Of these. I appreciate that. Thank you. Now, im going to bring in two of my colleagues to talk about ai, subject matter that is changing quickly and affecting a number of Industries Including the news. I want to bring in my two tech colleagues to break this all down. Thank you for joining me. I wanted to start with you. Im going to read this because it is news and it was news to me. Top tech firms since i want to the white house to identify ai generated images. Is this a big deal . Is this the start of potential regulations we are going to see . The pledge is a way for the government and companies to say we are doing something. We are thinking about this. There are a lot of efforts at regulations that will force companies to do things in terms of keeping up with certain standards. That is not going to be happening anytime soon. Chuck schumer says his timeline for regulation is months, not weeks, not years. Months, is that fall, next year . The white house wants to show the people they are taking ai seriously and pushing companies to adhere to certain standards. The Companies Want to say to employees and concerned consumers and the media that we also care deeply about these things. This pledge is voluntary. The Companies Went and signed of their own accord. They were not forced to. Some of the stipulations are murky. There are no consequences if they break the voluntary pledge. It doesnt show everyone involved seems to agree there is a need for some regulation when it comes to ai. I want to follow up on that briefly. I hear it on capitol hill. There is this feeling that we did not regulate social media and that spiraled out of control , depending on your opinion on that front. There does seem to be an effort. But have there been any signs of lawmakers even understanding where to start . This seems like a behemoth and a big unknown. It is a big unknown. The way it has exploded into the public consciousness is new. The ability of chatbots being able to have complex conversations are definitely new conversations that change things materially. Ai is not something that popped up six months ago. If we think about google maps for example, if you go to a place you have never been before, you just type the name into google. You do not even think about it. You put it on the dashboard and follow the instructions. 20 years ago, someone would have said this Artificial Intelligence mapping is incredible and so smart. That is incredible. I think the technology has definitely changed. It does feel like a big moment. We are still not sure if this is like when the internet just got invented and everything is about to change or if it is more that something changed in an iteration. Some things will change but it might not be the seachange where all of our jobs go away and everything needs to completely change. I want to bring you in. There is also conversation about how making Ai Technology free could be a watershed moment. How is it affecting content creators . I know it is a broad question because we are all grappling with the change. Im going to take that one at a time. The first thing is the impacts of making this free. In the news this week, we might have seen meta making the llama 2. 0 model open source and free to use. That is different from competitors that will be licensing and charging for Ai Technology. Making ai freight comes with big potential benefits when it is open source and usable for everyone. There is more visibility into how the models work which can help people check for bias or poison to datasets. It also comes with risks such as bad actors having more access to the technology, understanding how it works and being able to make use of it themselves. As far as what this means for content creators, i think it is the same for any other industry where there will be ai tools that make life much easier for content creators. One obvious example we are familiar with is face tune or beauty lenses on tiktok. There will also be costs for content creators in that the content they put out will be available to train ai models. Will those tools be sold back to them at a price . Will they see their opportunity diminished because ai tools can create some of the same content they are creating . That remains to be seen. I assume youll ask about the hollywood strike which has big implications. I literally was going to follow up with that. That is the most prime example. Come to concerns. There is some cutting cost potential and how you might literally use someones likeness in the future without their consent. Yeah, uhm. I will answer short because i want to hear what he has to say. Probably the biggest thing, if i were a big content creator watching this hollywood strike go down, i would say, awesome, this is going to create opportunities for me while hollywood is in disarray. My digital creator economy is going to have these new inroads for me to make more money and have more notoriety. We have already seen, there was a great headline from our colleague the other month saying there was a content creator charging 1 per week friend ai generated version of herself to be your girlfriend. You can also see the flipside where you are not getting the money you were expecting to get because an ai model is doing something you could do. Your take . I think it is important to remember with the strike that a lot of it is to do with streaming and how much that has changed the industry which is also a big tech topic. There is this huge question hanging over the entire Tech Industry right now. Was it oh k for them to scrape up everything on the internet which included every single Washington Post article ever written, most novels ever written, photographs, films, movies, scripts, and use it to create these tools that can write a hollywood script. Cynically, you might say it is better than some of what hollywood has produced sometimes. People say you went and used all of this stuff without our permission. Tech Companies Say it is fair use. If you are inspired by someone elses work to go do your own work, it is not just if you write a post olympic postapocalyptic model was cornered by the first one. A lot of people are saying that may not be exactly how it should be. Whether through the courts or through new laws, this may not be the most essential question, whether this is legal to go and do it this way. Im going to ask a selfish question. I heard google shopping around their ai platform to news organizations. How will this affect journalists . I would like to think an ai bot will not get to know our sources but it will affect us in some ways. Right . Yeah. I can take it. I do think the level of quality is not there yet. I think a lot of people who do not write for a living see these things as incredible. If you only spend 3 to 4 of your time writing, writing is hard. When you are forced to do it every day for many hours, you forget that. These tools can be so helpful for people who just need a resume, a place to start, a memo for the boss and they are stressing about it. Then again, i think technologists say we have seen exponential increase in quality, why wont that continue . It is possible technically they could interview people. You can imagine breaking news happening. There is a fire somewhere or a tornado hits a small town and news ai will dial every Single Person in the town simultaneously and gets a call saying this is the Washington Post ai reporter and i would like to ask you, did you see the tornado . Instead of three or four reporters spending all day making hundreds of calls, the ai could theoretically do it instantaneously. The Washington Post is not planning to do this as far as i know. But these things are theoretically possible. I think my job makes me be skeptical of some of the more aggressive and excitable claims about how these will change everything overnight because ive heard that a lot from technologists over the years but i also want to be openminded that someone might start pitching this technology and it is theoretically possible. I want to ask you both a question and look at another side of tech news happening. If you have twitter, you signed on today. Where did the bird logo go . It is now an x. I know there has been so much twitter news and we have seen elon musk trying to change the company. What should we take from this . In case you missed it, musk and some of his top executives announced twitter will be rebranding to x. The logo is a white x on a black background. This is some of musks sweeping changes since he bought the Company Including drastically reducing staff and its focus on combating misinformation and hate speech. Some people who were musk critics or longtime users have already reacted saying this was the nail in the coffin for me. The bluebird had a lot of what marketers call brand equity where people associate it with good things because maybe they had a good time on the app or are just familiar with it. A study said 25 of twitter users do not see them on the app in the next year. If people react poorly to the rebrand, it could be really bad for twitter. This is part of musks m. O. He has said he envisions twitter as in everything app like chinas wechat. Whether that is what people want is another question. I also want to get your perspective on that. Bigger picture, we have seen [indiscernible] trying to take over the twitter model. A lot of people are trying to figure out where i should be versus is twitter going to be around with all the changes . Maybe the question should be whether we should be on social media. We seem to always be going back. Threads is interesting. It is this weird, dark irony that Mark Zuckerberg is the one slipping in to provide this alternative. A lot of people the last six months have tried to build twitter alternatives and take in all the twitter refugees who do not want to be associated with elon musks app and everything tatum described. We will have to see. It is possible twitter continues on. I have no knowledge of this but it is possible the User Base Continues to shrink so much he decides to cut his losses and declare bankruptcy. I think he is still personally passionate about twitter or x. He enjoys it in some way i believe. It is where he solicits feedback and engages with his fanbase. I think it has great personal importance to him. He can keep the Company Going for a long time, especially if he continues to find ways to cut costs. I think twitter will continue Going Forward in some way. We will see other alternatives come up. They will never fully replace what twitter was in the same way other social networks continue to limp along like tumblr. Reddit is going through its own convulsions now with the ceo trying to exert more control over the platform that for many years was decentralized. This is just the way the world goes. I might suggest lets all take a break from all of it for a while. I am with you on that. Thank you both for joining us. I appreciate your perspective and reporting. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks to all of you who tuned in today. There are many more conversations we will be having at Washington Post and infrastructure investments. Good afternoon. Welcome to csis. People dont realize the nature of National Security has changed