With Google I/O just around the corner, there are few updates from Google or YouTube this week. But there is news from OpenAI, Sustack, TikTok, Threads and more.
Top news and updates this week
- Register for Google I/O
- OpenAI is building a Media Manager for creators
- Substack launches video shows and Creator Studio
- TikTok is labeling AI-generated content
- Bending Spoons lays off StreamYard team
- Google Search Central talks about content decay
- Threads lets you limit who can quote your posts and starts showing post count
- Jack Dorsey steps down from Bluesky; Bluesky says he doesn’t get what they are doing
- Google makes it a bit easier to set up 2-step verification
- Google Sheets pre-built tables make tracking your content, running a project or setting up an event easier
- Google Chat now lets you get notified of every post in a Space
- Be sure to check out “More Reading” at the end for some interesting articles this week
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Last year they introduced a way to modify a site’s robots.txt file to exclude their crawler. But that hasn’t been an ideal solution for a number of reasons:
So this week OpenAI announced they are working on a Media Manager, a tool “to enable creators and content owners to tell us what they own and specify how they want their works to be included or excluded from machine learning research and training.”
There aren’t any details, because it doesn’t exist yet. OpenAI is hoping to have it available in 2025. They are also hoping it will become the industry standard.
It still seems problematic to me, as it requires content owners to do the work to opt out their content, rather than requiring creators and publishers to opt in.
And I think it’s unlikely that it will become the standard, unless OpenAI can get companies like Google, Meta and Microsoft to sign on.
Related:
OpenAI is testing tools to detect AI-generated images, invisible image and audio watermarking, and has joined the steering committee for C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity). Also on the C2PA steering committee: Adobe, BBC, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Publicis Groupe, Sony and Truepic..
Jeremy Gray at PetaPixel reports OpenAI again refuses to say if it used your YouTube content to train Sora. OpenAI’s COO Brad Lightcap was asked whether they used YouTube data for training. The rambling non-reply certainly makes it seem that the answer to that is likely “yes”.
They are also launching Creator Studio, “a fellowship for the next wave of video stars to turn their TikTok channels into Substack shows and communities”, starting with an initial class of 10 fellows. They will be offered technical and strategic support, plus marketing.
Based on the comments on the announcement, many Substack users (including those who are video creators) aren’t seeing the value in this. The focus on writing is a big part of Substack’s appeal, and there are already options (like Patreon) for video creators to have paid subscribers.
The benefit for Substack seems to be attracting a wider variety of creators who will effectively be locked in to the platform. Newsletter writers can pretty easily move their subscribers and content to Beehiiv or Ghost or another platform. But videos uploaded to Substack can’t be moved.
YouTube is testing a generative AI content inspiration tool in YouTube Studio on desktop. This is only available to a small number of creators who publish content in English. To see if you have access, Open YouTube Studio on desktop (studio.youtube.com ) > Analytics > Research tab.
The YouTube Creator Liaison channel has a new series of Shorts with tips for thumbnail creation from Chucky, who creates thumbnails for Mr. Beast’s channel.
Lindsey Gamble reports that Instagram says videos longer than 90 seconds hurt distribution.
TikTok is automatically labeling some AI-generated content that has Content Credentials metadata. That is a standard from the C2PA (see the Open AI information above, for more details on that). Content Credentials are also being adding to TikTok content when it’s downloaded. You can check downloaded images for Content Credentials metadata here.
Vimeo is collecting user feedback on what AI-related controls its users want.
StreamYard’s founders apparently made an offer to buy the company back from Hopin. Hopin instead sold the company to Bending Spoons, which acquires companies and lays off most of the staff (they’ve done this with StreamYard already). Gergely Orosz speculates that Hopin’s investors control their board, and to recover as much of their investment as possible, the highest offer won out. It’s really too bad.
With the just-announced Apple Final Cut camera mobile app, Jaron Schneider at PetaPixel argues Apple is a Camera Company Now (Again).
Threads now also lets you limit who can quote your posts to people you follow. No, that won’t prevent people from sharing a screenshot, but those aren’t linked back to the original in the same way a quote-post is linked.
Bluesky shared what they are working on: DMs, native video, improved custom feeds, improved anti-harassment features, and OAuth (“sign in with Bluesky” on 3rd party sites).
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has stepped down from the Bluesky board. He claims Bluesky is “repeating the mistakes” of Twitter (like having moderation!), and is mostly focused on his cryptocurrency-linked social platform Nostr. Bluesky’s CEO Jay Graber says they have “carried out the work in a way I don’t think [Dorsey] fully understands”, and in a long thread Bluesky’s protocol engineer Paul Frazee explains why Dorsey is wrong. It seems that Bluesky is moving forward with a usable platform, and Jack isn’t happy it’s not following his vision (just creating the decentralized protocol and hoping other companies would adopt it).
Flipboard is seeing success with ActivityPub federation (which lets you read and interact with posts on platforms like Mastodon), so they are federating another 100 curator accounts.
Reddit has a new Public Content Policy, with detailed information on how third parties can use public Reddit content while maintaining user privacy. They are also launching r/reddit4researchers for academics who want (or have) access to Reddit data for research purposes.
Google Sheets will automatically suggest converting a column of data into preset dropdown chips if the data is compatible with that.
If you have a Google Workspace account with access to recording in Google Slides, you can now record your presentation in Microsoft Edge, in addition to Chrome.
If you are using Google Chat, you can now choose to get notifications of ALL messages in a Space. The other options are notifications for Main Conversations, For You (@ mentions and threads you follow), or None.
Google Meet now includes breakout room attendance in meeting attendance reports. That is available for Google Workspace Essentials, Business Plus, Enterprise and Education Plus or Teaching and Learning Upgrade.
Google Meet now lets presenters annotate presentations in-meeting. This is available for personal accounts with a Google Workspace Individual subscription, and other Google Workspace editions. Nina Trankova has shared a brief overview of how it works.
Microsoft Teams explained how their generative AI-powered “Decorate your background” feature for video calls works. It looks pretty neat in the examples. Instead of completely replacing your background, it adjusts the image of your actual surroundings by tidying up, making it more “fancy”, decorating,or adding plants.
Ars Technica reports Stack Overflow users sabotage their posts after OpenAI deal.
Design is important. Anna Andersen writes: How do you accidentally run for President of Iceland? A digital endorsement process gone wrong.
Annalee Newitz has a new book about psychological warfare. In her newsletter, she writes from that research How to recognize a psyop in three easy steps. “The basic structure of an American psyop is cobbled together out of advertising techniques, pop psychology, and pulp fiction tropes. Using insights gleaned from these sources, the military spent the early years of the 20th century figuring out how to craft messages that can hurt, demoralize, and distract you.”
Where does all the junk in the Google Search results come from? Maggie Harrison Dupre at Futurism investigates: Meet AdVon, the AI-Powered Content Monster Infecting the Media Industry. Those junky “buying guides”? This is the source.
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 May 4 edition here.
Yellow daisy by Kat Smith on Pexels. Free for commercial use.
Take this week’s quiz ✅
To Do & Try
Google I/O is May 14. This is Google’s annual developer conference, which usually includes announcements about new features and products. If you register you can make sure you don’t miss sessions you are interested in (some will only be available online after the event). Not surprisingly, it looks like generative AI is going to be one of the main topics.OpenAI says it is building a Media Manager
It’s not a secret that OpenAI trained its wildly popular AI models (like ChatGPT and Dall-E) on a huge compendium of text and images used without the permission of the copyright holders.Last year they introduced a way to modify a site’s robots.txt file to exclude their crawler. But that hasn’t been an ideal solution for a number of reasons:
- You have to block each AI company’s bots separately (if you can block them at all). This may actually be a feature, assuming some people might want to block OpenAI’s bot, but not the bot Google uses. The bigger problem is that there is no standard way to do this.
- There isn’t any way to remove your content that OpenAI already used to train their current models.
- Depending on where you publish your content, you may not be able to modify the robots.txt file.
So this week OpenAI announced they are working on a Media Manager, a tool “to enable creators and content owners to tell us what they own and specify how they want their works to be included or excluded from machine learning research and training.”
There aren’t any details, because it doesn’t exist yet. OpenAI is hoping to have it available in 2025. They are also hoping it will become the industry standard.
It still seems problematic to me, as it requires content owners to do the work to opt out their content, rather than requiring creators and publishers to opt in.
And I think it’s unlikely that it will become the standard, unless OpenAI can get companies like Google, Meta and Microsoft to sign on.
Related:
OpenAI is testing tools to detect AI-generated images, invisible image and audio watermarking, and has joined the steering committee for C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity). Also on the C2PA steering committee: Adobe, BBC, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Publicis Groupe, Sony and Truepic..
Jeremy Gray at PetaPixel reports OpenAI again refuses to say if it used your YouTube content to train Sora. OpenAI’s COO Brad Lightcap was asked whether they used YouTube data for training. The rambling non-reply certainly makes it seem that the answer to that is likely “yes”.
Substack Launches Video Shows and Creator Studio
Substack has been launching some interesting features, doubling down on its social feed, letting creators paywall chat, and now, subscriber-only video shows.They are also launching Creator Studio, “a fellowship for the next wave of video stars to turn their TikTok channels into Substack shows and communities”, starting with an initial class of 10 fellows. They will be offered technical and strategic support, plus marketing.
Based on the comments on the announcement, many Substack users (including those who are video creators) aren’t seeing the value in this. The focus on writing is a big part of Substack’s appeal, and there are already options (like Patreon) for video creators to have paid subscribers.
The benefit for Substack seems to be attracting a wider variety of creators who will effectively be locked in to the platform. Newsletter writers can pretty easily move their subscribers and content to Beehiiv or Ghost or another platform. But videos uploaded to Substack can’t be moved.
Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates
The new Promotions tab in YouTube Studio lets you easily promote your videos. Note these are paid ads (you pay for the promotion), and they work best if you are promoting a product or service. The paid ad views do not count towards YouTube Partner Program eligibility, and the common wisdom is that it isn’t really useful for building an audience beyond the promoted video. Learn more from Creator Insider.YouTube is testing a generative AI content inspiration tool in YouTube Studio on desktop. This is only available to a small number of creators who publish content in English. To see if you have access, Open YouTube Studio on desktop (studio.youtube.com ) > Analytics > Research tab.
The YouTube Creator Liaison channel has a new series of Shorts with tips for thumbnail creation from Chucky, who creates thumbnails for Mr. Beast’s channel.
Lindsey Gamble reports that Instagram says videos longer than 90 seconds hurt distribution.
TikTok is automatically labeling some AI-generated content that has Content Credentials metadata. That is a standard from the C2PA (see the Open AI information above, for more details on that). Content Credentials are also being adding to TikTok content when it’s downloaded. You can check downloaded images for Content Credentials metadata here.
Vimeo is collecting user feedback on what AI-related controls its users want.
StreamYard’s founders apparently made an offer to buy the company back from Hopin. Hopin instead sold the company to Bending Spoons, which acquires companies and lays off most of the staff (they’ve done this with StreamYard already). Gergely Orosz speculates that Hopin’s investors control their board, and to recover as much of their investment as possible, the highest offer won out. It’s really too bad.
Web Publishers and Search
The latest Google Search Central “Off the Record” podcast episode (YouTube link, transcript link) is about “Content Decay”. What do you do with old or outdated content on your website? Some you may want to update or add a banner that it may be outdated. Other content you may want to delete. Listen for a discussion of what the Google Search team considers regarding documentation and their blog posts.Photos and Image Design
If you are having trouble getting Google Photos to properly group faces from newer images, there are new instructions for troubleshooting (it’s basically: turn off power saver then leave the Google Photos app open and connected to the internet overnight).With the just-announced Apple Final Cut camera mobile app, Jaron Schneider at PetaPixel argues Apple is a Camera Company Now (Again).
Social Media
Threads is showing post view count with a tap. Threads head Adam Mosseri says it’s to help creators understand how their posts perform, but anyone can see views on anyone else’s posts (much like on X).Threads now also lets you limit who can quote your posts to people you follow. No, that won’t prevent people from sharing a screenshot, but those aren’t linked back to the original in the same way a quote-post is linked.
Bluesky shared what they are working on: DMs, native video, improved custom feeds, improved anti-harassment features, and OAuth (“sign in with Bluesky” on 3rd party sites).
Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has stepped down from the Bluesky board. He claims Bluesky is “repeating the mistakes” of Twitter (like having moderation!), and is mostly focused on his cryptocurrency-linked social platform Nostr. Bluesky’s CEO Jay Graber says they have “carried out the work in a way I don’t think [Dorsey] fully understands”, and in a long thread Bluesky’s protocol engineer Paul Frazee explains why Dorsey is wrong. It seems that Bluesky is moving forward with a usable platform, and Jack isn’t happy it’s not following his vision (just creating the decentralized protocol and hoping other companies would adopt it).
Flipboard is seeing success with ActivityPub federation (which lets you read and interact with posts on platforms like Mastodon), so they are federating another 100 curator accounts.
Reddit has a new Public Content Policy, with detailed information on how third parties can use public Reddit content while maintaining user privacy. They are also launching r/reddit4researchers for academics who want (or have) access to Reddit data for research purposes.
Security
Google has updated the options for setting up two-step verification (2SV). Now you can set up a second step, like an authenticator app or hardware security key before setting up 2SV. Previously you had to initially set up 2SV with a phone number. If you turn off 2SV, the added second factors are not automatically removed from your account. Learn more.Communication and Collaboration
Google Sheets has a new “convert to table” option, that takes your sheet of data and converts it into a nicely formatted table, with automatic formatting, a table-level settings menu, and table references. In the table, you can use the new “Group By” option to arrange your data in groups based on a selected column. For example, if you have a list of projects with a priority rating, you can group all the entries with the same priority level together. Plus, there are pre-built tables you can use and populate with your own data. If you want to create a content tracker for your social media, an event planner or track a project, there’s an easy option. Learn more and see examples.Google Sheets will automatically suggest converting a column of data into preset dropdown chips if the data is compatible with that.
If you have a Google Workspace account with access to recording in Google Slides, you can now record your presentation in Microsoft Edge, in addition to Chrome.
If you are using Google Chat, you can now choose to get notifications of ALL messages in a Space. The other options are notifications for Main Conversations, For You (@ mentions and threads you follow), or None.
Google Meet now includes breakout room attendance in meeting attendance reports. That is available for Google Workspace Essentials, Business Plus, Enterprise and Education Plus or Teaching and Learning Upgrade.
Google Meet now lets presenters annotate presentations in-meeting. This is available for personal accounts with a Google Workspace Individual subscription, and other Google Workspace editions. Nina Trankova has shared a brief overview of how it works.
More AI Updates
You can now use generative AI “help me write” or organize your tabs in Chrome. Learn how that was developed.Microsoft Teams explained how their generative AI-powered “Decorate your background” feature for video calls works. It looks pretty neat in the examples. Instead of completely replacing your background, it adjusts the image of your actual surroundings by tidying up, making it more “fancy”, decorating,or adding plants.
Ars Technica reports Stack Overflow users sabotage their posts after OpenAI deal.
More Reading (and watching)
Apple announced a new very thin iPad and posted an ad simply titled Crush! (watch on YouTube). It did not go over well. The video shows a big pile of creative tools -- musical instruments, colorful paint, camera lenses, paper notebooks, and so forth -- being crushed in a hydraulic press. And of course, all that turns into the iPad. I found the visuals a bit disturbing, with a human-like wooden artist’s mannequin seemingly trying to stave off being crushed, and all those tools that people use to create art destroyed and turned into a boring-looking electronic tablet. Times are tough for creatives, and this was dehumanizing. Apple apologized, saying “it missed the mark”.Design is important. Anna Andersen writes: How do you accidentally run for President of Iceland? A digital endorsement process gone wrong.
Annalee Newitz has a new book about psychological warfare. In her newsletter, she writes from that research How to recognize a psyop in three easy steps. “The basic structure of an American psyop is cobbled together out of advertising techniques, pop psychology, and pulp fiction tropes. Using insights gleaned from these sources, the military spent the early years of the 20th century figuring out how to craft messages that can hurt, demoralize, and distract you.”
Where does all the junk in the Google Search results come from? Maggie Harrison Dupre at Futurism investigates: Meet AdVon, the AI-Powered Content Monster Infecting the Media Industry. Those junky “buying guides”? This is the source.
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 May 4 edition here.
Yellow daisy by Kat Smith on Pexels. Free for commercial use.
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