Senior Reporter
Adi Robertson has been covering the intersection of technology, culture, and policy at The Verge since 2011. Her work includes writing about DIY biohacking, survival horror games, virtual and augmented reality, online free expression, and the history of computing. She also makes very short video games. You have probably seen her in a VR headset.
Sure, it’s not as eye-catching as Musk telling Disney to go fuck itself. But Musk and The New York Times’ Sorkin had a painfully ill-informed conversation about intellectual property and AI, starting with the factually wrong statement that AI companies claim they’re not training on copyrighted works. It’s been driving me up a wall, so kudos to Mike Masnick for laying out how silly it all was.
Epic v. Google: everything we’re learning live in Fortnite court
In a redux of a case against Apple and iOS, Epic aims to dismantle barriers that could spell higher fees for app makers — and, Google argues, keep Android safe and competitive.
The error stemmed from a Reuters report that erroneously estimated the Trump-backed social media company as having a net loss of $73 million rather than $31.5 million, apparently misinterpreting a nebulous profit declaration. (The Verge initially reported the wrong numbers in a link to Reuters’ reporting, too. We’re not a party to this suit.)
The lawsuit will face the high standard of US defamation law. And while Truth Social’s operator frames the reports as a “coordinated” attack on Truth Social... I’d guess most other outlets (totaling around 20, including Axios, Rolling Stone, MarketWatch, and The Hill) simply trusted the venerable wire service’s analysis.
No, really: this does not surprise me at all! Unlike 404’s Jason Koebler, I did in fact read early parts of blogger and AI “doomer” Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality — it was known in nerd/fan circles, not just the effective altruist movement, and at least initially was built around the pretty funny conceit of “applying cold hyperlogic to the quirks of a children’s fantasy series.” I did not get nearly far enough to reach the namecheck of Emmett Shear, OpenAI’s new CEO.
Legal blogger and podcaster Ken White has some thoughts on Elon Musk’s yet-unfulfilled promise of a “thermonuclear” lawsuit against Media Matters (for simply noting that X’s loose moderation policy lets through heinous content) and the larger pattern of insisting “freedom of speech” means “freedom from criticism”:
It would be easy to blame this contemptible nonsense on Elon Musk being socially inept, proudly ignorant, and grotesquely petulant. But when it comes to thinking that the right to free speech includes the right to silence others, Elon learned it by watching us, okay? He learned it by watching us.
Musk threatened to file that lawsuit “the split second court opens” today... a delay White also points out is completely unnecessary, because e-filing exists.
[popehat.substack.com]
