Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Make a face. Hello and welcome to App Stories. I'm John Voorhees and with me is Federico Vittici. Hey Federico. Hello John. It is fantastic to talk to you today. How are you? It is fantastic to talk to you too. I'm doing very well. You know, we just got off a very short pre-show, a very spicy short pre-show, because we are making some changes with App Stories Plus. Because the pre-show is ending.
It is. It is. It's just going away. But that's because we're going to be doing a post-show going forward. So we're actually just changing things up a little bit. App Stories Plus, that's the version of the show that's extended ad-free and gets delivered early every week. And you can get it two ways. One is you can subscribe directly to App Stories Plus because if you're a big fan of App Stories Plus, maybe that's all you want to do. You can do that by going to appstories.plus. Easy. Gets all those things, right? Or you could become...
A club, Mac Stories, premier member. Premier means you get all of our newsletters, you get all of our special columns, you get lots of perks. You get the Discord, but you also, along with that, get App Stories Plus. It's everything that we offer in terms of bonuses. And you can go to plus.club to learn more about that. Yeah, yeah. Premier means we love you. That's the easiest way to describe it.
We have, I think today, so we're going to be talking about the post-show later. We have, I think, a very reflective episode today. I think so, yeah. We wanted to have this conversation about this sort of meta conversation about ourselves. Not in the sense that we're going to be talking about me and you, but I feel like we wanted to address some of the things we've been thinking about
about how to cover artificial intelligence tools and Mac stories. It's a long conversation that I think it's one of those things where
Some people are going to be happy. Some people are going to be unhappy. And we are just going to stand in the middle of that being extremely open about what we think and how we feel. And I think the time is good now because you and I have both written a little bit about AI in recent weeks and the tools that we're using, things that we're doing. And
I think a lot of people might remember back last June, just after WWDC, we wrote a very strongly worded letter to Congress and to some of the EU Parliament that we thought AI companies ought to be regulated.
And I personally think that that's absolutely still as true and valid today as it was last summer. But people probably remember that and think, oh, I remember Mac Stories people. Federico and John were really upset about AI. What are they doing? They're flip-flopping now. They're using AI. What's wrong? What has changed? And...
I think the best place for us to start before we go too far into this, Federico, is to remind people probably what that letter was really all about. Because you and I did a lot of soul searching back then, and we have since. I mean, AI is something that you and I have spent an awful lot of time thinking about over the last eight, nine months since last June. And the thing that triggered that response and that letter was
Upfront was the fact that Apple revealed at WWDC that they had scraped the entire Internet to generate their model for Apple intelligence. And I think it's not too strong to say that we felt betrayed.
in that instance. Because Apple has always put itself out there as a company that has championed creators and the arts and that sort of thing. I mean, that was something that we knew that other companies were doing, but it was not clear at the time that Apple had done that. And they gave us a way to opt out, but they did it after the fact, after they had scraped the whole internet. And simultaneously with all that going on,
There was, you know, it became clear that perplexity was scraping the web without telling anybody and violating robots.txt files. There was a lot of shenanigans going on with AI companies. And our point in that letter was,
was very carefully tailored to two things. One is we think that's wrong, and I still think it's stealing to scrape the internet because I think that what these AI companies are doing is very different than someone browsing the internet. They are essentially
consuming all of the content created of the internet for their own financial benefit in a way that the internet was never designed or created to do. And then secondarily, we also were upset with a lot of the generative AI uses that we were seeing. Because remember last summer,
You know, the world has changed a lot in the last eight months in terms of the AI tools that are available. What we saw at WWDC was image playground. What we saw was emails being written for people. What we saw were ads from Apple about how you can be a lazy employee and get your work done, you know, by having the AI write your stuff for you. None of which I think we think is a good thing.
So that's where that, that's kind of the place that that letter came from. And I, for one, at least feel like that letter is as valid today as it was then. But there's also a lot of other things going on that we should talk about too. I mean, I'll stop for a second, Federico, and let you chime in about where this all started before we talk about the path we've been on for the last eight months. Yeah, no, I completely agree with all of that. And, um,
I feel like, obviously, Mac Stories is a drop in the bucket of the Internet, right? You see these tools that have scraped blogs like Mac Stories or 9to5Mac or Six Colors. They've scraped everything. And still, those blogs are a few more drops in the large, wide bucket of Internet.
training sets for large language models. But, you know, and these large language models, they have script scientific papers, academic papers, books, paintings, photos, videos, all kinds of things. Now,
If you ask me today, it's been eight, nine months, do you now feel that it's okay for AI companies to script the web without your consent, without telling you? I still think it's wrong. It still very much sits wrong with me. I think it's uncomfortable. I think it's wrong. I think it's a degree of intellectual theft, if you ask me. The idea that
I put words on the internet for people to read. I don't necessarily put them on the internet for bots to scrape it and contribute, although in a small part, to a company's profit and to a company's market valuation. So I still continue to believe that
appropriating other websites' content without telling them, making it opt-out, is wrong. It's morally wrong. And I feel like I...
I feel bad about the thought of I put this 15 years of content on the Internet and it became the 0.05 percent of something that can be used for all kinds of ways that are beyond the scope of what I intended my my articles to be consumed as, which is articles read by people. So I feel like I still have that thought.
I mean, and you see a lot of people complain about this stuff. We have put our names and our company's name on those letters that we have sent to politicians. And I believe only one of them replied. And it basically went nowhere. And it doesn't matter. Like what matters is that that's something we believe. And even though there's and this is where we're getting to the meat of the conversation, there's nothing we can do about it.
Because you and I, Mac Stories Inc., like, we're just powerless in front of it. But it matters to voice your opinion, even though you're going nowhere with that opinion. Because let's face it, we have gone nowhere with that opinion. In fact, maybe we have alienated a part of the audience that was thinking, ah, who do you think you are?
acting all high and mighty about it. - Oh yeah, we certainly did have people who walked away from the website, I think, because of it. And that's okay. I mean, I think that people who really know you and me know that we have strong opinions and we're gonna express them, you know, no matter what that, whatever the consequences are. - Right. And that is the core of this conversation. Like how, because lately you may have seen John has been writing about assistive AI tools. We did an episode about assistive AI tools on App Stories back in December.
I have been writing about AI tools myself. And we're all sort of just taking a look at the landscape. But we're getting some fair comments from people asking, how do you reconcile your strong opinion from last year with the reality of what you're writing about today? And here's what I will say. And I also obviously want to hear from you. I feel like it becomes this...
It's this difficult conversation that as an indie website, you need to have now in 2025, which is, let's face it, nothing else is basically happening in tech at the moment. And I mean, even if you just look at Mac Stories and the scope of content that Mac Stories has typically covered, I struggled to write a review of iOS without Apple Intelligence.
Look at the latest articles that Neil Ayan has published about the iOS features that are not about Apple intelligence. Every company's focus right now is on AI, computational photography, generative tools, which I still don't like. But basically the entire conversation is about that. So from my perspective, I could say, well,
I'm drawing the line here. Mac Stories is never going to write about any form of AI ever. And the reality of that is that if I knew if we made that decision, I don't want to say that we would stop publishing Mac Stories, but the volume of articles would be extremely low.
And as a result, you know, we got to think about the business. We have people employed. We have writers. We have an editor. It's a, you know, it's not just me sitting at a desk in 2010 and just blogging away about indie apps. And the reality is that we are writing about Apple and we are writing about tech. And the entire, the entire tech industry is moving in this direction.
If we don't find a way to reconcile what we think about AI training and what we think about AI in general with the reality that we have a website that needs to have content and needs to have something that people can read. Let me just ask the audience, is the solution that we're going to stop publishing Mac stories? Is that, you know, to uphold this position of
we don't do anything anymore. Right, right. No, I think you're right. And look, I totally understand that there are probably some people out there who say, well, you have this principled position on training models and every model has to be trained before it's released. And therefore, you should be against every tool that is built on a model that has been used, that has scraped your website. And I get that position, but...
I don't think that that, as you've kind of pointed out, I think alluded to is that it's not a practical solution. We are a tech website. We cover tech. There's nothing bigger in tech right now than AI. And you know what? The fact of the matter is, even though those models were made in a way that I don't like, there are good tools out there being built. There are tools now that are far better than when you and I wrote that letter in April
in the summertime there are true assistive tools that i think don't cross the line of the kind of things that we don't like because it's you know it's the combination of the training and also the generative stuff that we wrote about last summer and i think we were pretty careful in that letter not to say that all ai is bad we pointed out generative ai and i know that there is a continuum here and people can argue about what's what's um
you know, what's generative, like truly generative that's taking away, that's either, you know, creating fake art or taking away somebody's job or something like that, that we would, that we'd be opposed to versus something that's assistive and helping you. And the, one of the things that I, I keep coming back to is one of the best tools that I've found so far, which is something called granola.ai, which, which,
when you and I have a meeting or something, I can have it listening to the background and it'll create a summary at the end of everything we talked about in a list of all the tasks. And that's the kind of thing that I'm okay with and the kind of thing that I think is a good example of assistive AI that is fine with me because
let's face it, I'm not going to have somebody sit in our meeting and take notes for us. And, and, and it saves me time, like, or you time it, you know, like there was a time when there, I had a meeting the other day where you couldn't make it. So I did the notes through granola and I sent them to you. That saved me maybe 20 minutes of doing that myself. And I'm not going to hire somebody to do that. That's one of those things that's like,
I don't know, someone using Photoshop or using Grammarly or something like that to do their own work. There's a continuum here between truly assistive and generative things that are bad. And while I know that there are gray areas, so far for me, I think it's been very easy for me to choose which things I think are okay and which aren't.
You know, I'm not using AI. You know, for instance, your iOS review, we hired an artist to do the artwork for that, and we did that very deliberately to kind of make a point. Right, right. And, you know, you'd never use a generator of AI to create images for the website, neither would I. None of the writers at Mac Stories would. So there are lines, but I do think that there are tools here that are truly useful. And for two people who run a small company,
if anything, we are stretched thin all the time and anything that can make us more efficient and get us back to doing the writing and making the podcasts and all that faster and giving us more time for that is in the, in the end of the day, a good thing. Right, right. And I want to, I want to talk about the other side of the coin also, which is, um,
We've been getting over, I have personally been getting over the past few months since we started addressing sort of like how AI makes us feel uncomfortable. But I've received a lot of comments from people and it's been a spectrum, you know, some of them really upset, some of them just providing actual useful criticism. The other side of the coin being if the rest of the world
finds utility in tools like ChatGPT or Gemini or Cloud, why do you act so pretentious about the fact that you don't want to cover these tools, even though people... I got a handful of comments a few weeks ago via email from people saying...
I don't have, basically, along the lines of, like, I don't have the money to hire an editor or to hire, you know, I don't have the budget to hire or to sign up for other tools that are more expensive.
A $20 a month ChagGPT subscription lets me do my job more quickly and allows me to be more productive at the office, for example. And so why do you act so... Somebody said elitist or something like that? Which is the sort of opposition that I understand and that resonates with me. The idea that if the rest of the world
If a good portion of your readers don't care about the ethics of training and they're now using computers and their phones in a certain way, do you completely disregard that part of the audience? Which is an interesting problem because basically it boils down to how do you reconcile your morals?
And obviously the energy impact of AI and data centers. How do you reconcile all of that with the reality that of your X thousand of readers, 60% of them uses these tools and doesn't find any sort of useful related content on Mac stories?
what's the calculus there as a website owner? How do you reconcile the fact that I feel so strongly about AI training with these readers who thought, oh, maybe Federico and John are going to cover some useful AI apps for me because I find them really worthy. But now John and Federico have taken this position. Now Mac Stories is useless. Therefore, and I'm not going to say that like this is all
This is tricky because like, obviously it is about money and it is about like running Mac stories as a business. But for me, and this is something that I've said over the course of the entire history of Mac stories, for me, the biggest problem has always been irrelevance, fading into irrelevance. Mac stories is turning 16 this year and I,
It's not like I've had over the course of 16 years, the good months and the bad months with Mac Stories Finances. And we're fortunate enough to be in a position when we can have a small team, we can have a couple of developers, you know, we can afford these things and we can afford these things despite the awful situation of the ad market because of people supporting us. But people support us
Some of them thank you out of the goodness of their hearts because they like what we do. But let's face it, a good part of the audience supports us because they find Mac Stories useful. Yeah, they want something in return. They want something in return. And we try to give that to them, obviously. And we try. But if we become irrelevant, I think it would be a shame for Mac Stories to say, we faded into irrelevance willingly because
because we completely ignored how the tech industry was changing. But in doing so, at least we did it with strong morals. But now the website is closed. The club membership doesn't exist anymore. We had to lay off a bunch of people. And it's just me and John blogging away for free about the occasional indie app that doesn't have AI and strikes us as a good app to cover our Mac stories. Is that a positive outcome?
No, I'll tell you, I think the better outcome is that we, you know, we incorporate our skepticism about AI and the way it's trained into our coverage and that we look at these companies hard.
And we question what they're doing, you know, how they're going about doing it, whether it's, as you said, the climate impact, whether it's the way things are trained. And we don't just, you know, take this stuff at face value. There's an awful lot. The hype isn't just right now with the AI companies.
The hype is coming from you know that from the media itself because this is obviously a hot area and there are a lot of people who have jumped on the bandwagon and and aren't really looking at this stuff with a critical eye and I think you and I are in a good position to do that because We don't take this stuff at face value We do kind of scrutinize it the way we've scrutinized apps all these years and also, you know with the context
of our position on how training, what we don't like about training and what we don't like about certain generative tools. Yeah, and I think here comes the better part of this conversation, hopefully. I feel like we can pretty easily draw a line and say, are we going to cover generative illustration, photo tools? No. We find them creepy.
We find them wrong. I don't like the idea of replacing actual designers or photographers or video makers. I don't like that. Are we going to cover tools that aim to replace writers? Are we going to hire an AI engineer? No, we're not going to do that. But is there a space for us to cover things that...
make you more productive. Things that, AIs that are basically a new form of automation. I think there is that space for us. Yeah, it's really what's always been at the core of MacStory since the very beginning. It's just in a different format now, I think. I think thinking about it as automation is a good approach to Federico. I think that's a very good way to think about it. I feel like I've always liked writing about
how computers can work for us. Not how computers can work in Starbucks. Replace us. Replace us. But like as instruments, as tools, as, you know, the bicycle for the mind, so to speak. Like the idea of we're still humans. And I so fundamentally believe in the role of creativity and human art and just, you know,
being weird and coming up with weird original ideas. But I also believe in the idea of humans having intellect and free will and being able to use a computer to work for them. And so whenever I look at tools like
Deep Research, for example, which is a tool that now both Chagipiti and Google Gemini have. And that's basically in very simplistic terms, like a very fancy web browser combined with a large language model that can go out on the Internet and, you know, discover a lot of sources and bring you a research about a topic. Like that's something that I would have done manually.
Would have taken me two hours and the results probably wouldn't have been still that good. Now I can incorporate that sort of workflow and I'm going to get a bunch of results and I'm still going to check the sources because this is another fundamental point.
inherently, I don't trust what the LLM says. So as a result, and this is quite the paradox of this, because as a result of these deep research tools or web search built into ChagPT or Gemini, as a result, I'm clicking the sources more. So I'm actually visiting more websites. And I'm going to give you a very practical example. On Unwind last week, I brought a new band to the show.
called Slowly Slowly and their album that came out a couple of weeks ago. Now, first layer of this onion, I discovered Slowly Slowly because of the algorithm on Spotify. So I don't know if that's based on AI, whatever it is, but an algorithm led me to discover this actual band by humans from Australia. I had no idea they existed. Fell in love with this band. I wanted to bring the album to Unwind.
I used deep research in Google Gemini and I asked, can you give me like a summary of this band, Slowly Slowly, and their new album so that I can talk about it on my podcast? It created this like short essay for me with a whole bunch of sources. I discovered a couple of really cool Australian music websites because of that research. Now,
Could I have done that myself if I wanted to? Probably. But the net result is that I'm now subscribed to those websites. I brought this small indie band to the show. Pretty well researched, I think. I mentioned a couple of anecdotes about the album that deep research surfaced for me. And so this is the balance that I'm talking about. Like, how can you take advantage of these tools today
and combine them with the humanities. Combine them. Not replace art, but use it as a powerful instrument to help what we're doing. And I understand if politically speaking, that's still not good enough for a part of the audience that would come back to us and say, you hypocrites, you were against AI last year and now you're talking about it. But
And I'm sorry if that's the takeaway. But I personally, and maybe this is my shortcoming as a human and as an editor-in-chief, I don't see an alternative. And I think we're doing a pretty fair and balanced job at it, but we're navigating these waters just like anybody else. And I think at least we have a North Star. And at least...
We're trying to do good. And if that's not good enough for some people, hey, you can't please everyone in life. No, you can't. We're doing the best we can. And I think it's worth, if people have questions about this, it is worth going back and reading that original article.
letter that we wrote because I think we did what we're saying today is consistent with that position. I mean, we don't think it's changed. I will say that after we wrote that letter, I walked away from all AI tools for about four months or so. I just didn't have it in me anymore because that was like intellectually and emotionally draining time for us in a lot of ways.
And we really had to see where things went and get away from it for a little while before we revisited AI, which is why you're seeing it pop up more on Mac Stories now because Federico and I both started digging back in over the holidays and since then and reacquainting ourselves with all the tools and seeing what's out there now and what we can do that supports our work doesn't change or take away from our work.
So I think that that that's kind of where we're coming from. It's, it's one of those things. I mean, I think if anything, we probably torture ourselves over this more than people realize. I mean, I think about it all the time. I don't know about you. Yeah, no, no. I mean, I, it's,
constantly on my mind the amount of reading and research that I've been doing this past few weeks especially at night. Thinking about what's right, what parts are okay and what's wrong. You've probably seen me blogging away at night about this stuff. Yeah.
But there's something else that I wanted to say before we move on to the post-show. And I think in the post-show, maybe, John, we should talk about some of the specific tools that we've been using. Yeah, we should do that. I think talking about the tools would be a good idea. Yeah. But something else that I wanted to say is that I have a newfound understanding for people who work at these companies. Google, Apple, Meta. And there maybe are being...
I don't want to say forced because that's a word I don't like, but they have been told at their job that, look, now you got to do AI. And maybe they don't like it. Maybe the people who were tasked with doing the training of Apple Intelligence were against that approach. And I have a newfound understanding for that position. And I think
Last year, I was very upset about it and I was very angry about it. But I think now that I find myself in this position where the coverage of anything tech related that is not AI has dried up so much. And to be in that position where you have your opinions and you have your thoughts and
But you still got to make it to the end of the month to get your paycheck and to be employed and to go back home and say, I'm still a software engineer, even though I'm working on stuff that I absolutely hate. It's not a good position to be in, but such is life, you know, sometimes. And I hate to say this, but
Because ideally, I would live in this idealistic world where we get to do and we only get to do the things we love and the things we are ethically comfortable with. But sometimes you just got to suck it up and do it. And that's like maybe it's a maybe maybe it's I don't know.
I think it's just the reality of the situation is that every single tech company is doing this. There are tech projects that are not about AI that we are writing about. The open web, activity pub, RSS, all of these projects we are writing about, we are covering. And that is the, maybe the only reason
interesting thing happening in tech right now that is not about AI, open protocols, plain text, RSS feeds, that sort of stuff. We're writing about it. In software, at least. I think that we're also in a new world of gadgets, which I think is another area that we'll be doing more of. We're doing MPC. We're talking about handhelds. We've been trying to diversify. But the reality is, if you look at Mac Stories in the silo of Mac Stories and Apple stuff,
I mean, you know it, I know it. Look at iOS, look at what's going on. What else is happening?
Right. No, I agree with you. I agree with you. I mean, I think it's, it's worth saying that Mac stories isn't becoming an AI website by any stretch. We're not, that's, we're not changing what we're, what we're covering, but, but what we're, I think what Federico is explaining is that AI is going to permeate every aspect of everyone's lives, whether it's, you know, whether you're talking about Apple, whether you're talking about video games, whether you're talking about really just about anything.
And we're going to you know, we're not going to act as though that part of the world doesn't exist.
Yeah, yeah. So we're still going to do our MacStory Selects Awards. I'm going to do my shortcuts. Maybe the shortcuts will eventually be incorporated with Apple Intelligence. So I'm going to have to write about shortcuts and AI. We're going to do our usual things. We're going to talk about indie apps. We're going to talk about RSS. We're going to do our hidden gems on app stories. Like we're going to do that. But it basically is becoming impossible now
to stay away from AI because even in your favorite indie app, if it's not there already, I bet with iOS 19, you're going to see Apple intelligence integration. - Even if it's something simple like automatic tagging in a bookmarking app or something, those things are going to be built on AI. - And if you are an indie developer.
Wouldn't you do it? Would you risk your app being irrelevant, never featured on the App Store, never updated for new features that people expect, just so that you can say, I don't want to touch AI with a 10-foot long stick? Like, you can do it, but that's your decision. And I think it's better...
My friend Mike Hurley said something interesting today in our private group thread that I just kind of want to steal and reference. Like some people think that it's a crime to change your mind. And he was joking like you and John should go to prison for covering AI on Mac stories. But I think that that's what I will end up in this conversation, I think.
We're living in this era and it's changing so rapidly that it's...
It's a balancing act of staying true to some core values while also accepting the reality that the people around you, whether it's developers or other websites or the companies that you're covering or the developers making the apps, they're all moving in a certain direction. And either you accept it and try to combine your values with the reality of like, let me see if there's something useful that I can cover here or...
I fear, I am concerned, you become irrelevant. Very quickly too, given the speed of things these days. And I don't want to become irrelevant. So we're going to try our best. We're
You know, let's see what happens. Would be my conclusion. Yeah, we'll just keep trying. We'll keep trying. Well, we always do. All right. Well, Federico, I'll leave it at that. That's a great place to stop. We in the post show, the brand new App Stories Plus post show, we'll be talking about some of the tools we've been testing and using recently that incorporate AI. So...
Join us there. Go to plus.club if you want to become a Club Premier member and get AppStories Plus that way. Or just subscribe to AppStories Plus itself by going to appstories.plus. You'll learn about all the benefits there because it's extended, ad-free, and delivered early.
You can find the two of us over at MacStories.net. And we're on, of course, social media, where Federico is at Fatici. That's V-I-T-I-C-C-I. And I'm at John Voorhees. J-O-H-N-V-O-O-R-H-W-E-S. Talk to you later, Federico. Ciao, John.