Hot brat Summer Updates

Hot brat Summer

Charli XCX’s latest album brat is the unofficial soundtrack of millennial queer folks still going out to clubs in their 30s (me). I’m both loving the album itself and the memes it’s wonderfully simple album art’s spawning. Remember folks, if you want something to be meme-able, keep it simple. Arial text on a lime-ish green background is easy to riff on. My favorite brand example so far is this out of home campaign for plant-based sausages from Field Roast.

 Platforms

Instagram & Threads

Threads turned one year old today. In recent week’s they’ve been expanding fediverse integration and testing some new features like disappearing posts and a media tab on profiles. Instagram and Threads were both in hot water when folks realized the “it’s okay to show me political posts” toggle being reset back to “no news, only content” by the apps. Meta’s since fixed it. Instagram’s also started letting some creators test out their new AI Studio tools, which allow creators make AI Chatbot clones of themselves. Sounds dystopian to me, but I prefer my parasocial relationships via podcast and YouTube vs Instagram.  

The Rest of Meta 

One theme running through the past few months has been needing to roll back AI features that get launched too quickly. Meta got in a new take on the theme recently by needing to adjust their new “made by AI” automated content label after it kept incorrectly applying the label to non-AI images. The label now simply says, “AI info” and links out to more info on AI. Which almost feels less helpful. On the Metaverse side of Meta, the company reorged Reality Labs into two groups – one focused on headsets and another on wearables like their Ray-Ban partnership. Meta’s also dropping or consolidating some ad targeting options “that relate to topics people may perceive as sensitive.”

TikTok

There’s stuff going on with various lawsuits and challenges to the ban, but I’ve hit the “call me when there’s a final ruling” phase of this news cycle already. So instead let's focus on how you can now download your own videos without a watermark. Basically TikTok is okay with you treating it like a video editing app for other platforms as long as you also post to TikTok first. 

YouTube 

YouTube’s got a new policy that lets you request the removal of GenAI videos that look or sound like you. Very curious to watch how enforcement on this plays out in practice. They’ve got a new AI powered tool to help creators remove copyrighted music from their videos. According to Nielsen, YouTube now makes up almost 10% of connected and traditional TV viewership making it the largest streaming platform. 

Google 

Google will announce their new Pixel phones at an event in August and are expected to show off a ton of AI features. They’ve added Geini to Gmail. Oh and the company’s own 2024 Environmental Report showed “greenhouse gas emissions spiked by nearly 50 percent in the last five years thanks to energy-guzzling data centers required to power artificial intelligence.” 

Reddit

Reddit’s getting more aggressive about trying to stop content scrapers from crawling their site to train AI. See the AI section for more on content scrapers. 

Figma 

Figma announced a bunch of stuff at their annual Config conference, including several GenAI features. Being a tool used largely by graphic designers, the chatter around the GenAI changes was far from universally positive. They’ve already had to pull one of the GenAI tools, Make Design, because folks used it to copy the design of Apple’s weather app; suggesting that Apple’s app design was used in the training data. Yikes.

Pinterest (disclosure: I’m currently working as a contractor with Pinterest) 

Pinterest dropped a new way to share boards as videos on other platforms.

More brat

Culture Movers 

Film & TV

Paramount’s still trying to figure out how to get someone to buy it/merge with it. While they wait to figure out a final deal, they seem to be finding weird ways to save money over there. They’ve shuttered the entire MTV News library and taken all ComedyCentral.com clips (notably all of the old Daily Show clips going all the way back to 1999) offline. 

We’re also continuing the trend of looking at each individual theatrical release as a sign of the film industry's impending fate. Like ancient Roman augurs staring at birds, we have decided that Inside Out 2 doing well means a good harvest or something.  

Music 

We’re getting a new SOPHIE album in September. SOPHIE’s work as a producer and musician has a profound impact on contemporary music, especially electronic and dance genres like hyperpop (like brat). Her sudden death in 2021 was a tragedy for the music world and the many queer and trans fans who connected with her music. I’m grateful we’ll get to dance with her again through this posthumous album. 

Creator Economy 

Patreon is adding subscription gifting and a la carte content sale. Neat. Over on YouTube, Jenny Nicholson revealed that Disney tried to file a copyright claim against her Star Wars Hotel video (which you should watch if you haven’t yet, yes I know it’s long but it’s really good).

Cars 

Waymo’s driverless taxi service is now available to anyone in San Francisco. I’ve rode in them a few times now. They have screens that show you a render of what the car “sees” around you so you know that it knows where the other cars and pedestrians are. It feels pretty safe to me, and while I still prefer a human driver (case law is more developed there for if something goes wrong), I like having Waymo as another option now and will likely ride in one again. However, I will never willingly get inside a Cybertruck because they had another recall on those things (this time for the wipers so not too dramatic but still). 

Gaming 

I got sucked back into Elden Ring. It was on sale from Steam and I’ve got a Steam Deck now so I can play it anywhere. I think I’m gonna go for a magic samurai build around the Moonveil katana, and see if I make it far enough to even access the DLC content this time. 

AI 

So we’ve got the theme I mentioned up top of “oops, rolled that out too fast” that established companies are seeing when they add GenAI features. But what’s going on with the new AI focused companies? On the audio side, the RIAA filed a big lawsuit against a few startups around the use of copyrighted music. On the text side, Perplexity’s in hot water with publishers accusing the company of plagiarism and unethically scraping their web content. Perplexity is just looking like an all around shady company IMO. And ignoring crawler instructions may just be an industry-wide issue in the GenAI world. Also this Toy-R-Us ad made with OpenAI’s Sora is so bad. 

RIP 

PS

If you still don’t know what “Hawk Tuah” means, here’s an explainer. Read at your own risk of taking psychic damage. 

_{*I’m very dyslexic, and this is a largely free project/hobby. I do not set aside the same time for proofreading that I do for other professional work. If you spot a typo that would cause a communication error, please reach out to gently let me know.}