The Verge
• The Internet Archive has lost its first fight to scan and lend ebooks | The Verge
• The Internet Archive just lost its appeal over ebook lending | The Verge

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Decoder is off this week for a short end-of-summer break. We’ll be back with both our interview and explainer episodes after the Labor Day holiday. In the meantime we thought we’d re-share an explainer that’s taken on a whole new relevance in the last couple weeks, about deepfakes and misinformation.

In February, I talked with Verge policy editor Adi Robertson how the generative AI boom might start fueling a wave of election-related misinformation, especially deepfakes and manipulated media. It’s not been quite an apocalyptic AI free-for-all out there. But the election itself took some really unexpected turns in these last couple of months. Now we’re heading into the big, noisy home stretch, and use of AI is starting to get really weird — and much more troublesome. 

Links: 

• The AI-generated hell of the 2024 election | The Verge
• AI deepfakes are cheap, easy, and coming for the 2024 election | Decoder
• Elon Musk posts deepfake of Kamala Harris that violates X policy | The Verge
• Donald Trump posts a fake AI-generated Taylor Swift endorsement | The Verge
• X’s Grok now points to government site after misinformation warnings | The Verge
• Political ads could require AI-generated content disclosures soon | The Verge
• The Copyright Office calls for a new federal law regulating deepfakes | The Verge
• How AI companies are reckoning with elections | The Verge
• The lame AI meme election | Axios
• Deepfakes' parody loophole | Axios

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Decoder is off this week for a short end-of-summer break. We’ll be back with both our interview and explainer episodes after the Labor Day holiday, and I’m very excited for what we have coming up on the schedule. 

But while we’re out, we’d like to highlight a great episode from the Land of the Giants podcast, which is over at Vulture this season, for a deep dive into Disney. Can it be a tech company? It’s the question that defines the struggles of its streaming service Disney Plus — and it also tells us where it needs to go in the future to compete with Amazon, Apple, and Netflix. 

Links: 

• Disney Is a Tech Company? | Vulture
• Why Disney plussed itself | Vulture
• Disney’s CEO drama explained, with Julia Alexander | Decoder
• The clock is ticking on Disney’s streaming strategy | Decoder
• The Disney Plus, Hulu, and Max streaming bundle is now available | The Verge
• Disney reportedly wants to bring always-on channels to Disney Plus | The Verge
• How baseball's tech team built the future of television | The Verge
• The year Netflix ended the streaming wars | The Ringer

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Onion is a comedy institution — and like everything else in media, it went on a pure nightmare hell ride in the 2010s. We could do an entire episode on the G/O Media calamity, but the short version is: A bunch of friends just managed to buy The Onion, and they're busy relaunching the website, going back to print, and, clearly, having a blast doing it. CEO Ben Collins and chief product officer Danielle Strle joined me to explain how that even works in 2024.

Links: 

• The Onion sold by G/O Media | The New York Times
• Sam Reich on revamping the game show - and Dropout’s success | NPR
• Platformer’s Casey Newton on surviving the great media collapse | Decoder
• Craig Silverman: Digital advertising’s structure has been weaponized | Digiday
• US Warns a Gaza Ceasefire Would Only Benefit Humanity | The Onion
• The Truth is Paywalled but the Lies are Free | Current Affairs
• A newsroom expands and The Onion is out again on paper | Washington Post
• Report: Nuclear War Sounds Fucking Amazing Right Now | The Onion
• Google defends AI search results after they told us to put glue on pizza | The Verge
• Jury awards nearly $1B to Sandy Hook families in Alex Jones defamation case | CNN
• ‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens | The Onion

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23989633

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today I’m talking with Thomas Dohmke, the CEO of GitHub. GitHub is the platform for managing code – but since 2018, it’s also been owned by Microsoft. We talk a lot about how independent GitHub really is inside of Microsoft — especially now that Microsoft is all-in on AI, and Gitbhub Copilot is one of the biggest AI product success stories that exists right now. But his perspective on AI is pretty refreshing: It’s clear there’s still a long way to go.

Links: 

• Original GitHub landing page | Wayback Machine
• Introducing Entitlements | GitHub Blog
• ashtom (Thomas Dohmke) | GitHub
• The developers suing over GitHub Copilot got dealt a major blow in court | The Verge
• GitHub Copilot can now help start a project with AI | The Verge
• GitHub users can mess around with different AI models | The Verge
• GitHub’s AI-powered Copilot will help you write code for $10 a month | The Verge
• Google DeepMind co-founder joins Microsoft as CEO of its new AI division | The Verge

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23986019

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There’s a major internet speech regulation currently making its way through Congress, and it has a really good chance of becoming law. It’s called KOSPA: the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act, which passed in the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support late last month. At a high level, KOSPA could radically change how tech platforms handle speech in an effort to try and make the internet safer for minors. 

It’s a controversial bill, with a lot going on. To break it all down, I invited on Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner, who’s been covering these bills for months now, to explain what’s happening, what these bills actually do, and what the path forward for this legislation looks like.

Links: 

• Senate passes the Kids Online Safety Act | The Verge
• The teens lobbying against the Kids Online Safety Act | The Verge
• How the Kids Online Safety Act was dragged into a political war | NYT
• House Republicans won’t bring up KOSA in its current form | Punchbowl News
• Why a landmark kids online safety bill is still deeply divisive | NBC News
• Why Sen. Schatz thinks child safety bills can trump the First Amendment | Decoder
• Child safety bills are reshaping the internet for everyone | The Verge
• Online age verification is coming, and privacy is on the chopping block | The Verge

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Replika founder and CEO Eugenia Kuyda, and I will just tell you right away, we get all the way to people marrying their AI companions, so get ready. It’s a ride.

Replika’s basic pitch is pretty simple: what if you had an AI friend? The company offers avatars you can curate to your liking that pretend to be human, so they can be your friend, your therapist, or even your date. That’s a lot for a private company running an iPhone app, and Eugenia and I talked a lot about the consequences of this idea and what it means for the future of human relationships. 

Links: 

• The AI boyfriend business is booming | Axios
• Speak, Memory | The Verge
• Your new AI Friend is almost ready to meet you | Verge
• What happens when sexting chatbots dump their human lovers | Bloomberg
• AI chatbot company Replika restores erotic roleplay for some users — Reuters
• Replika’s New AI App Is Like Tinder but With Sexy Chatbots — Gizmodo
• Replika’s new AI therapy app tries to bring you to a zen island — The Verge
• Replika CEO: AI chatbots aren’t just for lonely men | Fortune
• Gaze Into the Dystopian Hell of Bots Dating Bots | Slate

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23980789

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge, and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking to Jonathan Kanter, the assistant attorney general for antitrust at the United States Department of Justice. This is Jonathan’s second time on the show, and it’s a bit of an emergency podcast situation. On Monday, a federal court issued a monumental decision in the DOJ’s case against Google, holding that Google Search and the text ads in search are monopolies. 

The court hasn’t decided on the penalties for all this yet — that process is scheduled to start next month. But it’s the biggest antitrust win against a tech company since the Microsoft case from two decades ago. I wanted to know what Jonathan thought of the ruling, what it means for the law, and most importantly, what remedies he’s going to seek to try and restore competition in search. 

Links: 

• Judge rules that Google ‘is a monopolist’ in US antitrust case | The Verge
• All the spiciest parts of the Google antitrust ruling | The Verge
• Now that Google is a monopolist, what’s next? | The Verge
• DOJ’s Kanter says the antitrust fight against Big Tech is just beginning | Decoder
• The DOJ Antitrust Division isn’t afraid to go to court | The Verge
• The US government is gearing up for an AI antitrust fight | The Verge

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23979725

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James. 

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, I’m talking with Glenn Fogel, the CEO of Booking Holdings, which owns a large portfolio of familiar travel brands: OpenTable, Kayak, and Priceline, as well as its largest subsidiary, Booking.com. This episode is pure Decoder bait all the way through — from Booking’s structure, to competition with hotels and airlines increasingly going direct to consumer, even to how European regulation affects competition with Google. Oh, and of course, how Booking is incorporating AI; Glenn has some fascinating thoughts there.

Glenn really got into it with me — there’s a lot going on in this space, and it’s interesting because there are so many players and so much competition across so many of the layers, even among Booking’s own subsidiaries. I think we probably could have gone twice as long. 

Links: 

• The oral history of travel’s greatest acquisition | Skift
• Long-term travel looks like a strong growth industry, says Booking’s Glenn Fogel | CNBC
• Ryanair wins screen-scraping case against Booking.com | Airways
• Aggregation Theory | Stratechery
• A Call for Embracing AI—But With a ‘Human Touch’ | Time
• Booking.com launches new AI Trip Planner | Booking
• Priceline releases new AI platform and ‘Penny’ chatbot | Skift

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23976178

Credits: 

Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Amanda Rose Smith. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices