This week was all about AI. You can access Google’s Gemini in different Google products and services (if you pay and don’t mind that it’s still learning), Google is paying Reddit for data access for AI training, get Chrome’s AI writing tools, use the AI image editor in Windows Photos, AI AI AI!
There are also important updates for YouTube creators, website owners, and social media folks so don’t miss those!
Top news and updates this week
- Make sure your YouTube channel has a TV-ready cover image.
- YouTube Partners can see their top earning content by format.
- Google now offers Gemini AI subscriptions for Google Workspace and personal accounts.
- Reddit has a data deal with Google that includes AI training and announced their IPO.
- You can now make Remixed “Collabs” in the YouTube Shorts editor on Android.
- Glen Gabe shares how to find the experimental Notes left on sites in Google Search.
- Windows Photos has a new AI-generative erase tool.
- Bluesky is federating.
- Instagram creator marketplace expands.
- X is rolling out audio and video calls to non-subscribers.
- Chrome’s AI “Help me write” tool is now available.
- The Google Account sign-in page has a new look.
- Find Google Chat 3rd party apps in the Google Workspace Marketplace.
- Signal now lets you use a username instead of your phone number.
- Articles about the death of Vice, how Google is killing independent review sites, how censorship works, AI search and the death of the internet and more.
Read on for details
and additional updates!
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Get your YouTube channel TV-ready. The
YouTube TV App
now uses a full 16:9 cover image
for channels, rather than the small strip used on desktop and mobile. How
does your channel look? You can update it in YouTube Studio >
Customization > Branding.
Learn more.
Create your own 3D Android Bot: For the Mobile World congress (happening now), Google launched a tool to create a cute 3D Android bot. You can personalize your own at www.android.com/build-android-bot/. (via the Android Intelligence newsletter)
Download your Keens. In June 2020, Google’s experimental Area 120 launched Keen, a site for collecting and sharing content for interests you are passionate about. It has social features, including a feed, comments, follows and collaboration. Plus “smart” suggestions from Google Search for content to add to your collections. But it looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2021, so not surprisingly it’s shutting down on March 24. If you used it, you can download the Keens you own or collaborated on at staykeen.com/download.
Free Accounts
Personal Google Accounts can access the Gemini chatbot at gemini.google.com, but it only uses the “Gemini Pro” model, and not the more advanced “Gemini Ultra” model.
Workspace Labs is still available for signup in the US to test AI tools in Docs, Slides, Sheets, Meet, Drive, Keep and Gmail. This offers trusted tester access to some experimental AI features.
Google One AI Premium
Take this week’s quiz ✅
What do you know about the gender makeup of the creator influencer economy? Take this week’s quiz.
To Do & Try
Create your own 3D Android Bot: For the Mobile World congress (happening now), Google launched a tool to create a cute 3D Android bot. You can personalize your own at www.android.com/build-android-bot/. (via the Android Intelligence newsletter)
Download your Keens. In June 2020, Google’s experimental Area 120 launched Keen, a site for collecting and sharing content for interests you are passionate about. It has social features, including a feed, comments, follows and collaboration. Plus “smart” suggestions from Google Search for content to add to your collections. But it looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2021, so not surprisingly it’s shutting down on March 24. If you used it, you can download the Keens you own or collaborated on at staykeen.com/download.
Gemini Subscriptions (and Growing Pains)
Google is integrating its Gemini Large Language Model (LLM) everywhere and, probably not surprisingly, if you want full access you’ll have to pay for it.Free Accounts
Personal Google Accounts can access the Gemini chatbot at gemini.google.com, but it only uses the “Gemini Pro” model, and not the more advanced “Gemini Ultra” model.
Workspace Labs is still available for signup in the US to test AI tools in Docs, Slides, Sheets, Meet, Drive, Keep and Gmail. This offers trusted tester access to some experimental AI features.
Google One AI Premium
Adults (18+) with personal accounts can subscribe to the
new Google One AI Premium plan
for $19.99 per month (after a 2 month free trial).
That includes:
This seems pretty spendy, but if you already pay for Google One Premium, it’s probably worth the 2 month free trial to see if it’s useful to you.
Google Workspace for Business
Google’s Duet AI is now Gemini for Google Workspace. There are two add-on options available to Google Workspace for Business and Non-Profits: Gemini Business ($20 per user per month) and Gemini Enterprise ($30 per user per month).
Advertisers
Advertisers using Google Ads will have Gemini-powered tools for ad creation, including image editing, headlines, sitelinks and auto-generated videos from brand assets.
So how is Gemini doing?
There was also a bit of a fuss this week (driven mostly by right-wingers) when Google’s Gemini chatbot (formerly Bard) generated images of racially diverse Nazis and US founding fathers.
Google apologized and said there were two problems that they are working on fixing: “our tuning to ensure that Gemini showed a range of people failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range. And second, over time, the model became way more cautious than we intended and refused to answer certain prompts entirely — wrongly interpreting some very anodyne prompts as sensitive.” They have “paused” the option to generate people until there is an update. Casey Newton’s Platformer has some context.
My thoughts? Generative AI tools are not actually intelligent, and there is no indication they are currently able to reliably generate any sort of “historically accurate” images, people or no, so that shouldn’t be expected.
That’s important to keep in mind whether you are using Gemini to chat, to draft documents, or search the web.
This gives Google access to the latest new content on Reddit to “better understand Reddit content and display, train on, and otherwise use it in the most accurate and relevant ways.” Which they note is well within what they normally do: “This expanded partnership does not change Google's use of publicly available, crawlable content for indexing, training, or display in Google products.”
Reddit adds this will support “new ways to display Reddit content and [provide] more efficient ways to train models”.
So what does that mean? I’m pretty sure Google and other companies have already been using public Reddit content for AI training. This deal gives Reddit some money and in return Google has better access to the content.
I’ve noticed a lot of Redditors who are unhappy about the deal, but it’s not clear to me this really changes anything.
Probably not coincidentally Reddit also announced their proposed IPO this week, with the added twist that top users will be able to purchase stock at the initial IPO price. The requirements? Users must be US residents, and there will be priority invitations to top creators (starting with those with 5000+ mod actions or 200,000+ karma) to pre-register. Pre-registration opens to everyone on March 1, but slots are limited.
Is it worth investing in? Reddit has never been profitable, but its revenue has been growing and it “only” lost $90 million in 2023.
In looking for a comparison, SNAP (parent of Snapchat) launched its IPO in 2017 at $17 per share. After peaking at $83 per share in September 2021, the value has plunged and is now trading at about $11 per share. My conclusion is don’t invest money you can’t afford to lose.
The YouTube Shorts editor on Android now lets you Remix videos with the “Collab” option, showing up to 60 seconds of the remixed video along with your reaction or other content. This launched for iOS devices in December.
YouTube is testing different desktop watch page layouts. If you are in the experiment, be sure to send feedback to YouTube to let them know what you think.
TV audience measurement company Neilson noted that YouTube has been the top streaming platform by watchtime in the US for the past 12 months. This is streaming on TVs, and comparing viewership to Netflix, Peacock and other TV streaming services.
The TikTok Short Film Competition is now open to submissions and for the first time is open to creators in the US. There are cash prizes and an awards ceremony in Cannes.
VideoPrism is a new video foundation AI model (ViFM) from Google that can describe the content in video.
Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro is pretty impressively able to find and describe specific moments in a video, from either a text prompt or even a crude sketch.
Substack is expanding the Recommendations to other newsletters that a newsletter author can offer during newsletter sign-up.
If your website uses Product structured data, note that Google Search now supports Product Variants structured data.
The latest version of WordPress logs style revisions, makes it easier to manage your site editing preferences and adds randomized images to the Gallery Block.
Does advertiser “brand safety” go too far? The Branded blog writes Jezebel’s new owner has a request for advertisers: Please stop hurting journalism.
Photos and Image Design on the Web
Windows Photos is getting AI-powered generative erase (erase elements in your photos), to go along with blurring, removing or replacing the background. This is available for Windows 10 and 11 on Arm64 devices.
The Instagram creator marketplace connects brands with creators. Instagram is testing “machine learning-based recommendations” to help brands discover creators, and the marketplace is expanding from the US to include Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Japan, India and Brazil. Learn how it works.
Will Oremus at the Washington Post has clarification on what Meta means when they say they downplay “political content” on Instagram and Threads. Political content isn’t just about elections or politicians, but also some “social topics”, which apparently includes “content that identifies a problem that impacts people and is caused by the action or inaction of others, which can include issues like international relations or crime”. That seems both broad and vague.
X is rolling out video and audio calls to non-subscribers. Even (or maybe especially) if you don’t plan to use the service, check your X Messages settings to limit who can call you. To do that, sign into your account in the mobile app, open Messages (envelope icon at bottom right), then click the gear icon at top right to open the messaging settings. You can choose to allow video and audio calls from people in your address book, people you follow, verified users or everyone. Learn more about audio and video calls on X.
The latest scams on Facebook and other social media prey on people with fake live streams of funeral services and fake obituaries (of people who haven’t died!).
If you are an Amazon Associate (sharing Amazon affiliate links), be sure to read the updated operating agreement. Among the changes are new language to clarify that Program Content and Special Links are not allowed to be used with generative AI.
StabilityAI has launched Stable Diffusion 3 text-to-image generator. You can join their waitlist to use the early preview.
At last week’s Munich Security Conference Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, TikTok and X agreed to the Tech Accord to Combat Deceptive Use of AI in 2024 Elections.
Google Workspace Marketplace now includes apps for Google Chat (such as Jira for Google Chat) and the Marketplace can be opened from inside Chat. Developers can also publish apps to the Marketplace, which could provide some useful additions to the current selection. Note that despite the name, this update is available for personal Google accounts, as well as Google Workspace users.
Google Docs is adding a smart chip that auto-completes inserted email addresses, and optionally lets you replace the email with a people chip.
Google Workspace customers and developers now have full access to the Google Meet API. This can be used to create and configure Meet meetings, retrieve information about past meetings, and generate real-time updates on meetings.
If you use Signal your phone number will no longer be visible by default, with the introduction of Signal usernames.
Meanwhile, Yahoo laid off the editor-in-chief and managing editor of Engadget, in addition to a number of other staff.
Read this! Product review site HouseFresh writes How Google is killing independent sites like ours: And why you shouldn’t trust product recommendations from big media publishers ranking at the top of Google.
Ethan Zuckerman @ The Prospect reflects on the 40th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh. We still live in Steve Jobs’s brave new world.
Ada Palmer writes about Tools for Thinking About Censorship.
This is a disturbing report in the New York Times: A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men
Read this! Ryan Broderick explains why AI search is a doomsday cult.
Jason Kottke celebrated 19 years of the kottke.org blog as his full time job. Amazing!
Thanks for reading!
---
That’s all the updates for this week. Subscribe to get the Weekly Update in your email inbox or favorite feed reader every week. Miss last week’s update? Get the February 17 edition here.
Image via Canva. Free for commercial use, no attribution required.
- Google One Premium with 2 TB of data, including more Google Photos editing features, advanced Google Meet features in eligible countries and a discount in the Google Store. This is $9.99 per month on its own.
- Gemini Advanced chat. That’s the updated Bard chat with Gemini Ultra.
- Gemini in Gmail and Docs (help you write), Meet (enhance video quality and generated backgrounds), and Slides (create original images)
This seems pretty spendy, but if you already pay for Google One Premium, it’s probably worth the 2 month free trial to see if it’s useful to you.
Google Workspace for Business
Google’s Duet AI is now Gemini for Google Workspace. There are two add-on options available to Google Workspace for Business and Non-Profits: Gemini Business ($20 per user per month) and Gemini Enterprise ($30 per user per month).
- Both have access to Gemini chat for business with Gemini Ultra at gemini.google.com .
- Gemini in Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Meet
- Gemini Enterprise also offers Meet meetings with translated captions in 15+ languages and “full access and usage of Gemini” (I’m not sure what that includes exactly).
Advertisers
Advertisers using Google Ads will have Gemini-powered tools for ad creation, including image editing, headlines, sitelinks and auto-generated videos from brand assets.
So how is Gemini doing?
There was also a bit of a fuss this week (driven mostly by right-wingers) when Google’s Gemini chatbot (formerly Bard) generated images of racially diverse Nazis and US founding fathers.
Google apologized and said there were two problems that they are working on fixing: “our tuning to ensure that Gemini showed a range of people failed to account for cases that should clearly not show a range. And second, over time, the model became way more cautious than we intended and refused to answer certain prompts entirely — wrongly interpreting some very anodyne prompts as sensitive.” They have “paused” the option to generate people until there is an update. Casey Newton’s Platformer has some context.
My thoughts? Generative AI tools are not actually intelligent, and there is no indication they are currently able to reliably generate any sort of “historically accurate” images, people or no, so that shouldn’t be expected.
That’s important to keep in mind whether you are using Gemini to chat, to draft documents, or search the web.
Reddit Does a Deal with Google, Announces IPO
Google and Reddit announced a deal, where Reddit integrates Google’s Vertex AI and Google gets access to the Reddit Data API.This gives Google access to the latest new content on Reddit to “better understand Reddit content and display, train on, and otherwise use it in the most accurate and relevant ways.” Which they note is well within what they normally do: “This expanded partnership does not change Google's use of publicly available, crawlable content for indexing, training, or display in Google products.”
Reddit adds this will support “new ways to display Reddit content and [provide] more efficient ways to train models”.
So what does that mean? I’m pretty sure Google and other companies have already been using public Reddit content for AI training. This deal gives Reddit some money and in return Google has better access to the content.
I’ve noticed a lot of Redditors who are unhappy about the deal, but it’s not clear to me this really changes anything.
Probably not coincidentally Reddit also announced their proposed IPO this week, with the added twist that top users will be able to purchase stock at the initial IPO price. The requirements? Users must be US residents, and there will be priority invitations to top creators (starting with those with 5000+ mod actions or 200,000+ karma) to pre-register. Pre-registration opens to everyone on March 1, but slots are limited.
Is it worth investing in? Reddit has never been profitable, but its revenue has been growing and it “only” lost $90 million in 2023.
In looking for a comparison, SNAP (parent of Snapchat) launched its IPO in 2017 at $17 per share. After peaking at $83 per share in September 2021, the value has plunged and is now trading at about $11 per share. My conclusion is don’t invest money you can’t afford to lose.
Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates
YouTube Analytics now lets you see your top earning content by format (Video versus Live versus Shorts).The YouTube Shorts editor on Android now lets you Remix videos with the “Collab” option, showing up to 60 seconds of the remixed video along with your reaction or other content. This launched for iOS devices in December.
YouTube is testing different desktop watch page layouts. If you are in the experiment, be sure to send feedback to YouTube to let them know what you think.
TV audience measurement company Neilson noted that YouTube has been the top streaming platform by watchtime in the US for the past 12 months. This is streaming on TVs, and comparing viewership to Netflix, Peacock and other TV streaming services.
The TikTok Short Film Competition is now open to submissions and for the first time is open to creators in the US. There are cash prizes and an awards ceremony in Cannes.
VideoPrism is a new video foundation AI model (ViFM) from Google that can describe the content in video.
Google’s Gemini 1.5 Pro is pretty impressively able to find and describe specific moments in a video, from either a text prompt or even a crude sketch.
Web Publishers and Search
In November 2023, Google added Notes to the experimental Google Search Labs features. This lets people add a note to websites in Google Search or Discover (Learn More). If you are a website owner there is no easy way to see the Notes for your website. But Glen Gabe shares a quick trick to find all the Notes on any site.Substack is expanding the Recommendations to other newsletters that a newsletter author can offer during newsletter sign-up.
If your website uses Product structured data, note that Google Search now supports Product Variants structured data.
The latest version of WordPress logs style revisions, makes it easier to manage your site editing preferences and adds randomized images to the Gallery Block.
Does advertiser “brand safety” go too far? The Branded blog writes Jezebel’s new owner has a request for advertisers: Please stop hurting journalism.
Photos and Image Design on the Web
Windows Photos is getting AI-powered generative erase (erase elements in your photos), to go along with blurring, removing or replacing the background. This is available for Windows 10 and 11 on Arm64 devices.
Social Media
Bluesky is federating. This is similar to the way Mastodon and other ActivityPub platforms federate - people on one platform can follow and engage with content from people on other platforms. Bluesky’s federation is less individual instances as separate entities and more a global experience with different data hosts.Read how Bluesky’s AT Protocol differs from ActivityPub.The Instagram creator marketplace connects brands with creators. Instagram is testing “machine learning-based recommendations” to help brands discover creators, and the marketplace is expanding from the US to include Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Japan, India and Brazil. Learn how it works.
Will Oremus at the Washington Post has clarification on what Meta means when they say they downplay “political content” on Instagram and Threads. Political content isn’t just about elections or politicians, but also some “social topics”, which apparently includes “content that identifies a problem that impacts people and is caused by the action or inaction of others, which can include issues like international relations or crime”. That seems both broad and vague.
X is rolling out video and audio calls to non-subscribers. Even (or maybe especially) if you don’t plan to use the service, check your X Messages settings to limit who can call you. To do that, sign into your account in the mobile app, open Messages (envelope icon at bottom right), then click the gear icon at top right to open the messaging settings. You can choose to allow video and audio calls from people in your address book, people you follow, verified users or everyone. Learn more about audio and video calls on X.
The latest scams on Facebook and other social media prey on people with fake live streams of funeral services and fake obituaries (of people who haven’t died!).
More AI Updates
Chrome is rolling out its “Help me write” AI-powered writing tool you can use anywhere on the web. Will this be useful? Maybe. Will it allow easy creation of low quality comments and reviews? Probably. It is available in Chrome M122 for Mac or Windows in the US in English. It can be enabled in the Chrome settings.If you are an Amazon Associate (sharing Amazon affiliate links), be sure to read the updated operating agreement. Among the changes are new language to clarify that Program Content and Special Links are not allowed to be used with generative AI.
StabilityAI has launched Stable Diffusion 3 text-to-image generator. You can join their waitlist to use the early preview.
At last week’s Munich Security Conference Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, TikTok and X agreed to the Tech Accord to Combat Deceptive Use of AI in 2024 Elections.
Communication and Collaboration
The Google Account sign-in page has a new look. If you have signed into your Google Account over the past few weeks you probably saw a notice this change was coming. There’s no change in functionality.Google Workspace Marketplace now includes apps for Google Chat (such as Jira for Google Chat) and the Marketplace can be opened from inside Chat. Developers can also publish apps to the Marketplace, which could provide some useful additions to the current selection. Note that despite the name, this update is available for personal Google accounts, as well as Google Workspace users.
Google Docs is adding a smart chip that auto-completes inserted email addresses, and optionally lets you replace the email with a people chip.
Google Workspace customers and developers now have full access to the Google Meet API. This can be used to create and configure Meet meetings, retrieve information about past meetings, and generate real-time updates on meetings.
If you use Signal your phone number will no longer be visible by default, with the introduction of Signal usernames.
More Reading
Read this! Owners of digital news site Vice have shuttered the site. Christ Thompson at Defector writes Vice's Avaricious Stewards Finally Succeeded At Bleeding It Dry : “It is entirely possible for journalists to earn enough from the sale of their work to make a living and to continue in their vocation; it just may no longer be possible for the sale of that work to also fund the extravagant ambitions of swirly-eyed, would-be moguls and grifting MBA-havers and entire constellations of make-work consultants.”Meanwhile, Yahoo laid off the editor-in-chief and managing editor of Engadget, in addition to a number of other staff.
Read this! Product review site HouseFresh writes How Google is killing independent sites like ours: And why you shouldn’t trust product recommendations from big media publishers ranking at the top of Google.
Ethan Zuckerman @ The Prospect reflects on the 40th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh. We still live in Steve Jobs’s brave new world.
Ada Palmer writes about Tools for Thinking About Censorship.
This is a disturbing report in the New York Times: A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men
Read this! Ryan Broderick explains why AI search is a doomsday cult.
Jason Kottke celebrated 19 years of the kottke.org blog as his full time job. Amazing!
Thanks for reading!
---
That’s all the updates for this week. Subscribe to get the Weekly Update in your email inbox or favorite feed reader every week. Miss last week’s update? Get the February 17 edition here.
Image via Canva. Free for commercial use, no attribution required.
I would be happy if you add more content to the "more reading" section in future publications.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the suggestion. Are you interested in more reading links? Or more description of the links?
DeleteSubstack is no longer a mere newsletter (it's quite strange to still use that term for it), but a website builder that has the function of a newsletter.
ReplyDeleteYes! There are posts and pages and comments and a feed and recommendations, plus emails. I'm thinking the main difference between whatever Substack is and a blogging platform is that the only way to monetize is through email subscriptions.
DeleteI've already started noticing obviously AI written content appearing in prominent 1st page search results on Google. I think scammers are using AI to generate specific use case instructions and gaming searches for that content. The writing is clearly AI and the supposed instructions are nonsense and sometimes don't even match the topic at all. I am deeply worried that it will soon be impossible to find real genuine human trialed-and-proved content online.
ReplyDeleteIt worries me too. If you don't care about accuracy, it's easy to quickly churn out AI-written content that looks plausibly correct (at least at first glance). And then the AI models train on that incorrect content for the next generation of even less accurate content, and so on.
Delete